Two astonishing facts about the universe

The unique ability (we think) of human beings to make music. The size of it. Let that sink in. All that old SF where the galaxy is big but crossable, that emperors and United Federations of Planets can dominate it, looks awfully parochial. I am not sure that future generations will even laugh at our efforts to comprehend it; maybe they will just blink at the so-called future.

50 Days to the Moon

The Fast Company site is in the middle of a series on the first moon landing.  It contains all sorts of topics related to the Apollo 11 mission, technical, political, and cultural.  Here's an example: 

Once Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed Eagle on the Moon, the Apollo 11 astronauts and their spaceship were actually lost.

  Oh, Mission Control never lost radio contact with them. But NASA was never able to figure out where, exactly, on the Moon they had set down, while they were on the Moon. And NASA sure did try.

 The landing area on the Moon that had been picked out for Apollo 11 was about the length of Manhattan and twice as wide. In photo surveys, it looked plain, flat, and bland—not interesting for geologists but a safe place to land a spaceship, the first time human beings ever tried that on a place off of Earth.

  But up close, the Sea of Tranquility was anything but tranquil. As Armstrong and Aldrin flew down toward the Moon in their lunar module, Armstrong was looking out the window and the spot the autopilot was flying them toward was, as Armstrong described it, a crater the size of a football field, littered with boulders, some as large as cars.

Not a comfortable place to try to land a gangly four-legged spaceship.

So Armstrong took manual control of where the lunar module was flying to—the spaceship computer still did all the actual flying, but Armstrong was instructing it where to go and at what speed.

In the end, he and Aldrin set down several miles from the original landing spot—on safe, level Moon ground, but not where they had planned to land. Armstrong, in particular, had studied photographs of the Sea of Tranquility in preparation for flying to it and knew the landmarks and the landscape of much of the area.

Andrew Chaikin, in his account of the Moon landings, A Man On the Moon, describes Armstrong’s reaction to landing in unfamiliar Moon terrain: “As he looked out (at Tranquility Base), Armstrong wondered where he and Aldrin had landed . . . . (He) searched the horizon for some feature he might be able to identify, but found none.”

Please Wake Up

For Lunar Landing Day.

A great leap forward in our knowledge of Jupiter

The Guardian reports on the new information about the planet Jupiter gained by the Juno spacecraft.  We're learning much more about  its structure.  The big news is that if there is a solid center, it's way way deep.  Mostly Jupiter seems to be a congregation of big, deep, fast hydrogen and helium storms.

The new findings, based on extremely sensitive gravitational measurements, also begin to paint a picture of the internal structure of the planet.

On an imagined journey from the outside to the centre, one would first encounter a cloud layer of 99% hydrogen and helium, with traces of methane and ammonia. The density at the surface is about 10 times less than that of air, but the gas becomes denser and denser towards the centre of the planet. At about 10% towards the centre, the gas becomes so dense that hydrogen becomes ionised, turning into a metallic hydrogen gas approaching the density of water. About 20% towards the centre, helium condenses into rain. And in the deep interior, where pressures are about 10 million times higher than at the Earth’s surface, scientists think the gas exists as a dense soup speckled with rocks of heavy metal.
“There may be a small hard [solid] core very, very deep, but we’re thinking it’s just dense gas enriched in heavy elements … it’s not a solid that you can imagine,” said Kaspi. “The normal concept of gas, liquid and solid don’t really hold at these pressures.”

Image:  Storms at the South Pole.

The great anniversary

Lunar Landing Day!

Happy Lunar Landing Day!

 

Image:   Apollo 15.

Earth, ISS, aurora and clouds

Thanks, Atlantic.

This is no abstract, this is real

The moons Titan and Dione pose before Saturn and its rings.  Click that image!

Beautiful, but it makes late winter in the Near North seem cozy.

Thanks to Will McLean for pointing me to this feature from the Atlantic.

The Atlantis mission-- end of an era

Let's hope a new era succeeds it.


Again, brilliant photography from the Big Picture.

Thought for the 4th

From TomDispatch.com, on the non-withdrawal from Afghanistan:

"It’s increasingly apparent that our disastrous wars are, as Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee John Kerry recently admitted, “unsustainable.”  After all, just the cost of providing air conditioning to U.S. personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan -- $20 billion a year -- is more than NASA’s total budget."

Update: The more I think about this the more I realize that what I said once is literally true: the USA could have built a new world on Mars but settled instead for blowing up Iraq.

Voyager at Jupiter

From a Talking Points Memo retrospective as Voyager leaves the solar system.

A day late for the anniversary

Yes, Russia can be proud.

Music from space

This wonderful piece of video has already appeared in two blogs I subscribe to, but it deserves wide circulation, so I'm here to do my part.

A contemplation on the universe

Paul Halsall sent me this link to the Scale of the Universe Interactive Tool.  Enjoy!

Image: Jon Lomberg's reconstruction of the Oort cloud around our solar system.

Egypt and Israel/Palestine from space

Thanks to NASA, Juan Cole and Amity Law for bringing this to my attention.  Click on the pic for a better view.

Endeavor

Click for a bigger pic. Thanks to Astronomy Picture of the Day.

Endeavor leaves the Big Loony Bin

From Astronomy Picture of the Day.

Name that planet!

More here.

You can make a real contribution to the exploration of the universe

Read about Galaxy Zoo.

Opportunity on Mars

If we were a sensible species, we'd be building new countries in the sky instead of blowing up the ones we already have.

Image: See APoD for an explanation of the pic and the mission (not a euphemism for "war" in this case).