Along the Way…

Archive for the ‘Science’ Category

Thanks to Congressman John Culberson, I watched live video from the control room, unpolished by NASA and up close and personal!

Here’s one of the first images sent back by Phoenix:

The congressman seems to have a genuine passion for the sciences and it was obvious he was having a blast in there! As one of the people, who were in the chatroom watching, said "He’s a kid in a candy store."

He was also watching the chatroom while he recorded the video, so we were able to actually ask questions to the NASA personnel, through Congressman Culberson. It was really a pretty exciting opportunity!

For more updates and pictures, be sure to check out the Spaceflight Now website: http://www.spaceflightnow.com/mars/phoenix/status.html

Here’s a brief excerpt from an interesting article over on the Science blog:

Third red spot erupts on Jupiter

Increased turbulence and storms first observed on Jupiter more than two years ago are still raging, according to astronomers from the University of California, Berkeley, and the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, who snapped high-resolution pictures of the planet earlier this month.

Captured with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and the 10-meter Keck II telescope, this so-called "major upheaval" on Jupiter involves stunning changes in the planet’s atmosphere, said lead astronomer Imke de Pater, professor of astronomy at UC Berkeley.

The images are available on NASA’s Web site, http://hubblesite.org/news/2008/23.

The upheaval was heralded in December 2005 by a color change from white to red of a large oval near the Great Red Spot, earning it the moniker Red Spot Jr. This oval, formally known as Oval BA, formed six years earlier through a merger of three large white ovals just south of the Great Red Spot – storms that formed in the early 1930s and were prominent in the Voyager era.

The new images, the first since Jupiter emerged from its passage behind the Sun, may show that Jupiter indeed is undergoing a major climate change, as predicted four years ago.

Now, the whole article is very interesting and worth visiting to read in its entirety. However, the question I really wanted to pose, here, has to do with this "major climate change" that’s been observed on Jupiter.

If Jupiter, a giant planet many times the size of our own Earth, can experience major climate change, all by itself, with no impact from human activity, then why is it not possible (even, probable) that the climate change we see here on Earth, is also just a natural occurrence?

Nobody is trying to claim that our automobile exhaust is reaching Jupiter! Surely, the handful of tiny, tiny machines we’ve sent to photograph and measure the gigantic planet cannot have caused such a shift in its climate!

It seems to me, that it requires a tremendous arrogance to believe that mere humanity is powerful enough (no matter how dirty we are) to have a long-term, permanent effect on Nature herself.