Congratulations NASA: Spirit has landed!

It’s official: Spirit (the first of two rovers sent to Mars) has landed successfully!

First pictures from Mars Spirit Rover

MSNBC: NASA rover sends snapshots from Mars

The first of NASA’s two Mars rovers landed safely on an open stretch within Gusev Crater on Saturday night and sent back screenfuls of black-and-white images, marking a successful start to NASA’s first ground-level exploration of the Red Planet in more than six years.

FOXNews: NASA Rover Lands on Mars, Begins Transmitting Photos

Within hours it began sending back photos of the Red Planet. Among the first was a tiny black and white image showing a sundial on the rover. Another showed the Martian horizon and portions of the lander.

Susan Kitchens was blogging the event live from the Pasadena Civic Auditorium at the Planetary Society’s “Wild About Mars” event. Part one contained all the pre-landing events and addresses, and part two covers the landing.

8:32 deceleration going as expected. parachute deployment soon w/in a minute.

1000+ mph…. 300 mph. Parachute detected! applause here in the room….

heat shields off! altitude 8000′ feet

airbag in approx 25 seconds.

we got radar lock (YES!)

retro rocket firing.. await word to confirm!

awaiting word that we are on the ground. wsigns of bouncing on the surface!!!!!!

applause!!!!!!! we got bouncing word. we heard we do not have signal from spacecraft. Rolling….spacecraft has to survive all boucning for landing to be a success…

vehicle could bounce and roll up to a kilometer from its initial impact point. Awaiting word.

the way that canberra is processing might be producing noise that makes it hard to hear actual signal. [heh. signal? noise? say it ain’t so!]

We are trying to get direct signal, and will keep doing so until earthset. Then there are two orbiting vehicles that can pick up signal and then relay it on to us. Donna is telling us about Pathfinder’s lack of telemetry, and the fact that this mission has lots of telemetry, so we’ve got lots of data.

If it bouncing around, and landed in a position so that the antenna is in right position. Bags have to deflate, and the petals open (and right themselves)

May have a data packet that might indicate someething from vehicle, but need a bit more time. Positive confirmation of signal. We’re down! (applause here, but no reaction in teh control room onscreen)

Awaiting semaphor tones from landed vehicle. That’ll take a lotta processing to come across.

Stanford University reports that it might have received signal from Rover independenbly

SIGNAL!! Applause. applause applause and handshakes. (applause here too! lots.)

Lots of very relieved, happy people onscren at flight control.

And, of course, there are lots more links available in this /. thread, and this Google News query.

Wild 2 comet nucleus

Meanwhile, the Stardust comet-chasing mission is also successfully sending back images from the Wild 2 comet!

NASA on Saturday was hoping to receive the last of dozens of close-up photographs a spacecraft took of a distant comet, but officials did not expect to release more photos to the public until Monday.

The Stardust spacecraft took 72 images of the dark nucleus of comet Wild 2 during a daring flyby Friday that occurred 242 million miles from Earth. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration hoped to receive the last of the black-and-white images by late Saturday.

NASA so far has released a single black-and-white photo of the comet nucleus, thought to be just 3.3 miles across. It showed what looked like a giant frozen meatball pocked with sinkholes.

Too, too cool.

From 299,792,458 m/s to 0

Fun with science — physicists have just managed to (very briefly) stop light in its tracks!

The research differs from work published in 2001 that was hailed at the time as having brought light to standstill. In that work, light pulses were technically “stored” briefly when individual particles of light, or photons, were taken up by atoms in a gas.

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Harvard University researchers have now topped that feat by truly holding light and its energy in its tracks – if only for a few hundred-thousandths of a second. “We have succeeded in holding a light pulse still without taking all the energy away from it,” said Mikhail D. Lukin, a Harvard physicist.

(via Prairie)

Fasten your seatbelts!

Quake shockwave (1.1Mb animated .gif)If you live in the Seattle/Portland/Pacific Northwest — or Japan — you might want to think about moving. At least, think about it if you have plans to be in the area in about 200 years. ;)

Geologists have discovered evidence of a massively powerful earthquake zone beneath the Pacific Northwest just offshore from the Seattle area.

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They made the discovery by piecing together ancient accounts of a giant Japanese tsunami and a computer simulation of a huge trembler in the 17th century.

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Thought to be inactive, the earthquake zone runs 600 miles up the Pacific Coast from Northern California to southern British Columbia. It appears to be subject to monster quakes every 500 years.

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[…]

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In Japan, Satake created a detailed computer model showing how the tsunami crossed the Pacific before crashing into Japan.

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Atwood said the geological record indicates the fault ruptures about once every 500 years and is capable of unleashing “truly giant earthquakes.”

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He said only three quakes this century compare in magnitude — a 9.0 quake in Kamchatka in 1952, a 9.5 quake in Chile in 1960 and a 9.2 trembler in Alaska in 1964.

Well, okay, so maybe there’s not great reason to panic just yet. Alaskans have been expecting a repeat of the ’64 quake “real soon now” for years without it happening, and this one isn’t due for another two centuries. Still, it’s nice to be able to plan ahead sometimes, isn’t it?

Top 10 scientific hoaxes

From The Guardian: the top 10 scientific hoaxes of all time. A very interesting list, some of which I’d heard of, some of which I hadn’t, and one that I’d never heard was a hoax.

2. The amazing Tasaday tribe

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In 1971 Manuel Elizalde, a Philippine government minister, discovered a small stone age tribe living in utter isolation on the island of Mindanao. These people, the Tasaday, spoke a strange language, gathered wild food, used stone tools, lived in caves, wore leaves for clothes, and settled matters by gentle persuasion. They made love, not war, and became icons of innocence; reminders of a vanished Eden.

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They also made the television news headlines, the cover of National Geographic, were the subject of a bestselling book, and were visited by Charles A Lindbergh and Gina Lollobrigida. Anthropologists tried to get a more sustained look, but President Marcos declared a 45,000-acre Tasaday reserve and closed it to all visitors.

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After Marcos was deposed in 1986, two journalists got in and found that the Tasaday lived in houses, traded smoked meat with local farmers, wore Levi’s T-shirts and spoke a recognisable local dialect. The Tasadays explained that they had only moved into caves, donned leaves and performed for cameras under pressure from Elizalde – who had fled the country in 1983 along with millions from a foundation set up to protect the Tasaday. Elizalde died in 1997.

I remember reading about the Tasaday tribe in National Geographic (though as the issue was printed in 1972, the year before my birth, it must have been much later when I found it) and being absolutely fascinated that they’d been able to survive unchanged for so long. A bit of a bummer that it was a hoax, but not terribly surprising.

(via MeFi)

Male contraceptive on the way?

With a few more years of testing and study, it appears that may finally be an effective male contraceptive.

Scientists have developed a male contraceptive which was 100% effective and side-effect free in trials.

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The hormonal treatment is a combination of an implant under the skin and injections – meaning men do not have to remember to take a pill every day.

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Researchers from the Anzac Research Institute, Sydney, Australia, gave the treatment to a relatively small sample of 55 men for a year – and none of their partners became pregnant.

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However, it will be some time before the treatment is widely available.

Very cool. Right now it’s a two-part treatment: a under-the-skin implant replaced every four months, and an injection every three months. Maybe with time it’ll be simplified a bit, but no matter what, I think it’s great that there’s at least an encouraging step towards something like this.

Genetic Engineering

NZ billboard protesting genetic engineering

Here’s an eye opener for you — a New Zealand billboard from Mothers Against Genetic Engineering protesting genetic engineering experiments that asks “Why not just genetically engineer women for milk?

Aside from the obvious (and brilliant) attention-getting shock tactics of the image, there’s some interesting questions being raised here.

New Zealanders are allowing a handful of corporate scientists and ill-informed politicians to make decisions on the ethics of GE. Our largest science company, AgResearch, is currently putting human genes into cows in the hope of creating new designer milks. The ethics of such experiments have not even been discussed by the wider public. How far will we allow them to go?

Unfortunately, it’s time for me to head out the door to get to work. Discuss amongst yourselves.

(via MeFi)

White House edits to EPA Report on the Environment

The White House really doesn’t want to admit that there’s such a thing as global warming. Need proof that they’re doing everything they can to prevent little things like scientific findings from getting in the way of their agenda? A leaked internal memo from the EPA dated April 29th 2003 discussing changes that the White House made to the EPA’s Report on the Environment, and what options they have while dealing with the White House.

  1. Most important, the ROE no longer accurately represents scientific consensus on climate change. A few examples are:
    1. Conclusions of the NRC (2001) are discarded, that multiple studies indicate recent warming is unusual. The 1000 year temperature record is deleted…. Emphasis is given to a recent, limited analysis [that] supports the Administration’s favored message….

    2. Natural variability is used to mask scientific consensus that most of the recent temperature increase is likely due to human activities….

    3. Uncertainty is inserted (with “potentially” or “may”) where there is essentially none. For example, the introductory paragraph on climate change…says that changes in the radiative balance of the atmosphere “may” affect weather and climate. EPA had provided numerous scientific citations, and even Congressional testimony by Patrick J. Michaels, to show that this relationship is not disputed….

    4. Repeated references may leave an impression that cooling is as much of an issue as warming….

(via Boing Boinga>)

Ecstacy or meth?

Here’s one hell of an “oops” — a greatly publicized study detailing the harmful effects of popular drug Ecstasy has been retracted after the scientist realized that instead of Ecstasy, methamphetamine had been used in the experiments.

“We write to retract our report ‘Severe dopaminergic neurotoxicity in primates after a common recreational dose regimen of MDMA (Ecstasy)’ following our recent discovery that the drug used to treat all but one animal in that report came from a bottle that contained methamphetamine instead of the intended drug MDMA,” Ricaurte said in the retraction, to be published in the Sept. 8 issue of Science.

While I’m certainly not going to promote drug use in general, or Ecstasy in particular, that’s one hell of a mistake to make, especially for such a widely-distributed report. Truth to tell, I’ve always been a little suspect of studies on both sides of many drug issues — for every study that comes out that claims any given drug is fine, causes no problems, and should be de-regulated, another will come out claiming that said drug will cause major biological and psychological disorders for the user and their descendants for the next twenty generations, and often both studies will come from groups apparently equally well credentialed. So who do you trust?

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water…

That's a whale of a fart...

I guess blaming it on the dog just isn’t an option when you’re in the middle of the Antarctic ocean, huh?

It’s one of the unfortunate consequences of being a mammal – flatulence.

And, more unfortunately for a group of whale researchers, nature took its course right under their noses – literally.

The researchers claim this is the first photograph of a minke whale letting one go in the icy waters of Antarctica. It was taken from the bow of a research vessel.

“We got away from the bow of the ship very quickly … it does stink,” said Nick Gales, a research scientist from the Australian Antarctic Division.

Hey, even I can succumb to the occasional giggle at juvenile fart humor every so often.

(via Boing Boing)