Category: Science

Tycho crater’s central peak complex casts a long, dark shadow near local sunrise in this spectacular view that was captured by the Lunar Reconaissance Orbiter on June 10, 2011. Shown in amazing detail (click to embiggen), boulder strewn slopes and jagged shadows appear in the highest resolution yet imaged at 5 feet per pixel. The entire complex is slightly less than a mile wide, formed in uplift by the giant impact that created the well-known ray crater 100 million years ago. The summit of its central peak reaches approximately 6500 feet above the crater floor.

Maybe it’s because I grew up the 1960s and 1970s and the manned space program left an indelible mark upon my psyche, but I look at an image like this and think, we must return to the moon. And at this point I don’t care if it’s the U.S. or the Chinese or some other country; it needs to be done.

Back in the 70s there was a loud outcry from certain sectors (and to a large degree, it remains today) that too much money was being spent on the space program; money that would be better suited to solving problems at home.

Since that time, funding for space exploration has been cut to almost nothing, and yet I see none of the social ills that plagued us in the 70s having gotten any better in the intervening years. So where did all that money go?

Keeping in mind the source of our current economic woes, do I really need to ask?

The United States currently spends over 60% of its income on the military. Can you imagine what we could do—not just in the areas of space exploration, but across the board in education, infrastructure and other areas currently so woefully underfunded—if that was cut by half? Hell, if it was cut by 20% this would be an entirely different country than it is now.

The surface area of the moon is 14.6 million square miles, roughly 3.8 times the area of the United States. C’mon folks, it’s a whole new continent out there waiting to be explored! What are we waiting for?

National will and curiosity, that’s what.

Out of national pride in what the U.S. used to be, I would naturallly like to see us be the ones to go back, but both national will and curiosity are sadly lacking in our current environment that is at best apathetic, or in the case of the Republicans and the low-information voters they rely on to get elected—downright hostile—to science and education. The recent election cycle has shown in no uncertain terms the level of intelligence that the people are sending to Congress (“A woman’s body can shut down pregnancy in the case of legitimate rape.”), and as long as teh st00pid is celebrated in society (I’m talking to you, Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian, Honey Boo Boo, et. al.), nothing is going to change.

And once again we fell for it. This was the “one for the history books” news announcement that NASA has been teasing us with for weeks. Really NASA, really?

Sounds suspiciously like another history-making announcement, but then that one was, “Whoops. It was just a weather balloon. Nothing to see here folks, move along.”

This storyline is getting tired.

No alien fossils—never mind anything actually living, not even any verifiably organic compounds of Martian origin (what may have been found may have come from earth and transported board the spacecraft). Seriously, NASA? Don’t you sterilize your shit before you go shipping it halfway across the solar system? We’re contaminating the Martian environment before we even get to analyze it?

As Charlie Brown said, “You must think [we’re] stupid.”

It’s no wonder certain groups see conspiracies swirling around everything you do relating to Mars, NASA. Back in 1976, the Viking landers supposedly returned definitive proof of life based on the experiments you created just for that very purpose. But then after announcing it, you backpeddled and said oh no—that was actually just some “strange chemistry.”

Please.

The Phoenix lander supposedly also detected organic compounds in the soil, but again…oopsie! “Our bad. We were mistaken.”

At this point I have to ask: if the experiments you send to Mars to detect life keep reporting life but not really, isn’t it time to start hiring some different designers who actually know what they’re doing and stop jerking us all around?

It’s always, “Oh, on the next mission we’ll get answers.” Because constantly looking for life but never actually finding any maintains the status quo (discovery of alien life—even bacterial—would upend every organized religious system on this planet) and keeps everyone at NASA, JPL, and your various subcontractors pretty much employed for life now doesn’t it?

Or at least as long as the American public keeps falling for this bullshit and funding you.

At this point I think most anyone with half a brain has accepted that there’s life on Mars, as well as under the ice of Europa, and probably scattered throughout the universe, so why the continued bullshit bait-and-switch crap? Just admit that you’ve found it and let us move on and absorb the most momentous discovery in human history.

It’s been 40 years since the we last landed on the moon. In 20 years there will be no humans alive who actually set foot there. This is inexcusable. We need to return.

And frankly, I don’t care if it’s us or the Japanese or the Chinese or the Russians. Humanity needs to go back. And while I seriously doubt I will see it in my lifetime, from there we need to go to Mars.

 

Stolen from a post on Facebook:

SCALE MODEL OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM

How big is the solar system? Scientists have placed the edge of the solar system at the Kuiper Belt or the Oort Cloud. The Kuiper Belt is an asteroid belt beyond Pluto (today, Pluto is categorized as a member of the Kuiper Belt) and about 60 times as massive as the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The Oort Cloud is the theoretical mass of comets, asteroids and other debris beyond the Kuiper Belt. This puts the solar system’s diameter at roughly 1.5 light years across, or about fifteen trillion kilometers.

In order to put this scale to a size that can be better related to, the Sun will be represented by a bowling ball about eight inches across. About 7.6 meters from the bowling ball is Mercury, represented by a pinhead. Another 6.9 meters is Venus, represented by a peppercorn, and Earth is 5.3 meters further, represented by another peppercorn (the moon is about 6.1 centimeters from the Earth, represented by a pinhead). At this point, Earth is almost 20 meters from the Sun. Continuing past the Earth 10.7 meters is find Mars, a second pinhead.

Between Mars and Jupiter is the asteroid belt. The asteroid belt is about 41.5 meters from the Sun. However, the asteroid belt is mostly empty space. Thirty one meters past the asteroid belt, or 72.4 meters past Mars, is Jupiter, represented by a chestnut. To put this scale into perspective, Jupiter is 102.9 meters from the Sun and more than a city block from Mars.

After Jupiter are the rest of the outer planets: Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, represented by a hazelnut, a coffee bean, and a peanut, respectively. Saturn is 85.3 meters past Jupiter, with Uranus 189.7 meters past that and Neptune 214.1 meters past Uranus. Finally arrive at Pluto, represented by a pinhead 184.4 meters past Uranus. This point is one kilometer from the Sun. At this distance, the bowling ball is no longer visible, not even with binoculars. Less than a millimeter past Pluto are the Voyager probes.

Of course, while the planets do not stay in a straight line (the Voyager probes used a unique aligning of the outer planets to their advantage), they generally stay about the same distance from the Sun and from each other. So, while Jupiter and Saturn can be as close as 85 meters together in this model, they can be as far as 391 meters apart when they are on opposite sides of the Sun from each other.

The nearest star to the Sun is Proxima Centauri, at 4.2 light years. On this model, it is a whopping 6,759 kilometers from the bowling ball that represents the Sun. The star Arcturus, which is 58,996 kilometers from the bowling ball – about four and a half times the width of the Earth – would be five meters across, longer than a standard pickup truck. Rigel, which is over a million kilometers from the bowling ball – three times further away than the moon – would be ten meters across, about the length of a standard school bus. Betelgeuse, the red giant in the constellation Orion, would be about 158 meters across – twice the size of an American football field. Yet, in this model, the Earth is just the size of an ordinary peppercorn.

– R. Atkinson

…in 1969 and then be all surprised some forty years later when he’s disgusted with the state of manned space exploration.

From high above. Gorgeous.

If you look closely, you’ll see dozens of black, spidery-looking things in these photos. They aren’t Martian arachnids (obviously), but something equally as interesting. It is now believed they are carbon dioxide geysers, the dark color coming from the darker underlying dirt and particulate matter that’s being spewed into the atmosphere during the spring thaw near Mars’ south pole. Scientists aren’t certain this is what’s happening because nothing like this is seen on any other terrestrial planet, but based on the evidence it seems to be the most likely explanation.

Saturn’s moon Enceladus, showing geysers spraying water into space that eventually finds its way onto Saturn and may be a big contributor to the planet’s “E” ring.

Click to embiggen.

Remind me again why the human race doesn’t need space exploration? And then when you’re finished maybe you can then explain why we don’t need art, or music, or literature…

The Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico, which uses something called “drift scanning” to document the vastness of the sky, has been snapping pictures of the heavens for twelve years as part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The Survey’s findings have been compiled into a 3D map of space, picturing 200 million galaxies and “7 billion years worth of cosmic movement.” The map will get bigger, soon.

I don’t know about you, but watching this full screen (and happening to be listening to one of the Doctor Who soundtracks when I first viewed it) almost brought me to tears. Keep in mind that each of those blobs of lights aren’t stars—they’re entire galaxies. How can anyone seriously believe we are the only sentient life in such vastness? The thought that there is so much life teeming in the darkness gives me chills. The Universe is so incredibly huge, even if reincarnation were a reality and we “visited” only a single world during each lifetime, we could never experience it all.

I am humbled by the immensity of it all, and makes the fact that the a group of clever apes on a grain of sand orbiting an insignificant speck of light are arguing over who they can love even sadder, doesn’t it?

Put on some music that inspires you (preferably through headphones) and watch (be sure to expand to full screen):

And thank you for making me—if only for a few brief minutes last night—a wide eyed ten year old again.

I honestly didn’t think the sky crane was going to work, but I confess when it was confirmed that Curiosity had touched down on Mars as planned, I was as giddy as any of the engineers I saw on JPL’s video feed.

Europa (minus the Pirate Twins)

Titan and Saturn

This is what true creation looks like; it’s how stars and planets come to be. These are called the Pillars of Creation and they are immense. Mind-numbingly immense. Immense as in 4 light years tall, the distance between the sun and its nearest neighbor Alpha Centauri.