Universe Today

A scientist has created a gadget that can make radio waves travel faster than light. Einstein predicted that particles and information can't travel faster than the speed of light, but phenomena like radio waves are a different story, said John Singleton, who works at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The polarization synchrotron combines the waves with a rapidly spinning magnetic field, and the result could explain why pulsars — which are super-dense spinning stars that are a subclass of neutron stars — emit such powerful signals, a phenomenon that has baffled many scientists.

Singleton said the polarization synchrotron basically abuses radio waves so severely that they finally give in and travel faster than light. This may be what happens in pulsars, as well.
Read more…

Filed under: Science | 29 Comments »

Topographic maps are some of the most used and valuable maps for both government and the general public. Now, NASA and Japan have released a new digital topographic map of Earth Monday that covers more of our planet than ever before and was created from nearly 1.3 million individual stereo-pair images collected by the Japanese Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer, or ASTER, on board NASA's Terra spacecraft. It is available online to users everywhere at no cost.
Read more…

Filed under: Earth Observation, NASA, Satellites | Comments Off

When is the best answer not the right answer? Assuredly many historical events epitomize this dilemma. Randall Whitcomb digs into Canada's Avro Arrow story and delivers up such an event in his book, "Cold War Tech War – The Politics of America's Air Defense". In it, he shows how a plane, successfully designed and built for winning tomorrow's war, ended up not being chosen as the perfect answer.
Read more…

Filed under: Book Reviews | 1 Comment »

This week’s Carnival of Space is hosted by Jennifer Oullette at Discovery Space's Twisted Physics.

Click here to read the Carnival of Space #109.

And if you’re interested in looking back, here’s an archive to all the past Carnivals of Space. If you’ve got a space-related blog, you should really join the carnival. Just email an entry to carnivalofspace@gmail.com, and the next host will link to it. It will help get awareness out there about your writing, help you meet others in the space community – and community is what blogging is all about. And if you really want to help out, let Fraser know if you can be a host, and he’ll schedule you into the calendar.

Finally, if you run a space-related blog, please post a link to the Carnival of Space. Help us get the word out.

Filed under: Carnival of Space | Comments Off

Using data obtained from the gamma ray spectrometer on the Kaguya spacecraft scientists have found signatures of uranium, an element not seen in previous moon-mapping efforts. In addition to uranium, the Kaguya GRS data also is showing clear signatures for thorium, potassium, oxygen, magnesium, silicon, calcium, titanium and iron.

"We've already gotten uranium results, which have never been reported before," said Robert C. Reedy, senior scientists at the Planetary Science Institute. "We're getting more new elements and refining and confirming results found on the old maps."
Read more…

Filed under: Moon | 5 Comments »

UPDATE: Use this link to watch the webcast (the other one isn't working very well!)

It's the spacecraft that just won't quit. We ran a story about a year ago that the Ulysses spacecraft was dying of natural causes (running out of power to keep the spacecraft warm and functional) and its mission would likely end by July 1, 2008. The thing is, the spacecraft just kept hanging on…and hanging on….and hanging on. But now, after 18.6 years in space and defying several earlier expectations of its demise, Ulysses will finally be switched off. You can watch a live webcast of the final communication with the spacecraft, which will occur on June 30, 2009, starting at 15:35 GMT and go until 20:20 GMT.
Read more…

Filed under: Missions | 1 Comment »

We work hard to put food on the table and a roof over our heads. If lucky, we've got some time left over for other activities. Patrick McCray's book "Keep Watching the Skies – The Story of Operation Moonwatch and the Dawn of the Space Age" is the story of a program that took advantage of some of those spare hours. During its time, this program had people encouraged, organized, and trained to view the skies and contribute to the nascent space age.
Read more…

Filed under: Book Reviews | 1 Comment »

Remember the polygon-shaped landforms at Mars north polar region that the Phoenix lander studied? The polygons are produced by seasonal expansion and contraction of ground ice, and these shapes have been found in other regions on Mars as well. New studies of images from the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter indicates that the Martian surface near the equator experienced freeze-thaw cycles as recently as 2 million years ago. This means Mars had significantly warmer weather in its recent past, and has not been locked in permafrost conditions for billions of years as had been previously thought.
Read more…

Filed under: Mars | 1 Comment »

With all the probes recently landing on Mars, it's no wonder we feel that the planet is close enough to vacation there. Robert Zubrin has such a scheme already in place for his book entitled "How to Live on Mars – A Trusty Guidebook to Surviving and Thriving on the Red Planet". Though vacationers are welcome, he much more expects the arrival of immigrants who are ready and raring to put spade into ground for a homestead of the future.
Read more…

Filed under: Book Reviews | 7 Comments »

Being part of a series on a "people's history of spaceflight", Chris Gainor's book entitled "To a Distant Day – The Rocket Pioneers" relives the onset of humankind's age of rocketry. Though starting from a broad, distant vantage point that includes Galileo and Copernicus, this book quickly jumps to Tsiolkovsky and other recent rocket luminaries. Then, it speedily presents the wondrous people and their amazing effort that led to human spaceflight.
Read more…

Filed under: Book Reviews | Comments Off

When your rover has abundant energy but can't go anywhere, what's a scientist to do? How about making observations of the evening and night skies on Mars? With the benefit of a boost in electrical power from a wind gust cleaning off her solar panels, the Spirit rover has more energy available than she's had for a couple of years. But unfortunately, Spirit is stuck in a patch of loose soil in the Home Plate region on Mars. While the engineers at JPL work hard at figuring out how to "Free Spirit" (see the new website dedicated to their efforts) scientists are making observations of her surroundings to aid in the effort to get her out. But there's also enough power to do additional observations, and astronomy was a logical choice. "Certainly, a month or more ago, no one was considering astronomy with the rovers," said Mark Lemmon, planetary scientist at Texas A&M University and member of the rover team. "We thought that was done. With the dust cleanings, though, everyone thinks it is better to use the new found energy on night time science than to just burn it with heaters." Besides, Lemmon added, using all the energy in the daytime might lead to overheating.
Read more…

Filed under: Astronomy, Mars, Missions | 2 Comments »

A man who circled the globe in a balloon in 1999 has a new global adventure planned. Bertrand Piccard has unveiled a prototype of a solar-powered plane he hopes to fly around the world. Until now, only unmanned solar airplanes have been flown, but Piccard's HB-SIA would be manned. The glider-like plane has solar panels covering the wings, and the wingspan of the prototype reaches 61m, while the entire vehicle weighs only 1,500 kg. The first tests of the plane will be done to prove it can fly at night. Piccard says he wants to demonstrate the potential of renewable energies.
Read more…

Filed under: Technology | 3 Comments »

Fear remained in the air even after the great global conflict of World War II ended. This arose because, rather than ushering in peace, the cessation of hostilities brought a new fear, the cold war. The History Channel's 2 DVD set entitled, "Sputnik Mania" shows just how fear permeated throughout the society of the United States and its impact upon the new technological field of rocketry. Whether being rational or even real, fear is shown to be significant catalyst to our journey to the stars.
Read more…

Filed under: Book Reviews | 1 Comment »

Most of us know the name of Charles Messier, the French astronomer and comet hunter who published perhaps one of the most celebrated catalogs of astronomical objects of all times, but how much do you really know about the man? Today is the anniversary of Messier's birth, so why not step inside a take a look a what make this curious astronomical character one of the most celebrated observers of all time. Read more…

Filed under: Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

Earth's climate has changed over time, but the cause for the changes has been hotly debated. One idea (Shaviv and Veizer,2003), suggested that perhaps two-thirds to three-fourths of the variance in Earth's temperature over the past 500 million years may be attributable to when our solar system passes through the spiral arms of the Milky Way galaxy. The evidence seemed to fit: there appears to be a 140 million year cycle of global climate change, and that correlates when our solar system seems to move between spiral arms, too. Or at least it used to. Since 2003 we have revised our map of the galaxy, which changes the estimation of when Earth transits through the spiral arms.

"Although previous work found a correlation between the 140 Myr climate cycle on Earth and the intersection with spiral arms," write researchers Adrian Melott, Andrew Overholt, and Martin Pohl, "with new data on the structure of the galaxy, this correlation disappears."
Read more…

Filed under: milky way | 7 Comments »