1. OU Astronomy Club Space News
April 2015

2. Solar Eclipse Maximum – from Svalbard, Norway 20/03/2015

3. Dark, Cold and NO POWER !!
During solar eclipses the temperature drops… Also all our solar panels stop working, producing electricity.
The National Grid estimated that the UK lost as much as 1GW during the eclipse.
Fortunately current PV output accounts for only around 1.5% of the UK’s total power demand.
The effect is expected to be higher in other EU countries, like Germany.

4. Double-Eclipse from Southern Spain, 20/03/15
IF you can find the right place – using an ISS tracker and an accurate eclipse predictor – you might be lucky enough to take a shot like this !!
Thierry Legault is becoming well-known for his photos of the ISS passing in front of other celestial objects.
See:
Double-Eclipse from Southern Spain, 20/03/15

5. ISS -- Next 20 Visible Passes over here . . .1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

6. Total Lunar Eclipse of 4th April 2015
Saturday’s TLE was not visible from Europe. This picture from southern California is by Dave Kodama ( Have you ever considered what you would see from the surface of the Moon?

7. Ceres Mapped -- Low Resolution showing ‘Feature 5’ and others
Dawn is now mapping Ceres from distance. Several “Bright Spots” now show.
Dawn spacecraft is now in orbit around Ceres. It will soon be in a circular orbit 8,400 miles above the surface. Current thoughts are it has an icy surface. Internal structure and chemistry is unknown, but the bright areas may be due to emissions from within. One suggestion is of a warm, convecting core with a muddy ocean beneath its cratered surface.

8. Curiosity Rover Finds Biologically Useful Nitrogen on Mars
Soil sample tests have detected nitrogen (II) oxide [nitric oxide, NO]
The NO was probably released from heated nitrates – further evidence of a past environment suitable for life forms to exist. There is no evidence to suggest that the fixed nitrogen found by the team was created by life. The surface of Mars is inhospitable for known forms of life.

9. Other Mars Rover News . . .
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity surpassed Olympic marathon distance on March 24, 2015, as the rover neared a destination called "Marathon Valley,"  That is miles in a finish time of roughly 11 years and two months! A WORLD RECORD – just not this one!!

10. Comet 67P on 22nd March 2015 showing current activity
We await the ‘awakening’ of Philae . . .

11. Herschel and Planck find missing clue to Galaxy Clusters . . .
Using ESA’s Herschel and Planck space observatories, cosmologists have discovered what could be the precursors of the vast clusters of galaxies that we see today. Objects in the distant Universe, when it was only three billion years old, could be precursors of the clusters seen around us today.

12. ESA’s SatNav System Grows . . .
Galileo 7 & 8 lifted off at 21:46 GMT on 27 March from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana on top of a Soyuz rocket. As planned by the European Commission, the objective is to deliver a package of SatNav Services, including a free Public Service, an encrypted Public Regulated Service and a Search And Rescue function, by 2016.
Full system capability that includes an encrypted commercial service benefiting from 24 operational satellites and six spares is expected to be in place by 2020.

13. Getting VERY WARM soon . . .
Solar Probe Plus (left) and Solar Orbiter (right) will be launched in 2018
and will venture inside the orbit of Mercury to study the Sun.
The temperatures on the front surfaces of these satellites will go into the high hundreds of degrees Celsius, and beyond. The engineering challenges to cope with this will involve new heat-shield technologies --- which also have to let the instruments ‘see’ to take measurements of the Sun.

14. LHC Restarted Sunday 5th April
After a 2-year rebuild, the Large Hadron Collider was restarted on Easter Day.
Two beams of protons are now circulating in opposite directions in preparation for first collisions in May. This will be at nearly twice the energy as before the rebuild (13 trillion eV). Plenty of hard work before then to get ready to search for more fundamental particles . . .

15. My Picture of the Month . . .
Soyuz Spacecraft returning from ISS with Crew 42 members - Cmdr Wilmore (NASA), Samokutyaev and Serova (Roscosmos).

16. Ideas for next month ??