Top 10: This year’s best astronomy stories on Space Oddities

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2005 YU55, Comet Lovejoy, Europa water, Exoplanets, Sharpless 2-106, solar storms, space junk, top astronomy stories, Vesta

Before 2011 escapes our reach, here’s a list of the Top 10 stories here on Space Oddities. There were so many amazing astronomy-related discoveries this year, but we could only fit a portion of our favorites.

Also, a special shout-out to our readers! You all have made this a very exciting journey for us.

Happy reading!

No. 10: Video from Mars

A NASA rover photographed 309 images of Mars during a three-year journey on the planet. Here’s what the rover, called Opportunity, captured. Only problem is the video too jumpy. But, we’ll take it.

No. 9: Too much junk

Courtesy of NASA

This year, we learned just how much crap is orbiting Earth. There are more than 500,000 pieces of debris, all traveling up to 17,500 miles per hour. That’s crazy! According to NASA, about 200,000 pieces of the space junk are the size of a softball or larger. Hopefully we’ll have a story in 2012 about NASA, and others, fixing this mess.

No. 8: An extremely ‘unique’ object

This full view of the giant asteroid Vesta was taken by NASA’s Dawn spacecraft. This view of Vesta shows impact craters of various sizes and grooves parallel to the equator. Photo and caption courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

Wait, what? Vesta isn’t really an asteroid? This was a big surprise. The spacecraft Dawn, which is orbiting Vesta – the second largest object in the asteroid belt – revealed some pretty fascinating stuff. Scientists now say the object is somewhere between a planet and an asteroid. Hmm…

No. 7: A view from the ISS

This was perhaps my favorite video of the year. It shows the International Space Station flying over Earth. Every time I see it, I think “Wow.” I bet you will, too!

No. 6: Lots of solar storms

The Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) captured this image of the X1.9 class solar flare from Nov. 3. Caption and photo courtesy: NASA/SDO

The sun was pretty violent this year, and it’s going to get worse.  The sun is currently in an active cycle that will peak in 2013, but luckily for us, NASA has found a way to better predict when these storms are heading for Earth. Read more about that, the sun’s cycle and what we could potentially expect from a massive CME, or Coronal Mass Ejection. Here’s some more solar storm stories (auroras are included here, too) from the year.

No. 5: Massive asteroid passes pretty close to earth

This radar image of asteroid 2005 YU55 was obtained on Nov. 7 when the space rock was at 3.6 lunar distances, which is about 860,000 miles, or 1.38 million kilometers, from Earth. Caption and image courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech

The 1,300-foot wide asteroid 2005 YU55 passed extremely close to Earth in November. While the object wasn’t a threat, it was closer to our planet than the moon is. Scary!

No. 4: More evidence of water

Europa's "Great Lake." Scientists speculate many more exist throughout the shallow regions of the moon's icy shell. Image and caption courtesy of Britney Schmidt/Dead Pixel FX/Univ. of Texas at Austin.

My favorite two stories this year dealt with evidence of water on Mars and Jupter’s moon Europa.

The NASA Exploration Rover Opportunity, which has been exploring the Martian surface for more than 7 years, found a “mineral vein” made up of gypsum. That tells scientists that water definitely flowed on Mars.

It was also announced that Europa has enough water beneath its surface to fill the Great Lakes. Whoa!

Want to read more about water worlds? Check out this gallery.

No. 3: Go, Comet Lovejoy!

This was a pretty amazing story. An icy comet named Lovejoy, which was about the size of two football fields, was expected to die a fiery death after it had an extremely close encounter with our Sun. Well, to everyone’s surprise, the comet survived! The comet passed the sun and went right on heading into space. Check out this video:

No. 2: Planets everywhere!

NASA's Kepler mission has discovered a world where two suns set over the horizon instead of just one. The planet, called Kepler-16b, is the most "Tatooine-like" planet yet found in our galaxy and is depicted here in this artist's concept with its two stars. Illustration and caption courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt

I think this was the perfect year to start my blog because there was always an awesome, newly discovered planet to write about. There was a planet made of diamond, one darker than coal, a planet that had two stars just like in Star Wars’ Tatooine, and even Earth-size planets being found. Hundreds of planets were discovered this year, bringing the total number of exoplanets discovered to over 700. Fabulous! Keep on planet hunting! Click here to read more about some of the exoplanets discovered in 2011.

No. 1: Snow angel shines for Hubble, and Space Oddities!

Image courtesy of NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

This breathtaking photo of the nebula Sharpless 2-106 made a recent Photo of the Week feature. A day or two after it posted, the stats here on Space Oddities jumped through the roof! We couldn’t believe how many people were searching for this image. While the piece wasn’t a full-on article, this definitely lands on our number 1 spot of best stories for 2011.

So, Vesta isn’t really an asteroid?

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asteroid, Dawn, Dawn spacecraft, Vesta

In images from Dawn's framing camera, the colors reveal differences in the rock composition associated with material ejected by impacts and geologic processes. Vesta is unique among asteroids visited by spacecraft to date in having such wide variation, supporting the notion that it is transitional between the terrestrial planets - like Earth, Mercury, Mars and Venus - and its asteroid siblings. Image and caption courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

When scientists examined a photograph of Vesta, the second largest object in the asteroid belt, they were surprised to find what the massive object was made of.

Vesta is composed of many different layers of rock and material. This means that Vesta’s classification is somewhere between that of an asteroid and a planet. It’s one of the most ‘unique’ asteroids a spacecraft has visited, according to NASA.

Shall we call it a plasteroid? Or a planetoid? Maybe Vesta is a dwarf planet?

“Vesta’s iron core makes it special and more like terrestrial planets than a garden-variety asteroid,” said Carol Raymond, Dawn’s deputy principal investigator at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in a release. “The distinct compositional variation and layering that we see at Vesta appear to derive from internal melting of the body shortly after formation, which separated Vesta into crust, mantle and core.”

The discovery was due to NASA’s Dawn Mission, which is now orbiting Vesta at its closest distance yet.

This image of the giant asteroid Vesta was obtained by NASA's Dawn spacecraft on Nov. 27 as it was spiraling down from its high altitude mapping orbit to low altitude mapping orbit. Low altitude mapping orbit is the closest orbit Dawn will be making, at an average of 130 miles above the giant asteroid's surface. Image and caption courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

Dawn has been orbiting Vesta since this past July. The spacecraft will leave the giant object in July 2012 for its next adventure: researching the dwarf planet Ceres.

Read more about asteroids here.

3-D video of asteroid Vesta

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asteroid, Dawn spacecraft, NASA Dawn, Vesta

This video was created using images from NASA’s Dawn spacecraft, which is orbiting a 330-mile asteroid called Vesta. The images were compiled this past summer.

Read more about Vesta, Dawn’s mission, and asteroids in this previous post.

Talk sheds light on asteroids; questions raised about Vesta’s mysterious grooves

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asteroid, Ceres, Dawn mission, ion propulsion, Kevin Conod, North Jersey Astronomical Group, Vesta

Our solar system has more than 500,000 asteroids – or pieces of debris left from the creation of our planetary system. But don’t worry, the “big one” isn’t expected to end life here on Earth for several million years.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t study them. After all, there are more than 1,000 asteroids on a “potentially dangerous” watch list.

“We have to figure out how to nudge these objects out of the way,” said Kevin Conod, manager for the Newark Museum’s Dreyfuss Planetarium.

Conod gave a lecture, “All about Asteroids,” this past week during the North Jersey Astronomical Group’s monthly meeting at Montclair State University.

Conod spoke about the history of asteroids (scientists thought they were stars, hence the Greek word “aster” for “star” ), its characteristics (a majority are dark carbonaceous objects; some are stony and a small fraction are metallic), and the latest asteroid-related discoveries gathered by NASA’s Dawn mission.

Dawn is orbiting the asteroid Vesta, a 330-mile object located in our solar system’s asteroid belt. After mapping, photography and further studying Vesta, Dawn will travel to Ceres, a dwarf planet. Vesta and Ceres are two of the largest objects in the asteroid belt and they are quite different. According to the mission’s website:

The top-level question that the mission addresses is the role of size and water in determining the evolution of the planets. Ceres and Vesta are the right two bodies with which to address this question, as they are the most massive of the protoplanets, baby planets whose growth was interrupted by the formation of Jupiter. Ceres is very primitive and wet while Vesta is evolved and dry.

Conod showed various pictures taken from Dawn that shows Vesta’s rocky and impact-ridden surface.

This 3-D image of the giant asteroid Vesta obtained by NASA's Dawn spacecraft shows the surface of the asteroid from an orbit of about 1,700 miles above the surface. Numerous impact craters illustrate the asteroid's violent youth. By counting craters on distinct geological surfaces scientists can deduce relative ages of the asteroid's surface. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

This image of Vesta, calculated from a shape model, shows a tilted view of the topography of the south polar region. This perspective shows the topography, but removes the overall curvature of Vesta, as if the giant asteroid were flat and not rounded. An observer on Vesta would not have a view like this, because the distant features would disappear over the curvature of the horizon. (In the same way, if you were standing in North America, you would not be able to see a tall Mt. Everest in the distance, because of Earth's curvature.) Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA/PSI

Questions were raised regarding some of the parallel grooves, or streaks, on Vesta’s surface. What could have caused those marks, audience members asked Conod. “They go on much longer than can be explained by impact,” Conod responded. “They are really quite long … It’s under investigation.”

This full view of the giant asteroid Vesta was taken by NASA’s Dawn spacecraft on July 24, 2011, at a distance of 3,200 miles. This view of Vesta shows impact craters of various sizes and grooves parallel to the equator. What caused those parallel grooves? Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

Later this month, NASA will obtain more images (eight times higher resolution) of Vesta. We’ll keep you posted here on Space Oddities.

After its rendezvous with Vesta, Dawn will head out to the dwarf planet Ceres. “It’s going to be an interesting world to explore,” Conod said.

There are only five objects classified as dwarf planets in our solar system. Perhaps the most famous is Pluto, which was declassified from a planet to a dwarf planet in 2006.

Other interesting asteroid/Dawn facts:

• According to Conod, if you took all the asteroids in our solar system and mashed them other, their total mass would only be 4 percent of that of our moon. Wow.
• When thinking about the asteroid belt, people usually reflect on what they’ve seen on television: Spaceships quickly darting out-of-the-way of thousands of incoming rocks. But, Conod said, the average distance between asteroids is about 2 million miles.  Wow again. “Collisions aren’t that common,” Conod said.
• Dawn, launched in 2007, is the first solar spacecraft to travel past Mars.
• Dawn uses ion propulsion, or electrical fields for power; unlike chemical reactions that were used for the Space Shuttle Program. An example: Conod said for 5,400 pounds of chemical propellant, only 540 pounds of ions are needed. Ion propulsion will allow scientists to go deeper and deeper into space. Read more about that here.
• Of all the meteorites that have crashed onto Earth, five percent of it has come from Vesta’s crust.
• Some asteroids, like Ida, have moons. Crazy, right? Read more about Ida and its moon Dactyl here.

Free MSU lecture: Everything you wanted to know about asteroids

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asteroids, Ceres, Dawn mission, Dreyfuss Planetarium, Kevin Conod, Montclair State, North Jersey Astronomical Group, Vesta

What do we know about asteroids? They can be very different in size, shape, and makeup. Some asteroids, like Ceres, have been reclassified as dwarf planets because of their composition. Ceres, unlike the asteroid Vesta which is dry and rocky, contains water-bearing minerals.

In this image of Vesta, taken by NASA's Dawn spacecraft just shortly before the beginning of high altitude mapping orbit, north is up and the upper right corner is to the northeast. The spacecraft's distance to Vesta's center is about 420 miles (680 kilometers). Recently, NASA released images that showed a mountain range on Vesta was three times as high as Mt. Everest. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

This week, the North Jersey Astronomical Group’s monthly meeting will have Kevin Conod of the Newark Museum’s Dreyfuss Planetarium giving a lecture dubbed, “All About Asteroids.” Conod will discuss the history of asteroid discovery and the latest information about them from NASA’s Dawn spacecraft.

The free lecture will be held at Montclair State University’s Richardson Hall, Room 232, at 8 p.m. tomorrow, Wednesday, Oct. 12. Will we see you there?