Tag Archive for 'astronomy'

Dreaming of the future at 11km per second

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marc
on 22 October 2008
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India launched its first unmanned moon mission on Wednesday following in the footsteps of rival China, as the emerging Asian power celebrated its space ambitions and scientific prowess.

Chandrayaan-1 (Moon vehicle), a cuboid spacecraft built by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) blasted off from a southern Indian space centre shortly after dawn in a boost for the country’s ambitions to gain more global space business.

The project cost $79m, considerably less than the Chinese and Japanese probes in 2007 and ISRO says the moon mission will pave the way for India to claim a bigger chunk of the global space business.

The mission is also expected to carry out a detailed survey of the moon to look for precious metals and water.

Fresh on the steps of the confidence that comes to any nation that can launch a few thousand pounds of metal faster than the 11km/s velocity needed to escape the earth’s gravitational pull on towards the moon is the Indian culture industry. To be released this summer is what seems to be a Bollywood take on the intense, high budget, the future is now Hollywood sci-fi film.

But what would even the most Doc Brown, cyberpunk metropolis be with out an appropriate measure of dance sequences? (Answer? something to be rewritten with more song and dance sequences)

Resolving the unresolvable cosmos

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marc
on 4 September 2008
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I believe it was Derrida who referred to nuclear warfare as a ‘remainderless event’ — something that could exist only as a fabulous bit of text, always just a fantasy of images standing in for the unimaginable. In light of such notions, this is a rather fun project that our civilization has spawned. A network of telescopes spanning 2800 miles across the earth have all pointed themselves to the black hole at the center of the galaxy:

“No one has seen such a fine-grained view of the galactic center before. We’ve observed nearly to the scale of the black hole event horizon - the region inside of which nothing, including light, can ever escape.” [link]

Artist rendition of blackhole at the center of the Milky Way

However, for something in someways just as distant, but in others much closer to the imagination, see the below composite of images recently transmitted back from the rover Phoenix of the Martian clouds floating along [link]:

The camera took these 10 frames over a 10-minute period from 2:52 p.m. to 3:02 p.m. local solar time at the Phoenix site during Sol 94 (Aug. 29), the 94th Martian day since landing.