Well, at least that’s what UFO spotters looking at this NASA Mars Rover picture saw:

I, personally, am more inclined towards a bowling ball, which would definitely mean the presence of intelligent life on Mars, unlike here, on Earth.

Unique visitors to post: 0

Today we celebrate the the Earth Day (different than the equinocal Earth Day celebrated by the UN - but hey, EVERY DAY should be an Earth Day) designed to inspire awareness and appreciation for the Earth’s environment. The tradition was started by a demonstration on the environment organized by US Senator Gaylord Nelson.  Today marks the beginning of The Green Generation Campaign™ which will also be the focus of the 40th Anniversary of Earth Day in 2010.

Throughout the half-century of space exploration, we have seen many breathtaking images of the cosmos, displaying not only the infinite beauty of the Universe but also reminding us of how fragile and precious life is. The Earth’s biosphere is incredibly small compared to the vast hostility of the Universe. It is the only place we know capable of supporting our way of living, yet the Universe itself could envy us our efforts to damage it beyond repair.

It is borderline naive to believe that the Universe has been created to support life (just as people once believed the Earth was in the center of everything).  Our Universe is actually an unbelievably hostile place and it doesn’t care for life at all. If it is good at anything, it masters the creation of black holes. You can read of many ways the Universe is trying to kill us (and how it will eventually succeed) in Phil Plait’s brilliant book - Death From The Skies!

On a brighter note, I never thought I’d say that others should follow the example of Vatican. It will most likely not happen again so here I go … The roof tiles on the Paul VI auditorium are being replaced by 2,700 solar panels in a $1.5m project to make Vatican the first solar-powered “country” in the world.

Since elected to office in 2005, Benedict XVI has criticized the current energy policies of the world which, according to him, make the lives of poor people unbearable. It seems he has some sense of true altruism, I give him that.

Nevertheless, I still believe that the world would be much better off without organized religion. Practicing religion on individual basis may have positive influence on one’s life besides the physiological impacts of the placebo effect. Richard Dawkins argues that “no single thing is the root of all anything”. It might be true of organized religion. Nevertheless, religion has a great propensity to be abused by those seeking power and as a tool to justify any ideology and motives. The never ending strive of religious zealots to reach a place were we would constantly base our decisions on superstitious and dogmatic believes over rational and critical thinking, that, is, I believe, the root of all evil. Hence I will conclude this post by a new T-Shirt design for killing two birds with one stone …

Unique visitors to post: 0

A little more than a month ago, NASA launched the Kepler space telescope which is specifically designed to survey our neighborhood looking for Earth-size and smaller planets in or near the habitable zone of their stars. Since the launch, the spacecraft has been slowly drifting away from the Earth and is now trailing us by more 3,000,000 km on its sun-centric orbit.

At 12:13 p.m. UT on April 7, mission operators sent the commands to jetisson the telescope’s dust cover. Engineers at Kepler’s mission operations center at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, in Boulder, Colorado, will now use the incident startlight to calibrate the instrument and the “real” data collection will commence in a few weeks time.

Meanwhile, NASA has released the first series of the star fields captured by the mission’s 95 megapixels camera (largest ever sent into space).

The star-rich region of sky between the constellations of Cygnus and Lyra stretching across 100 square degrees will be monitored constantly for three-and-half-year years (with the exception of downlink times). Scientist will analyze the data looking for periodic dips in brightness which occur when a planet crosses in front of their stars from Kepler’s point of view. The instruments aboard the spacecraft can notice changes in brightness of 0.002%  - small enough to detect transits of Earth-sized planets.

Detailed info about the mission is available at the NASA’s Kepler page. You can also follow the Kepler’s Twitter feed.

Unique visitors to post: 0

On Saturday April 4, at 12:43 UT, GalaxyZoo reached its goal of 1,0000,000 galaxy classifications during the Internation Year of Astronomy - 100 Hours of Astronomy effort which ends at 16:00 UT on April 5. The ZoonoMeter filled up well ahead of the schedule after 72 hours and 43 minutes since the challange started.

The GalaxyZoo project is a bit similar to the world-known SETI@Home which opened to public almost 10 years ago (May 17, 1999). Since then millions of internet users joined the effort and donated their computer idle time to a variety of scientific research. GalaxyZoo is different in a way that it recruits members of public to carry out galaxy classfications. Unlike the @Home projects, which rely on computer analysis of their data, automated programs have been unable to produce reliable galaxy classification. Human brain is far more efficient at recognizing patterns. Without human volunteers it would take years to analyze and classify the collected data.

The Galaxy Zoo files contain almost a quarter of a million galaxies collected by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. More than 150,000 people have taken part in Galaxy Zoo so far, producing a wealth of valuable data and sending telescopes on Earth and in space chasing after their discoveries. On April 2, Galaxy Zoo hit the 20 million classification mark!

Unique visitors to post: 0

Today at 23:58 UT asteroid labeled as 2009 FP will pass the Earth at a distance of about 0.003 AU which roughly represents 1.2 Lunar Distances (LD). The comfortable separation of 445,000 km is not a “hair” per se, nevertheless it is quite close by space standards.

This Near Earth Object (NEO) was discovered at 05:46 UT on March 29 by Mount Lemmon Survey (MLS) in Arizona, one of the three facilities of the Catalina Sky Survey. The probability of impacting the Earth is only 1 in 133,000. The asteroid has a diameter of approximately 10 meters and poses no risk to anyone as it would certainly break up in the Earth’s atmosphere and rain down only a few small fragments (meteorites).

Astronomers have been conducting surveys to locate objects whose orbits bring them to close proximity with the Earth for decades. However, automatization techniques first introduced by LINEAR program greatly increased the numbers of discovered asteroid in the last ten year. LINEAR alone is responsible for the discovery of more than 220,000 new objects out of which more than 2,000 classify and NEO’s (NEO is a Solar System object with perihelion distance less than 1.3 AU).

It might seem that Earth’s neighborhood got filled fill space junk suddenly as news of fireballs have filled internet blogs and even TV news over the past 6 months. Fortunately, it is far more likely that general public and media simply pay more attention to these events. Additionally, astronomers are becoming better at detecting even the smallest objects days before they pass the Perigee of their orbits. Bad Astronomer offers a great explanation for this “puzzling” phenomenon:

I think it’s a mix of coincidence — there may be a few more than usual, but it’s not like these things have published schedules; sometimes there are more and sometimes fewer — together with people being more aware of them because they’ve been in the news lately. It’s like buying a car and suddenly seeing it everywhere when you drive. We notice what we’re primed to notice.

Below is a short list of notable objects that crossed path with Earth in the past six month:

On October 6, 2008 Richard A. Kowalski of the Catalina Sky Survey discovered a meteoroid, later labeled as  2008 TC3, that entered Earth’s atmosphere only 20 hours later, at 02:46 UT on October 7, 2008 over Sudan. There was great excitement in NEO community as it was the first time a prediction was issued about an object entering Earth’s atmosphere. Consequent observations led to discovery of several fragments of the original piece of rock that measured about 5 meters in diameter. Here is an animation of what an observer on the asteroid would see in the last hours before the atmospheric entry.

A very bright fireball lit up the skies in Alberta and Saskatchewan, Canada around 22:30 UT on Thursday, November 20, 2008.

Only two months later this footage from Sweden captures a spectacular meteor that entered Earth’s atmosphere on January 17, 2009.

It is quite rare to see a meteor during daylight as most meteors are too faint to be noticed. One of the exceptions is the great fireball of 1972 which was the first Earth-grazing object ever observed.

Earth-grazing fireballs are caused by a meteoroid that enters the atmosphere but overcomes the Earth’s gravity and exists back into outer space. Only four grazers have been scientifically observed.

A very bright daylight meteor was seen over Texas on February 15, 2009. Only a few days later, two astronomers claimed to have found meteorite debris.

On March 2, 2008 at 13:45UT we had the first close miss of March when Asteroid 2009 DD45, discovered only a few days before, reached the perigee distance of 72,000 km.

Two weeks later, on March 18 at 12:17 UT another interplanetary rock 15 meters across, 2009 FH,  flew by reaching minimal geocentric distance of 79,000 km. Both of these objects passed us at only twice the altitude of geostationary satellites.

If this feels like the Universe is out there to get us … well … that’s right. We know with 100% certainty that it will eventually succeed.

Unique visitors to post: 0

UPDATE 2: Discovery Touchdown in HD

UPDATE: HD video of shuttle Discovery landing is now available at NASA TV YouTube Channel.

Today at 19:13:17 UT, the Space Shuttle Discovery landed on Runway 15 at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, Cape Canaveral in Florida, ending a 13-day mission to the ISS.

The STS-119 flight delivered the space station’s fourth and final set of solar array wings, completing the station’s truss. The additional electricity provided by the arrays will fully power science experiments, help support station operations and extend the station’s crew to six astronauts.

During the mission, which lasted 12 days 19 hours 29 minutes and 33 seconds, the crew travelled 8.5 million kilimetres (5.3 million miles). STS-119 was the 125th space shuttle flight, the 28th flight to the station, the 36th flight for Discovery and the first flight in 2009. Despite a few minor glitches and one relatively large one (mission specialist Joseph Acaba accidentally inserted a pin upside down jamming the deployment of an equipment storage platform outside the Japanese Kibo laboratory), the mission is viewed as a big success by bringing the station to full power. Eight flights to station remain before the shuttles retire in 2010.

With Discovery and its crew safely home, the stage is set for the launch of STS-125, targeted for May 12. Atlantis’ mission will return the space shuttle to NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope for one last visit before the shuttle fleet retires in 2010. Over 11 days and five spacewalks, Atlantis’ crew will upgrade the telescope, preparing it for at least another five years of research.

Unique visitors to post: 0

There are a few minor spoilers below but nothing that would reveal the big picture or make much sense without actually seeing the show’s conclusion.

Undoubtedly, the last Friday brought the finale of one of the best sci-fi shows on TV. Battlestar Galactica (BSG) had a great run of four full seasons. Since the finale aired on Syfy channel last Friday many bloggers posted their comments and criticism about the final revelations. I will refrain from commenting on the actually story and rather focus on some easily noticeable mistakes the show creators made. On a side note, I recommend to click on the images below to see them in higher quality.

In modern astronomy, constellations present a method of dividing the sky into (88) areas with precise boundaries. Nevertheless, it is more common to regard constellations as groups of stars resembling recognizable patterns - asterisms. Throughout centuries stars seem to maintain the same position and apparent distances with respect to each other. Nonetheless, long-term observation reveal that the constellations change shape as stars exhibit independent motion, albeit very slow. The constellations in the presence appear roughly the same as the ancient Egyptians would have observe them. Nonetheless, if we went much further back into the past, we would have hard time recognizing asterisms with which we are so familiar today.

At the beginning of the finale (at around 9:00) after Adama spits the contents of his drinks onto his suit, there is a cut back to the fleet. At that moment, anyone slightly familiar with the night sky will immediately recognize the stars of Orion. All prominent stars, apart from Rigel (β Ori) obscured by Galactica, are visible. Easily identifiable are stars from the main quadrangle: Betelgeuse (α Ori), Bellatrix (γ Ori), Saiph (κ Ori), the stars of the Orion’s belt: Alnitak(ζ Ori), Alnilam(ε Ori), Mintaka(δ Ori), and the Orion Nebula (M42).

Unlike most other constellations the stars in the Orion exhibit a small relative motion (as observed from the Earth). The asterism formed more than a million years ago and will remain observable for another million or two into the future. At the time the screen shot above was taken the fleet was nowhere close to Earth but there might be a possible explanation of Orion’s appearance here. With the exception of γ Ori (Bellatrix) at the distance of 240 light years (ly), the rest of the main Orion stars are distanced between 600 and 1300ly away from the Earth. Hence, there might have been a place within a few tens of light years of Earth where a pattern resembling Orion could have been seen in the past. Furthermore, there is evidence that the show creators were aware of stellar drift, as officers mentioned several times the necessity to periodically recompute the jump coordinates. I’m willing to give the show “scientist” the benefit of the doubt, despite Occam’s Razor.

A few seconds before the Earth comes into the camera view, Galactica “flies” over the moon. When the Earth rises, it is apparent that an observer on the planet would see the new moon lunar phase. Hence, Galactica must have come from the far side of the moon and flown directly above the north pole. However, the surface morphology observed on screen does not correspond to features shown in maps of Moon’s far side.

Furthermore, the Earth in the image has virtually cloudless atmosphere and looks as if cut directly out of the Universal Movies intro. Even worse, Earth’s terminator reaches too close to the equator. Even if the fleet arrived at the time of summer solstice, the shadow cannot reach past the Antarctic Circle, which reaches just a few kilometres north of the coast of Antarctica at the longitudes around the southern tip of Africa. In any case, judging by Earth’s tilt and the surface illumination, the time should be close to the autumnal equinox (How do I know this?).

The next image reveals the most easily recognizable mistake. As we learn in the last moments of the show, the fleet arrived at Earth 150,000 years in the past. It was mentioned earlier how stellar drift shapes the face of constellations over time. The stars which give Orion the easily recognizable shape have relatively small proper motion relative to the Sun. Nevertheless, the situation is quite different in the case of the brightest stars in Ursa Major (forming the famous Big Dipper).

The image above was captured a few seconds after the fleet arrived above Africa, roughly at 59:50. It clearly shows the Big Dipper and a more trained eye can easily spot other stars forming the Ursa Major constellation. The problem is that 150,000 years ago, this constellation looked very different and hardly anyone would be able to identify it in the night sky. The actual position of stars forming the Big Dipper is displayed below.

Of course, stars in any given constellation are unlikely to be physically related. Surprisingly enough most stars visible in this region of the sky seem to be connected. Their measured common motion suggests that they all belong to a open star cluster approximately 75 ly away. The cluster is more properly known as the Ursa Major Moving Group.

The last goof I noticed could have easily been prevented by asking a somewhat knowledgeable person a simple question. Instead, the writer went for a phrase which would deliver the biggest awe. It kind of reminds me of the mistake George Lucas made by confusing the parsec (pc) for a unit of time (”Kessel run in 12 parsecs”)

Adama: “How’s that possible? Human beings naturally evolved on a planet one million light years away. The odds against that are …”

Baltar: “Astronomical, yeah.”

The Milky Way has the diameter of approximately 100,000 ly. Thus, if it were true that the planet on which the fleet landed was a million light years away, the original 12 colonies could not have been in our galaxy. It gets even worse. As far as we know (and we know quite a lot about the neighborhood of Milky Way) there is no good candidate for a place where New Caprica could have been. There are two dwarf galaxies close to the 1 million light years (Mly) marker. Leo I is a dwarf galaxy at around 0.8 Mly and the Phoenix Dwarf galaxy at around 1.3 Mly. Nevertheless, it is fair to assume that the BSG universe is limited to Milky Way as there are (weirdly enough) references to constellations seen from the Earth, and we have not heard a word of intergalactic travel capabilities.

Finally on a slightly different note. I’m not sure whether to be disappointed or glad about how the series ended. On one hand, I found the “God always has a plan” notion really annoying ever since the Pythia’s prophecy began to play a significant role in the show’s development. The idea of a omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent being “playing the dice” sending agents into people’s head to deliver message for him, or bringing people back from death goes against rational thinking of any sort.

On the other hand, Moore’s portrayal how ridiculous irrational and superstitious beliefs are and how they ruin lives, regardless of whether or not that was his ultimate intention, is a good lesson that the viewers should take from the show.

1 - How did I conclude that the fleet arrives around the time of autumnal equinox? First of all, it is apparent from the illumination of Earth’s surface that the sun is positioned directly behind (the Moon is in the new moon phase). Hence, taking into consideration the axial tilt and the direction of Earth’s motion around the sun (see the image below), the conclusion follows.

Unique visitors to post: 0

The International Space Station made another great fly over London a few hours ago (19:24 UT). At the maximum brightness (-2.4mag), the station overshone any other object in the sky. Observing conditions were slightly worse tonight than yesterday, nevertheless, the image sequence below is a little better than the composite from my last pos (ISS above London).

The ISS will make a several great appearances over London in the next few days ( 7 passed brighter than -2.0 mag in the next week). The next visible pass during which the station will reach -2.3mag, will occur tomorrow at 19:47:52 UT. Monday offers two remarkable fly-overs (starting at 18:39:41UT and 20:15:08UT) each reaching -2.3 mag. More information about the current position as well as fly-over predictions for ISS (and many other objects) are available at Heavens Above.

Unique visitors to post: 0

The International Space Station (ISS) takes about 90 minutes to orbit the Earth. Because of its inclination of 51.6° it “flies” above any single place (between +51.6° and -51.6° latitude) a few times a day. Nonetheless, the station can be observed from the ground only under right conditions - shortly before sunrise or after sunset when the sky is darkened and sun light reflects from the station before it slides into the night.

Today, two passes were observable from the UK’s capital. The first started a few seconds after 18:51 UT and the station reached the altitude of 10° after 2 minutes (at around 18:31:30UT). It passed through the constellations of Eridanus, Orion, Gemini, Canis Minor, Cancer and Leo where it slowly sank into Earth’s shadow. At the maximum brightness, ISS was twice as bright (approx -2.0 mag) as the brightest star in the night sky, Sirius (-1.46 mag).

The second pass, during the station’s next orbit, wasn’t as glorious as the first. The station climbed over the horizon at 20:26 UT but wasn’t observable until it reached the altitude of about 10-15° at around 20:29 UT and appeared from behind the fog and light pollution.

I took the picture above with the digital camera on my Nokia N96. As you can imagine, light pollution is terrible in London. It wasn’t before some image reduction (using dark frames) that the captured station clearly appeared. I used the camera set to 800 ISO, decreased contrast (I wish I had remembered the black & white option) and in the burst sequence mode. Unfortunately, after 20 photos, the phone couldn’t store the raw image data in the buffer any more and began writing the data to disk effectively turning the camera to stand-by. At that point all I could do was to enjoy the show through my own eyes.

One piece of good news is that before a blackout window from April 1 through April 22 during which the ISS will not be observable from London, no less that eight majestic passes, each showing the ISS brighter than -2 mag, will be visible. More information about ISS visibility (for any location on the planet) can be found on Heavens Above.

As the ISS passed above London, I also watched the astronauts aboard the station during a live video broadcast on NASA TV. It was an interesting experience hearing the crew in TV while watching the station pass through Orion and reach -2.4 mag. During the conference, the crew answered questions about the recent debris collision alerts and described the view from the station. Apparently, astronauts can not only see the continents, mountains and cities but also airports, bridges and even some buildings. The Expedition 18 commander Mike Fincke talked about the tremendous value of international cooperation in projects such as the ISS and compared it to the utopian society from the Star Trek universe. He also answered an frequently asked question: it is impossible to see the Great Wall even under ideal weather conditions despite its length (over 6400km). The wall is not that wide, and made from native materials that match the color of the surrounding landscape.

Unique visitors to post: 0

Currently, NASA is tracking another piece of debris from the satellite collision last month. Last week, a piece of from Iridium’s Payload Assist Module (PAM) missed the station by approximately 5km and caused crew’s temporary relocation to the Soyuz Module. This time, the culprit is a piece from the old Soviet era Kosmos satellite. At the time of the closest approach (TCA), 07:14 UT on Tuesday, the debris will pass within 1 km of the station. This poses a serious to astronauts’ security and NASA considered firing the onboard thrusters to move the station out of harms way.

Update #1: 21:54UT - NASA CAPCOM Rick Davis just informed the International Space Station (ISS) Commander Mike Fincke (who celebrated his 42nd birthday on Saturday) that the station will NOT need to maneuver tonight to avoid the satellite debris. Thus it seems that the crew can continue their prepration for the visitors from STS-119 shuttle which will dock with the station tomorrow at 19:13 UT 22:13 UT.

Unique visitors to post: 0