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Now, you can recommend places to click on Mars!

May 29, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, May 29 (ANI): Arizona State University (ASU) researchers and scientists have created a new feature for Google Earth 5.0, which would enable anyone, anywhere, to recommend places on Mars to photograph.

Google Earth 5.0 is the popular online application that lets users tour Earth, the starry sky, and the Red Planet Mars.

The ASU team has created two new features for the application, one of which lets anyone, anywhere, recommend places on Mars to photograph with ASU’s THEMIS (Thermal Emission Imaging System) camera on NASA’s Mars Odyssey orbiter.

The second new feature shows the most recent infrared images of Mars sent back to Earth from the THEMIS camera.HEMIS is the Thermal Emission Imaging System, a multiband infrared and visual camera designed at ASU by Dr. Philip Christensen.

According to Dr. Christensen, “These two features, developed by our staff in cooperation with programmers at Google, will help everyone have a lot more fun exploring the Red Planet. It’s public engagement at its best.”

“We wanted to give the general public a way to suggest places on Mars for THEMIS to photograph,” he added.

“Using the new feature, people can recommend sites, and these recommendations go to mission scientists who will decide what areas THEMIS images. If a public suggestion matches what the researchers choose, we’ll notify the person who suggested the site and let them see the image as soon as we do,” he further added.

To suggest a place for THEMIS to photograph, viewers need two things: Google Earth 5.0 and a file that is updated each week giving the spacecraft’s Mars orbital ground track.

To get the orbital track, users should go to http://suggest.mars.asu.edu and follow the simple steps to register.

With the orbital track file downloaded, viewers start Google Earth and switch the globe to Mars (via the Planets toolbar button, which resembles the planet Saturn). Then, viewers open the orbital track file from within Google Earth.

Viewers can also just double-click on the orbital file once Google Earth has been set to Mars as its planet.

The places where THEMIS can take images during the coming week appear as stripes wrapped onto the Martian globe.

Viewers click on stripe segments to recommend places for THEMIS to photograph.

“Each viewer can make up to 10 imaging suggestions per week,” said Christian Yates, software engineer at the Mars Space Flight Facility. (ANI)

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NASA’s Kepler mission begins hunt for planets like Earth

April 17, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, April 17 (ANI): NASA’s Kepler mission has taken its first images of the star-rich sky where it will soon begin hunting for planets like Earth.

The new images show the mission’s target patch of sky, a vast starry field in the Cygnus-Lyra region of our Milky Way galaxy.

One image shows millions of stars in Kepler’s full field of view, while two others zoom in on portions of the larger region.

“Kepler’s first glimpse of the sky is awe-inspiring,” said Lia LaPiana, Kepler’s program executive at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “To be able to see millions of stars in a single snapshot is simply breathtaking,” she added.

One new image from Kepler shows its entire field of view – a 100-square-degree portion of the sky, equivalent to two side-by-side dips of the Big Dipper.

The regions contain an estimated 14 millions stars, more than 100,000 of which were selected as ideal candidates for planet hunting.

Two other views focus on just one-thousandth of the full field of view.

In one image, a cluster of stars located about 13,000 light-years from Earth, called NGC 6791, can be seen in the lower left corner.

The other image zooms in on a region containing a star, called Tres-2, with a known Jupiter-like planet orbiting every 2.5 days.

“It’s thrilling to see this treasure trove of stars,” said William Borucki, science principal investigator for Kepler at NASA’s Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, California.

“We expect to find hundreds of planets circling those stars, and for the first time, we can look for Earth-size planets in the habitable zones around other stars like the sun,” he added.

Kepler will spend the next three-and-a-half years searching more than 100,000 pre-selected stars for signs of planets.

It is expected to find a variety of worlds, from large, gaseous ones, to rocky ones as small as Earth.

The mission is the first with the ability to find planets like ours – small, rocky planets orbiting sun-like stars in the habitable zone, where temperatures are right for possible lakes and oceans of water.

“Everything about Kepler has been optimized to find Earth-size planets,” said James Fanson, Kepler’s project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

“Our images are road maps that will allow us, in a few years, to point to a star and say a world like ours is there,” he added. (ANI)

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Tonight, watch a “green comet” whizz by!

February 24, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, Feb 24 (ANI): Tonight, skygazers will get the opportunity to treat their eyes on a greenish, double-tailed comet, as it’s passing close by Earth.
vid sky watchers will be able to spot the comet with a pair of binoculars.

“For the last several weeks, the comet has been getting widespread attention as it has grown nearer and brighter. It should be at its best from about February 23 through 28,” said Sky and Telescope editor in chief Robert Naeye.

In a very dark, unpolluted, natural night sky, the comet is dimly visible to the unaided eye. Even in a more light-polluted suburban sky, however, a good pair of binoculars will do the trick.

But, eager comet fans would have to know exactly where to look.

An accompanying chart at SkyandTelescope.com/CometLulin shows the starry view high in the east-southeast in mid-evening.

People would have no trouble spotting the planet Saturn and the star Regulus in the constellation Leo. They’re the two brightest things in the area.

Using those as the guide, people would have to aim at the point on the comet’s path that’s labeled with the current date.

The comet’s position is indicated for the evening hours on each date for the time zones of the Americas. The orientation of the scene with respect to the horizon is drawn for North America.

Skygazers need to look for a very dim, biggish, slightly oval cotton-puff floating among the tiny pinpoint stars.

If looked at carefully, they would detect the spike of the comet’s “anti-tail” pointing toward the lower left.

The comet’s regular tail is actually dimmer, and it points in almost the opposite direction. In binoculars, the whole thing looks more gray than greenish.

In a large amateur telescope, the color and the comet’s structure are a lot more clearly visible.

“I saw it out my bathroom window with 10-by-50 binoculars,” said Alan MacRobert, a senior editor of Sky and Telescope. “It’s pretty plain if you get aimed at exactly the right spot,” he added. (ANI)

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NASA’s Kepler mission begins hunt for planets like Earth

Tonight, watch a “green comet” whizz by!

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