Fraser Cain, Author at Universe Today

September 18, 2007December 26, 2015 by Fraser Cain

Astrosphere for September 18th, 2007

Well, I’m officially jealous. Space blogger Keith Cowing recently got a chance to fly on the Zero Gravity Corporation’s G Force One and experience weightlessness. Tell me that doesn’t look like fun.

My good friends over at Earth & Sky are going to be launching a Spanish-language version of their popular astronomy podcast, funded by the National Science Foundation. They’re planning to produce 600 one-minute science radio spots in Spanish over the next three years. It’s going to be called Cielo y Tierra, which, uh, makes sense.

A big thanks to the History Channel, and its show, “The Universe“. They sponsored Universe Today and Astronomy Cast over the summer. The last episode has aired, so they’re moving on. Hey, that means there’s a sponsorship opportunity available in Astronomy Cast. If you’re interested in sponsoring Astronomy Cast, we now get about 180,000 shows downloaded every month.

September 18, 2007December 26, 2015 by Fraser Cain

NASA is Looking for New Astronauts

Have you got the right stuff? If you’ve got multiple advanced degrees, a body carved from a block of steel, tremendous experience flying jet aircraft, and strong stomach, you might want to consider signing up as a NASA astronaut. NASA announced today that they’re now accepting applications for the 2009 Astronaut Candidate Class. These are the people who will be staffing the International Space Station, and heading back to the Moon.

Don’t think this happens all the time. The last time NASA opened up applications for astronaut candidates (or ascans) was back in 2004. They brought in 11 US candidates and 3 international people out of thousands of applications. This time around, they’re going to be looking to fill 15 positions or so.

The NASA press release links to the USAJOBS website. Here’s the information from that website, including the astronaut salary range: $59,493.00 – $130,257.00 USD per year. Nice money.

Astronaut Candidate
SALARY RANGE:$59,493.00 – 130,257.00 USD per year
OPEN PERIOD: Tuesday, September 18, 2007 to Tuesday, July 01, 2008
SERIES & GRADE: GS-0801-11/14
POSITION INFORMATION: Full-Time – Permanent appointment
PROMOTION POTENTIAL: 15
DUTY LOCATIONS: Few vacancies – Houston
WHO MAY BE CONSIDERED:
This announcement is open to all qualified U.S citizens.

JOB SUMMARY:
NASA, the world’s leader in space and aeronautics is always seeking outstanding scientists, engineers, and other talented professionals to carry forward the great discovery process that its mission demands. Creativity. Ambition. Teamwork. A sense of daring. And a probing mind. That’s what it takes to join NASA, one of the best places to work in the Federal Government.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has a need for Astronaut Candidates to support the International Space Station (ISS) Program.

NASA uses the USAJobs resume as the basic application document. NASA limits resumes to the equivalent of about six typed pages, or approximately 22,000 characters (including spaces). You cannot complete the application process if your USAJobs resume is too long. More information about the NASA application process is also available under the “How to Apply” section of this announcement.

KEY REQUIREMENTS:
* Position subject to pre-employment background investigation
* U.S. citizenship is required
* This is a drug-testing designated position
* Frequent travel may be required
* Selectee must pass a pre-employment medical examination

So, unlike previous years, this one’s only open to US citizens. I guess that rules me out.

Click here to access the job posting.

Hilariously, the press release lists the possible destinations you might travel to: “Texas, Florida, California, Russia, Kazakhstan, the International Space Station and the moon.” Good to know.

The deadline to apply is July 1, 2008, so head out there and update your resume. Include the fact that you read Universe Today, that’s got to be a big positive.

Original Source: NASA News Release

September 18, 2007December 26, 2015 by Fraser Cain

The Northwest Passage is Open, and That’s Not a Good Thing

Here in Vancouver, we have a maritime museum with the first ship to completely circumnavigate North America, and the second vessel to complete a voyage through the Northwest Passage – the St. Roch. Their journey was long and difficult, taking 28 months to cross above North America. And just think, if they’d waited until now, they could sail right across with clear waters the whole way. Satellite photos show that Arctic ice levels have reached their lowest point in recorded history, opening up the Northwest Passage.

A mosaic of nearly 200 images captured by ESA’s Envisat satellite was recently released to the public. Here’s Leif Toudal Pedersen from the Danish National Space Centre, describing the ice coverage:

“We have seen the ice-covered area drop to just around 3 million sq km which is about 1 million sq km less than the previous minima of 2005 and 2006. There has been a reduction of the ice cover over the last 10 years of about 100 000 sq km per year on average, so a drop of 1 million sq km in just one year is extreme.”

Arctic sea ice coverage rises and falls over the course of the year. During the cold northern winters, it extends, and then recedes in the relatively warmer summer. The total coverage of ice has been decreasing on average since the first satellite observations were made in 1978.

In the image attached with this story you can see a yellow line and a blue line. The yellow line indicates the path you can take across northern Canada to get around North America. And the blue line indicates the path you can take above the Siberian coast. The Siberian route is still partially blocked – at the dotted line. Just give it a few years, though.

Climate researchers were predicting that there might be an ice free passage above North America in the middle of the 21st century, not this summer. The loss of sea ice has beaten their predictions by about 40 years. Some researchers are predicting the Arctic will be completely ice free in 2070 – they might want to revise their predictions.

Okay, so an open Arctic might make some shipping routes cheaper, but it could have bad consequences for the environment. Sea ice reflects sunlight back into space much more efficiently than dark ocean. Without the reflectivity of the Arctic, global warming could accelerate. The warmer oceans will make it difficult for sea ice to reform, so the process is probably irreversible.

Original Source: ESA News Release

September 18, 2007December 26, 2015 by Fraser Cain

Google Maps are Going to Get Better After Today’s Satellite Launch

Come on, admit it, you’ve spent hours gazing at Google Maps and Google Earth, finding your house, school, and seeing what various building and features look like from space. And after today’s launch of DigitalGlobe’s WorldView-1, the resolution is going to get even better. In fact, it’s going to have the highest resolution permitted by the US government to be installed on a commercial satellite – half a metre (20 inches).

How much better is this? Currently, the highest resolution commercial satellite images are taken by DigitalGlobe’s Quickbird. It was originally slated to have a 1-metre resolution, but engineers were able to get better images by adjusting its orbit so that it flies a little closer to the ground. It’s been able acquire images at 61 cm (about 2 feet). So, WorldView-1 will be able beat this resolution; the rumours say it’s even better, but it’s not permitted to take higher resolution images because of government regulations.

But more importantly, WorldView-1 can take a mountain of images, collecting up to 500,000 square kilometres (200,000 square miles) of imagery every day – 4.5 times the rate of any previous system. This means it’ll be able to quickly fill in regions missed by other satellites.

The satellite will have many customers, including Google and the US Government, but it’ll also be used by any number of urban planners, real estate developers and environmental monitors.

A Delta 2 rocket carrying WorldView-1 lifted off today at 11:35 PDT from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The rocket launched right on time, and there were no reported problems at the time that I wrote this up (it’s about 81 km altitude and climbing quickly).

This is just the first of two missions. WorldView-2 will be launched in 2008.

Original Source: Ball Aerospace

September 18, 2007December 26, 2015 by Fraser Cain

Neptune’s South Pole is the Warmest Place on the Planet

Here on Earth we think of the poles as cold places, but on Neptune, it’s just the opposite. New images of the planet’s southern pole show that it’s actually 10-degrees warmer than the rest of Neptune. Now don’t pack your bathing suit just yet, Neptune’s average temperature is still -200 degrees Celsius (-328 F); so it’s still really, really cold.

The images were gathered using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (now that’s how you name a telescope). The observatory uses a special mid-infrared camera/spectrometer to reveal the different temperatures across planet.

Obviously Neptune is different from the Earth, but consider this. The planet is located 30 times farther away from the Sun than the Earth. This means only 1/900th the sunlight reaches Neptune than what we get here on Earth. Still, it’s enough sunlight to warm up the southern pole, which is currently tilted towards the Sun.

It’s been receiving the warmth from the Sun for about 40 years now, and the ongoing input of solar energy continuously heats up the polar region to the point that it’s warmer than any other part of Neptune by about 10 degrees Celsius. This heating also whips up the planets winds into some of the strongest in the Solar System. On Neptune, winds can travel more than 2,000 km/hour, faster than any other planet – you definitely don’t want to bring your swimsuit.

The temperatures in the region are high enough that methane gas, normally frozen out of the upper atmosphere, can actually leak out through the region. And this helps explain why scientists have seen abundances of this molecule in the atmosphere.

Original Source: ESO News Release

September 17, 2007December 26, 2015 by Fraser Cain

Supercomputer Will Simulate Colliding Black Holes

You just know this is going to take some serious computer horsepower. Rochester Institute of Technologyâ€™s Center for Computational Relativity and Gravitation was recently awarded $330,000 from the National Science Foundation to simulate collisions between black holes. Dubbed “newHorizons”, this will be a cluster of 85 dual core processors acting like a single large computer. 1.4 terabytes of memory; 36 terabytes of storage. Yowza.

Sorry to geek out there, I’m getting little tired of the computer sitting on my desk right now. But any upgrade I might buy won’t hold a candle to this new supercomputer from the Rochester Institute of Technology.

The project is headed up by Manuela Campanelli, who led her team to solve the 10 equations in Einstein’s theory of general relativity for strong field gravity. She joined forces with physics professor David Merritt, who built the 32-node gravitySimulator, which calculations the gravitational interaction between objects, such as dark matter and galaxies.

As I mentioned in the intro, this new machine will consist of 85 nodes – individual computers with their own memory, processor – which are connected together. The latency, or delay, in communication between the individual computers is so low, that they can act like a single, large supercomputer – but built at a fraction of the cost.

Once newHorizons is built, the development team is expecting it’ll be running 24 hours a day for 5 or 6 years, simulating black hole collisions and mergers. The extra horsepower will allow physicists to simulate more complex interactions with additional variables that would overwhelm other computers.

Original Source: RIT News Release

September 17, 2007January 24, 2021 by Fraser Cain

Astrosphere for September 17, 2007

I’ve got a whole collection of interesting and unusual resources for you to enjoy today:

Remember Cassini’s visit to Iapetus? I know, I’m getting a little obsessed by it. Well, here’s another, more famous person who’s also excited by the arrival: Arthur C. Clarke. Here’s a video introduction that he recorded for NASA to celebrate the flyby.

More news from NASA. A new digital 3D film recently opening up at the Boston Museum of Science in the first week of September called “3D Sun”. Remember that really video of the Sun that STEREO captured? Well, imagine that, but on the big screen… in 3D!

Scientific American has a couple of new articles in the October issue about NASA’s return to the Moon, and the exploration of space. Here’s one entitled: To the Moon and Beyond, and a second called Five Essential Things to Do in Space.

And Popular Mechanics has gone absolutely bonkers for space. They put together a massive amount of articles, graphics and information for their Future of Space issue celebrating the 50th anniversary of Sputnik. For example, they list every mission launched… ever. All 6,039 of them. Kudos to PM on this one.

I know this isn’t exactly space-related, but Phil over at Bad Astronomy talks about his eye opening experiences running a space-related blog, and how it relates to publishing in the old world. It’s the evolution of a revolution. I couldn’t agree more.

September 17, 2007November 7, 2016 by Fraser Cain

The Magellanic Clouds are Here for the First Time

The Milky Way is surrounded by a cloud of smaller dwarf galaxies in various stages of destruction. Our galaxy’s gravity is tearing them apart and adding their stars to the galactic halo. The two largest and most familiar are the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds; only visible from the Southern Hemisphere. According to new research, this might be the first time these objects have ever met the Milky Way. After we’re done with them, it won’t be a pretty picture.

The Magellanic Clouds were first named after the explorer of the same name. To the unaided eye, they look like large glowing clouds. They’re both irregular galaxies; the larger is about 1/20th the size and has tenth the mass of the Milky Way, and the smaller cloud is even, well, smaller.

Astronomers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics recently calculated the three-dimensional velocities of the two galaxies with greater accuracy than ever before, and found they were strangely high. There can really only two explanations for this: either the Milky Way has more mass than astronomers believe, or the clouds aren’t actually gravitationally bound to our galaxy.

In other words, the two galaxies are on their first pass by the Milky Way.

This new result creates problems, though. The Milky Way is known to have a significant warp in its disk. Astronomers explained this warp through the gravitational interaction between our galaxy and the Magellanic Clouds. But if this is their first pass through, it doesn’t explain the warp. Another problem is a long trail of hydrogen gas streaming behind the clouds. Once again, if this is the first interaction, it couldn’t explain how a tidal stream of hydrogen could be stretched out.

The researchers are next planning to focus on the origin on the stream of hydrogen, trailing behind the clouds. If they can find a different source, it gives strength to the theory that the clouds are here for the first time.

Original Souce: CfA News Release

September 17, 2007December 26, 2015 by Fraser Cain

Podcast: Questions Show #6

It’s been a while, so let’s catch up with the listener questions. We’ve got some easy ones, some hard ones and probably some impossible ones. We talk about our universe as a black hole, tidal locking of planets like Uranus, colours of stars at different ages, our universe’s birthday and more.

Click here to download the episode

Questions Show #6 – Show notes and transcript

Or subscribe to: astronomycast.com/podcast.xml with your podcatching software.

September 13, 2007December 26, 2015 by Fraser Cain

More Amazing Images of Iapetus

We asked, and Cassini delivered; amazing, intriguing images of the surface of Saturn’s moon Iapetus. The spacecraft completed its latest flyby on September 10th, 2007, skimming just 1,640 km above the moon’s surface. Scientists will be digesting the photographs for years.

During this most recently flyby, Cassini passed 100 times closer than its previous Iapetus flyby in 2004. At this distance, the spacecraft was able to reveal the moon’s strange bulging shape, equatorial ridge, and pattern of bright and darkness across its features.

Many of its photographs focus in on the bizarre mountain ridge that circles the moon’s equator, like a seam. The new Cassini images showed that this ridge is mountainous, rising as high as 20 km, and extends across more than half its circumference.

The mystery deepens with the unusual light and dark hemispheres of Iapetus. One side is as white as snow, and the other is as black as tar. With the new Cassini images, you can actually see where the different regions mix. On the dark side, you can see spots where there are patches of white ice on dark mountainsides. And then on the bright side, you can see blobs of dark material. This dark material forms a very thin coating; probably only a few metres deep, since there are regions where impact craters have punched right through it, revealing white material underneath.

What caused this material? That’s a mystery. Maybe some previous Saturnian moon broke up, and spray painted Iapetus. Or maybe the material is volcanic material that welled up from within the moon. And this could somehow be connected with the moon’s equatorial ridge.

The images from Cassini were actually delayed early Tuesday, because a cosmic ray hit the spacecraft, putting it into safe mode. This happened after it had captured all its images from its flyby, and they were safely stored in memory. After a few hours Cassini came out of safe mode and continued sending its data back to Earth.

Original Source: ESA News Release