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...
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...
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...
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...
I love to discuss Mars rovers. The thought of robots roaming around the empty red desert, doing science in pure form, unmasking the surprising history of our red neighbour, it’s exciting and it’s the frontier of discovery. The limits of science and engineering are pushed as we send complex machines to travel further than any human in history. But with such a marvellous feat, issues can arise, and when they do, the nearest mechanic is 55 Million Km away. On February 27th, during the transfer of a sample of dust from the rover’s drill to its instruments, the rover suffered...
With all the amazing Science coming from Mars in the last decade, its seems easy to conclude that humans have a good understanding of our rusty neighbour. And then something new and unexpected happens. To someone who thought we knew all there was to know, this may be a disappointment. But to a scientist who has a passion for discovery, new and unexpected results are where the biggest breakthroughs happen! Massive plumes have been spotted high in the atmosphere of Mars, at an altitude of over 250 Km, where the thin Martian atmosphere is nearly indistinguishable from the emptiness of...
I always like to bring up the crazy ways in which two areas of science that seem completely disconnected can relate to each other, occasionally giving incredible insights. By looking at the ocean floor, a world human beings can’t reach without special pressurized equipment, we are learning about space, a world human beings can’t reach without special pressurized equipment. So how is the ocean teaching us about space? Physicists at the Australian National University have been studying seafloor dust that has been raining down on Earth as micrometeorites over the past 25 Million years. The dust is thought to originate...
…and not the ‘dawn’ we refer to when watching a sunrise. Dawn is a NASA spacecraft that was launched in 2007 with the goal of exploring the asteroid belt by observing its largest and most interesting objects up close. The two largest asteroids, Vesta and Ceres, have been the largest mission goals of Dawn as it has journeyed through the belt. From July 2011 to September 2012, Dawn was in orbit around the 525 Km wide Vesta, snapping amazing photos and studying the giant in detail. Since it’s departure from Vesta in September 2012, the craft has been on route...
Last week, as the Dragon capsule successfully launched for the International Space Station under the watch of Space enthusiasts the world over. There was also a bit of chatter about a secondary SpaceX goal, to land the Falcon 9 rocket on a floating barge in the Atlantic Ocean as a new method of recovery. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk had tweeted at the time that the landing did not go well, implying a bit of damage to the landing pad. A few days later, a first picture surfaced of the landing pad showing a bit of charring and a few rocket...
This morning at 4am EST on the International Space Station, an Ammonia leak alarm went off, leading the crew to perform an emergency evacuation from the American capsule of the ISS. All of the astronauts are currently safe and secure in the Russian capsule of the ISS. The hatch between the two capsules has been sealed, and any non-essential equipment has been powered down. Mission Control is in the process of assessing whether the alarm was the result of an actual leak or a malfunction, though recent reports from NASA TV suggest that the alarm was due to computer glitch...
