Showing posts with label Movie. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Movie. Show all posts

Wednesday, December 11, 2013

NASA Juno probe captures movie of Earth-Moon Flyby


When NASA's Juno spacecraft flew past Earth on Oct. 9, 2013, it received a boost in speed of more than 8,800 mph (about 7.3 kilometer per second), which set it on course for a July 4, 2016, rendezvous with Jupiter.

One of Juno's sensors, a special kind of camera optimized to track faint stars, also had a unique view of the Earth-moon system.

The result was an intriguing, low-resolution glimpse of what our world would look like to a visitor from afar.

The cameras that took the images for the movie are located near the pointed tip of one of the spacecraft's three solar-array arms.

They are part of Juno's Magnetic Field Investigation (MAG) and are normally used to determine the orientation of the magnetic sensors.

These cameras look away from the sunlit side of the solar array, so as the spacecraft approached, the system's four cameras pointed toward Earth.

Earth and the moon came into view when Juno was about 600,000 miles (966,000 kilometers) away -- about three times the Earth-moon separation.

During the flyby, timing was everything. Juno was traveling about twice as fast as a typical satellite, and the spacecraft itself was spinning at 2 rpm.

To assemble a movie that wouldn't make viewers dizzy, the star tracker had to capture a frame each time the camera was facing Earth at exactly the right instant.

The frames were sent to Earth, where they were processed into video format.

The music accompaniment is an original score by Vangelis.

Monday, January 14, 2013

Chandra Movie of Vela Pulsar: Neutron Star Action



The Vela pulsar, a neutron star that was formed when a massive star collapsed. (X-ray: NASA/CXC/Univ of Toronto/M.Durant et al; Optical: DSS/Davide De Martin).

This movie from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory shows a fast moving jet of particles produced by a rapidly rotating neutron star, and may provide new insight into the nature of some of the densest matter in the universe.

The star of this movie is the Vela pulsar, a neutron star that was formed when a massive star collapsed.

The Vela pulsar is about 1,000 light years from Earth, spansis about 12 miles in diameter, and makes over 11 complete rotations every second, faster than a helicopter rotor.

As the pulsar whips around, it spews out a jet of charged particles that race out along the pulsar’s rotation axis at about 70% of the speed of light.

In this still image from the movie, the location of the pulsar and the 0.7-light-year-long jet are labeled.

The Chandra data shown in the movie, containing 8 images obtained between June and September 2010, suggest that the pulsar may be slowly wobbling, or precessing, as it spins.

"It's like having an unsecured fire hose and a flow of water at high pressure," said co-author George Pavlov, principal investigator of the Chandra proposal at Pennsylvania State University in University Park. "All you need is a small bend in the hose and violent motion can result."

"We think the Vela pulsar is like a rotating garden sprinkler, except with the water blasting out at over half the speed of light," said Martin Durant of the University of Toronto in Canada, who is the first author of the paper describing these results.

Thursday, December 8, 2011

Time lapse movie: Mobile Launcher Moves



The mobile launcher returned from Launch Pad 39B at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida following two weeks of structural and other testing. The 355-foot-tall structure is to be used by the Space Launch System.

Sunday, June 6, 2010

Thursday, October 8, 2009

NASA Hubble's Amazing Rescue - The Movie

Click here to see the Movie Preview