Okay so even though it is technically the first ever Earth-borne object to ever touch the surface of Mercury, it isn’t as hopeful as one might expect from the planet’s best and brightest scientists. But in all fairness we have crash landed on Mars, the Moon, and into the clouds of Jupiter, so it’s not uncommon. The Messenger spacecraft has been in space since 2004, orbiting the Sun multiple times in order to arrive at Mercury in 2008. Since then it has completed 4,103 orbits and obtained an incredible amount of scientific data as the first ever space probe to...
As the capsule separates from the first stage rocket, the second stage booster takes over and sends Dragon into orbit around the Earth to rendezvous with it’s target a few hours from now. At this point the mission is a complete success from NASA’s perspective, but to Elon Musk and the rest of the SpaceX team, the real challenge is just beginning. They have to land that first stage rocket on a 300 x 170 foot barge in the vast ocean, or risk losing millions of dollars in their investment. Here’s how it went. Okay not so well, but arguably...
Tis the season, as they say. This year is a good one for space missions with the March arrival of the Dawn spacecraft at Ceres and the July fly-by of Pluto by new horizons. Dawn made history by being the first ever spacecraft to orbit a dwarf planet, and new horizons will provide the first ever pictures of the surface of Pluto in unprecedented detail. I can barely contain my excitement, after having watched the launch of New Horizons live on NASA TV in 2006. I thought about what life would be like in 2015 and what Pluto would look...
No, he isn’t a zombie. He’s a long dead scientific pioneer. He discovered Saturn’s moon of Titan and was the first to suggest that Saturn’s odd ‘blob’ shape could be explained by rings around the planet. He was a pioneer of optics and developed a telescope with two lenses, more powerful than Galileos. He also characterized the motion of an ideal mathematical pendulum (with a massless cord and a length longer than its swing), and invented the pendulum clock as a method of keeping time. He had a few other contributions to astronomy, including the observation of individual stars in...
If there’s one difference I notice between Science and Religion, it’s that when questions come up and something unexpected flies in the face of a well-established principle, Science gets excited, Religion gets defensive. I’m always on the lookout for new data that causes us to rethink the ideas we have, and when I find something, I get excited because it means we’ve found something that has been elusive for a long time. Isaac Asimov said it best: The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny…’ – Isaac Asimov...
We are fairly confident about the idea that the Moon formed when a Mars sized object hit the young Earth over 4 Billion years ago. The resulting debris cloud condensed to form the Moon, giving the Earth a surprisingly large Moon for its size. Next to Charon and Pluto, the Earth’s Moon is the largest relative to the size of its planet. It’s also the third largest of all moons in the Solar System, next to Ganymede and Titan, #1 and #2 respectively. but there is one problem with this theory of the Moons formation: The Earth and Moon are...
About a year ago I had an idea for a music video. I wanted to take a concept in science and put it to music, making it funny, catchy, memorable, and educational. I wrote out the majority of the lyrics but left it alone for a few months, until I connected with the right friend. My good friend Bob Wegner is a very talented guitarist and audio engineer, and as we spoke about the idea he wanted to be the guy to record it. We spent an afternoon doing the vocals and guitars, and he cleaned it up and made...
Over the course of a day the Earth changes quite a lot. Lightning strikes the Earth 8 Million times per day as the mighty water cycle on our planet churns under the power of the Sun’s warmth and the Coriolis force on the Earth. But have we ever just stared at the Earth’s surface over the course of the day? Definitely. We have seen the day to day changes from many different altitudes above the Earth’s surface, and the above image shows stunning changes over the course of a day. But how do we get a picture like this?...
The science of Astronomy goes far beyond what humans can see with our eyes. The visible part of the spectrum has taught us so much, but when we look at all photons across the spectrum of light, we find exponentially more powerful methods for discovering the mysteries of the universe. Radio waves, yes the same ones that bring you music in your car, are found throughout the universe in very interesting environments. Radio waves often trace the most powerful objects in the universe, such as super-massive black holes, quasars, and other types of active galactic nuclei. Humans see visible light...
Even I was blown away when I saw this image a friend sent me. Gravitational lensing is a rare occurrence, and a supernova is a rare occurrence, so to see a supernova in a gravitationally lensed galaxy deep within the universe is exceptional. So exceptional that it was spotted for the first time ever in a Hubble image of the distant universe. That dot in the image is a single supernova in a very distant galaxy, split into four images by the gravitational lensing of the galaxy cluster in front of it. But there is also a secondary lensing effect from...
