Really Rocket Science

One of my Brooklyn buds sent me this from the Asbury Park Press:

It fell from the sky! Mystery object hits Freehold Township house

Posted by the Asbury Park Press on 01/3/07
BY JAMES A. QUIRK

FREEHOLD TOWNSHIP — The Federal Aviation Administration is currently investigating the origin of what appears to be a lump of metal that fell from the sky and through the roof of a home on Kentucky Way last night.

The metal object is about the size of a golf ball and weighs nearly as much as a can of soup, authorities said. Nobody was injured when the oblong object, weighing more than 13 ounces, crashed into the home.

Police received a call Wednesday morning that the metal object had punched a hole in the roof of a single-family home and damaged tiles on a bathroom floor below.

The object was heavier than a usual metal object of that size, said police Lt. Robert Brightman. He added that investigators with the Monmouth County Office of Emergency Management this morning brought in Geiger counters to determine if the object posed any radiological hazard to the homeowners or responders, and the object was found not to be radioactive.

Brightman would not immediately disclose the address or the names of the people who lived at the home, other than to say that a couple and their adult son live there. He said a man who lived at the home found the object at about 9 p.m. Tuesday after returning from work and hearing from his mother that something had crashed through the roof a few hours before.

The Federal Aviation Administration sent a team to the home this afternoon to check whether the object came from an airplane, said spokeswoman Arlene Murray.

"We won’t know what it is until our inspectors have a chance to look at it,” she said. If the investigators cannot identify the object on sight, it may be sent for testing, she said.

Meanwhile, over Colorado, there was a spectacular meteor shower. Fox31 has the video.

Got a spare $80,000 and a dream of putting your own satellite into space?

Well, you’ve come to the right place. A recent article from News.com showcases the exciting CubeSat program, based at Stanford and California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, which allows students and companies from a around the world to launch tiny satellites for cut-rate prices without the bureaucratic and logistical hurdles they might experience if they tried to launch them on their own.

For around $40,000 for development and $40,000 for launch, the CubeSat program has put dozens of one kilogram, ten-centimeter cubed satellites 240-360 miles up in the heavens. Says one of the program’s principle founders Prof. Bob Twiggs:

"I kind of look at this as the Apple II. The ordinary person can get something into space. We don’t know what the ultimate use is, but look what happened to the Internet.”

So what are these mini satellites doing other than helping schools and individuals claim their own chunk of Space? Well, Stanford launch a three-cubed CubeSat in 2003, called QuakeSat, which monitors the seismic energy released over faults which could be used to predict earthquakes… a useful device if there ever was one for quake-prone California.

Students around the world have been using the CubeSat program to gain a working knowledge of spacecraft design that they might not otherwise have the opportunity to engage in. University students in Columbia and Romania are currently in the process of putting together their own CubeSat, as are high school students at San Jose’s Independence High.

While no word is out yet about how you could go about building your own CubeSat with the declining price of space technology, here’s $5 saying you’ll find a CubeSat in a box of Cracker Jacks in the next twenty years.

The elusive planet, as Mercury is sometimes known, will be less elusive in the coming weeks. Space.com reports:  

Often cited as the most difficult of the five brightest naked-eye planets to see, because it’s the planet closest to the Sun, Mercury never strays too far from the Sun’s vicinity in our sky.

Mercury is called an "inferior planet" because its orbit is nearer to the Sun than the Earth’s.  Therefore, it always appears from our vantagepoint to be in the same general direction as the Sun. Thus relatively few people have set eyes on it; there is even a rumor that the great Polish astronomer, Copernicus, never saw it.  Yet it’s not really hard to see.  You simply must know when and where to look, and find a clear horizon.

And during these next two weeks we will be presented with an excellent opportunity to view Mercury in the early morning dawn sky [map].

In fact, if you’ve been an early riser this past week, it’s quite possible you might have stumbled across Mercury on your own.  Since Nov. 20, it has been rising at least 90 minutes before sunrise, which is also just about the same time that morning twilight is beginning.  If you scan low along the east-southeast horizon about 45 minutes before sunrise, Mercury has been visible as a distinctly bright, yellowish-orange "star." 

The best views of Mercury, however, are reserved for this weekend, as Mercury will be rising more than 100 minutes before the Sun.  This is even before the break of dawn, so for a short while at least, Mercury will be visible against a completely dark sky. 

Early to bed and early to rise — will, if nothing else, grant you a rare opportunity for a good glimpse of the planet. So get to bed early this week!

A prediction of when to watch for the Leonids this year, from the Planetary Society:

Viewers along the northeastern coast of the United States and Canada, as well as people in Europe and western Africa might get to see a possible "outburst" of as many as 100-600 meteors per hour. This spike in activity is predicted for 11:45 p.m. – 1:33 a.m. EST on November 18-19 (4:45 – 6:33 UT on November 19).

Ok, honestly, what could be cooler than having your name — yes, YOUR name — on a future piece of space junk? Well, I can probably think of a few things (a free donut, a good massage, etc.), but having your name blasted in to space does seem pretty cool.

If you agree, you should check out MIT and Georgia Tech’s Your Name In Space project, which aims to put "America’s most ambitious student spacecraft" up in the sky with the "tax-deductible" support of people looking for their "space in space". The Boson Globe had the story yesterday, but the project website gets a little more specific:

"In 2010, a small unmanned research spacecraft designed by students will launch into Earth’s orbit. The science on board will help pave the way for humankind to explore our solar system. We invite you to participate in this landmark mission by uploading content to be printed on our spacecraft…

Choose a location on the outside of the spacecraft and get pictures of your content photographed in space. Choose a location inside the return vehicle, and after five weeks in orbit we’ll return to you the actual piece of spacecraft hardware which carried your image into orbit."

The best part? Even if you can’t pony up the cold hard cash (a donation as small as $35 gets you a picture of your name or image on the craft before the flight, $250 gets you piece after reentry), you can still send your name up into the heavens. While financial supporters get a photograph of their name/logo/etc. in space or even a piece of the spacecraft following the mission, anyone can provide their name and information and have it encoded on to a DVD that will hitch a ride on the craft during its journey. Sure, it might not be a trip aboard the ISS, but, for now, its the next closest (and far cheaper) alternative.

The unusual variable star V838 Monocerotis (V838 Mon) continues to puzzle astronomers. This previously inconspicuous star underwent an outburst early in 2002, during which it temporarily increased in brightness to become 600,000 times more luminous than our Sun. Light from this sudden eruption is illuminating the interstellar dust surrounding the star, producing the most spectacular "light echo" in the history of astronomy.

The image above was recently captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, which is in need of repair, according to this (among others)  CBC report:

NASA officials met Friday to decide whether to risk a space shuttle flight on a mission to repair the Hubble space telescope.

Michael Griffin, the agency administrator, is scheduled to announce Tuesday at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., whether the mission will take place.

NASA says a mission to repair the Hubble telescope carries a higher risk.
(NASA/Associated Press) Although the space agency hasn’t said anything officially, University of Wisconsin-Madison astronomer Jay Gallagher, a member of a science team responsible for a camera in the Hubble telescope, says the signs are promising.

The 16-year-old telescope has been repaired four times since its launch in 1990. A fifth repair mission was cancelled after the 2003 space shuttle Columbia tragedy that killed seven astronauts.

NASA officials decided to cancel any future repairs of Hubble, saying it was a matter of shuttle safety. If a spacecraft heading to the telescope encountered a problem, there would be no safety net, since the astronauts would not be able to reach the International Space Station from Hubble’s orbit.

If Tuesday’s announcement gives the go-ahead for the mission, it could prolong Hubble’s ability to capture some of the most spectacular images of the universe well into the next decade. If the repair doesn’t take place, the telescope will deteriorate by 2009 or 2010.

That’s the question many are asking when they see this stunning new image of the merging Antennae galaxies taken by the Hubble Space Telescope:

Reuters explains: 

A seemingly violent collision of two galaxies is in fact a fertile marriage that has birthed billions of new stars, and an image released on Tuesday gives astronomers their best view yet.

The new image of the Antennae galaxies allows astronomers working with the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope to distinguish between new stars and the star clusters that form them.

Most of these clusters, created in the collision of the two galaxies, will disperse within 10 million years but about 100 of the largest will grow into "globular clusters" — large groups of stars found in many galaxies, including our own Milky Way.

The Antennae galaxies, 68 million light years from Earth, began to fuse 500 million years ago.

The image serves as a preview for the Milky Way’s likely collision with the nearby Andromeda Galaxy, about 6 billion years from now.

So if you’ve ever gotten the feeling that everything was heading towards a tremendous smash-up — well, you’re right.

You can zoom in on the above image at the HubbleSite. 

MSNBC reports on the most recent Hubble exoplanet discovery:

WASHINGTON – A recently spied planet orbits so close to its star that a new year comes every 10 hours.

Called SWEEPS-10, the planet belongs to a newfound class of zippy exoplanets called ultra-short-period planets that have orbits of less than a day.

The Hubble Space Telescope recently spotted five ultra-short-period planets, all about the size of Jupiter, in a crowded star field near the galactic bulge of our Milky Way galaxy as part of an exoplanet survey called the Sagittarius Window Eclipsing Extrasolar Planet Search, or SWEEPS. A total of 16 planet candidates were found, all with relatively short orbital periods…

"These are the farthest planets detected so far around some of the faintest stars," study leader Kailash Sahu of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Maryland told reporters at a NASA press conference.

Extrapolated to the entire galaxy, the Hubble results suggest the Milky Way contains at least 6 billion Jupiter-sized planets, researchers say.

The findings are detailed in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature.

More info and images can be found on the HubbleSite.

The big astronomy news today, of course, is the award of the Nobel Prize in Physics to American physicists John C. Mather and George F. Smoot "for their discovery of the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation"  — or, more popularly, "cosmic ripples."

 "Cosmologists have praised the discovery by Americans John Mather and George Smoot of "cosmic ripples" as the greatest discovery of all time," according to SABC News.

The Boston Globe has more on this "inspiring example of scientific investigation and progress": 

In 1989, the Big Bang theory was backed up by striking corroborative evidence. NASA’s COBE satellite (for Cosmic Background Explorer) measured background radiation and helped scientists calculate tiny temperature variations that theories had predicted a big bang would produce.

These measurements “marked the inception of cosmology as a precise science," not just a theoretical one, Nobel Prize officials said in a statement announcing that this year’s physics prize goes to NASA scientist John C. Mather, who oversaw the COBE work, and to University of California/Berkeley physicist George F. Smoot, who worked on the temperature measurements….

Even more than honoring scientists, the Nobel Prize awards science itself: the work of forming and testing hypotheses that leads to abandoning old ideas and settling on new conclusions and, inevitably, new questions. It is often a team effort, the work of more than 1,000 people supported the COBE satellite. It is work that relies on the seemingly outrageous ideas of insightful individuals who frequently outrage establishment thinking and sometimes tear it down and rebuild it.

(The Globe also has a good story on Smoot’s days as a prankster at MIT.) 

Be sure to check out NASA’s COBE satellite page for details on the satellite and its three instruments, which each yielded a major discovery in cosmology — but which also raised a number of questions that the European Space Agency hopes to answer with the 2008 launch of its Planck satellite.

Ever wanted to have your own Observatory? Stargazing enthusiast Thomas Campbell did, so he created one and put it up in his own backyard, as seen below. Sure, it looks like a simple 2-3 man dome tent, but it’s actually has all of the features amateur astronomer might want and for under $40.

Campbell reports that two main reasons prompted him to build his observatory:

"Several years ago, I (not knowing any better) purchased a 60mm refractor (a Kmart Focus model) at a yard sale. The main tube has pretty good optics and the 20mm eyepiece (35x magnification) isn’t too bad, but the other eyepieces are only fair at best, and the wooden mount is pretty wobbly in even the slightest of breezes.

The most important reason, however, was light pollution in my backyard. I live in a small town, but live on a highway (with a lot of streetlights) and across the street from a county hospital (lots of light pollution there!). Even so, by cupping my hands around my eyes, on good nights of seeing, I can still make out the Milky Way, so the skies are still fairly dark.

I had found an article on the internet about how to make a light blocker out of PVC pipe and heavy-ply trash bags, but with the light coming from all around me, I would need about a dozen of them, and the amount of time needed putting all of those up would seriously cut into my observing time."

Not surprisingly, considering the tents ability to block light and wind, the $40 observatory seems to be working out for Campbell pretty well, saying it has,

"…allowed me to view things with my scope that I didn’t think was possible before. For instance, on nights of good seeing, I can now make out all four of the main stars of the Trapezium in the Orion Nebula. Before, I was only able to make out the three brightest stars at best. Overall, I believe I can now see objects about a half-magnitude fainter than I was able to before using the observatory."

Not bad for $30! Check out Campbell’s DIY observatory site for more information and maybe even check out some of the other projects he’s done ranging from building an astronomical red-dot finder out of a BB-gun site to constructing a ply-wood tripod & mount. Awesome stuff!