The WOW Science Thread

[pharvey]

^^ Yeah, it's quite something Steve - there's some more on it here: -

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/spac ... ation.html

[hhfarang]

World's Lightest Solid Takes Inspiration From Eiffel Tower

http://news.yahoo.com/worlds-lightest-s ... 09070.html

[pharvey]

^^ Quite something...

[pharvey]

[sandman67]

Nice shots mate....pcture 2 gets my vote. Always wanted to see the Northern Lights.

I refuse now to post to the climate change thread in Current Events as it has devovled nto a Black Knight argument about some transglobal cabal of evil scientists telling lies, so here instead is an nterestng report by the UN IPCC about the potential disaster risks of climate change and how governments should prepare for these

http://ipcc-wg2.gov/SREX/

the summary is avalable now and the full report will be released in Feb

As an intreresting aside, whlst this is gettng coverage in the European media in the US it has been ignored by every single broadcast news media outlet, despite the fact that the US has suffered disaster after disaster since 2000 at a visbly accellerated rate. With MSNBC, the channel I choose to watch online, the fact that a major advertser is Exxon is of course.... just coincidental.

[sandman67]

and now, for some light relief, episode 1234 of "Why the religious are stupid and wilfully ignorant".....The Catholc Geocentrist Edition:

Yes my pedigree chums, there really are some religious fools who insist that the EARTH is the centre of the solar system and the SUN goes around the EARTH. 2000 years of scientfic kowledge and observation disreguarded for the idiotic mythology of a pack of ignorant iron age goat herders.

Funnily enough, given the rule of Papal Infallibility and Roman Catholic Church canon law, now the Church have officially recognised that Gallileo was right and this was stamped by the prevous Pope under a Papal Bull, this means that these loons are Heretics and, in earlier time, would have been subject to excommuncation and the Inquisition.

Strap yourself into the grav chair, buckle on the tinfoil helmet, and have a laugh.....

http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/310901 which in turn refers to http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011 ... nter-group

[dtaai-maai]

Good stuff:

Galileo was denounced during a Roman Inquisition, but was later dropped of all charges

"Dropped of all charges" - ladies and gentlemen, I give you... the Digital Journal!

[pharvey]

Curiosity the NASA space rover ready for launch for Mars

Curiosity, the most complex and powerful robotic spacecraft ever built for work on distant planets is being readied for launch to Mars on Saturday.

[attachment=0]Capture.JPG[/attachment]

NASA's £1.6 billion Mars Science Laboratory rover, to give Curiosity its full name, is on a mission to look for organic compounds and signs of whether the planet might be - or might ever have been - habitable.

If all goes well, the nuclear-powered craft will reach Mars next August, entering the thin atmosphere at 3,200mph for a descent to the floor of a 100-mile-wide crater.

The final stages of the entry, descent, and landing sequence will be especially tense as the rover, dubbed Curiosity in a student naming contest, is gently lowered to the surface on cables suspended from a rocket-powered "sky crane" making its debut flight.

Because it is too large to use airbags - like those that cushioned NASA's Pathfinder, Spirit, and Opportunity rovers - Curiosity will rely instead on landing rockets positioned above it, avoiding the challenge of finding a reliable way to get a one-ton vehicle off an elevated lander.

Instead, Curiosity will be set down on its six 20-inch-wide wheels, ready to roll.

Full Story: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/spac ... -Mars.html

[hhfarang]

^ Launch completed!



full story of mission here:

http://news.yahoo.com/nasa-launches-sup ... 50495.html

[pharvey]

Calculations at heart of Apollo 13 drama sold at auction

A checklist used by Apollo 13 commander James Lovell to make calculations that helped guide the damaged spacecraft home has been sold at auction for $388,375 (£247,400).

The navigation checklist was re-written by the astronaut two hours after he uttered the famous words "Houston, we have a problem".

Had he miscalculated the guidance data by just a fraction then the three man crew would have drifted off into space and oblivion.

Lovell, played by Tom Hanks in the hit 1995 film Apollo 13, this year decided to sell the checklist, which was originally estimated to go for only $25,000 (£15,900).

The astronaut was forced to write out the new figures when, 55 hours into a routine moon mission, an on-board explosion crippled the main command module Odyssey.

As a result the crew had to use the Lunar module - the small craft the astronauts should have used to take them to the moon - to fly them home. The document is the activation checklist for the Lunar craft Aquarius.

If the coordinates were wrong then they would have had to fly towards Earth with no point of reference to aim at.

In the film, Hanks repeated Lovell's words back to mission control in Houston, saying: "We've got negative visibility in our star field and if this paperwork isn't right, who knows where we'll end up out here."

The Hollywood star was filmed holding a replica of the checklist to the one now being sold.

There are several ink notations and "very significant" pencil calculations made by Lovell on the document. There is also a blue Post-it that Lovell stuck on it some years later to explain the significance of the checklist.

Michael Riley, a senior historian at Heritage Auctions in Dallas, Texas, said: "There are few space artifacts as evocative or important as this little booklet.

"Without these successful calculations and the fast transfer of the information from one computer to the other, the Apollo 13 crew would not have known their position in space, possibly causing the outcome of the already ill-fated mission to be quite different.

"Captain Lovell has held this checklist book in his personal collection for 41 years and now feels it is time to turn over its stewardship to another person.

"This checklist may not have made it to the moon's surface, but it saved the lives of the crew of Apollo 13, captivated the world's attention and is an amazing artefact of a moment that was, simultaneously, one of America's darkest and proudest."

[sandman67]

More on the Curiosity Mars Lander care of Countdown



I like Derek Pitts....always has a good laugh whle educating at the same time

gotta say tho.....that jet pack landing system they are using looks pretty high risk to me - looks like there is plenty of room at the table for Mr Buggerup.

Fingers crossed for August 2012.

[PeteC]

Calculations at heart of Apollo 13 drama sold at auction

A checklist used by Apollo 13 commander James Lovell to make calculations that helped guide the damaged spacecraft home has been sold at auction for $388,375 (£247,400). .................

So happens Apollo 13 is showing on True this week and probably next week as well. It's on one of the HBO channels...I think HBOH but not sure. Pete

[hhfarang]

Very large earth-like planet found:



Full story here:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-19514_3-57337 ... able-zone/

[sandman67]

Jurassc Park comes one step closer to reality

Japan, Russia see chance to clone mammoth

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/ar ... 7edbd08.71

[pharvey]

New black holes 'so big nobody believed them for 20 years'

Scientists spent two decades before they finally accepted that they had discovered the biggest black holes known to exist – each one 10 billion times the size of the Sun.

A team led by astronomers at the University of California, Berkeley, discovered the two gigantic black holes in clusters of elliptical galaxies more than 300 million light years away.

But they could not believe their eyes – and the scientific community spent two decades before they accepted what they were seeing.

The previous black hole record-holder was the size of 6 billion suns.

The Oxford University astrophysicist Michele Cappellari, who wrote an accompanying commentary to the research published in the journal Nature, said the findings were at first unbelievable.

"It took a couple of decades to believe that these black holes weren't just fantasy but actually reality", he told Radio Four's Today programme.

Full Story: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/spac ... years.html