Exploration Work

While browsing through my archive today, I came across an interesting paper entitled “Are Black Hole Starships Possible?” This paper briefly explains the possibility of using the Hawking radiation from an artificial black hole as a power source to propel starships and run power plants. I have done a lot of research and calculations on the theory of using artificial black holes to accelerate starships to relativistic velocities and this paper reinforced my opinion of this concept as a very promising method for interstellar space travel in the far future. This paper can be downloaded from http://arxiv.org/abs/0908.1803v1.

WISE is the acronym for the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer and it is NASA’s latest space telescope which will survey the sky in four wavelengths of the infrared band at a very high sensitivity. WISE is scheduled for launch no earlier than 6:09 a.m. PST (9:09 a.m. EST) on Wednesday, 9 December 2009 from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. It is interesting to note that WISE has the potential to find any brown dwarfs that might be lurking closer to the Sun than the nearest star - Proxima Centauri!

NASA’s Space Shuttle Atlantis was launched on Monday, 16 November 2009 at 2:28 p.m. EST on a mission to the International Space Station. This marks the 5th shuttle flight in 2009, the 31st shuttle mission to the International Space Station, the 129th shuttle mission, the 31st flight of Space Shuttle Atlantis and the 160th American manned space flight. The Space Shuttle Atlantis is currently docked to the International Space Station. The launch was spectacular!

What are the cheapest, “most portable” and most exciting ways to fly? After doing skydiving in Sydney, Australia, I found out that riding under a parachute proved to be really exciting for me! Over the past few weeks, I’ve done research on powered paragliding and this seems to a fantastic way to take to the skies. Powered paragliding is now ranked number one on my list of adventure sports. The videos that I’ve seen on YouTube are awesome!

New Rocket

Tuesday, 28 October 2009… NASA’s Ares I-X ascended from Launch Complex 39 at Kennedy Space Center for the first test flight in the Ares I program. This marks NASA’s first test of a new rocket for human spaceflight since the first flight of the Space Shuttle in 1981. The Ares I rocket is the crew launch vehicle that is currently being developed by NASA as a component of the Constellation Program. The primary goals of the Constellation Program is to develop a new generation of spacecraft and rockets to replace the Space Shuttles and send astronauts back to the Moon and eventually to Mars.

Liftoff of Area I-X occurred on 28 October 2009 at 11:30 EDT (15:30 UTC). As the long and slender Ares I-X rocket powered through the sound barrier and went supersonic, a remarkable vapor cone appeared around the rocket for a brief duration! Towards the end of the flight, the upper stage simulator and first stage successfully separated approximately 130000 feet over the Atlantic Ocean. The upper stage simulator splashed down in the ocean and the first stage was fired for a controlled descent with parachutes into the Atlantic Ocean where it was recovered. I watched the entire launch on NASA Television and you can visit http://www.nasa.gov/ for all the latest news and related multimedia.

Enceladus is a small icy moon of Saturn with a diameter of about 500 kilometers and it was found to be geologically active when Cassini’s instruments discovered the presence of geysers at the south pole of this tiny moon in 2005. Enceladus is one of only three outer solar system bodies, along with Jupiter’s moon Io and Neptune’s moon Triton, where active eruptions have been observed. However, the key difference is that Enceladus is vastly smaller than Io and Triton.

On 2 November 2009, the Cassini spacecraft made the seventh targeted flyby of Enceladus where the spacecraft made its deepest dive yet through the plumes of Enceladus to learn more about the composition and density of the plumes spewing from the south pole of this moon. At closest approach, Cassini flew just 100 kilometers above the surface of Enceladus, at a velocity of almost 8 kilometers per second. Even though the flyby done on 2 November 2009 was not really an “imaging flyby”, the images returned so far have been incredible! Many of the images show the magnificent plumes spewing from the south pole of Enceladus and one of the images which I came across appears to show separate jets spewing from the moon. To learn more about this incredible mission, visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/. The next flyby of Enceladus will be on 21 November 2009.

Here are the titles of some interesting papers which I’ve read during the past few weeks - “First Results from the Swarms Survey: SDSS 1257+5428 - A Nearby, Massive White Dwarf Binary with a Likely Neutron Star or Black Hole Companion”, “Discriminating Strange Star Mergers from Neutron Star Mergers by Gravitational-Wave Measurements”, “Physical Properties of the 0.94-Day Period Transiting Planetary System WASP-18”, “Shock Breakout from Type Ia Supernova”, “A Neutron Star with a Carbon Atmosphere in the Cassiopeia A Supernova Remnant” and “Surface Detonations in Double Degenerate Binary Systems Triggered by Accretion Stream Instabilities”. These papers can be obtained from http://arxiv.org/.

Lunar Impacts

Smack! On Friday, 09 October 2009, at 7:31 am EDT (1131 GMT), a two ton Centaur rocket stage slammed into a large crater located near the south pole of the Moon at a velocity of around 9000 kilometres an hour. The lunar material thrown up by the impact was analyzed by instruments onboard the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) for approximately 4 minutes before LCROSS itself crashed into the Moon. LCROSS returned a lot of interesting data from the impact of the Centaur rocket stage and it even returned images of the plume thrown up by the impact of the Centaur rocket stage! With LCROSS returning data until the last second before its eventual impact, excellent images of the impact crater created by the impact of the Centaur rocket stage were captured and the images indicate that the crater is almost 30 meters wide!

In 1999, NASA’s Lunar Prospector spacecraft detected high concentrations of hydrogen in permanently shadowed craters at the lunar poles. These readings may be an indication of the presence of water on the Moon and could have far-reaching implications as humans expand the exploration of space beyond low-Earth orbit. By crashing a Centaur rocket stage and a smaller shepherding spacecraft, the LCROSS mission is seeking a definitive answer to the presence of water on the Moon. Visit http://lcross.arc.nasa.gov/ for the latest news!

A star which rotates rapidly is expected to take on an oblate structure. Such an oblate star will have a larger radius at its equator than at its poles and it results in a higher surface gravity at the poles and a lower surface gravity along the equator. With a higher surface gravity, the poles of the star will have a higher temperature and brightness compared to the equator. The transit of an extrasolar planet across the face of such a star with an oblate structure and a non-uniform surface brightness will generate a rather unique transit lightcurve depending on the transit geometry. Such a distinct lightcurve can also be used to determine the relative alignment of the star’s rotational axis with the planet’s orbital axis. The paper explaining this phenomenon is entitled “Transit Lightcurves of Extrasolar Planets Orbiting Rapidly-Rotating Stars” and it can be obtained from http://arxiv.org/abs/0909.1752.

The two pictures posted here were taken during yesterday’s walk at the Sungei Buloh Wetland Reserve. There were quite a number of birds present and I happened to capture some great videos of the birds. It was remarkable to watch the rising tides in the mangrove swamp and the water level rose to just a few inches below the surfaces of the main walking trails.

Take Flight

Cheers to the Japanese! The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) successfully launched their first cargo spacecraft to resupply the International Space Station on 10 September 2009 at 17:01:46 UTC. HTV-1, also known as the HTV Demonstration Flight, is an unmanned cargo spacecraft which carries a mixture of pressurized and unpressurized cargo to the International Space Station. On Friday, 18 September 2009, HTV-1 will approach to within 10 meters of the International Space Station, from where it will be grappled using the Canadarm2 robotic arm of the space station and then be attached to the Common Berthing Mechanism (CBM) port of the Harmony module. Visit http://iss.jaxa.jp/en/htv/mission/htv-1/ to get the latest news about this mission.

On Friday, 18 September 2009, at around midnight, I’ll be leaving for Sydney on a Singapore Airlines flight. I will be spending a total of 26 days in Australia and I will be back on Tuesday, 13 October 2009. For the first half of my trip, I will be learning skydiving and will be making daily high altitude jumps out of airplanes! For the second half of my trip, I will be touring and exploring both Canberra and Sydney! I expect a crazy amount of photography, filming and exhilarating fun! I will definitely use my DSLR camera like never before and I will post a full update with pictures when I get back! I’ve packed my bags and I’m ready to go! My flight from Singapore to Sydney will be on a Boeing B777-300ER and my flight from Sydney back to Singapore will be on an Airbus A380-800. Just two weeks ago, I was holidaying at Genting Highlands and Kuala Lumpur and I’ve posted the update on http://world-explorer21.blogspot.com/.

On Friday, 11 September 2009, I officially completed two years of National Service! Over the past two years in the military, I’ve made many different kinds of friends and experienced numerous enjoyable to tiring events. The one thing that I’ll miss most will be the fun from driving Class 4 military vehicles! Now, it is time to move on in life and “power up” to live and achieve my dreams and ambitions!

Puffed Up

Just before midnight on Friday, 28 August 2009, NASA’s Space Shuttle Discovery was successfully launched on a mission to the International Space Station, with 7 astronauts onboard. Launch occurred at 23:59 EDT (03:59 UTC, 29 August) and I managed to watch it live on NASA Television! It was a spectacular night launch and everything went flawlessly. Visit http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/ for the latest new!

How bloated can a planet get? Recently, I read a paper entitled “WASP-17b: An Ultra-low Density Planet in a Probable Retrograde Orbit”, which describes the discovery of the most bloated planet currently known. WASP-17b has only 1.6 times the mass of Saturn but it has a diameter that is 1.5 to 2 times larger than Jupiter’s. This gives the planet a density that is only 6 to 14 percent of Jupiter’s, or a mean density that is between just 0.08 and 0.19 grams per cubic centimetre!

WASP-17b takes only 3.7 days to orbit around its parent star. Preliminary detection of the Rossiter-McLaughlin effect indicates that WASP-17b is in a retrograde orbit around its parent star. This means that WASP-17b orbits in a direction counter to the rotation of its host star. When such a planet transits its parent star, observations of the Rossiter-McLaughlin effect will show an apparent spectroscopic blueshift followed by an apparent spectroscopic redshift. This paper can be found at http://arxiv.org/abs/0908.1553.

Just a few days ago, I read about another newly discovered transiting extrasolar planet called WASP-18b. Located at an incredibly close distance of just 2.2 million kilometres from the surface of its parent star, this planet whips around its star in less than a day, or 0.94 days to be exact. WASP-18b has about 10 times the mass of Jupiter and tidal theory argues that this planet should be torn apart in well under a million years. The fact that is planet is orbiting around a star that is about a billion years old is extremely intriguing. WASP, which stands for the Wide Angle Search for Planets, is operated by several universities in Britain and its website is http://www.superwasp.org/.

I’ll be going off for a holiday in Genting Highlands and Kuala Lumpur with some friends tomorrow! Over the past couple of months, I’ve bought most of my stuff and booked the air tickets for my upcoming vacations. In 3 weeks, I’ll be flying off for a long vacation in Australia, which includes an entire skydiving course! Check my updates!

Infrared Universe

On 13 July 2009 at 8:35 p.m. PDT (14 July 2009 at 03:35 UTC), a Falcon 1 launch vehicle built by Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) successfully placed Malaysia’s RazakSAT satellite into Earth orbit. Liftoff occurred from the SpaceX launch site on Omelek Island at the U.S. Army Kwajalein Atoll (USAKA) in the Central Pacific. The Flacon 1 launch vehicle precisely placed the RazakSAT Earth Observation satellite into its intended near-equatorial orbit at an altitude of 685 kilometres and orbital inclination of 9 degrees. This launch marks the first commercial payload to be launched from a rocket built by a commercial space company. Visit http://www.spacex.com/ for the pictures, videos and news about this launch. Later this year, SpaceX hopes to launch its much larger Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral.

On 15 July 2009 at 6:03:10 p.m. EDT (22:03:10 UTC), NASA’s Space Shuttle Endeavour was finally launch from Launch Pad 39A at Cape Canaveral, on a mission to the International Space Station after five aborted attempts. Space Shuttle Endeavour lifted off on the eve of the 40th anniversary of NASA’s Apollo 11 launch, which sent three Americans toward the moon atop a massive Saturn V rocket on 16 July 1969, where Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin made the first landing on the Moon four days later! This shuttle mission to the International Space Station is designated STS-127 and its main purpose is to deliver and install the final two components of the Japanese Experiment Module - the Exposed Facility (JEM EF) and the Exposed Section of the Experiment Logistics Module (ELM-ES). At 1:47 p.m. EDT (17:47 UTC) on Friday 17 July 2009, Space Shuttle Endeavour docked with the International Space Station. Following the docking of the space shuttle, there are currently 13 crewmembers onboard the space station and this marks the first time in history a single spacecraft has hosted such a large population!

NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) is an infrared space telescope which will perform a survey of the entire sky in 4 infrared wavelength bands centred within 10 percent of 3.3 microns, 4.7 microns, 12 microns and 23 microns. WISE is scheduled for launch onboard a Delta II 7320-10 rocket in November 2009 and it will be placed in a Sun-synchronous near-polar circular orbit at an altitude of 500 kilometres above the Earth’s surface. WISE will orbit the Earth once every 94.6 minutes and it will capture 516 frames per orbit at an 11 second cadence, completing a survey of the entire infrared sky in 6 months. Each frame will represent a 0.783 degrees field-of-view of the infrared sky with a resolution of 1024 by 1024 pixels, a frame-to-frame overlap of 10 percent and an orbit-to-orbit overlap of 90 percent.

The optical system of WISE consists of a 5 mirror telescope assembly with a 40 centimetre diameter primary mirror, two HgCdTe (mercury cadmium telluride) detector arrays for the 3.3 and 4.7 micron bands and two Si:As (arsenic-doped silicon) detector arrays for the 12 and 23 micron bands. Each detector array will be made up of 1024 by 1024 pixels and all 4 focal plane detector arrays will be cooled using a dual-stage solid hydrogen cryostat. The primary tank will cool the Si:As focal planes to 7.8 degrees Kelvin and the secondary tank acts as a guard to the primary tank by intercepting all parasitic loads from the ambient structure. I addition, the secondary tank also cools the HgCdTe focal planes to 32 degrees Kelvin.

WISE will be sensitive enough to detect 450 degrees Kelvin brown dwarfs out to 75 light years, 300 degrees Kelvin brown dwarfs out to 20 light years and 150 degrees Kelvin brown dwarfs out to 10 light years. One light year is a unit of length which is defined by the distance that light travels in one year and it has a value that is slightly less than 9.5 trillion kilometres. The nearest star from the Sun is Proxima Centauri and it is located at a distance of 4.2 light years away. Since brown dwarfs are expected to be as prevalent as stars, it is very likely that the closest “star” to the Sun is not Proxima Centauri, but some hitherto undiscovered brown dwarf that will be detected by WISE.

An Ultra-Luminous Infrared Galaxy (ULIRG) is an extremely luminious type of galaxy which has over a trillion times the luminosity of the Sun in the infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum and most ULIRGs emit at least 90 percent of their light in the infrared. WISE will be sensitive enough to detect the most luminous ULIRGS out to a look-back time of when the Universe was only a few billion years old

WISE will be at least a thousand times more sensitive than any previous infrared survey missions and it will deliver to the scientific community over a million images covering the whole infrared sky, including a catalogue of half a billion astronomical objects in the 4 infrared bands. Sine the wavelength range of WISE largely overlaps that planned for the future James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the catalogue of astronomical objects generated by WISE will be important for the JWST. Visit http://wise.ssl.berkeley.edu/ to know more about this fascinating mission.

Gravity’s Lenses

Microlensing and occultation are different limits of the same phenomena of one body passing in front of another body. When two objects in space, such as two stars, come into close alignment with respect to an observer, the foreground star may either eclipse or microlens the background star. If the angular size of the foreground star is much larger than its gravitational deflection angle, the foreground star will eclipse the background star and if the contrary is true, the foreground will magnify the light of the background star. If the angular size of the foreground star is comparable to its gravitational deflection angle, both microlensing and occultation will occur as the foreground and background stars align.

This week, I derived the solutions and wrote a program to compute exact models of both microlensing and occultation in the case of a spherical foreground object coming into alignment with a spherical background object of uniform brightness. I carried out extensive studies of many different aspects in gravitational microlensing, ranging from the detection of Massive Compact Halo Objects (MACHOs) to photometric variations in the transit light curves of brown dwarfs due to the gravitational lensing of light. I shall now describe some of the more interesting stuff that I have researched on…

For my study on extrasolar planet detection by gravitational microlensing, I ran simulations to model the magnification of the light of background stars due to gravitational microlensing by substellar foreground objects with masses and sizes ranging from Pluto to the Earth to Jupiter. In addition, I also included Jupiter-size brown dwarfs ranging from a few times the mass of Jupiter up to 75 times the mass of Jupiter. Throughout the analysis, I used background stars ranging from faint red dwarf stars to Sun-like stars to stars which are several times larger and more luminous than the Sun. In fact, a few extrasolar planets have already been discovered via gravitational microlensing and a recent paper entitled “Pixel-Lensing as a Way to Detect Extrasolar Planets in M31”, obtainable from http://arxiv.org/abs/0906.1050v1, describes a possible planet detection in the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) by gravitational microlensing.

The possibility of doing astronomical observations at the Solar Foci is one of the most interesting areas in my research on gravitational microlensing. The Solar Foci is located at any distance greater than 550 AU from the Sun, whereby one AU is the average distance of the Earth from the Sun. At increasing distances beyond 550 AU, the physical angular size of the Sun begins to get smaller and smaller with respect to its gravitational deflection angle. From an observer at the Solar Foci, this results in the magnification of electromagnetic signals from distant background objects in the object-Sun-observer alignment. I ran gigabytes of calculations to study the different kinds of astronomical observations which can be done at the Solar Foci.

One interesting possibility is performing detail studies and generating surface maps of distant extrasolar planets that are in perfect to near perfect planet-Sun-observer alignments at the Solar Foci. Such an aligned extrasolar planet will have its electromagnetic signal magnified by an order of a million due to the Sun acting as an enormous gravitational lens. Another interesting possibility is the detection and observation of possible signals from technologically advance extraterrestrial civilizations. With the Sun acting as a colossal gravitational lens, the strength of such signals can be amplified by up to an order of a few million to a few billion!

Moon Shot

On 18 June 2009 at 5:32 p.m. EDT (21:32 UTC), NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Spacecraft (LCROSS) were launched together onboard an Atlas V rocket from Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. After a journey of nearly 5 days, the LRO successfully entered orbit around the Moon and engineers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center confirmed the spacecraft’s lunar orbit insertion at 6:27 a.m. EDT on 23 June.

LRO will spend at least a year in a low polar orbit around the Moon at an altitude of approximately 50 kilometres above the lunar surface and an optional extension of the mission by up to five years could provide a communications relay for future missions to the lunar surface. The seven instruments onboard LRO will find and characterize safe landing sites for future manned missions, locate potential resources, characterize the radiation environment, map the Moon in great detail and test new technologies.

After launch, LCROSS and the Atlas V’s Centaur upper stage rocket made a flyby of the Moon and entered into a highly elongated Earth orbit to position both objects for impact in a permanently shadowed crater at the south polar region of the Moon which is scheduled on 9 October 2009 at 7:30 a.m. EDT. On final approach before impact, LCROSS and the Atlas V’s Centaur upper stage rocket will separate. The Atlas V’s Centaur upper stage rocket will impact the Moon to create a debris plume that will rise above the lunar surface and following four minutes behind, LCROSS will fly through the debris plume and analyze it with its instruments. The near-infrared and mid-infrared cameras on LCROSS will determine the total amount and distribution of water in the debris plume. LCROSS will then itself impact the lunar surface and create a second debris plume. Visit http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LRO/main/ and http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LCROSS/main/ to get the latest news and updates.

In science fiction, one of the most well known examples of a planet which orbits a binary star is the planet Tatooine in Star Wars. The two stars which the planet Tatooine orbit around are Sun-like stars and they are named Tatoo I and Tatoo II. This week, I researched on how it will be like from the surface of a planet which orbits both stars in a stellar binary and of a planet which orbits one of two stars in a stellar binary. I derived the solutions and wrote two programs for the two different orbital configurations.

My programs output data such as the sky positions of the stars, apparent sizes of the stars, brightness of the stars and etc, for different planets in different orbital configurations. I also carried out computations for hypothetical planets in different orbital configurations in the Alpha Centauri binary star system. Alpha Centauri is made up of the stars Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B. The two stars orbit each other with a mean separation of 3.5 billion kilometres and an orbital period of 79.91 years. I modelled the positions, appearance and brightness for each of the two stars from the surface of a hypothetical planet orbiting around Alpha Centauri A and of another hypothetical planet orbiting around Alpha Centauri B. Lastly, I shrank the orbital separation of Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B by a factor of a hundred and did the same computations for the surface of a hypothetical planet orbiting both the stars.

Over the past two weeks, I’ve came across some interesting papers and their titles are “Could the Galactic Disk Heating be due to Globular Cluster Impacts?”, “Alien Maps of an Ocean-Bearing World”, “Fossil Gas and the Electromagnetic Precursor of Supermassive Binary Black Hole Mergers”, “Optical Flares from the Tidal Disruption of Stars by Massive Black Holes”, “Earthshine Observations of an Inhabited Planet”, “Pixel-Lensing as a Way to Detect Extrasolar Planets in M31”, “Tidal Limits to Planetary Habitability”, “Chemistry of Silicate Atmospheres of Evaporating Super-Earths” and “Tidal Streams of Intracluster Light.”

The astrophysical phenomenon described in the paper entitled “Fossil Gas and the Electromagnetic Precursor of Supermassive Binary Black Hole Mergers” is rather unique and I shall explain more about it here. This paper describes the evolution of a supermassive black hole binary with a circumbinary gas disk which orbits both the primary and secondary black holes, and an inner gas disk which orbits the primary black hole. The separation of the secondary black hole from the primary black hole shrinks over time due to interaction with the circumbinary gas disk and gravitational wave losses, whereby the latter becomes dominant at small separations. This causes the inner disk to be tidally forced into the primary black hole by the secondary black hole as it spirals inward, resulting in a significant increase in the luminosity prior to final merger of the two black holes.

Since the gravitational wave from the merger of a supermassive black hole binary is observable with future gravitational wave detectors such as the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), the detection of such as electromagnetic signature to final merger will be important for the identification of the host galaxies of such binary black hole mergers. An interesting possibility is that an observed time variability of the electromagnetic signal from such as event due to perturbations from the orbiting secondary black hole would allow for an unambiguous association of the electromagnetic signal with the gravitational wave signal measured by gravitational wave detectors.

Entering Sunshine

Finally! A technique called astrometry has been used for the past 50 years to find planets orbiting other stars and until now, this method has failed to turn up any extrasolar planets. Astrometry involves measuring the precise motions of a star on the sky as an unseen planet tugs the star back and forth. Two to six times a year, for the past 12 years, a team of two astronomers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory have bolted their Stellar Planet Survey instrument to a telescope at the Palomar Observatory near San Diego. This instrument has a 16 megapixel charge-coupled device (CCD) which can detect very minute changes in the positions of stars. After careful observations of several stars, the team has found a planet orbiting around one of them.

This newly discovered planet is called VB 10b and it is located about 20 light years away in the constellation Aquila. VB 10b is a gas giant planet with a mass six times that of Jupiter’s. The planet’s star, called VB 10, has only one-twelfth the mass of our Sun, making it just barely massive enough to fuse atoms at its core and shine as a star. Currently, VB 10 is the smallest star known to host a planet and although the star is more massive than the planet orbiting it, the two objects would have a similar physical size. While VB 10b is located about as far from its star as Mercury is from the Sun, it will be a “cold Jupiter” because its star, VB 10, is a much smaller and vastly fainter than the Sun.

VB 10 is expected to continue shining as a normal main sequence star for about ten trillion years! In comparison, this is over 700 times the age of the current universe and about a thousand times longer than the lifespan of the Sun! Quadrillions of years after VB 10 stops shining as a normal main sequence star, gravitational radiation will ultimately bring VB 10 and VB 10b together into merger. This fresh input of pure hydrogen from the merger of VB 10b will revive the dead helium remnant of VB 10, causing it to shine for another hundred billion years or so.

A week ago, I researched on the insolation profile and Sun’s sky’s position from the surfaces of planets, asteroids, moons and other objects in the Solar System. I also extended my research to the surfaces of extrasolar planets orbiting other stars and hypothetical moons orbiting these planets. I wrote several programs and used solutions from some past research. I ran gigabytes of calculations to test the computation codes over a wide range of scenarios.

I modelled the time varying brightness and appearance of the Sun from the surfaces of numerous alien worlds and played around with some other interesting scenarios. Some of the more interesting scenarios include the time varying brightness of a star from the surface of an extrasolar planet in a highly eccentric orbit around it, the time varying brightness of the Sun from the surfaces of Kuiper Belt Objects with extreme axial tilts and orbital inclinations, the time varying brightness of a star from the surface of a moon around an extrasolar planet orbiting the star in its habitable zone, etc.

This week, I researched on the insolation profiles of satellites in orbit around planets in the Solar System. I derived he solutions and wrote a program to do the computations. I computed exact models of the time varying positions of the Sun with respect to satellites in elliptical, parabolic and hyperbolic orbits around the planets Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars and Jupiter respectively. Throughout the analysis, I used planetocentric equatorial coordinates such that the positions of the Sun and the satellite at any given time is described with respect to the center of the planet which the satellite orbits.

I also computed the time varying phase angles of the planet and the time varying apparent sizes of the Sun and brightness of the Sun as observed from the satellite for each of the orbital configurations described above. For satellites whose orbits bring them into the shadows of the planets they orbit, my program will compute the duration that the satellite will spend in the shadow of the planet and the times at which such crossings will occur. For some satellites in elliptical orbits, I also modelled their insolation profiles as they repeatedly enter and exit the shadows of the planets which they orbit.

This week, I also wrote a program to compute the luminosities of spheres with various blackbody temperatures as measured over a given range of wavelengths. I used this program to make comparisons between the luminosities of various astrophysical objects over different ranges of wavelengths. I calculated the luminosities ranging from the coolest brown dwarfs to red dwarf stars to Sun-like stars to the hottest and most massive stars. These objects have masses spanning 5 orders of magnitude and total luminosities spanning 14 orders of magnitude.

Changing Faces

NASA's Space Shuttle Atlantis was launched on 11 May 2009 at 2:01 p.m. EDT from Launch Pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center for the fifth and final servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope. Atlantis, with a crew of seven astronauts, installed two new instruments on the Hubble Space Telescope - the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph and the Wide Field Camera 3. In addition, the mission also replaced a Fine Guidance Sensor, installed six new gyroscopes and two battery unit modules to allow the telescope to continue to function at least through 2014. New thermal blanket insulating panels were also installed to provide improved thermal protection and a “soft-capture mechanism” was installed to aid in the safe de-orbiting of the telescope by an unmanned spacecraft at the end of its operational lifespan.

The crew of Atlantis included three astronauts who had previous experience servicing the Hubble Space Telescope. A total number of 5 spacewalks were carried out during the servicing mission. Throughout the duration of the mission, Space Shuttle Endeavour stood ready to launch from Launch Pad 39B, in case a rescue mission was required. After almost 13 days in space, Space Shuttle Atlantis successfully landed on Runway 22 at Edwards Air Force Base in California at 8:39 a.m. PDT (11:39 a.m. EST). I watched the landing of the shuttle on NASA Television from de-orbit burn to entry interface to wheels stop on the runway.

As an extrasolar planet orbits a distant star, the flux of reflected starlight from the planet will vary because the planet will present different amounts of its illuminated side during different phases in its orbit. The flux of reflected starlight from the planet will be lowest when the planet is directly in front of the star because a distant observer will be looking at just the night side of the planet and none of the day side of the planet will be visible. On the contrary, the flux of reflected starlight from the planet will be highest when the planet is almost directly behind the star because almost all of the day side of the planet will be visible. It should be noted that the flux of reflected starlight from the planet will be zero when the planet is directly behind the star because all of the reflected starlight from the planet will be blocked by the star.

A week ago, I derived the solutions and wrote a few programs to compute and model the time varying flux of reflected starlight from an extrasolar planet orbiting a distant star. I’ve also extended my analysis to include extrasolar planetary systems with two or more planets. I modelled the flux of reflected starlight from extrasolar planets with sizes similar to Mercury, Earth, Neptune and Jupiter. I also vary the reflectivity of the planets from 5 percent to 50 percent and vary the orbital distances of the planets from 5 AU to 0.02 AU. One AU is basically the mean distance between the Earth and the Sun. I used three stars throughout the entire analysis - one with the same luminosity as the Sun, one with 10 percent the luminosity of the Sun and one with just 1.5 percent the luminosity of the Sun. The flux of reflected starlight from an extrasolar planet relative to the luminosity of its parent star is greatest for giant planets in close orbits around low luminosity stars.

Interestingly, a research paper entitled “VLT transit and occultation photometry for the bloated planet CoRoT-1b” was published yesterday and it describes observations of the time varying flux of reflected starlight of an extrasolar planet called CoRoT-1b as it orbits its parent star. This paper can be obtained from http://arxiv.org/abs/0905.4571.

This week, I researched on the visibility characteristics of a constellation of satellites from any point on a planet’s surface at any given time. I wrote a program to do the simulations and used constellations of 6 and 12 satellites. I placed the satellites in elliptical orbits with systematically different orientations such that they “cover” the planet. The program also computes the altitude and azimuth positions of each satellite in the constellation on any given point on the planet’s surface at any given time.

Over the past three week, I’ve covered an enormous amount of research and all those which were described above are just a small fraction. I shall describe more about the other topics in my next update. Today, I added almost 100 gigabytes of movies, documentaries and reality series, and almost 50 gigabytes of music and digital books to my archives. Now, I’m going to describe about an upcoming mission to the Moon, a planet searching space telescope which has just completed its commissioning phase and a particularly interesting astronomical survey project.

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) is a robotic spacecraft which is scheduled for launch on 17 June 2009 aboard an Atlas V rocket from Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Piggy-backing on the launch of LRO will be the Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS). LCROSS is designed to observe the launch vehicle’s Centaur upper stage strike a permanently shadowed region near the south pole of the Moon, fly through the debris plume and crash itself into a different part of the crater approximately 4 minutes after the Centaur impact. Visit http://lunar.gsfc.nasa.gov/ or http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LRO/main/ for more information about this mission.

On 12 May 2009 at 5.01 p.m. Pacific Time (13 May 2009 at 1.01 a.m. UTC), NASA’s Kepler space telescope successfully completed its commissioning phase and began its search for planets around other stars. On 18 June 2009, Kepler is expected to send its first science data to Earth, at which point the mission’s science team will begin analysis. Kepler is NASA’s first mission capable of finding Earth-size and smaller planets around other stars. Visit http://www.kepler.arc.nasa.gov/ to learn more about this mission.

A few weeks ago, I researched and described about the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). This week, I’m going to describe about another similar astronomical survey project. Pan-STARRS (Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System) is a project to repeatedly survey the entire visible sky on a continuous basis and it is expected to create a database of all objects visible from Hawaii down to an apparent magnitude of 24. This planned astronomical survey will have a substantial impact on the study of the Kuiper Belt and of the outer solar system.

Pan-STARRS will consist of four telescopes, each with an aperture of 1.8 meters and they will be located at the summit of Haleakala in Maui Island, Hawaii. The first telescope, called PS1, went online on 6 December 2008 and the other three telescopes will be completed by 2012. The focal planes of the four telescopes will each be equipped with a 1.4 billion pixel camera. Each night, Pan-STARRS will cover about 6000 square degrees of sky and generate up to 10 terabytes worth of data.

Trojan asteroids are asteroids which share an orbit with a planet, 60 degrees ahead of and behind the planet, at the L4 and L5 Lagrangian points. Pan-STARRS is expected to catalogue approximately 100000 Jupiter Trojans, 8000 Saturn Trojans, 350 Uranus Trojans and 50 Neptune Trojans after one year of operations. Centaurs are objects that have obits that cross one or more of the giant planets and Pan-STARRS is expected to find on the order of a thousand Centaurs after one year of operation.

Undiscovered companions to the Sun, including planets and substellar objects, may exist in the far reaches of the outer solar system. Pan-STARRS will be able to detect an Earth-sized object out to 620 AU, a Jupiter-sized object out to 2140 AU, a Neptune-sized object out to 1230 AU and a Pluto-sized object out to 320 AU. With a higher albedo, objects of these sizes can be detected by Pan-STARRS out to even greater distances.

As for Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs), Pan-STARRS will discover about 20000 of them after a year of operations and this number is expected to increase with the duration of the survey. Some key issues that will be addressed from the survey of KBOs are the inclination distribution of KBOs, the sky-plane distribution of KBOs, the dynamical structure of KBOs, the abundance of Pluto-sized objects and the abundance of widely spaced binary KBOs.

New Astronomy

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) is the most ambitious survey currently planned in the visible band. The LSST is basically a ground-based observatory with an 8.4 meters primary mirror, a 9.6 square degrees field of view and a 3.2 gigapixel camera. This enables the LSST to cover about 10000 square degrees of sky area every three nights and produce extremely high quality images with superb astrometric and photometric accuracy.

This wide-field next-generation survey telescope will produce about 30 terabytes of data per night and over 60 petabytes of data over ten years of operation. The LSST will catalogue about 10 billion galaxies and 10 billion stars. This means that for the first time in history, the number of catalogued celestial object will exceed the human population. The 4 main science themes of the LSST are - Probing Dark Energy and Dark Matter, Taking an Inventory of the Solar System, Exploring the Transient Optical Sky and Mapping the Milky Way. Of the 4 themes mentioned, I will just elaborate more on the LSST in taking an inventory of the Solar System.

For objects located in the Solar System, the primary data that the LSST will generate is an expected catalogue of several million main-belt asteroids, about 100000 Near Earth Objects (NEOs), about 100000 Jovian Trojan asteroids, over 30000 Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs) and numerous objects with perihelia at several hundred AU. One AU is basically the average distance of the Earth from Sun and it has a value of 149.6 million kilometres. The LSST will also catalogue the orbits for each and every one of these Solar System objects.

Regarding the search for massive objects in the outer reaches of the Solar System, the LSST will be capable of detecting a Pluto-sized object out to a few hundred AU and an Earth-sized object out to over a thousand AU, depending on the albedo of the object.

The LSST is expected to begin survey operations in 2015 and the enormous archive of data that the LSST generates, will be made available to the world via the Internet. Each night, the LSST will generate terabytes of new data which will be easily accessible to anyone in the world that wants to explore it. To conclude, the LSST will be the ultimate network peripheral device to explore the Universe and a shared resource for all humanity!

This week, I read a report describing the discovery of the lightest known extrasolar planet to orbit a main sequence star and a revision to the orbital period of another planet in the same planetary system. Gliese 581e is the fourth planet detected around the M-dwarf star - Gliese 581. This star is located 20.3 light years away from Earth in the constellation Libra and as a red dwarf star, it is much smaller and less luminous than the Sun. Gliese 581e has a minimum mass of 1.9 Earths and it is the lightest known extrasolar planet to orbit a main sequence star. This planet takes about 3 days to orbit around Gliese 581 and being located at such a close distance from its parent star, its equilibrium temperature is too high to allow a substantial atmosphere. Gliese 581e is the innermost of the 4 known planets around Gliese 581 and the estimated upper limit for the mass of Gliese 581e is about 3 times the mass of the Earth.

Gliese 581 has a luminosity that is only 1.3 percent of the Sun’s. In order for a planet around Gliese 581 to have Earth-like surface conditions, it has to be located much closer to the star as compared to the Earth from the Sun. Gliese 581d is the outermost of the 4 known planets around Gliese 581 and its revised orbital period of 66.8 days places it inside the habitable zone of Gliese 581. This planet has a minimum mass of 7 Earths and an estimated upper mass of 13.8 Earths. The 4 known planets around Gliese 581 were detected using high resolution radial velocity measurements and the report describing these discoveries also shows the radial velocity curves for each of the 4 known planets. This report can be obtained at http://obswww.unige.ch/~udry/Gl581_preprint.pdf.

Orbiting the Sun at an average distance of 57.9 million kilometres, the planet Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun and it only takes 88 days for the planet to orbit the Sun. NASA’s MESSENGER (MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging) spacecraft is currently on its way to Mercury.

Since Mercury is located deep in the Sun’s gravity well, a spacecraft that is launched from the Earth will require an extremely large velocity change in order to get there. To make the trip feasible, MESSENGER makes extensive use of gravity assist manoeuvres to reduce the amount of rocket fuel needed to make the necessary velocity changes. For MESSENGER, it has to perform several flybys of the planets Earth, Venus and Mercury itself to make use of the planet’s relative movement and gravity to alter its trajectory and velocity. Since its launch on 3 August 2004, MESSENGER has made 1 flyby of Earth, 2 flybys of Venus and 2 flybys of Mercury.

On 29 September 2009, MESSENGER will execute one last flyby of Mercury to further slow down the spacecraft and on 18 March 2011, Mercury orbit insertion will be performed for MESSENGER to enter orbit around Mercury. The previous two flybys of Mercury on 14 January 2008 and on 6 October 2008 have produced some astonishing discoveries and spectacular imagery of the planet Mercury and you can visit http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/ to get the latest information on this exciting mission.

Dawn is the name of a robotic spacecraft launched by NASA on 27 September 2007 on a mission to the two most massive objects in the asteroid belt - the asteroid Vesta and the dwarf planet Ceres. Dawn is scheduled to arrive at Vesta on August 2011, carryout observations of Vesta and depart Vesta on May 2012. On February 2015, Dawn will arrive at Ceres and carryout extensive observations of Ceres. An extended mission whereby Dawn explores other asteroids after Ceres is also considered. However, this is unlikely as greater return is expected by spending the remaining available time at Ceres.

On 18 February 2009, Dawn performed a flyby of Mars, coming within 565 kilometres of the surface of Mars at nearly 20000 kilometres per hour. This flyby increased the velocity of Dawn and changed the spacecraft’s trajectory to a precise flight path for its journey to asteroid Vesta. Onboard Dawn is a small microchip bearing the names of more than 360000 people from around the world. The names were submitted online as part of a public outreach effort between September 2005 and November 2006. Visit http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/ to get the latest news on this mission.

The Hubble Space Telescope was launched on 24 April 1990 onboard the Space Shuttle Discovery. Since then, the space observatory has underwent 4 servicing missions - Servicing Mission 1 using Space Shuttle Endeavour, Servicing Mission 2 using Space Shuttle Discovery, Servicing Mission 3A using Space Shuttle Discovery and Servicing Mission 3B using Space Shuttle Columbia. The next planned servicing mission and will be the fifth and final servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope and it is scheduled for launch on 11 May 2009 using Space Shuttle Atlantis, with Space Shuttle Endeavour ready to launch in case a rescue mission is required.

This servicing mission will carry two new instruments to the Hubble Space Telescope, a replacement Fine Guidance Sensor, a new outer blanket layer to provide improved insulation and six new gyroscopes and batteries to allow the space observatory to continue to function at least through 2014. In addition, the Soft-Capture Mechanism (SCM) will be installed onto the telescope and this will enable a future spacecraft to be sent to the telescope to assist in its safe de-orbit at the end of its life. This mission is designated STS-125 and it will be flown by 7 astronauts, including 3 astronauts who have previous experience with servicing the Hubble Space Telescope. Visit http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/main/ to obtain the latest news about this servicing mission.

On 14 May 2009, two space-based observatories – Planck and the Herschel Space Observatory, will be launched together aboard an Ariane 5 rocket from Guiana Space Centre in French Guiana. Planck will observe the anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) over the entire sky with unprecedented detail and the Herschel Space Observatory will study the formation of stars and galaxies, and also conduct observations of the interstellar medium and the Solar System. Visit http://www.rssd.esa.int/index.php?project=Planck and http://herschel.esac.esa.int/ to learn more and get the latest news about Planck and the Herschel Space Observatory respectively.

Planet X

A super-Earth is an extrasolar planet that is more massive than the Earth but less massive than gas giant planets such as Neptune and Uranus. This week, I came across an astronomy project called the MEarth Project and its primary purpose is to search for transiting habitable upper-Earths around nearby M-dwarfs. The MEarth Project is basically a transit survey of about 2000 nearby M-dwarfs using 8 independent 0.4 meters aperture robotic telescopes at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory (FLWO) located on Mount Hopkins, Arizona.

The small diameters and very low luminosities of M-dwarfs compared to stars like our Sun, means that their habitable zones reside at much smaller orbital distances and this translates to much shorter orbital periods for planets orbiting at this distances. The geometric transit probability for a planet orbiting in the habitable zone of an M-dwarf is a few times greater than systems like the Earth-Sun system. The smaller diameters of M-dwarfs results in substantially deeper transits and the combination of smaller stellar mass and shorter orbital periods increases the radial velocity semi-amplitude of planets around M-dwarfs. The combination of all these factors means that the detection of super-Earths around M-dwarfs by the transit method is feasible from the ground using modest present day observational technique and detectors.

Are there any undiscovered massive planets and substellar objects orbiting the Sun far beyond the orbit of Pluto? Recently, I also came across a paper which describes how perturbations on the orbits of the inner planets of the solar system can be used to constrain the mass and distance of a massive unseen object located at hundreds to thousands of astronomical units (AU) from the Sun. One AU is the average distance of the Earth from the Sun and it has a value of 149.6 million kilometres.

For an undiscovered object having a mass equal to Mars, Earth or Jupiter, the approximate minimum distances from the Sun are 62 AU, 130 AU and 886 AU respectively. A brown dwarf with 75 to 80 times the mass of Jupiter cannot orbit at a distance smaller than about 3736 to 3817 AU from the Sun, while a red dwarf with 0.075 to 0.5 times the mass of the Sun cannot orbit at a distance smaller than about 3793 AU to 7139 AU from the Sun. The paper is entitled “Constraints on Planet X and Nemesis from Solar System's Inner Dynamics” and it can be obtained from http://arxiv.org/abs/0904.1562v2.

Distant Signal

I recently came across an interesting paper entitled - “On the Possibility of Detecting Extrasolar Planets’ Atmospheres with the Rossiter-McLaughlin Effect.” The atmospheres of transiting extrasolar planets have been probed from transmission spectroscopy and from measurements obtained during secondary transits, and this paper explains a new and distinct method to observe the atmospheres of transiting extrasolar planets. The paper basically describes how the measurement of the Rossiter-McLaughlin effect can be used to study the atmosphere of an extrasolar planet.

The spectral lines of a star will be symmetric since the blue and red Doppler-shifted regions of the surface of the rotating star are balanced. This spectral profile can be modified when a fraction of the star’s surface is blocked by a transiting planet, resulting in asymmetric spectral lines due to unbalanced red and blue Doppler-shifted contributions. The net effect of this is an observed radial anomaly of the star. A larger transiting planet and a faster rotating star will result in a larger observed stellar radial velocity anomaly. Since the Rossiter-McLaughlin effect is sensitive to the size of the planet and since the observed radius of the planet is wavelength-dependent, precise measurement of the Rossiter-McLaughlin effect via high resolution spectroscopy opens another means to probe and study the atmospheres of extrasolar planets.

This week, I researched on the prospects of detecting binary planets by precise measurements of the time of arrival of a pulsar’s signal. I developed the numerical solutions and wrote a program to generate the synthetic data of the “would-be-observed” time of arrival of a pulsar’s signal due to a pair of binary planets in orbit around it. The program also computes how the observed signal would differ for a single planet with the combined mass of the binary planets in an identical orbit around the pulsar.

In my analysis, I kept the mass of the pulsar constant at one solar mass. I vary the semimajor axis and the eccentricity of the orbit of the planet-planet barycenter around the pulsar and assume a non-negligible mass for the binary planets in comparison with the mass of the pulsar. I vary the mass of each planet from one third to ten times the mass of Jupiter and I also vary the orbital semimajor axis and eccentricity of the binary planets around each other. For both the orbits of the planet-planet barycenter around the pulsar and for the binary planets around each other, I kept the orbital inclinations near “edge-on” as viewed by a distant observer because observations of this nature is biased towards such orbital configurations.

I also extended the analysis to the possibility of detecting massive moons around planets orbiting pulsars. In fact, a paper entitled “Possibility of Detecting Moons of Pulsar Planets Through Time-of-Arrival Analysis,” which can be obtained from http://arxiv.org/abs/0805.4263 explains such a possibility. Finally, to double it up, I carried out an identical set of analysis on the prospects of detecting binary planets around stars via precise measurements of the stellar radial velocity!

Last weekend, I derived several equations and developed two programs to generate the exact time-varying parallax of stars that will be observed by a Sun-orbiting and an Earth-orbiting satellite respectively. I did this out of curiosity and just meddled around with the numbers.

On 28 March 2009 at 3:14 p.m. EDT, NASA’s Space Shuttle Discovery made a beautiful landing at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida after a successful mission to expand the International Space Station. This mission is designated STS-119 and it is the 125th space shuttle flight, the 28th flight to the International Space Station, the 36th flight for Discovery and the first space shuttle flight in 2009. The launch of Discovery took place on 15 March 2009 at 7:43 p.m. EDT to deliver the final set of solar arrays to the 100 billion dollar space station. The solar arrays were successfully installed and subsequently unfurled on 20 March 2009. The addition of the final set of solar panels brings the station’s total power output to 120 kilowatts and the extra power will allow the space station’s permanent crew to increase to six in May.

Worlds Unfathomed

Stellar astrometry is the precise measurement of a star’s position in the sky and monitoring how the position of the star changes over time. If a star has a planet in orbit around it, the gravitational influence of the planet will cause the star to move in a tiny elliptical orbit around the planet-star mutual center of mass. The movement of a star will be extremely small because the mass of a star is much greater than the mass of a planet.

At the same distance from the star, a more massive planet will induce a larger displacement of the star from the planet-star mutual center of mass as compared to a less massive planet. Also, for two planets of the same mass, the one being at a further distance from the star will induce a larger displacement of the star as compared to the one that is nearer. This makes the astrometric method of planet detection especially sensitive to massive planets with large orbits.

Jupiter is 318 times more massive than the Earth and it is 5.2 times further from the Sun than the Earth. To put things into perspective, one arcsecond is the width of one centimetre observed from a distance of over 2 kilometres and one light year is the distance light travels in one year, which is 9.46 trillion kilometres. For a distant observer, the displacement of the Sun caused by the gravitational influence of Jupiter will be roughly 1.7 milli-arcseconds from an observation distance of 10 light years, 0.17 milli-arcseconds from 100 light years and 0.017 milli-arcseconds from 1000 light years. To add on, the displacement of the Sun caused by the gravitational influence of the Earth will be approximately 1 micro-arcsecond from an observation distance of 10 light years, 0.1 micro-arcseconds from 100 light years and 0.01 micro-arcseconds from 1000 light years. One milli-arcsecond is one thousandth of an arcsecond and one micro-arcsecond is one millionth of an arcsecond.

During the second half of last week, I went about doing intense research on stellar astrometry, deriving countless exact solutions and developing a few elaborate program codes to compute and model the change in a star’s position over time due to the gravitational influence of one or multiple planets in orbit around it. I ran the computations using planets ranging from one tenth the mass of the Earth to a few times the mass of Jupiter and I also included brown dwarfs with tens of Jupiter masses. I placed these objects in orbits ranging from star-hugging 20 hours orbits to far-flung multi-decade orbits and I vary their orbital inclinations from face-on obits to edge-on orbits. I used stars ranging in mass from red dwarfs to the Sun and all the way to stars up to 5 times the mass of the Sun.

A large amount of the data that I have computed will be the expected observational data from future space-based observatories that will carryout planetary detection via stellar astrometry and two of these future missions are NASA’s Space Interferometry Mission and the European Space Agency’s Gaia Mission. I’ve also extended my research to include computing the change in a star’s position over time due to the gravitational influence of massive objects sweeping by on unbound orbits. For this particular aspect, I used passing objects ranging from Jupiter-mass planets to brown dwarfs to stellar mass objects on parabolic and hyperbolic orbits of various inclinations.

It has been over a week since the launch of NASA’s Kepler Mission onboard a Delta II rocket on 6 March 2009 at 10:49:57 p.m. EST. The spacecraft flew past the orbit of the moon on Sunday night EST and it will continue to trail behind Earth as it orbits the Sun. All systems onboard Kepler are performing as expected and the commissioning process is proceeding flawlessly. Flight controllers have already powered on Kepler’s photometer and it will be calibrated over the next several weeks. Since the dust cover in front of the photometer remains closed, the first few images taken by Kepler will be dark and engineers will use these dark images to characterize the noise in the instrument’s electronics. Visit http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/kepler/ or http://www.kepler.arc.nasa.gov/ to get more about Kepler.

It is already well over three years since the launch of NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft on a mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt. On 14 March 2009 at 1500 UTC, the New Horizons spacecraft is cruising at a Sun-relative velocity of 17.21 kilometres per second and it is 1.93 billion kilometres from the Earth and 2.83 billion kilometres from Pluto. Visit http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/ to get the latest news as New Horizons continues on its long voyage to Pluto and beyond.

NASA’s STS-119 mission to the International Space Station is scheduled for launch on 15 March 2009 at 7:43 p.m. EDT and it will be flown using Space Shuttle Discovery. The STS-119 mission will install the final set of solar arrays to complete the station’s complement of electricity-generating solar panels and support the expansion of the station’s crew to six this year.

The titles of some interesting papers which I’ve read during the past few days are - “Formation and Tidal Evolution of Hot Super-Earths in Multiple Planetary Systems”, “On the Semimajor Axis Distribution of Extrasolar Gas Giant Planets: Why Hot Jupiters are Rare around High Mass Stars”, “Frontiers of the Physics of Dense Plasmas and Planetary Interiors: Experiments, Theory, Applications” and “Release of Meteoriods from Asteroids by Earth’s Tides”.

Discovering Earths

A Delta II rocket carrying NASA’s Kepler planet-hunting spacecraft lifted off from Launch Complex 17-B at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on 6 March 2009 (7 March 2009) at 10:49:57 p.m. EST (03:49:57 a.m. UTC). I managed to watch the launch live on NASA television from 5 minutes before liftoff until over an hour after liftoff when the separation of the Kepler observatory from the third stage solid rocket booster is confirmed.

The Kepler observatory will now go through a commissioning phase of about 60 days during which the telescope’s systems and its instrument will be put through a series of checks before it begins its science mission. It will then begin a careful study of 100000 stars for signs of planets similar to Earth and it is expected to discover hundreds of Earth-size and smaller planets and determine the fraction of the hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy that might have such planets. The success of this mission will bring closure to the millennia-old quest for other worlds like our Earth. Visit http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/kepler/ to get the latest updates about this fascinating mission.

This week, I derived the solutions and wrote a program to compute the delay in the signal of a pulsar due to the gravitational “tug” from multiple planets in orbit around it. I ran the program using planets ranging from Earth mass to several times the mass of Jupiter.

On Wednesday night, I worked out a set of equations and wrote a program that can simulate the view of the Universe from a spacecraft that is travelling at a significant fraction of the speed of light. Various relativistic effects such as Doppler shift, relativistic beaming and stellar aberration are computed. This program can also be extended to simulate the view of the Universe from the surface of a relativistic object such as a quark star or a neutron star, and of a mildly relativistic object such as a white dwarf.

Here are some of the titles of interesting newly published papers that I’ve read in the past several day - “Formation, Survival and Detectability of Planets Beyond 100 AU”, “The Astrophysics of Ultra-Compact Binaries”, “Magnetized Massive Stars as Magnetar Progenitors”, “ The Dynamical Effects of White Dwarf Birth Kicks in Globular Star Clusters”, “The Evolution of Runaway Stellar Collision Products”, etc.

Planet Search

A couple of days ago, out of curiosity, I wrote a program that can generate the exact radial velocity curves of stars with multiple planets in obit around them. As a planet orbits around a star, its gravitational “tug” will cause the star to wobble back and forth. The program that I’ve wrote computes the varying receding and approaching velocities of the star as it is being “tugged” by the planets in various orbits around it. I also used this program to produce the radial velocity curve of the Sun and of known stars with multiple planets in orbit around them.

This week, I also did statistical analysis on the spin-orbit alignment of extrasolar planetary systems. The spin-orbit angle of a planet is simply the angle between the planet’s orbital axis and the spin axis of its parent star. In general, the true spin orbit angle of an extrasolar planet cannot be measured, but for transiting extrasolar planets, the sky projection of the spin-orbit angle can be measured via the Rossiter-McLaughlin effect. For my research in what’s described above, I developed a program that can generate the probability distributions from the projected spin-orbit angle of an extrasolar planet conditioned on various true spin-orbit angles and orbital inclinations.

NASA’s Kepler Mission is currently scheduled for launch on 6 March 2009 at 3:48:43 UTC (10:48 pm EST time on 5 March) aboard a Delta II rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The Kepler Mission is NASA’s first mission capable of detecting Earth-sized planets orbiting other stars. Kepler is a space-based photometer which will “stare” continuously at a particular region of space and observe the brightness of over 100000 stars over a period of 3.5 years to detect periodical transits of a star by its planets. Visit http://www.kepler.arc.nasa.gov/ for more information and updates about this mission. At the time of this writing, Kepler is less than 7 days away from the opening of its launch window!

As a result of my anticipation of the upcoming Kepler Mission, I have been doing a larger amount of research on extrasolar plants over the past week. To “fire up” some of my imagination, I ran some of my own simulation programs today to simulate the insolation profiles and insolation cycles as observed from the surfaces/cloud-tops of various hypothetical extrasolar planets and even their moons!

The Sun is a large source of electromagnetic radiation and it produces an external force on objects via the solar radiation pressure. This force affects the orbits of satellites around the Sun by inducing noticeable deviations from Keplerian orbits. Last week, I created a program to compute the increase in orbital periods of satellites in orbit around the Sun due to the effect of solar radiation pressure.

For example, a satellite orbiting the Sun at a distance of one hundred million kilometres has a mass of 1000 kilograms, an effective surface area of 5 square meters and a reflectivity of 50 percent. If solar radiation pressure is taken into account, the increase in its orbital period around the Sun will be 49.661351 seconds.

In addition to last week, I also derived the math and created a program to simulate the projection geometry of a cylindrical panorama. Based on the position of an object in the real world, the program basically calculates the pixel coordinates of the object after being captured onto a cylindrical panorama.

Rocketing Discoveries

This week, I derived and solved a huge lot of navigational differentiation equations regarding rocket motion. I also developed a few programs to compute trajectory models for a wide range of different rocket fight profiles. I also used the programs to produce the trajectory models for both the Space Shuttle and the Ariane V launch vehicle.

Yesterday afternoon, I reformatted all my computers and reestablished them with all the necessary programs, files and setups. Although it took me the entire afternoon, my computers now seem to be operating faster and the whole reformatting task was definitely worth the trouble. I also carried out some modifications to perfect my archiving system and at about early evening, I resumed nominal usage of my computers. Today, I added tens of gigabytes of music, books, wallpapers, pictures, movies and audio books to my archives.

Over the next few months, there will be some interesting missions and I shall describe a few here. STS-119 is the next mission to the International Space Station and it is scheduled to be flown by Space Shuttle Discovery. The current expected launch date for this mission is 12 February 2009, and STS-119 will deliver and assemble the fourth starboard Integrated Truss Segment (S6) and the fourth set of solar arrays and batteries to the space station.

On 12 May 2009, STS-125 is scheduled to be flown by Space Shuttle Atlantis as the fifth and final servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope. During this period, NASA’s Space Shuttle Discovery will be on standby and it will be launched as a rescue mission in the event Atlantis becomes disabled during STS-125. Such a contingency plan is required because Atlantis will not be able use the International Space Station as a “safe haven” in the event of a failure due to the much lower orbital inclination of the Hubble Space Telescope compared to the International Space Station.

If STS-125 is given the green light for a 12 May launch, the next Space Shuttle mission which is designated STS-127, will be rescheduled for launch on 13 June 2009 as this mission will be flown by Space Shuttle Discovery. STS-127 will be a mission to the International Space Station and the primary purpose of this mission is to deliver and install the final two components of the Japanese Experiment Module: the Exposed Facility (JEM EF) and the Exposed Section of the Experiment Logistics Module (ELM-ES).

NASA’s Kepler space observatory is scheduled for launch on 6 March 2009 aboard a Delta II rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida. The primary scientific objective of Kepler is to explore the diversity of planetary systems and determine the frequency of Earth-like planets around other stars.

On 24 April 2009, an Atlas V launch vehicle is scheduled to launch both the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and the Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) to the Moon. The LRO will be placed in a polar orbit around the Moon and it will be carrying out extensive observations of the Moon. Piggy-backing on the mission, LCROSS will watch the launch vehicle’s Centaur upper stage impact a permanently shadowed crater near the south pole of the Moon and observe the resulting impact plume to find hints of water ice. LCROSS will fly through the debris plume and it will impact a different part of the crater approximately 4 minutes after the impact of the Centaur upper stage.

During the last couple of days, I did many minor revisions to a large part of my travel plans for the last quarter of this year. I also went about checking out and knowing more about my planned destinations, including obtaining lesser known travel tips and information. Anyway, I went to the moneychanger today and converted an additional few grand of Singapore Dollars into Australian Dollars. I’m planning exploits and destinations with the “WOW FACTOR!!!” …

Relativistic Stars

Quark stars are one of the densest known stars in the Universe and their extreme characteristics also make them one of the most fascinating and least known objects. Several days ago, I did research on the observational characteristics of quark stars and the physics of cold matter at supra-nuclear densities.

I also came across a paper entitled “Dynamical and Thermal Evolution of the Quark-Nova Ejecta.” This paper explains the formation of a quark star when the interior of a neutron star undergoes a transition to the quark phase and collapses into a more compact configuration. The collapse produces an ultra-energetic fireball, releases an enormous amount of gravitational potential energy and creates a tremendous amount of neutrinos which deposit a huge amount of energy to the bottom of the crust of the parent neutron star.

Since the collapse of the interior of the neutron star into a quark star occurs faster than the response time of the overlying crustal material, the combination of baryon to quark conversion energy and gravitational energy generated from the collapse, accelerates the remaining crust of the parent neutron star to relativistic velocities. This shell of relativistically expanding ejecta is the result of the quark-nova and further evolution of the ejecta, such as clumping, crystallization and breakup of the material, depends on the surrounding ambient conditions.

This week, I also read and analyzed some interesting papers and their titles are “Explaining the Orbits of the Galactic Center S-Stars”, “Dark Stars: the first Stars in the Universe may be powered by Dark Matter Heating”, “Maxwell Tension Supports the Water Bridge”, “Quantum Black Holes as Elementary Particles”, “Superdense Massive Galaxies in the Nearby Universe”, etc.

As a particle falls towards a black hole, how will its motion appear to a distant observer? During the past two days, I derived several numerical methods and ran gigabytes of calculations to construct exact models of the motion of particles near black holes and other relativistic objects. The models include both bound and unbound particle trajectories and they are expressed in Schwarzschild coordinates.

On 10 January 2009, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 launch vehicle was raised to vertical at Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) in Cape Canaveral, Florida. This operation was completed two days ahead of schedule and it was a critical step towards the preparation for the maiden flight of Falcon 9. Visit http://www.spacex.com/ to get all the latest news and imagery.

In November 2008, SpaceX successfully conducted a full mission duration firing of Falcon 9. This firing test validated SpaceX’s use of nine engines on the first stage, as well as the ability to shut down engines without affecting the remaining engines. In December 2008, NASA selected the Falcon 9 launch vehicle and the Dragon spacecraft as the primary means of transporting cargo to and from the International Space Station after the Space Shuttle retires in 2010.

The Observer

Eratosthenes of Cyrene was a Greek mathematician, poet, athlete, geographer and astronomer, and at around 240 BC, he became the first Greek to calculate the circumference of the Earth. By making use of the knowledge of the Sun’s angle of elevation at noon on the summer solstice in Alexandria and on the island of Elephantine, Eratosthenes accurately calculated the circumference of the Earth to within an error of one percent.

A couple of days ago, I came across a paper describing a modified version of Eratosthenes’ method of deriving the Earth’s radius. This paper is entitled “Sunsets, Tall Buildings, and the Earth’s Radius” and it can be obtained from http://arxiv.org/abs/0812.3911. Today, I wrote a program that can derive the radius of the Earth based on the delay in sunset timings observed from various points up on a tall building that can be located anywhere on the Earth’s surface. I took many of the equations from this paper and improved them into their exact forms.

On Christmas Eve last year, I derived a set of equations and wrote a program code to calculate the observed radial stellar velocity anomaly due to the Rossiter-McLaughlin effect. When a star rotates on its axis, one quadrant of its surface will be seen approaching the observer and the other quadrant will be seen receding from the observer. Due to the Doppler Effect, light from the approaching quadrant will be blue-shifted into shorter wavelengths and light from the receding quadrant will be red-shifted into longer wavelengths.

When a planet transits the star, it blocks off part of the illuminated disk of the star, obscuring some of the blue-shifted or red-shifted light from reaching the observer. This results in an apparent radial velocity anomaly and as the planet moves from one side of the star’s disk to the other side, the amplitude of the apparent radial velocity anomaly will switch from being negative to being positive, or vice versa.

A couple of weeks ago, I read a paper about the discovery of a transiting extrasolar planet called OGLE2-TR-L9b. This planet has about 4.5 times the mass of Jupiter and it has a significantly larger radius than expected for a planet of its mass. The host star of OGLE2-TR-L9b is the fastest rotating and hottest main sequence star around which an orbiting extrasolar planet has been detected to date. Due to its fast rotation, this star is expected to exhibit a strong Rossiter-McLaughlin effect as OGLE2-TR-L9b transits in front of it.

The titles of some of the interesting papers that I’ve read and analyzed during the last few weeks are – “Apparent Shape of Super-Spinning Black Holes”, “The Extrasolar Planet Atmosphere and Exosphere: Emission and Transmission Spectroscopy”, “Empirical Evidence for Tidal Spin-up in Transiting Planetary Systems”, “Intermediate-Mass Black Holes as LISA Sources”, “Geo-Neutrinos”, “WASP-12b: The Hottest Transiting Extrasolar Planet Yet Discovered”, etc.

Over the past one month, I also researched on many advance topics such as the standard model of particle physics, supersymmetry, big bang nucleosynthesis, expansion of space, vacuum energy, dark matter, dark energy, cosmic microwave background, extra dimensions, string theory, etc. Entirely at the cutting edge! In addition, I’ve also spent a fair amount of time deriving several equations to solve some intriguing problems in geometry and combinatorics.

I’ve just read a paper describing a newly discovered planet… Imagine a planet which takes just over a day to complete one orbit around its parent star whose luminosity is almost three and a half times the Sun’s. This planet is named WASP-12b and it is the most heavily irradiated planet yet detected. At such an incredibly close proximity of only 3 million kilometers from its parent star, the surface of the planet is estimated to have a staggering temperature of around 2500 Kelvin! To put this into perspective, each square meter at the planet substellar point is blasted by 9 million watts of incident radiation from its host star!

NASA’s Kepler Mission is currently scheduled for launch on 6 March 2009 aboard a Delta II rocket from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The primary scientific objective of the Kepler Mission is to explore the structure and diversity of planetary systems. Kepler will monitor the brightness of over 100000 stars to detect periodical transits of a star by its planets and it will be powerful enough to detect Earth-sized planets orbiting other stars. Visit the Kepler Mission’s main site at http://kepler.nasa.gov/.

Happy New Year!!! It’s 2009!!! This year is going to be extraordinary and it will be unlike any before…

Stellar White

With many different research areas in mind, I shall just describe my research on two fascinating aspects of white dwarf stars. Firstly, the existence of low mass white dwarf stars with masses well below half the Sun’s is rather unusual because the Universe is not old enough for lower mass stars to end up as white dwarf stars. This week, I researched on the formation of low mass white dwarf stars by type Ia supernovae occurring in binary systems. In this case, the high velocity ejecta from the supernova strips off the outer envelope of the companion star and leaves only its core behind, providing a mechanism for the formation of a single low mass white dwarf star.

Continuing my focus on white dwarf stars, despite concentrating on a rather different aspect, I carried out studies on tidally induced thermonuclear explosions of white dwarf stars. This unique kind of supernova occurs when a white dwarf star undergoes a close encounter with a black hole and gets maximum stretching in its orbital direction and maximum compression perpendicular to its orbital plane. Nucleosynthesis is triggered at the region of maximum compression in the white dwarfs star and it rapidly develops into a full-fledged thermonuclear explosion, unbinding the entire star. However, there is a restriction on the masses of black holes involved as black holes more massive than a few tens of thousands times the mass of the Sun tend to gulp down a white dwarf star before their tidal forces can overwhelm the star’s self gravity. Such intermediate mass black holes are expected to exist in the cores of globular clusters or dwarf galaxies.

At present, I’m almost done with redesigning my entire room and a pleasant scent of “fresh” wood lingers in my room. The process is entirely DIY and the final outlook is sparkling and simplistic. The next step will be to decorate… plasma lamps and blacklight lamps?

Deep Skies

On 14 November 2008 at 7:55:39 p.m. EST, NASA’s Space Shuttle Endeavour lifted-off from Launch Pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center on a mission to the International Space Station. On this mission, Endeavour will transport the Leonardo Multi-Purpose Logistics Module (MPLM) to the space station. This module holds supplies and equipment, including additional crew quarters, life support systems and spare hardware. A large part of this mission is dedicated to the servicing and repair of the Solar Alpha Rotary Joints (SARJ) on both the port and starboard sides of the space station.

Recently, I’ve added several tens of gigabytes of new books to my vast collection of digital books, expanding it at a relentless pace. Much of it will prove useful in my current and future research and studies. Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve also collected numerous bizarre and peculiar wallpapers… looks interesting!

Over the past few days, I performed in-depth research on several interesting and new areas in astrophysics. Just to describe a few, one research I worked on is about using the measured gravitational redshift of compact rotating objects such as neutron stars and white dwarf stars to provide information on the mass-radius relationship or compactness of the star. Another intriguing topic is the investigation of the role of Quark-Novae in reionizing the early universe and their important distinguishing features in cosmological observations.

One of the more interesting research area is on the existence of hypervelocity stars and this week, I studied the properties of hypervelocity stars ejected at huge velocities out of the Milky Way Galaxy by gravitational interactions with Sagittarius A*, a supermassive black hole located in the Galactic Center. I examined how a statistical sample of hypervelocity stars can address the nature of the ejection mechanism, the in-fall history of stars towards Sagittarius A*, the types of stars orbiting Sagittarius A* and finally, how such a sample can provide a unique measurement of the “shape” of the galaxy’s dark matter potential.

Powers Within

Last week, I derived a method to calculate the transit timing variation and the transit duration variation caused by the presence of an exomoon around an exoplanet and I also wrote and ran a program to investigate the transit timing effects over a wide range of orbital configurations. These transit timing variations are basically caused by the slight gravitational tug of an exomoon acting on an exoplanet. This causes the exoplanet to wobble as it orbits its parent star which slightly modifies the timings at which the exoplanet passes in front of the illuminated disk of the star.

Over the past couple of weeks, I also did extensive research on topics such as hyper-compact star clusters around supermassive black holes ejected from the centers of galaxies by gravitational wave recoil, star formation in the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, the structures and dynamics of the atmospheres of diverse extrasolar planets, etc.

This week, I carried out extensive studies on the effects of nuclear explosions, including the effects of a worldwide nuclear war. My focus is on the effects of a nuclear war with a total nuclear explosive yield of 10000 megatons. 10000 megatons is equal to the total amount of energy released by exploding ten thousand metric tons of TNT and to put this amount of explosive energy into perspective, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima has a yield of only 13 kilotons (0.013 megatons) and the most powerful nuclear weapon ever detonated, the Tsar Bomba, has a yield of 50 megatons.

On the flipside, I also carried out substantial research on the future of energy generation by nuclear power and the hydrogen economy. Again and again, the definite and clear conclusion is that nuclear power is the only practical alternative to fossil fuels. I’ve also compared nuclear power with renewable energy sources such as wind, solar, hydroelectric, geothermal, etc. Once again, the conclusion is that nuclear power is better than these renewable energy sources in many aspects such as, cost, safety, reliability, environmental impact, consistency, feasibility, etc. The endless “green lights” and the attractiveness of nuclear energy only serves to reinforce my reasons to continue and accelerate my research on the next generation of nuclear reactors and the coming global nuclear renaissance.

Finally… Barack Obama in now the President-elect after defeating Republican presidential candidate John McCain in the general election and he will be sworn in as the 44th President of the United States on 20 January 2009. I expect and hope that he will bring positive changes to the United States and the world.

Burning Blue

Today, I went to the Jurong Bird Park in the morning and tested some new photography techniques. In total, I capture 164 pictures and 15 video clips including a few amazing ones featuring penguins “flying” through water. There was also hardly any visitors at the bird park today and this allowed me to fully concentrate on photographing the birds in solitude.

On Sunday, 28 September 2008 at 4:15 p.m. PDT (11:15 p.m. UTC), Falcon 1 was successfully launched into orbit from the Reagan Test Site (RTS) on Omelek Island at the U.S. Army Kwajalein Atoll (USAKA) in the Central Pacific. The Falcon 1 launch vehicle is designed by the Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) and Sunday’s launch marks the fourth flight. This successful space shot came less than a month after an engine timing error during stage separation doomed SpaceX’s third Falcon 1 test. As the first three launch attempts have been unsuccessful, this fourth flight established a milestone by being the first privately-developed liquid fuel rocket to successfully orbit the Earth.

The Falcon 1 rocket is the first in a planned family of Falcon boosters under development by SpaceX and it can carry up to 570 kilograms to low-Earth orbit. On Sunday night’s launch, Falcon 1 carried a simple 165 kilograms mass simulator that mimicked an actual satellite. SpaceX is also developing the Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon orbital spacecraft which will provide cargo and crew launch services to the International Space Station for NASA. The first flight of the Falcon 9 launch vehicle is currently scheduled to be launch in the summer of 2009, from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Visit http://www.spacex.com/index.php for the latest developments.

Last week, I did some fascinating research on dark matter and some of the weird things it can do. I derived a method and developed a program to investigate and study the distribution of dark matter in deep gravitational potential wells whereby the concentration of dark matter particles is assumed to be higher. Places with deep gravitational potential wells include the vicinity of the Milky Way’s central supermassive black hole and in the heart of globular clusters. Depending on their orbits, stars in these regions can capture a large enough amount of dark matter particles to significantly alter their nuclear luminosities and stellar structures.

The amount of energy generated in the star from the annihilation of dark matter particles can even exceed the energy generated from nuclear fusion! The energy produced from the annihilation of dark matter particles also extends the lifetime of the star by substituting a part of the energy required to support the structure of the star that would have been generated via nuclear fusion.

The highest of the world’s mountains, it seems, has to make but a single gesture of magnificence to be the lord of all, vast in unchallenged and isolated supremacy.
- George Leigh Mallory

Recently, I’ve been doing a lot of research and reading on the Himalayas, especially the region around where Everest is located. I’m approaching it from the perspectives of a geologist, a meteorologist, a mountaineer and a photographer. The peaks surrounding Everest are enormous and overwhelming, dragging the entire landscape straight into the heavens! It will surely be a perfect destination for an inquisitive adventurer who craves for vertigo and for lofty topographies.

A few days ago, I read in he news about a small airplane which crashed and caught fire as it tried to land in foggy weather at a tiny mountain airport near Mount Everest, killing 18 people. That incident occurred in the small town of Lukla, which serves as a main jump-off point for treks into the Everest region. Anyway, that does nothing to deter me from a possible future trekking adventure in the Himalayas.

On Saturday, I purchased two external hard disks which increased the capacity of my archiving system by two terabytes. At a cost of only one dollar for every 5 gigabytes, those were the cheapest external hard disks that I’ve ever bought. It took me a considerable amount of time to load the hundreds of gigabytes of stuff into my new external hard disks, with one serving as primary and the other as backup. With the addition of over a thousand new books to my massive digital library during the last couple of days, the pace at which I’m expanding my digital library has since moved into high gear. Until I begin to run low on hard disk space…

Getting back to doing my research…

Cosmic Expansion

A few days ago, I derived the equations and developed a few simulations to precisely model and study the spatial evolution of different kinds of Universes, including ours. Simulations include modeling the “lookback times” of distant objects as a function of their observed spectral redshifts and the distances of origin of luminous objects with various observed spectral redshifts. I also investigated and carried out exact calculations on the observed brightness of distant objects in different Universes with various expansion characteristics.

Also, being curious about the change in the radiation environment as a spacecraft’s velocity approaches the speed of light, I researched on the radiation hazard of relativistic space travel and investigated things such as the relativistic beaming effect of cosmic rays, the sputtering of a spacecraft’s frontal surfaces by relativistic dust particles and the presence of interstellar gas acting as a flow of bombarding nucleonic radiation. I’ve come out with the equations and developed a few simulators to investigate these effects. In addition, I’ve also explored a couple of feasible methods of radiation shielding at these ultra-high velocities.

Here are some interesting papers published over the last couple of weeks: “The Rise of the Vulcans”, “Neutrino-cooled Accretion Disk around Spinning Black Holes”, “The Star Ingesting Luminosity of Intermediate Mass Black Holes in Globular Clusters”, “On a Scattered-Disk Origin for the 2003 El61 Collisional Family - an Example of the Importance of Collisions on the Dynamics of Small Bodies” and “Formation of quark phases in compact stars and SN explosion.”

NASA’s next Space Shuttle mission, STS-125, is scheduled to be launched on 10 October 2008 and the will be the fifth and final servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). This mission will be flown by Space Shuttle Atlantis and it will add two new instruments, the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph and the Wide Field Camera 3, to the HST. During the mission, astronauts will also attach the Soft Capture Mechanism (SCM) to the HST which will enable a future spacecraft to be docked to the telescope for a safe de-orbit when the HST reaches the end of its life. This mission will extend the lifespan of the HST by allowing it to continue to function at least through 2013 and you can get the latest news at http://hubblesite.org/.

In preparation for adventure…

Pristine Areas

Today, I spent most of my day at the Central Business District doing photography and I took a total of over 300 pictures. Today’s shoot was excellent and the weather was perfect. My photographic work was done on foot from Fort Canning Hill to the Singapore River to Raffles MRT Station to the Merlion to the Esplanade to Suntec City to Millenia Walk. I also went for lunch with some friends at Raffles City.

My interest in the extremely long term evolution of white dwarf stars was reignited after reading a paper entitled “The Future Evolution of White Dwarf Stars through Baryon Decay and Time Varying Gravitational Constant” which is available at http://arxiv.org/abs/0808.1301v1. The paper basically describes how the decay of protons over immensely long time scales and how the time variations of the fundamental constants such as the gravitational constant affect the evolution of white dwarf stars. The evolution of a white dwarf star with the same mass as the Sun to a lump of hydrogen ice the size of an asteroid over an incredibly long time period of an order of a duodecillion years (one followed by 39 zeroes) is pretty remarkable! Go and read the paper if you want to know more about the mechanisms and processes involved.

This week, I also researched on a number of interesting topics such as the characterization of extrasolar planets with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the properties of Sagittarius A* (a supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way galaxy). I’m currently working on some incredibly fascinating research… big!

I’m currently building up a colossal archive of pictures and wallpapers and already, the file count is in the tens of thousands. The pictures and wallpapers range from digital art to natural scenes to themed backgrounds to anime thumbnail images. All these will definitely be very useful as presentation backgrounds, design templates, etc.

Sunlit Moons

Just over a week ago, I finished creating and tested a program which computes the exact position of the Sun in the sky from any point on the surface of any moon orbiting any planet in any orbital configurations. My test and analysis scenarios includes the Earth’s moon, Jupiter’s moon Europa, Neptune’s moon Triton and Eris’ moon Dysnomia. Performing the computations to model and investigate the day-night cycles of these far-flung worlds is simply awesome!

Yesterday, I went to the zoo for the first time in over a year and I did manage to take 378 pictures and 23 video clips. The zoo has undergone some slight changes, including the addition of several new exhibits and that allowed me to take many ‘never-taken-before’ shots. Uniqueness and rarity were my main consideration and objective respectively in composing my shots. With the well met objectives and the countless interesting subjects to photograph, yesterday’s trip was a very rewarding one.

As usual, I’ve occupied myself with lots of research this week and I’ve created a few simulation programs to aid me in my research analysis. Two of the more interesting ones are a computer program which generates exact trajectory models of projectiles moving through damping media and a program which computes the precise ground run characteristics for all aircraft takeoff and landing scenarios.

Recently, I’ve stumbled upon numerous new ideas and avenues in countless diverse aspects and areas. Although there is too much to be written here, I’ll just sum up by saying that with new possibilities, things are getting more interesting and rewarding!

Cieux Magnifique

Heaven's stars are the works of God,
The scriptures of his night sky.
After sunsets golden-red glow,
They're there to captivate the eye.
No one can see beneath their feet,
As heaven's pearls ignite their souls.
To be as one with their maker,
Is the highest of human goals.
Blessed be the candies of night,
Which guide the sailors at sea.
Bathing earth with their soft glow,
For all who love them, as we!
- Tom Zart

During the past couple of weeks, I’ve read a large number of newly published astrophysics papers and I’ll just list some of the more interesting titles here - “Gravitational Waves from Scattering of Stellar-Mass Black Holes in Galactic Nuclei”, “Evaporation of Extrasolar Planets”, “Several Results Concerning the Last Stages of Evolution of Close Binaries Composed of Compact Companions”, “COROT-Exo-4b: A Transiting Planet in a 9.2-Day Synchronous Orbit”, “Cometary Activity at 25.7 AU: Hale-Bopp 11 Years after Perihelion”, “Halo Gas Accretion onto Disk Galaxies”, “Exclusion of Black Hole Disaster Scenarios at the LHC”, “Gamma-Ray Bursts and Particle Astrophysics”, “Reionization – A Probe for the Stellar Population and the Physics of the Early Universe”, etc.

During the last several days, I’ve made massive modifications to the source codes of most of the orbital mechanics software that I have created a couple of weeks ago. These modifications provide ever greater sophistication, versatility, robustness and speed to the orbital mechanics software. Countless uses… Today, I’ve also created a simulator which can give the exact position of the Sun in the sky from any point on the surface of any planet. It is exciting to play with this program and simulate the motion of the Sun across the skies of diverse worlds such as Mercury, Ceres, Pluto, Eric, Sedna, etc. Of countless extraterrestrial sunrises - I shall precisely predict! When I have the time, I’ll extend the capabilities of this program to compute the exact position of the Sun in the sky from any point on the surface of any moon orbiting any planet! Any interested buyers?

This week… Revised my travel plans, added gigabytes of stuff to my music and Ebooks archives, watched “The Scorpion King 2: Rise of a Warrior”, “Stargate Continuum” and “Doomsday”, finished heaps of research, etc…

On 10 September 2008, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN will be “switched-on” and the first attempt to circulate a beam of particles around the particle accelerator will be carried out. The first beam of particles will be accelerated up to the energy of 0.45 TeV (0.45 trillion electron volts). The LHC is the most powerful particle accelerator ever constructed and when it reaches optimum design performance in 2010, it will generate beams seven times more energetic than any previous particle accelerators. Visit http://public.web.cern.ch/Public/Welcome.html to get the latest news and view the countdown.

Rumored… The possibility of the creation of micro black holes by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has lead some people to contemplate over the likelihood that some of these micro black holes might be trapped in the interior of the Earth, accrete matter and eventually gobbling up the entire planet. A recent paper entitled “Exclusion of Black Hole Disaster Scenarios at the LHC” (http://arxiv.org/abs/0807.3349v1/) explains why micro black holes produced by the LHC pose no threat whatsoever to the planet. Before reading this paper, I shall give you’re a few hints as to why micro black holes produced by the LHC pose no risk to the Earth. The hints are: white dwarf stars exist, micro black holes pass right through the Earth and the Earth has a low escape velocity.

On 11 August 2008, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft will flyby Saturn’s moon Enceladus at a minimum flyby distance of only 50 kilometers from the moon’s surface. As usual, the primary focus of this flyby will be on the enigmatic fissures running along Enceladus’ southern polar region where jets of icy water vapor emanate and erupt hundreds of kilometers into space.

Orbital Clockwork

The vast spread
Of darkness
That speaks of mystery
The darkness that reveals
The beauty that lies beneath
In the form of glittering
Stars, a countless beauty
That seemed to conceal
A million stories
That can make the mankind
Take a new look at life
And the majestic moon
That silently looks at mankind
Wondering how its serenity
Was disturbed by the little steps
Of a man from the beautiful earth
Yet softly smiling back
And let the world sleep
In its magical glow
A glow that soothes
The world’s senses
And forget the pain of reality
- Chandrasekar Koneru

During the last two weeks or so, I created almost thirty rather elaborate and long computer programs to carryout precise orbital simulation and orbital tracking for any spacecraft orbital configurations. The first group of programs calculates the exact time varying position and velocity of a spacecraft relative to an arbitrary point. The second group of programs constructs precise models of the trajectories of spacecraft with respect to arbitrary points on a planetary surface. The third group of programs generates exact models of the relative positions and velocities of multiple satellites in different orbits with respect to each other.

The final group of programs computes the exact time varying relative positions and velocities between multiple satellites orbiting different bodies. Throughout this research endeavor, I derived several hundred equations and performed billions upon billions of complicated calculations.

The many uses of these programs include modeling the time varying Doppler shifts of satellite signals, deriving the time varying delay of satellite signals due to the finite speed of light, determining the mass of a body from the Doppler shift of the signals from a flyby or orbiting spacecraft, simulating the time varying apparent size of a planet from a flyby or orbiting spacecraft, precise tracking of an interplanetary spacecraft from an Earth-orbiting satellite and many more uses which I have not even thought about…

Over two weeks ago, I developed a numerical simulator to model the exact time varying radial velocity of a binary system’s components as seen from distant observer and a computer code to create precise global models of tides raised on different bodies in different orbital systems. It is quite interesting to toy around with the input parameters and generate diverse results.

Some of the interesting science papers which I have read over the last several days are: “White Dwarfs in Globular Clusters”, “The HARPS Search for Southern Extra-solar Planets: HD 40307”, “IceCube: A Cubic Kilometers Radiation Detector”, “The Case for a Close-in Perturber to GJ 436b”, “Gamma Ray Burst Central Engines”, “ An Extremely Wide and Very Low-mass Pair with Common Proper Motion”, “SN2007AX: An Extremely Faint Type Ia Supernova”, “Decaying Dark Matter and the Deficit of Dwarf Haloes”, etc… In addition, I’ve also done research on several rather fascinating topics such as the halting mechanisms of the inward migration of extrasolar hot-Jupiters, the magneto-centrifugal acceleration of stellar winds, the growth of dust grains into planetesimals in protoplanetary disks, etc.

Yesterday evening, I had a one-of-a-kind net gathering where we celebrated someone’s belated birthday. I bought the birthday cake and went there with my camera. The birthday boy’s face got “smacked” with a piece of cake and the whole event was captured in over 50 very clear pictures! For those of you who know what I’m talking about; yup, this is it!

Currently, I’m researching on the effect of the decay of dark mater particles on the spherical dwarf haloes in which they reside in. The dispersion of dwarf haloes by the decay of dark matter particles can explain the observed deficit of small satellite galaxies around the Milky Way galaxy when these observations are compared with simulations. I have also just finished creating a computer program to model and analyze the time varying physical characteristics of dwarf haloes with the effect of dark matter decay. This research was inspired after reading a paper entitled “Decaying Dark Matter and the Deficit of Dwarf Haloes” by Majd Abdelqader and Fulvio Melia. This paper can be obtained from http://arxiv.org/abs/0806.0602.

NASA’s EPOXI mission which uses the Deep Impact spacecraft has created a video of the moon passing in front of the Earth as seen from the spacecraft’s point of view at a distance of about 50 million kilometers away from the Earth. Observing the Earth from such a large distance away will help searches for Earth-like extrasolar planets by giving insights as to how a distant Earth-like world will look like. Visit http://epoxi.umd.edu/ to get the latest news and updates about this mission.

The launch window of NASA’s Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) opens on 5 October 2008. IBEX will be launched on a Pegasus XL rocket and the primary objective of this mission is to map the boundary between the Solar System and interstellar space. IBEX will be placed in a highly elliptical orbit around the Earth where it will come as close as 5000 kilometers from the Earth’s surface and go as far as three quarters the distance to the Moon from the Earth. Visit http://www.ibex.swri.edu/ to know more about this mission and to get the latest news.

Dazzling Circles

Throughout the past several days, I explored a number of interesting astrophysical processes such as “Timescales for Orbital Circularization” and “Planet Detection by Timing the Arrival of Pulsar Signals.” I derived a large number of equations, developed the techniques for analysis and performed extensive computer numerical simulations on these topics. It is always pleasant to have a wide range of interesting subject matters to research on.

At 12:05 p.m. EDT on 11 June 2008, a Delta II 7920-H rocket carrying the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope, or GLAST, roared off into the blue Floridian sky from launch pad B at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station Launch Complex 17. The space observatory was successfully placed into in a low-earth circular orbit at an altitude of 550 kilometers and at an orbital inclination of 28.5 degrees.

GLAST is a powerful space observatory that will explore the most extreme environments in the universe, and search for signs of new laws of physics and what composes the mysterious dark matter, explain how black holes accelerate immense jets of material to nearly light speed, and help crack the mysteries of the staggeringly powerful explosions known as gamma-ray bursts.

On 30 June 2008, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft completed its norminal four year mission and began its two year extended mission. The incredible discoveries from observations that Cassini has made on Titan and Enceladus during the past four years have made these two worlds the primary targets for observations in the two year extended mission. Visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/ to get the latest news and images.

During the past week or so, I watched the movies - “The Shepherd: Border Patrol”, “Drillbit Taylor”, “WWE: One Night Stand 2008”, “21”, “The Ruins”, “Superbad”, etc. In addition, I also watched several presentations from the American Astronomical Society (AAS) 212th Meeting Sessions and the AAS 211th Meeting Sessions.

Today, I briefly went through my “awestruck” enormous music archive and library of eBooks. By randomly skipping through hundreds and hundreds of gigabytes of stuff, I chanced upon numerous awesome music tracks and interesting eBooks. An endless flow of mental stimuli…

Literally Trillions

On Saturday at 11.15 a.m. EDT, NASA’s Space Shuttle Discovery touchdown perfectly on runway 15 of the Shuttle Landing Facility at the Kennedy Space Center, crowing a successful two-week mission to the International Space Station to attach Japan’s Pressurized Module for its Kibo Laboratory. Visit http://www.nasa.gov/ to get all the latest news. STS-125 is the next Space Shuttle mission and it is scheduled to be launched no earlier than 8 October 2008. STS-125 will be the fifth and final servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and the mission will be flown by NASA’s Space Shuttle Atlantis.

Speeding at almost 20 kilometers a second and already over ten times further than the Earth is from the Sun, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is doing fine on its incredibly long voyage to explore Pluto and the Kuiper Belt. New Horizons crossed the orbit of Saturn on June 8 and currently, the spacecraft is still over 2500 days away from its closest approach to Pluto, which will occur on 14 July 2015. Visit http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/ to get the latest mission updates. On 18 March 2011, the spacecraft will pass Uranus’ orbit and on 1 August 2014, the spacecraft will pass Neptune’s orbit.

Some of the researches that I have been doing this week are - “deriving the solutions to calculate the effects of radiative thrusters on the orbital semi-major axis and orbital eccentricity of close-in extrasolar planets”, “extensively analyzing the relationship between spin and orbital angular momentum of binary systems”, “calculating the Poynting-Robertson effect on dust particles of various sizes, densities and distances from the Sun”, etc…

The future is not a result of choices among alternative paths offered by the present, but a place that is created-created first in the mind and will, created next in activity. The future is not some place we are going to, but one we are creating. The paths are not to be found, but made, and the activity of making them, changes both the maker and the destination.
- John Schaar

During some random free time periods, I managed to think and derive several moderately complicated equations in the area of hydrostatics. This week, I also spent numerous hours reading on Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPS), the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the Higgs Boson, pair instability supernovae, etc.

Yesterday, I did a lot of research and equation derivation on measuring the general relativistic periastron precession in transiting extrasolar planets, especially for planets which orbit very close to their parents stars. I will be developing the computer codes and run extensive computations in this area several days from now. It is rather interesting to bridge the science of extrasolar planets with the science of general relativity.

Rising Sun

“Booster ignition and lift-off of Shuttle Discovery! Ganbatte kudasai - best of luck to the International Space Station’s newest laboratory! Houston now controlling the flight of Discovery – a man made “Rising Sun” on behalf of Japan…”
- Commentary

The Space Shuttle Discovery lifted off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center at 5:02 p.m. EDT (2102 GMT) on 31 May 2008, on a mission to deliver the billion dollar Japanese Experiment Module’s (JEM) large pressurized laboratory named “Kibo” and an accompanying robotic arm system to the International Space Station. I was watching every live via NASA Television. The JEM’s cylindrical pressurized laboratory weights 14514 kilograms and measures 11.2 meters in length and 4.4 meters in diameter, making it the largest payload ever launched to the International Space Station.

This mission is designated STS-124 and it is the second of three planned shuttle flights to bring all of JEM’s components to the International Space Station. The JEM will be the largest single International Space Station module once it is completed. The first two components of the module were launched on space shuttle missions STS-123 and STS-124 and the third and final component is scheduled for launch on STS-127 in early 2009. You can get all the latest news and updates at http://www.nasa.gov/home/index.html.

On Sunday, 25 May 2008, NASA’s robotic Phoenix Mars Lander successfully landed in the northern polar region of Mars. The primary objective of this mission is to study the history of water and search for complex organic molecules in the ice-rich soil of the Martian arctic. On Saturday, 31 May 2008, I read an article and saw an image of a view of the ground directly underneath the Phoenix Mars Lander showing that the descent thrusters of the spacecraft had dispersed overlying soil and exposed a hard substrate that may be ice! Thrilling! Visit http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/index.php to obtain all the latest news and updates.

Over the past few days, I did a lot of reading and some cool research on areas in zoology and botany. Listing a few – “the science behind the processes governing the growth of termite mounds”, “the science behind the ability of plants to grow towards sunlight”, “the function and dynamics of fibroblasts, fibronectins and collagen fibers in animals.” In addition, I also did a lot of research on numerous incredible travel destinations South-East Asia, ranging from the turquoise waters of the Bacuit Archipelago in Palawan, Philippines, to the relaxing mountainous backdrop of Lake Toba in Northern Sumatra, Indonesia.

...travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.
- Miriam Beard

Wild Side

The diverse mating flash patterns of fire-flies; the blue bioluminescent photophores of the flashlight fish; the violet flash of the female Malayan Eggfly butterfly originating from the intricate optical nano-structure of its scales; the eerie glow of bioluminescent mushrooms; polarization of light through transparent bio-matter; navigation and hunting with polarization sensitive vision; the dazzling blue bioluminescent “smoke-screens” of the seed-shrimp; the utilization of countershading by open ocean fishes; the exploitation of red by the Dragon Fish in hunting the Red Oar-footed Shrimp; the biogenic blue glow of the single-celled Noctiluca; the glowing chain of droplets hanging from a glow-worm; the abundance of pigments versus photonic crystals for butterflies living at different altitudes; the generation of iridescence from the use of biological photonic crystals by butterflies and beetles; the creation of colors by pigments at the atomic level; the mixture of blue from Rayleigh scattering and yellow from pigments to give the tree frog its green color; the ghostly green fluorescence glow of a scorpion under ultraviolet light… This week, I went through a huge lot of research on the science and functions behind the colors of nature.

As usual, I have been immersing myself in travel guides and books on adventure sports. My main focus this week was on adventure tourism in Southeast Asia and some nearby islands. Some of my destinations are Christmas Island (Australia), Palawan Island (Philippines) and Lake Toba (Indonesia). Remote, pristine, breathtaking, photogenic and rich in wildlife, are just some of my criteria. One of the strange and ‘not very important’ criteria is visiting a destination that is also a cryptozoological hotspot. I guess it will take me a long time to narrow down the choices.

Adventure, travel and the destinations…

Greater Possibilities

Adventure is a human need. We recognize it as the daring thing which makes us bigger than our usual selves. Adventure is the curiosity of man to see the other side of the mountain, the impulse in him that makes him break his bonds with lesser things and frees him for greater possibility.
- Walt Burnett, the Spirit of Adventure

Since a few weeks ago, I have been reading many travel guides and checking out a huge list of travel website to plan for over ten overseas holidays and mountaineering expeditions which I will be going sometime next year. Anyway, I’m keeping the destinations and dates confidential for now… It will be a whole lot of adventure, adrenaline, exploration, flying, filming, photography, etc!

I have been researching a lot on many current and future technologies required for the surface arrival and exploration of the planets, moons and minor objects. The tremendous diversity of worlds and bizarre destinations in our Solar System, ranging from the hydrocarbon seas of Titan to the subsurface oceans of Europa to the acidic skies of Venus, will require vast array of very different exploration architectures and technologies. In addition, the commercial application of these technologies and their spinoffs will be incredible. Examples include the mining of asteroids, in situ resource utilization (ISRU) on far-flung worlds, lunar colonization and space tourism. There is so much terrific work to do!

Yesterday, I passed my final military class 4 driving test and this marks the conclusion of the military driving course which I started over a month ago, on 28 March 2008. During the driving course, I made several new friends and learnt how to drive the land rover and IVECO 3-tonner. To wrap up my achievement, I did my island wide confidence driving today on both the land rover and IVECO 3-tonner; journeying from Sembawang Camp to Changi Naval Base and back again.

Momentous Journeys

I’ve just finished watching the movies Dragon Wars and Beowulf! The dragons in Dragon Wars are very realistic and the entire part of the movie where the United States military fought the dragons in downtown Los Angeles was spectacular. My favorite scene was when several Apache helicopters attacked a huge serpent-like dragon at the crown of the Library Tower (currently the U.S. Bank Tower). The battle scenes in the movie Beowulf were remarkable and the storyline of the movie was built around weakness and temptation. Dragons, dragons, dragons…

I read some interesting astrophysics papers during the last few days and just to name a few, they are: “The Infrared Afterglow of Supermassive Black Hole Mergers”, “Planet Formation by Concurrent Collapse”, “Formation and Detectability of Terrestrial Planets around Alpha Centauri B”, “HAT-P-7b: An Extremely Hot Massive Planet Transiting a Bright Star in the Kepler Field”, “Tidal Heating of Extra-Solar Planets”, etc.

This week, I also did research on the geomorphology of Mars and the global atmospheric dynamics of Mars. During the last two weeks, I did a lot of reading on biomimicry and on travel guides to destinations such as Cairns, Australia and Kinabalu National Park, Malaysia.

Born Helena Jane, with a restless soul,
She moved west to California,
Became a centrefold

But once you change your name,
Well the pieces fall
Now she hardly recognizes herself at all

And there’s never any rain, when you want it
A hollow little game, and you’ve won it
Lookin’ for a thrill, but you’ve done it all

So long, put your blue jeans back on girl
Go home, remember
Hollywood is not America

So long, put your blue jeans back on girl
Go home, remember
Hollywood is not America

And everybody here’s from somewhere else
You can make a million dollars
But you might lose yourself
And you can take the heat; will your heart grow cold?
They say acting’s just pretending
But even that gets old

And there’s never any rain when you want it
A hollow little game and you’ve won it
Lookin’ for a thrill, but you‘ve done it all

So long, put your blue jeans back on girl
Go home, remember
Hollywood is not America

So long, put your blue jeans back on girl
Go home, remember
Hollywood is not America

And I know what you’re doing
I know that you,
You can be anything you want to be

So long, put your blue jeans back on girl
Go home remember
Hollywood is not America

So long, put your blue jeans back on girl
Go home, remember
Hollywood is not America

Hollywood’s not America
It’s not America

- Ferras, Hollywood Is Not America

This is a fantastic song and I guess it is about how Hollywood can make people rich and famous, but cause them to loose themselves in the process. Hollywood is not America…

I’m expanding my music and digital books archive at an increasingly faster rate. It is entertainment and knowledge! I’m adding music of all genres and books on all topics to my archives.

The European Space Agency (ESA) has successfully launched the first Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) on 9 March 2008, on a “first of its kind” mission to the International Space Station. The ATV, also known as “Jules Verne”, is Europe’s largest and most complex spacecraft ever built. To get it to space, the largest member of the Arianespace-built rocket family - the Ariane-5, was called into use. This is the largest payload ever launched by Arianespace and the new Ariane-5 launch vehicle performed flawlessly. The launch was declared a success 66 minutes from blast-off. The first automated docking slot for the ATV is scheduled for 3 April 2008 after the departure of NASA’s Space Shuttle Endeavour from the space station.

Barbaric Glass

On Thursday, I went to borrow some books from Woodlands Regional Library and I managed to borrow a comprehensive book on paragliding entitled: “Paragliding - The Complete Guide.” It will be useful… Recently, I have been reading a lot about the Earth’s cryosphere, which is anywhere on the Earth’s surface where water is in solid form. From the vast ice sheets of Antarctica to the snows of Kilimanjaro to the iceberg which sank the Titanic…

Ice, and again ice…
- Fridtjof Nansen

This week, I was immersed in researching and reading on numerous topics about ice, ranging from the vitrification of tissue to the ice hotels of Scandinavia to the mesospheric noctilucent clouds to the majestic ice rings of Saturn to the myriads of frozen worlds at the frontiers of the Solar System to the unearthly forms of extraterrestrial ice…

Like a great ring of pure and endless light.
- Henry Vaughan

Far-flung worlds, frozen oceans, virgin white…
- Anonymous

During the last several days, I have read a fair amount of rather interesting scientific papers. Just to name a few: “The Origin of Pluto’s Moons, Nix and Hydra”, “Primordial Black Holes and Asteroid Danger”, “Tidal-Evolution of Close-In Extrasolar Planets”, “Dark Matter Capture in the First Stars”, “Metal Enrichment Processes in the Intergalactic Environment”, etc. This week, I have also derived the exact equations to compute the transit duration for transiting extrasolar planets with the effect of orbital eccentricity included.

NASA’s Space Shuttle Endeavour is scheduled for launch with a crew of six on a mission to the International Space Station on 11 March 2008. Endeavour and her crew will deliver the pressurized section of the Japanese Experiment Logistics Module (ELM-PS) and the Canadian Special Purpose Dexterous Manipulator (SPDM) robotics system to the International Space Station. In addition, Japanese astronaut Takao Doi will be flying onboard as mission specialist 4.

On 12 March 2008, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft will make its closest flyby of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. At closest approach, Cassini will fly just 50 kilometers above the surface of Enceladus! The main goal of this flyby is to scoop up samples of water-ice particles and gas spewing from the geysers at the moon’s south polar regions! You can get all the latest news at http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.cfm.

Aérospatial Dynamique

On 20 February 2008, at 9:07 a.m. EST, Space Shuttle Atlantis and its crew landed at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center after spending 13 days in space which includes the delivery of the European Space Agency’s Columbus laboratory to the International Space Station. The next shuttle mission to the station will be flown by Space Shuttle Endeavour and it is scheduled for launch no earlier than 11 March 2008. This shuttle mission will deliver the Japanese Kibo Logistics Module and the Canadian Dextre robotics system to the International Space Station.

Today, I went to the Singapore Airshow 2008 at Changi Exhibition Center and I was there from early morning to later afternoon. I went because I was blessed with 2 tickets and I called my friend along using the other. I managed to take a total of 558 neat pictures and 40 videos at the exhibition. Most of my time was spent walking, snapping pictures and taking videos at the static aircraft display. Halfway through the day, I rested for half an hour under the shade of the Airbus A380.

During the exhibition, I accumulated a humongous pile of magazines, catalogues, brochures, etc and I also took free gifts such as caps and lanyards. In the later part of the day, I had to battle the crowds to get the best shots and getting home from there was quite inconvenient as I had to wait for about 30 minutes to grab a cab. Anyway, I had a very good time there and all the inconvenience was worth the experience. Private jets!!!

Endless Discoveries

On Thursday, 7 February 2008 at 2:45 p.m. EST, NASA’s Space Shuttle Atlantis blasted off on a mission to deliver the European Space Agency’s Columbus Laboratory to the International Space Station. This mission is designated STS-122 and you can get a lot of information about this mission at http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/203212main_sts122_presskit2.pdf.

The next mission to the International Space Station is STS-123 and it will be flown by Space Shuttle Endeavour. The primary objective of this mission is to deliver the pressurized section of the Japanese Experiment Logistics Module (ELM-PS) and the Canadian Special Purpose Dexterous Manipulator (SPDM), a robotic arm, to the International Space Station.

It is Chinese New Year this week! On Wednesday, I had reunion lunch and dinner and late at night, I watched the movie – Hitman. On Thursday, I spent the entire day visiting relatives and snapping pictures using my DSLR. I brought along my old laptop and spent the time between visits watching skydiving videos. These few days, I have been reading a lot on skydiving, base jumping and paragliding.

Recently, I have been doing a lot of reading and research on astronomy and astrophysics. A few days ago, I read an interesting astrophysics paper entitled “Distant future of the Sun and Earth revisited”. This paper explains how the Earth will be affected billions of years from now as the Sun evolves towards its final stage as a white dwarf star. You can obtain this paper at http://arxiv.org/abs/0801.4031.

The universe is a lot more complicated than you might think even if you start from a position of thinking that its pretty damn complicated to begin with.
- Douglas Adams

Over a billion kilometers from here, the Cassini spacecraft is making spectacular discoveries around the planet Saturn. I read a lot about the latest discoveries made by the Cassini spacecraft and yesterday, I watched a documentary entitle “Saturn: The Ringworld”. You can get stunning images and read interesting news about this mission at http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.cfm.

Tonight, I met up with four of my NS friends at Orchard and we went for buffet dinner at Sakura. After dinner, we walked around and then went to Starbucks and chill for a couple of hours. Later, we walked down Orchard Road and took several pictures using my DSLR for half an hour outside Plaza Singapura before heading home.

Messenger’s Flyby

On 14 January 2008, NASA’s MESSENGER (MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry and Ranging) spacecraft made its first flyby of the planet Mercury. All seven instruments onboard the spacecraft worked flawlessly and sent back torrents of fascinating data. During the flyby, MESSENGER took a total of 1213 images. MESSENGER will make a second flyby on 6 October 2008 and a third flyby on 29 September 2009 before making its final return to the planet on 18 March 2011 where it will insert itself into orbit around Mercury and begin its nominal science mission. You can get all the information about this mission at http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/. Just over a year ago, I wrote an article about MESSENGER at http://fusion-core.blogspot.com/2006/11/messenger.html.

NASA’s Space Shuttle Atlantis’ STS-122 is schedule for launch on 7 February 2008 at 2:45 p.m. EST from the Kennedy Space Center and it is the 24th mission to the International Space Station. The primary mission objective is to deliver the European Space Agency’s Columbus Laboratory to the International Space Station. The latest updates can be obtained at http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/shuttlemissions/sts122/.

I am currently in the process of creating a digital library and I already have several thousand digital books in my collection. The vast majority of the books are in the area of science, technology and engineering. Just to give you a very rough idea, I have books on Astronomy and Astrophysics, Astronautics, Aerospace Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Mechatronics and Robotics, Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, Medicine, Chemistry, Biology, Industrial and Systems Engineering, Physics, Engineering Science, Nanotechnology, Philosophy, Civil Engineering, Economics, Computer Science, Geology, History, Psychology, Nuclear Engineering, etc. Anyway, the list just goes on and on… I also have numerous other miscellaneous things such as aquarium books, travel guides, fiction books, audio books, books on illusion tricks, origami books, etc.

I’ve just finished watching a documentary entitled Alien Planet. This documentary is about a pair of robotic probes investigating alien life on a fictional planet named Darwin IV. You can watch this documentary at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3106679767514635043. The homepage for this documentary is http://dsc.discovery.com/convergence/alienplanet/splash.html. During the past one month, I have added thousands of new music tracks and music videos every week to my music archive. Discographies upon discographies… Recently, I have also collected numerous videos on skydiving, paragliding and base jumping. Lately, I have been reading a lot of very interesting science papers and doing research on amazing things. However, I will blog about them some other day.

By the way, I am currently in the 24th Battalion Singapore Artillery as a FATA (Field Artillery Target Acquisition) Locator and I will be completing my trainee phase within 3 weeks from now. I’m enjoying what I’m doing but I will not be blogging about them as they are classified stuff.

Fusion Scientist

The use of our intelligence quite properly gives us pleasure. In this respect the brain is like a muscle. When we think well, we feel good. Understanding is a kind of ecstasy.
- Dr. Carl Sagan

Just a few months ago, I never believed that it was possible… Yesterday, I managed to derive the equations for antiproton-initiated fusion space propulsion. Using the equations, I wrote a computer program to carry out all the calculations for me. By stretching and varying numerous input parameters, I completed a thorough and methodical analysis of this propulsion method.

I shall now put things into perspective. Using this propulsion method, a few milligrams of antiprotons is all that is required to accelerate a 100 ton spacecraft to a velocity of 1000 kilometers per second! Even at much lower velocities, the possibilities are endless!

I had the ambition to not only go farther than man had gone before, but to go as far as it was possible to go.
- Captain Cook

Of all investments into the future, the conquest of space demands the greatest efforts and the longest-term commitment . . . but it also offers the greatest reward: none less than a universe.
- Daniel Christlein

At around this time last year, I challenged myself to significantly advance my understanding and knowledge of nuclear physics, nuclear technology and their applications in spaceflight. I aimed to transform all concepts and ideas into serious scientific calculations and come up with new, revolutionary and novel methods of nuclear space propulsion. I set my goals and fashioned my research strategies…

In the beginning of 2007, I started to power-up my research on “everything that’s nuclear” and what I’ve got throughout the entire year vastly exceeded what I have targeted for! In fact, I didn’t expect such numerous and immensely complicated research accomplishments even in my wildest of dreams! Quickly naming a few - Radioisotope-Powered Stirling Engines, Successive Radioactivity, Heat Generation from Nuclear Fuel Elements of Different Configurations, Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, Heat Removal in Slabs Subjected to Radiation, Gas-Cooled Nuclear Reactors, Antimatter Production at a Potential Boundary, Next Generation Nuclear Weaponry, Inertial Confinement Fusion, Cooling Systems in Nuclear Power Plants, Antimatter Catalyzed Fusion, etc…

On Saturday, 15 December 2007, I wrote a brief article describing Antiproton-Driven Inertial Confinement Fusion for space propulsion at http://ferocious-combination.blogspot.com/2007/12/antiproton-driven-inertial-confinement.html. Recently, I have added a few hundred Christmas tracks to my music archive. The music tracks (especially the dance and remix versions) are amazingly nice! Christmas time!

Lately, I have been reading a lot of research papers on Astrophysics and Nuclear Technology. Some of the interesting titles are “Atypical Thermonuclear Supernovae from Tidally Crushed White Dwarfs”, “An Outer Planet beyond Pluto and Origin of the Trans-Neptunian Belt Architecture”, “Fourth Generation Nuclear Weapons”, “Antiproton Production for Near-term Propulsion Applications”, “Pulsational Pair Instability as an Explanation for the Most Luminous Supernovae”, “Two Stellar Components in the Halo of the Milky Way”, etc… Currently, I’m reading an interesting book entitled “The United States and Britain in Bible Prophecy” and I’m continuously making references to numerous verses in the Bible.

Red Horizon

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
- Arthur C. Clarke, "Profiles of the Future", 1961

Lately, I have been quite fanatical about something called antimatter! The science of antimatter is nothing new to me as I have studied about it at a very young age. However, due to the continuing surge of ideas that are bursting forth from my mind recently, I feel a great deal of novelty, newness, potential and technological infancy towards the utilization of antimatter.

I have been scrupulously detailing and researching about the physics and technologies involved in the employment of antimatter as an initiator for nuclear fission and nuclear fusion! This concept has impressive applications in breakthrough space propulsion, energy generation, advance 4th generation nuclear weaponry and in many more areas which I have not even begin thinking about! These ideas are fascinating!

Imagine a nuclear bomb the size of a marble… Imagine using a total of just a few milligrams of antimatter to initiate and sustain nuclear fusion to accelerate a spacecraft to a velocity of a thousand kilometers per second… Imagine the ability to initiate and control nuclear reactions at will… Right now, I am researching on the utilization of antimatter as initiators for inertial confinement fusion and it only gets more fascinating!

The most interesting aspect is the use of antimatter in breakthrough space propulsion. It will greatly reduce fuel consumption and shorten the traveling times to and from destinations such as the Moon, Mars, the Near Earth Objects (NEOs) and the Asteroid Belt. These revolutionary propulsion methods will rapidly advance the exploration of the moons of the gas giants and the multitude of worlds lying at and beyond the frontiers of our solar system. The best news is that most of these methods are surprisingly practical and feasible!

Current antimatter production rates are very low as there is not even one facility in this world that is optimized to produce antimatter. However, production rates will rise drastically in the near future as plans are already being made. I have simply too much to say about the applications of antimatter… Research!!! The calculations!!!

During the past several weeks, I was having my Basic Military Training in Pulau Tekong (an island off Singapore's northeastern coast) and the entire experience there was very meaningful. Throughout my stay there, I went through my live firing range, a grueling 6-day and 5-night field camp, a 3-day situational test, numerous route marches in full battle order, throwing of live hand grenade, a final 24 kilometers route march under the rain, etc… Most of our major activities such as the field camp, situational test and 24 kilometers route march, coincided with terrible rainy weather.

I made many friends throughout my stay and yesterday, we had our Passing-Out-Parade! On that long awaited day, I took over 200 pictures with my parents, platoon mates and commanders. However, life still goes on and I will definitely miss all the friends that I have made. Finally, I thank God for seeing me through it all…

During my stay in camp, I brought along and read countless science papers on diverse topics such ranging from asteroid mining to planetary science to cosmology. A few days ago, I did some research and reading about the gravitational properties of antimatter. Although untested, there are speculations predicting gravitational repulsion (antigravity) between matter and antimatter. It is interesting to read about how such a phenomenon, if it exists, can be detected by astronomical observations or by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. If antimatter does exhibit gravitational repulsion with matter, the collapse of a black hole will not end with a singularity and such a black hole will display various remarkable phenomena. For me, these things simply foster even more curiosity.

In one of my external had disk, I have almost a hundred new movies and documentaries and over a thousand new music tracks to entertain me! Included are hundreds of cool Christmas techno tracks and remixes and a significant number of them are in European languages. Christmas is coming!!!

[6] You alone are the LORD. You made the heavens, even the highest heavens, and all their starry host, the earth and all that is on it, the seas and all that is in them. You give life to everything, and the multitudes of heaven worship you.
- Nehemiah 9:6

[4] He determines the number of the stars
and calls them each by name.
[5] Great is our Lord and mighty in power;
his understanding has no limit.
- Psalm 147:4-5