It’s finally time for humanity to take the next great leap into the great beyond. We are natural explorers, and the time to explore a new frontier is now. Humans will soon go beyond the Moon, and we will venture there on the Orion Capsule, powered by the sails of the Delta IV rocket. You may have seen some of my other posts about it, or an old infographic of the flight procedure. The launch window is opening at 7:05 am EST today! It will have a 2 hour – 39 minute launch window. But if the weather is clear it...
The Orion vehicle is the successor to the Shuttle program. Bigger, better, more powerful, advanced technology, and it will take humanity further into the void than we have ever been before. And on December 4th, it will fly for the first time ever. Here are some of the first shots of the Capsule atop the new Delta IV Heavy Rocket, including a shot of the Delta IV rocket in action (with a different payload). The Basics: From NASA (Link) Mission: Orion Flight Test Launch Date: Dec. 4, 2014 Launch Time: 7:05 a.m. EST Launch Window: 2 hours, 39 minutes Launch...
Panspermia. Look it up. It sounds more like science fiction than science fact, but imagine the implications. It is the idea that life is everywhere, and is seeded throughout the universe by comets, asteroids, meteors, rogue planets, and even spacecraft, by way of unintended contamination of microbes. It could also explain why there is life on Earth. Because we still know so little about the Universe around us, panspermia is considered a plausible scenario. To test parts of this theory, a team from the University of Zurich’s Institute of Anatomy used small pipettes to actually place double stranded DNA on the outside of...
As the Canadian Winter approaches and our country goes into collective hibernation, we start to remind the world how cold it gets here, and that the tourist season is in July. Still, we Canadians are proud of our hardiness and we will welcome you with open arms if you decide to visit in January. Still, if you look at a population map of Canada, we mostly live in the southern 10% of our country’s latitudes. There are thousands of square kilometres of open wilderness to explore. We want to be warm, but we also love our home country. Many Canadians...
I’ve talked about black holes previously, and only in our own Galaxy, and only the big one in the middle, Sag A*. When I speak with the public and with kids about Black Holes, most people never really understand that there aren’t just one or two kicking around, but potentially there are as many as a Billion Black Holes in our own Galaxy! The problem is, we are not very good at finding them. It makes sense, they give off no light, and we can only find them through indirectly measuring their effects on the surrounding environment. We can sometimes see...
The Orion Spacecraft will eventually be the next vehicle to take humans further into space than ever before. But before it can do that, it requires extensive testing to ensure its ready to go! The short infographic below from the crew working on Orion gives us an idea of how the major December flight test will go, and the altitudes being tested. If you can’t see it, the axes are y (miles) vs. x (hours). Last short post of the week as my teaching conference STAO ends today!
They did it! 10 Years in Orbit and 2 Billion dollars later, the landing is successful and confirmed. Now comes the fun part: The resulting Science!!! The first image that was beamed through 28 ad a half light minutes showed the lander on its descent, about 3km from the surface. The landing wasn’t perfect though. In fact it may have ‘landed twice.’ The 4km wide comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko doesn’t have enough gravity to keep the lander from flying out into space, which is why Philae was equipped with a harpoon system to lock it in place on the surface. Yesterday I...
For the first time in human history we are landing on a Comet! Watch the live feed and you can follow the landing as it’s happening. It is expected to touch down at about 11:03 EST. The lander, named Philae, already detached from the Rosetta Spacecraft at about 4am EST, and is slowly moving toward the landing site. Once it gets close enough it will launch harpoons (yup you read it right) to grab onto the comet and pull itself down to the surface, snapping photos along the way. The Science communication world has been following this story since the Orbiter arrived...
Launched in December of 2013, the European Space Agency (ESA)’s GAIA Mission will be the next great mission to find exoplanets, planets orbiting stars other than our own Sun. However, GAIA’s main mission is not to search for planets, but to look at the motion, physical characteristics, and distance of up to one Billion stars with incredible precision. It’s a given that the satellite will invariably find planets by seeing the ‘wobble’ of a star due to the gravity of a planetary system. One of the strengths that GAIA posesses over other exoplanet studies is that it will search a...
It’s true, Mars just had what we call a Meteor Storm. This is an event that, on Earth, only happens once every few hundred years, and the one that Mars just had was more intense than anything Earth has experienced in recorded history. This event happened because of a close Martian fly-by of comet C/2013 A1 Sliding Spring. On October 19th around 2:30pm EDT the comet came within 140,000 Km of Mars. This is incredibly close in Astronomical terms, being less than half the distance to the Moon and comparable to the total distance I’ve driven my car in the...
