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.
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.
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.
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.
Interestingly, this is the first year that NASA’s Constellation program has received more funding than the Space Shuttle, which will retire in September 2010. Though Constellation will receive an extra $6.5 billion by that time (directly from shuttle program coffers) the program won’t be operational until at least 2015, forcing NASA to rely on the Russians for access to the International Space Station in the interim.
Florida Senator Mel Martinez, for one, is aghast: “Relying on the Russians to put a person in space for us? C’mon, this is the United States of America!” Get ‘em Mel!
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.
Based on the design of X-prize winning SpaceShipOne, Virgin Galactic's newly unveiled SpaceShipTwo and carrier airplane WhiteKnightTwo are bigger, better, and generally more awesome.
WhiteKnightTwo, the largest carbon composite aircraft in the world, is sporting four Pratt and Whitney PW308A engines, which Virging Galactic cites as "amongst the most powerful, economic and efficient engines available." They can boost the mothership to a high enough altitude to launch SpaceShipTwo, carrying eight astronauts, into suborbital space.
Today, researchers will start testing an 8-centimeter prototype in a high-speed wind tunnel at the University of Tokyo. Once inside, the origami space shuttle will brave wind speeds of 5,300 m.p.h. and the intense heat that comes with flying at Mach 7 speeds. That's a great start for a paper airplane, but it'll have to do better than that, because the actual space shuttle can reach speeds of Mach 20 upon reentry.
The ink is called OVI, for Optically Variable Ink -- so named because it appears to change color when viewed from different angles.
If you have a 100 dollar bill handy (and you would if you worked at 60 Second Science, where we maintain at all times a large vault full of cash that we swim in like Scrooge McDuck) you can see it on the number 100 on the bottom right side of the bill. This ink is only made for and sold to the U.S. Contrary to claims made in the original article I'm sourcing, this ink is used all over the world on all kinds of banknotes, or it was as of 2001, which is when the ink's maker, Sicpa of Switzerland, stopped delivering the ink to North Korea for fear that Kim Il-sung's government was using it to counterfeit U.S. $100 bills.
I just finished watching Danny Boyle's sci-fi opus Sunshine last night, and it was pretty incredible as a purely visual, visceral experience. Even though the film loses a bit of face with a credibility-stretching horror twist near the end, it was one of my better sci-fi experiences in recent memory. (Heavy emphasis on the fi: The loopy science only gets loopier, but they certainly make it look believable. And who doesn't want to believe we could fire a nuke the size of Manhattan into the core of the sun to reignite it?)
Don't look now, but we might be surrounded by invisible black holes, wandering around just waiting to devour up stars and planets, argued Kelly Holley-Bockelmann of Vanderbilt University today at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society.
Holley-Bockelmann and others at the University of Michigan and Penn State University say these "intermediate mass" black holes are nearly always invisible--not to mention possibly, and controversially, non-existent--but the researchers have been running computer simulations to predict where they might wind up. Answer: Our backyard.
An asteroid, you know, like the one that flattened a Siberian forest in 1908, has an usually high chance of hitting Mars on January 30, 2008.
"We're used to dealing with odds like one-in-a-million," said Steve Chesley, an astronomer with the Near-Earth Object office. "Something with a one-in-a-hundred chance makes us sit up straight in our chairs."
That hole your gazing at to the left isn't just any lame, B&W cave; it's a sinkhole on freaking Mars. It reminds us that Mars is more than a dot in the sky and a place to send people in 75 years — it's a real, live place with rocks, tunnels and maybe even signs of former life. Bad Astronomy collects their Top Ten Astronomy Pictures of 2007, and they all inspire the same sense of wonder and reveal new things as well. Kinda whets your appetite for next year's crop of sick astronomy photos.
Other photos include Comet Holmes swelling larger than the sun, Io and Europa captured in the same shot, light bent by dark matter, and chaos in the Vela supernova. They're all gorgeous, and all inspiring. Check out two more after the jump.
It's time to grab some Schlitz, St. Ides or Olde English and pour a forty: Voyager 2 has left our solar system for good. Voyager 2 first hit space in '77 and crossed the 'termination shock' -- the transition region between the bubble dominated by the sun's solar wind and interstellar space -- on August 30 of this year. To put it in perspective, Voyager 2 left Earth when swinging was cool and Star Wars movies ruled, whereas by the time Voyager 2 left the solar system, swinging got relegated to old folks in the 'burbs and Star Wars movies sucked.
But Voyager 2 ain't going out without giving us some sweet information. Voyager 1 crossed this same boundary in 2004, but Voyager 2 did it almost 1 billion miles closer to the sun, suggesting that something is compressing the bubble that contains the outermost reaches of solar wind -- which is generally considered the edge of the solar system.
In 1978 a NASA probe saw evidence of electrical activity in Venus' atmosphere, but there was no proof that it was lightning, which would affect scientists' interpretations of Venus' atmosphere. Now, however, a magnetic antenna on the European Space Agency's Venus Express probe has proven it. In light of that fact, the ESA has given us this artist's rendition of what the world probably looks like, which we all could have just as easily imagined yesterday.
The European Union set a budget last week that includes 2.4 billion euros (3.5 billion dollars) for the Galileo satellite-navigation project, which would give it one of the most effective GPS satellite networks around. Not so fast said the US. The US is getting ready to launch GPS III, the most significant update to the system since its launch in the 90s. With 500 times the current transmitting power, GPS III is ready for a scrap. "The GPS Block III satellite will provide improved positioning, navigation, and timing services to military and civil users by improving accuracy, integrity, and resistance to hostile jamming," said David Madden, commander of the GPS Wing in the US Air Force.
This audio recording of radio waves created by the various auroras coming off of Saturn was recorded a few years ago by the Cassini-Huygens mission, but that can't keep this hepcat from gettin' down to this gas giant's ca-raaaazy groove!
If you see the sun burning a brighter twinge of red later today, it's because he's no longer the king of the hill, the cock of the rock. For now, good 'ol Sol Invictus has to settle for second place: Comet Holmes is the biggest thing in our solar system.
Listen up, kids: It may start with a quick puff in the high-school bathroom, but before long you're jonesing for a nicotine fix right in the middle of a spacewalk. And in space, not even Joe Camel can hear you scream.
NASA imposed a ban on spacewalks this week after an astronaut reported smelling smoke in his suit during ground tests in Houston. There's been no evidence of a "combustion event" thus far, but engineers are running tests on the suit to determine if their are any dangerous generic flaws in the suit architecture.
"During the test, the astronaut smelled just a little bit of smoke," Dean said, adding that even a slight odor is cause for concern given the spacesuit's 100 percent oxygen environment. "They got the crew member out of there in less than a minute."
As soon as President Bush signs the $459 billion 2008 defense appropriations bill, the space defense program will get an injection of $100 million according to the House-Senate conference report on the bill. Shifting money away from the Navy's sub-launched Trident Intercontinental Ballistic Missile and the Air Force's Common Aero Vehicle, the bill will give to FALCON, "a reusable Hypersonic Cruise Vehicle (HCV) capable of delivering 12,000 pounds of payload at a distance of 9,000 nautical miles from [the continental United States] in less than two hours."
Well, I guess I owe Carl Sagan $50 after all. Recent research involving artificial meteorites sent to and returned from space shows that microbial elements survived the journey, lending credence to the idea that the origins of all life on earth could have originated from an alien source.
Did you hear that sound? That whooshing noise is the collective intake of breath from millions of stoners who "invented" this same idea while hitting a wad of Hawaiian Gold in a four-foot banana bong. Now those same jerks will think they're right about everything.
Yet another thing they're trying to take away from The Man Upstairs. Why do you think it's called "the heavens," people? Puh-leeeeze. Anyway, scientists think they've found the origins of the super-high energy, ultra-awesome cosmic rays that are millions of times more powerful than the strongest particles created in particle accelerators on earth.
Researchers at the Pierre Auger Observatory, a complex of detectors spread over a Rhode Island-sized slice of the South American prairie, said the most likely source for these ultra-high-energy particles is a type of black hole found at the center of some galaxies.
Watch the video. Then watch it again. And again. And then, finally, look up as you say "Goodnight, Moon" and pray to god that the robot with a planned "launchable/releasable grappling hook" carrying payloads of up to 20 tons doesn't come for you in the night. Oh, and by the way, NASA plans to integrate a "useful "voice and gesture" command mode to enable suited astronauts to interact with these vehicles." That way you can beg for your life.
Imagine powering your computer, iPod, or refrigerator for that matter, by solar power originally gathered in space. The idea is increasingly appealing at a point in time when population is growing, natural resources dwindling and many consider energy scarcity a major national threat.
New Mexico was once again the site of interstellar shenanigans (I'm looking at you, Roswell) as the X Prize Cup rocket expo ended with Armadillo Aerospace's entry into the 2007 Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge exploding in spectacular fashion.
In a last-ditch attempt to win the prize, Armadillo took the engine out of another, more powerful rocket called Pixel – which it had planned to fly in the more difficult level 2 challenge – and used it as a replacement for Module 1's cracked engine.
But the engine exploded in a fireball at launch, producing a bang that was audible from more than a kilometre away. Armadillo declared an emergency and fire trucks rushed to the scene, but the fire quickly burned itself out without any intervention or injuries.
Nine teams entered, but only Armadillo Aerospace was actually prepared to compete in time to win the prize. Armadillo was founded by John Carmack, creator of iD Software and the games Doom and Quake.
NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute/University of Colorado
Remember the first time you saw the rings of Saturn? They're mysterious and beautiful, eerie and perfect, and 10 years ago, NASA's Cassini spacecraft blasted off to explore them.
The most recent report from Cassini's voyage to the Great Ringed One suggests that the disks are the result of cosmic catastrophes. The outermost main ring, called the "A" ring, is littered with tiny holes shaped like airplane propellers. In the most recent issue of Nature, astronomers report that these propeller-shaped gaps point to the existence of thousands of "moonlets," giant boulders (some as large as city blocks) embedded in the ring of dust.
My dad has a semi-irrational fear of an impending Chinese takeover. All it takes is one Chinese-manufactured component on his grill breaking and he's foaming at the mouth about how my sister will have to learn Cantonese before she can finish her grad degree. We had to administer a rectal sedative when he discovered China supplies crucial airplane components to Boeing.
The news that China successfully launched a lunar probe yesterday probably sent him into an epic fit (I should check on mom). The Chang’e-1 satellite, named after a Chinese goddess who flew to the moon, took off from a site in Sichuan Province, according to state-run media.
Despite a troubling four-inch block of ice that had NASA techs running around with visions of flaming tragedy two hours before launch, the shuttle Discovery took off around 11:38 this morning without a hitch. Commander Pamela Melroy is only the second female shuttle commander in history, and she leads a team who plan to perform the most complex orbital additions ever to everyone's favorite crumbling camper-van-in-space: the International Space Station.
The crew will help install Harmony, an Italian-built living compartment the size of a bus. No word on whether Harmony includes Natuzzi leather couches or DeLonghi espresso machines, but a group of 130 schoolchildren who named it in a competition got to attend the launch.
Based on the design of 
Japan, I'm 
I just finished watching Danny Boyle's sci-fi opus 
That hole your gazing at to the left isn't just any lame, B&W cave; it's a sinkhole on freaking Mars. It reminds us that Mars is more than a dot in the sky and a place to send people in 75 years — it's a real, live place with rocks, tunnels and maybe even signs of former life. 
It's time to grab some Schlitz, St. Ides or Olde English and pour a forty: 
In 1978 a NASA probe saw evidence of electrical activity in Venus' atmosphere, but there was no proof that it was lightning, which would affect scientists' interpretations of Venus' atmosphere. Now, however, a magnetic antenna on the 
This audio recording of radio waves created by the various auroras coming off of Saturn was recorded a few years ago by the Cassini-Huygens mission, but that can't keep this hepcat from gettin' down to this gas giant's ca-raaaazy groove!
Listen up, kids: It may start with a quick puff in the high-school bathroom, but before long you're jonesing for a nicotine fix right in the middle of a spacewalk. And in space, not even Joe Camel can hear you scream.
Yet another thing they're trying to take away from 
My dad has a semi-irrational fear of an impending Chinese takeover. All it takes is one Chinese-manufactured component on his grill breaking and he's foaming at the mouth about how my sister will have to learn Cantonese before she can finish her grad degree. We had to administer a rectal sedative when he discovered China 
