Hubble Space Telescope Helps NASA With Vesta Mission

Asteroid Vesta

We tend to forget that there is always ongoing exploration in outer space - if not manned, then by telescopes. The NASA mission described below is one such endeavor. The new Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 just added in February is helping to correct some previously calculated orientations as new technology becomes available.
    . . . June


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NASA Mission to Asteroid Gets Help From Hubble Space
Telescope -- WASHINGTON, Oct. 8 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has captured images of the large asteroid Vesta that will help scientists refine plans for the Dawn spacecraft's rendezvous with Vesta in July 2011



Scientists have constructed a video from the images that will help improve pointing instructions for Dawn as it is placed in a polar orbit around Vesta. Analyses of Hubble images revealed a pole orientation, or tilt, of approximately four degrees more to the asteroid's east than scientists previously thought. The new


This means the change of seasons between the southern and northern hemispheres of Vesta may take place about a month later than previously expected while Dawn is orbiting the asteroid. The result is a change in the pattern of sunlight expected to illuminate the asteroid. Dawn needs solar illumination for imaging and some mapping activities.

'While Vesta is the brightest asteroid in the sky, its small size makes it difficult to image from Earth,' said Jian-Yang Li, a scientist participating in the Dawn mission from the University of Maryland in College Park. 'The new Hubble images give Dawn scientists a better sense of how Vesta is spinning because our new views are 90 degrees different from our previous images. It's like having a street-level view and adding a view from an airplane overhead.'

The recent images were obtained by Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 in February. The images complemented previous ones of Vesta taken from ground-based telescopes and Hubble's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 between 1983 and 2007. Li and his colleagues looked at 216 new images -- and a total of 446 Hubble images overall -- to clarify how Vesta was spinning. The journal Icarus recently published the report online.

"The new results give us food for thought as we make our way toward Vesta," said Christopher Russell, Dawn's principal investigator at the University of California, Los Angeles. "Because our goal is to take pictures of the entire surface and measure the elevation of features over most of the surface to an accuracy of about 33 feet, or the height of a three-story building, we need to pay close attention to the solar illumination. It looks as if Vesta is going to have a late northern spring next year, or at least later than we planned."

Launched in September 2007, Dawn will leave Vesta to encounter the dwarf planet Ceres in 2015. Vesta and Ceres are the most massive objects in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Scientists study these celestial bodies as examples of the building blocks of terrestrial planets like Earth. Dawn is approximately 134 million miles away from Vesta. Next summer, the spacecraft will make its own measurements of Vesta's rotating surface and allow mission managers to pin down its axis of spin.

"Vesta was discovered just over 200 years ago, and we are excited now to be on the threshold of exploring it from orbit," said Bob Mase, Dawn's project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif. "We planned this mission to accommodate our imprecise knowledge of Vesta. Ours is a journey of discovery and, with our ability to adapt, we are looking forward to collecting excellent science data at our target."

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Nasa's WONDER WALL Is Made Up Of Multi Wide Screens

 Exploring Outer Space is pretty exciting, but the article below shows us how the NASA folks keep track of all the various areas and purposes with their Wonder Wall which tracks weather and national disaster observations to displaying images from Nasa's Spitzer Space Telescope - as shown here - the quarter-of-a-billion-pixel, 128-screen, 23ft-wide LCD array is the world's highest-resolution display system. Wow! Talk about wide-screen.
        . . . . June

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Outer space: Nasa's multi-screen wonder wall
Mail Online:


You may think you've got a pretty good widescreen set-up at home, but nothing comes close to Nasa's hyperwall-2.

Used for a multitude of purposes, from weather and national disaster observations to displaying images from Nasa's Spitzer Space Telescope - as shown here - the quarter-of-a-billion-pixel, 128-screen, 23ft-wide LCD array is the world's highest-resolution display system.

Here, a Nasa analyst is examining a colourised image of part of the centre of our galaxy. The blue specks are Milky Way stars, and the bluish-white haze in the background is light from older star clusters. In the top left of the picture (the third screen along) you can see the Black Widow Nebula, ten thousand light years away.

Installed at Nasa's Ames Research Centre in 2008, the system is powered by 128 graphics-processing units with 1,024 processor cores, running at speeds of up to 74 teraflops - that's 74 trillion calculations per second, the equivalent of over 300 PS3 consoles.

But all this power isn't being used to play giant games of Modern Warfare 2 - it enables scientists to analyse massive data sets and run simulations that might take weeks on lesser computers.

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NASA Plans Mission To MARS in 2013

 In just three years, NASA will launch a mission to Mars. According to the article below, this trip will be aimed at investigating the mystery of how the 'red planet' lost its atmosphere."Mars can't protect itself from the solar wind because it no longer has a shield, the planet's global magnetic field is dead," said Jakosky, describing how the magnetic field disappeared and the atmosphere then exposed to the punishing solar wind. We still have a lot to learn about this planet.
     . . . June


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NASA to launch new mission to Mars
Yahoo! News: "– Wed Oct 6, 1:52 am ET

WASHINGTON (AFP) – The US space agency NASA announced it has given the green light to a mission to Mars aimed at investigating the mystery of how the 'red planet' lost its atmosphere.

NASA gave the approval Monday for 'the development and 2013 launch of the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) mission,' the agency said in a statement, noting that the project may also show Mars' history of supporting life.

'A better understanding of the upper atmosphere and the role that escape to space has played is required to plug a major hole in our understanding of Mars,' said MAVEN's lead investigator Bruce Jakosky of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

"We're really excited about having the opportunity to address these fundamental science questions," he added.
Three main scientific instruments will be launched to Earth's neighbor aboard a craft in November 2013 as part of the 438-million-dollar project.

Clues on Mars' surface, including features that resemble ancient riverbeds and minerals that could only form in the presence of liquid water, suggest the planet "once had a denser atmosphere, which supported the presence of liquid water on the surface," said NASA.

However, most of the Martian atmosphere was lost as part of a dramatic climate shift.

"Looking forward, we are well positioned for the next push to critical design review in July 2011. In three short years, we?ll be heading to Mars!" exclaimed MAVEN project manager David Mitchell of NASA's Maryland-based Goddard Space Flight Center.

"Mars can't protect itself from the solar wind because it no longer has a shield, the planet's global magnetic field is dead," said Jakosky, describing how the magnetic field disappeared and the atmosphere then exposed to the punishing solar wind.

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