Label: Space

April 22, 2013

The commander of the International Space Station, astronaut Chris Hadfield, sent down an Earth Day greeting from the International Space Station this morning. "Good Morning, World, and Happy Earth Day from orbit!" he wrote from his Twitter account (@Cmdr_Hadfield) on Monday. "One touch of nature makes the whole world kin."

He also sent this photograph, which he says is the robotic arm of the space station giving us a "thumbs up" for Earth Day.

The first Canadian commander of the space station loves taking photographs and videos of Earth. Commander Hadfield says that life on the ISS has changed his view of the Earth.

"If anything my respect and my concern and my love for the Earth has only been deepened by [having this] new perspective on the planet." 

April 16, 2013

As beautiful as a painting! That’s what I feel when I see this magnificent photograph of a section of our planet Earth, taken by an astronaut aboard the International Space Station. Can you tell what we are seeing in this photograph?

If you guessed that these are farmlands, you were correct. We are looking at an agricultural landscape in Minas Gerais state, Brazil. These fields are just outside of the city of Perdizes, which means "partridges" in Portuguese. Farmers are growing sunflowers, wheat, potatoes, coffee, rice, soybeans, and corn in the green fields, while the sections that are violet, reddish and tan are fields that are lying fallow - not planted this year while they restore their minerals and other nutrients. You can even see small streams, extending like silvery fingers through the landscape.

I never tire of looking at all the amazing photographs that are beamed back to Earth from space. How about you? 

January 8, 2013

The Cassini orbiter - an unmanned space probe - sent back this magnificent image of Saturn last month. The reason this photograph is so spectacular is that the orbiter is shooting from the "dark side" of Saturn, so the planet is glowing with the sun’s light behind it.

Look closely at the bottom left-hand corner of the photograph - do you see anything there? Those two little spots are Enceladus and Tethys, two of Saturn’s moons.

Here’s what Carolyn Porco, leader of the Cassini imaging team at the Colorado-based Space Science Institute, said about this image:"Of all the many glorious images we have received from Saturn, none are more strikingly unusual than those we have taken from Saturn’s shadow. They unveil a rare splendor seldom seen anywhere else in our solar system."

October 30, 2012

We are a little bit late with our posting of today’s Cool Photo of the Week because of the power outages here on the East Coast. But, we’re back online just in time to share this special, COOL HALLOWEEN PHOTO OF THE WEEK!

And since the Cygnus Loop Nebula looks like a ghost, it reminds me to wish all my readers a Happy, Out of This World Halloween!

Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech

October 1, 2012

Last week in the UK, people from all over England, Scotland and Wales called the police to report very bright lights in the night sky. One caller said, "I’ve seen shooting stars and meteor showers before, but this was much larger and much more colorful."

Experts think that what people probably saw was "space junk." Dr Tim O’Brien, from the Jodrell Bank Observatory, said it’s not possible to know the exact source. "It’s hard to say exactly, whether it was a chunk of rock coming in from outer space, burning up in the atmosphere, or a bit of space debris which we call space junk, which is basically man-made stuff from a spacecraft that’s burning up in the atmosphere."

I am guessing that it was probably space junk. Meteorites, or pieces of rock, usually blaze across the sky in a matter of seconds. That’s why people call them "shooting stars."

The truth is, we’ve left a pretty big mess of old hardware circling our planet. Those things tend to take longer to burn up as they enter our atmosphere, so more people see them.

Look at this diagram; the blue sphere is Earth. According to NASA, each dot represents a bit of known space junk that’s at least 4 inches (10 cm) in low-Earth orbit, where the space station and shuttles roam. In total, some 19,000 manmade objects this size or bigger were orbiting Earth as of July 2009. And there are lots of smaller ones, too.

No one is quite sure how to do it, but there is no question that it is time for us to clean up our room!

CREDIT: NASA/Orbital Debris Program Office.

September 12, 2012

Welcome to Writing Wednesday, where every week we give you a chance to post your writing here on the Seymour Science blog. Today we thought we’d have some fun, and let you do a piece of creative writing about space. It’s "Science Fiction" Writing Wednesday!

The Topic: Saturn and its rings. Saturn is one of the "gas giant" planets in our solar system. Often, when I try to describe the size of objects in the solar system, I find that I need to use comparisons. The numbers are just so huge that no one can imagine what they mean. For example, I can tell you that Saturn’s circumference (which you would measure by wrapping a giant tape measure around its equator) is 235,298 miles or 378,675 kilometers. But who can really imagine how large 235, 298 miles is? I can’t.

A better way to think about this is to use a comparison. To give you an idea of how big Saturn is, we can compare it to Earth. Saturn’s circumference is 9.4 times larger than Earth’s circumference. We can all understand that that is BIG.

Now, for the science fiction part. I found a great image this week (thanks to the USA Science and Engineering Festival for sharing!). This picture is also designed to help us understand how huge Saturn is, by imagining how long it would take to drive all the way around one of the rings. Of course, no one could never ever really do that. But doesn’t knowing that it would take 258 full days if you were driving 75 miles per hour the whole time help you to understand just how huge Saturn is? 

Your assignment: Imagine that you are in a that spaceship/ truck, driving on Saturn’s rings at 75 mph. Write a paragraph or two describing what that journey would be like. What are Saturn’s rings really like? Are they solid? What are conditions in space? Tell about the food and water you would need. Would you be lonely? Use what you know about Saturn and about space to imagine what you would encounter. Use lots of descriptive details to make you imaginary journey come alive for your reader.

When you are finished writing, click on the yellow "Comments" at the bottom of this post to enter your writing.

Photos: NASA, Earth Sky Photos

Note to Eucators: Today’s Writing Wednesday excercize is designed to support CSSS Writing Standard #3: Write narratives to develop real or imagined experiences or events using effective technique, descriptive details, and clear event sequences.

September 11, 2012

You may have already seen this magnificent photograph of Mars, taken by the mast camera on the Curiosity rover. Everyone has marveled at how much it looks like Earth, with its gravely surface and sandy dunes.

Here is a cool fact that you may not have heard about this photograph. If you were standing on Mars, these are not the colors that you would see in front of you. The dust in the planet’s atmosphere makes everything look very red, including this sandy dune.

The reason this photograph isn’t red is that NASA’s engineers are doing something called "white balancing" - adjusting the colors to make the scene look the way it would with the kind of light we have here on Earth. They do this to help out a particular bunch of Earthlings - the geologists who are studying the images with eyes that are trained to recognize rocks, minerals and other substances in more familiar light.

August 25, 2012

          You may have heard that an astronaut named Neil Armstrong died today. He was a hero to me and to many others – the man who took a “giant leap for mankind” when he first walked on the moon on July 20, 1969.

Neil Armstrong was a man of courage, and although he was a private person, he gracefully accepted his role for the rest of his life as the “face” of the space program and a symbol of man’s exploration of the solar system beyond our own planet.

This is a photograph of a footprint on the moon, left by our astronauts back in 1969. It marked the first time that human beings walked on ground that was not Earth. That footprint may last for a million years or longer, because there is no air on the moon. Without air there is no wind to blow the dust around.

The print of that first giant step for mankind will live forever on the moon, just as Neil Armstrong’s brave quest to explore and learn more will live forever in our memories.

When asked how they would like Neil Armstrong to be remembered, his wife and family said:

"For those who may ask what they can do to honor Neil, we have a simple request. Honor his example of service, accomplishment and modesty, and the next time you walk outside on a clear night and see the moon smiling down at you, think of Neil Armstrong and give him a wink."

I think we can do that, don’t you? 

July 12, 2012

Today, astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope announced that they have discovered Pluto’s fifth moon. Scientists have been looking closely at the space around Pluto because they are preparing for the 2015 Pluto flyby of NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft. New Horizons is going to give us our closest look yet at the dwarf planet, so NASA engineers want to map as many potential crash hazards as they can and design the safest possible course for the probe.

For the moment, the new moon is simply called S/2012 (134340) 1, or "P5" for short. Eventually, the International Astronomical Union will give names to P5 and P4, the fourth moon that was discovered late last year, and they will probably be names from Greek mythology. Pluto’s first three moons were named after mythological characters associated with the underworld. Greeks believed Charon was the ferryman who carried souls across the river to the underworld. Hydra was the serpentine monster that guarded the gates of the underworld, and Nix is named after the Greek goddess of the night.

The team is waiting awhile before naming P4 and P5, in case a P6 comes along. One thing for sure is that we’re going to learn a lot more about Pluto and the objects orbiting it in the next three years.

The timing of this discovery is good for one of my new eBooks. We are updating SPACE WORDS: A DICTIONARY for publication as an eBook, and my editor just changed the Pluto entry to state that it has five moons. Surely this will be the most up-to-date reference out there when it is published in late July!

Photo: M. Showalter / SETI Institute / NASA / ESA

May 15, 2012

Saturn has many moons - 53 that have been discovered and named, nine more "provisional moons" which have been detected but only assigned a number until more is known about them. 

Today’s "Cool Photo of the Week" is of two of Saturn’s moons. The small one is one of Enceladus, ice-covered and just 300 miles (483 kilometers) wide, and covered by ice. It is dwarfed by one of the big Saturnian moons, the 3,200 mile (5,150 kilometer) wide Titan. The streak across the middle of the photograph is one of the planet’s giant rings.

Cool photo, don’t you think? It was taken by the Cassini orbiter, an unmanned spacecraft which continues to help us learn more about this gas giant.

Photo: NASA/JPL/SSI/J. Major

An updated version of Seymour Simon’s SATURN, with the latest information from the Cassini mission, will be published for Amazon’s Kindle Fire this September.

 <  1 2 3 4 >