Space shuttle Endeavour lifted off at 4:14 AM EST this morning as planned, a beautiful fireball that lit up the sky after being delayed by a day. This was the last night launch of the shuttle, carrying the Node-3 Tranquillity module and large Cupola window into space to be joined with ISS.
Having been out this morning, I took a few pictures myself of the launch. By a few I mean two, and yes they both are horrible. At least my view was better than I got off with the camera. Fireball, Space Shuttle.
With nine minutes till the scheduled launch, at 4:30 AM EST the STS-130 launch was officially scrubbed. Sorry folks, another attempt will be made tomorrow at 4:14 AM EST.
Also worth mentioning, the scrub of Endeavour has moved up the launch of SDO. Now the Solar Dynamic Observatory will be flying on the 10th of February. Launch window will between 10:26 AM and 11:26 AM EST.
View of Karachi, Pakistan, imaged last month from NASA’s Earth Observing-1 satellite.
A centuries-old settlement that now ranks among the world’s largest, Pakistan’s seaport city of Karachi mixes intense urbanization with remnants of a natural environment. The Advanced Land Imager (ALI) on NASA’s Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) satellite captured this true-color image of Karachi on January 8, 2010. It shows the southwestern edges of the city, where mangroves and river deltas mix with ports and pavement.
Two rivers, the Lyari and Malir, pass through Karachi en route to the Arabian Sea. The Lyari River passes north of the Port of Karachi, and expansive salt works, appearing as large geometric areas of green, line the northern edge of that river’s delta. East of the port, the Malir River flows southward toward the sea. Emptying through a narrower delta, the Malir River is nevertheless more conspicuous than its neighboring waterway; the river is wider, and the corridor of vegetation along its banks extends farther out into the city.
Karachi’s port does not open directly to the Arabian Sea. Between the port and the ocean, a barrier island runs northwest-southeast (shown along the left edge of the image). East of this island and west of the port sits a large expanse of water and mangroves. Water in the Lyari River Delta must empty into the sea through the Baba Channel. (Tiny, oblong slivers in the channel are probably large ships.) Sediment colors the water flowing through that channel a lighter color than the surrounding ocean. Immediately east of the Port of Karachi lie two more mangroves, the larger of which is named Chinna Creek.
Away from the coastal mangroves, cityscape predominates. Many of Karachi’s oldest structures and most popular tourist attractions appear in the city center just northeast of the port, but street grids cover almost all of the available land outside of the mangroves. According to census statistics from 2000 to 2005, Karachi had a population of over 12 million inhabitants in 2006, and it was expected to maintain a high growth rate over the next decade.
Recently released images of the dwarf planet Pluto. Enjoy.
NASA today released the most detailed set of images ever taken of the distant dwarf planet Pluto. The images taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope show an icy and dark molasses-colored, mottled world that is undergoing seasonal changes in its surface color and brightness. Pluto has become significantly redder, while its illuminated northern hemisphere is getting brighter. These changes are most likely consequences of surface ices sublimating on the sunlit pole and then refreezing on the other pole as the dwarf planet heads into the next phase of its 248-year-long seasonal cycle. The dramatic change in color apparently took place in a two-year period, from 2000 to 2002.
The Hubble images will remain our sharpest view of Pluto until NASA’s New Horizons probe is within six months of its Pluto flyby. The Hubble pictures are proving invaluable for picking out the planet’s most interesting-looking hemisphere for the New Horizons spacecraft to swoop over when it flies by Pluto in 2015.
Though Pluto is arguably one of the public’s favorite planetary objects, it is also the hardest of which to get a detailed portrait because the world is small and very far away. Hubble resolves surface variations a few hundred miles across, which are too coarse for understanding surface geology. But in terms of surface color and brightness Hubble reveals a complex-looking and variegated world with white, dark-orange and charcoal-black terrain. The overall color is believed to be a result of ultraviolet radiation from the distant sun breaking up methane that is present on Pluto’s surface, leaving behind a dark and red carbon-rich residue.
Credit: NASA, ESA, and M. Buie/Southwest Research Institute
Stunning image from the European Southern Observatory via the Very Large Telescope. Beautiful. Details below.
ESO is releasing a magnificent VLT image of the giant stellar nursery surrounding NGC 3603, in which stars are continuously being born. Embedded in this scenic nebula is one of the most luminous and most compact clusters of young, massive stars in our Milky Way, which therefore serves as an excellent “local” analogue of very active star-forming regions in other galaxies. The cluster also hosts the most massive star to be “weighed” so far.
NGC 3603 is a starburst region: a cosmic factory where stars form frantically from the nebula’s extended clouds of gas and dust. Located 22 000 light-years away from the Sun, it is the closest region of this kind known in our galaxy, providing astronomers with a local test bed for studying intense star formation processes, very common in other galaxies, but hard to observe in detail because of their great distance from us.
The nebula owes its shape to the intense light and winds coming from the young, massive stars which lift the curtains of gas and clouds revealing a multitude of glowing suns. The central cluster of stars inside NGC 3603 harbours thousands of stars of all sorts: the majority have masses similar to or less than that of our Sun, but most spectacular are several of the very massive stars that are close to the end of their lives. Several blue supergiant stars crowd into a volume of less than a cubic light-year, along with three so-called Wolf-Rayet stars — extremely bright and massive stars that are ejecting vast amounts of material before finishing off in glorious explosions known as supernovae. Using another recent set of observations performed with the SINFONI instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), astronomers have confirmed that one of these stars is about 120 times more massive than our Sun, standing out as the most massive star known so far in the Milky Way.
The clouds of NGC 3603 provide us with a family picture of stars in different stages of their life, with gaseous structures that are still growing into stars, newborn stars, adult stars and stars nearing the end of their life. All these stars have roughly the same age, a million years, a blink of an eye compared to our five billion year-old Sun and Solar System. The fact that some of the stars have just started their lives while others are already dying is due to their extraordinary range of masses: high-mass stars, being very bright and hot, burn through their existence much faster than their less massive, fainter and cooler counterparts.
The newly released image, obtained with the FORS instrument attached to the VLT at Cerro Paranal, Chile, portrays a wide field around the stellar cluster and reveals the rich texture of the surrounding clouds of gas and dust.
In preparation for a Super Sunday launch on February 7th, Endeavour’s crew arrived at Kennedy Space Center in Florida last night. The six astronauts consist of Commander George D. Zamka, first time space traveler and pilot Terry Virts, along with Mission Specialists Kathryn P. Hire, Stephen Robinson, Nicholas Patrick, and Robert L. Behnken.
Endeavour and her crew will be spending 13 days in space, delivering the Tranquility Module and Copola to the International Space Station. Also of note, this will be the very last night mission planned. So while launch is scheduled for 4:39 AM EST, be sure to at the very least watch it live. I know I’ll be watching from my backyard.
Members of the Expedition 23 crew answer questions from students in Troy, Michigan yesterday. The members of the crew here are flight engineer Soichi Noguchi from JAXA, Commander Jeffrey N. Williams from NASA, and flight engineer Timothy Creamer from NASA.
Since you lot seem to enjoy pictures of Saturn so much, here is another one from last year. Pretty.
Bright spokes grace the B ring in this image which also includes the shadow of the moon Mimas and was taken about a month after Saturn’s August 2009 equinox.
The spokes are the ghostly radial markings visible near the middle of the image.
Mimas’ shadow stretches across the bottom of the image. The novel illumination geometry that accompanies equinox lowers the sun’s angle to the ringplane, significantly darkens the rings, and causes out-of-plane structures to look anomalously bright and cast shadows across the rings. These scenes are possible only during the few months before and after Saturn’s equinox, which occurs only once in about 15 Earth years. Before and after equinox, Cassini’s cameras have spotted not only the predictable shadows of some of Saturn’s moons, but also the shadows of newly revealed vertical structures in the rings themselves.
This view looks toward the northern, sunlit side of the rings from about 9 degrees above the ringplane.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Sept. 6, 2009. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 2.9 million kilometers (1.8 million miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 99 degrees. Image scale is 17 kilometers (11 miles) per pixel.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.
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