A stock image of the holiday season is a night scene of Santa and his reindeers silhouetted across a full moon, his sleigh packed with presents ready to be delivered throughout the evening. While this joyous image fits some of our romantic notions of being moonstruck, it contradicts some widely held beliefs about the negative effects of full moons. (And never mind that the odds of experiencing a full moon on Christmas Eve itself are very small: the last one was in 2007 and the next may not appear until 2026.) A teacher I know, complaining about her students’ boisterous behavior in the ... Read More
2 BD, 1 Bath, Nice View of Earth
September 9, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment
The week that NASA celebrated the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing, a multidisciplinary conference on working and living beyond low-earth orbit convened in the colonial city of Savannah, Ga. Whether the 300-some conference attendees considered the symbolism of meeting to plan the first outposts on the moon and Mars in one of the new world's first settlements is hard to know. They were, nonetheless, dealing with the same issue that bedevils tentative steps beyond the horizon in any age: sustainability. While the weeklong SAE-sponsored International Conference on ... Read More
Colonizing Space, 40 Rats at a Time
July 20, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment
Early next spring, an all-female "crew" of middle-aged Wistar rats will find themselves beginning one long Barcelona holiday. But instead of trolling the Ramblas for tapas scraps, these unwitting rodents may help ensure their human brethren have the chance to pack up and move off world. In June, the European Space Agency, along with outside European and Canadian research partners, announced the inauguration of an ecological pilot plant that will test closed-loop ecological technologies for eventual use in lunar habitats and colonies on Mars. Managed by ESA at Spain's University ... Read More
See It — and Believe It or Not
April 24, 2008 • By • Leave a Comment
Man’s first trips to the moon produced a series of memorable images, including the now-iconic one of astronaut Buzz Aldrin standing on the lunar soil during the Apollo 11 mission in 1969. Fellow astronaut Neil Armstrong took the photo during the first-ever moonwalk, using a camera mounted on the chest pack of his bulky space suit. But wait a minute. If the photograph was taken from chest level, why are we clearly looking down at Aldrin? After all, you can see the top of his helmet. And why are no stars on the horizon? If no atmosphere exists on the moon, there are obviously no clouds, so ... Read More
