Space is Crazy

We are space junkies. Find all things space here.

[spaceiscrazy]

"In the sky above and around it you can see Venus (lower right), Mercury (upper right), and mighty Jupiter (to the left). All three are unresolved dots at this magnification, but they may look different sizes because of their varying brightnesses. If the size variation were real, Jupiter would look three times bigger than Venus, and five times bigger than Mercury in the picture! Currently, all three are on the other side of the Sun, making them appear smaller than they can be. Mercury is actually the closest right now, about 170 million kilometers (105 million miles) distant, compared to 250 million km (150 million miles) for Venus and 910 million km (565 million miles) for Jupiter."

via Bad Astronomy

An incredible site to see in the sky. 

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Earth From Space: Antarctica's Secrets continued...

I'm sorry, did he just say "the size of 500 Niagara Falls" ?!? 

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Earth From Space: Antarctica's Secrets

Who knew Antarctica played such a key role in supporting all life on Earth? These visuals are stunning!

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Earth From Space: Part 2

The Earth is forever seeking an equilibrium that it never can reach. This segment explains the Monsoon of Western India and a place where no rainfall has ever been recorded!

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Earth from Space

How the World works as seen from space. This first segment shows how the world's moisture plays a key role in keeping Earth's oceans at equilibrium via massive hurricanes and other intricate systems. 

[distant-traveller]

Question: If 2 black holes get near each other, can they then gravitationally pull matter out of the other black hole & back into “normal” space?

The short answer is no.

A black hole (in the traditional sense) is defined as an object that has collapsed so that its radius is equal to, or less than, the Schwarzschild of the object.

What does this mean?

Every object has a Schwarzschild radius; this is the point at which an object’s mass is so compressed that the gravitational influence overpowers the other forces of nature and it collapses to a singularity.

Of course, not every object is massive enough to collapse to its Schwarzschild radius. The Earth’s Schwarzschild radius, for example, is about the diameter of a small marble. If you were to apply enough energy to the Earth and compress its mass to that size, it would collapse to form a black hole. The same is true for humans, except I’d need to compress you to a point some 10-million times smaller than a marble in order to turn you into a black hole.

So, what is special about the Schwarzschild radius? This is the point at which the escape velocity for the object is equal to the speed of light. Obviously, since you can’t travel ,or faster than, the speed of light you can’t get out of a black hole neither can another black hole pull you out.

It’s important to realize that, outside of the Schwarzschild radius (also known as the event horizon), spacetime is normal. You can interact with a black hole in the same ways you interact with any other object of mass.

Image credit: NASA/CXC/A.Hobart

Article: From Quarks to Quasars

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Cool facts about black holes and how compressed a human has to be to form one.

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Next time you see the Sun, please tell it that size doesn't matter. But, woah!

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If you have ever wondered what a decommissioned satellite looks like when it burns up in Earth's atmopshere, look no further!

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Repairing the Station in Orbit

Expedition 35 Flight Engineers Chris Cassidy (pictured) and Tom Marshburn (out of frame) completed a spacewalk at 2:14 p.m. EDT May 11, 2013 to inspect and replace a pump controller box on the International Space Station’s far port truss (P6) leaking ammonia coolant. The two NASA astronauts began the 5-hour, 30-minute spacewalk at 8:44 a.m. 

A leak of ammonia coolant from the area near or at the location of a Pump and Flow Control Subassembly was detected on Thursday, May 9, prompting engineers and flight controllers to begin plans to support the spacewalk. The device contains the mechanical systems that drive the cooling functions for the port truss.

Image Credit: NASA

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Milky Way vs. City Lights – My first attempt at computational astrophotography

From Mount Wilson on a moonless night, the Milky Way is faintly visible over Los Angeles. I wanted to see if I could extract enough information from multiple exposures to overcome the city lights and make the Milky Way become conspicuous.

This picture is the result of a fair amount of mathematical modeling and processing. All of the shots used to produce this image are taken from the same spot without moving the camera between exposures. I’ve included some further explanation and intermediate images in the first comment below.

- Aaron Kiely

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Fast-Track to Orbit: Expedition 36/37

A Russian Soyuz capsule launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Glorious Kazakhstan this afternoon, carrying U.S. astronaut (and space veteran/mechanical engineer) Karen Nyberg along with cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin and Italian astronauta Luca Parmitano to their rendezvous with the ISS. They will spend a mere six hours catching up with the space station before they dock later tonight, a new pedal-to-the-metal path to orbit recently adopted by ISS-bound craft. In addition to lots and lots of science, the crew of six that will be aboard the ISS will take part in the Winter Olympic torch relay later this year.

Will Karen Nyberg entertain us like Chris Hadfield did with his gorgeous photos and video experiments (and his great Tumblr)? We’ll see. But word on the street is she’s more of a Pinterest fan.

Godspeed, Expedition 36/37. Here’s to six of you being great of behalf of seven billion of us.

P.S. - Howmanypeopleareinspacerightnow.com is correctly showing “6”, in case you’re wondering.

[spaceiscrazy]

Annular Solar Eclipse, Pilbara, Western Australia.

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Expedition 35 landing

The Soyuz TMA-07M spacecraft is seen as it lands with Expedition 35 Commander Chris Hadfield of the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), NASA Flight Enineer Tom Marshburn and Russian Flight Engineer Roman Romanenko of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) in a remote area near the town of Zhezkazgan, Kazakhstan, on Tuesday, May 14, 2013. Hadfield, Marshburn and Romanenko returned from five months onboard the International Space Station where they served as members of the Expedition 34 and 35 crews.

Image credit: NASA/Carla Cioffi

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A great photo of the Expedition 35 crew safely landing their Soyuz on Earth.

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The International Space Station as the set for a music video covering Bowie's Space Oddity.  My favourite part is at 4:38.

[distant-traveller]

Herschel crater on Mimas of Saturn

Why is this giant crater on Mimas oddly colored? Mimas, one of the smaller round moons of Saturn, sports Herschel crater, one of the larger impact craters in the entire Solar System. The robotic Cassini spacecraft now orbiting Saturn took the above image of Herschel crater in unprecedented detail while making a 10,000-kilometer record close pass by the icy world. Shown in contrast-enhanced false color, the above image includes color information from older Mimas images that together show more clearly that Herschel’s landscape is colored slightly differently from more heavily cratered terrain nearby. The color difference could yield surface composition clues to the violent history of Mimas. An impact on Mimas much larger than the one that created the 130-kilometer Herschel would likely have destroyed the entire world.

Image credit: Cassini Imaging Team, ISS, JPL, ESA, NASA

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Incredible!

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"The spinning vortex of Saturn's north polar storm resembles a deep red rose of giant proportions surrounded by green foliage in this false-color image from NASA's Cassini spacecraft. Measurements have sized the eye at a staggering 1,250 miles (2,000 kilometers) across with cloud speeds as fast as 330 miles per hour (150 meters per second). 

This image is among the first sunlit views of Saturn's north pole captured by Cassini's imaging cameras. When the spacecraft arrived in the Saturnian system in 2004, it was northern winter and the north pole was in darkness. Saturn's north pole was last imaged under sunlight by NASA's Voyager 2 in 1981; however, the observation geometry did not allow for detailed views of the poles. Consequently, it is not known how long this newly discovered north-polar hurricane has been active."

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI

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A movie trailer for Gravity starring George Clooney and Sandra Bullock.  We can't wait to see this!