Jupiter's Great Red Spot Shrinking

Space.com is reporting that Jupiter's great red spot appears to be shrinking!  This observation is based on photos taken by the Hubble space telescope since the early 90s, as well as observations from amateur astronomers.

While the storm has been observations from  the late 1800s estimated  the spot at 25,500 miles across.  A century later, the Voyager spacecraft flybys  in 1979 revealed the spot had shrunk to 14,500 miles.


Images from Hubble showed in images taken in 1995, the storm shrinking to 13,020 miles across. By 2009, the Red Spot had diminished to 11,130 miles.

Read the complete Space.com article HERE

Voyager 2 Completes Switch to Backup Thrusters

In an effort to help control power consumption, controllers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory instructed the Voyager 2 space-craft to switch to it's backup thruster assembly.

The switch will now allow NASA to switch off fuel heaters to the primary thruster package. This will result in a substantial power saving for the 34-year-old spacecraft. This power reduction will lighten the load on Voyager 2's small nuclear power source which now only has to heat the backup thrusters fuel.

Even though the savings are small, it will allow Voyager 2 to operate for another decade. Also it should be noted that the backup thrusters have never been pressed into operation and are therefor completely new even though they are 35 years old.

To Boldly Go Where No Craft Has Gone Before!

Here is a quick question for you to answer... (didn't know there would be a test when you started reading huh?) Name a science project that was started 30 years ago. The test instruments are still operational along with the platform even though it is now experiencing -400 degrees below zero. Need another hint? It's experiencing huge amounts of radiation and should you wish to send it a message it will take 16 hours! Got it? huh? Did you guess Voyager? Yep! Voyager 1 matter of fact. So why the interest? Well the craft has not been asked to perform any maneuvers since 1990. Last month controllers asked it to perform a 70 degree roll using its gyroscopes, which it did flawlessly.

From the Dvice article:

• NASA is planning to start having Voyager roll on a regular basis to better detect changes in the solar wind, which is petering out as the spacecraft approaches the boundary with interstellar space. Five of these rolls are planned for the next seven days, with more rolls every week for the next three months..

Have you ever stopped to consider just how mind bending this little craft is? It masses only a little over a half a ton (1,592 lbs), 16 hydrazine thrusters (I suspect long out of fuel), three-axis stabilization gyroscopes and celestial referencing instruments. The scientific payload consists of 11 scientific instruments to study celestial objects. Communications is accomplished over the s and x bands through a 12 foot antenna with a maximum bandwidth as high as 115.2 kilobits per second. Should it be unable to communicate with Earth, Voyager will store up to 62,500-kilobytes of data with a Digital Tape Recorder! (DTR?!!! no way!) All of this is done with less than the amount of power that light five 100 watt light bulbs! Obviously that far out, solar is not possible. Voyager 1 has 3 radioisotope thermoelectric generators each generator includes 24 pressed plutonium oxide spheres which will power the craft until 2025!

Check out the Dvice article here And the excellent Wikipedia reference here

Voyager 2 is confused....

The Voyager 2 prob has become somewhat confused in its old age. According to an article in Tech Republic the 30 year old explorer has begun sending back confusing data, almost certainly due to the result of cosmic rays hitting the probe's computer memory and causing it to report conflicting data. The good news is that the command and control sections of the craft are still functioning so trouble shooting should be able to figure out the area of malfunction. Voyager 1 and 2 are still of major interest to the scientific community mainly because they are due, in the next five years, to exit the solar system ( the solar system's boundaries are determined by the " heliopause " or the area where the sun's solar wind is equaled by that of stellar wind) .

The two craft have traveled apx 13 billion kilometers which means that it takes 26 hours to send a command and receive a reply. Think about that....in 30 years, the fastest craft that man ever built has only traveled 13 hours away and hasn't even left the back yard yet, let alone the neighborhood. Space is incomprehensibly vast. Even if we construct a craft to go a hundred times faster, it would still take thousands of years to leave "the neighborhood".

Mysterious ribbon of energy surrounds the Solar System

At the edge of our solar system, between us and the rest of the galaxy mysterious bright band of surprising high-energy emissions. As Shaun Sauders puts it, when he sent me the article from Space.com, "the 'fence' around our local backyard".

This high energy area was discovered by the Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) spacecraft, launched in October 2008, while it was orbiting Earth. The IBEX was monitoring incoming neutral atoms that originate billions of miles away at the solar system's.

The truly remarkable results do not resemble any of the current theories or models of that region of "near" space. What scientists expected to see was a small, gradual variations at the interstellar boundary. However, IBEX is showed a very narrow ribbon that is two to three times brighter than anything else in the sky.

The energy ribbon lies at the very edge of the solar system's heliosphere, where the stream of charged particles from the sun finally fade to the cosmic background. It is in this area that the charged particles from the sun meet neutral atoms and exchange electrons which makes the charged particles also neutral. This transfer of energy causes a faint glow.

This interaction was first explored by the Voyager 1 spacecraft in 2004 when it first encountered the shock wave of the charged particle encountering the neutral atoms at the heliopause and again in 2007 with Voyager 2.

Read complete space.com article

Robert Picardo talks to IO9 about Atlantis

This article in IO9 does a good job of putting a good light on Stargate Atlantis' newest addition, Robert Picardo. Picardo replaces Amanda Tapping who is going on to play lead in the SF Channel's newest show Sanctuary. In the article, we get to see what changes are in store for Pcardo's character Richard Woolsey as well as his earlier work on Star Trek Voyager as the Doctor. Included are the original videos of the interview as well as the text of the meeting. I think you will find it as informative as I did.

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Bizarre Hexagon Spotted on Saturn

One of the most bizarre weather patterns known has been photographed at Saturn, where astronomers have spotted a huge, six-sided feature circling the north pole.

Rather than the normally sinuous cloud structures seen on all planets that have atmospheres, this thing is a hexagon.

The honeycomb-like feature has been seen before. NASA's Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft imaged it more than two decades ago. Now, having spotted it with the Cassini spacecraft, scientists conclude it is a long-lasting oddity.

he hexagon is nearly 15,000 miles (25,000 kilometers) across. Nearly four Earths could fit inside it. The thermal imagery shows the hexagon extends about 60 miles (100 kilometers) down into the clouds.

At Saturn's south pole, Cassini recently spotted a freaky human eye-like feature that resembles a hurricane.

The hexagon appears to have remained fixed with Saturn's rotation rate and axis since first glimpsed by Voyager 26 years ago. The actual rotation rate of Saturn is still uncertain, which means nobody knows exactly how long the planet's day is.

submitted by Shaun Saunders