Comments on Mike Brown's Planets: Heavens above!

Mike, Great article. Heavens above is a wonder...

2009-05-26T03:17:27.518-07:00

Mike,

Great article.

Heavens above is a wonderful resource. Last year I had wrapped it together with Clear Sky Charts and Google Maps to provide a resource for some local Scout Camps.

See http://mangsbatpage.433rd.com/search/label/SkyForecast

That www.heavens-above.com web page is great. Orbi...

2009-05-25T07:25:05.856-07:00

That www.heavens-above.com web page is great. Orbital path of ISS is such in this time, that I can watch ISS even twice per evening. I live in central Europe and so I have bright ISS quite often above my head. Cometary, asteroidal section on that web page is also interesting. Big part of comets come from Orion constellation, or from area around it. That is area, where cosmic rays sources - two hot spots were detected by Milagro cosmic rays survey.Those two hot spots are probably actually projections of one source hurtling toward us, what is close to orbit of Saturn now. Relative motion of Earth on its orbit causes, that we see two sources,spots in such shape, mutual distances.

I started using "heavens Above" about 10 years ago...

2009-05-25T06:22:23.805-07:00

I started using "heavens Above" about 10 years ago on my original Palm. Every time I synced it, the software would update. Since it was on the Palm, I had it with me everywhere I went. Of course, in days before GPS, I often would have to guess at latitude and longtitude, but is generally worked fine. I now use the software on my Windows Mobile based phone. It's great!

Cool story; as an amateur astronomer and retired U...

2009-05-21T07:21:12.187-07:00

Cool story; as an amateur astronomer and retired USAF military member, I can attest to the paradoxes inherent in the classified world. I once remember having to label a simple 2$ ball-peen hammer as "unclassified" simply because it was co-located with classified material! I've also heard astronomers at the Whipple observatory complain about the bewildering fax system they have to endure to assure their are no military satellites overhead when they calibrate their optical lasers. I can, however, understand the fears of the USAF astronomers; they know that someone will see "Titan" stamped unclassified and unwanted questions will ensue!

It appears the email service I referred to no long...

2009-05-20T10:30:55.472-07:00

It appears the email service I referred to no longer exists. But it was replaced by a java program. With it you can predict ISS and other satellites transits across the face of the sun and moon. You can get it here:
http://pictures.ed-morana.com/ISSTransits/predictions/

There's an image of the ISS and Hubble as it trans...

2009-05-20T10:14:06.047-07:00

There's an image of the ISS and Hubble as it transited the sun. You can see it here: http://www.universetoday.com/2009/05/15/amazing-images-of-shuttle-and-hubble-transiting-sun/

There used to be an email service that would alert you whenever the ISS would transit the sun anywhere within a specified distance of your location. I saw it once. If you blinked, you missed it.

Hi Mike, Thanks for the story. Sorry to ask an un...

2009-05-20T09:55:36.815-07:00

Hi Mike,

Thanks for the story. Sorry to ask an unrelated question but I could see that 2003AZ84 was finally numbered. Did you (or someone of your team) submit a name to the IAU? Its H below 4 would deserve a proper name don't you think?

Mike, I love your stories. They are always uplifti...

2009-05-19T14:56:35.081-07:00

Mike, I love your stories. They are always uplifting. And you're a great writer. Thanks for helping us visualize what you experienced!

Hi, Mike :) Sometimes I think they should ressure...

2009-05-19T09:48:00.000-07:00

Hi, Mike :)

Sometimes I think they should ressurect the old Titan. It would have made a great rescue vehicle; instead of taking a week to get ready for a mission, it can be fired more or less instantly. But really, we can't do that, they don't make them any more and used up all the rounds launching various satellites and interplanetary probes.

Surveying the various existing launch vehicles, the best candidate for a rescue vehicle would be the Russian Proton rocket. They do still make that one, which would shortcut a lot of R&D (not all, there's the vehicle itself, the adaptor, etc.). It started life as the old Soviet SS-18 ICBM.

It was a horror weapon. As if a multimegaton H-bomb were not horrifying enough, they made anthrax warheads for it, too. The Air Force had a name for the rocket.

They called it the "Satan".

Well, the Titan worked. The Satan was never fired in anger. Neither was the Titan, so I guess the Satan worked, too. Both got put to work doing sane tasks.

The anthrax turned out to be a fizzle. One of our scientists, ironically the one assigned to beat that sword into a ploughshare, stole the weapon from the arsenal and fired it at Bob Stevens, photo editor of the Sun. I speculate he did that because he didn't like pseudoscientists and considered Mr. Stevens the chief of them. Using the highly accurate U.S. Mail, he hit the target and missed his mailman. Then he fired at Senators and missed those targets and hit their mailmen. He fired from his father's institute of higher learning, I believe to discredit said institution (sadly, it worked - for a while). They said he chose the launchpad because of some girl. The girl turned him in.

Our astronomers, in co-operation with the military, scan the skies for incoming asteroids, and finally found a target on October 6, 2008, which gave it the license plate number 2008 TC3. What I found really interesting about the object at the time is that it was following the Hohmann minimum energy trajectory for Mars, which was invented by Dr. Hohmann to make transfer between planets with the least amount of fuel. This lead to speculation (which I subscribed to at the time) that it might be a burnt out rocket casing from some Mars mission. This had very serious political implications for the war-torn target country, which was Sudan. There was an earlier impact in Peru which started rumors that "the enemy" had fired a missile at them, and I was afraid, given the attitude in Sudan towards "Amerika", that a similar rumor might start there and that they might think it was deliberate. At the time I advocated that the military go out and find it, since I felt they were the best equipped to do so.

It's traditional in wars to depict the enemy as ignorant. But they do have a University of Khartoum in Sudan, and Professor Muawia Shaddad turned out the entire physics department, students and all, to find it. And they did. It was a natural object, a ureilite.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_TC3

It's the only object spotted in outer space before impact to be found.

What interests me in my narrow little field is that it appears that the Hohmann minimum energy trajectory just might be a chaos attractor for incoming asteroids. I'd never thought of that before this solid evidence came in, but it makes sense; two planets working together to capture a random object. And the practical implications for the warriors and their scouts protecting us is to watch this avenue perhaps a little more closely.

:)

-Michael C. Emmert