A Little Perspective From Mars

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has the HiRise camera on board.  HiRise is the largest telescope ever sent to another planet and has been returning spectacular pictures of Mars for the last few years.

On October 3rd, 2007, they turned it around to look at Earth and got the following image (courtesy of NASA/JPL/and the University of Arizona…click to embiggen).

Since Earth is closer to the Sun than Mars, you see Earth has phases just like the Moon.  In fact they both have the same phase (the Sun is off to the right in this image).  If you look at the full size image, you can make out the cost of South America.  It also shows the relative sizes of the Earth and Moon nicely.

Sometimes we just need to see Earth from a different perspective.

Monster New Ring Around Saturn

Saturn is famous for its rings which are one of the best sites to view through a small telescope.  As the years have gone on, we kept discovering new rings.  Surely there couldn’t be more discoveries now…I mean, we have spacecraft there and stuff, right?

Wrong…the Spitzer Space Telescope just discovered a very large, diffuse new ring around Saturn.  This ring is over 3.7 million miles from the planet and extends outward another 7.4 million miles. It’s also very thick…over a million miles from top to bottom.  For comparison, the rings you see in a telescope are only a hundred feet thick or so.

Of course this ring is very large and diffuse.  The density of it is much lower than the other rings, so low that we have had spacecraft fly through this ring unharmed. It is not visible to normal telescopes, but cool objects give off infrared light making it the perfect target for the Spitzer Space Telescope.

Here is an artist conception of the ring.  Saturn is way too small to see at this scale, a mere dot at the middle.

This ring is orbiting Saturn in the opposite direction of the other rings…so is the nearby Moon Phoebe.  This leads to us to believe that Phoebe may be the source of material for the ring.  And it solves a second mystery of the moon Iapetus.  Iapetus is dark on one side and light on the other.  It orbits inside this new ring in the opposite direction.  Material from this ring appears to be spiraling in toward Saturn and coating one side of Iapetus giving rise to its unusual appearance.

Unfortunately, Spitzer ran out of coolant in May.  These observations were made before the coolant ran out.  Observations such as this illustrate the importance of observing in all parts of the EM spectrum.

Return of the Hubble…

You might recall a few months ago there was a highly publicized Space Shuttle mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope.  With the exception of an image of the recent impact on Jupiter, Hubble has been quiet.  Too quiet.

When new cameras are installed, it takes time to power everything up, test it, take calibration images, tweak your image processing routines, etc.  But the wait is finally over.

Hubble released a whole slew of new images today.  Let’s take a peek.

That is Eta Carina…well, actually only a small part of the system imaged by the new Wide Field Camera 3 (yes, there was a 1 and 2). Eta Carina is a spectacular, mysterious nearby system.  Right now we think there are two stars. One of them is huge…over 100 times the mass of our Sun.  They are surrounded by this gas and dust.  The large star erupted spectacularly in 1841 and was the second brightest star in the sky by 1843 in spite of being about 8,000 light years away (for reference, Sirius, the brightest star in sky right now, is about 8.5 light years away).  I only embedded a small image here…check it out in hires.

Now let’s move on to Omega Centauri.

Again, you will want to look at hires versions.  This is only a small section of Omega Centauri which is the largest globular cluster in the Milky Way containing millions of stars. I will wait while you count them (don’t worry, there are only 100,000 or so in this image).

Hubble is back and better than ever.  Be sure to check out the other images released today.

The Crater of Eternal Darkness

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) continues to return spectacular images.  The one featured today might seem like an odd choice as it is almost totally black.

This is Erlanger Crater near the Moon’s north pole. It’s diameter is about 10km (6 miles)  Unlike Earth, the Moon’s axis is tilted only about 1.5 degrees.  Therefore, the Sun never gets more than a couple of degrees high in the sky near the poles.  If you have a crater with nice high walls, there are places where the Sun never shines.  The bottom of these craters have temperatures that hang out around -375F (or about 50 Kelvin).

Why do we care about dark spots?  In these very dark craters that do not receive Sunlight, water ice can happily sit and wait for oh, say, humans to land nearby and have a ready source of water.  Exploring crater such as this is one of the reasons we launched LRO.

Hanging Out at JPL

I just got back from a trip and one of my stops was a tour of the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena.  They build and run a wide variety of satellites, mostly Earth observing and solar system exploration including the Mars Rovers and Cassini.

The first stop was their little museum.  The room is dominated by a full scale model of the Galileo spacecraft that studied Jupiter.  Galileo was a fairly large satellite as you can see.We got to see the testing facility where they have a working replica of the Mars rovers.  Spirit is currently stuck on Mars.  They are trying to recreate the conditions as close as they can so they are burying its wheels (it has used a camera on a boom to photograph them so we know roughly how deep they are buried) and built a platform that gives the same incline the rover is resting on.  Now they are trying different techniques to get it unstuck.

And they are already hard at work on the next mission, the Mars Science Laboratory.  Here is part of the six-wheeled rover.

The clean room holds a wide variety of other pieces that will go into the Mars Science Laboratory as well.

Finally, we stopped by the control room.  This is where the commands are sent to and data is received from the spacecraft.

JPL is a small city.  Probably a couple of thousands of people work there on different projects.  They have multiple cafeterias/restaurants, a credit union, fitness center, post office, recreation facilities and lots of other things you expect from a small city.  I worked at Fermilab and it was very similar there.

It’s just cool to be where science is done.

The ISS Plus Two

Tonight I stayed home to image from the Courtyard of my townhome.  It was a much brighter ISS pass than last night, so I thought I could catch it without going out to a dark site.

I caught an interesting photo of the ISS.  You can see it as the bright streak on the left.  On the right you see a series of pairs of “stars” connected by a very thin streak.  This is a plane that happened to fly through my image.

Now for the challenge.  Click the image to embiggen.  Look closely between the plane and the ISS for a thin streak heading down to the left right.  After checking Heavens Above, I believe this may be the Cosmos 1666 rocket (I could see it visibly, but it was tougher to catch with the camera).  Look closely and you will see the Milky Way starting to poke through the image.  Several star clusters are visible.  After seeing that, I wish I drove out to the park to catch this from a slightly darker site.

Another ISS Pass

This time with the shuttle docked.  I got out there a little early to see a little of sunset.

The pass was about half an hour after sunset so the sky was still a little light.  Therefore, I used a low ISO and a shorter exposure.  After taking several shots during the pass, this was my favorite.

We have really good passes here Tuesday and Wednesday.  The monsoon is taking a break, so I might have a shot at them (although the seeing is still not that good here).

If you want to see if they will pass over your area, you can use Heavens-Above or Space Weather’s Simple Satellite Tracker.

The Apollo 11 Landing Site

Okay, I know I have been blogging a lot about the Apollo missions, but lots of cool stuff is coming out.  Today’s really cool thing is an image of the Apollo 11 landing site taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC for short).  Get a load of this.

The Lunar module had two parts.  The bottom part essentially served as a launch pad for the top part which the astronauts rode bade to lunar obrit.  It is this bottom part that we see here.  The Sun was low in the sky and you can clearly see its long shadow (just like we cast near sunset or sunrise here on Earth) pointing to the left.  The got an even more impressive image of the Apollo 14 site.

Here you can see an instrument package they left on the Moon as well as the astronauts tracks leading from the lander to the instrument!  These aren’t individual footprints (the resolution isn’t quite that good!) but rather more like a path they made in the lunar regolith (that dry dusty stuff that covers the surface).  You can check out the Apollo 15, 16 and 17 landing sites as well.

And these aren’t even the best images we will get.  The LRO is not in its final mapping orbit.  When it lowers its orbit, we will get even better images.  Stay tuned!

Apollo 11: The Big Picture

Boston Globe’s the Big Picture series takes on Apollo 11 today.  Here is a sample.

I like this one as it does a good job of showing the scale of a Saturn V.  A Saturn V clocks in at about 111 meters tall.  One of the other notable photos shows a very human side of the astronauts as they have breakfast before launch.  Check out all the photos.

40 Years Since Apollo 11

40 years ago on July 16th, 1968 three astronauts sat on top of a Saturn V rocket and headed toward the Moon.  It was the culmination of a challenge issued by Kennedy in 1961 and the final push in a race with the Soviet Union.  It wasn’t exactly shaping up to be a banner year for the U.S. at that point with political unrest and a controversial war raging in Vietnam.

But for the duration of Apollo 11 the U.S. finally had something that everyone could be proud of.    We all know how it ended, a rousing success.  They only spent a couple of hours on the surface (NASA wanted the least chance for things to go wrong…subsequent missions would be longer).

You can relive the mission 40 years after it happened at We Choose the Moon. Tomorrow you can watch the launch, followed by the landing and splashdown.  After the end, you can come back and watch them all at your own pace.

I remember in 1988 on the 20th anniversary when A&E aired the original David Brinkley coverage 20 years later.  Now 40 years later, I am watching it on the internet which says something about our progress since then as well.

I have been to both of the Spacefest events.  I have met many of the Apollo astronauts and had lunch with Buzz Aldrin this year.

The sad part is that we have not been back.

Well, 11 hours 56 minutes to liftoff and counting…that’s early for us Pacific time zone people!