NASA
catdynamics | February 20, 2011So, got confirmation of initial round of cuts.
NASA HQ is preparing for budget problems by starting to pull back funds already allocated, in anticipation of fiscal year 2010-11 cuts. Between possible government shutdown, and the uncertainty over the Senate response to the House cuts, and a possible veto, it is hard to know what the funding will be in the end, or indeed if there will be any guidance on what to cut.
So...
Major cuts to current ongoing mission operations and data analysis.
Specifcally, Swift and Chandra are cut. I hear three other missions are also cut, but don't know which…
cevans | December 13, 2010
We live in an age where truth is, if not stranger than fiction, then at least equally strange. Sometimes pop-science books illustrate this point with particular well-researched glee and Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void is such a book.
Where do I begin? It's a true nerd's smorgasbord. It answers all the scatological and emotional questions that kids always imprudently ask astronauts. It acknowledges the humanness of space travel as a venture: that astronauts are people who must eat, pass gas, have sex, take up space, sweat, sleep, fear, and otherwise learn to be…
mikethemadbiologist | December 6, 2010I don't see the need to redescribe the recent paper about the discovery of bacteria that can might replace, in extremis, phosphorus with arsenic, which was overhyped by NASA, was poorly covered by most journalists, and which has compromising methodological problems (for good coverage, read here, here, and here; and snark). But what the paper does demonstrate is the importance of culturing microorganisms, knowledge about which is becoming rapidly lost by younger scientists.
With the advent of DNA-based, culture-independent techniques, where we can look at the DNA and RNA of microbes without…
heathero | December 5, 2010In the wake of the NASA excitement over the new arsenic study, and my promise to give a detailed review of the paper itself, I have recruited a colleague with strong opinons about the work, a solid chemistry and microbiology background, and "Dr." in front of his name to share his analysis. I will be posting have posted my personal and less-technical take on the whole thing soon, so stay tuned as well.
Dr. Alex Bradley uses modern geochemistry and microbiology tools to study the evolution of life and Earth. He has the following to say about the paper.
There's been a lot of hype around the…
gregladen | December 3, 2010Many months ago, the fossil primate "Ida" was reported to the world with much fanfare, including an entire mass market book and a huge press conference, and everything else one can possibly do to announce a new fossil find. Science bloggers and others got rather upset at the Ida team's over the top fanfare, though few bloggers ever explained why it was a bad thing to make everyone on the planet notice an important new scientific find (and no one made the claim that Ida was not very important). One of the things the Ida team did was to use the term "missing link" in connection with that…
krandall | December 1, 2010By Dr. Rosalba Bonaccorsi
Environmental Scientist at the Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe, SETI Institute, and Gail Jacobs
Rosalba, what first sparked your interest in science?
I've always had big dreams -- even as a young girl. As soon as I started to walk, I took an interest in conducting experiments with whatever was available around such as household plants and various chemical compounds. I'm lucky I didn't end up poisoned or otherwise hurt! I remember dismantling alarm clocks. I was so curious!
As a young girl, I was in poor health and as a result spent a lot of…
kcollins | October 20, 2010NASA will be at the Festival and at the Lockheed Martin Stage there will be panel discussions with astronauts.
WASHINGTON, Oct. 19 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- NASA is joining more than 500 science organizations in Washington this weekend to inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers during the first national science and engineering festival to be held in the nation's capital.
(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO)
(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO)
The USA Science & Engineering Festival, which began Oct. 10 with activities…
ksnyder | October 15, 2010This guest post is written by Brookhaven physicist Thomas Roser, Chair of the Collider-Accelerator Department. Roser, who earned his Ph.D. from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, worked at the University of Michigan before joining Brookhaven in 1991.
Thomas Roser
The chain of accelerators that leads into two of Brookhaven's major research facilities - the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and the NASA Space Radiation Laboratory (NSRL) - will soon have a new starting point.
A new ion generator, called the Electron Beam Ion Source (EBIS), will produce and accelerate beams…
mikethemadbiologist | September 2, 2010Every so often, we hear or read someone who asks, "If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we do X?" But it's not so clear that we could still do it if we wanted to:
The Apollo and Gemini programs aren't truly lost. There are still one or two Saturn V rockets lying around, and there are plenty of parts from the spacecraft capsules still available. But just because modern scientists have the parts doesn't mean they have the knowledge to understand how or why they worked the way they did. In fact, very few schematics or records from the original programs are still around. This lack of…
eklemetti | August 23, 2010Finally, a chance to catch up a bit ... !
Yasur erupting in May of 2010.
Some news from the world of volcanoes:
The BBC has a series of videos one the fallout from the Eyjafjallajökull eruption - including a look at the area around the volcano and how the economy has been affected by the eruption. However, things seem pretty quiet at the summit of the Eyjafjallajökull summit where snow can begun to settle without melting - and the Icelandic Met Office appears to think that the eruption is more or less (but not officially) over. And take this press release as you will, but a recent study…
krandall | August 4, 2010By Dr. Adrian Brown
Planetary Research Scientist at the Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe, SETI Institute
The last two months have witnessed several extremely important events with respect to future Mars Exploration. The first two revolved around the rover "Spirit." The other two are a new mission to Mars and a possible road for humans to Mars.
"Spirit"
On June 3rd, the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) team published a stunning paper describing how the rover "Spirit," now immobile in the shifting sands of Gusev Crater, detected carbonate minerals in a rock called "Comanche…
eklemetti | August 3, 2010
Mt. Hood in Oregon, taken August 2008. Image by Erik Klemetti. Click on the image to see a larger version.
Quick news!
I'm not going to go into too much depth right now about the recent study published in Nature Geoscience on Mt. Hood in Oregon - I plan to talk about it more in a few weeks. Why is that? Well, the lead investigator on the study, Dr. Adam Kent of Oregon State University, is a friend of mine (and occasional Eruptions commenter) so I plan to get the details from him before posting. I was also peripherally associated with some of this work - mostly in the field acting as a pack…
eklemetti | July 25, 2010The northern Chilean and southern Peruvian Andes are full of volcanoes that look stunning - I mean, jaw-dropping details of volcanism litter the landscape. The reason for this is two fold: (1) there is an awful lot of volcanism in the northern Chilean/southern Peruvian Andes (as known as the Central Volcanic Zone) - and has been that way for over 10 million years and (2) it has also been very, very dry in the area (most of which is known as the Altiplano-Puna Plateau) for at least a few millions years as well - it is the home of the Atacama Desert! So, this means you get lots of volcanic…
krandall | July 23, 2010By Dr. Mark R. Showalter
Planetary Astronomer at the Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe, SETI Institute
In 1609, Galileo introduced to the world his new invention, the astronomical telescope. It opened up new opportunities to explore a territory that all prior generations had regarded as familiar--the night sky. In short order, he was making major discoveries. But the sky is very big and Galileo's telescope was very small. He had to choose his targets carefully.
In that context, Saturn was nothing special, the least of the known planets, just a bright point in a black…
eklemetti | July 22, 2010
Tourists hiking next to an active lava flow on Pacaya in Guatemala in 2006.
I'm flying back to Ohio today after a successful few weeks of fieldwork/paper writing. Apparently I have a pile of tomatoes waiting in our garden in Granville ... !
On to news:
To go with the news that lava flows from Kilauea creep ever closer to structures in Kalapana, the NASA Earth Observatory posts its first volcano image in a bit. The shot shows the steam-and-gas plume from the Halema`uma`u Crater in Kilauea's summit caldera. You can also see some video of the lava flows near Kalapana as they move along the…
krandall | July 14, 2010By Dr. Cynthia Phillips
Planetary geologist at the Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe, SETI Institute
Jupiter's moon Europa could be the best place beyond the Earth to search for life. This small moon, about the size of Earth's Moon, is one of the Galilean moons first discovered 400 years ago by Galileo. The Galilean moons were the first objects observed to orbit another planet, and they revolutionized the way our solar system was understood.
Today, the moons of Jupiter are known to be a scientifically rich part of our solar system, and they are yielding a new revolution…
sb admin | June 22, 2010by Nathalie A. Cabrol
I realize how immodest the title of this first blog may sound and it is certainly not my intention to convince anybody that I will answer this question in the limited space allowed here or even in a lifetime. My hope is, instead, to stir thoughts and invite an exchange of diverse perspectives to make this a thread that we can all pull from time to time. It is an immense subject debated in an abundant literature, but discussing it is certainly not the exclusive privilege of those called explorers. All beings, from the greatest minds to the simplest forms of life on this…
cevans | June 22, 2010
I believe the world is a complex phenomenological experience that can be explained, rationalized, and lived in myriad different ways. The way I see it, we all begin with the same fundamental mystery -- why are we here? what is life? -- and we attack this problem with whatever tools we find work best; some of us use science, parsing and decoding the secrets of life with a toolbox of methods and reason. Others, with the same goals in mind, use art, arranging ideas and objects in intentional ways designed to root at the questions of existence. Others still depend on the framework of religion to…
eklemetti | June 18, 2010This week went fast, didn't it?
The Baekdu caldera along the North Korean/Chinese border.
The NASA Earth Observatory have been giving us a steady diet of volcanic plumes over the last week, including PNG's Ulawun, Russia's Sarychev Peak (a very faint plume), both an ASTER and Terra image of the summit region at Kliuchevskoi and finally a mix of plume and clouds over PNG's Manam volcano.
I wanted to also mention a brief article I ran into on the Changbaishan/Baekdu caldera along the Chinese and North Korean border. Although short on specifics, this article mentions a number of interesting (…
cevans | June 17, 2010
Last week, fresh off the fourth-to-last Shuttle mission, STS-131, NASA astronaut Jim Dutton came to speak at OMSI, my local science museum. When I got the email about this event, I RSVPed immediately -- after all, an astronaut in my town? How urbane. Surely the intelligentsia of Oregon would come in droves to discuss the boggling phenomenological experience of spaceflight and the uncertain future of NASA with one of our nation's "right stuff." As usual, I was wrong; the only adult in the museum unaccompanied by a least one small child, I felt somehow like a pervert, as though the harried…