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Mars Base

NASA: Donated NRO Space Telescopes 'Came Out of the Blue' | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/y-space-telescopes-budget.html

scibyte51 hubble SpaceTelescope

shared by Mars Base on 15 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • A pair of space telescopes that were donated to NASA from the secretive National Reconnaissance Office could be repurposed for a wide variety of science missions
  • it will likely be years before the agency's budget can accommodate them.  
  • two spy satellite telescopes were originally built
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • but they were never used
  • June 4, NASA announced its acquisition of the telescopes, and the agency's intention to use them for future astronomical research
  • The two telescopes have main mirrors that measure nearly 8 feet wide (2.4 meters), making them comparable to the veteran Hubble Space Telescope, which was launched into orbit 22 years ago. Grunsfeld called the donated optical hardware "very high quality."
  • currently being stored in Rochester, N.Y., in facilities belonging to the hardware's manufacturer,
  • cost to keep them in storage is about $70,000 a year
  • not insignificant, but it's not something that's unmanageable
  • One possible application for the telescopes is as a base for NASA's Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST), which is being designed to hunt for dark energy
  • Given budget projections for the next several years
  • in an extremely confined fiscal environment
  • NASA does not anticipate being able to dedicate any funding to the newly acquired telescopes until the James Webb Space Telescope successfully launches
  • In the meantime, NASA is investigating different uses for the telescopes, and hopes to have input from the scientific community to guide the decision-making process
  • Mars Base on 15 Jun 12
     
    Grunsfeld co-hosted a town hall-style gathering Tuesday (June 12) to discuss NASA's budget and plans here at the 220th meeting of the American Astronomical Society.
Chris Fisher

NASA gets two military spy telescopes for astronomy - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...gJQAsT6UDV_print.html

nasa military telescopes

shared by Chris Fisher on 04 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • NASA officials stressed that they do not have a program to launch even one telescope at the moment, and that at the very earliest, under reasonable budgets, it would be 2020 before one of the two gifted telescopes could be in order. Asked whether anyone at NASA was popping champagne, the agency’s head of science, John Grunsfeld, answered, “We never pop champagne here; our budgets are too tight.”
  • The unexpected gift offers NASA an opportunity to resurrect a plan to launch a new telescope to study the mysterious “dark energy” that is causing the universe’s expansion to accelerate.
  • The two new telescopes — which so far don’t even have names, other than Telescope One and Telescope Two — would be ready to go into space but for two hitches
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • First, they don’t have instruments. There are no cameras, spectrographs or other instruments that a space telescope typically needs.
  • Second, they don’t have a program, a mission or a staff behind them. They’re just hardware.
  • “Instead of losing a terrific telescope, you now have two telescopes even better to replace it with,” Spergel said.
Mars Base

NASA Mulling Missions for Donated Spy Telescopes | National Reconnaissance Office | Spa... - 0 views

www.space.com/llite-telescopes-missions.html

scibyte93

shared by Mars Base on 04 May 13 - No Cached
  • NASA is sorting through a variety of possible uses for a pair of powerful spy satellite telescopes
  • SA asked scientists to suggest missions for the telescopes, which were donated by the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) and are comparable in size and appearance to the famous Hubble Space Telescope.
  • More than 60 serious proposals came
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • in, the most promising of which were presented in early February
  • The two scopes were originally built to carry out surveillance missions under a multibillion-dollar NRO program called Future Imagery Architecture
  • cost overruns and delays killed the program in 2005, and NASA announced in June 2012 that the NRO had bequeathed the instruments to the space agency
  • the telescopes' 8-foot-wide (2.4 meters) main mirrors are comparable to that of Hubble, the NRO instruments are designed to have a much wider field of view
  • Seven big ideas
  • Mars-orbiting space telescope
  • Exoplanet observatory
  • General-purpose faint object explorer
  • Advanced, Hubble-like visible light/ultraviolet telescope
  • Optical communications node in space (which would aid transmissions to and from deep-space assets)
  • Geospace dynamic observatory (which would study space weather and the sun-Earth system)
  • Research of Earth's upper atmosphere (from a spot aboard the International Space Station)
  • Whatever missions NASA ultimately assigns to the NRO scopes, the instruments are a long way from launch
  • they're far from being fully outfitted spacecraft.
  • no instruments on these two telescopes — just primary and secondary mirrors and the support structures
  • It's going to take a while to develop the instruments and integrate them into the structure
  • there's no guarantee that it will be
  • the funding to bring the scopes up to speed, launch them into space and maintain their operations has not been granted. And
Mars Base

Space Telescope Crowdfunding Project Raises $167,000 | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/e-telescope-raises-167000.html

scibyte96 CrowdSourcing

shared by Mars Base on 30 May 13 - No Cached
  • A commercial asteroid-mining company aiming to launch a crowdfunded space telescope raised more than $200,000 on the first day of its campaign
  • Planetary Resources, a private venture aiming to mine near-Earth space rocks
  • announced
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • May 29) that it would build and launch a space telescope for public use if it could raise at least $1 million in 33 days.
  • The telescope will be a twin copy of the Arkyd spacecraft the company is developing to detect, track and study asteroids in preparation for its mining mission
  • A test version of the spacecraft is set for its maiden trial flight in April 2014, while the crowdfunded model would launch in early 2015
  • public backers would use it to study celestial objects of their choice
  • also have the option of sponsoring research projects at schools, universities or museums that could use the instrument.
  • The telescope will also take
  • self portraits that show the telescope in orbit, with a user-submitted photo displayed on the instrument's screen
  • A camera mounted on the hull of the spacecraft will snap the photo.
  • Already more than 200 backers have ordered selfies for $25 and above.
  • But if the crowdfunding campaign fails to reach its $1 million goal by June 30, the company will receive none of the money it has raised
Mars Base

For the first time, astronomers have measured the radius of a black hole - 0 views

phys.org/...onomers-radius-black-hole.html

scibyte65 black holes

shared by Mars Base on 30 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • an international team
  • , has for the first time measured the radius of a black hole at the center of a distant galaxy—the closest distance at which matter can approach before being irretrievably pulled into the black hole.
  • scientists linked together radio dishes in Hawaii, Arizona and California to create a telescope array called the "Event Horizon Telescope" (EHT) that can see details 2,000 times finer than what's visible to the Hubble Space Telescope.
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • , the team observed the glow of matter near the edge of this black hole—a region known as the "event horizon."
  • , not everything can cross the event horizon to squeeze into a black hole
  • "cosmic traffic jam" in which gas and dust build up, creating a flat pancake of matter known as an accretion disk
  • disk of matter orbits the black hole at nearly the speed of light, feeding the black hole a steady diet of superheated material
  • Over time, this disk can cause the black hole to spin in the same direction as the orbiting material
  • Caught up in this spiraling flow are magnetic fields, which accelerate hot material along powerful beams above the accretion disk
  • resulting high-speed jet, launched by the black hole and the disk, shoots out across the galaxy, extending for hundreds of thousands of light-years
  • jets can influence many galactic processes, including how fast stars form.
  • . Because M87's jet is magnetically launched from this smallest orbit,
  • astronomers can estimate the black hole's spin through careful measurement of the jet's size as it leaves the black hole
  • Until now, no telescope has had the magnifying power required for this kind of observation
  • team used a technique called Very Long Baseline Interferometry, or VLBI, which links data from radio dishes located thousands of miles apart.
  • , taken together, create a "virtual telescope" with the resolving power of a single telescope as big as the space between the disparate dishes
  • enables scientists to view extremely precise details in faraway galaxies.
  • Using the technique
  • team measured the innermost orbit of the accretion disk to be only 5.5 times the size of the black hole event horizon
  • According to the laws of physics, this size suggests that the accretion disk is spinning in the same direction as the black hole
  • first direct observation to confirm theories of how black holes power jets from the centers of galaxies
  • The team plans to expand its telescope array, adding radio dishes in Chile, Europe, Mexico, Greenland and Antarctica, in order to obtain even more detailed pictures of black holes in the future.
  • www.eventhorizontelescope.org/
Mars Base

Alien Super-Earth Light Seen for 1st Time | Exoplanet Search | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/light-detected-55-cancrie.html

scibyte45 exoplanet Spitzer

shared by Mars Base on 09 May 12 - No Cached
  • Light from an alien "super-Earth" twice the size of our own Earth has been detected by a NASA space telescope for the first time
  • spotted light from the alien planet 55 Cancri e, which orbits a star 41 light-years from Earth
  • A year on the extrasolar planet lasts just 18 hours
  • ...27 more annotations...
  • 55 Cancri e was first discovered in 2004 and is not a habitable world
  • The world is about twice the width of Earth and is super-dense, with about eight times the mass of Earth.
  • until now, scientists have never managed to detect the infrared light from the super-Earth world.
  • pioneering the study of atmospheres of distant planets and paving the way for NASA's upcoming James Webb Space Telescope
  • Spitzer first detected infrared light from an alien planet in 2005
  • that world was "hot Jupiter," a gas giant planet much larger than 55 Cancri e that orbited extremely close to its parent star
  • other telescopes have performed similar feats
  • Spitzer's view of the 55 Cancri e is the first time the light from a rocky super-Earth type planet has been seen
  • Since the discovery of 55 Cancri e, astronomers have pinned down increasingly strange features about the planet
  • already knew it was part of an alien solar system containing five exoplanets centered on the star 55 Cancri in the constellation Cancer
  • But 55 Cancri e stood out because it is ultra-dense and orbits extremely close to its parent star
  • 26 times closer than the distance between Mercury and our own sun
  • observations revealed that the star-facing side of 55 Cancri e
  • temperatures reaching up to 3,140 degrees Fahrenheit (1,726 degrees Celsius).
  • likely a dark world that lacks the substantial atmosphere needed to warm its nighttime side
  • the planet is oozing
  • Past observations of the planet by the Spitzer Space Telescope have suggested that one-fifth of 55 Cancri e is made up of lighter elements, including water
  • the extreme temperatures and pressures on 55 Cancri e would create what scientists call a "supercritical fluid" state
  • Supercritical fluids can be imagined as a gas in a liquid state, which can occur under extreme pressures and temperatures
  • On Earth, water can become a supercritical fluid inside some steam engines.
  • This graphic illuminates the process by which astronomers using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope have for the first time detected the light from a super-Earth planet, the alien world of 55 Cancri e 41 light-years from Earth.
  • planet is likely a rocky world covered with water in a supercritical fluid state and topped off with a steam blanket
  • could be very similar to Neptune, if you pulled Neptune in toward our sun and watched its atmosphere boil away
  • detailed in the Astrophysical Journal
  • Spitzer Space Telescope launched in 2003
  • telescope engineers modified several settings on the observatory to optimize its alien planet vision
  • conceived of Spitzer more than 40 years ago
Mars Base

Missing 'Big Bang' Antarctic Telescope Found - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...ig-bang-arctic-telescope-found

scibyte49 telescope

shared by Mars Base on 01 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • Astronomers and students from the University of Minnesota hoping to search for radiation left over from the Big Bang instead spent the past few days looking for their telescope
  • 6,000 lb (2729 kg)
  • the truck driver who was supposed to deliver it to a NASA facility in Palestine, Texas
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • he’s not talking and police in Texas won’t press charges against him.
  • good news is that the missing telescope has been found – sitting at a truck wash — after a frantic cross-country search
  • telescope is a high-tech irreplaceable piece of equipment that is 22 ft high 15 ft wide (6.5 X 4.5 meters
  • designed to detect radiation from the Big Bang and it took fifteen people 8 years to build
  • will be shipped to Antarctica, where it will be attached to a giant balloon in December and sent 110,000 feet (33,500 meters) into the atmosphere.
  • Friday, a Minnesota trucking company sent off one of their trucks with telescope inside
  • Monday there was no word from the trucker and the scientists started to panic when the truck didn’t show up at the NASA facility
  • Calls to the trucker went unanswered
  • The owner of the trucking company sent his son to Dallas to search for the truck and the driver
  • only clue was a credit card charge at a Dallas truck stop.
  • The son found the driver, asleep in the cab of the truck, but the trailer, with the precious cargo inside, was nowhere to be seen.
  • driver said he left the trailer at a hotel parking lot
  • when the searchers arrived, it wasn’t there
  • trucker clammed up and wouldn’t provide any more clues or reasons for why he didn’t deliver his cargo
  • another employee of the trucking company found the trailer sitting at a truck wash in Dallas
  • If they would not have found that particular trailer at that time, maybe half a day or a day later someone would have stolen it and taken it for metal or just for scrap,”
  • NASA unpacked the crate Thursday morning and said the telescope was unharmed and is in great shape
Mars Base

Two 'Weird' Alien Planets Found Around Bright, Distant Stars | Space.com - 1 views

www.space.com/ets-kelt-telescope-aas220.html

scibyte52 exoplanets

shared by Mars Base on 19 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • Astronomers using a small ground-based telescope have discovered two unusual alien planets around extremely bright, distant stars.
  • detected using the Kilodegree Extremely Little Telescope (KELT) in southern Arizona, which has a lens that is roughly as powerful as a high-end digital camera
  • slightly more diminutive than Kepler
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • KELT-1b, is a massive world that is both incredibly hot and dense. The alien planet, which is mostly metallic hydrogen, is slightly larger than Jupiter, but contains a whopping 27 times the mass
  • completes one orbit in a mere 29 hours
  • surface temperature is likely above 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit (roughly 2,200 degrees Celsius
  • receiving 6,000 times the amount of radiation that Earth receives from the sun
  • located approximately 825 light-years away in the constellation of Andromeda
  • massive enough that KELT-1 has raised tides on its parent star and actually spun it
  • both KELT-1 and its parent star are locked in each other's gaze as they go around."
  • KELT-2Ab, and is located about 360 light-years away in the constellation of Auriga
  • 30 percent larger than Jupiter with 50 percent more mass.
  • KELT-2Ab's parent star is so bright it can be seen from Earth through binoculars
  • the star is so luminous that researchers will be able to make direct observations of the planet's atmosphere by examining light that shines through it when the star passes within KELT North's field of view again in November.
  • Follow-up observations are also being planned
  • as well as several space observatories, including the Hubble Space Telescope and the infrared Spitzer Space Telescope.
  • orbits a star that is slightly bigger than the sun, within a binary system
  • one star is slightly bigger than our sun, and the other star is slightly smaller. KELT-2Ab orbits the bigger star, which is bright enough to be seen from Earth with binoculars
  • using the so-called transit method, which involves watching for tiny dips in the star's light that could indicate a planet is crossing, or transiting
  • Rather than staring at a small group of stars at high resolution, the twin KELT North and KELT South telescopes observe millions of very bright stars at low resolution,
  • KELT North scans the northern sky from Arizona
  • KELT South covers the southern sky from Cape Town, South Africa.
  • small ground-based KELT telescopes provide a low-cost alternative for exoplanet hunters by primarily using off-the-shelf technology. The hardware for a KELT telescope costs less than $75,000
Mars Base

Comet ISON Buzzing Mars Now: A Telescope Viewing Guide | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/near-mars-telescope-guide.html

scibyte105 CometISON ViewerFeedback

shared by Mars Base on 05 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Seeing Comet ISON: A telescope guide
  • If you really want to try to see Comet ISON for yourself, you'll need two things
  • A dark sky.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • A moderately large telescope.
  • A comet's brightness
  • an "extended" object with the light inside the comet's head spread out over a larger area of space
  • (a dark sky) is absolutely necessary
  • telescope in the 8 to 12-inch range
  • magnification of at least 200 to 300 power
  • if you're trying to see the comet you’ll have much better success by looking off to one side of its position (averted vision) rather than staring right at it; in that way you’ll be able to better detect its faint and fuzzy image
  • if you're trying to see the comet you’ll have much better success by looking off to one side of its position (averted vision) rather than staring right at it; in that way you’ll be able to better detect its faint and fuzzy image
  • Tuesday, Oct. 15. 
  • the comet will appear 1.1 degrees above and to the left of Mars, while Mars itself is passing only 0.9 degrees above and to the left of the bluish 1st-magnitude star Regulus
  • Comet ISON continues to run roughly two magnitudes fainter than original projections
  • recent 'discovery' of a jet feature may be the key in understanding Comet ISON's behavior during the past 7 weeks
  • observers
  • have begun to notice a lengthening of Comet ISON's tail
  • might" be a sign that the sun's warmth has indeed begun to make the comet more active by way of sublimation
Mars Base

DARPA Wants Amateur Help Tracking Space Junk | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/k-darpa-amateur-astronomy.html

scibyte72 Darpa

shared by Mars Base on 21 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • The U.S. military is launching a far-out neighborhood watch. But instead of warding off burglars, these  amateur watchdogs are tracking orbital debris and possible satellite collisions in Earth orbit.
  • The sky-monitoring project, called SpaceView, is a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) program that enrolls the talents of amateur astronomers
  • SpaceView should provide more diverse data from different geographic locations
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • SpaceView is envisioned as a long-term partnership. This could potentially include time-sharing on telescopes, upgraded hardware at the astronomer’s site or financial compensation
  • SpaceView hopes to engage amateur astronomers by purchasing remote access to an already in-use telescope or by providing a telescope to selected astronomers
  • Telescopes used for astrophotography, asteroid hunting or simply high-quality astronomy are well suited for SpaceView’s needs
  • this new program provides the means to upgrade a skywatcher’s site to a state-of-the-art fully automated obser
  • in late 2013, the process will start to select the first dozen members of the project
Mars Base

Gone perhaps, but Kepler won't soon be forgotten | Atom & Cosmos | Science News - 0 views

www.sciencenews.org/..._Kepler_wont_soon_be_forgotten

scibyte95 Kepler

shared by Mars Base on 25 May 13 - No Cached
  • When scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics scheduled a conference called “Exoplanets in the Post-Kepler Era,” they figured that era would still be several years away
  • . When
  • Kepler into space
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • astronomers knew that the galaxy contained at least 350 exoplanets, nearly all of them the size of Jupiter or larger
  • Kepler’s then spent four years
  • added nearly 3,000 planets
  • It will take at least several weeks before they beam commands up to the $600-million telescope, and they admit that a fix is a long shot.
  • Kepler engineers
  • strategizing about how to remotely repair one of two broken reaction wheels that precisely point the telescope
  • astronomers are convinced that the Milky Way contains hundreds of billions of planets, roughly one for every star, with at least 17 billion of them Earth-sized
  • NASA’s next exoplanet-hunting mission, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, which is scheduled for a 2017 launch
  • Whereas Kepler has fixed its gaze on distant stars, TESS will focus on bright, nearby stars so that powerful telescopes like the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope will be able to probe the atmospheres of planets that TESS discovers
  • s TESS
  • while less sensitive than Kepler, will nonetheless uncover plenty of planets in our neighborhood, including a handful of Earth-sized worlds
  • Astronomers
  • Other astronomers
  • are still optimistic. They have a year of data from the telescope left to analyze
  • quite possibly including an Earth-sized planet orbiting a sunlike star at a distance suitable for life
  • Astronomers hope to pair size measurements of planets observed by telescopes such as TESS with mass readings from ground-based scopes that look for subtle wobbles in stars’ motion caused by the gravitational pull of orbiting planets.
  • Several years ago
  • radial velocity, could pick out only hulking planets that delivered a hard yank to their stars
  • lately the technology has improved so drastically that in October 2012, the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher instrument
  • spotted what appears to be a planet only slightly heavier than Earth tightly orbiting Alpha Centauri B, a sunlike star a mere 4.4 light-years away
  • Kepler’s main goal was to determine the frequency of Earthlike planets in the galaxy
  • have enough data to make an intelligent extrapolation about what that number is, but
  • actually determining that number
Mars Base

'Space Selfie' Telescope Could Hunt Alien Planets … If It Raises A Cool $2M - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...planets-if-it-raises-a-cool-2m

scibyte98 CrowdSourcing Arkyd

shared by Mars Base on 12 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • A crowdfunded telescope
  • is now considering a search for alien planets.
  • Planetary Resources Inc. (the proposed asteroid miners) announced a new “stretch goal” for its asteroid-hunting Arkyd-100 telescope.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • If the company can raise $2 million — double its original goal — it promises to equip the Arkyd telescope to look at star systems for exoplanets
  • partnering with exoplanet researchers at MIT [the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • Arkyd would use two methods to hunt down planets
  • Transiting, or seeing the dip in a star’s brightness when a planet passes in front of it;
  • Gravitational microlensing, or finding planets by measuring how the gravity of the star (and its planets) distorts light from stars and galaxies behind
  • If it can raise $1.3 million, Planetary Resources proposes to build a ground station at an undisclosed “educational partner” that would double the download speed of data from the orbiting observatory
  • Two more stretch goals will be revealed if Arkyd receives 11,000 backers and 15,000 backers
Mars Base

Faraway moon or faint star? Possible exomoon found - 0 views

phys.org/...y-moon-faint-star-exomoon.html

scibyte126 exoplanets

shared by Mars Base on 11 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • NASA-funded researchers have spotted the first signs of an "exomoon," and though they say it's impossible to confirm its presence
  • The discovery was made by watching a chance encounter of objects in our galaxy, which can be witnessed only once
  • won't have a chance to observe the exomoon candidate again
  • ...29 more annotations...
  • can expect more unexpected finds like this.
  • international study
  • using telescopes
  • technique, called gravitational microlensing, takes advantage of chance alignments between stars
  • When a foreground star passes between us and a more distant star, the closer star can act like a magnifying glass to focus and brighten the light of the more distant one
  • These brightening events usually last about a month
  • If the foreground star—or what astronomers refer to as the lens—has a planet circling around it, the planet will act as a second lens to brighten or dim the light even more
  • carefully scrutinizing these brightening events, astronomers can figure out the mass of the foreground star relative to its planet.
  • the foreground object could be a free-floating planet, not a star
  • astronomers are actively looking for exomoons—for example, using data from NASA's Kepler mission - so far, they have not found any.
  • In the new study, the nature of the foreground, lensing object is not clear. The ratio of the larger body to its smaller companion is 2,000 to 1.
  • That means the pair could be either a small, faint star circled by a planet about 18 times the mass of Earth—or a planet more massive than Jupiter coupled with a moon weighing less than Earth.
  • astronomers have no way of telling which of these two scenarios is correct
  • One possibility is for the lensing system to be a planet and its moon
  • The answer to the mystery lies in learning the distance to the circling duo
  • A lower-mass pair closer to Earth will produce the same kind of brightening event as a more massive pair located farther away
  • once a brightening event is over, it's very difficult to take additional measurements of the lensing system and determine the distance
  • The true identity of the exomoon candidate and its companion, a system dubbed MOA-2011-BLG-262, will remain unknown
  • In the future, however, it may be possible to obtain these distance measurements during lensing events
  • NASA's Spitzer and Kepler space telescopes, both of which revolve around the sun in Earth-trailing orbits, are far enough away from Earth to be great tools for the parallax-distance technique.
  • The basic principle of parallax can be explained by holding your finger out, closing one eye after the other, and watching your finger jump back and forth
  • A distant star, when viewed from two telescopes spaced really far apart, will also appear to move
  • When combined with a lensing event, the parallax effect alters how a telescope will view the resulting magnification of starlight
  • Though the technique works best using one telescope on Earth and one in space, such as Spitzer or Kepler, two ground-based telescopes on different sides of our planet can also be used
  • Meanwhile, surveys
  • are turning up more and more planets
  • These microlensing surveys have discovered dozens of exoplanets so far, in orbit around stars and free-floating
  • A previous NASA-funded study, also led by the MOA team, was the first to find strong evidence for planets the size of Jupiter roaming alone in space, presumably after they were kicked out of forming planetary systems
  • The new exomoon candidate, if real, would orbit one such free-floating planet.
Mars Base

First potentially habitable Earth-sized planet confirmed: It may have liquid water - 0 views

phys.org/...earth-sized-planet-liquid.html

scibyte127 exoplanet

shared by Mars Base on 19 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • The first Earth-sized exoplanet orbiting within the habitable zone of another star has been confirmed by observations with both the W. M. Keck Observatory and the Gemini Observatory
  • The initial discovery, made by NASA's Kepler Space Telescope, is one of a handful of smaller planets found by Kepler and verified using large ground-based telescopes
  • his Earth-sized planet, one of five orbiting this star, which is cooler than the Sun, resides in a temperate region where water could exist in liquid form
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • neither Kepler (nor any telescope) is currently able to directly spot an exoplanet of this size and proximity to its host star
  • can do is eliminate essentially all other possibilities so that the validity of these planets is really the only viable option
  • With such a small host star, the team employed a technique that eliminated the possibility that either a background star or a stellar companion could be mimicking what Kepler detected
  • the team obtained extremely high spatial resolution observations from the eight-meter Gemini North telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawai
  • using a technique called speckle imaging, as well as adaptive optics (AO) observations from the ten-meter Keck II telescope
  • The Gemini "speckle" data directly imaged the system to within about 400 million miles (about 4 AU, approximately equal to the orbit of Jupiter in our solar system) of the host star and confirmed that there were no other stellar size objects orbiting within this radius from the star
  • The host star, Kepler-186, is an M1-type dwarf star relatively close to our solar system, at about 500 light years and is in the constellation of Cygnus
  • The star is very dim, being over half a million times fainter than the faintest stars we can see with the naked eye
  • Five small planets have been found orbiting this star, four of which are in very short-period orbits and are very hot
  • Differential Speckle Survey Instrument (DSSI) on the Gemini North telescope
  • is a visiting instrument
  • works on a principle that utilizes multiple short exposures of an object to capture and remove the noise introduced by atmospheric turbulence producing images with extreme detail
Mars Base

Planetary Resources Raises $1.5M for Crowdfunded Space Telescope | Space Telescopes | S... - 0 views

www.space.com/owdfunded-space-telescope.html

CrowdFunded Arkyd scibyte101

shared by Mars Base on 07 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Planetary Resources raised more than $1.5 million in 33 days to launch a small space telescope into low Earth orbit in 2015
  • 17,614 people donated money for the crowdsourced Arkyd-100
  • The company hit that goal June 19, then raked in another $505,366 in the final 10 days of the campaign, including $100,000 on June 30 from Virgin Group Chairman Richard Branson.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Planetary Resources, Bellevue, Wash., began a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign May 29 seeking to raise at least $1 million by June 30
  • 14,919 space selfies, according data from Kickstarter
  • Kicktraq.com, shows that Planetary Resources raised an average of $45,614 a day, with the 17,614 donors contributing an average of $85 each
Mars Base

Light From a 'SuperEarth' Detected for the First Time - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...th-detected-for-the-first-time

scibyte46 Spitzer exoplanet

shared by Mars Base on 09 May 12 - No Cached
  • 55 Cancri
  • one of the first known stars to host an extrasolar planet
  • discovered via radial velocity measurements in 2004
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • astronomers were able to determine its mass and radius
  • Spitzer became the first telescope to detect light from a planet beyond our solar system, when it saw the infrared light of a “hot Jupiter
  • NASA’s Hubble and Kepler space telescopes
  • using the same method
  • In this method, a telescope gazes at a star as a planet circles behind it. When the planet disappears from view, the light from the star system dips ever so slightly, but enough that astronomers can determine how much light came from the planet itself
  • information reveals the temperature of a planet, and, in some cases, its atmospheric components
  • other current planet-hunting methods obtain indirect measurements of a planet by observing its effects on the star.
  • about 8.57 Earth masses
  • radius is 1.63 times that of Earth
  • density is 10.9 ± 3.1 g cm-3 (the average density of Earth is 5.515 g cm-3),
  • Cancri e is tidally locked, so one side always faces the star
  • James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled to launch in 2018, likely will be able to learn even more about the planet’s composition
  • might be able to use a similar infrared method to Spitzer to search other potentially habitable planets for signs of molecules possibly related to life.
Mars Base

Hubble Space Telescope Passes Major Science Milestone | Hubble 10,000th Science Paper |... - 0 views

www.space.com/cope-10000-science-papers.html

scibyte25

shared by Mars Base on 09 Dec 11 - No Cached
  • Hubble Space Telescope has crossed a major milestone, accumulating 10,000 science papers based on its observations
  • After 21 years
  • it's actually in the best shape of its life
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • last space shuttle servicing mission was in May 2009.
  • Papers describing discoveries in nearly every field of astronomy and cosmology have been published based on data gathered by the Hubble Space Telescope.
  • conducted by scientists in more than 35 countries
  • most papers written by researchers in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, France, and Spain
  • Hubble's top five most referenced papers are on
  • The search for distant supernovas used to characterize dark energy
  • The precise measurement of the universe's rate of expansion
  • The apparent link between galaxy mass and central black hole mass
  • Early galaxy formation in the Hubble Deep Field
  • The evolutionary models for low-mass stars and brown dwarfs
  • 10,000th Hubble science paper
  • announces the discovery of the faintest supernova ever associated with a cosmic explosion called a long-duration gamma-ray burst, which spews high-energy radiation into space when a star dies
  • The first science paper based on Hubble data came about six months after the telescope's launch
  • a paper on observations of the center of galaxy NGC 7457, where scientists suspected a huge black hole lurked
Mars Base

Hubble directly observes the disc around a black hole - 0 views

www.physorg.com/...11-hubble-disc-black-hole.html

scibyte20 black holes quasar

shared by Mars Base on 06 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • Scientists have used the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to observe a quasar accretion disc -- a glowing disc of matter that is slowly being sucked into its galaxy's central black hole
  • Scientists have used the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to observe a quasar accretion disc -- a glowing disc of matter that is slowly being sucked into its galaxy's central black hole.
  • the team measured the disc's size and studied the colours (and hence the temperatures) of different parts of the disc
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, combined with the gravitational lensing effect of stars in a distant galaxy, the team measured the disc's size and studied the colours (and hence the temperatures) of different parts of the disc.
  • Until now, the minute apparent size of quasars has meant that most of our knowledge of their inner structure has been based on theoretical extrapolations, rather than direct observations.
  • show a level of precision equivalent to spotting individual grains of sand on the surface of the Moon
  • Quasars — short for quasi-stellar objects — are glowing discs of matter that orbit supermassive black holes, heating up and emitting extremely bright radiation as they do so.
  • These observations show a level of precision equivalent to spotting individual grains of sand on the surface of the Moon.
  • using the stars in an intervening galaxy as a scanning microscope to probe features in the quasar's disc that would otherwise be far too small to see
  • As these stars move across the light from the quasar, gravitational effects amplify the light from different parts of the quasar, giving detailed colour information for a line that crosses through the accretion disc.
  • the team were able to reconstruct the colour profile across the accretion disc
  • allowed the team to measure the diameter of the disc of hot matter, and plot how hot it is at different distances from the centre
  • Quasars' physical properties are not yet well understood
  • This new ability to obtain observational measurements is therefore opening a new window to help understand the nature of these objects."
Mars Base

The iceberg's accomplice: Did the moon sink the Titanic? - 0 views

www.physorg.com/...s-accomplice-moon-titanic.html

scibyte37

shared by Mars Base on 07 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • The iceberg’s accomplice: Did the moon sink the Titanic?
  • once-in-many-lifetimes event occurred on that Jan. 4
  • moon and sun had lined up in such a way their gravitational pulls enhanced each other
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • suggested that an unusually close approach by the moon on Jan. 4, 1912, may have caused abnormally high tides
  • Where did the killer iceberg come from
  • ultimate cause of the accident was that the ship struck an iceberg
  • well-known as a “spring tide
  • moon’s perigee—closest approach to Earth—proved to be its closest in 1,400 years, and came within six minutes of a full moon
  • Earth’s perihelion—closest approach to the sun—happened the day before
  • the odds of all these variables lining up in just the way they did were, well, astronomical.
  • this configuration maximized the moon’s tide-raising forces on Earth’s oceans
  • researchers looked to see if the enhanced tides caused increased glacial calving
  • to reach the shipping lanes by April
  • any icebergs breaking off the Greenland glaciers in Jan. 1912 would have to move unusually fast and against prevailing currents
  • the answer lies in grounded and stranded icebergs
  • icebergs travel southward, many become stuck in the shallow waters off the coasts of Labrador and Newfoundland
  • Normally, icebergs remain in place and cannot resume moving southward until they’ve melted enough to refloat or a high enough tide frees them
  • single iceberg can become stuck multiple times on its journey southward, a process that can take several years
  • unusually high tide in Jan. 1912 would have been enough to dislodge many of those icebergs and move them back into the southbound ocean currents
  • they would have just enough time to reach the shipping lanes for that fateful encounter with the Titanic.
  • But an extremely high spring tide could refloat them
  • ebb tide would carry them back out
  • where the icebergs would resume drifting southward
  • could explain the abundant icebergs in the spring of 1912
  • Mars Base on 07 Mar 12
     
    d Russell Doescher, along with Roger Sinnott, senior contributing editor at Sky & Telescope magazine, publish their findings in the April 2012 edition of Sky & Telescope, on newsstands now. "Of course, the ultimate cause of the accident was that the ship struck an iceberg. The Titanic failed to slow down, even after having received several wireless messages warning of ice ahead," Olson said. "They went full speed into a region with icebergs-that's really what sank the
Mars Base

Telescope spies water plumes on dwarf planet Ceres - 0 views

phys.org/...spies-plumes-dwarf-planet.html

scibyte117 Asteroid Ceres

shared by Mars Base on 23 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Scientists
  • have made the first definitive detection of water vapor on the largest and roundest object in the asteroid belt, Ceres.
  • Plumes of water vapor are thought to shoot up periodically from Ceres when portions of its icy surface warm slightly
  • ...26 more annotations...
  • Ceres is classified as a dwarf planet, a solar system body bigger than an asteroid and smaller than a planet.
  • "This is the first time water vapor has been unequivocally detected on Ceres or any other object in the asteroid belt and provides proof that Ceres has an icy surface and an atmosphere,"
  • Michael Küppers of ESA in Spain
  • NASA's Dawn mission, which is on its way to Ceres now after spending more than a year orbiting the large asteroid Vesta
  • Dawn is scheduled to arrive at Ceres in the spring of 2015, where it will take the closest look ever at its surface.
  • will map the geology and chemistry of the surface in high resolution
  • International Astronomical Union, the governing organization responsible for naming planetary objects
  • Ceres was known as the largest asteroid in our solar system
  • reclassified Ceres as a dwarf planet because of its large size. It is roughly 590 miles (950 kilometers) in diameter
  • When it first was spotted in 1801, astronomers thought it was a planet orbiting between Mars and Jupiter
  • Scientists believe Ceres contains rock in its interior with a thick mantle of ice that, if melted, would amount to more fresh water than is present on all of Earth
  • The materials making up Ceres likely date from the first few million years of our solar system's existence and accumulated before the planets formed.
  • Until now, ice had been theorized to exist on Ceres but had not been detected conclusively
  • far-infrared vision to see, finally, a clear spectral signature of the water vapor. But
  • did not see water vapor every time it looked
  • spied water vapor four different times, on one occasion there was no signature.
  • what scientists think is happening
  • when Ceres swings through the part of its orbit that is closer to the sun, a portion of its icy surface becomes warm enough to cause water vapor to escape in plumes
  • a rate of about 6 kilograms (13 pounds) per second
  • When Ceres is in the colder part of its orbit, no water escapes
  • The strength of the signal also varied over hours, weeks and months
  • water vapor plumes rotating in and out of Herschel's views as the object spun on its axis
  • This enabled the scientists to localize the source of water to two darker spots on the surface of Ceres
  • previously seen by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and ground-based telescopes. The dark spots might be more likely to outgas because dark material warms faster than light material.
  • "The lines are becoming more and more blurred between comets and asteroids," said Seungwon Lee of JPL
  • Paul von Allmen, also of JPL. "We knew before about main belt asteroids that show comet-like activity, but this is the first detection of water vapor in an asteroid-like object."
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