Close Call for NASA's Fermi Gamm-ray Space Telescope!!

NASA's $690 million Fermi Space Telescope was nearly lost last year (4/3/2012) when a defunct one

and a half ton Soviet era reconnaissance satellite (cosmos 1805) missed the space telescope by only 700 feet. 

A much worse scenario was avoided when engineers instructed Fermi to perform a maneuver that took the satellite barely out of harms way.  

To get an idea of just how close this was to total destruction of the Fermi Telescope, at the speeds that both  objects were travelling, 700 feet equates to a difference of 30 milliseconds between one spacecraft entering and leaving the collision point, before the next craft enters the very same space.  Due to their size, this meant that a sizable portion of each craft would still be in the collision zone. 

As luck would have it, Fermi had onboard thrusters that were specifically designed to move the satellite out of  way of potential threats.   A one second burn of all thrusters changed Fermi's attitude enough that when April 3 2012 arrived, it missed the defunct satellite by 6 miles.  

This occurrence  only goes to heighten awareness of the growing threat to manned and unmanned spacecraft in orbit of colliding with a piece of space junk.  NASA now tracks 17,000 object larger than 4 inches across with only 7% being active satellites.  

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/science/2013/05/02/russian-space-junk-almost-destroys-nasa-telescope/#ixzz2SB7Vp1YM

Thanks to Xnewsman for the heads up!

Thunderstorms make antimatter?

Thunderstorms make antimatter? whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa????? Yeah, that was my reaction when I read a recent article that Courtney sent me. Scientists using NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have detected beams of antimatter. This antimatter is produced above thunderstorms by gamma-ray flash bursts associated with lightning.

Scientists estimate that world-wide there are approximately 500 gamma ray bursts from lightening daily worldwide. Most going undetected. Even though scientists have known about high energy bursts associated with thunderstorms, the confirmation coming from Fermi was a bit of a surprise. The Fermi Space Telescope is looking into deep space for tell tale gamma ray burst in space. So when Fermi scientists found their craft being bombarded with anti-matter electrons or positrons from thunderstorms only a few thousand miles away on Earth, you can imagine the surprised reaction. So much so that Michael Briggs, a member of Fermi's Gamma-ray Burst Monitor presented these findings during a recent briefing at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle.

Ilana Harrus, Fermi program scientist has said that the Fermi mission has proven to be an amazing tool to probe the universe. Now we learn that it can discover mysteries much, much closer to home!

NASA Fermi article

Check out the NASA video, on the subject, below.

Huge Gama-ray emitters Found Extending from MilkyWay's Core

From the IO9 blog - Astronomers working with data from the Fermi space telescope, which detects gamma rays, were able to see two enormous structures extending 25k light years above and below the galactic plane. These bubble shaped structures are extremely strong gamma ray emitters invisible to the eye but extremely bright to gamma ray detecting equipment.

Though not fully understanding the dynamics behind what formed the huge globes of gamma rays, scientists speculate that the globes might have been formed by matter infalling onto the super-massive black holes at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. Though there isn't any evidence of a gamma - ray jet now, when the Milky Way was much younger and denser, such a jet may have been much more likely. Here is a NASA film on the discovery.



IO9 article NASA article