Inauguran en Bilbao el observatorio astronómico más potente de Euskadi
El observatorio, instalado en la azotea de la Escuela Técnica Superior de Bilbao, consta de una cúpula de más de tres metros y medio de diámetro.
La Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingeniería de Bilbao ha inaugurado esta mañana el Observatorio Astronómico Espazio Gela, que cuenta con el telescopio más potente de los instalados en Euskadi.
Instalado en la azotea de la facultad de Ingeniería, el observatorio consta de una cúpula de más de tres metros y medio de diámetro construida en Australia y su cubierta puede verse desde la calle.
Se dedicará a la docencia e investigación y sus usuarios serán, principalmente, alumnos del máster y doctorado en Ciencia y Tecnología Espacial que la Universidad del País Vasco (UPV-EHU) pondrá en marcha en octubre.
La instalación del observatorio ha sido posible gracias al proyecto “Aula Espazio”, un aula dirigida a estudiantes de ingeniería, física y matemáticas que se puso en marcha hace un año con el apoyo y la financiación de la Diputación de Bizkaia, que aporta 665.000 euros para cuatro años.
Read more
El observatorio ha costado 83.000 euros y además del telescopio principal cuenta con 25 puestos para el alumnado, telescopios auxiliares para la observación del sol y móviles para observaciones especiales y trabajos de campo.
Como viene siendo habitual aprovechamos el post para dar un repaso a las ultimas noticias y videos de los diferentes eventos y misiones de las agencias espaciales internacionales. NASA, ESA, JAXA….etc
The Usual Suspects
‘Science research is like detective work. One scientist takes his case to California’s Death Valley, to search for clues surrounding a Titan lake.’
Date- 15th July 10 Source- http://www-a.jpl.nasa.gov/index.cfm
See Beautiful Ontario Lacus
‘This animation glides along the shoreline of Ontario Lacus, the largest lake on the southern hemisphere of Saturn’s moon Titan. It is based on overlapping radar images obtained by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft on June 22, 2009, July 8, 2009 and Jan. 12, 2010. The images were synthesized into stereoscopic images by the Cassini radar team.
The northern shoreline features low hills, probably about 1 kilometer (3,000 feet) in altitude, and flooded river valleys. A smooth, wave-sculpted shoreline, like that seen on the southeastern side of Lake Michigan, can be seen at the northeastern part of the lake. The southeast shore features a round-headed bay intruding into the shore. The middle part of the western shoreline shows the first well-developed delta observed on Titan.
Topography has been vertically exaggerated by a factor of roughly 10 times. Titan’s solid surface and atmosphere are portrayed in shades of brown, approximating their appearance as measured by the descent imager and spectral radiometer on board the Huygens probe, which landed on Titan in 2005. Scientists surmise the liquid methane, ethane and propane in the lake would look black to the human eye, but this is a hypothesis based on the best available data. The sun was placed low on the horizon, at an angle similar to where it was during the Cassini flybys.’
NASA JPL scientists look for Earthly examples of the terrain features they’ve been seeing on Saturn’s moon Titan, including the dry landscapes of Death Valley, California. From NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Since we’re probably never going to get to the surface of Titan and be able to pick up the rocks and take samples of the liquid, we wanted to be able to understand a place that we can get to, and then draw conclusions about Titan.
We believe that geology is geology everywhere. So we’ve come to Death Valley, to Racetrack Playa. It’s a dry lake right now, but it’s a lake nonetheless; so we can look for similar pieces of evidence. The reason we do that is we can crawl around Death Valley and measure things. We could find out what’s happening and find out what causes that evidence to occur. And it’s just like a detective game from there on.
So whenever you have a high thing next to a low thing, you can be sure that something’s going to happen. Nature likes to even itself out. On Ontario Lacus, we have high things right next to low things. So the rainfall is going to move the material from the high to the low and it’s going to form these same alluvial fans where material washes out from the gully like it does here, and it’s going to flow the material down to the lakebed.
At Ontario Lacus, there are pieces of bedrock like this, only probably made out of water ice, that make fingers that extend down into the lake. It’s as though the lake had risen up and flooded those valleys. Now this is a much smaller example than we see on Ontario Lacus, but it tells us that the level of the water is what has made this into a finger, not the finger itself.
On Titan, we think that the lakes are filled by seasonal drainages. Sometimes, those drainages make cross-hatch patterns that look like gullies. So we looked on Earth for a place that has those cross-hatch gullies, and here we find it at Racetrack Playa. Water that comes down from those hills flows in infrequent but violent thunderstorms out onto Racetrack Playa. As the rainfall comes down closer to the playa, on Titan, they form deltas, something like the Mississippi Delta out there.
This is a dry lakebed, so what happens is that the gravel just gets pushed out onto the lakebed. And that’s a clue, that what’s happening on Titan is a fluid, not a dry lakebed. So by studying the relationship between the evidence and the events here in Death Valley,where we can measure them, we can connect that same set of evidence to the events that might have happened on Titan.
It’s important because if we’re going to find life somewhere else in the universe, it has to have something in common with the once place that we know has life, and that’s here.
M31 Black Hole in 60 Seconds (Standard Definition)
For over a decade, astronomers have been using the Chandra X-ray Observatory to monitor the supermassive black hole in the center of Andromeda, the Milky Way’s sister galaxy.
M31 Black Hole in 60 Seconds (High Definition)
You Must First Invent The Universe
A general rebuttal to the claim that the earth and the universe is young, plus a comment on how much humanity has achieved since its relatively recent emergence in the grand scale of things.
Monday, July 19th, 2010,
by Manuel and is filed under "Aeronautica, Astrofisica, Astronomia, Ciencia, ESA, Hearth, Ingenieria, NASA, Science, Technology, Tecnologia, Tierra, Universidad, Universo |
, Astrofisica, Astronomia, Ciencia, ESA, Internacional, NASA, Science, Technology, Tecnologia, Universo ".
You can leave a response here,
or send a Trackback
from your own site.
