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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
You have heard of space chimps, now it’s time for space CHIPS. Could the future of space exploration be to create tiny micro-machine sized space craft? Some researchers feel this will be the more economical form of space flight.
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.
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Astronomers have discovered a new source of meteor showers, very likely from a comet, that may be coming to an Earth near you. While explaining why we shouldn’t panic at the news, Dr. Phil Plait gives us a great analogy for understanding meteor showers.
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
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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!
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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.
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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?
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.
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The following is reprinted from the book Uncle John’s Unsinkable Bathroom Reader.
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.
more …
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
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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.
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.
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.
Along with the humans another small passenger has hitched a ride aboard the space shuttle Endeavor; a squid. While monkeys and dogs have long been space faring species, it appears this is the first ever squid.
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.
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
I just learned a lot about sunspots from Dr. Phil Plait. He’s quite excited about NASA footage that shows the formation of a cluster of sunspots earlier this year.
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)
Did you file your taxes yet? No? Got a good excuse – like being in space? Not good enough for the IRS: astronauts orbiting Earth in the International Space Station have to file taxes just like everybody else!
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.
On April 12th, 1961, 50 years ago today, Yuri Gagarin {wiki} became the first human to go into space. Today is also the premiere of a full-length movie First Orbit.
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 Soviet Union used their space program as one of the front line battles of the Cold War. And for a time they were ahead, as anyone who remembers Sputnik and Gagarin will tell you. They had an edge in that reaching their goals was more important to the nation than the lives of the cosmonauts. Documentation on the cosmonauts is limited, and some evidence has been altered, such as the disappearing cosmonaut in the photo here. Then there was Voskhod 2, the mission featuring the first space walk.
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
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In the 1970s I thought it would be awesome to be a space pioneer and live in a colony in an orbiting spaceship. During that decade space colonies that could house 10,000 people were designed at NASA summer camps. You can see a gallery of these lovely hand drawn renderings here. NASA still runs summer camps for students but their output is probably not as charming as these pre-digital creations.
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’.
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