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Space News Update — January 28, 2014 —

Contents

In the News

Story 1:

Yutu Rover Suffers Significant Setback at Start of 2nd Lunar Night

Story 2:

Herschel Telescope Detects Water on Dwarf Planet

Story 3:

NASA Spacecraft Take Aim At Nearby Supernova

Departments

The Night Sky

ISS Sighting Opportunities

NASA-TV Highlights

Space Calendar

Food for Thought

Space Image of the Week

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1. Yutu Rover Suffers Significant Setback at Start of 2nd Lunar Night

This composite view shows the Yutu rover heading south from the Chang’e-3 landing site about a week after the Dec. 14, 2013 touchdown at Mare Imbrium. This cropped view was taken from the 360-degree panorama. See complete 360

degree landing site panorama below. The landers extreme ultraviolet camera is at right. Credit: CNSA/Chinanews/Ken Kremer/Marco Di Lorenzo – kenkremer.com

China’s maiden moon rover ‘Yutu’ has just suffered a significant mechanical setback right at the start of her 2nd lunar night, according to an official announcement from Chinese space officials made public this weekend.

The six wheeled Yutu rover, has “experienced a mechanical control abnormality” in a new report by China’s official government newspaper, The People’s Daily. Yutu was traversing southwards from the landing site as the incident occurred days ago about six weeks into its planned 3 month moon roving expedition.

However very few details have emerged or been released by the Chinese government about Yutu’s condition or fate. “Scientists are organizing repairs,” wrote the People’s Daily.

The abnormality occurred due to the “complicated lunar surface environment,” said the State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defence (SASTIND) in a brief statement, without giving further details, according to the paper.

This situation is serious because the “abnormality” took place just prior to the beginning of the 2nd lunar night and unavoidable ‘dormancy’ for both ‘Jade Rabbit’ and the Chang’e-3 mothership. So it’s not clear at this time if Chinese space engineers were able to take any concrete actions to rectify the unspecified problem before both spacecraft entered their next two week long night time slumber.

The now world famous rover entered its second hibernation at dawn on Saturday, Jan. 25, as the lunar night fell, according to the SASTIND statement. The mothership “fell asleep” a day earlier on Friday, Jan 24. Each

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ship had just completed their 2nd Lunar Day of operations and had apparently been functioning normally and taking planned scientific measurements and imagery.

Based on unofficial accounts, it appears that at least one of the solar panels did not fold back properly over Yutu’s mast after it was lowered to the required horizontal position to shield and protect it from the extremely frigid lunar night time temperatures. That could potentially spell doom for the mast mounted instruments and electronic systems, if true.

The research program during Lunar Day 2 included optical telescope observations of the sky, extreme ultraviolent observations of the Earth’s plasmosphere, subsurface radar measurements, and spectrometric measurements with Yutu’s robotic arm.

Both vehicles depend on their life giving solar panels to produce power in order to function and accomplish their scientific tasks during each Lunar day which lasts approximately 14 days. Likewise, each Lunar night also lasts approximately 14 Earth days.

In order to survive into the next Lunar day, they must each endure the utterly harsh and unforgiving lunar environment when the Moon’s temperatures plunge dramatically to below minus 180 Celsius, or minus 292 degrees Fahrenheit.

So they must enter a sleep mode to conserve energy since there is no sunlight to generate power with the solar arrays during the lunar night.

During the nocturnal hiatus they are kept alive by a radioisotopic heat source that keeps their delicate computer and electronics subsystems warmed inside a box below the deck. It must be maintained at a temperature of about minus 40 degrees Celsius to prevent debilitating damage.

Source: Universe Today Return to Contents

Traverse Path of Yutu rover from Dec. 14 landing to Dec. 21. Landscape textured with Chang’e 3 imagery from space and ground.

Credit: CNSA/BACC

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2. Herschel Telescope Detects Water on Dwarf Planet

Dwarf planet Ceres is located in the main asteroid belt, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, as illustrated in this artist's conception.

Image Credit: ESA/ATG medialab

Scientists using the Herschel space observatory have made the first definitive detection of water vapor on the

largest and roundest object in the asteroid belt, Ceres. Plumes of water vapor are thought to shoot up

periodically from Ceres when portions of its icy surface warm slightly. Ceres is classified as a dwarf planet, a

solar system body bigger than an asteroid and smaller than a planet.

Herschel is a European Space Agency (ESA) mission with important NASA contributions.

"This is the first time water vapor has been unequivocally detected on Ceres or any other object in the asteroid

belt and provides proof that Ceres has an icy surface and an atmosphere," said Michael Küppers of ESA in

Spain, lead author of a paper in the journal Nature.

The results come at the right time for NASA's Dawn mission, which is on its way to Ceres now after spending

more than a year orbiting the large asteroid Vesta. Dawn is scheduled to arrive at Ceres in the spring of 2015,

where it will take the closest look ever at its surface. "We've got a spacecraft on the way to Ceres, so we

don't have to wait long before getting more context on this intriguing result, right from the source itself," said

Carol Raymond, the deputy principal investigator for Dawn at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena,

Calif. "Dawn will map the geology and chemistry of the surface in high resolution, revealing the processes that

drive the outgassing activity."

For the last century, Ceres was known as the largest asteroid in our solar system. But in 2006, the

International Astronomical Union, the governing organization responsible for naming planetary objects,

reclassified Ceres as a dwarf planet because of its large size. It is roughly 590 miles (950 kilometers) in

diameter. When it first was spotted in 1801, astronomers thought it was a planet orbiting between Mars and

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Jupiter. Later, other cosmic bodies with similar orbits were found, marking the discovery of our solar system's

main belt of asteroids.

Scientists believe Ceres contains rock in its interior with a thick mantle of ice that, if melted, would amount to

more fresh water than is present on all of Earth. The materials making up Ceres likely date from the first few

million years of our solar system's existence and accumulated before the planets formed. Until now, ice had

been theorized to exist on Ceres but had not been detected conclusively. It took Herschel's far-infrared vision

to see, finally, a clear spectral signature of the water vapor. But Herschel did not see water vapor every time it

looked. While the telescope spied water vapor four different times, on one occasion there was no signature.

Here is what scientists think is happening: when Ceres swings through the part of its orbit that is closer to the

sun, a portion of its icy surface becomes warm enough to cause water vapor to escape in plumes at a rate of

about 6 kilograms (13 pounds) per second. When Ceres is in the colder part of its orbit, no water escapes.

The strength of the signal also varied over hours, weeks and months, because of the water vapor plumes

rotating in and out of Herschel's views as the object spun on its axis. This enabled the scientists to localize the

source of water to two darker spots on the surface of Ceres, previously seen by NASA's Hubble Space

Telescope and ground-based telescopes. The dark spots might be more likely to outgas because dark material

warms faster than light material. When the Dawn spacecraft arrives at Ceres, it will be able to investigate

these features.

The results are somewhat unexpected because comets, the icier cousins of asteroids, are known typically to

sprout jets and plumes, while objects in the asteroid belt are not.

"The lines are becoming more and more blurred between comets and asteroids," said Seungwon Lee of JPL,

who helped with the water vapor models along with Paul von Allmen, also of JPL. "We knew before about

main belt asteroids that show comet-like activity, but this is the first detection of water vapor in an asteroid-

like object."

The research is part of the Measurements of 11 Asteroids and Comets Using Herschel (MACH-11) program,

which used Herschel to look at small bodies that have been or will be visited by spacecraft, including the

targets of NASA's previous Deep Impact mission and upcoming Origins Spectral Interpretation Resource

Identification Security Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-Rex). Laurence O' Rourke of the European Space Agency is

the principal investigator of the MACH-11 program.

Herschel is a European Space Agency mission, with science instruments provided by consortia of European

institutes and with important participation by NASA. While the observatory stopped making science

observations in April 2013, after running out of liquid coolant, as expected, scientists continue to analyze its

data. NASA's Herschel Project Office is based at JPL. JPL contributed mission-enabling technology for two of

Herschel's three science instruments. The NASA Herschel Science Center, part of the Infrared Processing and

Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, supports the U.S. astronomical

community.

Source: NASA Return to Contents

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3. NASA Spacecraft Take Aim At Nearby Supernova

This Swift UVOT image shows M82 after the new supernova. The view showing SN 2014J (arrow) merges three exposures taken on

Jan. 22, 2014. Mid-ultraviolet light is shown in blue, near-UV light in green, and visible light in red. The image is 17 arcminutes across,

or slightly more than half the apparent diameter of a full moon. Image Credit: NASA/Swift/P. Brown, TAMU

An exceptionally close stellar explosion discovered on Jan. 21 has become the focus of observatories around and

above the globe, including several NASA spacecraft. The blast, designated SN 2014J, occurred in the galaxy M82

and lies only about 12 million light-years away. This makes it the nearest optical supernova in two decades and

potentially the closest type Ia supernova to occur during the life of currently operating space missions.

To make the most of the event, astronomers have planned observations with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space

Telescope and NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR), Fermi

Gamma-ray Space Telescope, and Swift missions.

As befits its moniker, Swift was the first to take a look. On Jan. 22, just a day after the explosion was discovered,

Swift's Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope (UVOT) captured the supernova and its host galaxy.

Remarkably, SN 2014J can be seen on images taken up to a week before anyone noticed its presence. It was only

when Steve Fossey and his students at the University of London Observatory imaged the galaxy during a brief

workshop that the supernova came to light.

"Finding and publicizing new supernova discoveries is often the weak link in obtaining rapid observations, but once

we know about it, Swift frequently can observe a new object within hours," said Neil Gehrels, the mission's principal

investigator at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

Although the explosion is unusually close, the supernova's light is attenuated by thick dust clouds in its galaxy,

which may slightly reduce its apparent peak brightness.

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"Interstellar dust preferentially scatters blue light, which is why Swift's UVOT sees SN 2014J brightly in visible and

near-ultraviolet light but barely at all at mid-ultraviolet wavelengths," said Peter Brown, an astrophysicist at Texas

A&M University who leads a team using Swift to obtain ultraviolet observations of supernovae.

However, this super-close supernova provides astronomers with an important opportunity to study how interstellar

dust affects its light. As a class, type Ia supernovae explode with remarkably similar intrinsic brightness, a property

that makes them useful "standard candles" -- some say "standard bombs" -- for exploring the distant universe.

Brown notes that X-rays have never been conclusively observed from a type Ia supernova, so a detection by Swift's

X-ray Telescope, Chandra or NuSTAR would be significant, as would a Fermi detection of high-energy gamma

rays.A type Ia supernova represents the total destruction of a white dwarf star by one of two possible scenarios. In

one, the white dwarf orbits a normal star, pulls a stream of matter from it, and gains mass until it reaches a critical

threshold and explodes. In the other, the blast arises when two white dwarfs in a binary system eventually spiral

inward and collide.

Either way, the explosion produces a superheated shell of plasma that expands outward into space at tens of

millions of miles an hour. Short-lived radioactive elements formed during the blast keep the shell hot as it expands.

The interplay between the shell's size, transparency and radioactive heating determines when the supernova

reaches peak brightness. Astronomers expect SN 2014J to continue brightening into the first week of February, by

which time it may be visible in binoculars.

M82, also known as the Cigar Galaxy, is located in the constellation Ursa Major and is a popular target for small

telescopes. M82 is undergoing a powerful episode of star formation that makes it many times brighter than our own

Milky Way galaxy and accounts for its unusual and photogenic appearance.

Source: NASA Return to Contents

This sky map shows the location of galaxy M82, the Cigar Galaxy, in relation to constellations in the January night sky as seen at 9 p.m. local time from mid-northern latitudes. The galaxy is home to a new supernova that was discovered on Jan. 21, 2014. Source: Space.com

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The Night Sky

Source: Sky and Telescope Return to Contents

Tuesday, January 28

Algol is at minimum brightness for a couple hours centered on 7:00 p.m. EST. In Wednesday's dawn, look for the eerily thin waning crescent Moon below Venus now. They're low in the southeast, as shown here.

Wednesday, January 29

Jupiter this month turns the Winter Triangle into a bigger, brighter Winter Diamond. Its bottom is Sirius, its two side corners are Betelgeuse and Procyon, and Jupiter forms its top. The diamond tilts leftward in early evening and stands vertically in the south around 10 p.m. (depending on your location).

Thursday, January 30

You may be familiar with the Double Cluster in Perseus. But do you know the clusters Stock 2, King 4, Trumpler 2, and NGC 957 right near it? Pick them out with Sue French's Deep-Sky Wonders article and chart in the February Sky & Telescope, page 56.

Back in the evening sky, the waxing Moon passes Mercury after sundown.

Friday, January 31

The Moon is back in the evening sky, as a thin waxing crescent to the lower right of Mercury. Look very low above the west-southwest horizon in twilight, as shown here.

Saturday, February 1

Mercury shines below the thin crescent Moon low in the west-southwest after sunset, as shown here.

Jupiter's moon Ganymede casts its tiny black shadow onto Jupiter from 5:42 to 8:22 p.m. EST. Jupiter's Great Red Spot crosses the planet's central meridian around 11:48 p.m. EST (8:48 p.m. PST).

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ISS Sighting Opportunities

Sighting information for other cities can be found at NASA’s Satellite Sighting Information

NASA-TV Highlights (all times Eastern Time Zone)

January 30, Thursday 10:10 a.m. - ISS Expedition 38 In-Flight Interview - JSC (All Channels) January 31, Friday 10:45 a.m. - ISS Expedition 38 In-Flight Interview with Space.com - JSC (All Channels)

Watch NASA TV online by going to the NASA website. Return to Contents

Date Visible Max Height Appears Disappears

Tue. Jan 28, 6;39 AM 1 min 17° 10 above W 11 above S

Wed Jan 29, 5:52 AM 3 min 30° 30 above WSW 10 above ESE

Thu. Jan 30, 5:06 AM 1 min 23° 23 above ESE 11 above SE

The rotation of the Earth captured in the trails of the

stars over Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Jan 23, 2014. NASA’s latest Tracking & Data Relay Satellite, TDRS-L, is seen

here hitching a fiery ride to orbit atop an Atlas-V rocket, as viewed from the Turn Basin on Kennedy Space Center just a

few miles away.

Credit: Mike Killian/www.MikeKillianPhotogra

phy.com/AmericaSpace

Source: Universe Today

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Space Calendar

Jan 28 - Comet P/2014 A3 (PANSTARRS) At Opposition (3.073 AU)

Jan 28 - Comet P/2014 A3 (PANSTARRS) Closest Approach To Earth (3.073 AU)

Jan 28 - Comet 267P/LONEOS At Opposition (3.190 AU)

Jan 28 - Asteroid 1179 Mally Occults HIP 7097 (3.6 Magnitude Star)

Jan 28 - Asteroid 2012 BX34 Near-Earth Flyby (0.025 AU)

Jan 28 - Asteroid 2791 Paradise Closest Approach To Earth (1.141 AU)

Jan 28 - Asteroid 58671 Diplodocus Closest Approach To Earth (1.724 AU)

Jan 28 - Asteroid 6030 Zolensky Closest Approach To Earth (2.227 AU)

Jan 29 - Comet 89P/Russell At Opposition (4.165 AU)

Jan 29 - 25th Anniversary (1989), Phobos 2, Mars Orbit Insertion

Jan 30 - Cassini, Orbital Trim Maneuver #370 (OTM-370)

Jan 30 - Comet 7P/Pons-Winnecke At Opposition (2.607 AU)

Jan 30 - Asteroid 4013 Ogiria Occults HIP 8588 (5.9 Magnitude Star)

Jan 30 - Asteroid 16155 Buddy Closest Approach To Earth (1.479 AU)

Jan 30 - Asteroid 4149 Harrison Closest Approach To Earth (1.742 AU)

Jan 30 - Asteroid 15402 Suzaku Closest Approach To Earth (1.889 AU)

Jan 31 - Mercury At Its Greatest Eastern Elongation (18 Degrees)

Jan 31 - Comet 249P/LINEAR At Opposition (3.914 AU)

Jan 31 - Asteroid 2008 CM20 Near-Earth Flyby (0.086 AU)

Jan 31 - Asteroid 2985 Shakespeare Closest Approach To Earth (1.987 AU)

Source: JPL Space Calendar Return to Contents

A promotional image from Sierra Nevada Corp. for the planned launch of the Dream Chaser on an Atlas V from Kennedy Space Center. Credit: SNC.

Commercial space company Sierra Nevada Corporation and NASA announced plans January 23 to launch an orbital test flight of the Dream Chaser vehicle in 2016, and that they plan to use processing facilities at Kennedy Space Center as well as land the vehicle at NASA’s Shuttle Landing Facility in Florida.

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Food for Thought

Black Holes No More? Not Quite.

Artist concept of matter swirling around a black hole. (NASA/Dana Berry/SkyWorks Digital)

Nature News has announced that there are no black holes. This claim is made by none other than Stephen Hawking, so does this mean black holes are no more? It depends on whether Hawking’s new idea is right, and on what you mean be a black hole. The claim is based on a new paper by Hawking that argues the event horizon of a black hole doesn’t exist.

The event horizon of a black hole is basically the point of no return when approaching a black hole. In Einstein’s theory of general relativity, the event horizon is where space and time are so warped by gravity that you can never escape. Cross the event horizon and you can only move inward, never outward. The problem with a one-way event horizon is that it leads to what is known as the information paradox.

The information paradox has its origin in thermodynamics, specifically the second law of thermodynamics. In its simplest form it can be summarized as “heat flows from hot objects to cold objects”. But the law is more useful when it is expressed in terms of entropy. In this way it is stated as “the entropy of a system can never decrease.” Many people interpret entropy as the level of disorder in a system, or the unusable part of a system. That would mean things must always become less useful over time. But entropy is really about the level of information you need to describe a system. An ordered system (say, marbles evenly spaced in a grid) is easy to describe because the objects have simple relations to each other. On the other hand, a disordered system (marbles randomly scattered) take more information to describe, because there isn’t a simple pattern to them. So when the second law says that entropy can never decrease, it is say that the physical information of a system cannot decrease. In other words, information cannot be destroyed.

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The problem with event horizons is that you could toss an object (with a great deal of entropy) into a black hole, and the entropy would simply go away. In other words, the entropy of the universe would get smaller, which would violate the second law of thermodynamics. Of course this doesn’t take into account quantum effects, specifically what is known as Hawking radiation, which Stephen Hawking first proposed in 1974.

The original idea of Hawking radiation stems from the uncertainty principle in quantum theory. In quantum theory there are limits to what can be known about an object. For example, you cannot know an object’s exact energy. Because of this uncertainty, the energy of a system can fluctuate spontaneously, so long as its average remains constant. What Hawking demonstrated is that near the event horizon of a black hole pairs of particles can appear, where one particle becomes trapped within the event horizon (reducing the black holes mass slightly) while the other can escape as radiation (carrying away a bit of the black hole’s energy).

Because these quantum particles appear in pairs, they are “entangled” (connected in a quantum way). This doesn’t matter much, unless you want Hawking radiation to radiate the information contained within the black hole. In Hawking’s original formulation, the particles appeared randomly, so the radiation emanating from the black hole was purely random. Thus Hawking radiation would not allow you to recover any trapped information.

To allow Hawking radiation to carry information out of the black hole, the entangled connection between particle pairs must be broken at the event horizon, so that the escaping particle can instead be entangled with the information-carrying matter within the black hole. This breaking of the original entanglement would make the escaping particles appear as an intense “firewall” at the surface of the event horizon. This would mean that anything falling toward the black hole wouldn’t make it into the black hole. Instead it would be vaporized by Hawking radiation when it reached the event horizon. It would seem then that either the physical information of an object is lost when it falls into a black hole (information paradox) or objects are vaporized before entering a black hole (firewall paradox).

In this new paper, Hawking proposes a different approach. He argues that rather than instead of gravity warping space and time into an event horizon, the quantum fluctuations of Hawking radiation create a layer turbulence in that region. So instead of a sharp event horizon, a black hole would have an apparent horizon that looks like an event horizon, but allows information to leak out. Hawking argues that the turbulence would be so great that the information leaving a black hole would be so scrambled that it is effectively irrecoverable.

If Stephen Hawking is right, then it could solve the information/firewall paradox that has plagued theoretical physics. Black holes would still exist in the astrophysics sense (the one in the center of our galaxy isn’t going anywhere) but they would lack event horizons. It should be stressed that Hawking’s paper hasn’t been peer reviewed, and it is a bit lacking on details. It is more of a presentation of an idea rather than a detailed solution to the paradox. Further research will be needed to determine if this idea is the solution we’ve been looking for.

Source: Universe Today Return to Contents

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Space Image of the Week

From the Northern to the Southern Cross Image Credit & Copyright: Nicholas Buer

Explanation: There is a road that connects the Northern to the Southern Cross but you have to be

at the right place and time to see it. The road, as pictured above, is actually the central band of our

Milky Way Galaxy; the right place, in this case, is dark Laguna Cejar in Salar de Atacama of Northern

Chile; and the right time was in early October, just after sunset. Many sky wonders were captured

then, including the bright Moon, inside the Milky Way arch; Venus, just above the Moon; Saturn and

Mercury, just below the Moon; the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds satellite galaxies, on the far

left; red airglow near the horizon on the image left; and the lights of small towns at several locations

across the horizon. One might guess that composing this 30-image panorama would have been a

serene experience, but for that one would have required earplugs to ignore the continued brays of

wild donkeys.

Source: NASA APOD Return to Contents