Lunar eclipse: Google doodle, photos document the rare red moon

Lunar eclipses are a rarity, but thanks to modern technology, there are a few ways to get in on the red-moon action for those who missed seeing the astronomical event as it happened.

Google.com's home page on Wednesday features a Google Doodle (as the tech giant likes to call the logo on its search engine site) that mimics the eclipse with photos of the actual event itself. A click and a push of the slider under the doodle moves the images from a white moon to red and back to white again, replicating the Earth's shadow passing by.

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http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/06/lunar-eclipse.html

NASA's Glory satellite launch fails

The Taurus XL rocket built by Orbital Sciences failed to lift NASA's Earth-observation satellite into orbit and plummeted into the Pacific Ocean. The failed mission cost $424 million.

A rocket, standing more than nine stories tall, blasted off from Vandenberg Air Force Base but failed to lift a NASA Earth-observation satellite into orbit and plummeted into the Pacific Ocean. The failed mission cost $424 million, the space agency said.

It is the second consecutive time that NASA has encountered the problem with the Taurus XL rocket built by Orbital Sciences Corp. of Dulles, Va.

NASA scientists believe the launch on Friday failed because the satellite's protective cover, which opens like a clamshell, did not separate as expected.

"Obviously, this is a terrific disappointment and we feel bad for letting NASA … down," said Barron Beneski, an Orbital Sciences spokesman. "People have dedicated years of their lives into this."

NASA's Glory satellite was designed to help scientists understand how the sun and particles of matter in the atmosphere called aerosols affect the Earth's climate. It was also built by Orbital in Virginia.

Everything seemed to go as planned from Vandenberg, located northwest of Santa Barbara, shortly after the 3:09 a.m. PST liftoff. Three minutes later, the cover was supposed to separate and the satellite was expected to enter orbit. That didn't happen.

"We failed to make orbit," Omar Baez, NASA's launch director, said at a news conference. "All indications are that the satellite and the rocket are in the southern Pacific Ocean somewhere."

It marks the second time in a row that NASA has encountered a problem with the protective shell separating from the satellite. The space agency's previous Taurus XL launch attempt on Feb. 24, 2009, carrying another Earth science spacecraft, dubbed the Orbiting Carbon Observatory, also failed to reach orbit because of lack of separation.

Orbital Sciences and NASA investigated the matter and believed that they had identified the problem. On Friday, Orbital Sciences said it was too early to tell whether the latest failure was linked to the issue they previously encountered.

"Understandably, people are thinking this is the same problem all over again," Beneski said. "It's too early to tell. We have to evaluate all the data before we can say that's true."

Although the satellite probably will never be recovered, sensors on the spacecraft captured enough information for engineers to identify a problem, Beneski said.

Since 1994, Orbital Sciences has attempted to launch a Taurus XL rocket a total of nine times. It has been successful in six of those attempts.

"That's not a great record," said Marco Caceres, senior space analyst for research firm Teal Group Corp. "Part of the problem is that the Taurus just doesn't launch enough. It's hard to develop a launch rhythm if the rocket is only going up once every few years."

Both Orbital Sciences and NASA plan to create investigation boards made up of engineers and scientists to evaluate the cause of Friday's failure.

NASA has another Earth sciences satellite slated to launch on a Taurus rocket in 2013. The space agency plans to wait and see the results of the investigation board before it goes forward with the launch.

Orbital Sciences shares lost 30 cents, or about 2%, on Friday, closing at $18.17.

Also Friday, the launch attempt of the U.S. Air Force's X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle from Cape Canaveral, Fla., was scrubbed because of bad weather. The launch was rescheduled for Saturday at 1:09 p.m. PST.


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NASA finds dozens of planets that might support life

The Kepler mission has discovered 1,235 possible planets, including 54 in the 'Goldilocks range' — just far enough from their stars to be neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water.

A catalog of possible planets discovered far out in space includes more than 50 candidates that could possibly support life, NASA scientists said Wednesday. If, as expected, most of the planets are confirmed as real, the Kepler mission — now finishing its second year — would nearly triple the number of planets discovered over the last decade and a half.

With 1,235 planetary candidates surrounding a collective 997 stars in an area 500 to 3,000 light-years away, the tally to date provides a wealth of data for scientists to sift through in search of Earth-like planets.

"This is the first step in understanding the possible distribution of life in our galaxy," said William Borucki, principal investigator for the Kepler mission at NASA Ames Research Center in the Bay Area's Moffett Field.

He noted that of the candidate planets, 54 reside in the so-called Goldilocks range — in a "just right" distance from its star to be neither too hot nor too cold to permit liquid water and therefore the presence of life as we know it. Five of those 54 are close to Earth's size.

The space-based Kepler telescope, which circles the sun trailing Earth's orbit, observes more than 155,000 stars and every half-hour measures the amount of light they give off. If a planet is orbiting a star, it is detectable because it temporarily blocks a bit of light each time it crosses in front of its star.

By measuring how much of a star's light a planet blocks during such transits, scientists can deduce what the planet's radius must be. By tracking how frequently each planet transits, they can determine how closely it orbits its star.

And in the case of very massive planets, researchers can estimate a planet's mass based on how much a star "wobbles" in response to the planet's gravitational pull.

Prior to Kepler, scientists had confirmed the existence of more than 500 planets outside our solar system, which are known as exoplanets. Among the 1,235 new candidates, 68 are Earth-sized, 288 are super-Earth-sized (up to about 10 times the Earth's mass), 662 are Neptune-sized and 165 are about the size of Jupiter, the largest planet within our solar system, Borucki said. Nineteen are up to twice the size of Jupiter.

UC Santa Cruz planetary scientist Jonathan Fortney, one of dozens of scientists on the Kepler team, helped identify a particularly rare find — six planets orbiting around an 8-billion-year-old star named Kepler-11, which is about 2,000 light-years away and much like our sun in size.

The findings were reported Wednesday in the journal Nature.

Unusually, five of the six planets were closer to Kepler-11 than Mercury is to the sun. Even stranger, the six planets orbit the star on the same plane, Fortney said; the star system, he said, is "flatter than a CD."

This flatness allowed all six planets to be seen crossing Kepler-11. It also helped the scientists to measure how the planets' gravitational tugs affected each other's orbits, and thus to determine the mass of each one. There may be many more planets in this system that have not been detected, scientists said.

Because having multiple planets in one system provides a richer detail on a solar system, the Kepler-11 system "tells us something very fundamental about planet formation, about the kind of galaxy we live in, the kind of planets around us," Fortney said.

The Kepler mission is scheduled to continue for another year and a half, and is expected to cost about $600 million.

Daniel Apai, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, called the Kepler-11 system's known structure and dynamics "amazing."

"Kepler is in many ways pushing us to rethink planet formation," Apai said.

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Entire nation gets a 'ringside seat' to total lunar eclipse

If you step outside late tonight into early Tuesday morning, you may notice the moon looks like a luminous rotten orange. It's a total lunar eclipse that will be visible to everyone in North and Central America, including Alaska and Hawaii.

"We've all got a ringside seat to this one," says Alan MacRobert, editor of Sky & Telescope magazine. "We'll be watching it together."

During a lunar eclipse, the Earth lines up directly between the sun and the moon, so there is no direct sunlight to hit and reflect off the moon's surface. The only light that reaches it is "filtered and bending through our atmosphere," MacRobert says. That gives it the color of "all of the world's sunrises and sunsets" together.

The total eclipse will last for 72 minutes, a deeper "night within a night," as he puts it. The moon will be partially eclipsed for about an hour as it goes into and out of the Earth's shadow. The total eclipse will last from 2:41 to 3:53 a.m. ET.

"It's going to take a long time to watch the whole eclipse, about 3½ hours," says Rebecca Johnson, editor of StarDate magazine.

The color the moon takes on during the eclipse depends on what's in Earth's upper atmosphere, or stratosphere, says Fred Espenak, a scientist emeritus with NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and eclipse specialist.

CELEBRATION: Lunar eclipse is holiday gift for skywatchers

"Volcanoes throw up sulfur dioxide, and when that gets to the upper atmosphere in the stratosphere, it combines with water vapor, creating a smog of sulfuric acid that reddens the light even more. So the more volcanic activity you have on Earth, the more it darkens and reddens the eclipse."

Richard Keen, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Colorado-Boulder, says the stratosphere is fairly clear right now, so this eclipse will be pretty light, most likely bright red to bright orange. "So it will be very colorful," Espenak says.

Most places on Earth see total lunar eclipses every three to five years. They tend to "occur in clumps," Espenak says.

There will be three over the next 12 months: Tonight, June 15 and Dec. 10. The June eclipse won't be visible from North America, and next December's will be visible only in the western part of the continent. "But the one coming up is ideally situated for all of the United States," he says.

In past ages, "these things spooked the bejesus out of people before people understood what caused them," MacRobert says.

VIEWER'S GUIDE: Total lunar eclipse

Today, science museums, parks, colleges and universities across the nation will be hosting viewing parties. Astronomers and telescopes will be on hand to explain what's happening and give the public a closer look into the awe-inspiring sight of the moon slowly disappearing from the sky.

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'Ice volcano' identified on Saturn's moon Titan

Scientists think they now have the best evidence yet for an ice volcano on Titan, the largest moon of Saturn.

The Cassini probe has spotted a 1,500m-high mountain with a deep pit in it, and what looks like a flow of material on the surrounding surface.

The new feature, which has been dubbed "The Rose", was seen with the probe's radar and infrared instruments.

Titan has long been speculated to have cryovolcanoes but its hazy atmosphere makes all observations very difficult.

Researchers are now wondering how active this mountain might be, and what sort of lava it could spew.

"Much of Titan's outer material is water-ice and ammonia, and so that's certainly one possible material that could melt at low temperatures and flow on the surface," explained Dr Randy Kirk, a Cassini radar team-member from the US Geological Survey (USGS).

"But there's a lot of organic material in the atmosphere, and deposited from the atmosphere, and maybe coming up from the interior in the form of these volcanoes. [This material could be] waxy or even plasticy," he told BBC News.

Dr Kirk was speaking here at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting, the largest gathering of Earth scientists in the world.

There have been previous claims for ice volcanoes at Titan, but these have never won universal support. Scientists have continued to look however because it is considered an excellent candidate given its frigid conditions: the surface temperature is about minus 180 Celsius.

Dr Kirk and colleagues hope their new data will convince even their sternest critics that a positive identification has now finally been made.

The putative volcano is sited just south of Titan's equator in a sea of sand dunes referred to as Sotra Facula.

The radar instrument on Cassini is able to see through the moon's haze and establish the local topography - scientists can build a 3D model of the ground. The infrared instrument on the probe, on the other hand, can gather some information on the variation in composition of the surface materials. Taken together, Dr Kirk's team says, the two views put forward a compelling case.

"We've seen a mountain that has a crater in, that flows of material coming out and spreading across the surface at some time in the past; and in fact when we looked in more detail in 3D we found that there was more than one volcano in this area. And that's actually very common in volcanic areas of the Earth and other planets."

Jeffrey Kargel, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona, Tucson, is not connected with the Cassini mission. He told the meeting The Rose was the most likely volcano he had yet seen on Titan.

He said that if the lavas were rich in hydrocarbons, they could have the look of softened asphalt, candle wax or even polyethylene.

"There are many unanswered questions and intriguing possibilities," he told reporters.

"Is Sotra the source of Titan's atmospheric methane? Is cryovolcanism still active at Sotra or elsewhere on Titan? What is the cryovolcanic substance? Is cryovolcanism there explosive or quietly effusive? Might cryo-lavas have dredged up indications of fossils or chemical remains of sub-surface life?"

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a co-operative project of Nasa, the European Space Agency (Esa) and the Italian space agency (Asi).

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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11996621

Now playing in a sky near you: Winter meteor show

Flaming rocks are hurtling toward the Earth upon the arrival of the annual Geminid meteor shower, one of the biggest of the year.

The peak of the week-long shower will come just before dawn Tuesday, but the shooting stars were visible across the world late this past weekend, says Rebecca Johnson, editor of StarDate magazine, which is published by the McDonald Observatory, the University of Texas research unit near Fort Davis, Texas.

Where skies are clear, the viewing will be best before dawn Tuesday. "It starts to get light an hour before sunrise, so any time before that is going to be a good time to look," Johnson says.

Those who'd rather stay up late than get up early might want to wait until the moon sets around midnight on each night during the shower.

"You can still see meteors when the moon is up, but it will be better when the moon has set," Johnson says.

The peak will hit at 6 a.m. ET on Tuesday, Johnson says.

"If you're brave enough to brave the frigid, arctic cold that's prevailing in most of the Eastern part of the country, that's when you'll see them," says Bill Cooke, an astronomer at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, in Huntsville, Ala.

Meteor showers can be unpredictable in the number of fiery paths sketched across the sky, but the Geminids are among the most consistent. They're expected to generate between 60 to 80 meteors an hour, "about one a minute," Cooke says.

Meteors aren't really falling stars. In the case of the Geminid shower, they're tiny pieces of debris breaking off an asteroid called 3200 Phaethon as it orbits the sun. Although the shower was first seen in the 1860s, the asteroid wasn't discovered until 1983.

The Geminids carry a whiff of mystery. Most well-known meteor showers, such as the Perseids and the Leonids, come from comets, which are "big, dirty snowballs," in Cooke's words.

When comets get near the sun, the heat turns the ice into gas, freeing some of that dirt, which is then pulled into Earth's orbit and falls through the atmosphere. As the debris burns up, it creates the brilliant streaks we see as meteors.

The Geminids come not from a comet but an asteroid, "a big hunk of rock," Cooke says.

Exactly why 3200 Phaethon has so much material trailing behind it to burn up in our atmosphere is unclear.

Even if 3200 Phaethon is a clump of rock bits, which is one kind of asteroid, the Geminids are many hundreds of years old, so those bits should have long since been lost, "and yet (they are) still throwing stuff off. It's a weird meteor shower," Cooke says.

For those who can't make it out Tuesday morning, the meteors will be visible tonight and a day or two after the peak, just not as plentiful.

It's "a great shower that many people never see" because they come during cold weather, Cooke says. "The Perseids get all the press. It's much nicer to be out on a warm August night than to be freezing your rear in December."

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http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/space/2010-12-13-Geminids13_ST_N.htm

Commercial rocket launch, splashdown a success

The first of what NASA hopes will become a fleet of privately built rockets and capsules successfully launched from Cape Canaveral on Wednesday morning in a major test for the commercial space industry. After twice circling the globe, the capsule landed in the Pacific as planned three hours later.

The successful splashdown marks the first time that a commercial company launched a rocket and capsule into space and brought the spacecraft safely back to Earth.

The landing was announced on the Twitter account of Space Explorations Technologies Inc., or SpaceX, the start-up company that has pioneered the new era of commercial space travel. A recovery team was at the capsule - built to be reusable - within 20 minutes of splashdown, suggesting that it was on target for its landing.

The Falcon 9 rocket built by SpaceX was on its first full test flight. Its Dragon capsule was empty and unmanned, but plans are to fill it in the months ahead with cargo - and ultimately with astronauts - to transport to the International Space Station.

NASA's deputy administrator, Lori Garver, said after the splashdown that the administration was delighted by the success and that "the path to and from the space station is going to be this: a partnership between private companies and government to get the job done most effectively."

The flight is an important moment for President Obama and his administration's hopes to expand commercial space efforts in low-Earth orbit as a way to free up NASA funds for missions to send astronauts much deeper into space and ultimately to Mars.

SpaceX, founded in 2002 by Elon Musk and run from California, successfully launched a Dragon 9 rocket in June, but that test was done without a real capsule. Musk, who founded and sold the online payment company PayPal and is also behind development of the Tesla electric car, said before launch that he rated the chances for a successful mission at about 60 percent.

After the splashdown, Musk said he was in "semi-shock."

"There's so much that can go wrong and it all went right," Musk said. His next challenge is a Dragon capsule rendezvous with the space station that is scheduled for next year.

The Falcon 9 rocket is a pipsqueak compared with the space shuttle it will partially replace - measuring 157 feet with the capsule and weighing 735,000 pounds. The much larger shuttle was needed to fly parts up to the $100 billon international space station, but the fleet is being retired because of its age and because its job is largely done. Each shuttle flight costs about $1 billion, while the entire NASA contribution so far to SpaceX has been $253 million, according to NASA officials.


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Secret Military Mini-Shuttle Headed Back to Earth

A miniature robotic space shuttle launched from Cape Canaveral in April has completed a nine-month classified mission for the military and will be headed for a landing as early as Friday, Air Force officials said on Tuesday.

The vehicle, known as the Orbital Test Vehicle or X-37B, is expected to land at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California between Friday and Monday, depending on weather and technical considerations, the Air Force said in a statement.

The project, started by NASA in the late 1990s and later adopted by the military, is intended to test technologies for a next-generation space shuttle.

The military is looking at the space plane as a way to test new equipment, sensors and material in space, with the intention of incorporating successful technologies into satellites and other operational systems.

The Air Force imposed a news blackout on the X-37B's activities while in orbit, though it was tracked by amateur satellite-watchers throughout its nine-month mission.

The X-37B looks like a space shuttle orbiter, with a similar shape and payload bay for cargo and experiments.

But it measures 29 feet, 3 inches in length and has a 15-foot (4.5-meter) wing span, compared to the 122-foot (37-meter) orbiters with wing spans of 78 feet.

Unlike NASA's space shuttles, which can stay in orbit about two weeks, X-37B is designed to spend as long as nine months in space, then land autonomously on a runway.

The Air Force plans to fly its second X-37B vehicle this spring. The vehicles were built by Boeing Co's advanced research lab, Phantom Works.

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Discovery launch pushed to Dec. 17 or later

Discovery's final launch will not be before Dec. 17 after NASA decided more tests were needed before launching the shuttle into space for one last mission.

The decision to push the launch closer to Christmas came Wednesday after the agency reviewed repairs and engineering evaluations associated with cracks on two U-shaped aluminum brackets on the shuttle's external tank.

"The managers decided the analysis and tests required to launch Discovery safely are not complete," it said. "The work will continue through next week."

As a result, the agency rescheduled its launch status meeting to Dec. 2. It was originally planned for Nov. 29.

NASA also said that if the Discovery is cleared for launch on Dec. 17, the preferred time is approximately 8:51 p.m. ET.

The flight was grounded earlier this month after a hydrogen gas leak was initially discovered during fuelling.

The 39th and final flight of Discovery was originally due to launch on Nov. 1, but several technical delays and one weather-related delay forced NASA to push the flight back.

The shuttle will carry seven astronauts and space station supplies during its mission


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http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2010/11/24/discovery-launch-delay.html#ixzz16GVxtZFb