How Hard Is It To Become An Austronaut? I Want To Start To Studie Astrophysics And I Don't Know If I'll

China's First Lunar Rover Live-Blogged Its Own Death

The Yutu rover suffered a mysterious “abnormality” over the weekend. And the robot’s microblogged death note may make you cry.

oh gosh!

Tampons were packed with their strings connecting them, like a strip of sausages, so they wouldn’t float away. Engineers asked Ride, “Is 100 the right number?” She would be in space for a week. “That would not be the right number,” she told them. At every turn, her difference was made clear to her. When it was announced Ride had been named to a space flight mission, her shuttle commander, Bob Crippen, who became a lifelong friend and colleague, introduced her as “undoubtedly the prettiest member of the crew.” At another press event, a reporter asked Ride how she would react to a problem on the shuttle: “Do you weep?”

Astronaut Sally Ride and the Burden of Being “The First” (via dinosaurparty)

I mention New Horizons in today’s podcast but here’s some more up-to-date info!

Solar System: Things to Know This Week

Time for a little reconnaissance. 

Our New Horizons spacecraft won’t arrive at its next destination in the distant Kuiper Belt—an object known as 2014 MU69—until New Year’s Day 2019, but researchers are already starting to study its environment thanks to a few rare observational opportunities this summer, including one on July 17. This week, we’re sharing 10 things to know about this exciting mission to a vast region of ancient mini-worlds billions of miles away.

1. First, Some Background 

New Horizons launched on Jan. 19, 2006. It swung past Jupiter for a gravity boost and scientific studies in February 2007, and conducted a six-month reconnaissance flyby study of Pluto and its moons in summer 2015. The mission culminated with the closest approach to Pluto on July 14, 2015. Now, as part of an extended mission, the New Horizons spacecraft is heading farther into the Kuiper Belt.

2. A Kuiper Belt refresher

The Kuiper Belt is a region full of objects presumed to be remnants from the formation of our solar system some 4.6 billion years ago. It includes dwarf planets such as Pluto and is populated with hundreds of thousands of icy bodies larger than 62 miles (100 km) across and an estimated trillion or more comets. The first Kuiper Belt object was discovered in 1992.

3. That’s Pretty Far

When New Horizons flies by MU69 in 2019, it will be the most distant object ever explored by a spacecraft. This ancient Kuiper Belt object is not well understood because it is faint, small, and very far away, located approximately 4.1 billion miles (6.6 billion km) from Earth.

4. Shadow Play 

To study this distant object from Earth, the New Horizons team have used data from the Hubble Space Telescope and the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite to calculate where MU69 would cast a shadow on Earth’s surface as it passes in front of a star, an event known as an occultation.

5. An International Effort 

One occultation occurred on June 3, 2017. More than 50 mission team members and collaborators set up telescopes across South Africa and Argentina, aiming to catch a two-second glimpse of the object’s shadow as it raced across the Earth. Joining in on the occultation observations were NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and Gaia, a space observatory of the European Space Agency (ESA).

6. Piecing Together the Puzzle 

Combined, the pre-positioned mobile telescopes captured more than 100,000 images of the occultation star that can be used to assess the Kuiper Belt object’s environment. While MU69 itself eluded direct detection, the June 3 data provided valuable and surprising insights. “These data show that MU69 might not be as dark or as large as some expected,” said occultation team leader Marc Buie, a New Horizons science team member from Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

7. One Major Missing Piece 

Clear detection of MU69 remains elusive. “These [June 3 occultation] results are telling us something really interesting,” said New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute. “The fact that we accomplished the occultation observations from every planned observing site but didn’t detect the object itself likely means that either MU69 is highly reflective and smaller than some expected, or it may be a binary or even a swarm of smaller bodies left from the time when the planets in our solar system formed.”

8. Another Opportunity 

On July 10, the SOFIA team positioned its aircraft in the center of the shadow, pointing its powerful 100-inch (2.5-meter) telescope at MU69 when the object passed in front of the background star. The mission team will now analyze that data over the next few weeks, looking in particular for rings or debris around MU69 that might present problems for New Horizons when the spacecraft flies by in 2019. “This was the most challenging occultation observation because MU69 is so small and so distant,” said Kimberly Ennico Smith, SOFIA project scientist.

9. The Latest 

On July 17, the Hubble Space Telescope will check for debris around MU69 while team members set up another “fence line” of small mobile telescopes along the predicted ground track of the occultation shadow in southern Argentina.

10. Past to Present 

New Horizons has had quite the journey. Check out some of these mission videos for a quick tour of its major accomplishments and what’s next for this impressive spacecraft.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

Here’s the nose scratching sponge I talked about in Episode 19!

‪This is how astronauts clear our ears (and scratch our noses!) during a spacewalk. ‬

People think they know darkness, and that they experience darkness everyday, but they don’t, really.

Across the United States, natural darkness is an endangered resource. East of the Mississippi, it is already extinct; even in the West, night sky connoisseurs admit that it’s quicker to find true darkness by flying to Alice Springs, Australia, than traveling to anywhere in the lower forty-eight.

Ever since the nation’s first electric streetlight made its debut in Cleveland, on April 29, 1879, the American night has become steadily brighter. In his new book, The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light, Paul Bogard aims to draw attention to the naturally dark night as a landscape in its own right — a separate, incredibly valuable environmental condition that we overlook and destroy at our own peril.

Read More.

I'm reading Starlight Detectives pretty hard cuz new episode goes up on Monday and let me tell you, I now have a very deep appreciation for the photographs we have of space.

Small Magellanic Cloud: Stunning Infrared Image

For the love of all that’s good and proper click here and zoom way into this image. It’s more than beautiful. The fact that it’s infrared means that we’re able to see past a lot of the dust that would otherwise block our view.

(Image credit: ESA/VISTA)

Hubble Hones In on a Hypergiant's Home

NASA - Hubble Space Telescope patch. March 10, 2017

This beautiful Hubble image reveals a young super star cluster known as Westerlund 1, only 15,000 light-years away in our Milky Way neighborhood, yet home to one of the largest stars ever discovered. Stars are classified according to their spectral type, surface temperature, and luminosity. While studying and classifying the cluster’s constituent stars, astronomers discovered that Westerlund 1 is home to an enormous star.  Originally named Westerlund 1-26, this monster star is a red supergiant (although sometimes classified as a hypergiant) with a radius over 1,500 times that of our sun. If Westerlund 1-26 were placed where our sun is in our solar system, it would extend out beyond the orbit of Jupiter.

Hubble orbiting Earth

Most of Westerlund 1’s stars are thought to have formed in the same burst of activity, meaning that they have similar ages and compositions. The cluster is relatively young in astronomical terms —at around three million years old it is a baby compared to our own sun, which is some 4.6 billion years old. For images and more information about Hubble, visit: http://hubblesite.org/ http://www.nasa.gov/hubble http://www.spacetelescope.org/ Image, Video, Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA/Text Credits: European Space Agency/NASA/Karl Hille. Best regards, Orbiter.ch Full article

First Female U.S. Astronaut, Sally Ride, Comes Out In Obituary | BuzzFeed

“I hope it makes it easier for kids growing up gay that they know that another one of their heroes was like them,” Sally Ride’s sister, Bear Ride, said.