I just heard from Richard Greenberg (NASA) that National Geographic’s Naked Science show will be talking about Alien Life on April 1st. (There is room for a joke or two about the date, I suppose!) Part of the show will involve Richard talking about Europa.
You may remember the Europa-Richard Green connection (and all the politics and controversy, and interesting science connected with that) from this review of Richard’s excellent book.
It was already known that we were totally doomed, but now there is a new and exciting scenario. In this one, comets rain down on us from the Ooort Cloud, said comets loosened by contact and interaction with a star called Gliese 710.
Continue reading We are totally doomed
A while ago, I complained that the people running the LHC did not have their act together when it came to managing and disseminating information for the interested public. I took a little flack for that (see comments) but I was right. And I’m still right. We (the interested public) were just recently given a very nice overview of the potential for the next several months of research. Then, today, we find out that the LHC is fundamentally busted and will be shut down for a significant rebuild. And part of that news is that this has been the plan for a long time. But I guess they forgot. Or something.
Can anyone explain to me what is going on?
This is a piece by Rolf Heuer, Director General of CERN explaining what is happening over at LHC. A must read.
scientists have detected ice deposits near the moon’s north pole. NASA’s Mini-SAR instrument, a lightweight, synthetic aperture radar, found more than 40 small craters with water ice. The craters range in size from 1 to 9 miles (2 to15 km) in diameter. Although the total amount of ice depends on its thickness in each crater, it’s estimated there could be at least 1.3 trillion pounds (600 million metric tons) of water ice.
The Mini-SAR has imaged many of the permanently shadowed regions that exist at both poles of the Moons. These dark areas are extremely cold and it has been hypothesized that volatile material, including water ice, could be present in quantity here. The main science object of the Mini-SAR experiment is to map and characterize any deposits that exist.
The red smudge at the center of this picture is the first comet discovered by NASA’s Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA
Continue reading WISE discovers its first comet
This oblique view shows geological layers of rock exposed on a mound inside Gale Crater on Mars. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/USGS
Continue reading Amazing stratigraphy in a Mars crater
The world’s highest energy atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), will run at half its maximum energy through 2011 and likely not at all in 2012. Officials at the European particle physics laboratory, CERN, had previously planned to run the gargantuan accelerator at 70% of maximum energy this year.
The change raises hopes at the LHC’s lower-energy rival, the Tevatron Collider at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois, of being extended through 2012 instead of being shut down next year.
Stellarium is a realistic looking, feature rich OpenSource planetarium. The default catalog has over one half million stars, but you can get an extended catalog with over 200 million stars. All the usual information you expect in a planetarium is available. For the most part, navigation of the image can be done easily with a mouse or using the keyboard. The software takes over the GUI (like some games do). It can project (via a projector, I assume) for use in an actual planetarium or be used on your computer screen. You can get plugins for artificial satellite tracks and to interface with your telescope (or at least, work with your telescope).
The Phoenix robot, left by NASA on the Martian Pole last Martian Fall, has been hidden by seasonal darkness and is presumably covered with ice. The explorer had performed very well during its mission, and it is not expected to have survived the winter.
Continue reading Will Phoenix rise from the ice?
If you don’t know someone’s age, over time they may let out clues that tell you when they were born based on what they remember, or things they claim to have done. This can be very inaccurate. My wife said something the other day that would cause anyone to infer that she was at least ten years older than she is, but it turns out the TV show she was referring to came to her home as syndicated re-runs. (My own personal memory of the recently deceased Soupy Sales is a similar example.)
32 previously unknown exoplanets have been discovered with a high-precision instrument hooked up to a Chilean telescope…
Continue reading 32 new planets discovered!
Early Friday Morning, plus/minus one half a day depending on where in the world you are, two alien space craft are going to crash into the moon. It will be visible from earth with a small telescope.
The balloon and camera were launched at 7:44 AM, the balloon burst at 10:51 AM at 107,145 ft. and the camera landed via parachute at 11:40 AM, 89 miles from the launch site after a 3 hr. & 56 min. flight. The camera recorded a total of 4 hrs. & 22 min. of Hi-Def Video before it stopped recording 53 secs after landing, when its 32GB of memory was full. The only thing better would have been if the camera had recorded for several minutes more to captured the sound of us approaching and video of us opening its container.
If you get motion sickness or are annoyed at unedited video, either don’t watch this or skp to three or four minutes in.
Continue reading 1st Successful Amateur Hi-Def Video from The Edge of Space