Really Rocket Science

By far the coolest space video ever, via the American Museum of Natural History:

After hovering over Mount Everest and the gorges that plunge to the Ganges, you are pulled through the Earth’s atmosphere to glimpse the inky black of space over Tibet’s high desert. So begins The Known Universe, a new film produced by the American Museum of Natural History that is part of a new exhibition, Visions of the Cosmos: From the Milky Ocean to an Evolving Universe, at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City.

The magic of this film, though, happens as the inky black expands. Pulling farther and farther from Earth, you see the deep blue of the Pacific give way to night as the Sun comes into focus, the orbits of the solar system shrink smaller and smaller, the constellations Sagittarius and Scorpio stretch and distort, and, as the Milky Way receeds, the spidery structure of millions of other galaxies come into view. Then, you reach the limit of the observable universe, the afterglow of the Big Bang. This light has taken more than 13.7 billion years to reach our planet, and you return, back to Earth, to two lakes that are nestled between Mount Kailash and Mount Gurla Mandhata in the Himalayas.

The structure of The Known Universe is based on precise, scientifically-accurate observations and research. The Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History maintains the Digital Universe Atlas, the world’s most complete four-dimensional map of the universe. The Digital Universe started nearly a decade ago. It is continually updated and is the primary resource for production of the Museum’s Space Shows such as the current Journey to the Stars, and is used in live, real-time renderings for Virtual Tours of the Universe, a public program held on the first Tuesday of every month. Last year, some 30,000 people downloaded the Digital Universe to their personal computers, and the Digital Universe will soon be updated with a more accurate and user-friendly software interface. Digital Universe is licensed to many other planetariums and theaters world-wide.

“I liken the Digital Universe to the invention of the globe,” says Curator Ben R. Oppenheimer, an astrophysicist at the Museum. “When Mercator invented the globe, everyone wanted one. He had back orders for years. It gave everyone a new perspective on where they live in relation to others, and we hope that the Digital Universe does the same on a grander, cosmic scale.”

The new film was produced by Michael Hoffman, and directed by Carter Emmart. Brian Abbot manages and Ben R. Oppenheimer curates the Digital Universe Atlas. The exhibition at the Rubin, Visions of the Cosmos: From the Milky Ocean to an Evolving Universe, opened on December 11 and continues through May 10.

The animation was done in Uniview (SCISS AB)

Travelling through space using waves of light -- or photons.

Sir Arthur supported this concept, which is noted in tomorrow's New York Times Science Section :

There is a long line of visionaries, stretching back to the Russian rocket pioneers Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Fridrich Tsander and the author Arthur C. Clarke, who have supported this idea. “Sails are just a marvelous way of getting around the universe,” said Freeman Dyson, of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., and a longtime student of the future, “but it takes a long time to imagine them becoming practical.”

The solar sail receives its driving force from the simple fact that light carries not just energy but also momentum — a story told by every comet tail, which consists of dust blown by sunlight from a comet’s core. The force on a solar sail is gentle, if not feeble, but unlike a rocket, which fires for a few minutes at most, it is constant. Over days and years a big enough sail, say a mile on a side, could reach speeds of hundreds of thousands of miles an hour, fast enough to traverse the solar system in 5 years. Riding the beam from a powerful laser, a sail could even make the journey to another star system in 100 years, that is to say, a human lifespan.

Excellent graphic to go with this piece, which is typical for the NYT.

The Planetary Society is behind this project, funded my an anonymous donor.

Artists rendition of LightSail-1 by Rick Sternbach. Credit: Planetary Society

"Bridget" will be driving on Mars in 2018 or so, presumably on the other side of the street.

The new European version of a Mars rover, ExoMars, is being tested in a sand quarry in Bedfordshire:

 The quarry - chosen for its similarity to Martian terrain - saw cameras and image processing software tested on the ExoMars prototype rover Bridget.

The rover will be equipped with a raft of cameras and the aim is to integrate them and the data they will send back.

The technology developed for the mission has applications not only in space science but also here on Earth.

The eventual rover will have a pair of front-mounted navigation cameras and a quartet of cameras at its corners for hazard avoidance.

It will also have a pair of scientific cameras that give it stereoscopic vision and thus depth perception, as well as a high-resolution camera for zooming in on areas of interest.

The wide-angle scientific cameras are equipped with filter wheels, which limit the light that reaches them to specific wavelengths.

Measuring the sunlight reflected off Martian terrain in these specific bands gives information on the chemical makeup of whatever is in the field of view.

The aim of the EU PRoVisG (Planetary Robotics Vision Ground Processing) project is to stitch together all of the information from the cameras, ensuring for example that the scientific results are tagged to the location at which they were taken and that the navigation cameras' views are assembled into a virtual, 3D representation of the rover's environment.

What are they looking for? Plenty:

The ExoMars mission's scientific objectives, in order of priority, are:

1. To search for signs of past and present life on Mars.
   » Read more...

    

2. To characterise the water/geochemical distribution as a function of depth in the shallow subsurface.

    

3. To study the surface environment and identify hazards to future human missions.

    

4. To investigate the planet's subsurface and deep interior to better understand the evolution and habitability of Mars.

Video report, via ITN...

It may not be a catchy name, but the ESO discovery is nevertheless very significant.

The longest set of HARPS measurements ever made has firmly established the nature of the smallest and fastest-orbiting exoplanet known, CoRoT-7b, revealing its mass as five times that of Earth's. Combined with CoRoT-7b's known radius, which is less than twice that of our terrestrial home, this tells us that the exoplanet's density is quite similar to the Earth's, suggesting a solid, rocky world. The extensive dataset also reveals the presence of another so-called super-Earth in this alien solar system.

The ESA's P.R. folks put it in better pespective:

The confirmation of the nature of CoRoT-7b as the first rocky planet outside our Solar System marks a significant step forward in the search for Earth-like exoplanets. The detection by CoRoT and follow-up radial velocity measurements with HARPS suggest that this exoplanet, CoRoT-7b, has a density similar to that of Mercury, Venus, Mars and Earth making it only the fifth known terrestrial planet in the Universe.

The search for a habitable exoplanet is one of the holy grails in astronomy. One of the first steps towards this goal is the detection of terrestrial planets around solar-type stars. Dedicated programmes, using telescopes in space and on ground, have yielded evidence for hundreds of planets outside of our Solar System. The majority of these are giant, gaseous planets, but in recent years small, almost Earth-mass planets have been detected demonstrating that the discovery of Earth analogues – exoplanets with one Earth mass or one Earth radius orbiting a solar-type star at a distance of about 1 astronomical unit – is within reach.

 A little too hot for us. The work of astronomers continues, worldwide, day and night.

Australian Anthony Wesley has discovered an impact on Jupiter, and confirmed by NASA's JPL. The local story, via the Sydney Morning Herald:

 An amateur Australian astronomer has set the space-watching world on fire after discovering that a rare comet or asteroid had crashed into Jupiter, leaving an impact the size of Earth.

Anthony Wesley, 44, a computer programmer from Murrumbateman, a village north of Canberra, made the discovery about 1am yesterday using his backyard 14.5-inch reflecting telescope.

The impact would have occurred no more than two days earlier and will only be visible for another few days.

 Check out Sky and Telescope's Red Spot Transit Table for reference.

Yeah, reminds me of the scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite...

The Ulysses mission came to a close last week. It was launched aboard the space shuttle Discovery in 1990 and planned to last five years. Good show!

From the joint NASA/ESA statement:

When it began in 1977, the Out-of-Ecliptic mission (as Ulysses was then called) represented the first major joint undertaking by ESA and NASA. It was also the first ESA scientific mission to have such a high percentage of non-European lead scientists, with many of the nine investigations under US responsibility. Undoubtedly, Ulysses stands out as an excellent example of international collaboration in space.

The scientific harvest has been extraordinarily rich, with many discoveries, some anticipated, and others completely unexpected. For example, the measurements made by the instruments on board Ulysses have completely changed our view of the Sun’s magnetic influence on the charged particles that populate the space in which our satellites and astronauts have to operate, leading in turn to new models of how the Sun’s magnetic field is carried out into space by the solar wind. The breadth of scientific investigations made possible by Ulysses is truly amazing, extending from the study of processes occurring within the Sun itself to the properties of our local interstellar neighbourhood. Data from Ulysses have even been used to shed light on questions of fundamental cosmological importance.

Check out the ESA archives for details.  And their anniversary video...

I'd have to agree with Mike Swift of the San Jose Mercury News that Wednesday's scheduled launch from the Cape on Wednesday, 17 June 2009, will be the beginning of the coolest moon mission ever:

LCROSS may be one of NASA's most participatory missions. If the spacecraft launches on schedule at 12:51 p.m. Wednesday, it would hit the moon in the early morning hours of Oct. 8. The cloud from the 350 metric tons of debris kicked up by the Centaur booster should spread six miles above the surface of the moon, hitting the sunlight and making it visible to amateur astronomers across North America. The space agency is enlisting telescopes around the country to help monitor the impact.

The 1,664-pound spacecraft will have the best view. LCROSS will separate from the Centaur booster less than 10 hours before impact and will be less than 400 miles above the moon when the spent rocket booster collides at a speed five times faster than a bullet from a .44 Magnum. NASA plans to stream a live view from LCROSS as the Centaur, followed by the spacecraft, plows into the moon.

Over the final four minutes of its existence, as it follows the same terminal trajectory as the Centaur, LCROSS will train its instruments and cameras on the debris cloud, searching it for the chemical signature of water.

Previous spacecraft and ground-based instruments have detected signs of hydrogen near the moon's poles, and scientists are split over whether that is from ice that could have arrived through the impact of comets or by other means. That ice could have lingered for more than a billion years at the bottom of craters near the lunar poles that have never seen sunlight, where temperatures are more than 300 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.

And despite all the serious scientific talk about hydrogen signatures and lunar regolith, flying a rocket booster into the moon at 5,600 mph to trigger a massive explosion is just flat-out cool.

"We're certainly going to be making a big splash," Ennico said. "We're going to see something, but I don't know what to expect. I know on the night of the impact, I'll be running on adrenaline."

Found this very good simulation on YouTube:

And here's the video from Northrop-Grumman...

Japan's Kaguya spacecraft is expected to crash into the moon this week. Yeah, this is serious business, according to Inside Japan:

The Japanese Kaguya lunar orbiter is to conclude its research mission in dramatic fashion by crash-landing on the moon later this week.

Observers will be watching the moon's near side for the final impact made by the probe, which has been in orbit around Earth's satellite since late 2007, at 18:30 GMT on June 10th.

The mission of the Kaguya probe, formerly codenamed Selene, was to aid study of the evolution of the moon by collecting data on its composition and gravitational field, as well as recording high-definition video of its surface.

Collision with the moon is the typical destiny of such orbiters, with the European Space Agency's SMART-1 and the Chinese Chang'e 1 among the probes to impact upon the lunar surface in the last two years.

Shin-ichi Sobue, a spokesperson for the Kaguya mission, described the forthcoming collision as "a final show for the Japanese people".

This "landing" will undoubtedly add an exclamation point to the fine video footage gathered by JAXA and partner NHK. This eart-rise is a fine example:

Well if I had money
I tell you what I'd do
I'd go downtown and buy me a Mercury or two
Crazy bout a Mercury
I'm gonna buy me a Mercury
And cruise it up and down the road

Ford's Mercury brand did make some cool cars, back in the day. I remember their product placements in the Hawaii Five-O TV series. Which, to this day, has law enforcement types exclaiming "book em , Danno!" I can't remember the last time Mercury had a popular model (always liked the '67 Cougar).

You know who's got money for a Mercury? NASA! The MESSENGER spacecraft (MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging) just did a second fly-by of  the planet Mercury found there's more to it:

Analyses of data from the MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging (MESSENGER) spacecraft’s second flyby of Mercury in October 2008 show that the planet’s atmosphere, magnetosphere, and geological past are all characterized by much greater levels of activity than scientists first suspected.

On October 6, 2008, the probe flew by Mercury for the second time, capturing more than 1,200 high-resolution and color images of the planet unveiling another 30 percent of Mercury’s surface that had never before been seen by spacecraft and gathering essential data for planning the remainder of the mission.

“MESSENGER’s second Mercury flyby provided a number of new findings,” says MESSENGER Principal Investigator Sean Solomon at the Carnegie Institution of Washington. “One of the biggest surprises was how strongly the planet’s magnetospheric dynamics changed from what we saw during the first Mercury flyby in January 2008. Another was the discovery of a large and unusually well preserved impact basin that was the focus for concentrated volcanic and deformational activity. The first detection of magnesium in Mercury’s exosphere and neutral tail provides confirmation that magnesium is an important constituent of Mercury’s surface materials. And our nearly global imaging coverage of the surface after this flyby has given us fresh insight into how the planet's crust was formed.”

 Nice animation...

Tommy Chong of Cheech & Chong said it best: "Far out, man!"

I wonder if somebody at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center said something similar about this blast from the past, maybe 13 billion light years away:

NASA's Swift satellite and an international team of astronomers have found a gamma-ray burst from a star that died when the universe was only 630 million years old, or less than five percent of its present age. The event, dubbed GRB 090423, is the most distant cosmic explosion ever seen.

"Swift was designed to catch these very distant bursts," said Swift lead scientist Neil Gehrels at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "The incredible distance to this burst exceeded our greatest expectations -- it was a true blast from the past."

At 3:55 a.m. EDT on April 23, Swift detected a ten-second-long gamma-ray burst of modest brightness. It quickly pivoted to bring its ultraviolet/optical and X-ray telescopes to observe the burst location. Swift saw a fading X-ray afterglow but none in visible light.

"The burst most likely arose from the explosion of a massive star," said Derek Fox at Pennsylvania State University. "We're seeing the demise of a star -- and probably the birth of a black hole -- in one of the universe's earliest stellar generations."

Gamma-ray bursts are the universe's most luminous explosions. Most occur when massive stars run out of nuclear fuel. As their cores collapse into a black hole or neutron star, gas jets -- driven by processes not fully understood -- punch through the star and blast into space. There, they strike gas previously shed by the star and heat it, which generates short-lived afterglows in many wavelengths.

"The lack of visible light alone suggested this could be a very distant object," explained team member Edo Berger of Harvard University.

Beyond a certain distance, the expansion of the universe shifts all optical emission into longer infrared wavelengths. While a star's ultraviolet light could be similarly shifted into the visible region, ultraviolet-absorbing hydrogen gas grows thicker at earlier times. "If you look far enough away, you can't see visible light from any object," he noted.

Within three hours of the burst, Nial Tanvir at the University of Leicester, U.K., and his colleagues reported detection of an infrared source at the Swift position using the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. "Burst afterglows provide us with the most information about the exploded star and its environs," Tanvir said. "But because afterglows fade out so fast, we must target them quickly."

At the same time, Fox led an effort to obtain infrared images of the afterglow using the Gemini North Telescope on Mauna Kea. The source appeared in longer-wavelength images but was absent in an image taken at the shortest wavelength of 1 micron. This "drop out" corresponded to a distance of about 13 billion light-years.

Here's a video of what a gamma ray burst would look like up-close (Credit: NASA/Swift/Cruz deWild):