“This Administration has never really faced up to where we are going in space… As a result, NASA is both drifting and lobbying for bigger things — without being able to focus realistically on what it should be doing.”
-White House staff assistant Clay Thomas Whitehead, February 1971
What should we be doing with respect to our space program? At its peak — the mid-1960s — the US government spent somewhere around 20% of its non-military discretionary spending on NASA and space science/exploration. Today?
Image credit: OMB Historical Budget Tables.
That number is down to 3%, the lowest it’s ever been. As far as our priorities as a nation go, is this right?
In an enraging talk at the annual American Astronomical Society meeting, John M. Logsdon argued that we should be happy, as a community, that we still get as much funding as we do, despite all the we could (and won’t) accomplish if our funding would increase.
Image credit: NASA / Science@NASA.
Needless to say, I think we need to rethink this defeatist point of view. What’s your opinion?
“A physicist is just an atom’s way of looking at itself.” -Niels Bohr
There’s a wonderful story that the Universe tells us about itself: the story of where everything in it came from, and how it came to be this way. From the perspective of a human being, there’s possibly no component of that as important to our existence as the humblest of all building blocks: the atoms.
Image credit: (c) Theodore W. Gray, from http://periodictable.com/.
Yet when the Universe first cooled from the Big Bang, over 99.999999% of what existed was nothing more than hydrogen and helium. So where did the atoms that make us up come from?
This sounds like a job for our Genesis series, so check out episode 4: Atoms!
“With an eye made quiet by the power of harmony, and the deep power of joy, we see into the life of things.” -William Wordsworth
You’ve seen the amazing photos of spiral galaxies, with the vast, sweeping arms, the massive, central bulges and the great underdense regions in between the arms. As you move farther and farther towards the outskirts, the stellar density drops away to practically nothing.
Image credit: Vicent Peris (OAUV), José Luis Lamadrid (CEFCA), Jack Harvey (SSRO), Steve Mazlin (SSRO), Ivette RodrÃguez (PTeam), Oriol Lehmkuhl (PTeam), Juan Conejero (PixInsight), via http://pixinsight.com/gallery/M74-CAHA/.
But if you see these galaxies at an angle, rather than face-on, you’re likely to notice that there’s not only the presence of dust, but that one “side” of the galaxy almost always appears “dustier” than the other!
Image credit: Bill Snyder (at Sierra Remote Observatories), via http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap140313.html.
Why is that? Thanks to the first 3D dust map, now we know!
Cosmic dust clouds and young, energetic stars inhabit this telescopic vista, less than 500 light-years away toward the northern boundary of Corona Australis, the Southern Crown. The dust clouds effectively block light from more distant background stars in the Milky Way. But the striking complex of reflection nebulae cataloged as NGC 6726, 6727, and IC 4812 produce a characteristic blue color as light from the region's young hot stars is reflected by the cosmic dust. The dust also obscures from view stars still in the process of formation. At the left, smaller yellowish nebula NGC 6729 bends around young variable star R Coronae Australis. Just below it, glowing arcs and loops shocked by outflows from embedded newborn stars are identified as Herbig-Haro objects. On the sky this field of view spans about 1 degree. That corresponds to almost 9 light-years at the estimated distance of the nearby star forming region. Authors & editors: Robert Nemiroff (MTU) & Jerry Bonnell (UMCP)
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Destroying chemical warfare agents in bulk is a challenge for the military and international community. Current methods of
The post Pay Dirt: Turning Deadly Chemical Agents Into Harmless Soil has been published on Technology Org.
