Blogs / Bad Astronomy

German amateur astronomer Bernhard Christ was in the right place at the right time — due to very careful planning and foresight — and captured this astonishing scene:

[Click to embiggen.]

That’s the International Space Station crossing the face of the Moon, what astronomers call a transit (like an eclipse, but when something small goes in front of something big). This image is actually a composite of several images taken in a row, with some sharpening to make it cleaner looking.

The transit only lasted for 0.4 seconds, so Christ had to be on the ball to capture this. He used a digital astronomical camera that can take what is essentially video (really just rapid still shots, but after all that’s what video is), and processed the individual frames. It’s a gorgeous image, with the Moon looking really stunning.

And if you’re wondering why he only got four shots of the ISS, look again: there is a shot of it just inside the limb of the Moon, but it’s low contrast and hard to see. Just follow the path of the ISS as it crosses the Moon and you’ll find it.

My thanks to Herr Doktor Christ for allowing me to post this picture. Well done, and vielen Dank!

NASA has found a significant amount of water ice on the Moon!

Holy Haleakala!

On October 9, the LCROSS spacecraft watched as a Centaur rocket booster slammed into the south pole of the Moon, hoping to determine if any water ice exists under the lunar surface. The idea is that over millions of years, comet impacts and other events have brought water to the Moon. Most of it goes away over time, but if any water happens to accumulate at the bottoms of craters at the poles, where the Sun never shines, it can stay put, frozen forever in shadow. By impacting a spacecraft into the Moon, it can eject the ice where it gets hit by raw sunlight. The water breaks down into hydrogen and hydroxyl molecules (OH-), which can be directly detected.

The target crater, Cabeus, has a temperature on its floor of -230 Celsius, cold enough to store ice. The Centaur slammed into it at high speed, making a new crater about 20 meters across and splashing debris over an even bigger area. A plume went up and out of the crater, and it was that tower of ejected material that had the telltale signs of water. The infrared spectrometer on LCROSS definitely detected absorption lines from water, and the ultraviolet spectrometer saw it in emission. Not only that, the emission got stronger with time, which clinches the deal! That’s exactly what you expect by a plume containing water.

Wow.

The amount of water they found in the plume was a couple of hundred kilograms in total, but that indicates there is a lot more still lying on the surface. They don’t know how much exactly just yet; NASA wanted to release this news as soon as they were sure they had definite results, but there is still much to do. Where did this water come from? How long has it been there? How accessible is it to future astronauts? These questions and more will, hopefully, be answered in the coming weeks and months as the data are analyzed more thoroughly. So stay tuned. There’s lots more good news to come!

Let me show you something. And when I say "something", I mean something.

See the red arrow, and where it’s pointing? That arrow is pointing to a place that changed humanity forever. You can divide all of history between the time before and the time after what happened where that arrow points.

You see, that arrow is pointing to the spot, the very spot, where Neil Armstrong became the first human to step on another world.

Yeah.

This image is from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, and it shows the Apollo 11 landing site. We’ve seen it before, but this time LRO is in its 50 km mapping orbit, so the resolution on this image is far higher — about 50 or so centimeters (20 inches). In this image, the tracks made by Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin as they scampered on the Moon for 2 hours and 31 minutes are obvious. You can even see the lander footpads, each just less than a meter (a bit over a yard) across.

The bright spots south of (below) the lander are various scientific packages they installed, including the Lunar Ranging Retro Reflector and the Passive Seismic Experiment. If I’ve got the scale right, the faint dark trail going to the upper left is where they put the TV camera. Somewhere between that and the lander is the flag. The Sun was shining straight down in this image, so the flag isn’t visible.

The image above is only one part of a bigger shot:

That big feature to the right is West crater. As the astronauts rode the lunar lander down to the surface, Armstrong saw that the computer was going to put them down right in the rubble field west (left) of the crater. He took control, and with literally seconds of fuel left, put the lander safely down where you see it in this image. His cool hand saved the mission; had they landed among the rubble the lander could have hit a boulder, or landed so lopsided they would not have been able to take off again.

Note the picture’s scalebar. If this were the Earth, you could stroll across this image in maybe 10 minutes. Encumbered as they were in their spacesuits, and lacking time, Armstrong and Aldrin never got very far, and certainly not to West crater. Pity; it’s interesting. Look at the rubble around it! Those boulders which almost wiped out our first attempt to land on the Moon must have been excavated by the impact, and would have provided instant insight into the Moon’s deeper layers.

Of course, we went back five more times. There was plenty of interplanetary booty to be nabbed.

I love these pictures from LRO! I’ve waited for years to be able to see images like this, and they are just as I imagined them. And they come at a propitious time, when the fate of our exploration of space is changing rapidly, and decisions on its future are to be made. It’s at just this time we most need to be reminded of what we can do when we strive for what seems to be impossible, and when we set our sights, quite literally, beyond the horizon.

Credit: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University

The hi-res Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter’s camera captured a pretty cool image of a (what I’m guessing is an ancient) landslide on the Moon. Check this out:

[Click to embrobdingnangate.]

The slide is down the steep slope of a crater called Marius, located in Oceanus Procellarum, a vast smooth-surfaced area on the Moon (generally called "maria" — singular is "mare" — and easily visible to the naked eye). The crater itself is pretty old; the floor is covered with the same smooth surface as the mare around it, so it predates Oceanus Procellarum which we know is pretty frakkin’ old.

The slide is very interesting; what could have caused it? A moonquake, or a nearby impact? Either way, the ground shook, knocking loose rubble at the crater rim which then rolled downhill. And just to give you an idea of the scale here, the image is 510 meters across: you could walk that distance in a few minutes. The fingers of debris are only a few dozen meters across at most! The smallest objects you can see in this image are less than a meter across.

Features like this on the Moon yield a lot of information. Better, as the LROC page notes, this feature can be compared to similar ones on Mars, giving scientists insight into both worlds.

And? It’s just really cool. Landslides on the Moon! Look out below!

When NASA slammed the 700 kg (1500 pound) 2400 kg (5200 pound) Centaur rocket booster into the Moon on October 9, the hope was that it would make a plume visible from Earth. Terrestrials were disappointed, however, when none was seen.

However, a better view was to be had by LCROSS, the Lunar Crater Sensing and Observation spacecraft, which shepherded and closely followed the rocket booster, impacting itself just minutes later. From its much closer (and doomed) location it spotted both the plume and the flash of impact! Here’s the plume:

I’ll be honest with you, it’s not much to see. For some reason, the plume was not several kilometers high as hoped, but instead more like only one or maybe two (and, it seems, blocked from our Earthly view by the rim of a crater). In the above image, taken 15 seconds after the booster impact, the plume was 6-8 kilometers wide. The fact that it was not as bright as hoped is itself interesting, however! The actual plume brightness was at the low end of what was expected, which may be due to the nature of the material it slammed into.

There was never really a chance to see the flash from Earth, since it was at the bottom of a crater blocked from our view. But LCROSS was directly above the crater when the Centaur hit, and took several images, including the one shown here right at the moment of impact. This image shows the flash in the mid-infrared, beyond what our eyes can see but where a lot of the energy of the impact went. Other images can be found on the NASA site.

The crater carved out by the Centaur was less than 30 meters across. That’s far too small to be seen from Earth (our limit, even with Hubble, is more than 100 meters in size), but the orbiting Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter should be able to see it easily, and in fact did take observations of the impact just a minute or so after it happened.

All of these data are being analyzed right now. Did any of those instruments see the signature of water in the plume? Did the much larger LCROSS impact (it had a mass of 2000 kg) dig up any water? No one’s telling right now, but I suspect we’ll know soon enough. You can read more about this at Universe Today.

Update: Somehow, in my head, I got the masses of LCROSS and the Centaur reversed. Apologies, and thanks to IVAN3MAN for correcting me!

The instant I saw the avalanche image from the HiRISE camera on-board MRO orbiting Mars, I knew I would have a contender for my Top Ten Astronomy Pictures of 2008.

But then they released this one at the same time:

Yeah, that’s us. That’s home. We were 192 million kilometers (115 million miles) from Mars when HiRISE turned around and took this picture. Right away I could tell that was South America’s west coastline… which is incredible. I also was just starting to wonder about the Moon in the image when I read that it had been brightened artificially to make it easier to see; in general the Earth is 3-4 times more reflective than the Moon, so it’s a lot brighter.

The Mars-Earth-Sun angle was just about 90 degrees when this was taken, which is why the Earth and Moon are half-full. Note that in reality, the Moon is about 30 Earth-diameters away from the Earth, so we’re seeing some perspective here. The Moon was a day before third quarter when this was taken, so it was actually a bit closer to Mars than the Earth was when HiRISE snapped this picture.

Beautiful.

Richard Hoagland, perhaps long ago sensing failure in his "Face on Mars" scheme, started downplaying it in favor of the ridiculous (and easily debunked) "City" on Mars, which then led to his totally over-the-top dumbosity of hyperdimensional physics. All of this, of course, fits (although "jammed-in-to-make-it-fit" would describe it better) into his over-blown conspiracy theory that NASA is Doing Nefarious Things.

RCH’s latest silliness is a book called Dark Mission. In the book, he and his cohort Mike Bara are making the same tired and painfully silly claims that NASA is hiding evidence of alien bases on the Moon, artifacts on Mars, conspiracies that go All The Way To The Top, yadda yadda. He also has a website describing it. Now, if I were to make a website to promote a book, I would take some of the best bits of the book and put them on the site.

Well, if the stuff on the site indeed represents the best examples from the book, I have to assume the rest of the book should have a toxic waste warning. It’s so profoundly goofy that it’s difficult to know where to start. Happily, Hoagland and Bara give me an excellent place to start debunking their goofiness: right on the very first page of the site.

If you go to the Dark Mission website (WARNING: extreme danger for brain cells!), the first image you see is this one:

This image shows astronaut Al Bean from Apollo 12 carrying the ALSEP (Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package). Hoagland cranked the contrast way up to show fainter features. See the pentagonal-shaped glow around Bean? On his website, Hoagland claims that this is actually "a massive tier of ‘glass-like ruins’", indicating — in his mind — that there is evidence of alien artifacts on the Moon. Bara makes this same ridiculous claim elsewhere.

Ignoring for a moment the overwhelmingly obvious problem of being able to see the lines of the pentagon in front of the astronaut — how massive can it be, if it’s between Bean and Pete Conrad (who took the picture)? — and also ignoring the obvious problem that this claim is bug-nut crazy, there is maybe a simple explanation.

The Hasselblad cameras used on Apollo had an iris inside, much like the one in your eye. It can open and close an aperture to let in more or less light. Guess what shape that aperture was? Yup: pentagonal.

That’s no glass ruin. It’s an internal reflection, inside the camera itself.

Mind you, this is the very first picture on Hoagland and Bara’s Dark Mission website. This gives you an idea of just how ridiculous this stuff is. They literally can’t even get the first thing right.

Note added December 18: Some commenters below have noted that in the book, it’s the vertical streamers in the background of the image that Hoagland and Bara cite as evidence for structures on the Moon (and also they do say the pentagon is an internal reflection). That is not at all clear from the page on RCH’s site to which I link, but that’s fine: the streamers are no more evidence of a structure than the pentagon is. Think of it: any structure bigger than a few hundred meters across is easily visible in a telescope, and it escapes me how a giant structure miles across would not have been seen hundreds of years ago by eager astronomers. Oh wait, it doesn’t escape me: Hoagland and Bara are wrong, and are amplifying defects in the images well beyond what is reasonable. This is their standard MO for such things. I stand corrected on the pentagon, but I still say they are dead wrong on just about everything else. And as I note near the bottom of this page; Hoagland is capable of actual image analysis when it suits his cause, but then turns around and does the most ridiculous image manipulation when it suits him as well. I leave it to the reader to draw their conclusions about him from that.

I could go on (and on and on and on), but why bother? Hoagland and Bara, as usual, never come within a glancing blow of reality. Going through the website (gah, the things I do for you BABloggees) is a seemingly endless mind-numbing journey through antiscience claptrap and truly awful claims. Not that I need to tell anyone here, but reading it is likely to melt your brain. You’d be closer to reality watching a few hours of Jerry Springer.

Did you know Hoagland and Bara actually held a press conference for the book? According to Dwayne Day at The Space Review, not only was it a flop, but it showed just how egregious these guys are. You should read Dwayne’s article; it’s great for a schadenfreude laugh or three.

I’m quite sure Hoagland and Bara will do a tour, going to UFO conventions and psychic fares to peddle their bunkum, just as I am quite sure there will be an eager audience lapping it up. Nonsense never ends, my friends. Happily, though, the truth really is out there.