Four years later...

Has it really been four years since I last updated this blog?  It's hard for me to believe, but yes, it has been quite a while.  As I mentioned in that last post, the blog really started to mess with my work/life balance quite a bit when I started doing the "Io Volcano of the Week" feature.  It was a neat idea for generating fresh content for this site, but I ended up spending a ridiculous amount of time on those posts, to the detriment of the rest of my free time.

I think with Discovery proposal season wrapping up and all the warm, over-optimistic feels that generates, I think now is a good time to revive The Gish Bar Times blog, but I really want to go back to focusing on new papers, missions, and data rather than trying to generate a lot of fresh content that took up way to much of my free time and quickly left me worn out.  I think I had this feeling that I always had to come up with more posts when honestly, the focus of this blog is not generating much news right now, and that's okay.

That being said, I do have a long backlog of papers that I haven't discussed here in the last four years, so I should run out of things to talk about here for a while.  My favorite part about doing this blog is that it really forced me to read the current literature and writing articles about them really helped to reinforce what I read.

In the meantime, I wanted to point out this neat site which presents planetary maps for children, including Io, Europa, Mars, Venus, and Titan. The maps were created by a group of graphic artists for the ICA Commission on Planetary Cartography.  The Io map (a portion of which is shown at the top of the post) was created by Dóri Sirály.  I kinda wish the Titan map had more of a medieval map art style (like I keep saying I want to make myself...) but I think these are all well done.

Link: Planetary Maps for Children [childrensmaps.wordpress.com]
Link: Planetary Map Series for Children (LPSC abstract) [http://www.hou.usra.edu]

Blogger Static Pages at The Gish Bar Times

As some of you may have noticed, over the last couple of weeks, I have been taking advantage of Blogger's new Pages system, which allow me to add static pages to the blog and link them using tabs below the heading banner.  If you haven't noticed them, or read my blog using an RSS Reader and therefore haven't seen them, I encourage you to check them out or use them for reference if need be.  I have converted the Io Basics posts I wrote a few months into a static page for easier reference, and will use that to present a more extended introduction to Io and my blog.  The Io Information page is basically a copy of the three main Wikipedia articles on Io (Io, Exploration of Io, and Volcanism on Io) and provides a more extended introduction to Ionian science than what is provided in the About Gish Bar Times page.  I have also added an index of the Io Volcano of the Week articles and an informative table on spacecraft encounters with Io, both past and future.

Perhaps the most significant static page I have added is a zoomable global map of Io.  The map is based on the USGS global basemap and includes labels for named surface features.  The Zoomify map, based on Adobe Flash, allows you to zoom in on the global map as well as pan around using the buttons at the bottom of the player, the navigation inset at top left, or clicking and dragging across the image.  You can even expand the image to display full-screen on your computer monitor.  In the future I hope to add more functionality to this page, including separate layers for the labels and another indicating the location of plumes and hotspots.  Not sure I can do that with Zoomify, so I am open to other suggestions for perhaps using other platforms.

Link: Zoomable Global Map of Io [www.gishbartimes.org]

The Carnival of Space: Issue #166

Welcome one and all to Io and the Gish Bar Times for this week's Carnival of Space - a weekly series of articles highlighting the best space exploration blogs have to offer.  Each week a different blog hosts the festivities, and this week the Gish Bar Times was selected as the host.  The Carnival is organized by Universe Today, and you can check out their website for information on how to participate in future editions of the Carnival of Space and for back issues.

Now when Fraser selected my blog to host this week's Carnival of Space, I was in a quandary over how to organize the submitted articles.  Last time I hosted back in October, I faced a similar, perplexing problem.  How do I make it unique?  For that edition, I settled on ordering the subject planetary/stellar bodies by the amount of energy output, placing fairly inert bodies like the Moon and the asteroids first, then more energetic moons and planets next, then stars, and finally the universe in general.  So for this issue of the Carnival of Space, that just wouldn't do.  For this Carnival, let's try out the old tried and true, Chronological order.

So welcome, stay awhile, explore the Gish Bar Times and the great space articles discussed below.  And as always, don't feed the space bears! Yes, they are part of the carnival, but they have this special diet, I really don't want to get into it...  Anyways, enjoy!

We begin this journey through time, space, and space blogs by visiting the Rundetaarn, a nearly 400-year-old Danish observatory in Copenhagen, built during the waning years of the Thirty Years' War.  Ian Musgrave has posted a series of photos from his visit to the observatory on his blog, Astroblog.  The Rundetaarn was built in the early days of telescopic astronomy, only three decades after Galileo's discovery of Io and the other Galilean satellites.  One important task that the early astronomers at Rundetaarn and backyard astronomers today needed to perform was determining true north.  The Urban Astronomer has a treatise on a simple method for determining true north by using the Sun at local noon, a method simple enough to be possible on almost any solid surface in the Solar System.

Over the next few hundred years, telescopes were used to make a number of momentous discoveries, far too many to recount here.  One such revelation in the 19th Century was the connection drawn between short-period comets and meteor showers.  The story of the Perseids and their parent comet, 55P/Swift-Tuttle, is explored at Simostronomy.  Alan Boyle over at the Cosmic Log provides an observer's guide to this year's incarnation of the Perseid meteor shower, which peaks this week.

Also in the 19th Century, German astronomer Samuel Heinrich Schwabe and Swiss astronomer Rudolf Wolf discovered that solar activity waxed and waned with a period of 10.7 years.  This periodicity is known as the Solar cycle.  At solar minimum, the number of sunspots is low, approaching zero at times.  At solar maximum, as we are expected to reach in the next few years, solar activity is high with more than 100 sunspots at a time observed as well as severe coronal mass ejections (CMEs), which create concentrations of charged particles that seem like gusts and gales in the solar wind.  The Sun's activity at solar maximum can wreck havoc on the electrical systems of orbiting satellites.  The Chandra Blog explores the effects of the upcoming solar maximum on the X-ray space observatory, and how this Solar cycle maybe weaker than expected.  Of course, tell that to people in the mid-northern and mid-southern latitudes of our planet last week as a powerful CME touched off spectacular auroral displays.  PlanetBye presented a series of pictures from Scandinavia of the incredible aurora borealis that were visible last week.  Unfortunately, I live too far south in the United States to have seen them in person, so thanks to Bente Lilja Bye for hosting these great pictures.  As he and other aurora watchers waited for last week's display, Stuart Atkinson over at Cumbrian Sky recounted his experiences of amazing set of aurora borealis over the UK in April 2000.

We move on now to the 20th Century where a major development in our exploration of space was the commencement of manned spaceflight.  In 1961, US President John F. Kennedy committed his country to the goal of landing men on the Moon before the end of the decade.  The effort succeeded despite its champion's tragic death, but when it was initially proposed, there were several competing schemes for accomplishing this goal.  David Portree over at Beyond Apollo took at look at one such idea called Lunar-Surface Rendezvous (LSR) and presented by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory that would have included a number of unmanned probes for each manned landing site.  In the end, only Apollo 12 landed near an earlier unmanned landing site, visiting Surveyor 3.  The most recent manned spaceflight development, new equipment and capabilities continue to be added to the International Space Station, even as the Space Shuttle winds down.  Kentucky Space has a video showing the installation of the NanoRacks system on the station, a new platform that NASA says went from "concept to on-orbit capability in less than 10 months."  collectSPACE discussed a humanoid robot called Robonaut 2 that will be going to the space station with the Shuttle Discovery on STS-133 in November.  Perhaps the coming of even testing models of humanoid robots should go in the paragraph about the end of the world at the end of this post ;-)

Of course, humans are not the only ones exploring space, as our robotic emissaries beam back images of the planets and moons of our solar system.  This week, on my own blog, I discussed what we can learn at Jupiter's moon Io while the satellite is in eclipse, how Io is not quite as smelly as this summer's news reports suggest, and the volcanic history and geology of one of Io's volcanoes, Zal Patera.

Despite the doomsayers, the end of manned spaceflight is not nigh, as engineers and scientists are looking to the future of human exploration of the solar system and beyond.  One group is the Space Studies Institute, which is getting ready for the Space Manufacturing 14 conference on the technology and policy needed for space settlement.  Habitation Intention has an interview up with Dr. Lee Valentine, the executive vice-president of the Space Studies Institute.  Of course, getting to other places in the solar system is half the battle, and Next Big Future has a pair of articles on a study by high school student Erika DeBenedictis on low-energy trajectories and a video by Reaction Engines demonstrating their designs on a proposed Mars mission.

We may even find that we are not alone in this universe as we begin our exploration of our own little corner of it.   Centauri Dreams examines Project Argus, which would use quite a number of radio telescope to provide more continuous temporal coverage of the entire sky in order to look for short radio bursts from extraterrestrial civilizations.  WeirdWarp this week discussed the possibility of finding artifacts from aliens on nearby worlds in the solar system, particularly on the Moon (with shades of 2001: A Space Odyssey). Finally, Weird Sciences has a pair of posts suggesting that extraterrestrial contact is not a crazy idea, even given the vast distances to even the closest star systems.  They also discuss the possible evidence we have on hand for life elsewhere in the solar system.

All good things must eventually come to an end.  A pair of blogs this week looked at our end in the distant future.  StarryCritters examined a composite image of the Antennae Galaxies (NGC 4038 and 4039), created from data taken by the Hubble, Chandra, and Spitzer Space Telescopes.  These galaxies are in the process of colliding, creating spectacular displays at visible, X-ray, and infrared wavelengths, much as the Milky Way and Andromeda Galaxies will in a few billion years time.  It also doesn't help that our universe isn't getting any younger and that we are all headed toward a very dimly lit distant future, all thanks to entropy as discussed in a podcast [MP3 file] over at Cheap Astronomy.

Thanks everyone for coming out here to the best moon in the solar system for this Carnival of Space!  I hope everyone enjoys these wonderful articles.

New URL for the The Gish Bar Times

With the second birthday for The Gish Bar Times coming up on Thursday, I want to go ahead and announce the blog's new URL: http://gishbartimes.org.  The old Blogspot URL will remain active, just redirecting you to the new site so you should never have any problems accessing the site or finding information on this site using Google.  Hopefully, people will find it easier to reach this blog by using this url.

Again, you don't need to do anything if you subscribe to the blog's RSS feed, subscribe via Google Reader, or have this site bookmarked, but certainly I would recommend changing to this new url if you like.  It looks like there are a few elements on the site that no longer work on the old gishbar.blogspot.com url, like some of the sidebar elements, like the ability to send a page to one of the social network sites like Digg or Facebook or Google Friend Connect.  I also had to recreate my blogroll.  For whatever reason, my ability to quick edit a post is gone with these custom urls.

Anyways, excuse the mess while we go through this transition to the new URL. Also allows a couple of days for the new URL to work its way through everyone's DNS listings.

Io Basics

Have you come to this blog looking for basic information on Io?  Well many of the posts here may seem a bit overwhelming without a bit of understanding of the main topic, Jupiter's moon Io.  In this post, I have organized a list of link that will be helpful to new visitors, as well as a list of overview posts that highlight the latest in Io science:

Overview of Io

Io is the innermost of the four large moons of Jupiter known as the Galilean satellites.  Io is a little larger than the Earth's moon but has a surface that couldn't be more different.  While the ancient surface of our moon is dominated by impact craters and large basalt "mare" provinces that are 3-4 billion years old, Io's surface is continuously being renewed, with more than 400 volcanic depressions known as a paterae and more than 130 mountains, the vast majority of which are created by tremendous compressional stresses in Io's crust.  The engine for this violent volcanic activity is tidal heating.  Io's orbit is slightly eccentric and Jupiter's gravitational pull on Io varies over the course of an Ionian day.  The moons Europa and Ganymede help to prevent Io from circularizing its orbit, keeping the heat engine in Io's mantle running.

For more information on Io and its volcanism, check out the following links:

• On Wikipedia, check out the Io and Volcanism on Io articles.  Both are featured articles on the online encyclopedia, representing some of the best content there.  Plus, I regularly review content changes to those articles in order to maintain their high quality.  I am also beginning to prepare more articles on several of Io's volcanic features, such as Pele, Masubi, and Tawhaki Vallis.
• Janet Wood created a neat site about 10 years ago on Io that is still helpful for providing an overview of Io science called Io: Jupiter's Volcanic Moon
• The USGS has a website dedicated to planetary nomenclature, or surface feature names. Their section on Io provides a list of official names used for volcanoes and mountains on Io.
• Looking for a map of Io?  Scientists at the USGS office in Flagstaff created a basemap based on Voyager and Galileo images of the satellite several years ago.  Several versions of this map can be found on their website as well as a PDF version of the color basemap with feature names added.
• Looking for images from the Voyager, Galileo, or New Horizons spacecraft?  A good place to look for officially released versions of spacecraft images is the Planetary Photojournal, which has a page for Io images.  I also have a page where I've done my own processing of the raw data from Voyager, Galileo, and New Horizons.

From the Blog

While generally I post articles related to recent news or the latest papers, from time to time I also post articles that provide an overview of a topic of Ionian research, whether it is on the formation of Io's volcanoes or the composition of its surface.  I believe these articles are of the most interest to new readers, so I've listed a few of them here:

• Formation of Paterae (volcanic craters) on Io
• Formation of Mountains on Io
• The Chemical Composition of Io
• Boösaule Montes: The Tallest Mountain on Io
• The Curious Case of Reiden Patera
• It's Not Easy Being Green: The Chaac Patera Story
• Io@400: A series of posts covering Galileo Galilei's Discovery of Io in 1610
• Astronomy from Io
• The Potential for Science at Io from the upcoming Juno mission
• Summary of the proposed Io Volcano Observer mission
• The Potential for Science at Io from the upcoming Europa/Jupiter System Mission

I hope you all enjoy you visit to the Gish Bar Times!

Io@400: The 400th Anniversary of Galileo's Discovery of the Galilean Moons

Thursday is the 400th anniversary of the discovery of Io and the other Galilean satellites by Galileo Galilei.  In celebration of this event, I will be posting a series of articles here over the next five days covering various topics related to the discovery of the Galilean moons.  On Monday and Tuesday, we will look at Galileo's first observations with a telescope building on the design of a Dutch patent by Hans Lippershey.  On Wednesday, we will look at Simon Marius and the claim of priority he presented in his 1614 book, Mundus Iovialis anno M.DC.IX Detectus Ope Perspicilli Belgici.  On Thursday, we will take a look back at January 7, 1610.  Finally, on Friday, we will take a look at Galileo's treatise on his discoveries with the telescope, Sidereus Nuncius, and the effects his discoveries had on his career.

• Monday, January 4: Copernicus, Galileo, and the Invention of the Spyglass
• Tuesday, January 5: Looking through the telescope in 1609
• Wednesday, January 6: Simon Marius and the Mundi Iovialis
• Thursday, January 7: 400 years ago today, Cosmica Sidera
• Friday, January 8: The Starry Messenger

I will update this post with the links to these post as they go online over the next few days.  Keep in mind that I am in the Mountain Time Zone here in the US and I will post these articles in the evening here, so they will show up early the next day from what is indicated for European readers or in the early afternoon the next day for Australian readers.  Like I asked a few days ago, if you know of any star parties or other events occurring over this week in commemoration of this important anniversary in astronomy, send me an email and I'll post about them here.

Happy Io Discovery Day!

The Carnival of Space: Issue #126

Welcome to the 126th Edition of the Carnival of Space!  Each week, the Carnival of Space is hosted by different blogs and provides links to the best in the space and astronomy blogosphere so everyone can be kept up-to-date.  We are this week's hosts!  For earlier editions of the CoS, or if you want to learn how you too can participate in the Carnival, check out the Carnival of Space archive at the Universe Today.

Now, since I learned I would host the Carnival of Space, I wracked my brain on how I would organize the links.  Would I go the traditional route, outward from the sun?  Would I go from smallest celestial body to largest, or vice versa?  This week's carnival is the first Carnival to be hosted on Jupiter's innermost large satellite, Io, and in honor of that fact, I thought it would be a nice change of pace to go in order of least "active" to most "active", in terms of the amount of internal energy escapes that body.

We will start first at the Moon.  In recent years, various space agencies around the world have been racing to send unmanned probes to our nearest celestial neighbor.  In NASA's most recent entry, the LCROSS satellite and its Centaur booster impacted within a permanently shadowed area near the Moon's south pole on October 9 in search of water.  Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy took a look a look at the mission's "impact" on his fellow Earthlings versus the spacecraft's actual impact on the Moon.  The discovery of a lava tube skylight by Japan's Kaguya spacecraft inspired blog posts by Emily Lakdawalla at the Planetary Society Blog, focusing on Kaguya's results, and by Ian O'Neill at Astro Engine, who took a look at the discovery's impact on possible human settlement of the Moon.  For a bit of a historical perspective on the future of manned exploration of the Moon, Louise Riofrio at A Babe in the Universe took a look at Apollo moon samples and reflected on the Apollo missions' impact on life here on Earth.  Finally, Hui Chieh at My Dark Sky showed off some great images of a crescent moon as imaged from Pulau Tioman, Malaysia.

The next most active place we shall visit is Mars.   The Mars Exploration Rovers continue to chug along at Gusev and Meridiani Planum.  Well, Opportunity is anyway.  That rover continues to make its way toward the crater Endeavour, checking out meteorites along the way.  Stuart Atkinson at Road To Endeavour brings his poetic license to the latest of these, Mackinac.  At Beyond Apollo, David Portree showed off pictures of models of a canceled pre-Viking, Mars lander, the Automatic Biological Laboratory, currently at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science.

From Mars, we move back toward the Sun to our own planet, Earth.  More specifically, let's take a look at what folks were talking about regarding the exploration of space by sentient primates from that volcanically active world.  The big news of the week was the release of the final report from the Augustine Commission, a committee that took a look at the current state of the United States' manned spaceflight program, where it should be directed over the next two decades, and how NASA's budget should be adjusted to meet those goals.  Nancy Atkinson at Universe Today and Steinn Sigurdsson at Dynamics of Cats both provide an overview and their opinions regarding this report.  Chuck Black at Commercial Space compares the chairman of the commission, Norm Augustine, to Liber Augustin and Augustine's 1990 assessment of the US manned spaceflight program.  One issue highlighted in the Augustine report is the need for NASA to work with private spaceflight endeavors.  Alan Boyle at MSNBC's Cosmic Log provides two reports from the ISPCS conference in New Mexico.  These posts examine the need for the public and private spaceflight programs to work together and low-cost commercial spaceflight. 21st Century Waves has an interview with Stephen Ashworth and examines whether the optimism in spaceflight seen in the Apollo era might be making a comeback.

Looking further into the future of human spaceflight, Weird Warp talks about the potential of moonbases and their requirements. At The Next Big Future, Brian Wang notes the upcoming Space Elevator Games beaming competition and has a cool trailer. Triggered by a 1997 article by Freeman Dyson, Music of the Spheres discusses the prospects and the possible timing for our expansion into the Greater Solar System.  Looking at spaceflight today, Robert Pearlman at collectSPACE talks about a scarf owned by Amelia Earhart that will taken up into space on the Shuttle Atlantis next month by her photographer's grandson.  Cheap Astronomy presents their IYA 365 Days of Astronomy podcast covering the TDRS system, a group of satellites used to communicate with International Space Station and the Space Shuttle, for example.

Looking at Earth, beyond just the exploration of its nearby space by humans, Robert Simpson at Orbiting Frog discusses fun ways to destroy our home planet.  I like death by Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle myself.  Another potential way to destroy our planet may be balloon boy hoax stories in the media, which Ray Villard at Cosmic Ray examines with an eye towards the media's interest in pseudoscience.

From Earth, we go to the most volcanically active moon in the Solar System, Jupiter's moon Io.  From this blog, I summarized a paper presenting a new geologic map of the volcano Prometheus, the site of a persistently active volcanic plume.

Finally, we move beyond the Earth and move out into the wider, more energetic universe, in this case looking at astronomy here on Earth.  Robert Simpson suggests checking out the Astronomy Stars project, a South African site with tips and advice on how to communicate astronomy to the public and the media.  For those with a space blog or are considering starting one, this site is a great resource.  Alice's Astro Info has a video providing tips for buying your first telescope (you may not like her first answer...).  Steve's Astro Corner has a post about the Cincinnati Observatory on Mt. Adams, what he calls the birthplace of American astronomy.  The Chandra Blog, which focuses the results and observations of Chandra X-Ray Space Observatory, takes a look at a new visualization of the Chandra Source Catalog, a collection of information of all of Chandra's observations imported into Google Sky.

I hope you all enjoyed this tour of this week's best of the space blogosphere.  Hope you all have a great week!

New Blog

Well, after 7 years of absence, it is time to restart my Io website. This is actually the site's third incarnation. The first I started almost 10 years ago. The second I started up on Fortunecity in 1999. You actually still visit that website at http://volcanopele.fortunecity.com/. Unfortuately, Fortunecity's file storage capacity decreased to the point where for some reason, I got locked out of the account, but the website remained online. Then college happened. In 2004, I started working on the Cassini mission, currently in orbit around Saturn nowhere near Jupiter and Io.

Early last year, my attention returned to Io thanks to New Horizons. I became interested in what had happened on Io since Galileo last looked at it in October 2001 before crashing into Jupiter in September 2003. After posting some analysis of the New Horizons LORRI images on the Unmannedspaceflight.com website, I was privileged to be a co-author on the Science magazine paper on the New Horizons results at Io. Also the year before, I co-wrote a review chapter for Rosaly Lopes and John Spencer's book Io After Galileo on that probe's mission at Io.

So over the last year, in my spare time, I've been drawn back to Io: reprocessing Galileo and Voyager images, working with the New Horizons images, and editing the Wikipedia article on Io. Now, a blog.

Wait, a blog about Jupiter's Moon Io? But there isn't a spacecraft within 100 million km of it!

True, but that doesn't mean that there is no news, new images, or potential discussion points about everyone's favorite moon. I plan on reporting on papers and abstracts that are released and explaining some of these new results. I will post some of my reprocessed images that I've been working on. If any readers are amateur astrophotographers (or professional, I'm not discriminatory), and you have some nice Jupiter-Io shots to share, pass them along. Got some new volcano news you like to share, I would love to hear it.

Obviously, since news is not being generated daily about Io, there will some off-topic posts, like movies I am enjoying at the moment or the latest Europa news to annoy me (hey, wanna be creative and make some nice anti-Europan propaganda posters, pass them along). Obviously, as a new blog, we'll see how this goes.

I hope you all enjoy!