Tag archives for orbit
My God, It’s Full of Stars…
Posted by Jason Major on January 20, 2012 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 Commanding View of a Comet
Posted by Jason Major on December 22, 2011 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!
Posted by In Roman mythology, Mercury was the fleet-footed messenger to the gods. It’s therefore fitting that NASA went to great pains to name the first spacecraft to orbit the planet Mercury MESSENGER. That’s an acronym for MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging. (Personally, I would have tried to find a way to name the orbiter…
It might not be in the stars for humans to return to the moon anytime soon. But NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, launched last year in part to scout locations for a moon base, is proving that there’s still plenty it can do in the name of space exploration. High-resolution LRO images have helped researchers track…
From huge patches of plastic in remote corners of the ocean to piles of consumer electronics in rural Nigeria, trash has a way of accumulating even in places few of Earth’s 6.8 billion people have ever been. Space is no exception: Even though the first satellite went into low-Earth orbit a little over 50 years…
—Image courtesy NOAA Next week NASA will launch the latest in a series of satellites run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration designed to track extreme weather events from space. Known as the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites, or GOES, each craft carries a letter designation until it arrives in orbit, when it is renamed…
The closer stuff is to the sun, the harder it is to see. —Image courtesy SOHO (ESA & NASA) That’s the fundamental problem with vulcanoids, a hypothetical band of asteroids orbiting between the sun and the closest planet in, Mercury. In fact, for years that was the problem with studying Mercury, since looking at the…
At 5:55 p.m. ET today, the MESSENGER spacecraft will make its closest pass in its third and final flyby of the innermost planet. Mercury, as seen from MESSENGER on September 28, 2009 —Image courtesy NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington When images from the flyby start pouring in around midnight, scientists hope…
Posted by These NASA images represent all man-made objects, both functioning and useful objects and debris, currently being tracked by the U.S. Space Surveillance Network. NASA illustrations courtesy Orbital Debris Program Office. Caption by Holli Riebeek The images were made from models used to track debris in Earth orbit, NASA said in a caption accompanying the release…
On October 9, 2009, a piece of launch rocket still attached to an orbiting spacecraft will finally let go so it can take a dive into the moon. The event is the end goal of NASA’s LCROSS mission, which aims to study material kicked up by the impact to find out whether the lunar surface…
After a successful four-year mission studying the ringed planet, the Cassini probe was still orbiting Saturn in near perfect health in June 2008. So NASA dug deep and found the funding to keep Cassini gainfully employed. The extension, dubbed the Equinox Mission, is primarily focused on changes wrought on Saturn by the onset of equinox,…
Right now people in the Northern Hemisphere are enjoying the last few weeks when Venus will shine bright in the night. Around the end of March the “evening star” becomes the “morning star,” and the planet won’t grace the dusk skies again until next year. (Read more at EarthSky to find out why Venus makes…
It seems fitting that in a year being celebrated worldwide as the 400th anniversary of telescopic astronomy, NASA and ESA have chosen one of Galileo’s first loves, Jupiter, as their next top planet. Cut-away images show the insides of Io, Ganymede, … In January of 1610 the famed Italian Galileo Galilei pointed a homemade ‘scope…
Great stars don’t die, they just fade away. It’s been almost two months since NASA lost contact with the Phoenix Mars Lander, which had been studying icy soils near the red planet’s north pole. The lander’s surface stereo imager made a mosaic to show the craft from a few feet in the air—that black spot…
Tip ‘o the backyard telescope to the folks over at EarthSky, who have a skywatcher alert that this Friday, December 12, the full moon will be closer to Earth than it has been for the past 15 years. If the weather cooperates, viewers will see the whole round, shining face of the moon at its…
Okay, not really, but I couldn’t resist. In reality, the agency has approved a new spacecraft dubbed Juno that will launch in 2011, making it into an elliptical polar orbit around Jupiter by 2016. The mission isn’t named for the teenage darling of independent film, but for the Roman goddess who was the jealous sister-wife…
On November 20, 1998, a bus-size hunk of electronics poetically named Zarya, Russian for “dawn,” blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The module was the first piece of the International Space Station, which after ten years and 29 construction deliveries is the largest spacecraft ever built, comparable in size to a five-bedroom house—albeit…
Sometimes it seems like being large, distant, and gassy is a major turn-off for space engineers—unless you’ve got great eyes or lots of jewelry. Of the eight recognized planets in our solar system, the terrestrial worlds are by far the in-crowd as far as scientific orbiters are concerned, with Mars and Earth as the obvious…
Bang! Zoom! Straight to tha moon! That’s what officials at the Indian Space Research Organization hope will happen early tomorrow, when India sends up its first ever mission to the moon: Chandrayaan-1. Starting at 5:50 a.m. local Indian time, you can watch a live webcast of Chandrayaan-1 lifting off from Satish Dhawan Space Centre on…
—Image courtesy NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington NASA’s MESSENGER space probe sent some postcards home this morning from its second jaunt past Mercury, that tiny planet nearest to the sun. The flyby is part of some maneuvering MESSENGER has to do to ease itself from orbiting the sun to orbiting Mercury.…
