The Ten Tenors – Bohemian Rhapsody
An evening pause:
Year: 2011
A global map of Titan, in color
Crime rates plummet in Chicago and Washington after gun laws were ruled unconstitutional
Surprise, surprise! The crime rates plummeted in Chicago and Washington after the Supreme Court ruled their gun laws were unconstitutional.
NASA awards $1.35M to creators after their electric plane flies 200 miles
NASA awards $1.35 million to the creators of an electric-powered plane after it flies 200 miles.
A Virgin Galactic customer gets a refund
A Virgin Galactic customer gets a refund.
The 2011 Nobel Prize for Physics has been awarded
The 2011 Nobel Prize for Physics has been awarded to the astronomers who discovered dark energy.
Saul Perlmutter from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and University of California, Berkeley, has been awarded half of this year’s prize for his work on the Supernova Cosmology Project, with the other half awarded to Brian P. Schmidt from the Australian National University and Adam G. Riess from the Johns Hopkins University and Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, for their work on the High-z Supernova Search Team.
Shawn Colvin – I don’t know why
An evening pause: Shawn Colvin, at the 1988 Philadelphia Folk Festival, early in her career, singing one of her early hits.
For an extraterrestrial skiing experience, Enceladus is the place to go.
An update on the ongoing X-37B mission
An update on the ongoing X-37B mission.
I like this quote from the article:
Meanwhile, Boeing has begun to look at derivatives of their X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle — including flying cargo and crew to the International Space Station. Speaking this week at the Space 2011 conference —organized by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) and held in Long Beach, Calif. — Arthur Grantz of Boeing Space and Intelligence Systems sketched out a host of future uses for the space plane design. For one, the X-37B, as is, can be flown to the space station and dock to the facility’s common berthing mechanism. No new technology is required for X-37B to supply cargo services to the ISS, Grantz said. Also, an X-37C winged vehicle has been scoped out, a craft that would ride atop an Atlas 5 in un-shrouded mode.
The Boeing roadmap, Grantz added, also envisions a larger derivative of the X-37B space plane, one that can carry up to seven astronauts, as well as tote into Earth orbit a mix of pressurized and unpressurized cargo.
The Obama administration by the numbers
Simple, graphic, and devastating: The Obama administration by the numbers.
The strange hollows on the mountain tops of Mercury
Another spectacular planetary science image, this time from Messenger orbiting Mercury. This close-up image of the hollows of Mercury only illustrates their mystery. The insert shows the context of the close-up image. These irregular sinks are here found on the mountain top ridge of an inner crater rim. Also, some but not all of the hollows have bright interiors.
Scientists have proposed that some form of impact melt process caused these hollows. At impact, the ground literally rippled like water when you toss a stone into a pool. Here, however, the molten ripples quickly froze, creating the inner and outer crater rim rings. To my untrained eye, the hollows look like collapse features where the surface hardened first, then collapsed when the molten inner material drained away as it became solid.
Why some hollows are bright, however, is not yet understood.
Dawn begins close-up orbit observations
Dawn begins close-up orbit observations of Vesta. More new results here.
In this orbit, the average distance from the spacecraft to the Vesta surface is 420 miles (680 kilometers), which is four times closer than the previous survey orbit.