Surviving the end of the shuttle problem: how some companies are doing it
Surviving the end of the shuttle problem: how some private companies are doing it.
Year: 2011
China launches communications satellite
China has resumed rocket launches after an August failure, putting a communications satellite into orbit.
This bodes well for the pending launch of the country’s first space station module, Tiangong 1.
Bjork – It’s oh so quiet
An evening pause:
UARS to hit Earth in a week
The sky is falling: The six-ton climate satellite UARS is now expected to crash to Earth within a week.
Webb Telescope budget continues to grow
Bad news for astronomers: The budget for the James Webb Space Telescope continues to swell.
Gordon Lightfoot – Canadian Railroad Trilogy
An evening pause:
Spelling negus
An evening pause: The lurking and sometimes silly taboos of our society.
The reconnaissance satellite Big Bird on display
Worth a look: The U.S. spy satellite Big Bird, the KH-9 Hexagon, will be on public display for the first time tomorrow, for only one day, in the parking lot of the Air and Space Museum’s Udvar-Hazy Center.
A Yellow Supergiant Progenitor of a Massive Star Supernova in M51
The uncertainty of science: Astronomers have determined that the star that went supernova in the Whirlpool Galaxy (M51) in June — making it the nearest supernova in 25 years — was a yellow supergiant star, not an aging red supergiant as predicted by theory. From the preprint paper:
Despite the canonical prediction that Type II supernovae arise from red supergiants, there is mounting evidence that some stars explode as yellow supergiants. A handful of Type II supernovae have been observed to arise from yellow supergiants: supernovae 1993J, 2008cn, and 2009kr. The locations of the progenitors on the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram shows clearly that these stars are not located on the predicted end points for single star stellar evolution tracks. In addition, despite arising from supposedly similar yellow supergiant progenitors, these supernovae display a wide range of properties.
The Hertzsprung-Russell diagram is a graph mapping the color of stars against their luminosity. Because color and brightness change as the star evolves over time, the graph is used by astronomers to track the birth, growth, and death of stars. That these yellow supergiants don’t appear to be at “the predicted end points for single star evolution” on the diagram is a serious problem for the theorists who have tried to explain what causes this particular type of supernova.
Which also means astronomers are still unable to tell us what stars in the sky are most likely to go supernova in the future.
Update on the repairs to the Subaru Telescope
The Subaru Telescope team has posted an update on its repair effort following a July 2nd coolant leak.
Bigelow and Boeing do airbag drop tests on Boeing manned capsule
On Monday Bigelow and Boeing completed successful drop tests in the Mohave Desert of airbags to be used during landings of the Boeing manned capsule. With video.
A Smartphone ap to weigh galaxies
Want to known how much a galaxy weighs? There is now an Android smartphone application, GalMass, for calculating it!