- Posts tagged Nasa
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Breathtaking Footage of the Sun
Old Man Punches Moron in Face, Saves World
How Buzz Aldrin's Beat-Down of Moon-Hoaxer Gives Me Strength (Video)
Buzz Aldrin is a great hero of the modern age. He's one of only 12 people to have ever stepped foot on another world. He's also an accomplished mechanical engineer, fighter pilot, and humanitarian. He's been critical of NASA's recent lack of ambition, and endeavours to motivate the public to aggressively pursue the space effort. Yet while he was only the second man on the moon, he's first in my books.
Saturn's Moons and Ice Volcanoes
Just some cool new Cassini photos I found online. Pasted below is the original text from the article, found here if you're interested.
The Eerie Sounds Of Saturn
I won't pretend to add to NASA's own write up on this fantastic audio clip. (with attached video, at bottom) Instead I'll paste it below.
My only editorial remark follows: Cooooooooooooollllll.
Saturn is a source of intense radio emissions, which have been monitored by the Cassini spacecraft. The radio waves are closely related to the auroras near the poles of the planet. These auroras are similar to Earth's northern and southern lights. This is an audio file of radio emissions from Saturn.
The Cassini spacecraft began detecting these radio emissions in April 2002, when Cassini was 374 million kilometers (234 million miles) from the planet, using the Cassini radio and plasma wave science instrument. The radio and plasma wave instrument has now provided the first high resolution observations of these emissions, showing an amazing array of variations in frequency and time. The complex radio spectrum with rising and falling tones, is very similar to Earth's auroral radio emissions. These structures indicate that there are numerous small radio sources moving along magnetic field lines threading the auroral region.
Time on this recording has been compressed, so that 73 seconds corresponds to 27 minutes. Since the frequencies of these emissions are well above the audio frequency range, we have shifted them downward by a factor of 44.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter was designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The radio and plasma wave science team is based at the University of Iowa, Iowa City.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission, visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the instrument team's home page, http://www-pw.physics.uiowa.edu/cassini/ .
Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Iowa
Nature... You Frighten Me.
Here's another installment in everyone's favourite series, "Why I Would Sacrifice A Lamb To Nature If It Asked Me To".
This is a photo taken by NASA, and I'll post their quick blurb about it below:
Cumulonimbus Cloud Over Africa
High above the African continent, tall, dense cumulonimbus clouds, meaning 'column rain' in Latin, are the result of atmospheric instability. The clouds can form alone, in clusters, or along a cold front in a squall line. The high energy of these storms is associated with heavy precipitation, lightning, high wind speeds and tornadoes.
No wonder fledgling man created deities.
Look at the awesome power and size of this naturally occurring phenomenon. And then consider how tiny an effect it is compared to our planet's environmental system as a whole, followed by how tiny our world is in comparison to the cosmos.
It's certainly inspiring, but it's also just scary. Being a fan of astronomy I've become acutely aware of how fragile Earth's hold on a temperate climate is. Our planet happens to sit in what scientists call a 'Goldilocks zone', neither too hot nor too cold, shielded from cosmic radiation by our magnetic field, and with just enough of a natural greenhouse effect to keep the oceans from solidifying into ice.
In fact, the planets to either side of us, Venus and Mars, both exhibit signs of having been formerly much more temperate. Each one is a lesson about how climates can go astray, and how delicate the balance between habitable and not really are.
Now don't worry, I'm not getting political, and while I'd never judge anyone for hugging a tree, I'm not suggesting you do so here.
I'm just saying that it's an awesome, frightening realization, when nature shows you how big it is. I must admit that during particularly bad thunderstorms, which I love to observe, I often wonder if this will be the one that surprises everyone by spiraling completely out of control and killing us all.
I'm cheery like that.
While the earth's climate seems stable when observed from the relative micro-moments that are our lifespans, it's really an ever changing dynamo, the functioning of which we've only begun to understand, and with a wildly uncertain future.
I mean hey, it's not like I wet myself every time the wind blows. The odds of seeing any real fluctuation in our atmospheric systems during any particular lifetime are almost nil. Even a runaway greenhouse effect, either manmade, or natural like on Venus, would take millennia to play out. At least based on what we currently know.
So since we can only partially understand what's happening in nature and have no real idea what is to come, I'm heading down to the local farm to buy a baby sheep. And make no mistake, I'll cut that little fucker's throat if a really big cloud asks me to.
