The 71th Carnival of Space this week is up at dotastronomy.
Sorry that I’ve missed the last two week Carnival, I was outstation… or more precisely, I’m in the jungle, conquering Gunung Tahan.
The links for the last two Carnival are as follow:
Carvinal of Space #70 at The OrbitalHub.
Carnival of Space #69 by Irene Klotz.
Phoenix, a lander currently working hard on Mars, has successfully completed its 90-sols primary mission and is currently continuing its extended activities on Mars. But it has to work fast, for the martian days are getting colder as the Sun dips below the horizon.
Like Earth, Mars has seasons. When Phoenix landed on Mars, it was in late spring. Since the landing site is above the Martian arctic circle (at latitude 68 degN), the Sun will not set during the peak of the Martian summer. The Sun will shine on Phoenix’s solar panels the whole Martian day.
Midnight Sun on Mars (Sol 58). Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/Texas A&M University.
However, as the days went by, this period of maximum solar energy is past. On Sol 86 after the Phoenix landing, the Sun dipped completely below the horizon for about half an hour. The Sun will spend more and more time below the horizon until a time when Phoenix will only see total darkness. The loss of sunlight, extreme arctic cold and accumulation of carbon dioxide frost will prevent operations by December or January next year.
Ice Cold Sunrise on Mars (Sol 91). Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/Texas A&M University.
As the Sun dips lower in the Martian sky with each passing day, the solar-powered Phoenix Mars Lander is working as fast and as hard as it can to dig, deliver and conduct as many experiments as possible before it runs out of power.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/Texas A&M University
The image beside shows the delivery of a soil sample on Sol 107 (September 12) to the Wet Chemistry Laboratory. A small pile of soil is visible on the lower edge of the second cell from the top. This deck-mounted lab is part of Phoenix’s Microscopy, Electrochemistry and Conductivity Analyzer (MECA).
In the coming days, the Phoenix team will also fill the final four of eight single-use ovens on another soil-analysis instrument, the Thermal and Evolved Gas Analyzer, or TEGA.
Let’s welcome the fifth member to the club of dwarf planet – Haumea, joining Pluto, Ceres, Eris and Makemake.
Haumea was formerly known as 2003 EL61. It was initially discovered by Mike Brown at Caltech in Pasadena on December 28, 2004. However, only in mid-2005 the discovery was announced, not by Mike Brown, but by a Spanish team.
Haumea is the name of the goddess of childbirth and fertility in Hawaiian mythology. Her many children sprang from different parts of her body. She takes many different forms and has experienced many different rebirths. As the goddess of the earth, she represents the element of stone.
Haumea has two moons, and now they too have been named. The first and largest moon is to be called Hi’iaka, after the Hawaiian goddess who is said to have been born from the mouth of Haumea and the patron goddess of the island of Hawaii. The second moon of Haumea is named Namaka, a water spirit who is said to have been born from Haumea’s body.
The name Haumea suits the characteristic of this new dwarf planet. First, Haumea represents the element of stone and observations hint that this dwarf planet is almost entirely composed of rock (which is quite unusual).
Second, Haumea’s children sprang from different parts of her body and this dwarf planet may also has a similar history. The two moons of dwarf planet Haumea are thought to have been created by parts of Haumea’s icy surface that were blasted off during impacts in the past.
Haunea looks and spins approximately like this. Credit: Mike Brown.
Haumea is “big” – its diameter is about the same as Pluto. But it has an odd shape, like a squashed American football. It is believed that its oblong shape is due to its rapid four-hour rotation. Objects that rotate fast tend to get equatorial bulges; for example Jupiter, which rotates once in 10 hours, gives it a squashed ball “look”. Because Haumea is very, very small compared to Jupiter, it has much, much weaker gravity, and this gives it a much, much “squasher” (if there is such word) look; so squashed that it look like a cigar rather than a ball.
Haumea sits among the trans-Neptunian objects, a vast ring of distant cold and rocky bodies in the outer Solar System. At this moment it is roughly 50 AU from the Sun, but at its closest the elliptical orbit of Haumea brings it 35 AU from our star.
This rare alignment between the two spiral galaxies “on top of each other” was captured by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. Look carefully at the outer rim (the left side) of the smaller foreground galaxy against the bigger background galaxy, you will notice tentacles of dust lanes extending beyond the small galaxy’s disk of starlight.
This feature – the outer dark dusty structures – is rarely so visible in a galaxy because there is usually nothing behind them to illuminate them. But in this case, we have a big, bright background galaxy to illuminate it.
Astronomers calculated that the background galaxy is 780 million light-years away. They have not as yet calculated the distance between the two galaxies, although they think the two are relatively close, but not close enough to interact. The background galaxy is about the size of the Milky Way Galaxy and is about 10 times larger than the foreground galaxy.
Rosetta is an European Space Agency (ESA) spacecraft designed to orbit and land on a comet. You read it right, to orbit and land on a comet.
Steins is an asteroid roughly 10 km in diameter, located in the main asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
The story goes like this… Rosetta is planned to rendezvous with a comet named 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (don’t ask me how to pronounce that!) in 2014. After it enter orbit around the comet, Rosetta will release its “baby” – Philae Lander – onto icy nucleus. This is the first mission designed to orbit and land on a comet.
Rosetta initial target was not Churyumov-Gerasimenko; it was supposed to be 46P/Wirtanen (this is much easier to pronounce), with the encounter planned for 2011. However, after postponement of the initial launch in January 2003, the spacecraft was launched in March 2004 and will meet its new target – Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.
During its 10 years journey to the comet, Rosetta will pass by two asteroids: 2867 Steins on 5 September 2008 and 21 Lutetia on 10 June 2010. So, about 8 hours from now, Rosetta will reach closest approach to Steins, targeted to be 800 km from the asteroid, passing by at a speed of 8.6 km/s relative to Stein.
Latest post from the Rosetta Blog said that the analysis of Rosetta’s and Steins’ location enabled the mission team to determine that Rosetta will pass within 2 km of the targeted 800 km, which is within acceptability for the science observations to come.
An artist impression of ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft flew by asteroid (2867) Steins while on its way to Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The study of asteroids is extremely important because they represent a sample of Solar System material at different stages of evolution – key to understanding the origin of our own planet and of our planetary neighbourhood. Credits: ESA.
Between 40 and 20 minutes before closest approach, Rosetta will be flipped and the spacecraft will switch to a specially designed asteroid fly-by mode, an optimal configuration that supports the intensive observation and tracking activity of the on-board instruments. Although most scientific observations will take place in the few hours around closest approach, several instruments will be switched on for a longer time around the event.
Around closest approach, Rosetta will be 2.41 Astronomical Units, or about 360 million km, from Earth. Radio signals sent to and from the spacecraft will have a 20 minute one-way travel time.
Not long ago in June, GLAST, a space telescope designed to look at gamma-rays was launched.
A few days ago, NASA announced that GLAST has been renamed the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. The new name honours Enrico Fermi (1901-1954), a pioneer in high-energy physics.
Enrico Fermi was an Italian physicist who later became an American citizen. He is most noted for his work on the development of the first nuclear reactor and for his major contributions to the development of quantum theory, nuclear and particle physics, and statistical mechanics. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1938 for his work on induced radioactivity and is today regarded as one of the top scientists of the 20th century.
After two months testing and calibrating its two instruments – the Large Area Telescope (LAT) and the GLAST Burst Monitor (GBM) – Fermi has seen first light and returned an all-sky image showing the glowing gas of the Milky Way, blinking pulsars, and a flaring galaxy billions of light-years away.
The image above shows gas and dust in the plane of our Milky Way as well as pulsars and active galaxy known as blazar. The pulsars seen here are from the familiar Crab Nebula, the Vela and Geminga pulsars. The fourth bright spot in the image lies far beyond our galaxy – a blazar known as 3C454.3 in Pegasus that lies about 7.1 billion light-years away.
The spacecraft’s secondary instrument, the GBM, spotted 31 gamma-ray bursts in its first month of operations. These high-energy blasts occur when massive stars die or when orbiting neutron stars spiral together and merge. The GBM is sensitive to less energetic gamma rays than the LAT. Bursts seen by both instruments will provide an unprecedented look across a broad gamma-ray spectrum, enabling scientists to peer into the processes powering these events.
Source: NASA News Release
Crowlspace is hosting this week’s Carnival of Space – star-travel won’t be easy. Check it out!
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