Patrick Mylund Nielsen

We Are the Explorers

2013-03-30T12:05:00-04:00

This ad spot from NASA will be played before showings of the upcoming 'Star Trek' film.

Apollo 12 - SCE to AUX

2013-03-29T22:18:00-04:00

Apollo 12 has just launched. All of a sudden, the command module loses all power, and mission control gets nothing but garbled read-outs. Fortunately, EECOM in mission control is manned by a person who hadn't just been focused only on what he was supposed to be doing.

via reddit

We Live In a Cosmic Shooting Gallery

2013-03-13T19:14:00-04:00

Give Me Space Exploration Or Give Me Death

Matt Damon Goes On Strike

2013-02-27T16:52:00-05:00

How's That Space Program Coming Along?

2013-02-15T13:04:00-05:00

Very fitting in light of the meteor strike in Russia this morning:

Give Me Space Exploration Or Give Me Death

Poster by Do Gooder Press

Lincoln

2013-02-11T04:49:00-05:00

Euclid's first common notion is this: Things which are equal to the same thing are equal to each other.

That's a rule of mathematical reasoning. It's true because it works—has done, and always will do. In his book, Euclid says this is "self-evident." You see, there it is, even in that two-thousand-year-old book of mechanical law, it is a self-evident truth that things which are equal to the same thing are equal to each other.

We begin with equality. That's the origin, isn't it—that balance? That's fairness. That's justice.

2012 Was the Best Year In the History of the World

2012-12-16T18:50:00-05:00

If you live in the Western world, and particularly if you watch the news, you probably weren't expecting this:

It may not feel like it, but 2012 has been the greatest year in the history of the world. That sounds like an extravagant claim, but it is borne out by evidence. Never has there been less hunger, less disease or more prosperity. The West remains in the economic doldrums, but most developing countries are charging ahead, and people are being lifted out of poverty at the fastest rate ever recorded. The death toll inflicted by war and natural disasters is also mercifully low. We are living in a golden age.

To listen to politicians is to be given the opposite impression — of a dangerous, cruel world where things are bad and getting worse. This, in a way, is the politicians' job: to highlight problems and to try their best to offer solutions. But the great advances of mankind come about not from statesmen, but from ordinary people. Governments across the world appear stuck in what Michael Lind, on page 30, describes as an era of 'turboparalysis' — all motion, no progress. But outside government, progress has been nothing short of spectacular.

Take global poverty. In 1990, the UN announced Millennium Development Goals, the first of which was to halve the number of people in extreme poverty by 2015. It emerged this year that the target was met in 2008. Yet the achievement did not merit an official announcement, presumably because it was not achieved by any government scheme but by the pace of global capitalism. Buying cheap plastic toys made in China really is helping to make poverty history. And global inequality? This, too, is lower now than any point in modern times. Globalisation means the world's not just getting richer, but fairer too.

The doom-mongers will tell you that we cannot sustain worldwide economic growth without ruining our environment. But while the rich world's economies grew by 6 per cent over the last seven years, fossil fuel consumption in those countries fell by 4 per cent. This remarkable (and, again, unreported) achievement has nothing to do with green taxes or wind-farms. It is down to consumer demand for more efficient cars and factories.

From/more at The Spectator
via reddit

Billions and Billions of Stars

2012-12-16T03:06:00-05:00

Take a look at this image. (Click for the high-resolution version.) Any two stars, or indeed any two pixels, are further apart than mankind has ever travelled.

The distance the Voyager spacecraft have travelled could not be made out on this image. Yet, we see only a part of our own galaxy, and there are more than 170,000,000,000 in the universe.

The universe is vast and awesome, and we are very small. To explore it, we must become much wiser, and much more courageous.

From Wikipedia
via reddit

Small NASA Side Project to Build WARP DRIVES!

2012-12-09T02:32:00-05:00

NASA/JSC is implementing an advanced propulsion physics laboratory, informally known as "Eagleworks", to pursue propulsion technologies necessary to enable human exploration of the solar system over the next 50 years, and enabling interstellar spaceflight by the end of the century. This work directly supports the "Breakthrough Propulsion" objectives detailed in the NASA OCT TA02 In-space Propulsion Roadmap, and aligns with the #10 Top Technical Challenge identified in the report. Since the work being pursued by this laboratory is applied scientific research in the areas of the quantum vacuum, gravitation, nature of space-time, and other fundamental physical phenomenon, high fidelity testing facilities are needed. The lab will first implement a low-thrust torsion pendulum (<1 uN), and commission the facility with an existing Quantum Vacuum Plasma Thruster. To date, the QVPT line of research has produced data suggesting very high specific impulse coupled with high specific force. If the physics and engineering models can be explored and understood in the lab to allow scaling to power levels pertinent for human spaceflight, 400kW SEP human missions to Mars may become a possibility, and at power levels of 2MW, 1-year transit to Neptune may also be possible. Additionally, the lab is implementing a warp field interferometer that will be able to measure spacetime disturbances down to 150nm. Recent work published by White suggests that it may be possible to engineer spacetime creating conditions similar to what drives the expansion of the cosmos. Although the expected magnitude of the effect would be tiny, it may be a "Chicago pile" moment for this area of physics.

Low-thrust torsion pendulums and quantum vacuum plasma thrusters with warp field interferometers. Hot—physically and metaphorically!

More
via reddit

What Do 100,000 Stars Look Like?

2012-11-14T22:59:00-05:00

If you love the stars, and you're using Google Chrome, do yourself a favor and check out 100,000 Stars, one of the latest Google Chrome WebGL experiments. It's an interactive view of our local group, including the Sun, solar system, Kuiper comet belt, Oort cloud, and much more. It's absolutely stunning.

If you can't get enough, I can't recommend Universe Sandbox and Space Engine enough either.

A Slower Speed of Light

2012-11-07T10:57:00-05:00

A Slower Speed of Light is a first-person game prototype in which players navigate a 3D space while picking up orbs that reduce the speed of light in increments. Custom-built, open-source relativistic graphics code allows the speed of light in the game to approach the player's own maximum walking speed. Visual effects of special relativity gradually become apparent to the player, increasing the challenge of gameplay. These effects, rendered in realtime to vertex accuracy, include the Doppler effect (red- and blue-shifting of visible light, and the shifting of infrared and ultraviolet light into the visible spectrum); the searchlight effect (increased brightness in the direction of travel); time dilation (differences in the perceived passage of time from the player and the outside world); Lorentz transformation (warping of space at near-light speeds); and the runtime effect (the ability to see objects as they were in the past, due to the travel time of light). Players can choose to share their mastery and experience of the game through Twitter. A Slower Speed of Light combines accessible gameplay and a fantasy setting with theoretical and computational physics research to deliver an engaging and pedagogically rich experience.

It's the game version of:

via MIT

Alpha Centauri Has a Planet

2012-10-16T22:27:00-04:00

European astronomers have discovered a planet with about the mass of the Earth orbiting a star in the Alpha Centauri system — the nearest to Earth. It is also the lightest exoplanet ever discovered around a star like the Sun. The planet was detected using the HARPS instrument on the 3.6-metre telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile. The results will appear online in the journal Nature on 17 October 2012.

This is incredibly exciting to me! A few years ago, when I worked on Hubble, I looked into using it to search for planets around Alpha Cen. I worked out some simulations to see if we could detect anything, and at best we could see a Jupiter-sized planet orbiting far enough out that its faint light wouldn’t be blasted out by the star itself. It was deemed too risky an observation (too low a chance of payoff) so we didn’t get time on the telescope to make it. We’d never have seen this planet anyway; looking for a planet reflecting its star’s light is very different than looking for the Doppler shift. Obviously!

Also, c'mon. This is Alpha Centauri! Famed and fabled in a thousand science fiction stories. It’s where the Robinson family was supposed to go in "Lost in Space". It’s where Zefram Cochrane lived in "Star Trek". It’s where the Fithp came from in Footfall. Because the system is bright and close, and the stars so close to being like our own Sun, they’re an obvious place to put aliens. Plus, you get the exotic locale of a binary star plus the red dwarf thrown in on top. It’s perfect!

So I, and a lot of people like me, grew up hoping against hope we’d find a planet around one of these stars someday.

And here we are.

— Phil Plait (Bad Astronomer)

via ESO and Bad Astronomer

Neil deGrasse Tyson Ponders About Life On Europa

2012-09-30T15:55:00-04:00

"There are no fish and no kids?"

A Pale Blue Self-Portrait

2012-09-30T15:53:00-04:00

Aki Hoshide, a Japanese astronaut, has taken a picture of himself during a spacewalk around the International Space Station:

via NASA

Mathemagic

2012-09-14T22:01:00-04:00

This is one of the funniest videos about mathematics I've seen: Arthur Benjamin, a professor of Mathematics at Harvey Mudd College, shows how to do mental math extremely quickly:

Can you mentally multiply enormous numbers faster than a calculator? Memorize a 100 digit number? Figure the day of the week of anyone's birthday? These are just some of the many feats of mind that will be demonstrated at this event. Mathematics can be a difficult and perhaps puzzling subject for many. But watch in amazement as one of the world's fastest human calculators shows his ability to turn math into magic.

Arthur Benjamin, Ph.D. is a professor of Mathematics at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, CA. He is the author of Secrets of Mental Math and Proofs that Really Count as well as co-editor of the journal Math Horizons. Fusing his love of both mathematics and magic, he has appeared at the World Science Festival in New York and the Magic Castle in Hollywood. Reader's Digest calls him "America's Best Math Whiz".

Smooth Video of Curiosity's Descent

2012-09-13T20:59:00-04:00

Bard Canning has made this motion-flow interpolated video using the original images taken by the Curiosity rover as it descended to the surface of Mars:

Very cool.

via reddit

M7 in Scorpius

2012-09-13T01:41:00-04:00

Are those grains of sand, or are they stars?

Incredible.

From NASA APOD:

M7 is one of the most prominent open clusters of stars on the sky. The cluster, dominated by bright blue stars, can be seen with the naked eye in a dark sky in the tail of the constellation of the Scorpion (Scorpius). M7 contains about 100 stars in total, is about 200 million years old, spans 25 light-years across, and lies about 1000 light-years away. The above deep exposure was taken from Hakos Farm in Namibia. The M7 star cluster has been known since ancient times, being noted by Ptolemy in the year 130 AD. Also visible are a dark dust cloud and literally millions of unrelated stars towards the Galactic center.

Back to the Moon

2012-09-13T00:25:00-04:00

NASA Reveals Goal for Eventual Manned Lunar Outpost

The Obama administration has laid out its most detailed ambitions yet for a return of U.S. astronauts to the moon, including the prospects of a lunar outpost where explorers could live for months at a time.

Lori Garver, the No. 2 NASA official, on Tuesday gave a speech in which she emphasized the importance of exploring the moon and its environs. She also disclosed that an unspecified mission to the moon is tentatively scheduled as early as 2017.

"Let me say that again," she told an industry conference in Pasadena, Calif. "We are going back to the moon," while pursuing more-ambitious goals to blast manned spacecraft deeper into the solar system.

The comments come after NASA sent Congress a report on "sustainable human exploration" of the moon and beyond that includes a section focusing on the scientific benefits of establishing a long-term human presence on the lunar surface. The last manned moon mission took place in December 1972.

Part of the report, which Ms. Garver's speech described as a comprehensive overview of exploration destinations, spelled out long-duration visits to the moon by astronauts who would live in "a nearly self-sustaining surface habitat," or outpost, capable of extracting oxygen, water, silicon and other materials on site.

Very exciting and unexpected!

via the Wall Street Journal

Huge Impact on Jupiter

2012-09-11T19:07:00-04:00

Jupiter was just hit by something really, really big:

Jupiter is huge. The visible impact, itself, is larger than Earth.

Incredible. And scary.

via Space

9/11 as Seen From Space

2012-09-11T17:08:00-04:00

On September 11, 2001, US astronaut Frank L. Culbertson watched the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks from the International Space Station. He wrote up his experience that day and the days following in a letter posted on NASA's site:

I glanced at the World Map on the computer to see where over the world we were and noticed that we were coming southeast out of Canada and would be passing over New England in a few minutes. I zipped around the station until I found a window that would give me a view of NYC and grabbed the nearest camera. It happened to be a video camera, and I was looking south from the window of Michael's cabin.

The smoke seemed to have an odd bloom to it at the base of the column that was streaming south of the city. After reading one of the news articles we just received, I believe we were looking at NY around the time of, or shortly after, the collapse of the second tower. How horrible...

I panned the camera all along the East Coast to the south to see if I could see any other smoke around Washington, or anywhere else, but nothing was visible.

It was pretty difficult to think about work after that, though we had some to do, but on the next orbit we crossed the US further south. All three of us were working one or two cameras to try to get views of New York or Washington. There was haze over Washington, but no specific source could be seen. It all looked incredible from two to three hundred miles away. I can't imagine the tragic scenes on the ground.

via BoingBoing