LCROSS has a date with destiny…

The final stage of the LCROSS mission has been identified. LCROSS is a mission that plans to end with a bang. It carries with it the upper stage of the rocket that launched it. The intention is to send the rocket on ahead to collide with the lunar surface. Not just any lunar surface though, this has to be a well chosen crater floor. One that lies in perpetual darkness and may just have water ice frozen inside it. When the rocket hits, the plume of material sent up will be directly sampled by LCROSS itself, which will be on the same collision course, but slightly delayed.

The decision over which crater in the southern lunar region will be best to collide with (including factors such as can LCROSS get there, will be plume be visible from Earth – NASA wants amateurs and professionals to image it) has been made. The crater is Cabeus A and the time of impact will be 7:30am EDT on October 9th – 12:30am BST, not good for UK based observers… Below is the mission briefing from NASA’s Youtube Channel:

Students @ NASA

There are lots of activities where NASA invites students to participate. Coming up soon, for example, will be the results of the 2009 Moon Work Engineering Contest. The winning teams are from the University of Maryland, College Park; the University of Akron, Ohio; and Texas A&M University, College Station. They will be put to work on part of the Desert RATS lunar analog tests ongoing at the moment. These tests, which include the new Lunar Exploration Rover, Chariot B, the TriAthlete and a new portable utility thing called a PUP, are presently being run with ‘astronauts’ undergoing a mock fortnight mission in the desert.

Another thing students can do at NASA is become an intern. These three guys describe life at a NASA research center (one went to Dryden, the other two Langley). As well as quick interviews and links to their blogs, the webpage also has a link to NASA’s aeronautical scholarship application system.

STS-128 mission highlights

…have been posted to NASA’s Youtube Channel, following the space shuttle Discovery’s return from the International Space Station:

STS-128 can be read about by using its mission pages, through events posted to NASA’s Youtube Channel) or through twitter via @Astro_Jose, @Astro_Tim, @CFuglesang, @Astro_Nicole and @NASA. Check here to see if the ISS or other satellites are going to pass over your area.

This Week @ NASA

As if the title wasn’t a big enough clue, here’s this week’s This Week @NASA, taken from NASA’s Youtube Channel:

The space shuttle has landed

The space shuttle Discovery has ended mission STS-128 to resupply the International Space Station. After almost fourteen days, the twin sonic booms announcing the shuttle’s arrival over LA signaled the orbiter’s path towards the Edward’s Airbase was almost complete. The booms had people in southern California twittering a variety of fears from Earthquakes to shootings, but these were soon allayed. The shuttle had to divert to a Californian landing site after the preferred site at the Kennedy Space Center proved nonviable due to the Florida weather. Discovery will now be transported back atop an airplane as several shuttle missions before have been. Discovery brought back with it ISS astronaut @Astro_Tim, who swapped places with @Astro_Nicole, now living on the space station. As well as this, ESA astronaut Christer Fuglesang (@cfuglesang) also returned to the ground.

Once on the ground, the shuttle crew switched off the orbiter and underwent medical checks before six of the seven went on a walkabout and said a few words. Below are some videos showing the landing, walkabout and post landing briefing, posted to NASA’s Youtube Page:

The next mission is STS-129, penciled in for November 12th using the space shuttle Atlantis. It is expected to last eleven days and involved three spacewalks.

STS-128 can be read about by using its mission pages, through events posted to NASA’s Youtube Channel) or through twitter via @Astro_Jose, @Astro_Tim, @CFuglesang, @Astro_Nicole and @NASA. Check here to see if the ISS or other satellites are going to pass over your area.

Getting to grips with spectroscopy

For most people, the closest they get to spectroscopy – the study of the spectrum – is looking at a pretty rainbow. For astronomers, the pretty rainbow produced by stretching out the light of celestial objects is more than just something nice to look at, it contains information on materials in and around the object. Temperature, chemical composition, velocity. It can differentiate between various types of Supernovae. If the spectrum is extended so that as well as visible light, frequencies the eye cannot see are included – gamma rays, x-rays, infrared, microwave, submilimetre, radio – then the information available grows too.

Two American universities of note have websites introducing spectral studies, to help people get a grip on what is happening. Caltech’s website, known as the Cool Universe, includes an introduction to the spectrum concentrating on infrared information (images, spectra and the like). Harvard’s take, known as the Virtual Spectrometer, is slanted towards teaching all about the velocity induced Doppler shift and measuring the motion of galaxies using it. Both have games and different ways of introducing the concept of spectral lines – fingerprints of chemicals that can be found in a well studied spectrum.

ESA Bulletin

The European Space Agency produces a quarterly magazine called The Bulletin. It provides a wide ranging overview of the agency’s activities. This quarter’s edition includes interviews with ESA’s new astronauts, impact crater studies on Earth and Mars, Planck and Herschel probe Science Ground Segments and an introduction to the European Space Astronomy Centre in Spain.

IYA2009 wins scifi podcast prize

The official podcast of the International Year of Astronomy, 2009 is called 365 days of astronomy. It features community generated comment (ie people booked a day and produced the podcast on that day) from notables and not so notables within the astronomical community.

It has been given a prize that has been running for three years, the Parsec Award, one of the most recognised awards in science and fiction podcasts. The award was picked up by the composer of the theme tune to the 365 days podcast, which is show below:

Another landing scrub

The space shuttle Discovery has been told it can’t land at the Kennedy Space Center, following its mission to the International Space Station, tonight due to the Florida weather. The California weather is far more helpful at Edwards Airbase and it looks like they’ll try for a landing their tonight at 1:53am BST, 8:53pm EDT.

STS-128 can be followed by occasional bulletins here, its mission pages, through live events on NASA TV (later posted to NASA’s Youtube Channel) or through twitter via @Astro_Jose, @Astro_Tim, @CFuglesang, @Astro_Nicole and @NASA. Check here to see if the ISS or other satellites are going to pass over your area.

Magnetism fights starbirth

via Astronomy Now.

We are used to hearing about stars being the fight of fusion generated heat inspired expansion against gravitationally induced collapse. Either the star shines too brightly (over the Eddington limit) and blows itself apart or, more often, the fuel runs out and the star collapses, with the outer layers bouncing off the core and producing a nebula. Well it seems a similar battle is fought within the heart of ‘molecular clouds’, giant clouds of gas and dust in which stars are born.

Within these clouds, knots of high density material act as cores to which other gas and dust can gravitate and slowly collapse in, forming a protostar over time. However, such gravitational collapse is fought by two processes, turbulence, which swirls the material, forming an outward force, and magnetism, which pulls ionic material away along its field lines. There has been some controversy over which was the most significant factor in slowing down collapse.

Now a team led by Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics astronomer Hua-bai Li has begun studying the question. Magnetism in twenty-five cores within 6,500 light years of Earth was studied by looking on its effect on the polarisation of light. This showed that magnetic fields connecting different cores retained their original directions. They hadn’t been messed up by turbulent flows, suggesting magnetism was the dominant dissenting voice in these areas of gravitational collapse.

Still, no wonder stars go in such spectacular fashion. Gravity comes along, finds a pocket of gas, tries to collapse it, byt magnetism sucks away some material. When it gets somewhere, the actual energy of accelerating this gas into one packet makes it heat up and expand again. The heat and density then lead to fusion, which also expands the star and fights gravity. Hydrogen burning gives way to helium, CNO and all kinds of other burning until eventually the star gives way and gravity gets its white dwarf, neutron star or maybe even black hole…