One Man's Trash is Another Man's Treasure

Above is a picture of SuitSat.
The old space suit, now named "SuitSat", is leaving with style and fame. SuitSat is an old space suit who is going to be thrown out of the International Space Station after being fully equipted to be a satellite ("SuitSat" meaning a SUIT SATellite). But don't worry there won't be anyone inside this space suit it will be empty. The space suit will be equipted with three batteries, a radio transmitter, and internal sensors to measure temperature. The suit's temperature controller will be turned off to conserve energy so the suit will be exposed to the Sun's rays with no way to regulate its internal temperature. SuitSat will answer many questions about the manufacturing of our space suits.
If you want to hear SuitSat's radio transmissions just tune into 145.990 MHz FM (the larger the antenna the better, police scanners and hand-talkie ham radios work well also). To find when SuitSat will pass over you go to http://science.nasa.gov/RealTime/JPass/25/JPass.asp, they will ask you for your zip code and then tell you when SuitSat will be over your head. Special awards will be given to students who listen to the transmissions, go to site at end of article to find out more.
SuitSat is planned to launch on February 3, 2006.

For more information and the full article click on picture above.

New Extrasolar Planet Found!

Above is an artist's conception of the newly discovered rocky planet.
A new extrasolar planet found! The planet is five times the size of Earth yet the smallest extrasolar planet to be found so far. The planet is a rock and ice planet, the most like Earth than any other extrasolar planet found yet. It has a solid core, its mass is too low to be a gas planet and still hold itself together. It orbits a red dwarf star that is five times less massive than our sun, making one full orbit in about ten years. The planet and its parent star (the star it orbits around) lay in the constellation Sagittarius, near the center of the Milky Way more than 20,000 light years away(Don't get sucked into the black hole! =]).
So far more than 200 extrasolar planets have been discovered in the Milky Way, most are gas giants around the size of Jupiter and Saturn. These planets orbit their parent star at distances less than the distance from the Earth to the sun, though this newly found planet orbits at a distance tree times greater.
It is estimated by its parent star and large orbit, that this planet's surface temperature is around 428 to 364 degrees below zero. This is much to cold for liquid water, yet astronomers believe that there may be frozen oceans under this planet's rock and ice surface.
This star was found using the technique called microlensing using the observations of two stars and their light, this is not used to find near by planets only extrasolar planets in distant parts of the galaxy. This newly found planet is only the third extrasolar planet to have been discovered through microlensing. Most extrasolar planets are found using the technique called Doppler shift though, in this technique they use light shifts to find planets, this technique is used mostly for closer extrasolar planets and gives more precise measurements. Most planets found by the Doppler shift have been gas giants.

For more information and the full articles go to:
http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Closer_To_Home.html
and
http://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/newworlds/Rocky_planet.html

Milky Way banishing stars?

Picture above is an artist's conception of a hypervelocity star.
Recently astronomers, using the MMT observatory in Arizona, discovered two stars leaving the Milky Way galaxy at speeds over 1 million mph, so fast they will never return to our galaxy! The first exiled star was discovered in 2005, two more were later found in Europe, and these two recently discovered stars brings the total amount of known exiled stars to five. These stars make up a new class of objects known as hypervelocity stars. Astronomers suspect there to be 1,000 of these stars exists in our galaxy, our galaxy containing roughly 100 billion stars.
Theoretically it is believed that these stars were thrown out of our galaxy's center millions of years ago. Each star belonging to a binary star system (two stars orbiting each other). When the binary pair come too close to the black hole in the center of our galaxy, the black hole's intense gravity pulls the stars apart, capturing one star while flinging the other out of the galaxy at great speeds. Detailed studies of our galaxy's center have found stars orbiting the black hole with very elongated, elliptical orbits, the same kind of orbits expected from the past companions of hypervelocity stars.
It is estimated that another star is thrown out of our galaxy every 100 thousand years on average. Though seeing one of these stars ejected is very unlikely, so trying to find these stars are very difficult. Astronomers must find common characteristics in the stars already discovered and search stars with these same characteristics.

To read the entire article click on picture above.

Nearest Theaters for "Roving Mars" have arrived!

If you are interested in seeing the "Roving Mars" movie (comes out January 27) these are the theaters closest to you (these are all of the theaters in California):

*Loews Theaters Metreon & IMAX
(Fourth & Mission)
101 Fourth Street
San Francisco, CA 94103
Group Sales: (415) 369-6210

*Hackworth IMAX Dome Theater
201 South Market Street
San Jose, CA 95113
(408) 294-TECH ext. 3
www.thetech.org

*Regal Hecienda Crossings & IMAX
5000 Dublin Boulevard
Dublin, CA 94568
(925) 560-0900
Group Sales: 1-800-792-8244
www.regalcinemas.com

New Horizons launched on Thursday!

The probe New Horizons was launched on Thursday, January 19, at 2:00pm. The launch was planned for Tuesday, January 17 but because of weather conditions the launch had to be delayed. In order for the mission to work and make each check point at the right time (ex. They have to make sure that New Horizons goes by Jupiter in February of 2007 in order to use Jupiter's gravity to assist the probe on its course), NASA had a launch window (if they didn't launch it before this date then the probe's course wouldn't work) that extended until February 14, 2006 (can you imagine if they failed to launch New Horizons by Feb. 14 and missed the launch window? This was a once in a life time opportunity, thank goodness they didn't miss it).

Mission Milestones
February 2007..................Jupiter gravity assist
March 2007 - June 2015....Interplanetary cruise
July 2015...........................Pluto-Charon encounter
2016-2020........................Kuiper Belt objects encounter

For more information click on picture above.

New Horizons planned to launch tomorrow!!

The New Horizons spacecraft is planned to launch tomorrow on its trip to Pluto, Pluto's moon Charon, and the Kuipler Belt. It is estimated to get to those destinations earliest at summer of 2015 (wow that is a long time, its so weird scientists work so hard on something only to send it out into space and then wait). The launch is planned to happen at 1:24 EST. From Cape Canaveral Air Force Station Florida (oh...I'll be at school but I'm sure they will have replays of it on the NASA channel later, though take offs aren't as fun to see as the images and video they get back from the spacecraft, so I guess it isn't that big of a deal). New Horizons has seven scientific instruments on it and weighs a total of 1, 060 pounds (that is really heavy! Though that might not be that heavy for a spacecraft, I don't know). With the data that New Horizons will bring back we will be able to find out more about Pluto and Charon's geology and environment, and we may be able to map their surfaces, find their temperature, and examine Pluto's complex and mysterious atmosphere. After Pluto's flyby New Horizons will do a flyby of the Kuipler Belt, this could change many of our views on planets and even the origin of our universe. In the Kuipler Belt there is a "planet" that may be the "tenth planet", it is in discussion right now on whether or not it is a planet. If it is a planet, then the discussion if Pluto being a planet will still be in discussion, but if this is decided not a planet, then the discussion of Pluto being a planet will be debated even more because this "tenth planet" is bigger Pluto and has one or more moons.

For more information click on the photo above.

Stardust's mission finally has come to a close

You have all heard about the space craft Stardust and how it got samples from a comet. Well today those samples successfully landed on Earth. My dad was board and turned to the NASA channel today and saw a replay of the control room when they heard that Stardust had landed safely. He told me about it later and I thought I would find the story and post it on this blog.
They planned the mission for ten years and the mission lasted seven years (to think that they had predicted the comet's location nearly seventeen years before the comet was actually there, wow). It must have felt great to see that all that work wasn't for nothing. Stardust traveled 2.88 billion miles in the seven years in space (I wonder how it was powered, or was it powered at all, did they just power it to get it out there and then leave it to drift off in the right direction then power it again to get back home?). Stardust brought back comet and interstellar dust particles. Scientists will be analyzing and examining these particles for many years to come.

My dad and I were talking about this earlier today and I was thinking what if you helped plan Stardust's mission, and while it was in space you retired; now Stardust has landed and you get to watch new young scientists analyze the data that you had helped collect, and you just get to watch (now that would stink!).

Also can you imagine if while transferring the samples something happened and they got lost? You know how much money, time, and work went into getting those samples? There would be some really mad scientists out there if that happened.

For more information, videos, images, and audio click on picture above.

"Roving Mars" A Whole New World Awaits

Walt Disney Pictures and NASA have come together to create "Roving Mars", an upcoming IMAX movie presenting the findings and visuals gathered by the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity. The movie is being produced by Academy Awards nominated filmmaker Frank Marshal ("Raiders of the Lost Ark", "Who Framed Roger Rabbit", "The Sixth Sence", "Seabiscuit"). Out of his movies that I have seen they are great, I can only imagine how good this movie will be. The film will be directed by George Butler ("The Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antartic Expedition", "Pumping Iron"). This film will take the viewers as close as it is possible to Mars by showing them real footage of the red planet.
The rovers Spirit and Opportunity who took this footage are still on Mars and have been for just nearly two years, a trip that was planned for 90 days. With over four miles on her odometer, Opportunity has brought back over 58,000 images and Spirit has brought back over 70,000 images. They are still bringing us more and more information about Mars.
Sadly as far as I know there aren't any IMAX theaters near or in Humboldt County, so hopefully this film will come out on DVD and VHS in the future so we can all see it too and not be left out.
The film is rated 'G' so no worries there.
It comes out on January 27, 2006.
I think that this movie will be boring to some but amazing and fascinating to others. I would love to see this movie, especially in an IMAX theater, because then it feels like you are the one walking on Mars, not the rover but you. This isn't your normal movie filmed here on Earth, this movie is one of the first if not the first movie to be filmed on a different planet.

For more information about "Roving Mars", pictures, trailers, and more go to
http://disney.go.com/disneypictures/rovingmars/