NASA News: NEOWISE Spots Hazards & Mining Possibilities

A recent NASA story notes that the NEOWISE project, an unplanned extension of the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), has found more potentially hazardous asteroids than initially estimated by scientists (also called PHAs by those government types who can find a acronym for anything - AFA).  These PHAs can most likely make it through our atmosphere and do some serious damage below.  NASA findings indicate there are about 4,700 PHAs with diameters larger than 330 feet.  And where did they come from?  Most likely collisions in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

This could be good news for those who plan to mine the asteroids, such as Planetary Resources.  The company has a simple mission:

Planetary Resources’ mission is clear: apply commercial, innovative techniques to explore space. We will develop low-cost robotic spacecraft to explore the thousands of resource-rich asteroids within our reach. We will learn everything we can about them, then develop the most efficient capabilities to deliver these resources directly to both space-based and terrestrial customers. Asteroid mining may sound like fiction, but it’s just science.

Whether or not we need to go so far for such resources is another question.  Of course, this is something the private sector can decide.  As Slate noted: 

This space-mining venture is either going to be a spectacular success or a spectacular failure. Either way, the emphasis will be on spectacular. And the best part of all is that U.S. taxpayers won’t bear the risk if these extraordinary plans fail to pan out.

Hubble: There's an App for That

Do you need a little inspiration when going about your errands?  Is the night sky still hours away yet you want to see something interesting now?  Well, download the HubbleSite app from the iTunes store and you will have the universe at your fingertips. 

Here is the quick description from the app site: 

HubbleSite, the online home of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, invites you to help choose the world’s most popular Hubble images. Get wallpaper, Hubble facts, and more.

Hubble’s vast collection of images awaits your critical and discerning eye. Become part of the Hubble mission by voting for the most spectacular and awe-inspiring sights from Hubble’s archive.

The app provides a selection of Hubble wallpaper images, chosen and edited for visually stunning results on the iPhone and iPod Touch. Plus, get facts about Hubble history; the telescope; and the scientific discoveries it’s revealed, from the age of the universe to the mysterious force known as dark energy. The app has been optimized for iPhone and iPod Touch’s Retina display.

For over 20 years, Hubble has orbited the Earth, beaming home images of celestial splendor. Join in the excitement of the Hubble mission.

And if you need more, try out the  Hubble Top 100 app from the European Southern Observatory.  

Another Chinese Space Launch

China sent its first woman astronaut (Liu Yang) to space this week as the Shenzhou-9 spacecraft successfully docked with the orbiting Tiangong-1 space laboratory on Monday.  The Tiangong-1 was placed in orbit last fall as a prototype of a larger station to follow in 2020.  Over a 10-day period, three Chinese astronauts will stay aboard the "space station" to conduct tests. 

The great space race continues, with both the private sector (SpaceX) and other nations taking the lead.  China has already moved up its manned moon-landing to 2016, showing an increasing confidence in its space capabilities.  While the U.S. has lost its shuttles and will lose the $100 billion International Space Station by 2020, others are stepping up the challenge with broad plans for expansion.  SpaceX is even talking about $500,000 trips to Mars while the U.S. has no such plans on the drawing board. 

Great Images: Death of a Star

This computer-generated image from NASA shows the death of a red giant as it is consumed by a black hole (PS1-10jh) located 2 billion light-years from Earth.  The destruction was captured in 2010 by NASA's orbiting Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) and the ground-based Pan-STARRS telescope in Hawaii.

More on GALEX:  GALEX is an orbiting space telescope observing galaxies in ultraviolet light across 10 billion years of cosmic history. Launched into orbit on April 28th, 2003 and originally planned as a 29-month mission, its mission lifetime was extended. 

GALEX’s observations are telling scientists how galaxies, the basic structures of our Universe, evolve and change. Additionally, GALEX observations are investigating the causes of star formation during a period when most of the stars and elements we see today had their origins.

Led by the California Institute of Technology, GALEX is conducting several first-of-a-kind sky surveys, including an extra-galactic (beyond our galaxy) ultraviolet all-sky survey. During its mission GALEX will produce the first comprehensive map of a Universe of galaxies under construction, bringing us closer to understanding how galaxies like our own Milky Way were formed.

More on Pan-STARRS:  The Panoramic Survey Telescope & Rapid Response System is a wide-field imaging facility developed at the University of Hawaii's Institute for Astronomy. The combination of relatively small mirrors with very large digital cameras results in an economical observing system that can observe the entire available sky several times each month. The prototype single-mirror telescope PS1 is now operational on Mount Haleakala; its scientific research program is being undertaken by the PS1 Science Consortium - a collaboration between ten research organizations in four countries,

A major goal of Pan-STARRS is to discover and characterize Earth-approaching objects, both asteroids and comets, that might pose a danger to our planet.  Its vast database is also ideal for research in several other astronomical areas, particularly those which involve an aspect of time variability.

Ray Bradbury: The Loss of a Dark Magician

Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there.

It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.

 ― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

I have read a fair amount of science fiction over the years and Ray Bradbury was always one of my favorites.  He was certainly a gardener.  While his view of the future was not as consistently dark as Philip K. Dick's version, he often had a warning wrapped within his fascinating and insightful tales.  Given his lack of a college education and inability to drive a car, I find his understanding of the past, present, and future to be all the more amazing.  He was a man full of stories that needed to be shared. 

Hopefully, Bradbury's death last week at the age of 91 will only increase the attention paid to his work and cause us all to dream a little more and think harder about the world we want to inhabit.  As Bradbury said, in reference to his story Fahrenheit 451, "There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them."

The New York Times published a nice summary of Bradbury's take on the future called Uncle Ray's Dystopia, which was filled with examples of his warning about technology. The author sums up Bradbury's vision in this way: 

There’s already been a lot of rhapsodizing about Ray Bradbury’s “sense of wonder,” the dark magic and October chill he infused into his work. But let’s not turn him into something harmless, a kindly, childlike uncle spinning marvelous tales of rocket ships and dinosaurs. Don’t forget that he was also the crazy uncle, the dangerous one, a malcontent and a crank, alarming everyone at the dinner table with impassioned rants and dire warnings.

I think its time to take his stories off the shelf and read through them again.  I am sure I will see them in a new light now that many years have passed.  And I know I will miss the dark magician and his dire warnings.  As Bradbury noted in his own words, "People call me a science fiction writer, but I don't think that's quite true. I think that I'm a magician who is capable of making things appear and disappear right in front of you and you don't know how it happened."