Oh My Gosh This Is Incredibly Exciting! Imagine Combining Them With A Star Wars LEGO Set...

Happy long weekend to folks in the US who are lucky enough to HAVE a long weekend! I finally fulfilled my promise to bring you an episode on comets—I didn’t last month but I had a good reason, and that reason was black holes. Now you can learn about comets! I’ve likewise talked about comets before, but now I go in-depth on what they are, some great comets throughout human history, and some of the missions we’ve sent out to collect info on comets.

Below the cut are the glossary, transcript, a timeline of all the people I mention, sources, and music credits. Send me any topic suggestions via Tumblr message (you don’t need an account to do this, just submit as anonymous). You can also tweet at me on Twitter at @HDandtheVoid, or you can ask me to my face if you know me in real life. Subscribe on iTunes to get the new episodes of my semi-monthly podcast, and please please please rate and review it. Go ahead and tell friends if you think they’d like to hear it, too!

(The next episode is... not decided, or even thought about much. It’ll go up at the end of June if I come up with a topic, though!)

Glossary

coma - the cloud of dust and gas particles that is burned off of a comet and trails behind it, helping to form the comet’s tail.

comet - a small, icy body that orbits the Sun. When its orbit takes it close to the Sun, the comet warms up and releases gases and debris that produce a visible atmosphere, sometimes called the comet’s tail. (ep. 8, 9, 33)

hyperbolic comets - comets which will only ever enter our solar system once.

long period comets - comets come near our Sun for brief times every few thousand years, following egg-shaped elliptical orbits that often send them beyond Pluto before they return to the Sun.

short-period comets - comets that orbit the Sun closely and show up at regular intervals.

sungrazing comets - comets which come within about 850,000 miles from the Sun at their perihelion, though many of these kinds of comets come even closer, to within a few thousand miles at perihelion.

perihelion - a comet’s closest approach to the Sun in its orbit.

Transcript

Timeline

Ephorus of Cyme (c. 400-330 BCE), Greek

Taqi ad-Din (1526–1585), Turkish

Tycho Brahe (1546-1601), Danish

Gottfried Kirch (1639-1710), German

Isaac Newton (1643-1727), English

Eusebio Kino (1645-1711), Spanish

Edmund Halley (1656-1742), English

Battista Donati (1826-1873), Italian

Jérôme Eugène Coggia (1849-1919), French

Heinrich Kreutz (1854-1907), German

Frank Skjellerup (1875-1952), Australian

Edmundo Maristany (1895-1983), Argentinian

Sylvain Arend (1902-1992), Belgian

Georges Roland (1922-1991), Belgian

Eugene Shoemaker (1928-1997), American

Carolyn Shoemaker (1929- ), American

Tsutomu Seki (1930- ), Japanese

Richard Martin West (1941- ), Danish

Kaoru Ikeya (1943- ), Japanese

David H. Levy (1948- ), Canadian

Thomas Bopp (1949-2018), American

Yuji Hyakutake (1950- ), Japanese

Robert McNaught (1956- ), Scottish-Australian

Alan Hale (1958- ), American

Terry Lovejoy (1966- ), Australian

Sources

Comets via Cool Cosmos (August 2013)

Comet Introduction via Views of the Solar System

On Hyperbolic Comets by David W. Hughes (1991)

What is a Sungrazing Comet? via NASA (July 2013)

Missions to Comets via NASA

Galileo via NASA

Shoemaker-Levy 9 via NASA

Rosetta Images via ESA (video)

Rosetta spacecraft image archive complete via EarthSky (June 2018)

Intro Music: ‘Better Times Will Come’ by No Luck Club off their album Prosperity

Filler Music: ‘Stories We Build/Stories We Tell’ by José González off his album Vestiges & Claws

Outro Music: ‘Fields of Russia’ by Mutefish off their album On Draught

Does space have a standard time or do you rely on the time zones on Earth while you are in space?

Great question.  Really it is up to the particular space agency/mission which time zone they use.  For example, since the International Space Station is a collaboration between NASA, the Russian Space Agency, the European Space Agency, the Japanese Space Agency, and the Canadian Space Agency, we came up with the compromise of operating on Greenwich Mean Time (GMT).  So, Space Station time is the same as London time!  The International Space Station orbits our planet every 90 minutes, so of course we’re transiting across multiple time zones constantly.  

Ep. 19 Astronauts - Long-Term Space Living - HD and the Void

How to astronauts shower? How many astronauts are on the International Space Station right now? How do you pack enough food for them? What kind of comfortable housing options are available when orbiting Earth? What can you pack and not pack? All t...

I imagine most people wanted to be astronauts when they learned it was a job they could have - I certainly did! And then I thought about it and realized podcasting about outer space was much less scary and much more achievable than becoming an astronaut, with the bonus of not having to wonder how hard I’d panic in an enclosed-yet-surrounded-by-vastness space. There have been a lot of people braver than me who went to space, and some of them went to space on long-term missions lasting months or a year, living on the International Space Station (or the historical equivalent, depending on when in history this happened). Learn what resources are available to ISS astronauts, and what risks there are out there (apart from the obvious ones).

Sorry I missed last week, but it was New Year’s and I don’t feel very guilty. Get excited about more space podcasts in 2018, though! Below the cut are my sources, music credits, a vocab list, and the transcript of this episode. I bolded any videos or sources that I mentioned in the podcast, if you’re looking for those specifically. Go ahead and suggest what you think I should research next by messaging me here, tweeting at me at @HDandtheVoid, or asking me to my face if you know me. Please subscribe on iTunes, rate it and maybe review it, and tell friends if you think they’d like to hear it! 

(My thoughts on the next episode are more about astronauts, or I could go into the transit of Venus. I have a couple books about space I should really get into reading… The next episode will go up January 22nd.)

Glossary

free fall - the downward movement of an object that is due to the force of gravity alone.

gravity - the phenomenon which causes all things with mass to move towards each other. On the universal scale, this is caused by the warping of spacetime by objects with large mass, e.g. stars and planets, and is explained through Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

microgravity - the state of perpetual free fall in a gravity field.

orbit - the gravitationally curved trajectory of an object, e.g. the trajectory of a satellite around a planet.

Script/Transcript

Sources

Yuri Gagarin via NASA 

Microgravity via NASA (Feb 2012)

The history of astronaut life via the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum

Menstruation in space via National Geographic (Apr 2016)

The Air We Breathe via the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center

Breathing Easy on the Space Station via NASA (Nov 2000)

Jay Perry: “the chemical-mechanical systems are much more compact, less labor intensive, and more reliable than a plant-based system.”

Astronaut’s Home Videos Show How to Cook in Space via Space.com (Mar 2013)

Astronaut Hygiene: How to Wash Your Hair In Space (Video) via Space.com (July 2013)

Interview with former astronaut Prof. Jeremy Hoffman via the University of Leicester

A day in the life aboard the International Space Station via NASA (2015)

Zvezda Module Overview via NASA

Food for Space Flight via Nasa (Feb 2004)

John Glenn via NASA (Feb 2012)

Crew From U.S., Russia and Japan Expands Space Population to Six via NASA (Dec 2017)

ISS blog with experiment updates via NASA 

Astronaut daily life via ESA (Nov 2012)

The Skylab 4 Mutiny, 1973 via libcom.org (Apr 2004)

Carr: “On the ground, I don’t think we would be expected to work a 16-hour day for 85 days, and so I really don’t see why we should even try to do it up here.”

‘Space Oddity’ by Chris Hadfield via YouTube

Interview with astronaut Chris Hadfield via NPR (Oct 2013)

Col. Chris Hadfield: “The contrast of your body and your mind inside … essentially a one-person spaceship, which is your spacesuit, where you’re holding on for dear life to the shuttle or the station with one hand, and you are inexplicably in between what is just a pouring glory of the world roaring by, silently next to you — just the kaleidoscope of it, it takes up your whole mind. It’s like the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen just screaming at you on the right side, and when you look left, it’s the whole bottomless black of the universe and it goes in all directions. It’s like a huge yawning endlessness on your left side and you’re in between those two things and trying to rationalize it to yourself and trying to get some work done.”

Excerpt from memoir by former astronaut Scott Kelly via the Sunday Morning Herald (Oct 2017)

Intro Music: ‘Better Times Will Come’ by No Luck Club off their album Prosperity

Filler Music: ‘Major Tom’ by Shiny Toy Guns off their album Major Tom.

Background Music: ‘Leaves’ by Patients aka Ben Cooper, who primarily releases music as Radical Face but also has at least three other bands or band names he’s working with/has released music as.

Outro Music: ‘Fields of Russia’ by Mutefish off their album On Draught

Mosaic of the nebulae in the Orion Constellation

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How does a microgravity garden grow when there’s no up or down? An advanced chamber, about the size of a mini-fridge, is giving us a clearer perspective of plant growth habits. Without gravity and the addition of a wide variety of light and humidity settings, the plants cultivated on the International Space Station provide a world of opportunity to study space-based agricultural cycles.

Learn more about our space garden HERE.

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

Black Holes Are Real And Spectacular, And So Are Their Event Horizons

“Originally estimated to be slightly larger than its M87 counterpart, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way — known as Sagittarius A* — has not yet had its event horizon imaged. When you observe the Universe, you don’t always get what you expect; sometimes, you get what it gives you. Instead, it was M87’s black hole that came through first, which was a much brighter and a much cleaner signal.

What we’ve found is spectacular. Those dark pixels at the center of the image are actually the silhouette of the event horizon itself. The light that we observe comes from the accelerated, heated matter around it, which must emit electromagnetic radiation. Where the matter exists, it emits radio waves, and the dark circle we see is where the background radio waves are blocked by the event horizon itself.”

We have an event horizon, folks! It wasn’t the one at the center of our galaxy that came through first, but rather the one at the center of Messier 87: a black hole over 1,000 times more massive, but some 2,000 times farther away, than the one contained in the Milky Way. This is an ultramassive black hole that’s almost the size of the entire Solar System, and its event horizon is real.

Come get the full story on what we know, now that we have our image, about black holes in the aftermath of the Event Horizon Telescope!

The Meaning of Color in Hubble Images: An interactive slideshow that illustrates how the Hubble Space Telescope incorporates light in multiple wavelengths to produce it’s stunning imagery.

I saw the picture and I thought it was a photo of the space between a Venetian blind and a window frame but no. No. It was a moon between the rings of Saturn.

Eagle Nebula

via reddit

Of Course I Still Love You returned to Port Canaveral earlier this morning with the SES-10 Falcon 9 first stage. Since this is the first Falcon 9 rocket to be reflown this marks the second time this particular rocket returned to port after landing. The images above were captured by remote cameras on the droneship and show the vehicle coming into land. Falcon 9 landed eight minutes after a March 30 liftoff from LC-39A at Kennedy Space Center. Extensive scorching is visible on the exterior of the rocket including the interstage and grid fins. The fins themselves were seen glowing during launch footage as the booster returned to Earth. Each fin is coated in ablative paint which helps protect the metal but the severe temperatures of reentry still cause the fins to glow. Since SES-10 was placed into Geostationary Transfer Orbit, not enough propellant remained in the first stage’s tanks to allow for a nominal reentry profile and the boostback burn was not performed. As such, the rocket came in over twice its normal landing speed and eight times hotter than flights which have a boostback burn. This particular rocket will not be reused after recovery; Elon Musk stated in the SES-10 post-launch news conference that the rocket will likely be given to the Air Force for display at either Cape Canaveral or Kennedy Space Center. P/C: SpaceX