Novedades Astrofisica
Ultimas noticias delos eventos y las diferentes misones de las Agencias espaciales internacionales , NASA, ESA, JAXA…etc
NASA Televisions 2010 Happy New Year ID
NASA Televisions Happy New Year ID for 2010.
Mark R. Hailey, NASA Televisions Art Director, created this piece.
Water On The Moon
LCROSS Impact: Water On The Moon.
NASA confirmed water was detected when the Centaur rocket hit the moon. Where did it come from? Whats next? Will we develop a lunar outpost? One big answer leads to many bigger questions.
LCROSS Impact Data Indicates Water on Moon: The argument that the moon is a dry, desolate place no longer holds water.
Secrets the moon has been holding, for perhaps billions of years, are now being revealed to the delight of scientists and space enthusiasts alike.
NASA opened a new chapter in our understanding of the moon. Preliminary data from the Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, indicates that the mission successfully uncovered water during the Oct. 9, 2009 impacts into the permanently shadowed region of Cabeus cater near the moons south pole.
The impact created by the LCROSS Centaur upper stage rocket created a two-part plume of material from the bottom of the crater. The first part was a high angle plume of vapor and fine dust and the second a lower angle ejecta curtain of heavier material. This material has not seen sunlight in billions of years.
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LCROSS/main/prelim_water_results.html
Read more
The California Academy of Sciences is a world-class scientific and cultural institution based in San Francisco. The Academy recently opened a new facility in Golden Gate Park, a 400,000 square foot structure that houses an aquarium, a planetarium a natural history museum and a 4-story rainforest all under one roof.
The new facility is also home to the Academy’s staff of world-class scientists, an education department that provides a wide range of student and teacher services, and an extensive science library with over 26 million specimens and artifacts.
Free Spirit: Six Years on Mars
‘On their sixth anniversary of landing on Mars, one of two scrappy rovers faces an uncertain future.’
http://www-a.jpl.nasa.gov/index.cfm
Chandra’s Extraordinary Universe
‘In ten years of operation, the Chandra X-ray Observatory has transformed our view of the high-energy universe with its ability to make exquisite X-ray images of star clusters, supernova remnants, galactic eruptions, and collisions between clusters of galaxies.’
http://chandra.harvard.edu/resources/podcasts/hd/index.html
Constellation Year in Review
A look back at the past year of NASA’s Constellation program.
Jupiter Gets The Measles
The most prominent feature on the planet Jupiter is a large, ruddy oval that is simply called the Great Red Spot (GRS). The GRS is a giant storm in Jupiter’s atmosphere that has been remarkably stable. In fact, it may have been observed as early as the 1660s. During the intervening centuries, the GRS was not just the largest, but also the only red spot ever seen on Jupiter.
That situation changed when a formerly white storm turned brown in late 2005, and then red in early 2006. And yet another red spot appeared in spring 2008. After such consistency for hundreds of years, Jupiter appears to be breaking out in red spots. Join us for a look at this historic case of planetary measles.
http://hubblesite.org/explore_astronomy/hubbles_universe_unfiltered/4
Jupiter is the fifth planet from the Sun and the largest planet within the Solar System. It is a gas giant with a mass slightly less than one-thousandth that of the Sun but is two and a half times the mass of all of the other planets in our Solar System combined. Jupiter is classified as a gas giant along with Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Together, these four planets are sometimes referred to as the Jovian planets.
The planet was known by astronomers of ancient times and was associated with the mythology and religious beliefs of many cultures. The Romans named the planet after the Roman god Jupiter.
Jupiter is primarily composed of hydrogen with a quarter of its mass being helium; it may also have a rocky core of heavier elements. Because of its rapid rotation, Jupiter’s shape is that of an oblate spheroid (it possesses a slight but noticeable bulge around the equator).
The outer atmosphere is visibly segregated into several bands at different latitudes, resulting in turbulence and storms along their interacting boundaries. A prominent result is the Great Red Spot, a giant storm that is known to have existed since at least the 17th century when it was first seen by telescope.
Surrounding the planet is a faint planetary ring system and a powerful magnetosphere. There are also at least 63 moons, including the four large moons called the Galilean moons that were first discovered by Galileo Galilei in 1610. Ganymede, the largest of these moons, has a diameter greater than that of the planet Mercury.
Jupiter has been explored on several occasions by robotic spacecraft, most notably during the early Pioneer and Voyager flyby missions and later by the Galileo orbiter. The most recent probe to visit Jupiter was the Pluto-bound New Horizons spacecraft in late February 2007.
Great Red Spot and other storms
The best known feature of Jupiter is the Great Red Spot, a persistent anticyclonic storm located 22° south of the equator that is larger than Earth. It is known to have been in existence since at least 1831, and possibly since 1665.
Mathematical models suggest that the storm is stable and may be a permanent feature of the planet. The storm is large enough to be visible through Earth-based telescopes with an aperture of 12 cm or larger.
The oval object rotates counterclockwise, with a period of about six days. The Great Red Spot’s dimensions are 2440,000 km × 1214,000 km. It is large enough to contain two or three planets of Earth’s diameter.
Storms such as this are common within the turbulent atmospheres of gas giants. Jupiter also has white ovals and brown ovals, which are lesser unnamed storms.
White ovals tend to consist of relatively cool clouds within the upper atmosphere. Brown ovals are warmer and located within the “normal cloud layer”. Such storms can last as little as a few hours or stretch on for centuries.
Even before Voyager proved that the feature was a storm, there was strong evidence that the spot could not be associated with any deeper feature on the planet’s surface, as the Spot rotates differentially with respect to the rest of the atmosphere, sometimes faster and sometimes more slowly. During its recorded history it has traveled several times around the planet relative to any possible fixed rotational marker below it.
In 2000, an atmospheric feature formed in the southern hemisphere that is similar in appearance to the Great Red Spot, but smaller in size. This was created when several smaller, white oval-shaped storms merged to form a single feature—these three smaller white ovals were first observed in 1938. The merged feature was named Oval BA, and has been nicknamed Red Spot Junior. It has since increased in intensity and changed color from white to red.
wikipedia.org
Best of The Beautiful Universe
http://chandra.harvard.edu/resources/podcasts/hd/index.html
Wednesday, December 30th, 2009,
by Manuel and is filed under "Agujeros negros, Astrofisica, Astronomia, Ciencia, Cosmologia, Cosmos, ESA, Exobiologia, Exploración, Fisica, Galaxias, Hubble, Internacional, Investigacion, Nasa, Science, Sistema Solar, Technology, Tecnologia, The Universe, Universo |
, Agujeros negros, Astrofisica, Astronomia, Chandra's, Ciencia, Cosmologia, ESA, Hubble, LCROSS, Nasa, Science, Technology, Tecnologia, Tierra, Universo ".
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