A Pale Blue Dot Revisited

Earth (inside the blue circle) from four billion miles away taken by the Voyager spacecraft as it was about to leave our solar system.  This month on the 30th anniversary of the picture NASA has released this digitally remastered version.  See link address below for the article.

The late astronomer Carl Sagan.. referencing the picture of earth appearing as a tiny unspectacular pale blue dot hardly noticeable in the vast universe surrounding it..said this when the original picture was released:

“We succeeded in taking that picture from [deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity--in all this vastness-- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us... To my mind, there is perhaps no better demostration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.” 

― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

Article on the updated picture:
https://www.space.com/pale-blue-dot-earth-space-photo-remastered.html

Photos Of Pluto Reveal A 'Toy Store' Of Surprises

(npr.org)

Members of the New Horizons science team react to seeing the spacecraft's image of Pluto on Tuesday, before its closest approach.
Bill Ingalls/NASA via AP

Pluto turns out to be pretty lively.

Not Las Vegas, perhaps, but more vivacious with geologic activity than we've ever known about, and for good reason: Pluto is currently almost 3 billion miles away from Earth, a dwarf planet spinning in the lonely last ring of our solar system.

But this week the New Horizons space probe sent back the first detailed pictures humans have ever been able to see of Pluto and its five moons.

Pluto is also billions of miles from the sun, so it's cold. But according to these first photos, cold with ice, not stone. Mountains of ice as tall as the Rockies, and only about 100 million years old in a solar system that's been around more than 4.5 billion years.

"Who would have supposed that there were ice mountains?" project scientist Hal Weaver asked at a press conference. "It's just blowing my mind."

A close-up of a region near Pluto's equator taken by the New Horizons spacecraft.
NASA

Imagine what it must take to blow the mind of a space scientist.

Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute, the mission's chief scientist, says that icy, soaring peaks on Pluto should "send a lot of geophysicists back to the drawing boards." It's not what the smartest people expected to see.

These pictures also show Pluto to be a relatively unblemished babe among celestial bodies. It has those ice mountains, but no impact craters — as they're called — caused by the crash of meteorites or other flotsam from space. The scientists say this suggests that Pluto could still smolder below its surface, swelling with energy from the decay of radioactive material, or even an underground ocean.

Dr. Stern said, "I don't hink any one of us could have imagined that it was this good of a toy store," which is how a great scientist may see a planet of surprises.

Stephen Hawking of Cambridge sent a message to the New Horizons team in which he called Pluto, "a distant icy world on the edge of our solar system. The revelations of New Horizons may help us to understand better how our solar system was formed. We explore because we are human and we long to know."

And New Horizons will go on, sailing deeper and deeper into deep space, and into our imaginations, as long as the plutonium aboard can propel it; perhaps until the 2030s.

The great intrepid voyages of the 15th century's Age of Discovery revealed surprises, riches and how different people in disparate places share the same world. The voyages of the 21st century may help us learn how much larger the world is than our world alone.

When you're clicking around the Internet remember to check in with The Pocomoke Public Eye.  We strive to be a worthwhile supplement to your choices.

A New "Eyeball" For the Science Museum

The Science Museum of Virginia is getting its eyeball back.

Eighteen days after thieves stole an eyeball cover that sheathed the museum’s Grand Kugel, a replacement eyeball is set to be unveiled Wednesday at noon.

“When our eyeball was stolen a few weeks ago, there was so much community support that we had to replace it,” Richard Conti, the museum’s director, said in a statement.

The eyeball’s vendor replaced the cover at a “considerably reduced price,” Conti said, because “of all the incredible news coverage around the world.” The original cover cost $4,000.

During the early morning hours of Oct. 2, thieves cut away the eyeball that tightly wrapped the 8½ foot diameter, 29-ton ball. The decoration had been installed just 12 hours earlier to promote a new exhibit — “Goose Bumps! The Science of Fear” — at the museum.

The thieves have yet to be caught and the eyeball remains missing. Virginia’s Capitol Police, who have jurisdiction over the Science Museum Property, continue to investigate.

To celebrate the replacement eye, the museum staff “is asking for eye-deas on how to keep an eye on our eye,” Conti said. Suggestions can be posted on the Science Museum of Virginia’s Facebook page.

All ideas will be entered into a random drawing for an “eye-pod” and a free family museum membership, Conti said. The winner will be announced at 4:30 p.m. Wednesday.

www.timesdispatch.com

Strange Find On Titan

New findings have roused a great deal of hoopla over the possibility of life on Saturn's moon Titan, which some news reports have further hyped up as hints of extraterrestrials.

However, scientists also caution that aliens might have nothing to do with these findings.

All this excitement is rooted in analyses of chemical data returned by NASA's Cassini spacecraft. One study suggested that hydrogen was flowing down through Titan's atmosphere and disappearing at the surface. Astrobiologist Chris McKay at NASA's Ames Research Center speculated that this could be a tantalizing hint that hydrogen is getting consumed by life.

"It's the obvious gas for life to consume on Titan, similar to the way we consume oxygen on Earth," McKay said.

Another study investigating hydrocarbons on Titan's surface found a lack of acetylene, a compound that could be consumed as food by life that relies on liquid methane instead of liquid water to live.

"If these signs do turn out to be a sign of life, it would be doubly exciting because it would represent a second form of life independent from water-based life on Earth," McKay said.

However, NASA scientists caution that aliens might not be involved at all.

"Scientific conservatism suggests that a biological explanation should be the last choice after all non-biological explanations are addressed," said Mark Allen, principal investigator with the NASA Astrobiology Institute Titan team. "We have a lot of work to do to rule out possible non-biological explanations. It is more likely that a chemical process, without biology, can explain these results."

McKay told Space.com that "both results are still preliminary."

To date, methane-based life forms are only speculative, with McKay proposing a set of conditions necessary for these kinds of organisms on Titan in 2005. Scientists have not yet detected this form of life anywhere, although there are liquid-water-based microbes on Earth that thrive on methane or produce it as a waste product.

On Titan, where temperatures are around minus-290 degrees Fahrenheit (-179 degrees Celsius), any organisms would have to use a substance that is liquid as its medium for living processes. Water itself cannot do, because it is frozen solid on Titan's surface. The list of liquid candidates is very short — liquid methane and related molecules such as ethane. Previous studies have found Titan to have lakes of liquid methane.

Missing hydrogen?
The dearth of hydrogen Cassini detected is consistent with conditions that could produce methane-based life, but do not conclusively prove its existence, cautioned researcher Darrell Strobel, a Cassini interdisciplinary scientist based at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Strobel wrote the paper on hydrogen appearing online in the journal Icarus.

Strobel looked at densities of hydrogen in different parts of the atmosphere and at the surface. Previous models from scientists had predicted that hydrogen molecules, a byproduct of ultraviolet sunlight breaking apart acetylene and methane molecules in the upper atmosphere, should be distributed fairly evenly throughout the atmospheric layers.

Strobel's computer simulations suggest a hydrogen flow down to the surface at a rate of about 10,000 trillion trillion molecules per second.

"It's as if you have a hose and you're squirting hydrogen onto the ground, but it's disappearing," Strobel said. "I didn't expect this result, because molecular hydrogen is extremely chemically inert in the atmosphere, very light and buoyant. It should 'float' to the top of the atmosphere and escape."

Strobel said it is not likely that hydrogen is being stored in a cave or underground space on Titan. An unknown mineral could be acting as a catalyst on Titan's surface to help convert hydrogen molecules and acetylene back to methane.

Although Allen commended Strobel, he noted "a more sophisticated model might be needed to look into what the flow of hydrogen is."

Consumed acetylene?
Scientists had expected the sun's interactions with chemicals in the atmosphere to produce acetylene that falls down to coat Titan's surface. But when Cassini mapped hydrocarbons on Titan's surface, it detected no acetylene on the surface, according to findings appearing online in the Journal of Geophysical Research.

Instead of alien life on Titan, Allen said one possibility is that sunlight or cosmic rays are transforming the acetylene in icy aerosols in the atmosphere into more complex molecules that would fall to the ground with no acetylene signature.

In addition, Cassini detected an absence of water ice on Titan's surface, but loads of benzene and another as-yet-unidentified material, which appears to be an organic compound. The researchers said that a film of organic compounds is covering the water ice that makes up Titan's bedrock. This layer of hydrocarbons is at least a few millimeters to centimeters thick, but possibly much deeper in some places.

"Titan's atmospheric chemistry is cranking out organic compounds that rain down on the surface so fast that even as streams of liquid methane and ethane at the surface wash the organics off, the ice gets quickly covered again," said Roger Clark, a Cassini team scientist based at the U.S. Geological Survey in Denver. "All that implies Titan is a dynamic place where organic chemistry is happening now."

www.msn.com