New Mars image and an update
I’m always impressed by the images that come back from Mars Express’ High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC). This new one released a few days ago (below) is no exception. It shows a region called Hebes Chasma, a vast gauge into the martian surface around 8 kilometres deep! The incredible feature is located just above the main canyon on Mars, the impressive and truly staggering in size (3000km long!), Valles Marineris. Each pixel in the image corresponds to 15 metres on the martian surface.
Scientists studying the image believe it shows evidence of landslides, depositions and other hints of a terrain shaped by erosion, large-scale geological activity and water. In fact recently the spectrometer on-board Mars Express detected signs of water-bearing minerals around Hebes Chasma showing that there have clearly been, according to ESA, “significant quantities of water” there in the past. To see more images as well as the high-res versions visit the ESA page here. If you have got some 3D specs then have a look at the anaglyph below to see Hebes Chasma in perspective.
Also a quick mention to thank all the people who came to my Hubble talk in Torquay on the 20th. It was good to visit Torbay again and to see many faces from the Torbay Astronomical Society which I haven’t seen for a while. I’m going to be heading over to Belfast on Tuesday for a few days for the Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting 2008. When I get a moment I will post about some of the fascinating discoveries and announcements that always come up at NAM. It seems I will be in good company!
Top image: Hebes Chasma from the HRSC on Mars Express
Bottom image: A 3D anaglyph of the Hebes Chasma region
Image credits: ESA/ DLR/ FU Berlin (G. Neukum)
Hubble finds methane on an exoplanet
The Hubble Space Telescope has recently found the organic molecule methane on the extrasolar planet HD 189733b. Here’s a section of the ESA press release below.
“Under the right circumstances methane can play a key role in prebiotic chemistry – the chemical reactions considered necessary to form life as we know it. Although methane has been detected on most of the planets in our Solar System, this is the first time any organic molecule has been detected on a world orbiting another star”
With an atmospheric temperature of around 900 degrees there certainly isn’t going to be life (at least as we know it) on HD 189733b. The importance of this observation is more that it is “proof that spectroscopy can eventually be done on a cooler and potentially habitable Earth-sized planet orbiting a dimmer red dwarf-type star” says Mark Swain who led the team that made the discovery at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
I saw this exciting news come in when I was working with the Hubble group in Germany and I began scripting a Hubblecast to cover the result. To see the finished piece visit the ESA Hubblecast no.14 page here.
Above: An artist’s impression of HD 189733b around its parent star.
Credit: Credit: ESA, NASA and G. Tinetti (University College London, UK & ESA)
Britain’s Moon shot
I have a new feature article (my first cover feature!) in April’s issue of BBC Sky At Night magazine, which is in the shops on Tuesday 18th March.
The article covers the proposed MoonLITE probe, a UK mission to send a small spacecraft to the Moon deploying four missiles to study the lunar surface. The missiles (or ‘penetrators’ as they are actually called) will impact the surface and remain there working for about a year. They will create a seismometer network as well as carry out geological and chemical analyses of the lunar surface. It’s a fascinating proposal. You can get the full story and read several expert interviews in the article.
You shouldn’t fail to miss the cover in the shops, the graphic designers and illustrators who worked on this article have really brought the story to life. So if you do spot the magazine grab a copy and find out how the UK may soon be joining the return to the Moon!
N.b. If you are in south-east England on Wednesday (19th March), at 10:30am, tune into BBC Radio Kent as I will be speaking live with Dominic King about MoonLITE. If you are in or around Cumbria I will be talking live to Ian Timms about the mission on BBC Radio Cumbria at 12:40pm the same day.
Lecture reminder
Just a reminder to those of you in the south-west UK that on Thursday evening ( 20.03.08 ) I will be giving a lecture to the Torbay Astronomical Society. The title of the talk is “Not just pretty pictures – the science behind Hubble’s greatest images”.
All are welcome and the talk starts at around 7:30pm at Torquay Boys’ Grammar School. For information on how to get there and visitor fees see the TAS website.
It’s all happening in the next few days…
There are a handful of very cool things going on in space over the next few days. Here’s my very quick run down of what not to miss.
The first event is happening in the wee small hours of tomorrow morning. The European Space Agency is launching the ATV, the Automated Transfer Vehicle, atop its Ariane 5 launcher. This is essentially a very large unmanned supply ship that is capable of flying to the International Space Station under its own power. It is going to be launched from the ESA launch site at Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana on Sunday morning at 04:03 GMT.
Once the ATV is at the station it will supply the ISS with drinking water, fuel for the station’s propulsion, food for the astronauts, clothing and spare parts for the new Columbus lab. It will also use its engine to boost the ISS into a higher orbit. Something that is very important to do as the ISS continually encounters the drag from the Earth’s atmosphere, causing it to slow and fall closer to Earth. You can read more about the ATV here and also watch the launch live here.
EDIT: The ATV has now successfully launched! You can try and see it too, albeit briefly, in the night sky (before it docks presumably) – more details at Heavens-Above.com
Above: An ESA Ariane 5 with the ATV inside, poised on the launchpad.
Credits: ESA – S. Corvaja 2008
The next Space Shuttle mission, STS-123, is set to lift-off from Cape Canaveral as well at 21:28 GMT on Tuesday 11th March. This is a night-time launch (by my recollection that hasn’t happened for a while) so should look very cool as the shuttle, Endeavour, rises into the inky black darkness. This will be the 25th flight to the ISS and Endeavour will be carrying a robotic system and the Japanese Kibo Logistics Module. You can watch the launch live on NASA TV and find out more about the Space Shuttle at the NASA page.
Above: The shuttle Endeavour lifting off on a previous 2007 mission.
Credit: NASA/John Kechele, Scott Haun, Tom Farrar.
The Cassini orbiter is going to be flying right over Enceladus’ surface on March 12th. Passing by only 50km above the icy moon’s surface we should see some truly incredible science come out of this flyby. Hopefully we will find out more about those jets! Cassini won’t be imaging though, at its closest appraoch, as it will be travelling far too fast not to take blurry pictures. But the pictures from before and after the approach should be amazing. You can get all the updates from the Cassini-Huygens website over at JPL when they are released.
Lastly then the Moon passes very close to the Pleiades cluster of stars on Wednesday (12th March); making for a nice early evening view through some bins or a small telescope. Visit the night sky page for more info.
44th Carnival of Space
The 44th Carnival of Space is being hosted by Phil on the Bad Astronomy blog, with a distinctly Martian theme.
Farside radio astronomy one step closer
For a long time astronomers (specifically radio astronomers) have wanted to place a telescope on the Moon. Now it seems that that desire is slowly becoming a possibility. NASA recently announced how it was backing a series of studies to investigate potential experiments for its ‘Next Generation Astronomy Missions’. Included in that backing is one proposal from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to build a small radio telescope array on the Moon’s far-side.
Radio telescopes are really important tools for probing the Universe. All sorts of objects emit radio waves; quasars, very hot gas in the space between the stars, electrons rapidly whirring around in magnetic fields as well as planets to name but a few. On Earth radio astronomy has been at the forefront of astronomical research for decades. Indeed many of the great discoveries of modern astronomy have been made thanks to the use of radio telescopes; for example the radio telescope (MK1A) at Jodrell Bank Observatory in the UK discovered the first gravitational lens amongst its many great accomplishments.
But there is a problem with doing radio astronomy from Earth. Radio signals from astronomical objects are extremely faint; something that makes observing radio sources tricky even on a good day. But radio waves, of course, don’t just come from the sky. Radio stations, satellites, Wi-Fi networks and many other man-made sources all emit vast amounts of radio waves that are much more powerful than those coming from space. With this ubiquitous fog of radio waves often ‘spilling’ into the frequencies that astronomers observe in (combined with the fact that the Earth’s ionosphere blocks certain radio signals) it’s a wonder we can observe anything emitting radio waves in space; sorting the proverbial radio wheat from the chaff is no easy task.
What radio astronomers really need is something to block all the ‘noise’ coming from the Earth. Something like a massive shield…something like…the Moon. By locating radio telescopes (or groups of smaller telescopes called ‘arrays’) on the lunar ‘farside’ the telescopes are hidden from the radio noise from the Earth, since the farside is always in the radio ‘shadow’ of the Moon, plus they don’t have the Earth’s ionosphere to contend with!
MIT’s proposed telescope will consist of hundreds of small instruments set up across about 2 square kilometres to studio low frequency radio waves. The telescopes will be arranged by robotic machines and they don’t have to be that accurate since the wavelenghts that the array will study are fairly long. The array will probe some of the least well known periods of the Universe’s early history as well as looking at space-weather from the solar wind, radio emissions from the planets and possibly even galaxies too.
I’m going to be talking to Dominic King live on BBC Radio Kent at 10:30am tomorrow morning about the ambitious plans for these lunar observatories so if you are in south-east England tune in!
Above: ‘Farside’ radio telescopes will be able to tell us more about periods in the early Universe, earlier than the HUDF (pictured).
Credit: NASA, ESA, and S. Beckwith (STScI) and the HUDF Team
The Sky At Night – Return to the Moon
If you didn’t catch last night’s Sky At Night programme then you should try and watch it in the next 7 days on BBC iPlayer or when it is repeated on BBC 2 this Saturday at 13:30*.
The episode is an hour long special called ‘Return to the Moon’. It covers everything from NASA’s Constellation program, the recent lunar eclipse, the hardware NASA are going to be using, the UK’s MoonLITE experiment and some great exchanges on the history of lunar observing (and of course Sir Patrick’s contribution) between Dr Allan Chapman and Sir Patrick. It really is a great episode and one not to miss.
Oh and if you haven’t already seen it you should check out the latest astounding image from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Chris has it over here.
*The BBC’s What’s On listing that I found lists the repeated episode as only 20 minutes long.
Above: NASA’s Orion craft (left) docked with the Altair lunar lander.
Image credit: NASA
