July 2017

NASA Detects More Chemicals on Titan that are Essential to Life Saturn’s largest moon Titan may be the most fascinating piece of real-estate in the Solar System right now. Not surprising, given the fact that the moon’s dense atmosphere, rich organic environment and prebiotic chemistry are thought to be similar to Earth’s primordial atmosphere. As such, scientists believe that the moon could act as a sort of laboratory for studying the processes whereby chemical elements become the building blocks for life. These studies have already led to a wealth of information, which included the recent discovery of “carbon chain anions” – which are thought toRead More →

Messier 52 – the NGC 7654 Open Star Cluster Welcome back to Messier Monday! We continue our tribute to our dear friend, Tammy Plotner, by looking at the open star cluster of Messier 50. Enjoy! In the 18th century, while searching the night sky for comets, French astronomer Charles Messier kept noting the presence of fixed, diffuse objects in the night sky. In time, he would come to compile a list of approximately 100 of these objects, with the purpose of making sure that astronomers did not mistake them for comets. However, this list – known as the Messier Catalog – would go on toRead More →

Carnival of Space #520 This week’s Carnival of Space is hosted by Allen Versfeld at his Urban Astronomer blog. Click here to read Carnival of Space #520. And if you’re interested in looking back, here’s an archive to all the past Carnivals of Space. If you’ve got a space-related blog, you should really join the carnival. Just email an entry to carnivalofspace@gmail.com, and the next host will link to it. It will help get awareness out there about your writing, help you meet others in the space community – and community is what blogging is all about. And if you really want to help out,Read More →

Veteran Multinational Trio Launches on Soyuz and Arrives at International Space Station The Soyuz MS-05 rocket is launched with Expedition 52 flight engineer Sergei Ryazanskiy of Roscosmos, flight engineer Randy Bresnik of NASA, and flight engineer Paolo Nespoli of ESA (European Space Agency), Friday, July 28, 2017 at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Photo Credit: (NASA/Joel Kowsky) An all veteran multinational trio of astronauts and cosmonauts rocketed to orbit aboard a Russian Soyuz capsule and safely arrived at the International Space Station (ISS) after a fast track rendezvous on Friday, July 28. NASA astronaut Randy Bresnik, Sergey Ryazanskiy of Roscosmos and Paolo Nespoli of ESARead More →

Where Will the Space Launch System Take Us? Preparing For The Most Powerful Rocket Ever Built NASA is in an awkward in-between time right now. Since the beginning of the space age, the agency has had the ability to send its astronauts into space. The first American to go to space, Alan Shepard, did a suborbital launch on board a Mercury Redstone rocket in 1961. Then the rest of the Mercury astronauts went on Atlas rockets, and then the Gemini astronauts flew on various Titan rockets. NASA’s ability to hurl people and their equipment into space took a quantum leap with the enormous Saturn VRead More →

What Is the Name Of Our Galaxy? Since prehistoric times, human beings have looked up at at the night sky and pondered the mystery of the band of light that stretches across the heavens. And while theories have been advanced since the days of Ancient Greece as to what it could be, it was only with the birth of modern astronomy that scholars have come come to know precisely what it is – i.e. countless stars at considerable distances from Earth. The term “Milky Way”, a term which emerged in Classical Antiquity to describe the band of light in the night sky, has since goneRead More →

The Crater Constellation Welcome to another edition of Constellation Friday! Today, in honor of the late and great Tammy Plotner, we take a look at “The Cup” – the Crater constellation. Enjoy! In the 2nd century CE, Greek-Egyptian astronomer Claudius Ptolemaeus (aka. Ptolemy) compiled a list of all the then-known 48 constellations. This treatise, known as the Almagest, would be used by medieval European and Islamic scholars for over a thousand years to come, effectively becoming astrological and astronomical canon until the early Modern Age One of these constellation is Crater (aka. “The Cup”), an asterism located in the Southern Hemisphere. This small constellation isRead More →

Opportunity Starts Historic Descent of Tantalizing Martian Gully to Find Out How Was It Carved Historic 1st descent down Martian gully. Panoramic view looking down Perseverance Valley after entry at top was acquired by NASA’s Opportunity rover scanning from north to south. It shows numerous wheel tracks at left, center and right as rover conducted walkabout tour prior to starting historic first decent down a Martian gully – possibly carved by water – and looks into the interior of Endeavour crater. Perseverance Valley terminates down near the crater floor in the center of the panorama. The far rim of Endeavour crater is seen in theRead More →

Cassini Finds that Titan is Building the Chemicals that Might Have Led to Life on Earth Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, has been a source of mystery ever since scientists began studying it over a century ago. These mysteries have only deepened with the arrival of the Cassini-Huygens mission in the system back in 2004. In addition to finding evidence of a methane cycle, prebiotic conditions and organic chemistry, the Cassini-Huygens mission has also discovered that Titan may have the ingredient that help give rise to life. Such is the argument made in a recent study by an international team of scientists. After examining data obtained byRead More →

Hubble Sees Tiny Phobos Orbiting Mars Mars’ moon Phobos is a pretty fascinating customer! Compared to Mars other moon Deimos, Phobos (named after the Greek personification of fear) is the larger and innermost satellite of the Red Planet. Due to its rapid orbital speed, the irregularly-shaped moon orbits Mars once every 7 hours, 39 minutes, and 12 seconds. In other words, it completes over three orbits of Mar within a single Earth day. It’s not too surprising then that during a recent observation of Mars with the Hubble space telescope,  Phobos chose to photobomb the picture! It all took place in May of 2016, whenRead More →

New Comet: C/2017 O1 ASAS-SN Takes Earth by Surprise Getting brighter… Comet O1 ASAS-SN from July 23rd. Image credit and copyright: iTelescope/Rolando Ligustri. A new comet discovery crept up on us this past weekend, one that should be visible for northern hemisphere observers soon. We’re talking about Comet C/2017 O1 ASAS-SN, a long period comet currently visiting the inner solar system. When it was discovered on July 19th, 2017 by the All Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN) system, Comet O1 ASAS-SN was at a faint magnitude +15.3 in the constellation Cetus. In just a few short days, however, the comet jumped up a hundred-foldRead More →

Breakthrough Lofts the Smallest Satellites Ever, not Interstellar Yet, but a Step Forward In 2015, Russian billionaire Yuri Milner established Breakthrough Initiatives, a non-profit organization dedicated to enhancing the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). In April of the following year, he and the organization be founded announced the creation of Breakthrough Starshot, a program to create a lightsail-driven “wafercraft” that would make the journey to the nearest star system – Alpha Centauri – within our lifetime. This past June, the organization took a major step towards achieving this goal. After hitching a ride on some satellites being deployed to Low Earth Orbit (LEO), Breakthrough conductedRead More →

Ready to Leave Low Earth Orbit? Prototype Construction Begins for a Deep Space Habitat In 2010, NASA accounted its commitment to mount a crewed mission to Mars by the third decade of the 21st century. Towards this end, they have working hard to create the necessary technologies – such as the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and the Orion spacecraft. At the same time, they have partnered with the private sector to develop the necessary components and expertise needed to get crews beyond Earth and the Moon. To this end, NASA recently awarded a Phase II contract to Lockheed Martin to create a new spaceRead More →

Dream Chaser Mini-Shuttle to Fly ISS Resupply Missions on ULA Atlas V Artist’s concept of the Sierra Nevada Corporation Dream Chaser spacecraft launching atop the United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket in the 552 configuration on cargo missions to the International Space Station. Credit: ULA The first two missions of the unmanned Dream Chaser mini-shuttle carrying critical cargo to the International Space Station (ISS) will fly on the most powerful version of the Atlas V rocket and start as soon as 2020, announced Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC) and United Launch Alliance (ULA). “We have selected United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V rocket to launch our firstRead More →

Ancient Volcanoes on Mars Could Have Been the Place for Life For decades, Mars has been the focal point of intense research. Beginning in the 1960s, literally dozens of robotic spacecraft, orbiters and rovers have explored Mars’ atmosphere and surface, looking for clues to the planet’s past. From this, scientists now know that billions of years ago, Mars was a warmer, wetter place. Not only did liquid water exist on its surface, but it is possible life existed there in some form as well. Granted, some recent findings have cast some doubt in this, indicating that Mars’ surface may have been hostile to microbes. ButRead More →