Hell yes–wheels down on Mars again!

We all stayed up last night to watch Curiosity land on Mars. It was amazing, to be watching the live feed from Mission Control at JPL, hearing the live telemetry being relayed, and then just moments after touchdown get to see the first photo sent back by the rover (it’s grainy and blurry because the transparent lens cap is still on the camera to protect it from the dust kicked up by the landing).

As John Holdren, President Obama’s assistant for science and technology, said, “there’s a one ton automobile-sized piece of American ingenuity and it’s sitting on the surface of Mars right now.”

I was particularly engaged because I had gotten to see parts of the actual spacecraft, including the aeroshell and rocket skycrane, during a tour of JPL two and a half years ago. Strange and amazing to know that the same machinery I saw in the big white room at JPL is now on Mars.

During the landing, data were relayed  back by the Mars Odyssey spacecraft, which has been in orbit around Mars for 10 years, 9 months, and 13 days. This decade-old craft was never designed to function as a data relay, but, you know, engineers are smart. Curiosity joins the rover Opportunity, which is still going strong 3116 days into its 92.5-day mission.

Turns out, we weren’t the only ones watching the landing. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter got a photo of Curiosity on the way down, using its HiRISE camera.

This is the second time MRO has caught a Mars lander on the way down; it got a photo of Phoenix descending under its parachute back in 2008.

Happily, today’s xkcd explains why I’m blogging about space on a Monday morning:

Or, as my buddy Jarrod put it on Facebook, “We just landed a one-ton NUCLEAR ROBOT on another planet with a SUPERSONIC PARACHUTE and a FRICKIN’ ROCKET SKYCRANE.”

Good times.

Curiosity arrives at Mars this weekend!

Our newest and largest Mars rover, Curiosity, will arrive at Mars Sunday night or Monday morning, depending on your time zone (image from Wikipedia). I say “will arrive at Mars” because we won’t know if it landed safely or just hit Mars until 7 minutes after the fact. As you can see from this nifty calculator, the distance between Earth and Mars is currently 152 million miles and growing. The landing is scheduled to occur at 10:31 PM, PDT, on August 5, or 1:31 AM EDT, or 5:31 AM UT/GMT.

This video about the landing explains something of the difficulty and complexity of landing a BIG rover on Mars, and some (but not all) of the justification for going with the never-before-attempted skycrane landing method.

Fingers firmly crossed!

Back to Barsoom

I haven’t had a look at Mars through my telescope yet this year, but I have seen it with the naked eye a few times, when I’ve been out late at night. Mars has been much on my mind lately, because I’ve been rereading the Mars novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs. The first book, A Princess of Mars, follows the adventures of John Carter, an ex-Confederate officer who is mysteriously transported from the desert southwest to the desert planet. He is captured by warlike Martians, falls in love with a human princess, and goes through a series of chases, escapes, imprisonments, arena battles, and deadly duels. The tale was first published in serial form in 1912, when the “canal” theory of Mars was at its most popular. The Mars of Burroughs’ novels, known as Barsoom by its inhabitants, is only sustained in a habitable state by the high technology of the dwindling races of Martians, in particular the canal system and the “atmosphere plants” that produce and distribute breathable air. The canal theory is a historical curiosity now; when modern astronomers get excited about Martian water, it’s over braided fluvial systems that seem to change from year to year, based on high-resolution photos from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

Burroughs’ Mars books are all ripping adventure yarns and they inspired much of the pulp science fiction of the early 20th century–and many of the science fiction films of more recent years, from Star Wars to Avatar. That circle is about to be completed: in this 100th anniversary of the first publication of A Princess of Mars, the story is finally coming to the big screen, in Disney’s John Carter, set to be released on March 9.

Needless to say, I’m looking forward to the movie. But I’m also looking forward to hauling out a telescope and having a good look at the red planet. The thing that always gets me about seeing planets through a telescope is that I am forcefully confronted with how real they are. Of course, nebulae and galaxies and everything else “up there” is equally real, but as much as I love those things they don’t have the same mythic hold on me as the planets. Even when I look up with my naked eyes and see Mars, I experience a curious sense of dislocation, knowing that Mars is really there. The canals may be (human) history, but the ice caps and canyons and volcanoes and dust storms are all just as real as you or me. And at least a handful of Earthlings really have been transported to Mars and have left their tracks on its dry, dusty plains. The fact that these have all been robots so far should not discourage us. To paraphrase Carl Sagan, Mars calls to us, possibly in a more profound and mysterious way than any other heavenly body. I don’t know exactly when we’ll get there, but I think we will actually get there, and have adventures no less exciting than those of John Carter.

I’m going a lot sooner. I have this weird device in my garage. It looks like a small water heater, but it’s really a transporter. Very soon, I’m going to Mars. I’ll let you know if I ever come back.

If you’ve never read A Princess of Mars or the rest of Burroughs’ Barsoom novels, you can start right now, for free. Most are in the public domain, and you can find them at Project Gutenberg, and on Amazon in free Kindle versions, and probably elsewhere on the web as well. For more of my thoughts on the upcoming movie, go here, and for my previous posts on the real Mars, go here.

Ginormous Mars atlas for free

Your tax dollars at work: the USGS map of the Hellas Planitia region of Mars, all 13.8 megabytes of it, is freely available for download here. Hat tip to Mike.

If you’re more interested in the kind of Mars exploration depicted above, try here.

Either way, have fun!

The moon and Saturn tonight

It was almost freakishly clear and calm here in Claremont this evening. My friend and fellow blogger Andy Farke came over and we spent some time looking up.  First target was the waxing crescent moon. Here in town, the seeing is often so bad that at anything over 100x, the image looks like it is under a rippling sheet of water. But tonight we were able to push on to 240x with no problems. I’d say the effects of seeing (atmospheric turbulence) didn’t start to be noticeable until 120x and even at 240x it wasn’t a dealbreaker.

Here’s Mare Nectaris and vicinity (click for the larger, unlabeled version). The line of craters formed by Theophilus, Cyrillus, and Catharina is an easy catch in binoculars at this phase. The Altai Scarp is an immense range of cliffs, hundreds of miles long. Mare Nectaris formed as a multi-ringed impact basin, much like the Chicxulub crater from the “dinosaur-killer” asteroid, and the Altai Scarp is the largest surviving stretch of one of the outer rings.

We had a look at Mars, which was a well-defined disc with hints–and only hints–of detail. I suspected the ice cap from time to time, but couldn’t convince myself that I’d really seen it, as opposed to just thinking the disc looked lighter where I know the ice cap ought to be. Still, a whole ‘nuther planet, y’know? Give me a telescope and a world to point it at and I get a little giddy.

The real treat of the evening was Saturn. At 120x it was crisp and jewel-like, but at 240x it was simply astounding. I have never seen so much detail in one of my own telescopes. The photo is by far my best ever for Saturn, but it just doesn’t do it justice, not by a long shot. The whole planet was striped with pastel bands, and we could clearly see the gap between the rings and the planet. The dark band stretching across the disc is the shadow of the rings. Three moons shone out proudly to the left of the rings; Stellarium informs me that they were Dione, Rhea, and Titan, from inward to out. After Andy left I even caught little Enceladus–she of the geysers–between Dione and the rings.

I also cruised over to the globular cluster M3 and it was very nice, a contained explosion of stars. It looked better than I’ve ever seen it, which is saying something since the moon was out. Most DSOs don’t suffer unduly from bad seeing since they are extended and dim to begin with, but globs do. I’m half-tempted to haul out the scope again and have a look at M13, which ought to be up now, but I have to sleep sometime. Good night, and clear skies.

Photos taken with a Nikon Coolpix 4500 digital camera, shooting through an Orion SkyQuest XT10 telescope and Orion Stratus eyepieces.

Mars landings faked!

Here’s a picture of the shadowy government “lab” where all of the images from the supposed Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, are invented by Hollywood special effects artists under the direction of unscrupulous government “scientists”. As this remarkable image clearly shows, each rover has only a small sandbox to roll around in. The rest of each faked image is created by the holographic projector standing on the yellow tripod in the middle of the room. The technology used to bilk the unsuspecting public out of  billions of dollars has come a long way since the moon landing hoax!

How much longer are we going to let the incompetent liars at NASA keep taking our tax dollars to support this transparent fraud!!?? Just Say No to the Fake Space Show! Contact your senator or representative today!

(For those without much sense, or a sense of humor: this is a joke, obviously!)

Mission 16: MARS!

Mission Objective: Planet

Equipment: Telescope

Required Time: 10 minutes

Related Missions: Ring of Fire

Instructions: Go outside after dark, face east, and look for a red star. It may help to get to Mars by way of the ring of bright seasonal stars that are also climbing the eastern sky on winter evenings.

On January 29, Mars will be at opposition, when it is directly opposite the sun from us. That means (by definition!) that it rises at sunset and sets at dawn, just like the full moon–in fact, you could say that the moon is full when it is at opposition. So you’ll have to wait a while after sunset before Mars will be very far up the sky. The best time to observe is when Mars is at the zenith and you’re looking through the least atmosphere possible, which happens around midnight.

For observers, the oppositions of Mars vary more noticeably than those of any other planet. The orbit of Mars is considerably more elliptical than that of Earth, so sometimes when we pass each other we are very close, and sometimes not so much–the Earth-Mars distance at opposition (when Mars is directly opposite the sun from us, and therefore as close as it is going to get on that pass) varies from about 35 million miles to something like 60 million miles. Right now we’re at the long end, and 2012 will be about equally as bad. The next close approach is 2018.

Still, Mars is as good as it’s  going to get for two years, so you might as well have a look. Last night I was able to see tantalizing detail at 92x in my six-inch reflector using a 13mm eyepiece. I put in a Barlow lens to double the magnification. Using that and the 3x optical zoom on my Nikon Coolpix 4500 digital camera, I got the shot at the top of this post, which is comparable to what I could see at the eyepiece. Here’s a labeled version:

The telescope inverts the image by 180 degrees, and I didn’t bother to flip it. Presenting planets southside up is pretty much the standard for solar system astrophotography, to the extent that the map of Mars in the December Sky & Telescope had the south at the top. That map is by expert solar system imager Damian Peach, and I used it to identify the features shown above. If you want to see some really mind-blowing shots of Mars and the other planets, check out Peach’s website. My Mars shot is pretty similar–in terms of part of the planet shown, not clarity!–to the second photo from the top on this page.

That’s all for now. Go explore the red planet. If you don’t have a scope or it’s too cold to set one up (one guy on Cloudy Nights posted a Mars shot he took on a night when it was -36C at his place in Russia!) at least go outside and have a look. Spirit and Opportunity are still up there, six years on. If you do see Mars, throw ‘em a friendly wave, or maybe a salute. They’re doing us proud.

Mission 15: Ring of Fire

Mission Objectives: Bright Stars, Constellations

Equipment: Naked eye

Required Time: 2 minutes

Related Missions: Three Astronomical Treats for Naked Eyes, Binoculars, and Telescopes

Introduction: It’s a new mission for a new year. New stars are in the skies, and it’s the perfect time to start exploring the heavens–for the first time if you’re new to this, or exploring it again if you’re an old hand. This mission requires no prior knowledge, experience, or equipment; it’s just about getting out and getting acquainted with the night sky.

Instructions: Go outside after dark, face southeast, and find three stars in a straight, vertical line. These are the stars of Orion’s belt. They are flanked on either side by twin bright stars of roughly equal brightness but different color. On the left is Betelgeuse, an enormous red giant that appears yellow to the naked eye. On the right is Rigel, a blue-white supergiant.

Follow the line made by the belt stars down to even brighter Sirius. Sirius is the brightest star in Earthly skies, but it’s a not a giant or supergiant like Betelgeuse and Rigel. In fact, Sirius is a main-sequence star, a little less than twice the diameter of the sun, but about 26 times as bright. By comparison, Rigel is about 40,000 times as bright as the sun. But Rigel is 773 light years away, whereas Sirius is only 8.6 light years from us–the fifth closest stellar system to our own. Sirius, the Dog Star, is the chief star in the constellation Canis Major.

From Sirius, hang a right-angle left turn and head on to Procyon, “before the dog”, so named because it rises just a few minutes before Sirius from mid-northern latitudes. The small and otherwise dim constellation Canis Minor has little else to recommend it, and Procyon serves mainly as a celestial landmark.

Farther left still, and farther up in the sky, are the twins, Castor and Pollux, at the head of the constellation Gemini. If you have trouble keeping them straight, remember that “Castor is close to Capella, but Pollux is in proximity to Procyon”.

Speaking of Capella, it’s the very bright star directly toward the zenith from Castor and Pollux. It’s a brilliant gem in a ring of prominent stars that mark out the constellation Auriga, the Charioteer (this is not the big ring marked in red on the diagram above, but the much smaller blue-white ring on the upper left).

To the right of Capella is Aldebaran, the burning red eye of Taurus, the Bull. Aldebaran means “the follower”, because this star rises after the Pleiades, which it appears to chase from horizon to horizon (to trace that line, see the previous mission). Aldebaran is an orange giant, meaning that it has exhausted the hydrogen in its core and moved off the main sequence. Without the outward pressure of radiation from hydrogen fusion to prop it up, the core of the star is compacting under gravity and heating up. When it gets hot and dense enough to start fusing helium, Aldebaran will bloat into an immense red giant, like its neighbor, Betelgeuse.

And speaking of Betelgeuse, it lies in the middle of the great circle described by Rigel, Sirius, Procyon, Castor and Pollux, Capella, and Aldebaran. I call it the Ring of Fire–nowhere else in the northern sky is there an equal concentration of bright stars.

Below and to the left (east and north) of the Ring of Fire is Mars, which will be at opposition–opposite the sun, and at its closest approach to Earth–in a couple of weeks. The orbit of Mars is more elliptical than that of Earth, and this will not be one of the better oppositions, but it’s still the best look at the red planet that we’ll get for another two years.

What’s next? This mission was just a lightning run through the bright stars of winter. Their respective constellations are packed full of beautiful targets for binoculars and telescopes, and we’ll look at some of those in future missions. If you’re impatient to get started, download this month’s The Evening Sky Map, haul out your optics, and happy hunting!

Get your Mars on

The Boston Globe’s The Big Picture feature covers Mars today, thanks to the HiRISE camera on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. See craters, dunes, water-eroded gullies, dust devils, and the tracks of our rovers, courtesy of what is still the coolest non-Hubble camera in existence.

More mind-blowing pictures from our robotic servants

There is a certain segment of the population that, when encouriaged to get outside to do a little stargazing, says, “Nah, I’ll stay inside and surf for pictures on the internet.” I don’t advocate doing this instead of going outside and seeing things for yourself, but I’m certainly not opposed to surfing for pictures in addition to stargazing. And this is a good time to do it!

Hubble is back, baby, and the Hubble team showed off the rejuvenated telescope’s mojo with a ream of mind-bendingly awesome pictures, many taken by the newly installed Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3).  These have turned up all over the astro-blogosphere. My favorite is the Butterfly Nebula, NGC 6302, a planetary nebula blown off by a dying star (at top). Would that we could all go out with such grace.

For my money, the coolest non-Hubble camera in existence is the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Image above shows craters and ridges in Hesperia Planum (full version here). The archive of publicly available images from HiRISE continues to grow; go here and spend some time exploring another planet.