Cosmos
gregladen | June 27, 2010It's one of those hitch hiking deals:
NASA's Deep Impact/EPOXI spacecraft will fly past Earth this Sunday (June 27). Mission navigators have tailored this trajectory so the spacecraft can "hitch a ride" on Earth's gravity field, which will help propel the mission toward its appointment with comet Hartley 2 this fall. At time of closest approach to Earth, the spacecraft will be about 30,400 kilometers (18,900 miles) above the South Atlantic.
"Earth is a great place to pick up orbital velocity," said Tim Larson, the EPOXI project manager from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif…
gregladen | June 17, 2010I dislike the term "god particle" but I could not resist the play on words ... as researchers at Fermilab suggest that there may be five different versions of the Higgs boson, not just one. This would require, apparently, some rewriting of the Standard Model.
Here's the story in non-technical terms, and thus, somewhat butchered (but if you're reading my blog for particle physics, you're kinda asking for it anyway). Matter and it's constituent parts may or may not have a certain kind and degree of symmetry. One theory as to why there is only "matter" and not "anti-matter" in the universe…
gregladen | June 16, 2010... maybe.
Maybe there were vast oceans, and maybe they were occupied by microbes. This, according to reserearch being discussed in Natoial Geographic.
A vast ocean chock-full of microbes may have once covered more than a third of Mars's surface, scientists say.
The new evidence, from an analysis of dried-up Mars river deltas, adds to growing signs the red planet was once wet.
On Earth, river deltas all lie at more or less the same elevation and reflect the current sea level. In fact, by estimating the elevations of ancient deltas, scientists can reconstruct how sea levels have changed over…
gregladen | June 4, 2010Rocks examined by NASA's Spirit Mars Rover hold evidence of a wet, non-acidic ancient environment that may have been favorable for life. Confirming this mineral clue took four years of analysis by several scientists.
An outcrop that Spirit examined in late 2005 revealed high concentrations of carbonate, which originates in wet, near-neutral conditions, but dissolves in acid. The ancient water indicated by this find was not acidic.
NASA's rovers have found other evidence of formerly wet Martian environments. However the data for those environments indicate conditions that may have been acidic…
gregladen | May 24, 2010Those are the words of UCLA's Ned Wright, a PI with NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE.
NASA is putting out a press release summarizing the results of the project so far. For example:
"We are taking a census of a small sample of near-Earth objects to get a better idea of how they vary," said Amy Mainzer, the principal investigator of NEOWISE, a program to catalog asteroids seen with WISE.
So far, the mission has observed more than 60,000 asteroids, both Main Belt and near-Earth objects. Most were known before, but more than 11,000 are new.
details here
gregladen | May 24, 2010Or should I say "ice."
The Phoenix Mars Lander seems to be dead in the dust, with its solar panels having suffered severe winter ice damage as shown by photos from the Odyssey Orbiter:
The blue color on the left shows clean, reflective, round solar panels. The blacky-browny image on the right indicates that one of the solar panels is, essentially, gone and the other is yecked up.
More imagery and information about the photos are here.
More information about the Phoenix mission here: Press release by D.C. Agle and Dwayne Brown.
gregladen | May 20, 2010Why are most stars in binary systems? New Spitzer results may help explain.
Stars form from cosmic dust accumulating in sufficient quantities to generate sufficient gravity to mush the atoms with sufficient compression to cause nuclear fusion. The dust initially gathers in a large formation long thought to be more or less spherical. By the time the process is over, the star-stuff in the middle of this 'envelope' of dust, nuclear fusion and all, is likely to be two stars in many cases.
Most of the stars in the galaxy are binary, or twin, stars. At least some (if not most, perhaps almost…
gregladen | May 20, 2010This just in from NASA:
PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Project will pass a historic Martian longevity record on Thursday, May 20. The Opportunity rover will surpass the duration record set by NASA's Viking 1 Lander of six years and 116 days operating on the surface of Mars. The effects of favorable weather on the red planet could also help the rovers generate more power.
Opportunity's twin rover, Spirit, began working on Mars three weeks before Opportunity. However, Spirit has been out of communication since March 22. If it awakens from hibernation and resumes…
gregladen | April 24, 2010Twenty years ago today, the rocket ... The Discovery .... blasted off, carrying the Hubble Space Telescope.
And, to celebrate, NASA has released one of the most astonishing photographs ever.
gregladen | April 15, 2010Videos of the so called fireball:
It's funny that it says in the CNN piece, quoting "NASA":
"Air friction heats the meteoroid so that it glows and creates a shining trail of gases and melted meteoroid particles," it said. "People sometimes call the brightest meteors fireballs."
Which, as I understand it, is a falsehood. There is probably heat from friction, but most of the heat is from compression owing to the supersonic speed of the object.
But that is not my area of expertise so I will leave it to others to expand on that.
More videos:
Iowa:
Close call. It could have been this:
I…
gregladen | April 15, 2010Holy, crap, did you see this??????
Authorities in several Midwestern states were flooded Wednesday night with reports of a gigantic fireball lighting up the sky, the National Weather Service said.
The fireball was visible for about 15 minutes beginning about 10 p.m., said the National Weather Service in Sullivan, Wisconsin, just west of Milwaukee.
"The fireball was seen over the northern sky, moving from west to east," said the NWS in the Quad Cities area, which includes parts of Iowa and Illinois.
"Well before it reached the horizon, it broke up into smaller pieces and was lost from sight,"…
gregladen | April 14, 2010There is something strange in the cosmic neighbourhood. An unknown object in the nearby galaxy M82 has started sending out radio waves, and the emission does not look like anything seen anywhere in the universe before.
"We don't know what it is," says co-discoverer Tom Muxlow of Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics near Macclesfield, UK.
Whatever it is appreas to be moving at four times the speed of light. In other words, it has a Warp Drive. And, it is moving towards us, more or less. Well, at a slight angle. Better to surround us that way!!!!
I'm going to go stock up on canned foods…
gregladen | March 30, 2010Today, Marcy 30th .... Beams collided at 7 TeV in the LHC at 13:06 CEST, marking the start of the LHC research programme. Particle physicists around the world are looking forward to a potentially rich harvest of new physics as the LHC begins its first long run at an energy three and a half times higher than previously achieved at a particle accelerator.
"It's a great day to be a particle physicist," said CERN1 Director General Rolf Heuer. "A lot of people have waited a long time for this moment, but their patience and dedication is starting to pay dividends."
... read the rest here.
gregladen | March 30, 2010Supposedly:
The world's largest atom smasher has set a new record for high-energy atom collisions - with three times more force than ever before.
I had no idea it was pronounced "Kern" ... I thought it was "Sern."
gregladen | March 29, 2010I'm pretty sure I knew a guy, way back in the 1970s, who thought that Pac Man .... the video game ... was an attempt by aliens from another galaxy to communicate with us. Well, with him, actually.
Huh.
The Cassini spacecraft in orbit around Saturn has caught an interesting new view of the tiny moon Mimas.
The probe measured temperature differences across the object's surface and produced a map that looks just like the 1980s Pac-Man video games icon.
Scientists are unsure why Mimas should display such variations ...
bbc
1980s indeed. That was Ms Pac Man. Entirely different galaxy.
gregladen | March 16, 2010I just heard from Richard Greenberg (NASA) that National Geographic's Naked Science show will be talking about Alien Life on April 1st. (There is room for a joke or two about the date, I suppose!) Part of the show will involve Richard talking about Europa.
You may remember the Europa-Richard Green connection (and all the politics and controversy, and interesting science connected with that) from this review of Richard's excellent book.
gregladen | March 14, 2010It was already known that we were totally doomed, but now there is a new and exciting scenario. In this one, comets rain down on us from the Ooort Cloud, said comets loosened by contact and interaction with a star called Gliese 710.
Gliese 710 is one of a handful of stars that have had recent interactions with our solar system, or plan to in the future.
there is 86 percent chance that Gliese 710 will plough through the Oort Cloud of frozen stuff that extends some 0.5 parsecs into space.
That may sound like a graze but it is likely to have serious consequences. Such an approach would send…
gregladen | March 11, 2010A while ago, I complained that the people running the LHC did not have their act together when it came to managing and disseminating information for the interested public. I took a little flack for that (see comments) but I was right. And I'm still right. We (the interested public) were just recently given a very nice overview of the potential for the next several months of research. Then, today, we find out that the LHC is fundamentally busted and will be shut down for a significant rebuild. And part of that news is that this has been the plan for a long time. But I guess they forgot…