As you may or may not know, I’m a big fan of manned space flight. I’m being serious. I truly marvel that man can leave Earth and bemoan the lack of progress and support for human travel away from Earth.
Not often my interest in space flight and medicine kind’ve come together…at least not in the mainstream media, but here we have a prelim story to The Andromeda Strain. I first heard this on NPR, but here’s an AP piece on how salmonella bacteria sent into space returned more potent…
The researchers placed identical strains of salmonella in containers and sent one into space aboard the shuttle, while the second was kept on Earth, under similar temperature conditions to the one in space.
After the shuttle returned, mice were given varying oral doses of the salmonella and then were watched.
After 25 days, 40 percent of the mice given the Earth-bound salmonella were still alive, compared with just 10 percent of those dosed with the germs from space. And the researchers found it took about one-third as much of the space germs to kill half the mice, compared with the germs that had been on Earth.
The researchers found 167 genes had changed in the salmonella that went to space.
The gene changes associated with the increased disease burden aren’t completely understood in terms of how they make the bacteria more potent and why the changes occurred while in space.
“These bugs can sense where they are by changes in their environment. The minute they sense a different environment, they change their genetic machinery so they can survive,” she said.
European astronomers have published the discovery of the smallest extrasolar planet yet. What’s making popular news however, is the fact that,
They say the benign temperatures on the planet mean any water there could exist in liquid form, and this raises the chances it could also harbour life.
“We have estimated that the mean temperature of this ’super-Earth’ lies between 0 and 40 degrees Celsius, and water would thus be liquid,” explained Stephane Udry of the Geneva Observatory, lead author of the scientific paper reporting the result.
The Gliese 581 super-Earth is in what scientists call the “Goldilocks Zone” where temperatures “are just right” for life to have a chance to exist.
The planet, which isn’t alone in orbiting Gliese 581, circles the star in just 13 days (watch a potential orbit around Gliese 581) but because its parent star is a red dwarf, and much colder than the Sun, the temperatures on it are likely to be within a nominal range for water to exist. Couple that with its ‘earth-like’ size, which increases the likelihood that it is rocky (most exoplanets are huge, and probably represent gas giants like Jupiter), and you have the general media paying attention.
Gliese 581 would be within this frame at Wikisky. Of course it isn’t visible with the naked eye with a magnitude of ~2.5.
Tomorrow is the 26th anniversary of the space shuttle. On April 12, 1981 - more than five years since the last American was in space - the shuttle Columbia took off as mission STS-1.
Footage Of The First Manned Shuttle Mission’s Lift Off
It carried only a commander and pilot - John Young and Robert Crippen - and lasted less than three days.
The First Shuttle Mission Patch
Columbia was the first shuttle. From STS-1 she flew for another twenty-two years almost. And then sadly,
The Shuttle Which Had Brought Young & Crippen Back Safely…Failed
Despite the dangers and the criticisms of costs versus benefits, I love the marvel of manned space flight. There is a nobility to it. It is a testament to all human achievement. To how far we have come. And certainly a window into how far we can go.
The shuttle program will be retired in 2010. The manned flight activity will be taken up eventually by Orion in the hope of achieving the goals set out in the Vision for Space Exploration.
A moment on this anniversary to all those who have risked, and especially those who have given, themselves in order to explore; to push the boundaries of human capability and knowledge, in large part for no other reasons than to prove we are able.
*EDIT*
An oversight. No wonder NASA launched Columbia on April 12th. This is also the anniversary of man’s first footsteps into space - on April 12, 1961 (exactly 20 years before the Columbia launch) Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space on Vostok 1.
Using electron microscopy and isotope tests, the scientists looked at the chemical make-up of the grains and discovered they had unusual ratios of different forms of nitrogen and hydrogen. Ratios of the isotope nitrogen-15 to nitrogen-14 were nearly twice those on Earth, while the ratio of deuterium, a heavy form of hydrogen, to normal hydrogen, was between 2.5 and nine times higher than usual.
Reporting in the journal Science today, a team lead by Keiko Nakamura-Messenger and Michael Zolensky show the levels of the isotopes in the meteorite could only arise from chemical reactions taking place in an extremely cold climate, where temperatures were as low as -260C. Those conditions would only be found in remote molecular clouds before the formation of the solar system, or at the very edge of what is known as the protosolar disc that was later to coalesce into the celestial bodies of the solar system. “These little particles within the meteorite seem to predate everything else. We don’t know exactly how old they are, but they could be billions of years older than the rest of the meteorite,” said Dr Zolensky.
That would mean that…
[…] while the first light from the sun fell on the fledgling Earth, as the dinosaurs rose and died out and humans gained dominance, the meteorite was hurtling around the heavens on a billions-of-years-long journey destined to terminate with a thud in Yukon territory.
Boeing’s commercial satellite launching service, Sea Launch, suffered a disaster yesterday (January 30th). A Zenit-3 rocket, with a Dutch satellite as payload, exploded on the launch pad. However, because the launch platform is at sea, no personnel were physically on it and no one was injured.
Impressive
They’re being mum on what happened. Here is there literally 5 line press release. I’m sure the media will hear more later.
…that helped capture what I have been convinced is the most important image ever recorded has shut down.
The newest and most heavily used camera on the Hubble Space Telescope shut down over the weekend and appears to be permanently damaged, NASA said Monday.
Though other cameras on Hubble remain operative, the Advanced Camera for Surveys, which is used to peer back to the earliest and most remote galaxies in the universe, appears to be irreparable…
The newest and most heavily used camera on the Hubble Space Telescope shut down over the weekend and appears to be permanently damaged, NASA said Monday.
Though other cameras on Hubble remain operative, the Advanced Camera for Surveys, which is used to peer back to the earliest and most remote galaxies in the universe, appears to be irreparable
I’ve posted on this before but I believe, as many have claimed, that the Deep Field images (especially the Ultra Deep Field) taken by Hubble (and specifically the ACS) are the most telling images ever.
This Image Has 10,000 Galaxies In It
The Deep Fields were the furthest any human had ever looked into the universe’s past in the visible spectrum. Some of the light from galaxies in the image above (and even those little specks that might just be scratches are galaxies representing millions of stars) is from just 700 - 800 million years after the Big Bang. Far, far before the sun or earth even existed.
That is amazing in and of itself. However, what makes the Ultra Deep Field image the most important/amazing image ever is what it tells us about our place in the universe.
As mentioned, there are more than 10,000 galaxies in that picture above. But this image isn’t a sweeping survey of the universe. Far from it, as NASA says,
Looking into the Ultra Deep Field is like peering through an eight-foot-long soda straw.
The Hubble telescope was peering into a tiny portion of space. Now, the light from these galaxies obviously isn’t visible to the naked eye. Indeed, the vast majority of these galaxies aren’t even observable in the visible spectrum with ground based telescopes. However, consider that if these galaxies were visible you could go outside, look up into the night sky, hold a tennis ball at arm’s length and probably obscure all of them from your view.
10,000 galaxies. Perhaps trillions of stars. All in a relatively teeny tiny section of the universe.
I’ve Posted This Video Before, But Watch It Again
The observable universe contains an estimated 80 billion galaxies. But no matter how big the galaxy is (and even the current thought based on this paper has its major critics) we clearly cannot observe all (perhaps even most of it). Indeed, imagine what it says for our place if the universe is infinite.
But 80 billion, infinite, 78 billion light years (as a radius). They’re numbers. They’re nothing. When you read them they allow your mind to no more grasp the TRUE size than if you read pseudopseudohypoparathyroidism.
If the Ultra Deep Field does anything it is to put the size of the universe in slightly more visual terms.
Unfortunately the camera responsible for the majority of the Ultra Deep Field has cronked out. Get a visible light camera of similiar power and capabilities up and working NASA!!
On this day - January 27th - in 1967, during a systems test run, the cabin of the capsule which was eventually supposed to carry Virgil Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee into space as Apollo 1, burst into flames.
All three perished.
Their sacrifice, although a terrible price, made space flight safer for all to follow. Indeed, some argue the redesigned and insulated wiring, which followed the fire, was key to allowing the astronauts on the famous Apollo 13 mission to shut down the command module (to save power) and then to safely turn it back on in order to reenter the earth’s atmosphere.
Young Americans have high levels of apathy about NASA’s new vision of sending astronauts back to the moon by 2017 and eventually on to Mars, recent surveys show.
Concerned about this lack of interest, NASA’s image-makers are taking a hard look at how to win over the young generation — media-saturated teens and 20-somethings growing up on YouTube and Google and largely indifferent to manned space flight.
“If you’re going to do a space exploration program that lasts 40 years, if you just do the math, those are the guys that are going to carry the tax burden,” said Mary Lynne Dittmar, president of a Houston company that surveyed young people about the space program.
The 2004 and 2006 surveys by Dittmar Associates Inc. revealed high levels of indifference among 18- to 25-year-olds toward manned trips to the moon and Mars.
As Dittmar said, these statistics are depressing and bad news for long range space exploration. This generation (my generation) just needs too much of a ‘WOW’ factor I suppose. I’d like to be able to say they’re socially conscious enough that they have legitimate complaints about money being denied from welfare programs in favor of the ‘frivolity’ of manned space flight. Not that I in any way agree with that statement, but at least it would imply that they’re simply not too busy with their PS3s.
Then again, there will always be morons like this,
Ali Kuwait, 19, who is studying civil engineering at Brevard Community College, said he recently watched a clip on YouTube that made a convincing case that NASA’s moon landings between 1969 and 1972 were faked.
Repeating an old myth that NASA has not been able to kill, Kuwait said: “The moon thing was not real.”
No reasoning, no true argument why he believes such, just an unshaking suspicion of NASA for…well, no reason at all. You’re training great critical thinkers Brevard Community College.
Coming under a presidency whose slogan might be “No Price Too High To Accomplish Nothing,” the idea of a permanent, crewed moon base nevertheless takes the cake for preposterousness.
Unfortunately the analysis of the situation is very, very, very short sighted.
[I]ts scientific value is likely to be small while its price is extremely high. Worse, moon-base nonsense may for decades divert NASA resources from the agency’s legitimate missions, draining funding from real needs in order to construct human history’s silliest white elephant.
No one has any interest in settling Antarctica, which is much more amenable to life than the moon and can be reached at far less than 1 percent of the cost.
All I can say is…dumbass. We have to start sometime and some taxpayers will have to foot the bill. I know the idea of living off of earth seems like it is science fiction, like it should be hundreds of years away but it will take that many years of experience to make it a realistic goal. If this guy cannot see the major difference between the experience gained in colonizing the moon and colonizing Antarctica then I feel sorry for him. Comparing the two in a major online publication is just…well, it may force me to go burn all of my critical reasoning and logic books.
And while I know NASA has to paint a rosy picture, so you can be sure it’ll cost more than any broad estimates given at a news conference, I assure you that you should trust the physics/cost analysis by them more than this Greg Easterbrook.
NASA said Monday it can build a moon base for about the $10 billion per year it now spends on the (soon-to-be-retired) space shuttle and the space station. Considering that the space station and shuttle cost about $10 billion per year, a moon base might cost much more.
His reasoning?
The space station is 200 miles away and only goes up, never comes down. The equipment for a moon base would need to be accelerated to a significantly higher speed than was required for the space station, and that means a lot more fuel and a lot more expense.
Prevented by low cloud cover from lift off last night, STS-116 got off the ground tonight for the first night launch of a space shuttle mission in over 4 years. Here’s the CNN page.
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Live NASA TV Feed
You can track the shuttle as it “chases” down the International Space Station on NASA’s website.
Liquid water has flowed on the surface of Mars within the past five years, suggest images by the now lost Mars Global Surveyor (MGS). The results appear to boost the chances that Mars could harbour life.
Not everyone is convinced water created the “new” gullies on Mars in areas previously photographed.
Allan Treiman of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas, US, agrees that something flowed recently to make the observed changes.
But he is not convinced that water was involved. “There is no direct evidence of water in the images – only that something flowed downhill. My money is on sand and dust, because there’s lots and lots of sand and dust on Mars.”
The guys running the Mars Global Surveyor have seen plenty of flowing dust and have a retort that basically says, “this looks nothing like the other streaks caused by flowing sand we’ve seen.” Read the article for it.
There are other “problems,” while we can theorize, no one can really say where the water might have come from or specifically how it didn’t freeze on reaching the surface. The ice at the core sublimates - turning directly from a solid to a gas. So it isn’t flowing from the caps. As well, the gullies,
would have involved 5 to 10 swimming pools’ worth of water.
It would have been similar to a flash flood in the desert, says team member Ken Edgett of Malin Space Science Systems. “If you were there and this thing was coming down the slope, you’d probably want to get out of the way,” he says.
Any liquid water exposed to Mars’s atmosphere would quickly freeze, but Malin’s team says even if the exterior of the flow rapidly freezes, water could continue flowing much farther inside this ice shell
That’s a lot of water.
If the deposits are the result of liquid water flow, the source of the water is not clear. Malin’s team suggests it comes from underground aquifers, perhaps kept liquid at low temperatures with the help of high salt concentrations.
I’ve was never a kid with a telescope. But man, I think manned space exploration is so exciting. And now we have two major calls for permanent human outposts beyond Earth. First, NASA wants a permanent lunar post,
NASA’s plans for returning people to the moon — an objective called for by President Bush in 2004 — includes establishing a permanent outpost that would be used to prepare for a manned trip to Mars.
NASA Associate Administrator Scott Horowitz said the goal is to conduct the first manned missions to the moon by 2020, starting with short stays by four-person crews that would establish the outpost.
He estimated that perhaps by 2024 there might be a continual presence on the surface, with crews rotating in and out, as is done with the international space station.
“Once we spread out into space and establish colonies, our future should be safe.”
He said there were no similar planets to Earth in our Solar System so humans would “have to go to another star”.
Professor Hawking said that current chemical and nuclear rockets were not adequate for taking colonists into space as they would mean a journey of 50,000 years.
He also discounted using warp drive to travel at the speed of light for taking people to a new outpost.
Instead, he favoured “matter/anti-matter annihilation” as a means of propulsion.
This is just cool. Plenty of blogs are posting these photos - but no one seems to officially know where they’ve come from. The blog & blog I got them from originally claimed this was from the ISS.
Lift Off, We Have Lift Off
Even though you can see the curvature of the earth I’m trying to decide if I think this looks closer than othe pictures of the International Space Station that I’ve seen. Maybe.
It Is Surprising To Many At First How Close To The Earth The ISS Actually Orbits
Check out this cool tool which will show you where the ISS is in its orbit.
All this speculation about where the photos came from may be moot however, considering NASA faked the moon landing, it would be but a little challenge for this photo to just be some giant hoax.
The new survey – the last of a three-part series sponsored by the industry group the Coalition for Space Exploration – found that more than two-thirds of Americans polled support NASA’s stepping-stone approach to returning astronauts to the Moon, provided the effort’s cost does not exceed more than one percent of the federal budget.
“I think the stability of the numbers over time is probably the most significant thing,”Jeff Carr, chairman of the Coalition of Space Exploration, told SPACE.com of the three surveys. “Our mission is to help broaden the public’s awareness of the value and benefits of space exploration.”
The Princeton, New Jersey-based Gallup Organization conducted the new poll for between Aug. 2 and Aug. 19 in a telephone survey of 1,000 adults of age 18 or older. The new poll follows similar surveys in March 2006 and June 2005.
In the most recent poll, more than 60 percent of those surveyed stated they supported NASA’s human space exploration efforts.
Of the 63 percent of those polled stating that the U.S. should continue to fund NASA’s space exploration efforts, 32 percent said exploration should continue at the current funding level, while 22 percent supported a slightly increased level and nine percent preferred a significant funding increase.
Anyone who has read me might know I’m a strong supporter of manned space flight. This article points out NASA’s budget works out to less than $60 per American. Obviously not distributed like that with a progressive income tax, but a number I think it completely reasonable (despite my other libertarian tendencies).
I did my undergrad work in USC's School of Cinema-Television Cinematic Arts. I have a Bachelors of Fine Arts in Writing for Screen & Television. I loved it, but a future of waiting tables and taking meetings with B-List producers was not for me.
This blog is ostensibly to discuss healthcare policy and maybe educate a few of my fellow medical students. But it will stray into current events, politics, and other science topics when they draw my interest
Other odd notes about me:
I've skied half the resorts on this list (Squaw Valley/Lake Tahoe, Snowbird/Park City, Whistler, Taos, Vail)
I "played" lacrosse in high school and through a club level team in college
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- Mark Lanier
