August 5, 2012 ALP Monthly Meeting Report
by James Kevin Ty , Christopher Louie Lu  and John Ray Cabrera
Images by James Kevin Ty

Last August 5, members of the Astronomical League of the Philippines (ALP) held their monthly meeting at Manila Planetarium.  Members who attended were ALP President James Kevin Ty , Charito and son Kendrick Cole KC Ty ,  Secretary  Christopher Louie Lu , Treasurer Andrew Ian Chan , directors Edgar Ang, John Ray Cabrera, Alfonso Uy and Christopher Lee ; Liza Quitlong, Ma. Belen Pabunan , Nel Lagda , Jan Karlo Hernandez, Ronald Sison ,  Jerome Clemente,  Gary Andreassen , wife Irma and son Steinar Andreassen , Norman Marigza , Jan Karlo Hernandez , Marv Gulapa , Mark Ian Singson & Cristina Decena.

Meeting proper started at around 3:30pm with  ALP Secretary Christopher Louie Lu discussing on the August 12, 2012 Jupiter-Moon Occultation & Perseid Meteor Shower Observation as well as the August 6 Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) landing date. Below is his sypnosis of the Mars Science Laboratory Mission.

Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) is a robotic mission to Mars launched by NASA that will attempt to land a Mars rover called Curiosity on the surface of Mars. Launched on Nov. 26, 2011, Curiosity is currently en route to the planet Mars, it is scheduled to land in Gale Crater at about 05:31 UTC on August 6, 2012.

Specifications:

The Curiosity rover will weigh only 900 kg (2,000 lb) including 80 kg (180 lb) of scientific instruments. The rover is 3 m (9.8 ft) in length, approximately the size of Mini Cooper automobile, much larger than the Mars Exploration Rovers, which have a length of 1.5 m (4.9 ft).

Curiosity will be able to roll over obstacles approaching 75 cm (30 in) in height. Maximum terrain-traverse speed is estimated to be 90 m (300 ft) per hour by automatic navigation; average traverse speeds will likely be about 30 m (98 ft) per hour, based on variables including power levels, terrain difficulty, slippage, and visibility. MSL is expected to traverse a minimum of 19 km (12 mi) in its two-year mission.

Curiosity is powered by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG), like the successful Viking 1 and Viking 2 Mars landers in 1976. The two identical on-board rover computers, called "Rover Compute Element" (RCE), contain radiation-hardened memory to tolerate the extreme radiation from space and to safeguard against power-off cycles.

Curiosity has two means of communication – an X band transmitter and receiver that can communicate directly with Earth, and a UHF Electra-Lite software-defined radio for communicating with Mars orbiters. Communication with orbiters is expected to be the main path for data return to Earth, since the orbiters have both more power and larger antennas than the lander.

The Mars Science Laboratory mission is part of NASA's Mars Exploration Program, a long-term effort for the robotic exploration of Mars, and the project is managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of California Institute of Technology.The total cost of the MSL project is about US$2.5 billion.

Mission Goals & Objectives:

The MSL mission has four scientific goals:

1) Determine whether Mars could ever have supported life
2) Study the climate of Mars
3) Study the geology of Mars
4) Plan for a human mission to Mars

To contribute to these goals, MSL has six main scientific objectives:

1) Determine the mineralogical composition of the Martian surface and near​surface geological materials.
2) Attempt to detect chemical building blocks of life (biosignatures).
3) Interpret the processes that have formed and modified rocks and soils.
4) Assess long-timescale (i.e., 4-billion-year) Martian atmospheric evolution​processes.
5) Determine present state, distribution, and cycling of water and carbon dioxide.
6) Characterize the broad spectrum of surface radiation, including galactic​radiation, cosmic radiation, solar proton events and secondary neutrons.

ALP Secretary Christopher Louie Lu discussed on the August 12, 2012 Jupiter-Moon Occultation & Perseid Meteor Shower Observation as well as the August 6 Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission.	ALPers listen to the interesting topics presented by ALPers Christopher Louie Lu and John Ray Cabrera.
ALP director John Ray Cabrera gave  an interesting lecture entitled The Stuff that Makes the Universe (Dark Matter, Dark Energy, Baryonic Matter, and the Fate of the Universe)	ALPer Gary Andreassen distributed some guides on double star observation project by Sissy Haas which can be done by members with any scopes they owned,

ALP director John Ray Cabrera was next to give an interesting lecture entitled The Stuff that Makes the Universe (Dark Matter, Dark Energy, Baryonic Matter, and the Fate of the Universe). His synopsis on the lecture can be found below:

The lecture posits on the understanding of particle formation from the time when four forces of nature collapses at the onset of a Big Bang Nucleosynthesis. The particles after the temperature of the cosmos cooled down, giving rise to requisite elements for the advent of stellar birth and galactic clusters and ultimately to what is known today as our Universe.

However, the mass component of the baryonic matters is not enough to account for the total mass volume of the universe. Simple Newtonian physics suggests that objects located even at the outskirts of the galaxy rotates with seemingly high angular momentum in its orbital path as with the objects near the mass concentration/luminous bulge. Thus a Dark Matter is taken into account, comprising 23% of the cosmic components. It was found out that the role of the Dark Matter is to clump clusters of galaxies together so that its circumnavigating objects local to the respective galaxies will not smear out of its structure. Observational evidence for the presence of the Dark Matter includes red shifting of Type 1A Supernovae, gravitational lensing, and the data obtained from the Chandra X-Ray observatory. CDMS(Cryogenic Dark Matter Search) was also launched to hunt for the elusive Dark Matter.

Dark Energy on the other hand is the energy of the vacuum that stretches the fabric of space and time in exponential rate. Dark Energy, on a mathematical sense, is essentially a positive energy density with a negative pressure. Two models were taken into consideration for its explanation, Quintessence and Quantum Fluctuation. By Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, when the conservation of energy is temporarily violated, it left an energy density hole in the vacuum. Dark Energy is said to be the downright victor in the tug-of-war of the Dark Matter and Dark Energy pulling against its other because of the 70% measured volume of the Dark Energy.

In the understanding of the fate of the universe, five ages were tackled. Primordial Era – where subsequent inflation and recombination of electrons took place, Stelliferous Era – the current era where galaxies and stars are formed, Degenerate Era – the cosmological epoch where stars lost its fuel, habituated by neutron stars, brown dwarfs, and white dwarfs, Black Hole Era – where organized matter were just in a form of Black Holes, and Dark Era – where the universe has been vasty stretched out, with only diffused particle left such as long microwave photons, electrons and positrons occasionally forming positronium atoms. The universe started out as a particle, and ultimately ends up with it.

Afterwards , ALPer Gary Andreassen distributed some guides on double star observation project by Sissy Haas which can be done by members with any scopes they owned and invited all to test out the interesting project. Lastly, ALP President James Kevin Ty informed members of possible group observation of the August 12, 2012 Jupiter occultation by the Moon at PAGASA observatory in case weather is good or else it will be an individual observations.  Meeting ended at around 6:00pm.