Video of the lunar far side from GRAIL/Ebb

Phil Plait — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 17:49:19 +0000

This is so cool: NASA’s twin GRAIL spacecraft (now named Ebb and Flow) have cameras on board to take images of the lunar surface, and an animation has been put together of Ebb’s view of the Moon’s far side!

Pretty neat. I love the wide-angle view; the individual images were taken while Ebb was still over a thousand kilometers from the Moon. The huge circular feature you can see on the right 30 seconds into the video is Orientale Basin, an impact so huge it must’ve lit up the solar system a few billion years ago. That basin is nearly 1000 km (600 miles) across! See the LRO image below for a clearer view, and click it for more info.

I’m really looking forward to seeing what will be done with these cameras. As Principal Investigator Maria Zuber explains in the video, they were installed specifically for educational purposes, and kids all over America will get a chance to examine the data. I love this idea, since it means these children will be invested in the project itself, and remember it for their whole lives. It’s a fantastic idea.

Q&BA full video chat session online

Phil Plait — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 17:43:55 +0000

On Sunday, I did a live video chat on Google+ where I took astronomy and space questions from folks and answered them as best I could. It was a lot of fun, with several hundred people showing up! I did some minimal editing of the session and put it on YouTube for your enjoyment:

The video resolution is not that great, I know, and I’m working on solutions for that. I’m looking into recording the feed locally on my PC so that I can upload a better version. If you have suggestions, I’m listening (but anyone starting a PC vs Apple war will be eviscerated; be ye fairly warned, says I).

I’m also always happy to get suggestions from people too. I have plans to do this on a weekly basis, and would love to improve it. Whaddaya got?

[P.S. In the "Related posts" below I have some links to the old Q&BA v.1.0 videos. Those got to be so time-consuming I had to stop doing them, but things have gotten much better since then! I'm looking forward to doing this more often now.]

Related posts:

- Q and BA Episode 7: By Any Other Name

Weekly Space Roundup for January 19, 2012

Phil Plait — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 20:45:21 +0000

Every week, my friend Fraser Cain of Universe Today gathers together a few scientists and science journalists to review the past week’s space and astronomy news. This week we talked about boiling planets, the demise of Phobos-Grunt, dark matter galaxies, and an Earth-sized telescope to zoom in on a supermassive black hole.

Participating were Fraser, Pamela Gay, Alan Boyle, Emily Lakdawalla, Jon Voisey, Nicole Gugliucci, Nancy Atkinson, and me. We do these on Google+, which has a feature called Hangouts On Air, which allows for live video broadcasts like this, and also the ability to save them on YouTube. We do these roundups every Thursday at 18:00 UTC (13:00 Eastern Standard Time). You don’t have to be signed up for G+ to watch them, but if you are (and it’s free and easy) we ask also that you +1 them, so we get an idea of how many folks are tuning in. Thanks!

What happened to Phobos-Grunt?

Phil Plait — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 18:05:13 +0000

On Sunday, January 15th, 2012, the Russian spacecraft Phobos-Grunt fell to Earth after a failed attempt to get it to Mars. It burned up in our atmosphere some time around 18:00 UTC, though the exact time isn’t clear.

During its final orbit, I did a live video chat on Google+ with my friend, science journalist Emily Lakdawalla of The Planetary Society, and we talked about the probe. The entire discussion is now on YouTube:

It’s an hour and a half long, as we were following the news and rumors of the probe in real time. The big question the whole time was: where and when did the probe fall?

It’s a good question. Moving at 8 km/sec (5 miles/sec) as it came in, it covered a lot of territory — as you can see in the map above showing the final track of the spacecraft. And since the final moments apparently happened over the Pacific ocean and southern South America — places where there aren’t many observers — it’s not at all clear just where, or even when, the spacecraft came ...

Time lapse: Chinese rocket caught on video

Phil Plait — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 14:00:42 +0000

Not that any time lapse video of the Very Large Telescope complex at Paranal in Chile would be normal, but this one by Farid Char caught something pretty unusual: what appears to be a Chinese rocket boosting a satellite to orbit!

Did you catch it? From 14 – 18 seconds in, you can see it as a bright object moving against the setting stars to the west. If you pause the video, you can see what look like two plumes of gas coming from the object (though I wonder; a cone-shaped plume might look like this too seen from the side due to limb-brightening). Given the time, it was most likely the Chinese satellite FengYun 2-F moving into its transfer orbit (or possibly just venting some fuel), and it will slowly boost itself to a final geosynchronous orbit over the next few weeks.

These time lapse videos are always pretty cool, but they’re even better when they get a surprise like this!

Tip o’ the lens cap to eundas on Twitter.

Related posts:

- Time lapse: The Aurora
- ...

Phobos-Grunt to come down today

Phil Plait — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 13:45:27 +0000

[Update 2 (18:40 UTC): According to the US Strategic Command, Phobos-Grunt re-entered over the Pacific ocean, not far west of Chile. This is unconfirmed, but STRATCOM is usually quite reliable. As I write this, I'm pretty sure the spacecraft is down, and hopefully we'll know more about where it came down in the next few hours.]

[Update 1 (15:50 UTC): The predicted re-entry time is now around 17:20 UTC or so, but still not exact (Eastern US time is UTC - 5 hours, so 12:20 in the afternoon). The Russian space agency Roscomos has created a map of the predicted final orbit:

That's over more land than I would've expected, but still lots of water. And remember, even if it falls over land the odds of it hitting anyone are incredibly low. Follow PhG_Reentry and me on Twitter for constant updates.]

I’ve been referring to Phobos-Grunt as "the doomed Russian space probe". Today, that name gets verified: it’s due to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere today, sometime around 18:30 UTC (plus/minus 3 hours), though the exact time is still unsure.

Emily Lakdawalla at The Planetary Society ...

Stunning view of a bloom from space

Phil Plait — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 14:00:48 +0000

Almost exactly one year ago, I posted a beautiful picture of a phytoplankton bloom as seen from space. And here’s another one, and it’s way, way more spectacular!

Holy wow! [Click to enalgaenate.]

This shot of a bloom in the southern Atlantic Ocean was taken by the ESA’s Envirosat, which — duh — is designed to observe our environment. In this case, scientists keep a keen eye on phytoplankton blooms: while this bloom is breathtaking and gorgeous, many can be hazardous. Besides producing toxins that can harm sea life, they can also consume more oxygen in the water than usual, which is obviously tough on any life in the area. The color of the bloom can be found quickly using satellite imagery like this, and the algae species determined. Also, phytoplankton are sensitive to some climate changes, so observing them can act as a "canary in the coal mine" for climate change.

Sometimes, the best view of the Earth around us is from above. And sometimes that view is amazing, but a reminder that our ecosystem is a dynamic balance… and it’s best ...

Live weekly astronomy roundup on Google+!

Phil Plait — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 17:10:55 +0000

Fraser Cain (from Universe Today) and I are trying something new… and by new, I mean new. We’re going to be holding a live video weekly astronomy and space roundup on Google+! We’ll have a roundtable group of scientists and science journalists discussing the latest cosmic news, explaining it, and letting you know what it all means. We have a pretty good group of folks lined up for this, and the first one will be held today, Thursday, January 5 at 18:00 UTC (1:00 p.m. Eastern US time).

[UPDATE: We're live now!]

These will be held on Google+ using Hangouts on Air – a live video stream that can be watched by an unlimited number of people. You have to be on Google+, and then circle Fraser Cain — that’s G+’s version of adding friends. He’ll have the link to the video feed in his stream once it’s set up (and I’ll update this very blog post as well). And once you’re in, you can ask questions for us in the comments section on the post! You can read more about this on Universe Today.

I’m very excited about these live video news session. For one thing, ...

Doomed Russian Mars probe seen from the ground

Phil Plait — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 21:21:38 +0000

In November 2011, the Russian space agency launched the much-anticipated Mars probe called Phobos-Grunt (which means "Phobos dirt" or "ground"), which would go to the Red Planet, soft-land a probe on the tiny moon Phobos, and return a sample of the surface to Earth. Unfortunately, the booster that would take it from Earth orbit into a Mars-intercept trajectory failed to fire, stranding the spacecraft in low-Earth orbit. Atmospheric drag has doomed the mission; it will most likely burn up sometime in the next two weeks.

Phobos-Grunt is visible to the naked eye as a bright star if it happens to pass overhead. Astronomer Thierry Legault, an expert in nabbing incredible images of objects in orbit (and no stranger to this blog!), traveled to Nice, France to observe it, and (as usual) got great video of it:

You can actually see detail in the probe; he provided a helpful picture to make it more clear:

The solar panels and other parts are pretty obvious.

Like UARS and ROSAT last year, Phobos-Grunt is making an uncontrolled re-entry, and it’s not entirely clear where it will fall. Odds ...

NASA sends GRAIL shaped beacon to the Moon

Phil Plait — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 22:14:42 +0000

Mynd you, Møøn bites Kan be pretti nasti…

Today, NASA successfully put a new mission into lunar orbit: GRAIL, for Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory. Great acronym, weird name, right? What this mission will do is map the gravity field of the Moon, and use that to probe the interior composition. The basic idea isn’t all that complicated: fly a probe around the Moon. If it goes above a region where the density is higher, there will be a slightly stronger gravitational pull, and the spacecraft will accelerate a bit. By carefully measuring the spacecraft position and velocity, you can make the lunar gravity map.

In detail, that’s a bit tougher! What NASA has done is launch two probes, GRAIL-A and GRAIL-B, that will fly in the same orbit, one behind the other*. They’ll stay in constant communication, sending radio pulses to each other. The timing of these pulses allows an extremely accurate determination of their separation: their distance will be known to an accuracy of about a micron: that’s a hundredth the width of a human hair, or the size of a red blood cell!

So how does ...

Cool picture of Expedition 29 on its way home

Phil Plait — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 14:00:44 +0000

When Expedition 29 astronauts Mike Fossum, Sergei Volkov, and Satoshi Furukawa returned to Earth from the ISS on November 21, Dan Burbank stayed aboard the station and got this dramatic picture of them coming home:

[Click to deorbitenate.]

See it? The returning Soyuz capsule itself is the bright dot in the center of the picture, and you can see the trail of plasma behind it, pointing almost straight down. It’s almost lost against the city lights below it.

I couldn’t find this picture on NASA’s Gateway to Astronaut Photography, unfortunately, but a little sleuthing gleans some info anyway. The picture’s header says it was taken on November 22 at 02:03 GMT, and Wolfram Alpha kindly told me that this put the space station over Turkey at the time. This view is looking toward the east; I know that due to the rising Sun at that time (given the time, it can’t be sunset to the west). Also, as the Soyuz capsule carrying the astronauts home dropped to a lower orbit, it would have pulled ahead of the higher space station, and ...

Best video of Soyuz rocket burning up so far

Phil Plait — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 14:00:58 +0000

Assuming you had other things on your mind this past weekend, you may have missed the foofooraw of a Russian rocket booster that re-entered over Europe on Saturday. It was part of a rocket that took new crew up to the International Space Station a few days ago, and was expected to come back down at that time. It was seen by a lot of people, because it happened at 5:30 p.m. local time on a clear night, so a lot of folks were out. It was also bright and spectacular… as you can see for yourself in this amazing footage taken in Germany:

Pretty cool, isn’t it? Make sure to set it to the highest resolution, and make it full screen. When it’s in focus (cameras sometimes have a hard time focusing on objects at infinity) you can see parts of the booster breaking off and making their own trails as they burn up. The bright star passed by the fireball is Jupiter (the two stars above it are part of Aries), and then you can see it pass under the Pleiades, and then the bright star Aldebaran in Taurus.

There are lots of other videos of ...

Colbert on Tyson

Phil Plait — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 14:14:43 +0000

Neil deGrasse Tyson may be the most recognizable astronomer on Earth these days, in part due to his frequent appearances on The Colbert Report. Earlier this year In 2010, Colbert sat down with Neil at the Kimberley Academy in Montclair, New Jersey and chatted with him about life, the Universe, and everything. Colbert did this out of his TV character — well, mostly — and even though it’s over an hour, it’s well worth your time. The original video is on the Hayden Planetarium site, but it’s also all over the place, including YouTube. I’ve embedded it here for your enjoyment, too.

Neil and I agree on a wide variety of topics, and he’s doing a great job inspiring people to look beyond their own immediate surroundings.

Related posts:

- Our Future in Space – panel at TAM 9
- In which I disagree with cartoon Neil Tyson
- SMBC on the brain
- Neil Tyson and I talk time travel

Top 16 Pictures from Space 2011

Phil Plait — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 12:57:48 +0000
Click here to view gallery

Last week’s solar eclipse tripled by Hinode

Phil Plait — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 14:00:42 +0000

Did you know there was a solar eclipse last week? Probably not, since — due to the geometry of the Moon’s orbit around the Earth — it occurred over Antarctica.

However, it was seen by the Japanese Sun-observing satellite Hinode (pronounced, "HEE-no-day"; meaning "sunrise"). As the satellite moved around the Earth, its viewing angle of the Moon changed, so it saw the eclipse not just once but three times, making for a very odd video of the event:

This change in perspective is called parallax, and besides tripling the eclipse fun, it also manifests itself as a severe curve to the Moon’s motion in the video. If the satellite were hovering over the Earth, it would’ve seen just one eclipse as the Moon slowly moved across the Sun’s face (if it had been over Antarctica at the time). But the satellite orbits the Earth at a height of about 700 km (400 miles), moving at several kilometers per second. That motion is reflected in the apparent path of the Moon in the sky, and so it saw not just one but three eclipses. Something like this happened earlier in the year with another solar satellite, and

ESA writes off Phobos-Grunt

Phil Plait — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 21:07:27 +0000

The Russian space probe Phobos-Grunt was an ambitious attempt to send a spacecraft to Mars, land on its moon Phobos, and return a sample to Earth. However, once it achieved low-Earth orbit after launch in November, the rocket that would have sent it on its way to Mars failed to fire, stranding the probe here at Earth. There have been numerous attempts to communicate with Phobos-Grunt, but they have been met with very limited success and most usually failure.

And now another nail has been driven in the coffin: the European Space Agency, which was tasked with spacecraft communications during the cruise phase to Mars, has announced they will no longer try to talk to Phobos-Grunt, declaring the mission "no longer feasible". Ouch.

NASA joined in the effort to talk to the probe, but had to abandon those efforts when the antennae were needed for other missions. It’s unlikely Russia will give up on the mission soon, but my own opinion is that the outlook’s pretty bleak. If they can’t get the probe on its way, or even boosted to a higher orbit, it’ll burn up in an uncontrolled re-entry over Earth sometime in ...

Curiosity on its way to Mars!

Phil Plait — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 14:05:03 +0000

Yesterday morning, NASA successfully launched the Mars Science Laboratory — named Curiosity — toward the fourth planet. If, like me, you missed the launch itself (^%$#@&! sinuses) why then, here’s some pretty dramatic video of the liftoff:

[Make sure to set it to 720p resolution!]

The cool parts to watch are: about 2 minutes in when the booster rockets fall by the wayside; 3:42 when the payload fairing is jettisoned, exposing the Curiosity spacecraft — as seen by the camera onboard the rocket, which is way cool; 4:38 when the entire rocket starts to slowly spin up, providing stabilization and allowing the Sun to heat the assembly evenly; then a few seconds later when the upper stage Centaur rocket ignites, leaving the booster behind (also extremely cool).

But wait! There’s more!

There’s also a video taken a few minutes later, showing the view from the Centaur stage as the Curiosity spacecraft separates, a crucial moment in the mission. The Centaur is what boosted the spacecraft up to speed, putting it on the right trajectory to Mars.

I love that we can get video like this ...

Curiosity launches to Mars on Saturday

Phil Plait — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 18:55:21 +0000

[UPDATE: SUCCESS! The launch was just about perfect, and Curiosity is now on its way to Mars, scheduled to land in August 2012. Congrats to everyone on the mission!]

Tomorrow, Saturday, November 26 at 10:02 Eastern (US) time (15:02 UTC), an Atlas V rocket carrying the Curiosity Mars rover will blast off from Florida, sending the sophisticated rolling lab to the Red Planet.

You can watch the launch live at NASA TV, or I recommend on the NASA/JPL UStream channel. I imagine I’ll be up and tweeting about it, as will my pal Emily Lakdawalla.

It is no exaggeration to say that Curiosity is a huge leap forward for Mars exploration. Designed to last for nearly two years, it’s 3 meters long — the size of a hefty golf cart — and its scientific payload is ten times more massive than its predecessors. It has instruments (PDF) that can sample and taste the air and surface, imagers to provide high resolution stereo pictures, a laser to zap rocks and get their spectra (which yields their composition), and ...

Attend a suborbital rocket meeting, and you might win a seat to space!

Phil Plait — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 16:45:41 +0000

This is not a joke: if you attend the Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference 2012, you could win a seat on an XCOR suborbital rocket flight to space!

I’ll note this conference is a technical meeting for suborbital researchers, so it’s not like Comic Con. Still, I know a lot of scientist-types read this blog, so it’s worth promoting. I attended the meeting here in Boulder in 2010, and it was a fascinating look into a new field of research: science done on crewed suborbital rocket flights, where microgravity (free fall) conditions last for as long as four minutes. That’s long enough to do a lot of interesting work, including astronomy, physics, engineering, and biology.

The meeting is being sponsored by the Southwest Research Institute and many other groups, including XCOR Aerospace, which is developing a reusable suborbital spaceplane that can carry people above the 100 km (62 mile) demarcation line of space. And they’re putting their money where their mouth is: one paid registrant to NSRC 2012 will win a seat on XCOR’s Lynx suborbital vehicle, where they can perform their research. This is a ...

Astronaut snaps amazing pic as ISS cargo ship burns up over Pacific

Phil Plait — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 13:01:28 +0000

On April 27, 2011, a Russian Progress M-10M rocket launched into space from Kazakhstan, carrying supplies for the astronauts aboard the International Space Station. It stayed docked to the ISS for nearly 181 days. On October 29, 2011 — last Saturday — it undocked, empty, filled with a half a year’s worth of cast-off detritus. It performed a routine de-orbit burn, dropped down into the Earth’s atmosphere, and disintegrated as it burned up at 12:54 UTC.

But not before U.S. astronaut Mike Fossum took this incredible picture of it from space:

[Click to embiggen.]

That shot is amazing. You can see the pieces of the spacecraft falling off as it rams through the Earth’s air at Mach 25 or so. You’re probably seeing the solar panels, antennae, and various other external bits being stripped off and leaving their own meteoric trails.

In the case of resupply ships, the time and place they de-orbit is tightly controlled. In this case, as usual, it was sent into the Pacific. That’s generally safe because the ocean is 160+ million square kilometers in area, and much of that real estate is ...

Great news: Russians successfully launch Soyuz rocket to ISS!

Phil Plait — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 12:00:10 +0000

Yesterday, October 30, 2011, the Russian space agency Roscosmos successfully launched a new Progress spacecraft on a Soyuz rocket, the same kind of rocket that failed in August and caused such worry.

This means it looks like the Russians have indeed figured out what went wrong in the previous launch and fixed the issue. I’ll be happier with two successful launches rather than one — they may have gotten it right by accident — but still, I bet a lot of folks at NASA are breathing easier now, and this will ease discussion of de-crewing the ISS, which NASA was considering a few months ago.

The Progress is in orbit and scheduled to dock with the ISS on November 2. It’s carrying nearly 3 tons of food, fuel, and supplies for the astronauts. Because of this success, another rocket launch is planned on November 13, carrying three more astronauts up to ISS. Usually there is a crew of six on board, but three of the six astronauts came home in September, leaving three to stay on ISS until more could be launched. ...

Final: ROSAT came down in the Bay of Bengal

Phil Plait — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 16:32:01 +0000

The German space center DLR is reporting that ROSAT — an astronomical satellite launched in 1990 — re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere just after 01:50 UTC last Sunday, October 23, burning up over the waters of the Bay of Bengal, to the southwest of Thailand. This was during the day, which is why there were no reports of it coming in, and no reports of debris hitting the ground. There are no reports of anyone getting hit, either, of course.

I was thinking about why it’s so hard to know exactly where and when a satellite comes down. New Scientist has a short, to-the-point article about it. In a nutshell, low-Earth orbit satellites like ROSAT are a few hundred kilometers above the Earth’s surface, circling every 1.5 hours or so. The Earth’s atmosphere doesn’t just stop if you go high enough; it thins out slowly, and even at 300 km there is still some air, though incredibly tenuous. However, over days, months, and years, a satellite moving through it feels a drag, feels air resistance. This drops its orbit, putting it into thicker air, which slows it ...

Bad Astronomy » Space

Maiden flight for ESA’s Vega rocket tonight

Another interactive way to scale the Universe

OK, a couple of more things about a Moon base

Video of the lunar far side from GRAIL/Ebb

Q&BA full video chat session online

Weekly Space Roundup for January 19, 2012

What happened to Phobos-Grunt?

Time lapse: Chinese rocket caught on video

Phobos-Grunt to come down today

Stunning view of a bloom from space

Live weekly astronomy roundup on Google+!

Doomed Russian Mars probe seen from the ground

NASA sends GRAIL shaped beacon to the Moon

Cool picture of Expedition 29 on its way home

Best video of Soyuz rocket burning up so far

Colbert on Tyson

Top 16 Pictures from Space 2011

Last week’s solar eclipse tripled by Hinode

ESA writes off Phobos-Grunt

Curiosity on its way to Mars!

Curiosity launches to Mars on Saturday

Attend a suborbital rocket meeting, and you might win a seat to space!

Astronaut snaps amazing pic as ISS cargo ship burns up over Pacific

Great news: Russians successfully launch Soyuz rocket to ISS!

Final: ROSAT came down in the Bay of Bengal