First of three Spacewalks

While I am here, writing my blog, astronauts Steve Swanson and Richardson Arnold are on the 1st of 3 spacewalks to install the S6 truss on the ISS. The main purpose of this spacewalk is to perform a number of tasks to help install the S6 truss. Once both the space walking astronauts are in place, Koichi Wakata and John Phillips will operate the stations robotic arm to carefully move S6 to the side of the already installed S5 truss. This space walk is expected to last 6.5 hrs. Man! What an experience.

Courtesy: www.nasa.gov

Discovery docked to ISS

Discovery successfully launched, headed its way to the International Space Station (ISS) and now it has successfully docked to it and delivered the final truss segment and pair of U.S. solar arrays and a new crew member to take up residence aboard the growing orbital scientific complex at 5:20 PM EDT today. Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata will now be the official resident aboard the growing orbital scientific complex.

Prime business for the crews Wednesday will be to lift the truss segment out of Discovery’s payload bay with the shuttle robot arm and hand it off to the station’s mechanical arm for an overnight stay before Thursday’s permanent installation on the station.

Courtesy: nasa.gov

Discovery is all set for Launch tomorrow

NASA managers said Saturday that space shuttle Discovery is ready for Sunday’s launch opportunity as repairs on a leaking gaseous hydrogen vent line are moving along smoothly.

The weather forecast continues to call for an 80 percent chance of acceptable conditions, said Kathy Winters, shuttle weather officer.

Launch controllers will begin preparing to pump fuel and oxygen into the external tank Sunday at 10:18 a.m. EDT. Launch time is 7:43 p.m.

I am desperately looking forward for the Launch... Godspeed, Discovery team.

Courtesy:nasa.gov

Up, up and away...

The Delta II rocket carrying the Kepler planet-hunting spacecraft lifted off on time at 10:49 p.m. EST from Launch Complex 17-B at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The spectacular nighttime launch followed a smooth countdown free of technical issues or weather concerns.

Kepler is a critical component in NASA's efforts to ultimately find and study planets where Earth-like conditions may be present," said Jon Morse. Earth like conditions may lead to “LIFE” on such planets is the understanding. Keplers mission is the first of its kind to detect and characterize such worlds around nearby stars.

Courtesy: nasa.gov

Retrograde Motion of Planets

Inferior and Superior planets: In terms of their motions in the Sky as seen from Earth, the planets are divided into two groups. The Inferior planets, Mercury and Venus, are those that orbit closer to the Sun than Earth. The remaining planets are all Superior planets.

The Retrograde that you see in the picture above is of Mars (pictures taken for more than a month) and the other faint line that you see in the background is of Uranus.

The planets generally move from West to East in the night sky. However, periodically, a planet moves from east to west for a short time.. This phenomenon is called Retrograde Motion. This is an effect of changing perspective. Superior planets such as Mars show retrograde when Earth overtakes the other planet at opposition(when Earth moves between the Superior planet and Sun). The inferior planets show retrograde motion on either side of the inferior conjunction. They overtake Earth as they pass between Earth and Sun.

Scientists map CO2 emissions with Google Earth

Interactive maps that detail carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel combustion are now available on the popular Google Earth platform. The maps, funded by NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy through the joint North American Carbon Program, can display fossil fuel emissions by the hour, geographic region, and fuel type.

A science team led by researchers at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., integrated seven primary data sets, including imagery of Earth’s surface captured by the NASA-built Landsat 5 satellite, fossil-fuel carbon dioxide emissions data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and U.S. Department of Energy, and population data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Researchers from the project, named "Vulcan" for the Roman god of fire, constructed an unprecedented inventory of the carbon dioxide that results from the burning of 48 different types of fossil fuel. The data-based maps show estimates of the hourly carbon dioxide outputs of factories, power plants, vehicle traffic and residential and commercial areas.

First released to the scientific community in April 2007, the emissions data have now been integrated into an image-based format that has become a standard online viewing tool for content that spans broad geographic areas.

“The release of the Vulcan inventory on Google Earth brings this information into the living room of anyone with an Internet connection," said Kevin Gurney, an assistant professor of Earth and atmospheric sciences at Purdue and leader of the Vulcan Project. "From a societal perspective, Vulcan provides a description of where and when society influences climate change through fossil-fuel carbon dioxide emissions."

"Users can see their county or state in relation to others, and see what aspects of economic activity are driving fossil-fuel emissions,” Gurney added. "Vulcan could help demystify climate change and empower people in the same way as seeing the miles-per-gallon number on the dashboard of a hybrid car.”

The high-resolution map, available at http://purdue.edu/eas/carbon/vulcan/GEarth , shows carbon dioxide emissions in metric tons in residential and commercial areas by state, county or per capita.

Courtesy: nasa.gov

Discovery’s STS-119 – Due for a Launch.

The flight readiness review meeting is expected to set an official launch date for the STS-119 mission to the International Space Station. For planning purposes, liftoff as of today is tentatively targeted for March 11 at 9:20 p.m. EDT.

The Space Shuttle Program moved the targeted launch a day earlier following extensive review of flow control valve inspection data and assessment of ongoing and planned work. A formal presentation of the flow control work and a thorough evaluation of all aspects of flight will be made at Friday's readiness review.

Discovery’s seven astronauts are going into quarantine tonight at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in preparation for next week’s possible launch.

Commander Lee Archambault will lead Discovery's crew of seven, along with Pilot Tony Antonelli, and Mission Specialists Joseph Acaba, John Phillips, Steve Swanson, Richard Arnold and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Koichi Wakata.

The Discovery crew members are set to fly the S6 truss segment and install the final set of power-generating solar arrays to the International Space Station. The S6 truss will complete the backbone of the station and provide one-fourth of the total power needed to support a crew of six.

Purpose of STS-119:

The purpose of the Previous Mission: STS-126 was to delivered equipment to the International Space Station enabling larger crews to reside aboard the complex. The purpose of this Mission is to carry the S6 truss segment as well as a new station crew member to the orbital outpost. STS-119 is the 28th shuttle mission to the International Space Station.

Public Invited to Submit Questions for NASA's Space Shuttle Launch

Space enthusiasts from across the United States and around the world are invited to submit questions about space shuttle Discovery's upcoming launch, its STS-119 mission to the International Space Station, and NASA space exploration. Questions may be answered on NASA Television during the countdown to launch. Discovery and its seven astronauts are tentatively targeted to launch March 12 at 8:54 p.m. EDT from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

NASA commentary will begin about five hours before liftoff.
Questions can be submitted online at: http://webcast.ksc.nasa.gov/

Courtesy: nasa.gov

Earth grants an Asteroid Flyby.

A 200-foot wide asteroid zoomed past Earth yesterday(2nd March 2009) at an altitude of 40,000 miles - swerving far enough from our planet to avoid total destruction, officials said.

Dubbed 2009 DD45, the large rock was discovered only Friday by Australian astronomers.The enormous asteroid narrowly avoided a collision with Earth at 8:44 EST, officials said.Although 40,000 miles sounds like a safe distance, it's only about one-seventh of the way to the moon and less than twice as far out as most satellites, astronomers said.

Had 2009 DD45 slammed down onto the Earth, it would have exploded with the force of a large nuclear blast somewhere in the Pacific Ocean west of Tahiti.Astronomers said the asteroid is likely to return for another series of near misses since it's somehow drawn in by our planet's gravity.

Peter Brown, an astronomer at the University of Western Ontario in Canada, said the last rock "as large or larger than this to come this close was in 1973 and the next time will be in 2029 when Apophis makes its close approach."Apophis initially caused some concern among scientists when its plotted course revealed it to be on a collision trajectory with Earth, but further investigations have since shown it will pass harmlessly by.

The only thing that suprises me after all this latest technology in place, is that the scientists were able to detect this asteroid coming towards earth only on friday! Its high time to think about ways of diverting these asteroids from hitting Earth way before they are anywhere close to Earth. Afterall, what else is the use of Nuclear and atomic power?

Image Courtesy: AFP

Interacting Galaxies

People around the world voted on nasa.gov to select the next object the Hubble Space Telescope would view, choosing from a list of objects Hubble had never observed before. This was to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Galileo's observations. This program was called “Hubble's Next Discovery -- You Decide”. The last date was March 1st 2009 and the winner from the list is “Interacting Galaxies: Arp 274”. Apr 274 is a pair of interacting galaxies. The winning image of the interacting Galaxies will be released between April 2 and 5.

What are Interacting Galaxies?

Interacting galaxies or Colliding Galaxies are the result of one galaxies gravitational effect on the other. There are different types of interactions between the galaxies depending on their sizes and shapes.

Satellite interaction – Satellite here does not refer to man made satellites (remember, Moon is Earths natural satellite???). A giant galaxy interacting with one of its satellite galaxy is common. Most likely the satellite galaxy due to its gravity distorts the primary galaxies one of the spiral arms. This could result in a small amount of star formation.

Galaxy Collision - When two galaxies collide and do not have enough momentum to continue traveling after the collision, they tend to fall back into each other and eventually merge to form one galaxy. This is called a galaxy collision.

Galactic cannibalism - When a large galaxy, through tidal gravitational interactions with a companion, merges with its companion, resulting in a larger, often irregular galaxy it is called, Galactic cannibalism.

Well, all this is okay… but for people like me who are wondering “Why do galaxies ever collide if they were all ejected from a point (Big Bang) at constant speed?”

That is because they were not ejected from a single point in the Big Bang. This is major mistake non-astronomers make in thinking about the Big Bang. The Big Bang did erupt from a single point in Space but as time passed, small collections of matter began to form and fall under their own strong self-gravity rather than expanding with the rest of the objects in the Universe. Thus the motions in the universe after the Big Bang started to differ became irregular. The largest objects(like very large galaxies) are still sailing along the path of the big bang, but their constituent galaxies may be moving under a local much stronger force of attraction causing them to collide with each other.

Bottom Line: Galaxies follow the Big Bang only on a Large scale and not EVERY scale.

Our Expanding Universe...

Two things that come to my mind when I think of the Universe… It has to be either finite or Infinite, and both set sail thoughts in my mind. Over the past 80 years scientists have started believing that our universe is constantly expanding. How did they come to this conclusion?

The light coming from distant objects would be redshifted (Visible light emitted or reflected by an object is shifted towards the red end of the electromagnetic spectrum) as it traveled through the expanding universe. The redshift would increase with increasing distance to the object.

Edwin Hubble, measured the redshifts of a number of distant galaxies. He also measured the relative distances of those galaxies by measuring the apparent brightness of a class of variable stars in each galaxy. When he plotted redshift against relative distance, he found that the redshift of distant galaxies increased as a linear function of their distance (ie; more the distance between galaxies, more will be the redshift). The only explanation for this observation is that the universe was expanding! Edwin Hubble also realized that galaxies were rushing away from each other at a rate proportional to their distance, i.e. the farther away the galaxies are, the faster they are moving away from each other.

Once scientists understood that the universe was expanding, they immediately realized that it would have been smaller in the past. At some point in the past, the entire universe would have been a single point. This point, later called the big bang, was the beginning of the universe as we understand it today.

Universe Calandar - We were born just a minute ago!

Carl Sagan ( 1934-96 ), an American astronomer, first suggested a 'cosmic calendar' as a way of helping people understand the history of Universe. He assumed the total duration of Universe as 1 year(365 days) and scaled every event that happened in this Universe into that 1 year, starting from the Big Bang happening at 00.00 hrs on the 1st of January.

Here are the list of events one after the other...

1 Jan (00.00 hrs) - Big Bang - Universe forms.

15 March - First stars and galaxies form
1 May - Milky Way galaxy forms
8 Sep - Sun forms
9 Sep - Solar system forms
12 Sep - Earth forms
13 Sep - Moon forms
20 Sep - Earth atmoshere forms
1 Oct - Earliest known life on earth
7 Oct - Earliest known fossile
18 Dec - First many celled life forms
19 Dec - First fish
21 Dec - First land plants ; first insect
23 Dec - First reptiles
24 Dec - First Dinosaur
26 Dec - First mammal
27 Dec - First bird
28 Dec - First flowering plant
28 Dec - Dinosaurs extinct
31 Dec (11:55PM) - Homo sapiens, humans appear.

31 Dec (11:59PM) - Modern Humans continue to live.

Facinating as it is... the lifespan of an average human being is not even 1 millionth of second, when compared to the gigantic life span of our Universe!