Really Rocket Science

The Hubble Space Telescope’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) has been offline since June 19, Space.com reports:

ngineers have yet to figure out what caused the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) to go into "safe mode," essentially a sleep state that prevents normal operations. But the outlook is bright.

"We’re very optimistic" that the camera will be fixed, said Ed Ruitberg, associate program manager for Hubble at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

Ruitberg told SPACE.com that some potential causes have been ruled out and that the problem is likely with a low-voltage power supply interface, something between the batteries and a camera component. If that’s the case, then redundant electronics can be relied on to bypass the problem area.

"We’re still investigating the problem and working on all sorts of contingencies," said Max Mutchler at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, where Hubble’s science operations are run. "We’re hoping for the best but preparing for other contingencies."

"There’s a new crater on the Moon. It’s about 14 meters wide, 3 meters deep and precisely one month, [sixteen] days old," NASA reports:

NASA astronomers watched it form: "On May 2, 2006, a meteoroid hit the Moon’s Sea of Clouds (Mare Nubium) with 17 billion joules of kinetic energy—that’s about the same as 4 tons of TNT," says Bill Cooke, the head of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office in Huntsville, AL. "The impact created a bright fireball which we video-recorded using a 10-inch telescope."

Lunar impacts have been seen before–"stuff hits the Moon all the time," notes Cooke–but this is the best-ever recording of an explosion in progress.

"The video plays in 7x slow motion; otherwise the explosion would be nearly invisible to the human eye. "The duration of the fireball was only four-tenths of a second," says Cooke.

You’ve heard it since high school. Staring into the sun is bad for your eye. Fortunately, you now have a satellite to do it for you, and even take pictures. I happened across this MetaFilter thread about the TRACE, the Transitional Region and Coronal Explorer, and discovered a treasure trove of photographs shot by the satellite. Kinda like this one.

Built and launched in April of 1998, on a mission to enable scientists to "study the connections between fine-scale magnetic fields and the associated plasma structures on the Sun in a quantitative way by observing the photosphere" (whatever that means) the satellite isn’t exactly new. But it took its millionth picture of the sun back in October of 1999. So it’s a great source of photographs that make great wallpaper for your desktop your IM profile, as well as movies that just make interesting viewing.

More pictures from space. This time it’s NASA using satellites to look inside storm clouds, in order to predict how much water they hold and how much might fall.

The first images from a $217 million satellite project to measure the moisture content of clouds provided breathtaking views of storms on Earth, scientists said.

“For the first time we’re seeing inside the clouds,” said Graeme Stephens, a Colorado State University atmospheric sciences professor and the principal investigator for the CloudSat project. “We can see tropical storms 15 kilometers deep organized on scales of thousands of kilometers across.”

CloudSat, a formation of five satellites launched April 28, was developed by CSU researchers in conjunction with other agencies to determine the moisture content of clouds, in the hope of developing long-term precipitation models.

“We want to know how much water is in the sky so we can see how much water falls,” Stephens said.

The spacecraft are 438 miles above the Earth.

NASA, of course, has the latest photos.

Last month we wrote about the launch of the CloudSat and Calipso satellites. Now reports are coming back that the first images from Cloudsat are giving scientists a completely new view of the clouds:

"We’re seeing the atmosphere as we’ve never seen it before," says Deborah Vane, CloudSat deputy principal investigator at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, US. "We’re no longer looking at clouds like images on a flat piece of paper, but instead we’re peering into the clouds and seeing their layered complexity…."

CloudSat’s Cloud Profiling Radar, the first millimetre-wavelength radar, underwent tests in late May and was formally activated on 2 June.

"All major cloud system types were observed, and the radar demonstrated its ability to penetrate through almost all but the heaviest rainfall," says Graeme Stephens, CloudSat principal investigator and atmospheric scientist at Colorado State University, US.

The first image is a cross-section of a warm storm front above the Norwegian Sea taken on 20 May. In the image, red represents highly reflective particles such as raindrops, ice crystals or snowflakes. Blue represents thinner cirrus clouds.

The radar also provided a look at a night snow storm near Antarctica. The long winter nights make traditional remote sensing difficult in the polar regions and CloudSat is the first satellite able to detect snowfall from space.

A third image shows tall thunderstorm clouds over east Africa.

The results are still preliminary, but the mission team aims to release validated science data within nine months.

CloudSat is part of the A-Train, a constellation of five satellites that fly right behind one another, measuring the same swath of Earth.

The picture above is "CloudSat’s first image, of a warm front storm over the Norwegian Sea, was obtained on May 20, 2006. In this horizontal cross-section of clouds, warm air is seen rising over colder air as the satellite travels from right to left. The red colors are indicative of highly reflective particles such as water droplets (or rain) or larger ice crystals (or snow), while the blue indicates thinner clouds (such as cirrus). The flat green/blue lines across the bottom represent the ground signal. The vertical scale on the CloudSat Cloud Profiling Radar image is approximately 30 kilometers (19 miles). The blue line below the Cloud Profiling Radar image indicates that the data were taken over water."

For more information on Cloudsat, visit the NASA CloudSat website.

It has nothing to do with Wes Craven and is not nearly as scary as it sounds: new details have been released about the Jason-2 (Joint Altimetry Satellite Oceanography Network) satellite set to be launched from Vandenberg AFB in October 2008. In a demonstration of international cooperation in global warming research, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency is working with the French company CNES on the project:

The science objectives of Jason-2/OSTM are to extend the time series of ocean surface topography measurements to: a) obtain a continuous record of observations (with the previous missions), b) to determine the variability of ocean circulation at decadal time scales from combined data record with T/P and Jason, c) improve the measure of the time-averaged ocean circulation, d) improve the measure of global sea-level change, and e) improve open ocean tide models.

The mission objectives call for the provision of the same measurement accuracy of Jason (3.3 cm) with a goal of achieving 2.5 cm, and to maintain the stability of the global mean sea level measurement with a drift less than 1 mm/year over the life of the mission. The overall goal is to better understand the forces behind global changes of climate and to predict seasonal anomalies in weather patterns; this is vital to understand the physics of the ocean.

Jason-2 is scheduled to join Jason-1 in the same orbit with a 10 day repeat observation cycle. Both satellites will pass within minutes of each other over the same ocean surface, thus enabling verification and cross-calibration of the collected data. Together, they will provide a vital contribution to the expanding network of global ocean observations and their application in meteorology, operational oceanography and climate monitoring.

Looks like the spacewalk we blogged about yesterday went off without a hitch. Almost.

The spacewalk took 6 1/2-hours, longer than expected, but nowhere near the record of eight hours and 56 minutes set in 2001.

"OK. We’re going out," Russian commander Pavel Vinogradov said at 6:48 p.m. EDT Thursday as he and U.S. flight engineer Jeff Williams exited the Russian side of the station in their bulky suits while the outpost soared more than 220 miles above Earth.

Vinogradov attached himself to the end of a boom that can extend to 50 feet and Williams maneuvered him to an area on the station where the Russian commander installed a new vent for a broken oxygen-generation system. At one point, the spacewalkers were bathed in a golden glow from a sunset over the Pacific Ocean. After the sun passed, the temperature got chilly.

"My feet are like ice," Williams joked in Russian when asked if he was cold. A Russian flight controller responded, "We need to put brandy into the system instead of water." 

No word on the brandy, but there was a pretty cool droid on board the ISS.

A couple of fifth grade students are going to see thier first rocket launch, and it’s a happy story of the internet community coming together to help a couple of fifth-graders who may be the next generation of rocket scientists. 

Here’s your chance to help do just that. Two fifth grade students from Indiana, Cameron Wade and Billy Shannon, both 11 years old, have an experiment that will launch onboard a suborbital NASA rocket. It’s part of a partnership between their school and NASA. The problem is, the grant they have doesn’t cover their own travel to Virginia to see the rocket launch!

They still want to go, of course. The trip will cost $3000, and they’re still $1000 from their goal.

And their experiment sounds pretty interesting. 

Their experiment is already in Virginia, waiting to be loaded onto the rocket. The students placed nuts and bolts screwed together in tiny bottles to see whether the vibrations from the rocket will break them apart.

They also sent up plant seeds, which they will plant this summer along with seeds that haven’t been airborne to see whether there is a difference in growth.

“They’re learning how to follow an experiment through,” Ghaffarian said. “They’re learning how to change the variables and see what happens, and it’s cool because … it makes it much more exciting than if you just buy a couple seeds and plant them.”

The nuts and bolts tie in with a unit the class did on robots and cars. The seeds work with lessons on extreme environments. Everyone in Ghaffarian’s third- through fifth-grade multiage class wrote essays that were judged by the school’s office staff on why they should be chosen for the Virginia field trip.

The good news? In less than a day, the money was raised. 

I am incredibly pleased and proud to announce that after just a few hours, BABloggers have donated more than $1000 to help the two fifth-graders and their teacher fly to Virginia to see their rocket launch!

… I just talked to Pamela Ghaffarian, the teacher, on the phone, and she was thrilled with how wonderful people have been to send her this money. She told me the two students, Cameron Wade and Billy Shannon, are really excited about the trip. I know they’re happy now, but wait until they actually see the launch! Even though it’s a small rocket, it’ll be really dramatic, and they’ll have the time of their lives.

And it might also inspire them to keep aiming high. Here’s to the science blogging community for coming together so quickly to help these students out!

Reading about a new satellite in New Scientist, set to launch in 2007, that could help us study the 4^th dimension by analyzing gamma-ray bursts:

Charles Keeton, a physicist at Rutgers University in New Jersey, U.S.,  and colleague Arlie Petters at Duke University in North Carolina, U.S., have calculated how many of these tiny black holes should exist – and how they might be detected – according to an offshoot of string theory.
 
The theory they use, called the Randall-Sundrum braneworld model, proposes that the 3D universe we live in is floating within a larger universe with an extra spatial dimension.
 
They based their calculations on black holes that each contain only the mass of a small asteroid. Assuming these objects make up 1% of the mass of nearby dark matter – whose existence can only be detected through its gravitational effects on normal matter – the team says there could be several thousand black holes in the solar system. And not only that: "The nearest ones would lie well inside Pluto’s orbit," says Keeton.
 

Even NASA is calling this “extreme physics,” which has a nice ring to it. 

We’ve covered this type of  topic before – we like anything having to do with anti-gravity, anti-matter and the “theory of everything.”

Consider this your mid-week 70s flashback. Science Daily reports that the two Voyager spacecraft are still sending back useful data to NASA scientists nearly 30 years after their launch — and they’re providing clues to better understanding both the heliosphere and the direction of our solar system through local space:

 The heliosphere, generated by the Sun, is sort of the cocoon in which the solar system rides. It has been suspected for several years that it is not spherical but more egg shaped. Voyager 1 recently reached one edge and it is estimated it will pass into interstellar space at about 12.4 billion miles from the Sun. It was recently announced that Voyager 2 has reached its more southerly edge, sooner than expected. It is now believed it will reach interstellar space at about 10.5 billion miles. This reveals that the heliosphere is not a sphere after all, but is more of a comet shape.

According to Cal Tech’s Ed Stone, the former director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a Voyager chief scientist, the shape of the bubble is determined by what is pressing on the solar system from the outside, meaning the shape and force of interstellar gases. That is one explanation. Another put forth by Walter Cruttenden of the Binary Research Institute is that local gases are fairly uniform and the shape derives from the trajectory of the solar system through local space — possibly in its orbit around a companion star. While this latter explanation is far more speculative, it is not unlikely that local interstellar gases are relatively homogeneous and therefore the shape of the heliosphere may be at least partially due to motion of the solar system.

 

Amazingly, both Voyager spacecraft are expected to remain active for several more decades. Which is more than can be said for many other artifacts of the 70s.