compiled from photos from the Dawn mission. The grooves running around the "equator" of the asteroid are interesting - kindof like debris may have bounced around the asteroid for huge amounts of time in low gravity gradually carving out the apparent channels.
Click for rotational movie. (Click the lower right corner of the video window to make it full screen.)
Here's also a really nice hi-res photo
Here's a story from NPR regarding an early Russian cosmonaut who plunged to his death in the early stages of the space race between the U.S. and Soviet Union. The story puts a human face on the highly politicized competition between super-powers.
Here's Vladimir Komarov's story: "I'm not going to make it back from this flight."
Here's an interesting discussion - should a human mission to Mars be a one way trip?
It seems kindof cold to me, but worth reading.
I find this inspiring. If there are other earth-like planets out there the Kepler space telescope will be able to find them. Based on the type of star and orbit scientists can determine if the planet exists in what is called a habital zone - and likely to be an earth-like planet. Kepler will watch a cluster of around 100,000 stars for a period of 3.5 years to generate some statistically significant distributions.
from the article:
Boss said one day "we'll be able to stand outside ... and say 'Hey kids, look out there see that star? That one has an Earth".
I had C-SPAN on this morning watching James Hansen talk about his book "First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong." As the author was talking about the decision for Neil to be the first to set foot upon the moon (instead of Buzz Aldrin) I got to thinking a) about what Armstrong said, b) how odd that it was left to Armstrong to say what he wanted on such a defining occasion, and c) how fortunate, timeless, inspirational and high-minded Armstrong's mis-spoken line "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind" was - especially considering what it could've been given the cold-war political climate.
From what I understand - the line was composed by Armstrong in the 6 hours after landing on the moon prior to exiting the lander. You gotta give kudos to Armstrong for coming up with such a cool statement in both short order and with so much else likely going on in the lander. Maybe it was inspiration from the moment. But in any event I'm glad the line was left to Armstrong rather than to be butchered by some government committee.
Here's a very interesting story regarding a scientific paper projecting the odds of planetary orbit disruption in our solar system. This is the kind of stuff you don't learn in the school books and is why I regularly check links to science articles. Interesting stuff.
Appararently over long time periods the planetary orbits as we currently know them are not stable, and there are are small percentage chances that some current planets may wobble/evolve into orbits that cross the orbits of other planets - creating the likelihood of planetary collisions within our solar system. Apparently this is the most complex modeling of planetary orbits over long periods attempted.
From the Space.com article:
Our solar system has a potentially violent future. New computer simulations reveal a slight chance that a disruption of planetary orbits could lead to a collision of Earth with Mercury, Mars or Venus in the next few billion years.
I find this video very interesting.
Based on some web searches I guess it's possible that there's some video artifacts going on here given the shape of some of the objects seen here, kindof like maybe seeing reflections of stuff in your own eye sometimes when looking in a microscope, but I was engrossed when I saw this. Note how many of the objects appear to move behind the severed tether in the video. Here's an in-depth video analysis.
It's incredible footage and too easily dismissed with a shrug of the shoulders in my opinion. Very cool stuff. Way more interesting than a lot of stuff that's treated seriously. Doesn't it remind you of looking at pond water under a microscope?
I saw this today on the Astronomy Pic of the Day
Here's a big version of the image. Photo is from NASA.
I was reading about the Golden Record that was put on the Voyager spacecrafts and found this very interesting. (The record cover is shown above - here's more about all the symbols on the front. They say an intelligent race could decipher what's on here, but I wonder.) Image from JPL/NASA
The record was designed to last for a billion years so that if somewhere out there the spacecraft was encountered by an alien race there'd be a message from earth to them. The cover above shows information intended to communicate how to play the record and retrieve the data, including audio and visual information.
It's interesting - how do you communicate without language? and what gets put on the disk? There's greeting from earth in many languages, music, and images from earth, including images of our solar system's location, images of the planets, mathematical notation, as well as everyday scenes of life on earth.
Anyhow, I thought this was pretty cool to read through - imagining I had encountered something like this - how would I interpret what I see? Also, it's interesting to see what was included on the disk (many scenes of biology and daily life)- and consider what was excluded (no scenes of war).
Here's an interesting hypothesis on the origin of the asteroid that scientists think struck the Yucatan and killed the dinosaurs at the KT extinction 65 million years ago. A massive collision in the asteroid belt that exists between Mars and Jupiter is identified as the source in the study. The study is interesting as they've taken orbits of existing groups of a family of shattered asteroids and worked backwards to the point in time when a collision broke them apart from what used to be a much larger asteroid.
I've not seen this discussed before, but this post discusses what would happen to you if your body were unprotected in space. Actually it's not quite as extreme as portrayed in the movies, and surprisingly it indicates you could probably survive for a while in space without a suit. And despite the extreme cold you wouldn't immediately turn into an ice cube because despite the cold there's so little air to take your body heat away.
