After talking about high resolution mapping of Ceres last week, it occurred to me that we have mapped so many distant worlds in our solar system. We have seen moons of Jupiter and Saturn up close, completely mapped Mars, and started mapping Pluto, pushing our boundaries of exploration. But what about our Moon? Sure the Earth-facing side has been seen in high definition. Anyone with a small telescope and a camera can take a great photo of the Moon. But what about the other side of the Moon, the so called dark side? It turns out that the Lunar Reconnaissance...
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...
Remember a few months ago when excitement was high about seeing the surface of the dwarf planet Ceres for the first time with the Dawn spacecraft? Remember when the pictures were simple and blurry and looked more like a conspiracy theorist’s UFO pictures than another celestial body? Remember when I wrote about how cool it will be when we become the first humans in history, and the first form of life to ever see the surface of this object? The lead up to the Ceres encounter is well summed up in the NASA video from right before the encounter. I...
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...
Tis the season, as they say. This year is a good one for space missions with the March arrival of the Dawn spacecraft at Ceres and the July fly-by of Pluto by new horizons. Dawn made history by being the first ever spacecraft to orbit a dwarf planet, and new horizons will provide the first ever pictures of the surface of Pluto in unprecedented detail. I can barely contain my excitement, after having watched the launch of New Horizons live on NASA TV in 2006. I thought about what life would be like in 2015 and what Pluto would look...
As the Dawn Spacecraft readies for orbit insertion only a week from now, the images coming in are getting sharper and sharper. Once the craft is fully in orbit its first task will be to map the surface of the planet in high definition. Even on the last few weeks of the journey to Ceres, we have seen increasingly clear images, and have already started asking ‘What the heck is that?’ This week’s ‘what the heck are we looking at?’ involves this apparent double bright spot on Ceres, imaged on February 19th from a distance of 46,000 Km, about an...
