This past week, American astronaut Scott Kelly, currently on a one year stint aboard the International Space Station, broke the record of 363 days for most time logged in Space by an American. Kelly will continue to run up the tally, as he is just over halfway through his one year mission. His record comes from a total of four space missions, including two Shuttle missions and two ISS stays. While Kelly continues his mission to determine the long term effects of space flight on humans, his fellow ISS astronaut Andreas Mogensen has been testing a new skin suit developed...
Every so often we see a new set of images from Pluto, giving us a chance to rediscover it multiple times. It’s like we are experiencing the July fly-by over and over again, and each new set of images reveals something new and exciting. I feel the same sense of excitement and discovery each time I see a new image, realizing that it spent 6 hours as a beam of light crossing the 5 Billion Kilometres of the solar system to connect us to the New Horizons probe, a lonely little piece of human ingenuity flying through the darkness. Here...
It’s hard to do experiments in space. It costs a boatload of money, takes years of preparation, and even then we can’t get much further than low-Earth orbit. But there is a cheaper alternative to understanding the universe. We can perform experiments on Earth to simulate what happens far beyond our own planet. That’s just what scientists did at the Vertical Gun Range at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California. They found that Ceres is likely a mish-mash of celestial bodies from several billion years of bombardment. Until March of this year, when the Dawn spacecraft entered orbit of the...
We tend to think of the Moon as a boring old rock. “We’ve been there, so we know all there is to know, onto the next one.” But the Moon still holds secrets, and has its surprises. The formation of the Moon through collision of proto-Earth with a Mars-sized object is an idea that can give us a lot of insight into how the Earth formed and what raw materials we started with. But of course to study it we have to see what the Moon is made of in addition to what the Earth’s rocks contain. In recent years,...
Deep within the Earth, far below the layers of rock that form the crust, and even further below the molten rock of the mantle, lies a hot core of Iron and Nickel. The swirling of the liquid metal creates a flow of charge and produces the magnetic field of the Earth, without which we humans could not survive. But there is still more. At the centre of the Earth, a part of the liquid metal core, the size of Pluto, cooled into a solid ball of Iron and Nickel. When in the Earth’s history did it form? This question has...
I went to the movies last night to see ‘The Martian,’ something I have been excited about for a long time. The theatre was packed, and the movie was amazing, both unsurprising facts. I had very few scientific issues with the film, even with low standards for a big screen pic, but mostly due to first thing the screen showed: ‘NASA was heavily consulted to ensure the science in this movie is accurate.’ Way to go Hollywood! My favourite parts of the movie employed some hilarious use of technical definitions. For example, when Mark Watney grows potatoes on Mars, he says...
Some colour images were released from New Horizons today, showing some of the first true colour views of the icy dwarf planet. The amazing thing is that to human eyes, the combination of Methane and Nitrogen in the atmosphere give it a gorgeous blue tinge. The other amazing piece of news is that Pluto has water ice on its surface! Check out these photos highlighted for surface water ice. By looking for the signature of Sunlight reflected off water, the cameras on New Horizons can spot regions where water ice is dominant. Pluto continues to surprise!
The high resolution data keeps on coming in from New Horizons, now far beyond the dwarf planet Pluto. Using some of the images as the craft flew by, mission scientists were able to create a fantastic video that gives you some perspective as if you were flying along yourself. We can see Charon and other moons during the early and later stages of the fly-by, with the orbits overlaid, giving perspective on how the Plutonian system’s mechanics work. As the craft approaches Pluto, time slows down to appreciate the closest approach and see the stunning detail revealed in the...
The short answer is….we don’t know. It could still be a lot of different things, but take a look for yourself and see if you can figure it out. Here are the possibilities: Ceres is soon to make a descent to its lowest orbit for final mapping, and will be orbiting only 375 Km above the surface. This will give the highest resolution data yet, and hopefully shed some light on the mystery of Occator crater. What do you think?
After an epic weekend of eclipse talk, NASA came out with a press conference that overshadowed much more than just the Moon. The announcement, as many had speculated, revealed that conclusive evidence shows there is flowing water on Mars. Like seasons on Earth, warmer conditions cause water to flow down steep hills and into valleys. The speculation came due to the invitation of Lujendra Ojha of the Georgia Institute of Technology to the NASA panel. Ojha noticed strange features on Mars as an undergraduate student in 2010, while looking at images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO)’s High Resolution Imaging Science...
