Rocketless launches
I love McLean Fahnestock’s series of modified photos of rocket launches without the rockets:
Fahnestock also did the video of all 135 Space Shuttle launches at once.
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kottke.org posts about space
All 135 Space Shuttle launches at once
This is a video showing all 135 launches of the various Space Shuttle at once.
Turn up your sound. I’ve seen this done with episodes of the Simpsons and Star Trek, but this is way better. The fade out on the tiny Challenger square is surprisingly affecting. Created by McLean Fahnestock.
Contents of the Voyager Golden Record
When they were launched in 1977, the two Voyager spacecraft each carried with them a 12-inch gold-plated copper record containing multimedia pertaining to life on Earth, the idea being that if an extraterrestrial ran across one of these records millions of years from now, they could play it an learn something about our planet. This site has a listing of some of the music, images, and sounds contained on the records. Here are two of the images included…the first is a rudimentary mathematics primer and the second is a family portrait:
I wonder when we’ll see these records again. I mean, it seems more plausible that Elon Musk’s grandson will mount an expedition to retrieve a Voyager probe in 2077 than some alien running across the thing.
How to measure the size of the Universe
From The Royal Observatory, Greenwich, a short video explanation of how scientists measure the size of the Universe.
This is science for the layperson done right…PBS or the Discovery Channel would have inflated this into a 30-minute show. (via ★interesting)
Time lapse video of the transit of Venus
Venus passed in front of the Sun yesterday for the last time until 2117. The transit took almost seven hours but this NASA video shows it in under a minute.
The Pioneer Anomaly has been solved
I missed this last July when the news came out, but since I’ve been following the Pioneer Anomaly for the past eight years, I wanted to mention it here for closure purposes. First, what the hell is the Pioneer Anomaly?
The Pioneer anomaly or Pioneer effect is the observed deviation from predicted accelerations of the Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 spacecraft after they passed about 20 astronomical units (3×10^9 km; 2×10^9 mi) on their trajectories out of the Solar System. Both Pioneer spacecraft are escaping the Solar System, but are slowing under the influence of the Sun’s gravity. Upon very close examination of navigational data, the spacecraft were found to be slowing slightly more than expected. The effect is an extremely small but unexplained acceleration towards the Sun, of 8.74±1.33x10^-10 m/s^2.
A team at JPL has tracked the problem to uneven heat emissions from the probes’ fuel source.
For their new analysis, Turyshev et. al. compiled a lot more data than had ever been analyzed before, spanning a much longer period of the Pioneers’ flight times. They studied 23 years of data from Pioneer 10 instead of just 11, and 11 years of data from Pioneer 11 instead of 3. As explained in their new paper, the more complete data sets reveal that the spacecraft’s anomalous acceleration did indeed seem to decrease with time. In short, the undying force had been dying after all, just like the decaying plutonium.
A more recent paper by the same researchers offers even more support for their theory. Case closed, I say.
Quantum propulsion system for spacecraft invented
Aisha Mustafa, a 19-year-old Egyptian physics student, has invented a promising new quantum propulsion system for spacecraft.
Mustafa invented a way of tapping this quantum effect via what’s known as the dynamic Casimir effect. This uses a “moving mirror” cavity, where two very reflective very flat plates are held close together, and then moved slightly to interact with the quantum particle sea. It’s horribly technical, but the end result is that Mustafa’s use of shaped silicon plates similar to those used in solar power cells results in a net force being delivered. A force, of course, means a push or a pull and in space this equates to a drive or engine.
Alien still hasn’t listened to all of Voyager’s Golden Record
Eighteen months on, the alien who discovered Voyager’s Golden Record still hasn’t gotten around to listening to the whole thing.
“The wind, rain, and surf sounds are pretty cool, but I usually sort of zone out when it gets to the crickets chirping, and then I just end up turning it off,” said Ellinger, adding that he will sometimes put the record on as background noise when he’s cleaning his electro-biological habitat.
Current status of The Onion: still really pretty good.
My God, it’s full of galaxies
The VISTA telescope in Chile recently took a photo of the sky that contains over 200,000 galaxies. For reference, the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field image shows only about 10,000 galaxies (but sees further back in time, I think).
I’ve spent years studying all this, and it still sometimes gets to me: just how flipping BIG the Universe is! And this picture is still just a tiny piece of it: it’s 1.2 x 1.5 degrees in size, which means it’s only 0.004% of the sky! And it’s not even complete: more observations of this region are planned, allowing astronomers to see even deeper yet.
Here’s a full view of the image that looks sorta unimpressive:
You can download the original 17,000 x 11,000 pixel image here (250 Mb, yo) for the full effect. As a preview, this is several levels of zoom in…just a tiny part of the full image.
What the Space Shuttle booster saw
You’ve likely seen other videos taken from cameras attached to the Space Shuttle and its boosters, but this is one is exceptional in two regards: it’s in HD and the sound has been remastered by Skywalker Sound.
Watch, and more importantly, listen to the whole thing…at the very end, you can see the second booster land a few hundred yards away from the first one. Who knew that being in space sounds like being trapped with a whale underwater in a tin pail? (via ★mouser)
Martian twister
On a recent pass, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter caught this dust devil dancing its way across the surface of Mars.
The active dust devil displays a delicate arc produced by a westerly breeze partway up its height. The dust plume is about 30 yards or meters in diameter.
The image was taken during the time of Martian year when that planet is farthest from the sun. Just as on Earth, winds on Mars are powered by solar heating. Exposure to the sun’s rays declines during this season, yet even now, dust devils act relentlessly to clean the surface of freshly deposited dust, a little at a time.
Dust devils occur on Earth as well as on Mars. They are spinning columns of air, made visible by the dust they pull off the ground. Unlike a tornado, a dust devil typically forms on a clear day when the ground is heated by the sun, warming the air just above the ground. As heated air near the surface rises quickly through a small pocket of cooler air above it, the air may begin to rotate, if conditions are just right.
Space is closer than you might think
Space always seems so far away and much of it actually is. But space is actually quite close to where we are all sitting right now. The Kármán line, the commonly accepted boundary between the Earth’s atmosphere and space, is only 62 miles above sea level.
The line was named after Theodore von Kármán, (1881-1963) a Hungarian-American engineer and physicist who was active primarily in the fields of aeronautics and astronautics. He first calculated that around this altitude the Earth’s atmosphere becomes too thin for aeronautical purposes (because any vehicle at this altitude would have to travel faster than orbital velocity in order to derive sufficient aerodynamic lift from the atmosphere to support itself). Also, there is an abrupt increase in atmospheric temperature and interaction with solar radiation.
A distance of 62 miles can covered by a car on the interstate in less than an hour. Stable Earth orbits are achievable at only 100 miles above the Earth, with the ISS and Space Shuttles usually orbiting at a height of ~200 miles. To show how small a distance that really is, I made the following image…the orange line in the upper left represents 200 miles away from the surface.
Pretty crazy.
On the occasion of your going into space
Scott Carpenter was one of the original seven Mercury astronauts and the second American to orbit the Earth. Just before he went into space, his father wrote this wonderful letter.
And I venture to predict that after all the huzzas have been uttered and the public acclaim is but a memory, you will derive the greatest satisfaction from the serene knowledge that you have discovered new truths. You can say to yourself: this I saw, this I experienced, this I know to be the truth. This experience is a precious thing; it is known to all researchers, in whatever field of endeavour, who have ventured into the unknown and have discovered new truths.
Comet time lapse
A short time lapse of Comet Lovejoy appearing in the pre-dawn sky over the Andes. Wait for the last sequence…it’s the best one.
Lovejoy was only discovered in Nov 2011 by an amateur astronomer. (via ★interesting)
Amazing HD time lapse taken from the International Space Station
Perhaps you’ve seen the recent videos of the Earth at night taken from the ISS…they were a bit rough. This? This is five minutes of gorgeous HD:
You can watch it embedded here but what you’ll really want to do is head over to Vimeo so that you can watch it in fullscreen HD. (via colossal)
Earth orbit time lapse
Time lapse movie composed of photographs taken from the International Space Station as it orbits the Earth at night.
This movie begins over the Pacific Ocean and continues over North and South America before entering daylight near Antarctica. Visible cities, countries and landmarks include (in order) Vancouver Island, Victoria, Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, San Fransisco, Los Angeles. Phoenix. Multiple cities in Texas, New Mexico and Mexico. Mexico City, the Gulf of Mexico, the Yucatan Peninsula, Lightning in the Pacific Ocean, Guatemala, Panama, Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, and the Amazon. Also visible is the earths ionosphere (thin yellow line) and the stars of our galaxy.
(via stellar)
Solar eclipse…by Saturn
The Cassini spacecraft caught this remarkable photo of Saturn eclipsing the Sun in 2006.
Click through for the big image and the massive image. If you look close can see the Earth in the image, for reals!
Flowing water on Mars?
From late last week, news that NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has found possible evidence that there’s flowing water on Mars.
Dark, finger-like features appear and extend down some Martian slopes during late spring through summer, fade in winter, and return during the next spring. Repeated observations have tracked the seasonal changes in these recurring features on several steep slopes in the middle latitudes of Mars’ southern hemisphere.
“The best explanation for these observations so far is the flow of briny water,” said Alfred McEwen of the University of Arizona, Tucson. McEwen is the principal investigator for the orbiter’s High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) and lead author of a report about the recurring flows published in Thursday’s edition of the journal Science.
A history of the Space Shuttle in pictures
From earlier this month at In Focus, a photographic look at the “dizzying inspiration and crushing disappointment” of NASA’s Space Shuttle program. (via @robinsloan)
Year-long Moon timelapse
This is a timelapse animation of the surprisingly wobbly Moon over a period of one year.
Note: this is an animation, not a timelapse video…i.e. there’s CG involved. More info here.
Rough space
Space photography and videography all looks pretty much the same: high contrast, lots of black backgrounds, smooth, and often sterile. Designer Chris Abbas took a bunch of photos from the Cassini Mission (to Saturn) and made them into something that is definitely not your usual NASA video.
(via stellar)
Tour of Earth from orbit
This is a wonderful seven-minute HD video tour of Earth using video shot from orbit.
Look at this neat picture of Great Salt Lake in Utah. And the variation in color? That’s due to an almost a complete blockage of the circulation of the lake by a trestle for a railroad that crosses from one side to the other. It stops the circulation and things get a little bit saltier and certainly saltier at the north end of the lake.
Never knew that about the Great Salt Lake, but you can see the effect on Google Maps as well. (via ★interesting)
Night sky timelapse…with a twist!
This will be the hundredth night sky timelapse video you’ve seen but probably the first one that shows the Earth rotating instead of the stars.
Best viewed full screen. (via stellar)
SETI project on hiatus
Due to a lack of funding, SETI Institute shut down the radio telescope array they were using to look for evidence of extraterrestrial life outside our solar system.
The timing couldn’t be worse, say SETI scientists. After millenniums of musings, this spring astronomers announced that 1,235 new possible planets had been observed by Kepler, a telescope on a space satellite. They predict that dozens of these planets will be Earth-sized — and some will be in the “habitable zone,” where the temperatures are just right for liquid water, a prerequisite of life as we know it.
(via ★genmon)
Saturn fly-by video
There is no 3-D CGI involved in this amazing Saturn fly-by video…it’s made from thousands of hi-res photographs taken by the Cassini orbiter.
Wait for the full-frame full-color video starting at around 1:00. (thx, sam)
Moon cave!
Indian lunar orbiter Chandrayaan-1 has discovered a large cave on the Moon. Aside from the hey, cool, there’s a cave on the Moon factor, the other big feature of the cave is its constant and temperate temperature.
Temperatures on the moon swing wildly, from a maximum of 262 degrees Fahrenheit to a minimum of -292. The cave holds steady at a (relatively) comfortable -4, since the moon’s weather can’t penetrate its 40-foot-thick wall. It could also protect astronauts from “hazardous radiations, micro-meteoritic impacts,” and dust storms, according to paper published by the journal Current Science.
(via @juliandibbell)
Sex in outer space
From a paper published in the Journal of Cosmology entitled Sex On Mars: Pregnancy, Fetal Development, and Sex In Outer Space:
Humans are sexual beings and it can be predicted that male and female astronauts will engage in sexual relations during a mission to Mars, leading to conflicts and pregnancies and the first baby born on the Red Planet. Non-human primate and astronaut sexual behavior is reviewed including romantic conflicts involving astronauts who flew aboard the Space Shuttle and in simulated missions to Mars, and men and women team members in the Antarctic. The possibilities of pregnancy and the effects of gravity and radiation on the testes, ovaries, menstruation, and developing fetus, including a child born on Mars, are discussed. What may lead to and how to prevent sexual conflicts, sexual violence, sexual competition, and pregnancy are detailed. Recommendations include the possibility that male and female astronauts on a mission to Mars, should fly in separate space craft.
NASA study of arsenic-based life flawed?
Redfield blogged a scathing attack on Saturday. Over the weekend, a few other scientists took to the Internet as well. Was this merely a case of a few isolated cranks? To find out, I reached out to a dozen experts on Monday. Almost unanimously, they think the NASA scientists have failed to make their case. “It would be really cool if such a bug existed,” said San Diego State University’s Forest Rohwer, a microbiologist who looks for new species of bacteria and viruses in coral reefs. But, he added, “none of the arguments are very convincing on their own.” That was about as positive as the critics could get. “This paper should not have been published,” said Shelley Copley of the University of Colorado.
(thx, anil)
Planetary sci-fi
Matt Webb of BERG shares some of his favorite sci-fi about each of the planets. And the Sun (sort of)…no solar system sci-fi list would be complete without a mention of Sunshine.
In 2057, the Sun is dying, and the Earth is freezing. So the ship Icarus 2 goes on a mission to reignite it with a massive bomb. This is the movie Sunshine, and if you get a chance to see it, watch it on a big screen. The crew themselves watch the Sun close-up, awestruck, from a view-port the exact dimensions of a movie screen, so the Sun fills your picture too and you spend half the film bathing in powerful yellow light. Like some kind of church.
Although I didn’t, Matt, appreciate the diss of Pluto. Never forget, my friend.
Spacelog
Spacelog is taking the original NASA transcripts from early space missions and snazzing them up with a more compelling presentation. Here’s the famous moment in the Apollo 13 mission:
Houston, we’ve had a problem. We’ve had a MAIN B BUS UNDERVOLT.
Wonderful stuff. The site is looking for help with getting more missions transcripts up…go here and scroll down to “Getting involved without technical knowledge”. Although I think they’d get more people involved if they didn’t just dump people into GitHub. (thx, the 50 people who sent this to me this morning)
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