A “Once in a Civilization” comet will be paying us a visit next New Year’s Eve. From Scientific American:
Why is this comet expected to be so unique? Two reasons:
Astronomers predict that the comet will pass just 1.16 million miles from the Sun as it swings around its perihelion, or closest approach. (This may seem like a lot, but remember—the Sun is big. If we were to scale the Sun down to the size of Earth, the comet would pass well within the orbits of dozens of satellites.) The close approach will melt enormous amounts of the comet’s ice, releasing dust and gas and forming what should be a magnificent tail.
After it loops around the Sun and forms this tail, the comet should then pass relatively close to Earth—not near enough to cause any worry, but close enough to put on a great show. Viewers in the Northern Hemisphere will get the best view as the comet blooms in the weeks approaching Christmas 2013. The comet could grow as bright as the full moon.
Comets can be somewhat unpredictable (remember the last appearance of Comet Halley?) but this one looks like it probably won’t disappoint. The “once in a civilization” moniker makes me a little squeamish, though people with a much better understanding of orbital mechanics than I have insist there’s no way this thing will hit us.
But being so big, and so close, passing right over Earth next New Year’s Eve will be quite a show. Brighter than the full moon and maybe even visible in daylight.
If you’d like to make yourself feel a little better about probabilities and all, here’s NASA’s orbit visualizer.
How the attack sub HMS Conqueror pulled off one of the most audacious heists of the Cold War. Thirty years later, the story of Operation Barmaid can finally be told.
“The British believed they were selected because they had more skilled submariners, and exercises do seem to bear this out. British submariners tend not to play by the book to the extent that the Americans do.
“The more cynical view has it that if a British sub was caught the diplomatic fall-out would be less severe than if an American one was involved. No one wanted to provoke a superpower confrontation.”
Cutting a towed-array cable and making it look like an accidental loss was no easy task. Before Conqueror was fitted with the television-guided pincers, her sister ship HMS Churchill had tried to steam through an array to sever it from the towing ship. She was damaged and depth-charged for her pains.
Submariners as a group did some pretty hairy stuff during the Cold War, but this took an iron will and brass giblets. For more stories like this, I highly recommend a book called Blind Man’s Bluff.
Above: an enhanced view of Saturn’s moon Enceladus, which was apparently on the Federation’s short list for testing the Genesis Device. Think I’m kidding?
See? Opposite angle. Trust me, I’m an amateur astronomer.
Except for the above, these are from a new book called Planetfall, a collection of meticulously enhanced images from NASA probes. Some are composites from multiple images, others stand alone as testament to the ingenious beauty of the solar system God has blessed us to live in.
As for the book itself, it’s proof that not everything translates well into an e-reader. This deserves the big ol’ coffee-table treatment and a prominent place on my Christmas list.
One more jaw-dropper, and then you’ll just have to go check out the rest for yourself:
35 years after its launch, has Voyager 1 finally left the solar system? It’s not as clear-cut as you might think: cross Pluto’s orbit, the Kuiper Belt (where I guess Pluto technically belongs), and even the Oort Cloud (from where comets come), and you’re still not there.
Barriers still have to be crossed, essentially signals that its leaving the Sun’s bubble of charged particles. The problem is that we don’t know precisely where they are, but there are some telltale signs:
Two of three key signs of changes expected to occur at the boundary of interstellar space have changed faster than at any other time in the last seven years, according to new data from NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft.
For the last seven years, Voyager 1 has been exploring the outer layer of the bubble of charged particles the sun blows around itself. In one day, on July 28, data from Voyager 1’s cosmic ray instrument showed the level of high-energy cosmic rays originating from outside our solar system jumped by five percent. During the last half of that same day, the level of lower-energy particles originating from inside our solar system dropped by half. However, in three days, the levels had recovered to near their previous levels.
A third key sign is the direction of the magnetic field, and scientists are eagerly analyzing the data to see whether that has, indeed, changed direction. Scientists expect that all three of these signs will have changed when Voyager 1 has crossed into interstellar space.
No word on if it’s encountered Klingons yet. Not that they’d tell us anyway…
The Klingon Empire meets Voyager. “Today is a good day to die.”
Interesting goings-on in our night sky recently – check out this amateur video of something big hitting something even bigger: Mysterious Impact Flash on Jupiter.
Now, understand I use the “amateur” term carefully. There’s a huge global network of astronomers out there who do this stuff purely for fun and personal interest. Some of the equipment they have is astounding, and they got mad skillz. Professional astronomers count on these guys for cataloging phenomena that the Big Dogs just can’t devote scope time to: stuff like variable stars, planetary occultations, Martian dust storms, and comets (many of the named comets were discovered by non-professionals).
Apparently that list also includes potential civilization-destroying rogue asteroids.
Yeah, I left the best part for last: from iO9, speculation that perhaps Jupiter took one for the team. There’s been a lot of that lately, come to think of it.
So, are the massive outer planets with their deep gravity wells actually a picket system for the smaller inner planets – namely, the ones that could support life? More specifically, ours?
This is a theory which has been gaining traction over the years. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus (stop giggling), and Neptune patrol the far reaches of our solar system, sucking in or otherwise diverting species-threatening chunks of rock and ice that otherwise might find themselves on orbits that intersect ours at really inconvenient times. Like, you know, when we’re in the same place.
NEO (Near-Earth Object) detection has been getting more and more attention of late, but an observer’s position on our globe makes a big difference: if you’re in North America, most of the southern sky is permanently out of reach. If you’re in Australia, the problem is reversed. And as I understand it, there isn’t a lot of observing capability in the southern hemisphere. If you look at the distribution of population and land mass, it’s not hard to see why. But the rocks are still out there.
NASA has proposed a manned mission to a NEO using the Orion spacecraft it’s developing, and there are plenty of candidate asteroids out there. I’m all for it if they can afford it. Besides going farther than the Moon, to something humans have never encountered, it’s a good idea to understand these things better so as to be able to deflect or destroy them before one of them eventually gets pitched through the strike zone right into home plate.
So could NASA do it? Sure, if they ever get Orion flying. The whole idea is that it would need less delta-V than a lunar mission and it could be done without a specialized lander – so it’s less of an engineering hurdle and more of a logistics problem. LockMart has already studied this extensively, calling it the “Plymouth Rock” mission.
Could private space do it? Well, ya’ll can probably guess how I feel about that. Once a manned Dragon is ready, I’ll bet SpaceX could put a mission together in short order if they really wanted to.
This is why building routine low-cost access to space is important: it enables us get out there and do something about it. Space travel isn’t easy or inherently safe, but there’s no reason the mechanical aspects of it can’t be made reliable and modular. Which of course is exactly what SpaceX, Bigelow, XCor, Masten, et al., are trying to do.
Think about this: what would you need to put together an asteroid mission?
Well, there’s the transportation up and down: Dragon.
How about a crew habitat and life support? Bigelow Sundancers would be a good start.
Propulsion? I don’t know, maybe existing Centaur kick-stages or whatever that Russian booster Space Adventures is using for their lunar orbit tourist flight.
Get the idea? The basic components either exist or are in development with test articles already flown in orbit. But as they say, the devil’s in the details: radiation shielding being the most obvious. Leaving the protection of the Van Allen belts is a real hazard – the Apollo program didn’t really address it, placing their faith in probability. That is, the missions were of short enough duration that the likelihood of being fried by a Coronal Mass Ejection was acceptably low. But they also recognized that if they kept going, it would eventually happen. A two or three month flight to an asteroid raises the odds significantly.
Which brings us back to my point: none of this is without risk. But nothing worth doing ever is. In the meantime, if you want to get a good idea of the sort of widespread mayhem even a relatively small asteroid or comet could produce, check out this handy little Calculator of Mass Destruction.
And be thankful that our solar system has been blessed with these gas giants which are not only nice to look at, but which protect us from all manner of big space junk.
As if Amazon hasn’t given me enough gizmos, gadgetry, and geedunk to spend money on, now we have Apple’s annual festival of brand snobbery product event tomorrow.
OK, that was a little snarky. Admittedly I’m just jealous of all those people who can afford Macbooks. iPhones aren’t out of reach, but my employer already has me carrying a (cough cough) crackberry and I just don’t want to lug two smartphones around.
That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.
iPods are a different story. Dadgum if I don’t love the little beasties, and if rumors hold true we should be seeing an all-new Nano introduced tomorrow. Behold the project known as Codename N31:
Nano-nano!
I’ve no idea how close to reality that rendering will be, since it originates with Japanese internet fanboys. But it certainly looks plausible, considering these aftermarket Nano cases are supposed to be the real deal:
Couple that with a reported shortage of current-gen Nanos (that is, Apple’s not sending replacement stock to retailers), and it’s a good bet we’ll see something new tomorrow.
Supposedly 16gb memory will be standard, but the big question is which operating system will it run? It would be great to load up a Nano with some of my kid’s Touch apps, but it’s hard to see how Apple would undercut their own product line like that.
The wild card in all this is the rumored iPad Mini. If they release a 7″ version that goes head-to-head against the Kindle Fire HD on price, then the market will get verrrry interesting. I’d have a hard time forking over $300 or so for a Mini if the Touch is still in the 200-250 range.
So why not just get a Touch? Because I’m really cheap – and really clumsy. The screen on a Touch wouldn’t last a week in my back pocket. Thus, I dig Nanos.
But I can dream. More rumory goodness at 9to5mac.com, which is where I found these pics and other juicy details.
Being a gadget freak, I’m always eager to hear about the latest whiz-bang computing devices. Alas, I’m only limited by the power of money. If only the kids didn’t like living in a house and eating food so much…and those braces? Meh.
C’mon boys, wouldn’t you rather Dad got an iPad?
And if a frog had wings it wouldn’t bust its ass hopping. $700 is a lot of money to play Fruit Ninja. But I can dream, right?
So let’s narrow this down a bit: being a budget-conscious gadget freak, I’m always eager to hear about the latest whiz-bang devices from Amazon. Which means today I’m a very happy boy.
Checking off the latest techie goodness from the Left Coast:
Front-lit Kindle touch? Tick.
Cheaper Kindle Fire with more memory and battery life? Tick-tick.
Kindle Fire HDs with 16GB memory and screen resolution comparable to iPad’s Retina? Tick-tick-tick…
But wait, there’s more! The HDs come in 7″ and 9″ models, priced at $199 and $299 respectively. BOOM!
There’s also a higher-capacity Fire HD with 4G LTE wireless, at a price point that gives Apple the Big Middle Finger.
Lots more from Wired’s live blog of the Amazon event, just follow the link above. There’s also a quick write-up at Gizmodo.
After singing the praises of indie publishing through Kindle Direct, Jeff Bezos also announced a new product from the KDP service: Kindle Serials. For one price, you can buy a serial novel and automatically receive each new chapter as it’s published. As a bonus, you get to interact with the author during the writing process.
I like the sound of this, as the next book I have in mind after the Perigee sequel would be big. As in spanning-generations big. I’d figured on it being a three-volume work but a serial version might be just the ticket.
Finally, it appears that Kindle Singles are now being priced at $1.99. Not sure yet how that might affect the $0.99 price as a promotional tool, but my first guess is that we won’t see many more novels priced that low.
Ho-lee crap. NASA actually pulled it off. Curiosity, a rover that’s roughly the size of a Mini Cooper, is now safely on Mars and ready to cruise.
This was a real feat – if , like most normal people, you haven’t been paying attention (as opposed to abbie-normal space geeks like me), this wasn’t your average Mars landing. Which proves we’re living in the future: namely, that “average Mars landing” is not a downright laughable turn of phrase.
Anyways, this one was lowered by a hovering rocket-powered robotic sky crane like something from The Terminator. Guess the bubble-wrap air bag technique wasn’t going to work this time.
I’ll post more later, for now here’s some linkage to sites with a lot more information than I have time to gather.
Oh, and did I mention it also has a rocket-blasting laser? Cool points are off the scale.
UPDATE: An overhead shot of Curiosity under parachute, from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. I don’t think you can even measure the cool points anymore…
How the attack sub HMS Conqueror pulled off one of the most 
So could NASA do it? Sure, if they ever get Orion flying. The whole idea is that it would need less delta-V than a lunar mission and it could be done without a specialized lander – so it’s less of an engineering hurdle and more of a logistics problem. LockMart has already studied this extensively, calling it the “Plymouth Rock” mission.
Ho-lee crap. NASA actually pulled it off. Curiosity, a rover that’s roughly the size of a Mini Cooper, is now safely on Mars and ready to cruise.
The Chiles Files 