Ben Gilliland's blog

Discovery's last hurrah - Day One

Mon, 11/01/2010 - 14:05 — Ben Gilliland

Discovery: The birth of a legend

In which we take a look at Discovery's formative years when she looked more Airfix kit than spacecraft

This week the Space Shuttle Discovery is set to make its finally flight – after which it will be decommissioned, sent to a museum and it will spend the rest of its days as a monument to human endeavour and achievement and to dreams fulfilled and to dreams broken. I shall spend this week remembering the achievements of this iconic vehicle.

Day One – Early memories and some of Discovery's baby photos

I was just five years old when the Space Shuttle Columbia – the first of Nasa’s next generation of manned-spacecraft – pushed through the clouds and punched its way into the heavens.

Tap The Brain: An Update

Fri, 10/29/2010 - 10:50 — Ben Gilliland

You haven't been forgotten!

When I launched Tap The Brain last month, I received a collosal number of questions – far more, in fact, than I (or the scientists that form The Brain) were anticipating!

The Brain is a magnificent and powerful creation but it takes pride in its work and can't be rushed, as such, it is taking some time for the The Brain to process your questions.

The first wave of processing is almost complete so you can expect to see the answers appearing in the Metro newspaper (and here of course) over the next few weeks.

So, in the mean time, please keep the questions rolling in!

Welcome to Mars

Fri, 10/29/2010 - 09:50 — Ben Gilliland

You will die here...

By 1970 America had the Moon under its belt and the human exploration of other worlds was riding high in the imagination of the Earth-bound masses. Predictions of lunar colonies by the late 70s and Martian colonies by the 1980s were tossed around the media as if their planning and execution were no more troublesome than building a ring road around Milton Keynes.

By today, Mars was supposed to be a ‘New Earth’ where humans no longer tenuously inhabited Martian outposts, but thrived in autonomous cities where generations were born, lived and died having never known the blue skies of Mother Earth. Obviously this isn’t the case today, nor is it likely to be for a very long time.

But we might soon see the dispatch of those first Martian pioneers and the settlement of those first outposts – even if they are three decades too late. Earlier this month, Nasa announced an initiative to move space flight and exploration to the next level.

Nasa does a double-take... and gets wet

Fri, 10/22/2010 - 12:19 — Ben Gilliland

Meet Moon 2.0 (now with added water and other useful stuff)

Despite what I was told as a child, we are now pretty sure that the Moon is not made of cheese and, in case there was any doubt, the ‘magnificent desolation’ experienced by the Apollo lunar astronauts – and the chunks of definitely non-cheese derived rock they brought back with them – definitely put those rumours to bed.

The Apollo missions also proved one other thing – the Moon is dry and lifeless. Any hope that the ‘Sea of Tranquility’ hid any of the runny stuff that gave it its name was banished for good and the Moon officially became the driest (and most cheese free) place in the solar system. Then, in 2009, Nasa deliberately crashed one of their space probes (LCROSS) into a lunar crater whose interior had never seen the light of the Sun.

In the resulting plume of dust they detected the unmistakable signature of dihydrogen monoxide – that’s water to you and me. That report, like the first pee during a night of heavy drinking, opened the floodgates and, following the results of an Indian lunar explorer, Chandrayaan-1, those few ‘buckets’ of water became gallons in a single crater and those gallons became some 600million metric tonnes distributed across 40 craters, all in a couple of months.

New results from Nasa's LCROSS impact experiment, published today as a multi-page spectactular in the journal Science, have revealed that, in some areas at least, the Moon's dark craters hide concentrations of water-ice as high as five per cent – that's about 12 gallons for every tonne of lunar soil!

What small, red, a bit dim and very, very old? (Clue: It's not an ancestral mentally-challenged Ooopa Loompa)

Fri, 10/22/2010 - 10:08 — Ben Gilliland

It's a galaxy from the dawn of the universe!

Thirteen billion years is a long time to wait to be noticed but, for UDFy-38135539 (which we’ll call Bob for convenience), the wait has finally paid off and Bob is now a record breaker.
Bob is the tiny little dot that you (might) be able to see hiding in the middle of that circle on the right. It may not look like much, but that slightly red-tinged dot is officially the most distant galaxy ever recorded.
It is red because its light has been slogging its way across the universe for more than 13billion years and, in doing so, its wavelength has become stretched until (from where we are looking at it) it moved into the red end of the spectrum. This colour change is called ‘redshift’ and more shift the red has, the further away the object is.

Hubble captures cosmic hit and run

Fri, 10/15/2010 - 11:00 — Ben Gilliland

There's no hiding from anything these days!

It’s got to be pretty cool being an asteroid. You are as ancient as the stars and custodian to their most intimate secrets. You are the guardian of rich treasures that can reveal secrets about the formation of the solar system and you cruise the vastness of space, bearing witness to wonders of a sort that we poor Earth-tethered humans can only dream of.

It’s got to suck then when, halfway through another of your magnificent interplanetary tours, and minding your own business you are suddenly smashed into by another asteroid (probably uninsured) that wasn’t paying attention to where it was going.