Final

Have a nice break and good luck on your finals!!!!

Mission on Mars

Hey guys, this week's post is concerning NASA's rover mission to find life on the planet Mars. The rocket is called Atlas V, which was launched on Saturday from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The six-wheeled rover, Curiosity, will take about eight and half months to reach the surface on Mars. Curiosity is the heaviest and biggest robot sent to Mars' surface. The rover contains a drill to dig into the Mars' surface and obtain samples. It is also equipped with a generator that converts heat from the natural decay of a non-weapons-grade plutonium into electricity. The electricity will be used to keep the rover warm in an environment where the average temperature is negative 64 degrees Fahrenheit.

Milky Way and Andromeda

Hey everyone, for this week's article I will be talking about the most recent research publication by Simon Mutch and his group of astronomers, of the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne. These astronomer's research demonstrates that Milky Way and Andromeda are in transition from being young and star-forming into old and stagnant galaxies. They came up with the conclusion using the color difference between the young and the old galaxies. Instead of being blue or red color, a sign of young and active galaxy, Milky Way and Andromeda are green which is a sign of an old galaxy. Besides not being able to form new stars, the astronomers also said that these galaxies will be unable to produce an active galactic nucleus or AGN, which is brightest radio signals that can be seen across great distances.    

Formation of Planets

Hey Everyone,

I was reading some of the material in the book and came up on the formation of planets. This caught my eye because I have never heard of some of the theories given. The one that I became really interested in was the solar nebula theory. It is a branch of the evolutionary theory because it states that the Earth was formed from the by-product of the formation of the sun. The Earth formed from the nebula around the proto-sun, which is a result of the formation of the sun. So my question for you all is, which section during this semester did you find the most interesting?

Finals

Hey guys, as we approach the end of the fall 2011 semester, I would like to give everyone some tips on how to do better on your final exam in the astronomy course. The one important and main thing to do is to review all of the previous tests. Make sure to pay more attention to the material you have missed in the tests and try to answer each question without looking at your answers. If you don't know the answers of any questions, then first look it up in the book or your documents and if you still don't understand it then go to your professor and ask her. It is really important to understand all the material on the test because your final will most likely consist of similar questions. After you have finished with the tests, read the summary of the chapters your instructor has covered during the semester. Make sure you know all the objectives in your final exam and go to the exam relaxed.    

Hubble Telescope

Hey everyone.

I was just looking over some facts about the Hubble Telescope and I thought that I would share them with you. One of the first facts that I noticed was the fact that the Hubble Telescope cost around 1.5 billion dollars up to the launch period. This is a staggering amount of money, but necessary for the discoveries that it made. A couple other interesting details about the Hubble were that it runs on solar power from two 25 foot solar panels and that it can produce pin point accuracy. The two mirrors that form the telescope have almost a perfect curvature of their lenses. This curvature allows for the telescope to lock on a target and have minimum deviation. How do you think that the mirrors were formed to consist of almost a perfect curvature?

http://space.about.com/od/telescopesandoptics/p/hubbleinfo.htm

Tractor Beam

Tractor beams are used to trap and move objects using laser light. Recently NASA has funded $100,000 to a team of scientists, Barry Coyle, Paul Stysley, and Demetrios Poulios, to find a way to remotely capture particles in the space and send it to a spacecraft for analysis. The purpose of the idea was to use tractor beams to clean up the orbital debris, but according to the scientists it is impossible to do that at this time. So they decided to use the same idea to collect sample particles for analysis. This idea would reduce the cost of collecting samples, increase the amount of samples collected at one time, and reduce mission risk according to the team. There are three techniques selected by the team of scientists but the one which will work is not decided yet. Please read the following article and the three methods in the bottom and tell me which one do you think is most effective and most likely to work. Feel free to ask any questions about the methods. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/11/111103030817.htm