Breaking Orbit

As New Horizons speeds toward its date with Pluto the mission team petitions to celebrate the spacecraft with a USPS Forever Stamp… and YOU can help!

The New Horizons spacecraft is soaring through the outer solar system, currently in blissful hibernation but nonetheless excellent condition for its upcoming date with Pluto. It is now the closest any manmade spacecraft has come to the distant world, and in July of 2015 it will send back the first views ever of Pluto, its moon Charon, and whatever surprises the far-flung family of frozen worlds may hold in store.

So why shouldn’t we honor this intrepid robot explorer with a stamp?

That’s exactly what the New Horizons team is trying to make happen though an online petition to the U.S. Postal Service. The stamp above, a concept illustration by space scientist and artist Dan Durda of the Southwest Research Institute, is what’s envisioned as a successor to a 1990 stamp portraying Pluto as a “Not Yet Explored” featureless orb.

(Personally, I like Dan’s version much better.)

Previous US stamp featuring Pluto. (NASA)

Admittedly, what was known about Pluto in 1990 (back when it was still an honest-to-goodness “planet”) was mostly speculative. There was no New Horizons, no Hubble images of its curiously-mottled surface, no knowledge of its smaller moons Nix, Hydra or the yet-to-be-named P4. Even the presence of an tenuous atmosphere had only been discovered two years prior. Pluto, for the most part, was very much an enigma.

The gold-foiled New Horizons will, in a little over 41 months from now, help solve the puzzle of Pluto (and in the process undoubtedly reveal many more new mysteries!)

A stamp, in my opinion, is the least we can do to pay homage to the historic and groundbreaking New Horizons mission. Alan Stern, principal investigator for New Horizons, has similar sentiments.

“You can help make this happen,” Stern said. “We’re asking people to sign the petition, because the post office considers not just the merits of a new stamp proposal, but also whether it is supported by a significant number of people. This is a chance for us all to celebrate what American space exploration can achieve though hard work, technical excellence, the spirit of scientific inquiry, and the uniquely human drive to explore.”

It can take at least three years for a stamp concept to be created and released by the USPS, so by petitioning now we can help make sure it’s ready in time for the spacecraft’s flyby.

So sign the petition on Change.org here. Pass it on. Tell your friends and family to do the same. Share it on Facebook, Twitter, email, whatever your social media platform of choice may be. With enough support we can make this a reality and give New Horizons — and Pluto — our “stamp” of approval!

Read the New Horizons message here.

Forever Stamps were created by the United States Postal Service in 2007. They are non-denominational First Class postage, which means that they can be used to mail First Class letters no matter what the postal rate. Learn more about Forever Stamps here.

You may not consider winter prime stargazing season, but in fact some of the brightest stars are found shining in Northern Hemisphere skies this time of the year. Probably the most recognizable pattern of stars in all the heavens, after the Big Dipper, is the constellation Orion, the Hunter. Because of its placement in the sky, you can observe Orion from just about anywhere on Earth, and it has spawned legends and myths in many cultures going back thousands of years.

Part of what makes Orion so popular with beginner sky-watchers is that it vividly resembles its mythological character: a mighty hunter armed with a club and shield. With its distinctive row of three equally brilliant stars representing Orion’s belt and four surrounding stars marking the shoulders and knees of the giant, this constellation is easily found about due south around mid-evenings.

Marking Orion’s right shoulder is the striking orange colored Betelgeuse—one of the largest stars known, sitting about 500 light-years away.  Even brighter Rigel, marking Orion’s left knee, lies over 700 light-years away and makes for a spectacular contrast with its sparkling blue-white color.

Orion's sword features a giant star nursery. Credit: Starry Night Software

The real cosmic treasure however is within Orion’s Sword—three more stars hanging under the three-star belt of the mythical hunter. Even with the naked eye, you can tell that the middle star in the sword is different from the others, because it looks like a faint hazy patch of light instead of a pinpoint in the night sky.

This special “gleam” in the sword is not a star at all but one of the true marvels of the universe—a colossal star factory over 1,200 light-years away from Earth called the Great Orion Nebula.

Nebula is Latin for “cloud,” and that ghostly greenish glow in the warrior’s sword is indeed a cloud in deep space. Even binoculars or a small telescope will reveal the nebula as a beautiful luminescent cloud in the shape of a blooming flower. Unlike our Earthly clouds made of water vapor, a nebula is made of gas—mostly hydrogen—and dust.

The Great Orion Nebula. Credit: NOAO

Orion’s great mass (20 light-years wide) of swirling chaotic gas is the birthplace of scores of stars. Thanks to the eagle eyes of the Hubble Space Telescope, we now know that the nebula also holds the promise of forming countless of future planetary systems like our own!

Like a great big celestial neon sign, the Orion Nebula is glowing from the light of embedded hot newborn stars. Looking at this hauntingly beautiful stellar nursery, we are probably witnessing what our own sun’s birthplace looked like over five billion years ago!

Without question it is the most spectacular nebula visible to novice stargazers—clearly evident to the naked eye in dark country sites and easily seen with binoculars from the city.

 

Andrew Fazekas, aka The Night Sky Guy, is a science writer, broadcaster, and lecturer who loves to share his passion for the wonders of the universe through all media. He is a regular contributor to National Geographic News and is the national cosmic correspondent for Canada’s Weather Network TV channel, space columnist for CBC Radio network, and a consultant for the Canadian Space Agency. As a member of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, Andrew has been observing the heavens from Montreal for over a quarter century and has never met a clear night sky he didn’t like.

 

"Invisible" veils of cold plasma discovered around Earth might tell us something about how Mars lost its atmosphere, experts say.

  NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is currently speeding through the outer solar system toward its July 2015 date with Pluto, when it will take a good close look at the dwarf planet’s mysterious surface, atmosphere, moons, and… rings? Less than three-quarters the size of our moon, Pluto nevertheless has no shortage of fascinating features. It…

After a weekend filled with great auroral activity in Northern Canada and Scandinavia (Norway video) thanks to a strong gust of solar wind coming off the Sun Jan.19th, the Earth is about to get hit again -by the biggest blast of solar radiation in 7 years. Talk about a one-two punch on the cosmic scale!…

Here’s a wonderful time-lapse video made of photos taken from orbit as the International Space Station passed over Switzerland, western Europe and eventually Saudi Arabia on the night of December 22, 2011. A portion of the Station can be seen along the right side, reflecting the lights of the major cities passing 240 miles below.…

A dark sky filled with stars is becoming an ever rarer sight.  Since most of the human population lives in or around big cities we have become detached from our night sky heritage as artificial lights filter out natural star light. Ask a young person about the Milky Way and you’re more often than not…

New NASA footage shows a long-lasting flare followed by an eruption of charged particles from the sun's atmosphere aimed right at Earth.

Spirit may be settled in for its eternal sleep, but the data it’s returned is still helping researchers piece together clues to Mars’ watery past! The image above, a false-color view from the “Home Plate” region where Spirit now sits, points to a feature geologists call a “bomb sag”. Bombs are a term for rocks ejected…

Next few evenings backyard astronomers get a chance to see two worlds in the extreme – Venus and Neptune – in the same part of the sky.   The brightest and faintest planets visible to skywatchers will be huddling together in a close conjunction in the south-western sky after sunset. While Venus is super easy to…

Seen from the outside, our home galaxy is "the color of fine-grain, new spring snow in the early morning or late evening," astronomers say.

  The image above, a composite of visible and infrared light images captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, shows the newfound locations of five small and incredibly ancient galaxies which are in the process of merging into a galactic cluster. Located a staggering 13.1 billion light-years away, these galaxies were in existence a mere 600…

Illustration courtesy J. Huart, ESA

It’s been an incredible week for space weather, thanks to a nasty sunspot that hurled a cloud of superheated gas and charged particles toward the Earth.

But some cooler space weather news has snuck into the mix: “Invisible” veils of cold plasma were discovered around Earth, and they might tell us something about Mars’s missing atmosphere.

First, a little bit more on the discovery.

Two space scientists poring over data from the European Space Agency’s Cluster II satellites—four spacecraft which zip around Earth in an elliptical orbit—found evidence of positively charged, slow-moving (hence “cold”) plasma particles as far as 60,000 miles (100,000 kilometers) above Earth’s surface.

That’s about a quarter of the way to the moon, and a region where few researchers suspected any cold plasma lurked. But nobody needs to be hard on themselves, said space scientist Mats André of the Swedish Institute of Space Physics (and leader of the new study about the plasma in Geophysical Research Letters). That’s because cold plasma is really, really tough to detect.

The invisibility of cold matter has a lot to do with like charges repelling like charges. Sunlight in space strips away electrons from atoms, ionizing any “naked” matter out there to have a positive charge. That includes spacecraft (like Cluster II satellites) and atmospheric gas at the edge of Earth’s atmosphere (which creates cold plasma).

Like a magnet’s north pole near another magnet’s north pole, the spacecraft and cold plasma repel and never meet. “Hot” plasma, on the other hand, is moving fast enough to ignore any magnetic repulsion with a spacecraft, so it’s detectable.

Without some clever analysis, cold plasma just doesn’t seem to be out there.

But André knew two things. First, that a spacecraft zooming through cold plasma—if it existed—would create a shockwave (i.e. cold plasma piling in front and zipping around to the back). Second, moving charged particles emit electric fields.

André and his colleague paired these facts up to “see” the subtle shockwaves in Cluster II’s data. The results imply cold matter constitutes between 50 and 70 percent of all charged particles in Earth’s magnetic field! That’s quite a jump from zero percent.

The sudden abundance of cold plasma means a few things. Space weather forecasts stand to improve, as cold plasma particles probably interact with incoming hot matter from solar storms—and that dynamic is missing from computer models. Another effect is that the Earth is bleeding off roughly 2.2 pounds (1 kilogram) of atmospheric gas every second.

When you look at planets with thin atmospheres like Mars (which has just 1 percent the atmospheric pressure of Earth), scientists like André begin to wonder what role the “blood loss” of cold plasma plays in killing atmospheres.

Illustration couretsy NASA/JPL-Caltech

Despite having half the solar intensity, the rate of loss may be about the same as it is at Earth (about one Chihuahua’s weight every second).

“There are all kinds of ways to get rid of a planet’s atmosphere—big asteroid impacts, loss of a dynamo, and so on,” André said. “Well, this is certainly one of them when you apply it over billions of years of time. I don’t know how important it is, but this is on my short list.”

While no one knows for certain how Mars lost its atmosphere, we now have a chilly new suspect.

Dave Mosher is a freelance journalist obsessed with space, physics, biology, technology and more. He lives in New York City and you can stalk him on Twitter as @davemosher.

A popular explanation for the Star of Bethlehem is that it was actually a conjunction of Jupiter and Venus that presumably occurred on June 17, 2BC  (see bethlehemstar.net).  In other words, in the evening hours of that day, Jupiter and Venus appeared so close together in the sky to observers in the middle east that…

Hubble image of Pluto and its four known moons. NASA, ESA, and M. Showalter (SETI Institute)

 

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is currently speeding through the outer solar system toward its July 2015 date with Pluto, when it will take a good close look at the dwarf planet’s mysterious surface, atmosphere, moons, and… rings?

Less than three-quarters the size of our moon, Pluto nevertheless has no shortage of fascinating features. It has a curiously mottled coloration that seems to change with its seasons, an atmosphere that expands and falls back onto its surface, a system of four moons in orbit around it — the most recent of which, currently called “P4″, was announced just last summer — and, according to Planetary Science Institute senior scientist Henry Throop, possibly even a system of rings.

Astronomers have suggested before that Pluto could have rings… probably not an elaborate system like Saturn’s, of course, but rather a thin ring made up of small bits of rock, dust, gas and ice. These could be the remains of a small moon or even ejected material from one of the existing ones.

In fact, concerns over the existence of such rings have recently arisen, as running into unseen debris at 14 kilometers a second — the velocity at which New Horizons will pass by Pluto — would pose a serious risk to the spacecraft and its sensitive suite of instruments.

Artist's concept of the New Horizons spacecraft during its planned encounter with Pluto. (JHUAPL/SwRI)

“Even particles less than a milligram can penetrate our micrometeoroid blankets and do a lot of damage to electronics, fuel lines and sensors,” said New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern.

While it’s not known if Pluto has such rings, or perhaps even more moons in tow, Throop’s team is using occultation data gathered with the four-meter Anglo-Australian Telescope in Australia to search for any hints of hidden ring structures.

“As Pluto passes in front of a star, the star’s light blinks out, like a moth blocking out the beam from a flashlight,” Throop said at the Division for Planetary Sciences meeting in Nantes, France. “We searched through the observations to try to find any hint that the star light was being blocked by rings of Pluto.”

Although no conclusive evidence for rings has yet been found, Throop’s research is still valuable to the New Horizons mission. After all, knowing where rings aren’t is just as important as knowing where they are when planning a safe path for the spacecraft.

Read more about this research on PhysOrg.com.

This holiday season skywatchers get to witness five planets hanging like ornaments in the skies above. All throughout the end of the month you can catch the five classical naked-eye planets – Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn – all of which were first seen by astronomers  in ancient Greek and Roman times.  First up…

After a weekend filled with great auroral activity in Northern Canada and Scandinavia (Norway video) thanks to a strong gust of solar wind coming off the Sun Jan.19th, the Earth is about to get hit again -by the biggest blast of solar radiation in 7 years. Talk about a one-two punch on the cosmic scale!

Late last night (Jan.22) at around 11 pm ET a giant, long lasting, solar flare erupted off the face of the Sun, sending a giant Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) – cloud of plasma and charged particles – squarely towards the Earth.  Detected by NASA’s sun-monitoring satellites SOHO and STEREO, the solar blast was determined to be an M9 on the Richter scale of solar flares – just shy of an X- class flare which is ranked as the most powerful. Space weather forecasters at NOAA – who keep watch for any hazardous, incoming solar storms – are expecting the brunt of the CME to slam into Earth’s magnetic field Jan.24 around 9 am EST ( 2 pm UT)   +/- 7 hours.

And Earth is not the only planet in its cross-hairs. Mars will get walloped too when the CME arrives there on Jan.25th.

Already the front of the storm is now being felt as space radiation (energized protons) speeds by Earth, states the Spaceweather.com website. The high influx of charged particles hitting the magnetic field poses a hazard to everything from GPS signals, polar radio communications, power grids  and circuit boards on orbiting satellites.

What does this mean for chances of seeing Northern Lights? If the geomagnetic storm becomes moderate to strong then auroras may creep down to southern latitudes like Texas and Georgia -but that’s pretty rare. Exactly how intense and widespread the sky show will be depends on how our planet’s magnetic field is oriented at the time when the storm arrives.

Best time to go outside will be between local midnight and pre-dawn hours. Face the northern sky and look for green or red glows to start near the horizon. Catching auroras with your camera is not hard. All you need to have is a tripod mounted DSLR camera with a wide angle lens, capable of taking exposures of up to 20 seconds with a timer.

As usual there are still too many unknowns to forecast reliably who, where, and when exactly will get a sky show when it comes to aurora, but one thing is for sure – you have to go outside and look up to even have a chance.

 

Andrew Fazekas, aka The Night Sky Guy, is a science writer, broadcaster, and lecturer who loves to share his passion for the wonders of the universe through all media. He is a regular contributor to National Geographic News and is the national cosmic correspondent for Canada’s Weather Network TV channel, space columnist for CBC Radio network, and a consultant for the Canadian Space Agency. As a member of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, Andrew has been observing the heavens from Montreal for over a quarter century and has never met a clear night sky he didn’t like.

While we wait for official word on the nature of the Namibian "space ball," NASA's Cassini orbiter is highlighting some spacey spheres of its own: Saturn and its colorful moons.

Here’s a wonderful time-lapse video made of photos taken from orbit as the International Space Station passed over Switzerland, western Europe and eventually Saudi Arabia on the night of December 22, 2011. A portion of the Station can be seen along the right side, reflecting the lights of the major cities passing 240 miles below.

Flashes of lightning briefly illuminate scattered storm clouds, and the thin shell of our atmosphere is capped by airglow — a greenish light cast by ions charged by UV radiation.

(See the video in HD here.)

This photos were taken by Expedition 30 astronauts, compiled at Johnson Space Center and uploaded to The Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth.

Especially impressive are the stars visible in the background… this should answer any questions as to whether or not astronauts can see stars from space!

(The visibility of stars in photos from space is entirely dependent on the ambient sunlight and how the camera is set to expose the scene. In these instances, passing above the night side of the planet and shielded from the Sun, cameras are set for maximum sensitivity and so stars can register on the sensor. In daylight the camera is set differently, so as not to overexpose a brightly-lit Earth. This makes capturing much dimmer background stars impossible.)

The video was rotated (by me) 90º clockwise to give, one: a larger view on screen, and two: an entirely different sense of passing “around” the planet. North is up, and so it portrays more of a globe feeling, in my opinion. But, however you look at it, the view is simply incredible!

Video courtesy of the Image Science & Analysis Laboratory, NASA Johnson Space Center. See the original video and more at The Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth.

A time-lapse movie taken from the International Space Station shows a brightening view of Earth’s horizon at dawn on December 21. It features an orbital view of lightning storms, stars, airglow… and the dramatic appearance of “sungrazer” Comet Lovejoy as it rises above the atmosphere! Incredible! Discovered on December 2 by amateur astronomer Terry Lovejoy…