- Posts tagged Space
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Flying Around the World in 90 Minutes - to Less Crappy Music
Those of you who follow the Brad Blogspeed Facebook page (you DO all follow the Facebook page, right?) may remember this stunning clip that I shared there last week. It's yet another fantastic time lapse video taken from the International Space Station, and when I posted it I added the comment:
Strangeness in Space
How the Moon Buggy Fit on Apollo
My Favourite Astronomy Photos
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
Cosmos Carl and the Apple's Adventures in Flatland
As some may have deduced, I've been way into Carl Sagan of late.
He was always someone I'd heard of, with 'billions and billions' being the one quote I could attribute to him, despite the fact that he never actually said it.
But I didn't know Sagan. I couldn't pick him out of a lineup, nor had I ever actually heard his voice, although I had heard poor impressions of it often enough.
But I've certainly heard a bunch of it now. Sagan became an interest of mine through Steven Novella, a well known podcaster and Yale Neurologist, as well as being a bit of an intellectual hero of mine. He discussed Sagan at length on his weekly show, the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe.
Novella and his co-hosts couldn't say enough about Sagan and 'Cosmos', the 80s PBS series for which he was most famous. It had obviously inspired an appreciation of science and skepticism in the younger versions of all of them.
One day I finally went hunting, and behold, Cosmos was available for the getting. Once downloaded I tore into the episodes, and over three days watched the entire 13-hour series.
Carl Sagan had extremely rare gifts. In Cosmos he demonstrates his ability to inspire with science, or more accurately, with his own endless appreciation of it. He manages to do what so few working scientists can, in that he communicates, using poetry instead of statistics, the truly awesome scope of the truths that science unearths.
And the voice! He absolutely must be the inspiration for Hugo Weaving' portrayal of Agent Smith in 'The Matrix'.
I could just listen to it for hours. Monotone but quirky, Sagan almost sounds like a disguised alien who learned perfect english in an effort to fit in to our society, but could never get the casual tone right. But he's also the alien that when he realized this, was confident enough not to give a shit.
Sagan smoked pot and wrote a mean book, and was the coolest mega-dork I've ever seen.
This is one of my favourite clips from the show, so I thought I'd share.
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.
