Posted on 08/01/2011 3:53:31 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
Explanation: What's that strange bright streak? It is the last image ever of a space shuttle from orbit. A week and a half ago, after decoupling from the International Space Station, the Space Shuttle Atlantis fired its rockets for the last time, lost its orbital speed, and plummeted back to Earth. Within the next hour, however, the sophisticated space machine dropped its landing gear and did what used to be unprecedented -- landed like an airplane on a runway. Although the future of human space flight from the USA will enter a temporary lull, many robotic spacecraft continue to explore our Solar System and peer into our universe, including Cassini, Chandra, Chang'e 2, Dawn, Fermi, Hubble, Kepler, LRO, Mars Express, Messenger, MRO, New Horizons, Opportunity, Planck, Rosetta, SDO, SOHO, Spitzer, STEREO, Swift, Venus-Express, and WISE.
[Credit: ISS Expedition 28 Crew, STS-135 Mission, NASA]
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I don’t understand how this picture was taken/put together. The shuttle must have taken several minutes at least to make the track in the photo, but the ISS, from where the photo/s were taken, had to have moved hundreds if not thousands of miles. Yet the earth under the shuttle’s track is sharp and clear, not blurred.
Is the picture the product of extensive manipulation/combination of many pictures taken from a moving vantage point?
pinging me, so I can see it, when I get home
I think the picture is a single image with a short exposure time. The shuttle entered into view from the bottom leaving behind a lingering trail of smoke in the upper atmosphere. The shuttle itself is at the tip of the bright spot near the top of the image.
Since the space shuttle does not have an ablative heat shield, I am not sure what leaves the smoke trail, unless it is an artifact of the ionization of the atmosphere around the shuttle as it passes through at high speed.
Just did a Google search. The Shuttle does leave a greenish trail of ionized atmosphere behind it. The trail persists for several minutes.
Beautiful!
Just thought you might find these interesting.
New photos of Vesta
http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/feature_stories/spacecraft_begins_science_orbits.asp
Very interesting black crater in this one.
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/dawn/multimedia/pia14317.html
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