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Comet Don Quixote

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Comet Don Quixote - NASA
Comet Don Quixote as photographed by the Spitzer Space Telescope

Named after the classic 17th century Spanish book, the celestial Don Quixote was initially believed to be a large asteroid in deep space. But with the help of the Spitzer Space Telescope, astronomers discovered that what they initially believed was an asteroid was in fact a comet. The infrared imagery from Spitzer showed that Comet Don Quixote had the telltale features of a comet – a distinctive head and a (trailing) tail. In the above NASA pictures, the bright areas around Comet Don Quixote are stars and the horizontal line is from artifacts caused by image processing.

“Thou hast seen nothing yet.”
– Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

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Pictures

Organic matter found on Jupiter

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Jupiter acetylene - NASA
Organic matter (acetylene) on the poles of planet Jupiter

The joint NASA/ESA Cassini-Huygens mission made some interesting discoveries on Jupiter, on the way to its final destination which was Saturn. This January 2001 composite infrared picture shows Jupiter’s south pole (left) and north pole (right). The bright green spots are the warmer areas, believed to be organic matter, specifically acetylene (ethyne; C2H2). This research allowed scientists to better understand the chemical interactions between sunlight and molecules in Jupiter’s stratosphere.

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Videos

NASA revs up manned space program to Mars

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NASA conducted an exploration forum this week where several administrators, scientists and other NASA personnel outlined how this US space agency plans to land human astronauts first on an asteroid and then Mars. They hope accomplish the manned Mars mission by 2030. One can speculate whether unofficial work has already been done for such initiatives but this does mark an important point in NASA’s public push to take humans to outer space – the first one since the mission to put man on the moon.

The full presentation is long (2.5 hours) but worth watching for  space enthusiasts and budding, future astronauts 🙂

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Pictures

Birth of a star

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Not the human kind but birth of a celestial star.

Birth of a star - NASA
Spitzer Space Telescope and ALMA capture the birth of a star

The birth of a star is a fascinating process that has and will long continue to draw the attention of astronomers and scientists. This picture was based on the observations of NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and Atacama Large Millimeter/sub-millimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, and  gave us a first look at a newborn star. Combination of Spitzer and ALMA are able to capture the infrared and sub-millimeter light spectrums; thus a allowing a rare glimpse inside the the dark cosmic cloud around Herbig-Haro (HH) object 46/47. The blue areas show gas energized by out flowing jets representing the shorter wavelength light, with the blueish-green areas caused by hydrogen gas. The redder areas are the longer wavelength and are created by excited carbon monoxide gas in this new star.

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Pictures

Comet Tempel 1

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Tempel - NASA
Comet Tempel 1 of the Jupiter system

NASA’s Deep Space probe took this picture of Comet Tempel 1 (designation  9P/Tempel), which is a comet in the Jupiter system. It was taken by Deep Space probe’s impactor targeting sensor, about five minutes before it deliberately impacted/crashed with Comet Tempel 1. This comet is relatively small in size, 7.6 km × 4.9 km in diameter and has a rotational period of 40.7 hours.

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