GLIESE 581d, Here I Come... At 7:00 PM, California time today (12:00 PM Sydney time on Friday, August 28), a large radio telescope near Canberra, Australia began transmitting into deep space a signal containing 25,880 text messages gathered by COSMOS Magazine (for its Hello From Earth campaign) earlier this month. The signal is headed for a star system known as Gliese 581, where a potential ocean-covered planet (known as Gliese 581d) could possibly be harboring life. The signal will take 20.3 light-years (119 trillion miles, or 192 trillion kilometers) to reach Gliese 581, meaning it should arrive at the star system around December of 2029, give or take a few months. If advanced alien life forms do detect and decipher our signal, we wouldn't get a response from them till as early as 2051.



The agency responsible for transmitting the signal was NASA...since the radio telescope [known as Deep Space Station 43 (or DSS-43), which is 70 meters—or 230 feet—in diameter] that was used is part of the worldwide Deep Space Network (DSN) that communicates with interplanetary probes such as Cassini, Dawn, Kepler and the New Horizons spacecraft. According to COSMOS Magazine, the messages were encoded into a binary format (by engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California) before being transmitted by the Canberra Deep Space Communications Complex at Tidbinbilla, Australia. They were sent at a 7.145 Gigahertz frequency at 18 kilowatts...meaning the signal is technically slightly more powerful than some of today’s best computer servers. However, the size of the 70-meter DSN telescope amplified the signal...making its strength the equivalent of using the transmitting power of 300 billion cell phones combined (or 300 gigawatts). The transmission will fly through the Gliese 581 star system two times over two hours...since the signal was relayed twice from DSS-43.

(I did the math, and if the two signals were sent into space exactly two hours apart from each other, then the first signal should be traveling around 1.3 billion miles—or 2.2 billion kilometers—ahead of the second one!)



With the technical aspects of this Blog now out of the way, all I can say about this campaign is that it’s pretty friggin’ cool! And very amusing too...but not in a good way. In terms of it being cool, Hello From Earth somewhat made up for me not being able to get my name on the Pluto-bound New Horizons probe 4 years ago. The opportunity this time around is actually a lot better. Even though my name (and the message I typed) is in the form of an encrypted radio signal and not imprinted on an actual object like a microchip or a compact disc, my name will reach interstellar space a whole lot faster (since it’s traveling at the speed of light) than on a robotic spacecraft using conventional rocket fuel; and the signal will last as long as outbound space probes such as New Horizons and the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft possibly will. (Assuming, of course, none of these probes collide with an interstellar asteroid or something.) After the signal reaches Gliese 581d, it will still be strong enough to be detected by intelligent life forms up to 100 light-years from Earth. Despite diminishing in strength as time goes by, the artificial nature of this transmission should be detectable up to 10,000 light-years away, before the signal disappears completely. That’s what I call a long shelf life. However, this doesn’t mean that I still can't wait for the day NASA approves another robotic mission like New Horizons that will fly beyond our solar system.



Now...in terms of Hello From Earth being amusing, but not in a good way, if alien beings EVER DO detect and decipher this signal, and they actually speak um, English, then they will most likely be appalled by our transmission. Browse through all the messages on the Hello From Earth website (click on the first link posted at the start of this journal entry), and count to see how many of them actually have proper grammar and spelling. Not much. Granted, folks from all 195 nations (as well as Antarctica and Vatican City) submitted a message...so I really shouldn’t be expecting someone from Brazil, China or Iran to submit something that would imply they would win an English essay contest or something. But still, it’s just mind-boggling to think that extraterrestrials would get their first perception of Earthlings by reading this garbled nonsense. Oh well. Despite all this, I hope that COSMOS Magazine has another opportunity like Hello From Earth next year. After all, there are still more than 350 ‘exoplanets’ out there for us to send badly-worded greetings to. Live long and prosper.


"My name is Richard Par, and HELLO from planet Earth!!! I hope all is well in your civilization...and I hope you are a much more peaceful species than we are..."
Richard Par
August 17, 2009

PHOENIX Update... The photo above has been saved on my desktop since early June, so I thought I’d finally post it on my Blog. Also, the image below was released on the Phoenix mission’s official website
last month. *Sigh* All that dirt scattered around the Phoenix DVD...

At least the disc wasn’t installed with the readable side facing right-side-up on the deck of the lander. Then that would really suck.



Images courtesy of NASA / JPL - Caltech / University of Arizona / Texas A&M University

PHOENIX Blog Entries Archive:

May 8, 2007
July 28, 2007
August 3, 2007
August 4, 2007
August 8, 2007
October 25, 2007
April 11, 2008
April 25, 2008
May 1, 2008
May 11, 2008
May 18, 2008
May 24, 2008
May 25, 2008
May 27, 2008
June 18, 2008
August 4, 2008
November 10, 2008
May 25, 2009

Gary Rothstein / EPA

PHOTOS OF THE DAY... The launch of space shuttle Discovery was scrubbed for the second straight day, but oh well. When was the last time a shuttle launched on time? Um... 2007? Anyways, these three photos were taken during Discovery’s previous liftoff attempt yesterday. Meteorologists at NASA's Kennedy Space Center predicted an 80% chance of acceptable launch weather conditions for last night.

...

Needless to say, those meteorologists need a deduction in pay. That is all.


Justin Deniere / EPA


NASA / Ben Cooper

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS... I saw Quentin Tarantino’s latest flick last night, and I must say, it was a pretty good film. As a whole, that is. Before I get to the positive aspects of the movie, here are a few gripes I have about it:



-Inglourious Basterds at times felt like it was a film history course disguised as a World War II flick. The gist of some of the scenes: "Hey guys, I'm letting you know that old movies were once printed on lethal, explosive material that was projected at theaters! Google 'silver nitrate film' to know what I’m talking about! Oh, and look up 'Marlene Dietrich' on Wikipedia while you're at it."

-I obviously understand that Tarantino's signature trademarks in his movies are long scenes with witty dialogue in 'em. However, the long scenes in my opinion were only interesting when they dealt with German SS officer Hans Landa (who was terrifically played by Christoph Waltz. More on him later). The opening scene with him and that French dude at the farm was pretty intense. For other scenes with other characters, though, I was thinking, "Get to the f***in' point!"

-I was waiting for Mike Myers to break out with a "Yeeaaah baby, yeeaaah!" during his brief cameo. Though I will admit he still did a nice job keeping a straight face as the British general.



Now onto the positive parts:

-Christoph Waltz = A recipient of the Best Supporting Actor award next year (for both the Golden Globes and the Oscars)? His character may have had an extremely sudden change of heart at the end of the movie, but Waltz sure did an AWESOME JOB playing this Nazi "Jew Hunter".

-Brad Pitt totally kicks ass. He was amusing in the Oceans film trilogy by Steven Soderbergh, though I never saw The Curious Case of Benjamin Button last year. I was rooting for Pitt's Aldo Raine (a.k.a. "Aldo the Apache") to "kill some Nazis" whenever he showed up on screen. Carving swastikas into Germans’ foreheads was kinda cool too. And when he said he "wanted the scalps of a hundred dead Nazi soldiers", Raine wasn't joking.


-The guy who played Adolf Hitler should get props for his performance. Hell, everyone in the film should get props for making the movie feel more authentic with their all-out French and German conversations... They put the 'British-accents-on-Nazi-soldiers-'cause-Tom-Cruise-can't-speak-German-for-s**t' aspect of Valkyrie to shame.



And lastly...

-That was ONE COOL way of fictionalizing the end to the European front in World War II. Two Jewish "Basterds" blasting away at Hitler's corpse and hundreds of hapless German moviegoers inside that French theater = WIN. And what Aldo the Apache does to Hans Landa in the final scene of the movie = Another Win.

SO LAST NIGHT, I dreamt that Los Angeles was being invaded by the Vietnamese army. Viet Cong troops were burning down bridges, attacking buses and scouring neighborhoods for Angelenos to take prisoner. In a reversal of roles from the Vietnam War in real life, it was good ol’ Americans who had to seek hidden shelters underground. I’d say that this dream was funny, if it did’t feel scary. Being shot at by a bunch of Commie bastards whose descendants would later take residence in Orange County in California... In Westminster and Garden Grove, to be exact. No, those cities weren’t in the dream.

Oh, and the person on the left side of this photo is the good guy. General Nguyen Ngoc Loan. The dude he's, um, blow-drying is a Viet Cong soldier. The Geneva Convention states that if a soldier is caught fighting on the battlefield while not in a uniform, he/she can be summarily...blow-dried.

SINCE I HAVEN'T TALKED about Transformers in a while, just thought I’d post these two funny pieces of artwork...courtesy of Matt Moylan on LilFormers.com. The original "Pokemon/Smurformer" comic strip can be found here. The original "Devastator & His Promiscuous Son" strip can be seen here. I came up with those titles myself. Have a good day.

DISTRICT 9: The Review... I saw the critically-acclaimed sci-fi film twice this weekend (the first time I watched it was during a midnight screening on opening day last Friday. The second viewing was yesterday), so I think you can guess where this review is going. The movie was AWESOME. First-time feature film director Neill Blomkamp (with the help of Oscar-winning producer Peter Jackson) did a masterful job making a flick that was not only action-packed, but also carried a serious, intelligent message: If living beings from another world came to our planet one day, would we treat them the same way we occasionally treat fellow Earthlings who are completely different from us? With violence and extreme prejudice? District 9 handles this topic with intense and gory results. And I mean that in a positive way.



I’m not gonna do a full synopsis on District 9...since you can just read about the story online (or, um, watch the movie?). The main character, Wikus Van De Merwe, was superbly played by Sharlto Copley...a South African director/producer who made his debut acting performance in a feature film with this flick. If anyone accuses this movie of not having any character development, then that person is, how should I say politely, a friggin’ idiot? Not to spoil anything, but Van De Merwe goes from a bumbling pencil pusher at a shady security organization called MNU (for Multi-National United) to a figure who most decisively has a good reason to relate with the alien creatures—known derisively as prawns for their lobster-like appearances in the movie—whose ship settled over Wikus’ hometown of Johannesburg, South Africa 20 years earlier. Van De Merwe just wants to be a normal person and go home to his hot-ass wife Tania (played by Vanessa Haywood) at the end of the day, but fate has something else in store for him. Van De Merwe eventually has to team up with a prawn that goes by the name of Christopher Johnson, who along with his young son (Little C.J.?) has to recover a mysterious fluid that was responsible for Wikus’turn of fate, and is vital to Johnson saving his people after learning how they were treated by MNU outside the walls of District 9.



For a movie with a ‘mere’ $30 million budget, District 9 looked phenomenal. The FX work done on the prawns was well-done, and I just totally dug the scenes where you see the massive alien mothership hovering silently and ominously over the city of Johannesburg. I don’t want this to sound awkward, but am I the only one here who thought Little C.J. was, um...adorable? If you thought like I did, then you would feel more sympathy for Christopher Johnson (I’ll call him C.J. from this point on) because of his smart and heroic son who helped him on his plan to reactivate the mothership and start the process of freeing his people from their current predicament outside of Johannesburg. The rich characterization by C.J. and Little C.J. is testimony to the hard work done by several FX houses, including Peter Jackson’s own company Weta Digital...which also did the epic special effects for Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy. If I would have to take a wild guess for the Oscars next year, I would have to say that District 9 should be vying for the Best Visual FX award...along with Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and, um, G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra? HAHAHAHA! Just kidding about that last one.



Besides the alien creatures and the mothership, I also dug the FX work done on (Spoilers ahead) that robotic exosuit that Van De Merwe dons during the climax of the film...when he has to protect C.J. as he makes his way to his son and that alien shuttle that will take them up to the mothership. That suit reminded me of ED-209 from the first Robocop film, and the mech suits used during the 'Battle of Zion' sequence in The Matrix Revolutions. Speaking of Robocop, and Paul Verhoeven’s other smart action satire, Starship Troopers, District 9 had a lot of gory scenes like these two films. Most of that is attributed to the numerous shots of humans exploding whenever they were blasted by alien weaponry. The prawns are made to look pathetic as they wander around their squalid home in District 9, but me thinks that if they were in their home environment, with each of them armed with those large cannons that they casually exchanged for cat food during the film, then they would be to the humans what U.S. forces were to the Taliban in 2001. I’m talking about the war in Afghanistan, of course.



One last note before I end this review, the music in District 9 was pretty cool. But I think the African chant used by Hans Zimmer in Black Hawk Down (which you can clearly compare Neill Blomkamp’s film to, in a complimentary way) sounded a lot more unique. That is all. Along with The Hurt Locker, District 9 is the second best film I’ve seen this year...so far.

THESE PHOTOS PISS ME OFF...but not for the reasons you'd expect. NASA finally completed the assembly of the Ares I-X rocket yesterday...making it the first new launch vehicle to reside inside the Vehicle Assembly Building at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center in almost 30 years. Unfortunately, thanks to a series of delays, including that caused by the Hubble Servicing Mission...which was scheduled to launch in May of last year but didn’t get off the ground till this year, and the results of the Obama-appointed Augustine committee (which will most likely recommend to the president that the Ares I program be scrapped), Ares I-X might never fly. Or it WILL fly...but it will be nothing more than a publicity stunt since the launch vehicle that it is a prototype for will most likely be cancelled (Hell... It's as much a waste of money assembling Ares I-X without launching it as it is flying the vehicle as nothing more than a "glorified model rocket". Just launch the damn thing). *Sigh.* Screw you Congress, for not giving NASA the money it needs to send astronauts beyond Low-Earth Orbit once more. And screw you Obama...for not having any vision for our space program, and relying on some presidential panel to give you an inkling of an idea for what direction NASA should take. F**K THAT.


NASA / Dimitri Gerondidakis

ONE YEAR AGO TODAY... I went on a trip to Florida for the first time and took a cruise to The Bahamas (Nassau City, to be exact). Fun times. If you ignore the fact I gave the trip a B- because I wasn't able to visit Kennedy Space Center (KSC) due to Tropical Storm Fay. I'll upgrade the score to an A- since I was able to visit KSC earlier this year.


LINK: Photos I took in Florida and The Bahamas

SO I watched Return of the Jedi (a.k.a. Star Wars: Episode VI) on Spike TV earlier today...and I forgot how utterly kick-ass a film from the original Star Wars trilogy is. The space battle above Endor... Luke Skywalker goin' berserk on Darth Vader in that climactic lightsaber duel onboard the Death Star 2... Emperor Palpatine goin' berserk on Skywalker with that Force lightning attack... Yep, Episode VI rocks.