Remember the Rovers?

The Mars Rovers are the robots that were sent to Mars when today's juniors and seniors in high school were still in middle school. They had a three month mission. They've been at it about five years. In fact, just a month ago the rover Spirit celebrated its 2000th "sol", or Martian day. It's been experiencing some rough weather recently- dust storms.

Thr rover Opportunity, on the other hand, has been plodding away. In fact, in the photo below, you can see a photo of Opportunity taken by an orbiting satellite. If you look carefully, you can even see the wheel tracks it has left behind. Opportunity has travelled over 100 meters in a day. It is headed toward an interesting crater named Endeavor. At this rate, it will be thee in about two Earth years.

Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

New lease on life for Hubble

If you are a regular follower of this blog, then you know that last October it carried a story about the Hubble Space telescope upgrade being cancelled. (See http://sms-astro-08.blogspot.com/2008/10/hubble-time-to-say-goodbye.html)

Then of course the astronomy class is not offered again in the spring, so the blog hibernates. Well, last spring the Hubble was in fact rejuvenated- last May, shuttle astronauts did a series of repairs and upgrades and two new instruments were added. The official NASA press release can be found here.

It took three months of calibrations to get the telescope back on line, but today NASA released some of the images taken by the refurbished Hubble. Plans are to observe "Kuiper Belt objects at the fringe of our solar system; survey the birth of planets around other stars; and probe the composition and structure of extrasolar planet atmospheres; take the deepest-ever near-infrared portrait of the universe to reveal never-before-seen infant galaxies that existed when the universe was less than 500 million years old;and shed light on the behavior of dark energy, a repulsive force that is pushing the universe apart at an ever-faster rate."

The picture at the top of this blog gives some idea of the amount of detail the images contain; the image below is of colored stars in a cluster actually zoomable on the Hubble site itself.

Beautiful Astronomy

In class we were discussing telescopes, and how they can show us things our eyes can't see because they collect more light by having bigger "pupils" (apertures.) Another way to collect more light is to spend more TIME collecting the light- this is what cameras do. Dr. Belknap, who is now in Jordan, alerted me to the first annual Astronomy Photographer of the Year contest, sponsored by England's Royal Observatory. Two British newspapers have posted some of the entries on their web sites- the Telegraph and the Guardian.

These are worth looking at- hard to pick a favorite, but the image above is quite nice. It is from the Telegraph site, and is described as

This colourful nebula, known as the Gabriela Mistral Nebula, contains a mass of giant, hot young stars. The bright colours are caused by different chemical elements found in the nebula as energy released from the stars excites the atoms and causes them to glow with different colours of light. It is named after the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral as it is thought to bear a striking resemblance to her in profile.By Steve Crouch