Robert Picardo hosts Planetary Post, launched this month by the Planetary Society as a monthly Video Newsletter designed to keep you up to date on space news. For its pilot episode Robert had Bill Nye the Science Guy as his guest (not a difficult thing to get the leader of the Planetary Society to volunteer to hype his organization), and it was all silly fun. I am looking forward to seeing a lot more episodes in this series, some of which may accidentally include news and video from Space!
Japan’s first planetary orbiter Akatsuki is now sending back images of Venus from close up, and the folks at the Planetary Society have posted a nicely detailed Akatsuki Mission Status Report on their web site which includes those pictures. Besides telling us about the satellites current status, they also give some information about its mission as the Venus Climate Orbiter and the three cameras that are its primary data gathering instruments. There was also some background on the JAXA planetary orbiter history, of which this mission is the first success, and a translation of their press conference announcing the achievement. While I would personally rather move to Mars, the knowledge we can gain from studying the weather dynamics on Venus will be very useful in better understanding our own.
This year the Geminid meteor shower peaks on the 14th, but numbers will be high from December 13th through the 15th. If we get clear skies the viewing should include fainter meteors since the moon will not be overhead during the event, which means 60 to 100 visible per hour, or better than 1 a minute on average. If you haven’t enjoyed a meteor shower before, stop by Meteor Watch to learn the basics. The really short version of the basics are be comfortable (chair, appropriate clothing, munchies and drinks, etc.) and keep looking at the sky.
Over at the official site the headline reads Cassini Finds Global Ocean In Saturn’s Moon Enceladus, which isn’t an overnight discovery. They had to go back over images takes across the past seven years and carefully measure the wobble it goes through in its orbit to prove the liquid water below its ice shell pretty much covered the globe, instead of being confined to the southern pole as they had originally thought. Now the mystery is what keeps it liquid, and what do the simple organic molecules contained in the water vapor being vented at the south pole indicate about the possibilities of its evolving life of some kind.
The Planetary Society had a Kickstarter goal of $200,000 to fund their LightSail Project. When they met that, they went for a stretch goal of $450,000, to use the extra money to educate scientists and engineers about how the combination of CubeSats and LightSails will change the exploration of the Solar System, making orbital observation missions to any of the planets cost about the same as buying a new car. When they met that and the money kept coming in, their next stretch goal was to educate the public about how unlimited free energy from the sun will provide CubeSat propulsion and revolutionize access to space for low-cost citizen projects. They passed that goal, and the contributions will be open for the next two days. If you haven’t already gotten in on The People’s Spacecraft, you have 2 days left to make your support known and get in on the rewards for your chosen donation level.
As anyone who has stood at the bottom of the Earth’s gravity well and pointed their camera up can tell you, the kind of pictures an Astronaut can take from orbit will far surpass that. In this video, Astronaut Don Pettit gives you an idea of what is involved, and what you might be able to achieve. Knowing this, all you have to do now is achieve orbit, making sure to bring your camera with you.