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Hubble Treasures Contest: iPad And iPod Touch Up For Grabs | Video | Space.com - 0 views

  • Over a million observations of the Universe have been made by the Hubble Space Telescope. Spacetelescope.org is asking the public to sift through the archives, adjust the colors of their favorite photos with an online tool, and submit to the contest
  • Over a million observations of the Universe have been made by the Hubble Space Telescope. Spacetelescope.org is asking the public to sift through the archives, adjust the colors of their favorite photos with an online tool, and submit to the contest
  • Spacetelescope.org
Mars Base

Students: Asteroid 1999 RQ36 Needs a New Name! - 0 views

  • NASA and the Planetary Society are giving students worldwide the opportunity to name an asteroid
  • an upcoming NASA mission will return samples of this asteroid to Earth
  • Origins-Spectral Interpretation-Resource Identification-Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) will be heading to an asteroid, currently named (101955) 1999 RQ36
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  • Scheduled to launch in 2016
  • NASA also is planning a crewed mission to an asteroid by 2025
  • competition is open to students under age 18 from anywhere in the world
  • Each contestant can submit one name, up to 16 characters long
  • must include a short explanation and rationale for the name
  • Submissions must be made by an adult on behalf of the student. The contest deadline is Sunday, Dec. 2, 2012
  • sponsored by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington; and the University of Arizona in Tucson
  • A panel will review proposed asteroid names. First prize will be awarded to the student who recommends a name that is approved by the International Astronomical Union Committee for Small-Body Nomenclature
  • asteroid was discovered in 1999
  • received its designation of (101955) 1999 RQ36 from the Minor Planet Center, operated by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory
Mars Base

Contest Challenges Students to Design Next Mars Rover | University Rover Challenge | Sp... - 0 views

  • The competition is hosted by the Mars Society, a non-profit research organization dedicated to promoting the exploration and eventual settlement of Mars
  • The competition site is located at the society's Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS), a rocky barren landscape that's about as close to Martian terrain as you can get on Earth
  • Each team was allowed to spend up to $15,000 on their rovers, which can weigh no more than 50 kilograms — about 110 lbs.
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  • vehicles
  • compete in four challenges, designed to replicate the activities of NASA's rovers on Mars.
  • teams will guide their rovers to collect the subsurface soil samples most likely to contain photosynthetic bacteria, lichen and other bits of living material
  • specific tasks change each year, but the most difficult ones continue to be those that need rovers to do humanlike work
  • team members must guide their rovers via a remote connection, such as a computer in the back of a truck, as long as it's shielded so the team can't see their rovers
  • The URC is based on the assumption that the rovers are telerobots, which means they would be operated by astronauts on or orbiting Mars
  • In addition to collecting soil, the rovers will deliver a series of packages, such as emergency supplies to "astronauts" (URC staff) in the field, fix a dust-covered solar panel (without water, of course) and finally, navigate an obstacle course that will include climbing steep grades, getting over boulders and passing through PVC pipe gates, aimed to test each rover's maneuverability.
  • This year's teams represent universities and colleges in Canada, India, Poland and the United States
  • including two-time returning champions Toronto's York University (2012 and 2009) and Oregon State (2010 and 2008).
Mars Base

Hubble's Hidden Treasures 2012 | ESA/Hubble - 0 views

  • Since 1990, Hubble has made more than a million observations
  • the most stunning are in our Top 100 gallery and iPad app.
  • Searching Hubble’s archive for hidden treasures is a lot of fun, and it’s pretty straightforward, even if you don’t have advanced knowledge
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  • prepared some tutorials to get you started with searching the archive
  • Hubble’s Hidden Treasures 2012: Find and tweak Hubble observations using a set of simple online tools. It’s easy and fun, and anyone can take part. Top prize: Apple iPod Touch and goodies
  • Hubble’s Hidden Treasures 2012 Image Processing: Find Hubble observations and then process them using professional astronomical imaging software. An extra challenge for amateur astronomers or people keen to learn about astronomical image processing. Top prize: Apple iPad and goodies
  • you’re playing with real data from the world’s most famous astronomical observatory
Mars Base

Join the 2012 Hubble's Hidden Treasures Competition | ESA/Hubble - 0 views

  • hidden in Hubble’s huge data archives are still some truly breathtaking images that have never been seen in public
  • Hubble’s Hidden Treasures
  • inviting the public into Hubble’s vast science archive to dig out the best unseen Hubble images
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  • you could win an iPod Touch in our Hubble’s Hidden Treasures Competition.
  • Download the data from the Hubble Legacy Archive, process using powerful open-source software such as the ESO/ESA/NASA FITS Liberator and make a beautiful image for our Hubble’s Hidden Treasures Image Processing Contest Flickr group.
  • you’ll be in with a chance to win an iPad.
  • Both parts of the Hubble’s Hidden Treasures competition close on 31 May 2012
  • The best datasets that you identify will also be featured as future pictures of the week and photo releases on spacetelescope.org.
Mars Base

How to find hidden treasures in the archive | ESA/Hubble - 0 views

  • How to find hidden treasures in the archive
  • The main interface to get at the Hubble data is the Hubble Legacy Archive website.
  • search box lets you look for objects based on their name or coordinates
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  • advanced search option is useful to restrict the search to specific instruments (cameras) on Hubble
  • recommend narrowing your search to give only results from ACS, WFC3 and WFPC2 – Hubble’s general purpose cameras.
  • Universe is a big place
  • there are many, many objects which Hubble has never studied
  • not all of Hubble’s observations are images
  • most observations are only released to the public a year after they have been made
  • scientists get the first chance to work with their data. These are marked “proprietary data, no preview”.
  • several options for how to display the results
  • easiest is to click on the images tab, which gives you preview images of all the results
  • Another useful view is the footprints tab, which shows the location of Hubble’s images overlaid on an image of the part of the sky where they are located
  • in most cases) offer an option to open the interactive display
  • opens the interactive tool which you can use to look at the image in more detail, and carry out basic image processing such as adjusting the zoom and changing the contrast and colour balance
  • lets you save your work as a JPEG.
  • process is entirely browser-based, and you need no special software
  • You can also download the data in FITS format
  • can then use
  • FITS Liberator
  • Photoshop
  • more sophisticated image processing
Mars Base

What is image processing? | ESA/Hubble - 0 views

  • What is image processing?
  • Hubble takes pictures which capture many more colours and gradations of light and dark than the human eye (or consumer digital cameras) can see
  • are also quirks in how its cameras work
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  • designed to make scientifically useful observations rather than being optimised for pretty pictures.
  • most of these quirks have already been corrected in the data you find in the archive,
  • images are still scientific data rather than photographs like those from a normal digital camera
  • still contain far more information than the eye can see.
  • beautiful Hubble images that we all know have all been extensively tweaked and optimised by hand, in order to reveal as much of the data as possible
  • brightening the glowing gas in nebulae or compressing the dynamic range of galaxy images so that the core and spiral arms can both be seen equally clearly
  • Image processing is the name for this process of selecting data, adjusting colour, contrast and dynamic range to reveal the hidden detail in Hubble’s scientific data.
Mars Base

Santorini Bulges as Magma Balloons Underneath - 0 views

  • Santorini locals began to suspect last year that something was afoot with the volcano under their Greek island group
  • Wine glasses occasionally vibrated and clinked in cafes, suggesting tiny tremors, and tour guides smelled strange gasses.
  • satellite radar technology has revealed the source of the symptoms. A rush of molten rock swelled the magma chamber under the volcano by some 13 to 26 million cubic yards (10 to 20 million cubic meters)—about 15 times the volume of London's Olympic Stadium—between January 2011 and April 2012
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  • even forced parts of the island's surface to rise upward and outward by 3 to 5.5 inches (8 to 14 centimeters).
  • volcano has been quiet for 60 years
  • recent events don't indicate an imminent eruption
  • the earthquake activity and the rate of bulging have both slowed right down in the last few months, it doesn't look as though the volcano is about to start to erupt, and it is quite likely that it could remain quiet for another few years or decades.
  • don't know enough about the lifecycle of large volcanoes in between eruptions to be certain
  • beginning in the January 2011 data, more than a thousand small quakes, most of them imperceptible
  • confirmed a subtle rise in Santorini's surface level with satellite radar images and GPS receivers
  • Catastrophic eruptions on Santorini, which produce mostly pumice rather than lava, appear to occur here about 20,000 years apart
  • The last one, in 1950, oozed enough lava to cover a few tennis courts
  • Despite its relative quiet, Santorini is an ideal location to learn more about processes like the magma chamber's rapid inflation
  • While satellite evidence of swelling magma chambers has rarely been available for an active volcano, the processes the data represent may not be all that unusual
  • some large volcanoes like Santorini and Yellowstone spend hundreds or thousands of years in a state of what you'd call dormancy
  • they'll often have these little restless patches
  • These types of phenomena are likely to be common, but you need the right instruments and technology to detect what are usually rather small changes in behavior."
  • we aren't any closer to knowing if, or when, the next lava eruption might happen
  • likening the recent swelling to someone blowing a big breath into an invisible balloon.
  • don't know how small or big the balloon is, and we don't know whether just one more breath will be enough for it to pop or not
Mars Base

collectSPACE - news - "NASA's Curiosity rover flying to Mars with Obama's, others' auto... - 0 views

  • on the rover's deck
  • is a plaque inscribed with the signatures of President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, in addition to other administration and NASA leaders
  • continues a more than 40-year tradition of sending presidential plaques on planetary missions
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  • Elsewhere on the rover is the autograph of the 14-year-old girl from Kansas who gave Curiosity its name
  • millions of digital signatures from members of the public who signed up through NASA
  • NASA's Mars program leaders round out the autographs on the plate
  • It's on the rover in the front left corner
  • it will be visible and that at some point will be photographed on Mars by Curiosity's camera-topped mast
  • "When we made the request to the White House for permission to launch, we took this along with us and said, 'Oh by the way, if you sign this we will stick it on the rover.'"
  • Clara Ma, who won NASA's naming contest with the suggestion of "Curiosity," signed the rover in 2009
  • As part of her prize, she was invited to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, where in June 2009 she donned a "bunny suit" to step into a clean room and sign her name on the rover
  • Silicon chips attached to Curiosity's deck bear the digital signatures of people who submitted their names through NASA's website for going to Mars aboard the rover. Each chip is about the size of a dime
  • More than 1.24 million names were submitted online
  • etched into silicon using an electron-beam machine used for fabricating micro-devices at JPL
  • more than 20,000 visitors to locations of work on the rover at JPL and Kennedy Space Center wrote their names on pages, which were scanned and reproduced at microscopic scale on another chip
  • As Curiosity drives over the martian terrain, the groves in each wheel will form a string of 'dash' and 'dot' imprints — morse code that will spell out "J-P-L."
Mars Base

Mars Science Laboratory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

  • Launch vehicle Atlas V 541
  • Mission duration 668 Martian sols (686 Earth days)
  • Landing August 5, 2012 (planned
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  • Mass 900 kg (2,000 lb)[
  • Power Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator (RTG)
  • the general public had an opportunity to rank nine finalist names through a public poll on the NASA website
  • Curiosity was selected, which was submitted by a sixth-grader, Clara Ma, from Kansas in an essay contest
  • 10 ft (3.0 m) in length
  • radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs), as used by the successful Mars landers Viking 1 and Viking 2 in 1976
  • Radioisotope power systems are generators that produce electricity from the natural decay of plutonium-238, which is a non-fissile isotope of plutonium used in power systems for NASA spacecraft. Heat given off by the natural decay of this isotope is converted into electricity, providing constant power during all seasons and through the day and night, and waste heat can be used via pipes to warm systems, freeing electrical power for the operation of the vehicle and instruments
  • designed to produce 125 watts of electrical power from about 2000 watts of thermal power at the start of the mission
  • lifetime of 14 years, electrical power output is down to 100 watts
  • "Rover Compute Element" (RCE), contain radiation hardened memory to tolerate the extreme radiation environment from space and to safeguard against power-off cycles
  • 256 kB of EEPROM, 256 MB of DRAM, and 2 GB of flash memory
Mars Base

Spectacular Liftoff Thrusts China's First Rover 'Yutu' to the Moon - 0 views

  • China successfully launched its first ever lunar rover bound for the Moon’s surface aboard a Long March rocket
  • at 1:30 a.m. Beijing local time, Dec. 2, 2013 (12:30 p.m. EST, Dec. 1) from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southwest China.
  • The name for the ‘Yutu’ rover – which translates as ‘Jack Rabbit’ – was chosen after a special naming contest involving a worldwide poll and voting to select the best name
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  • ‘Yutu’ stems from a Chinese fairy tale, in which the goddess Chang’e flew off to the moon taking her little pet Jade rabbit with her.
  • The Chang’e 3 lander will fire thrusters to enter lunar orbit on Dec. 6.
  • It is due to make a powered descent to the lunar surface on Dec. 14, firing thrusters at an altitude of 15 km (9 mi) for touchdown in a preselected area called the Bay of Rainbows or Sinus Iridum region.
  • If successful, the Chang’e 3 mission will mark the first soft landing on the Moon since the Soviet Union’s unmanned Luna 24 sample return vehicle landed nearly four decades ago back in 1976.
  • Jack Rabbit measures 150 centimeters high and weighs approximately 120 kilograms
  • The rover and lander are equipped with multiple cameras, spectrometers, an optical telescope, radar and other sensors to investigate the lunar surface and composition
  • The rover is expected to continue operating for at least three months
  • The next step will be an unmanned lunar sample return mission, perhaps around 2020
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