May 2009 - Posts
SETI @ Home / UC-Berkeley |
Ten years after the SETI @ Home screensaver
program made a splash, the Internet is being
enlisted once again to help alien-hunting scientists.
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It's been 10 years since the SETI @ Home online project sparked a revolution in the search for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. Over the past decade, more than 5 million people around the world have signed up to look for aliens, and now astronomers are enlisting the Internet masses for a new task: deciding what we should tell them.
The "Earth Speaks" project was organized by Douglas Vakoch, the SETI Institute's director of interstellar message composition, to spark suggestions for messages that could be transmitted to extraterrestrial civilizations.
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In this YouTube video, Endeavour commander Mark Polansky solicits video
questions that he intends to answer from space next month.
Atlantis spacewalker Mike Massimino made a splash with his Twitter updates from orbit, but from now on, those orbital tweets are likely to become routine. The commander for NASA's next shuttle mission, due to visit the international space station next month, has been posting 140-character updates for weeks.
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UW-Madison |
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Terry Devitt and David J. Tenenbaum, two of the brains behind "The Why Files,"
hang out in the Zoology Museum at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
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Can poker make you sick? How can a few herbs make your Memorial Day barbecue a little healthier? Why has the world community failed to stop genocide? "The Why Files" takes on scientific questions great and small, on the Web and in a new book. (Answers below.)
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NASA |
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The documentary "Orphans of Apollo" focuses on the effort to privatize Russia's Mir
space station, shown here during a 1995 space shuttle mission to the outpost. The
effort helped prolong Mir's life but ultimately failed, leading to its demise in 2001.
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A behind-the-scenes documentary on the unsuccessful effort to turn Russia's Mir space station into a money-making operation serves as a cautionary tale for the private sector's present-day space ambitions.
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Warner Bros. Pictures |
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Can time travel save Los Angeles? Marcus Wright (played by Sam Worthington)
surveys post-Judgment Day destruction in the movie "Terminator Salvation."
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Time travel has been a standard feature of science fiction, but never more so than today: The latest "Star Trek" and "Terminator" movies, as well as the TV series "Lost" and "Heroes," play off the classic paradoxes, and still more shows are on the way. In fiction, all it takes to travel back in time is a black hole or a flash of energy, with nothing more than a hand-waving explanation. If only real-life experiments in time and causality were that simple ...
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NASA |
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Astronaut Mike Massimino grins as he looks in on his crewmates inside
Atlantis from the shuttle's payload bay. Fellow spacewalker Michael Good
and the Hubble Space Telescope can be seen in the background, with Earth
looming over the scene. Click on the image for a larger view.
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Spacewalking is serious business, especially when you're working on a multibillion-dollar telescope, but there's room for a little whimsy and wonder as well.
Take astronaut Mike Massimino, for example: The shuttle Atlantis' current mission marked his second visit to the Hubble Space Telescope, making him one of the astronaut corps' more experienced telescope repair technicians. Yet he had to slog through two overtime spacewalks, both of which ranked among NASA's top 10 in duration (and probably difficulty as well). Heck, he even had to rip off one of Hubble's hand rails with his gloved hands!
Did that get him down? No way.
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President Obama's meeting with the man who could be the next NASA administrator, former astronaut Charles F. Bolden Jr., has been postponed until at least Tuesday due to today's White House session with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, presidential spokesman Robert Gibbs said.
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Aerospace Industries Assn. |
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NASA's final mission to the Hubble Space Telescope has thrown a spotlight on the best and the brightest in space exploration, but next-generation space explorers are getting opportunities to shine as well.
One of those opportunities came over the weekend in Virginia, during the final round of the Team America Rocketry Challenge, an annual contest sponsored by the Aerospace Industries Association and the National Association of Rocketry.
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NASA |
Click for video: Perched on the end of the space shuttle Atlantis' robotic arm,
spacewalker Andrew Feustel works on the Hubble Space Telescope with his Pistol
Grip Tool tucked at his side like a sword. Click on the image for a larger
version, or click here for a video about the tools developed for the mission.
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Stray rivets? Stuck bolts? Parts that don't quite fit? Sometimes it sounds as if fixing the Hubble Space Telescope is like trying to put a new headlight in my VW Beetle. OK, there are a couple of differences - like the fact that all this is happening in zero-G, where a stray rivet or a broken bolt could ruin a $10 billion investment.
The differences between space repairs and earthly repairs go a long way toward explaining why spacewalkers' tools have to be built from scratch rather than bought off the shelf, and why it takes seven hours or more to install parts that would take much less time on Earth.
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Columbia Pictures |
Click for video: Watch
a clip from "Angels and
Demons" that explains
how the (fictional)
antimatter bomb works.
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They're making antimatter at the Large Hadron Collider?! That little jolt of reality is what sets the plot in motion for "Angels & Demons," Hollywood's follow-up to "The Da Vinci Code."
The good news is that you don't have to worry about an antimatter bomb blowing up the world. Physicist Michio Kaku says so. The better news is that the antimatter being made at Europe's CERN physics lab is used for good, not for evil.
The physicists who do real-life research with antimatter and other exotic substances see "Angels & Demons" not as a threat but as an opportunity. CERN is just one of the scientific institutions to capitalize on the "science behind the story."
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NASA / J. Frassanito & Assoc. / FISOWG / STScI |
This artwork shows one of the possible designs
for the Advanced Technology Large-Aperture
Space Telescope, which would have more than 40
times Hubble's sensitivity.
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When Hubble finally fades into the sunset, what will take its place? More space telescopes are on tap, but some question whether any of them can truly replace the grand old observatory.
If you were to ask the scientists on the Hubble Space Telescope's team whether there's a successor, they'd have a quick answer: the James Webb Space Telescope, which is destined for launch in the 2013 time frame, just when Hubble is expected to wrap up its work for good.
NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency are spending $3.5 billion or more on the telescope, which is destined to observe the cosmos from a gravitational balance point about 1 million miles from Earth, known as L2. It's designed to take the handoff from Hubble as NASA's greatest observatory, and I've referred to it more than once as "Hubble's Heir."
Just don't call it a successor to Hubble while Bob Zimmerman, the author of "The Universe in a Mirror," is within earshot.
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It's been seven years exactly since I first started chronicling the "follies and mysteries" of the universe in Cosmic Log, and boy, have times changed.
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NASA / ESA / STScI / AURA |
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Scores of books let you hold Hubble imagery in your hands — including "Touch
the Invisible Sky," from which this photoillustration is taken.
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Only a few astronauts have ever held the Hubble Space Telescope in their hands, but "Hubble huggers" on Earth have plenty of opportunities to get hold of Hubble's finest - including books that focus on coffee-table-sized imagery, the deeper stories behind the telescope's travails, and even the feel of outer space.
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NASA / ESA / STScI / AURA |
This view of the planetary nebula
Kohoutek 4-55 will be the last
"pretty picture" from Hubble's Wide
Field and Planetary Camera 2. Click
on the image for a larger view.
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With only a few days before it goes dark, the camera that arguably saved the Hubble Space Telescope has delivered a stunning image of a dying star. The picture of planetary nebula Kohoutek 4-55 was snapped just last week by Hubble's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (a.k.a. WFPC2), the instrument that also imaged the iconic "Pillars of Creation" and the Hubble Deep Field.
WFPC2 was built in the 1980s as a "clone" of the space telescope's first wide-field camera, to be used as a spare in case something went wrong with the original instrument. Something went wrong, all right, but not with the camera. Shortly after Hubble's launch in 1990, scientists discovered to their horror that the telescope's primary mirror was shaped incorrectly, crippling its optics.
Fortunately, the Hubble team figured out a way to adjust WFPC2's optics to compensate for the mirror flaw - turning the tide in the telescope's favor.
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ESA |
Click for video: Atlantis grabs hold of the Hubble Space
Telescope in this artwork illustrating the mission plan. Click on
the image for more about Hubble and its new instruments.
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When astronauts from the shuttle Atlantis open up the Hubble Space Telescope for its final extreme makeover, much of the work will be aimed at fixing what's been ailing the world's premier orbiting observatory. It'll get fresh batteries and brand-new gyros, and if all goes well, Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys and the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph will be back in full working order for the first time in years.
But this is not just a fix-up mission. Two new instruments are due to be swapped into the mix, and those enhancements should give Hubble superpowers it never had before: for example, three-in-one vision that spans the spectrum from ultraviolet to infrared, and the ability to make out the cosmic cobwebs that stretch out between galaxies.
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Suppose you take an acre's worth of switchgrass and turn it into ethanol for your flex-fuel car, while your neighbors take their acre's worth and burn it in a power plant to generate electricity for their plug-in hybrid. Which car would go farther?
If you guessed that your car would, you'd be way off. About 7,000 miles off, in fact.
In a study published online today by the journal Science, researchers say using biomass to generate electricity is more efficient for transportation than making biofuels - and might actually do more to cut CO2 emissions as well.
So does that mean bioelectricity is better than bioethanol? Wrong again.
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NASA |
A color-coded image from NASA's Aqua satellite
shows levels of outgoing long-wave radiation
during the deadly European heat wave of 2003.
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Swine flu? Global warming? Toxic oceans? Why does Mother Nature sometimes seem to be on the attack? According to the decades-old "Gaia hypothesis," it's because Earth is a self-regulating system that is responding to our own excesses. In a new book titled "The Vanishing Face of Gaia," British biologist James Lovelock says humanity is "Earth's infection."
"Individuals occasionally suffer a disease called polycythaemia, an overpopulation of red blood cells. By analogy, Gaia's illness could be called polyanthroponemia, where humans overpopulate until they do more harm than good," Lovelock writes. He says the cure won't come until the human tribe is trimmed back from its current 6.8 billion to, say, 1 billion people.
Now University of Washington paleontologist Peter Ward has proposed an alternate theory that suggests Earth is set up to kill off life when it spreads too widely. Humans wouldn't be the first victims of this periodic biocide. The dinosaurs may have been killed off by an asteroid, he says, but during the planet's other mass extinctions, millions of species were done in by good old Mom.
"I hypothesize that life and its processes, together often referred to as 'Mother Nature,' was, is, and will be anything but a good mother to her many evolved and evolving species," Ward contends in his new book, "The Medea Hypothesis."
Gaia vs. Medea ... that sounds like the start of a philosophical catfight.
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McGovern Institute / MIT |
Click for audio: Zebra finches may be hard-wired to sing a particular
kind of tune. Click on the image to hear CCNY researcher Olga Feher
explain how the tune changed over the course of generations.
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A songbird's brain may be programmed to gravitate toward a particular kind of tune, even if it's been taught from infancy to sing to the beat of a different warbler, researchers say. They go on to suggest that a similar neural mechanism might be behind the way our brains handle language.
"I think we humans, and songbirds, are probably born with some innate predisposition to communicate in a particular way," Olga Feher, a biologist at The City College of New York, told me this week.
The findings from Feher and her colleagues appear in this week's issue of the journal Nature. The experiments suggest that phenomena rooted in a species' culture - for example, singing for birds, using language for people - may be rooted in a species' genome as well.
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Imaginova |
Click for video: The Drake Equation estimates the likelihood
of alien intelligence, based on assumptions about life in the
universe. Click on the image to watch a Space.com video
featuring the SETI Institute's Seth Shostak and Frank Drake.
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It's been almost 50 years since scientists first came up with the idea of looking for radio signals from extraterrestrial civilizations - and although there have been a couple of curious blips, we haven't yet definitively heard E.T.'s cosmic call. Now the experts in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, are wondering whether we've been looking in the wrong places for the wrong kinds of signals.
Or maybe we just haven't been looking long enough.
All of those possibilities are considered in "Confessions of an Alien Hunter," a new book from Seth Shostak, the SETI Institute's senior astronomer.
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NASA / JPL-Caltech |
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Rivers of stars create a smooth swirl in this infrared view of the galaxy NGC 2841,
captured by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. Click on the image for a larger view.
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The month of May is bringing in so many outer-space wonders, it's as if a three-ring circus were rolling into town with four or five rings. Today is Space Day, which morphs into Astronomy Day and the Astronaut Hall of Fame on Saturday, followed by the peak of the Eta Aquarid meteor shower next week ... all leading up to one of the greatest shows off Earth, the final upgrade to the Hubble Space Telescope.
And if that still isn't enough rings for you, there's a sparkling new image of a ring galaxy from Hubble's younger sibling, the Spitzer Space Telescope.
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