Featured Posts
Spaceports
21 Mar 2010, 00:57 UTC
Orbital Sr. VP Frank Culbertson appearing before the Augustine Commission in 2009.Former NASA astronaut Frank Culbertson, now Senior Vice-President at Virginia-based Orbital Sciences Corporation, appeared before a Senate Commerce subcommittee this week giving testimony as to the capability of the Taurus 2 booster planned for launch from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport on Wallops Island, Va. saying that human launches could occur by 2015."Orbital believes, as do I, that U.S. industry, given the right conditions, relationships, and investments, should be able to develop and demonstrate safe and reliable crew transportation systems for International Space Station support by 2015," Culbertson told the Senate subcommittee."Since 2008 Orbital has been fully engaged as one of two companies contracted to provide the delivery of crew and cargo to the International Space Station. Although this has been a huge development program for a company of our size, and unprecedented in scope for a purely commercial venture between a private company and NASA, I am very pleased to report that from Orbital’s perspective, and that of our shareholders, we have made steady and valuable progress. We expect to have achieved all but 3 of 21 NASA program milestones by the end of this year," with the Taurus-2 ...
Commercial Human Launch by 2015
21 Mar 2010, 00:57 UTC
Orbital Sr. VP Frank Culbertson appearing before the Augustine Commission in 2009.Former NASA astronaut Frank Culbertson, now Senior Vice-President at Virginia-based Orbital Sciences Corporation, appeared before a Senate Commerce subcommittee this week giving testimony as to the capability of the Taurus 2 booster planned for launch from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport on Wallops Island, Va. saying that human launches could occur by 2015."Orbital believes, as do I, that U.S. industry, given the right conditions, relationships, and investments, should be able to develop and demonstrate safe and reliable crew transportation systems for International Space Station support by 2015," Culbertson told the Senate subcommittee."Since 2008 Orbital has been fully engaged as one of two companies contracted to provide the delivery of crew and cargo to the International Space Station. Although this has been a huge development program for a company of our size, and unprecedented in scope for a purely commercial venture between a private company and NASA, I am very pleased to report that from Orbital’s perspective, and that of our shareholders, we have made steady and valuable progress. We expect to have achieved all but 3 of 21 NASA program milestones by the end of this year," with the Taurus-2 ...
Cosmic Log
20 Mar 2010, 00:17 UTC
JAXA An artist's rendering shows Japan's Ikaros solar sail in flight. As Japan gears up to send the first working solar sail into orbit in a couple of months, the Planetary Society is moving ahead with its own solar-sail project. You can put your name on both sails … if you act now. Sunday is the deadline for adding your name to the list for Japan's Ikaros spacecraft, due to piggyback on the May 18 launch of the Venus-bound Akatsuki orbiter aboard a Japanese H-2A rocket. More than 25,000 people have signed up already using the Planetary Society's "Sail Away" Web page - and when those are added to the Japanese list, the tally goes up to 60,000 names....(read more)
Solar sails take shape
20 Mar 2010, 00:17 UTC
JAXA An artist's rendering shows Japan's Ikaros solar sail in flight. As Japan gears up to send the first working solar sail into orbit in a couple of months, the Planetary Society is moving ahead with its own solar-sail project. You can put your name on both sails … if you act now. Sunday is the deadline for adding your name to the list for Japan's Ikaros spacecraft, due to piggyback on the May 18 launch of the Venus-bound Akatsuki orbiter aboard a Japanese H-2A rocket. More than 25,000 people have signed up already using the Planetary Society's "Sail Away" Web page - and when those are added to the Japanese list, the tally goes up to 60,000 names....(read more)
Professor Astronomy
19 Mar 2010, 21:30 UTC
Image Credit: C. Smith, S. Points, the MCELS Team and NOAO/AURA/NSF The picture above is of the Large Magellanic Cloud, or LMC for short. The LMC is one of the closest galaxies to our home galaxy, the Milky Way. (Read here if you need to remind yourself what a galaxy is). One of the troubles with trying to understand the Milky Way is that we are in it (can't see the forest for the trees), and large portions of the Milky Way are blocked from our view by clouds of dust and gas. We can see the entire LMC, on the other hand, and it is close enough that we can see fairly typical individual stars! So, with the LMC, we can study both the forest and the trees. There is another, smaller galaxy called the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) that is roughly the same distance away, in a slightly different direction, which is likewise useful for studying an entire galaxy along with the component stars. Supernovae are the explosive deaths of some stars. There are two main types of supernovae, Type Ia supernovae, which are thought to be the explosions of certain white dwarfs, and "core-collapse supernova", which are ...
The rate of supernovae in the Large Magellanic Cloud
19 Mar 2010, 21:30 UTC
Image Credit: C. Smith, S. Points, the MCELS Team and NOAO/AURA/NSF The picture above is of the Large Magellanic Cloud, or LMC for short. The LMC is one of the closest galaxies to our home galaxy, the Milky Way. (Read here if you need to remind yourself what a galaxy is). One of the troubles with trying to understand the Milky Way is that we are in it (can't see the forest for the trees), and large portions of the Milky Way are blocked from our view by clouds of dust and gas. We can see the entire LMC, on the other hand, and it is close enough that we can see fairly typical individual stars! So, with the LMC, we can study both the forest and the trees. There is another, smaller galaxy called the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) that is roughly the same distance away, in a slightly different direction, which is likewise useful for studying an entire galaxy along with the component stars. Supernovae are the explosive deaths of some stars. There are two main types of supernovae, Type Ia supernovae, which are thought to be the explosions of certain white dwarfs, and "core-collapse supernova", which are ...
Simostronomy
19 Mar 2010, 19:44 UTC
Do you know where Pluto got its name? I didn't know until I stumbled on this quite by accident.Venetia Burney was born July 11, 1918. On March 14, 1930, when she was only 11 years old, Venetia's grandfather had just read an article in The Times about the discovery of a new planet. Venetia recalled some years later what transpired over breakfast that day."It was about 8 o’clock and I was having breakfast with my mother and my grandfather, and my grandfather as usual opened the paper, the Times, and in it he read that a new planet had been discovered. He wondered what it should be called. We all wondered. And then I said, “Why not call it Pluto”. And the whole thing stemmed from that.and he shared the story with his granddaughter."Her grandfather forwarded the suggestion to astronomer Herbert Hall Turner, who cabled his American colleagues at Lowell Observatory. Clyde Tombaugh, the discoverer of the new planet, liked the name because it started with the initials of Percival Lowell who had initiated the search for Pluto. On May 1, 1930, the name Pluto was formally adopted.An interesting side note to this story is that her grandfather's brother, Henry ...
Venetia Burney, The Girl Who Named Pluto
19 Mar 2010, 19:44 UTC
Do you know where Pluto got its name? I didn't know until I stumbled on this quite by accident.Venetia Burney was born July 11, 1918. On March 14, 1930, when she was only 11 years old, Venetia's grandfather had just read an article in The Times about the discovery of a new planet. Venetia recalled some years later what transpired over breakfast that day."It was about 8 o’clock and I was having breakfast with my mother and my grandfather, and my grandfather as usual opened the paper, the Times, and in it he read that a new planet had been discovered. He wondered what it should be called. We all wondered. And then I said, “Why not call it Pluto”. And the whole thing stemmed from that.and he shared the story with his granddaughter."Her grandfather forwarded the suggestion to astronomer Herbert Hall Turner, who cabled his American colleagues at Lowell Observatory. Clyde Tombaugh, the discoverer of the new planet, liked the name because it started with the initials of Percival Lowell who had initiated the search for Pluto. On May 1, 1930, the name Pluto was formally adopted.An interesting side note to this story is that her grandfather's brother, Henry ...
Cumbrian Sky
19 Mar 2010, 18:16 UTC
Poor Spirit. Not only is she stuck in that ghastly dust-filled crater, she’s now having to deal with a body temperature of minus 41 deg C… Hearing this inspired me to write a new astropoem about Spirit. Hope some of you like it… Minus 41 Degrees I am cold. So cold. Once I felt young; now – as old As the chipped, frost-nipped rocks surrounding Me. Hard to believe I once climbed the Mountains Of Mars, gazed down on Gusev’s Big Country Plain To watch dust devils whirling again and again ‘cross the landscape beneath my strong wheels… Now I feel… oh, so weary; the weight of the rusty crust Lying on my back stoops me like an old man And I cannot feel a thing, can merely flick My dry, itching electronic eyes this way and that, Wondering if each picture I take will be my last… Current flows through me grudgingly now. I am hungry for power, starved of it, As thirsty for it as a vampire gone weeks without A kill. The thrill of basking in prickly summer Sunshine is just a memory; the low winter sun Is sorbet-cold, hanging in the sky like a skull, A ...
Spirit shivering…
19 Mar 2010, 18:16 UTC
Poor Spirit. Not only is she stuck in that ghastly dust-filled crater, she’s now having to deal with a body temperature of minus 41 deg C… Hearing this inspired me to write a new astropoem about Spirit. Hope some of you like it… Minus 41 Degrees I am cold. So cold. Once I felt young; now – as old As the chipped, frost-nipped rocks surrounding Me. Hard to believe I once climbed the Mountains Of Mars, gazed down on Gusev’s Big Country Plain To watch dust devils whirling again and again ‘cross the landscape beneath my strong wheels… Now I feel… oh, so weary; the weight of the rusty crust Lying on my back stoops me like an old man And I cannot feel a thing, can merely flick My dry, itching electronic eyes this way and that, Wondering if each picture I take will be my last… Current flows through me grudgingly now. I am hungry for power, starved of it, As thirsty for it as a vampire gone weeks without A kill. The thrill of basking in prickly summer Sunshine is just a memory; the low winter sun Is sorbet-cold, hanging in the sky like a skull, A ...
Slacker Astronomy
19 Mar 2010, 16:33 UTC
This is a solar image from St. Patrick’s Day sent in by one of our Slacker friends, Glen Ward. You can clearly see a solar prominence in profile here. A prominence is usually in the form of a large, bright loop extending outward from the Sun’s surface into the corona. A prominence forms in about [...] St. Patrick's Day prominence. Image credit: Glen Ward This is a solar image from St. Patrick’s Day sent in by one of our Slacker friends, Glen Ward. You can clearly see a solar prominence in profile here. A prominence is usually in the form of a large, bright loop extending outward from the Sun’s surface into the corona. A prominence forms in about a day, and stable prominences may persist in the corona for several months. A typical prominence extends over many thousands of kilometers; the largest ever observed by SOHO was in 1997. It was an awesome 350,000 km long. There is a lot we don’t know about the Sun. Scientists are currently researching how and why prominences are formed. NASA recently launched the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) to study the Sun in more detail than ever before. You can read more about ...
The Sun Gets Active Again
19 Mar 2010, 16:33 UTC
This is a solar image from St. Patrick’s Day sent in by one of our Slacker friends, Glen Ward. You can clearly see a solar prominence in profile here. A prominence is usually in the form of a large, bright loop extending outward from the Sun’s surface into the corona. A prominence forms in about [...] St. Patrick's Day prominence. Image credit: Glen Ward This is a solar image from St. Patrick’s Day sent in by one of our Slacker friends, Glen Ward. You can clearly see a solar prominence in profile here. A prominence is usually in the form of a large, bright loop extending outward from the Sun’s surface into the corona. A prominence forms in about a day, and stable prominences may persist in the corona for several months. A typical prominence extends over many thousands of kilometers; the largest ever observed by SOHO was in 1997. It was an awesome 350,000 km long. There is a lot we don’t know about the Sun. Scientists are currently researching how and why prominences are formed. NASA recently launched the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) to study the Sun in more detail than ever before. You can read more about ...
Astronomy magazine editors' blog
19 Mar 2010, 16:21 UTC
The Orion Nebula (M42) imaged by Gene Turner with the 14-inch SCT at Astronomy Magazine Observatory, a Hyperstar correcting lens system, and a Canon XTI DSLR camera. It‘s a composite of five 15-second exposures at f/2. On Wednesday night, March 17, Gene Turner of Rancho Hidalgo shot the first deep-sky images using Astronomy Magazine Observatory. Previously, the telescopes had been used to shoot planetary images. On Wednesday Gene concentrated on short-exposure tests of the Orion Nebula (M42), and Omega Centauri (NGC 5139). The first image of M42, published here, is a simple, raw, unguided shot — yet it’s pretty nice overall and shows the incredible nature of the dark sky at Hidalgo. It‘s a composite of five 15-second exposures!Enjoy the opening salvo in what will be a stream of many more images to come, and let us know if you have favorite deep-sky objects you would like the editors to image and share with you in the future.
First deep-sky image from Astronomy Magazine Observatory
19 Mar 2010, 16:21 UTC
The Orion Nebula (M42) imaged by Gene Turner with the 14-inch SCT at Astronomy Magazine Observatory, a Hyperstar correcting lens system, and a Canon XTI DSLR camera. It‘s a composite of five 15-second exposures at f/2. On Wednesday night, March 17, Gene Turner of Rancho Hidalgo shot the first deep-sky images using Astronomy Magazine Observatory. Previously, the telescopes had been used to shoot planetary images. On Wednesday Gene concentrated on short-exposure tests of the Orion Nebula (M42), and Omega Centauri (NGC 5139). The first image of M42, published here, is a simple, raw, unguided shot — yet it’s pretty nice overall and shows the incredible nature of the dark sky at Hidalgo. It‘s a composite of five 15-second exposures!Enjoy the opening salvo in what will be a stream of many more images to come, and let us know if you have favorite deep-sky objects you would like the editors to image and share with you in the future.
Discovery News - Space News
19 Mar 2010, 16:00 UTC
The world's largest atom smasher has just broken its own record, and it's just getting started.
