Nerd is my Gender
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Mystery planet
Neptune is about to celebrate its first birthday. On 12 July it will be exactly one Neptunian year - or 164.79 Earth years - since its discovery on 24 September 1846.
Many fun facts follow the link
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‘Space Chronicles’: Why Exploring Space Still Matters
February 27, 2012After decades of global dominance, America’s Space Shuttle program ended last summer while countries like Russia, China and India continue to advance their programs. But astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, author of the new book Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier, says we’re at a critical moment for America’s space program. He thinks it’s time for America to invest heavily in space exploration and research.
“Space exploration is a force of nature unto itself that no other force in society can rival,” Tyson tells NPR’s David Greene. “Not only does that get people interested in sciences and all the related fields, it transforms the culture into one that values science and technology, and that’s the culture that innovates,” Tyson says. “And in the 21st century, innovations in science and technology are the foundations of tomorrow’s economy.”
He sees this “force of nature” firsthand when he goes to student classrooms. “I could stand in front of eighth graders and say, ‘Who wants to be an aerospace engineer so you can design an airplane 20 percent more fuel efficient than the one your parents flew?’ ” Tyson says. “That doesn’t usually work. But if I say, ‘Who wants to be an aerospace engineer to design the airplane that will navigate the rarefied atmosphere of Mars?’ because that’s where we’re going next, I’m getting the best students in the class. I’m looking for life on Mars? I’m getting the best biologist. I want to study the rocks on Mars? I’m getting the best geologists.”
But spending for space programs isn’t where Tyson would like it to be. In just one year, Tyson says, the expenditure of the U.S.’s military budget is equivalent to the entire 50-year running budget of NASA combined.
“I think if you double [the budget], to a penny on the dollar, that’s enough to take us in bold visions in a shorter timescale to Mars, visit asteroids, to study the status of all the planets,” he says. On Venus, for example, scientists have observed a “runaway greenhouse effect,” Tyson says. “I kinda want to know what happened there because we’re twirling knobs here on Earth without knowing the consequences of it.”
Today, Mars is bone-dry; it once had running water. “Something bad happened there as well,” he says. “Asteroids have us in our sight. The dinosaurs didn’t have a space program, so they’re not here to talk about this problem. We are, and we have the power to do something about it. I don’t want to be the embarrassment of the galaxy, to have had the power to deflect an asteroid, and then not, and end up going extinct. We’d be the laughing stock of the aliens of the cosmos if that were the case.”
And asteroids hitting the Earth are actually a reasonably serious problem that does need a solution, Tyson contends. The asteroid Apophis, named for the Egyptian god of death and darkness, has a very slim chance of striking the Earth in 2036. Tyson says some researchers have advocated for blowing up the football stadium-sized object.That could create a bigger problem, though: “If you blow it up and it becomes two pieces, and now one is aimed for each coast of the United States, it’s just doubled the emergency status of that call,” he says.
Another option is what he calls a “gravitational tractor beam.” A space probe would be parked a fixed distance away from the asteroid. Gravity would want to pull the objects together, but by firing rockets on the probe, the asteroid would actually be “towed” out of harm’s way.
Tyson admits that such a space tow truck would be a tough sell for a president to make when asking for more money for NASA.
He proposes this tack: “What [the President] needs to say is, ‘We need to double NASA’s budget because, not only is it the grandest epic adventure a human being can undertake; not only would the people who led this adventure be the ones we end up building statues to and naming high schools after and becoming the next generation’s Mercury 7 as role models; not only will there be spinoff products from these discoveries, but what’s more important than all of those, what’s more practical than all of those, is that he will transform the economy into one that will lead the world once again rather than trail the world as we are inevitably going to be doing over the next decade.”
Watch out, we’re dealing with a bad-ass here!
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The Serpent Dust Devil of Mars
A towering dust devil, casts a serpentine shadow over the Martian surface in this image acquired by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
The scene is a late-spring afternoon in the Amazonis Planitia region of northern Mars. The view covers an area about four-tenths of a mile (644 meters) across. North is toward the top. The length of the dusty whirlwind’s shadow indicates that the dust plume reaches more than half a mile (800 meters) in height. The plume is about 30 yards or meters in diameter.
A westerly breeze partway up the height of the dust devil produced a delicate arc in the plume. The image was taken during the time of Martian year when the planet is farthest from the sun. Just as on Earth, winds on Mars are powered by solar heating. Exposure to the sun’s rays declines during this season, yet even now, dust devils act relentlessly to clean the surface of freshly deposited dust, a little at a time.
This view is one product from an observation made by HiRISE on Feb. 16, 2012, at 35.8 degrees north latitude, 207 degrees east longitude. Other image products from the same observation are athttp://www.uahirise.org/ESP_026051_2160 .
HiRISE is one of six instruments on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The University of Arizona, Tucson, operates the orbiter’s HiRISE camera, which was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Boulder, Colo. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Project for the NASA Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, built the spacecraft.
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Fermi Epicycles: The Vela Pulsar’s Path
Credit: NASA, DOE, International Fermi LAT CollaborationExplanation: Exploring the cosmos at extreme energies, the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope orbits planet Earth every 95 minutes. By design, it rocks to the north and then to the south on alternate orbits in order to survey the sky with its Large Area Telescope (LAT). The spacecraft also rolls so that solar panels are kept pointed at the Sun for power, and the axis of its orbit precesses like a top, making a complete rotation once every 54 days. As a result of these multiple cycles the paths of gamma-ray sources trace out complex patterns from the spacecraft’s perspective, like this mesmerising plot of the path of the Vela Pulsar. Centered on the LAT instrument’s field of view, the plot spans 180 degrees and follows Vela’s position from August 2008 through August 2010. The concentration near the center shows that Vela was in the sensitive region of the LAT field during much of that period. Born in the death explosion of a massive star within our Milky Way galaxy,the Vela Pulsar is a neutron star spinning 11 times a second, seen as the brightest persistent source in the gamma-ray sky.
Genderqueer with a touch of happy humanism.
