The Cassini Mission: The Movie

CASSINI MISSION from cabbas on Vimeo. [You'll probably want to watch this with HD and full screen turned on.] This is footage from the Cassini Imaging Science System by the hard workers at NASA. The Cassini spacecraft has been orbiting Saturn for nearly 7 years now, tracking moons, rings, and the planet. Many thousands of images have been sent back to Earth and have been enjoyed by the public over the past few years. Videographer Chris Abbas got the idea to string them together into a video. The result was an eerily beautiful look at the sixth planet using raw, unprocessed data. You can see some of the 'defects' that astronomers tend to work around since it gets in the way of the science being done. But in the case of art, the dark donuts created by dust in the camera, cosmic rays hitting...

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Posted in Carl Sagan,Cassini,Chris Abbas,Saturn 33 comments

The Other Life on Mars

I felt like I haven't done a good astrobiology article in awhile. And I wanted to do something a bit different then the normal way we tend to think about life in the Universe. This one is about life on Mars, but in a different sense. It also pulls on an idea I talked about in the Life on Ceres article from a couple weeks back. Lets just go ahead and throw the big-worded-phrase out there: Unintentional Anthropogenic Panspermia. More simply: human activity might have accidentally brought life to another planet. Specifically, Mars in this case. OK? Yeah, it is kind of a crazy idea, along with lots of questions of hows and whys. But, like the classic...

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Posted in America,astrobiology,Extremophiles,Life,Mars,Panspermia,USSR,Viking 31 comments

June 2011 Highlights

As with previous months, I am delivering another summary of the great astronomical events you can expect this upcoming month. It definitely feels like Summer here, the Sun doesn't set until nearly 8:30 pm, and the heat has been sweltering this past Memorial Day weekend. All the more reason to spend more of the day at the pool and go out in the cooler evenings to take a look at the stars. June 1: New Moon: The Moon will be directly between the Earth and the Sun and will not be visible from Earth. June 1: Partial Eclipse of the Sun: The partial eclipse will be visible in most parts eastern Asia, Alaska, northern Canada, Greenland, and other high latitude locations in the northern hemisphere. Begins at 19:25, ends at 23:06 UT. (UT stands for Universal Time, equivalent to Greenwich Mean Time) June...

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Posted in Astronomy,Eclipse,Full Moon,Highlights,June,Planets,Solstice 20 comments

Infographic: OSIRIS-REx

Last week NASA announced its asteroid sample return mission, OSIRIS-REx. It has similarities to a previous mission, Stardust, which collected samples from a comet. The good people over at Space.com put together an infograph for it that you can see below. Anyways, I feel bad about posting two infographics in the same week, but hey, there's been a lot of news and it's Memorial Day weekend. I reserve the right to dial it in every once in awhile. Oh yeah, OSIRIS-REx stands for Origins-Spectral Interpretation-Resource Identification-Security-Regolith Explorer (isn't that a mouthful), but it certainly...

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Posted in Asteroids,NASA,OSIRIS-REx 34 comments