Dr. Frank Drake

Dr. Frank Drake is the Director of the SETI Institute's Center for the Study of Life in the Universe and also serves on the Board of Trustees of the SETI Institute as Chairman Emeritus.

In 1960, as a staff member of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, he conducted the first radio search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences where he chaired the Board of Physics and Astronomy of the National Research Council (1989-92). Frank also served as President of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. He was a Professor of Astronomy at Cornell University (1964-84) and served as the Director of the Arecibo Observatory.

He is Emeritus Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of California at Santa Cruz where he also served as Dean of Natural Sciences (1984-88).

In his spare time Frank enjoys cutting gem stones and growing orchids.

Frank has three grown sons and two daughters in college. Both daughters are superb ballet dancers.

منبعستی

NASA's Mars-Bound Phoenix Adjusts Course Successfully

August 10, 2007

NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander today accomplished the first and largest of six course corrections planned during the spacecraft's flight from Earth to Mars.

Phoenix left Earth Aug. 4, bound for a challenging touchdown on May 25, 2008, at a site farther north than any previous Mars landing. It will robotically dig to underground ice and run laboratory tests assessing whether the site could ever have been hospitable to microbial life.

Phoenix today is traveling at about 33,180 meters per second (74,200 miles per hour) in relation to the sun. The first trajectory-correction maneuver was calculated to tweak the velocity by about 18.5 meters per second (41 miles per hour). The spacecraft fired its four mid-size thrusters for three minutes and 17 seconds to adjust its trajectory.

"All the subsystems are functioning as expected with few deviations from predicted performance," said Joe Guinn, Phoenix mission system manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

Key activities in the next few weeks will include checkouts of science instruments, radar and the communication system that will be used during and after the landing.

The second trajectory-correction maneuver is planned for mid-October. "These first two together take out the bias intentionally put in at launch," said JPL's Brian Portock, Phoenix navigation team chief. Without the correction maneuvers, the spacecraft's course after launch day would miss Mars by about 950,000 kilometers (590,000 miles), an intentional offset to prevent the third stage of the launch vehicle from hitting Mars. The launch vehicle is not subject to the rigorous cleanliness requirements that the spacecraft must meet as a protection against letting Earth organisms get a foothold on Mars.

The burn began at 11:30 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time. Each of the four trajectory-correction thrusters provides about 15.6 newtons (3.5 pounds) of force. Smaller, attitude-control thrusters pivoted the spacecraft to the desired orientation a few minutes before the main burn and returned it afterward to the right orientation for catching solar energy while communicating with Earth. Their thrust capacity is about 4.4 newtons (1 pound) apiece. The twelve largest thrusters on Phoenix, delivering about 293 newtons (66 pounds) apiece, will operate only during the final minute before landing on Mars.

The Phoenix mission is led by Peter Smith of the University of Arizona, Tucson, with project management at JPL and development partnership at Lockheed Martin, Denver. International contributions are provided by the Canadian Space Agency; the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland; the universities of Copenhagen and Aarhus, Denmark; the Max Planck Institute, Germany; and the Finnish Meteorological Institute. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

Additional information on Phoenix is available online at: http://www.nasa.gov/phoenix and at http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu . Additional information on NASA's Mars program is available online at: http://www.nasa.gov/mars .

منبع ناسا

عکسهایی از بارش بر ساووشی

 

عکسها از بابک امین تفرشی

منبع مجله نجوم

 

من به رصد با رش شهابی نمیرم

من امروز اصلا حالم خوب نیست چون برنامه رصدمان بهم خورد خلاصه باید بشینم گریه کنم

و تو همین اسمان مسخره تهران شهاب ها را رصدکنم

اخرین خبر از شاتل ایندیور

The STS-118 and Expedition 15 crews are conducting joint operations aboard Space Shuttle Endeavour and the International Space Station. Also, the crew activated the Station-to-Shuttle Power Transfer System (SSPTS) at 5:17 p.m. EDT Friday.

These activities began within hours of STS-118’s arrival at the space station. Endeavour docked with the station at 2:02 p.m. and the STS-118 was welcomed aboard the station at 4:04 p.m.

The SSPTS is designed to reroute power from the station to a visiting shuttle. If the transfer system works as expected, mission managers could elect to extend STS-118’s mission from 11 to 14 days and increase the number of spacewalks from three to four. A decision on a possible extension could occur Sunday.

The two crews are preparing for STS-118's first spacewalk, which is set to begin at 12:31 p.m. Saturday. The spacewalkers will assist in the installation and activation of the Starboard 5 (S5) truss. Friday’s preparations included transfer of spacewalk equipment and the review of procedures. Also, the two crews used the shuttle robot arm to lift the S5 out of the payload bay and hand it off to the station robotic arm.

The two spacewalkers, Mission Specialists Rick Mastracchio and Dave Williams, will enter the station’s Quest airlock where they will spend the night. This procedure is performed to help prevent decompression sickness.
منبع ناسا

NASA Spacecraft Heads for Polar Region of Mars

August 04, 2007

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - NASA's Phoenix Mars Mission blasted off Saturday, aiming for a May 25, 2008, arrival at the Red Planet and a close-up examination of the surface of the northern polar region.

Perched atop a Delta II rocket, the spacecraft left Cape Canaveral Air Force Base at 5:26 a.m. Eastern Time into the predawn sky above Florida's Atlantic coast.

"Today's launch is the first step in the long journey to the surface of Mars. We certainly are excited about launching, but we still are concerned about our actual landing, the most difficult step of this mission," said Phoenix Principal Investigator Peter Smith of the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, Tucson.

The spacecraft established communications with its ground team via the Goldstone, Calif., antenna station of NASA's Deep Space Network at 7:02 a.m. Eastern Time, after separating from the third stage of the launch vehicle.

"The launch team did a spectacular job getting us on the way," said Barry Goldstein, Phoenix project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "Our trajectory is still being evaluated in detail; however we are well within expected limits for a successful journey to the red planet. We are all thrilled!"

Phoenix will be the first mission to touch water-ice on Mars. Its robotic arm will dig to an icy layer believed to lie just beneath the surface. The mission will study the history of the water in the ice, monitor weather of the polar region, and investigate whether the subsurface environment in the far-northern plains of Mars has ever been favorable for sustaining microbial life.

"Water is central to every type of study we will conduct on Mars," Smith said.

The Phoenix Mars Mission is the first of NASA's competitively proposed and selected Mars Scout missions, supplementing the agency's core Mars Exploration Program, whose theme is "follow the water." The University of Arizona was selected to lead the mission in August 2003 and is the first public university to lead a Mars exploration mission.

Phoenix uses the main body of a lander originally made for a 2001 mission that was cancelled before launch. "During the past year we have run Phoenix through a rigorous testing regimen," said Ed Sedivy, Phoenix spacecraft program manager for Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, which built the spacecraft. "The testing approach runs the spacecraft and integrated instruments through actual mission sequences, allowing us to asses the entire system through the life of the mission while here on Earth."

Samples of soil and ice collected by the lander's robotic arm will be analyzed by instruments mounted on the deck. One key instrument will check for water and carbon-containing compounds by heating soil samples in tiny ovens and examining the vapors that are given off. Another will test soil samples by adding water and analyzing the dissolution products. Cameras and microscopes will provide information on scales spanning 10 powers of 10, from features that could fit by the hundreds into a period at the end of a sentence to an aerial view taken during descent. A weather station will provide information about atmospheric processes in the arctic region.

The Phoenix mission is led by Smith, with project management at JPL and development partnership at Lockheed Martin, Denver. The NASA Launch Services Program at Kennedy Space Center and the United Launch Alliance are responsible for the Delta II launch service. International contributions are provided by the Canadian Space Agency, the University of Neuchatel (Switzerland), the University of Copenhagen (Denmark), the Max Planck Institute (Germany) and the Finnish Meteorological Institute. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

Additional information on Phoenix is available online at: http://www.nasa.gov/phoenix . Additional information on NASA's Mars program is available online at: http://www.nasa.gov/mars .

نقد نجومی کتاب هری پاتر و محفل

امروزه همه ی ما خبر های داغی راجع هری پاتر می شنوییم چون در این روز ها هم فیلم ان در پرده ها است هم کتاب هفتم امده ولی هدف من از این مقاله این است که اشکالات نجومی کتاب ۵ را بگم

اول اینکه  امتحان نجوم را در زیر نور ماه بدرصورت نمی گیرند.

 روز امتحا نات سمج در اوایل تابستان است . در صفحه ی ۱۶۵ امده که هری قبل از نیمه شب نمودار صورت  فلکی جبار را داره کامل می کنه ولی در اسمان و در ان زمان جباری نیست و همینطور در صفحه ی بعد می بینیم که هری داره نمودار سیاره زهره را بررسی می کنه ولی همه می دانیم که زهره همیشه بعد از غروب خورشید یا قبل از طلوع ان پدیدار می شه ولی  زمان رصد ان بعد از نیمه شبه.

Quadruple Sunsets Possible on Other Worlds

Astronomers have spotted a dusty disk in a four-star solar system that could be home to a planet in the making.

Using the infrared eyes of NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, astronomers spotted the swirling disk around a pair of stars in the quadruple-star system HD 98800, located 150 light-years away in the constellation TW Hydrae.

If a planet did form in the disk, its sky would be bathed in the light of four suns. One pair of suns would blaze brightly, while the other pair, gravitationally bound to the first pair, would appear as little more than faint pinpoints of light.

The finding will be detailed in an upcoming issue of The Astrophysical Journal.

So-called "circumstellar" disks like the one that rings HD 98800 can be the birthplace of planets. Most disks are smooth and continuous, but Spitzer detected a gap in the HD 98800 disk that could be evidence of one or more immature "protoplanets" carving out lanes in the dust.

voyager interstellar message

In the annals of exploration, the achievements of the two Voyager spacecraft are unprecedented. The piddling journeys of Columbus and Magellan spanned a few tens of thousands of miles on the watery surface of one small world. Voyagers 1 and 2 have traveled billions of miles through the ocean of space, exploring dozens of new worlds along the way and revolutionizing our knowledge of the solar system in which we live. And as a gift of the brilliant mission design, these robot ships are no longer bound by the Sun's gravity. They have passed the outermost planets and are on their way to the cold, dark near-vacuum that constitutes interstellar space. Nothing can stop them. Their radio transmitters are unlikely to work beyond the year 2020. Thereafter, they will wander silently and forever in the realm of the stars.

Who knows who's out there? Perhaps the rest of the Milky Way Galaxy is populated by desolate, wasteland worlds circling a hundred billion stars. Or maybe the Galaxy is rich in life forms and intelligence and technology much further beyond our reach than the Voyagers are beyond the reach of Columbus and Magellan. Someday - maybe millions of years in the future - one of these ghostly, derelict ships may be detected and captured by the representatives of some devastatingly advanced interstellar culture. They will wonder about the shipbuilders.

If you could send a long message to such extraterrestrial beings - words, pictures, sounds, music - what would you say? How would you describe us? What would you leave out? Could you communicate intelligibly to very different beings with a wholly independent evolution? In 1977, at NASA's behest, a few of us had a remarkable opportunity to attempt such a (one-way) communication. Frank Drake suggested not a plaque, but a phonograph record. As described in the book, Murmurs of Earth, we designed and prepared the record to carry a rich message to the stars - 116 pictures and diagrams about our global civilization and our species, greetings, samples of the world's great music, the brain waves of a young woman in love and much else.

The Voyager mission has already become the stuff of myth, the premise for many works of science fiction. Brief excerpts from the Voyager record have been heard in films, television and radio. But the record itself has never before been available to the public, because of corporate rivalries and copyright restrictions. Warner New Media has broken through the logjam. Those of us who created the interstellar record - well-aware that different people would have made different selections - are delighted to help bring this message to you, essentially complete, as carried by Voyager. This is what the extraterrestrials will learn about us, should the spacecraft - now the fastest and farthest machines ever launched by the human species - one day encounter someone else in the depths of space.

A billion years from now, when everything on Earth we've ever made has crumbled into dust, when the continents are changed beyond recognition and our species is unimaginably altered or extinct, the Voyager record will still speak for us.

- Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan

کارل ساگان

carl sagan biography

Biography

CARL SAGAN was the David Duncan Professor of Astronomy and Space Sciences and Director of the Laboratory for Planetary Studies at Cornell University. He played a leading role in the American space program since its inception. He was a consultant and adviser to NASA since the 1950's, briefed the Apollo astronauts before their flights to the Moon, and was an experimenter on the Mariner, Viking, Voyager, and Galileo expeditions to the planets. He helped solve the mysteries of the high temperatures of Venus (answer: massive greenhouse effect), the seasonal changes on Mars (answer: windblown dust), and the reddish haze of Titan (answer: complex organic molecules).

For his work, Dr. Sagan received the NASA medals for Exceptional Scientific Achievement and (twice) for Distinguished Public Service, as well as the NASA Apollo Achievement Award. Asteroid 2709 Sagan is named after him. He was also awarded the John F. Kennedy Astronautics Award of the American Astronautical Society, the Explorers Club 75th Anniversary Award, the Konstantin Tsiolkovsky Medal of the Soviet Cosmonauts Federation, and the Masursky Award of the American Astronomical Society, ("for his extraordinary contributions to the development of planetary science…As a scientist trained in both astronomy and biology, Dr. Sagan has made seminal contributions to the study of planetary atmospheres, planetary surfaces, the history of the Earth, and exobiology. Many of the most productive planetary scientists working today are his present and former students and associates").

He was also a recipient of the Public Welfare Medal, the highest award of the National Academy of Sciences (for "distinguished contributions in the application of science to the public welfare…Carl Sagan has been enormously successful in communicating the wonder and importance of science. His ability to capture the imagination of millions and to explain difficult concepts in understandable terms is a magnificent achievement").

Dr. Sagan was elected Chairman of the Division of Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society, President of the Planetology Section of the American Geophysical Union, and Chairman of the Astronomy Section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. For twelve years he was the editor-in-chief of Icarus, the leading professional journal devoted to planetary research. He was cofounder and President of the Planetary Society, a 100,000-member organization that is the largest space-interest group in the world; and Distinguished Visiting Scientist, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology.

A Pulitzer Prize winner for the book The Dragons of Eden: Speculations of the Evolution of Human Intelligence, Dr. Sagan was the author of many bestsellers, including Cosmos, which became the bestselling science book ever published in English. The accompanying Emmy and Peabody award-winning television series has been seen by a billion people in sixty countries. He received twenty-two honorary degrees from American colleges and universities for his contributions to science, literature, education, and the preservation of the environment, and many awards for his work on the long-term consequences of nuclear war and reversing the nuclear arms race. His novel, Contact, is now a major motion picture.

In their posthumous award to Dr. Sagan of their highest honor, the National Science Foundation declared that his "research transformed planetary science… his gifts to mankind were infinite."

Dr. Sagan's surviving family includes his wife and collaborator of twenty years, Ann Druyan; his children, Dorion, Jeremy, Nicholas, Sasha, and Sam; and grandchildren.

from  کارل ساگان