NASA image & Video Search April 14, 2017
Posted by aquillam in Astronomy.Tags: astronomy, images, NASA
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NASA has launched a new portal to make it easier to search their vast multimedia collection. Try it out with your favorite object!
Solar Eclipse 08 March 2016 March 8, 2016
Posted by aquillam in Astronomy.Tags: astronomy, NASA, Solar eclipse
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Tonights solar eclipse might not be visible in the US, but that doesn’t mean you have to miss it!
Watch on NASA TV, and learn more about the research astronomers and planetary scientists can do:
- News item “A Moment in the Sun’s Atmosphere: NASA’s Science During the March 2016 Total Solar Eclipse“
- Related videos and link to the NASA TV stream: “2016 Eclipse“
- NASA TV main portal
Messenger comes to an end April 29, 2015
Posted by aquillam in MichiganAstro.Tags: Mercury, Messenger, NASA
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I am nowhere near as talented as Bill Dunford, who created this beautiful tribute video, but here are my two cents on the end of the messenger mission.
Some 20 years ago, a small group of students from the recently formed Student Astronomical Society hopped on a bus and went up to the University of Michigan north campus to see a piece of a spacecraft. It was a mass spectrometer built by some of our fellow students (I think few faculty and staff members were involved too.) We joined probably 200 other people to see the instrument off. It was a little surreal, this tiny thing sitting under a clear cover with steam from the liquid nitrogen pouring out all over the stage. We were all very excited. A little piece of Michigan was going off to the planet Mercury.
At that time, Mercury was a very mysterious world. We didn’t even know what most of it surfaced looked like. It had an oddly strong magnetic field, and jumbled terrain unlike anything else we’d seen in the solar system. If you had told me then that there were volcanoes on this tiny planet, I wouldn’t have believed you.
We’ve learned a lot in the past 20 years. Personally, I’ve certainly learned that 20 years is a very short time indeed, but it appears to go by so slowly that sometimes you need an event like this to put into perspective.
And now, at around 3:26 pm ET on April 30, a little piece of Michigan will be part of the planet Mercury.
Letters of Note: Why Explore Space? August 6, 2012
Posted by aquillam in Science.Tags: Mars, NASA, Science, space exploration
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Letters of Note: Why Explore Space?.
This is a letter from Ernst Stuhlinger, Marshall Space Flight Center’s Associate Director for Science in 1970. It is in response to a nun, who asked why we should spend billions of dollars toward space exploration when there a children starving here on Earth. It’s an appropriate post for the day after Curiosity landed of Mars.
40 years latter, I find the letter to be highly relevant.
Big, broad, goals lead to big, broad, results, which usually lead to many other deeply beneficial results that seem completely unrelated to the original goals.
Sideways Orion 