On May 25, 2008, the Phoenix Mars Lander will attempt its 7-minute descent onto the North Pole of Mars. Launched in August, the eight month trip thus far will look like a breeze compared to the tricky maneuvering necessary to land on another planet.

Phoenix will enter the top of the Martian atmosphere at almost 21,000 kilometers per hour (almost 13,000 mph). In seven minutes, the spacecraft must complete a challenging sequence of events to slow to about 8 kilometers per hour (5 mph) before its three legs reach the ground.

And this all must be done entirely autonomously. While the descent itself takes seven minutes, any information traveling to or from Mars will take ten minutes. So by the time NASA hears about the descent beginning, it will already be over.

Cynics may scoff at the difficulty, noting it’s been done, but you should also note that only half of international attempts to land on Mars have been successful. Here’s hoping this $325 million mission is in the “success” half.

The Phoenix website has an completely over-the-top video of the EDL (entry, descent, landing) process. Visit http://www.nasa.gov/phoenix for more information, including when and how to watch live coverage of the descent.

UPDATE: Catch up-to-the-minute updates on the MarsPhoenix Twitter page.

The WorldWide Telescope has been released.

First mentioned on TEDBlog, the WorldWide Telescope builds a “seamless” view of the universe with images taken from telescopes and satellites all over the world and sky. The software is pretty amazing, but the WWT website is unfortunately a cesspool of terrible promotional videos, so I recommend just heading over to the download page.

In many ways, the WWT is simply a desktop version of Google Sky. It’s just…a lot more robust, detailed, and inspiring to behold.

Galaxies Gone Wild! (via kottke)

The Hubble Space Telescope was launched into space 18 years ago and to celebrate, NASA has put up a photo gallery of merging galaxies, galaxies as in love with each other as NASA is with the Hubble. Aww.

On April 11, Moscow unveiled a statue commemorating the first living creature to fly into space: Laika, a stray dog stolen from the streets of Moscow. Gizmodo has a good overview of one of the saddest stories ever, with photo accompaniment provided by Flickr.

A BMW forum has a great set of photos of the space shuttle processing, from shipment of the external fuel tank to liftoff. (Why it’s the car forums that always have these cool stories, I do not know.) Reminds me of a more localized version of the trip a 200-ton piece of a particle detector took from Deggendorf, Germany, to a laboratory in Karlsruhe, only 400 kilometers away.

A belated NASA happy birthday for the Cassini-Huygens.

On October 15, 1997, NASA launched the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft to study Saturn and its moons. The craft reached its destination on July 1, 2004, and has since been orbiting Saturn and collecting enormous amounts of data. It has also since become my favorite jumble of metal ever lofted into the skies. To win you over as well, I present to you the following morsels of greatness.

First, eerie sounds of Saturn’s radio emissions (718 Kb .wav file):

Saturn is a source of intense radio emissions, which have been monitored by the Cassini spacecraft. The radio waves are closely related to the auroras near the poles of the planet. These auroras are similar to Earth’s northern and southern lights. This is an audio file of radio emissions from Saturn.

They could use a better copywriter, but you get the idea.

Secondly, two videos from the Huygens probe, which separated from the Cassini orbiter on December 25, 2004, and landed on Saturn’s moon Titan on January 15, 2004. The first is a technical video with all the bells and whistles (quite literally). I highly recommend you splurge for the 160.9 MB version, but I understand if you’re a bit timid. There is an impressive amount of information squashed onto the screen, and the beeps and boops as it all resolves makes it all the more fun.

(Yes, this is old news.)

After watching that, turn your attention to A View from Huygens, a much more public-friendly video “built with data collected during the 147-minute plunge through Titan’s thick orange-brown atmosphere to a soft sandy riverbed”. The realistic animation is narrated by KUAT radio broadcaster David Harrington, and backed by Beethoven’s “Piano Concerto #5″. (Visit the above link for a subtitled version of the video.)

For more Cassini audio, visit the University of Iowa Space Audio, bizarre features, and sounds of lightning pages.

As per Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD, 6/16/07):

As of today, June 16, the APOD editors have enjoyed presenting images from space missions, major observatories, and professional and amateur cosmic tourists alike for twelve years.

APOD, educational and beautiful all at once, you know I love you.

I have always loved Astronomy Picture of the Day, with its stunning images and lucid explanations, but, from an artistic perspective, it can be hit or miss. Mars As Art and The Sun as Art are both informative (less so, but still) and beautiful.

The Sun as Art can, admittedly, be overwhelming at times, obscuring its beauty behind cold science, but Mars As Art never falters. Indeed, the project’s sleek layout and description assures this. (”Five thousand images were nominated by scientist; forty-five were selected by a panel of professional artists, photographers, and photo editors. Every successful Mars mission since Viking is represented in this collection.”)

Even better, for those uninterested in the artistic merit behind the shots, NASA has a large image of the day gallery. Surprisingly, Astronomy Picture of the Day is not linked to from that site, but other gems are: Great Images in NASA, Planetary Photojournal (solar system and beyond, broken down by object), Hubble Space Telescope (home of mostly every stunning image of the universe you have seen).

While wars rage on, the environment crumbles, and our solar system loses a member, scientists have discovered proof of dark matter. The matter and energy we can see (people, buildings, planets, stars, etc.) only constitutes 5% of all the energy in the universe. 25% more is found in dark matter, and 70% more in dark energy. For those too tired to do the math, that means 95% of all the stuff in the universe is invisible to us. We can determine its existence through its effects (as in the case of dark matter, and similarly black holes), but we cannot see it. To put it another way, the complete destruction of all visible matter - let alone our country or even our world - would leave 95% of the universe intact. To me, this is a sobering fact. Humanity has this almost intrinsic idea that it is the most important aspect of the universe, but even passing contemplation of our place in the whole of things leaves me feeling tiny beyond measure.

Disregarding dark matter and energy, we are still inconceivably small in this grand universe of ours. Our world, which is so giant compared to our cramped bodies, is a fraction of the size of its neighboring planets, let alone the nearest star, the Sun. Even the Sun isn’t so massive, its size paling in comparison to that of a red giant. With celestial objects so large, it is even more amazing to think about that stars rarely (if ever) collide, even in colliding galaxies.

For another perspective of Us vs. The Universe, consider some distances:

4,828 kilometers - East Coast to West Coast
12,756.2 kilometers - diameter of the Earth
35,764.4 kilometers - altitude of most weather satellites
363,000 kilometers - distance to the moon at its closest
150,000,000 kilometers- distance from you to the Sun
5,913,520,000 kilometers - distance from Pluto to the Sun

From here, things jump up quickly:

3.9 x 10¹³ kilometers - distance to closest star, Proxima Centurai
2.4 x 10¹⁹ kilometers - distance to the closest major galaxy, Andromeda
4.4 x 10²³ kilometers - radius of the observable universe

To sum all that up:

The size of the Earth is about 290 quadrillionth (2.9×10^-17) the size of the radius of the universe.

The quotes and images below are the impetuses for this unusual Undressing the Internet. The first box is a selection from a poem by Laurie Sheck in which she weaves personal statements between quotes from astronauts concerning their experiences. It may not exactly capture my feelings, but it provides a good glimpse with much more eloquence than I can offer.

The second box is two day’s worth of Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD). Everyday, obviously, APOD displays an interesting picture dealing with astronomy along with a thoroughly hyperlinked explanation of the picture. August 9’s APOD shows a dark Australian sky with the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds visible to the naked eye. The larger of the two, the Large Magellanic Cloud, takes up only an inch or so in the center of August 9’s picture, and only about half a degree (probably) in the night sky.

September 4’s APOD returns to the subject of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), this time in much much much greater detail. It is the combination of these two photographs that caused my mind some trouble. Viewing the enlarged version of the LMC allows you see the immeasurable multitude of stars contained within and in the background/foreground. The LMC is a dwarf galaxy, having only about 10 billion stars (the Milky Way has about 200 to 400 billion stars). If most galaxies in the universe are dwarf (although certainly most visible galaxies are not), and an estimated 125 billion galaxies (and counting) exist in the universe, then there are at least 1 septillion (a 1 followed by 24 zeros) stars besides our Sun.

If the Sun, which overshadows us with its huge expanse, is but a grain of sand in comparison to the number of other stars in the universe, then what are we?

Laurie Sheck, “Notes On The Earth Seen From Space”, A Public Space, Issue 2

Neil Armstrong said, “I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.”

(Is this what frightened you, is this what you sought to combat and to flee? This fragility, this somehow-knowledge even then before anyone had ever left the earth or seen it from a distance, of how small it is and delicate, as we are too, how finite, how beside-the-point, how fleeting.)

When Leonov and White floated in space they didn’t want to come back… They couldn’t have known this beforehand. And what is a footstep then, after that, and the feeling fo earth (so fragile, so small) beneath a shoe, or the thin tether of breath, or a name, or a day, a boundary, a theory, a bond-

APOD: 2006 August 9 and
APOD: 2006 September 4, respectively:

(click to enlarge )

This early morning skyscape recorded near Winton, Queensland, Australia,looks toward the southeast. Low clouds are seen in silhouette against the first hints of sunlight, while two famous cosmic clouds, the Clouds of Magellan, also hover in the brightening sky. The Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC, upper right), and the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) are prominent wonders of the southern sky, named for the 16th century Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan. They are small, irregular galaxies in their own right, satellites of our much larger, spiral Milky Way galaxy. The SMC is about 210,000 light-years and the LMC about 180,000 light-years away.

(click to enlarge )

Where does dust collect in galaxies? To help find out, a team of researchers took the most detailed image ever of gas clouds and dust in the neighboring Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) galaxy. The composite image, shown above, was taken by the Spitzer Space Telescope in infrared light, which highlights the natural glow of the warm materials returned to the interstellar medium by stars. The above mosaic combines 300,000 individual pointings to create a composite 1,000-times sharper than any previous LMC image. Visible are vast clouds of gas and dust, showing in graphic detail that dust prefers regions near young stars (red-tinted bright clouds), scattered unevenly between the stars (green-tinted clouds), and in shells around old stars (small red dots). Also visible are huge caverns cleared away by the energetic outflows of massive former stars. The faint blue (false-color) glow across the bottom is the combined light from the old stars in the central bar of the LMC. The LMC is a satellite galaxy to our own Milky Way Galaxy, spans about 70,000 light years, and lies about 160,000 light years away toward the southern constellation of the Swordfish (Dorado).

I’m trying not to lose myself.