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Mars Phoenix: Pay your respects

October 31, 2008 By

NASA’s Mars lander, Mars Phoenix, is struggling for power as the Martian winter sets in at its polar landing site. On its hugely popular Twitter feed, Phoenix has been keeping us updated on its fight to stay alive for another day. I have to confess I felt strangely emotional (and then foolish!) when the little lander said goodbye….

And it seems like I’m not the only one who’s formed an attachment to Phoenix! Over at Wired, writers started a contest to write epitaphs for the robot. So join in here and submit your entry!

Surprisingly (to me at least), many people seem to associate Phoenix with being female. What’s the psychology behind that?! Scientists are male, but little robots sent to Mars are female? Interesting.

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Mixed fortunes for Hubble

October 31, 2008 By
Hubble/WFPC2 image of interacting galaxies Arp 147

Hubble/WFPC2 image of interacting galaxies Arp 147

First, the good news: Hubble is back y’all! This stunning picture of the interacting galaxies known as Arp 147 was produced with the telescope’s workhorse camera, the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) since engineers brought the telescope back online just a few days ago following September’s failure. Engineers and astronomers having been working against the clock to get Hubble back up and running, and produce this really great picture, and they deserve all of our support and congratulations!

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Meet 'n Greet our Solar Neighbours

October 30, 2008 By

Check out this very cool interactive 3D map of our Sun’s 32 nearest neighbours, created by German designer Krystian Majewski. Each star is coloured according to its spectral type. You can zoom and rotate, and when you hover your pointer over a star, its name and some background information pops up.

Nice work!

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A Cosmic Challenge

October 30, 2008 By
Galaxies Magnified by Galaxy Cluster Abell 1689's "Gravitational Lens"

Galaxies Magnified by Galaxy Cluster Abell 1689

Cosmology, the study of the Universe on the very largest of scales, is a frustrating business. The vast majority of the matter in the Universe is unaccounted for, and of a large fraction, which we call Dark Energy, we have no idea what it even might look like, let alone how to find it. One important source of information comes from the study of gravitational lenses. When light from the most distant sources travels across the Universe, it is distorted by intervening matter, as predicted by Einstein’s general theory of relativity. By studying the distortions seen in these distant objects, cosmologists gather information about the properties of the large-scale matter distribution along the line of sight.

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Citizen Geology: Earthquake-spotting @ home

October 29, 2008 By
Earthquake in Reno, Nevada in April this year, as detected by traditional earthquake sensors (black) and by laptops participating in QCN (blue).

Earthquake in Reno, Nevada in April this year, as detected by traditional earthquake sensors (black) and by laptops participating in QCN (blue).

Citizen science is a term loosely used to describe scientific research projects that use resources offered by the general public, without specific training, often enabled by the internet. The SETI@home initiative was one of the first high profile projects in astronomy to use computing power in the homes of non-scientists to process large volumes of data; more recently the Galaxy Zoo project enlisted volunteers to help with the identification of galaxy shapes.

Now geology has also joined the fray of citizen science with the Quake-Catcher Network, led by scientists from Stanford University and UC Riverside. Using the same BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Networked Computing) infrastructure that enabled SETI@home, it links thousands of laptop and desktop computers around the world to help gather data from earthquakes, as they occur.

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