Phobos-Grunt
Mission Poster for the Russian Phobos-Grunt soil sample return spacecraft set to launch to Mars and its moon Phobos in November 2011. Credit: Roskosmos (Russian Federal Space Agency)/IKI
Russia is marking the upcoming blastoff of their dauntingly complex Phobos-Grunt sample return mission to the Martian moon Phobos with the release of a quite cool looking mission poster – see above. Phobos-Grunt translates as Phobos-Soil and is due to liftoff on or about November 7, 2011 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome atop a Zenit rocket.
The holy grail of Mars exploration has long been a sample return mission. But with severe cutbacks to NASA’s budget that goal is realistically more than a decade away. [click to continue…]
First photograph of a UFO sighting, taken 12 August 1883 by Jose Bonilla.
On August 12th, 1883, Mexican astronomer José Bonilla was preparing to study the Sun at the recently opened Zacatecas Observatory. However, the Sun’s surface was marred by numerous objects quickly travelling across its disk. Over the course of the day and the next, Bonilla exposed several wet plates to take images of the 447 objects he would observe. They weren’t released publicly until January 1st, 1886 when they were published in the magazine L’Astronomie. Since then, UFOlogists have crowed these photographs as the first photographic evidence of UFOs. The chief editor of L’Astronomie passed the observations off as migrating animals, but a new study proposes the observation was due to the breakup of a comet that nearly hit us.
HST image of Pluto and its moons, Charon, Nix and Hydra. Image Credit: NASA, ESA, H. Weaver (JHU/APL), A. Stern (SwRI), and the HST Pluto Companion Search Team
The controversy between Pluto and Eris regarding their status as “largest dwarf planet” continues. During a joint meeting of the American Astronomical Society Division for Planetary Sciences and the European Planetary Science Congress last week in Nantes, France, new data was presented that may help settle the debate. The new findings regarding this size of Eris may be a surprise to some, and to others a confirmation of what was believed to be true.
How were astronomers able to make the new measurements of Eris, and what implications will these new measurements have on the Pluto / Eris debate?
While you can’t exactly call Joe Brimacombe an amateur astrophotographer, he’s managed to capture an elusive solar event on film… a coronal mass ejection! [click to continue…]
Editor’s note: This guest post was written by Andy Tomaswick, an electrical engineer who follows space science and technology.
Imagine a rover on the Moon nimbly gliding around boulders and crevices until it finds something that looks interesting. It stops to pick up a sample and then rushes back to its home platform only to venture out again soon. Now imagine that it was doing all of this without any humans telling it to.
That’s the idea behind NASA’s new Sample Return Robot Challenge, part of its Centennial Challenge program. The space agency announced a potential $1.5 million prize for what it terms “an autonomous robotic system to locate and collect a set of specific sample types from a large planetary analog area and then return the samples to the starting zone.”
The innermost antennae along the north arm of the Very Large Array, superimposed upon a false-color representation of a radio (red) and optical (blue) image of the radio galaxy 3C31. Image courtesy of NRAO/AUI
The iconic Very Large Array is almost as much pop culture as science instrument. It’s been part of movie plots, on album covers, in comic books and video games. But now, the VLA is being transformed from its original 1970s-vintage technology with state-of-the-art equipment. The National Radio Astronomy Observatory says that the upgrades will increase the VLA’s technical capabilities by factors of as much as 8,000 and greatly increasing the array’s scientific impact.
And so to befit the VLA’s new capabilities, NRAO has decided the array should have a new name. And they are looking for some help from the public. [click to continue…]
Adam Block obtained this beautiful image of NGC 7129 on September 23rd-26th, 2011 at Mount Lemmon SkyCenter.
This colorful cloud, known as NGC 7129, is an open cluster star-forming region located in Cepheus. Astronomers estimated that this region contains bright, very young stars that are less than a million years old.
Adam used a 32-inch Schulman Telescope and an SBIG STL11000 CCD Camera with the following specs:
Check out Adam’s website for more amazing astrophotography.
Want to get your astrophoto featured on Universe Today? Join our Flickr group, post in our Forum or send us your images by email (this means you’re giving us permission to post them). Please explain what’s in the picture, when you took it, the equipment you used, etc.
The European Union and European Space Agency (ESA) will launch the first components next week of the €20 billion Galileo global navigation satellite system. This constellation of satellites will allow users to pinpoint their location anywhere on Earth. It will be a free, fully autonomous and interoperable worldwide satellite navigation system, broadcasting global navigation signals for high-performance services, which ESA says possesses the service integrity guarantees that GPS lacks for commercial and safety-critical services.
The first launch is scheduled for October 20, 2011. This 3-D video provides an overview of the system. Use red/blue 3D glasses to watch in 3D.
Artists concept of a black hole. Image credit: Gallery of Tempolimit Lichtgeschwindigkeit
As astronomers began working out how stars die, they expected that the mass of remnants, whether white dwarfs, neutron stars, or black holes, should be essentially continuous. In other words, there should be a smooth distribution of remnant masses from a fraction of a solar mass, up to nearly 100 times the mass of the sun. Yet observations have shown a distinct lack of objects at the borderline of neutron stars and black holes weighing 2-5 solar masses. So where have they all gone and what might this imply about the explosions that create such objects?
The votes are in, the guesses have been made, and the answer is now posted for this week’s Where In The Universe Challenge. Find it back on the original post. And check back next week for another test of your visual knowledge of the Universe.
This photo of a partial solar eclipse was captured by Marcin Wieczorek in Lodz, Poland on January 4. Marcin used a Nikon D5000 camera with 105mm lens. A partial solar eclipse is an event wherein the Moon partially blocks the Sun as observed from the Earth. This, as well as a total solar eclipse, is [...]
Imagine you’re an astronaut. You have what it takes to be selected to fly a mission to the Moon. You train, make the trip, and become one of literally a handful of humans ever to have walked on the lunar surface. And when you leave the desolate beauty of the Moon behind in your Landing [...]
Way off in the constellation of Virgo, galaxy cluster MACS J1206.2-0847 -or MACS 1206 for short – is making news as the forerunner of a brand new Hubble Space Telescope survey. What’s new for the aging telescope? Now astronomers are able to assemble a highly detailed dark matter map… one that involves more galaxy clusters [...]
It might be four billion years old, but this meteorite which may have originated near the surface of Mars has a story to tell… one about a warmer and wetter history. Researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have been analyzing the carbonate minerals contained within the Martian meteorite – ALH84001- and piecing together [...]
Solar sails, much like anti-matter and ion engines appear at first glance to only exist in science fiction. Many technologies from science fiction however, become science fact. In the example of solar sails, perfecting the technology would allow spacecraft to travel through our solar system using very little fuel. NASA has been making strides with [...]
Martin Meupelenberg of Australia captured this photo of the Orion Nebula on October 2, 2011 at 3:00 am. The Orion Nebula, also known as Messier 42, is an example of a diffuse nebula located south of Orion’s Belt. It’s the closest region of massive star formation to Earth at a distance of 1,344 ± 20 [...]
Here’s a great talk given by our friend Phil Plait at a TED event, TEDxBoulder, about how an asteroid might one day give us Earthlings a really bad day. But he’s got good news, too: We have a space program!
This amazing startrail image was shot by Dustin Kukuk in Patriarch Grove, Ancient Bristlecone Forest, White Mountains, California during the Kessler “TimeFest 2011″ Timelapse meet up. “This photo is from a 400 frame astro timelapse that I merged together into 1 single frame, creating this amazing image of our night sky. Connect with Dustin through: [...]
In just over 3 weeks’ time, Russia plans to launch a bold mission to Mars whose objective, if successful , is to land on the Martian Moon Phobos and return a cargo of precious soil samples back to Earth about three years later. The purpose is to determine the origin and evolution of Phobos and [...]
It looks as though the efforts to get commercial space taxis off the ground – is succeeding. Sierra Nevada Corporation’s (SNC) “Dream Chaser” space plane is slated to conduct its first test flight as early as next summer. SNC is one of four companies that have had proposals selected by NASA under the Commercial Crew [...]
