The Dawn Spacecraft, launched September 27, 2007 (and getting a gravity boost from Mars in February 2009), is headed for the asteroid Vesta and the dwarf planet Ceres.

NASA/JPL Dawn trajectory

This next image, processed to show the true size of the giant asteroid Vesta, shows Vesta in front of a spectacular background of stars.  NASA got this image May 3rd:

NASA/JPL Dawn

“Since Vesta is so bright that it outshines its starry background, Dawn team members commanded a long exposure time to make the stars visible. They corrected the resulting exaggerated size of Vesta by superimposing a short exposure image of the target asteroid, showing its true size. Vesta is the small, bright pearl in the middle of the image.”  (NASA)

Isn’t that great?  Here’s the same image, without the processing:

NASA/JPL Dawn

“This image shows the first, unprocessed image obtained by NASA’s Dawn spacecraft of the giant asteroid Vesta in front of a background of stars. It was obtained by Dawn’s framing camera on May 3, 2011, from a distance of about 1.2 million kilometers, or 750,000 miles.” (NASA)

Here’s what NASA had to say about Dawn’s adventures:

NASA Dawn Spacecraft Captures First Image Of Nearing Asteroid

WASHINGTON — NASA’s Dawn spacecraft has obtained its first image of the giant asteroid Vesta, which will help fine-tune navigation during its approach. Dawn expects to achieve orbit around Vesta on July 16, when the asteroid is about 117 million miles from Earth.

The image from Dawn’s framing cameras was taken on May 3 when the spacecraft began its approach and was approximately 752,000 miles (1.21 million km) from Vesta. The asteroid appears as a small, bright pearl against a background of stars. Vesta also is known as a protoplanet, because it is a large body that almost formed into a planet.

“After plying the seas of space for more than a billion miles, the Dawn team finally spotted its target,” said Carol Raymond, Dawn’s deputy principal investigator at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif. “This first image hints of detailed portraits to come from Dawn’s upcoming visit.”

Vesta is 330 miles (530 km) in diameter and the second most massive object in the asteroid belt. Ground- and space-based telescopes obtained images of the bright orb for about two centuries, but with little surface detail.

Mission managers expect Vesta’s gravity to capture Dawn in orbit on July 16. To enter orbit, Dawn must match the asteroid’s path around the sun, which requires very precise knowledge of the body’s location and speed. By analyzing where Vesta appears relative to stars in framing camera images, navigators will pin down its location and enable engineers to refine the spacecraft’s trajectory.

Dawn will start collecting science data in early August at an altitude of approximately 1,700 miles (2,700 km) above the asteroid’s surface. As the spacecraft gets closer, it will snap multi-angle images allowing scientists to produce topographic maps. Dawn will later orbit at approximately 120 miles (200 km) to perform other measurements and obtain closer shots of parts of the surface. Dawn will remain in orbit around Vesta for one year. After another long cruise phase, Dawn will arrive in 2015 at its second destination, Ceres, an even more massive body in the asteroid belt.

Gathering information about these two icons of the asteroid belt will help scientists unlock the secrets of our solar system’s early history. The mission will compare and contrast the two giant asteroids shaped by different forces. Dawn’s science instruments will measure surface composition, topography and texture. Dawn also will measure the tug of gravity from Vesta and Ceres to learn more about their internal structures. The spacecraft’s full odyssey will take it on a 3-billion-mile (5-billion-km) journey, which began with its launch in September 2007.

Dawn’s mission to Vesta and Ceres is managed by JPL for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Dawn is a project of the directorate’s Discovery Program, managed by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.

The University of California in Los Angeles is responsible for overall Dawn mission science. Orbital Sciences Corp. of Dulles, Va., designed and built the spacecraft. The framing cameras were developed and built under the leadership of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Katlenburg-Lindau in Germany, with significant contributions by the German Aerospace Center (DLR) Institute of Planetary Research in Berlin and in coordination with the Institute of Computer and Communication Network Engineering in Braunschweig. The framing camera project is funded by NASA, the Max Planck Society and DLR.

Click here to view the embedded video.

One of my two favorite astronomers is UCLA Professor Andrea Ghez.

Venus and Jupiter pair up in the morning sky. This is looking east at 04:45. Click for May 12 pairing.

If you can get outside before daylight tomorrow and for the next few days you can get a look at the nice Jupiter/Venus pairing in the east.  Before daylight means after about 04:30 and about 05:00.  If you go out at 05:30 like I did this morning it will be too light out (in the northern hemisphere at least).  Pity too because this morning they were pretty close together.  Given the topography here the planets might not clear the mountain in time for me to see them anyway.

The images give you a representation of what you will see. The picture shows this morning and if you click it you will get tomorrow.  You will notice they spread out a little and that trend will continue as the days go by.  Venus will be somewhat brighter than Jupiter and both will be the brightest thing in the east provided the sun isn’t up.

I’ve been good about getting outside between 03:00 and 03:40. This morning the sky was amazing, I spent my time looking at Sagittarius, Scorpio and Antares. They are low in my southern horizon if you are up and about at such hours you should get a good look at them.

I kind of like the My Favorite Astronomer theme, I have two.  I will share one tomorrow.

Testing the new Soyuz launch site in French Guiana. Click for larger. Credit: ESA - S. Corvaja, 2011

The Soyuz spacecraft will soon be launching from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana.

The facilities are almost complete and final testing began on April 29, 2011 with a simulated launch.  The simulation is designed to ensure the facilities work as expected and allow teams to train under realistic conditions.

The image shows the vehicle as it was transferred from the preparation building to the launch area and moved to the vertical position.  A mobile gantry was then rolled out to the pad and the upper stage was hoisted atop the launcher.

The first launch will be in the third quarter of 2011.

Read more about it and see lots more images here.

For his post subject, Bill gave me the opportunity to pick a famous astronomer and do a “thumbnail” bio on him/her.  I’m going to take a bit of literary license here and talk about the astronomer I most admire.

The astronomer I most admire isn’t famous, for one thing.  He doesn’t get any recognition for his work.  He doesn’t even get paid for it; he does it for love of the science.

Yeah, like THAT'S going to stop us! Image found at sodahead.com

He is a scientist, really.  If you tell him, “The paint’s wet.”, chances are he’ll touch it.  Just to see if it’s really wet… and how wet.  He listens to the ideas of others; not just to be polite, but because he’s truly interested.  If the idea sounds like a load of equine offal, he’ll point that out.  It doesn’t matter if the purveyor of the equine offal is an astrophysicist with four or five PhD’s.  If it’s offal, my hero will say it’s offal.  And he’ll keep saying it, until someone can prove to him that the load of equine offal is, in fact, solid gold.

The astronomer I most respect has a regular job, and he puts in his hours there so he can provide for his family.  He’s still waiting to buy that telescope he wants.  He almost had it last year, but then he found out his daughter needed braces.  Maybe next year.

Image found at funnyanimatedemoticons.com

My guy wasn’t formally trained in astronomy.  Oh, he had the bare bones minimum they teach in public schools in order to kick you up to the next grade, but that was it.  What he did was start reading and learning on his own.  He found a fascination for astronomy; a love, a passion for the cosmos.  When he googles “star” on his computer, he’s looking for Epsilon Eridani, not Angelina Jolie.  He knows that Betelgeuse was a  star long before Michael Keaton’s claim for fame.

He argues passionately and intelligently about things like quasars and pulsars because it matters to him.

There you have it:  A thumbnail sketch of my favorite astronomer/scientist.  Now, you all know I really like Newton, Einstein, Galileo… the list goes on and on.  Still, my favorite scientist, the one I respect above and beyond all the others, is the one sitting at home (or work) reading this right now.  He’s tired.  He’s shouldering the responsibility of his family, and when he gets a few free moments he learns something new about the science he passionately loves.  He’s my hero.

The scientist I most admire and respect is you.

Josh Rosenau just got his 23andMe results back. He asked me what he could do with it. Well, I might have told him that he should throw his genotype to the public domain…but most people are a little reluctant to do that it seems (though remember, if you want to do that just email me and I’ll publicize it. For example, Blaine Bettinger just put a bunch of stuff online public domain). I told Josh to look at some of the third party tools at the website 23andYou. Focus on the left column in particular. I assume in the future the tools will get slicker and much more user friendly, but why wait until grandma gets into the game?

A comment from earlier this week struck a nerve with me. I’ll repost it in totality first:

I find it interesting that Fox Keller seems to be assuming that human interest in “nature” began only in the 19th century. Rather, the concept of mankind’s nature has been a topic of much interest since at least the induction of philosophical inquiry by the Greeks, and remains a topic of interest in philosophical circles in the philosophy of man. While the ancient Greeks certainly had no idea about DNA or genes, they were able to examine man’s behavior and physical characteristics and to try to determine whether or not men were born a certain way (nature) or could learn to alter some traits by choice (a great example of such an inquiry is in the Nicomachaen Ethics by Aristotle, regarding the definition and inculcation of virtue). The current debate about nature vs. nurture in a specifically genetic mode is merely a more specialized version of the exact same concept…how to differentiate what parts of “man” are immutable and what parts seem to respond to differing environments (whether internally or externally imposed). That might explain why Fox Keller is so confused about why ...

In my experience most scientists are not too clear on the details of intelligence testing, perhaps because the whole area is somewhat in ill repute (except when you want to brag about your own SAT/GRE score!). This despite the fact that the profession of science is skewed toward the right end of the intelligence bell curve. Steve Hsu, a physicist at the University of Oregon (and someone I’ve known for a while in the interests of “full disclosure”) has a nice presentation up in PDF format which summarizes the major points of interest in this area. Worth a skim if you are unfamiliar. Additionally he alludes to future directions in the study of the genetic basis of intelligence using genomics. Here’s his abstract:

I begin with a brief review of psychometric results concerning intelligence (sometimes referred to as the g factor, or IQ). The main results concern the stability, validity (predictive power) and heritability of adult IQ. Next, I discuss ongoing Genome Wide Association Studies which investigate the genetic basis of intelligence. Due mainly to the rapidly decreasing cost of sequencing (currently below $5k per genome), it is likely that within the next 5-10 years we will identify genes ...

1) First, a post from the past: Why the indigenous still dominate the Andean region.

2) Weird search query of the week (#5 keyword!): “sara sidner ethnicity”

3) Comment of the week, in response to “Edge question 2011″:

At business school (at a well-respected, major research university) one of my profs prided herself on being the most “scientific” of our professors. That was her reputation and she liked to brag about how rigorous and “scientific” her classes were. What her approach consisted of was to demand that any claim made by a student be backed with a citation in the literature. That was it. You can imagine what kind of science gets produced in MBA literature and the quality of studies used to prove or disprove various management fads.
(She was also a huge proponent of using Myers-Briggs test to make hiring and staffing decisions. I consider Myers-Briggs to be one step up from astrology personally.)

Anyway, it was scientism at it’s best. And, given the non-science backgrounds of a typical MBA class, maybe that’s all that can be hoped for — to get them to look past just the management fad ...

Sex on the Brain?: An Examination of Frequency of Sexual Cognitions as a Function of Gender, Erotophilia, and Social Desirability.

“It is commonly believed that men think about sex much more often than do women, but the empirical evidence in this area is fairly weak. By means of a golf tally counter, 283 college students kept track of their thoughts pertaining to food, sleep, or sex for one week. Males reported significantly more need-based cognitions overall, but there was no significant interaction between sex of participant and type of cognition recorded. Therefore, although these young men did think more about sex than did young women, they also thought more about food and sleep. In contrast, a retrospective estimated frequency of need-based cognitions obtained at the start of the study revealed a sex difference in sexual cognitions, but not thoughts about eating or sleeping. Erotophilia and sexual desirability responding were significant predictors of frequency of sexual cognitions for women, but not for men. Overall, erotophilia was a better predictor of sexual cognition than was sex of participant. Taken as a whole, the results suggest that, although there may ...

This is happening. Pornography found in bin Laden hideout:

The pornography recovered in bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, consists of modern, electronically recorded video and is fairly extensive, according to the officials, who discussed the discovery with Reuters on condition of anonymity.

The officials said they were not yet sure precisely where in the compound the pornography was discovered or who had been viewing it. Specifically, the officials said they did not know if bin Laden himself had acquired or viewed the materials.

…

Three other U.S. officials familiar with evidence gathered during investigations of other Islamic militants said the discovery of pornography is not uncommon in such cases.

One issue I’ve noticed personally with some conservative Muslims is that their threshold for what is ‘pornographic’ is different from those of typical Westerners. I have an uncle who is a member of Tablighi Jamaat who considers the outfits worn by ballerinas to be pornographic and instances of crass nudity. I do wonder if outbreaks of extreme sexual deviance and psychopathy, such as the notorious Saudi gang rape, might be as much due to the peculiar collapse of what seem clear and distinct categories to us, as much as garden-variety repression. A ...

It’s Friday the 13th. So why not a morbid post? I stumbled onto to some “life tables” for 2007. Actually what the link gives you is the probability of death and life expectancy at a given age for males and females. This is obviously important for purposes of private and public insurance. The tables are naturally broken down by sex because males and females differ in their likelihood of death. Women are well known to have higher life expectancies in all but the most primitive of nations today.

I wanted to do a little visualization. I limited the years across the interval 0 to 100. Since I find life expectancy a boring statistic (well known) I want to focus on probability of death in a given year. I generated four tables.

- First, a table which shows probability of death in a given year log transformed. I had to transform because the difference between a 1 year old and a 100 year old spans four orders of magnitude.

- Second, a table which illustrates the absolute change in the probability of death year to year. This is basically measuring the absolute change between year X and year X – 1. Concretely an ...

It started with an innocent, and possibly joking, request on Twitter: “Can you explain M-theory?” Having previously been asked to defend the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics and various other topics, I didn’t take it very seriously.

But upon further reflection — why not? Obviously nobody is going to give a full and comprehensible account of any reasonably complex topic when limited to 140 characters, but it might be fun and even useful to try to distill the basic point of something down to its tweetable essence. Still, in a single tweet there is almost no chance to do much but introduce jargon, so I decided to allow myself three tweets. Here’s my go at summarizing M-theory. (Remember chronology is bottom-up.)

Obviously, there is more to be said, but I think some actual information is conveyed. Different people might choose different aspects of a subject to spend their precious three tweets on, but that’s part of the beauty. As someone pointed out, a poetic aspect results from subjecting yourself to such stringent limitations on what you can say.

And if it works for M-theory, what else? And thus a hashtag was born: #3tweets. Yesterday I took a stab at the Higgs boson.

This reminded me that quantum field theory is probably the single most under-popularized subject in all of fundamental physics. Particle physics, yes; string theory, sure; quantum mechanics, endlessly; but the structure of QFT itself is rarely explained in its own right. It’s worth at least a few tweets.

I certainly hope to try a few more examples. But — it’s everyone’s internet. Feel free to join in, with new topics or ones previously covered. I’m sure someone has a different take on quantum field theory than I do.

What’s the News: A non-invasive test that measures brain waves could help doctors better diagnose whether a patient is truly in a vegetative state, according to a preliminary study published today in Science. What’s more, the results suggest that a particular pathway of communication in the brain is disrupted in vegetative patients but not patients with somewhat less severe brain damage—which could not only improve diagnosis, but help researchers better understand these tragic conditions.

How the Heck:

The researchers recorded the brain activity of 21 people with severe brain injuries and 22 healthy controls using an EEG, a set of electrodes placed on the scalp that pick up electrical signals generated by the brain’s neurons firing. Of the patients with brain damage, eight had been previously diagnosed as being in a vegetative state, while the other thirteen were in a minimally conscious state, meaning they retained some level of conscious awareness and ability to interact.
While recording the subjects’ brainwaves, the researchers played each of them a series of sounds with unexpected changes of tone (a one-time warble in the note). When healthy people and patients in a minimally conscious state heard the blip, their brain waves showed a spike that lasted around ...

As the number of bacteria in mosquitoes’ guts (x axis) went up,
the malaria parasite levels dropped faster than a cartoon anvil.

What’s the News: We know the bacteria living in our guts are important to our health—but the bacteria in mosquitoes’ guts could be too. Researchers have discovered a species of mosquito gut bacteria that destroys the malaria parasite, keeping the disease from spreading to humans. This explains why some Anopheles mosquitoes (the only genus that transmits malaria) don’t spread it, and it spurs the imagination towards possible ways of tamping down the disease.

How the Heck:

Scientists have long wondered why some Anopheles mosquitoes don’t seem to carry malaria, while others of the same species or strain do. Mosquitoes’ immune response to the malaria parasite, Plasmodium, and their gut bacteria were known to play a part in this, but to uncover exactly what was going on, scientists collected gut bacteria from wild mosquitoes and watched what they did to the parasite in Petri dishes.
They identified one bacterium in particular that severely impaired the parasite’s development. When they fed it to mosquitoes, parasite levels plummeted (see graph above).
To find out how the bacteria were doing it, ...

Each Friday this month, I’m having a conversation about viruses to mark the publication of my new book A Planet of Viruses. Last week, I talked to virologist Ian Lipkin about the search for new viruses and their potential to alter our behavior. Today, I’m delighted to talk with Richard Preston, the author of the Hot Zone and other books on viruses. He and I discuss the fate of smallpox. The worst viral killer in the history of civilization is now wiped off the face of the Earth, except for some laboratory stocks. Preston and I take on the question of whether we should now annihilate it. Check it out.

This is a guest post by Jamie L. Vernon, Ph.D., an HIV research scientist and aspiring policy wonk, who recently moved to D.C. to get a taste of the action

Not much to say except this is a hilarious production designed to draw attention to the fracking debate. To be clear, my biggest concerns are not centered on the hydraulic fracturing fluid per se. I feel the recent PNAS paper highlighted the much more worrisome problem of methane gas leakage. In fact, the PNAS paper stated that there was no evidence of contamination of drinking water with deep saline brine or fracking fluids.

The anti-fracking video compared to the pro-fracking video (below) represents an interesting dichotomy in communication tactics.

Which do you feel is more effective?

You have a sculpture, an intricate piece of modern art, covered in bulges and blisters. Your task is to weave a cover for it. The fit must be exact. You have to fill in every dent and wrap around every lump. Here’s the catch: you have to make this faultless shroud from a single piece of string that must automatically weave itself into the right three-dimensional shape.

This is the challenge that Sarel Fleishman, Timothy Whitehead and Damian Ekiert from the University of Washington have just overcome. Their “sculpture” is a protein called haemagglutinin, or HA, which sits on the surface of flu viruses. Their “shroud” is another protein designed to perfectly fit onto the contours of HA and neutralise it. They have found a way of fashioning these designer proteins on a computer – a feat that could make it easier to create the next generation of anti-flu drugs.

Under the microscope, flu viruses look like spherical pincushions. The “pins” consist of two proteins: haemagglutinin, which allows the virus to stick to a host cell, and neuraminidase, which allows it to eventually escape. The different versions of these ...

We live in an era of wonder, where people send robots to other worlds and view them close up. These machines get bathed in radiation, searing heat, bitter cold, suffocating vacuum, and they keep running. Moreover, they send their data back digitally, which can then be stored in a database and, if permissions are given, accessed by the public. And a subset of that public is educated in the ways of digital media, able to stitch together pictures, carefully aligning them, balancing them, coordinating borders and overlap regions.

The result? This:

Yegads. That is Mercury as seen by the MESSENGER spacecraft in 2008, as it flew by the planet for the first time. It would do so again before finally entering orbit in March 2011. But as it left the smallest planet, it snapped a series of wide angle and high-resolution images.

Gordon Ugarkovic is a Croatian software developer. He’s also an amateur image processor… for a sufficiently wide definition of "amateur". He takes space images and works his prowess on them, creating dramatic and beautiful images like this one of Mercury.

Click the picture to embiggen it, or you can ...

British readers might have caught wind of a new Guardian/Wellcome Trust Science Writing prize, aimed at finding the “next generation of undiscovered science writing talent.” Since the announcement, the Guardian have been pumping out a series of pieces on tips and tricks for good science writing, penned by established writers.

Alok asked me for something different – he wanted a reflection on the importance of entering and winning competitions. I won the Daily Telegraph’s young science writer prize in 2007, which in many ways was the spiritual predecessor of the new Guardian/Wellcome Trust one. My thoughts on that win, and its importance in my career, is now up at the Grauniad.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good science background must be in want of a PhD. So it was that I found myself re-enacting a bad 80s sitcom in a biochemistry lab, full of exaggerated characters and slapstick mishaps, but with fewer happy resolutions and more radioactive clothes. Somewhere, a laughter track was playing.

During this time, I realised that I wanted to swap pipettes for pens. ...