Stuffis
Still "Brent's pile o' stuff" but at least now there are sections.
Space
Astronomy
Planets, Moons, Comets
- Upcoming IMAX film "Outside In": beautiful Cassini Saturn fly-by motion video constructed from high-resolution still photos
- NASA After the Space Shuttle slideshow has some beautiful recent planet/moon/asteroid pictures
- On 4 Feb 2011, metre-sized asteroid 2011 CQ1 came within 5,480 km of the Earth's surface (closest near-miss on record), bending its path by 60 degrees — for comparison, geosynchronous orbit is all the way up at 36,000 km
- CoRoT-7: a planet only 500 LY away, discovered in early 2008 by the ESA's CoRoT space telescope — first "rocky" planet outside our system (Earthlike, very dense, not a gas giant), smallest planet located so far, 23x closer to its star than Mercury is to ours (fast orbit), one side locked toward star (permanent hot/cold sides)
- All (known) Bodies in our Solar System Larger than 200 Miles in Diameter
- 100 Explosions on the Moon
- Astronomers have decided to make the definition of "planet" less inclusive and exclude Pluto (now considered a "dwarf planet"); I wholeheartedly agree. Poor Pluto! Interestingly though it does have five moons (Charon, Nix, Hydra, P4, P5)
- Astronomers were previously thinking about making the definition of "planet" more inclusive
- The proposal would have included 3 dwarf planets (Ceres (asteroid—discovered in 1801 and considered a planet at that time), Charon (Pluto's moon), and Eris (2003 UB313—Kuiper-belt)) as "planets" — so we'd have had 12 "planets" total
- Apparently the proposed definition had to do with whether the object (a) "has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape" and (b) orbits a star but isn't a satellite of another planet
- But: Pluto's moon Charon would qualify because, since the center of mass of the two-body system is outside Pluto, technically they are a "double planet"
- To those two qualifications, the IAU added a third: (c) has cleared the neighborhood around its orbit (which puts Pluto, Eris, etc. in the "dwarf planet" category)
- 581 c, a new Earth-like planet found orbiting Gliese 581 (20.5 light-years away) in the Libra constellation
- Two largest asteroid-belt objects: Ceres (dwarf planet), Vesta (protoplanet) — NASA's Dawn mission reaches Vesta in July 2011, approaches Ceres in 2015
- Trans-Neptunian objects (Kuiper ("KAI-pur") belt, Scattered disk, hypothetical Oort cloud)
- Eris (2003 UB313 — formerly "Xena"/"Lila"): Kuiper-belt dwarf planet, about the same size as Pluto
- 2011 size measurement — surprising accuracy
- CNN article
- Good write-up by CalTech's Mike Brown (whose team discovered it) — it also has a moon, Dysnomia
- This makes the 4 largest trans-Neptunian objects Eris (w/moon Dysnomia), Pluto (w/5 moons Charon/Nix/Hydra/P4/P5), Makemake, and Haumea (w/2 moons, ellipsoidal); Wikipedia has an image of the largest trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs)
- The Kuiper belt is 30-55 AU out; in decreasing size: Eris, Pluto, Makemake, Haumea, Sedna, Orcus, 2007 OR10, Quaoar
- Note that the Oort cloud (nearly a light-year out! 50,000 AU) is a hypothesis (meant to explain Halley-type comets, among other things); we don't have any direct observations yet
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- Sedna (2003 VB12) — most distant object (more precisely: object with greatest average orbital distance) known in our solar system (Oort-cloud)
- Proxima Centauri is the closest star to us (4.24 LY), a red dwarf only visible with a telescope — next are Alpha Centauri A and B (binary) which are larger (they appear as one star to the naked eye)
- 3753 Cruithne, 2003 YN17, and other quasi-moons of Earth
- Bode's Law (Titius-Bode Law), an easy way to remember the major planets' distances from Sol — holds true except Neptune
Software
Civilian Spaceflight: Challenges
- The Ansari X-Prize: 3 people, 100km altitude, 2 flights in 2 weeks — Scaled Composites' SpaceShipOne won this in October 2004
- The 2007 X-Prize Cup: Lunar Lander Challenge (LLC): Armadillo Aerospace (AA) was the only team to fly this in 2007, and missed it by just 7 seconds
- Northrup Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge (LLC) (rules) (levels 1 and 2): lift off pad A, translate over to pad B, meet minimum hover time, and land — then a second flight from B back to A — all within a set time period
- Armadillo Aerospace (AA) competed every year from 2006-2009: they were first to complete level 1 in 2008 (1st prize), and first to complete level 2 in 2009 (but 2nd prize)
- Masten Space Systems (MSS) became second to complete level 1 on Oct. 7, 2009 (2nd prize), and then were second to complete level 2 on Oct. 30, 2009 — plus, they were more accurate than AA, so MSS took 1st prize for level 2
- NG LLC 2009 Resources
- Google Lunar X-Prize, $20M to the first team that can land a rover on the moon, travel 500m, and return data/video — by 2015 (after which the award drops in value)
- 29 teams as of Feb 2011
- Michael Doornbos is tracking the teams' progress with a scorecard — although many teams are being secretive and may be farther ahead than is apparent
Civilian Spaceflight: Teams
- Armadillo Aerospace (AA) (John Carmack), "working on computer-controlled LOX/ethanol rocket vehicles, with an eye towards manned suborbital vehicle development in the coming years" (they have some NASA and Air Force contracts) — were clearly the front-runners in the NGLLC competition
- Masten Space Systems (MSS), behind AA, the next leading NGLLC competitor
- vehicle "Xombie" flies higher than the Empire State building and lands vertically
- vehicle "Xoie" uses He for pressurant (lightweight, nonreactive), anhydrous isopropyl alcohol for fuel, and LOX for oxydizer — right down to the wire but they were 2nd to complete level 2 in 2009
- SpaceX:
- Unreasonable Rocket (father-son team, Cantil, CA), the 3rd LLC competitor
- Team BonNovA (Mojave, CA) — close to being the 4th LLC competitor — recently announced they would not make it in 2009
- Scaled Composites (Burt Rutan), whose SpaceShipOne (on the back of WhiteKnight) won the original X Prize for the first private manned spacecraft to reach space twice in two weeks ... sadly they suffered a fatal accident during a July 2007 test in the Mojave Desert
- The Spaceship Company (Scaled Composites and Virgin Galactic joint venture), working on SpaceShipTwo and WhiteKnightTwo, with the goal of providing the world's first commercial passenger space vehicles.
- AMSAT-DL (AMSAT Deutschland) is working on a mission to Mars
- ARCA, a team from Romania, who launch their Helen and Stabilo rockets from a balloon — pursuing the Google Lunar X-Prize
- Team Cringely, whose web site is now dead but whose "very aggressive development schedule" was going to get them to the moon so fast, they couldn't wait 20 months for the Google Lunar X-Prize contest rules to be finalized! Right, then. As usual with Cringely projects, more announcements on the status of the project "coming soon". (Update: That page said "Team Cringely [...] still expects to reach the Moon by 2011" and promised updates by Fall 2009.)
Other Civilian Spaceflight
- Breakthrough Starshot: tiny lightweight solar-sail chips to reach Alpha Centauri in a reasonable time
- Airbus gets contract to build satellites for Greg Wyler's OneWeb Internet project (backed by Richard Branson/Virgin Galactic, and Qualcomm)
- Planet Labs is deploying "flocks" of microsatellites to take frequently-updated images of the Earth (down to 4m resolution)
- X-Cor partnering with the island of Curiçao, Netherlands Antilles (who want to provide a "space in the morning, scuba in the afternoon" vacation experience)
- Copenhagen Suborbitals (HEAT-1X rocket launched June 3, 2011) — now blogging on Wired
- Elevator:2010 - The Space Elevator Challenge and The Space Elevator Blog
- NASA's Dryden Research Center is hosting the 2010 Space Elevator challenge — next competition to be held November 2, 2009: 1km climb at 5 m/s
- Overview of the teams
- University of Saskatchewan Space Design Team (USST) — fell just short of claiming the prize in 2007 (1.8 m/s speed, 2 m/s needed to win) — trailer (3rd to qualify; the "University" team, most experienced in elevator challenges) — Saskatoon, Saskatchewan — in 2009 (using the Trumpf 8 kW laser), they were believed to be the best prepared and in the strongest position, but they had climber motor and GPS reception problems and were unable to reach the top; here's the USST 2009 post-competition analysis
- Kansas City Space Pirates (KCSP) — laser-powered RC car, and space elevator climber with an automated beam-director — trailer (1st to qualify; the "robotic-club hobbyist" team, but nothing "amateur" about them, prepared and detail-oriented) — Kansas City, MO — in 2009 (using the Trumpf 8 kW laser) had a lot of different system components fail and were unable to reach the top; here's the KCSP 2009 post-competition analysis
- LaserMotive (LM) — building a laser tracker (2nd to qualify; the "industry" team) — Seattle, WA — in 2009, qualified for the 2 m/s level ($900,000 prize) (using their own 4 kW laser)
- National Space Society (NSS) (Detroit) — 4th to qualify, provisionnaly; couldn't raise supplemental entry fees, so is out for 2009
- Michigan Tech University is developing a nanosatelite for telescope calibration and space-to-space imaging
- Some MIT students spent only $150 and got a camera up near the 100km (62 mi.) space boundary: Project Icarus (Wired story)
Satellites and Astrodynamics
- Getting to space is hard, not because space is high up, but because you have to go so fast. "If you're in Sacramento, Seattle, Canberra, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Phnom Penh, Cairo, Beijing, central Japan, central Sri Lanka, or Portland, space [100km] is closer than the sea."
- Electrodynamic Tether Propulsion
- Airborne Launch Assist Space Access (ALASA) program being developed by DARPA: launch satellites from an autonomous plane
- Satellite Watching
- SeeSat-L mailing list
History
My contact information,
brief autobiography (such as it is), and
family tree.
