Something Strange Stalks the Space Station

July 07, 2009

Over at SpaceWeather.com, reports have been coming in of observers seeing a strange object following the International Space Station (ISS) as it passes overhead. What could it be? It's certainly a smaller object than the space station, and we know it's not the shuttle (we have a few more days until the launch of the delayed Endeavour). Perhaps it's a UFO? Well, for casual observers, this is certainly an "unidentified" flying object, but one ace astrophotographer managed to capture the the object through his lens, revealing its true identity...

Should NASA Return to the Moon? 73% Said "Yes"

July 06, 2009

This was a very interesting answer to a comparatively simple question. From the get-go, the survey was very general, and fairly unscientific, but I think it gauged the general feeling toward the planned NASA return mission to the lunar surface. As you may have guessed, the timing was no coincidence, as Discovery Space launched our Wide Angle: The Lunar Landings on Monday to celebrate the upcoming Apollo 11 mission 40th anniversary.

The majority (73%) of participants replied "Yes -- the Moon first, then we can use it as a stepping stone to Mars, later," 20% replied "No -- been there, done that, it's a waste of money, we should be focusing on Mars, now!" and 7% replied "Neither -- what's the point?"

956 people placed a vote, a much larger number than I was expecting!

The Fourth of July Celebrated Solar Style

July 04, 2009

The sun has been very quiet recently, but today marks an interesting change in solar behavior. A new active region has rapidly emerged (called sunspot 1024), right in time for the US Independence Day celebrations. What's more, it's exploding to life with some fireworks of its own special brand: B Class solar flares...

*Image credit: British amateur astronomer David Tyler managed to capture one of the flares from young sunspot 1024 from his backyard solar observatory in England.

The First Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Pictures Are Here!

July 02, 2009

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) launched on June 18 for a short trek to the moon. Only five days later, the LRO and companion spaceship, the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS), arrived in lunar orbit. On June 30, the LRO opened its eyes and started taking pictures of the cratered surface. Prepare yourself, you're about to see the first images transmitted to Earth from the LRO.

Ready? Here they are...

Scientist Accelerates Radio Waves Faster than Light...

July 01, 2009

...using this "gadget." What's that all about? Actually, I don't know.

What would happen if I walked into a physics conference and shouted, "I've discovered a phenomenon that travels faster than light!"?

1. I get laughed at.
2. I get thrown out.
3. I get ignored.
4. I get thrown in science jail for breaking the laws of physics.*

There might have been the chance that I'd made a huge discovery (perhaps I'd discovered the tachyon?), but I think I would have proven my statement before I made such a huge proclamation.

So yesterday, there was a buzz about a scientist, from Los Alamos National Laboratory, who managed to force the "phenomenon" of radio waves faster than the speed of light. Instantly, the physicist inside me nearly exploded with excitement. Sure, I've read papers that study quantum entanglement, where two particles will instantaneously change quantum states, thereby 'communicating' faster then light. I've also been neck deep in warp drives and wormholes recently, two other possible loopholes around Einstein's general relativity. But the "phenomenon" of radio waves? Wow...

*Thank you Lori for that little insight.

Mining Asteroids And Getting Rich (Or Not)

June 29, 2009

This special Space Disco Guest Article, is written by friend and co-author Greg Fish. Greg and I are currently putting the finishing touches to a book called Astroeconomics: Making Money from the Vacuum of Space, where we investigate the various opportunities space exploration presents to the world. In this post, Greg dips into one of the topics from Astroeconomics and discusses the pros and cons of asteroid mining (and discovers there are actually more 'cons' than we originally thought).

Poll: Should NASA Return to the Moon?

June 28, 2009

It is currently NASA's plan to return man to the Moon by 2020. It will probably be after that, but that's the plan. However, it is far from clear whether it will be the Constellation Project (in its current form -- Ares rocket, Orion crew vehicle, Altair lunar lander) that will be taking us there. There's a lot of ideas flying around at the moment, including the point that perhaps we shouldn't be going back to the Moon at all.

As we fast approach the 40th anniversary of the Apollo lunar landings, what do you think NASA should be doing? Discovery Space is asking a very basic question to get a feel for the current situation from our readers: Should NASA Return to the Moon?

Read on, weigh up the options and vote. I'll be publishing the results on July 6...

Skylab Littering Fee Paid to Aussie Shire 30 Years Later

June 27, 2009

Image: Pieces of Skylab remain in the Shire of Esperance to this day, as decoration, apparently. Credit: kleinmatt66 on Flickr.

Although this news is fairly old (positively ancient in blog-time -- a whole two months ago), it somehow passed me by. Whether that's because it wasn't widely reported or I was caught sleeping (probably the latter), I don't know. Regardless, this is certainly one for space trivia quiz night.

On July 11, 1979, the world watched as the US space station Skylab re-entered the atmosphere. Having been abandoned years earlier, the empty station finally succumbed to the Earth's atmosphere, broke up and burned. However, not all of Skylab was incinerated by the atmosphere, in fact, it made quite a mess...

Celebrating Michael Jackson's Legacy: The Moonwalk

June 26, 2009

Yesterday was a shocking day down here in LA.

Not only did the movie industry lose the legendary Farrah Fawcett after her epic battle with cancer, but in a surprise announcement that flooded the social media websites, music legend Michael Jackson was pronounced dead at the UCLA Medical Center. To understand the gravity of Michael's death, the best summary came from a local LA reporter when he said, "First there was Elvis, and then Sinatra. Now Jackson has sadly passed away."

Beware the Phantom Exoplanets

June 25, 2009

This is an added complication in the search for exoplanets I hadn't thought of before: confusing exoplanets with starspots.

Yes, starspots are pretty much the same thing as sunspots; patches of cool plasma exposed by magnetic flux pushing the hotter photosphere and chromosphere aside.

Similar mechanisms drive both sunspots and starspots, and huge spots or large swarms of smaller spots have been detected on the surface of distant stars. In some cases, these starspots can be very extreme, covering a huge area of the star (up to 30% of the star's total area in some cases).

Back in 2004 however, astronomers thought they'd made quite a different discovery. Studying an exoplanet orbiting a star called TrES-1 (in the constellation of Lyra, 500 light years away), international teams of astronomers confirmed the discovery, but noted that something else was orbiting the star.

The astronomers used the transit method to detect exoplanets, meaning they measured the dip in stellar brightness as the exoplanet passed in front of the star. Exoplanets are simply too small to be resolved with telescopes (actually, that's not entirely true), so we must depend on the exoplanet blocking some of the starlight from view to signify its presence.

Although it is attractive to think there might be another exoplanet out there producing this transit effect, it turns out that the exoplanet would have to be 745AU from TrES-1 with an orbital period of 21,000 years. At these kinds of extreme distances, the exoplanet would need to be gargantuan to produce any measurable change in stellar brightness!

In a publication released yesterday, Jason Dittmann and colleagues from the University of Arizona did the legwork and worked out that the phantom exoplanet was actually a giant starspot causing the dip in brightness.

Why do I feel a tinge of sadness in the air? It's kinda cool we can detect spots on distant stars... isn't it?

Source: arXiv blog