Astronomy | NEW FRONTIER NEWS

Mars Rovers Still Going Strong, U.S. Cars Still Suck

The Spirit rover. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

NASA’s Mars rovers are still chugging along on the red planet. The missions, originally planned to be about 90 days, have in fact lasted longer than a single term presidency. To put it another way, Opportunity and Spirit have been on Mars longer than the subjective time one would experience watching a single Michael Bey movie.

Both of the rovers are showing the signs of age, but after five straight years trundling around an alien planet this is to be expected. New Frontier News owned a car built in the United States once, and it broke down in only three years.

Some sources say this breakdown occurred because of New Frontier News’ habit of feeding it candy by way of the gas tank, but we prefer to believe it was because the car had been designed and built by a short-sighted, profit driven American car company, rather than by NASA.

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6 Pieces of Deadly Eye Candy: Supernova Edition

Isn't this pretty? It may have killed a bunch of very nice aliens. Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Penn State/S.Park et al.; Optical: Pal.Obs. DSS

As regular readers of New Frontier News know, outer space is essentially large stretches of nothing studded with beautiful things that are trying to kill you. This is especially true in the case of stars.

All forms of stellar phenomena are impressive, but for many of us the most mind boggling are supernovas. This is because regular novas are boring and hypernovas are trying too hard. Also, supernovas make gold. Really. All gold, anywhere, was born in the flaming heart of a supernova.

Below you’ll find some of the most dazzlingly beautiful (and deadly) pieces of eye candy humanity has ever found.

As always with astronomical images featured on New Frontier News, please click to embiggen.

Supernova Survivor

This artist’s depiction shows a double star system. The star on the left is a red supergiant that’s making boom boom, after having transferred about 10 solar masses of hydrogen to its blue companion. The blue star was the first supernova survivor ever found.

Image Credit: European Space Agency and Justyn R. Maund (University of Cambridge)

Kepler’s Remnant

This is a composite image compiled by three space telescopes; Chandra (X-rays), Hubble (visible light), and Spitzer (infrared). There’s actually some history behind this image. Four hundred years ago, astronomer Johannes Kepler got the living crap surprised out of him by a new star in the sky. The telescope hadn’t been invented yet, so Kepler and his astronomer buddies had to observe it with the naked eye, and were deprived of the awesome power and beauty we see below. In your face, Kepler! Telescopes were invented about four years later, but they still wouldn’t have shown Kepler anything like the image below.

Image Credit: R. Sankrit and W. Blair, ESA, NASA.

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Buzz Aldrin to Accept Emmy, Conspiracy Nuts Wet Pants in Excitement

Buzz Aldrin. Image Credit: NASA

Buzz Aldrin will accept an Emmy award from the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences this Saturday at the Emmy Engineering Awards.

Aldrin is famous as both the second man on the Moon and probably the gazillionth person to want to punch moon landing denier Bart Sibrel in the face. The difference is that Buzz Aldrin follows through.

Aldrin will be accepting the Philo T. Farnsworth award on behalf of NASA. The award recognizes an agency, company or institution whose contributions affected the state of TV technology and engineering.

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TXT MSGS to Aliens? SRSLY?

Artist's conception of Gliese 581 d.

Do you remember that scene in Contact, where it turns out the first broadcast aliens received from Earth was of Adolph Hitler? Well, Australia’s COSMOS Magazine has decided to lower Earth’s galactic credibility even further by beaming a bunch of text messages at some aliens they hope might exist and be listening. They’ve even somehow roped NASA into the deal.

The Pioneer probes carry space porn, and instructions on where to find more. Image Credit: NASA.

It’s not like this is the first time NASA has gone out of its way to send messages to possibly non-existent (and possibly hostile) aliens. The Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 probes are both carrying aluminum plaques that not only show aliens how to get here, but also that we’re really into porn.Voyagers 1 and 2 carry the famous golden records, as well as instructions and equipment for playing them back. The records have greetings in many different languages, nature sounds, and over 115 images. New Frontier News was unable to find out if those were also porn.

On August 23, 2009, NASA’s Tidbinbilla radio telescope will send a really, really, really long text message to Gliese 581d, a rocky “Super-Earth” orbiting a dim red dwarf star roughly 20.3 light years away. Of all the planets discovered outside our solar system so far, Gliese 581d has the best chance of having liquid water, and thus life.

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Carnival of Space #116

Carnival of Space #116 is being hosted by Habitation Intention. Check it out.

The First Nations in Space

It sometimes seems as if humanity has gotten a bit cocky about exploring the big deep. Probes have explored a lot of the solar system, and Hubble and the other space based telescopes have vastly expanded our view and understanding of the cosmos.

With over 560 satellites currently circling the Earth, it’s not surprising that simply putting something into orbit just doesn’t impress the average idiot-on-the-street anymore. The lesson is clear. Do the impossible once, you’re a hero. Do it a zillion times, and they’ll pre-empt your time slot for reruns of American Idol.

The early satellites impressed people in ways the post-Apollo generation doesn’t really understand. For many years, space travel was considered by most people to be a ridiculous fantasy. With the launch of Sputnik 1 by the Soviet Union, all that changed. New Frontier News is pleased to present our take on the satellites launched by the first three nations into space.

Sputnik 1

Built by: USSR

Operated for: 22 days

Orbited for: 92 days

Sputnik-1 was launched on October 4, 1957. It was pretty light on gear by today’s standards, or even compared to Sputnik-2, which at least had a couple of photometres and a dog. This doesn’t diminish the singular achievement of being the first in space. Sputnik 1 taught us things about our planet, including data on the density of the upper atmosphere and distribution of radio signals in the atmosphere.

More Stuff:

“Space Age at 50: The Top 10 Sputniks” is a great article at collectSPACE.com on the backup units and replicas of the first satellite.

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Carnival of Space #115

Welcome to the Carnival of Space #115. For more information on the Carnival of Space, please click here.

Kepler Gets Early Results

You can tell the news is exciting when three different blogs can’t wait to share it:

Steinn Sigurðsson of Dynamics of Cats updates us on NASA’s Kepler Planet Finding Mission. It has made its first discovery, while still being calibrated.

Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy also seems pretty excited about Kepler coming online, and with good cause. As he explains, the results from the calibration and testing indicate that if there are Earth-like planets in the direction it’s pointed, Kepler is going to find them.

Kepler Measures a Planetary Atmosphere. Media Sleeps Through It. The Space Writer is Ticked.

IAU Meets, Fails to Remove Planet Status from Hollywood

Megan Watzke of the Chandra X-Ray Center fills us in on the hidden (and horrifying) connection between the last meeting of the International Astronomical Union and old Barry Manilow songs.

Alan Boyle of Cosmic Log has some more details on the IAU meeting, but chooses to focus on a subject close to his heart: Pluto Politics.

The site for space collectors, collectSPACE, tells us why a certain NASA patch has sold out a month before the payload it celebrates is even launched. Here’s a hint: the answer rhymes with “Cephen Stolbert.”

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Celebrating 10 Years of Incredibly Deadly Eye Candy: The Chandra X-Ray Observatory

Since being launched in 1999, the Chandra X-ray Observatory has taught us many things about our universe. For example, it has given us beautiful pictures of stellar phenomenon that are trying to kill us.

Chandra is one of NASA’s “Great Observatories”, a designation that includes the Hubble Space Telescope, Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory, and Spitzer Space Telescope. Those four space telescopes have outdone Michael Bay in both of his areas of expertise. Black holes, supernovas, and other cosmic phenomena have way better special effects, and pulsars deliver radio blasts of gibberish at incredible levels.

In no particular order, here are our 10 favourite images from Chandra’s first 10 years. Please note that these are composite images, typically put together from several space-based telescopes.

The Cartwheel Galaxy

It’s pictures like this that make us suspect that NASA has been feeding its fleet of robo-scopes some sort of robo-peyote.

It looks kind of like a cartwheel. Image credit: Composite: NASA/JPL/Caltech/P.Appleton et al. X-ray: NASA/CXC/A.Wolter & G.Trinchieri et al.

2. The Crescent Nebula

We added this one to the list because of how incredibly tacky it was. Why have we never seen this on a velvet painting at the midway? Don’t worry, though, it will explode in about a hundred thousand years, presumably out of shame after it reads this article.

Image credit: X-ray: NASA/UIUC/Y. Chu & R. Gruendl et al. Optical: SDSU/MLO/Y. Chu et al.

3. Star Formation in M33

As a respected provider of high-quality astrojournalism, we at New Frontier News are sometimes asked why astronomers so often use serial numbers instead of easy to remember names. The reason is simple: astronomers hate you, and each other. Various people refer to M33 as the Triangulum Galaxy, the Pinwheel Galaxy, and NGC 598.

Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/CfA/R. Tuellmann et al.; Optical: NASA/AURA/ STScIThis is a view of the largest region of star formation in M33. You’re looking at about 200 very young stars.

4. Supernova Remnant of G292.0+1.8

Look in awe at the sublime beauty of this awesome stellar event, and then feel ashamed because it probably wiped out some very nice civilizations.

Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Penn State/S.Park et al.; Optical: Pal.Obs. DSS

5. NGC 4649 is Dead Inside

NGC 4649 is a giant galaxy about 51 million light years from Earth that contains one of the biggest black holes ever found. The black hole, however, appears to be dormant. Yes, apparently that happens sometimes… Do they fill up or something?

Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Univ. of California Irvine/P.Humphrey et al. Optical: NASA/STScI

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