There's word today that the GLAST spacecraft described in a Sun story here is safely in orbit 350 miles above the earth and running smoothly. It launched from Cape Canaveral June 11.

The solar arrays or "wings" that will power it have begun working, the software to control its heating system has been activated and it began tracking its first stars June 16.

Now, engineers at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt will spend the next four weeks turning on and checking out the various components on the spacecraft.

GLAST will survey the entire sky every three hours.

I hate when science writers get gee-whiz about their subjects, but this is really cool stuff, so I guess I'm doing it here: The mission is aimed at trying to decipher the who, what, where and why of gamma ray bursts, which originate in black holes, shoot out across space in little understood tubular formations and are one of the most powerful sources of energy ever discovered.

The mission's an international affair, with the lead U.S. agencies NASA and the Department of Energy, but there are important contributions from universities and partners in France, Italy, Japan and Sweden.

There's more on the mission here.

Posted by Dennis O'Brien at 10:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

With its nuclear power generator cooling and its maneuvering fuel about to freeze, ESA/NASA's Ulysses spacecraft is nearing the end of its 18-year voyage to study the sun and its impact on the solar environment, or "heliosphere."

 NASA and the European Space Agency are planning to pull the plug on Ulysses on July 1, ending the only mission ever sent to orbit over the north and south poles of the sun, rather than circling in the same plane as the planets. Launched in 1990, Ulysses flew out to Jupiter and used the giant planet's gravity to bend its trajectory so that it dove "down," below the orbital plane of the planets. It then circled back under the sun, swept "up" again and began its exploration of a region of the solar system that had never been visited before.  In two Jupiter flybys, it also added to our understanding of the Jovian system.

The mission lasted four times longer than its designers planned, and the German-built, NASA-powered craft has provided scientists with a long list or surprises and discoveries. You can read more about it here.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 11:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

NASA

I'm blogging about a NASA launch today because it gives me a chance to post the wonderful image above, which is today's launch of the GLAST spacecraft from Cape Canaveral. I know a little bit about GLAST -- but not that much -- because I wrote a story about it that appeared in the paper on Monday.

 It was one of the those stories that I wish I had more time on (I had two days) because the idea and the history behind the $690 million mission is fascinating. The idea is to use a form of light we cannot see to study and trace the origins of one of the most powerful forms of energy known -- gamma ray bursts.

 The history of what we know about gamma rays in space goes back to the Cold War and our concern about Russia's nuclear capabilities.

One point to start with: The light we see around us is only a small part of the light in the electromagnetic spectrum, and several telescopes now use types of light beyond the visible portion of the spectrum to peer out into the universe.

The famous Chandra telescope uses X-rays and there's another called the Spitzer telescope that "sees" stellar objects in the infrared portion of the spectrum. This all might be basic stuff to you science blog types, but it still fascinates me that we're learning so much about the universe these days by studying objects that we could never see with our own eyes.

GLAST stands for the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope and it is designed to detect gamma ray bursts -- mysterious high energy bursts --- pinpoint their origin and shed light on the black holes that spawn most of them. GLAST's operations will be managed over the next five to 10 years by engineers and scientists at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, in Greenbelt.

Now the history lesson: In the 1960s, the U.S. signed a treaty with the Soviets to limit testing of nuclear weapons, but we were worried that the Russians would cheat by testing their nuclear capabilities in space. So the U.S. government asked scientists if there was a way to monitor what was going on in the heavens and secretly, they found a way: launch a satellite capable of detecting the signatures left by gamma ray bursts -- forms of high energy radiation that would be created by a nuclear blast in space.

The scientists in charge didn't find any bursts coming from any Earth-based systems, but instead they saw these incredible blasts coming from outer space. A complete suprise that no one could explain. But their existence remained classified until 1973.

Beginning in 1991, an instrument known as the Compton Gamma-ray Observatory began nine years of collecting data, suggesting that the bursts come from all over distant galaxies. GLAST builds on that history.

You can read about today's launch here. 

Posted by Dennis O'Brien at 2:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

Just as we were getting used to the idea that Pluto was not a full-fledged planet, but rather a "dwarf" planet, the International Astronomical Union has come up with a new twist.

The IAU, which is the internationally recognized authority for naming and categorizing celestial objects, has created a new family of dwarf planets called "plutoids." And the first two (and so far only known) members of the family are Pluto and Eris.

Never heard of Eris? No wonder. It was discovered just five years ago by a team at the Palomar Observatory, and named for the Greek goddess of strife and discord. It's orbiting the sun three times farther out than Pluto. Astronomers estimate it is about 2,500 kilometers in diameter, and 27 percent more massive than Pluto. That makes it the ninth largest object known to be orbiting the sun. Eris (pictured in an artist's rendering at left) has a satellite of its own, dubbed Dysnomia, the daughter of Eris and demon of lawlessness. Nice.

Anyway, the IAU has decided than any object that's orbiting the sun beyond the orbit of Neptune, and large enough for its own gravity to pull it into a spherical shape, will henceforth be classified as a plutoid. And while there are just two such objects so far - Pluto and Eris - scientists are confident they will find more.

Telescopic searches and the voyage of NASA's New Horizons spacecraft will be looking. New Horizons (at right), built and managed at the Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Lab near Laurel, is due to fly by Pluto in 2015. From there it will cruise out into the icy regions beyond, where more plutoids are likely lurking.

The solar system's only other known dwarf planet is the asteroid Ceres. It's big and spherical, too, but because it orbits the sun in the asteroid belt between the orbits of Jupiter and Mars, it's not a plutoid. Astronomers believe Ceres is the only object of its kind, so it likely will not be categorized in any other way.

The term "plutoid" was coined by the IAU's Committee on Small Body Nomenclature and accepted by the IAU Executive Committee meeting in Oslo, Norway.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 11:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

Disappearing rings? What's this guy talking about? People have been entranced by Saturn's glorious ring system since Galileo first spotted them in 1610.

His telescope wasn't very strong, so the rings looked like ears, or jug handles to him. But the advent of better telescopes brought the complex, and ultra-thin ring planes into clearer view. And no one who sees them through a good telescope ever forgets his/her first view.

Saturn and its halo are an image you've seen since childhood - an icon representing all of outer space. Here's an amazing Hubble movie of Saturn rotating inside of its rings.

But the magic of celestial mechanics periodically makes the rings vanish, as the Earth passes through the ring system's plane twice during each of Saturn's 29-year orbits around the sun. That brings them into an edge-on perspective with respect to Earth. Like a dinner plate, the rings may present a broad expanse to our eyes when the angle is steep. But tilt it back to edge-on, and the dinner plate becomes a thin line.

In Saturn's case the rings are so thin they virtually disappear. Two years after Galileo discovered them, the rings "vanished." He was baffled.

And that's where we're headed now. Saturn is visible on any clear evening this spring, high overhead in the constellation Leo. By April 30, our view of Saturn's rings will show them at an angle of just under 10 degrees from edge-on. And that will be our last, best view of the ring system for the next several years.

The last time this happened was in 1995 and 1996, when the ring angle shrank to zero. Then it began to increase again, reaching a maximum of 27 degrees in 2003, a climax that occurs about every 14 years. It's been diminishing ever since, and slips to zero degrees again in September 2009.

Here's how the 1995-96 event looked to Hubble.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 5:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

Astronomers using NASA's Swift observatory to watch for titanic blasts of gamma rays in deep space say they have spotted the granddaddy of them all. The explosion, probably triggered by the collapse of a giant star, was the most powerful gamma ray burst ever witnessed, and the most intrinsically bright object ever observed by human beings.

In visible light it was just barely bright enough to see with the naked eye - even at a distance halfway across the visible universe - some 7.5 billion light years away. It was spotted on Wednesday, when the light finally reached Earth after traveling across the universe for 7.5 billion years - since long before our solar system even formed.

If anyone was actually looking, they would have seen the most distant object ever observed by the unaided human eye. Here's more about this extraordinary phenomenon.

And here below is what it looked like in two of the orbiting Swift observatory's instruments. Swift is managed at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt.

Credit: NASA/Swift/Stefan Immler et al.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 6:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

Credit: NASA

What you're looking at is an image of the infant Universe, 380,000 years after the Big Bang, as captured by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe. The probe, launched in 2001, not only pinpointed the age of the universe (13.7 billion years old), but helped refine our understanding of how it developed.

This week, astronomers released five years of data colleced by WMAP in the form of seven papers submitted to the Astrophysical Journal. The major findings include new evidence that the early universe was permeated by a sea of cosmic neutrinoes - mysterious forms of energy in themselves - and that it took the first stars more than a half billion years to create a thin cosmic fog of electrons in the universe's earliest times.

Instruments on WMAP were able to discern patterns of microwave light, left over from the Big Bang, that revealed temperature fluctuations (shown as color differences) differing by one-millionth of a degree Celsius.

Temperature fluctuations stem from density differences in the cosmic soup that formed soon after the Big Bang and became the seeds of galaxies and the stars around us today.

Continue reading "Oldest light in the universe" »

Posted by Dennis O'Brien at 2:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

Credit: NASA/JPL/Caltech/University of Arizona

Among the 2,400 images of Mars being released by NASA today, they found the first-ever image of active avalanches near the Red Planet's north pole.

 The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter took the above photograph Feb. 19, showing a bird's view of evidence of one of the avalanches, where fine-grained ice, dust and possibly large blocks of other material broke off from a 2,300 foot cliff and cascaded to slopes below. The darkest material, farthest to the right, is the material at the bottom of what fell in the avalanches and the white material is Martian ice that's at the top. 

 The image is considered so fantastic because most of the Martian landscape -- captured in thousands of images -- hasn't changed much in millions of years, although there are seasonal changes.

Continue reading "Avalanches on Mars" »

Posted by Dennis O'Brien at 10:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

Credit: AP photo

Okay, so now is you’re chance to see a lunar eclipse. My colleague, Frank Roylance, has a story about it here.

And if you’re out howling at the moon tonight, here’s some things to think about: The moon was formed at about the time the Earth was gelling into a planet 4.5 billion years ago. The scientific consensus is that as debris was floating around the solar system, something hit the  Earth blowing out a hole of rocky material that went into orbit around the Earth and aggregated into the moon.

The best evidence for this decades-old theory is that moon soils have the same sort of chemical content, oxygen isotopes, as planet Earth, while Mars and the other planets do not. There’s good information on that here.

Continue reading "Howling at the moon" »

Posted by Dennis O'Brien at 9:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
                    

Well, it's sort of square - or, more precisely, cubical, like a gigantic grain of salt. This moon of Saturn, called Epimetheus, is too small (71 miles across) for gravity to pull it into a spherical shape like Earth's moon. It shows several more-or-less flat facets, the result, perhaps, of impacts over the eons.

One commenter here insists this is no moon, but rather a Borg cube:

Continue reading "Square moon of Saturn" »

Posted by Frank Roylance at 6:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)
                    

There's a total eclipse of the moon coming up on Feb. 20th. We don't know yet whether the clouds will part and give us a look, but two local groups are already planning a moon party that night.

The eclipse is the last one visible from Maryland in full until Dec. 21, 2010, so we're all hoping for clear skies. At 8:43 p.m., the dark center of the Earth's shadow will begin to slide across the face of the full moon, turning it a dull orange-reddish hue.

The color is determined by the amount of dust in the Earth's atmosphere. Sunlight shining through the atmosphere is filtered and bent, throwing the ruddy colored light onto the moon's surface.

The moon will be fully in shadow at 10:01 p.m., and stay that way until 10:51 p.m. Then it will begin to slip back into direct sunlight, brightening gradually from one side to the other until it emerges from the central shadow at 12:09 a.m.

Howard Community College and the Howard Astronomical League will co-host a Lundar Eclipse Viewing from 8:30 until 11 p.m. on the upper level of the HCC parking garage. College faculty and amateur astronomers with HAL will be on hand to explain the event. They'll also have telescopes available to provide bonus views of Mars and Saturn. 

For more information, click here. For updates on weather and cancellation, click here, or call Prof. Russ Poch, at 410 772-4891. 

Posted by Frank Roylance at 1:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

Credit: Associated Press

 Okay, I will eventually get off dangers posed by stuff falling from the sky. But there is something you should know: if an asteroid hits and you do survive, it can mess up the water supply for years to come. Millenia in fact.

Continue reading "More danger from the skies" »

Posted by Dennis O'Brien at 10:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
                    

Credit: Sandia National Labs/Associated Press

As if there isn't enough to worry about, what with the economy and all.

 Now there's more: news about asteroids. One passed through our planetary neighborhood this morning and another that hit 100 years ago is the subject of a scientific study. Today's visitor was the size of a city block and packed 60 times the force of our largest Cold War era hydrogen bomb.

My colleague, Frank Roylance, has a story in today's Sun about an asteroid with the very uncatchy name of 2007 TU24 brushing by planet Earth Tuesday. 

The Associated Press story describes the latest scenario for what happened when a pretty well known asteroid smashed into the Tunguska forest in Siberia in 1908. Scientists at Sandia National Laboratories say the asteroid was smaller than previously thought, but exploded above the ground and became a fireball that blasted down at the earth, leaving 800 square miles of scorched and downed trees.

Pictured above is a computer simulation of the kind of fireball created when an asteroid explodes in the earth's atmosphere  -- kind of like what happened in the forest at Tunguska -- by Mark Boslough, a researcher at Sandia National Laboratories.

Continue reading "Danger from the sky" »

Posted by Dennis O'Brien at 2:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

Credit: NASA

I hate it when the most powerful explosions in the universe go off -- and nobody notices them. Why is that?

Because gamma ray bursts are so far away -- in distant galaxies, billions and billions of light years away, as Carl Sagan would say. So what's the shiny tin can thing pictured above? NASA's latest gamma ray detector, due for launch this spring. I'll explain that, but we need a bit of gamma ray-space history first.

In the 1960s, the U.S. and the Soviets signed a treaty to limit nuclear testing --  and to keep an eye on the Soviets, the U.S. launched a satellite to detect any bursts of gamma radiation that a nuclear blast would have produced.

The satellite found bursts of gamma radiation all over the place — blasting off like cosmic flash bulbs. But they weren’t coming from the Soviets, or anywhere else on earth. They they were emanating from  distant space. That started a quest to figure out what was causing these blasts and their effects on surrounding galaxies and stars.

Continue reading "The most powerful explosions in the Universe" »

Posted by Dennis O'Brien at 12:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

Pluto and its moons. Credit: NASA/Hubble. For more on this image, click here. 

Search for science-focused groups on Facebook, and the most popular deals with astronomy - specifically, it is a group for people nostalgic for the days when little Pluto still held planetary status.

The group, named "When I was your age, Pluto was a planet" boasts over 12 million members and was created on August 24, 2006 - the day the International Astronomical Union demoted Pluto to a "dwarf planet."

Among the many postings by people offering to teach the secrets of becoming a millionaire and scantily clad women looking for "friends," Pluto fans wax nostalgic over now outdated mnemonic devices.

Continue reading "When I was your age, Pluto was a planet" »

Posted by Chris Emery at 7:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

When matter and antimatter collide, both are destroyed. Antimatter can be created by eruptions on the Sun, such as the one above that occurred in 1999. But luckily, the antimatter created along with matter in the Big Bang remains fairly rare in the universe.

In 1979, astronomers found gamma rays produced by collisions of matter and antimatter coming from the center of the galaxy. But what produced the antimatter remained a mystery, until now.

Analyzing four years of data from a European Space Agency satellite, an international team, including researchers from the Goddard Space Flight Center, has found some evidence that the antimatter originated from neutron stars and black holes. The researchers calculated that when a black hole or neutron star tears apart a relatively ordinary star --  a system they call "a low mass X-ray binary" -- it could spew out the necessary ingredients.

They published findings in the journal Nature. For a readable readable version of the report from Space.com, click here.

Posted by Dennis O'Brien at 10:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

Solar scientists say they've spotted the first conclusive evidence that the next 11-year cycle of solar activity has begun.

It's a sunspot, located at 27 degrees north latitude on the sun's sphere. That relatively high latitude, plus the negative polarity observers detected, qualify it as the first spot of the new solar cycle.

From here, scientists say, we can expect a slow acceleration in sunspot counts -- and in the frequency of solar storms, leading to a peak sometime in 2011 or 2012.

These solar storms are not just a matter of idle scientific curiosity. Titanic eruptions of solar particles and energy from sunspots can kill communications satellites and threaten spacewalking astronauts. They can also boost radiation exposures of airliner passengers and crews, disrupt radio communications and electrical distribution on the ground, and more.

Continue reading "New solar cycle has begun" »

Posted by Frank Roylance at 10:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

Comet Holmes was a real thrill for lots of people who stepped outside in late October or early November to have a look. The comet flared from obscure dimness to naked-eye brightness literally overnight, and glowed for weeks in the sky above the bright star Capella in the northeastern sky.

But I'm afraid most of us missed yet another comet spectacular this week. Comet 8P/Tuttle, a beautiful greenish blob just a shade too dim for most of us to spot with the naked eye, was nevertheless a beautiful target for many with telescopes and cameras as it drifted past the grand spiral galaxy known to astronomers as M33 (see accompanying photo).

Although they appear roughly the same size as they hang side-by-side in the night sky, the comet is actually very small and very close - a member of our own solar system and just 24 million miles away at its nearest pass on Jan. 1-2.

M33, on the other hand, is vast (60,000 light years across) and enormously distant (3 million light years away, a member of our "local group" of galaxies). Here's a fascinating photo gallery, most snapped by amateurs around the world.

And here's a sky map that may help you to find both Holmes and Tuttle with binoculars or a telescope.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 2:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

Scientists have found evidence of a massive explosion in space.

It was a gamma ray burst in the constellation Gemini.

But the thing is, gamma rays bursts are thought to be powered by the death of massive stars and there weren't any such massive stars in the vicinity. For more look here

Posted by Dennis O'Brien at 7:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

NASA/JP