This Week @Nasa

More from the Nasa Television Youtube Channel on what has been happening at Nasa this week.

International Year of Astronomy News and Updates

It is Friday, it is time for news and updates from the International Year of Astronomy, 2009. As ever, the IYA2009 team have divided the various snippets into ones that can be classified as external news sources reporting on the IYA2009 related events (news round-up) and internal progress reports on IYA2009 activities (updates).

In the news this week… Canada.com and the Montreal Gazette have both carried an article on experiencing Galileo moments and advertising the grand party that is the 400th anniversary of the first views through the telescope. By Harriot. Anyway, Scientific American has taken a look at the events of 1609 and then moved forward into the present day and exoplanets. Taiwan News has been advertising the up and coming Solar Eclipse of the 22nd of July. SatNews has been advertising the 27th General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union. The Standard in Hong Kong has been advertising AstroPark, a dark skies area separated into an amateur observing area, a naked eye observing area and an education area filled with ancient Chinese instruments. In the UK, Science Centric has mentioned the University of Kent’s new digital planetarium, which will be touring local schools. Finally the Wisconsin Journal notes a new star walk with a 200 million to one scale. It includes information posts at relevant points from the Sun to Pluto and is so designed that a moderate walking speed should take a person from the Sun to the Earth in eight minutes – the time that light takes making the same trip on the real scale.

IYA2009 Updates mentions the CERN Courier’s latest IYA2009 special edition. The EUMETSAT-ESOC free classical concert gets a mention as does the Communicating Astronomy with the Public Journal, number 6. Galileo-kun and his friends, the Japanese cartoon strip, is mentioned as well as Nepal’s first astronomical documentary. The IYA2009 calls to its members to embrace sharing of resources and skills through the single point of contacts (IYA ambassadors to each country), as well as to its more scientific members to make use of this year’s solar eclipse for experiments and for everyone to become involved in the Citizen Sky project to track the activity of a mysterious but very bright variable star.

CERN Courier puts out IYA2009 edition

To celebrate the International Year of Astronomy, 2009, the CERN Courier, in house magazine of the community servicing the Large Hadron Collider in France and Switzerland, has released a special edition that includes details on links between experimental particle physics and astronomy. There are many high energy processes in the universe and to understand these a knowledge of what is happening on the subatomic level can be vital.

Modelling a Sunspot

via Astronomy Now.

Well, they may be absent from the solar disc, but at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in the USA and the Max Plank Institute for Solar System Research in Germany, sunspots are available whatever the weather – or at least simulations of one.

A new model of the phenomenon takes a volume 100,000 km long, 50,000 km wide and 6,000 km deep. It slices the space up into 1.8 billion separate cuboids of simulated solar material. It then works out gas motion, electric and magnetic induction, heat flow, momentum flow and all the rest at every single point. This is then brought step by step along in time to see the construction, structure and destruction of a sunspot.

The new model is the most detailed sunspot model ever attempted and requires the use of computing facilities that perform 76 trillion computations every second. It shows how magnetic convection forms the underlying structure of a sunspot with vertical field lines in the dark centre (umbra) and horizontal ones crossing the penumbra. The researchers have pointed out that there are flaws remaining in the model as to calculate the conditions in the longest horizontal flux tubes (plasma containing field lines) even more computing power is required.

Mapping shadowy craters

via Astronomy Now.

Nasa has been using the 70m Deep Space Network (normally used for communications with space probes in the far reaches of the solar system) Goldstone Solar System Radar to bounce signals off the Moon. The idea was to build a map of the topography of the Moon – see where it dips and rises. This can been added to by Laser Altimeter data from the Kaguya probe (basically the same thing as bouncing a radar off the surface, but using visible light and a lot closer in).

The result is a map that can be used to determine where the deepest, darkest craters are. These permanently shadowed features are potentially host to water, and therefore of use to any future manned inhabitance. The LCROSS mission will be slamming into one or two of these in order to try and scare up some of the water for analysis and prove for definite that it is there. We’ve had signals from hydrogen that might be inside water molecules before, but these are ambiguous as to whether or not they are definitely in there.

More Moon landing stuff

As the fortieth anniversary of the Moon landings approaches, yet more collectibles and programs are coming to light. The BBC has released an archive full of related programs. Astronomy Now is selling its specials online. I’ve already mentioned the Sky at Night Magazine special edition (sitting behind me, well read), various photo books and twitters from ApolloPlus40 as if the mission was happening now. Well that account has been joined by a new account that of the speaker at the Royal Festival Hall soon, Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin.

Lightning on Mars

via Universe Today.

Researchers at the University of Michigan have seen a signal from Mars that implies the presence of dry lightning within dust clouds. They studied the red planet in microwave emissions and saw a release of non-thermal radiation – microwaves not attributable to the normal background radiation on Mars or that of a dust cloud. Microwaves are released during lightning and this is the most likely explanation for the signals. The red planet is a very dry planet and so the lightning will be due to static charges in dust rather than being produced by water or accompanied by rain.

Lightning can have a huge effect on atmospheric composition, the intense bursts of plasma and heat allowing chemical reactions otherwise barred to the Martian environment.

First light for Herschel

via the Herschel Team.

A few days ago, I mentioned that the Herschel Infrared Space Telescope had blown the bolts holding on its lens cap and allowed light to flow from the mirrors into the instruments. The telescope, which is still in the middle of the commissioning date, wasn’t supposed to send any data back to Earth at this point, but a change in heart amongst the ground crew meant they gave it a go anyway. The image below is the first sight of the infrared Universe through Herschel. It has been put next to a view of the same galaxy, M51, as seen by the Spitzer Infrared Space Telescope, our previous best effort at this wavelength. The improvement is obvious.

Lucky Imaging

Yep, just what it sounds like.

When you’re at the telescope looking at faint stars, fuzzies or planets, there will always be a bit of boiling and bubbling of the image going on due to turbulence in the atmosphere. This “seeing” as it is known in the biz means the thing at the eyepiece may go in and out of focus and jig around a little.

The same problem afflicts the professionals. They realised some time ago that a process of taking short exposures, selecting the best frames (where the image isn’t an unfocused large blob) and aligning them so the jiggling about doesn’t blur the final image produces better results. Indeed, this has long filtered down to the amateur community with the free program Registax doing the job known as Lucky Imaging.

A recent paper has appeared on arxiv where a team led by Andrew Smith has evaluated the current state of play. They used a thousand or so images recorded of a binary star and compared the results obtained with no Lucky Imaging, the results obtained simply by lining up all the images recorded with no discarding of bad images (no frame selection) and the results obtained with frame selection. They found that improvements were made just by the aligning, but with frame selection the improvements were far more pronounced. Longer wavelengths were better served by this technique than shorter wavelengths and finally that the nominal exposure time for each image in a series should be less than ten milliseconds (for their skies, perhaps longer under better conditions). Exposure times up to 640 ms were capable of being improved by Lucky Imaging, but less so than those below 10. This confirms recent theoretical work in the same field.

ESA expands their spaceport

ESA’s spaceport in the French Guiana is nearing completion of a new launch facility designed to allow Soyuz rockets to be fired from there. The Soyuz facility will join facilities for Vega and Ariane rockets already operational at the site. There are a few pictures below and many more at this website.

Credit: ESA

Credit: ESA

Credit: ESA