Blogs / Bad Astronomy

My friend Bug Girl (an entomologist and Skepchick) sent me a note about a cool opportunity for U.S. east coast teachers: you can participate in a Shuttle experiment involving Monarch butterflies in space!

When Atlantis launches next week, it will be carrying some Monarch caterpillars to be taken aboard the Space Station, where they will hatch and be observed. Lots of questions will be investigated: What happens when pupae burst open in space? How will the butterflies cope? Will their migrating instinct be satisfied by moving 7 km/sec across the face of the Earth?

OK, I made up that last one, but Monarch Watch is looking to get teachers and students involved in the real science of butterflies in microgravity. But HURRY! They need your email by tomorrow, Friday, November 6! So if you’re an east coast teacher, go to Bug Girl’s blog and see how you can join in on the insecty fun.

STS 129, the 31st mission of the Space Shuttle Atlantis, is scheduled to launch at 14:28 Eastern time on November 16, 2009. Like all remaining flights, this will be to the space station. The primary goal is to install a couple of platforms on ISS on which they can store spare hardware for use after the shuttles retire.

The launch date depends on an Atlas V launch from a nearby air force base on the 14th, so stay tuned to NASA to see if there are any last-minute changes.

This is very, very cool: The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, currently orbiting the Moon just 50 km off the surface, has taken more shots of the Apollo 17 landing site… and has seen the actual U.S. flag!

Behold (and salute):

[Click to boldly embiggen.]

Well, lookit that! It’s fuzzy and small and hard to be sure it’s the flag in the picture, but there it is. It does match maps made of the Apollo 17 landing site, so it’s definitely the flagpole we’re seeing there.

Cooool.

Compare this picture to that taken by the 16mm movie camera on the Ascent Module right after Apollo 17 lifted off the Moon; you can see many of the same features. I spent a minute looking for the rover in the LRO picture, then remembered that the astronauts moved it well off to one side, about 100 meters, before they left the Moon so that the video camera on board could record their ascent (it was remotely controlled from Earth by an operator named Ed Fendell, who had tried to film the launch of Apollo 15’s and 16’s Ascent Module but missed; with Apollos 15 and 16 technical issues prevented the ascent from being filmed, but with 17 he made it, and that’s the movie you always see in documentaries). However, you can see it in this larger overview from LRO:

[Again, click to make a giant leap.]

Incredible. The LRO page on this has more details, including comparisons of the images from LRO to ones taken in situ from Apollo 17. Remember too that these LRO images have a resolution of 50 cm (18 inches) per pixel!

Wow. Wowee wow wow.

Back to the flag, there’s a curious thing about it. The flag itself was nylon, and that tends to get brittle when exposed to ultraviolet light — which is relentless and plentiful on the airless Moon (the thermal pounding it’s taken between day and night can’t help either). I’ve often wondered what we’ll find when we go back to the Apollo landing sites; I half-expect to see red, white, and blue powder off to one side of the flagpole, and no actual flag left on the pole. This picture, as frakkin’ amazing as it is, is still just barely too low resolution to be able to say for sure, I think. The shadow is only a pixel or so in size and so it’s hard to say what’s what.

Still, Holy Haleakala. Apollo 17’s flag. I wonder what Gene Cernan and Jack Schmitt thought when they saw this picture. And I wonder when we’ll go back.

Tip o’ the spacesuit visor to Guillermo Abramson. [Edited to add: Apparently I am late to this game. While catching up on other blogs just now, I saw that both Emily Lakdawalla and Nancy Atkinson already wrote about this!]

Bad weather forced NASA to scrub the first launch attempt of the test rocket Ares I-X. They will try again tomorrow, Wednesday October 28, at 08:00 ET (12:00 GMT). The weather looks better for launch at that time, but not by a whole lot.

As it happens, I will be away at that time and won’t be able to follow the action, assuming there is any. Your best bets are to watch NASA TV, and to follow Nancy Atkinson from Universe Today on Twitter.

Image credit: NASA

[Note: NASA is trying to launch the new ARES I-X rocket, scheduled right now for 10:54 Eastern time. As I write this weather is not so great so it may be a scrub, but follow me on my BANews feed on Twitter for the latest!]

I don’t usually talk about iPhone-specific stuff, but as it happens I own (a spiffy pink) one, and this is pretty cool.

NASA just released a new app for the iPhone, and I like it. It has info on missions, pictures, videos (links to YouTube), and more. It’s a pretty slick app, professionally put together.

You can filter the missions to look at using categories like Earth, Solar System, Moon and Mars, and so on. It tells you when it launched, what the mission elapsed time is (which is pretty nifty), and from there you can access images and video related to the mission. Not only that, but if you tap the Earth icon when a mission is displayed, it will show you a real-time map of the location of the spacecraft over the Earth! I checked it using the space station against the info at Heavens Above, and it matched closely.

If you start from the home page and tap the image icon at the bottom, you get a choice of pictures from NASA’s Image of the Day as well as the venerable Astronomy Picture of the Day. I checked those and they were up to date with the current day’s images, too. Nice.

Videos appear to be in reverse chronological order, which is nice. Also, if you tap the RSS symbol you get the NASA Twitter stream. Very well done.

Any complaints I have are minor. It refers to Fermi as GLAST, which was its name before launch– a year ago. Some missions are missing, and I hope they’ll put them in when they update the software. Swift would be a great candidate for this, especially if they give real-time access to when it sees gamma-ray bursts. Things like that would turn this app from something cool into something extremely handy. Also, it seemed a little slow to get started, even using 3G. I turned on my wireless connection and it zipped right up though.

Still and all, it’s worth the download. If you’re a geek like me (and c’mon, admit it: if you’re reading this blog in the first place, it’s too late to hide it) you’ll enjoy it.

Regular readers know I have an marginally unhealthy crush on Felicia Day. Of course, so do millions of other people, so she’s probably relatively safe from me.

But are we safe from… colliding galaxies? Apparently, only Felicia knows for sure, as she demonstrates in this NASA PSA:

Hey! That was funny! Like, really funny! Lots of inside jokes for Felicia’s fans, too ("Is this your first time doing an internet video, Miss Day?") A lot of times videos like this are just painful, but this one is actually really good. Felicia is great, and the Sean Astin stuff cracked me up.

And I think someone’s been reading my book… OK, probably not. But the way she talked about all the astronomy was very natural and smooth, so I just know deep in her heart Felicia’s harboring a strong and undeniable love for astronomer. I mean astronomy. Yes! Astronomy! Of course that’s what I meant!

Sigh. We’ll always have Comic Con.

Tip o’ the Guilded lily (see what I did there?) to Javier Pazos.

NASA is planning to launch the new Ares I-X rocket — the precursor to the bigger Ares series of rockets that will be the mainstay of the Constellation program — at 08:00 EDT (12:00 GMT) Tuesday October 27. It’ll be shown live on NASA TV and probably on a few TV channels as well.

I do want to watch this, so I may struggle to get my carcass out of bed at 5:00 a.m. local time. If I do, then keep an eye on my BANews Twitter feed for live updates. And I may have to call someone at NASA and tell them to schedule these things for a more convenient time…