Archive for the ‘SPACE’ Category
Dawn Gets Closer Views of Ceres
This animation showcases a series of images NASA’s Dawn spacecraft took on approach to Ceres on Feb. 4, 2015 at a distance of about 90,000 miles (145,000 kilometers) from the dwarf planet.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA
Read more at www.nasa.gov
Dragon Begins Cargo-laden Chase of Station
By Steven Siceloff,
NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, Fla.
More than two tons of experiments, equipment and supplies was sent to the International Space Station early Jan. 10 when a SpaceX Falcon 9 roared off the pad at Space Launch Complex 40 to place a Dragon cargo capsule on a path to the orbiting laboratory.
The rocket lifted off on time at 4:47 a.m. EST from the Florida launch site adjacent to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center following a quiet countdown that played out to the second.
NASA flight controllers in Houston and SpaceX controllers at the company’s Hawthorne, California headquarters reported the spacecraft reached its preliminary orbit as planned and the flight was going extremely well. Dragon extended its two power-producing solar array wings moments after separating from the second stage to begin its independent flight.
Dragon, which is carrying only cargo and no crew, will take two days to catch up to the station. It will remotely fly close enough for station commander Butch Wilmore to grab the spacecraft with the station’s 57-foot-long robotic arm and latch it to the station. Read the rest of this entry »
Asteroid Crashes And Raindrop Splashes Look Almost Alike
It’s hard to study what an asteroid impact does real-time as you’d need to be looking at the right spot at the right time. So simulations are often the way to go. Here’s a fun idea captured on video — throwing drops of water on to granular particles, similar to what you would find on a beach. The results, the researchers say, look surprisingly similar to “crater morphology”.
A quick caution — the similarity isn’t completely perfect. Raindrops are much smaller, and hit the ground at quite a lower speed than you would see an asteroid slam into Earth’s surface. But as the authors explain in a recent abstract, there is enough for them to do high-speed photography and make extrapolations…
…Read more at www.universetoday.com
Holiday Lights On the Sun
The sun emitted a significant solar flare, peaking at 7:24 p.m. EST on Dec. 19, 2014. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, which watches the sun constantly, captured an image of the event. Solar flares are powerful bursts of radiation. Harmful radiation from a flare cannot pass through Earth’s atmosphere to physically affect humans on the ground, however — when intense enough — they can disturb the atmosphere in the layer where GPS and communications signals travel.
To see how this event may affect Earth, please visit NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center at http://spaceweather.gov, the U.S. government’s official source for space weather forecasts, alerts, watches and warnings.
This flare is classified as an X1.8-class flare. X-class denotes the most intense flares, while the number provides more information about its strength. An X2 is twice as intense as an X1, an X3 is three times as intense, etc.
http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/details.cgi?aid=11721
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