From Athens to Tuscaloosa — In 3 Seconds!

MSFC’s all sky meteor camera recorded this bright meteor last night (November 1st) at 9:04 pm CDT. Blazing across the sky at 40 miles per second (144,000 mph), the 1 inch visitor from space took only 3.3 seconds to go 132 miles, starting at a point just northeast of Athens, Alabama and burning up west of Tuscaloosa.

Now that’s moving!




 

 

Northern Lights Travel South

On Oct. 24, 2011, the Northern Lights glowed over North Alabama, visible even though the skies were bright from city lights.

 

Aurora Borealis, or Northern Lights, are unusual so far south — the colorful, 20-minute display was a rare sighting caused by a recent solar storm. This video was captured by the color allsky camera at the Automated Lunar and Meteor Observatory, or ALaMO, at the Marshall Center in Huntsville, Ala.



Evaporated Comet

A meteor and the barred spiral galaxy NGC-2903 grace the top of this October 14 image of an area of space near the head of the constellation Leo. The meteor and the galaxy were purely coincidental, as it is what is not visible in the image that is important. Two telescopes operated by astronomers at the Marshall Space Flight Center just stopped scanning the skies for Comet Elenin, which began fading and breaking apart back in August. Its close approach to the Sun on September 10 apparently caused the comet to disintegrate even further, into  objects so small they are unable to be seen by ground-based telescopes like the 20″ instrument which took this picture. An anticlimatic end to the so-called “Comet of Doom”, with only empty space to mark its close approach (22 million miles) to Earth.

 

By the way, the galaxy NGC-2903 is 30 million light years distant from our own Milky Way.



 

Photo credit: Rhiannon Blaauw, Rob Suggs

 

One Night, Five Meteor Showers

On the night of Oct. 15-16, NASA’s All-sky camera network saw meteors from five different meteor showers! October is known to be a busy month in the world of meteor showers, but even five is an unusually high number.


 


 The last meteor seen in the early morning skies over Huntsville, Ala., on the night of the Oct. 15-16.

 

To see videos of these meteors, and others, go to fireballs.ndc.nasa.gov and select 20111016 on the left panel. In addition to those five shower meteors, eight sporadic or background  meteors were detected. The five showers were: Delta Aurigids, or DAU, October Ursa Majorids, or OCU, Chi Taurids, or CTA, Orionids , or ORI, and Eta Geminids, or EGE. See the list at the end of this post for more information on each shower.

 

The only shower mentioned above that would be worth observing for yourself is the Orionids. The Orionids peak this Friday evening — the night of Oct. 21-22 — and are best viewed anytime after midnight. They are one of the last showers of the year that may have favorable weather to lie outside all night. If you are in Northern Alabama, October evenings are still quite pleasant for stargazing. Luckily for you the moon won’t be too much of a problem. Only a small fraction of the moon is illuminated, unlike many major meteor showers this year whose rates were considerably hampered because the light from a full moon washed them out.

 

Delta Aurigids, or DAU: Active from Sept. 20 — Oct. 16, peaking on Oct. 3 with only two meteors per hour. Velocity of 143,000 miles/hour. The Delta Aurigids are not a well-known shower thus any observations refine the information we know about them.

 

October Ursa Majorids, or OCU: Active from Oct. 12-19, peaking on Oct. 15. Velocity of 119 miles/hour. This is a very minor shower rates of less than one per hour. Radiant — where the meteors appear to come from — is in Ursa Major.

 

Chi Taurids, or CTA:  Active from Oct. 10 — Nov. 10, peaking on Nov. 3. Velocity approximately 94,000 miles/hour. This is also a shower that has very little known about it. It was recently discovered in a survey to find minor meteor showers using a meteor radar (Brown et al, 2010).

 

Orionids, or ORI: Active from Oct. 2 — Nov. 7, peaking on Oct. 21 with rates up to 25 per hour. Velocity of 150,000 miles/hour. Radiant is in the constellation Orion.

 

Eta Geminids, or EGE:  Active from Oct. 14-27.  Peaking on Oct. 18 with rates of three per hour. These are fast-moving meteors that average at 157,000 miles/hour. Eta Geminids are often confused with Orionids since their velocity and peaks are similar.

 

Brown, P., Wong, D.K., Weryk, R.J., Wiegert, P.

A meteoroid stream survey using the Canadian Meteor Orbit Radar II: Identification of minor showers using a 3D wavelet transform

Icarus 207 (2010) 66–81.

 

 

Credits: NASA/MSFC/Meteoroid Environment Office/Rhiannon Blaauw, Bill Cooke

 

Sunset at the ALaMO

A new color all-sky camera has opened its eyes at the ALaMO, or Automated Lunar and Meteor Observatory, at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. Watch its inaugural video below, showing sunset fade into evening at the Marshall Center on Oct. 5, 2011. The time-lapse video spans about 2:28 hours, and the Moon is the object that emerges at the lower left side to cross the sky so brightly.

 

The ALaMO consists of two observatory domes, a 15-meter, or 50-foot, tower with a roll-off roof and an operations center with laboratory space. A 14-inch Ritchey-Chrétien telescope resides in the tower, and a 14-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain in one of the two observation domes.

 

Check out this curious short-term visitor, seen on Oct. 6, 2011. 

 

 


 

A Spectacular Double-Shot

A wide field meteor camera at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center recorded this spectacular meteor breaking up in Earth’s atmosphere on Sept. 30, 2011, 8:37 p.m. EDT. Also visible is a star-like object moving slowly toward the upper middle of the field of view — the upper stage of the Zenit booster that launched the Russian Cosmos 2219 intelligence satellite back in 1992. Orbiting 500 miles above Earth, this empty rocket body can get bright enough to be seen with the unaided eye.   


Credit: Meteoroid Environment Office/Bill Cooke

 


 

 

 

 

Our New Telescope is Operational

Our new telescope in New Mexico — we call it MUT, or Multi-Use Telescope. It can see the explosion flashes caused by meteoroids hitting the moon, measure dust coming off comets, see meteors in the atmosphere, and track satellites/space junk.

 

MUT also takes nice pictures!

 

 

Test image with the MUT telescope we just set up in New Mexico. The globular star cluster M-13 in the constellation Hercules, seen at 30-second exposure.

 

 

MUT image of Comet Garradd, discovered back in 2009. Now at magnitude 7.5 — visible in good binoculars — Garradd is a first-time visitor to the inner solar system. It will be closest to the sun around Christmas, when it is just outside the orbit of Mars.

Credit: NASA/MSFC/Meteoroid Environment Office

Bright Meteor Lights Up Atlanta Skies

The video and images below show a very bright meteor that streaked over the skies of Atlanta, Ga., on the night of Aug. 28, 2011.

View from all sky camera in Cartersville, Ga., operated by
NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.
 › View linking/embed version of video


Some stats on the meteor:

Initial speed: 23.6 km/s (52,800 mph)
Start location: 84.131 W, 33.981 N, Altitude 104.6 km (65.0 miles)
End location:  84.109 W, 33.524 N, Altitude 41.3 km (25.7 miles)

 


View from all sky camera located at Huntsville, Al.



View from all sky camera located at Tullahoma, Tenn.



 
View from all sky camera located at Cartersville, Ga.

The meteor was too bright for the all sky camera in Cartersville, Ga., to accurately determine the center of light, so manual analysis will be required to determine a more accurate end point. Results will be posted here on the blog as they become available.

 

 

Video and image credits: NASA/MSFC/Meteoroid Environment Office

The Moon: What We've Learned So Far


We all know the moon is not made of cheese, but what is it made of?

 

 Credit: Sylvain Weiller

 

Believe it or not, there’s a lot of ice on it. Scientists have been able to study samples brought back from the moon’s surface during the Apollo missions. In addition, recent missions like NASA’s Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, and Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO, made it possible to study the moon’s composition in space. With LCROSS and LRO, NASA has been able to observe lunar dust within the moon’s craters and make a more detailed lunar topographical study than ever before — and they’ve made some pretty exciting discoveries about the moon’s composition.

The biggest finding, of course, was evidence of water on the moon, but that was only the beginning of the discoveries. Along with water, LCROSS also uncovered evidence that the moon has its own water cycle and that the water is typically present in the form of pure ice crystals.

Scientists were able to study the moon’s composition in 2009 when LCROSS impacted in a deep crater on the moon’s surface, ejecting a plume of material that might not have seen sunlight in millions of years. Instruments on the orbiting LRO satellite picked up traces of ice crystals and other volatiles, compounds that freeze and are trapped in the cold lunar craters and vaporize when warmed by the sun. As much as 20 percent of the material kicked up by the LCROSS impact was made up of volatiles, including methane, ammonia, hydrogen gas, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. The instruments also discovered relatively large amounts of light metals such as sodium, mercury and possibly even silver. Scientists believe the water and mix of volatiles that LCROSS and LRO detected could be the remnants of a comet impact. According to scientists, these volatile chemical by-products are also evidence of a cycle through which water ice reacts with lunar soil grains.

The proportion of volatiles to water in the lunar soil indicates a process called “cold grain chemistry” is taking place. Scientists have theorized that this process takes thousands of years and could happen on other frigid bodies, like asteroids and moons of other planets.

The moon is more than a giant rock circling Earth; it is a body with its own chemistry and composition that NASA has only just begun to reveal. As NASA looks toward the future for new lunar missions, its knowledge of the moon’s composition could help future explorers. The existence of mostly pure water ice could mean future human explorers won’t have to carry their own water source for valuable life support resources. In addition, an abundant presence of hydrogen gas, ammonia and methane could provide possible sources of fuel for future surface activities. Who knows — in a few decades, lunar astronauts may return to Earth using the moon’s own “lunar fuel.”

 

Perseids Meteor Shower Lights Up the Sky

Marshall scientist Bill Cooke and his team, from the Meteoroid Environment Office at Marshall Space Flight Center, watched the sky during the peak of the Perseid meteor shower. The team used the Marshall meteor cameras the evening of August 12 and into the early morning August 13 to capture images of the Perseids.

 

 
Meteor over Tullahoma, Tennessee 
(Courtesy: NASA/MSFC/Meteoroid Environment Office)
 

The Perseids have been observed for about 2,000 years. The source of the annual meteor shower is the debris trail left behind comet Swift-Tuttle. Each year in August, the Earth passes through a cloud of the comets debris. These bits of ice and dust burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere. Most of the Perseid meteors that we observe now were ejected from Swift-Tuttle about 1,000 years ago.

Cooke and his team answered questions about the Perseids during an Up All Night with NASA web chat. You can read a transcript of the web chat (PDF, 550 Kb) to learn more about the Perseids: what creates them, their composition, how old they are, how fast they travel and other fascinating facts.