Archive for December, 2009

Video showing the highlights of the year, with events and happenings around, within and with the help of NASA.

Holiday dance of the moons of Saturn set to Tchaikovsky’s Dance of Sugarplum Fairy from the Nutcracker. Featuring in alphabetical order, these moons: Janus, Mimas, Pandora, Prometheus, Rhea, and Tethys.

The crew of Expedition 22 docked to ISS today at 5:48 p.m. EST.

This is a much longer video, and also has the hatch opening between the two spacecraft.

Season’s greeting from NASA.

A view of the snow storm covering the eastern United States from the Aqua satellite taken yesterday.

The Mid-Atlantic states were completely white on Sunday, December 20, 2009, in the wake of a record-breaking snow storm. The storm deposited between 12 and 30 inches of snow in Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, D.C. on December 19, according to the National Weather Service. For many locations, the snowfall totals broke records for the most snow to fall in a single December day.

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this view of the Chesapeake Bay region as the clouds were clearing on December 20. The snow highlights the course of the Potomac and Susquehanna Rivers from the Appalachian Mountains to the Chesapeake Bay. The ridges and valleys of the Appalachian Mountains are similarly highlighted. The forested peaks are darker than the snow-covered valleys.

The massive snow storm was a Nor’easter, a powerful storm with strong winds that channels moisture from the Gulf of Mexico to the northeastern United States.

Not sure how I missed this, but many of you know I love the Aqua and Terra satellite for the excellent earth images they provide and Terra has had its 10th anniversary. This video is about the sort of data Terra has provided in those 10 years.

At 4:52 p.m. EST, Soyuz TMA-17 with its crew of three lifted off from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Video and a image of the event.

View of a gold mine in Western Australia.

Roughly 55 kilometers (35 miles) south of Laverton, Western Australia, lies the Sunrise Dam Gold Mine. A gold deposit was discovered in the area in 1988, and by 1995, the mine was open for business. Started as an open pit mine, the operation expanded to include underground mining in 2003. The mine produces roughly 460,000 ounces of gold each year, according to AngoGold Ashanti, which operates the mine.

The Advanced Land Imager (ALI) on NASA’s Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) satellite captured this true-color image of the Sunrise Dam Gold Mine on December 4, 2009. The main pit’s terraced landscape appears in shades of gray in the left half of this image, and what appears to be a smaller, rectangular pit appears on the right. In 2008, the central pit at Sunrise Dam reportedly reached a depth of 440 meters (1,445 feet). The straight line running diagonally through the lower right quadrant of the image is probably a landing strip; miners at Sunrise Dam frequently fly in and out of the remote area.

Away from the mining operation, the landscape appears in shades of brown. The physical environment around Sunrise Dam Gold Mine is flat and arid, comprised of sand and gypsum-rich dunes and saltpans. Acacia trees and shrubs well adapted to dry environments make up the vegetation in this warm, dry region.

Ares progress report on the Constellation program.

Tomorrow evening at 4:52 p.m. EST, Expedition 22 will be launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The new crew will be heading to ISS in the Soyuz TMA-17 spacecraft, and bring the total number of crew aboard ISS to five. Below are the rollout pictures from NASA’s Bill Ingalls.

The three members of the crew will be Oleg Kotov from the Russian space agency, Soichi Noguchi of JAXA, and Timothy Creamer of NASA.

It will be Timothy’s first spaceflight, and for Oleg and Soichi it will be their second.

You of course can watch the launch live here when it happens.