Space exploration

Dynamics of space storm

Posted by Dmitry

June 19, 2009

A team from the U. of Alberta was able to observe a space storm in its full dynamics – at least during first minutes from its birth. For that, they used a network of cameras located in multiple places within Canada – you can see exact location of vertices of the grid on the video below. Phase front propagation velocity of the storm in the atmosphere was about 100000 km/h, so it took a couple of minutes for the storm to cover the whole Earth (well, half of it) from the moment first electrons hit the atmosphere.

One step for a Man

Posted by Dmitry

June 18, 2009

Apollo 11

Nature News has decided to start running a Twitter microblog devoted to the history of Apollo 11 mission – the first manned mission to the Moon. They will basically twit all the steps of the mission, to the Moon and back, day after day, event after event as if it was happening today, in 2009. They also promise that the feed will include various contextual information – politics, related events, etc. Following this Twitter feed you will open yourself to a quite unique experience: learn exactly what your father felt back in 1969. Thanks so much for this precious gift, Nature. Such feeds as yours make Twitter a really great service, worth to have a Twitter account.

LISA technology and instrumentation

Posted by Dmitry

June 17, 2009

LISA orbit

Oliver Jennrich (European Space Agency) has prepared a large review on technical aspects of LISA (space laser interferometer) mission – the project is extremely complicated for realization, many technologies are not even yet fully developed, and various prototypes will have to be launched. Yet, possible payout is so huge – even including possible detection of gravitational waves from the very early Universe – from inflationary and reheating stages (just think about it – detecting EM radiation did not really allow us to go beyond redshift $z\sim{}8$ so far, not including here CMB of course). Who is a sucker for space research as I am – please check out the paper. It does not discuss science related to the mission but contains tons of technical information about LISA you won’t find anywhere else.