How small are we really? Just have a peek at the largest NASA photo ever taken–a super-high resolution image of Andromeda from Hubble–and feel how incredibly vast the universe is. It is simply breathtaking. 

Find Jill on Twitter @jillettinger

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There are a lot of mysteries out there.

Journalists and designers developed the infographic as a way to interpret vast amounts of data. And what has a vaster amount of data than the final frontier? That’s right—NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory recently started JPL Infographics, where space nerds and graphic design wizards can take NASA data and create their own illustrations. Take a look at these ten infographics and brainstorm a few ideas of your own.

Are We Alone in the Universe?: A list of possibly habitable planets.

NASA’s Space Shuttle: The United States shuttle program has been shut down, but its manned spacecraft is still a technological marvel.

The Moon 1990-Future: A catalog of the various countries that have landed on Earth’s only natural satellite.

Space Invaders: Do you believe in aliens? A surprising number of people do.

Space Race: How far away from the planet have we gotten?

Big Brothers: We’ve managed to litter even the vast blankness of our skies.

15 Things You Didn’t Know About Space: It’s a myth that the Great Wall of China is the only man-made object you can see from space. What other facts have you missed?

50 Years of Space Exploration: Where we’ve been, where we should go.

Funding the Final Frontier: Bravery isn’t the only currency that the space program recognizes.

Women in Space: Sally Ride isn’t the only woman to crack the glass ceiling.

Image: Sweetie187.

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Ground control to Major Tom.

In a week that Mercury went into retrograde (we think), our thoughts turn skywards. What’s up there waiting for us, in every sense? This week, our regular launch into the EcoSalon archives takes a celestial flavor as we look at space – the key to so many of our earthly problems.

Space Is How We Fix Our Own Planet. Remember the incredible image of Earth-rise, described by photographer Galen Rowell as “the most influential environmental photograph ever taken”? That’s a gift the space program has bestowed upon us – ecological self-awareness. We know how fragile our world is because we can see it, bright and alive against the backdrop of the most profound emptiness we know. The help to our planet is technological, too: For example, you may have heard of a little invention developed for spacecraft called solar panels.

Space: Why Bother?

The more fuel efficient flying machine Aurora researchers envision (illustration, above) would be designed to cruise at mach 0.72 instead of the industry standard of mach 0.8. It would not have to use composite materials (which are lighter weight and used in the newly tested Boeing 787 Dreamliner) but it could use conventional aluminum and manufacturing technology, while still saving substantial amounts of fuel.

25% of costs for a typical airliner are spent on fuel, studies show. So the environmental benefits should deliver economic benefits, too.

Can the same efficiencies apply to space travel and space ships? As an industry, commercial space travel is too nascent to “go green,” Parrish says. But it is starting with a very ecological-minded entrepreneur, Richard Branson, along with pioneering spacecraft designer Burt Rutan.Branson famously supported and financed the development of alternative, renewable energy and signed the Clinton Global Initiative in 2006.

EcoMeme: The Future Of Flight, Fuel Efficient?

There are around 900 satellites up there, busily keeping the world connected. They’re immersed in a sea of spacecraft fragments and garbage nicknamed space junk. There are parts of rockets, fragments of destroyed satellites (some of them very fresh indeed), gloves…even, would you believe, an astronaut’s tool bag that can occasionally be spotted whipping across the night sky (and here’s how it got up there). Around 18,000 pieces are larger than 10cm and can therefore be tracked and avoided. The rest? An estimated 580,000 further objects above 1cm in diameter. And all of these are hurtling round at orbital velocity, with enough kinetic energy to punch through spacecraft armor, destroy systems worth millions of dollars and endanger the lives of astronauts. It’s way beyond being a nuisance and makes a shocking picture.

The Sky’s The Limit: Space Gets Trashed

If there’s one way to feel how precious and fragile our tiny blue-green planet is, it’s to watch the stars wheel as the world turns on its axis. When I eventually settle down and have kids, I’ll be taking them for long trips away from the city lights, and encouraging them to squint through a telescope, and pointing them towards online astronomical resources such as the pupil-dilating beauty of the WorldWide Telescope project, and all the other forms of amateur astronomy that gave me such a sense of the wonder of Nature when I was a child.

Stars: Teaching Us About Living (And Lying)

The thing about the Geminids is that they’re unlike other meteor showers in that their “shooting stars” do not come from our passing through the tail of a comet, but rather from a “weird rocky object” called 3200 Phaethon. This smallish rock with an odd orbit is believed to have come from an impact event with asteroid called Pallas. In any event, there’s a ton of strange and unique features to this show, many of which remains a mystery to scientists. Its big deal though, is, well, its bigness.

Heads Up, The Geminids Are Coming

Whether you actually buy into planetary politics (we’re reserving judgment), the cosmos are a fun and convenient foil for a range of bad behavior and bum luck. Your astrocartography, on the other hand, is something that should be taken very, very seriously. That’s right, your astrocartography, a.k.a. locational astrology, meaning you are where you live. That’s what the experts say, anyway. And you, my dear Leo, could very well be living in the wrong ZIP code.

Pack your bags. Here’s where you should be living according to your star sign.

The 20 Best And Worst Cities For Your Astrological Sign

Images: paul (dex), Aurora, Buglugs, ForestGladesiWanderer, DrRawheaD and Apple Wood Manor.

The post From the Vault: The Sky Is Not the Limit appeared first on EcoSalon.

Allow me to wax cosmic: There are certain events that take us outside of ourselves. Big ones, dwarfing our most significant human travails. Events where we look up for a moment and submit to the understanding that we’re part of a stupefying stellar picture, passing through a heavens so overwhelming that we’re simply owned – and there’s nothing to do but watch and accept our role in the show. Beautiful stuff.

I’m talking solar and lunar eclipses. I’m talking comets. And I’m talking meteor showers, the most intense of which is about to make its annual clockwork appearance, erupting out of Gemini early next week to the delight of night-sky devotees who never miss its arrival. The Earth, says NASA, “will pass through the Geminid debris stream, producing as many as 120 meteors per hour over dark-sky sites.” The shower will peak probably between midnight and sunrise on Tuesday, “when the Moon is low and the constellation Gemini is high overhead, spitting bright Geminids across a sparkling starry sky.” (See NASA waxes, too.)

The thing about the Geminids is that they’re unlike other meteor showers in that their “shooting stars” do not come from our passing through the tail of a comet, but rather from a “weird rocky object” called 3200 Phaethon. This smallish rock with an odd orbit is believed to have come from an impact event with asteroid called Pallas. In any event, there’s a ton of strange and unique features to this show, many of which remains a mystery to scientists. Its big deal, though, is, well, its bigness.

“Of all the debris streams Earth passes through every year, the Geminids’ is by far the most massive,” says NASA astronomer Bill Cooke. “When we add up the amount of dust in the Geminid stream, it outweighs other streams by factors of 5 to 500.” Says the NASA site: “This makes the Geminids the 900-lb gorilla of meteor showers.”

So go. Watch. Obey the heavens and enjoy the show.

Images: Dr. Rawhead, St0rmz, Nasa Images, Navicore, Noel Feans

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The space-obsessed were treated to a Foursquare check-in from the wild black yonder last week from NASA astronaut and International Space Station Commander Doug Wheelock. For his efforts, he was told: “You are now 220 miles above Earth traveling at 17,500 mph and unlocked the NASA Explorer Badge! Show this badge and get a free scoop of astronaut ice cream.” Tons of press. Presumably, he’s the mayor of Space – for now, anyway. And for all you future-trippers, here’s something you might want to start worrying about right away. I mean, we do have our green priorities.

Bad news, says NewScientist: “Space tourism could have major consequences for Earth’s climate.” This based on brand spanking new computer simulations that say soot-spewing rockets (we recently told you about the climate evils of soot) could have an effect far nastier than airplanes, even though the model would have them “belch out” only about 600 tons of the stuff, which is less than airplanes currently bless us with.

This is because spacecraft are so far out – literally: “…plane soot occurs at low enough altitudes for rain to wash it out of the atmosphere in just days or weeks. Rockets expel the stuff at altitudes three times as high – in the stratosphere more than [about 25 miles] above sea level. There, well above the weather, it can remain for up to 10 years,” the article says.

Why should we worry about this? Well “in the next few years,” (ya think? really?) “space tourism companies hope to start routinely flying passengers on suborbital space flights.” Based on what some companies are saying, their business plans in the “by 2020” column, the simulations were based on an assumed rate of 1,000 suborbital trips per year.

The science is that the soot could warm air in the stratosphere and strengthen currents that carry air from the equator to the poles. This is “not a pretty picture for the Arctic or Antarctic,” says Charles Zender of the University of California, Irvine.

So a word of warning for you green folks who are looking to purchase advance tix for the Buck Rogers express: your eco-priorities might conflict with your moonage daydreams (or Foursquare badge aspirations). I don’t know, though. You might have some time to think about it. In the meantime, maybe stick to “unlocking” where you’re at.

Image: x-ray delta one

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Is space worth it?

Another year, another whirl of astronautical triumphs and failures, all at the taxpayer’s expense. With environmental problems already testing us to our limits, do we really need to go in search of the mysteries of the universe?

Not Worth It

Space eats money. The technical challenges of space exploration, particularly the manned variety, are such that any extraterrestrial venture is fabulously expensive. NASA’s 2007 budget? $16 billion. Accompanying this massive outlay is the failure rate. Space is the most hostile environment we know of – yet we’re launching super-expensive machinery into it, hoping everything will be fine. All too often, it isn’t. India has recently lost an £80m lunar probe. NASA lost both its Mars Surveyor spacecraft in 1998, at a cost of $125m. It’s a bottomless black hole. Why keep trying to fill it?

Space Can’t Solve Our Problems. “Spread humanity into space” goes the argument, but when only the richest reach the stars, it’s surely a nonsense idea. How exactly does this help our worsening overpopulation problem? It makes sense in the long run – but first things first, we have a planet to save.

Space Is Too Damn Big. The number of discovered exoplanets (“those outside the solar system”) now exceeds 400, with more popping into view every month. But in a practical sense, this is meaningless. They’re just too far away to ever go there. Not for nothing is space described as the “final frontier”: the distances are impossibly vast. When the best imagined speed to the nearest star results in a century’s travel-time (one way), you can be sure E.T. won’t be popping by for candy anytime soon.

Worth It

Space Is A Bargain. The work that NASA did with its relatively paltry $19b budget in 2009 is simply amazing. Sound like a lot? Compare it with the cost of the Iraq War ($10b a month) or GDP ($13 trillion+). Considering how tough it is to work in space, it’s terrific value for money. And the space program isn’t a drain – it generates revenue, creates jobs and stimulates many industries. Space exploration is investment at home. Without it, many technologies we take for granted probably wouldn’t exist. (Not Velcro – that’s a myth).

Space Is How We Fix Our Own Planet. Remember the incredible image of Earth-rise (shown below), described by photographer Galen Rowell as “the most influential environmental photograph ever taken”? That’s a gift the space program has bestowed upon us – ecological self-awareness. We know how fragile our world is because we can see it, bright and alive against the backdrop of the most profound emptiness we know. The help to our planet is technological, too: For example, you may have heard of a little invention developed for spacecraft called solar panels.

We Are Too Small. In July 1994, the remnants of comet Shoemaker-Levy smacked into Jupiter. Some of the holes left in its atmosphere were bigger than the Earth. Forget cheesy Bruce Willis films: it’s scientific fact that we’re a celestial sitting duck and it’s only a matter of time. It’s true we can’t move entire populations, but we can colonize other worlds (in theory) and as a species, give ourselves a fighting chance. Yet it’s not just raw survival instinct that should propel us towards the stars – it’s the fact that we’re human, and it’s what we do. We’re pioneers. It’s why we left the trees, why we crossed the oceans, how the proverbial West was won. Without exploration, we stagnate. Exploring space is how we can remain ourselves.

Images: ‘J’, Bill Anders

The post Space: Why Bother? appeared first on EcoSalon.

Aviation and space exploration suck – fossil fuel that is. Not to mention clean air, and quiet habitat. Can these industries, so essential to global scientific and economic progress, go green? The race is definitely on.

Offering hope, inspiring blog posts and tweets-a-plenty over the past two weeks were the test flight of Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner, which burns 20% less fuel than other passenger planes of its approximate size, and the unveiling of the world’s first, commercial passenger space craft, the SpaceShipTwo (SS2) by Virgin Galactic and Scaled Composites. SS2 is reportedly more fuel efficient than NASA’s spacecraft.

But such breakthroughs are just the start of what’s possible, in terms of fuel efficiency and other environmental advances, says Joe Parrish, vice president of research and development for Aurora Flight Sciences in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Aurora makes innovative aerospace products, including unmanned space vehicles, planes that can fit in your pocket, and planes with a 500-foot wingspan that can stay aloft for five years.

Working on the NASA N+3 “future commercial flight program” with Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.), and the engine technology firm Pratt & Whitney, Aurora Flight Services’ research showed, in preliminary results, “that as much as 40% fuel reduction can be achieved through reduced cruise speed and redesign of aircraft,” Parrish reported.

In other words – a makeover and taking it easy!?

“You can’t take an existing aircraft and just reduce its speed to realize these environmental benefits. It’s not a matter of pulling back the throttle. But the redesigned aircraft does not look totally different from the old,” Parrish notes.

The more fuel efficient flying machine Aurora researchers envision (illustration, above) would be designed to cruise at mach 0.72 instead of the industry standard of mach 0.8. It would not have to use composite materials (which are lighter weight and used in the newly tested Boeing 787 Dreamliner) but it could use conventional aluminum and manufacturing technology, while still saving substantial amounts of fuel.

25% of costs for a typical airliner are spent on fuel, studies show. So the environmental benefits should deliver economic benefits, too.

Can the same efficiencies apply to space travel and space ships? As an industry, commercial space travel is too nascent to “go green,” Parrish says. But it is starting with a very ecological-minded entrepreneur, Richard Branson, along with pioneering spacecraft designer Burt Rutan. Branson famously supported and financed the development of alternative, renewable energy and signed the Clinton Global Initiative in 2006.

A report out on Wednesday (Dec. 16, 2009) from the American Lung Association showed “sixty percent of Americans live in areas with unhealthy air pollution levels,” even with new laws in place attempting to regulate and improve air quality. Every little bit of petroleum saved, and greenhouse gas emission avoided, helps.

Read up on the Boeing 787, and the SpaceshipTwo, and make your wishes for greener commercial and space flight known.

Basic Reading:

“With more than 300 future passengers already putting up the $200,000 for a seat on SpaceShipTwo, there appears to be a strong demand for the rides to the blackness of space…” – Wired.com

“Boeing’s first new aircraft for ten years represents a radical departure for the manufacturer, eschewing traditional aircraft materials in favour of composites, in the pursuit of efficiency and lightness. If the composites, comprising 50% of the aircraft by weight, do not perform as expected, major headaches could emerge.”- Center for Asia Pacific Aviation

“The [Boeing 787] Dreamliner will offer greater efficiency for airlines”¦ The plane [should] use 20% less fuel than today’s aircraft of comparable size, provide up to 45% more cargo capacity and include a new interior environment with cleaner air, larger windows, more stowage space, improved lighting and other conveniences.”- AviationRecord.com

Further Resources:

A NasaWatch blog entry in anticipation of the roll out of SpaceShipTwo, entitled “Big Party in the Mojave Tonight”

A blog entry at UniverseToday that includes photos and a video tour of the six-passenger vehicle, the SpaceShipTwo

A story in the New York Times entitled “A Takeoff and Hope for Boeing”

The official home page of N.A.S.A., the National Aeronautics and Space Administration of the U.S. Government

Image: Aurora

This is the latest installment of EcoMeme, a column featuring eco news, tech and business highlights by columnist Lora Kolodny.

The post EcoMeme: The Future of Flight, Fuel Efficient? appeared first on EcoSalon.

Energy, that is. With few energy resources of its own, Japan is literally reaching for the stars in its attempt to turn unlimited clean energy into reality by 2030.

The nation’s plan, known as the Space Solar Power System (SSPS), involves positioning huge, floating photovoltaic dishes to hover in the geostationary orbit just outside the Earth’s atmosphere.

These photovoltaic dishes would harvest the solar energy that, at this level, is at least five times stronger than on earth and beam it down to earth through lasers and microwaves. On earth, gigantic antennae, located in restricted areas at sea or on dam reservoirs, would collect and store the solar energy.

This controversial plan sounds like something you’d only find in a Sci-Fi novel.

But the Japanese government thinks it has huge potential. To that end, it has established the Institute for Unmanned Space Experiment Free Flyer (USEF), a consortium of companies (including Mitsubishi Electric, NEC, Fujitsu and Sharp) and scientists who will be working on finding ways of turning the SSPS into reality.

Image: Velo Steve

The post It Came from Outer Space appeared first on EcoSalon.

If you’re looking for the next big environmental catastrophe waiting to happen – look up.

There are around 900 satellites up there, busily keeping the world connected. They’re immersed in a sea of spacecraft fragments and garbage nicknamed space junk. There are parts of rockets, fragments of destroyed satellites (some of them very fresh indeed), gloves…even, would you believe, an astronaut’s tool bag that can occasionally be spotted whipping across the night sky (and here’s how it got up there).

Around 18,000 pieces are larger than 10cm and can therefore be tracked and avoided. The rest? An estimated 580,000 further objects above 1cm in diameter. And all of these are hurtling round at orbital velocity, with enough kinetic energy to punch through spacecraft armor, destroy systems worth millions of dollars and endanger the lives of astronauts. It’s way beyond being a nuisance and makes a shocking picture.

And it’s not going away by itself. Space is a biologically inert environment. Anything you leave up there will stay left, pristine, until it spirals into the Earth’s upper atmosphere and burns up. This could take centuries – and that’s a very long time for world Space programs, because if a piece of scrap hits anything else, it creates more junk. It’s a tiny junk-making machine that’s powered by our own planet – and there’s over half a million of them up there.

The answer? Treat nearby Space the same way we want to treat our precious ecosystem – with rules, regulations and penalties. Cleanup acts are currently far too expensive, but penalizing astronautical litterbugs could be a way to stop this junk-belt developing further.  Otherwise, somewhere down the line our night sky will be a glittering, inaccessible, lethal sea of junk – and we’ll have shut the door on humanity’s future.

Images: buglugs, quimix

The post The Sky's the Limit: Space Gets Trashed appeared first on EcoSalon.

Over the next few months, as winter wanes and the night air warms up enough to be comfortably breathed, it’s time to stand in the garden and watch the sky fall.

It’s not difficult to see how meteoroids got their nickname of shooting stars, even if the term couldn’t be less accurate. These lumps of icy gravel (cast-offs from comets powering around our solar system) rain against our planet in a slow, steady drizzle for much of the year, and unless you are remarkably lucky, there’s not much to see. But every few months, the earth passes through the dusty trail of a fragmenting comet – and we’re treated to the celestial firework display known as a meteor shower.

It’s the perfect excuse to grab a warming drink, wrap up well, and sit – or even lie – in your back garden until your eyes become accustomed to the dark. Because meteoroids move on parallel paths, they appear to be radiating from the same point of the sky – it’s the same perspective trick as when you are standing on railway tracks that seem to converge in the distance. Watching for meteors is a job for the more light-sensitive corners of your eyes – most of the time all you’ll glimpse is an after-image of a livid scratch of light across the dark sky, on the very edge of your perception. It’s hypnotically calming and it hones your senses.

So what can we expect from meteor showers in 2009? The best displays for North American observers are:

The Lyrids (mid April).

The Perseids (early August) – the most famous, and often the most beautiful.

The Orionids – caused by the passage of Halley’s Comet, and streaking across the sky in late October.

The Leonids (mid November) – spectacular in history, and a little unpredictable (although the heaviest storms come in 33-year cycles). Remarkable images include this one taken from an aircraft at 40,000 feet.

The Geminids (mid December). Appearing to fly out of the constellation Gemini (hence their name), the rather weird Geminids are regarded as one of the meteor-shower highlights of the year.

For the hardened stargazer, there are other less easily-spotted showers to tax the senses – SkyTour lists the full 2009 itinerary. And as eccentric as it may seem, reclining on the ground is a good way to watch – no amount of yoga (or mulled wine) will unkink the crick in your neck from a long, mesmerized night of craning your head back.

Images: jurvetson / johndan / typicalnaloboy

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