Space: The Final Frontier

[CaaC (John)+]

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NASA/JPLEYES

Pioneer 11

Pioneer 11 (also known as Pioneer G) is a 260-kilogram (570 lb) robotic space probe launched by NASA on April 6, 1973, to study the asteroid belt, the environment around Jupiter and Saturn, solar wind and cosmic rays. It was the first probe to encounter Saturn and the second to fly through the asteroid belt and by Jupiter. Thereafter, Pioneer 11 became the second of five artificial objects to achieve the escape velocity that will allow them to leave the Solar System. Due to power constraints and the vast distance to the probe, the last routine contact with the spacecraft was on September 30, 1995, and the last good engineering data was received on November 24, 1995.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_11

 

[nudge+]

It's official, we'll have WiFi on the Moon by 2022...

 

 

[Stan]

WiFi drops here more than a whore drops her knickers but yeah, sort WiFi out on the moon first!

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@CaaC (John)

[CaaC (John)+]

2 hours ago, nudge said:

@CaaC (John)

If that is a real shot with your new scope then what you bought must be worth millions.

[nudge+]

31 minutes ago, CaaC (John) said:

If that is a real shot with your new scope then what you bought must be worth millions.

Haha if it was worth millions the picture would look more like this:

But yes, that's the actual shot the image is obviously cropped and the contrast is boosted in post processing though. Looks much better through the scope, you can even make out some of the moons! Seeing the rings for the first time made me more excited than I thought it would

 

[CaaC (John)+]

I love it. 🥰

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[CaaC (John)+]

10 hours ago, nudge said:

 

 

Lol, you beat me to it, just seen an article on this on a science page and was about to post it in here. 

[CaaC (John)+]

10 hours ago, nudge said:

 

 

Imagine landing on this fucker 

Bennu

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3 hours ago, CaaC (John) said:

Imagine landing on this fucker 

Bennu

Technically, it's not a landing, it's a Touch-and-Go event, but I agree - it's mindblowing nonetheless... I've read about the whole procedure and watched them practice actual maneuvers a few months ago, and it's a highy complex engineering feat. Things like that make me proud of the progress we are making in terms of technology and engineering. Imagine a van-sized spacecraft about 330 million kilometers away from the Earth trying to collect a surface sample of an asteroid as big as the Empire State building, and we get to watch it live on youtube. Wouldn't have believed it if even just 20 years ago someone told me it would be possible.

This is a cool map of the asteroid:

 

The sample will be taken from the Nightingale site.

[CaaC (John)+]

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NASA/JP EYES

16 Psyche - Astroid

16 Psyche /ˈsaɪkiː/ is one of the most massive asteroids in the asteroid belt. It is over 200 kilometres (120 mi) in diameter and contains about 1 per cent of the mass of the entire asteroid belt. Psyche is thought to be the exposed iron core of a protoplanet and is the most massive metallic M-type asteroid. Psyche was discovered by the Italian astronomer Annibale de Gasparis on 17 March 1852 from Naples and named after the Greek mythological figure Psyche. The prefix "16" signifies that it was the sixteenth minor planet in order of discovery.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/16_Psyche

 

[nudge+]

I swear someone is making Darth Vader sounds in the background of NASA broadcast

 

[CaaC (John)+]

 

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Elation as Nasa's Osiris-Rex probe tags asteroid Bennu in sample bid

America's Osiris-Rex spacecraft has completed its audacious tag-and-go manoeuvre designed to grab surface rock from an asteroid.

Radio signals from 330 million km away confirm the probe made contact with the 500m-wide object known as Bennu.

But the Nasa-led mission will have to wait on further data from Osiris-Rex before it's known for sure that material was actually picked up.

The aim was to acquire at least 60g, perhaps even a kilo or more.

Because Bennu is a very primitive space object, scientists say its surface grit and dust could hold fascinating clues about the chemistry that brought the Sun and the planets into being more than 4.5 billion years ago.

FULL REPORT

 

 

Edited October 21, 2020 by CaaC (John)

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NASA is set to make a "major anouncement" about the Moon on Monday  

 

[Dr. Gonzo]

9 minutes ago, nudge said:

NASA is set to make a "major anouncement" about the Moon on Monday  

 

I hope they say confirm that it's made of cheese

[nudge+]

3 minutes ago, Dr. Gonzo said:

I hope they say confirm that it's made of cheese

The question is, Pecorino or Grana Padano? 

[Stan]

8 hours ago, Dr. Gonzo said:

I hope they say confirm that it's made of cheese

 

8 hours ago, nudge said:

The question is, Pecorino or Grana Padano? 

My trusted sources say it is most likely Wensleydale or Stilton.

 

[CaaC (John)+]

 

[CaaC (John)+]

NASA/JPL EYES
433 Eros - Asteroid 

 

Eros (minor-planet designation: 433 Eros), provisional designation 1898 DQ, is a stony and elongated asteroid of the Amor group and the first discovered and second-largest near-Earth object with a mean diameter of approximately 16.8 kilometres. Visited by the NEAR Shoemaker space probe in 1998, it became the first asteroid ever studied from orbit.

The eccentric asteroid was discovered by German astronomer Carl Gustav Witt at the Berlin Observatory on 13 August 1898 and later named after Eros, a god from Greek mythology; the son of Aphrodite who is identified with the planet Venus.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/433_Eros

[CaaC (John)+]

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Alien Planets Around 1,000 Nearby Stars Could Be Looking Straight Back at Earth

David Nield  23 October 2020

Astronomers are working hard to catalogue all of the exoplanets visible from Earth, but now two researchers have turned the idea around, to look at which exoplanets are getting a good view of Earth in return.

It turns out there are 1,004 (and counting) main sequence stars, similar to the Sun, with orbiting Earth-like planets that probably have an opportunity to detect chemical traces of life on our own planet. If there's anyone up there, they can see us.

These stars are all within 326 light-years (100 parsecs) of Earth, with the study focusing on the closest exoplanets first.

Data from NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) star catalogue and the Gaia star map was used to make the calculations, and over time the star systems that can view Earth will change.

"If observers were out there searching, they would be able to see signs of a biosphere in the atmosphere of our Pale Blue Dot," says astronomer Lisa Kaltenegger, from Cornell University. "And we can even see some of the brightest of these stars in our night sky without binoculars or telescopes."

To spot Earth, astronomers on these exoplanets would need to use the same techniques we do to catalogue a distant object: watching as Earth passes in front of the Sun to figure out the makeup of our planet's atmosphere, known as a transit observation.

The Earth's ecliptic, or the plane of Earth's orbit around the Sun, is crucial in working out which exoplanets can see us. It tells astronomers where exoplanets with a good view of Earth are going to be located – in other words, from which deep space vantage points our spinning rock will appear as a transiting planet.

Of the 1,004 stars identified with potentially habitable zones, 508 offer their surrounding planets a minimum of a 10-hour observation window of Earth with each orbit. Most of the stars – 77 per cent – are M-type or red dwarf stars, the smallest and the coolest of main-sequence stars.

"Only a very small fraction of exoplanets will just happen to be randomly aligned with our line of sight so we can see them transit," says physicist Joshua Pepper, from Lehigh University. "But all of the thousand stars we identified in our paper in the solar neighbourhood could see our Earth transit the Sun, calling their attention."

The TESS space telescope has already proved phenomenally useful since it went into operation in 2018: it's been busy identifying our next-door neighbours in space, and solving mysteries about the edges of our Solar System, as well as looking for the most Earth-like exoplanets in the cosmos.

When the NASA James Webb Space Telescope finally launches, studying space in the infrared spectrum, it will give us even more information about the composition of exoplanets and the story of the early universe.

For now, the researchers think their work could be used to narrow down the search for extraterrestrial life in the future – if we want to find exoplanets that might have spotted us as well as us spotting them, for example.

"If we found a planet with a vibrant biosphere, we would get curious about whether or not someone is there looking at us too," says Kaltenegger.

"If we're looking for intelligent life in the universe, that could find us and might want to get in touch, we've just created the star map of where we should look first."

The research is due to be published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters.

https://www.sciencealert.com/plenty-of-exoplanets-could-be-looking-straight-back-at-us-too

 

 

[CaaC (John)+]

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NASA’s OSIRIS-REx was so good at grabbing asteroid rocks that they’re overflowing

    When you take too big of a bite
     Oct 23, 2020, 7:32 pm EDT                                 

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft did its job a little too well on Tuesday when it tried to scoop up a handful of rocks from an asteroid named Bennu more than 200 million miles from Earth. The vehicle actually grabbed too much material with its robotic arm, jamming the lid at the end of the arms open — and letting part of the asteroid sample escape out into space.

“We were almost a victim of our own success here,” said Dante Lauretta, the principal investigator for the OSIRIS-REx mission at the University of Arizona, in a press conference.

OSIRIS-REx’s mission is to bring a sample of asteroid material back to Earth so that scientists can study the rocks in a lab. But because OSIRIS-REx bit off more than it could chew, its mission team is racing to stow the sample inside the spacecraft’s belly, so the vehicle doesn’t lose too much material to the void. “Time is of the essence, and no, we won’t sleep,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator for science, in a press conference.

The good news is that OSIRIS-REx seems to have grabbed an abundant and diverse group of asteroid rocks. The team’s goal was to snag up to 60 grams (2.1 ounces) of rocks from Bennu’s surface, and images from the spacecraft show that OSIRIS-REx likely grabbed up to 400 grams (14.1 ounces) of material, according to the mission team. The sample includes rocks that range in size, and some are so big that they prevented the spacecraft from sealing the sample shut.

The engineers are confident that the rocks aren’t escaping too quickly, so the spacecraft should be able to store a good amount inside the spacecraft before too much is depleted. They think that they lost between 1 to 10 grams of the material yesterday, after moving the robotic arm around. However, NASA doesn’t plan to stow the sample inside OSIRIS-REx until Monday. The mission team has to take time to figure out all the commands for the spacecraft and ensure that this process will still work with rocks spilling out into space. It’s unclear how much of the sample will be lost as they wait.

There’s another complication, too: just moving the robotic arm around with the sample inside causes rocks to flee outward, so stowing the materials risks losing more pebbles. The engineers think they may lose up to 10 more grams of rocks just by stowing the sample inside the spacecraft. But it’s better to stow something than to wait for everything to leak out.

To grab the sample from Bennu, OSIRIS-REx is equipped with a robotic arm that has a cylindrical sample collector at the end. On Tuesday afternoon, OSIRIS-REx slowly approached Bennu and gently tapped its surface with the collector. At the moment of contact, the collector puffed out a bunch of nitrogen gas, shaking up all the rocks and pebbles on the asteroid’s surface. Some of those rocks shot up inside the collector, while others danced and twirled out into space.

The OSIRIS-REx team couldn’t tell right away if it had a sample or not, as they had to wait to get images from the spacecraft. But they soon knew they had a problem when they finally got an up-close picture of the sample collector. The pictures show that part of the lid is jammed open by a centimetre; tiny pieces of the asteroid can be seen hovering around the arm.

If the sample grab had gone more smoothly, NASA would have waited a little while longer to stow the material inside OSIRIS-REx. In fact, the mission team had planned to do a spin manoeuvre on Saturday with the spacecraft, twirling the vehicle up with its robotic arm outstretched. This would have helped the team figure out just how much material the spacecraft had collected. The engineers could measure the spacecraft’s inertia, comparing it to a time before when the spacecraft didn’t have a sample in its arm. But the spin is effectively cancelled. “It would risk the loss of material so that is not a prudent path to go down,” Lauretta said.

That means the OSIRIS-REx team won’t truly know how much sample is in the spacecraft’s belly as the vehicle returns back to Earth. “I think we’re going to have to wait till we get home to know precisely how much we have and that, as you can imagine — that’s hard,” Lauretta said. “We were looking forward to a sample mass measurement.” So it’s possible that all of the samples could fall out before Monday, and we wouldn’t truly know until the spacecraft comes back to our planet.

The OSIRIS-REx team also doesn’t plan to grab another sample from Bennu, so this is it. That’s why engineers are working quickly to store this sample on Monday. “I am highly confident that it was successful — that we have more than the 60 grams of material that we promised Thomas and the agency that we would deliver,” Lauretta said, adding, “the most important thing is to get the sample safely stowed and minimize any more loss.”

https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/23/21531060/osiris-rex-nasa-sample-pebbles-asteroid-bennu-escape

 

Edited October 24, 2020 by CaaC (John)

[CaaC (John)+]

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NASA/JPL EYES

81P/Wild 2 - Comet

Comet 81P/Wild, also known as Wild 2 (pronounced "vilt two") (/ˈvɪlt/ VILT), is a comet named after Swiss astronomer Paul Wild, who discovered it on January 6, 1978, using a 40-cm Schmidt telescope at Zimmerwald, Switzerland.

For most of its 4.5 billion-year lifetime, Wild 2 probably had a more distant and circular orbit. In September 1974, it passed within one million kilometres of the planet Jupiter, the strong gravitational pull of which perturbed the comet's orbit and brought it into the inner Solar System. Its orbital period changed from 43 years to about 6 years, and its perihelion is now about 1.59 astronomical unit (AU). 

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/81P/Wild

 

 

[nudge+]

Tried to capture Jupiter tonight. It's been cloudy in the last few nights so there have been few observation opportunities, had only less than an hour window tonight before the Jupiter set... Think it turned out quite well... Managed to get Jupiter and three of its Galilean moons - Ganymede, Io, and Europa (from left to right). Sadly couldn't see Callisto, must have been behind Jupiter already. Have to click on the image to see it properly, as those moons are tiny...