New Horizons

Today, July 14th, 2015 will go down as a major milestone in humanity exploration of the cosmos. After 85 years of pondering what Pluto actually looks like, we know and will learn more in the upcoming days and months.

New Horizons made its closest approach to Pluto at 11:50 UTC, allowing us to see it for the first time with clarity. By now, many of you have probably seen the images of Pluto with its heart-shaped surface feature, which was actually hinted at by Hubble images taken between 2002 and 2003.

If you look at the 180° face, a hint of the heart-shaped feature seen below may now be apparent.

This image of Pluto from New Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) was received on July 8, and has been combined with lower-resolution color information from the Ralph instrument.

Via NASA/New Horizons

 

And from images taken on July 11, a composite of Pluto with its companion Charon.

A portrait from the final approach. Pluto and Charon display striking color and brightness contrast in this composite image from July 11, showing high-resolution black-and-white LORRI images.

Via NASA/New Horizons



For more information, follow New Horizons on Twitter and here, Alan Stern, Principle Investigator for New Horizons.

Also, visit the New Horizons page for updated images as they are posted.

 

Year-long Mission in Space

Today, astronaut Scott Kelly and cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko will launch from Baikonur in the Ukraine to begin a year-long mission in space on board the International Space Station. The unique thing about Scott Kelly is the mission will allow us to look at how extended time in space can affect the human body as Scott Kelly has a twin brother, retired astronaut Mark Kelly.


The science we will learn from this is remarkable because it will give us an understanding of how the human body will react to extended time in space, and give us knowledge of how to alleviate problems on the body for longer duration flights, for example, to Mars.


Follow Scott Kelly on twitter here.
Follow Mark Kelly on twitter here.
Follow the International Space Station here.


Watch the launch live here.

The Challenger Disaster

In January of 1986, I was 11 years old and had dreams of becoming an astronaut. I loved Star Trek and Star Wars, but would have preferred to be on the Enterprise, rather than the Millennium Falcon. I was waiting for my chance to go into space to be able to see the beauty of the Universe without the filter of Earth's atmosphere.
On January 28, 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger was ready to launch into orbit with the first civilian, Christa McAuliffe, on board. Her job was to be the first teacher in space and to teach children around the world while orbiting the Earth. Along with McAuliffe were the commander of the mission Dick Scobee, the pilot Michael Smith, Mission Specialists; Ronald McNair, Elison Onizuka, and Judith Resnick, and the other Payload Specialist Greg Jarvis.
It was unusually cold for Florida that day, with temperatures below freezing. The cold weather caused the O-rings in the solid rocket boosters to warp and fail upon throttling the shuttle up. 73 seconds after launch, the Challenger and her crew were lost.
I was in sixth grade and in the middle of my music class at St. Peter's Cathedral in Kansas City, KS. We were singing so loud that we missed the announcement on the PA system. The PE teacher had to let our class know what happened. I will never forget that day.
In the aftermath of the Challenger Disaster, NASA and the US government created the Rogers Commission (named after the chairman, William P. Rogers) to determine what happened. On the commission were former astronauts, Neil Armstrong and Sally Ride, and famous physicist, Richard Feynman. It was determine that engineers thought that the O-rings would fail based on the temperature at launch, but were pressured to let the launch continue. In a demonstration to the commission, Richard Feynman showed how the O-rings would fail if exposed to frigid temperature, and would lose their elasticity to complete the seal on the booster rockets that would prevent liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen from escaping. The seals failed, and caused a massive explosion seen the world over.
29 years later, I still remember everything about that day. However, it never diminished my desire to be an astronaut and go into outer space.

Top Row: Onizuka, McAuliffe, Jarvis, Resnick

Bottom Row; Smith, Scobee, McNair

 

RIP Challenger Crew - You will always be among the stars.

NASA's Dawn Spacecraft

NASA is on the verge of visiting an asteroid. The Dawn spacecraft is about as far from Ceres as the Moon is from Earth right now and is beginning to send back images of the asteroid. The resolution is not as good as Hubble (yet), but as it gets closer, we will begin to see it in better detail.

This processed image, taken Jan. 13, 2015, shows the dwarf planet Ceres as seen from the Dawn spacecraft. The image hints at craters on the surface of Ceres. Dawn's framing camera took this image at 238,000 miles from Ceres. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA)

There are a couple of places that you can follow the Dawn Program.

• Twitter: NASA_Dawn
• NASA's Dawn Homepage

New Horizons

On December 6, New Horizons "woke up" for the last time. It is on its last 162 million mile journey to an object in our solar system that has never been visited by Earth spacecraft until now.


Pluto will be visited for the first time and we will have the best resolution images of Pluto ever by mid-May. By July of 2015, New Horizons will finally arrive at the Pluto system and we will also have close-up images of five of its major moons (or co-orbital bodies): Charon, Nix, Styx, Hydra, and Cerebus.

New Horizons Instrumentation

Image Credit:

NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

Read more about the mission at NASA.gov

Orion's First Flight

NASA is allowing people to virtually board the Orion Test Flight in December. All you have to do is sign up here:

Orion First Flight Boarding Pass

NASA to Resume Launching Astronauts to Space

NASA announced yesterday that it will resume launching astronauts into space using two American companies, Boeing and SpaceX. This will be done to stop our reliance on the Russians to launch astronauts to and from the International Space Station.

Boeing will be using its CST-100 spacecraft and SpaceX will be using the Crew Dragon spacecraft. NASA is currently using SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft to send supplies to the ISS.

This is good news for NASA as it may be the first step to making space travel privatized in the US instead of making space travel exclusively for military and the government.

News of the announcement is here on the NASA website.