More Here Tattin’ It Up

Wonderful Rio

Awesome mission since voyagers!!!!

After 20 years in space, the Cassini spacecraft is running out of fuel. In 2010, Cassini began a seven-year mission extension in which the plan was to expend all of the spacecraft’s propellant exploring Saturn and its moons. This led to the Grand Finale and ends with a plunge into the planet’s atmosphere at 6:32 a.m. EDT on Friday, Sept. 15.

The spacecraft will ram through Saturn’s atmosphere at four times the speed of a re-entry vehicle entering Earth’s atmosphere, and Cassini has no heat shield. So temperatures around the spacecraft will increase by 30-to-100 times per minute, and every component of the spacecraft will disintegrate over the next couple of minutes…

Cassini’s gold-colored multi-layer insulation blankets will char and break apart, and then the spacecraft’s carbon fiber epoxy structures, such as the 11-foot (3-meter) wide high-gain antenna and the 30-foot (11-meter) long magnetometer boom, will weaken and break apart. Components mounted on the outside of the central body of the spacecraft will then break apart, followed by the leading face of the spacecraft itself.

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Some of the stunning designs from the Beyond Curie project, by Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya.

"There comes a time when we realize that we are not the center of the universe" — Cosmos — hope everyone is checking out the new mind blowing remake of Carl Sagan’s classic show #space #nature #science

Mariposa de la suerte,cierra los ojos, pide un deseo y rebloguea

The Adventures of Prince Achmen. 1926. German. The oldest surviving animated film in history.

Five Years After The Higgs, What Else Has The LHC Found?

“There is every reason to be optimistic, since the LHC will produce tons of b-mesons and b-baryons, as well as more Higgs bosons than every other particle source combined. Sure, the biggest breakthrough we could hope for would be the detection of a brand new particle, and evidence for one of the great theoretical breakthroughs that have dominated particle physics in recent decades: supersymmetry, extra dimensions, technicolor, or grand unification. But even in the absence of that, there is plenty to learn, at a fundamental level, about how the Universe works. There are plenty of indicators that nature plays by rules we have not yet fully discovered, and that’s more than enough motivation to keep looking. We already have the machine, and the data will be on its way in unprecedented amounts very soon. Whatever new hints are hiding at the TeV scale will soon be within reach.”

There are lots of calls out there for the LHC to be the last great particle physics collider out there, as fears that there’s nothing new to discover at the energies we can create grip the community. After all, the great hope was that they would find new, unexpected particles at CERN, and that would guide the way forward in the field with experimental evidence. Well, we didn’t get as lucky as we could have, but there are plenty of reasons to be optimistic: there appears to be new physics in the b-quark sector; we’re entering the era of precision Higgs measurements; and the total amount of data we’ve obtained at the LHC is just 1/50th of the total amount we’ll wind up with after Runs III, IV and V are complete. Just because the greatest victory we could have imagined didn’t come true doesn’t mean there isn’t an incredible amount left to learn from this remarkable machine.

Come see, five years on, what we have and haven’t found. The future of particle physics is bright even without made-up evidence for our favored hypotheses!