Universe Today

July 21, 2012December 23, 2015 by Jason Major

Brazilian Band Soars to New Heights with a NASA-Inspired Video

Popular Brazilian rock band Fresno recently released a new video for their new song, “Infinito”, and it really rises above the rest — literally!

It’s a story of four guys who take their childhood dream of launching a package up into space and, after years apart, come back together to make it a reality. Along the way we get to see some great views from a camera that the band members actually sent up to the edge of space via weather balloon — an accomplishment that came with its fair share of challenges.

Fresno lead member Lucas Silveira shared some behind-the-scenes info with Universe Today. “We wasted two cameras. One of them landed on a military base — exactly in the middle of a mine field — and the other simply disappeared… completely lost due to the lack of cellular signal on the landing spot.”

And even on a successful third try there were some technical difficulties.

“In our third attempt we used a different balloon, with more capacity, and it managed to fly for over 3.5 hours… but our camera only survived for around 2.5 hours. So we had to send a smaller balloon just to capture the ‘popping up’ moment, and added it to the ‘main balloon ride’ on post production.”

Still, the results — a dizzying view of Earth from 35 km up — are well worth it, and the story is an inspiring one… inspired, in fact, by NASA.

“I wrote this song after watching a video by NASA in which they zoom out from the Himalayas to the edge of the universe, showing the areas that still yet to be mapped. We are so infinitely small in the middle of all this greatness, and suddenly our problems get as tiny in our heads as our lucky existence here. It’s about searching for better days, creating a better future through proactivity and not letting others letting you down.”

When you soar that high it’s hard to feel let down.

Video courtesy of Fresno. Technical and launch assistance provided by ACRUX Aerospace Technologies. Band photo by Gustavo Vara.

July 21, 2012January 6, 2016 by Nancy Atkinson

Japanese Cargo Ship Launches to Space Station

A Japanese resupply ship, the HTV-3 “Kountouri” (White Stork) launched Saturday to the International Space Station, lifting off on an H-IIB into overcast skies from the island of Tanegashima at 02:06 UTC. About 15 minutes after the launch, the cargo ship was released from the rocket and is now in orbit catching up to the space station. The Kountouri contains supplies such as food, clothing and equipment for experiments.
Continue reading “Japanese Cargo Ship Launches to Space Station”

July 20, 2012December 23, 2015 by Jason Major

Independent Filmmaker Wants to Kickstart America’s Space Program

“If Kennedy said ‘we will go to the Moon…some time before the century ends,’ what is… what is that? That’s not ambition. That’s pandering.”
– Neil deGrasse Tyson, Fight for Space

Here we are on the 43rd anniversary of the Apollo Moon landing, with no more shuttles flying, slashed space program budgets and no real targeted plan to get people off this world and onto another. American students score abysmally in science and math, and the general public thinks NASA is dead. What’s happened to America’s drive? What’s happened to the nation’s sense of wonder, its devotion to science, engineering, education and its man-on-the-Moon motivation?

Film producer Paul Hildebrandt wants to find out. But he needs your help.

Hildebrandt and his team from Eventide Visuals in Chico, CA, are creating an independent feature-length documentary about America’s space program, called “Fight for Space”. It’s not a collection of launch videos and CGI solar system shots, though; Hildebrandt is digging deeper into what originally made the U.S. space program great — and what has happened to it since then.

“We are producing a documentary that will examine the reasons why our space program is not all it can be. We are also going to show that space IS worth the time, money, and energy that it needs, not for only exploration and scientific reasons but for economic, planetary security, and cultural reasons as well,” writes Hildebrandt.

Hildebrandt has been attending space symposiums and traveling to interview key figures in science and space outreach, like Neil deGrasse Tyson, Bill Nye, Robert Zubrin and Congressman Dana Rohrabacher. He’s talked with scientists, astronauts, educators and regular everyday Americans about the importance of the space program. But in order for the Fight to continue, he needs our help.

Fortunately, that’s what Kickstarter is here for. Fight for Space is looking to get a little backing from interested and like-minded space fans to keep the process moving, and hopefully see the film become a fully produced, publicized, and possibly broadcasted reality.

“With your help we can bring awareness to this issue and come closer to making our space program a priority for this country once again.”

You can pledge any amount, from $10 to $10,000 or more (and see the incremental rewards of doing so) on the Fight for Space Kickstarter page here, and visit the Fight for Space website here.

“Please, support our film by donating above and share this project with your friends, family, and anyone you know who cares about space exploration or cares about the future economic and national security of this country.”
– Paul Hildebrandt, Fight for Space producer

July 20, 2012December 23, 2015 by Fraser Cain

Universe Today’s First Android App – Phases of the Moon

I really believe portable devices like the Nexus and iPhone are amazing tools for astronomy. They can give you research information at your fingertips, figure out your position on Earth, direction you’re pointing.

Mobile apps are the future (actually the present). But my entire background and experience are in web development, not mobile, so this is a brand new learning curve. But we have to embrace change and build new knowledge, no matter how difficult it is.

Here’s the first app I’ve ever built. Well, not me, specifically, but I built this with my programming partner Alexander Allahverdiev.

Click here to check out Phases of the Moon App on Google Play.

It gives you the current phase of the Moon, allows you to seek the next full Moon, see a calendar of upcoming lunar phases. Swipe side to side to rotate the Moon to future days and see a realistic view of what the Moon is going to look like.

I think it’s the first app that actually accurately shows both the phase and the apparent distance to the Moon – we accurately show lunation.

Finally, you can just click play, and watch the Moon go through its phases, wobbling forward and back – it’s hypnotic.

[moon_app]

Anyway, we need to build up an initial user base of app users so we can see if there are any bugs, and start gathering feedback for future versions. We’ve only done the Android version so far, but we’re going to release an iOS version shortly too, and then keep them concurrent.

Oh… it’s $.99

P.S. I know there are a lot of Moon Phase apps on Android and iOS, that’s not the point. The point is to learn. To go through the difficult learning curve of mobile development, to deeply understand what it takes to build and run mobile apps.

July 20, 2012December 23, 2015 by Jason Major

The First Photo From The Moon

“That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” After speaking these historic words at 10:56 EDT on July 20, 1969, marking the moment that humanity first placed a foot on a world other than its own, Apollo 11 commander Neil Armstrong began his work documenting the lunar surface before him.

The image above is the first photo taken by Armstrong after exiting Eagle, the landing module — and the first photograph ever taken by a person standing on the surface of another world.

After this image, Armstrong took several more images of the surrounding landscape before fellow astronaut Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, Jr. exited the module as well. The third man on the mission, Michael Collins, remained in lunar orbit piloting the command module Columbia.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Armstrong, as were all the Apollo mission astronauts, was trained in the use of a modified Hasselblad 500 EL camera, which took wonderfully detailed images on large-format film. Most of the photos they brought back have been high-quality scanned by Kipp Teague and are available online at the Apollo Image Gallery.

Today is the 43rd anniversary of the first lunar landing. More than just a page in the history books, it marks a shining moment for all of humanity when the combined ingenuity and courage of many, many people succeeded in the daunting task of, in President Kennedy’s words from May 25, 1961, “landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth.”

Images: NASA. Scans by Kipp Teague.

July 20, 2012December 23, 2015 by Nancy Atkinson

Watch A Near Earth Asteroid Zoom By

Caption: A view of asteroid 2002 AM31 on Friday, July 20 2012, at 08:34 UT by the Faulkes Telescope North. Credit: Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network.

An asteroid will pass by Earth on July 22, and thanks to the Slooh Space Camera you can watch it zoom by. There’s absolutely no chance this asteroid, named 2002 AM31, could hit Earth, as it is passing by at 14 times the distance of the Moon. But it should be interesting to watch the action live! As they have done with recent asteroid close passes, Slooh live-stream telescope views of the near-approach of this city-block-sized asteroid at http://www.slooh.com, starting at 4:30 p.m. PDT / 7:30 p.m. EDT / 23:30 UTC — accompanied by real-time discussions by Slooh’s Patrick Paolucci and Astronomy magazine columnist Bob Berman.

The asteroid is estimated to be 620 m to 1.4 km (2,000 to 4,500 ft wide) and will pass within 14 times the Moon’s distance from our planet.

Due to its size and proximity to Earth, 2002 AM31 qualifies as a near-Earth object as it’s more than 500 feet wide and within 4.65 million miles of Earth.

“Near Earth objects are no longer treasures only for the paranoid, or for those who secretly and strangely are rooting for an early apocalypse,” said Berman. “The entire astronomical community has reversed its thinking about them over the past few decades. Instead of living on an “island Earth” with little or no connection with other celestial objects, we now feel that collisions with comets or asteroids change the evolution of our biosphere, and maybe even seeded our world with the amino acids that started life long ago. In other words, these are important entities. Not to mention, there’s always that exciting little hint of danger.”

“One of our missions at Slooh is to provide the public with free, live views on fascinating celestial happenings,” says Patrick Paolucci, President at Slooh. “Near-Earth asteroid 153958 (2003 AM31) represents 1 of approximately 9,000 whizzing past Earth at any given moment, and we wanted to highlight this one as it’s only 13.7 lunar distances from Earth — similar to near-Earth asteroid LZ1 which zoomed past us unexpectedly mid-June.”

July 20, 2012December 23, 2015 by Jenny Winder

A Space-Time Crystal to Outlive the Universe

Caption: Selfmade Alum Crystal. Weight 5.01g Source: JanDerChemiker via wikimedia commons

The second law of thermodynamics states that all isolated systems head towards entropy. Our universe will one day reach a state where all energy is evenly distributed and can no longer sustain motion or life. A group of physicists have speculated that a device called a ‘space-time crystal’ could theoretically continue to work as a computer even after the heat death of the universe. Trouble was that they had no idea how to build a space-time crystal, until now.

Crystals are made up of repeating patterns of atoms or molecules, they are symmetrical in space and in their lowest energy state. They are the result of removing all the energy from a system (like ice crystals forming when heat is taken away) Nobel-prize winning physicist Frank Wilczek at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology speculated that the symmetry of such crystalline structures could exist in the fourth dimension of time as well as in space. The atoms in a time crystal would constantly rotate and return to their original location and, being in their lowest possible energy state they would continue to rotate even after the universe has succumbed to entropy. Such a repeating pattern of motion usually requires energy but now a group of scientists at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and Tsinghua University in Beijing, led by Tongcang Li at the University of California, Berkeley think they have worked out how to create such a crystal in its lowest energy state that shows this repeating pattern, or periodic structure, in both space and time, a space-time crystal.

They propose constructing an ion trap, which holds charged particles in place using an electric field. The ions naturally repel each other due to Coulomb repulsion, forming a ring-shaped crystal which can be made to rotate by applying a weak static magnetic field. If you then remove the electric field, the ions will continue rotating by themselves. This does not violate any laws of physics, it isn’t a perpetual motion machine as no energy can be taken out of the system, it can’t do any work even though it is moving. The main challenge to building the crystal will be the need to bring the temperatures close to absolute zero.

Space-time crystals’ periodicity makes them natural clocks. Wilczek suggests building a computer from a working time crystal, with different rotational states standing in for the 0s and 1s of a conventional computer. Such a computer would be able to survive the eventual heat death of the Universe. There is just one small snag, however, as Tongcang Li admits “we focus on a space-time crystal that can be created in a laboratory, so you need to figure out a method to make a laboratory that can survive in the heat-death of the universe.”

The Journeys of Apollo

On this 43rd anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing, here’s a documentary that NASA produced to mark the 40th anniversary, and is just now available on YouTube. It covers the full scope of the Apollo program and features interviews with many of the Apollo astronauts. If the narrator sounds eerily familiar, it is Peter Cullen from the Transformers movie. Want more information about Apollo? Visit http://www.nasa.gov/apollo

July 20, 2012December 23, 2015 by Jason Major

Exoplanet Gliese 581g Makes the Top 5

Exoplanet Gliese 581g is back, and “officially” ranking #1 on a list of potentially habitable worlds outside of our solar system thanks to new research from the team that originally announced its discovery in 2010.

Orbiting a star 20 light-years away, the super-Earth is now listed alongside other exoplanets Gliese 667Cc, Kepler-22b, HD85512 and Gliese 581d in the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo’s Habitable Exoplanets Catalog as good places to look for Earthlike environments… and thus the possibility of life.

First announced in September 2010 by a team led by Steven S. Vogt of UC Santa Cruz, the presence of Gliese 581g was immediately challenged by other astronomers whose data didn’t support its existence. Vogt’s team conducted further analysis of the Gliese system in which it appeared that the orbits of the planets were circular, rather than elliptical, and it was in this type of scenario that a strong signal for Gliese 581g once again appeared.

Read: Could Chance For Life on Gliese 581g Actually Be “100%”?

“This signal has a False Alarm Probability of < 4% and is consistent with a planet of minimum mass 2.2M [Earth masses], orbiting squarely in the star’s Habitable Zone at 0.13 AU, where liquid water on planetary surfaces is a distinct possibility” said Vogt.

And, located near the center of its star’s habitable “Goldilocks” zone and receiving about the same relative amount of light as Earth does, Gliese 581 g isn’t just on the list… it’s now considered the best candidate for being an Earthlike world — knocking previous favorite Gliese 667Cc into second place.

Read: Billions of Habitable Worlds Likely in the Milky Way

The announcement was made on the PHL’s press site earlier today by Professor Abel Méndez, Director of the PHL at UPR Arecibo.

Diagram of the Gliese system. The green area is the habitable zone, where liquid water can exist on a planet’s surface. (PHL @ UPR Arecibo)

“The controversy around Gliese 581g will continue and we decided to include it to our main catalog based on the new significant evidence presented, and until more is known about the architecture of this interesting stellar system”

– Prof. Abel Méndez, UPR Arecibo

July 19, 2012December 23, 2015 by Jason Major

Aurora Over Antarctica: a “Teardrop From Heaven”

“We managed to snap a few photos before Heaven realised its mistake and closed its doors.”
– Dr. Alexander Kumar

This stunning photo of the Aurora Australis, set against a backdrop of the Milky Way, was captured from one of the most remote research locations on the planet: the French-Italian Concordia Base, located located at 3,200 meters (nearly 10,500 feet) altitude on the Antarctic plateau, 1,670 km (1,037 miles) from the geographic south pole.

The photo was taken on July 18 by resident doctor and scientist Dr. Alexander Kumar and his colleague Erick Bondoux.

Sparked by a coronal mass ejection emitted from active region 11520 on July 12, Earth’s aurorae leapt into high gear both in the northern and southern hemispheres three days later during the resulting geomagnetic storm — giving some wonderful views to skywatchers in locations like Alaska, Scotland, New Zealand… and even the South Pole.

“A raw display of one of nature’s most incredible sights dazzled our crew,” Dr. Kumar wrote on his blog, Chronicles from Concordia. “The wind died down and life became still. To me, it was if Heaven had opened its windows and a teardrop had fallen from high above our station, breaking the dark lonely polar night.

“We managed to snap a few photos before Heaven realised its mistake and closed its doors.”

With winter temperatures as low as -70ºC (-100ºF), no sunlight and no transportation in or out from May to August, Concordia Base is incredibly isolated — so much so that it’s used for research for missions to Mars, where future explorers will face many of the same challenges and extreme conditions that are found at the Base.

But even though they may be isolated, Dr. Kumar and his colleagues are in an excellent location to witness amazing views of the sky, the likes of which are hard to find anywhere else on Earth. Many thanks to them for braving the bitter cold and otherworldly environment to share images like this with us!