June 2008 - Posts
PlanetSpace |
The sun glints off a shiny mockup of PlanetSpace's
Silver Dart hypersonic glider.
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PlanetSpace may not have kept up with the ambitious spaceship-building schedule it set out three years ago, but the U.S.-Canadian venture says it's moving ahead with concepts for a new suborbital craft as well as an orbital launch system.
On the suborbital front, the company is working on a quarter-scale, turbojet-powered version of its Silver Dart hypersonic glider that will be tested as an unpiloted aerial vehicle. Meanwhile, on the orbital front, PlanetSpace says it has teamed up once again with Lockheed Martin and ATK to repitch a proposal for resupplying the international space station.
SpaceX and Orbital Sciences, two companies that beat out PlanetSpace in earlier NASA competitions, say they have also submitted proposals.
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NASA / JPL-Caltech / UA / IA-Cambridge / SINGS team |
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The Fireworks Galaxy, also known as NGC 6946, blazes in an infrared image
captured by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. This image has been reoriented to
maximize the view. Click on it to see even larger versions from the Spitzer team.
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Have you ever heard an aurora? Or a black hole? Have you ever filled your screen with the fireworks of the final frontier? Help yourself to the biggest pictures and the coolest sounds from space.
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Alex Wong / Getty Images file |
Peter Diamandis says the X Prize
Foundation is going global.
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The X Prize Foundation successfully pulled off a $10 million contest for the first privately developed spaceship and is offering tens of millions of dollars for feats ranging from mass-market genomes to moon missions. By purely monetary measures, today's announcement about the foundation's three-year, $7 million philanthropic deal with Britain's BT telecommunications giant may not rank as high. But the way X Prize founder Peter Diamandis sees it, this is just the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
"The X Prize is going global," Diamandis, the foundation's chairman, told me today.
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Space.com |
An artist's conception shows a
massive black hole in action.
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If big black holes are so scary, why do scientists think it's not a problem to be around teeny-tiny black holes? Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson literally wrote the book on "Death by Black Hole," so he ought to know. He also ought to be good at explaining the difference, since he's the director of the Hayden Planetarium at New York's American Museum of Natural History as well as the host of "NOVA scienceNOW," the TV magazine show that begins its summer season on PBS tonight.
If you're wrestling with all the claims and counterclaims over matter-gobbling black holes, this is the guy you want on your side.
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Maximilien Brice / CERN |
A hardhat worker is dwarfed by the inner workings of the Large Hadron
Collider's ATLAS detector. Click on the image for a larger version.
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The federal government today struck back in force against a lawsuit that has raised an alarm over the world's biggest particle collider. In 40 documents comprising hundreds of pages, attorneys and government officials contended that "scientifically, there is no basis for any conceivable threat" from black holes or the other theoretical horrors posed in the suit.
If the government has its way, the lawsuit would be thrown out on procedural grounds even before getting to the scientific arguments.
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Contests and cars are made for each other, as demonstrated every year by NASCAR and the Indy 500. But what about contests to create less polluting, more fuel-efficient cars? The GOP's presumptive presidential candidate, John McCain, weighed in today with ideas aimed at revving up the age of plug-in hybrid vehicles. Will those ideas take root? As usual, the devil is in the details.
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NBC News |
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Pilot Mike Melvill flashes thumbs-up after flying SpaceShipOne
above the 62-mile boundary of outer space on June 21, 2004.
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This weekend marks four years since Burt Rutan and his team at Scaled Composites ushered in the age of privately developed spaceflight with the SpaceShipOne rocket plane. But don't expect a big celebration: Rutan told me he's been so busy ushering in the next stage of the spaceflight age that he forgot about the anniversary . . . until I reminded him.
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CERN |
A simulation shows the particle tracks that scientists
think could be given off by the decay of a black hole
in the Large Hadron Collider's ATLAS detector.
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Europe's CERN particle-physics lab has issued its long-awaited report on safety issues surrounding the Large Hadron Collider, the world's biggest and most expensive atom-smasher. Some have feared that when the collider reaches full power, sometime next year, it might create microscopic black holes or other exotic phenomena that could endanger Earth. The new report, like earlier safety studies, rules out the possibility of global danger.
Critics of the collider are pursuing a federal lawsuit challenging the safety claims - and they're likely to continue the doomsday debate even in the wake of this report.
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NASA / JPL-Caltech / CXC / ESA / CfA |
Click for video: This composite image of
the spiral galaxy M81 incorporates X-ray,
visible-light, infrared and ultraviolet observations.
Click on the image for a video report from
msnbc.com's Keva Andersen.
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The latest X-ray view of a photogenic galaxy shows that the feeding habits of black holes are the same, whether they're 10 times or 70 million times as massive as the sun.
Black holes are thought to come in all sizes, from supermicro proton-size to supermassive galaxy-size. But are all black holes alike? Albert Einstein thought so: General relativity suggests that the collapsed singularities are simple things, varying only in how big they are and how much they spin.
Some astronomers have taken issue with Einstein, however. Stellar-mass black holes are in settings that are much different from galaxy-scale black holes, which might lead to differences in diet and behavior: The smaller ones suck in whirling disks of gas from their companion stars, while the bigger ones feed on the material surrounding them at the dense cores of galaxies.
In an effort to shed new light on a black hole's digestive routine, astronomers observed the spiral galaxy M81, about 12 million light-years from Earth, using NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory as well as three radio-telescope arrays, two millimeter-wave telescope arrays and the infrared camera at the Lick Observatory.
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Frank Polich / Reuters |
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Surveyors Dick Leach and Kevin Flood measure the height of the
Mississippi River in relation to the height of the levee in Canton, Mo.
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How high will the flooding go? That's been a crucial question for Midwesterners this month, and the answer requires some complex - and changeable - figuring.
Forecasting the rise of the rivers is a cross between predicting the weather and predicting a traffic jam, experts say. The good news is that this summer's flooding is something of a slow-motion phenomenon, providing time for communities to shore up their defenses. The bad news is that the lessons from the last monster flooding in the Midwest, back in 1993, have gone largely unlearned.
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Zade Rosenthal / Twentieth Century Fox |
Writer-director M. Night Shyamalan sets up
a shot on location for "The Happening."
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Film director M. Night Shyamalan started out wanting to tell a simple, scary story with his latest effort, "The Happening" - but in the process, the movie's message sparked his own personal epiphany about paying attention to Mother Nature.
"I'm the No. 1 culprit," he admitted.
Shyamalan's movies often contain the stuff of science fiction: the paranormal in "The Sixth Sense," superpowers in "Unbreakable" and crop-circle-making aliens in "Signs." But "The Happening" is a different kind of science fiction, grounded in worries over what humans are doing to the environment - and what the environment could do in response.
In a wide-ranging interview, I asked the 37-year-old writer-director about his environmental-themed horror movie, his attitudes toward science-laced storytelling, and even his next movie. Read on for an edited transcript of the Q&A:
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CERN |
A simulation shows the particle tracks that scientists
think could be given off by the decay of a black hole
in the Large Hadron Collider's ATLAS detector.
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The world's largest particle collider is designed to do its job largely under the surface - and that under-the-surface status also applies to much of the progress in the legal case challenging whether the collider should actually be allowed to do its job.
Take today's seven-minute-long conference in Hawaii's U.S. District Court, for example: The meeting set up the schedule for a federal trial, due to begin a year from today, on a suit seeking to hold up operations at Europe's Large Hadron Collider while officials answer claims that the machine could create world-gobbling black holes or other monsters.
Under the surface, both sides are aiming to get what they want long before June 16, 2009.
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NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI |
An artist's conception
shows NASA's New
Horizons probe during its
2015 encounter with Pluto.
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The latest round in the planethood debate may well provoke planetary scientists into a revolt against the international body that usually has the last word on astronomical terminology, according to the top scientist for NASA’s mission to Pluto.
This week's announcement from the International Astronomical Union that Pluto and other dwarf planets on the solar system's edge would be known henceforth as "plutoids" has been seen by some as a sign of respect for what was once considered the smallest of the solar system's nine planets.
That's not how Alan Stern, principal investigator for NASA's New Horizons mission to Pluto, sees it. In fact, he wonders whether this will be the last straw for those who think IAU officials badly bungled their definition of a planet almost three years ago.
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Emc2 Fusion |
A test plasma in WB-7.
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Emc2 Fusion's Richard Nebel can't say yet whether his team's garage-shop plasma experiment will lead to cheap, abundant fusion power. But he can say that after months of tweaking, the WB-7 device "runs like a top" - and he's hoping to get definitive answers about a technology that has tantalized grass-roots fusion fans for years.
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Reuters file |
Google co-founder Sergey
Brin has his eye on space.
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Google co-founder Sergey Brin has put down $5 million toward a flight to the international space station with the company that has sent millionaires and even a billionaire into orbit.
Virginia-based Space Adventures announced the identity of the future space traveler as well as its vision for the next decade of space tourism at a New York news conference today.
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NASA / ESA / STScI / AURA |
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The galaxy IC 4040 dominates the stage in this detail taken from Hubble's
view of the Coma Cluster. Click on the image for a zoomable version.
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If galaxies are your thing, you simply have to zoom in on the Hubble Space Telescope's latest picture of the Coma Cluster, one of the densest collections of galaxies found to date.
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When gasoline prices crossed the $4-a-gallon milestone, that got a lot of people thinking about ways to reduce transportation costs. Many are taking a second look at pedal power and mass transit. Others are looking at energy technologies that offer alternatives to fossil fuels. Longtime Cosmic Log correspondent Christopher Eldridge takes a totally different view: Instead of figuring out cheaper ways to travel, how about figuring out cheaper ways not to travel?
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Alan Boyle / msnbc.com |
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Software billionaire Paul Allen takes journalists and VIPs on a
tour of the Flying Heritage Collection on Friday. The plane with
the painted teeth is a Curtiss P-40C Tomahawk attack plane.
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Software billionaire Paul Allen has unveiled a new museum that recognizes milestones in the history of flight - including an episode in which he himself played a role: the flights of the SpaceShipOne rocket plane.
Although Allen's Flying Heritage Collection focuses on the fliers of the past, the longtime airplane buff is still looking forward as well as backward. In an exclusive interview, he hinted that he's considering at least one more pioneering aerospace venture.
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H. Bond and K. Exter / STScI / AURA / NASA / NOAO
This image of the planetary nebula SuWt 2 reveals a bright ringlike structure
encircling a bright central star. The central star is actually a close binary system.
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The scientists behind NASA's three Great Observatories had a great opportunity to show their stuff this week at a gathering of thousands of astronomers from around the world. The good stuff included a wide shot of starbirth in our home galaxy, a second look at a supernova's leftovers, and a break in "the case of the missing dwarf."
In all three cases, the results weren't the result of one team working on its own. Observations from multiple instruments and even multiple telescopes were pooled together to create a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. This week's cosmic pictures serve to show what can happen when telescopes team up.
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Pantheon Books |
"Microcosm" focuses on
E. coli and the new
science of life.
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Can a whole book actually be written about one single-celled organism? "Microcosm" pulls off the feat by using the E. coli bacterium as a guidepost to life's secrets.
E. coli? Isn't that one of the biggest villains of the bacterial world? The one responsible for the spinach scare and last year's tainted-beef recall? Yes, those problems were caused by bad breeds of E. coli - but for every bad strain, there are hundreds of good strains you can't live without.
"You have several billion E. coli inside of you right now, and they're going to be with you until you die," science writer (and blogger) Carl Zimmer told an audience at Town Hall Seattle this week, capping a West Coast book tour for "Microcosm."
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IEM |
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This chart traces the political fortunes of Democratic candidates on the Iowa
Electronic Markets. Yellow stands for Barack Obama, blue stands for Hillary
Clinton, green stands for John Edwards and red stands for the rest of the field.
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Now that the presidential primary season is over, economists are analyzing how the political prediction markets sized up against the pollsters - and looking ahead to the bigger campaign ahead.
Like the polls and the pundits, the markets were sometimes thrown for a loop during this season of political surprises. But in the judgment of economist Justin Wolfers, who has been monitoring the ups and downs of political fortunes for years, "the markets got it the least wrong." And the markets already have picked a clear favorite for the White House prize.
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A new president is at the helm of Scaled Composites, the company that produced the world's first private-sector spaceship and is now working on a fleet of second-generation rocketships.
According to a news release issued this afternoon, Doug Shane is moving up from vice president and will take responsibility for day-to-day operations at the company, which is based in Mojave, Calif., and was acquired last year by Northrop Grumman.
Company founder Burt Rutan has been named chief technology officer and chairman emeritus.
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Courtesy P.Z. Myers |
P.Z. Myers is the evolutionist creationists love to hate: They hate him so much that he was expelled from an advance screening of "Expelled," even though the anti-evolution movie includes an interview with him.
During a visit to Seattle, the biology professor, blogger and "godless liberal" recounted the tale with relish - and then predicted that old-time creationism will be making a comeback.
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Laura Rauch / AP |
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Brian Binnie rides on SpaceShipOne after his flight to win the Ansari X Prize
on Oct. 4, 2004. A new book chronicles the SpaceShipOne saga.
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Before it was ever named SpaceShipOne, the world's first private-sector spaceship was designed for a splashdown if necessary. And when the rocket plane and its carrier airplane made a farewell trip to the museum, SpaceShipOne looked so much like a missile that a skittish air controller nearly denied the pilot permission to land.
These and other inside stories come to light in a glossy book titled "SpaceShipOne: An Illustrated History." Aviation and aerospace writer Dan Linehan's 160-page volume is chock-full of photos and diagrams, as you'd expect a coffee-table book to be - but this coffee-table book also contains plot twists that weren't widely known four years ago, when SpaceShipOne won the $10 million Ansari X Prize.
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