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NASA Naysayers Proved Wrong

October 30, 2009 By James View Comments

I can be the bigger man and admit when I am wrong. I admit that there may have been one (or more) occasions that I have entered into a “spirited” dialogue with someone and tried my hardest to persuade them that the entire moon landing was a hoax. Most of me knew it was bs, but part of me thought it would be much cooler to find out it was a hoax than to confirm it actually happened. I’ll never know what the former would feel like, but I have to admit the latter feels pretty cool too.

challenger_4x

LRO maneuvered into its 50-km mapping orbit on September 15. The next pass over the Apollo 17 landing site resulted in images with more than two times better resolution than previously acquired. At the time of this recent overflight the Sun was high in the sky (28° incidence angle) helping to bring out subtle differences in surface brightness. The descent stage of the lunar module Challenger is now clearly visible, at 50-cm per pixel (angular resolution) the descent stage deck is eight pixels across (four meters), and the legs are also now distinguishable. The descent stage served as the launch pad for the ascent stage as it blasted off for a rendezvous with the command module America on 14 December 1972.

ap17_1st50km_4release

via LROC.com

Filed Under: Science Tagged With: apollo 17, moon landing, NASA, space

Starburst Galaxy

November 21, 2008 By James View Comments

starburst_galaxy

While it is not a delicious, chewy, fruit flavored galaxy far away, it’s still pretty freaking amazing.

Long ago, astronomers spotted a galaxy far away and wondered why it was giving birth to so many stars. Using the Hubble Space Telescope, they have finally figured out the answer to the puzzle: The starburst galaxy turns out to be farther away than they thought.

Rather than being all by its lonesome, just 7 million light-years away, the starburst galaxy NGC 1569 is stuck in the middle of crowded galactic cluster nearly 11 million light-years away. The resulting gravitational interactions are probably squeezing the galaxy’s gas so much that it’s been forming stars at a rate more than 100 times faster than our own Milky Way … for the past 100 million years or so.

“This was the strongest starburst galaxy in the nearby universe,” Alessandra Aloisi, an astronomer at the Baltimore-based Space Telescope Science Institute and the European Space Agency, told me today. “It was really puzzling why it was forming stars at such a high rate. It wasn’t fitting in with current theories.”

This also reminds me of a conversation I was having the other day about the sad but inevitable demise of the Hubble.  NASA has claimed that if the telescope breaks down again it will not be fixed, that its lifespan has run its course.  Let’s hope there is something bigger and better in line to replace the Hubble quickly when it does reach it’s end.

Just a few weeks ago NASA rebooted several critical backup units on board the Hubble to repair the primary instrument control and data formatting unit which failed in late September this year causing the telescope to shutdown.  The first image the Hubble produced after being rebooted was astonishing.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: astronomy, hubble telescope, NASA