As is the case with any final approach to a new object, the early images, with their horrible resolution, pixelated appearance, and possibly false features due to processing, lead to significant speculation on what we will see as the craft approaches. It was the same a few months ago with Ceres. I personally love the blurry images. It’s a mystery waiting to be solved, and we see it unfold as we move ever closer to our destination. It also reminds me of the early days of the internet I grew up with, using a good old 28.8K modem and waiting 2...
I was downtown Toronto this morning, dressed in a suit and holding my umbrella to stay dry and navigate the city streets as they were soaked with rain. I was headed to the CBC building on John street to do an interview about the SpaceX CRS-7 mission that would launch an hour later. This would be a very important mission, the seventh of twelve ISS resupply missions contracted by NASA. It was also the third attempt at a secondary goal – landing the first stage launch vehicle, the Falcon 9 rocket, upright on an ocean platform, a feat that had...
Since it’s landing made international headlines back in November as it landed on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, the Philae lander has been in hibernation mode, not able to generate enough power to operate due to a lack of direct sunlight on its solar panels. But after 7 months, as the comet has come closer to the Sun, the increasing solar intensity has given it the boost it needed to wake up! “Philae is doing very well: It has an operating temperature of -35ºC and has 24 Watts available,” explains DLR Philae Project Manager Dr. Stephan Ulamec. “The lander is ready for operations.” The...
New Horizons is giving Earth the A-OK! All the systems look good and we are only 37.4 million kilometres away from Pluto. Yes that is far, but considering we usually see Pluto at a distance 200 times that, we are doing pretty well. The newest processed photos have come in from NASA and John’s Hopkins University, and they are starting to show a complex and mysterious surface chock-full of science goodies that make astronomers salivate like Pavlov’s dog when the bell rang. But image processing is a science in itself, and I wanted to show you the difference between a raw photo...
One of the most difficult maneuvers I can imagine is the rendezvous and docking connection of two spacecraft in orbit. They’ve launched at different times, they are travelling several thousand kilometers per hour, and they are orbiting the Earth 400 Km above the surface. And yet human ingenuity has prevailed and allowed us to not just perform this procedure, but to experience it as humans trapped on the surface. This NASA video shows a real time docking procedure. I can’t help but think of the video game Kerbal Space Program, an excellent space program simulator for anyone who loves the...
Today is a busy day in the world of astronomy and space news. The US Air Force has approved SpaceX for military launches, ending a ten year monopoly by Boeing and Lockheed-Martin. A black hole jet moving at nearly the speed of light is having traffic issues, resulting in knots of jet material rear-ending each other. An experiment in Quantum Mechanics has shown that reality simply doesn’t exist until we measure it. Finally, the Gemini planet imager has found a bright, disk-shaped ring of dust around the star HD 115600, which is being likened to the Kuiper Belt in the...
For a long time, the scientific community has been hopeful for a mission to some of the most interesting moons of the solar system. Europa, Enceladus, and Ganymede all have subsurface oceans and will give substantial insights into the formation and evolution of life in the solar system and beyond. The only problem is that it costs an astronomical (literally) amount of money to get there. A bare bones mission to Europa would cost over 600 Million dollars, and if we are spending that much we had better be sure it will work. Money aside, the technology to get appropriate...
It sounds completely like science fiction, something out of a campy space thriller where the protagonist is a miner taking a daily shuttle to the Moon to mine all the precious metals that the Earth needs to sustain itself. But in real life, for a long time, it was thought that the Moon was a dead rock, completely useless to humanity except as the gravitational force to provide the amazing tides in the bay of Fundy. Today we know so much more about the Moon, and its value has (pun intended) skyrocketed. For one, the low gravity of the Moon...
Eight minutes after launching from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, a Russian Proton-M rocket experienced a catastrophic failure in its third stage rocket, resulting in the complete atmospheric burn-up of the rocket and its payload, a Mexican Communications Satellite. After launching at 11:47am local time in Kazakhstan, the rocket experienced an emergency situation 497 seconds into the flight, reported as a failure in the rocket’s Breeze-M third stage. The carrier rocket was launching the Mexsat 1 communications satellite, known as Centenario, into orbit, in a contract with the Mexican government. After reaching a 161 Km altitude, the rocket failed and fell back to...
I feel this will be a recurring theme with my posts, especially for those who read my blog on a regular basis. I love Pluto and am fascinated by new horizons. Its like a kitten chasing a ball of yarn. But with so many new possibilities popping up with Pluto as the new horizons rendezvous draws near, its hard to contain my excitement at the prospects of great science. The latest photo taken from just under 100 Million Km distant, shows some surface features for the first time. The features are interpreted as broad surface features, some are brigt and...
