2015年9月30日 星期三
Seasonal Streaks Point to Recent Flowing Water on Mars
The Martian: How NASA Soars - and Stumbles - Simultaneously
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NASA Cancels B612 Sentinel Agreement and Then Picks JPL NEOcam
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NASA announces five Discovery proposals selected for further study
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ISS Daily Summary Report – 09/30/15
October 01, 2015 at 12:35AM
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NASA Awards Contract for Software Engineering Support at Goddard
September 30, 2015
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NASA Selects Investigations for Future Key Planetary Mission
September 30, 2015
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NASA Awards Contract for Engineering Software, Hardware
September 30, 2015
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The Inevitable Commercial Crew Train Wreck?
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The solar system at 1 kilometer per pixel: Can you identify these worlds? The answers
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A Fresh Perspective on an Extraordinary Cluster of Galaxies
Bloom With a View. Two of Them, in Fact.
Oh, I do so love a coincidence. And when it’s about imaging Earth from space, that’s even better.
I subscribe to NASA’s Earth Observatory Image of the Day (and you should, too!), which, oddly enough, posts an image of Earth every day. They’re almost always satellite shots, featuring various amazing portraits of our planet. As a satellite photo nerd I love it, and I learn a lot about Earth every time I see a new one. The cloud images alone are worth it.
One of the most spectacular and lovely kinds of photos they post are of phytoplankton blooms—huge bursts of growth (usually of cyanobacteria) in the ocean. Warmer waters can create conditions where nutrients and sunlight become abundant to the little planets, and they go forth and multiply. Blooms can be huge, hundreds of kilometers across.
The image above shows (a small part of) a bloom in the Baltic Sea, just north of Poland. It was taken by Landsat 8 on Aug. 11, and it’s not “true color,” that is, what your eye would see. The detectors used are sensitive to colors across a range of the spectrum, so the colors displayed are close to red, green, and blue, but there’s quite a bit of overlap (for example, the detector that sees in the green is also sensitive to yellow, and the blue one sees green as well). Still, the bloom is eerily beautiful. You can see airplane contrails and the wakes of ships in the original full-res image, too.
The spiral pattern is lovely, caused by eddies in the sea currents. Cyanobacteria are plants (more or less) so they flow along with the water.
The coincidence? The European Space Agency released a similar picture taken just a few days before, on Aug. 7, using the Sentinel-2 Earth-observing satellite:
Whoa. I’m not positive that’s the same swirl, but it’s from the same general area of the Baltic Sea (the Sentinel image is also part of a much larger image). Interestingly, both images from Landsat and Sentinel-2 show ships crossing their respective swirl; in each you can see the ship as a dot followed by a black trail.
Cyanobacterial blooms are important to study. They can rob water of oxygen and nutrients, and some phytoplanktons produce toxins that can be dangerous. And here we have two space agencies studying the same bloom at two different times with two different satellites! It’s really gratifying to see nations taking this sort of work seriously … especially when one faction of my own nation doesn’t.
We need to understand our planet as best we can. Not just because doing so produces such wonderful natural art, but because we are part of Nature ourselves, and we influence it just as it influences us. Understanding it is critical.
After all, Nature can live without us, but we can’t live without Nature.
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ISS Daily Summary Report – 09/29/15
September 30, 2015 at 12:44AM
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2015年9月29日 星期二
Supermoon Total Lunar Eclipse and Lightning Storm
NASA Cancels Space Act Agreement With B612 Foundation
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NASA Selects Contractor for Environmental, Medical Contract
September 29, 2015
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In Space No One Can Hear Space Advocates Scream
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Planetary Society's Mars Mission Takes Longer To Do Less
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Dark, Recurring Streaks on Walls of Garni Crater on Mars
Astrobiology Hearing Today
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Global Epic Eclipse
Well, despite some baseless fears, we’re still here after Sunday night’s lovely lunar eclipse.
It was quite nice here in Colorado; the Moon was still very low to the horizon when it started to pass into the darkest part of the Earth’s shadow. I was just finished setting up my Celestron Regal M2 80ED spotting ‘scope to watch when I saw an airplane approaching the rising Moon… and as I shot the video, to my surprise I got two planes transiting!
That was fun. The Moon was still yellowish as it rose due to atmospheric effects. It was just about the enter the darker part of the Earth’s shadow (called the umbra) but even then you can see the left side is darker and redder than the right.
I also did a live Periscope as the Moon darkened, winding up with over 8,000 people watching at different points. I love seeing so many folks interested in what’s going on in the sky!
I think my video is pretty cool, but master astrophotographer Thierry Legault did me one better. Well, more than one: He caught the International Space Station transiting the Moon during the eclipse!
That is so cool. He told me that, to the best of his knowledge, this is the first time anyone has caught the ISS transiting the Moon during a lunar eclipse on video.
I want to share a couple of photos, too. As the sky darkened, the eclipsed Moon rose through several thin cloud banks, and I liked the feel of this one:
You can see the eclipsed part of the Moon on the left. It helps sometimes to have something else in the field of view when you’re taking pictures like this. A cloud is nice, but sometimes something more recognizable can turn a nice shot into a fantastic one.
Like, say, this:
Wow. Yeah, sometimes it’s all about the framing.
If you want to learn more about these events, I talk all about them in my Crash Course Astronomy episode on eclipses. The next lunar eclipse visible to the US won’t be until 2018, but August 2017 will bring the Great American Solar Eclipse. Stay tuned for more on that.
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ISS Daily Summary Report – 09/28/15
September 29, 2015 at 12:38AM
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Mars Week Continues: We've Released Our 'Humans Orbiting Mars' Workshop Report
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2015年9月28日 星期一
NASA Ignores The Same Next Generation It Hypes
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Golden Spike: Another Space Commerce Casualty?
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Reaching The Other 99.99% About The Mars Thing
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Total Lunar Eclipse over Waterton Lake
Sometimes Fun Things Just Happen By Coincidence
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Planetary Society Does Not Want Humans on Mars
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NASA TV to Air Space Station Cargo Ship Launch, Docking
September 28, 2015
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NASA Announces Appointment of New Agency Chief Information Officer
September 28, 2015
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One Presidential Candidate Mentions Mars
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Not Everyone Wants To Be The Martian
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NASA's Mars Announcement: Present-day transient flows of briny water on steep slopes
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NASA Confirms Evidence That Liquid Water Flows on Today’s Mars
September 28, 2015
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The Big Mars News: Flowing Water on Mars, at Least Briefly
Scientists have found what they think is evidence of extant, if brief, flowing water on Mars.
In a NASA press conference on Monday, scientists claimed that images and spectra taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s HiRISE camera show what are called Recurrent Slope Lineae, or RSLs, straight dark streaks that run down the sides of craters and canyons on Mars. These features, which are a few meters across and hundreds of meters long, change with the seasons, becoming darker and more obvious in the spring and summer on the sides of crater walls facing the Sun. That strongly implies that warmth triggers the formation of the RSLs. The important finding: Scientists found evidence of salt deposits in these features, which in turn implies that briny, salty water is the force behind them. They think the darkening seen every spring is from water seepage!
If you want details, I wrote all about this Sunday in an article based on papers written by the scientists in question to be presented at a planetary science conference in Europe. I had not read the (embargoed) science papers, so what I wrote was based solely on those public papers, but it looks like I was right on the money.
Mind you, the detection of water here is indirect, through the dark streaks and the presence of salt. Still, the evidence they presented is very compelling, and their conclusions, in my opinion, likely to be correct. But there’s a problem, and it’s a big one: Where does the water come from?
We know there’s ice under the Martian surface. We see lots of evidence for it—it was seen directly by the Phoenix lander in 2008, and small asteroid impacts leave craters behind that excavate ice that can be seen. But Phoenix landed at high latitude, near the north pole where you’d expect ice, and the craters with ice only reach as far as midlatitude. But these RSLs are seen closer to the equator of Mars. Over time, the water ice there, to at least mild depths, should have disappeared, melting away.
Because of this, the authors of the work speculate that perhaps water is absorbed into the ground from the atmosphere, where it collects until there’s enough for it to flow—a process with the lovely name of deliquescence. The soil of Mars is loaded with a chemical called perchlorate, which is capable of absorbing water in this way, and perchlorates were found at the RSL sites.
So this idea ... holds water.
Still, the air on Mars is exceedingly thin, less than 1 percent of Earth’s. And there’s not much water in it, either, so it’s difficult to understand how enough water could collect to form these seepages. Although deliquescence is the preferred scenario by the scientists involved, they also admit the actual source of the water is still something of a mystery.
Opinion time: This is a wonderful discovery, and an important one. The origin of these features has been a mystery for a long time, and it does look like we’re finally starting to get a grip on it.
But it’s far from solved. Where does the water come from? How much is there? Is it just water, or are there other substances involved?
And what does this mean for the possibility for life on Mars? Well, in my opinion, it doesn’t change much. Not yet. We know Mars has lots of water ice, and it once had vast amounts of standing and flowing liquid water on its surface in the past. This doesn’t change that. Mars may once have had life, but we still don’t know, and don’t know if there’s life there now.
What it does change is the idea that there could be liquid water beneath the surface of Mars. This makes it less unlikely, I’d say, which I know sounds weak. But what we’ve seen here is temporary flowing water, not persistent liquid water. The bottom line is that we still don’t know if liquid water exists under the Martian surface or not.
But we’re learning. This is just one of many steps we’re taking in observing Mars. Remember, Mars is a planet, an entire world, with a rich history, diverse geography, and a lot of real estate. We’ve only just scratched the surface—in this case, almost literally—and there are great depths left to explore.
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Water Flows On The Surface of Mars
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Supermoon Eclipse in Washington
Dawn Journal: 8 Years in Space
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Supermoon Eclipse in New York City
2015年9月27日 星期日
Mars News: "Major Science Finding" To Be Announced Monday
By now, many of you have heard about some big announcement NASA is about to make about Mars. The news is embargoed until the press conference Monday (which you can watch live at 11:30 EDT), but of course speculation is rampant, especially since the press release says it’s a “major science finding”.
In the email NASA sent out, the names of some panelists were given: Alfred McEwen, Lujendra Ojha, and Mary Beth Wilhelm. McEwen is the Principal Investigator for the wonderful HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Ojha studies recurrent features on Mars that look very much like they were carved from water, like gullies down the sides of craters. Wilhelm studies many things, including the habitability of ancient Martian terrain.
As many people have pointed out on social media, at a European planetary science conference on Monday, McEwen and Ojha are presenting results of a study showing that seepage in crater walls appears to be seasonal, and most likely due to water. Not only that, but Ojha and Wilhelm are presenting results that show the presence of salts in crater wall gullies, too, implying strongly they are due to water leakage.
I’m posting this now to hopefully extinguish rampant speculation (what I write here is based on evidence, so call it mild speculation). I assume these new results will be a major part of the news conference, but there might be more as well.
I also wanted to give a little bit of background on these gullies, since they’re pretty cool. As far back as 2007, NASA announced they might be from water, though a year later a study was released indicating many might be better explained as dry grains flowing downhill. In 2010 more gullies popped up that looked like they could be from liquid flowing, but the evidence was still a bit circumstantial. We know water once flowed on Mars, a long time ago, and there’s plenty of evidence for ancient standing lakes and even oceans. Also, even now there’s lots of water ice just below the surface across a wide range of latitudes, too.
Salty water melts at lower temperatures than fresh water, so if that’s what lurks behind crater walls, then in the spring sunlight can warm the ground and cause seepage. The results being presented at the European conference question the idea of water ice under the surface being the cause, and suggest it may be from deliquescence; absorption from the atmosphere in the ground until the water can break through. That seems unlikely, but we’ll get more info during the press conference.
Mind you, as of right now we have never seen any evidence for the presence of extant liquid water on Mars. Even the temporary existence of water in a liquid state is scientifically interesting, even exciting. However, it’s also been found that a type of chemical called perchlorates is widespread in Martian soil, which makes the hunt for life a bit more of a problem. I expect that will come up in the press conference as well.
I’ll be listening in and will write up the news as soon as I can. Stay Tuned.
In the meantime, because why not, here’s my Crash Course Astronomy episode on Mars. Enjoy!
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Hey, I Can See My House From Here
I love posting pictures of the Earth from space. It’s fun to see things from a height, and get an overview of our planet. Volcanoes, lakes, deserts, cyanobacterial blooms … sometimes you need to take a step back (well, up) to see things for how they are.
But then you get a picture of some place you recognize, and suddenly it becomes personal.
To wit: On April 29 an astronaut on the International Space Station took a picture of me.
Can you see me? I’m in there. This photo shows a healthy chunk of west-central Colorado, where the midwestern plains meet the Rocky Mountains (north is more or less to the right). The big city on the left is Denver, and to the right, sitting right on the border between flat and steep, is Boulder. There’s a road extending almost straight down from Boulder (or in real directions, to the northeast) called 119, or Diagonal Highway. The city at the bottom is Longmont, and in between the two is the small town of Niwot. The Earth Observatory Picture of the Day, where I got this photo, also has an annotated map.
I’ve ridden my bike all through that part of this picture, and it’s a bit surreal to see it this way. The reservoir, smaller lakes, farmland … I’ve seen a lot of it from eye height, but not 400 kilometer high!
People think Denver is in the mountains, but it’s really quite a bit into the plains. Boulder sits right where the mountains pop up, which is one of many reasons it’s such an amazing place to live. The view is spectacular.
This picture lays it out so well! And I checked my calendar: On April 29 I was at home, which means I’m in this picture. So are roughly 3 million other people; most of the population of Colorado is in this picture.
Maybe you are too. Well, the odds are low unless you live near me. But a lot of the planet has been photographed this way, and those pictures are online. Go take a look! Maybe you can find a shot of your hometown.
And next time the space station is overhead, maybe they’re taking another one. Don’t forget to wave!
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2015年9月26日 星期六
M31 versus M33
Noel Hinners is Now a True Martian
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Crash Course Astronomy: Black Holes
OK, so here’s the thing about black holes: They’re weird.
Well, that’s not the only thing about black holes. And that’s the problem. There’s a lot to know about black holes, and it goes from simple to brain-melty pretty quickly. I had big plans for the Crash Course Astronomy episode about black holes, covering so many of the cool things about them.
After writing more than 3,000 words on them—the equivalent of about 25 minutes of footage—I realized I had a problem. A lot of stuff had to go. So I went through and cut this, excised that. What was left is, I hope, a pretty good primer on black holes, with the info you need to understand the basics.
The good news? Most of the stuff I cut will show up in later episodes. I’m pretty good about recycling electrons. If you’re impatient and want to know more about them now, then try these articles:
- Ten Things You Don’t Know About Black Holes
- Why Do Black Holes Have Such Strong Gravity?
- Weighing a Galactic Monster
- Let Me Hold You in My Anomalous Arms
- Sputtering Black Hole Caught by Hubble
- What Kind of Object Can Survive a Close Encounter With a Monster Black Hole?
- A Supermassive Black Hole’s Fiery and Furious Wind
- Follow-Up: Interstellar Mea Culpa (I made a boo-boo about black holes)
- Superfast Spinning Black Hole Tearing Up Space at Nearly the Speed of Light
- How Do You Weigh a Supermassive Black Hole?
- … or you could just search my blog for “black holes.” And stay tuned, because they'll turn up many more times in future episodes!
Oh, one more thing: In the video, at about the 8:30 mark, I talk about the perception of time near an object with gravity, and how it slows down. I say that someone near a black hole perceives time as moving more slowly than someone far away does. I should have phrased that differently; both people observe time to flow normally. To them. But they see each other's time flow rate change. Someone far away from the black hole sees the time flowing more slowly for the person near the black hole while the person close to the black hole sees the person's time far away flow more quickly. Time is relative; grammar isn't. I should've been more clear.
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2015年9月25日 星期五
Pluto's Snakeskin Terrain
NASA Prepares For Possible Government Shutdown
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NASA Selects Science Education Partners for STEM Agreements
September 25, 2015
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The solar system at 1 kilometer per pixel: Can you identify these worlds?
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Mars Needs Money
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Buying/Selling ULA: The Four Amigos Continue To Squabble
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The Nile at Night
Pluto. Oh My, Pluto.
I was going to write a big flowery introduction to preface this new image of Pluto from the New Horizons spacecraft, but screw that.
Just look at it. Seriously. Look.
That ridiculously gorgeous picture is actually a combination of three images shot by New Horizons, one each using a blue, red, and near-infrared filter. So this isn’t what you’d see with your own eyes if you flew past Pluto (and weren’t dead from hypothermic anoxia), but it’s still simply amazing. By the way, this is a very, very ensmallened version of the picture; click it to get a 2000 x 2000 pixel version.
Or, you could grab the 8000 x 8000 pixel shot. Y'know. If you want.
As usual, Emily Lakdawalla does a great job explaining all this. In a nutshell, it was taken by the Multi-spectral Visible Imaging Camera. It has several detectors on it, three of which are dedicated to seeing blue, red, and infrared. They use what’s called the “pushbroom” technique to take images, basically sweeping across an object like a scanner does when you scan a document. It’s a commonly used technique for spacecraft, so you don’t have to build a huge detector.
What can you say about this shot, though? Pluto is gorgeous! You can see the heart-shaped Sputnik Planum feature in the middle, and some terrain on the left that’s highly reflective in infrared (colored red in the photo). Those highlands are pocked with craters, in contrast to Sputnik, which is smooth — that’s an indicator of relative age; smooth terrain has probably been resurfaced, and so it’s younger.
I’m pretty interested in the higher surface features you can see that define the left side of the heart. What could cause such tall mountains so close to lower terrain?
And check out this close up of a region near the leftmost part of the heart:
Whoa. Mountains pop up higher than the nitrogen ice plain below… which isn’t as smooth as I first thought. It appears almost corrugated, like it’s stippled with dunes. There’s no word yet on what’s actually causing that; the ice might be sublimating (turning directly into a gas) which could cause a rippling effect.
Again, Emily has more close-ups and discussion, care of Alex Parker, the astronomer who created this jaw-dropping image. NASA has a few more detailed shots as well, including the highest-resolution map ever made of the surface of Pluto.
Remember, too, that new raw images are released every week on the New Horizons website. You should check there to see what’s hot off the interplanetary presses; it’ll take the better part of a year to get all the data back from the spacecraft. These marvels are just the beginning. It’s a whole new world out there on the edge of the main solar system. A lot more wonder awaits.
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SpaceX Static Fire of Upgraded Falcon 9
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ISS Daily Summary Report – 09/24/15
September 25, 2015 at 12:49AM
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LightSail Gets Backup Burn Wire for 2016 Mission
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2015年9月24日 星期四
LDN 988 and Friends
More Vaporware From The Space Advocate Community
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NASA Will Reveal a "Major Science Finding" About Mars on Monday
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Lose yourself in this high-resolution portrait of Pluto
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NASA to Announce Mars Mystery Solved
September 24, 2015
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JSC PAO Once Decided You Could Not See This Photo
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Can Congress Authorize Mining On Asteroids?
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A New Way To Do Mission Outreach
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Veil Nebula Supernova Remnant
Mega Hemorrhaging Total Lunar Eclipse Sept 27-28, 2015
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Ben Carson: Evolution Is Satanic and the Big Bang Is a Fairy Tale
At one point in time, GOP presidential candidate Ben Carson may have been best known as an excellent, even groundbreaking, neurosurgeon. In recent years, though, he’s done everything he can to throw that reputation away.
It won’t surprise regular readers to know I disagree with him on, well, almost everything. But recently he’s starting to get more heat about his religious views. He’s an outspoken creationist.
This actually goes way back. In 2006 he clearly stated his anti-evolutionary views and has repeated these claims many times since. In 2012 there was controversy over this when he was asked to give the commencement address at Emory University. In 2004 he said that people who accept evolution “dismiss ethics,” a comment he later backed down on a very tiny little bit (later saying they “might have more difficulty deriving where their ethics come from”).
I’d heard about all this before, but an article at BuzzFeed has something I hadn’t heard: In 2012, in a speech at an event called “Celebration of Creation,” he said that Darwin came up with evolutionary theory because the devil made him do it.
I mean that literally. He said, “I personally believe that this theory that Darwin came up with was something that was encouraged by the adversary.” The Adversary is a nickname for the devil; it’s the actual translation of the word “Satan.” So there’s that.
He also dismissed the Big Bang, calling it a “fairy tale.” The irony of this is palpable. When recently called on this claim, he dug in, saying (about people who think the Big Bang is true), “Here’s the key, I then say to them look, ‘I’m not gonna criticize you, you have a lot more faith then I have.’ I couldn’t, I don’t have enough faith to believe that.”
Wow. Where to start?
OK, how about this: The Big Bang is not something you believe in. It’s a scientific model, supported by a truly vast amount of evidence. It doesn’t take faith, it takes science (and, despite Carson’s claims, science is not faith-based).
Creationists who dismiss the Big Bang usually do so because they think the Earth is young, 6,000–10,000 years old. This belief is, to put it simply, wrong. We know the Earth is more than 4.5 billion years old, give or take a few million years. The evidence for this is overwhelming.
We also know the Universe itself is old; a huge number of independent lines of evidence make this clear. It doesn’t take faith to think the Big Bang is true, it takes a profound dismissal of all of science to think it isn’t.
Which brings us to evolution. Young Earth Creationists dismiss this as well due to the age issues, as well as others (for example, the Bible stating that God created Adam fully formed and in his image).
But evolution is a fact. Like the Big Bang, the evidence for it is overwhelming (it’s even been observed).
It bothers me greatly when a presidential candidate is so cavalier in dismissing facts. That’s a route we’ve been down before, and it leads to Very Bad Things.
As for Carson’s statement on ethics, well, humans were ethical long before monotheism came around. His claim that people who accept evolution is true might have difficulty with ethics is profoundly insulting to scientists.
The almost unutterable irony here is how Carson dismisses this all, talking about “high-faluting” scientists. But he was a neurosurgeon. His entire career owes its existence to science, yet he tosses out the men and women over the past few centuries whose expertise allowed him to benefit so greatly from his practice.
I know a lot of the Republican base is very religious, and they have every right to be. But fundamentalism is dangerous; it promotes clearly erroneous claims while simultaneously encouraging people to legislate those beliefs. We’ve seen what happens there; fittingly enough due to the antics of Bobby Jindal, another GOP presidential candidate. It shortchanges our children out of an education they’ll need to survive in our science- and technology-based society.
I also know that the vast majority of creationists have very basic misunderstandings about evolution, the Big Bang, and science in general; I addressed this in depth when I wrote my article “Answers for Creationists.” I tried very hard to be polite in that post, given I was dealing on a personal level with people’s personal beliefs.
I take a different stance when it’s a politician who espouses these views, especially when he’s running for the highest office in America. If someone wants to run this country, then he better show that he has a solid grasp on reality. Dismissing and actively denigrating strongly understood science—whether it’s astronomy, biology, or climatology—is at the very least cause to dump him.
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Towards a Jupiter Weather Forecast
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ISS Daily Summary Report – 09/23/15
September 24, 2015 at 12:48AM
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2015年9月23日 星期三
Antarctic Analemma
Supersonic Shock Waves of a T-38C Aircraft
Watch the Lunar Eclipse on Sept. 27–28!
On Sept. 27 and 28, the Moon will enter Earth’s shadow, creating a total lunar eclipse. These only happen a couple of times a year, and are a great event to watch.
First, the quick stuff you need: The Moon begins to enter the dark part of Earth’s shadow starting at 01:07 UTC on Sunday night/Monday morning. To be clear, for folks in the U.S. that’s Sunday night, starting at 9:07 p.m. Eastern time; for most of the country the Moon will be low to the eastern horizon. At that time you’ll start to see a dark “bite” taken out of the Moon on the part of it nearest the horizon (the lower left, again for Americans).
It’ll take just over an hour for the Moon to pass fully into the shadow, and the last sliver of it will slip into darkness at 02:11 UTC (10:11 Eastern). It’ll stay dark for more than an hour, and then start to be illuminated once again at 03:23 UTC (11:23 Eastern). “Last contact,” when it is out of Earth’s shadow, occurs at 04:27 UTC (00:27 Eastern, after midnight).
People in the western U.S. (west of Colorado) will see the Moon already in eclipse when it rises. Here’s a map to show if you’ll be able to view the eclipse:
“U1” is when the Moon begins to enter the dark part of the shadow (the umbra), so everyone east of that spot in the U.S. will see the whole eclipse. Everyone west of the line marked “U4” (when the last part of the Moon leaves the shadow) will miss the event. Sorry. We live on an opaque spinning planet, so someone always misses out. Anyway, the diagram below shows the Moon's path through the Earth's shadow.
You don’t need any special equipment to see this; just go outside and look at the Moon. (This is different than a solar eclipse, where you need eye protection from the bright Sun.) Having said that, I’ve always found binoculars to be best aid to viewing. The Moon can take on an odd three-dimensional appearance when you use binoculars during an eclipse, and it’s pretty cool to see. A telescope is great, too, if you have access to one. If there’s a local astronomy club or observatory near you, see if they’re running a star party for it.
I’ve written before about exactly how and why we get lunar eclipses; the dance of the Moon, Earth, and Sun has to play out just right for the Moon to move through Earth’s shadow in the sky. Go there to get details, but there’s one thing I want to emphasize.
When the Moon is fully eclipsed it usually turns red, though sometimes the effect is more subtle than other times. This is because from the Moon’s point of view the Earth is blocking the Sun, and sunlight gets filtered through the thin layer of Earth’s atmosphere, reddening it. If you were standing on the Moon, it’s like you’re seeing every sunrise and sunset on Earth all at once!
How about that?
You can read more about the eclipse at the Time and Date site, EarthSky (which separately lists the timing for the eclipse in different U.S. local time zones), and Wikipedia. Also, the Virtual Observatory will be running a live viewing of the event online, in case your weather isn’t cooperative. So will my friend Adam Block at the Mt. Lemmon SkyCenter.
Also, I just so happen to have done an entire episode of Crash Course Astronomy on eclipses. Watch!
I’ll note that this eclipse happens very close to when the Moon is at perigee, the part of its elliptical orbit when it’s closest to Earth. Its average distance from Earth (center to center) is about 384,000 kilometers, and during the eclipse it’ll be only 356,900 km distant, 7 percent closer than average. That means it’ll look 7 percent wider than average … but I doubt you’ll notice. If you took a picture when it’s at apogee (farthest from Earth) on Sept. 14—when it’s 406,500 km away—and then compared it with a picture taken on Sept. 28 you’d definitely see the difference! But just going out and looking during the eclipse you’re unlikely to be able to tell.
Of course, the Moon will be rising for many people in the U.S. at the start of the eclipse, so the Moon may look huge due to the well-known Moon Illusion. But don’t be fooled! A lot of websites will no doubt be hyping up the “Supermoon” (a full Moon at or near perigee), but don’t be taken in by them. The difference in size isn’t all that much.
Not to pooh-pooh any of this! Lunar eclipses are fun; they play out relatively slowly, so you can take a look, go inside for a few minutes, then go back outside to see more of the Moon gone. It’s a great opportunity to try your photography skills, and because you don’t need any equipment, it’s nice to get friends and family together outside to take a peek.
I strongly recommend marking your calendar. The next total lunar eclipse won’t happen until January 2018! So watch this one if you can.
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