Random little Spacey Articles

Scientists go to great lengths to reconstruct the flavor, speed, and direction of every cosmic ray that wanders anywhere near our corner of the galaxy. Typically they do this by analyzing the particle bursts they create inside fancy high-altitude balloons or satellite-borne scintillators.

The rays can also be occasionally caught at ground level provided your detector is big enough. The Auger observatory in Argentina, for example, is the size of Rhode Island (3,000 km2 to 1,200 sq mi) yet only sees one event per square kilometer per century. A better way, says Justin Bray from the University of Southampton, is to build a radio telescope ten times as big (the size of Maryland) and use the Moon itself as the actual cosmic ray detector.

Spaceship Earth Grants (SEG), a US public-benefit organization and an affiliate of the Buckminster Fuller Institute, has launched a contest that aims to give away one space flight for every 50,000 applications it receives. With a judging panel made up of former NASA astronauts, industry experts, space enthusiasts, and others, this new program aims to be a crowd-driven and crowd-funded effort to send private citizens into space.

The winner (or winners) will receive a trip aboard a spaceflight provider flight available at the time of the award announcement. In other words, should the likes of space tourism companies like Virgin Galactic or Space Adventures be capable of offering trips into space at the time, then the winning candidate would be booked aboard one of their flights. Subject, of course, to availability and the various restrictions one or all of these companies may impose, along with the rider that no promise is made to be able to fly on a particular carrier.

Included in the major prize will be a Spaceflight Training package from SEG's Star Harbor Space Training Academ, and all travel expenses, including basic airfare to and from the participants home country or state, along with meals, ground transport, and accommodation.

To be eligible, applicants need to be at least 18 years of age. To enter, participants must first create an account on the SEG website and then pen a short essay (with the option to also submit a 90-second video) in answer to the question: "How will you use this experience to better yourself, your community or our planet?" The answer to this question will form the primary selection criteria regarding the applicant’s demonstration of a clear ability to communicate this benefit to the judges.

Surprisingly enough for a space junkie like me, I've never seen this image of the MIR—the Soviet space station that was destroyed on reentry on 2001 after 5,519 days in orbit. The photo was taken from the space shuttle Atlantis on the mission STS-71, docked in the photo below.

Everything on the planet has a unique spectral signature, reflected or emitted by the chemical bonds holding its atoms together. Human eyeballs see some of this signature, which we perceive as color. But, visible light is tiny part of the electromagnetic spectrum, and from a sensing perspective, tells scientists very little about an object. Scooping up huge swaths of the electromagnetic spectrum requires things called hyperspectral sensors.

Mounted on satellites or aircraft, these sensors have the potential to collect a running inventory of the state of the earth’s surface.

Rucking_Fetard wrote: »

Plutonium: The scary element that saved the crew of Apollo 13

In the 1990s, an American journalist named Eileen Welsome of the Albuquerque Journal won the Pulitzer Prize after she brought to light secret studies commissioned by the US military into the effects of radiation exposure on the human body.



These included experiments conducted at the behest of the US military on human subjects without their consent. Prisoners and hospital patients were used as human guinea pigs. In one experiment doses of radiation were even fed to orphaned children with their breakfast.

shedweller wrote: »

Different times eh?!

The Aurora Borealis (AKA Northern Lights) often makes an appearance in time-lapse videos of the night sky, but have you ever seen what it looks like in real time? That’s what Korean astrophotographer Kwon O Chul was able to capture in the video above.

With every second that ticks past, the spacecraft Voyager 1 ventures farther away from Earth. You can actually watch this happen, in a way, on NASA's website, which tracks the probe's distance from our planet with a meter that's constantly counting up. Voyager is moving away from our sun at a clip of nearly 1 million miles a day.

Since its launch 37 years ago this month, the spacecraft has become humankind's farthest flung object. Today it is more than 11 billion miles from home, a distance equivalent to nearly half a million trips around the planet Earth.

"I'd say it's as fresh and new as the day it was placed aboard the spacecraft."

Yet all these years later, from a galactic vantage point that seems impossibly far away, Voyager is still sending data back to scientists on Earth. And even when its last instruments power down in 2025, the spacecraft will continue to carry one of humanity's greatest hopes: the prospect of communicating with intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. That was the idea, anyway, behind the Golden Record, copies of which were placed aboard both Voyager 1 and its predecessor, Voyager 2, which was launched first but on a slower trajectory.

Gravity—yes, gravity—is the latest victim of climate change in Antarctica. That’s the stunning conclusion announced Friday by the European Space Agency.

“The loss of ice from West Antarctica between 2009 and 2012 caused a dip in the gravity field over the region,” writes the ESA, whose GOCE satellite measured the change.


Current best estimates show that global seas could be as much as 50 inches higher by century’s end, due in large part to ice melt in West Antarctica.

shedweller wrote: »

You may head off to Finland for a while then because you'll sooner win the lotto than see the aurora from Ireland!