The final frontier of a son’s awe – and abject fear
For most people, Feb. 1, 2003, passed like any other day. Sure, a pretty big disaster dominated the headlines: The space shuttle Columbia disintegrated as it re-entered the atmosphere, raining down bits of metal and debris on the lawns of some Texans. But at the end of the news cycle, most people ate dinner and drifted off to sleep. For me, however, it was different. Growing up the son of an astronaut sounds glamorous, and in many ways it is. I didn’t quite understand how lucky we were to have that access, but I always expected it to be there. Columbia changed all that. The news networks milked the disaster as long as they could, then moved on. My father’s previous spaceflight (STS-100) had occurred less than two years before Columbia, which meant that, regardless of scheduling changes related to the disaster, he wouldn’t be flying again any time soon. Then, in early 2008, Dad got a new assignment. I’d learned what failure means in my father’s line of work. Yes, I’m terrified.
Why Explore Space?
. Specifically, she asked how he could suggest spending billions of dollars on such a project at a time when so many children were starving on Earth. Stuhlinger soon sent the following letter of explanation to Sister Jucunda, along with a copy of "Earthrise," the iconic photograph of Earth taken in 1968 by astronaut William Anders, from the Moon (also embedded in the transcript). May 6, 1970Dear Sister Mary Jucunda:Your letter was one of many which are reaching me every day, but it has touched me more deeply than all the others because it came so much from the depths of a searching mind and a compassionate heart. The photograph which I enclose with this letter shows a view of our Earth as seen from Apollo 8 when it orbited the moon at Christmas, 1968.
Elon Musk's Mission to Mars | Wired Science
Maverick entrepreneur Elon Musk Photo: Art Streiber When a man tells you about the time he planned to put a vegetable garden on Mars, you worry about his mental state. But if that same man has since launched multiple rockets that are actually capable of reaching Mars—sending them into orbit, Bond-style, from a tiny island in the Pacific—you need to find another diagnosis. That’s the thing about extreme entrepreneurialism: There’s a fine line between madness and genius, and you need a little bit of both to really change the world. All entrepreneurs have an aptitude for risk, but more important than that is their capacity for self-delusion. I have never met an entrepreneur who fits this model more than Elon Musk. And he is leading the private space race with SpaceX, which is poised to replace the space shuttle and usher us into an interplanetary age. It’s no wonder the character of Tony Stark in Iron Man, played by Robert Downey Jr., was modeled on Musk: This is superhero-grade stuff.
Magnetosphere in Sound
One of NASA's newest missions has recorded the radio waves coming from our magnetosphere. Musicians: Sample away. A graphic of Earth's twin rings of plasma known as the Van Allen Radiation Belts in our planet's magnetosphere (NASA) Surrounding our planet are rings of plasma, part of Earth's magnetosphere, which are pulsing with radio waves. Those waves are not audible to the human ear alone, but radio antennae can pick them up, and that's just what an instrument -- the Electric and Magnetic Field Instrument Suite and Integrated Science (EMFISIS) -- on NASA's recently launched Radiation Belt Storm Probes has done. The noises, often picked up here on Earth by ham-radio operators, are called Earth's "chorus" as they are reminiscent of a chorus of birds chirping in the early morning.
Cosmic latte
Cosmic Latte is a name assigned to the average color of the universe, given by a team of astronomers from Johns Hopkins University. Discovery of the color[edit] In 2001, Karl Glazebrook and Ivan Baldry determined that the color of the universe was a greenish white, but they soon corrected their analysis in a 2002 paper,[1] in which they reported that their survey of the color of all light in the universe added up to a slightly beigeish white. The survey included more than 200,000 galaxies, and measured the spectral range of the light from a large volume of the universe. The hexadecimal RGB value for Cosmic Latte is #FFF8E7. The finding of the "color of the universe" was not the focus of the study, which was examining spectral analysis of different galaxies to study star formation. Glazebrook's and Baldry's work was funded by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. Naming of the color[edit] The color was displayed in a Washington Post article. References[edit] External links[edit]
A Brief History Of Nothing : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture
Using my recent interview on To The Best Of Our Knowledge about the Krauss and the "Universe From Nothing" controversy as a pretext, I thought it would be a good idea to write a bit about what physics says of "nothing," and how this tricky notion evolved. (Here is something I wrote for 13.7 on this a few weeks back.) We may start with Aristotle, who decided that "Nature abhors a vacuum" and thus declared that there was no such thing as nothing, understood as absolute emptiness. Spaced was filled up with aether, the same stuff that made up all celestial objects, from the moon up. Aristotle was reacting to the atomists, who, before him, had declared that matter was made of indivisible atoms moving in the void. Fast forward to the early 17th century and Descartes also states that there is no such thing as empty space. The ping pong continued in the 19th century, when Maxwell figured out that light was made of waving electric and magnetic fields.
