Here’s the home page of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.
January 12, 2011
December 9, 2010
A step closer to private space travel
SpaceX’s Dragon capsule was successfully launched into orbit:
Judging by the excited faces of SpaceX employees after the live webcast, everything went perfectly. Dragon, the world’s first orbital space capsule built by the private sector, will now orbit the planet a few times over the next couple of hours before splashing down in the Pacific.
It is a small but significant milestone. The unmanned demonstration mission wants to prove that Dragon is able to deliver crew and cargo to the International Space Station (ISS). The reason for all the excitement is that the working capsule really points the world firmly in the direction of greater involvement by the private sector in providing trips to space. More competition means lower prices. Lower prices mean better access. After the retirement of the shuttle, Dragon would be able to deliver crew and cargo to the ISS on top of a Falcon 9 rocket.
Here’s hoping that NASA won’t succeed in choking off/crowding out other private launch efforts.
More information (including some graphics) at the BBC website.
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October 8, 2010
Do you recognize this astronaut?
Apparently, he’s so easily identified in this image that he’s suing the artist, her recording company, and the stock image firm:
An American astronaut is suing Dido, claiming the singer misappropriated his image on her most recent album. Bruce McCandless II was photographed on a spacewalk in 1984; a quarter of a century later, he found himself floating in the centre of Dido’s Safe Trip Home album cover. And he isn’t happy.
McCandless’s complaint, filed last week, names Sony Music, Getty Images and Dido as defendants, using the singer’s full name – Dido Florian Cloud de Bounevialle O’Malley Armstrong. However, because the Nasa astronaut does not own the rights to the photograph, he is not suing for copyright infringement. Instead, he claims his “persona” was used without permission to help sell Dido’s album.
I don’t know what his chances of success might be, but if Sony Music bought the image from Getty, then it’s Getty that should be the only defendant . . . it’s the stock photography company’s responsibility to ensure that all the images they sell are properly licensed and available to sell on. Downstream users shouldn’t be held responsible for the due diligence of the seller.
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August 31, 2010
Do we live in a “basement” universe?
Many years back, one of the mailing lists I regularly read had a long and interesting discussion about the possibilities of creating new universes. Not in a science-fictional sense, but based on the theories then current and using the technologies which were already under development at the time. They were referred to as “basement universes”, “pocket universes” and so on. It was fascinating, although my weak math abilities forced me to skip over the parts of the discussion with all the numbers and symbols.
Elizabeth sent me a link to John Gribbin’s “Are we living in a designer universe?”, which took me back to those fascinating discussions:
The argument over whether the universe has a creator, and who that might be, is among the oldest in human history. But amid the raging arguments between believers and sceptics, one possibility has been almost ignored — the idea that the universe around us was created by people very much like ourselves, using devices not too dissimilar to those available to scientists today.
As with much else in modern physics, the idea involves particle acceleration, the kind of thing that goes on in the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. Before the LHC began operating, a few alarmists worried that it might create a black hole which would destroy the world. That was never on the cards: although it is just possible that the device could generate an artificial black hole, it would be too small to swallow an atom, let alone the Earth.
However, to create a new universe would require a machine only slightly more powerful than the LHC — and there is every chance that our own universe may have been manufactured in this way.
August 23, 2010
QotD: Peak Culture
The height of their society peaked in 1969. They used militarism and socialism to put two guys on the Moon, they trotted out their public-private partnership (Concorde) to build exclusive supersonic transport for the rich. Max Faget and some other brilliant engineers designed a space shuttle fleet of ten vehicles capable of hundreds of flights a year to make access to low Earth orbit cheap and routine. And the Advanced Research Projects Agency had some geeks create an inter-networking protocol that could survive a nuclear war.
Obviously, they shot their wad, as it were, and no longer put guys on the Moon. They no longer fly supersonic transports. Their space shuttle is going to stop flying soon, if it hasn’t already. Those geeky guys went on to develop open source cryptography, open source software, and totally private economic transactions. The future we’re creating is going to be very, dramatically different. It is going to be decentralised to a fare thee well.
Right now, today, two people anywhere in the world *can* have a totally private economic exchange that cannot be detected by anyone else. And since it cannot be detected, it cannot be regulated, it cannot be prohibited, and it cannot be taxed. Even inflation cannot tax it, if the exchange is denominated in some money like silver or gold. Which means that those who dream of ruling the world sowed the seeds of their own damnation?
Jim Davidson, “Peak Culture”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2010-08-22
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July 6, 2010
April 30, 2010
January 5, 2010
The real universe is like an original Star Trek set
The moon may not be made of cheese, but how about a planet made of styrofoam?
A giant planet with the density of Styrofoam is one of a clutch of new exoplanets discovered by NASA’s Kepler telescope. The planets are too hot to support life as we know it, but the discoveries, made during the telescope’s first few weeks of operation, suggest Kepler is on the right track to find Earth’s twins, researchers say.
More than 400 planets have now been found orbiting other stars, but Earth-sized planets — which may be the best habitats for life – have remained elusive.
NASA’s orbiting Kepler telescope is designed to find them. It has been scrutinising 100,000 stars since April 2009, searching for telltale dips in starlight created when planets pass in front of their host stars.
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December 9, 2009
Hyping space travel
Colby Cosh finds the marketing hype from Virgin Galactic to be more than a little over the top:
I continue to be awestruck at Sir Richard Branson’s gift for hype. On Monday he rolled out Virgin Galactic’s “SpaceShipTwo”, dutifully described by Wired magazine as “the first commercial spacecraft” and “the first commercial spaceship”. This must be galling for the folks at the spaceflight research firm SpaceX. In July of this year, to little fanfare, they successfully put a Malaysian satellite into low earth orbit using a privately designed and built unmanned rocket, the Falcon 1. This is definitely commerce, and RazakSat is definitely up there in space, bleeping away in Malay. Surely everything else is Bransonian semantics?
SpaceShipTwo, despite the name, is an airplane — a very sophisticated and impressive airplane, designed to make brief suborbital hops after being carried aloft by another airplane. Branson’s hundreds of more-money-than-they-know-what-to-do-with customers are buying the aviation experience of a lifetime, one that nobody returns from unmoved. But it will be an aviation experience. “Space” is defined in custom, international law, and Virgin marketing literature as “high enough that airplanes mostly don’t work anymore”. To get there as an airplane passenger, by virtue of a few seconds of rocket boost tacked onto a conventional flight, seems a little like a technical cheat — the equivalent of trying to join the Mile High Club by oneself in the john.
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December 4, 2009
Britain lowers defences against alien invasion
It’s true . . . the British are now wide-open to invaders from Rigel: they’ve re-assigned their UFO investigation forces to other duties:
The Ministry of Defence has closed its UFO unit after more than 50 years of investigating reported UK sightings.
A hotline and e-mail address for the public to report possible sightings was shut on 1 December because it had no “defence value”, the MoD said.
The officer handling reports has moved to another post, saving £44,000 a year.
The MoD said the unit had received thousands of reports, although none had yielded proof of aliens or any security threat to the UK.
Well of course they’d say that, wouldn’t they? Expect the mothership to show up any day now . . .
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October 14, 2009
Neuter NASA to save manned space exploration?
Gregg Easterbrook, to be polite, isn’t a fan of NASA’s big-budget plans:
Soon, Barack Obama must make a decision on whether to continue funding NASA’s daffy plan to build a Motel 6 on the moon. The president will be put on the spot when the final report of a space commission [. . .] is delivered. Rumor is that in keeping with the tradition of Washington commissions, the report will contain extremely vague language about sweeping reform; then cite every item on every wish list of every interest group with a finger in this pie; then recommend nothing specific, so as to offend no interest group; then close with a call for higher subsidies. NASA is not one of the core missions of government, and spends only one-half of 1 percent of the federal budget, so space waste is relatively minor in the scheme of things. But if public policy can’t get this right, what can it get right?
Right now NASA’s budget is $18 billion annually, and the quarter or so spent on science — planetary probes, telescopes that scan the far universe — is going very well. The rest of NASA is a mess. The agency has just thrown $100 billion of your money down the drain on the space station, which has no scientific achievement and no known purpose other than keeping checks in the mail to favored contractors and congressional districts. The station is such a white elephant the current plan is to “deorbit” the thing in 2016. “Deorbit” is polite for “make it burn up in the atmosphere.” So after spending $100 billion to build a space station, we’ll destroy it. Your tax dollars at play!
Since 2004, NASA has said its next goal is a manned outpost on the moon, as a stepping-stone to manned travel to Mars. There’s nothing a person could do on the airless, lifeless lunar surface that a tele-robot operated from a Houston office building could not do at a fraction of the price and risk. And the moon has nothing to do with Mars. Any Mars-bound mission will leave directly from low-Earth orbit to the Red Planet: stopping at the moon, then blasting off again, would consume the mission’s fuel to accomplish nothing. Though NASA has been studying moon-base and Mars-mission proposals for five years, the agency refuses to give a cost estimate — a sure sign the plans cannot pass a giggle test. Considering the space station price was $100 billion for a limited facility that was not accelerated to the speed necessary to reach the moon — speed means fuel which means higher price — even a Spartan moon base easily could cost several hundred billion dollars. For what? Why, for “economic expansion”! Today, no one is interested in economic expansion at Earth’s poles, which are far more amenable to life than the moon, have copious resources, and can be reached at one-ten thousandth the cost of reaching the moon.
There’s a lot more, buried in the middle of his weekly “Tuesday Morning Quarterback” column at ESPN.com. The numbers for manned exploration of Mars aren’t encouraging, either.
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October 2, 2009
You’d really want to get in out of the rain on COROT-7b
According to scientists, the recently discovered exoplanet known as COROT-7b is so close to its primary that it rains molten rock:
To find out what COROT-7b’s atmosphere might be like, Fegley and his colleagues modeled it. They found that COROT-7b’s atmosphere is made up of the ingredients of rocks and when “a front moves in,” pebbles condense out of the air and rain into lakes of molten lava below.
“Sodium, potassium, silicon monoxide and then oxygen — either atomic or molecular oxygen — make up most of the atmosphere,” Fegley said. But there are also smaller amounts of the other elements found in silicate rock, such as magnesium, aluminum, calcium and iron.
The rock rains form similarly to Earth’s watery weather: “As you go higher the atmosphere gets cooler and eventually you get saturated with different types of ‘rock’ the way you get saturated with water in the atmosphere of Earth,” Fegley explained. “But instead of a water cloud forming and then raining water droplets, you get a ‘rock cloud’ forming and it starts raining out little pebbles of different types of rock.”
It’d make hell seem like a holiday cottage in the Poconos.
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September 5, 2009
Scientific head-scratchers
Courtesy of Roger Henry, a list of oddities from New Scientist:
2. Dark Flow: Something unseeable and far bigger than anything in the known universe is hauling a group of galaxies towards it at inexplicable speed.
3. Eocene Hothouse: Tens of millions of years ago, the average temperature at the poles was 15 or 20 °C. Now let’s talk about climate change.
4. Fly-by Anomalies: Space probes using Earth’s gravity to get a slingshot speed boost are moving faster than they should. Call in dark matter.
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July 24, 2009
There are spinoffs, and then there are spinoffs
The space program has lots of detractors (and, to be fair, lots of starry-eyed, er, boosters), but here are some spinoffs from the space program that may not be obvious:
Or: more accurately, in strictly economic terms — what has the space program done for us?
Well, for starters: without the space program we’d probably be dead. Spy satellites are the very keystone of arms verification; without spysats the cold war would quite possibly have turned hot by the early 1960s, due to misinformation and fear permeating the chain of command on either side. Subsequently, gamma-ray detector satellites such as the American Vela constellation and its Soviet equivalents gave some reassurance to the superpowers by giving them the ability to know with a degree of confidence in whether or not nuclear explosions were taking place anywhere on the planet — a prerequisite for nuclear deterrence without a launch-on-warning policy.
But the cold war’s over. So what else?
* Weather satellites. We tend to forget how primitive weather forecasting was before we could look down on developing weather systems from above; the evidence is on your TV set every day.
* Communications. The first live trans-Atlantic TV transmission took place as recently as July 23rd, 1963; go back even a few years before that, and intercontinental TV was an element of science fiction. Today, you can buy a premium-priced mobile phone that gives you coverage from the middle of the ocean, by way of satellite services such as Inmarsat and Iridium, and see news from the far side of the world in real time. It has quite literally shrunk the world.
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Is this the original “Eye of Horus”?
Full story here.
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