Het Astronomie Topic #3

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Japanese freighter makes re-entry

Japan's new space freighter has burned up in the Earth's atmosphere after completing its mission to the International Space Station (ISS).

The H-II Transfer Vehicle (HTV) carried 4.5 tonnes of supplies to the orbiting platform, including scientific equipment for its Kibo laboratory.

The HTV, which had arrived at the ISS in September, was released on Friday.

A series of engine firings then took the vehicle into a controlled but destructive dive over the Pacific.

A statement from the Japanese space agency said the freighter re-entered the atmosphere at 0626 Japan Standard Time (2126 GMT Sunday).

Most of the vehicle components would have been destroyed although some debris was expected to survive and fall into the ocean, it added.

The HTV is one of Japan's major contributions to the orbiting space station project and is part of the barter agreement it has with the other station partners to pay its way.

The HTVs that follow in the coming years will play a critical role in servicing the ISS after the US space shuttles are retired.

It is the first spacecraft to visit the ISS which does not drive itself all the way to berthing. Rather, it simply parks up under the bow of the station to allow the platform's Canadarm2 to manage the final stage of attachment.

When the US shuttles retire at the end of next year or the beginning of 2011, the ISS project will become dependent on five robotic freighters for its logistics:

• The Russian Progress and European ATV have already demonstrated their flight capability. Four more ATVs have been booked to fly to the station, one a year starting in 2010.

• Following on from the first HTV mission, Japan plans a further six flights through to 2015.

• Two commercial US suppliers, SpaceX and Orbital Sciences, are in the process of developing their Dragon and Cygnus supply ships. The first of these is scheduled to deliver supplies to the ISS no earlier than the end of 2010.

HTV and Dragon are particularly important because of their ability to deliver larger items in their unpressurised compartments that would not normally fit through the docking port of a pressurised compartment.

Bron: BBC

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Op dinsdag 3 november 2009 10:49 schreef Iblis het volgende:
Physicist Makes New High-Res Panorama of Milky Way

[ afbeelding ]

Piecing together 3000 individual photographs, a physicist has made a new high-resolution panoramic image of the full night sky, with the Milky Way galaxy as its centerpiece. Axel Mellinger, a professor at Central Michigan University, describes the process of making the panorama in the forthcoming issue of Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. An interactive version of the picture can viewed on Mellinger’s website: http://home.arcor.de/axel.mellinger/.

“This panorama image shows stars 1000 times fainter than the human eye can see, as well as hundreds of galaxies, star clusters and nebulae,” Mellinger said. Its high resolution makes the panorama useful for both educational and scientific purposes, he says.

Mellinger spent 22 months and traveled over 26,000 miles to take digital photographs at dark sky locations in South Africa, Texas and Michigan. After the photographs were taken, “the real work started,” Mellinger said.

Simply cutting and pasting the images together into one big picture would not work. Each photograph is a two-dimensional projection of the celestial sphere. As such, each one contains distortions, in much the same way that flat maps of the round Earth are distorted. In order for the images to fit together seamlessly, those distortions had to be accounted for. To do that, Mellinger used a mathematical model—and hundreds of hours in front of a computer.

Another problem Mellinger had to deal with was the differing background light in each photograph.

“Due to artificial light pollution, natural air glow, as well as sunlight scattered by dust in our solar system, it is virtually impossible to take a wide-field astronomical photograph that has a perfectly uniform background,” Mellinger said.

To fix this, Mellinger used data from the Pioneer 10 and 11 space probes. The data allowed him to distinguish star light from unwanted background light. He could then edit out the varying background light in each photograph. That way they would fit together without looking patchy.

The result is an image of our home galaxy that no star-gazer could ever see from a single spot on earth. Mellinger plans to make the giant 648 megapixel image available to planetariums around the world.

Bron: Chicago Journals.

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Op vrijdag 6 november 2009 03:32 schreef ExperimentalFrentalMental het volgende:Die 'dampkring' zou dan een dikte van slechts tien centimeter hebben, een druk die tien keer zo hoog is als de druk in de kern van de aarde, en een dichtheid gelijk aan die van diamant. Het zwaartekrachtsveld aan het oppervlak van een neutronenster is honderd miljard keer zo groot als het zwaartekrachtsveld van de aarde.

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Op vrijdag 6 november 2009 10:43 schreef Handschoen het volgende:

[..]

Zou zo'n koolstof atmosfeer dan niet gewoon diamant zijn onder die drukken en zwaartekracht?? Een ster gecovered met een laag diamant .

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Op zondag 8 november 2009 00:54 schreef Apogist het volgende:

[..]

"diamond star thrills astronomers"
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3492919.stm

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Russia to resume ISS construction
^{By Anatoly Zak, Science reporter}

After a hiatus of almost a decade, Russia is set to resume construction of its share in the International Space Station (ISS) with the launch of a new module this week.

A Poisk ("Quest") Mini-Research Module-2 (MIM-2 in the Russian abbreviation) is set for launch from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Tuesday at 1422 GMT.

The spacecraft is essentially a twin of another Russian module - the Pirs Docking Compartment - added to the outpost in September 2001.

In the intervening years, economic problems kept further Russian pieces of the station on the ground and forced a significant scaling down of the Russian segment in comparison to its originally conceived architecture.

The MIM-2 module is only the first of three long-term components which Russia plans to add to the station over the next three years.

Another module, Mini-Research Module-1 or MIM-1, is currently undergoing final check-ups at RKK Energia, Russia's prime contractor for manned spacecraft. Energia is based in Korolev, near Moscow.

Multi-purpose module

Next month, MIM-1 is due to be shipped to Cape Canaveral, Florida. From here, it is to be launched to the station in the cargo bay of Nasa's space shuttle in May.

The MIM-1 spacecraft was recycled from the habitation section of the aborted science and power-supply platform (NEP). This platform was never completed due to lack of cash.

Despite their identification as research modules, the primary function of both craft is to provide four docking ports for the Russian segment of the station, which are needed to receive Soyuz and Progress transport ships.

After this year's increase of the outpost's crew from three to six people, the number of Soyuz spacecraft heading to the station is set to double from two to four annually.

At least two three-seat Soyuz spacecraft have to be docked to the station at all times to serve as a lifeboat for all crew members.

With the anticipated retirement of the shuttle within a year, and until the introduction of the Nasa's Orion spacecraft in the middle of the decade at the earliest, Russian Soyuz spacecraft would be the only way to transport people in and out of the station.

In addition to their function as "hallways" for the outpost, MIM-2 and MIM-1 sport interfaces for the installation of scientific instruments.

At the beginning of 2012, Russia plans to launch yet another long-delayed multi-purpose module, MLM, aboard a heavy-lift Proton rocket.

As one of its key elements, MLM would carry a European-built remote manipulator arm, known as ERA.

An 11m-long robot is expected to be deployed to shift up to eight tonnes of hardware, as well as astronauts, during assembly operations outside the Russian segment.

In order to add the MLM to the ISS, the Pirs docking compartment would have to be detached from its current position on the station and directed to a destructive re-entry into the Earth atmosphere.

Beyond 2020

Since Pirs currently serves as a "door" for all Russian spacewalks, all future work on the exterior of the Russian segment would be staged from the MIM-2 Poisk module.

With the improvement of the Russian economic situation, the nation's federal space agency, Roscosmos, started planning the development of two new modules, that would take on the responsibilities of the cancelled NEP science and power-supply platform.

Both spacecraft would feature specialised research labs and their own solar power systems. Provided sufficient funding were available, they would be launched to the station by Proton rockets in 2014 and 2015.

However, with the financial situation around the ISS looking clouded, Russia reserved the possibility of converting these new modules into the core of a new station, which could serve as a base for deep-space exploration in the following decades.

In June 2009, Simonetta Di Pippo, the European Space Agency's (Esa) director of human space flight, said she shared Russia's vision of the future space station as a platform for deep space missions.

"I have continuous consultations with officials in Russia. We meet every month to month-and-a-half, and now we are going to start joint work on the study for how to proceed beyond 2025," Ms Di Pippo said.

"We have a common idea that we would like to preserve a presence in [low-Earth orbit]. We are studying different scenarios, whether we need permanent presence or, maybe, a human-tended capability, and we can end up with a totally different solution in the end. But I don't believe we can leave Earth orbit."

Ms Di Pippo also said that although current Nasa plans for a return to the Moon left no major role for the station, that could change in the future.

"Even on the Nasa side, they have too many different developments (associated with Earth orbit) - including commercial involvement - which they cannot immediately give up," Ms Di Pippo said.

By the end of 2010, all partners in the ISS project expect to agree on an extension of the station's lifespan from 2015 to 2020 or even 2025.

Once a date for ending the life of the ISS had been decided, active planning for post-ISS manned spaceflight could begin in Russia, Europe and possibly the US.

Bron: BBC

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Op woensdag 11 november 2009 00:30 schreef ExperimentalFrentalMental het volgende:
10-11-2009

Onbekende planetoïde scheerde langs de aarde

[ afbeelding ]

Afgelopen vrijdag, 6 november, is onverwachts een kleine planetoïde langs de aarde gescheerd. Het naar schatting slechts zeven meter grote brok ruimtesteen, dat de aanduiding 2009 VA heeft gekregen, miste het aardoppervlak op ongeveer 14.000 kilometer. Daarmee was het, voor zover bekend, de op twee na dichtste nadering van een planetoïde die niet op aarde is neergestort.

Alleen in 2004 en 2008 vonden niptere missers plaats. Gemiddeld komen er ongeveer twee van zulke kleine planetoïden dicht langs de aarde, en eens in de vijf jaar ploffen de restanten van zo'n object op het aardoppervlak.

Het zonnestelsel wemelt van de planetoïden van deze grootte, maar doorgaans worden deze pas opgemerkt als ze de aarde al dicht genaderd zijn. Planetoïde 2009 VA is pas vijftien uur voor zijn scheervlucht ontdekt door de Catalina Sky Survey.

© Eddy Echternach (www.astronieuws.nl)

(allesoversterrenkunde)