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Listen to the October 3rd Paranormal Radio Show

Back on Friday October 3rd, I was invited back onto Paranormal Radio in my new capacity as “Science Content Editor“! (Or an even cooler title “In-house Myth Buster” if Jack has his way!) This is a really great position as I get to add all things spacey to the Paranormal Radio website, and then I get to chat about it later live on the radio with the excellent Captain Jack. A pretty nice position to be in if you ask me… However, on that Friday two weeks ago, I had very little to talk about. After all, I’d just gotten married and I had just said goodbye to my family who headed back to the UK. I’d missed most of the excitement surrounding the Chinese spacewalk, I very nearly missed the historic SpaceX launch… but fortunately Jack had some questions for me about “Dark Flow” and he introduced me to the whole China spacewalk conspiracy and we were away!

If you fancy listening into the cool three-hour show, it is now available by mp3 or you can have a play with the Black Vault Radio Flash player to listen in to my show (which now has a monthly slot) and all the other nightly shows with Captain Jack.

We have some interesting future shows in store for you! Watch this space for announcements on when we air each month…

Saturn’s Hexagonal North Pole: What is Causing It?

Infrared observations of the north pole of Saturn as taken by the Cassini mission in 2007 and 2008 (NASA)

The mystery of Saturn’s hexagonal shape embedded in its violent north polar cyclone just became more intriguing.

NASA’s Cassini probe has been orbiting the ringed gas giant for four years and has just returned some of the most detailed images of the planet’s stormy atmosphere to date. The south pole has been mapped and the north polar region has been imaged in near-infrared wavelengths. The north pole is currently facing away from the Sun, so by observing the atmosphere in these wavelengths, Cassini scientists can see Saturn’s cloud formations silhouette against the background glow of the gas giant’s internal heat. This provides the perfect opportunity to see the hexagon in unprecedented detail.

So what is generating this mysterious six-sided shape?
Continue reading “Saturn’s Hexagonal North Pole: What is Causing It?”

Chinese Shenzhou-7 Spaceship Imaged by Microsatellite

Shenzhou-7 imaged by the BX-1 small monitoring satellite six minutes after it was released from the main ship (Xinhua Photo)

On September 27th (Saturday), two hours after Zhai Zhigang completed China’s first ever space walk, the Shenzhou-7 spaceship launched a mini-monitoring satellite to orbit its mothership. Although it might have been a better idea to launch BX-1 before Zhai started his EVA (thereby stemming some of the accusations that China had faked the whole event), the images BX-1 returned were pretty impressive. According to state-run news sources, the BX-1 has taken over 1,000 images, the first one was taken only six seconds after being released…
Continue reading “Chinese Shenzhou-7 Spaceship Imaged by Microsatellite”

Carnival of Space Week 74 – Kentucky Space

The Kentucky Space logo

This week’s Carnival is being hosted by Wayne Hall at Kentucky Space (KySat), an organization with an aggressive orbital agenda and punchy space flight motto: “fly stuff.” To be honest, this should be the motto for NASA… flying stuff around space is something we should be doing, all the time. Just because we can. If a non-profit organization can do it on a shoestring budget, we should be seeing more commercial ventures like SpaceX popping up all over the world. Here’s to hoping!

In addition to Week 74 of the carnival, Kentucky Space are currently preparing for the sub-orbital launch of one of their payloads from the Mojave Desert tomorrow! So be sure to keep an eye on their site.

For my part, I am very thankful to Wayne for adding my article about naked singularities right at the top of the Carnival. Awesome CoS, be sure to check out all this week’s entries…

First Image of Asteroid TC3 Impact Fireball… From Space

2008 TC3 generates a huge fireball according to weather satellite Meteosat 8 (Zdenek Charvat, Czech Hydrometeorological Institute)

There may not be any ground-based imagery of the 1.1-2.1 kT fireball after asteroid 2008 TC3 hit the Earth’s upper atmosphere above Sudan, but we now have the first satellite observation of the impact. 2008 TC3 (a.k.a. “Brian” as I lovingly named it in my previous post) hit at 02:43am (UTC) yesterday morning, three minutes before the predicted re-entry. This is a huge moment for asteroid hunters: 2008 TC3 is the first ever asteroid to be discovered and accurately forecast to hit our planet.

The above image was taken by the weather satellite Meteosat 8, as Jiri Borovicka of the Czech Academy of Sciences explains: “The explosion was visible in all 12 of the satellite’s spectral channels, covering wavelengths from 0.5 to 14 microns,” he said. “The satellite takes pictures every five minutes; the fireball appeared at 0245 UTC and had faded away by 0250 UTC.”

It’s great to finally see the explosion of the first ever predicted asteroid impact. I think we all feel a little safer now…

Source: Space Weather

Listen to Tonight’s Paranormal Radio – The Chinese Spacewalk Conspiracy

Paranormal Radio with Captain Jack logo

In a follow-up to our October 3rd discussion, Captain Jack and myself will be discussing my recent Astroengine article “Bubbles, Reflections and Space Walks… Did China Really Fake It?” On first seeing the video I was intrigued by what I saw, and the mysterious moving objects in shot needed to be addressed. Although I do not believe the Chinese staged the event, it does pose some interesting questions…

Paranormal Radio has started now, so check out the website to listen in…

Bubbles, Reflections and Space Walks… Did China Really Fake It?

Tracks of seven objects during Chinese space walk. Red tracks are the visual 'start' and 'finish' of the objects, blue tracks are lines drawn back to possible origin. Object number and time in video included. Scene frozen at 26 seconds into video when object 1 is seen (CCTV)

China successfully launched three taikonauts into Earth orbit and, on September 27th, the first Chinese national (41 year old fighter pilot Zhai Zhigang) walked in space. The space walk lasted a total of 15 minutes, enough time to retrieve some solid lubricant from the outer hull of the Shenzhou-7 module and to give the brand new “Feitian” space suit a trial run. The launch, orbital insertion, space walk, re-entry and landing were all executed perfectly, securing China as only the third nation to successfully carry out an extra-vehicular activity (EVA).

It can therefore be expected, as with space flight achievements by the US and Russia before, there will be some conspiracy theories out there…
Continue reading “Bubbles, Reflections and Space Walks… Did China Really Fake It?”

Historic Asteroid 2008 TC3 Hits Earth as Predicted

Predicted region of atmospheric impact according to infrasound observations (Peter Brown, University of Western Ontario)

2008 TC3 wasn’t a particularly interesting asteroid. It wasn’t very big (only 1-5 metres wide) and it didn’t really stand out as being special (if it was special, we didn’t have any time to realise it anyway). If 2008 TC3 was in a crowd of other asteroids you wouldn’t have picked it out. In fact, it was that “normal” that it wasn’t named, it just kept its original asteroid designation number. 2008 TC3 was an ordinary piece of space rock in an extraordinary situation.

This was the first ever asteroid that astronomers were able to track and predict (with high precision) where and when it was going to hit Earth. Sure enough, astronomers using the Mt. Lemmon telescope in Arizona as part of the NASA-funded Catalina Sky Survey for near-Earth objects discovered 2008 TC3 before it hit Earth, enabling us to be forewarned a whole six hours before impact. If the object was any larger, astronomers will have (for the first time) been able to warn people on the surface, thus saving lives.

In fact, asteroid 2008 TC3 is so special that I’m going to give it an unofficial name: Asteroid Brian*.
Continue reading “Historic Asteroid 2008 TC3 Hits Earth as Predicted”

No Naked Singularity After Black Hole Collision

Black holes cannot be naked... the event horizon will always be there to cover them up...

You can manipulate a black hole as much as you like but you’ll never get rid of its event horizon, a new study suggests. This may sound a little odd, the event horizon is what makes the black hole, well… black. However, in the centre of a black hole, hidden deep inside the event horizon, is a singularity. A singularity is a mathematical consequence, it is also a point in space where the laws of physics do not apply. Mathematics also predicts that singularities can exist without an associated event horizon, but this means that we’d be able to physically see a black hole’s singularity. This theoretical entity is known as a “naked singularity” and physicists are at a loss to explain what one would look like.

Like any good physics experiment, an international team from the US, Germany, Portugal and Mexico have decided to simulate the most extreme situation possible in the aim of stripping a pair of black holes of their event horizons. They did this by constructing an energetic collision between two black holes travelling close to the speed of light, crashing head-on. Here’s what they discovered…
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Writing for Los Angeles Family Magazine – New Science Column!

The October 2008 edition of LA Family Magazine, where my new space column features!

So what does Astroengine.com and Denise Richards have in common? Well, usually not a lot, but today my writing appears in the October 2008 edition of LA Family Magazine with Denise Richards featuring in the leading article. Admittedly, there’s 36 pages separating Denise from me, so the link is a little tenuous, but great nonetheless!

I was asked to become a regular columnist in this leading parenting magazine in an effort to communicate space science topics to parents and their kids. And what better way to begin than by writing about flying to the Moon!

After writing a very popular article about “How Long Does it Take to get to the Moon?” for the Universe Today, I thought this was a good place to start. The next article will tackle a bigger project, a trip to Mars…

Have a look at this month’s edition of Los Angeles Family Magazine and have a read of “Hey, Kids! Want to Go to the Moon?” (page 54)