Looking Up by Bob Eklund
Looking Up – Bob Eklund
Spacecraft Earth to Perform Asteroid ‘Flyby’ this Fall Since the dawn of the space age, humanity has sent 16 robotic emissaries to fly by some of the solar system’s most intriguing and nomadic occupants—comets and asteroids. The data and imagery collected on these deep-space missions of exploration have helped redefine our understanding of how Earth and our part of the galaxy came to [...]
Looking Up – Bob Eklund
NASA Orbiter Reveals Buried Dry Ice Deposit on Mars NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has discovered that the total amount of atmosphere on Mars changes dramatically as the tilt of the planet’s axis varies. This process can affect the stability of liquid water, if it exists on the Martian surface, and can increase the frequency and severity of Martian dust storms. Researchers using [...]
Looking Up – Bob Eklund
School Pupils to Partner with Research Scientists - The Van Allen radiation belts are a hazardous environment, full of “killer” electrons that can be lethal to orbiting satellites. And when those electrons sometimes hit the Earth’s atmosphere, they alter its chemistry—with implications for climate variation. Now, students at a school in Yorkshire, England, are set to help scientists [...]
Looking Up – Bob Eklund
Adventures of a Mount Wilson Telescope Operator - A Research Technician for Mount Wilson Observatory’s CHARA Array, PJ Sallave-Goldfinger gives an informative talk on the adventurous undertaking of running this coordinated array of six telescopes. This free lecture will be held on Saturday, April 23, at 2:30 p.m. in the Community Room of the Altadena Public Library. It is being presented [...]
Looking Up – Bob Eklund
Getting Ready for the World’s Biggest-Ever Telescope - Plans for the world’s biggest telescope—the Square Kilometer Array—advanced significantly this month with a decision to locate the project office at Jodrell Bank Observatory near Manchester, England; support from the partners including the United Kingdom for the next phase of the project; and the first steps towards creating the [...]
Looking Up – Bob Eklund
When Is an Asteroid Not an Asteroid? On March 29, 1807, German astronomer Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers spotted Vesta as a moving pinprick of light in the sky. Two hundred and four years later, as NASA’s Dawn spacecraft prepares to begin orbiting this intriguing world, scientists now know how special this object is, even if there has been some debate on how to classify it. Vesta is most [...]
Looking Up- Bob Eklund
Wasted Lights and Wasted Nights: Globe at Night Tracks Light Pollution Poorly aimed and unshielded outdoor lights are more than an annoyance. They waste more than $2 billion (17 billion kilowatt-hours) of energy in the United States each year. Poorly shielded roadway lights are also a safety and glare hazard, especially for older citizens. Under an unpolluted sky we ought to see more than [...]
Looking Up – Bob Eklund
MESSENGER Spacecraft Enters Mercury Orbit After more than a dozen laps through the inner solar system and six planetary flybys, NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft was scheduled to move into orbit around the planet Mercury on March 17. The durable spacecraft—carrying seven science instruments and fortified against the blistering environs near the Sun—will be the first ever to orbit the [...]
Looking Up – Bob Eklund
Scientists Study 4 Billion-Year-Old Meteorite-- Scientists have performed a microprobe analysis of the core and outer layers of a pea-size piece of a meteorite some 4.57 billion years old to reconstruct the history of its formation, providing the first evidence that dust particles like this one experienced wildly varying environments during the planet-forming years of our solar system. The [...]
Looking Up – Bob Eklund
Planet Formation in Action -- Using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, an international team of astronomers has been able to study the short-lived disc of material around a young star that is in the early stages of making a planetary system. For the first time, a smaller companion could be detected that may be the cause of the large gap found in the [...]
