Cosmic Log
A total solar eclipse is a rare and thrilling sight, but seeing it from a height makes it even more exotic.
Check out the view from Japan’s Himawari 8 weather satellite, stationed more than 22,000 miles above the Pacific Ocean in geostationary orbit. The satellite was perfectly placed to track the moon’s shadow as it sped from west of Indonesia to east of Hawaii on March 8. (Or was that March 9?)
KENT, Wash. – For the first time, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos guided a pack of journalists around his Blue Origin rocket factory today and showed off hardware that could send people on suborbital rides to outer space as early as next year.
The billionaire tech entrepreneur also laid out a vision for space commercialization that stretches out for hundreds of years, leading to an era when millions of people would be living and working in space.
“I think space is chock full of resources,” Bezos told reporters. “This is all my view, and I’ll be dead before I’m proved wrong, so it’s a very safe prediction to make. But my view is that there will be a ‘Great Inversion.’”
Today, huge industrial complexes on Earth build components that are sent into space, at a cost of thousands of dollars per pound. Bezos foresees an inversion in that flow of goods. “We’ll make the microprocessors in space, and then we’ll send the little tiny bits to Earth,” Bezos said.
In the long term, Blue Origin could set the stage for moving heavy industries completely off Earth, leaving our planet zoned strictly for “residential and light industrial” use.
Now, that’s service: Amateur astronomers persuaded Seattle-based Alaska Airlines to shift its departure time for Tuesday’s flight from Anchorage to Honolulu 25 minutes later so that passengers can see a total solar eclipse en route.
“It’s an unbelievably accommodating gesture,” Mike Kentrianakis, solar eclipse project manager for the American Astronomical Society, said in an Alaska Airlines blog post about the schedule shift. “Not only is Alaska Airlines getting people from Point A to Point B, but they’re willing to give them an exciting flight experience.”
Thanks to the time change, the passengers on Alaska Flight 870 are now due to see a minute and 53 seconds of totality out the window from a height of 37,000 feet, well above any clouds. (But if you haven’t bought a ticket, don’t bother looking; the flight’s sold out.)
This week’s total solar eclipse is a bad-news, good-news, even-better-news situation for skywatchers in the United States.
Solar eclipses are must-see astronomical events that occur when the moon is positioned just right to block the sun’s disk, as seen from Earth. The eclipse that unfolds on Tuesday is the only time during 2016 that anyone can see the sun totally blotted out.
The bad news is that the total eclipse is visible only in the Asia-Pacific region. The moon’s shadow rolls eastward across the Indian and Pacific oceans, beginning at sunrise just west of Indonesia and ending at sunset just east of Hawaii. If you’re in the United States, you’ll totally miss seeing totality in person.
The good news is that in this age of the Internet, you can still get a peek online.
After coping with a wayward boat, unfavorable winds and propellant problems, SpaceX launched the SES-9 telecommunication satellite on its Falcon 9 rocket today, then tried unsuccessfully to land the rocket’s first stage on an oceangoing platform.
The Falcon 9 soared into the skies above Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida just after sunset at 6:35 p.m. ET (3:35 p.m. PT) after a smooth countdown.
The satellite was sent on its way to geosynchronous transfer orbit, the first step toward putting SES-9 into position for Luxembourg-based SES to deliver satellite broadcast services to millions of customers in the Asia-Pacific region.
After his return from nearly a year in space, NASA astronaut Scott Kelly gave Microsoft’s HoloLens headset a big thumbs-up for work on the International Space Station – and for shooting down aliens in his spare time.
“It worked great,” he said today during a news briefing at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Texas. “I was really surprised. We messed around with it for about two hours, and immediately I sensed this is a capability we could use right now.”
The orbital test was part of Project Sidekick, a Microsoft-NASA collaboration to see how augmented-reality tools like HoloLens could facilitate operations on the space station. The HoloLens glasses can superimpose computer-generated graphics on the wearer’s field of view, and show someone else what the wearer is looking at. Both functions were put to the test in orbit.
“It had some cameras on it, and we could also see a display that’s in your field of view, The person on the ground could be drawing things in your field of view, and pointing to things, and I could be doing the same thing,” Kelly explained.
Even before NASA’s New Horizons probe flew past Pluto, scientists thought they might see clouds in its thin atmosphere – and now a couple of pictures suggest they were spotted.
One of the pictures from last July’s flyby, published by New Scientist today, shows what appears to be a light-colored wisp amid the dwarf planet’s haze.
Michael Buckley, a spokesman for Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, told GeekWire that the science team is still discussing the data.
“What the team can say at this point is Pluto’s atmosphere, including hazes, is complex, and scientists continue to analyze and discuss incoming data as part of the normal science process,” Buckley said in an email. “As always, we’ll post a feature just as soon as we have more analysis and consensus.”
How do you know when to get up in space? And what do you eat? Kindergartners got answers to these and other burning questions about life on the International Space Station from NASA astronaut Kjell Lindgren in a video done up by Wired.
Lindgren came back to Earth from the space station in December after spending 141 days in orbit. That may sound like a short stint, compared to the 340-day stint that his former crewmate Scott Kelly just finished, but it’s plenty long enough to get into a zero-G routine.
The questions that the 5-year-olds asked are the sorts of things that 25-year-olds would be interested to hear as well: For example, one of Lindgren’s favorite space foods was a “faux-cheeseburger” he made from a pieced-together recipe: rehydrated beef patties and cheddar cheese spread, rolled up in a tortilla with squirts of ketchup and mustard on top.
The dark terrain informally known as Cthulhu Regio sweeps nearly halfway around Pluto’s equator, with light-colored peaks sticking up from the surrounding plains. What is that light-colored stuff? Apparently, it’s methane frost.
Evidence for Pluto’s methane meteorology was laid out today by the science team behind NASA’s New Horizons mission.
The piano-sized spacecraft’s cameras zeroed in on Cthulhu when it flew past Pluto last July 14. Most of the region is covered with a layer of dark reddish tholins, a substance that forms when sunlight breaks down hydrocarbons such as methane.
Then there are those bright peaks in southeast Cthulhu: When the scientists looked closely at compositional data collected by New Horizons’ Ralph/Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera, they found that the bright areas on top of Cthulhu’s mountains matched up with the spectral signature of methane ice.
Film director/producer J.J. Abrams has been in on two of the biggest space-movie franchises ever, “Star Trek” and “Star Wars” – so maybe it shouldn’t be that surprising that he’s also in on “Moon Shot,” an online documentary series that tracks the teams vying for the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize.
Abrams is the executive producer for the Google-backed project announced today. That suggests he wasn’t involved in the day-to-day shooting. But the director of “Moon Shot,” Orlando von Einsiedel, has some top-drawer entries on his resume as well. “Virunga,” his 2014 documentary about conservationists in the battle-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo, has won dozens of awards and was nominated for an Oscar.
The nine-part “Moon Shot” series tells the behind-the-scenes story of the 16 teams that are developing spacecraft for trips to the moon.