Cosmos
gregladen | March 25, 2008I believe I knew before PZ Myers did that an Asteroid had been named after him. I heard it on the radio. and much later on he confirmed it on his blog. See this post.
[Correction: He knew, he was just being cool. See this.]
Curiously, PZ claims that we do not know what the asteroid looks like. He relies on a description provided by his arch rival, Phil Plait. Why would he trust Phil Plait to describe his asteroid?
Anyway, I went into the NASA archives (to which I have special access because of my work on the robot problem) and dug out a pretty clear photograph of the asteroid. Here it…
gregladen | March 22, 2008... and, gave positive results. I know you have been waiting in anticipation for the results of an experiment in which an astronaut was going to toss a boomerang in space to see if it came back.
Well, it worked:
Boomerang works in space: Japanese astronaut from PhysOrg.com
In an unprecedented experiment, a Japanese astronaut has thrown a boomerang in space and confirmed it flies back much like on Earth.
[...]
Whew, this one had me really worried...
gregladen | March 17, 2008If you are interested in astronomy, you know that there are a lot of Planetarium applications that you can install on your computer in order to find your way around the night sky. Kstars is a well known standby for KDE (but of course it will run under Gnome as well). Search for "stars" in your package manager and you'll see quite a few other pieces of software as well.
But when you get to "Stellarium" ... stop and install that one.
Stellarium pretty much has all the stars. Well, not all of them. It has 120,000 stars (I understand there are billions and billions of them...). It has the…
gregladen | March 14, 2008Governor Spitzer, only recently deposed for committing the crime of being a Democrat on the Republican Hit List, has already launched a new career as a Telescope:
Spitzer Finds Organics and Water Where New Planets May Grow from PhysOrg.com
Researchers using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope have discovered large amounts of simple organic gases and water vapor in a possible planet-forming region around an infant star, along with evidence that these molecules were created there. They've also found water in the same zone around two other young stars.
[...]
gregladen | March 13, 2008
Vanguard I celebrates 50 years in space from PhysOrg.com
The Vanguard I satellite celebrates its 50th birthday this year. Its launch on March 17, 1958 from Cape Canaveral, Florida, culminated the efforts of America's first official space satellite program begun in September 1955. The first solar-powered satellite, Vanguard I has the distinction of being the oldest artificial satellite orbiting the earth. Its predecessors, Sputniks I and II and Explorer I, have since fallen out of orbit.
[...]
gregladen | March 8, 2008The age of the Universe is 13.73 billion years, plus or minus 120 million years. Some people might say it doesn't look a day over 6000 years. They're wrong.
The quote above is from Bad Astronomy, where Phil explains the latest WMAP results. Highly recommended. A very nice history of the study of the universe, accessible to all, is Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe (P.S.) by Singh.
The big bang and stuff that happened in connection with this cosmic event, the so-called origin of the universe, left a signal that is visible today to instruments on earth. Careful analysis of this signal can…
gregladen | March 7, 2008If you thought robotic snakes were creepy, you should check out this (very serious) proposal for how to make a "manned" Mars trip a reality.
Will humans ever really go to Mars? Let's face it, the obstacles are quite daunting. Not only are there numerous, difficult, technical issues to overcome, but the political will and perseverance of any one nation to undertake such an arduous task just can't be counted on. However, one former NASA engineer believes a human mission to Mars is quite doable, and such an event would unify the world as never before. But Jim McLane's proposal includes a…
gregladen | March 5, 2008Our colleagues over at scienceblogs.com of Germany have a new cool video. My German is rusty but let me try to translate:
If you mix warm and cold (liquid or gas) you get a temperature that is in between. But what if the "warm" is burning thermite (at thousands of degrees C) and the cold is liquid N, at hundreds of degrees below zero?
What happens is that the temperature difference is just too high so that one can not be sure what to expect. And then my translation kind of trails off, but if you look at the video, I think what happens is that the liquid nitrogen is transferred into an…
gregladen | March 4, 2008When certain space ships travel by the Earth they seem to demonstrate a shift in velocity that is not predicted. Space ships traveling parallel to the Earth's Equator do not seem to show this anomaly; It appears to be most readily observed in those that travel in a path unsymmetrical with respect to the equator.
The following is from a report filed with Physics News Update in September, 1998:
ANOMALOUS ACCELERATION. Data from several spacecraft, including Pioneer 10 and 11, Galileo, and Ulysses, provide evidence for an unexplained, weak, long-range acceleration, a new report shows.…
gregladen | March 4, 2008NASA is considering a trip to the moon, and this time, the destination would be the scenic South Polar Region. Pursuant to this, they have compiled a set of more detailed than ever high-resolution radar maps of the Man in the Moon's chin.
Scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory collected the data using the Goldstone Solar System Radar located in California's Mojave Desert. Three times in 2006, JPL scientists targeted the moon's south polar region using Goldstone's 70-meter radar dish. The antenna, three-quarters the size of a football field, sent a 500-kilowatt strong, 90-minute long…
gregladen | March 1, 2008Investor Steve Jurvetson talks about his awesome hobby -- shooting off model rockets. With gorgeous photos, infectious glee and just a whiff of danger.
gregladen | February 26, 2008According to the New York Times, "An
Errant Satellite Is Gone, but Questions Linger" ...
Should the people of the world be breathing a sigh of relief that the risk of a half-ton of frozen, toxic rocket fuel landing who knows where has passed? Or should they be worried about the latest display of the United States' technical prowess, and see it as a thinly veiled test for a shadow antisatellite program?
gregladen | February 21, 2008"We were tossing around ideas about the size of the Galaxy, and thought we had better check the standard numbers that everyone uses. It took us just a few hours to calculate this for ourselves. We thought we had to be wrong, so we checked and rechecked and couldn't find any mistakes."
A team of Australian astrophysicists pulled some readily available data off the internet, ran it through a spreadsheet model, and re-estimated the thickness of the 100,000 light year wide Milky Way Galaxy. The previously widely used estimate was that the Galaxy was 6,000 light years thick, but this new estimate…
gregladen | February 15, 2008George Dyson tells the amazing story of Project Orion, a massive, nuclear-powered spacecraft that could have taken us to Saturn in five years. With a priceless insider's perspective and a cache of documents, photos and film, Dyson brings this dusty Atomic Age dream to vivid life.
gregladen | February 14, 2008Some time in the next few days the US navy will fire a rocket in order to shoot down a satellite carrying 454 kilograms of the very poisonous substance hydrazine. By blowing the satellite up, the hydrazine tank will explode dispersing the gas to a low concentration level If the tank is not blown up, it would likely survive re-entry. If it burst on contact with the earth, several city blocks could be covered with deadly gas.
Most likely, the satellite will not hit a few city block, and the military says it is most likely to come down in a desolate area. But, the military has said a lot of…
gregladen | February 11, 2008Or your dog, or favorite house plant, or whatever.
Via Bad Astronomy, we have learned of the Name That Satellite Project at NASA. NASA is trying to reverse the mistake of naming a sattelite "GLAST."
This appears to be the beginning of a new policy of satellite naming.
Go here to name the satellite.
gregladen | February 11, 2008In the classic science fiction novel, Venus on the Half Shell by Kilgore Trout, the question of how intelligent life evolved (at many different locations) in The Universe is raised, and pursued by the novel's protagonist. As the novel ends, it turns out that the origin of intelligent life across the universe is ...
SPOILER WARNING ... END OF THE BOOK IS BELOW THE FOLD
... closely linked to cockroach shit.
So now you know how it ends, but you've really got to read that book anyway.
Well, once again, real life imitates fiction (how does it do that???) as it has recently been discovered…
gregladen | February 2, 2008
This looks like a photograph of a mountain, possibly a volcano, with natural drainage systems emanating from it. But it is not.
It is actually a large depression with numerous troughs emanating, perhaps, into it. They can't be erosional features because that would require some kind of liquid, presumably not available on this planet.
This is not the first photograph of a strange thing on the planet Mercury. We need to start doing some 'splaining.
Pictured here is a photo from space of Mt. Hood, near Seattle. You can see a similar pattern, but in reverse. So, I would propose that the…
gregladen | February 2, 2008or at least, the US Space Age. And belated (sorry, The Space Age, please don't get mad at me!)
It was fifty years ago on Janurary 31st, 1958, when Explorer 1 was thrown into space by three Rocket Scientists (pictured here seconds before launch). Explorer 1 basically went up and then came down. Later, following the invention of the Rocket Launcher, similar efforts went higher, sometimes into orbit.
[source]
Here's a video:
I think this is very cool. Notice that they had a whole different conception of what a countdown is. Also, they take off at night, presumably to not run into the sky…
gregladen | February 1, 2008
NASA will no longer be making photographs from its latest Mercury probe available on the internet. Recent evidence from the nearest planet to the sun (that we know about) clearly indicates that the planet has been copyrighted. Legal experts are working on the case now, but feel that a resolution is unlikely.
Even stranger evidence has come from Mars, where it has been discovered that Martian Sentient Beings are very, very silly. See this new evidence here at Bad Astronomy.
[source of Mercury Photograph]