Really Rocket Science

You’ve heard it since high school. Staring into the sun is bad for your eye. Fortunately, you now have a satellite to do it for you, and even take pictures. I happened across this MetaFilter thread about the TRACE, the Transitional Region and Coronal Explorer, and discovered a treasure trove of photographs shot by the satellite. Kinda like this one.

Built and launched in April of 1998, on a mission to enable scientists to "study the connections between fine-scale magnetic fields and the associated plasma structures on the Sun in a quantitative way by observing the photosphere" (whatever that means) the satellite isn’t exactly new. But it took its millionth picture of the sun back in October of 1999. So it’s a great source of photographs that make great wallpaper for your desktop your IM profile, as well as movies that just make interesting viewing.

I posted earlier about Phil’s prediction that the earth probably wouldn’t have a date with a comet last month. And it looks like he was right. There is, however, a YouTube video showing what it might have looked like had Phil been right.

Okay, it’s probably not exactly like it would have been (the meteor in the CGI video looks much bigger than I think the theoretical comet would have been), but the video is still worth a look.

Being mono-lingual, I can’t tell what the announcer is saying. Can anyone translate? And how accurate is this video anyway?

Via TechEBLog.

Forget hurricane season. The really big storms to watch this summer are out of this world.

Specifically, they’re on Jupiter, where the Great Red Spot– a massive, centuries-old storm of 350 mph winds that is twice as big as the Earth — and Oval BA, aka "Red Jr.," — a six-year-old storm that is "only" the size of one Measly earth — are expected to brush against each other on or about the Fourth of July. Fireworks may fly, Space.com reports:

 "There won’t be a head-on collision," [says Amy Simon-Miller, an astronomer at Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.] "The Great Red Spot is not going to ‘eat’ Oval BA or anything like that."

However, the storms’ outer bands are expected to pass close to one another and it’s anybody’s guess what will happen when they do.

This isn’t the first time that such an encounter has happened. In fact, the two storms typically pass each other every two years or so. Similar encounters happened in 2002 and 2004, but they were very anti-climactic. Aside from some "roughing" around the edges, both storms came out unscathed.

This time might be different, however, said Simon-Miller. Red Jr. could revert to its original color and change from red to white. From 2000 to 2005, Red Jr. was actually white and no different form the many other small "white ovals" circling the planet.

But in 2006, astronomers noticed a change: a red vortex formed inside the storm, the same color as the powerful Great Red Spot. Scientists believe the color change was a sign that the storm was intensifying.

Scientists think the Great Red Spot could push Oval BA toward a southern jet stream on the planet during their upcoming encounter. The jet stream blows against Oval BA’s counterclockwise rotation and could slow its spin, possibly changing the storm’s color back to white.

The color of the Great Red Spot itself is a mystery. According to one popular theory, the storm dredges up material from deep inside Jupiter’s atmosphere, lofting it above the highest clouds where ultraviolet rays from the Sun turn color-changing compounds, called "chromophores," red.

Reading about a new satellite in New Scientist, set to launch in 2007, that could help us study the 4^th dimension by analyzing gamma-ray bursts:

Charles Keeton, a physicist at Rutgers University in New Jersey, U.S.,  and colleague Arlie Petters at Duke University in North Carolina, U.S., have calculated how many of these tiny black holes should exist – and how they might be detected – according to an offshoot of string theory.
 
The theory they use, called the Randall-Sundrum braneworld model, proposes that the 3D universe we live in is floating within a larger universe with an extra spatial dimension.
 
They based their calculations on black holes that each contain only the mass of a small asteroid. Assuming these objects make up 1% of the mass of nearby dark matter – whose existence can only be detected through its gravitational effects on normal matter – the team says there could be several thousand black holes in the solar system. And not only that: "The nearest ones would lie well inside Pluto’s orbit," says Keeton.
 

Even NASA is calling this “extreme physics,” which has a nice ring to it. 

We’ve covered this type of  topic before – we like anything having to do with anti-gravity, anti-matter and the “theory of everything.”

Consider this your mid-week 70s flashback. Science Daily reports that the two Voyager spacecraft are still sending back useful data to NASA scientists nearly 30 years after their launch — and they’re providing clues to better understanding both the heliosphere and the direction of our solar system through local space:

 The heliosphere, generated by the Sun, is sort of the cocoon in which the solar system rides. It has been suspected for several years that it is not spherical but more egg shaped. Voyager 1 recently reached one edge and it is estimated it will pass into interstellar space at about 12.4 billion miles from the Sun. It was recently announced that Voyager 2 has reached its more southerly edge, sooner than expected. It is now believed it will reach interstellar space at about 10.5 billion miles. This reveals that the heliosphere is not a sphere after all, but is more of a comet shape.

According to Cal Tech’s Ed Stone, the former director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a Voyager chief scientist, the shape of the bubble is determined by what is pressing on the solar system from the outside, meaning the shape and force of interstellar gases. That is one explanation. Another put forth by Walter Cruttenden of the Binary Research Institute is that local gases are fairly uniform and the shape derives from the trajectory of the solar system through local space — possibly in its orbit around a companion star. While this latter explanation is far more speculative, it is not unlikely that local interstellar gases are relatively homogeneous and therefore the shape of the heliosphere may be at least partially due to motion of the solar system.

 

Amazingly, both Voyager spacecraft are expected to remain active for several more decades. Which is more than can be said for many other artifacts of the 70s. 

What’s that in the sky? A bird? A plane? Well, no. It’s a comet, but nothing you need to worry about according to Phil over at Bad Astronomy.

Well, today is the day, once again, that the world won’t end. I’m shocked, shocked, that the comet fragment predicted to hit in the Atlantic causing a seismic event and an ensuing tidal wave hasn’t materialized.

Of course, the day’s not over yet. But I’m pretty sure how this will turn out.

Chris has been blogging the story of whether or not a comet will hit the earth today, and is pretty sure it won’t. He’s updated his post about his Sirus Radio interview on the subject with more than enough links to make an effective case. 

But keep one eye on the sky today just in case, will ya?

Via Google Maps Mania comes this very cool mashup:

South Florida newspaper Florida Today has built a Google Maps mashup of space launch sites at Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral. It includes a database of every launch since the dawn of the space age, shuttle and rocket launch video and images, and video tours inside facilities people usually don’t get a chance to see guided by its space reporters. It also has an enhanced 3D Google Earth version you can download as well 

The standard 2-D tour is interesting, but if you want an amazing tour experience you’ll want a (warning: highly addictive) copy of Google Earth (available here) to view the mashup.

In either version, you can click on various launch pads and browse photos, videos, and a database of launches, and generally while away a good part of a Tuesday at work.

Some of you may be familiar with a rumor that’s been circulating various apocalyptic astronomy blogs: that fragments of the comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann will impact the Atlantic Ocean this Thursday, thus ruining the Memorial Day weekend plans for millions of people (but perhaps leading to a bounceback for Posiedon’s flagging box office receipts).

Phil Plait over at the Bad Astronomy Blog has been busy debunking the myth, pointing out that, among other things, the closest the disintegrating comet is coming to earth is, oh, about 5.5 million miles.

Hardly the makings of a disaster film, much less a reason to cancel a trip to the Jersey Shore.

In any case — if you want to have a clever astronomical answer to the watercooler question of "what are you doing for Memorial Day weekend?", Phil has a collection of blog posts he’s written on the topic. And the photos he’s collected of the comet are worth checking out.

Astronomers have released the largest-ever atlas of the cosmos — and it’s coming soon to the world wide web.

The Royal Astronomical Society reports:

Traditionally, astronomers have needed to take a "spectrum" of each galaxy to determine [the distance between galaxies], splitting its light into many components to reveal sharp features with which to measure the amount of redshifting. This requires a time-consuming, individual observation of each galaxy.

The new cosmic map has been constructed using a novel technique focusing on a special class of galaxy whose intrinsic colour is very well known. For these ‘Luminous Red Galaxies’ researchers can measure the amount of colour distortion, and hence the approximate distance of the galaxy, just by looking at digital images of the sky, without the need to obtain a full spectrum.

What is most striking is that the new study and atlas have revealed that "the ordinary matter our bodies are made of and that we experience in everyday life only accounts for a few percent of the total cosmic budget:"

Our Universe contains billions of galaxies of all shapes and sizes. In recent years astronomers have used increasingly large surveys to map out the positions of these galaxies, stepping their way out into the Cosmos.

The new cosmic map unveiled today is the largest to date — a three-dimensional atlas of over a million galaxies spread over a distance of more than 5 billion light years. The findings confirm that we live in a Universe filled with mysterious dark matter and dark energy.

"We have analyzed the patterns in this map and discovered waves of structure over a billion light years across," said Dr. Chris Blake of the University of British Columbia, principal author of the study. "These waves were generated billions of years ago and have been vastly stretched in size by the expanding Universe."

"Indian and U.S. space agencies Tuesday signed an agreement to put two U.S.-made scientific instruments on board of Chandrayaan-I, India’s first unmanned moon explorer, in 2008, Indo-Asian News Service reported:

NASA will put one mini synthetic aperture radar (Mini SAR) and moon mineralogy mapper (M3) on board of Chandrayaan-I, according to the agreement.

"The objective of SAR is to detect water in the permanently shadowed areas of lunar polar regions, while M3 will map the minerals on the lunar surface and study its characterization," [Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) chairperson G. Madhavan] Nair said.

Chandrayaan-I will be launched from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre (SDSC) at Sriharikota in southeast India’s Andhra Pradesh, by an advanced polar satellite launch vehicle (PSLV), into a 240-24,000 km earth orbit and placed subsequently in a 100-km polar orbit around the moon, with its own propulsion system.