European spacecraft to wake up, begin comet mission

An unmanned European spacecraft is scheduled to wake up early Monday from a long nap and begin preparing for its next task, a rendezvous with a comet.
After more than two years of snoozing, the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft is programmed to awake from hibernation at 5 a.m. ET Monday in anticipation of an August meeting with its target, Space.com reported Sunday.
The Rosetta spacecraft will take about seven hours to warm up, operate its navigation gear and fire rocket thrusters to reposition itself. It is scheduled to transmit a message back to its European controllers.
It is located about 500 million miles from Earth, near Jupiter's orbit, and radio transmissions will take 45 minutes at the speed of light to reach listening stations in Australia and the United States, Reuters reported.
The agency said its ground control teams hope to have confirmation that the probe has resumed operations by early afternoon.
The Rosetta spacecraft launched in 2004 on a decade-long journey to the Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The spacecraft is scheduled to take up orbit around the comet in August for more than a year and eventually place a small lander on the comet's surface.
The spacecraft, which has been hibernating to save power, carries the 220-pound lander called Philae. Only the probe's main computer and some heaters stayed on to keep it alive during its hibernation, ESA officials said.
This putting the probe to sleep and just leave it alone also save money because unlike the just starting out probe in the 60,70,80s which need to be babysit often . The probe have better PC nowday.NASA does this with New Horizon space probe to Pluto. Its turn on once every 6 months to warm it up and check to see if everything is OK and so far it is. I done a small essay about it long ago
This is how both the orbiter and probe look like

Pleiades

On the left, cataloged as NGC 1499, the California Nebula does have a familiar shape, though its coastline is actually over 60 light-years long and lies about 1,500 light-years away. The nebula's pronounced reddish glow is from hydrogen atoms ionized by luminous blue star Xi Persei seen just to its right. At the far right, the famous Pleiades star cluster is some 400 light-years distant and around 15 light-years across. Its spectacular blue color is due to the reflection of starlight by interstellar dust. In between are hot stars of the Perseus OB2 association and dusty, dark nebulae along the edge of the nearby, massive Perseus molecular cloud.
The photo covers 12 degrees or it would take 25 full moons. This type of photo take very,very dark skies which is getting harder and harder to do
This why nowday they place telescope in middle of no where. Like the telescope on Hawaii are place on top of a extinct volcano and there are law that forbids build of anything around the area. The whole area is classified as national park ,so no one can be build in the park,its keep as clean as they can
In the past they just place a telescope close to the college that support the telescope this why they place the 200 inch Hale telescope-Palomar Observatory in California on a mountain by LA,plus they didn't think LA would grow so fast.At the time it was build it was the biggest on the Earth this last for some time but now days 200 inch telescope is consider on the small size. But the light pollution is effecting the 200 inch plus 100 inch telescopes at Palomar Observatory in California
.They update the telescope now they used electric camera instead of film. They now build the new telescope elsewhere but these telescope are name part of the Palomar Observatory. They have a 60 inch in its good time this telescope took the first full sky maps,theese map are still being used today,they did it again using electric camera but nowday its being used as a teaching telescope people can look through it or buy time and used it all night....
There was talk of moving both the telescope,the 100 inch and the 200inch,but so far I don't know,it might be cheaper to try to limit the type of light people used outside.they like LED lights and low pressure mercury light.High pressure light block out the light wave astronomer used
 

Storm on Saturn

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has obtained the highest-resolution movie yet of a unique six-sided jet stream, known as the hexagon, around Saturn’s north pole.
This is the first hexagon movie of its kind, using color filters, and the first to show a complete view of the top of Saturn down to about 70° latitude. Spanning about 20,000 miles (30,000 kilometers) across, the hexagon is a wavy jet stream of 200 mph (about 300 km/h) winds with a massive rotating storm at the center. There is no weather feature exactly consistently like this anywhere else in the solar system.
“The hexagon is just a current of air, and weather features out there that share similarities to this are notoriously turbulent and unstable,” said Andrew Ingersoll from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. “A hurricane on Earth typically lasts a week, but this has been here for decades — and who knows — maybe centuries.”
Weather patterns on Earth are interrupted when they encounter friction from landforms or ice caps. Scientists suspect the stability of the hexagon has something to do with the lack of solid landforms on Saturn, which is essentially a giant ball of gas. Better views of the hexagon are available now because the Sun began to illuminate its interior in late 2012. Cassini captured images of the hexagon over a 10-hour time span with high-resolution cameras, giving scientists a good look at the motion of cloud structures within.
They saw the storm around the pole, as well as small vortices rotating in the opposite direction of the hexagon. Some of the vortices are swept along with the jet stream as if on a racetrack. The largest of these vortices spans about 2,200 miles (3,500km), or about twice the size of the largest hurricane recorded on Earth.
Scientists analyzed these images in false color, a rendering method that makes it easier to distinguish differences among the types of particles suspended in the atmosphere — relatively small particles that make up haze — inside and outside the hexagon.
“Inside the hexagon, there are fewer large haze particles and a concentration of small haze particles, while outside the hexagon, the opposite is true,” said Kunio Sayanagi from Hampton University in Virginia. “The hexagonal jet stream is acting like a barrier, which results in something like Earth’s Antarctic ozone hole.”
The Antarctic ozone hole forms within a region enclosed by a jet stream with similarities to the hexagon. Wintertime conditions enable ozone-destroying chemical processes to occur, and the jet stream prevents a resupply of ozone from the outside. At Saturn, large aerosols cannot cross into the hexagonal jet stream from outside, and large aerosol particles are created when sunlight shines on the atmosphere. Only recently, with the start of Saturn’s northern spring in August 2009, did sunlight begin bathing the planet’s northern hemisphere.
“As we approach Saturn’s summer solstice in 2017, lighting conditions over its north pole will improve, and we are excited to track the changes that occur both inside and outside the hexagon boundary,” said Scott Edgington from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
 

The Dumbbell Nebula (M27)

The Dumbbell Nebula (M27) is a planetary nebula in the constellation Vulpecula the Fox. It lies some 1,400 light-years from Earth. (5.2-inch Takahashi TOA-130F refractor at f/7.7, Quantum Scientific Instruments QSI 540wsg CCD camera, Hydrogen-alpha/LRGB image with exposures of 15, 25, 5, 5, and 5 minutes, respectively)

Solar Probe Plus

Solar Probe Plus or Solar Probe+, previously NASA Solar Probe, is a planned robotic spacecraft to probe the outer corona of the Sun. It will approach to within 8.5 solar radii (0.034 astronomical units or 5.9 million kilometers or 3.67 million miles, roughly 1/8 of the perihelion of Mercury) to the 'surface' (photosphere) of the Sun. The project was announced as a new mission start in the fiscal 2009 budget year. On May 1, 2008 Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory announced it will design and build the spacecraft, on a schedule to launch it in 2015.The launch date has since been pushed back to 2018.Due to budget cuts ,now it will cost more because they have to store the space probe in a clean room which cost about 1million for every few months or so.. PS You can't just leave sitting around the office LOL!
 This art photo show how the solar cell will be during the close approach
Trajectory and mission
Early conceptual designs for the Solar Probe mission used a gravity assist maneuver at Jupiter to cancel the orbital angular momentum of the probe launched from Earth, in order to drop onto a trajectory close to the Sun. The Solar Probe Plus mission design simplifies this trajectory by using multiple gravity assists at Venus, to incrementally decrease the orbital perihelion to achieve multiple passes to approximately 8.5 solar radii, or about 6,000,000 km (3,700,000 mi).
The mission is designed to survive the harsh environment near the Sun, where the incident solar intensity is approximately 520 times the intensity at Earth orbit, by the use of a solar shadow-shield. The solar shield, at the front of the spacecraft, is made of reinforced carbon-carbon composite. The spacecraft systems, and the scientific instruments, are located in the penumbra of the shield. The primary power for the mission will be by use of a dual system of photovoltaic arrays. A primary photovoltaic array, used for the portion of the mission outside of 0.25 AU, is retracted behind the shadow shield during the close approach to the Sun, and a much smaller secondary array powers the spacecraft through closest approach. This secondary array uses pumped-fluid cooling to maintain operating temperature.
As the probe passes around the Sun, it will achieve a velocity of up to 200 km/s (120 mi/s) at that time making it the fastest manmade object ever, almost three times faster than the current record holder, Helios II.


 

Solar Orbiter

Heliospheric in-situ instruments
Solar Wind Analyser (SWA): To measure solar wind properties and composition
Energetic Particle Detector (EPD): To measure suprathermal ions, electrons, neutral atoms, as well as energetic particles in the energy range from few keV/nuc to relativistic electrons and ions up to 100 MeV (protons) and 200 MeV/nuc (heavy ions)
Magnetometer (MAG): will provide detailed measurements of the magnetic field
Radio and Plasma Wave analyser (RPW): To measure magnetic and electric fields at high time resolution
Solar remote-sensing instruments
Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager (PHI): To provide high-resolution and full-disk measurements of the photospheric magnetic field
EUV full-Sun and high-resolution Imager (EUI): To image various layers of the solar atmosphere
EUV spectral Imager (SPICE): To provide spactral imaging of solar disk and corona, characterize plasma properties at the Sun
X-ray spectrometer/telescope (STIX): To provide imaging spectroscopy of thermal and non-thermal solar X-ray emission from 4 to 150 keV
Coronagraph (METIS): To provide simultaneous UV (121.6 nm), and polarized visible light imaging of the corona
Heliospheric Imager (SoloHI): To image quasi-steady and transient flows of the solar wind

Solar Orbiter will be used to examine how the Sun creates and controls the heliosphere, the vast bubble of charged particles blown by the solar wind into the interstellar medium. The spacecraft will combine in situ and remote sensing observations to gain new information about the solar wind, the heliospheric magnetic field, solar energetic particles, transient interplanetary disturbances and the Sun's magnetic field.
Scheduled for launch in January 2017, the mission will provide close-up, high-latitude observations of the Sun. Solar Orbiter will have a highly elliptic orbit – between 0.9AU at aphelion and 0.28AU at perihelion. It will reach its operational orbit three-and-a-half years after launch by using gravity assist manoeuvres (GAMs) at Earth and Venus. Subsequent GAMs at Venus will increase its inclination to the solar equator over time, reaching up to 25° at the end of the nominal mission (approximately 7 years after launch) and up to 34° in the extended mission phase.
Solar Orbiter is an ESA-led mission with strong NASA participation. There will be ten instruments on board, eight of which will be provided by Principal Investigators through national funding by ESA Member States. A European-led consortium supported by national funding and ESA contributions will provide one complete instrument, whilst the remaining instrument and an additional sensor will be provided by NASA. The launch from Cape Canaveral will be aboard a NASA-provided launch vehicle.
Researchers will also have the chance to co-ordinate observations with NASA's planned Solar Probe Plus mission which will make in situ measurements in the Sun's extended corona (down to approximately 9.5 solar radii).

IC 1396: Emission Nebula in Cepheus

Stunning emission nebula IC 1396 mixes glowing cosmic gas and dark dust clouds in the high and far off constellation of Cepheus. Energized by the bright, bluish central star seen here, this star forming region sprawls across hundreds of light-years -- spanning over three degrees on the sky while nearly 3,000 light-years from planet Earth. Among the intriguing dark shapes within IC 1396, the winding Elephant's Trunk nebula lies just below center. The gorgeous color view is a composition of digitized black and white photographic plates recorded through red and blue astronomical filters. The plates were taken using the Samuel Oschin Telescope, a wide-field survey instrument at Palomar Observatory, between 1989 and 1993.