Tag: space

Orbital

I finally got around to picking up Orbital and can’t wait to read it in the next few weeks. This line with the author Samantha Harvey’s interview in The Guardian stuck out to me as something that very few of us discuss openly, but is certainly a reality of modernity…

‘I’m so not an astronaut!’ Samantha Harvey on her Booker-winning space novel – and the anxiety that drove it | Books | The Guardian:

“I pretty much hit 40 and became anxious,” she says. “I don’t know why. I think maybe I just decided it was time to have some sort of crisis.” Suddenly, she could no longer sleep. “I was finding the world kind of abrasive. Everything was too noisy and too busy and too huge.”

In Physics, Minor Errors Can Cause Huge Issues

Fascinating!

Retired engineer discovers 55-year-old bug in Lunar Lander computer game code | Ars Technica:

As mentioned in the quote above, the root of the problem was a simple computational oversight—a missing division by two in the formula used to calculate the lander’s trajectory. This seemingly minor error had big consequences, causing the simulation to underestimate the time until the lander reached its lowest trajectory point and miscalculate the landing.

Io’s Volcanoes

Io looks a bit like a pale pizza, covered in weird splotches that turn put to be volcanoes, surrounded by the black of space.

It’s fascinating to me that we can peer up through our thick and whiriling sea of gasses above us that we call our atmosphere and peer into the far reaches of our solar system to capture images of Jupiter’s moons and their surface activity here from the surface of our own planet. 

Thanks to the amazing Phil Plait for the inspiration to look up today!

An amazing image of Io, Jupiter’s tortured hell-moon:

Yowza! All those blotches on it are volcanoes, many of which are active (Io is relentlessly squeezed by Jupiter’s immense tidal force, which create internal friction which melts the moon’s interior and cracks the outer layers, allowing that material to reach the surface). In fact the paper notes that the observations show some changes on the surface. The volcano Pele is the oddly shaped dark blob just below and to the right of center, surrounded by a red ring of erupted material. There are two volcanoes just to the right of it; the left one is Pillan Patera, and the scientists note that the red ring looks overlaid by newer lighter material right where Pillan sits. That’s likely from a powerful eruption that occurred in 2021.

Happy Aphelion, Earthlings!

I always love working with my students to help them realize the really interesting nature of the Earth’s tilt (and wobble) and how it directly impacts our seasons rather than proximity to the Sun!

When Is Aphelion 2023 and What It Means – The New York Times:

But don’t expect any relief from summer. Seasons on Earth are the product of changes in the amount of direct sunlight as the planet tilts toward and away from the sun — not its orbital path. It would take a much greater swing, so that the amount of received sunlight dropped significantly, in order to notice the difference.

“Still discovering new things”

golden_record_cover

On board each Voyager is a golden record — and record player — that is built to last one billion years or more and contains key information about humanity and life on planet Earth, in case of an alien encounter.

The sounds include the calls of humpback whales, the Chuck Berry song “Johnny B. Goode,” Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, a Japanese shakuhachi (a type of flute), a Pygmy girls’ initiation song, and greetings in 55 languages.

via Forty years on, Voyager still hurtles through space

Stephen Hawking is backing a project to send tiny spacecraft to another star system within a generation

The concept is to reduce the size of the spacecraft to about the size of a chip used in electronic devices. The idea is to launch a thousand of these mini-spacecraft into the Earth’s orbit. Each would have a solar sail. This is like a sail on a boat – but it is pushed along by light rather than the wind. A giant laser on Earth would give each one a powerful push, sending them on their way to reaching 20% of the speed of light.

Source: Hawking backs interstellar travel project – BBC News

Fascinating.

 

Metaphor for Looking Ahead By Looking Back

By pushing NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to its limits, an international team of astronomers has shattered the cosmic distance record by measuring the farthest galaxy ever seen in the universe. This surprisingly bright infant galaxy, named GN-z11, is seen as it was 13.4 billion years in the past, just 400 million years after the Big Bang. GN-z11 is located in the direction of the constellation of Ursa Major.

Source: Hubble Team Breaks Cosmic Distance Record | NASA

Our eyes, like the (still) incredible Hubble Telescope, are time machines. We see things as they happen in the past, whether they are right in front of us or 13.4 billion light years away. We are a curious and amazing species that can process signals to make inferences about our own future.

Whether it’s looking into deep space or contemplating the future of your life or business, don’t ever stop visioning. Our brains are built for such duties.