Category Archives: Planet

Across the Universe: Stardust messages

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This entry is part 13 of 180 in the series Across the Universe

First published in The Tablet in January, 2006; we ran it here in 2015. Thirty [now more than 40!] years ago, when I was a doctoral student at the University of Arizona, our campus in Tucson lay beneath the landing path of the Davis-Monthan Air Force Base and every few minutes our planetary science classes would be interrupted by the roar of a jet fighter. But an occasional plane would cross overhead with a different sound… an odd, almost quiet whine. Looking up you’d see the large black cruciform, long straight wings and a thin fuselage, of a U-2 spy plane. For twenty years they’d flown photography missions over Soviet Russia and other cold war hotspots. But one U-2 was different. Rather than spooky black, it was painted pure white. And instead of air force emblems, it flew NASA insignia. A visitor to our Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, Don Brownlee from the University of Washington, explained those flights to us. … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Desert or a dessert?

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This entry is part 12 of 180 in the series Across the Universe

First published in The Tablet in January, 2005, just after the Huygens probe landed on Saturn’s moon Titan. We ran it again here on January, 2015. This text is based on what I submitted, which was edited for length when it was printed.   The most remarkable thing about the images from Saturn’s moon, Titan, which ESA’s Huygens probe has just sent us, is how “familiar” they look. They remind me of Nadar’s 19th century Collodion “wet plate” photographs taken from a balloon above Paris. Black and white, a bit fuzzy, these patterns of light and darkness can be grasped and processed by imagination and memory until we impose meaning on them. I picture myself floating through the clouds, gazing across at an intricate pattern of riverbeds cutting through rough light-colored mountains, flowing down to a flat, wine-dark sea. If these are riverbeds – and they certainly look like textbook examples of the many-branched “dendritic channels” made by rainfall flowing down hills … Continue reading →

NASA’s New Web-Based Solar System Orrery

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NASA has introduced a web-based orrery showing a real-time simulated view of our solar system, with planets, moons and spacecraft shown where they are right now. Go to solarsystem.nasa.gov and click on the solar system icon in the menu. The orrery is a lightweight, mobile-friendly version of NASA’s Eyes on the Solar System software. “This snapshot of our solar system focuses on active NASA planetary science missions and select ESA missions. Showcasing the entire operating NASA fleet is too much of a data wallop at the moment (but we are working on it). International missions such as Japan’s Akatsuki (orbiting Venus) and ESA’s BepiColombo (en route to Mercury) are not yet available.” The orrery is a WebGL application – it’s performance will be better on systems with accelerated graphics. Related Tweet: Go to https://t.co/abXYSA6T9t – hit the hamburger menu – and hit Orrery. New WebGL experience from the ‘Eyes….’ team. Lots more to come from the new engine behind it – but … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: First scout

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This entry is part 2 of 180 in the series Across the Universe

This column first ran in The Tablet in November 2017 In the month after its discovery we were able to train some of the largest telescopes in the world on the new visitor to our solar system (that I wrote about here), a small body whose orbit indicates that it is had come to us from outside our own solar system. “We’ve been expecting for twenty years to find some body on an orbit like this,” explained Brett Gladman to me. He’s an astronomer at the University of British Columbia who specializes in the faint distant objects of our solar system. (I was visiting Vancouver in November 2017.) He wasn’t surprised that its path was almost perpendicular to the plane where our sun’s planets orbit. There’s no reason why it couldn’t come from any direction, since it is not tied to our system. He wasn’t surprised that it was small, barely visible to our biggest telescopes. “In space, collisions mean … Continue reading →

Kentucky Science Conversations – Professor Kate Bulinski writes a guest blog

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This is the second “Kentucky Science Converstions” guest blog.  As mentioned in last week’s post, Prof. Gerry Williger, an astronomer at the University of Louisville here in Kentucky, and Louisville’s Archbishop Joseph Kurtz set in motion a series of ongoing conversations about science.  This conversation has included Williger, Kurtz, Tim Dowling, who studies planetary atmospheric dynamics at UofL, and Kate Bulinski, a geoscientist with the School of Environmental Studies at Bellarmine University in Louisville, and me. I of course had to encourage all of these folks to contribute posts to this blog. Today we have a guest post from Professor Kate Bulinski, who is is an Associate Professor of Geosciences in the School of Environmental Studies at Bellarmine University. She received her B.S. in Geoscience from The Pennsylvania State University in 2002 and her Ph.D. in Geology from University of Cincinnati in 2008. In addition to teaching classes for undergraduate students each semester, she pursues paleontological research often involving her students. … Continue reading →

Ultima Thule – resistance is futile

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  During World Space Week I was invited to do my workshop Pluto WOW !!!  for a small group of children .   I put the workshop together in order to highlight the incredible images sent back by the New Horizons Spacecraft.  This year it was impossible to resist including Ultima Thule the new flyby target of New Horizons. Pluto WOW ! When I was a child there were nine planets in the solar system , that was my reality. Pluto being the farthest planet was almost a myth as there were no proper images of it for many years.  The Hubble Space Telescope wonderful  as it is only managed unclear nondescript photographs. When New Horizons left Earth to flyby Pluto it was still a proper member of the planet family. Along that journey the status of Pluto was altered forever, when it was demoted to being merely a dwarf planet.   New Horizons continued its pioneering journey to discover what Pluto … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Tradition… and Pluto

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This entry is part 24 of 180 in the series Across the Universe

The following column was written in 2006, just after the IAU had voted to name Pluto a Dwarf. It ran in The Tablet in August, 2006. We ran it again in 2015, just before New Horizons went past Pluto. Now it has recently come out of hibernation on its way to a Kuiper Belt Object encounter next January. Never mind the 2,500 astronomers attending dozens of seminars and joint discussions about stars and galaxies in Prague; the news of the 2006 triennial General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) was all about the changing status of Pluto. General Assemblies are different from typical scientific congresses. Rather than being focused exclusively on presenting scientific results, the main point here is to decide on all the arbitrary but necessary definitions that let us talk to each other and understand each others’ data. For example, we’re worrying about tweaking definition of latitude and longitude on the Moon to match the the expected … Continue reading →

Turned toward the vastness

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[A version of this appeared at CatholicPhilly.com in July 2010.] On Friday, I walked onto the driveway to call the cat in for the night, peering under her favorite bushes, warmed by the brick wall of the house. I happened to look up. There, on a velvety deep cobalt sky, perfectly framed between two towering trees across the street, was a brilliant Venus and a slim crescent of the moon. The sight took my breath away, so much so that after a moment, I went back inside and pulled my husband out of bed to come see. As I sat on the driveway, watching the moon inexorably slip away, I remembered an evening sitting on a bench outside the Jesuit retreat house on Eastern Point in Massachusetts. The bench faced east, not west, so instead of watching the fiery exuberant swirls of red and gold over Gloucester bay, my view was one of an impending darkness extending further than I … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: By Paper, to the Stars

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This entry is part 175 of 180 in the series Across the Universe

This column was first published in The Tablet in June, 2004, and first published here in 2015… read the end to find out what happened! The people who design airplanes say that a plane can’t fly until its weight is matched by the weight of its paperwork. The same must be true for launching spacecraft to another planet. Last month [May 2004] I took part on a NASA panel in Washington DC, reviewing five competing plans to build a planetary probe; in the run-up to the panel I was shipped 30 pounds of paper to read. NASA’s “New Frontiers” program is a development of another project driven by piles of paperwork: the Solar System Decadal Survey commissioned by NASA and executed by the National Academy of Sciences in 2002. After hearing from hundreds of planetary scientists at meetings around the world (and reading white papers solicited and gathered by various international  societies) a committee of graybeards outlined where NASA should be … Continue reading →

Marvellous Mars Castletown House Ireland

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  Castletown House is a Georgian palace set in a magnificent landscape in Co Kildare.  The building is full of grace and elegance of times long past . That splendour coupled  with all that is required of a  building for public events makes Castletown House a special place. It was a pleasure to be invited to do a workshop in this excellent venue.  Particularly timely as it was on the eve of the launch of NASA’s InSight mission. The evening was set up for my Marvellous Mars drawing workshop. The  audience were families , mams, dads and children, a perfect combination. It was a beautiful, with late warm sunshine , a powder blue sky over the greenest of green trees. Flowers, shrubs and land stretching out over 120 acres that seemed to go on forever It occurred to me that perhaps my audience might be small due to the pleasant weather and bank holiday. However 42 people arrived , sat … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Planet Nine

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This entry is part 165 of 180 in the series Across the Universe

This column first ran in The Tablet in April 2016; this has been slightly edited. Planet Nine, whose possible existence was first broached in January 2016, has become a hot topic of speculation. By April of that year, one tabloid announced that comets perturbed by Planet Nine would soon lead to the demise of life on Earth! (Astronomer Phil Plait ran an amusing rebuttal in The New Scientist.) But, is there actually a Planet Nine? Recall, an Astronomical Unit (AU) is the distance from Earth to the sun. From the sun to Neptune, the farthest known planet, is 30 AU. Pluto is but one of a thousand balls of ice orbiting between 30 to 50 AU. But in 2003, Mike Brown and his team at Cal Tech found a body they named Sedna whose orbit comes no closer to the Sun than 76 AU, and which actually arcs out to nearly 1000 AU. It’s hard to imagine how it could … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Original Proof

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This entry is part 158 of 180 in the series Across the Universe

First published in The Tablet in February, 2005… and on The Catholic Astronomer several years ago. Note that Spirit and Opportunity, originally designed to be a 90 day mission, have now been in operation for more than 5000 days! In January [2005], the Opportunity rover that has been trundling across Mars came upon a pitted lump of iron and nickel, about the size of a basketball. The rover’s chemical tests confirmed that it had found an iron/nickel meteorite, a stray bit of a broken-up asteroid fallen from the sky, with a composition like those that have fallen onto the Earth. A lump of metallic iron is not what one would expect to find on Mars. The Martian atmosphere is rich in carbon dioxide; the oxygen from that carbon dioxide, and from the water we now know once flowed on the surface, should be enough to turn metallic iron into a rusty pile of iron oxide. And in fact, oxidized iron … Continue reading →