The details are murky and, considering the source, unlikely to become much clearer. But word is the much vaunted North Korean launch of a Unha-3 rocket from a newly completed Tangachai-ri space center, believed to consist of three stages with at least one heavy liquid fuel stage, failed just after liftoff for reasons unknown. [Read more…]
SpaceX Dragon spacecraft shown in a hypothetial dock with the ISS. The next test of this system is scheduled for 30 April
That was my opening line at a small talk over the weekend, my warmer upper, it’s not exactly a spine tingler, but it’s the truth. The only manned ground to orbit launch capacity on earth exist in Rsocosmos, the dregs of the Russian manned program. Because of management missteps, congressional malfeasance, a world-wide recession and austerity programs in the few space faring countries left standing, we as a species, ladies and gentlemen, are about one single launch/operational/reentry disaster away from having no manned capability at all, while a luxury free-fall hotel and science station weighing in at almost a million pounds whizzes around empty of science and man until it burns into a briefly spectacular, $100 billion high-altitude fireworks show. Right now much of our hope hinges on this event: [Read more…]
An exosolar guide of planets by size vs density and theoretical composition.
What with Pluto being demoted and exosolar astronomy going gang busters, a solar system with more planets than our own was bound to turn up sooner or later. New data from a near twin of our sun 130 light-years away has come sooner: [Read more…]
There’s a reason I moved a thousand miles and took a low paying dead-end job: I used to live in Brevard County, a hop, skip, and jump away from the Kennedy Space Center, I could watch shuttle launches from my yard. Now, that region is devastated by the shuttle’s retirement, cuts to NASA, and the economy: [Read more…]
According to Russian media, Roscosmos head Vladimir Popovkin was hospitalized for exhaustion. At the same time he checked in with a bandaged head, in itself an unusual symptom for over work, Aleksander Paramonov, Deputy Head of Star City was fingered as possibly being involved in incident that led to the hospital visit. No one’s talking on the record, but word is Popovkin got smacked in the head by a bottle during a drunken brawl over his choice for Roscosmos spokesperson, the nubile 27 year-old former model, uh-huh, shown next to him above. [Read more…]
The image above is the globular cluster M54, a huge ball of mostly older stars 90,000 light-years away. I thought I knew about globular clusters, but the Bad Astronomer posted two points that are entirely new to me, and very cool: [Read more…]
A huge, lingering ridge of high pressure over the eastern half of the United States brought summer-like temperatures to North America in March 2012. Image courtesy NASA/EO.
A spring heat wave shattered records across the US and Canada this month and some researchers worry it could be a symptom of sizzling summers and active hurricane seasons for the next few years. And that could be just the tip of the vanishing iceberg: [Read more…]
Artist's conception of a Jupiter-size rogue planet with the edge on disk of a spiral galaxy in the background. Image via the Wiki
Call it planet Crank. A study slated to be published in the Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society finds that not only are nomad planets possible, under ideal conditions some of them could be ejected from the heart of large galaxies at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light: [Read more…]
The Hubble zooms in on a globular cluster called Messier 9. Click image to enrapture.
The NASA WISE telescope spent a year imaging sections of the sky in infrared and astronomers have been working for the last few months to knit it together in a 360 degree map, all doped up with false color. It is spectacular. The limitations of this website can’t do it justice: that bad boy above is scalable like you wouldn’t believe. (Speaking of which, don’t click on the last image or two if your PC bitches about large pics, one of them is width 54000, which auto scales to 5400 on some devices and still causes fits). Let’s take a little piece of it on the far left and zoom in, so you can see what this means. [Read more…]