LM3 Design – Page 9 – Hybrid Design • Video • Photography

Space: The Final Frontier

No truer words can ever be spoken. The depths of the mind are indeed complex but not tangible. Our oceans floors hold many secrets about life and the history of our planet. Space is, for all intensive purposes, infinite. This isn’t technically true, to our knowledge. We estimate the true size of the Universe to be 93 Billion Light Years. So vast, in fact, that light from one side will never reach the other. This is why it is the pinnacle of exploration.

Eventually, one day, our destiny will lie somewhere in space. Perhaps another planetary body in this solar system or even another star system. That is, if we don’t blow ourselves up or suffer a cataclysmic set back.

The recent White House budget leaves me both concerned and yet I see an opportunity to be optimistic. I’ve been reading forums to get people’s takes on this. Mind you this is coming from people who work in the industry to plain people like myself. It is inevitable that politics gets head-firsted into the mix. I made that slang up. Nice eh? I guess there is no way around it but the degree of “This was Bush’s fault!”; “This was Griffin’s fault”; “Obama sux!” is just a little much.

I try my damnedest to take a middle road approach. I want science. I want exploration. I want a manned flight program (also termed HSF for Human Space Flight). At the moment we have it with Shuttle. In a few short months, it will be done and gone. What happens after that? We’re grounded, at least humans are.

Private companies are really getting into the mix of things which does excite me. Thing is, they’re a ways off from manned flight. It will happen, just not quite soon as we’d like.

Constellation is dead. I’m sad and yet I can understand this move. Some claim to have had the insight or ESP enough to know it was doomed from day one. I think having a pessimistic attitude isn’t very healthy. I don’t work in the industry, I follow it from a few rows back. I can say that my interest is important, not as a single entity but gathered with the combined interest of persons just like myself. Lack of public interest will kill a program deader than dead. Apollo anyone?

So, I thought about the cancellation of that program and realized, ok, maybe this isn’t as bad as it seems. I’m still icky feeling about not having the ability to put humans up but lets think this out. The downfall of Constellation was reaching back to the past to sort of re-use older technologies or at least model from them. What we need are newer technologies that are laced with our learnings of the past.

I think the biggest technological advance we need is in propulsion. Chemical rockets are dandy at getting heavy vehicles off the ground and into space but once in space you need something else. Something that’s less cumbersome, less prone to failure and has some oomph! These technologies should be researched to make Moon and Mars missions faster. Transit time to Mars is MONTHS. With new propulsion you could get it down to weeks; or so I’ve heard.

So, new technologies and private companies. I think I actually like the sound of that. Will they deliver? The talk is there, the walk is yet to come.

More notes on the budget are promised robotics and planetary missions. This is very exciting to me. Rovers are great tools for science! Just look at Spirit and Opportunity; they vastly outlived their planned mission time. If we had a mission going up every other month, I’d be stoked.

A final note about canceling the Moon program. Listen, we’ve been there before. Yes, actual people walked on the actual Moon. That program was initially a race; a race we would win. After that, you had a group of giddy scientists drooling over the prospect of getting some precious samples back. That came later and Apollo XVII was the final Moon-shot. We never spent more than a couple of days there. When we go back, we need to plan on STAYING for a length of time. Weeks, not days.

China wants to go there. Let them go, plant their flag and then come back. It’s a great thing for a country. I’d applaud them for it. As the saying goes “been there, done that”. It’s time we went a step ahead. That way when countries are landing and planting their flags, we can wave at them from our cozy Moon habitats. From that point we can build on and then eyeball Mars or even asteroids.

So, finally, it’s bittersweet for me. I wanted to see Constellation work but ultimately I want to see anything work. I’ll hold on the promise of some serious R&D and science missions. I’ll hold on to private companies keeping us in orbit too. It’s a big time shake up of things. Perhaps it was needed.

Obama says we need to get young people into science and math. I couldn’t agree more. If he truly means this then he needs to deliver on this budget. NASA has inspired generations of people. Let’s keep it that way.

If this flops as a dud and our space program is left floundering for years, I’ll be one mad space cadet. >:o

The Scale of the Universe [Updated]

This is a very clever little bit of flash put together by someone whom I have no idea who they are. All I know is that the site was blocked at work. I went in and nabbed the SWF file and I’m going to place it on my blog. You still have to endure the Newgrounds logo to see the animation.

[swfobj src=”http://static.onemorelevel.com/games3/scale-of-the-universe-2.swf” alt=”Scale of the Universe” width=”640″ height=”440″]

Use the keyboard to move left or right for a smoother experience. The largest things in the Universe are mind boggling. The really fascinating stuff is all of the tiny things that go into making the world around us. You can see how small a neutrino is for instance; and why it passes unhindered through just about everything (including entire planets!).

The music is very pleasant too. 🙂

A new type of supernova?

SN 2006gy — This one exploding star outshines an entire galaxy! The NGC 1260 core is the dimmer object.

Ok, I thought I was all on the up and up with these things and how they worked. Ok, that is, as much as a layman can be on the up and up. I am not an astrophysicist (yet)!

So get this: a few years ago we witnessed a strange supernova. Actually, a little back story first. The general idea I always had was that stars with several solar masses went supernova. Reason being, they burned through their fuel at a greater rate. Once the fuel at the core was gone or fusion wasn’t adequate enough to resist the inward pressure (gravity) the whole thing collapsed. This releases a tremendous amount of energy and essentially the star explodes. You get left with a huge amount of ‘stuff’ being blown out into space and you’re left with either a neutron star or black hole at what used to be the core of the star.

That was a super basic overview and back story. So what is this new supernova? It is being called a Pair-instability Supernova. What the what?! If the name sounds bizarre then wait until you hear about how it works.

So here is how it goes. First, you need a supermassive star. A star of 130-250 solar masses seems to be the “zone”. Instinctively, one thinks “the more massive the star, the more massive the black hole it leaves behind”. Well, not really. At least, not in the case of this kind of star. See, these supermassive stars have low metallicity. I believe that means they’re almost entirely Hydrogen and Helium with very little other elements present…

…and well, I’m going to just post what Wiki says because I’m feeling lazy:

A pair instability supernova occurs when pair production, the production of free electrons and positrons in the collision between atomic nuclei and energetic gamma rays, reduces thermal pressure inside a supermassive star‘s core. This pressure drop leads to a partial collapse, then greatly accelerated burning in a runaway thermonuclear explosion which blows the star completely apart without leaving a black hole remnant behind.^[1]^[2] Pair instability supernovae can only happen in stars with a mass range from around 130 to 250 solar masses and low to moderate metallicity (low abundance of elements other than hydrogen and helium, a situation common in Population III stars). The recently observed objects SN 2006gy and SN 2007bi^[3] are hypothesized to have been pair instability supernovae.

So there, you have it. The star goes kablooey and leaves nothing but the fresh scent of brute. Ok maybe not. Incredible though, that a star can completely obliterate itself and leave nothing behind.

With that said, the star SN 2006gy is in a galaxy some 240 million light years away (ie the light we saw originated 240 million years ago). There is a star nearer to us, Eta Carinae that might go supernova much in the same way. If it does, it will likely be brilliantly bright. Visible during the day and able to be read by at night.

Fact is stranger than fiction, once again.

More info here

And here (this site has multiple links at the bottom)

Things you probably don’t think about: Why can’t we see Venus overhead at night?

We all know the planets are out there, orbiting tirelessly around the Sun. How do we know? Well, we can see them, and most with the naked eye! Something you might not have thought about is why we can see all the planets overhead at night except Venus and Mercury.

Why is that?

Here is the simple answer: Our orbit is outside of Venus and Mercury’s orbit. Therefore when they are directly overhead it is daytime to some degree. Have no fear, I’m a fan of using imagery. Take a look below.

Inner Solar System — Note: light travels out in all directions obviously and this is not to scale either

So you can see there, when the Sun is overhead, the orbits of Venus and Mercury are also overhead. Since they never travel outside of the Earth’s orbit, we never see them overhead at night. Mars on the other hand is commonly visible at night (as is Jupiter and Saturn). We also go around the Sun faster than Mars so we actually lap it (it goes around every 1.8 Earth years). Neat huh?

Venus is often called the Morning or Evening Star. That’s because we see it either before the Sun rises or after the Sun sets, depending on where all the planets are at the time. After it rises far enough in the morning sky, the sky itself becomes too bright to be able to easily see it. Though it is possible. As for setting, it just dips below the horizon.

Just recently we were also able to see Mercury in the evening sky. The window to capture that rare moment was small; just a couple of weeks I believe. I snapped a photo which you can see in an earlier post.

So there you have it of something you probably never wondered about in the first place. 🙂

Strangelet or StrangePET?

It will steal your covers, guaranteed.

Disclaimer: I’m in the camp of firmly believing that even if a black hole were created it’d be so tiny it’d evaporate in an instant. I do not think the LHC poses any threat to Mankind, Earth or Beyond.

Also, what IS a strangelet? Just as the name implies, it’s very strange. I’ll just post a link here to a site that goes into a bit more detail about what it theoretically is. Here is the path to knowledge

Venus and Mercury sitting in a tree…

Ok, maybe not sitting IN a tree but I had to dodge trees to be able to see them both. I went out with my D3000 and snapped a few pics with the standard lens. I can bet a telephoto or even a cam attached to a telescope would take a great pic. So long as the field of view allowed them both in the same photo!

So here is a smallish version:

And here is the higher resolution version clickety

Large Hadron Collider

This is COOL!

I wanted to get that out of the way. Well when they first fired this thing up over a year ago it didn’t go so well. Something broke so they had to go back in and fix it. This isn’t like replacing an alternator on a car. The circumference of the collider is 27km. On top of that it is just insanely complex. Well they worked and worked and yesterday it went back online. I watched some of the webcast. It was great to see all the people there celebrating as it appeared to work as planned.

Well, what IS the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Ok, I’m not really smart enough to type it all up and have it work. So I’m going to take it from the actual site itself. Here are two explanations:

Simple: Take two beams of particles (protons or ions) and send them whizzing around a circular track at 99% the speed of light. Merge the beams near a detector. Watch to see what happens when these little particle smack into one another.

More detailed:

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a gigantic scientific instrument near Geneva, where it spans the border between Switzerland and France about 100 m underground. It is a particle accelerator used by physicists to study the smallest known particles – the fundamental building blocks of all things. It will revolutionise our understanding, from the minuscule world deep within atoms to the vastness of the Universe.

Two beams of subatomic particles called ‘hadrons’ – either protons or lead ions – will travel in opposite directions inside the circular accelerator, gaining energy with every lap. Physicists will use the LHC to recreate the conditions just after the Big Bang, by colliding the two beams head-on at very high energy. Teams of physicists from around the world will analyse the particles created in the collisions using special detectors in a number of experiments dedicated to the LHC.

There are many theories as to what will result from these collisions, but what’s for sure is that a brave new world of physics will emerge from the new accelerator, as knowledge in particle physics goes on to describe the workings of the Universe. For decades, the Standard Model of particle physics has served physicists well as a means of understanding the fundamental laws of Nature, but it does not tell the whole story. Only experimental data using the higher energies reached by the LHC can push knowledge forward, challenging those who seek confirmation of established knowledge, and those who dare to dream beyond the paradigm.

What I found interesting was the power at which is operates. Right now it’s going to 7TeV or Tera-electronvolts. Sounds insane! Though that’s about the same kinetic energy of a mosquito in flight, from what I read. So, I suppose you might not even feel the beam hitting your hand. I want to clarify, that having a ‘few’ particles pass through you isn’t a big deal. Having them pass through you in the trillions IS bad. I understand that’s the rate at which these hadrons will be passing each other; trillions per second. Whoa!

Other cool LHC facts from their site:

At full power, trillions of protons will race around the LHC accelerator ring 11 245 times a second, travelling at 99.99% the speed of light. Two beams of protons will each travel at a maximum energy of 7 TeV (tera-electronvolt), corresponding to head-to-head collisions of 14 TeV. Altogether some 600 million collisions will take place every second.

The data recorded by each of the big experiments at the LHC will fill around 100 000 dual layer DVDs every year. To allow the thousands of scientists scattered around the globe to collaborate on the analysis over the next 15 years (the estimated lifetime of the LHC), tens of thousands of computers located around the world are being harnessed in a distributed computing network called the Grid.

Safety? Yes it’s safe. The bottom line is that collisions like these occur in space all of the time. I think you have as good a chance of passing through a wall with both you and the wall in one piece as this machine creating a killer black hole. So, don’t worry about it. Also, if it DID create a killer black hole, well, no one will be around to care, eh? 🙂

If you made it this far, I commend you and you deserve cool linkage. Here is your gift, a link to see some of the data coming from LHC while it is online. This. is. cool.

What will happen? — Lets find out! ( I did not draw this it links to where I got it from)

Shuttle ‘go’ for April 5th launch

STS-131 Seems there were some technical issues that threatened a delay of the launch. Normally I’m all over the news on this stuff but I’ve slacked a bit. I am happy though that we’ll get to see a launch in less than a week.

Here are several articles on STS-131

From NASA’s website:

Discovery will carry a multi-purpose logistics module filled with science racks for the laboratories aboard the station. The mission has three planned spacewalks, with work to include replacing an ammonia tank assembly, retrieving a Japanese experiment from the station’s exterior, and switching out a rate gyro assembly on the S0 segment of the station’s truss structure.

STS-131 will be the 33rd shuttle mission to the station.

We’re behind you Discovery!

Why many surveys of distant galaxies miss 90 percent of their targets

(PhysOrg.com) — Astronomers have long known that in many surveys of the very distant Universe, a large fraction of the total intrinsic light was not being observed. Now, thanks to an extremely deep survey using two of the four giant 8.2-metre telescopes that make up ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) and a unique custom-built filter, astronomers have determined that a large fraction of galaxies whose light took 10 billion years to reach us have gone undiscovered. The survey also helped uncover some of the faintest galaxies ever found at this early stage of the Universe.

Full story here.

Though, I do have my own theory as to where they looked…

There it is! And it has my other sock!

Comics and randomness

Believe it or not, years and YEARS ago I used to draw. A lot. It’s like a muscle though. If you don’t work it and practice at it, you get rusty. Well, I did at least. I still like to doodle but mostly I like to think of funny little stories or scenarios. Something like SNL skits or anything along those lines. I’ve doodled them before but never really did much with them. I have TONS of comics I drew when I was in middle/high school. Mind you, these are simple three panel comics – not X-men or Spiderman comics. I wasn’t quite of that caliber.

I like to think of myself as more of someone who’d write or help write the story. So I’ve decided to take my zany ‘one liner’ thoughts and turn them into comic strips here and there. They are crude stick figures but that means nothing. The guy over at XKCD has some of the funniest (and cool) stuff I’ve ever seen and it’s predominantly stick figures. Yes, I’m copying that style in that I’m not an exquisite artist. I also don’t have time for that. So little lumpy sticks will express my humor.

Well, today on the way to work we were talking about ‘s-exting’ and a funny thought popped into my head. Here is that thought in ‘doodle’ form:

Bad idea!