space
sciencetolife | February 3, 2008
NASA recently signed an agreement with the Indian Space Research Organization to continue collaborating with each other in the exploration and use of outer space for peaceful purposes.
"This agreement will allow us to cooperate effectively on a wide range of programs of mutual interest. India has extensive space-related experience, capabilities and infrastructure, and will continue to be a welcome partner in NASA's future space exploration activities," said NASA Administrator Michael Griffin.
This new agreement aims to extend a similar agreement first signed in 1997 to foster bilateral…
aardvarchaeology | January 4, 2008
Dear Reader, remember the remote-controlled Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity? How long is it since the last time you thought of them? Spirit landed on Mars four Earth years ago today, Opportunity on 25 January -- and both are still going strong! These machines were originally meant to work for three months, yet they continue to trundle around that cold, distant planet, taking pictures and analysing rocks. Check out the project's web site for news!
[More blog entries about astronomy, space, mars, nasa; astronomi, rymden, mars, nasa.]
cevans | December 19, 2007
The search for a Theory of Everything, which is kind of the unofficial M.O. of the scientific establishment, has always been closely guarded. The elements of profound uncertainty involved with such a quest have always primly clipped, safe from the grubby hands of untrained speculation. Relatively sane, brilliant physicists who err too far in the direction of the fabulous are practically shunned, or at least relegated to different class; those who posit that any variant of string theory might bridge the gap are nominally demoted from "physicists" to "string theorists," a nomenclature that…
cevans | November 2, 2007
On March 26th, 1997, 39 people in matching black sweatsuits and Nike sneakers were found dead in a rented mansion in the San Diego suburb of Rancho Santa Fe. They were members of a marginal religious group called Heaven's Gate -- a "cult," in the frenzied media parlance of the 90's -- and they had committed suicide, cleanly and methodically, by ingesting large doses of phenobarbital and vodka. Their motive, profoundly misunderstood by pretty much everyone not directly involved with the group, was to hitch a ride to the "Next Level" on a heavenly spacecraft positioned behind the rapidly-…
nisbetmc | November 1, 2007
Gallup has released its latest tracking data on American views of NASA. As Gallup describes, according to the Sept. 14-16 poll, 56% of Americans rate the job NASA is doing in positive terms, with 16% saying it is doing an "excellent" job and 40% a "good" job. Meanwhile, just 8% say it is doing a poor job, with most of the rest describing NASA's performance as "only fair."
According to Gallup, NASA has had less-than-majority positive evaluations just twice since 1990, when Gallup first asked this question. The initial 46% rating in July 1990 came shortly after a flaw in the Hubble telescope…
cevans | September 25, 2007
To aid in the gestation of a new project, I've been watching a whole lot of Carl Sagan programs.
Namely, the 13-part epic of Cosmos, which remains, to me, the most comprehensive survey of the Universe and our place within it ever presented to the lay public. Sagan's devastating empathy, his respect of the viewer's intelligence, as well as his often outrageously optimistic sense of human community, have never been replicated in television. He shifts deftly from dallies in human history to well-diagrammed explanations of evolution, stressing the clarity and self-evidence of science and…
cevans | August 31, 2007I once said that 2007 on Universe would include many new features, one being an occasional review of a work of science fiction. Hello!
The Black Cloud is a 1957 science-fiction novel written by British astronomer Fred Hoyle. Like the novels of Carl Sagan, and, often, Arthur C. Clarke, it's something of an extrapolation of the author's deeply-held scientific conceptions. Because it was written by a scientist, further, it's almost overwhelmingly dry at times; the narrative often gives way entirely to pages full of mathematical formulae, diagrams, and lengthy expository footnotes.
The…
cevans | August 25, 2007Few things get me as riled up as the human being's lack of perspective: about our place in the "grand scheme of things," about our longevity, or about the kinds of impact -- damaging and otherwise -- that we have on our planet. We seem terrified of massive perspectival shifts, threatened by our own galactic history or the dark matters that astronomers so often bandy about. There is one trope, I've found, however, that can lead laypeople to safely revel in the sheer minisculity of our race: the Condensed History of the Universe. "Imagine that all of time were to take place in one day," the…
purepedantry | August 21, 2007The space shuttle Endeavor has landed safely at Kennedy Space Center:
After two weeks of analyzing, worrying and ultimately taking no action to repair a small but deep gouge in the Endeavour's underside, NASA flight controllers cleared the shuttle to return to Earth this morning.
"You are go for the de-orbit burn," Christopher J. Ferguson, an astronaut at the NASA's mission control center in Houston, radioed to the Endeavour crew at 11:05 a.m. Eastern time.
Starting at 11:25 a.m., with broken clouds but otherwise blue skies over the landing strip and a steady breeze blowing near the ground,…
sciencetolife | July 11, 2007
Scientists appear to have evidence of water on a planet outside our Solar System.
The planet is called HD 189733b and orbits a star in the constellation of Vulpecula the Fox.
The international team, which included scientists from University College London, took measurements of the planet's absorption parameters. They did painstaking calculations to show that the absorption pattern observed could only be explained by the presence of water vapor in the atmosphere.
Although the planet has water on it, it is far from being habitable-parts of the atmosphere reach 2,000 degrees.
These results…
purepedantry | May 17, 2007Neat.
One of the moons of Saturn, Enceladus, has cracks and eruptions that couldn't be explained by heat. (It is much too small to have volcanic actiivty.) They think that the cracks might be caused by tidal forces from Saturn's gravity:
In 2005, the Cassini spacecraft flew by Enceladus and saw plumes of material erupting from the south pole of Enceladus. Scientists were surprised to see this because eruptions are powered by heat from an object's interior. Enceladus is tiny compared to most moons, only about 500 kilometers (310 miles) in diameter, so it should have lost its interior heat…
cevans | April 26, 2007Of course, you've already heard.
A team of European astronomers have discovered a planet five times as massive as the Earth orbiting a distant, dim red star known as Gliese 581. I've already started lamenting the proto-future, the first contact with extraterrestrial life, that I imagine my generation -- already so media savvy, so keen to negotiate alternative spaces with their own sets of digital constraints -- will probably just miss out on. I could cry, just weep, thinking about it.
Although most scientific developments of this magnitude -- including the recent discovery of another new…
cevans | April 4, 2007James Gardner is part of a new breed of complexity theorists: an armchair philosopher that goes beyond the epistemological, who posits broad, celebratory theories about the nature of the future of the universe. His first book, Biocosm, proposed the "Selfish Biocosm" hypothesis, which suggests that intelligence doesn't emerge in a series of Darwinian accidents, but is hard-wired into the cycle of cosmic creation; it's a really beautiful idea, putting us right at the center of a living, breathing, intelligent universe, which, incidentally, is the title of his newest book.
Dude also rolled…
omnibrain | March 2, 2007We all know that the full moon turns you into a werewolf or just plain stark raving mad. Well at least according to this website:
The full moon is credited for a lycanthropic man's moonlight metamorphosis into a dangerous howling beast - the werewolf (in North American cultures, or a horse or goat in Brazil, or a tiger in India, and so on). In a less Anthropomorphic vain, many believe that the full moon is responsible for an increase in abnormal psychological behaviors such as suicides and violent crimes. As I shared the introduction of this article to this point with the nurse at my…
purepedantry | February 15, 2007In light of the Lisa Nowak love triangle/kidnapping/nutness NASA is re-evaluating how it...well...evaluates astronauts for psychological fitness for space flights.
Part of the problem is one of sex frankly; astronauts are not allowed to have it while on duty.
NASA has been intransigent about the idea of the astronauts have intimate relations, justifying this policy because they would rather not deal with any of the associated problems on manned missions. On the other hand, for particularly long flights -- such as trips to Mars -- sex could be a stabilizing force. Anyway, an interesting…
cevans | February 2, 2007If we're going to make it in this future of ours, we've got to stop thinking that our planet hangs in some kind of splendid isolation in the dead vapor of empty space. We're part and parcel of a dynamic system, a vast cosmos of activity and, probably, intelligence; though our home planet's life span is limited, the Universe is not going anywhere.
That said, meet the Space Elevator, probably the most revolutionary idea in the history of aeronautics. Why? Because it's exactly what it sounds like. An elevator. To space.
Image courtesy of Liftport Group
What's so elegant about the space…
cevans | January 30, 2007Three incredible, little-known things about the Apollo 11 mission:
1. Although everyone knows what Neil Armstrong said as he hopped out of the landing module, I've always preferred Buzz Aldrin's elegiac phrase, "Beautiful. Beautiful. Magnificent desolation." This leads me to the next point.
2. Aldrin, always the most conceptually approachable of the Apollo 11 astronauts, claims in this interview that he (as well as Collins and Armstrong) observed an unidentified ship traveling alongside theirs, but never said anything about it for fear of being sent back to Earth. The sighting, which was…
omnibrain | December 7, 2006What would you talk about with an astronaut at the pub? (assuming you've had a few to many).
Some of us New Scientist staffers were idly wondering about the universe in the pub last night - arguing about the "speed of dark" (as opposed to the speed of light) for reasons I'd rather forget - when into the bar walks space shuttle astronaut Mark Kelly, pilot on shuttle Discovery's July 4 mission to the space station.
I'm jealous...the New Scientist crowd got a chance to do this. The Scienceblogger crowd should get to drink with...hmm... I don't know? What science etc. figure would you want to…