Astronaut anatomy

NASA astronaut Scott Kelly has just taken off for a yearlong stay on the International Space Station. He will perform sophisticated testing on himself and the results will be relayed so that researchers can understand the effects of long-term stints in space. Of the ocular analysis, UC-San Diego postdoctoral fellow Brandon Macias, a co-investigator on the project, says, "Our goal is to understand and measure the fluid shift that occurs in space. We hope to create a longitudinal map of changes: before, during, and after spaceflight.” And they have the perfect control for comparison of the results: Scott's identical twin brother, retired astronaut Mark Kelly.

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Clinging and singing

Yesterday, the European Space Agency succeeded in in unprecedented decades-long mission to land a spacecraft on a comet. It took 10 years for the rocket to reach Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, which is 4 billion miles (6.4 billion km) away, only 4.1 miles (6.7 km) wide, and is hurtling around the sun at speeds of up to 84,000 miles (135,000 km) per hour. After a bit of a glitchy landing, the probe is already sending back novel information about the universe. While the world applauds, the comet sings (LISTEN HERE).

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Bitty blue marble

In the unique perspective of this photograph taken last month from just outside lunar orbit by China’s lunar test probe, Chang’e 5TI, our planet looks miniscule compared to the moon. In fact, the moon is only 27% the size of the earth and has only about 2% of its volume (MORE HERE).

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New York by NASA

This view from space (MORE HERE) was taken from the International Space Station on May 5th, 2014. It shows the island of Manhattan, between the Hudson River and the East River, in the early afternoon. The green of Central Part is dotted with white playing courts, and Midtown and the Financial District are darkened by the shadows of the skyscrapers.

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Beyond my comprehension

See what you make of this:

"For this particular experiment, researcher Georg Heinze and his team converted light coherence into atomic coherences. They did so by using a quantum interference effect that makes an opaque medium — in this case a crystal — transparent over a narrow range of light spectra (a process called electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT)). The researchers shot a laser through this crystal (a source of light), which sent its atoms into a quantum superposition of two states. A second beam then switched off the first laser, and as a consequence, the transparency. Thus, the researchers collapsed the superposition — and trapped the second laser beam inside."

Here's why I bring it to your attention. Physicists Georg Heinze, Christian Hubrich, and Thomas Halfmann of the Technische Universität Darmstadt in Germany have succeeded in stopping light in its tracks for an entire minute. This astounding achievement has implications for building light-based quantum memory (which I also don't understand). But here's what blows my mind: In that one-minute span during which the beam of light was "frozen," it could theoretically have traveled about 11 million miles (18 million km), or 20 round trips to the moon.

 

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Big bluer marble

I don't often blog about space, preferring to remain grounded with more earthly topics because so much about astronomy boggles my mind. For instance, NASA and the European Space Agency just announced the discovery of a planet orbiting a star 63 light-years away. A light-year, as you may remember from science class, is the distance that light travels in a vacuum in 365 days, which means that HD 189733b (as it is known) is 378,000,000,000,000 miles (630,000,000,000,000 km) away from us. Even as far away as that, astronomers have been able for the first time to determine the actual color of a planet outside our solar system. Using the Hubble Space Telescope – which was almost allowed to die, but is now expected to function through at least next year – they have identified the color as a deep azure blue. They have also calculated that the planet is 10 times closer to its star than Mercury is to our sun, so its temperature is 2,000°F (1,093°C). But here is the reason I wanted to bring this to your attention. Because this planet's atmosphere contains high clouds laced with silicate particles and has winds of 4,500 mph (7242 km/h), it rains liquid glass sideways.

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Egyptian iron

The tube-shaped bead above was made of iron by the ancient Egyptians c. 3,300 B.C.E. - thousands of years before the earliest evidence of iron smelting in the region. It was found with 8 others in a cemetery south of Cairo in 1911, and by 1928 scientists were already speculating that the metal was of celestial origin. Diane Johnson of the Open University in Milton Keynes, U.K., borrowed the bead from the Manchester Museum to seek a definitive answer. She and her colleagues used scanning electron microscopy and computed tomography to analyze the trinket without having to cut it apart. Nickel content of as much as 30% and a distinctive crystalline structure pointed to its origins in a meteorite which had once been part of an asteroid dating back to the origins of the solar system. The handful of iron artifacts found in ancient Egypt were hammered from fragments in meteorites and placed in high-status graves. “The sky was very important to the ancient Egyptians. Something that falls from the sky is going to be considered as a gift from the gods,” says team member Joyce Tyldesley of the University of Manchester. Campbell Price of the Manchester Museum (not a member of the team) points out that during the time of the pharaohs meteorites were believed to be bits of the bones of the gods themselves.

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Russian rock

Did you see the footage that so many people captured when a meteor streaked across the Russian sky on February 15th? If not, here's a slideshow and compilation video. The meteor originated in the asteroid belt, was visible in the sky for about 30 seconds, let loose several sonic booms as it entered the atmosphere, and disintegrated over Chelyabinsk, Siberia. Here are a few statistics about it:

• It was originally 55' (17m) long and had an estimated mass of 10,000 tons.
• It entered the atmosphere at about 40,000 mph (18km per second).
• It released nearly 500 kilotons of energy (about 30 times the power of the Hiroshima atomic bomb).
• it exploded at an altitude of 12 to 15 miles above the surface.
• Fragments left a 20' wide (6m wide) hole in the ice.

The cosmic event was the largest to have happened within the last century, and the only time a crashing meteor is known to have injured a large number of people, by shattering glass as they went to the windows to see what was happening. "[It] turns out to be the most widely witnessed asteroid strike in modern history."

 

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