Beyond the how awesome to hear this song actually sung by a person is space, the video it's self is pretty breath taking. The visions of earth are amazing but the part that really gave me goose bumps was all the zero gravity movements.
Everything seems so serene. Personally the idea of being up there stuck on that thing has always filled me with dread. This video made me understand a bit how someone could actually stay sane up there.
I spent a little time following different youtube links and watching this guy. He's pretty great. He's also the guy who wrung the washcloth out earlier this month.That video was even cooler than this one.
Watching all these videos I really started thinking about how gravity operates in space. In each one he lets his guitar or microphone go and it sort of floats and moves about. What makes it do that? Obviously some of it is inertia and I imagine there isn't really "zero gravity"anywhere, but still these objects seem to have a mind of their own.
There where two interesting little blurbs in the Science Tuesday section of the Times yesterday. The first was about sending animals into space, the other was about sending smart phones into space.
The smart phone one was pretty cool. They sent up standard Google Nexus One phones ups and had them send images back to determine whether this technology can be used in satellites. The phones are named Alexander, Graham and Bell. Which is a nice coincidence considering they just released recording of Alexander Graham Bell's voice that had been lost for over a century.
The animals flight was much more interesting. They sent up gerbils, mice, geckos and snails to test the effects of prolonged space flight on living creatures. The best part is that they will be studying the sperm of the mice to try and determine how possible it would be for people to re-produce in space. This means we're one step closer to the a "space arc".
The Times makes a point of noting that the animals are expected to survive re-entry, the phones will not.
Just checked out the Bad Astronomer blog that was suggested as an option for the website review. Having taken a closer look at it now I kinda wish I'd chosen to do a review of it. This guy's writing is so much more accessible to me than the websites I did review.
I read three of his entries. One was on the above video of silly putty, which had been mixed with iron oxide, "eating" a magnet. It's a pretty cool video and the blog's author Phil Plait explains some of it's scientific implications well. Really though I just kept thinking it would be a cool thing to do with the high school kids I tutor.
The second article was about the difference in the nights sky in the southern hemisphere. Not doing much star gazing myself I didn't find this one all that interesting.
The third one though was pretty intersting. This was about a NASA mission to bring an asteroid close enough to the earth that we can study it. Plait spent quite a bit of time talking about this one. He discussed how it could be done, why it should be done, and what the obstacles are. He included the far out drawing below of one of the capture options. If I understand it correctly this will match the movements of the asteroid pull it into it's large bag thing, close the bag then make constant adjustments until the asteroid settles down.
Plait's primary conclusion was that, although this was an incredibly cool idea, it might not really be feasible.
His skepticism was based on a few factors but primarily it came down to him not believing NASA had much of a plan or the money to do it. They'd recently announced that the white house will give $100 million dollars to this project. Not much considering how much it will cost.
A couple things that caught my eye while reading this this where
1) It's really hard to see small things in space like astroids.
2) Plait seems to think that the best option to get people up to actually look at this astroid if we get it near us is SpaceX, the privately owned space program. That's pretty amazing.
3)All this stuff is so incredibly expensive. It must be surreal to be an astronaut and know that a country is spending millions of dollars on your existence every day your up there.
