Brice Crawford

Terrific news out of NASA on Thursday night - MESSENGER successfully entered orbit around Mercury after six and a half years in transit. Great stuff - can’t wait to see what images and science come out of the mission over the next few years!

For a while I was tracking MESSENGER’s status and the early images that have come back from the flybys its done so far have been stunning. For example:

But, time got away from me and the last time I looked at the mission was 2009. The news of successful orbit insertion made for a very welcome surprise at the end of last week! Keep the images coming!

PBS: What We’re Watching: NASA’s Accidental Video Art

NASA posts videos from their rocket launches occasionally, and PBS was kind enough to link to one of the better ones.  The camera in this video is attached to one of the solid rocket boosters which have a burn time of 126 seconds.  As a result, not much exciting happens until just after the 2 minute mark, but from there on its phenomenal.  PBS’s description below:

The film below is a space shuttle launch from the perspective of a solid rocket booster, one of the giant white rockets attached to the belly of the shuttle during its ascent. Thanks to a tiny camera and contact microphone attached its frame, you can ride along with it as it sends the shuttle into orbit, then free falls back to earth. There’s not much going on visually until the boosters separate at about the two-minute mark—but after that, it’s a film even Stanley Kubrick would be proud of.

Sad to read about the decline of Slashdot.org in recent years.  I admit that after being a heavy user 2 years ago I rarely go on the site anymore.  Just as the research shows, I now go to news.yc and my feeds on Google Reader for my daily news.  The king is dead.  Long live the king!

Daft Punk do Star Wars for Adidas

Watch this - it is phenomenal.

Astronomy Picture of the Day: Looking Back Across Mars

It’s been a long trip for the Martian rover Opportunity. Last week Opportunity surpassed Viking 1 as the longest running mission on Mars, now extending well over six years. Pictured above, Opportunity’s tire tracks cross a nearly featureless Martian desert, emanating from a distant horizon. Landing in 2004 in Meridiani Planum, the robotic Opportunity has embarked on its longest and most dangerous trek yet, now aiming to reach large Endeavor Crater sometime next year. Endeavor, it is hoped, holds new clues to the ancient geology of Mars and whether Mars could once have harbored life.

Eruption of Eyjafjallajökull Volcano, Iceland

Seeing this, I can certainly understand why air travel around Europe has been so difficult recently!

The plume of ash and steam rising from the Eyjafjallajökull volcano reached five to six kilometers (17,000 to 20,000 feet) into the atmosphere on May 10, 2010, when the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this image. The ash is blowing southeast over the North Atlantic Ocean. Volcanic ash from previous days closed airports in Ireland and Portugal on May 10, said CNN.

A few years ago I had the good fortune of working with ATK - a company out in Promontory, Utah that makes the solid-rocket-propellant boosters for the NASA space shuttle.  Watching these marvels of engineering being manufactured was awe-inspiring.

Unfortunately, I missed out on the true spectacle of the manufacturing process.  Every once in a while ATK test fires a booster in Utah to make sure that everything operates according to spec.  They test fire by pointing the booster into a large cement block in the ground and letting it rip.  For 123 seconds the booster scorches everything within several hundred yards and knocks viewers off their feet.  Unlike at Kennedy Space Center, where viewers are 6 miles away across the water and the boosters shoot up into the sky, at ATK viewers are within 1.5 miles of the rocket and the booster is on the ground for the whole burn.

Sad to hear that the booster program did its last test burn - and even sadder that I never had a chance to see one.  There’s always the possibility that they’ll start test-burning the Atlas boosters sometime soon!

NASA’s Space Shuttle Program conducted the final test firing of a reusable solid rocket motor Feb. 25 in Promontory, Utah. The flight support motor, or FSM-17, burned for approximately 123 seconds—the same time each reusable solid rocket motor burns during an actual space shuttle launch. Preliminary indications show all test objectives were met. After final test data are analyzed, results for each objective will be published in a NASA report.

The test—the 52nd conducted for NASA by ATK Launch Systems, a unit of Alliant Techsystems Inc.—marks the closure of a test program that has spanned more than three decades. The first test was in July 1977. The ATK-built motors have successfully launched the space shuttle into orbit 129 times.

Link here.

Astronomy Picture of the Day comes through again!

Why did the recent volcanic eruption in Iceland create so much ash? Although the large ash plume was not unparalleled in its abundance, its location was particularly noticeable because it drifted across such well populated areas. The Eyjafjallajökull volcano in southern Iceland began erupting on March 20, with a second eruption starting under the center of a small glacier on April 14. Neither eruption was unusually powerful. The second eruption, however, melted a large amount of glacial ice which then cooled and fragmented lava into gritty glass particles that were carried up with the rising volcanic plume. Pictured above two days ago, lightning bolts illuminate ash pouring out of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano.

Here’s a great picture that went up yesterday on Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Bright Points on the Quiet Sun

Up close, the solar surface is a striking patch work of granules in this very high resolution picture of the quiet Sun. Caused by convection, the granules are hot, rising columns of plasma edged by dark lanes of cooler, descending plasma. But the high-resolution view reveals that the dark lanes are dotted with many small, contrasting bright points. Constantly present on the solar surface, the bright points do not seem to be related to sunspots that come and go with the magnetic solar cycle. Nonetheless, the bright points are regions of concentrated magnetic fields and are bright because the magnetic pressure opens a window to hotter deeper layers below the photosphere. For scale, the white bar at the lower left corresponds to 5,000 kilometers across the Sun’s surface. The sharp, narrow-band image was recorded in September, 2007 using the Swedish Solar Telescope on the astronomical island of La Palma.

We need more missions like this:

Jupiter’s moon Europa is thought to harbor a liquid ocean beneath its icy crust, and many scientists believe that life could inhabit this watery environment. In February, NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) announced that they will be collaborating on a new mission to Jupiter and its four largest moons.

My tumblog just turned 2!  It’s amazing how much has changed technology-wise (and life-wise, for me at least) in the last 2 years.  Congrats to Tumblr for keeping their business running strong since the early days when I joined up - best of luck in the future!

Can’t believe I haven’t seen this solution before now…

nikf:

I need this at the office. Thanks Tim

“Someone Great” by LCD Soundsystem off of Sound of Silver

I can’t wait for LCD Soundsystem (aka. James Murphy) to release his new album later this spring - thanks to Pitchfork for helping me discover him!

Apparently the Moon contains an enormous amount of water — funny considering we thought that it contained none…

Moonwater. Look it up. You won’t find it. It’s not in the dictionary.

That’s because we thought, until recently, that the Moon was just about the driest place in the solar system. Then reports of moonwater started “pouring” in – starting with estimates of scant amounts on the lunar surface, then gallons in a single crater, and now 600 million metric tons distributed among 40 craters near the lunar north pole.

“We thought we understood the Moon, but we don’t,” says Paul Spudis of the Lunar and Planetary Institute. “It’s clear now that water exists up there in a variety of concentrations and geologic settings. And who’d have thought that today we’d be pondering the Moon’s hydrosphere?”

Saturn’s Moon Helene from Cassini

Courtesy of Astronomy Picture of the Day:

What’s happening on the surface of Saturn’s moon Helene? The moon was imaged in unprecedented detail last week as the robotic Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn swooped to within two Earth diameters of the diminutive moon. Although conventional craters and hills appear, the above raw and unprocessed image also shows terrain that appears unusually smooth and streaked. Planetary astronomers will be inspecting these detailed images of Helene to glean clues about the origin and evolution of the 30-km across floating iceberg. Helene is also unusual because it circles Saturn just ahead of the large moon Dione, making it one of only four known moons to occupy a gravitational well known as a stable Lagrange point.

Spirit, one of the two Mars rovers that landed way back in January 2004, is now permanently stuck in the dirt.  Had to happen sometime.  But, it’s still able to do good science while stationary.  Spirit will now help scientists at the JPL learn more about Mars’ core by measuring small variations in its precession about its axis.  From the article:

Mars is rotating around its own axis and orbiting the Sun. With the rover stationary, the radio’s only motion will be the motion of Mars. Because the scientists already know the specifics of the red planet’s orbit, they’ll be able to use Spirit’s radio signal to hone in on how the planet spins around its own axis.

“Mars wobbles, or precesses, as it spins,” says Bruce Banerdt of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “We’ll measure that wobble by looking at the Doppler shift of Spirit’s radio signal.”

Thanks to ReadWriteWeb.

The Economist summarizes the World Economic Forum at Davos quite succinctly.  My favorite point:

Capitalist of the week: Stephen Schwarzman, a private-equity tycoon and boss of Blackstone Group. He made little effort to contain his glee at the profit opportunities he has found during the economic crisis, and his hope that Barack Obama will press ahead with his latest banking reforms—which should help private equity by harming the public capital markets.

An interesting observation.  Even given the looming tax law changes on carried interest, private equity will likely benefit from any misguided populist backlash against the banks.  Just goes to show how complex the whole system is.

A few days ago this video popped up on Astronomy Picture of the Day.  Amazing how small our planet is in the grand scheme of things!  The more we learn about the cosmos the more we realize how little we actually know.

I love the visualization of the man-made satellites in this movie - it really gives a good sense of the difference between low-earth orbit and high-earth orbit.  And look at all the geosynchronous satellites!