Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission successfully enters Moon’s orbit

LRO
This artist’s concept shows LRO in orbit of the Moon.
NASA
June 23, 2009
After a four-and-a-half-day journey from Earth, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has successfully entered orbit around the Moon. Engineers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, confirmed the spacecraft’s lunar orbit insertion at 6:27 a.m. EDT June 23.

During transit to the Moon, engineers performed a mid-course correction to get the spacecraft in the proper position to reach its lunar destination. Because the Moon is always moving, the spacecraft shot for a target point ahead of the Moon. When close to the Moon, the LRO used its rocket motor to slow down until the gravity of the Moon caught the spacecraft in lunar orbit.

“Lunar orbit insertion is a crucial milestone for the mission,” said Cathy Peddie, LRO deputy project manager at Goddard. “The LRO mission cannot begin until the Moon captures us. Once we enter the Moon’s orbit, we can begin to build up the dataset needed to understand the lunar topography, features, and resources in greater detail. We are so proud to be a part of this exciting mission and NASA’s planned return to the Moon.”

A series of four engine burns over the next 4 days will put the satellite into its commissioning-phase orbit. During the commissioning phase, each of its seven instruments is checked out and brought online. The commissioning phase will end approximately 60 days after launch, when LRO will use its engines to transition to its primary mission orbit.

For its primary mission, LRO will orbit above the Moon at about 31 miles (50 kilometers) for 1 year. The spacecraft’s instruments will help scientists compile high resolution, three-dimensional maps of the lunar surface and survey it at many spectral wavelengths.

The satellite will explore the Moon’s deepest craters, examining permanently sunlit and shadowed regions, and provide understanding of the effects of lunar radiation on humans. LRO will return more data about the Moon than any previous mission.

The Milky Way Inside and Out

WAUKESHA, Wis. — Tour our home galaxy with Astronomy magazine’s The Milky Way Inside and Out. This 108-page special issue features fascinating stories, discoveries, insights, and more about the Milky Way. It highlights everything you want to know about our galaxy, from the Milky Way’s core to the local neighborhood of galaxies.

Preview The Milky Way Inside and Out.

Thousands of years ago people had no idea what constituted the band of light arching across the sky. Then Galileo Galilei first looked at the Milky Way band through a simple telescope and resolved far more stars than he could see with his unaided eyes. From that point on, astronomers have worked to understand our galaxy. They’ve made great strides in the past 4 centuries, and you can read about many of those findings in this special issue.

Enjoy such topics as an introduction to our Sun’s nearest stellar neighbors, written by an expert in the field of stellar astronomy. Learn how our galaxy works, what triggers supernovae, and how astronomers have determined the Milky Way’s shape. Journey into the giant black hole in the galaxy’s heart, and then read about our galaxy’s globular star clusters. Enjoy these and nine other stories, including one about the Milky Way’s future collision with the Andromeda Galaxy.

This special issue also features a spectacular 8-page foldout by Senior Editor Richard Talcott, which includes art by space artist Lynette Cook. This foldout showcases different views of the galaxy — how astronomers think it looks from a bird’s-eye view and a more oblique view. The oblique view includes the positions of different objects, such as the Orion Nebula and Globular Cluster M13.

Order The Milky Way Inside and Out and receive free shipping.

NASA’s next Moon mission

Ten years ago, NASA’s Lunar Prospector detected hydrogen in permanently shadowed craters at the Moon’s poles. These readings intrigued scientists who wondered if water-ice existed there. So, in April 2006, NASA scheduled the Lunar CRater Observing and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) mission to find the answer. NASA selected LCROSS because of its relatively low cost and because it could ride along with the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO).

Return to the Moon

If all goes according to plan, humans will once again walk on the Moon in 2020 or soon thereafter. Fifty years after Apollo opened the lunar surface to human exploration, NASA will return with equipment that superficially resembles the Apollo hardware. Yet the new systems — dubbed “Apollo on steroids” by some — take advantage of decades worth of technological advances. Make no mistake: These won’t be your father’s Moon missions.

Free Preview: Bob Berman’s Strange Universe, “Edges of the universe”

Bob Berman in Astronomy magazine
Bob Berman’s Strange Universe appears in each issue of Astronomy magazine. This article appeared in August 2009. Subscribers have access to the complete online archive of “Bob Berman’s Strange Universe.” Subscribe today!

Last year, researchers found one of the farthest-ever galaxies. This smudge on a Hubble photo is said to sit at a distance of 13 billion light-years (abbreviated 13 Gly). It was born soon after the Big Bang and has been given the catchy name A1689-zD1.

But viewing galaxies whose light traveled a long time through an expanding universe introduces several bizarre twists in understanding. Let’s finally get this straight, once and for all.

Nothing is particularly screwy in our own close-up neighborhood of space, at least outside Washington. The galaxy M87 in the Virgo cluster lies some 50 million light-years away. So its light took that long to get here. That’s short compared with its age of at least 8 billion years; its image is therefore a current, accurate snapshot. Also, the distance from here to M87 grows by 800 miles (1,300 kilometers) every second. This redshifts (stretches) its light, which makes the galaxy slightly dimmer. The effect is barely noticeable because M87’s recession is less than 1 percent of light-speed.

Even if we jump 20 times farther and observe any of the 60 million galaxies that float within 1 billion light-years of Coney Island, we see them essentially where they really are and how they look today.

But now the fun begins. Because the speed of the expanding universe in-creases with distance, weird stuff happens to truly faraway objects. Take A1689-zD1. We can say it’s old because we see the galaxy as it was when its light started traveling to us 13 billion years ago. The galaxy’s image is ancient. We can also say it’s young because we’re viewing a picture of a newborn object.

But is this galaxy really 13 Gly away, as the news articles claim? Cosmologists use cool calculators to answer this sort of thing. When the image we’re seeing left A1689-zD1, we were much closer to-gether. It was then only 3.35 Gly from us. So the image should logically display the size of a galaxy at that nearer distance, when its light left, rather than the distance the light had to cover in order to get here. The image’s dimensions don’t change just because it took a long time to reach us.

Amazingly, that galaxy does look larger than we’d expect for something so far away. It measures 1/67 the angular size of nearby Virgo galaxies of the same type. If it were 13 Gly away, it would appear 1/260 the size of Virgo galaxies. Holy cow! It’s like a funhouse mirror. The galaxy appears much closer than it is!

Because the speed of the expanding universe increases with distance, weird stuff happens to truly faraway objects.
In size, that is. But it’s far dimmer than we’d expect a 13 Gly object to be. Space has been stretching all the time its image traveled, dramatically redshifting and weakening the light. It now exhibits the ultra-faintness of a galaxy at the impossible distance of 263 Gly.

Let’s put all this together. It’s the oldest galaxy image we’ve ever seen, which also makes it the youngest. It looks way too big for its distance, but also way too faint. Could things get any weirder?

You bet. Science articles say it’s 13 Gly from here because distance is often ex-pressed that way. But that’s merely how long its light took to reach us. During all that time, A1689-zD1 has been madly receding. This galaxy is now actually 30 Gly away. To get the true figures for these kinds of questions, use the calculator cosmologist Ned Wright of UCLA posts. Punch in a light-distance, and it’ll give you the rest: http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/DlttCalc.html

Now consider cosmic boundaries. The first stars or protogalaxies may have formed as early as 100 million years after the Big Bang; it’s still debated. If so, they’ll display angular sizes as if they’re just 1.2 Gly away. But their brightnesses would indicate an inconceivable distance of 1.2 trillion light-years — utterly undetectable. Their actual distance today would be 38 Gly. These parameters roughly mark the edges of the observable universe.

But objects do not end there. Most galaxies were never positioned for their light to be able to arrive here at all. Astronomers such as Wright believe at least 98.4 percent of the universe lies “over the horizon” in a zone that can never be observed. This can be a frustrating limitation. For example, something massive is disrupting the universe’s smooth expansion in our region of space. Some sort of “great attractor” lies in the direction of Centaurus. Many astronomers think it’s located outside our observable reality. It tugs on our visible universe from a place beyond.

That “place beyond” constitutes nearly all of the cosmos. And where does that end? No one’s sure, but it’s likely the universe is, was, and always will be infinite in extent. If this is true, everything we can ever see represents 0 percent of the total galactic inventory.

Read more of Bob Berman’s Strange Universe
July 2009: Facing reality
See an archive of Bob Berman’s Strange Universe

Free preview: David H. Levy’s Evening Stars, “Celebrate Galileo Galilei”

David Levy in Astronomy magazine
David H. Levy’s Evening Stars appears in each issue of Astronomy magazine. This article appeared in August 2009. Registered subscribers have access to the complete online archive of “David H. Levy’s Evening Stars.” Subscribe today!

The International Year of Astronomy is really about Galileo. It’s not because he was the first to look through a telescope — remember, last month we discussed the English perspective glass that was in use decades earlier. It’s because he was the first to carefully record what he saw, promptly publish his work, and accept the consequences of the conclusions he drew.

Galileo was born in 1564, the same year as William Shakespeare. His first name derives from a Tuscan custom of the era that the first name of the firstborn child would be a repeat of the surname. Although Galileo lived to age 78, extraordinarily long for his time, he was often ill with arthritis or rheumatism.

Galileo was well past mid-career when he looked at Jupiter January 7, 1610. He wrote, “I perceived … three starlets, small indeed, but very bright.” Certain that these were “fixed” stars, he enjoyed his view enough that on the next night he sought them out again. The starlets had moved with respect to Jupiter, and over the next few evenings they moved enough to convince Galileo that they were moons circling their planet.

Later in 1610, Galileo used his telescope to record the positions of sunspots crossing the full diameter of the Sun. Although he did not use a filter, he likely performed his observations near sunrise or sunset, when the natural atmospheric haze dims the Sun slightly. The poor quality of his objective lens probably also acted as a sort of filter.

August 2009 Galileo telescope
The author’s Galileo telescope replica sits to the left of his 16-inch scope. Peter Manly of Phoenix, Arizona, made it out of cardboard and wrapped it with butcher paper.
David H. Levy
But it was a third discovery that sealed Galileo’s fate. Throughout the fall of 1610, as Venus shone in the evening sky, it revealed its phases through Galileo’s optical tube. This meant that Venus must orbit the Sun, and Earth isn’t at the center.

Galileo lived to see his friend, Maffeo Barberini, elected Pope Urban VIII in 1623. The new pope couldn’t wait to see his scientific friend.

The pope’s early years were a victory for Galileo. He and Urban VIII took long walks on the grounds and discussed all manner of scientific questions. Although Galileo understood that he was no longer talking with Barberini but with Pope Urban VIII, he felt reassured by the pope. In 1632 Galileo published his interpretation of his 1610 discoveries in the form of a conversation called Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. In the publication, Galileo presented the pope’s arguments against the Copernican system in the voice of a simple fool. The publication enraged the pope, who summoned Galileo to appear before the Inquisition.

It was a catastrophe for Galileo. Even as he awaited trial, he was led to believe that he would get off with something like a reprimand. However, at the end he was sentenced harshly. Convinced that Galileo had duped him into granting permission to publish a book that made him look foolish, the pope sentenced Galileo to life imprisonment. Galileo begged for a lighter sentence, which the pope quickly granted: life imprisonment within the scientist’s villa in Arcetri while a representative of the Inquisition kept tabs on Galileo’s activities.

August 2009 Gelileo home
Galileo was held under house arrest during the final years of his life in his villa in Arcetri, Italy, south of Florence.
David J. Eicher
Some years later on a fall afternoon in 1638, a young English poet named John Milton visited Galileo. How I wish I could have eavesdropped on the conversation between two men whose instruments — a telescope and a pen — and words spoke to the ages. Years later, Milton’s Paradise Lost mentions the names of many angels, but only one human — the man named Galileo.

In this year of astronomy, Galileo remains an enigma. The controversies that plagued his later years have vanished, and he is now regarded universally as one of the greatest scientists of all time, well positioned with Newton and Einstein. As re-cently as 1992, Pope John Paul II declared after a 13-year investigation that the Catholic Church wrongfully condemned Galileo. Father George Coyne, then director of the Vatican Observatory, told me that John Paul may have chosen this path rather than risk a second trial of Galileo.

“The error of the theologians of the time,” John Paul noted, “when they maintained the centrality of the Earth, was to think that our understanding of the physical world’s structure was, in some way, imposed by the literal sense of Sacred Scripture.” The world had changed, and now 17 years later the church is enthusiastically on board with the modern world’s celebration of Galileo’s great deeds — and his courage.

Read more of David H. Levy’s Evening Stars
July 2009: The Bard and astronomy
See an archive of David H. Levy’s Evening Stars

How do scientists determine the elevations of mountains and other topography on the Moon, Mars, and other places where there is no sea level as the reference point?

Earth and Moon
This image shows a partial view of Earth as well as the Moon in the background.
JPL/NASA

Elsewhere in the solar system, where there are no standing bodies of water, we normally use the planet or moon’s average radius as a reference for measuring elevation.

Jupiter reaches its peak

August 2009 Jupiter
Giant Jupiter dominates the late-summer sky, reaching opposition August 14 and remaining visible all night. The best views through a telescope will come when it lies high in the south around midnight.
NASA/JPL/SSI

You can retrace Galileo’s footsteps this month by observing Jupiter and its four bright moons. Jupiter reaches opposition and peak visibility in August, and it remains on display all night. Its moons show up through any telescope.

Profile: Youngest person to discover a supernova

Caroline Moore in her family’s backyard Deer Pond Observatory
Caroline Moore in her family’s backyard Deer Pond Observatory.
Robert Moore
June 22, 2009
In November 2008, Caroline Moore, a 14-year-old budding astronomer in Warwick, New York, discovered a supernova. And not just any supernova: This exploding star, dubbed SN 2008ha, was surprisingly dim — some 1,000 times dimmer than a typical supernova. The first official reports examining SN 2008ha’s strangeness are now appearing in scientific literature.

Moore, a ninth-grader at Warwick Valley High, has garnered the distinction of being the youngest person ever to discover a supernova. And that honor is helping her to inspire a new generation of kids into the hobby of astronomy. “This year is the International Year of Astronomy,” Moore says. “We’re really trying to push kids’ involvement.”

Family business
Robert Moore, Caroline’s father, is an avid astroimager and the co-chair of the NorthEast Astro-Imaging Conference. Moore and his daughter enjoy a well-equipped backyard base of operations — Deer Pond Observatory. (Caroline’s telescope is a 10-inch Newtonian reflector.)

The teen’s introduction to serious astronomy was not through an eyepiece, but on a computer screen. In April 2008, she began to participate in an international group called the Puckett Observatory Supernova Search (POSS) team.

POSS uses four robotic telescopes to capture digital images of the sky. The volunteers (eight right now) use special software to comb through the images for novae, or “new stars.” Sometimes the nova is the sudden (and temporary) brightening of a star. But sometimes it is the one-time fireworks of a sun blowing itself to pieces: a supernova.

Puckett Observatory Supernova Search
Puckett Observatory Supernova Search
Caroline K. Moore
Discovery time!
For 7 months, Caroline sifted through POSS images. Then, on November 6, 2008, she found a possible supernova in a galaxy in Pegasus called UGC 12682. It was dim — just 18.8 on the astronomical brightness scale – but it was visible.

Moore’s observation was later confirmed and designated SN 2008ha. Far from Warwick, 60 miles northwest of New York City, scientists quickly turned massive telescopes on SN 2008ha, including the Magellan telescopes in Chile, the MMT telescope in Arizona, the Gemini and Keck telescopes in Hawaii, and NASA’s Swift satellite. Researchers needed the supernova’s spectral fingerprint and other essential data.

A team of scientists led by Ryan Foley at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, determined that SN 2008ha is a peculiar intermediate type of stellar explosion. It may have been a “failed” supernova whose blast was not powerful enough to destroy the entire star.

“Coincidentally, the youngest person to ever discover a supernova found one of the most peculiar and interesting supernovae ever,” says Alex Filippenko, leader of a group of supernova hunters at the University of California at Berkeley. “This shows that no matter what your age, anyone can make a significant contribution to our understanding of the universe.”

Caroline Moore in her family’s backyard Deer Pond Observatory.
Caroline Moore in her family’s backyard Deer Pond Observatory.
Robert Moore
Poster kid
Caroline continues to work on the supernova search, fitting it in with schoolwork, singing, and participating on the school ski team. How many images has she looked at so far? “Oh, thousands,” she says chuckling, “definitely thousands.” In a typical week, she processes 100 to 200 paired images, looking to notch more supernovae.

Moore is active in the Rockland Astronomy Club, assisting at public star parties and events for other young people. But the hoopla over the supernova discovery has sparked a new “career” for the teen: poster child for attracting a new generation of kids into stargazing.

On February 6, 2009, iOptron Corporation announced Moore as the iOptron Young Astronomer of the Year for the International Year of Astronomy 2009.

In the last week of August, she is going to speak at a public star party on the deck of the USS Intrepid, a World War II aircraft carrier docked on the Hudson River in New York City as part of the Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum.

The date has not been set yet, but sometime in the fall Moore will share the stage with astronomer Heidi Hammel at the Andrus Planetarium in Yonkers, New York. Moore says it’s going to be a sort of “before and after” demonstration of where an interest in science can lead. “I’m supposed to be the example of where you start, and Heidi Hammel is supposed to be where you go to,” Moore says. “Those are pretty big shoes to fill!”

But Moore says it’s vital to the future of amateur observing for young people to see kids like her advocating for astronomy. “My discovery has been really helpful to get kids involved with iOptron in the Young Astronomer of the Year,” she says. “We need a future for our hobby.”