Your Name In Landsat

August 31, 2024 by Jenny List No comments

We’re guessing most readers can cite things from their youth which gave them an interest in technology, and spurred on something which became a career or had a profound impact on their life. Public engagement activities for technology or science have a crucial role in bringing forth the next generations of curious people into those fields, and along the way they can provide some fun for grown-ups too.

A case in point is from NASA’s Landsat engagement team, Your Name In Landsat. Type in a text string, and it will spell it out in Earth features seen by the imaging satellites, that resemble letters. Endless fun can be had by all, as the random geology flashes by.

The text entry form with a pop-up warning only A to Z are accepted. — No text emojis, boo hiss!

In itself, though fun, it’s not quite a hack. But behind the kids toy we’re curious as to how the images were identified, and mildly sad that the NASA PR people haven’t seen fit to tell us. We’re guessing that over the many decades of earth images there exists a significant knowledge base of Earth features with meaningful or just amusing shapes that will have been gathered by fun-loving engineers, and it’s possible that this is what informed this feature. But we’d also be curious to know whether they used an image classification algorithm instead. There must be a NASA employee or two who reads Hackaday and could ask around — let us know in the comments.

Meanwhile, if LANDSAT interests you, it’s possible to pull out of the air for free.

Charles Duke during his interview with Jack Gordon. (Credit: Jack Gordon, YouTube)

Lunar Landing Lunacy: Charles Duke Confronted With Reality-Deniers

August 24, 2024 by Maya Posch 104 Comments

Lunar Module pilot Charles Duke saluting the US flag during Apollo 16. (Credit: NASA)

Imagine: you spent years training for a sojourn to the Moon, flew there on top of a Saturn V rocket as part of Apollo 16, to ultimately land on the lunar surface. You then spend the next few days on the surface, walking and skipping across the lunar regolith while setting up experiments and exploring per your mission assignments. Then, you pack everything up and blast off from the lunar surface to the orbiting command module before returning to Earth and a hero’s welcome. Then, decades later, you are told to your face that none of that ever happened. That’s the topic of a recent interview which [Jack Gordon] recently did with astronaut [Charles Duke].

None of these ‘arguments’ provided by the reality-denying crowd should be too shocking or feel new, as they range from the amount of fuel required to travel to the moon (solved by orbital mechanics) to the impossibility of lighting on the Moon (covered by everyone and their dog, including the Mythbusters in 2008).

Of course, these days, we have lunar orbiters (LRO and others) equipped with powerful cameras zoomed in on the lunar surface, which have photographed the Apollo landing sites with the experiments and footsteps still clearly visible. Like today’s crowd of spherical Earth deniers, skeptics will denounce anything that doesn’t fit their ill-conceived narrative as ‘faked’ for reasons that only exist in their fevered imaginations.

A common objection we’ve heard is that if we went to the moon back then, why haven’t we been back? The reason is obvious: politics. The STS (Shuttle) project sucked up all funding and the USSR collapsed. Only recently has there been a new kind of ‘space race’ in progress with nations like China. That doesn’t keep countless individuals from dreaming up lunar landing conspiracy theories to file away with their other truth nuggets, such as how microwaved and genetically engineered foods cause cancer, vaccines are another government conspiracy to control the population, and nuclear power plants can explode like nuclear bombs.

Perhaps the best takeaway is that even if we have not found intelligent life outside Earth yet, for at least a few years, intelligent life was the only kind on Earth’s Moon. We wish [Charles Duke] many happy returns, with maybe a casual return to the Moon in the near future as well, to frolic once more on the lunar surface.

Not that there hasn’t been a moon hoax, just not lately. If you want to watch the old Apollo video, it has been improved in recent years.

Continue reading “Lunar Landing Lunacy: Charles Duke Confronted With Reality-Deniers” →

Citizen Scientists Spot Super Fast Moving Object In NASA Data

August 22, 2024 by Lewin Day 18 Comments

When you were five, you probably spotted your best friend running at “a million miles an hour” when they beat everybody at the local athletics meet. You probably haven’t seen anything that fast snice. According to NASA, though, a group of citizen scientists spotted a celestial object doing just that!

The group of citizen scientists were involved in a NASA program called Backyard Worlds: Planet 9. They were working on images from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Explorer mission. Scanning through stored images, Martin Kabatnik, Thomas P. Bickle, and Dan Caselden identified a curiously speedy object termed CWISE J124909.08+362116.0. There are lots of fast-moving objects out in space, but few quite as fast as this one. It’s quite literally zooming through the Milky Way at about 1 million miles per hour.

It’s unclear exactly what the object is. It appears light enough to be a low-mass star, or potentially a brown dwarf—somewhere in between the classification of gas giant and star. It also has suspiciously low iron and metallic content. The leading hypothesis is that CWISE J1249 might have been ejected from a supernova, or that it got flung around a pair of black holes.

For now, it remains a mystery. It’s a grand discovery that really highlights the value of citizen science. If you’ve been doing your own rigorous scientific work—on NASA’s data or your own—do let us know!

WOW! It Wasn’t Aliens After All!

August 20, 2024 by Jenny List 21 Comments

There may not be many radio astronomy printouts that have achieved universal fame, but the one from Ohio State University’s Big Ear telescope upon which astronomer [Jerry R. Ehman] wrote “WOW!” is definitely one of them. It showed an intense one-off burst that defied attempts to find others like it, prompting those who want to believe to speculate that it might have been the product of an extraterrestrial civilization. Sadly for them the Planetary Habitability Laboratory at the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo has provided an explanation by examining historical data from the Arecibo telescope.

The radio signal in question lay on the hydrogen line frequency at 1420 MHz, and by looking at weaker emissions from cold hydrogen clouds they suggest that the WOW! signal may have come from a very unusual stimulation of one of these clouds. A magnetar is a type of neutron star which can create an intense magnetic field, and their suggestion is that Big Ear was in the lucky position of being in the right place at the right time to see one of these through a hydrogen cloud. The field would excite the hydrogen atoms to maser-like emission of radiation, leading to the unexpected blip on that printout.

There’s a question as to whether speculation about aliens is helpful to the cause of science, but in answer to that we’d like to remind readers that we wouldn’t be talking about magnetars now without it, and that the WOW! signal was in fact part of an early SETI experiment. Better keep on searching then!

Meanwhile readers with long memories will recollect us looking at the WOW! signal before.

Canadarm2 captures Cygnus OA-5 S.S. Alan Poindexter in late 2016 (Credit: NASA)

Canadarm2 Scores Milestone With Catching Its 50th Spacecraft

August 16, 2024 by Maya Posch 3 Comments

Recently Canada’s Canadarm2 caught its 50th spacecraft in the form of a Northrop Grumman Cygnus cargo vessel since 2009. Although perhaps not the most prominent part of the International Space Station (ISS), the Canadarm2 performs a range of very essential functions on the outside of the ISS, such as moving equipment around and supporting astronauts during EVAs.

Power and Data Grapple Fixture on the ISS (Credit: NASA)

Officially called the Space Station Remote Manipulator System (SSRMS), it is part of the three-part Mobile Servicing System (MSS) that allows for the Canadarm2 and the Dextre unit to scoot around the non-Russian part of the ISS, attach to Power Data Grapple Fixtures (PDGFs) on the ISS and manipulate anything that has a compatible Grapple Fixture on it.

Originally the MSS was not designed to catch spacecraft when it was installed in 2001 by Space Shuttle Endeavour during STS-100, but with the US moving away from the Space Shuttle to a range of unmanned supply craft which aren’t all capable of autonomous docking, this became a necessity, with the Japanese HTV (with grapple fixture) becoming the first craft to be caught this way in 2009. Since the Canadarm2 was originally designed to manipulate ISS modules this wasn’t such a major shift, and the MSS is soon planned to also started building new space stations when the first Axiom Orbital Segment is launched by 2026. This would become the Axiom Station.

With the Axiom Station planned to have its own Canadarm-like system, this will likely mean that Canadarm2 and the rest of the MSS will be decommissioned with the rest of the ISS by 2031.

Top image: Canadarm2 captures Cygnus OA-5 S.S. Alan Poindexter in late 2016 (Credit: NASA)

Possible Discovery Of Liquid Water In Mars’ Mid-Crust By The Insight Lander

August 13, 2024 by Maya Posch 15 Comments

One of the most sought after substances in the Universe is water – especially in its liquid form – as its presence on a planet makes the presence of life (as we know it) significantly more likely. While there are potentially oceans worth of liquid water on e.g. Jupiter’s moon Europa, for now Mars is significantly easier to explore as evidenced by the many probes which we got onto its surface so far. One of these was the InSight probe, which was capable of a unique feat: looking inside the planet’s crust with its seismometer to perform geophysical measurements. These measurements have now led to the fascinating prospect that liquid water may in fact exist on Mars right now, according to a paper published by [Vashan Wright] and colleagues in PNAS (with easy-read BBC coverage). Continue reading “Possible Discovery Of Liquid Water In Mars’ Mid-Crust By The Insight Lander” →

The First Real Sputnik

August 7, 2024 by Al Williams 17 Comments

Americans certainly remember Sputnik. At a time when the world was larger and scarier, the Soviets had a metal basketball flying over the United States and the rest of the world. It made people nervous, but it was also a tremendous scientific achievement. However, it wasn’t the plan to use it as the first orbiter, as [Scott Manley] explains in a recent video that you can see below.

The original design would become Sputnik 3, which, as [Scott] puts it, was the first Soviet satellite that “didn’t suck.” The first one was essentially a stunt, and the second one had an animal payload and thermal problems that killed the canine occupant, [Laika].

Continue reading “The First Real Sputnik” →