:: BLOG NATION aka BlahBlahBlog ::

:: 3.17.2006 ::

Lá Fhéile Pádraig Sona Daoibh
Originally uploaded by Mr. TRONA.

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Go dtaitní an ghrian go bog bláth ar do chlár éadain
(May the sun shine warm upon your face)

Here's another Gaelic phrase, one that I like --
Go n-ithe an cat thú is go n-ithe an diabhal an cat
(or May the cat eat you and the devil eat the cat ;-)

Ok...

Píonta Guiness, le do thoil
(A pint of Guinness, please =)

:: Mr. TRONA 2:49 PM [+] ::
...

:: "Boarding now for Mars" ::

From CNET
Dawn Kawamoto
Google is the latest Web site to offer detailed images of Mars for folks looking to get a closer look at the red planet. Google Mars dishes up three types of data that users can patch into, from color-coded elevation maps to thermal infrared maps to snapshots of the far-away planet. (For screen shots from Google Mars, click here.)

And then there's the mother of Mars Web sites, published by NASA. You can get the latest info on everything from the Mars rovers to the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter that entered the red planet's orbit last week.

With all the attention on Mars these days, it seems the moon may be getting lonelier by the minute.

posted by me
:: Mr. TRONA 10:06 PM [+] ::
...

:: "Super-Earth" Discovered Orbiting Distant Star ::

From National Geographic

Scientists have discovered a new planet they call a "super-Earth" in a solar system 9,000 light-years away.

The icy, rocky planet, which weighs 13 times as much as Earth, orbits the outer region of its solar system, around a so-called red dwarf star that is about half as big as our sun.

The planet dominates a region similar to the one in our solar system that is populated by the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn. Scientists believe the planet likely didn't accumulate enough gas to grow to giant proportions. (See an interactive map of our solar system.)

"We've never been able to see these failed Jupiter cores before," said Andrew Gould, an astronomer at Ohio State University in Columbus who is leading the research.

He suggests, however, that icy super-Earths are common and that about 35 percent of all stars have them.

Read more here.

posted by me
:: Mr. TRONA 10:00 PM [+] ::
...

:: RE Stardust ::

Composition of Comet Samples Surprises NASA Scientists
By Guy Gugliotta
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 14, 2006; A03

HOUSTON, March 13 -- Dust samples from a comet formed in deep space unexpectedly contain high-temperature mineral particles that may have been ejected by the young sun at the dawn of the solar system, scientists said Monday.

First-sample results from NASA's Stardust mission suggest that scientists may have to modify the traditional view that comets are bodies of ice and dust composed largely of interstellar material on the outskirts of the solar system.

Instead, the sun, in a process not yet fully understood, may have catapulted material outward even as the "dust disk" that formed the solar system was swirling inward like a whirlpool with the sun at its center, said Stardust lead scientist Donald Brownlee of the University of Washington at Seattle. "We have found fire and ice," Brownlee told reporters at the Johnson Space Center here. "We have found extremely high-temperature minerals coming from the coldest place."

Early analysis revealed minerals that included magnesium iron silicate, known as olivine, or, in its gem-quality variety, peridot; magnesium aluminum oxide, also called spinel; and titanium nitride. Brownlee said all these form at temperatures of at least 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

Brownlee said images of young stars often showed not only an inward-swirling disk but also "vertical jets" leaping high above the disk plane. "Even though [solar systems] are formed by things falling in, there are also things flying out," he said.

But it was unclear whether the jets were the source of the comet's unusual minerals, and although Brownlee said that was one possible explanation, the minerals may have come from another star. He said researchers will be able to tell the difference after further chemical analysis.

Stardust, the first spacecraft to return samples from a comet, flew through the shroud of dust and gas surrounding comet Wild 2 on Jan. 2, 2004, trapping perhaps a million tiny particles in a tennis-racket-like collector. The collector had 132 small compartments filled with aerogel, a fine spun glass that is 99 percent empty space, but easily able to muffle the shock of tiny impacts and engulf the particles like a pillow.

The Stardust space capsule parachuted to a flawless landing at the U.S. Army's Dugway Proving Ground in Utah on Jan. 15. The sample canister was flown to a special lab at the Johnson Space Center in the same "clean" facility that houses the moon rocks collected in the Apollo program.

Although the samples were tiny -- the largest are about two-thousandths of an inch in diameter, half the width of a human hair -- researchers are easily able to slice them up for analysis.

Read more here.

posted by me
:: Mr. TRONA 9:54 PM [+] ::
...