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Curiosity Is On It’s Way To Mars

Posted by Alan Buckingham at 11:43 AM on November 27, 2011

The big one we have all been waiting for is on it’s way.  The Mars Science Laboratory, better known as the Curiosity rover, lifted off yesterday from Florida and began it’s 8 and half month journey to the red planet.  Curiosity carries with it the hopes and dreams of, not just a lot of scientists and NASA engineers, but also a lot of average Americans who can only dream of this trip and what can be discovered there.

Carried into space on an Atlas 5 rocket, Curiosity, a rover the size of a car, will touch down in the Gale Crater and begin it’s systematic experiments in search of the building blocks of life on Mars.  Gale Crater is described by Universe Today as “one of the most scientifically interesting locations on the Red Planet because it exhibits exposures of clay minerals that formed in the presence of neutral liquid water that could be conducive to the genesis of life.”

The launch yesterday went off without a hitch and the rover is now on it’s way to the red planet.  Before you get too excited, Curiosity won’t discover life (if any), but only find if the necessary conditions are present.  Finding actual life will have to wait for the next mission.  As with all things this complicated, expensive, and time-consuming the scale of time is much greater than we all would like it to be.

You can watch a video of yesterday’s launch below.

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Posted in nasa, Science, space

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Great ISS and Meteor Video

Posted by Alan Buckingham at 10:53 AM on August 14, 2011

One of my favorite web sites, Universe Today, has linked up a video that really captured my imagination.  The video, captured by Bryan Stewart and posted to Vimeo, shows the International Space Station (ISS) passing overhead during the recent Perseid Meteor Shower.

The video is 1:06 in length and was filmed in Texas at 6:25am on August 10, 2011.  In addition to some great videography, it also features a soundtrack that is Carl Sagan set to music.  What more could you ask for?!

If you have never seen the ISS pass over, it’s a steady, non-blinking white light that moves fairly quickly across the sky.  Not meteor-fast, but you will only have 1-2 minutes of viewing time to follow it from one horizon to the other.

If you want to find out if/when it will be viewable in your area, I recommend the Heaven’s Above website.  You will to need to enter the coordinates of your location, but once you have it set up you can bookmark it with your coordinates and you will not need to ever enter them again.  In addition to the ISS, it also gives information on such passes as Iridium Satellites.

The video is posted below.  Enjoy.

ISS pass with perseid meteor from Bryan Stewart on Vimeo.

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Posted in Astronomy, iss, Science, space, video

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60 Years of BBC’s Reith Lectures as Podcasts

Posted by Andrew at 5:16 AM on June 26, 2011

Sixty years of the BBC’s Reith Lectures archive have been made available as downloadable .mp3s, a fantastic resource for Renaissance geeks and lovers of 20th century history. The Reith Lectures are an annual short series of lectures on issues of the day pitched to the general public and given by respected individuals. They cover a wide range of topics but are touched by the era in which they were recorded. There’s usually four or five lectures in a series.

They’re named after Lord Reith, the first Director General of the BBC and started in 1948, continuing to this day. This year’s lectures on “Securing Freedom” will be given by Aung San Suu Kyi, Burmese pro-democracy leader and Baroness Manningham-Buller, Director General of MI5 from 2002 to 2007. Last year’s were on “Scientific Horizons” and were presented by Martin Rees, President of the Royal Society. As you can see, these aren’t irrelevant boring lectures by dull academics.

Until now, if you didn’t catch the lectures when they were broadcast through the RSS feed, you had to use iPlayer to listen to the lectures and the on-line archive has been expanded right back to the start in 1948. Currently, they appear as three tranches, 1948-1975, 1976-2010 and this year’s, 2011.

Hopefully, the downloads aren’t restricted to the UK as there’s some very interesting content that’s worth listening to, some still relevant to today and other material that will help you in understanding previous decades and the impact they’ve had on today.

I think my broadband’s going to take a hammering this month…

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Posted in audio, bbc, Science

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Scientists Need To Stand Up

Posted by Andrew at 12:30 AM on June 23, 2011

If you were to draw a Venn diagram of the whole of science, I’d like to think that us geeks fit in there as a subset. Many of us come from a scientific background and appreciate science, scientific method and the benefits it brings to humanity. This isn’t to say that we don’t value art, but rather we have critical approach to life that uses evidence and method rather than doubt and misinformation. Theories aren’t always right but we value the outcome when they are disproved.

Regrettably science and scientists have often failed to engage with public, either retreating into academia or else becoming the boffins in the backrooms of organisations that capitalise on their work. The Internet has given plenty of space for pseudo-science to become widespread and thought of as fact. Validated research and evidence rarely gets the weight it deserves.

The New Statesman has published an excellent article on how the scientific community needs to take a look and learn from other social groups such as gays and blacks which have managed to get the respect that they deserve. Scientists need to stand up and speak out against pseudo-science and misinformation.

The UK’s Government Chief  Scientific Adviser John Beddington said, “We are grossly intolerant, and properly so, of racism. We are grossly intolerant, and properly so, of people who [are] anti-homosexuality… We are not – and I genuinely think we should think about how we do this – grossly intolerant of pseudo-science, the building up of what purports to be science by the cherry-picking of the facts and the failure to use scientific evidence and the failure to use scientific method.“

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Posted in Geek Culture, geeks, Science

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The Slowest Landslide Ever

Posted by Alan Buckingham at 6:41 PM on June 4, 2011

Okay, the headline may be an exaggeration.  After all, I don’t know if records exist for such things and if they do, I didn’t look for them.  However, be it a record or not, this is still an absolutely amazing natural phenomena.

In Wyoming, recently, a large amount of rain and snow-melt has resulted in unstable conditions.  This, in turn, lead to a massive landslide in the Snake River Canyon, which came down across Highway US 26-89.  Even now, days later, the landslide is still moving at about a half meter (18 inches) per hour.  The Wyoming Department of Transportation has been following it and took a time-lapse video which can be seen below.  To get a sense of scale, pay attention to the man who enters the video and walks around RIGHT ON THE LANDSLIDE.

 

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Posted in Science

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Yuri Gagarin 50th Anniversary Links

Posted by Andrew at 4:47 PM on April 17, 2011

Image credit: NASA

To conclude our short series of posts on Yuri Gagarin’s first orbit of the Earth in Vostok 1 fifty years’ ago, I thought I might put together a few of the best links that I’ve found on the web for those who want to know more about Yuri and his historic flight.

  1. Yuri Gagarin’s Wikipedia Entry
  2. YuriGagarin50.org – A comprehensive site dedicated to the 50th Anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s Flight Into Space
  3. BBC Gagarin 50 Years On – The BBC’s micro-site about Gagarin and space flight.
  4. Sky at Night magazine – I’m afraid you’ll have to find a bookstore or newsagents and buy this one.
  5. NASA – Yuri Gagarin – NASA’s celebration of Yuri.
  6. RIA Novosti’s Gagarin Coverage – Russia’s state-owned newsgency’s take on Yury and the celebrations.
  7. RIA Novosti’s Image Library – Do an advanced search for Gagarin and put in dates from 1960 to 1965.
  8. Astronautix – This is a fascinating site. Once you’ve finished with Gagarin, have a browse round some of the other articles.
  9. Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre – Bit difficult to navigate around and translated from Russian but some interesting stuff and photos.
  10. Yuri Gagarin Flight Video on YouTube – Just turn the sound down.
  11. Vostok 1 Mission on YouTube
  12. Propaganda Booklet
  13. Starman: The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin – Generally considered to be the best biography – available from good bookstores everywhere.

Did I miss any? Let me know in the comments.

Starman: The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin

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Posted in Science, space

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First Orbit

Posted by Andrew at 5:09 PM on April 14, 2011

Continuing the celebration of Yuri Gagarin’s orbit of the Earth in Vostok 1 back in 1961, First Orbit is a documentary film that joins archive footage of the event with modern shots taken from the International Space Station (ISS). The filmmaker, Christopher Riley, collaborated with the European Space Agency to see if it would be possible to film the same view across the planet that Gagarin saw out of the window of his tiny spacecraft. As you might guess, it was possible, and by filming at particular time on a particular orbit, astronaut Paolo Nespoli captured a re-creation of that historic flight.

The film unfolds in real-time and includes Gagarin’s original communications with ground control, call sign Dawn. Fortunately there are English subtitles if your Russian is a bit rusty. There’s a stirring soundtrack by Philip Sheppard and it’s really quite mesmerising to watch. You almost forget that it happened 50 years ago and the real-time nature of it makes it feel that it’s unfolding as you watch.

The film is available on YouTube (below) but you can also freely download it in a variety of sizes. I’d recommend downloading the 1.9 GB hi-def version, and putting on the big TV. Set aside 108 minutes and become Yuri.

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Posted in Film, Science, space

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Thanks Yuri and I’m Sorry We Let You Down

Posted by Andrew at 2:31 PM on April 13, 2011

As you’ll know from all the coverage, yesterday was the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s historic first orbit of the Earth by a human. Back in 1961 at the height of the Cold War, it was a demonstration of superiority by one superpower over another rather than any altruistic motive that sent him into space.

Regardless of how it was viewed then or now, I can’t help but feel we’ve let Yuri down. In the fifty years since then, human exploration has travelled no further than the moon and that was done in the immediate decades after his orbit. There’s no doubt that we extensively use space-based satellites for telecommunications, GPS and a myriad of other functions. And yes, the International Space Station is a remarkable achievement. But we haven’t really gone anywhere.

Let’s look at this another way. In December 1903, the Wright brothers made the first human flight. By the 1930s, there were commercial transatlantic flights and jet airliners took over the route in 1958.  So in approximately 50 years, flight went from 850 feet in 1 minute to thousands of miles at hundreds of miles per hour.

The comparison with space travel doesn’t look so good.

I understand well the arguments between human and machine space travel. The latter does give better bang-for-buck and machines can go places that we could not. But has the “PlayStation generation” become so ingrained in our psyche that we have to travel by remote control? Is there still no imperative “to boldly go”?

George Mallory, the mountaineer was asked why he wanted to climb Mount Everest. “Because it’s there” was his reply. His journey wasn’t about the accumulation of scientific knowledge, it was about personal conquest and fighting against the odds. And it ultimately cost Mallory his life.

Physics fights against us. We like our explorers to come back and tourists want a return ticket, but this makes exploration twice as hard as the round trip isn’t always easy to achieve. But I bet you that if NASA offered one way tickets to Mars, there would be no shortage of volunteers.

I’m sure Yuri Gagarin would be disappointed with how little we have achieved now and how little we expect to achieve in the coming years for human space exploration. Regrettably we can’t ask him as he died in 1968 before we reached the moon. Yuri, thanks for freeing us from Earth back in 1961 and I’m sorry we let you down.

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Posted in Science, space

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Corning Gorilla Glass Meets Todd and Wins!

Posted by Andrew at 9:34 AM on February 1, 2011

If you’ve got a mobile phone from htc or a Samsung Galaxy Tab, then there’s a good chance you’re looking at the display through Corning glass. Todd talks to James Hollis, Director of  Corning Display Technologies, to find out what Corning brings to the electronics market.

Well…Gorilla Glass is probably their most well known and flagship product. Developed in 2007, it’s an aluminosilicate glass that is optically pure and has excellent scratch resistance and strength properties. James describes how this glass is manufactured and the chemical structure that gives the glass its hardness. Gorilla Glass is 3-to-5 times harder than standard glass (well, I think that’s what he means when he talks about “soda lime glass”).

Todd has a lot of fun scratching and breaking samples of glass…or not breaking in the case of the Gorilla Glass. It’s a great demonstration of what you are buying when you buy a gadget with Gorilla Glass, so watch the video to understand the value.

Interview by Todd Cochrane of Geek News Central.

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Posted in ces, Information, Science, smartphone, Special Media

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Climate Change: A Summary of the Science

Posted by Andrew at 1:00 AM on October 19, 2010

The politics of the green movement and the polarity of views have often prevented real debate on climate change from happening.   Each side will reinforce their opinion with selective facts from the data and use every opportunity to ridicule their opposition’s theories.  A great deal of the climate discussion that has appeared in the media has been coloured by specious facts and bad science.

To counter this and open up the debate, the Royal Society has published a 19 page document (.pdf) called, “Climate Change: A Summary of the Science“, which is effectively a primer on the science behind climate change.  It attempts to be a balanced view, with notes on the background science, what is widely agreed, what is still debated, what is not well understood and what developments we can expect.

The Royal Society is an independent ”Fellowship of more than 1400 outstanding individuals from all areas of science, mathematics, engineering and medicine, who form a global scientific network of the highest calibre.“  Consequently, I think that we can be confident that the working group setup to produce the document has used a scientific approach to assess the climate change data and present the information fairly.  In several areas, uncertainty is acknowledged.

However, the concluding remarks are fairly clear with regard to the evidence for climate change.
“There is strong evidence that changes in greenhouse gas concentrations due to human
activity are the dominant cause of the global warming that has taken place over the last
half century. This warming trend is expected to continue as are changes in precipitation
over the long term in many regions. Further and more rapid increases in sea level are
likely which will have profound implications for coastal communities and ecosystems.”

I would encourage everyone to read this document (there’s only about 11 pages of reading) so that you can understand the science, take part in the debate and help develop the policies in response to climate change.

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Posted in Science

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