Cosmos
gregladen | March 9, 2010This is a piece by Rolf Heuer, Director General of CERN explaining what is happening over at LHC. A must read.
gregladen | March 3, 2010scientists have detected ice deposits near the moon's north pole. NASA's Mini-SAR instrument, a lightweight, synthetic aperture radar, found more than 40 small craters with water ice. The craters range in size from 1 to 9 miles (2 to15 km) in diameter. Although the total amount of ice depends on its thickness in each crater, it's estimated there could be at least 1.3 trillion pounds (600 million metric tons) of water ice.
The Mini-SAR has imaged many of the permanently shadowed regions that exist at both poles of the Moons. These dark areas are extremely cold and it has been hypothesized that…
gregladen | February 12, 2010
The red smudge at the center of this picture is the first comet discovered by NASA's Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA
NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer discovered its first ever comet as part of an infrared survey of the whole sky.
The comet is called "P/2010 B2 (WISE)," but is known on the street as WISE. If they keep naming comets like that this will get confusing as WISE will probably discover dozens of these suckers.
P (which is what I like to call it) is 175 x 106 km away from Earth, about 2 km in diameter, and about 4.5…
gregladen | February 11, 2010
This oblique view shows geological layers of rock exposed on a mound inside Gale Crater on Mars. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/USGS
It is easy to forget how important impact craters are on planetary history on a planet like Earth with dynamic continental movement, wind and water erosion, and a short memory. But we are reminded when we look at the research coming out of Mars.
Gale Crater is about the size of Connecticut, and within the crater is a huge mound, several thousand meters high, which expose a time-deep sequence of layers demonstrating dramatic changes in…
gregladen | February 5, 2010The world's highest energy atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), will run at half its maximum energy through 2011 and likely not at all in 2012. Officials at the European particle physics laboratory, CERN, had previously planned to run the gargantuan accelerator at 70% of maximum energy this year.
The change raises hopes at the LHC's lower-energy rival, the Tevatron Collider at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois, of being extended through 2012 instead of being shut down next year.
Read the rest here.
gregladen | February 4, 2010Stellarium is a realistic looking, feature rich OpenSource planetarium. The default catalog has over one half million stars, but you can get an extended catalog with over 200 million stars. All the usual information you expect in a planetarium is available. For the most part, navigation of the image can be done easily with a mouse or using the keyboard. The software takes over the GUI (like some games do). It can project (via a projector, I assume) for use in an actual planetarium or be used on your computer screen. You can get plugins for artificial satellite tracks and to interface…
gregladen | January 12, 2010The Phoenix robot, left by NASA on the Martian Pole last Martian Fall, has been hidden by seasonal darkness and is presumably covered with ice. The explorer had performed very well during its mission, and it is not expected to have survived the winter.
However, if, when sunshine warms its frosty panels, the science robot develops a positive energy balance, its circuits still work, Phoenix will alternately use its two radios and its two antennas to send out a signal. In the mean time, the Odyssey, which is a NASA flying robot circling the planet, will try to pick up this signal and re-…
gregladen | December 12, 2009You know the old gag where the woman is in labor, and then gives birth, and asks the doctor "What is it, a boy or a girl?" and the doctor says "Both! You have twins!"
Well, astronomers have been playing this gag for some time now with a particular star system and the latest surprise just happened.
It has long been known that one of the stars of Ursa Major is a binary system, with two stars very close to each other. This was apparently discovered in ancient times. They are known as Alcor and Mizar, and are thus the longest-identified binaries.
With telescopes, Mizar was then discovered to…
gregladen | December 11, 2009More than 24 hours after the incident, the Russian Ministry of Defence confirms that it was a failed Bulava missile launch that caused the strange spiral shaped lights over Northern Norway yesterday....
details
gregladen | November 23, 2009The Large Hadron Collider has produced some data!
Geneva, 23 November 2009. Today the LHC circulated two beams simultaneously for the first time, allowing the operators to test the synchronization of the beams and giving the experiments their first chance to look for proton-proton collisions. With just one bunch of particles circulating in each direction, the beams can be made to cross in up to two places in the ring. From early in the afternoon, the beams were made to cross at points 1 and 5, home to the ATLAS and CMS detectors, both of which were on the look out for collisions. Later,…
gregladen | November 18, 2009There are not going to be too many more of these:
Space shuttle Atlantis and its six-member crew began an 11-day delivery flight to the International Space Station on Monday with a 2:28 p.m. EST launch from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The shuttle will transport spare hardware to the outpost and return a station crew member who spent more than two months in space.
Atlantis is carrying about 30,000 pounds of replacement parts for systems that provide power to the station, keep it from overheating, and maintain a proper orientation in space. The large equipment can best be…
gregladen | November 14, 2009"We'll start by steering the wheels straight and driving, though we may have to steer the wheels to the right to counter any downhill slip to the left" ... OMG have I ever been there before . But not on Mars.
The Martian rover Spirit got stuck in the dust on April 23rd of this year. One wheel was already broken, forcing the little martian rover to drive backwards. Then, its other wheels plunged through a crust covering the dusty infill of a 26 foot wide crater. If Spirit turns into the crater, it's curtains.
So, from April 23rd to now, NASA engineers have been thinking about this,…
gregladen | November 6, 2009Divining sticks that consist essentially of an antenna not even attached to a radio (which might make it slihgtly useful for listening to music and stuff), and costing between 16 and 60 THOUSAND DOLLARS each, are being used as the main technology for detecting bombs at check points staffed by the Iraqi army.
The US Army has told the Iraqi army that this does not work, but they don't care.
"I don't believe there's a magic wand that can detect explosives," said Maj. Gen. Richard J. Rowe Jr., who oversees Iraqi police training for the American military. "If there was, we would all be using…
gregladen | October 29, 2009If you don't know someone's age, over time they may let out clues that tell you when they were born based on what they remember, or things they claim to have done. This can be very inaccurate. My wife said something the other day that would cause anyone to infer that she was at least ten years older than she is, but it turns out the TV show she was referring to came to her home as syndicated re-runs. (My own personal memory of the recently deceased Soupy Sales is a similar example.)
The Universe
You can always ask a person his or her age, but you have to infer the age of inanimate…
gregladen | October 20, 200932 previously unknown exoplanets have been discovered with a high-precision instrument hooked up to a Chilean telescope...
The existence of the so-called exoplanets -- planets outside our solar system -- was announced at the European Southern Observatory/Center for Astrophysics, University of Porto conference in Porto, Portugal, according to a statement issued by the observatory.
The announcement was made by a consortium of international researchers, headed by the Geneva Observatory, who built the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher, or HARPS. The device can detect slight wobbles…
gregladen | October 6, 2009Early Friday Morning, plus/minus one half a day depending on where in the world you are, two alien space craft are going to crash into the moon. It will be visible from earth with a small telescope.
Read about it here!
gregladen | September 24, 2009The balloon and camera were launched at 7:44 AM, the balloon burst at 10:51 AM at 107,145 ft. and the camera landed via parachute at 11:40 AM, 89 miles from the launch site after a 3 hr. & 56 min. flight. The camera recorded a total of 4 hrs. & 22 min. of Hi-Def Video before it stopped recording 53 secs after landing, when its 32GB of memory was full. The only thing better would have been if the camera had recorded for several minutes more to captured the sound of us approaching and video of us opening its container.
If you get motion sickness or are annoyed at unedited video, either…
gregladen | September 18, 2009Juno is an asteroid that will be coming into view shortly. To find it, go out into the night in a relatively unpolluted sky and look near Uranus.
You can often see Juno with a descent telescope, but if conditions are good, you should be able to see it with the naked eye.
Juno is the tenth largest known asteroid and is about the size of Maryland.
How to find it:
The asteroid, which orbits the sun on a track between Mars and Jupiter, will be at its brightest on Sept. 21, when it is zooming around the sun at about 22 kilometers per second (49,000 miles per hour). At that time, its…