Jupiter Rules September Night Skies

Jupiter is always an easy planet to pick out. This month Jupiter is brighter than usual as it reaches opposition. Saturn is rising on Jupiter?s heels and is a show all of its own. And for the early risers, there is a lovely show of Mercury, Venus, Mars and the bright star Regulus in Leo.

Other than the Moon, Jupiter outshines anything else in the sky (and there are some pretty bright stars out there to compete with, but Jupiter wins hands down!) Jupiter is so bright because it is at opposition. This means that it is opposite the Sun in a line drawn through Jupiter, the Earth and the Sun (with the Earth in the middle.) This is a position similar to the full Moon. And like the full Moon, Jupiter rises at sunset and is up all night, making it a great viewing spectacle.

Jupiter rises nearly due east just after sunset. The king of the planets is so bright because it is at opposition and also because it is so big. If you lumped together all of the planets and moons in the solar system, Jupiter would be 70 percent of the total mass! Jupiter?s diameter is 11 times that of the Earth?s.

With binoculars or a small telescope you can easily see the four big moons of Jupiter. They are known as the Gallilean moons because they were discovered by the astronomer Galileo, the first person to turn a telescope to the night sky. The individual moons are Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto. It is interesting to watch the moon?s cross Jupiter?s diameter and disappear behind the giant planet and pop out on the other side. Jupiter is residing in the constellation Aquarius the water bearer.

For all Jupiter's glory and brightness, it is Saturn that most often fascinates people. Though Saturn is not the only planet known to have rings, indeed rings have become a common occurrence in the solar system, but Saturn was the first, and remains the best! Saturn rises about one and a half hours after Jupiter. Saturn is also approaching an opposition on October 6. Binoculars will show Saturn?s rings and a good pair or a small telescope will show the shadow of the planet on the rings. An interesting fact about Saturn is though it is nearly 9.5 times the diameter of the Earth, this giant planet has an average density less than water,. If you had an ocean large enough, Saturn would float!

As if to avoid being lost in the glory of Jupiter and Saturn, the smaller planets are hanging out in the morning sky but you?ll have to catch them during the first half of the month. It?s quite a treat if you?re an early riser. Venus is the brightest of the three planets and the easiest to spot. Mercury is about as bright as it ever gets, and it only a few degrees away from brilliant Venus. Mars is about 5 degrees above those two. About three degrees below Venus is the bright star Regulus in Leo.

The waning crescent Moon does a dance among the morning stars and planets. On September 17 the moon slides past Mars and on the Sept 18 the Moon slides past Regulus. On Sept 19, the moon is 3 degrees away from Venus. Happy stargazing !

SETI@home

What is SETI@home ?

SETI@home is a scientific experiment that uses Internet-connected
computers in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). You
can participate by running a free program that downloads and analyzes
radio telescope data.

The Science of SETI@home

SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) is a scientific
area whose goal is to detect intelligent life outside Earth. One
approach, known as radio SETI, uses radio telescopes to listen
for narrow-bandwidth radio signals from space. Such signals are not
known to occur naturally, so a detection would provide evidence of
extraterrestrial technology.

Radio telescope signals consist primarily of noise (from celestial
sources and the receiver's electronics) and man-made signals such as TV
stations, radar, and satellites. Modern radio SETI projects analyze the
data digitally. More computing power enables searches to cover greater
frequency ranges with more sensitivity. Radio SETI, therefore, has an
insatiable appetite for computing power.

Previous radio SETI projects have used special-purpose
supercomputers, located at the telescope, to do the bulk of the data
analysis. In 1995, David Gedye proposed doing radio SETI using a
virtual supercomputer composed of large numbers of Internet-connected
computers, and he organized the SETI@home project to explore this idea.
SETI@home was originally launched in May 1999.

If you are interested in participating Click Here.

Goal of Returning to Moon Could Be Slipping Further Away

NASA's goal of putting astronauts back on the moon by 2020 is all but impossible to achieve, a presidential panel was told Wednesday.

An independent analysis concluded there is little hope NASA could replicate any time soon what Apollo 11 accomplished 40 years ago. And sources said an undisclosed part of the study showed it may take until 2028 -- nearly 60 years after America's first moon landing -- to get back.

"We can't see [the gap] closing," Gary Pulliam, an analyst with Aerospace Corp., told a near-silent audience in Huntsville, Ala., where engineers at the Marshall Space Flight Center have spent the past four years designing new rockets for NASA's Constellation program.

One NASA analyst, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak on behalf of NASA or the review panel, said astronauts might be able to return to the moon by 2028, although another source said 2035 was more likely.

The grim assessment, delivered on the second day of hearings this week on NASA's human spaceflight program, is the latest blow to the Constellation program, a 4-year-old effort to design new rockets and a crew capsule to take astronauts to the moon and eventually Mars.

On Tuesday, former astronaut Sally Ride told the full panel, led by former Lockheed Martin CEO Norm Augustine, that she did not expect that Constellation's Ares I rocket and Orion capsule could complete a first mission into low-Earth orbit before 2017 -- two years after its current target date.

A second estimate, calculated by Pulliam on Wednesday, was even more pessimistic. Because of ongoing technical troubles and insufficient funding, he said, Constellation's first mission could be delayed to 2019. "It should not surprise anyone that problems exist," he said.

The findings of the panel build on months of increasingly critical reports on Constellation, which ex-NASA Administrator Michael Griffin chose in 2005 to fulfill then- President George W. Bush's vision of returning astronauts to the moon by 2020 to prepare for an eventual Mars mission.

There are already signs that the panel is preparing options that would dramatically change NASA's current plans to build two big rockets: the Ares I to take crew to the space station and low-Earth orbit, and the Ares V heavy-cargo lifter that would take up a moon lander and propellant to take the Orion capsule and astronauts to the moon for extended visits.

One of the panel's subgroups, led by retired Air Force Gen. Lester Lyles, recommended that the group consider allowing America's international partners to participate in the development of NASA's human spaceflight plans.

Another far-reaching recommendation came from a subgroup headed by former space-shuttle engineer and Boeing executive Bohdan Bejmuk. It called for NASA to give up flying to low-Earth orbit, including to the international space station.

"Let's turn it over to the newcomers," he said, referring to companies such as SpaceX of California and Orbital Sciences Corp. of Virginia, which have NASA contracts to develop rockets and unmanned capsules that can reach the space station.

Doubts about the direction of the manned-space program spurred President Barack Obama to name the committee, which has until late August to present financial and policy options as to how NASA should proceed.

To stay on the current course, the White House would have to pump billions of dollars more into Constellation -- or completely rethink how, and why, NASA sends astronauts into space. In the meantime, with the space shuttle slated to retire by 2010 or 2011, the U.S. will confront a years-long gap when it has no capacity to send humans into space and must pay the Russians for trips to the space station.

An option to narrow that gap, suggested by Ride on Tuesday, is to extend the shuttle program past 2011. When the panel meets in Cocoa Beach today, U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson is expected to advocate this idea, according to an advance transcript.

"I wish you would consider extending the shuttle to a point in time that would lessen the gap so that we can have Americans riding American vehicles to get to our station, and then on to the moon, and then on to Mars," said Nelson, D-Fla.

A shuttle extension would prevent devastating job losses at Kennedy Space Center, which prepares NASA spacecraft for launch. One upcoming report estimates 7,000 job losses at KSC after the shuttle's retirement.

Jeff Hanley, manager of the Constellation program, appeared resigned to the bleak reports that the rockets would be years late. He said that predicting when a new rocket would launch was akin to "hurricane forecasting."

During the daylong hearing, however, several of Hanley's midlevel managers defended the beleaguered program. They offered their draft solutions to ongoing technical problems, including the Ares I rocket's tendency to shake violently on liftoff and potentially drift into its launch tower.

"We believe [Constellation rockets] are the fastest, most proven [vehicles] to close the human spaceflight gap," said Steve Cook, manager of the Ares program.

Vigorous defense from ex-chief But the most vigorous defense came from Griffin, who left the agency when Obama took office and is now a professor at the University of Alabama at Huntsville.

In a letter to the panel, he said NASA and the Constellation program were "targets of broad but shallow criticism." And he said Constellation was the "most expeditiously attainable, broadly capable, lowest risk, and lowest life cycle cost design" under review. "Do not allow the parochial voices of the small-minded, the self-interested, and the uninformed to prevail. Choose the future," he concluded -- a parting shot aimed at commercial carriers and military rocket companies competing to bury the Constellation program.

Among the options being considered by the committee are designs that would put the Orion capsule atop military rockets and another system that would use the shuttle's engines, giant fuel tank and solid-rocket boosters.

Hubble Readies for Full Operation

It's hard to believe that 2½ months have passed since the crew of Atlantis wrapped up their extensive repairs and refurbishment of the Hubble Space Telescope.

So when will Hubble get back to work? In a sense, it already has. When Australian amateur Anthony Wesley spotted the "powder burn" in Jupiter's atmosphere from an apparent impact on July 19th, Hubble managers hustled to turn its 94-inch (2.4-meter) eye on the new feature so that the just-installed Wide Field Camera 3 could take some snapshots.

But HST isn't yet fully ready to return to duty. Engineers are still stepping their way through the long "to do" list known as the Servicing Mission Observation Verification (SMOV), and a few glitches have come up.

For one thing, the Science Instrument Command and Data Handler — think of it as the router for Hubble's science data — acted up not long after the servicing mission concluded. (Remember: NASA delayed STS 125, the fifth and final Space Shuttle servicing mission, by some six months so that this last-minute replacement could be recalled from storage, checked out, added to the payload, and installed by spacewalking astronauts.) Fortunately, this anomaly resolved itself after engineers shut down the SI-C&DH and powered it back up.

A few days later two Hubble instruments, the patched-up Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) and the brand-new Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, hiccupped. Both have since resumed operation.

Then on July 6th the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph shut itself down and didn't return to operation on July 28th. STIS still has a problem with its near-ultraviolet channel: a mysterious fluorescence on its optical window is creating detector noise (dark current) that degrades the instrument's performance.

All this might seem ominous for Hubble's prospects for long-term success. But according to Preston Burch, program manager for HST at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, the team is just being cautious. "We want to be careful that we don't break something," he says. In fact, Burch seems quite upbeat because the post-repair checkout is actually quite far along.

Even NICMOS, the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer, will soon be back in operation after a year-long hiatus. On August 1st the instrument's finicky cryogenic cooling system finally responded to coaxing from ground controllers after many months of failed restart attempts. NICMOS must operate at very cold temperatures — at or below –321°F (77 K) — to ensure that its sensitive detectors are recording feeble infrared light from space instead of heat from its own electronics.

"If all goes well," comments Glenn Schneider, instrument scientist at the University of Arizona, "it will take about a month for NICMOS to cool down so that we can begin the re-enabling and recalibrating the instrument."

 "We're over the hump," Burch told me this afternoon, "and starting to do routine science operations." Within two weeks, he estimates, HST will be observing a third of the time, and that should rise to nearly full-time by early September.

Astronomers have already been zeroing in on deep-space targets with ACS and WFC3 that will showcase the orbiting observatory's enhanced capabilities. Circle September 9th on your calendars — that's when NASA managers plan to release some eye-popping new views from the rehabbed, restored, refurbished, and remarkable Hubble Space Telescope.

The Moon Trees

Apollo 14 launched in the late afternoon of January 31, 1971 on what was to be our third trip to the lunar surface. Five days later Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell walked on the Moon while Stuart Roosa, a former U.S. Forest Service smoke jumper, orbited above in the command module. Packed in small containers in Roosa's personal kit were hundreds of tree seeds, part of a joint NASA/USFS project. Upon return to Earth, the seeds were germinated by the Forest Service. Known as the "Moon Trees", the resulting seedlings were planted throughout the United States (often as part of the nation's bicentennial in 1976) and the world. They stand as a tribute to astronaut Roosa and the Apollo program.

The project began after Roosa was chosen for the Apollo 14 mission. Ed Cliff, Chief of the Forest Service, knew of Stuart Roosa from his days as a smoke jumper and contacted him about bringing seeds into space. Stan Krugman of the Forest Service was put in charge of the project and selected the seeds for the experiment. Seeds were chosen from five different types of trees: Loblolly Pine, Sycamore, Sweetgum, Redwood, and Douglas Fir. The seeds were classified and sorted, and control seeds were kept on Earth for later comparison. Roosa carried about 400 - 500 seeds in his personal kit which stayed with him as he orbited the Moon in the command module "Kitty Hawk" in February, 1971. Unfortunately, the seed cannisters burst open during the decontamination procedures after their return to Earth, and the seeds got mixed together and were presumed to be no longer viable.

Stan Krugman had the seeds sent to the southern Forest Service station in Gulfport, Mississippi and to the western station in Placerville, California to attempt germination. Surprisingly, nearly all the seeds germinated successfully, and the Forest Service had some 420 to 450 seedlings after a few years (some from cuttings). Some of these were planted with their earth-bound counterparts as controls, (as would be expected, after over twenty years there is no discernable difference) but most were given away in 1975 and 1976 to many state forestry organizations to be planted as part of the nation's bicentennial celebration. These trees were southern and western species, so not all states received trees. A Loblolly Pine was planted at the White House, and trees were planted in Brazil, Switzerland, and presented to the Emperor of Japan, among others. Trees have also been planted in Washington Square in Philadelphia, at Valley Forge, in the International Forest of Friendship, and at various universities and NASA centers. The Moon Tree shown at top left is a sycamore growing at Koch Girl Scout Camp in Cannelton, Indiana and at top right at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. A list of Moon Tree locations can be found at the bottom of the page.

Stuart Roosa was born on 16 August 1933, in Durango, Colorado. He worked for the Forest Service in the early 1950's as a smoke jumper fighting fires and later joined the Air Force and became a test pilot. He was one of 19 people selected for the astronaut class of 1966 and was part of the astronaut support crew for Apollo 9. Following Apollo 14, Roosa was backup command module pilot for Apollo's 16 and 17. He then worked on the Space Shuttle program until his retirement as a Colonel in the Air Force in 1976, the time when many of his trees were being planted.

Sadly, Stuart Roosa passed away in December, 1994. The Moon Trees continue to flourish, a living monument to our first visits to the Moon and a fitting memorial to Stuart Roosa. Believed locations of some Moon Trees are listed below, but no list was ever kept nor any systematic tracking made of the disposition of all the trees. If you know of a Moon Tree, please send a message to dave.williams@nasa.gov.

Perseid Meteors by Moonlight - Peaks Tonight

The little bits of interplanetary grit making up the Perseid meteoroid stream orbit the Sun with a period of about 130 years, like their object of origin, Comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle. The richest part of the stream is strung out near the comet itself, which last dipped through the inner solar system in 1992. So the shower's annual sky show has waned of late — gone are the great Perseid meteor displays of the early 1990s.

This year's Perseid peak is predicted to come around 18h Universal Time (2 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time) on August 12th. That's good timing for the Far East, but for North America it splits the difference between the nights of August 11-12 and 12-13. Flip a coin — or watch the evening weather forecast — to decide which night to watch for them. The shower is also active to a lesser degree for many days beforehand and several days afterward.

The waning Moon is nearly at last quarter those two nights. It rises an hour or two after dark and will brighten the sky somewhat during the best Perseid-activity hours, from 11 p.m. until dawn. Nevertheless, this is a pretty reliable shower, and some Perseids should be there for the catching.

Moreover, meteor specialists Esko Lyytinen and Mikhail Maslov suggest we may encounter a ribbon of very old debris (ejected by the comet in 1610) on August 12th near 9h UT, which could briefly up the count by a few to tens or meteors per hour for West Coast skywatchers. Both researchers also believe that Earth's proximity to the stream's core might produce an additional burst a few hours earlier, at around 5h UT.

You may also see occasional meteors from two lesser showers that are also active: the Delta Aquarids and Kappa Cygnids. These move noticeably slower than Perseids, and they travel in different directions as if originating from their respective constellations.

Meteor watching is great "eyeball astronomy." Find a spot with an open view of the sky, wrap up warmly in winter clothes or a sleeping bag, and use mosquito repellent where you're not wrapped. Lie back in a lounge chair and watch whatever part of your sky is darkest. Be patient. You may see a meteor zipping into the upper atmosphere every few minutes on average.

August night sky offers Summer Triangle and more

August is perhaps the best month to enjoy the night sky.

As soon as it is dark, look almost directly overhead to find the bright-blue star Vega, which is part of the constellation Lyra. Look a few degrees to the northeast and find the bright star Deneb, which is the tail of the constellation Cygnus, the swan. Then look a few degrees due south and you find Altair, the heart of Aquila, the eagle. These stars make up the asterism known as the Summer Triangle.

Away from city lights you can view this same area of the sky and see that the Milky Way runs right down the center. The dark patches in the middle of this mass of stars are caused by clouds of interstellar dust that block the light from the more distant stars.

Jupiter has now reached opposition, which means that it rises when the sun sets and is ideal for viewing. You have to wait for it to rise above the thick atmosphere. About 11 p.m. you will find it in the southeast. It is the brightest object in that portion of the sky; after viewing it for a few moments you will notice that it does not twinkle.

Again, away from city lights, using binoculars and a star map from the Internet, you can locate Neptune, following close behind Jupiter. You will also be able to view Jupiter's four primary moons, which Galileo first saw 400 years ago.