Amazing Technology

I just finished watching the capsule landing and recovery coverage on NASA TV, and I started thinking how amazing technology is. Of course the Stardust is amazing technology, but I was thinking of the technology that even ordinary people have at their fingertips.

From Northern California I took a digital picture of some light that could be the Stardust capsule. And While NASA TV's live coverage of the landing played in the background on my desktop, I plugged my camera into my computer and pulled the image onto my harddrive. I used Hello! to post it to my blog, I added some text, republished, and 6 minutes after I took the picture (four minutes if you saw it while I wrote the text),before the capsule even landed in Utah, people all over the world could see it. (not that anyone did, I'm sure, but so what. That it can be done is amazing enough.)
I'm going to bed, it's almost 3 am.

Stardust capsule?

Stardust capsule? full resolution

I definitely saw the capsule as a pale orangish light moving fairly quickly from northwest to north before it went behind some trees. I saw it for about 4 or 5 seconds and I took a picture in the last couple seconds. Now I have to admit when I took this picture I thought for sure I'd missed the shot. I also thought that if by some miracle I had gotten the shot, the light would be in the lower right frame. The elongation is stretching the wrong direction too.

But I looked around from where I took the picture and didn't see another light similar to what is on the image (which I zoomed in on, on the camera, at the spot)

So who knows. But I saw it for sure. Here's the full sized image.

Stardust returns comet samples

After almost seven years tonight is the night. Well, early tomorrow morning actually. If you live in the Northwest set your alarm clocks for about 1:45 am, Stardusts' capsule will enter Earths atmosphere at 1:57 am Pacific Standard Time. Depending on where you live you should be able to see the capsule in the northern sky as it streaks toward Utah. It will be traveling at 28,860 miles per hour, the fastest any human made object has ever traveled in our atmosphere. The capsule is scheduled to land at 2:12 am at the Utah Test and Training Range.

Learn more about the mission, and an opportunity for you (yeah, you) to participate. The link will take you to one of my previous posts, follow the links there to learn all about the mission. Here's a page that has a Flash multimedia presentation about the mission. You can also watch it live from here. Starting at 1:30 am Pacific time.

Spirit and Opportunity

This mission appears to be one of NASA's greatest success stories. Two robots were sent to land on the surface of the planet Mars. They sent two robots to double the chances of a successful landing, both robots landed safely. They were designed to rove the Martian surface with an array of scientific instruments for an expected 90 days, both robots are still operating two years later. They continue to return a massive amount of useful data, most notably, several pieces of evidence that water once flowed on the surface of Mars.

Mars Spirit landed on January 4, 2004 with Opportunity following 21 days later. Here is a cool QuickTime movie (based on instrument readings so the movements are accurate) of Mars Spirit entering Mars' atmosphere, deploying drag chutes, inflating airbags, and bouncing to a stop on the surface of Mars. Rolling on six wheels the rovers move just a fraction of one mile an hour, but they have each traveled several miles in the last 700+ days. You can learn all about the mission, and the rovers, at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory Mars Rover Mission website.

The image of the rover at the top of this post is more then it appears. It's a high resolution (3000X2400 pixel) jpeg of an amazingly realistic rendering of the rover (Spirit and Opportunity are identical). The resolution is so high that the second image came from the first. I zoomed in on the instrument array with an image viewer, saved it, and posted it. These images are courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech. You can download the full jpeg here (or right click and save target as). It's a lot of fun to play with. Just open it in an image viewer that can zoom in and out and you can get up close on all the parts of the rover.

The rovers have several cameras to send pictures back to Earth. The Panoramic Camera or PANCAM is the highest resolution camera to ever photograph the surface of another planet. PANCAM is mounted on a rotating mast allowing for 360 degree images. Here's something you can't get anywhere else on the internet...It's a panorama of the surface of Mars. It's from my website portableplanetarium.com. You can move your cursor around inside the image to get it to pan around. No QTVR necessary. The file is huge. It can take almost a minute to load even on broadband, but its worth the wait.

Nebulae (neb-you-lee)

Where do stars come from? I've been asked that question dozens of times.

Stars form, in place, from surrounding clouds of dust and gas (mostly hydrogen). These clouds are the aftermath of some past cataclysmic event. We can see examples of these clouds, and the stars forming within them, with telescopes. They're called nebula (two or more are called nebulae) and there's one that you can see with just your eyes. It's easy to find too. It's within the constellation Orion the Hunter, the constellation with three stars in a straight line. Those three stars are called Orions belt. Orion is very prominent in the eastern sky all winter. Hanging down from Orions belt are two or three points of light (depending on how dark the sky looks from where you are). The brightest point of light is the Orion Nebula, marked on star maps as M42.

Yes, it just looks like a star. Not very exciting. But even with a cheap pair of binoculars you can see that it is definitely not a star. A small telescope can show its shape, and a really good amateur telescope will show a lot of detail and maybe some color-depending on conditions. The picture on this post is from the Hubble Space Telescope. It looks like two separate clouds, but there is actually a dark lane of dust in front of a single glowing cloud. It glows because the radiation from the newly forming star(s) is knocking electrons off of atoms of hydrogen. As the electrons are knocked off and move back to their original position they give off light or a glow, like a neon light. That's why M42 is called an emission nebula; it is emitting (giving off) light. Emission nebulae are also known as diffuse nebulae.

Just about anything other than a single star or a planet could technically be called a nebula. But modern astronomers only refer to certain types of deep space objects as nebulae. They are...

Now here comes a classic case of astronomy being more confusing than it has to be...But here goes.

There are three kinds of diffuse nebula, they are: Emission nebulae, they give off light; Reflection nebulae, they reflect light from emission nebulae(or some other light source); and Dark nebulae, which is basically a reflection nebula that isn't reflecting anything...they are practically invisible unless the dark cloud is blocking some of the background light from a more distant emission nebula, or starfield. Or, if stars begin to form inside the the cloud, making the surrounding atoms of hydrogen glow; the dark cloud become a visible emission nebula. So, all diffuse nebulae are clouds of dust and gas where stars sometimes form.

Now the confusing part...There are also objects called planetary nebulae. But they are not planets, and they are not nebulae(at least not diffuse nebulae). They're the outer material, or shell, of a dead or dying star. As a star slowly runs out of fuel it expands and contracts, losing its outer layers due to the violent changes and to the stars decreasing gravitational pull. The material continues to travel away from the dying star appearing as a smoke ring, a round cloud or a smudge. This material is sometimes lit by the dying stars last gasps of energy. Early astronomers mistook them for planets, hence the label planetary nebulae. And last...

Supernova remnants. If a star is large enough, when it finally collapses, it will explode in a supernova. The material that is scattered by this event continues to travel outward into space, This cloud of leftover material is sometimes referred to as a nebula.

Click here for a page with additional information about, and photo examples of, all of these types of nebula. Here is a very cool mpeg animation (or you can right click and save as) flying through the Orion nubula. Or get the QuickTime here. These movies come from the San Diego Supercomputer Center website.

Stardust

More than ten years years ago, in the fall of 1995, NASA approved an amazing mission. Called "Stardust", an office desk sized spacecraft weighing 770 pounds will fly through space for hundreds of millions of miles. Five years later it will meet up with a comet called Wild 2 (pronounced Vilt two), collect some dust coming off the comet, and then fly back to Earth. When the craft approaches Earth it will shoot a capsule containing the dust samples back to the surface of our planet.

The spacecraft launched successfully on February 7, 1999, encountered Wild 2 on January 2, 2004, turning the A side of its collector toward particles coming off the comet. The collectors B side was used to capture any small interstellar material it encountered in its journey. It will then deliver the capsule, with the data enclosed, back to Earth early Sunday morning (January 15, 2006).

The dust particles that were collected are very important because scientists believe that comets and interstellar material are left over from the formation of our solar system. If we could get some of this dust back to Earth scientist could study it and tell us more about the conditions during the earliest period of our solar system.

Stardust used a special material called aerogel to collect the particles of dust coming off of the comet. These particles were traveling up to seven times faster than a bullet shot from a rifle, and they needed to be undamaged by the collection process. The aerogel is able to slow the particles and capture them intact. As the particles of dust travel through the aerogel they leave a carrot shaped track with the tiny (smaller than a grain of sand) particle captured at the tip of the "carrot". Stereoscopes are used to locate the tracks in the transparent gel. Nicknamed "solid smoke" aerogel is in the Guinness Book of World Records as the world's lightest (least dense) solid material.

But what makes this mission most exciting is the opportunity for average people to participate in two different ways. If you live in Northern California, Oregon, Washington, Northern Nevada, Southern Idaho or Western Utah you should be able to see the Stardust capsule as it enters our atmosphere, it will look like a moving pinkish-white light about as bright as the planet Venus. If you are able to capture the reentry on video, or digital still images, you can be part of the observation team by contributing your photos or video to NASA to help the scientists study the reentry. You can let NASA know of your intent to record the reentry by clicking here and filling out the form. Be aware that it's a bit more complicated than just pointing your camera and taking a picture. Click here to get detailed instructions and advice that will make your images more useful to the scientists. Click here for instructions and advice for video.

The second way you can participate is by volunteering to be part of the team searching for dust particles captured by the aerogel, and you can do it from your computer at home! The discoverer of an interstellar dust particle will be included as co-author on any scientific paper written by the stardust@home collaboration announcing the discovery of the particle. You will go through a web-based training session and then you must pass a test qualifying you to participate. If you are interested in being involved you can pre-register by clicking here. The search will start around springtime of 2006 at which point an email announcement will be sent to you if you pre-registered. You can learn all about the program by clicking here.

Why are we here?

I have created this blog to serve several purposes: First, I wanted to have a place where students who have experienced Portable Planetarium in their school could come to leave comments, and to keep up on news and events concerning my presentation, and astronomy in general. With that being said, I don't want to limit visitors to only those who have seen my show, so... Second I plan to provide information to anyone interested in astronomy. In this space you will find interesting photographs, links to cool astronomy pages and activities on the internet, news and happenings in the world of astronomy and special night-sky occurrences-including when, and where, you should look to see them.

I started Portable Planetarium here in Sacramento, CA in 1998 and since then I have visited hundreds of schools across the west, and my show has been seen by over 300,000 students. I realized the other day that the very first students to see my show, sixth graders at Hillcrest Elementary School in Lawrence, Kansas, are now twenty years old and some are sophomores in college! I have always hoped and imagined that maybe some of the students that have seen my presentation would go on to careers in astronomy. That my show might plant that seed of interest that would result in an engineer, or a scientist, or even an astronaut.

I see this blog as an extension of my presentation, a way to get others interested in, and excited about, the science that I love, and still find so fascinating-astronomy. The most effective education is one that is pursued and investigated through the students' own desire. I can only hope to create the spark that leads them to that explosion of knowledge, and from there... to the stars.