Search engine Google and NASA announced that the two will collaborate to put information on the web. The effort aims to enable the public to view high-resolution 3D maps of the Moon and Mars, track the International Space Station and the space shuttles on flight on the web and basically make NASA's work publicly accessible.
The Large Hadron Collider of CERN is nearing completion with the delivery of the last superconducting main magnet to the facility last November 27. The LHC will be the biggest and most powerful particle accelerator in the world when it is completed and becomes operational in November 2007.
There's a big brouhaha right now in Great Britain regarding the mysterious death of a former Russian spy, who was discovered to have been poisoned with polonium-210. Interestingly, polonium-210, which is highly radioactive, was used by the Russian space program in the 1970s - primarily to power the Lunokhod rover that went to the moon. According to this article, a half-gram of polonium can generate 140 watts of energy by just decaying.
The New York Times has reported that the Arecibo radio telescope may be closed down in 2011 due to financial issues unless other sources of funding be obtained by the National Science Foundation. The Big Ear, as the radio telescope is known, is the most powerful radio telescope in the world, and is used by, among others, the SETI@Home project. Current astronomy projects being done in the facility may also be curtailed as Arecibo's budget may also be cut by 25% in the next three years.
Astronomers are expecting a strong shower for this year's Leonids, which will be on November 18-19. At peak, 150 meteors and hour (ZHR) are expected to light up the sky and provide excitement to the meteor hunters around the world. The meteor shower will last for about 2 hours.
The Mars Global Surveyor is still out of contact. The spacecraft, launched 10 years ago to map the Martian surface using high-resolution cameras, has been out of touch from its controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory more a week now, and NASA engineers and scientists are trying to re-establish contact with it. The MGS is currently in "safe mode" after it encountered a problem with its solar cell array.
I checked my BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) status today, and I was pleased with the number of work units crunched by my PC. These are my contributions to the grid computing project so far:
Mercury will transit the Sun on Wednesday, November 8, 2006, starting at 8:51 UT in the Philippines. The planet last transited in 2003 and the astronomical event will happen again in 2016. Mercury transits the Sun around 13 times a century.
George W. Bush recently signed a document that effectively extends Pax Americana to outer space. The document, called National Space Policy, underlines the strategic importance of having access to space. It stated that the national security of the US "is critically dependent upon space capabilities, and this dependence will grow." Hence, the US will "preserve its rights, capabilities, and freedom of action in space... and deny, if necessary, adversaries the use of space capabilities hostile to US national interests."
It seems periodic tables need to be reprinted again.
Microprocessor company Advanced Micro Devices is naming its next-generation K8L microprocessors after stars. The 65-nm chips, slated to be released in 2007, will be named Antares, Altair, Arcturus, and Spica.
Grumpy grammarians can get off Neil Armstrong's back at last. A computer programmer who studied the audio recordings of the first moon landing and found that Armstrong did say the oft-quoted words - one small step for a man, one giant step for mankind - correctly. It was previously thought that Armstrong omitted the "a," earning him the ire of anal grammarians everywhere.
Virgin Galactic, the space flight company owned by billionaire Richard Branson, gives the option of converting frequent flyer miles incurred on its twin company, Virgin Atlantic, into a free flight to space. Virgin Galactic will start having commercial suborbital flights starting 2009.
The Cassini spacecraft has discovered a new ring of Saturn. The ring, which crosses the orbits of moons Janus and Epimetheus, is located inside the outer E ring system. It is likely to be made up of water ice particles.
Astronomers have discovered a new class of huge planets but has a density lower than that of water. The newly discovered body was detected orbiting a binary star 450 light-years away at constellation Lacerta. According to the discoverers, the planet, designated HAT-P-1, has the same density as cork, but is bigger than Jupiter, and if there's a big enough tub, it will float in water.
The International Astronomical Union has renamed Xena, the minor planet that was the bane of Pluto's existence. Xena, designated 2003 UB313, is now officially known as Eris, after the Greek goddess for discord. Its moon, previously dubbed Gabrielle, was named Dynomia, after Eris's daughter.
Asteroid 134340 is now the official designation of Pluto, underscoring its downgrade to minor planet status. The new designation was given by the Minor Planet Center. Because they are part of the Pluto system, the companion bodies Charon, Nix and Hydra will also be called 134340 I, II and III, respectively.
It seems that the controversy regarding the demotion of Pluto has repercussions far more than the IAU had expected. Astrologers from all over had been calling foul over the astronomy body's decision to demote Pluto from its planet status.
SMART-1, Europe's first mission on the moon, has landed with a bang. Literally. The spacecraft, which was designed to crash on the moon's surface, did so at a planned 1.25 miles/hour. The resulting dust cloud of the explosion was observed by scientists, who hoped that the dusts will give a clue on the composition of the area around the impact site.
The votation made by the delegates of the International Astronomical Union in Prague did not bode well for Pluto - the controversial body demoted from its planet status to a "dwarf planet." The new designation leaves the solar system with eight planets and four dwarf planets: Pluto, Ceres, previously designated an asteroid, Charon (previously Pluto's moon) and 2003 UB313, also known as Xena. The three will also be known as trans-Neptunian objects.
NASA scientists using data from the Chandra-X space telescope has confirmed the existence of dark matter. The little-known dark matter - deemed to composed 80-90% of all the matter in the Universe - was observed when two giant gas clouds collided, an event observed by Chandra-X, the Hubble Space Telescope, the Very Large Telescope and the Magellan Telescope. This is the first direct evidence that the the-theoretical dark matter is not just a stuff of theoretical astrophysics.
Members of the International Astronomical Union are gathering in Prague to discuss the fate of Pluto - whether to still consider the body as a planet or to demote it into a lesser status: asteroid, Kuiper Belt object, planetissimal. More importantly the outcome of IAU's discussio would be to define, for once and for all, what really a planet is. The group will also discuss the classification of newly discovered bodies like Xena and Segna. (And we think taxonomists had it easy classifying the platypus...)
It was reported that researchers using data gathered by the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope found eight types of complex carbon-based molecules in interstellar space. The molecules include acetamide, cyclopropenone, propenal, propanal and ketenimine, found in Sagittarius B2, and methyl-cyano-diacetylene, methyl-triacetylene and cyanoallene, found in the Taurus Molecular Cloud (TMC-1).
Ten years ago, NASA biochemist David McKay presented a Martian meteorite, named ALH84001, found to contain microscopic structures scientists surmise to be biological in origin. These structures are called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, commonly produced by biological processes - the main argument used by McKay in his thesis that life could have existed in Mars, but many scientists have argued that PAHs can also be produced by non-biological means.
The International Herald Tribune has recently run a story about the Alliance to Rescue Civilization, which advocates turning the Earth's satellite into a repository of DNA from all of earth's creatures, as well as a "compendium of all knowledge" . The vault and its contents, according to the group, will act as an insurance from catastrophic events, such as a major world war or an asteroid collission, that could wipe out civilizations.
Stardust@home, a new distributed computing project designed to look for microscopic interstellar dust grains collected by the Stardust mission, is set to go online on August 1. The program will use web-based virtual microscope programs to look for the tiny dust grains collected by the Stardust Interstellar Dust Collector. Around 50 dust grains are expected to be found from the tiles of aerogel used to collect the dusts. The Stardust spacecraft gathered samples near the comet Wild 2.
I had a change of heart and decided to once again to participate in the SETI@home project. I now participate in three grid computing projects: Einstein@home, which aims to search for pulsars using data from the LIGO and GEO facilities, Rosetta@home, which investigates protein folding, and SETI@home, which looks for signals from little green men. SETI@home analyzes signals recorded by the Arcecibo radio telescope.
It seems that Japan is again poised to take over the numero uno position in the supercomputing list once again. It was reported here that the MDGrape-3 supercomputer of RIKEN in Yokohama, managed to achieve a speed of one quadrillion floating-point operations per second - the first to reach petaFLOP speed. It is about three times faster than the current champ, the IBM-built Blue Gene/L. Blue Gene/L deposed the previous record holder from Japan, the Earth Simulator.
Space Adventures, the space tourism firm that put the first space tourist in orbit, is now offering space walks for $35 million a pop. The space walk, to be done outside the International Space Station, will last for one and a half hours.
This one could be funny if it weren't so tragic - yet another case of careless engineering? DARPA has announced that the cause of the March 24 crash of Falcon 1 rocket was a busted aluminum nut that cost only $5.
I saw this while browsing on the Net, a sort of Swiss knife for astronomers - the Astronomers Versatool. It's a multifunction tool with 21 attachments useful for a night out with the stars, including an optics brush, hex keys for collimation, a red LED flashlight, wrenches and even a pen. It's priced something like $25.
The Space Shuttle Discovery landed safety at the Kennedy Space Center after a 13-day mission. The shuttle, with a complement of six crews, carried supplies to the International Space Station and perform some maintenance and experiments during the mission.
I just signed up to the Einstein@Home project, which aims to find pulsars using data from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) and GEO 600 gravity wave detectors. Einstein@Home will use my computer's idle CPU cycles to process some of the data collected by the detectors. Previously I donated my CPU cycles to the SETI@Home project.
This is a painting of a Jesuit friend of mine, Fr. Jason Dy. Entitled Inigo, nakahangad sa mga bitoon, ug namalandong (Iñigo, stargazing and meditating), it depicts St. Ignatius looking at the stars. Aside from its religious undertones, I think the painting should be a fitting tribute to the Jesuit penchant for astronomy. It was the Society of Jesus which founded the Manila Observatory in 1865 in the Philippines, which became the forerunner of the Weather Bureau and later the Philippine Atmospheric Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration (PAGASA).
China's Moon Probe will broadcast music
There was an ongoing discussion on the UP Astronomical Society e-group about the upcoming vote on the classification of Pluto as a planet by the International Astronomical Union. Apparently, according to Bamm, one of the members, the Philippine representative to the IAU, Dr. Cynthia Celebre, has been consulting the local astro community regarding the issue. IAU will vote on the issue in August, and the Philippines will have a vote in the General Assembly.
The aging Space Shuttle Discovery was launched yesterday, July 4. On a 12-day mission, the shuttle safely reached orbit but is still plague with falling-foam problems that spelled doom to Columbia in 2003. Pieces of the insulating foam were seem falling from the fuel tank of the shuttle moments after launch.
Hubble Space Telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys failed last week. The ACS, installed in 2002, reportedly had problems with its power supply and was shut down last Monday. NASA engineering are currently looking into the problem and how to repair the camera.
Newly Discovered Moons of Pluto Named
"Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us."
"It is important for the human race to spread out into space for the survival of the species. Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of."
NASA has released a report discussing the demise of the Genesis space probe. A set of gravity switches installed backwards did the space probe in as it re-entered the earth's atmosphere on September 8, 2004. Genesis was designed to collect solar wind atoms and return the samples back to earth after a 3-year mission. Because of the flawed switches, the Genesis crash landed on its re-entry. The container housing the samples cracked thereby exposing its payload to contamination.
British scientists have unveiled "Bridget," the autonomous robotic craft designed to explore Mars. Its designers are hoping that the robot will be included in the European Space Agency's ExoMars mission to be launched in 2011.
Today is Google Earth's first birthday. Google Earth is the fine virtual globe program downloadable free from Google that has sent shivers to dictators and military men everywhere for its hi-res imagery of the earth's surface. I once used the software to locate the airfield of the famed Area 51 in Nevada, and a site even sponsors a contest to locate black helicopters (ostensibly the ones used in covert ops). The same site even reported that al Qaeda uses the software to stalk its targets.
It has been reported that astronomers using data from Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer, or FUSE, have deduced that planets may be orbiting the star Beta Pictoris, around 60 ly away from us. Beta Pictoris is said to be teeming with carbon, as such, the planets around it may have encrusted with diamonds as large as boulders.The planetary system and Beta Pictoris itself are relatively young, around 20 million years old.
John Barentine of Apache Point Obsevatory is suggesting that ancient Native Americans may have recorded a supernova explosion in AD 1066. The purported record is carved in a rock found in Arizona. The petroglyph apparently shows an eight-pointed star and a scorpio, which according to Barentine, could be the supernova explosion that occured at the vicinity of Scorpius more than a millenia ago.
