Saturday, May 26, 2007

Space Poem Chain

Stars are full of poetry. The Japanese Space Agency decided that it cannot ignore the artistic dimension of stars and universe and initiated a project: the Space Poem Chain. For six months, people around the world submitted their vision about universe, earth and life to form a chain poem. 24 poems where chosen to be recorded on a DVD and be sent on the ISS.

We children of the stars children of space
Born in the oceans and matured on land
have the history of the universe its hundreds of billions of years
etched on our bodies
Look! Today too somewhere a tiny light
Naoko Yamazaki

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When bad luck turns to gold


If someday you feel unlucky, you're maybe on your way to take Science further...


The american robot Spirit is exploring Mars' ground for some times, and its NASA team was quite worried that one of its 6 wheels broke, until they found out that this broken wheel was leaving a deep track on the robot's path, and revealed an obvious silica presence : almost 90%, says the onboard X-ray spectrometer !


What is the point of finding silica in this big messy bunch of sands that is Mars' ground ?

Its origin can have 2 different sources :

- result of the interaction between acid rain and volcanic activity, with presence of water

- cluster coming from the cooling of ancient hot water sources

In both case, the process involves an obviously huge quantity of water...Mars, water, Mars, water, there is something that does not want these words to be dissociated...
Photo credits : NASA

Thursday, May 24, 2007

ESA photo album

During the last week, ESA released some pictures taken by ESA's spacecrafts orbiting the Moon (SMART-1), Mars (Mars Express) and Earth (Envisat). The huge Oreseme crater at the South Pole of the Moon, the Deuteronilus Mensae region on Mars and the Earth's Alps. These three pictures make quite a good point on why we should take care of our good ol' Earth.

*photo credits: ESA

Thursday, May 17, 2007

solar whisper

Did you ever wonder how it would be to have the solar wind whispering to your ears? Voyager 1 recorded it. Just check it here.

Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Cell-Phone Base in Orbit

The Japanese Engineering Test Satellite ETS-8 has started operations on the 25th of April after its initial test phase. ETS-8 demonstrates a futuristic technology for mobile phone devices, wireless communication services and digital multimedia broadcasting services. It covers all of Japan with 2 tennis-court sized antennas, including mountainous regions, oceans and even the small islands around Japan. Unlike the previous satellite mobile phone systems, we do not require a backpack-phone or a shoulder-phone or an umbrella-sized mobile antenna. Just a normal size mobile phone for communication will suffice, even in the middle of nowhere!

Photo credits: JAXA

Monday, May 14, 2007

ultra large geometry

Some twenty years ago, Voyager 1&2 took pictures of a strange phenomenon in saturnian atmosphere. Now, in the 15 years long saturnian polar night, Cassini imaged it again. It is a spinning hexagon four times the size of Earth. It spins and spins and spins at the nordic pole of Saturn. For now, nobody can tell exactly what it is and how it works. Best guess is that is just a strangely shaped polar vortex, similar to the Earth's circular polar vortex.


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photo credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

A light torch on the dark matter

The "dark matter" refers to this mysterious hidden mass that rules the Universe's gravity, and this term is a general name to store our ignorance on the subject, much like "terra incognita" was on the early maps.

Anyway, by combining numerical models and radio observations of some galaxies in the Hydra constellations, a friendly team of scientists managed to clear two tasks that would make me feel a hero if I was one of them.

First, they pointed out exactly where the dark matter should be (in red in the picture), so that it becomes suddenly brighter than expected.

Then they might have a serious idea about its composition : molecular hydrogen !
The "hidden" behavior of the dark matter was generally assumed to be due to its exotic composition : nice particles such as neutralinos, axions, or unknown "stuff".

Well in the studied galaxies, assuming that dark matter would be of this type would go against our best modern models about galaxy formation. these models tell that the dark matter should remain in the spherical halos that surround galaxies. But the numerical computations performed on the tide dwarves (forget about your Tolkien dreams, these are galaxies born because of giant intergalactic collisions - a bit freakier than the Moria), show that these galaxies simply stole matter from the discs of their mother-galaxy at their birth. The dark matter in those is obvious : their mass is 3 times what it should be, and it is also obviously not coming from the halos.

As a very cold molecular gas, hydrogen seems to be the number one suspect hiding behind the dark people...

credits : Ciel et Espace, CEA/CNRS,
NASA


Thursday, May 10, 2007

slingshot mail delivery

Since SpaceDHL and starUPS didn't start to compete on the intergalactic fast shipping market, some students thought of a method to deliver a parcel to Earth using just gravity.
At an altitude of about 300 km, a half a millimeter thick, 30 km long tether will be released from the Russian research capsule Foton M3. From the tether will be attached the result of YES2 project, the "parcel", Fotino. Due to the gravity, the parcel will start swinging up and down. The parcel will be released and placed on a path towards Earth.

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picture credits: ESA

Wednesday, May 9, 2007

biggest boom

The brightest and most energetic stellar explosion was recorded by Chandra X-Ray Telescope and ground based space telescopes.
"The top panel of this graphic is an artist's illustration that shows what SN 2006gy may have looked like if viewed at a close distance. The fireworks-like material in white shows the explosion of an extremely massive star. This debris is pushing back two lobes of cool, red gas that were expelled in a large eruption from the star before it exploded. The green, blue and yellow regions in these lobes shows where gas is being heated in a shock front as the explosion material crashes into it and pushes it backwards. Most of the optical light generated by the supernova is thought to come from debris that has been heated by radioactivity, but some likely comes from the shocked gas."(http://chandra.harvard.edu)



Image credit: Illustration: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss; X-ray: NASA/CXC/UC Berkeley/N.Smith et al.; IR: Lick/UC Berkeley/J.Bloom & C.Hansen

black hole eclipse

A black hole is not the first thing to come in one's mind in the list of eclipsable things. Nonetheless, Chandra X-Ray Telescope recorded such an "serendipitous" event. X-Ray photons released from the superheated material disk around the supermassive black hole were blocked by a passing dense cloud of gas. This allowed astronomers to measure the size of the material disk.
The X-Ray insert in the picture contains the Chandra image with the black hole appearing as a bright spot in the center, while the optical image was captured by the European Space Observatory Very Large Telescope.
Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/CfA/INAF/Risaliti Optical: ESO/VLT

Saturday, May 5, 2007

training New Horizons

New Horizons is a NASA spacecraft launched in 2006. It's main mission is to visit Pluto and it's moon Charon and to reach the Kuiper Belt.
On February 28'th, New Horizons came to within 2.3 million kilometers from Jupiter, using the planet's gravity to trim 3 years from it's journey to Pluto. During it's approach to the Jupiter system, New Horizons stored more than 30Gb of pictures and information collected from Jupiter and it's moons. This proved to be a good occasion to test all instruments aboard New Horizons.

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photo: NASA, New Horizons Spacecraft, Jupiter's moon, Io, with a volcanic plume

rocket science games

Both NASA and ESA let you play a little with assembling their main launchers.

You can assemble Ariane 5 on ESA's webpage.

On NASA's webpage you can assemble one of the Delta, Atlas or Pegasus launchers.

Thursday, May 3, 2007

milibots - nanonauts

A new breed of astronauts is born in Glasgow's laboratories. Taking advantage of miniaturization, the engineers there are cooking up robots not bigger than 1 mm. Despite their size, they can communicate, work in formation and take scientific measurements.
The most impressive part though, is their way of moving. They use small voltages to deform a polymer which is attached to the main chip. This allows them to change shape and increase or decrease the drag coefficient. Thus, they can use wind for moving towards a target. Actually they hop towards the target, taking advantage even of the swirling winds.
The nanonauts can be used to explore planets like Mars and Venus, but their size is limited by the density of the planet's atmosphere.

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no more radiation

If I were you I wouldn't schedule a photo session in 15 trillion years from now. It's not that my molecules would be so far away that I'll probably need Hubble v.100 to do it, but it seems that by the end of time, matter would dominate radiation. That means in 10 trillion years we will only be able to see our own cluster of galaxies. And in about 15, Hollywood will bankrupt.

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Wednesday, May 2, 2007

visiting aliens' hometown

Burkhard Heim is a German physicist that worked on the Theory of Everything, the Philosophical Stone of modern physics. This theory should unify the quantum theory and the general theory of relativity. His results are surrounded by doubt, mainly because almost nobody seems to understand them. Nonetheless, his theory is the only one able to predict the mass of fundamental particles.
What makes his theory important for visiting aliens' hometown is the fact that it provides the background for a new method of propulsion, one that would make the trip to Mars a leisure 3 hour drive. A spinning ring and a strong magnetic field could produce a repulsive anti-gravity force that would propel a spacecraft into a multidimensional hyperspace. The required magnetic field required to propel a 150 tones spacecraft would be around 25 Tesla (500,000 times the Earth magnetic field). This is within the reach of today's technology that allows pulsed magnets to briefly reach 80 Tesla.

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Galileo?

The European version of GPS seems to have some problems. It's not technology, but the never ending economic-political quarrellings. Nevertheless, the EU Commission is decided to continue the program no matter the costs.

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picture: ESA, Galileo constellation