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International Space Station (ISS)

STS-120 Mission - Monday, November 5 (Flight day 14)
The two crews spent the morning preparing for Discovery's undocking from the International Space Station. At 10:32 UTC, the orbiter successfully backed away from the Pressurized Mating Adapter on the Destiny Laboratory, and pilot Zamka began the fly-around to allow the shuttle crew to photograph the new configuration of the station. After performing the final separation burn, focused inspection began, to scan the wing leading edges and nose cap, the final analysis that allows the ground team to clear the orbiter for re-entry on Wednesday.

Photo:

Backdropped by the blackness of space and Earth's horizon, the International Space Station is seen from Space Shuttle Discovery as the two spacecraft begin their relative separation.

scared sun

click on the image for better detail

The Sun on June 1 2005 in white light. TOA-130 refractor, Baader helioscope, STL-11000M CCD Camera. Credit: Thierry Legault's Astrophotography

ying and yang moon

credit: josé luis and vicent peris

our newest "neighbour"

Credit & Copyright: Vicent Peris and José Luis Lamadrid (astrofoto.es)

Comet Holmes continues to be an impressive sight to the unaided eye. The comet has diminished in brightness only slightly, and now clearly appears to have a larger angular extent than stars and planets. Astrophotographers have also noted a distinctly green appearance to the comet's coma over the past week. Pictured above over Spain in three digitally combined exposures, Comet 17P/Holmes now clearly sports a tail. The blue ion tail is created by the solar wind impacting ions in the coma of Comet Holmes and pushing them away from the Sun.

Comet Holmes underwent an unexpected and dramatic increase in brightness starting only two weeks ago. The detail visible in Comet Holmes' tail indicates that the explosion of dust and gas that created this dramatic brightness increase is in an ongoing and complex event. Comet Holmes will move only slightly on the sky over during the next month.

credit & copyright: spielgelteam

the majestic giant planet and his rings

Saturn never shows a crescent phase -- from Earth. But when viewed from beyond, the majestic giant planet can show an unfamiliar diminutive silver. This image of crescent Saturn in natural color was taken by the robotic Cassini spacecraft in May. The image captures Saturn's majestic rings from the side of the ring plane opposite the Sun -- the unilluminated side -- another vista not visible from Earth. Pictured are many of Saturn's photogenic wonders, including the subtle colors of cloud bands, the complex shadows of the rings on the planet, the shadow of the planet on the rings, and the moons Mimas (2 o'clock), Janus (4 o'clock), and Pandora (8 o'clock). As Saturn moves towards equinox in 2009, the ring shadows are becoming smaller and moving toward the equator. During equinox, the rings will be nearly invisible from Earth and project only an extremely thin shadow line onto the planet.

jupiter ahead !

The New Horizons spacecraft took some stunning images of Jupiter earlier this year while on the way out to Pluto. Famous for its Great Red Spot, Jupiter is also known for its regular, equatorial cloud bands, visible through even modest sized telescopes.
The above image was taken near Jupiter's terminator, and shows that the Jovian giant possibly has the widest diversity of cloud patterns in our Solar System. On the far left are clouds closest to Jupiter's south pole. Here turbulent whirlpools and swirls are seen in a dark region, dubbed a belt, that rings the planet. Even light colored regions, called zones, show tremendous structure, complete with complex wave patterns. The energy that drives these waves likely comes from below.
New Horizons is the fastest space probe ever launched, and is zipping through the Solar System on track to reach Pluto in 2015.

the red face of andromeda

(click for much, much better detail)

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has captured stunning infrared views of the famous Andromeda galaxy to reveal insights that were only hinted at in visible light.
Spitzer's 24-micron mosaic (top panel) is the sharpest image ever taken of the dust in another spiral galaxy. This is possible because Andromeda is a close neighbor to the Milky Way at a mere 2.5 million light-years away.
The Spitzer multiband imaging photometer's 24-micron detector recorded 11,000 separate snapshots to create this new comprehensive picture. Asymmetrical features are seen in the prominent ring of star formation. The ring appears to be split into two pieces, forming the hole to the lower right. These features may have been caused by interactions with satellite galaxies around Andromeda as they plunge through its disk.
Spitzer also reveals delicate tracings of spiral arms within this ring that reach into the very center of the galaxy. One sees a scattering of stars within Andromeda, but only select stars that are wrapped in envelopes of dust light up at infrared wavelengths.
This is a dramatic contrast to the traditional view at visible wavelengths (lower left panel), which shows the starlight instead of the dust. The center of the galaxy in this view is dominated by a large bulge that overwhelms the inner spirals seen in dust. The dust lanes are faintly visible in places, but only where they can be seen in silhouette against background stars.
The multi-wavelength view of Andromeda (lower right panel) combines images taken at 24 microns (blue), 70 microns (green), and 160 microns (red). Using all three bands from the multiband imaging photometer allows astronomers to measure the temperature of the dust by its color. The warmest dust is brightest at 24 microns while the coolest is most evident at 160 microns. The blue/white areas have the hottest dust, as seen in the bulge and in the star-forming areas along the arms. The cooler dust floating further out in the ring and arms are in the redder regions.
The data were taken on August 25, 2004, the one-year anniversary of the launch of the space telescope. The observations have been transformed into this remarkable gift from Spitzer -- the most detailed infrared image of the spectacular galaxy to date.

your path to divinity

The Aurora Borealis, or Northern Lights, shines above Bear Lake, Alaska.

Author: United States Air Force photo by Senior Airman Joshua Strang.

(inspired by jesu)

a hole in mars

Credit: HiRISE, MRO, LPL (U. Arizona), NASA

In a close-up from the HiRISE instrument onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, this mysterious dark pit, about 150 meters across, lies on the north slope of ancient martian volcano Arsia Mons. Lacking raised rims and other impact crater characteristics, this pit and others like it were originally identified in visible light and infrared images from the Mars Odyssey and Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft.
While the visible light images showed only darkness within, infrared thermal signatures indicated that the openings penetrated deep under the martian surface and perhaps were skylights to underground caverns. In this later image, the pit wall is partially illuminated by sunlight and seen to be nearly vertical, though the bottom, at least 78 meters below, is still not visible. The dark martian pits are thought to be related to collapse pits in the lava flow, similar to Hawaiian volcano pit craters.

the pioneer

Sputnik means "traveling companion". Despite the innocuous sounding name, the launch of planet Earth's first artificial moon, Sputnik 1, by the Soviet Union on October 4, 1957, changed the world and set in motion events which resulted in the creation of NASA and the race to the Moon. Sputnik 1 was a 184 pound, 22 inch diameter sphere with four whip antennas connected to battery powered transmitters. The transmitters broadcast a continuous "beeping" signal to an astounded earthbound audience for 23 days. A short month later, on November 3, the Soviet Union followed this success by launching a dog into orbit aboard Sputnik 2.

iapetus

Credit: Cassini Imaging Team, SSI, JPL, ESA, NASA

What does the surface of Saturn's mysterious moon Iapetus look like? To help find out, the robotic Cassini spacecraft now orbiting Saturn was sent soaring last week just 2,000 kilometers from the unique equatorial ridge of the unusual walnut-shaped two-toned moon. The above image from Cassini is from about 4,000 kilometers out and allows objects under 100-meters across to be resolved. Cassini found an ancient and battered landscape of craters, sloping hills, and mountains as high as 10 kilometers and so rival the 8.8-kilometer height of Mt. Everest on Earth. Just above the center of this image is a small bright patch where an impacting rock might have uncovered deep clean water ice. Space scientists will be studying flyby images like this for clues to the origin of Iapetus' unusual shape and coloring with particular emphasis because no more close flybys of the enigmatic world are planned.

Credit: Cassini Imaging Team, SSI, JPL, ESA, NASA

ladies and gentelmans...blue gene

The IBM® System Blue Gene®/P Solution is designed to operate continuously at speeds exceeding one “petaflop” - or one-quadrillion operations per second. The system is 100,000 times more powerful than a home PC and can process more operations in one second than the combined power of a stack of laptop computers nearly 1.5 miles high. Blue Gene/P can be configured to reach speeds in excess of three petaflops, a performance level that many thought unattainable only a few short years ago.

The Blue Gene® line was born from a visionary IBM initiative to develop a hugely scalable and highly reliable scientific computing platform. With Blue Gene, designers sidestepped two key constraints on state-of-the-art supercomputing - power usage and space requirements. Blue Gene was purpose-built to fit in smaller spaces and use less electricity compared to other commercially available designs. Today, Blue Gene/P is at least seven times more energy efficient than any other supercomputer.The influence of Blue Gene’s super energy-efficient design and computing model -- once considered exotic - can be seen everywhere in the industry where people have attempted to lower energy use and get performance without traditional reliance on chip frequency. The breakthrough BlueGene design uses many small, low-power chips each connected through five specialized networks inside the system.



Like its predecessor, Blue Gene/P is a modular design, composed of “racks” that can be added as requirements grow. Four IBM (850 MHz) PowerPC® 450 processors are integrated on a single Blue Gene/P chip. Each chip is capable of 13.6 billion operations per second. A two-foot-by-two-foot board containing 32 of these chips churns out 435 billion operations every second, making it more powerful than a typical, 40-node cluster based on two-core commodity processors. Thirty-two of the compact boards comprise the 6-foot-high racks.

Each rack runs at 13.9 trillion operations per second, 1,300 times faster than today’s fastest home PC.The one-petaflop Blue Gene/P configuration is a 294,912-processor, 72-rack system harnessed to a high-speed, optical network. Blue Gene/P can be scaled to an 884,736-processor, 216-rack cluster to achieve three-petaflop performance. A standard Blue Gene/P configuration will house 4,096 processors per rack.

For more information, go to: blue gene