Bench Press

If you’re an astronomy buff, February 14 means a lot more than just Valentines Day. It also marks the fateful day (HT: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory), in 1990, when the Voyager I spaceprobe took a “family portrait” of all the planets of our solar system that it could see as one last parting gift before it shut down its camera and continued its journey towards “interstellar space”:

The diagram above shows the 60 frames that Voyager I took. The pictures aren’t high-resolution beauties (as a result of needing to use optical tricks to correct for the amazing brightness of the sun and the light it scatters, and smearing from the long exposure times needed to capture Neptune and Uranus), but it is still amazing to think that this is the only family portrait mosaic of the solar system ever taken. Closeups on the 6 prominently visible planets are below (left to right and top to bottom are Venus, Earth, Jupiter, and Saturn, Uranus, Neptune):

More details are at the NASA JPL page, but I will leave you all with this bit from Carl Sagan:

This was the image that inspired Carl Sagan, the the Voyager imaging team member who had suggested taking this portrait, to call our home planet "a pale blue dot."

As he wrote in a book by that name, "That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. … There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world."

Happy 20 year anniversary to the grandest family portrait humanity has ever taken, and happy Valentine’s Day to all.

(Image credits – NASA JPL)

We’ve previously covered the computer modeling solutions being used to model and track the paths of near-earth asteroids (especially those which might treat Earth like a dartboard), but for those of you not content to just sit at home while NASA scientists do all the tracking, the asteroid trackers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory have made it now easier to follow what’s going on in the world of near-earth asteroids from the comfort of your own home.

The first little gadget they’ve developed is a computer widget (pictured on the left) which is compatible with the Mac OS and Yahoo widget engines.

What it will show is a list of the next five near-earth asteroid approaches (within ~20x the distance of the moon) and an estimate of their size (including a pictogram depiction of what that size means) as well as their distance. The widget will also make it easy to find more information about the particular asteroids it is identifying (an example is linked here) which will show off a dynamic Java applet map of the asteroid’s orbit through the inner solar system (which you can manipulate so you can see how the orbit looks in 3D) as well as a wide range of data on the asteroid such as the eccentricity of an asteroid’s orbit (in layman’s terms, how oval-like versus how circular), the orbital period (the time it takes for an asteroid to complete one rotation around the sun).

The second thing the brains at NASA’s JPL have put together for researchers and amateur astronomers is a Twitter account (@AsteroidWatch), which accompanies NASA JPL’s main Asteroid Watch site. The feed went live on July 29, 2009 and, although not written in the cutesy voice of the MarsPhoenix twitter account (which followed the exploits of the Phoenix Mars probe NASA launched a while back), the AsteroidWatch feed so far has reported on near-earth asteroids and new reports and articles issued by NASA’s official asteroid tracking team.

You can follow the BenchPress team on Twitter! You can follow us at Anthony (@AnthonyPhan), Ben (@BenjaminTseng), Eric (@EricSuh), and Kevin (@Kevin_Tseng).