Aangemaakte reacties
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NASA Commercial Crew Systems Development, House Space Subcommittee, January 17, 2018
Secret US govt satellite launched on SpaceX reportedly missingIk heb die hele testemony op 17 januari bekeken. De lancering en de ontkoppeling waren goed geslaagd, volgens Dr. Hans Koenigsmann Vice President, Build and Flight Reliability, SpaceX.
Als kijker van de lancering hebben wij niet alles kunnen zien. Waar is Zuma?Of het chic is om aanvankelijk naar SpaceX te wijzen was niet zo handig. (Daarna de speculaties, zucht)
Er valt mij wel het een en ander op tijdens de getuigenissen, waardoor ik denk dat “finding Zuma” voor ons een gesloten boek blijft.
Kort door de bocht, SpaceX heeft goed werk afgeleverd, maar waar is Zuma?
Mr. William Gerstenmaier, associate administrator, Human Exploration and Operations Directorate, NASA [Truth in Testimony]
Mr. John Mulholland, vice president and program manager, Commercial Programs, Boeing Space Exploration [Truth in Testimony]
Dr. Hans Koenigsmann, vice president, Build and Flight Reliability, SpaceX [Truth in Testimony]
Ms. Cristina Chaplain, director, Acquisition and Sourcing Management, U.S. Government Accountability Office [Truth in Testimony]
Dr. Patricia Sanders, chair, NASA Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel [Truth in Testimony]Bonus(Zumastyle, hieronder) :
http://www.iflscience.com/space/the-us-air-force-may-have-blown-up-a-spacex-rocket-booster-that-was-stranded-in-the-ocean/Zou het iets te maken kunnen hebben tussen deze vrienden?
Zou het een geschrokken asteroïde zijn geweest die plots afboog met een enorme snelheid? Je ziet dat wel meer op die NASA filmpjes, maar daar wordt nooit wat over gezegd.
In de loop der jaren heb ik heel wat filmpjes geschoten en dan ga je dingen herkennen zoals vogels die door het beeld vliegen. Deze “asteroïde” lijkt mij geen vogel. Het is de vraag wat mijn telescoop wel en niet kan waarnemen.
Waarom zie ik bijvoorbeeld geen ruimtepuin (het grotere ruimteafval) als daar zoveel van rond de aarde valt.
Vandaag een nieuwe toepassing adapter/oculair geknutseld voor de telescoop.
Sinds ik mijn spiegelreflexcamera heb, vervangt de telescoop als het ware de lens. De adapter had ik al moeten verlengen met het tussenstuk van mijn 2x Barlowlens omdat de Canon camera te dicht op de viewfinder van de telescoop zat.
Het nadeel was eigenlijk dat ik mijn oculair(s) niet meer gebruikte bij de filmopnames (wel om direct door de telescoop te kijken) Ik vroeg mij af hoe ik toch met de 700D door een van de oculairs kan filmen. De adapter voor de 700D past in de telescoop, maar daar zit geen schroefdraad om een oculair op te schroeven. Nu heb ik het toch op een andere manier voor elkaar gekregen. Ik had nog een klem over van de andere camerahouder die ik destijds eens bij de Koepel had besteld. Met die klem heb ik het oculair vastgemaakt aan het Barlowtussenstuk. Even gecheckt of ik dan wel scherp beeld had met de 15mm oculair ertussen. Via de telescoop scherpgesteld en klaar.
De eerstvolgende keer uitproberen hoe dicht ik op de maan zit, en wat dacht je van Jupiter?
NASA kondigt aan dat buitenaards leven mogelijk is op Saturnusmaan Enceladus.
De maan is beroemd om de uitstoot van gaspluimen op de zuidpool. In oktober 2015 maakte de Cassini een “duikvlucht” in die pluimen
Het onderzoek toont aan dat de oceaan energetisch bewoonbaar is, wat betekent dat er voldoende chemische energie aanwezig is om een aantal microscopische levensvormen, vergelijkbaar met die hier op aarde, te ondersteunen.De Cassini constateerde dat 1,4 procent van het materiaal uit die pluimen, moleculair waterstof is en 0,8 procent carbondioxide.
Hoewel dit uit een geologisch en planetair aspect gezien heel spannend is, is dit niet het bewijs dat er leven op Enceladus is.
The Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/04/13/nasa-announce-major-discovery-ocean-worlds-search-alien-life/Two veteran NASA missions are providing new details about icy, ocean-bearing moons of Jupiter and Saturn, further heightening the scientific interest of these and other “ocean worlds” in our solar system and beyond. The findings are presented in papers published Thursday by researchers with NASA’s Cassini mission to Saturn and Hubble Space Telescope.
In the papers, Cassini scientists announce that a form of chemical energy that life can feed on appears to exist on Saturn’s moon Enceladus, and Hubble researchers report additional evidence of plumes erupting from Jupiter’s moon Europa.
“This is the closest we’ve come, so far, to identifying a place with some of the ingredients needed for a habitable environment,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate at Headquarters in Washington. ”These results demonstrate the interconnected nature of NASA’s science missions that are getting us closer to answering whether we are indeed alone or not.”
The paper from researchers with the Cassini mission, published in the journal Science, indicates hydrogen gas, which could potentially provide a chemical energy source for life, is pouring into the subsurface ocean of Enceladus from hydrothermal activity on the seafloor.
The presence of ample hydrogen in the moon’s ocean means that microbes – if any exist there – could use it to obtain energy by combining the hydrogen with carbon dioxide dissolved in the water. This chemical reaction, known as “methanogenesis” because it produces methane as a byproduct, is at the root of the tree of life on Earth, and could even have been critical to the origin of life on our planet.
Life as we know it requires three primary ingredients: liquid water; a source of energy for metabolism; and the right chemical ingredients, primarily carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur. With this finding, Cassini has shown that Enceladus – a small, icy moon a billion miles farther from the sun than Earth – has nearly all of these ingredients for habitability. Cassini has not yet shown phosphorus and sulfur are present in the ocean, but scientists suspect them to be, since the rocky core of Enceladus is thought to be chemically similar to meteorites that contain the two elements.
“Confirmation that the chemical energy for life exists within the ocean of a small moon of Saturn is an important milestone in our search for habitable worlds beyond Earth,” said Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.
The Cassini spacecraft detected the hydrogen in the plume of gas and icy material spraying from Enceladus during its last, and deepest, dive through the plume on Oct. 28, 2015. Cassini also sampled the plume’s composition during flybys earlier in the mission. From these observations scientists have determined that nearly 98 percent of the gas in the plume is water, about 1 percent is hydrogen and the rest is a mixture of other molecules including carbon dioxide, methane and ammonia.
The measurement was made using Cassini’s Ion and Neutral Mass Spectrometer (INMS) instrument, which sniffs gases to determine their composition. INMS was designed to sample the upper atmosphere of Saturn’s moon Titan. After Cassini’s surprising discovery of a towering plume of icy spray in 2005, emanating from hot cracks near the south pole, scientists turned its detectors toward the small moon.
Cassini wasn’t designed to detect signs of life in the Enceladus plume – indeed, scientists didn’t know the plume existed until after the spacecraft arrived at Saturn.
“Although we can’t detect life, we’ve found that there’s a food source there for it. It would be like a candy store for microbes,” said Hunter Waite, lead author of the Cassini study.
The new findings are an independent line of evidence that hydrothermal activity is taking place in the Enceladus ocean. Previous results, published in March 2015, suggested hot water is interacting with rock beneath the sea; the new findings support that conclusion and add that the rock appears to be reacting chemically to produce the hydrogen.
The paper detailing new Hubble Space Telescope findings, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, reports on observations of Europa from 2016 in which a probable plume of material was seen erupting from the moon’s surface at the same location where Hubble saw evidence of a plume in 2014. These images bolster evidence that the Europa plumes could be a real phenomenon, flaring up intermittently in the same region on the moon’s surface.
The newly imaged plume rises about 62 miles (100 kilometers) above Europa’s surface, while the one observed in 2014 was estimated to be about 30 miles (50 kilometers) high. Both correspond to the location of an unusually warm region that contains features that appear to be cracks in the moon’s icy crust, seen in the late 1990s by NASA’s Galileo spacecraft. Researchers speculate that, like Enceladus, this could be evidence of water erupting from the moon’s interior.
“The plumes on Enceladus are associated with hotter regions, so after Hubble imaged this new plume-like feature on Europa, we looked at that location on the Galileo thermal map. We discovered that Europa’s plume candidate is sitting right on the thermal anomaly,” said William Sparks of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. Sparks led the Hubble plume studies in both 2014 and 2016.
The researchers say if the plumes and the warm spot are linked, it could mean water being vented from beneath the moon’s icy crust is warming the surrounding surface. Another idea is that water ejected by the plume falls onto the surface as a fine mist, changing the structure of the surface grains and allowing them to retain heat longer than the surrounding landscape.
For both the 2014 and 2016 observations, the team used Hubble’s Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) to spot the plumes in ultraviolet light. As Europa passes in front of Jupiter, any atmospheric features around the edge of the moon block some of Jupiter’s light, allowing STIS to see the features in silhouette. Sparks and his team are continuing to use Hubble to monitor Europa for additional examples of plume candidates and hope to determine the frequency with which they appear.
NASA’s future exploration of ocean worlds is enabled by Hubble’s monitoring of Europa’s putative plume activity and Cassini’s long-term investigation of the Enceladus plume. In particular, both investigations are laying the groundwork for NASA’s Europa Clipper mission, which is planned for launch in the 2020s.
“If there are plumes on Europa, as we now strongly suspect, with the Europa Clipper we will be ready for them,” said Jim Green, Director of Planetary Science, at NASA Headquarters.
Hubble’s identification of a site which appears to have persistent, intermittent plume activity provides a tempting target for the Europa mission to investigate with its powerful suite of science instruments. In addition, some of Sparks’ co-authors on the Hubble Europa studies are preparing a powerful ultraviolet camera to fly on Europa Clipper that will make similar measurements to Hubble’s, but from thousands of times closer. And several members of the Cassini INMS team are developing an exquisitely sensitive, next-generation version of their instrument for flight on Europa Clipper.
