Hubble spies fourth moon at Pluto

[Ringel05]

Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have identified another moon around the dwarf planet Pluto.

It becomes the fourth object known to be circling the distant world after the long-recognised Charon and recently observed Nix and Hydra satellites.

Scientists are temporarily calling the new moon P4 and estimate its diameter to be 13 to 34 km (of 8 to 21 miles).

Pluto, controversially demoted from full planet status in 2006, will be the target of a big space mission in 2015.

BBC News - Hubble spies fourth moon at Pluto

 

[waltky]

Hubble space telescope comes to end of it's mission...

Hubble's Dazzling Mission Nears Its End
May 23, 2014 ~ The Hubble Space Telescope has changed the way we see the universe.

For almost a quarter of a century, it has sent vast amounts of data and images from space. A new exhibit at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington documents how Hubble’s remarkable success has hinged on its ability to be repaired and serviced in orbit. Hubble was launched aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery in 1990. Mission Control saw something it hadn’t expected: fuzzy images. Hubble Space Telescope Program Manager Douglas Broome delivered the troubling news: “The conclusion we’ve come to is that a significant spherical aberration appears to be present in the optics, in the optical telescope system optics,” he said.

In other words - the outer edge of Hubble's primary mirror had been ground too flat, off by roughly one-fiftieth the thickness of a human hair. In 1993, a shuttle mission carried a replacement camera, WFPC2 and an instrument with corrective lenses called COSTAR for astronauts to install on the telescope. “The COSTAR inserted mirrors into the optical beam that corrected the light for all the other instruments,” said National Air and Space Museum senior curator David Devorkin. The fix proved that very difficult and very complicated operations could be undertaken by shuttle astronauts. “The whole idea of living and working in space is doing useful stuff and this certainly was useful," Devorkin said. "On the astronomical side and you might say on the technical side, it represents how fast telescopes are improving because Hubble was only repaired once, but it was upgraded four times.” COSTAR and WFPC2 were replaced in 2009 and are now on exhibit in the museum.

The near collision of two spiral galaxies taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and its Wide Field Planetary Camera 2

Hubble images have become better and sharper over time, and its data has allowed astronomers to confirm that the universe is expanding and calculate its age to some 13 to 14 billion years. And the powerful space telescope has led to other important breakthroughs. "… understanding star forming regions, how stars form out of gas and dust, and now the ability of the Hubble to see deeply into the infrared, far deeper than before has shown us the processes inside these interstellar clouds that literally are forming the stars and their interaction with the dust and gas around them,” Devorkin said.

As Hubble nears the end of its journey in space, the telescope has paved the way for its replacement. The James Webb Space Telescope - with an expected launch date in 2018 - will probe even farther beyond the spectrum of light with a primary mirror five times larger than Hubble. “The James Webb is optimized for infrared because all of the most amazing discoveries about galaxy formation, star formation and the kind of stuff that astronomers want to know is in the infrared,” Devorkin said.

No more service missions are scheduled for repairs or upgrades. Hubble's components will slowly degrade to the point the telescope stops working. When that happens, the telescope will continue to orbit the Earth until its orbit decays, allowing it to spiral toward Earth. A robotic mission is expected to help de-orbit Hubble, guiding its remains through a plunge through the atmosphere and into the ocean, as its stellar career comes to an end. But for now, as Hubble nears its 25th birthday next year, the telescope is still going strong. Astronomers hope it will last long enough for the James Webb Space Telescope to launch so that the two can be in space at same time and calibrate with one another. Until its space journey comes to an end, Hubble remains a workhorse for astronomers and continues to delight the public with dazzling images.

Hubble's Dazzling Mission Nears Its End

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Rare and Spectacular Meteor Shower May Light Up the Skies Over North and Central America
May 23rd, 2014 ~ If you live in North or Central America, you just might have front row seats to a rare and spectacular meteor shower. Scientists said that the view might even better if you happen to be in the northwestern United States or in southern Canada

NASA said the shower — dubbed the May Camelopardalids, which can mean either ‘camel leopard’ or giraffe in Latin — could possibly light up the sky sometime between 0230 and 1100 UTC on May 24. This celestial light show should take place early Saturday morning, but scientists aren’t absolutely sure. Since this is a new meteor shower, there’s also a chance that it might take place at another time or possibly not at all. At its peak, which should be between 0600 and 0800 UTC, May 24, the May Camelopardalids could produce about 200 or so meteors per hour.

A meteor shower occurs when a number of meteors originate from one point in the night sky. They are caused by cosmic debris which enters the Earth’s atmosphere at extremely high speeds on parallel trajectories. The new meteor shower is being produced because Earth will be making its way through a field of dust and other debris generated by Comet 209P/LINEAR, which is looping back into the deep solar system after a recent rendezvous with the Sun.

Projected viewing of May Camelopardalids meteor shower at its peak 0600 – 0800 UTC May 24, 2014

The comet doesn’t seem to be particularly active at the moment, but it is dragging some of the refuse material it ejected in its previous 5-year trips around the sun. The amount of remaining debris will also factor into how active a meteor shower this will be. Part of the comet’s name – LINEAR – is actually an acronym for Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research which is the name of a research project that discovered the comet back in February 2004.

The comet got within about 13,463,808 kilometers of the Sun back on May 6, 2014. The 209P/LINEAR is also supposed to get pretty close to Earth on May 29, 2014 where it’ll pass us from a distance of about 5,983,915 kilometers. Along with the upcoming May Camelopardalids, stargazers will also be getting set to observe two of the most popular annual meteor showers, the Perseid, which peaks in August and the Leonid meteor showers that usually takes place every November.

http://blogs.voanews.com/science-wo...s-over-north-and-central-america/?from=lister

 

[waltky]

Hubble gets new lease on life...

Hubble Space Telescope Gets a New 5-Year Contract
August 11, 2016 — The Hubble Space Telescope has been dazzling earthlings with views of deep space for over 26 years. That’s old for a satellite but NASA has a team of approximately 80 engineers working at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland to extend the life of Hubble’s mechanical parts.

Anticipating Anomalies

Hubble is taking pictures and transmitting them down to Earth 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, as it races around our planet at more than 27,000 kilometers per hour. This means that most of the instructions sent to the orbiting observatory must be automated and uploaded ahead of time. So, the engineers at Goddard spend much of their time coming up with innovative ways to keep the decades-old mechanisms on Hubble moving. This usually involves minimizing the motions of the most-used gears and predicting the future. “Part of our jobs here at Goddard is to try to anticipate problems ... and try to find ways to work around them or respond to them so we get back to science” as quickly as possible, Olivia Lupie, mission operations manager for Hubble, tells VOA. Months and months pass between issues. But rest assured, the engineers are prepared to respond to get the telescope back on its science schedule -- even on weekends.

These towers of gas and dust in the Eagle Nebula are known as the Pillars of Creation because within them, hundreds of new stars are being created.​

Hubble Tetris

Astronomers from around the world request images from Hubble. Each week, Merle Reinhart, an engineer at the Space Telescope Science Institute, is tasked with organizing hundreds those requests. “It’s kind of a big jigsaw puzzle. The hard part is trying to figure out the most efficient way to put all those together so that we’re making maximum use of the time on Hubble,” Reinhart explains. “We really don’t want the spacecraft sitting there doing nothing.” The images are usually available within 24-48 hours. It can take anywhere from a few weeks to a few months for the researchers to look at the data and tell the world about their exciting results. Data from Hubble has allowed astronomers to make cosmic breakthroughs:

* pin down the age of the universe by measuring the brightness of stars in distant galaxies
* watch comets plunge into Jupiter’s clouds, providing new insights into the physics of the stormy planet
* take the very first images of planet-forming disks around newborn stars, something astronomers knew had to be there but never dreamed they’d see with their own eyes.

Four of these five galaxies in Stephan's Quintet are so close together they are bound together by gravity and will eventually merge into a single galaxy. The galaxy at top left is in the foreground, far from the other members.​

Cosmic team-up

NASA began constructing Hubble in 1979 for what was planned as a 15-year mission. But several visits by shuttle astronauts to fix problems and install updates prolonged its life beyond that, and Hubble is still working so well that NASA just extended its operation for another five years. That means its mission will overlap with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), scheduled to launch in October, 2018. That will give astronomers what Malcolm Niedner, JWST project manager, calls "a very full toolkit." "Hubble is primarily an optical and ultra-violet telescope," he explained. "James Webb is an infrared telescope. Having them both together, very potent, very powerful." The James Webb Space Telescope is still being assembled and tested here on Earth but astronomers can hardly wait to see what this dynamic duo can produce.

Hubble's image of the dark clouds of the Carina Nebula​

Hubble Space Telescope Gets a New 5-Year Contract

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2nd Planet May Have Been Habitable Once: Scientists
August 12, 2016 - “Hellish” is a word commonly used to describe the atmosphere on Venus, but a new study suggests the second planet from the sun may have been habitable once.

Writing in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, climate scientists from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) say the planet may have had a shallow ocean and “habitable surface temperatures” for around 2 billion years of its history. “Many of the same tools we use to model climate change on Earth can be adapted to study climates on other planets, both past and present,” said Michael Way, a researcher at GISS and the paper’s lead author. “These results show ancient Venus may have been a very different place than it is today.” Today, Venus is a suffocating place with an atmosphere 90 times denser than Earth’s, almost no water vapor and temperatures that can reach as high as 462 degrees Celsius. Venus likely formed from the same materials as Earth, but went in a very different direction at some point in its history.

The notion of a liquid ocean once flowing on the planet’s surface is not new. In the 1980s, the Pioneer space probe discovered hints that water once existed; but, that water was burned off by the amount of sunlight Venus gets. Venus spins very slowly, and one day there is the same as 117 days here on Earth. Even the water vapor was likely broken apart by ultraviolet radiation, which caused the hydrogen to escape the atmosphere, say scientists. “With no water left on the surface, carbon dioxide built up in the atmosphere, leading to a so-called runaway greenhouse effect that created present conditions,” NASA wrote in a press release.

This June 2004 photo shows the transit of Venus, which occurs when Venus passes between the Earth and the sun.​

Venus’ slow rotation compared to Earth was thought to be a result of the thick atmosphere; but, researchers say that even a planet with a relatively thin atmosphere like Earth’s could also spin slowly. That means an ancient, habitable Venus could have also spun slowly. Topography also plays a crucial role in Venus’ atmosphere. The researchers think that even with an ocean, Venus has more dry land than Earth, particularly in the tropical regions. This, researchers say, would limit evaporation and slow down the greenhouse effect caused by water vapor.[ “This type of surface appears ideal for making a planet habitable; there seems to have been enough water to support abundant life, with sufficient land to reduce the planet’s sensitivity to changes from incoming sunlight,” NASA said.

For the climate modeling used in this study, researchers took all of this into consideration when making a model for a hypothetical early Venus. They also took into account data from the Magellan spacecraft mission in the 1990's as well as factoring in that the ancient sun was up to 30 percent dimmer than it is today. “In the GISS model’s simulation, Venus’ slow spin exposes its dayside to the sun for almost two months at a time,” co-author and fellow GISS scientist Anthony Del Genio said. “This warms the surface and produces rain that creates a thick layer of clouds, which acts like an umbrella to shield the surface from much of the solar heating. The result is mean climate temperatures that are actually a few degrees cooler than Earth’s today.”

2nd Planet May Have Been Habitable Once: Scientists

 

[SixFoot]

Hubble couldn't even tell us what color Pluto was, now it's discovering new moons? How come New Horizons didn't catch any of this?