Bad Astronomy » NASA

Hey, I can see my snow-covered house from here!

Phil Plait — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 20:51:20 +0000

In case you were wondering what the snow was like here in Colorado the other day…

[Click to ensnowflakenate.]

That’s an image taken by NASA’s Aqua satellite on February 5, 2012. I live in Boulder, to the northwest of Denver (which is labeled), right on the edge of the Rockies. We got well over 30 cm here locally, and it was deeper in other places. Typical of the area, though, the Sun was out the next day, and now our yard looks like a fairyland of sparkles.

It’s unusual to get a heavy snowfall like this in February (we do get big ones, but later in the year) and from what I’ve heard this was a record for a February. And not to overextend the post to climate change, but a) weather is not climate… unless you add time, and 2) contrary to any soundbite you might hear, snowstorms will actually become more common as the Earth warms. Warmer weather means more evaporation, so more moisture in the air. It’s still cold higher up in the atmosphere, and it’s still cold in the winter over land, so a ...

OK, a couple of more things about a Moon base

Phil Plait — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 14:00:13 +0000

I love the idea of returning to the Moon, and the idea of going back there to stay I love even more. Having said that, I want to stress it must be done the right way. This has been back in the news lately because Newt Gingrich made a speech about it before his doomed Florida Republican presidential primary run.

What bugs me is that we’re talking about it in context of what Gingrich said; I’d rather we were talking about this on its own merits. There are reasons to go to the Moon, and reasons not to do it Newt’s way… all of which I went over in an interview on CBC radio’s Day 6 show with Brent Bambury that aired Saturday. The interview is archived on their site, and you can listen to it there. I was unusually lucid, IMO, and I think the points made were valid.

I was also interviewed on The Alonya Show, a TV news/opinion program on Russia TV:

[UPDATE: I also did an interview with Globo TV in Brazil that's online as well. The show is in Portugese, but I'm in English with subtitles.]

I want to add to ...

What caused the Little Ice Age?

Phil Plait — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 14:00:31 +0000

Over the course of several hundred years – most notably in the 17th and 18th centuries — winter temperatures in western Europe were much lower than normal. Glaciers came much farther south than they had before, and a famous painting shows people ice skating on the Thames river — which hasn’t been frozen since. The period is known as the Little Ice Age, and its cause has always been something of a mystery.

However, new research by scientists at the University of Colorado-Boulder (yay team!) may have pegged it: the LIA appears to have started abruptly in the late 13th century, between the years 1275 and 1300. Radiocarbon dating of plants from Baffin Island (north of the Hudson Bay in Canada) and sediment samples from a lake in Iceland indicate that there was a rapid onset of severe cooling at that time. It’s been thought that the cooling started around then, but it’s been hard to pin down until now.

More importantly, this narrows down the cause of the LIA: four tropical volcanoes erupted violently in that period. The ash would have darkened the atmosphere, letting slightly ...

The Gingrich Who Stole The News Cycle

Phil Plait — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 18:38:39 +0000

Because I was on the road Wednesday night, I missed the first few hours of reaction to Newt Gingrich’s speech in Florida, when he said he wants to have a permanent station on the Moon "by the end of my second term". It wasn’t until Thursday morning that I opened up my web browser and saw that every blog, every news site, everyone, was talking about it. I must have had dozens of tweets and emails telling me about it and asking my opinion.

So I found a video of the speech and watched it. The only reason I didn’t laugh out loud at the nonsense unfolding from Mr. Gingrich’s mouth was that I already had seen the reaction online.

In Discover Magazine’s Crux blog I wrote a dissection of his speech and why he’s so vastly and profoundly wrong: The Newt-onian Mechanics of Building a Permanent Moon Base. You’ll get all the details there of why I think Gingrich’s plan is the worst possible way to go about trying to go to the Moon: in a hurry, with the wrong source of funding, and maybe ...

Mosaic of home

Phil Plait — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 17:05:35 +0000

Just before Halloween last year, NASA launched into orbit the improbably named National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System Preparatory Project, which they thankfully shortened to NPP. In its low 800 km (500 mile) orbit it looks down at the Earth to investigate our environment. It only sees a portion of the Earth at any one time, but if you take observations taken during a single day — say, on January 4, 2012 — and stitch them all together, you get this magnificent shot:

[Click to engaiaenate, or download the Big McLarge Huge 8000 x 8000 pixel version.]

Man, the resolution is so high is like you’re actually there.

Oh wait.

In fact, the biggest version is 8000 pixels across, and the Earth is about 8000 miles wide, so the resolution is about a mile per pixel. We’re not seeing the entire hemisphere here, but the view is roughly 8000 km across (judging from the size of the US compared to the view). The big image is 8000 pixels wide, so the resolution of that mosaic is about 1 km/pixel. The Earth is big.

NPP was recently renamed Suomi NPP ...

The Sun aims a storm right at Earth: expect aurorae tonight!

Phil Plait — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 13:00:26 +0000

Around 04:00 UTC on Monday morning, January 23, 2012, the Sun let loose a pretty big flare and coronal mass ejection. Although there have been bigger events in recent months, this one happened to line up in such a way that the blast of subatomic particles unleashed headed straight for Earth. It’s causing what may be the biggest space weather event in the past several years for Earth: people at high latitudes can expect lots of bright and beautiful aurorae.

I’ll explain what all that is in a second, but first here’s a video of what this looked like from NASA’s SOHO satellite.

Wow! Make sure you set it to high def.

So what happened here? The sunspot cluster called Active Region 11402 happened.

Sunspots are regions where the magnetic field lines of the Sun get tangled up. A vast amount of energy is stored in these lines, and if they get squeezed too much, they can release that energy all at once. When this happens, we call it a solar flare, and it can be mind-numbing: yesterday’s flare exploded with the energy of hundreds of millions of nuclear bombs!

Independent researchers find no evidence for arsenic life in Mono Lake

Phil Plait — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 21:04:32 +0000

Late in 2010, scientists participating in a NASA news conference dropped a bombshell: they had found evidence that bacteria in California’s Mono Lake were metabolizing arsenic and using it in their life processes.

This was huge news, since arsenic is toxic for carbon based life. If some forms of life evolved a way to process it, this would open up a whole new field of biochemistry!

However, almost immediately, the work came under attack. Biochemists accused the original team of not performing the research carefully (to put it delicately). Rosie Redfield, a microbiologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, was particularly critical. She decided, in fact, to try to verify the original work, and set out to do so openly, writing up her progress on her blog.

And now, according to an article on Scientific American, she can confidently provide a "clear refutation" of the arsenic uptake in the organisms:

Their most striking claim was that arsenic had been incorporated into the backbone of DNA, and what we can say is that there is no arsenic in the DNA at all.

That’s a pretty clear statement! The ...

2011: The 9th hottest year on record

Phil Plait — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 17:34:50 +0000

If anyone tells you the Earth isn’t warming up…

… tell them they’re full of it.

2011 was the ninth hottest year on record, and those records go back 130 years.

And then they might say, well, sure, but that could be coincidence. Then you look them straight in the eye, and you say:

Nine of the ten hottest years on record have been since 2000.

As from above, so from below

Phil Plait — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 14:00:30 +0000

NASA’s Earth Observatory site just put up this amazing picture. I have to say, this is one of the cooler pictures from the International Space Station that I’ve seen. Not for it’s beauty or anything like that — though it is starkly lovely — but because of what it shows:

[Click to dicraternate.]

Obviously, that’s a volcano on the right: Emi Koussi, in northern Africa. But look to the left, almost at the edge of the picture. See that faded ring? That’s Aorounga — an impact crater, some 10 – 15 km wide, formed when a chunk of cosmic debris hit the Earth about 300 million years ago! So these are two craters, one formed from processes happening deep below the Earth, and one from events from far above. Yet both can be seen at the same time, from one vantage point: orbiting our planet somewhere above the surface but beneath the rest of the Universe.

Image credit: NASA

Related posts:

- A long, thin, volcanic plume from space
- UPDATE: more amazing Nabro volcano images
- Staring down an active volcano’s throat
-

Google+ astronomy weekly roundup video now online

Phil Plait — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 16:00:24 +0000

Yesterday, I was in a live video chat session with several other scientists and science journalists. I wrote up the details of it yesterday, and it went pretty well! We had a lot of fun talking about the new GRAIL Moon mission, the fiery future return of Phobos-Grunt, 2012, and of course President Obama’s purported teleportation trip to Mars many years ago.

Wait, what?

Well, if you wanna know more, now you can: the video’s online.

The plan is to do these every week on Thursdays, and have a rotating cast of characters over time. I hope you like it. And I strongly suggest people join up over at Google+. I really like it there, and post quite a few things you won’t see here or on Twitter.

Live weekly astronomy roundup on Google+!

Phil Plait — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 17:10:55 +0000

Fraser Cain (from Universe Today) and I are trying something new… and by new, I mean new. We’re going to be holding a live video weekly astronomy and space roundup on Google+! We’ll have a roundtable group of scientists and science journalists discussing the latest cosmic news, explaining it, and letting you know what it all means. We have a pretty good group of folks lined up for this, and the first one will be held today, Thursday, January 5 at 18:00 UTC (1:00 p.m. Eastern US time).

[UPDATE: We're live now!]

These will be held on Google+ using Hangouts on Air – a live video stream that can be watched by an unlimited number of people. You have to be on Google+, and then circle Fraser Cain — that’s G+’s version of adding friends. He’ll have the link to the video feed in his stream once it’s set up (and I’ll update this very blog post as well). And once you’re in, you can ask questions for us in the comments section on the post! You can read more about this on Universe Today.

I’m very excited about these live video news session. For one thing, ...

NASA sends GRAIL shaped beacon to the Moon

Phil Plait — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 22:14:42 +0000

Mynd you, Møøn bites Kan be pretti nasti…

Today, NASA successfully put a new mission into lunar orbit: GRAIL, for Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory. Great acronym, weird name, right? What this mission will do is map the gravity field of the Moon, and use that to probe the interior composition. The basic idea isn’t all that complicated: fly a probe around the Moon. If it goes above a region where the density is higher, there will be a slightly stronger gravitational pull, and the spacecraft will accelerate a bit. By carefully measuring the spacecraft position and velocity, you can make the lunar gravity map.

In detail, that’s a bit tougher! What NASA has done is launch two probes, GRAIL-A and GRAIL-B, that will fly in the same orbit, one behind the other*. They’ll stay in constant communication, sending radio pulses to each other. The timing of these pulses allows an extremely accurate determination of their separation: their distance will be known to an accuracy of about a micron: that’s a hundredth the width of a human hair, or the size of a red blood cell!

So how does ...

Cool picture of Expedition 29 on its way home

Phil Plait — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 14:00:44 +0000

When Expedition 29 astronauts Mike Fossum, Sergei Volkov, and Satoshi Furukawa returned to Earth from the ISS on November 21, Dan Burbank stayed aboard the station and got this dramatic picture of them coming home:

[Click to deorbitenate.]

See it? The returning Soyuz capsule itself is the bright dot in the center of the picture, and you can see the trail of plasma behind it, pointing almost straight down. It’s almost lost against the city lights below it.

I couldn’t find this picture on NASA’s Gateway to Astronaut Photography, unfortunately, but a little sleuthing gleans some info anyway. The picture’s header says it was taken on November 22 at 02:03 GMT, and Wolfram Alpha kindly told me that this put the space station over Turkey at the time. This view is looking toward the east; I know that due to the rising Sun at that time (given the time, it can’t be sunset to the west). Also, as the Soyuz capsule carrying the astronauts home dropped to a lower orbit, it would have pulled ahead of the higher space station, and ...

Colbert on Tyson

Phil Plait — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 14:14:43 +0000

Neil deGrasse Tyson may be the most recognizable astronomer on Earth these days, in part due to his frequent appearances on The Colbert Report. Earlier this year In 2010, Colbert sat down with Neil at the Kimberley Academy in Montclair, New Jersey and chatted with him about life, the Universe, and everything. Colbert did this out of his TV character — well, mostly — and even though it’s over an hour, it’s well worth your time. The original video is on the Hayden Planetarium site, but it’s also all over the place, including YouTube. I’ve embedded it here for your enjoyment, too.

Neil and I agree on a wide variety of topics, and he’s doing a great job inspiring people to look beyond their own immediate surroundings.

Related posts:

- Our Future in Space – panel at TAM 9
- In which I disagree with cartoon Neil Tyson
- SMBC on the brain
- Neil Tyson and I talk time travel

Watch the lunar eclipse Saturday

Phil Plait — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 17:00:29 +0000

Tomorrow (Saturday December 10) the Moon will pass into the Earth’s shadow, causing it to plunge into ruddy darkness, an event called a total lunar eclipse. These happen roughly twice a year somewhere on Earth, but this is the last one visible in North America for more than two years, so even though it’s in the morning it might be worth a look for you.

You can get all the info you need on watching the eclipse from my pal Alan Boyle over at the Cosmic Log, including timing, locations, and where to watch live online, too. NASA has a page with more detailed information as well. This one favors US folks farther west; the Moon will have set when the eclipse really starts for East Coast folks.

But the fun begins when the Moon starts to enter the deepest part of the Earth’s shadow at 12:45 UT (04:45 Pacific US time), and the last bit passes into shadow at 14:06 UT (06:06 Pacific). Deepest eclipse is about 25 minutes after that. Interestingly, for people in the western US, that’s around the same time as sunrise. ...

Top 16 Pictures from Space 2011

Phil Plait — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 12:57:48 +0000
Click here to view gallery

ESA writes off Phobos-Grunt

Phil Plait — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 21:07:27 +0000

The Russian space probe Phobos-Grunt was an ambitious attempt to send a spacecraft to Mars, land on its moon Phobos, and return a sample to Earth. However, once it achieved low-Earth orbit after launch in November, the rocket that would have sent it on its way to Mars failed to fire, stranding the probe here at Earth. There have been numerous attempts to communicate with Phobos-Grunt, but they have been met with very limited success and most usually failure.

And now another nail has been driven in the coffin: the European Space Agency, which was tasked with spacecraft communications during the cruise phase to Mars, has announced they will no longer try to talk to Phobos-Grunt, declaring the mission "no longer feasible". Ouch.

NASA joined in the effort to talk to the probe, but had to abandon those efforts when the antennae were needed for other missions. It’s unlikely Russia will give up on the mission soon, but my own opinion is that the outlook’s pretty bleak. If they can’t get the probe on its way, or even boosted to a higher orbit, it’ll burn up in an uncontrolled re-entry over Earth sometime in ...

We need to increase the awesome

Phil Plait — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 19:59:38 +0000

I might quibble over details in this video, but the overall message is spot-on.

Tip o’ the heat shield to NASA on Google+.

Congressional funding disaster

Phil Plait — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 18:00:33 +0000

I recently posted a lengthy analysis of the fiscal year 2012 budget Congress and the President approved for NASA. I didn’t mention it then because it was off-topic, but in the press release for the funding bill, they list bullet points of "Important Policy Items". I took a screen grab of the last item listed, and the note below it:

Perhaps I’m the only one who sees irony in a bullet point saying Congress won’t appropriate $322M for an NOAA climate change service, while then immediately below it noting how the natural disasters that have befallen this country have required " historic levels of relief and recovery assistance", necessitating $2.3 billion in relief funds. Hmmm.

[Note: While it can be hard to pin any one natural disaster like a hurricane, heat wave, or snow storm on climate change, as we warm up we will see more things like those. I want my tax dollars to go to more scientific investigation by NOAA and other agencies. But then, I'm not funded in any way by the oil industry, and ...

Curiosity on its way to Mars!

Phil Plait — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 14:05:03 +0000

Yesterday morning, NASA successfully launched the Mars Science Laboratory — named Curiosity — toward the fourth planet. If, like me, you missed the launch itself (^%$#@&! sinuses) why then, here’s some pretty dramatic video of the liftoff:

[Make sure to set it to 720p resolution!]

The cool parts to watch are: about 2 minutes in when the booster rockets fall by the wayside; 3:42 when the payload fairing is jettisoned, exposing the Curiosity spacecraft — as seen by the camera onboard the rocket, which is way cool; 4:38 when the entire rocket starts to slowly spin up, providing stabilization and allowing the Sun to heat the assembly evenly; then a few seconds later when the upper stage Centaur rocket ignites, leaving the booster behind (also extremely cool).

But wait! There’s more!

There’s also a video taken a few minutes later, showing the view from the Centaur stage as the Curiosity spacecraft separates, a crucial moment in the mission. The Centaur is what boosted the spacecraft up to speed, putting it on the right trajectory to Mars.

I love that we can get video like this ...

Curiosity launches to Mars on Saturday

Phil Plait — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 18:55:21 +0000

[UPDATE: SUCCESS! The launch was just about perfect, and Curiosity is now on its way to Mars, scheduled to land in August 2012. Congrats to everyone on the mission!]

Tomorrow, Saturday, November 26 at 10:02 Eastern (US) time (15:02 UTC), an Atlas V rocket carrying the Curiosity Mars rover will blast off from Florida, sending the sophisticated rolling lab to the Red Planet.

You can watch the launch live at NASA TV, or I recommend on the NASA/JPL UStream channel. I imagine I’ll be up and tweeting about it, as will my pal Emily Lakdawalla.

It is no exaggeration to say that Curiosity is a huge leap forward for Mars exploration. Designed to last for nearly two years, it’s 3 meters long — the size of a hefty golf cart — and its scientific payload is ten times more massive than its predecessors. It has instruments (PDF) that can sample and taste the air and surface, imagers to provide high resolution stereo pictures, a laser to zap rocks and get their spectra (which yields their composition), and ...

Happy birthday, Swift!

Phil Plait — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 14:00:24 +0000

NASA’s little satellite that could, Swift, recently celebrated its seventh year in space. It blasted into orbit on November 20, 2004, starting a mission that would increase our understanding of the most violent events in the universe, and shatter cosmic distance records.

I wrote about Swift six years ago, on the first anniversary of its launch, and the funny thing is not a whole lot has changed except for the numbers. It’s still going strong after 2500+ days in orbit, and instead of dozens of gamma-ray bursts seen after one year, now it’s seen well over 600. Gamma-ray bursts are the mind-numbingly violent explosions of stars that signal the births of black holes, and each event releases as much energy in a few seconds as the Sun will over its entire lifetime. Happily, the Earth is nowhere near any potential GRB candidates (the nearest is about 7500 light years away, far enough that any damage it could do to us would be relatively mild), but if one were, say, 100 light years away, it would cook us like a whelk in a supernova.

New satellite gets INSANELY hi-res view of Earth

Phil Plait — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 21:32:49 +0000

On October 28th, the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System Preparatory Project (NPP) satellite launched into low-Earth orbit from Vandenberg Air Force base in California. Designed to observe Earth’s environment and climate, it’s in an 800 km (500 mile) orbit, and on November 21 it took its first images of the planet below.

And what a picture! Check. This. Out.

[Click to engaiaenate.]

What’s that, I hear you ask? It doesn’t look like that big a deal? That’s because I had to shrink the flippin’ huge 6000×6000 original image to fit the blog! The whole swath shows the planet from Canada to South America, but here’s a closer-up version:

This zooms in a bit to show Florida, Cuba, and part of Hispaniola. You can really see an amazing amount of detail, even in this compressed version.

But wait! We can zoom in even more!

Yegads. Florida dominates the upper left, with stippled clouds and Lake Okeechobee visible. You can also see the jade-green Atlantic waters, and the islands of the Bahamas, Nassau, and Freeport. And even that isn’t full-res! Download the big picture to scan over it yourself. It’s stunningly beautiful.

The image ...

NASA’s budget: JWST saved, but not much good news

Phil Plait — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 18:00:22 +0000

A few days ago, the US House and Senate compromised on a (partial) federal budget, and President Obama signed it into reality. Among many other things, NASA’s budget was in there. Congress has posted an overview of the bill, which I recommend perusing. Space News has an excellent overview of the budget, as does The Planetary Society blog.

The big picture: NASA will get a total of $17.8 billion for fiscal year 2012, which is about $600M less than last year, and over $900M less than what President Obama wanted.

Ouch.

But totals aren’t necessarily as important as specifics. What are the details?

James Webb Space Telescope

As you may recall, the House wanted to ax the James Webb Space Telescope, literally giving it 0 dollars. The Senate wanted to save it. The new funding just passed gives NASA’s Science Directorate a total of $5.1 billion, which is an increase over last year by about $150 million. That sounds great, but this total includes $530 million for JWST to keep it going.

I’m glad that the project won’t be canceled, but I’m very concerned about ...

An astronaut’s away-from-home movie: Fragile Oasis

Phil Plait — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 16:11:25 +0000

Astronaut Ron Garan’s photography is a common feature here at BA Central, and although his still photos are incredible, he hadn’t tried time-lapse photography until his last trip up to the space station.

He took a series of images and he himself created a video from them, called "Time Lapse From Space – Literally. The Journey Home". It’s similar to the time lapse I posted recently of the Earth from space, but has some new stuff in it:

Breathtaking, isn’t it?

This is part of a project Ron is working on called Fragile Oasis, an effort to get everyone to see the Earth as a single home for humanity, and to inspire people to make a difference, change things for the better. About his feelings as he gazed down on the Earth from space, Ron writes:

It was very moving to see the beauty of the planet we’ve been given. But as I looked down at this indescribably beautiful fragile oasis, this island that has been given to us and has protected all life from the harshness of space, I couldn’t ...