Water on Mars and Liquid Lakes on Titan.

Two big pieces of news in space science this week (besides NASA’s birthday — which was awesome too).  Both of these stories are from NASA and may be interesting to anyone, like myself, who is a big supporter of space exploration.  First, NASA’s Phoenix Landed on Wednesday confirmed finding water on the red planetwhich gained an extension for the mission.  Is the discovery of organic molecules, or, rather optimistically, life next?  Doubtfully, but water is still a big find.  The other big find of the week is that there are liquid lakes on Saturn’s moon Titan.  This find was confirmed by the Cassini Space Probe which has been studying the moons of Saturn.  On earlier fly-bys of Titan, Cassini had shown dark lake appearing areas but it was not until this week that test results confirmed that these were actually made of the liquid hydrocarbonethane (which, being a hydrocarbon, is an organic chemical by the way).  Of course considering that ethane is usually a gas on Earth (it is similar to methane) that means these are some very cold lakes, not at all suitable for any Earth-like lifeforms to be swimming in.  Very cool stuff here, way to go NASA, 50 years old and still wowing us (now lets get some folks back to the moon and maybe to Mars too right?)

Happy Birthday NASA!

Fifty years ago today, President Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act which into law and established the United States federal space agency NASA.  To date the organization has achieved some pretty amazing things.  It is still the only space organization to successfully land people on the Moon.  It has sent tons of satellites and probes to study other planets and comets.  The Hubble telescope, which is run by NASA, has provided some of the most amazing images of distant space.  All around NASA is great and I really hope that they achieve just as much  (if not more) over the next fifty years as they did during their first.

Periodic Table . . .Table

For the real die hard science fan/nerd . . . a periodic coffee table of elements.  Thank you Information Aesthetics for the find.

What Happened to Mars’ Magnetic Field

Mars doesn’t have a magnetic field like Earth does (no auroras for the martians) and this has a lot of scientist wondering why.  Here is a Discovery News article that discusses a possible theory of what our planetary neighbor’s my lack this magnetism.  Because of the lack of magnetic field on the red planet, if humans ever visit there they will need to develop forms of navigation besides compass use.  Probably this will involve some form of advanced GPS provided by a satellite relay around Mars.

Northern Lights

Discovery News today provides us with a wonderful little slide show of some beautiful Aurora Borealis pictures.  The Auroras, which occur in both hemispheres (in the south they are called Aurora Australis), are created when charged particles collide with the Earth’s magnetic field.  I have only vaguely witnessed the Aurora Borealis once when I was really little.  All I can really remember was how alien the lights in the sky seemed.  I’d love to someday go somewhere where I can witness a full blast showing of this strange natural phenomena.

Space is a Mess

Just a little post on the Discovery Blog showing how messy the space around Earth is.  Kind of sad that we’ve polluted up there too.

A Wet Mars?

NASA has announced that studies from observations taken by it’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter suggest that our planetary neighbor may once, a long time ago, been a world with many lakes and rivers.  If this is true then the prospect of finding evidence for past life on the red planet may greatly increase.  Read about it here.

What do you need to Achieve Nuclear Fusion?

A really huge laser . . . at least according to this Discovery News article.  The prospects of fusion (combining to atoms of an element to form an atom of another element) are theoretically quite big.  Fusion powers stars and it is thought that if we could learn to harness and control forms of fusion we could eventually produce cheap renewable energy.  I am very interested to see how this giant laser experiment works out.

The Windy Seas

Evan actually pointed me to this yesterday evening and I found the story here on Discovery News today.  People have long known that the there can be some pretty good winds out at sea (hence the centuries of sailing ships by power of wind) but this new NASA study now maps these winds.  The days of sailing are not quite what they used to be, but with energy concerns all over the world, the days of wind power are just starting to get some legitimate consideration.  The NASA wind mapping will likely aid in making decisions on where to set up offshore wind farms for electricity production.

Talking about the Past in Present Tense

“The question now is whether the majority of the very most massive galaxies form very early in the universe.” ~ Peter Capak

I love the above quote, taken from this Discovery News article, because of the way that it is worded.  It sounds like Mr. Capak is speaking about something that supposedly happened a long time ago (and considering that the Universe is estimated to be around 13 billion years old, early on is a really long time ago indeed) in present tense.  Why I like this is because, essentially, a lot of what we are looking at way out in space did happen a long time ago.  This all has to do with the speed at which light travels.

Light is fast.  In fact there isn’t suppose to be anything faster (though I remember reading something not too long ago about some experiment that aimed to show that something could theoretically travel faster than light, I cannot recall the exact details unfortunately).  It travels at about 186,282.397 miles per second.  But the Universe is a really big place and so even at the amazing speeds at which it is traveling light takes time to get from point A to point B.  What this means is that a lot of the light that we see from stars in the night sky has taken quite awhile to reach Earth.  We talk about light years, which is a measurement of the amount of distance light will travel in one  year.  Alpha Centuri, our closest neighboring star, is about 4.37 light years away from our solar system, meaning that if we were to travel at the speed of light it would take us about four and a third years to get there from here.  Observing the red shift (an increase of wavelength of electromagnetic radiation) of distant stars and galaxies, showing us that they are moving away from us, and doing some math (probably some type of triangulation) scientists are able to estimate a general idea of how far away said light sources are and thus determine how long ago the light originated.  In this way, the light that we receive from distant stars and galaxies is actually old because it has taken so long for that light to reach us (the light from Alpha Centuri is 4.37 years old).  What this in turn means is that people like Mr. Capak can talk about an event that happened a long time ago in present tense because we are observing the light of the ancient occurrence in our present day. 

This is awesome to me.