Sunday Summary 9 March 2014
This week in the world above our heads
Welcome to Looking Up’s Sunday Summary — a quick recap of what you missed this week in the world above our heads, both on Medium and elsewhere on the web.
On Looking Up
Our biggest story this week was Project Orion — the story of how space engineers in the 1950s planned to launch a rocket on the shockwave of a series of nuclear explosions. Their plan could have sent men to Mars decades ago, but was killed over political fears.
We also wrote about the three potentially habitable exoplanets that have been found less than fifty light years from Earth. Gliese 180c, thirty-eight light years away, Gliese 422b, forty-one light years away, and Gliese 682b, just seventeen light years away, could all be potential targets for eventual human colonisation — but we’re a long way away from that still.
Meanwhile, the astronauts on the International Space Station are likely looking down at what’s happening in the Crimea with dismay — because Russia is the only country in the world with the capability to send astronauts to and from the ISS. Ukraine has become an international space situation.
We may not need to worry though — NASA has come out on record as saying that its relationship with its Russian buddies is ‘normal’. Russia hasn’t yet commented.
More than 20,000 people signed up when a Dutch company began work on a one-way mission to Mars. Who are these people? You can meet five of them in a fantastic 11-minute documentary, titled Mars One Way.
In the asteroid belt, Hubble has managed to grab some pictures of an asteroid undergoing disintegration. We don’t think it’s due to a collision, or warming up, but simply because sunlight over millennia has made it spin too fast and now it can’t cope with the centrifugal force.
Finally, in the Cloud Index this week, we profiled stratocumulus — the lumpy, leaden clouds that often appear in the morning and can herald bad weather to come.
Elsewhere on the web
Airships are about to revolutionise science, according to a new report published in Technology Review. Huge blimps could patrol the upper atmosphere at a faction of the cost of a satellite, but we need some motivation to get things started — Sarah Miller believes an X-Prize style competition could be the kick up the backside that the technology needs.
Obama made his request for NASA’s 2015 budget this week, and Dan Leone at Space.com has a nice summary of what it means. In short, it would keep most of the largest space programs going, while making preparations for some major new missions. For a full breakdown, you should also check out M129k’s analysis on /r/space.
One of the most intriguing items in the budget is $15 million for early work on a potential mission to Jupiter’s icy moon Europa. A probe would be launched in the 2020s which would arrive in the 2030s. It might be a non-starter, explains Becky Ferreira on Motherboard, but it’s worth keeping an eye on.
The Space Shuttle Colombia disintegrated in January 2003 in what is undoubtedly the space program’s darkest hour in recent times. On Ars Technica, Lee Hutchinson narrates what happened on that fateful day as well as sharing the untold story of a rescue mission that could have saved the shuttle.
Astronomers say they’ve seen powerful sparks in the distant reaches of the Universe. But nobody is sure how these sparks form or even if they really come from space at all. The Physics arXiv Blog on Medium has dug in to the latest work on the topic to see if it can find some more answers.
Meanwhile, the Messier Mondays on Ethan Siegel’s Starts With A Bang are getting better and better, dedicated to each of the wonders that make up the Messier Catalogue. This week, Siegel profiles Virgo’s brightest galaxy, M49.
Finally, the BBC’s James Morgan has been looking into why scientists are reporting lightning flashes that appear moments before earthquakes strike. They could be triggered by shifting soil layers, apparently — a phenomenon which is being tested in tubs of flour.
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