Mercury Pollution from Compact Fluorescent vs Incandescent Light Bulbs

Here I thought I'd share a bit of research I did over the past few days. Are incandescents better because they don't contain mercury? NO.

We can reduce mercury pollution from CFLs to zero by taking two steps: 1) use clean sources of power, 2) recycle the bulbs after they blow.

Think about it.

Rosetta and OSIRIS - Mission To Catch A Comet

The Rosetta Spacecraft - Mission to Catch a Comet!

Comets have inspired awe and wonder since the dawn of history. Many scientists today believe that comets crashed into Earth in its formative period spewing organic molecules that were crucial to the growth of life. Comets may have formed about the same time as the giant planets of our solar system (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune) - about 4.6 billion years ago.

Some scientists think that comets and planets were both made from the same clumps of dust and ice that spewed from our Suns birth; others think that these roving time capsules are even older than that, and that they may contain grains of interstellar stuff that is even older than our solar system!
Attempting New Firsts in Space

Rosetta is a spacecraft on a ten-year mission to catch the comet "67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko" (C-G) and answer some of our questions about comets. Rosetta will be the first spacecraft to soft-land a robot on a comet!

Rosetta will also be the first spacecraft to accompany a comet as it enters our inner solar system, observing at close range how the comet changes as the Suns heat transforms it into the luminous apparition that has frightened and inspired people for centuries.

Named after the Rosetta Stone

The Rosetta spacecraft is named after the ancient Rosetta Stone that you can visit today in Londons British Museum. The Philae lander is named after the Philae Obelisk which, together with the Rosetta Stone, provided the key to our first understanding of Egyptian hieroglyphs, or picture words.

Scientists hope that the Rosetta spacecraft will enable us to translate the even older language of comets, as expressed by their thermal signatures, into new knowledge about the origins of our solar system and, perhaps, life on Earth.

An International Mission with U.S. Support

This daring international mission is spearheaded by the European Space Agency (ESA), with key support and instruments from NASA. NASA contributed three of the orbiter's instruments (ALICE, MIRO, and IES) and part of the electronics package for the Double Focussing Mass Spectrometer - one of two detectors on the Swiss ROSINA instrument. NASA is also providing science investigators for selected non-U.S. instruments. In all, NASA is involved to a greater or lesser degree in Alice, MIRO, IES, OSIRIS, Radio Science, ROSINA, and VIRTIS experiments. NASA's Deep Space Network provides backup support for ESA's Ground Station Network for spacecraft tracking and navigation.

http://rosetta.jpl.nasa.gov/
.

Homosexuality In Animals

Facts Of Evolution: Speciation And Extinction

Radiometric Dating is Flawed!! Really?? How Old IS the Earth?

First Images From WISE - The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer

The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, will scan the entire sky in infrared light, picking up the glow of hundreds of millions of objects and producing millions of images. The mission will uncover objects never seen before, including the coolest stars, the universe's most luminous galaxies and some of the darkest near-Earth asteroids and comets.

Its vast catalogs will help answer fundamental questions about the origins of planets, stars and galaxies, and provide a feast of data for astronomers to munch on for decades to come.

Thanks to next-generation technology, WISE's sensitivity is hundreds of times greater than its predecessor, the Infrared Astronomical Satellite, which operated in 1983.

WISE will join two other infrared missions in space -- NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and the Herschel Space Observatory, a European Space Agency mission with important NASA participation.

WISE is different from these missions in that it will survey the entire sky. It is designed to cast a wide net to catch all sorts of unseen cosmic treasures, including rare oddities.

The closest of WISE's finds will be near-Earth objects, both asteroids and comets, with orbits that come close to crossing Earth's path. The mission is expected to find hundreds of these bodies, and hundreds of thousands of additional asteroids in our solar system's main asteroid belt.

By measuring the objects' infrared light, astronomers will get the first good estimate of the size distribution of the asteroid population. This information will tell us approximately how often Earth can expect an encounter with a potentially hazardous asteroid.

WISE data will also reveal new information about the composition of near-Earth objects and asteroids -- are they fluffy like snow or hard like rocks, or both?

The next closest targets for WISE are dim stars called brown dwarfs. These Jupiter-like balls of gas form like stars but fail to gather up enough mass to ignite like stars. The objects are cool and faint, and nearly impossible to see in visible light.

WISE should uncover about 1,000 in total, and will double or triple the number of star-like objects known within 25 light-years of Earth. What's more, if a brown dwarf is lurking closer to us than the closest known star, Proxima Centauri, WISE will find it and the little orb will become famous for being the "closest known star."

The most distant objects that will stand out like ripe cherries in WISE's view are tremendously energetic galaxies. Called ultraluminous infrared galaxies, or ULIRGs, these objects shine with the light of up to a trillion suns.

They crowd the distant universe, but appear virtually absent in visible-light surveys. WISE should find millions of ultra-luminous infrared galaxies, and the most luminous of these could be the most luminous galaxy in the universe.

Other nuggets to come out of the WISE survey will be newborn stars; disks of planetary debris around young stars; a detailed look at the structure of our Milky Way galaxy; clusters of galaxies in the far universe and more.

The most interesting finds will lay the groundwork for follow-up studies with other missions, such as NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, the Herschel Space Observatory, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, NASA's upcoming SOFIA airborne telescope and NASA's upcoming James Webb Space Telescope. Powerful ground-based telescopes will also follow up on WISE discoveries.

As with past all-sky surveys, surprises are sure to come. For example, one of the most surprising finds to come out of the Infrared Astronomical Satellite mission was the discovery of excess infrared light around familiar stars like Vega and Fomalhaut. Astronomers soon determined that the excess light comes from pulverized rock in disks of planetary debris.

The findings implied that rocky planets like Earth could be common. Today hundreds of astronomers study these debris disks, and Hubble recently captured an actual photograph of a planet orbiting Fomalhaut within its disk.

WISE will orbit Earth at an altitude of 525 kilometers (326 miles), circling Earth via the poles about 15 times a day. A scan mirror within the WISE instrument will stabilize the line of sight so that snapshots can be taken every 11 seconds over the entire sky.

Each position on the sky will be imaged a minimum of eight times, and some areas near the poles will be imaged more than 1,000 times.

The mission's sensitive infrared telescope and detectors are kept chilled inside a Thermos-like tank of solid hydrogen, called a cryostat. This prevents WISE from picking up the heat, or infrared, signature of its own instrument.

http://www-a.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/mi...
.

hccom5