NASA: The Frontier Is Everywhere

A stirring endorsement of the capacity for good within the human race, our collective drive to seek out the great unknown and the media-challenged governmental agency that will someday take us there:


Would I come off as too big of a nerd if I admitted that I already have the official NASA app on my iPad? Yeah? Well I don't care...

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TDS: Wish You Weren't Here

Jon Stewart beaks down why President Obama wants those dirty Muslims ("non-Christians", if you're scoring at home) to rule space and build mosques next door to you:

Assembling The International Space Station

I remember when the idea of this thing was just that, and look at it now. The assembly happens over the first 1:30 and then the rest details the individual sections (if that turns you on):


(hat tip: Reza)

Picture Of The Day

How cool is this?

This isn't our Sun. This other sun is 470 light-years away from our home. Its name is 1RXS J160929.1-210524, and the orange sphere near it has been confirmed today as an orbiting planet. The first photo of an extra-solar planet.

The photo was originally taken in 2008 by David Lafreniere and collaborators working at the Gemini Observatory. Scientists weren't sure about it being an orbiting planet until now, however. New observations have shown that the planet follows an orbit around the star 300 times larger than Earth's orbit.

The planet has eight times the mass of Jupiter, and has a much higher temperature: 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit as opposed to the minus 166 degrees of the biggest planet in our solar system. Scientists believe this temperature is a product of the age of this star system, much younger than ours.

Far from throwing any light in planetary theories, this discovery challenges the current model. Lafreniere and his colleagues think the orbit is too large for the planet to form by core accretion. If that was the case, then the star system could be much older than is actual age.

The only thing that worries me about this: what if the inhabitants of that planet saw the flash from our camera? Now I'm not saying that we're due for an alien invasion or anything like that but we do have a black president: isn't that always when shit goes down?

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90 Minute Review: Attack Of The Clones

I featured the prequel review of The Phantom Menace earlier this year and I have to say that this one is even better:

I know what you’re thinking—nine 10-minute long YouTube videos that dump all over the Star Wars prequels doesn’t sound like your thing. I thought that too. Until I watched the first segment of the latest 90 minute-long review of Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones. The review is, from what I’ve seen, hilarious if for no other reason than the reviewer, Mike Stoklasa, has fully embraced his geek rage towards George Lucas for whiffing it so bad with the Star Wars prequels and created a rambling but thoroughly scathing and spot-on takedown.

The best part is that Stoklasa knows all too well that he sounds like an irate and thoroughly depressed nerd and he vamps it up to the hilt as his alter-ego, “Mr. Plinkett,” an crotchety old man that may or may not be a serial killer (“Now I’m the last person in the world who you’d call an expert on love considering that most of my relationships seem to end up inside different trash bags.”).

I actually find the intermediate serial killer jokes to be a bit pedantic and labored (and that's coming from someone who is admittedly morbidly fascinated by serial killers) but speaking as a sci-fi nerd the review is pretty damn spot on. In fact, just as in his first review, I'm fairly impressed with his grasp of narrative and story telling and his explanation of how Lucas has failed on so many levels in his beautiful yet irrelevant prequel endeavours (and I love the Last Starfighter references). Here's part one (you can find the rest at YouTube):

What Your Email Says About You

I would just like to point out to those that use it exclusively that my Hotmail address has pretty much been my digital junk drawer for years now; the Gmail is in the sidebar to your right. And if you haven't watched the Family Guy Empire Strikes Back parody Something, Something, Something Dark Side yet then you haven't seen one of my favorite email jokes in the world:


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Picture Of The Day

I can't believe that I've never seen this photo before:

After an oxygen tank exploded and crippled their service module, the Apollo 13 astronauts were forced to abandon plans to make the third manned lunar landing. The extent of the damage is revealed in this grainy, grim photo, taken as the service module was drifting away, jettisoned only hours prior to the command module's reentry and splashdown. An entire panel on the side of the service module has been blown away and extensive internal damage is apparent. Visible below the gutted compartment is a radio antenna and the large, bell-shaped nozzle of the service module's rocket engine. On April 17, 1970 the three astronauts returned safely to Earth.

I couldn't imagine what those three men must have felt during that harrowing experience. Astronauts are some of my favorite American heroes.

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Picture Of The Day

The Earth as seen from Mars:

This is the first image ever taken of Earth from the surface of a planet beyond the Moon. It was taken by the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit one hour before sunrise on the 63rd Martian day, or sol, of its mission. (March 8, 2004)

Dammit, I had my eyes closed. How about a heads up next time, Spirit?

Picture Of The Day

An erupting solar prominence leaps off the surface of the sun in one of the first images captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory:

At a press conference today in Washington DC, researchers unveiled "First Light" images from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, a space telescope designed to study the sun.

"SDO is working beautifully," reports project scientist Dean Pesnell of the Goddard Space Flight Center. "This is even better than we could have dreamed."

Launched on February 11th from Cape Canaveral, the observatory has spent the past two months moving into a geosynchronous orbit and activating its instruments. As soon as SDO's telescope doors opened, the spacecraft began beaming back scenes so beautiful and puzzlingly complex that even seasoned observers were stunned.

Incredible. You can view more images and even watch some video of the same at NASA's official SDO press site here.

Celestial Music

If Galileo Galilei had a mixing turntable:

SolarBeat is little website that shows the planets in our solar system orbiting the sun and making a little "ding!" every time they complete a circuit. You can mess with the tempo to alter the music, and if you speed it up all the way and sit around for like 40 years you can finally hear the sound Pluto makes. SPOILER: It sounds like a fork hitting a wine glass.

You can check it out here. This really puts the orbits of respective bodies in our solar system into perspective. And birthday parties on Pluto must be quite the occasion.

Galactic Empire State Of Mind

Darth Vader channels his inner Jay-Z. The bling is strong with this one, he's got 99 problems but a Jedi ain't one, etc.:


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Picture Of The Day

A closeup shot of the martian moon Phobos, snapped by the European Space Agency’s Mars Express spacecraft, which completed its most recent set of flybys on March 13. The photos received by the ESA as a result of these flybys represent the sharpest images to date of Mars’ largest moon. Cool.

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Sudden Disturbing Realization Of The Day

Continuing with the theme, this is what we were all thinking when Leia told Han about her and Luke:


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Predators Trailer

OK, I loved Predator, Predator II was pretty damn good (Busey scared me more than the predators, but what else is new?), Alien vs. Predator was fairly interesting yet also fairly boring and Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem literally put me to sleep so I'm giving this franchise just one more sequel before I finally give up on the off-world dreadlocks (and leave the acidic aliens out this time, please):

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Picture Of The Day

There appears to be some simian activity on my second favorite planet:

This amazing picture of the Martian landscape has got alien hunters excited about the possibility that it shows a silverback gorilla striking a pose on the Martian surface.

The image was taken by the Mars Spirit Rover in the Gusev crater, a crater over 100 miles in diameter that is thought to have once been a lake filled with liquid water.

It's one of several images taken by Spirit that appear to show a gorilla knuckle-walking across the surface of the Red Planet.

Online sites devoted to searching through pictures of Mars for signs of life have long pointed to the picture as an example of an 'anomaly' that suggests Martian life...

But it isn't a gorilla. It's a rock. Gorillas have not invented spaceflight and could not survive in the 95% carbon dioxide atmosphere of Mars. Also, it looks like a rock.

I'm pretty sure that it's just a rock as well but if the first person to set foot on Mars some time in the future is suddenly mauled by a pissed off silverback don't be surprised. I'm just saying.

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Picture Of The Day II

This is just gorgeous:

This stunning solar eclipse is a composite of nine images (taken with a Canon 200mm lens) and 38 eclipse images layered over one another. The eclipse occurred in July...

The image shows how magnetic waves emanate from the sun in brilliant nano-flares. Look closely at the image and you can see the impact craters on the moon. The eclipse lasted just over 5 minutes.

I've seen a few eclipses before but my sunglasses didn't provide nearly this level of detail. The hi-res photo is also definitely worth checking out as well.

Obama's Budget Would Cut NASA's Moon Plan

I know that we're in the middle of a serious economic recession but I still have to say that I hate to see this happen:

The Obama administration is killing Constellation, NASA's ambitious back-to-the moon program. The decision represents a thunderous demolition of the Bush-era strategy at the space agency, which had already poured $9 billion into a new rocket, the Ares 1, and a new crew capsule, Orion.

Both were years from completion. And now both have been spiked by the administration's 2011 budget, released Monday. The budget includes $2.5 billion over the next two years to shut down Constellation.

Instead of continuing to develop the Ares 1 and Orion, the administration wants to invest $6 billion over five years in a commercial space taxi to carry astronauts into low Earth orbit. The budget would also funnel billions of dollars into developing new space technologies, such as the ability to refuel spacecraft in orbit. What isn't in the budget is a specific target for exploration.

Expanding our space exploration program was one of the few issues on which I agreed with both Bush administrations, so hearing that Obama now wants to discontinue our program to return to the moon is truly a disappointment. We're only now in the infancy of our potential to eventually become a space-faring race but we may never reach that level of exploration if we don't seriously invest in its future. The Constellation Program is estimated to cost ninety-seven billion dollars through the year 2020. That's how much we've spent every year we've been in Iraq.

Think about that: one year of paying for that war would develop a replacement fleet for our aging space shuttles along with new vehicles to carry us to the Moon, Mars and beyond. Obama's budget tries to do this through commercial means but without an overarching goal of extra-planetary exploration NASA will lack the inspirational vision to focus those newly developed capabilities. My only consolation in all of this is that these commercial taxis might help to hasten the opportunities for civilians like myself to one day travel into space ourselves.

Picture Of The Day

It's a space station. Ah, the treachery of satellites...

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Illustrating Gravity Wells

A comment by regular reader oneLbill yesterday about shooting our collective waste into space as a (tongue in cheek, I assume) strategy for dealing with some of our environmental problems reminded me of this chart I saw last week illustrating the respective gravity wells for the major celestial bodies in our solar system. I just like the simple layout and the easy to understand way in which it explains the science (you'll have to enlarge to read it).

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70 Minute Review: The Phantom Menace

I know this movie is almost ten years old but I just watched the first part of this and I found it equal parts entertaining and informing:

If you’d stopped by the Heeb office recently, you would know how obsessed I’ve been with this 70-minute review of Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace. I was so obsessed that I reached out to the critic himself, Milwaukee-native Mike Stoklasa. His justifiable character assassination of the worst Jedi ever (Liam Neeson’s Qui-Gon Jin) and his overall slamming of the CGI clusterfuck that helped spawn a generation of overvisualized, underdeveloped and downright boring blockbusters is especially relevant today with everyone spewing blue goo over James Cameron’s self-important Smurfs project.

Here's part 1 of 7:


He makes a lot of sense, no? You can watch the other six parts by clicking on the options in the YouTube window (just in case you've for some reason never used YouTube before).

[Update: On the topic of plot and character development being sacrificed for a focus on special effects and technology, I did in fact see Avatar a few weeks back. Meh... Now, the look of the movie was absolutely incredible. Cameron created an entire other world out of digital pixie dust and it was seamlessly beautiful (which is why I recommend seeing it on the big screen while you can) but the rest of his effort can unfortunately be summed up by the following script comparison to Disney's Pocahontas:
Having never seen this cartoon I went with Dances With Wolves myself, although pretty much any flick with Native Americans as the main characters is a valid comparison I think.]