the-shrike.net

Schirra’s NASA career began with his selection as one of the original seven Mercury astronauts in 1959 and spans the period from Americas first tentative steps into space to the missions to the moon.

Schirra flew on the fifth Mercury flight in 1962, orbiting the Earth six times. He commanded Gemini 6A in 1965, a flight with Tom Stafford that had the historic distinction of being the first rendezvous of two manned, maneuverable spacecraft. Gemini 6A and Gemini 7 flew in formation for five hours, as close as one foot to one another.

Commander Schirra in the center with the rest of the Apollo 7 crew.

Schirra also commanded Apollo 7, the first manned Apollo flight. During that 11-day flight in Earth orbit in 1968, he and fellow crewmembers Walt Cunningham and Donn Eisele tested the Apollo systems and proved it was ready to take astronauts to the moon.

One of the great one has left us.

I would like to wish him a safe journey like the ones he had around Earth.

By observing a rare head-on collision of galaxies at 10 million miles per hour, astronomers have made the first direct detection of “dark matter”–the mysterious, invisible stuff that comprises at least one-quarter of the universe.

Here is the entire news post on the National Science Foundation website about this discovery, that will be soon published on the forthcoming issues of the Astrophysical Journal and Astrophysical Journal Letters.
If you don’t want to read the whole story, just take a look at the picture. Images like these (just like Hubble deep field ones) always amuse me in a sort of magical way.

Actually, I’d like to read something more about this topic: I’ll take my time to search the internet for something else about it.

Oh, the fun thing about it, is that I found the link to the news in the newsgroup alt.geek (in particular: here).
Gosh, I love internet!

Apparently, what they’ve taught me in school is no longer correct.
Today, during the 2006 International Astronomical Union (IAU) General Assembly, resolutions 5A & 5B have been voted and approved (among others…) thus leading to the final chapter on the question: is Pluto to be considered a planet?.
Apparently the final answer is to be considered: NO.
As stated by Resolution 5A:

• The eight planets are: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.
• An IAU process will be established to assign borderline objects into either dwarf planet and other categories.
• These currently include most of the Solar System asteroids, most Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs), comets, and other small bodies.

It appears that Pluto, Ceres and the recently discovered 2003-UB313 are small bodies enough to be considered non-planets. Look also at this post by Tom to clear your mind even more.
By now on, we’ll better refer to Pluto as a dwarf planet rather than a planet. Probably this’s a good step forward down the right direction of classifying better all the bodies of our Solar System (and all the bodies we’ll hopefully find outside of it), but I can’t help but being a little sad for Pluto.
It feels a little weird to consider our Solar System to have only 8 planets…

On the 1st of November 2005 I blogged about the discoveries of two candidates to become newest knwon Pluto’s moon.
Finally, they got names and they’re now considered as two satellite of the most distant planet of the Solar System.

Pluto’s small moons were provisionally designated S/2005 P1 and S/2005 P2. They have now been officially christened Nix and Hydra. [..] Nix was the goddess of darkness and night and the mother of Charon, while Hydra was a nine headed monster and is now orbiting the solar system’s ninth planet.
(source: Astronomy Picture of the Day)

The full, and detailed, article about this naming could be found here, and I also suggest to take a look at the pictures here too: the first one is really impressive, showing also Charon. It is good to know New Horizon is going to have so much to study once arrived to Pluto.

The continuing disintegration of Comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 has allowed ESA scientists to see into the interior of the comet. Using a revolutionary camera attached to the ESA Optical Ground Station on Tenerife, they have followed the detailed twists and turns of various comet fragments.

More information here: http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Rosetta/SEMN1C9ATME_0.html.

The MCR (main control room) at ESA’s Space Operations Centre (ESOC) is getting ready to accompany Venus Express on its arrival on Venus, scheduled for 11th of April. Orbit insertion manouver is going to be (as always) a tough and delicate one, and for the first ESA mission to Venus, that is going to be one of the most critical part ever.

As for now, the spacecraft looks in peferct shape:

“In the night between 16 and 17 February, Venus Express passed its VOI readiness review after a successful burn of its main engine, providing a thrust of 400 Newtons,” said Don McCoy, Venus Express Project Manager. “This was followed by a minor mid-course correction provided by the spacecraft’s four 10-Newton thrusters on 24 February.”

All the preliminary tests show nominal behaviour, and that is really reassuring after such a long journey in space. In this ESA press relase it is possible to find also a brief explanation of some of the manoeuvres that are going to be performed shortly before/during the VOI (Venus Orbit Insertion).

Let’s cross our fingers for the next 15 days, they’re surely going to be very busy and full of anxiety at ESOC! (I remeber when I have visited that control room… AMAZING!)

• Hayabusa: the Japanese probe seems to get more and more ill as time passes, but at its mission control they seem to remain quite optimistic about the possibility to bring her back anyway. Let’s hope they’re right!
  You can find a translation of the latest conference about Hayabusa’s status on this page (seems very detailed, I’ll finish studying it later…)
• MRO: the Mars Reconaissance Orbiter is due to begin its orbit insertion phase at 1:25 p.m. PST (21:25 UTC) on March 10, and today a pre-arrive conference has been held by the team to explain what is going to happen. More informations about it, on the relative page of the Planetary Society Blog.

(Source: The Planetary Society Blog)

At the latest meeting of the European Space Agency’s Earth Observation Programme Board, which took place at ESA’s Headquarters in Paris on 23 and 24 February, ESA received the green light from its Member States to build and launch a CryoSat recovery mission, CryoSat-2.

This is a news I was waiting to read since 8th of October 2005, after the tragic launch failure (of a Rockot russian launcher) that led to CryoSat lost in the Artic Sea. The failure was caused by a malfunction of the 2nd stage of the launcher, that caused the abort of the launching process and the not controlled fall of the 3rd stage (containing CryoSat) somewhere in the North Sea.

“This decision is very important, as the scientific community in Europe and elsewhere is eagerly awaiting resumption of the CryoSat mission. We are happy to have obtained approval today”, said Volker Liebig, ESA Director of Earth observation programmes.

Let’s hope in 2009 (planned launch year for CryoSat-2) everything will go fine (I am now curious to know if they’re planning to use the same launching system or to change on a different one…) and that CryoSat-2 will help us understanding what is the actual status of ice poles and their evolution in time.

(source: ESA)

…Venus Express is inexorably approaching Venus. ESA announced a week ago today that they successfully performed a test of their main engine, a little less than two months before their planned Venus arrival.

(source: The Planetary Society Weblog)

Everything is going smooth for Venus Express, and this is something I’m very pleased to read. Returning back to Venus after such a long time is something very thrilling, and so let’s hope everything is going to continue without any problems.

Anyway, still on the same page on The Planetary Society Weblog you may find some informations about the status of another probe getting closer to its destination: Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (this time a NASA mission, not ESA like Venus Express).

Different planets, different probes, same emotions! :)

Claims that the Solar System has a tenth planet are bolstered by the finding by a group lead by Bonn astrophysicists that this putative planet, announced last summer and tentatively named 2003 UB313, is bigger than Pluto. By measuring its thermal emission, the scientists were able to determine a diameter of about 3000 km, which makes it 700 km larger than Pluto and thereby marks it as the largest solar system object found since the discovery of Neptune in 1846.

For those of you still interestend and fascinated about the discovery of the alleged 10th planet in our solar system, I suggest taking a look at this new press relase by a team of scientists from the University of Bonn and Max Planck Institut fuer Radioastronomie Bonn (published today in the journal Nature) about new measurements of the size of 2003 UB313. On the Planetary Society blog you can find a larger and exhaustive explanation about current tries to get 2003 UB313’s correct size.

And let’s hope, in the case, that Xena (2003 UB313’s actual nickname) is not going to remain the official name of this new Solar System body :)

Here you’ll find an interesting covering about the actual status of studies on the Pioneer 10 & 11 slowing down anomaly.
Apparently without any understandable reason these two probes launched in 1972 and 1973 (and now at the outer border of our Solar System) are, year by year since the early ‘80, losing substantial ammount of their velocity. Unfortunately NASA is not going to allocate resource to investigate what is happening (due to a very low budget, I suspect…) and noone since then has been able to think about an answer. Some of the scientists actually studying the problem are even thinking that:

…something may be wrong with our understanding of the laws of physics.

Of course, even without going so far, the anomaly Pioneer 10 & 11 are experiencing is really a huge mistery by now, even if the investigation continues to go on, mainly thank to the support from The Planetary Society and all its members (look here for an exhaustive report on the 2005 Pioneer Anomaly Conference).

Today was the first time I get in touch with such a detailed analysis of what is happening, and I think I will follow any news about this in the future, it’s something very interesting and charming… mysteries always are! :)

Today, a team of scientists has reported the discovery of the lowest mass planet yet. The planet, called OGLE-2005-BGL-390Lb, is about 5 times the mass of the Earth, orbiting a star about 25,000 light years away.

Today another planet discovery has been announced.
This time, as stated above, we’re dealing with a planet definitely smaller than the other ones discovered in the past, leading us closer and closer to the moment when our telescopes will find an Earth-like planet somewhere up there.

OGLE-2005-BGL-390Lb is somewhere near the center of the Milky Way, very far away from us, and it’s orbiting around a star very different from our Sun (it’s just 1/5 of the Sun in mass) and it’s probably to far away from its (weak) star to be something less than a ball of ice or even not solid at all (it may be a Jupiter-like body), but finding out that the resolution of our instruments makes us able to see such a small and far object is encouraging on the way to find a planet just like our.

Take a look here for more detailed informations on the discovery announcement and for a quick (and exhaustive) explanation about the technique usually used to search for extraterrestrial planets.