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Space: The Final Frontier

E

Escape Goat

Member
Neptune was discovered one year ago...according to Neptune's definition of a year. What is one year to Neptune is 165 here on Earth. In honor of this event, Hubble Telescope gives us these new images.

110712-coslog-neptune-1015a.photoblog600.jpg
 
M

Memphis Reigns

Member
Deadly Cyclone said:
I love this thread by the way.

Can anyone recommend some amazing Astronomy books that are interesting to read (less like textbooks)?
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There is a book version of Carl Sagan's Cosmos. It reads almost exactly like the dialogue in the tv series. He is an AMAZING talker, very articulate and a great read.
 
E

Escape Goat

Member
4th moon discovered in orbit of Pluto. Its pretty amazing we're still finding celestial bodies within our own solar system, even if they are on the fringes of that system.

HOUSTON (AP) — Distant and tiny Pluto has been hiding something from Earth: another moon.

NASA announced Wednesday that the Hubble Space Telescope has found a fourth moon circling Pluto, which had been demoted from full planet to dwarf planet. Astronomers had been looking to see if Pluto had a ring, but instead they found another object circling the dwarf planet that is 3 billion miles from Earth.

But it is a mini-moon. It is only eight to 21 miles wide. Pluto's biggest moon, Charon, is 80 times bigger. The other two moons are Nix and Hydra.

Until astronomers decide a name, this moon is called P4.
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C

Cyrillus

Member
I just listened to "The Story" today on NPR, in which they interview Vance Gloster, who worked on NASA's early radar system. They also play a bit of tape from the last mission, in which the ground control, Atlantis crew, and ISS crew give each other some final thoughts and thanks. I have to say, I definitely choked up at that part of the program. You can really hear and feel the sense of pride and great loss they are evoking in their words. The link above has the audio if you'd like to listen to it, it also discusses one-way trips to Mars.
 
H

Hootie

Member
Well Space-GAF, we've officially entered one of the darkest moments in the history of manned space exploration. For humanity's sake, let's hope this era is short-lived.
 
M

Mr. Luchador

Member
I'm genuinely upset its all come to end without anything already in place to replace it. No dreams.
42 Years after we first landed on the moon, we put our feet firmly back on the ground.

I read that the next 'mission' is to land on an asteroid in 2030 or something. I don't know, can't get excited about that.

Why not explore the Moon a bit more?
 
L

Lucky Forward

Member
110608-space-msl-915a.photoblog600.jpg


NASA's Next Mars Rover to Land at Gale Crater

NASA's next Mars rover will land at the foot of a layered mountain inside the planet’s Gale Crater.

The car-sized Mars Science Laboratory, or Curiosity, is scheduled to launch late this year and land in August 2012. The target crater spans 96 miles (154 kilometers) in diameter and holds a mountain rising higher from the crater floor than Mount Rainier rises above Seattle. Gale is about the combined area of Connecticut and Rhode Island. Layering in the mound suggests it is the surviving remnant of an extensive sequence of deposits. The crater is named for Australian astronomer Walter F. Gale.

"Mars is firmly in our sights," said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. "Curiosity not only will return a wealth of important science data, but it will serve as a precursor mission for human exploration to the Red Planet."

During a prime mission lasting one Martian year -- nearly two Earth years -- researchers will use the rover's tools to study whether the landing region had favorable environmental conditions for supporting microbial life and for preserving clues about whether life ever existed.

"Scientists identified Gale as their top choice to pursue the ambitious goals of this new rover mission," said Jim Green, director for the Planetary Science Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "The site offers a visually dramatic landscape and also great potential for significant science findings."
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Curiosity is about twice as long and more than five times as heavy as any previous Mars rover. Its 10 science instruments include two for ingesting and analyzing samples of powdered rock that the rover's robotic arm collects. A radioisotope power source will provide heat and electric power to the rover. A rocket-powered sky crane suspending Curiosity on tethers will lower the rover directly to the Martian surface.

The portion of the crater where Curiosity will land has an alluvial fan likely formed by water-carried sediments. The layers at the base of the mountain contain clays and sulfates, both known to form in water.

"One fascination with Gale is that it's a huge crater sitting in a very low-elevation position on Mars, and we all know that water runs downhill," said John Grotzinger, the mission's project scientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif. "In terms of the total vertical profile exposed and the low elevation, Gale offers attractions similar to Mars' famous Valles Marineris, the largest canyon in the solar system."

Curiosity will go beyond the "follow-the-water" strategy of recent Mars exploration. The rover's science payload can identify other ingredients of life, such as the carbon-based building blocks of biology called organic compounds. Long-term preservation of organic compounds requires special conditions. Certain minerals, including some Curiosity may find in the clay and sulfate-rich layers near the bottom of Gale's mountain, are good at latching onto organic compounds and protecting them from oxidation.
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M

Maklershed

Member
Neat.

Imagine how great that would be if they could find a way to have a streaming camera feed on that and you can check out Mars from the internet whenever you want. That would build up some exposure for NASA one would think. I know transferring that much data from Earth to Mars is probably an impossibilty at this point though.
 
L

Lucky Forward

Member
Maklershed said:
Neat.

Imagine how great that would be if they could find a way to have a streaming camera feed on that and you can check out Mars from the internet whenever you want. That would build up some exposure for NASA one would think. I know transferring that much data from Earth to Mars is probably an impossibilty at this point though.
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That would be a cool idea, but I don't think the prior rovers were ever in constant contact with earth, I think their data was sent back in bursts during specific time windows. Maybe one day, though.
 
C

ChRoNiTe

Member
Water in distant quasar could fill Earth's oceans 100 trillion times.

Is there water in space? Well, 12 billion years ago there was a lot of it, astronomers say.

A team of international scientists analyzing a quasar 12 billion light-years from Earth say there is water vapor in the object – which they call "a voraciously feeding black hole" – equivalent to 34 billion times the mass of our planet. They say it's the largest mass of water ever found.

"We not only detected water in the farthest reaches of the universe, but enough to fill Earth's oceans more than 100 trillion times," said Jason Glenn, an associate professor at the University of Colorado-Boulder, who was co-author of a study of the quasar.

The discovery shows water was present in the early stages of the universe when it was 1.6 billion years old, researchers say. The big-bang theory puts the age of the universe at 13.6 billion years.

In our galaxy, the Milky Way, there is 4,000 times less water than in the quasar, and it is spread over a few light-years, according to the study. But in the quasar, the water vapor is present over hundreds of light-years, they said. A light-year is about 6 trillion miles.

The discovery was made using a spectrograph at the California Institute of Technology's telescope on the Mauna Kea volcano on Hawaii's Big Island and verified using a facility in California's Inyo Mountains.

Besides the University of Colorado-Boulder and Caltech, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Japan's Institute of Space and Astronautical Science, the Observatories of the Carnegie Institute of Science and the University of Pennsylvania participated in the research.
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Amazing.
 
Z

Zapages

Member
Very cool. :)

Two teams of astronomers have discovered the largest and farthest reservoir of water ever found in the universe. It’s 12 billion light years away, and holds at least 140 trillion times the amount of water in all the Earth’s oceans combined.

wireduk
It manifests itself as a colossal mass of water vapor, hidden in the distant APM 08279+5255 quasar. Quasars are bright and violent galactic nuclei fueled by a supermassive black hole at their center.

This quasar holds a black hole that’s 20 billion times more massive than the sun, and after gobbling down dust and gas it belches out as much energy as a thousand trillion suns. The water vapor is spread around the black hole in a gaseous region spanning hundreds of light years.

“The environment around this quasar is unique in that it’s producing this huge mass of water,” says Matt Bradford from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in a press release.

“It’s another demonstration that water is pervasive throughout the universe, even at the very earliest times,” adds Bradford in the release. As the light from this watery quasar took 12 billion years to reach Earth, the observations come from a time when the universe was only 1.6 billion years old.

The water reservoir was discovered by astronomers, led by scientists at the California Institute of Technology, and using the Z-Spec instrument at the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory in Hawaii and the Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-Wave Astronomy (CARMA) in the Inyo Mountains of Southern California.

Both instruments observe in the millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths, which lie between infrared and microwave wavelengths. Over the last two to three decades, this technique has allowed astronomers to find trace gases, including water vapor, in the earliest universe.

Astronomers are now building a new telescope that specializes in these wavelengths. The proposed 25-meter telescope is called CCAT (Cornell Caltech Atacama Telescope) and would be plopped on the Cerro Chajnantor lava dome, more than 5,600 meters above sea level.

By measuring the presence of water and other important trace gases, it would allow cosmic researchers to hunt out primordial galaxies and more accurately study their composition. CCAT should start construction in 2013 and be completed in 2017.
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Source: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/07/black-hole-holds-universes-biggest-water-supply/
 
C

Crazymoogle

Member
*shakes head at Zapages*

Anyway the real mind bender is that we have no clue if any of that water is there right now. In fact, it probably isn't. We're just looking back 12 billion years.
 
N

Naked Snake

Member
Maklershed said:
Wonders of the Universe starts at 9pm est tonight on Science Channel.
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Love Brian Cox, but I didn't hear good things about this show... which reminds me I still haven't finished watching Wonders of the Solar System.
 
N

Neverender

Member
Naked Snake said:
Love Brian Cox, but I didn't hear good things about this show... which reminds me I still haven't finished watching Wonders of the Solar System.
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I really enjoyed the show... Haven't read anything about it but I loved Wonders of the Solar System. Universe probably wasn't as good but still worth watching, I'd say.
 
P

pestul

Member
Neverender said:
I really enjoyed the show... Haven't read anything about it but I loved Wonders of the Solar System. Universe probably wasn't as good but still worth watching, I'd say.
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Universe was good, but you won't learn anything new.
 
S

Scrow

Still Tagged Accordingly
Dutch Mafia said:
awsom

5196972891_ff78a23ff2_b.jpg
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what blows my mind about pics from that perspective is we're like microscopic organisms on a large spherical rock that have evolved to harvest the environment around them to light up the dark side of ball of rock because as a species we prefer to have light when we WANT it.
 
U

UrbanRats

Member
Scrow said:
what blows my mind about pics from that perspective is we're like microscopic organisms on a large spherical rock that have evolved to harvest the environment around them to light up the dark side of ball of rock because as a species we prefer to have light when we WANT it.
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And to think that is even more complex than that.. some of those lights (for example) are billboards like the ones in Times Square and such, made for other (more complex) purposes, rather than to light up the surroundings.
It's weird to think about how complex our life has become, compared to the one of bacteria or even more complex animals.




..and i'm not even stoned, right now.
 
E

Escape Goat

Member
RiZ III said:
I can't even really imagine this when I try. I mean is it like a HUMONGOUS ocean floating around in space?? I really can't even picture it.
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I think its water vapor meaning its in there but its not like its a huge floating ball of water.
 
D

Deku

Banned
A new theory suggests the Earth once had a small second moon that perished in a slow motion collision with its "big sister".
Researchers suggest the collision may explain the mysterious mountains on the far side of our Moon.

The scientists say the relatively slow speed of the crash was crucial in adding material to the rarely-seen lunar hemisphere.

...
Dr Martin Jutzi from the University of Bern, Switzerland, is one of the authors of the paper. He explained: "When we look at the current theory there is no real reason why there was only one moon.

...

The scientists argue that the impact would have led to the build-up of material on the lunar crust and would also have redistributed the underlying magma to the near side of the moon, an idea backed up by observations from Nasa's Lunar Prospector spacecraft.

...


But according to Dr Jutzi the scientists would prefer to get their hands on samples from the far side of the Moon to prove their theory.

"Hopefully in future, a sample return or a manned mission would certainly help to say more about which theory is more probable." :(
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14391929
 
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