So, did anybody know there's a shuttle launch coming up in about 6.5 hours?

STS-130, Endeavour, is due to lift off at 4:39am tomorrow morning, Feb 7, 2010. Last night-time shuttle launch.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/main/index.html

Launch Blog: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/...aunch_blog.html

http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2010/feb/H...-033_Pluto.html

NASA and Hubble have released the most detailed images ever of dwarf planet Pluto. The images show an icy, mottled, dark molasses-colored world seasonally changing surface color and brightness. Pluto has become significantly redder, while its illuminated northern hemisphere is getting brighter. Surface nitrogen ice is melting on the sunlit pole and then refreezing on the other pole during Pluto’s 248-year-long seasonal cycle. The dramatic color change took place from 2000 to 2002.

Pluto is a dynamic world with dramatic atmospheric changes, not simply a ball of ice and rock. Axial tilt and the long year propel the seasonal changes. Unlike Earth, where tilt alone drives seasons, Pluto’s elliptical orbit also drives the seasons. Spring transitions to northern summer quickly because Pluto is moving faster in its orbit and closer to the sun.

Ground-based observations illustrate that the atmospheric mass doubled from 1988 to 2002. Comparing 1994 Hubble pictures to 2002 and 2003 showed that the northern polar region has gotten brighter, while the southern hemisphere darkened. Particularly noticeable is a bright and puzzling spot unusually rich in carbon monoxide frost. New Horizons will get an excellent look at the boundary between this bright feature and a nearby pitch-black surface material region. It shows surface variations a few hundred miles across that are too coarse for understanding surface geology. Ultraviolet radiation from the distant sun breaks up surface methane, leaving behind a dark red carbon-rich residue.

These images will remain the sharpest view of Pluto until NASA’s New Horizons probe gets within six months of its 2015 flyby. New Horizons will pass Pluto so quickly that it will see only one hemisphere in detail. Since the Hubble images are only a few pixels wide, dithering computer processing combines multiple, slightly offset pictures. It has taken four years and 20 continuously and simultaneously operating computers to computers synthesize this higher-resolution single exposure view. Hubble will make additional observations prior to New Horizons’ arrival.

 Pluto_is_Changing.jpg ( 85.98K ) Number of downloads: 0

No preface--watch this interview with Gene--the last man to leave footprints on the moon

http://video.foxnews.com/v/3998554/turning...aylist_id=86919

http://www.universetoday.com/2010/01/21/un...essier-objects/

Tammy for Universe Today has completed the monster volume “Guide to the Messier Objects”. It covers all 110 Messier Objects, from M-1, the Crab Nebula, to M-110, a satellite galaxy to Andromeda, and everything in between.

In addition to descriptions of the individual Messier Objects, she nicely introduces the Messier Objects, gives a guide to doing a Messier marathon, and suggests how to stretch out your Messier marathon to a week.

http://www.universetoday.com/2010/02/02/wi...stead-of-solar/

While we think of solar power as the fuel for our great, great, great grandkids on Mars, a bio fuel tank of gas might be in their home. We would not bring bio fuels to Mars, but rather a slightly altered cyanobacterium to power future Martian rovers, homes, and power tools with biofuel.

Mars is not the ideal location for energy production. It receives half of the sunlight Earth does, which dims hopes of a solar powered off world outpost. Even if solar panels received 100% of the energy from the Sun, global dust storms could make solar panels useless for weeks or months at a time.

Big Red offers future settlers rust, dust, and lots of CO2. With a few genetic alterations, this microscopic cyanobacterium can convert this last resource into the biofuel called isobutanol. Isobutanol could power rovers, Martian settlements, and even power tools without the Sun or an underground miniature nuclear reactor, which might be too expensive for small outposts. Cutting rocks with lasers is going to require lots of energy!

Since biofuels do not openly burn in the carbon dioxide atmosphere, future settlers will need to obtain oxygen as well which they could extract from Martian ice. By having an inexpensive and cheap fuel, establishing homes and traveling the Martian globe could become a reality without the heavy and sometimes helpful of governments and mega-corporations.

http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2010/sdss/

In a survey of 120,000 quasars, SDSS J1254+0846 is the first binary quasar ever found. Two merging distant galaxies, each containing an active nucleus, have their supermassive black holes orbiting each other. The pair is 4.6 billion light-years away, but separated by only 70 thousand light-years.

http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Merging_...Quasar_999.html
I originally found the story at SpaceDaily, but needed more information. The Harvard site had the advantage of showing the imarge. It clearly shows the tidal tails of the interacting galaxies, meaning they are merging.

 Binary_Quasar_SDSS_J1254_0846.jpg ( 21.67K ) Number of downloads: 0

http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1005/

This magnificent VLT image of the giant stellar nursery surrounding nebula NGC-3603 shows stars continuously being born. Embedded in this nebula is one of the most luminous and compact young, massive star clusters in our Milky Way. It serves as an excellent local analogue of very active star-forming regions in other galaxies. The cluster also hosts our most massive star weighed so far.

NGC-3603 is a starburst region where stars form frantically from extended clouds gas and dust clouds 22 000 light-years from us. This closest region of this kind in our galaxy gives us a intense star formation process local test bed. These regions are very common in other galaxies but hard to observe in detail because of their great distance.

The nebula shape comes from intense light and winds coming of young, massive stars which lift the curtains of gas and clouds revealing a multitude of glowing suns. The central star cluster inside NGC-3603 has thousands of different stars. the majority have masses similar or less than our Sun. Several spectacular stars though are very massive and close to the end of their lives. Several of these blue supergiants crowd into a volume less than a cubic light-year, along with three Wolf-Rayets. These are extremely bright, massive, and ejecting vast amounts of material before they finish as supernovae. one of these stars has 120 times the mass of our Sun, making it the most massive star in the Milky Way.

NGC-3603 clouds provide a family picture of stars in different stages of life. Some gaseous structures are still growing into stars, but newborn stars, adult stars, and stars nearing the end of their life also exist. All these stars are roughly the same age, a million years old, wich is an eye blink compared to our 5,000 million year-old Sun and Solar System. The extraordinary wide range of masses explains why some of the stars have just started life while others are already dying. High mass stars, being very bright and hot, burn through fuel much faster than their less massive, fainter, and cooler counterparts.

Star NGC-3603-A1 is an eclipsing binary system orbiting around each other in 3.77 days. The more massive star has 116 solar masses, while its companion has 89 solar masses. By comparison, a star of eight solar masses will collapse and supernova, and a 20 solar mass star is unusually rare.

 Stars_Behind_the_Curtain_NGC_3603_1a.jpg ( 610.26K ) Number of downloads: 0


http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/The_Star...urtain_999.html
I strarted at this page, but the image they had was obviously a pint-sized version. So I surfed and found the ESO article they took the story from in the first place.

http://www.universetoday.com/2010/01/27/ne...flyover-videos/

Here are new Mars flyover videos created from data from HiRise photos on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. They rendered into 3-D movies of specific locations on Mars. These unexaggerated actual high-resolution photos accurately give the terrain seen in the movies.

The first video is of the Mojave Crater wall on Mars, and the next is Athabasca Valles, with more are on the way! The creator Doug Ellison is working on videos of Gale Crater, Bahram Vallis, Candor Chasma, Juventae Chasma, and more. He is drowning in data.

He makes the video from two high-resolution images of the same area, taken from different angles. Creating the videos is uses complicated and sophisticated software with a lot of computing time and man-hours.

Collisions between asteroids should be highly energetic affairs, with an average impact speed of close to 5 kilometers per second. We may be looking at the debris of a head-on collision between two asteroids in imagery provided by the Hubble Space Telescope. The object in question, originally thought to have been a comet, is P/2010 A2, discovered by the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) sky survey on January 6 of this year. The follow-up Hubble imagery dates from late January, and shows an unusual filamentary pattern near the nucleus.

Image: HST picture of the comet-like object called P/2010 A2. The object appears so unusual in ground-based telescopic images that discretionary time on Hubble was used to take a close-up look. This picture, from the January 29 observation, shows a bizarre X-pattern of filamentary structures near the point-like nucleus of the object and trailing streamers of dust. The inset picture shows a complex structure that suggests the object is not a comet but instead the product of a head-on collision between two asteroids. Credit: NASA, ESA, and D. Jewitt (UCLA).

No asteroid collision has been observed before, but the idea that the asteroid belt is continuously ground down by collisions is well established. Indeed, natural impacts of this kind are thought to supply the zodiacal cloud in our Solar System with its dust. When the image was taken, the object was 300 million kilometers from the Sun and 140 million kilometers from Earth. Taken by Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3, the black and white image was made in visible light but uses a blue color map to bring out details.

The assumption is that the filaments consist of dust and gravel thrown out of the 140-meter nucleus. Another intriguing fact: The main nucleus of P/2010 A2 lies outside its own halo of dust, a configuration never seen before in a comet-like object.


“This is quite different from the smooth dust envelopes of normal comets,” says principal investigator David Jewitt of the University of California at Los Angeles. “The filaments are made of dust and gravel, presumably recently thrown out of the nucleus. Some are swept back by radiation pressure from sunlight to create straight dust streaks. Embedded in the filaments are co-moving blobs of dust that likely originate from tiny unseen parent bodies.”

Astronomers believe the lack of gas in the spectra of this object is consistent with a collision. We don’t seem to be looking at ices from a parent cometary body turning into vapor, but rather a shower of debris pushed by the pressure of sunlight into a comet-like tail. If P/2010 A2 is indeed the result of an asteroid collision, its orbit is consistent with its being a member of the Flora asteroid family, which was itself produced by collisional shattering. In fact, according to this NASA news release, one fragment of the collision that produced the Flora family may have been the impactor that struck the Earth 65 million years ago, possibly the cause of the mass extinction of the dinosaurs.

Link: http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=11254

Wow,pretty cool pic..

Questions:

1. I always thought that asteroids were all travelling in the same direction?
2. Why is there a dust tail at all?


Tim-

 08_09_29_Ep._108_Life_of_the_Sun.doc ( 62.5K ) Number of downloads: 3

http://media.libsyn.com/media/astronomycas...Cast-080929.mp3

I have been editing dozens of astronomy podcast transcripts recently. This episode particularly caught my eye. It covers the life of our Sun from 4.6 billion jears ago when it was a gas cloud to the distant future when it will be a cold black dwarf of an Earth-sized diamond.

The link is the 18 meg, 35 minute audio; I have converted the HTML transcript into a twelve page Word document.