The Night Sky: ESA Arc

(Terribly messy – need to be cleaned)

When I was a kid I used to map the stars on my elementary pad paper. I would usually put some random dots and connect them just like the constellation appearing in the night sky. Even I was doing that that time I have to be honest that until now I cannot really distinguish the name of the stars (as well as point the exact star) except for Orion’s belt. After doing some weird, indescribable and doodle-looking patterns, I would usually make a story out of it and would say that they were my predictions of the future. Oh well, I was a kid then. Now, I cannot exactly remember those predictions. But one thing remained, my curiosity of things beyond that thin lining that separate the earth from space. Back then, I already believe that we are not alone that those stars might contain some other beings aside from us, that those stars might reveal surprising wonders to us someday, that I might have a new friend from the other star.

No one could beat me when it comes to imagination that time. Maybe I was the only kid in town thinking about some plants bearing fruit with money inside, a rice-plant that can produce rice grains thousand times without cutting them into paddies, corn that can bear instant food, friends from outer space, and creating robots out of the scraps from my father’s junk shop.

Until now, those stars, that I always look at in the sky during clear evenings, remained the same stars for 26 years and with them, my dreams will be immortalized. I always believe and I have hope that man someday will colonize those small twinkling dots in the space above us.

Of course, as a result of that childhood curiosity, I got this habit of monitoring the advancement of man in conquering space.

Noted here are the several important explorations of Man in space. Let’s start with ESA’s endeavors.

ESA – European Space Agency

Mars Express

THE MISSION:

Mars Express, so called because of the rapid and streamlined development time, represents ESA's first visit to another planet in the Solar System. The spacecraft borrows technology from the failed Mars 96 mission and from ESA's Rosetta mission that is currently en route to comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The mission helps to answer fundamental questions about the geology, atmosphere, surface environment, history of water and potential for life on Mars.

Here are some worth keeping links (results of Mars Express data):

HRSC Data Explorer

… need to cook lunch… (so I have to list the links quickly)

Venus Express

THE MISSION:

Venus Express is a follow on from the Mars Express mission. Many of the instruments on the mission are simply upgraded versions of those on the Mars Express platform. After a 153 day cruise to Venus the spacecraft entered Venusian orbit on 11 April 2006.

Rosetta

THE MISSION:

The International Rosetta Mission was approved in November 1993 by ESA's Science Programme Committee as the Planetary Cornerstone Mission in ESA's long-term space science programme. The mission goal was initially set for a rendezvous with comet 46 P/Wirtanen. After postponement of the initial launch a new target was set: Comet 67 P/Churyumov- Gerasimenko. On its 10 year journey to the comet, the spacecraft will pass by two asteroids: 2867 Steins (in 2008) and 21 Lutetia (in 2010).

Ulysses

THE MISSION:

The joint ESA-NASA Ulysses deep-space mission was designed to study the heliosphere - the region of space influenced by the Sun and its magnetic field. The primary scientific goal was to make the first-ever measurements of the unexplored region of space above the Sun's poles. Other areas of investigation include determination of the global properties and behaviour of the solar wind, the study of energetic particles of solar and interplanetary origin, measurement of the magnetic field of the Sun and the heliosphere, study of galactic cosmic rays, investigation of how the heliosphere interacts with interstellar space, and participation in a programme to identify the origin of gamma-ray bursts.

Anyway, I think this is enough for now. Always visit this website re: Astronomy matters… Astronomy Blog.

Myriad

Last year, I tried playing around with Terragen hoping that I can create extrasolar terrains. Due to my limited time, I wasn't able to produce good images, or shall I say "stunning" images, capturing my imagination.

I am always a fan of planetary artists and I always love to see myriad terrains produced by these artists. Here are some of the artworks of the different planetary artists from Pandromeda. I hope someday I can also create images like these.

Irene Alora

Armands Auseklis

JBA

Ashley Parker

Robert Buttery

Other Artists

What’s With Molybdenum?

While browsing through the items of my bookmarks, I came across a very interesting, in scientific perspective, website which I saved long time ago (I cannot remember the date anymore). This website is dedicated to answer the questions of our existence, of life, of the possibility of other life forms beyond the confine of our planet, and even of our system. A small patch in the immense manifold of cyberia, this site exists to provide us bits of information, insights of different scientific papers, ideas of different scientists about a new field called Astrobiology – life in our Universe (not just within the boundaries of out planet but all through the space of our cosmos).

When I opened the site, I was intrigued by one article. This article caught my attention and commanded by eyes to read through it. It was insightful, the science of heavy metal in connection with the progress of the evolution of life here on earth. How the hell is Molybdenum connected to the delays of the evolution of complex organism, such as ourselves, here on earth?

To answer this, please read the article below from the Astrobiology website:

Missing Molybdenum
Based on an Arizona State University news release

International team of scientists discover clue to delay of life on Earth.

Scientists from around the world have reconstructed changes in Earth’s ancient ocean chemistry during a broad sweep of geological time, from about 2.5 to 0.5 billion years ago. They have discovered that a deficiency of oxygen and the heavy metal molybdenum in the ancient deep ocean may have delayed the evolution of animal life on Earth for nearly 2 billion years. The findings provide an important example of connections between the evolution of life and the environment of Earth.

The findings, which appear in the March 27 issue of Nature, come as no surprise to Ariel Anbar, one of the authors of the study and an associate professor at Arizona State University with joint appointments in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and the School of Earth and Space Exploration. The study was led by Clint Scott, a graduate student at University of California Riverside. Scott works with Timothy Lyons, a professor of biogeochemistry at UCR who is a long-time collaborator of Anbar’s and also an author of the paper.







“Clint’s data are an important new piece in a puzzle we’ve been trying to solve for many years,” says Anbar. “Tim and I have suspected for a while that if the oceans at that time were oxygen deficient they should also have been deficient in molybdenum. We’ve found evidence of that deficiency before, at a couple of particular points in time. The new data are important because they confirm that those points were typical for their era.”

“Clint’s data are an important new piece in a puzzle we’ve been trying to solve for many years,” says Anbar. “Tim and I have suspected for a while that if the oceans at that time were oxygen deficient they should also have been deficient in molybdenum. We’ve found evidence of that deficiency before, at a couple of particular points in time. The new data are important because they confirm that those points were typical for their era.”

Molybdenum is of interest to Anbar and others because it is used by some bacteria to convert the element nitrogen from a gas in the atmosphere to a form useful for living things – a process known as “nitrogen fixation.” Bacteria cannot fix nitrogen efficiently when they are deprived of molybdenum. And if bacteria can’t fix nitrogen fast enough, then eukaryotes – a kind of organism that includes plants, pachyderms and people – are in trouble because eukaryotes cannot fix nitrogen themselves at all.

“If molybdenum was scarce, bacteria would have had the upper hand,” continues Anbar. “Eukaryotes depend on bacteria having an easy enough time fixing nitrogen that there’s enough to go around. So if bacteria were struggling to get enough molybdenum, there probably wouldn’t have been enough fixed nitrogen for eukaryotes to flourish.”

“These molybdenum depletions may have retarded the development of complex life such as animals for almost two billion years of Earth history,” says Lyons. “The amount of molybdenum in the ocean probably played a major role in the development of early life.”

This research was motivated by a review article published in Science in 2002 by Anbar and Andy Knoll, a colleague at Harvard University. Knoll was perplexed by the fact that eukaryotes didn’t dominate the world until around 0.7 billion years ago, even though they seemed to have evolved before 2.7 billion years ago. Together, Anbar and Knoll postulated that molybdenum deficiency was the key, arguing that the metal should have been scarce in ancient oceans because there was so little oxygen in the atmosphere in those times.

In today’s high-oxygen world, molybdenum is the most abundant transition metal in the oceans. That is because the primary source of molybdenum to the ocean is the reaction of oxygen with molybdenum-bearing minerals in rocks. So the hypotheses rode on the idea that the amount of molybdenum in the oceans should track the amount of oxygen. To test that idea, Scott, Lyons and Anbar examined rock samples from ancient seafloors by dissolving them in a cocktail of acids and analyzing the rock for molybdenum content using a mass spectrometer. Many of these analyses were carried out using state-of-the art instrumentation in the W. M. Keck Foundation Laboratory for Environmental Biogeochemistry at Arizona State University. The scientists found significant evidence for a molybdenum-depleted ocean relative to the high levels measured in modern, oxygen-rich seawater.

By studying Earth’s ancient oceans, atmosphere and biology we can test how well we understand the modern environment, according to Anbar. “Our molybdenum hypothesis was inspired by the theory that biology in the oceans today is often starved for a different metal – iron – and that the lack of iron in parts of the oceans affects the transfer of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to the ocean” he says. “The idea that metal deficiency in the oceans can affect the entire planet is very powerful. Here, we are exploring the limits of that idea by seeing if it can solve ancient puzzles. These new findings strengthen our confidence that it can.”


Currently, I am looking for the copies of these papers resulting to this insight. I believe they are worth reading and will really give me handful of ideas about how we are created.

Here are some helpful links:

1. Ariel Anbar [http://knet.asu.edu/research/?getObject=asulib:60426]
2. Molybdenum Isotope Evidence for Widespread Anoxia in Mid-Proterozoic Oceans [http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/sci;304/5667/87]

(It’s quite difficult to find free copies of their papers)

Terragen: Other Feature Experimentation 1

Now I have the stars, a planet, the light of the dusking star, terrain and water. Few more explorations then I can create endless possible worlds.







So, I think you are dying to ask me how I did this. Well, here's my workspace in Terragen. This is where I created the landscape above.

Terragen: Camera Experimentation

Here are some renderings I obtained from different camera orientation. Now I am learning how to view the whole landscape in different perspective.

Rotation x = -5, y = 20, z = 0

Rotation: x = -5, y = 40, z = 0

Rotation: x = 5, y = 40, z = 0

Rotation: xyz = 0

Position: x: 0, y: 0, z: 0 Rotation: x: -10, y: 45, z: 0

Rotation - x: 0, y: 0, z: 0 Position: x: 1047, y: 1462 z: -2655

Terragen Children: Next Generation

Well, I cannot really stop myself in exploring the capabilities of Terragen 2 program. Now I got another two children. This one is the product of camera angle and rotation experimentation.

Different angle of the first world.

Now this one is really different because I can already insert a planet in the background.

Technorati Tags: terragen, extraterrestrial, future

My First Child with Terragen

I am currently tinkering the Terragen 2 program as well as the Terragen v0.9.

And this is my first born. I think I will be addicted to this program and most of my time will be spent in creating weird terrains of other planets. Expect more to see in the coming weeks.

To try the program, just type "Terragen 2" in google and definitely you will find a new way to spend your spare time.

It is very exciting!

Alien Journal 1: On Homo sapiens Copulation

Mreskeh Experimental Entry 785-258-01: On Homo sapiens Copulation

I got this opportunity to observe the activities of a certain species in the third planet, known to us as Mral, of the star system Drak (the sentient beings of this star call it Sol/Sun). The first thing I observed was their ways of copulation. They call themselves as Homo sapiens and I am not sure why they are formally called this way which they do not commonly speak of it.

Of the thousand species I have observed so far, they are the only species with astounding and puzzling ways of copulations. I cannot derive any positive generalization from my observations.

First, the place of copulation. Homo sapiens can copulate anywhere. I want to make it clear, anywhere. Well some species of this planet also display same attitude however Homo sapiens are really unique because they can copulate inside their traveling machines. They can also do this beside the waste place (trash bin in their language), or even in the dark corners of the street. The funny thing with them is that they are hiding while doing it, afraid to be seen by their co-species. It is weird for me to note because copulation in most species of this planet is not done in hidden way. Why are they trying to hide it? I cannot ascribe the main reason why they are doing this because in our community we celebrate the day by inviting all the members of the colony every time we copulate and they have to see us copulating.

Second, the period of copulation. Our species copulates only during 274 prah 21 mrah (noontime of the 4^th day of the 7^th month in human terms). Homo sapiens are really unique, they copulate anytime. No specific time. In 3600 seconds of their day, you can find several couples copulating around the planet, actually I found out that in one instance there are about 300,000++ couples mating. That’s only in one instance. I can’t really believe this. They copulate in the morning when they wake up, during noon, before they sleep, and quickie in the afternoon while doing household chores.

This species really fascinates me.

The third part is the way they copulate, in technical terms, the methods the way they do it. Under this observation I have several parameters but I limit my focus on the partners involved.

I was shocked by this.

There are two forms of Homo sapiens. One has a protruding part of its skin that hardens and elongates before and during the process of copulation. The other one has a hole that expands when the protruding part of the skin is being inserted. It is funny to note that both partners are somewhat reddish during the process. This distinction, male and female, has no counterpart in our species. We don’t have a male or a female. We copulate through sac-fluid-sharing (conjugation in human terms).

The devastating side of my observation is the way they copulate. I observed male-female, male-male and female-female. Only male-female copulation will produce successful offspring. What piqued my mind is the copulation between male-male and female-female. Also, I happen to observe mass copulation – all forms of Homo sapiens in one room exercising the rituals of copulation.

The way Homo sapiens copulate violates the Law of Reproduction in our world but the Laws of Genetics are working fine.

This is really something new. My mentor did not make a mistake in choosing this species as our main target of observation. The level of biological process in their lifestyle is very complicated that even me the highest honored biologist of my star system cannot fully comprehend.

The male-male or female-female copulation is a very interesting deviation from the normal copulation process of this species. They are just like us. However they cannot successfully produce offspring through these methods. Now, this brings me to the question of what would be the purpose of these methods. Are these necessary in future evolution of Homo sapiens? Is this an integral part of their natural growth as a species?

For now, I cannot answer these questions. There is something deep in the human evolutionary formation that leads to this kind of cases. It could be in their genetic coding or it could be a complex-social-interaction by product. Or, it has something to do with the deep meaning of human existence.

I have to end this journal for I have to attend the second phase of my reproductive cycle. In few seconds I will be splitting into two beings.