Science Note: Unsung Hero

The Mars rover "Opportunity" has been declared dead, mission accomplished. Here's a whole twitter thread on the mission.

NASAVerified account
@NASA Yesterday
Today, we’re expressing gratitude for the opportunity to rove on Mars as we mark the completion of a successful mission that exceeded our expectations.

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Oppy's mission was original planned for ninety days. He kept going for fifteen years.

(And isn't it interesting the way we anthropomorphize things? I can't shake the image of this plucky little robot, going on against the odds.)

More Space News

No, I don't mean Republican members of Congress. Not quite so far away as Ultima Thule -- in fact only a little over halfway to Pluto -- NASA's Juno orbiter has captured images of a volcanic eruption on Jupiter's moon Io:

Image credit: NASA / SwRI / MSSS

Four instruments onboard Juno — a camera called JunoCam, the Stellar Reference Unit, the Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper and the Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph — observed Io for over an hour, providing a glimpse of the moon’s polar regions as well as evidence of an active eruption.

JunoCam acquired the new images of Io on December 21, 2018, at 12:00, 12:15 and 12:20 p.m. GMT before Io entered Jupiter’s shadow.

The images show the moon half-illuminated with a bright spot seen just beyond the terminator, the day-night boundary.

“The ground is already in shadow, but the height of the plume allows it to reflect sunlight, much like the way mountaintops or clouds on the Earth continue to be lit after the Sun has set,” said Dr. Candice Hansen-Koharcheck, JunoCam lead from the Planetary Science Institute.

And once again, this is something that started before the current regime was installed.

Have we reached the point where our major achievements are in the past?

Antidote: It's Confirmed

NASA manages to do some good work in spite of the current regime. We've successfully completed the farthest ever fly-by of an object in space:

NASA now has proof that its New Horizons probe completed its record-setting flyby of the Kuiper Belt object Ultima Thule. The mission team confirmed the flypast at 10:31AM Eastern Time after receiving telemetry data indicating that the spacecraft was "healthy." It technically flew past Ultima Thule at about 12:33AM , but the combination of data collection and the six-hour signal travel time left the New Horizons crew waiting until much later to receive the A-OK from their pride and joy.

Scientific data won't arrive until sometime around 200 UTC on January 2nd (9PM ET on January 1st). You'll have to wait a while for an up-close snapshot, then.

The confirmation isn't just a relief for the New Horizons team. This marks the farthest-ever flyby in human history -- at about 4 billion miles from the Sun, Ultima Thule makes Pluto seem like a next-door neighbor by comparison. It also promises a raft of potential scientific insights, including clues to the formation of dwarf planets. Some of those discoveries may take a long time, but they'll be worthwhile if they shed light on the Solar System and the cosmos at large.

So, no pictures yet, but eventually.

This is a lot more exciting that a mythical wall.

I almost feel as though I should spend the day at the planetarium. Almost.

Via Joe.My.God.

Science Note: "To Boldly Go. . . ."

This is one thing Trump couldn't shut down:

This composite image of Ultima Thule was taken on Dec. 1. Photo: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

On New Year's Day, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is expected to make history by conducting the most distant flyby ever, by zooming past an object a billion miles past Pluto. It's called "Ultima Thule," meaning "beyond the known world.

Why it matters: The spacecraft, which is the same one that sent back dazzling images of Pluto in 2015, is slated to be the first to explore an object in the Kuiper Belt -- a region of icy bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune that are thought to be leftovers from the solar system's early days.
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The goal of the mission is to learn more about the building blocks of planets. "In effect, Ultima should be a valuable window into the early stages of planet formation and what the solar system was like over 4.5 billion years ago," principal investigator Alan Stern wrote in a NASA blog post.

This is reallly exciting for us science geeks. This goes back to the first entry in "Earth: A Biography", which, as you'll no doubt recall, dealt with the origins of the universe and, finally, this planet we're sitting on.

There's a lot more at the link, and it's pretty interesting.

Via Joe.My.God.

Saturday Science: RIP Kepler Space Telescope

Interesting article on the long life (well, longer than expected) of the Kepler Space Telescope, which is finally shutting down:

Image:  NASA

This afternoon [Oct. 30], NASA officially bid farewell to the Kepler Space Telescope, a pioneering spacecraft that helped discover thousands of planets beyond our Solar System. After years of service that extended long beyond its initial four-year mission, the spacecraft finally ran out of fuel.

Engineers realized that Kepler was almost out of fuel earlier this summer. At the time, they put it in safe mode for a brief time to focus on getting the scientific data that Kepler had already connected safely back to Earth. They managed to turn it on and collect more data, but they knew at the time that the spacecraft was nearing its end.

Kepler launched with enough fuel on board to last for more than six years; it lasted nine. “We filled it up with fuel to let it go as long as it could,” says Charlie Sobek, project system engineer for the Kepler spacecraft.

Read it -- it's pretty interesting, especially for space nerds. We are not alone. Probably.

Saturday Science: Asteroid News

Although in this case, it should be "dwarf planet" news, since that is the current official designation of Ceres, one of the two largest objects in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

We're about to get a lot more information on Ceres:

NASA's Dawn spacecraft has become the first mission to achieve orbit around a dwarf planet. The spacecraft was approximately 38,000 miles (61,000 kilometers) from Ceres when it was captured by the dwarf planet’s gravity at about 4:39 a.m. PST (7:39 a.m. EST) Friday.

Mission controllers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California received a signal from the spacecraft at 5:36 a.m. PST (8:36 a.m. EST) that Dawn was healthy and thrusting with its ion engine, the indicator Dawn had entered orbit as planned.

"Since its discovery in 1801, Ceres was known as a planet, then an asteroid and later a dwarf planet," said Marc Rayman, Dawn chief engineer and mission director at JPL. "Now, after a journey of 3.1 billion miles (4.9 billion kilometers) and 7.5 years, Dawn calls Ceres, home."

Ceres on approach from the dark side:

Ceres is seen from NASA's Dawn spacecraft on March 1, just a few days before the mission achieved orbit around the previously unexplored dwarf planet. The image was taken at a distance of about 30,000 miles (about 48,000 kilometers).

Image Credit: 

NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

The most recent images received from the spacecraft, taken on March 1 show Ceres as a crescent, mostly in shadow because the spacecraft's trajectory put it on a side of Ceres that faces away from the sun until mid-April. When Dawn emerges from Ceres' dark side, it will deliver ever-sharper images as it spirals to lower orbits around the planet.

I'm looking forward to it.