Hanging with Tutu, Science in Space, and Other Stories We Didn't post [Video]

By Brian Barrett Oct 10, 2011 8:00 PM 1,745 6

So much news passes before our collective eyes every day that we couldn't possibly cover it all. Mostly because much of it isn't worth covering! But here are a some borderline tidbits we passed on, just in case.

Lenovo accepting submissions from high schoolers for its Space Lab contest; the winning science experiment will be blasted off into space and performed on YouTube. Which, from what I remember about every science fair I've ever seen in movies or television, can only mean one thing: BAKING SODA VOLCANOS IN SPPPAAAAAACCCCCEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!

Microsoft employees have started changing their employment statuses on LinkedIn to the "next-gen console" department, which means that, yes, Microsoft isn't going to sit on the Xbox 360 for the next five years. Related: Apple has people working on iPad 3, Microsoft has people working on Windows 9, and Starbucks has people working on serving a Quaranta that won't cause massive heart failure. [Kotaku]

It's easiest to spread a message of peace in a place where there's no one around to fight. [The Next Web]

That seemed to be the reaction in certain corners of the web today, when it became apparent that Audible was flying in the face of Apple by including a link to an external content store in its app. Or! They just decided to suck it up and tithe 30% of purchases. That sounds more likely, right? Right. [9to5Mac]

Left Behind is our daily collection of chaff we didn't think was quite good enough to post on its own, and why. Related Stories

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Scientists Discover the Best Skiing In the Solar System [Space]

By Jack Loftus Oct 9, 2011 7:00 PM 34,228 29

...and it's only a few hundred million miles away. Better fuel up your rocket and get started today, however, because we're talking about Saturn's moon Enceladus and the incredibly fine, snowy powder that covers its surface:

"The particles are only a fraction of a millimeter in size … even finer than talcum powder," study leader Paul Schenk, a planetary scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas, said in a statement. "This would make for the finest powder a skier could hope for."

The discovery was made by a joint effort between the ever-effective NASA Cassini orbiter and maps of the moon's surface that used various colors to represent the age of surface features. The image included here is an artist's rendition of the surface.

In some places the snow cover is an estimated 330 feet deep! Bring your fat skis.
[National Geographic via Boing Boing]

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This Massive Cold War Spy Satellite Was Hidden from the World Until Now [Space]

The HEXAGON satellite spied on America's Cold War foes for over a decade, taking extremely detailed (film!) photographs from space. It was 60 feet long—bigger than a bus. And the public never, ever saw it. We did.

To celebrate its 50th birthday, the top secret satellite operators at the National Reconnaissance Office gave the public a little present: full access to a real life HEXAGON at National Air and Space Museum's Udvar-Hazy Center in Virginia—filled largely with nostalgic old spies and space engineers. So of course we checked it out. The enormity of the thing is stunning, as is its complexity. [View as single page]

In the 70s, flying a plane over the Soviet Union and China wasn't like hopping on Jet Blue—especially one loaded with American spy gear. So the Pentagon cooked up HEXAGON—the most sophisticated space eyeball among the first generation of spy sats. Beginning in 1971, each HEXAGON was pushed up into space by a Titan III rocket, whereupon it would snap humungous panoramic views of Russian turf with its giant camera, which boasted a focal length of 77 inches, a 20-inch aperture, and the ability to capture detail down to two or three feet. But how'd it get the film down to Earth? With a lot of balls.

Each payload of recon negatives was launched in its own landing vehicle, met by a spy plane that would literally snatch it out of the air like a butterfly net. These photos were used to, of course, see what the dastardly commies were up to, and plan for an eventual war against them. Of course, none of this was ever needed, as they weren't really up to that much. But the HEXAGON marked a profound shift for warfare—even cold warfare. For the first time, space was a battlefield. America began to think that to control space was to control what sat underneath it—the vacuum was militarized. And this giant hulk helped make it that way—a process that'll never, ever be reversed. [NRO] You can keep up with Sam Biddle, the author of this post, on Twitter, Facebook, or Google+. All photography by Nicko Margolies. For more of Nicko's work and contact information, check out his photo blog.

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Another Dead Satellite Is Blindly Plummeting to Earth [Space]

So apparently dead satellites blithely falling from the sky is a thing now. After last week's UARS debacle, the now-defunct German Roentgen Satellite (ROSAT) is scheduled to crash to Earth in late October or early November.

The ROSAT was originally an X-Ray observatory developed by Germany, the United States, and the United Kingdom and launched in 1990. Its design life was 18 months, but it functioned fully through 1994, and was only shut down for good in 1999. And now it's coming to kill us all.

For its part, the German Aerospace Agency promises to provide frequent updates, similar to NASA during the UARS scare. Though apparently the ROSAT's orbit means it could land anywhere from Canada to South America, which sounds totally reasonable and not at all incredibly horrifying. And the odds of its debris crushing a human being are a less optimistic 1-in-2000, compared to UARS's 1-in-3200.

The danger period is still a pretty wide window, so you certainly have time to get your affairs in order before you're crushed to death but a 2.4-ton molten German satellite. But do begin praying to whatever deity or Sector 7 flower girl you go to for salvation from giant falling space objects. [Smart Planet, NASA]

Image Credit: German Aerospace Center

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This Incredible Space Aurora Video Trumps Any Earth Fly-By—Ever [Video]

This breathtaking time-lapse of Earth's auroras as seen from the flying International Space Station is one of the most beautiful videos I've seen in my life. I can't even begin to imagine the feelings that astronauts must experience when they watch this in real time.

It truly must be the most exhilarating yet most humbling experiences any human being can go through.

If you are experiencing playback problems, please refresh your browser using F5.

The video was created by our friend Félix Pharand using time-lapse NASA images released yesterday. He employed the same technique used for last weekend's stunning fly-by.

Félix is the anthropologist and visualization expert behind Globaïa, one of the proponents of the Anthropocene geological era. This era begins when humans started to significantly change the surface of our planet using engineering.

It's ironic that, for all the changes that we have inflicted upon our home planet, Earth keeps reminding us how immensely beautiful she is and how insignificant we are compared to her power and the cosmos that surrounds her. [Thanks Félix!]

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What It Feels Like To Get Hit By Falling Space Junk [Science]

We know that at least one person has been hit by space junk. Her name is Lottie Williams and she was hit by a piece of a Delta II rocket that fell to earth in 1997.

Her encounter with space debris happened in a park in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She was walking with some friends late at night, admiring the fireball that streaked across the sky. Shortly afterwards, she felt a tap on the shoulder and heard something hit the ground behind her.

That "something" was a small piece of fabric-like metal that weighed as much as an empty soda can. Analysis by several independent laboratories confirmed it came from a falling rocket. [Fox News]

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Watch Why and How Seasons Change From Space [Video]

Today the summer ends. The season is changing because Earth is tilted. As it rotates around the Sun, the light reaches regions at a different angle for a longer or shorter time. This is how it looks from space:

This video shows how the line between the night and day—called the terminator—changes its angle from December 21 2011 to September 20, 2011. This doesn't mean the Sun changes its position in relation to Earth. It's Earth that moves. And since our planet is tilted on its vertical axis 23.5 degrees relative to the Sun and the ecliptic plane—the plane on which Earth rotates—the Sun's light reaches the Northern and Southern Hemispheres for a different amount of time depending on Earth's position.

When Earth is going through the December's solstice, the axis is tilted away from the Sun. The Northern Hemisphere is exposed to the Sun for shorter time periods than the Southern Hemisphere. The longer nights mean less Sun radiation reaching the Northern Hemisphere, which means colder days during the winter seasons. Meanwhile, the Southern Hemisphere gets its long days of summer. The contrary happens during the June solstice.

Today we are going through the equinox—exactly, it happened at 9:04am Coordinated Universal Time. The terminator is now perpendicular to the orbital plane because the Earth's axis is inclined neither away nor towards the Sun. This means that both the Northern and Southern Hemisphere are getting roughly the same day and night hours. Here in NYC, this means fall. Down there in places like Buenos Aires, that means the beginning of the spring. On March 20 next year, this will happen again but on reverse.

This time lapse shows exactly how this all looks from space. The images for the video were captured by the EUMETSAT's Meteosat-9 satellite. [NASA's Earth Observatory, NASA Goddard Flickr Stream]

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NASA Will Give $1.6 Billion to Private Companies to Design a Shuttle Replacement [Space]

After announcing its new deep space rocket and Apollo program heir, NASA says that they will give $1.61 billion to private companies to design a full system and a spacecraft capable of ferrying cargo and astronauts to the ISS.

The money will fund the Integrated Design Contract and the Commercial Crew Development Round 2, which will take it where the shuttle left.

The process is open to different companies, like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, SpaceX or Dream Chaser. In the first phase, companies will use part of that money to present their systems. On the second phase, the winner—or winners, if the budget allows—from phase one will finish their projects.

It will begin in July 2012 and end in April 2014. At the end of this long tunnel, there will be something that will take US astronauts to the ISS low-earth orbit. Until then, it's Soyuz all the way.

That will give the winning program six years of operation—the ISS is expected to be sunk in the ocean in 2020. Hopefully, the systems would be in place to go somewhere else by then. Perhaps one of Bigelow's space motels. [NASA, NASA and NASA]

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NASA's Not Sure Where in the World This Satellite Will Crash [Space]

The 20-year-old UARS satellite has dropped out of orbit—as old satellites are wont to do—and is reentering the atmosphere. Too bad NASA can't pinpoint where—or when—exactly it will land. Could be the middle of the Pacific, could be the middle of Paris—it's a surprise!

If you have to leave your house on or around September 24th, remember to keep one eye on the skies. The Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS) is currently hurtling in at 5 meters per second and is expected to land somewhere between the 57th latitudes—that's 57 degrees north and 57 degrees south of the equator—which only covers...most of the world's populated areas. Shit.

Luckily, most of the satellite is expected to break apart and burn up before it touches terra firma. Unluckily, the UARS still has only a 1 in 3,200 chance of striking a populated area—NASA's normal safety protocols limit that probability to 1 in 10,000. Apparently you are more likely to be killed via falling satellite than you are by a bear wearing a ballerina outfit. [BBC]

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Ancient Earth Got a Galactic Golden Shower [Space]

A large part of gold's allure is its rarity. Even so, it's still 1000 times more abundant on Earth than it should be. Boffins at University of Bristol now have an explanation for this phenomenon: it came from ouuuuter spaaaaaace!

In theory, most of the gold, and other heavier metals like tungsten, that were around during Earth's inception would have been sucked into the core during its formation because of their relatively high mass and density; thus leaving behind a crust bereft of bling. While this makes sense logically, it clearly doesn't mesh with reality. Humans have been mining gold for millennia despite not having access to the core.

After comparing tungsten concentrations from samplings of the world's oldest rocks (formed about 4 billion years ago) with those of more modern rocks, scientists found that modern rocks contain significantly more tungsten than their ancient counterparts. Since gold, tungsten, and precious metals in general behave similarly when it comes to geological formation, this means that the original crust contained far fewer precious metals than modern ones. Through further research, they were able to link this change to an exact event: the "terminal bombardment".

Far from being an Schwarzenneger movie, "terminal bombardment" refers to a gigantic meteor shower (or rather hurricane) that took place around 3.9 billion years ago. It consisted of 20 billion billion tons [not a typo] of meteorites crashing into the recently-formed Earth's crust. Damn, nature... It's these asteroids that endowed Earth with virtually all the metals that we've come to depend on for so many purposes. After all, where would civilization be today without grillz? [University of Bristol, BBC] Image from NASA: William Moede et al

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This Is Probably the Best Way to Watch a Space Shuttle Launch (Updated) [Image Cache]

I always thought that flying around the space shuttle was the most amazing way to watch the launch. After seeing this image of skydivers falling as the shuttle rocket fired through the clouds, I've serious doubts.

Of course, flying a combat jet is awesome on its own right. In any case, what it really surprises me is that a shuttle rocket launches at all with so many people flying and falling around it. [Imgur via Reddit—Thanks Makowb!]

Edited: Apparently it wasn't the shuttle, but a Delta rocket. Still, it's an awesome way to view any launch.

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Wicked Laser S3 Krypton Lightning Review: Holy Christ Now It's Green and Goes Into Space [Lasers]

The Wicked Laser odyssey of horror continues. First, they offered an underwhelming laser you couldn't even buy. Then, they stuck two together. And now? A green one that's twenty times brighter, twenty times more pointless, and twenty times as awesome.

The S3 Krypton is twenty times as bright as its blue predecessor, which was already shockingly, dangerously bright. It's not more powerful—both emit a full watt of power—but the green light's wavelength is vastly more visible. Wicked Laser claims an 85 mile range, which means it could penetrate the Earth's atmosphere—the thermosphere, no less!—and go into fucking space. Hypothetically, at least. You'll forgive me for not being able to verify that claim myself. Essentially, the Krypton is just 20x the reckless fun of the Arctic. And yes, it is extremely, extremely bright. The dot is blinding. The beam is visible in full daylight. It hurts your skin. It hurts your friend's skin. Zap.

Like the other Wicked Lasers, this thing is completely, paradoxically useless. According to its own safety manual, you can't do anything with it. You can't use it for presentations, lest you blind everyone in the room with you. You're not supposed to look at the beam, or the dot, or any reflected light from either. You're not supposed to shoot it at stars, or planets, or use it as a gun sight. You definitely aren't supposed to shoot it at your friends or cat. What are you supposed to use it for? I don't know. Wicked Lasers doesn't say. I can only fathom uses that result in blindness, pain, arrest, or at the very least, high risk of one. It's also—god christ—one thousand dollars.

I'm not even sure if I can in good conscience tell you to buy this. I'm terrified of it. My roommate made me put it away. I slept anxiously knowing it was in my apartment. It's a giant, metal, $1,000 liability. But the mere idea of it is so stupendous, so insane, bizarre, and incredible—wield photons, mortal!—that I can't help but love it. That said, do not do anything risky with it. Don't shine it at yourself, others, or anything flying in the sky. Don't be stupid.

[Wicked Lasers]

Note: Wicked Lasers, after last year's shit-up with the Arctic, wants to say sorry. And that you can trust them again!

We have the real-time inventory system as you can see on the site, so users know how many are in stock (or not). Once we run out of stock, we will not accept pre-orders until we get firm dates from our manufacturing center (which will take several weeks).

Let's hope they learned their lesson.

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The Wildfires Burning Texas Right Now Can Be Seen from Space [Fire]

Texas is burning right now. More than a thousand homes have already been lost, 5,000 people have been evacuated and more fires are popping up. Some of the fires are so big that you can see them from space.

It's a really scary situation, a lot of people don't even know what's going to happen—there are an estimated 85 fires burning with more than 7,500 acres already destroyed by the fires. According to people in the Lone Star State, the entire state smells like fire and the clouds are filled with smoke (most of the fires are in Central Texas).

Something as small as a Labor Day BBQ could start a fire because it's hot, it's dry and it's windy in Texas. Absolutely destructive weather and with no rain in sight, the fires are raging and spreading. The Texas Forest Service said, "this is unprecedented fire behavior. No one on the face of this Earth has ever fought fires in these extreme conditions." The space shots of the fires come from NASA and though they don't show the damage up close (like these photos do), it does show the sheer size and power behind it. Hopefully, everyone fighting these fires can stay safe. [LA Times via @MattHardigree, Image Credit: NASA] You can keep up with Casey Chan, the author of this post, on Twitter or Facebook.

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New Moon Landing Sites Photos Are So Sharp They Show Detailed Rover Tire Marks [Space]

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12 Satellites Under Construction [Space]

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This Bottle Contains the Breath of the Greatest Space Heroes of All Time [Space]

It looks like a tiny bottle of liquid, but you are looking at the breath of Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins, the crew of Apollo 11, the first humans to land on the Moon, condensed into liquid:

A sample of wastewater taken from the Apollo 11 command module after its return to Earth. The item is a 2.5-inch tall bottle about one-quarter of the way full of the clear liquid. A typed label affixed to the glass reads Apollo 11, Post Flight Waste Tank 0720Z 7/25/69.

According the consignor, the liquid is actually condensation formed as a result of the astronauts breathing.

Needless to say, if you drink this holy water, you will become stronger than Captain America, smarter than Stephen Hawking and grow your steel balls courage level up to +2591. Yes, my dear space nerds, that's courage balls the size of two entire planetary systems.

The breath's humidity was captured by the Apollo environmental control system, which had 180 parts compared to the eight for a window AC unit. It performed 23 functions, which included air cooling, air heating, ventilation to suits, ventilation to cabin, air filtration, CO2 removal, odor removal using activated charcoal filters and humidity control. The latter was the part that collected excessive humidity in the command module atmosphere, which couldn't exceed 70% or go below 40%. That condensed liquid was then stored in a waste tank.

In case you are wondering, the pee was ejected directly into space as a golden nebula of frozen stars using a hose in which astronauts introduced their penises. Feces weren't ejected as meteorites into space, however. They were stored in bags at the end of the cumbersome and disgusting process you can imagine, which included using your fingers and, after collecting every bit and piece into the bag, massaging the crap with an anti-germ dust inside the bag.

The bottle of space heroes' breath will be auctioned alongside stuff like an Apollo 11 flight plan page, Neil Armstrong's letter with his first words on the Moon, the Apollo 14 lunar Bible and Armstrong's training glove. Other objects in the auction start at only $200. [Apollo Experience Report, JSC and Apollo Saturn Facts via RR Auction via CNET]

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The First Hi-Res Simulation of the Milky Way's Formation [Space]

It took nine months and 1.4 million processor-hours of work from NASA's Pleiades supercomputer but a group of researchers from UC Santa Cruz have discovered how, exactly, our galaxy was born.

The Cold Dark Matter theory posits that right after the Big Bang, gravitational forces influenced the minute variations in density of dark matter, slowly clumping them together into large and larger forms. These clumps eventually became gravity wells that, in turn, pulled together the remaining visible matter into the galaxies we see around us.

As Piero Madau, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UCSC and coauthor of the study states:

Star formation in real galaxies occurs in a clustered fashion, and to reproduce that out of a cosmological simulation is hard. This is the first simulation that is able to resolve the high-density clouds of gas where star formation occurs, and the result is a Milky Way type of galaxy with a small bulge and a big disk. It shows that the cold dark matter scenario, where dark matter provides the scaffolding for galaxy formation, is able to generate realistic disk-dominated galaxies.

Until now, numerous lower-resolution computer simulations had failed to generate a spiral galaxy similar to our own—slight bulge in the middle with a large, well-formed disk surrounding it—instead creating one with an impossibly large bulge-to-disk ratio. Turns out that this was caused because the low resolution of the models averaged gas densities over too large an area which resulted in low-density stars. In the high resolution study by US Santa Cruz, dubbed Eris, gas densities were more locally concentrated which resulted in a more realistic distribution of stars that only form in the highest density areas.

[UCSC via Popular Science]

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NASA Might Have to Control the International Space Station by Remote Control [Space]

Space.com reports that, with last week's resupply failure putting NASA behind schedule, Russia needs to get its Soyuz craft back up to speed. If they don't, the ISS will be an empty vessel after the last of the current crew leaves in November.

This wouldn't be the end of the world, as NASA is capable of controlling the ISS from Earth. However, it does put pressure on Russia to see that their Soyuz rockets function so we can continue research there. The Soyuz-U spacecraft that fell back to Earth is similar in design to the craft that will carry the next batch of astronauts to the station. Russian scientists are racing to test their rockets and give them the green light for lift off, but they may not have enough time to meet their deadlines. The current crews scheduled to return mid-September and mid-November. NASA may have no choice but to go it alone thereafter. [Space.com via NPR]

Image: NASA

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How a Robotic Telescope Just Found the Youngest Supernova Yet [Space]

See that little, growing white dot? That's the youngest supernova ever discovered and the closest to Earth in a generation.

The lucky Galileio to spot this momentous event was The Palomar Transient Factory, an automated system mounted on the 48-inch Samuel Oschin Telescope in Southern California. As it scans the night sky, the PTF transmits the collected data to the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center where a cadre of of supercomputers apply advanced computer-learning search algorithms to analyze and identify potentially important objects. Coordinates to these points are then distributed to astronomers worldwide for further inspection.

PTF 11kly—as the supernova has been ID'd—is a Type Ia located in the the Pinwheel Galaxy, part of the Big Dipper constellation about 21 million light years away. That's unfortunately too far away to see with the naked eye but luckily too far away to pose any threat to the planet. It's just the fifth Type Ia supernova to explode this close to the Earth since 1572. To find one just a few hours after it went critical is unheard of and will provide invaluable insight into how they develop.

Type Ia supernovae are formed when White Dwarves—a star that's already burned through its fuel and ceases fusion—undergo a secondary fusion reaction after siphoning material off a companion star, releasing massive amounts of enrgy. These supernovae are incredibly valuable to science because the peak luminosity between these types of supernova is so uniform that they can be used as standard candles in measuring interstellar distances.

[Berkeley Labs via Popular Science - Type Ia Supernova Wiki]

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Samsung Cites 2001: A Space Odyssey Against Apple in Greatest Legal Defense of All Time [Video]

Apple is giving Samsung a legal pummeling because it thinks the latter stole the iPad's design for the Galaxy Tab. So far, the fight's going well for Apple. But Samsung has something up its sleeve: Apple ripped off science fiction.

Or so Samsung claims. Patent expert Florian Mueller noticed something odd in Samsung's American legal counteroffensive: they argue the idea for the iPad existed back in 1968, when Stanley Kubrick dreamed up his sci fi classic. And in American patent law, if the idea existed before your patent application—what's known as prior art—your patent is null. So essentially, Samsung is pulling a hell of a legal maneuver here, alleging they couldn't possibly have stolen the iPad's design, because Apple took it from an imaginary science fiction movie space station:

Attached hereto as Exhibit D is a true and correct copy of a still image taken from Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film "2001: A Space Odyssey." In a clip from that film lasting about one minute, two astronauts are eating and at the same time using personal tablet computers. The clip can be downloaded online at . As with the design claimed by the D'889 Patent, the tablet disclosed in the clip has an overall rectangular shape with a dominant display screen, narrow borders, a predominately flat front surface, a flat back surface (which is evident because the tablets are lying flat on the table's surface), and a thin form factor.

Mueller says it would be "amazing" if the court bought this. But Samsung does have a point, even if it's a futile one. The problem with Apple's radically minimal design is that it's hard to say there's terribly much singular about it. Unlike the design of, say, a Lamborghini, which is distinctive and iconic because of its detail, Apple's gorgeous industrial design is striking because of how invisible it is.

All tablets are pretty much just black glass rectangles. Most smartphones are pretty much just smaller black glass rectangles. Apple certainly made this design ubiquitous through the iPad and iPhone, respectively, but did they invent it? With a form so vague, it might be hard to prove that they did. And if the realm of science fiction becomes fair game, the fights of Samsung—and any other company Apple might square off against—could become easier. I'd never have guessed Space Age design and beautiful futurism could be a liability. [FOSS Patents via 9to5Mac]

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