Moon Buggy Celebrates 40th Anniversary this Year!

I don't know what it is about the show Top Gear (the UK version.. not the American one!) that has me captivated, but I am a devout fan. I love that show.. it's in the top 10 on my DVR. So, over spring break, I indulged in some idleness on the couch and caught up on missed episodes... Guess what I found.... Astromony blog fodder!!!

NASA in Clear Lake let James Ray drive the new Lunar Rover! This year marks the 40 anniversary of the lunar rover and Top Gear flew James out to drive the latest model. The new model is massive compared to the original! .... think Volkswagen Beetle meets Monster Truck!

It's pretty impressive and entertaining at the same time. James, AKA "Captain Slow", only almost crashes it twice! LOL! My favorite part is when he parallel parks the 4 ton vehicle.

The show, which is for gear heads, spends a lot of time on the rover's specs, but James does go into some of the history of the program and when, if ever (never, actually, in his opinion), the rover will ever be used for its intended purpose.

See the YouTube video link here!... but watch out when you read the blog comments... some are not intended for the younger viewers!

Book Review: "How I Killed Pluto and Why it had it coming.

I just finished this book by Dr Mike Brown of Caltech.

http://www.amazon.com/How-Killed-Pluto-Why-Coming/dp/0385531087/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1300756965&sr=8-1

He is largely credited with the reduction of Pluto to a "dwarf planet" although he himself did not participate in the discussion. The book starts of by giving a window into what it is like to be an astronomer. He tells about late nights, trying to get time on telescopes, trying to complete a dissertation, and trying to get tenure.

The majority of the book focuses on the Dr. Brown's discovery of objects in the Kuiper Belt namely: Sedna, Eris, and I forgot what he named them but they were codenamed Santa Clause and Easter Bunny. All of these objects were considered to be planets in that they were near the size of Pluto and had more regular orbits than Pluto. Dr Brown tells the story about the discovery of these objects, the potential theft of this information by a Spanish astronomer before he could publish (he is actually very cordial), and the debate on the definition of planets.

Jocelyn Bell makes an appearance in the book as the primary voice against a second resolution to play a definitions game in terms of planets so that Pluto could still be considered a planet. The idea was to have "classical planets" (MVEMJSUN) and "dwarf planets (Pluto, Xena, Eris, etc). Jocelyn Bell gave a demonstration with a beach ball, a stuffed dog, and an umbrella that prevented the motion from gaining traction. I only wish that I had finished the book prior to her lecture, I would loved to have asked her about that.

I would encourage you to pick this book up and read it yourself. It will be in the Rockwall Public Library as soon as I can get over there and return it.

MESSENGER @ Mercury

NASA has sent a robotic orbiter to Mercury to study the planet using instrumentation very similar to what has been used to study Mars, Venus, Jupiter, and Saturn.

http://www.astronomy.com/en/News-Observing/News/2011/03/MESSENGER%20spacecraft%20begins%20orbit%20around%20Mercury.aspx

MESSENGER stands for MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, Geochemistry, and Ranging. I am starting to think that NASA has an entire department dedicated to making names try and form some cool acronym.

It took MESSENGER over 6 years to reach Mercury and large amounts of fuel. Controllers were required to slowly approach Mercury due to the speed that Mercury travels at and its proximity to the Sun. The large amount of fuel was used to ensure a proper gravitational capture by Mercury.

Dark Energy

Scientists have recently discounted one alternative hypothesis to the theory of dark energy http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-03-hubble-alternative-dark-energy.html .

The Hubble telescope was used to more accurately measure the expansion of the universe. It was determined that the farther you look away from Earth the faster objects are moving by a factor of 73.8 km/s for every Mpc. This accuracy allowed scientist to determine that Earth does not reside in a bubble of relatively empty space which would cause us to perceive that objects are moving faster the further we look. This would require that Earth be near the center of one of these regions of empty space.

Measuring distance was difficult but astronomers measured the apparent brightness of Type 1A supernovae and pulsating Cepheid stars. These apparent brightness compared to the actual brightness allowed for calculation of distance. This is very similar to what we did on Problem Set #2. The article mentions that a new space-based telescope the Webb telescope is scheduled to be launched in a few years and will be able to further refine our calculations of the Hubble constant.

The idea is that the more accurately we can define the Hubble constant the more that we can determine is the cause of the acceleration instead of deceleration of the expanding universe.

Jeff Chandler

Goldilock Planets Extrapolated - take 2 or 3...

Recently I read an article put out by the Associated Press headlined as “Cosmic census finds crowds of planets in our galaxy”. Being new to this whole blog thing and having just found access to the site I felt pretty lame when I saw that this article had been posted about by Angus and other commenters. Nevertheless having spent time writing this on the plane with my knees at my chin (economy row) and being very proud that I was going to get this posted.. here it goes.

The article starts out by giving some “astronomical” number of planets that are estimated within our Milky Way. Researchers estimate that there are “at least 50 billion planets in the Milky Way”. Of those, they estimated that some 500 million planets are in the not-too-hot, not-too-cold “Goldilocks zone” where life could perhaps exist. The basis for these estimates comes from the data collected by NASA’s Kepler telescope with the research being headed by the Kepler Science Chief – William Borucki. The research concentrated on only 1/400th of the available night sky and extrapolated the estimates from their findings. Within this sliver of observed sky, Kepler has so far found 1,235 candidate planets, with 54 in the Goldilocks zone. The method used by Kepler researchers is to fix on a distant star and watch for anything that may block the star’s light such as a rotating planet about the star.

Based on the figures, further estimates were made that for every two stars, one star could be expected to have planets in the habitable zone. These ratios were announced recently at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual conference in Washington.

The article goes on to say that for many years astronomers figured that there were 100 billion stars in the Milky Way, but now it is believed by at least one Yale University researcher that there may be around 300 billion stars within our home galaxy. Also, stated is that there is an estimated 100 billion galaxies in the now known universe.

With these kinds of numbers and the fact that there may be many places for other life to exist, the reporter asked Borucki why these life forms have not contacted us. The answer from Borucki, “I don’t know”.
Brian Morgan
Texas A&M – Commerce
Astronomy 561
3/11/11

Brace for the worst: Your Zodiac sign may have changed!

Did you hear about this? There are now 13 Zodiac signs!

In a psychology class (of all places), I heard that a new sign has been added to the zodiac. I had to look it up.. and it's true! The millennia-long effect of the moon's gravitational pull on the Earth has changed the Earth's alignment to the stars by about 10 degrees therefore forcing astrologists to ADD another astrological sign to the list: Ophiuchus.

(for info about the star, Ophiuchus, go HERE... for info about the astrological sign, Ophiuchus, go HERE.)

So, if you thought you were a Leo all your life, you may now be a Cancer... Capricorns, you may be need to start looking to Aquarius for answers.... LOL!

It was the astronomers at the Minnesota Planetarium Society who dropped the bomb on the zodiac.. and get this.... THEY DON'T EVEN HAVE A PHYSICAL PLANETARIUM anymore. You can read all about their comings and goings on their website ... but what I found really cool was a link to a YouTube video they put out using their planetarium software (they have a portable planetarium?! I wonder what THAT looks like!).

The video shows all the constellations in relation to the earth and sun throughout the year, including the newest one, and they end the video by running a simulation that helps conceptualize distances to the stars, even going outside our solar system, past other known galaxies, and out to the after glow of the Big Bang!

I thought it was pretty cool! The music is soothing too!

Enjoy!

Notes for class with a different author!

Searching all of the news (because TV news is hung up on one star that has reach the supernova stage) for something amazing, I found this....

http://www.astronomytoday.com/cosmology/evol.html


on Stellar Evolution. So if the notes are not sufficient, check this out. Good reading and good information.

Kepler Telescope and Planets Discovered

I am going to try to post this again where it can be seen by Dr. Newton. It's buried in comments and I really did have this posted earlier.

Thanks. I am going to use this as a starting point for my blog, which comes from an AP article entitled Census finds Milky Way is teeming with planets. According to this article, astronomers said there are 50 billion planets in the Milky Way and that 50 million of them are in the area that is not too hot or not too cold region of the galaxy.

It's interesting that these numbers were extrapolated from data collected the first year of NASA's planet hunting telescope Kepler.

I attempted to post a picture of the Kepler space craft with no success, so I am rather frustrated with this blogging thing, to say the least. The account that will allow me to blog is the Angus account and I somehow also created the fizteach account, which does not seem to give me new post rights.

To get back on topic, with many possible "Goldilocks" planets, it is possible that there is life either more or less advanced than ours. I guess we could relate this to the TV series, V.