IdeaFestival

Robots roam Eden

Having spent a little less than a year studying the exposed rock layers in Victoria Crater (background), the Mars rover Opportunity recently climbed out and took a look back in this picture. The rover, along with its twin, Spirit, have been on the Red planet for 4 and a half years.

As pointed out by Paul Gilster, on Friday the robotic spacecraft Rosetta maneuvered past the asteroid Šteins, which served as a reference point for mission control as the craft ventured into the asteroid belt located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

Rosetta is on its way to comet 67/P Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

Beginning in 2014, it will be the first craft to undertake the long term exploration of a comet at close quarters, and will deliver a lander, called Philae (this image has been my Macbook desktop for a while now), to the comet's surface. For the next year as the comet hurtles sunward and the lander does its work, Rosetta will orbit both bodies and return science to Earth.

Why land on a comet? Cometary formation is coincidental with the development of our solar system, estimated at 4.6 billion years old. The spacecraft will provide scientists with a view to an epoch when no planets existed and only a vast swarm of asteroids and comets surrounded our star.

Pictures from the Steins' flyby will be streamed beginning Sept. 6. The newly-created Rosetta blog is here.

Wayne

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech. Artist's impression: ESA, image by AOES Medialab

Wikipedia: Rosetta Stone

SEED profiles "revolutionary minds" working between sciences

Covering young pioneers in emerging scientific fields such as immunocomputing, stochastic biology, genetic acculturation, neuroarchaeology and astronomical medicine, SEED Magazine is running a terrific piece on how science increasingly "hybridizes" multiple fields of study, how insight so often happens between fields of study.

Seeing the article about how the concept of information is under new scrutiny because of insights derived from the study of the immune system brought to mind recent experiments confirming that "information" travels faster than the previous limit - the speed of light - between entangled particles hundreds of kilometers apart. 

SEED is also, of course, home to one of my favorite science writers, Jonah Lehrer, who will be at the IdeaFestival this month.

Wayne

Cosmology rap: The Large Hadron Collider in verse

This is just plain fun. The lyrics reflect the state of cosmology and raise some of the questions the LHC hopes to answer.

Wayne

Gott Mars? The human imperative to explore

How important is the human exploration of space? One argument take you're unlikely to hear in most debates over the wisdom of going to the stars involves a calculation by Dr. J. Richard Gott, a Louisville native, Princeton Astrophysicist and speaker at the IdeaFestival this September.

In 1993 he used the Copernican Principle to assess the odds for human survival and came up with the near certainty, statistically speaking, that humanity would go on for at least another 5,100 years.

The Copernican principle makes reasonable guesses about the future using one known fact and the assumption that there is nothing special about this moment in time. In 1969, Gott used the principle to accurately predict, for example, how long the Berlin Wall would stand.

John Tierney's New York Times article, "A Survival Imperative for Space Colonization" elaborates:

Suppose you want to forecast the political longevity of the leader of a foreign country, and you know nothing about her country except that she has just finished her 39th week in power. What are the odds that she’ll leave office in her 40th week? According to the Copernican Principle, there’s nothing special about this week, so there’s only a 1-in-40 chance, or 2.5 percent, that she’s now in the final week of her tenure.

It’s equally unlikely that she’s still at the very beginning of her tenure. If she were just completing the first 2.5 percent of her time in power, that would mean her remaining time would be 39 times as long as the period she’s already served — 1,521 more weeks (a little more than 29 years).

So you can now confidently forecast that she will stay in power at least one more week but not as long as 1,521 weeks. The odds of your being wrong are 2.5 percent on the short end and 2.5 percent on the long end — a total of just 5 percent, which means that your forecast has an expected accuracy of 95 percent, the scientific standard for statistical significance.

The "Space Colonization Imperative" suggests that humans should have a space colony up and running on Mars in the next 45 years, since, applying the Copernican principle, the space program is half way through its expected life span. If we don't have a permanent base on Mars by then, it might be too late.

His column also drew a response from one of my favorite writers on big space themes, Paul Gilster. His "Odds on a Human Future" post also describes Dr. Gott's thinking on the matter.

Wayne

A Bounty of Super Earths

[cross-posted from Kentucky Space] Here is an artist's impression of the latest in a haul of planets from recent observations at the European Souther Observatory.

The image depicts a system of three "super-Earths" around the star HD 40307 in the constellation Pictor.

As detection techniques improve, the ability to potentially resolve exoplanets as small as Earth is becoming more likely, and, indeed, according to European astronomers about 45 new "Earth-like" planets have been uncovered by Harps, or the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher at the observatory in Chile. The new discoveries have the mass of three or four Earths.

Astronomers now believe that roughly thirty percent of the stars in the Milky Way may harbor such super-Earths, according to a New York Times article yesterday.

Scientific American has more.

Given the wealth of data being created by terrestrial observatories like Harps, space craft such as Kepler almost undoubtedly will find planets very similar in mass to our own within habitable orbits - orbits permitting the presence of liquid water - of their parent stars.

You and I are living in the Golden Age of planetary discovery.

Wayne

Large Hadron Collider to write modern chapter in creation story

In the latest in a series of terrific TED presentations filmed and posted to YouTube, particle physicist Brian Cox explains why the Large Hadron Collider matters.

Twelve particles of matter stuck together by four forces of nature interact in ways that have resulted in the mind and the eyes you are now using to read this post. To complete the mathematical equations in the Standard Model, which, as Cox says, elegantly describes why the sky is blue and could, given enough computing power, suggest why DNA is shaped the way it is, particle physicists want to uncover the Higgs Boson, which the last remaining undiscovered particle predicted by the Standard Model.

He concludes the 17 minute video with a three minute description of what particle physics means to him. Pointing to the stage props around him, he memorably says that everything from Saturn V rockets, to great literature to DNA to science itself "are the things that hydrogen atoms do when given 13.7 billion years." What's more, this narrative, which has only come into focus in the past fifty years, leaves him feeling privileged to be a part of this moment in history.

But to answer the question with which he begun, the LHC matters, he says, because it will write the next chapter of the creation story. Enjoy.

Wayne

Spying on Eden

Herschel, a space-borne telescope that will use the far infrared wavelength to observe some of the deepest objects in the universe, has been assembled.

With its imaging equipment cooled to near absolute zero, the craft will be to detect the most distant and faintest heat from the origins of the universe. It will be launched along with Planck sometime later this year, and the two observation platforms, posted and operating independently at L2, will comprehensively look at cosmic microwave background radiation, observe galaxy formation and determine what theories about the origins of the universe might be correct.

So other than spying Eden, the mission pretty low key.

Wayne

Credits: ESA (Image by AOES Medialab)