Space

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  • cee134
    cee134 Posts: 33,711 Member
    Liftoff of SpaceX's CRS-17 Dragon Cargo Craft

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    SpaceX's Dragon lifted off on a Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on Saturday, May 4, with more than 5,500 pounds of research, equipment, cargo and supplies that will support dozens of investigations aboard the International Space Station.

    On Monday, May 6, while the station was traveling over the north Atlantic Ocean, astronauts David Saint-Jacques of the Canadian Space Agency and Nick Hague of NASA grappled Dragon at 7:01 a.m. EDT using the space station’s robotic arm, Canadarm2.
  • cee134
    cee134 Posts: 33,711 Member
    The Great Nebula in Carina

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    What's happening in the center of the Carina Nebula? Stars are forming, dying, and leaving an impressive tapestry of dark dusty filaments. The entire Carina Nebula, cataloged as NGC 3372, spans over 300 light years and lies about 8,500 light-years away in the constellation of Carina.

    The nebula is composed predominantly of hydrogen gas, which emits the pervasive red glow seen in this highly detailed featured image. The blue glow in the center is created by a trace amount of glowing oxygen. Young and massive stars located in the nebula's center expel dust when they explode in supernovae.

    Eta Carinae, the most energetic star in the nebula's center, was one of the brightest stars in the sky in the 1830s, but then faded dramatically.
  • Nacho_Daddy
    Nacho_Daddy Posts: 846 Member
    edited May 2019
    JustReadTheInstructions wrote: »
    .... Could you imagine if that happened while it was attached to the ISS?...

    Yeah, that'd be bad... the Crew Dragon has eight Super Draco engines, which is what they were testing on the stand. These SuperDracos use hypergolic fuels like a n RCS and have multi-run capabilities... I'm kinda assuming that this "test flight" went without those having fuel, but I'm not certain. Prior manned-flight solutions jettisoned the LAS, but the Crew Dragon has em incorporated into the capsule itself (this is a hover test of the Crew Dragon LAS):
    https://youtu.be/07Pm8ZY0XJI
  • cee134
    cee134 Posts: 33,711 Member
    Mature Galaxy Mesmerizes in New Hubble View

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    This striking image was taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), a powerful instrument installed on the telescope in 2009. WFC3 is responsible for many of Hubble’s most breathtaking and iconic photographs.

    Shown here, NGC 7773 is a beautiful example of a barred spiral galaxy. A luminous bar-shaped structure cuts prominently through the galaxy's bright core, extending to the inner boundary of NGC 7773's sweeping, pinwheel-like spiral arms. Astronomers think that these bar structures emerge later in the lifetime of a galaxy, as star-forming material makes its way towards the galactic center — younger spirals do not feature barred structures as often as older spirals do, suggesting that bars are a sign of galactic maturity. They are also thought to act as stellar nurseries, as they gleam brightly with copious numbers of youthful stars.

    Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is thought to be a barred spiral like NGC 7773. By studying galactic specimens such as NGC 7773 throughout the universe, researchers hope to learn more about the processes that have shaped — and continue to shape — our cosmic home.
  • cee134
    cee134 Posts: 33,711 Member
    The Cave Nebula in Infrared from Spitzer

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    What's happening in and around the Cave Nebula? To help find out, NASA's orbiting Spitzer Space Telescope looked into this optically-dark star-forming region in four colors of infrared light. The Cave Nebula, cataloged as Sh2-155, is quite bright in infrared, revealing details not only of internal pillars of gas and dust, but of the illuminating star cluster too - all near the top of the image.

    The red glow around the Cave's entrance is created by dust heated by bright young stars. To the right is Cepheus B, a star cluster that formed previously from the same cloud of gas and dust. Other interesting stars of Cepheus come to light in infrared as well, including those illuminating an even younger nebula toward the image bottom, and a runaway star pushing a bow shock, tinged in red near the image center.

    This region spans about 50 light years and lies about 2,500 light years toward the constellation of the King of Aethiopia (Cepheus).
  • cee134
    cee134 Posts: 33,711 Member
    I sure wish I knew about any rocket launches without having to look up the information..........
  • cee134
    cee134 Posts: 33,711 Member
    Spiral Galaxy M96 from Hubble

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    Dust lanes seem to swirl around the core of Messier 96 in this colorful, detailed portrait of the center of a beautiful island universe. Of course M96 is a spiral galaxy, and counting the faint arms extending beyond the brighter central region, it spans 100 thousand light-years or so, making it about the size of our own Milky Way.

    M96, also known as NGC 3368, is known to be about 35 million light-years distant and a dominant member of the Leo I galaxy group. The featured image was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. The reason for M96's asymmetry is unclear -- it could have arisen from gravitational interactions with other Leo I group galaxies, but the lack of an intra-group diffuse glow seems to indicate few recent interactions.

    Galaxies far in the background can be found by examining the edges of the picture.
  • cee134
    cee134 Posts: 33,711 Member
    JustReadTheInstructions wrote: »
    cee134 wrote: »
    I sure wish I knew about any rocket launches without having to look up the information..........

    Why there's one today my good friend! Unfortunately I'm going to have to force a meeting to end early to watch it. 10:17 EST!

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8A2nJd9Urk8&feature=youtu.be

    I assume AM but it could be PM because I don't know your life. You could be having meetings at night. It might not even be a work meeting but just a meeting, I don't like to make assumptions. Now I have many questions.
    Today’s flight is scheduled for takeoff at 10:17AM ET / 7:17AM PT out of Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. SpaceX has a short 13-minute launch window, so the Falcon 9 rocket can conceivably launch up until 10:30AM ET. SpaceX’s coverage of the launch will begin about 15 minutes before liftoff

    Probably should of looked at your link first...

  • cee134
    cee134 Posts: 33,711 Member
    JustReadTheInstructions wrote: »
    Lol sorry yeah I meant AM. I was too preoccupied with the time zone since it's in California.

    The satellites will deploy 54 minutes after launch

    And I missed it again....
  • cee134
    cee134 Posts: 33,711 Member
    JustReadTheInstructions wrote: »
    cee134 wrote: »
    JustReadTheInstructions wrote: »
    Lol sorry yeah I meant AM. I was too preoccupied with the time zone since it's in California.

    The satellites will deploy 54 minutes after launch

    And I missed it again....

    The launch or the deployment?

    Yes, now.
  • cee134
    cee134 Posts: 33,711 Member
    The Colors and Magnitudes of M13

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    M13 is modestly recognized as the Great Globular Star Cluster in Hercules. A ball of stars numbering in the hundreds of thousands crowded into a region 150 light years across, it lies some 25,000 light-years away. The sharp, color picture of M13 at upper left is familiar to many telescopic imagers. Still, M13's Color vs Magnitude Diagram in the panel below and right, made from the same image data, can offer a more telling view.

    Also known as a Hertzsprung Russell (HR) diagram it plots the apparent brightness of individual cluster stars against color index. The color index is determined for each star by subtracting its brightness (in magnitudes) measured through a red filter from its brightness measured with a blue filter (B-R). Blue stars are hot and red stars are cool so that astronomical color index ranging from bluer to redder follows the relative stellar temperature scale from left (hot) to right (cool).

    In M13's HR diagram, the stars clearly fall into distinct groups. The broad swath extending diagonally from the bottom right is the cluster's main sequence. A sharp turn toward the upper right hand corner follows the red giant branch while the blue giants are found grouped in the upper left. Formed at the same time, at first M13's stars were all located along the main sequence by mass, lower mass stars at the lower right.

    Over time higher mass stars have evolved off the main sequence into red, then blue giants and beyond. In fact, the position of the turn-off from the main sequence to the red giant branch indicates the cluster's age at about 12 billion years.
  • cee134
    cee134 Posts: 33,711 Member
    Atlas, Daphnis, and Pan

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    Atlas, Daphnis, and Pan are small, inner, ring moons of Saturn. They are shown at the same scale in this montage of images by the Cassini spacecraft that made its grand final orbit of the ringed planet in September 2017. In fact, Daphnis was discovered in Cassini images from 2005.

    Atlas and Pan were first sighted in images from the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft. Flying saucer-shaped Atlas orbits near the outer edge of Saturn's bright A Ring while Daphnis orbits inside the A Ring's narrow Keeler Gap and Pan within the A Ring's larger Encke Gap. The curious equatorial ridges of the small ring moons could be built up by the accumulation of ring material over time. Even diminutive Daphnis makes waves in the ring material as it glides along the edge of the Keeler Gap.
  • cee134
    cee134 Posts: 33,711 Member
    NGC 4676: The Mighty Mice

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    These two mighty galaxies are pulling each other apart. Known as The Mice because they have such long tails, each large spiral galaxy has actually passed through the other. Their long tails are drawn out by strong gravitational tides rather than collisions of their individual stars.

    Because the distances are so large, the cosmic interaction takes place in slow motion -- over hundreds of millions of years. They will probably collide again and again over the next billion years until they coalesce to form a single galaxy. NGC 4676 lies about 300 million light-years away toward the constellation of Bernice's Hair (Coma Berenices) and are likely members of the Coma Cluster of Galaxies.

    Not often imaged in small telescopes, this wide field of view catches the faint tidal tails several hundred thousand light-years long.
  • cee134
    cee134 Posts: 33,711 Member
    Unusual Mountain Ahuna Mons on Asteroid Ceres

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    What created this unusual mountain? There is a new theory. Ahuna Mons is the largest mountain on the largest known asteroid in our Solar System, Ceres, which orbits our Sun in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Ahuna Mons, though, is like nothing that humanity has ever seen before. For one thing, its slopes are garnished not with old craters but young vertical streaks.

    The new hypothesis, based on numerous gravity measurements, holds that a bubble of mud rose from deep within the dwarf planet and pushed through the icy surface at a weak point rich in reflective salt -- and then froze. The bright streaks are thought to be similar to other recently surfaced material such as visible in Ceres' famous bright spots. The featured double-height digital image was constructed from surface maps taken of Ceres in 2016 by the robotic Dawn mission. Successfully completing its mission in 2018, Dawn continues to orbit Ceres even though it has exhausted the fuel needed to keep its antennas pointed toward Earth.
  • cee134
    cee134 Posts: 33,711 Member
    Storm Rages in Cosmic Teacup

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    Fancy a cup of cosmic tea? This one isn't as calming as the ones on Earth. In a galaxy hosting a structure nicknamed the "Teacup," a galactic storm is raging.

    The source of the cosmic squall is a supermassive black hole buried at the center of the galaxy, officially known as SDSS 1430+1339. As matter in the central regions of the galaxy is pulled toward the black hole, it is energized by the strong gravity and magnetic fields near the black hole. The infalling material produces more radiation than all the stars in the host galaxy. This kind of actively growing black hole is known as a quasar.

    Located about 1.1 billion light years from Earth, the Teacup's host galaxy was originally discovered in visible light images by citizen scientists in 2007 as part of the Galaxy Zoo project, using data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

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