Man, Vesta is weird. It’s a 500 km (300 mile) wide asteroid, the second biggest, so its gravity should be strong enough to crush it into a sphere. But it’s not a ball; it’s lumpy and stretched out and, weirdest of all, has an enormous circular depression at its south pole which flattens that entire [...]

Click here to view the embedded video.

Well the GRAIL mission was delayed again as you probably know, launch is scheduled for tomorrow at 9:08 a.m. EDT.  The delay today was to allow mission managers to review the propulsion system from the de-tanking after Thursdays scrubbed attempt.  So all looks good and hopefully the third time is a charm.

The video here shows as you know (you’ve watched it already probably) new views of the Apollo landing sites, good video that could be much better with a big slow down.  However to examine the images in more detail you can go here and have a look.

One of the questions I hope GRAIL might help answer I will just call: The Tale of Two Moons.  Okay, I’m a big time Dickens fan. 

The twin GRAIL spacecraft sit on the launch pad at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station Florida. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/United Launch Alliance, Thom Baur

The GRAIL spacecraft were set to launch this morning but the launch was scrubbed due to upper level winds. The launch will be attempted again tomorrow at 08:33 a.m. EDT and if that is not “a go” there is another chance at 09:12 a.m. EDT.

There will be a launch blog up and running at 06:00 a.m. EDT. You can watch online with a live chat on Ustream TV, and by the way this is a pretty fun way to go and there is also Twitter at http://twitter.com/NASAJPL and http://twitter.com/NASA are good choice especially if you can watch NASA TV.

Me? Um, I think I’ll be watching at the Ustream link.

NASA put a interesting launch milestone list up, so I included it here:

Launch
At liftoff, the rocket’s first-stage engine and six of its nine strap-on solid rocket motors will ignite, and the rocket will be airborne, carrying GRAIL up and over the Atlantic Ocean.

First six solid rocket motors are jettisoned
GRAIL’s Delta II is carrying nine strap-on graphite-epoxy motors. The first six will be ignited at the time of liftoff. The remaining three will be ignited shortly after the first six strap-on motors burn out.

Fairing separates
After the Delta’s first stage completes its tour of duty, its second stage, which will provide 9,645 pounds of kick for GRAIL, will begin the first of two scheduled burns.

Shortly after ignition of the rocket’s second stage, the Delta’s 30-foot-long (8.88-meter-long) nose cone, or fairing, will separate and be jettisoned as planned, providing the GRAIL twins with their first taste of exo-atmospheric existence.

Parking at 17,500 miles per hour
The Delta’s second stage will temporarily stop firing, as planned, and the rocket and GRAIL will begin a planned coast phase, also known as a “parking orbit” at about 90 miles (nearly 167 kilometers up).

GRAIL heading from Earth to the moon
The Delta’s second stage will begin a second burn. This approximately four-and-a-half-minute-long burn will place GRAIL on its desired trajectory to the moon.

Spacecraft begin to separate from second stage
The GRAIL-A spacecraft begins its separation process from the Delta’s second stage. The GRAIL-B spacecraft separates about 8 minutes later. At this point, the moon is three-and-a-half months away.

Lunar North Pole. Click for larger. Image Credit: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University

Nice!!  Want a large version? You do, trust me on this. Click here.

Here’s the caption from NASA:

The Earth’s moon has been an endless source of fascination for humanity for thousands of years. When at last Apollo 11 landed on the moon’s surface in 1969, the crew found a desolate, lifeless orb, but one which still fascinates scientist and non-scientist alike.

This image of the moon’s north polar region was taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, or LROC. One of the primary scientific objectives of LROC is to identify regions of permanent shadow and near-permanent illumination. Since the start of the mission, LROC has acquired thousands of Wide Angle Camera images approaching the north pole. From these images, scientists produced this mosaic, which is composed of 983 images taken over a one month period during northern summer. This mosaic shows the pole when it is best illuminated, regions that are in shadow are candidates for permanent shadow.

Craters and Rays on Vesta. Click for larger. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

Pretty nice picture don’t you think? The streak across the small dark crater (right, center) in particular is pretty interesting to me. I modified the image a little to bring out some of the features, you can get the original at the link below.

About the image from the Dawn page on which it appears:

PASADENA, Calif. — NASA’s Dawn spacecraft obtained this image with its framing camera on August 18, 2011. This image was taken through the framing camera’s clear filter aboard the spacecraft. The image has a resolution of about 260 meters per pixel.
The Dawn mission to Vesta and Ceres is managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington. It is a project of the Discovery Program managed by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala. UCLA is responsible for overall Dawn mission science. Orbital Sciences Corporation of Dulles, Va., designed and built the Dawn spacecraft.
The framing cameras were developed and built under the leadership of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany, with significant contributions by the German Aerospace Center (DLR) Institute of Planetary Research, Berlin, and in coordination with the Institute of Computer and Communication Network Engineering, Braunschweig. The framing camera project is funded by NASA, the Max Planck Society and DLR. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology, in Pasadena.

There is a possibility of your being able to see a supernova, certainly with a telescope and possibly with binoculars.

The supernova is in the Pinwheel galaxy is located in the Big Dipper. I was going to check for this but the flooding rains came again last night and will return again tonight, thanks to Lee.

So please go to Sky & Telescope for all the information. If this supernova gets to mag 8, it will be visible with binoculars and that could happen so be sure to look if you have the skies!!

Click here to view the embedded video.

We have flood watches out, not for Katia but for Lee.  I will gladly donate some of the rain to other parts of the country needing some, the challenge is getting it to you.

Source

Saturn's Clouds from Cassini. Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Cassini recently took this image of the swirling clouds on Saturn.  Although it looks pretty close, Saturn is a BIG place and the spacecraft was 1,292,430 miles / 2,079,966 km from the planet at the time.

To my excitement I got the Tutsi (almost) and Malagasy genotypes. These are cases where N = 1 is a big deal, as opposed to N = 0. What other groups might be informative? Most of the world’s population is obviously not sampled, but they’re not always of equal interest. What would be equivalent to [...]

Semen collection in rhinoceroses (Rhinoceros unicornis, Diceros bicornis, Ceratotherium simum) by electroejaculation with a uniquely designed probe.

Howdy. We’re currently upgrading the Discoblog commenting system. If all goes well, it will soon be back online, bigger and badder than ever. Seeing as the Internet is made out of pure magic, we’re burning a few chickens, an old magician’s trick, to make sure everything goes smoothly.

If you go outside a couple of hours after sunset tonight and look east, you’ll see a very bright "star" in the sky. That’s Jupiter. If you look at it with a nice telescope equipped with a good camera and filter set, and you have the patience to spend a bit of time afterwards putting [...]

A month ago I asked for a Malagasy genotype. Almost immediately I received a response from someone that was 33% Malagasy. More recently I have sent a genotyping kit to someone who is Malagasy. Those results should come in within a month or so. But a few days ago I received a contact from a [...]

What’s the News: Among the many creepy denizens of Australia—such as the red back spider, seen here hauling a lizard into its nest, and the saltwater crocodile, which kills with its distinctive “death roll”—the assassin bug is right at home. With its erratic, long-legged walk, it stalks along spiders’ webs, caressing its prey with its [...]

The Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, Italy What’s the News: The walls of the Palazzo Vecchio, the centuries-old seat of Florentine government, have doubtless housed many secrets over the years. Now, a physicist, a photographer, and a researcher who uses advanced technology to analyze art are teaming up to reveal one secret that may still linger there: [...]

Last week, NASA released new, higher-res images of three Apollo landing sites taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. BABloggee Rick Sheppe had a cool idea: why not compare these to ones taken by the Apollo astronauts themselves? In fact, by grabbing a frame taken by a 16mm movie camera on board the Apollo 17 ascent [...]

1) Post from the past: Introgression in wolves & dogs. 2) Weird search query of the week: “any gay iranians to shag.” 3) Comment of the week, in response to Twin studies are not useless: It’s interesting that one of the San genomes had a non-standard FOXP2 SNP. I am wondering if this can be [...]

The cover of The Postmortal is one of the coolest images I’ve seen in a long time. Death impaled by his own scythe – be not proud, indeed. The idea behind Drew Magary’s great new book is simple: aging, as it turns out, is caused by one gene. Shut that gene off and you stop aging; accidents [...]

Keen eyes will notice tiny improvements in the look-and-feel of the Discover blogs today, thanks to behind-the-scenes work of our crack website team. One improvement is that the social-media buttons at the bottom of each post are a little more clear and logical. They also let you know how many people have passed along a post via each medium.

Which leads me to an entirely unoriginal observation: the internet loves Top Ten lists. Perusing our home page, it’s easy to be struck by the giant numbers for the Things Everyone Should Know About Time post. It’s true that I like to think the post was actually interesting. (People seem to be divided between whether #4 or #10 is the most striking entry.)

But still, I’ll be honest: being at the conference I hadn’t been able to blog much, so I thought it would be good to write something that would be popular but not too hard to write. Thus: a top ten list. Box office!

So why exactly is that? I’m not disparaging: a good list is a way to convey a substantial amount of information in a well-organized form. But still, would it have been as popular had it been Top Seven? What if each entry were three times as long? What if the exact same words were presented without the numbers and bold-face labels?

No grand theories here, just idle curiosity. Enjoy the tiny aesthetic upgrade.

[UPDATE: The launch of GRAIL has been postponed once again to Saturday, tomorrow. There are two launch windows; one at 12:29:45 UT and the other at 13:08:52 (08:29 and 09:08 Eastern US time). The weather forecast is iffy, so there may be another postponement. Stay tuned.] NASA’s GRAIL mission — Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory, [...]