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Welcome Home Discovery!
by The 14-day mission to the International Space Station ended as Discovery touched down on the 15,000-foot landing strip at 11:15 a.m Saturday morning in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
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When We Left Earth
by Do you know about the Discovery Channel show called "When We Left Earth" ? It celebrates 50 years of NASA missions, and looks like a fun and informative series. Somethign for Sunday nights. Also, tonight there's a live chat with one of the show's creators.
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Pluto's a Plutoid!
Ever wonder what Pluto is since it stopped being a planet? A dwarf planet, you say. Well, as of Tuesday, there's a new classification. It is a Plutoid.
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At Last - GLAST!
The GLAST observatory has been launched today. It is designed to study gamma rays coming from space. There's an exciting time ahead, with this new window on a range of highly energetic phenomena happening in the universe. We may learn a great deal about astrophysics and cosmology. Stay tuned.
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What Goes Down Must Come Up
by The earth emits almost exactly as much energy as it receives. This is not a coincidence.
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Safe to Proceed
by After some tense moments involving a sniff test that identified a "short circuit," the Phoenix mission passed the "safe to proceed" review.
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Stephen Colbert bows to our microbe overlords
by Finally, someone acknowledges the superiority of microbial life...
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Phoenix's Photo Finish
The Phoenix Mars Lander has begun its tour of the Martian polar region and already we've seen some amazing photos of the planet's surface, but my favorite images (thus far) were snapped right before the lander touched down.
Big (Martian) Science Ahead
The Phoenix has landed! Congratulations to the team at JPL on the first powered landing in over 30 years. This plus the scientific surveying that lies ahead make yesterday's landing a remarkable achievement.
Will She Stick the Landing!?
It is almost time. The Phoenix craft (launched last year) is approaching Mars, and later today it is due to land. The landing is going to be scary since the craft has to slow down from 12500 miles per hour to make a soft landing using the atmosphere (friction of entry, then a parachute) and then blast rockets to slow itself down at the very end. All this in a matter of minutes! With any of these steps going wrong, the craft goes splat on the surface of Mars. Needless to say, everyone is nervous.
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Seven Minutes of Terror
Today is the day the NASA/JPL Phoenix Mars Lander Mission culminates in a terrifying seven minute descent to the red planet. Hence the title of this blog entry. Before you get on my case for indulging my Hollywood roots using words like "terror," let me remind you that JPL coined the phrase and they've put together a short video about the mission that plays like a summer blockbuster movie trailer.
Jupiter's New Visitor
Jupiter has a new red spot! There's a lot to learn about planetary climate change here on earth, and so other examples are worth studying. Why are there new spots appearing on Jupiter of late?
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Open House at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Ever wanted to see where those wonderful spaceships we send out there are designed and assembled? Wanted to talk to the scientists and engineers who do that? Well, this weekend you can do it quite easily. Go to JPL!
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Carolyn Porco on Titan
Carolyn Porco gave an excellent talk at TED last year. I recommend it. You'll learn about some of the wonderful things that were learned about the Saturn system using Cassini and Huygens. She focuses on the moon Titan, which can teach us a lot about ourselves.
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Galaxy Bumper Cars
Galaxies are, quite often, far from the safe places that they are usually portrayed as. They're not just the places where the universe keeps its stars. Among other things they've been seen getting up to, they can collide and merge with each other. NASA recently released some images of some of these events...
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Taking Precocious Too Far
A famous mathematical thorem about the number of colors needed to cover a map has been solved since, but I took it up seriously in my childhood. Or so I thought. A cautionary tale for those who think they "know better"...
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A Cosmic Salute to Arthur C. Clarke?
As Damon pointed out earlier, the great writer Arthur C. Clarke died on Wednesday of last week. Did you know that on that same day, there was a huge celestial event? Coincidence, or the universe's way of paying tribute?
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Rings around Rhea
The Cassini probe has found evidence of a new ring system! Not about another planet (Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune all have rings, by the way), but about a moon of another planet, Rhea, which orbits Saturn. This opens up yet another new avenue in the exciting field of planetary science.
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Junk Science
So when we left off in my last entry we were talking about shooting satellites out of orbit and the ulterior motives of our government. Oh, and we were trying to figure out what this all had to do with DIY month here on the WIRED Science website. I think I figured out the, umm, correlation.
Target Practice
So the other day the Pentagon made the decision to shoot down an ailing spy satellite. Why exactly would they go through all the trouble of firing a missile (that costs millions of dollars) at what amounted to a school bus-sized piece of space junk? And what does it have to do with DIY month? Answers and conspiracy theories abound after the jump.
Paper Geniuses
by Give me an A4 sheet of white paper and you might get a few doodles, a paper airplane, or a snowflake-cum-doily if I'm feeling particularly creative. But for some folks, a simple sheet of paper can evolve into a mind-melting trip into another dimension.
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Space Exploration's Beginning In the USA
Today is the 50th anniversary of the day the US replied to the world-changing Sputnik launch by the USSR almost four months earlier. In some sense, the space race began in earnest with this launch of the craft called Explorer. It also marked the beginning of spacecraft-driven scientific discoveries about the world beyond and our own planet earth.
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44 Orders of Magnitude
What a ridiculously large number 44 orders of magnitude is! Yet that is the span of science; the number of the smallest subatomic scale phenomena that we are interested in that span the largest cosmological scale.
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Images from Mercury
NASA's website for the MESSENGER spacecraft has a growing bank of lovely images of Mercury, recently sent. There are more on the way. So go and have a good look at the solar system's closest body to the sun.
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Where do our radio waves go?
I was reading on the internet that our oldest radio broadcasts of the 1930's have already traveled past 100,000 stars. Which got me to wondering...What happens to these radio waves? Do they degrade? Would it actually be possible to listen to these broadcasts if someone theoretically set up a massive receiver like the one at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in The Quiet Zone segment?
A Cloud Called Smith
There's quite a substantial cosmic collision due to happen. It is between our very own galaxy and a cloud of gas called the Smith Cloud. It's due to happen soon, by cosmological standards, but rather a while away by human standards. There are all sorts of collisions happening in our universe, near and far, fast and slow, always interesting, and often with a lot to teach us. More locally, there's also been an update on the collision of an asteroid with mars that was possible at the end of this month.
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Comets and Meteors for the New Year
The year starts out with the return of some familiar objects in the sky. Comet Tuttle returns, comet Holmes is still putting on a show,and the Quadrantid meteor shower had quite a peak this morning.
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Film, Rockets & New Years Eve
Today there are seemingly endless countdown clocks, all ticking off time toward disparate events. There's the countdown to the 2010 Olympics, the countdown to George Bush's days left in office, the countdown to Keanu Reeves' birthday, and even Life countdown clocks if you want a reminder of how many hours you have left before the proverbial bell tolls. So since tomorrow signals the world's largest en masse countdown, I've been wondering just when this idea of a public countdown began?
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A Big Bang for 2008?
There's an asteroid on its way to a close approach to the planet Mars. New data on its trajectory have helped scientists announce today that the chances of a collision have increased from 1 in 75 to 1 in 25. Happily, there's quite a bit of Earth-originated traffic in the Mars area these days, and so if the collision does happen, we're bound to learn a lot of exciting new science.
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Earth as Alien Planet
The field of astronomy and planetary science devoted to the study of planets in other star systems is a young and exciting one. Soon, it is hoped, we will be able to learn about planets not so different from ours, but orbiting about other stars. Will there be life on those other planets? Will there be intelligent life? To learn that will require detection tools currently unavailable, but currently being developed. In preparing for such remarkable telescopes, some scientists have been wondering about what an alien species (perhaps on one of those very planets we might find one day) might see if looking back at our very own planet earth? What can they learn about our planet using telescopes of the sort we might build soon?
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The Sirens of Titan
Sometimes it isn't obvious why scientists study the things we study. Usually we have more reasons than meets the eye. A study of one of Saturn's moons, for instance, has managed to shed a great deal of light on the climate of the earth.
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A Black Hole Death Ray?
Another supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy makes the news. This time, this sort of violent activity affects a neighbouring galaxy. And it's been caught on film. While a great story in itself, showing the immense power of black holes, another interesting story that lurks is how we went from black holes being exotic solutions to exotic equations to the commonplace objects that they are in today's astrophysics.
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The Universe, on TV
WIRED Science is not the only science show that launched on television this year. A number of channels are making new science-themed TV shows, with others under discussion. This is good news for everyone! The second season of the History Channel's new show "The Universe" has begun airing, and there's some fun stuff coming up.
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Warped Ambitions?
I noticed recently that there was a conference, hosted by the British Interplanetary Society, about research on things like warp drive. You know, the means by which they zip around space in Star Trek. Is this crazy stuff? Where does the science begin and the science fiction end? Current research shows that there are certain important obstacles in the way of building a warp engine, even in principle. Can we get around them?
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Germs....in......SPACE!
What effect does space travel have on bacteria? A recently published study investigates the question.
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New Possibilities for Black Holes
There's been a recent discovery of an unusual black hole. It is about 16 times the mass of our sun. Such large black holes resulting from the collapse of ordinary stars have hitherto been unknown. It doesn't fit well with current theories about how these processes work. This presents an important and exciting puzzle for Astrophysicists. There's evidently more going on than previously thought.
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Deep Impact: Sputnik
Today is the 50th Anniversary of the USSR's launch of the satellite Sputnik. The impact of this event on our culture should not be underestimated. America was scared, shocked, and panicked. The full meaning of the event was not clear to everyone, but the idea that "the Soviets were ahead" did not sit well, and it spurred a huge investment in science and technology - including recognizing the importance of better science education in schools. It must have been an amazing time. The culture was changed forever.
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