Current Events in Astronomy

[Garuda]

I recall a probe called Stardust a few years back collected dust samples from a comet tail, but Rosetta plans to land probe. That will be exciting!

'We're in orbit!' Rosetta becomes first spacecraft to orbit comet
By Dave Gilbert and Nick Thompson

After a 10-year chase taking it billions of miles across the solar system, the Rosetta spacecraft made history Wednesday as it became the first probe to rendezvous with a comet on its journey around the sun.

"Thruster burn complete. Rosetta has arrived at comet 67P. We're in orbit!" announced the European Space Agency, which is leading the ambitious project, on Twitter.

Rosetta fired its thrusters on its final approach to Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, known as "Chury" for short, on Wednesday morning. Half an hour after the burn, scientists announced that the craft had entered into the orbit of the streaking comet.

"After 10 years, five months and four days travelling towards our destination, looping around the Sun five times and clocking up 6.4 billion kilometers, we are delighted to announce finally 'we are here'," said Jean-Jacques Dordain, ESA's Director General, in a statement.

"Europe's Rosetta is now the first spacecraft in history to rendezvous with a comet, a major highlight in exploring our origins. Discoveries can start."

ESA tweeted a photo of the comet after Rosetta's maneuver. Chury and the space probe now lie some 405 million kilometers from Earth, about half way between the orbits of Jupiter and Mars, according to ESA.

The mission has now achieved the first of what it hopes will be a series of historic accomplishments. In November mission controllers aim to place the robotic lander Philae on the surface -- something that has never been done before.

Previous missions have performed comet fly-bys but Rosetta is different. This probe will follow the comet for more than a year, mapping and measuring how it changes as it is blasted by the sun's energy.
Story Continues

There's a thread about it, started by majicbar, here
http://www.theoutpostforum.com/tof/s...-Comet-Mission

[calikid]

NASA seeks YOUR help cataloging photos.
WHo knows, might be a UFO hidden somewhere in the batch!

Image overload: Help us sort it all out, NASA requests
By Eliott C. McLaughlin

NASA is asking for your help.

No, you do not get to go to space.

You do, however, get to view hundreds of thousands of images taken from space. Via The Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth, NASA is making available images ranging from the Mercury missions of the 1960s to photos recently snapped from the International Space Station.

The hope, NASA says, is that the images "could help save energy, contribute to better human health and safety and improve our understanding of atmospheric chemistry. But scientists need your help to make that happen."

The catalog contains more than 1.8 million photos, about 1.3 million of them from the space station and roughly 30% of them taken at night.
Story Continues

[calikid]

Hi-Def camera with a live feed on the space station.
This could get interesting!

See the UFO? No? Try squinting. Squint harder
By Ben Brumfield

Down on Earth, we all know: Do anything stupid these days, and video of it will turn up on the Internet to embarrass you.

Now, space aliens may be about learn that lesson, too.

NASA deployed live webcams on the International Space Station in March, and UFO enthusiasts monitoring their live feeds online have nabbed unidentified flying objects scooting through Earth's orbit.

They've made screen grabs of the NASA video and posted them online. UFOlogist Scott Waring may have been the first, when he plastered them onto his blog, UFO Sightings Daily, early last week.

Highlighted by a red circle and clearly visible is -- a speck. A white one. An enlargement of the screen grab reveals -- a blur.

A note explains the alleged vehicle's shape: "It has a long line down its middle and a dome on its top, but is rectangle on it lower bottom."

If you still don't recognize it, don't worry, it's not called "unidentified" for nothing. And it's hard to know for sure what it is, with all the meteors, satellites and space junk swarming around Earth.
Story Continues

[calikid]

Photo of Triton reminds me a precious gemstone, opal.
25 years later? That's a long development process.

NASA Unveils Best Map Ever of Neptune's Moon Triton
By Mike Wall
A scientist has created the best-ever global color map of Neptune's big moon Triton, using images taken by a NASA spacecraft 25 years ago.

Paul Schenk of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston produced the map after restoring photos snapped by the Voyager 2 probe during its flyby of Neptune and Triton on Aug. 25, 1989. The new map has also been turned into a minute-long movie of Voyager 2's historic Triton encounter — the first and only time a spacecraft has ever visited the Neptune system.

The new map, which has a resolution of 1,970 feet (600 meters) per pixel, may help bring enigmatic Triton back into the spotlight. Story Continues

[CasperParks]

It would be surprising if some sort of marine life is found beneath the ice in the waters of Triton and Europa.

[CasperParks]

It would be surprising if some sort of marine life is found beneath the ice in the waters of Triton and Europa.

correction - typo "It would not be surprising" if some sort of marine life is found...

[majicbar]

http://www.nasa.gov/jpl/asteroid/sma...l#.VAezVPldUfU

Only discovered on the 31st of August of this year, (this week), this 60 foot (18 meter) small chunk of rock will glider under the ring of geosynchronous satellites at 25,000 miles from Earth's center, from the press release it looks like this is a one pass wonder, not to return again. It is roughly a bit larger than the bolide that entered over Russia, bu I'm glad to see that it will miss us.

[majicbar]

http://www.space.com/27102-bright-qu...40910_31383596

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal...ture13712.html

Study has found that the suspected nature of Quasars is driven by it's being a "Black Hole" and the size of the Black hole and the disc of gasses surrounding it and the angle to which it is viewed explain the variations we see in Black Holes.

"Our results show that most of the diversity of quasar phenomenology can be unified using two simple quantities: Eddington ratio and orientation."

[calikid]

http://www.space.com/27102-bright-qu...40910_31383596

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal...ture13712.html

Study has found that the suspected nature of Quasars is driven by it's being a "Black Hole" and the size of the Black hole and the disc of gasses surrounding it and the angle to which it is viewed explain the variations we see in Black Holes.

"Our results show that most of the diversity of quasar phenomenology can be unified using two simple quantities: Eddington ratio and orientation."

Amazing the variety of theories on Quasars over the years.
Back in the 1970s, (now I feel old!) when I took astronomy at university, the theory was it was a single large star that INCREDIBLY emitted as much radiation as a galaxy.

Would seem that today's better instruments provide a more solid theory.

[calikid]

Always smart to check the expiration date on bottled water before you buy.

Earth's water older than the sun, came from interstellar ice

The water in our solar system -- including up to half of Earth's supply -- has actually been here since before the birth of the sun, according to new research.
by Michelle Starr

Somewhere between 30 and 50 percent of the water in the solar system -- including the water on Earth as well as the ice in comets, the discs around Saturn, meteorites and other planets -- was around before the birth of the sun, according to research conducted by astronomers at the University of Michigan.

In a paper published in the journal Science, the team explains that the water originated in the molecular cloud -- the nebula -- that gave birth to the sun, and predates the solar system by around a million years.

In the way of stars, the sun was born from a nebula, a cloud of dust and gas floating in space. As the nebula increased in density, its gravity would have caused it to collapse in on itself, forming a rotating ball of gas. As this ball cools, it becomes denser and its spin increases, and the gas and matter of the nebula around it form a flattened disc of material that swirls into the star's gravitational pull.

This disc is called the accretion disc -- or the protoplanetary disc. As the gas in the centre of the disc stabilises into a fully grown star, so too does the disc stabilise and coalesce into discrete planets and asteroids. A delicate balance of gravitational force (the sun's gravity attracting objects towards the sun) and centripetal force (the resisting force or the planet's spin around the sun -- think of spinning a ball on a rope) hold these objects in the solar system's orbit.

What the researchers sought to discover was whether the water was already extant in the sun's parental nebula, or whether the birth of the solar system also birthed the water within it.

"Why this is important? If water in the early Solar System was primarily inherited as ice from interstellar space, then it is likely that similar ices, along with the prebiotic organic matter that they contain, are abundant in most or all protoplanetary disks around forming stars," said Carnegie Institution for Science's Conel Alexander, who contributed to the research.

"But if the early Solar System's water was largely the result of local chemical processing during the Sun's birth, then it is possible that the abundance of water varies considerably in forming planetary systems, which would obviously have implications for the potential for the emergence of life elsewhere.

To figure out where the water originated, the research team simulated the chemistry of the forming solar system
Story Continues