astro
catdynamics | July 13, 2006Couple of interesting snippets on NASAwatch
SOFIA is back. SIM is slipped, which apparently saves everything. WISE, GLAST, JWST, even HST.
Who knew you could do so much by slipping a $100 million item...
Uh, oh, if you click through to the New Scientist story, we learn SIM is being "refocused". That can't be good.
Yee-Haw!!! - for True Space Cadets Only.
Bigelow launched and deployed successfully the "Genesis" 1/3 scale model of their inflatable space habitat. Full scale version is decent sized and planned to accommodate ~ half dozen people. Possible ISS add-ons if I read correctly, and…
catdynamics | July 8, 2006GSFC's Terra mission detects indisputable evdence for gravity waves.
From the MISR instrument
Ok, this was inspired by last month's Physics Today, but y'all remember that "gravity waves" are old fashioned fluid waves with gravity as the restoring force, and quite distinct from gravitational waves.
Those will come later.
catdynamics | July 5, 2006It was NASA proposal season last month, meant to comment on it, but was so exhausted and pissed off about the whole thing that I needed some space.
A typical proposals is 15 pages of main text; including biblio, bios, associated documents and blurbs the final (electronic) package is typically 40-55 pages.
NASA's budget is a funny thing.
It has the Space Operations Directorate which is basically keeping the shuttle and space station and associated armies of contractors at JSC and KSC in business. $6 billion in round numbers.
Then is has Science, Aeronautics (well, not so much anymore) and…
catdynamics | July 4, 2006Word out of Space Telescope Institute is that the Advanced Camera has taken blanks and the spare electronics are good. Low read noise and bias, and system is stablising at operational temperature.
Both cameras working.
Should have first calibration frames by now, looks good as new.
Will look for "second light" images, if/when they put them up. Science schedule should start executing soon.
catdynamics | June 30, 2006Side 2 (spare) electronics were powered up on the Advanced Camera for Surveys.
Preliminary indications are that they are in good shape and that the ACS will be live and taking science data again by July 4th.
Looks good.
catdynamics | June 28, 2006
The Las Cumbres Observatory is a private foundation planning a network of 5-7 homogenous 2m telescopes around the world, and an associate network of smaller educational telescopes for schools.
As I'm told, they have one operational telescope and one under construction.
The observatory has funding, thanks to a .com boomer, they are hiring serious staff to do serious work, and possibly fishing for science ideas.
Lots of things spring to mind, including planet transits and astroseismology (well I know they know that); gamma ray burst optical transients, microlensing, white dwarf oscillation…
catdynamics | June 27, 2006space.com is running the top ten weird things in space.
Some of the choices don't seem that strange, but then familiarity does bring contempt.
Go vote. Vote early. Vote often.
catdynamics | June 26, 2006
There it is, back after a hundred years in the outer system.
From CARA - the Cometary Archive for Amateur Astronomers in Italy.
Nice one.
catdynamics | June 25, 2006The Minor Planet Center reports the discovery by L. Buzzi of the Schiaparelli
Observatory, Varese, Italy of comet P/2006 M3.
Computations by Green strongly suggests it is Barnard's comet of 1889 (c). Returning with a about a 128 year period.
Welcome back.
New orbit estimate is 119 year period, with apperihelion at about 1.1 AU and eccentricity of 0.95.
Here is the original (pdf)
No picture yet from the current observations. Maybe someone will get one up tomorrow.
catdynamics | June 21, 2006NASAwatch reports ACS outage
Electronics problems. ACS observations suspended for a week while a tiger team studies the issue.
Could be resolved quickly, or could be Really Bad News.
Will keep an eye out.
Hm, leaves WFPC2 and NICMOS operating. They'll run out of targets pretty quickly.
Hopefully they can just power up the spare "side 2" electronics and resume normal operation, though you never know until you try...
This is at least a warning to us all - this stuff is worryingly fragile in many ways, and operations are on a thread.
Update: apparently they think it is the power converter, not…
catdynamics | June 21, 2006
From Andrew Hamilton's black hole image collection
There are, for most practical purposed, two qualitatively distinct types of black holes: Schwarzschild - which are spherical and not spinning and Kerr - axisymmetric and spinning
So... I know how to spin up a non-spinning black hole, you drop matter in with some finite angular momentum.
I also know how to extract angular momentum from a black hole, eg through the Penrose process
What I do not know is how, or if, you can go exactly back to a non-spinning black hole.
Why is this? (J. Pedersen pointed this issue out to me and figured out many…
catdynamics | June 20, 2006
Video of meteor striking the Moon
Bad Astronomy has it also
Comparable to the one that hit Norway recently!
oops. video bit too big, cut header image down and left link, go take a peek
catdynamics | June 20, 2006
The actual LISA spacecraft
Or, one of the three modules.
That is a 1.96 kg cube of 3/4 gold, 1/4 platinum.
The actual LISA spacecraft, in a very real sense, is three of those, separated by 5 million kms.
At about $600 per ounce, that is a little over $100,000 of precious metal. Each of these is surrounded by about a 2 m "saucer", which is the auxilliary spacecraft.
Somewhat amusingly, depending on how you do your accounting, the ~ 300kg of epoxy, metal, optics and electronics wrapped around the gold/platinum cube is the expensive part. Per unit mass the chunk of gold is the cheapest part…
catdynamics | June 19, 2006
Bats' ears at AMNH
To really see in the dark, at some point you must abandon the light...
You can go far in faint light by using high efficiency detectors, large collecting areas and amplification;
but, as nature discovered a long time ago, to really find things in the dark you need to switch to an entirely different spectrum and look at vibrations.
This is also true if you want to look at Black Holes.
You can do a lot with light, but to really probe what is going on with black holes, to come close to the event horizon, to test relativity, to measure spins and test astrophysics of formation…
catdynamics | June 15, 2006I am hearing an irritating buzz in my ear...
Apparently cosmology is liberal.
Can someone tell me, what is a conservative cosmology? And what is the distinction?
catdynamics | June 15, 2006Astrology is crap
You can not buy a star name
Yes, there really was a Big Bang
catdynamics | June 15, 2006So Stephen Hawking spoke in defence of off-planet colonization
and got pounced by, among others, a trio of tough sciencebloggers.
Shelley, grrlscientist, and PZ.
Also Chris Clarke...
Sagrada Familia
This is an interesting situation - Stephen is at the best of times terse.
He is unlikely to expound in detail on his rationalisation or start commenting in blogs.
People who listen to him, and who are on the same page to begin with, tend to fill in the gap, under the assumption that he has made the full reasoned argument without expounding it - when I gave a talk to his group at DAMTP a few years…
catdynamics | June 14, 2006
European Southern Observatory press release on globular cluster 47 Tucanae
47 Tuc is one of my favourite globulars.
It is large, quite dense, metal rich as globulars go, and it is gorgeous.
It is full of pulsars, blue stragglers, x-ray binaries and other fun beasties.
A few years ago we looked there for planets - "hot Jupiters" to be specific
There were none. Which is moderately surprising in a subtle way.
catdynamics | June 14, 2006
the Spirit Rover discovers a possible meteorite, on Mars
That is one way to find a meteorite, I wonder how the Rover spares would do north and east of Tromsø in mid-summer, there's Nkr 100,000 at stake.
About 870 days now, and still going...