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...
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. ...
Beyond the atmosphere, past the stars we see, farther than the Milky Way, and continuing past Andromeda, we reach the real cosmic ocean. So called because like an ocean on Earth, it is vast, homogeneous, and impossible to navigate by common sense alone. In the cosmic ocean, an impossibly huge amount of space separates island galaxies, whose strong gravity binds them across incredible distances, dictating their course, and forming the largest and most massive structures in the universe: galaxy clusters. Because these immense structures are so vast and so distant, it requires the work of several telescopes to map out...
The Past: Mars has water, and it used to have a lot more. If modern Mars had the ocean it once had, it would evaporate off into space quickly because there is no heavy atmosphere to help keep it pressurized and in liquid form. Mars would have had a thicker atmosphere in addition to it’s magnetic field in order to keep all that water in one place. So where did the atmosphere go? And if there was such a thick atmosphere, how does it account for the fingerprint of excess Carbon-13 and a lack of Carbon-12 found on the red planet...
Space is incredibly dangerous, in case you didn’t know. Harmful radiation, bitter cold, low pressure, no air, and no gravity make for a very difficult environment to survive in. Even though a space capsule is pressurized with breathable air, protected with radiation shields, and warmed to a comfortable temperature, the effects of microgravity are still damaging to the human body. We know that astronauts lose bone mass rapidly, have to exercise to keep their muscles active, but what other effects does microgravity have on the body? For one, without gravity to clear your sinuses, they get a bit clogged in...
Halloween is an amazing chance for people to be someone (or something) they have always wanted to be. To step outside of their norm and live their life as an alter ego, if only for one night. This is why so many people have crazy Halloween stories, and why the ‘holiday’ captivates us so much. With humanity’s excellent pattern recognition skills, we tend to see spooky things in space, where if you would just turn the picture 90 degrees, it probably would look like some other item from human experience, and not be spooky after all. Here are a few...
It always fascinates me to see videos and photographs from the International Space Station (ISS), how simple day to day activities are so altered because of the altered Physics of constant free fall in orbit around the Earth. Many of the videos are showing what people call the ‘effects of zero gravity.’ This is actually not the case. There is gravity in space. Let’s take a closer look at the situation of an ISS astronaut. If we do the math (I do realize the term ‘do the math’ turns away a lot of people, so I will keep it short),...
Now that New Horizons has passed by Pluto and it’s moons, it’s time we updated out images of the entire system. Taking images from New Horizons, today’s APOD shows the relative sizes of the moons with the best photos we have of them to date. Looking at the image, it makes sense that Nix and Hydra weren’t discovered until 2005, and that Kerberos and Styx were not found until 2012. The moons are so tiny and distant, and are dwarfed by the larger Charon and central Pluto. As far as we know, this is it for Pluto’s moons, since we haven’t...
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...
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,...
