Transapient Musings of an S6 Archailect

"NASA encouraged Europe on Thursday to develop its own manned spaceship, which would give the world -- and particularly the U.S. -- another way of reaching the international space station. Europe became "a full-fledged space power," the agency's administrator said, when flight controllers at a European Space Agency center guided an unmanned cargo ship to the international space station in April, successfully delivering food, water and clothes."

This is so exciting! Phoenix stretched its backhoe out and after what looks like a pro was at the controls of the back hoe, it dug right in and took out a scoop. I was looking at the dirt and you can see some bright material. I immediately was all worked up “hey look ice!”, woke the dog up, but when I read the press release the scientists say it could be salt too.

Kind of cool how they make the color images too. The camera has it’s own red, green and blue lights and when combined (like I do with RGB filters) you get a color image.

I’ve included the press release for those of you in a hurry, but do check out the Phoenix website to “really” have a good look at the image with that nice interface they have.

The Phoenix press release:
One week after landing on far-northern Mars, NASA Phoenix spacecraft lifted its first scoop of Martian soil as a test of the lander’s Robotic Arm.

The practice scoop was emptied onto a designated dump area on the ground after the Robotic Arm Camera photographed the soil inside the scoop. The Phoenix team plans to have the arm deliver its next scoopful, later this week, to an instrument that heats and sniffs the sample to identify ingredients.

A glint of bright material appears in the scooped up soil and in the hole from which it came. “That bright material might be ice or salt. We’re eager to do testing of the next three surface samples collected nearby to learn more about it,” said Ray Arvidson of Washington University in St. Louis, Phoenix co-investigator for the Robotic Arm.

The camera on the arm examined the lander’s first scoop of Martian soil. “The camera has its own red, green and blue lights, and we combine separate images taken with different illumination to create color images,” said the University of Arizona’s Pat Woida, senior engineer on the Phoenix team.

News on GLXP Teams Cringely, STELLAR, and SCSG
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Briefs: Team Cringely on its own; Team Stellar - RLV News - This includes a link to an article on STELLAR and some interesting comments, but I want to focus on another part. Team Cringely drops out of the Google Lunar X PRIZE competition for political and economic reasons explained in the article. He has some criticisms of the X PRIZE Foundation in the article on issues like media rights. However, he still plans on a mission to the Moon, perhaps with a nice media deal to help fund the venture.

While I think a thoughtful pause may be in order at the X PRIZE Foundation on this and the SCSG exit, I don't really see a down side if they're going for a lunar mission on their own. That would sort of leapfrog past the prize step on the path to sustainable business, which sounds fine to me. That effort probably wouldn't have started without the GLXP. Meanwhile teams without the built-in media fundraising capabilities can continue with their (hopefully somewhat different) efforts.

Cringely also gives the following links:

Team Cringely Talks to the Space Fellowship about winning the Google Lunar X-Prize. - the media rule issue is mentioned

SoCal Selene Group Drops Google Lunar X Prize Bid - Slashdot on SCSG

Here's more news:

Getting Back in the Swing of Things - William Pomerantz - It sounds like Will has been very busy, with big personal events, travel, and of course prize work. He notes some other cases where prizes were mentioned at the ISDC, and the idea that similar panels may be held at later events.

Raleigh Team Shooting For The Moon - The Raleigh Chronicle

posted at: 11:08 | path: /sci/astro | permanent link to this entry

Googlokhod - Google Lunar X PRIZE Team from Russia
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Media Coverage - Googlokhod - This blog links to a couple of articles in Russian with links for English translations on this unofficial team:

Patriotic team "Guglohod", consists largely of former engineers and some existing aerospace industry. It will have to compete with the 14 foreign teams from Italy, Malaysia, Canada, Romania and the United States, with some of them facing serious sponsors of the Western aerospace industry.

It's pretty tough for me to tell how far along unregistered teams are, or are likely to get. The Googlokhod site does have a number of links to unofficial teams, a few of which I've read about before. Some have probably already moved on to other things; others are currently university classes on the prize. In most cases I'll wait to see some registration news before posting on them. I'm about to make an exception for one of them, though ...

posted at: 11:08 | path: /sci/astro | permanent link to this entry

"On June 2, 2008, NASA SMD, in cooperation with ESMD, is releasing a Cooperative Agreement Notice soliciting proposals for the NASA Lunar Science Institute (NLSI). Proposers will be required to clearly articulate an innovative, interdisciplinary, lunar research program, together with plans to advance the full scope of NLSI objectives as defined in the Institute's Mission Statement. Proposals may address science of the Moon, on the Moon, and from the Moon, including objectives that meet NASA's future lunar exploration needs. NASA anticipates making $8-10M per year available for this selection, leading to 5 to 7 awards at least one of which will be focused on exploration objectives. Awards will be for 4 years duration."

Mining for Molecules in the Milky Way
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Scientists are using the giant Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT) to go prospecting in a rich molecular cloud in our Milky Way Galaxy. They seek to discover new, complex molecules in interstellar space that may be precursors to life.

What about setting up an online, accessible, downloadable mapping system so that we can contribute to this work? Also, what are the most molecularly resourceful parts of our local galaxy?

posted at: 10:59 | path: /sci/astro | permanent link to this entry

The thing about black holes is, they’re black. That makes them hard to find, of course, but once you find one it’s also hard to get any information about it. The only way we can figure out anything about them is by looking at how they affect things around them: how stars orbit them, how material falls in and gives off light, and so on.

After observing many galaxies over many decades, it was found that every large galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its core, where supermassive means thousands, millions, or even billions of times the mass of the Sun. The way to weigh a black hole is to carefully measure the velocity of stars in orbit around them; the faster they move, the more massive the black hole. Thanks to Kepler, we can use those measurements to get a decent estimate of the central black hole mass.

But this can be hard to do, especially for distant galaxies. It takes long exposure times, intensive analysis, and generally quite a bit of work. But now astronomers have announced a very interesting discovery: spiral galaxies with more massive central black holes tend to have their arms more tightly wrapped. Galaxies with lower mass black holes seem to have more loosely wound spiral arms.

Why this would be is something of a mystery, and to be honest the discovery is not on absolutely firm ground. What they have uncovered is a correlation, not a rock solid cause-and-effect, but their data so far look pretty good. This idea pans out, that means that getting the mass of the central black hole in a spiral galaxy may be as easy as simply taking the galaxy’s snapshot and looking at the spiral arms. Incredibly, this means the central black hole’s mass can be determined for galaxies that are eight billion light years away!

So, for example, the Andromeda galaxy, which has a very massive black hole in its heart — nearly 200 million times the mass of the Sun, or about 50 times the mass of the black hole in the center of our Milky Way — has its arms relatively tightly wound up. But the Triangulum galaxy, which has loose arms, has a low-mass black hole in its core, just a few thousand times the Sun’s mass.

The mass of the central black hole turns out to be pretty important in the life of the galaxy… though probably not why you’d think. Even the most massive black hole is only a tiny fraction of the total mass of the parent galaxy — far less than even 1%! But it turns out that the mass of the black hole seems to play an important role in how the galaxy itself forms. The black hole forms at roughly the same time as the galaxy itself. As the black hole gobbles down matter, it can get what is basically indigestion, eating material too quickly. This sets up a wind of matter that blows out from the black hole, and that in turn disturbs the gas in the galaxy. That gas is what forms stars, so the star formation history of the galaxy can be affected by its central black hole. This in turn can affect how mass gets distributed in the disk of the galaxy, and that’s — maybe — why the arm structure is affected by the black hole.

However, galaxy history is fraught with danger. Galaxies collide, or slide past each other and mess each other up. This also affects how the disk and arms behave, so obviously this situation gets complicated quickly. Worse, dark matter may play a role as well, but it’s not clear how that might work either. But if the result that black hole mass somehow correlates with the spiral arm shape is correct, that will give astronomers yet another handle on how galaxies interact with the monsters at their hearts.

Editor's 31 May 11 pm EDT update: The MarsPhoenix Twitter feed now has 11,667 followers whereas the Twitter feeds for Twitter's Co-founder Biz Stone only has 11,178, Stephen Colbert has 10,593 followers, and Gen Y techie favorite Wil Wheaton (Star Trek actor) has 11,270 followers.

Editor's 1 June 12 am EDT update: One hour later and there are now 12,119 followers. That's nearly a 5% increase in just one hour.

Editor's 1 June 12 pm EDT update: Now up to 13,970 followers. Twitterholic now ranks it at 20th most popular.

Editor's 2 June 12 am EDT update: Now up to 15,038 followers. While the Twitterholic ranking has not been updated, this number of followers would rank it at around 14. At this growth rate MarsPhoenix will break into the top ten in a matter of days - and all of the great science news has just started to arrive.

Wed, 28 May 2008

"The NASA Innovative Partnerships Program (IPP) is hereby requesting information from organizations interested in hosting NASA employees participating in the NASA Innovation Transfusion project. The goal of the Innovation Transfusion project is to increase the flow of new ideas into NASA by increasing connections between NASA employees and outside organizations that are creative leaders in areas that could benefit NASA missions.

The Innovation Transfusion project has two elements: Innovation Ambassadors and Innovation Scouts. The Innovation Ambassadors program will provide a temporary developmental assignment for select members of NASA's technical workforce. The Innovation Scouts program will provide for small teams of NASA employees to participate in focused workshops with a host external organization to exchange information on specific technical innovations."

TARC Today
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Today is the Team America Rocketry Challenge held in The Plains, Virginia. Spaceref has a press release about the Jacksonville Florida Challenger Learning Center participation in the event with 1 of the 100 finalist teams. In addition, they will be

providing astronaut training activities for all event guests and participating students from across the United States. Students will be able to take a ride in the Barany chair, a spinning chair used to help pilots and astronauts adjust to disorientation, and to try their hand at tossing a ball using special glasses that simulates what it might be like to work on the space station.

Update (May 17 evening): Here are the 2008 contest final results. Currently on the main TARC page:

A team from Enloe High School in Raleigh, North Carolina, won the national Sixth Annual Team America Rocketry Challenge Saturday, beating out 99 rivals for the title. The 10-member team rose to the top of squads of middle and high school-aged students facing off in the final round of the world's largest rocket competition held today outside of Washington, D.C.

"We saw it go up and it looked perfect and it was ideal," Enloe team Captain Levon Keusseyan said.

posted at: 11:49 | path: /sci/astro | permanent link to this entry

Editor's note: I got a Twitter note an hour or so ago from someone@arc.nasa.gov: "reference to nasawatch at the all-hands - how folks use that more than insidenasa." Interesting. I am curious to see how the new ~~inside-the-firewall~~ NASAsphere system works. Does anyone have a screen grab they can send me of NASAsphere that they can share? This is what InsideNASA looks like today.

Editor's update: this is a screen grab from NASAsphere. I have learned that this is not a permanent NASA feature - at least not yet. It is undergoing an evaluation period for the next month or so. At that point a decision will be made whether to go ahead - and what software platform to use.

Reader note: "In conjunction with the NASA 50th anniversary show When We Left Earth: The NASA Missions, which airs on Discovery Channel beginning next month, we'd love to hear any short stories you may wish to share about missions from the agency's early days or from the shuttle program. Here's a link:
http://dsc.discovery.com/tv/nasa/audio-messages/audio-messages.html

1) for the early missions- Mercury, Gemini, Apollo 866-947-6272
2) for crews and anyone involved with the space program 866-948-6272
3) for Shuttle stories 866-949-6272"

As I live and breath. The space community has gotten serious again about chemical analysis of Martian soil. NASA is very much driven by physicists and engineers, so it is nice to see chemistry get some flight time. Why don’t more chemists elbow these physicists out of the way to put packages on rockets? I guess we are insufferable ground pounders.

The Phoenix Lander which, to NASA’s great credit, has successfully landed in the North polar region of Mars, is equipped with an array of analytical instruments and wet chemical apparatus for on-the-spot analysis of soil samples. Among the devices on board is a Swiss-made Atomic Force Microscope. This device will provide direct microscopic imaging of Martian soil samples. In true Swiss fastidiousness, it has multiple cantilevers for redundancy. I’m sure it keeps good time as well.

The Canadian Space Agency has contributed a meterological station on the lander.

The lander was constructed by contractor Lockheed Martin.

Given that the lander contains hazardous chemcials for the analyses, somebody is going to have to dispose of the hazardous waste after 90 days. I hope it is properly placarded. \

Tue, 20 May 2008

NASA Authorization Act of 2008 - Innovation Prizes
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Space Politics covers HR 6063, the NASA Authorization Act of 2008. Let the dissection of the bill begin! In my first skim through it, I saw quite a bit that would be interest to commercial space, Earth science, space science, and aeronautic advocates. Innovative-sounding provisions were also added to the NASA lunar plan. It didn't strike me as a "NASA business as usual" bill. There might be some sticker shock along the way, though.

NASA authorization bill introduced in House

NASA authorization bill text available

Here's the prize section (and for your reference, here's Section 314 that's mentioned). Although it would increase the potential size of NASA prizes, I didn't see any request for actual funding for prizes.

SEC. 1106. INNOVATION PRIZES.

(a) In General- Prizes can play a useful role in encouraging innovation in the development of technologies and products that can assist NASA in its aeronautics and space activities, and the use of such prizes by NASA should be encouraged.

(b) Amendments- Section 314 of the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 is amended--

(1) by amending subsection (b) to read as follows:

`(b) Topics- In selecting topics for prize competitions, the Administrator shall consult widely both within and outside the Federal Government, and may empanel advisory committees. The Administrator shall give consideration to prize goals such as the demonstration of the ability to provide energy to the lunar surface from space-based solar power systems, demonstration of innovative near-Earth object survey and deflection strategies, and innovative approaches to improving the safety and efficiency of aviation systems.'; and

(2) in subsection (i)(4) by striking `$10,000,000' and inserting `$50,000,000'.

posted at: 23:40 | path: /sci/astro | permanent link to this entry

Whether or not information can truly be lost is a major issue in the study of black holes. Stephen Hawking’s work in the 1970s offered a mechanism for black hole evaporation. Vacuum fluctuations would cause a particle and its antiparticle to appear just beyond the black hole’s event horizon, with one of the two falling into the black hole while the other escaped. A ‘virtual’ particle, in other words, would become a real particle. Black holes, in this view, would be able to lose mass through quantum effects, a theory that the soon to be launched GLAST satellite will try to confirm.

But ingenious as Hawking’s theory was, it produced a conundrum. Black holes that fail to gain more matter will eventually vanish, with information, such as the identity of matter drawn into the black hole, becoming permanently lost. It being a linchpin of quantum mechanics that information cannot be lost, this presents a problem. Enough of one that physicist John Preskill (Caltech) bet Hawking and Kip Thorne (also at Caltech) that information could not be lost in black holes. Hawking conceded in 2005, and now a team of physicists has suggested a new way of seeing black holes that would indeed allow information to escape.

Image: An artist’s depiction of the accretion of a thick ring of dust into a supermassive black hole. The accretion produces jets of gamma rays and X-rays. Credit: ESA / V. Beckmann (NASA-GSFC).

The idea behind this work, led by Abhay Ashtekar (Penn State), is that the disappearance of information is only an illusion. Think of spacetime as a series of individual building blocks. Ashtekar’s team believes that the idea of a continuum is but an approximation of a larger reality, one in which singularities, as Ashtekar himself says, “…are merely artifacts of our insistence that space-time should be described as a continuum.” Thus:

The work, to be published in the Physical Review Letters, draws on mathematical studies of black holes in two dimensions, an approach the team believes accurately applies to real black holes in four-dimensions, although directly studying the latter is what Ashtekar and company are now proceeding to do. If confirmed, their work would validate Hawking’s decision to pay off the bet with Preskill, which he did by giving the physicist what he had asked for, a baseball encyclopedia. Thorne has yet to concede the bet, for Hawking’s own take on how black holes might leak information is as controversial as Ashtekar’s is likely to be.

The most recent supernova in our Milky Way happened around 1680 or so we thought; it was called Cassiopeia A. Astronomers have estimated about three supernovae every century occur in Milky Way galaxy. Doing the math, since 1680 there should have been about 10, or one every thirty-two years or so.

Why haven’t we seen one? Well aside from the fact that the Milky Way is a very big place, it’s also pretty dusty in spots. Keep in mind that while the estimate was a supernova about every thirty-two years, but they may have happened long ago and the light it just getting here.

In 1985 astronomers using the Very Large Array spotted the radio image of what they identified a supernova remnant near the center of the galaxy ~ 26,000 light-years away (left image). The supernova was not visible to us because it was hidden by a thick cloud of gas and dust; they named the supernova G1.9+0.3 and gave it an age of somewhere between 400 and 1,000 years,

In 2007 a team of astronomers being led by North Carolina State University’s Stephen Reynolds too a look at G1.9+0.3 with the Chandra X-Ray Observatory and whoa, this thing grew! The supernova expanded by roughly 16 percent. To be sure the team was seeing what they thought they were seeing they got a very fast approval to use the VLA to look at the supernova again just like the first time (right image).

They have found surprises not the least of which is based on the expansion rate the supernova was much younger than they thought, just 140 years.

Mon, 12 May 2008

The Antennae Galaxies are about 20 million light-years closer than was thought. That’s the result of new research from an international group led by Ivo Savianne from the European Southern Observatory using the Hubble Space Telescope and ground based observations.

The research put the distance estimate at 45 million light-years, the former estimate was 65 million light-years. You might be tempted to thinking how can that possibly be, after all that is a big difference and how can that possibly be. Cosmic distances may seem to be pretty routine; in reality it’s not like getting out a ruler and it turns out that determining distances is one of the most difficult things in professional astronomy.

The Antennae Galaxies are the closest pair of colliding galaxies, and at a magnitude 10.9 are easily visible with a modest telescope. The coordinates are RA: 12h 01m 52.8s / Dec: -18°51′54” (Epoch 2000).

The press release is very good and there are other images (and larger formats) there too, check it out. BTW, I noted Robert Gendler is in the credits and he is one of the world’s best astrophotographers; I’ve enjoyed his work for years.

Fri, 11 Apr 2008

Johannes Kepler: 436th birthday
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Johannes Kepler was born prematurely near Stuttgart on 12/27/1571. His grandfather was a mayor of their town but once Johannes was born, the family's fortunes were already dropping. His father was a mercenary and left the family when Johannes was five. His mother was a healer and a witch which has also led to some legal problems.

Johannes was a brilliant child with early inclinations to astronomy. In Graz (1594-1600), he was defending the Copernican heliocentric system. At that time, there was no clear difference between astronomy and astrology. Therefore, Kepler also invented the ADE classification of planets orbiting the Sun. ;-) This attempt resembled, but was not identical to, Garrett Lisi's hopeless attempt to unify. Kepler also wrote that the Universe had to be stationary.

In 1600, Kepler finally met Tycho Brahe in Benátky nad Jizerou (see the picture), a central Bohemian town where Brahe built an observatory. Brahe quickly recognized Kepler's magic theoretical powers. Their negotiations about the new Kepler's job in Prague were accompanied by arguments and tension. Fortunately for the Czech capital, Kepler had more serious problems with Graz where they expected him to convert to Catholicism. Finally, Kepler moved to Prague, including his family.

He became the imperial mathematician of our monarchy, an advisor to Emperor Rudolph II, a predecessor of Václav Klaus and a great sponsor of arts and sciences pictured above, and 11 most productive years of Kepler's life were just getting started. Kepler was also giving his political recommendations to the empire although his common sense was more instrumental than the stars.

In Prague, Kepler established modern optics (he understood geometry of lunar shadows, the inverse-square law controlling the light intensity, and other things). In 1604, he started to observe SN 1604, a supernova also known as Kepler's star, in the constellation Serpentarius, the 13th sign of the zodiac in which your humble correspondent was born. Click at the link and see Kepler's beautiful drawing of Ophiuchus, as the constellation should now be called. It started to be clear to him that the heavens were not as constant as Aristotle used to think.

Kepler's laws

In 1602, Kepler discovered the law that we derive from the conservation of the angular momentum these days. He had a somewhat strange, non-Newtonian interpretation of it: the Sun provides the planets with motive power that decreases as they get further from the Sun which means that when the planets are far away from the Sun, they move more slowly. ;-)

Tycho's very accurate data about Mars were very important for Kepler. Incidentally, Mars may be hit by an asteroid in one month: the probability exceeds 1 percent.

After 40 years of failed attempts, Kepler finally got the right idea about the shape of the orbit in 1605. Why didn't he think about the ellipse - the shape dictated by his first law - earlier? Because it was too simple and Kepler thought that the astronomers would have figured out such a solution a long time ago if it were correct. This story hides at least two general lessons.

The first lesson is that it is sometimes easier to learn important insights from examples that are not the simplest ones because their patterns are sharper, more visible, and more characteristic and they cannot be confused with others. The simplest cases and solutions often look too singular and their modest internal structure is a bad starting point for generalizations. More complex examples typically "pinpoint" the right general law or algorithm uniquely or almost uniquely.

The second lesson is a sociological one. While it may be more likely that a simple solution should have already been found by others, they may have overlooked it, too. And if they did, such a simple solution might be much more valuable. I think it follows that scientists shouldn't ignore a topic just because it was found uninteresting or unrealistic by many others.

On the other hand, you are never guaranteed to succeed. If you attempt to do something simple that has been tried by many others, you are less likely to find something new, especially if you are less gifted than Kepler.

Kepler realized that the Mars data agreed with the ellipse beautifully and he has abruptly and correctly deduced that all planets had elliptical orbits even though he couldn't have done the numerical calculations for all the planets (he had no postdocs and grad students). In 1610, Kepler also had a healthy and friendly exchange with Galileo Galilei, supporting his discovery of the moons and helping him and others to improve the telescope.

The last law of planetary motion I didn't mention was the third one: the orbital times squared are proportional to the distances cubed. Kepler included this law as an example of the harmonies that the Creator used to decorate the heavens.

Religious tension in Prague

Unfortunately, politics slowed the progress down in 1611. Rudolph II became seriously ill - and died in 1612 - and his brother Matthias who was 5 years younger and who was already controlling Austria, Hungary, and Moravia was able to grab the kingdom of Bohemia, too. This, of course, meant a dramatic decrease of the influence of so-far-dominant Bohemia within the Holy Roman Empire. It also meant a dramatic weakening of the conditions to do research in Prague (and elsewhere, for that matter). While Matthias confirmed Kepler's job and salary, he allowed him to leave for Linz, Austria. In Linz, Kepler was teaching at the district school and he was calculating the year of Christ's birth.

That was a pretty bad development for science. At least, Kepler's second marriage was much happier than the first. However, his writing got much less quantitative than during the golden years in Prague. It became somewhat astrological and similar to his early years. A monument to Brahe and Kepler at the picture above is in Prague 6, Pohořelec, a former place of another observatory of Brahe near the Prague Castle.

Jacob Bernoulli

Another guy who was born on December 27th was Jacob Bernoulli, namely in 1654. His parents wanted him to do theology but he preferred mathematics and astronomy. The Bernoulli numbers that appear in Martin Schnabl's solution to string field theory and elsewhere belong among his discoveries. However, you should be careful: there were 8 good mathematicians and physicists in his family. For example, the laws of hydrodynamics and aerodynamics are due to Daniel Bernoulli.

posted at: 23:33 | path: /sci/astro | permanent link to this entry

Wed, 11 Jun 2008

Wed, 28 May 2008

Tue, 20 May 2008

Mon, 12 May 2008

Fri, 11 Apr 2008