World’s largest telescope threatened by fire

La Palma in the Canary islands is an underdeveloped island adopted by the world’s astronomers due to its excellent observing conditions. There are many important telescopes there, but the one that has raised the most interest is the Gran Telescopia Canarias, inaugurated on the 24th of July this year. The 10.4 metre mirror makes this the largest telescope in the world.

But La Palma is presently on fire due possibly to a stray firework let off during local fiestas, threatening the new telescope as well as the population of the island. The BBC has further news.

UPDATE: To allay any immediate fears – here are the Observatory Webcams, showing the situation inside and outside of the GTC dome.

Stephen Hawking to get Medal of Freedom

President Obama has announced that Professor Stephen Hawking will be amongst 16 agents of change to receive the Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honour. The iconic Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University is best known for the book A Brief History of Time and spends much of his research time on the physics of black holes and General Relativity.

One smalls leap for a man…

When the astronaut Koichi Wakata returned to Earth, he brought with him a little present for the lab boys – his used underwear. Normally, astronauts receive new underwear via cargo transfers and put old underwear into the empty robotic vehicles to burn up in the atmosphere. However, this would not be an option on a longer mission to the Moon or Mars. Astronauts smalls need to be, well, smaller to cope with the journey.

JAXA, the Japanese space agency, developed a new material that was water resistant, flameproof, odour eating and antibacterial. They made socks, shorts, T-shirts and leggings out of it and sent it into space. Originally, the clothing went on a sixteen day mission with Takao Doi, but the success of that led on to the more rigorous test – a month in orbit on the person of Koichi Wakata.

Now they’re back and getting tested. Much to the relief of the person of Koichi Wakata.

The Space Tweeps Society

Do you use twitter?

From my many posts on the matter (and the small hint in the sidebar to the right), regular readers may well guess that I do. Twitter is a website that allows the sharing of messages of 140 characters or less. This may include links and the like, and it has become a bit of a modern ticker tape for various news summaries for blogs like this one.

Well sometimes 140 characters isn’t enough, as the motto of the Space Tweeps Society website puts it (tweeps = twitter peeps, where peeps = people). This is a kind of enhanced version of twitter, allowing longer messages with embedded stuff like youtube videos to be posted. The intended audience include people working in the various space industries or research areas and people with just a big interest in space. Membership is free, and if nothing more, it’s another big directory of active space twitterers to harvest people to follow from.

The Great Look Up

People in the South-East (yes, we in the North West sometimes call you people) might be interested in knowing about a large star party planned for your region. The Great Look Up is a collaboration between the University of Surrey and Guilford Astronomical Society.

Taking place between 7:45 and 11:30pm on the 28th of August, the event will feature guest speakers, expert assistance with getting the best out of your telescopes, small and large telescopes for viewing, interactive activities and a big summer BBQ.

The venue is the Varsity Centre at the University of Surrey in Egerton Road, Guilford, which uses astroturf (fittingly enough), so no spiky heels. News about the event can be followed on twitter or facebook.

The final test fire of a space shuttle engine…

via PhysOrg.com.

As the era of the space shuttle starts to come to an end and that of the Aries rocket, as part of the Constellation program, dawns, nothing can be more symbolic than the final test firing of the space shuttle engines.

Space shuttle engines have been test fired at NASA’s John C Stennis Space Center for more than 34 years. Around 50 engines produced there have undergone the 520 second burn, representative of the time take from launch to orbit. Each engine can provide up to a dozen or so flights of the shuttle and so far 130 or so flights have flown the engines. The engine test-fired today added with those already attached to the three remaining shuttles, Atlantis, Discovery and Endeavour, should last for the remainder of the shuttle program.

Stennis has three platforms for hosting these tests. The final burst was performed on stand A-2, as stand A-1 is presently being modified for the new Aries I/V J-2X engine, which will be test-fired there now that there’s nothing left to work on with the shuttle program.

Studying meteorites on Mars

If you’ve popped over to Mars to rove about and look at rocks, it perhaps isn’t improbable that you’d find a few alien boulders. However, the Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity have taken it a bit further by finding not just Mars rocks, but also meteorites on the Martian surface. The latest find is a rather large (0.6 metre) thing called Block Island. The candidate meteorite, which looks rather different from its surroundings, is to be blasted with radiation from the alpha particle and X-ray spectrometer to help determine what it is and if it looks more like the meteorites we know and love or whether it is actually just an unusual Martian boulder.

Our resident frustrated Martian in this region is @Mars_Stu, who as well as everything else he does blogs at Cumbrian Sky. In this post he examines the various meteorites discovered on the surface of the Red Planet by the two intrepid rovers.

Simulating a supernova

via Space.com.

An unusual image has been created by an astrophysicist in the hope of understanding the internal workings of supernovae. The image (shown below), shows the various degrees of entropy (disorder) in the erupting gas. The behavior of the simulated supernova can then be tweaked by altering the initial conditions of the exploding star, both inside and out, to see how they affect the explosion. This can then be compared to the supernovae we see in the skies to help us understand what goes on in the real events. This might then tell us what the stars were like before they exploded – their lives told in the manner of their deaths.

Credit: Hongfeng Yu

Interesting though this is (despite the unusual brain scan like picture – nothing like as pretty as a planetary nebula), other blogs picking this up seem to concentrate on the supercomputer used to create it. Argonne’s supercomputer  is a 160,000 core machine, but the data normally outputted is sent to a standard graphics card, which is tuned more to games than scientific data. As a result, the company has created its own display mechanism that speeds up render time – the time taken to draw pictures like that above, thereby speeding up the whole process.

This is all very useful as supernovae are rather big things. Solar system sized stars undergoing various shells of nuclear fusion, interactions between photons and matter, high pressure physics, hydrodynamics and the effects of magnetic and electric fields fighting with gravity for control of a runaway process that sees a core crushed and an envelope expelled in a moment of tremendous violence. And to get it right, everything must be included and the whole process followed through. It takes a lot of computing.