The Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations Geodesy and Heat Transport (InSight) mission, originally set to launch in March of 2016, has been delayed. It’s not yet clear when it will launch, but it certainly won’t be on schedule for March. The reason for the scrub is that a major science instrument on the lander has been having issues. The French-made Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS) requires a vacuum seal around three main sensors to protect them from the Martian environment. This vacuum seal allows them to detect seismic activity on Mars, and notice any ground movements as small as...
For the first time in 30 years, the United States has the capability to produce fuel for deep space missions. Plutonium-238 is an isotope that produces thermal energy through radioactive decay. This energy can be converted into electricity and used to power spacecraft systems for decades of flight. Systems using this isotope include the Viking landers, the Voyager spacecraft, and more recent missions like the Mars Science Laboratory (Curiosity) and New Horizons. The Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, run by the US Department of Energy, has produced 50 grams of the isotope, amounting to the size of a golf...
It’s mapping orbit #4 for the Dawn spacecraft as it orbits the dwarf planet Ceres. Currently mapping at an altitude of only 385 Km, the images are stunning, and give a feeling of actually being on Ceres. I can imagine the terrain, being in a crater, seeing the dark horizon off in the distance, the rocky-ice world untouched for Billions of years. It really reminds me of the Moon, with the powdery bright dust across the surface and craters dotting the landscape, yet when I see some of the close up craters, it feels very different from our familiar moon. ...
Christmas on Mars is like most other days on Mars: Dry, cold, and dusty. However, as the Curiosity rover works its way across the ancient Martian surface, it sees changes in the terrain that are very interesting to investigate. It’s at 1200 sols (Martian days) of roving around the planet as of Monday, and it continues to make its way to the primary target, Mount Sharp. a Christmas photo shows how far the rover still has to go, but proves that it still has it’s sights set on the lonely mountain. The rover has travelled far since it’s landing, and...
The Geminid meteor shower passed earlier this month, but there is always something magical about those little bits of rock that burn up in the atmosphere while moving at 40 Km/s. Whatever you do for the holidays, have fun, be responsible, and definitely don’t drink and drive. It’s not worth your life or anyone else’s. See you in a couple days!
Have you ever seen those amazing composite images that people will post, showing the same picture every day or every year for a long period of time. We see how children age, how people transform their bodies, and how their day to day experiences, though seemingly small, add up to incredible changes as the years go by. I personally love time-lapse photography, representing a long period of time in a shorter instance. For me the beauty is showing those changes that are subtle in human experience and communicating them in a way that shows how significant they are when we...
After watching the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket explode shortly after launch back in June, two things were going through my head. “How will they handle this disaster?” and “When will they return to flight?” The first question was answered in the weeks that followed as SpaceX CEO Elon Musk reported that the most likely cause of the accident was a failure in a second stage strut that held a high pressure helium tank in place. The second question could be answered this evening when the first Falcon 9 launch in six months takes place at Cape Canaveral. The last time a...
Twenty years of hunting exoplanets has given us nearly 2000 chunks of non-fusing rock and gas. It’s also given us the statistics to show that the galaxy is likely to be filled to the brim with other worlds, giving incredible potential for finding other Earths and maybe even other life. The latest discoveries involve the use of better technology, more intuitive methods, and more comprehensive searches. This means that we aren’t just discovering planets that are further from Earth, we are finding the ones that are nearby, but small enough to have been hidden, until now. The red dwarf star...
Since the arrival of the Dawn spacecraft in March of 2015, we have seen tremendous views of the dwarf planet Ceres. Lying within the asteroid belt, it is revealed to be a frozen world of ice and rock, with many interesting features. None of these features had generated more intrigue than the famous bright spot in the bottom of what is now called the Occator crater. The icy spot has had astronomers guessing for months whether it is a cryovolcano, water ice, frozen carbon dioxide, or something even more strange and rare. As the Dawn spacecraft has moved into a...
Predicting the death of a star is easy. If we know how massive it is, and what stage of life it’s in, we know that it should explode eventually, within a set timeframe of many hundreds of thousands, or even millions of years. But on human timescales, that is just not good enough. What if we could predict a supernova explosion within a few months? For something that lives for so long, this would be a triumph in our understanding of the universe. Over the past couple of years, this is exactly what happened. Here’s how. A supernova is one of the most...
