brainrow

Via Boing Boing:

NASA attached a video camera to a Solid Rocket Booster (SRB) on a 2008 Space Shuttle launch. At the beginning of the video, we’re looking at part of the Shuttle’s external fuel tank and the underside of the Shuttle’s nose. We get a wider view when the boosters separate about two minutes into the flight. The video continues until the booster splashes down.

To me, the most astonishing thing about this video is the audio track, which grows quieter as the air grows thinner, and then louder again as the booster falls into denser air.

Spaceflight isn’t magic. Spaceships are physical things, built by humans. That becomes really apparent when you hear the creaking and clanking of the booster as it settles into the water.

For space nuts like myself, this is a famous photo. Astronaut Bruce McCandless is testing a self-contained jet backpack called the Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU), designed to allow astronauts to perform extra-vehicular activities (EVAs) untethered from their spacecraft.

NASA’s official title for this photo was “EVAtion”, but when the photo was posted on another blog a few months ago, I suggested a different title, which I still like: Sky, Viewed from Above.

Fairly amazing, isn’t it?

Hard to feel enthusiastic about outdoing the neighbor’s Christmas lights after viewing this: Boston.com has the Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar — a new photo will be revealed every day until Christmas.

If you look at the photos and can’t wait to see more, you can check out last year’s calendar while you wait.

NASA’s Astronony Picture of the Day had this farewell photo of the earth from the European Space Agency’s comet-chasing spacecraft, Rosetta.

The world of the future? It’s on the way:

The first-ever video advertisement will be published in a traditional paper magazine in September.

The video-in-print ads will appear in select copies of the US show business title Entertainment Weekly.

The slim-line screens – around the size of a mobile phone display – also have rechargeable batteries.

The chip technology used to store the video – described as similar to that used in singing greeting cards – is activated when the page is turned.
Each chip can hold up to 40 minutes of video.

I think Jetsons. BBC thinks Harry Potter. Either way, Pepsi will be getting a lot of buzz, and not just from poorly-connected batteries.

Via Pink Tentacle, the recent solar eclipse, as seen by a Japanese weather satellite:

I just got back from a park near here. I stood out in the middle of a dark softball field and watched the International Space Station (ISS) fly over.

It looked like a bright star, but it was moving. If I hadn’t known what it was, I might have assumed it was a high-flying jet. But it was too high, and too bright, to be a jet. The sun had set more than an hour before. The ISS, orbiting 220 miles above the earth, could still catch sunlight.

I knew where and when to watch thanks to NASA’s ISS tracker site, and this Space Fellowship article, which I found thanks to Slashdot.

The marathon of space station flybys won’t stop until mid-to-late July (depending on your location). That gives space shuttle Endeavour, currently scheduled to launch on July 11th, time to reach the space station and join the show. As the shuttle approaches station for docking, many observers will witness a memorable double flyby — Endeavour and the ISS sailing side by side across the starry night sky.

So, watch the skies, and remember to wave.

The same orbiting camera that captured yesterday’s photo of the Earth and the Moon from Mars got this photo of the Phoenix spacecraft descending toward Mars under its 30-foot wide parachute. That’s the Martian surface in the background.

(How it was done.)

Via Stranger Fruit, the planet Earth and its Moon, as seen from Mars. To the naked eye, Earth would be nothing more than a bright blue point of light in the Martian night sky. This photo was taken by a very high-resolution camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, like looking through a powerful telescope.

Today’s a big day for Earth-Mars relations. The Phoenix lander is scheduled to touch down in the far north at 7:53 PM EDT tonight. Scientists believe there is water ice under the surface there, and Phoenix is equipped to dig for it. (Speculation that Phoenix will bring the ice back to earth to counteract global warming is a pretty good joke, I think.)

If you are a space nut, Space Nut Central (better known as The Planetary Society) suggests places where you can follow the landing live.

Update: Photos from the Phoenix lander.

Apollo 12 astronaut Alan Bean, on returning to earth after walking on the moon:

Since that time, I have not complained about the weather one single time. I’m glad there is weather. I’ve not complained about traffic. I’m glad there’s people around.

One of the things that I did when I got home, I went down to shopping centers, and I’d just go around there, get an ice cream cone or somethin’, and just watch the people go by, and think: “Boy, we’re lucky to be here. Why do people complain about the earth? We are living in the Garden of Eden.”

(This is from the documentary In the Shadow of the Moon.)

Via A Blog Around the Clock, the Anchorage Daily News reports on a polar bear study proposed by the Alaska legislature:

The state Legislature is looking to hire a few good polar bear scientists. The conclusions have already been agreed upon — researchers just have to fill in the science part.

Start at the end, keep going until you reach the beginning, then stop.

You know, you could save money and frustration if you dropped the “good scientists” part.

A $2 million program funded with little debate by the Legislature last month calls for using state money to fund an “academic based” conference that highlights contrarian scientific research on global warming. Legislators hope to undermine the public perception of a widespread consensus among polar bear researchers that warming global temperatures and melting Arctic ice threaten the polar bears’ survival.

Republican legislative leaders say a federal decision to declare the polar bears “threatened” by climate change would have troubling effects on Arctic oil development and the state’s economic future.

…

The $2 million is also to be used for a national public relations campaign to promote the findings of the conference.

And you could save money by just skipping over the “conference” part. A good PR firm can print up some nice brochures for a lot less than $2 million.

But the point is not to seek some non-biased measure of scientific truth. The point, said [House Speaker John] Harris, is to provide a forum for scientists whose views back Alaska’s interests.

“You know as well as I do that scientists are like lawyers,” Harris said.

Methinks Mr. Harris got through his science classes in school by getting a copy of the Teacher’s Edition of the textbook and looking up the answers in the back. He seems to believe that’s the scientific method.

The physicist Richard Feynman occasionally led workshops at the Esalen Institute, which was attended by lots of people with “new age” ideas. The book No Ordinary Genius includes this brief exchange between a workshop member and Feynman:

You are an original thinker. I would like to ask you, how would you go about designing a miniature antigravity machine?

I can’t. I don’t know how to make any antigravity machine.

You would lick the world’s problems.

It doesn’t make any difference. I still don’t know how to do it. The game I play is a very interesting one. It’s imagination, in a tight straitjacket, which is this: that it has to agree with the known laws of physics. I’m not going to assume that maybe the laws of physics have changed, so that I can design something or other. I operate as if everything that we know is true. If we’re wrong, of course, we can redesign something with the new laws later. But the game is to try to figure things out, with what we know is possible. It requires imagination to think of what’s possible, and then it requires and analysis back, checking to see whether it fits, whether it’s allowed, according to what is known, okay?

In the case of an antigravity machine, I immediately give up, because my understanding of the laws of gravity are such that it doesn’t make sense for antigravity. The only antigravity machines, things which oppose gravity, that is, and which are very effective, are like you’re using now — a pillow, or a floor under your behind. Those are antigravity machines and they will support you in a space, above the earth, a few feet in this case, for a relatively unlimited time. Next?

See, there’s the bottleneck to human creativity. If we can just eliminate reality as a restriction, all sorts of wonderful things become possible.

Lots of prominent people have already managed to slip past this limitation, and they have been very successful, even if only in their own minds.

I read the news today, oh boy — that NASA will observe its 50th anniversary on Monday by beaming a Beatles song toward Polaris, the North Star. The song, of course, is “Across the Universe,” but the 431 light years to Polaris isn’t even across the galaxy. Gotta start somewhere.

NASA launched the first U.S. satellite, Explorer 1, on January 31, 1958, and that’s the anniversary which is being celebrated.

While we’re celebrating, let’s take a moment to remember the crew of the space shuttle Columbia, which broke apart on re-entry five years ago today.

Let’s remember the crew of the shuttle Challenger, which exploded shortly after launch on January 28, 1986 — 22 years ago last Monday.

And let’s remember the crew of Apollo 1, lost on January 27, 1967 — 41 years ago last Sunday. They died in a fire in the spacecraft during a “routine” test on the launch pad. Nothing is “routine” when you’re testing the limits of humans and their machines.

Apollo 1: Gus Grissom, Ed White, Roger Chaffee

Challenger: Francis Scobee, Michael Smith, Judith Resnik, Ellison Onizuka, Ronald McNair, Gregory Jarvis, Christa McAuliffe

Columbia: Rick Husband, William McCool, Michael Anderson, Ilan Ramon, Kalpana Chawla, David Brown, Laurel Clark

John Glenn, at a memorial service for Judith Resnik:

We hoped these past few days would never come. And for nearly a quarter of a century we pushed back the time we knew — intuitively — must sometime be, that day when despite all our best efforts, there would be a loss.

…

It has been my observation that the happiest of people, the vibrant doers of the world are almost always those who are using — who are putting into play, calling upon, depending upon — the greatest number of their God-given talents and capabilities. For them, curiosity is a way of life, and the quest for knowledge and the new is insatiable and exhilarating.

But it becomes many-fold more meaningful when put to use for a higher purpose, for something bigger than self, for a goal that calls on those individuals to dictate themselves to accomplishment for the betterment of our nation, and indeed for all mankind.

Let’s not forget all those, living and dead, who have given — and are still giving — their best for a higher purpose.

Via Corpus Callosum, here’s another way to handle uncertainty:

And the child asked:

Q: Where did this rock come from?
A: I chipped it off the big boulder, at the center of the village.
Q: Where did the boulder come from?
A: It probably rolled off the huge mountain that towers over our village.
Q: Where did the mountain come from?
A: The same place as all stone: it is the bones of Ymir, the primordial giant.
Q: Where did the primordial giant, Ymir, come from?
A: From the great abyss, Ginnungagap.
Q: Where did the great abyss, Ginnungagap, come from?
A: Never ask that question.

The author says we have lots of “semantic stopsigns,” signalling “do not think beyond this point.”

The stopsigns are up wherever the questions start to get hard. That’s where the most interesting answers lurk.

It’s not just the usual suspects that signal “no thinking”:

I know someone whose answer to every one of these questions is “Liberal democracy!” That’s it. That’s his answer. If you ask the obvious question of “How well have liberal democracies performed, historically, on problems this tricky?” or “What if liberal democracy does something stupid?” then you’re an autocrat, or libertopian, or otherwise a very very bad person. No one is allowed to question democracy.

I once called this kind of thinking “the divine right of democracy”. But it is more precise to say that “Democracy!” functioned for him as a semantic stopsign. If anyone had said to him “Turn it over to the Coca-Cola corporation!”, he would have asked the obvious next questions: “Why? What will the Coca-Cola corporation do about it? Why should we trust them? Have they done well in the past on equally tricky problems?”

The problem with blind faith — no matter what it is we believe in — is that we don’t even realize where we’ve stopped thinking. We’re blind to our own blind spots.

Physicist Richard Feynman tells how his father taught him “the difference between knowing the name of something, and knowing something.”

The general principle is that things that are moving try to keep on moving, and things that are standing still tend to stand still, unless you push on them hard. This tendency is called “inertia,” but nobody knows why it’s true.