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NASA Expects Philae to Wake up in Summer

November 28, 2014 By Germaine Hicks 3 Comments

Everyone knows that the landing of Philae went a bit out of plan. The Philae lander bounced back twice before landing safely on the surface of the comet.

Recently, scientists of Rosetta comet mission informed that they are pretty sure that Philae lander would restart sometimes in spring or summer of 2015.

The recent movement of the lander provides strong hopes to scientists. In the month of August, the comet moved towards the nearest point to the sun. There are 50 percent chances that the Philae would be able to get large amount of sunlight from that location in the future. The sunlight will provide enough energy to the solar panels of lander so that it can recharge its batteries.

Michael Maibaum, an engineer of Philae system stated that scientists believe that the lander will get sufficient energy to recharge its batteries till the month of March of 2014. Hence, scientists expect a few of the operations of lander to restart in the summer of 2015.

On the other hand, Rosetta which is considered as the mother of Philae lander works flawlessly. Currently, it is observing numerous cometary actions such as jets of material. This is the first evidence scientist found that the nucleus covers itself in a tenuous gaseous cloud.

Furthermore, scientists expects that Rosetta might spot Philae through its high resolution cameras. Earlier, Rosetta and Philae carried out a radio experiment which helps researchers to determine the current position of the lander.

Michael A ’Hearn, a professor of astronomy stated that researchers are unaware of the exact location of Philae. However, they doubt that the lander is at a particular place near the comet. If it’s correct then soon seasonal changes will bring Philae in front of the sun.

The Peak Time to Catch Annual Leonid Meteor Shower

November 18, 2014 By Rebecca McGhee Leave a Comment

The sky is all set to display an amazing Leonid Meteor Shower on 17 November. However, the experts predict that in the Leonid Meteor Shower numerous shooting stars would emerge after every three minutes.

A few days ago, people witnessed several shooting stars and fireballs in the sky. These fireballs indicated towards the arrival of the Leonid Meteor Shower.

The sky has arranged this massive show with the help of Comet-Tempe Tuttle. The Comet Tempel Tuttle makes a ring around the solar system after every 33.5 years. It leaves behind a trail of dust and other fragments during its round around the solar system. Every year, the Earth moves through that wake due to which the remnants of comets strike the atmosphere and give birth to a huge meteor shower.

NASA informed that a crescent moon will offer extremely dark sky. The dark sky will enable the sky gazers to view the meteor shower. In short,the entire Leonid Meteor show depends upon the light of the moon.

As per the reports of NASA, the people of both hemispheres would be able to view this spectacular scene. Fortunately, this time sky gazers do not need to look at a particular like all the previous lunar and solar eclipses. People can effortlessly enjoy this scene with their naked eyes.

Additionally, NASA will also show the live broadcast on two websites on Monday night. NASA’s webcast announced that it will start the show at 7:30 p.m ET. On the flip side, the Slooh.com will begin the live telecast at 8 p.m. ET.

Robotic Drone Solved the Mystery of Antarctic Ice Melting

November 12, 2014 By Rebecca McGhee Leave a Comment

Scientists claimed that they discovered the entire procedure behind the melting of polar ice shelves.

The way through which warm water got into cold areas were a big mystery since several years. NASA even stated that it is impossible to stop the disastrous melt of ice sheets in the cold regions.

Recently, a group of researchers of the California Institute of Technology revealed the most comprehensive report of things that happens under the Southern Ocean.

Generally, experts accumulate oceanic temperature measurements through different satellite. Unfortunately, scientists failed to discover a more feasible method for the Antarctic Sea.

Andrew Thompson, the main author of the study stated that it is extremely difficult place to reach even with ships. Moreover, the warm water is present deep inside the ocean which makes observation more complex for the researches.

Therefore, experts utilized underwater robot dolphins in order to solve the mystery. They used an extremely long torpedo drones that appears like a dolphin. These robotic dolphins can effortlessly cross the ocean with less amount of energy. In addition, they can stay in the deep water for a longer time period. The robotic dolphins move up and down in the water in order to pass the precious data to the scientist.

Earlier, military forces, research organizations utilized underwater drone to discover the ocean. On the other hand, Fossil Fuel makes use of self-sufficient subs to search the hidden oil and gas reserves. At the beginning of this year, U.S Navy sends a special underwater drone to find the missing Malaysian airline.

The study is printed in detail in the Journal Nature Geoscience.

A Russian, American and a German, all astronauts, share a Russian Spacecraft while returning from International Space Station

November 10, 2014 By Jason Leathers Leave a Comment

An American, a Russian and a German returned from the International Space Station late Sunday night on Nov. 9, landing in Kazakhstan after spending 165 days in orbit.

“What a ride it has been,” NASA astronaut Reid Weisman exclaimed and wrote on Twitter just before he, Roscosmos cosmonaut Maxim Suraev and European Space Agency astronaut Alexander Gerst closed the hatch separating their Russian Soyuz TMA-13M spacecraft from the International Space Station at 4:27 p.m. EST (2127 GMT) Sunday.

Three hours later, the three Expedition 40/41 crewmates undocked Soyuz from the orbiting laboratory’s Rassvet mini research module, setting off for their return journey to home i.e. Earth. Monitoring their departure from onboard the station were Expedition 42 commander Butch Wilmore and cosmonauts Alexander Samokutyayev and Elena Serova, who arrived at the International Space Station in September.

The Soyuz crew performed a 4-minute, 41-second engine burn at 10:05 p.m. EST (0305 GMT on Nov. 10), slowing the craft and causing it to fall out of orbit.

After re-entering the atmosphere and descending under a parachute, Wiseman, Suraev and Gerst touched down on the frigid steppe of Kazakhstan at 10:58 p.m. EST (0358 GMT; 9:58 a.m. Kazakh local time on Nov. 10), northeast of the remote town of Arkalyk.

The three space flyers were provided brief medical checks before being flown to the Kazakh town of Kustanai for a traditional welcome ceremony. From there, Wiseman and Gerst were to be flown by a NASA jet to Scotland, where the two will part ways: Gerst will depart for the European Space Agency while Wiseman flies to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. Suraev will be flown directly from Kustanai to the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, located outside of Moscow.

Meteor Shower Changed Martian Atmosphere

November 10, 2014 By Brian Galloway 4 Comments

Last month, Comet Siding Spring spawned several tons of dust and ice particles on the Red Plane. The incident produced an approximately thousands of shooting stars.

Recently, NASA accumulated data from two of its spacecrafts that revealed significant information which gave an insight about the structure of Comet Siding Spring and the atmosphere of Mars.

The data unveiled that the large amount of dust and other fragments changed the entire configuration and released a meteor shower. Later on, the meteor shower gave birth to several atmospheric alterations.

Jim Green, the director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division informed that the scientists were really surprised by the large quantity of particles comet produced.

The magnesium break down the electric charge present in the Martian atmosphere. On the other hand, sodium formed a yellowish shade in the night sky that people usually witness in their parking lots at night.

Moreover, scientist asserted that this is the first time they observed this kind of ionization in the atmosphere because of any comet. It increased the layer of ions in the top most level of atmosphere. Some of the most noteworthy ions were sodium, iron and magnesium.

Nick Schneider, the main instrument scientist of one of the NASA’s satellite stated that it was indeed an amazing sight for the human eye.

The best place to witness this meteor shower was the Martian Surface. However, it was certainly impossible for experts to view the incident from there. Therefore, NASA sent two of its rover over there in order to record this amazing meteor shower. Unfortunately, the rovers failed to document the meteor shower due to some technical fault.

Curiosity, Opportunity, but No View of Mars Sky Show

November 8, 2014 By Germaine Hicks Leave a Comment

Researchers revealed this Friday in presenting initial scientific findings from the flyby, “A comet that zipped past Mars last month, dumped tons of dust into the planet’s atmosphere, providing a spectacular light show.”

A planetary scientist from University of Colorado, Nick Schneider, who was working on NASA’s Maven orbiter mission said that thousands of shooting stars — scraps of cometary dust burning up in the atmosphere — splashed across the Martian sky that night.

During NASA’s news conference, Dr. Schneider said, “It’s a very rare event in the entire history of humanity, and it would have been truly spectacular to the human eye.”

Robotic explorers limitations were highlighted, neither of NASA’s Martian rovers, Opportunity and Curiosity, successfully observed the shooting stars.

Dr. Schneider said, “We’ve got all these high-tech robots around, but I have to say, it might be the most sensitive scientific instrument of all to have a human lying outside with dark-adapted vision looking up at that sky.”

On 19^th Oct, Opportunity was able to capture images of the comet, Siding Spring, as it passed within 87,000 miles of Mars. L. Green, director of NASA’s planetary sciences division, said, “Curiosity and Opportunity don’t capture movies. They just weren’t designed to be able to do that.”

Though, orbiting spacecraft vibrantly observed the effects of the dust. Maven Orbiter’s instruments, which unexpectedly arrived weeks before the comet, looked at the upper Martian atmosphere, and afterward, a very bright color of UV light appeared which was linked to magnesium. Other colors showed the presence of iron.

Dr. Schneider, the lead scientist for the Maven instrument that made those observations said, “These are not what you expect for atmospheric ingredients, but they are what you expect from comet dust.”

Another Maven instrument detected Sodium, nickel, manganese, potassium, zinc and chromium.

Magnesium is usually 10% by weight of comet dust, Dr. Schneider said, leading to an estimate of thousands of kilograms of dust showering on Mars in about an hour. If that material arrived in pieces the size of sand grains, “a meteor shower could be made,” he added.

A radar instrument fitted on the ESA’s Mars Express orbiter observed an additional layer of electrons in the atmosphere — the result of falling dust particles burning up. Donald A. Gurnett, a physics professor at the University of Iowa who is the lead investigator for the instrument said, “This is extremely unusual.”

Moreover, the researchers revealed that within just hours most of the changes in the Martian atmosphere dissipated.

The European Space Agency and NASA’s orbiters were positioned on the opposite side of Mars when the peak of comet dust arrived. Traveling at 126,000 miles per hour, even a small particle could have damaged or destroyed a spacecraft.

The observatory in Australia that first identified the comet in January 2013 and named it as ‘Comet Siding Spring’, which is evolved from the Oort Cloud — a ball of icy debris about a light-year away. Though, each year, numerous cloud comets fly through the inner solar system, by the time they are seen, there is not enough time to send a spacecraft to study them.

But the comets that have been studied up close, such as Halley’s Comet, are closer in and return to the inner solar system every few years or decades.

With Siding Spring and its close encounter with Mars — less than half the distance between Earth and the moon — the spacecraft was already there to conduct the first close-up observations of an Oort Cloud comet. The NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter took the photographs that revealed — comet’s nucleus was smaller than the expected 1.2 miles, and it was rotating once every 8 hours.

In the meantime, the European Space Agency is concluding preparations for a high-risk, high-reward attempt to place a small lander on a comet next week.

Its Rosetta spacecraft arrived at Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in August. On Wednesday, a lander named Philae with a weight of 220-pound is going to detach from Rosetta for a period of seven-hours to the surface of the 2.5-mile-wide comet, tugged down by its gravitational pull.

Once Philae is on its way, it has no way to adjust its trajectory, and the mission managers admit the attempt could go skewed if the lander ends up on a boulder or in a hole. Andrea Accomazzo, the flight director said, “We have to be a bit lucky.”

An Incredible Meteor Shower by Comet Siding Spring

November 8, 2014 By Brian Galloway Leave a Comment

Comet that passed by Mars formed a new layer of primordial dust in the thin atmosphere.

The Comet’s dust caused a great threat to three spacecrafts that orbits around Mars. These orbiters directly came in contact with the dust and ice particles of the Siding Spring Comet. These particles compel the orbiters to stay at a distance from the Red Planet.

Fortunately, it turned out as a really wise decision of experts since the distance allowed orbiters to gather samples and several information related to that event.

Jim Green, director of planetary science at NASA expressed that after some time scientists realized the benefits hiding these orbits behind Mars. It saved the orbiters from the damage of several tons of ice and dust elements.

The Siding comet flyby around 140,000 kilometers away from the Red planet on the 19^th of October. The gap of this measure is equivalent to the one third of the distance between the Moon and the Earth. Shortly after this once in a history incident Martian skies turned into yellowish shades. The yellow color emerged due to the sodium in vaporized dust dumped by the Comet Siding Spring.

Nick Schneider, planetary scientist informed that it gave birth to numerous shooting stars that created an incredible view.

The scientists named this comet after the Australian Astronomical Observatory. It was first recognized last year in the month of January. However, Anglo-Australian Observatory is its official name.

NASA’s Hubble Telescope Takes Implausible Photos of Dusty Debris Around Stars

November 7, 2014 By Germaine Hicks Leave a Comment

As per the recent reports revealed, the renowned NASA Hubble telescope has captured implausible images of the dusty discs around the stars. The dust debris is formed as a result of the collision between leftovers following the recent planet formation, researchers said. The Hubble telescope captured the images of young stars that are 10 million years old and older stars that are at least 1 billion years old.

The NASA researchers said, “They are looking to see if they can find any unseen planets orbiting the stars.”

Glenn Schneider, one of the researchers from the University of Arizona said about the new phenomenon that; “It’s like looking back in time to see the kinds of destructive events that once routinely happened in our solar system after the planets formed.”

The researchers found a fascinating fact, using the Hubble telescope is that no dusty disks were the same. All the disks of dust around the stars are completely different. “The systems are not flat and one of the disks of dust has uniform surfaces. These are actually pretty complicated three-dimensional debris systems, often with embedded smaller structures,” Schneider said.

One of the stars, named HD 181327, has a massive spray of debris and dust surrounding it, the astronomers claimed. The astronomers believe that could be the result of two bodies colliding with each other. However, not all the irregularities they’ve seen in the dust disks come from the unseen planets in their vicinity, they added.

NASA’s Christopher Stark said that the dusty material on HD 181327 is not close to the host star. “Catastrophically destroying a massive object at such a large distance is difficult to explain, and it should be very rare,” he added.

The researchers said that the disks they’ve seen using the Hubble telescope might have been warped and twisted with unseen star material while interacting with each other. Using the Hubble telescope, the scientists were able to capture high-contrast images and could observe the debris system around the stars. Because of its distance, it was very difficult to capture images of the debris. Since 1995, only a few dozen pictures were captured of the dust debris around stars.

More than half of all the stars maybe rogue depict a NASA rocket experiment

November 7, 2014 By Rebecca McGhee Leave a Comment

NASA’s Cosmic Infrared Background Experiment rocket launch last year at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia shows that half the extragalactic background light is coming from rogue stars kicked out of their galaxies.

Scientists who shot a rocket up beyond the atmosphere for minutes at a time have discovered something remarkable in the universe’s diffuse background light that as many as half of the stars in the universe may have been stripped from their home galaxies and flung into space.

Scientists have long wondered about the origins of the diffuse light permeating the heavens, which they called extragalactic background light.

“There were some hints that there was some light in the background, and the question is that do we understand all of the processes that produced that light?” said study coauthor James Bock, a Caltech experimental cosmologist.

One theory held that the faint radiation might be coming from the early universe, a product of the first primordial galaxies that are so far away that they elude astronomer’s telescopes.

To find out, scientists with NASA’s Cosmic Infrared Background Experiment (CIBER) shot a small telescope up beyond the atmosphere to take clear shots of the sky in near-infrared light and then parachute back down to Earth.

Rather than finding signs of the stretched-out, red-shifted light from distant galaxies, the scientists discovered the light was surprisingly blue; a sign that it was coming from more nearby stars in the universe; stars that weren’t accounted for among the known galaxies.

These stars are so distant and faint that there’s no way to pick them out individually. They could be detected only by looking for this collective glow, the scientists said.

NASA’s Hubble captured “Ghost Light” from ceased galaxies

November 2, 2014 By Germaine Hicks 1 Comment

NASA’s Hubble telescope has captured a faint and ghostly glow of stars that were once emitted from galaxies billions of years ago. Since the glow is faint, NASA’s astronomers arrived at the conclusion that these galaxies were ripped apart gravitationally billions of years ago. They also concluded that six galaxies imploded inside a cluster of galaxies stretching over time frame of six billion years.

According to the scientists, the chaos occurred inside a vast collection of nearly 500 galaxies four billion light-years away. This large group of galaxies was nicknamed as ‘Pandora’s Cluster’.

Ignacio Trujillo from The Instituto de Astrofsica de Canarias (IAC), Spain’s Santa Cruz de Tenerife, said, “The Hubble data revealing the ghost light are important steps forward in understanding the evolution of galaxy clusters. It is also amazingly beautiful in that we found the telltale glow by utilizing Hubble’s unique capabilities.”

The research group estimated that the combined light of about 200 billion outcast stars contributed to about 10% of the brightness of the cluster.

The measurements by Hubble also depicted that the phantom stars are rich in heavy elements such as carbon, nitrogen and oxygen. This brings us to the conclusion that the scattered stars must be second or third generation ones because they are enriched with those elements that are formulated in the hearts of the first generation stars of the universe.

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