Via Phil Plait comes this link to a NASA website inviting students to name a pair of satellites. The project is called GRAIL for “Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory”, and for now the satellites are simply called GRAIL-A and GRAIL-B, but I liked the suggestion in this graphic that appeared with Phil’s post:
The other night I was watching a rerun of the Mythbusters episode where they attempt to debunk several elements of the persistent conspiracy theory talk that the moon landings were faked. Quite honestly, some of the ways they chose to debunk the claims were themselves a little less than convincing, as Phil Plait noted back when the episode first aired last August. But the most convincing one they did was a segment where they went to an observatory that has a laser which can pinpoint a series of reflectors placed on the moon by Apollo 17. The astronomer showed them how she aims the laser at known coordinates on the lunar surface, and measures the response — when the laser hits the reflectors (which are big prismic arrays about the size of a car door panel), it basically bounces back and is picked up by the observatory’s instruments. Thus, it is demonstrable that the astronauts did go to the moon and deliberately leave the reflectors in documented locations.
Works for me, since I have no doubt in my mind in the first place that we absolutely did send astronauts to the moon and bring them back again. But if you STILL need more hard evidence, well, maybe THIS will sell you:
India (yes, I said India) launched its first lunar probe, Chandrayaan, late last year. Apart from the bragging rights and the obvious technological benefits, the ostensible scientific mission of Chandrayaan is to produce a complete three-dimensional atlas of the lunar surface, including mapping the geological, mineralogical and chemical compositions of the surface.
Today, the Times Of India reports, a scientist involved in the project has told them that Chandrayaan has also mapped and photographed the landing sites of five of the six Apollo missions that landed on the moon (via slashdot). This would be the first direct photography of the sites other than the mission photography itself, and further proof of the reality of successful manned landings on the lunar surface.
Of course, this won’t deter the hardcore conspiracy loonies, but it might shut up the occasional asshole in a bar who won’t shut up about such nonsense.
Gizmodo reports that NASA has released this pair of images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope a couple of years ago. As you can see, a fairly substantial object instantaneously appeared in a portion of space that the telescope was pointed at while looking for supernovae. It increased in magnitude over the period of 100 days, then faded away back to nothingness in the same amount of time. According to the scientists who wrote this up for the Astrophysical Journal, the object did not match any known pattern for a supernova, is inconsistent with gravitational microlensing, and does not match any known object in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey database.
Maybe the Vogons finally got all the necessary permits for that hyperspace bypass after all. Do you know where your towel is?
DSL Reports says that scientists at the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa, Italy have successfully tested a wireless network technology capable of a throughput speed of 1.2 terabits per second. That utterly shatters the previous record, which was 160Gbps. By comparison, your typical home wireless network running 802.11g (which is soon to be superseded by 802.11n) crawls along at 19 megabits per second, literally about a billion times slower. The technology uses a combination of optical and radio transceivers, where present conventional wireless networking is entirely radio-based. The first practical use for such technology is hoped to be inter-satellite communication, but before you know it, you’ll be able to pick up one of these babies at Circuit City for 69 bucks.
Okay, if that link wasn’t geeky enough for you, this one is guaranteed to make your eyes roll back in your head: it’s an Ars Technica interview with Tim Sweeney, the guy who developed the Unreal 3D graphics engine and co-founded Epic Games. Having just spent the better part of an entire weekend frigging around with replacing the graphics card in my computer so that I would be able to play Spore, this article caught my eye. The subject of the interview is his view that gaming PCs are going to swing away from big fat GPUs (graphics processing units) on motherboards and graphics cards and back towards processing all graphics right in the CPU itself. The advent of the GPU was a big, big deal for high-speed three-dimensional rendering when it first emerged in the ’90s — it took lots of load off the CPU, which could then be given over to other tasks, and it created a particular paradigm of graphics processing that has taken the animation of computer games from the clunky styles of yesteryear to the near-flawless rendering you see today. But, Sweeney argues, the multi-core processor is ready to take back graphics and do an even better job with improved software-based rendering. The best part is that you won’t even need a tricked-out gamer PC to achieve all of this; even laptops will come with the processing power necessary to render 3D graphics flawlessly soon enough.
Back to outer space for a minute…remember that Gamma Ray Burst that was so powerful it was visible to the naked eye? You don’t? Well, I posted about it when it happened. You just weren’t paying attention. A few days ago, astronomer and blogger Phil Plait filled in some of the details about just how close we all came to being crispy-crittered by the aforementioned GRB. Let’s just say we wouldn’t have had to worry about the Large Hadron Collider, if this thing had been a few billion miles closer, mm-kay?
A sign of the times: The University of Kentucky has decided to yank all the land-line telephones wired into dorm rooms on their campus because students have abandoned using them in favor of cellphones, IM and other modern communications devices. I can still remember standing in line for what seemed like a bazillon years as a freshman at Northwestern to get signed up for an account with Illinois Bell. Every dorm room at NU had (has?) a landline, and rare was the pair of roommates who did not have their own telephone. By comparison, my friends who went to University of Maine didn’t have in-room phones, and it was always a crapshoot trying to call them on the one public-use phone in their dorm lounge. We’d have to coordinate a call-time via letters (yes, snail-mail! It took a week and a half to arrange a 10-minute phone call once a month!).
Another sign of the times: while UK students might have traded landlines for iPhones, their iPhones are spying on them. This Wired blog post discusses a little-publicized bit of information about the iPhone: the clever way it returns you to the exact place you left off when you turned off your phone is by caching screenshots every time the screen changes. That cache persists in the iPhone’s memory, and, according to one hacker, can be accessed by anyone savvy enough to find the cache, not the least of whom are the assorted phone-tapping intelligence people George Bush keeps on hand to “fight terrorism”. Your entire history of activity on the iPhone, not just your phone calls, can be completely traced. So whatever you do, the next time you plan to blow up the World Trade Center, don’t call Osama on your iPhone, got it?
Via Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer, comes news that yesterday there was a massive gamma ray burst bigger than any astronomical event ever seen by human beings. The event was so massive that it was visible to the unaided human eye, even though the burst was 7.5 billion light years away. For those of you who aren’t fundamentalist Christians, that means that the explosion actually took place 7.5 billion YEARS ago, before the Earth was even formed. (For those of you who are fundamentalist Christians, GFY) Ordinarily, the most distant object visible to the naked eye is a galaxy 2.9 billion light years away.
The afterglow of the burst (which is what you see in the picture above), was 2.5 million times more luminous than the most luminous supernova ever detected in recorded history. If you had been standing outside in the dark, in a place without much light pollution, this burst would have been just barely visible if you knew where to look. Most astronomers were able to pick it up on radio telescopes, not optical ones.
To give you a sense of how massive that explosion would have been, Phil Plait says:
Let me put this in perspective for you. Imagine a one megaton nuclear weapon detonating. That’s roughly 50 times the explosive yield of the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. Devastating.
The Sun, every second of every day of every year, gives off 100 billion times this much energy. That’s every second. A star is a terrifying object.
In the few seconds that a gamma-ray burst lasts, it packs a million million million times that much energy into its beams. In other words, for those few ticks of a clock the GRB is sending out more energy than the Sun will in its entire lifetime.
Wow. Just wow.
A few years ago, George Bush was ready to pull the plug on the Hubble Space Telescope in order to spend more money fucking things up in Iraq on other priorities, but the hue and cry were so fierce that eventually the administration gave in and agreed to support Hubble a little while longer. So NASA has a mission in the works to do one last major maintenance and upgrade job that will keep the telescope operational for a couple of years beyond the projected end-of-life date of 2011. Among the upgrades will be a new spectrograph instrument and a new wide-field camera that will improve the power of the telescope 90 times. The Bad Astronomy blogger, Phil Plait, has tons of details that were announced at the American Astronomy Society meeting he’s attending this week, along with his own notes about Hubble and its forthcoming replacement, the Webb Space Telescope. He also has a lot to say about a briefing he heard from the current head of NASA, Mike Griffin, about financial and political realities and decision-making within the organization.
Remember the story about the asteroid that is headed straight for Mars? Phil Plait, who writes the Bad Astronomy Blog, reports that the odds of the asteroid hitting Mars have actually improved…so now it’s only 96% unlikely to happen. He also pooh-poohs the suggestion that it’s not an asteroid at all but the long-lost Mars Observer space probe that disappeared just as it was about to enter Martian orbit several years ago. By calculating the asteroid’s path backward, he says, it’s easy to disprove that idea. Funny how science lets you figure things like that out without having to take it on faith, eh?
Wired reports that NASA is well-underway on designing the next-generation Martian lander intended for launch in 2009. As you can see at the top of this post, the new design is much larger (the Mini Cooper is shown in the picture as a comparative object — the rover is almost as big as the car) and more robust. The picture does not show the science package that will be incorporated into the final vehicle, but Wired says plans include the ability to vaporize soil samples for spectroscopy from up to 60 feet away and a tiny plutonium battery that would be used to keep the rover alive when the solar panels don’t recharge.
When it gets down to brass tacks, though, I doubt few of us will really be satisfied with all of this interest and exploration of Mars until we get some people “on the ground”. That day is still pretty far off, but the groundwork is being laid. This fantastic post from the Spanish blog Fogonazos has a ton of information about the “Mars Analogue Research Station” project , a joint venture between NASA, the Canadian Space Agency, The SETI Institute, and the Mars Institute. They’ve built self-contained research stations in the Arctic, where terrain and climate conditions are most like what astronauts will encounter on Mars, and the crews try to simulate extra-terrestrial expedition conditions as much as possible.
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