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I am hoping that Moon will be awesome and not just a mashup of 2001 and Solaris. The score is by Clint Mansell, who has scored all of Darren Aronofsky’s movies, most notably Requiem for a Dream. Moon opens on June 12 in NYC and LA. (via sarahnomics)
If the naked eye could see like a telescope, this is what the night sky might look like. (via rw)
The Hubble Space Telescope captured four of Saturn’s moons crossing its face at the same time. (via cyn-c)
A zoomable National Geographic map of the Moon from 1969. Richard Furno worked on the map and tells the very long story of how it came about. One of the first images on the page is from a Soviet mission called Luna-3 that took the first photographs of the far side of the Moon. (thx, lynda)
A map of the Milky Way done in the style of the London tube map.
I was re-reading Carl Sagan’s novel Contact recently, essentially a series of arguments about SETI wrapped into a story, and he alludes to some sort of cosmic Grand Central Station. That, coupled with my longtime interest in transit maps, got me thinking about all of this.
This HD video taken by the Hubble telescope of Ganymede going behind Jupiter looks completely computer generated and surreal.
Bad Astronomy has its list of the top 10 astronomy pictures of 2008 up. It includes this video of the moon orbiting the earth, comprised of a series of photos taken by a reassigned space probe.
There has never been a generation of humans in all of history who could see such an event. If you ever get a little depressed, or lonely, or think like there’s nothing going on that’s interesting any more, think on that for a moment or two. A thousand generations of people could only imagine such a thing, but we can actually do it.
(thx, amos)
It is yet to be decided whether Wakata himself will throw the paper planes or whether he will use the space station’s robotic arm.
The planes are made from sugar cane fiber paper treated to withstand high temperatures and strong winds. (via waxy no idea where I got this)
Update: The launch of the origami planes has been scrubbed. (thx, edieraye)
Man in Space was a short film made by Disney about the possibility of putting humans into space. The film was first shown in 1955 and features several prominent scientists of the day, including Wernher von Braun. The film is available for viewing on YouTube in eight parts.
Prehistory of Rocketry (1/8)
Early Rockets (2/8)
How Rockets Work (3/8)
Space Medicine - Adapting to Space (4/8)
Space Medicine - Dangers in Space (5/8)
Werner von Braun - Designing a Rocket (6/8)
Conquest of Space - Launch! (7/8)
Conquest of Space - In Orbit (8/8)
Watch as they gloss over the use of rockets to bomb Europe during WWII and caution against smoking in space. Man in Space was followed by two other Disney short films, Man and the Moon and Mars and Beyond. Particularly entertaining is von Braun explaining his complicated plan to send a manned spaceship to the moon and back, which involves a permanent orbiting space station — which looks not unlike a giant bicycle wheel — with a crew of fifty and powered by a nuclear reactor.
When I was born 35.2 years ago, a light cone started expanding away from Earth out into the rest of the universe (Minkowski space-temporally speaking, of course). Thanks to updates from Matt Webb’s fancy RSS tool, I know that my personal light cone is about to envelop the Zeta Herculis binary star system, located 35.2 light years from Earth in the constellation Hercules.
With a mass some 50 percent greater than the Sun, however, and beginning its evolution toward gianthood (its core hydrogen fusion likely shut down), Zeta Her A is 6 times more luminous than the Sun with a radius 2.5 times as large. Nevertheless, the star gives a good idea of what the Sun would look like from a great distance, in Zeta Her’s case 35 light years. The companion (Zeta Her B), a cooler class G (G7) hydrogen-fusing dwarf with a luminosity only 65 percent that of the Sun and a mass about 85 percent solar, orbits with a period of 34.5 years at a mean distance of 15 Astronomical Units (over 50 percent farther than Saturn is from the Sun). A rather high eccentricity takes the two as far apart as 21 AU and as close as 8 AU.
Hercules is of course named for the Greek hero, Heracles. Next up is Delta Trianguli, another binary star system, in about two months.
A classic from The Onion in way more than 96 pt. type: HOLY SHIT, MAN WALKS ON FUCKING MOON.
“Holy living fuck…. Are you fucking believing this? Over,” Armstrong radioed back to NASA headquarters nearly 250,000 miles away. “I abso-fucking-lutely am standing on the surface of the fucking moon. I am talking to you from the goddamned fucking moon. Jesus H. Christ in a chicken basket.”
“Holy mother of fuck,” the first man on the moon added.
If you submit your astronomy photo to the Astrometry group on Flickr, a tool of the same name will look at the image, tell you the location of the field of view, and label all of the celestial objects contained within it. Here’s an annotated photo of the Pleiades.
Your assignment: use the Astrometry and Exif data to stitch all these photos together into a huge Hockney-esque map of the sky. I am also wondering the extent to which you can fool Astrometry with, say, a painting of a portion of the sky. It would be neat if you could submit a drawing of a constellation and get the correct star IDs back. (via mouser)
The Big Picture collects photos of the Sun. I’ve featured a number of these on kottke.org before but it never hurts to look often at the Sun.
Those plucky Mars rovers are still going. Their planned roving time was three months but now more than four years in, NASA is sending Opportunity off on a two-year trek to visit a large crater.
The mission team estimates Opportunity may be able to travel about 100m per day. But even at that pace, the journey could take two years. The rover will stop to study rocks on the way, and in winter months it cannot move because there is not enough sunlight to provide sufficient power for driving.
Flat-earthers are people who believe, here in the 21st century, that the Earth is flat. (Believers in a round earth are called globularists.)
And what about the fact that no one has ever fallen off the edge of our supposedly disc-shaped world? Mr McIntyre laughs. “This is perhaps one of the most commonly asked questions,” he says. “A cursory examination of a flat earth map fairly well explains the reason — the North Pole is central, and Antarctica comprises the entire circumference of the Earth. Circumnavigation is a case of travelling in a very broad circle across the surface of the Earth.”
If, like me, you have questions about how the Earth could possibly be flat, some of them are answered in the Flat Earth FAQ.
Q: “What about the stars, sun and moon and other planets? Are they flat too? What are they made of?”
A: The sun and moon, each 32 miles in diameter, circle Earth at a height of 3000 miles at its equator, located midway between the North Pole and the ice wall. Each functions similar to a “spotlight,” with the sun radiating “hot light,” the moon “cold light.” As they are spotlights, they only give light out over a certain are which explains why some parts of the Earth are dark when others are light. Their apparent rising and setting are caused by optical illusions. In the “accelerating upwards” model, the stars, sun and moon are also accelerating upwards. The stars are about as far as San Francisco is from Boston. (3100 miles)
BTW, the “ice wall” is what separates the edge of the earth’s disc with outer space or whatever ether or monsters are beyond the earth. We know the wall as Antarctica. I call shenanigans on all this…it’s gotta be a hoax. Nobody’s this ignorant, right? Please?
Water on Mars: confirmed.
Laboratory tests aboard NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander have identified water in a soil sample. The lander’s robotic arm delivered the sample Wednesday to an instrument that identifies vapors produced by the heating of samples.
The lander itself added, on Twitter, “FTW!”
In the late 1950s and 1960s, two brothers from Turin claim to have intercepted dozens of transmissions of secret Soviet space launches, including those of cosmonauts who perished in space before Yuri Gagarin officially became the first man in space.
There are those who believe that somewhere in the vast blackness of space, about nine billion miles from the Sun, the first human is about to cross the boundary of our Solar System into interstellar space. His body, perfectly preserved, is frozen at -270 degrees C (-454 °F); his tiny capsule has been silently sailing away from the Earth at 18,000 mph (29,000km/h) for the last 45 years. He is the original lost cosmonaut, whose rocket went up and, instead of coming back down, just kept on going.
You can hear a couple of their recordings here. Naturally, there is quite a bit of skepticism about the brothers’ exploits.
After the launch of Sputnik by the Soviet Union in late 1957 awoke the US to the possibility of a developing outer space “gap” with the Russkies, President Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act into law on July 29, 1958, thereby creating NASA. Only 11 years later, NASA landed men on the moon. Happy birthday, NASA.
Scientists were recently “astonished” to find water in Mercury’s atmosphere. Plus, the particles in the atmosphere were blasted off the surface by the solar wind so the atmospheric water could indicate that it can be found on the surface as well. First Mars and now this. Has The Onion done a “Scientists find evidence of water on Earth” story yet?
From Harvard Magazine, an appreciation of the work that the Hubble telescope has done since its 1990 launch into orbit.
The “Pillars of Creation” may be the most iconic Hubble photograph ever taken. “Located in the Eagle Nebula, the pillars are clouds of molecular hydrogen, light years in length, where new stars are being born,” says Aguilar. “However, recent discoveries indicate these pillars were destroyed by a massive nearby super nova some 6,000 years ago. This is a ghost image of a past cosmic disaster that we won’t see here on Earth for another thousand years or so-and a perfect example of the fact that everything we see in the universe is history.”
Scientists think that Mars’ alkaline soil might be able to grow asparagus.
Although he said further tests would have to be conducted, Mr Kounaves said the soil seemed “very friendly… there is nothing about it that is toxic,” he said. “It is the type of soil you would probably have in your back yard — you know, alkaline. You might be able to grow asparagus in it really well.”
This site lets you track the International Space Station, the Space Shuttle (when in orbit), and all sorts of other satellites in relation to their position over the earth with a familiar Google Maps interface. Very cool.
Is the universe fractal-like, even on large scales? A group of Italian and Russian scientists argue that it displays a fractal pattern on a scale of 100 million light years. Other scientists aren’t so sure.
Many cosmologists find fault with their analysis, largely because a fractal matter distribution out to such huge scales undermines the standard model of cosmology. According to the accepted story of cosmic evolution, there simply hasn’t been enough time since the big bang nearly 14 billion years ago for gravity to build up such large structures.
About 2 hours ago, the Mars Phoenix rover twittered that it had found evidence of ice on Mars.
Are you ready to celebrate? Well, get ready: We have ICE!!!!! Yes, ICE, *WATER ICE* on Mars! w00t!!! Best day ever!!
The Mars rover said “w00t”. Here’s the w00t-less press release and the associated images that show the ice sublimating from the surface over the last four days.
Beautiful photos of the Space Shuttle lifting off and of earth from space. Check out the cloud wake and the thunderheads.
At the very moment that humans discovered the scale of the universe and found that their most unconstrained fancies were in fact dwarfed by the true dimensions of even the Milky Way Galaxy, they took steps that ensured that their descendants would be unable to see the stars at all. For a million years humans had grown up with a personal daily knowledge of the vault of heaven. In the last few thousand years they began building and emigrating to the cities. In the last few decades, a major fraction of the human population had abandoned a rustic way of life. As technology developed and the cities were polluted, the nights became starless. New generations grew to maturity wholly ignorant of the sky that had transfixed their ancestors and had stimulated the modern age of science and technology. Without even noticing, just as astronomy entered a golden age most people cut themselves off from the sky, a cosmic isolationism that only ended with the dawn of space exploration.
That’s Carl Sagan in Contact from 1985. The effects of light pollution were documented in the New Yorker last August.
Here’s an update on the effort to solve the Pioneer anomaly, the unexplained deviation in motion of deep space probes from what Newton and Einstein’s theories predict.
As it sped through space, a specialist in radio-wave physics named John Anderson at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory noticed an odd thing. The spacecraft was drifting off course. The discrepancy was less than a few hundred-millionths of an inch per second for every second of spaceflight, accumulating year after year across billions of miles. Then Pioneer 11, an identical probe escaping the solar system in the opposite direction, also started to veer off course at the same rate.
Ordinarily, such small deviations might be overlooked, but not by Dr. Anderson. He monitored the trajectories six years before calling attention to the matter. “I’m a little like an accountant,” Dr. Anderson said. “We have Newton’s theory and Einstein’s theory, and when you apply them to something like this — and it doesn’t add up — it bothers me.”
The researchers, using data recovered from recently discovered Pioneer records and funded by sources outside of NASA, have figured out part of the problem but the rest remains a mystery.
The Hubble Space Telescope was launched into space 18 years ago and to celebrate, NASA has put up a photo gallery of merging galaxies, galaxies as in love with each other as NASA is with the Hubble. Aww.
The Expedition One crew, consisting of one American and two Russian astronauts, spent 136 days in space aboard the International Space Station. Their logs include a record of the movies they watched while on their mission.
6 Feb 2001: We ate some dinner and watched the last part of “City of Angels”. Shep did his best to explain to Yuri and Sergei what the phrase “chick flick” means.
24 Feb 2001 We put some chow and the DVD player in the Soyuz and close the hatch about 0530. It takes 2 orbits to get the first set of hooks off and the docking tunnel pressure checked. We get the “Austin Powers” sequel in while all this is taking place. (Maybe a Soyuz first here).
Update: The Expedition One crew also documented their many computer problems.
Sergei notices that the Russian PCS laptop has locked up. He tries to reboot, but the Sun application software won’t load. Lots of messages on the screen noting data errors. Sergei thinks that it may be the hard drive. He boots up windows to see if the windows partition runs OK—it does. So at least some of the hardware is functional.
Maybe they need Macs?
Budget cuts at NASA means that one of the two Mars rovers will be shut down, even though it’s still doing useful science.
Besides resting Spirit, scientists also likely will have to reduce exploration by Opportunity, which is probing a large crater near the equator. Instead of sending up commands to Opportunity every day to drive or explore a rock, its activities may be limited to every other day, said John Callas, the Mars Exploration Rover project manager at JPL.
The rovers were originally deployed for three-month missions but have operated for more than four years.
Update: NASA decided not to go through with Mars rover budget cuts. (thx, jeff)
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