Teachers In Space

Wednesday is launch day, actually night 6:20 pm PDT, for space shuttle Discovery to photogenically blast into the heavens to park at the International Space Station (ISS) with parts for recycling pee into the clean drinkable water machine, a $300 million USD 31,000 pound truss segment to support the additions to the ISS, more items for the solar arrays and two teachers. Discovery's crew has to vacate and finish their spacewalking and scientific chores by March 26 because the Russians booked the penthouse suite with the Soyuz capsule making a grand entrance and bringing a new ISS crew. One space visiting team at a time and there is no place to fill up with rocket fuel in space yet.

More solar equipment means more power to tun the increasingly sophisticated apparatus at the ISS. Recycling urine is important because May heralds doubling the size of the crew from 3 to 6. The US space shuttle program is due to end in 2010. Up to this point there have been a multitude of spectacular successes and tragic failures accompanied by loss of life. Honoring the pioneer of teacher in space, NASA reopened its program for teachers after the 2003 mission failure and two teachers are now fully fledged astronauts hurtling out in maximum G's on STS-119. Those two teachers, Joe Acaba and Richard Arnold, are actually each going to don a spacesuit and go out for a spacewalk. (Discovery photos courtesy Reuters)

Richard Arnold started by teaching college preparatory courses in Morocco, then moved on to schools in Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and Romania. Joe Acaba, an ex-Marine, found his calling in the classroom after a tour in the Dominican Republic with the Peace Corps.

“As an educator,” Arnold said, “you presumably believe in the notion that education can take you anywhere. Here we are. We’re knocking on the door. We’re about to go to space.”

Selected for the space agency’s educator-astronaut initiative, Acaba, 45, began training in 2004 with nine others. 41, and ArnoldNow, NASA has put them on the same shuttle flight.

“We were both surprised when we were assigned,” Arnold said. “I was really happy to be flying with a classmate, and I was really happy it was Joe.”

Watching such a vivid night launch via NASA webcast is going to be fun. The weather forecast looks great barring any equipment failures like the one that scuttled the February 12th launch. Right now the crew aboard the ISS is doing some routine maintenace and spacewalking chores before Discovery arrives on Friday. The space station is nearing completion with all of the cool gadgets like Canada's robotic Mr. Dexter, Japan's Kibo Room (and a Japanese astronaut is on board this flight) and the view of Earth from the ISS space "porch" is said to be unparralelled. What a great teachable moment in science.

Just because I love his books and his whole attitude about science, I will tout Neil deGrasse Tyson's latest wonderful snarkfest in book form, The Pluto Files. It would be the perfect book to take into space when you have some downtime at the International Space Station.


Oh well, the space shuttle seems like its not going anywhere today due to a gas leak. (3/10)

Black Holes

Imagine running away from a stellar nuclear home, experiencing life anew by careening into wallflower others while gorging on everything within reach, then dancing the excess off in a manic spinning fashion as the less brave watch, still solemnly wedded for eternity to their first stationary positron partner. Across this Universe, black holes are exhibiting interesting and pulsating behavior patterns. Neutron star fights and black holes create an aftermath of anti-matter that spontaneously combusts upon meeting matter. It is a version of West Side Story playing out in Space with the outer limits of astrophysics being tested at each juncture, as space itself shifts and becomes reshaped by massive black holes. (Photo NASA/Ohio)

"We think these monster black holes are spinning close to the limit set by Einstein's theory of relativity, which means that they can drag material around them at close to the speed of light," said Rodrigo Nemmen, a visiting graduate student at Penn State University, and lead author of a paper on the new results presented at American Astronomical Society in Austin, Texas.

"Extremely fast spin might be very common for large black holes," said co-investigator Richard Bower of Durham University. "This might help us explain the source of these incredible jets that we see stretching for enormous distances across space." (Photo credit: Credit: NASA/CXC/CfA/R.Kraft et al)

A supersized black hole is on an order of magnitude unimaginable, 18,000,000,000,000 (long form number) times larger than our Sun. Technically, black holes are invisible, but the gravitational effects on everything around them is observable. Or to put it in a nutshell, anything that gets too close to a black hole goes immediately into the, now you see it, now you don't category eons faster than it took me to type that. Sheer presence of black holes that size has spawned a new interest based on a burst phenomena that happens once every twelve years.

Quasars are thought to be powered by gas falling into giant black holes boasting millions or billions of solar masses. Though smaller than the solar system, a quasar can outshine an entire galaxy.

This particular quasar has a regularly pulsing light signal with two major pulses every 12 years. The first two pulses were observed in the year 1994-1995, and the first one of the next set in 2005. The observations helped astronomers refine their computer models, predicting the next pulse would come on Sept. 13, 2007.

Sure enough, right on schedule OJ287 sent out a light pulse on that date. No other pulses of that kind showed up during September or October, indicating, the astronomers say, the binary black-hole model was correct.

Closer to home here in the Milky Way Galaxy, black holes are renegades that are causing sudden interest. Scientists are discovering thin galaxies are attracting the decidedly more Rubenesque black holes. The Milky Way is featuring a Buddha belly making astrophysicists review projections for the size of black holes here at 'home'.









More fantastic reading about the cosmos is in anything written by Neil deGrasse Tyson or for under $10 discover Adam G Freeman's technically rich, Anti-Matter and Black Holes in a 2007 paperback.

Dying Star Leaves Zippy Trail of Cosmic Dust

Imagine being NASA's Galex telescope operator observing as a blazing fast dying star trails a James Brown glittering cape of cosmic dust in its wake that is 13 light years long. It certainly isn't the hardest working star in this Universe, but Mira is one of the fastest with its own signature bling. The diagnosis is clear, the star is dying, but what a way to flame out. (photo BBC)

Mira (also called Mira A) has captivated astronomers for more than 400 years.

It sits about 350 light-years from Earth in a constellation known as Cetus, and is accompanied in orbit by a smaller secondary star, called Mira B, forming a binary system.

Billions of years ago, Mira would have been much like our Sun, but as it now enters its death-throes it has swollen into a type of star known as a red giant.

This wake gives scientists a first opportunity to study the pathology of a dying star. Mira or Omicron Ceti if you are into name dropping, has been putting on a show for Earth for the last 400 years or since the settlement of Jamestown, the Reformation was all the rage with Thirty Year Wars in Europe and Holland bought its first tea bag from China. Mira is in the last throes of stellar fame after burning up the universal stage a thousand times more than our own Sun. What comes after being center stage for a red giant, is well, sad - like child stars gone bad, the hot red giant morphs into a cold white dwarf signaling the last curtain call of its nuclear fusion life. BUT the good news is Physics will never be the same.

Most entertaining astrophysicist is now on PBS's NOVA and he wrote the wonderful collection of essays in Death By Blackhole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries Neil deGrasse Tyson. In a joint book and PBS effort with Daniel Goldsmith and filled with fabulous science snark is Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution. He also has The Sky is Not The Limit: Adventures of an Urban Astrophysicist as well. Dr. Tyson is a must read (I have all his books) and much fun to watch and listen to his energetic explanations of the Universe! He wore pants ripped at the knee on his excellent lecture for C-SPAN.