Crew Return Vehicle – the CRV

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In novel, Orbital Maneuvers, the crew was able to return to Earth using the CRV or the Crew Return Vehicle.  NASA just posted a rather neat picture of the CRV hanging from the wing of the B-52 mother-ship.

Crew Return Vehicle X-38 - Image courtesy of NASA

This is not a full size vehicle of the X-38 but only 80% scale model that was used for drop testing.  It’s very unfortunate that the CRV was not finished, as it would have provided an alternative to using two Russian Soyuz capsules as escape vehicles for a full space station crew compliment.  With the end of the space shuttle’s tour of duty drawing near, we are even more dependent on Russia to get to and from the ISS.  A situation that I sincerely hope does not place politics and international relations above the space science and research we’ve worked so hard to create and do on the ISS.

There is more information and pictures on the CRV and the Soyuz capsule on the website.

Here’s a link to a larger picture of the X-38.  Also, check out NASA’s Picture of the Day site for a daily fix for images of and about space and NASA technology.

Till next time,

RC Davison

Comet Hartley 2 and the International Space Station

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Thanks to the efforts of Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society, there is a really neat image that shows to scale the International Space Station next to the nucleus of comet Hartley 2.  (Note that this is a composite picture created using graphic manipulation software.)

Comet Hartley 2 and ISS - Image courtesy of NASA and Emily Lakdawalla

We have an appreciation for how big the space station is relative to the shuttle but seeing it next to the comet gives one a better sense of how big this small comet is.   Check out Emily’s blog, she does a great job posting the latest developments in planetary science.

Till next time,

RC Davison

The Heart of a Comet

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NASA’s EPOXI mission, formerly the Deep Impact mission that launched an impactor into comet Temple 1 on July 4, 2005, has just sent back some amazing images of the nucleus of comet Hartley 2 as it flew by at a distance of about 700 km or about 420 miles.

Flyby views of Comet Hartley 2 - Image courtesy of NASA

You can easily see the jets of vapor being back-lit by the Sun at the ends of the nucleus, which is about 2 km, or about 1.2 miles long.  This is a great image that shows just where the large tail and coma, which surrounds the nucleus comes from.  Check out NASA’s site for EPOXI for more pictures and information.

This isn’t the first time we’ve gotten an image of a comet’s nucleus.  The picture below shows a nice comparison of the five comets we’ve peeked at.

5 Comets we've visited. Image courtesy of NASA

Till next time,

RC Davison

Final Launch of the Shuttle Discovery: STS-133

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Space Shuttle Discovery sits on the pad awaiting another leak (actually 2) to be repaired. this time in the pressurization system on the right maneuvering system.  About two weeks ago they were fixing a fuel leak.  Maybe this is routine as shuttle launches go, or maybe it is showing that time and space are beginning to take their toll.

Discovery's Final Rollout - Image courtesy Larry Tanner, United Space Alliance

(Shuttle Image courtesy Larry Tanner, United Space Alliance.  Click for larger image.)

I fear that we are pushing our luck with each launch of these complex machines.  Although well maintained and serviced, they are still operating with equipment and systems that are beyond their specified operating lifetimes.  From an engineering perspective, that’s not a good thing to be doing.  It angers me that we, as a country, have not had the foresight and energy to build a successor to the shuttle fleet such that we could retire these work-horses and continue exploring space and servicing the International Space Station (ISS) without interruption.  We dropped the ball as far back as the  1970’s when the last Apollo missions were canceled.

At this point there are no quick answers.  Commercial space flight may come about in the near future, but that is highly dependent on how successful the initial flights are, and if these companies can make money off the venture.  I’m not very comfortable being tied into using another country to get to the ISS, but for now that is all we’ve got.

For today, I hope Discovery has a flawless mission and returns safely to Earth with her crew.  The time has come for her to return to Mother Earth and reach no longer for the stars.

Till next time –

RC Davison

In The Spirit of Halloween

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For those of you that celebrate, appreciate, or just tolerate Halloween, I offer you a cosmic witch to look out for!

Witch's Nebula in the Orion Nebula - Courtesy of Star Shadows Remote Observatory

Catching some rays from Orion’s blue supergiant – Rigel, the witch is actually a reflection nebula (hence the bluish color) that is over 50 light-years long.   The Witch Head Nebula (IC 2118) is about 1000 light-years distant, so we have nothing to fear from this witch on Halloween!

Click the link for more information about, and a larger image of the Witch Head Nebula.

Till next time,

RC Davison

Stars In Motion!

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When I look at a globular cluster like Omega Centauri I always imagined that the 10 million stars in the cluster rotated majestically about a central mass in an orderly fashion.

Globular Cluster Omega Centauri - Image courtesy of the University of Michigan

Thanks to some new work by two astronomers from the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md, my peaceful, orderly vision of a globular cluster has been trashed!

Jay Anderson and Roeland van der Marel, using data from the Hubble Space Telescope, have measured the velocities of some of the stars at the heart of the cluster and their motion is far from peaceful!

In the close-up image below, we see the brilliant blue and red stars that reside in the center of this ancient globular cluster.  The area in the rectangle is magnified and displayed below showing the relative velocities of the stars contained within.

Using Hubble to Chart the Future Motions of Stars Within a Cluster

Source: Hubblesite.org

This motion was gleaned from images Hubble took in 2002 and 2006.  Its precise optics allowed the astronomers the ability to measure the relative motion of these stars over such a short period of time.

In the Hubble clip below, you will zoom into the heart of Omega Centauri and ultimately see the predicted motions for these stars over the next 10,000 years.  It is interesting to note that this random motion gives astronomers clues that may dispel the theory of a massive black hole at the center of globular clusters.  There may be a black hole present, but it would not be equivalent to the massive black holes found in the center of galaxies, like the one at the center of the Milky Way, which is about 4 million times the mass of our Sun.

Till next time,

RC Davison

Inside The Milky Way

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“Inside The Milky Way” is a new production by the National Geographic Channel that aired Sunday night and will be broadcast again on Thursday, October 28th at 9 pm.  I saw most of the program and highly recommend it.

Stunning visuals, animations, and the latest hot topics in astronomy are intelligently discussed in this 2-hour program.  Black holes, dark matter, galactic superclusters, and the Andromeda/Milky Way collision (In about 2 billion years – don’t sweat it!) are some of the topics covered.  (Just ignore the sound effects for the supernova!)

Check out the web site for some videos and photos.  Enjoy!

Till next time,

RC Davison

Do They Know We’re Here? – Clarification

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My post on August 21, 2010, “Do They Know We’re Here?” contains a bit of misinformation, which I hadn’t thought of until reading the latest Planetary Report from the Planetary Society.

While we’ve been experimenting and transmitting radio signal for over a 100 years, those early transmissions were low frequency, typically 1 MHz or less.  The ionized layer of our atmosphere – the ionosphere, reflects those signals back down to the surface, so they won’t escape the planet.

If any of you have listened to AM radio (Remember that?) at night, you find that you can pick up stations from 100s to 1000s of miles away, whereas you can’t hear them during the day.  This is because at night, the sunlight is no longer showering the atmosphere with UV radiation, which knocks electrons off the oxygen and nitrogen atoms charging them – ionizing them.  The lower layer of the ionosphere rapidly dissipates when the Sun sets, leaving the higher layers to reflect the AM transmissions, allowing them to reach much further.

We don’t see this with our FM radios,  because they operate at much higher frequencies (in the 10-100 MHz range) and don’t rely on the ionosphere to  reflect them to your radio.  For your radio to receive your favorite FM station, you have to be able to receive the signal directly from the transmitting antenna, this is why they are called “line-of-sight” transmissions.  These higher frequencies were used commercially for FM radio and early television in the early 1930s, and they blasted right through the ionosphere and out into space.

So, a long winded explanation to say that we’ve really been broadcasting to the cosmos for about 75 years, as opposed to the 100 years mentioned in the earlier post.

Comments always welcome!

Till next time,

RC Davison

It’s Full of Stars!

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Initially, I was just going to put up a link to the European Southern Observatory’s list of top 100 images, which has enough pictures to keep any fan of the cosmos happy.  But, I made the mistake of checking out NASA’s Hubble site, which has a huge collection of images, and I compounded that mistake by looking at the European Space Agency’s (ESA) site for Hubble.  Wow!  I think I’ve overloaded my neural-net!

There is just way too much to look at on these sites!  As a tantalizing tidbit, take a look at this beautiful Hubble image of the spiral galaxy NGC 5866 seen edge on.

Spiral Galaxy NGC 5866 Seen Edge On - Hubble Image

Click on the link above for larger images (down-loadable) where you can enjoy the exquisite detail Hubble captured of this galaxy.

One last thing.  ESO is running a contest – ESO’s Hidden Treasures for anyone that has an interest in creating a new image from their data archives.  They provide instructions on what you have to do to create the image, but hurry, the contest ends on November 30, 2010.

Till next time,

RC Davison

UFOs – Real or Imaginary?

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UFOs seem to be popping up in the news.  China is having a rash of sightings compromising certain airports in their country, and the National Press Club had a news conference on September 27, 2010 with retired Air Force personnel recounting their experiences.

So, UFOs, real or imaginary?

To paraphrase Carl Sagan, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, we have to ask, where’s the evidence?  Surely, UFOs are extraordinary objects, but we don’t seem to have the hard physical evidence.  Some might argue that there is physical evidence, but it is locked up on some high security military base, or buried in a nondescript government warehouse.  So, the general public doesn’t have access to that.  What we do have is a small percentage of sightings that can not be explained as the planet Venus, weather balloons, airplanes, etc.  Within this group of unexplained cases we find that a percentage of those sightings were made by people with professional backgrounds—pilots, police officers, military personnel, and astronauts— that lend credibility to their reports.  They knew enough and had enough experience to report an incident that could not be dismissed with one of the typical explanations.

I think we are too short-sighted and conceited to admit that there is other intelligent life in our galaxy/universe.  The argument is often put forth that the physics prevents interstellar travel, so it is impossible that these sightings are extraterrestrial in origin.  To think that we know everything there is to know about the physics of the cosmos is as faulty today as it was in the late 1800s when scientists thought there was nothing more to learn.  They had discovered electricity, magnetism, gravity…What else was there to discover?  It was around the turn of the century that X-rays were discovered, and a few years later Einstein came up with his theories about the photoelectric effect and relativity, and it goes on and on.  There is a lot out there we haven’t a clue about yet!

For me, it’s not hard to see that we don’t know everything about everything.  And, with over 300 billion stars in this galaxy, which is over 10 billion years old, and with an unimaginable number of planets orbiting those stars, odds are that there are many extraterrestrial civilizations out there.  Personally, I think that they’ve been here and checked us out more than once.

Why?  Who knows?  Maybe one day we will get to ask them in person.

I’ve been working on a new novel for the last year or so that involves a unique UFO encounter.  This all adds incentive to finish it up sooner!

Till next time,

RC Davison