The Art of Exoplanets

One of the things that amazes me is the ability of making us imagine how outer worlds may look like through the production of credible idealisation of those planets based on available data about the planets' diameters, masses and distances from the host star.

Artist's concept by Robert Hurt and Tim Pyle show us how planetary systems may look like and Hurt and his colleague, multimedia producer Tim Pyle, developed a series of arresting, photorealistic images of what the new system's tightly packed planets might look like.

This film show us some of their projects and no doubt they have helped us to have a detailed perspective about these planets atmospheres, mountain relief and geology.

Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech

PHILAE TouchDown on COMET #67P

PHILAE on #67P

After more than 10 years travelling through space, PHILAE the spaceship that got its name from an island on the river Nile, where it was found the obelisk which allowed to decode the Rosetta Stone, has successfully descended on the surface of Comet #67P and grabbed to the rock with 3 harpons that anchored the lander securely to the surface.

PHILAE is full equipped with the latest technology in order to get acquired measures at the surface. Existing jets and geysers will be evaluated, real surface temperatures, gravity and a highly sophisticated equipment will "read" and perform combustion and chemical analysis from the 4.5 billion years old comet composition, sending afterwards its results, through the solar and battery powered ' antennas, first to Rosetta and from there to ESA, on Earth. 

ISS - International Space Station

Early, on last Saturday, SpaceX's Dragon Spacecraft splashed down into the Pacific Ocean bringing hundreds of pounds of cargo, as a result of long-term research on board the ISS, and hopefully the experiments made on board could aid in the development of more efficient solar cells and semiconductor-based electronics, the development of plants better suited for space and improvements in sustainable agriculture.

The third commercial re-supply flight by a Cygnus spacecraft to the ISS will transport some 5,000 pounds of supplies and experiments to the orbiting laboratory and it'll be launched next November 2d.

According to Sam Scimemi, director of the ISS division at the NASA headquarters in Washington, “This mission enabled research critical to achieving NASA's goal of long-duration human spaceflight in deep space.”

According to some experts everything is being settled for Mars long journey, and according to Buzz, for a long term stay on the Red Planet.

The Dark Side of the Moon

Three Craters on the edge of the Moon in a place called Luna INCOGNITA

ESA/SMART-1/AMIE camera team/Space Exploration Institute

I guess everyone would prefer to see the Rainbow side of the Moon or a glance of the bright side of the small asteroid. Nevertheless ESA got what it can be called a perfect shot of the Dark Side of the Moon where no human telescopic eye can normally reach.

ESA launched a SMART-1 mission which brought us images of Plaskett, Rozhdestvenskiy and Hermitethe, the 3 big craters which stand always hide on the darker side, each one with a surprising size of more than 100 Km wide.

The LUNA INCOGNITA or the undercover side of the Moon can be yearly seen, for a few days, due the Earth's rotation process but never as it was now caught, really closer to our sights.

Who knows if it isn't the right place to simulate a human mission to Mars, without the fear of the distance and the danger of not being able to get back if something doesn't come out according with the plans. Credits: ESA

Getting Together

Comet 67P/Churyumov- Gerasimenko on a close shot by Rosetta's NAVCAM

Every shot looks closer, every bit of this Comet seems to wonder where will Rosetta land next November on the day that a small spaceship and the rock will meet.

Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko is being scrutenized for the past few months by Rosetta powerful  cameras, from a distance of 27.8 km above the comet's centre. The image covers an area of about 2 x 1.9 km and focuses on the smaller of the two comet lobes. 

It's visible one of the primary landing sites called  J 'above' located on the distinctive depression. Every thing points out that it will be the chosen spot to dock Philae, the small lander developed by ESA which will be grabbed to the comet in order to perform the first attempt to collect samples from a moving rock comet surface.

November is near and all the incredulous eyes are set on the screen for a new era. 

For now every moment in being set for a major advance in science, that moment when two strangers will meet in space.

67P/Churyumov-GERASIMENKO - A Comet with a diversity of surface structures

67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko - Credits: ESA/Rosetta/NAVCAM

67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, the most photographed comet of all times, shows on the last Rosetta shootings a diversity of surface structures

In the image, the comet’s head (in the top half of the image) exhibits parallel linear features that resemble cliffs, and its neck displays scattered boulders on a relatively smooth, slumping surface. 

In comparison, the comet's body (lower half of the image) seems to exhibit a multi-variable terrain with peaks and valleys, and both smooth and rough topographic features.

Comets are time capsules containing primitive material left over from the epoch when the sun and its planets formed. 

Observations planned for this mission will help scientists learn more about the origin and evolution of our solar system, and the role comets may have played in seeding Earth with water. Rosetta's lander will obtain the first images taken from a comet's surface and will provide the first analysis of a comet's composition by drilling into the surface. 

Let's see if we have more clues about what happened on the Big Bang.

Credits: Nasa

ROSETTA - August 6th 2014 - Comet CLOSE UP

Stunning close up detail focusing on a smooth region on the ‘base’ of the ‘body’ section of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. 

The image was taken by Rosetta’s OSIRIS narrow-angle camera and downloaded on August 6th clearly showing a range of features, including boulders, craters and steep cliffs. 

Taken from a distance of 130 km, Rosetta will be orbiting the comet till November 9th, the day all ESA scientists are looking forward once it'll be the first day in history when a spacecraft will land on a comet.

On that day, ROSETTA will absolutely be the shinning STAR.

Credits: ESA/Rosetta/MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/SSO/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA

ROSETTA - RENDEZ-VOUS with COMET 67P/CHURYUMOV-GERASIMENKO

After a 10-year, 4-billion-mile journey through deep space, a European probe will finally arrive at its comet destination this week.

The European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft is scheduled to rendezvous with Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko today, August 6th. If all goes according to plan, Rosetta will become the first probe ever to orbit a comet — and, in November, the first to drop a lander onto the surface of one of these icy wanderers.

6th August approach

JUPITER - The STORMY GIANT

JUPITER - The Stormy Giant
Credits NASA

At about 89,000 miles in diameter, Jupiter could swallow 1,000 Earths. It is the largest planet in the solar system and perhaps the most majestic. 

Vibrant bands of clouds carried by winds that can exceed 400 mph continuously circle the planet's atmosphere. Such winds sustain spinning anticyclones like the Great Red Spot -- a raging storm three and a half times the size of Earth located in Jupiter’s southern hemisphere. 

In January and February 1979, NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft zoomed toward Jupiter, capturing hundreds of images during its approach, including this close-up of swirling clouds around Jupiter's Great Red Spot. This image was assembled from three black and white negatives.

Credits NASA

Saturn MOON ENCELATUS - A Distante Frozen World

Credits: NASA spacecraft CASSINI

CASSINI the unmanned spacecraft launched in 1997 to orbit planet SATURN and its multiple MOONS has arrived, 7 years later, to Saturn system in 2004. 

Since then, Saturn and its many natural satellites have been studied and observed as well as their heliosphere, testing the famous Einstein theory of relativity.

On its way, Cassini captured this still and partially sunlit ENCELADUS, a Saturnian MOON covered in ice that reflects sunlight similar to freshly fallen snow, making ENCELADUS one of the most reflective objects in the solar system. The blue color in this false-color image indicates larger-than-average ice particles. The moon's surface is decorated with fractures, folds and ridges caused by tectonic stresses. 

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 7, 2010, using filters sensitive to ultraviolet, visible and infrared light.

January 20th 2014 - Wake UP! Rosetta

Today is the BIG day that ESA has been waiting for to wake up Rosetta which has been hibernating since 2011. 

Let's hope that everything goes well along with scheduled.

Mission: ROSETTA - Landing on COMET 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko

Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko has its name due to the ukranian scientist who discovered it

(see in 720p HD)

If you were curious about my last post and the scheduled Rosetta's mission, here is a short movie produced by ESA which allows us to know with more detail about what scientists are up to with this mission and what space knowledge can we expect to get further on finding the origins of the universe.

Synthetically this will be the longest duration encounter with a comet. It involves a spacecraft called Rosetta, which will map the comet surface and its magnetic fields.

After 6 months orbiting the comet, which is 4 Km long with the shape of a potatoe, a Lander will be detached. 

This lander, called Philae, got its name from the island on the Nile, in Egypt, where was found the obelisk which allowed to decode the Rosetta Stone, so I'm sure that this name will function as an encouragement for scientists hopefully decoding on this mission some of the mysteries that may lay on the comet' s nucleus.

Philae will descend from Rosetta to the surface and as soon as it touches it, once there's little gravity, there will be 3 harpons that will anchor the lander securely to the surface.

The Lander is full equipped with the latest technology in order to get acquired measures at the surface. Existing jets and geysers will be evaluated, real surface temperatures, gravity and a highly sophisticated equipment will "read" and perform combustion and chemical analysis from the 4.5 billion years old comet composition, sending afterwards its results, through the solar and battery powered ' antennas, first to Rosetta and from there to ESA, on Earth. 

Looking forward for this great space adventure I'm sure that all data collected will give us clues about the origins of the universe and maybe, who knows, life somewhere else.

What about 2014 SPACE MISSIONS?

NASA and ESA presented their main missions for 2014.

More than 24 are active at the moment and others will be launched during this year.

Mission: ROSETTA

ROSETTA is being classified as THE one great expectation mission.
Since 2004 when Rosetta was launched, ESA has been waiting for the right moment to catch an enormous comet, land there and take as many samples and pictures as possible. Rosetta will be the "big star" of 2014, making the first-ever orbit insertion at a comet in August and attempting a landing on it in November. Images will be spectacular for sure! See the film.

In MARS two more spacecraft will be launched and they will arrived at the red planet in September 2014. Japan is also following space targets with theirs HAYABUSA mission.

MESSENGER will go on its mission to Venus and Mercury until 2015.

The twin ARTEMIS spacecraft are still happily operating at the Moon and will continue to do so through 2014.

LADEE is in its prime mission and is planned to crash into the lunar surface in March. No lengthy mission extension is possible for this mission -- its low orbit, necessary for sampling the lunar atmosphere, is a death sentence.

CURIOSITY in Mars has only one goal: TO DRIVE as much as possible in order to explore Mars soil.By the summer of 2014 the rover should be approaching the Murray Buttes, a gap between the basalt sand dunes that will allow them passage to the clay-bearing rocks they landed in Gale crater to explore.

ODYSSEY and MARS EXPRESS have had the most serious problems, but continue to do great imaging and (in the case of Odyssey) valuable relay work. Mars Express' mission is extended through 2016.

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has developed a spectacular routine of wider-field imaging with its Context Camera with rapid followup of any new features with high-resolution HiRISE images, so I hope to see more new discoveries of fresh impact craters, possible water-carved features, moving sand dunes, and other geomorphology that shows Mars to be an active planet.

OPPORTUNUTY, will have its moment this winter. The rover's activities will be limited by low power. However, they have found themselves a nice north-facing slope to tilt the solar panels at the winter Sun, so they shouldn't have to park for long stretches; they'll make brief journeys from one north-facing "lily pad" to another, exploring Murray Ridge.

CASSINI, in Saturn in planned to have 11 gravity-assist flybys of Titan. All of 2014 will be spent in an inclined phase from which it can observe the effects of springtime sun on the north poles of Titan and Saturn and image the rings, while exploring the magnetosphere and plasma environment of Saturn in three dimensions. Cassini will not return to an equatorial orbit (and frequent opportunities to observe the other moons) until March of 2015. However, Cassini is currently under very real threat of cancellation. If its mission is to be ended in 2015, then a propulsive maneuver to set up that ending will be performed in 2014, canceling all those carefully-laid plans. So for Cassini the most important events of 2014 will be taking place here on Earth, in the halls of Congress and the White House.

ICE will fly past Earth in August. If we want to regain control of this aged-but-still-perfectly-good spacecraft, we must do it early this year. The budget mess is making that seem difficult to achieve. I'll report if I have any further news on that.

Juno, Dawn, and New Horizons will spend 2014 cruising to their next destinations. The latter two will be setting the stage for a spectacular 2015, what I'm calling the Year of the Dwarf Planet, when we will turn three round worlds from astronomical objects to geological objects for the first time: Ceres, Pluto, and Charon.

Voyagers 1 and 2 will be carrying their missions on, into the interstellar medium.

I'll keep on track of their important goals.

from here

CASSIOPEIA the NewBorn Star in the Milky Way

Cassiopeia the New born Star on the Milky Way

This extraordinarily deep Chandra image shows Cassiopeia A (Cas A, for short), the youngest supernova remnant in the Milky Way. 

New analysis shows that this supernova remnant acts like a relativistic pinball machine by accelerating electrons to enormous energies. The blue, wispy arcs in the image show where the acceleration is taking place in an expanding shock wave generated by the explosion. The red and green regions show material from the destroyed star that has been heated to millions of degrees by the explosion.  from here

CURIOSITY - FIRST MARS SOIL ANALYSIS

This is a view of the third (left) and fourth (right) trenches made by the 1.6-inch-wide (4-centimeter-wide) scoop on NASA's Mars rover Curiosity in October 2012. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS 

Mars Curiosity rover has used its full array of instruments to analyze Martian soil for the first time, and found a complex chemistry within the Martian soil. Water and sulfur and chlorine-containing substances, among other ingredients, showed up in samples Curiosity's arm delivered to an analytical laboratory inside the rover.

Detection of the substances during this early phase of the mission demonstrates the laboratory's capability to analyze diverse soil and rock samples over the next two years. Scientists also have been verifying the capabilities of the rover's instruments.

Curiosity is the first Mars rover able to scoop soil into analytical instruments. The specific soil sample came from a drift of windblown dust and sand called "Rocknest." The site lies in a relatively flat part of Gale Crater still miles away from the rover's main destination on the slope of a mountain called Mount Sharp. 

"We have no definitive detection of Martian organics at this point, but we will keep looking in the diverse environments of Gale Crater," 

said SAM Principal Investigator Paul Mahaffy of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

NASA's Mars Science Laboratory Project is using Curiosity to assess whether areas inside Gale Crater ever offered a habitable environment for microbes. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, a division of Caltech, manages the project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington, and built Curiosity. more here

SATURN B Ring

Saturn B Ring

Cassini continues its space exploration sending extraordinary images from Saturn's rings.

Here we see a glorious B ring with its dense layers and various structures which have been one of the subjects which scientists have been looking up to.

Saturn's B ring is the densest and most massive of all the rings. The C ring is also visible inside the B ring and the A ring puts on an appearance beyond the Cassini Division near the top and bottom of the image.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on July 22, 2012.

The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 201,000 miles (324,000 kilometers) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 134 degrees. Image scale is 10 miles (16 kilometers) per pixel.   from here

EXOPLANETS - Possible Habitable Worlds

Exoplanets

This image shows a composition of all the current potential habitable exoplanets candidates in the catalog. The exoplanets are ranked by similarity to Earth from best to worst, #1 being the best candidate.

The only two confirmed exoplanets in the data, HD 85512 b and Gliese 581 d, still rank very low as compared to the NASA Kepler candidates, that are waiting confirmation.  from here

Cassini - TITAN Reveals an HIDDEN OCEAN at DEPTH

This artist's concept shows a possible scenario for the internal structure of Titan, as suggested by data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft. Image credit: A. Tavani

PASADENA, Calif. - Data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft have revealed Saturn's moon Titan likely harbors a layer of liquid water under its ice shell.

Researchers saw a large amount of squeezing and stretching as the moon orbited Saturn. They deduced that if Titan were composed entirely of stiff rock, the gravitational attraction of Saturn would cause bulges, or solid "tides," on the moon only 3 feet (1 meter) in height. Spacecraft data show Saturn creates solid tides approximately 30 feet (10 meters) in height, which suggests Titan is not made entirely of solid rocky material. The finding appears in today's edition of the journal Science.

"Cassini's detection of large tides on Titan leads to the almost inescapable conclusion that there is a hidden ocean at depth," said Luciano Iess, the paper's lead author and a Cassini team member at the Sapienza University of Rome, Italy. "The search for water is an important goal in solar system exploration, and now we've spotted another place where it is abundant."   from here

Night is Slowly Gaining Our Day...

Night is slowly but surely gaining on day here, and it is time to go our separate ways.... I will meet you here tomorrow, for another adventure in space. Bring your friends! My spaceship is like the universe around us, limitless, and there will be always a place for you, whoever you are, wherever you are coming from. Good night!

here

CASSINI - A Long Mission to SATURN

For the last 15 years, since October 15th, 1997 Cassini Mission has been exploring Saturn, its Moons and Rings. Astonishing images were captured by Cassini and much of the Big unknown planet is nowadays widely covered with thousands of infra red pictures which opened our knowledge and clarified many of Saturn mysteries. Scientists could see frozen lakes, mountains, small and huge moons,  furious storms and rings that seemed to float on Saturn's gas atmosphere.

Cassini spacecraft views SATURN rings and TITAN its biggest Moon

TITAN the biggest Saturn's moon was extensively explored and incredible shoots were captured, like this one where the BIG MOON relays in the center of the image, with its 5,150 km, across. 

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on 15 Jan. 2011 using a combination of polarized and spectral filters sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared light.

The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 844,000 km from Titan. 

Image scale is 50 km per pixel.