Astronomy
vhughes | May 14, 2007Nope, it's not the movie trailer for Armageddon II. The clip below is a new animation from NASA meant to get us excited about its Constellation Program and our upcoming trip--erm, 13 years from now--back to the Moon.
The Constellation Program includes: Developing the Crew Exploration Vehicle, Orion, by 2014; returning astronauts to the Moon by 2020; and once on the Moon, according to NASA's Constellation Program website, "extending human presence across the solar system and beyond."
(Hat tip: Clive)
vhughes | April 20, 2007New York's American Museum of Natural History presents Beyond, a new IMAX show of 30 tweaked--and stunning!--space photos. Michael Benson, the brains behind the exhibit, spent years browsing the digital archives from NASA and the European Space Agency, selecting photos from Mars, Venus, and Jupiter's moons, Europa and Io. He enhanced the photos to highlight exotic features of these faraway landscapes, like Europa's frozen plains and the lava flows of Venus.
As Beyond's website describes:
Bringing together science and art, Benson asks us to consider questions of life in the universe, the past…
scientificactivist | March 3, 2007I got home tonight just in time to catch the full lunar eclipse. Although my crappy dinosaur of a camera doesn't really do it justice, it was quite stunning here in Oxford. Observers across Europe, Africa, and East Asia had an excellent view of the eclipse tonight, and some viewers in the U.S. might just catch the end as the moon rises and sun sets this evening.
As the Earth passes directly between the sun and the moon (an event that only happens once every couple of years), the moon is almost completely obscured from the sun's light, except for a few rays refracted through the Earth's…
purepedantry | February 6, 2007Good news for sufferers of osteoporosis. There is more calcium in the universe than theoretical physicists had predicted:
According to Jelle de Plaa, space researcher at SRON, many answers can be found in distant clusters of galaxies. "Clusters are in many ways the big cities of the universe", he says.
"They consist of hundreds of galaxies, each containing thousands of millions of stars. The galaxies are embedded in a gigantic cloud of hot gas that fills this cluster like a smog. Due to their enormous size and numbers, clusters contain a large fraction of the total amount of matter in the…
sarahdasher | January 9, 2007
Andromeda's halo, and other galactic marvels, brought to you by Dynamics of Cats.
ksharpe | January 4, 2007CNN has the story of a mysterious falling object that punctured the roof of a home in New Jersey on Tuesday evening, damaging bathroom floor tiles on impact before bouncing and lodging itself in a wall. The object is metal; lab tests will determine whether or not it is a meteorite.
Steinn covers the story on ScienceBlogs, with a link to a site running guidelines for meteorite identification. Who will figure it out first, cops or bloggers?
Image: This meteorite fell on Wisconsin in 1868. (Source)
purepedantry | August 27, 2006So Pluto is no longer a planet (totally destroying everything I learned in elementary school), and I get the feeling the little guy is bummed out about it. I have a list of suggestions of things Pluto can do to raise it's self esteem:
1) Become a free agent and join another solar system
2) Crash into (invade) another planet to show it who's boss, then fail to adequately prepare for that planet's reconstruction
3) Attract attention of NASA...then lose all the probes they send
4) Circle the wagons with the other "Dwarfs" at the dork table at lunch, mock other planets with your superior…
purepedantry | August 14, 2006Scientists meet in Prague to discuss whether Pluto is a planet:
Nearly 2,500 astronomers from 75 countries gathered in Prague Monday to come up with a universal definition of what qualifies as a planet and possibly decide whether Pluto should keep its planet status.
For decades, the solar system has consisted of nine planets, even as scientists debated whether Pluto really belonged. Then the recent discovery of an object larger and farther away than Pluto threatened to throw this slice of the cosmos into chaos.
Among the possibilities at the 12-day meeting of the International Astronomical…
purepedantry | August 9, 2006Why do we lose all the good ones?
Physicist James A. Van Allen, a leader in space exploration who discovered the radiation belts surrounding the Earth that now bear his name, died Wednesday. He was 91.
The University of Iowa, where he taught for years, announced the death in a statement on its Web site.
In a career that stretched over more than a half-century, Van Allen designed scientific instruments for dozens of research flights, first with small rockets and balloons, and eventually with space probes that traveled to distant planets and beyond.
Van Allen gained global attention in the…
purepedantry | August 8, 2006It's all the lying that really gets me:
The universe could be 2 billion years older than thought, according to a new report by an international team of astronomers. The scientists have found that a nearby galaxy is 15% farther away than previous results suggested. That could mean the age of the universe is off by the same amount. But other experts think it's too early to draw such far-reaching conclusions.
Astronomers have been able to determine relative distances of remote galaxies using observations of a particular type of star that periodically changes its brightness. But in order to know…
joshua braun | March 31, 2006The Detroit Free Press has an article today detailing the claim by members of Congress that the US is entering a new space race--with China.
When the plans for the new moon missions were unveiled, many journalists and space enthusiasts were disappointed. The plans looked nearly identical to the Apollo missions of thirty years before. It was as if Chevy had announced its new 2006 models and rolled out a '76 Nova. Thirty years on, shouldn't a moon mission look slicker, different, better?
What the people making this criticism have failed to appreciate is that engineering projects suffer from…