This week’s kiss was sent by Sara Cody who writes:
This is my New Years 2010 kiss with my boyfriend Jeff at Times Square in New York City. This is actually a still from a video we took on our camera of the ball drop and our subsequent kiss after!
Thanks for this beautiful submission Sara! (Click on the image to make it larger)
Submit your original photograph or artwork to the Science of Kissing Gallery for consideration by emailing me at [email protected].
I get smeared sometimes. As a journalist who has actually written on conflict of interest, it can be amusing to watch–but rarely this amusing:
Chris Mooney’s Pharmaceutical Influence
By Jake Crosby
He is the drug industry’s newer, trendier go-to guy in the media, replacing the role of Arthur Allen, who took a break to write about tomatoes. An ex-patriot of “Science”Blogs who now blogs for Discover, and contributing editor to Science Progress, Chris Mooney is perhaps Pharma’s newest writer who has taken on the task of spoon-feeding its message to the public.
From there it is smears all the way down. You can read the whole thing here. My favorite sentence:
Yet despite the previously described mingling with obvious denialists and plagiarists, Chris Mooney is perhaps most notorious in the autism community….
You complete the sentence. But make sure to include the word “Pharma” at least twice….
PS: Orac has more on Jake Crosby’s endeavors…..written pretty kindly, as I think this particular case deserves.
Today, March 20, at 17:32 GMT (1:32 p.m. EST) — after three months of crawling northward — the center of the Sun will lie on the celestial equator, heralding the moment of the vernal equinox.
Or, more understandably, if somewhat less correctly, spring will arrive.
But someone really needs to tell New Mexico (where I’m currently traveling). I don’t think the weather watches the news here.
My friend and Hive Overmind co-blogger Sean Carroll is a theoretical cosmologist, which means he thinks about why the Universe is the way it is, and applies what we know about physics and mathematics to try to understand it. His particular interest is the flow of time, and why it goes from the past to the future. That may seem like a weird thing, but in fact we don’t understand why we remember the past and not the future. Space goes in all directions, but time is a one-way street. Why?
This question is so interesting, in fact, that it caught the attention of noted scientist and thinker Stephen Colbert, who discussed it (and Sean’s new book, From Eternity to Here) on his TV show last week. I highly recommend taking a look at the clip Sean has on his blog; he’s a great example of not only someone trying to pry open the secrets of everything, but also of someone who enjoys doing it, and does a great job explaining it under what must be the high-pressure gaze of Colbert. My congrats to Sean for joining the long list of my friends who have been on that TV show, and of course I’m not jealous at all. Really. Not even a little tiny bit. Seriously.
Foot-in-the-door technique using a courtship request: a field experiment.
“‘Foot-in-the-door’ is a well-known compliance technique which increases compliance to a request. Many investigations with this paradigm have generally used prosocial requests to test its effect. Evaluation of the effect of foot-in-the-door was carried out with a courtship request. 360 young women were solicited in the street to accept having a drink with a young male confederate. In the foot-in-the-door condition, before being solicited to have a drink, the young woman was asked to give directions to the confederate or to give him a light for his cigarette. Analysis showed foot-in-the-door was associated with greater compliance to the second request.”
Door-in-the-face technique and monetary solicitation: an evaluation in a field setting.
“To test the door-in-the-face technique for a private solicitation, 53 men and 37 women in several bars were engaged. In one condition, a female confederate asked the subject to buy her drink because her boyfriend had left without paying the bill. After the subject refused, the confederate requested only 2 or 3 coins. In the control condition, the latter request was the only one. Analysis showed a dramatic increase in compliance for the door-in-the-face condition. A positive effect of the door-in-the-face technique was also observed for the average amount of the donation. The accentuation of the solicitor’s dependency in the door-in-the-face condition seemed relevant for explanation.”
Thanks to John for today’s ROFL!
Photo: flickr/AndrewEick
Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Bust size and hitchhiking: a field study.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Does this outfit make me look like I want to get laid?
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Women’s bust size and men’s courtship solicitation.
Launch up from your couch and voyage to the final frontier this weekend with Hubble 3D, a hi-tech piece of visual wizardry from Warner Bros, IMAX, and NASA. The movie tracks the efforts of the astronauts on board mission STS-125, who blasted off aboard space shuttle Atlantis last May to fix the Hubble Space Telescope. For this mission, as DISCOVER explained in a review of the movie, Atlantis carried not only its regular payload of new gear for the telescope, but also a 600-pound IMAX camera to record the orbital repair job in breathtaking detail.
Apart from replacing worn out equipment and upgrading the world’s largest telescope so that it could continue to send home breathtaking images of the universe, the astronauts also functioned as cinematographers, using only eight minutes of film to shoot the repair work. The film also takes viewers on a tour of the telescope’s most famous observations, and explains what the ’scope has revealed about such wonders as the stellar nurseries of the Orion nebula and our closest galactic neighbor, Andromeda. Director Toni Meyers, whose credits include a 3-D documentary about the international space station, says: “I think there is a kind of innate curiosity in all of us and a thirst to travel to places that either we can’t go to or it’s extremely difficult to do so” [CNN].
Narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio, this interstellar ride allows viewers to watch crew members working on the open body of Hubble in space even as politicians on Earth debated the telescope’s future. The brisk 40-minute film is also interspersed with vignettes of the astronauts’ pre-launch training in a gigantic underwater repair station.
While the astronauts were confident about their roles aboard the space shuttle, they were nervous of their filmmaking duties. “We’re basically a bunch of knuckleheads,” said [astronaut Michael] Massimino, a graduate of Columbia University with a doctorate from MIT. “Just because you can walk in space and fly a space shuttle doesn’t mean you’ll remember to turn a camera on and off” [CNN]. But director Meyers was more confident about the crews’ directorial and acting talents. “The crew is very engaging, with wonderful personalities…. They really show the audience how difficult it is to do what they were faced with up there”[DISCOVER], she says.
The film opens today, March 19th, in some theaters, but more shows are expected to be added in April when Hubble celebrates its 20th anniversary. For crew members, Hubble 3D was an especially exciting opportunity as they could finally share what they see and do in space with the rest of the world. Astronaut Micheal Massimino, a veteran of two space-walks aboard Atlantis exclaimed: “I tell folks … if you’re in heaven, this is what you would see…. This is what heaven must look like. It’s beautiful” [CNN].
Here’s a look at the making of Hubble 3D.
Related Content:
80beats:Hubble Spies Baby Galaxies That Formed Just After the Big Bang
80beats: Prepare to Be Amazed: First Pics From the Repaired Hubble Are Stunning
80beats: Space Shuttle Grabs Hubble, and Astronauts Begin Repairs
80beats: Researchers Find First Picture of An Exoplanet! (In 11-Year-Old Hubble Data)
Cosmic Variance: Well, That Was Fast, on the upgraded Hubble’s initial data
Bad Astronomy: Hubble’s Back, and Spying on Wailing Baby Stars
Over at The Planetary Society Blog, Emily has posted this bizarre image of the International Space Station, taken by another satellite in the radio part of the electromagnetic spectrum. If you want the whole story, then click it and see what she wrote!
It’s become one of our favorite rituals: Researchers come out with a paper pushing the science of invisibility cloaks a little further, inspiring everyone to go giddy with visions of Harry Potter and Romulan Warbirds. This week’s study in Science is another small step, but it’s a crucial one. Scientists in Germany have created the first rudimentary “invisibility cloak” in 3D.
Invisibility cloak mania started in 2006, when a Duke University team created the technology to bend light waves around an object; since the tiny object neither absorbed nor reflected the experiment’s microwaves, it was essentially “cloaked.” (The researchers used microwaves instead of visible light because microwaves have longer wavelengths, and are therefore easier to control.) The invisibility excitement struck again two years later when researchers refined their technique to hide a nanoscale object from visible light waves.
Now, researchers have created a cloak that not only works in infrared light wavelengths that are close to humans’ visual range, but also in 3D, too. Previous devices have been able to hide objects from light travelling in only one direction; viewed from any other angle, the object would remain visible [BBC News].
The team from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology didn’t exactly make the Statue of Liberty disappear. The “bump” made invisible is a spot in a layer of gold that’s 0.00004 inches high by 0.00005 inches wide. That hasn’t dampened lead researcher Tolga Ergin’s excitement, though. “In principle, the cloak design is completely scalable; there is no limit to it,” Ergin said. Developing the fabrication technology so that the crystals were smaller could “lead to much larger cloaks” [The Independent].
The sci-fi kind of cloaking will be harder to achieve, since visible wavelengths of light are shorter than infrared and thus harder to control. But Ergin’s 3D cloak is another step toward humanity’s ultimate dream: not being bothered by other humans.
Related Content:
DISCOVER: How to Build an Invisibility Cloak
DISCOVER: Invisibility Becomes More Than Just a Fantasy
80beats: New Version of Invisibility Moves Closer to Visual Cloaking
80beats: Light-Bending Scientists Take a Step Closer to Invisibility
Image: Science/AAAS
Geeks across the galaxy, rejoice! Soon you’ll be able to release your inner Jedi and vanquish evil forces with your iPhone–or rather with the new “Star Wars: Lightsaber Duel” app, due to be released next month.
The new dueling app builds on an existing iPhone app, “Lightsaber Unleashed,” which was a one-person game that turned your screen into a glowing lightsaber, and made an official-sounding “whoosh” as you brandished your phone. But the new app is a two-geek affair that promises to enhance your lightsaber experience.
If you and a friend both have the app, you’ll be able to use Bluetooth to duel with one another–although it isn’t yet clear how the app declares a victor. Advertisements for the new app also declare that it will feature 11 new characters from the Star Wars series, which presumably means that you can decide whose lightsaber you want to wield, and whether you swear allegiance to the Rebel Alliance or the Dark Side.
Plus, for the many people who think lightsaber duels are pointless without dramatic accompanying music, here’s some news. The app has thoughtfully provided a selection of music to pick from as you duke it out.
THQ Wireless, the makers of Lightsaber Duel have also ramped up the graphics and animations and hope to have the product ready by April. There’s still no word yet on how much it would cost to download. The previous app was free.
Related Content:
Discoblog: Weird iPhone Apps, a compendium
Science Not Fiction: Star Wars: Taking “A Long Time Ago” Very Seriously
Bad Astronomy: Star Wars: The Old Republic
Science Not Fiction: The Return Of…Chad Vader
Science Not Fiction: If You Wait Long Enough, There *Is* Sound in Space
Image: THQ Wireless
On Monday, we reported that the United States and the European Union were spearheading an effort to ban the international trade of bluefin tuna at the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). Now that the week is ending, so are the hopes for the proposal that could have protected the vanishing fish. It failed by a wide margin, thanks largely to the diplomatic efforts of Japan.
Japan consumes around three-quarters of the globe’s bluefin tuna catch, with almost all of it served raw as sushi and sashimi, of which it is the most sought-after variety [Christian Science Monitor]. It can be an expensive delicacy there. In addition, the transformation of sushi from a luxury dish to a cheap food available at the corner store seems to be one of the factors that has led to quickly diminishing tuna stocks. The Japanese government, while acknowledging that the species is in danger, pledged to defeat the proposal or else opt out of complying with it.
At CITES, Japan rallied developing nations and fishing industry nations against the ban, and Libya called a committee vote that quashed the proposal before it even reached a vote in the full session. Privately, European diplomats expressed frustration that Japan, which consumes 80 per cent of the bluefin tuna caught, was able to cement opposition to the ban while the EU’s 27 member states were thrashing out their internal disputes [Financial Times]. The Christian Science Monitor, however, interviewed Japanese residents who say the fact that the bluefin is getting more attention than other troubled fish is partly because of building anti-Japan sentiment, pointing to the Toyota public shaming and the controversy connected to the documentary The Cove, which shone the spotlight on an annual dolphin hunt.
CITES meets every two or three years. Before this year’s meeting is out, the organization must vote on the proposal by Tanzania and Zambia to open up trade in elephant ivory. A ban on polar bear trade that the United States proposed already went down in flames. Finally, a proposal that simply called for more research into the illegal shark trade, in which fins are harvested for shark fin soup while the rest of the animal is left to rot, was also defeated.
Related Content:
80beats: Is Ivory Season Starting, Just As Tuna Season’s Ending?
80beats:Scientists Say Ban Atlantic Bluefin Tuna Trade–and Sushi Chefs Shudder
80beats: DNA Forensics Traces Sharks Killed for Their Fins
80beats: Human Appetite for Sharks Pushes Many Toward Extinction
80beats: Documentary on Endangered Bluefin Tuna Reels in Sushi Joints & Celebrities
80beats: Elephant-Lovers Worry About Controversial Ivory Auctions in Africa
Image: Wikimedia Commons
In the first part of this post, Researching at the edge of space, I talked about the scientific frontier about to be opened up by suborbital flights up to 100 km (62 miles) above the Earth’s surface. The possibilities for science are exciting… but at the meeting I attended about these rockets, there was something else going on. And as interesting as the science involved with this will be, there was something bigger on everyone’s mind. At the meeting, the electricity about it was palpable, and it was obvious what it was.
We are at the very threshold of easy, inexpensive access for humans to space.
At $200,000, a flight to the edge of space is cheap. That’s well within the budget for a lot of people on this planet. Not me personally (dagnappit) but I know people who can afford that. And hundreds of human beings across the world have signed up.
This isn’t make believe. No, this is quite real. So real, in fact, that Alan Stern and Dan Durda, both friends of mine, both astronomers, and both men with their eyes firmly planted on the skies, created this video. You really, really need to see this.
They also have a followup video about the training of the first class of citizen astronauts as well.
Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic will probably be the first company to launch private citizens into space. They have already sold 300 seats and have deposited $39 million in advance sales! At the meeting, Steven Attenborough with VG said that they expect Space Ship 2 to do a “drop test” (literally be hoisted up to 50,000 feet and dropped by an airplane for a test landing) in the fall of 2010, and undergo its first power tests by the end of the year.
Humans will then be loaded up and sent into space in 2011. That’s next year.
People always lament that we’re past the year 2000 and we still don’t have flying cars. Personally, I don’t trust 95% of the people driving on the ground, let alone in the air. But it doesn’t matter, because the future is here. It’s now. Next year, people will be flying into space. Into space.
This is beyond cool. This is fantastic!
No, scratch that. The base root of that word is fantasy, and this is as real as it gets. While a lot of people have been whining about how the future never comes, my friends and a lot of others will soon be strapping themselves into rockets and making the dreams of Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, and millions of others come true.
Per ardua ad astra. Hodie.
In leafcutter ants and honeybees, it’s survival of the fittest sperm. Biologist Boris Baer, for a study out this week in Science, investigated these two species because of their peculiar sexual practices: In one day, the queen acquires all the sperm she’ll need to fertilize her eggs over the course of her lifetime. But in the race to be the top genetics-spreader, the males have evolved a dirty trick. Their seminal fluids actually do battle within the female’s reproductive tract.
To test out the idea, Baer and colleagues exposed the sperm of the bee and ant males to their own seminal fluid, and also to that of other males of the same species. The seminal fluid killed more than 50 per cent of the rival sperm within 15 minutes. “The males seemed to use the seminal fluid to harm the sperm,” says Baer [New Scientist]. When the team studied other organisms whose lifestyle didn’t depend on this kind of polyandry, they didn’t see the same effect.
However, in an interesting twist, it turns out that the queen is onto these devious males. In her sperm storage area, the spermatheca, the queen has a fluid she can deploy at the time of her choosing to put a stop to the seminal competition. “We basically show that there are two wars going on at the same time,” says Dr Baer. “The male would actually like to kill sperm from other males, but the female has other ideas” [Australian Broadcasting Corporation]. Baer suspects that she lets the competition run on long enough to eliminate the weakest candidates, then halts it before too much has been destroyed.
Given that we humans aren’t the most faithful lot, is it possible that we evolved something similar? Unlikely. “To my knowledge women do not copulate with 90 mates in half an hour, so whether there is much room that this has evolved in humans as well, I have my doubts,” says Baer [New Scientist].
And if you haven’t had your fill of sperm news, fear not—there’s more. Baer’s team studied semen warfare in the lab, but in a separate Science study, researchers show that they could observe it happening inside the insect, thanks to glowing sperm. While scientists first created such a thing a decade ago, now Scott Pitnick says his team has found a way to track them in real time. “It turns out that they [the sperm] are constantly on the move within the female’s specialised sperm-storage organs and exhibit surprisingly complex behaviour,” Prof Pitnick said. “It far exceeds our expectations, in that we can essentially track the fate of every sperm the female receives” [BBC News].
Related Content:
DISCOVER: The Most Incredible Things Ants Can Do (photo gallery)
DISCOVER: Sperm Cells Demonstrate Some Brotherly Solidarity
80beats: Revealed: The Secret of the Sperm’s Wild Dash to the Egg
Discoblog: In Competitive Sex, Male Butterflies Employ “Dipstick Method”
Image: Wikimedia Commons / Christian R. Linder
I just started a comments thread over at the Point of Inquiry forums to ask what folks think of my first three programs–on vaccine denial with Paul Offit, on climate denial with Michael Mann, and then on science journalism and disaster with Andrew Revkin. We’ve determined that I’ll be taking next week off, and a D.J. Grothe show that was in the can will air instead. So now is a great time to evaluate strengths and weaknesses and plot new directions. This is, after all, a new experiment, and I want to learn from it and progress. So any thoughts are appreciated. Leave them at the forum thread, or leave them here–and thanks!
At this very moment the LHC is busy trying to set a new world record. The goal is to achieve beams circulating at 3.5 TeV, bringing collisions between protons to 3.5+3.5=7 TeV center-of-mass energy. This would be the highest particle energy ever accomplished by humans (nature somehow routinely manages to produce cosmic rays at energies 8 orders of magnitude higher!). This news is hot off the press: we had a talk today by Lyn Evans, and he gave us the latest update. He should know what’s going on, since he’s project leader of the LHC. Evans shared some entertaining anecdotes from the last few years of commissioning, including:
They use superfluid helium to cool the superconducting magnets. One of the many weird properties of this stuff is that it has zero viscosity. Which means that, if there’s any sort of hairline fracture anywhere in the 27 kilometer long tunnel, the stuff comes spewing out, and very, very bad things happen. Every component, every joint, every one of the tens of thousands of tiny connections has to be perfect. It is this sort of failure which brought the machine to its knees shortly after commissioning, over a year ago.
The magnets are kept very, very cold; the superfluid helium is at 1.9 Kelvin (-271 Celsius), or a couple of degrees above absolute zero. We’re not talking a little vial in a laboratory being kept at this temperature. We’re talking many thousands of tonnes of magnets, kept just above absolute zero (using 96 tonnes of liquid helium). As things cool down, they naturally contract. The decks on bridges do the same thing, hence those serrated grills at the ends of bridges to absorb the expansion and contraction due to weather (if you’ve ever motorcycled across a bridge, you know exactly what I’m talking about). There are equivalent serrated joints in the LHC beam pipe to ensure that it doesn’t contract and rip open upon cooling (which, needless to say, would be bad). But upon reheating a section of the LHC, it turned out some of these devices left little fibers in the beam tube. Not good. How to find them, without ripping open the entire collider (costing millions of dollars and setting the project back precious months)? They ended up blowing a ping pong ball (with electronics embedded) down the tube, and tracking where it would get stuck. A simple, elegant, cheap solution to fix a multi-billion dollar enterprise.
For a while during the construction they ended up with roughly a billion dollars worth of superconducting magnets being stored in a parking lot at CERN. For reference, this is comparable to the entire GDP of many small countries (Bhutan, Guyana, Burundi, etc.), sitting out in the rain and snow. Big science.
Hopefully sometime in the next few days they’ll be running at 3.5 TeV. Apparently it’s been slow going because the system to prevent catastrophic quenching of the magnets (which is what “broke” the machine previously) is on a hair-trigger, setting off all sorts of false alarms (and when it goes off it quenches the magnets [in a controlled manner]). You can keep track of the progress on the LHC webpage (clicking on the image of the ring gives real-time data on the temperature of the magnets). Although this would be the highest energy ever achieved, it still doesn’t significantly surpass the science reach of Fermilab’s Tevatron, since the latter has run for many years (albeit at a lower energy of 1 TeV+1TeV). Both energy and (integrated) luminosity matter in this game, and the Tevatron has gotten more than 8 inverse fb (femtobarns; one of the best units in all of science [think “there’s no way to miss it, it’s as big as a barn”]). The LHC is shooting for 1 inverse fb. All being well, in a few months they’ll bump the energy up to 5 Tev on 5 TeV. This should significantly open up the scientific discovery space, and could conceivably kick off the next revolution in particle physics. Exciting times!
C-SPAN has opened up their archives, so that you can search and watch all 23 years of their footage. Their Booknotes crew came to a talk I gave at Stanford University Medical School about my book Soul Made Flesh. And now you can watch it here.
Think scientists are always tactful? Think again! Here are our five favorite insensitive paper titles of all time:
1.) Ashes to ashes: thermal contact burns in children caused by recreational fires.
3.) A lucky catch: Fishhook injury of the tongue.
4.) Children and mini-magnets: an almost fatal attraction.
5.) “Here’s egg in your eye”: a prospective study of blunt ocular trauma resulting from thrown eggs.
Photo: flickr/Joe Shlabotnik
Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Rectal salami.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Ingested magnets: the force within.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Top 10 absurd papers of 2009.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: ridiculous titles
Pictured here is an European Synchrotron Radiation Facility double mirror system handy for focusing X-ray beams down to the nanometer range. ESRF has used these fine beams to examine recently discovered interstellar dust collected in the Stardust spacecraft. Photographer Peter Ginter describes his process with this image: “I wanted to photograph this detection device, hidden and growing in an eggshell of thoughts, going through many phases of an evolutionary process before it actually sees the light.” While photographing, Ginter noticed the anxiously watching researchers’ faces reflected on the surface of the machine, and “instantly had the gut feeling how very much this instrument was an extension of the scientist’s mind.”
Photograph courtesy ESRF/Peter Ginter
If you haven’t already cluttered your car with talking gadgets and navigation systems, then here’s something else you might want to pop into your driving machine one day: a new augmented reality windshield that’s being developed by General Motors. While the windshield is still years away from the assembly line, car enthusiasts and tech geeks are already getting excited about the idea.
The “enhanced vision system” aims to help drivers navigate through dark or foggy conditions. The system would alert the driver by highlighting landmarks or outlining obstacles like a running animal on the windshield to help the driver avoid collisions.
Here’s how it works. A bunch of forward-looking sensors, including infrared sensors and visible cameras on the windshield, gather data on the external environment. Three other cameras inside the car track the driver’s head and eyes to determine where he is looking. Both sets of data are then paired up so that the enhanced views can be projected on the windshield, overlaid over the actual scene outside the car. This enhanced view or “augmented reality” would clearly point out obstacles on the road, so the driver can avoid them. GM suggests that GPS directions could also be projected onto the glass, so the driver doesn’t take his eyes off the road.
Technology Review explains:
To turn the entire windshield into a transparent display, GM uses a special type of glass coated with red-emitting and blue-emitting phosphors–a clear synthetic material that glows when it is excited by ultraviolet light. The phosphor display, created by SuperImaging, is activated by tiny, ultraviolet lasers bouncing off mirrors bundled near the windshield.
This may all sound a little distracting for the driver. But Thomas Seder, the lab group manager for the Human Machine Interface Group at GM, says: “We definitely don’t want the virtual image that’s on the display to complete with the external world; we just want to augment it.”
Technology Review reports that the augmented reality windshield is not the first of its kind:
Head-up displays (HUDs) are already used to project some information–like a car’s speed or directions–directly in front of the driver, through the windshield, or even through a side view mirror. These sorts of displays have started appearing in high-end cars, and typically work by projecting light to create an image on part of the windshield.
GM hopes to have the augmented reality windshields in the market by 2018. Click here for a video on how the fancy windshield works.
Related Content:
DISCOVER: A GPS to Augment Your Entire Reality
Discoblog: Augmented Reality Phone App Can Identify Strangers on the Street
Discoblog: Augmented Reality Tattoos Are Visible Only to a Special Camera
Discoblog: Look Kids, Big Ben in 1890! Augmented Reality Meets Tourism
Image: General Motors
When we last covered NASA’s Stardust mission a couple weeks ago, we noted that it was one of those missions that just keeps popping up as new findings from its data makes the news. But Stardust might by outdone by another: Cassini, which continues to reveal new surprises about Saturn and its moons—not to mention sending back beautiful images like this new batch. Today in the journal Science, Cassini researchers review six years of Saturn science (here and here) by the hardy spacecraft.
The first review tackles the planet’s atmosphere and magnetosphere. Before Cassini, scientists thought that the magnetosphere, the shield from the solar wind that forms around a planet, contained nitrogen ions that had come from Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. Cassini showed that wasn’t so, and that wasn’t the only surprise about the magnetosphere: The spacecraft’s observations showed that it is dominated by water, part of which comes from water vapor plumes that shoot out of geysers on the surface of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. “The big news is that Saturn’s space environment is swimming in water,” said Tamas Gombosi, a Cassini scientist [Space.com].
And then there are those rings. The scientists released these new photos with the studies. These images are true color, except the black-and-white one and the one with the bluish ring, which is enhanced. You can see the reddish tinge in some of the rings [io9]. Cassini showed that these famous features are not serene circles, but active and mysterious regions. That reddish tinge Cassini spied comes from a contaminant that still hasn’t been identified. Also, the mission documented the perturbing objects and pulls of the moons that shake up the rings. With Cassini the rings “went from like a very beautiful cardboard cutout … to a real 3D structure,” said Jeff Cuzzi, Cassini’s interdisciplinary scientist for rings and dust [Space.com].
Cassini has already been in Saturnian orbit since June 2004, and with its recent mission extension, will keep studying the mysteries on Saturn, Titan, Enceladus, and more until 2017. You can keep up with Cassini on Twitter. And while you’re at it, follow us.
Related Content:
80beats: More Watery Eruptions, and More Head, On Saturn’s Moon Enceladus
80beats: Cassini Probe Finds “Ingredients For Life” on Saturn’s Moon Enceladus
80beats: Antifreeze Might Allow For Oceans—And Life—On Enceladus
80beats: Does Enceladus, Saturn’s Geyser-Spouting Moon, Have Liquid Oceans?
Images: NASA/JPL/CICLOPS
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My friend Eran Segev, an Aussie skeptic and all-around good guy, submitted a podcast to 365 Days of Astronomy dealing with the venerable Parkes radio dish and its support of the Apollo 11 Moon landing. It’s a good story — it was fictionalized in the very cute movie “The Dish” — and he interviews a couple of the men who were there during the whole thing. And if you listen to the whole thing, they mention a familiar name, too…
