I Mention New Horizons In Today’s Podcast But Here’s Some More Up-to-date Info!

No matter where you hang your stockings, I wish you a very Merry Christmas!

July 16th, 1969, 8:32 AM - Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin Jr. lift off aboard Saturn V SA-506.

Scientists Discover The Oldest, Largest Body Of Water In Existence–In Space

Scientists have found the biggest and oldest reservoir of water ever–so large and so old, it’s almost impossible to describe.

The water is out in space, a place we used to think of as desolate and desert dry, but it’s turning out to be pretty lush.

Researchers found a lake of water so large that it could provide each person on Earth an entire planet’s worth of water–20,000 times over. Yes, so much water out there in space that it could supply each one of us all the water on Earth–Niagara Falls, the Pacific Ocean, the polar ice caps, the puddle in the bottom of the canoe you forgot to flip over–20,000 times over.

The water is in a cloud around a huge black hole that is in the process of sucking in matter and spraying out energy (such an active black hole is called a quasar), and the waves of energy the black hole releases make water by literally knocking hydrogen and oxygen atoms together.

The official NASA news release describes the amount of water as “140 trillion times all the water in the world’s oceans,“ which isn’t particularly helpful, except if you think about it like this.

That one cloud of newly discovered space water vapor could supply 140 trillion planets that are just as wet as Earth is.

Mind you, our own galaxy, the Milky Way, has about 400 billion stars, so if every one of those stars has 10 planets, each as wet as Earth, that’s only 4 trillion planets worth of water.

The new cloud of water is enough to supply 28 galaxies with water.

Truly, that is one swampy patch of intergalactic space.

Equally stunning is the age of the water factory. The two teams of astrophysicists that found the quasar were looking out in space a distance of 12 billion light years. That means they were also looking back in time 12 billion years, to when the universe itself was just 1.6 billion years old. They were watching water being formed at the very start of the known universe, which is to say, water was one of the first substances formed, created in galactic volumes from the earliest time. Given water’s creative power to shape geology, climate and biology, that’s dramatic.

“It’s another demonstration that water is pervasive throughout the universe, even at the very earliest times,” says Matt Bradford, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and leader of one of the teams that made the discovery. (The journal article reporting the discovery is titled, without drama, “The Water Vapor Spectrum of APM 08279+5255: X-Ray Heating and Infrared Pumping over Hundreds of Parsecs.”)

It is not as if you’d have to wear foul-weather gear if you could visit this place in space, however. The distances are as mind-bogglingly large as the amount of water being created, so the water vapor is the finest mist–300 trillion times less dense than the air in a typical room.

And it’s not as if this intergalactic water can be of any use to us here on Earth, of course, at least not in the immediate sense. Indeed, the discovery comes as a devastating drought across eastern Africa is endangering the lives of 10 million people in Somalia, Kenya, and Ethiopia. NASA’s water discovery should be a reminder that if we have the sophistication to discover galaxies full of water 12 billion light years away, we should be able to save people just an ocean away from drought-induced starvation.

The NASA announcement is also a reminder how quickly our understanding of the universe is evolving and how much capacity for surprise nature still has for us. There’s water on Mars, there’s water jetting hundreds of miles into space from Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons, there are icebergs of water hidden in the polar craters of our own Moon. And now it turns out that a single quasar has the ability to manufacture galaxies full of water.

But it was only 40 years ago, in 1969, that scientists first confirmed that water existed anywhere besides Earth.

Pluto is Still Legally a Planet (Whenever it Passes Over New Mexico) | Nerdist

August 24, 2006 was a dark day for Pluto enthusiasts. It was on that day that the International Astronomical Union established three conditions a celestial body must meet in order to be considered a planet. A planet must orbit around the sun, it must be massive enough to be rounded by its own gravity, and it must have "cleared the neighborhood" around its orbit, which means, simply put, that it must have a certain amount of gravitational pull. Pluto does not meet the third condition, so once those rules were put in place, Pluto was demoted to "dwarf planet," 75 years after its discovery. Hearts everywhere were broken, as the ninth planet was sadly no longer so. What is My Very Excellent Mother going to serve us nine of now? That's not a problem in New Mexico, who has taken a Jerry Smith-like stance and declared that, in some instance, they will still legally consider Pluto to be a full-fledged planet (via Reddit). In 2007, the state's house of representatives voted on a piece of

Did you know the government of New Mexico still considers Pluto to be a planet? In fact March 13th is “Pluto Planet Day”! So mark your calendars, it’s coming up.

Ep. 12 Longitude - HD and the Void

The hardest part of determining longitude was figuring out how sailors could find their longitudinal coordinates at sea. There were a lot of methods proposed but adding a ship into the equation makes precision difficult. Learn about the Longitude ...

The hardest part of determining longitude was figuring out how sailors could find their longitudinal coordinates at sea. There were a lot of methods proposed but adding a ship into the equation makes precision difficult. Learn about the Longitude Act of 1714 and how, even though this podcast loves astronomy, the astronomical method might not always be the best option.

Below the cut are my sources, music credits, a timeline of the astronomers and engineers and clockmakers I mention, a vocab list, a really cool resource that lets you drag continents all over a flattened map of Earth to compare their sizes at different latitudes, and the transcript of this episode. Let me know what you think I should research next by messaging me here, tweeting at me at @HDandtheVoid, or asking me to my face if you know me in real life. And please check out the podcast on iTunes, rate it or review it if you’d like, subscribe, and maybe tell your friends about it if you think they’d like to listen!

(My thoughts on the next episode were the Voyager golden records, space race history, the transit of Venus, or maybe something about the Moon landing. I’m loving Edmond Halley again these days, too. I’m prepping to interview a friend about her graduate-level research into the history of the universe and possibly dark matter, too. Let me know by the 20th and I’ll hopefully have the next podcast up on September 25th! If not then, I’ll push for October 2nd.)

Glossary

azimuth -  a section of the horizon measured between a fixed point and the vertical circle passing through the center of an object. See example in the link. 

equator - Earth’s zero line of latitude. It’s the place on Earth where the Sun is directly overhead at noon on the vernal and autumnal equinoxes.

kamal - an Arabic navigation tool consisting of a knotted string and a piece of wood. A navigator would tie a knot in the string and, by holding it in their teeth, sight the North Star along the top of the wooden piece and the horizon along the bottom. To return home, the navigator would sail north or south to bring Polaris to the altitude they had observed in their home port, then turn left or right and sail down the latitude, keeping Polaris at a constant angle. Over time, Arab navigators started tying knots at regular intervals of a fingerwidth, called an issbah, that’s about 1 degree and 36 minutes.

magnetosphere - an invisible barrier that surrounds a celestial objet. It is often generated by the movement of the liquid metal core of the object. Around a planet, it deflects high-energy, charged particles called cosmic rays that can either come from the Sun or, less often, from interstellar space.

prime meridian - Earth’s zero degree of longitude. In current maps and time zones, this invisible, imaginary line runs through London, England.

sextant - a device used to determine an observer’s location based on the observation of a known celestial object and a lot of calculation. It is still in use by sailors.

tropic of cancer - a line of latitude that marks where the Sun will be at noon on the summer solstice.

tropic of capricorn - a line of latitude that marks where the Sun will be at noon on the winter solstice.

Script/Transcript

Sources

Longitude at Sea via The Galileo Project at Rice University

Vitamin C necessity via University of Maryland Medical Center

Scurvy via NHS

Scurvy via the Encyclopedia Britannica online

An interactive map that shows how our current map distorts land masses by letting you compare different countries’ sizes.

Sobel, Dava. Longitude. Walker & Co.; New York, 1995.

“anyone living below the Equator would melt into deformity from the horrible heat” (3).

“It simply urged Parliament to welcome potential solutions from any field of science or art, put forth by individuals or groups of any nationality, and to reward success handsomely” (53).

Timeline

Claudius Ptolemy, Greek (100-170 CE)

Johannes Werner (in Latin, Ioannis Vernerus), German (1468-1522)

Tycho Brahe, Danish (1541-1601)

Galileo Galilei, Italian (1564-1642)

Giovanni Cassini (in French, Jean-Dominique Cassini), Italian/French (1625-1712)

Christiaan Huygens, Dutch (1629-1695)

Sir Isaac Newton, English (1642-1726/7)

Ole Rømer, Danish (1644-1710)

John Flamsteed, English (1646-1719)

Edmond Halley, English (1656-1742)

John Hadley, English (1682-1744)

John Harrison, English (1693-1776)

Thomas Godfrey, American (1704-1749)

John Bird, English (1709-1776)

Larcum Kendall, English (1719-1790)

James Cook, English (1728-1779)

Nevil Maskelyne, English (1732-1811)

John Arnold, English (1736-1799)

Thomas Earnshaw, English (1749-1829)

Intro Music: ‘Better Times Will Come’ by No Luck Club off their album Prosperity

Outro Music: ‘Fields of Russia’ by Mutefish off their album On Draught

Stars Born in Winds from Supermassive Black Holes

ESO - European Southern Observatory logo. 27 March 2017 ESO’s VLT spots brand-new type of star formation

Artist’s impression of stars born in winds from supermassive black holes

Observations using ESO’s Very Large Telescope have revealed stars forming within powerful outflows of material blasted out from supermassive black holes at the cores of galaxies. These are the first confirmed observations of stars forming in this kind of extreme environment. The discovery has many consequences for understanding galaxy properties and evolution. The results are published in the journal Nature. A UK-led group of European astronomers used the MUSE and X-shooter instruments on the Very Large Telescope (VLT) at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile to study an ongoing collision between two galaxies, known collectively as IRAS F23128-5919, that lie around 600 million light-years from Earth. The group observed the colossal winds of material — or outflows — that originate near the supermassive black hole at the heart of the pair’s southern galaxy, and have found the first clear evidence that stars are being born within them [1]. Such galactic outflows are driven by the huge energy output from the active and turbulent centres of galaxies. Supermassive black holes lurk in the cores of most galaxies, and when they gobble up matter they also heat the surrounding gas and expel it from the host galaxy in powerful, dense winds [2]. “Astronomers have thought for a while that conditions within these outflows could be right for star formation, but no one has seen it actually happening as it’s a very difficult observation,” comments team leader Roberto Maiolino from the University of Cambridge. “Our results are exciting because they show unambiguously that stars are being created inside these outflows.”

Artist’s impression of stars born in winds from supermassive black holes

The group set out to study stars in the outflow directly, as well as the gas that surrounds them. By using two of the world-leading VLT spectroscopic instruments, MUSE and X-shooter, they could carry out a very detailed study of the properties of the emitted light to determine its source. Radiation from young stars is known to cause nearby gas clouds to glow in a particular way. The extreme sensitivity of X-shooter allowed the team to rule out other possible causes of this illumination, including gas shocks or the active nucleus of the galaxy. The group then made an unmistakable direct detection of an infant stellar population in the outflow [3]. These stars are thought to be less than a few tens of millions of years old, and preliminary analysis suggests that they are hotter and brighter than stars formed in less extreme environments such as the galactic disc. As further evidence, the astronomers also determined the motion and velocity of these stars. The light from most of the region’s stars indicates that they are travelling at very large velocities away from the galaxy centre — as would make sense for objects caught in a stream of fast-moving material. Co-author Helen Russell (Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge, UK) expands: “The stars that form in the wind close to the galaxy centre might slow down and even start heading back inwards, but the stars that form further out in the flow experience less deceleration and can even fly off out of the galaxy altogether.” The discovery provides new and exciting information that could better our understanding of some astrophysics, including how certain galaxies obtain their shapes [4]; how intergalactic space becomes enriched with heavy elements [5]; and even from where unexplained cosmic infrared background radiation may arise [6]. Maiolino is excited for the future: “If star formation is really occurring in most galactic outflows, as some theories predict, then this would provide a completely new scenario for our understanding of galaxy evolution.” Notes: [1] Stars are forming in the outflows at a very rapid rate; the astronomers say that stars totalling around 30 times the mass of the Sun are being created every year. This accounts for over a quarter of the total star formation in the entire merging galaxy system. [2] The expulsion of gas through galactic outflows leads to a gas-poor environment within the galaxy, which could be why some galaxies cease forming new stars as they age. Although these outflows are most likely to be driven by massive central black holes, it is also possible that the winds are powered by supernovae in a starburst nucleus undergoing vigorous star formation. [3] This was achieved through the detection of signatures characteristic of young stellar populations and with a velocity pattern consistent with that expected from stars formed at high velocity in the outflow. [4] Spiral galaxies have an obvious disc structure, with a distended bulge of stars in the centre and surrounded by a diffuse cloud of stars called a halo. Elliptical galaxies are composed mostly of these spheroidal components. Outflow stars that are ejected from the main disc could give rise to these galactic features. [5] How the space between galaxies — the intergalactic medium — becomes enriched with heavy elements is still an open issue, but outflow stars could provide an answer. If they are jettisoned out of the galaxy and then explode as supernovae, the heavy elements they contain could be released into this medium. [6] Cosmic-infrared background radiation, similar to the more famous cosmic microwave background, is a faint glow in the infrared part of the spectrum that appears to come from all directions in space. Its origin in the near-infrared bands, however, has never been satisfactorily ascertained. A population of outflow stars shot out into intergalactic space may contribute to this light. More information: This research was presented in a paper entitled “Star formation in a galactic outflow” by Maiolino et al., to appear in the journal Nature on 27 March 2017. The team is composed of R. Maiolino (Cavendish Laboratory; Kavli Institute for Cosmology, University of Cambridge, UK), H.R. Russell (Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge, UK), A.C. Fabian (Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge, UK), S. Carniani (Cavendish Laboratory; Kavli Institute for Cosmology, University of Cambridge, UK), R. Gallagher (Cavendish Laboratory; Kavli Institute for Cosmology, University of Cambridge, UK), S. Cazzoli (Departamento de Astrofisica-Centro de Astrobiología, Madrid, Spain), S. Arribas (Departamento de Astrofisica-Centro de Astrobiología, Madrid, Spain), F. Belfiore ((Cavendish Laboratory; Kavli Institute for Cosmology, University of Cambridge, UK), E. Bellocchi (Departamento de Astrofisica-Centro de Astrobiología, Madrid, Spain), L. Colina  (Departamento de Astrofisica-Centro de Astrobiología, Madrid, Spain), G. Cresci (Osservatorio Astrofisico di Arcetri, Firenze, Italy), W. Ishibashi (Universität Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland), A. Marconi (Università di Firenze, Italy; Osservatorio Astrofisico di Arcetri, Firenze, Italy), F. Mannucci (Osservatorio Astrofisico di Arcetri, Firenze, Italy), E. Oliva (Osservatorio Astrofisico di Arcetri, Firenze, Italy), and E. Sturm (Max-Planck-Institut für Extraterrestrische Physik, Garching, Germany). ESO is the foremost intergovernmental astronomy organisation in Europe and the world’s most productive ground-based astronomical observatory by far. It is supported by 16 countries: Austria, Belgium, Brazil, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Finland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, along with the host state of Chile. ESO carries out an ambitious programme focused on the design, construction and operation of powerful ground-based observing facilities enabling astronomers to make important scientific discoveries. ESO also plays a leading role in promoting and organising cooperation in astronomical research. ESO operates three unique world-class observing sites in Chile: La Silla, Paranal and Chajnantor. At Paranal, ESO operates the Very Large Telescope, the world’s most advanced visible-light astronomical observatory and two survey telescopes. VISTA works in the infrared and is the world’s largest survey telescope and the VLT Survey Telescope is the largest telescope designed to exclusively survey the skies in visible light. ESO is a major partner in ALMA, the largest astronomical project in existence. And on Cerro Armazones, close to Paranal, ESO is building the 39-metre European Extremely Large Telescope, the E-ELT, which will become “the world’s biggest eye on the sky”. Links: ESOcast 101 Light: Stars found in black hole blasts http://www.eso.org/public/videos/eso1710a/ Research paper in Nature: http://www.eso.org/public/archives/releases/sciencepapers/eso1710/eso1710a.pdf Photos of the VLT: http://www.eso.org/public/images/archive/category/paranal/ ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT): http://www.eso.org/public/teles-instr/paranal-observatory/vlt/ MUSE instrument: http://www.eso.org/public/teles-instr/paranal-observatory/vlt/vlt-instr/muse/ X-shooter instrument: http://www.eso.org/public/teles-instr/vlt/vlt-instr/x-shooter/ Image, Video, Text, Credits: ESO/Richard Hook/Cavendish Laboratory, Kavli Institute for Cosmology University of Cambridge/Roberto Maiolino/M. Kornmesser. Best regards, Orbiter.ch Full article

The Milky Way rising over Badlands National Park Keith Duvall

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Ep. 28 Tidal Forces - HD and the Void

Tidal forces are not only the cause of ocean tides, but affect how satellites orbit objects in space, and they can even tear some objects apart under their extreme stresses. Learn about types of tides on Earth and in our solar system.

This episode’s been a long time coming because the topic’s come up before. I originally conceived of this podcast as a way for me to learn about space things I’d always taken for granted, and truly, there is nothing closer to home that I’ve just agreed to believe than the statement that the tides are affected by the Moon. What? How? Why? All these questions and some I didn’t even realize I had will be answered in this episode on tidal forces!

Below the cut are my standard glossary, transcript, sources, and music credits. Send me any topic suggestions via Tumblr message (you don’t need an account for it!). You can also tweet at me on Twitter at @HDandtheVoid, or you can ask me to my face if you know me. Subscribe on iTunes to get the new episodes of my maybe now monthly-updated podcast (we’ll see how the weeks unfold), and please please please rate and review it. Go ahead and tell friends if you think they’d like to hear it, too!

(My thoughts on the next episode are Stephen Hawking and his theories, or famous comets. The next episode will go up in September—ideally, September 10th!)

Glossary

barycenter - the common center of mass between two objects that allows them to orbit.

Roche limit - the distance in which a celestial body will disintegrate because of a second celestial body's tidal forces exceeding the first body's gravitational self-attraction, or the force that’s holding it together. Within the Roche limit, orbiting material disperses and forms rings, like how Saturn’s rings are within the Roche zone; outside the limit, material tends to coalesce.

spaghettification - when extreme tidal forces pull an object apart in space.

tidal force - an apparent force (sometimes also called the differential force) that stretches a body towards another, more gravitationally-strong body’s center of mass. This can cause such diverse phenomena as tides, tidal locking, breaking celestial bodies apart to form ring systems within a Roche limit, and in extreme cases, spaghettification. It arises because the gravitational force exerted on one body by another is not constant across its parts: the nearest side is attracted more strongly than the farthest side.

Types of ocean tides:

diurnal tide - a daily tidal cycle with only one high and low tide each lunar day, and a period of a little over 24 hours.

meteorological tide - a tidal change due to weather patterns. Wind, or unusually high or low barometric pressure causes variations between the actual sea level and its predicted height.

mixed tide - a daily tidal cycle with two high and low tides that differ in their peaks. This difference in height between successive high or low tides is called the diurnal inequality. They have a period of 12 hours and 25 minutes.

neap tide - a type of bi-monthly tidal cycle that occurs when the Sun, Earth, and Moon are positioned at a 90-degree angle, so the tidal forces of the Sun are acting against the tidal forces of the Moon. During a neap tide, the difference between high tide and low tide is the least extreme.

semidiurnal tide - a daily tidal cycle with two nearly equal high tides and low tides every lunar day. They have a period of 12 hours and 25 minutes.

spring tide - a type of bi-monthly tidal cycle that occurs when the Sun, Earth, and Moon line up so that the gravitational forces of Sun and Moon are working together to form a large tidal bulge. During a spring tide, the difference between high tide and low tide is at its maximum.

tidal locking - when long-term interaction between two co-orbiting astronomical bodies causes at least one of the bodies to rotate in such a way that one face of the body is always pointed at the body it’s orbiting. This is also called gravitational locking or captured rotation. An example is that the same side of the Moon always faces the Earth, and its synchronous rotation means that it takes just as long to rotate around its own axis as it does to revolve around the Earth.

Script/Transcript

Sources

Tidal Cycles in Tides Explained via beltoforian.de

“a tide is a distortion in the shape of one body induced by the gravitational pull of another nearby object.”

Meteorological effects on tides via the New Zealand Government website

Tides and Water Levels via the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)

Tides by R. Nave, my dude, my guy, my friend and yours, of Georgia State University

The Tidal Force by Neil deGrasse Tyson via Hayden Planetarium (Nov 1995)

“A mild increase in distance between two objects can make a large difference in the strength of the tidal force. For example, if the Moon were just twice its current distance from us, then its tidal force on Earth would decrease by a factor of eight. At its current average distance of 240,000 miles from Earth, the Moon manages to create sizable atmospheric, oceanic, and crustal tides by attracting the part of Earth nearest the Moon more strongly than the part of Earth that is farthest. (The Sun is so far away that in spite of its generally strong gravity, its tidal force on Earth amounts to less than half that of the Moon.) The oceans respond most visibly in being stretched toward the direction of the Moon.” 

“When Earth's rotation slows down until it exactly matches the orbital period of the Moon, then Earth will no longer be rotating within its oceanic tidal bulge and the Earth-Moon system will have achieved a double tidal lock. In what sounds like an undiscovered wrestling hold, double tidal locks are energetically favorable (like a ball coming to rest at the bottom of a hill), and are thus common in the universe.”

Forget “Earth-Like”—We’ll First Find Aliens on Eyeball Planets via Nautilus (Feb 2015)

High Tide on Io! via NASA (Mar 2012)

Tidal forces and spaghettification via NASA handout

Spaghettification via Cosmic Funnies

Single atoms feel tidal force via Physics World (May 2017)

Robbins, Tom. Still Life with Woodpecker. Bantam Books: New York, 1980.

“Being four times larger than the moon, the earth appeared to dominate. Caught in the earth’s gravitational web, the moon moved around the earth and could never get away. Yet, as any half-awake materialist well knows, that which you hold holds you.”

Sobel, Dava. The Planets. Viking: NY, 2005.

Intro Music: ‘Better Times Will Come’ by No Luck Club off their album Prosperity

Background Music: ‘Sad Business’ by Patients aka Ben Cooper, who primarily releases music as Radical Face but also has at least three other bands or band names he’s working with/has released music as.

Filler Music: ‘It’s Getting Boring by the Sea’ by Blood Red Shoes off their album Box of Secrets

Outro Music: ‘Fields of Russia’ by Mutefish off their album On Draught

Ep. 30 Coriolis Effect - HD and the Void

The Coriolis force is a force in physics that has profound impact on us here on Earth. Listen to hear how this apparent force has influence over the weather, tides, and even some creatures. I refuse to talk about the formulas surrounding it but I ...

We’re back in 2019 with an episode that would have been more appropriate to release during hurricane season: a discussion of the Coriolis force! This force was observed centuries ago but takes its name from the scientist who first considered it in terms of theory and physics. It has an impact on a vast range of natural phenomena, from weather patterns to ocean waves to the flights of flies and moths.

Below the cut are the glossary, transcript, a timeline of the people I mention, sources, and music credits. Send me any topic suggestions via Tumblr message (you don’t need an account to do this, just submit as anonymous). You can also tweet at me on Twitter at @HDandtheVoid, or you can ask me to my face if you know me in real life. Subscribe on iTunes to get the new episodes of my so-far-monthly-updated podcast, and please please please rate and review it. Go ahead and tell friends if you think they’d like to hear it, too!

(My thoughts on the next episode are Stephen Hawking, Hedy Lamarr, or famous comets. The next episode will go up in late February.)

Glossary

Coriolis force - a force in a rotating system that acts perpendicular to the direction of motion and to the axis of rotation. On Earth, this tends to deflect moving objects to the right in the Northern Hemisphere and to the left in the Southern Hemisphere.

Ekman transport - the net motion of fluid that results from the balance between Coriolis and turbulent drag forces.

Eötvös effect - the change in perceived gravitational force that results from eastbound or westbound movement on Earth’s surface.

Kelvin waves - an ocean wave that is trapped at the Earth’s equator and along vertical boundaries like coastlines. They move towards the equator when they have a western boundary; towards the poles when they have an eastern boundary; and make a whirlpool when they have a closed boundary, moving counterclockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere.

Lagrange points -  five points where three bodies can orbit each other, yet stay in the same position relative to each other in a stable configuration. L1-L3 are in line with each other, while L4 and L5 are at the points of equilateral triangles in the configuration.

prograde - when a planet spins from east to west.

Rossby number - used to determine the relative importance of the centrifugal and Coriolis forces in maps of weather patterns. A small Rossby number indicates that a weather system is strongly affected by Coriolis forces, while a large Rossby number signifies that a system is affected by inertial and centrifugal forces.

Transcript

Timeline

Giovanni Battista Riccioli, Italian (1598-1671)

Francesco Maria Grimaldi, Italian (1618-63)

Joseph-Louis Lagrange, French (1736-1813)

Gaspard-Gustave de Coriolis, French (1792-1843)

Sir William Thompson, AKA Lord Kelvin, Scots-Irish (1824-1907)

Baron Loránd Eötvös de Vásárosnamény, Hungarian (1848-1919)

Ottokar Tumlirz, Austrian (1856-1928)

Fridtjof Nansen, Norwegian (1861-1930)

Vagn Walfrid Ekman, Swedish (1874-1954)

Carl-Gustaf Arvid Rossby, Swedish-born American (1898-1957)

Sources

Coriolis Effect via the University of Oregon

Coriolis Force via Wikipedia

Coriolis effect, two centuries before Coriolis via Physics Today (Aug 2011)

Gaspard-Gustave de Coriolis via Wikipedia

Coriolis effect via National Geographic

Hurricane, cyclone, typhoon, tornado – what’s the difference? via African Reporter (Sep 2017)

Wang, B. Kelvin Waves. University of Hawaii: Honolulu, 2002.

Ocean in Motion: Ekman Transport Background via NASA

Ekman transport via Wikipedia

What is a Geodesist? via Environmental Science

“The Second Coming” by W. B. Yeats via Poetry Foundation

Intro Music: ‘Better Times Will Come’ by No Luck Club off their album Prosperity

Filler Music: ‘Ambergris’ by Tipper off their EP Fathoms

Outro Music: ‘Fields of Russia’ by Mutefish off their album On Draught

NASA’s Hybrid Computer Enables Raven’s Autonomous Rendezvous Capability

ISS - International Space Station patch. March 21, 2017 A hybrid computing system developed at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, is the enabling technology behind an ambitious experiment testing a relative navigation and autonomous docking capability known as Raven.

Image above: This panorama of the International Space Station was composed by piecing together images taken by Raven’s Visible Camera. These images were processed by a hybrid computing platform, SpaceCube 2.0. Image Credit: NASA. Developed by the Satellite Servicing Projects Division, or SSPD, the carry-on luggage-sized module was launched February 19 aboard SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft, along with other experiments deployed outside the International Space Station on an experiment pallet. Raven is testing and maturing visible, infrared and lidar sensors and machine-vision algorithms; the module will bring NASA one step closer to realizing the groundbreaking autopilot capability that can be applied to many NASA missions for decades to come. Since NASA’s pre-Apollo days, the agency has successfully docked spacecraft while they speed through space. However, all operations involved humans who orchestrated the movements from the ground. Raven’s objective is to develop and mature technologies that ultimately will relieve human dependency and give spacecraft the ability to catch up with one another and dock autonomously in real time. “The Raven module is equipped with technology that lays the foundation for a relative navigation system,” said Goddard Director Christopher Scolese. “What some may not fully appreciate is the fact that Raven’s sensors could not do their job if it weren’t for another very effective technology called SpaceCube. The SpaceCube processor is the behind-the-scenes technology that is making this important demonstration possible.” SpaceCube is a reconfigurable, very fast flight computing platform that Goddard technologists first demonstrated during a relative navigation experiment on the Hubble Servicing Mission-4 in 2009. During the Raven experiment, the module’s “sensors serve as the eyes. SpaceCube acts as the brain, analyzing data and telling components what to do,” said Ben Reed, deputy division director of SSPD. The “eyes” and the “brain” together create the autopilot capability. Since its initial development, SpaceCube has evolved into a family of flight computers all distinguished by their computing speed, which is 10 to 100 times faster than the commonly used spaceflight processor — the RAD750. Though the RAD750 is immune to the adverse effects of radiation, it is slow and many generations behind the computing speed of commercial processors. SpaceCube processors achieve their data-crunching prowess because Goddard technologists married radiation-tolerant integrated circuits, which are programmed to execute specific computing jobs simultaneously, with algorithms that detect and fix radiation-induced upsets in collected data. Consequently, these hybrid systems are nearly as reliable as the RAD750, yet orders-of-magnitude faster, capable of executing complex computations once limited to ground-based systems.

Image above: This image shows the Defense Department’s experiment pallet, STP-H5, hanging at the end of Canada’s robotic arm during installation on the outside of the International Space Station. Image Credit: NASA. During its two-year stay on the space station, Raven will sense incoming and outgoing visiting space station spacecraft, feeding the data it “sees” to SpaceCube 2.0, one in the family of SpaceCube products. SpaceCube then runs a set of pose algorithms, or a set of instructions, to gauge the relative distance between Raven and the spacecraft it is tracking. Then, based on these calculations, SpaceCube 2.0 autonomously sends commands that swivel the Raven module on its gimbal or pointing system to keep the sensors trained on the vehicle, while continuing to track it. While all this is transpiring, NASA operators on the ground monitor Raven’s technologies, paying close attention to how they function as a system and making necessary adjustments to increase Raven’s tracking abilities. “Tracking spacecraft with this system is only possible because we have SpaceCube,” said SSPD Avionics Technology Lead and SpaceCube Lead Engineer David Petrick, who has won prestigious awards for his work on the processor. “This type of operation requires fast computing.” Raven’s foundational technologies will be applied to future missions. For example, Restore-L, which also will use SpaceCube 2.0, will rendezvous with, grasp, refuel and relocate Landsat 7 when it launches in 2020.   SpaceCube 2.0, however, isn’t the only processor now at work on the space station’s external experiment pallet sponsored by the Department of Defense’s Space Technology Program. SpaceCube 1.0 is being used as the communication interface between the space station’s data services and multiple experiments on the pallet. In addition, a miniaturized version of SpaceCube 2.0 — the SpaceCube Mini —  is operating two NASA and U.S. Defense Department experiments. NASA also is testing two other miniature computers, developed with the University of Florida. These models are mostly equipped with commercial parts. For other technology news, go to https://gsfctechnology.gsfc.nasa.gov/newsletter/Current.pdf Related links: Raven: https://sspd.gsfc.nasa.gov/Raven.html SpaceCube: https://spacecube.gsfc.nasa.gov/ Space Station Research and Technology: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/index.html International Space Station (ISS): https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/main/index.html Images (mentioned), Text, Credits: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/Lori Keesey/Lynn Jenner. Greetings, Orbiter.ch Full article