Koppernigk

Enough for another 2000 years

Here's a good one: will the Perseid Meteor Shower Ever Run Dry?

"One of the biggest sky shows of the year peaks the evening of August 12, when the Perseid meteor shower will be most active in the night sky. The Perseids, which may deliver as many as 80 meteors per hour, should also be visible on the night of August 13.

The Perseid shower reaches its peak once a year, in mid-August, when Earth's orbit carries the planet through the debris stream left behind by Comet Swift-Tuttle, a 26-kilometer body that sheds ice and dust as it orbits the sun. As Earth approaches the tiny bits of cometary debris, the meteoroids burn up in the atmosphere, generating the bright streaks in the night sky that are often known as shooting stars. ... "(SciAm)

Odds & ends

Coming night you should go out for the Perseids, weather permitting. This meteor swarm is always able to produce a couple of dozen meteorites every hour during peak hours. You can find Perseus in the northeast. A chart can be obtained from www.heavens-above.com

Spacewalk two to repair the defunct cooling system "A" is in progress. A failed pump module, to be precize. You can watch it now, (17:40 UT) on the NASA TV Website. They're now 5 hours into the repairs.

Neptune playing comet catcher

"Neptune was struck by a giant comet about two centuries ago, according to new research. The find adds to a growing body of evidence that cometary collisions with gas giant planets may be more common than astronomers thought.

On rocky planets with thin atmospheres, such as Mercury (pictures) and Mars, it's easy to count the craters made by impacts dating back millions of years, giving scientists a rough estimate of how frequently space rocks collide with other worlds.

But the gas giants—Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune—are planets that are almost all roiling atmosphere with just tiny cores of rock, making it much harder to find evidence of past impacts.

In 1994 the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 broke apart and smashed into Jupiter, and several space probes, including Voyager 2, Galileo, and the Hubble Space Telescope, were able to document the rare event.

Using what they'd learned about chemicals left in Jupiter's atmosphere after the comet crash, scientists from the French observatory LESIA and the Max Planck Institutes in Germany analyzed the composition of Neptune's atmosphere with the European research satellite Herschel.

The data show that the amount of carbon monoxide in Neptune's upper atmosphere is higher than in the planet's lower atmosphere. Since gas would normally thin out as it reaches higher atmospheric layers, the extra gas had to come from some outside source, the scientists say.

A comet, which carries carbon monoxide in its icy tail, is the "main explanation," said study co-author Paul Hartogh of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research. ..." (NGC)

Lutetia spotted from up close

Rosetta has sent back some awesome pictures of Lutetia. The pictures on this page are awaiting captions at this moment, but the results are spectacular. Below a picture that might creep you out from sheer beauty. What a sight. Click on the picture for a full scale version. Way to go, ESA.

Rosetta Closing in on Lutetia

Sit tight; tomorrow Rosetta will perform a flyby of Lutetia. You can watch it on livestream on the ESA channel here. Starts at 5 pm GMT

picture of Lutetia by Rosetta; distance abt. 2 million km.

We'll always have Paris

Rosetta is going to visit Paris. Or better, Lutetia. Even better, 21 Lutetia, an asteroid discovered from a balcony in Paris in the 19th century. Then it was just a faint blob, but on July 10th, 2010, the spacecratf Rosetta will picture it from a distance of about 800 kilometers. If you're from the real press, and not a cheap kopykat blogger like me, you can attend the festivities and have a look at the first pictures, to be seen around midnight if we may believe the good folks over at ESA. And we do.

Here are the details.

this pic stolen from a cool site! click here to visit.

Bright KBO

"How do you study an extremely small planetary body in the dim outer reaches of our solar system? Get all your friends from around the world to wait for a very elusive – if not short-lived – special event. And in doing so, you may find something completely unexpected. Enter James Elliot from MIT. Elliot and astronomers from observatories across the globe teamed up to make observations of the Kuiper Belt Object 55636, a small body orbiting beyond Neptune. Since the KBO is too small and distant for direct observations of its surface, Elliot tracked and plotted its course, figuring out when it would pass in front of a distant star. "For several years, we've been accurately measuring the position of the KBO," Elliot said in an article in BBC. "With an accurate orbit, we just projected where it was going to be in the sky and looked for stars that it might occult."

The KBO occulted, or passed in front of a bright background star, an event which lasted only 10 seconds. But this was enough time to determine the object's size and albedo. And both of these results were surprising. ..." (Universe Today)

Hayabusa burning up in close up; capsule found and secured

Here are some pictures of the retrieval of the capsule ejected by Hayabusa that landed in the Australian outback. De container will be transferred to Japan and opened in a clean room for inspection - to see if it contains dust particles or more from the asteroid Itokawa. SPACE.com has more on the story here.

The photo below is quite supercool: you see debri of Hayabusa - may it rest in peace - burning up in the atmosphere and to the right below the debri you actually see the ejected capsule moving off. Cooool. No fireworks are as cool as the fireworks Mother Nature can create for us.

Hayabusa back home

Hayabusa has returned to Earth and it has burnt in the atmosphere. Right now they're looking for the capsule that should already have landed. Below you can see Hayabusa's spectacular re-entry around the three minute mark.

update: the beacon of the capsule has been heard, sources say and it will be tracked by helicopters, but retrieval shouldn't take place until daylight, a few hours from now. That is, around midnight CEST or 22.00 h UT.

Hayabusa about to burn and land at the same time

Ion propelled spacecraft Hayabusa is finally returning home. On Sunday it's expected to burn up in the atmosphere while a capsule with (possible) asteroid fragments will enter at equally large speed. Eventually it should land safely in Autstralia, in the Woomera range.

I don't know if there's a way to follow it live, but the Hayabusa sites are here and here. The site of the Planetary Society and Emily Lakdawalla's blog is also a good place to visit on a regular basis for news and updates. You can find it here.

Quite close - quite a distance

Hayabusa is still on its way to Earth. It has now completed the so-called TCM3-procedure, which aims it to land in the Woomera area in Australia. This means that the spacecraft is at 3.6 million kilometers from home, roughly 9 to 10 times the distance of the Moon from Earth. A press release can be found here. As far as I understand Hayabusa - propelled by an ion motor - is bound to land this month. When (and if) it does, Japanese scientists will find out if it really returned asteroid samples.

Below you see a picture generated with Celestia. It shows Earth from a distance of 3.6 million kilometers. Yes, it's the speck in the middle, believe me. And below you can see the speck of the Moon. That's quite a distance...

Jupiter gets another big hit

Giant happenings on Jupiter. Some object smashed into our big brother and protector and gave off a lightbulb event than could be seen here on Earth. Below's the picture, this link is to a video on Spaceweather, which has the story.

Eta Aquarids coming

The Eta Aquarids are coming. Again. We're not talking about big eyed aliens, but about meteors. This swarm is, like the Orionids, associated with Halley's Comet. If you go outside in the early hours of May 6th, you might get a glimpse. Last quarter Moon is interfering, but you might give it a shot if skies are clear and you're in a good mood.

You can find the constellation of Aquarius (my birth sign, which is, as you know, very very important when I'm in my fifth house opposite my love quadrant) low in the east around five in the morning, between the Moon and Jupiter. Click on the Stellarium screenshot below to get an idea. And if you're in the southern hemisphere, stand upside down to get the correct directions.

HAYABUSA close to home

Asteroid chaser HAYABUSA is about to return to Earth. Well, about to return in less than two months, carrying samples from asteroid Itokawa. Mission specialists hope the container is really filled with samples, as the probe met some difficulties along the way. There were problems when HAYABUSA was "docked" with Itokawa, delaying its departure, and November last year one of the ion engines had some troubles. But nevertheless, when the capsule touches down a historic journey has come to an end: flying to an asteroid, landing on it and returning to Earth.

Sungrazer away!

This is one cool sequence of pictures taken by SOHO. It's a comet on its way to its demise: a sungrazer comet.

From the Spaceweather website:

"A newly-discovered comet is plunging toward the sun and probably will not survive. The encounter is too close to the sun for human eyes to see, but the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) is able to monitor the action using an opaque disk to block the sun's glare. (...)

The doomed comet is probably a member of the Kreutz sungrazer family. Named after a 19th century German astronomer who studied them in detail, Kreutz sungrazers are fragments from the breakup of a giant comet at least 2000 years ago. Several of these fragments pass by the sun and disintegrate every day. Most are too small to see but occasionally a big fragment--like this one--attracts attention."

A Valentine - in a year or so

There's always a space probe out there, going for a next advanture. In about one year, "re-used" probe Stardust is on its final way to Tempel 1, a comet named after astronomer Ernst Wilhelm Leberecht Tempel, who discovered it in 1867. The comet is now somewhere between the planet Mars and the orbit of Jupiter:

"Just three days shy of one year before its planned flyby of comet Tempel 1, NASA's Stardust spacecraft has successfully performed a maneuver to adjust the time of its encounter by eight hours and 20 minutes. The delay maximizes the probability of the spacecraft capturing high-resolution images of the desired surface features of the 2.99-kilometer-wide (1.86 mile) potato-shaped mass of ice and dust.

With the spacecraft on the opposite side of the solar system and beyond the orbit of Mars, the trajectory correction maneuver began at 5:21 p.m. EST (2:21 p.m. PST) on Feb. 17. Stardust's rockets fired for 22 minutes and 53 seconds, changing the spacecraft's speed by 24 meters per second (54 miles per hour).

Stardust's maneuver placed the spacecraft on a course to fly by the comet just before 8:42 p.m. PST (11:42 p.m. EST) on Feb. 14, 2011 – Valentine's Day. Time of closest approach to Tempel 1 is important because the comet rotates, allowing different regions of the comet to be illuminated by the sun's rays at different times. Mission scientists want to maximize the probability that areas of interest previously imaged by NASA's Deep Impact mission in 2005 will also be bathed in the sun's rays and visible to Stardust's camera when it passes by. .... " (JPL)

WISE is out

"NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, has discovered its first comet, one of many the mission is expected to find among millions of other objects during its ongoing survey of the whole sky in infrared light.

Officially named "P/2010 B2 (WISE)," but known simply as WISE, the comet is a dusty mass of ice more than 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) in diameter. It probably formed around the same time as our solar system, about 4.5 billion years ago. Comet WISE started out in the cold, dark reaches of our solar system, but after a long history of getting knocked around by the gravitational forces of Jupiter, it settled into an orbit much closer to the sun. Right now, the comet is heading away from the sun and is about 175 million kilometers (109 million miles) from Earth.

"Comets are ancient reservoirs of water. They are one of the few places besides Earth in the inner solar system where water is known to exist," said Amy Mainzer of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Mainzer is the principal investigator of NEOWISE, a project to find and catalog new asteroids and comets spotted by WISE (the acronym combines WISE with NEO, the shorthand for near-Earth object).

"With WISE, we have a powerful tool to find new comets and learn more about the population as a whole. Water is necessary for life as we know it, and comets can tell us more about how much there is in our solar system." ..." (JPL)

Is it a bird? A comet? No....

...maybe it's an asteroid collision - or better, the remains of a collision. Hubble took the picture after the LINEAR survey came up with the comet-like phenomenon earlier. From the HubbleSite:

"... This leaves open the possibility that the complex debris tail is the result of an impact between two bodies rather than ices from a parent body simply turning into vapor. Asteroid collisions are energetic, with an average impact speed over 11,000 miles per hour (5 km/s, or five times faster than a rifle bullet).

"If this interpretation is correct, two small and previously unknown asteroids recently collided, creating a shower of debris that is being swept back into a tail from the collision site by the pressure of sunlight," says Jewitt. ..." (HubbleSite)

No Rama, no rendez-vous

"Asteroid 2010 AL30, discovered by the LINEAR survey of MIT’s Lincoln Laboratories on Jan. 10, will make a close approach to the Earth’s surface to within 76,000 miles on Jan. 13 at 12:46 pm Greenwich time (7:46 am EST, 4:46 am PST).

Because its orbital period is nearly identical to the Earth’s one year period, some have suggested it may be a manmade rocket stage in orbit about the sun. However, this object’s orbit reaches the orbit of Venus at its closest point to the sun and nearly out to the orbit of Mars at its furthest point, crossing the Earth’s orbit at a very steep angle. ..." (Space Fellowship)

Rendez-vous with Rama

No, I wish it was. But no, really. Whatever.

One day we'll regret our space junk as much as our earthbound junk.

"A curious object is about to fly past Earth only 130,000 km (0.3 lunar distances) away. Catalogued as a 10m-class asteroid, 2010 AL30 has an orbital period of almost exactly 1 year. This raises the possibility that it might not be a natural object, but rather a piece of some spacecraft from our own planet. At closest approach on Jan. 13th, 2010 AL30 will streak through Orion, Taurus, and Pisces glowing like a 14th magnitude star. Experienced amateur astronomers are encouraged to monitor the flyby:... " (Spaceweather.com)