Space Oddity’s Spore Blog

Our intrepid Mars Rover Opportunity (lovingly called Oppy by its followers) has started its ninth year on the red planet. This calls for a new Mars picture in celebration.
By the way all the raw^* images made by her cameras are found on the NASA Mission site.

^* ‘Raw’ here means there is nothing done to enhance the images yet, what you see what the camera saw.

The sharpest picture of the Andromeda Nebula was released by the Hubble Telescope allowing zoom deep into the core of the young galaxy. Imagine how many planets are present in that view. The newest estimate for the number of planets in our Milky Way based on the findings of Kepler is 160 billion…

With 2012 around the corner I would like to thank you for being here and wish you a happy new year. I still enjoy posting here, and even though the work on Joynet Solutions is claiming a lot of my time, I will certainly will continue to do so.

The new year will see the start of a set of science-fiction themed stories. My aim is to publish a new story every month. I am really looking forward to that, and I hope you will enjoy them too.

Sometimes we are reminded of just how risky and difficult space flight is, even if it is not manned. The Russian mission to Mars’ moon Phobos is not running as it should be. After being successfully launched from Earth, it failed to head off to Mars. Instead it will fall back, and still being loaded with the fuel that would have gotten it to Mars, it will burn to a cinder.

Not all hope is lost however, because the journey always was intended to be round-trip, so some of the instruments might still survive the fiery return. One experiment in particular is of interest: a module appropriately called LIFE. It contains 10 species of microscopic organisms, representing all three of Earth’s domains of life. Some of the LIFE species have never been flown in space before, if some or all of these survive we will know more about life’s resilience to the rigours of outer space.

The past years I have tried to keep you up to date on the new exoplanet discoveries. The discoveries are coming thick and fast now, they even can be called relatively numerous, so I was toying with the idea of setting up an overview. An overview like that would be hard to keep up-to-date though, with the different groups that exist around the world.

Since I never gotten ’round to start it, I was very happy to hear that there now is a formal Habitable Exoplanet Catalog, set up at Arecibo. It combines the data of confirmed planets and the Kepler Candidate planets.

Since this week the first Kepler Science Conference is running, you can expect the data to be updated very soon.

Many more details can be found the site: http://www.astrobiology-upra.org/

The system that is Earth is so incredibly beautiful and intricate. It’s climate is kept stable by the interaction between chemistry and biology. The salt water in the oceans and the sweet water that is constantly being moved around by the suns energy are fundamental and keeps surprising us the more we know about it. The gulf-stream that plays such an important part in keeping Europe warm, is powered by salty water sinking at the North Pole. This sinking water does more than that, as is shown in this beautiful footage made by the BBC.

In a few minutes Curiosity will be launched!

More on Churiosity later.

A quick post to keep you up to date on new Solar system findings:

The moon is possibly much younger than Earth, 70 million years, and created by a Mars size protoplanet colliding with young Earth.

Wind on Mars is a much lighter thing than here on Earth, since the atmosphere is much less dense. That is why scientists assumed sand dunes on Mars would remain stationary. Pictures by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have now shown that they do move. 1-0 for observational science!

And, today (November 16th 2011) NASA will announce new findings about Europa, my pet Jupiter moon, with its large ocean of salty water under thick ice. I’m curious to find out what the news is, the event will be broadcast live on NASA TV at 13:00h EST.

EDIT: The live conference has come and gone; here is the video.

As every year, Nikon has held a competition for the best micro photographs. And the harvest is again very beautiful. The complete set of winners and recommendations can be found at their site.

The one I want to highlight here though, is an image of a freshwater flea that looks like you could make it using the creature editor is Spore. Anyone up for a challenge?

Picture made by Joan Röhl. It was rewarded 10th in the 2011 contest.

Astronomy Picture of the Day features something very special today and I like to share with you. The video below shows accurate animations of the visual effects that occur when you move at almost the speed of light. Although the text-to-speech voice-over is distracting, I still recommend to keep sound on.

Movie created by Antony Searle and Craig Savage