Great Image: Milky Way with Ariane Rocket Launch

You cannot do much better than this fantastic view of the Milky Way, meteor streak, and Ariane rocket plume.  The image is from NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day.  Here is the accompanying story from the website:

Can the night sky appear both serene and surreal? Perhaps classifiable as serene in the above panoramic image taken last Friday are the faint lights of small towns glowing across a dark foreground landscape of Doi Inthanon National Park in Thailand, as well as the numerous stars glowing across a dark background starscape. Also visible are the planet Venus and a band of zodiacal light on the image left. Unusual events are also captured, however. First, the central band of our Milky Way Galaxy, while usually a common sight, appears here to hover surreally above the ground. Next, a fortuitous streak of a meteor was captured on the image right. Perhaps the most unusual component is the bright spot just to the left of the meteor. That spot is the plume of a rising Ariane 5 rocket, launched a few minutes before from Kourou, French Guiana. How lucky was the astrophotographer to capture the rocket launch in his image? Pretty lucky -- the image was not timed to capture the rocket. Also lucky was how photogenic -- and perhaps surreal -- the rest of the sky turned out to be.

Image Credit and Copyright: Matipon Tangmatitham

17th International Mars Society Convention

If you are looking for more information on Mars, from past rover programs to ideas for future settlements, you may want to attend the 17th International Mars Society Convention at the South Shore Harbour Resort in League City, Texas from August 7-10, 2014.  

Last year's conference covered a number of interesting topics, including:

-- Latest Findings from the Mars Probes
-- Plans for Human Mars Missions
-- Martian agriculture/aquaculture and greenhouse/greenhab technology
-- Terraforming - Creating an Ecology for Mars
-- The One Way Mission to Mars
-- Asteroid Missions: A Bridge to Mars?

For example, Bas Lansdorp, the co-founder and CEO of Mars One, discussed his idea of organizing a mission to Mars.  If you want to view this presentation and others, you can view them at the Mars Society's page on YouTube.  And if you want to learn more about the projects of the Mars Society, I recommend you visit their website as well as view their past quarterly reports. 

Russian Olympics: A New Potemkin Village

Speaking of the Olympics, it is clear the Sochi games ending this weekend were basically a $50 billion modernized Potemkin village.  Not only does Putin's Russia have some pretty horrible internal problems, as well as a few problems on its border (be it Georgia or Ukraine), but the "village" itself is plagued with corruption and construction issues.  I believe Russia would have been much better off investing that money in its future, including education, science, and needed infrastructure.

The New Yorker magazine had a good article titled the "Sochi Effect," calling this Winter Olympics the "greatest financial boondoggle in the history of the Games."  The article goes on to state:

But an economic boost based on corrupt spending is an illusion, the equivalent of a sugar high... in a pathbreaking study nearly twenty years ago, [IMF economist] Mauro found that countries with high levels of corruption spent little on education. In economist-speak, corrupt politicians put too much money into physical capital and not enough into human capital. Crony construction capitalism leaves us with too few teachers and too many ski jumps to nowhere.

Sadly, the Olympics have become window-dressing for bad actors, be it Russia, China, or even Greece (which spent plenty of money it clearly did not have).  How much better would it have been if Russia took care of things at home and spent some of these funds on longer-term projects, such as a space program that does more than shuttle cosmonauts to the International Space Station?  Yes, many countries have wasted their treasure on such white elephants, but I look forward to the day the human race has greater designs for the future than winning a medal n figure skating. 

Extra Special Medals in Sochi

Last Saturday marked the one-year anniversary of the Chelyabinsk meteor hitting Russia, the largest such strike since 1908 in another part of Russia (yes, one lucky country).  To commemorate the event, the Russians provided special gold medals to athletes at the Sochi Olympics with pieces of the meteorite integrated into the design (pictured above).  

And to further commemorate the event, another meteor was streaming towards the Earth today just in case we were not paying attention to the medals.  This meteor is the size of three football fields and should miss us by about 2 million miles.  As you may recall, we were watching another close flyby when the Chelyabinsk meteor came out of nowhere.  I imagine a number of Russians are looking skyward now. 

A New Cosmos is Coming, But Not on PBS

Like millions of people, I am a fan of Carl Sagan's Cosmos series from 1980.  The program, Cosmos: A Personal Journey, brought a fascinating and understandable form of astronomy into America's living rooms.  The program was viewed by more than 750 million people and won both Emmy and Peabody awards. 

Dr. Sagan put the universe, and our place in it, into a context that continues to fascinate today, particularly the cosmic calendar.  The calendar demonstrated that, if all time was condensed to a year, we humans would have first appeared on December 31st during the remaining 8 minutes of the year, with our written history appearing in the last 13 seconds. Certainly a mind-blowing way to show our place in time.

So is it time for an updated version of Cosmos?  It seems the Fox network and the National Geographic Channel feels it is and it has brought in Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist, to renew the role of Dr. Sagan.  The new program, to be broadcast next month, is called Cosmos: A SpaceTime Odyssey. You can view a trailer for the show here.

It is a wise choice in terms of a popular scientist who can make the complex fun.  However, I am more comfortable with PBS, the creator of NOVA and Frontline, taking the helm than Fox, the creator of the Simpsons and Fox News.  In fact, Fox is bringing in the animation skills of Seth MacFarlane, creator of Family Guy.  Does this mean a talking dog will explain the process of searching for exoplanets?  I hope not.

The original Cosmos is one of those television jewels that most likely will never be duplicated, but time moves on (yes, that last second of the year) and new stories need to told.  Let's hope Dr. Tyson can create a whole new generation of fans staring at the stars for answers. 

Update:  The new Cosmos series premieres on Fox and the National Geographic Channel on March 9th.

Jade Rabbit: “Hi, anybody there?”

Reports of the little guy's death were premature.  China's Moon rover, the Jade Rabbit, is showing signs of life again.  On Thursday, the little craft communicated with the Chinese space agency. 

London's The Guardian reported 

Concerns were raised that the vehicle would not survive the bitter cold of the lunar night. An unverified Weibo user “Jade Rabbit Lunar Rover”, which has posted first-person accounts in the voice of the probe, made its first update since January, when it had declared: “Goodnight, Earth. Goodnight, humans.”

“Hi, anybody there?” it said on Thursday, prompting thousands of comments within minutes.

The question now is whether it can continue with its original science mission or will need a more truncated set of tasks due to the mechanical issues. 

More on Kepler from the 2013 Kepler Science Conference II

After discussing Kepler in my recent post, I wanted to learn more about the status of the Kepler mission.  You can find numerous papers from the November 2013 Kepler Science Conference II held at the NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, California.  At this link you can view the agenda and get further links to papers and videos. 

One topic that was covered was the future of the Kepler spacecraft, launched in 2009.  While its primary mission may be over (though much data analysis remains), NASA believes it can still do some science with the damaged craft.  One of the slides from the Kepler Deputy Project Manger Charlie Sobek's presentation is shown below. 

The issue is finding a way to stabilize the orbit of the Kepler spacecraft with its two remaining wheels while also staying away from the "annoying" shine of the sun.  This next phase is called "K2."  The theory is that NASA can stabilize the spacecraft 4 days at a time before firing the thrusters so it continue with its science.  Luckily, most of this can still be done within budget since new funds are tight. 

NASA has been very creative in its efforts to salvage past missions, so hopefully Kepler can still do some great work in the years to come.

New Impact Crater on Mars

Earlier this week NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory reported on a new impact crater on Mars.  The crater was spotted last November using the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera.  The impact happened sometime between July 2010 and May 2012.

About 100 feet in diameter, the crater produced a beautiful spread of colors, including an odd powder blue that you would not associate with Mars.  In the accompanying text, JPL explains "Because the terrain where the crater formed is dusty, the fresh crater appears blue in the enhanced color of the image, due to removal of the reddish dust in that area." 

China: Problems on the Moon

After a successful landing on the moon last December, the Chinese rover Yutu ("Jade Rabbit') has experienced some "mechanical control abnormalities" during a routine power-down, according to ReutersNews. The little rover and the Chang'e 3 probe that took it to the moon's surface is a significant accomplishment for the Chinese nation, though this latest difficulty could certainly threaten the scientific benefits of the mission. 

Just prior to the rover problems, the Chinese Academy ofSpace Technology was inventorying the scientific successes thus far (as noted in the news story in English.news.cn):

The probe radar has surveyed the moon's surface and collected two sets of data about the structure of lunar soil beneath the surface within 140 meters and 10 meters respectively, the statement said.

 The panoramic camera and infrared spectrograph have sent back clear images of the moon's surface and data collected by a particle X-ray device has helped scientists identify 11 types of chemical elements such as magnesium, aluminum, calcium and yttrium on the moon, it added.

 Data collected from observations of the plasmasphere over the Earth will provide more information about the impact of solar activities to the Earth, according to the statement.

Another story from English.news.cn was quick to point out that such lunar failures were not unprecedented: 

 Lunar probe mission failure is not rare. In April 1962, the U.S. lunar probe Ranger 4 crashed into the dark side of the Moon after equipment failure prevented it from returning pictures and scientific data. 

Japan launched a lunar probe in 1990, which soon moved off course. It failed to transmit any data and crashed into the Moon in 1993.

India managed to send a lunar probe into space in 2008, but an equipment in the main craft malfunctioned several months later, leading to the loss of contact with the unmanned spacecraft.

Of course one can also read about these problems and quickly note that China has only progressed to where the United States was 52 years ago, but I don't think that was the story's intent.  Nonetheless, for the same of science, let's hope the little rabbit is bouncing around again real soon.