Transcripts: January Week 3

PAUL
Welcome to Idaho Skies on Radio Boise. This is the third week of January. We’re your hosts, Paul..

RACHEL
..Rachel..

KRIS
..And Kris

PAUL
The Moon reaches the first quarter phase on the 15th.

RACHEL
The first quarter phase is the most popular phase to go moon watching

KRIS
That’s because the moon is up in the evening

RACHEL
And because the shadows along the lunar terminator show the greatest amount of detail.

KRIS
Even if you only have a pair of binoculars or a spotting scope, go moon watching tonight.

PAUL
Meanwhile, near the Sun, the MESSENGER spacecraft makes its first flyby of tge planet Mercury on the 15th.

RACHEL
MESSENGER stands for MErcury Surface, Space Environment, GEochemistry, and Ranging.

KRIS
It’s an American spacecraft developed by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and launched by NASA.

RACHEL
MESSENGER left Earth on August 3rd, 2004 and is finally reaching Mercury for the first time.

KRIS
The reason it has taken so long for MESSENGER to reach Mercury is that the spacecraft will eventually go into orbit around Mercury.

RACHEL
However, to do so, the spacecraft had to lose a lot of speed.

KRIS
Rather than using fuel to slow down, MESSENGER has played a game of cosmic billiards with Earth and Venus.

RACHEL
Each time MESSENGER has passed these planets; it has lost speed and dropped into a lower orbit around the sun.

KRIS
After making three passes of Mercury, the spacecraft will have just the right speed to easily enter into a Mercurian orbit in March 2011.

RACHEL
From its orbital perch, MESSENGER will photograph nearly the entire surface of this planet and map its composition.

PAUL
The moon passes close enough to the Pleiades star cluster on the night of the 17th.

KRIS
They’ll be close enough to be seen together in your binoculars.

RACHEL
Just look overhead after it gets dark, the Pleiades star cluster will be to the moon’s lower left

PAUL
On the 19th, the red planet, Mars, is to the upper right of the waning gibbous moon.

KRIS
Mars is not really red. Martian landers and rovers show that the surface is more brown or light orange from the iron oxide in its soil.

RACHEL
That makes Mars one rusty planet. So look for Mars near the Moon on the night of the 19th.

PAUL
That’s Idaho Skies for the third week of January. Next week is Moon week at Idaho Skies. We’ll talk about lunar markings and let the Moon be our astronomical guide.

For Idaho Skies this is Paul…

KRIS
..Kris..

RACHEL..
and Rachel.

Transcripts: January Wee k2

PAUL
Welcome to Idaho Skies on Radio Boise. This is the second week of January. We’re your hosts, Paul..

RACHEL
..Rachel..

KRIS
..And Kris

PAUL
Last week we mentioned that Isaac Newton discovered that a force of gravity that was a one over r-squared force could explain the falling of an apple and the orbit of the Moon around the Earth. But what does one over r-squared mean?

KRIS
A one over r-squared force drops off in strength at the square of the distance between two bodies.

RACHEL
So if the distance between two astronomical bodies is doubled, the force between them becomes on one-fourth as strong.

KRIS
Forces like these include the forces of magnetism and electric fields.

RACHEL
Newton’s discovery that gravity is a one over r-squared force lead to the discovery that gravity extends across the solar system to hold all the planets in orbit around the Sun.

KRIS
The same year Newton made his gravitational discovery, he developed a mathematical method of calculation. It used infinitesimals to prove that planets moved in elliptical orbits under a one over r-squared force.

RACHEL
You may know that his mathematical method by its more popular name, calculus.

PAUL
Last week was the 40th anniversary of the launch of Surveyor 7.

KRIS
Surveyor was a program of seven unmanned spacecraft targeted for soft landings on the Moon.

RACHEL
Initially, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory designed Surveyor to be a stand alone program for lunar exploration.

PAUL
Eventually, the Surveyor spacecraft were suppose to carry remotely controlled rovers to the moon.

KRIS
In 1961, President Kennedy announced the American goal of landing a man on the moon. As a result, Surveyor became a prelude to the manned Apollo landings on the moon. Its extensive exploration of the moon and rover ideas were dropped.

RACHEL
The last one, Surveyor 7 made the fifth successful American landing on the Moon on the 10th.

KRIS
Surveyor 7 returned over 21,000 pictures of the lunar surface, dug trenches, moved rocks, and sampled the lunar surface with its alpha backscatter experiment.

RACHEL
Surveyor 7 discovered that the rocks of the lunar highlands near the crater Tycho were not as rich in iron and iron-loving elements as the lava plains of the lunar maria.

PAUL
The 8th is the 35th anniversary of the Soviet’s launch of Luna 21.

KRIS
From the name of the spacecraft, you can guess its target was the Moon.

RACHEL
Luna 21 made a soft landing on the Moon and did what Surveyor hoped to do, land a rover on the moon.

KRIS
The rover, named Lunokhod 2 was a four foot tall moon buggy controlled by a team of five drivers back on Earth.

PAUL
The rover weighed 1,850 pounds on Earth and was solar powered.

RACHEL
Its eight wheels each had their own motor that drove at two speeds, roughly 0.6 and 1.2 miles per hour.

KRIS
Television cameras onboard provided its Earth-crew a 360 degree panorama around the rover.

RACHEL
During its mission, Lunokhod 2 traveled nearly 22 miles across the lunar surface, returned 80,000 television pictures, measured the lunar magnetic field, and tested the strength of the lunar soil.

KRIS
The last experiment onboard \Lunokhod 2 was a French built laser retro-reflector that allowed observatories on Earth measure the distance between the Earth and Moon.

PAUL
That’s Idaho Skies for the second week of January. Next week we focus our telescopes on the Moon and Mercury.

For Idaho Skies this is Paul.

RACHEL
..Rachel..

KRIS
.. and Kris.

Transcript: January Week 1

PAUL
Welcome to Idaho Skies on Radio Boise. This is the first week of 2008. We’re your hosts, Paul..

RACHEL
..Rachel..

KRIS
..And Kris

PAUL
The earth reaches perihelion on the 3rd.

RACHEL
Since the Earth orbits the Sun in an elliptical orbit, there are two times when the Earth is at its closest and farthest points from the Sun.

KRIS
Perihelion is the name for the point in Earth’s orbit that’s closest to the Sun and aphelion is the name of the point in Earth’s orbit that’s the farthest.

RACHEL
Since perihelion puts Earth nearly 2 % closer to the Sun, it increases sunlight at Earth by more than 3% than at aphelion.

PAUL
But this has an insignificant effect on Earth’s climate and is not the cause of the season.

KRIS
The tilt of the Earth’s hemisphere towards or away from the Sun has a much grater effect on the climate and is the cause of the seasons.

RACHEL
Today Earth is 91,375,400 miles from the Sun.

KRIS
That’s 98.3% of our average distance, or .98 astronomical units, which is the name astronomers call the average distance between the Earth and Sun.

PAUL
While we’re sill on the 3rd, the moon is also at apogee, or its greatest distance from Earth.

RACHEL
Measured from center to center, Earth and the moon are 251,700 miles apart.

KRIS
Let’s see, at a driving speed of 75 miles per hour…..

SOUND OF CALCULATOR BUTTONS

KRIS
It would take me 139 days to drive to the Moon.

PAUL
Well that’s a lot better than trying to drive to the Sun today.

RACHEL
Right, it would take…..

SOUND OF CALCULATOR BUTTONS

RACHEL
..it would take 139 years to drive to the Sun.

PAUL
The Quadrantid meteor shower reaches its peak on the morning of the 4th.

KRIS
On the 4th, the Moon is two days from new and only 13% illuminated.

RACHEL
So it will rise very late and reflect very little interfering light.

KRIS
With the dark skies and the shower’s peak occurring at night, this year’s Quadrantid meteor shower promises to be good.

RACHEL
Your best views should begin around 1:00 AM and the meteors will appear to originate from the low northeast.

KRIS
Watch this shower if you can, as the next good shower for Idaho doesn’t occur until April.

PAUL
We celebrate Isaac Newton on the 4th.

RACHEL
Newton was born 365 years ago, on what was Christmas Day 1643.

KRIS
With the adoption of the Gregorian calendar, his birthday moved up 10 days to January 4th.

RACHEL
Newton is best known for his discovery of how gravity works.

KRIS
The city of London was wracked by the plaque in 1666. To avoid it, Newton left the university and went back to his home in the country.

RACHEL
While there, Newton observed an apple fall from a tree.

KRIS
This got him wondering.

NEWTON
Is the force of gravity that brings apples to the ground, the same force that keeps the Moon in orbit around the Earth?

RACHEL
Using an estimate for the distance between the Earth and Moon, and the Moon’s orbital period around the Earth, Newton estimated how fast the Moon is falling towards the Earth.

KRIS
The amount was a close agreement for a force that dropped off by the square of the distance.

RACHEL
And we’ll talk about what that means next week.

PAUL
That’s Idaho Skies for the first week of 2008. Listen to our show next week when we’ll fill you in on one over r-squared forces and two unmanned lunar landings.

For Idaho Skies this is Paul…

KRIS
Kris..

RACHEL
.. and Rachel.