Cozy Dark emerging technology began work in 2010 as a skunkworks-style engineering firm and is registered with CCR and NSPIRES.
Our early engineering & design efforts have focused on orbital debris solutions and electrodynamic tether technology.
Zach Urbina founded Cozy Dark with the cooperation of technical, research, and academic colleagues in the Southern California AeroAstro community.
We also have a growing library of space science talks featuring Apollo astronaut Buzz Aldrin, astrophysicist Sean Carroll and more.
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120 posts tagged astronomy
Cassini Spots Tiny Moon, Begins to Tilt Orbit |
NASA’s Cassini spacecraft made its closest approach to Saturn’s tiny moon Methone as part of a trajectory that will take it on a close flyby of another of Saturn’s moons, Titan. The Titan flyby will put the spacecraft in an orbit around Saturn that is inclined, or tilted, relative to the plane of the planet’s equator. The flyby of Methone took place on May 20 at a distance of about 1,200 miles (1,900 kilometers). It was Cassini’s closest flyby of the 2-mile-wide (3-kilometer-wide) moon. The best previous Cassini images were taken on June 8, 2005, at a distance of about 140,000 miles (225,000 kilometers), and they barely resolved this object.
Also on May 20, Cassini obtained images of Tethys, a larger Saturnian moon that is 660 miles (1,062 kilometers) across. The spacecraft flew by Tethys at a distance of about 34,000 miles (54,000 kilometers).
Cassini’s encounter with Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, on May 22, is the first of a sequence of flybys that will put the spacecraft into an inclined orbit. At closest approach, Cassini will fly within about 593 miles (955 kilometers) of the surface of the hazy Titan. The flyby will angle Cassini’s path around Saturn by about 16 degrees out of the equatorial plane, which is the same plane in which Saturn’s rings and most of its moons reside.
Cassini’s onboard thrusters don’t have the capability to place the spacecraft into orbits so inclined. But mission designers have planned trajectories that take advantage of the gravitational force exerted by Titan to boost Cassini into inclined orbits. Over the next few months, Cassini will use several flybys of Titan to change the angle of its inclination, building one on top of the other until Cassini is orbiting Saturn at around 62 degrees relative to the equatorial plane in 2013. Cassini hasn’t flown in orbits this inclined since 2008, when it orbited at an angle of 74 degrees. continue reading
Stunning View of Lyrids and Earth at Night |
On the night of April 21, the 2012 Lyrid meteor shower peaked in the skies over Earth. While NASA allsky cameras were looking up at the night skies, astronaut Don Pettit aboard the International Space Station trained his camera on Earth. Video footage from that night is now revealing breathtaking images of Earth with meteors ablating — or burning up — in the atmosphere.
The downlinked image to the right shows a Lyrid meteor in a six-second exposure, taken on April 22, 2012 at 5:34:22 UT. The International Space Station position was over 88.5 W, 19.9 N at an altitude of 392 km. NASA astronomer Bill Cooke mapped the meteor to the star field — seen in this annotated image — and confirmed that the meteor originated from the Lyrid radiant.
The image is rotated so that the north celestial pole (NCP) is roughly in the up direction. The lights of Florida are clearly seen above and to the right of the meteor. Cuba, the Florida Keys and the eastern Gulf Coast shoreline are also visible. Some brilliant flashes of lightning are also prevalent in the image.
A movie of a International Space Station’s pass over Earth on the night of April 22, 2012, during the peak of the Lyrid meteor shower — a composite of 316 still frames seen during the flyby — is available at:http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/videogallery/index.html?media_id=143997541
Venus to Appear in Once-In-A-Lifetime Event |
On 5 and 6 June this year, millions of people around the world will be able to see Venus pass across the face of the Sun in what will be a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
It will take Venus about six hours to complete its transit, appearing as a small black dot on the Sun’s surface, in an event that will not happen again until 2117.
In this month’s Physics World, Jay M Pasachoff, an astronomer at Williams College, Massachusetts, explores the science behind Venus’s transit and gives an account of its fascinating history.
Transits of Venus occur only on the very rare occasions when Venus and Earth are in a line with the Sun. At other times Venus passes below or above the Sun because the two orbits are at a slight angle to each other. Transits occur in pairs separated by eight years, with the gap between pairs of transits alternating between 105.5 and 121.5 years — the last transit was in 2004.
Building on the original theories of Nicolaus Copernicus from 1543, scientists were able to predict and record the transits of both Mercury and Venus in the centuries that followed.
Johannes Kepler successfully predicted that both planets would transit the Sun in 1631, part of which was verified with Mercury’s transit of that year. But the first transit of Venus to actually be viewed was in 1639 — an event that had been predicted by the English astronomer Jeremiah Horrocks. He observed the transit in the village of Much Hoole in Lancashire — the only other person to see it being his correspondent, William Crabtree, in Manchester. continue reading
Rogue Stars Ejected from the Galaxy Are Found in Intergalactic Space |
It’s very difficult to kick a star out of the galaxy. In fact, the primary mechanism that astronomers have come up with that can give a star the two-million-plus mile-per-hour kick it takes requires a close encounter with the supermassive black hole at the galaxy’s core.
So far astronomers have found 16 of these “hypervelocity” stars. Although they are traveling fast enough to eventually escape the galaxy’s gravitational grasp, they have been discovered while they are still inside the galaxy.
Now, Vanderbilt astronomers report in the May issue of the Astronomical Journal that they have identified a group of more than 675 stars on the outskirts of the Milky Way that they argue are hypervelocity stars that have been ejected from the galactic core. They selected these stars based on their location in intergalactic space between the Milky Way and the nearby Andromeda galaxy and by their peculiar red coloration.
“These stars really stand out. They are red giant stars with high metallicity which gives them an unusual color,” says Assistant Professor Kelly Holley-Bockelmann, who conducted the study with graduate student Lauren Palladino. continue reading
Sifting through Dust near Orion’s Belt |
A new image of the region surrounding the reflection nebula Messier 78, just to the north of Orion’s Belt, shows clouds of cosmic dust threaded through the nebula like a string of pearls. The observations, made with ESO’s Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) telescope, use the heat glow of interstellar dust grains to show astronomers where new stars are being formed.
In the centre of the image is Messier 78 (NGC 2068), a reflection nebula with a pale blue glow of starlight reflected from clouds of dust. The APEX observations are overlaid on the visible-light image in orange. Sensitive to longer wavelengths, they reveal the gentle glow of dense cold clumps of dust, some of which are even colder than -250°C, and invisible at other wavelengths.
One filament appears in visible as a dark lane of dust cutting across Messier 78, meaning that the dense dust lies in front of the reflection nebula, blocking its bluish light. Another prominent region of glowing dust overlaps with the visible light from Messier 78 at its lower edge with no visible dark dust lane, meanig that it must lie behind the reflection nebula.
Observations of the gas in these clouds reveal gas flowing at high velocity out of some of the dense clumps. These outflows are ejected from young stars while the star is still forming from the surrounding cloud. Their presence is therefore evidence that these clumps are actively forming stars.
(via unknownskywalker)
Sombrero Galaxy Has Split Personality |
While some galaxies are rotund and others are slender disks like our spiral Milky Way, new observations from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope show that the Sombrero galaxy is both. The galaxy, which is a round elliptical galaxy with a thin disk embedded inside, is one of the first known to exhibit characteristics of the two different types. The findings will lead to a better understanding of galaxy evolution, a topic still poorly understood.
“The Sombrero is more complex than previously thought,” said Dimitri Gadotti of the European Southern Observatory in Chile and lead author of a new paper on the findings appearing in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. “The only way to understand all we know about this galaxy is to think of it as two galaxies, one inside the other.”
The Sombrero galaxy, also known as NGC 4594, is located 28 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo. From our viewpoint on Earth, we can see the thin edge of its flat disk and a central bulge of stars, making it resemble a wide-brimmed hat. Astronomers do not know whether the Sombrero’s disk is shaped like a ring or a spiral, but agree it belongs to the disk class. continue reading
NASA’s Webb Telescope Flight Backplane Section Completed |
The center section of the backplane structure that will fly on NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has been completed, marking an important milestone in the telescope’s hardware development. The backplane will support the telescope’s beryllium mirrors, instruments, thermal control systems and other hardware throughout its mission.
“Completing the center section of the backplane is an important step in completing the sophisticated telescope structure,” said Lee Feinberg, optical telescope element manager for the Webb telescope at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “This fabrication success is the result of innovative engineering dating back to the technology demonstration phase of the program.”
The center section, or primary mirror backplane support structure, will hold Webb’s 18-segment, 21-foot-diameter primary mirror nearly motionless while the telescope peers into deep space. continue reading
Cassini sees new objects blazing trails in Saturn ring |
Queen Mary scientists working with images from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft have discovered strange half-mile-sized objects punching through parts of Saturn’s F ring, leaving glittering trails behind them.
These trails in the rings, which scientists are calling ‘mini-jets’, fill in a missing link in our understanding of the curious behaviour of the F ring. The results will be presented today (24 April) at the European Geosciences Union meeting in Vienna, Austria.
Scientists have known that relatively large objects like the moon Prometheus (as long as 92 miles across) can create channels, ripples and snowballs in the F ring. But until recently they didn’t know what happened to these snowballs after they were created.
Now Professor Carl Murray, Nick Attree, Nick Cooper and Gareth Williams from Queen Mary’s Astronomy Unit have found evidence that some of the smaller snowballs survive, and their differing orbits mean they go on to strike through the F ring on their own. continue reading
