This is so cool: NASA’s twin GRAIL spacecraft (now named Ebb and Flow) have cameras on board to take images of the lunar surface, and an animation has been put together of Ebb’s view of the Moon’s far side!

Pretty neat. I love the wide-angle view; the individual images were taken while Ebb was still over a thousand kilometers from the Moon. The huge circular feature you can see on the right 30 seconds into the video is Orientale Basin, an impact so huge it must’ve lit up the solar system a few billion years ago. That basin is nearly 1000 km (600 miles) across! See the LRO image below for a clearer view, and click it for more info.

I’m really looking forward to seeing what will be done with these cameras. As Principal Investigator Maria Zuber explains in the video, they were installed specifically for educational purposes, and kids all over America will get a chance to examine the data. I love this idea, since it means these children will be invested in the project itself, and remember it for their whole lives. It’s a fantastic idea.

Image credit: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University

This Friday, the last Space Shuttle launch is scheduled to take Atlantis into space. I’ve written a lot about the Shuttle over the years, as well as about NASA, private space companies, and where I think we as the human race should be headed.

I put a lot of these thoughts together for an article in today’s New York Post. Here’s a screen grab of the first part:

As for my other articles on this, I listed and linked to them in a recent post about debating space exploration. My opinion changes here and there over time as more data come in, but I think you’ll get a pretty good feel about what I think from those articles.

Just in case you haven’t seen enough snow this week, NASA and NOAA have released an amazing video made from GOES 13 weather satellite images. I present to you Snowpocalypse 2011:

[Set the resolution to 480p to see it best.]

The animation goes from January 31 to February 2, and you can really see how the wet air from the ocean and Gulf of Mexico gets slammed by incredibly cold arctic air that had screamed south, creating this enormous storm front that swept across the nation. I was in Nebraska when this hit; the night before it had been unseasonably warm, but then temperatures dropped a lot — like 40°C (65°F) — by the next day. Nebraska looked like another planet. Boulder didn’t get much snow (you can see from the animation that snow was mostly east of Colorado) but the temperatures were so cold they had to cancel schools; the fuel mix used in school buses wasn’t rich enough to start the engines!

The GOES satellites (Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites, just so’s you know) orbit the Earth over the Equator at a height of about 40,000 km (24,000 miles) above the surface. This makes their orbital period 24 hours, so they orbit once for every time the Earth rotates once. (more…)

It’s a (Bruce) banner moment for NASA’s new Fermi satellite: it’s found a pulsar that emits only gamma rays.

Brief background: when a massive star explode, its core collapses. If it has enough mass, the core shrinks down into a black hole. If it doesn’t have quite that much oomph (if it has about 1 – 2.8 times the mass of the Sun) it forms a weird object called a neutron star. As massive as a star but only a few kilometers across, a neutron star is incredibly dense, rapidly rotating, and has a magnetic field intense enough to give you an MRI from a million kilometers away.

OK, I made that last one up, but in fact it sounds about right. The point: neutron stars are seriously awesome, right on the edge of matter as we understand it.

The supercharged magnetic field channels a tremendously powerful flow of energy away from the star in twin beams like a lighthouse. And, like a lighthouse, as the star rotates these beams sweep around. If they’re aimed at Earth we see a pair of pulses every time the star spins around once. So, duh, we call these special neutron stars pulsars. You can see a way cool animation of this on NASA’s Conceptual Image Lab web page.

Usually, the beams from these pulsars contain light from all (or nearly all) across the electromagnetic spectrum. We seem them in radio waves, visible light, ultraviolet, even X-rays and some in gamma rays. The processes that create these beams are pretty fierce and weird, and the type of light emitted depends on the process. However, in general, if we see high energy light (like X- and gamma rays) from a pulsar, we tend to see it in lower energy light (optical and radio) as well.

But Fermi found an oddball! Located about 4600 light years away in the constellation of Cepheus, CTA-1 is a supernova remnant, the expanding debris from an exploding star. But that expanding junk is only from the outer layers of the detonated star: the core collapsed down into a neutron star, and that’s what Fermi detected. This newly discovered gamma-ray-only pulsar spins three times per second — think on that; an object with the mass of an entire star spinning at that rate! — and is blasting out gamma radiation with 1000 times the Sun’s entire energy output.

And all of it in super-high energy invisible gamma rays. The Hulk has nothing on this pulsar.

Actually, let’s pause for just a sec. Is it sunny outside? Good. Go outside, and hold your hand up. Feel the warmth? That’s just a bit of optical light warming your hand. Now think about how much energy is falling over the entire Earth itself, a gazillion times the size of your hand. Now think about how much energy the Sun is emitting in all directions; the entire Earth only intercepts about one-two billionths of that light. Now think about one thousand times that much energy. Now think of all that energy being only in the form of DNA-shattering gamma rays.

Yeah, now you’re getting it. This object is seriously freaky.

We know of about 1800 pulsars, and all of them emit radio waves. All but this guy. It’s a brand new category of object (well, a sub category, but still), a new character on the cosmic stage. But why does it only emit gamma rays? Hey, good question. I don’t know the answer (and the press release doesn’t say, in fact). I suspect the answer right now is, we don’t know. This object was only discovered a little while ago, and worse, gamma rays are really difficult to study. That’s why we launched Fermi in the first place! Worse even than that, without being able to look at this object in radio, optical, or any other form of light really hobbles our ability to study it.

For now, I think we’ll have to rely on Fermi’s observations and then look at theoretical models. I imagine there will be astronomers all over the world pouncing on this, trying to figure out how the magnetic fields of the star can be so choosy (maybe they’re elitist).

But until then, as usual, I have to wonder: if we only just now found this object, what the heck else is floating around out there just waiting for us to find?

Pulsar image credit: NASA.

The naming of names for astronomical satellites is a funny game. Most are weird acronyms (WFPC, STIS, NICMOS are all Hubble cameras), which many times are puns on the mission itself (FAST). Some are named simply, after astronomers who contributed to the field of study (Chandra, Spitzer). The Swift satellite is not an acronym or named after anyone. It’s just a swift satellite.

Right now, the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope is very close to launch. But "GLAST" is not the best name. I worked on the education and public outreach for the mission for years, and sometimes the hardest part was using that name (though it made for some fun puns; I wrote articles like "The GLAST Resort"). Because of the picture we used a lot for GLAST, shown on the left, I called it the "flying cheese block".

It’s time to rename GLAST into something cool. And NASA wants you to help.

Got an idea for a new name for GLAST? Send it to NASA (through Sonoma State University)! There are some things you need to know, though. For example, it’s a gamma-ray observatory, so if you want to name it after some gamma ray pioneer, they can’t still be alive (that’s a NASA tradition). The name should be catchy, but not too silly (it’s a $350 million mission that’s managed by both NASA and the Department of Energy, so some modicum of decorum is necessary). It needs to be simple, and easy to say (so Mxyzpltlk is out, even if you try to say it backwards).

I actually don’t have too many ideas. Jan van Paradijs was a beloved astronomer who worked on gamma-ray astrophysics, but his name is too hard to spell for most Americans. Maybe some variation on it?

Please, no Mr. Spaceypants. It doesn’t matter anyway; this isn’t a vote or a contest, just a way to suggest cool names for the mission.

To get you started: GLAST will look at high-energy radiation from black holes, active galaxies, gamma-ray bursts, antimatter annihilation, and even from solar flares. If you go the acronym route, GR is not a bad combo for some good words (can we get GROK out of it? OGRE?). Gamma rays are Super High Energy, too. Also, it’s not a traditional telescope, either.

The deadline is March 31, 2008. So get thinking! Post your suggestions in the comments. Let’s see what we can come up with!

Welcome Farkers! Well, everyone but aerojockey.

Wow, some antiscience claims are so weird it’s a wonder anyone can take them seriously.

Take this blog post about the image here, for example. In just a few words, it manages to get nearly everything wrong. A lot of it is in Japanese, but some is in English:

A man is in the photograph which the Mars explorer Spirit (it stopped transmitting data in 2004) sent.

First, puhlllleeeeze. A man? It’s a tiny rock only a few inches high. It’s only a few feet from the rover! Here’s the image from NASA. As usual for antiscience nonsense, they point to a press release image with no indication of when it was taken, or what the original image is. There are thousands of Spirit images, and I have little desire to comb through them looking for this one (though it appears to be early in the mission; it’s still on the landing accouterments).

Second, Spirit stopped transmitting data in 2004? Well, kinda. It did stop, but then it started again. We’re still getting good stuff from both the Spirit and Opportunity rovers on Mars. The blog post seems to phrase it that way on purpose, to make it sound like Something Mysterious Happened.

Now, I don’t read Japanese, so this may be a misunderstanding on my part. Are they just pointing out something funny looking? Maybe. FWIW, the site appears to be about weird images and such. But I see so much of this, and there is no lower limit to the dumbosity of such claims, that it just makes sense to figure on the lowest common denominator.

Anyway, the image itself is, of course, yet another example of pareidolia, our ability to see patterns in random shapes. That does look like a guy hanging out on Mars, enjoying the 0.01 Earth atmospheric pressure, the 98% CO₂ air, the subfreezing cold, and of course, just being four inches tall. Martians are pretty short, it seems. And patient, given its pose.

Tip o’ the tin foil beanie to BABloggee piotr slisz.

I posted a few days ago that NASA’s MESSENGER probe is headed toward a rendezvus with Mercury on Monday. In the comments, BigBob noted that the first image has been returned!

This was taken on January 11, when the spacecraft was still 1.7 million kilometers from the planet. On Monday, it will pass about 200 km over the surface (yikes!). It will fly on, making two more passes of Mercury over time before settling into orbit, and making a detailed map of this planet. That’ll be in 2011, so the images we see from this first of three flybys will have to do you for now.