Another Side of Phobos

Today the camera eyes of the European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft will scrutinize the oddly shaped and pockmarked Phobos, as it makes its closest ever pass by the largest of Martian moons, gliding a mere 60 miles above its surface.The spacecraft will use all of its high-tech tricks to perform a thorough examination, taking 3-D images, mapping with a high-resolution camera, making precise measurements of the Phobos' mass and composition, and unleashing its subsurface probing radar .. Read more »

What do a Dwarf Planet and a Polynesian God Have in Common?

They both share the same name: Makemake ( say it with me, MAH-kay, MAH-kay). The planet naming authority of the International Astronomical Union recently decided on the name, which comes from the Polynesian god of fertility and and creator of humanity.The dwarf planet, is a member of the newly created plutoid subclass, where it joins Pluto and Eris. Like its plutoid brethren, Makemake is far off from the sun, lying beyond Neptune... Read more »

And Then There Was Light...Emitting Diodes

They've been around since the 1960s (mostly in traffic signals), but Light Emitting Diodes(LEDs) are lighting up the future.I could rave about all the neat characteristics these luminous materials have, but only two are really important: LED lights only need to be replaced every 15 years, and they could potentially reduce the amount of electricity we consume by 10 percent, if used widely.What more could one want in a lighting source? Unfortunately, there is a "dark" side to LEDs. They are painst.. Read more »

Large Hadron Collider: Colder Than Deep Space

Everyone's favorite particle smasher, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has almost reached 1.9 Kelvin (-465F), colder than deep space. Never before has a physics experiment so enormous and complex been operated at such extremely low temperatures.It contains 7,000 magnets that will be maintained at colder than space temperatures using liquid helium, in order to make them superconducting. The magnets are arranged in a ring that runs through the underground tunnel.Cooling the Collider is a process th.. Read more »

This Week's Good Reads

In case you missed them:"Science, Schmience: How To Make Sense of a Published StudyBlogrivetYou know you've always wanted to learn the trick to this. (h/t: A Blog Around the Clock)"Trinity + 1: The Decision to Use the Bomb"Ptak Science BooksRevisiting a pivotal point in physics history."The Birds and Their Creepy Hive Mind"BioephemeraA flock of starlings make pretty patterns in the sky."The Periodic Table of Elements, in Videos"io9A couple of guys from the University of Nottingham in the UK have.. Read more »

What Earth and Moon Look like to Aliens.

Check out this video NASA's Deep Impact Sapcecraft made, of the moon passing in front of Earth, viewed from 31 million miles away. Kind of cool to think that this is how aliens might see us from somewhere off in the distant universe.The clip combines several images of the moon rotating around the Earth in color. According to NASA, Deep Impact is the only spacecraft to show the moon passing around the earth in detail: you can actually see our oceans and continents, and the moon's large craters... Read more »

On the Moon and Need a Telescope? Make Your Own!

Hauling stuff up to the moon can get heavy and expensive. That's why Peter Chen and other NASA researchers (right down the road in Greenbelt, MD) have been working on a way to build telescopes using moon materials.They have already managed to make a telescope mirror out of moon dirt (called "regolith" in space jargon), carbon nanotubes, and a pinch of epoxy. In something like lunar pottery, they spun the concrete-like mixture into a parabolic bowl shape, characteristic of a telescope mirror.The .. Read more »