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Astronomy Picture of the Day: Earth rise

"Oh my God! Look at that picture over there! Here's the Earth coming up. Wow is that pretty!"

Soon after that pronouncement, 50 years ago today, one of the most famous images ever taken was snapped from the orbit of the Moon.

Now known as "Earthrise", the iconic image shows the Earth rising above the limb of the Moon, as taken by the crew of Apollo 8. But the well-known Earthrise image was actually the second image taken of the Earth rising above the lunar limb -- it was just the first in color.

With modern digital technology, however, the real first Earthrise image -- originally in black and white -- has now been remastered to have the combined resolution and color of the first three images. Behold!

The featured image is a close-up of the picture that Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders was talking about. Thanks to modern technology and human ingenuity, now we can all see it.

(Historical note: A different historic black & white image of the Earth setting behind the lunar limb was taken by the robotic Lunar Orbiter 1 two years earlier.)

Voyager 2 Entered interstellar space

For the second time in human history, a object has reached the space in between the stars, interstellar Space. The NASA's Voyager 2 probe now has left the heliosphere - the protective bubble of particles and magnetic fields created by our Sun.

Comparing data from different instruments aboard the trailblazing spacecraft, mission scientists determined the probe crossed the outer edge of the heliosphere on Nov. 5.

This boundary, called the heliopause, is where the tenuous, hot solar wind meets the cold, dense interstellar medium. Its twin, Voyager 1, crossed this boundary in 2012, but Voyager 2 carries a working instrument that will provide first-of-its-kind observations of the nature of this gateway into interstellar space.

Voyager 2 now is slightly more than 11 billion miles (18 billion kilometers) from Earth. Mission operators still can communicate with Voyager 2 as it enters this new phase of its journey, but information - moving at the speed of light - takes about 16.5 hours to travel from the spacecraft to Earth. By comparison, light traveling from the Sun takes about eight minutes to reach Earth.

The most compelling evidence of Voyager 2's exit from the heliosphere came from its onboard Plasma Science Experiment (PLS), an instrument that stopped working on Voyager 1 in 1980, long before that probe crossed the heliopause. Until recently, the space surrounding Voyager 2 was filled predominantly with plasma flowing out from our Sun. This outflow, called the solar wind, creates a bubble - the heliosphere - that envelopes the planets in our solar system. The PLS uses the electrical current of the plasma to detect the speed, density, temperature, pressure and flux of the solar wind. The PLS aboard Voyager 2 observed a steep decline in the speed of the solar wind particles on Nov. 5. Since that date, the plasma instrument has observed no solar wind flow in the environment around Voyager 2, which makes mission scientists confident the probe has left the heliosphere.

 

 

 

Follow the Link below to see realtime updates about the 2 Voyagers:

https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status/

New Cosmos Series

As host of the new TV series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, astrophysicist and author Neil deGrasse Tyson is following in the footsteps of the late Carl Sagan, the renowned scientist who starred in Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, the classic 1980 program that powerfully influenced many people’s view of science and the universe. Oddly, Tyson, who was in graduate school at the time, recalls that he only had time to catch a few episodes of the original Cosmos when it originally aired. All the same, Sagan still managed to exert a profound personal influence upon his future Cosmos successor, thanks to a meeting between the two that occurred when Tyson was a teenager. 

It happened back in December 1975, when Tyson, a senior from at the Bronx High School of Science who dreamed of becoming an astrophysicist, applied to Cornell University, and his application was forwarded to Sagan, a faculty member. To Tyson’s surprise, he soon received a personal reply. “It was completely surreal,” recalls Tyson. “I’m just a 17-year-old kid, and here’s the most famous scientist in the world—he’d been on Johnny Carson—inviting me to come visit him at his lab.” When Tyson took a bus from New York City to the Cornell campus in Ithaca, N.Y., and walked to the building where Sagan worked, he was even more startled to find the scientist waiting outside for him. After giving Tyson a tour of the lab, autographing one of his books and discussing the Viking Mars lander with him, Sagan gave Tyson a ride back to the bus station. “It had started snowing,” Tyson recalls. “He wrote his home phone number on a piece of paper and gave it to me, saying, ‘If the bus can’t get through, call me, and we’ll put you up for the night.’”

Read the rest of the story at: National Geographic Channel

Ancient city of Petra

Totally carved directly into vivid red, white, pink, along with sandstone cliff faces, the ancient Jordanian city of Petra was "lost" to the Western world for hundreds of years.

Located amongst rugged desert canyons and mountains in what is now the southwestern corner of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, Petra was once a thriving trading center and the capital of the Nabataean empire between 400 B.C. and A.D. 106.
The city sat empty and in near ruin for centuries. Only in the early 1800s did a European traveler disguise himself in Bedouin costume and infiltrate the mysterious locale.

In 1985, the Petra Archaeological Park was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site, and in 2007 it was named one of the new seven wonders of the world.

Indiana Jones Movie Location

Several scenes from the Hollywood blockbuster Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade were filmed in Petra. The movie's fictional Canyon of the Crescent Moon was modeled on the eastern entrance to Petra, a 250-foot-high (76-meter-high) sandstone slot canyon known as the Siq that leads directly to Al Khazneh (the Treasury)-perhaps the most stunning of Petra's dozens of breathtaking features.

In the film's climactic final scenes, actors Harrison Ford and Sean Connery burst forth from the Siq and walk deep into the labyrinths of the Treasury in their quest to find the Holy Grail. But, as usual, archaeological fact bowed to Hollywood fiction when Indy came to Petra.

In reality, the Treasury is nothing more than a facade with a relatively small hall once used as a royal tomb.

"You can't really say that anything in Indiana Jones is accurate," Haifa University archaeologist Ronny Reich said. "I was once asked in the United States if one of the responsibilities of Israeli archaeologists is to chase down Nazis. I told them, 'Not any more. Now we just chase down pretty women.'"

A giant urn carved above the entrance to the Treasury bears the marks of hundreds of gunshots. Bedouin tribesmen living in and among the ancient ruins say the damage was caused when local men would open fire with rifles, seeking the loot thought to be inside the urn (actually made of solid stone).

There are dozens of tombs and other carved or constructed structures and sites within Petra.

Advanced Society

The Nabataeans, before they were conquered and absorbed into the Roman Empire, controlled a vast tract of the Middle East from modern-day Israel and Jordan into the northern Arabian peninsula. The remains of their innovative networks of water capture, storage, transport, and irrigation systems are found to this day throughout this area.

Scholars know the Nabataeans were in Petra since at least 312 B.C., says archaeologist Zeidoun Al-Muheisen of Jordan's Yarmouk University.

Al-Muheisen, who has been excavating in Petra since 1979 and specializes in the Nabataean period, says no one has yet found any archaeological evidence dating back to the fourth century B.C. The earliest findings thus far date back only to the second and first centuries B.C.

But more clues remain beneath the surface. "We have uncovered just 15 percent of the city," he says. "The vast majority-85 percent-is still underground and untouched."

Numerous scrolls in Greek and dating to the Byzantine period were discovered in an excavated church near the Winged Lion Temple in Petra in December 1993.

Researchers at the American Center of Oriental Research in Amman, the capital, are now analyzing the scrolls and hope they will shed light on life in Petra during this period.

Once Rome formally took possession of Petra in A.D. 106, its importance in international trade began to wane. The decay of the city continued, aided by earthquakes and the rise in importance of sea trade routes, and Petra reached its nadir near the close of the Byzantine Empire's rule, around A.D. 700.

Visitors today can see varying blends of Nabataean and Greco-Roman architectural styles in the city's tombs, many of which were looted by thieves and their treasures thus lost.

Today, local Bedouins selling tourist souvenirs hawk their wares not far from the place where Arabs believe Moses struck a rock with his staff, causing water to burst forth.

Third Dutch-born Astronaut Launched on Soyuz TMA-03M

Soyuz TMA-03M launched successfully from Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 14.16pm Amsterdam time today, carrying the next three crew members for the ISS.
The European Space Agency's Andre Kuipers, NASA's Don Pettit and Roscosmos Oleg Kononenko launched to complement the crew for Expedition's 30 and 31 aboard the International Space Station.
 
The spacecraft will presently orbit the Earth 36 times, executing three major engine burns, to be able to adjust its trajectory to meet the ISS on Friday at 14.43 Amsterdam time ( +1 GMT). The docking on Friday will be broadcast live on NASA-TV. The three astronauts will join the US Dan Burbank and Russians Anton Shkaplerov and Anatoly Ivanishin, who have been living on the station since November. All six expedition members will be there to greet the first ever commercial resupply from the US, when Elon Musk's SpaceX Dragon ship sets out for the ISS in February. There'll also be time for Kononenko and Shkaplerov to carry out external assembly and maintenance on the station during a six-hour spacewalk.
Burbank, Shkaplerov and Ivanishin are due back in March, and the second half of the crew will return to Earth in May.
 
André kuipers is the third Dutch born to enter space for his second mission (his first mission was Soyuz TMA-4 launched 19 April 2004 duration 11 day's). The first dutch born in space was Lodewijk van den Berg (launched aboard Space Shuttle Challenger on April 29, 1985 STS-51B.), at the time of his flight, Van den Berg was not a Dutch citizen, having been naturalized as US citizen.
The second Dutch-born astronaut and first Dutch citizen to have been to space is Wubbo Ockels (Space Shuttle Challenger on October 30, 1985 STS-61A, the last successful flight of the challenger). 
 
During this 6-month PromISSe mission, André will conduct 57 experiments and around 15 from other Station partners, including human research, life sciences, physics, materials science, radiation research and technology demonstrations
His mission also features a strong educational aspect centred on the theme ‘Spaceship Earth’.
The lessons from space will educate children in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, as well as teaching about the requirements for life on Earth.
As part of ‘Mission-X: Train Like an Astronaut’, André will invite thousands of students to perform physical exercises and classroom lessons to compete with teams around the world to become as fit as astronauts. 

 

Turin Shroud Defy Scientific Explanation

Italian governmental scientists now have claimed to discovered proof that a supernatural event produced the image on the Turin Shroud, presumed by many people to be the burial cloth of Jesus Christ.

After many years of work attempting to replicate the colouring on the shroud, a comparable image has been produced by the scientists.However, they only managed the effect by scorching comparable linen materials along with high-intensity ultra violet lasers, undermining the arguments of other research, they say, which claims the Turin Shroud is a medieval hoax. This kind of technology, say scientists from the National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development (Enea), was in fact far beyond the capability of medieval forgers, whom most experts have attributed with making the famous relic.

"The results show that a short and intense burst of UV directional radiation can colour a linen cloth so as to reproduce many of the peculiar characteristics of the body image on the Shroud of Turin," they said.And in case there has been any doubt about the preternatural degree of energy necessary to make such distinct marks, the Enea report spells it out: "This degree of power cannot be reproduced by any normal UV source built to date."A statement by head investigator, Dr Paolo Di Lazzaro, stated: "If our results prompt a philosophical or theological debate, these conclusions we'll leave to the experts; to each person's own conscience,"he was quoted saying. Luigi Garlaschelli, a professor of chemistry at Pavia University, explained: "The implications are... that the image was formed by a burst of UV energy so intense it could only have been supernatural. However I don't think they've carried out anything of the sort."

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