New Horizons" New Images of Pluto Echoes Mars" Camera Debut - http://clapway.com/2015/07/15/new-horizons-new-images-of-pluto-echoes-mars-camera-debut324/

With all of the excitement in anticipation of the imminent arrival of Hi-Res photos of Pluto and its Moon Charon from New Horizons’ flyby yesterday, this is a golden opportunity to remember how planetary exploration by space probe began. Fifty years ago, on July 14th, 1965, NASA’s Mariner 4 captured 23 closeup images of Mars, that dusty next-door neighbor of ours. It was the first time we had seen another planet so close.

NEW HORIZONS ECHOES MARINER 4

Just as we are about to echo with Pluto and New Horizons, the images arrived precisely one day after Mariner 4 successfully engaged its flyby of Mars. Fifty years later, we’re about to repeat the maneuver, in a cosmic dance that’s symphony to Mariner 4’s prelude.

Alan Stern, an academic expert at Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, agrees: “You couldn’t have written a script that was better.” Just like Mariner 4, New Horizons is teasing science lovers, prudishly forcing us all to wait for hour after hour until the final unveiling occurs. One should note that today a debutante move faster; millennials aren’t waiting as long as the baby boomers did.

NEW IMAGES WILL COME QUICKER

This afternoon, NASA is receiving a smorgasbord of imagery and scientific data, which will all be transmitted to NASA headquarters in a matter of minutes. In 1965, however, each image Mariner 4’s television camera captured required 10 hours to be uploaded and transmitted.

“If someone had asked ‘What do you expect to see?’ we would have said ‘craters’ …[yet] the fact that craters were there, and a predominant land form, was somehow surprising,” reminisces Robert Leighton, Caltech geology professor, who dressed Marner with its camera, and its vast assemblage of instruments.

BEGINNINGS OF INTERPLANETARY EXPLORATION

Leighton and several more Caltech physicists, engineers and geologists were responsible for lifting the then-infantile NASA and its subordinate Jet Propulsion Laboratory out of the crib, and throwing it out the window hard enough to achieve orbit. woof.

John Grotzinger, chairman of Caltech’s Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences describes the atmosphere of the times: “These early flyby missions showed the enormous potential of Mars to provide insight into the evolution of a close cousin to Earth and stimulated the creation of a program dedicated to iterative exploration involving orbiters, landers and rovers.”

ALIEN AESTHETICS, HUMAN SENTIMENTS

Since Mariner 4 first graced Mars’ atmosphere, 19 probes have followed in kind, orbiting and landing on Mars. However, twenty-five other probes have failed. But the sacrifices were certainly not in vain, because the advent of imaging other planets coincided with our first true scientific enquiry into the planets, and sent the captivated the public at large with contradictory sentiments like the beauty in alienness.

Let’s enjoy Pluto, and celebrate history today.

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New Horizons" New Images of Pluto Echoes Mars" Camera Debut

New Horizons Carries Remains of Pluto"s Discoverer, Clyde Tombaugh - http://clapway.com/2015/07/12/new-horizons-carries-remains-of-plutos-discoverer-clyde-tombaugh567/

While we wait for New Horizons to begin its flyby of Pluto, there are some sentiments of the more Earthly persuasion for us to consider. Firstly, Clyde Tombaugh, the ashes of the man who first discovered that distant, icy world in its lonely dance with Charon 85 years ago, are contained in the spacecraft. His remains will have reached Pluto’s system on the fourteenth of this month.

WORTHY STORAGE

Also stored on New Horizons is the 1991 U.S. postage stamp nearing its end of use date in this country. It’s mantra–”Pluto Not Yet Explored”–is brazenly etched at bottom. There are also two state quarters, one of Florida, where the probe was launched, and also Maryland, HQ of New Horizons’ producers and flight control.

In fact, a total of nine lovely mementos are stored aboard the New Horizons, and this number was chosen intentionally.

A DEMOTED WAND

Upon New Horizons’ launch from Cape Canaveral on January 19th of 2006, Pluto was still officially the ninth planet in our solar system. Its present, demoted status as a dwarf planet was assigned seven months post-launch.

It was Tombaugh’s widow and two children who offered an ounce of the man’s ashes for his final journey to Pluto. The farm-boy-cum-astronomer’s ashes are sealed away in a 2-inch aluminum capsule inscribed with the following words:

“Interned herein are remains of American Clyde W. Tombaugh, discoverer of Pluto and the solar system’s ‘third zone.’ Adelle and Muron’s boy, Patricia’s husband, Annette and Alden’s father, astronomer, teacher, punster, and friend: Clyde Tombaugh (1906-1997)”

TOMBAUGH’S FAMILY TO UNITE FOR NEW HORIZONS’ FLYBY

Annette Tombaugh-Sitze and her younger brother Alden are in their seventies, but still plan on being present at the flight operation base at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, when Tuesday’s historic flyby occurs. The two’s mother passed away in 2012 at ninety-nine years of age.

Annette spoke of the event in a NASA interview posted online: “I think my dad would be thrilled with the New Horizons. I mean, who wouldn’t be? When he looked at Pluto, it was just a speck of light.”

DETAILS OF CARGO

The Pluto-stamp mentioned above depicts the planet as a gray hue with orange flecks, which was an artist’s best rendering based on what NASA knew of the tiny planet pre-1991, which, to be earnest, didn’t amount to much. Only recently has New Horizons revealed the planet to be a copper-colored, icy and bright world. However, Mark Saunders, a spokesman for the U.S. Postal Service said in an email last week that “[n]o stamp has ever traveled this far!”

A piece of SpaceShipOne has also been attached to New Horizons. SpaceShipOne was the first manned private space plane to reach suborbital flight back in 2004, winning the $10 million Ansari X Prize.

New Horizons also contains two U.S. flags and two CDs, the first of which contains photos of the New Horizons’ team members, the second contains the names of 434,738 names of the people who signed up online in advance.

 

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New Horizons Carries Remains of Pluto"s Discoverer, Clyde Tombaugh

New Horizons" Pluto Map Reveals Strange Bands and Patches - http://clapway.com/2015/07/08/new-horizons-reveals-strange-bands-and-patches987/

One could safely assume most readers didn’t covet their Moon or Mars Maps in their childhood. But there’s always a chance to make amends for your kids’. A new map of Pluto that scientists have constructed from images captured by the famed spacecraft New Horizons has just hit the proverbial press.

Pluto map is a flat representation made from spherical pieces

The map unravels visible pieces of the sphere onto a flat, projected representation, revealing more features scientists have begun to take note of in recent days. They include patches near the equator which alternate between light and dark, and a singular, long, dark band scientists have named “the whale.”

Moby Dick’s Darker Cousin is only the beginning in a string of photos and data

New Horizons, the spacecraft that captured Moby Dick’s darker cousin, is only seven days away from its groundbreaking flyby of Pluto. New Horizons will pass Pluto’s surface at an altitude of about 13,000km. In this first pass, it will snap a veritable plethora of images and other scientific data. But these first pictures of the dwarf planet will be of a sophistication of an entirely different order than those of the Moon, or even our first studies of Mars. New Horizons will capture 5,000 times the data that Mariner did during its visit to the Red Planet. Moreover, targeted areas on Pluto’s surface will be displayed at a resolution better than 100 meters per pixel.

Images available so far are of much lower resolution, being assembled from a combination of the probe’s high-resolution (black and white) LORRI camera and its lower-resolution color imager, which we lovingly refer to as Ralph. Even so, we can still see a slew of different characteristics on the dwarf planet.

A white area near the center of Pluto will be directly below New Horizons upon the probe’s closest pass. On the east side is a splotchy place that’s been the root of the most heated discussion to the present moment. No one seems to know what the blobby patches are, but every one of them is a few kilometers in diameter.

Whale’s “tail” has weird craterlike donut

In what’s called the whale’s “tail,” is an object seeming to take the form of a doughnut. This could actually be an impact crater or a volcano, but at this low resolution either interpretation is equally warranted, i.e., is really unwarranted.

New Horizons has totally recovered from its 4th of July weekend hiccup, when it accidentally entered protective safe mode and dropped its connection with Earth for over an hour. The engineers behind New Horizons’ software have stated they understand the cause of the computer glitch, and have ruled it out of the realm of possibility for the next few days. Now let’s hope the Plutonians haven’t hacked our probe.

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New Horizons" Pluto Map Reveals Strange Bands and Patches

They never get old. - http://clapway.com/2015/06/30/why-abisko-is-the-best-place-to-experience-northern-lights/

Experiencing the spectacular Northern Lights is probably everyone’s dream, although standing in freezing cold weather for hours in the darkness waiting and hoping for the lights to appear might not be everyone’s cup of tea.

Abisko: 200km north of the Arctic Circle

In January, I visited Abisko in (very) northern Sweden, one of the best known places in Lapland. My trip included standing for up to four hours in -40°F in complete darkness, but the spectacular northern lights phenomenon was worth the wait and the pain.

Abisko is also where “Kungsleden” starts, the country’s biggest and most famous trail which measures over 400km and attracts thousands of hardcore nature-lovers every year.

In the winter, though, people travel there to see fluorescent green lights dancing in the sky and experience the arctic circle’s dark winter days. As a matter of fact, the sun almost never rises during the season. However, as many of you imagine it being completely dark, note that it is more close to “dawn” for a few hours per day, with the snow playing a big role in brighting up the atmosphere.

Lonely Planet’s best spot for Auroras

The UN has named 2015 the International “Year of Light” and Lonely Planet chose Abisko as the number one place (in a top 10 released last year) to experience the Northern Lights. What makes this location a great spot is the likelihood of clear skies due to its geographical position. Abisko is located in a valley surrounded by mountains, which often help in keeping clouds away and increasing the number of clear nights.

A cloudless sky is essential for you to experience the Northern Lights and so is complete darkness. So, being anywhere in Lapland is not enough. You ought to find the right spot far from any kind of light pollution and hope that no clouds get in the way.

As we are talking about nature and not fiction, Northern Lights might take time to appear. They start by being weak and fade with the sky, which is the main reason why, at first, they are often confused with clouds. However, experts told me there that the way to differentiate a could from an “aurora” at its early stage, is to check if stars are still visible behind it. Clouds would impede the view of anything they cover, while northern lights don’t.

Never go without a good camera

One great piece of advice is not to travel all the way to Lapland without a very good camera and a tripod. If you rely on your iPhone, you will end up with a number of pitch black shots which could be quite disappointing. So, make sure you have a high quality device with you which is able to shoot pictures with high exposure.

If you don’t have a good camera (like in my case), you can rent one there through organised expeditions. I took all the photos below in Abisko this winter:

 

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Why Abisko is the Best Place to Experience Northern Lights