Hakan’s Spatial Blog

International Space Station comes together

http://marsvoice.com/images/station.swf

Ahmet Güvenç ve Hakan Yıldızeli Mars buluşması, Manhattan NY

Webisto Productions & Netalto Entertainment

Original image:

http://webisto.com/images/Holmes-CFHT_Cuillandre.jpg
Credit & Copyright: Jean-Charles Cuillandre (CFHT), Hawaiian Starlight

The spherical coma of Comet Holmes has swollen to a diameter of over 1.4 million kilometers, making the tenuous, dusty cloud even bigger than the Sun. Scattering sunlight, all that dust and gas came from the comet’s remarkably active nucleus, whose diameter before the late October outburst was estimated to be a mere 3.4 kilometers. In this sharp image, recorded on November 14 with the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, stars are easily visible right through the outer coma, while the nucleus is buried inside the condensed, bright region. The bright region of the coma seems offset from the center, consistent with the idea that a large fragment drifted away from the nucleus and disintegrated, producing the comet’s spectacular outburst. Of course, more recent images of Holmes also show the bright star Mirfak (Alpha Persei) shining through as the comet sweeps slowly through the constellation Perseus.

Original image:

http://www.webisto.com/images/02.jpg

Explanation: Our universe is filled with galaxies. Galaxies — huge conglomerations of stars, gas, dust — and mysterious dark matter are the basic building blocks of the large-scale universe. Although distant galaxies move away from each other as the universe expands, gravity attracts neighboring galaxies to each other, forming galaxy groups, clusters of galaxies, and even larger expansive filaments. Some of these structures are visible on one of the most comprehensive maps of the sky ever made in galaxies: the APM galaxy survey map completed in the early 1990s. Over 2 million galaxies are depicted above in a
region 100 degrees across centered toward our Milky Way Galaxy’s south pole. Bright regions indicate more galaxies, while bluer colors denote larger average galaxies. Dark ellipses have been cut away where bright local stars dominate the sky. Many scientific discoveries resulted from analyses of the map data, including that the universe was surprisingly complex on large scales.

Original Image: http://webisto.com/images/ab001.jpg

With pine trees in dim silhouette, this skyscape from Breil-sur-Roya in southern France was captured on November 11. In the early evening scene, a satellite seems to streak through the branches, while bright, round, fuzzy Comet Holmes appears to lie just beyond them, near the stars of the constellation Perseus. Mirfak, alpha star of Perseus, is the brightest star above the comet and to the right. Next Monday (November 19), Holmes will be close enough to Mirfak to view the star through the remarkable comet’s expanding coma. Recent measurements place the dusty coma’s diameter at about 1.4 million kilometers, even larger than the Sun.

7 Cities of Mars by Hakan Yildizeli Music CD

Track List:
1. Candor City
2. Smoke - Stack Tower
3. Cydonia Pyramid City
4. Pyramid & Town Grid
5. Rectilinear City
6. Mud Covered City
7. Terraced Island City

Total time: Cue-Sheet.7-Cities-of-Mars.com

Genre: Electronic/Experimental/Cinematic
Company: Webisto Productions
2008

7-Cities-of-Mars.com

In this image made available from NASA on Sunday March 5, 2006, which shows the central region of a group of galaxies 300 million light-years away known as Stephan’s Quintet. The distant galaxy is generating a ’sonic boom’ of cosmic proportions, astronomers have discovered, as one of the galaxies falls towards the others at high speed, ploughing through a cloud of hydrogen gas travelling at 540.6 miles per second - 100 times faster than the speed of sound. The effect of this is similar to the sonic boom created by a fast jet, according to astonomers at the American space agency Nasa, using the Spitzer space telescope, and their findings are to be published later in March, in the Astrophysical Journal. (AP Photo / Nasa via Pa)

Leaving the robots to “get on with it” - to do the decision-making - is the way ahead, Nasa believes.

The agency’s Mars Odyssey orbiter, which has been mapping the Red Planet since 2001, will get new autonomous flight software later this year.

This will give the satellite the ability to react to sudden changes on the Martian surface. It will be “tuned” to look for temperature anomalies, rapid changes in the polar caps, the emergence of dust storms and the formation of water-ice clouds.

If its algorithms mark an event of interest, the spacecraft will be able to break into its routine and take more images, without waiting for commands from Earth.

Scientists say this will capture short-lived, but highly significant, events that might otherwise have been missed.

The approach has been pioneered on Nasa’s Earth Observing-1 satellite, which has now made thousands of autonomous data collects since 2003.

A classic example was an eruption on Antarctica’s Mt Erebus volcano in 2004. Typically, it could take several weeks to learn such a remote volcano had gone into an active phase; but as soon as EO-1 detected heat from the lava lake at the mountain’s summit, it reprogrammed its camera to take more pictures.

The spacecraft also sent a rapid alert to volcanologists on the mission’s science team.

So successful has EO-1’s Autonomous Sciencecraft Experiment software been that it is now running the satellite’s main science operations.

“This has helped us reduce the operations cost of this mission from $3.6m to $1.6m a year - over half that reduction was directly attributed to the onboard automation that we’re talking about. That was critical in getting the mission extended,” said Steve Chien, principal investigator for autonomous sciencecraft at JPL.

“The approach has shown its worth and it is applicable to a wide range of future missions.”

Giant geysers are erupting high into the thin air of Mars as the vast ice cap surrounding the planet’s south pole begins to melt each year with the arrival of springtime, a team of space scientists is reporting today. Astronomers have been puzzled by images of dark splotches and weblike gouges in the ice of the south pole ever since the orbiting spacecraft Mars Odyssey began transmitting images during initial flights over the Martian poles five years ago. Now the puzzle appears solved, the scientists say.

“These are roaring jets of gas and sand, hundreds of meters high, and the Martian ground is rumbling and vibrating underneath the clear ice,” said geophysicist Philip R. Christensen of Arizona State University, who designed the detecting instrument. “The area would make a great national park — like Yellowstone’s geysers, with a lot of dirty Old Faithfuls,” he said in an interview.

Christensen, together with Hugh H. Kieffer, a retired U.S. Geological Survey geologist, and Timothy N. Titus, a survey geophysicist, are reporting their findings today in the journal Nature.

The detecting instrument aboard Odyssey is called THEMIS, which stands for Thermal Emission Imaging System, a camera that takes pictures of the Martian surface in many wavelengths.

Christensen said more than 200 images from THEMIS show that a portion of the south polar ice cap is a great, clear slab during the winter when all is frozen solid at nearly 200 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. But when the sun rises over the horizon early each spring, the dark spots and weblike gouges in the ice known as spiders appear in the same area of what the scientists call the “cryptic” portion of the cap — roughly an area that would lie between 3 and 6 on a clock’s face.

The ice slab, Christen said, is about 3 feet thick, and the many dark spots that appear range from 50 to 150 feet wide, each lying several hundred feet apart. They last for three or four months, disappear when the warming ice melts completely by vaporizing and then tend to reappear when winter ends after the carbon dioxide has frozen out of the atmosphere and rebuilt the ice cap anew.

The geysers erupt, according to Christensen, when the bottom of the ice slab nearest the bare Martian ground vaporizes every spring and creates a high-pressure reservoir of carbon-dioxide gas. When the pressure becomes intense, the slab lifts off the ground, weak spots in the ice open up and the gas rushes out, creating eruptions from the reservoir like geysers rising at speeds of 100 mph or more, scooping up particles of sand that fall back to darken the remaining upper ice before it, too, vaporizes.

The strange mechanism of the eruptions, he said, “is unlike anything ever observed on Earth.”