Tag: JPL

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Two probes to slam into the moon. No, really.

Photo: <a href="http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2012-398b&rn=news.xml&rst=3625">NASA JPL</a>

It sounds suspiciously like an Austin Powers movie, but no: the probes are not being slammed into our moon in ransom of 1. million. dollars. They’re being spiked into the moon at the end of a very successful mission to avoid leaving space junk floating around.

NASA announced on Friday that the last firing sequences were successfully completed that would propel the GRAIL gravity measurement satellites hurtling towards a sudden end. The Gravity Recovery and Internal Laboratory program was sent to the moon in order to study our largest satellite’s gravitational field in high detail, so that we might better understand the moon’s makeup and origins. The program is considered to have been a huge success, but fuel limits mean GRAIL will need to come to an end.

Even in the end, GRAIL’s contribution to NASA engineering is not quite finished, however. Because they know how much fuel the satellites were launched with and they’re certain that they’ve neared the end of that reserve, NASA plans to burn one long last firing to find out just how much is left in the tanks, exactly. This information will help engineers to understand just how accurate their measurements of fuel had been to this point to better prepare future missions.

For those that are interested, NASA will be providing minute-by-minute commentary on GRAIL’s final trajectory starting at 2pm Monday morning. Both probes are expected to crash at around 2:28pm. There will not be any video of the event, however, as the probes will be on the moon’s dark side on impact.

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Space Porn

Is there liquid on Vesta? Strange features puzzle boffins

Photo: <a href="http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2012-389&rn=news.xml&rst=3616">NASA JPL</a>

No one is saying that, exactly. Even if there were a liquid, it wouldn’t be water, as the asteroid is far to distant from the sun and much too cold for liquid water.

But scientists are puzzling over the observations of Jennifer Scully, a University of California scientist who is working on the Vesta project. She has seen gullies and what seem to be flows down craters on the surface of the asteroid that so far have defied explanation.

On Earth, the answer would be simple: the gullies are created by liquid water flows eroding the surrounding landscape. On Mars, similar featured have been observed and attributed to liquid water in the Red Planet’s distant past.

But similar shapes on Vesta can have no such explanations, which means that if other erosive forces are at play, then even agreed-upon answers for Mars may be in question:

Indeed, scientists have suggested various explanations for gullies on Mars since fresh-looking gullies were discovered in images from NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor in 2000. Some of the proposed Martian mechanisms involve water, some carbon dioxide, and some neither. One study in 2010 suggested that carbon-dioxide frost was causing fresh flows of sand on the Red Planet.

This is one more reason that scientific data is always important and often surprising: study of two completely different systems may reveal new facts that change our understanding of both systems. It isn’t rare, in fact, it is what science is all about.

Interested? Check out our archives on Vesta and NASA for even more great stuff!

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Science Technology

Remembering Ray Bradbury: NASA’s JPL recalls his last visit to the labs

Screen cap from <a href="http://1.usa.gov/LO14Sj">NASA JPL</a>

If there is a thing Ray Bradbury is most closely associated with in the world of Science Fiction, it is Mars. From The Martian Chronicles to Mars is Heaven!, Bradbury seems to have had a life-long love for the Red Planet.

And in 2007, Ray Bradbury visited the labs where his dreams began to come true, in NASA’s Jet Propulsion Labs, where the Mars Rover’s command and control are. On June 8th, JPL released this video of Ray’s visit (note: for some reason, video takes a while to load, sometimes):

[quicktime]http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/videos/other/20120607/bradbury20120607-1280.m4v[/quicktime]

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Space Porn VIDEO

Take a virtual flight into the dawn sky on asteroid Vesta

Image: NASA Jet Propulsion Labs

Miss the sunrise this morning? No worries. @NASAJPL (the Jet Propulsion Labs at NASA) gives you a virtual fly-over of the asteroid Vesta, composited from the many topographical photos taken by the Dawn mission. The video below shows the craters, mountains and other features of this 330 mile wide satellite that orbits our sun in the asteroid belt.

And Vesta is big: it comprises an estimated 9% of the total mass of the asteroid belt – which is the ring of asteroids and debris that orbits between Mars and Jupiter. It is considered the most geologically-diverse of the asteroids studied so far, containing huge features including a crater 285 miles across – nearly the whole diameter! – that is evidence of an impact with another object.

In fact, Vesta just behind to the dwarf planet Ceres in size, making it nearly big enough to sit in the same pantheon of semi-planets as the former planet Pluto.

[quicktime]http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/videos/asteroids/20120510/vestaflyover20120510-1280.m4v?[/quicktime]

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Space Porn VIDEO

The NASA JPL NuStar telescope is a black hole hunter

Photo: NASA.gov

How many black holes are in the observable universe? How fast do they spin?

These are just a few of the questions the @NASAJPL NuStar space telescope is set to answer soon. The NuStar space telescope is an x-ray telescope, which gives it the ability, just like medical telescopes, to peer beyond the things we cannot see with conventional light. And in addition to the free-floating black holes that exist, science now knows that the heart of every galaxy including the Milky Way is a black hole. So, getting past all the star-dust, suns and planets is key to understanding these ubiquitous mysteries of the universe.

For example, understanding how fast black holes spin is a key task for NuStar. As matter orbits any object in space, it generally falls in a circular pattern around the object. This is called an orbit. And orbits generally are not static: they either decay, eventually leaving the satellite to fall into its gravitational focus, or else the satellite may have too much mass or speed, in which case, it may fly free of its gravitational focus.

But with black holes, things work a little differently. As matter gets closer to a black hole, the black hole warps space and time, accelerating the matter. This in turn allows much more matter to orbit the black hole without actually falling in. If that sounds counterintuitive for black holes, which we think of as space dustbusters, it is. Yet more mystery.

[quicktime]http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/videos/nustar/20120507/nustar20120507-1280.m4v[/quicktime]

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Space Porn

VIDEO: Rochester will get to see a partial solar annular eclipse this month

Photo: NASA JPL

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab released a video today summarizing the month’s events in what is a regular series, anachronistically entitled “What’s Up?”

This month, an annular solar eclipse will create a ring-like effect on the sun, as the moon will only cover up about 94% of the sun’s visible area. Rochester will be one of the few places on the Eastern Seaboard that will get to view at least part of this phenomenon and for you telescope enthusiasts, this is a great time to get out there and photograph some sun spots!

Also some great star-gazing tips at the end, showing the relative position of stars that will be visible in the night sky:

[quicktime]http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/videos/whatsup/20120501/whatsup20120501-1280.m4v[/quicktime]