A short piece of audio of the Discovery landing, which took place in June of 2008. Just one of a large collection of interesting sound files you can access from Hark Dot Com.
Provided I can get this player properly embedded, of course… should be just above this text.
Astrophysicist Geoffrey Marcy has managed to discover more extrasolar planets than anyone else, 70 out of the first 100 in fact. He also is the director of the Center for Integrative Planetary Science, an entire organization dedicated to extrasolar planet research. So it shouldn’t be any surprise he has received a grant to study the Kepler data for evidence of Dyson Spheres, the mark of a Type II civilization. A Type II civilization on the Kardashev scale utilizes close to the total energy output of their star to power their culture, and one way to do that is to build a Dyson Sphere around the star for both living surface and to capture that energy. Thanks to NASA’s Kepler mission we now have a huge amount of reconnaissance of other star systems already being sifted for evidence of other planets, to reexamine that data looking for Dyson Spheres only costs some additional computing power and man hours, all the capital outlay has already been made. And we might just discover some new neighbors!
The Air and Space Museum has a couple of nice presentations they have put together about how Hollywood has approached showing what going into space will look like over the years. On the Rocket Pioneers page they have a list of early rocket scientists, pretty much the men who invented the entire concept of using rockets to get humans into space. As you read through the entries you will see references to the various science fiction movies they consulted on, such as Fritz Lang’s Frau im Mond. Be sure to check the film clips at the bottom of the page while you are there. They also have Hollywood Spacesuits, and the subtitle to the article says it all: A sci-fi historian’s guide to movie spacesuits, from wacky to realistic.
Neil Armstrong was one of my heroes, and I finally found a video I wanted to post here about his contributions to the space program. This Week @ NASA (actually, last week at this point) had this brief comment about him, along with a number of other interesting entries on a variety of topics. If you are not familiar with the weekly vlog, here is an entry to give you an idea of what they cover. You can subscribe to the podcast at the link above if you want to follow it…
Not the whole sun, just one little strand of plasma. But that one little strand was many times larger than Earth, and was traveling at 900 miles per second when it left the sun on August 31st this year. NASA had a number of observation platforms able to get a look at it, so they put together this rather amazing video. The music is quite tasty as well, wish I knew what it was. The music is not as good on the second video, but it is quite silly and celebrates the recent landing of Curiosity on the red planet, so I felt the need to include it.
From the web site Space Facts, this little infographic gives a very clean representation of the relative sizes of the planets in our solar system. I think if they would have included Pluto its size compared to the others would have made the not-a-planet argument obvious.
