Backlit by sunset over Pluto, NASA’s New Horizon’s probe captured rugged ~11,000ft (3,350m) mountains and wide glaciers of nitrogen ice. To quote Principal Investigator Alan Stern: “Pluto is surprisingly Earth-like…and no one predicted it.” (Full Story)
Credit: Space.com/NASA/JHPL/SWRI/Edited by @SteveSpaleta
In a new video, an enormous cluster of sunspots rotates across the sun’s face before gradually separating into several distinct groups, which also fired off a bunch of solar flares.
The massive grouping took less than a week, from Aug. 21 to Aug. 26, 2015, to travel across the face of the sun. It formed the only significant spots on the sun during that time, and they were imaged by NASA’s orbiting Solar Dynamics Observatory. [Watch the NASA video of the sunspot group’s break-up]
Sunspots are the darker, cooler regions of the sun in the photosphere, the sun’s surface layer. Although they appear dark when compared to the brighter, hotter regions around them, they average around 6,400 degrees Fahrenheit (3,500 degrees Celsius). They form via interactions with the sun’s magnetic field.
The intriguing region in the video produced several medium-size, or M-class, flares, ejecting material from the sun into space. The largest of these was rated as an M-5.6-class flare. The number provides information about the solar flare’s strength; higher numbers mean stronger flares. The strongest flare from the cluster erupted on Aug. 24, peaking at 3:33 a.m. EDT (0733 GMT).
Follow Nola Taylor Redd on Twitter @NolaTRedd. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.
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| A Russian Proton rocket launches the Express AM8 satellite from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Credit: Roscosmos |
PARIS — The successful Proton launch Sept. 14 of the Express AM8 telecommunications satellite completes the most urgent fleet-replenishment requirements and puts Russia’s satellite bandwidth supply into a favorable balance with expected demand, Russia’s two satellite fleet operators said Sept. 16.
The launch, from the Russian-run Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, was the second since Proton’s May failure. The Proton vehicle used a new version of the DM upper stage and not the Breeze-M upper stage that in recent years has replaced DM aboard Proton.
Express AM8 is owned by the Russian Satellite Communications Co. (RSCC) of Moscow, which has suffered from Proton’s error-prone record in the past six years more than any other company.
The 2,100-kilogram Express AM8 was built by ISS Reshetnev of Krasnoyarsk, Russia, and carries a C-, Ku- and L-band payload provided by Thales Alenia Space of France and Italy, a longstanding Reshetnev partner. The satellite is designed to deliver 5.9 kilowatts of power to its payload at the end of its 15-year service life.
Express AM8’s 28 C-band transponders will be dedicated to two beams, one including Europe, Africa and the Middle East, and a second in Latin America with a stretch of the U.S. East Coast.
The satellite’s 20 Ku-band transponders will be devoted to three beams, over Europe and the Middle East, Africa and the Middle East, and Latin America and the eastern United States. The three L-band transponders will be used for secure government communications.
The satellite’s arrival at 14 degrees west “paves the way for RSCC to the regional market of Latin America, and provides additional opportunities to develop business in Africa, Europe and the Middle East,” RSCC Chief Executive Yuri Prokhorov said in a Sept. 15 statement.
The satellite is part of the Russian government’s 2009-2015 television and radio broadcasting development program, with non-Russian beams to be commercialized by RSCC.
The launch, combined with recent launches of telecommunications satellites for Gazprom Space Systems of Moscow, Russia’s second main fleet operator, has made up for the capacity shortage provoked by several Proton failures, said Dmitry Sevastiyanov, director-general of Gazprom Space Systems.
“There is now plenty of capacity over the Russian market,” Sevastiyanov said here Sept. 16. He said the problem for his company, as is true to some extent for RSCC, is how to recover satellite costs — some incurred in euros — from a market in which the Russian ruble has declined sharply against the euro and the U.S. dollar.
Raising transponder-lease rates to Russian customers is something both companies prefer to avoid in rural Russia, Sevastiyanov said.
RSCC Chief Financial Officer Dennis Pivnyuk said RSCC’s fleet was slightly less than 70 percent full before the Express AM8 launch. Pivnyuk said the Russian market is characterized by a wide variation in the prices paid for transponder capacity. In some regions it is around $1,000 per megahertz per month, while in other regions it is $3,000.
This story was provided by SpaceNews, dedicated to covering all aspects of the space industry.
A spectacular new image from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft shows Pluto in an entirely new light.
The photo, which New Horizons took during its epic July 14 flyby of Pluto, captures a gorgeous sunset view. Towering ice mountains cast long shadows, and more than a dozen layers of the dwarf planet’s wispy atmosphere are clearly visible.
“This image really makes you feel you are there, at Pluto, surveying the landscape for yourself,” New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, said in a statement today (Sept. 17). “But this image is also a scientific bonanza, revealing new details about Pluto’s atmosphere, mountains, glaciers and plains.” [See more Pluto photos by New Horizons]
New Horizons captured the panorama, which covers a stretch of land 780 miles (1,250 kilometers) across, using the probe’s wide-angle Ralph/Multispectral Visual Imaging Camera on July 14, just 15 minutes after closest approach to Pluto.
The spacecraft turned back and looked toward the sun, snapping the photo at a distance of just 11,000 miles (18,000 km) from the dwarf planet, NASA officials said. (At closest approach, New Horizons was about 7,800 miles, or 12,550 km, from Pluto’s surface.)
The result was a new perspective on Pluto’s Norgay Montes and Hillary Montes, two ranges of ice mountains that rise up to 11,000 feet (3,500 meters) above the dwarf planet’s frigid surface. The backlit photo also reveals new details about Pluto’s nitrogen-dominated atmosphere, showing many different layers, extending from ground-bound fog to wispy tendrils more than 60 miles (100 km) up.
“In addition to being visually stunning, these low-lying hazes hint at the weather changing from day to day on Pluto, just like it does here on Earth,” Will Grundy, leader of New Horizons’ composition team from Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, said in the same statement.
The new panorama and other recently downloaded New Horizons images also shed light on how ice — likely made of nitrogen and other materials rather than water — flows into a vast, flat glacial plain known as Sputnik Planum. Some of Sputnik Planum’s ice apparently evaporates, gets deposited in a region of rough terrain to the east and then flows back down into the plain as glaciers, via a system of valleys.
These glaciers are similar to those seen in Greenland and Antarctica here on Earth, researchers said.
“We did not expect to find hints of a nitrogen-based glacial cycle on Pluto operating in the frigid conditions of the outer solar system,” said Alan Howard of the University of Virginia, a member of the mission’s geology, geophysics and imaging team. “Driven by dim sunlight, this would be directly comparable to the hydrological cycle that feeds ice caps on Earth, where water is evaporated from the oceans, falls as snow and returns to the seas through glacial flow.”
“Pluto is surprisingly Earth-like in this regard, and no one predicted it,” Stern added.
New Horizons beamed the new backlit panorama home to mission control on Sunday (Sept. 13), and NASA released the photo today.
The world can expect to see many more stunning new views from the Pluto flyby over the coming year or so. New Horizons relayed just 5 percent of its flyby data back in the immediate aftermath of the close encounter, keeping the vast majority on board for later transmission. That data dump began in earnest earlier this month and is expected to take about 12 months, New Horizons team members have said.
Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.
Lead actor Matt Damon describes how Ridley Scott’s film – and Andy Weir’s book – can perk students’ curiosity, in this conversation with Space.com’s @DavidSkyBrody at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab. Also discussed: inhabiting a snarky character, astronauts (and actors) on too much time away from home, and the search for water worlds in space.
The movie is based on author Andy Weir’s book. [Read the first chapter of the ‘The Martian’ on Space.com]
Credit: Space.com / 20th Century Fox
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| High-school freshman Ahmed Mohamed was arrested Monday for bringing a clock he built to school after it was mistaken for a bomb. Scientists, engineers and tech organizations have responded en masse with their support. Credit: The Dallas Morning News (via YouTube) |
NASA, Obama, MIT and more hailed teenaged Ahmed Mohamed, who was arrested at school Monday when teachers mistook his homemade electronic clock for a bomb.
Social media quickly picked up the Texas teen’s cause with the marker #IStandWithAhmed, garnering offers to visit NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, MIT, Google and the White House, a scholarship to Space Camp, and even am astronaut’s NASA shirt that’s flown in space (to complement the one he was wearing during his arrest).
NASA reaffirmed their support of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) curriculums, saying they hope to inspire kids like Ahmed.
We’re supporters of #STEM & inspiring kids like Ahmed to pursue their dreams. Get involved: http://t.co/Bye4JcO1Ho pic.twitter.com/XEHsZs21sS
— NASA (@NASA) September 16, 2015
Bobak Ferdowski, NASA’s ‘Mohawk Guy’ systems engineer at JPL who worked on landing the Curiosity Mars rover, offered his support, saying he might not have worked at NASA at all if he’d faced a similar situation.
I can’t imagine if be working @nasa today if anything like this had ever happened to me. http://t.co/OajWwPXchB #IStandWithAhmed
— Bobak Ferdowsi (@tweetsoutloud) September 16, 2015
Hey Ahmed, give me a call in a couple years. We could always use smart, curious & creative people. https://t.co/02a4feMrk5
— Bobak Ferdowsi (@tweetsoutloud) September 16, 2015
President Obama offered his encouragement, as well.
Cool clock, Ahmed. Want to bring it to the White House? We should inspire more kids like you to like science. It’s what makes America great.
— President Obama (@POTUS) September 16, 2015
Those invitations were joined by a few more: visits to MIT, Facebook and Google, to name a few (and an offer from R&B singer Ne-Yo), as well as an offer for a Twitter internship. It looks like he’ll take up at least one of those invites.
@IBJIYONGI @anildash I would love to!! MIT is my dream school.
— Ahmed Mohamed (@IStandWithAhmed) September 16, 2015
(He also got an in-person invite to the school’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research and Center for Theoretical Physics during an interview, saying that he is “the kind of student [they] want.”)
As a NASA fan, Mohamed has been offered a scholarship to space camp as well — from Homer Hickam, former NASA engineer and author of “Rocket Boys,” which became the movie “October Sky.” In 2013, Hickam offered such a scholarship to Kiera Wilmot, a high school student arrested after a science experiment done on school grounds exploded.
@SpaceCampUSA My co-creators at http://t.co/VAytd0lYUx have offered Ahmed a scholarship at Space Camp just as we did for Keira Wilmot.
— Homer Hickam (@HomerHickam) September 16, 2015
Canadian astronaut and space popularizer Chris Hadfield, known for his videos filmed in space, sent along an invitation to his science show in Toronto.
Hi @IStandWithAhmed ! I’d love you to join us for our science show Generator in Toronto on 28 Oct. There’s a ticket waiting for you.
— Chris Hadfield (@Cmdr_Hadfield) September 16, 2015
And in case he needs an upgrade to his now iconic NASA shirt, Mohamed has at least one space-faring alternative, from astronaut Dan Tani:
Looks like Ahmed might need a new NASA shirt. I can give him one of mine – that flew in space! #IStandWithAhmed pic.twitter.com/I5aluiw24C
— Daniel Tani (@Astro_Tani) September 16, 2015
Email Sarah Lewin at slewin@space.com or follow her @SarahExplains. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.
Just 15 minutes after its closest approach to Pluto on July 14, 2015, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft looked back toward the sun and captured this near-sunset view of the rugged, icy mountains and flat ice plains extending to Pluto’s horizon.
ESA deploys ‘big iron’ to communicate with its deep-space missions: three 35 m-diameter dishes employing some of the world’s most advanced tracking technology. And it’s about to get a boost.
ESA’s three Deep Space Antenna stations at New Norcia, Australia, Cebreros, Spain and Malargüe, Argentina, beam commands and receive data from spacecraft voyaging hundreds of millions of kilometres into our Solar System.
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| Astrophotographer Maxwell Palau captured this view of a total lunar eclipse from San Diego, California, on Oct. 8, 2014. Credit: Maxwell Palau/StarDude Astronomy |
This month’s highly anticipated “supermoon eclipse” may be a magical treat for skywatchers, but there’s nothing supernatural about the event.
On Sept. 27, skywatchers throughout North and South America, Europe, Africa, western Asia and the eastern Pacific Ocean region will witness a total eclipse that happens to occur when the moon looks abnormally large and bright in Earth’s sky. It will be the first supermoon eclipse since 1982, and the last until 2033.
This rare celestial phenomenon has its roots in the moon’s elliptical orbit around Earth. [Supermoon Lunar Eclipse: Complete Blood Moon Coverage]
“When the moon is farthest away, it’s known as apogee, and when it’s closest, it’s known as perigee,” Noah Petro, deputy project scientist for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in a statement. “On Sept. 27, we’re going to have a perigee full moon — the closest full moon of the year.”
The moon is about 31,000 miles (50,000 kilometers) closer to Earth at perigee than it is at apogee. As a result, perigee full moons, also known as supermoons, appear about 14 percent bigger and 30 percent brighter in the sky than do apogee full moons (which are also called minimoons).
“There’s no physical difference in the moon,” Petro said. “It just appears slightly bigger in the sky. It’s not dramatic, but it does look larger.”
“Normal” total lunar eclipses — which occur when the Earth, moon and sun align, and the moon passes completely into Earth’s shadow — aren’t terribly uncommon: On average, a skywatcher in a given location on Earth can expect to see one of these events every 2.5 years or so.
But it is uncommon for a total lunar eclipse to coincide with a supermoon. There have been just five such events since 1900 (in 1910, 1928, 1946, 1964 and 1982), NASA officials have said.
Rarity does not imply anything inexplicable, however.
“It’s just planetary dynamics. The orbit of the moon around Earth is inclined to the axis of Earth, and the orbital plane of all these things just falls into place every once in a while,” Petro said. “When the rhythms line up, you might get three to four eclipses in a row, or a supermoon and an eclipse happening.”
The supermoon will begin to dim slightly at 8:11 p.m. EDT on Sept. 27 (0011 GMT on Sept. 28), NASA officials said. The total eclipse will start at 10:11 p.m. EDT (0211 GMT), and it will last 72 minutes.
Editor’s note: If you capture an amazing view of the supermoon lunar eclipse or any other night sky view that you would like to share with Space.com for a possible story or gallery, send images and comments to managing editor Tariq Malik at: spacephotos@space.com.
Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.
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| This SpaceX conceptual illustration depicts how the private spacecraft company plans to send their Dragon capsule to Mars. Image released Sept. 14, 2015. Credit: SpaceX (via Flickr as SpaceX Photos) |
A gallery of gorgeous new images shows a cone-shaped space capsule shooting like a meteor through the atmosphere of Mars, and descending quickly toward the surface before its thrusters set it down gently in the middle of a rocky, uninhabited landscape. The human crew prepares to set food on the Red Planet.
The images are only artist’s renderings, of course — humans have not yet made it to Mars. The gorgeous gallery was released on the Flickr page of the private Spaceflight company SpaceX, and shows what it might look like if and when the company’s Dragon crew capsule makes a trip to the Red Planet. You can see all of the new images in our full Crew Dragon photo gallery.
From early in its creation, SpaceX has made clear that one of its central goals is to set up human colonies on Mars. Test flights have already begun on the Dragon capsule, so it’s possible that the gorgeous scenes captured in this stunning and incredibly realistic image series could already be on the horizon.
The new SpaceX images on Flickr show the dry, rocky Martian landscape as it often looks in images captured by NASA’s Curiosity rover and other robots on the surface of the Red Planet.
NASA scientists have studied the possibility of using a robotic version of its Dragon capsule in a mission to bring samples of Martian soil and rock back to Earth. The “Red Dragon” project, which is only in the concept stage, would pick up samples collected by NASA’s 2020 Mars rover. This could help tremendously in the search for ancient life on Mars. Finding signs of ancient organisms in the Martian soil will likely be an extremely delicate task and will require that the samples be analyzed in advanced laboratories on Earth.
Part of SpaceX’s plan for human spaceflight involves making its powerful Falcon 9 rockets reusable. In theory, the rocket’s first-stage boosters would shoot the payload into space and then land safely on a ship, rather than falling into the ocean and being discarded. The company has attempted to land the reusable stage of the Falcon rocket on two occasions, without success.
NASA, meanwhile, has also discussed a human mission to Mars but has not made any solid mission plans. However, the space agency has said that the primary goal of the one-year mission aboard the International Space Station is to learn about how long-duration spaceflight affects the human body. NASA astronaut Scott Kelly and cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko, are halfway through their nearly yearlong stay aboard the station. Using current technology, experts estimate that a trip to Mars would require more than a year in travel each way..
Follow Calla Cofield @callacofield. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.
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| An artist’s impression of the completed Square Kilometer Array, which will be constructed in South Africa and Western Australia. Credit: SKA Organisation |
A huge telescope array will allow scientists to conduct the most sensitive and exhaustive search for signs of alien civilizations to date when it comes online, the project’s backers say.
The Square Kilometer Array (SKA), currently planned to begin construction in 2018, could enable the search for intelligent alien life to piggy-back on other scientific observations, scouring the galaxy with unprecedented precision.
“A unique aspect for the search of life in the universe is the question of whether advanced lifeevolves intelligence,” Andrew Siemion said at the Astrobiology Science Conference in Chicago in June. [13 Ways to Hunt Intelligent Alien Life]
Siemion, who holds joint appointments with the University of California, Berkeley, the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy and Radbound University in the Netherlands, hunts for signs of alien technology in the universe.
“The only way to answer that in the foreseeable future is to look directly for evidence” of intelligence, Siemion said. “For that, you need a large telescope.”
Do you believe alien life exists elsewhere in the universe?
The Square Kilometer Array is an enormous radio telescope that will be built in South Africa and Australia. Funded by a consortium of different countries, the SKA will combine thousands of small antennaeacross the globe instead of a single large dish, allowing unprecedented sensitivity in radio astronomy.
Using such a costly instrument for a single scientific study, especially one as speculative as the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), is unheard of in astronomy. But SETI scientists figured out a way to obtain significant telescope time nearly 30 years ago, when they began to piggy-back on other users’ observations at the enormous Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, duplicating their observations with very little loss of sensitivity. Today, SETI researchers are able to obtain thousands of hours of observations annually, which they diligently scrutinize for radio signals from beyond Earth.
According to Siemion, data from the SKA could be similarly piggy-backed. But while Arecibo utilizes a single large dish, the SKA will be much larger than the biggest radio telescope operating today, allowing scientists to search for fainter signals.
Construction on the SKA should begin in 2018. The first phase, planned for completion by 2020, would allow for about 10 percent of the collecting area of the full instrument at low and mid-range frequencies.
According to a paper Siemion authored last fall, a five-year campaign by the first phase of the SKA could allow scientists to survey more than 10,000 stars. When completed, the SKA could detect signals as faint as those emitted by aircraft radars on Earth from every star within almost 200 light-years.
Earth began leaving its mark in the galaxy when humanity started transmitting signals by radio. These signals radiate outward from the planet, and could theoretically be detected by other civilizations. Given the enormous size of the spectrum that radio waves cover, scientists have suggested a number of preferred frequencies to hunt for extraterrestrial communication. [The Serious Search for Intelligent Life: 4 Key Questions (Video)]
As technology has improved on Earth, however, humanity has begun to reduce the radio-wave leakage into space. This could suggest that the window for observing accidentally broadcast signals is brief — perhaps only a century or so. While scientists still hope to detect such signals, they also aim to find deliberately transmitted radio waves, which have been designed to travel through space.
The SKA concentrates on a frequency region known as the “terrestrial microwave window,” the spectral region of low natural noise between the galactic background and the emission and absorption of water and oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere. These frequencies can travel through the space between stars and through the water-laden atmosphere of Earth or any other planet with ease, leading scientists to suspect that distant civilizations might use them to communicate.
SETI scientists aren’t just searching for signals broadcast at random. They also hope to eavesdrop on interplanetary communications.
If alien technology spreads to multiple planets within a single system, it is feasible to expect these various outposts to communicate with one another. If those planets lie along Earth’s line of sight, and observations are made when the planets are communicating with each other, it is possible that the SKA could pick up those broadcasts, researchers said.
In addition to the recent spate of planets unearthed by NASA’s Keplermission, the European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecrat and future missions such as NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite(TESS) could produce a catalog of properly aligned planetary systems to watch. Life-hunting researchers have already begun eavesdropping on some of Kepler’s discoveries, for example.
“We’re going to have all kinds of data to figure out how to build these databases in coming years,” Siemion said.
Although the terrestrial microwave window will be the primary focus of the SETI search with the SKA, Siemion cautions that it is not the only potential signal for communication.
“We don’t know exactly what E.T. is going to do,” he said.
Follow Nola Taylor Redd on Twitter @NolaTRedd or Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.
Technology image of week: BepiColombo mission modules set be on show during the ESTEC Open Day
On Nov. 12th, 2014, the European Space Agency’s Rosetta probe deployed its lander to the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Seven images were taken by Philae’s ROLIS instrument from 219 Feet (67 meters) to 30 Feet (9 meters) of the surface of the comet. The images have been used to create a real-time look at the descent from the lander perspective.
Credit: ESA/Rosetta/Philae/ROLIS/DLR, Stefano Mottola/Jakub Knapik, Platige Image/Sarah Poletti and Marc Thiebaut (ATG/medialab for ESA)/Music: “Saline” (instrumental version), from “Experiments in Mass Appeal”, Frost*/Jem Godfrey