Looking Up by Bob Eklund
Looking Up – Bob Eklund
Evidence of Liquid Water on Icy Europa Analysis of data from NASA’s Galileo planetary mission has turned up evidence of what appears to be a body of liquid water equal in volume to North America’s Great Lakes beneath the icy surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa. The Galileo data suggest there is significant exchange between Europa’s icy shell and the ocean beneath. This information [...]
Looking Up – Bob Eklund
CURIOSITY GOES TO MARS NOV. 25 — NASA’s most advanced mobile robotic laboratory, built into a car-sized rover named “Curiosity,” is in final preparations for a launch from Florida’s Space Coast at 10:25 a.m. EST on Nov. 25. It will examine one of the most intriguing areas on Mars, near the base of a mountain inside a deep crater. The Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission will have [...]
Looking Up – Bob Eklund
City Lights Could Reveal E.T. Civilization -- In the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, astronomers have hunted for radio signals and ultra-short laser pulses. In a new paper, Avi Loeb (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) and Edwin Turner (Princeton University) suggest a new technique for finding aliens: look for their city lights. “Looking for alien cities would be a long [...]
Looking Up – Bob Eklund
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE ASTEROID KIND — NASA scientists will be tracking asteroid 2005 YU55 with antennas of the agency’s Deep Space Network at Goldstone, Calif., as the space rock safely flies past Earth slightly closer than the Moon’s orbit on Nov. 8. Scientists are treating the flyby of the 1,300-foot-wide asteroid as a science target of opportunity—allowing instruments on the ground [...]
Looking Up – Bob Eklund
FRANKENSTEIN’S MOON: AN ASTRONOMY DETECTIVE STORY -- Detective work by a team of moon-struck astronomers from Texas State University–San Marcos may have finally laid to rest lingering doubts about the date when the legendary horror story Frankenstein was conceived—and about the honesty of its author, Mary Wallstonecraft Shelley. Texas State physics faculty members Donald Olson and [...]
Star Party with Bob Eklund Coming Up – Nov. 5
The community is invited to share a family evening viewing the stars, the planet Jupiter, and the Moon on Saturday, November 5. Bob Eklund and fellow volunteers from local astronomy clubs will present this free event for the public in the parking lot of the Christian Science Church, 7855 Alverstone Ave., in Westchester. Several telescopes will be set up for sky-viewing between 7:00 and 10:00 p.m. [...]
Looking Up – Bob Eklund
Wet & Mild: Caltech Researchers Take the Temperature of Mars’s Past -- Researchers at Caltech have directly determined the surface temperature of early Mars for the first time, providing evidence of a warmer and wetter Martian past. By analyzing carbonate minerals in a four-billion-year-old meteorite that originated near the surface of Mars, the scientists determined that the minerals [...]
Looking Up – Bob Eklund
Subtly Shaded Map of Moon Reveals Titanium Treasure Trove -- A map of the Moon combining observations in visible and ultraviolet wavelengths shows a treasure trove of areas rich in titanium ore. Not only is titanium an extremely valuable element (a metal used extensively in aircraft due to its strength and light weight), it is key to helping scientists unravel the mysteries of the Moon’s [...]
Looking Up – Bob Eklund
Alma Opens Its Eyes -- Humanity’s most complex ground-based astronomy observatory, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), has officially opened for astronomers at its 16,500-foot high desert plateau in northern Chile. Thousands of scientists from around the world are competing to be the first few researchers to explore some of the darkest, coldest, farthest, and most hidden [...]
Looking Up – Bob Eklund
Huge Sunspots Unleash Solar Flares -- A severe “geomagnetic storm” in Earth’s outer atmosphere followed the impact last week of a coronal mass ejection, or stream of charged particles, resulting from a solar flare that occurred on Sept. 26. The Goddard Space Weather Lab reported a strong compression of Earth’s magnetosphere resulting from this impact. Simulations indicate that solar [...]
