Ewan's Corner

Posts Tagged ‘space’

Asteroid Apophis, a 350 metre wide chunk of rock due to make a worryingly close Earth flyby in April 2036, has been in the media for several years now – and I suppose a successful Apophis-based hoax was just a matter of time.

In a story straight out of Hollywood combining apocalyptic predictions, asteroid collisions with Earth, a cute kid showing up NASA scientists and dodgy science comes a successful hoax – Nico Marquardt, a 13-year-old from Germany, reportedly corrected the estimated chance of Apophis impacting Earth in 2036 down from a worrying 1 in 45000 to a downright scary 1 in 450 (i.e. 100 times more likely) based on the chance of Apophis hitting a geosynchronous satellite during its next Earth flyby on April 13, 2029.

Nico exists, but the story isn’t entirely true – see the NASA press release – and the chance remains 1 in 45000.
AFP (Agence France-Presse) started the global story rolling (although they weren’t the source – that honour apparently goes to Bild.de) and then it spread worldwide without anyone bothering to check the facts – today it made South African papers. Great journalism – not.
Links:

• Wikipedia Apophis topic
• Dedicated NASA Apophis site
• Slashdot coverage

A sense of scale, and relative importance.

MyFox (Fox 31), a local TV station in Denver, Colorado, got lucky when their helicopter traffic monitor crew captured live video of space debris breaking up in the early morning sky. The video is beautiful, and the reactions from the pilot and anchors are great :-)
You can view the video from the MyFox website (Space Debris Breaks Up on LIVE TV) or grab a local copy from this site (7mb flash video file, which you can view with the latest version of VLC Media Player).
This was not a meteor – this was most likely video footage of a spent Russian booster rocket burning up on re-entry:

“A spent Russian booster rocket re-entered the atmosphere Thursday over Colorado and Wyoming, the North American Aerospace Defense Command said. NORAD spokesman Sean Kelly said the agency was trying to confirm a report that a piece of the rocket may have hit the ground near Riverton, Wyoming, at about 6 a.m. Kelly said military personnel had not yet reached the scene. No damage was reported and the debris was not believed to be hazardous, NORAD said. Eyewitnesses reported seeing flaming objects in the sky at the time the rocket was re-entering, Kelly said.”

Slashdot – Russian Rocket Hits Wyoming
CNN – NORAD looking for Russian rocket in Wyoming

Something to kick-start the budding astronomer in the new year:

“Are you looking for all the best of what’s up in the night sky for the year 2007? Then be my guest and download my free e.book — ’365 Days of SkyWatching’! (Brought to you courtesy of The Universe Today.) Each day is specifically geared to give you the best of what can be seen with the unaided eye, binoculars, and small telescopes and even has challenge objects for seasoned observers. It’s beautifully illustrated and contains many special features, such as anotated lunar maps. Please feel free to pass it along to anyone in the astronomy community and enjoy!”

—Tammy Plotner, president of Warren Rupp Observatory
And go get yourself a copy of Stellarium – free, open source planetarium software (windows/mac/linux) to help explore the skies.
Also awesome – The Top Ten Astronomy Images of 2006

“We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbour life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

– Carl Sagan, May 11, 1996

Resources:
APOD for Oct 16th 2006 “In the Shadow of Saturn” (a newer perhaps better “blue dot” image)
NASA / JPL detail on the above image