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Star Trek! Need I Say More?

Posted on May 7, 2009 | 0 Comments

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I'm so excited, and I just can't hide it.

I've grown up on a stead diet of Star Trek—from the days when Mom confided to my preteen self that she married Dad because he reminded her of Mr. Spock, to just this week when I was talking to a coworker and found out I was not the only person in the universe who actually liked Voyager.

[watch me duck to avoid being pummeled by virtual tomatoes ...]

So you can imagine my joy when I was given the green light to guest blog for National Geographic magazine about the science of the starship Enterprise.

spock-bridge-trek.jpg

—Copyright 2009 by PARAMOUNT PICTURES CORPORATION. All Rights Reserved.

Hopefully this will make up in some small part for my disappearing act over the past few weeks—it's been something of a whirlwind, but that's no excuse for being a delinquent blogger.

Having now seen the new film, I can say I was not disappointed, mostly because the acting was so genuine. They really captured those characters without turning it into a parody—Karl Urban is my new hero. Despite Bakula's best efforts, I'd say the franchise is still alive and kicking.

As a bonus, one of the questions I asked for the magazine's blog that didn't make it in was whether they had any science consultants other than Cassini's Carolyn Porco, who famously provided design help with their planetary scenes. Production designer Scott Chambliss told me in reply:

We did quite a lot of research with the NASA and JPL crowd. They told us that they watched Star Trek, and aspired to create in the real world what the Trek world did. Go figure!

When you think about it, there's a host of things in modern society that mirror Trek tech:

  • flip phones = Starfleet communicators
  • PDAs = PADDs (those nifty hand-held screens officers use to read reports)
  • Bluetooth headsets = Uhura's earpiece

And even more Trek-inspired gadgets are "on the way," if scientists have their way about it—cloaking devices, hyposprays, tricorders, universal translators, even nanoprobes.


So, it's been a long day, and I'm beat ... Can someone please get on those transporter beams? Thanks.

There's More to Mercury Than Meets the Eye

Posted on May 5, 2009 | 0 Comments

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It's tiny, it's pockmarked, and it's got almost no atmosphere. So it's probably small wonder that we cared so little for poor Mercury that we couldn't be bothered to check out a whole half of the planet until 2008.

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—Image courtesy NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Arizona State University/Carnegie Institute of Washington

But when we did send a probe to scope out the scene, boy did we find some doozies!

Last October the MESSENGER probe had its second sweep past the planet as it settles into an eventual orbit. Not to waste the opportunity, scientists programed the craft to collect all kinds of data during the brief flyby.

The latest issue of Science describes a whole slew of neat findings from the October visit, including:


I personally loved the magnetic twisters, which I found cool enough to assign as a news story that was deftly reported by our own Rebecca Carroll.

But that last one is also pretty impressive.

As impact basins go, the newly named Rembrandt is a sizable feature—430 miles (700 kilometers) wide, or big enough to stretch from D.C. to Boston if it was on Earth.

rembrandt-basin-earth.jpg

—Image courtesy NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington/Smithsonian Institution Copyright: Smithsonian Institution

For something so large, it really surprised the research team to find that the floor of the basin has remained largely unchanged for 3.9 billion years.

"This is the first time we have seen terrain exposed on the floor of an impact basin on Mercury that is preserved from when it formed," the Smithsonian's Thomas Watters said in a statement. "Terrain like this is usually completely buried by volcanic flows."

Being almost bare-bottomed means that researchers can see the patterns of ridges and troughs criss-crossing the basin floor, including evidence of a thrust fault that would rival the San Andreas in California.

"The pattern of tectonic landforms in the Rembrandt basin is truly extraordinary," Watters said. "It is unlike anything we have seen before in other impact basins on Mercury, the Moon or Mars, or in basins formed on the icy moons of the outer planets."

Satellites Measure the Melt (Plus Lemmings)

Posted on November 7, 2008 | 0 Comments

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Malaspina Glacier in the Gulf of Alaska (created from a Landsat satellite image and NASA's Shuttle Radar Topography Mission)

—Image courtesy NASA

I was stunned to hear that ice loss from glaciers in the Gulf of Alaska adds up to 84 gigatons a year, or about five times the average yearly flow of the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, according to NASA satellite measurements.

"The Gulf of Alaska region is 20 times smaller than the ice-covered area of Greenland, yet it contributes nearly half as much freshwater melt as Greenland and accounts for about 15 percent of present-day global sea level rise stemming from melting ice," the NASA press release quoted geophysicist Scott Luthcke as saying. "Considering that the Gulf of Alaska makes such a disproportionate contribution, it is vital that we know more about the nature of glacial change there."

The NASA team's work is published in the Journal of Glaciology.

The team used NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites to measure changes in Alaska's coastal glaciers. These twin satellites orbit the Earth 137 miles apart and "weigh" the changes in glaciers' mass by detecting miniscule changes in the distance between the two satellites. The distance between the satellites changes in response to Earth's gravity field, which changes with the mass of the land area or body of ice being measured.

Got that? If not, this NASA article probably explains it better than I can.

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Columbia Glacier near Valdez, Alaska

—Image courtesy Extreme Ice Survey

Related content: On the National Geographic environment website, we've got some amazing time-lapse video of a series of massive calving events at Columbia Glacier near Valdez, Alaska. The video was created by Extreme Ice Survey.

► Read This Entire Post

Willkommen! Bienvenue! 歓迎!

Posted on September 2, 2008 | 0 Comments

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Welcome to Breaking Orbit, a new blog about planetary science, space exploration, and technology brought to you by National Geographic News.

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Voyager 1 image of Saturn and some of its moons, courtesy NASA

When I joined National Geographic in 2005, the society was in the process of shifting perspectives. Since its foundation in 1888, the stated mission has been "to increase and diffuse geographic knowledge while promoting the conservation of the world's cultural, historical, and natural resources."

But in the fast-paced world of the Web, who has time for such a mouthful? So today NatGeo backs up its mission with a more concise and elegant tagline: Inspiring People to Care About the Planet. That pretty much says it all... or does it?

NatGeo has a rich history of covering lots more than just Earth. There's a whole solar system of planets out there, not to mention dwarf planets, asteroids, comets, meteors, and the growing roster of extrasolar planets circling distant suns.

That's where we come in. The mission of this blog is to boldly go where no other NatGeo blog has gone before, to increase and diffuse extraterrestrial knowledge while promoting the exploration of all worlds' cultural, historical, and natural resources.

In other words, to inspire people to care about other planets.

—Victoria Jaggard

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About This Blog

The moon
From dwarf planets to hot Jupiters, join NatGeo News space and tech editor Victoria Jaggard in a global discussion about all things extraterrestrial.


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