As I write this, a plane powered by the sun is flying somewhere over Europe, undertaking its most ambitious test flight yet.

When we last left the Solar Impulse back in April, the experimental aircraft had flown a two-hour test to prove it was flight-worthy. Today, the pilot in the plane, which weighs about as much as a car and is covered in 12,000 solar cells, will try to stay aloft for 24 hours, even cruising along during the nighttime hours.

“The goal of the project is to have a solar-powered plane flying day and night without fuel,” said team co-founder Bertrand Piccard, adding that this test flight – the third major step after its first ‘flea hop’ and an extended flight earlier this year – will demonstrate whether the ultimate plan is feasible: to fly the plane around the world. “This flight is crucial for the credibility of the project” [AP].

Piccard’s team wanted to fly a little closer to the summer solstice last month, but technical problems left them grounded. With the bug in the communications system now sorted out, pilot Andre Borschberg took off from Switzerland at about 7 a.m. local time. When night falls in Europe—sometime later this afternoon U.S. time—Borschberg will have to decide whether he’s managed to save enough energy to fly through the night. If so, he’ll bring the plane down from an altitude of nearly 28,000 feet to just about 5,000 and hold steady, waiting for the dawn so he can land.

“For seven years now, the whole team has been passionately working to achieve this first decisive step of the project,” said pilot Andre Borschberg as he entered the cockpit at an airfield in Payerne, in the west of Switzerland…

“The big question is whether the pilot can make efficient use of the battery energy to fly throughout the night,” the team said in a statement [BBC News].

We’ll keep you posted on how they do.

Related Content:
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DISCOVER: Who’s Flying This Thing?

Image: Solar Impulse

It sounds cool to say maybe the Internet has turned us all into one giant superorganism, as Robert Wright does today in the Opinionator blog at the New York Times. But before we bandy about cool-sounding words, it’s necessary to think hard about what they mean–particularly, what they mean to the biologists who first developed them as concepts.

The word superorganism can describe an ant colony or any other society of animals in which the individuals function like cells in a body. They come in extremely specialized types (workers and queens and other castes for ants; liver cells, neurons, and other cell types for our bodies). They coordinate their specialized functions with communication (alarm pheromones in ants; hormones, cytokines, and other signals in us). What’s more, superorganisms have been shaped by the same force that shapes organisms like us: natural selection. Organisms have evolved into sophisticated decision-generators. In response to changes in the environment, our bodies generate decisions about how to react–whether that decision is to run for our lives or just break into a sweat to help keep ourselves from overheating. Some kinds of decision-making systems favor survival and reproduction. Other kinds fail. It’s legitimate to call an ant colony a superorganism, because the ants also make collective decisions (move a colony, defend it, etc.), and those decisions determine their survival and their ability to make new colonies.

The word superorganism is a metaphor–a way of thinking of something (an insect colony) as something else (an individual animal). But it’s a great metaphor, because the more you think about it, the more parallels you encounter. It guides thought, and yields insight. (A good place to see the metaphor work its magic is in Bert Holdobler’s book, The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies.) Metaphors fail when they capture a few, superficial similarities but lack the deep connections that really matter. Yes, we can communicate with each other a lot with Facebook, but what collective decision has emerged from that communication, beyond getting Betty White on Saturday Night Live? How have those decisions allowed some superorganisms to survive while others die off? Oops–there’s only one so-called superorganism in Wright’s piece–ourselves. So the metaphor fails yet again. Wright doesn’t do the hard work of proving this metaphor really works. And so when he then starts hinting that somehow becoming a superorganism is the whole point of human evolution–our destiny–it’s a prize he has not earned.

Superorganisms are cool enough when they’re just made up of ants. We don’t need Facebook to make them interesting.

[Image: Alex Wild]

Hubble is the gift that keeps on giving. Check this jaw-dropping stunner:

Holy wow! Click to embiggen, or go here to get a ginormous image.

This is an image of NGC 3603, a vast cloud of gas and dust that is cranking out stars like no one’s business. It’s one of the busiest stellar nurseries in our entire galaxy. That cluster of stars in the center has thousands of newly-born stars in it, including one named NGC 3603A. This bruiser is the most massive star ever to have its mass directly measured: it is a whopping 116 times heftier than the Sun. That’s about as massive as a star can get without tearing itself apart!

But look to the upper right; see that bright star centered in some blue-ish gas? I’ve zoomed in on it here. That star is Sher 25, a massive B1a supergiant that is a ticking time bomb. Sometime in the next 20,000 years — and that’s a guarantee — it’ll blow, creating a supernova that will rival Venus for brightness! I know this because the gas around it is a classic hourglass-shaped bipolar nebula, created as the star itself expels dense winds of its own material. We’ve seen this before: around the supernova SN 1987a.

Here’s a shot from Hubble of 87a (click to embiggen this, too). You can see the ring around the star, and the faint rings around it top and bottom. It’s still not clear exactly how they formed, but it’s clear they’re from when the star was younger. The rings around 87a can be dated to be about 20,000 years old — that means the star made the rings and blew up 20,000 years later. Sher 25 already has rings, and it’s a bit hotter and more massive than the star that blew up in 1987… so it has no more than 20,000 years, and probably less, before it detonates as a tremendous supernova. I’ll note it’s 20,000 light years away, so it’s no danger to Earth.

NGC 3603 is one of my favorite objects in the whole sky. I studied SN87a for my PhD, and a few years back I was a referee on a paper about Sher 25 — the only paper I ever professionally refereed. All for the best, I’m thinking.

Still, the nebulosity, the stars, Sher 25 — altogether, this is an amazing object, and a magnificent picture. We may even have an early entry for my annual Top Ten Astronomy Pictures of 2010.

Oh — this image was taken by my old grad advisor, Bob O’Connell. So now I think this object and I have come — pardon the expression — full circle.

Image credit: NASA, ESA, R. O’Connell (University of Virginia), F. Paresce (National Institute for Astrophysics, Bologna, Italy), E. Young (Universities Space Research Association/Ames Research Center), the WFC3 Science Oversight Committee, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

I spent some fifteen minutes on the moon yesterday. It wasn’t pretty. A meteor strike knocked out my base’s life support; I crashed a robot into a NASA supply shed; and, while I fiddled around with a welding torch, a gas line exploded.

Moonbase Alpha, the first of two commercial-quality online games that NASA has just developed, taught me a lot: how a solar panel-powered life-support system might work, what “regolith processing” really means, and the weird gait I’d have if I tried to sprint on the lunar surface. Perhaps it also taught me that I’m not cut out to be an astronaut, but maybe I’ll try multiplayer mode before making that decision.

The game, released yesterday on Valve’s Steam video game network, imagines the year 2020 when we have the meager start of a lunar base near Shackleton crater, not far from the Moon’s south pole. A meteor strike disables the base’s life-support (it’s not just me) and one or more players must get it running again in about 25 minutes.

This requires an understanding the base’s systems as well as building and maneuvering (or racing…) your own robots into areas too dangerous for humans. The game is a project launched by NASA’s Learning Technologies program and is a proof-of-concept meant to see if a video game can inspire youth interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

I’m not sure how more expert gamers will feel, but my geeky heart leap when I saw the animated NASA logo in the game’s opening credits–not to mention the lunar footprints left behind on my trail of destruction.

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I've looked a bit more closely at the Smithsonian/Pew Poll that I blogged recently, and I realized I overlooked one of the most important (and dismal) findings. Once again, this poll shows that global warming denial is on the rise:
In an exception to the pessimism about the environment, the poll found a ten-point drop in the percentage of respondents who say the earth will get warmer: from 76 percent in 1999 to 66 percent in 2010. And moreover--and consistent with my remarks in the Washington Post piece--this is happening among Republicans:
That trend “is very consistent with data we've gathered on the issue of global warming more generally,” Keeter said. “There are many possible explanations, but one thing is quite clear: there is a strong partisan and ideological pattern to the decline in belief in global warming.” The vast majority of the change since 1999, he said, has occurred among Republicans and independents who lean Republican. Yup--the issue has gotten more partisan, more polarized, and so people have made up their minds based on ideology first, and data second. Sadly, that's how we think. And how we operate. Want to know how bad it gets? Just check out this Brendan Nyhan paper:
An extensive literature addresses ...