NASA Appoints Constellation Program Managers

This is so sad. What was once probably one of the coolest jobs on Earth – “Constellation Program Manager” – now turns out to be something deliberately pepped up. NASA News writes:

Lawrence D. Thomas has been appointed manager of NASA’s Constellation Program, which manages the effort to take humans beyond low-Earth orbit and develop the next generation launch vehicle and spacecraft.

Watch the emphasis (mine). We wanted to go to the Moon, Mars and also get back. Orion? Merely an escape-vehicle for the ISS, if at all. Ares? Canceled. Altair? Who knows.

Anyway: Congratulations to Lawrence Thomas!

Re: The Worldwide telescope

Tomaso just had this beautiful posting about Microsoft’s new software, WWT. There were some comments on his blog which pointed out that Google Earth has this feature for quite some time. I was aware about it, but I took the Pepsi-Test with Tomaso’s NGC7331 usecase.

Now the same picture which I just took from Google earth:

Google Earth can’t even compete with the low-res picture, not to mention with the high-resolution picture Tomaso provided:

Long story short: Though it might be inconvenient, MS WWT seems to be better than Google Earth in this certain case.

Buran calling

The Museum of Technology of Speyer just bought the last remaining Buran Spacecraft – you remember, the russian competitor to the american Space Shuttle.

This vessel, the Buran, has quite some history. After lurking around for quite some time in a russian hangar it was shown at the Olympic Games in Sidney back in 2000. After that event it went to Bahrain, where a venture-capitalist took over the ownership.
Due to legal problems the Buran was rotting in a harbor of Bahrain, until it was resdiscovered just recently, when it was bought by the Museum of Speyer.

The Buran started it’s journey on the river Rhine in Rotterdam, where it was put on the river Rhine vessel “Broedertrouw 2″ – which means “Brother Loyality” in english.

It’s just being shipped up the river Rhine and my friend Edwin Top made those really nice pictures last night.

Figure 1: Buran Spacecraft at the harbor of Cologne

Figure 2: Buran engine closeup

Figure 3: Buran wings closeup

Figure 4: Buran Cockpit closeup

Figure 5: Buran carried on the river Rhine vessel “Broedertrouw 2″

According to the official website, the Buran is just right now – as of 00:15 2008.04.10 – a couple of kilometers south of Koblenz, close to Boppart. You can track the Buran’s path to it’s final destination online.

Thanks a lot to Edwin Top for those fine pictures and all his help for this article.
The pictures can be seen in full resolution at Edwin’s website.

Edit: koww has some cool pictures too!

Hubble Finds Ghostly Ring of Dark Matter

Via the NASA-homepage:

Scientists found a huge ring made of dark matter using the Hubble space-telescope. NASA says:

“Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope got a first-hand view of how dark matter behaves during a titanic collision between two galaxy clusters. The wreck created a ripple of dark matter, which is somewhat similar to a ripple formed in a pond when a rock hits the water.

The ring’s discovery is among the strongest evidence yet that dark matter exists. Astronomers have long suspected the existence of the invisible substance as the source of additional gravity that holds together galaxy clusters. Such clusters would fly apart if they relied only on the gravity from their visible stars. Although astronomers don’t know what dark matter is made of, they hypothesize that it is a type of elementary particle that pervades the universe.”

This is way cooler than evarrything I’ve read the last couple of months. The whole dark matter topic is insanely exciting. Considering that 20% of the universe’s mass is supposed to be dark matter and that without that matter planets would just leave their orbits it’s no wonder that lot’s of people are so excited about it.

The whole idea of dark matter came up when an astronomer named Franz Zwicky observed a galaxy cluster and figured out that the mass of that cluster isn’t big enough to explain why the galaxies keep sticking together. The observed mass and the observed motion just didn’t fit together. He was also the one who came up with the idea of dark energy in the first place. However, his colleagues denounced him as being a crackpot – the idea just wasn’t sexy enough, it sounded to esoteric.

Later the idea became more popular when astronomers observed more weird behaviour. The stars in spiral-galaxies should rotate the slower, the farer away they’re from the core of it’s galaxy – however, they don’t, they’re moving faster than they are supposed too. So where’s the extra gravity coming from?

Dark matter, is the theory. Now they still have to figure out what the heck dark matter is after all. Wikipedia lists three different types of dark matter. It could simply be ordinary baryonic matter, like clouds of very cold dust – that’d be the most simple theory and doesn’t involve any weird matter at all. The other two idea what dark matter could be are Hot and Cold dark matter, but since I ain’t no physicist I’m not not to explain them, refer to Wikipedia.

Probably Tomaso could explain that even better than I could possibly do :)

Spiegel Online also has a nice video (in german, flashy stuff) with some cool animations and more detailed information.

Tomorrow I’ll be off for BBQ and beer. After that people can claim: “He’s so dense, light bends around him“.

Tech Tags: Space Dark Matter

Edit: Removed the x% faster, it didn’t make sense… :-) And added the digg-button…

Spin, pulsar, spin!

Via Scientific Computing:

The January issue of Nature has an article (subscribers only) about a solution to the problem how pulsars get their spin. This was quite a mystery, for a pulsar should have the same spin as the star it used to be, but faster because it’s contracting during the collapse. However, it somehow didn’t sum up – this theory would only be true for very fast spinning pulsars – those with a rotation-time less than a second or so.

Now some fellow from the Department of Energy and the North Carolina State University used Oak Ridge‘s Phoenix (rated 32 in the TOP500), a Cray X1E supercomputer, to perform detailed simulations about what happens during the collapse.

The results were interesting; apparently the spin of the neutron star is not determined by the spin of the star, but from the shock waves which occur when the solid iron-core of the star collapses:

“That shock wave is inherently unstable, a discovery the team made in 2002, and eventually becomes cigar-shaped instead of spherical. The instability creates two rotating flows — one in one direction directly below the shock wave and another, inner flow, that travels in the opposite direction and spins up the core.

“The stuff that’s falling in toward the center, if it hits this shock wave that is not a sphere any more but a cigar-shaped surface, will be deflected,” Mezzacappa said. “When you do this in 3-D, you find that you wind up with not only one flow, but two counter-rotating flows.”

Interesting stuff, although I must admit that I didn’t really understand everything. A pity that no animations or better pictures than the one published at Scientific Computing are available, it could enlight the uninitiated. Kudos to Dorigo, for he presents his results in a way that even the dumbest high-school-grade physics-adept understands it :) (if brain is enabled)

Spin, spin, spin! I get all dizzy.

P.S.: The ORNL website seems to be down at the moment. Wasn’t me!

Tech Tags: space science

Brilliant photo of a Space Shuttle taken from a High Altitude Research aircraft

Via Mrdeadworry’s Blog:

Fellow Blogger Mrdeadworry posted a very nice picture of a starting Space Shuttle taken from the ISS a High Altitude Research aircraft. More information about the misinterpretation on the Urban Legend Reference Pages.

(Thanks to noisedoctor for the correction!) 

Starting Spaceshuttle, linked from Mrdeadworry’s Blog

Tech Tags: space

Gamma-Ray-Burst came before a supernova

Via the Knight Science Journalism Tracker:

NASA‘s satellite SWIFT, built for detecting and analyzing Gamma-Ray-Bursts (GRB), recently detected a GRB and alerted scientists all over the world who pointed their whole weaponry to the spotted location and yes! There was a supernova. They were able to observe the 40-minute event, which occurred some 440-million years ago, in it’s full length and beauty.

GRBs were linked to supernovae for quite some time, now the gathered data seems to support the theory even more.

Tech Tags: Science Space