Just Some Eye Candy From The Hubble Space Telescope.  One Of The Great Scientific Achievements Of Our

Sorry, Tumblr, but Seth found his new favorite social network to reach fans: Ham radio.

Titan Touchdown

On Jan. 14, 2005, ESA’s Huygens probe made its descent to the surface of Saturn’s hazy moon, Titan. Carried to Saturn by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, Huygens made the most distant landing ever on another world, and the only landing on a body in the outer solar system. This video uses actual images taken by the probe during its two-and-a-half hour fall under its parachutes.

A close-up of an enhanced-color image of Jupiter’s clouds obtained by NASA’s Juno spacecraft.

NASA/SWRI/MSSS/Gerald Eichstädt/Seán Doran / New York Times                 

Cassini prepares for final orbital “Grand Finale” at Saturn.

Erik Wernquist, the same filmmaker who created 2014’s “Wanderers” and a stunning New Horizons promotional film in 2015, has created a new video highlighting NASA’s Cassini mission’s final days at Saturn. The Cassini spacecraft will begin its final series of orbits to cap a 13-year groundbreaking science mission known as the Grand Finale. For the first time ever in Cassini’s time at Saturn, the spacecraft will fly in between the planet’s rings and atmosphere. No spacecraft has ever before flown in this region of any of the solar system’s ringed planets. After 23 orbits, Cassini will dive into Saturn’s upper atmosphere September 15 where it will be destroyed. In 2008, mission managers explored a range of End of Mission scenarios that would protect Saturn’s moon’s from Earthly contaminants before ultimately deciding on atmospheric reentry. Cassini began her End of Mission manoeuvres on November 26, 2016, when it began the first of 20 ring-grazing orbits. A close flyby of Titan April 22 will alter the spacecraft’s trajectory to begin the first of 23 orbits in the Grand Finale, which will begin April 26.

Cassini launched from Earth on October 15, 1997, and entered Saturn orbit June 30, 2004. Six months later, on January 14, 2005, the European-built Huygens probe attached to the spacecraft landed on Titan, becoming the first probe to land in the outer solar system. 

Originally scheduled for a four-year mission ending in 2008, Cassini received two mission extensions in 2008 and 2010, with the latter ending in 2017. With the spacecraft’s fuel reserves low, the Cassini team decided to end the mission. P/C: JPL/Erik Wernquist

Catching Up: Weather is weird... TWWN continues... 80 Meter woes...

-=> Weather is just plain odd around here. We’re supposed to get up to 7 inches of snow, but nothing so far. Here in town it’s actually pretty nice

Out in the country it’s a different story. Not snowing, but 30+ MPH winds are whipping the snow we do have into near blizzard like conditions in some areas. Went down to Stockbridge to my favorite coffee shop, Mud Creek, and if I hadn’t been driving the Jeep I don’t think I would have made it. Was bucking drifts a foot or more deep in some areas, and visibility was down to just a few feet in places.

Problem with the Jeep is I get overconfident. I was bashing along around 40 mph in four wheel drive, and nearly lost it when I nailed a 2 foot deep drift. Wouldn’t have been a problem if I’d been driving slow, but at 40 the front end wiped out and I nearly went sideways before I got it straightened out again. Needless to say, I slowed down a bit after that.

So, snow storms today, and by Thursday it’s supposed to be 40 degrees and raining.

Sigh…

Noticed they got the street dug up just down the road from the house here. Another water main break. Must be the fifth one we’ve had in town in the last two months. Feel sorry for the water utility guys. And I stocked up on bottled water just in case…

-=> Work on The World’s Worst Novel continues unabated. I’ve been having way too much fun with this thing. It’s an SF novel in the worst sense of the word, harking back to the old space opera days with ridiculous space battles, paying very little attention to whether or not the ‘science’ bears any relationship to actual physics. It’s also gotten very, very dirty. Well, not by modern standards. Compared to modern fiction it’s actually pretty mild, but for me… I keep wondering where this stuff comes from.

Curiously, I just realized that almost all of the main characters are female. The protagonist is female, her spouse is female, almost all the heads of government are female… Not sure why. Didn’t do it deliberately. 

-=> Amateur Radio stuff… I have, alas, been doing very little of late except listening. I’ve discovered that my Comet vertical antenna is total crap below about 20 meters or so, which is understandable when you look at how the thing is built. Most of the energy going into the thing, especially at lower frequencies, is never getting into the air. Frankly, it’s surprising I can get a decent SWR at all with the thing on the lower bands. I ran some generic calculations and if I got the formulas right (which I probably didn’t) if I put 200 watts into the thing down at 3.8 mHz I’m lucky if I get 20 out of it.

Weather has been so nasty I’ve never even tried to get the dipole up. For one thing, mounting it is going to be a problem. I’m going to have to put up some kind of mast to try to get the center of the thing up to around 35 feet, and then it’s going to have to be configured as an inverted V because there’s nothing I can hook the ends to.

I picked up a Gap Titan multi band vertical that I’m going to give a try. It’s far more efficient than the Comet and even better, I can finally use my big amplifier with it. It’s rated to handle 1,500 watts so I can finally fire up the Ameritron. If it works, that is. Considering Ameritron’s reputation, you never know what’s going to happen. I talked to a guy who used to sell the things and they’d go through every one before they sent it out because they were having a 25% failure rate straight form the factory. I looked it over carefully when I put it together and didn’t see any obvious issues, and it does come up in standby mode, but until I actually try using it, whether it’ll work or not is anyones guess.

From what I’ve been hearing, the Titan has some issues when it comes to tuning it to work on the various bands. One fellow I talked to told me he never could get the thing down to a reasonable SWR on 80 meters. Other people tell me they had no problems at all. So we’ll see. SWR doesn’t bother me that much. I’ve got a massive Palstar auto tuner that can handle up to 2,000 watts output to hang behind the Ameritron.

I really wish now that I’d spent a little bit more and gone for the solid state amplifier rather than the tube based one. The solid state amps are a lot easier to work with. They’re pretty much plug and play, just turn them on, select the band you want, and go. Tube amps are fussy, requiring a lot of fiddling whenever you change bands, even changing frequencies. It’s easy to mess them up and end up blowing a $300 tube. Still, it was almost a grand cheaper than the solid state amp I was looking at, so we’ll see.

Maria Mitchell - Scientist of the Day

Maria Mitchell, an American astronomer, was born Aug. 1, 1818, in Nantucket. Mitchell was the first professional woman astronomer in the United States and a role model for generations of aspiring women scientists. She was trained by her father, a school-teacher, and had the extreme good fortune to discover a comet in 1847. Not only was she the first to see the comet, she also had the mathematical skill to calculate its orbit. Her feat won her an international gold medal from the Danish government, the first such recognition for any American woman, and eventually, the professorship of astronomy at Vassar College, also the first such position for any woman. (It is probably of interest to some of this reading audience that, before she became famous, Mitchell spent 17 years as a librarian on Nantucket.) Mitchell was admitted to various male bastions, such as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Boston (the only woman so honored until the 20th century), but she decided early on that, instead of trying to show men that women could be good scientists, she would spend her life showing young women that they could be good scientists. She seems to have done a superb job at this task, becoming a legendary teacher at Vassar. Antonia Maury, a noted astronomer at Harvard, was one of her pupils. The lovely albumen print portrait of Maria above is at Harvard.

In 1863, Matthew Vassar, the founder of Vassar College, personally commissioned a telescope for Mitchell from Henry Fitz, a well-known New York telescope builder. With a lense 12 inches in diameter, it was second among American telescopes only to the great refractor at Harvard (see second image above). The telescope is now in the National Museum of American History in Washington. Vassar also built an observatory for Maria; a period photo can be seen above, just below the Fitz refractor.

The small telescope that Mitchell used to discover the Nantucket comet is now mounted in her childhood home on Vestal Street (see last photo above), across from the headquarters of the Maria Mitchell Association, the group her descendants founded in 1908 to continue Mitchell’s lifelong passion for the natural sciences and science education.

Dr. William B. Ashworth, Jr., Consultant for the History of Science, Linda Hall Library and Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Missouri-Kansas City

A once in a lifetime event visible every 75-76 years, Halleys comet returned in 1986. Halley is the only short-period comet that is clearly visible to the naked eye from Earth. It has been documented since 240 BC.

NASA Tests 3-D Printed Engine Components

3-D printing isn’t just for toys and plastic models of your head. Witness a hot fire of NASA’s newest design for rocket engine injectors, 3-D printed to up performance in a way that traditional manufacturing of the parts couldn’t attain.

The agency, which tested the experimental injectors last month at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., used a type of 3-D printing called direct laser melting. To make the parts, a machine fires a laser at metal powder under the direction of a computer design program. This deposits layers of the metal one on top of the other until the part is complete.

NASA says the technique is letting engineers build the injector out of just two parts instead of the 163 formerly needed using traditional manufacturing methods.

Keep reading

Hubble has been 27 years in space, being launched in April 24, 1990. The first image it shoot was the star cluster NGC 3532.

Spacex CRS-10