The National Air and Space Museum is Open for Business

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): The “Destination Moon” exibition at the refurbished National Air and Space Museum. (Smithsonian Museum)

If you have been awaiting the refurbishing of the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, then you will be happy to know that the museum reopened on October 14th. Only now you cannot simply stroll into the museum. Instead, you need to obtain a free timed-entry pass. Unfortunately, this seems to be the current system used by numerous museums to control traffic as well as capture all of your personal information so they can swamp you with junk mail and offers. Anyway…

Here are the a few of the new exhibits the museum is highlighting (go here for the full list):

  1. “Walking On Other Worlds”: Experience what it’s like in distant parts of our solar system in the “Walking on Other Worlds” interactive experience in the Kenneth C. Griffin Exploring the Planets Gallery. This immersive media exhibit presents visitors with a seven-minute “tour” of seven different worlds: Venus, Earth’s Moon, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn’s moon Titan, asteroid Ryugu, and comet 67P.
  2. Science Fiction Artifacts: New to display is a full-sized T-70 X-wing Starfighter “flown” by Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019). The screen-used vehicle is on long-term loan from Lucasfilm and is displayed hanging outside the planetarium. Star Trek is also represented in the new exhibitions. 
  3. ISS Cupola: In the One World Connected gallery, put yourself in the shoes of astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS) with the ISS Cupola interactive. Every 90 minutes, astronauts on board the ISS can see the Sun rise from the station’s Cupola, a European Space Agency-built observatory module. 

Given that NASA’s Artemis 1 mission is shooting for the Moon again, the timing is perfect. Of course, in December 2022 it will have been 50 years since the last human walk on the Moon’s surface, so we have a lot to celebrate as well as a lot of time to make up. Let’s hope a future update to the National Air and Space Museum includes models of spacecraft used to get humans to Mars.

And remember, you can also visit the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center outside the Washington Beltway that contains large planes, jets, and spacecraft that cannot fit in the DC museum, including the Space Shuttle Discovery. Last time I went there I could walk right in without using a timed-entry pass.

Image (Credit): Space Shuttle Discovery at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center. (Smithsonian Museum)

Pic of the Week: Juno and Europa

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): Jupiter’s moon Europa. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Björn Jónsson CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

This week’s image is from NASA’s Juno spacecraft orbiting Jupiter and its moons. It is a beautiful image of Europa from the spacecraft’s Junocam. Europa is one of 80 known moons orbiting its host planet.

Here is a little more from NASA about this image:

JunoCam took its closest image at an altitude of 945 miles (1,521 kilometers) over a region of the moon called Annwn Regio. In the image, terrain beside the day-night boundary is revealed to be rugged, with pits and troughs. Numerous bright and dark ridges and bands stretch across a fractured surface, revealing the tectonic stresses that the moon has endured over millennia. The circular dark feature in the lower right is Callanish Crater.

Such JunoCam images help fill in gaps in the maps from images obtained by NASA’s Voyager and Galileo missions. Citizen scientist Björn Jónsson processed the image to enhance the color and contrast. The resolution is about 0.6 miles (1 kilometer) per pixel.

To learn more about JunoCam submissions go here.

Astronomy Ideas on Borrowed Time?

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): The position of our Sun as it orbits the Milky Way’s center. (Stefan Payne-Wardenaar)

A recent Big Think story, “5 Consensus Ideas in Astronomy That Might Soon be Overturned,” comes as a good time as we reach further into space and back into time using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and contemplate other telescopes that should come online shortly.

The story highlights these five ideas:

  • Dark energy is a cosmological constant;
  • Stars predate black holes;
  • Jovian planets protect terrestrial ones;
  • Most of the galaxy is uninhabitable; and
  • Globular clusters are planet-free.

For instance, regarding the uninhabitable areas of the galaxy, the Big Think story states:

Among its many discoveries, the ESA’s Gaia mission has found that the Milky Way galaxy not only has a warp to its galactic disk, but that the warp in the disk precesses and wobbles, completing a full rotation for roughly every three revolutions of the Sun [shown in yellow above] around the galactic center. Most astronomers assume that regions with too many stellar cataclysms in them, like the centers of galaxies, may be completely uninhabitable. But this picture is far from certain.

It is worth reading through the list and keeping these ideas in mind, and then following the JWST stories as they unfold. I bet you will be able to make a much longer list as old consensus ideas come apart and new ideas quickly follow.

Podcast/Book Review: The Mission: A True Story

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Credit: NASA

A recent episode of the Astronomy Cast podcast recommended a number of books to read this summer, including David W. Brown’s book The Mission: A True Story. It highlights all the efforts to make the soon-to-be-launched Europa Clipper mission a reality. Below is the book blurb by Harper Collins:

In the spirit of Tom Wolfe and John McPhee, The Mission is an exuberant master class of creative nonfiction that reveals how a motley, determined few expanded the horizon of human achievement.

When scientists discovered the first ocean beyond Earth, they had two big questions: “Is it habitable?” and “How do we get there?” To answer the first, they had to solve the second, and so began a vivacious team’s twenty-year odyssey to mount a mission to Europa, the ocean moon of Jupiter.

Standing in their way: NASA, fanatically consumed with landing robots on Mars; the White House, which never saw a science budget it couldn’t cut; Congress, fixated on going to the moon or Mars—anywhere, really, to give astronauts something to do; rivals in academia, who wanted instead to go to Saturn; and even Jupiter itself, which guards Europa in a pulsing, rippling radi­ation belt—a halo of death whose conditions are like those that follow a detonated thermonuclear bomb.

The Mission is the Homeric, never-before-told story of modern space exploration, and a magnificent portrait of the inner lives of scientists who study the solar system’s mysterious outer planets. David W. Brown chronicles the remarkable saga of how Europa was won, and what it takes to get things done—both down here, and up there.

I think it is safe to say that every space mission goes through a gauntlet these days and is lucky to remain intact at the other end. The James Webb Space Telescope started in the 1990s and only saw the light of day (on a distant exoplanet) earlier this year. Not everyone may have the stomach for the sausage-making behind these missions, but you may want to read this tale if you are looking for modern-day drama in the halls of government and academia that can lead to something meaningful.

Credit: Harper Collins

Pic of the Week: A New View of Jupiter

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): Jupiter as captured by the JWST. (NASA, ESA, CSA, Jupiter ERS Team; image processing by Ricardo Hueso (UPV/EHU) and Judy Schmidt)

This week’s image once again comes from the new James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), but instead of peering outside of our solar system, it is looking around closer to home. The image above of Jupiter is an amazing shot that shows the planet in all its glory – violent storms, glowing auroras, delicate rings, and orbiting moons. The particulars are labeled in the same image below.

The image came from the JWST’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), which NASA notes has:

…three specialized infrared filters that showcase details of the planet. Since infrared light is invisible to the human eye, the light has been mapped onto the visible spectrum. Generally, the longest wavelengths appear redder and the shortest wavelengths are shown as more blue. Scientists collaborated with citizen scientist Judy Schmidt to translate the Webb data into images. 

This is a whole new way to see our neighborhood worlds as well as the worlds many light years away.

Image (Credit): Jupiter as captured by the JWST with all of the key areas labeled. (NASA, ESA, CSA, Jupiter ERS Team; image processing by Ricardo Hueso (UPV/EHU) and Judy Schmidt)