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.
Experiments prompted by a 2008 surprise from NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander suggest that soil examined by NASA’s Viking Mars landers in 1976 may have contained carbon-based chemical building blocks of life.
“This doesn’t say anything about the question of whether or not life has existed on Mars, but it could make a big difference in how we look for evidence to answer that question,” said Chris McKay of NASA’s Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif. McKay coauthored a study published online by the Journal of Geophysical Research – Planets, reanalyzing results of Viking’s tests for organic chemicals in Martian soil.
The only organic chemicals identified when the Viking landers heated samples of Martian soil were chloromethane and dichloromethane — chlorine compounds interpreted at the time as likely contaminants from cleaning fluids. But those chemicals are exactly what the new study found when a little perchlorate — the surprise finding from Phoenix — was added to desert soil from Chile containing organics and analyzed in the manner of the Viking tests.
“Our results suggest that not only organics, but also perchlorate, may have been present in the soil at both Viking landing sites,” said the study’s lead author, Rafael Navarro-González of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico City. … (JPL)
