Space Videos: Space Exploration News & Space Videos // Current

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10 hours ago

Harvest Moon

In the legend of the Harvest moon, it is said that all full moons have their own special characteristics based primarily on the whereabouts of the ecliptic in the sky at the time of year that these moons are visible. The full moons of September, October and November as seen from the northern hemisphere—which correspond to the full moons of March, April and May as seen from the southern hemisphere—are well known in the folklore of the sky. All full moons rise around the time of sunset. However, although in general the moon rises about 50 minutes later each day, as it moves in orbit around Earth, the Harvest Moon and Hunter's Moon are special, because around the time of these full moons, the time difference between moonrise on successive evenings is shorter than usual which means that the moon rises approximately 30 minutes later, from one night to the next, as seen from about 40 degrees N. or S. latitude, for several evenings around the full Hunter's or Harvest Moons. Thus there is no long period of darkness between sunset and moonrise around the time following these full moons. In times past this feature of these autumn moons was said to help farmers working to bring in their crops (or, in the case of the Hunter's Moon, hunters tracking their prey). They could continue being productive by moonlight even after the sun had set. Hence the name Harvest Moon. The reason for the shorter-than-usual rising time between successive moonrises around the time of the Harvest and Hunter's Moon is that the ecliptic—the plane of Earth's orbit around the sun—makes a narrow angle with respect to the horizon in the evening in autumn. The Harvest Moon is said to come before or after the autumnal equinox. It is simply the full moon closest to that equinox. About once every four years it occurs in October (in the northern hemisphere), depending on the cycles of the moon. Currently, the latest the Harvest Moon can occur is on October 13. Often, the Harvest Moon seems to be bigger or brighter or more colorful than other moons. These effects are related to the seasonal tilt of the earth. The warm color of the moon shortly after it rises is caused by light from the moon passing through a greater amount of atmospheric particles than when the moon is overhead. The atmosphere scatters the bluish component of moonlight (which is really reflected white light from the sun), but allows the reddish component of the light to travel a straighter path to one's eyes. Hence all celestial bodies look reddish when they are low in the sky. The apparent larger size is because the brain perceives a low-hanging moon to be larger than one that's high in the sky. This is known as a Moon Illusion and it can be seen with any full moon. It can also be seen with constellations; in other words, a constellation viewed low in the sky will appear bigger than when it is high in the sky. The Harvest Moon is also known as the Wine Moon, the Singing Moon and the Elk Call Moon. In American myth and folklore the full moon of each month is given a name. There are many variations, but the following list gives the most widely known names in the modern US: January - Wolf moon, Hunger moon, Old moon February - Snow moon, Ice moon March - Worm moon, Sap moon, Sugaring moon, Crow moon, Storm moon April - Pink moon, Egg moon, Grass moon, Rain moon, Growing moon May - Flower moon, Planting moon, Milk moon, Hare moon June - Strawberry moon, Rose moon, Honey moon, Mead moon July - Buck moon, Thunder moon, Deer moon, Hay moon August - Sturgeon moon, Corn moon, Fruit moon, Barley moon September - Harvest moon October - Hunter's moon November - Beaver moon, Frosty moon, Snow moon December - Cold moon, Long Night moon, Winter moon The third full moon in a season with four full moons is called a blue moon, as described in the Maine Farmer's Almanac. Until recently it was commonly misunderstood that the second full moon in a month was the blue moon. However, it was recently discovered by Sky & TelescopeIn the legend of the Harvest moon, it is said that all full moons have their own special characteristics based primarily on the... more

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12 hours ago

Is this the end for human space flight?

SO WE won't be going to Mars, not in my lifetime anyway. And not back to the moon either, not for decades. Buzz Lightyear fantasies are dashed. Don't believe the spin - the dream is over.

OK, the Augustine panel's review of NASA's human space-flight plans outlines several options. Mars may be out, but the moon is still in with a shout, and plans to go to the Lagrange points and even the asteroids are mooted. Technically, all this is probably doable. But it won't happen, and here's why.

The problem is not money: the US can afford an extra $3 billion a year. It is psychological. NASA, the only game in town, has no idea what space is for, and no audacity.

There certainly was audacity in 1961, when John F. Kennedy made his lunar pledge. The key line was not the crazy bit about landing a man on the moon, it was the hubristic promise to do so by 1970. If Wernher Von Braun had insisted the moon was unreachable before 1975, they probably would never have gone. Why? Because by 1975 Kennedy's presidency would be ancient history. Some other guy would get all the glory as Old Glory was hammered into the lunar regolith.

Of course that happened anyway, but Kennedy's reasoning must have been that, even in 1969, he would be able to bask in the glory of a successful moon shot.

It may simply be that space exploration is incompatible with US democracy. A Mars shot would take four presidential terms at least. No president will ask taxpayers to fund something he won't be around to take credit for.

Another big problem is the legacy of some terrible decisions that left NASA with the expensive, dangerous space shuttle and a white-elephant space station that manages the feat of making space seem as dull as cardboard. The whole thing is a mess.

So where now? Probably nowhere. Expect the Augustine report to be quietly forgotten. After all, we've been here before. In 1989 George Bush Snr promised the moon and Mars too, and that came to naught. The problem with these visions is that they are too sane. Human space exploration requires a tinge of madness - that theatrical Kennedy hubris - to work.

They'll probably keep the International Space Station going out of bloody-mindedness. The shuttles will fly a few more times. There will be some vague plans, more studies. Robots, of course, but no concerted attempt to look for alien life, the most compelling raison d'être for space exploration. But as to the moon, Mars, infinity and beyond, I'm afraid, in all likelihood, Buzz Lightyear will just have to wait.

Continued at link . . .

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427355.700-is-this-the-end-for-human-space-flight.htmlSO WE won't be going to Mars, not in my lifetime anyway. And not back to the moon either, not for decades. Buzz Lightyear... more

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22 hours ago

Now, web surfers can explore Mars

Nasa and Microsoft launched an interactive website that allows web surfers to become Mars explorers.The “Be a... more

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1 day ago

Meteor illuminates the Utah sky

preety amazing. wish i would have seen it (video) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8367760.stm

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1 day ago

AUGUSTO DE LUCA : FOTOGRAFIE - NAPOLI GRANDE SIGNORA -PHOTOGRAPHS

FOTO TRATTA DAL LIBRO " NAPOLI GRANDE SIGNORE " GANGEMI EDITORE ROMA.... more

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1 day ago

Thousands of Worms Headed to International Space Station For Muscle Tests

The perils of space flight number in the hundreds, from radiation exposure to the impact of micro-asteroids. But for astronauts... more

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3 days ago

Ripples in space divide classical and quantum worlds

WHY can't we be in two places at the same time? The simple answer is that it's because large objects appear not to be subject to the same wacky laws of quantum mechanics that rule subatomic particles. But why not - and how big does something have to be for quantum physics no longer to apply? Ripples in space-time could hold the answer.

The location of the boundary between the classical and quantum worlds is a long-standing mystery. One idea is that everything starts off as a quantum system, existing in a superposition of states. This would make an object capable of being, for example, in many places at once. But when this system interacts with its environment, it collapses into a single classical state - a phenomenon called quantum decoherence.

Brahim Lamine of Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, France, and colleagues say that gravitational waves may be responsible for this. These waves in the very fabric of the universe were generated by its rapid expansion soon after the big bang, as well as by violent astrophysical events such as colliding black holes. As a consequence, a background of ripples at very low amplitudes pervades space-time.

Lamine and colleagues calculated how this fluctuating space-time might contribute to quantum decoherence. They found that for systems with very large mass, such as the moon, decoherence induced by the gravitational waves would have caused any quantum superposition to dissipate immediately. At the other end of the scale, such waves would have a negligible effect on massless photons.

To test whether gravitational waves do in fact cause the decoherence seen in large objects, the researchers suggest using a set-up called a matter-wave interferometer in which molecules are made to pass through multiple gratings. The wave-like nature of the molecules causes them to diffract, and the diffracted waves interact to give rise to an interference pattern. Quantum decoherence destroys this pattern, so in principle this could provide a test for whether the decohering effect of background space-time fluctuations matches predictions. Such a system would have to be completely isolated to rule out other effects.

This is, however, impossible in practice - with today's interferometers, at least. Experiments pioneered by Anton Zeilinger, Markus Arndt and colleagues at the University of Vienna, Austria, have been able to generate interference with beams of 60-atom carbon buckyballs, but even with molecules of this size the effect of gravitational waves would be too small to be observed.

According to Lamine, who presented his work last month at the Gravitation and Fundamental Physics in Space meeting at Les Houches in the French Alps, the effect should be measurable in larger systems at high energy. Supersonic beams of about 3000 carbon atoms would do the trick if made to interfere over an effective area of about 1 square metre. This is far beyond the reach of any foreseeable technology.

Some speculative theories predict, however, that quantum decoherence will occur on a lower energy scale than that suggested by Lamine. If so, this could be within experimental reach. "That is why our experiments are pushing [up] the interference mass limit, step by step," says Arndt.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427353.800-ripples-in-space-divide-classical-and-quantum-worlds.htmlWHY can't we be in two places at the same time? The simple answer is that it's because large objects appear not to be... more

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4 days ago

Let There Be Light

The Kepler Mission will make finding potentially habitable exoplanets easier than ever, but what’s the point if we... more

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3 days ago

Fall Colors From Space

The brighter reds and oranges of fall are already fading in this Nov. 8 image of the northeastern United States, captured by... more

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3 days ago

Space Chair Project

Kewl stuff! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6PSbUl_68k&feature=player_embedded

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4 days ago

Astronomers Find Vampire White Dwarf

Type Ia supernovae are a mystery because no one can predict when or where one might occur. But astronomers are hedging their bets on V445 Puppis. A so-called "vampire white dwarf" that underwent a nova outburst after gulping down part of its companion’s matter in 2000, now, it appears this double star system is a prime candidate for exploding. “Whether V445 Puppis will eventually explode as a supernova, or if the current nova outburst has pre-empted that pathway by ejecting too much matter back into space is still unclear,” said Patrick Woudt, from the University of Cape Town and lead author of the paper reporting the results. “But we have here a pretty good suspect for a future Type Ia supernova!”

This is the first, and so far only nova showing no evidence at all for hydrogen, and provides the first evidence for an outburst on the surface of a white dwarf dominated by helium. “This is critical, as we know that Type Ia supernovae lack hydrogen,” said Danny Steeghs, from the University of Warwick, UK, “and the companion star in V445 Pup fits this nicely by also lacking hydrogen, instead dumping mainly helium gas onto the white dwarf.”

The astronomers have determined the system is about 25,000 light-years from the Sun, and it has an intrinsic brightness of over 10,000 times our Sun. This implies that the vampire white dwarf in this system has a high mass that is near its fatal limit and is still simultaneously being fed by its companion at a high rate.

“One of the major problems in modern astrophysics is the fact that we still do not know exactly what kinds of stellar system explode as a Type Ia supernova,” said Woudt, “As these supernovae play a crucial role in showing that the Universe’s expansion is currently accelerating, pushed by a mysterious dark energy, it is rather embarrassing.”

Woudt and his team used the ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) to obtain very sharp images of V445 Puppis over a time span of two years. The images show a bipolar shell, initially with a very narrow waist, with lobes on each side. Two knots are also seen at both the extreme ends of the shell, which appear to move at about 30 million kilometers per hour. The shell — unlike any previously observed for a nova — is itself moving at about 24 million kilometers per hour. A thick disc of dust, which must have been produced during the last outburst, obscures the two central .

As Steeghs said, one defining characteristic of Type Ia supernovae is the lack of hydrogen in their spectrum. Yet hydrogen is the most common chemical element in the Universe. Such supernovae most likely arise in systems composed of two stars, one of them being the end product of the life of sun-like stars, or white dwarfs. When such white dwarfs, acting as stellar vampires that suck matter from their companion, become heavier than a given limit, they become unstable and explode.

The build-up is not a simple process. As the white dwarf cannibalizes its prey, matter accumulates on its surface. If this layer becomes too dense, it becomes unstable and erupts as a nova. These controlled, mini-explosions eject part of the accumulated matter back into space. The crucial question is thus to know whether the white dwarf can manage to gain weight despite the outburst, that is, if some of the matter taken from the companion stays on the white dwarf, so that it will eventually become heavy enough to explode as a supernova.

http://www.universetoday.com/2009/11/17/astronomers-find-type-ia-supernova-just-waiting-to-happen/Type Ia supernovae are a mystery because no one can predict when or where one might occur. But astronomers are hedging their bets... more

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4 days ago

Leonid Meteor Shower November 2009

The Leonid Meteor Shower started November 13 and will last until November 20, and will peak in intensity early morning on November... more

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4 days ago

Earth Size Telescope - to View Quasars

Ever wondered what the largest telescope on the Earth is? Well, this coming Wednesday and Thursday of this week, the largest telescope ever assembled will take observations for a whole day. How big is the telescope? About the size of the whole Earth! 35 radio telescopes on 7 continents will link together for one whole day in an effort to observe distant quasars as part of an initiative to improve the reference frame that scientists use to measure positions in the sky.

Radio telescopes in Asia, Australia, Europe, North America, South America, Antarctica, and in the Pacific will all be linked together to measure the same 234 quasars over a 24-hour period. Quasars are galaxies that have a supermassive black hole at the center, which has strong emissions in the radio spectrum. The quasars being monitored are so far away from the Earth that they appear to be motionless in the sky. This makes them a perfect candidate for setting up a grid in the sky to use as a frame of reference, against which the positions of other objects can be determined.

This monitoring session comes out of a meeting of the International Astronomical Union in August, during which it was decided to start using a set of 295 quasars as a celestial reference frame starting January 1st, 2010. This is not a new reference frame to be used by astronomers – the current one was adopted in 1998 - but an important update to the existing reference frame, the International Celestial Reference Frame.

The session, called the Very Large Astrometry Session is coordinated by the International VLBI Service for Geodesy and Astrometry. Several of the participating observatories will have live webcams running during the event (check for the observatory in your language!), and a public outreach page on the event, hosted by the Bordeaux Observatory, can be found here. The public outreach page will post images as they are taken during the session, with information about observation coordinates.

Radio telescopes like the Very Long Base Array in the United States already link together observatories that are far apart to take observations. This technique is called very long baseline radio interferometry (VLBI), and allows for the use of smaller telescopes that are distant from one another to be linked together and have the same angular resolution as if they were one larger telescope. Doing these observations all in one go will reduce some of the errors that occur when disparate observatories take images at different times.

The previous record for radio observatories linked together to create a larger telescope for one monitoring session is 23. That means that this observing session will beat that record by a whopping 12 additional observatories. Even with this unprecedented amount of observatories monitoring the quasars, there will be a few gaps in the sky, mostly in the Southern hemisphere. Only 234 of the total 295 quasars in the reference frame will be observed this week, though that will break another record for the amount of objects observed in one session using this method. The image below depicts the locations of the participating observatories.

By taking data on the 234 selected quasars, astronomers will be able to more accurately pinpoint objects in the sky in all wavelengths, and gather more precise data. For instance, many objects of scientific interest are monitored by separate telescopes operating in the visible, radio, x-ray and infrared wavelengths. Having a more accurate frame of reference to tell these different telescopes where to point in the sky will improve the ability of the different telescopes to gather information from the same place in space.

http://www.universetoday.com/2009/11/16/35-radio-observatories-link-to-break-record/Ever wondered what the largest telescope on the Earth is? Well, this coming Wednesday and Thursday of this week, the largest... more

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5 days ago

Space Shuttle Atlantis has successful launch

The space shuttle Atlantis made a successful lauch taking supplies to the international space station. This is one of six... more

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5 days ago

Moon Water: Will Lunar-Base Humans be Able to Drink It?

According to Koschny, we’ve still got a long ways to go before this water can be harvested, but understanding how the water... more

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4 days ago

Dawn Takes up Residence in Asteroid Belt

The Dawn spacecraft – which is on a course to study the asteroid Vesta and dwarf planet Ceres – has taken up permanent residence in the asteroid belt as of November 13th. Dawn is officially the first human-made object to become a part of the asteroid belt, which is sandwiched between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.Dawn didn't move in without checking the place out first, though; this is the second visit for the craft, which remained there for 40 days in June of 2008. The lower boundary of the asteroid belt is defined as the furthest Mars gets away from the Sun during its orbit – 249,230,000 kilometers, or 154,864,000 miles.

Dawn, which was launched in September 2007, is on an eight-year, 4.9-billion kilometer (3-billion mile) journey to study the asteroid Vesta and the dwarf planet Ceres. By studying these members of the asteroid belt, NASA scientists hope to learn more about the formation of our Solar System. Because Vesta and Ceres are some of the largest members of the ring of asteroids between Mars and Jupiter, they are the most intact from when they were formed, and should act as a 'time capsule' to preserve information about what the early Solar System was like.

Dawn got a gravity assist from Mars in February of 2009, which propelled it past the planet and into the asteroid belt.

The spacecraft is expected to visit Vesta in August of 2011. Vesta is believed to be the source of most of the asteroid-origin meteorites that fall to ground here on Earth, and further study of the asteroid should confirm this.

In May of 2012, Dawn will make its way to Ceres, which lies further out in the asteroid belt. It will arrive there in July of 2015, where it will spend the remainder of its mission studying the icy dwarf planet, which may even have a tenuous atmosphere.

If you want to keep tabs on Dawn in its new home, the mission web site has a tool updated hourly, found here, which allows you to see where Dawn is right now. The tool includes simulated views of the Earth, Mars, Sun and Vesta from the vantage point of the spacecraft.

http://www.universetoday.com/2009/11/16/dawn-takes-up-residence-in-asteroid-belt/The Dawn spacecraft – which is on a course to study the asteroid Vesta and dwarf planet Ceres – has taken up permanent... more

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5 days ago

Atlantis (Launch Live Feed)

This will be the last shuttle launch in 2009. Then we will only have five more launches: • STS-130 Endeavour: ISS assembly... more

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5 days ago

Strong Leonid meteor shower peaks early Tuesday morning

One of the best annual meteor showers will peak in the pre-dawn hours Tuesday, and for some skywatchers the show could be quite... more

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5 days ago

Mystery 'dark flow' extends towards edge of universe

Something big is out there beyond the visible edge of our universe. That's the conclusion of the largest analysis to date of over 1000 galaxy clusters streaming in one direction at blistering speeds. Some researchers say this so-called "dark flow" is a sign that other universes nestle next door.

Last year, Sasha Kashlinsky of the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and colleagues identified an unusual pattern in the motion of around 800 galaxy clusters. They studied the clusters' motion in the "afterglow" of the big bang, as measured by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP). The photons of this afterglow collide with electrons in galaxy clusters as they travel across space to the Earth, and this subtly changes the afterglow's temperature.

The team combined the WMAP data with X-ray observations and found the clusters were streaming at up to 1000 kilometres per second towards one particular part of the cosmos (The Astrophysical Journal Letters, vol 686, p L49).

Many researchers argued the dark flow would not turn up in later observations, but now the team claim to have confirmed its existence. Their latest analysis reveals 1400 clusters are part of the flow, and that it continues to around 3 billion light years from Earth, a sizeable fraction of the distance to the edge of the observable universe (arxiv.org/abs/0910.4958). This is twice as far as seen in the previous study.

The dark flow appears to have been caused shortly after the big bang by something no longer in the observable universe. It has no effect today because reaching across this horizon would involve travelling faster than light.

One explanation for the flow would be the gravity of a huge concentration of matter, but this is very unlikely. Within the standard big bang picture, massive cosmic structures were "seeded" by random quantum fluctuations, so overall, matter should be spread evenly.

There could be an exotic explanation. Laura Mersini-Houghton of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, thinks the flow is a sign of a neighbouring universe. If the tiny patch of vacuum that inflated to become our universe was quantum entangled with other pieces of vacuum - other universes - they could have exerted a force from beyond the present-day visible horizon (see "Nosey neighbours").

Yet despite the new findings, the existence of the dark flow remains disputed. Charles Bennett, principal investigator of WMAP says the cluster analysis is not statistically significant. "There is no evidence for the large-scale dark flow, using all of the best data available."

Nosey neighbours
Was our universe once entangled with a neighbour? The observation of "dark flow" in galaxy clusters was predicted in 2006 by Laura Mersini-Houghton of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and colleagues. She proposes that the effect occurs because our universe was once influenced by neighbouring domains (arxiv.org/abs/0810.5388).

Mersini-Houghton reasoned that if a force exerted by other universes squeezed ours, it could generate a repulsive effect that would impede the shrinkage of matter into clusters but not leave an imprint on smaller scales. "This skews the distribution of lumps so they are not the same in all directions," she says. "There is a preferred direction - the dark flow."

She also predicted in 2006 that there should be two "holes" - regions with fewer galaxies than expected. Sure enough, there does appear to be a hole - the so-called "cold spot" identified by the WMAP probe. The hole is a very large region of space where the afterglow is cooler than average. However, its cause - and even existence - is disputed, and Mersini-Houghton's hypothesis remains controversial.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427345.000-mystery-dark-flow-extends-towards-edge-of-universe.htmlSomething big is out there beyond the visible edge of our universe. That's the conclusion of the largest analysis to date of... more