Duck! New data suggests that the giant ancient asteroid barrage during the early solar system may have lasted much longer than previously thought.
An evening pause: Truly Walt Disney’s most frenetic and surreal animated films.
Twinkle twinkle little bat,
How I wonder what you’re at.
Up above the world you fly,
Like a tea tray in the sky.
A new study by astronomers has found a vast structure of satellite galaxies and star clusters aligned perpendicular to the Milky Way and extending outward above and below the galaxy’s nucleus by as much as a million light years.
In their effort to understand exactly what surrounds our Galaxy, the scientists used a range of sources from twentieth century photographic plates to images from the robotic telescope of the Sloan Deep Sky Survey. Using all these data they assembled a picture that includes bright ‘classical’ satellite galaxies, more recently detected fainter satellites and the younger globular clusters.
“Once we had completed our analysis, a new picture of our cosmic neighbourhood emerged”, says Pawlowski. The astronomers found that all the different objects are distributed in a plane at right angles to the galactic disk. The newly-discovered structure is huge, extending from as close as 33,000 light years to as far away as one million light years from the centre of the Galaxy.
An animation illustrating this galactic distribution is posted below the fold. You can read the actual preprint paper here.
The problem with this polar alignment with the Milky Way’s core is that the theories for explaining the distribution of dark matter do not predict it.
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To mine the asteroids, first build small cheap space telescopes.
The space telescope will be based on the same design Planetary Resources will eventually use for its asteroid-prospecting spacecraft: a 30-kilogram to 50-kilogram flier packed with imaging sensors and a laser-optical communication system the company is developing to avoid encumbering its spacecraft with large antennas. The company, which says it has about two dozen employees, will market these spacecraft as cheap but effective telescopes for both astronomical and Earth-observing applications. Sales would provide cash for the company’s core work on asteroid mining, Eric Anderson, co-founder and co-chairman of Planetary Resources, said.
The telescope slated for launch sometime in the next two years “would be something, let’s say, a university buys [for astronomical observations], or a commercial company that wants to monitor shipping traffic or something like that,” Anderson said in a phone interview. The cost for the telescope, which Planetary Resources is calling Arkyd-101, would be “millions of dollars, including launch.”
At the Planetary Resources press conference today, there was a lot of talk about the benefits and profits to be gained from mining the asteroids. However, this ain’t gonna happen for quite a few years. In the meantime, the company plans to make money building space telescopes which scientists and others can use, for a fee, to do research.
In other words, the government and astronomers dropped the ball on replacing the Hubble Space Telescope. Now, private enterprise is going to pick it up and run with it.
SpaceX and NASA have now set May 7 as the planned launch date for the Dragon test flight to ISS.
Cryosat has released its first seasonal variation map, tracking the growth of the Arctic icecap for the winter of 2010-2011.
The video at the link is quite interesting to watch. Note however that the press information says nothing about whether the icecap was larger or smaller than expected, something that probably is not surprising. It will probably take decades of further work to get the true context of these results.
The Air Force moves forward with the plans to develop a reusable first stage rocket.
“The suspect is not cooperating.”
The suspect? A crying four-year-old girl the TSA wished to frisk because she had hugged her grandmother.
The day of reckoning looms: A new official report released yesterday predicts that Social Security will run out of money three years earlier than previously predicted.
Wrong again: The Great Lakes are not drying up, as predicted by global warming advocates.
Two weeks of protests are being planned by Catholics for this summer over the Obama administration’s contraceptive mandates.
And some pundits still think this election will be close? Hah. Any politician who has made as many enemies as Obama can’t possibly win.
The global warming advocate who invented the concept of “Gaia” now admits he was wrong about global warming.
“The problem is we don’t know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books – mine included – because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn’t happened,” Lovelock said. “The climate is doing its usual tricks. There’s nothing much really happening yet. We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now,” he said.
“The world has not warmed up very much since the millennium. Twelve years is a reasonable time… it (the temperature) has stayed almost constant, whereas it should have been rising — carbon dioxide is rising, no question about that,” he added.
No announcement yet, but of the many stories available this Wired article appears to provide the best overview of the asteroid mining plans of Planetary Resources.
The company’s first phase is most interesting:
Within the next 18 to 24 months, Planetary Resources hopes to launch between two and five space-based telescopes at an estimated cost of a few million dollars each that will identify potentially valuable asteroids. Other than their size and orbit, little detailed information is available about the current catalog of near-Earth asteroids. Planetary Resources’ Arkyd-101 Space Telescopes will figure out whether any are worth the trouble of resource extraction.
The actual press conference is scheduled for 10:30 am (Pacific). Stay tuned.
Update: The Planetary Resources website has now been updated. You can read more about their space telescope proposal here.
Scientists studying Cassini images have spotted the trails of objects as they punch through one of Saturn’s rings.
SpaceX has delayed the launch of its Dragon test mission to ISS, with the launch now scheduled sometime between May 3 and May 7.
“After reviewing our recent progress, it was clear that we needed more time to finish hardware-in-the-loop testing and properly review and follow up on all data,” SpaceX spokeswoman Kirstin Brost Grantham wrote in an email. “While it is still possible that we could launch on May 3rd, it would be wise to add a few more days of margin in case things take longer than expected. As a result, our launch is likely to be pushed back by one week, pending coordination with NASA.”
An op-ed in Houston: “The Space Launch System is a threat to JSC, Texas jobs.”
It appears that even some NASA employees are beginning to see the madness of spending billions on a launch system that will likely only fly one mission almost a decade from now. And it will seem even more mad to more people should Dragon and Cygnus prove successful in the coming year.
To put it bluntly, the long term politics are very much hostile to SLS. It is going to die, if only because the federal government is bankrupt and can’t afford it. I just wish our elected officials had the brains to realize this now rather than three years down the road.
Want to get a jumpstart on Tuesday’s asteroid-mining announcement by Planetary Resources? Read this NASA report [pdf], released April 2.
An evening pause: In honor of the 35th anniversary today of the premiere of Star Wars in 1977, a beautiful and silly rendition by the Piano Guys.
For those who were not alive in the 1960s and 1970s, it is hard to explain the impact of Star Wars. For more than twenty years, science fiction fans had dreamed of seeing a really good space opera science fiction film on the big screen. Sadly, we saw disappointment after disappointment instead. Except for Forbidden Planet (1956) and television’s Star Trek in the 1960s, practically every science fiction film about space exploration told childish stories that made no sense.
And then came Star Wars.
An evening pause: As you giggle at this, be forewarned: seventy years from now what you consider sane will be considered just as absurd.
An evening pause: “The monkey mocks me with each flip.”
Only those who have explored deeply into the avant-garde French film world will truly understand this classic.
DARPA has released some details about last summer’s HTV-2 hypersonic test flight.
An unmanned hypersonic glider likely aborted its 13,000 mph flight over the Pacific Ocean last summer because unexpectedly large sections of its skin peeled off, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency said Friday.
Birds of a feather: Jon Corzine, whose company MF Global illegally used and lost more than a billion in customer funds, is still listed as a fund-raiser for the Obama campaign.
Good news: Data now suggests that the bats are showing signs of recovery in the first caves hit by white nose syndrome in New York. More here. Plus here’s a link describing some of the research being done on this subject.
Note that the death toll listed in these stories is nothing more than an arbitrary exaggeration by government officials. The National Speleological Society estimates that the numbers are probably far less, and based on my own caving experience, I agree.
Mexico has passed its own very strict climate change law.
The new law contains many sweeping provisions to mitigate climate change, including a mandate to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide by 30% below business-as-usual levels by 2020, and by 50% below 2000 levels by 2050. Furthermore, it stipulates that 35% of the country’s energy should come from renewable sources by 2024, and requires mandatory emissions reporting by the country’s largest polluters.
Some predictions:
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Orbital Sciences has released an updated launch schedule for its Antares rocket and Cygnus capsule.
The significance?
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The death of the double click.
The story includes some nice history behind the invention of the GUI.
Interestingly, I could probably count on one hand the times I have double-clicked on a computer, since I rarely use the mouse at all. Instead, I have found it is far faster to use the keyboard to access commands, files, programs, etc.
