Category — COSMOS

Went to see Melies Trip to the Moon, and Kubrick’s 2001 at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics Sci Fi Movie Night, and was treated to the world premiere of a song about our Solar planets, all 11 of them! The song we heard was an amusingly catchy tune, and though I can’t link you to a recording of it, or confirm the singer’s name (Lisa Lyons?), at least you heard about the song on Yunchtime first!

Yes, it seems that after a struggle among themselves almost as ridiculous as the opening scene of Trip to the Moon, the astronomers of the world have accepted the fact that dwarf planets are still planets. This means that not only do we regain our recently demoted Pluto, but we bring Ceres and Eris into the tribe. Following this remarkable turn-around in nomenclature, 11-year old Maryn Smith of Great Falls, Montana, won the schoolkids’ contest to invent a nifty mnemonic to help us remember the names of the planets, and their sequence in distance from the sun. Okay, sure, Pluto occasionally loops closer to the sun than Neptune, but after a couple of drinks ‘Nine Palace Elephants’ and ‘Palace Nine Elephants’ could hardly make a difference, right?

The ailing Spirit Rover–already a four-year veteran of Mars exploration–is now limping backwards over the red planet.   One of Rover’s front wheels is gone gammy, hopelessly stuck.   But, lo and behold!   The unmoving wheel is dragging a trail through the crust of Mars, revealing layers of silica and traces of titanium.  These elements are common around fumaroles and are typical breeding grounds for extremophile life forms.    YOU GO, ROVER!

** LINK to SF Chronicle Article  **

** LINK to NASA Rover Article **

On a trip to Vienna last week, I was happy as a clam to find a copy of “Das Bildbuch der Welt Raum Fahrt,” [Picture Book of Space Travel] which documents the latest advances in Space Travel up to the year it was published, 1960. Directly across the street from the Sigmund Freud Museum was a second hand store where I scored this odd picture book for only 0.70 Euros.

That night at the hotel they were airing television programs about the 50th anniversary of Sputnik’s launch, which made the find even juicier. In addition to more than 40 pages of detailed histories of the early space race, the second half of the book features some really high quality black and white photos. For example, a curious picture shows Werhner Von Braun, age 18, carrying a rocket model on his shoulder out to the test launching pad…

It looks as if Werhnie’s shirt is a little mussed up from earlier tests….So that’s how it all started!Another intriguing shot depicts an early prototype spacesuit from 1952. Looks like they sort of ran out of time on the boots and grabbed some waders off a local fisherman, doesn’t it? And those hoses? I’m not sure I’d want to bet my life on something pilfered from the office vacuum cleaner… Then again, the US space program was still a decade away from getting someone into orbit.

Meanwhile, the Soviet space program was hard at work. If you compare the images of the Soviet cosmonaut practicing for space with that of the American astronauts practicing, you can guess why the Soviets made it into orbit first!

Cosmonaut Practice:	Astronaut Practice:

For some reason September 2007 is Moon month, or is that an oxymoron? At MIT, the film In the Shadow of the Moon was launched with a free reception and discussion. Ten years in the making, this film promises some amazing high-resolution footage of the Apollo missions that we have never seen before!

Halfway through the month, Japan has launched a new lunar orbiter, Kaguya, named after a mythical Princess born on the Moon. Is it a coincidence that Kaguya is also one of the most ubiquitous mythical characters to be reincarnated in Japanese Manga? What great cultural cross-over branding! You’ve got the old timers who still think of Kaguya as an obi-belted Princess in a kimono, and you’ve got all the science fiction punks sketching Kaguya as a laser-sword wielding space opera star. Then, of course, you can net all the salary-man types hooked on Kaguya hentai stuff. On the other hand, this was probably just the name suggested by the boss’s secretary, who knows!

Meanwhile, the launch of China’s Chang’e 1 lunar orbiter is just around the corner.

If that is not enough, Google has just announced a $30,000,000 Lunar X Prize to the first private company that can successfully land a robot on the moon! Yes, you read those zeros correctly…so get out your slide-rule and your metal lathe kids, it’s time for you to earn your keep by sending a wise-cracking K-9 bot to luna.

Or is this all some kind of fiendish plot by those Mooninite freaks?

Little did I know when writing the previous post that Google was cooking up SKY for their latest version (4.2) of GoogleEarth! Now, the greenest tyro can download GoogleEarth, click on Sky, and begin scanning the heavens. Naturally, Google makes this easy and intuitive. They provide a simple menu of Celestial Objects to choose from, including the entire catalog of Messier objects, Yale Bright Stars, and the New General Catalog, all of which label themselves at appropriate levels.

You really have to wonder if Google is not actually run by some sinister joint venture between the NSA and aliens from another galaxy. After all, they are doing a pretty good job of digitizing the entire corpus of human knowledge, while at the same time observing each mouse-click made by human beings and getting us ready for outer space!

At any rate, I have to admit that the time-bar, which I am busily trying to implement for my own spatio-temporal geographic data, is totally cool when it comes to animating the positions of planets in the sky.

You can set a “thickness” of the time bar, which creates a sort of streaming image trail, and then you can either drag the thickness along the width of the time-bar, or you can just do the lazy thing and click the animation button. Either way, you are in for a fun visual…the sort of thing that must have danced in the minds of Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler when the rye bread they were chewing on tasted a little rusty!

Google has also managed to embed fairly decent resolution images of various objects taken by the Hubble telescope. This makes for some spectacular browsing, if you have any interest in astronomy.

These kids today…no more Elmer’s glue and stryofoam balls…just flick a mouse across the sky and away you go!

GoogleEarth’s Sky is definitely not up to the gold-standard set by Stellarium, but it does provide a sort of “gateway drug” for people afraid of software.     Judging from my experience with GIS, there will be millions of people who will give Sky a whirl, but who wouldn’t even consider downloading Stellarium.

When I was a member of the Albuquerque Astronomical Society, back in the 1970s, we all had our trusty star charts for finding objects in the night sky. These were big cardboard books with oval windows revealing part of a circular star chart that you would turn with your thumb.

Lots of fun, though it meant a great deal of neck twisting and holding the chart up at arm’s length while trying to point a red-filtered flashlight upwards. Not to mention the fact that the resolution of the star chart provided little more than the major constellations as a guide, which we then supplemented with rapid reading of the Skyguide, Field Guide to the Heavens and Burnham’s Celestial Handbook.

In terms of planetary astronomy, we were lucky if we could get a half decent solar system model to stay together long enough to display at school. You know, those things glued together from styrofoam balls and kebab sticks, and with Saturn’s rings portrayed by a lamentable pipe cleaner or sagging circle of construction paper.  Now we can crank out images of our sister planets with X-Planet.

Or, in a matter of seconds, we can install Stellarium, a virtual live-time planetarium! This software is fantastic! In the blink of a lunatic’s eye, we can use our up-down arrows on the keyboard to sail skywards, and the page up page down keys to zoom across inter-galactic space! Want to see the Dumbbell Nebula?

Want to see Jupiter and it’s moons, all moving in the correct orbits–live time?

Whoa, nelly! This stuff is amazing. On the other hand, with imagery like this, I’m afraid kids will not bother to go out and look at the hazy, smoggy, overlit sky. Somehow we have to do both… that is if we ever want to get to Gleise J436b.

** LINK **

The Center for Space Standards & Innovation has some interesting videos of earth orbiting satellites. The satellite destroyed by a missile launched from Xichang, Sichuan (China) is depicted in a high-resolution WMV file.

The red debris cloud is shown in relation to the green orbit of the International Space Station.

**LINK**