Smithsonian – Jupiter Broadcasting https://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com Open Source Entertainment, on Demand. Mon, 22 Feb 2016 02:47:17 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.5.3 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/cropped-favicon-32x32.png Smithsonian – Jupiter Broadcasting https://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com 32 32 Habitable Exoplanets & Diabetes | SciByte 92 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/36836/habitable-exoplanets-diabetes-scibyte-92/ Tue, 07 May 2013 21:35:10 +0000 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/?p=36836 We take a look at habitable zone exoplanets, diabetes treatment advances, water in Jupiter, living on Mars, and spacecraft updates.

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We take a look at habitable zone exoplanets, diabetes treatment advances, water in Jupiter, living on Mars, spacecraft updates, Curiosity news, and as always take a peek back into history and up in the sky this week.

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Show Notes:

More Habitable Zone Exoplanets

  • Astronomers have announced that they have found three new, potentially rocky, planets in the habitable zone of their stars by analyzing nearly three years’ worth of data
  • Kepler Space Telescope
  • As of April 2013, Kepler data has uncovered more than 2,700 potential planets, with about 120 of them having been confirmed to date
  • Mission scientists expect that more than 90 percent of the planets detected are real and not illusions in the data
  • Until now planets in the habitable zone were discovered by what is known as the radial velocity method, which gives a lower limit for the planet’s mass, but no information about its radius
  • While a small radius (less than 2 Earth radii) is a strong indicator that a planet around is indeed rocky it is difficult to assess whether or not a planet is rocky, like the Earth.
  • Finding planets in the habitable zones of larger stars is harder because those planets have relatively long orbits and barely cast a shadow as they pass across the faces of their suns
  • Kepler-62
  • Kepler62 is a red dwarf star, about two-thirds the size of the sun and several hundred degrees Celsius cooler
  • It is only 20 percent as bright as the sun and is about 1,200 light years away and contains five planets currently identified
  • Two of the worlds, Kepler-62e and Kepler-62f are the smallest exoplanets yet found in a habitable zone, and they might both be covered in water or ice, depending on what kind of atmosphere they might have
  • Life on these worlds would be under water with no easy access to metals, to electricity, or fire for metallurgy
  • The biggest uncertainty right now is about both planets composition, early evidence suggests that at least 62f is rocky
  • Kepler-62e and Kepler-62f would exhibit distinctly different colors and make our search for signatures of life easier on such planets in the near future
  • Kepler-62e
  • Orbit is 122 days
  • 1.6 times the diameter of Earth
  • Kepler-62e would have a bit more clouds than Earth according to computer models to sustain an ocean
  • An astronomer at the University of Washington not involved in the research says that Kepler-62e may be too close to its star – and therefore too hot – to sustain life
  • If 62e is a rocky planet, it’s almost certainly tidally locked with its star, half of its surface always facing the star, and the other always facing away
  • Kepler62-f
  • Orbit is 267 days
  • 1.4 times the diameter of Earth
  • Kepler-62f would need the greenhouse effect from plenty of carbon dioxide to warm it enough to host an ocean
  • Kepler-69 System
  • Kepler-36 is a sun-like star located 2,700 light-years away,
  • The Kepler-69 system contains one known planet in that star\’s habitable zone
  • Kepler-69c
  • 1.7 times bigger than Earth, sits on the inner edge of the habitable zone and is almost certainly a super-Venus rather than a super-Earth
  • Habitable Zone Types
  • The \”empirical habitable zone\” is where liquid water can exist on the surface of a planet if that planet has sufficient cloud cover
  • The \”narrow habitable zone\” is where liquid water can exist on the surface even without the presence of a cloud cover
  • Of Note
  • According to the Planetary Habitability Laboratory, there are now nine potential habitable worlds outside of our solar system, with 18 more potentially habitable planetary candidates found by Kepler waiting to be confirmed
  • Astronomers predict there are 25 potentially habitable exomoons
  • Kepler cannot search for signs of life on worlds like Kepler-62e, Kepler-62f and Kepler-69c, but the telescope is paving the way for future missions that should do just that
  • Next-generation missions like the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, which NASA approved earlier this month for launch in 2017, will take on the task of finding nearer planets that astronomers can study in depth
  • Multimedia
  • YouTube | Animation of the Kepler 62 Planetary System | UniverseTodayVideos
  • YouTube | NASA\’s Kepler Discovers Its Smallest \’Habitable Zone\’ Planets to Date | NASASolarSystem
  • Infographic | 3 Potentially Habitable Super-Earth Planets Explained | Space.com
  • IMAGE | Diagram compares the planets of the inner solar system to Kepler-69 | Image credit: NASA Ames/JPL-Caltech
  • IMAGE | Diagram compares the planets of the inner solar system to Kepler-62 | Image credit: NASA Ames/JPL-Caltech
  • IMAGE | Current known potentially habitable exoplanets | Credit: Planetary Habitability Laboratory/University of Puerto Rico, Arecibo.
  • IMAGE | The habitable zone for different types of stars | Image: L. Kaltenegger (MPIA)
  • YouTube | Full Anouncement | Kepler Makes Discoveries Inside the Habitable Zone | NASAtelevision
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Discovered! Most Earth-Like Alien Planet & 2 Other Possibly Habitable Worlds | Space.com
  • Most Earthlike planets yet seen bring Kepler closer to its holy grail | Atom & Cosmos | Science News
  • Habitable Worlds? New Kepler Planetary Systems in Images | UniverseToday.com
  • Kepler Team Finds System with Two Potentially Habitable Planets | UniverseToday.com

— NEWS BYTE —

New Possible Diabetes Treatment Option

  • Researchers have discovered a hormone that holds promise for a dramatically more effective treatment of type 2 diabetes and believe that the hormone might also have a role in treating type 1, or juvenile, diabetes
  • Type 1 Diabetes
  • While betatrophin primarily as a treatment for type 2 diabetes, it is believed it might play a role in the treatment of type 1 diabetes as well
  • Perhaps boosting the number of beta cells and slowing the progression of that autoimmune disease when it\’s first diagnosed
  • Type 2 Diabetes
  • Type 2 diabetes is usually caused by a combination of excess weight and lack of exercise and causes patients to slowly lose beta cells and the ability to produce adequate insulin
  • Provide this hormone, the type 2 diabetic will make more of their own insulin-producing cells, and this will slow down, if not stop, the progression of their diabetes
  • Betatrophin
  • The hormone, called betatrophin, causes mice to produce insulin-secreting pancreatic beta cells at up to 30 times the normal rate
  • In addition the new beta cells only produce insulin when called for by the body, offering the potential for the natural regulation of insulin
  • The researchers know that the hormone exists in human plasma; betatrophin definitely exists in humans
  • The Research
  • The team wasn\’t just looking at what happens when an animal doesn\’t have enough insulin, they were able to find this a gene that had largely gone unnoticed before
  • Another hint came from studying what happens during pregnancy, when there are more beta cells needed, and it turns out that this hormone goes up
  • When a woman gets pregnant, her carbohydrate load, her call for insulin, can increase an enormous amount because of the weight and nutrition needs of the fetus
  • The Future
  • Betatrophin could be in human clinical trials within three to five years, an extremely short time in the normal course of drug discovery and development
  • If it works as they hope it will it could eventually mean that instead of taking insulin injections three times a day, you might take an injection of this hormone once a week or month, or even year
  • The researchers who discovered betatrophin caution that much work remains to be done before it could be used as a treatment in humans
  • Multimedia
  • YouTube | Potential Diabetes Breakthrough | Harvard
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Potential diabetes breakthrough: Researchers discover new hormone spurring beta cell production | MedicalXPress.com

Soaking up Venom in Blood

  • A tiny sponge camouflaged as a red blood cell could soak up toxins ranging from anthrax to snake venom, new research suggests
  • Bacteria and Poisons
  • One of the mainstay strategies of bacteria and poison is to poke holes in cells, disrupting their internal chemical balance and causing them to burst
  • So far, researchers haven\’t had much success creating all-purpose treatments to exploit this vulnerability
  • Nanosponges
  • Researchers created a tiny spherical core of a lactic acid byproduct, which forms naturally during metabolism in the human body
  • To get the outer skin of red blood cells, they used a difference in particle concentration inside and outside the cells to cause them to burst, and then collected their outer membranes
  • They then wrapped the cores in the outer surface of the red blood cell
  • The nanoparticles, also called nanosponges, act as decoys that lure and inactivate the deadly compounds
  • The entire ensemble became a tiny nanosponge, which was about 85 nanometers in diameter, or 100 times smaller than a human hair
  • The sponges\’ tiny size means a small amount of blood, for camouflage, can be used to make an effective dose
  • In cell cultures, the camouflaged sponges act as decoys, luring the toxins from the bacteria that causes strep throat and bee venom
  • The toxins then bind to the structure the \”poisons\” normally use to poke through cells
  • When they stick onto the nanosponge, that particular damaging structure gets preoccupied, since the sponges are so small they can circulate freely through blood vessels, and then the body can digest the entire particle
  • Experiment
  • The team injected 18 mice with a lethal dose of a MRSA, Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, toxin. Half the mice then got a dose of the nanosponges
  • Whereas all the mice in the control group died, all but one that received the treatment survived
  • When injected into mice, the tiny decoys protect mice against lethal doses of a toxin produced by methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA.
  • The Future
  • The researchers want to see whether the method works in human blood, and against other toxic chemicals, such as scorpion venom and anthrax, which use similar attack strategies
  • Because so many bacteria use the same pore-forming strategy, the nanosponges could be used as a universal treatment option when doctors don\’t know exactly what is causing an illness
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Tiny Sponge Soaks Up Venom in Blood | Scientific American

— TWO-BYTE NEWS —

Water in Jupiter\’s Clouds

  • How Did It Get There?
  • In July 1994, the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 plowed into Jupiter leaving behind millions of gallons of water.
  • Water from the impact still makes up at least 95 percent of the water in the planet’s upper atmosphere
  • Telescopes had previously spotted water in Jupiter’s upper atmosphere, some 100 kilometers above the planet’s ammonia cloud tops, but those surveys could not determine where the water came from
  • Now astronomers have created a high-resolution map of water vapor distribution throughout Jupiter’s atmosphere
  • They found that the concentration of water peaked in the planet’s southern hemisphere, right in the region where the comet struck
  • More water also appeared at higher altitudes around the planet, which supports the comet as its origin.
  • Water from other sources such as Jupiter’s icy moons would likely spread out more evenly around the planet and would gradually filter down to lower altitudes
  • Multimedia
  • Comet Shoemaker Levy 9 – How The Universe Works | DiscoveryTV
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • News in Brief: Comet\’s water still hanging around on Jupiter | Atom & Cosmos | Science News

MarsOne and Life on Mars and Science

  • Mars colony project will do its best to avoid disturbing potential Red Planet life rather than aggressively hunt it down
  • Science and Life
  • The Netherlands-based nonprofit Mars One opened its astronaut-selection process on April 22
  • They plan to land four people on the Red Planet in 2023 to make a permanent human colony on the Red Planet, with new crews arriving every two years thereafter
  • Human explorers will doubtless contaminate whatever site is chosen for the settlement, so the organization will try to pick a place unlikely to host indigenous life to localize the pollution
  • Mars One is working with experts to minimize the risks its colonization effort may pose to potential Red Planet lifeforms
  • While Mars One hasn\’t picked a precise location for its settlement yet, the organization is targeting a swath of the Red Planet between 40 and 45 degrees north latitude
  • Mars One astronauts will not necessarily be scientists
  • Anyone over the age of 18 is eligible to apply, with the selection committee prizing traits such as intelligence, resourcefulness, determination and psychological stability over academic background
  • Science is not the main focus of what we are doing; although, crewmembers will take some scientific gear with them
  • Mars One officials won\’t dictate what the experiments should be, but there will be a budget for equipment that they want to take for scientific research
  • Multimedia
  • Mars 2023 – Inhabitants wanted | MarsOneProject
  • YouTube Channel | Mars One – Human Settlement of Mars
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Mars One
  • Private Mars Colony Won\’t Seek Martian Life | Mars One | Space.com

— VIEWER FEEDBACK—

Peter, AKA \”Korlus\” | Check This Out!

  • On April 4, 2012 he Fermi spacecraft almost ended it\’s mission to map the highest-energy light in the universe because of a collision with a dead Cold-War spy satellite
  • What Happened?
  • An automatically generated report arrived from NASA\’s Robotic Conjunction Assessment Risk Analysis (CARA) team based at NASA\’s Goddard Space Flight Center was sent to the FERMI team just one week away from an unusually close encounter with Cosmos 1805, a defunct spy satellite dating back to the Cold War.
  • The two objects, speeding around Earth at thousands of miles an hour in nearly perpendicular orbits, were expected to miss each other by a mere 700 feet
  • An update days later indicated the satellites would occupy the same point in space within 30 milliseconds of each other
  • Using thrusters for use at the end of Fermi\’s operating life designed to take it out of orbit and allow it burn up in the atmosphere they were able to adjust the orbit just slightly enough to evade a collision
  • The U.S. Space Surveillance Network continues to keep tabs on every artificial object larger than 4 inches across in Earth orbit. Of the 17,000 objects currently tracked, only about 7 percent are active satellites
  • Multimedia
  • YouTube | Near Miss – Dead Russian Spy Satellite Forces NASA Probe Move | VideoFromSpace
  • YouTube | Animation of Earth with Near-Earth Orbital Debris [HD] | TheMarsUnderground
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Mars One
  • Private Mars Colony Won\’t Seek Martian Life | Mars One | Space.com

— SPACECRAFT UPDATE—

New Atlantis Exhibit Prep

  • The Space shuttle Atlantis is set to go on public display June 29 at NASA\’s Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida
  • Shuttle Reveal
  • It was revealed Friday, April 26 after workers spent two days peeling off its protective shrink-wrap cover of the past five months.
  • Workers began carefully cutting back the 16,000 square feet (1,486 square meters) of shrink wrap that protected Atlantis as its $100 million exhibition building was completed around it
  • By the end of the first day, the shuttle\’s nose, tail, aft engines and left wing were exposed, the workers completed the process the next day, revealing Atlantis\’ right wing and its 60-foot-long (18 meter) payload bay
  • Opening the payload bay is set to begin in May, will take about two weeks, as the doors are very slowly hoisted open, one by one.
  • Atlantis has been mounted. Thirty feet (9 meters) in the air, the space shuttle has been tilted 43.21 degrees, such that its left wing extends toward the ground.
  • Atlantis will appear to be back in space – an effect that will be enhanced by lighting and a mural-size digital screen that will project the Earth\’s horizon behind the shuttle
  • Multimedia
  • YouTube Clip | Uncovering the Nose
  • YouTube Clip | Uncovering a Wing
  • YouTube Clip | Peeling Back the Layers
  • YouTube | Shuttle Atlantis Unwrapped & Revealed at Kennedy Visitor Center | SpaceVidsNet
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Atlantis Exposed: Space Shuttle Fully Unwrapped for NASA Exhibit | Kennedy Space Center | Space.com

SpaceShipTwo

Opportunity Rover Back Fron Glitch

  • Mars rover Opportunity has overcome a glitch that put the robot into standby mode late last month
  • What Happened?
  • Opportunity apparently put itself into standby auto mode, in which it maintains power balance but waits for instructions from the ground, on April 22, after sensing a problem during a routine camera check, mission officials said.
  • The rover\’s handlers didn\’t notice the problem until April 27, when Opportunity got back in touch after a nearly three-week communications moratorium
  • They then prepared a new set of commands on April 29 designed to get things back to normal, and the fix has apparently worked
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Mars Rover Opportunity Back in Action After Glitch | Mars Solar Conjunction | Space.com

— CURIOSITY UPDATE —

SCIENCE CALENDAR

Looking back

  • May 01, 1958 : 55 years ago : Van Allen radiation belts : The discovery of the powerful Van Allen radiation belts that surround Earth was published in the Washington Evening Star. The article covered the report made by their discoverer James. A. Van Allen to the joint symposium of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Physical Society in Washington DC. He used data from the Explorer I and Pioneer III space probes of the earth\’s magnetosphere region to reveal the existence of the radiation belts – concentrations of electrically charged particles. Van Allen (born 7 Sep 1914) was also featured on the cover of the 4 May 1959 Time magazine for this discovery. He was the principal investigator on 23 other space probes

Looking up this week

The post Habitable Exoplanets & Diabetes | SciByte 92 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

]]> Mining Asteroids & Shuttle Discovery | SciByte 44 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/19186/mining-asteroids-shuttle-discovery-scibyte-44/ Tue, 01 May 2012 22:59:56 +0000 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/?p=19186 We take a look at mining asteroids, recovery from strokes, lefties, talking to yourself, solar cells, a review of some recent major media stories, and much more.

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We take a look at mining asteroids, recovery from strokes, lefties, talking to yourself, solar cells, a review of some recent major media stories, viewer feedback, spacecraft updates, and as always take a peek back into history and up in the sky this week.

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Show Notes:

New Mining Resources



Credit: PlanetaryResources

  • Asteroid Mining
    • The idea of exploiting the natural resources of asteroids dates back over 100 years.
    • California Institute of Technology in Pasadena completed an in-depth study of the feasibility of asteroid mining
    • The study showed that, for the first time in history, this was now feasible using technology available in this decade
    • It is reasonable to assume we could identify, and bring an entire asteroid that is roughly 23 feet [7 meters] wide [~500 tons] into a high lunar orbit
  • Asteroid composition classifications
    • D class asteroids: They are also known as Trojan asteroids of Jupiter and are dark and carbonaceous in composition.
    • C class asteroids: They are found in the Earth’s outer belt and are darker and more carbonaceous than the ones found in the S class.
    • S class asteroids: They are found in the Earth’s inner belt, closer to Mars and are composed of mostly stone and iron.
    • V class asteroids: They are a far-out group of asteroids that follow a path between the orbits of Jupiter and Uranus, and are made of igneous, eruptive materials.
  • Why is mining asteroids feasible now?
    • The ability to discover and characterize enough sufficiently small near-Earth asteroids for mining.
    • An evolving ability to equip powerful enough solar electric propulsion systems to enable transportation of the captured asteroid.
    • A proposed human presence around the moon in the 2020s both enables exploration and exploitation of the returned near-Earth asteroid.
  • * Enter Planetary Resources, Inc.*
    • A new company Planetary Resources, Inc. is now making plans to be able to mine asteroids
    • The company, has been in existence for about three years, announced itself to the general public now because they are starting to aggressively search for the world’s best engineers, to help design and build a fleet of asteroid-mining robots [not Bruce Willis]
    • This company’s investors include Google execs Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, who are worth $16.7 billion and $6.2 billion
    • Their advisors include, filmmaker and adventurer James Cameron, former NASA astronaut Tom Jones and MIT planetary scientist Sara Seager
    • While it may be possible for this to happen, Planetary Resources is still years away from actually seizing an asteroid and staking a cosmic claim
    • Materials from such asteroids could be used for both the Earth and for planetary exploration, providing shielding galactic cosmic rays and propellant to transport a shielded
    • The initial focus will be developing Earth orbiting telescopes to scan for the best asteroids, and later, create extremely low-cost robotic spacecraft for surveying missions.
    • What we learn from such missions and a possible industry could someday help us deflect a much larger near-Earth object
  • The Legal angle
  • The legality of asteroid mining is in itself interesting
  • The 1967 Outer Space Treaty says that “Outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.”
  • Whether or not that applies to individuals or companies is one question
  • Anything launched into space remains the private property of its owner
  • However NASA and other entities ‘own’ and sell rocks and dirt from the moon
  • Even the sea-floor could be mined
    • Canada-based mining firm Nautilus Minerals said Tuesday it had signed China’s Tongling Nonferrous Metals Group as the first customer of its pioneering Papua New Guinean seafloor mine.
    • Currently it is slated to begin production in the fourth quarter of 2013 Nautilus claims the project to be the world’s first commercial seafloor mine
    • This area has deposits of rocks containing high grades of copper, gold, zinc and silver, what is known as “seafloor massive sulphides” from hydrothermal vents
    • Robots would be controlled remotely to drill for those sulphide deposits 5,250ft [1,600 m] below sea level
    • Then another machine would pump the material to a support vessel at the surface, which would then be dewatered for transport
    • These robots are currently under construction and are based on those used in deepwater oil and gas, terrestrial mining and marine dredging industries
  • Multimedia
  • Further Reading / In the News

— NEWS BYTE —

Recovery from Strokes

  • The low down
    • Currently the drugs administered for a stroke are to break up clots that caused the stroke, and need to be given within 4.5 hours after a stroke
    • Neuroscientists at the Stanford University School of Medicine were looking for alternatives
  • Significance
    • Brain-derived neurotrophic factor, BNNF, are powerful and long-studied nerve growth factor
    • BDNF is critical during the development of the nervous system and known to be involved in important brain functions including memory and learning.
    • A compound called LM22A–4, mimics this factor, is a small molecule that weighs less than one-seventieth that of BDNF
    • In a study the speed of recovery was improved rapidly, in fact those mice who had received the drug showed half as many stroked affected nerve cells as their counterparts without the drug
    • In fact the drug wasn’t even administered until a full three days after the strokes, showing that it does not limit a strokes damage but enhances recovery
    • These molecules stimulate the brain’s own stem cells to form new neurons
    • Stem-cell therapy is a somewhat invasive and expensive treatment for lost or damaged tissues, making a drug that could achieve the same results on the brain very promising and a welcome development
  • Further Reading / In the News

The competitive nature of lefties

— TWO-BYTE NEWS —

Talking to yourself isn’t crazy

Liquid Solar cells

— THE NEWS IS CATCHING UP—

Nine Planet System

Planet in habitable zone

— VIEWER FEEDBACK —



Credit: [Arizona State University]

Spirals on Mars

  • For making sure that we saw this, thanks to
  • Jacob Roecker & other JupiterBroadcasting staff members
  • The low down
  • What started as research into nighttime infrared temperatures of the plates, came in interest in the terrain between the plates, leading to a Arizona State University graduate student noticing spiral patterns in the lava
  • Here on Earth lava coils can be found on the Hawaiian islands(*seen in space.com article below) and near the Galapagos Rift on the Pacific Ocean floor
  • When lava flows move past each other at different speeds, or directions, rubbery lava crust can peel away or coil up to create wrinkles in the crust that can then be twisted around
  • In order to really make them out the images need to be zoomed and have their contrast tweaked a bit
  • The largest Martian coil is however bigger than any seen on Earth; at 98 ft [30 m] when the ones on Earth are about a third of that
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Researchers find new form of Mars lava flow | phys.org
  • Ancient Mars Lava Spirals Reveal Volcanic Secrets of Red Planet | space.com

SPACECRAFT UPDATE

The Shuttle Shuffle Continues



YouTube channel : daujla2

SpaceX Falcon 9 Rocket

  • SpaceX is preparing for a scheduled launch of May 7th headed to the International Space Station!
  • Further Reading
  • SpaceX

You may have seen

California Meteorite



CREDIT: Lisa Warren | Credit : P. Jenniskens (SETI Institute) and Eric James (NASA Ames)

  • Last time on SciByte
  • The low down
    • Sunday April 22 over California a large fireball was seen along with a sonic boom characteristic of large meteors entering the Earth atmosphere
    • Scientists have confirmed that this meteor was between 4 to 5 billion years old and probably about the size of a minivan, about 154,300 pounds [69,989 kg]
    • Meteorites don’t actually ‘burn-up’ the friction against the air during re-entry actually causes it to vaporize
    • The sonic boom heard from this meteor was because it entered the atmosphere faster than the speed of sound, between 22,000 mph and 44,000 mph [35,000kph – 70,000kph]
  • Significance
    • The meteors reentry was seen from Sacramento, Calif., to Las Vegas and parts of northern Nevada.
    • The first pieces, discovered by Robert Ward, were neat where gold was first discovered in California in 1848
    • Ward has been hunting and collecting meteorites for more than 20 years and has found meteorites in every continent but Antarctica
    • Those two pieces were probably part of the same meteorite that broke apart on impact, each weighs about 10 grams, about the same as two nickels
    • Most nighttime meteors that you see are around the size of grain of sand or a tiny stone, and only last a few seconds
    • An meteor event of this size typically happens around the world once a year, and then most occur over ocean or uninhabited places
    • Although this event occurred just after the peak of the annual mid-April Lyrid meteor shower it is unlikely that it was a Lyrid meteor, although without more information about its trajectory it won’t be known for sure
  • Of Note
    • “NASA and the SETI Institute are asking the public to submit any amateur photos or video footage of the meteor that illuminated the sky over the Sierra Nevada mountains and created sonic booms that were heard over a wide area at 7:51 a.m. PDT Sunday, April 22, 2012.”
    • Also any security footage should be checked to see if the fireball was visible, which could also be used in pinpointing the area for fragments
  • Further Reading / In the News

SCIENCE CALENDER

Looking back

  • May 08 1790 : 222 years ago : Metric System : Acting on a motion by a bishop, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand (1754–1838), the French National Assembly decided to create a simple, stable, decimal system of measurement units. The earliest metre unit chosen was the length of a pendulum with a half-period of a second. On 30 Mar 1791, after a proposal by the Académie des sciences (Borda, Lagrange, Laplace, Monge and Condorcet), the Assembly revised the definition of the metre to be 1/10 000 000 of the distance between the north pole and the equator. On 7 Apr 1795, the Convention decreed that the new “Republican Measures” were to be henceforth legal measures in France. The metric system adopted prefixes: greek for multiples and latin for decimal fractions.
  • May 06 1937 : 75 years ago : Hindenburg : At 7:25 pm, the dirigible The Hindenburg burned while landing at the naval air station at Lakehurst, N.J. On board were 6l crew and 36 passengers. The landing approach seemed normal, when suddenly a tongue of flame appeared near the stern. Fire spread rapidly through the 7 million cubic feet of hydrogen that filled the balloon. Within a few seconds the Zeppelin exploded in a huge ball of fire. The ship fell tail first with flames shooting out the nose. It crashed into the ground 32 seconds after the flame was first spotted; 36 people died. Captain Ernst Lehmann survived the crash but died the next day. He muttered “I can’t understand it,” The cause remains the subject of debate even today.

Looking up this week

  • Solar Activity

  • Another CME will pass by the Curiosity rover around May 4th, Curiosity is actually equipped with instruments to sense and study solar storms

  • Keep an eye out for …

  • Thursday, May 3rd : Saturn and Spica are to the lower of the moon, Saturn being the farther from the Moon and to the left

  • Friday, May 4th : The Moon will now sit below both Saturn and Spica

  • Saturday, May 5th : The moon will be near the horizon below and to the left

  • Saturday, May 5th is Full Moon, called a ‘super moon’ because it is the one full moon of the year when the Moon is in its closest part of its orbit, appearing 14% larger and 30% brigher

  • Later this month there will be an Annular (ring) eclipse for the Western Americas, and a Partial eclipse for the rest.

  • The southern hemisphere should, Keep an eye out for …

  • Just remember to vertically flip all the things for the Northern hemisphere

  • Saturn and Spica will sitting above the Moon

  • Further Reading and Resources

  • More on what’s in the sky this week

  • Sky&Telescope

  • SpaceWeather.com

  • StarDate.org

  • For the Southern hemisphere: SpaceInfo.com.au

  • Constellations of the Southern Hemisphere : astronomyonline.org

  • Royal Astronomical Society of New Zealand : rasnz.org.nz

  • AstronomyNow

  • HeavensAbove

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