This is not the first picture you’ve seen of the Helix Nebula, but it’s the best image so far. The Helix Nebula is a cloud of gas that was left when a star expired 700 light years away from us.

This image is in the near-infrared, taken using the European Southern Observatory’s Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA), a 4.1 meter telescope in Chile. Equipped with a whopping 67 megapixel camera it can take pictures of large areas of the sky. The Helix nebula fits that bill: it’s close enough to us that it’s nearly the size of the full Moon in the sky.

You are right, this would make an awesome desktop wallpaper! You can download the huge version if you like, and get more details about the Eye of Sauron Helix Nebula at Bad Astronomy. Link

(Image credit: ESO/VISTA/J. Emerson/Cambridge Astronomical Survey Unit)

The semi-annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society was held in Austin recently, and many space images were shared. Dr. Phil Plait was not at the meeting, so the other astronomers sent him pictures, which he put into a gallery at Bad Astronomy. Each has a link to more information about the picture. The image shown here is a high-energy gamma-ray map from NASA’s Fermi telescope. Shiny! Link

(Image credit: NASA/DOE/Fermi LAT Collaboration)

Their paper formed part of a loose trilogy of flatulence-related papers that the pair worked on, which kicked off with 1968′s “The Use of Expired Air to Measure Intestinal Gas Formation” and concluded with 1971′s “Reduction of Intestinal Gas-Forming Properties of Legumes by Traditional and Experimental Food Processing Methods.” Truly, if you needed to know something about farting in the late 1960s or early 1970s, you went to Calloway and Murphy. I would kill to be able to put something like that on a business card.

Link -via the Presurfer

What’s more awesome than move special effects? The real thing! This footage of Earthrise over the moon was taken from the Apollo X mission in 1969. All it needed was the proper soundtrack. -via Boing Boing

Apollo 8 wasn’t just a NASA mission; it was the biggest, coolest, most mind-blowing Christmas special of all time.

The men of Apollo 8 -Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders- had their work cut out for them. They were slated to become the first humans ever to leave the Earth’s orbit, enter lunar orbit, and see the far side of the Moon. But as their launch date approached in December 1968, NASA added an even more terrifying task to the crew’s to-do list: public speaking. The agency wanted the astronauts to host a live broadcast from the spacecraft on Christmas Eve. Worse still, the men were given only one cryptic instruction: “Say something appropriate.”

The astronauts were in a tough spot. When millions of people of different faiths and backgrounds are listening, what exactly constitutes appropriate? To make matters trickier, 1968 had been a grim year for Americans -the Vietnam War was raging, and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. had both been assassinated. How could the astronauts simultaneously orbit the Moon, introduce millions to outer space on TV, and buoy the American spirit?

The men were stumped. They began enlisting the help of media experts, who were mostly just as clueless as they were. The answer finally came from the wife of Joe Laitin, a former reporter who’d worked as a public affairs officer under five presidents. She made an elegant, simple suggestion: Why not just read from the book of Genesis?

The astronauts jumped at the idea. They reasoned that genesis had a broad enough appeal across religions to add a hint of spirituality without ostracizing non-Christians. Borman, the mission’s commander, had the first ten verses typed onto fireproof paper and tucked the sheet into his flight plan. The astronauts had their script.

The broadcast began with the crew showing some of the first images of Earth ever seen from space. Lovell remarked, “The vast loneliness up here of the Moon is awe-inspiring, and it makes you realize just what you have back there in Earth.”

Viewers were captivated. But as airtime dwindled, Anders revealed that the crew had a special message for all the people of the planet. He started with the familiar “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the Earth…”

He read the first four verses; Lovell read four more. Borman recited the last two and ended the show, saying, “And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with a good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you -all of you on the good Earth.”

In the end, the crew’s effort paid off. Half a billion people tuned in, making it the largest TV event in history at the time, and the reception was overwhelmingly positive; even Walter Cronkite admitted that he had tears in his eyes. Of course, not everyone on Earth was thrilled; one atheist activist sued NASA for interjecting religion into a government project, but the Supreme Court dismissed the lawsuit. Enough nitpicking! The Christmas Eve special won an Emmy, and Time made the crew the magazine’s “Men of the Year” for 1968. The broadcast was truly out of this world.

(YouTube link)

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The article above, written by Ethan Trex, is reprinted with permission from the Scatterbrained section of the November-December 2011 issue of mental_floss magazine. Get a subscription to mental_floss and never miss an issue!

Be sure to visit mental_floss‘ website and blog for more fun stuff!

Last week, Phil Plait posted his year-end gallery of the best pictures taken from space. Now you can see his picks for the best pictures of deep space, really deep, like these galaxies that are 300 million light years away.

Because they’re big, sometimes galaxies get close together. Too close. Close enough that their gravity can affect each other, drawing out long arms of gas and stars, distorting each other into weird and beautiful shapes. It happens a lot.

Such is Arp 273, seen here in a Hubble image taken to celebrate the observatory’s 20th anniversary in space. These two big galaxies passed each other in the recent past (like, a few million years ago). Both were probably normal enough before the encounter, but are now twisted and asymmetric.

See the other 23 images at Bad Astronomy. Link

(Image credit: NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team)

Dr. Phil Plait selects his favorite space pictures every year, but this year he had a lot to sift through. The top 16 pictures taken from the viewpoint of space include volcanoes, hurricanes, earth formations, the moon, eclipses, and spacecraft, including the final space shuttle missions. Astronaut Ron Garan took this photograph of the moon from the International Space Station. See the rest at Bad Astronomy Blog. Link

“We’ve come a long way across the solar system,” says Glen Fountain, New Horizons project manager at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. “When we launched [on Jan. 19, 2006] it seemed like our 10-year journey would take forever, but those years have been passing us quickly. We’re almost six years in flight, and it’s just about three years until our encounter begins.”

From New Horizons’ current distance to Pluto – about as far as Earth is from Saturn – Pluto remains just a faint point of light. But by the time New Horizons sails through the Pluto system in mid-2015, the planet and its moons will be so close that the spacecraft’s cameras will spot features as small as a football field.

Get ready for your closeups, Pluto! Link

Michael König edited a sequence of photographs taken from the International Space Station (ISS) between August and October into a time-lapse video of an orbit over the earth. The altitude is approximately 350 kilometers. The music is “Do Dekor” by Jan Jelinek. -Thanks özi!

The International Space Station (ISS) occasionally has to boost itself into a higher altitude to counteract the effects of microgravity drag. Recently, the ISS boosted itself about two miles up, and video cameras caught what happened inside to Commander Mike Fossum and Flight Engineers Satoshi Furukawa and Sergei Volkov. The physics of the process are explained at Bad Astronomy Blog. Link -Thanks, Phil!

Space Alien Alarm Clock – $13.95

Are you endlessly searching for a way to defeat oversleeping? You need the Space Alien Alarm Clock from the NeatoShop. This fantastic alarm clock is shaped like the iconic arcade game character. The clock makes arcade game sounds and moves side to side when the alarm goes off. The Space Alien Alarm Clock is sure to inspire you to gain control of your sleeping patterns and score big points for waking up on time.

Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more great Clocks & Timers.

Link

]]> http://www.neatorama.com/2011/11/09/space-alien-alarm-clock/feed/ 0 http://www.neatorama.com/2011/10/27/a-cosmic-halloween-gallery/ http://www.neatorama.com/2011/10/27/a-cosmic-halloween-gallery/#comments Thu, 27 Oct 2011 17:45:23 +0000 Miss Cellania http://www.neatorama.com/?p=54993 What does astronomy have to do with Halloween? You’d be surprised!

Halloween is coming, and while people are out trick or treating or enjoying a costume party, the Universe will continue to go about its business.

The business of DEATH, that is. Black holes will continue to tear apart stars and gorge themselves on the tasty, gooey insides; galaxies will erupt with high-energy radiation, blasting out killer rays for hundreds of thousands of light years; giant clouds of gas will collapse, form stars, and promptly have their interiors eaten out from within.

Bad Astronomy Blog has a gallery of creepy astronomy pictures that appear to have sprung from our nightmares, but are actually things that exist in our universe. The picture here is of the flaming skull of Perseus: actually Perseus A, a huge galaxy that blasts out x-rays. Link -Thanks, Phil!

Three astronauts touch down after being cryogenically frozen for years during their space flight. This is a choose-your-own-adventure type video, where you select what happens next. Of course, if you are like me, the premise will immediately remind you of a certain Charleton Heston film from the early ’70s. -via the Presurfer

Seven farms across the country are sporting NASA-themed corn mazes this year, as part of NASA’s Space Farm 7 project. It’s an educational project, as these farms host fall festivals open to the public, and a celebration of NASA’s achievements over the past 50 years. You can even vote on your favorite maze, and be entered to win lunch with an astronaut. The maze shown is at Dewberry Farm in Brookshire, Texas. See them all at Universe Today. Link -via Metafilter

(Image credit: The MAIZE Inc.)

If your kiddos are getting tired of boring old regular playdough colors, then try adding some sparkles to the black dough and they can suddenly play with space playdough. If you want to make your own, Fairy Dust Teaching has a great recipe.

Link Via Craftzine

This photograph of a meteor burning up in our atmosphere was taken by astronaut Ron Garan from the International Space Station. Dr. Phil Plait brings us the picture and a little math to explain how many more meteors you could see from the ISS than from the planet’s surface, which leads to the question of meteors hitting the ISS. What are the odds? Find out at Bad Astronomy Blog. Link

The SETI Institute has been around for decades: It stepped in to help keep the search for alien radio signals active after NASA cut off funding for the quest in 1993. It’s not the only organization doing SETI, but it’s the leader in the field. The Allen Telescope Array, or ATA, was launched with $50 million in contributions from software billionaire Paul Allen and others — and if the array ever takes in 350 linked antennas, as it’s designed to do, it would rank among the world’s premier radio-telescope facilities.

But in light of the financial challenges, that’s a huge “if” right now. In fact, until last week it wasn’t certain if or when the ATA would come back online.

After the antenna array was mothballed, the institute and its fans in Silicon Valley set up a Web-based campaign for donations, known as SETIstars. The campaign kicked off in June, and about 45 days later, on Aug. 3, contributions hit the $200,000 mark. That was how much money the SETI Institute said would be needed to bring the antenna array back into operation. (Since then more than $4,000 in additional contributions have come in.)

Among the contributors are Jodie Foster, the actress who played a SETI researcher in the movie “Contact”; science-fiction writer Larry Niven, creator of the “Ringworld” series of novels; and Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders, who flew around the moon in 1968. “It is absolutely irresponsible of the human race not to be searching for evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence,” Anders wrote in a note accompanying his contribution.

Donations are still needed, as well as volunteers to crunch the data. Link -via Engadget

Could the building blocks of life been first delivered to Earth from outer space? That is what some research may be suggesting.

“People have been finding nucleobases in meteorites for about 50 years now, and have been trying to figure out if they are of biological origin or not,” study co-author Jim Cleaves, a chemist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, told SPACE.com.

To help confirm if any nucleobases seen in meteorites were of extraterrestrial origin, scientists used the latest scientific analysis techniques on samples from a dozen meteorites — 11 organic-rich meteorites called carbonaceous chondrites and one ureilite, a very rare type of meteorite with a different chemical composition. This was the first time all but two of these meteorites had been analyzed for nucleobases.

The analytical techniques probed the mass and other features of the molecules to identify the presence of extraterrestrial nucleobases and see that they apparently did not come from the surrounding area.

Two of the carbonaceous chondrites contained a diverse array of nucleobases and structurally similar compounds known as nucleobase analogs. Intriguingly, three of these nucleobase analogs are very rare in Earth biology, and were not found in soil and ice samples from the areas near where the meteorites were collected at the parts-per-billion limits of their detection techniques.

“Finding nucleobase compounds not typically found in Earth’s biochemistry strongly supports an extraterrestrial origin,” Cleaves said

Link

Using the Warsaw Telescope at Chile’s Las Campanas Observatory, researchers found 14 possible objects in space that could be interesting for further study. Of those objects, 11 turned out to just be oversized chunks of debris, but three of them are big enough to meet the definition of a dwarf planet.

According to the International Astronomical Union, two criteria must be met in order to be a dwarf planet. It must have enough mass that its gravity forces it into a spherical shape, and it must orbit the sun. This second criteria is what eliminates several large moons that, while bigger than a dwarf planet, do not orbit the sun.

The new discoveries are barely big enough to be classified as dwarf planets. They are most likely only around 250 miles wide, which is much smaller than Pluto. The fact that these planets are made of ice is likely what helps them pull themselves into a spherical shape.

Link

The Soviet Union launched fruit flies into space in 1947. I did not know that until today. Since then, we’ve sent many living species up into space for exploration and experimental purposes, and eight of those were mammals. Can you name them all in two minutes? You don’t have to know their personal names, just what kind of mammal they were, in today’s Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss. I only missed one. Link

Miniaturization will inevitably mean limitation—less power, fewer instruments, and reduced ability to store and broadcast data. But dust-mote-size spacecraft could do things that no current space probe can do: coast without a parachute onto the plains of Mars or float for weeks in the soupy atmosphere of Titan. They could be mass-produced and launched by the thousands to form vast space-based networks of sensors. And if the probes could be made thin and lightweight enough, alternative forms of propulsion could eventually send them to distant worlds, without the need for rocket fuel.

Link

If the path of the comet intersects the orbit of the Earth, we plow through that material at the same time every year. Think of it this way: imagine a racetrack, and you are driving around it. Now also imagine a long line of gnats flying across the racetrack. You would drive through that line of bugs at the same point on the racetrack every time, right? OK, replace you with the Earth, the racetrack with the Earth’s orbit, and the bugs with debris shed off a comet. Since the Earth returns to the same point in its orbit every year, if there is cometary debris there, we’ll smack into it at roughly the same calendar day every year.

This loose stuff from the comet burns up in our atmosphere, and we get a meteor shower.

Find out more about the specific new information from the Cameras for Allsky Meteor Surveillance, or CAMS. at Bad Astronomy Blog. Link

Space Intruders Multi-Tool Keychain – $15.95

Are you a Geek in need of a new keychain?  Why settle for ordinary when you can have an out of this world Space Intruders Multi-Tool Keychain from the NeatoShop. This fantastic keychain has phillips and flat head screwdrivers and also functions as a bottle opener.  You know you want one!

Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more great Keychains & Key Covers!

Link

What kind of aliens would evolve out of a light years wide mass of water vapor? That question could be posed knowing that 12 billion years in the past more water then exists on all of earth was floating out there in space.

Using a pair of sub-millimeter wavelength telescopes, two teams of astronomers have discovered the largest reservoir of water ever found in the Universe. The water-containing cloud was found near quasar APM 08279+5255, some 12 billion light years from Earth; this means that the radiation seen today from this quasar was emitted when the universe was a scant 1.6 billion years old. Calculations have placed the mass of water vapor in the cloud at approximately 100,000 solar masses, or 140 trillion times the mass of all water on the planet Earth.

Link

Environmental Graffiti has a great collection of pictures of The Orion Nebula for your viewing pleasure. After viewing them all, I can’t help but think they should take over as the Rorschach Test of the new century. I see an astronaut with bird wings, what about you?

Link

A beautiful time-lapse of NASA’s shuttle Discovery (STS131) and the space shuttle Atlantis. The screenshot is from the the third and last part of this 50 seconds long video clip:

The Sun rises behind space shuttle Atlantis in this time-lapse sequence from July 19, 2011, one of the last days of the historic final mission of the shuttle program.

Link via Pusha

For nearly twenty years after Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon in July 1969, the Soviet Union categorically denied having a manned lunar program of its own. It wasn’t until the late 1980s that we began to learn just how close they came to beating the United States to the moon.

HEARING IS BELIEVING

Not too long after 9:00 PM on the evening of April 11, 1961, a United States government listening post off Alaska picked up the sound of human voices speaking in Russian. That wasn’t unusual; in the early 1960s, the Cold War was at its height, and the listening post had been set up for the purpose of intercepting Soviet communications.

But as the analysts studied the transmission, they realized that one of the voices was coming from space -low-Earth orbit to be exact- and the other voices were transmitting from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Soviet Kazakhstan, headquarters of the USSR’s space program. As the entire world would learn in a few hours, the 27-year-old cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin had just become the first human being to fly in space. As was typical with the Soviet space program, the launch had been kept a secret. The signals from space were probably the first inkling the United States had that it had been beaten in the space race once again.

SECOND PLACE

Gagarin had blasted off at 9:07 AM Moscow time on the morning of April 12th (Moscow was 12 hours ahead of Alaska). He made just one orbit around the Earth before landing back on Soviet soil at 10:55 AM. That’s not much of a space flight by modern standards, but in 1961 it stunned the world. Just as it had when it launched Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite, in October 1957, the Soviet Union had demonstrated that it, not the United States, was leading the way into space. The United States wouldn’t be able to send an American astronaut, John Glenn, into orbit until February 1962.

JFK’s QUERY

No one felt the sting of second place more than president John F. Kennedy. “Do we have a chance of beating the Soviets by putting a laboratory in space, or by a trip around the Moon, or by a rocket to land on the moon, or by a rocket to go to the moon and back with a man?” the president asked in a memo to his vice president, Lyndon Baines Johnson. “Is there any other space program which promises dramatic results in which we could win?”

JFK dispatched Johnson to NASA to get an answer. Wernher von Braun, head of rocket development, suggested that America had a chance of beating the Soviets in a flight around the Moon, but that it had an even bigger chance at being the first country to land a man on the Moon’s surface. JFK weighed the options, and on May 25, 1961, made his famous speech committing the United States to landing a man on the Moon by the end of the decade.

NO CONTEST?

On July 20, 1969, the United States won the race to the Moon when astronaut Neil A. Armstrong became the first human being to set foot on lunar soil. But had the Soviets contemplated trying to beat the United States to the Moon? For more than two decades after the Moon landing, the official answer was a definitive, categorical “Nyet!” The Soviets claimed they skipped the Moon race in favor of the more practical challenge of putting a space station into Earth’s orbit. And they succeeded- between 1971 and 1986, they launched seven different space stations into orbit.

The Soviets stuck to their we-didn’t-shoot-for-the-Moon story until August 18, 1989, when the government’s official newspaper, Izvestiya, admitted that the USSR had indeed tried to send a cosmonaut to the Moon, in what was one of the most closely guarded secret programs of the Cold War. They had actually come pretty close to succeeding: Were it not for one large technical challenge that proved insurmountable, the Soviet Union might well have won the race.

When the Soviets were planning their lunar program, they faced the same question NASA had faced: Did they want to go in one large rocket, or did they want to use several launches of smaller rockets to assemble a lunar spacecraft in Earth’s orbit before heading to the Moon? Launching everything aboard one rocket was a quicker option, and since beating America to the Moon was a high priority, that’s what the Soviets chose to do. They set to work developing a rocket big enough for the job, called the N-1.

DOWNSIZING

Soviet N-1 rocket

Using one rocket, no matter how big it is, severely limits the options on how to get to the moon and back, and because of this, the Soviets’ secret program ended up looking a lot like the Apollo program, which also used one rocket, the Saturn V. But because the N-1 was smaller than the Saturn V, the Soviet mission would be smaller in many respects. It would have less room for cargo, and only two cosmonauts would make the trip, not three as on the Apollo missions. And that meant that only one cosmonaut would get to walk on the Moon, instead of two.

* The Soviet plans called for the N-1 rocket to lift a command ship called the Lunniy Orbitalny Korabl (LOK) into Earth’s orbit. The command ship would then travel to the Moon and enter lunar orbit. An attached lunar lander, call the Lunniy Kabina (“Lunar Cabin,” or LK, for short), would then separate from the LOK and descend to the lunar surface with one of the cosmonauts aboard. The other cosmonaut had to remain on the LOK.

* After spending about 24 hours on the surface of the Moon, the cosmonaut would climb back into the LK, launch back into lunar orbit, and dock with the LOK. Once the cosmonaut was safety back aboard the LOK, the LK would be jettisoned, and the LOK would fire its rocket, putting the craft on a return course to Earth. Then, when the LOK arrived in Earth’s orbit, the crew compartment would split apart from the rest of the LOK and re-enter the atmosphere with the cosmonauts aboard, parachuting to a landing somewhere inside the Soviet Union. The rest of the LOK would burn up on re-entry.

A model of the Lunniy Orbitalny Korabl (LOK)

NOT QUITE APOLLO

For all its similarities with the Apollo program, the Soviet lunar program did have its differences.

* Would you want to land on the Moon all by yourself while wearing an unwieldy spacesuit that’s difficult to move around in? What if you fell down -who would help you up? The Soviets were so worried about this possibility that they attached a device to the spacesuit that looked like a hula hoop. If the lone cosmonaut did fall on his back while walking on the Moon, he could use the hula hoop to roll over on his knees and stand back up.

Lunniy Kabina (LK)

* The Soviets were also worried about the LK becoming so damaged during landing that it would be unable to blast off from the Moon -landing a man on the Moon just to watch him die there would have been a human tragedy, not to mention a public relations disaster. The Soviets made plans to send a second LK to the Moon in advance of the mission …just in case.

* The second LK would have been useless if the cosmonaut landed too far away from it or couldn’t find it after landing on the Moon, so the Soviets also planned to send an unmanned, remote controlled rover to the Moon in advance of the manned landing. Its job would be to select landing sites for both the primary LK and the unmanned backup, and then serve as a landing beacon for both LKs. The rover would also be equipped with oxygen tanks and a platform for the cosmonaut to stand on, to enable it to ferry the cosmonaut to the backup LK if necessary.

TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE

So why didn’t the Soviets make it to the Moon? Part of the problem was that the Soviet leadership didn’t take the challenge seriously until it was too late to catch up with the Americans. Premiere Nikita Khrushchev endorsed the idea of a lunar program in 1962, but it wasn’t until 1964, more than three years after JFK put NASA on a course toward the Moon, that the Soviet leadership started committing resources to the project.

By then it probably would have been too late for them to catch up with the United States even under the best of circumstances, and the Soviets made the situation worse by designing the giant N-1 rocket so that it used 30 smaller rocket motors instead of fewer, more powerful motors. (NASA’s Saturn V used five rocket motors -that’s how it got its name.) Getting 30 rocket motors to work together in perfect unison without shaking each other apart is next to impossible, and the Soviets never did pull it off. The N-1 was only test launched four times -twice before Neil Armstrong landed on the Moon and twice afterward. All four tests ended in failure; the rockets either exploded or malfunctioned and had to be destroyed by Soviet ground control.

SHHH!

Given the open nature of the Apollo program and subsequent NASA missions, it’s difficult to absorb just how covert the Soviet Union’s manned lunar program was. Launches took place in complete secrecy, although the United States did have an inkling that a Soviet lunar program was underway. The N-1 rockets were nearly 40 stories tall, and once they were rolled out onto the launch pads, it wasn’t hard for American spy satellites to find them or for the CIA to guess what rockets that big were designed for.

On a few occasions, the U.S. government was even spooked into thinking they were about to lose the race to the Moon. In September 1968, for example, the U.S. detected the launch of a rocket from Baikonur and traced its course all the way to the Moon. They even detected the sound of a human voice in a radio signal transmitted from the spacecraft. Was this another Yuri Gagarin moment? This time, NASA got lucky -the voice was only a recording designed to test the spacecraft’s radio equipment.

NASA was so concerned about losing the space race that it sped up the pace of its operations. The Apollo 8 mission (December-21-27, 1968), only the second manned mission of the Apollo program, was originally intended to test equipment in Earth’s orbit. But the CIA was so convinced the the USSR was about to send cosmonauts on a flight around the Moon, NASA changed it to a circumlunar mission to keep the Soviets from beating them to the punch. Less than a year later, the Soviets -along with the rest of the world- watched the United States win the race.

NOW WHAT?

With that, the Soviet lunar program lost much of its purpose. For a time, the Soviets considered expanding the program to include a base on the Moon -if they couldn’t get there first, they reasoned, they could still get there best. But the lunar program was canceled in 1974 as the Soviet Union shifted its emphasis to building space stations.

In the early 1970s, NASA began work on a reusable space shuttle. When informed that the United States’ shuttle would be able to carry military cargo over the Soviet Union, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev ordered up a space shuttle of his own. “We are not country bumpkins here!” he is said to have shouted. The first American space shuttle, the Columbia, flew on April 12, 1981; the first Soviet shuttle, named the Buran, or “Snowstorm,” flew on November 15, 1988. The Buran only made a single, unmanned flight before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 caused the program to be canceled.

Today the rivalry between the United States and Russian space programs is over, perhaps for good, as they work together with other countries in the International Space Station.

This NASA photo shows astronauts from the US, Russia, Japan, Canada, and Belgium together aboard the International Space Station (ISS)

CABIN FEVER

Not much remains of the Soviet manned lunar program more than 35 years after it was canceled. Remember, it wasn’t just canceled; it was officially, categorically denied until the late 1980s, and by then nearly everything that could be recycled or reused by the Soviet space program had long since disappeared. Some parts that couldn’t be used for anything else were made into storage sheds, airplane hangars, and even bandstands and children’s playgrounds in and around the Baikonur Cosmodrome. Four of the LKs did survive, however. If you ever make it to France, you can see one of them on display at EuroDisney.

____________________________

The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John’s Unsinkable Bathroom Reader.

The Bathroom Readers’ Institute has sailed the seas of science, history, pop culture, humor, and more to bring you Uncle John’s Unsinkable Bathroom Reader. Our all-new 21st edition is overflowing with over 500 pages of material that is sure to keep you fully absorbed.

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute has published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts. Check out their website here: Bathroom Reader Institute.

The Sagan Series put together an inspiring video in honor of the final space shuttle flight, narrated by Carl Sagan. You can see the sources for all the video clips at the YouTube page. -via reddit

In honor of the final mission of the space shuttle program, I Can Has Cheezburger posted a cat’s retrospective of NASA history. You’ll find moar pictures and funny videos of kittehs and their dreams of space exploration. Link

With the American Space Shuttle program winding up this year the European Space Agency is unveiling its plans for a reusable spacecraft. The agency is going to start building the unmanned Intermediate eXperimental Vehicle and should be ready for flight in 2013.

IXV is quite different from the NASA shuttle, using a lifting body design instead of wings, with some flaps and thrusters to provide control. Another change is that it lifts off for space on the nose of a small Vega rocket, and splashes down in the Pacific Ocean instead of landing on a runway. In that way it more closely resembles America’s initial forays into space, such as the splash-down orbiter designs of the Mercury Program.

Link

Mama told me not to trust those Martians! The song is from The Imagined Village. The clips are from various space movies and TV shows that you’ll find listed at the YouTube page. -via Buzzfeed

One thing we should always remember is that the the earth is spinning around while the stars stay relatively constant in the sky. YouTube member bulletpeople took a beautiful existing time-lapse video of the stars and edited it to show the stars as static in the sky, which highlights the rotation of the earth. -via reddit

While still not proven, the possibility of the existence of “white holes” in deep space have some in the scientific community excited.

White holes are the opposite of black holes, objects into which nothing can enter but are constantly spewing out matter. They were thought to be completely hypothetical, more a mathematical oddity than a real thing…but we may have seen one.

Link

A lot of people are trying to be more green these days by installing solar panels on the roofs of their homes and businesses. However the ultimate solar panel installation may be on the moon.

Shimizu Corporation construction firm’s research branch, CSP, unveiled a long-term planning project to install a belt of photovoltaic panels across the surface of the Moon. Power gathered from the 13,000 terawatts of continuous solar energy the Moon’s surface receives daily would be beamed back to an Earth-based receiving station via microwave or laser transmission, where it would then be used to power public offices, hospitals and schools across the globe.

Link

The reason that a baby bobtail squid is going along for Endeavor’s final flight in the first place is not to study whether squid turn into superhuman monster brain sucking aliens when exposed to cosmic rays and a low gravity environment, but rather to watch and see whether a certain type of bacteria inside the squid plays naughty or nice in orbit.

Link

I like websites that perform one function well. This website answers the question of how many people are in space at any given moment and where (on the International Space Station, aboard the Space Shuttle, etc.)  Link

This past fall when NASA astronaut Colonel Douglas H. Wheelock took command of the International Space Station he began posting photos to his Twitpic account of the incredible views he was encountering from his lofty perch. My favorite is this photo of an island that looks like a hat. Link

If I lived on Neptune I would be less than a Neptune year old, how old would you be?  This nifty calculator allows you to figure out your “age” on different planets (including dwarf planet Pluto). Every grade school student knows we measure years by how long it takes the Earth to travel around the Sun. However it’s interesting to think how time measurement would be different if we lived on a world like Mercury that takes only 88 Earth days to travel around the sun. Link

Sunspots are actually regions of slightly cooler material at the Sun’s surface. Hot plasma (ionized gas, stripped of one electron or more) rises from the solar interior, reaches the surface, cools off, and sinks back down. This is called convection, and is the same process you see in a pot of boiling water. But at the surface, the tortured and twisted magnetic field of the Sun can suppress convection, preventing the cooler material from sinking. Since the brightness of the plasma depends on the temperature, this cooler stuff is darker. Boom! Sunspot.

Or, in this case, sunspots. You can see five of the suckers here, changing and mutating as the plasma interacts with the magnetic field. I recognize these spots, too: they were responsible for the first X-class flare of the season on March 15th. There’s dramatic footage of that as well which I posted on my blog at the time. They’re busy spots; they blew out a lower energy flare a few days earlier, too.

And here I am calling them cute and little when they’re actually comfortably bigger than the Earth and exploded with the energy equivalent of millions — millions! — of nuclear bombs.

Now I’m excited, too! Watch the video at Bad Astronomy. Link

(Image credit: NASA/SDO)

As it turns out, being 220 miles (354 kilometers) above the planet is no excuse to file late. Thankfully, Cady Coleman and Ron Garan, who are currently living and working aboard the orbiting outpost, most likely took care of that already.

"I’m not sure of their exact situations, but they could either file early, or if they have spouses, their spouses could file for them," NASA spokesperson Kylie Clem told SPACE.com.

Link

In a unique collaboration with the European Space Agency, and the Expedition 26/27 crew of the International Space Station, we have created a new film of what Gagarin first witnessed fifty years ago.

By matching the orbital path of the Space Station, as closely as possible, to that of Gagarin’s Vostok 1 spaceship and filming the same vistas of the Earth through the new giant cupola window, astronaut Paolo Nespoli, and documentary film maker Christopher Riley, have captured a new digital high definition view of the Earth below, half a century after Gagarin first witnessed it.

Weaving these new views together with historic, recordings of Gagarin from the time, (subtitled in Englsih) and an original score by composer Philip Sheppard, we have created a spellbinding film to share with people around the world on this historic anniversary.

You can watch the entire movie (99 minutes) at the website. Link

Everyone has dreams. This cat dreams of being a cosmonaut. If he’d read yesterday’s post on that same subject, he might not have been so ambitious. This is an ad for a Russian lottery. -via The Daily What

The launch went up safely, got into an orbit, and a cosmonaut, Alexei Leonov, became the first human to perform a spacewalk. Super. But that was about when things took a turn for the cataclysmic.

On his way back in, Leonov’s spacesuit inflated due to the vacuum of space, which, apparently, the guys who designed the suit had never heard of. His suit was so laughably ballooney, in fact, that he could barely move and most definitely couldn’t fit back in the spaceship door. Leonov was forced to let some air out, all the while suffering from heatstroke and the bends. By the time his little 12 minute walk turned into a 20 minute walk, he was up to his knees in sweat. But he made it back in to the ship, safe and sound.

However, things got worse for Voskhod 2 after that. Read all about it at Cracked. NSFW text. Link -via reddit

Have you ever wondered what astronauts do in their free time? Cady Coleman {wiki} is a scientist, flautist, and an astronaut, currently aboard the International Space Station. In this video, she gives us the short version of what it’s like to play music in space. -via Geeks Are Sexy

How much would you pay for a dinner date with Apollo 13 commander Jim Lovell? Or lunch with original Mercury astronaut Scott Carpenter? How about skydiving with a shuttle astronaut? Or maybe you’d be more inclined to purchase some astronaut autographs, or objects that have been in space. These are all up for bid now at the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation during their spring auction. The ASF was founded by Mercury astronauts, and proceeds go to fund science and technology scholarships for deserving students. Bidding will close on March 26. Link

Link – Via Geeks Are Sexy

Today’s final launch of the space shuttle Discovery will have a robotic passenger aboard. Robonaut 2 (affectionately called R2) is going to the International Space Station so NASA can study how it performs in zero gravity. National Geographic has a photo gallery of the NASA robots who have paved the way for R2, including some that have been in space and some, like the Robonaut 1 shown, that were test models or concepts. I saw this picture and thought, “Spock on a lawnmower.” Link -Thanks, Marilyn!

I knew this, but only because I recall the approximate the number of miles to the moon, and the circumference of the earth. Those near my age might also remember that a fast rocket ship takes three days to get to the moon. -via reddit

After over eight months of training, cosmonauts have now for the first time “walked the surface of Mars”. Too good to be true? Yes, kind of. It’s the Mars 500 project – a simulated mission with the goal to find out how humans react during long spaceflights.

The experiment is nearing its mid-point. After the volunteers spent more than 200 days simulating the flight to the Red Planet, they have been divided into two groups — one staying on board a module which is simulating a flight in Martian orbit, and another one sent to land on ‘the planet’s surface’.

Link – via Nerdcore

Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy Blog has a collection of astronomical images that display valentine heart shapes -which just goes to show you can find anything if you look heart, er, hard enough. This picture is of the W5 star-forming region taken by the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). The gallery ends with an extremely geeky bit of graffiti. Link