Entries Tagged 'Astronomy' ↓

Today in space news: SPACE.com — NASA’s Mission to Service Hubble in 2008 Will Cost $900 Million

To me this begs the question: Why risk humans (and the fragile shuttle) to repair the ailing satellite, when for probably the same amount ($900 million) they could just launch one or more new Hubble-class satellites? The big thing about Hubble is that it is serviceable, but what if it wasn’t? Wouldn’t that make it cheaper?

It just seems to me that it would be smarter, faster, and cheaper to take that money and launch a couple of new replacements.

But this is NASA we’re talking about. Logic doesn’t seem to have a place in their planning when it comes to topics like the shuttle, the ISS, or the Hubble. *sigh*

With the confirmation of 2003 UB313 being bigger than Pluto the questions of “Is this the tenth planet?” and “Is Pluto really a planet?” have cropped up again. For a long time I was on the side of the fence that said “Just leave Pluto alone, and lets say there are no more planets out there.”.

But after reading this article about the differences between planets and asteroids, I’ve changed my mind. I think Pluto should be demoted and the planet count set to 8.

In the article Alain Maury points out that if you graph the mass and orbital inclination of the planets and the asteroids (and KBO’s and TNO’s) that something really interesting happens: the two cluster seem to form, one for planets, and one for everything else. Pluto and 2003 UB313 (and several other new discoveries) don’t fall into the planet group, they land in the “asteroid” group.

After seeing these charts I’m inclined (har har) to say that unless an object can show by a combination of its mass and orbital inclination that it belongs in the “planet” group, that it is not a major planet.

Something tells me that once we are able to explore other solar systems we will probably use that type of a guideline when marking new planets. Of course at some point it won’t matter, the sheer number of objects found across the stars will make it impossible to name and keep track of everything.

We know that the earth runs into small meteorites all the time (ranging from dust size up to small boulders). We see these as “Shooting Stars” in the night time sky. But here’s something you might not have thought about: The moon get hit too. Unlike the earth, the moon has no thick atmosphere to protect it, so when something hits, it hits.

This article talks about a telescope that has been setup to monitor the moon for the these types of collisions. On its first night in operation it captured the explosion of a 12cm meteor impacting the lunar surface at 27 km/s! The resulting explosion was equivalent to 70 kg of TNT and it is thought to have left a crater 3 meters in diameter!

An interesting tidbit from the article is that they are reviewing the data from the telescope by watching it, not by having a computer process it. That blew my mind, these explosions from impacts would probably be really short lived events. Plus imagine all of the cross checking the computer could do: As it finds a flash it could look to see if there were any satellites in the vicinity, then check the duration of the event to make sure it wasn’t a cosmic ray, it could cross check with another telescope to make sure it wasn’t a fluke camera malfunction… The possibilities are endless. I really need to get more involved in virtual astronomy, there is just so much coolness happening there.

This is kinda cool, they have found a moon orbiting large Trans-Neptunian Object that was announced a few weeks ago: The moon of the 10th planet. You know, the one called Xena. In fact, they are calling the moon Gabrielle.

Once they are able to get some telescope time they are going to try and determine the orbital period which will give a pretty good mass estimate for the planet. Yes, I said planet, it sure seems like it is one crazy orbit or not.

A few months ago when it was announced that astronomers had found a trio of large objects in the outer solar system, I was intrigued. I’ve been a huge “Space Fan” ever since I could remember and in the last year or so I’ve been getting really interested in Astronomy.

I found out that there was a Yahoo! group called the Minor Planet Mailing List which has a mailing list where a lot of astronomers talk about what they are finding, how they observe, etc. I joined this list and was expecting to read some really interesting (if not over my head) tidbits about the heavens.

Was I in for a surprise.

It turns out that the announcement of the new objects was stirring up quite a controversy. Allegations of hacking, blackmail, theft, and all kinds infractions were flying back and forth on the list. A good little explanation of what was (and still is) going on was put out in Scientific American today: Breaking News - Astronomer denies improper use of web data.

This incident has really riled up this community of star gazers. They are all really passionate about their craft (which is a great thing) and the controversy has made some really big waves. It still strikes me as funny that I joined the list to read some scholarly discussions about what lies out beyond the orbit of Neptune, and instead I walked into a flame war like you would see on Slashdot.

Despite the action on the list, I have learned a lot just by reading it. In fact, reading the list has inspired me to learn more about astronomy so that if nothing else I can understand more of what they are talking about.