Posts tagged Space
Exploring Space
The BBC has created a monster infographic illustrating “every attempt to leave Earth’s orbit and reach a destination in extraterrestrial space – be it with probes, orbiters, rovers, or of course manned missions.”
The graphic shows successful and failed missions, country of launch origin and type of mission (eg., fly-by, rover, actual landing).
Related: How Big is Space?
Image: Screenshot, detail from Spacial Awareness: Ultimate guide to exploring space, via the BBC. Select to embiggen.
Astronaut Wrings Out Wash Cloth In Space
Astronaut Chris Hadfield of the Canadian Space Agency demonstrates water’s reaction to being wrung from a wash cloth in zero gravity. His video is a response to 10th graders in Nova Scotia who won a CSA contest because of their science experiment with surface tension in outer space.
FJP: If you check out the CSA’s YouTube channel, you’ll find more sweet cosmic how-to’s — like how to clip your nails and how to sleep in space.
And for all my fellow Trekkies out there, this one’s for you: Chris Hatfield’s space convo with William Shatner. — Krissy
The White House responds to the Death Star Petition
In response to a petition at We the People, Paul Shawcross, Chief of the Science and Space Branch at the White House Office of Management and Budget, writes:
Even though the United States doesn’t have anything that can do the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs, we’ve got two spacecraft leaving the Solar System and we’re building a probe that will fly to the exterior layers of the Sun. We are discovering hundreds of new planets in other star systems and building a much more powerful successor to the Hubble Space Telescope that will see back to the early days of the universe.
Besides, he adds, “The Administration does not support blowing up planets.”
Well played. Very well played.
Goodnight: Evening on Planet Earth
Above, satellite Suomi NPP’s view of lights on our planet. Compiled from imagery taken over the course of 22 days.
Here’s Slate:
I’ll note Suomi NPP orbits about 800 kilometers (500 miles) above the Earth and sees only a small part of the planet at any one time. This animation comprises 2.5 terabytes of data—2500 gigabytes!—that were stitched together to show the entire Earth’s face over a single rotation.
Happy Birthday, Carl Sagan!
Rest in Peace, Carl. Now, let’s watch Cosmos.
TCM to screen “Forbidden Planet” in Flordia (and Space)
If you’re going to be in Florida next month and fancy a movie, consider getting free tickets to a screening of “Forbidden Planet” and watch it with some astronauts. They’ll be on the ISS, by the way.
via the Times:
Movies are part of what NASA calls psych support, or psychological support, for astronauts aboard the space station.
One of those astronauts, the American Sunita Williams, is to introduce “Forbidden Planet” from space to the attendees at the Kennedy Space Center screening.
Curiosity’s Mars Descent in HD
Someone took all the pictures of the Mar’s descent and made a video of Curiosity’s descent to Mars.
Here’s his explanation, posted on Reddit:
For those wanting to know how I made this:
I manually added thousands of motion-tracking and adjustment points.
Here’s a screenshot of some of them
I had to go the laborious manual route because the frame-rate is too low causing the footage to jerk around too quickly for automated motion tracking to handle it.
It should definitely be noted that by its very nature interpolation creates inaccuracies. The original was 4fps, so converting to 30fps at the same speed means that you’re essentially inventing 87% of the footage.
On top of that I also had to use pan and scan techniques in order to convert it to the 1080p format but still track the interesting features.
The first few seconds were the hardest part. Accomplishing smooth movement in that section actually involved separating the heat shield from the background layer and rendering them as two independently moving layers.
I say all of this because people should understand that although I took great pains to make this accurate, you should still watch the original footage if you want a true accuracy.
(Plus, white-balancing images of a planet that we’ve never been to is quite a task :)
I used the rather meaningless phrase “ultra HD” to try and describe the fact that I actually rendered the video at enterprise-quality 1080p, 50,000 kbps (instead of the usual ~1000kbps). This meant it took the entire night to render and the filesize was hundreds of times bigger.
You probably won’t notice the difference unless you play the video at 1080p - but I think it was worth it.
Coronal Mass Ejection
On August 31, 2012 a long filament of solar material that had been hovering in the sun’s atmosphere, the corona, erupted out into space at 4:36 p.m. EDT. The coronal mass ejection, or CME, traveled at over 900 miles per second. The CME did not travel directly toward Earth, but did connect with Earth’s magnetic environment, or magnetosphere, causing aurora to appear on the night of Monday, September 3.—NASA
Image via Flickr. NASA also posted a video of the CME captured by three of its observatories.
We posted this back in spring, but in case you missed it then: How Curiosity will land on Mars, in 11 easy steps.
Plus: The Anatomy of Curiosity.
FJP: And remember, “We accurately guided this monster from 200 million miles away (that’s 7.6 million marathons). It requires better accuracy than an Olympic golfer teeing off in London and hitting a hole-in-one in Auckland, New Zealand. It will use a laser to blast rocks, a chemical nose to sniff out the potential for life, and hundreds of other feats of near-magic.”
Next week, while we’re all watching NBC, a nuclear-powered, MINI-Cooper-sized super rover will land on Mars. We accurately guided this monster from 200 million miles away (that’s 7.6 million marathons). It requires better accuracy than an Olympic golfer teeing off in London and hitting a hole-in-one in Auckland, New Zealand. It will use a laser to blast rocks, a chemical nose to sniff out the potential for life, and hundreds of other feats of near-magic. Will these discoveries lead us down a path to confirming life on other planets? Wouldn’t that be a good story that might make people care about science? But telling us this story means more than just the composition of the rocks (sorry, Mars geologists). It’s about the team that makes it happen.
No one producing an Olympic teaser asks, “What’s the importance of 100 meters?” No, they tell us about the athletes who dedicate their lives to running the race, because dedication and triumph are what make a human running 100 meters interesting. If NBC can get us all misty-eyed about 100 meters, imagine what NASA could do with 200 million miles.
The Mars race is about human survival and understanding our place in a vast and terrifyingly beautiful universe. And the stories of its athletes (mathletes?) should be world-class, because they accomplish near-impossible tasks on a cosmic scale — the hardest sport you could ever compete in. It requires dedication and doggedness that only the most passionate people in the universe could deliver. Unfortunately, this drama plays out behind closed doors. We won’t have insights into the sacrifice, scandal, discovery, divorce, hardship, and drama that it takes to work for a decade delivering a one-ton super rover to another planet. It’s the biggest irony that the most junior engineer at NASA is fearless in the face of trying to send a robot to Mars, but the career bureaucrats are afraid to tell that engineer’s story of failure or success.
NASA will say that they’re doing the best they can and stretching their education and outreach budgets to the max. But if they hope to stay in business, they need to tell us how they’re pushing the limits of humanity with over-the-top, risky-ass missions that will answer questions about who we are as a species on this planet.
Andrew Kessler, The Huffington Post. Why You Should Be More Interested in Mars Than the Olympics.
Kessler, who spent ninety days inside NASA to write Martian Summer: Robot Arms, Cowboy Spacemen and My 90 Days with the Phoenix Mars Mission, believes the agency is “so frightened of failure that they’re willing to sacrifice their greatest asset: the ability to inspire.” In other words, they no longer tell a good story.
Know who could help? Kick ass science journalists.
Sidenote: AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Awards applications are due tomorrow.
43 years ago today: “Men Walk On Moon.”
It was man’s first landing on another world, the realization of centuries of dreams, the fulfillment of a decade of striving, a triumph of modern technology and personal courage, the most dramatic demonstration of what man can do if he applies his mind and resources with single-minded determination.
The moon, long the symbol of the impossible and the inaccessible, was now within man’s reach, the first port of call in this new age of spacefaring.
Just Another Video of all 135 NASA Rocket and Space Shuttle Launches Happening Simultaneously
H/T: Kottke.org
An epilogue to the Space Shuttle program, in pictures
The Space Shuttle Discovery took off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida this morning (bolted somewhat dramatically on top of a 747) en route to its final home — the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Chantilly, Virginia. Click the picture above for a small slideshow, provided by the Guardian.
Picture originally taken by Jonathan Ernst, Reuters.
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