All systems are go today for the launch of Cosmos 1, a satellite designed to test the possibility of interstellar travel via solar sail. “Because it carries no fuel and keeps accelerating over almost unlimited distances, it is the only technology now in existence that can one day take us to the stars.” (Well, it worked for Chris Lee.) Update: Uh oh…
Category: Space
Darkness on the Edge of Town.
Twenty-eight years into its tour of the universe, Voyager I reaches the edge of the solar system. “[P]roject scientists, working from models of a phenomenon never before directly observed, finally agreed that data from Voyager 1’s tiny 80-kilobyte computer memory showed that the spacecraft had passed through termination shock to the ‘heliosheath,’ a frontier of unknown thickness that defines the border with interstellar space.“
That’s no moon, it’s a…uh, a moon.
The Cassini discovers a new moon within Saturn’s rings. “Tentatively called S/2005 S1, the moon measures four miles across and is about 85,000 miles from the center of Saturn.” (Via Corsairs United.)
Express Shuttle.
A month into his new gig, new NASA administrator Michael Griffin argues for speeding up the shuttle replacement by four years, with a new proposed launch date of 2010. “To execute the new strategy, sources said, Griffin intends to assemble a small, Apollo-style team of NASA experts and scrap the current plan to have two civilian contractors compete for several years for the right to direct development of the exploration vehicle.”
The Blackness of Space.
“It was a different time, 1957 or ’58. America’s love affair with racism was in full swing. NASA was no exception.” Ted at The Late Adopter sends along a sordid tale of cosmic achievement and racial injustice in this award-winning documentary on The Old Negro Space Program, a film not by Ken Burns.
Griffin in the door?
Finally, a Dubya nominee I can get behind. At his confirmation hearing, Michael Griffin — the administration’s pick for head of NASA — suggests the Hubble may still be worth saving. “Griffin, a physicist-engineer who holds six advanced degrees, is known as a devotee of human space travel and a firm advocate of Bush’s ‘Vision for Space Exploration’ aimed at the moon and Mars…He bluntly expressed his intention to lead a resurgence in American ‘spacefaring,’ noting that Russia and China had both put humans into space since the space shuttle last flew.”
Life on Mars, Death from Space.
“I’d give it a 50-50 shot that you could find it somewhere underground. But then that’s a guess.” The NYT surveys the current thinking about prospects of Martian life, and how astrobiologists plan to go about proving or disproving its existence. (To wit, the European Space Agency plans to send an tricked-up rover to the red planet after 2011…hopefully, it’ll get past the Dubya Pentagon’s rash of Moonraker weapons.) Update: In somewhat related news (to the second story), Slate‘s Fred Kaplan assesses the Pentagon’s overly enthusiastic vision for ground-based future tech.
Dark Globes No More.
Only a decade after the discovery of the first extra-solar planet, two separate teams of scientists manage to “see” exoplanets directly for the first time. “Dr. Geoffrey Marcy, a planet hunter at the University of California in Berkeley, called the results ‘the stuff of history books.‘”
Ice, Ice, Baby.
Alright, stop, collaborate, and listen — Images sent back by the ESA’s Mars Express show the remants of icebergs once floating in a Martian Sea near the equator, and suggest that large ice blocks may well still exist just underneath the dusty surface (increasing both the chances of life on the Red Planet and the prospects for a successful manned mission.) Word to your mother.
Caverns of Mars.
After perusing “methane signatures and other possible signs of biological activity,” two NASA researchers claim there may well be life presently existing in subsurface Martian caves. We’re talking mitochondria, not Morlocks…but still, such a discovery would be exciting stuff, to say the least.