Category Archives: Space Science

Events, Space Science, Space Systems

Videos: 40th Anniversary of the Voyager missions

To mark the 40 years of the flights of the two Voyager spacecraft through the solar system and into interstellar space, NASA held an event with several of the scientists involved in the project to discuss what it has accomplished:

This segment with William Shatner is about public messages transmitted to Voyager 1:

From the caption:

On Sept. 5, 2017—the 40th anniversary of Voyager 1’s launch—NASA revealed the winning #MessageToVoyager and beamed it into space. “Message to Voyager” is a social media campaign inspired by the messages of goodwill carried on the Golden Record aboard each Voyager spacecraft.

NASA invited the public to submit short, uplifting messages to the Voyager 1 spacecraft and all that lies beyond it. These messages were a maximum of 60 characters and were tagged #MessageToVoyager. NASA tracked more than 30,000 submissions. The Voyager team together with JPL and NASA headquarters selected their 10 favorites, which were then put to a public vote. The winning message was sent into interstellar space by a command that originated from the Deep Space Network (DSN) mission control at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory with help from the original Captain Kirk, actor William Shatner; Tracy Drain, Juno mission deputy chief engineer; Jeff Berner, DSN chief engineer; and Annabel Kennedy, DSN command engineer.

To see all 10 finalist messages and get more details about the #MessageToVoyager campaign, visit https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/message/

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Astronomy, SETI, Space Science

Project Blue: Crowd-funding a telescope to find habitable worlds

The BoldlyGo Institute and several other institutions are supporting Project Blue, a private initiative to develop a space telescope specialized to look for habitable planets around other stars. The Project has opened a crowd-funding campaign to pay for the design of the spacecraft: Project Blue: A Telescope to Find Habitable Worlds | Indiegogo 

Our generation has a unique opportunity to discover Earthlike planets around other stars, and Project Blue could make this breakthrough. We’re creating detailed plans for the spacecraft, and we want you to be a part of advancing our mission to the Launchpad!

We believe a sister Earth could exist not too far from the place we call home and, thanks to recent breakthroughs, the technology now exists to find out. We at Project Blue aim to search the Alpha Centauri system for planets like Earth, and we want your help to launch our engineering design effort, like creating blueprints for a house before construction begins. We are looking to raise $175,000 to complete this engineering phase and to establish our industry partnerships. And we want to get you involved in the mission right at the start so that, together, we can all take a bold leap into shaping humanity’s future!

The observatory would be much smaller, and much cheaper, than the Hubble or similar big science spacecraft:

Project Blue is a space telescope mission that seeks to find and photograph a habitable world, another Earthlike planet where life can potentially thrive. Our goal is simple — to build & launch a telescope so powerful it can detect a blue planet in the nearby Alpha Centauri star system. Thanks to recent technological innovations, our telescope is small enough to fit on a coffee table, but powerful enough to pick up a planet over a billion times dimmer than its star — from four light years away! With this telescope we aim to take the first ever optical image of a potentially habitable exoplanet, and the team hopes that the results will show a ‘pale blue dot’ similar to the famous photo of Earth taken by the Voyager probe.

With sufficient public support, the spacecraft could go into orbit by 2023:

Gas giants Saturn, Jupiter, et al, Space Science

Cassini nears journey’s end + The plume of Enceladous + The rings in hi-res

The Cassini mission to Saturn will end on September 15th when the spacecraft’s orbit will take it into the gas giant’s atmosphere. This video shows some of the spectacular imagery of the Saturn system sent back by the probe since it went into orbit there in 2004.

** Here is a video clip showing the plume of water vapor emitted at the pole of Saturn’s moon Enceladus: Cassini: The Grand Finale: Last Enceladus Plume Observation

This movie sequence of images is from the last dedicated observation of the Enceladus plume by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft.

The images were obtained over approximately 14 hours as Cassini’s cameras stared at the active, icy moon. The view during the entire sequence is of the moon’s night side, but Cassini’s perspective Enceladus shifts during the sequence. The movie begins with a view of the part of the surface lit by reflected light from Saturn and transitions to completely unilluminated terrain. The exposure time of the images changes about halfway through the sequence, in order to make fainter details visible. (The change also makes background stars become visible.)

The images in this movie sequence were taken on Aug. 28, 2017, using Cassini’s narrow-angle camera. The images were acquired at a distance from Enceladus that changed from 684,000 to 539,000 (1.1 million to 868,000 kilometers). Image scale changes during the sequence, from 4 to 3 miles (7 to 5 kilometers) per pixel.

** Sharpest images yet of Saturn’s rings: Cassini: The Grand Finale: Colorful Structure at Fine Scales

These are the highest-resolution color images of any part of Saturn’s rings, to date, showing a portion of the inner-central part of the planet’s B Ring. The view is a mosaic of two images that show a region that lies between 61,300 and 65,600 miles (98,600 and 105,500 kilometers) from Saturn’s center.

The first image (Figure A, above) is a natural color composite, created using images taken with red, green and blue spectral filters. The pale tan color is generally not perceptible with the naked eye in telescope views, especially given that Saturn has a similar hue.

The material responsible for bestowing this color on the rings—which are mostly water ice and would otherwise appear white—is a matter of intense debate among ring scientists that will hopefully be settled by new in-situ observations before the end of Cassini’s mission.

Continue…

More about Cassini’s final days and its legacy:

Activism, General, Space Science

Videos: Planetary Post with Robert Picardo + Cassini: A Saturn Odyssey + Jupiter’s Great Red Spot Timelapse

Here is Robert Picardo with his monhtly Planetary Post video:

Bill Nye celebrates the total solar eclipse of 2017 at Homestead National Monument as part of our partnership with the U.S. National Parks and Picardo has a very special goodbye song for the Cassini Mission.

More space science video:  Cassini: A Saturn Odyssey

** [The video Jupiter’s Great Red Spot Timelapse was removed for some reason from YouTube. In its place is a nice true color image of Jupiter taken by the Juno probe:]

This image of Jupiter’s iconic Great Red Spot was created by citizen scientist Björn Jónsson using data from the JunoCam imager on NASA’s Juno spacecraft. This true-color image offers a natural color rendition of what the Great Red Spot and surrounding areas would look like to human eyes from Juno’s position. The tumultuous atmospheric zones in and around the Great Red Spot are clearly visible. The image was taken on July 10, 2017 at 07:10 p.m. PDT (10:10 p.m. EDT), as the Juno spacecraft performed its seventh close flyby of Jupiter. At the time the image was taken, the spacecraft was about 8,648 miles (13,917 kilometers) from the tops of the clouds of the planet at a latitude of -32.6 degrees.

Gas giants Saturn, Jupiter, et al, Space Science, Space Systems

After 40 years, Voyagers 1 and 2 still talk to us from billions of kilometers away

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This summer marks the 40th anniversary of the launches of the two Voyager spacecraft, which are still in contact with earth as they head out into interstellar space:

More about the two deep space explorers:

A longer documentary about the Voyager missions:

https://youtu.be/ZGDfw5Nq3fI

 

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