MESSENGER Team Completes Two-Week Orbital Flight Test
by Alexandre Costa on Sep.09, 2010, under Solar System
Credit: Messenger mission
Calvino Exposes Layers beneath the Rudaki Plains.
Credit: NASA/Messenger
The MESSENGER team has just wrapped up a two-week flight test to ensure that the Mercury-bound spacecraft is ready for orbital operations. On March 18, 2011, MESSENGER will become the first spacecraft to enter into orbit about Mercury, embarking on a year-long mission to study in depth the planet closest to the Sun. The completion of this recent test provides a high-fidelity verification of the tools, processes, and procedures that are needed to conduct flight operations at Mercury.
“Even though we have more than six months to go until orbit, we wanted to do this test now to make sure that we had enough time to make adjustments,” says MESSENGER Mission Operations Manager Andy Calloway, of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., “But everything worked as expected. We have proven, not just in the ground tests but now in flight, that the sequences and planned daily activities can be conducted safely and as expected. We are quite pleased with the results.”
The flight test took place from August 17 to August 29. In order to force the spacecraft to rotate in space and to gather science data in a manner similar to the operations the probe will experience during the orbital phase of the mission, the ephemerides used onboard the spacecraft had to be modified. “We had to convince the spacecraft that it was in Mercury orbit,” Calloway says. “We also intentionally chose a two-week period with Sun and Earth geometries similar to those that MESSENGER will see during the orbital phase of the mission. The goal was to exercise the flight system in flight conditions as nearly identical as possible to those that will be experienced in orbit to validate performance, and to run as many of the same processes as possible to match a typical fortnight of orbital operations.”
In support of the two-week flight test, team members worked with NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN) schedulers and engineers to put in place an orbit-like track schedule that is very different from cruise. This schedule consists of daily contacts to play back stored data, upload commands, and monitor vehicle health, while pointing the high-gain antenna at Earth, plus about five hours a day for radio science measurements while the spacecraft points away from Earth and conducts science operations.
“During MESSENGER’s cruise phase, we typically have had three to four DSN tracks a week, for about six to eight hours each,” Calloway says. “But during orbit we will be tracking the spacecraft for 13 hours a day, including weekends and holidays. We needed to see if that was a realistic track schedule and one that we could maintain with our staffing plan, ground tools, and automation scripts.”
Approximately once a week during orbit, mission operators will perform brief propulsive maneuvers, where they fire MESSENGER’s small thrusters to unload angular momentum that builds up in the probe’s reaction wheel assemblies due to continuous external forces pushing on the spacecraft – primarily from the Sun. “During the test, they performed three such maneuvers successfully,” says APL’s Eric Finnegan, the MESSENGER Systems Engineer. “We were able to demonstrate that such momentum management actions can be executed safely and routinely without any impact to science data gathering.”
During the two weeks of the test, the team also exercised a variety of orbit-like scenarios and activities, including eclipse power management, star tracker management, quick data acquisition, variable downlink data-rate changes, command timing biases, weekly ephemeris loads, bi-weekly command loads, and instrument memory checks.
During the second half of the test, the science instruments conducted a series of observations as if the spacecraft were in orbit about Mercury. For example, the Mercury Dual Imaging System collected more than 1,400 images, as if mapping the planet, and the Mercury Laser Altimeter fired four times over the course of two days, as if ranging to the planet’s surface. The command sequence directing these activities was generated using the mission’s automated science-planning tool, as all sequences will be during the prime mission.
“Our entire cruise phase, and even the three Mercury flybys, have only been warm-ups for the main event of our mission,” says MESSENGER Principal Investigator Sean Solomon, of the Carnegie Institution of Washington. “These two weeks of flight tests have been our dress rehearsal, to ensure that our spacecraft and our flight team are ready for opening night.”
Moon Sketch from West Cork – I am the Moon Look at Me – International Observe the Moon Night – What’s Up for September 2010
by Deirdre Kelleghan on Sep.05, 2010, under EAAE News, Ireland, Solar System
I am the Moon – Look at Me by Deirdre Kelleghan
15 Day Moon Durrus, West Cork Ireland 26th August 2010 23:05 UT – 00:08 UT Pastel and conte on black paper 200 mm Dob/ FL 1,200 mm / 32 mm eyepiece
I am the Moon – Look at Me by Deirdre Kelleghan
We are privileged to live on a beautiful but fragile planet moving through space at 18.5 miles per second. We are born, live and die here; in our lifetimes we owe it to ourselves to become even a little knowledgeable of our place in the Universe. Just a small fraction of us ever get to leave the planet and become acutely aware of the startling reality that we do in fact live in space.
We all admire humans and robots who explore off planet, but each of us here on the Earth can still reach out to grab a bit of wonder for ourselves by simply looking up. Our moon is a beautiful object whether you look at it with an instrument or just by eye.
The Moon is our nearest natural orbiting satellite, so let us stand a while and look at it together.
Let’s think about what we see when we gaze upward. On International Observe the Moon night the moons appearance is described as waxing gibbous. The gibbous shape of the moon on September 18th is exactly in-between the first quarter and full moon. This phase gives us the opportunity to view naked eye most of the Maria. In the northern section close to the terminator, Mare Imbrum, (The Sea of Rains) just a bit to the right is Mare Serenitatis, (The Sea of Serenity) below Imbrium is Mare Insularium, (The Sea of Islands). Below Serenitatis, is Mare Tranquillitatis (The Sea of Tranquillity), the place where men first stood upon the moon.
Just three days previous most people would refer to it as a half moon but have a think for a minute or two. The Moon is a spherical object, like a ball, it moves around our planet approximately once every twenty nine days. On its journey it presents a different shape to us depending on its position to the sun in relation to the person viewing the near side from Earth. The sun illuminates the moon’s surface and reflects that light towards our eyes. When the moon is at first quarter, half of its surface is lit up by the sun. At all times one half of the moons surfaces is bathed in sunlight while the other half rests in total darkness.
The Earth and the moon do a little orbital dance together which the sun lights up for our pleasure.
This dance involves the larger Earth partner holding the moons near side face towards itself the entire time .The orbital waltz created by the Earth and the moon as they swing around the sun together produces various phenomena during their annual soiree. These include eclipses, both lunar and solar, depending on the angle and varied positions between the three of them, the dancers and their light.
When you use your eyes only to look at the moon on International Observe the moon night, what are you looking at exactly? You will see the moon present itself to you when it is positioned a little more than one quarter way around the Earth. You will see the bright limb of the moon; you will see the line that separates daytime on the moon from night time on the moon. It is called ‘The Terminator’. Look closely and observe the darker markings ‘The Maria’ large lava filled impact basins. You will see the brighter higher areas and maybe if you have good eyesight you will see some of the larger craters and their rays. The lovely small rounded area to the upper right of The Sea of Tranquillity, close to the limb, is Mare Crisium (the sea of crisis).
With even a small pair of binoculars your view will be enhanced with detail. With a telescope depending on the size and quality of the eyepieces your view will be awesome. There is a lifetimes worth of observing to be had with the moon alone. The contrast, the rich lunarscape, the play of light against the blackness of space, it is an exploration adventure available for all to view.
What\’s Up for September 2010 – The Moon
In this podcast Jane Houston Jones talks about the Moon and International Observe the Moon Night
Get Comfy The Perseids are Coming – Introducing Meteorwatch 2010 – What’s Up for August 2010 from Jane Houston Jones
by Deirdre Kelleghan on Aug.06, 2010, under EAAE News, Ireland, Meteor Showers, National Representatives
Get Comfy the Perseids are Coming By Deirdre Kelleghan
Skellig Rocks image Bernard Kelleghan
About 24 years ago we had a holiday in a remote location in the west of Ireland. The house was high on a grassy ridge on Bolus Head looking over St Finian’s Bay in Co Kerry. From this vantage point the 350 million year old Skellig Rocks rose like stegosaurus plates from the Atlantic Ocean. They were 16 kilometres out to sea but their jagged presence dominated the view to the South. It was early August and when darkness fell the predicable blinking of a distant lighthouse was the only manmade object discernable at sea level in the blackness.
One moonless evening, the sky was crystal clear, the summer triangle was dramatically intersected by our galaxies river of stars, so much more touchable than the suburban view. I lay on the sun -dried grass looking for Perseids, one, two, three, four, five, six, plus several in the corner of my eye within a few minutes.
Time to take action, I went into the house and dragged out several mattresses, and encouraged (made) my family and our guests come outside, lie down and look up. I have a vague memory of sofa cushions being shoved through windows at one point to help the nest building.
As usual they thought I was mad, but soon they were seeing one of the year’s wonders in perhaps the darkest place on our island. We watched for satellites and my mattress guests (two families, four adults, four children) had never seen them either, so in between meteors we looked at these metal objects orbiting about 200 miles up.
A perfect viewing spot, we watched on a slight incline toward Perseus in North East, but the meteors came from what seemed like every direction. We watched many many meteors sizzling into our atmosphere in dots and dashes with long gaps and differing lengths. The Perseids are the result of tiny cast – off particles from Comet Swift Tuttle, shed as it passed through our solar system on its 130 year orbit of our sun. Once a year the Earth’s journey round our sun brings our atmosphere and these remnants into contact with each other .These particles hit the atmosphere at huge speeds and burn up thereby offering the observer natural fireworks. Ancient elements revealed by their colours as they vaporise in front of our eyes.
I will never forget the perfection of the viewing, the WOW’s, the laughter, the joy of my family seeing this beautiful meteor shower for the first time ever.
Over the years since I have watched the Perseids from a deck chair in my garden, some escape the eye under hazy lights in suburbia. It is always the most exciting shower of the year and rarely disappoints. If you are lucky to have clear skies between now and mid August, no equipment is needed, just you and your eyeballs. If you want to fill out an observing sheet to record, the colour, length, duration, direction, location, hourly rate of your Perseids then they are easy to find and fill.
Post midnight is the best time to view. The Earth has left the Belt of Venus long behind and has rolled toward the night were other suns populate the soft deep cloak of space. The Perseids bring nano seconds, and multi seconds of wispy joy to all who take the time to look up from mattresses or other comfy viewing places. My apologies, to holiday homes everywhere.
Introducing Meteorwatch 2010 Check this out , contribute your observations , images, learn a little and most of all have fun.
The Perseids in association with ,The British Astronomical Association lots of good informaton on observing, imaging , and you can contribute your own observations and enjoy The Perseids even more . You can follow Meteorwatch on Twitter via @VirtualAstro
Hope it is clear and you all have a lovely time lookng up.
What\’s Up for August 2010 – The Perseids from Jane Houston Jones
Caltech Astronomer Finds Planets in Unusually Intimate Dance around Dying Star
by Alexandre Costa on Jul.28, 2010, under Stellar Evolution
Source: Caltech
Hundreds of extrasolar planets have been found over the past decade and a half, most of them solitary worlds orbiting their parent star in seeming isolation. With further observation, however, one in three of these systems have been found to have two or more planets. Planets, it appears, come in bunches. Most of these systems contain planets that orbit too far from one another to feel each other’s gravity. In just a handful of cases, planets have been found near enough to one another to interact gravitationally.
Now, however, John A. Johnson, an assistant professor of astronomy at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), and his colleagues have found two systems with pairs of gas giant planets locked in an orbital embrace.
In one system—a planetary pair orbiting the massive, dying star HD 200964, located roughly 223 light-years from Earth-the intimate dance is closer and tighter than any previously seen. “This new planet pair came in an unexpected package,” says Johnson.
Adds Eric Ford of the University of Florida in Gainsville, “A planetary system with such closely spaced giant planets would be destroyed quickly if the planets weren’t doing such a well synchronized dance. This makes it a real puzzle how the planets could have found their rhythm.”
A paper by Johnson, Ford, and their collaborators describing the planets and their intriguing orbital dynamics has been accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journal (see http://arxiv.org/abs/1007.4552 for a preprint).
All of the four newly discovered exoplanets are gas giants more massive than Jupiter, and like most exoplanets were discovered by measuring the wobble, or Doppler shift, in the light emitted by their parent stars as the planets orbit around them. Surprisingly, however, the members of each pair are located remarkably close to one another.
For example, the distance between the planets orbiting HD 200964 occasionally is just .35 astronomical units (AU)—roughly 33 million miles—comparable to the distance between Earth and Mars. The planets orbiting the second star, 24 Sextanis (located 244 light-years from Earth) are .75 AU, or about 70 million miles. By comparison, Jupiter and Saturn are never less than 330 million miles apart.
Because of their large masses and close proximity, the exoplanet pairs exert a large gravitational force on each other. The gravitational tug between HD 200964′s two planets, for example, is 3,000,000 times greater than the gravitational force between Earth and Mars, 700 times larger than that between the Earth and the moon, and 4 times larger than the pull of our sun on the Earth.
Unlike the gas giants in our own solar system, the new planets are located comparatively close to their stars. The planets orbiting 24 Sextanis have orbital periods of 455 days (1.25 years) and 910 days (2.5 years), and the companions to HD 200964 periods of 630 days (1.75 years) and 830 days (2.3 years). Jupiter, by contrast, takes just under 12 Earth years to make one pass around the sun.
Planets often move around after they form, in a process known as migration. Migration is thought to be commonplace—it even occurred to some extent within our own solar system—but it isn’t orderly. Planets located farther out in the protoplanetary disk can migrate faster than those closer in, “so planets will cross paths and jostle each other around,” Johnson says. “The only way they can ‘get along’ and become stable is if they enter an orbital resonance.”
When planets are locked in an orbital resonance, their orbital periods are related by the ratio of two small integers. In a 2:1 resonance, for example, an outer planet will orbit its parent star once for every two orbits of the inner planet; in a 3:2 resonance, the outer planet will orbit two times for every three passes by the inner planet, and so forth. Such resonances are created by the gravitational influence of planets on one another.
“There are many locations in a protoplanetary disk where planets can form,” says Johnson. “It’s very unlikely, however, that two planets would just happen to form at locations where they have periods in one of these ratios.”
A 2:1 resonance—which is the case for the planets orbiting 24 Sextanis—is the most stable and the most common pattern. “Planets tend to get stuck in the 2:1. It’s like a really big pothole,” Johnson says. “But if a planet is moving very fast”—racing in from the outer part of the protoplanetary disk, where it formed, toward its parent star—”it can pass over a 2:1. As it moves in closer, the next step is a 5:3, then a 3:2, and then a 4:3.”
Johnson and his colleagues have found that the pair of planets orbiting HD 200964 is locked in just such a 4:3 resonance. “The closest analogy in our solar system is Titan and Hyperion, two moons of Saturn which also follow orbits synchronized in a 4:3 pattern,” says Ford. “But the planets orbiting HD 200964 interact much more strongly, since each is around 20,000 times more massive than Titan and Hyperion combined.”
“This is the tightest system that’s ever been discovered,” Johnson adds, “and we’re at a loss to explain why this happened. This is the latest in a long line of strange discoveries about extrasolar planets, and it shows that exoplanets continuously have this ability to surprise us. Each time we think we can explain them, something else comes along.”
Johnson and his colleagues found the two systems using data from the Keck Subgiants Planet Survey—a search for planets around stars from 40 to 100 percent larger than our own sun. Subgiants represent a class of stars that have evolved off the “main sequence,” and have run out of hydrogen for nuclear fusion, causing their core to collapse and their outer envelope to swell. Subgiants eventually become red giants—voluminous stars with big, puffy atmospheres that pulsate, making it difficult to detect the subtle spectral shifts caused by orbiting planets.
“Subgiants are rotating very slowly and they’re cool,” unlike rapidly rotating, hot main sequence stars, “but they haven’t expanded enough to be too fluffy and too jittery,” Johnson says. “They’re ‘Goldilocks’ stars: not too fast, not too hot, not too fluffy, not too jittery”—and, therefore, ideal for planet hunting.
“Right now, we’re monitoring 450 of these massive stars, and we are finding swarms of planets,” he says. “Around these stars, we are seeing three to four times more planets out to a distance of about 3 AU—the distance of our asteroid belt—than we see around main sequence stars. Stellar mass has a huge influence on frequency of planet occurrence, because the amount of raw material available to build planets scales with the mass of the star.”
Eventually, perhaps 10 or 100 million years from now, subgiant stars like HD 200964 and 24 Sextanis will become red giants. They will throw off their outer atmospheres, swelling to the point where they could engulf the inner planet of their dancing pair, and will throw off mass, changing the gravitational dynamics of their whole system. “The planets will then move out, and their orbits will become unstable,” Johnson says. “Most likely one of the planets will get flung out of the system completely”-and the dance will end.
The paper, “A Pair of Interacting Exoplanet Pairs Around the Subgiants 24 Sextanis and HD 200964,” was coauthored by Matthew Payne and Eric B. Ford of the University of Florida; Andrew W. Howard and Geoffrey W. Marcy of the University of California, Berkeley; Kelsey Clubb of San Francisco State University; Brendan P. Bowler of the University of Hawai’i at Manoa,; Gregory W. Henry of Tennessee State University; Debra A. Fischer, John Brewer, and Christian Schwab of Yale University; Sabine Reffert of ZAH-Landessternwarte; and Thomas Lowe of the UCO/Lick Observatory.
Planck unveils the Universe – now and then
by Alexandre Costa on Jul.06, 2010, under Milky Way, Planck Space Telescope
Source: ESA PR 15-2010
ESA’s Planck mission has delivered its first all-sky image. It not only provides new insight into the way stars and galaxies form but also tells us how the Universe itself came to life after the Big Bang.
“This is the moment that Planck was conceived for,” says ESA Director of Science and Robotic Exploration, David Southwood. “We’re not giving the answer. We are opening the door to an Eldorado where scientists can seek the nuggets that will lead to deeper understanding of how our Universe came to be and how it works now. The image itself and its remarkable quality is a tribute to the engineers who built and have operated Planck. Now the scientific harvest must
begin.”
From the closest portions of the Milky Way to the furthest reaches of space and time, the new all-sky Planck image is an extraordinary treasure chest of new data for astronomers.
The main disc of our Galaxy runs across the centre of the image. Immediately striking are the streamers of cold dust reaching above and below the Milky Way.
This galactic web is where new stars are being formed, and Planck has found many locations where individual stars are edging toward birth or just beginning their cycle of development.
Less spectacular but perhaps more intriguing is the mottled backdrop at the top and bottom. This is the ‘cosmic microwave background radiation’ (CMBR). It is the oldest light in the Universe, the remains of the fireball out of which our Universe sprang into existence 13.7 billion years ago.
While the Milky Way shows us what the local Universe looks like now, those the microwave pattern is the cosmic blueprint from which today’s clusters and superclusters of galaxies were built. The different colours represent minute
differences in the temperature and density of matter across the sky. Somehow these small irregularities evolved into denser regions that became the galaxies of today.
The CMBR covers the entire sky but most of it is hidden in this image by the Milky Way’s emission, which must be digitally removed from the final data in order to see the microwave background in its entirety.
When this work is completed, Planck will show us the most precise picture of the microwave background ever obtained. The big question will be whether the data will reveal the cosmic signature of the primordial period called inflation.
This era is postulated to have taken place just after the Big Bang and resulted in the Universe expanding enormously in size over an extremely short period.
Planck continues to map the Universe. By the end of its mission in 2012, it will have completed four all-sky scans. The first full data release of the CMBR is planned for 2012. Before then, the catalogue containing individual objects in our
Galaxy and whole distant galaxies will be released in January 2011.
“This image is just a glimpse of what Planck will ultimately see,” says Jan Tauber, ESA’s Planck Project Scientist.(read more)
Brown University Team Finds Widespread Glacial Meltwater Valleys on Mars
by Alexandre Costa on Jun.30, 2010, under Solar System
Source: Brown University
A research team led by Brown University has documented dozens of channels carved by melted water from glaciers located in the midlatitude region of Mars. The glaciofluvial valleys were carved in Mars’ most recent epoch, the team reports, supporting the idea that the Red Planet was home to diverse watery environments in its recent past. Results are published in Icarus. (read more)
‘Galactic archaeologists’ find origin of Milky Way’s ancient stars
by Alexandre Costa on Jun.30, 2010, under Milky Way
Source: Royal Astronomical Society
Many of the Milky Way’s ancient stars are remnants of other smaller galaxies torn apart by violent galactic collisions around five billion years ago, according to researchers at Durham University, who publish their results in a new paper in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. (read more)
Proba-2 tracks Sun surging into space
by EAAE Webteam on Jun.30, 2010, under Satellites, Probes and Telescopes, Sun
Source: ESA
Proba-2 is a small but innovative member of ESA’s spacecraft fleet, crammed with experimental technologies. In its first eight months of life it has already returned more than 90 000 images of the Sun.(read more)
Carbon dioxide on the rise
by Alexandre Costa on Jun.28, 2010, under Earth, Global warming
Source: ESA
The SCIAMACHY sensor on ESA’s Envisat satellite has provided scientists with invaluable data on our planet, allowing them to map global air pollution and the distribution of greenhouse gases. (read more)
Hubble captures bubbles and baby stars
by Alexandre Costa on Jun.23, 2010, under Hubble Space Telescope, Stellar Evolution
Credit: ESA/HST
A spectacular new NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image — one of the largest ever released of a star-forming region — highlights N11, part of a complex network of gas clouds and star clusters within our neighbouring galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud. This region of energetic star formation is one of the most active in the nearby Universe.(read more)
Super-complex organic molecules found in interstellar space
by Alexandre Costa on Jun.22, 2010, under Nebula
Source: PHYSORG
A team of scientists from the Instituto Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the University of Texas has succeeded in identifying one of the most complex organic molecules yet found in the material between the stars, the so-called interstellar medium. The discovery of anthracene could help resolve a decades-old astrophysical mystery concerning the production of organic molecules in space. The researchers report their findings in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.(read more)
Rosetta’s blind date with asteroid Lutetia
by Alexandre Costa on Jun.15, 2010, under EAAE News
Source: ESA
ESA’s comet-chaser Rosetta is heading for a blind date with asteroid Lutetia. Rosetta does not yet know what Lutetia looks like but beautiful or otherwise the two will meet on 10 July. (read more)
New CU-Boulder Study Indicates an Ancient Ocean May Have Covered One-Third of Mars
by Alexandre Costa on Jun.15, 2010, under Solar System
Source: University of Colorado at Boulder
A vast ocean likely covered one-third of the surface of Mars some 3.5 billion years ago, according to a new study conducted by University of Colorado at Boulder scientists.
The CU-Boulder study is the first to combine the analysis of water-related features including scores of delta deposits and thousands of river valleys to test for the occurrence of an ocean sustained by a global hydrosphere on early Mars. While the notion of a large, ancient ocean on Mars has been repeatedly proposed and challenged over the past two decades, the new study provides further support for the idea of a sustained sea on the Red Planet during the Noachian era more than 3 billion years ago, said CU-Boulder researcher Gaetano Di Achille, lead author on the study.
A paper on the subject authored by Di Achille and CU-Boulder Assistant Professor Brian Hynek of the geological sciences department appears in the June 13 issue of Nature Geoscience. Both Di Achille and Hynek are affiliated with CU-Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics.
More than half of the 52 river delta deposits identified by the CU researchers in the new study — each of which was fed by numerous river valleys — likely marked the boundaries of the proposed ocean, since all were at about the same elevation. The research team says twenty-nine of the 52 deltas were connected either to the ancient Mars ocean or to the groundwater table of the ocean and to several large, adjacent lakes. (read more)
Space Station keeps watch on world’s sea traffic
by Alexandre Costa on Jun.15, 2010, under Satellites, Probes and Telescopes
Source: ESA
As the ISS circles Earth, it has begun tracking individual ships crossing the seas beneath. An experiment hosted by ESA’s Columbus module is testing the viability of monitoring global traffic from the Station’s orbit hundreds of kilometres up.(read more)
Scientists pull Japanese asteroid capsule from Outback
by Alexandre Costa on Jun.14, 2010, under Satellites, Probes and Telescopes
Source: AFP
Scientists in Australia’s vast Outback on Monday recovered a capsule of the Hyabusa mission that they hope contains the first piece of asteroid ever brought to Earth — perhaps offering a glimpse into ancient space history.
The pod was ejected from a Japanese space probe as the host vessel burned up in a spectacular display over Australia following a seven-year odyssey across the solar system to the far-off Itokawa asteroid.
It lay in the desert dust overnight before scientists were given the go-ahead to retrieve it after Aboriginal elders said it had not landed in any indigenous sacred sites. (read more)
NASA Dryden Hosts Radar Tests for Next Mars Landing
by Alexandre Costa on Jun.12, 2010, under Satellites, Probes and Telescopes
Source: NASA /JPL
This test of the radar system to be used during the August 2012 descent and landing of the NASA Mars rover Curiosity mounted an engineering test model of the radar system onto the nose of a helicopter. Image Credit: NASA
Engineers with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., are running diverse trials with a test version of the radar system that will enable NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory mission to put the Curiosity rover onto the Martian surface in August 2012.
One set of tests conducted over a desert lakebed at NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center, Edwards, Calif., in May 2010 used flights with a helicopter simulating specific descent paths anticipated for Martian sites.
During the final stage of descent, NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory mission will use a “sky crane” maneuver to lower Curiosity on a bridle from the mission’s rocket-powered descent stage. The descent stage will carry Curiosity’s flight radar.
The testing at Dryden included lowering a rover mockup on a tether from the helicopter to assess how the sky crane maneuver will affect the radar’s descent-speed determinations by the radar. The helicopter carried the test radar on a special nose-mounted gimbal.
Helicopter-flown testing has also been conducted at other desert locations for experience in an assortment of terrains. Later in 2010, the team plans to test the higher-altitude, higher-velocity part of Curiosity’s radar-aided descent by flying the test radar on dives by an F/A-18 jet from Dryden.
A Cosmic Zoo in the Large Magellanic Cloud
by Alexandre Costa on Jun.01, 2010, under Galaxies
Source: ESO
Astronomers often turn their telescopes to the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), one of the closest galaxies to our own Milky Way, in their quest to understand the Universe. In this spectacular new image from the Wide Field Imager (WFI) at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile, a celestial menagerie of different objects and phenomena in part of the LMC is on display, ranging from vast globular clusters to the remains left by brilliant supernovae explosions. This fascinating observation provides data for a wide variety of research projects unravelling the life and death of stars and the evolution of galaxies. (read more)
A chance to name ESA’s next astronaut mission
by Alexandre Costa on Jun.01, 2010, under Satellites, Probes and Telescopes
Source: ESA
ESA has now opened the possibility of people to try to suggest a name for next mission to the ISS. An oportunity not to loose.
ESA’s promotion slogan is “ESA’s Italian astronaut Paolo Nespoli will soon visit the International Space Station, and he needs your help to name his mission.” (read more)
Train like an astronaut
by Alexandre Costa on May.31, 2010, under Satellites, Probes and Telescopes
Source: ESA
ESA and its partners are launching a new kind of fitness initiative using the example of space explorers to promote exercise and healthy nutrition to young people worldwide. ‘Mission X: Train Like an Astronaut’ is boarding now in eight countries. (read more)
‘First light’ as SOFIA completes observation flight
by Alexandre Costa on May.31, 2010, under Galaxies
Source: DLR
The German-American Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, SOFIA, completed an important milestone by achieving ‘first light’ when it performed its first observations during the night between 25 and 26 May 2010. SOFIA is the only airborne observatory in the world, operated jointly by NASA and the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum fur Luft- und Raumfahrt; DLR). The observatory carried out observations of astronomical objects at infrared wavelengths in flight. (read more)
