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)

Previously we’ve covered the extensive tracking and modeling of near-earth objects NASA undertakes as well as efforts to pass along data to the public via the internet. In Ben’s post about modeling near-earth objects he wrote about a specific asteroid designated 99942 Apophis. Discovered in 2004, it has been closely scrutinized by astronomers worldwide as it’s size and potential for collision with Earth have sparked interest.

Meet Apophis. Discovered in 2004, it will likely set a record for harmless near earth pass in 2029.

Earlier data pointed to the asteroid potentially passing through a troublesome gravitational keyhole which increased the threat to Earth in 2036, however new data from previously unreleased images from a University of Hawaii telescope near the summit of Mauna Kea have allowed NASA scientists to improve their models. New models show a reduced risk of collision in 2036 from 1 in 45,000 to 1 in 250,000.

From the NASA press release:

“The refined orbital determination further reinforces that Apophis is an asteroid we can look to as an opportunity for exciting science and not something that should be feared,” said Don Yeomans, manager of the Near-Earth Object Program Office at JPL.

Modeling asteroids and allowing humanity a chance to risk assess is only one example of the power of computer modeling. However, this example also illustrates one important caveat about modeling. One’s model is only as good as the data utilized in generating and analyzing it. Let’s hope that future data on Apophis continues to produce good news.

(Image Credit)

What can you do with a 110 foot wide, nine story tall radio telescope that weighs almost a million pounds? Not a question the average person or even educational institution asks themselves. Yet, this was a question Lewis Center founder Rick Piercy contemplated when he convinced NASA to donate a radio telescope being decommissioned that had once been used to communicate with Apollo spacecraft.

Thanks to Rick Piercy’s efforts K-12 students around the world have access to the Goldstone Apple Valley Radio Telescope through the Lewis Center’s GAVRT program which is a partnership with NASA offering a variety of programs exposing students to radio astronomy and cutting edge scientific work. Teachers from all institutions are welcome to join the program and are given a training seminar and visit to the telescope in order to familiarize themselves with the curriculum currently designed around the GAVRT as well as learn how to control the telescope via the internet.

In one of the ongoing projects students have been giving NASA scientists a helping hand track the Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) spacecraft with the GAVRT. The LCROSS mission is ongoing and the satellite is scheduled to make impact with the moon in order to look for water on October 9, 2009. One of the beauties of this program is that not only is this a unique learning opportunity for the students, but they also help provide additional data gathering time for NASA scientists as explained by Brian Day of the NASA Ames Research Center,

Because LCROSS has a very steeply inclined orbit, we have only a 2-hour window once every 3 days when we can check out the spacecraft using the Deep Space Network. So we decided to ask GAVRT for help. These kids help us get extra listening time for our spacecraft, and they get an incredible educational experience in return.

Thanks to the internet and some enterprising individuals some lucky students will have a front row seat to some exciting scientific exploration of our nearest celestial neighbor. I look forward to hearing about the results of the LCROSS mission. Congratulations guys!

Read more about GAVRT and the LCROSS mission.

Two weeks ago a large wildfire broke out north of Los Angeles within the Angeles National Forest. It grew quickly becoming the largest wildfire in Los Angeles County’s history. A suspected case of arson, it has burned over 160,000 acres as of today and is only 62 percent contained. The immediate impact of the Station Fire is illustrated dramatically by this image produced by NASA’s Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) instrument on the Terra satellite.

Even having lived in San Diego during the 2007 wildfires, images like that one are just incredible. In addition to this image NASA’s Aqua satellite monitored carbon monoxide concentration within the atmosphere over the first seven days of the fire. Click through for the full animation.Thanks to NASA’s satellites some potentially useful scientific data can be gleaned from this disaster. Too bad they don’t have a satellite to help us catch those responsible.

(Station Fire Image)(Carbon monoxide measurements)

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).