This week in Science Friday we look at the sights, smells, and price of space exploration as well as today’s announcement by NASA of where the LCROSS spacecraft will impact the moon. Be sure to check out the gorgeous images back from the newly refurbished Hubble, and see our video of the week: the Ares rocket motor test.
Refurbished Hubble Taking Better Pictures than Ever
Astronomers have declared NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope a fully rejuvenated observatory with the release of observations from four of its six operating science instruments. Topping the list of new views are colorful, multi-wavelength pictures of far-flung galaxies, a densely packed star cluster, an eerie “pillar of creation,” and a “butterfly” nebula. Hubble’s suite of new instruments allows it to study the universe across a wide swath of the light spectrum, from ultraviolet all the way to near-infrared. The new pictures are some of the most astonishing photographs taken with the HST yet. See lots of beautiful images at NASA.gov.
The Butterfly Nebula. Click image for full glorious version.
Human Space Exploration Too Expensive for NASA, Experts Say
Spend more money on space. This is the recent recommendation from a blue-ribbon panel that spent the summer reviewing the human spaceflight program. Although taking a dim view of the status quo at NASA, the committee clearly endorsed the goal of a robust human spaceflight program and all but pleaded on behalf of the agency, which runs on an annual budget of about $18 billion. A space exploration program “that will be a source of pride for the nation” will require roughly an additional $3 billion a year, the committee found. The big question is about where this money would come from, especially during such hard economic times. Without a restructuring of the way NASA currently operates, NASA’s future human spaceflight program may be left in the dust. Here is a clip from "Russia Today", where they seem to be rubbing it in.
NASA Selects Target for Lunar LCROSS Impact
Today at 10am PDT, NASA will announce their selected permanently-shadowed lunar crater for the impact of the LCROSS spacecraft. The lucky crater selected has been deemed the ideal target for evaluating if water ice exists at the lunar south pole. Anthony Colaprete, LCROSS principal investigator, will make the announcement and you can catch it live on NASA TV. The impact is scheduled for October 9, 2009 at 4:30am PDT. At that time, the kinetic impactor (the size of a large sports utility vehicle) will slam into the Moon at over 9,000 km/h (5,600 mph).
LCROSS preparing to impact the moon!
Space Smells Strong, Metallic, and Unique, Say Astronauts
NASA astronauts aboard the US space shuttle Discovery have said that the smell of space, which is regarded as the final frontier, is strong, metallic and unique. “There is one smell up here that is really unique though and that is the smell, we just call it ‘the smell of space’,” said NASA engineer and astronaut Gregory Chamitoff, who is on board US space shuttle Discovery. “I haven’t had a chance to do a spacewalk yet, but when the other guys did and they came back in, there’s this really, really strong metallic smell,” he added. For rookie astronaut Kevin Ford, Discovery’s pilot, both the sounds and smells of space have surprised him. “It’s like something I haven’t ever smelled before, but I’ll never forget it,” he said. “You know how those things stick with you,” he added.
Love that new space smell!
Video of the Week: Ares Rocket Motor Test
This Wednesday, NASA and industry engineers lit up the Utah sky with the initial full-scale, full-duration test firing of the first stage motor for the Ares I rocket. The Ares I is a crew launch vehicle in development for NASA’s Constellation Program. Check out the video footage from the test below.
Bonus Video: Inflatable Heat Shield
While they work on creating the energy shields of Star Trek, spacecraft have to rely on traditional heat shields to survive entry into an atmosphere. NASA recently successfully tested a new lower cost form of heat shield that is inflatable. More info at NewScientist.com.
#FollowFriday
If you are on Twitter, you know there are plenty of amazing people out there tweeting away. And, many of them are scientists! Every Friday I’ll be bringing you a new list of great scientists and techies to follow on Twitter. This week…
- @LCROSS: NASA mission to explore the Moon and see if there is water ice near one of the lunar poles! The impact site will be announced today.
- @GLXP: The official Google Lunar X PRIZE Twitter account. Going back to the moon, and taking you with us.
- @NASA_Ares_I_X: First flight test for America’s Next Generation Rocket
Science Quickies
Not enough science for you? Here’s a warp-speed look at some more science tid-bits that are worth a look.
- Successful test of Ares first stage motor
- NASA approves X-Ray space mission
- Description [linked words]
TrekMovie’s Science Friday is an homage the the great NPR radio show Science Friday. Science Friday® is a registered service mark of ScienceFriday Inc.
Cool Stuff.
(1st!?)
How many people would be disappointed to know that Hubble’s pictures are actually black and white with color added later in Photoshop? I know I was.
From Space.com:
“Interestingly, all Hubble images are created with black-and-white cameras. Ones and zeros are sent to Earth. Color is dropped in later with the popular Photoshop program.”
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/astronomy/color_universe_020625-1.html
@2
Wow. I didn’t realize that, but I guess considering the photos aren’t even of Thr visible light spectrum, it’s understandable. Interesting!
I wonder how it is posible to smell somthing in pace a it is a vacume. Perhaps the smell of the suite or tools is enhanced due to exposure to the vacume of space?
Does anybody have an idea?
well, so much for the red sun of Vulcan.
Don’t they have a way of determining what the colors would be if the photo were an actual color photo? Then they photoshop using the colors they know to be there. I may be wrong so let me know what you think.
I have seen Jupiter and it’s moons in quite decent resolution through a decent telescope, there’s something very powerful and emotional about seeing an it live and directly to your retina as opposed to screen or print. Also interesting was the lack of colour, barely any at all even in the bands of Jupiter. Most of the colour seen in all astrophotography has to be added or enhanced in some way, sadly.
The new images from the upgraded HST are truly awe-inspiring. The Carina Nebula in particular though struck me as, well… bearing a striking resemblance to a certain junkyard boss on Tatooine… the Watto Nebula?
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/Space/popup?id=1884338
First generation holodeck by 2016?
Here’s another cool piece of tech just launched.
ATI’s new multimonitor GPUs a step in the right direction! Looks pretty cool.
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3635
This is all great stuff so I hate to nitpick but here goes:
Astronaut Greg Chamitoff is not currently aboard Discovery.
Yeah, I’m a big space nerd. Sorry.
I became a big fan of Chamitoff when he was on the ISS several months ago because he often talked about and made comparisons to Star Trek. So I’m a fan because he’s a fan.
I hope NASA can afford to pay for Greg’s next mission.
@2 If you read the story you would realize that the hubble deploys a color filter for each grayscale image it takes just the the handheld camera you use to take pictures. That grayscale image is then colored to match the filter just like your camera colors the red filtered pixels red in your camera image.
Machines in Space -vs- Humans in space.
Hear is my simple question as to why Humans are needed in space.
A shoe becomes untied, a human can fix the problem in 5 seconds, for a computer it would take 10 years or so.
on the other hand a camera needs focused a 20 times a second for 5 years. A human would stop after a few trys because at best he could do it 3 times a second and give up.
A Human can solve unexpected things with no programming needed.
a computer needs code authored to tell it what to do, this means self programming needed. And who knows if the computer code is correct.
A computer over time can be taught to do things, the more unique the more time needed. Then odds are new hardware is needed for the computer to do it correctly. And for this computers still need Humans.
When computers can handle unique projects as fast as Human solutions can then comes the old Terminator Problem.
Either way solutions evolve time, computers can handle time and speed with quality work, but computers are not yet creative or adaptive. When they become so, then comes the extinction factor also know as the Borg factor. Patrick Stewart has had first hand deallings with this, although only on a sound stage from a Director, but that is far closer that may will ever come to it happening today. The future is another big question.
Then comes the Mammal species problem. Much of the problem with what happened Eight years ago today is cause by the fact that Mammals need free territory to explore and concer. With out it Mammals develop forns of mental illness labeled as Rabies. And the Islamic lead Terrorist have no free space or areas to concur so they terrorize to give them the semblance of concurring new territory.
If humanity can no longer personally explore and concur new territories then we will all start showing signs of becoming rabid. And these signs are first developing in Islamic Terrorist.
This hole problem can be removed from our danger list just by having the freedom to explore and concur in person. But the paper shuffling fat asses in Washington DC just want to use money to gain self power over those of lesser power that was given to them by those of lesser power to get more power.
If any thing we need to solve the problem of politics before it removes our power to explore new territories. Which in turn it does happen then there will be no personalities like Captain James Tiberius Kirk for children to idolize.
By the way I left out the big political fight over what brought this money question up. And that is the big fat assed paper shufflers we vote for (aka: Politicians) .
Minor correction, line 2 was to be “Here” not the auditory “Hear”.
#2. How many people would care to know that digital TV is broadcast in bimary black and white.
It is all a matter of the algorithmic process of turning binary or even olf fashioned analog video into color . And if you do not know it TV was first broadcast at 512×384 in 236 shades of Black and White. This was in 1953 and before that it was more like watching TV on a osciliscope (a circular picture vacuum tube) first thought of back in the 30’s by Germans and seperate American Engineers.
As for smelling in space…
First the process would may cause death if tried in person. But thanks to robotics, there has been sensors that can behave like the smell cells we have in our noses.
It’s all a matter or detecting chemical mixtures, in a way the first smoke alarms in ways smell things. They smell smoke and start screaming a warning alarm.
Even before that was the photo sensor, what has developed now into 25k x 16k image arrays used in Pro digital military and Retail Cameras.
Again it is all in the software (or in human terms) learning what sensors detect equate to what name to give that sensation.
In space, no-one can smell you fart… except yourself.
@16 … except for the guys who help you remove your spacesuit.
Whoever smelt it, dealt it.
I’m excited about the LCROSS Impact. If water is found on the moon, it would drastically alter plans for a manned missions there, making it much more cheaper. Water on the moon means that they would not need to carry water, oxygen, or rocket fuel.
Great update Kayla!
Huh- how can there be any smell it’s a vacuum. That’s the smell of oxygen pumping into a space suit. Are they really that dumb?
Spockish…
The first practical use of television was in Germany. Regular television broadcasts began in Germany in 1929 and in 1936 the Olympic Games in Berlin were broadcast to television stations in Berlin and Leipzig where the public could view the games live.
This was substantially before 1953… and our local station (then WFBM) was on the air in 1948.
(source-god forgive me, but it was quick, and accurate) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television
Smell of space? I have my doubts. Obviously needs further study. Isn’t smell the brain’s interpretation? Would be interesting to know what this is really about.
Grrrrrrreat, just what we need is mush-skulled kids trying to stick their nose in a vacuum cleaner, so that they too can “smell the vacuum”…
This is a non sequitur, but I just took today’s poll, and is it true? Is at least 71 percent of the readership younger than I am? I was too young to watch the premiere in 1966, but I’ll confess to being alive then.
Wow, guys. Thanks for making me feel old.
Hey, at least we had a television set. It was black and white and got 3 channels.
20. “Huh- how can there be any smell it’s a vacuum. That’s the smell of oxygen pumping into a space suit. Are they really that dumb?”
Whoever taught you how to speed read short paragraphs—fire that person. To review:
“There is one smell up here that is really unique though and that is the smell, we just call it ‘the smell of space’,” said NASA engineer and astronaut Gregory Chamitoff, who is on board US space shuttle Discovery. “I haven’t had a chance to do a spacewalk yet, but when the other guys did and they came back in, there’s this really, really strong metallic smell,” he added.
Point 1: The “smell of space” is what they “call” it, not necessarily what it really is.
Point 2: The smell is not, according to what the article says, what spacewalking astronauts smell in their suits.
Point 3: Those who have NOT spacewalked seem to smell that “smell of space” AFTER astronauts who have spacewalked reenter the shuttle.
Maybe the odor results from the interaction of freezing space and the material of their suits? Who knows? I’m sure NASA’s TOP minds are hard at work on the mystery this very moment.
Maybe someone should remove their helmet while outside in space, take a big sniff, then put it back on and report how space smells.
Or maybe we could used Dr. Farnsworth’s “Smell-o-scope” to find out!
Often astronauts have said that after a spacewalk their suits and airlock area smell of gun powered, a metallic smell.
Wow! That Butterfly Nebula is really beautiful..What a disappointment to learn NASA photo shops the pix because they are in Black & White. Hope they at least got the colors right. Still it’s an awesome picture.
Dave @11 – If you read the story you would also have read:
“Human eyes, even if very near to or inside one of these nebulae, could not make out the colors, however, because the emissions are too faint. They would see little more than a big gray area.”
So it doesn’t matter how many filters or correct scientific methods they use to extract the correct color spectrum data; what we are shown in the pictures is not what we would physically see with our eyes, and that they are rejigging the spectrum data to make the pictures prettier for human consumption.
First to our Trek Nerd, It’s nice to know that at least 71% of the public is younger than me. I use to use this line to test to see if whom I was talking to had more than one brain cell. When they asked my age I stated I was born one year to the day before JFK said we’re going to the moon.
On the six panel pre-holo-deck by ATI, I’ve been going ATI since 1996 when they created the All-in-Wonder TV I/O card. The screen display looks nice, but I’d rather have a higher rez HDTV. The one in Japan is higher rez but 4K x 2560. Personally myself I’d create a ultra light wieght head set with hi-rez panels to place in-front of your eyes, That would give you more of a surround vision resemblance. But ATI makes great video display cards not what displays the video.
And If you viewed the latest Popular Science’s episode, they had wath resembled the six screen display made by ATI, can not be sure because Discovery Science channel would not give the details in fear that that much data would boar the show.
I’ve worked with Lasers for light shows and even made small holograms in High School Physics class. To make life size video speed holograms is going to need a military like budget and 20 years of work. And if Free Enterprise is still alive the Retail public could do it in half the time, just because their would be so many free open minds looking at the problem from so many angles with such a broad vast envelope of different educations.
The best way to create 3D holograms is to be able to program the brain directly to make you think what your brain sees, smells, hears, and feels is real. But first you need to learn how the brain works. Then control the electrical/chemical exchanges between the indivigual brain cells. To to do this means you are steps closer to creating a matter-energy-matter Transporter.
Besides the Warp Engines that Star Trek popularized the Transporter is one of the most famous. That fact can be seen by the use of the phrase BEAM ME UP. And the holo Deck took another 23-5 years and TNG.
And the use of colors and color relationships to each other is one of the big items in the marketing departments of any advertising companies. Color has been used far longer than sex has been in ads. But I think sex came before color in real life.
And color is a big thing to color blind people. I use to be Purple, as I age it’s becoming more a green/brown which is what my younger brother is.
#4- The smell comes from when the come back in the airlock and the smell from the outside permeates what they sense once the airlock is full of air. They said its like a gunpowder smell.
Photoshoping Hubble? In hindsight it makes sense for marketing reasons but man that is disappointing to read.
Regarding the smell of space:
Could it be the space suits outgassing from being in a vacuum, and then suddenly getting soaked with air?
Also, the radiant energy from the sun might be absorbed in the material in the suit, then is released when they enter the airdock. I’m thinking maybe the suits were cooked a little bit?
Also, even though space might be a vacuum, there are still small particles floating around. Space dust if you will. Perhaps it clings to the suit, gets charged up from the sun’s radiant energy, then outgasses when it enters the ship?
I’m just guessing; I’m not claiming to have an answer.
Again the smell of space depends on where your at and where you been, because any thing to have a smell there needs to be something there in the first place. Then as the particles from space go from one are to another they all change their energy status static to potential energy charge.
To really smell space you need a sensor that survives the vacuum of space. For humans to do such involes potential damage to what humans smell with, the nose. A machine may one day be able to simulate a nose.
But until humans evolve into species that can survive in space, humanity will never really personal know, then it will be a subjective view. Until then we are all just guessing, or repeating what our sensors tell us.
For now it is like asking a person what love is when they never have been in love. To get a answer you need to ask those that have experienced the subject in person to really know.
What a shame that we don’t have the money for what we want in space exploration.
#37) I agree it is a waste, went over to my brothers tonight, the one who is an electrical engineer at Lockheed Martin in Denver. they are creating the command capsule, and doing the electronics on the Ares 1 and 5. He has herd nothing yet about the cuts but he said it still needs to float down from the big wigs from above. And the cuts will effect any of the 9 contracts they have with NASA.
The one thing he did say is Thursday they stopped researching the Ares 3 which was a program launch new replacement segment for the ISS that ESA had interest in when they are given total control of it in 2012 as NASA hands it over. And NASA, ESA and Russia will be sending people/tourist up there, China may be added but that’s 2015+ and Europe’s choices.
He also said India and Australia are looking into starting space programs. India to compete with China and Australia may buy stuff from the US company replacing the shuttle. You know they have a right if DOD okays it.
But he would not tell me what the 9 programs with NASA was. You know the old thats Top Secret and if he told me then he’d have to kill me. He said that as a Bond film came on the TV, I think that’s why he used the line.
Hi, Spockish. NASA’s fate is tied to that of the economy, and when times are tough, NASA’s budget is the first to suffer.
The Presidential commission that issued the recent report saying that NASA’s budget was $3 billion short annually did say that, instead of landing on the Moon again, astronauts could land on asteroids or the moons of Mars. That seems counterintuitive — it seems it would be more difficult to do the latter than to return astronauts to the Moon. But if reports are true, not all hope is lost for the American manned program.
As far as India, China, and so on, they’re moving along at their own pace. China did their first spacewalk about a year ago, whereas India has yet to launch people aboard its own spacecraft. Both of these countries, and Japan, have sent their own spacecraft to explore the Moon aboard their own rockets (although India’s failed prematurely). It’s great that they’re picking up a little of the slack, but no other country or organization, including the ESA, can really do what NASA is capable of.
NASA continues to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or, rather, the lack of it. The LCROSS spacecraft is at least something, though.
Sometimes the only thing I think will make the world truly take notice of the critical importance of spaceflight once again is if, by means of shiny, metallic starships, representatives of an alien civilization landed in the national capitals of every single country with a demand to surrender or be conquered.
And then it will be too late.
@12: It’s not a problem that it would take 10 years for a computer to learn how to tie a shoelace…computers don’t wear shoes.
41, I beg to differ:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0065566/
Alf@2, 30: NASA is not in fact Photoshopping the Hubble images to pretty them up for the public – the Hubble telescope is first and foremost an important tool for astronomers to do science with. The various filters used to enhance some Hubble images are doing so for research reasons — the press release that accompanies the Butterfly Nebula image explains that it was filtered through 6 distinct wavelengths corresponding to chemical components of the nebula (brown is hydrogen, cyan is O3, white is sulfur, orange is nitrogen, purple is O3, helium is blue) in order to pull apart the composition of the structure of the nebula and understand the way this star ejected its outer shell. Some of the Hubble pictures are enhanced in this way and some are filtered for the same natural light we would see them in.
You can learn about how NASA uses Hubble’s various filters here:
http://www.hubblesite.org/gallery/behind_the_pictures/meaning_of_color/index.php
Spockish@38, currently, NASA is trying for funding to keep ISS in space through 2020, when it will likely be de-orbited and ditched in the ocean (this may happen as soon as 2016, according to some NASA officials, if funding does not come through). The Russians have talked about possibly detaching some of their ISS modules to spare them from destruction.
Peter @43:
Actually, the story I linked to does indicate that it is the media that doesn’t pass on the info about what the photoshopped colors represent and there is no deliberate misrepresentation.
But the bottom line is that the images we are shown are not the same as what we would see if we were looking at the objects with the naked eye. If you were paying a tour company to take you out to look at these galactic events based on what you’d seen in the brochures then you’d probably demand your money back.
If I were to pay a tour company to take me out to look at these galactic events in the first place, I would be best advised to get my head examined. ;-)
Alf@44:
If someone was going to all the effort and expense to be sent in person to the Butterfly Nebula, 3800 light years away, they’d likely be willing to look at the nebula as via all sorts of enhanced telemetry. Human eyes wouldn’t be able to take in the entire nebula at once, close up, anyway, since it’s over 2 light years across (or it was in 1780 B.C., when the light Hubble is showing us left the nebula).
The filtering of chemical composition was for astronomers to try to understand how shockwaves of particles propagated through the nebula from the huge dying star at its center. Hubble is a tool for scientific research into the universe around us, not a tool for marketing tourism destinations.
That said, another of the released images from the upgraded Hubble camera, this July view of post-impact Jupiter, is presented in visible light, exactly as we would see it if we were approaching the planet in a spacecraft:
http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2009/23/image/b/
Prematurely de-orbiting the ISS would be a tragedy of epic proportions.
Let’s pray that common sense prevails.
#43) Peter F. I’ve been hearing rumors that ESA has perked interest in ISS, the interest could be as simple as one guy having a question to fill his dreams, but the dream may either grow or shrink, but it is still a hope for a dream. It could be a good dream, but most likely it is only a dream.
Who knows if the Japanese Hotel King’s dream of a hotel in space by 2018 will ever come true, it would be nice and it will cost $$$ to both build and rent rooms. And much of these ideas came about before last years money mess.
It would be nice if these ideas still lived but only time and money will tell.
And PhotoShop at NASA is mainly used to stitch photos into one big one and alter the gray colors into what we the public like, color. It is possible to alter, add or delete content but those levels of changes are made by higher ups with more political power than your 20’s aged newbie that does the real work at NASA. The rest seem to be no more than Stuffed Shirts getting big paychecks. But as with any job you have to learn and do the hard work to last long enough to get the high paid jobs.
It’s plans like deorbiting the ISS after merely a fraction of the time it takes to complete it that make NASA and/or the relevant budgeteers of same look really stupid.
Imagine if the pharoahs had destroyed the Great Pyramids ten years after they were built. How smart would that be?