Sauntering Vaguely Downward

My friends, ankaret has restarted her "The Bachelor" recaps. I confess I have never seen the show, but I also feel I don't need to, seeing as (a) the premise is not complicated and (b) I am confident ankaret's descriptions are far more entertaining than actually viewing them. They contain such gems as:

Frankie is wearing a bodycon scuba long sleeved high necked mini dress in a strange repeated digital print that looks like a website using the Stargate SG-1 logo as a tiled background some time in the early nineties. I half expect a message saying 'Under Construction' to circle her waist in rainbow marquee.

You can begin reading her recaps from Episode 1 of the current "The Bachelor UK" series here.

It is now just over three weeks until Cassini plunges into Saturn’s atmosphere and the mission (but not the Project) comes to an end. I grow a little sentimental.


This is the flight spare of Cassini’s fluxgate magnetometer sensor, which will live on. We use it for command simulations on the ground.


This is a 1:25 scale model of the Cassini spacecraft, with the Huygens probe attached to its side. It includes the magnetometer boom, which is hidden in this view. These were distributed to the payload teams. It's been in our group longer than I have (>11 years).

I recently ordered a big perspex display box for the model, so we can have it on show at the upcoming Imperial Fringe festival, post-mission-end. I’ll be giving a talk at the Farewell to Cassini exhibit. Details to follow (on the Londoners filter) when they’re confirmed and the web site for event registration is live.


This is a screenshot of NASA Eyes on the DSN that I took on 4 August. DSS-14 at Goldstone (the antenna in white on the left) is receiving data from Voyager 1 (spacecraft shown on the right). I accompanied this with “We’re still listening” on magnetometrist on Instagram.

NASA has a poll, open until Tuesday 29 August, to choose a 60-character-or-less #MessagetoVoyager, to be sent on 5 September. If you want to vote on a message, go here.

A selfie I took on the bus from Leiden Centraal to Noordwijk. The bus takes about 45 minutes, so most people opt for a taxi when they’re visiting ESTEC. I like the bus, though. It’s a really pretty route through the city and out into the countryside. Plus, it only costs 4 euros.

While I’m on the subject of space agencies, here are a few links.

• Want to holiday like an Elder God? Try these lethal exoplanet destinations! Galaxy of Horrors (h/t to redsixwing)
  
  
• For a more soothing experience, you can watch a mildly animated page of the Deep Space Network stations uplinking and downlinking data from different spacecraft. I sometimes do this. I mean, I have a PDF with all the scheduled DSN passes for Cassini, but let’s face it, this is much prettier. Eyes on the DSN.
  
  
• And finally, in Geeky Space Swag news, the Rosetta mission shop has been updated with new shirts and hoodies that include the cartoon spacecraft from the “Once Upon a Time” video series about the mission. Best of all, you can get your mitts on a cuddly/plushy toy of Rosetta and Philae, or donate one to be sent to a primary school.

majoline asked: Space! Any really interesting projects or phenomena happening right now?

Ha, now this is a broad topic. I'm going to choose three things to witter about that are close to my heart because I'm personally involved with them.

1. On 20 January 2014, the Rosetta spacecraft is going to be switched on after 2.5 years of hibernation. This is going to be quite an event. Rosetta has been traveling towards its rendezvous with a comet since its launch in 2004. The comet has the exciting name 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, or "Chury Gery" for short. It needed to hibernate in order to use as little power as possible for the last stage of its journey. Assuming it comes back on as planned, Rosetta will go into orbit around the comet whilst its accompanying lander, Philae, drops onto the comet's surface and probes its composition. Since comets are thought to be some of the last remnants of early solar system, we hope Rosetta's exploration will teach us something about the way ours formed.
   
   Here is a short YouTube video (2 minutes 29 seconds) that shows how Rosetta will wake up.
   
   "" (Watch on YouTube)


You can follow Rosetta's progress towards wake-up on Facebook.


2. There is a massive hexagonal hurricane at Saturn's North Pole.
   
   
   The Cassini spacecraft discovered this feature on Saturn a few years into the mission, because the poles were dark when it first arrived at the planet in 2004. Hurricanes on Earth tend to migrate north, but this one is as far north as it can get. The storm is effectively stuck at the pole. The eye of the storm is about 50 times bigger than your average Earth hurricane.
   
   There's a short article on the hurricane here.
   
   For me, this discovery highlights the importance of keeping missions to the outer planets going for as long as possible. It takes years to get a craft to them (7 years in the case of Cassini traveling from Earth to Saturn) and it doesn't happen very frequently. No space agency has a mission to Saturn currently in the works. The time from planning to launch is usually a decade, minimum, for outer planetary missions. Cassini is therefore likely to maintain its position as the first and the only spacecraft to orbit Saturn for at least a couple of decades if not longer.
   
   
3. BRB, going to Ganymede. Okay, maybe not exactly "BRB". The JUpiter ICy moons Explorer (JUICE) spacecraft is not scheduled for launch until 2022. But it is now over a year and a half since the mission was selected to be the first L-class, or large, mission launched as part of the European Space Agency's Cosmic Vision programme. It will study Jupiter's icy Galilean moons - Europa, Callisto and most particularly Ganymede, which it will orbit. It will attempt to discern, among other things, the extent and depth of the subsurface oceans on these moons. The oceans are thought to be one of the most likely places for life to have potentially developed elsewhere in our solar system.
   
   It's over a year since our lab was selected to build the magnetometer, which will measure the magnetic field to an absolute accuracy of 0.1 nT. To give you an idea of how small a tenth of a nanoTesla is, the Earth's magnetic field is, on average, 45 microTesla. Hence, what we experience every day is over a hundred thousand times bigger than what the JUICE magnetometer will be trying to measure.
   
   There isn't much in the public domain about the mission development that I can link you to now. Suffice it to say that even though press coverage is light, there is a hell of a lot of work going on behind the scenes. As I have signed an NDA (non-disclosure agreement) with respect to the instrument and spacecraft development, that's about as specific as I can get. Any disappearance on my part from social media for the next eight years can probably be attributed to intensive work on JUICE.
   
   A description of the JUICE payload can be found here.

Finally, this post allows me to showcase my exciting new icon by itsamellama, featuring me cosplaying Abby Sciuto from NCIS. \o/

The comet ISON is on approach to the sun and has entered the field of view of the long-running SOHO (Solar Heliospheric Observatory) mission. There are some fantastic shots of it traversing towards the sun through a CME (Coronal Mass Ejection) on the SOHO web site. The images were captured by the LASCO instrument on board the spacecraft. Stunning stuff - have a look!


This is LASCO's perspective on the sun and the comet. The sun is in the centre, blocked out so that the instrument can focus on what's going on around the edge of it. If you watch the latest movie on the web site, you'll see a big CME forming on the lower right side of the sun, and then ISON appears from the side and streaks toward the centre.

Images and movies from today's data on the SOHO NASA web site.

ETA 20:50 GMT: It looks like the comet may have broken up at perihelion (closest approach to the sun), as shown in this video by another sun-observing spacecraft, STEREO.