In addition to hearing individuals like Jon Landau talk about his out-of-this-world work on Avatar, or Philippe Petit describe walking the (very) high wire, why not participate in some daring-do of your own?
IdeaFestival pass holders will have the opportunity during the festival this year to provide their signatures for a very special delivery to space via Kentucky Space.
Registration and the full line up of presenters for 2010 will be available soon. Stick around.
Wayne
Thanks to everyone who registered for Friday's "Lunch with IF" at the Kentucky Center. We're now sold out!
One lucky attendee Friday will win an All-Access Pass to the IdeaFestival, September 29 - October 2.
Wayne
In contrast to the mesophiles - that would be you and me! - that live in the temperate climes that prevail over most of our world, what life forms may lie in the dark hidden lakes of the Antarctic? Nature:
Over the past 40 years, radar imagery has revealed around 150 freshwater lakes of various sizes and ages beneath the massive Antarctic ice sheet. Some have been isolated from the outside world for millions of years, raising the possibility that they hold unique life forms. The dark, nutrient-deprived environment of the lakes could resemble conditions on Jupiter's moon Europa, which is assumed to hold a large ocean beneath its frozen surface.
Three projects designed to carefully sample the lakes, at least one of which is as large as Lake Ontario, will happen beginning next year. Hat tip: Alan Boyle
Wayne
Wikipedia: extremophile
Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/30685567@N03/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Why do some discoveries leave us bewildered?
The Long Now Foundation links to a middle ground between "two sorts of facts," immutable ideas like the certainty that Kentucky is located north of Tennessee, and facts that constantly change in response to external factors. Today, the dollar has a new value in relation to the Euro. But "mesofacts" - "meso" means "middle" - are facts that change, but change slowly enough that the implications leave us between then and now, wondering when our reality fell out of date. Samuel Arbesman:
Not so fast.
Finding "more than 40 small craters with water ice," a NASA radar, Mini-SAR, that flew aboard India's Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft has confirmed the presence of substantial water ice deposits, perhaps as much as 600 million metric tons, enough to sustain a moon base or, if the oxygen were converted to fuel, to power rockets for thousands of years.
Those permanently shadowed crater walls haven't seen sunlight in billions of years and are as cold as the surface of Pluto.
'The emerging picture from the multiple measurements and resulting data of the instruments on lunar missions indicates that water creation, migration, deposition and retention are occurring on the moon,' said Paul Spudis, principal investigator of the Mini-SAR experiment at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston. 'The new discoveries show the moon is an even more interesting and attractive scientific, exploration and operational destination than people had previously thought.'
The NASA news release is here.
These results follow the work of a mission late last year that crashed a rocket hull into a cold, dark crater. Orbiting craft analyzed the ejected plume of material, which strongly suggested the presence of water ice on the moon’s surface.
Wayne
Image source: NASA
According to completed research on data collected by Cassini following dives through the Saturn moon's now-famous jets in 2008 and 2009, Enceladus joins Earth, Titan and comets as the only known places where negatively charged ions are known to exist. The short-lived ions are further evidence that the moon hosts a subsurface and, perhaps, relatively warm ocean. At right is a picture of the moon's active geysers, first observed by Cassini soon after the doughty explorer arrived in 2005.
More about this story may be found here, at Centauri Dreams.
Wayne
Links from my feed reader today:
Wayne
Image credit: Cassini Imaging Team, ISS, JPL, ESA, NASA
Recent Comments