After a week on the Lizard in Cornwall, I’m back from an inspiring trip. It was great to spend some quality time with Mum and Colette and a great opportunity to take in the stunning sights of this wonderful part of the world. Naturally I spent some time finding any chance to research some stories for astroengine and managed to wander around the Goonhilly Earth Station. There is a great article to be written about this historic location, so I’ll be getting onto that soon. Also, as we’d never been, we spent today at the Eden Project near St. Austall. There are some parallels with my work with the Mars Foundation, so expect an article about this superb project too (with some interesting applications to Mars colonization)…
As I’m going to be away for a week, Astroengine is going to be quiet for seven days. I’m heading down to Cornwall, UK where I hope to go to Goonhilly Earth Station (on the Lizard) to try to get some more information on its shutdown. Last year I was shocked to hear that the station and its operations were being moved to the South East, so the majority of the satellite dishes will be dismantled. This is such a shame; those dishes are synonymous with the Cornish countryside. When they’re gone it will be like a good old English cream tea, but without the scone… but hey, everything changes, but I want some answers, so I intend to get some!
It’s that time of the week again, when all the space enthusiasts get together for one big party. This week, the Carnival is being held over at the Space Cynics. They may be a cynical bunch, but they’ve put on one great, enthusiastic gathering. Like a huge art gallery, they’ve looked at the artistic merit of each entry and turned it into something beautiful…
My entry (filed under “Audio Gallery”), was the great interview I had with Dr Adrian Brown, CRISM scientist and SETI Institute member. It was aimed toward the Mars Foundation, so there were lots of fun Mars settlement ideas. Have a look at the Mars Foundation for the full interview, or here for a summary…
This is quite possibly the most stunning photograph I have seen for a long, long time. In Chile, a volcano has erupted, blasting huge quantities of ash and gas into the atmosphere. As the plume of ejected material rose through the cooler atmosphere, electric charge was built up through electron exchange between plume and surrounding air. The resulting electrical storm produced some terrifyingly beautiful images. Thank goodness I spotted the lead on this story, from a tabloid newspaper in Bristol’s city centre…
It’s one of those iconic media images, something so unworldly and terrifying that it takes some time to understand the scale of what you’re seeing. Sitting outside a pub in glorious (and rare) UK sunlight, flicking through the Daily Mail, I stumbled across page 20 of the tabloid (dated May 7th). A double-page spread of a scene that was more reminiscent of an apocalyptic movie. My first thought was that it was some sort of nuclear explosion, but then, on reading the text I realized it was in fact a huge plume of ash and smoke being blasted from the Chilean volcano that had erupted last Friday. But something was strange about the image. A vast quantity of electrical discharge could be seen, lightning strikes threading through the plume and more lightning bolts being emitted by the surrounding cloud cover. I knew this was something special, so I checked to see if the newspaper ran a story online too.
Fortunately they did, and no one else seemed to be following it out of the mainstream UK media. I’ve actually been trying to find a way of including the Chaiten Volcano event in the Universe Today for the last few days, but apart from doing a minor story of an International Space Station snapshot from orbit, I couldn’t find much bulk for the report. The Daily Mail ran some stunning images of the event, but it was the volcano triggered lightning that got me interested. Have a look at the story I ran on the Universe Today (it’s proving to be pretty popular…).
As far as I can see, the violent lightning storm would have been caused by the rapid updraught of hot ash. Friction between the hot cloud and cool surrounding atmosphere would have created a vast charge generator, sparking to life as electrical discharge.
Chaiten Volcano, lightning strikes from atmospheric cloud cover (UPI)
What with all the surprise activity of the Sun at solar minimum of late, I’ve found myself looking around the solar observation sites an awful lot more than I used to. During all the commotion back in 2003 when the Sun was blasting out record breaking X-ray flares one after another, I really didn’t think I could be surprised with anything else the Sun would do. That was until, very much unannounced, three sunspots rotated into view, blasting another X-ray flare into space… at solar minimum. The strange thing was, that these sunspots weren’t even from this solar cycle, they were from the previous one that ended some time around December 2007! And now we get a stunning, detailed view of more unexpected solar activity from the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO), a hi-res video of dynamic coronal loops… Continue reading “Dynamic Coronal Loops as seen by STEREO (Video)”
In my capacity as Mars Foundation Communications Officer, I was asked to approach one of the mission scientists working with The Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM) instrument on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The Foundation has an acute interest in CRISM as its main task is to look for water (past and present) and certain minerals on the Martian surface. We are currently investigating Mars settlement designs, so any indication about the location of these quantities will be of huge interest to us (especially as our “Hillside Settlement” will require colonists to use local materials when and where possible). In an enlightening interview, SETI Institute principal investigator Dr Adrian Brown detailed some of the important discoveries to come out of CRISM and how it may be of use to future colonists… Continue reading “Interview: Dr Adrian Brown, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Scientist”
One year on, the Carnival of Space has gone from strength to strength. After astroengine hosted the Carnival last week, I realized just how many diverse space blogs there were out there. I counted 30+ entries; trying to organize that huge number of blogs, whilst doing them all justice, is a hard task. This week it seems everyone has been typing hard and finding their best stories for the Anniversary Edition hosted where the Carnival was born one year ago. Week 52 has a science fiction theme, which has given me the perfect opportunity to display a picture of my favourite sci-fi program of all time: Babylon 5. Check out the Why Homeschool blog with Henry Cate for this weeks massive collection of space news from around the web.
For me, the most incredible story was the colliding black hole research to come out of the Max Planck Institute. They have observed a black hole being “kicked out” of its host galaxy during a galactic merger event. Two supermassive black holes collided, causing a huge recoil, ejecting a black hole of several hundred million solar masses into intergalactic space. Stunning science.
Martian sand dunes, shaped like terrestrial barchan dunes (HiRISE/NASA/UA)
The sand dunes on the surface of Mars closely resemble their terrestrial cousins, only bigger. Formed from wind-driven sand and dust, the Martian versions can grow ten-times bigger than any dunes we have on Earth. The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) on board NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has been taking shots of these distinctive shapes, and although there are examples all over the planet, they seem to have the same characteristics no matter where they form or how they swarm. Now researchers are investigating how these Mars dunes grow and why they are so large…
On the 11th April, I reported on some new HiRISE images of barchan sand dunes that appeared to form on the Red Planet. In this particular case, a flat-topped mountain (or mesa) was being ravaged by the Martian wind, sweeping fine grains of sand and dust downstream. What formed in the mesa’s wake turned out to be quite impressive. Long strands of sand banks, stretching hundreds of miles beyond the mesa mixed with swarms of similarly-shaped dunes. What struck me were the impressive similarities with Earth-based sand dunes we find on our beaches and deserts.
Since this initial report, I have found HiRISE to be quite a prolific dune-seeker. On April 16th, HiRISE released more images of sand dunes in the northern polar regions of Mars, some heavily eroded (pictured below), and others tightly packed and clumsily shaped. I was intrigued. As you may have noticed from some of the Mars stories I cover, I like to see terrestrial processes happening on the surface of Mars. Seeing an impressive Mars avalanche, or a simple rock rolling down a hill, I love it. I think it gives us a special connection with an alien world when we can see processes we commonly associate with Earth happening on an eroding Mars.
The dissappearing dunes at northern latitudes (NASA/JPL/UA)
So what processes are behind these giant Mars dunes? It might seem obvious (wind blowing sand ain’t that hard to understand after all), but researchers at the Federal University of Ceará in Fortaleza, Brazil have been modelling the effects that the tenuous Mars atmosphere and weak gravity have on sand dune construction. Murilo Almeida and his team have found that when blown around on the surface of Mars, grains of sand “bounce” much higher than their terrestrial counterparts. In fact, they bounce 100 times higher and further. They are also blown 10 times faster. This has the effect of producing a series of sand dunes with very long wavelengths.
This also has a knock-on effect as a possible mechanism that drives the savage dust storms in the thin atmosphere. As there is more bouncing action in Martian grains of sand than here on Earth, more dust particles are thrown aloft and suspended in the air.
astroengine.com 
