The Moon Hoax...  

Only a few problems.

 

Of all the conspiracy theories, this one has always irritated me most. So I'm not impartial here. Good to see some facts thrown at it.

But wait for the finish.

Just to get some perspective...  

In case all you've been able to see are fields struggling to hold on...



 

Cool music too.

I did not know that...  

That famous line from Johnny Carson leapt to mind as I saw this photo showing the shadow of the rings of Saturn. It never dawned on me they would be dense enough to cast shadows. I'm trying to get my head around what it would look like on the surface.

This is a stunning portrait of Saturn taken by the Cassini spacecraft in December. Its beauty and fantastic — in the literal sense of being like a fantasy — cloudscape are so overwhelming you might not even notice the moon Tethys hanging just under the knife-edged rings. To give you an idea of how immense Saturn is, "tiny" Tethys is over a thousand kilometers across. [More]

A man and the moon...  

Simply amusing and amazing photos.
 

[Even more]

Not from Pixar...  

Incredibly cool photos of Phobos passing Jupiter as seen from the Mars Express.



Mars has two moons, Deimos and Phobos. For orientation see this graphic:

 [Click to embiggen]

I remember a science fiction story where Mars explorers discovered an extremely low-orbit moon previously undetected. The leader of the expedition got to name it, and chose "Bottomos"

(snort)

(via bad astronomy)

What space really looks like...

From space.  Via the Hubble Telescope

[Even better when clicked]

[More]

To start your week...

A call to greater imagination and faith in ourselves.



For all the "billions" of jokes, Carl Sagan still echoes in my mind as the voice that lifts us to thoughts of a astounding future.

[via sullivan]

There's an app for that..

iPhones in Space (Space...space...space).  How cool is this?


Homemade Spacecraft from Luke Geissbuhler on Vimeo.

Space Saturday...

First, a Saturn V launch in super-slo-mo.  Remember, all this takes place in about 30 seconds.


Apollo 11 Saturn V Launch (HD) Camera E-8 from Mark Gray on Vimeo.

[via bad astronomy]

Next, how Star Trek predicted more than just what cell phones would look like.



Now read about what is happening like this in the real world:

Sergeant Kris Gilbert of the Polk County, Florida, narcotics squad is teaching his officers to use a new device that’s going to make their job a lot easier. It looks like a vintage cell phone and weighs about 13 ounces. Held against a bag of white powder, it emits a beam of laser light that—in 20 seconds—can tell the officers at a crime scene whether the bag contains crack cocaine, methamphetamine, or baby powder. The device is programmed to recognize 100 narcotics. “Once the courts accept this new evidence,” says Gilbert, “it could replace the chemical kits we currently use to test drugs in our labs.”

What has brought this Star Trek wonder scanner to life is Raman spectroscopy: a quick, easy, and non-invasive tool that tells users in seconds what something really is at the molecular level. Recent improvements in technology have shrunk the once expensive, unwieldy tabletop device into an array of smaller, more commercially viable Raman scanners, such as the handheld drug detector by DeltaNu, which costs $15,000 and is being tested by police departments in several states. About 1,000 portable devices that identify hazardous materials are also in use. Within 10 years, DeltaNu expects its handheld devices to be in every police squad car in the country, as ubiquitous as the breathalyzer.
Raman devices work by shooting a laser beam at an object. The laser light interacts with the object’s electrons, making the atoms vibrate and shifting the energy of the laser photons up or down. The shift creates a visual pattern—the Raman effect, named after C. V. Raman, the Indian scientist who discovered it in the 1920s. Almost every material has its own unique Raman pattern, based on how strongly its atoms are bonded. [More]

[via sullivan]


Now, the best from the Hubble Telescope in honor of its 20th Anniversary

(Note: these are entire galaxies)

Suggestion: kill a few minutes viewing the entire showcase of spectacular photos.

Farmers, travel agents, astronauts...

Common theme: low demand for new entrants.  Consider the need for spacepersons, for example.

The Air Force launched a secretive space plane into orbit last night from Cape Canaveral, Florida. And they’re not sure when it’s returning to Earth.
Perched atop an Atlas V rocket, the Air Force’s unmanned and reusable X-37B made its first flight after a decade in development shrouded in mystery; most of the mission goals remain unknown to the public.
The Air Force has fended off statements calling the X-37B a space weapon, or a space-based drone to be used for spying or delivering weapons from orbit. In a conference call with reporters, deputy undersecretary for the Air Force for space programs Gary Payton,  space programs did acknowledge much of the current mission is classified. But perhaps the most intriguing answer came when he was asked by a reporter wanting to cover the landing as to when the X-37B would be making its way back to the planet.
“In all honesty, we don’t know when it’s coming back for sure,” Payton said.
Payton went on to say that the timing depends on how the experiments and testing progress during the flight. Though he declined to elaborate on the details. The vague answer did little to quell questions about the ultimate purpose of the X-37B test program. [More]

In addition to being unmanned, the project is being run by a private contractor, another possible harbinger for the space program.

A post on an official Air Force blog described the X-37B as "a flexible space test platform to conduct various experiments to allow satellite sensors, subsystems, components and associated technology to be efficiently transported to and from the space environment."
Some observers have theorized that the X-37B is meant to be an orbital platform for lasers or other weapons that could be used to knock out satellites belonging to hostile countries.
Whatever its purpose, the X-37B's successful launch by a consortium of private contractors could provide a boost for President Obama's plan to outsource some space missions and launches to the private sector.
The plan has drawn heat from some lawmakers, who claim it will cost jobs in states that support NASA launches and that launches are best left to the space agency's experts.
ULA officials, for their part, said Thursday's launch of the X-37B shows the efficiency of public-private partnerships. [More]

Given the budget issues looming before us, this transfer of mission to the private sector is the right way to go in my book. It's also pretty un-socialist, no?

When I was a boy...

We didn't hold with the idea of "other planets". 

Now we got 'em in all shapes and flavors - including backwards.

Thank your lucky stars you live in a relatively peaceful corner of the galaxy. Astronomers have found six large planets whose off-kilter orbits suggest that they crashed through their solar systems, swallowing any smaller planets that got in their way. The findings indicate that solar system formation is often disorderly and unpredictable, and that some potential cousins of Earth may have been destroyed in the chaos.
Astronomers have long thought that the formation of a star and its solar system was straightforward. A large cloud of gas and dust begins to congeal gravitationally, starts rotating, and eventually flattens into an object called a protostellar disk. That rotation dictates the future spin of the sun and the orbit of its planets. This is essentially what happened in our own solar system. There can be irregularities, of course, such as the odd spin axis of Uranus, which for as-yet-unexplained reasons is nearly tilted on its side, and Pluto's odd orbit, which occasionally takes it inside the path of Neptune. But these oddballs are nothing compared with what astronomers are seeing with six newly discovered planets known as hot Jupiters.
Hot Jupiters resemble our largest planet in size and composition, yet they orbit much closer to their stars, sometimes well within what would be the orbit of Mercury. But the newly discovered worlds add an extra twist: all orbit in the opposite direction from all of the other objects in their solar system (a so-called retrograde orbit), and all orbit at severe angles. [More]

I think Spock predicted this...

Deep thoughts, Part XXRK...

Which are more pathetic - Storm Troopers or Redshirts?

So, on one side of this battle we have a stormtrooper. All stormtroopers are dressed in white armor even in environments (everywhere but Hoth-like places, really) where this makes them stick out like a sore thumb. This armor has significant downsides for its wearer: It weighs him down, makes him too loud to be able to sneak up on anyone, and makes it hard for him to see (Luke even comments on this when dressed as one). These disadvantages might be acceptable if the armor were at least mildly effective, but a single shot from any blaster — the most common weapon they are likely to encounter — goes right through it. And of course, as everyone knows, stormtroopers are such terrible shots that the safest place to be is wherever they’re aiming. I laugh every time I watch the original Star Wars and get to Obi-Wan’s line “Only Imperial stormtroopers are so precise.”

On the other side we have a redshirt. Redshirts are the hapless Enterprise crewmen who exist only to beam down with the main bridge crew so that someone can be killed, so that, in turn, Captain Kirk can have something to over-emote about. This happens with such regularity that one is forced to wonder whether there is a specific course at Starfleet Academy called “How to Die Before the Opening Credits.” Or perhaps it is simply a case of Darwinian natural selection, in that any crewman unable to compute the likely outcome of a mission on which the away team consists of Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Sulu and himself deserves to be weeded out of the gene pool. And why would any crewman agree to wear a red shirt?  Indeed, if Scotty and Uhura didn’t also wear red, one would be forced to wonder whether the color red had some mystical power in the Star Trek universe to attract fatal shots, animal attacks, falling rocks, etc. (This power would no doubt be explained as a result of a sub-phase transposition field.)
Here’s the conundrum: Who would win this fight between a man incapable of hitting his target and a man capable of being killed by any shot? In order to make it interesting, we must assume that the fight takes place in an arena containing nothing else capable of killing the participants, for otherwise the redshirt would surely find another way to die before the stormtrooper found a way to kill him. Now, redshirts do occasionally manage to get a good phaser shot off before they snuff it, so that works in the redshirt’s favor. Also in the redshirt’s favor is the open question, much like the classic tree falling in the forest, as to whether a redshirt can die if Captain Kirk is not around to over-emote about his death. (And, I suppose, if Bones isn’t around to say “He’s dead, Jim.”) Truly, the only factor in the stormtrooper’s favor is the innate ability of a redshirt to turn life into a fighting chance to die, to paraphrase Dr. McCoy. [More]

This puzzle will keep you up tonight.

 

So big, so empty...





Merry Christmas to the Universe!


[via sullivan]

Department of Zowie!...

Arctic Norwegians were amazed by an atmospheric unprecedented atmospheric display that seems a little UFO-ish for many.

But I think it's legit.

The first reaction of many readers when they see this picture is Photoshop! Surely this must be a fake. But no, many independent observers witnessed and phtotographed the apparition. It is real.
Banbury continues: "It consisted initially of a green beam of light similar in color to the aurora with a mysterious rotating spiral at one end. This spiral then got bigger and bigger until it turned into a huge halo in the sky with the green beam extending down to Earth. According to press reports, this could be seen all over northern Norway and must therefore have been very high up in the atmosphere to be seen hundreds of km apart."

UPDATE (2 a.m. EST, Dec. 10): Circumstantial evidence is mounting that the phenomenon was caused by a malfunctioning suborbital rocket, possibly a Bulava ICBM launched from a Russian submarine in the White Sea. A Navtex no-fly alert was issued for the White Sea on Dec. 9th, and photographers have recorded what appears to be the initial boost phase of a launch beneath the spiral (see inset). A rocket motor spinning out of control could indeed explain the spiral pattern, as shown in this video of a Trident II missile launched from a US submarine in 2007. The Russian rocket hypothesis is plausible, but it has not yet been confirmed. [More]

I immediately tried to picture the reaction on the Ruskie sub.

It's not too often you have failures this photo-spectacular.  I think we should ask them to do one on New Year's eve.

Aaron's going to hate me...
 
For this one.  Suppose environmentalists had written Star Wars?



Maybe they would at least replace the stiff who played "Annie" (no wonder he turned out bad).

[via scienceblogs]

I thought I heard a crash...

When galaxies collide.

This beautiful image gives a new look at Stephan's Quintet, a compact group of galaxies discovered about 130 years ago and located about 280 million light years from Earth. The curved, light blue ridge running down the center of the image shows X-ray data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory. Four of the galaxies in the group are visible in the optical image (yellow, red, white and blue) from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope. ... The galaxy NGC 7318b is passing through the core of galaxies at almost 2 million miles per hour, and is thought to be causing the ridge of X-ray emission by generating a shock wave that heats the gas. [More]

If it wasn't so cold, I'd do some summer stargazing.


BTW - Carl Sagan never actually said, "billions and billions", in case that phrase just came to mind.

It was real...

And being a teen-aged twit, I didn't realize what a moment in human history it was.  After all, we'd be establishing moon colonies next, right?

[More]

I feel so big and significant...


via videosift.com

Not.

I think I still believe...

In the dreams of these space colonies.

 

  

  

[More]

Two things of note in these idealizations.

1. The belief in the rightness of going into space was commonly held.  While there were skeptics, the idea of colonizing in space was not yet seen as ridiculously beyond our capacity.
2. The Apollonian view of agriculture (orderly, disciplined) is apparent.  The scenes look like northern Europe or Yorkshire, not Nebraska or Indonesia.  This powerful vision of what the "country" should look like remains in most minds today, I believe.

Truly, I was motivated by images like these to study engineering.  Engineers were the guys who supplied the technology to put dreams into reality.  

Even now, as I view these fantasies, I have no regrets in aiming for a future suggested in these visions.

Axe Mr. Science...

One of my most loyal readers - "Anonymous" -  asked if the satellite collision I posted about would have made a sound.

Nope.