Now here’s something I didn’t know: Polaris, a.k.a. the North Star, is actually three stars, a trinary system consisting of a supergiant much larger than our own sun and two smaller companions. One of these companions can be seen with a small telescope, but the other is in so close to the big one that its presence has only ever been deduced, never directly observed. Until now.

In this photo, the supergiant is the big white blob, naturally, while the companion star is the much smaller bright spot in the seven o’clock position. Not surprisingly, the image was captured by the amazing Hubble Space Telescope, which had to be cranked up to its maximum resolution in order to accomplish the job; details can be found in this press release from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Pretty cool.

According to official Star Trek lore, the eccentric genius Zefram Cochrane is scheduled to test humanity’s first warp-driven spacecraft on April 5, 2063. But a Scottish newspaper article suggested last week that this timeline may be moving up a bit:

AN EXTRAORDINARY “hyperspace” engine that could make interstellar space travel a reality by flying into other dimensions is being investigated by the United States government.
The hypothetical device, which has been outlined in principle but is based on a controversial theory about the fabric of the universe, could potentially allow a spacecraft to travel to Mars in three hours and journey to a star 11 light years away in just 80 days, according to a report in… New Scientist magazine.

 

The theoretical engine works by creating an intense magnetic field that, according to ideas first developed by the late scientist Burkhard Heim in the 1950s, would produce a gravitational field and result in thrust for a spacecraft.

 

Also, if a large enough magnetic field was created, the craft would slip into a different dimension, where the speed of light is faster, allowing incredible speeds to be reached. Switching off the magnetic field would result in the engine reappearing in our current dimension.

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Ever wonder where you fit into the Big Picture? Well, now we have a pretty good idea:

Using a network of radio telescopes spread across the globe, astronomers have determined that the distance from our solar system to the nearest spiral arm of the galaxy (we’re in the gap between two arms) is 1.95 plus or minus 0.04 kiloparsecs, or about 36,000,000,000,000,000 miles. That’s a pretty long trip, even at “point-five past lightspeed.” Just a little something to think about on this chilly Friday morning…

I won’t make the “that’s no moon, that’s a space station” remark, because every other blogger who’s ever posted a picture of Saturn’s moon Mimas has already said it. Even so, I gotta say that this thing looks enough like the Death Star to give me the willies. We’d better hope that really is just a big impact crater there in the upper hemisphere, and that this thing doesn’t someday start moving toward Earth under its own power…

Technical note, for those who may care: this image of Mimas against the backdrop of Saturn’s rings was taken by the Cassini spacecraft. Details can be found here.

You don’t hear much about space exploration on the nightly television news these days, but if you do a little googling, you’ll find that there’s actually a lot of activity going on Out There. Between the various US organizations, the ESA (European Space Agency), and the Japanese, our species has placed its mechanical proxies all over the solar system, everywhere from the very edge of interstellar space back to Jupiter and Saturn, and all the way inward to the sun. But the missions that seem to draw the most public attention are the ones focused on Mars, especially the rock stars of robotic space probes, those two intrepid little rovers. The first rover to land on the Red Planet, Spirit, has just celebrated its first year there — its first Martian year, that is, which is actually equivalent to about two Earth years. Not bad for a machine that was only supposed to last 90 days. The official press release puts this milestone into some perspective:

During Spirit’s martian year, the seasons have changed from summer to winter and back again. In its orbit around the Sun, Mars has returned to where it was when the rover first landed. Having survived seven times its expected lifetime and traveling over 3 miles (about 5,000 meters), Spirit is still going strong.

If you have a minute, give that entire press release a look; it’s an interesting recap of Spirit’s various discoveries as well as its arduous climb up the Columbia Hills, with several pictures and a map of the rover’s wanderings. You might also want to check out the “special effects” photos prepared by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to commemorate the anniversary. Basically, they’ve combined a Hollywood-style digital model of the rover with actual images sent back from Mars to give us an external view of how Spirit might look in the Martian environment. My personal favorite of is this one. I like the romantically bittersweet feeling of the little probe all alone in the coming night of an alien world…

We’ve seen it hundreds of times on TV and in the movies: an entire planet shrinking away from the camera, swallowed up by the darkness of space in a matter of seconds as the Enterprise warps out of orbit or the Millenium Falcon races away from pursuing TIE fighters. Ever wonder what it would really look like to watch our homeworld slide into the distance behind us? Then check out this movie, which is composed of several hundred images taken by the spacecraft Messenger during a “gravity assist manuever” that will slingshot the unmanned probe toward Mercury. The photos were made over the course of 24 hours, so we get to see a complete rotation of the planet during the film. This makes Earth look something like a toy top spinning at an unnatural, crazy speed, but it is a beautiful sight nonetheless. I was especially fascinated by the golden sun-highlight in the upper quadrant; that’s something no special-effects guy has ever thought to add to his shot, at least not to my knowledge.

I still believe and hope that someday a human being will see this view with their own eyes instead of through a trick of technology…

For any who be interested, here’s another article about the James Webb Space Telescope. This one is a little more generalized and “big picture” than the one I linked to yesterday…

My entry awhile back on the recent space shuttle mission triggered a comment-section discussion between myself and my friend Robert about, among other things, plans for a new space telescope to replace the aging Hubble. Well, Robert, just for you, I’m linking to this article about that new telescope, which has just reached a big manufacturing milestone related to its primary mirror. Fantabulous factoids about said mirror and the telescope to which it belongs follow:

The [James] Webb [Space] Telescope features a 6.5-meter (20 feet) aperture primary mirror comprised of 18 beryllium segments and will be the largest deployable telescope ever launched. …JWST will peer into the infrared at great distances to search for answers to astronomers’ fundamental questions about the birth and evolution of galaxies, the size and shape of the universe and the mysterious life cycle of matter. The space-based observatory will reside in an orbit 940,000 miles from Earth at the L2 Lagrange point.

The Lagrange points, for the non-geeky among us, are places in space where an object will be stationary relative to both the Earth and the Moon, rather than continuously changing position like ordinary satellites.

This has been another interesting but essentially useless exercise in trivia, courtesy of Simple Tricks and Nonsense. You may now return to your regularly scheduled Web surfing.

There are some interesting tidbits over at Space.com today that probably won’t make it onto the evening news, so I thought I’d provide a valuable public service and bring them to the attention of my three loyal readers.

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I’m sure everyone knows by now that space shuttle Discovery landed safely yesterday morning at Edwards AFB in California. I’m pleased about that, of course, and also pleased that the mission went as well as it did, including the unprecedented repairs to the shuttle itself that were performed by astronaut Steve Robinson. Post-landing glow aside, however, this Interested Observer found himself deeply troubled throughout most this flight, and it wasn’t because of the constantly looming specter of another Columbia-style disaster.

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