Tuesday, April 12, 2011

50 Years: Redux

1:17 AM Astronomy Pirate

 Earlier I had posted about the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's first flight, known as Yuri's Night. Well, I also learned that a movie has been made, just premiered in fact, called First Orbit. It is a real time recreation of Yuri's 108 minute flight, using the original mission audio from Yuri's flight and shot from the ISS by ESA astronaut Paolo Nespoli with a musical score by composer Philip Sheppard.

The audio is subtitled in English and runs about 140 minutes. It is completely free and on Youtube (embedded below) and on their website: firstorbit.org. I just started watching it and I have to say, the high definition video really gives justice to this historic anniversary. I hope you take the time to enjoy!


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Monday, April 11, 2011

That New Blog Look

9:48 PM Astronomy Pirate

So, the template is up and working. I got it to a point where I am satisfied for now. It's called Blue Cosmos by Lasantha Bandara. There is still some tweaking to be done, but I'll continue to fiddle with it over the next couple days.

What do you think? Love it, hate it, don't care?  Comment.

Personally, since I am using blogger, I'd like to get to blogger bar back as a courtesy, but its no biggie. And I realize the title is two lines and all jammed together, I haven't figured that one out either yet. But, I figure I'll try replacing it with a banner soon enough. I also want to lessen some of padding space at the top of the page and between posts, it seems kind of far.

As far as the widgets and gadgets though, they all look good. I like the bar going across the top of the body, the subscription and twitter buttons, and the placement of the ads and stuff info on the sidebars.


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50 Years of Human Spaceflight!

5:00 PM Astronomy Pirate


Tomorrow night is Yuri's Night, a celebration of the first human spaceflight, made on April 12, 1961 by Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. His flight took one orbit that lasted 108 minutes in his Vostok 1 spacecraft.

He was the first person to leave the bonds of the Earth's gravity and the first to see the planet as a globe without borders. The celebration of this event has slowly been growing over the years, and hopefully you will join in too. You can find out more and event locations spanning the globe at yurisnight.net, and more on Yuri Gagarin on Wikipedia.


"Circling the Earth in my orbital spaceship I marveled at the beauty of our planet. People of the world, let us safeguard and enhance this beauty — not destroy it!"
Yuri Gagarin, 1st person in space


[Sorry this one is relatively short, messing around with this template and still trying to get back into things.]


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Sunday, April 10, 2011

Curiosity For Mars

6:01 PM Astronomy Pirate

NASA's next Mars rover, Curiosity, is near completion. Part of NASA's Mars Science Laboratory Spacecraft, engineers have assembled and tested nearly all the rover's components at the Jet Propulsion Lab in California.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

In May and June the rover and other components of the spacecraft will be shipped to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where it will be prepared for launch. The launch will have to take place somewhere between Nov. 25 and Dec. 18, 2011, when the spacecraft can most effectively reach Mars. The launch vehicle to be used is an Atlas V rocket, on which the spacecraft will be bolted to the top.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

These images are essentially how the rover will look when it lands on Mars in August 2012. The mission will last for at least two earth years, but given the high mileage we have gotten out of the last two rovers (Spirit and Opportunity), this one has a lot of hope for more.

The landing-site is still to be selected among four finalist candidates, but the rover is equipped to study the intriguing places on Mars. At about 3 meters in length, the size of a Mini-Cooper (a small British-made car), the Curiosity rover is equipped with 10 scientific instruments to analyze Martian rock and soil. It will look for evidence of if Mars has ever offered environmental conditions favorable to microbial life in the past or present.

The decision on a landing-site is a matter of what area is most likely to be habitable. A sort of 'habitable zone' for Mars' surface. This would also help our own understanding on life's limits within our solar system. The problem with selecting a site also becomes an issue between researchers and engineers. The researchers, of course, want to research every nook and cranny and examine the most challenging places. The engineers can only build something that can do so much and go so far. There needs to be a broad open area to land a craft, and often that knocks out most of the interesting regions. Part of the reason some of the previous Mars photos looked like deserts was because the craft landed in a Martian desert.


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Saturday, April 9, 2011

I'm Back

2:15 PM Astronomy Pirate

It's been a long, stressful week. My grandma is at peace though. After the funeral we went to a buffet which ended up giving me and my dad food poisoning. A great follow up. I think I have lost about 5 pounds over the last week from not eating much. I finally started trying to eat solid food late yesterday, seems to be going well.

As far as astronomy stuff, I will get the '2012 doomsday' mumble jumble done on this Tuesday, just to make things easier. My telescope camera was also waiting here for me when I got home, so once I feel better and get a chance to practice with it, expect pictures. I am also giving a lecture this upcoming Thursday called 'Life in the Universe' that seems like it might have a high turn out. It is based on the toolkit that I have been testing for NASA of the same name. A bit excited about that and hoping to feel better by then.

So there is the update, no real new content today. There is some stuff in the news from the past week though: SpaceX announced plans for a heavy lift rocket, A possible new particle discovered in data from a US accelerator, next week (April 10-16) is lunar week in the global month of astronomy (hopefully I'll use my camera for some moon shots by then.), NASA released a Hubble image of a star torn apart by a black hole, and A strangely silent triple star system discovered by Kepler.


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