June 2009 - Posts
Neil Armstrong / NASA |
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Electronic equipment and switches surround astronaut Buzz Aldrin in Apollo 11's
lunar module, nicknamed Eagle, before the moon landing in 1969. Over the past
40 years there have been big changes in computers — and in the amount of
information available on computers about the Apollo moonshots.
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Forty years ago, the world watched the Apollo 11 moon landing on television sets and giant screens. This year, the tale of the moonshot is being retold on computer monitors and mobile phones. Here's a Top 10 list of online destinations celebrating the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11:
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Natural History Museum |
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This artist's conception shows a hadrosaur eating. An analysis of tooth wear
suggests that hadrosaurs were more likely to graze on low-growing, silica-rich
plants than on tall bushes. The tooth scratches also reveal how hadrosaurs chewed.
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A novel analysis of microscopic scratches on fossilized teeth reveals how plant-eating duck-billed dinosaurs used a now-extinct type of jaw to chew their food. The study also suggests duckbills were more likely to graze on low-lying greenery than chomp on tree leaves like giraffes (or like the dinosaurs in "Jurassic Park").
The researchers behind the study, published online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, say the technique they used to uncover the tale of the teeth could be applied to other scientific mysteries as well.
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Kevin Frank / The Tonight Show / NASA |
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Apollo 12 astronaut Pete Conrad stands near the southern rim of Surveyor Crater
during a moonwalk on Nov. 19, 1969. Conrad holds a sampling scoop, and a tool
carrier rests by his foot. Put on red-blue glasses for the 3-D effect, which was
added by graphic artist Kevin Frank. Click on the image for a larger version.
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Our latest crop of cosmic pictures puts you hundreds of miles above an erupting volcano, sends you zooming over the moon and plunks you down on Mars. But if you really want to feel as if you're in outer space, you'll have to put on your red-blue 3-D glasses. It's the next best thing to being there.
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BioMed Central |
Click for video: Watch
mating worms. (Credit:
Paul Sternberg, Allyson
Whittaker, Caltech)
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How do you spice up a report about the mating habits of nematode worms? Well, how about an online video of hot nematode-on-nematode action?
The video and an accompanying news release are related to a research paper published today in the open-access journal BMC Biology.
The paper focuses on the male mating behavior of Caenorhabditis elegans, an oft-studied worm species.
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ALMS via Argonne Nat'l Lab |
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A GM Chevrolet Corvette (bottom) and a Porsche RS Spyder were the two
winners of the first Green Challenge at the Petit Le Mans race in Atlanta
last October. The winners were selected based on a formula that factored
in energy efficiency, petroleum displacement and greenhouse-gas
emissions as well as speed during the 1,000-mile race.
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The race doesn’t always go to the swiftest. Nowadays, some auto races go to the most fuel-efficient, or to the most environmentally friendly, or even to the best business plan.
That doesn't mean you should expect a NASCAR prize to go to a Prius anytime soon. But it does mean you'll see different kinds of scales for judging the cars that go onto the track - scales that you might even use when you buy your next car.
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Daniel Maurer / AP |
Click for video: The University of Tubingen's Nicholas Conard holds an ancient
flute during a news conference. Click on the image for a video report on the find.
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Scientists say they've found what they consider to be the earliest handcrafted musical instrument in a cave in southwest Germany, less than a yard away from the oldest-known carving of a human. The flute fragments as well as the ivory figurine of a "prehistoric Venus" date back more than 35,000 years, the researchers report.
The findings, published online today by the journal Nature, suggest not only that cavemen and cavewomen could rock the house, but that musical jam sessions may have helped modern humans prevail over their Neanderthal cousins.
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Ron Batzdorff / Universal Pictures |
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"Apollo 13," starring Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon and Bill Paxton, ranks
among the best fictional movies about NASA's moon effort.
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If you're lusting to relive the glory days of NASA's early space effort, the best time for doing that is right now: Video resources about the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs are at their peak as the 40th anniversary of humanity's first moon landing approaches. Here's a Top 10 list, plus a couple of extra-credit pointers to more space video:
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NASA / JPL / SSI |
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The spiky shadow of Saturn's moon Mimas dips onto the planet's rings and
straddles the Cassini Division in this natural color image taken by the Cassini
spacecraft on April 8, 2009. Click on the image for a larger view.
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Leapin' and hoppin' on a moonshadow? The Cassini space mission turns that line from the Cat Stevens classic completely around by revealing the leapin' and hoppin' moonshadows on Saturn's rings.
Those shadows are taking on an especially eerie look as the planet nears equinox, an event that happens only twice during Saturn's 29.5-year-long orbit. In August, Saturn's rings will be facing the sun exactly edge-on. During the buildup to that event, the Cassini orbiter has been focusing on the shadows cast by moons as well as structures on the rings themselves.
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NASA's moon-crashing probe - known as the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS - is flying past its target Tuesday morning. And if the streaming-video spirits are smiling, you can follow along.
The space agency says it is planning to webcast LCROSS' lunar encounter starting at 8:20 a.m. ET Tuesday. The swingby is aimed at changing the spacecraft's trajectory, five days after launch, in order to get it into position for its eventual crash (currently set for October).
LCROSS' cameras and other scientific instruments will be switched on for about an hour for calibration purposes. The first 30 minutes of LCROSS' data feed will provide frame-per-second video views of the lunar surface from an altitude of about 5,600 miles (9,000 kilometers), NASA says. During the second half-hour, LCROSS will scan the lunar horizon to calibrate its sensors, and the video imagery will update only occasionally. Another Web stream will show an animation visualizing the spacecraft's position throughout the swingby.
The availability and quality of the streaming video will depend on a multitude of factors - so as usual, there are no guarantees (tip o' the Log to SpaceWeather.com).
Even earlier in the day, NASA TV will be carrying coverage of its other moon probe's entry into lunar orbit. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter was launched right along with LCROSS, but in this case, the point of the maneuver is to position the spacecraft so it doesn't hit the moon. Video coverage of LRO's lunar orbit insertion begins at 5:30 a.m. ET, NASA says.
Here are a few other Web links to moon over:
Spaceport America |
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Virgin Galactic's White Knight Two carrier airplane flies over New Mexico's Las
Cruces International Airport on Saturday, showing off its dual-fuselage design.
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Five years after the private-sector space age began, rocketeers are taking circuitous routes to turn their spaceship dreams into reality. And the pioneers of the age say that's just as it should be.
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Berkman Center / Harvard |
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This map provides a visualization of the Iranian blogosphere in early 2009.
Clusters of blogs are associated with different themes, ranging from reformist
vs. conservative politics to Persian poetry and "CyberShia" religious discourse.
Click on the image for the Berkman Center's interactive version of the map.
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An analysis of Iran's Internet reveals a deep level of diversity, with a level of surveillance (and surveillance-dodging) that goes just as deep. During this week's post-election crisis, so many reflections have been bouncing back and forth in this online hall of mirrors that it's sometimes hard to get a fix on where anyone stands - geographically or politically.
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An independent panel was mostly in listening mode during today's first hearing on the future of America's spacefaring effort, but the fact that so many perspectives were heard suggests that the Review of U.S. Human Space Flight Plans Committee is really going to review a wide spectrum of options.
Those options include NASA's current Constellation Program, which calls for developing new types of rockets known as the Ares 1 and 5 to send humans back to the moon by the year 2020. But they also include adapting existing rockets such as the Delta 4 or Atlas 5, or some sort of "Frankenrocket" that marks the next stage of evolution for expendable launch vehicles. Or maybe the rockets that SpaceX and Orbital Sciences are building to send cargo up to the international space station. Or maybe a novel kind of shuttle-derived launch vehicle like the one envisioned by the mavericks behind the DIRECT spaceflight plan.
The panel's chairman, former aerospace executive Norman Augustine, told reporters after the hearing that he and his colleagues had a lot of homework to do between now and August, when they're due to file their report on what NASA should do after the shuttle fleet is retired in 2010 or so.
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Bruce Rolff / FeaturePics.com |
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Our consciousness plays a key role in how we perceive space and
time, biomedical researcher Robert Lanza says in "Biocentrism."
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Biomedical researcher Robert Lanza has been on the frontier of cloning and stem cell studies for more than a decade, so he's well-acclimated to controversy. But his book "Biocentrism" is generating controversy on a different plane by arguing that our consciousness plays a central role in creating the cosmos.
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- This month, Virginia-based Space Adventures announced that Cirque du Soleil's billionaire founder, Guy Laliberte, is planning to take a multimillion-dollar trip to the international space station in September. But if Laliberte can't go, who is his backup? Today, the company said business and aviation attorney Barbara Barrett was training alongside Laliberte as the backup crew member for the Russian Soyuz flight. Barrett is an instrument-rated pilot, a former U.S. ambassador to Finland, and the wife of former Intel Chairman Craig Barrett. "Training as a backup for the September space launch is an adventure - and education - of a lifetime," Barrett said in today's announcement. The previously quoted price for the backup cosmonaut package (including training and certification at Russia's Star City cosmonaut complex) is $3 million, compared with an estimated $35 million to $40 million for the actual space trip.
- Virgin Galactic's White Knight Two carrier airplane zoomed through test flight No. 8 last week at the Mojave Air and Space Port in California, and observers continue to expect that the SpaceShipTwo rocket plane will have its rollout and begin flight tests later this year. Groundbreaking ceremonies for SpaceShipTwo's future home, Spaceport America in New Mexico, are scheduled on Friday. The festivities should include a White Knight Two flyover, assuming that the weather and the flight test schedules are cooperative. If you can't be there in person, you can watch the webcast on the Spaceport America site. In honor of the event, the spaceport has released a fresh batch of design concepts for its suborbital flight terminal, due for completion in 2010 or 2011.
- The Commercial Spaceflight Federation is celebrating its new name, its new Web site ... and its new chairman, Mark Sirangelo of Sierra Nevada Corp. The New Space industry group used to be known as the Personal Spaceflight Federation, but at a recent board meeting, members decided that their ventures were about much more than just personal tourism. "There are so many uses for commercial access to space, and we want to emphasize the broad cross-section of potential markets for our members' products and services," the federation's president, Bretton Alexander, said in today's news release. The group's new officers include representatives from companies that are targeting NASA space station resupply contracts and research opportunities as well as the tourist/explorer clientele.
- Should NASA modify its multibillion-dollar plan to retire the shuttles, build a new fleet of spaceships and return to the moon by 2020? That question is sure to be addressed on Wednesday during the first public hearing conducted by a independent review panel under the chairmanship of aerospace executive Norman Augustine. The panel, known formally as the Review of U.S. Human Space Flight Plans Committee (and informally as the Augustine 2.0 Commission), is due to meet from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. ET at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, and NASA will be doing an all-day webcast on its Media Channel.
Kelley Knight Heins |
Click for video: John Callas, project manager for the Mars rover mission,
explains how a duplicate rover is being used at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory
in Pasadena, Calif., to figure out how best to free up a rover stuck in Martian sand.
Click on the image to watch an msnbc.com video.
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Take two parts diatomaceous earth, add one part clay ... and voila! You've got a blend of simulated Martian sand fine enough to get a rover stuck in.
"It's not a secret formula," John Callas, project manager for the Mars Exploration Rovers, said as he showed us around the place at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory where a stand-in for the Spirit rover is mired in buckets of the stuff.
The semi-impromptu tour, arranged for me and a few other folks who attended last week's American Astronomical Society meeting in Pasadena, Calif., provided an inside look at the clean room where NASA's future Mars rover is taking shape, as well as the not-so-clean room where rovers are put to the test.
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NASA / JPL / SSI |
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A natural-color image provided by the Cassini orbiter shows Saturn's southern
hemisphere and the planet's main rings. Click on the image for a larger version.
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Did you know that Saturn's rings are wavy? Which Mars probe is back in business after it ran into trouble? How many rookies are on the space shuttle Endeavour? Which Apollo 11 crew member never set foot on the moon? Test your wits - and exercise your curiosity.
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SETI Institute |
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Radio dishes monitor the skies over California at the Allen Telescope Array.
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After years of preparation and testing, the SETI Institute has released the first results from a search for alien signals that uses the $50 million, 42-dish Allen Telescope Array. You didn't hear about it? Maybe that's because none of the thousands of signals picked up so far has rung an alarm bell.
Nevertheless, the fully functioning system represents the latest, greatest leap in the nearly 50-year-long search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI.
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S.V. Ramirez / NExSci / Caltech / JPL / NASA |
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This infrared image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope shows the center of the
Milky Way galaxy, with three baby stars highlighted in the inset images.
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NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has turned up infrared evidence of baby stars being born near the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. The discovery demonstrates that our home galaxy's most crowded neighborhood is more diverse than astronomers may have thought.
"These stars are like needles in a haystack," Solange Ramirez, principal investigator of the research program at NASA's Exoplanet Science Institute at the California Institute of Technology, said in a news release issued Wednesday. "There's no way to find them using optical light, because dust gets in the way. We needed Spitzer's infrared instruments to cut through the dust and narrow in on the objects."
In its current condition, the Milky Way's center isn't the kind of place you'd think infant stars would find much footing. Until now, astronomers haven't had much luck finding young stellar objects. But the Spitzer science team focused in on about 100 candidates and identified three stars that were less than a million years old, based on their spectral signatures in infrared wavelengths.
"It is amazing to me that we have found these stars," Ramirez said. "The galactic center is a very interesting place. It has young stars, old stars, black holes, everything. We started mining a catalog of about 1 million sources and managed to find three young stars - stars that will help reveal the secrets at the core of the Milky Way."
And not just the Milky Way, according to Deokkeun An of Caltech's Infrared Processing and Analysis Center, who is the lead author of a research paper submitted to The Astrophysical Journal. "By studying individual stars in the galactic center, we can better understand how stars are formed in different interstellar environments," An said in Wednesday's news release.
The Spitzer imagery was unveiled during this week's meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Pasadena, Calif. Here are other tales of galactic goings-on from the AAS agenda:
SwRI |
A map of Pluto's surface,
based on brightness.
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The main players in the planethood debate gathered together this week to look back at Pluto's woes - and look ahead to fresh discoveries on the solar system's farthest frontiers.
Among the speakers at Tuesday's forum, held at the American Astronomical Society's summer meeting in Pasadena, Calif., were Neil deGrasse Tyson, the astrophysicist and planetarium director whose Pluto-less planetary display contributed to the controversy, and Alan Stern, the planetary scientist who heads NASA's New Horizon science mission to Pluto and its neighbors on the solar system's edge.
In all, seven speakers revisited the International Astronomical Union's decision three years ago to issue a definition of planethood that excluded Pluto because it hadn't "cleared its orbit" of other objects close to its size.
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STScI |
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Astronomer Galileo Galilei made these drawings of the moon based on telescope
observations made four centuries ago. Could you do any better? The Galileoscope
project is planning a contest for sketchers and photographers.
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The International Year of Astronomy isn't just for astronomers anymore: There's a whole constellation of projects aimed at getting regular folks like you and me involved in celestial adventures.
"Anyone can be a space explorer, just by going outside at night and looking up with a little bit of a prepared mind," said Andrew Chaikin, a former editor of Sky & Telescope magazine who wrote "A Man on the Moon," the classic history of the Apollo moon missions.
Some of the leaders of the citizen astronomy movement provided status reports on their own missions at this week's American Astronomical Society meeting in Pasadena, Calif. Here's just a sampling:
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Kochanek, Stanek, Prieto / Ohio State U. |
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The galaxy M81, seen here in an image from the Large Binocular
Telescope, is home to several ultra-long-period Cepheid variable stars that
could help astronomers fine-tune a new way to measure cosmic distances.
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How far away is that galaxy? The more precise your answer is, the more you can find out about mysterious dark energy. In the past, astronomers have used variable stars and a special kind of supernova to make their distance estimates - and now two new measuring sticks are being added to the toolbox.
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NASA |
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Astronaut Buzz Aldrin erects a solar wind experiment on the moon after Apollo 11's historic landing on July 20, 1969. Click on the image for a high-resolution view.
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That's one small step for a man ... and one giant stack of books for the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.
The pile of new publications about NASA's moon effort, timed to anticipate the anniversary on July 20, has been rising so high that Robert Pearlman, editor of the CollectSpace Web site, had to clear out his bookshelves this week. "I now have stacks of older books sitting around my office," he told me today.
It's Pearlman's job to keep track of the memories and the memorabilia surrounding space missions, and even he is impressed by the breadth of offerings being released this year. "Each of them is slightly different - they're not just telling the same story over and over again," he said.
That sentiment is echoed by Andrew Chaikin, author of "A Man on the Moon," the classic chronicle of the Apollo missions. "Apollo was such an enormous undertaking that I'm continually reminded that you can never truly know everything about that program. There were so many people, and so much, and all of them have their stories to tell," he said.
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Miriam Wessels / Univ. of Veterinary Medicine |
Click for video: An orangutan named Naru vocalizes during a tickling session.
Click on the image to watch what happens when a gorilla is tickled in captivity.
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How do you graph the evolution of a laugh? Researchers tickled babies and six different kinds of apes, quantified their giggles, and found that the patterns fit a classic evolutionary tree.
Those patterns hint at the ancient origins of human hilarity and suggest that other social species - including apes, dogs and rats - really, truly laugh as well.
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NASA / JPL / USGS |
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This image shows the underbelly of NASA's Spirit rover, as seen by the rover's microscopic imager on June 2. One wheel can be seen at left, another buried wheel
is at right, and a pointed shape that may be an obstruction is at center. The picture
is fuzzy because the camera was not designed to take these types of images, and
it is tipped to reflect the rover's orientation relative to the local terrain.
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NASA experts are taking fuzzy pictures and trying out different recipes for Red Planet dirt as they continue their weeks-long effort to get a stuck Mars rover moving again.
It's been more than three weeks since the Spirit rover became mired in loose dirt on the west side of the Martian feature known as "Home Plate." During that time, the mission team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has fielded scores of suggestions for freeing up Spirit, rover project manager John Callas told me today.
Callas said he and his colleagues have heard from "farmers who have had tractors stuck in the mud and figured out how to get them out," as well as a 7-year-old boy named Julian who suggested having Spirit push itself out with its robotic arm.
The ideas are much appreciated, Callas said, but "we still have many arrows in our quiver before we have to consider more drastic operations."
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msnbc.com |
Click for video: The
primate fossil known
as "Ida" has caused
a scientific stir.
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A growing number of online ventures are serving up regular doses of science video to fill the gaps in TV coverage - including some ventures that are led by media-hopping TV types.
The latest entrant in the field is "Science Nation," a weekly video series funded by the National Science Foundation and created by former CNN producers. The first installment, released Monday, focuses on Earth's "alien" species - that is, extremophile organisms that can survive in Antarctica's frozen deserts or volcanic vents at the bottom of the ocean.
"Science Nation" is just the tip of the video iceberg: Here are the beginnings of a mini-TV guide for science video online:
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- NASA has announced the full lineup for an independent committee tasked with reviewing the space agency's plans to retire the shuttle fleet, build a new line of spaceships and return to the moon. The panel is headed by retired aerospace executive Norm Augustine, but its members also include a leading space entrepreneur, XCOR Aerospace CEO Jeff Greason. Today's official list also includes two former astronauts (Sally Ride, first American woman in space; and Leroy Chiao, former space station commander) as well as two former prospects for NASA's top post (retired Air Force Gen. Lester Lyles and Earth scientist Charles Kennel). The committee's first meeting is set for later this month.
- The name of a Canadian entrepreneur who is due to fly as a paying passenger to the international space station in September will be announced simultaneously in Montreal and Moscow on Thursday, Virginia-based Space Adventures says. The seat opened up when Kazakhstan canceled its plans to send a trained cosmonaut on that flight, as reported by Reuters last month. The quoted rate for a reservation on Russia's Soyuz spaceship is $35 million, or maybe even more by now. The Itar-Tass news agency quoted Russian space chief Anatoly Perminov as saying that "this form of tourism will continue" - which was an expected reversal of his previous position that space millionaires would no longer be flown. So who's the Canadian space traveler? Let the guessing game begin. (I'll guess Stewart Blusson.)
Update for 12:15 p.m. June 2: NASA Watch seems to have a more informed guess: Cirque du Soleil founder and CEO Guy Laliberté.
- California-based SpaceX says its next Falcon 1 launch, which would put Malaysia's RazakSat Earth-observing satellite into orbit, has been rescheduled for July 13 or 14.
- Aviation Week delves more deeply into the SpaceShipTwo rocket motor tests that came to light last week. The rocket ship itself is due to roll out later this year.
Z. Kawasaki / Osaka U. via NWS |
Lightning strikes a plane over an
airport in Japan in 1997. Click on
the image for an animated version.
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Did lightning alone bring down Air France 447? Or were there complicating factors?
Solving the mystery surrounding the jet's trans-Atlantic disappearance is more challenging because there's no radar, no witnesses, no easy-to-find debris field.
But similar mysteries have been solved over the past couple of decades, thanks to some heavy-duty underwater sleuthing.
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