Hordes of Tiny Moonlets Populate Saturn’s F Ring

More cool pics from Saturn.
–Ben
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April 23, 2012

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

Today the Cassini Imaging Team presents to you a glimpse of what patience, care and painstaking analysis can bring. And it is glorious.

Recall the F ring of Saturn … a solitary ring of icy debris, lying outside Saturn’s main rings, that first came into view during the historic Voyager flybys of Saturn in the early 1980s. Voyager found a bright ring, shepherded into a tight orbital corridor by two of Saturn’s moons, Prometheus and Pandora, the so-called `shepherd moons’. But it was the complexity of this ring that baffled: isolated bright clumps, individual strands, braided regions, kinky segments all seemed at the time to be inexplicable.

Fast forward 22 years, Cassini arrives at Saturn, and finds more of the same. But this time, it’s different: now we imaging scientists have the luxury of observing the behavior of this ring closely for extended periods of time.

And that we’ve done. Tens of thousands of Cassini images later, we have come finally to understand the intricate workings of this most beguiling ring.

Go to…

http://www.ciclops.org/view_event/172/Hordes_of_Tiny_Moonlets_Populate_Saturns_F_Ring

… and find a link to a smorgasbord of images and movie clips illustrating the cause of the F ring’s myriad structures, as well as an updated Captain’s Log.

And so, we continue our Saturnian explorations knowing, with a certain satisfaction and pleasure, that one of our solar system’s finest mysteries has yielded finally to our scrutiny.

Next, our voyage takes us out of the equatorial plane and up and over the rings, where we will enjoy repeated and prolonged looks at the intricate structures therein, and the polar regions of the planet. With nothing in our way, it’s full speed ahead.

Enjoy!

Carolyn Porco
Cassini Imaging Team Leader
Director, CICLOPS
Boulder, CO

http://ciclops.org

http://twitter.com/carolynporco

http://www.facebook.com/carolynporco

Cassini’s Latest: Flight by Three Moons

More news from ‘THE’ ringed planet.
–Ben

Cassini’s Latest: Flight by Three Moons
March 28, 2011

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

Yesterday and early this morning, Cassini completed, in rapid succession, flybys of three Saturnian moons: a very close encounter with Enceladus, and reasonably close flybys of one of the co-orbital moons, Janus, and its medium-sized moon, Dione. Though we’ve been in orbit around Saturn for nearly 8 years now, we still continue to image these moons for mapping purposes and, in the case of Enceladus, to learn as much as we can about its famous jets and the subterranean, organic-rich, salty, liquid water chamber from which we believe they erupt.

Check out our raw, unprocessed images from all three flybys here:

http://www.ciclops.org/view_event/169/Enceladus_Janus_and_Dione_Rev_163_Raw_Preview?js=1

And for my take on just why Enceladus is /the/ place, in all the solar system, most deserving of immediate flagship-scale investigation, with a spacecraft properly equipped to address questions about possible life, here’s an interview I gave, published today on the NASA website, for NASA Science News:

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2012/27mar_enceladus/

Enjoy!

Carolyn Porco
Cassini Imaging Team Leader
Director, CICLOPS
Boulder, CO

http://ciclops.org

http://twitter.com/carolynporco

http://www.facebook.com/carolynporco

Listening to Solar Storms

Interesting data sonification.
–Ben

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This sonification of the recent solar storm activity turns data from two
spacecraft into sound. It uses measurements from the NASA SOHO spacecraft
and the University of Michigan’s Fast Imaging Plasma Spectrometer (FIPS)
on NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft at Mercury.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-saaAyaW0c

SETI Institute Teams with Zooniverse to Launch SETILive.org to Empower Citizen Scientists

Tell your PC to step aside, and let a REAL HUMAN do it.
You too can now look for E.T.

–Ben

SETI Institute Teams with Zooniverse to Launch SETILive.org to Empower Citizen Scientists

The SETI Institute, TED and Zooniverse Launch SETI LIVE to Empower Citizen Scientists to Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

SCIENCE Channel Supports Initiative with Month-long Programming on Search for Extraterrestrial Life

As part of the TED Prize Wish made by renowned astronomer Jill Tarter, the TED Prize today launches SETI Live (setilive.org): a site where – for the first time – the public can view data being collected by radio telescopes and collectively help search for intelligent life on other planets.

TED, the nonprofit dedicated to Ideas Worth Spreading, established the TED Prize in 2005, born out of a vision by the world’s leading entrepreneurs, innovators, and entertainers to turn ideas into action one Wish at a time. SETI Live was created in collaboration with Zooniverseteam at Chicago’s Adler Planetarium and is the latest development of Dr. Tarter’s 2009 TED Prize wish, “to empower Earthlings everywhere to become active participants in the ultimate search for cosmic company.”

The launch of SETI Live opens the door for anyone to help search for intelligent life on other planets. For the first time ever, data being received by the Allen Telescope Array in Hat Creek, CA will be made public so citizen scientists can scan it for potential signals…

…“There are frequencies that our automated signal detection systems now ignore, because there are too many signals there.  Most are created by Earth’s communication and entertainment technologies, but buried within this noise, there may be a signal from a distant technology,” said Dr. Tarter.  “I’m hoping that an army of volunteers can help us deal with these crowded frequency bands that confuse our machines. By doing this in real-time, we will have an opportunity to follow up immediately on what our volunteers discover.”…

http://www.seti.org/node/967

sunset postcard and a special shadow from Opportunity

Nice Shot
–Ben

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Pretty picture: A sunset postcard and a special shadow from Opportunity

The individual frames for this image were taken and downlinked a few weeks ago, but it took Don Davis many hours of meticulous labor to assemble it into this beautiful postcard from Mars. Take a moment to be the rover, standing there, covered with fine red dust, on a cold day in Martian winter, the yellow Sun taking its light with it as it sinks behind you.

Please note that this image is copyrighted. Do not reproduce it without contacting the artist.

An area of Endeavour’s floor immediately around Opportunity’s shadow appears slightly brighter than the floor elsewhere, possibly because of the opposition effect, where specks of dust on the floor of the crater, seen with the Sun directly behind Opportunity’s cameras, hide their own shadows from view. (This effect was first pointed out by fredk on unmannedspaceflight.com.)

Don Davis had the following to say about assembling the postcard: “The preliminary jpeg images were difficult to match due to lighting and shadow changes between exposures. I leveled and cropped and freely distorted the original mosaic, and editorially approximated the actual colors of the dusty sundial rather than using the odd colors the actual filter set uses, which is optimized for getting the subtle color differences across the scene.”

More at:

http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00003387/

Hubble Reveals a New Class of Extrasolar Planet

Now that’s hot and steamy…
–Ben

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NASA’s Hubble Reveals a New Class of Extrasolar Planet

Observations by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have come up with a new class of planet, a waterworld enshrouded by a thick, steamy atmosphere. It’s smaller than Uranus but larger than Earth.

Zachory Berta of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) and colleagues made the observations of the planet GJ1214b.

“GJ1214b is like no planet we know of,” Berta said. “A huge fraction of its mass is made up of water.”

The ground-based MEarth Project, led by CfA’s David Charbonneau, discovered GJ1214b in 2009. This super-Earth is about 2.7 times Earth’s diameter and weighs almost seven times as much. It orbits a red-dwarf star every 38 hours at a distance of 1.3 million miles, giving it an estimated temperature of 450 degrees Fahrenheit…

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2012/13/full/

Ed Weiler Says He Quit NASA Over Cuts to Mars Program

Newt is looking better and better all the time.

This bothers me because SPACE is about the ONLY thing we agree on.

–Ben

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Ed Weiler Says He Quit NASA Over Cuts to Mars Program

by Yudhijit Bhattacharjee on 9 February 2012, 1:50 PM

Next week, President Barack Obama will propose a $300 million cut in NASA’s
planetary science programs as part of his 2013 request for the agency,
ScienceInsider has learned. If adopted by Congress, the 20% cut in
planetary science would in all likelihood shelve NASA’s ability to
participate in two Mars missions to be carried out in partnership with the
European Space Agency (ESA). And the former head of NASA’s science mission
says that the targeting of the ExoMars program by White House budget
officials was the final straw leading to his resignation last fall.

“The Mars program is one of the crown jewels of NASA,” says Ed Weiler. “In
what irrational, Homer Simpson world would we single it out for
disproportionate cuts?”

Weiler’s resignation in September caught the space science community by
surprise. But he says it was the culmination of a soul-sapping and
ultimately unsuccessful battle with the Office of Management and Budget
(OMB) on how to accommodate the rising cost of the James Webb Space
Telescope within an overall agency budget being squeezed by efforts to
reduce federal spending and shrink the deficit. “It all left a very bad
taste,” Weiler told ScienceInsider this morning from his house in Vero
Beach, Florida.

The story begins with a 2008 agreement between NASA and ESA to share the
costs of sending the Trace Gas Orbiter to Mars in a 2016 mission, followed
by a European rover and a U.S. rover in 2018. Last week, ESA officials said
that they were in talks with Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, to fly
those missions without any help from NASA on the assumption that NASA was
likely to pull out of the partnership.

More at:

http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2012/02/ed-weiler-says-he-quit-nasa-over.html

Comet Lovejoy from the space station

Mega Cool.
–Ben

Comet Lovejoy from the space station

International Space Station Commander Dan Burbank captured spectacular imagery of Comet Lovejoy as seen from about 240 miles above the Earth’s horizon on Wednesday, Dec. 21. Burbank described seeing the comet as “the most amazing thing I have ever seen in space,” in an interview with WDIV-TV in Detroit

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/videogallery/index.html?media_id=125774121

CASSINI DELIVERS HOLIDAY TREATS FROM ACROSS THE SOLAR SYSTEM

Holiday Greeting from your favorite ringed planet.
–Ben

IMAGE ADVISORY: December 22, 2011

CASSINI DELIVERS HOLIDAY TREATS FROM ACROSS THE SOLAR SYSTEM

No team of reindeer was necessary for these holiday treats from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. A beam of radio signals, from clear across the solar system, has delivered a Christmas package of glorious images of Saturn’s largest, most colorful ornament, Titan, and other icy baubles in orbit around this splendid planet. These treats are being featured today in a public release from the mission’s imaging team.

The release includes images of satellite conjunctions in which one moon passes in front of or behind another. Cassini scientists regularly make these observations to study the ever-changing orbits of the planet’s moons. But even in these routine images, the Saturnian system shines. A few of Saturn’s stark, airless, icy moons appear to dangle next to the orange orb of Titan, the only moon in the solar system with a substantial atmosphere. Titan’s atmosphere is of great interest because of its great similarities to the atmosphere believed to exist long ago on the early Earth.

The images can be found at
http://ciclops.org,
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and
http://www.nasa.gov/cassini

While it may be Christmastime and wintry in Earth’s northern hemisphere, it is currently northern spring in the Saturnian system and will remain so for several Earth years. Current plans to extend the Cassini mission through 2017 will surely beget a continued bounty of scientifically rewarding and majestic views of Saturn and its moons and rings, as we spectators are treated to the passage of northern spring and the final arrival of summer in May 2017.

“As another year traveling this magnificent sector of our solar system draws to a close, all of us on Cassini wish all of you a very happy and peaceful holiday season,” said Carolyn Porco, Cassini imaging team lead at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo…

http://www.ciclops.org/view.php?id=7041

Hubble Serves Up a Holiday Snow Angel

fyi:
Be sure to check out the zoom in video from entire galaxy to HST shot.

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2011/38/video/b/

–Ben

Hubble Serves Up a Holiday Snow Angel
December 15, 2011: The bipolar star-forming region, called Sharpless 2-106, or S106 for short, looks like a soaring, celestial snow angel. The outstretched “wings” of the nebula record the contrasting imprint of heat and motion against the backdrop of a colder medium. Twin lobes of super-hot gas, glowing blue in this image, stretch outward from the central star. This hot gas creates the “wings” of our angel. A ring of dust and gas orbiting the star acts like a belt, cinching the expanding nebula into an “hourglass” shape.

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2011/38/