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

Image: Martian polar sunrise

At the polar north on Earth, the sun hangs low in the sky for a good portion of the year, and depending on latitude, may dip below the horizon for a short time. On Mars, the summer at the polar north where Phoenix is currently at work features similar a similar sun trek. In this image, our sun rises on the morning of Sol 90 following a 75 minute "night."

Click the image to enlarge.

Wayne

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/Texas A&M University

Quantum entanglement exceeds speed (of light) limit

3quarksdaily: Scientists in Switzerland recently conducted another in a series of tests related to entanglement, the little understood quantum property whereby two entangled objects - in this case, photons - immediately share the same informational state once one of the objects is measured. In 2007 experiments, this "spooky action" was confirmed at a distance of 89 miles.

The Swiss test wanted to rate the speed at which this communication might take place. It turns out to be quite a bit faster than the speed of light, which raises questions about the nature of quantum communication since ordinary communication cannot exceed the universal speed limit of 186,000 miles per second.

In the everyday world, objects can organize themselves in just a few ways. For example, two people can coordinate their actions by talking directly with each other, or they can both receive instructions from a third source.

In both these cases, the information is communicated at or below the speed of light, in keeping with Einstein’s axiom that nothing in the Universe can go faster. But quantum mechanics allows for a third way to coordinate information (emphasis added)....

Scientific American - "Entanglement clocks in at 10,000 times the speed of light?" - has more on the story:

Theoretical physicist Terence Rudolph of Imperial College London, author of a commentary on the new paper, says that putting bounds on faster-than-light entanglement [which the Swiss experiment seems to have done] is useful for researchers trying to imagine theories that might extend beyond quantum mechanics.
 
What might such a theory look like? Rudolph says we're probably stuck with instantaneous entanglement, which seems impossible to us because we're stuck in everyday space and time. 'We need to understand how quantum mechanics sees space and time,' he says. 'I think there's probably much deeper issues.

In physics history, Einstein used the fact that communication was fast, but not infinitely fast, to question and to ultimately revolutionize Newtonian physics, which implied that gravitational effects were instantaneous over vast distances. Einstein's re-conception led to his spectacularly successful and empirically confirmed theories of special and general relativity, which show how space and time is a thing, bent and twisted.

In the current example, "quantum communication" may hint at limits subtler than those imposed by space and time, and, perhaps, at revolutions to come.

Wayne

Wikipedia: quantum entanglement

Galaxy Zoo collects ghostly specimen

Combing the archives of the Galaxy Zoo as a volunteer and unable to find a match for the object, an amateur Dutch astronomer has discovered  a one of kind light, a ghostly echo that may be entirely new to science.

In the past year 150,000 amateurs have helped classify more than 1 million galaxies as part of the Galaxy Zoo project. As Pamela Gay has suggested, astronomy is one of the rare science disciplines where amateurs can make significant contributions.

Wayne

Lakeside on Titan

This is an artist's conception of the only known body besides Earth with liquid water on the surface, Titan. Cassini scientists have concluded that at least one of the large lakes observed on Saturn's moon contains liquid hydrocarbons, and have positively identified ethane.

Wayne

Image credit: NASA/JPL

 

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

Springtime on Saturn

[Cross posted from the Kentucky Space blog] Having toured the Saturn system for four years now, the intrepid craft Cassini has snapped 150,000 images, discovered organics venting from Enceladus and dispatched Huygens to the surface of Titan, which, as we now know, is an organic chemistry factory with a complex hydrology that suggests something about the possibility of life.

That length of time has also enabled scientists to observe a very slow change in the northern pole. The blues and grays are are gradually diminishing in intensity as "winter gives way to spring."

Wayne

Image credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Honoring Randy Pausch

Editor's note: Jeffrey Manber is a writer, commercial space pioneer, former IF speaker and a principle in the new movie Apollo's Orphans. These are his thoughts on the passing of the Randy Pausch, of "last lecture" fame.

I wonder how many of us harbor the idea of floating weightless in space as one of those little life-long dreams so important to who we truly are. I’m thinking about this given the news that Randy Pausch the professor whose “last lecture” made him a symbol for the wisdom of everyday life experiences,  passed away on July 25^th from pancreatic cancer.

His lecture, delivered at Carnegie Mellon on Sept. 18, 2007, has become of course, first a YouTube phenomena and later a best seller book. His down-to-earth advice on growing up (he was grateful for being allowed to paint pictures on his walls), thoughts of his wife, on never giving up no matter how many brick walls must be confronted, struck a chord with millions of viewers and readers.

Amongst the remaining wishes of his life the professor mentioned wanting to experience floating in the weightlessness of zero-gravity. And there we are, confronted once again that for so many of us, there is something special about the frontier of space, a place as filled with gigantic planets and inconceivable forces, as with the wonder of floating and flying and running along alien surfaces.

Dr. Pausch realized that particular dream: NASA allowed him on one of their KC-135 zero-gravity missions. Even there he had to overcome yet another metaphoric brick wall. When his students in a virtual reality program won the right to fly aboard a KC-135 flight, it was understood that faculty members were not allowed. So Dr. Pausch applied as a journalist covering the mission to experience the thrill of zero-gravity.

Taken for granted was his desire to play for a football team; work with Disney, or to take part in a Star Trek film. Yet for those who came of age in the glory of the Apollo program, there remains a life-long wonder of what was then accomplished. Let us hope that this feeling towards space travel, and the desire to personally experience it, never becomes extinguished.

NASA does these sort of things badly, but an educational zero-gravity program named after Dr. Randy Pausch would be a fitting memorial for a man who moved so many with his clear-eyed list of the priorities of life.

Jeffrey

Before the Big Bang?

In a blog post at the Foundational Questions Institute, William Orem is peeved by the idea that "nothingness" is an operable term when it comes to cosmological beginnings:

It’s at least worth noting that the word 'nothingness' itself contains a postulate that is by no means self-evident: namely, that '-ness' can meaningfully be attached to the term 'no-thing' in the way it might be attached to 'red' or 'happy.' When we agree to the attachment we are ceding the strange point that there is a state or condition of being in no state or condition, something very much like 'being not being.' Viewed this way, 'nothingness' appears to be a round square.

In a similar vein I would submit that the phrase 'emerged out of nothing' is grammatically sound but has no meaning, just as we can speak with perfect clarity but no content about a room full of married bachelors. The point is that the only quantum fluctuations with which we are familiar are embedded in spacetime, or are themselves expressions of spacetime, which we offhandedly refer to as 'nothingness' or 'emptiness' at our peril.

I'm certainly guilty of this, as astronomer Pamela Gay, a.k.a. "Star Stryder," has pointed out to me.

Thanks to some interesting new work that Orem points out, "what came before the Big Bang?" might someday be addressed. By clearing up a little semantic confusion, we are expanding not only what we know, but adding to what we know how to know.

I just picked up Brian Greene's Fabric of the Cosmos, which I'm enjoying immensely.

Wayne