The ISS, or International Space Station, is very easy to see from the surface of the Earth using just the Mark I Eyeball, providing you know where to look, and depending on whether or not you will have clear sky’s for viewing. There are a number of resources available for knowing where to look; the one embedded here is from the folks at SatFlare, who do a great job with online satellite and flare tracking. Another favorite is the one at I.S.S. Tracker, and of course Heavens-Above has a 2D tracker, the 3D tracker I linked here, and an app you can download to your phone or tablet. I rather enjoy watching the ISS hurtling overhead, knowing that someone might be looking back at us; you should try it sometime and see if you don’t agree.
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.
The tag line for the new movie The Martian is: Help Is Only 140 Million Miles Away. Pretty scary, but very true for this scenario. It has an all star cast (as you can tell from the trailer), and it is a Riddly Scott movie. What’s not to love? Other than the fact that we have to wait until forever for it to come out, of course.
The NASA spacecraft Dawn became the first man made object to go into orbit around a dwarf planet this month. Ceres holds that distinction, along with Pluto, but Ceres is a lot closer and easier to get to. This wasn’t Dawn’s first visit to a celestial body; it stopped off at the giant asteroid Vesta on it’s way to Ceres, spending from 2011 to 2012 there and sending back a ton of data. The other thing I find exciting about this mission is that Dawn is flying using an Ion Engine, allowing it to do really long range sustained controlled flight. The Ion Engine technology is going to help open up the outer Solar System to the kinds of exploration you just can’t do when your flight is based on gravity assist orbital changes alone.
NASA celebrated 5 years worth of data from the Solar Dynamics Observatory by putting together this collection of some of the best imagery they have gathered. They also opened the Solarium at the Goddard Space Flight Center’s Visitor Center in Greenbelt, MD, where you can get up close and personal with the project’s rich harvest of information. Did you know the sun was on twitter?