Voyager 1 and 2 still alive!!!! 38,000 mph!

[amazinblue82]

You've heard all the jokes probably. "We need Bruce" tops the generic category I have heard the most.

Monday 9/26 NASA is going to be flying spacecraft into an asteroid, that is not threatening the Earth, to see if that impact is enough to make the asteroid change course a little bit.

Theory being if it was neaded for impact with us, we bump it while is far away it course will progressively change. Then, by the time it gets to our orbital path, it misses hitting us.

Maybe one day, if we are threatened by a spacerock hitting the one we live on, we have to try something like this. Be nice to know if it even hs chance of working.

Guess we'll learn a lot next week.

Yippie Ki-Yay

source: DART asteroid-smashing mission 'on track for an impact' Monday, NASA says

"NASA is just days away from slamming a spacecraft into an asteroid 7 million miles (11 million kilometers) from Earth.

The agency's long-awaited Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission will impact with the asteroid moonlet Dimorphos on Monday (Sept. 26), if all goes according to plan.

The DART mission launched on Nov. 23, 2021 on top of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and is now hurtling through deep space toward the binary near-Earth asteroid (65803) Didymos and its moonlet Dimorphos.

The mission, which is managed by the John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHUAPL), is humanity's first attempt to determine if we could alter the course of an asteroid, a feat that might one day be required to save human civilization."

 

[amazinblue82]

They did it.

7 million miles away, the hit a Giza pyramid-sized rock, with a 1,200 lb refrigerator sized spacecraft going 14,000 mph. Won't know for a few weeks if they changed the trajectory.

source: NASA's first attempt to smack an asteroid was picture perfect

A look at this rock right before DART hit it. Several hundred thousand of these things clumped together under gravity a few billion years ago and we get the rock we live on.

Just like the process of millions of little dust particles clumped together and made this asteriod. Big and little pieces of that space debris are still whizzing around the solar system. 66 million years ago a piece the size of Central Park in NYC hit the planet and killed the dinosaurs.

A few thousand of those rocks (more than a kilometer in diameter) are being tracked as their orbits intersect the Earth's orbit. The creates the possibility of a collsion.

None of those being tracked that are big enough to hurt us will hit us in the next hundred years, but ya never know. Stuff in bumping into stuff out there all the time naturally, changing directions, etc.,

Worth $350 million for this experiment. Yeah I think so. Hope it worked to see if we could change our fate if we face this problem for real.

 

[Turboomni]

James Webb Caught DART Smashing Into Asteroid​

I heard that there was a trailing probe behind DART videoing the impact at a much closer range. Haven't heard or seen anything about it since the impact.

 

[amazinblue82]

James Webb Caught DART Smashing Into Asteroid​

I heard that there was a trailing probe behind DART videoing the impact at a much closer range. Haven't heard or seen anything about it since the impact.

I hadn't heard or seen anything about a trailing probe up there with the thing that actually hit the asteroid. That would be interestng to see.

 

[LocuMob]

James Webb Caught DART Smashing Into Asteroid​

I heard that there was a trailing probe behind DART videoing the impact at a much closer range. Haven't heard or seen anything about it since the impact.

I hadn't heard or seen anything about a trailing probe up there with the thing that actually hit the asteroid. That would be interestng to see.

CNN: New images reveal moment of DART asteroid impact captured by Italian satellite.
New images reveal moment of DART asteroid impact captured by Italian satellite | CNN

 

[amazinblue82]

Webb (reddish tone) and Hubble (blue series) photos of asteroid a few hours after the impact. Followup to #483 above.

source: New Hubble and Webb Images Capture Aftermath of DART Asteroid Smash Up

 

[amazinblue82]

A Webb/Chandra mash up October 4.

Infrared with Webb and X-rays with Chandra, both wavelengths we can't see, composited. These photos are the first ever of their kind - x-rays see things IR doesnt, and vice versa. Combine them and you get pics for the ages.

BTW, eEven us noobs can see tons of galaxies - spirals edge on, spirals full-face, irregulars, etc. - in the background, gravitational lensing due to dark matter, etc. Remarkable stuff here.

source: Chandra :: Photo Album :: Chandra Meets Webb :: October 4, 2022

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Stephan's Quintet:
The four galaxies within Stephan’s Quintet are undergoing an intricate dance choreographed by gravity. (The fifth galaxy, on the left, is an interloping galaxy at a different distance.)

The Webb image (red, orange, yellow, green, blue) of this object features never-seen-before details of the results of these interactions, including sweeping tails of gas and bursts of star formatio

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SMACS 0723.3–7327
Webb data shows how the galaxy cluster SMACS J0723, located about 4.2 billion light-years away, contains hundreds of individual galaxies. Galaxy clusters, however, contain far more than their galaxies alone.

As some of the largest structures in the universe, they are filled with vast reservoirs of superheated gas that is seen only in X-ray light.

 

[amazinblue82]

Dumb-*** dinosaurs ... they didn't have a NASA. So now they're oil.

DART was successful. A first ever for humans. We changed the motion of a celestial body. Basically, we hit a bullet with a bullet.

The trajectory of the little asteroid was changed. After we hit it, we were hoping it would slow down its orbit of the bigger asteroid by 10 minutes. We got 32 minutes. Translate that as IF this one was gonna hit us, we changed it enough that it would NOT hit us.

Dunno the upper size limit. I imagine something bigger would shrug off a hit like a ping pong ball bouncing off a bullet train. Still, its a victory for the space kids.

Soon we'll see if they can get Artemis off the ground.

source: The DART mission successfully changed the motion of an asteroid | CNN

 

[amazinblue82]

New Webb photo with a lotta buzz.

5,600 LY away in Cygnus, this binary star system's light plus stellar winds is pushing dust around. The shape is concentric rings, that themselves are not circular, but squarish.

This isn't a "new" observation (Keck saw it over 15 years ago), just Webb's take on it reveals finer details.

May be some diffraction going on too. The space kids are scratching their heads a bit. One more cool thing to explain.

source: JWST Captures Incredible Images of Dust Being Pushed by Light

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Keck's photo of same star system WR 140. somethng "square" going on but of course without the detail Webb got.

source: WR140 Introduction

 

[amazinblue82]

The B.O.A.T. - Brightest of All Time. This one is nerdy space stuff. Tons of stuff the veg out on via an internet search.

The star is GRB 221009A (GRB stands for gamma-ray burst), 2.4 billion LY's away (so this happened that long ago and the light just got here last week - October 9th), a massive star that collapsed and likely formed a black hole.

The orange photo is a ground-based telescope X-Ray photo (can't wait till they turn Webb to look at this) of emissions from the explosion hitting interstellar dust.

source: Bright, powerful burst of gamma rays detected by multiple telescopes | CNN

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Another view of the event in visible light by the Gemini telescope in Chile. Not as spectacular but still significant. It's blowing off radition in magnitudes we have never seen.

source: Record-breaking gamma-ray burst possibly most powerful explosion ever recorded

The science world is buzzing what they believe to be a once in a century event .. that is a supernova THIS energetic. So a hypothetical 30 year old cosmologist may never see one this big in their lifetimes again.

Or, one of these things could go off tomorrow. Anyway, the space kids have a lot to study with this one.

Again, maybe they'll point Webb at it and we'll see what it shows.

 

[amazinblue82]

The "Pillars_of_Creation", a new star formation region about 6,500 LY away in the Eagle nebula, in the constellation of Serpens.

New, Webb take on it, below that, the a new-and-improved Hubble in 2014 (its pretty good tho), still one of the most iconic Hubble photos ever taken.

source: NASA’s Webb Takes Star-Filled Portrait of Pillars of Creation

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2014 Hubble

 

[thethee]

The "Pillars_of_Creation", a new star formation region about 6,500 LY away in the Eagle nebula, in the constellation of Serpens.

New, Webb take on it, below that, the a new-and-improved Hubble in 2014 (its pretty good tho), still one of the most iconic Hubble photos ever taken.

source: NASA’s Webb Takes Star-Filled Portrait of Pillars of Creation

View attachment 563618

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2014 Hubble
View attachment 563620

I personally like this side-by-side comparison in the same orientation. I think it's another exemplary illustration of the difference in optical and IR imagery.

 

[Turboomni]

Live tracking of Voyager 1 and 2.

Interesting to see how the miles fly by in real time at around 38000 mph and the light speed distance is.

 

[amazinblue82]

fascinating look at things.

i am always struck by the fact we are still talking to these remarkable machines almost 50 years later. and i so vividly remember when we launched them.

watching the miles click by in huge chunks every second is cool. 38K mph is purdy fast (~11 miles per second)

then, seeing it takes 20+ hours at "c" (670M mph) to talk to it, makes me feel really tiny.

 

[amazinblue82]

Another Webb (with MIRI) view of Pillars of creation. Guess its the Halloween version.

source: Webb Telescope Drops Creepy Image of the Pillars of Creation

 

[LocuMob]

Another Webb (with MIRI) view of Pillars of creation. Guess its the Halloween version.

source: Webb Telescope Drops Creepy Image of the Pillars of Creation

View attachment 564908

Thanks! My new phone won't let me download pictures from news blurbs, makes it hard to send to my coworker who is into this, he's used a few of the pictures I've sent as wallpaper on the work computer.

The JWST has been delivering better than I expected, not that I expected much, but wow! I hope I'm alive if they make a replacement telescope for space.

 

[Turboomni]

What If We Turned On Voyager 1’s Camera?​

Hypothetical on turning on cameras ,details of a half century old cameras and tape recorder in the Voyager ,bit rate etc.

 

[Turboomni]

Voyager tape recorder ,it has 8 tracks.

 

[amazinblue82]

Couple things here. Interesting.

First Webb on Nov. 9, 2022 vs. the deactivated Spitzer (another space-based IR telescope, shut down in 2020).

source: New Webb telescope image shows 'lonely' dwarf galaxy in striking detail | CNN.

I put the green notations -- I could be wrong -- to help me orient the pics.

I am not sure where the Wolf-Lundmark-Melotte dwarf galaxy is in both pics. The arrow the same bright star. The Wolf galaxy is 3 million LY away from us, one tenth the size of the the Milky Way, but still part of our local group.

Even if my notations are wrong, the detail from Webb is again the headline here. Hot young stars, old cold starts, other galaxies, etc. Priceless detail to the space kids nerdin' out on Webb's incredible detail.

BUT

Another shot of Wolf-Lundmark-Melotte dwarf galaxy in 2017 from a ground-based imager at the ESO (European Southern Observatory) in Chile. Its a tighter shot than Spitzer/Webb of Wolf, but you can still see colors (the blue stars in the pink area are newly formed) in the background.

Both Spitzer and Webb can "see through" the blob of gas/dust ... probably why it looks different in the photos above.

The point: the ground-based imagers ain't slouches either. they are still doing gret celestial work.

source: APOD: 2017 May 19 - Wolf-Lundmark-Melotte

 

[thethee]

The original caption of your first pic reads:

"A portion of the dwarf galaxy Wolf--Lundmark--Melotte is shown, as captured by (from left) the Spitzer Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope."

Both Spitzer and Webb can "see through" the blob of gas/dust ... probably why it looks different in the photos above

I think both Spitzer and Webb are actually showing a small portion of the blob from your last pic? Tried zooming on that last one but there's no way I'm going to find that specific section.