Astro Blog

Source:   Kenneth Chang, New York Times Excerpt: On Wednesday NASA showed off some of the first pictures taken by its Mercury Messenger spacecraft, which is to spend at least a year photographing, measuring and studying the smallest planet. Mercury has been seen close up… in half a dozen flybys…: three by the Mariner 10 in the 1970s and three by the Messenger in the last three years. But now …planetary scientists will be able to get their first long look at the smallest of the eight planets. The day side of Mercury can broil at 800 degrees Fahrenheit; the night side drops to minus 300 degrees. Particularly intriguing, scientists say, are the shadows in craters near Mercury’s poles. There, the Sun never shines, and in the frigidity, some scientists expect that the Messenger will find frozen water.   www.nytimes.com/2011/03/31/science/space/31mercury.html

Source:   RT News (Russian) Excerpt: April 12, 2011 will mark 50 years since Yuri Gagarin broke through the Earth's atmosphere to become the first man in space. This YouTube video shows how the former Soviet Union developed the R-7 (Semyorka) from the V-2, discusses future plans in French Guiana and Vostochniy Cosomdromes, additional robotic plans for the Moon (i.e., Luna-Glob and Luna-Resurs)…. www.youtube.com/watch

Source:  Christopher Riley, The Attic Room                Excerpt: A real time recreation of Yuri Gagarin's pioneering first orbit, shot entirely in space from on board the International Space Station. The film combines this new footage with Gagarin's original mission audio and a new musical score by composer Philip Sheppard. For more information visit  www.firstorbit.org/‬ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKs6ikmrLgg&feature=related

Source:   NASA Excerpt: When a rather large-sized flare occurred near the edge of the Sun, it blew out a gorgeous, waving mass of erupting plasma that swirled and twisted over a 90-minute period (Feb. 24, 2011). This event was captured …by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) spacecraft. To see an image showing the size of the prominence in comparison to the size of earth see http://www.flickr.com/photos/gsfc/5492781335/. To view a high res still from this event go here: www.flickr.com/photos/gsfc/5483196119/ www.flickr.com/photos/gsfc/5483193591

Source:   Lance Knobel, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Excerpt: Saul Perlmutter, a professor of Physics at UC Berkeley ... has been awarded this year’s Einstein Medal, presented by the Albert Einstein Society. The medal was awarded for “discovering the acceleration of the universe” through the observation of very distant supernovae. .In 1998 Perlmutter announced the ... landmark finding that the expansion of the universe is not slowing, as virtually all scientists expected, but accelerating. The cause of the acceleration has been dubbed dark energy, and is estimated to constitute nearly three-quarters of everything in the universe. The nature of dark energy remains unknown. www.berkeleyside.com/2011/02/23/berkeley-labs-perlmutter-wins-einstein-medal/

Source:   NASA MESSENGER Mission News Excerpt: “Achieving Mercury orbit was by far the biggest milestone since MESSENGER was launched more than six and a half years ago,” says MESSENGER Project Manager Peter Bedini, of APL. “This accomplishment is the fruit of a tremendous amount of labor on the part of the navigation, guidance-and-control, and mission operations teams, who shepherded the spacecraft through its 4.9-billion-mile [7.9-billion-kilometer] journey.” For the next several weeks, APL engineers will be focused on ensuring that MESSENGER’s systems are all working well in Mercury’s harsh thermal environment. messenger.jhuapl.edu/news_room/details.php  

Source:    NASA-LRO Excerpt: NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) team released ... the final set of data from the mission's exploration phase.... The spacecraft's seven instruments delivered more than 192 terabytes of data with an unprecedented level of detail ...a global map with a resolution of 100 meters per pixel. It would take approximately 41,000 typical DVDs to hold the new LRO data set.  ...Armchair astronauts can zoom in to full resolution with any of the mosaics.... All of the final records from the exploration phase, which lasted from Sept. 15, 2009 through Sept. 15, 2010, are available through several of the Planetary Data System nodes and the LROC website.  pds.nasa.gov   and  www.nasa.gov/lro    www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LRO/multimedia/index.html