Imagine the view the astronauts onboard the ISS get to taste every day. The Earth from orbit – surely a beautiful image that will navigate its way safely into your memory and stay with you forever.
Well that’s great for astronauts and well they deserve it. Thankfully enough for us astronauts frequently aim their cameras toward Earth and their images are uploaded to a huge archive. James Drake, a science educator added 600 such images, stitched them together and produced this amazing HD timelapse movie.
From the Pacific Ocean, flying over the Americas before reaching sunrise over Antarctica this video is stunning even showing the network of night-time cities that inhabit Earth and lightning storms past the southern coast of Mexico.
Raw data was downloaded from NASA’s Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth which is a Johnson Space Center project hosting the best and most complete online collection of astronaut photographs of the Earth which should keep interested followers busy until the ISS gets it’s new streaming HD video cameras in 2012.
View Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth here.
Just like "Star Wars" Tatooine newly discovered Kepler-16b is a world where two suns set over the horizon - Credit: NASA TV
Exciting news from the Kepler mission announced at 1800 UTC/GMT + 1 today.
The existence of a world with two suns like Tatooine, as seen in the film Star Wars more than 30 years ago, is now scientific fact.
NASA’s Kepler mission has made the first real detection of a circumbinary planet (a planet orbiting two stars) located 200 light-years from Earth.
The planet, called Kepler-16b, is not thought to be habitable. It is thought to be a cold world, with a gaseous surface. So what’s all the fuss about?
“This discovery confirms a new class of planetary systems that could harbor life,” Kepler principal investigator William Borucki said. “Given that most stars in our galaxy are part of a binary system, this means the opportunities for life are much broader than if planets form only around single stars. This milestone discovery confirms a theory that scientists have had for decades but could not prove until now.”
Scene from Star Wars showing the two suns from Tatooine - Credit: Lucasfilm Ltd. / NASA TV
Although Kepler-16b lies outside the system’s habitable zone, where liquid water could exist on the surface at least we now know how to detect circumbinary planets and maybe we’ll find more, one like Tatooine that can actually harbor life?
NASA will announce a new discovery by its Kepler planet-hunting telescope on Thursday 15 September in a press conference featuring astronomers and — oddly — a representative from Industrial Light & Magic (ILM).
The announcement is scheduled for Thursday at 18:00 UTC/GMT and will broadcast and webcast live on NASA TV.
15 September. Just announced! Click here for the latest news and post.
The visual effects company, a division of Lucasfilm Ltd., was founded in 1975 by filmmaker George Lucas to produce the effects for his “Star Wars” films.
Artist's impression showing the planet orbiting the Sun-like star HD 85512 in the southern constellation of Vela (The Sail) - Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser
And there’s us thinking NASA’s Kepler telescope rules the roost over exoplanet hunting!
Today astronomers in La Silla, Chile announced a fertile haul of more than 50 new exoplanets – the latest results using ESO’s exoplanet hunter HARPS (High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher). The haul includes 16 super-Earths, one of which orbits at the edge of it’s habitable zone around its star. By studying the properties of the planets found so far, the ESO team have discovered that around 40% of stars similar to our Sun have at least one planet lighter than Saturn.
Lead author Dr Michel Mayor, from the University of Geneva in Switzerland, said the haul included “an exceptionally rich population of super-Earths and Neptune-type planets hosted by stars very similar to our Sun”.
He added: “The new results show that the pace of discovery is accelerating.”
One of the recently announced newly discovered planets, HD 85512 b, is estimated to be only 3.6 times the mass of the Earth and is located at the edge of the habitable zone.
“This is the lowest-mass confirmed planet discovered by the radial velocity method that potentially lies in the habitable zone of its star, and the second low-mass planet discovered by HARPS inside the habitable zone,” says Lisa Kaltenegger (Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, Heidelberg, Germany and Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Boston, USA), who is an expert on exoplanets habitability.
Astronomers are confident they are close to discovering other small and rocky habitable planets around stars similar to our Sun. Moving forward new instruments are planned to further the search and include a copy of HARPS to be installed on the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo in the Canary Islands, to survey stars in the northern sky, as well as a new and more powerful planet-finder, ESPRESSO, to be installed on ESO’s Very Large Telescope in 2016. Looking further into the future the planned CODEX instrument on the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) will push this technique to a higher level.
Wouldn’t it be great to wake up one morning to a fresh Sky-Watching post actually detailing a habitable planet! I guess by then we could just beam the information directly to your brain!
Saturn's Auroras in Double Light Show, March 2011 - Credit: NASA/ESA/STScI/University of Leicester
On 30 June 2004 the NASA Cassini-Huygens probe successfully entered orbit around Saturn.
At 9:12 p.m. PDT (+7 for GMT), flight controllers received confirmation that Cassini had completed the engine burn needed to place the spacecraft into the correct orbit and begin its four-year study of the giant planet, its majestic rings and known moons.
Happy 7th Orbitday!
See the original NASA press release from 2004 here.
