Breaking Orbit

NASA today posted video of Hurricane Earl taken by the Expedition 24 crew aboard the International Space Station as the storm—a Category 4 at the time—swirled northeast of Puerto Rico.

Partially narrated by an unidentified crew member, the video was shot around 5:30 p.m. ET on August 30 from 218 miles (350 kilometers) above Earth.

As of today, Earl is predicted to sweep northward along the U.S. East Coast, and it may make landfall as far up as Nova Scotia, Canada.

William Lenoir, an astronaut who flew aboard the first space shuttle mission to deploy commercial satellites, died August 26 from head injuries sustained during a bicycle accident.

—Image courtesy NASA

Born March 14, 1939, in Miami, Florida, Lenoir earned undergraduate and graduate degrees from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, ultimately graduating with a Ph.D. in electrical engineering in 1965. He then taught at MIT, where he became involved in research there that led to development of the Skylab space station.

NASA selected Lenoir as a scientist-astronaut in 1967. He was a backup crew member for missions to Skylab, and he was involved in development of the space shuttle program.

After 15 years with NASA, Lenoir flew to space for the first time on the space shuttle Columbia during the STS-5 mission in November 1982.

Although STS-5 was the fifth shuttle mission, it is considered the program's first operational flight, because the first four missions primarily involved research and development activities to test Columbia for spaceworthiness.

During their five-day flight, Lenoir and his crewmates successfully put two communications satellites into orbit.

The four astronauts of STS-5, aka the Ace Moving Co.
—Image courtesy NASA

The crew also carried a German-sponsored microgravity experiment into space aboard Columbia and conducted three student-designed experiments.

Lenoir was slated for another "first" during the mission—the first spacewalk from a shuttle, along with crewmate Joseph Allen—but the walk was canceled due to illness followed by spacesuit malfunctions.

[Ed White was the first U.S. astronaut to conduct a spacewalk, floating outside the Gemini 4 capsule for 23 minutes in June 1965. Donald H. Peterson and Story Musgrave became the first people to spacewalk from a shuttle in 1983 during STS-6, the first Challenger mission.]

In line with NASA tradition, family and friends of the STS-5 astronauts were asked to select wakeup music, one song for every day of the mission.

The five tracks played during STS-5 were "76 Trombones" from The Music Man; "Cotton-eyed Joe;" the Marine's Hymn, aka "The Halls of Montezuma;" "The Stroll;" and "Take Me Home, Country Roads" by John Denver.

After STS-5, Lenoir took over direction and management of mission development for NASA's Astronaut Office, but he never again flew to space. He left the astronaut corps in 1984 to join aerospace consulting firm Booz, Allen & Hamilton in the Washington, D.C., area.

Lenoir returned to NASA in 1989 as the Associate Administrator for Space Flight, then went back to Booz-Allen in 1992 to become Vice President of the Applied Systems Division. He retired in 2000.

In addition to receiving the Exceptional Service Medal (1974) and Space Flight Medal (1982) from NASA, Lenoir received the Carleton E. Tucker Award for Teaching Excellence at MIT.

The conversation in the latest xkcd seems eerily familiar to me:

At least I can guess with some degree of accuracy what type of news feeds the artist must be reading ... Exhibit A and Exhibit B, both widely covered by the scientific press, from just last week.

For the past two years the Large Hadron Collider has been a poster child for Big Science.

The huge European particle accelerator holds the promise to re-create the origins of the universe, reveal the nature of dark matter, and explain why ordinary matter—you, me, this computer—has mass.

But in a highly theoretical scenario, the LHC could also spawn tiny black holes and strange forms of matter that might eat the planet.

An artist's rendering of a black hole (upper left) capturing matter from a nearby star.
—Image courtesy Aurore Simonnet/Sonoma State University/NASA

This bizarre and remote possibility got some people worked into a lather, until the point in 2008 when two "independent scientists" decided to file suit in Hawaii to stop the LHC from firing a single proton.

The original suit was dismissed within months via a 24-page ruling issued a few weeks *after* the LHC was switched on successfully.

Since then, the collider has shattered a few records among high-energy physics experiments and has seen some first tantalizing clues to the nature of the Higgs boson, aka the God particle.

It has not, as far as I can tell, destroyed the Earth.

But that didn't stop the people behind the lawsuit from filing an appeal.

Last week, the Hawaiian district court once again found that the legal case has no legs, on a couple of counts.

For starters, the lawsuit was required to show what in legalese is known as "injury in fact"—there has to be a believable, likely threat of harm to Earth.

Instead the suit could only claim a series of theoretical possibilities, with many of the doomsday scenarios riddled with "maybes" and "mights."

(Read a copy of the original LHC lawsuit here [MSWord].)

There's also a little issue of jurisdiction. The lawsuit was brought against the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, and other federal bodies that contributed funding to the project.

But the LHC was actually designed, built, and is now managed by the European Center for Nuclear Research, and the U.S. has no control over what CERN does with its toys. (See LHC pictures.)

According to the decision on the appeal (pdf)—a succinct five paragraphs, btw—"the alleged injury, destruction of the earth, is in no way attributable to the U.S. government's failure to draft an environmental impact statement."

I guess that last part might read a bit like we're passing the buck. If Earth is doomed, it's not like anyone will be around to say "I told you so" or to argue over who has to fund the cleanup.

The bigger question now is, is this the last time the LHC will be challenged in court?

Considering the media splash, and subsequent public interest in the LHC, the black hole fears spawned the first time around, maybe it'd be a good thing for science if it's not.

It sounds like the start of a fairy tale: There's a unicorn in outer space that holds a rose and a star that rings like a bell.

What I'm actually talking about is the constellation Monoceros, the Unicorn, a grouping of relatively faint stars huddled between Orion, Gemini, and Canis Major.

In addition to the main stars that give the constellation its shape, Monoceros houses a number of impressive objects visible via telescope—a triple star system that looks like a fixed triangle, a pair of binary stars that together weigh more than a hundred suns, and the colorful, star-forming Cone Nebula, to name a few.

Recently NASA's Wide-field Infrared Explorer (WISE) space telescope captured this detailed picture of the Unicorn's rose: the Rosette nebula, aka NGC 2237.

—Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

The false-color composite shows starlight in shades of blue and the nebula's warm gas and dust in red and green, as seen in four different infrared wavelengths.

At the rose's heart sits a cluster of young stars called NGC 2244. The most massive of these stars produce huge amounts of ultraviolet radiation, which erode the nebula and sculpt it into its flowery form.

The whole shebang is visible through a backyard telescope. In fact, the star cluster was first spotted around 1690 by an English astronomer, and the surrounding nebula was identified about 150 years later.

Also this week, an international team using the French-led Convection Rotation and planetary Transits (CoRoT) satellite announced that they successfully listened in to the sound waves coming from a star in Monoceros called HD49933.

For the first time, the scientists were able to use these stellar sound waves to monitor starspots—patches of intense magnetic activity on the star's surface, similar to sunspots.

What they found is that the distant star is going through a cycle of magnetic activity just like our sun's 11-year cycle.

"Essentially, the star is ringing like a bell," study co-author Travis Metcalfe, of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said in a statement.

"As it moves through its starspot cycle, the tone and volume of the ringing changes in a very specific pattern, moving to higher tones with lower volume at the peak of its magnetic cycle."

So far CoRoT has made its name largely as a planet hunter. The scope has found 14 stars that have at least one planet, and half of them are also in the Unicorn, including a star that hosts the "most Earthlike" planet yet found, dubbed CoRoT-7b.

CoRoT searches for planets via the transit method, which involves looking for dips in starlight as a body passes in front of the star.

But the probe was also designed to look for stellar oscillations that can reveal a star's magnetic activity.

In our solar system, this magnetic cycle has plusses and minuses... stronger solar storms can trigger awesome auroras, but they can also spew radiation that can be damaging to astronauts, satellites, and even power grids.

(See pictures of auroras driven by a recent solar storm.)

Unlike the sun, the cycle for HD49933 seems to last less than a year, the shortest magnetic cycle yet observed on another star. But this difference could be a scientific boon.

In addition to offering a sort of sped-up view of what goes on with our sun, studies of more stars with short cycles could give insight into star cycles overall, which in turn sheds light on what makes a sunlike star a good place for hosting life as we know it.

"Understanding the activity of stars harboring planets is necessary, because magnetic conditions on the star's surface could influence the habitable zone, where life could develop," study lead author Rafael Garcia, of France's Center for Nuclear Studies of Saclay, said in the statement.

In other words, variations in a star's magnetic activity could affect the criteria for the so-called Goldilocks zone, the region around a star that's "just right" for life to evolve on another Earthlike world.

How's that for bringing the fairy tale full-circle?

About 127 light-years away there's a star like our sun that hosts at least five planets, each roughly the same mass as Uranus or Neptune, astronomers announced today.

A closeup of the sky around HD 10180
—Image courtesy ESO and Digitized Sky Survey 2. Acknowledgment: Davide De Martin

The planets were found via what's called the radial velocity method, aka the Doppler wobble. This method of planet hunting looks for periodic shifts in starlight caused by the gravitational pull of orbiting worlds.

Using an instrument dubbed the HARPS spectrograph on a European Southern Observatory telescope in Chile, the team saw five strong wobbles corresponding to planets between 13 and 25 times Earth's mass orbiting the star HD 10180.

For comparison, Uranus is roughly 14 times Earth's mass, and Neptune is about 17 times Earth's mass. By contrast, Saturn is 95 Earth masses, and Jupiter tips the scales at almost 318 Earth masses.

What's more, there are hints that the planetary system also hosts a world roughly the mass of Saturn, with at least 65 Earth masses, and another more like Earth itself.

The Saturn-like world would be farther out, taking about 2,200 days to complete an orbit. The Earthlike planet, meanwhile, would be closer in than all the rest, and it would be the least massive exoplanet yet found, at just 1.4 Earth masses.

If confirmed, the two additions would make this planetary system the most like our own yet discovered, at least in terms of number and general layout.

But don't bust out the interstellar Mayflower just yet.

The Earthlike world, if it's there, would be incredibly close to its star—one year would last just 1.18 Earth days. At that distance, the rocky planet would be more like the hot, raging volcanic hell Corot-7b.

The system also seems to be missing a Jupiter-like gas giant planet, and all its Neptunes are huddled up fairly close to the star, with years ranging from about 6 to 600 days.

Scientifically, the find "highlights the fact that we are now entering a new era in exoplanet research: the study of complex planetary systems and not just of individual planets," team leader Christophe Lovis said in a press release.

"Studies of planetary motions in the new system reveal complex gravitational interactions between the planets and give us insights into the long-term evolution of the system."

Culturally, however, it's likely the news is making waves because we're constantly hoping we'll find another version of home.

—Image courtesy NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

Right now we have 480+ exoplanets cataloged, and only 15 systems are known to have three worlds or more. Most of the planets found, alone or in groups, are more like Jupiter than Earth. That's because technological limitations make small, rocky worlds harder to spot.

But we suspect there must be plenty out there, including some in the so-called habitable zone, the magic region just far enough from a star to host liquid water.

In fact, finding habitable Earths is the primary goal of a NASA space telescope called Kepler, which is searching for planets based on transits, looking for dips in starlight as a planet passes in front of its host star, as seen from Earth.

So does it make a difference if any soon-to-be-discovered Earths are part of larger planetary systems? Would life on Earth cease, for example, if Venus winked out of existence?

Probably not. But studies have shown that Jupiter, with its gassy enormity, has been acting as a sort of shield for Earth, gravitationally deflecting asteroids and comets that hold the potential to trigger mass extinctions.

And there's still plenty to be found out about how planets form and how that process influences the evolution of star systems.

Some exoplanet discoveries suggest that not all worlds stay where they were born, and that planets can migrate, tilt, and even get expelled over the course of a few billion years.

In other words, it's a strange universe out there, and parallel Earths have so far proven elusive. But that won't stop astronomers from trying to find them, or people across the globe from getting thrilled at the prospect.

Since the heady days of the Apollo program, NASA has asked friends and family of astronauts to select "wakeup music" for slumbering spacefarers.

Astronaut Gregory C. Johnson rests in his sleeping bag on the space shuttle Atlantis in May 2009.
—Picture courtesy NASA

After all, sunrises are a dime a dozen in low-Earth orbit, and the hyper-chickens from a backwoods asteroid haven't made it here yet, so astro-workers have to have some way of marking the morning.

With just two scheduled shuttle flights left on the roster, NASA today made the wakeup-song selection a matter of national importance.

Anyone on Earth can vote for their favorites out of a "top 40" hit list, and the two winning songs will get played during the final flight of the space shuttle Discovery in November.

I *just* cast my vote, and I can see that I'm among 8,817 people who've done so as of 7 p.m. ET.

I can also see there are three clear leading candidates: "Countdown" by Rush, the Star Trek theme, and "Beautiful Day" by U2. Huh.

Polling closes when Discovery launches, which is slated for November 1—it should be interesting to see if/how the rankings change as word spreads.

Meanwhile, aspiring rock stars are being asked to write and submit their own wakeup songs, with two winners to be played during the last planned shuttle mission, when Endeavour lifts off next February.

NASA will be the judge of song quality for original works, based on:

• relation to or suggestiveness of human spaceflight;
• catchy or lasting impression of the song;
• originality; and
• overall quality of the song.

One wacky feature on the contest website is the participation map, which is keeping tabs on how many people submit original songs and where they're based.

So far today there are 27 entries, most from the U.S. and Canada, but also one each from Colombia, Peru, Chile, and Switzerland, and two each from India and Iran.

I wonder if any superstars will toss in a submission or two. Paging Dr. Dre ...

August 20, 1975: A Titan 3/Centaur rocket launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, carrying the Viking 1 spacecraft, the first NASA mission to put a lander on Mars.

Moments after touchdown on July 20, 1976, Viking 1 sent the first-ever picture taken from the surface of the red planet:

A portrait of the artist as a young robot.
—Image courtesy NASA/JPL

Part of the lander's footpad is visible at bottom right. For a sense of scale, the pyramid-looking rock to the left is about four inches (ten centimeters) wide.

The Viking 1 craft was actually a combo package of lander plus orbiter, and—like the exploration rovers Spirit and Opportunity—the bundle had a twin: Viking 2 launched September 9, 1975, and arrived at Mars on August 7, 1976.

As a team, the Viking probes offered us humans the most complete picture of Mars to date, mapping the entire planet from space at high resolution (492 to 984 feet, or 150 to 300 meters) and compiling more than 1,400 surface images of rocky terrain, dust storms, and seasonal ice cover.

(Last month officials with NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter released what they call the best Mars map yet, culling more than 21,000 pictures to create an interactive, zoomable tool showing detail down to 330-foot [100-meter] resolution.)

Unlike the twin rovers, however, the two Viking landers were both stationary.

Viking 1 hung out on Chryse Planitia, aka the "Golden Plain," a flat, rolling lowland in Mars's northern hemisphere. The circular plain may have been an ancient impact basin, and outflow channels along its edges suggest it once held a large lake.

Pictures from Viking 1 revealed that the smooth-looking plain is actually strewn with small boulders—see, for example, this shot of the region taken just before sunset on August 21, 1976:

—Image courtesy NASA/JPL

Meanwhile, Viking 2 touched down at Utopia Planitia (site of a future Starfleet shipyard). This vast lava plain is also on Mars's northern hemisphere but pretty much on the opposite side of the planet.

Sadly, every mission to Mars so far has been a one-way trip. Both Viking landers stopped communications in the early 1980s. But they're still there, quietly waiting on the Martian surface for future explorers to make pilgrimages and build visitor centers nearby.

The look-back at the Viking program may be foreshadowing for at least one Mars rover: Poor Spirit, lodged in a crater full of soft sand, stopped communicating earlier this month, and mission managers fear the long-lived bot may get too cold to survive the oncoming Martian winter.

The moon may be shrinking, but it's still a big enough ball of fun to warrant its own night in the limelight.

On September 18 people around the planet will be gathering for the first ever International Observe the Moon Night, a global event meant to get people excited about lunar science and exploration.

The whole thing started with a national moon night in the U.S. last year, spurred by the activities of two NASA moon missions: the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS).

The LRO launched on June 18, 2009, and settled into orbit around the moon on June 23. The orbiter was carrying LCROSS, which got shot into the moon on October 9 as part of a search for water ice in shadowy lunar craters.

To get people stoked about NASA's moon missions, the LRO and LCROSS teams co-hosted National Observe the Moon Night on August 1.

That event was so successful, NASA decided to up the ante, calling on partners with the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Astronomers Without Borders, and Gemini Observatory to help coordinate a worldwide moon extravaganza for 2010.

This year may see a dip in the "lunacy," at least in the U.S.—human missions to the moon have been effectively canceled, the Apollo 11 anniversary has passed, and there's no promise of "moon bombing" probes to look forward to.

But maybe that's why taking moon fever international makes sense. Data from India's lost Chandrayaan-1 lunar orbiter and Japan's terminated Kaguya moon probe are still offering scientific riches (boosting those countries' excitement over moon exploration).

And China is planning to launch its second lunar probe in October, possibly followed by a human mission to the moon in 2017.

Mountains on the moon.
—Picture courtesy LRO/NASA

For sky-watchers in the Northern Hemisphere, September 18 will present a lovely waxing gibbous moon, offering a chance to see plenty of surface features brought into sharp relief by shadows.

(A full moon can be a beautiful sight to the naked eye, btw, but through a telescope the glare can drown out details.)

With a decent telescope, viewers should be able to get a good look at features such as Tycho crater, the deep depression surrounded by bright rays that dominates the moon's southern face.

Higher magnifications will reveal mountain ranges, dark lava fields, and rippling ridges.

The nice part of events like International Observe the Moon Night is that you won't need your own fancy instruments to see the sights. Organizations and hobby groups around the world will be volunteering their time and access to equipment—all you have to do is show up!

If you can't make it out to an official event, it still counts, imho, to stop at some point during the night, look up, and briefly ponder a few lunar mysteries.

Hot on the heels of The Planets in HD, I see the folks at SEED magazine have a nifty interview with One Ring Zero about their new album, PLANETS, an astronomy-themed rock symphony.

We're still a few years out from the hundredth anniversary of Gustav Holst's astrology ode, written between 1914 and 1916.

But the smartie-pants musical duo of Michael Hearst and Joshua Camp decided to mark the occasion a touch early with a much more science-based tribute to our solar system—beating Dr. Dre to the proverbial punch.

The SEED Q&A kinda has things covered—including how the demotion of Pluto acted as a driver for the album—so I will say no more than to check out the trippy video for Venus:

Well, who knows at this stage whether NASA will ever get its next-generation ATHLETE rover onto the moon or Mars.

But at least we can rest assured it'll provide any future astronauts with hours of entertainment:

From moon buggy to moon boogie.

This month the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) released its list of the 21 sites being added to the World Heritage list.

Inclusion on the list is meant to "encourage the identification, protection and preservation of cultural and natural heritage around the world considered to be of outstanding value to humanity," according to UNESCO.

(See pictures of the natural wonders added to the World Heritage list.)

UNESCO was also the driving force behind the International Year of Astronomy, which last year commemorated the 400th anniversary of Galileo Galilei's first astronomical observation through a telescope. So perhaps it's no surprise that two of the 15 new cultural sites on the World Heritage list are historic observatories.

—Image courtesy Knowledge Seeker

The Jantar Mantar observatory was built in Jaipur, India, in the 18th century under the rule of Maharaja Jai Singh II. According to UNESCO, the site "is the most significant, most comprehensive, and the best preserved of India's historic observatories."

The observatory at Jaipur is actually the largest of five similar facilities the Maharaja had built across India, and it's modeled after the first observatory built in Delhi.

Jantar Mantar (literally, "calculation instrument") is actually a complex of 14 main stone structures, each with a specific astronomical use. The idea was to take traditional instruments and build them on a grand scale to enhance the accuracy of measurements.

A pair of ginormous sundials, for instance, allowed astronomers to walk around inside their Aricebo-esque bowls to take time and track the seasons. Other, waterslide-like instruments were used to chart the courses of stars and planets through the sky.

(See a panorama of Jantar Mantar at dusk.)

The other astronomical site added to the World Heritage list is part of the monuments at "The Centre of Heaven and Earth"—a sacred mountain in China's Henan Province.

The site includes the Zhougong Sundial Platform and the Dengfeng Observatory, built about 700 years ago at the beginning of the Yuan Dynasty (A.D. 1271-1368) by astronomer Guo Shoujing.

Perhaps the oldest known observatory in China, Dengfeng is a 31-foot-high (9.5-meter-high) square-ish tower built of stone (see a picture of Dengfeng) that was used to measure the sun's shadow and track celestial bodies.

The sundial is a huge depression to the north of the tower, and nearby lies a chart of the heavens made of blue tiles set into the ground.

"The historical monuments of Dengfeng include some of the best examples of ancient Chinese buildings devoted to ritual, science, technology and education," UNESCO says on its website.

Perhaps befitting this celebration of astronomy past, the National Research Council this week announced its vision for astronomy future: the so-called Astro2010 decadal survey of astronomy and astrophysics.

The report lays out what the council thinks should be top priorities for space- and ground-based research activities, taking into account not only science goals but also technical readiness, schedule, and cost.

Tops on the list for space probes are the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST), the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), and the International X-ray Observatory (IXO).

Carrying an estimated price tag of $1.6 billion, WFIRST would explore two hot areas in astronomy—habitable, Earthlike exoplanets and dark energy.

LISA is actually three identical probes designed to detect gravitational waves, ripples in space-time predicted to occur when very massive objects, such as black holes and pulsars, closely orbit and eventually merge.

An artist's illustration of a LISA probe near binary pulsars.
—Image courtesy NASA

The IXO, meanwhile, would bring together NASA, ESA, and JAXA on a projet designed to study the evolution of matter and how the early universe assembled into the galaxies, nebulas, and other structures we know and love.

On the ground, the decadal survey recommends moving forward with the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), a wide-field optical telescope that would be able to observe more than half the sky every four nights, offering new insight into changes to celestial bodies over time.

The report also recommends participation in the Giant Segmented Mirror Telescope, a next-generation optical observatory, and the Cerro Chajnantor Atacama Telescope (CCAT), a new short-wavelength radio telescope to be built in Chile.

OK. If this headline makes you cringe rather than snicker, just stop reading this post right now.

Good? Great. On to the news.

An artist's impression of a Jupiter-like exoplanet.
—Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech

Late last month astronomers at the California Institute of Technology announced the discovery of four new extrasolar planets, two each around the subgiant stars HD 200964 and 24 Sextanis.

The pair of exoplanets found around HD 200964 got top billing, because the planets' "intimate dance is closer and tighter than any previously seen," according to the Caltech press release.

What astronomers found is that, even though the two worlds are gas giant planets each more massive than Jupiter, they orbit within 32.5 million miles (52.3 million kilometers) of each other.

By contrast, Jupiter and Saturn are the closest-together gas giants in our solar system, and they're never less than 330 million miles (531 million kilometers) apart.

"This new planet pair came in an unexpected package," astronomer John Johnson (no, I am not making that up) was quoted as saying.

But it turns out the other pair of exoplanets may be even funnier, thanks to the formal naming conventions for planets found orbiting other stars.

The two worlds circling 24 Sextanis are also in a close embrace, keeping within about 70 million miles (112.6 million kilometers) of each other.

What the CalTech release fails to mention is that the planets have names: 24 Sex b and 24 Sex c.

While each world in our solar system bears an official name based on mythology, the basic rule for naming an exoplanet is to use the star's name followed by a lower-case letter. The star itself is considered "a," so the first planet found gets labelled with a "b," and so on through the alphabet.

A direct picture of exoplanets HR8799b, c and d.
—Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/Palomar Observatory

Sometimes the star names get abbreviated in the catalogs, so 24 Sextanis (itself named for the constellation it lives in, Sextans) got cut short—and hilarity ensues.

Sometimes newer stars get named after the instruments or techniques used to find them, giving us exoplanets with names such as OGLE-TR-56b.

That's thanks to the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE), which was designed to study variability in starlight.

OGLE data have helped astronomers find planets via the so-called Doppler wobble, slight dips in starlight caused by a planet's gravitational pull.

Of course, this system can also mean that exoplanet names get increasingly unwieldy—NGC 4349 No 127 b just doesn't have the same ring as say, Uranus.

The issue has led some people to suggest we should formalize a naming convention for exoplanets based on mythology, although at 473 planets and counting, we could run out of Greco-Roman names real fast.

Still others have said to save the proper names for habitable, Earthlike worlds.

Astronomical naming can get contentious, as evidenced by recent debacles over several newfound Kuiper belt objects. But it does tend to make life easier for those of us who have to talk about exoplanets to the public on a regular basis.

So, what would you name an exoplanet?

As mentioned in a previous post, this past Saturday I was a guest of the Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts in Virginia for their presentation of The Planets in HD.

The show combines the music of Gustav Holst's The Planets—played live by the National Symphony Orchestra—with some amazing high-definition imagery and animations from NASA, ESA, and the historical collection of the Adler Planetarium in Chicago.

During intermission, one of my friends who'd bought lawn seats for the show informed me that the director of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country wanted to use The Planets as the basis for movie's score, but the plan got prohibitively expensive.

His girlfriend immediately crowned him King of the Nerds.

But maybe some folks at NSO are just as nerdy, considering the first half of the concert: To complement The Planets, NSO conductor Emil de Cou and artistic director Norman Scribner got things started with a selection of orchestral pieces from famous science fiction and fantasy films.

Thus Spake Zarathustra (aka the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey) may be one of the most recognizable scores of the genre, but that didn't stop me from getting chills listening to the live performance.

The audience was also treated to themes from The Twilight Zone and Lost in Space, the closing credits music from the 2009 Star Trek movie, and a couple John Williams standards, the "Imperial March" from Star Wars: Episode V and the "Flying Music" from E.T.

De Cou and colleagues even got permission to do the first-ever concert performances of suites from James Cameron's Avatar and Disney-Pixar's Wall-E.

So my question to the blogosphere is, What's missing? In a list of the Top Ten Sci-fi Instrumentals, what would you add or subtract from the NSO's eight selections?

For my part, I much prefer the original 1960s Star Trek theme over the J.J. Abrams movie score—there're some classics you just can't improve upon.

I also would have loved a little Back to the Future action, although I guess that's less spacey than what the NSO had in mind.

Any other votes?

It's been four years since the International Astronomical Union (IAU) ruled that Pluto is no longer a planet, and the subject remains almost as divisive as the political rumble over climate change.

But it turns out that Pluto was creating kerfuffles almost from the moment it was discovered—even among world-reknowned composers.

If [like me] you're in the Washington, D.C., metro area, you might be headed to the Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts tomorrow night for their first ever performance of The Planets in HD.

The show is a mashup of the classic orchestral suite by British composer Gustav Holst with high-definition videos of NASA and ESA planetary pictures, plus historical illustrations.

Watch a clip from "The Planets in HD" >>

Commissioned by the Chicago Sinfonietta in 2005, The Planets in HD was researched, produced, and directed by José Francisco Salgado, a professor and astronomer at Chicago's Adler Planetarium.

Salgado tells me that his mission in designing the show was "not to create a documentary, but to create art pieces that inspire people to learn more about Earth and the universe.

"They won't learn the exact physical properties going on with each planet, but now they know these things are out there, and they'll come out inspired to learn more about astronomy."

The irony is that when Holst wrote his suite in the early 1900s, science was probably the last thing on his mind.

"He was more interested in the astrological aspects of the planets," Salgado said. Each movement is supposed to convey the emotional influence a given planet has on people, based on their horoscopes.

When Holst started writing in 1914, he focused on seven planets: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Earth wasn't included in his ode to astrology, since it's hard for the planet you're standing on to move into your ruling sign.

Chicago Sinfonietta musicians get ready to rehearse in 2006.
—Photograph copyright José Francisco Salgado

Holst was alive for Pluto's discovery in 1930, but while astronomers hailed Pluto as a new planet, the composer "showed no interest" in making a new movement, Salgado said.

For one thing, Pluto had no astrological meaning. For another, Holst "kind of resented the popularity of The Planets, because it overshadowed the rest of his catalog."

By popular demand—and a commission from the Hallé Orchestra in the U.K.—there is a movement for Pluto, written by Holst scholar and composer Colin Matthews in 2000.

But you won't find the demoted world in the HD show: Salgado didn't make a Pluto video, because "we haven't visited Pluto yet," so there's a dearth of high-end imagery.

To be fair, Salgado faced similar challenges with Mercury and Neptune.

He completed the work in 2006, two years before NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft arrived at Mercury to start a series of flybys before the craft settles into orbit in 2011.

Until that point, humans had collected pictures of only about half the tiny planet, and those date to the 1970s.

So Salgado decided to kill two birds with one stone.

"With those amazing movies from [NASA solar satellites] SOHO and TRACE, it'd be a shame not to include the sun," he said.

"So, since Mercury is the closest planet to the sun, I said, I'm going to feature the sun [during the Mercury movement]. The segue is transits—"when planets pass in front of the sun as seen from Earth.

"I show both the transits of Mercury and transits of Venus ... and then I show how dynamic the sun is, with prominences and sunspots."

Similarly, there have not been many eyes trained on Neptune, now officially the farthest planet from the sun.

"We don't have a lot of visuals of Neptune, and, you know, it's a long movement," Salgado said.

"Also, I don't think just showing images of yet another gas giant is the way to conclude the piece. So I said, Ah-ha, this will be my reason to ... actually leave the solar system.

The Chicago Sinfonietta rehearses in 2006.
—Photograph copyright José Francisco Salgado

"We go through a few galactic objects, such as nebulae, and then we leave the galaxy and we fly through the universe, using images from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey."

Now, after spending more than six months producing The Planets in HD and several years taking this show on the road, Salgado has moved on to a host of other projects, including a collaboration with former Thompson Twin Tom Bailey on the night sky and the founding of a nonprofit, dubbed KV265, to promote and produce art that communicates science.

But that doesn't mean he's given up on Pluto just yet.

"There's a space probe called New Horizons that will get to Pluto in 2015, and when it does, I think it would be interesting to consider making a video for Pluto," Salgado said.

"A lot of people have sympathy for that little guy, ... and I think it will be fascintaing when we see those first really detailed images of Pluto."

That was the most asked question during an event this morning at the National Air and Space Museum featuring the crew of STS-132, the final flight of the space shuttle Atlantis to the International Space Station.

A student asks a question of the STS-132 crew.
—Image by Eric Long/NASM

Well, the final "scheduled" flight, anyway. There's a proposal out to add one more launch before the U.S. shuttle fleet gets retired, and if that mission flies, Atlantis will get back to work.

But I digress.

The STS-132 crew was on hand today for the official return to the museum of "the world's most well-traveled Nobel Prize"—an official replica of the 2006 Nobel Prize for physics that flew to space during the shuttle mission in May.

Nobel laureates John Mather and George Smoot shared the prize for their work on the cosmic microwave background radiation—"the residual heat from the big bang itself," as Mather described the CMB to the crowd at this morning's event.

Measuring properties of the CMB had been Mather's thesis project at Berkeley in 1970, he noted. But trying to collect data on this extremely faint radiation from under the blanket of Earth's atmosphere posed a few challenges, and "my thesis didn't work out so well."

Later, as a postdoc at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, Mather applied to design a NASA satellite to investigate the CMB, and his proposal led to the development and launch of the Cosmic Background Explorer, or COBE.

Nobel-winning splotches: COBE's map of the CMB.
—Image courtesy NASA

Data from this satellite "confirmed that the big bang theory really is a good story" when it comes to explaining the origins of the universe, Mather said—findings that were later backed up by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe.

(See "Proof of Big Bang Seen by Space Probe, Scientists Say.")

So it's pretty apropos that Mather donated a replica of his prize to the Air and Space Museum in 2007.

Earlier this year [apparently in the midst of Snowpocalypse here in D.C.] STS-132 robotics officer Piers Sellers wrote to the museum to see about getting the prize up to where COBE did its heavy lifting.

According to museum curator Margaret Weitekamp, the astronaut's awe for what the medal represents was apparent: When the replica arrived at Kennedy Space Center, Sellers emailed museum staff, writing: "Hello, everyone. I have received the Nobel Prize. (I've always wanted to say that.)"

After shepherding the artifact through 186 trips around the world during Atlantis's mission to the ISS, Sellers donned white gloves this morning to hand the medal back to museum staff, saying: "Thanks for the loan."

Afterward, the rest of the crew presented a video of mission footage from launch to landing. This fine piece of filmography had some truly hilarious examples of fun things to do in zero-G [playing with floating food just never gets old] but with a rock-n-roll soundtrack that requires copyright permissions to post on YouTube... Sorry, you just had to be there.

The crew then took questions from the horde of space fans assembled in the gallery, which revealed that boys and girls from across the country really want to know one thing: How do you get to be an astronaut?

It's not easy: Up to this point only about 0.7 percent of applicants, on average, have become astronaut candidates, mission specialist Stephen Bowen told National Geographic News. Of those candidates, just a handful have made it into space.

"That's why we were telling the kids that you have to love what you do" when you're not on astro-duty, he said.

Bowen, for example, has degrees in electrical engineering and ocean engineering, and his "day job" is as a submarine officer for the U.S. Navy.

"NASA must have said, If we could only find someone who likes to live in a steel tube and eat really bad food, they'd make a great astronaut," mission commander Kenneth Ham joked about Bowen's selection into the astronaut corps.

Another STS-132 mission specialist, Garrett Reisman, has degrees in economics and mechanical engineering, and—when he's not actually using spacecraft—he's involved in spacecraft design.

Speaking of design, another important trait in an astronaut must be some serious physical tolerance.

Reisman, a veteran of just over 14 hours worth of spacewalks during the STS-132 mission alone, told NatGeo News that the current spacesuit has some "serious limitations" when it comes to comfort and dexterity.

"It's like trying to change the oil in your car while wearing a medieval suit of armor," he said.

Reisman, anchored to a robotic arm during a May 17 spacewalk.
—Image courtesy NASA

Because the suit has to be pressurized inside, range of motion is fairly limited: You can't really bend your knees or put your arms over your head, so you have to be creative when it comes to designing tools for a given task, Reisman said.

Not to mention the part where every 24-hour period in orbit sees 16 sunrises and sunsets. When you swoop 'round the world in a mere 90 minutes, you have to be prepared for some extreme temperature changes.

Bowen added that, because spacewalkers need to perform intricate tasks while wearing stiff, puffy gloves, "you learn very quickly to keep your fingernails really short" to avoid injury.

As a girl who loves her manicures, can I just say: Yikes.

It's tough to be an astronaut, for sure, and it may get even tougher as NASA wraps up the shuttle program and starts relying on Russia and private enterprise to get U.S. citizens into space.

But Bowen and Reisman agreed that the kids in today's audience still have a fighting chance.

"By the time they're ready, we'll have teleporters to Mars!" Reisman quipped.

[As an addendum, here's photographic proof that I got face time with people who have been in space. Squee!]

—Picture by Eric Long/NASM

Today scientists with the Cassini mission to Saturn released yet another glorious picture of the gassy planet's icy rings—in this case, a shot of the shepherd moon Prometheus carving arcs in the thin, outer F ring.

—Image courtesy NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Cassini has been in orbit around Saturn since June 2004, and it's sent back scads of pictures over the years of the planet's amazing ring system, revealing, for example, how tiny moons like Prometheus herd ring matter and create gaps between the rings.

Even from Earth, Saturn's rings pop into view through modern binoculars or backyard telescopes, making the loops a well-known feature in the night sky.

But 400 years ago, those familiar rings created quite a puzzle for one of the world's most famous astronomers.

Although Galileo Galilei trained his telescope on the heavens for the first time in the fall of 1609, it wasn't until July 25, 1610, that he took a gander at Saturn.

His homemade telescope allowed Galileo to see the planet in unprecedented detail ... but with the technology of the time, the view wasn't exactly crystal clear.

What's more, the mere concept of a planet with rings of orbiting debris would have been totally foreign to the great man's mind.

So, already familiar with four of the larger Jupiter moons, Galileo's first thought was that Saturn had a couple moons of its own—two closely orbiting bodies almost as big as the planet itself.

"... to my very great amazement Saturn was seen to me to be not a single star, but three together, which almost touch each other," he wrote at the time.

Saturn and its "moons," as drawn by Galileo.
—Image courtesy NASA

Not a bad guess: Lots of bright stars that we see as points of light with the naked eye (i.e., Alpha Centauri) actually turn out to be two or more stars orbiting each other on closer inspection.

Luckily Galileo looked at Saturn again in 1612 and was promptly blown out of the water to see that the two megamoons had disappeared.

"I do not know what to say in a case so surprising, so unlooked for, and so novel," he wrote.

Another peek in 1616 revealed that the "moons" had returned, but they were no longer round—the shapes had shifted to look more like "two half ellipses with two little dark triangles in the middle of the figure and contiguous to the middle globe of Saturn, which is seen, as always, perfectly round."

This cosmic head-scratcher baffled the best scientific minds until 1655, when Dutch astronomer Christaan Huygens took a look through his own beefed up telescope and proposed that the morphing moons might actually be "a thin, flat ring, nowhere touching, and inclined to the ecliptic."

Ah, that's better.

The reason the rings occasionally "vanish" is because, the way we orbit in relation to Saturn, we see the loops at different angles over time—about every 15 years, the wafer-thin rings turn edge-on to our field of view.

Saturn, with the ring plane facing us in 1994 (top) and edge-on in 1995.
—Top image courtesy Reta Beebe (New Mexico State University), D. Gilmore L. Bergeron (ST ScI) and NASA; bottom image courtesy Amanda S. Bosh (Lowell Observatory), Andrew S. Rivkin (Univ. of Arizona/LPL), the HST High Speed Photometer Instrument Team (R.C. Bless, PI), and NASA

Now, after 400 years of observations, we have a pretty good picture of Saturn's many and diverse rings. We even know that other gas giant planets have rings of their own, albeit much thinner and fainter than Saturn's.

(Tee-hee: "Hubble Reveals New Moons, Rings Around Uranus.")

Today's nod to history is a nice reminder that, although certain things about the universe might seem like cold, dry facts, there's still room for some completely unexpected discoveries.

As the Man in Black said:

"Fifteen hundred years ago everyone *knew* the world was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, eveyone **knew** the earth was flat. ... Imagine what you'll know tomorrow."

—Image courtesy NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Curiosity, as compared with the Mars rover Spirit.
—Image courtesy NASA/JPL

No matter where you stand on the future of human space flight, if you want to visit other worlds, you are probably a fan of robotic exploration.

Still, there're a lot of hurdles to putting even a robot on another planet: budget, scientific squabbling, budget cuts, technological hang-ups, budget shortfalls, political reviews. And did I mention issues with the budget?

But putting everything else aside, the scariest moment in any planetary landing attempt is, well, the landing.

When you've poured years of your life and millions of tax dollars into a little bot with big promise, getting it safely to its destination is the nerve-wracking moment everyone is waiting for.

For the Phoenix Mars lander, engineers dubbed the window when the craft entered Mars's atmosphere and lost contact until it set foot near the Martian north pole the "seven minutes of terror."

Well, the folks at NASA must be fans of horror movies, because for their next Mars lander, the roving science lab dubbed Curiosity, they're gonna film and broadcast the moments just before touchdown.

The MARDI, with a Swiss Army knife for scale.
—Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/Malin Space Science Systems

The downward-facing Mars Descent Imager, or MARDI, will record full-color, high-res video of the two minutes before landing, as the craft comes screaming through the Martian atmosphere and deploys its unique landing system.

According to a NASA press release, the resulting video should go something like this:

"Initial frames will glimpse the heat shield falling away from beneath the rover, revealing a swath of Martian terrain below illuminated in afternoon sunlight. The first scenes will cover ground several kilometers (a few miles) across. Successive images will close in and cover a smaller area each second.

Dust kicked up by the rocket engines during landing may swirl as the video ends and Curiosity's surface mission can begin."

An illustration of Curiosity's stages of descent.
—Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/Malin Space Science Systems

Sounds amazing, eh? But don't set your Tivo just yet. Curiosity isn't slated to reach Mars until August 2012, and the video will be too much data for the lander to send back in a timely fashion.

At about 150 million miles (250 million kilometers) from Earth, there's no way the rover will be streaming anything in real time. Instead, images have to be sent via relay through a Mars orbiter, which limits the times the lander can communicate with Earth to whenever there's a craft passing overhead.

Given the delay, the video frames will get sent to NASA piece by piece, enabling a slow progression in video quality.

The first version will be comparable to a YouTube video, according to the camera's lead investigator, Michael Malin of Malin Space Science Systems.

"The high-definition version will not be available until the full set of images can be transmitted to Earth, which could take weeks, or even months, sharing priority with data from other instruments," Malin said in a press release.

Eventually NASA will share the "full glory" version landing video with the wide world. But the clip will be more than just an excuse to make popcorn.

Mission managers back on Earth can use the detailed pictures of the surrounding terrain to decide on Curiosity's initial path. And engineers will be studying the data to inform designs for future landing systems.

In addition, once landed, the "belly" camera can be used to watch the ground go by beneath the rover, for geologic mapping or for other scientific pursuits.

"I am really looking forward to seeing this movie," Malin said of the landing video. "We have been preparing for it a long time."

Late last week scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena announced the discovery of a new class of moons orbiting Saturn: the giant propeller moons.

Tracked over a four-year period by the Saturn-orbiting Cassini spacecraft, the moons create distinctive propeller shapes as they travel through the planet's A ring, the outermost of the large, bright rings.

An unseen moon making a bright, white propeller feature in Saturn's A ring.
—Image courtesy NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

The moons had long been hidden, since they are embedded in the icy particles of the dense A ring.

"Scientists have never tracked disk-embedded objects anywhere in the universe before now," Matthew Tiscareno, a member of the Cassini imaging team, said in a statement. "All the moons and planets we knew about before orbit in empty space."

What Cassini's new pictures revealed is that, as the moons orbit, they each kick up bright "propellers" of material several thousand miles long.

Such features aren't entirely new: Small propellers had been previously spotted elsewhere in the A ring and were linked to tiny objects dubbed moonlets orbiting in the ring plane. These moonlets are thought to number in the millions.

But the new propellers are hundreds of time bigger, appear in a section of the ring farther out from Saturn, and are likely linked to full-size moons.

Cassini saw only 11 of the giant propeller features, but the science team thinks there could be dozens of moons hidden from view that are capable of creating propellers.

The find has implications for how larger bodies orbit inside disks of debris—an area of interest, for example, for scientists studying how planets take shape in the dusty disks around young stars.

But the find also highlights the enormous complexity of Saturn's rings and moons. The ringed planet boasts more than 60 moons that vary dramatically in shape, size, complexion, and origin.

To get a handle on things, the moons have been grouped into ten classes based on where and how they orbit:

"Moonlets" is the general term applied to the not-quite-moon-size bodies that orbit inside the rings.

Ring shepherds are relatively small moons that "herd" the ring particles around them, sculpting the outside edges of rings or carving distinct gaps in their middles. The moons Pan and Daphnis, for example, created and maintain the Encke gap and Keeler gap, respectively. The newfound giant propeller moons aren't exactly shepherds, since they don't carve out defined paths in the rings—hence the suggestion that they make up a new Saturnian moon class.

Daphnis making waves in the Keeler gap.
—Image courtesy NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Co-orbital moons are pairs of moons that both orbit at almost the same distance from a parent body. In Saturn's case, the moons Janus and Epimetheus orbit so close to each other that every four years it looks like a collision is unavoidable. Instead, thanks to some fun physics, the moons swap places, with one taking a slightly lower, faster path and the other taking a higher but slower route.

Saturn also hosts the only known trojan moons, pairs of moons that travel in stable positions either ahead of or behind a much more massive moon. The large moon Tethys, for example, is accompanied on its journey by the trojan moons Calypso (picture) and Telesto.

Tethys is one of the four inner large moons, which orbit in the diffuse, microscopic particles of the E ring, Saturn's outermost ring. Its neighbors are Dione, Mimas, and one of Saturn's most famous moons, the "ice-geyser world" Enceladus.

Between Mimas and Enceledus lie three smaller moons that make up their own class, the Alkyonides. Each of these tiny moons displays its own ring arc, a faint, partial ring of material that's likely being knocked off the moon by minute impacts.

A ring arc around the moon Anthe.
—Image courtesy NASA/JPL

The outer large moons are the much more traditional satellites, orbiting outside the planet's rings. Here we have Rhea, Hyperion, Iapetus, and Saturn's largest moon, Titan.

Finally, Saturn has a few irregular moons orbiting beyond the big outer moons. These small satellites—some of which even orbit backward with respect to Saturn's rotation—are likely passing objects that were captured by Saturn's gravity. The irregulars are separated into (and named according to) three main groups: Inuit, Gallic, and Norse.

NASA announced today that they've officially decided to postpone the final two space shuttle launches, pushing Discovery's launch to November and the [supposed] last-ever shuttle launch featuring Endeavour to February 2011.

For followers of the intrepid space agency, news of the delay—or any delay, really—will surely come as no surprise.

Space shuttle Atlantis lifts off for the ISS in May.
—Picture courtesy NASA

In fact, NASA has been asking for this particular delay since June, according to Space.com.

The stated rationale is that the hardware the shuttles are supposed to deliver to the International Space Station simply wouldn't have been ready in time for the previously scheduled launch dates.

Discovery was slated to fly September 16 carrying a new storage module for the station and NASA's prototype space robot, Robonaut 2.

But engineers said they wouldn't have everything ready by September, so NASA agreed to bump Discovery's flight.

The slipped schedule meant that Endeavour needed a new launch window, and the first available opportunity isn't until next year.

Luckily, that gives folks more time to put the finishing touches on Endeavour's main payload, a new instrument designed to live on the outside of the station called the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer.

The AMS is a particle physics detector slated to work for at least three years. Scientists hope the data collected will help answer some big questions related to the way the universe works, including:

1. solving the puzzle of the universe's "missing" antimatter;
2. finding traces of possible dark matter particles [note: a previous claim of dark matter detection has since been debunked]; and
3. assessing the long-term risks of cosmic radiation to people and craft traveling in space.

NASA is also saying any decisions on scheduling a bonus shuttle flight won't be made until August.

If the extra launch happens, NASA will give Atlantis, which otherwise finished its final flight in May, one more trip to space.

This time it's the White House dragging some feet: Higher-ups in the Executive Branch need to make the call to extend the shuttle program, which is estimated to cost U.S. taxpayers $200 million a month.