Kepler Project Finds Earth-Comparable Planet In Star's Habitable Zone

Via ellroon (again!), we read, spellbound, as NASA informs us of the Kepler mission's first "hit" of exactly the sort everyone hoped it would make... not exactly a new event (almost a year old, in fact), but I just noticed it:

Using NASA's Kepler Space Telescope, astronomers have discovered the first Earth-size planet orbiting a star in the "habitable zone" -- the range of distance from a star where liquid water might pool on the surface of an orbiting planet. The discovery of Kepler-186f confirms that planets the size of Earth exist in the habitable zone of stars other than our sun.

While planets have previously been found in the habitable zone, they are all at least 40 percent larger in size than Earth and understanding their makeup is challenging. Kepler-186f is more reminiscent of Earth.

"The discovery of Kepler-186f is a significant step toward finding worlds like our planet Earth," said Paul Hertz, NASA's Astrophysics Division director at the agency's headquarters in Washington. "Future NASA missions, like the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite and the James Webb Space Telescope, will discover the nearest rocky exoplanets and determine their composition and atmospheric conditions, continuing humankind's quest to find truly Earth-like worlds."

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Hot-damn! First we discovered a planet orbiting around another star. Then over the years we found hundreds of planets of different fundamental types orbiting around many stars. Now we're seeing something not too different from Earth, though many particulars are not yet known.

I always knew this day would come; what I didn't know is that the discovery would be made within my lifetime... 

(For interested parties, NASA offers some simple explanations about how Kepler accomplishes the detection of exoplanets. And please view visuals on the linked sites; I can't do them justice here with my self-imposed file size limits.)

NASA Study: Mars Oceans Larger, Deeper, Lasted Longer Than Previously Thought

Michele Starr at c|net gives the particulars. Some people (John Gribbin comes to mind) are not going to be happy with the increasing likelihood that Mars long ago had sufficient water that the question of whether it ever supported life will surely now have to be reevaluated.

NASA/GSFC

QuikSCAT's Replacement, RapidScat, Arrives At International Space Station, Will Resume Hurricane Forecasting Capabilities Much Missed Since QuikSCAT's 2009 Demise

Dr. Jeff Masters at Weather Underground tells us about RapidScat. This one is worth reading in its (relatively short) entirety. Here are some of the basics, from a post on Dr. Masters's blog yesterday:

In November 2009, one of the greatest success stories in the history of satellite meteorology came to an end when the venerable QuikSCAT satellite failed. Launched in 1999, the QuikSCAT satellite became one of the most useful and controversial meteorological satellites ever to orbit the Earth. It carried a scatterometer--a radar instrument that can measure near-surface wind speed and direction over the ocean. ... A QuikSCAT replacement called ISS-RapidScat was funded in 2012 and built in just 18 months. RapidScat was successfully launched on September 20, 2014 on a SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft, which docked last week with the International Space Station (ISS.) This morning, RapidScat was plucked out of the Dragon and install it on the Space Station. The heaters have been turned on, and full activation of RapidScat is expected on Wednesday. In a clever reuse of hardware originally built to test parts of NASA's QuikScat satellite, RapidScat cost NASA just $30 million--80% lower than if the instrument had been built new.

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Wednesday... that's today! And according to Masters's article, it has been installed.

QuikSCAT lasted 10 years, well beyond its expected lifetime of 3 years, and was much appreciated by those of us who live in hurricane‑affected areas, for whom early and accurate forecasts are the key to preparation and thus to human survival and, where possible, avoidance of large-scale storm damage. It's been a scary few years without QuikSCAT; RapidScat, though its virtues and limitations are different, is a welcome replacement.

Please note that this is one of the first serious practical missions using a privately developed SpaceX spacecraft, which is, to put it bluntly, all America has in the way of launch capability now that the Space Shuttle has retired. Even putting aside a projected Mars mission in a few years, everyone will benefit from the availability of these craft. And considering the cost saving in delivering RapidScat to the ISS, surely even Republicans could learn to love SpaceX, with its ever-developing expertise in automated space technology.

Space: The Final (Commercial/Tourist) Frontier

Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo (or VSS Enterprise) is looking mighty good to begin passenger tourist service in 2014. I never would have imagined that, in the span of my lifetime, 1) America's official government space program would dwindle to this point, and 2) an international commercial tourist service (for very wealthy people, of course) would take off. All social commentary aside, I admit I'm impressed.

If you have any doubt that it's truly a commercial venture, watch this, um, commercial for Virgin Galactic. (Scaled for medium large display.)

Chang'e Lands Successfully On Moon

Remember Chang'e, the Chinese space vehicle intended to soft-land on the Moon and deploy a rover? Via Bryan of Why Now?, the AP on CBC informs us it arrived successfully and is leaving "deep traces on [the Moon's] loose soil" today. (See video on linked page.)

When I was 10 years old I assumed this sort of event would be routine by now. Because Saint Ronald Reagan effectively abandoned any aspect of the American space program that could not be turned directly to military purposes, it has actually been almost 40 years since America left the moon. America gave up space research, and humankind is the poorer for it.

Congratulations to China. It is good to know that as America abandons its creative technological past in favor of direct transfers of taxpayers' money to already wealthy people, at least one nation intends to revive and continue the efforts America gave up.

Hey, maybe we can ask China for a lift to the International Space Station. We've been depending on Russia to move people there and back...

Moon... Rover... Wider Than A Mile... ♬

China today launched a spacecraft aimed at soft-landing a rover on the Moon in the middle of this month. The mission is named Chang'e 3, after a mythical Chinese moon goddess, and the rover is named Yutu or Jade Rabbit, after her equally mythical pet.

In 2003, China entered the very small club of nations involved (currently or previously) in human space flight. More recently, China successfully sent an unmanned craft to orbit the Moon, subsequently intentionally crashing it into the Moon. (Better to litter the surface than space near the Moon!)

Search Google Images on "chang'e 3 rover" for a lot of pictures related to the mission. The rover is not much to look at, but it's a lot more substantial than America's current Moon program, which is, uh, mythical. My best wishes to the goddess and her rabbit.

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Afterthought: An Australian analyst goes all touchy-cranky about accusations of similarity of design to America's Mars rovers.

Interstellar Space!

Sorry I missed this on Thursday:

PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft officially is the first human-made object to venture into interstellar space. The 36-year-old probe is about 12 billion miles (19 billion kilometers) from our sun.

New and unexpected data indicate Voyager 1 has been traveling for about one year through plasma, or ionized gas, present in the space between stars. Voyager is in a transitional region immediately outside the solar bubble, where some effects from our sun are still evident. A report on the analysis of this new data, an effort led by Don Gurnett and the plasma wave science team at the University of Iowa, Iowa City, is published in Thursday's edition of the journal Science.

"Now that we have new, key data, we believe this is mankind's historic leap into interstellar space," said Ed Stone, Voyager project scientist based at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena. "The Voyager team needed time to analyze those observations and make sense of them. But we can now answer the question we've all been asking -- 'Are we there yet?' Yes, we are."

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I am glad to have lived to see the day (more or less; the actual point in time is a bit ambiguous). The Voyager probes aren't exactly Enterprise-class starships, and none of us will live to see those, but we take hope in the accomplishments available to us in our time...

(H/T NTodd.)

Mars And Mercury

Mars Curiosity Rover, despite recent rumors, has not yet found any organic molecules on Mars, while on the positive side, NASA's MESSENGER Mercury mission, the first spacecraft to orbit Mercury, has found "three independent lines of evidence" that Mercury's perpetually shadowed polar craters contain large amounts of water ice.

H/T TPM for both news items.

Message To Stella; Also, Mars Rover Curiosity

For my birthday, this year only, to Stella:

Stella is giving me David Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity, both of us feeling that the library copy should at least occasionally go to someone else.

But there's an arguably even better present in the works: at 12:31AM CDT Aug. 6, Mars Rover Curiosity of NASA's Mars Science Laboratory is scheduled to land, and it's to be broadcast on NASA-TV public channel! If you're reading this at midnight, if you hurry, you might catch the last of the pre-landing commentary.

This is the first use of a new landing technique involving a winch; the rover is the largest, heaviest ever; and the radio delay to Mars at the moment is 14 minutes... so the landing has to be fully automatic, and we won't know for 14 minutes whether the rover is safely on the surface. Succeed or fail (so far, NASA's Mars landing record is 15 successes, 24 failures), could you possibly ask for more suspense?  

ASIDE: Happy Birthday to NTodd as well!

UPDATE: Too cool! Curiosity is on the ground! A few images have come back! Even just as a technological feat, this is impressive. Every one of you who has ever participated in a large technology-based project has some idea how those people in the control room feel. A toast to Curiosity... and to curiosity!

ADDENDUM: Does the Mars Science Laboratory pique your, um, curiosity? Read the wiki!

Sally Ride (1951-2012)

First American woman astronaut in space, scientist with several advanced degrees, educator and inspiration for millions of women in the sciences and the few in the space program... Ride was all those and more. She died at age 61, of pancreatic cancer. (Aside: Stella is the same age: though to all appearances she is healthy, it really gives me pause to think.) Ride will be much missed. Thanks and R.I.P., Dr. Ride; all of us admired you, both who you were and what you did.

Voyagers On The Edge

Spacecraft Voyager 2 and Voyager 1, launched in 1972 and 1977 respectively, are on the verge of exiting the heliosheath, the area around the Sun within which the Sun's particle emissions meet the galaxy's cosmic rays from interstellar space. Both spacecraft are still working, still sending back information. Now there's some technology for you... when is the last time you owned a TV that worked for more than 30 years?

These are humankind's first interstellar objects. If they keep on working as they go through the heliosheath (a big IF, I suspect), we will learn things about our Sun and our galaxy that have only been speculated on to this point. To those who say spaceflight has no impact on actual science, I can only stand back and point to the Voyager program.

Americans: Do You Know What Your Government Is Flying In Secret? - UPDATED

Neither do I... but if the Guardian is right, apparently it looks something like this:

Supposedly Secret Unmanned X-37B Shuttle

The Guardian has such details as are available to me (it's ironic but unsurprising that my only source is a foreign news org). The one significant thing I noticed is that the budget for the craft is "[h]undreds of millions of dollars" but the actual total is secret. If you ever wondered how much of your tax dollar is going to off-the-books projects... keep on wondering. The craft has reportedly been on two missions so far, each lasting several months. If you're wondering what it did in those months... keep on wondering.

What am I bellyaching about? Simple: there's no budget to produce a working successor to the Space Shuttle, which had a combined scientific and military mission, but "hundreds of millions of dollars" have been spent on a secret military vehicle with more limited capabilities and no known civilian mission. Can you say "aerospace/defense industry boondoggle," children? I knew you could!

UPDATE: Bryan of Why Now? provides additional information in the comment thread that leads to a different assessment of the utility of these vehicles, which he says are not secret (though their cargoes may have been). I have to defer to his greater knowledge of aerospace matters. I still don't like finding out about it after the fact, from a news source overseas.

Spitzer Infrared Telescope Captures Images Of Very Old, Distant Objects

On bad days, I awaken with the feeling that I am the Universe's oldest object. Apparently that's not so, according to a post by TPM's Carl Franzen, who shows and links some dramatic NASA photos of some very, very old objects.

The Big Bang occurred very close to 13.7 billion years ago (that figure looks more reliable all the time), and the images captured by the Spitzer seem to be of objects at the right distance to be our Universe's oldest... stars? galaxies? Exactly what they are remains to be determined; infrared has its limitations, and the obstacles are formidable. Roughly speaking, an object's distance is a measure of its age in an expanding universe, and these objects are about 13 billion light years away. The filtering required to extract the signal from the noise of nearer, brighter objects must have been a computational tour de force.

Please note that there is increasing evidence of multiple universes that either do not interact or interact only very weakly with our own, and also of other universes nearly identical to our own in which some of the processes of quantum mechanics work themselves out. We will presumably never observe the former... things? places? I am at a loss for words... directly with any sort of telescope, and we may well interact with the latter, our quantum-mechanical doppelgangers, moment to moment. It may or may not make sense to talk about how far away those are. Good popular authors on that subject include David Deutsch, John Gribbin and (on different but related subjects) Lisa Randall, to pick just a few of literally hundreds out there. And believe me, they are "out there"!

'Hey, Venus! Oh, Venus!'

It's naught to do with Frankie Avalon, but Venus passed between the Earth and the Sun two days ago, resulting in this time-lapse image:



This will not happen again for 105 (Earth) years, and TPM points us to a NASA composite video of the transit. Please have exact change, ticket or passkey ready upon entry. Oh, wait, different transit...

The Space Program: What Is Was It Worth To You?

(H/T NTodd.)

AFTERTHOUGHT: Once, long ago, I wrote an app, on a sub-subcontract, a tiny standalone app that allowed NASA to track training and qualification status of Mission Control crew members for various seats. There was nothing deep or sophisticated about the app, and what I was paid was negligible. But every time I think of it, I realize that I was given an opportunity to put my thumbprint on the grandest engineering program humans ever conceived and created. What a privilege it was!

AFTERTHOUGHT: I have encountered people, mostly Americans, surprisingly often over the years who are emphatic in their denunciation of the space program, and outraged that, say, a Moon landing was ever done, because the money could have been used to save starving children. If that is what you believe, if you believe the entire program is a waste of taxpayers' money, I'm certain that nothing I can say to you will change your mind, so I won't even try. But I will correct your error of fact. As Tyson pointed out in the video, the entire budget for NASA from the beginning amounts to 0.4% of your tax dollar... that's one penny out of every $2.50 for the arithmetic-challenged among you. If you really want to discover a waste of taxpayers' money big enough to address essentially all of our social ills that can be addressed with money... look no further than the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest of the wealthy. Rescind the cuts and re-purpose the regained revenues, and hunger is gone in today's America. Of course, that happy state will continue only until the Mitt Rmoneys and John Boehners of the world (not to mention the Grover Norquists) find ways to undo your good work. You say you want to end hunger, and you're attempting to fund your effort from the NASA budget? You're not just a fool but a damned fool. Bark up another tree for a while.