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The Meteors Are Coming, The Meteors Are Coming...

Ever wonder where those meteors come from?  Here's a link to an informative site.

http://astrobob.areavoices.com/

Here is an article on the event this evening...

Lyrid meteor shower will make you think big

Posted on April 20, 2012 by astrobob

A brilliant meteor flashes across the sky. Will this weekend's Lyrid meteor shower shower us with a few of these beauties? Lyrids are known for their occasional fireballs. Credit: John Chumack

The annual Lyrid meteor shower peaks tomorrow night through Sunday morning April 21-22. While a minor shower, the Lyrids serve as a “season opener” to the bigger shows coming in mid-August and December.

Lyrid meteors originate from grains of dust shed by Comet Thatcher, which was discovered by A.E. Thatcher on April 5, 1861.

Every year in April Earth passes through the dust and debris left behind by past visits of Comet Thatcher. Illustration: Bob King

The comet takes 415 years to make a single trip around the sun, so there’s no hope of any of us seeing it in our lifetimes. But we can see little bits of it that were left behind long ago.

Each time a comet swings by the sun, it drops lots of dust, fluffy ice and pebbly pieces in its wake.  The third week of April every year Earth plows through debris ranging in size from sand grains to small pebbles left behind during Thatcher’s previous flybys. When a lucky mote strikes the atmosphere, it vaporizes in a flash of light called a meteor or shooting star.

When you’re out watching the show, consider that the average speed of a Lyrid meteor is 30 miles per second or 108,000 miles per hour. At that velocity, a bit of dust or small pebble burns to ash through friction. The luminous trail we call a meteor is mostly light given off by atoms in the upper atmosphere some 70 miles high. The fast-moving comet debris excites or ionizes the atoms; when they return to normal microseconds later they emit billions of photons of light we see as a bright streak or “falling star”.

In a flame test, sodium burns a brilliant yellow. Sodium is common in some meteorites. Credit: Soren Wedel Nielsen

A typical meteor trail is less than 3 feet in diameter but tens of miles long. Think of it as glowing tube overhead.

When the comet particle burns up, it can give off different colors depending on its composition. Sodium flares bright yellow; magnesium is blue-white and nickel a lovely emerald green to name a few. Speed also factors into color. The faster the meteor, the more energy it imparts to the air and the whiter and bluer the streak will be. Slower meteors blaze orange and red.

The Lyrids are named after Lyra the Harp, the constellation from which they appear to originate. The origination point is called the radiant, and you can see from the map it’s not far southwest of Lyra’s brightest star Vega, making it easy to pinpoint. The radiant is the direction Earth is moving toward as it slices through Comet Thatcher’s debris.

Snow appears to radiate from straight ahead as seen through your windshield when you drive into a storm. Meteor showers appear to radiate from one point in the sky because Earth is traveling "into the storm" just like your car. Photo: Bob King

Similar to seeing snow or rain appear to originate from a point ahead of you when you’re driving straight into it, the meteors stream out and away from the radiant. Lyrids closest to the radiant are short, slow stubs of light while those further off stretch into longer streaks.

News is all good for this year’s Lyrids. No moon to interfere and the shower maximum occurs Sunday morning, which for many of us is the weekend. From a dark sky expect to see 10-12 meteors per hour. If you have any doubt as to whether they’re Lyrids or just random meteors, trace their paths backwards and if they point toward Vega, you’ve caught one.

This map shows the sky early Sunday morning with Vega and the Lyrid radiant well up in the eastern sky. Face your lawn chair east or south for the best view. Created with Stellarium

To see the shower best Vega and the radiant should be well up in the northeastern sky. For observers in the U.S. and Canada, you can start watching around 12:30-1 a.m. Sunday.      Numbers should pick up as the radiant rises higher and higher until dawn.

I like to flop out in a folding chair under a warm blanket. Don’t get too comfortable though – you might fall asleep! Having a friend join you is a great way to stay alert. It also puts the conversation in a larger, more cosmic context. I’ve found that almost everyone thinks bigger thoughts under a starry sky than when seated inside a building.

In a related story, this weekend, NASA scientists, amateur astronomers, and astronaut Don Pettit on board the International Space Station will attempt the first-ever 3D photography of meteors from Earth and space. Read about it HERE.

 

Big Kids With Big Toys: R C Aircraft

http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=zYPag3LuKlA

Deep Space Probe Fly By & New Moons Around Pluto; Perhaps It Really IS A Planet After All!

Is the Pluto System Dangerous?

November 7, 2011

Pluto's newest found moon, P4, orbits between Nix and Hydra, both of which orbit beyond Charon. Could there be still more moons of Pluto? Perhaps, and the New Horizons team plans to look harder to ensure that we don't run into something that could damage or destroy New Horizons.

New Horizons remains healthy and on course, now almost twenty two times as far from the Sun as the Earth is, and approaching six years into its 9.5-year journey to the Pluto system. 

We’ve taken the spacecraft out of hibernation to perform maintenance activities, and to re-point our radio antenna to compensate for Earth’s movement around its orbit. This “hibernation wakeup” started November 5 and will last until November 15. Then New Horizons will hibernate again until early January, when we’ll perform a more extensive, almost month-long wakeup.

I’ll provide an update soon about how the November hibernation wakeup went and what’s in store for the January wake up and our cruise to Active Checkout 6, which begins next May. But in this PI’s log, I want to concentrate on a question that has recently come to the fore on the mission: “Is the Pluto system dangerous to New Horizons?”

If you’re wondering what I mean, I’m referring to the fact that the more moons that pop up in the system, the more we have to worry that there are still more undiscovered moons that are too small and faint to detect. When we discovered P4 this summer, along with possible evidence of a couple of still-fainter moons (something we need more study to confirm or reject), we began to worry about just how many tiny moons Pluto might have and whether we might have to dodge them. 

Even more worrisome than the possibility of many small moons themselves is the concern that these moons will generate debris rings, or even 3-D debris clouds around Pluto that could pose an impact hazard to New Horizons as it flies through the system at high speed. After all, at our 14-kilometer-per-second flyby speed, even particles less than a milligram can penetrate our micrometeoroid blankets and do a lot of damage to electronics, fuel lines and sensors.

So to assess that hazard, we brought together about 20 of the world’s experts in ring systems, orbital dynamics and state-of-the-art astronomical observing techniques to search for small satellites and rings at distant Pluto. This group convened November 3-4 at the Southwest Research Institute’s offices in Boulder, Colo., where the New Horizons science team is centered. During this two-day workshop, a series of technical talks and discussions sections examined every aspect of the hazards that debris and small moons orbiting in the Pluto system might pose.

The presenters and attendees of the New Horizons Pluto Encounter Hazards Workshop on November 4, 2011.

We found a plausible chance that New Horizons might face real danger of a killer impact; and that to mitigate that hazard, we need to undertake two broad classes of work. 

First, we need to look harder at the Pluto system for still undiscovered satellites and rings. The best tools for this are going to be the Hubble Space Telescope, some very large ground-based telescopes, telescopes that can make stellar occultation observations of the space between Pluto and Charon where New Horizons is currently targeted, and thermal observations of the system by the ALMA radio telescope array just now being commissioned.

Then, we need to plan for an alternate, safer route through the Pluto system in case those observations reveal strong evidence that our current trajectory is too hazardous. Studies presented at the Encounter Hazards Workshop indicate that a good “safe haven bailout trajectory” (or SHBOT) could be designed to target a closest-approach aim point about 10,000 kilometers farther than our nominal mission trajectory. More specifically, a good candidate SHBOT aim point would be near Charon’s orbit, but about 180 degrees away from Charon on closest-approach day. Why this location? Because Charon’s gravity clears out the region close to it of debris, creating a safe zone. 

Making this situation still more complex is the fact that debris created in the Pluto system may not lie in a plane, as in  other ring systems, but might instead be contained in a fat torus (donut-shaped) or even a nearly-spherical 3-D cloud if the debris coming off small satellites has high velocity (such debris is created by impactors from the Kuiper Belt, which hit at pretty high speeds of 1-2 kilometers per second.) 

The question of whether the Pluto system could be hazardous to New Horizons remains open –but one we’ll be studying hard over the next year, with everything from computer models to big ground-based telescopes to the Hubble. 

I’ll report on results as we obtain them, but it is not lost on us that there is a certain irony that the very object of our long-held scientific interest and affection may, after so many years of work to reach her, turn out to be less hospitable than other planets have been. We’ll see.

 

Beam Up The Grouch...

While Oscar lives in a garbage can on Sesame Street, we, on the other hand should not.  Considering toxic waste and the need for storage of nuclear fuel, the entanglement of particles noted in Quantum Theory may offer a remedy.

Basically, all matter has relationship.  Imagine two tuning forks.  Ping one, the other picks up the vibration.  Such is the fuzzy connectivity between particles in the Quantum reality.  Studies in the Canary Island have demonstrated that if two linked particles have one then connected to a distant one, one of the proximal particles vanishes (we're not sure if they cease to exist, well, at least I don't know) and duplicates appear near the distant particle.  Essentially, lock into another particle far away, and what is here disappears and something exactly the same suddenly appears at that far away point.  The more I try to explain, the more confusing it will get.  So re-read the above if you are not sure what I have just said.

Now, let's consider our trash, nuclear waste, air pollution, whatever.  If we can pair it with a local particle then pair that particle with one say in the middle of the Sun or elsewhere, POOF!  No more trash here.  And where it ends up, that environment takes care of the rest.

The downside?  Let's say you have a machine to do such.  Is there anything in the toilet?  POOF (or pooh), it is now in the refridgerator of someone you don't like.  

If we ever devise such machinery to handle our waste hopefully we will be wise enough not to use it to our create our own destruction.

You Are Here??? 3 D Map Of Our Local Galaxy

 

Hans Sulu?

Tiangong, the Chinese manned space station 

Tiangong, the Chinese manned space station

The China National Space Administration has big plans for the near future. Chinese authorities announced that the first Chinese manned space station currently named Tiangong (“Heavenly Palace” in free translation) will be fully completed by 2020. The Project 921-2 consisting in building a module type space station was launched in 1992.

The first module consisting in a apace laboratory named Tiangong 1 is scheduled to be launched in October 2011. This target vehicle is made of a lab module, a resource module and a docking mechanism, having a final mass of only 9 tons. In this phase a crew of three astronauts will go in space with Tiangong 1 for a short term stay in space.

The astronauts on board of Tiangong 1 are not the first Chinese traveling to space. The history of human traveling in space for China started  in 2003 when Yang Liwei became the first Chinese astronaut ever to travel in space aboard Shenzhou-5.

Another successful mission for Chinese space program followed in 2008, when another three Chinese astronauts aboard the Shenzhou-7, carried out successfully the first Chinese spacewalk.

The project Tiangong is developed fully by Chinese capabilities, with no connections to other countries that also have space programs.

The “Heavenly Palace” will weight only about 60 tons which is extremely light in comparison to the 419 tons of the International Space Station or the 137 tons of the MIR station. A strength of the project Chinese space station consists in the superior technology that will be used for the multi-modular system.

China also has planes to launch a second lunar probe in October 2011 as a first step and in preparation for an unmanned moon landing by the end of 2012. A manned lunar mission will be possible in few years being proposed as a target date the year 2017.

 

Free Computer Planetarium Program... This Is Soooo Coooolllll....

http://www.stellarium.org/

Radiation in Japan, It's all Fuk'd Up...

Here are some links to Mother Jones (MoJo) which I have found to be a great altenative news reporting agency:

http://motherjones.com/blue-marble/2011/04/radiation-seafood-japan

→ Econundrums, Food and Ag, Top Stories

Is There Radiation in Your Seafood?

— By Kiera Butler

| Mon Apr. 11, 2011 2:30 AM PDT

seiho/Flickr

The oceans around Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant are beginning to show troubling signs of radioactivity. Recent tests by TEPCO found levels far surpassing legal limits, iodine by 7.5 million times and cesium by 1.1 million times. As MoJo environmental correspondent Julia Whitty has reported in several recent posts, radioactive material is now entering the marine food web, and will likely only continue to work its way up. And ocean currents are carrying the contaminants far and wide. As a result of the increased radiation levels, several countries, including Hong Kong, Russia, and India, have enacted temporary bans on Japanese seafood imports. But so far, there is no such ban in the US.

So should I steer clear of sushi?

Some experts believe that there's little cause for concern. Andrew Maidment, an associate professor of radiology at the University of Pennsylvania, points out that people are typically exposed to 3 millisieverts of "background radiation" every year. (Did you know that Fiesta ware, smoke detectors, and bananas all emit low levels of radiation?) Maidment says that according to data from TEPCO, eating seafood from near the Fukushima plant for a year would up your radiation exposure by .6 millisieverts, roughly a 20 percent increase from normal background exposure. "But all kinds of things can increase your radiation levels," says Maidment. "People who live at high altitudes can easily be exposed to twice the radiation of people at sea level, for example."

FDA spokeswoman Siobhan DeLancey assured me that so far, imported seafood that the agency has tested has not shown elevated levels of radiation. She attributed this in part to the ocean's ability to both dilute radiation and protect marine life. "Airborne radiation settles on the surface of the water and acts as a barrier to fish under the surface," she wrote in an email. "In the case of a direct release into the sea, the amount of water in the ocean rapidly dilutes and disperses the radiation to negligible levels."

But other scientists are not so sure that ocean ecosystems are in the clear. Over at Yale e360 Elizabeth Grossman has a great, comprehensive rundown of what scientists know about radiation's effect on sea life, and what they have yet to figure out. This is interesting:

How the radioactive materials released from the Fukushima plants will behave in the ocean will depend on their chemical properties and reactivity, explained Ted Poston, a ecotoxicologist with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, a U.S. government facility in Richland, Washington. If the radionuclides are in soluble form, they will behave differently than if they are absorbed into particles, said Poston. Soluble iodine, for example, will disperse rather rapidly. But if a radionuclide reacts with other molecules or gets deposited on existing particulates—bits of minerals, for example—they can be suspended in the water or, if larger, may drop to the sea floor.

Given all the unknowns, you'd think testing US oceans for radiation would be top priority for the government. Is it?

Sure doesn't seem like it. I emailed the National Oceanic and Atmostpheric Administration to ask how the agency was testing for radiation in the ocean. A spokeswoman would only tell me that "NOAA is playing a supporting role in the Administration's response effort." When I asked her to describe exactly what that role was, she declined to answer.

Meanwhile, the environmental health advocacy group Food & Water Watch has criticized the FDA for inadequate inspection of imported seafood. FWW executive director Wenonah Hauter told me that the agency inspects only 2 percent of all seafood imports. The FDA's DeLancey would neither confirm nor deny Hauter's assertion, saying only: "While it's difficult to quantify exactly how much of a given product is subject to inspection, FDA uses its knowledge of various import factors and vulnerabilities to target for the most efficient and effective public health intervention. Because of the potential for radionuclide contamination, we have chosen to screen all foods from Japan very stringently until the situation stabilizes."

So which elements could eventually wind up in my sushi, and how long will they stick around?

It's hard to find specific information about the health effects of radiation, but here's what I've cobbled together: The three radioactive elements present in greatest quantities around Fukushima are iodine-131, cesium-134, and cesium-137. Iodine is of the greatest immediate concern, since both humans and sea mammals accumulate it in the thyroid. Luckily, it only has a half-life of eight days, so the levels around Fukushima are already dropping dramatically. The cesiums, on the other hand, are more of a long-term risk: Cesium-134 has a half-life of two years, and cesium-137, 30 years. Damon Mogler, director of the climate and energy program at the environmental advocacy group Friends of the Earth, told me that "cesium builds up in bottom feeders, crustaceans and bivalves, which in turn get eaten by bigger fish, and ultimately, people." Maidment explains that since cesium is chemically similar to potassium, the body processes it similarly, meaning it can build up in muscle tissue.

What are the potential health effects of ingesting radiation from seafood?

No one knows yet whether the radiation from the Fukushima disaster will build up in levels high enough to cause human health problems, but we do know that accumulation of radiation in your body can lead to cancer. The EPA has a pretty good explanation of how it works here.

Are people eating less seafood because of radiation fears?

Yes, report Bloomberg and the NY Times. Several important fish auctions around the world were canceled in the wake of the nuclear disaster, and NPR reports that prices at Japan's famous Tsukiji fish market have "plummeted." FWIW, I called a local sushi restaurant called Tsukiji in Mill Valley, California, and they told me business had slowed down "a little bit" in recent weeks.

Got a burning eco-quandary? Submit it to econundrums@motherjones.com. Get all your green questions answered by visiting Econundrums on Facebook here.

 

• Japan's Radioactive Ocean

  How Fukushima poisons work their way up the foodweb.

• Radioactive Fish and Birds: Dangers from Japan?

• The Radioactive Ocean

  Radioactivity is increasing in the waters near Japan's Fukushima plant. But nuclear pollution in the oceans is nothing new.

Nitrogen From Low Temperature Reactions Open New Doors...

A Cheap Way to Chop up Nitrogen

By Michael Torrice
ScienceNOW Daily News
14 December 2009

Nitrogen atoms are needed to make many important chemicals from drugs to fertilizers. But getting those atoms into chemicals is challenging, because nitrogen molecules are tough nuts to crack. They consist of two atoms sharing a stubborn triple bond, which chemists can break up only by scorching them with temperatures of up to 500°C. And that results in the simple chemical ammonia, which needs further processing to produce more complicated compounds. Now chemists have bypassed the energy-intensive reaction and devised a new one that splits molecular nitrogen at room temperature and synthesizes a common fertilizer.

Nitrogen gas (N2) makes up 78% of the air you breathe. Since the early 20th century, chemists have combined nitrogen and hydrogen with an iron catalyst at 500°C to produce ammonia, a process called the Haber-Bosch process. In the mid-1990s, inorganic chemists discovered a gentler way to force nitrogen's molecular break-up using compounds that contained molybdenum. Pairs of these metal compounds donate six electrons to nitrogen--two for each of nitrogen's three bonds. Others have since created similar compounds that follow the same strategy. In 2004, chemist Paul Chirik of Cornell University made his own version based on zirconium.

Chirik's molecules split nitrogen and added hydrogen to form ammonia, mimicking the Haber-Bosch process at a much more reasonable temperature of 85°C. But the procedure is not completely clean: To make hydrogen gas, chemists start with methane, a fossil fuel, and release carbon dioxide as a byproduct. So Chirik and colleagues wanted to find a reaction that skipped ammonia synthesis altogether and went right from nitrogen gas to a useful chemical.

The solution involves clamshell-like organic molecules that hold an atom of the metal hafnium in their opening. Two of these molecules can lock a nitrogen molecule between their metal atoms and break the first two of its bonds. That's as far as hafnium atoms, which have only two electrons each to donate, can go. To break the final bond, the chemists turned to another molecule with an even stronger triple bond, carbon monoxide. When they bubbled this gas into a flask with their hafnium molecules, two carbon monoxide molecules split the nitrogen and formed new bonds to create oxamide, a common fertilizer, the scientists reported online 13 December in Nature Chemistry. Oxamide is a simple chemical with six atoms: two carbon, two oxygen atoms that are both from the incoming carbon monoxide molecules, and two individual nitrogen atoms. The hafnium molecules "pinned [nitrogen] down, pulled its bond apart, and got it ready to do chemistry," Chirik says. "The carbon monoxide is the straw that breaks the camel's back."

Exactly how the reaction works is not yet clear, Chirik says. He and his colleagues want to understand this mechanism and improve on it, because the reaction is currently not catalytic: The hafnium compounds can do the reaction only once, because freeing oxamide from the molecules leaves them in a state that can't bind nitrogen again. To create molecules that can react over and over may require the chemists to move down the periodic table to find a new metal that doesn’t clutch onto oxamide as tightly, Chirik says.

Splitting molecular nitrogen with the help of carbon monoxide is "unexpected and completely unprecedented," says inorganic chemist Michael Fryzuk of the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, in Canada. This new combination of reactions is "super elegant," says chemist Christopher Cummins of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, and the process could allow molecular nitrogen to be a reagent in other synthetic reactions, he adds.