I’m not much into the customer policy Apple has adapted, because basically I like to own the stuff that I buy, like Steve Jobs and all those others clinging to their worldly possessions, wanting to decide what they want to do with it.
But anyhow, if you don’t mind the mind boggling behavior of people you provide their daily bread for by buying and using an iPhone, if you’re a user this app might be worth your while: New NASA HD App for iPad With Expanded Content Available Free.
Here’s a graph showing you what Koppernigk writes about. Remember that the sum of all category numbers is more than 1500, because multiple categories can be assigned to one post. So you see 1500 blog entries (not including this one) and 2308 category entries. Oh, and this is blog post 1501.
click to enlarge
Isn’t it stupid to celebrate based on random numbers, just because they look nice? This is my 1500th blog post since December 11, 2006 when “The Cookie has Spoken” changed its destiny and became this astronomy blog. Eventually the name changed as well, to Koppernigk, named after a man of science.
It’s better to congratulate someone else with an achievement in real science, not based on random numbers. Congratulations to Edward Cheung, born on Aruba, working on the HST and still visiting his home to educate the kids in astronomy. Albeit a resident of the US, still a bit of a countryman, because Aruba and Netherlands are both part of the official kingdom of the Netherlands.
He received a well deserved honor from our Queen Beatrix, and became Ridder in de Orde van de Nederlandse Leeuw. More on SPACE.com or on the official Aruba site.
NASA has started development of the Solar Probe Plus, a probe that will get as close as 4 million kilometers to the Sun’s surface. Compare that to about 50,000 km from Earth. That might give even better pictures than ever before:
… The small car-sized spacecraft will plunge directly into the sun’s atmosphere approximately four million miles from our star’s surface. It will explore a region no other spacecraft ever has encountered. NASA has selected five science investigations that will unlock the sun’s biggest mysteries.
“The experiments selected for Solar Probe Plus are specifically designed to solve two key questions of solar physics — why is the sun’s outer atmosphere so much hotter than the sun’s visible surface and what propels the solar wind that affects Earth and our solar system? ” said Dick Fisher, director of NASA’s Heliophysics Division in Washington. “We’ve been struggling with these questions for decades and this mission should finally provide those answers.”
As the spacecraft approaches the sun, its revolutionary carbon-composite heat shield must withstand temperatures exceeding 2550 degrees Fahrenheit and blasts of intense radiation. The spacecraft will have an up close and personal view of the sun enabling scientists to better understand, characterize and forecast the radiation environment for future space explorers. … (NASA)
NASA’s new course (if Congress permits) is to put astronauts on an asteroid. Two goals can be achieved by landing on such a piece of solar system debris: first to find out how to disarm such a projectile when it’s flying in the direction of Earth, and second to function as a first stage to Mars. Problem is you have to find an asteroid quite close to Earth, else you could better fly to Mars directly. Turns out there are very few of those critters flying around. NASA only found two so far:
NASA may appear to have its pick of thousands of known asteroids for a manned mission, but only two are good targets within the next 20 years.
An asteroid mission requires a large-enough destination that astronauts could reach within a few months of launch from Earth, says Lindley Johnson, head of NASA’s Near-Earth Object program in Washington. Other limits to such an ambitious undertaking include the viewing range of ground-based telescopes.
“They don’t come all that close all that often,” Johnson said at a NASA workshop on NEOs three weeks ago.
While NASA admits more knowledge about objects that pass within 28 million miles (45 million km) of Earth could increase the number of possible destinations, only two currently meet the guidelines set out by the space agency in its attempt to send a manned mission to an asteroid by 2025, a goal set by President Barack Obama. One of the asteroids could be reached in 2020 and the other in 2025.
A third candidate would not be within range until 2045. (SPACE.com)
Well, for the time being one is enough, methinks.
