SpaceRef has a story about NASA releasing an amazing panorama of the Columbia Hills on Mars. The full size version gives me an amazing feeling of “being there”, something that you don’t get from the normal photos. The panorama gives you the freedom to virtually spin in a circle and see what’s out there.
They’ve also got an interesting article about Max Faget, who just died, the man who designed the “escape rocket” (the Launch Escape System) on top of the NASA Mercury and later launches.
Having vented my spleen about the recent elections in Australia in my previous article here’s a more upbeat story.
A heap of sites are reporting that the NASA Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, have not only survived their Martian winter hibernation but have now both returned more evidence for water having existed on Mars.
This is a remarkable achievement given that both rovers have survived well past their 90 Martian days “warranty” (Spirit has managed 184 to date, Opportunity 163 as it landed just under three weeks later than Spirit).
The BBC is reporting that the Apollo 11 moon landing missions "S" film magazine has been thawed and digitally scanned to produce high definition images for the first time.
These are available from the Apollo Gallery one the Apollo Archive website (beware, heavy javascript usage!).
For those who can’t get the Apollo Archive site to work properly the BBC article has a good selection of images.
Thanks to my brother, Alan, for pointing me at this BBC report about Stephen Hawking recanting on his 30 year belief that information cannot escape from black holes at the 17th International Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation.
New Scientist reports "I want to report that I think I have solved a major problem in theoretical physics," announced Hawking as he described his solution to the black hole information paradox.
His abstract reads "The Euclidean path integral over all topologically trivial metrics can be done by time slicing and so is unitary when analytically continued to the Lorentzian. On the other hand, the path integral over all topologically non-trivial metrics is asymptotically independent of the initial state. Thus the total path integral is unitary and information is not lost in the formation and evaporation of black holes. The way the information gets out seems to be that a true event horizon never forms, just an apparent horizon.". I’m glad we’ve got that straight.. 🙂
Other reports
If you want more see the Google News results for a huge selection of reports from around the world.
OK, this may sound like a typical psuedo-science kook headline, but this actually comes from the website of New Scientist magazine and it’s not April 1st either!
They report that there is evidence that the fine structure constant "alpha" may have changed in the past by re-analysing data from the natural Oklo nuclear reactor in Gabon, West Africa.
As the speed of light "c" is inversely proportional to alpha then it follows if alpha has been different in the past then the speed of light has also changed over time!
I think my brain hurts…
Excellent news, the BBC and the ABC are both reporting that the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft has safely achieved orbit around Saturn after a nail-biting flight through the rings around the giant planet.
Many congratulations to all those involved!
Here’s a nice little piece specific to Melbourne about both the forthcoming transit of venus on the 8th June as well as a nice piece about the history of it.
