I’ll Tell You What…

Jupiter has a new red spot! The new red spot was recently photographed by Christopher Go of the Philippines. Go reported that Red Jr was white in November, brown in December and turned red just a few weeks ago. Red Jr is now about half the size of the Great Red Spot.

Check out the picture at NASA.

If you have broadband you have to visit Maas Digital Gallery and watch the Mars Explorer animation video. The music video is absolutely wonderful. Maas Digital created this animation to illustrate the NASA mission and 6 minutes of animation was included in a special PBS Nova episode, MARS Dead or Alive, which can be watched on-line.

If you like space photographs, you’ll love these pictures taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. The HubbleSite has many excellent pictures as well.

Canadian astronomers announced today the first evidence of a magnetic field on a planet outside of our solar system which is also the first observation of a planet heating its star. The report was presented this morning by Ph.D. candidate Evgenya Shkolnik, Dr. Gordon Walker, both of the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC and Dr. David Bohlender of the National Research Council of Canada / Herzberg Institute for Astrophysics, Victoria, BC at the meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Atlanta, Georgia. The result may offer clues about the structure and formation of the giant planet…

The trio observed the sun-like star HD179949 with the 3.6-meter (142-in) Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope atop Mauna Kea, Hawaii (a 14,000-ft. dormant volcano) using its high-resolution spectrograph called Gecko. HD179949 is 90 light years away in the direction of the southern constellation of Sagittarius (the Archer) but it is too faint to be seen without a telescope. It was first reported to have a close-in planet by Tinney, Butler, Marcy and others in the first results of the Anglo-Australian planet search in 2000. The planet is at least 270 times more massive than the Earth, almost as big as Jupiter, and orbits the star every 3.093 days at 350,000 mph. Such tightly orbiting “roasters” or “hot jupiters” make up 20% of all known extrasolar planets.

The star’s chromosphere, a thin, hot layer just above the visible photosphere, was observed in the ultraviolet light emitted by singly-ionized Calcium atoms. Giant magnetic storms produce hot spots which are visible as bright patches in this light. Such a persistent hotspot is observed on HD 179949 keeping pace with the planet in its 3-day orbit for more than a year (or 100 orbits)! The hotspot appears to be moving across the surface of the star slightly ahead of, but keeping pace with the planet. Most evidence suggests the star is rotating too slowly to carry the spot around so quickly.

The best explanation for this traveling hot spot is an interaction between the planet’s magnetic field and the star’s chromosphere, something predicted by Steve Saar of the Center for Astrophysics and Manfred Cuntz of the University of Texas at Arlington in 2000. If so, this is the first ever glimpse of a magnetic field on a planet outside of our solar system, and may provide clues about the planet’s structure and formation.

“If we are indeed witnessing the entanglement of the magnetic field of a star with that of its planet it gives us an entirely new insight into the nature of closely bound planets.” — Dr. Gordon Walker

Obviously, more observations are needed to test if the magnetic interaction is a transient event or something longer lasting. Also, observations from the 8-meter Gemini-South Telescope in Chile of this stellar system are underway in the infrared light emitted by Helium which would map hotspots at higher levels of the chromosphere.

This work was supported by the Canadian Natural Science and Engineering Research Council and the National Research Council of Canada.

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CONTACTS:



Evgenya Shkolnik, University of British Columbia

Tel: 250.595.3801 email: shkolnik@physics.ubc.ca

http://www.astro.ubc.ca

http://www.physics.ubc.ca

The press release and presenation can be found on Wednesday midday at:
http://cadc.hia.nrc.ca/cfht/aas/



Gordon Walker, University of British Columbia

Tel: 250.592.6205 email: walker@astro.ubc.ca



David Bohlender, National Research Council of Canada / Herzberg Institute for Astrophysics

Tel: 250.363.0025, email: David.Bohlender@nrc.ca

http://www.hia.nrc.ca

Launched in February, 1999, the Stardust spacecraft’s mission was simple: rendezvous with a comet, collect some comet dust and come home. It doesn’t sound so simple when you consider that the spacecraft travelled 3.22 billion miles just to get there.

The success of the first leg of the mission is a big shot in the arm for our space program as well as space education.

There’s a really cool picture at Space.com.

The home-coming isn’t supposed to occur until January 2006.

MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE
JET PROPULSION LABORATORY
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
PASADENA, CALIF. 91109. TELEPHONE (818) 354-5011
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov

DC Agle (818) 393-9011
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

Donald Savage (202) 358-1547
NASA Headquarters, Washington, D.C.

News Release: 2004-001 January 2, 2003

Team Stardust, NASA’s first dedicated sample return mission to a comet, passed a huge milestone today by successfully navigating through the particle and gas-laden coma around comet Wild 2 (pronounced “Vilt-2″). During the hazardous traverse, the spacecraft flew within 240 kilometers (149 miles) of the comet, catching samples of comet particles and scoring detailed pictures of Wild 2’s pockmarked surface.

“Things couldn’t have worked better in a fairy tale,” said Tom Duxbury, Stardust project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

“These images are better than we had hoped for in our wildest dreams,” said Ray Newburn of JPL, a co-investigator for Stardust. “They will help us better understand the mechanisms that drive conditions on comets.”

“These are the best pictures ever taken of a comet,” said Principal Investigator Dr. Don Brownlee of the University of Washington, Seattle. “Although Stardust was designed to be a comet sample return mission, the fantastic details shown in these images greatly exceed our expectations.”

The collected particles, stowed in a sample return capsule onboard Stardust, will be returned to Earth for in-depth analysis. That dramatic event will occur on January 15, 2006, when the capsule makes a soft landing at the U.S. Air Force Utah Test and Training Range. The microscopic particle samples of comet and interstellar dust collected by Stardust will be taken to the planetary material curatorial facility at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas, for analysis.

Stardust has traveled about 3.22 billion kilometers (2 billion miles) since its launch on February 7, 1999. As it closed the final gap with its cometary quarry, it endured a bombardment of particles surrounding the nucleus of comet Wild 2. To protect Stardust against the blast of expected cometary particles and rocks, the spacecraft rotated so it was flying in the shadow of its “Whipple Shields.” The shields are named for American astronomer Dr. Fred L. Whipple, who, in the 1950s, came up with the idea of shielding spacecraft from high-speed collisions with the bits and pieces ejected from comets. The system includes two bumpers at the front of the spacecraft — which protect Stardust’s solar panels — and another shield protecting the main spacecraft body. Each shield is built around composite panels designed to disperse particles as they impact, augmented by blankets of a ceramic cloth called Nextel that further dissipate and spread particle debris.

“Everything occurred pretty much to the minute,” said Duxbury. “And with our cometary encounter complete, we invite everybody to tune in about one million, 71 thousand minutes from now when Stardust returns to Earth, bringing with it the first comet samples in the history of space exploration.”

Scientists believe in-depth terrestrial analysis of the samples will reveal much about comets and the earliest history of the solar system. Chemical and physical information locked within the cometary particles could be the record of the formation of the planets and the materials from which they were made. More information on the Stardust mission is available at

http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov

Stardust, a part of NASA’s Discovery Program of low-cost, highly focused science missions, was built by Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, Colo., and is managed by JPL for NASA’s Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

I missed this story for some reason. It was found on Yahoo!s Reuter - Science news feed. Expect some disruptions to satellite television services as you normally would but this one is probably the worst disruption by far. This one may even mess up cell phone service.