What's Going on in Space This Month

meteor showers

 The Southern Delta Aquarids

Duration: July 14 - Aug. 18

Peak: July 28/29

ZHR (rate): ~10 per hour

Radiant: In Aquarius

The Aquarids will rise at about 8 p.m. and will be overhead at about 2 a.m.  The very bright waning gibbous moon, only three days past full, will rise before the end of twilight so observing will be difficult at best  Normally you should expect perhaps 8-15 per hour. Face south and look for meteors overhead and begin your observing about 11 p.m. on the 28th and continue into the dawn of the morning of the 29th.

Tips on how to watch meteor showers

THE NAKED EYE PLANETS

Mercury

July is a very difficult month to spot the elusive innermost planet, Mercury, which is embedded in bright dusk after sunset. It will be easier to see around the middle of the month. Look on July 27 with binoculars or a wide field telescope only 1/2 degree from REGULUS to see Mercury. Another opportunity arises on July 30-31 when the plane will be just to the left of Regulus right on the western horizon about 45 minutes after sunset. It will not be seen in dark skies, only in twilight shortly after sunset.   

Venus

Although fairly bright in western skies and somewhat high enough to be seen in dark skies, the planet Venus will begin slowly moving closer to the western horizon with each successive evening as July progresses. The brightest of all planets will be poised to the lower right of the bright star REGULUS in the first week of July but will slowly move eastward relative to the stars of LEO. By July 9, near the end of twilight in the far western sky, a wonderful grouping of Venus and Regulus will be seen when the pair is only about one degree apart.

Mars

Mars is teamed up with Saturn and Venus as bright naked eye planets this month and by mid-month Mars will be a short distance to the left (east) of brilliant Venus.  Note the very red color of Mars as compared with the brilliant white of Venus.  Mars has receded far from Earth at this point and is a very disappointing view in even the largest telescopes.

Jupiter

The mightiest of planets and this month the most magnificent, JUPITER is found easily rising about midnight local time and will be high overhead at dawn, but low in southern skies for northern observers. The apparent diameter of this large planet will be about 42 arc seconds in July, large enough to spot the Great Red Spot, white cyclonic storms and the many belts and zones of this rapidly rotating gaseous world.

Saturn

Saturn is very low in western skies at the end of evening twilight. This will be one of three bright planets visible to the naked eye in the evening.  Saturn's rings are still tilted toward Earth nearly edge-on so that its reflectance overall is far less than it can be when the rings are tilted at their maximum presentation. Thus, the planet is somewhat fainter in recent years than it can be.  It is low in western skies at dark and this will be the last month of the year that it can be favorably viewed in evening skies.

phases of The moon

                                       July 4                 July 11                July 18                 July 26

SPACE watch news

Spirit Team Announces Major Water Discovery on Mars
By A.J.S. Rayl - The Planetary Society

Mars Exploration Rover Spirit continued to hibernate this month, parked in place near an old volcanic formation called Home Plate. At the same time though she managed to rove back into the planetary exploration spotlight when a group of the mission scientists announced they had found -- in data from an outcrop the rover visited more than four years ago -- evidence for a past watery environment more suitable for life than any other either Spirit or Opportunity have found, a place where near-pure water existed.

Spirit came across the strange looking outcrop, called Comanche, in December 2005, while hiking down from Husband Hill and into the Inner Basin, where Home Plate had captured the rover's eyes and the team's attention. The outcrop looked weird enough that it drew them in, and the team commanded the rover to make a pit stop to examine it up-close with all its instruments. That was in December 2005.

Comanche in Martian color - Comanche just looked different. The scientists generally believe it's the remnant of something larger, "perhaps a volcano or bed of volcanoes," says Ray Arvidson, MER deputy principal investigator and a co-author of the paper.   Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Cornell / colorized by Stuart Atkinson

Spirit and the mission moved on. But for senior planetary scientist Dick Morris, manager of the Spectroscopy and Magnetics Laboratory down on Earth at NASA's Johnson Space Center (JSC), the work on Spirit’s latest bizarre taget was only beginning. He knew from his first look at data from the Mössbauer spectrometer, an instrument that detects iron-bearing minerals, something was different. It would take him a couple of years before he openly hazarded his guess and that was but a new beginning.

Ultimately, it would take Morris’ continued persistence inside and outside the laboratory and cajoling a number of other scientists on the MER team to sign up to conducting analyses, and even then, more testing to unequivocally confirm his hunch.

But it paid off big time. Comanche is harboring magnesium iron carbonate -- and a lot of it. And that’s a discovery that MER Principal Investigator Steve Squyres is now calling “one of the top five findings of the entire mission.” The team’s report was published in Science online June 3, 2010.

New NASA & ESA Games - Virtual Moon-base & Europa-base
By Jeremy Hsu - SPACE.com Senior Writer

NASA may not be sending astronauts back to the moon anytime this decade, but the space agency hopes to give virtual explorers a sense of what life on the moon would be like in a new computer game launching this month.

The game, "Moonbase Alpha," will allow players to work together in a futuristic lunar base. It will be available for PC download from Valve's Steam network on July 6. Players must tackle the challenge of restoring oxygen flow and critical systems after a meteor strike cripples a solar array and life support system.

This comes as a precursor to NASA's massively multiplayer online game, called "Astronaut: Moon, Mars & Beyond," where players would take on astronaut roles, such as a roboticist, and explore virtual versions of the moon and other extraterrestrial locations

developers had debated about whether to keep the "Moonbase Alpha" setting on a lunar base, after the cancellation of NASA's Constellation Program that aimed to return astronauts to the moon. But they eventually decided to forge ahead with their original plans.

"The moon's not going anywhere," said Daniel Laughlin, project manager for NASA Learning Technologies at the agency's Goddard Earth Science and Technology Center in Maryland.

A game of their own

Games that recreate real space environments inside a user's computer can entertain casual gamers and perhaps spread the word about space exploration activities. At least that's the hope among NASA's "Moonbase Alpha" designers, and the U.S. space agency isn't alone in trying to tap into that potential.

Consider: If paying $200,000 for a real-life suborbital spaceflight on a Virgin Galactic space liner sounds like a hefty price, that ticket price still falls short of the $330,000 one gamer spent to buy a virtual space station in the online game "Entropia Universe."

The company behind "Entropia Universe" has since created a demo for the European Space Agency (ESA) to show how online gaming could promote space exploration.

The developers at MindArk used their "Entropia Universe" game engine to create a virtual base set on Jupiter's moon Europa. Their scripted demo shows players cooperating on in-game missions, such as repairing a broken-down rover

ESA contracted game developer MindArk to build a demo of a massively multiplayer online game set in a future base on Jupiter's moon Europa. Credit: ESA/MindArk

"[ESA] was expecting a mock-up, but not a prototype," said Christian Bjorkman, chief marketing officer for MindArk. "But for us to create the mock-up, we might as well create the environment and run around in it."

But Joachim Fuchs, a technical officer and system modeler at ESA, had also seen examples of engineers holding collaborative work sessions in online games. He wondered if an online game could not only promote space exploration among gamers, but also allow engineers to play out scenarios for future space missions.

"The next generation of engineers we're going to get in this agency is going to have grown up in a world dominated by [gaming] technologies and social networks," Fuchs told SPACE.com.

To educate or entertain

Massively multiplayer online games have attracted millions of players worldwide who are willing to pay about $15 per month to run around a virtual world with thousands of other people. Researchers have even looked into using popular games such as "World of Warcraft" to encourage group learning among students.

That doesn't mean NASA and ESA can simply cram knowledge down the throats of gamers. Successful online games provide players with entertainment first and foremost — a fact that both the U.S. and European space agencies have recognized.

NASA has recruited the help of game developers such as Virtual Heroes, which created the free online game "America's Army" for the U.S. Department of Defense. The U.S. Army has dubbed the game its single most effective recruitment tool for reaching out to young people.

"America's Army" works because most of it feels like any other action-oriented, shoot-'em-up game. Yet it also immerses players in virtual Army training, such as learning how to use different weapons on the firing ranges, or diagnosing and treating virtual wounded soldiers.

Games that advertise their intent to educate players and promote learning have fared less well, according to the MindArk developers. They also emphasized the need to create a self-sustaining, profitable game that players would want to keep playing.

"The absolute majority of these educational games have been a failure in terms of attracting the interest and keeping it among the kids," Bjorkman explained. "This means that the fundamental criteria should always be to have an entertainment base in which learning factors are built upon and added to."

Exploring the virtual frontier

ESA considered many software and game developers to examine the idea of an online game, but ultimately chose MindArk based on its success with "Entropia Universe." The commercial game allows players to pay real money for better in-game guns or equipment, but players can also earn virtual game currency and then cash out for real money.

MindArk already offers commercial partners the choice of adding on new planets to "Entropia Universe," making it easy to put together the Europa base demo.

"In the ESA study our game developers could put together the prototype environment in a short time and publish the finished 'game' for ESA to access and evaluate; it is actually still online," Bjorkman said.

The study suggested several game development scenarios for an ESA-themed game, depending on the space agency's goals. An online game with fewer players could represent a more suitable choice for exploratory learning. Another game could reach out to more casual players through social media, but at the expense of education.

ESA has yet to decide on a full-fledged game, and has not signed any developers on. But both ESA and MindArk representatives were enthusiastic about the possibility of pushing forward.

"Increasing the awareness and knowledge about space are issues far too important NOT to be played out in a game," the ESA study concludes.

100s of Possible Alien Planets Discovered By NASA Spacecraft

By Denise Chow - SPACE.com Staff Writer

NASA's Kepler spacecraft hunting for Earth-like planets around other stars has found 706 candidates for potential alien worlds while gazing at more than 156,000 stars packed into a single patch of the sky.

If all 706 of these objects pass the stringent follow-up tests to determine if they are actually planets, and not false alarms, they could nearly triple the current number of known extrasolar planets. They were announced as part of a huge release of data from the mission's first 43 days by NASA's Kepler science team this week.

The Kepler space observatory monitors stars for subtle changes in their brightness, which could indicate the presence of alien planets passing in front of them as seen from Earth. Astronomers will use the newly-released data from Kepler to determine if orbiting planets are responsible for the variation in brightness of several hundred stars.

 "This is the most precise, nearly continuous, longest and largest data set of stellar photometry ever," said David Koch, the mission's deputy principal investigator at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., in a statement. "The results will only get better as the duration of the data set grows with time."

By measuring tiny decreases in the brightness of stars when planets cross – or transit – in front of them, astronomers can determine the size of the planet. [The strangest alien planets.]

To date, astronomers have discovered more than 400 alien planets lurking around stars beyond our solar system. That includes six newfound worlds discovered by a French observatory that were announced earlier this week.

Zoo of parent stars

Kepler currently monitors a star field in the constellations Cygnus and Lyra. The stars make up a full range of temperatures, sizes and ages. Many of them are stable, but others pulsate.

Luke Skywalker's home planet of Tatooine in Star Wars had two suns, but that's paltry compared to a Jupiter-like planet 149 light-years from Earth. This planet has three suns, with the main star similar in mass to our own sun. The triple-star system is known as HD 188753. Like Tatooine, the planet there is likely pretty hot. It orbits very close to the main star, completing one orbit every 3.5 days.  Credit: Space.com

Some of the stars show starspots, which are similar to sunspots, and a few even produce flares that are so powerful they would sterilize their nearest planets, should any exist.

In this particular star field, Kepler has identified 706 planetary candidates, of which the data for 306 of these were part of the public data release this week.

The 28 members of the Kepler science team are using ground-based telescopes, the Hubble Space Telescope and the Spitzer Space Telescope to perform follow-up observations on a specific set of 400 objects that were not publicly released to double-check if they are good candidates for alien planets.

Data from these follow-up observations will determine which of the objects of interest can be identified as planets. These findings will subsequently be released to the scientific community in February 2011.

Double-checking potential planets

Follow-up observations are necessary in order to distinguish candidates that are actual planets from false alarms, such as binary stars, which are two stars that orbit each other.

"For the most interesting objects, we go through a process of putting the data through a series of sieves," Charles Sobeck, Kepler's deputy project manager, told SPACE.com. "For final candidates that have passed all the tests, we then go to the expensive resources like Hubble and Spitzer."

The size of planetary candidates can also only be approximated until the size of the stars they orbit is determined from additional spectroscopic observations made by ground-based telescopes.

"I look forward to the scientific community analyzing the data and announcing new exoplanet results in the coming months," said Lia LaPiana, Kepler's program executive at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C., in a statement.

Search goes on

The Kepler observatory will continue conducting science operations until at least November 2012. It will also continue searching for Earth-like planets, including those that orbit stars in a warm, habitable zone where liquid water could exist on the surface of alien planets.  

And, since transits of planets within this habitable zone of solar-like stars occur about once a year and require three transits for verification, it is expected to take at least three years to locate and verify any potential Earth-size planet.

"The Kepler observations will tell us whether there are many stars with planets that could harbor life, or whether we might be alone in our galaxy," said Kepler's science principal investigator William Borucki of NASA's Ames Research Center.

So far, Kepler's observations have produced a wealth of information, and it has surpassed the expectations of its mission scientists, Borucki said.

"We never thought we'd have this much this early, it's absolutely wonderful," Borucki told SPACE.com. "The instruments are working well, but we still have some work to do. We're certainly not finished with this kind of work, and each year, we go to more and more difficult targets. So, people have to be patient."

For more information on Space Watch opportunities please go to www.space.com