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Old 28-01-2015, 10:59
HenryGarten
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I remember Apollo 1, I was 9 at the time and a real space buff. It was the first mainstream news story that really had an impact on me.

And 29 years since Challenger, time really does fly.
The best time to be a space buff. It was gut wrenchingly exciting in those days. The USA thought they had lost the race to the moon at that point. Then of course came the disaster of Soyuz I a few months later and it was back to all square.

To be honest I think the most gripping moment of Apollo was the launch of Apollo VIII

Almost everyone was saying "They will never come back"
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Old 28-01-2015, 11:08
Eddie Badger
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The best time to be a space buff. It was gut wrenchingly exciting in those days. The USA thought they had lost the race to the moon at that point. Then of course came the disaster of Soyuz I a few months later and it was back to all square one.

To be honest I think the most gripping moment of Apollo was the launch of Apollo VIII

Almost everyone was saying "They will never come back"
Exciting times, other kids had pictures of footballers on their bedroom walls, I had astronauts. I'll never forget staying up with my grandfather to watch Neil Armstrong step on the moon and the nail biting tension of Apollo 13 and the relief when they made it through re-entry.
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Old 28-01-2015, 11:16
HenryGarten
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Exciting times, other kids had pictures of footballers on their bedroom walls, I had astronauts. I'll never forget staying up with my grandfather to watch Neil Armstrong step on the moon and the nail biting tension of Apollo 13 and the relief when they made it through re-entry.
Yes late on a Friday afternoon. Yet the astronauts were ever so calm. I think that was the TV event with the greatest audience for very many years.
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Old 28-01-2015, 19:19
Rich Tea.
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Tuesday 28th January 1986 is a day I recall very clearly indeed for the shock of the Space Shuttle and especially the civilian crew member and teacher who had won a place on the crew, Christa McAuliffe. I was 16 at the time and had not long come in from school and I recall that Channel 4 was on when there was a newsflash at about 4,52pm and Peter Sissons came on screen to say what had just happened. It seared into my memory. We'd just got so used to them going up safely in the previous 5 years and it seemed routine by then. President Reagan then made a great speech at his desk in the Oval Office I recall later that day.

At the time I had a large model of Space Shuttle Columbia in the bedroom, which I had got and made the year the shuttle first went up. I still have it in a cupboard a bit worse for wear, so when Columbia too was destroyed on re-entry I was really very saddened, and the 12th anniversary of that shuttle tragedy is only this coming Sunday 1st February too.
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Old 28-01-2015, 19:42
HenryGarten
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Tuesday 28th January 1986 is a day I recall very clearly indeed for the shock of the Space Shuttle and especially the civilian crew member and teacher who had won a place on the crew, Christa McAuliffe. I was 16 at the time and had not long come in from school and I recall that Channel 4 was on when there was a newsflash at about 4,52pm and Peter Sissons came on screen to say what had just happened. It seared into my memory. We'd just got so used to them going up safely in the previous 5 years and it seemed routine by then. President Reagan then made a great speech at his desk in the Oval Office I recall later that day.

At the time I had a large model of Space Shuttle Columbia in the bedroom, which I had got and made the year the shuttle first went up. I still have it in a cupboard a bit worse for wear, so when Columbia too was destroyed on re-entry I was really very saddened, and the 12th anniversary of that shuttle tragedy is only this coming Sunday 1st February too.
Yes it is interesting how the three biggest accidents all happened on dates very close to each other.
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Old 28-01-2015, 20:25
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It appears to be very round and rather less pockmarked than one imagines a typical irregular shaped asteroid.

Did anyone see it with binoculars from the UK overnight?
The dwarf planet/largest asteroid 1 Ceres (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceres_%28dwarf_planet%29) is best seen towards the end of July this year using binoculars. I'd suggest checking out online star maps nearer the time.

The best picture of it from the Hubble Space Telescope can be seen here http://www.daviddarling.info/images/Ceres_Hubble.jpg and the discovery of the asteroids can be read about here http://www.esa.int/About_Us/Welcome_...y_of_asteroids.
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Old 29-01-2015, 00:08
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“The first images that we are starting to get are actually of Pluto itself and Charon, its largest moon,” says Kief. “It’s really cool because you can actually look at a GIF of a bunch of images spliced together showing the rotation of Charon around Pluto. Because they are both so small and, relatively speaking, closer in size to each other, Charon doesn’t necessarily orbit Pluto. They orbit a ‘barycentre’ which is in between the two of them. It’s cool to watch.”
http://www.news1130.com/2015/01/28/n...ures-of-pluto/

l assume that the first pictures of Pluto are still being image processed and that they will be publicly released within the next day or so.
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Old 30-01-2015, 09:34
The Martian
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Water May Have Once Gushed From Massive Asteroid

Liquid water apparently flowed on the surface of the huge asteroid Vesta briefly in the relatively recent past, a surprising new study suggests.

"Nobody expected to find evidence of water on Vesta. The surface is very cold and there is no atmosphere, so any water on the surface evaporates," study lead author Jennifer Scully, a postgraduate researcher at UCLA, said in a NASA statement. "However, Vesta is proving to be a very interesting and complex planetary body."
http://news.discovery.com/space/aste...oid-150128.htm

I like water.
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Old 30-01-2015, 10:01
albertd
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l assume that the first pictures of Pluto are still being image processed and that they will be publicly released within the next day or so.
I think I saw somewhere that the radio signal is so weak due to the distance that the bit rate is extremely low and so it will take quite a long time (I think it said several months) to transmit all the pictures. If that is the case, it may be that very few have actually been received yet.
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Old 30-01-2015, 17:40
WhatJoeThinks
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I think I saw somewhere that the radio signal is so weak due to the distance that the bit rate is extremely low and so it will take quite a long time (I think it said several months) to transmit all the pictures. If that is the case, it may be that very few have actually been received yet.
Emily Lakdawalla has blogged about this today:
Talking to Pluto is hard! Why it takes so long to get data back from New Horizons
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Old 30-01-2015, 20:49
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I think I saw somewhere that the radio signal is so weak due to the distance that the bit rate is extremely low and so it will take quite a long time (I think it said several months) to transmit all the pictures. If that is the case, it may be that very few have actually been received yet.
^^^ This is all true but the reports nevertheless gave the impression that some pictures at least would be arriving this week. I guess we'll have to wait a couple more weeks then - dayum! At least 2015 will be a good year for planetary astronomy because we'll get new results from both Ceres and Pluto and the Philae lander and Comet P67 might even wake up too!

Given the mission timelines involves, the technology in that particular probe quite possibly originates from the year 2000 or thereabouts and I daresay that very few of us still have computers from those days.

Water May Have Once Gushed From Massive Asteroid

http://news.discovery.com/space/aste...oid-150128.htm

I like water.
Actually, quite a few meteorites that have landed on Earth have come from Vesta which has been subject to various collisions and bombardments over the aeons (see http://geology.com/articles/vesta-meteorites/). It would be interesting to see if any reanalyses of the Vesta meteorites backs up this latest report.
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Old 31-01-2015, 03:47
WhatJoeThinks
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^^^ This is all true but the reports nevertheless gave the impression that some pictures at least would be arriving this week. I guess we'll have to wait a couple more weeks then - dayum! At least 2015 will be a good year for planetary astronomy because we'll get new results from both Ceres and Pluto and the Philae lander and Comet P67 might even wake up too!
Well, Emily calculated that there could be up to 11 images per day, so they may release them sooner than that.

I hope so.
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Old 05-02-2015, 09:38
Eddie Badger
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Latest news from Pluto http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-31144138
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Old 05-02-2015, 17:05
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It was a nice gesture of NASA to release the latest Pluto and Charon images on what would have been Clyde Tombaugh's 109th birthday:

Nasa released the new image set on the 109th birthday of Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered the distant icy world in 1930. The American astronomer died in 1997, but his daughter, Annette Tombaugh, commented: “My dad would be thrilled with New Horizons." To actually see the planet that he had discovered, and find out more about it - to get to see the moons of Pluto - he would have been astounded.
In other news, we've also got the best ever images of that other micro-world Ceres:

Dawn Gets Closer Views of Ceres
NASA's Dawn spacecraft, on approach to dwarf planet Ceres, has acquired its latest and closest-yet snapshot of this mysterious world. The image of Ceres, taken on Feb. 4, 2015, from a distance of about 90,000 miles (145,000 kilometers), is available at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/...hp?id=pia19174
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/...hp?id=pia19179
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=4475


Impact craters can now clearly be seen on Ceres and comparisons have been drawn with Saturn's moon Tethys :

Ceres Coming Into View
To get a sense of what the new images in February might tell us about Ceres, I've dug up some Cassini images of Saturn's icy moons. Take Tethys. Famous for its really large and deep impact basin Odysseus and nearly globe-girdling fault valley Ithaca Chasma. Odysseus is ~430 km wide and at least 8 kilometers deep. Several other deep craters make Tethys a useful comparison. Ithaca Chasma is a prominent fracture system 75 to 115 kilometers wide, several kilometers deep and nearly circles the globe. Both features are prominent and possible analogs for what we might see on Ceres.
http://www.planetary.org/blogs/guest...into-view.html

Let's now go find a comet:

Comet Lovejoy: http://astronomynow.com/2015/02/05/t...ough-february/

Comet 67P (the one where Philae landed) is still quite a long way off and a powerful telescope would be needed to currently see it: http://www.livecometdata.com/comets/...v-gerasimenko/
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Old 08-02-2015, 21:03
StrmChaserSteve
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Nasa Tv
LIVE NOW: Watch coverage of @NOAASatellites #DSCOVR, set to launch at 6:10pm ET

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasat...l#.VNfO0_msVeN
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Old 09-02-2015, 21:49
tiger2000
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Nasa reveals far side of the Moon

Nasa has released a view of the Moon that cannot be seen from Earth.

Using nearly five-years of mapping data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, the space agency has created footage showing what it is like on the far side.

The far side of the Moon is home to a scarred area known as the South Pole-Aitken, one of the largest and oldest 'impacts' in the solar system.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-31297370
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Old 10-02-2015, 00:16
Keyser_Soze1
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Absolutely beautiful - this is science at it's very best.

The dark side of the moon - surely once the very epitome of the unknowable now see in such wonderful detail.

And the dwarf planets of Ceres and Pluto to get their portraits very shortly.
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Old 10-02-2015, 20:51
atg
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It's a very nice imaginative film, but I'm sure we must have had pretty good pictures already from other probes, not to mention the Apollos. Didn't Patrick Moore literally 'reveal' the first far side pictures live on air more than 50 years ago?
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Old 10-02-2015, 23:22
Keyser_Soze1
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It's a very nice imaginative film, but I'm sure we must have had pretty good pictures already from other probes, not to mention the Apollos. Didn't Patrick Moore literally 'reveal' the first far side pictures live on air more than 50 years ago?
I think so but it is the stunning detail of the map that is the main difference - with a far higher resolution.
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Old 11-02-2015, 16:04
Eddie Badger
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Europe's Mini-Shuttle returns
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-31421200
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Old 11-02-2015, 21:32
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I just had a eureka moment

I'd been wondering why the planets are all (pretty much) orbiting the sun in the same plane and if planets around other stars were similarly aligned, and even aligned with ours. Not sure about the last bit, unless those very densest objects are having some effect, but, given time, all orbiting planets will align to a plane which is the natural result of their slight pull on each other. Not sure if it's right, but it's good to imagine.

Perhaps planets which are less aligned than would be expected are more recent additions to the system.
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Old 11-02-2015, 21:58
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Absolutely beautiful - this is science at it's very best.

The dark side of the moon - surely once the very epitome of the unknowable now see in such wonderful detail.

And the dwarf planets of Ceres and Pluto to get their portraits very shortly.
It's a very nice imaginative film, but I'm sure we must have had pretty good pictures already from other probes, not to mention the Apollos. Didn't Patrick Moore literally 'reveal' the first far side pictures live on air more than 50 years ago?
The first sight of the far side of the Moon was obtained by the Soviet Union's Luna 3 probe way back in 1959 and the pictures were crude by today's standards: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...una_3_moon.jpg

There's a comparison of the Moon's two sides here http://www.lpi.usra.edu/lunar/missio...es/img5_lg.gif, there are far fewer frozen lava 'seas' on the far side and there's an interesting discussion here http://space.stackexchange.com/quest...-the-near-side and here http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astro...different.html.
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Old 11-02-2015, 22:20
afcbfan
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I just had a eureka moment

I'd been wondering why the planets are all (pretty much) orbiting the sun in the same plane and if planets around other stars were similarly aligned, and even aligned with ours. Not sure about the last bit, unless those very densest objects are having some effect, but, given time, all orbiting planets will align to a plane which is the natural result of their slight pull on each other. Not sure if it's right, but it's good to imagine.

Perhaps planets which are less aligned than would be expected are more recent additions to the system.
MinutePhysics did a video about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmNXKqeUtJM
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Old 11-02-2015, 22:32
archiver
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Thanks for that. I followed it all the way to the 4D bit.

I wonder if the universe is 'flat' for the same reason.
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Old 11-02-2015, 22:45
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I'm guessing everyone has seen this ?

https://www.flickr.com/photos/europe...y/15861603283/
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