On July 4th, for about an hour and twenty minutes, my heart stopped. This was the amount of time that New Horizons was quiet. No contact, no data, nothing but the lonely black of space. In this time, the craft did what it was programmed to do. It transferred control to its backup computer, which told the main computer to enter safe mode and suspend all non-essential functions. Then the backup computer attempted to re-establish contact with Earth, 5 Billion Kilometres away. Contact has been re-established with the craft and its backup computer has been transmitting telemetry data back to mission...
If you could see through the lens of a very powerful telescope, to an area of sky the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length, a new universe would be revealed to you. For in that tiny patch of seemingly empty sky, there are thousands of galaxies visible, albeit with many hours of light collection. Observing the most distant of these galaxies, at the edge of the universe, allows us to estimate the number of Galaxies present in the distant past, when the universe was very young. As our observations improve, and our ability to simulate the conditions of the...
In the last few days, we have watched the intricate dance of Venus and Jupiter in the Western sky after sunset. They have tangoed and passed by one another and the world has watched as the best conjunction of the year has come and gone. Don’t forget that even though they appear close in the sky, Venus is actually closer to the Earth than it is to Jupiter. Jupiter is hundreds of millions of kilometers further away than Venus. Today’s APOD is a beautiful shot by Letian Wang combining the proximity of the two planets with the (much further East...
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...
For the last few months, Venus and Jupiter have been visible in the night sky. Venus makes it’s usual 584 day cycle, becoming an ‘evening star’ once again, reaching far from the Sun in the West, while still following our central star. Jupiter has slowly worked its way westward over the past few months, due more in part to Earth’s orbit than Jupiter’s. Finally, the long-awaited conjunction of the planets is nigh, and it offers the best views and photographic opportunities of the year for professional and amateur astronomers alike. What is the brightest object in the sky? The Sun...
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...
I presume that you know what a leap year is. A year is the amount of time the Earth takes to orbit the Sun, and is measured as 365 days, or 365 rotations of Earth. It is, in reality, a little bit longer. Each orbit of the Sun takes 365.25 days, or 365 days and six hours. So what do we do with that six hours? We ignore it for 3 years. On the fourth year we add up those extra hours and we get 24 hours, an extra day! So we add in February 29th every four years. This...
If there’s one true fact about every single gas giant planet ever observed, around the Sun or other stars in the Galaxy, it’s that they all are mainly composed of Hydrogen. Even though the giants of our solar system such as Neptune and Jupiter seem very different, it is Hydrogen that primarily composes them. The difference is in the details though. The blue colour of Neptune is due to the presence of Methane, and even then it only makes up 1.7% of Neptune’s mass. But Hydrogen is light. Wouldn’t giant planets like hot Jupiters lose their Hydrogen from being blasted...
The true story of why Pluto isn’t a planet goes back further than you would think. It has a lot to do with our understanding of science at the time, and a lot more to do with surprising luck. I made this video a couple of days ago for the Khan Academy Talent Search. I hope you enjoy it. It will be interesting as we move into better telescope technologies that allow us to see further into the depths of the solar system and the universe. What strange mysteries will we find?
Since it entered Saturnian orbit on July 1st, 2004, the Cassini spacecraft has changed our view of Saturn and its moons. It is a dynamic gas giant with unique and fascinating moons that have their own characteristics that make them seem more like small, rocky, planets than moons of a gas giant. Cassini has been delivering amazing science for over a decade, and it’s next journey lies in a polar orbit of Saturn, where it will dive through Saturn’s rings, giving the most detailed and close up views of the tiny ice particles that compose them. Before this journey, Cassini...
