A clip from a BBC documentary explaining Hawking radiation around black holes.
Negative mass??
Hawking Radiation
Space Walk Underway
ISS from May 2006 Credit: APOD
The EVA is over or just finishing up (depending on when you got here) and the ammonia pump subsystem was replaced with a spare. So far so good.
The video feed worked great too!
Here’s the UStream feed of NASA TV.I will remove the feed after the spacewalk.
The EVA is to address and repair the source of the ammonia leak.
Should take a few hours.
Ammonia Leak Update
Photo from the ISS on May 4th. You can see the Atlantic coast of Canada and the northeastern US behind the docked Soyuz spacecraft. Great shot of Cape Cod. Credit: Expedition 35 / NASA.
Yesterday the crew aboard the International Space Station noticed “white flakes” floating away from the station. I was watching and waiting for word from NASA before I put anything here. Oh sure there were stories of doom and gloom, I don’t know about you but I’m a bit tired of the knee jerk reactions and sensationalizing something that doesn’t really warrant it. No the crew IS NOT IN DANGER! There will be some impact to power on the station most likely and even that is being mitigated as much as can be. Still waiting on approval for a walk outside to do a repair.
So what is the story? This from NASA and no nothing will stop the conspiracy theory folks, but hey they are having fun I guess:
Following Thursday’s identification of an ammonia coolant leak outside the International Space Station, the Expedition 35 crew Friday began preparing for a possible spacewalk Saturday. Mission managers are discussing the information that was gathered overnight about the leak on the far left-side of the station’s truss structure, called the P6 with P standing for port. A final decision on whether to go forward with a spacewalk is not expected until late tonight.
The crew is not in danger, and the station continues to operate normally otherwise. Work is underway to reroute power channels to maintain full operation of the systems normally controlled by the solar array that is cooled by the suspect loop.
Space Warps Project
An example of a gravitational lens from Project’s Spotters Guide. About 1/3 the width if the image in from the right and from the bottom. Credit: Zooniverse
Need a fun project you can do in your spare minutes? Zooniverse has new one that might suit you. It’s their new Space Warps project and you will be looking for gravitational lenses in the distant universe. Gravitational lenses are really cool!!!
Before you go into a tizzy on me, yes you CAN do this. Zooniverse will quickly teach you everything you need to know, they do a marvelous job in that regard, so give it a try. Besides their projects are always so cool.
The images have never been seen before, but have been checked with computer algorithms but it takes a human eye to catch them all. You could well be able to make some amazing discoveries – seriously.
To learn more and sign up, click here, be sure check out the Spotter’s Guide.
Shockingly Bright
Swift’s X-Ray Telescope took this 0.1-second exposure of GRB 130427A at 3:50 a.m. EDT on April 27, just moments after Swift and Fermi triggered on the outburst. The image is 6.5 arcminutes across.
Caption and Image: NASA/Swift/Stefan Immler
On April 27th the brightest gamma ray burst ever recorded occured. It was so intense it was described as “shockingly, eye-wateringly bright” by Julie McEnery, project scientist for the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
The energy level of the burst was at least 94 billion electron volts and some three times greater than the previous record.
The burst occurred in the constellation Leo and was about 3.6 billion light-years away. As far away as that is, it is still rather close for such an event, in the closest five percent category.
It is suspected this was from a massive star collapsing into and becoming a black hole and ejecting material outward at close to the speed of light. The event should produce a supernova which will become evident shortly.
Read more about the burst and see some nice animations in the NASA press release.
Vega Launched
After a couple of delays Arianespace launched the second Vega rocket from the Guiana Space Center at 02:06 UTC.
The rocket, the second flight for ESA’s newest launch vehicle carried three spacecraft into orbit:
Proba‑V is based on the platform flown on two previous ESA missions and carries the Vegetation imager to map global vegetation cover every two days, as a follow-on to the first generation of Vegetation imagers on France’s Spot-4 and -5 satellites.
In addition to this primary payload, Proba also hosts a series of technology payloads such as a receiver to detect aircraft in flight around the globe, a communications amplifier based on the latest gallium nitride technology, a novel pair of radiation monitors and a photonics experiment testing fibre optics for space.
Along with Proba-V two other satellites were also sent into orbit:
VNREDSat-1A (Vietnam Natural Resources, Environment, Disaster Satellite), a commercial remote sensing satellite built by Vietnam’s Academy of Sciences and Technologies, and ESTCube-1. As the name ESTCube-1 suggests this is a Cube sat and was designed an built by students from the University of Tartu. This first satellite for Estonia was built with a contribution from the Finnish Meterorological Institute. It will deploy a 10 m-long tether to demonstrate electrostatic manoeuvring through the plasma flow, which could lead to electrostatic solar sails for propellantless interplanetary travel.
Flare Art
Art and science combine to make this photo of a CME as it leaves the Sun. Image: SOHO (ESA/NASA)/S. Hill
This picture is a melding of art and science data by the SOHO space observatory during a coronal mass ejection (CME). The result is quite spectacular. The two bright areas indicate looping magnetic fields in particularly active regions. what looks to be a cooler and dense filament of gas can be seen towards the left.
The picture was taken in the extreme-ultraviolet view of the disk superimposed on a wild-field view of the solar environment.
By comparing sequential snapshots so that the strongest and more persistent features are isolated and highlighted in what is called “the running difference” technique.
More about the photo from ESA – Destination Earth.
The Great Moonbuggy Race
PhoneSat Photos
Photo’s assembled from packets sent to Earth by PhoneSats Graham (L) and Bell (R). Images Credit: NASA Ames
If you were around the site a couple weeks ago before things got switched around you might remember the Antares post and the PhoneSats. I’m just begining to get caught up on things.
The three PhoneSats named Alexander, Graham and Bell were launched as a part of the Obital Sciences Antares mission from the NASA Wallops Flight Facility on April 21, 2013. Their brief but successful mission was to demonstrate the ability of a consumer-grade smartphone could be used as the main flight avionics for a satellite.
The mission was great on a vairiety of levels not the least of which being it started as a student-led colloborative between the International Space University, Strasbourg and NASA’s Ames Research Center. Funding came from NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters and the Engineering Directorate at NASA Ames Research Center.
The PhoneSat website terms them NASA’s Smartphone Nanosatellite. Nanosatellite is a good description. They were tiny not just in size but also in cost, the budget (excluding launch) was only $3,500 each. Is this a record for low cost?
Short on size but long on performance (and fun), the three satellites orbited the Earth and successfully accomplish their main goal. The fun part of the mission involved the tiny satelittes taking pictures of the Earth as you can see above, and transmitting the “image-data packets” to mulitiple ground stations. This is where the second colloborative part of the mission came, collecting the transmitted packets via the Ham radio geeks out there, a group of which I am proud to be a part. About 300 of the data packets have been recieved so far.
Did I hear anything of PhoneSats? YES! The packets were transmitted on 437.425 Mhz. I didn’t record the transmission but there is no doubt it was from one of the satellites. I don’t have a dedicated radio for that particular ham band but what I did do was to set up a Software Defined Radio (QST, Jan 2013) receiver on a laptop I had . That took a little doing but it was pretty easy once I got my ducks in a row. I didn’t know how to record anything at that point. I’m going to be fully ready for the next incarnation of the PhoneSats expected later this year. Anyway the collected image packets were put together to produce the image above. The image made the NASA Image of the Day too.
Alexander, Graham and Bell have deorbited (April 27, 2013) and burned up in the atmosphere as predicted, at least there has been nothing heard from them. We can safely assume prediction confirmed.
More results from PhoneSats including MP3 and WAV files.
If there are any fans of the Southern Kings and you haven’t see a score, you might not want to look! They are being outclassed by the Waratahs so far in the match at Port Elizabeth and we’re almost 50 minutes in as I write this. Match update.
GROVER
The GROVER acronym stands for two things, Greenland Rover and Goddard Remotely Operated Vehicle for Exploration and Research.
As the name suggest GROVER is headed to Greenland, on or about June 8th.
GROVER was developed in 2010 and 2011 by teams of students participating in summer engineering boot camps at Goddard. ROVER will be joined on the ice sheet in June by another robot, named Cool Robot, developed nearby at Dartmouth College, Hanover, N.H., with funding from the National Science Foundation.
For more information visit NASA’s GROVER feature in their Looking at Earth site.
Another partnership between NASA and students that will be fun to follow as time goes on.