Monthly Archives: September 2013

Events, Rockets, The Moon

Night launch of Minotaur V with lunar probe

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1:15 am ET/Sept.7.13:  This fact sheet from Emily Lakdawalla outlines the tasks for LADEE in the coming days and months. It will actually do several burns to get into the lunar orbit to begin its science mission: LADEE prelaunch facts – The Planetary Society.

11:59 pm ET: Success! Congratulations to the Orbital team for sending the LADEE spacecraft on the start of its journey to the Moon. LADEE will later fire its own on-board engine to complete the trip. NASA has been able to contact the spacecraft.

9:57 pm ET: The countdown is going well for the launch of the Orbital Sciences five-stage Minotaur V rocket from Wallops Island Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) on the Eastern Shore of Virginia. (See earlier post.)  Liftoff is expected at 11:27 p.m. EDT. The rocket will send NASA’s LADEE science probe to orbit the Moon.

Updates on the launch status can be found here:

[ Update: Here is a video of the launch:

]

Astronomy, Exoplanets, Space participation

With OSCAAR spot exoplanets with home telescope

The software OSCAAR/OSCAAR  at GitHub allows for small telescopes to observe the transit of an exoplanet across the face of its home star:

The original OSCAAR team at the University of Maryland created OSCAAR because we wanted to observe transiting exoplanets at our small campus observatory, but our faculty and staff at the time had never used our observatory for such observations. We experimented with different observing and analysis techniques until we got our first transit light curve of HD 189733 b in the summer of 2011. We immediately wanted to share what we learned, and in the two years since then we’ve built OSCAAR for use by others like us — with access to basic observing equipment and a drive to observe transiting exoplanets, who need a place to start.

OSCAAR is continuously being enhanced and expanded by an open community of active observers and astronomers. Our contributors today span from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center to the University of Leiden, and observers getting started with OSCAAR reach from Vestal, New York to Athens, Greece. If you’re interested in using or contributing to OSCAAR, we look forward to welcoming you into the community! Don’t be shy to ask how you can get involved! Contributing to OSCAAR makes a great undergraduate research project, for example.

See also Spot Exoplanets With Your Home Telescope, Using Free NASA Software – Popular Science

The new software is called the Open Source differential photometry Code for Accelerating Amateur Research, or OSCAAR for short. OSCAAR measures changes in the brightness of stars. When exoplanets pass between their stars and Earth, they reduce the amount of light that reaches Earth. OSCAAR accounts for the distortion of light that occurs in the Earth’s atmosphere and for changes in light that may occur because there are clouds overhead.

Those who use OSCAAR will likely find giant gas planets orbiting close to their stars. Hot. (Literally.) That’s because such planets are large enough to cause enough change in their stars’ light for amateur equipment to detect. Also, because they’re close to their stars, their orbits are small, swift and measurable over the course of one night.

DIY space, Living in Space, Space Systems

Copenhagen Suborbitals: Spacesuit testing in high altitude chamber

Copenhagen Suborbitals posts this video about testing a prototype space suit in a pressure chamber:

High altitude chamber test of the Copenhagen Suborbitals / Project Alpha DIY space suit at the main hospital of Copenhagen, Denmark. The test was performed to validate the stability of internal suit pressure and working life support systems in a stressful environment.

http://youtu.be/T4JCItzUMsY

Science and Technology

Sci-Tech: Tesla Model S vs Aston Martin Rapid S at Autocar.co.uk

If this review is any guide, the Tesla Motors Model S will do well in the UK: Video: Tesla Model S vs Aston Martin Rapide S Car Video – Autocar

Asteroids & Comets, Astronomy

Video: Fireball in the sky over southeast US

A super bright meteor fireball was visible over the southeastern USA during the early hours of August 28th: Fireball outshines moon:  NASA cameras captured video of a meteor streaking past the moon. The fireball was one of the brightest observed by NASA in the past five years. – CSMonitor.com

“Recorded by all six NASA cameras in the Southeast, this fireball was one of the brightest observed by the network in 5 years of operations,” Bill Cooke, head of the Meteoroid Environment Office at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., wrote in a blog post Tuesday (Sept. 3).

“From Chickamauga, Georgia, the meteor was 20 times brighter than the full moon; shadows were cast on the ground as far south as Cartersville.”

Here’s a brief video of the fireball talken by a NASA camera:

Caption:

Early Wednesday morning, at 3:27:20 AM Eastern Time, a piece of an asteroid, about 2 feet in diameter and weighing over 100 pounds, entered Earth’s atmosphere above the Georgia/Tennessee border, just south of Cleveland. The meteor was moving northeast at 56,000 miles per hour, and began to break apart north east of Ocoee, at an altitude of 33 miles. A second, fragmentation occurred less than half a second later, at an altitude of 29 miles. NASA cameras lost track of the fireball pieces at an altitude of 21 miles, by which time they had slowed to a speed of 19,400 mph. Sensors on the ground recorded sound waves (“sonic booms”) from this event, and there are indications on Doppler weather radar of a rain of small meteoritic particles falling to the ground east of Cleveland, Tennessee.