Science – Page 13 – Slugger O'Toole

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

Pete Baker on February 10, 2010, 5:15 am

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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 …

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

Pete Baker on February 8, 2010, 10:19 pm

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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 …

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

Pete Baker on February 7, 2010, 2:29 am

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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 …

“an unprecedented achievement from an Earth-based observatory”

Pete Baker on February 6, 2010, 4:35 am

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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 …

Spirit of Mars

Pete Baker on January 29, 2010, 10:24 pm

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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. Here’s the longer version with contributions from the scientists involved. From JPL news Meanwhile, the …

“This is just a baby step towards bringing our archives to a wider public”

Pete Baker on January 18, 2010, 9:57 pm

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The Royal Society’s celebration of its 350th anniversary continues with the Guardian noting that more wondrous things have been made available online – stunning 3D facsimiles of maunscripts from their archive. The Guardian mentions Isaac Newton’s early biographer and friend – they met in 1718 – William Stukeley’s Memoirs of Newton’s Life, source of the apocryphal tale of the falling apple. Among the other manuscripts online is, another friend and correspondent of Newton’s, philosopher John Locke’s 1681 draft constitutional document …

“It’s obviously an alien probe”

Pete Baker on January 13, 2010, 7:55 pm

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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.From Space Weather Discovered barely three days ago, 2010 AL30 is catalogued as a 10m-class …

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

Pete Baker on January 13, 2010, 4:41 am

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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 …

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

Pete Baker on January 9, 2010, 5:52 am

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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 …

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

Pete Baker on January 8, 2010, 3:10 am

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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 …

WISE First Light

Pete Baker on January 7, 2010, 5:44 am

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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

“People’s lives are at stake”

Pete Baker on January 2, 2010, 4:02 am

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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 …

“The history of aeroplaning in this country will date from 31st December 1909”

Pete Baker on December 31, 2009, 7:05 pm

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The Irish Times reports that the Royal Irish Automobile Club (RIAC) are commemorating the centenary of “the first powered flight of an Irish aircraft” – the National Aero Club are to take to the skies at Weston Airport, Dublin. The event they’re celebrating, as the Belfast Telegraph notes, is Harry Ferguson’s maiden flight on New Year’s Eve 1909 in Hillsborough, Co Down, in the monoplane pictured above – Ferguson is to the left of the propeller. The BBC report adds …

“an absolutely phenomenal 26 days”

Pete Baker on December 30, 2009, 11:56 pm

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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

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

Pete Baker on December 27, 2009, 3:34 am

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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 …

Dance of Saturn’s Moons

Pete Baker on December 24, 2009, 5:09 am

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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.From the Nasa/JPL press release To celebrate the holidays, the Cassini imaging team has created a video collection of “mutual events,” which occur when one moon passes in front of another, as seen from the spacecraft. Imaging scientists use mutual event observations to refine their understanding of the …

“It’s an unsettling combination of strangeness yet similarity to Earth.”

Pete Baker on December 20, 2009, 2:00 am

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The latest image from Nasa’s Cassini mission is the first observed flash of sunlight reflected off a northern lake on Saturn’s moon Titan. Team members at the University of Arizona in Tucson processed the image further. They were able to pinpoint the reflection at the southern shoreline of a lake called Kraken Mare. The sprawling Kraken Mare covers about 400,000 square kilometers (150,000 square miles), an area larger than the Caspian Sea, the largest lake on Earth. By comparing this …

“when our eyes tell us something different”

Pete Baker on December 19, 2009, 8:16 pm

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Mick’s been pestering asking me, and others, for a post on a recommended book for Christmas. But since I’m still an independently minded blogger, and I’ve already made one recommendation recently, I thought I’d do something else. So, instead of a book I’ve read, here’s a book I’ve just put on top of my to-be-read list – Seeing and Believing: The Story of the Telescope, or How We Found Our Place in the Universe by Richard Panek. Why? Well my …

“The old all-sky infrared pictures were like impressionist paintings..”

Pete Baker on December 16, 2009, 2:27 am

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It’s been 26 years since the last infrared sky survey, and on Monday Nasa’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer [WISE] launched successfully from Vandenberg Air Force Base on a Delta II rocket – BBC report here and full launch video here. WISE will be used to identify objects as diverse as the most luminous galaxies known, over 10 billion light-years away, and potentially hazardous Near Earth Objects (NEOs) [see fun video here]. Those NEOs do occasionally get very close. As well …

The Geminids are coming!

Pete Baker on December 12, 2009, 11:44 pm

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If you’re fortunate enough to have clear skies this weekend, and the signs are good, don’t forget that the Geminids are due to make their annual appearance. Unlike last year, the moon has decide to take Sunday night off so conditions should be perfect for a good show when maximum activity is expected – Monday morning at 0510 UT. But there should still be plenty to see from around 9pm either tonight or tomorrow. The Irish Astronomical Association has viewing …