MSL is on its way to Mars !!!!

MSL is on its way to Mars !!!!
Next Stop Gale.

Congrats to NASA, JPL and the ULA Atlas V / Centaur teams.

–Ben

A signal from NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft, including the new Curiosity rover, has been received by officials on the ground. The spacecraft is flying free and headed for Mars after separation from the United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket that started the spacecraft on its journey to the Red Planet. Liftoff was on time at 10:02 a.m. EST from Space Launch Complex 41 on Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida…

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/index.html

Latest from Cassini: The Saturn Storm Chronicles

News from your favorite Ringed Planet
–Ben

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

Ever since the birth of a colossal atmospheric disturbance that has ravaged the northern face of Saturn for nearly a year, the Cassini imaging team has been systematically recording the associated tumultuous changes in the planet’s appearance.

Today, I am enormously pleased to bring to your attention, for your sheer dazzlement, the public release of a large series of images, mosaics and movies that are the result of these methodical observations, and chronicle, month by month, and in kaleiodoscopic color, the development and evolution of this monster tempest, the longest lasting ever observed on Saturn.

You can begin your journey, down the rabbit hole and through the land of wonder, right here …

ciclops.org

… where you’ll discover an updated Captain’s Log and a link (at the top of the page) to this mind-bending and spectacular event.

In times as restless and troubled as ours, it is worth remembering that we humans are capable of extraordinary feats. And I think you will agree: Cassini’s exploration of Saturn has been one of them.

Enjoy!

Carolyn Porco
Cassini Imaging Team Leader
Director, CICLOPS
Space Science Institute
Boulder, CO

http://ciclops.org

http://twitter.com/carolynporco

http://www.facebook.com/carolynporco

Earth | Time Lapse View from Space, Fly Over | NASA, ISS

Nice collection of time lapse videos of Earth @ Night as seen from the International Space Station.

–Ben

Earth | Time Lapse View from Space, Fly Over | NASA, ISS

http://vimeo.com/32001208

Rover’s Eye View of Three-Year Trek on Mars

not as smooth as other rover movies but still nice.

–Ben

Three years on Mars … in 3 minutes

By Alan Boyle

It’s been a long, lonely three years for NASA’s Opportunity rover, which has just finished a 13-mile (21-kilometer) trek from Victoria Crater across the Martian wasteland of Meridiani Planum to Endeavour Crater. A newly released time-lapse video from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory condenses the odyssey down to just three minutes.

The video draws upon a series of 309 images, each taken when the rover stopped driving at the end of a Martian day. The pictures give you a sense of the loneliness that an astronaut might feel while following in Opportunity’s wheel tracks. Drifts of sand go on for miles and miles, interrupted only by craters or patches of bedrock.

The soundtrack for the video was created by taking low-frequency recordings from Opportunity’s accelerometers and speeding them up by a factor of 1,000. “The sound represents the vibrations of the rover while moving on the surface of Mars,” Paolo Bellutta, a roer planner at JPL in Pasadena, Calif., said in NASA’s video advisory. “When the sound is louder, the rover was moving on bedrock. When the sound is softer, the rover was moving on sand.”

More at:

http://tinyurl.com/6dltlch

aka:

http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/10/11/8274228-three-years-on-mars-in-3-minutes

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vj4e2FyNFIE

GLORIA

sounds interesting.

Also interesting no US partners.

–Ben

What is GLORIA?

GLORIA stands for “GLObal Robotic-telescopes Intelligent Array”. GLORIA will be the first free and open- access network of robotic telescopes of the world. It will be a Web 2.0 environment where users can do research in astronomy by observing with robotic telescopes, and/or analyzing data that other users have acquired with GLORIA, or from other free access databases, like the European Virtual Observatory (http://www.euro-vo.org).

Who can access GLORIA?

The community is the most important part of GLORIA project. Access will be free to everybody who has an Internet connection and a web browser. Therefore it will be open not only to professional astronomers, but also to anyone with an interest in astronomy.

Which services will GLORIA offer?

Many Internet communities have already formed to speed-up scientific research, to collaborate in documenting something, or as social projects. Research in astronomy can only benefit from attracting many eyes to the sky – to detect something in the sky requires looking in the right place at the right moment. Our robotic telescopes can search the sky, but the vast quantities of data they produce are far greater than astronomers have time to analyze. GLORIA will provide a way of putting thousands of eyes and minds on the problem. GLORIA is intended to be a Web 2.0 structure, with the possibility of doing real experiments. The community will not only generate content, as in most Web 2.0, but will control telescopes around the world, both directly and via scheduled observations. The community will take decisions for the network and that will give “intelligence” to GLORIA, while the drudge work (such as drawing up telescope schedules that satisfy various constraints) will be done by algorithms that will be developed for the purpose.

How will GLORIA face its challenges?

GLORIA project will define free standards, protocols and methodology for:

1. Controlling Robotic Telescopes: and all related instrumentation i.e. cameras, filter-wheels, domes, etc.
2. Giving Web access to the Network: access to an arbitrary number of robotic telescopes via a web portal.
3. Conducting On-line experiments: It will be able to design specific web environments for controlling telescopes for research in some specific scientific issue.
4. Conducting Off-line experiments: It will be able to design specific web environments for analyzing Astronomical meta-data produced by GLORIA or other databases…

http://venus.datsi.fi.upm.es/gloria/index.php/en/

Aurora From Orbit Sept. 17, 2011

Coolest thing I’ve seen all month.
–Ben

Aurora From Orbit Sept. 17, 2011

This gorgeous view of the aurora was taken from the International Space Station as it crossed over the southern Indian Ocean on September 17, 2011. The sped-up movie spans the time period from 12:22 to 12:45 PM ET.

While aurora are often seen near the poles, this aurora appeared at lower latitudes due to a geomagnetic storm – the insertion of energy into Earth’s magnetic environment called the magnetosphere – caused by a coronal mass ejection from the sun…

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/videogallery/index.html?media_id=112616781

Is this one of the “First Stars”?

A Star That Should Not Exist

The above link is to astrobites. The article is about a star that is 13 billion years old and of very low metallicity (4.5×10^-5 that of the Sun). Could this be a Pop III star?

Doug?

New method detects emerging sunspots deep inside the sun

fyi:
–Ben

New method detects emerging sunspots deep inside the sun, provides warning of dangerous solar flares, say Stanford researchers

Sunspots spawn solar flares that can cause billions of dollars in damage to satellites, communications networks and power grids. But Stanford researchers have developed a way to detect incipient sunspots as deep as 65,000 kilometers inside the sun, providing up to two days’ advance warning of a damaging solar flare…

http://news.stanford.edu/pr/2011/pr-sunspot-prediction-081811.html

Photos and video at http://hmi.stanford.edu/Press/18Aug2011/">http://hmi.stanford.edu/Press/18Aug2011/

Hubble Movies Provide Unprecedented View of Supersonic Jets from Young Stars

Fun bit of Astro 14 yr time lapse.

This is Not Computer fluid dynamics modeling but OBSERVED data.

So HST has done TWO movies??
This one and the Crab nebula, are there any others???

–Ben

Hubble Movies Provide Unprecedented View of Supersonic Jets from Young Stars

Stars aren’t shy about sending out birth announcements. They fire off energetic jets of glowing gas traveling at supersonic speeds in opposite directions through space.

Although astronomers for decades have looked at still pictures of stellar jets, they now can watch movies of them, thanks to NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.

A diverse team of scientists led by astronomer Patrick Hartigan of Rice University in Houston, Texas, has collected enough high-resolution Hubble images over a 14-year period to stitch together time-lapse movies of young jets ejected from three stars…

…Hartigan and his colleagues used the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 to study jets HH 1, HH 2, HH 34, HH 46, and HH 47. HH 1-HH 2 and HH 46-HH 47 are pairs of jets emanating in opposite directions from single stars. Hubble followed the jets over three epochs: HH 1 and HH 2 in 1994, 1997, and 2007; HH 34 in 1994, 1998, and 2007; and HH 46 and HH 47 in 1994, 1999, and 2008. The jets are roughly 10 times the width of our solar system and zip along at more than 440,000 miles an hour (700,000 kilometers an hour).

All of the outflows are roughly 1,350 light-years from Earth. HH 34, HH 1, and HH 2 reside near the Orion Nebula, in the northern sky. HH 46 and HH 47 are in the southern constellation Vela…

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2011/20/full/

CASSINI CLOSES IN ON SATURN’S TUMBLING MOON HYPERION

fyi:
–Ben

August 26, 2011

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

Yesterday, Cassini captured new images of Saturn’s moon Hyperion during
its 2nd closest encounter with this deeply cratered body. Closest approach registered at 15,000 miles.

Hyperion is a small moon … just 168 miles across … orbiting between Titan and Iapetus. It has an irregular shape and surface appearance, and it rotates chaotically as it tumbles along in orbit, making it impossible to say just exactly what terrain we would image during this flyby.

To see how it all turned out, go to

http://www.ciclops.org/view_event/160/Hyperion_Rev_152_Raw_Preview

And the adventure continues. Cassini’s next flyby of Hyperion will be on September 16, 2011, when it passes the tumbling moon at a distance of about 36,000 miles.

Enjoy!

Carolyn Porco
Cassini Imaging Team Leader
Director, CICLOPS
Space Science Institute
Boulder, CO

http://ciclops.org

http://twitter.com/carolynporco

http://www.facebook.com/carolynporco