Bald, bearded, and trim at sixty-one, Wessen worked on the Voyager and Cassini space probes. Facing him were eighteen researchers-planetary scientists, astrophysicists, engineers-most in their mid-twenties, all graduate students or postdocs. Two years later, at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, California, an astronautical engineer named Randii Wessen stood before a wall-sized whiteboard in a room called Left Field. They named it ‘Oumuamua-a Hawaiian word meaning “scout.” A team and a consensus grew, with scholars around the world using their telescopes to study what was now almost certainly the first interstellar object to be observed entering our solar system. He wrote to the individual directors of other telescopes, explaining why the object merited observation time. He also contacted astronomers at the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, on the Big Island of Hawaii, who added the object’s coördinates to the list of targets the telescope should view the following night. He asked a colleague in Europe to take a look. This object was travelling at twenty-six. Long-period comets, which are just barely bound to our solar system, might move at one or two kilometres per second. As he investigated, an astonishing picture emerged. It behaved oddly: unlike everything else in the solar system, from dust motes to Jupiter, it didn’t seem gravitationally tethered to the sun. Weryk used these previous observations to reconstruct the object’s flight path. Still, once the movement had been spotted, it was possible to go back in time, locating it in the pre-discovery, or “precovery,” data. Visually, it was uninterpretable-a dot, or maybe noise in the image. Weryk noticed that, on October 19th, something new had been detected.
#Who owns nasa software#
Special software flags anything that moves for review. The panoramic telescope stares fixedly at vast fields of the night sky, searching for changes over time. One morning, before heading off for a day of presentations, he opened his laptop to go through data he had downloaded from a telescope called Pan- STARRS, which is situated at the Haleakala Observatory, on Maui. Weryk, an astronomer and postdoctoral fellow at the University of Hawaii, was in town for the forty-ninth meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences. In October of 2017, Rob Weryk discovered an interstellar object in his hotel room at the Marriott in Provo, Utah.
0 kommentar(er)
