From planetarium at lists.parkland.edu Sun Sep 21 22:01:41 2008 From: planetarium at lists.parkland.edu (planetarium@lists.parkland.edu) Date: Sun Sep 21 22:02:19 2008 Subject: [Planetarium] Staerkel Planetarium E-news Message-ID: <48D6C446020000A90004450A@alter.parkland.edu> William M. Staerkel Planetarium E-news September 21, 2008 We start with an apology as it has been WAY too long since our last edition of E-news! With the start of classes, plus Dave was asked to be one of the college's two co-chairs for the next accreditation visit in 2012 . . . add in shows, and it's been a little crazy. It is our hope to make these a bit more regular! So we have a bit of catching up to do! * You may have heard that, thanks to a bevy of sponsors and the Parkland Foundation, we have a Saturn Sky to raffle off to support our full-dome immersive video conversion project! The Sky is a sporty two-seat convertible retailing for about $28,000. Raffle tickets are $100 each and only 500 will be sold. Thanks to sponsors, 100% of the proceeds will go to the planetarium! We'll need $1.2 million for the project which will rid us of slide projectors and bring full-dome video technology to Champaign-Urbana! If you are local and take the Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette, be sure to see the special four-page pull-out section in this Sunday's edition detailing the project. Thanks to the News-Gazette for donating the space to us! The planetarium supplied the copy and the photos, but the paper did the layout. For more information and to make a possible donation, go to: http://www.parkland.edu/planetarium/upgrade.html * The Phoenix Lander continues to function in the arctic region of Mars, though the advent of winter will most likely shut down operations. Regions of ice have been identified below the lander! The trick is using the shovel to shave off some of the ice so that it can be entered into the experiments. Electric sensors in the shovel tell us that the soil is very, very dry though the changes in the humidity levels above the soil tell us that there must be some movement of moisture. For the latest go to: http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/ * You don't hear much from the rovers on Mars, but they are still there and still operating. "Spirit" went into hibernation due to the Martian winter in its hemisphere and "Opportunity" has backed its way out of Victoria Crater. See: http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/home/ * The planetarium?s line-up of ?World of Science? speakers is set for the 2008-2009 academic year. We lead off with a talk on stem cells with Joanne Manaster, followed by Randy Lloyd, who comes to us from Bloomington to talk about the wind farm north of Farmer City. A full schedule can be found at: http://www.parkland.edu/planetarium/scienceLectures.html * The latest news from the Cassini mission at Saturn tells of ring arc orbiting some of the smaller, inner satellites of Saturn. They are probably a result of recent impacts of micrometeorites. Exciting stuff! Next up is another flyby of the moon Enceledas in early October. More at: http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.cfm * The Champaign-Urbana Astronomical Society will hold a free telescope buyer?s seminar at the planetarium on Thursday, October 9 at 7pm. If you have questions on what to look for in a new telescope purchase (and what to avoid), this is the night for you! Feel free to join us. www.cuas.org. * The space shuttle Atlantis is on the launch pad to hoist STS-125 to the very last servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope. Since the shuttle will be too high above the Earth to use the space station as a refuge in case of emergency, the shuttle Endeavor is also on the pad, making it about the third time in history that two shuttles were on the two launch pads concurrently. The seven Atlantis astronauts arrived at the Cape today. If all goes well, Atlantis is due to launch on October 10 at 12:43 a.m. EDT http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/shuttlemissions/hst_sm4/overview.html From planetarium at lists.parkland.edu Mon Sep 29 15:48:28 2008 From: planetarium at lists.parkland.edu (planetarium@lists.parkland.edu) Date: Mon Sep 29 15:49:08 2008 Subject: [Planetarium] Planetarium E-news: breaking news! Message-ID: <48E0F865.641B.00A9.0@parkland.edu> William M. Staerkel Planetarium E-news September 29, 2008 Here are two news stories that just came out today . . . . . one deals with trouble aboard the Hubble Space Telescope and the other is evidence of snow falling on Mars! Failure aboard Hubble puts shuttle mission on hold BY WILLIAM HARWOOD A science data control system aboard the Hubble Space Telescope failed Saturday, preventing the observatory from relaying data to the ground and effectively ending science operations until the observatory can be switched over to a backup unit late this week. With no redundancy left in such a critical system, NASA managers decided today to delay the planned Oct. 14 launch of the shuttle Atlantis on a Hubble servicing mission. It is not yet clear how long it will take to resolve the issue, but sources say replacing the channel A electronics of the control unit/science data formatter likely would push launch to January or February. The telescope is not in any danger, but science operations have been suspended until engineers can reconfigure the observatory to use channel B of the control unit/science data formatter, or CU/SDF-B, late this week. The backup channel has not been powered up since the telescope was launched in 1990. Even if it works - and if multiple subsystems successfully make the transition - NASA would still be faced with a loss of redundancy in a critical system and a subsequent failure would permanently disable the observatory. Given CU/SDF-A worked normally for nearly two decades, one could argue the backup channel should work as required for years to come. But senior managers do not want to risk mounting a costly servicing mission and then leave the telescope without redundancy and no chance to carry out an additional servicing mission before the shuttle is retired in 2010. Shuttle mission STS-125, the fifth and final Hubble servicing mission, already has a full plate: five back-to-back spacewalks are planned to install two new science instruments, to repair two others, to install six new gyroscopes, six new batteries, a new fine guidance sensor and new insulation blankets. It is considered one of the most challenging Hubble servicing missions yet attempted. A spare control unit/science data formatter, used for testing and troubleshooting, is available at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., but it has not been powered on since 2001 and it would require extensive testing and checkout to upgrade it to flight status. Whether the unit could be added to Atlantis' payload complement without bumping something else is not yet known. Likewise, it's not yet known when Atlantis could be ready for launch if a replacement is ordered. But sources said today the flight likely would slip to January or February, throwing a wrench of sorts into NASA's tightly scripted space station assembly schedule. If the Hubble flight is, in fact, delayed to next year, NASA likely would press ahead with plans to launch the shuttle Endeavour around Nov. 16 on a space station assembly mission. Endeavour already is mounted atop pad 39B to serve as a quick-response rescue vehicle for Atlantis should the Hubble crew encounter any orbiter problems that might prevent a safe re-entry. It's not yet clear, however, which pad Endeavour would use if the Hubble flight is delayed. Either way, the shuttle Discovery, now scheduled for launch Feb. 12 on a mission to deliver a final set of solar arrays to the station, would have to replace Endeavour as a rescue vehicle for Atlantis. In the meantime, NASA managers have postponed a planned executive-level flight readiness review for Atlantis and mission STS-125. NASA Mars Lander Sees Falling Snow, Soil Data Suggest Liquid Past NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander has detected snow falling from Martian clouds. Spacecraft soil experiments also have provided evidence of past interaction between minerals and liquid water, processes that occur on Earth. A laser instrument designed to gather knowledge of how the atmosphere and surface interact on Mars has detected snow from clouds about 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) above the spacecraft's landing site. Data show the snow vaporizing before reaching the ground. Phoenix experiments also yielded clues pointing to calcium carbonate, the main composition of chalk, and particles that could be clay. Most carbonates and clays on Earth form only in the presence of liquid water. Since landing on May 25, Phoenix already has confirmed that a hard subsurface layer at its far-northern site contains water-ice. Determining whether that ice ever thaws would help answer whether the environment there has been favorable for life, a key aim of the mission. The evidence for calcium carbonate in soil samples from trenches dug by the Phoenix robotic arm comes from two laboratory instruments called the Thermal and Evolved Gas Analyzer, or TEGA, and the wet chemistry laboratory of the Microscopy, Electrochemistry and Conductivity Analyzer, or MECA. The TEGA evidence for calcium carbonate came from a high-temperature release of carbon dioxide from soil samples. The temperature of the release matches a temperature known to decompose calcium carbonate and release carbon dioxide gas, which was identified by the instrument's mass spectrometer. The MECA evidence came from a buffering effect characteristic of calcium carbonate assessed in wet chemistry analysis of the soil. The measured concentration of calcium was exactly what would be expected for a solution buffered by calcium carbonate. Both TEGA, and the microscopy part of MECA, have turned up hints of a clay-like substance. "We are seeing smooth-surfaced, platy particles with the atomic-force microscope, not inconsistent with the appearance of clay particles," said Michael Hecht, MECA lead scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. The Phoenix mission, originally planned for three months on Mars, now is in its fifth month. However, it faces a decline in solar energy that is expected to curtail and then end the lander's activities before the end of the year. Before power ceases, the Phoenix team will attempt to activate a microphone on the lander to possibly capture sounds on Mars. "For nearly three months after landing, the sun never went below the horizon at our landing site," said Barry Goldstein, JPL Phoenix project manager. "Now it is gone for more than four hours each night, and the output from our solar panels is dropping each week. Before the end of October, there won't be enough energy to keep using the robotic arm." More information about Phoenix is at http://www.nasa.gov/phoenix .