It's official. There is ice on Mars! Little chunks of material dug up by the lander have since disappeared. The only explanation is that the chunks are water ice that sublimated when exposed to the thin Martian atmosphere. That's cool.
Of course, other possible explanations were considered:
This week's Radio Lab episode was a rebroadcast of a 2006 episode. The topic is space.
It includes a segment about the famous Golden Records placed aboard the Voyager spacecraft. I features an interview with Ann Druyan, who helped create the record and married Carl Sagan soon after the Voyager probes launched. Their love story alone is worth hearing.
The episode uses the record to ask the question, "What would you send into space?" Composer Phillip Glass gives his answer in the episode, but they also asked chef Alice Waters, author Neil Gaiman, comedian Margaret Cho, and author Michael Cunningham. You can listen to these online via links on the Space episode page. (Unfortunately, you Real Player for the clips.)
If I had to construct a message for extraterrestrials that explains the human race, I'm not sure what I would send. These days we can probably send a Gold DVD with a lot more information on it.
I would likely choose some of the same sounds on the record: children laughing, babies, voices in different languages. They couldn't manage motion pictures on Voyager, but if I could, there would be time-lapse movies flower growing, trees budding, and something decomposing. 360-degree panoramas would be nice, from places like NYC, the Sahara desert, and the Amazon rain forest. As for books an poetry, I'm at a loss to choose authors. Shakespeare, Homer, and Steinbeck come to mind. Seeing Homer makes me think the Simpsons should be on there. And there should be Pink Floyd music on there somewhere....
What would you send?
In the time it took to read that quote, we all moved about 25 miles closer to Mars. That's according to NASA calculations and this article from Space.com. Mars and Earth are closing the gap between them at a rate of 22,000 mph.
By December, Mars will outshine every star in the sky. It will not, of course, be anywhere near the size of the moon, regardless of chain mail that suggests otherwise. Even at its brightest Mars is still a dot of light to the naked eye.
However, it will be very accessible to backyard astronomers. A good pair of binoculars or an amateur telescope will let you see it's disk shape and maybe even some surface details. During its last approach, I was able to spot one of the polar ice caps. I'll be out again this time around.
If you have a telescope you haven't used yet (you know who you are), this is a great time to try it out.
Google Earth is adding a new feature that will allow users to see the heavens. If this new feature, called Sky, is any bit as cool as Google Earth, it will be awesome. I can't wait. The story here.
Yesterday evening was absolutely perfect night for observing the sky. It was cool, dry, and, but for a few wisps of cloud, crystal clear. The sun was barely below the horizen when Venus was out, low in the western sky. The moon was higher in the west, half full. Jupiter was high in southern sky.
I got out the telescope and the whole family spent the next hour looking at everything. We started with Venus, now down to a thin crecent. Normally one associates that shape with the moon, and we had to remind my youngest that this was a crescent Venus.
Next we turn to Jupiter. I wasn't sure the bright object was Jupiter until I looked in the eyepiece. There is no mistaking Jupiter. You can see the stripes if the cloud bands, and the four pinpricks of light that are the Galilean moons.
We moved on to our own moon. This brought wows form the children. The moon more than filled the eyepiece, and we scanned the edge of the shadow where the surface features were in strongest relief.
Finally, so as not to limit our sky tour to the solar system, we aimed the telescope at Mizar, the second star from the end in the Big Dipper's handle. Mizar is actually a binary star - through the telescope you can clearly see that is made up of two stars very close to one another. It is probably the easiest binary star to observe.
It's been too long since we had the telescope out. We need to do this more often.
This past Friday, my youngest daughter and I sat on the deck watching the stars come out. The first thing we saw, of course, was Venus. The "Evening Star" is shining its brightest right now, with a magnitude of -4.5. My daughter's eyes are better than mine, so she spotted the first actual star - Sirius. The "Dog Star" is the brightest star in the sky, but it couldn't compete with Venus. We looked at Venus through binoculars, and spotted Regulus just above it.
Venus is about to make a dramatic exit from the evening sky. Tonight it will be close to the moon and Saturn. I hope it's clear. Then each day, as it lowers in the western sky, it will become an upturned crescent. It will leave with a smile.
P.S. This was a welcome bright spot in an otherwise awful weekend. Here's why....
NASA gave the green light to a final Hubble servicing mission!
Every season has its familiar little joys we look forward to. Autumn, for me, has leaves, apples, and Halloween. It also marks the return of Orion, The Hunter, to the night sky. I never go out looking for Orion. Still, every year there comes a night when I glance up at the night sky, and there are the three bright stars, all in a row, that comprise his belt.
Like the Ursa Major, the "Big Dipper," Orion is a constellation that dominates the sky. You can't miss it - even in the light polluted skies of central NJ. And no wonder. Orion is home to six of the fifty brightest stars in the sky (our sun included). Two are in the top ten. Rigel is the blue-white star at his left knee. Betelgeuse is the reddish star at his right shoulder. I just read that Betelgeuse is one of the largest stars observed, with a radius roughly the same as that of Jupiter's orbit.
My favorite part of Orion, though, is the Orion Nebula. In clear dark skies, even the naked eye can see that there's something in Orion's sword that isn't a star. With a decent pair of binoculars you can clearly make out the nebula and maybe one or two of the young stars within. View it through a telescope and you're in for a treat. It quickly fills the eyepiece with purple clouds and tiny pinpoints of light from newborn stars. If I were Carl Sagan I'd have a more eloquent description, but for me it's just cool.
Tonight it's cloudy, so you can't see any stars. It's been a week since I spotted Orion. I meant to post this sooner, but I seem to have less blogging time, lately. But the idea stayed with me, so here it is.
As I type this, the ISS crew is about to push an old Russian space suit out the door. The worn-out Orlan spacesuit is outfitted with radio equipment, turning it into a makeshift satellite. SuitSat, as it's been dubbed, will broadcast a signal on FM frequency 145.990 MHz that HAM radios and police scanners can pick up on earth. You can read about it here and track its position here.
Here is one more story about the suit, and it notes that this dumping old suits is old hat for the Russians. Apparently MIR cosmonauts would entertain guest with a movie of one such suit which was posed with its arm waving as is floated away, just like countless sci-fi movies.
Do you sometimes get the feeling the Russians are having just a little more fun up there?
Update: It's away!
The New Horizons spacecraft has begun 3-billion-mile trip to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt. It was nine hours to the moon's orbit, it will be nine years to Pluto. Next year it gets a bit of a boost from Jupiter's gravity.
I had the NASA TV feed on, so I was able to catch the whole launch. Once they lost sight of the rocket from the ground, they switched to a cool 3-D rendering that updated based on live telemetry data. After that, during the third stage burn, it was just a shot of a launch controller watching the telemetry data as it rolled of the printer. Kind of a low-tech finale, but it was neat to watch. Clyde Tombaugh's widow was there for the launch of the probe, which carried some his ashes onboard.
This is the fastest spacecraft ever launched from Earth. Despite that fact, it will take at least nine years for it to reach Pluto, illustrating how incredibly far away Pluto is. I told one of my daughters that she'd be driving by the time the probe gets to Pluto. "Wow," she said. Wow indeed.
It sure is. The Stardust probe's sample return capsule landed safely in the Utah desert, completing its 2.9 billion mile round trip!
Yesterday marked the two-year anniversery of the rover Spirit's arrival on Mars. In two weeks, Opportunity will also pass the two year mark. Not too shabby for a pair of rovers meant to last three months!
Read more here.
That full moon we just had was the Harvest Moon, so named because its light afforded farmers a few more hours to harvest their crops. This year's was special because it was in the same place as it was 50 years ago when captured on film as the famous "Autumn Moon" by Ansel Adams. Astronomers figured out the precise time and date of the original image, then predicted it's return (the story).
The Harvest moon is not the only named moon. Most people know the Blue Moon, the uncommon second full moon of a calendar month. Actually, there are traditional English names for the full moon of every month. Native Americans had their own names, as did other cultures. Here's a list from the Farmer's Almanac (via Wikipedia).
| Month | English | Native American | Other Names |
|---|---|---|---|
| January | Moon After Yule | Wolf Moon | Old Moon |
| February | Wolf Moon | Snow Moon | Hunger Moon |
| March | Lenten Moon | Worm Moon | Crow Moon, Crust Moon, Sugar Moon, Sap Moon |
| April | Egg Moon | Pink Moon | Sprouting Grass Moon, Fish Moon |
| May | Milk Moon | Flower Moon | Corn Planting Moon |
| June | Flower Moon | Strawberry Moon | Rose Moon, Hot Moon |
| July | Hay Moon | Buck Moon | Thunder Moon |
| August | Grain Moon | Sturgeon Moon | Red Moon, Green Corn Moon |
| September | Fruit Moon | Harvest Moon | Corn Moon, Barley Moon |
| October | Harvest Moon | Hunter's Moon | Travel Moon, Dying Grass Moon |
| November | Hunter's Moon | Beaver Moon | Frost Moon |
| December | Moon Before Yule | Cold Moon | Long Nights Moon |
The planet Mars, I scarcely need remind the reader, revolves about the sun at a mean distance of 140,000,000 miles, and the light and heat it receives from the sun is barely half of that received by this world. It must be, if the nebular hypothesis has any truth, older than our world; and long before this earth ceased to be molten, life upon its surface must have begun its course. The fact that it is scarcely one seventh of the volume of the earth must have accelerated its cooling to the temperature at which life could begin. It has air and water and all that is necessary for the support of animated existence.
-H. G. Wells
The War of the Worlds
In the news this week are two really neat new propulsion systems.
First, there is the scramjet powering NASA's hypersonic X-43A test place. The latest flight achieved Mach 9.6 breaking the world record for speed. The engine is cool in that it scoops oxygen from the air instead carrying it in a tank like other rocket engines. This saves a lot of weight. Of course, the engine only works at supersonic speeds, so it needs a rocket engine to get it started.
The second engine is, IMHO, even cooler. That's the ION drive used on the European Space Agency's SMART-1 probe that just entered lunar orbit. Solar panels generate electricity that ionizes the atoms of the xenon fuel. These xenon ions are then shot out the back of the craft, creating a very gentle push. The force is almost imperceptable, but unlike a rocket engine, it is also continuous. So the craft keeps moving faster and farther, until suddenly, you're at the moon. Even cooler is the fuel economy: 5,000,000 miles a gallon!
