Saturn Storms!

NASA's Cassini spacecraft is tracking a storm on Saturn that is producing massive electrical discharges that are upwards of 10,000 times stronger than lightning found on Earth. The spacecraft tracked the discharges as the storm started, now in its fifth month of existence. The spacecraft has seen a few storms in the last few years that have lasted about a month, but this storm has obviously lasted much longer than the previously observed storms!

Want to check out more about this? Head on over to Nasa.gov

Godspeed

Lunar GPS

With development and testing of the shuttle replacement well underway, the next milestone beyond first flight of the rocket, is a lunar base. In order for the lunar base to be successful, they will need to communicate with Earth. This could pose a challenge for when astronauts are on the backside of the moon.

The current proposal is to launch a number of satellites to act as communication relay for the astronauts, and they could also double as a Lunar GPS system. A few proposals currently exist for where to place the satellites. One is the most obvious of orbiting the moon, but the moon has a very irregular gravitational field due to irregular mass within the moon. So they would have to follow a very specific path. The second idea is to place the satellites in the Lagrangian points where they would be able to see the reverse side of the moon and would remain fixed relative to the Earth-Moon system.

Swing on over to Space.com to check out the full article.

Godspeed

The Huge... Scratch that, Tiny Blackhole

NASA has just discovered the smallest known black hole. The black hole discovered using the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer, a small satellite placed in orbit in 1995.

The black hole is only 3.8 times the mass of our own sun and is part of a binary system comprised of this black hole and an orbiting star. This is extremely small, about half of the mass of the previous record holder and billions of times smaller than the largest black holes.

If Einsteins theories hold true a black hole with a mass 3.8 times that of our sun, would only be 15 miles across; the size of a city.

If you want to know more, check out NASA.gov


Godspeed

GRB From Beyond

A little over a week ago, a rare event occurred and was captured by NASA's Swift satellite. The event was actually so rare, that nothing with that magnitude had ever been detected before. I'm speaking of a gamma ray burst (GRB) that was visible with the naked eye.

Gamma Ray Bursts are not uncommon, about 2 are detected every week. The oddity here was how far away the burst was from Earth. The distance was measured at about halfway across the observable universe. That is 7.5 billion light years, and it was visible with no telescope, no binoculars. Nothing even remotely close to this distance has ever been observable with the naked eye.

There are two explanations, either this was an extremely powerful burst, or the jets from the GRB was extremely narrow and happened to be directed toward Earth. Actually, when this GRB occurred, the Earth was not even in existence, 7.5 billion years ago. Pretty interesting to imagine this.

This burst came as one of 4 GRB's detected that day, setting a new record for GRB detections for the Swift satellite. Coincidentally this record GRB detection came the day after Arthur C. Clarke died.

If you want to read more on this check out NASA.gov


Godspeed

Life on Enceladus?

The Cassini spacecraft was recently steered into the icy plumes that emanate from Enceladus, a moon of Saturn. The icy plumes were only discovered in 2005 and was a surprise to many scientists who did not expect to find activity on a moon so far from the Sun.

A surprising thing was discovered when the Cassini spacecraft was steered through the moons icy plumes. There were many organic compounds found within the material being ejected from the moons surface. Basically the moon is ideal to have life on the surface, or someplace within the Saturn system.

Enceladus has the conditions needed for life to exist and this is the first time that such favorable life supporting conditions have been found outside of our own planet. Truly a remarkable discovery and something that will definitely need to be looked into further.

An amazing find, hopefully we'll see more come of this in the near future.

Godspeed

DARPA Loves Long Flights

That's right, DARPA is at it again with a pretty crazy project. DARPA is looking to have an aircraft built to meet some pretty crazy criteria. The main one being, a 5 year flight duration.

Yep, DARPA wants to fly an aircraft for 5 year straight without touching down. The aircraft will be mainly used to sample the atmosphere over the five year mission time. DARPA has named this project the "Vulture" project.

DARPA is close to awarding a contract and will move forward after that. The picture above is of the NASA long endurance aircraft and could be one possible design choice for entries into the project.

Currently the longest duration aircraft flying is the Global Hawk. The Global Hawk is an UAV that can fly for 40-48 hours straight without refueling. This new proposed aircraft would fly for 1000 times longer than the Global Hawk. Some ideas of how this could be achieved include solar power which would work really well and possibly fuel cells.

We'll see how this interesting project pans out in the near future!

Godspeed

Phoenix Readying for Touchdown

NASA has begun adjusting orbits of three orbiting satellites over Mars as it prepares to cover the landing of the latest Martian visitor, the Phoenix. Having the three satellites cover the landing of the probe will give scientists a better understanding of what occurs as probes land on Mars.

Phoenix was launched in 2004 and will land farther north than any previous Mars lander. The hope is that the probe will be able to find frozen water further north.

The polar regions of Mars is covered in what appears to be snow, but the white "ice caps" are actually frozen Carbon Dioxide. Scientists believe that beneath the CO2 lies frozen or even liquid water/ice, this belief arising from observed impact craters and the debris spread from those craters. Also recent observations with a gamma ray spectrometer has detected water at the polar caps.

The probe will search for signs of water and gather data on the meteorological conditions at the polar caps so that models of the past and present polar conditions can be created. The probe is set to enter the martian atmosphere on May 25th.

This should be an interesting mission


Godspeed

Endeavor Away!

The shuttle Endeavor is on the platform and ready to go. Endeavor is prepared to take off on it's mission to the International Space Station, launch is scheduled for 2:28 am local time.

The Endeavor will fly to the ISS carrying the new Japanese built Kibo labratory section. Also the shuttle will carry the new Canadian double robotic arm, this will allow the arm system to reach just about all locations on the space station and make many repairs and adjustments without having to preform a spacewalk.

For more information, visit NASA.gov

Saturns Moon Has A What?

Thats right the Saturn satellite Rhea, may have rings surrounding it. The Cassini detected lowered levels of electron activity coming from around the moon Rhea. The most obvious and plausible explanation is that the moon has a ring, or multiple rings filled with stellar debris, very similar to the ring surrounding it's parent planet, Saturn. The ring would be not nearly as dense as those found around Saturn, but a ring none the less.

This is the first discovery of a moon that has a ring, no stellar body other than planets have been found to have rings. This is an interesting discovery, and has yet to be verified visually, but possibly in the near future by Cassini or other spacecraft could visually confirm this.

The Dwarf Planets

As many know by this point, Pluto was removed from the list of solar system "planets" and added to the new list of "dwarf planets" which brought us to an 8 planet solar system and 3 major dwarf planets. Pluto was reclassified in 2006, this was something know by most people, but the reason for the reclassification.

In 2003 the "dwarf planet" Eris was first seen, but not identified until 2005. Eris is located well beyond the Kuiper Belt, at 96.7 AU away from the sun, which is about 3 times farther away than Pluto.

The kicker of discovering Eris... it's bigger than Pluto, 27% more massive. This caused Eris to be dubbed the tenth planet for a short period of time, until it spurred the defining of the label "planet" which reclassified Pluto and Eris as a dwarf planet.

As much as I hate to see Pluto go, I don't really know how well everyone would have excepted a 10th planet. If at all interested in Eris, check out some general information HERE.

Is that the Moon? Shoot it!!!!

NASA is now planning a trip to the moon with a probe that will one two punch our neighbor. The mission set to occur in February of 2009. This probe will carry a couple of objects to send into the moons surface and strike the surface twice in order to kick debris off of the surface. Once this occurs NASA will analyze the debris that gets lifted off the surface in order to see if water is on the moon. This impact is set to occur at one of the moons poles.


As far as updates for the blog go, this week has been crazy at work. So starting next week I should return to regular updates. Enjoy yourselves!

A Party Bag of Topics

Just a bunch of small topics to discuss today.


Tonight there is a total lunar eclipse, be sure to get outside and take a look at it. Happens at 10 pm EST and will be the last lunar eclipse visible in the US until 2010. Go outside and take a look, the moon will turn a cool shade of red due to the red wavelength of light that gets bent in the upper atmosphere of the Earth and projected onto the surface of the moon.

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Space shuttle Atlantis has returned safely to Cape Canaveral today ending its mission to bring a new piece of the ISS into orbit. The shuttle crew completed many tasks and made a successful mission after nearly 2 months of delays due to a faulty fuel sensor. Good to see Atlantis making another successful flight.


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One of the bigger stories of the day was the NAVY preparing to shoot down a failed satellite in orbit. This has been a huge story for the last few days as the NAVY has had to invest millions ($60 million to be exact) in modifications and man hours to prep and launch this missile. The missile will intercept the satellite and break it into many pieces which will easily burn up on re-entry. The whole reason for the shoot down of the satellite was so that the volatile hydrazine fuel won't spread over land if the fuel was to by chance survive re-entry.


Fun day for aerospace in the news!

Your WIng is in My Body... No Your Body is in My Wing

NASA has recently been testing the new Blended Wing Body (BWB) concept. The new concept takes the conventional build for an aircraft and modifies the fuselage into a lifting surface. The new design could prove to be more efficient and will definitely allow for more passenger space/ cargo space on-board.

The current flight tests being preformed by NASA will for one, validate the airworthiness of the design. Secondly, and most importantly, the tests will give valuable feedback on flight performance. As this is a completely new design and a fairly significant departure from current aircraft design, the aircraft must be tested. The feedback from the test flights will help determine how the BWB design will react in situations and how flight controls will work.

The information gathered from the test flights will allow the refinement of flight control software and basic flight controls for maximum in-flight performance. This new design could be the future of large scale passenger travel.

This design could prove to be very valuable to military forces. The BWB would be able to efficiently carry huge amounts of cargo on-board and may replace the conventional heavy lift cargo planes used in the Air Force today.

This would be a cool sight in full scale, coming to an airport near you!

Mercury: Up Close and Personal

The NASA probe Messenger has sent back images of Mercury on it's first of three passes over the next few years that will conclude with the spacecraft entering orbit of Mercury in 2011. The flyby revealed some images that perplexed the scientists at NASA; specifically the image shown below:


The confusion lies around the crater where there seems to be the cracks or splits in the surface of Mercury. Personally my first reaction was that it was a asteroid that impacted the surface and allowed lava to flow out, hence the large stream looking pattern toward the bottom of the picture. The proximity of the planet to the sun would seem to allow the planet to have a molten core. It also seems that many scientists agree with my assessment of the cracks. Read more at nasa.gov

Also another oddity of the planet is that the probe found a magnetic field produced by the planet, something that is not found on any other planet besides Earth. This also seems to support the conclusion of a molten core, but I won't say I know much about planetary magnetic fields.