Somehow this simple comparison makes the moon landing seem so much more REAL on a human, experiential level. Brilliant move, NASA.
The map's gigantic - click here to view.
Kottke also has links to the moonwalks supered over a soccer pitch, and a movie backlot (for conspiracy-theorist types).
Posting today's Monitor in John Pavlus' stead...
Space methane suggests the possibility of space cows, space robots are serving their NASA masters (for now), and why is everything in space made of matter? RIP Arthur C. Clarke.
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Created, written & designed by John Pavlus / Screencasts produced by Smashcut Media / Music by Jeff Alvarez
Last Wednesday, the Cassini spacecraft whizzed through a giant geyser bursting from the surface of Enceladus, one of Saturn's tiny moons. Cassini’s cameras were poised to take new pictures of Enceladus, and an onboard tool was supposed to analyze the composition of the geyser.
Those Enceladan outbursts, hundreds of miles tall, are curious beasts. Scientists suspect they contain ice and rocky debris, but how such a small and cold body can host these powerful plumes remains a mystery. Is there a watery ocean trapped under the frozen surface? Where does all this energy come from? To add mystery to mystery, last month, we learned that Saturn’s outermost ring actually sops up debris from the geysers.
Well, at least Cassini’s camera worked! (The image above is from NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute.) And so did four of the other devices. The new pictures deliver new details on the polar regions of the moon, which is only about 310 miles in diameter. But we’ll have to wait a few months for an inside look at the geysers.
Continue reading 'We’ll get you, Enceladus. Just you wait.' >
The astronomy quote of the week comes from Aussie astronomer Peter Tuthill:
"I used to appreciate this spiral just for its beautiful form, but now I can't help a twinge of feeling that it is uncannily like looking down a rifle barrel."
The end could be closer than we thought.
In the March 1st Astrophysical Journal, Tuthill reports on a photogenic binary star system he’s been watching for some time. The dancing duo is a Wolf-Rayet system, which means that one of the stars is dangerously unstable. As in, close to going supernova. The press release calls it a “ticking time bomb.”
For 8 years, Tuthill has believed himself lucky for getting such a nice angle to watch the spiraling star from. Here’s how he describes an image of it (posted on the next page of this post) on his web site:
A sequence of 11 sharp frames show the elegant spiral nebula in the constellation of Sagittarius to be rotating in a circle every 8 months, keeping precise time like a jewel in a cosmic clock. In the image to the left [follow the jump to the next page to see it], we have rotated the camera frame of each of the 11 images so as to follow the motion, and as a result we can stack all our images into a single false-colour composite.
But Tuthill’s stellar view of the star could be bad news for Spaceship Earth.
Continue reading 'Bang, whimper, or … gamma ray burst from the Death Star?' >
According to the Meteoritical Society, more than 30,000 meteorities have been identified. (Meteorites are the interstellar rocks that make it through our atmosphere and land on Earth.) Most of them come from the rocky debris (like asteroids and comets) floating through space, but a few dozen are believed to have originated on Mars or the moon.
Or Mercury? (What, can anomalous meteorites only come from places the begin with the letter “M”?)
In a new paper submitted to the journal Meteoritics and Planetary Science, two Canadian astronomers crunch the numbers and find that we should expect Mercury-borne meteorites to strike the Earth at roughly half the rate of those from Mars. In other words, there might already be a few pieces of Mercury here on Earth.
Astrophysicist John Dubinski has been running simulations on his supercomputer of galaxies forming, colliding into each other, and otherwise moving around as they are wont to do. Last year he compiled nine animations onto a DVD, wrapped them up with "the soundworlds of renaissance and baroque counterpoint, free improvisation, Middle-Eastern music, minimalism, techno and electronica to create a musical feast that crosses time and dimension," and sold Gravitas.
As of this week, he's begun giving the DVD away for free via torrent, but he's posted the series of animations on YouTube, making my day far, far happier than otherwise possible.
Continue reading 'Free galactic simulations are the best part of my day' >
Perhaps I spoke too soon with our "simulated" footage of the satellite strike. The Pentagon has released video of the successful missile strike:
Click through to see a vid of the satellite-busting missile taking off.
Continue reading 'UPDATE: Satellite destruction mission video footage' >
Woo-hoo! I don't know if I'm more excited about the success of our military's efforts to destroy a wayward satellite because 1) it's a bold tactical, interstellar move, or 2) now we'll get to stop writing about it. Either way, the Navy is "80-90 percent confident" that a missile aboard the U.S.S. Lake Erie took out most of the spy satellite, including that tank of poisonous hydrazine that caused such a hubbub. There's no official video of the takedown, but you can imagine that it went a little something like this:
This isn’t going to shake up the big questions in cosmology, but it might change the way you think about the night sky. Those stars you see? They may not be where you think they are.
Gravitational lenses operate like funhouse mirrors in deep space. They can magnify, distort and bend the light from distant galaxies, and make them appear in different places than where you would expect. (No word yet on whether they can make galaxies look taller or thinner or shorter or heavier or wavier…) Gravitational lenses, as their name suggests, are usually giant galaxies so massive that they bend spacetime—and thus redirect light or anything else that happens to be traveling close by.
They can be helpful to astronomers: the magnification and redirection of light allows stargazers to see farther into deep space. And thus, farther back in time.
The Cosmological Evolution Survey (COSMOS), led by Nick Scoville at Caltech, recently completed a long, hard look at a patch of the sky roughly equal to the area of 9 full moons (1.6 square degrees). The survey used data from the major league of telescopes: the Hubble, Chandra, Spitzer, and the VLT all contributed images. The researchers found 67 new gravitational lenses.
Continue reading '67 new gravitational lenses; no word yet on scratch-resistant coating' >
War is bad and all, but recent news of an errant satellite and our military's plans to blow it out of the sky has stoked the fires of our Millennium Falcon-loving youth. Luckily, our thoughtful, do-gooder big brother spent less time breaking out the action figures and actually investigated the possibility of the U.S. and China engaging in a protracted arms race in outer space. Basically, the Pentagon is already thinking about it seriously, but astronomical (heh) costs and mitigating factors (debris in orbit from space battles could interfere with essential communications satellites) might hold us or the Chinese back from building a Death Star anytime soon.
Even cooler than the article, though, is the space weapons slideshow our sibling provided at no extra charge. It covers possible space weapons, connected technology, and the feasibility and costs of getting said super-weapons off the ground. Badass entries include: a ground-based antisatellite laser, kinetic-energy interceptors, offensive satellites, and space-based hypersonic bombers (pictured left). Yes! Way to go, bro!
Continue reading 'Pew! Pew! Is an arms race in space on the horizon?' >
After all the hand-wringing about what's going to happen to the U.S.'s broken, poisonous satellite on track to crash into earth, it looks the military is going to go ahead and do the Hollywood thing after all and blow it out of the sky. Or at least, they're going to try.
Right now, the military has a two-week window in which to shoot down the school bus-sized satellite; after that point, it would begin to break apart and tumble down into the earth's atmosphere, depositing its half-ton of frozen, hazardous hydrazene rocket fuel in an unknown place. Because the satellite circles the earth 16 times a day, we'll have a second and maybe even a third chance to hit it if we miss on the first blast.
The plan is to use ship-based anti-ballistic missile weaponry to take out the busted satellite, which, um, hasn't exactly been done before. If it works, it stands to serve not only as a way to take out a potentially dangerous piece of space junk, but also a powerful proof-of-concept for the U.S.'s antisatellite capability.
Continue reading 'Asteroid practice: U.S. plans to shoot down errant spy satellite' >
Well, this is striking news: Space, apparently, has a peculiar scent all its own, according to a nose that would know — an astronaut on the International Space Station. I know, I know — huh? But International Space Station science officer Don Pettit swears that space bears a distinctive if somewhat ephemeral odor, a "pleasant sweet metallic sensation," like "sweet smelling welding fumes." Um, maybe I should just let him describe it in full:
Few people have experienced traveling into space. Even fewer have experienced the smell of space. Now this sounds strange, that a vacuum could have a smell and that a human being could live to smell that smell. It seems about as improbable as listening to sounds in space, yet space has a definite smell. Being creatures of an atmosphere, we can only smell space indirectly. Sort of like the way a pit viper smells by waving its tongue in the air and then pressing it to the roof of its mouth where sensors process the molecules that have been adsorbed onto the waggling appendage.
I had the pleasure of operating the airlock for two of my crewmates while they went on several space walks. Each time, when I repressed the airlock, opened the hatch and welcomed two tired workers inside, a peculiar odor tickled my olfactory senses. At first I couldn't quite place it. It must have come from the air ducts that re-pressed the compartment. Then I noticed that this smell was on their suit, helmet, gloves, and tools. It was more pronounced on fabrics than on metal or plastic surfaces.
Continue reading 'Space has a smell; astronaut swears 'it wasn't me'' >
Living on the International Space Station kinda sucks. The food mostly blows, the bus is always late and you have to hear the Japanese guys go on and on about their paper airplane projects. But every now and then, you get to see something in person no one else will ever see, and it's all worth it. Check out these images of auroras taken by ISS crew members during a mild geothermal storm over Newfoundland:
Although the auroras appear to be located below the ISS, they occur at the same altitude, and sometimes the space station passes through them. More solar streams are expected soon, so astronauts can expect a few more pretty, sleepless nights.
One more pic after the jump.
Continue reading 'Geomagnetic storm as seen from International Space Station gives good image' >
ShuttleWatch: Retiring-this-boring-feature Edition
The Latest:
Atlantis launched on time! Who'da thunk?
The Details:
Space.com pseudo-liveblogged the whole glorious affair. Which is good, because we're over this. Bottom line: the EU's science-in-a-can will be up and running before you can say "let's let the Russians take care of this from now on."
As a galaxy, it can get difficult out there in the black. Just cold chillin' on your own gets, well, cold. Elliptical galaxy NGC 1132 (pictured) survives by 1) being huge and 2) containing enormous amounts of dark matter comparable to what you might find in entire groups of galaxies.
This new Hubble image captures the scale of the ginormous galaxy, which either formed as a solo "lone-wolf" amidst tons of galaxy clusters or perhaps merged with other galaxies in recent history. The amount of dark matter classifies the galaxy as a "fossil-group" system, a rare galaxy that formed when growth of moderate-sized galaxies got suppressed, leaving only one massive galaxy to form.
The elliptical NGC 1132 emanates tons of yellow light — which pours out from the aging stars within. Since it's 318 million light-years away in the constellation Eridanus, it's not like we'll have any contact. But hey, 1132 — if you get too lonely, don't be afraid to text us or something.
(click image for hi-res)
Isolated Galaxy or Corporate Merger? Hubble Spies NGC 1132 (HubbleSite)
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