If you like looking at two minutes of rocket ignition, this is your change.
The video shows you the successful static NASA and ATK Solid Rocket Motor Test, claimed to be the most powerful rocket they ever built, according to a NASA press release.
Basically it’s an upgraded Space Shuttle engine. Too bad I can’t find any reference as to its thrust. The rocket is being developed to haul larger cargo into space. There’s no mention about where in space, only low Earth orbit or higher up.
Monthly Archives: August 2010
Look through NASA picture archives on Flickr
NASA submitted a lot of historical pictures on the Flickr Commons photo stream. You can find it here. You can find pictures from launches, people who played a big role in NASA’s history, like Goddard, Ames, Von Braun, the people who founded JPL, you name it, they’re there. Enjoy browsing them.
From less than ten thousand to more than half a million in 30 years
This video is spectacular and very informative as well. It shows the growth of number of asteroids we have discovered since 1980. You can see the dots lighting up as they are discovered during the years.
Interestingly it shows a regular pattern: the discoveries are all in sync with the orbit of the Earth. That’s no surprise, as we can’t look through the Sun. It’s obvious but surprising to see nevertheless: during the year we really only can observe a small patch of the universe.
But in that small patch we sure have learned to pace up the speed of discoveries, as you can see.
Let’s talk, not travel
An interesting take on interstellar travel and communications on the Weird Sciences blog. Short and sweet: let’s not fly out there ourselves, but talk to each other and let small (self-replicating) probes do the grunt work.
Especially interesting is the take on problems surrounding interstellar travel itself: it’s not just a matter of an obstacle to be conquered, but a fundamental problem due to limitations imposed on us by the laws of nature.
Read the entry Interstellar Spaceflight and Extraterrestrial Civilizations on Weird Sciences.
Titan occults two stars
Eventually all of our lives will end up on YouTube. But that’s not always bad, as shows the video below. It’s a sequence of observations made with the Mount Palomar 5 meter Hale-telescope, equipped with adaptive optics. It shows you a pair of twin stars being occulted by the large Saturn moon Titan. The observation was done in 2001, and learned the team a lot about the atmosphere of Titan, like the occurrence of jet winds.
You can see the light of the stars being refracted by the atmosphere while Titan passes, the left one at the top, the right one at the bottom.
Mind you, this is well before Cassini-Huygens taking off. More info about the project and the story from Scott Kardel, who posted this entry yesterday, can be found here.
Ring my bell
In a bid to unlock longstanding mysteries of the Sun, including the impacts on Earth of its 11-year cycle, an international team of scientists has successfully probed a distant star. By monitoring the star’s sound waves, the team has observed a magnetic cycle analogous to the Sun’s solar cycle.
The study, conducted by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and colleagues in France and Spain, is being published this week as a “Brevia” in Science.
The scientists studied a star known as HD49933, which is located 100 light years from Earth in the constellation Monoceros, the Unicorn, just east of Orion. The team examined the star’s acoustic fluctuations, using a technique called “stellar seismology.” They detected the signature of “starspots,” areas of intense magnetic activity on the surface that are similar to sunspots. While scientists have previously observed these magnetic cycles in other stars, this was the first time they have discovered such a cycle using stellar seismology.
“Essentially, the star is ringing like a bell,” says NCAR scientist Travis Metcalfe, a co-author of the new study. “As it moves through its starspot cycle, the tone and volume of the ringing changes in a very specific pattern, moving to higher tones with lower volume at the peak of its magnetic cycle.” … (UCAR)
COROT
The asteroid belt: into the partying zone
On its way to Jupiter and beyond mission specialists had some bad nights about Pioneer (both 10 and 11) crossing the asteroid belt. Although it’s very empty in space and the asteroid belt is no exception, there are a lot of asteroids. One hit can be enough to end a promising space life.
Luckily, both Pioneers survived and still send back data, after more than 35 years. I sure hope they sail out into the dark universe once to be found in millions of years’ time by other living creatures. That would be a spectacle.
But we weren’t discussing Pioneer, we’re talking about the asteroid belt:
The asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter is often depicted as a dull zone of dead rocks with an occasional wayward speedster smashing through on its way toward the sun.
A new study appearing in the Aug. 26 issue of the journal Nature paints a different picture, one of slow but steady change, where sunlight gradually drives asteroids to split in two and move far apart to become independent asteroids among the millions orbiting the sun.
“This shows that asteroids are not inert, dead bodies of no interest,” said study co-author Franck Marchis, a research astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley, and the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif. “In fact, small asteroids very slowly evolve into binaries and, eventually, divorced binaries.” … (redOrbit)
