The latest episode of TMRO is now available on line: The SpaceUP Foundation – TMRO
This week we are joined by Chris Radcliff, creator and head monkey of SpaceUP. For more information on the new SpaceUP Foundation head over to http://www.spaceup.org
Here’s the latest TMRO Spacepod news report: Hacking Space with 3DSlicer – Space Pod 03/30/15
A detailed model of the International Space Station was created by Christoph Ruge from LEGO bricks: LEGO Ideas – International Space Station.
The model has gotten the 10000 votes necessary for it to be considered as a LEGO production model for sale: Fan’s LEGO replica of International Space Station soars to 10,000 votes – collectSPACE.
The 10k votes, however, is necessary but not sufficient.
Ruge’s station is only the fourth model of a real spacecraft to qualify for review. Two earlier ideas, Japan’s Hayabusa asteroid sample probe and NASA’s Mars Curiosity Rover, entered production and were sold. The third, a fan-created version of the Hubble Space Telescope, was not approved by LEGO.
Below is an announcement of a science festival in Cheltenham, in the Cotswolds area of England this June. The festival will feature lots of space related events:
SPACE EVENTS AT CHELTENHAM SCIENCE FESTIVAL
The Times Cheltenham Science Festival (2-7 June 2015) brings another stellar programme to Cotswolds this summer. Over the course of six days, the Festival hopes to inspire, challenge, surprise and entertain visitors in equal measure. It showcases ground-breaking research, debates big questions and introduces audiences to some of the world’s greatest thinkers. The 2015 Festival also has a fascinating range of space-themed events.
Particle physicist, retired rock star and presenter of the BBC’s Wonders of the Solar System, Brian Cox is the Royal Society’s newly appointed Professor for Public Engagement in Science at Manchester University. Join Brian as he talks with Adam Rutherford about particle physics, the importance of getting people engaged with science and why the UK needs to aspire to be the best place for science in the world.
Brian Cox will participate in the Time Cheltenham Science Festival.
What does the long-range future hold? Is there just one universe, or is ours one of many? Past President of the Royal Society Martin Rees goes from Mars to the multiverse, with astonishing recent developments in astronomy and cosmology: from unmanned spacecraft exploring our own solar system, to telescopes that reach as far as the Big Bang — and perhaps gives hints of other big bangs!
Mars is our nearest neighbour, but how do we get a better look at it? Land a 1 tonne, car-sized, laser-eyed nuclear powered robot laboratory named Curiosity on its surface, that’s how! Since 2012, the rover has been tasting, vaporising and rolling over the Martian landscape. Join Sanjeev Gupta, Peter Grindrod and John Bridges to get the latest on the red planet from Curiosity.
In 2014, Rosetta finally reached its destination after a ten-year, 6 billion km journey, becoming the first spacecraft in history to orbit a comet and land a probe on its surface. Join astrobiologist Lewis Dartnell, Rosetta project scientist Matt Taylor and planetary and space scientist Monica Grady to find out what happened when Philae touched down, the latest discoveries from Rosetta and what exciting breakthroughs are yet to come.
In 2014, cosmologists were thrilled to report ripples emanating from the beginning of time. But in a widely-publicised debacle these were proved false, the results most likely due to dust in the Milky Way. Andrew Pontzen joins experts Andrew Jaffe and George Efstathiou as they explain what went wrong, the effect this had on cosmology and what happens next as we continue searching for the moments after the Big Bang.
Space is an expensive business; this recent Rosetta mission is said to have cost £1.4bn. Although space research is often seen as glamorous and exciting, should research here on earth take priority? Asking whether we can justify the cost are Monica Grady, who organised a Kickstarter campaign to fund a mission to the moon, Director of RAL Space Richard Holdaway and former European Commission Chief Scientific Adviser Anne Glover.
For more than 50 years, giant telescopes like those at Jodrell Bank Observatory have searched the skies for evidence of alien civilisations. Join Jodrell Bank’s Tim O’Brien as he describes recent progress in the Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence (SETI), including live data links to giant telescopes, and considers what the future may hold in our attempts to make contact with our cosmic neighbours.
Festival visitors can join the Cotswold Astronomical Society for an evening of stargazing or for a bit of Festival fun, audiences can join a spoof mission to Mars. Masquerading as highly trained astronauts, participants should be prepared to face the worst case scenario!
The full Festival programme is available at cheltenhamfestivals.com
The latest episode of NASA’s Space To Ground weekly bulletin on activities related to the International Space Station:
The latest finding from the Hubble Space Telescope:
Hubble finds ghosts of quasars past
The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has imaged a set of enigmatic quasar ghosts — ethereal green objects which mark the graves of these objects that flickered to life and then faded. The eight unusual looped structures orbit their host galaxies and glow in a bright and eerie goblin-green hue. They offer new insights into the turbulent pasts of these galaxies.
The ethereal wisps in these images were illuminated, perhaps briefly, by a blast of radiation from a quasar — a very luminous and compact region that surrounds asupermassive black hole at the centre of a galaxy. Galactic material falls inwards towards the central black hole, growing hotter and hotter, forming a bright and brilliant quasar with powerful jets of particles and energy beaming above and below the disc of infalling matter.
In each of these eight images a quasar beam has caused once-invisible filaments in deep space to glow through a process called photoionisation. Oxygen, helium, nitrogen, sulphur and neon in the filaments absorb light from the quasar and slowly re-emit it over many thousands of years. Their unmistakable emerald hue is caused by ionised oxygen, which glows green.
These ghostly structures are so far from the galaxy’s heart that it would have taken light from the quasar tens of thousands of years to reach them and light them up. So, although the quasars themselves have turned off, the green clouds will continue to glow for much longer before they too fade.
Not only are the green filaments far from the centres of their host galaxies, they are also immense in size, spanning tens of thousands of light-years. They are thought to be long tails of gas formed during a violent past merger between galaxies — this event would have caused strong gravitational forces that would rip apart the galactic participants.
Despite their turbulent past, these ghostly filaments are now leisurely orbiting within or around their new host galaxies. These Hubble images show bright, braided and knotted streams of gas, in some cases connected to twisted lanes of dark dust.
Galactic mergers do not just alter the forms of the previously serene galaxies involved; they also trigger extreme cosmic phenomena. Such a merger could also have caused the birth of a quasar, by pouring material into the galaxies’supermassive black holes.
The first object of this type was found in 2007 by Dutch schoolteacher Hanny van Arkel (heic1102). She discovered the ghostly structure in the online Galaxy Zooproject, a project enlisting the help of the public to classify more than a million galaxies catalogued in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). The bizarre feature was dubbed Hanny’s Voorwerp (Dutch for Hanny’s object).
These objects were found in a spin-off of the Galaxy Zoo project, in which about 200 volunteers examined over 16 000 galaxy images in the SDSS to identify the best candidates for clouds similar to Hanny’s Voorwerp. A team of researchers analysed these and found a total of twenty galaxies that had gas ionised by quasars. Their results appear in a paper in the Astronomical Journal.
Those featured here [see above matrix of images] are (from left to right on top row) the Teacup (more formally known as 2MASX J14302986+1339117), NGC 5972, 2MASX J15100402+0740370 and UGC 7342, and (from left to right on bottom row) NGC 5252, Mrk 1498, UGC 11185 and 2MASX J22014163+115123