J.J Abrams takes on Star trek

At last we have a decent version of what the new Star Trek film trailer. I have always enjoyed Star Trek as far as science fiction and cool space ships blowing things up. So I have to say that I am actually quite looking forward to J.J Abrams vision of the Star Trek Legacy. The trailer has some great visuals and the Enterprise looks great with the stark interior. Plus we have Simon Pegg playing the part of Scott which should be a laugh. Video after the jump. Beware its the High Res version.

The Phoenix Mars Polar Lander has died.

The Phoenix Mars Polar Lander has died. It stopped transmitting data last week as the Martian winter approaches and the power the Sun has to recharge the solar cells is diminished.
The last signal was received by NASA on November 2nd and concludes what is deemed an incredibly successful mission.

Phoenix was launched on August 4 2007 and touched down over 8 months later on May 25 2008. During its time on Mars the Lander dug trenches to reveal ice, dug holes and transferred regolith to the onboard ovens. The biggest accomplishment was the discovery of water ice below the surface which the NASA engineers were able to watch sublime away.

Along with these discoveries Phoenix transmitted more that 25,000 pictures of the surrounding terrain and the local environment around the craft.

Meanwhile in an incredible feat of endurance the 2 rovers Opportunity and Spirit are still roving the surface gathering information about the history of the red planet.

Well done to the boffins at NASA for another successful mission and I look forward to the next major Mars adventure.

Saturn V as you have nver seen before

This is a video that surfaced of the huge Saturn V Apollo rocket in super slo-motion. It is truly amazing. And having just watched the latest Discovery Channel doco called "When we Left Earth" about the NASA missions I have a new respect for the people that made this possible. They were thinking many years ahead of their time.

Picture of the Day -

This picture is quite amazing, and it is probably the last time that you may see this. Both Space Shuttle Atlantis and Space Shuttle Endeavour are out on launch pads together ready for an upcoming mission. Atlantis is the nearer of the two and is being prepped for the last mission to the Hubble telescope to do repairs and add additional hardware. This being the case if something is to go wrong with the spacecraft and it cannot return to Earth, Endeavour will be launched as a rescue vehicle.

Because the Hubble telescope is in a very different orbit to the International Space Station Atlantis would not be able to dock there is there was a problem with the orbiter. If any reason crops up Endeavour will be launched and the crew will transfer to the rescue ship and the damaged Shuttle will be destroyed on re-entering the Earth's atmosphere. NASA have said that this is just a contingency plan and that they do not expect to have to have two shuttles in space at the same time. What it does do is give us ordinary folk a great new wallpaper for our desktop and also the last chance to see two Space Shuttles on the launch pad at the same time, for the last time (probably).

Bigger versions are available here.

Thanks to Tom's Astronomy Blog for this.

The World is Doomed.

Phil Plait the Bad Astronomer has frequently talked about the possibility of a major impact by an asteroid and now has a new book called 'Death From the Skies' which he goes into various scenarios that could cause the end of the World. I bet nothing he can describe looks as cool as the video that I found on Geekologie of a space station, sorry, small moon smashing into Earth. It is wickedly cool and destructive looking. Check out the video after the jump.

Ed, please stop - you are making a fool of yourself

Ed Mitchell - astronaut, woo-merchant and grey alien lover. I guess by now everyone and their dog has heard of Ed and his amazing stories of the aliens at Roswell, New Mexico. But this is not new - he's been saying this for some time, and it was only thanks to his interview on Birmingham-based Kerrang radio where he said "that we have been visited on this planet and the UFO phenomenon is real - though it's been covered up by governments for the last 60 years or so". This has lead to some typical hysteria in the news from journo's willing to sensationalise anything to move a paper or get more visits. But I was extremely surprised when I saw John Campbell dip into this murky well of bullshit reporting last week, and interviewed Ed on his show.

Ok, I'll give it that John Campbell is not the fount of excellent journalism, and he does stray into the News of the World territory on occasion, but he's from Palmerston North (Represent! P. Nth 4 Life!) so I'll cut him a break for now. My main problem is that he is giving airtime to someone who has a hypothesis about what actually happened at Roswell, when he wasn't involved at all. He plainly says in the interview that he was a teenager at the time living in Roswell, and he doesn't really remember a whole lot about it, except some stuff in the local papers. That's not surprising in the slightest - my nephew is in the teen years and its impossible to get him interested in anything going on in the world outside his circle of friends, his job or the Playstation. Everything else is comprehensively labelled as "lame", "dumb" or the derisive "that's so gay".

But even though he was not involved, he is using his Argument from Authority and Anecdotal Evidence to try and convince the world that aliens crashed at Roswell. He says "the old timers" from Roswell who apparently were involved have passed on the vital information about 10 years ago about what they saw and heard, and this is what he bases his opinion on alien visitation. He has no evidence to prove the veracity of these claims except the word of other people that they are telling the truth which, I'm sorry Ed, doesn't count for squat. Now to give Ed his dues, he has been fooled in the past.

It was Mitchell who “discovered” spoon-bender Uri Geller when Geller was only a cabaret performer doing his run-of-the-mill “psychic” tricks for teeny-boppers in Israel, assisted by Hannah Shtrang – who later became his wife – and Shipi Shtrang, her brother, who still works as his assistant. Mitchell actually travelled to Israel and arranged for Geller to come to the USA and be studied at the Stanford Research Institute – later to be re-named SRI International. Two physicists there, apparently awed by meeting a genuine Lunar Astronaut, chose to believe that such a hero couldn’t be wrong, that Geller was therefore the real thing, and Geller’s career took off. It’s safe to say that without Edgar Mitchell’s naivety, we’d have been spared the advent of the Geller Delusion.
James Randi - Swift 31/07/2008

After retiring from the Navy in 1972, Dr. Mitchell founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences to sponsor research into the nature of consciousness as it relates to cosmology and causality. In 1984, he was a co-founder of the Association of Space Explorers, an international organization of those who have experienced space travel.

He is the author of "Psychic Exploration," 1974, "The Way of the Explorer," 1996, (Third edition, 2006) as well as dozens of articles in both professional and popular periodicals. He has devoted the last 35 years to studying human consciousness and psychic and paranormal phenomena in the search for a common ground between science and spirit.
Ed Mitchell Bio

Ok, that does run close to an Ad Hominem attack, but I think its relevant. He has shown a propensity in the past to be fooled by charlatans like Uri Geller, so who is to say that some group of people who believe what they say happened in Roswell so many years ago couldn't do the same? Fool me once, shame on me, fool me twice, shame on me again.

As for the Psychic Investigations, Phil Plait over at Bad Astronomy says that he is fully in support of people doing science based investigations of this sort of stuff, but I'm not too sure that's what he would be doing. If you back someone like Uri Geller without any evidence apart from watching a few parlour tricks, how credible will any scientific conclusions on similar topics be?

I guess we can only hope that the news agencies publish less of this and focus more on what Ed actually achieved - its a lot to hope for I know, but hey - a Palmy boy can dream cant he?

Britain from Above

We all know what the countries of the World look like from space. Italy is a boot, America has a pan handle and Australia is a big smudge. Ever wondered what a countries infrastructure would look like from space? No, well I’m sure some people have. The BBC have a new documentary called ‘Britain from Above’ which uses state of the art computer graphics combined with GPS information from Taxis, planes, ferries and other vehicles to show how the country functions. After the cut you will find some facts and a link to the video on the BBC website.

Hosted by Andrew Marr the show will present imagery of Britain and the daily heartbeat that is the countries commute and communications network. Also included in this series is a look at how the cities have changed and how technologies keep us moving.

Video link

Facts from the show.

• The English Channel is the busiest shipping lane in the world: on a typical day 400 plus vessels travel through the Dover Straits, the biggest of which weigh up to 150,000 tonnes and take 3.5 miles to come to a stop.
• East London's Beckton Sewage Plant - all 280 football pitches worth of tanks, troughs and waterways - is one of the largest in Europe.
• On an average day, Britain's water pipes carry 16 billion litres of water - enough to fill 18 million bathtubs.
• In less than a week the waste sent to sewage plants is clean enough to be able to be pumped back into our taps.
• At the peak of the working day Britons send more than 5,000 text messages per second.
• 109 square miles of British countryside is just used for landfill.
• Between 7 and 10am, 36 million Britons are on the move commuting to the office or school.
• The average road user will spend more than 6 months of their life stuck in traffic jams.
• Every day more than 7,500 civilian aircraft crowd Britain's airspace, carrying more that half a million passengers.
• Over three quarters of a billion pounds in hard cash is transported around the roads of Britain every day. Driving one of the secured vans is one of the most dangerous jobs in the country with sometimes 15 attacks a week.
• Every day the nation's rubbish trucks collect more than 82,000 tonnes of refuse.

What has NASA ever done for us…….

Many people don’t believe that space travel is worth the massive amounts of money that we spend, or the Americans spend should I say. Here in New Zealand we do not have a space program so our tax money does not feature in the final frontier. Needless to say that we are fortunate that everyone reaps the benefits of the space programs provided by other countries.

Rob Sharp over at The Independent has chronicled some of the top 50 developments that the Worlds space programs have given us. Things such as the hand held vacuum cleaner, safer runways, freeze dried meals and Heart Surgery have all come about due to the research and development that goes on at NASA and other agencies.

Check out the link to see the top 50 inventions given to us by space exploration.

Solar Eclipse from 27000 feet.

One of the items on my list of things to do before I die is to see a full solar eclipse. We dont get many down here in NZ, in fact someone recently mentioned that we will get one in about 30 years or so, so that means I will have a bit of a wait. Anyway here is some footage of the latest solar eclipse as seen from an aircraft flying at 27,000 feet over the Canadian Arctic. It is pretty cool footage as you can actually see the shadow moving over the position of the plane. The people on board are obviously quite happy about what they have just witnessed. Have a look after the cut.

Mythbusters Moon Hoax Special

Here at RD we are firm believers in the fact that NASA and the US government successfully landed men on the Moon. There is no hoax, there is nothing fishy going on and there is an answer to every single so called 'fact' that the hoaxers come up with. Go to BadAstronomy.com to read more info about the Moon hoax.
Well it looks like our favourite buster of myths, The Mythbusters are doing a Moon Hoax special. Yay, I am supremely confident that every test, experiment they do will add weight to the truth, that we as a species landed on the Moon. I am not going to debunk the the Moon hoax stuff here as there are plenty of reality based sites out there with that info.
Check out the trailer after the jump for the Mythbusters Moon Hoax special.

Amazing Volcano Images

The guys over at Boston dot com have done it again with their new set of high res pictures. They have compiled a selection of images of volcanoes that have erupted or are currently erupting around the world. Several of these are pictures from the international space station and orbiting shuttles. The space images really help with the scale of some of these events, it is truely difficult to know how big they are until seen from high altitude. Great stuff. Check out the samples after the jab.

Go here for the full set.

Picture That!

A newish website has has been brought to my attention. It comes from the team at Boston.com. Its a blog that they run with high res photo's from around the world and beyond. I noticed this site primarily because of the images that it posted of Mars and the Apollo missions, but there are a host more. There are some stunning images of the current fires in California and more topical events such as the Presidential battle between Obama and McCain. I saw the link for this first from Phil over at Bad Astronomy There are a couple of samples after the jump but go to BOSTON for the full size images.

It's Official - Ice Found on Mars

The Mars Phoenix lander has done what it was sent to Mars for. It had found solid evidence of ice on the red planet. The lander dug a small trench which revealed a white shiny substance. This has been up for much debate over the last week as to whether or not it was ice or salt. But it looks like it is probably ice.

Mars has a different atmospheric pressure than here on Earth, that being the case liquid water can not exist. What happens is that when ice is exposed to the atmosphere it literally turns straight to gas, skipping the liquid stage, this is called sublimation. NASA has just announced that the patch of white shiny stuff they found has started to vanish, this can only mean that sublimation is taking place. The only real thing left for Phoenix to do now of find evidence of organic compounds that lead to life.
This is a major discovery, we now have evidence that water existed on Mars and is still there in ice form.
Phoenix Principal Investigator Peter Smith of the University of Arizona said:

"It must be ice, these little clumps completely disappearing over the course of a few days, that is perfect evidence that it's ice. There had been some question whether the bright material was salt. Salt can't do that."

That's not bad going, the craft has only been there for 24 days. It was day 20 when the hole was dug and 4 days later they an ounce that they have found ice.

Needless to say that the discovery has come at an interesting time. The US Presidential candidates have been announced and who knows what is in store for NASA and space exploration. Hopefully this will encourage the new President to re-examine the current policies and throw a bit more money their way.

This is another nail in the coffin of intelligent design or creationism (whatever its called). I see a future that many have predicted, seas on Mars and colonists walking the land breathing the air. Start terraforming now I say.

Photo of Earth from Mars - Well done HiRISE

Oh my God the aliens are coming, run for the hills.... Aarrgghh!!!
Here is the best photo ever of the planet Earth taken from the orbit of Mars. This falls into the same realms as the photo that was taken recently of the Mars Phoenix lander descending to the Martian surface. Funnily enough both images were taken by the HiRISE camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and goes to show just how good that technology is.
So this is what we look like to an approaching invasion force, or to an alien race as it leaves our solar system after having its ass whipped by Will Smith.... Bigger picture after the jump.

This picture was taken on October 3, 2007, when Earth was 142 million kilometers away, that is amazing. It is similar to an image that was taken back in 2003 by the Mars Global Surveyor but this new image is a much better resolution.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

Little Green Men, Call the Plumber Please.

What a week it’s been for NASA and space. We have the $325 million Phoenix Lander successfully making touchdown on the red planet and the Space Shuttle Discovery made it to orbit without any major issues. That means the hunt for little green men is now on and the Space Station will get its new crapper.



The Phoenix landed just as expected and in a nice flat area with very few rocks and boulders. During its rocket assisted descent the plumes of exhaust have blown away the dust to reveal flat, bright areas that we will hopefully find to be ice of some kind. After performing all the post landing tests it was confirmed that the lander was in good shape and ready to start science. Just yesterday the bucket scoop grabbed a sample of the regolith and took images of the rusty coloured material. I have to say that it looks a lot like mud and surprisingly there is a small patch of what looks like a white/silvery substance which NASA think could be ICE or some kind of salts.
NASA hopes to do some tests on this soil sometime over the next week and confirm what the makeup of it is. We may yet see traces of hydrogen which may mean water.

And coupled with that the Space Shuttle Discovery launched almost flawlessly on its way to the International Space Station to deliver the rest of the Japanese science module Kibo and repair the toilet that is not working. The toilet has 2 parts, one for poo and one for wee, it’s the wee part that is broken, so at least they are not up shit creek yet. In saying that the manual function of the toilet is working and the crew has been using the toilet in the Soyuz capsule which is docked for emergencies so it’s not all doom and gloom. If the toilet can not be fixed they may have to evacuate the station or use Apollo era crapper bags which could be messy.

The launch which was almost flawless did no apparent damage the orbiter but it sunbstantially wrecked part of the launch facility. Mortar and bricks were blown out from the blast chamber which channels the exhaust plumes during takeoff and scattered them over the road behind the pad. NASA have said that this should be repaired in time for the next scheduled launch at pad 39A on Oct 8th.

All in all a pretty good week for NASA as they try to complete the space station and prove that little green men do in fact live on Mars and War of the Worlds is a documentary.

Phoenix Lands on Mars.

NASA has successfully landed the first controlled descent craft on Mars since the 1976 Viking landers more than 30 years ago. This is a huge relief to NASA because the last time they tried this method they lost the craft during its descent. That was the Mars Polar Lander. After that disappointment the Phoenix spacecraft emerged from the ashes of Polar Lander and this time everything is going to plan, so far.

NASA received a signal from Phoenix at 2353 GMT that suggests that the craft has successfully made the tricky entry through the Martian atmosphere. The next step for NASA is to open the solar arrays and then take some pictures of the craft itself to ensure that the arrays have deployed correctly.

The primary mission for Phoenix is to test the Martian soil for the signs of water. A tool on board the craft will dig a sample of dirt and do various test on the dirt. This is not to dissimilar to the actions that the Viking probes did in the 70’s, the big difference of course the technology. Now we are better equipped to detect and analyse results should they be found.

Images should be sent soon after all post landing checks are done, hopefully some of those will be released to the public. When they are they we will put some up.

3, 2, 1 Blast off! No - I mean, blast on, er down - goddamit!

The Phoenix Mars lander is due to stop, drop and roll dick roll onto the Martian surface this week. May 25, 4.46 PDT (Pacific Daylight Time - UTC -7 hrs) is the time for our attack, er I mean, landing and investigation. The mission, Jim, is to drop this sucka onto the pole and find out where all the women, I mean, water is at. More info and a cool vid after the jump.











So once our tank, I mean, scientific vehicle lands on the Pole, it will be sniffing around to try and find signs of water in either frozen or liquid form, and also if life could have ever been sustained ere
Heres the offical line :

The complement of the Phoenix spacecraft and its scientific instruments are ideally suited to uncover clues to the geologic history and biological potential of the Martian arctic. Phoenix will be the first mission to return data from either polar region providing an important contribution to the overall Mars science strategy "Follow the Water" and will be instrumental in achieving the four science goals of NASA's long-term Mars Exploration Program.

They forgot to mention the machine guns and high explosives, but thats ok. We dont want the Martians finding out anyway.

Heres a vid explaining what has to happen to get the Phoenix onto the martian surface without doing an impression of the Dambusters bouncing bomb.

World Wide Telescope Goes Live

Microsoft have finally gone live with their version of Google Sky. Its called the World Wide Telescope and is now available from Microsoft at http://www.worldwidetelescope.org. I heard about this project a while ago when it was announced at TED and was excited from the get go. More info after the jump.

Currently Microsoft have about 20 terabytes of data that make up the visual experience, which will be updated on a regular basis. This equates to about 1.2 million books.
One of the features that Microsoft has been keen on is the ability for anyone from professional astronomers to amateur viewers to be able to use the software. This should enable the tool as a teaching aid to school children and other novices.
This is what Dr Roy Gould of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics had to say about the new software tool.

"Galileo's telescope started to give us views of the universe that no one else
had seen before and we started asking what was out there and why. And I think
the WorldWide Telescope is going to do the same thing for the rest of us, In terms of pushing the envelope, this really pushes the envelope."

I cant wait to get this going and see if it is as good as its supposed to be.

Clinton Pays for Good Science - Saves Arecibo

Hilary Clinton has stepped into the fray over the funding of the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico by proposing a bill that will secure dollars for the facility. Currently it is funded by the National Science Foundation and they have announced that the will cut most of its budget by 2011. A spokesperson at NSF said that the observatory does “good and unique science”, surely this alone would be grounds to continue with the funding. People in favour of the facility have noted that the Bush administration are looking at doubling the NSF’s budget within the next 10 years. Amazing.

I know that the decision by Clinton is more than likely a political driven stunt due to the ongoing Democratic Presidential bid but I welcome the news and hope that the telescope at Arecibo has along and fruitful life. You never know, it may still receive a reply to the message that was beamed from there in 1974 (more below).

Facts about Arecibo:
1968, the discovery of the periodicity of the Crab Pulsar
1974 Hulse and Taylor discovered the first binary pulsar PSR B1913+16, for which they were later awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics
1982, the first millisecond pulsar, PSR J1937+21, was discovered by Don Backer, Shri Kulkarni and others
1989, the observatory directly imaged an asteroid for the first time in history: asteroid 4769 Castalia
1990, the first extra-solar planets ever discovered.
2008, detection of prebiotic molecules methanimine and hydrogen cyanide in the distant starburst galaxy

The telescope also had military intelligence uses, for example locating Soviet radar installations by detecting their signals bouncing back off the Moon. Arecibo is also the source of data for the SETI@home project

In 1974, the Arecibo message, an attempt to communicate with extraterrestrial life, was transmitted from the radio telescope toward the globular cluster M13, about 25,000 light-years away. The 1,679 bit pattern of 1s and 0s defined a 23 by 73 pixel bitmap image that included numbers, stick figures, chemical formulas, and a crude image of the telescope itself.

It has also featured in the James Bond film Goldeneye as the Villains hideout and it played itself in the film Contact about a message from outer space.

The desire to expand the knowledge of the universe needs places like Arecibo to continue the work now and in the future.

Thanks - Bad Astronomy - Orlando Sentinal - NASA Watch - WIKI

Ancient Russian Technology

It looks like the crew of the Soyuz that just landed had a wee bit of a bumpy ride. According to CNN.com the returning ISS crew hit 10gees on re-entry into the atmosphere and landed more than 250 miles away from the target landing zone. Everyone is well but I bet they were shitting themselves when they were on their way down.... Jeez.

Space.com also reported that they landed short of the target due to a possible ballistic re-entry which is "a steeper than normal descent that can subject the crew to higher gravitational forces". I hate to hear about this sort of thing and it sucks that the manned space missions have to rely on this kind of technology. Fortunately NASA have been involved with upgrading these spacecraft over the last few years which has added to the safety, control and comfort.
Well done to the crew for getting back safely and I hope that this does not deter them from going back.