UC Santa Cruz grad student Carver Bierson gives an interesting SETI Institute talk about how the southern polar cap of Mars came to consist of multiple alternating layers of water ice and frozen CO2. He also addresses the question of whether the storehouse of earth’s nuclear weapons could be used to melt the ice cap and provide a dense atmosphere for terraformers living there.
Category Archives: Space Science
A “Galaxy of Horrors” at JPL
On this Halloween evening, check out the spooky worlds in the Galaxy of Horrors at JPL’s Eyes-Ranger.
Here is a sampling:
Videos: Moon gems from Japan’s Kaguya spacecraft
Check out these nice views of the Moon and Earth from the Japanese Kaguya (Selene) mission: New Gems from the Moon | The Planetary Society –
Although the mission took place in 2007-2009, only now has
the Japanese space agency, JAXA, […] publicly released the entire data set from Kaguya’s HDTV cameras. The iconic views are all there…plus some gems that haven’t been widely seen before. One reason they weren’t previously released may be that some of them are “marred” by lens flare and other imperfections, but I think such things lend interesting visual texture and context to the images and videos.
Enjoy a few examples below, then visit the Kaguya HDTV Data Publication System website if you want to explore further.
More than seven years after Kaguya’s planned impact on the lunar surface, it’s good to have these fresh visions, courtesy of the moon’s brave princess.
Videos: Four Days at Saturn + Public lecture: Cassini’s Epic Journey at Saturn
This time lapse video made by the Cassini spacecraft shows four rotations of Saturn:
NASA’s Cassini spacecraft stared at Saturn for nearly 44 hours in April 2016 to obtain this movie showing four Saturn days.
Cassini will begin a series of dives between the planet and its rings in April 2017, building toward a dramatic end of mission — a final plunge into the planet, six months later.
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The Cassini Mission to Saturn, which was launched in 1997 and reached the ringed planet in 2004, will come to an end in September 2017 when the spacecraft will dive into the atmosphere of the gas giant. Earl Maize, Cassini Project Manager, and Linda Spilker, Cassini Project Scientist, gave a lecture on Saturn and the Cassini mission this past week:
This public talk presented highlights of Cassini’s ambitious inquiry at Saturn and an overview of science observations in the final orbits. There was a discussion of Cassini’s exciting challenges, and promise of the final year of the mission, ultimately flying through a region where no spacecraft has ever flown before.
ESA Rosetta mission ends with spacecraft impacting the surface of Comet 67P/C-G
The European Space Agency (ESA) ended the Rosetta mission to Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko today by maneuvering the spacecraft onto (or, more likely, into) the surface of the comet: Mission complete: Rosetta’s journey ends in daring descent to comet – ESA
ESA’s historic Rosetta mission has concluded as planned, with the controlled impact onto the comet it had been investigating for more than two years.
Confirmation of the end of the mission arrived at ESA’s control centre in Darmstadt, Germany at 11:19 GMT (13:19 CEST) with the loss of Rosetta’s signal upon impact.
Rosetta carried out its final manoeuvre last night at 20:50 GMT (22:50 CEST), setting it on a collision course with the comet from an altitude of about 19 km. Rosetta had targeted a region on the small lobe of Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, close to a region of active pits in the Ma’at region.
The descent gave Rosetta the opportunity to study the comet’s gas, dust and plasma environment very close to its surface, as well as take very high-resolution images.
Pits are of particular interest because they play an important role in the comet’s activity. They also provide a unique window into its internal building blocks.
The information collected on the descent to this fascinating region was returned to Earth before the impact. It is now no longer possible to communicate with the spacecraft.
This video shows the trajectory that led the spacecraft into the comet:
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Here is a video preview of Rosetta’s final act from TMRO.tv:
TMRO Astronomer Jared Head gives us a review of the incredible Rosetta mission from the European Space Agency, and then gives us a preview of what to expect in it’s final days ahead at the end of the mission.
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