There has been a lot to talk about with our home solar system lately. Spacecraft approaching dwarf planets, robots on Mars, and all kinds of orbiters giving new insights and views we had never expected. It’s a heavy news year for Planetary Science, and the great stories keep creeping up! Today we have an update on the Dawn spacecraft approaching Ceres. The picture I posted on January 20th (shown below) was from 380,000 Km away, comparable to the distance between Earth and the Moon. Now, about 2 weeks later, Dawn is only 145,000 Km away, and the view is much clearer!...
If I told you that humanity was going to mine the Moon for rare elements and water ice, you might think it was the plot of a science fiction book I was writing. However, with the recent strides made by unmanned space missions, coupled with a discovery of water and rare elements near the lunar surface, that story could become fact sooner than you’d think. It’s been 40 years since the Apollo landings on the Moon, and for a long time we naively thought we had discovered everything there was to discover about the Moon. We assumed it was a big...
Venus is the most hellish place I know of in the Solar System, and maybe even the broader Universe. Even though Venus looks pretty harmless and is named for the Roman goddess of Love, beneath the soft looking clouds lies sulphuric acid rainfall, 450 degree surface temperatures, and crushing pressure 90 times the atmospheric pressure of Earth at sea level. How do we get the surface picture of Venus above? NASA’s Magellan probe in 1994 finished mapping the surface by looking at Radio wavelengths emitted by the planet and using radar to bounce waves off the surface to measure features....
…and not the ‘dawn’ we refer to when watching a sunrise. Dawn is a NASA spacecraft that was launched in 2007 with the goal of exploring the asteroid belt by observing its largest and most interesting objects up close. The two largest asteroids, Vesta and Ceres, have been the largest mission goals of Dawn as it has journeyed through the belt. From July 2011 to September 2012, Dawn was in orbit around the 525 Km wide Vesta, snapping amazing photos and studying the giant in detail. Since it’s departure from Vesta in September 2012, the craft has been on route...
It seems that in recent years, asteroids have been flying past Earth with increasing frequency. Does it mean that more asteroids are coming around? Is it the beginning of the end? Will one of them hit us soon and doom us all? Probably not, but there’s always a chance. It’s almost certain that the reason we’ve been able to find so many new asteroids, and especially near-Earth asteroids, is because of the technology increase in Astronomy the past few years. New telescopes and tracking methods exist with the sole purpose of finding near-Earth asteroids, somewhat of an early warning system...
This morning at 4am EST on the International Space Station, an Ammonia leak alarm went off, leading the crew to perform an emergency evacuation from the American capsule of the ISS. All of the astronauts are currently safe and secure in the Russian capsule of the ISS. The hatch between the two capsules has been sealed, and any non-essential equipment has been powered down. Mission Control is in the process of assessing whether the alarm was the result of an actual leak or a malfunction, though recent reports from NASA TV suggest that the alarm was due to computer glitch...
Saturday Morning, 4:47am, Launch: Confirmed. SpaceX launched another successful resupply mission to the International Space Station this morning. The successful launch comes in the wake of the Orbital Sciences Antares rocket explosion back in late October, and is the fourth mission as part of a 12+ Mission contract with NASA worth 1.6 Billion dollars. The Dragon capsule is expected to rendezvous with the ISS early Monday morning, where Astronauts will use the Canada arm to grab it and connect. The capsule will remain connected to the ISS for more than four weeks as ISS astronauts unpack supplies and repack completed experiments...
The Hubble Space Telescope’s just had its 25th Anniversary of bringing us the greatest Astronomical images the world has ever seen. To celebrate, the Hubble team revisited one of Hubble’s most iconic images by pointing the cameras at the Eagle nebula once more. The image, dubbed the ‘Pillars of Creation’ show columns of star forming gas and dust, where the proverbial ‘magic’ happens. But let’s begin with the old image, taken in 1995, so we can compare the differences between then and now. And now the newest image. Quite a striking difference. Like a fine wine, Hubble has only gotten...
When I became a Masters student, a big part of the reason I liked the supervisor I had was that she studied M31: The Andromeda Galaxy. Since I was young I was obsessed with finding this galaxy in a telescope, and I will never forget the night I first found it. Seeing that strange fuzzy patch, photons that had travelled for 2.5 Million years through space, it was my first ever experience with ‘time travel’. Consequently, it makes sense that I am excited about a recent Hubble release: the highest resolution photo of the Andromeda Galaxy Ever taken. Let’s start...
A lot of the data that comes from Space can be called art. Though if you’ve ever seen raw Astronomical data, it’s anything but. It takes a talented artist to bring out the detail in the photo and make it truly beautiful! In the case of large missions like the Cassini Spacecraft, there are a plethora of scientists and artists alike making the most of the data. Especially with Cassini, I always get the feeling it’s a professional photographer taking the photos. The lighting, composition, and other photographic buzzwords are all exceptional, as if it was staged by someone saying...
