Subscriber nudge+ 15,325 Posted December 18, 2018 Subscriber Share Posted December 18, 2018 21 hours ago, CaaC - John said: Aye, and I am bloody sure I saw that on tv one night when Liz was around our daughters babysitting!! How was it? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber CaaC (John)+ 5,358 Posted December 18, 2018 Author Subscriber Share Posted December 18, 2018 38 minutes ago, nudge said: How was it? Any Space film is good to me and this was a historical drama film and I quite enjoyed although being in Russian with sub-titles it was still good, for it to get a 7.2/10 rating from IMBd tells you it must be good. "Salyut 7 (Russian: Салют 7) is a 2017 Russian historical drama film directed by Klim Shipenko. The story is based on the Soyuz T-13mission in 1985, part of the Soviet Salyut programme; it was the first time in history that a 'dead' space station was docked with and brought back into service. It was released on 12 October 2017". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salyut_7_(film) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber nudge+ 15,325 Posted December 18, 2018 Subscriber Share Posted December 18, 2018 Just now, CaaC - John said: Any Space film is good to me and this was a historical drama film and I quite enjoyed although being in Russian with sub-titles it was still good, for it to get a 7.2/10 rating from IMBd tells you it must be good. "Salyut 7 (Russian: Салют 7) is a 2017 Russian historical drama film directed by Klim Shipenko. The story is based on the Soyuz T-13mission in 1985, part of the Soviet Salyut programme; it was the first time in history that a 'dead' space station was docked with and brought back into service. It was released on 12 October 2017". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salyut_7_(film) Hide contents Hehe I don't need subtitles for Russian so that's an advantage I guess. Was just curious how well done it is in terms of the story and CGI; the trailer looks beautiful so I think I'll give it a go! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber CaaC (John)+ 5,358 Posted December 18, 2018 Author Subscriber Share Posted December 18, 2018 9 minutes ago, nudge said: Hehe I don't need subtitles for Russian so that's an advantage I guess. Was just curious how well done it is in terms of the story and CGI; the trailer looks beautiful so I think I'll give it a go! Salyut 7 film review: Russian space epic is an edge-of-the-seat retelling of a mission impossible In similar gripping vein to Ron Howard’s Apollo 13, this Russian thriller highlights the heroism and desperation of Soviet-era cosmonauts tasked with a first docking of an unmanned object in space PUBLISHED: Saturday, 24 February 2018, 7:01 am UPDATED : Saturday, 24 February, 2018, 7:00am Billed as “a Russian Gravity”, Klim Shipenko’s Salyut 7 is the thrilling retelling of one of the most technically complicated space missions in human history. When the Soviets lose contact with their orbiting space station, it prompts a never-before-attempted mission to dock with an unmanned object in space. Unspooling at the height of the cold war, the Soviets not only risk losing a highly advanced piece of technology, should the Salyut 7 come hurtling back to Earth, but also horrific casualties if it crashed in a populated area. Of even greater concern is the loss of face to the Americans, who were hurrying to launch their own Challenger Space Shuttle. Any Russian space film is cursed to exist in the shadow of Andrei Tarkovsky’s existential masterpiece Solaris, but Salyut 7 holds its own by keeping its feet firmly on the ground, even as its characters drift thousands of miles above the Earth. Vladimir Vdovichenkov and Pavel Derevyanko, as the cosmonauts tasked with this mission, strike a perfect balance between granite-faced heroism and fallible desperation, while carrying a playful degree of disdain for their superiors and even each other. The film actually shares more in common with Ron Howard’s Apollo 13, as both champion the humbling resilience of the human spirit, when faced with the failures of our most advanced technological achievements. Shifting between the smoke-filled offices of Ground Control and the icy confines of the defunct space station, Shipenko has created a claustrophobic and unrelentingly tense experience, further heightened by gorgeous cinematography, strong effects work, and a stirring score that accentuates the overall epic scale. https://www.scmp.com/culture/film-tv/article/2134435/salyut-7-film-review-russian-space-epic-edge-seat-retelling-mission 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber CaaC (John)+ 5,358 Posted December 18, 2018 Author Subscriber Share Posted December 18, 2018 Nasa's New Horizons probe on course for a historic flyby By Jonathan Amos BBC Science Correspondent 2 hours ago The American space agency's New Horizons probe remains on course for its daring flyby of Ultima Thule. When the mission sweeps past the 30km wide object on New Year's Day, it will be making the most distant ever visit to a Solar System body - at some 6.5 billion km from Earth. Mission planners decided at the weekend to forego a possible trajectory change. It means the probe will get to fly 3,500km from icy Ultima's surface to take a series of photos and other data. There had been some concern that the object might be surrounded by large debris particles which could destroy the probe if it were to run into them. But nothing of the sort has been detected and so a wider, safer pass will not be needed. Voyager 2 probe 'leaves Solar System' Saturn probe Cassini is incinerated Nasa spacecraft speeds past Pluto It is now three years since New Horizons made its remarkable flyby of dwarf planet Pluto. That was a technical tour de force and acquiring observations at Ultima will be just as tricky. Controllers will have to tell the spacecraft precisely where and when to point its instruments or risk sensing empty space as it hurtles by at 51,000km/h. "Can we fly 3,500km from the object and get all those images centred right on to the target, and not miss anything? That's the excitement for me; that's the challenge," said Mission Operations Manager Alice Bowman at last week's American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in Washington DC. New Horizons will be sending back repeat images of Ultima in the coming days that will help refine the final navigation and timing models used during the flyby. What do we know about Ultima Thule? Very little. The object was only discovered four years ago by the Hubble telescope in a search for potential targets that New Horizons could reach after its Pluto encounter. Initially catalogued as (486958) 2015 MU69, it was given the more catchy nickname of Ultima Thule (Pronounced: Tool-ee) after a public consultation exercise. Like many Kuiper belt objects of its type, it is likely to be composed of dust and ices that came together at the dawn of the Solar System more than 4.5 billion years ago. Theory suggests such bodies will take on an elongated or globular form. Think potato or peanut. Its surface should be very dark, having being "burnt" through the aeons by high-energy radiation - cosmic rays and X-rays. New Horizons will study Ultima's shape, composition and environment. Scientists hope Ultima can provide insights into how these distant objects formed. One idea is that they grew from the mass accretion of a great many pebble-sized grains. What can we expect from the flyby? Don't blink, you might miss it. Unlike the encounter with Pluto in July 2015, there won't be increasingly resolved images on approach to admire. Ultima will remain a blob in the viewfinder pretty much until the day of the flyby, which has 05:33 GMT set as the time of closest approach. However, the much-reduced separation between the probe and Ultima (3,500km versus 12,500km at the dwarf planet) means that finer detail in the surface will eventually be observed. The "mouthwatering" phase of the pass occurs in a roughly 48-hour period, centred mostly on the day-side of the object. Because New Horizons has to swivel to point its instruments, it cannot keep its antenna locked on Earth while also gathering data. Controllers must, therefore, wait until later on New Year's Day for the probe to "phone home" a status update and to start to downlink some choice pictures. And it will be 2 January before we see the first of these images, and 3 January before we get the best. At a distance of 6.5 billion km, radio signals take over six hours to reach Earth. "Our data rates are low - typical data rates max out around 1,000 bits a second and it's going to take 20 months to get it all back," explained New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern. "Which is kinda cool because we'll be getting new presents from the Kuiper belt every week and every month through 2019 and most of 2020," he told BBC News. What does New Horizons do afterwards? The team working on the probe is going to ask Nasa to fund an extended mission. The hope is that the course of the spacecraft can be altered to visit at least one more Kuiper belt object sometime in the next decade. It has just enough fuel reserves to be able to do this. Critically, it has sufficient electrical reserves to keep operating its instruments through this period, too. New Horizon's plutonium battery may even allow it to keep talking to Earth as it leaves the Solar System. The two 1970s Voyager missions have both now exited the heliosphere - the bubble of gas blown off our Sun. Voyager 2 has only recently done it, in November. This occurred at a distance of 119 Astronomical Units (or 119 times the Earth-Sun distance, 149 million km). New Horizons is currently at 44 AU and clocking about three additional AU every year. Its power system could probably run to about 100 AU, said, Prof Stern. "That's less than the Voyagers' distance but the interesting game is that the heliosphere breathes in and out by tens of astronomical units because of the solar cycle," he explained. "No-one is good enough at predicting the solar cycle to tell you where the edge of the heliosphere will be in the mid-late 2030s when we go power-critical." https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-46610812 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber CaaC (John)+ 5,358 Posted December 19, 2018 Author Subscriber Share Posted December 19, 2018 Saturn losing rings at 'worst-case-scenario' rate Sky News 22 hours ago Saturn is losing its rings at a "worst-case-scenario" rate according to new research by NASA. The gas giant's iconic rings are being pulled into the planet by gravity as a dusty rain of ice particles under the influence of the planet's magnetic field. "We estimate that this 'ring rain' drains an amount of water products that could fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool from Saturn's rings in half an hour," said James O'Donoghue of NASA. "From this alone, the entire ring system will be gone in 300 million years," Mr O'Donoghue added but noted that actually, the situation was far direr. Measurements of ring-material detected falling into Saturn's equator by the Cassini spacecraft suggest that the rings actually have less than 100 million years to live. "This is relatively short, compared to Saturn's age of over four billion years," stated Mr O'Donoghue, who is the lead author of the study on Saturn's ring rain. The origins of Saturn's rings have long puzzled scientists, who are still unsure if the planet was formed with the rings or if it acquired them at a later stage. According to the findings of the new research, it is now considered to be more likely that it acquired the rings after it formed. The study suggests Saturn's rings are unlikely to be older than 100 million years. "We are lucky to be around to see Saturn's ring system, which appears to be in the middle of its lifetime. "However, if rings are temporary, perhaps we just missed out on seeing giant ring systems of Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune, which have only thin ringlets today!" added Mr O'Donoghue. There are a number of theories which could explain the origin of the rings. Among the most prominent is the suggestion that they came about when small icy moons collided, perhaps after their orbits were disturbed by a passing asteroid or comet. https://uk.yahoo.com/news/saturn-losing-rings-worst-case-scenario-rate-101600827.html Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber CaaC (John)+ 5,358 Posted December 19, 2018 Author Subscriber Share Posted December 19, 2018 A Dwarf planet is the most distant solar system object we’ve ever observed Mary Beth Griggs 2 hrs ago © Roberto Molar Candanosa/Carnegie Institution for Science Astronomers have spotted a new object that’s the most distant ever discovered in our solar system— a dwarf planet that’s roughly four times farther away from the Sun than Pluto. The discovery was announced on Monday by the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center. When Scott Sheppard, who helped detect the dwarf planet, first saw how slowly the distant object moved across the sky, he had one thought, murmured quietly to himself: “far out.” He was amazed, because to astronomers like Sheppard, a slow object is a very distant object in our solar system. And this one was extraordinary. “It was the slowest-moving object we’ve ever seen,” Sheppard, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science says. By measuring how slowly the dwarf planet moved across the sky, Sheppard and his colleagues calculated that the object, now known as 2018 VG18 (and nicknamed ‘Farout’), was at least 120 astronomical units (AU) away from Earth. For perspective, one AU is the distance between the Earth and the sun, or 93 million miles away. © Roberto Molar Candanosa/Carnegie Institution for Science That puts Farout at around the same distance from Earth as Voyager 2, the space probe that recently crossed into interstellar space. Another spacecraft, Voyager 1, is even farther away at 145 AU and is getting farther all the time. These extreme distances mean that figuring out what’s going on with the Voyager spacecraft is hard enough, but discovering what’s happening with other, natural objects in these outer reaches of the solar system is far more challenging. It took an international team of astronomers to confirm the existence of Farout, scanning through data from extremely high-powered telescopes to look for small signs of movement that might indicate the presence of a planet. © Scott S. Sheppard/David Tholen Sheppard and the team responsible for this discovery detected another dwarf planet that was announced earlier this year, nicknamed the Goblin. Both discoveries, and others, are thanks to a massive search of the sky that’s been going on for the past six years. “We’ve been doing the largest, deepest survey for solar system objects,” Sheppard says. One of the goals of this survey is to look for a large planet-sized object (also called Planet 9 or Planet X) that might exist in the outer reaches of the Solar System. Since 2012, the team has covered about 20 per cent of the night sky, and while they’ve found a lot of dwarf planets, they still haven’t found Planet X. Even with objects that the team has located, like Farout, researchers don’t have a whole lot of information. “All that we currently know about 2018 VG18 is its extreme distance from the Sun, its approximate diameter, and its colour,” David Tholen, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii and a co-discoverer of the object said in a statement. They can tell that it’s roughly 500-600 kilometres (310-372 miles) around, large enough to qualify as a dwarf planet. It’s also a distinctive reddish-pink colour, which is common for that area of the solar system. Sheppard says the colour indicates that it is probably an icy object. “When ice is bombarded by radiation over the age of the Solar System it turns kind of reddish in colour,” Sheppard says. And in this area of our cosmic neighbourhood, objects are constantly bombarded with radiation, just as they’ve been for hundreds of millions of years, if not longer. Out there, they are at the edge of the protective bubble formed by plasma streaming off the Sun. When they cross that boundary, called the heliopause, the levels of cosmic radiation go up, and the interaction changes icy objects, giving them that characteristic tinge of colour. “There are hundreds of thousands of worlds of various sizes from the size of islands to the size of continents in this realm of the solar system and almost all of them are going in and out of the heliopause as they travel in their orbit around the Sun,” Michele Bannister, an astrophysicist at Queen’s University Belfast, says. “If it wasn’t pinkish, I would be astounded.” While researchers can detect a blush of pink through the telescope, other details about 2018 VG18 (Farout) remains stubbornly out of focus. Astronomers can tell that it probably takes a thousand years or more to make one full circuit around the sun, but they still aren’t sure what the shape of its orbit is, whether it’s moving away from the Sun, or toward it. They still have no idea how far into the Solar System it might come, and whether or not it is affected by the gravity of the giant planets, like Neptune, Saturn, or Jupiter. All of that information will take at least a year, if not more, to tease out from data gathered by telescopes around the world. “That this object is particularly distant is in many ways not the most interesting thing about it,” Bannister says. Bannister, who was not involved in the survey, points out that the discovery of objects such as this one, and future analyses of its orbit will help astronomers get a better picture of how the Solar System formed and developed. For her, the fact that we managed to see this faint object at such a great distance is more of a bonus than a feature. “This is what comes out of doing patient, careful searching,“ Bannister says. “That we’re seeing it at this distance is purely an accident of cosmic time.” https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/techandscience/dwarf-planet-is-the-most-distant-solar-system-object-we’ve-ever-observed/ar-BBRb8k3?ocid=chromentp 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber nudge+ 15,325 Posted December 20, 2018 Subscriber Share Posted December 20, 2018 Just shows how little we know about the universe despite all the progress we've made in the last few decades... Still waiting for the hypothetical Planet Nine to be found in the outer solar system beyond Neptune. Based on evidence and modeling work, it's expected to be 10 times more massive than Earth and to take tens thousands of Earth years to orbit the sun. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber CaaC (John)+ 5,358 Posted December 20, 2018 Author Subscriber Share Posted December 20, 2018 Planet 9 would be like looking for ET living here on Earth, you know he exists (Aliens) but bloody finding him (them). ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Planet Nine This article is about the hypothetical planet first suggested in 2014. For other uses, see Planet Nine (disambiguation). Not to be confused with the hypothetical Planet X first proposed in 1906 by Percival Lowell. For doomsday speculation concerning Planet Nine, see Nibiru cataclysm § Planet Nine. Planet Nine is a hypothetical planet in the outer region of the Solar System. Its gravity could explain the unlikely clustering of orbits for a group of extreme trans-Neptunian objects (eTNOs) that orbit beyond Neptune with average distances greater than 250 AU. These eTNOs tend to have their points of closest approach to the Sun clustered in one direction, and many of their orbits have a similar tilt. This evidence suggests that the gravity from a large undiscovered object is influencing the orbits of the most distant known Solar System objects. This undiscovered super-Earth-sized planet would have an estimated mass of ten Earths, a diameter two to four times that of Earth, and an elongated orbit lasting 10,000 - 20,000 years. Batygin and Brown suggest that Planet Nine could be the core of a primordial giant planet that was ejected from its original orbit by Jupiter during the genesis of the Solar System. Others have proposed that the planet was captured from another star, is a captured rogue planet, or that it formed on a distant orbit and was pulled into an eccentric orbit by a passing star. As of 2018, efforts have failed to directly observe Planet Nine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_Nine Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber CaaC (John)+ 5,358 Posted December 21, 2018 Author Subscriber Share Posted December 21, 2018 This Week’s Sky at a Glance, December 21 – 29 By: Alan MacRobert | December 21, 2018 Friday, December 21 • By mid-evening, the Moon, nearly full, forms an almost-isosceles triangle with Aldebaran to its upper right (shown here) and Betelgeuse to its lower right (not yet risen in this twilight scene). Aldebaran is an orange, K5 giant star 65 light-years away. Betelgeuse is an orange, slightly less hot M1 supergiant about 10 times more distant. • This is the longest night of the year for the Northern Hemisphere; the longest day for the Southern Hemisphere. The solstice occurs at 5:23 p.m. EST when the Sun reaches its farthest point south and begins its six-month return northward. That's when winter begins in the Northern Hemisphere, summer in the Southern. On Friday evening the 21st, look for Aldebaran to the upper right of the Moon as the stars come out. Saturday, December 22 • Full Moon (exact at 12:49 p.m. EST). The Moon, near perigee, shines between the feet of the Castor figure and the dim Club of Orion. Farther left or lower left of the Moon are brighter Castor and Pollux. Farther right or lower right of the Moon is Orion, with his belt almost vertical. The full Moon of December rides higher across the sky in the middle of the night than it does in any other month (for Northern Hemisphere skywatchers), "giving luster of midday to objects below." • Algol should be at minimum brightness for a couple hours centered on 11:36 p.m. EST. Algol takes several additional hours to fade and to rebrighten. Sunday, December 23 • As the stars come out, face due north and look high. Cassiopeia is now a flattened M shape canted at about a 45° angle (depending on where you live). Yet hardly more than an hour later, the M has turned horizontal. Why so fast? Constellations passing near the zenith appear to rotate rapidly with respect to the direction "up." The waning gibbous Moon shines in the shelter of the Sickle of Leo late on Christmas night. . . Monday, December 24 • This is the time of year when Orion shines in the east-southeast after dinnertime. He's pretty high now, but his three-star Belt is still nearly vertical. The Belt points up toward Aldebaran and, even higher, the Pleiades. In the other direction, it points down to where bright Sirius will rise around 7 or 8 p.m. to twinkle furiously. Tuesday, December 25 • Sirius and Procyon in the balance: Sirius, the Dog Star, sparkles low in the east-southeast by mid-evening. Procyon, the Little Dog Star, shines in the east about two fist-widths at arm's length to Sirius's left. If you live around latitude 30° (Tijuana, New Orleans, Jacksonville), these two canine stars will be at the same height above your horizon soon after they arise. If you're north of that latitude, Procyon will be higher. If you're south of there, Sirius will be the higher one. Why? The eastern edge of the Earth tilts differently with respect to the stars depending on your latitude. • You'll catch Algol at its minimum brightness for a couple hours centered on 8:26 p.m. EST. Wednesday, December 26 • The Pleiades cluster glitters high in the southeast these evenings, no bigger than your fingertip at arm's length. How many Pleiads can you count with your unaided eyes? Take your time and keep looking. Most people can count 6. With sharp eyesight, a good dark sky, and a steady gaze, you may be able to make out 8 or 9. Thursday, December 27 • M31, the Andromeda Galaxy, now crosses the zenith shortly after dark (if you live in the mid-northern latitudes). Exactly when? That depends on your longitude. Binoculars will show it just off the knee of the Andromeda constellation's stick figure; see the big evening constellation chart in the center of Sky & Telescope. Friday, December 28 • Last-quarter Moon tonight (exact at 4:39 a.m. on the 29th EST). The Moon, half-lit, rises around midnight in Virgo. By the beginning of Saturday's dawn, it's shining high in the south, close above Gamma (γ) Virginis and about a fist and a half upper right of Spica (as shown above). Saturday, December 29 • Before dawn on Sunday the 30th, the waning Moon shines upper left of Spica. Much farther upper left of the Moon is Arcturus, pale yellow-orange. Far to the Moon's lower left are bright Venus, then Jupiter, then Mercury. .And when the Moon wanes to last quarter, it'll pose above the telescopic double star Gamma (γ) Virginis (Porrima) before dawn. https://www.skyandtelescope.com/observing/this-weeks-sky-at-a-glance-december-21-29/ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber CaaC (John)+ 5,358 Posted December 22, 2018 Author Subscriber Share Posted December 22, 2018 NASA: Holiday asteroid looks like a hippopotamus Amanda Kooser 7 hrs ago (Video provided by GeoBeats) Asteroids aren't always the most elegant-looking objects in the cosmos. New NASA radar images of asteroid 2003 SD220 show a rock that resembles a space slug, or that creepy Ceti eel ear-bug thing from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Or even a hippo. The asteroid is considered a near-Earth object, but it'll zoom past us at a safe distance of 1.8 million miles (2.9 million kilometers) on Saturday. This is 2003 SD220's closest approach to our planet in 400 years, though it will slide by slightly closer in 2070. © CNET Space hippo? Asteroid 2003 SD220 poses for radar images. The asteroid is about 1 mile (1.6 kilometers) long. NASA thinks it looks like a "hippopotamus wading in a river." The radar images came from mid-December through coordinating the efforts of the Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex in California, the National Science Foundation's Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia and the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. "The radar images achieve an unprecedented level of detail and are comparable to those obtained from a spacecraft flyby," said NASA scientist Lance Benner. Benner says NASA noticed a distinctive ridge along one end and numerous small bright spots that may be reflections from boulders. Asteroid 2003 SD220 is also notable for its slow, complicated rotation, which NASA compares to that of a poorly thrown American football. The data NASA gathered will help scientists better understand how similar space bodies formed and evolved. © Provided by CBS Interactive Inc. NASA's three great observatories, Chandra, Hubble and Spitzer, all worked on this image showing two galaxies colliding. These are known as the Antennae galaxies due to long "arms" seen in wide-angle views. "The collision, which began more than 100 million years ago and is still occurring, has triggered the formation of millions of stars in clouds of clouds of dust and gas in the galaxies," says NASA. While 2003 SD220 is classified as a "potentially hazardous asteroid" thanks to its size and travel path, NASA confirmed, "it does not pose a future impact threat to Earth." This isn't the only odd-looking asteroid we've seen. We caught sight of a skull-shaped asteroid in October and one that looked like a peanut in 2017. At least this one looks like a cute (though potentially dangerous) critter. https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/techandscience/nasa-holiday-asteroid-looks-like-a-hippopotamus/ar-BBRhX6r?ocid=chromentp Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kowabunga 313 Posted December 22, 2018 Share Posted December 22, 2018 (edited) A beautiful composite image of the Korolev crater, covered with ice, created from Mars Express data: It has a 1,8 km diametre and gathers 2200 km^3 of ice. While close to the Martian south pole, its location still falls outside of it. Mars Express beams back images of ice-filled Korolev crater EDIT: Actually ice it is 1,8 km-deep and has a 82 km diametre. Edited December 25, 2018 by Kowabunga 1 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber CaaC (John)+ 5,358 Posted December 23, 2018 Author Subscriber Share Posted December 23, 2018 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber CaaC (John)+ 5,358 Posted December 24, 2018 Author Subscriber Share Posted December 24, 2018 This bright, hazy blue blob is the brightest comet to visit Earth in 2018 Mike Wehner | 1 day ago For astronomers, spotting things at huge distances is all part of the gig, but sometimes our Solar System takes care of the hard work by bringing interesting objects within a cosmic hair’s width of Earth. Comets are one of those kinds of objects, and in a new blog post, NASA shows off some lovely (if a bit blurry) images of the brightest comet of 2018. This particular ball of ice and rock is called 46P/Wirtanen, and the images you see here were captured on December 13th as the comet came within approximately 7.4 million miles of our planet. © Provided by Penske Media Corporation hubble_observation_of_comet_46p The visible light image (above) makes the comet itself somewhat difficult to see, but it’s there tucked away within the brightest central region of the fuzzy blue cloud. That cloud is a mix of dust and gas that the icy object begins to eject as it gets closer and closer to the Sun. It’s this material that forms the iconic “tail” that we’ve all come to expect from comets. In the infrared image (below) you can more clearly see a well-defined nucleus. These images helped scientists closely study the comet and learn more about how sunlight affects these kinds of objects as well as the clouds of debris that flow around them. © Screengrab BGR Screengrab BGR “Comet 46P/Wirtanen orbits the Sun once every 5.4 years, much quicker than the 75-year orbit of the more famous comet Halley,” NASA says. “Most of its passes through the inner solar system are much farther from Earth, making this year’s display particularly notable.” NASA and other scientific bodies around the world have plenty of reason to study comets, especially in the wake of new research and theories that comets might have been responsible for delivering large quantities of water to our planet in the distant past. If that was indeed the case, we may have comets to thank for our very existence. https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/techandscience/this-bright-hazy-blue-blob-is-the-brightest-comet-to-visit-earth-in-2018/ar-BBRkcLL?ocid=chromentp Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber CaaC (John)+ 5,358 Posted December 25, 2018 Author Subscriber Share Posted December 25, 2018 (edited) 50 years ago, 'Earthrise' inspired the environmental movement Steve Dent 2 hrs ago The most famous photo ever taken from space, Earthrise, is 50 years old today. It's so ironic that we now take it for granted, but it may have had a greater impact on humanity than any photograph ever taken. Far from being planned, astronaut Bill Anders snapped it during the ground-breaking Apollo 8 mission on the spur of the moment. "Suddenly we saw this object called Earth," Anders told the Guardian. "It was the only color in the universe." The 1968 Apollo 8 mission was crucial in the race to get a man on the moon. It was the first manned launch of the colossal Saturn V rocket, which had only flown twice before in unmanned test missions. It was also the first manned spacecraft to escape Earth's gravity, reach another celestial body, and orbit it. It took nearly three days for the crew to reach the moon, and after a tense four-minute engine burn -- which could have flung them into space or crashed them onto the Moon's surface --they successfully entered orbit. The astronauts were equipped with a highly modified Hasselblad 500 EL with the reflex viewfinder replaced by a mechanical sighting ring. They were fully trained in its use and in photography principles and had access to both 70mm color and black and white film. Commander Frank Borman happened to be turning the command module when it came around on its fourth orbit on December 24th, and the Earth appeared as a blue jewel against the Moon's drab monochrome surface. Video player from YouTube (Privacy Policy) Borman reportedly took a black and white photo of the Earth in a slightly lower position next to the moon, but Anders thought the shot would be worthy of color. The conversation among the crew at that moment was famously recorded for posterity (above) and reveals what happened next. Anders: Oh my God! Look at that picture over there! There's the Earth coming up. Wow, that's pretty. Borman: (Joking) Hey, don't take that, it's not scheduled. Anders: (laughs) You got a color film, Jim? Hand me that roll of color quick, would you... Lovell: Oh man, that's great! Anders didn't get the film loaded quickly enough to take the shot from the main window but noticed that the scene was still visible from the hatch. Crew member Jim Lovell wanted to grab the camera to take several more, but Anders amusingly chided him. "Wait a minute, just let me get the right setting here now," he said. "Calm down, Lovell!" Anders knew he got it ("Aw, that's a beautiful shot!") and said he took it at 1/250th of a second at f/11. He took a couple more at slightly different exposures to make sure, though. The crew splashed down on December 27th, along with the famous photo. After Anders loaded the film, the next person to handle it was NASA chief of photography Dick Underwood early in 1969. The development of the seven rolls, containing 865 frames, was undertaken with the same level of precision as the rest of the mission. "I took them to my area of the photo lab where we had a special processor that I had built for Apollo space film," Underwood told the Independent in 2009. "We gave that very thin film tender love and care. There was no room for error. Failure was not going to happen." The photo was first published in early 1969 and reportedly inspired the first-ever Earth Day in 1970. It has been a touchstone for the environmental movement ever since. "The vast loneliness is awe-inspiring and it makes you realize just what you have back there on Earth," said Lovell. NASA https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/techandscience/50-years-ago-earthrise-inspired-the-environmental-movement/ar-BBRpqFN?ocid=chromentp Edited December 25, 2018 by CaaC - John 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber nudge+ 15,325 Posted December 26, 2018 Subscriber Share Posted December 26, 2018 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber CaaC (John)+ 5,358 Posted December 27, 2018 Author Subscriber Share Posted December 27, 2018 Ancient space crystals may prove the sun threw heated tantrums as a tot Neel V. Patel 9 hrs ago Many newborn and toddler stars are not all that different from newborn and toddler humans—prone to bouts of cranky energy, loud and violent tempers, and indiscriminately wailing and vomiting heaps of disgusting matter in every direction. It’s natural to assume even our 4.6 billion-year-old sun had a messy heyday in its youth, but without any hard evidence to prove this was the case, the only thing many scientists had going for them were strong suspicions. New data, focused around a peculiar set of ancient blue crystals from space, seems to suggest the sun emitted a much higher flux of cosmic rays in its early history than we once thought. Those blue crystals are called hibonite, and they’ve arrived here on Earth by way of meteorite impacts. Hibonite are effectively some of the first minerals formed in the solar system, created by the cooling gas derived from the sun. The new study, published in Nature Astronomy, focuses on the Murchison meteorite, which fell in Australia in 1969, likely originating from an asteroid in the asteroid belt—and which possesses pieces of micron barely larger than the width of human hair. “We think hibonites like those in Murchison formed close to the young sun because that is where temperatures were high enough to form such minerals,” says Levke Kööp, a cosmochemistry researcher at the University of Chicago and the lead author of the new study. “Hibonites from Murchison are famous for showing large isotope anomalies that tell us about the types of stars that contributed material to the molecular cloud that the sun formed from.” The team doesn’t have an exact date on the hibonite grains, but based on the age of refractory elements in the meteorite, it pegs the crystals to be a little over 4.5 billion years old. If hibonite really was produced by an early active sun, the answer would be found in analyzing the crystals’ helium and neon isotopes. High energy particles being ejected by a volatile young sun would have hit calcium and aluminium deposits in the crystals and split these atoms into neon and helium, and been irrevocably trapped for billions of years. The research team studied the hibonite crystals using a highly sensitive mass spectrometer at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, melting the grains of hibonite down with a laser while the spectrometer measured and confirmed the presence of helium and neon concentrations. Beyond simply illustrating that the young sun went through a phase of high activity, the new results also show how some meteorite materials from the solar nebula are directly affected by young sun irradiation. The team also noticed helium and neon were absent from younger crystals, indicating that something changed later in the irradiation conditions created by the sun, and raising the question of what happened. This sort of insight might augur later into a better understanding of how the roles star evolution plays in the creation of elements and materials that later on assemble into planets and other celestial bodies. “Over the last few decades, there has been a controversy whether meteorites contain evidence of an early active sun,” says Kööp. “In general, even for us, it was hard to know what to expect from this study. In the end, we were very excited to see such a clear irradiation signature in the hibonites.” Andrew Davis, a study coauthor affiliated with the University of Chicago and the Field Museum of Natural History, points out the minuscule size of the hibonite grains limits how much the team could measure helium and neon traces, as well as an analysis of the absolute age of the hibonite itself. Moreover, the analyses also involve the destruction of the grains. “We are working on a new instrument in my lab to study the isotopic compositions of more elements in the hibonite grains, to better understand how different sources of dust were mixed in the early solar nebula,” he says. Still, the implications of these findings alone shouldn’t be understated. “I’ve been involved with this type of research for a very long time. I’ve constantly been sceptical of claims from scientists that traces of the early sun have been found.” “With this new study,” he says, “I’m happy to change my mind.” https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/techandscience/ancient-space-crystals-may-prove-the-sun-threw-heated-tantrums-as-a-tot/ar-BBRtJRn?ocid=chromentp Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber nudge+ 15,325 Posted December 29, 2018 Subscriber Share Posted December 29, 2018 2019 key spaceflight events January NASA's New Horizons spacecraft conducts flyby of Ultima Thule - The New Horizons probe was designed to study Pluto. But after its successful rendezvous with the dwarf planet in 2015, the craft continued speeding along into the Kuiper Belt, a debris-filled region of the solar system beyond the orbit of Neptune. Here, at a distance of about 4 billion miles from Earth, New Horizons will zoom past the icy object 2014 MU69, which is nicknamed Ultima Thule, on Jan. 1. The New Year's rendezvous will make Ultima the most distant object ever visited by a spacecraft. The first high-resolution images will arrive back on New Year’s Day, but it’ll take 20 months for all the data to be sent back to Earth. China becomes the first nation to land on the far side of the moon - On Dec. 7, China launched its robotic Chang'e 4 spacecraft on the world's first mission to the far side of the moon. The robotic lander and the rover being carried on the craft could touch down as early as Jan. 1 within the South Pole-Aitken basin, one of the moon's largest and oldest impact craters. The Chang'e 4 mission is a prelude to a successor robotic mission, Chang'e 5, which is designed to return lunar samples to Earth. SpaceX performs first test flight of new crew capsule - SpaceX has been developing its Crew Dragon capsule as a replacement for NASA's space shuttles, which were retired in 2011. The new craft is designed to ferry up to seven astronauts to and from the International Space Station, ending NASA's reliance on Russia's Soyuz capsules. During its first uncrewed test flight, which is scheduled for Jan. 17, the capsule will launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida, dock with the space station and then return to Earth, splashing down in the Atlantic Ocean If it's successful, the Crew Dragon's first test flight with astronauts aboard will follow later in the year. Israel launches its first spacecraft to the moon - Sometime in the first quarter of 2019, a Tel Aviv-based nonprofit called SpaceIL will launch a 1,322-pound lunar lander on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida. After a two-month journey, the lander will touch down on the moon, with the earliest landing attempt pegged for Feb. 13. If successful, the mission would make SpaceIL the first private entity, and Israel the fourth country, ever to land on the moon. India launches its second mission to the moon - On Jan. 31, India's space agency will launch its second lunar mission, Chandrayaan-2, sending a robotic orbiter, lander and rover to the moon. Chandrayaan-2, which will touch down at the lunar south pole for the first time in history, will study the moon's mineral content and its topography. India's first lunar mission, Chandrayaan-1, launched in October 2008. That mission found evidence of water ice on the moon's surface. February British startup launches first set of satellites for all-Earth internet - Sometime in February, a London-based startup called OneWeb will launch the first 10 satellites of what ultimately will be a fleet of 600 telecommunications satellites designed to provide high-speed internet service to every part of the world. The satellites will launch aboard an Arianespace Soyuz rocket from the Guiana Space Centre in French Guiana. NASA's InSight lander begins drilling into the surface of Mars - it'll hammer sensors up to five meters (16 feet) into the ground to measure the temperature inside the Red Planet. March Boeing conducts first test flight of its CST-100 Starliner capsule - Like SpaceX, Boeing is developing a space capsule to replace NASA's retired space shuttle fleet. Sometime in March, Its CST-100 Starliner will take its maiden flight aboard an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida, with the uncrewed capsule docking with the space station before parachuting back to Earth. If the test is successful, Boeing could conduct crewed test flights of the Starliner in August. SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket returns to space - SpaceX's Falcon Heavy booster completed its maiden launch on Feb. 6, 2018, lifting off from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, and launching a Tesla Roadster into space. On its second flight, which is planned for early in 2019, the huge rocket will carry 25 individual payloads for the U.S. military and NASA, including weather satellites and a space radiation experiment. April NASA's $1.5 billion solar probe zooms past the sun - NASA's Parker Solar Probe (PSP) already broke the record for the fastest human-made object. On November 5, 2018, it flew past the sun at more than 212,000 mph — nearly 120 miles per second (3.3 times as fast as the Juno spacecraft at Jupiter). That's fast enough to fly from New York to Tokyo in less than a minute. But PSP will make two more flybys this year, each closer to the sun and slightly faster than the one before it. The goal is to crack two 60-year-old mysteries: why the sun has a solar wind and dangerous mass ejections of particles, and how the corona — the star's outer atmosphere — can heat up to millions of degrees (about 100 times as hot as the sun's surface temperature). SpaceX performs a test flight of its Starship vehicle, intended to one day take humans to Mars May Richard Branson’s Virgin Orbit company sends its first rocket to space June SpaceX launches first crewed test flight of its Crew Dragon capsule - If the uncrewed test flight of SpaceX's Crew Dragon is successful, the craft will return to space with two spaceflyers aboard. NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken will fly Crew Dragon to the space station. Blue Origin performs its first crewed flight July China conducts first test of next-generation crewed spacecraft - China is expected to test the successor to its crewed Shenzhou spacecraft sometime in mid-2019, but a detailed timeline of the mission hasn't yet been revealed. The nation plans to conduct a test launch of a vehicle it calls the New Generation Manned Spacecraft sometime in mid-2019. The test won't send up any people, but eventually China wants to use the vehicle to ferry four to six taikonauts into orbit. September NASA’s OSIRIS-Rex spacecraft swoops down to the surface of the asteroid Bennu in September and tries to collect a sample October A new planet-hunting mission from ESA launches between October 15 and November 14 - It’s called CHEOPS (Characterising Exoplanets Satellite), and it’ll look for planets orbiting bright stars close to our Solar System. December China launches sample-return mission to the moon - After its Chang'e 4 mission to the lunar far side, China will attempt an even more ambitious lunar mission sometime toward the end of the year. Chang'e 5 will include a lander designed to collect samples of lunar rocks and soil and return them to Earth. If successful, it would be the first time materials from the moon will have been brought back to Earth since 1976. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber CaaC (John)+ 5,358 Posted December 30, 2018 Author Subscriber Share Posted December 30, 2018 Nasa's New Horizons: Excitement ahead of Ultima Thule flyby 1 hour ago History will be made on Tuesday when Nasa's New Horizons probe sweeps past the icy world known as Ultima Thule. Occurring some 6.5 billion km (4 billion miles) from Earth, the flyby will set a new record for the most distant ever exploration of a Solar System object by a spacecraft. New Horizons will gather a swathe of images and other data over the course of just a few hours leading up to and beyond the closest approach. This is timed for 05:33 GMT. At that moment, the probe will be about 3,500km from Ultima's surface and moving at 14km/s. When its observations are complete, the robotic craft will then turn to Earth to report in and begin downlinking the gigabytes of information stored in its memory. Mission scientists, gathered in a control centre at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, are excited at what lies in prospect. "It's electric. People across the whole team are ready. They're in the game and we can't wait to go exploring," says New Horizons' principal investigator Prof Alan Stern. The probe is famous for making the first ever visit to the dwarf planet Pluto in 2015. To reach Ultima, it has had to push 1.5 billion km deeper into space. Telescopic measurements indicate it is about 20-30km across, although scientists concede it could actually be two separate entities moving very close to each other, perhaps even touching. The next couple of days will tell. Ultima is in what's termed the Kuiper belt - the band of distant, frozen material that orbits far from the Sun and the eight major planets. There are probably hundreds of thousands of Kuiper members like Ultima, and their frigid state almost certainly holds clues to the formation conditions of the Solar System 4.6 billion years ago. "About one day out we'll turn on all our instruments," explains mission scientist Dr Kelsi Singer. "We'll take black and white images; we'll take colour images. And we'll take compositional information... This is just such a new object because we've never been to an object like this before. It's hard to predict but I'm ready to be surprised by what we find." Why is New Horizons visiting Ultima Thule? Nasa wanted to explore something beyond Pluto and this was object was reachable. Remarkably, it was only discovered four years ago by the Hubble telescope. Initially cataloged as (486958) 2014 MU69, it was given the more catchy nickname of Ultima Thule (Pronounced: Tool-ee) after a public consultation exercise. It's a Latin phrase that means something like "a place beyond the known world". Like many Kuiper belt objects of its size, it is likely to be composed of a lot of ice, dust and maybe some larger rock fragments, which came together at the dawn of the Solar System. Theory suggests such bodies will take on an elongated or lobate form. Think potato or peanut. Distant telescopic observations suggested its surface is very dark, with a bit of a red tinge. That darkness (it reflects only about 10% of the light falling on its surface) is the result of having been "burnt" through the eons by high-energy radiation - cosmic rays and X-rays. New Horizons will study Ultima's shape, rotation, composition, and environment. Scientists want to know how these far-off worlds were assembled. One idea is that they grew from the mass accretion of a great many pebble-sized grains. What can we expect from the flyby? Don't blink, you might miss it. Unlike the encounter with Pluto in July 2015, there won't be increasingly resolved images on approach to admire. Ultima will remain a blob in the viewfinder pretty much until the final hours of the flyby. However, the much-reduced separation between the probe and Ultima (3,500km versus 12,500km at the dwarf planet) means that finer detail in the surface will eventually be observed. Features as small as 33m across should be discernible if the pointing of the cameras is spot on. Because New Horizons has to swivel to point its instruments, it cannot keep its antenna locked on Earth while also gathering data. Controllers must, therefore, wait until later on New Year's Day for the probe to "phone home" a status update and to start to downlink some choice pictures. The "hey, I'm healthy and I've got a treasure trove of data" message should be picked up by Nasa's network of big radio dishes at 15:28 GMT. Just how big a challenge is this flyby? In some ways, this event is more difficult than the pass of Pluto. The object in the viewfinder is almost a hundred times smaller. New Horizons will get closer than at Pluto, which is good for image detail; but it means that if the pointing is off, the probe could be sending back pictures of empty space. And this really is a major concern. Because Ultima was only discovered four years ago, its position and movement on the sky are much more uncertain than the coordinates for Pluto. Every image taken on approach has been used to refine the navigation and timing models that will be critical to the control of New Horizons during the flyby. And, remember, all this is being done at a distance of 6.62 billion km (4.11 billion miles) from Earth. At that separation, radio signals take six hours and eight minutes to reach home. What is more, the data rates are glacial - around 1,000 bits a second. It will be late on Tuesday before the first of a few choice images is downlinked, and it will be September 2020 until every last scrap of data from the flyby is pulled off New Horizons. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-46699737 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber nudge+ 15,325 Posted December 30, 2018 Subscriber Share Posted December 30, 2018 Really looking forward to it; so exciting! Definitely going to have the livestream from the mission control center on in the background, perfect for the lazy (and probably hungover) first day of the New Year! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber CaaC (John)+ 5,358 Posted December 30, 2018 Author Subscriber Share Posted December 30, 2018 1 minute ago, nudge said: Really looking forward to it; so exciting! Definitely going to have the livestream from the mission control center on in the background, perfect for the lazy (and probably hungover) first day of the New Year! Hopefully me too without a hangover 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber CaaC (John)+ 5,358 Posted January 1, 2019 Author Subscriber Share Posted January 1, 2019 New Horizons: Nasa waits for a signal from Ultima Thule probe By Jonathan Amos BBC Science Correspondent 3 hours ago The American space agency's New Horizons probe is in the midst of an encounter with a giant ball of ice and dust nicknamed Ultima Thule. The flyby, taking place 6.5 billion km from Earth, is the most distant ever exploration of a Solar System object. New Horizons should be filling its memory banks right now with a swathe of photos and other scientific data. Once the probe has gone past Ultima, it will turn to radio home a status report that should arrive at 15:28 GMT. This initial contact ought to give controllers a good idea of how New Horizons performed as it swept over the 30km-wide world just 3,500km from its surface. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-46699737 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber nudge+ 15,325 Posted January 1, 2019 Subscriber Share Posted January 1, 2019 1 minute ago, CaaC - John said: New Horizons: Nasa waits for a signal from Ultima Thule probe By Jonathan Amos BBC Science Correspondent 3 hours ago The American space agency's New Horizons probe is in the midst of an encounter with a giant ball of ice and dust nicknamed Ultima Thule. The flyby, taking place 6.5 billion km from Earth, is the most distant ever exploration of a Solar System object. New Horizons should be filling its memory banks right now with a swathe of photos and other scientific data. Once the probe has gone past Ultima, it will turn to radio home a status report that should arrive at 15:28 GMT. This initial contact ought to give controllers a good idea of how New Horizons performed as it swept over the 30km-wide world just 3,500km from its surface. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-46699737 I'm waiting too! Watched the live stream from the mission control when I woke up today; Brian May is there too and he wrote a new solo song for this flyby... Hope everything went well and we'll be receiving the first image today and a lot of data afterwards! 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber CaaC (John)+ 5,358 Posted January 1, 2019 Author Subscriber Share Posted January 1, 2019 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber nudge+ 15,325 Posted January 1, 2019 Subscriber Share Posted January 1, 2019 A good two-part documentary has been released a few days ago by the people involved in the mission: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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