Hampton VA (SPX) Jul 22, 2008 -
NASA completed a full-scale rocket motor test on Thursday, July 17, to further development of the Orion jettison motor, which will separate the spacecraft's launch abort system from the crew module during launch.
Hampton VA (SPX) Jul 22, 2008 -
NASA completed a full-scale rocket motor test on Thursday, July 17, to further development of the Orion jettison motor, which will separate the spacecraft's launch abort system from the crew module during launch. The Messenger spacecraft spotted a volcano on Mercury during the flyby back in January. You can see it in the upper part of the image. Even the vent is visible.
Here’s part of the caption from the Messenger site:
This image shows the largest feature identified as a volcano in the upper center of the scene. The volcano has a central kidney-shaped depression, which is the vent, and a broad smooth dome surrounding the vent. The volcano is located just inside the rim of the Caloris impact basin. The rim of the basin is marked with hills and mountains, as visible in this image. The role of volcanism in Mercury’s history had been previously debated, but MESSENGER’s discovery of the first identified volcanoes on Mercury’s surface shows that volcanism was active in the distant past on the innermost planet.
Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington
R. Hurt (SSC-Caltech), JPL-Caltech, NASA
Explanation:
Recently discovered Makemake is one of the largest objects known in the outer Solar System. Pronounced MAH-kay MAH-kay, this Kuiper belt object is only slightly smaller than Pluto, orbits the Sun only slightly further out than Pluto, and appears only slightly dimmer than Pluto. Makemake, however, has an orbit much more tilted to the ecliptic plane of the planets than Pluto. Designated 2005 FY9 soon after its discovery by a team led by Mike Brown (Caltech) in 2005, the outer Solar System orb was recently renamed Makemake for the creator of humanity in the Rapa Nui mythology of Easter Island. Additionally, Makemake has been recently classified as a dwarf planet under the new subcategory plutoid, making Makemake the third cataloged plutoid after Pluto and Eris. Makemake is known to be a world somewhat red in appearance, with spectra indicating it is likely covered with frozen methane. Since no images of Makemake’s surface yet exist, an artist’s illustration originally meant to depict Sedna has been boldly co-opted above to now illustrate Makemake. A hypothetical moon is visualized above nearly in the direction of our distant Sun.

I’m off to ComiCon! I’ll be arriving around 1-ish, but I have to hit the ground running. My schedule has changed…
Here’s the deal: Steven Moffat (the new show runner for Doctor Who) as well as Julie Gardner (DW Producer) and Naoko Mori (Toshiko on Torchwood) will be doing interviews today, Wednesday, at ComiCon. I’ve signed up for this, and evidently there are too many journalists to do individual interviews, so they’re putting us at tables to do round-robins. Moffat is from 4:00 - 4:30, and Mori and Gardner are from 4:30 - 5:00; all times are Pacific time (add seven hours for UT).
So I get to ask all three of them questions, and I’m still brewing that in my head (suggestions are welcome; leave them in the comments!).
But what I’m going to try to do is do this live, streaming on my UStream channel. That means that if you tune in you can watch it live!
However, many things have to work: the connection must be good, the stream must not lag or be impossible to set up due to software glitches, and of course the BBC has to agree to this. They may not.
But I’ll try! And just in case I don’t have time to write a new page, I’ve embedded the player below.
We had a bit of trouble parking, as the museum car park was full, unusual; we thought, as this was a week day and the school holidays were over in Victoria. Then as we tramped up to the entrance, we saw an ABC camera crew setting up. Interesting, we thought. After purchasing our tickets (should we go for the IMAX 3D dinosaur presentation, or the special exhibition on dinosaur eggs and babies, we chose the latter after some indecision), the lady who handed us our tickets casually mentioned, “Oh, and if you go around the corner, they are just about to start the giant squid dissection”. Er, what?
Fishermen had pulled up a recently deceased giant squid off the coast of southern Victoria. The museum was going to do a public dissection of this giant beast, and webcasting the entire event (you can see the webcast here). This was big news in Melbourne (Sydney had the Pope, but Melbourne had a giant Squid, take that Sydney. PZ Myers would be pleased.) but of course I and my family, blithe Adeliadeans who ignore the Sydney-Melbourne rivalry thing, had no idea, and had walked into a big event by accident.
Unfortunately, around half of Melbourne was there as well, even though it was a school day (okay, I exaggerate; it was only about a quarter). I didn’t know there was so much interest in oversized calamari. We could just see the big screen the heads of the crowd, over in corner I could see the Catalyst crew setting up. Still, despite the crowds, we could hear what was going on and see a fair bit. SurferDad and I stayed the longest, the rest wandered off in a parallel exhibit. They were a bit bothered by the overpowering smell of calamari. I did learn that you can tell the age of a squid by the growth bands in its beak, and that Giant squid have a most impressive radula, the rasp like tongue they use to grind down their food. Then we had to go and see the Dinosaur eggs and missed the main part of the dissection.
By the time we came back the dissection was almost over, and they were sewing the squid up for preservation, the crowd had thinned and we could get a good look. SmallestOne and Sisterson were pretty curious, but EldestOne was not really turned on by a mass of tentacles (why I have no idea).
We complemented this completely unexpected event by a quick trip to the marine section, where there was an exhibit on giant squid to learn more. All in all, a most exciting day.
I love crocodiles. They scare the crap out of me on a visceral level, so I’m fascinated by them. I mean, c’mon: they fit the definition of "monster".
In Africa, it’s been known that a croc can take down a leopard — even a leopard can’t outrun the blinding speed of a croc’s jaws — but now, for the first time, evidently, photos have been taken of a leopard taking down a croc!
Photographer Hal Brindley got the shots, and they are very, very cool… well worth a look. He even put up a video:
Whoa. But the picture sequence is more complete. It gave me chills.
Credit & Copyright:
Explanation:
This beautiful cosmic cloud is a popular stop on telescopic tours of the constellation Sagittarius. Eighteenth century cosmic tourist Charles Messier cataloged the bright nebula as M8, while modern day astronomers recognize the Lagoon Nebula as an active stellar nursery about 5,000 light-years distant, in the direction of the center of our Milky Way Galaxy. Striking details can be traced through this remarkable picture, processed to remove stars and hence better reveal the Lagoon’s range of filaments of glowing hydrogen gas, dark dust clouds, and the bright, turbulent hourglass region near the image center. This color composite view was recorded under dark skies near Sydney, Australia. At the Lagoon’s estimated distance, the picture spans about 50 light-years.

I find politically-based interpretation of science fascinating. Why would party affiliation have anything to do with how you view science?
Maybe if the top politicians in your party lie constantly about the science, that plays a part.
A recent survey indicates belief in global warming is slightly lower than last year, due almost entirely to Republicans denying it. Incredible. With Inhofe claiming it’s a hoax, and with Bush and Cheney doing what they can to suppress real research and public release of information on the effects of GW, I’m not surprised.
I hope people don’t get their science from Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck, but I do a lot of hoping.
And speaking of which, you also have the right-wing machine which takes any little thing, spins it madly, and totally destroys reality in the process. The American Physical Society — a professional society representing tens of thousands of scientists — has long been vocal about the reality of global warming. However, in one of their newsletters, a single editor posted a ridiculous assertion from a long-debunked GW denier. That was from one editor, who does not speak for the APS as a whole at all… and mind you, this was in a newsletter, and not a peer-reviewed journal.
However, Drudge picked it up, and then so did many neocon blogs. A lot of them, including Drudge, claimed that this was coming from the APS itself. That is clearly and obviously false, but the pressure got so high that the APS had to issue a followup restating their support for the reality of global warming.
Incredible. The influence of smear tactics on science is truly terrifying; we have an election coming up in November where the future of this country and the people in it are profoundly affected by how well the voters understand reality. That’s why I’m so vocal about this; there are very bad people doing very bad things, and if those of us who like reality the way it is — real — don’t speak up, then things will get very bad indeed.
I’ll add that Jennifer Ouellette has an excellent blog post on this topic as well.
It starts Saturday! I plan on being there Saturday and the following Friday. Other appearances are TBD. Do you think it’s just fundamentalist Americans who see signs of God in every stain, wood grain, rock, and piece of baked goods?
Nope. Muslims see them too. We knew this already, but I think this one is marginally better, if by better you mean "you don’t have to squint quite as much to see it."
A Nigerian restaurant has been serving pieces of meat that appear to have the word Allah inscribed in them in Arabic. And by inscribed, I mean written out in the gristle.
OK, first: ewwwwww.
Second, sigh. Here’s a picture of the meat with the word Allah next to it in Arabic:

There is a resemblance, if you ignore the misplacement of the vertical stroke, and the strong diminution of the tail on the left of the chewy apparition. Also, if you’re predisposed to seeing God in pieces of torn, boiled, and fried animal flesh.
Third, sigh again. Guess what was said about the meat? "This was just a funny coincidence, and we all had a good laugh and then ate the meat"?
HAHAHAHAHAHAhahahaha! No.
“When the writings were discovered there were some Islamic scholars who come and eat here and they all commented that it was a sign to show that Islam is the only true religion for mankind,” he said.
That’s not terribly convincing under any circumstances, and less when you take in all the wacky pareidolia seen in the United States. Whose God is the right one? Scholars and laymen have wrestled with that for millennia, and I have a fleeting suspicion that a chunk of animal muscle isn’t the right piece of evidence on which to bet a whole lot of epistemological credit.
Clark Lindsey lets us know that the Popular Mechanics article on the Mojave Air and Space Port is on-line - New Area 51: Mojave's Desert Outpost Holds Space Flight's Future. Credit:
NASA/JPL/University of Arizona
Description:
This image was targeted because a previous MOC image (R1100035) showed an distinctive field of mounds on the floor of an ancient, large, filled-in crater.
The origin of the mounds was unclear, so we hoped that a HiRISE image with higher resolution and color would solve the mystery. The HiRISE image shows much more detail on the mounds and other rough textures, indicating that this is an eroded bedrock surface, perhaps exposed by removal of an overlying layer of fine-grained materials by the wind.
But how did the rocks form, and why did they erode onto mounds? It could have been lava or impact ejecta or fluvial sediments, perhaps altered and indurated by groundwater. The mounds could be due to how it was deposited—like hummocky impact ejecta—or how it was indurated. In other words, we haven’t solved the mystery!
Yet we may get new clues from future images of similar terrains in places where the origin is more interpretable, or from other datasets such as the mineral content determined by CRISM.
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Credit & Copyright:
Explanation:
A careful look at the full field of view for this sharp image reveals a surprising number of galaxies both near and far toward the constellation Ursa Major. The most striking is clearly NGC 3718, the warped spiral galaxy right of center. NGC 3718’s faint spiral arms look twisted and extended, its bright central region crossed by obscuring dust lanes. A mere 150 thousand light-years to the left is another large spiral galaxy, NGC 3729. The two are likely interacting gravitationally, accounting for the peculiar appearance of NGC 3718. While this galaxy pair lies about 52 million light-years away, the remarkable Hickson Group 56 can also be seen clustered just below NGC 3718. Hickson Group 56 consists of five interacting galaxies and lies over 400 million light-years away.

X-ray (NASA/CXC/Univ. of California Irvine/P.Humphrey et al.); Optical (NASA/STScI)
Other Pictures
Description:
This is a composite image of data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory (shown in purple) and Hubble Space Telescope (blue) of the giant elliptical galaxy, NGC 4649, located about 51 million light years from Earth. Although NGC 4649 contains one of the biggest black holes in the local Universe, there are no overt signs of its presence because the black hole is in a dormant state. The lack of a bright central point in either the X-ray or optical images shows that the supermassive black hole does not appear to be rapidly pulling in material towards its event horizon, nor generating copious amounts of light as it grows. Also, the very smooth appearance of the Chandra image shows that the hot gas producing the X-rays has not been disturbed recently by outbursts from a growing black hole.
So, the presence and mass of the black hole in NGC 4649, and other galaxies like it, has to be studied more indirectly by tracking its effects on stars and gas surrounding it. By applying a clever technique for the first time, scientists used Chandra data to measure a mass for the black hole of about 3.4 billion times that of the Sun. The new technique takes advantage of the gravitational influence the black hole has on the hot gas near the center of the galaxy. As gas slowly settles towards the black hole, it gets compressed and heated. This causes a peak in the temperature of the gas right near the center of the galaxy. The more massive the black hole, the bigger the temperature peak detected by Chandra.
Reassuringly, the estimate of the black hole’s mass using this X-ray technique is consistent with a more traditional technique using the motions of stars near the black hole. NGC 4649 is now one of only a handful of galaxies for which the mass of a supermassive black hole has been measured with two different methods.

I’ve seen the Pinwheel Galaxy, also known as Messier 101, numerous times, but never quite like this. Clicking on the image above may help show its great structure.
The Pinwheel is pretty easy to find and at a Magnitude 7.9 it is close to being a binocular object if you have dark skies.
The galaxy is in the constellation of Ursa Major, or the Great Bear; it is also known as the Plough and probably best known as The Big Dipper around these parts.
Want to try and see it? Ok here’s how: find the handle of the dipper and follow it, going away from the dipper part, there is a crook in the handle at the next to the last star in the handle, Before moving on look at this star, oops it’s a double star Mizar and Alcor, easy to see in binoculars, and if you have good eyes you can see both stars with no assistance. Truth is this is more than a double star. Click here to find out more about the complex star system.
Anyway, from Mizar continue in a straight line from the line made by the handle away from the dipper, the galaxy is about even with the last star in the handle (Alkaid), the one after Mizar/Alcor.
If you have even a small telescope or possibly a good set of binoculars spend some time looking around The Great Bear; there is lots to see and it never sets. I spent hours and hours last autumn checking it out, a very rich area.
Here’s the press release at the Spitzer site. Heh, I’ll be thinking about this post later this week when I BBQ, read the release to find out why.
I mean, literally: how cool is the Large Hadron Collider?
Now you can find out. The LHC page has a map showing the temperatures of various aspects of the giant collider. As I write this, sectors 7-8 and 8-1 are the warmest at a balmy 20 - 60. But that’s not Fahrenheit, or even Celsius: it’s Kelvin, baby, and that’s cold. 60 Kelvin is -213 Celsius, and -350 F. Yikes.
But it’ll get colder still. Soon the whole ring will be chilled to operating temperatures, and then away we go, smacking protons together at a whisper slower than light itself. What new physics will they find?


The 2008 Perseid meteor shower peaks during the dark hours before dawn on Tuesday, August 12th, and forecasters say it should be a good show.
Please vote for this podcast at PodcastAlley!
At the end of one of my favorite movies of all time, The War of the Worlds (the 1953 version, the only version, there was no remake, I can’t hear you, lalalalalalalala), the narrator says that it’s the littlest things that are important, alluding to the microbes that (spoiler alert) wipe out the aliens.
I always hated that voice-over at the end, actually. But he’s right. In this case, big things might be stars, and little things are black holes.
OK, so what does this have to do with anything? Well, in my live video chat, Cate Mato asked, "Why is the gravity from a black hole so much stronger than the star from which it forms?"
That’s a good question. I have a good answer. Maybe you’ve already figured it out, but just in case, here’s my response. And I get to plug my book! Bonus.
I am no fan of Larry King. I really don’t see his appeal; he tends to ask facile questions, throw softballs, probe about 1 nanometer deep, and have a lot of guests with extremely questionable credentials.
The latter is the stuff of which blog posts are written.
My friend and fellow skeptic Scott Hurst pointed me to a video on CNN’s site from Larry King’s show on July 20. Why he would pick the anniversary of the day we walked on the Moon for the first time for this particular topic is beyond me, but then, so are the claims of his guests. They are UFO believers. They all appear to have good credentials: military men, engineers, and so on. But credentials mean little to me; I prefer evidence.
Did they have any?
Guess.
The best part: they show a video of a crop circle obviously taken from some distance away and using a telephoto. There are people walking around in it, and a white unresolved object apparently flying over it. Given that the videographer followed this object as it flew around and then off to the side, it’s clear we are to think this is some sort of flying saucer or UFO or perhaps the TARDIS.
But notice anything funny about it? Like, how no one walking around seems to notice it? What can we surmise from this?
I surmise it was a bird. That would fit all the facts in hand. Now, it appears to accelerate rapidly, but then, we don’t know where the bird is. It looks like it’s over the circle, but it might be much closer to the person taking the footage. With a big telephoto there is little depth perception, and so it could have been much closer to the camera than the circle, and just appeared between them. That’s why no one noticed it, and why it appeared to move so rapidly.
Does that explanation make more sense than it being a UFO?
And these guys talk a good game, I’ll give them that, but they all have the same story: I had great footage, but the government took it away! Yeah, OK, sure. So why are you on national TV then?
Oh, right. The gatekeepers on the news stations don’t give a fig about reality. Larry King has had all sorts of fraudulent "psychics " on his show, and UFO people, and and and. To his credit, he had Randi on once, but he still promotes all manners of irrational garbage.
So, Larry King: feh. And CNN: shame on you.
We got a few emails from folks who flew their D5's this past weekend.
Note: The Q2G2 igniter is a 6V igniter designed to work on the Quest 9V and Estes 6V "weenie" launch controllers.
When you hook these up to a higher current launch system - it is possible they will go when you insert your safety key.
Please do a test firing with your launch system FIRST.
We've included two igniters with every motor.
Thanks!
This image is amazing as is all those coming from the HiRise imager aboard Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The false color helps show some of the details the layman, like me would otherwise overlook.
It’s really quite remarkable, Mars having water and apparently a lot of it, in its past. I am mulling over the idea in the context of the current barometric pressure, and what it means for the Martian atmosphere of the past. Canada has a weather station on Mars and it’s pretty cool, the barometric pressure is fairly steady at 8.0 to 8.5 millibars, compare that to a “normal sea-level” Earth pressure of 760 mb. Is there a pressure below which liquid water disappears?
Visit the MRO site for more information and full res images.
The NASA caption:
A color-enhanced image of the delta in Jezero Crater, which once held a lake. Researchers led by CRISM team member and Brown graduate student Bethany Ehlmann report that ancient rivers ferried clay-like minerals (shown in green) into the lake, forming the delta. Clays tend to trap and preserve organic matter, making the delta a good place to look for signs of ancient life.

At 87x, two yellowish stars of 7th magnitude and a pearly, split chain of eight 10th magnitude stars unite in a Y-shaped pattern about 5' long.



The latest Cassini image really does make Saturn look majestic; there are two moons transiting too: Janus and Pandora.
Janus shows up as a small dot, being only 111 miles in diameter; it is just above the rings and about centered.
Pandora on the other hand, at a whopping 50 miles in diameter, is all but invisible, at least to me anyways. If you have trouble finding it too, clicking the image will open a larger version, look to the left of Janus. Still having trouble? Click here.
Read the Cassini press release.



Woohoo! One week turnaround is pretty good for motors. My thanks to Quest for the prompt and courteous service. I actually could have gone to the NARHAMS launch and tried them in my new Art Applewhite creations. But it's hot and I decided to paint said creations, go by the Beer Fest at my local beer and wine shop, and maybe the Re-Store to see what scrap junk motivates me. A new set of scales to weigh supermassive black holes, pretty cool.
This is a composite image of data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory (shown in purple) and Hubble Space Telescope (blue) of the giant elliptical galaxy, NGC 4649, located about 51 million light years from Earth. Although NGC 4649 contains one of the biggest black holes in the local Universe, there are no overt signs of its presence because the black hole is in a dormant state. The lack of a bright central point in either the X-ray or optical images shows that the supermassive black hole does not appear to be rapidly pulling in material towards its event horizon, nor generating copious amounts of light as it grows. Also, the very smooth appearance of the Chandra image shows that the hot gas producing the X-rays has not been disturbed recently by outbursts from a growing black hole.
So, the presence and mass of the black hole in NGC 4649, and other galaxies like it, has to be studied more indirectly by tracking its effects on stars and gas surrounding it. By applying a clever technique for the first time, scientists used Chandra data to measure a mass for the black hole of about 3.4 billion times that of the Sun. The new technique takes advantage of the gravitational influence the black hole has on the hot gas near the center of the galaxy. As gas slowly settles towards the black hole, it gets compressed and heated. This causes a peak in the temperature of the gas right near the center of the galaxy. The more massive the black hole, the bigger the temperature peak detected by Chandra.Reassuringly, the estimate of the black hole’s mass using this X-ray technique is consistent with a more traditional technique using the motions of stars near the black hole. NGC 4649 is now one of only a handful of galaxies for which the mass of a supermassive black hole has been measured with two different methods.
(Mojave Green is a trademark of AeroTech and Green Gorilla is a trademark of Animal Motor Works) 

Credit: NASA, ESA, A. Simon-Miller (Goddard Space Flight Center), N. Chanover (New Mexico State University), and G. Orton (Jet Propulsion Laboratory)
It appears “Baby Red Spot” is in the process of being absorbed by the Great Red Spot. In the last (right-most) frame you can still see part of it. I was thinking “great it will live to fight another day”. Apparently not, according to the press release and reproduced below, the Baby Red Spot is just about to be drawn into the GRS — it’s toast. The red spots are cyclonic storms akin to hurricanes here on Earth, and are given names to distinguish them. Click the image above for a larger version.
It is good to see Red Spot Jr. (the bottom one) making it through intact. Amazingly all three spots converged at the same time and in view of Hubble.
Another thing about this image that strikes me is the banding. The dark clouds (the belts) are areas of high pressure in the atmosphere, the color is thought to come from organics and polysulfides. The whitish clouds (the zones) are much lower in pressure and higher in altitude. So we are looking down into the Jovian atmosphere through gaps in the white clouds. These images capture that very nicely.
The press release is below, but if you want to see more images, including each individual panel click here.
The press release from Hubblesite:
This sequence of Hubble Space Telescope images offers an unprecedented view of a planetary game of Pac-Man among three red spots clustered together in Jupiter’s atmosphere.
The time series shows the passage of the “Red Spot Jr.” in a band of clouds below (south) of the Great Red Spot (GRS). “Red Spot Jr.” first appeared on Jupiter in early 2006 when a previously white storm turned red. This is the second time, since turning red, it has skirted past its big brother apparently unscathed.
But this is not the fate of “baby red spot,” which is in the same latitudinal band as the GRS. This new red spot first appeared earlier this year. The baby red spot gets ever closer to the GRS in this picture sequence until it is caught up in the anticyclonic spin of the GRS. In the final image the baby spot is deformed and pale in color and has been spun to the right (east) of the GRS. These three natural-color Jupiter images were made from data acquired on May 15, June 28, and July 8, 2008, by the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2).