Category: Astronomy
Science and entertainment are blending again, as James Cameron, director of Avatar, is now working with NASA. He’s been everywhere lately, spreading his message of stopping the rainforest destruction and environmental degradation. We loved Avatar, and it’s great that he is following it up with lots of interviews explaining the message of the movie and he even knows quite a bit about climate change. (Sigourney Weaver has also done some interviews on the rainforest and ocean.)
Cameron was at last week’s climate rally in Washington, he was on Democracy Now, on other radio and TV talk shows, and now he’s even helping out NASA. They are in development sessions for the new Mars rover, Curiosity, and Cameron will be helping them design the 3D camera. Here’s the story from Information Week.
James Cameron is working with the space agency to outfit the next-generation rover, Curiosity, with 3D cameras.
NASA is getting help from Hollywood director James Cameron to build 3D cameras for the next Mars rover, Curiosity.The space agency abandoned plans to build cameras with the capability for the rover in 2007 due to budgetary concerns.
That prompted the director ” known for blockbuster films Avatar and Titanic– to step in and personally petitioned the agency to build the cameras, according to NASA. The agency this month said it has delivered the last two of four science cameras — called Mastcams — for the rover without 3D capability.
To announce the new NASA solar dynamics observatory, they released a brand new video of the sun last week. It’s amazing, but it’s also large and takes quite a while to load, even with a fast connection.
NASA writes:
April 21, 2010: Warning, the images you are about to see could take your breath away.
At a press conference today in Washington DC, researchers unveiled “First Light” images from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, a space telescope designed to study the sun.
“SDO is working beautifully,” reports project scientist Dean Pesnell of the Goddard Space Flight Center. “This is even better than we could have dreamed.”
Launched on February 11th from Cape Canaveral, the observatory has spent the past two months moving into a geosynchronous orbit and activating its instruments. As soon as SDO’s telescope doors opened, the spacecraft began beaming back scenes so beautiful and puzzlingly complex that even seasoned observers were stunned.
For instance, here is one of the first things SDO saw:
“We’ve seen solar prominences before—but never quite like this,” says Alan Title of Lockheed Martin, principal investigator of the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA), the observatory’s main telescope array. “Some of my colleagues say they’ve learned new things about prominences just by watching this one movie.”
SDO is the first mission of NASA’s Living with a Star (LWS) program. The goal of LWS is to understand the sun as a magnetic variable star and to measure its impact on life and society on Earth. Program scientist Lika Guhathakurta of NASA headquarters envisions big things for the new observatory:
“SDO is our ‘Hubble for the sun’,” she says. “It promises to transform solar physics in the same way the Hubble Space Telescope has transformed astronomy and cosmology.”
“No solar telescope has ever come close to the combined spatial, temporal and spectral resolution of SDO,” adds Title. “This is possible because of the combination of 4096 x 4096-pixel CCDs with huge dynamic range and a geosynchronous orbit which allows SDO to observe the sun and communicate with the ground around the clock.”
A complete gallery of SDO’s First Light images and data may be found at http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/Gallery/ SDOFirstLight.html.
An unknown object in the galaxy M82 has started sending out radio waves. The emission does not look like anything seen anywhere in the universe before. It does not fit the pattern of radio emissions from a supernova, according to the Coast to Coast radio show. Those usually get brighter over a few weeks and then fade away over months, the spectrum of the waves changing all the while, which this one doesn’t do. So this is something completely unknown and as yet a mystery.
“The co-discoverer of these radio waves Tom Muxlow of Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics www.jodrellbank.manchester.ac.uk/ in the UK exclaims ”We don’t know what it is,” The interesting aspect of this story is the radio waves seem to be a very dense object that does not fit the typical criteria for a black hole , or a micro-quasar . The radio waves were somewhat found accidentally using the MERLIN network of radio telescopes in the UK. The possibilities are endless it may turn out to be a galactic echo or it may turn out to be a massive thriving civilization that finally found us and sent a virtual space text message we found unintentionally.”
If you think you know the story of the spiral seen in Norway’s sky from December, 2009, think again. Soon after this mysterious spiral disappeared, President Obama cancelled most of the U.S. space program. The spiral was also seen on the very day that President Obama appeared in Norway to accept his Nobel Prize, and the spiral itself seemed to be stopped abruptly in its tracks by something . . . . . unknown. If you think that’s all very “normal”, it’s not. This might, believe it or not, be connected to 9/11 and the reason our space program has taken an abrupt turn into obsolescence.
Read the story of the spiral and what it might mean on the website of Richard C. Hoagland, Enterprise Institute, here. That is part II. Also check out part 1 and III which are on the same site. In a nutshell, the spiral was a sign to the Obama administration and other leaers in power that they don’t control things. Whoever or whatever this entity, according to Hoagland, is trying to tell us, it’s that they are in control of the planet, of weapons, of wars, of our space program, and maybe of the solar system. What do they want? No one knows. It sounds like an extension of the “Illuminati” (something I consider a myth). What is clear is that it was not only a Russian missile test.
I know it sounds crazy, which is why you should listen to the two hours on the radio show Coast to Coast about this — where it sounds much less out there.
(Big file -- click for larger version)
The Hubble photos literally see light back in time, which makes these photos from a real time machine. Below are some more Hubble photos from last year, though not as recent as the galaxy photos.
