A flyby of a comet, Stardust, Comet Wild 2 Encounter on January 2, 2004.
Also, Mars landings - Spirit on Jan 3 and Opportunity on Jan 24.
See Mars Rover missions for details. Note landing times below.
Spirit Lands: January 3, 2004 about 8:35 pm PST
Opportunity Lands: January 24, 2004 about 9:05 pm PST
See also the updated list of JPL Centers in the Science Index.
From the New Scientist:
Pretty women scramble men's ability to assess the futureWell, Duh! Only a scientist would find this is news."Men lose the ability to think rationally when they see beautiful women, suggests new research"
Here's the latest list of events and discoveries in science:
"The pulsar rotates 339 times per second and produces a burst of light lasting 43 microseconds. The pulsar has held steady over 2 years of study and is one of the best astrophysical clocks found."
Astronomers from the University of Hawaii (UH), Institute for Astronomy (IfA) today released the first image from a gigantic new 16 Megapixel infrared camera recently mounted on the UH 2.2-meter (88-inch) Telescope on Mauna Kea. The new camera provides a sixteen-fold increase in sky coverage together with much higher sensitivity than the 1-Megapixel cameras in widespread use on telescopes for the last decade. Until larger telescopes have similar cameras, it makes the 30-year-old UH 2.2-meter telescope the most powerful in the world for infrared imaging. Read the full story and picture at University of Hawaii.
For New Science facilities, the Department of Energy's new road map puts fusion and supercomputers first. From the NewScientist.com news service:
Making clean energy by nuclear fusion and building supercomputers to speed up scientific research are the top priorities in physical science, according to a new US Department of Energy road map.
Read the full list of projects and see why particle physicists feel shortchanged at the New Scientist.
Martian Rivers were real says Malin Space Science Systems:
Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) has been operating in Mars orbit longer than any other spacecraft. The Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) began taking pictures in September 1997, shortly after MGS arrived. Since that time, it has only imaged about 3% of the martian surface with its high resolution (1.5 to 12 meters, 5 to 40 feet, per pixel), narrow angle (NA) camera system. Thus, an important discovery from MOC can--and does-- come at any time, even five and six years into the mission.What is important about this discovery? First, it provides clear, unequivocal evidence that some valleys on Mars experienced the same type of on-going, or, persistent, flow over long periods of time as rivers do on Earth. Second, because the fan is today a deposit of sedimentary rock, it demonstrates that some sedimentary rocks on Mars were, as has been suspected but never clearly demonstrated, deposited in a liquid (probably water) environment. Third, the general shape, pattern of its channels, and low topographic slopes provide circumstantial evidence that the feature was actually a delta--that is, a deposit made when a river or stream enters a body of water. In other words, the landform discovered by MOC may be the strongest indicator yet that some craters and other depressions on Mars once held lakes.
Read the whole fascinating story and see the evidence in high resolution pictures at Malin Space Science Systems.
A record flare called a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) was recorded on November 4, 2003. It was rated as X28, which is an estimate because it saturated the detectors on the SOHO satellite. Two days later, another CME saturated the SOHO detectors again, and it appears that this may be close to the record.
This astonishing display of flares is unusual in that it is happening three years into the normal cycle of sunspot declines, and at record levels. It may already have had some impact on earth's weather, as last week the Pacific Northwest had some record low temperatures. Scientists say that we are still in the early part of our discoveries about the sun.
Read more about these events at NASA's NASCOM site.
Fluctuations in the Ionosphere caused by earthquakes can be detcted by measuring the very small delay changes in signals from GPS satellites. This is an unexpected discovery that was clearly not based on the design for GPS satellites. The benefit to science is from serendipity, the lucky discovery of something not expected when searching for other things.
Read more from The Inquirer, with more science from the European Space Agency site, the home of the original discovery team.
BBC News reports on the largest telescope ever seen. Its 30-metre-diameter mirror would be almost 10 times as big as those in the Keck telescopes in Hawaii, currently the world's largest observatories.
The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation is funding a $17.5m feasibility study and it could be ready for work by 2012. Astronomers say the new telescope would allow a more detailed look at distant stars and galaxies, and aid the search for planets beyond our Solar System.
Read the full story at BBC News.
Astronomers have found the first "dark galaxy" - a black cloud of hydrogen gas and exotic particles, devoid of stars. The gloomy galaxy lurks two million light years from Earth.
Read the full story at New Scientist.
Also on dark matter, Joshua Simon, Timothy Robishaw and Leo Blitz of the University of California, Berkeley, observed a cloud of hydrogen gas called HVC 127-41-330 using the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico.
PlanetLab seeks to re-create the Internet in the form of a distributed, planetwide parallel processor. Scientists would be allocated a slice of the system on which to perform any computer function now residing on their desktop or portable PC.
"A movement to build an overlay network called PlanetLab atop the Internet is mushrooming in the same heady collaborative spirit that propelled the open-source Linux operating system. At the same time that PlanetLab is thinking big, another movement is burrowing to ground level, attempting to extend the Internet downward into a fine-grained, ubiquitous network of sensors and actuators.
Since the dot-com bust and the wider economic slowdown, there has been much speculation about a new killer app to reignite the technology sector's fortunes. A conference on emerging technologies held recently at MIT suggested that elusive agent may be hiding in plain sight in the form of the Internet. Intel Corp., which is especially active in this pursuit, described a two-pronged plan to retrofit the Internet by means of PlanetLab and a network composed of miniature hardware called Motes. If they come to fruition, the two ideas could radically reshape both the electronics industry and consumer products."
Scientific American has an article about a science network for the public. This could be a valuable knowledge tool for everyone. You don't need a PhD to have a useful grounding in science. In addition, you can answer your children's 'simple' questions like "Why is the sky blue?"
One more reason to learn science is from the following quote from the article - in the last two sentences:
"Over the past two decades, however, a literary genre has arisen in which professional scientists are presenting original research and theories in books written for both their colleagues and the public. Most of Stephen Jay Gould's works are in this mode, as are those of Edward O. Wilson, Ernst Mayr, Jared Diamond, Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker and others. In fact, if you want to be considered a cultured person in today's society, it is not enough to be steeped in literature, art and music. You need to know something about science."
Find out more in the Scientific American article. Also check out the Cable Science Network. Science can become a fascinating study into biology, genetics, chemistry and the physics of how the real world works. You can start now by browsing the Science Index, built for exactly that purpose.
eSTAR is a project to build computer programs that can detect unusual events and bring them to the immediate attention of astronomers and astrophysicists for more detailed study. This is a UK joint project between the Astrophysics Research Institute at Liverpool, John Moores University and the Astrophysics Rearch Group of the School of Physics at the University of Exeter. The project will include telescopes and astronomers from around the world. Read more about this at the eSTAR Web Site, and the Press Release at Outreach in Hawaii.
Scientific discoveries are in the news. There is finally some evidence of Dark Matter, the term scientists have used to describe the missing mass of the galaxy. Missing mass is deduced from star orbits which are too tight to be explained by the observable mass in the Galaxy. This missing mass (unseen) was postulated to explain the measured observations. Check out Evidence of Dark Matter in the New Scientist.
Along with dark matter, scientists have some remarkable photos of what is called a 'Galaxy Eater', a larger galaxy tearing apart a smaller one that passes close by. It turns out that our home galaxy (aka the Milky Way) is the eater and a small galaxy close by is already thoroughly torn. Read more about the Galaxy Eater at the University of Virginia. There is additional information at the 2MASS (Two Micron All Sky Survey), where much of the data for this discovery was collected.
In addition to the discoveries above, one of our nation's top universities, MIT, has released 500 OCW (Open CourseWare) courses to the world via the Internet. This is a gold mine of the best the US has to offer in education, with many science courses. If science has tickled your curosity, this is the place to seriously scratch that itch. Check out the news MIT Launches 500 OCW courses, and take a look at MIT's OCW site.
Rounding out this science update, Japan's Earth Simulator shows some interesting results. Presented at a climate workshop in Cambridge, UK, the first results promise better prediction of dangerous weather such as hurricanes, very heavy rain and heatwaves. Check out the BBC News report, and the English language Earth Simulator Center.
If the Nobel prizes didn't interest you, perhaps the Ig Nobel prizes will. Celebrating the obscure and absurd edges of science, these annual awards have become famous in their own right. It's worth a look just for humor or to see how far out some science really goes. Appropriately enough, the web site is www.improbable.com. Learn something really far out at the Ig Nobel Awards.
Dr. Kaku talks about physics and the nature of the universe with an unusual clarity. He manages to take complex physics concepts and make them clear to non-scientists. Here are a few of his concepts from the Guest of Honor
Later this week I'll be adding notes from Dr. Kaku's panel on Time Travel, plus an excellent overview by two scientists from JPL on past, present and future robotic explorations.
One important comment they made was that they did not see any conflict between robotic and manned exploration. They viewed the process as robotic exploration first, and sending people later to deal with complex issues beyond robotic capability.
About Virtual Observatories
Astronomy faces a data avalanche. Breakthroughs in telescope, detector, and computer technology allow astronomical surveys to produce terabytes of images and catalogs. These datasets will cover the sky in different wavebands, from gamma- and X-rays, optical, infrared, through to radio. In a few years it will be easier to "dial-up" a part of the sky than wait many months to access a telescope.
With the advent of inexpensive storage technologies and the availability of high-speed networks, the concept of multi-terabyte on-line databases interoperating seamlessly is no longer outlandish. More and more catalogs will be interlinked, query engines will become more and more sophisticated, and the research results from on-line data will be just as rich as that from "real" telescopes.
Moore's law is driving astronomy even further: the planned Large Synoptic Survey Telescope will produce over 10 petabytes per year by 2008! These technological developments will fundamentally change the way astronomy is done. These changes will have dramatic effects on the sociology of astronomy itself.
A new approach to finding undiscovered objects buried in immense astronomical databases has produced an early and unexpected payoff: a new instance of a hard-to-find type of star known as a brown dwarf.
NVO researchers emphasized that a single new brown dwarf added to a list of approximately 200 known brown dwarfs isn� as scientifically exciting as the timing of the new discovery and the tantalizing hint it offers to the potential of the NVO. The discovery came at a stage when organizers were simply hoping to use NVO to confirm existing science, not make new findings.
The PR release with several links to astronomy information is here. The US National Virtual Observatory site, part of a $10 million NSF project, has links to four classes of products developed so far, with a broad range of information. Most of this is technical for astronomical science, but there are also several overview documents and a compressed movie under Publications. Look for NVO Movie.
The COSMOS grid aims to allow collaboration on the history of the universe after the big bang, tracked over 14 billion years.
The first Grid Virtual Organization (VO) in Ireland is for Grid-enabled Computational Physics of Natural Phenomena, alternatively known as CosmoGrid. This VO is led by DIAS (Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies). The other partners are DCU, NUIG, UCD, HEAnet, Met Eireann, Armagh Observatory, and Grid-Ireland (represented by TCD, UCC and NUIG). Here is an outline of the original proposal.
CosmoGrid Proposal: http://frigg.nuigalway.ie/cosmogrid/outline.html
Other members of the COSMOS group include
the Dept of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical
Physics, the Institute of Astronomy, the
Cavendish Labs at Cambridge, Imperial College,
the University of Portsmouth and the University
of Sussex.
Cosmo Grid: http://www.cosmogrid.org/
SGI News: The Silicon Graphics Inc. press release
about CosmoGrid.
http://sgi.com/newsroom/press_releases/2003/april/cosmogrid.html
Get a copy of a very nice science overview PDF from SGI.
Geosciences and information technology researchers collaborating in the GEON project are gathering at SDSC from around the United States and Canada for the 2003 GEON All-Hands Meeting, which runs from April 16-18.
GEON is a multi-institution coalition of information technology (IT) and Earth Science researchers that is collaborating to create a modern information technology framework, or cyberinfrastructure, for the Geosciences. The large NSF Information Technology Research (ITR) project is developing technologies to enable geoscientists to integrate, analyze, model, and visualize todays enormous multidisciplinary 4-D Earth Science data sets. By providing leading-edge data integration and grid computing services to support geosciences research and collaboration on unprecedented scales, GEON will make possible new insights into the complex dynamics of Earth systems.
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