Tag Archives: nasa

Finally it starts Dawning

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NASA’s Dawn spacecraft has provided researchers with the first orbital analysis of the giant asteroid Vesta, yielding new insights into its creation and kinship with terrestrial planets and Earth’s moon.

Vesta now has been revealed as a special fossil of the early solar system with a more varied, diverse surface than originally thought. Scientists have confirmed a variety of ways in which Vesta more closely resembles a small planet or Earth’s moon than another asteroid. Results appear in today’s edition of the journal Science.

“Dawn’s visit to Vesta has confirmed our broad theories of this giant asteroid’s history, while helping to fill in details it would have been impossible to know from afar,” said Carol Raymond, deputy principal investigator at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “Dawn’s residence at Vesta of nearly a year has made the asteroid’s planet-like qualities obvious and shown us our connection to that bright orb in our night sky.” …(DAWN Mission)

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Soccer preferred

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Tonight we had the one before last competition round of the Dutch Eredivisie, the primera division of Dutch soccer. It was exciting so I wasn’t much concerned with astronomy. Weather played a big role in tonight’s round, as thunder and lightning caused at least two games to be suspended for a while. But Ajax became national champion and there’s still batlle for second place.

In the mean time it seems SpaceX has some serious delays with the scheduled launch – that is, first scheduled on April the 30th, then May the 7th and now… who knows. Follow their twitter stream for updates. It just looks like the old days with Space Shuttles delayed, sometimes forever. And this time it’s not the weather.

How’s the critter doing?

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While Spirit is silenced forever, Oppy’s still running. That is, it’s coming out of hibernation these weeks. A status report:

Opportunity is positioned on the north end of Cape York on the rim of Endeavour Crater with an approximate 15-degree northerly tilt for favorable solar energy production. The winter solstice (March 30, 2012) has now passed for the rover.

Radio Doppler tracking passes for the geo-dynamic investigation were performed on Sols 2909 and 2912 (March 30 and April 2, 2012). Atmospheric argon measurements were performed with the Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer (APXS) on Sols 2907 and 2909 (March 28 and March 30, 2012). Additional Panoramic camera (Pancam) images were taken on several sols, along with a 360-degree Navigation camera (Navcam) panorama to be used to refine knowledge of the rover’s attitude.

The project is continuing to investigate the anomalies from Sol 2899 (March 20, 2012), that indicate apparent downward motion (of a few millimeters) of the left-front wheel and a stall in the robotic arm (Instrument Deployment Device, IDD). On Sol 2910 (March 31, 2012), a Quick Fine Attitude (QFA) was performed to establish the rover’s attitude using the Sun along with the collection of additional Hazardous camera (Hazcam) imagery. No motion in the rover was observed when comparing these images to ones collected just after the anomalous wheel motion. However, the project is planning to stabilize the left-front wheel by performing a small wheel spin and a steering wiggle. These actions should remove any loose material under the wheel and relax any tension in the rover’s suspension. A small dust cleaning event around Sol 2911 (April 1, 2012), improved the solar array dust factor by a few percent.

As of Sol 2913 (April 3, 2012), solar array energy production was 321 watt-hours with an atmospheric opacity (Tau) of 0.521 and a solar array dust factor of 0.506.

Total odometry is unchanged at 21.35 miles (34,361.37 meters). (NASA/JPL)

Primordial soup for you!

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The primordial soup in our solar system might be a lot more infected with organics than previously thought, although the results come from a computer, not a test tube:

Complex organic compounds, including many important to life on Earth, were readily produced under conditions that likely prevailed in the primordial solar system. NAI-funded researcher Scott Sandford at NASA Ames Research Center and his colleague Fred Ciesla at the University of Chicago came to this conclusion after linking computer simulations to laboratory experiments. Their study appears in Science Express

Ciesla simulated the dynamics of the solar nebula, the cloud of gas and dust from which the sun and the planets formed. Although every dust particle within the nebula behaved differently, they all experienced the conditions needed for organics to form over a simulated million-year period.

“Whenever you make a new planetary system, these kinds of things should go on,” said Sandford. “This potential to make organics and then dump them on the surfaces of any planet you make is probably a universal process.”

Although organic compounds are commonly found in meteorites and cometary samples, their origins presented a mystery. How important a role these compounds may have played in giving rise to the origin of life remains poorly understood, however. … (NASA Astrobiology)