The next mission to Mars, called InSight (Interior Exploration Using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport), is slated to launch in Spring of 2016. It will be the first stationary lander to investigate the internal structure of Mars and search for seismic activity, ie marsquakes! NASA has always been good at including space enthusiasts in the public in their missions, giving them a human feel, and this mission is no exception. You can sign up to have your name included on a silicon microchip on the lander! In the first 24 hours, NASA has had 67,000 people sign up, and they expect...
The rendering I’ve been waiting for is finally here! A conceptual video of the flyby of Pluto from far away, leading through closest approach and turning back to see the dark side, all together. This will give you a sense of the motion of New Horizons, and the state of the Pluto system in the Kuiper Belt. The credit goes not just to NASA, but to space enthusiast Björn Jónsson, who created the rendering from the latest Pluto images and data from New Horizons. The strangest part of watching this was the sense of longing I felt as we fly past...
The Deep Space Climate Observatory (DISCOVR) was launched back in February of this year. Although its goal is to measure solar wind particles from the Sun as a space weather predictor, DISCOVR passes the orbit plane of the Earth and the Moon twice per year. In its first pass, it snapped an amazing series of frames of the Moon passing in front of the Earth. The images show the dark side of the Moon, as well as the stark contrast between the darker lunar surface and the bright Earth. The camera that took the shots, the Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera...
With all the news of the past year in the Astronomy world, Rosetta on 67P, Dawn on Ceres, New Horizons on Pluto, our old friend the Curiosity rover hasn’t had time to watch the news. Curiosity has been working hard, ‘rocking out’ (pun intended) on the red planet. Tomorrow, August 6th, marks its third anniversary since touching down on Mars and beginning science operations that would forever change our understanding of our next-door neighbor. To mark the occasion, the Mars Science Laboratory team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has released an anniversary video. For its third anniversary, Curiosity has found...
I love data visualization. If I didn’t love astronomy and explosions so much, I would probably be in the art form of visualizing data in fascinating ways. Who knows? I may change my life’s work some day. A recent APOD takes the art to a new level. By looking at time sensitive measurements of Gamma Rays from an incredible active galactic nucleus (AGN), we can get an idea of how a gamma ray burst comes at us from so far away, and what the difference is between the usual activity and a true burst of radiation. Each circle represents a...
Lurking in the depths of a galaxy, hidden from human eyes, lie millions of monsters. They could swallow you up in an instant, sealing you off from the outside world and devouring you atom by atom. This sounds like your typical Hollywood monster movie, but with millions of black holes hidden throughout the galaxy, its more real than you might think. Supermassive black holes, the largest ones that reside at the centers of galaxies, are much easier to see. They are devouring gas and dust rapidly, resulting in bright emission across the electromagnetic spectrum, especially in x-rays. For many galaxies,...
It’s not fuzzy caterpillars or any small creatures interacting in a Petri dish. The strange growing and twisting creatures are not creatures at all. Today’s NASA APOD shows a time lapse view of a cluster of sunspots as they pass along the surface of the Sun during its rotation. The total time is about 12 hours for the sunspots to cross the solar surface, yet the video is shortened to a quick minute and a half. The amazing thing to notice is the amazing dance of the sunspots as they shift, twist, merge, separate, and interact with the granular convection cells...
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...
When Charles Messier catalogued 100 different objects in the night sky, he couldn’t have imagined the richness and detail of each one of his individual discoveries, or that we would ever see them in such incredible detail as to understand what they truly are and how they evolve. But every time I see a new image of a well-known object, I not only see the new and amazing details revealed, I see the next level of technology that enables us to see it in a new light. This image of Messier number 64 gives me that view. Messier 64 is...
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...
