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Venice News Updates

News of Venice, CA and Marina del Rey CA

Rover Celebrates Fourth Year on Mars

Posted by :reta On : August 11, 2016
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Category: Bob Eklund Column, Looking Up Column

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Bob Eklund Looking Up

Bob Eklund
Looking Up

This month, NASA’s Curiosity rover celebrates four years on the Red Planet. The rover, with the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) aboard, hit the dusty Martian surface on August 6, 2012, and began its mission of finding evidence about whether ancient Mars offered environmental conditions conducive to microbial life. By March 2013, NASA reported that MSL had achieved its primary objective after scientists found evidence of oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, sulfur, phosphorous and carbon—all essential chemical elements for supporting living organisms. Now the mission, which was scheduled to end this year, has been given a two-year extension.

As part of the fourth-year celebration, NASA has released a smartphone game, which lets users navigate their own MSL across the rugged terrain of Mars searching for water. On their mobile devices, players challenge themselves to navigate and balance the rover while earning points along the way. For more information about the Mars Rover game, visit: mars.nasa.gov/gamee-rover

Here at home, we have good views of Mars in our southern sky, along with four other bright planets. Venus, now appearing as the “evening star,” is just above the southwest horizon after sunset. To the upper left of Venus, look for Mercury, Jupiter, orange Mars, and golden Saturn (in that order).

NASA’s Juno Spacecraft Sends First In-Orbit View

Posted by :reta On : July 14, 2016
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Category: Bob Eklund Column

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Note: this is a press release from JPL

jupiter
This color view from NASA’s Juno spacecraft is made from some of the first images taken by JunoCam after the spacecraft entered orbit around Jupiter on July 5th (UTC). Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS

Bob Eklund Looking Up

Bob Eklund
Looking Up

The JunoCam camera aboard NASA’s Juno mission is operational and sending down data after the spacecraft’s July 4 arrival at Jupiter. Juno’s visible-light camera was turned on six days after Juno fired its main engine and placed itself into orbit around the largest planetary inhabitant of our solar system. The first high-resolution images of the gas giant Jupiter are still a few weeks away.

“This scene from JunoCam indicates it survived its first pass through Jupiter’s extreme radiation environment without any degradation and is ready to take on Jupiter,” said Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. “We can’t wait to see the first view of Jupiter’s poles.”

The view was obtained on July 9, when the spacecraft was 2.7 million miles from Jupiter on the outbound leg of its initial 53.5-day capture orbit. The color image shows atmospheric features on Jupiter, including the famous Great Red Spot, and three of the massive planet’s four largest moons—Io, Europa, and Ganymede, from left to right in the image.

Mars at Closest Approach to Earth in Last Ten Years

Posted by :reta On : May 25, 2016
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Category: Bob Eklund Column, Looking Up Column

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Note: This is a press release from Hubble/European Space Agency and Sloohmars
NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope picture of Mars.

Looking Up Column By Bob Eklund

Looking Up Column
By Bob Eklund


During this month, the Earth and Mars get closer to each other than at any time in the last ten years. The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has exploited this special configuration to catch a new image of our red neighbor.

On May 22, Mars will be at opposition, the point at which the planet is located directly opposite the Sun in the sky. This means that the Sun, Earth and Mars are all lined up, with Earth sitting in between the Sun and the red planet. This is also the planet’s closest approach to Earth.

WATCH MARS LIVE ONLINE ON MEMORIAL DAY. On Monday, May 30th, at 6:00 p.m. PDT, the international astronomy-outreach organization Slooh will share brilliant live views of Mars at closest approach with the public, looking through a telescope at the Canary Island Observatory. During the live show, Slooh Astronomers Paul Cox and Bob Berman will be on hand to take viewers on a tour of the Red Planet, discussing everything from scientific study of the planet to its cultural significance in antiquity through to sci-fi movies, and even the possibility that it may have once harbored life.

Viewers are encouraged to make themselves a part of the show by sending their questions to @Slooh on Twitter, or by joining in on the live chat on Slooh.com.

ET-94 Arrives; Leaving Late Friday

Posted by :reta On : May 18, 2016
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Category: Uncategorized

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ET

NASA’s external fuel tank ET-94 arrived early Wednesday morning in the Marina to the constant chatter of the helicopters. It will be leaving Friday for permanent placement at the Space Center.

ET-94 Arrives Wednesday; Goes Home Friday

Posted by :reta On : May 17, 2016
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Category: Marina del Rey

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NASA’s last remaining space shuttle fuel tank, ET-94, will be displayed in Marina del Rey from May 18-20, before making its way to the California Science Center to join the Endeavor space shuttle display.

To celebrate this historic event, the Department of Beaches and Harbors is organizing a “Party in the Park” on Friday, May 20 from 5 – 9 pm. The event will feature a DJ, food trucks, science exhibits, space-themed activities, and more!

PARKING:
Public lots are available throughout the Marina. Rates range from $5 – $15. Please click here for a map.

NOTE: On Friday, May 20 there will be very limited parking in lots on Fiji Way, so the best areas for parking are Lots #4 on Mindanao Way and #5 on Bali Way.

PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION:
◦ To facilitate transit between the Marina’s public parking lots to ET-94’s location in Fisherman’s Village, a Beach Shuttle and water taxi service will be available for FREE! Click here for a route map & schedule.

shittle

STREET CLOSURES:
The External Tank is scheduled to leave the Marina the night of May 20 at midnight. Various street closures and detours will be in effect 10 pm to 1 am.

Solar Storms Ignite X-Ray “Northern Lights” on Jupiter

Posted by :reta On : March 31, 2016
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Looking Up_edited-1

Note: Press releases from the Chandra X-Ray Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center In Huntsville, Alabama, and University College London (UCL).

jupiter

Solar storms are triggering X-ray auroras on Jupiter that are about eight times brighter than normal over a large area of the planet and hundreds of times more energetic than Earth’s “northern lights,” according to a new study using data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. This result is the first time that Jupiter’s auroras have been studied in X-ray light when a giant solar storm arrived at the planet.

The Sun constantly ejects streams of particles into space in the solar wind. Sometimes, giant storms, known as coronal mass ejections (CMEs), erupt and the solar winds become much stronger. These events compress Jupiter’s magnetosphere, the region of space controlled by Jupiter’s magnetic field, shifting its boundary with the solar wind inward by more than a million miles. This new study found that the interaction at the boundary triggers the X-rays in Jupiter’s auroras, which cover an area bigger than the surface of the Earth.

A series of composite images show Jupiter and its aurora during and after a CME’s arrival at Jupiter in October 2011. In these images, X-ray data from Chandra (purple) have been overlaid on an optical image from the Hubble Space Telescope. The left-hand panel reveals the X-ray activity when the CME reached Jupiter, and the right-hand side is the view two days later after the CME subsided.

The impact of the CME on Jupiter’s aurora was tracked by monitoring the X-rays emitted during two 11-hour observations. The scientists used that data to pinpoint the source of the X-ray activity and identify areas to investigate further.

The dramatic findings complement NASA’s Juno mission this summer which aims to understand the relationship between the two biggest structures in the solar system—the region of space controlled by Jupiter’s magnetic field (i.e., its magnetosphere) and the region controlled by the solar wind.

“There’s a constant power struggle between the solar wind and Jupiter’s magnetosphere,” explained William Dunn, lead author and PhD student at University College London’s Mullard Space Science Laboratory “We want to understand this interaction and what effect it has on the planet. By studying how the aurora changes, we can discover more about the region of space controlled by Jupiter’s magnetic field, and if or how this is influenced by the Sun. Understanding this relationship is important for the countless magnetic objects across the galaxy, including exoplanets, brown dwarfs and neutron stars.”

NASA’s Juno spacecraft, launched in 2011, will investigate Jupiter’s relationship with the Sun and the solar wind by studying its magnetic field, magnetosphere and aurora. The UCL team hopes to find out how the X-rays form by collecting complementary data using the European Space Agency’s X-ray space observatory, XMM-Newton, and NASA’s Chandra X-ray observatory.

NASA Targets May 2018 Launch for Mars InSight Mission

Posted by :reta On : March 16, 2016
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Category: Bob Eklund Column, Looking Up Column

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Note: This is a press release from JPL/NASA.

NASA has set a new launch opportunity, beginning May 5, 2018, for the InSight mission to Mars. InSight is the first mission dedicated to investigating the deep interior of Mars. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA has set a new launch opportunity, beginning May 5, 2018, for the InSight mission to Mars. InSight is the first mission dedicated to investigating the deep interior of Mars. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA’s Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport (InSight) mission to study the deep interior of Mars is targeting a new launch window that begins May 5, 2018, with a Mars landing scheduled for Nov. 26, 2018.

InSight’s primary goal is to help us understand how rocky planets—including Earth—formed and evolved. The spacecraft had been on track to launch this month until a vacuum leak in its prime science instrument prompted NASA in December to suspend preparations for launch.

InSight project managers recently briefed officials at NASA and France’s space agency, Centre National d’Études Spatiales (CNES), on a path forward; the proposed plan to redesign the science instrument was accepted in support of a 2018 launch.

“The science goals of InSight are compelling, and the NASA and CNES plans to overcome the technical challenges are sound,” said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. “The quest to understand the interior of Mars has been a longstanding goal of planetary scientists for decades. We’re excited to be back on the path for a launch, now in 2018.”

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, will redesign, build and conduct qualifications of the new vacuum enclosure for the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS), the component that failed in December. CNES will lead instrument level integration and test activities, allowing the InSight Project to take advantage of each organization’s proven strengths. The two agencies have worked closely together to establish a project schedule that accommodates these plans, and scheduled interim reviews over the next six months to assess technical progress and continued feasibility.

The cost of the two-year delay is being assessed. An estimate is expected in August, once arrangements with the launch vehicle provider have been made.

The seismometer instrument’s main sensors need to operate within a vacuum chamber to provide the exquisite sensitivity needed for measuring ground movements as small as half the radius of a hydrogen atom. The rework of the seismometer’s vacuum container will result in a finished, thoroughly tested instrument in 2017 that will maintain a high degree of vacuum around the sensors through rigors of launch, landing, deployment and a two-year prime mission on the surface of Mars.

“The shared and renewed commitment to this mission continues our collaboration to find clues in the heart of Mars about the early evolution of our solar system,” said Marc Pircher, director of CNES’s Toulouse Space Centre.

The mission’s international science team includes researchers from Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Poland, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Gravity Waves and ET

Posted by :reta On : February 19, 2016
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Category: Looking Up Column

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Looking Up_edited-1

Here is an article by Seth Shostak, Senior Astronomer for SETI, regarding gravitational waves that were just verified.

gravitational-waves Image by NASA

By Dr. Seth Shostak, Senior Astronomer for SETI
The other shoe has dropped.

After a century of speculation and a half-century of searching, science teams using instruments built by Caltech and MIT have made a discovery that will take up permanent residency in physics textbooks from now to the end of textbooks. They’ve found the gravity waves that Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity predicted must pervade the cosmos.

There’s little doubt that this experiment should be celebrated. It’s a triumph of perseverance and clever effort: the instrumentation involved is able to detect distortions amounting to a millionth of a billionth of a meter in a tube four kilometers long. That’s like measuring the distance to Mars with a precision greater than the thickness of a bacterium’s cell wall.

Once more, Einstein’s concept of space-time has been vindicated, and while pundits love to talk about how incomplete science is and how little those pointy-headed academics know, this discovery indicates that there are things we do know. Important things, such as the behavior of space and time.

This is a story about physics, of course. But although one seldom hears “extraterrestrial intelligence” and “space-time continuum” in the same breath (unless you’re a Dr. Who fan), there’s a perceived connection between the two subjects.

I often get correspondence from folks who think that listening for radio signals or looking for laser flashes are fundamentally flawed approaches to hunting down evidence for alien beings. The extraterrestrials, these people suggest, will have moved on to a more avant-garde communication mode: gravity waves.

There are, indeed, some positive arguments for aliens with a penchant for palaver to opt for gravity wave communication. Gravity waves can travel unhindered through the dusty material that suffuses interstellar space — unlike laser light. And gravity waves aren’t distorted and scattered by the ionized gas that clutters the cosmos — unlike radio waves.

In addition, you don’t have to aim your gravity wave detector in any particular direction: the waves go right through the Earth and reach you from everywhere.

But alas, there’s a serious downside.

The gravitational disturbance that produced this history-making detection was apparently the result of two colliding black holes. That’s not something you see every day. Yes, gravity waves are ubiquitous: they’re generated as the Moon orbits the Earth or for that matter whenever you wave your arms. But even the extremely sensitive instrumentation of LIGO (the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) is thoroughly unable to pick up these very local disturbances. It took a rare cosmic catastrophe to produce a space-time ripple large enough to be sensed.

So imagine a scenario in which every time you want to send a bit of information to another part of the universe, you have to slam together a pair of black holes. Not easy, and not cheap — especially if your goal is to send lots of information.

Also, many people (including, it must be said, Isaac Newton) have assumed that gravity waves travel at infinite speed. That would be a real plus for using them to communicate across the vast distances of the cosmos. But it’s not true: they travel no faster than light and radio. If the Sun were to evaporate right now, Earth would continue to orbit its ghost for another eight minutes before barreling in a straight line towards the galaxy’s nether regions.

Gravity waves may not be the communication mode of choice for intelligent beings, but they will eventually give us an entirely new way to study the cosmos, including its earliest history. That’s a real promise.

Meanwhile, there’s this philosophical uplift: Gravity waves have been as elusive as the Higgs boson, dark matter and dark energy. But they’re another cosmic phenomenon that has just moved from the category of “blackboard conjecture” to that of “experimentally demonstrated.” It’s an important day.

NASA’s Fermi Satellite Kicks off a Blazar-Detecting Bonanza

Posted by :reta On : December 18, 2015
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Category: Bob Eklund Column, Looking Up Column

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Looking Up500_000001

Note: This is a press release from NASA.


(Courtesty of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.)

A long time ago in a galaxy half the universe away, a flood of high-energy gamma rays began its journey to Earth. When they arrived in April, NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope caught the outburst, which helped two ground-based gamma-ray observatories detect some of the highest-energy light ever seen from a galaxy so distant. The observations provide a surprising look into the environment near a super-massive black hole at the galaxy’s center, and offer a glimpse into the state of the cosmos 7 billion years ago.

“When we looked at all the data from this event, from gamma rays to radio, we realized the measurements told us something we didn’t expect about how the black hole produced this energy,” said Jonathan Biteau at the Nuclear Physics Institute of Orsay, France. He led the study of results from the Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array System (VERITAS), a gamma-ray telescope in Arizona.

Astronomers had assumed that light at different energies came from regions at different distances from the black hole. Gamma rays, the highest-energy form of light, were thought to be produced closest to the black hole.

“Instead, the multi-wavelength picture suggests that light at all wavelengths came from a single region located far away from the power source,” Biteau explained. The observations place the area roughly five light-years from the black hole, which is greater than the distance between our Sun and the nearest star.

The gamma rays came from a galaxy known as PKS 1441+25, a type of active galaxy called a blazar. Located toward the constellation Boötes, the galaxy is so far away its light takes 7.6 billion years to reach us. At its heart lies a monster black hole with a mass estimated at 70 million times the Sun’s.

As material in the disk falls toward the black hole, some of it forms dual particle jets that blast out of the disk in opposite directions at nearly the speed of light. Blazars are so bright in gamma rays because one jet points almost directly toward us, giving astronomers a view straight into the black hole’s dynamic and poorly understood realm.

In April, PKS 1441+25 underwent a major eruption. Luigi Pacciani at the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics in Rome was leading a project to catch blazar flares in their earliest stages in collaboration with the Major Atmospheric Gamma-ray Imaging Cerenkov experiment (MAGIC), located on La Palma in the Canary Islands. Using public Fermi data, Pacciani discovered the outburst and immediately alerted the astronomical community. Fermi’s Large Area Telescope revealed gamma rays up to 33 billion electron volts (GeV), reaching into the highest-energy part of the instrument’s detection range. For comparison, visible light has energies between about 2 and 3 electron volts.

Following up on the Fermi alert, the MAGIC team turned to the blazar and detected gamma rays with energies ranging from 40 to 250 GeV. “Because this galaxy is so far away, we didn’t have a strong expectation of detecting gamma rays with energies this high,” said Josefa Becerra Gonzalez, a researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “There are fewer and fewer gamma rays at progressively higher energies, and fewer still from very distant sources.”

The reason distance matters for gamma rays is that they convert into particles when they collide with lower-energy light. When a gamma ray encounters starlight, it transforms into an electron and a positron and is lost to astronomers. The farther away the blazar is, the less likely its highest-energy gamma rays will survive to be detected.

NASA’s Curiosity Mars Rover Heads Toward Active Dunes

Posted by :reta On : November 18, 2015
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Category: Bob Eklund Column, Looking Up Column

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Looking Up500_000001

Note: This is based on press release from NASA/JPL.

This Sept. 25, 2015, view from the Mast Camera on NASA's Curiosity Mars rover shows a dark sand dune in the middle distance. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

This Sept. 25, 2015, view from the Mast Camera on NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover shows a dark sand dune in the middle distance. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

On its way to higher layers of the mountain where it is investigating how Mars’ environment changed billions of years ago, NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover will take advantage of a chance to study some modern Martian activity at mobile sand dunes.

In the next few days, the rover will get its first close-up look at these dark dunes, called the “Bagnold Dunes,” which skirt the northwestern flank of Mount Sharp. No Mars rover has previously visited a sand dune, as opposed to smaller sand ripples or drifts. One dune Curiosity will investigate is as tall as a two-story building and as broad as a football field. The Bagnold Dunes are active: Images from orbit indicate some of them are migrating as much as about 3 feet per Earth year. No active dunes have been visited anywhere in the solar system besides Earth.

“We’ve planned investigations that will not only tell us about modern dune activity on Mars but will also help us interpret the composition of sandstone layers made from dunes that turned into rock long ago,” said Bethany Ehlmann ofCaltech and JPL..

As of Nov. 16, Curiosity has about 200 yards remaining to drive before reaching “Dune 1.” The rover is already monitoring the area’s wind direction and speed each day and taking progressively closer images, as part of the dune research campaign. At the dune, it will use its scoop to collect samples for the rover’s internal laboratory instruments, and it will use a wheel to scuff into the dune for comparison of the surface to the interior.

What distinguishes actual dunes from windblown ripples of sand or dust, like those found at several sites visited previously by Mars rovers, is that dunes form a downwind face steep enough for sand to slide down. The effect of wind on motion of individual particles in dunes has been studied extensively on Earth, a field pioneered by British military engineer Ralph Bagnold (1896-1990). Curiosity’s campaign at the Martian dune field informally named for him will be the first in-place study of dune activity on a planet with lower gravity and less atmosphere.

Observations of the Bagnold Dunes with the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter indicate that mineral composition is not evenly distributed in the dunes. The same orbiter’s High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment has documented movement of Bagnold Dunes.

“We will use Curiosity to learn whether the wind is actually sorting the minerals in the dunes by how the wind transports particles of different grain size,” Ehlmann said.

Ehlmann and Nathan Bridges of the Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Maryland, lead the Curiosity team’s planning for the dune campaign.

“These dunes have a different texture from dunes on Earth,” Bridges said. “The ripples on them are much larger than ripples on top of dunes on Earth, and we don’t know why. We have models based on the lower air pressure. It takes a higher wind speed to get a particle moving. But now we’ll have the first opportunity to make detailed observations.”

THE KELSO DUNES in California’s Mojave Desert are a good example of somewhat similar dunes on Earth. These dunes, covering 45 square miles near the town of Baker, are called “booming” or “singing” dunes because of the low-pitched resonant noise they produce—especially when someone slides down their steep face. Do the Bagnold Dunes on Mars also boom, when slid down? That’s something for an expedition of human “Martians” to check out, some day.