Blogs / Bad Astronomy

If you’re jonesing for some spacey stuff and maybe some critical thinking too, then check out these three links:

1) Starts with a Bang has a diary of the Ares I-X launch a couple of weeks ago.

2) The 127th Carnival of Space is lying in wait at Next Big Future.

3) The 123rd Skeptics Circle is at Blue Genes Science News, where things have become decidedly Galilean.

So go waste your Thursday afternoon learning stuff.

Speaking of HiRISE and Mars…

The Phoenix Mars Lander is sitting at the Martian north pole, its mission complete. Designed to study the history of water on Mars and investigate potential human habitability, it touched down in May 2008. It dug trenches and examined the surface soil of Mars for months, but the Martian winter was inexorable. Eventually, the intense cold forced engineers to shut Phoenix down (as planned), and there it still sits.

The HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter took images of Phoenix last year while its mission was still active, in June 2008. Here’s that image:

Phoenix is pretty obvious! The surface there was relatively free of frost at that time. But scientists on Earth decided to get more images, this time during the winter. In July of this year they found Phoenix once again, but the picture is a little different!

First off, the green is not real; this is a false color image. So don’t go thinking they found moss bogs or anything like that. What you’re seeing is the same field as in the first picture, but this time its covered with carbon dioxide frost! Even Phoenix appears to have CO₂ over it, making it pretty difficult to see. I imagine that if they hadn’t taken the earlier picture, it would’ve been a lot harder to pick the lander out from the background.

Spring sprung on the northern hemisphere of Mars a couple of weeks ago, and in another few months scientists will try to contact Phoenix and see if they can wake it up after its lengthy hibernation. It’s a bit of a long shot — the mission wasn’t designed for it — but one thing we’ve learned about the probes we’ve sent to Mars is that they can be incredibly hardy: the two rovers are still operating years after the initial design lifetime. So maybe Phoenix will live again, and get back to work (expect other news sources to say it will rise from its ashes; a bad metaphor given that it’s covered in frost). And if it does, images like the ones above from HiRISE will help us back here on Earth interpret what it’s seeing. The more eyes we have on Mars, the better.

Wanna go to space? You can, but it’ll cost you over 300 grand.

At least, it will if you do it through the Austrian Penny Markt, which just opened a travel business.

And travel it is: for $314,000 you’ll train in Oklahoma for five days, then board a Rocketplane XP flown by Rocketplane Global. Once aloft, you’ll be taken to 105 kilometers high — just above the official 100 km limit into space — where you’ll get a precious few minutes of microgravity. Then it’s back to Earth.

Personally, I have no desire to do this. I want to be in space, but I don’t want to have to go to space to get there. Strapping myself in a rocket seems like a bad idea to me, since I get sick on playground swings. But if you are made of sterner stuff, start saving your pfennigs (OK, Euros). The trips are promised to start at the end of 2011, though more likely it’ll be sometime in 2012.

I’ll wave to you from here.

Tip o’ the spacesuit visor to Gábor Török.

Just a few things from here and there:

1) The 126th Carnival of Space is spacing it up at The Gish Bar Times (where I think they serve nice cold Gish Gallops). You know the deal: astronomy, space, blog posts, etc. Go there and read good stuff!

2) Speaking of good stuff, my Hive Overmind colleague Sean Carroll at Cosmic Variance is taking antivaxxers to task, and got a visit by none other than JB Handley, head of the mouthfoaming antivax group Age of Autism. Handley left some spin in the comments, and I’ve taken him to task there, asking him some simple questions about studies which show that everything he claims is wrong. We’ll see what happens there.

3) I forgot to post Script PhD’s interview with the Mythbusters from Comic Con! It’s old, I know, but you might like it. Scroll waaaay down to get to it. Unless you’re a Lost or Fringe fan, then you can read the whole thing.

[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.

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…

The 125th Carnival of Space is currently orbiting a frog right now. If you’ve been reading this blog for more than six days you know the deal, otherwise it’s a collection of the past week’s best astronomy and space blog posts from around the planet. Go look!