I started writing for Universe Today in September 2007, and have loved every second of it since! Astronomy and science are fascinating for me to learn and write about, and it makes me happy to share my passion for science with others. In addition to the science writing, I'm a full-time bicycle mechanic and the two balance nicely, as I get to work with my hands for part of the day, and my head the other part (some of the topics are a stretch for me to wrap my head around, too!).
Virgin Galactic, the private aerospace company founded by billionaire Richard Branson, successfully tested the passenger space-plane SpaceShipTwo today. SpaceShipTwo (SS2), is also called the Virgin Space Ship Enterprise, or VSS Enterprise, an obvious tribute to another space vehicle of some note. SS2 was carried to 45,000 feet (13.7km) by its mothership, named WhiteKnightTwo (WK2), or ‘Eve’, after Branson’s mother. In this initial ‘captive carry’ test of the space plane, it remained attached to the mothership for the duration of the flight.
The SS2/WK2 combo took off from a runway at the Mojave Air and Space Port in California, and flew for approximately three hours over the deserts of the Antelope Valley. SS2 is a prototype passenger vehicle that is designed to take astronauts to suborbital flight. If the remaining tests go as planned, it will eventually take a crew of two pilots and up to six passengers to the edge of space, at just over 100km (62 miles).This may happen as early as the end of 2011.
SpaceShipTwo is an all-carbon composite plane that uses a hybrid rocket motor, and will be carried to 50,000 feet (15.2 km) by WhiteKnightTwo before being released. It will then fire the rocket to propel it above the Karman line.
Here’s a video of the takeoff and landing of SS2 today:
SS2 was unveiled to the public in December of last year, and this is the first in a series of tests to determine how safe and operational the craft is before it can begin to bring passengers into space. It will undergo another captive carry flight to 50,000 feet, and then will be brought into the air by WK2 and released in subsequent tests.
SpaceShipTwo was designed by Burt Rutan of Scaled Composites, who also led the design team for SpaceShipOne, which won the Ansari X-Prize of $10 million in 2004 for completing the first series of manned commercial spaceflights.
If you have $200,000 laying around and want to go into space, SS2 is your space plane. However, you’re going to have to get in line: over 300 people have already signed up for seats on the plane.
The ESA has scheduled the launch of Cryosat-2 for February 25th aboard a Russian Dnepr rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. This is the second attempt at launching the Earth-observing satellite that’s tasked with monitoring global ice thickness. The initial launch of Cryosat on October 8th, 2005 failed due to an anomaly of the launch sequence.
Other Earth-observing satellites have taken measurements of the ice thickness near the poles, but Cryosat-2 will be the first such satellite completely dedicated to monitoring ice thickness variations, and will keep tabs on the decline of sea ice, which in the Arctic has been shown to have shrunk 2.7% per decade since 1978.
Cryosat-2 will have a highly inclined polar orbit, and will reach 88 degrees north and south, so as to maximize the amount of observations of the Earth’s poles. The instruments aboard the satellite will be able to monitor the thickness changes in both sea ice and land ice with an accuracy of one centimeter. This will give scientists an unprecedented amount of data to work with to study how Arctic and Antarctic ice changes impact climate change, and vice versa.
The instrument aboard Cryosat-2 that will be measuring ice thickness is the SAR/Interferometric Radar Altimeter (SIRAL). This is a an altimeter and interferometer that operates in the Ku-band (13.575 GHz), and uses radar signals bounced off the ice to measure its thickness variations.
Cryosat-2 also has two other instruments to determine its position with a high amount of accuracy, the Doppler Orbit and Radio Positioning Integration by Satellite (DORIS) and Laser Retro-Reflector (LRR). DORIS detects and measures the Doppler shift of signals broadcast from a network of radio beacons spread around the world to give the velocity of the satellite relative to the Earth.
The LRR instrument will complement and help calibrate DORIS. The LRR is a small laser retroreflector that is attached to the underside of the satellite, and lasers from a network of tracking stations will be fired at the satellite. By measuring the interval between the firing of the laser and the return of the pulse, the position of the satellite can be measured very accurately.
The mission has a three-year lifespan, with a potential for a two-year extension. Cryosat-2 is currently nestled safely inside the Dnepr rocket’s protective fairing, and in the next nine days the satellite will be integrated into the rest of the launcher and moved out to the launch pad.
The Cassini mission is just a non-stop faucet of fantastic images! Here are two that were released today, for your viewing pleasure. The first image, above, is an eclipse of Saturn’s moon Tethys, which lies in the background, by Dione. The three images were each taken one minute apart.
As you can see, from Cassini’s perspective Dione passes right in front of Tethys. Make no mistake in thinking that these two Saturnian companions are close together in this shot, however; Dione, the moon in the foreground, is 2.2 million kilometers (1.4 million miles) from the Cassini spacecraft, while Tethys is 2.6 million kilometers (1.6 million miles) away.
An interesting feature of the image is how Tethys appears brighter on the side of the moon opposite the Sun. This is because Saturn, which lies out of the image to the right, is reflecting light from the Sun back onto the moon. Dione is not being backlit by Saturn from the vantage point of Cassini, so its face that is opposite the Sun appears darker.
Visible on Tethys is the Odysseus Crater, which spans a whopping 400km (240 miles). Given that Tethys is only 1,062 kilometers, or 660 miles across, the crater appears very large in comparison to the moon. It also makes the moon very much resemble the Death Star from Star Wars, don’t you think? These images were taken using Cassini’s narrow-angle camera on Nov. 28, 2009.
This second image is a synthetic aperture radar image of the surface of Saturn’s moon Titan. In the lower right and upper center of the image, the two wrinkly features are actually small Titanian mountains. What exactly causes the grooves in these mountains has still to be determined.
On Earth, the shifting of tectonic plates can form such structures, as well as the processes of water flowing, freezing, and melting.
Since Titan has an atmosphere composed mostly of methane and ethane, and experiences rain much like here on Earth, it’s quite possible that these processes are the cause of such features.
Because the illumination of this image comes from the radar on Cassini, the peaks of these formations should be the brightest. As is visible, this isn’t the case. Notice how the left side of the upper mountain in the image, and right side of the lower-right mountain are brighter. The materials that make up the darker and lighter areas are the cause for this lighting effect.
The image represents a patch of Titan’s surface 250 km (155 miles) high and 285 km (180 miles) wide, and the resolution is about 350 meters (1,150 feet) per pixel, and it was taken on December 28th, 2009.
SOFIA, accompanied by an F/A-18 during the open-door testing in December of 2009. Image Credit: NASA/Jim Ross
If you’ve ever been out observing and the clouds roll in, undoubtedly you’ve thought, “If I could only get above all of these stupid clouds, the sky would look great!” Well, NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) is capable of doing just that: SOFIA is an infrared telescope mounted on a 747SP airliner that used to be a passenger plane for Pan Am. By mounting the telescope on an airplane, NASA is able to fly it into the stratosphere, and get past all of the annoying gases and water vapor that get in the way when making observations.
SOFIA is still undergoing a battery of testing to ensure proper operation of the telescope before it starts observations. In December of last year, the telescope was taken up and the doors to the bay where it is mounted were opened. On January 15th, the telescope was flown to 35,000 feet (10.6 km) and the doors were left closed to test an updated gyroscope that was installed on the ‘scope.
These latest tests were designed to test how well the telescope can stabilize itself, because an airplane flying at 41,000 feet (12.5km) – the altitude at which many observations will be made – isn’t exactly a steady mount for a telescope. Gyroscopic stabilizers counteract the movement of the airplane to steady the telescope for observation.
During the test, the ability of the entire system to operate at cooler temperatures was established as well. The temperature for this latest test hovered around -15 degrees Celsius (+5 degrees Fahrenheit) even with the doors closed.
The telescope itself has a 2.5 meter (8.2 foot) mirror, with a 0.4 meter (1.3 foot) secondary mirror. The range of wavelengths that SOFIA can “see” is 0.3 microns to 1.6mm, meaning it’s capable of taking images in the infrared and submillimeter.
Some of the objects and phenomena that SOFIA will be observing include proto-planetary disks and planet formation, star formation, the chemical composition of other galaxies and interstellar cloud physics. An extensive description of SOFIA’s capabilities can be found on their site here.
SOFIA still has a few tests to undergo, and will be fully operational come 2014. In the next few years basic science observations will start up, and then other instruments will be added to the observatory. SOFIA is a collaboration between NASA and a German telescope partner, Deutsches SOFIA Institute.
The hydrogen gas cannon proposed by Dr. John Hunter
To get something into space right now, you need a rocket. You also need a lot of money, as the current going rate for getting something into orbit is about $5,000 a pound ($11,000 per kg). But what if you could, instead, do away with the rocket and still get your payload to space, for under $1,000 a pound? Sounds like a deal, right.
According to Dr. John Hunter, a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and president of the company Quicklaunch, Inc., using a hydrogen-powered cannon may be the ticket for cheap access to space. That’s right, a “space gun” platform for inserting satellites, fuel, and other supplies into space genuinely could be the next big thing in space technology.
You might say, “A gun to shoot stuff into space? That sounds like something out of Jules Verne!” And you’d be right: in Verne’s “From the Earth to the Moon” a giant cannon called the Columbiad was used to propel three of the characters in the story to the Moon.
“Jules Verne got it right, he just had to pick the correct fluid, ” Hunter said in a Google Techtalk, embedded below.
Rockets have been the workhorse of space-faring nations for decades, but there are a few newcomers to the game that are just getting started. Space elevators are starting to get “off the ground”, so to speak – the Space Elevator Games turned out a winner just last year – as an alternative method of transporting materials into space.
“We do hear about space elevators a lot of the time, and people always ask, ‘Are you related to space elevators?’, but we don’t interact as far as technologies go.” Hunter said.
Light-gas cannons work almost like you’d expect a really, really big gun to work: at one end inside of a long tube a gas, hydrogen, helium or methane, is pressurized to an extreme pressure, 15,000 PSI in the largest cannon proposed by Hunter. The payload is at this end of the cannon, when the pressure is released, the bullet-shaped projectile that holds the payload is ejected out of the end. Hydrogen is used because of its lightness. Since a projectile can’t go faster than what’s pushing it along inside a cannon, the lighter gas – which can travel quicker – allows for a projectile to be accelerated to incredible speeds, in excess of 13,000 miles per hour (21,000 km/hr).
These cannons have been around since the 1960s, though they haven’t seen any use in space payload delivery technology. The record setting cannon for altitude of a projectile was the High-Altitude Research Project (HARP) cannon. It was built by the United States Department of Defense and Canada’s Department of National Defence, and placed in the Yuma proving grounds in Arizona. It successfully lobbed a Martlet-2C inert projectile to 180 km (112 miles) on November 12th, 1966, which still stands as the altitude record for this type of gun.
Another iteration, developed by Dr. Hunter himself, was the Super High-Altitude Research Project (SHARP, an homage to the original cannon) in the late 1980s by Lawrence Livermore University.
Hunter explained to Universe Today via phone interview, “So here’s what happens: I started back in 1985 at Livermore and I was fresh out of grad school and they hired me to build electric guns which I could have done pretty straightforwardly. But I ran into a guy at a cocktail party, believe it or not. He knew I was working on post-production coil guns and and he said, ‘John, those are great because you can get 12km/s where we can only get to like 9 km/s with these gas guns.’ I said, ‘What’s a gas gun?’ That’s what started this whole ball rolling. As it turns out, the electric guns only get to 5.5 km/s and gas guns get to 11km/s.”
SHARP was – and still is – owned by the United States Air Force. Hunter’s company has a five-year contract to utilize the gun for testing shots, but it’s not set up to do shots vertically. SHARP was originally designed as a testbed for hypersonic engines for scramjets – jets that are accelerated to high speeds, then use a specialized engine of their own to push up to 8 or 9 times the speed of sound.
“If we’re going to to a publicized shot, where there’s a lot of publicity and stuff, we’d have to go to a different system, which would not be a big deal to build one because I could dedicate it for that particular application. If we decide to do the shot with the Air Force, that’ll probably be a smaller subset of people who could watch the shot. The Air Force is sorta careful how they do things so we have to get approval. They actually own the gun.”
So Hunter has struck out on his own to develop a commercially viable cannon that can deliver payloads at a fraction of the cost of conventional rockets. He and two other scientists, Dr. Harry Cartland and Dr. Rick Twogood, formed Quicklaunch, Inc.
“We got out of the blocks the 30th of September when we had the Space Investment Summit. Then I made the talk at Google and then the Popular Science article and we have now briefed a venture capital group. We’re in the “hustle phase” and I expect us to be in this hustle phase for six months, where we have to go just shop our project around. But while we’re in this phase we still believe in hardware so I’m actually going to have a demonstrating submerged version late February. It basically will acquire the right inclination and do shots. It’s going to be a 10-foot prototype,” Hunter said.
Ultimately, Hunter envisions a large-scale cannon that will launch from the sea near the equator. In launching from the sea, the gun will be able to pivot and swing around to launch payloads to different orbits easily. Being near the equator is necessary because that’s where the Earth is spinning its fastest, so objects launched from equatorial latitude can obtain a higher orbit with less energy.
Critical to getting the payloads into orbit is the use of a single-stage rocket attached to the payload projectile. Since the largest gun is projected to get the package going at a little over 7km/s (4.3 miles/s), a booster is needed for that extra push to get it past the escape velocity of the Earth, which is 11.2 km/s (6.95 miles/s).
Don’t expect to see humans launching to the Moon or Mars aboard one of the projectiles, though, as the force of launch from the cannon could be up to 5,000 Gs.
The largest – and most expensive – cannon would be capable of launching 1,000-pound (454 kg) payloads into a Low-Earth Orbit (LEO). The projected cost for this cannon is $500 million, but this is the last stage in a proposed series of cannons that would start out small and build on the lessons learned from each iteration.
After some initial testing with the SHARP gun and prototype models, a system that is capable of launching 2-pound (0.9 kg) payloads into space will be designed. The cost of this cannon, Hunter estimates, will be around $10 million and take two years to get rolling.
“[The 2lb capability launcher] is actually tailored to a small niche, which is the Cubesat community. It makes sense because we can “G-harden” cubesats. To me, that would make a nice niche to be able to work with academics. That’ll be a lot of fun because they’ll be orbiting Cubesats, obviously. In Phase one we’re just going to feed inert rounds, and we’re just going to do maybe 20 shots into low space and break the world record ten or twelve times. In phase two we’ll be orbiting things that will take data and will transmit,” Hunter said.
Cubesats – small satellites that are no larger than a liter volume (10cm cube) and weigh less than a kilogram – can be easily “G-hardened”, or made to withstand the impressive forces of being launched out of a huge cannon.
After this system has been tested, Hunter said, “The first commercial system is going to be a $50 million system for 100-pound [45 kg] capability. $50 million is less than the price of an F-15, basically. I think that’s quite within a lot of folks’ means, particularly if you’ve demonstrated phases one and two before that.”
Don’t get Hunter wrong: $50 million is not within the means of the average Joe, but for launching small satellites into space that’s a pretty small number. Each space shuttle mission, for example, costs $450 million, and to launch a communications satellite you’re talking $50 million to $400 million.
The largest gun – 1.1km in length – would run about $500 million and would be able to be constructed within seven years, optimally. Given that the gun itself is reusable, and that capturing the hydrogen from each firing of the gun could be done to save on fuel costs, the cost for somebody wishing to launch a payload would range between $250-$1000 per pound.
Hunter has already seen interest from various enterprises, he said.
“There has been one private company that will remain confidential. We’re going to keep them private until the smoke clears here. We’ve had serious interest from some people. We intend to increase that number of candidates substantially. We’re going to have more candidates than the last republican convention, that’s my goal!”
With regards to whether or not this type of system has had any interest from the R&D over at NASA, Hunter replied, “We have not approached NASA, and I think NASA is ultimately going to become a client of ours…I’m going to be approaching NASA in the next couple of weeks.”
For more about the specific details of the gun and payload deliver system, watch the Google Techtalk embedded above, or listen to the January 15th episode of The Space Show, on which Hunter appeared as a guest.
An artist's rendering of the Tiangong-1 module, China's space station, which was launched to space in September, 2011. To the right is a Shenzhou spacecraft, preparing to dock with the module. Image Credit: CNSA
China is planning to launch their own space station, named Tiangong, by the end of 2010 or beginning of 2011. There have been a few instances where information about the station surfaces briefly over the past few years about the development of the space station. Specific details on the program are not being release in large doses by the Chinese National Space Administration (CNSA), so the development of the station is somewhat shrouded in mystery.
Qi Faren, one of the designers of the Shenzhou-5 spacecraft, said in an interview on CCTV last month of the upcoming launch, “Quality is the key to technology. We must guarantee a successful launch. We will launch it whenever we are ready. It will be the end of 2010, or the beginning of 2011.”
Here’s what is known about the program: the Tiangong – which means “Heavenly Palace” – station will start out much as the ISS and Mir did, with a small module to house taikonauts. This component, named Tiangong-1, and shown above, is estimated to be an 8.5-ton module that will have life-support and solar energy production facilities. It’s a rather small module, with not much more room than the Shenzou spacecraft that will later carry taikonauts to the station.
The CNSA unveiled a model of the station during TV special celebrating the New Year in January 2009, but not much more has been said until the most recent statements regarding its potential launch dates.
Shenzhou-7 was the last manned Chinese spacecraft to launch, and it brought astronaut and former fighter pilot Zhai Zhigang into space for China’s first spacewalk. The next launch of a Shenzhou spacecraft, Shenzou-8, will be unmanned and is planned to dock with Tiangong-1, reminiscent of the ESA’s Automatic Transfer Vehicle. Of course, details about the date of this launch will be forthcoming pending the launch of the station itself. This docking mission could last a few weeks to a few months, and will carry a payload of scientific experiments.
After that, Shenzhou-9 and -10 will likely carry taikonauts up to the station. It isn’t really clear whether Shenzhou-9 will be another unmanned docking mission, or will carry the first of the taikonauts to board the station. The success of Shenzhou-8 will have a lot to do with whether the following launch will be manned or not. Any of the missions to the station containing humans would be shorter than the unmanned docking missions for the logistical problems raised by bringing humans into space.
According to the Chinese Academy of Sciences, scientific and support modules will eventually be added to the station, named Tiangong II and Tiangong III.
Further down the road, China plans to build a larger, more long-term space facility. Zhang Jianqi, Deputy Commander-in-Chief of China’s Manned Space Engineering Program, told the Xinhua News Agency last March, “…We will go all out to build a long-term manned space station by 2020.” This fits in well with China’s plans to take humans to the Moon after 2020, as it could provide a support platform for such a venture.
As the launch of the newest addition to human outposts in space approaches, we’ll hopefully get more information as to the details of Tiangong.
If there were to be an advertisement from NASA for this initiative, it would read as follows: “NASA’s Bargain Basement – Get your artifacts now! For a limited time only, “Crazy Charlie Bolden” is slashing prices at NASA for artifacts from historic space missions!! Act within the next 90 days and pay only shipping!!!”
If you thought obtaining the old Shuttles was cheap, qualified museums, educational institutions and other organizations are able to request over 2,500 artifacts from current and past NASA programs that include the space shuttle, Hubble Space Telescope, Apollo, Mercury and Gemini, all for the cost of shipping and processing.
Unfortunately for space enthusiasts looking to get in on the liquidation, a prescreening registration program will allow only those U.S. institutions that qualify to view and request the items. But, if you are part of one of these qualifying entities, act now, as each artifact is only available for viewing and requests for 90 days, starting last Tuesday, January 19th.
In all seriousness, this is a wonderful opportunity for educational organizations like museums and schools to acquire historic items from human spaceflight programs. The artifacts will include astronaut suits and suit-mockups, some shuttle assembly pieces, and scale models of the various space vehicles used in historic space missions. Any organizations wishing to request artifacts can go to the General Services Administration site that NASA has set up for the program.
After the requests have been processed, each organization will be notified of the status of their request. All items will be provided by NASA as donation, and the organizations receiving the artifacts will only be responsible for shipping and processing, which will vary with the size and type of artifact. Obviously, if you request a spacesuit, the shipping will be far less than for a piece of hardware that was used on one of the shuttles.
This is the second “clearance sale” that NASA has initiated recently. 913 artifacts were screened from October 1st to November 30th of last year, and NASA donated all 913 artifacts to various organizations after that program.
Pythagoras, the Greek mathematician and philosopher, is credited with saying, “There is geometry in the humming of the strings. There is music in the spacing of the spheres.” This idea of the “Music of the Spheres” has endured over the centuries, ultimately informing how Kepler visualized the movements of the planets, which led him to formulate his laws of planetary motion. The notion that the stars, planets and galaxies resonate with a mystical symphony is a rather appealing one.
If you’ve ever been curious about how this music would sound, I’d invite you to watch and listen to The Wheel of Stars. Jim Bumgardner, a software engineer specializing in visualizations who consults out of his home in Los Angeles, created this visualizer that utilizes data from the Hipparcos mission. The program puts the stars in the sky to an ethereal music of their own making.
As he describes on the site:
To make this, I downloaded public data from Hipparcos, a satellite launched by the European Space Agency in 1989 that accurately measured over a hundred thousand stars. The data I downloaded contains position, parallax, magnitude, and color information, among other things.
I used this information to plot the brightest stars, and cause them to revolve about Polaris (the North Star) very slowly, as the stars appear to do. Like the night sky, this is a sidereal time clock — it takes nearly 24 hours for the stars to fully rotate. You’ll notice some familiar constellations, such as the Big Dipper in there. As the stars cross zero and 180 degrees, indicated by the center line, the clock plays an individual note, or chime for each star. The pitch of the chime is based on the star’s BV measurement (which roughly corresponds to color or temperature). The volume is based on the star’s magnitude, or apparent brightness, and the stereo panning is based on the position on the screen (use headphones to hear it better).
Other projects that Bumgardner has developed include a music box that generates sound using trigonometry and harmonics and a camera that renders everything in ASCII code (yes, of course you can make yourself look like you’re in The Matrix). He also designed Coverpop, a program to which a user can give criteria that it uses to collects images and make a mosaic. All of these programs are more easily viewed and listened to than described, and are available on the Wheel of Stars site.
I interviewed Bumgardner about The Wheel of Stars via email. Here is what he had to say about the making of what he calls a “software toy”.
UT: What gave you the idea to make the Wheel of Stars?
JB: I’ve been interested in methods of producing automatic music since I studied music composition at CalArts. Among my interests are self-playing instruments like wind chimes, aeolian harps, player pianos and music boxes. A previous project which led directly to this one was my Whitney Music Box, based on the visual motion graphics of John Whitney.
So, already having the basic idea of using mathematical and random sources to trigger notes, in the style of a disc music box, it occurred to me that the stars themselves might make an interesting generator, and such a music box would make a very literal kind of “music of the spheres.”
UT: After looking at some of your other projects, I’m hard pressed as to exactly what to call the “Wheel of Stars.” It’s a toy, but more. It’s not really “just a software program,” or music visualizer, either. So, what do you call it?
JB: It’s a lot of things: It’s an aleatoric music composition which uses astronomical data for the “chance” element. It’s a software toy. It’s a work of art. It’s a musical clock. I think “software toy” is probably the best description from the above — a description I’ve applied to a lot of my projects. We hesitate to use the word “toy”, because we fear it belittles the project, but I think it imparts a healthy amount of playfulness in the description, and ultimately, these are works of play for me. I wrote a blog post which addresses this issue to some extent.
UT: I have to admit thinking, “This sounds what I have always imagined the “Music of the Spheres” to sound like.” You mention this in your description of the Wheel. This is probably a question you’ve had before, but I have to ask: was there any sort of influence from that age-old concept of the “Music of the Spheres” for the Wheel of Stars?
JB: Absolutely. My “Whitney Music Box” is another kind of music of the spheres, based as it is on basic trigonometry and harmonics. A lot of my work is concerned with circles, and I imagine I could go on making other kinds of “Music of the Spheres” for a long time to come.
I should also mention that the ethereal quality of the music is very much affected by my choice of audio sample. If I had used a Banjo sound, the effect would be quite different. I chose that particular sound because of my own preconceived notions of what a star should sound like. Probably a similar mental process to what Alexander Courage went through when he chose the opening notes for Star Trek.
UT: What would you like viewers/listeners to take away from the program/toy/visualizer?
JB: A little wonderment. A little more interest in the stars. Maybe do some research on Wikipedia, or pick up a good starter book like H.A. Rey’s “The Stars”. A very few listeners might be tempted to teach themselves how to program computers and make their own software toys. The “Processing” language is good place to start (processing.org).
UT: Have you had many planetariums or schools contact you to get it incorporated into their shows or curriculum?
JB: A couple nibbles, but nothing serious yet. I’d love to set up a large scale version of this piece — I think it would have a significant impact on the viewer.
UT: Did you design it with schools/planetariums in mind, or was it more for the pleasure of doing so?
JB: I made the piece because I was curious what it would sound like. Would it be totally random? Would there be hidden melodies or a secret message hidden in the stellar arrangement? Ultimately, I think I found a little bit of both. It’s quite different in character from what I would have gotten if the points where laid out with a number generator (and of course my choice of parameter mapping has a big effect on the outcome), but it’s not exactly morse code.
I also wanted to share it with people. The first version I made, in Processing, wasn’t easily sharable, so I ported it to Flash, so I could put it on the website.
UT: Any screen saver software planned for the future?
JB: I’ve prepared a stand-alone version which I email to folks upon request. It can be converted to a screen-saver with the right software. In my opinion, screensavers aren’t ideal for this kindof piece, because you don’t want your computer emitting sounds when you walk away (and can’t turn it off). But I think a stand-alone program that doesn’t require internet access, and which has higher quality sounds would be great.
UT: Do you plan to make any other astronomy-related programs like the Wheel of Stars?
JB: Yes. It occurs to me that a series of (8 or 9) short pieces based on astronomical data about the planets (their motions, and composition) might be interesting. However, at the moment, I’m pretty busy with other things.
UT: What other projects are you working on, astronomy-related or otherwise? I’ll cover the ASCII cam, Whitney Music Box and Coverpop and others in the article.
JB: I’m working on facilitating a showing of James Whitney’s extraordinary films “Lapis” and “Yantra” in Los Angeles next month (February 10th at the Silent Music Theater in Hollywood). We wlll be showing new digital transfers of these films, with live musical accompaniment. I also host and play piano at an Open Mic at Jones Coffee in Pasadena every month.
A couple of computer-related projects of interest: my recent music piece “Kasparov vs. Deep Blue” in which I programmed a chess computer to produce musical feedback showing what it is “thinking”, [See the video here] and my work simulating the automatic music algorithms of Athanasius Kircher. [a link to the paper can be found here].
Source: email interview with Jim Bumgardner. Cycling helmet nod to The Bad Astronomer
One would think that crafting a shield out of water wouldn’t do much good (not in medieval combat re-enactments, anyways). But that’s precisely what the molecules in the early Solar System – some of the same ones that you are made out of today, perhaps – may have done. In their case, protection from broadswords wasn’t as much of a concern as the effects of ultraviolet radiation from the Sun.
UV light is pretty hard on molecules because it readily breaks them up into their constituent parts. Larger organic molecules that coalesced in the dusty disk out of which our planets formed billions of years ago would have been broken apart by the Sun’s rays, but calculations by two astronomers at the University of Michigan show that thousands of oceans worth of water present in a protoplanetary disk can shield other molecules from being broken up.
Edwin (Ted) Bergin and Thomas Bethell, both of the Department of Astronomy at the University of Michigan, calculated that in Sun-like systems the abundance of water early on can absorb much of the ultraviolet light from the central star. By shielding other molecules from being broken up, they continue to persist in the later stages of the disk’s development. In other words, these molecules hang around until the formation of planetesimals and planets, and this mechanism could have been guarded the constituents of life from the ravages of the Sun in our own Solar System.
Circumstellar disks modeled by Bergin and Bethell in their paper include DR Tau, AS 205A and AA Tau.
Bergin told Universe Today, “At present there have been upwards of 4 systems with water vapor observed. All are consistent with our model. I understand that there are numerous other detections of water vapor by Spitzer but these have yet to be published. The water vapor that we see is continually replenished by high temperature chemistry in these systems, so you would not see any degradation.”
In systems like the Solar System, planets form out of a disk of dust and gas that surrounds the young star. This large, flat disk later solidifies into planets, comets and asteroids. Near the center of the disk, between 1 and 5 astronomical units, warm water vapor in the disk could “protect” molecules inside this layer from being broken apart by UV light.
H2O breaks down when exposed to UV light into hydrogen and hydroxide. The hydroxide can be further broken down into oxygen and hydrogen atoms. But water, unlike other molecules, reforms at a quick pace, replenishing the shield of water vapor.
Smaller dust grains within the disk capture some of the UV radiation in the early formation periods of a protoplanetary disk. Once these dust grains start to snowball into bigger pieces, though, the UV light filters through and breaks apart molecules in the inner portions of the disk, where planets are in their early stages of formation.
The previous model for how organic molecules persisted past this point suggested that comets from the outer portion of the disk somehow fall into the center, releasing water to absorb the harmful radiation. But this model didn’t explain the hydroxide measurements for the disks so far observed.
If enough water is present, which seems to be the case in a handful of disks observed by the Spitzer Space Telescope, these other molecules remain intact, and as a bonus the water present in the interior portions of the disk also sticks around.
Bergin told Universe Today, “There are other molecules that can shield themselves – CO and H2 – but these cannot shield other molecules as well (because they capture only a fraction of the spectrum of light). Water is the only one with a strong formation that can compensate for destruction. It then provides the full shielding for other species. It is unlikely that another molecule will do this.”
This mechanism would only protect water vapor and other molecules in the inner part of the disk, closest to the star.
“This will likely be active in the inner few AU — at some point say between 5-10 AU it will become inactive and things will be inhospitable for various species [of molecule],” Bergin said.
So, where does all of the water go once the planets form? The vapor closest to the star – within about 1 AU – eventually gets broken down by the starlight into hydrogen and oxygen. At about 3 AU from the star, the water could constitute part of the planets and asteroids that form in that region. It may have been such asteroids that carried water to the surface of the Earth during its early formation, filling up our oceans. Outside of this region, H2O is broken down into hydrogen and oxygen and blown into space, said Bergin.
When asked whether this protective shield of water was present in our own Solar System, Bergin answered, “When we say that there were thousands of oceans of water vapor in the habitable zone, we mean around Sun-like stars. Presumably this was present around our Sun as well.”
Source: Physorg, Science, email interview with Ted Bergin
India launched a small fleet of rockets to monitor the effects of the annular solar eclipse that occurred today. A total of 11 Rohini sounding rockets – suborbital rockets designed for scientific experiments – were launched from several different sites, including the Satish Dhawan Space Centre (SDSC) in Sriharikota. These rockets, launched by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), carried instruments to measure the effect the eclipse had on the Earth’s atmosphere.
The eclipse – which lasted 11 minutes and 8 seconds at its peak, was visible to observers in Africa, southern Asian countries, India and China. This was an annular eclipse, meaning that the Moon blocked the Sun’s light enough for a bright ring to be seen around the silhouette of the Moon, and was the longest such eclipse of the millennium.
There are several phenomena that take place in the lessening of the Sun’s rays during an eclipse. When the solar radiation drops during an eclipse, the ionization that occurs in the atmosphere is temporarily lowered, causing disruptions in the Equatorial Electrojet – a ribbon of electric current that flows east to west near the equator.
The temperature and wind of the atmosphere are also altered by the cessation of sunlight, and were measured by the rockets. India launched five rockets yesterday to record pre-eclipse data, and then six more were launched today to measure the changes after the eclipse, which peaked at 1:15pm local time. Over 90% of the Sun’s light was blocked near the Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station (TERLS), which lies on the southern tip of India, and was well-placed to measure the eclipse.
“Results of these experiments will coordinate ground-based eclipse observations with in situ space measurements. Interpretation of eclipse data together with space data is expected to give new insights to the earlier eclipse observations,” the ISRO wrote in a press release.
Sounding rockets have been used by other space agencies to monitor the ionosphere and the role of the Sun in atmospheric phenomenon. In 1994, NASA cooperated with Brazil on the Guara Campaign, named after the Guara bird that is native to Brazil. In August-October of that year, NASA launched a total of 33 rockets with various experiments to measure the photochemistry and plasma of the atmosphere near the equator. All of the rockets were launched from the Alcantara launch range in Brazil.
