Evening passes for the ISS (International Space Station) and the Shuttle in Chicago

A number of visible passes for Chicago this week:

http://www.heavens-above.com/PassSummary.aspx?satid=25544&lat=41.781312&lng=-87.605097&loc=Chicago&alt=0&tz=CST

Hayabusa coming home

An amazing comeback for the little falcon that could--


Credit: ISAS / JAXA / Øyvind Guldbrandsen / Planetary Society Blog

The Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa will be returning to Earth with perhaps a sample of the asteroid Itokawa in just four days. This spacecraft has had as many setbacks in the seven years it's been running as you can have without losing the craft completely. When they released the data archive in 2007 I made a color image of Earth made by Hayabusa during a flyby and some more surface close-ups here.

Live video feed from the International Space Station

This is great; I've been holding off on sharing this because I felt like it was too special to share widely. But here's the deal--there is a live video feed on the International Space Station. And usually it's pointing out at Earth. So literally you can watch the Earth go by live. You can experience sunrise and sunset in orbit. You can see the biggest cities' light pollution on the dark part of the orbit and sun glints of the Pacific or the swirls in the clouds in the Southern Ocean.

Here's the Live ISS video feed. If you stop the video, reload the page rather than restarting the video; otherwise regular NASA TV will start up.

See where the ISS is via http://www.heavens-above.com/orbit.aspx?satid=25544&lat=41.781312&lng=-87.605097&loc=Chicago&alt=0&tz=CST and http://www.n2yo.com
.

There are some parts of the orbit with no video download. It is also sensitive to the TDRSS capacity.

While writing this, I am watching sunrise on the ISS just south of South Africa. It is beautiful.

Gorgeous rocket failure

Spaceweather has a photo

Some video

ISS and Space Shuttle passes next few evenings

UPDATE 7/08/2009: Current Passes here.

We get some reasonably good passes of the International Space Station and the Shuttle here in Chicago the next few evenings. Take a look. The Shuttle will dock in three days at the ISS, so until then watch for the Shuttle trailing the ISS in the orbit. You might even see them quite close together in the sky during the pass.

UPDATE 5/13/2009: Current passes here.

Satellite collision: story to watch for future complications

Two satellites collided in orbit two days ago, creating a spray of debris that will have to be closely watched to avoid further collisions. One satellite was an Iridium, one of the 88 or so in orbit (I see it was #33), and the other was a non-functioning Russian Cosmos satellite. I hope the Cosmos had either ejected the nuclear reactor that some of them use or was non-nuclear. I see another nuclear Cosmos had a problem recently. What's interesting about this collision was the height: at 490 miles, the debris is fairly high enough to have some significant lifetime. As debris densities increase, chances of collision greatly increase, greatly increasing debris densities, increasing collisions, which... you get the idea. These sort of things are really bad for our near Earth environment.

Here's a graph of the two orbits. It was a bad high energy collision.

UPDATE: Animation of the two satellites colliding (in a virtual sense).

Big Picture does the ISS.

The Big Picture does the ISS. I just watched the ISS and Shuttle pass by to the north last evening and fade into darkness. There are still some times to see it pass in Chicago.



via Bad Astronomy

Inbound bolide: 2008 TC3

Astronomers have discovered a small inbound object a few meters across that appears to be on an impact course with the Earth. The object may enter the Earth's atmosphere somewhere over Europe or North Africa just after 2:30AM UT Tuesday (9:30PM CDT tonight). The orbit is uncertain enough to have a number of possible interactions with the Earth, including missing entirely. It is small enough, based on its brightness, to cause no concern, but should be a nice bright fireball and might drop some meteorites. The self-assigned ID is 8TA9D69, and it was discovered on Mt. Lemmon near Tucson, Arizona by the Mt. Lemmon Sky Survey.
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/mpml/message/21070

Update: It's now designated 2008 TC3
http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/mpec/K08/K08T50.html

Kaguya: Color on the Moon

I was perusing (as best as possible without reading Japanese) the currently released images of the Moon from the Japanese spacecraft Kaguya when I encountered this one. You nearly forget all the images are in color when all you are looking at is the nearly monochrome Moon.

Click to enlarge to HDTV resolution

ISS passes for Chicago

If the Shuttle launches as planned in a few days on the 7th, the ISS will be positioned for good viewing during the time the Shuttle is near or docked with the space station, which is three days after launch, and until it undocks 10 days into the mission.

In other satellite news, the decaying spy satellite might be visible to you in the morning before it deorbits.

Probable Future APOD from Cassini

NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute -- click to enlarge
Mimas is an old and quite battered moon. You know, the one that's 'That's No Moon', right? What's neat is that it's surface is ancient: you can date how old a surface is in the solar system by measuring the crater density. Such an old icy surface has been darkened to an albedo of 0.50 (50% reflectivity). And it compares so dramatically against the next moon out, Encedalus, which has fewer craters and is the brightest surface in the solar system: an albedo of 0.99 (99% of light reflects back from it).

The Cassini spacecraft peers through the fine, smoke-sized ice particles of Saturn's F ring toward the cratered face of Mimas. The F ring's core, which contains significantly larger particles, is dense enough to completely block the light from Mimas.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Nov. 18, 2007. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 772,000 kilometers from Mimas

This one is nice.
But this one is in color!

Via Planetary Society Blog, a Cassini image that will likely be a future Astronomy Picture of the Day.

Space Shuttle and ISS visibility in Chicago

The International Space Station is back being visible in the Chicago evening sky for the next 10 days, and the Space Shuttle is expected to launch in two days, so if the weather clears up here we'll have some great passes. The passes on the 4th, 5th, and 6th are all very good and the ISS will be fairly high in the sky at maximum elevation, although it's snowing heavily right now here for tonight's pass.

The Earth and Moon from Kaguya

Kaguya is a Japanese moon orbiter that is sending back HD video.
And awesome images.

Incoming asteroid--errr, satellite

Astronomers at the Catalina Sky Survey near Tucson discovered an object on November 7th and when the orbit was calculated it was a Near Earth Object (or NEO) and would barely pass by Earth in only five days time. By barely, it was calculated at only a Earth's diameter away--a little under 8,000 miles.

Photometric measurements suggested the object was 20m in diameter, which is pretty big as things go--the Meteor Crater parent body was estimated at 30-50m.

But as Russian astronomer Denis Denisenko noted on the MPML, the object had a peculiar orbit: it passed quite close by Mars at nearly the same time as an ESA orbiter called Rosetta. See a view at Mars here. And, Rosetta happens to have the largest solar panels short of the ISS, two 14 meter long panels that make 64 square meters in total, matching the expected brightness of the object. Sure enough, Rosetta is due at Earth for a orbit changing interaction with Earth in five days so it can rendezvous with a comet in 2014. The people in charge of maintaining minor planet orbits decried the lack of coordination between the artificial satellite organizations and the minor planet community--as satellites are launched it's easy to watch them go away, but the NEO watchers are rightfully concerned about inbound objects, and the data about spacecraft outside of near-Earth space is skimpy.

Space station and Shuttle passes over Chicago

Why, yes, there are visible passes for them tonight.

Link to Heavens-Above.

50th anniversary of Sputnik

Things have been very busy and as a result I've been unable to post--but today is the 50th anniversary of man's entry into space with the launch of Sputnik. Last night the visitors to the Ryerson Astronomical Society's Wednesday viewing saw the largest satellite (artificial) in orbit: the International Space Station, as it rose above the horizon, passed Jupiter, and went into the Earth's shadow. Tonight in Chicago, you can see it twice, once at 6:57PM and again, once around the Earth, at 8:30PM. Details are always at Heavens-Above.

P.S. It's also World Space Week. Go to the RAS lecture on Monday about Sputnik.

French whine about spy satellite disclosure

Via an article in the Inquirer and the original Space.com article, the French military is threatening to publish US spy satellite orbital data, which has been left out of the official US catalog of orbiting objects. Amateur satellite observers find this stupid and just figure out the orbits themselves. What the French really want is a quid pro quo agreement to not publish French spy satellite orbits. But of course, all it takes are a couple of people with clocks watching the sky to figure the orbit, so why hide the orbit elements in the first place?

The French discovered these uncataloged satellites via radar returns. The US has a fence of VHF radars across the southern US, known as NAVSPASPUR, that can detect nearly every satellite in LEO orbit over a short time period. Amateurs can pick up the radar returns from meteors and other objects from these transmitters.

Rhea

Emily Lakdawalla at the Planetary Society Blog has spliced together Cassini images of Rhea and done a fantastic job of creating a massive image of a crescent Rhea.

It's really big, and really awesome. This deeply cratered moon is the second largest Saturnian satellite, with a bright (but not snow white) albedo.

Just saw the Space Station and the Shuttle

I just ran out and saw the Space Station and the ISS passing to the north, a touch dimmer than Jupiter. If I were inclined, I could see them in the west on their next orbit, but it's quite low. Tomorrow's pass in Chicago is perfect--let's hope the weather cooperates.

Good passes of the space station over Chicago for the next few days

Wednesday the 15th, starting at 9:43:32PM, reaches 10 degrees above the NW horizon, maximum altitude of 33 degrees at 9:46:11 in the NNE and fades into shadow then.

Thursday the 16th, two good passes:
8:31:17PM, reaches 10 degrees elevation in the NNW,
8:33:23 maximum elevation of 18 degrees in the NNE,
lowers to 10 degree elevation at 8:35:29 in the ENE

The very next orbit (i.e., you could record the time it takes the space station to completely orbit the earth!):
10:05:53PM, reaches 10 degrees elevation in the NW,
10:07:36 maximum elevation of 32 degrees in the NW and fades into shadow then.

Friday the 17th,
8:53:27PM, reaches 10 degrees elevation in the NW,
8:56:08 maximum elevation of 32 degrees in the NNE;
fades into shadow at 8:57:41 at 19 degrees above eastern horizon.

On Saturday the 18th, a fantastic pass, right overhead!
It reaches 10 degrees elevation at 9:15:45PM in the NW, passes overhead at 9:18:38, and passes into shadow at 9:19:09PM 57 degrees above the ESE horizon.

All predictions are from Heavens-Above.

Again, what you'll see is a moving, steady point of light that may be one of the brighter objects in the evening sky, possibly brighter than Jupiter, which is shining in the south. If the object has more than one light, or blinks, you are seeing an aircraft. The color can range from pure white to orange; it's orange when the solar panels on the station are facing the right way; it also fades into an orange when the sun is setting at the space station.

I have some images from last month's Space Shuttle mission to the ISS here.