Tag Archives: NASA
Giga-Pixels to explore Mars
My dreams of high-definition astrophotography have already been realized by NASA’s Curiosity rover.
The rover took over 900 images using the rover’s mastcam. The Mastcam can take high-definition video at 10 frames per second. There are actually two cameras on the mast.
The telephoto Mastcam, or “Mastcam 100” has a 100-millimeter focal-length, f/10 lens with a 5.1° square field of view that provides enough resolution to distinguish a basketball from a football at a distance of seven football fields, or to read “ONE CENT” on a penny on the ground beside the rover.
Its other camera is the “Mastcam 34” and has a 34 mm, f/8 lens with a 15° square field of view.
Both of the cameras take 1200 x 1200 pixel (1.4 Megapixel) images using a 1600 by 1200 CCD detector. But each pixel of the CCD detectors are different size. Both cameras can acquire high definition 720p video at 10 frames per second.
The images where then were painstakingly stitched together to produce the first billion plus pixel view of the surface of Mars. The 1.3 Gigapixel 360 degree image is available for everyone to view with pan and zoom here. If that is too much for you to handle, a scaled down version is available for download here.
“It gives a sense of place and really shows off the cameras’ capabilities,” said Bob Deen of the Multi-Mission Image Processing Laboratory at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. “You can see the context and also zoom in to see very fine details.”
The CCD camera that I currently use takes 8.3 Megapixel images, so I could possible stitch together something similar, but I don’t think I have the same zest for doing it like this all sky photo.
– Ex astris, scientia –
I am and avid amateur astronomer and intellectual property attorney in Pasadena, California and I am a Rising Star as rated by Super Lawyers Magazine. As a former Chief Petty Officer in the U.S. Navy, I am a proud member of the Armed Service Committee of the Los Angeles County Bar Association working to aid all active duty and veterans in our communities. Connect with me on Google +
Norman
SPACE!
This post is specifically for my niece Jennifer (she is an artist, and a good one at that). Anyway, the title of this post is also the name of a new art exhibit here in California.
The show is being held at Gallery 1988: West.
Opening the show opening had special guest Bobak Ferdowsi, a NASA systems engineer at JPL who is best known as “Mohawk Guy” after he was captured with his star spangled Mohawk during Curiosities landing on Mars. Let’s face it, he does rock the look.
The show runs through Saturday, July 20, closing on the 44th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing. So if you are in the area, check it out, you might end up with some new artwork for your home or office.
– Ex astris, scientia –
I am and avid amateur astronomer and intellectual property attorney in Pasadena, California and I am a Rising Star as rated by Super Lawyers Magazine. As a former Chief Petty Officer in the U.S. Navy, I am a proud member of the Armed Service Committee of the Los Angeles County Bar Association working to aid all active duty and veterans in our communities. Connect with me on Google +
Norman
Make mine extra large please.
NASA’s largest rocket yet is being developed. The Space Launch System (SLS) should be ready for tests in 2017.
Since NASA has given up ferrying people, goods and materials to Earth orbit to private space companies, the SLS is being designed to carry astronauts farther from the planet than ever before.
The SLS was begun over a decade ago. “We want to take NASA well beyond the space station. The SLS will be the most powerful rocket ever built, and it will be safe, affordable and sustainable.” Says former astronaut David Leestma and now part of NASA.
The SLS will be able to boost 143 tons (130 metric tons) to orbit using many existing components in its construction. Like all recent missions, NASA has focused on using “off the shelf” materials for missions to cut costs.
The main liquid-fueled engines and the the solid rocket boosters are leftovers from the shuttle program. Only the central structure is new.
NASA plans on using the new Orion capsule with the SLS, and hopes to have both systems ready for spaceflight by 2021.
The SLS will be able to deliver payloads L2, which is a stable orbit just past the moon, or farther distances.
The power of the SLS will also let NASA to send probes directly to other planets in the Solar System without using gravity-assist swings that can save up to three years of flight time.
In addition to the new components of the SLS, some reverse engineering of legacy hardware, such as the Saturn V’s F-1 engines (capable of 1.5 million pounds of thrust), are being conducted.
“We are ready to move beyond LEO (low Earth orbit) into more ambitious missions,” said Leestma.
– Ex astris, scientia –
I am and avid amateur astronomer and intellectual property attorney in Pasadena, California. As a former Chief Petty Officer in the U.S. Navy, I am a proud member of the Armed Service Committee of the Los Angeles County Bar Association working to aid all active duty and veterans in our communities. Connect with me on Google +
Norman
Jelly Doughnuts!
“Mmmmm…doughnuts” Homer Simpson.
Today is Friday, and I am in charge of bringing in the doughnuts (or donuts if you prefer) and bagels for everyone in the office.
Today it turns out that the jelly doughnuts and bagels have switched metaphoric states.
Credit: Alson Wong (http://www.alsonwongastro.com/m57-ring.htm)
Most of my pictures look like my friend Alson Wong’s image above. (Alson, I needed to borrow yours because I can’t find mine, thanks). You could always see that there was some material in the center portion, but it was thought to be the expanding matter blown off from the central star.
However, a new image by Hubble has lead team leader C. Robert O’Dell of Vanderbilt University to state that: “The nebula is not like a bagel, but rather, it’s like a jelly doughnut, because it’s filled with material in the middle.”
One of the reasons that the ring nebula is so interesting, is because it is a prelude to what could happen with our Sun. Although the star at the center of the ring was much larger than our Sun, it should end up in a similar fate. Blowing of material and becoming a white dwarf. From millions of times the size of the Earth, to about the same size (although a lot hotter and denser).
Someone once asked me why I keep taking images that everyone else has already imaged. The answer, of course, is you never know what you will find. Many new discoveries in space happen because of directed research by professionals (like this one), but a good amount of discoveries happen because some amateur astronomer was imaging the same thing and something new showed up.
We have only been peering at the heavens seriously for about 400 years. We tracked the stars way before that, but serious, scientific inquiry is only about 400 years old. The star that formed the ring is relatively young in comparison, the event happened about 4,000 years ago and will go on for another 10,000 years or so.
BIG PLUG for RTMC.
This weekend, if you want to learn more about astronomy, how to make your own telescope, view the night sky. The RTMC Astronomy Expo is being held near Big Bear California this weekend. Go here for more information. I’ll be there and I’m sure that the will be jelly doughnuts….mmmmmm.
– Ex astris, scientia –
I am and avid amateur astronomer and intellectual property attorney in Pasadena, California. As a former Chief Petty Officer in the U.S. Navy, I am a proud member of the Armed Service Committee of the Los Angeles County Bar Association working to aid all active duty and veterans in our communities. Connect with me on Google +
Norman
Space Pizza.
No delivery needed, and its not DiGiorno. NASA has unveiled plans to print pizza in space. That right, printed pizza.
I have probably mentioned once or twice on this blog how I love 3D printing. 3D printing has been in the news a lot lately when someone figured out that you could print a functioning plastic gun that would pass through security. Not the best use of the technology, but predictable.
A much better use has been chocolate (and other extrudable materials) for making fantastic food.
Picking up on this theme, NASA has awarded a $125,000 grant to the Systems & Materials Research Cooperation to design a 3D printer capable of printing a pizza from 30-year shelf stable foodstuffs. SMRC built a basic food printer from a 3D chocolate printer to win the grant. The design is based on an open-source RepRap 3D printer (shown above). The 3D printer would “build-up” a pizza serving by first layering out the dough onto a heated plate then adding tomato sauce and toppings. Mmmmmm….Pizza.
So instead of plastic containers of food, members of the International Space Station will be dinning on pizza in 2014. There are a few problems to solve, such as zero g printing, but the upside is huge.
The ISS and other long term missions would only need to carry quantities of food material and have dinner printed. Sort of like a poor mans replicator.
Now if they could only print beer, everything would be perfect!
– Ex astris, scientia –
I am and avid amateur astronomer and intellectual property attorney in Pasadena, California. As a former Chief Petty Officer in the U.S. Navy, I am a proud member of the Armed Service Committee of the Los Angeles County Bar Association working to aid all active duty and veterans in our communities. Connect with me on Google +
Norman
Small PhoneSats the next big thing?
Yesterday, I told you about the 1st ever crowd sourced satellite, the Skycube. I turns out however, that Sunday NASA also launched three low-cost smartphone satellites aboard the maiden flight of Orbital Science Corp.’s Antares rocket.
The PhoneSats are transmitting data packets on the amateur radio spectrum. You can see what data is being transmitted by the Phonesats here. If you are an amateur radio operator and you can help the project by submitting them to NASA (go citizen scientists!). The dashboard page will give you all the information you need to track the satellites in real time.
The two PhoneSat 1.0 satellites, Graham and Bell, transmit signal every 28 and 30 seconds respectively. A new PhoneSat 2.0 test satellite, Alexander, transmits every 25 seconds. You need to hurry, the satellites are only expected to remain in orbit for about two weeks before de-orbiting to a fiery death.
The goal of the PhoneSat missions are to determine if off the shelf smartphones, or smartphone components, can be used as the main flight avionics of a capable, yet very inexpensive, satellite. Much like the Spirit and Opportunity rovers on Mars (who both exceeded their original missions by a long time).
The PhoneSats already have many of the systems needed for a satellite, including fast processors, versatile operating systems, multiple miniature sensors, high-resolution cameras, GPS receivers and several radios.
“Smartphones offer a wealth of potential capabilities for flying small, low-cost, powerful satellites for atmospheric or Earth science, communications, or other space-born applications. They also may open space to a whole new generation of commercial, academic and citizen-space users.”
Images taken with the Phonesats will be transmitted back to Earth in smaller packets. These packets will, hopefully, be received by amateur radio operators around the world.
NASA engineers kept the total cost of the components for the three prototype satellites in the PhoneSat project under $7,000 using mostly commercial hardware. The hardware used for this mission is the Google-HTC Nexus One smartphone running the Android operating system. I wonder if there is now going to be a bidding war by other manufactures to make their claim to space capable smartphones. The engineers did have to modify the phones for use in space by adding a larger, external lithium-ion battery bank (no recharging in orbit, also it seems that it would be trivial to add a solar battery charger) and a more powerful radio (no cell towers for miles, literally) to send messages and data from space back to Earth.
I wonder if I can send my own phone into space? I do know people with rockets capable of sub-orbital flight. Hmmm…more importantly, I wonder if my insurance will cover the replacement cost of the phone.
– Ex astris, scientia –
I am and avid amateur astronomer and intellectual property attorney in Pasadena, California. As a former Chief Petty Officer in the U.S. Navy, I am a proud member of the Armed Service Committee of the Los Angeles County Bar Association working to aid all active duty and veterans in our communities. Connect with me on Google +
Norman
Windows booted from the ISS.
Most of you know that I am an advocate for FOSS (free and open source software). Not that I begrudge anyone from making money, because you can still make money from FOSS, just ask Google, Apple, Yahoo, Netflix, Red Hat, Intel….yada, yada, yada. Even Microsoft has products that use FOSS and even has FOSS projects of their own.
It seems that NASA has decided to drop Windows from the laptops on the International Space Station (ISS) in favor of Linux.
Keith Chuvala, a United Space Alliance contractor, manager of the Space Operations Computing (SpOC) for NASA, and leader of the ISS’s Laptops and Network Integration Teams, recently explained that NASA had decided to move to Linux for the ISS’s PCs. “We migrated key functions from Windows to Linux because we needed an operating system that was stable and reliable — one that would give us in-house control. So if we needed to patch, adjust, or adapt, we could.”
It appears that when you are in space, you might need to look at the source code to make changes during an event, just as Curiosity and its recent stray radiation problem.
Scientific Linux Logo.
ISS astronauts will be using computers running the well-tested and reliable Debian 6 version of Linux. Earlier, some of the on-board computers had been using Scientific Linux, a Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) clone.
I have been working on getting Scientific Linux (with some modifications) to run my observatory, mount and cameras. I hope to have a presentation ready soon so that people with limited budgets can take astrophotos without having to invest thousands of dollars in software, like I have done over the years.
Linux has been used on the ISS ever since its launch and at NASA ground operations almost since the day it was created, it was not used much on PCs in space.
Linux is also running Robonaut (R2), the first humanoid robot in space. R2 is meant to carry out tasks too dangerous or tedious for astronauts.
A Stereo Lemmon.
This weekend NASA’s Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory (STEREO) spacecraft captured comet Lemmon at it traped across the face of the Sun.
Its like 3D! Of course that is the whole point of the STEREO spacecraft. The two nearly identical spacecraft – one ahead of Earth in its orbit, the other trailing behind – are normally used to trace the flow of energy and matter from the Sun to Earth. STEREO has revealed the 3D structure of coronal mass ejections; violent eruptions of matter from the sun that can disrupt satellites and power grids.
We haven’t known this much about the star that gives us life ever. But the images they provide are pretty spectacular as well.
Hopefully, we will get some great shots of ISON from STEREO as well. Wow, I feel like I am back in the Navy using all these acronyms.
– Ex astris, scientia –
I am and avid amateur astronomer and intellectual property attorney. As a former Chief Petty Officer in the U.S. Navy, I am a proud member of the Armed Service Committee of the Los Angeles County Bar Association working to aid all active duty and veterans in our communities. Connect with me on Google +
Norman
Missed it by that much.
Just like Maxwell Smart, Cosmos 1805 just barely missed hitting NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. Cosmos 1805, weighing in at about 1.5 tons, missed hitting the spacecraft by a scant 700 feet.
Predicting how close two satellites come within proximity of each other is not an exact science.
The last time this happened on Feb. 10, 2009,Cosmos 2251, another dead Russian communications satellite, was supposed to pass about 1,900 feet from the Iridium 33 communications satellite. When the spacecraft were supposed to pass by each other all contact with Iridium 33 was lost. Radar later revealed clouds of debris traveling along the orbits of both spacecraft, confirming the first known satellite-to-satellite collision.
So now we have tiny bits of two satellites spawning other tiny bits of satellites causing even more hazards in orbit. I hope Richard Branson is paying attention to all of this.
Well, at least this story had a happy ending the non working satellite did not make more non working satellites (or itty bitty pieces of satellites). All is well until the next time.
– Ex astris, scientia –
I am and avid amateur astronomer and intellectual property attorney. As a former Chief Petty Officer in the U.S. Navy, I am a proud member of the Armed Service Committee of the Los Angeles County Bar Association working to aid all active duty and veterans in our communities. Connect with me on Google +
Norman