Touchdown confirmed! Curiosity lands safely on Mars!

In what is arguably the nation’s greatest engineering achievement in space, NASA‘s Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity landed safely on Mars a little after 10:15 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time Sunday. Because of the distance from Earth to Mars and the time it takes communication to travel between the two, we didn’t know until 14 minutes after it happened that a complicated landing plan worked.

Alice Enevoldsen of Alice’s Astro Info, a NASA Solar System Ambassador, hosted a gathering at the Kenney in West Seattle to watch NASA TV coverage of the landing. “This has already happened,” Enevoldsen said of the time delay. “It’s just like the NBC Olympics!” she quipped.

More than 50 people attended the event, and the tension was palpable in the viewing room. Here’s Seattle Astronomy video from the landing:



“Shake hands with the person next to you,” Enevoldsen said after the landing was confirmed. “That crazy landing maneuver worked!”

The Curiosity landing has at least one big Washington state connection. Rob Manning, flight system chief engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, attended high school in Burlington and is a 1980 graduate of Whitman College in Walla Walla. Coincidentally, Enevoldsen also is a Whitman alum.

Mars fans gather after the successful landing
of "Curiosity" to check out model rovers and
Mars maps to learn more about the science
mission. Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

It’s interesting and encouraging that the landing drew such a crowd late on a warm summer Sunday evening. While a number of those who attended are residents of the Kenney, a retirement community in West Seattle, local media such as the West Seattle Blog and Seattle Astronomy spread the word, and many visitors attended as well. After the excitement of the landing many of the attendees gathered around a table set up with model rovers—including some made from Lego blocks—and looked at maps of Mars with the various spacecraft landing sites marked. Enevoldsen fielded questions from many of those in attendance.

We understand there was a good crowd at the Mars Fest at the Museum of Flight as well.

It’s encouraging to see the interest in the mission and the excitement about the successful landing. NASA administrator Charlie Bolden was clearly both relieved and elated with the successful landing. The mission is a pricey one, at $2.5 billion, and a crash landing would have been demoralizing to say the least. Afterwards Bolden, speaking to the NASA TV audience, called it “a huge day for the American people.” National pride aside, it has to be good for NASA to pull off a big success in these days of shrinking budgets. Energizing the public and impressing the folks with the purse strings can only help.

Getting to Mars was the hard part; now Curiosity and its arsenal of scientific instruments can go about the business of poking around Mars for evidence that our neighbor planet has supported or could support life.

We’re curious to see what it finds.

Weather angst and the Venus transit

Venus will transit across the face of the Sun Tuesday afternoon. This rare celestial event won’t happen again until the year 2117, and Northwest astronomy hobbyists, for good reason a highly pessimistic bunch when it comes to matters of cloud cover, have been warily watching the long-range forecasts since June 5 started to show up on the weather radar.

It is not looking pretty.

The 2004 Venus transit was captured from
Germany in this image by Jan Herold. Creative
Commons, GNU free documentation license.

As of this writing, Saturday, June 2 at 4 p.m., the Seattle forecast for Tuesday afternoon was for clouds and a 30 percent chance of rain. The prediction for much of the Northwest looks similar. Our best bet as of the moment looks like Goldendale, with a forecast of merely partly cloudy and just a 10 percent chance of rain. (Really, we don’t care so much if it rains as long as it’s not cloudy!) Yesterday Moses Lake and Wenatchee looked promising, but those forecasts have flipped. We’d also been eyeballing the “rain shadow” of Sequim, but even that Olympic Peninsula town now has a wet forecast for Tuesday. The closest “sunny” forecast I am able to find is for Red Bluff, California. Do you roll the dice on an 11- or 12-hour drive, or hope for the best somewhere a little closer?

Many of us will likely be watching the weather forecasts up until Monday evening or Tuesday morning, making some last-minute decisions about where our chances look best for transit viewing, and then high-tailing it to those spots.

Of course, it’s possible, maybe even likely, that we’ll out-think ourselves on this decision. The lore of celestial event chasing is full of accounts of people who have made extreme travel efforts to get to places certain to be clear, only to find those locations socked in while the sky above their own backyards was crystal clear.

Why are we making such a big deal of this? Due to the peculiar geometry of the orbits of Earth and Venus around the Sun, we can only see a Venus transit occasionally. They come in pairs separated by eight years, and either 105.5 or 121.5 years go by before the next pair comes along. Tuesday’s transit is the second of a close pair. Unfortunately, the 2004 event wasn’t visible from the West Coast, and only the end of the transit was visible from the Eastern U.S. as the Sun rose that day. Europe, Asia, and Africa had the best views last time. So this is your last chance unless you make it to December of 2117.

There will be plenty of opportunities to enjoy the 2012 transit from Seattle if the weather cooperates. Events actually begin the evening before, Monday, June 4, at the University of Washington. Astronomy Professors Woody Sullivan and Victoria Meadows will give lectures about the significance and history of Venus transits. The talks begin at 7 p.m. in room 120 of Kane Hall on the UW’s Seattle campus. It’s free, but registration is required.

The UW will have several locations for viewing the transit when it begins at about 3 p.m. June 5. Viewing will also take place at the Pacific Science Center, Solstice Park in West Seattle hosted by Alice’s Astro Info, Battle Point Park on Bainbridge Island hosted by the Battle Point Astronomical Association, and others listed here by the Seattle Science Festival. Many of these sites will at least have online feeds, so participants can watch the transit as viewed from less weather-challenged areas. Other astronomy clubs are likely to be holding formal or informal transit viewings.

Seattle Astronomy will likely be at the Solstice Park event, unless we’re beating it to Goldendale.
Remember, don’t look at the Sun without proper protection. You’ll zap your eyeballs. Standard sunglasses are not good enough. This NASA website has some good pointers about transit viewing, eye protection, and pinhole projectors, as does transitofvenus.org.

Let’s hope we don’t miss our chance to see an astronomical rarity!

Debunking 2012's doomsday

Alice Enevoldsen says the notion that the world is going to end this December has become something of a “kitchen sink” of hoaxes. Fully seven different doomsday scenarios are being put forward as causes of our imminent demise.

Predictions that the world is coming to an end
in December represent a kitchen sink of hoaxes,
according to Alice Enevoldsen, author of Alice's
Astro Info and an educator at the Pacific Science
Center. Enevoldsen debunked the doomsayers at
this week's meeting of the Seattle Astronomical Society.
Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

“It’s really cool how wrong they are,” Enevoldsen, planetarium specialist for the Pacific Science Center and author of Alice’s Astro Info, said during a talk this week at a meeting of the Seattle Astronomical Society. It was difficult to detect any signs of panic among the society membership, and there was much levity in the discussion. Enevoldsen said that while she’s not concerned about the destruction of Earth, the hoax is not entirely a laughing matter.

“The thing about the 2012 hoax is that it is hurting people. There are children writing to scientists saying ‘I’m scared that I’m not going to grow up.’ That just gives me the shivers,” she said. “There are children threatening to kill themselves. This is not OK with me.”

“That’s one of the reasons I use the word hoax. Anybody who supports this non-science stuff about how the world is going to end in 2012 is supporting children threatening to kill themselves.”

Much of the talk about impending doom is fueled by a strange mashup of three stories: the fictional planet Nibiru (and its ancient astronauts) cooked up by novelist Zecharia Sitchin, predictions by “psychic” Nancy Lieder that a “Planet X” would slam into Earth, and the 2009 disaster film 2012. Enevoldsen expressed dismay that people can be swayed by movies, pointed out Lieder’s original prediction was that “X” would smack us in 2003, and noted that astronomers have found no evidence of anything large with the remotest chance of colliding with us.

“You guys all know if there’s a planet that’s close enough to hit Earth at the end of this year we would be able to see it by now,” she told the society gathering.

Another misconception that is driving talk that the end of the world is nigh is that the Mayan calendar “ends” on Dec. 21 because the Maya somehow knew that was the last day.

“Today’s Maya all think we’re insane talking about how they think the world’s going to end,” Enevoldsen said. She explained that while we use month, day, and year to describe any date, the Maya “long count” uses five numbers to do so. A kin is a day, a uinal is about 20 days, a tun is about a year, a katun is roughly 20 years, and a baktun is about 400 years. By coincidence, they all re-set in December.

“It just rolls over. It’s like an odometer,” Enevoldsen said. “It’s not ending, we’re rolling over to the next count.” She said it is something like our turn of the century.

“If I were using the Mayan long count I would be pretty excited on Dec. 20 of this year because it means I get to change over all the numbers on my calendar,” she said. “This is a cool thing, but it’s kind of meaningless.”

Several other apocalyptic notions are included in the kitchen sink, some of them with at least a grain of truth.

• The Earth’s magnetic poles will shift, causing earthquakes and leaving us exposed to radiation. Enevoldsen said we’re sort of due for a shift, but there’s no reason to believe it will happen this year. It’s happened before and we’re still here.
• The Earth’s rotational poles will shift. Enevoldsen said it would take a collision with a massive object to make that happen. There’s nothing on the radar that is on a collision course.
• Solar maximum will arrive and the Sun will zap us with cosmic rays. 2012 does promise to be an active year for sunspots and such, but scientists think the true maximum won’t get here until 2013. This is a roughly 11-year cycle that hasn’t wiped us out yet.
• The planets will align, causing lots of disruption. Enevoldsen pointed out that this simply isn’t true.
• We’ll be lined up with the galactic plane and the center of the galaxy, causing lots of disruption. Enevoldsen said there are some half a dozen definitions of the galactic plane, and there’s no reason to believe that our periodic passes through it mean anything. And we’re aligned with the center of the galaxy every year around the winter solstice.

Enevoldsen suggested not simply dismissing people who have concern about 2012, but instead validating their interest in the subject. But, she said it’s important to share the facts in order to quash the hoax, and suggest astronomical activities to share, such as this year’s solar eclipse or the transit of Venus. She added that professional help might be in order for those truly gripped by fear that the world is doomed.

The 2012 hoax has received enough attention that many mainstream media have taken on the task of providing more information. Enevoldsen suggested the website 2012hoax.org as a great source about the topic. She’s also written her own paper, published by the Astronomical Society of the Pacific and aimed at educators, that explains many of these concepts in greater detail.

Storm on Saturn, and a Voorwerp

There are a couple of great new posts up on Alice’s Astro Info by Alice Enevoldsen this week.
The first, Storm on Saturn—With a Tail, was posted Sunday. It’s a great summary of a new storm that turned up on Saturn at the end of 2010. It’s about the same size as the Great Red Spot on Jupiter.

Cassini captured this photo of the storm on Saturn on Christmas
 Eve, 2010. Photo: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute.

We tried to spot this storm from Seattle Astronomy headquarters in West Seattle during that rare, clear weather we had over the holidays. Alas, while we had a couple of good looks at Saturn, it was still pretty low in the sky, a bit murky, and we couldn’t make out enough detail to spot the storm. (St. Nick delivered a new Tele Vue 10mm Radian eyepiece we were hoping would help tease it out, but even great new optics didn’t get us there.) Even today Saturn isn’t rising until a little after midnight. It’s plenty high before sunrise, but we’re a lot better at staying up until 3 a.m. than we are at rising at 5:00, so we haven’t seen the ringed planet at its best, and probably won’t until it’s at opposition in early April.

We’re rolling the dice by waiting to try to see this storm. While the Red Spot has been around for centuries, this Saturn storm popped up out of nowhere and could fade back into the yellow-orange haze of Saturn just as quickly.

The other new article, posted today, is about Hanny’s Voorwerp. It looks kind of like an enormous cosmic frog in an amazing Hubble photograph included in the post, but in actual fact is a light echo. Enevoldsen is a physics and astronomy genius and explains the phenomenon very well. I just think it looks cool. And I like to type the word Voorwerp. Voorwerp, voorwerp, voorwerp. It’s Dutch for “object,” and Hanny’s Voorwerp was discovered by a Dutch schoolteacher using Galaxy Zoo.

Keep an eye on Alice’s Astro Info for great notes about what’s up in the sky.