Hello Twitterverse! We r now LIVE tweeting from the International Space Station — the 1st live tweet from Space! : ) More soon, send your ?s

Sending tweets from space began during NASA’s STS-125, the fifth and final service mission to the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). On May 12, 2009, mission specialist Michael J. Massimino (@Astro_Mike) sent the first tweet from space.

From orbit: Launch was awesome!! I am feeling great, working hard, & enjoying the magnificent views, the adventure of a lifetime has begun!

Well, not quite. Mike did not update his account directly from space. He wrote his updates and then emailed them to Houston. Since emails are transmitted from the space shuttle to the Control Center only a few times a day, his status updates were not “Live”.

I will be able to twitter from space if I have time. I will email tweets to NASA who’ll fwd them. No promises but I will try my best.

Other members of Expedition 22 who also have twitter accounts are Jeff Williams (NASA) and Soichi Noguchi (JAXA). Recently, Nicholas Patrick, a mission specialist of the STS-130 mission to the ISS currently scheduled for launch at 09:39 GMT on February 7, also joined in.

Note: On October 21, 2009, Jeff Williams and his Expedition 21 crewmate, Nicole Stott, participated in the first tweetup from the station with members of the public gathered at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C. This involved the first live Twitter connection for the astronauts.

More than 750,000 have seen this video comparing the size of our Moon and Earth (along other planets and the Sun) to some of the largest stars known. Now, the American Museum of Natural History in partnership with Rubin Museum of Art, created a video showing the known Universe mapped through astronomical observations. Every satellite, moon, planet, start and galaxy is represented to scale and in its correct, measured location according to the best scientific research to-date.

This new film, created by the Museum, is part of an exhibition, Visions of the Cosmos: From the Milky Ocean to an Evolving Universe, at the Rubin Museum of Art in Manhattan through May 2010. The Known Universe takes viewers from the Himalayas through our atmosphere and the inky black of space to the afterglow of the Big Bang. The accurate placement of every object seen in the film is possible because of the world’s most complete four-dimensional map of the universe – the Digital Universe Atlas that is maintained and updated by astrophysicists at the American Museum of Natural History.

To join in you can simply tweet with the hashtag #Moonwatch or follow NewburyAS or @astronomy2009uk.

Also, you can keep track of all pictures/images submitted to twitter for the event via my gallery and the MoonWatchPix twitter account.

First data from LCROSS impacts are coming in. Athony Colaprete, LCROSS Principal Investigator (NASA Ames), confirmed during NASA/LCROSS press conference that

We saw the impact, we saw the crater, we got spectroscopic data, which is the data we need.

Centaur impact flash detected by the Mid IR camera from 600 km above the surface - Source: NASA TV

Centaur impact detected by visible spectrometer - Source: NASA TV

Jennifer Heldmann, LCROSS Observation Campaign Lead (NASA Ames), said that there is observation data from over 20 land sites as well as the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and other observatories in Earth’s orbit.

Lunar crater Cabeus were taken on October 9, 2009 with the Palomar Observatory's 200-inch (5-meter) Hale Telescope and its Adaptive Optics - Source: Palomar Observatory/Antonin Bouchez

The public was somewhat disappointed by not seeing the ejecta plume. Although the scientists have confirmed the impact and seen a crater, there are several explanations for the lack of plumes. One could be simply that the ejecta did not “fly” high enough above the surface to escape the shadows of lunar surface. Alternatively, the ejected material could have been too faint and too spread out to be observable from almost 400,000 km. Nevertheless, Colaprete emphasized that scientific instruments were primarily focused on collecting spectra and that the first look at the data shows signs of ejected material.

An artist's impression of the LCROSS spacecraft's Centaur stage crashing into the surface of the Moon. The LCROSS spaceraft will observe and record the impact and then it also will crash into the crater - Image Credit: NASA

Immediately after the LRO/LCROSS launch on June 18, science illiterate members of the blog community started a campaign to stop NASA from “Bombing the Moon”; an act, which, according to them, was in a clear violation of the UN resolution 2222 written in the 1499th plenary meeting on December 19, 1966 – Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies. I will not support this insanity by providing links here (just google “NASA Moon bombing”).

The arguments on blogs range from the creation of (up to) 8km deep crater, to the bombing constituting a hostile act against known extraterrestrial civilizations and settlements on the Moon allegedly observed by the crew of Apollo 11 (seriously?). Several magazines and newspapers (the likes of Scientific American, the Examiner and the UK Telegraph – no surprise there) jumped on the bandwagon featuring articles with an unfortunate (but I suspect a rather deliberate) word choice – “Moon bombing”.

Bombing can be defined as detonation (on impact) of an explosive devise producing a chemical action which causes a sudden formation of a great volume of expanded gas. In other words, nothing close to the events which are about to occur near the Moon’s south pole.

Let me assure you: the Moon is hit by space junk on regular basis. It has withstood this bombardment for billions of years and it will prevail for many billions to come. The flash in the sequence below was caused by a meteoroid about 25 cm in diameter traveling at 38 km/s. As such, although much smaller than either the (S-S/C) and the Centaur, the energy released in the impact is comparable with tomorrows impacts because this piece of rock was traveling fifteen times faster than LCROSS.

A meteoroid hits the Moon, May 2, 2006; video-recorded by MSFC engineers Heather McNamara and Danielle Moser.

The Centaur upper stage will impact the lunar surface at around 11:31:20 UTC at -84.675, 311.275 E (in selenographical coordinates). NASA estimates the impact velocity of 2.5 km/s which will excavate more than 350 tonnes of lunar material and create a crater 20m in diameter with a depth of about 4m; in other words, nowhere near the sensational 8km (given the crater size, not even the Hubble Space Telescope will be able to see it under ideal conditions).

Using the nominal impact mass of 2,305kg and the velocity of 2.5km/s the kinetic energy of the spacecraft can be easily calculated as

Since a kiloton of TNT is equivalent to , the total energy released in the impact (under ideal conditions) is kiloton of TNT; again, nowhere close to the 2 kiloton of TNT (which equals to 10% of the yield of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima) claimed by some authors. Furthermore, both the S-S/C and Centaur performed a blow-down maneuver to vent any remaining fuel inside the Centaur to help prevent contamination of the impact site and the ejecta material, thus there will be no explosion.

The Shepherding Spacecraft will impact the lunar surface roughly four minutes after the Centaur upper stage, at around 11:35:39 UTC at -84.729, 310.64 E, ejecting about 150 tonnes or material leaving behind a crater 14m wide and 2m deep.

LCROSS Shepherding Spacecraft and Centaur upper stage impact sites - Source: NASA

As for the last argument, if you truly believe in the conspiracy to cover up the presence of an extraterrestrial civilizations on the Moon, reported in witnessed statements by astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong, and in witnessed statements to NSA (National Security Agency) photos and documents regarding an extraterrestrial base on the dark side of the Moon (let’s forget for a second that there is NO such thing as the “dark” side of the Moon), I applaud you for reading this far and let’s just leave it at that…

The most-widely accepted model proposes that GRBs are created in a gravitational collapse of extremely massive stars into black holes when matter in the accretion disk is heated by neutrinos and driven into narrowly focused jets along the rotational axis.

As the core of a massive star in a distant galaxy collapses, deep inside, twin beams of matter and energy begin to blast their way outward. Within seconds, the beams have eaten their way out of the star, and observers at Earth see it as a gamma-ray burst, GRB 060729A - Credit for caption: Phil Plait SSU NASA E/PO; Images: Aurore Simonnet SSU NASA E/PO

Nevertheless, this model makes it difficult to explain long GRBs with the duration of more than 100 seconds and cannot account for afterglows lasting up to 10,000 observed by the Swift spacecraft.

Professor Komissarov and his colleagues at the University of Leeds accredit the creation of the matter jets to a magnetic mechanism and examine the close binary scenario involving a merger or a WR star (evolved, massive star of over 20 solar masses) with a neutron star or a black hole, in their article Close Binary Progenitors of Long Gamma Ray Bursts.

“The neutrino model cannot explain very long gamma ray bursts and the Swift observations, as the rate at which the black hole swallows the star becomes rather low quite quickly, rendering the neutrino mechanism inefficient, but the magnetic mechanism can.”

Apart from the primary objectives to prepare a 3D atlas with the resolution of up to 10-5m and chemical and mineralogical mapping of the entire lunar surface, the terrain mapping camera on board the spacecraft has also sent images of the landing site of Apollo 15 and the tracks of land rovers astronauts used to travel on the lunar surface.

Apollo 15 lunar module, Falcon - Image Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/Arizona State University

Analysis of data from the onboard Terrain Mapping Camera (TMC) and the Hyper Spectral Imager (HySi) revealed disturbances on the the lunar surface show tracks on Lunar Roving Vehicles (LRV) used by astronauts on Apollo 15, 16 and 17.

That’s right, all your Moon landing deniers (read crazy people). Here are photos and data acquired by instruments built by an agency from a different country on board a spacecraft launched into lunar orbit independently of NASA – Chandrayaan 1 also carried NASA instruments but the TMC was built in ISRO’s Space Applications Centre (SAC).

I’m truly curious how Moon hoaxers tackle this one. Meanwhile, the rest of us who live in a real world will no doubt enjoy in awe all other wonders of the universe.

It is not uncommon in science to make accidental discoveries. Alexander Fleming certainly did not intend to contaminate one of his research cultures with a Penicillium genus. Arno Penzias and Robert Woodrow Wilson discovered the cosmic microwave background radiation because of their “inability” to account for the 3.5 K excess temperature of their radiometer. Thomas Bopp (co)discovered the most observed comets of the 20th century when looking at the globular cluster M70 (and actually did not even own a telescope at the time).

Other times, data from a research project with a specific goal can be used to make discoveries never anticipated by the project team. Several Galaxy Zoo participants noticed interesting artifacts present in images of galaxies from the SDSS. The rainbow-like artifact in the image below is actually an asteroid.

Galaxy designated as SDSS J130941.81+063637.8 with an asteroid trail - Image Source: SDSS

The SDSS instruments use couple-charged device (CCD) cameras to collect light. A CCD chip can be thought of as a 2 dimensional array of light collectors that accumulate electric charge proportional to the intensity of incident light. The electric charge is then converted to voltage in a charge amplifier and digitized by a computer to create an image. CCD data in astronomy is used to create (only) gray-scale images. To make a color image, the camera takes exposures with different filters. The individual filter images can be later combined into a single color image (similar to combining the  R, G and B channels of a color picture).

The SDSS camera uses five different filters: u (ultraviolet), g (green), r (red), i and z (both infrared). Thus, five exposures are required to produce an image of any single region of the sky. The actual order in which the filters are used is r, i, u, z and g. Although SDSS takes images through five filters, only three are combined to produce colored pictures. The i filter makes the red picture, r filter makes the green picture, and the g filters makes the blue picture.

Because of the technique called “drift-scanning” employed by the SDSS, exposure through a single filter takes roughly 54 seconds. Since asteroids are relatively close to us, they move rather quickly across the sky. This motion is easily noticeable at the resolution of 0.396 arc second per pixel achieved by SDSS. Furthermore, because of the order in which different filters are used, the red and green streaks are closer together and for slower moving objects may even be combined into single yellow/orange/brown streak. The dark blue/violet streak, however, is always easily recognizable at a sufficient distance from the other two (because the g filter is used last) .

Galaxy designated as SDSS J105646.89+050055.3 with an asteroid trail beneath it - Image Source: SDSS

The animation below shows what happens when the SDSS’s filters scan a part of sky with a slow-moving asteroid. The asteroid is the brown dot moving across the animation. The animation shows the camera’s r, i, and g filters sweeping across the sky. (In reality, it works the opposite – the cameras stay still and the sky moves during the night.) The camera takes a picture of the asteroid through the r and i filters (which are next to one another), leaving a yellow dot (or red and green dots). When the g filter scans the asteroid, the asteroid has moved; it shows up as a blue dot in its new place. In the last frame of the animation, the asteroid is removed, leaving only the image that would be seen by the SDSS.

Although SDSS is focused on looking for distant galaxies and quasars, it also sees objects in our cosmic neighborhood. The first data release (SDSS DR1) alone contains more than 100,000 asteroids. Occasionally, it manages to photograph a wobbling satellite in low-earth orbit (below) and even a bright meteor (below).

A satellite in Low Earth Orbit captured by SDSS camera using the r filter. The discontinuity in the satellite's path is a result of the data for that particular area being taken at different time - Image Source: SDSS

Bright meteor captured in the act of burning up in the earth's atmosphere. The trail is colored green because the image of the meteor was captured in only one of the 5 SDSS filters - Image Source: SDSS

Moon Zoo will be another citizen science project, the latest incarnation of the highly successful Galaxy Zoo. The project will use high resolution images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) on NASA’s LRO spacecraft. Moon Zoo will ask the participants to classify and measure the shape of features on lunar surface with the main focus on:

• counting the number of and measuring the size of impact craters
• categorizing locations of interest such as lava channels, crater chains, lava flooded impact craters,  volcanic eruptive centers, etc.
• assessing the degree of boulder hazard by comparing boulder density on two images
• identifying recent changes on lunar surface by comparing LRO and Apollo photographs
• determining the location of space mission hardware on the Moon (Apollo landers, Luna rovers, European and Chinese probes)

Besides delivering high quality data which will (hopefully) address many questions of lunar science, Moon Zoo will also be an excellent tool to promote lunar and space exploration and engage the public in learning about processes involved in scientific discoveries. Moon Zoo is expected to be even more popular than Galaxy Zoo, exploiting the media exposure of the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11 and the recent NASA’s LRO/LCROSS mission.

Full resolution detail from one of the first LROC NAC images. At this scale and lighting, impact craters dominate the landscape. Two general types of impact craters are readily identifiable. Solitary craters which most likely represent a single impact event, and clusters or chains of small, fresh craters produced by the impact of lunar material excavated by a larger impact. Image width is 1400 meters, north is down - Photo Source: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University

When the original Galaxy Zoo was launched in summer of 2007, hardly anyone could anticipate the enormous participation and the enthusiasm with which thousands of users meticulously classified millions of galaxies. Because of the immense success of the original project, Galaxy Zoo 2 was created to focus on a detailed classification of 245,609 galaxies selected from millions of classifications available. Galaxy Zoo 2 participants answer the kind of questions the creators of the original Galaxy Zoo project would have asked had they known how large the users base was going to be.

Earlier this month the Zoo project family was extended by Galaxy Zoo Supernovae (currently in a planned off-time to analyze preliminary data). The Supernovae project uses images from the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) taken only hours earlier. The PTF data is fed through an automated pipeline which finds suitable candidates to display to users. Because time (the age of a supernova) is of the essence for this type of research, unlike in Galaxy Zoo 1 and 2, GalaxyZoo Supernovae implemented a priority queue to always display the most recent candidates before showing older data. This system presents a unique opportunity for anyone to discover a never-before-seen supernova.

A supernova found in on of the Galaxy Zoo Supernovae candidate assets - Photo Source: GalaxyZoo.org

Galaxy Zoo project was the first of its kind to use the exceptional power of human brain to recognize patterns and shapes (something that computers “learn” with great difficulties). More importantly, Galaxy Zoo proved that worldwide citizen science projects can provide data analysis comparable in quality to professional astronomers. The large number of independent results by amateurs or enthusiasts has an advantage over a significantly smaller number of results by experts because it allows to quantify uncertainties with ease.