Went to KSC yesterday, and here are a couple of pictures for a tour

http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/James_We...r_Test_999.html

Six James Webb Space Telescope beryllium mirror segments completed a series of cryogenic tests at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. During testing, NASA contractor engineers subjected the mirrors to -415 degrees Fahrenheit, measuring in extreme detail the shape of the mirror changes as it cooled.

NASA will ship the mirror to Redmond, California for final room temperature surface polishing. Using those surface error measurements, NASA will then polish each segment to the opposite value of the observed surface error. When the mirror goes through the next round of cryogenic testing, it should distort into a perfect shape.

The Marshall facility is the world’s largest X-ray telescope test facility and a unique site for cryogenic clean room optical testing. The next mirror set is due to arrive in August. Marshall will cryogenically test each of the 18 James Webb mirror segments twice, once with bare polished beryllium and then again after applying a thin gold coating. This will ensure that the mirror will maintain its shape in space.

The cryogenic test gauges how each mirror changes temperature and shape over an operational temperature range in space. This helps predict the infrared image quality and data processing adjustments needed. The mirrors and instruments will stay cold to allow seeing the infrared light they reflect. Warm objects give off infrared light, or heat.

If the mirror is too warm, we may lose the distant galaxies’ faint infrared in the infrared glow of the mirror itself. Thus, the mirrors will operate around -379 degree Fahrenheit.

The James Webb will give clues about the formation of the universe and evolution of our own solar system. This will stretch from the first light after the Big Bang to star system formations capable of supporting life on Earth-like planets.

http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Brown_Dw...e_Star_999.html

Astronomers have imaged a 36 Jupiter-mass very young brown dwarf tightly orbiting a young nearby sun-like star. International astronomers made the rare find using the Near-Infrared Coronagraphic Imager on the international 8-meter Gemini-South Telescope in Chile. The brown dwarf, PZ Tel B, is only 18 astronomical units from the primary star PZ Tel A. Only 18 Astronomical Units separates them, similar to Uranus from the sun.

Most directly imaged young brown dwarf and planetary companions are at orbital separations greater than 50 AU, larger Pluto’s 40 AU orbit. In addition to its small separation, in just the past year PZ Tel B has moved quickly outward from its parent star. A seven-year-old image showed the glare from the host star obscured PZ Tel B.

PZ Tel A is rare being both close and very young, so we imaged it several times in the past. It was surprisingly to see a new companion around what we thought was a single star. PZ Tel B travels on a particularly eccentric orbit. In the last 10 years, it has careen through its inner solar system. We can best explain this by a highly eccentric, oval-shaped orbit rather than circular.

Host star PZ Tel A is like our sun, being of similar mass but only 12 million years old. Our Sun is 400 times older. The PZ Tel system is still young enough to possess significant cold circumstellar dust, which the brown dwarf may have gravitationally sculpted. This makes the system important to study early solar system formation stages. PZ Tel B’s orbital motion has significant implications for what planets can form, and whether they can form at all.

Because PZ Tel B is so close to its parent star, it was difficult to distinguish the faint companion’s light from the primary star. PZ Tel B is only 0.33 arcseconds from PZ Tel A, equivalent to a dime seen from 7 miles. Adaptive optics coupled to a coronagraph to block excess starlight allowed pictures so close to the star. Specialized image analysis techniques detected PZ Tel B and measured its orbital motion.

The Near-Infrared Coronagraphic Imager that discovered PZ Tel B can detect companions a millionth the intensity of the host star at just one arcsecond separation. We are just beginning to learn the many solar system configurations around sun like stars.

http://www.space-travel.com/reports/ISS_Co..._Earth_999.html

The 44-year-old International Space Station Commander Alexander Skvortsov responded to a love letter from a 17-year-old Moscow girl. RIA Novosti has published parts of the cosmonaut’s reply with permission from the girl, her parents, and Skvortsov himself.

"Of course, I am flattered, as every normal man would be; however, I became a bit confused when I received a letter from a 17-year-old girl. I realize that it is ok to have a crush on famous people at [her] age, but I never expected to become an object of the girl's affectation, so much the more I have a daughter at almost this age," Skvortsov wrote. "Although, if speaking seriously, I believe the girl's enthusiastic attitude is concerned with space rather than with me personally," the cosmonaut said.

The young Muscovite, who fell in love with Skvortsov, attended his launch into space. "Even adults cry when they see [carrier] rockets soar up into the sky. And here's a young girl, a rocket, a launch, a huge crowd of people, the crew in spotlight... Her admiration was inexpressible. In this situation her [love of] choice was made just by chance," Skvortsov wrote.

"I am happy that an astronaut has become the girl's superhero, I mean the profession as a whole, not me in particular," he wrote. If young people show interest in space now, mankind will probably continue exploring the Universe throughout the years, the cosmonaut wrote. "And maybe some day will go far beyond." However, the cosmonaut did not give the girl his personal e-mail or ICQ.


I started editing, but after the fist paragraph, I pretty much left it original.

Man, talk about putting him on the spot! And he handled it beautifully!

http://www.universetoday.com/2010/07/27/re...-earth-in-2182/

Spanish asteroid trackers upgraded the chance that asteroid 1999 RQ36 could hit our planet to a one-in-a-thousand chance on Sept. 24, 2182 from one chance in 1,400. Currently, however, NASA assigns it a 1 in 3,570 chance. That is a 99.972% chance the asteroid will completely miss us.

The Spanish team said knowing this asteroid poses a potential twenty-second century threat may spur design asteroid deflection advances. They have estimated and monitored potential impacts for this asteroid through 2200.

In 2009, new calculations and observations revealed a chance of impact sometime during a 30 year span in the mid-to late 2100’s. The asteroid is 560 meters wide, more than twice the size of asteroid Apophis, which has a 1 in 250,000 chance of impact in 2036. The greater width means it will have ten times the impact energy. Gravitational influences on the asteroid when it passes massive objects, plus slight Yarkovsky effects induce a fair amount of orbital uncertainty. This is sunlight hitting one asteroid side and not the other, producing a tiny acceleration.

We have not measured this effect for 1999 RQ36 until this new research. Up until 2060, the divergence of the impacting orbits is moderate. Between 2060 and 2080, it increases 10,000 times as the asteroid approaches Earth. It then increases again slightly until another approach in 2162, and then decreases. The most likely collision year is 2182.

This complex dynamic makes a realistic deflection procedure possible. We can produce a path deviation before the impact in 2080, and more easily before 2060. Discovering this object after 2080 means the deflection would require technology we do not currently have. Therefore, we need careful monitoring to deflect this object type with moderate technological and financial resources.

We call the proposed robotic mission to this asteroid OSIRIS-Rex, the Origins, Spectral Interpretation Resource Identification, and Security, Regolith Explorer. I dare you to say that quickly three times. It is one of three NASA New Frontiers proposals for more study under. The mission would launch in about 2018, and it could provide solar system formation information, and perhaps shed light on how life began. It also might be one of the first looks at how we might deflect an asteroid.

Spacequakes - a temblor in the earth's magnetic field

(that I don't quite understand, butthought you guys would enjoy the read. It's short.)

That trailer finally lets me see what Phil Plait looks like. He has been on a crusade for about ten years, maybe more, to debunk junk science. Several years ago his website, Bad Astronomy, merged Fraser Cane's website Universe Today, becoming BAUT.

I remember Phil's earliest peeve was the people claiming that men never walked on the Moon.

(IMG:http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/files/44431/Fermi%20Paradox.png)

In 1950, the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi raised the question that now bears his name. If there are intelligent civilisations elsewhere in the Universe with technologies that far surpass our own, why do we see no sign of them?

Since then, the so-called Fermi Paradox has puzzled astronomers and science fiction writers alike. And although there are no shortage of ways to approach the problem (this blog has covered them here and here for example), nobody has come up with a convincing explanation. .

Now there is another take on the problem thanks to a new approach by Igor Bezsudnov and Andrey Snarskii at the National Technical University of Ukraine.

Their approach is to imagine that civilisations form at a certain rate, grow to fill a certain volume of space and then collapse and die. They even go as far as to suggest that civilisations have a characteristic life time, which limits how big they can become.

http://technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/25501/

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/s...ce/ngc-297.html
Galaxies blaze throughout the universe with star birth. However, for nearby, small spiral galaxy NGC-2976, the star-making party is almost over. Its outer regions star-formation activities shut down millions of years ago. The celebration remains only for a few die-hard partygoers huddled in the inner region.

A raucous interaction with M-81, a neighboring hefty galaxy group, ignited star birth a billion years ago in NGC 2976, but the star-making fun is ending. Hubble images show that outskirt star formation began fizzling out 500 million years ago. Some of the gas stripped away and the rest collapsed toward the center. With no gas left to fuel the party, fewer regions are taking forming stars. The core star-making region is now only 5,000 light-years wide.

NGC-2976 does not look like a typical spiral galaxy, having no obvious spiral arms. Dusty disk filaments show no clear spiral structure, and the galaxy has no central star bulge. The blue dots are fledgling blue giants in remaining active star birth regions. NGC-2976 is on the M-81 galaxy group fringe 12 million light-years away in the Ursa Major constellation.

Hubble resolved hundreds of thousands of individual stars. What look like grains of sand in the image are actually individual stars. Their study yielded color, brightness, and therefore age. Hubble results combined with a radio observation map gave the galaxy’s current hydrogen distribution. The Hubble research team then reconstructed the star-making history for large areas of the galaxy.

This Hubble site gives additional details.
http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/r...ull/results/50/
grazing encounters between galaxies funneled gas into a galaxy’s core, with these Hubble observations providing the clearest view of this phenomenon. In another 500 million years, the party will be over.

At one point during the star formation process, gas density in the galaxy’s inner regions was five times higher than it is today. The gas quickly vanished, letting the galaxy to settle down now.

Hubble uniquely gives us this type of observation is. Had we had not picked out individual stars, we would not have seen the galaxy’s significant gas rearrangement, causing the stellar birth zone to shrink toward the center.

 Spiral_Galaxy_NGC_2976_1a_Hubble.jpg ( 1.15MB ) Number of downloads: 1

http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Black_Ho..._Twice_999.html

Chandra astronomers discovered that something jerked a giant black hole around twice, pointing its spin axis in a different direction from before. The black hole spin axis moved, but not the black hole itself. Astronomers are not exactly sure what caused this behavior, but a collision between two galaxies probably triggered it.

Galaxy 4C+00.58 is 780 million light years from Earth. Like most galaxies, it has a supermassive black hole at its center, but this one is pulling in massive quantities of gas. The swirling gas forms a disk around the black hole.

Twisted magnetic fields in the disk generate strong electromagnetic forces that propel some of the gas away at high speed producing radio jets. A bright pair of jets point from left to right and a fainter, more distant radio emission runs in a different direction. 4C+00.58 is an X-shaped galaxy because of its radio emission outline.

The X-ray image reveals four different cavities around the black hole. These cavities come in pairs. One pair is in the top-right and bottom-left, another in the top-left and bottom-right. The complicated geometry tells what happened to this supermassive black hole and its galaxy. Something changed its spin axis not once, but twice.

The spin axis of the black hole ran diagonally from top-right to bottom-left. After colliding with a smaller galaxy, a jet ignited, blowing away gas. This formed cavities in the hot gas to the top-right and bottom-left. The gas did not align with the spin of the black hole, rapidly changing its spin axis. The jets then pointed roughly top-left to bottom-right, creating hot gas cavities, and radio emission in this direction.

Then, either the two central black holes merged or more infalling gas jerked the spin axis around to its present roughly left to right direction. Astrophysicists have previously suggested these supermassive black hole angle changes to explain X-shaped radio galaxies, but this is the first convincing individual case.

Jets and cavities are cosmic fossils that trace supermassive black hole merger history and the galaxy it lives in. If spin flips produce even a fraction of X-shaped radio galaxies, then their frequency may be important for estimating gravitational radiation rates.