Download the new version of Google Earth and you will get the latest offering from Google, Google Sky. It is a navigable map of the night sky with imagery from the Hubble Space Telescope. You can zoom and rotate among other bells and whistles.
Space Shuttle Endeavour landed safely at Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 12:32 EDT. The tile damage suffered during launch and deemed safe for re-entry was not an issue.
The image here was acquired by the Galaxy Evolution Explorer, a NASA satellite that is currently surveying the entire night sky in the ultraviolet. Ultraviolet light is electromagnetic radiation that is a bit more energetic than the visual light to which the human eye is most sensitive. The image shows the star Mira moving through space (from left to right in the image) at enormous speeds, shedding gas along the way. Mira itself is buried in the bright region on the right, which is surrounded by a "bow shock", a feature that looks like the wake raised by a rock in a stream. The bow shock indicates Mira is moving rapidly, and measurements conclude that the star is moving at 291,000 miles per hour. The "tail" being left behind by the star is over 13 light years in size, truly enormous.
I just finished reading a series of articles in the April 2007 issue of National Geographic on the state of the ocean and sealife. The articles cover the global human mismanagement of the ocean in terms of industrial fishing and commercial aquaculture, the impact of industrial fishing on a small Newfoundland village that is dying because of the collapse of local cod stocks, and finally the impressive example of New Zealand in setting aside no-take marine reserves that have produced an explosion of recovery for marine life.
The article covering the global ocean crisis is downright scary in scope. The commercial fishing fleets of the industrialized nations of the world have scoured the oceans clean, leaving mere remnant populations of majestic fish species, including the bluefin tuna, hunted mercilessly to the ends of the earth to satisfy sushi needs worldwide. Some species will never recover and are effectively extinct. There are twice as many fishing vessels currently at sea as are needed for sustainable fishing. The bad news goes on and on.
The article on New Zealand offers some hope. New Zealand first set aside coastal areas as no-take marine reserves over 30 years ago. The outcome has been nothing short of miraculous. With no commercial or recreational fishing allowed, marine species rebounded quickly and abundantly in these reserves. Tourist and research dollars followed, providing a model example of how nature alone can often be more profitable than anything created by man. Thankfully the United States has started to respond to these examples, the recently established Hawaiian islands national marine sanctuary being the largest protected marine environment on earth. But more must be done or our grandchildren will know many species of fish only from photos.
The author of one of these articles makes the excellent point that if the bluefin tuna (a gorgeous ocean fish that on average once tipped the scales at 500 pounds and 12 feet long) ran on land, like lions or bison, they would be protected and revered. Just because the bluefin tuna runs in the ocean, beyond our view, does not mean it does not deserve equal reverence.
The title of this post is a Richard Ellis book I plan on reading that explores our dying oceans.
Astronomy news hound Chris passes along to me this week that NASA has published a launch schedule for Project Orion, our return to the Moon. The first landing is scheduled for December of 2019. A lot of things have to go right for that date to stand, but here's hoping for a great Christmas in 2019.
Here we go again, folks. Space shuttle Endeavour, currently docked with the International Space Station, has tile damage on the belly of the spacecraft. The damage is no doubt the result of ice or foam debris shaken loose from the boosters hitting the orbiter during launch. Following the Columbia re-entry loss in 2003 every shuttle undergoes detailed examination upon reaching orbit. I believe all 6 shuttle missions since the loss of Columbia have found damage to the heat shield tiles upon reaching orbit. The reality is that every shuttle ever launched has suffered damage during launch. One out of roughly 100 missions was lost because of that damage. In other words, this is probably nothing to worry about. Statistical reality check aside, the damage this time around may be a little more serious than previous instances in that it appears the damaged tile may have been completely penetrated, exposing underlying insulation and the frame of the orbiter itself. Further investigations in the coming week will determine need for repair. The incident is made all the more poignant in that one of the crew is a civilian teacher who was in fact the backup to Christa McAuliffe on the Challenger mission lost in 1986. This stuff makes for great news, but rest assured, everything will be fine.
I think that our hypersensitivity to shuttle damage is similar to the hypersensitivity to damage that accompanies commercial air travel. Forty years ago commercial aircraft probably flew regularly with damages that would ground them today. Similarly, space shuttles flew and landed in the 80s and 90s with damage that is currently unacceptable. I'm not suggesting the attention to damage isn't a good thing, it is, but the engineering of complex flying machines always involves margin, i.e. wiggle room in design and construction that gives us outs if something fails. So yes, tiles may be damaged, but that does not mean disaster is imminent.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Stephen Hawking made his much publicized zero gravity airplane flight Thursday. The flight prompts me to look at the current price scoresheet for privatized space travel and related zero gravity experiences:
Orbital flight around the moon (Space Adventures as early as 2009, but I doubt it): approximately 1 week experience for $100 million.
Visit to the International Space Station (Space Adventures): approximately 1 week experience for $20-30 million.
Sub-orbital flight (e.g. SpaceShipTwo from Virgin Galactic): approximately 1 hour experience with 7-10 minutes of weightlessness for $200,000.
Parabolic airplane flight (Zero G): a couple hour experience with combined weightlessness of 3-5 minutes for $3,500.
So, for the time being the parabolic flight is the only experience even relatively within reach of the average human. However, just like computers and flat screen televisions keep getting cheaper, this will too. If the current pace of privatized space travel is maintained, I can confidently conclude that I will someday travel to space.
This image is featured today on CNN, but go to this site and check it out full resolution. Click on the image and it should come up full resolution. Get it as big as your screen will allow and then go exploring. This is a nebula where stars are being born.
A zoomable version is available here.
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED BY THE LEGISLATURE OF THE STATE OF NEW MEXICO that, as Pluto passes overhead through New Mexico's excellent night skies, it be declared a planet and that March 13, 2007 be declared "Pluto Planet Day" at the legislature.
This could be a new civil war, Pluto planet states versus Pluto non-planet states. Ugly.
