space ad

This is an ad from the late 60s or early 70s in which Volkswagen paid homage to the lunar lander, a.k.a. the spider, a.k.a. the ugliest contraption ever imagined by man.

Tvashtar

The image here shows the Tvashtar volcano erupting on Io, a moon of Jupiter. The image was actually acquired by the Pluto-bound spacecraft New Horizons. New Horizons used a Jupiter flyby a few months ago to gain speed for the long cruise out to Pluto. During the flyby New Horizons took advantage to study the moons of Jupiter as well as Jupiter itself. The Tvashtar plume, at the top of the image, reaches hundreds of miles into space. The plume is symmetric because Io has no real atmosphere so the erupted material follows perfect arc trajectories on all sides.

sonic booms?

The space shuttle landed at Edwards Air Force Base in California at 12:49pm Pacific daylight time this afternoon. Usually, that means great sonic booms but alas, there were none to be heard with this landing. I'm not sure why.

Ceres and Vesta

The image here shows the two largest asteroids in the asteroid belt, which lies between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. The asteroids will be visited in 2011 and 2015 by the DAWN spacecraft, which launches in July. The images here were acquired by the Hubble Space Telescope over the last few years and despite the low resolution they show some nice features that will exciting to see close up in a few years. Ceres, on the left, is about 600 miles in diameter and was recently categorized as a dwarf planet (just like Pluto). It's big enough that gravity makes it spherical and the white blotches on the surface may be crater features. Vesta, on the right, is about 330 miles in diameter and shows off a large crater on the lower left.

2015 will be a big year for dwarf planet exploration. Not only will DAWN go into orbit around Ceres, but the New Horizons spacecraft (currently somewhere beyond the orbit of Jupiter) will fly by Pluto.

summer solstice

The longest day of the year has come and gone, welcome to summer.

gum arabic

I'm trying not to piggyback too many articles these days, but this piece today from NPR's Gwen Thompkins was too interesting to pass up. So, give it a quick read and learn a little about an ubiquitous food additive and the geopolitical problems it is generating. I can nearly guarantee that you consumed gum arabic today.

Isaac Newton

With the interesting news this week that Isaac Newton calculated when doomsday will occur, I thought I'd share a passage I came across in one of my books:

On Christmas Day, 1642, the year Galileo died, there was born in the Manor House of Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth a male infant so tiny that, as his mother told him in later years, he might have been put into a quart mug, and so frail that he had to wear a bolster around his neck to support his head. This unfortunate creature was entered in the parish register as 'Isaac sonne of Isaac and Hanna Newton.' There is no record that the wise men honored the occasion, yet this child was to alter the thought and habit of the world.
- James R. Newman

Any student of physics has heard the story of Newton fitting in a quart mug, but the last sentence is obviously the one that really packs the punch. I'm not in any way belittling religion, but the last sentence is a fact that affects the life of every human on earth. Newton's work changed everything and while his pseudo-scientific dabblings are amusing, it's important to keep his true genius at the forefront.

Pluto takes another hit

Not only is Pluto no longer a planet, it is apparently not the most massive Kuiper Belt body either. New research this week out of Caltech concludes that Eris, the Kuiper Belt object that resulted in Pluto's demotion from planet status last year, is not only slightly larger than Pluto but also about 27% more massive. This finding does not detract from Pluto's importance in the solar system (see one of my posts from last year) but it does firm up the framework of our new classification of solar system bodies. Eight planets and eight planets only.

snakebitten shuttle

Sitting here watching CNN, once again a space shuttle flight and visit to the International Space Station are drawing media attention for the wrong reasons. The shuttle arrived at the space station a few days ago carrying a new solar panel array that will boost power to the station. The array was successfully installed but upon power up apparently produced a cascading failure of the station's computer system. This computer system handles pretty much all of the vital station functions, including temperature and oxygen regulation. The problem is being worked while the shuttle astronauts attend to spacewalking duties including a small fix to the shuttle thermal blanket that was peeled away during launch. Despite the computer troubles and thermal blanket damage, the astronauts are in no real danger. The real concern with the computer failure is not loss of oxygen, it's loss of orientation. If the station propulsion systems lose orientation in space, the station orbit could degrade and then the astronauts would have a real problem. Thankfully word came down late this afternoon that the computers rebooted and the station is approaching nominal health.

Dr. Sagan

This may have been the pinnacle of my nerdiness in high school but I apologize for nothing. I had the truly awesome experience of attending a lecture by Carl Sagan at the University of Buffalo when I was a sophomore in high school. At the time of this lecture I had only read one of his books (Cosmos, probably the most famous) but had seen a number of episodes of his Cosmos television series and was definitely a card carrying Saganaut. As I recall the lecture touched on a dozen or more topics, including of course space travel, life in the universe, man's place in the universe, our future, etc. and I remember how easily Dr. Sagan fielded audience questions and delivered quiet, confident answers that just made sense and demanded attention. It was certainly an event that solidified my interest in astronomy and science.

After the lecture my friend and I decided to really geek it up so we headed backstage to see if we could actually meet Dr. Sagan. He was back there and while he didn't stop to speak with anyone, he stopped long enough to autograph our copies of Cosmos. Like I said, the pinnacle of my nerdiness.

black holes on Mars!

The image here shows a fascinating new feature from the surface of Mars. The black hole near the center of the image is not a processing error, it's literally a hole in the surface. The origins of the feature are a current topic of discussion in Mars research circles and this is not the only hole, there are many. We can conclude a few things from the image. For one, the complete blackness of the hole suggests that the hole is deep enough that overhead sunlight illuminates none of the interior. Second, the hole shows no ray structure or crater wall that would indicate an impact feature. Of course, rays and crater walls can be weathered away but nothing about the Martian crust suggests that a crater could punch a hole this deep. Finally, the lack of illumination all the way to the rim of the feature suggests that the interior walls of the structure are either perfectly perpendicular to the line of sight or that the hole expands into an overhang "cavern". These deep holes on Mars were found on the slopes of a large volcano and I suspect that they may be cooling features similar to lava tubes on Earth. As molten material flowed down the slopes of the volcano it cooled from the surface into the interior of the flow, resulting in a "crust" on the flow. A cracking of that crust long after the eruption could produce a hole into the interior of the flow, long since evacuated of material.

Regardless of origin, these holes on Mars have created a lot of excitement in the exobiology community because deep caves could protect life from the harsh radiation environment of the Martian surface. Needless to say, the black holes on Mars will be getting a lot of attention in the coming months and years.