“We’re able to take advantage of the close proximity of the Moon”

Stunning images of the lunar surface from Nasa’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. You can almost taste the water… Video Credit: NASA/GSFC/Moscow Institute for Space Research/UCLA/MIT.

Pete Baker @ 10:02 AM | Comments (4)

“My God, who thought that up?”

The Sunday Times reports on a new decommissioning process in Dublin.

The council said that, before the decommissioning policy, there were no formal procedures for the removal of works in Dublin. Ruairí Ó Cuív, the council’s public-art manager, said he had proposed the policy last year to stop the “willy-nilly” removal of art. Eamonn O’Doherty, the sculptor of the Anna Livia fountain (the “Floozie in the Jacuzzi”), which was on O’Connell Street from 1988 to 2000 and is arguably the most famous public artwork to be removed from the streets of Dublin, questioned why there was a need to remove public artworks when the city had so few. “I was unable to get a definitive answer as to who made the decision to remove the Anna Livia. Whenever I brought the question up with officials, they said they supposed it was the city manager, which was just an excuse,” said O’Doherty, who also designed the Galway Hookers in Eyre Square and the famine memorial in New York.

Pete Baker @ 04:19 PM | Comments (4)

“It was no longer appreciated that the structure as a whole comprised two separate components”

Yesterday RTÉ reported the publication of the independent report [pdf file] into the collapse of the Broadmeadow rail viaduct near Malahide last August.  As the Irish Times reports today, following work carried out in the period 1966-1968, “It was no longer appreciated that the structure as a whole comprised two separate components: a causeway/weir and a viaduct”.  From the Irish Times

The report said the structure of the viaduct was unusual because the piers holding it up did not extend down into the bedrock of the sea. Instead, they sat into a manmade causeway made of large stone blocks which rested on the bed of the estuary. This made the piers vulnerable to erosion. It said in 1967 grouting was carried out on the causeway and it was believed this would reduce the need for ongoing maintenance. Since then, engineers had focused on the foundations of the piers, replacing stone blocks to protect the piers, but not the entire causeway.

“It was no longer appreciated that the structure as a whole comprised two separate components: a causeway/weir and a viaduct,” the report said. The importance of maintaining the causeway “was no longer fully appreciated”. In the months prior to the collapse, the channel between pier 4 and pier 5 deepened and the flow became ever stronger with standing waves, the report found. Eventually, pier 4 became undermined and collapsed.

Pete Baker @ 12:43 PM | Comments (7)

“Is Everything We Know About The Universe Wrong?”

As I said at the end of last year - It’s still the experiment most likely to find more than a pair of WIMPy socks.  If they’re really there…  But it might take a little longer than expected.  Belfast-born director of accelerators at Cern, Steve Myers, has told the BBC that the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s highest energy particle accelerator, will only be run at half-maximum power for 18 to 24 months before being switched off for a year to carry out improvements to the 27km tunnel - at which point maximum power collisions will be attempted for the first time.  Although the CERN bulletin doesn’t appear to have heard the news, whilst the Director General portrays it as standard procedure.  And if you missed it last night, you can catch another wondrous Horizon on the iPlayer - “Is Everything We Know About The Universe Wrong?” - on the ‘fixes’ to the standard cosmological model required to match the observable universe.  Including the inflationary hypothesus, ‘dark’ matter, ‘dark’ energy, and, possibly, ‘dark’ flow.

Pete Baker @ 02:27 PM | Comments (10)

The Caves of Titan?

After landing the Huygens probe on Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, in 2005, the Cassini orbiter has been hanging around the neighbourhood taking some stunning images of a strangely familar world.  The latest images come via the orbiter’s radar instrument and there’s a JPLnews video to accompany the press release.

Pete Baker @ 08:44 PM | Comments (9)

“There’s not one flavour of water on the Moon; there’s a range of everything”

When Nasa’s LCROSS mission disappeared into the lunar crater Cabeus the initial data collected showed evidence of “a significant amount” of water vapour and water-ice in the impact plume.  Now, as the BBC reports, “A radar experiment aboard India’s Chandrayaan-1 lunar spacecraft has identified thick deposits of water-ice near the Moon’s north pole” - estimated as “at least 600 million metric tonnes of water-ice”.  And there’s been further analysis of the LCROSS impact plume.  From the BBC report

Scientists have also reported the presence of hydrocarbons, such as ethylene, in the LCROSS impact plume. Dr Colaprete said any hydrocarbons were likely to have been delivered to the lunar surface by comets and asteroids - another vital source of lunar water. However, he added, some of these chemical species could arise through “cold chemistry” on interstellar dust grains accumulated on the Moon. In addition to water, researchers have seen a range of other “volatiles” (compounds with low boiling points) in the impact plume, including sulphur dioxide (SO2) and carbon dioxide (CO2).

Pete Baker @ 09:40 PM | Comments (6)

“We’ve got a candy store of images coming down from space”

Launched on 15 December 2009, Nasa’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer [WISE] opened its eyes for first light in January.  And, as the BBC report, Nasa has just published the first survey images from the latest space telescope.  Downloadable images here.  And here’s a neat video compilation from JPL news

Pete Baker @ 02:37 PM | Comments (1)

Hubble Views Saturn’s Stunning Aurorae

Cassini may have captured Saturn’s Northern Lights but the Hubble Space Telescope has gone one better - observing both northern and southern aurora together.  And those observations form the basis of this informative Hubble videocast.

Pete Baker @ 12:50 PM | Comments (2)

And another one bites the dust…

Hmmm there goes Deirdre… She was no fainting Violet, but now Senator de Burca is gone (from the Seanad as well as from the party whip) the Greens in the Republic’s government must be wondering what’s next? Veronica has a great review over at Irish Election on how it all went so badly wrong for the Greens and for their leader, John Gormley. Nothing describes it so succinctly as the problem of the Poolbeg incinerator. But the real killer has been the way the economic downturn has cashiered what little interesting the Irish people had been able to muster on environmental safety:

Mick Fealty @ 11:52 AM | Comments (11)

“and where there’s water, carbon and energy…”

We’ve seen the fun festive dance of Saturn’s moons, but the BBC reports the latest confirmation of the briny breath of Enceladus - courtesy of the Cassini Plasma Spectrometer.  And, from the Cassini press release

“While it’s no surprise that there is water there, these short-lived ions are extra evidence for sub-surface water and where there’s water, carbon and energy, some of the major ingredients for life are present,” said lead author Andrew Coates from University College London’s Mullard Space Science Laboratory. “The surprise for us was to look at the mass of these ions. There were several peaks in the spectrum, and when we analyzed them we saw the effect of water molecules clustering together one after the other.” The measurements were made as Cassini plunged through Enceladus’ plume on March 12, 2008.

At Titan, the same instrument detected extremely large negative hydrocarbon ions with masses up to 13,800 times that of hydrogen. A paper in Planetary and Space Science by Coates and colleagues in December 2009. They found showed that, at Titan, the largest hydrocarbon or nitrile ions are seen at the lowest altitudes of the atmosphere that Cassini flew (950 kilometers, or 590 miles). They suggest these large ions are the source of the smog-like haze that blocks most of Titan’s surface from view. They may be representative of the organic mix called “tholins” by Carl Sagan when he produced the reddish brew of prebiotic chemicals in the lab from gases that were known to be present in Titan’s atmosphere. Tholins that may be produced in Titan’s atmosphere could fall to the moon’s surface and may even make up the sand grains of the dunes that dominate part of Titan’s equatorial region. The findings add to our growing knowledge about the detailed chemistry of Enceladus’ plume and Titan’s atmosphere, giving new understanding of environments beyond Earth where pre-biotic or life-sustaining environments might exist.

Pete Baker @ 10:15 PM | Comments (3)

Endeavour launches, and Bolden on “the future of human spaceflight”

Delayed by the weather on Sunday, the Space Shuttle Endeavour successfully launched this morning on the final scheduled night flight of the soon to be retired Nasa shuttles.  Mission STS-130 will deliver a third connecting module - the Tranquility node - to the International Space Station as well as “a room with a view”.  And possibly some decking… The BBC’s Spaceman blog has more on the cupola, and provides a post, with video links, of “Nasa chief Charlie Bolden holding forth on the future of human spaceflight.” Endeavour launch video from NASAtelevision.

 

Pete Baker @ 03:19 PM | Comments (3)

Hubble reveals Pluto as “a dynamic world that undergoes dramatic atmospheric changes”

Something else for the Ingenious Mr Hooke to smile about.  In preparation for an encounter with Nasa’s New Horizons mission, led by honker-in-chief Alan Stern, the Hubble Space Telescope had been looking closely again at the dwarf planet Pluto.  And, as reported by the BBC, by comparing the newer images (taken in 2002-2003) with earlier Hubble images taken in 1994 [added link] they’ve seen evidence that, “The icy dwarf planet Pluto undergoes dramatic seasonal changes” in its 248-year-long cycle. Much more information at the Hubble Newscenter.

Hubble’s view isn’t sharp enough to see craters or mountains, if they exist on the surface, but Hubble reveals a complex-looking and variegated world with white, dark-orange, and charcoal-black terrain. The overall color is believed to be a result of ultraviolet radiation from the distant Sun breaking up methane that is present on Pluto’s surface, leaving behind a dark, molasses-colored, carbon-rich residue. Astronomers were very surprised to see that Pluto’s brightness has changed — the northern pole is brighter and the southern hemisphere is darker and redder. Summer is approaching Pluto’s north pole, and this may cause surface ices to melt and refreeze in the colder shadowed portion of the planet. The Hubble pictures underscore that Pluto is not simply a ball of ice and rock but a dynamic world that undergoes dramatic atmospheric changes.

Below the fold astronomers explain the significance of the revealed changes. In the meantime, as spotted at WiredScience, here’s an animation of the latest Hubble images of Pluto. Video Credit: NASA, ESA, and M. Buie (Southwest Research Institute).

Pete Baker @ 07:29 PM | Comments (18)

“an unprecedented achievement from an Earth-based observatory”

Nasa are celebrating the apparently successful demonstration of a new technique used, with Nasa’s relatively modest 30-year-old, 3-meter-diameter, Infrared Telescope Facility in Hawaii, to identify water, carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere of exo-planet HD 189733b - a Jupiter-size planet nearly 63 light-years away. Here’s a NASA/JPL-Caltech graphical explanation. And the BBC report.  Nature has the technical details. Somewhere, the “Ingenious Mr [Robert] Hooke” is smiling.  As he said in the preface to his 1665 publication Micrographia

‘Tis not unlikely, but that there may be yet invented several other helps for the eye, as much exceeding those already found, as those do the bare eye, such as we may perhaps be able to discover living Creatures in the Moon, or other Planets, the figures of the compounding Particles of matter, and the particular Schematisms and Textures of Bodies.

Pete Baker @ 09:35 PM | Comments (14)

“He asked Mr Poots to ‘detail any representations’”

In the Belfast Telegraph David Gordon notes that the Green Party’s Brian Wison, MLA, has tabled some questions about potential DUP lobbying on behalf of certain developers.

The questions on the First Minister were tabled by Green Party MLA Brian Wilson. He asked Mr Poots to “detail any representations” made by Mr Robinson since 2000 in relation to planning applications by Mr Campbell, Mr Fraser or “associated companies”. In a question to Mr Robinson’s own department, Mr Wilson asked if “any declarations of interest were made by the First Minister in relation to departmental or Executive discussions” on the future of Belfast’s Titanic Quarter.

Mr Campbell is a member of the Titanic Quarter advisory board. The Green Party MLA also requested details of “any planning enforcement actions initiated on developments owned by Fred Fraser or associated companies”. The DUP has stonewalled questions on whether Mr Fraser financially supported the party.

Pete Baker @ 04:58 PM | Comments (8)

Spirit of Mars

Nasa’s Mars Exploration Rover, Spirit, has been stuck in soft soil on Mars since May last year.  After failing to free it in the months since, NASA has now designated the once-roving scientific explorer “a stationary science platform”.  Below the fold JPL news celebrates 6 years of roving by the “little rover who could”.  But first, here’s a short compilation of the sights they’ve seen.

Pete Baker @ 03:24 PM | Comments (13)

“It’s obviously an alien probe”

The Professor has some fun with the discovery of a mystery 10m-wide Near Earth Object, 2010 AL30, which flew past today missing the Earth by about 80,000 miles - about 1/3 distance to the Moon.

DUH — IT’S OBVIOUSLY AN ALIEN PROBE. Friendly and sending back pictures? Or hostile and dropping lethal nanobots? We’ll know soon!

And I, for one, welcome our new alien nanobot overlords.

Pete Baker @ 12:55 PM

“More than 12 billion years of cosmic history..”

Image credit: NASA, ESA, et al.  Nasa’s shiny new Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer [WISE] may have just opened its eyes for the first time, but the refurbished Hubble Space Telescope is proving there’s life in the old dog yet. They’ve just released a panoramic, full-color view of thousands of galaxies in various stages of assembly made from mosaics taken in September and October 2009 with the newly installed Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) and in 2004 with the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS). As well as a number of other wondrous images.  And, via the Professor, there’s an accompanying NY Times article

The new galaxies, along with other recent discoveries like the violent supernova explosion of a star only 620 million years after the Big Bang, take astronomers deep into a period of cosmic history known as the dark ages, which has been little explored. It was then that stars and galaxies were starting to light up vigorously in larger and larger numbers and that a fog of hydrogen that had enveloped space after the Big Bang fires had cooled mysteriously dissipated.

“These are the seeds of the great galaxies of today,” said Garth Illingworth of the University of California, Santa Cruz, who discussed the new galaxies last week at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington. “We are pushing Hubble to the limit to find these objects.” Richard Ellis of the California Institute of Technology, one of many astronomers who have been working with the observations, said, “We’re reaching the beginning where galaxies formed for the first time.”

Pete Baker @ 09:41 PM

“It’s a little weird in current dark matter models..”

We might not know exactly what dark matter is yet, although the world’s highest-energy particle accelerator is the most likely experiment to provide evidence for the answer to that question, but we can still see the effects of its existence.

What came out is what Dr [David] Law described as a “cosmic beach ball, squashed from the side”, flattened along the direction corresponding to the plane of the Milky Way. The fact that the un-flattened direction should be above and below the galactic plane remains a mystery. “It’s a little weird in current dark matter models, but it’ll be very useful in helping constrain future models, not only of dark matter itself but also how galaxies such as our own form in the universe.”

 

Pete Baker @ 10:52 PM

“exactly the kind of building that conservation area designation set out to protect.”

The BBC reports that a High Court judge has quashed decisions to demolish a 19th Century linen warehouse within the Belfast City Centre Conservation Area after the Department of Environment withdrew their objections to a legal challenge brought by the Ulster Architectural Heritage Society.  They don’t detail whether the original decision was made by a Minister, and if so which one.  From the BBC report

A lawyer for the DOE said it was recognised that the conservation area architect should have been consulted. It was also accepted that the Society had a strong argument over costs for alternative schemes not being prepared.

The lawyer added that it was “not obvious” why the strong recommendations of the conservation officer were not followed. “We recognise that there is a public interest in this type of case, in ensuring these things are conducted properly and also there is an interest in ensuring developers’ planning permission applications are dealt with expeditiously and properly,” he said.

Pete Baker @ 08:54 PM

“the first evidence we have of an animal with legs and digits walking on land at that time”

This month’s Nature’s cover story of the discovery in southeast Poland of “a trackway and an isolated footprint that were made by early four-legged land vertebrates (tetrapods) almost 400 million years ago” - 18 million years older than the earliest known tetrapod body fossils, and 10 million years older than the oldest elpistostegids - prompts The Guardian’s Adam Rutherford to celebrate “the intellectual freedom of pure research that led them to this awesome discovery.”  Which may be a bit of a stretch…  The BBC report provides some of the detail from the Nature story.  An earlier Guardian article adds

Ahlberg and his co-authors, mainly from the Polish Geological Institute in Warsaw, say their findings highlight how little we know of the earliest history of land vertebrates. They write that the prints “force a radical reassessment of the timing, ecology and environmental setting of the fish-tetrapod transition, as well as the completeness of the body fossil record”.

And from the NatureVideoChannel

Pete Baker @ 08:10 PM

WISE First Light

Nasa’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer [WISE] has taken its first glimpse at the treasure to be uncovered, capturing “its first look at the starry sky that it will soon begin surveying in infrared light.”  Full image here. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA.

Pete Baker @ 10:44 PM

“People’s lives are at stake”

Earlier this week the BBC reported that “the head of Russia’s federal space agency [Roscosmos] has said it will work to divert an asteroid which will make several passes near the Earth from 2029.”  The Guardian, re-assuringly, added, “The head of the Russian space agency said today that it was considering a Hollywood-style mission to send a spacecraft to bump a large asteroid from a possible collision course with Earth.”  The intended target, Apophis, “approximately the size of two-and-a-half football fields”, currently has a one-in-250,000 chance of hitting the Earth in 2036 - which has been reduced from the 1 in 5,500 risk calculated in 2005 - and will pass, harmlessly, no closer than 18,300 miles above Earth’s surface on Friday, April 13th, 2029.  Personally, I think it’s a wonderful idea.  After all, what could possibly go wrong…  [Is the great god Ogdy coming to visit again? - Ed].  There does seem to have been a lot of too-near Earth objects around recently.  But perhaps they could start with something smaller.. and further away…

Pete Baker @ 09:02 PM

“an absolutely phenomenal 26 days”

From CernTV.  A short end of term report from the scientists at the world’s highest-energy particle accelerator, including Belfast-born director of accelerators, Steve Myers - interview with Robin McKie noted here.  It’s still the experiment most likely to find more than a pair of WIMPy socks.  If they’re really there…

 

Pete Baker @ 04:56 PM

“As Christmas presents, they’re both a pair of socks.”

Physicist Paul Davies enthuses in the Guardian on the possibility that the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search in Minnesota might have detected “the first faint hints” of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles [WIMPs], as reported by the BBC and the Guardian, before cautioning “it is too soon to open the champagne”.  A more sceptical Peter Woit has pointed out that the two possible candidate events identified, from two years worth of observations, are not statistically significant against predicted background noise - there’s a 23% chance that’s exactly what they are.  And the published paper itself admits that small tweaks to the assumed values used to predict that noise would remove even those two events as potential candidates.  As this Science Now article notes

So should the CDMS result be taken as an observation of dark matter? “Absolutely not,” says Edward Thorndike, an experimental particle physicist at the University of Rochester in New York state. The 25% chance that the purported “signal” is actually just a few extra background events is far too big to justify any claim of discovery, he says. “If you’re going after something that’s going to send you to Stockholm, [that probability] better be well below 1%.” Even so, Joseph Lykken, a theorist at Fermilab, says he’s relieved that CDMS has finally seen something. WIMPs are predicted to exist by theories involving a principle called supersymmetry, which posits a heavy partner for every particle currently known. Had CDMS continued to see nothing, the results would have undermined those theories. So seeing something is better than seeing nothing, Lykken says. Gaitskell disagrees. Statistically speaking, he notes, with an expected background of one event, the probability of seeing zero events is almost the same as the probability of seeing two, so both are equally consistent with no WIMPS at all, he says. “As Christmas presents, they’re both a pair of socks.”

Evidence of WIMPs, a new form of matter predicted by supersymmetry, is much sought after by the string hypothesists.  But that proof, or otherwise, seems more likely to emerge from the world’s highest-energy particle accelerator than the former mine in Minnesota.  And, as the Nasa article points out, there are other potential candidates for “dark matter”.  One of those other potential candidates, MAssive Compact Halo Objects [MACHOs] such as brown dwarf stars, could be identifed by WISE.

Pete Baker @ 08:34 PM

Dance of Saturn’s Moons

Some festive fun from the imaging team at Nasa’s Cassini mission who constructed this musical interlude featuring Saturn’s moons from original images captured between Aug. 27 and Nov. 8, 2009. Video credit: NASA/JPL.

Pete Baker @ 10:09 PM