Tag Archives: planet

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An Eleven Year Marathon

While 11 years is about how long my kids suggest it would take me to run a marathon, this marathon is entirely other-worldly. It’s taken NASA’s Opportunity rover this length of time to cover just over 26 miles. It may seem like an awfully long time to cover that short distance, but think of all the rest stops — for incredible scientific discovery — along the way.

Check out a time-lapse that compresses Opportunity’s incredible martian journey into a mere 8 minutes.

[tube]3b1DxICZbGc[/tube]

Video courtesy of NASA / JPL.

BigBang, Idea Soup

Name a Planet

So, you’d like to name a planet, perhaps after your grandmother or a current girlfriend or boyfriend. Here’s how below. But, forget trying to name a celestial object after your pet. So, “Mr.Tiddles”, “Snowy” and “Rex” are out.

From the Independent:

The international institute responsible for naming planets, stars and other celestial bodies has announced that the public will now be able to submit their own suggestions on what to call new discoveries in space.

Founded in 1919, the Paris-based International Astronomical Union (IAU) has more than 11,000 members in more than 90 countries, making it the de facto authority in the field.

Without any official laws enforcing the use of planetary names, the decisions on what to call new discoveries are usually a matter of consensus.

The changes announced by IAU hope to make public’s involvement more streamlined, asking that submissions are “sent to iaupublic@iap.fr” and promising that they will be “handled on a case-by-case basis”.

“The IAU fully supports the involvement of the general public, whether directly or through an independent organised vote, in the naming of planetary satellites, newly discovered planets, and their host stars,” says the statement.

The following guidelines have been offered for submission by would-be planet-namers:

? 16 characters or less in length,

? preferably one word,

? pronounceable (in as many languages as possible),

? non-offensive in any language or culture,

? not too similar to an existing name of an astronomical object.

? names of pet animals are discouraged,

? names of a purely or principally commercial nature are not allowed.

Despite this nod towards a democratic process, the IAU recently vetoed naming a newly discovered moon orbiting Pluto after Vulcan, the home-planet of Spock from the Star Trek franchise.

William Shatner, the actor who played Captain James Kirk in the show, launched a campaign via Twitter after the Seti institute discovered the new moons and created an online poll to name them.

Submitted names had to be picked from classical mythology and have an association with the underworld.‘Vulcan’ easily won the contest with 174,062 votes, followed by ‘Cerberus’ with 99,432 votes, and ‘Styx’ with 87,858 votes.

However, the IAU chose ‘Kerberus’ and ‘Styx’ as the names for the new moons, rejecting Vulcan as it “had already been used for a hypothetical planet between Mercury and the Sun.”

This planet was later found not to exist, but the term ‘vulcanoid’ is still used to refer to asteroids within the orbit of Mercury. Shatner responded to the IAU’s decision by tweeting, “They didn’t name the moon Vulcan. I’m sad. Who’d ever thought I’d be betrayed by geeks and nerds?”

 

Read the entire article here.

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The View From Saturn

As Carl Sagan would no doubt have had us remember, we are still collectively residents of a very small, very pale blue dot. The image of planet Earth was taken by the Cassini spacecraft, which has been busy circuiting and mapping the Saturnian system over the last several years. Cassini turned the attention of its cameras to our home on July 19, 2013 for this portrait.

From NASA:

Color and black-and-white images of Earth taken by two NASA interplanetary spacecraft on July 19 show our planet and its moon as bright beacons from millions of miles away in space.

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft captured the color images of Earth and the moon from its perch in the Saturn system nearly 900 million miles (1.5 billion kilometers) away. MESSENGER, the first probe to orbit Mercury, took a black-and-white image from a distance of 61 million miles (98 million kilometers) as part of a campaign to search for natural satellites of the planet.

In the Cassini images Earth and the moon appear as mere dots — Earth a pale blue and the moon a stark white, visible between Saturn’s rings. It was the first time Cassini’s highest-resolution camera captured Earth and its moon as two distinct objects.

It also marked the first time people on Earth had advance notice their planet’s portrait was being taken from interplanetary distances. NASA invited the public to celebrate by finding Saturn in their part of the sky, waving at the ringed planet and sharing pictures over the Internet. More than 20,000 people around the world participated.

“We can’t see individual continents or people in this portrait of Earth, but this pale blue dot is a succinct summary of who we were on July 19,” said Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist, at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “Cassini’s picture reminds us how tiny our home planet is in the vastness of space, and also testifies to the ingenuity of the citizens of this tiny planet to send a robotic spacecraft so far away from home to study Saturn and take a look-back photo of Earth.”

Pictures of Earth from the outer solar system are rare because from that distance, Earth appears very close to our sun. A camera’s sensitive detectors can be damaged by looking directly at the sun, just as a human being can damage his or her retina by doing the same. Cassini was able to take this image because the sun had temporarily moved behind Saturn from the spacecraft’s point of view and most of the light was blocked.

A wide-angle image of Earth will become part of a multi-image picture, or mosaic, of Saturn’s rings, which scientists are assembling. This image is not expected to be available for several weeks because of the time-consuming challenges involved in blending images taken in changing geometry and at vastly different light levels, with faint and extraordinarily bright targets side by side.

“It thrills me to no end that people all over the world took a break from their normal activities to go outside and celebrate the interplanetary salute between robot and maker that these images represent,” said Carolyn Porco, Cassini imaging team lead at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo. “The whole event underscores for me our ‘coming of age’ as planetary explorers.”

Read the entire article here.

Image: In this rare image taken on July 19, 2013, the wide-angle camera on NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has captured Saturn’s rings and our planet Earth and its moon in the same frame. Courtesy: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute.

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The Habitable Exoplanets Catalog

The Habitable Exoplanets Catalog is a fascinating resource for those who dream of starting a new life on a distant world. Only into its first year, the catalog now lists 7 planets outside of our solar system and within our own Milky Way galaxy that could become a future home for adventurous humans — complaints from existing inhabitants notwithstanding. Although, the closest at the moment at a distance of just over 20 light years — Gliese 581g — would take around 200,000 years to reach using current technology.

[div class=attrib]From the Independent:[end-div]

An ambitious project to catalogue every habitable planet has discovered seven worlds inside the Milky Way that could possibly harbour life.

Marking its first anniversary, the Habitable Exoplanets Catalog said it had far exceeded its expectation of adding one or two new planets this year in its search for a new earth.

In recent years scientists from the Puerto Rico-based Planetary Habitability Laboratory that runs the catalogue have sharpened their techniques for finding new planets outside our solar system.

Chile’s High Accuracy Radial Veolocity Planet Searcher and the orbiting Kepler Space Telescope are two of the many tools that have increased the pace of discoveries.

The Planetary Habitability Laboratory launched the Habitable Exoplanets Catalog last year to measure the suitability for life of these emerging worlds and as a way to organise them for the public.

It has found nearly 80 confirmed exoplanets with a similar size to Earth but only a few of those have the right distance from their star to support liquid surface water – the presence of which is considered essential to sustain life.

Seven potentially habitable exoplanets are now listed by the Habitable Exoplanets Catalog, including the disputed Gliese 581g, plus some 27 more from NASA Kepler candidates waiting for confirmation.

Although all these exoplanets are superterrans are considered potentially habitable, scientists have not yet found a true Earth analogue.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article following the jump.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image: Current Potential Habitable Exoplanets. Courtesy of CREDIT: PHL @ UPR Arecibo.[end-div]

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A Star is Born, and its Solar System

A diminutive stellar blob some 450 million light years away seems to be a young star giving birth to a planetary system much like our very own Solar System. The developing protostar and its surrounding gas cloud is being tracked astronomers at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville, Virginia. Stellar and planetary evolution in action.

[div class=attrib]From New Scientist:[end-div]

Swaddled in a cloud of dust and gas, the baby star shows a lot of potential. It is quietly sucking in matter from the cloud, which holds enough cosmic nourishment for the infant to grow as big and bright as our sun. What’s more, the star is surrounded by enough raw material to build at least seven planetary playmates.

Dubbed L1527, the star is still in the earliest stages of development, so it offers one of the best peeks yet at what our solar system may have looked like as it was taking shape.

The young star is currently one-fifth of the mass of the sun, but it is growing. If it has been bulking up at the same rate all its life, the star should be just 300,000 years old – a mere tyke compared to our 4.6-billion-year-old sun. But the newfound star may be even younger, because some theories say stars initially grow at a faster rate.

Diminutive sun

The cloud feeding the protostar contains at least as much material as our sun, says John Tobin of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville, Virginia.

“The key factor in determining a star’s characteristics is the mass, so L1527 could potentially grow to become similar to the sun,” says Tobin.

Material from the cloud is being funnelled to the star through a swirling disc that contains roughly 0.5 per cent the mass of the sun. That might not sound like a lot, but that’s enough mass to make up at least seven Jupiter-sized planets.

Previous observations of L1527 had hinted that a disk encircled the star, but it was not clear that the disk was rotating, which is an essential ingredient for planet formation. So Tobin and his colleagues took a closer look.

Good rotations

The team used radio observations to detect the presence of carbon monoxide around the star and watched how the material swirled around in the disc to trace its overall motion. They found that matter nearest to the star is rotating faster than material near the edge of the disc – a pattern that mirrors the way planets orbit a star.

“The dust and gas are orbiting the protostar much like how planets orbit the sun,” says Tobin. “Unfortunately there is no telling how many planets might form or how large they will be.”

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article following the jump.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Protostar L1527. Courtesy of NASA / JPL, via tumblr.[end-div]

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Curiosity in Flight

NASA pulled off another tremendous and daring feat of engineering when it successfully landed the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) to the surface of Mars on August 5, 2012, 10:32 PM Pacific Time.

The MSL is housed aboard the Curiosity rover, a 2,000-pound, car-size robot. Not only did NASA land Curiosity a mere 1 second behind schedule following a journey of over 576 million kilometers (358 million miles) lasting around 8 months, it went one better. NASA had one of its Mars orbiters — Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter — snap an image of MSL from around 300 miles away as it descended through the Martian atmosphere, with its supersonic parachute unfurled.

Another historic day for science, engineering and exploration.

[div class=attrib]From NASA / JPL:[end-div]

NASA’s Curiosity rover and its parachute were spotted by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter as Curiosity descended to the surface on Aug. 5 PDT (Aug. 6 EDT). The High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera captured this image of Curiosity while the orbiter was listening to transmissions from the rover. Curiosity and its parachute are in the center of the white box; the inset image is a cutout of the rover stretched to avoid saturation. The rover is descending toward the etched plains just north of the sand dunes that fringe “Mt. Sharp.” From the perspective of the orbiter, the parachute and Curiosity are flying at an angle relative to the surface, so the landing site does not appear directly below the rover.

The parachute appears fully inflated and performing perfectly. Details in the parachute, such as the band gap at the edges and the central hole, are clearly seen. The cords connecting the parachute to the back shell cannot be seen, although they were seen in the image of NASA’s Phoenix lander descending, perhaps due to the difference in lighting angles. The bright spot on the back shell containing Curiosity might be a specular reflection off of a shiny area. Curiosity was released from the back shell sometime after this image was acquired.

This view is one product from an observation made by HiRISE targeted to the expected location of Curiosity about one minute prior to landing. It was captured in HiRISE CCD RED1, near the eastern edge of the swath width (there is a RED0 at the very edge). This means that the rover was a bit further east or downrange than predicted.

[div class=attrib]Follow the mission after the jump.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona.[end-div]

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Curiosity: August 5, 2012, 10:31 PM Pacific Time

This is the time when NASA’s latest foray into space reaches its zenith — the upcoming landing of the Curiosity rover on Mars. At this time NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission plans to deliver the nearly 2,000-pound, car-size robot rover to the surface of Mars. Curiosity will then embark on two years of exploration on the Red Planet.

For mission scientists and science buffs alike Curiosity’s descent and landing will be a major event. And, for the first time NASA will have a visual feed beamed back direct from the spacecraft (but only available after the event). The highly complex and fully automated landing has been dubbed “the Seven Minutes of Terror” by NASA engineers. Named for the time lag of signals from Curiosity to reach Earth due to the immense distance, mission scientists (and the rest of us) will not know whether Curiosity successfully descended and landed until a full 7 minutes after the fact.

For more on Curiosity and this special event visit NASA’s Jet Propulsion MSL site, here.

[div class=attrib]Image: This artist’s concept features NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover, a mobile robot for investigating Mars’ past or present ability to sustain microbial life. Courtesy: NASA/JPL-Caltech.[end-div]

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Happy Birthday Neptune

One hundred and sixty-four years ago, or one Neptunian year, Neptune was first observed by telescope. Significantly, it was the first planet to be discovered deliberately; the existence and location of the gas giant was calculated mathematically. Subsequently, it was located by telescope, on 24 September 1846, and found to be within one degree of the mathematically predicted location. Astronomers hypothesized Neptune’s existence due to perturbations in the orbit of its planetary neighbor, Uranus, around the sun, which could only be explained by the presence of another object in nearby orbit. A triumph for the scientific method, and besides, it’s beautiful too.

[div class=attrib]Image courtesy of NASA.[end-div]