Really Rocket Science

Mars Madness is on the rise in Tucson, the Arizona Daily Star reports. That’s because on May 25th, NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander is scheduled to touch down on the red planet. The event is significant in Tucson because the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Lab team is leading the mission’s science and built some of the instruments.

But the fever is spreading well beyond Arizona for this risky mission:

Fewer than half of attempts to land on Mars have succeeded, but planetary scientists leading the Phoenix Mars mission are cautiously optimistic. So far, all looks good, they say.

Public events to celebrate the landing are planned for at least 110 sites around the world, including London and Paris. There’s even a virtual landing bash planned, in Second Life, which is a virtual social world on the Internet.

Just how risky and difficult is it to put a lander on the surface of Mars? To answer that question, check out this excellent video from NASA’s Jet Propulsion laboratory. (NASA has done a fantastic job promoting the mission and landing in the style of a summer movie blockbuster):

The Phoenix Mars Mission website provides additional detail:

At 125 km (78 miles) above the surface, Phoenix will enter the thin martian atmosphere. It will slow itself down by using friction. A heat shield will protect the lander from the extreme temperatures generated during entry. Antennas located on the back of the shell which encases the lander will be used to communicate with one of three spacecraft currently orbiting Mars. These orbiters will then relay signals and landing info to Earth.

After the lander has decelerated to Mach 1.7 (1.7 times the speed of sound), the parachute is deployed. Shortly after the parachute is deployed, the heat shield is jettisoned, the landing radar is activated, and the lander legs are extended. The lander continues through the Martian atmosphere until it comes within 1 km (.6 miles) of the Martian surface. At this point, the lander separates itself from the parachute. It then throttles up its landing thrusters and decelerates.

When Phoenix is either at an altitude of 12 m (39 ft) or traveling at 2.4 m/s (7.9 ft/s), the spacecraft begins traveling at a constant velocity. The landing engines are turned off when sensors located on the footpads of the lander detect touchdown.

As we’ve mentioned, only half of all international attempts to land on Mars have succeeded. Back in 1999, the Mars Polar Lander (MPL) went missing as it entered Mars’s atmosphere, and its fate has been a mystery ever since. But now there is a chance for a member of the public to locate the missing spacecraft and help work out what went wrong, thanks to a new "Spot the Spacecraft" challenge: 

The High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE), based at the University of Arizona in Tucson, has a raft of images of the MPL’s projected landing area, but scans of the huge images came up blank.

So now, the HiRISE team’s blog has published 18 images, and has challenged the public to find the lost lander.

Can you find the MPL? The images can be viewed here. 

We’ll report more on the landing of the Phoenix Mars Lander after the 25th. 

Very cool announcement from NASA this afternoon, uncovering the most recent supernova from 140 years ago:

"We can see some supernova explosions with optical telescopes across half of the universe, but when they’re in this murk we can miss them in our own cosmic backyard," said Stephen Reynolds of North Carolina State University in Raleigh, who led the Chandra study. "Fortunately, the expanding gas cloud from the explosion shines brightly in radio waves and X-rays for thousands of years. X-ray and radio telescopes can see through all that obscuration and show us what we’ve been missing."

Astronomers regularly observe supernovae in other galaxies like ours. Based on those observations, researchers estimate about three explode every century in the Milky Way.

"If the supernova rate estimates are correct, there should be the remnants of about 10 supernova explosions that are younger than Cassiopeia A," said David Green of the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, who led the Very Large Array study. "It’s great to finally track one of them down."

The tracking of this object began in 1985, when astronomers, led by Green, used the Very Large Array to identify the remnant of a supernova explosion near the center of our galaxy. Based on its small size, it was thought to have resulted from a supernova that exploded about 400 to 1000 years ago.

Twenty-two years later, Chandra observations revealed the remnant had expanded by a surprisingly large amount, about 16 percent, since 1985. This indicates the supernova remnant is much younger than previously thought.

That young age was confirmed in recent weeks when the Very Large Array made new radio observations. This comparison of data pinpoints the age of the remnant at 140 years – possibly less if it has been slowing down – making it the youngest on record in the Milky Way.

Besides being the record holder for youngest supernova, the object is of considerable interest for other reasons. The high expansion velocities and extreme particle energies that have been generated are unprecedented and should stimulate deeper studies of the object with Chandra and the Very Large Array.

"No other object in the galaxy has properties like this," Reynolds said. "This find is extremely important for learning more about how some stars explode and what happens in the aftermath."

More images here.

Here’s an animation from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory:

In order to determine the age of G1.9+0.3, astronomers needed to track how quickly it is expanding. By comparing a radio image from 1985 to a Chandra image taken in 2007, scientists see the ring of debris expand. The expansion rate was confirmed with another radio observation with the VLA in 2008. The difference in size between these images gives clear evidence for expansion, allowing the age of the remnant and the time since the original supernova explosion (about 140 years) to be estimated.

"Der Junge aus Potsdam habe recht" — that’s what NASA said, as reported by the Potsdamer Neueste Nachrichten over the weekend. Translation: The boy from Potsdam is right:

Ein Potsdamer Schüler hat die Gefahr eines Asteroideneinschlags richtig berechnet und damit die Nasa blamiert. Was der 13-Jährige für das Jahr 2036 voraussagt, ist alles andere als beruhigend.

NASA figured there was a 1 in 45,000 chance the Apophis asteroid could collide with Earth. More like 1 in 450, according to Nico Marquardt. Here’s the story in English, via the AFP:

A 13-year-old German schoolboy corrected NASA’s estimates on the chances of an asteroid colliding with Earth, a German newspaper reported Tuesday, after spotting the boffins had miscalculated.

Nico Marquardt used telescopic findings from the Institute of Astrophysics in Potsdam (AIP) to calculate that there was a 1 in 450 chance that the Apophis asteroid will collide with Earth, the Potsdamer Neuerster Nachrichten reported.

NASA had previously estimated the chances at only 1 in 45,000 but told its sister organisation, the European Space Agency (ESA), that the young whizzkid had got it right.

The schoolboy took into consideration the risk of Apophis running into one or more of the 40,000 satellites orbiting Earth during its path close to the planet on April 13 2029.

Those satellites travel at 3.07 kilometres a second (1.9 miles), at up to 35,880 kilometres above earth — and the Apophis asteroid will pass by earth at a distance of 32,500 kilometres.

If the asteroid strikes a satellite in 2029, that will change its trajectory making it hit earth on its next orbit in 2036.

Both NASA and Marquardt agree that if the asteroid does collide with earth, it will create a ball of iron and iridium 320 metres (1049 feet) wide and weighing 200 billion tonnes, which will crash into the Atlantic Ocean.

The shockwaves from that would create huge tsunami waves, destroying both coastlines and inland areas, whilst creating a thick cloud of dust that would darken the skies indefinitely.

The 13-year old made his discovery as part of a regional science competition for which he submitted a project entitled: "Apophis — The Killer Astroid."

Paid my taxes the other day — yes, I had to pay. The forthcoming golden goose from the U.S. Treasury will act as a counter-balance, but I’m still paying up. Where does my money go?

The U.S. Defense Budget dwarfs hundreds of other counties’ budgets combined — in fact, the DoD overspent by $295 billion last year, reports the Christian Science Monitor.  Does that include the "black budget?" The New York Times did a great piece on it on April Fools Day:

The classified budget of the Defense Department, concealed from the public in all but outline, has nearly doubled in the Bush years, to $32 billion. That is more than the combined budgets of the Food and Drug Administration, the National Science Foundation and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Those billions have expanded a secret world of advanced science and technology in which military units and federal contractors push back the frontiers of warfare. In the past, such handiwork has produced some of the most advanced jets, weapons and spy satellites, as well as notorious boondoggles.

Budget documents tell little. This year, for instance, the Pentagon says Program Element 0603891c is receiving $196 million but will disclose nothing about what the project does. Private analysts say it apparently aims at developing space weapons.

More than the FDA, NSF and NASA budget combined? Dude, that’s a black hole, which some find interesting. Hey, I’m all for space research and development, but a cure for cancer would be better 

More interesting, in my opinion, was the news from the ESA press release yesterday about a "certified monster" black hole:

A team of Japanese astronomers using ESA’s XMM-Newton, along with NASA and Japanese X-ray satellites, has discovered that our galaxy’s central black hole let loose a powerful flare three centuries ago.
 
The finding helps resolve a long-standing mystery: why is the Milky Way’s black hole so quiescent? The black hole, known as Sagittarius A-star (A*), is a certified monster, containing about 4 million times the mass of our Sun. Yet the energy radiated from its surroundings is thousands of millions of times weaker than the radiation emitted from central black holes in other galaxies.

"We have wondered why the Milky Way’s black hole appears to be a slumbering giant," says team leader Tatsuya Inui of Kyoto University in Japan. "But now we realise that the black hole was far more active in the past. Perhaps it’s just resting after a major outburst."

The observations, collected between 1994 and 2005, revealed that clouds of gas near the central black hole brightened and faded quickly in X-ray light as they responded to X-ray pulses emanating from just outside the black hole. When gas spirals inward toward the black hole, it heats up to millions of degrees and emits X-rays. As more matter piles up near the black hole, the X-ray output becomes greater. 
 
These X-ray pulses take 300 years to traverse the distance between the central black hole and a large cloud known as Sagittarius B2, so the cloud responds to events that occurred 300 years earlier.

Read more about the XMM-Newton.

How many pixels? 1400-megapixel? That’s 1.4 billion pixels, shutterbugs. And it won’t fit in your pocket.

The camera is part of the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS), which promises to change our view of the Universe, producing the largest and most detailed map of the heavens ever produced. Defense Industry Daily reports the project is about to get $8 million in funding from the U.S. Air Force:

Kirkland AFB, NM recently gave the University of Hawaii of Honolulu, Hawaii a modified contract for $8 million for the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (PanSTARRS) multi-year program. The initial effort to develop and deploy a telescope data management system was awarded via a Grant to the University of Hawaii (considered a Minority Institute) and “as the various phases progressed, the Air Force determined that a Cooperative Agreement would be the more appropriate instrument as now we would be substantially involved.” At this time all $8 million has been committed (FA9451-06-2-0338, P00002).

Located on top of a dormant volcano in Hawaii, the Pan-STARRS telescope will survey the visible sky, taking up to 1,000 exposures per night. In fact, this one telescope may be able to discover up to five times as many near-Earth asteroids as all present survey telescopes combined.

 Check out this page for a comparison of what other observation platforms/systems can see: Hubble, Subaru, Pan-STARRS and Palomar Sky Survey. This is an amazing telescope, with 400 times the sensitivity of the Palomar Sky Survey.

Yi? Why, that’s Korea’s first astronaut. Yi So-yeon is scheduled to lift-off tomorrow, on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft, rolled to its launching pad earlier today. Symbolizing the historic trip, the rocket will depart from the same launch pad that Soviet Yury Gagarin, the first man in space, blasted off on in 1961.

The Russian-Korean crew has already bonded in the usual, Russian fashion – “The White Sun of the Desert”:

As always with Russian space missions, the crew will sit down together before blast off to watch the old Soviet film “The White Sun of the Desert”. The comedy classic boosts morale and is thought to bring the mission good luck.

Yi’s historic stint in space will be very busy:

After a 50-hour flight, the Soyuz spacecraft will dock at the International Space Station on Thursday. There Yi will conduct several experiments until April 18, one day before she returns to Earth. The experiments include studies of the germination, growth and mutation of plants in space, the effects of micro-gravity on eye pressure, the effects of a space environment on the heart, and a study on gravitational effects on aging and genes. Yi will use fruit flies for the latter experiment since their life span is two weeks, making it possible to observe their growth to maturity during her 10-day stay. Having obtained a doctorate in bio and brain engineering from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) last February, Yi is considered well qualified for experiments involving biology, physics, and electronic engineering.

And Yi isn’t about to conform to the usual NASA/RSA diets during her busy trip:

When it comes to dining, astronauts must live on space food they bring with them. Hundreds of kinds of space foods have been developed in the U.S. and Russia, made by freeze-drying items after they are sterilized by radiation. Yi will bring about a dozen Korean comestibles developed by the Korea Food Research Institute and Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute, including rice, kimchi, red pepper paste, soybean paste soup and instant noodles.

Great image from the Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Here’s one of the many fabled stories of how lunar eclipses have influenced history:

A lunar eclipse bailed Christopher Columbus out of a jam in Jamaica in 1504. Stranded there, ships damaged on a follow-up voyage to what would be called the Americas, Columbus and crew were starving because the natives refused to trade food for trinkets. The wily explorer consulted an almanac and learned a lunar eclipse would occur on Feb. 29, 1504. On that day, Columbus told the natives that God frowned on their lack of hospitality and would remove the moon from the sky if they didn’t cooperate. The eclipse made good on the warning. The spooked natives promptly offered food if Columbus would bring back the moon, which natural events did for him. Well-supplied, Columbus and crew ultimately made it back to Europe.

While unlikely to improve relations with your neighbors, it’s worth stepping out to see tonight’s lunar eclipse. USA Today ran a great viewing guide yesterday. Some highlights:

• Nearly a billion people in the Western Hemisphere, more than 1.5 billion in Europe and Africa, and perhaps another half-billion in western Asia will be able to watch — weather permitting…
• The only problematic area will be along the Oregon and northern California coast, where the first partial stage of the eclipse will already be underway when the moon rises…
• This eclipse comes with a rare bonus. The planet Saturn (magnitude +0.2) and the bright bluish star, Regulus (magnitude +1.4) will form a broad triangle with the moon’s ruddy disk….this upcoming double event will be the only one of its kind occurring within the next millennium!

The European Space Agency and NASA both have viewing information, as well. For those in North America, this map tells you the time the eclipse will begin in your location. The short of it: 10:01 pm Eastern.

NASA also explains the color change during totality: 

During an eclipse the moon changes color, going from a light gray color to an orange or deep red shade. This is totality. The moon takes on this new color because indirect sunlight is still able to pass through the Earth’s atmosphere and cast a glow on the moon.

The exact color that the moon appears depends on the amount of dust and clouds in the atmosphere. If there are extra particles in the atmosphere, from say a recent volcanic eruption, the moon will appear a darker shade of red.

I can’t think of any recent volcanic eruptions, do dark red may not be in the picture. 

The next lunar eclipse will be on Dec. 21, 2010.

The Keck Interferometer — two linked observatories in Hawaii (above, with Pu’u Poliahu in the background), located on the highest point in the Pacific — give astronomers a new view of novae:

First results from a new NASA-funded scientific instrument at the W. M. Keck Observatory at Mauna Kea, Hawaii, are helping scientists overturn long-standing assumptions about powerful explosions called novae and have produced specific information about one nearby nova.

This sophisticated new system, called the Keck Interferometer, combines the observing power of the two 10-meter (33 feet) Keck telescopes into a single mega-telescope. Using the interferometer’s "nulling" mode, data were taken by the Keck Interferometer team on a nearby nova called RS Ophiuchi.

In "nulling" mode, the Keck Interferometer suppresses the blinding light of a star so researchers can study the surrounding environment. The instrument helps them observe very faint objects near bright sources and produces 10 times more resolving power than a single Keck telescope working alone. It is the only instrument of its kind in operation.

The nulling mode was developed to search for dust regions around nearby stars, where planets might be forming, but the bright starlight poses a great challenge. "Because a star is so much brighter than the dust, something has to block the light, which is what the nuller does," said Rachel L. Akeson, Keck Interferometer project scientist at the California Institute of Technology’s Michelson Science Center. "This technique turns out to be useful for lots of other kinds of objects, including this one, where dust is near a star that just went nova."

These nova data were taken by a team led by Wes Traub of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., and the data analysis and unified model for the nova were produced by a team led by Richard Barry and William Danchi of the Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

The star in the constellation Ophiuchus went nova at the perfect time for the team, on Feb. 12, 2006. "We were extremely lucky, because we had astronomers in place at two mountain-top interferometers, Keck in Hawaii and Infrared Optical Telescope Array in Arizona. Within minutes of hearing about the discovery of the nova, we alerted both teams to start observing it that night," said Traub, a senior research scientist at JPL.

The nova system, known as RS Oph consists of a white dwarf and a red giant. The red giant is gradually shedding its massive gaseous outer layers, and the white dwarf is sweeping up much of this wind, growing in mass over time. As the matter builds up on the white dwarf’s surface, it eventually reaches a critical temperature that ignites a thermonuclear explosion that causes the system to brighten 600-fold. RS Oph was previously observed blowing its stack in 1898, 1933, 1958, 1967 and 1985, so astronomers were eagerly anticipating the 2006 eruption.

About three-and-a-half days after the nova was detected, the group observed the explosion with the Keck nuller. They set the instrument to cancel the nova’s light, allowing them to see the much fainter surrounding material, and then the extremely bright blast zone.

The instrument’s versatility was key to a surprising discovery. The nuller saw no dust in the bright zone, presumably because the nova’s blast wave vaporized dust particles. But farther from the white dwarf, at distances starting around 20 times the Earth-sun distance, the nuller recorded the spectral chemical signature of silicate dust. The blast wave had not yet reached this zone, so the dust must have pre-dated the explosion.

"This flies in the face of what we expected. Astronomers had previously thought that nova explosions actually create dust," said Richard Barry of Goddard, lead author of the paper on the observations that will appear in the Astrophysical Journal. The team thinks the dust is created as the white dwarf plows through the red giant’s wind, creating a pinwheel pattern of higher-density regions that is reminiscent of galaxy spiral arms. Inside these arms, atoms become cool enough and dense enough to allow atoms to stick together to form dust particles. The nova’s blast wave has since destroyed RS Oph’s pinwheel pattern, but it should re-form over the next few years, and future observations by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope could see it. Barry is also coauthor of a paper based on Spitzer observations of RS Oph.

Most studies of RS Oph have relied on spectroscopic models, which have not been able to distinguish various nova components with as much detail as the interferometer. The Keck nuller measured one component of the RS Oph system to an accuracy of just 4 milliarcseconds, or about the size of a basketball seen 7,500 miles away.

A new cycle of solar activity, officially "Solar Cycle 24," is upon us according to a NOAA press release:

A new 11-year cycle of heightened solar activity, bringing with it increased risks for power grids, critical military, civilian and airline communications, GPS signals and even cell phones and ATM transactions, showed signs it was on its way late yesterday when the cycle’s first sunspot appeared in the sun’s Northern Hemisphere, NOAA scientists said.

“This sunspot is like the first robin of spring,” said solar physicist Douglas Biesecker of NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center. “In this case, it’s an early omen of solar storms that will gradually increase over the next few years.”

A sunspot is an area of highly organized magnetic activity on the surface of the sun. The new 11-year cycle, called Solar Cycle 24, is expected to build gradually, with the number of sunspots and solar storms reaching a maximum by 2011 or 2012, though devastating storms can occur at any time.

During a solar storm, highly charged material ejected from the sun may head toward Earth, where it can bring down power grids, disrupt critical communications, and threaten astronauts with harmful radiation. Storms can also knock out commercial communications satellites and swamp Global Positioning System signals. Routine activities such as talking on a cell phone or getting money from an ATM machine could suddenly halt over a large part of the globe.

The discussion on Slashdot ranged from light polarity to global warming to AIDS research, which may or may not be entertaining, depending on your point of view.

You can bet the Big Bear Solar Observatory will be watching this intently. It may be in California, but it’s run by the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT).

Having your ATM machines go cold suddenly is probably because that location depends on a VSAT terminal to process transactions, which uses a geosynchronous communications satellite to connect to the banking system. If that VSAT network uses an AMERICOM satellite, hopefully it won’t be a problem (disclosure: AMERICOM underwrites this blog). The satellites that AMERICOM operates are designed to withstand the effects of extreme solar events, categories S5 and G5, and with more than the predicted number of events of all levels over the life of each satellite as part of the design. Electronic components that are known to degrade in the presence of solar radiation have been "oversized" to degrade acceptably and operate nominally during the expected radiation exposure associated with soloar storms. In addition, shielding is utilized to reduce the exposure of electronic components to the effects of solar radiation and geomagnetic storms.

As always, check SpaceWeather for the latest developments.