Universe Today

January 3, 2008December 26, 2015 by Nancy Atkinson

SETI@home Needs You!

If your New Year’s resolutions include trying something new, expanding your horizons, or doing something to benefit humanity, this is for you: SETI@home needs more volunteers to help crunch data in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). And the easy part is that your desktop computer does all the work.

SETI uses radio telescopes to listen for narrow band-width radio signals from space. Since these signals don’t occur naturally, a detection of such a signal would indicate technology from an extraterrestrial source.

The SETI project at the University of California-Berkley gets data from world’s largest radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, which has recently been updated with seven new and more sensitive receivers. The improved frequency coverage for the telescope is now generating 500 times more data for the SETI project than before, and more volunteers are needed to handle the increase in data.

According to project scientist Eric Korpela, the new data amounts to 300 gigabytes per day, or 100 terabytes (100,000 gigabytes) per year, about the amount of data stored in the U.S. Library of Congress. “That’s why we need all the volunteers,” he said. “Everyone has a chance to be part of the largest public participation science project in history.”

The SETI@home premise is simple but brilliant: Instead of using a monstrously huge and expensive supercomputer to analyze all the data, it uses lots of small computers, all working simultaneously on different parts of the analysis. Participants download a special screensaver for their home computers, and when the computer is idle, the screensaver kicks in to grab data from UC Berkley, analyze the data and send back a report. SETI@home was launched in May of 1999.

The SETI@home software has now been upgraded to deal with all the new data generated by the updated Arecibo telescope. The telescope can now record radio signals from seven regions of the sky simultaneously instead of just one. It also has greater sensitivity and 40 times more frequency coverage.

So, if the phrase “to search out new life and new civilizations” inspires you, her’s your chance to be part of the largest community of dedicated users of any internet computing project. Currently SETI@home has 170,000 individuals donating time on 320,000 computers.

“Earthlings are just getting started looking at the frequencies in the sky; we’re looking only at the cosmically brightest sources, hoping we are scanning the right radio channels,” said project chief scientist Dan Werthimer. “The good news is, we’re entering an era when we will be able to scan billions of channels. Arecibo is now optimized for this kind of search, so if there are signals out there, we or our volunteers will find them.”

Check out SETI@home here.
Original News Source: UC Berkley Press Release

January 2, 2008January 24, 2021 by Fraser Cain

Reader Meetup: January 8, 2008 in Austin

Phil mentioned it on Bad Astronomy, Pamela dropped a note on Star Stryder, we chatted about it on Astronomy Cast. And here’s Universe Today’s compelling coverage…

I’m going to be in Austin for the Winter Meeting of the American Astronomical Society. In addition to all the news journalism, we thought we’d get some socializing done too. 🙂

Phil, Pamela, Rebecca, and I will be hosting a reader/listener meetup at the Iron Cactus in downtown Austin on January 8th at 8:00pm. Here’s a link that gives you directions from the Austin convention centre to the Iron Cactus.

If you’re going to be coming, can you drop me an email and let me know so we can gauge how many people might be there.

I look forward to meeting you all.

December 31, 2007December 26, 2015 by Nancy Atkinson

Controversial NASA Aviation Report Released

NASA released the results on Dec. 31 from an $11.3 million federal air safety study. The agency previously withheld the report, and came under fire from Congress and news organizations for doing so. Earlier reports said NASA was concerned the data in the report would upset travelers and hurt airline profits. But today NASA administrator Mike Griffin and the head of NASA’s Office of Safety and Mission Assurance Bryan O’Connor said the release of the report was delayed to protect both pilot confidentiality and classified commercial aviation information.

“We came across instances in looking at the raw data where information was contained that could have compromised one of those two things,” said Administrator Griffin. “We determined that an independent review of that data was necessary in order to prevent such compromise.”

A panel led by O’Connor reviewed the 16,000 page report and data such as pilots’ names and other confidential information was redacted.

Also, Griffin said there are questions as to the validity of the data in the report, which has not been peer-reviewed.

“We consider the study was not properly organized and not properly reviewed, and that makes the results very difficult to interpret and to use,” he said. The study was conducted by the Battelle Memorial Institute for NASA.

An independent review of the data will be done in the future by the National Academy of Sciences.

Griffin said the original press release highlighting the refusal to release the data used “inappropriate language” to explain the rationale for not releasing the report.

NASA’s survey, the National Aviation Operations Monitoring System (NAOMS), interviewed about 8,000 pilots per year from 2001 until the end of 2004. The program was terminated before moving on to interview flight attendants and air traffic controllers, as originally proposed.

Approximately one million dollars a year was put into this study. Griffin said it is a small fraction of NASA’s overall work, and in retrospect, the study did not receive the attention that it should have.

The report can be found on NASA’s website. Its length makes it difficult to wade through the data. Additionally, some portions of the report that have not yet been edited for confidential information have been left out. NASA will release the remainder of the report as soon as possible.

The original plan for the survey never called for NASA to interpret and analyze the data. The study’s purpose was to develop new methodologies for collecting aviation safety data, and then the data would be transitioned to the aviation safety community.

“NASA conducts research, and this was one element of such research,” said Griffin. “NASA extended the research, which was originally to be concluded in 2004 in order to properly fund the transition of the data and its review. We’ve gone the extra mile with this data and we’ve gone well beyond our original intentions, which is why we’ve brought it to an end.”

It remains uncertain whether any data from the report will ever be used by the aviation safety community. Griffin said it was his understanding that the FAA has â€œsimply moved on from NAOMS,â€? and that the FAA has over 150 different programs to provide survey data from individuals involved in all areas of air flight.

While NASA didn’t analyze the data, Griffin offered his opinion of what the report surmises: “What the flying public should understand is that they have approximately the same risk of dying from a lightning strike as they do dying from an air transport accident in the United States, which means to say that this is one of the safest forms of travel that human beings have ever invented, and that no one should think otherwise.”

In testimony to Congress earlier this year, Griffin characterized the data in the report as not as valid as he would prefer to have for a NASA report. Griffin said that he still feels that way, and that his concern is that this research work was not properly peer reviewed and the data that was extracted from the survey was not properly vailidated at its conclusion.

The survey purportedly unearthed approximately four times as many engine failures than the FAA has documentation for. â€œIt calls into question the reporting mechanisms rather than the underlying rate of engine failures, which we believe we understand,â€? Griffin said, adding there are other inconsistencies, as well. â€œThose kinds of inconsistencies, when we looked at the data, gave us pause for thought, and still do.â€?

“The value of this will need to be determined by the larger aviation community, which I remind you, does not reside within NASA,” Griffin continued. “All that we at NASA have said is that this survey was not peer reviewed and the data was not validated at its conclusion. It’s up to others whether or not they believe this research has value.”

Griffin had promised to release the report before the end of 2007, and he did so without compromising confidential information that, by law, NASA is prohibited from releasing.

Griffin said this survey doesn’t cast any doubt in his mind about the safety of aviation in the United States. “I did not, having looked at a snapshot of the data, see anything that the flying public would care about or ought to care about,” he said. “But it’s not for me to prescribe what others may care about. We were asked to release the data and we did that.”

The report can be found on the NASA website.

Original News Source: NASA News Audio

December 31, 2007December 26, 2015 by Nancy Atkinson

STS-122 Shuttle Launch Decision on Tap

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NASA engineers continue to repair a faulty electrical connector on Space Shuttle Atlantis’ external fuel tank which has delayed the launch of the STS-122 mission to the International Space Station. An update of the progress on that work will be presented at a mission management team meeting scheduled for Thursday, January 3 and mission managers will perhaps then be prepared to announce a proposed launch date for Atlantis.

The repairs could take several days or even weeks. At a press briefing last week, shuttle program manager Wayne Hale declined to offer a probable launch date. “We’re in the middle of troubleshooting and repair,” he said. “Until that gets a little bit further along, I actually have no valid dates to give you. To avoid what I think would be a totally misleading headline along the lines of ‘NASA Delays the Space Shuttle Again,’ we’re just not going to give you a launch date because that, in fact, would not be accurate.”

The engine cutoff (ECO) fuel sensor system transmitted false readings during two launch countdowns for Atlantis earlier in December. A fueling test performed on December 18 isolated the problem to a 1 Â½ -by 3 inch connector called a pass-through connector, located both inside and outside the tank. The wires for all four ECO sensors pass through the same connector. From the data of that test, engineers believe the problem lies in gaps between pins and sockets on the external side of the pass-through connector when the system is chilled to cryogenic temperatures, as when the tank is filled with liquid hydrogen and oxygen.

Engineers have removed the connector and are bench-testing the components in similar cryogenic conditions to try to duplicate the failure. Meanwhile, new hardware is being installed on the tank as the shuttle sits on launchpad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center.

“We have allowed the team that did the troubleshooting to very thoroughly go through all the data,” said Hale. “They have told us they are sure the problems that we’re seeing reside in that series of connectors. Where exactly in that series of connectors is a little bit open to interpretation.”

The connectors on the inside of the tank are being visually inspected. “It is a possibility that the internal connector is involved,” Hale said. “However, all the physics based discussion of the kinds of things that can happen point to something happening on the external connector.”

Problems with the internal connector would involve “more invasive” work, Hale said, that could possibly damage the tank.

A similar repair was done to the Atlas rockets several years ago to fix problems with circuitry in the Centaur stage. ECO sensors protect the shuttle’s main engines by triggering engine shut down if fuel runs unexpectedly low. The Space shuttle main engines running without fuel would likely result in an explosion.

The STS-112 mission will deliver the European Space Agency’s Columbus science module to the station along with a new crew member Leopold Eyharts from France who will take over for Dan Tani. Tani, whose mother was killed in a car accident on December 19, will return to Earth on Atlantis.

“These repairs and troubleshooting activities will determine when we will launch” said Hale. “The plan to go forward will take as long as it takes, but we don’t think this will be a long-term thing. Probably something that will take a couple of weeks.”

December 28, 2007December 26, 2015 by Tammy Plotner

Quadrantid Meteor Shower Will Sparkle on January 3rd

Beginning each New Year and lasting for nearly a week, the Quadrantid Meteor Shower sparkles across the night sky for nearly all viewers around the world. Its radiant belongs to an extinct constellation once known as Quadran Muralis, but any meteors will seem to come from the general direction of bright Arcturus and BoÃ¶tes. This is a very narrow stream, which may have once belonged to a portion of the Aquarids, but recent scientific data points to a what may have been a cosmic collision.

According the most recent data, the Quandrantid meteors may have been formed about five centuries ago when a near-Earth asteroid named 2003 EH1 and a comet smashed into one another. Historic records from ancient China put comet C/1490 Y1 in the path of probability. As Jupiter’s gravity continues to perturb the stream, another 400 years may mean this shower will become as extinct as the constellation for which it was once known… But NASA scientists and astronomers are taking to the skies to study the event.

A Gulfstream V aircraft will fly scientists and their instruments for 10 continuous hours over the Arctic to observe and record meteor activity. From above the Earth, the stream can be studied without light pollution and clouds to determine when the activity peaks and how the stream is dispersed. â€œWe will fly to the North Pole and back to compensate for Earth’s rotation and to keep the stream in view throughout the flight,â€? said Peter Jenniskens, a principal investigator at NASA’s Ames Research Center.

According to NASA, scientists believe this could be the most brilliant meteor shower in 2008 with over 100 visible meteors per hour at its peak. Best viewing times with the highest meteor rates are expected to be in either the late evening of Jan. 3 over Europe and western Asia or the early morning of Jan. 4 over the eastern United States. For the USA: 6pm â€“ 2am (Pacific Time) on Jan. 3 and 4, 2008. For Northern Europe: 2am â€“ 10am (London) on Jan. 4, 2008. For Northern Asia: 11am â€“ 7pm (Tokyo) on Jan. 4, 2008. For almost of us, this means bundling up against the cold and battling the remnants of the waning Moon… But the sight of even one “shooting star” can make the trip worthwhile!

Will the Quadrantid Meteor Shower live up to its expectations? No one knows for sure… But we’ll be watching!

December 28, 2007December 26, 2015 by Fraser Cain

Podcast: Globular Clusters

This week we’re going to study some of the most ancient objects in the entire Universe; globular clusters. These relics of the early Universe contain hundreds of thousands of stars, held together by their mutual gravity. Since they formed together, they give astronomers a unique way to test various theories of stellar evolution.

Click here to download the episode

Globular Clusters – Show notes and transcript

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

December 28, 2007December 26, 2015 by Mark Mortimer

Book Review: Rocketeers

People as a group don’t get credit for making great advances. Individuals are the ones who rise above the background noise of humanity, and their suggestions or offerings provide a new thrust for our civilization. Edison brought ready energy to peoples’ houses; the Wright brothers brought ready transport across vast distances. Michael Belfiore in his book Rocketeers â€“ How a Visionary Band of Business Leaders, Engineers, and Pilots is Boldly Privatizing Space gives identity to some of today’s individuals who are trying to rise above. His is the story of these individuals who want to enable the ready travel of people beyond Earth’s atmosphere.

Just recently, SpaceShipOne won the Ansari X Prize by privately funding a craft that could rise to more than 328,000 feet. Belfiore sees this as a starting point to a grand adventure for humankind. He claims, and writes, how individuals are able to accomplish tasks once solely in the realm of government. These few people, with great drive and smarts, set their special skills to attaining a specific goal. And some, almost miraculously, achieve it. The author also describes how most of these people, if not all, have great expectations on seeing their results become a cornerstone to another, new vibrant industry.

In this book, Belfiore is, if nothing else, amazingly vibrant and cheerful. Think, a cheerleader on steroids after drinking an overly caffeinated drink. He glamourizes imagery and enlightens background situations. In doing, he leaves no doubt as to the challenge of building rockets, the risk with flying them and the utmost joy upon a mission’s success. He relays the fear of having a plane door flap open during flight, the amazement of using a rocket to power a bicycle, and the dejection of months of effort evaporating with the failure of one small, relatively inexpensive, component. Within this book, everything is happening immediately, in front of the reader. Great distances and many people dash by, as the book follows the author while he visits airfield operators, financial underwriters and rocket developers. He conveys the feeling of no time to waste, as in any start-up industry.

This traveling about by the author is the greatest appeal to this book. Belfiore includes passages that show he hasn’t just read clippings and then written a book. Rather, he’s gone out, met the people and got first hand information. He writes of meetings with Bigelow, Feeney, Ansari and many others. He describes many of the manufacturing facilities, test sites and mock-ups which he visited. Included within the book are photographs and fun anecdotal events to back up these travels. With these, the book really comes alive for the reader. The reader becomes part of the working group gathered around the restaurant table, all drawing schematics on paper napkins.

But, this optimism and vibrancy throughout the text makes for a very one-sided appreciation of the undertaking. Entrepreneurs and experimenters with near-limitless funding or with connections to wealthy benefactors are all nearly eulogized as being the best. The government comes across as lost, misdirected or obstructionist. Further, there’s only reference to efforts in the United States. Therefore, as wonderful as this will read for any rich citizen in the United States, others may have some difficulty in sharing in the excitement and hope. Given references to one hundred thousand dollar tickets to fly to orbit and back, most people on this planet will never experience this pleasure. Hence, though Belfiore is careful to write that the goal is to benefit all humankind, the book’s details impart a different story.

Hence, if a reader is very much into space and rocket travel, this book is great fun. Rocket plane races, weddings in space and orbiting hotels make for exciting visions of the future. Those readers who perhaps dwell deeper in the practicalities will find this book a bit overly optimistic and thin. But, anyone who enjoys fast paced, lively writing on technical subjects will enjoy this book probably as much as Belfiore says he had in gathering the information.

Working for the future allows us to put substance into our dreams. Waiting for a finished product to service our longings may mean never doing it. In Rocketeers â€“ How a Visionary Band of Business Leaders, Engineers, and Pilots is Boldly Privatizing Space, Michael Belfiore writes of those doing the deed rather than waiting for a provider. For them, a ticket to ride can never come soon enough and their dreams may just enable ours.

December 28, 2007December 26, 2015 by Ian O'Neill

SoHO Celebrates its 12th Birthday

On December 2^nd, 1995 a large joint ESA and NASA mission was launched to gain an insight to the dynamics of the Sun and its relationship with the space between the planets. 12 years on, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SoHO) continues to witness some of the largest explosions ever seen in the solar system, observes beautiful magnetic coronal arcs reach out into space and tracks comets as they fall to a fiery death. In the line of duty, SoHO even suffered a near-fatal shutdown (in 1998). As far as astronomy goes, this is a tough assignment.

By the end of 1996, SoHO had arrived at the First Lagrange Point between the Earth and the Sun (a gravitationally stable position balanced by the masses of the Sun and Earth, about 1.5 million km away) and orbits this silent outpost to this day. It began to transmit data at “solar minimum”, a period of time at the beginning of the Solar Cycle, where sunspots are few and solar activity is low, and continues toward the upcoming solar minimum after the exciting firworks of the last “solar maximum”. This gives physicists another chance to observe the majority of a Solar Cycle with a single observatory (the previous long-lasting mission was the Japanese Yohkoh satellite from 1991-2001).

On board this ambitious observatory, 11 instruments constantly gaze at the Sun, observing everything from solar oscillations (â€œSun Quakesâ€?), coronal loops, flares, CMEs and the solar wind; just about everything the Sun does. SoHO has become an indispensable mission for helping us to understand how the Sun influences the environment around our planet and how this generates the potentially dangerous â€œSpace Weatherâ€?.

The SoHO mission site confidently states that SoHO will remain in operation far into the next Solar Cycle. I hope this is the case as the new Hinode and STEREO probes will be good company for this historic mission.

Source: NASA News Release

December 28, 2007December 26, 2015 by Ian O'Neill

1-in-75 Chance Of Tunguska-Size Impact On Mars

A 164-foot (50 meter) wide asteroid will be crossing the orbit of Mars at the end of January 2008. Currently, there is a 1-in-75 chance of the “Mars Crosser” hitting the Red Planet, and if it does, the 30,000 mile per hour speeding mass would generate a three megaton explosion (approximately the size of the terrestrial Tunguska impact over Siberia in 1908) and create a crater half-a-mile wide somewhere north of Meridiani Planum. So, the Mars Rover Opportunity will get a ringside seat should this once-in-a-thousand-year event occur…

NASA’s Near-Earth Object Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California reported this month that a known Near Earth Asteroid (NEO) will be crossing the path of Mars on January 30, 2008. This puts asteroid “2007 WD5” in a special group of asteroids: “Mars Crossers“. NASA’s Near Earth Object Observation Program (or “Spaceguard” program) is intended to track asteroids that come close to the orbit of Earth, but also provides data for any asteroids tracked near our planetary neighbors.

Scientists are both excited and concerned by the possibility of an impact on Mars. Whilst this is a once in a lifetime opportunity to observe an impact of this size on Mars (remember the excitement at Shoemaker-Levy hitting Jupiter in 1994?), this event would eject millions of tons of dust into the Mars atmosphere, interfering with the Mars Expedition Rovers, and hindering orbital imaging of the planet. The Phoenix mission (currently en-route) will undoubtedly be affected. Looking far into the future, this event could have serious consequences for manned exploration.

“Right now asteroid 2007 WD5 is about half-way between the Earth and Mars and closing the distance at a speed of about 27,900 miles per hour […] Over the next five weeks, we hope to gather more information from observatories so we can further refine the asteroid’s trajectory,” – Don Yeomans, manager of the NEO Office at JPL.

Although the odds are low, and the asteroid is expected to miss Mars by 30,000 km, asteroid hunters will be keeping a close eye on the progress of 2007 WD5 as it barrels closer and closer to the Red Planet and our robotic explorers.

Source: Near Earth Object Program

December 27, 2007December 26, 2015 by Elizabeth Howell

Happy Birthday Johannes Kepler!

December 27 is a day to celebrate the life of astronomer Johannes Kepler, who was born on this date in 1571, and is best known for his three laws of planetary motion. But also, coming up in 2009, The International Year of Astronomy (IYA) will celebrate the work of Kepler as well. Not only did Galileo begin his observations with a telescope almost 400 years ago in 1609, but also in that year Kepler published his book New Astronomy or Astronomia Nova. This was the first published work that documented the scientific method.

Kepler’s primary reason for writing Astronomia Nova was to attempt to calculate the orbit of Mars. Previous astronomers used geometric models to explain the positions of the planets, but Kepler sought for and discovered physical causes for planetary motion. Kepler was the first astronomer to prove that the planets orbited the sun in elliptical paths and he did so with rigorous scientific arguments.

An offshoot of Astronomia Nova was the formulation of concepts that eventually became the first two of Kepler’s Laws:

First Law: The orbit of a planet about the Sun is an ellipse with the Sun’s center of mass at one focus.

Second Law: A line joining a planet and the Sun sweeps out equal areas in equal intervals of time.

And Kepler’s third Law: The squares of the periods of the planets are proportional to the cubes of their semi-major axes.

Kepler was also instrumental in the development of early telescopes. He invented the convex eyepiece, which allowed an expanded field of vision, and discovered a means of determining the magnifying power of lenses. He was the first to explain that the tides are caused by the Moon and the first to suggest that the Sun rotates about its axis. He also was the first to use stellar parallax caused by the Earth’s orbit to try to measure the distance to the stars.

While Kepler remains one of the greatest figures in astronomy, his endeavors were not just limited to this field. He was the first person to develop eyeglasses designed for nearsightedness and farsightedness, the first to investigate the formation of pictures with a pin hole camera, and the first to use planetary cycles to calculate the birth year of Christ. He also formed the basis of integral calculus.

Kepler’s many books provided strong support for Galileo’s discoveries, and Galileo wrote to him, “I thank you because you were the first one, and practically the only one, to have complete faith in my assertions.”

Original News Source: The Writer’s Almanac