Galileo, Juno, and Jupiter himself
NASA's Jupiter-bound Juno spacecraft will carry the 1.5-inch likeness of Galileo Galilei, the Roman god Jupiter and his wife Juno to Jupiter when the spacecraft launches this Friday, Aug. 5. The inclusion of the three mini-statues, or figurines, is part of a joint outreach and educational program developed as part of the partnership between NASA and the LEGO Group to inspire children to explore science, technology, engineering and mathematics. In Greek and Roman mythology, Jupiter drew a veil of clouds around himself to hide his mischief. From Mount Olympus, Juno was able to peer through the clouds and reveal Jupiter's true nature. Juno holds a magnifying glass to signify her search for the truth, while her husband holds a lightning bolt. The third LEGO crew member is Galileo Galilei, who made several important discoveries about Jupiter, including the four largest satellites of Jupiter (named the Galilean moons in his honor). Of course, the miniature Galileo has his telescope with him on the journey. -NASA Press Release
Key things to know about the Juno Mission
A macabre and forgotten episode from the Dark Ages has been uncovered by British researchers after they examined dozens of beheaded skeletons.Mystery surrounded the identity of the victims since they were discovered by accident last June near Weymouth, Dorset, England, when workers at a 2012 building site, stumbled across a burial pit.
The grave contained a mass of bones and 51 skulls neatly stacked in a pile.
Scientific tests have now revealed that the individuals, all males mostly in their late teens or early 20s, were likely Viking raiders who were brutally executed 1,000 years ago.
Indeed, chemical analysis of teeth from 10 of the men showed they originated from a variety of places within the Scandinavian countries, with one thought to have come from within the Arctic Circle.
The tests showed they had high protein diets similar to those known from sites in Sweden, one of the Viking homelands.
Captured by Anglo-Saxon locals some time between 910 and 1030 A.D., a time when Vikings were raiding throughout Britain and Europe, the Vikings met a horrible death at a public execution.
"It was not a straight one slice and head off. They were all hacked at around the head and jaw. It doesn't look like they were very willing or the executioners very skilled," Ceri Boston, an expert in ancient bones who examined the remains, told the "London Times."
"We think the decapitation was messy because the person was moving around. One man had his hands sliced through. It looks like he was trying to grab hold of the sword as he was being executed," Boston said.
The researchers, who are still examining the remains, also found that some individuals suffered various wounds such as a cut to the pelvis, blows to the chest and stomach, all thought to relate to the process of decapitation.
"The burial pit took us all by surprise and its story gets more fascinating as the analysis goes on," Angus Campbell, leader of Dorset County Council, said. -Discover Channel News (thanks to Andy for the heads up)
The Soviet probe Venera 3 successfully lands on the surface of Venus. It’s the first time anything man-made makes contact with an extraterrestrial surface beyond the Moon.
The Soviet Union originally designed the vehicle to explore Mars, but repurposed three of them as Venera probes to visit Venus. In February 1966, Venera 2 managed to fly by the planet at a distance of 15,000 miles, but its instruments failed before it could send the data back to Earth. The probe eventually began orbiting the sun.
The Soviets got much closer on their next attempt. Venera 3 was supposed to land a probe on the planet’s surface, collecting and sending back data as it descended toward the planet with a parachute.
The probe weighed around a ton and was equipped with instruments to gather data on the temperature, pressure and composition of the Venusian atmosphere, which it probably did.
Before reaching the atmosphere, Venera 3 had already communicated with Earth 93 times, but ground control lost contact with the spacecraft on Feb. 16, just before its probe reached the atmosphere. The probe landed on Venus on March 1, becoming the first Earthly craft to touch alien terrain.
The following Venera missions became more and more successful, as the Soviets learned from their earlier attempts. Venera 4 was the first spacecraft to measure the atmosphere of another planet. In 1970, despite a parachute failure at the last minute, Venera 7 landed mostly intact and became the first probe to transmit data back to Earth from another planet.
Venera 13 transmitted the photo below and 13 others from the Venusian surface March 1, 1982, exactly six years after Venera 3 landed.
In all, 14 Soviet landers made it to the surface of Venus, and the United States landed the Pioneer Venus Multiprobe in 1978. Earthlings have also sent landers and rovers to Mars. In 2005 the Huygens probe successfully disengaged from the Cassini spacecraft and landed on the surface of the Saturnian moon Titan. Probes have also made contact with two asteroids and a comet. -Wired.com
Explanation: Goodbye Earth. Earlier this month, ESA's interplanetary Rosetta spacecraftPictured above, zoomed past the Earth on its way back across the Solar System. Earth showed a bright crescent phase featuring the South Pole to the passing rocket ship. Launched from Earth in 2004, Rosetta used the gravity of the Earth to help propel it out past Mars and toward a 2014 rendezvous with Comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Last year, the robot spacecraft passed asteroid 2867 Steins, and next year it is scheduled to pass enigmatic asteroid 21 Lutetia. If all goes well, Rosetta will release a probe that will land on the 15-km diameter comet in 2014.
Explanation: Why is there water on the Moon? Last month, the LCROSS mission crashed a large impactor into a permanently shadowed crater near the Moon's South Pole. A plume of dust rose that was visible to the satellite, although hard to discern from Earth. The plume is shown above in visible light. Last week, the results of a preliminary chemical analysis gave a clear indication that the dust plume contained water. Such water is of importance not only for understanding the history of the Moon, but as a possible reservoir for future astronauts trying to live on the Moon for long periods. The source of the lunar water is now a topic of debate. Possible origins include many small meteorites, a comet, or primordial moon soil.
Explanation: Driving along on a summer evening, near the small town of Weikersheim in southern Germany, photographer Jens Hackmann had to stop. He couldn't resist pointing his camera and telephoto lens at this lovely conjunction of a Full Moon and planet Jupiter looming near the steeple of a local church. Of course, 400 years ago, Galileo couldn't resist pointing his newly constructed telescope at these celestial beacons either. When he did, he found craters and mountains on the not-so-smooth lunar surface and discovered the large moons of Jupiter now known as the Galilean Moons. Jupiter's Galilean moons are just visible in this photo as tiny pinpricks of light very near the bright planet. Want to see the Moon and Jupiter better than Galileo? Look for local 2009 International Year of Astronomy activities and events during these next few Galilean Nights (October 22-24). -APoD
“This is a day we’ve been waiting for for a long time,” said exoplanet researcher Sara Seager of the Massachusettes Institute of Technology, who was not involved in the research. “It’s the first definitive rocky world beyond our solar system, and it’s opening a new gate for our research. We’re really, really excited about it.”
When astronomers discovered COROT-7b in February, they couldn’t determine its mass because they didn’t have precise enough measurements of the velocity of its star. Now, using 70 hours of observation data from the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) spectrograph, scientists from the European Southern Observatory have calculated that the exoplanet is only about five times more massive than Earth.
Combined with the planet’s known radius, which is almost twice that of Earth, the new mass measurement makes COROT-7b the first exoplanet with a known density similar to Earth’s.
Most exoplanets are gaseous giants that resemble Jupiter or Neptune. But if extraterrestrial life exists in the universe, Seager said we’re most likely to find it on a small, rocky exoplanet with a density similar to Earth. “The holy grail in exoplanets, and maybe in all of science, is to find another planet like Earth, a planet that has signs of life on it,” she said.
Unfortunately, with daytime temperatures above 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit and nighttime temps of minus 200, the environment on COROT-7b is probably too extreme to support life. “But it’s helping to tell us that these things must be pretty common,” Seager said.
Indeed, scientists have found about a dozen small exoplanets that might be Earth-like, including a sister planet called COROT-7c that they discovered while studying COROT-7b. “But COROT-7b is the only one with a measurement of the mass,” astrophysicist Claire Moutou of the Laboratory of Astrophysics of Marseilles in France wrote in an e-mail. Moutou and her colleagues presented their results Wednesday at the European Planetary Science Congress in Germany.
Although scientists guessed COROT-7b might have an Earth-like density as soon as they detected the small planet, the variable activity of the planet’s star made it hard to know for sure. The COROT satellite detects exoplanets by measuring tiny changes in a star’s brightness as a planet passes in front of it, but the COROT-7 star is almost constantly twinkling.
“The stellar activity (presence of changing starspots on its surface) generates a strong scattering of the measurements,” Moutou said. “It was pretty hard to disentangle the effect of stellar activity from the planet signal.”
In addition to being the first rocky exoplanet, COROT-7b also orbits closer to its host star than any other known exoplanet. Whipping around at a record-breaking speed of 750,000 kilometers per hour, the planet’s extreme environment may include lava or boiling oceans on its surface. Because this is the first exoplanet of its kind, researchers don’t know quite what to expect.
Just last week, before the announcement of COROT-7b’s mass, astronomer Greg Loughlin of the University of California, Santa Cruz, told Wired how exciting it would be to find such a planet. “We have no idea what a five-Earth-mass planet is like,” Loughlin said. “It could be an oversized version of Earth, it could be a super-Earth. Or alternately, it could be a sub-Neptune or a sub-Uranus. It really is the last basic fundamental kind of planet that we have not had any kind of a look at.” -Alexis Madrigal, Wired.com
Skygazers are preparing for another dazzling sky show, as the annual Perseid meteor shower reaches its peak. No special equipment is required to watch the shower, which occurs when Earth passes through a stream of dusty debris from the comet Swift-Tuttle. Astronomers are advised to lie on a blanket or a reclining chair to get the best view.As the cometary "grit" from Swift-Tuttle strikes our atmosphere, it burns up, often creating streaks of light across the sky. The meteors appear to come from a point called a "radiant" in the constellation of Perseus - hence the name Perseid.
The late evening on 12 August through to the early hours of the 13 August is the best time to see the shower. The best time to watch is before dawn on Wednesday.
Astronomers say up to 100 meteors per hour are expected to streak across the sky during the shower's peak. But this year, light from the last quarter Moon will interfere significantly with the view. Astronomers say binoculars might help with viewing the spectacle, but will also restrict the view to a small part of the sky. The Perseids can appear in any part of the sky, but their tails all point back to the radiant in the constellation Perseus.
