September 2007 - Posts
NCsoft |
Richard Garriott floats during a zero-gravity flight publicizing his new video game.
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The next millionaire space passenger, announced just today by Virginia-based Space Adventures, could be a pioneer on three counts: A year from now, Richard Garriott would be the first video-game superstar to go into space, thanks to his role in developing the Ultima game series and a new game to be released next month. He would also be the first son of an American astronaut to go into space himself.
Last but not necessarily least, Garriott could break new ground in terms of getting his trip sponsored as a commercial venture. "The fundamental goal is to make sure we're demonstrating that this is and can be much more than a personal lark, and really can return more value than the expense," he told me today.
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Andrea Ottesen / University of Maryland |
A mass of seaweed known as Irish moss was spread
out and dried in preparation for this picture showing
the plant's delicate structure.
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Can you find beauty by looking up someone's nose, or inspecting a slimy mass of seaweed, or following the flight of a bat? Scientsts can, and the proof is found in this year's annual competition for the coolest images in science and engineering.
This is the fifth year for the International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge, co-sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the journal Science. The winners are featured in this week's in-print issue of Science - but the beauties are best experienced through interactive exhibits on Science's Web site and at NSF.
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Alan Boyle / msnbc.com |
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Workers at Fermilab line up the first segments for an experiment that could set the stage for the multibillion-dollar International Linear Collider.
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Particle physicists can't afford to get too sentimental about where they work. They need bigger and bigger machines to focus on smaller and smaller frontiers - and when they just can't make the machines bigger, they have to blaze a completely new trail to those frontiers.
That's the situation facing researchers at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, near Chicago: Some researchers are squeezing the last ounce of performance out of the 24-year-old Tevatron accelerator, looking for a mysterious particle called the Higgs boson. Others are working on the next big machine, Europe's Large Hadron Collider. And still others have begun building something called "Project X," the prototype for a radically different kind of multibillion-dollar physics machine.
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Fermilab |
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An aerial photo of Fermilab shows the futuristic
Wilson Hall alongside the cooling canal for the
Tevatron, with a prairie habitat inside the ring.
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On the surface, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory looks like a patch of Illinois left behind from the 1970s - or sometimes even the 1870s.
Much of Fermilab's 6,800-acre preserve, nestled amid Chicago's suburbs, has reverted to wilderness. A herd of bison roams the prairie. Decades-old frame houses and industrial buildings dot the developed areas. The tallest building is Wilson Hall, a 16-story headquarters that looks like a setting for the '70s sci-fi flick "Logan's Run."
And then there's the Tevatron.
From the surface, all you see of the Tevatron is a perfectly circular ridge and canal, running around a mile-wide island of prairie. But 30 feet down, bunches of protons and antiprotons race through supercooled high-tech plumbing. Every time those bunches collide, the chances go up ever so slightly that something remarkable will be discovered - something that nations around the world are spending billions of dollars to find.
The most exciting action at Fermilab is just beneath the surface - literally, and figuratively as well.
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SCIVIS |
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A young man searches for switches
during a simulated launch on the
shuttle Atlantis, at a space-camp
session for the visually impaired.
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This year's zero-gravity flight by world-famous physicist Stephen Hawking proved that disabilities need not be an impediment to spacey experiences - and another proof comes this weekend, when about 115 kids with vision impairments ranging all the way up to total blindness begin a week of space-camp training at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Alabama.
The experience will be tailored to the kids' capabilities, thanks to voice recognition devices and other high-tech tools. Someday, we may see such technologies on real spaceships as well, said Dan Oates, coordinator of Space Camp for Interested Visually Impaired Students, or SCIVIS.
"With the space tourist industry coming along as it is, eventually there'll be an opportunity for the common person to go," he told me. "When that happens, screen readers and electronic magnification will all be a little bit more common."
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Francis Kenny / ClockDrive Productions |
Patrick Ferris looks through a telescope in Florida, in a scene from the documentary
"Seeing in the Dark." The public-TV show celebrates the joys of stargazing.
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Today's amateur astronomers can access an arsenal of equipment that would make Galileo green with envy: computerized go-to interfaces that steer you toward your celestial target at the click of a button, even over the Internet if you like ... ultra-sensitive imaging arrays that rival what the professionals command ... software that can sift through a flurry of pictures, looking for patterns of change that can point to a fresh discovery.
At the deepest level, however, the essence of stargazing is the same as it's been for millennia: to encounter the cosmos, to bring the frontiers of the universe just a little closer to the soul. That meditative aspect of amateur astronomy resonates throughout "Seeing in the Dark," a highly personal documentary by Timothy Ferris that makes its high-definition debut tonight on PBS.
"It is quite a meditative activity," said Ferris, who wrote the book on which the film is based, plus many other science-themed works. "It's such an odd thing, you know. You're out there for hours, and often alone."
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I'm heading out to Illinois and Iowa to see the folks over the next few days, and Cosmic Log postings will be lighter than usual during the trip. But I'll be sure to send a postcard from
the sights I see along the way.
So you want to be an astronaut? For the first time in several years, NASA is putting out a job posting for astronaut candidates, including pilots, scientists and teachers. But what kind of spaceship will the Class of '09 astronauts fly? Almost certainly not the space shuttle.
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THINKFilm |
Apollo 12 moonwalker
Alan Bean in the
documentary "In the
Shadow of the Moon."
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As a Navy test pilot and an astronaut, Alan Bean had plenty of the Right Stuff. But sometimes he sounds as if he wishes he had a little more of the Left Stuff. "A lot of things I think about come from the right side of my brain. And for most of the other guys, most of the things they think about come from the left side," the 75-year-old artist and one-time moonwalker told me. "And it got me in trouble at NASA at first."
Bean retired from NASA long ago - but that other-side-of-the-brain perspective still comes through loud and clear, whether he's talking about the sullied image of the astronaut corps or his fears about the future of exploration. He may sound like an aw-shucks kind of guy, but he doesn't pull any punches. "I just say it how I think it, even though other people will say, 'That's weird,' because it's from the other side of the brain," he said.
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The commercial space race has had its downs and ups in recent days, with Rocketplane Kistler facing financial troubles and Google signing on for a new $30 million X Prize competition. Here's an update on some of the main and lesser-known players – including good news from SpaceX and reports about a couple of teams who are hoping to chase that lunar X Prize.
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Google is bankrolling a $30 million race for privately funded moon rovers - an endeavor that takes the X Prize to new heights.
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Jim Seida / msnbc.com file |
Buzz Aldrin's head is buzzing with ideas – ranging from spaceship-building projects to film appearances to, yes, commentary on lovelorn astronaut Lisa Nowak's travails. The 77-year-old moonwalker sadly notes that people know more about the allegedly diaper-wearing astronaut than about NASA’s program to go back to the moon. And over the next five years, Aldrin intends to do something about that.
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NASA / ESA / STScI / AURA |
The Hubble Space Telescope documents the beautiful stages of death for stars like our sun in a newly released series of four images.
In the first images, stars can be seen blowing away dense clouds of gas - and in the last images, those clouds have blossomed into colorful cosmic butterflies.
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NASA has given notice to one of the winners of its $500 million spaceship competition that it’s no longer interested in working with the company due to its investment woes. That could open the way for termination of the agreement with Oklahoma-based Rocketplane Kistler as early as next month. In response, Rocketplane’s chief executive officer told me that “we are working on possible cures” for the funding crisis.
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If a virus is killing off bees, is it safe for humans to consume honey, or bee pollen, or royal jelly? Are organic bees less vulnerable? What about all these other suggested causes of the bees’ “disappearing disease”? If you see some strange bee behavior, who you gonna call? We handle these questions and more in the wake of the journal Science’s latest study on Colony Collapse Disorder.
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After spending weeks in information-gathering mode, a Pentagon analyst says the idea of putting satellites in orbit to harvest solar power and beam it down to Earth has lots of merit - and a test of the concept could be set in motion by 2015.
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Visionary Vehicles |
A quarter-scale model shows the concept for
Visionary Vehicles' $35,000 luxury plug-in hybrid
electric vehicle. Production is targeted for 2010.
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Even though the $10 million-plus Automotive X Prize hasn’t been officially launched yet, the competition picked up some extra flash today with the entry of auto-entrepreneur Malcolm Bricklin’s Visionary Vehicles electric plug-in hybrid.
Bricklin, the guy who brought Subarus (and Yugos) to America, promises to have the first prototype on the road next year and get the $35,000 vehicles rolling off the assembly line by the time the X Prize race really gets going in 2010. But in order to win the prize, Bricklin will have to vie with 31 other teams, and maybe more yet to be announced.
During today’s teleconference, X Prize founder Peter Diamandis also dropped a hint about next week’s biggest-ever X Prize. "It's in the space and exploration realm, but that's all I can say about it right now," he told reporters on the call.
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Cambridge / Caltech / STScI / NASA / ESA |
The left view shows a "before" image of the Cat's Eye Nebula from the Hale
Telescope. The middle view shows the nebula after Lucky Imaging correction. The
right view shows the same nebula as seen by Hubble. The coloring and orientation
of the Hubble image are different due to the method used to create the picture.
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Do we really need the Hubble Space Telescope anymore? You could put that spin on the news that astronomers have developed a ground-based telescope system that can produce pictures twice as sharp as Hubble’s. But that would be wrong.
"Just line up the pictures, and you be the judge," said Ray Villard, a spokesman for the Space Telescope Science Institute. A leader of the Lucky Imaging team, the University of Cambridge's Craig Mackay, agrees that the sharper-than-Hubble claim depends on what you’re looking at - and that anyone with a case of telescope envy is missing the point.
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Now that we’re coming off a double whammy of meteor showers, is there still any reason to look up at the night sky? You bet there is: Over the next few nights, the waning moon can take you on a guided tour of the planets – starting with Mars tonight, and moving on to Venus and Saturn. If you’re quick with your binoculars after sunset, you could catch a peek at Mercury and Jupiter, the other “naked-eye” planets.
But if you're already nostalgic for the Perseids and the Aurigids, we've got that covered, too: Here's our first gallery of meteor masterpieces, highlighting the work of Colorado Mountain College’s Jimmy Westlake. And that's just the start.
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NASA / SETI Institute |
The wake of this Aurigid meteor blows in the wind at high altitudes, in a photo by
the SETI Institute's Kat de Kleer. Vibrations of the aircraft cause the wiggly track.
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Did they or didn't they? Meteors were supposed to light up the sky in a rare, brief burst at around 4:36 a.m. PT Saturday. Or so the experts said. In reality, the seldom-seen Aurigid meteor shower was showier but not quite as prolific as predicted. And the show peaked a few minutes early.
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