Hubble 3D

The Hubble Space Telescope, May 25, 2009 (NASA)

Next month, on March 19th, IMAX will release the new Hubble 3D movie, which documents the successful journey of space shuttle STS-125 to repair and upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope in May 2009. If it proves to be anything like the current indications, it will be spectacular.

Calla Cofield, writing in Fermilab’s Symmetry Breaking online magazine, declares it Confirmed: Hubble 3D Will Be Awesome. The article includes a brief trailer that does precisely that.

For much more on the movie itself and a number of links to related topics, see IMAX’s Hubble 3D page.

For more on the Hubble Space Telescope, visit NASA’s Hubble Site.

A rejuvenated Hubble drifts away from shuttle Atlantis (NASA)

The Myth & Reality of Lady Jane Grey

In Debunking the Myth of Lady Jane Grey in More Intelligent Life online magazine, Leanda de Lisle discusses aspects of the Tudor tragedy of Lady Jane Grey’s execution at the age of sixteen, one element of her book The Sisters Who Would Be Queen.

On Books, #21

The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book.

– Northrop Frye

LEARN Haysville

Helium & Kansas

The helium plant in Dexter, Kansas, where helium was first discovered in natural gas on December 7, 1905 (Blue Skyways)

Kansas is America’s leading producer of helium, the second lightest and second most abundant element in the universe (after hydrogen), and an element discovered on the sun (in the solar spectrum during an eclipse in 1868) prior to its discovery on earth.

Beneath the surface of central Kansas runs an underground mountain of granite, the Nemaha Ridge, along a north-south axis below a layer of sedimentary rock laid down during the Pennsylvanian. Through the radioactive decay of uranium and thorium embedded in this granite, this granite produces helium, which then permeates and suffuses the natural gas deposits of the region.

Helium has grown increasingly useful for a wide variety of applications, including birthday balloons, lasers, magnetic resonance imaging, chromatography, the detection of microscopic leaks, fiber optics manufacturing, and, among numerous others, cryogenic superconductors. In consequence, global demand for helium has risen at a rate of more than eight percent per year for the past quarter of a century.

What makes all of this important today? As the Australian science magazine Cosmos observes, (in an article originally gleaned from Fermilab’s Symmetry Magazine) the World’s Helium Supply [is] Running Low.

(For more information on Helium production and reserves, see this two-page document from the US Geological Survey.)

Update: A very interesting sidebar to this discussion may be found in today’s New Scientist in Helium Clue Found in Echo of Big Bang, which notes, among other things, that new measurements appear to confirm that helium constituted about a quarter of all ordinary matter created during the Big Bang.

Helium Plants & Pipelines (Bureau of Land Management)

Yalta

This week marks the 65th anniversary of the postwar conference at Yalta, the meeting at which the “big three” — Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill — met “to determine the fate of postwar Europe.” Long noted as the opening scene of the impending Cold War — which was manifested as the fundamental reality for Europe and much of the world for nearly the next half century – Yalta was a crucial turning point.

Now, a new book by Harvard’s S.M. Plokhy adds voluminous research to the controversies that have surrounded Yalta for decades. (For earlier perceptions, see, for instance, Diane Shaver Clemens’ 1971 classic Yalta). The Wall Street Journal’s Matthew Kaminsky reviews Plokhy’s new Yalta: The Price of Peace in Creating a Postwar World.

Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin meet at Yalta

Kansas City’s Community Bookshelf

Kansas City Public Library's Community Bookshelf

If you haven’t seen a photograph of the Kansas City (Missouri) Public Library’s Community Bookshelf, here it is.

How wonderful.

Here’s how they describe it: “The Community Bookshelf is a striking feature of Kansas City’s downtown. It runs along the south wall of the Central Library’s parking garage on 10th Street between Wyandotte Street and Baltimore Avenue. The book spines, which measure approximately 25 feet by 9 feet, are made of signboard mylar. The shelf showcases 22 titles reflecting a wide variety of reading interests as suggested by Kansas City readers and then selected by The Kansas City Public Library Board of Trustees.”

For a listing of the titles displayed, each accompanied by a brief synopsis, see the Community Bookshelf web page noted above, where you’ll also find a number of additional interesting views of the Bookshelf.

School’s Closed . . . But the Library is Open for Knowledge

Pluto’s Changing Face

A full rotational sequence of Pluto's surface (NASA -- Hubble Space Telescope)

This coming month (on March 18th) we’ll celebrate the 80th anniversary of the discovery of Pluto by Kansan Clyde Tombaugh. But in the entire span of time since its discovery, Pluto has completed less than a third of its 248-year circuit about the sun.

We’ll learn a great deal more about Pluto when the New Horizons probe approaches the “dwarf planet” five years from now (for details see the New Horizons Mission Website.) Even now, however, we’re learning more about seasonal changes on the surface of that tiny, distant world.

The Hubble Space Telescope has secured a number of extraordinary images evincing those seasonal changes transpiring on Pluto, as reported by NASA in New Hubble Maps of Pluto Show Surface Changes . (See also the NASA press release on the topic.) The images have evoked commentary from a variety of interested parties from the BBC News (see Pluto’s Dynamic Surface Revealed By Hubble Images) and New Scientist (see Sharpest Ever Images of Pluto Show Mottled World) to Scientific American (see New Hubble Maps Show a Changing Pluto) and Science Daily (see New Hubble Maps of Pluto Show Surface Changes).

You’ll find a short video of Pluto’s rotation and changes here.

And for more on Pluto, you can visit our earlier posts Is Earth a Planet? and Pluto’s Anniversary.

On Books, #20

Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.

– W.H. Auden

International Living’s 2010 Quality of Life Index

The magazine International Living produces an annual Quality of Life Index for 194 countries throughout the world, ranking and rating each to “come up with our list of the places that offer you the best quality of life.” As they indicate, “this isn’t about best value, necessarily. It’s about the placers in the world where the living is, simply put, great.”

Here’s how they describe the construction of their index:

“To produce this annual Index we consider nine categories: Cost of Living, Culture and Leisure, Economy, Environment, Freedom, Health, Infrastructure, Safety and Risk, and Climate. This involves a lot of number crunching from ‘official’ sources, including government websites, the World Health Organization, and The Economist, to name but a few. We also take into account what our editors from all over the world have to say about our findings.”

For the fifth year in a row, IL has selected France as their number one “Best Place to Live,” followed by Australia, Switzerland, Germany, New Zealand, Luxembourg, and, in seventh place, the United States.

At the opposite end of the scale, Somalia ranks last in quality of life, edging out Yemen, Sudan, Chad, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, Djibouti, Eritrea, and Guinea in the race to the bottom.

For the top 10 countries, each with a brief discussion of the rationale for its selection, see the 2010 Quality of Life Index. For a complete listing of all 194 countries’ scores in detail, check here. For a more complete discussion of how they go about constructing their ratings, look here.

Is Your Asteroid At Risk?

Despite the long-held scientific conviction that the asteroid belt is being continually (though perhaps not literally) being atomized by collisions, no such impact has previously been witnessed. But on January 6th, the Hubble Space Telescope discerned a uniquely bizarre asteroid, P2010 A2, which appears to be the debris resulting from the collision of two previously unknown asteroids, most likely at speeds exceeding 11,000 miles per hour.

But there’s more. As NASA explains, “the asteroid belt contains abundant evidence of ancient collisions that have shattered precursor bodies into fragments. The orbit of P/2010 A2 is consistent with membership in the Flora asteroid family, produced by collisional shattering more than 100 million years ago. One fragment of that ancient smashup may have struck Earth 65 million years ago, triggering a mass extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs. But no such asteroid-asteroid collision has been caught ‘in the act’ — until now.” (For further details, see this writeup from NASA. See also this item in Science Daily.)

With that connection to the KT extinction, this new discovery might well occasion another question: What’s the status of the Congressional mandate directing NASA to find 90 percent of all near-earth asteroids by 2020 that we discussed last August in Asteroid Watch Update? The answer: Not good.

The National Research Council has issued a preliminary version of the 150-page final report on the question entitled Defending Planet Earth: Near-Earth Object Surveys and Hazard Mitigation Strategies. It is an interesting document which exhaustively explores the topic outlined by its title. For our purposes here, however, just two summary judgments are immediately relevant:

First, “Congress has mandated that NASA discover 90 percent of all near-Earth objects 140 meters in diameter or greater by 2020. The administration has not requested and Congress has not appropriated new funds to meet this objective. Only limited facilities are currently involved in this survey/discovery effort, funded by NASA’s existing budget.”

And second, “the current near-Earth object surveys cannot meet the goals of the 2005 George E. Brown, Jr. Near-Earth Object Survey Act directing NASA to discover 90 percent of all near-Earth objects 140 meters in diameter or greater by 2020.”