The Last 31 Days in Astronomy

OCT-11-2007 • GMT to be Built in Chile • The Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) site has been announced. The telescope with an effective aperture of 80 feet will be built at Los Campanas in Chile. The resulting resolution is 10 times better than Hubble. It is expected to be completed in 2016. The mirror surface will be accurate to 1 millionth of an inch. http://www.gmto.org/newsitems/gmtlcositeselected

OCT-25-2007 • Comet Holmes • One of the biggest astronomy news items of the year is how Comet Holmes has blossomed into a naked eye object long after perihelion. http://www.astronomynow.com/news/071025holmes/

NOV-01-2007 • Possible Water at Mars Equator • The Mars Express orbiter, launched by the ESA, has used radar to study an area called the Medusae Fossae Formation. The results indicate that there is some loosely packed material that is at least 2.5 kilometers thick. It might be volcanic dust or just more of the ordinary Martian dust that has blown into this area. However, such dust in an anhydrous environment should be packed tightly by now. The remaining possibility would be water ice which could have been formed when the Martian obliquity (tilt) was much different and the current equator was near the pole. But ice should have evaporated at least down to several meters. The radar equipment on the Mars Express was built by a collaboration between the University of Rome and JPL. http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2007-126

NOV-06-2007 • Fifth Planet found at 55 Cancri • A fifth planet has been discovered orbiting 55 Cancri. Debra Fischer and Geoff Marcy and a team of collaborators took 320 velocity measurements at Lick and at Keck. The planet is too large to be Earth-like but if it has a large moon that moon might contain large bodies of water. Interesting. http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2007-128

NOV-07-2007 • STS-120 Landing • The space shuttle Discovery completed a most unusual mission with a perfect landing at Cape Canaveral. The mission dropped of the Harmony module but became more famous by the unplanned fixing of a solar panel that tore while it was being unfurled. The next mission will use Atlantis in its last flight before the Hubble fixing mission in mid-2008. The following link leads to photos, videos, and other interactive features including the first high definition video of a shuttle launch. http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/main/Shuttle_Multimedia_Collection_archive_1.html

NOV-11-2007 • Artificial Asteroid • An asteroid headed for a near miss with Earth has turned out to be artificial. In fact asteroid 2007 VN84 is the European spacecraft Rosetta which is actually right on schedule for a flyby of Earth on its way to orbit the comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko. It’s not entirely clear how a billion dollar mission with 3 planned flybys of Earth could not be detected before getting an asteroid designation. But it has happened before. Asteroid J002E3 turned out to be part of the Saturn rocket that sent Apollo 12 to the moon. http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/071112-technov-asteroid-mistake.html http://spaceguard.esa.int/tumblingstone/issues/num17/eng/apollo.htm