Showing posts with label Space. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Space. Show all posts

Saturday, April 11, 2026

Captivated...................

 









We live in an era that often feels defined by great despair. War rages, lawlessness spreads, politicians betray their values, and it can seem, at times, that we are simply drowning in the uncertainty of it all.

And then something breaks through. For the first time in more than 50 years, we sent human beings to the moon and back. For 10 days, we watched as they beat a new path for exploration beyond anything we have ever known.

We watched them record detailed scientific observations of the lunar surface. We pored over their remarkable images of the far side of the moon. We saw them collect biological samples, test radiation-monitoring equipment, and conduct bone marrow experiments, all while traveling more than 24,000 miles per hour through the solar system.

For 10 days, we were captivated by achievements most of us could never imagine. And yet, the most compelling part of it all was not how foreign it felt, but how familiar.

-from The Free Press


Thursday, January 23, 2025

The James Webb Space Telescope..................

 

............................................continues to surprise.  Hate it when our "models" don't work:




They contain a significant amount of nitrogen, far more than what we observe in our Sun, while most other metals are present in lower quantities. This suggests there were processes at play in the early universe we don’t yet fully understand.

JWST has shown our models of how stars drive the chemical evolution of galaxies are still incomplete, meaning we still don’t fully understand the conditions that led to our existence.


as culled from here

image via


Thursday, February 29, 2024

A different definition of discipline......

 In the spiritual life, the word 'discipline' means 'the effort to create some space in which God can act'. Discipline means to prevent everything in your life from being filled up. Discipline means that somewhere you're not occupied, and certainly not preoccupied … to create that space in which something can happen that you hadn't planned or counted on.

-attributed to Henri Nouwen

Wednesday, September 27, 2023

On beauty..........................

      I had thought that going into space would be the ultimate catharsis of that connection I had been looking for between all living things—that being up there would be the next beautiful step to understanding the harmony of the universe.  In the film Contact, when Jodie Foster's character goes to space and looks out into the heavens, she lets out an astonished whisper, "They should've sent a poet."  I had a different experience, because I discovered that the beauty isn't out there, it's down here, with all of us.

-William Shatner, Boldly Go: Reflections of a Life of Awe and Wonder

Saturday, January 7, 2023

Traveling to Mars..................

...............or not?   Here's a fun-to-read essay suggesting it would be folly to send live humans to explore the red planet.

 "When you hold on to a belief so strongly that neither facts nor reason can change it, what you are doing is no longer science, but religion."

via

Monday, August 29, 2022

Thursday, August 18, 2022

Is the Big Bang Theory in trouble................?

 It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong.

-Richard Feynman

Pictures from the James Webb Space Telescope don't seem to be supporting it.  Story here.



via

Monday, July 18, 2022

Answers....................................

 ............................to big questions.

Reading this article on the James Webb telescope took me way back in time when the news was news with no embellishment, slant, or agenda other than informing.  I found it very refreshing and recommend it to you.



A few interesting snippets:

By comparison, it takes light about 1 second to travel from the moon and 8 minutes from the sun. Therefore, we see the sun as it was 8 minutes ago. If it were to disappear, we would find out 8 minutes later.

Webb also doesn't orbit Earth, like its predecessor Hubble does, but rather orbits the sun 1 million miles (1.5 million km) from our planet at what is called the second Lagrange point or L2. 

The Earth is not visible in any of the images. That is because the bottom of the James Webb Space Telescope, which is a tennis court sized shield, is always facing the sun to block it out.   It means that the Earth is always between James Webb and the sun as well, so would never be captured by the telescope.

When a telescope looks further away, it is also looking back in time. It takes time for the light the telescope is receiving to travel through space. Therefore, we see objects not as they are now but as they were at the time when they released the light that has travelled for billions of years across the universe to reach us.

What we are seeing is just a minor glimpse of images, science, knowledge yet to come.

Tuesday, April 12, 2022

In accord.................

 Modern civilization is all about conquering space: winning territory in geopolitical contests, building ingenious contraptions and monuments to this ingenuity, growing and prospering economically.  It seeks relentlessly to convert time, priced like any other commodity into achievements in space.  But, "the danger begins," Heschel worried, "when gaining power in the realm of space we forfeit all aspirations in the realm of time."  In that realm, "the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give, not to control but to share, not to subdue but to be in accord."

-Sohrab Ahmari, The Unbroken Thread: Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos

Thursday, October 14, 2021

"I hope I never recover from this....................."



 "I am so filled with emotion about what just happened. It's extraordinary. I hope I never recover from this. I hope that I can maintain what I feel now. I don't want to lose it," he said.

"It's so much larger than me and life. It hasn't got anything to do with the little green men ... It has to do with the enormity and the quickness and the suddenness of life and death."

-William Shatner

Wednesday, January 10, 2018

Fifty years ago........................


In the news...................January 10, 1968 Surveyor 7 "soft lands" on the moon.   The seventh and final Surveyor mission, setting the stage for Neil Armstrong's first step onto the moon.


Surveyor 7 model

"Tycho" crater, the target for Surveyor 7 (landed just north)

Monday, July 17, 2017

I know how the story ended............


..................but I still got anxious watching the countdown:




July 16, 1969.  Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins head toward the moon.