Herschel detects water in Jupiter's stratosphere. Image: ESA/Herschel/T. Cavalié et al.; Jupiter image: NASA/ESA/Reta Beebe (New Mexico State University)

The Herschel Space Telescope was never meant for hot astronomy topics. It was meant for the cool ones. The European Space Agency spacecraft officially ended its observations yesterday when the last of its liquid helium, used to keep the telescope’s temperature close to absolute zero, was exhausted after three years of operation.

Herschel was launched in 2009 and spent its mission orbiting at L2, one of five Lagrangian points in the Earth-Sun system that are gravitationally stable. L2 is nearly a million miles farther from the sun than Earth is — ESA’s Planck Space Telescope, among others, is already stationed there, and it’s the future location of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. That far from the Sun is an ideal place to look at cool objects.

Observing in a broad spectral range from the far infrared to submillimeter wavelengths, Herschel could study dim objects, like asteroids in the Kuiper belt at the edge of our solar system, or debris disks where planets are forming around other stars. It also saw red-shifted light from early and active star-forming galaxies. Herschel hunted for water around the universe, finding ice particles heated by ultraviolet light from stars in many protoplanetary disks, and discovering that nearly all the water in Jupiter’s atmosphere was brought to the planet by comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 in 1994.

Herschel had the largest infrared mirror ever launched into space — at 3.5 meters in diameter, it’s more than a meter bigger than the Hubble Space Telescope’s. (JWST’s mirror, however, will be almost twice as big as Herschel’s.) Scientists are still reviewing data from the space observatory, so even though the spacecraft has gone dead, discoveries will likely still be made. Indeed, astronomers are hoping that a brand new ground-based observatory can leapfrog off of Herschel’s contributions in studying the “cool” universe: ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile, began operating earlier this year and should be fully operational in September. Combining their data should tell us much about the early universe and galaxy formation.

A tweet from science fiction writer David Brin alerted me to some of the fun and innovative things people are doing with space-y graphics and visualizations—everything from a weightless Google page to an animation of the Sun and planets moving together through the Milky Way.

My favorite is this simulation, created by software engineer Ian Webster, of all the asteroids orbiting the Sun in Earth’s vicinity. The simulation is designed for Chrome, but works in some other browsers, too. (If you don’t see a giant swarm of asteroids, you’re not getting the full effect.)

Webster even lets you sort the rocks by their accessibility and economic value. Watching all these would-be impactors crossing Earth’s orbit makes me glad that asteroids are small and space is big.

Detail from a unique wide-angle hand mosaic of Surveyor 1's shadow on the Oceanus Procellarum, June 13, 1966. The mosaic is made of 66 gelatin silver prints in all, and measures 18 by 59 inches. (Each image mounted on the mosaic is approximately 6 by 6 inches.) The piece (lot #62) is estimated to go for $80,000 to $100,000. Photograph courtesy Bonhams auction house.

If you grew up near Bethpage, New York in the early 1960s, you probably were obsessed with the Apollo Lunar Module built by the Long Island-based Grumman Corporation. And if you were an extremely prescient teenager, you might have started amassing your own world-class collection of space-related items, including photographs, manuscripts, and prints.

Pierre Henri Puiseux and Maurice Lowey's large-format quadrant of the moon. Photograph courtesy Bonhams.

This Wednesday, Bonhams is auctioning off one such private collection. In a video on Bonhams’ Website, the collector (who wishes to remain anonymous) explains that he grew up “during the height of the windup to the Apollo era,” just a few miles from Grumman, and many of the fathers in his neighborhood worked on the Lunar Module. “I was working towards a goal fairly early on,” he recalls in the video. “In my early- to mid-teens, what I wanted to do was to have an exhibition focusing on unmanned space travel.”

Many of the items are one-of-a kind. The lunar photomosaic above (see the full image here), was made as a five-foot-wide presentation piece in 1966, and was painstakingly assembled by Kay Larson of the U.S. Geological Survey using images captured by Surveyor 1. “I’m lucky to have found this—it would have been thrown in the trash, eventually,” the collector notes.

John Russell's lunar globe, circa 1797. Photograph courtesy Bonhams.

There are objects relating to Mars, Mercury, Venus, and Jupiter, but Earth’s moon is the centerpiece of this show. Some of the items predate the space age. One particularly lovely object is a photograph made up of four large-format quadrants of the moon, taken in 1899, and probably created for the 1900 Paris Exposition. The photogravures, by Pierre Henri Puiseux and Maurice Loewy, were taken at the Paris Observatory. “It was only with NASA’s Lunar Orbiters in the 1960s,” reads the collection note, “that images substantially better than those of Loewy and Puiseux were obtained.” The plates are from Puiseux and Loewy’s Atlas photographique de la lune. The two men were able to photograph the moon only during perfect weather, the catalog notes, which meant just 50 or 60 nights each year—explaining why the Atlas took 14 years to complete. These may be the first oversize plates from the Atlas to come up for auction, and are expected to bring $12,000 to $18,000.

British pastel portraitist John Russell (the appointed painter to the King and the Prince of Wales) was so fascinated with the moon that he created a lunar globe in 1797, which he called a Selenographia. Russell spent many years drawing and observing the moon; his globe even accounts for lunar motion, or libration. No more than 11 Selenographias are believed to exist; six are in public collections. This example, lot number 23,  is expected to fetch between $200,000 to $300,000.

The original Hubble cost billions. The new mirrors, at least, are free.

NASA is asking astronomers for help in figuring out what to do with a rare gift — a pair of half-assembled space telescopes, each the size of Hubble — donated earlier this year by the National Reconnaissance Office. The space agency’s astrophysics division is about to recruit members of a study team to look into how the telescopes might be used for either of two proposed missions — to study dark energy or to search for planets around other stars. The study group will hold its first meeting in November and report by the end of April. Their findings will then be folded into a wider study of possible uses for the telescopes, beyond just astrophysics.

How did NASA get such a windfall?  The NRO, which builds and operates U.S. spy satellites, had two telescope assemblies (including 2.4-meter mirrors, but no instruments or spacecraft) left over from its canceled Future Imagery Architecture program. The mirrors are the same size as Hubble’s, and would offer a telescope with a wider field of view.

In different times, space scientists would be giddy at the prospect of free, Hubble-class mirrors. But NASA’s science budget has been so depleted by big-ticket items like the Mars Curiosity rover and the forthcoming James Webb Space Telescope that there’s no money left to turn the donated NRO mirror assemblies into completed space telescopes. Astronomers’ next priority for a large space mission is the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST), which would hunt for evidence of dark energy. Using the NRO hardware would save NASA some $250 million by some estimates, but the agency still doesn’t have enough money to finish the WFIRST project, which will cost upwards of $1.6 billion.

So, it’s a dilemma. And now it’s the astronomy community’s dilemma.

September 4 update: A workshop on the NRO telescopes is being held this week at Princeton University.

Titan and Dione (the smaller moon) against the face of Saturn (Cassini image)

One of the solar system’s most interesting places just got even more interesting.

Scientists studying data from the U.S./European Cassini probe in orbit around Saturn report (in this week’s Science magazine) that the fog-covered moon Titan most likely has an ocean some 60 miles beneath its icy surface.

The Cassini team infers the ocean from the way the moon flexes due to gravitational tides as it circles Saturn.  The amount of flexing is greater than one would expect if Titan were made entirely of solid rock.

Titan — already the only place in the solar system beside Earth with surface lakes — now joins a small group of water worlds: Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto, all moons of Jupiter.

The ocean had been predicted (below) but it’s nice to have empirical evidence.

The June 8, 2004 transit. Photograph courtesy Jan Herold.

When you drive to your local observatory to witness the Transit of Venus next Tuesday, spare a thought for the men who sought to witness the spectacle in 1761. As Andrea Wulf writes in her new book Chasing Venus: The Race to Measure the Heavens, in 1760, astronomer Joseph-Nicolas Delisle asked his colleagues to participate in an international collaboration to observe the transit of Venus.

Jean-Baptiste Chappe d’Auteroche, slowly making his way from France to Tobolsk, Siberia,

“endured a cold he ‘had not before experienced.’ Even inside the carriage the temperatures were so low that one day he fumbled out his thermometer with numb fingers and scrawled in his journal ‘eleven degrees below 0.’ He had to wade waist-high through sluggishly floating ice when the carriage crashed through the frozen surface that had transformed the rapid rivers into temporary roads—probably no surprise given that the instruments alone weighed more than half a ton. The hilly roads on land posed other problems as they were covered ‘from top to bottom’ with an icy glaze. Even when they put all ten horses in front of one carriage, they found they couldn’t move it. Much of the way through the mountains they had to walk, slipping and falling, and were soon covered in bruises. Sometimes strong winds blasted clouds of snow high up into the air, whipping the flakes into frozen pellets. The coachman, who was most exposed to the frosty assault, ‘could not stand it’ and ran away.”

Or this poor guy, Anders Planman, traveling from Sweden to Kajana, Finland:

“To reach Finland, he had to cross the frozen Gulf of Bothnia by sledge, but the severe winter had laid an unusually thick blanket of snow over Scandinavia. The whipping waves had congealed into a frosted picture, as if someone had snapped a finger to stop the world. In place of a smooth surface the Gulf of Bothnia was a treacherous icescape of ‘superb stalactites of a blue green colour.’ Though stunningly beautiful, it made for dangerous traveling. Sledges had to follow the hardened lines of the waves, regularly overturning when one side would suddenly be ‘raised perpendicularly in the air.’ Wrapped up in thick pelts, the passengers were often catapulted out of their sledges like furry cannonballs and the horses then galloped off, scared, as another traveler described, ‘at the sight of what they supposed to be a wolf or bear rolling on the ice.’”

The "Transit of Venus March" by John Philip Sousa. Courtesy Library of Congress.

Observers in North America will see the transit of Venus the evening of June 5th. You can download a free Transit of Venus phone app here.

Want some musical accompaniment? Listen to a recording of John Philip Sousa’s “Transit of Venus March,” courtesy of the Library of Congress. The piece was composed in 1883 in honor of Joseph Henry, the first Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution.

An artist's conception of GJ 1214b

Astronomers announced this week that they’ve confirmed the existence of a new class of planet — a hot, watery, exotic “super-Earth.”

A little over two years ago, astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics discovered an exoplanet that we agreed was worth some extra attention. The planet, designated GJ 1214b, is only 2.7 times the diameter of Earth — one of the smallest exoplanets found — and orbits just over a million miles from its star (compare to Earth’s 92 million miles) in a zippy 38-hour ‘year.’

Given its size and density, astronomers speculated that GJ 1214b may very well be covered in deep oceans. The Harvard-Smithsonian team kept studying it, enlisting the Hubble Space Telescope to get more data about the planet’s atmosphere. “We’re using Hubble to measure the infrared color of sunset on this world,” said astronomer Zachory Berta in this week’s release. The data seem to confirm that GJ 1214b has a very steamy atmosphere, thick with water vapor.

Even more intriguing is that due to the temperature (being so close to its red dwarf star makes it around 450 degrees Fahrenheit) and extreme pressures, all that water gets a bit…exotic. Materials “like ‘hot ice’ or ‘superfluid water’ – substances that are completely alien to our everyday experience” would form, according to Berta. We emailed Berta to ask if he could explain these strange materials further.

Frankly, it’s difficult for me to imagine what these exotic forms of water would be like – we have very little experience with them here on Earth. They’re simply how the molecule H2O acts when it is in high pressure and temperature environments …

Our closest point of comparison is that the outer atmosphere might be something like a hot, steamy oven that you would use to bake bread with nice crust. But as you go deeper into the planet, you would encounter these exotic forms of water. I should add, however, that there’s still an enormous uncertainty about the composition of the planet overall. Yes, the observations point to a planet that is rich in water, but what is it mixed with, and in what proportions? Really visualizing the “surface” of this planet (if there is one!) will require us figuring those things out!

But whatever the case, the temperatures are too high for liquid water as we know it to exist on GJ1214b.

We feel obligated to point out that if you’re going to google “hot ice” like we did, the first hit you get is this video; we asked Berta if that’s what he was talking about. He replied, “Sadly, I don’t think the YouTube video would be a great example. It shows water that’s saturated with sodium acetate, and the sodium acetate is crystalizing into the solid form. I’d really rather you didn’t link to it [ed note -- Sorry!], because that’s not what we think is going on.” OK, we crossed it off our “What Hot Ice Might Be Like” list.

Given the existence of water, we also asked Berta if he would “speculate wildly” on the question of life on GJ 1214b:

There’s probably no liquid water anywhere on this planet, so nope, I won’t speculate wildly about what sort of life could live there. Sorry! I can’t imagine it – the temperature would be too high for the large, complex molecules that make life possible to survive. But I will say this, which I think is an important point along the same lines:

What makes me excited about these observations is really the technique, the idea that we can use a telescope to observe the atmosphere of a very distant planet. GJ1214b is too hot for life, but it’s not too difficult for us to imagine that we could make similar observations of the atmosphere of a planet that was a little cooler in temperature than GJ1214b and could potentially host life. Microbial and plant life on Earth have dramatically altered our atmosphere over its history. If they did the same on another planet orbiting another star, observations like these of that planet’s atmosphere might then be able to tell us whether or not there is life elsewhere in our galaxy.

Our efforts to send people to the moon seemed to cause an existential crisis regarding our place in the universe, and in 1968 two exceptional short films were produced in response.  Cosmic Zoom was one of the first valiant tries to make the size of things knowable. Many of you might have seen this Canadian-produced movie in school, watching as it zoomed from a boy rowing his canoe out, out, out to the edges of our (then) knowable universe and back again. The American film Powers of Ten was the other big hit that year, starting in a park on a summer day and stepping back at, well, powers of ten.

Another high-quality visualization, the Interactive Scale of the Universe Tool, was made just a couple years ago. It uses a bar you can drag from yocotometers to yottometers (and if those two words are the coolest thing you learn today, we don’t blame you).

We got to thinking about these scaling attempts when we stumbled upon the most recent version. The Known Universe, produced by the American Museum of Natural History in New York, is essentially a 21st-century upgrade to Cosmic Zoom. The graphics are from scientific data pulled from their Digital Universe Atlas, a project they’ve maintained with the Hayden Planetarium for the last decade. The video is part of an exhibit, Visions of the Cosmos: From the Milky Ocean to an Evolving Universe, that runs at AMNH through May 10.

Update: One of our colleagues reminded us of another interactive visualization by the Smithsonian Center for Education and Museum Studies that allows you to compare astronomical objects to relatable every day objects, like basketballs and baseballs, and even overlay distances onto Google Maps.

And, of course, this beautiful moonset, which was filmed over the North Atlantic ocean on January 9.  The video is sped up: the sequence covers 10 minutes as the station orbited from northeast of the Caribbean to just west of Europe.

Click on the image to watch the video.

January 22, 2012 solar flare. Photo courtesy NASA/SDO/AIA.

Despite being the strongest solar storm since 2005, this week’s flareup appears to have caused few disruptions on Earth. (As Space.com reports, the Coronal Mass Ejection “hit Earth at an angle, so the electromagnetic burst was largely shielded by the planet’s magnetic field.”)

But the storm did lead some airlines—including Delta, Qantas, and Air Canada—to alter their transpolar routes to reduce potential disruptions to high-frequency radio communication along the way. At least one Qantas flight, reports AvWeb, carried an extra five tons of fuel in order to fly a less southerly route.

We may have gotten off easy. The remarkable electrical effects of solar storms have been recorded in newspapers since British astronomer Richard Carrington noticed a solar eruption in 1859 while sketching sun spots seen through his telescope. Just days later, the northern lights—seen as far south as Cuba—damaged telegraph systems, even setting offices on fire and melting wires. On August 30, 1859, the New York Times included this observation from the superintendent of the Canadian Telegraph Company:

I never, in my experience of fifteen years in the working of telegraph lines, witnessed anything like the extraordinary effect of the Aurora Borealis, between Quebec and Further Point last night. The line was in most perfect order, and well-skilled operators worked incessantly from 8 o’clock last evening till 1 o’clock this morning, to get over in even a tolerably intelligent form about four hundred words of the steamer Indian‘s report for the Associated Press, and at the latter hour so completely were the wires under the influence of the Aurora Borealis, it was found utterly impossible to communicate between the telegraph stations, and the line was closed for the night.

Another solar storm, nearly as strong as what has come to be known as the Carrington event, occurred in 1921. On May 16, 1921, the Los Angeles Times reported that “electrical influences exerted by the Aurora Borealis…continued today to play havoc with telegraph traffic throughout the United States…. For more than an hour before midnight Saturday nearly every telephone wire leading from New York and Chicago was out of condition.”

The New-York Tribune hoped to calm its readers by noting that the sun would soon “turn [its] spotted face away and end earthly wire troubles,” while the New York Times reported disturbances in France: “The operators at the central transmission stations came to the conclusion that a strange force had got into their instruments, for nothing would go right. Morse instruments, instead of making dots and dashes, recorded one long line. Hughes instruments produced words in what might have been an unknown language, and Baudot, of which French telegraphers are proud because it is very intricate, seemed possessed by evil spirits.”

Newcomb Carlton, president of the Western Union Telegraph Company, was quoted in the New York Times as saying: “The magnetic disturbances were much the worst ever experienced. A great many fuses were blown out on our land lines and we had great difficulty with the submarine cables.” The story also reports that the solar storm burned out a telephone station in Sweden, which then contributed to a short circuit in the New York Central signal system, which was followed by a fire in the Fifty-seventh Street signal tower.

In 1989, the Washington Post reported on December 18 that a solar storm—or “titanic temper tantrum”—set off radiation alarms aboard the supersonic Concorde in flight, damaged orbiting satellites, and caused a nine-hour power blackout in most of Canada’s Quebec province.

In comparison, Space.com reports, this week’s solar flare caused “minor disruptions to spacecraft and power grids.”

Don’t worry if the 3D animation is confusing; it’s not so much a Thomas Guide (Take the 405 to the Pegasus Galaxy) as a statistical representation of how mass is distributed through the universe. It’s the clumps and lack of clumps that are important. Astronomers took measurements of nearly a million galaxies, and by graphing them out are able to learn about the structure of the universe, including how it evolved over time, back to the inflationary epoch — the moment just after the Big Bang when the universe rapidly expanded. In the animation, each green dot represents one galaxy. The image covers a redshift range from 0.25 to 0.75, reaching back to six billion years ago.

The measurements are ongoing, and will eventually include around 1.5 million galaxies, which the researchers hope to be finished with sometime this year. They’re already making interesting finds: Their data shows that dark matter makes up 73% of the density of the universe.

An artist rendering of the gas cloud being pulled towards Sgr A*. Courtesy ESO/MPE/Marc Schartmann

Not long from now, astronomers are going to witness something they’ve never seen before: a black hole chowing down on a feast. Although scientists have a short list of probable black holes, there’s only one close enough for us to observe with any detail, and that’s the one in the center of the Milky Way, Sagittarius A*, or Sgr A*. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics confirmed this week in Nature that they’ve discovered a gas cloud plowing straight for it.

Sgr A* is a “supermassive” black hole, with the mass of about four million Suns. Although these still mysterious objects are difficult to observe directly, since they absorb all light that gets too close, there are a few ways to gather data. One is by studying the accretion disk; the extreme gravitational forces coming from the black hole compress material as it falls ever closer, and this causes an emission of electromagnetic radiation. With black holes, that radiation is usually in the x-ray range. Studying this radiation can tell astronomers a lot about the black hole itself.

So why is the discovery of this gas cloud so exciting? Because Sgr A* is a fairly quiet black hole. There’s not a lot of nearby material for it to feast on, and so not a lot of data for astronomers to collect. But this gas cloud is barreling down a path almost straight toward Sgr A*. Using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile’s Atacama desert, the astronomers have been able to track the cloud’s path and determine its size and mass — it covers an area about the size of our solar system, with the mass of just three Earths.

Even more exciting, in a universe where human life spans are mere blips in astronomical time, it turns out this gas cloud is going to reach Sgr A* in just about 18 months. The same Max Planck scientists who authored the Nature paper will be the ones collecting data from the VLT in mid-2013. That has to be high on the list of astronomer dreams.

The cloud is already close enough to start being stretched apart by gravitational forces, which are pulling it toward the black hole faster and faster — the speed of the cloud has doubled in the last seven years, and it is now moving over 5 million miles per hour. In this short film, astronomer Stefan Gillessen says the cloud “will be elongated and stretched, it will become essentially like spaghetti, and… fall into the black hole.” Or, as one of the best lines we’ve read in a science article in a long time puts it, “The inevitable doom of such a blob of gas is its inexorable tendency towards fragmentation.”

Pretty, pretty outer space. Credit: NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team (AURA/STScI)

As Oscar Wilde said, “Aestheticism is a search after the signs of the beautiful. It is the science of the beautiful through which men seek the correlation of the arts. It is, to speak more exactly, the search after the secret of life.” So what better place to turn the lens of aestheticism than images from our universe?

Researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have been doing just that though the Aesthetics and Astronomy project. They hoped that by studying how the public reacts to the beauty of nebulas and far-off galaxies, they can foster fascination with the science behind the images as well.

Turns out, however, that people don’t always choose beauty over science.  From The Harvard Crimson:

People responded more positively to images that were accompanied by an explanation, suggesting curiosity about the nature of the celestial event or object pictured, according to [Randall] Smith.

“There is a devaluing when you separate out function and form,” [Kimberly Kowal] Arcand said.

The A&A researchers said they believe that an understanding of the scientific nature of astronomical imagery can let people more fully appreciate its beauty—and conversely, that its aesthetic appeal can increase appreciation of the science.

The group’s research is ongoing, as they try to develop the best ways to convey scientific information through astronomical images, like using the “Cocktail Format” in captions — quick, memorable facts instead of lengthy, descriptive text.

Detail of "Underwater" by Stanley Goldstein, featured in Celestial Matters

And while we’re talking about pretty things in space, we should mention an unusual art exhibit appearing next weekend. Celestial Matters features ten artworks that spent time on the International Space Station. Well-known space tourist Richard Garriott de Cayeux, who hitched a ride on a Soyuz up to the ISS in 2008, commissioned a handful of artists to create pieces for the trip.  They were given weight, size, and material restrictions, but otherwise just instructed to “present a compelling interpretation of space and how it impacts and inspires the human perspective.” The exhibition is by Zero G Art and supports the Challenger Center.

You have to head to the Lower East Side to see it in person, but at least it’s a bit more doable than low-Earth orbit.  (You can see the works online, too.)  The exhibit is on display at the Charles Bank Gallery at 196 Bowery, New York City, from Friday through Sunday, Oct. 14-16, 12 to 7 p.m.

Albert Einstein Planetarium, Photo Courtesy NASM

The series starts this Saturday with Dr. Gareth Morgan, a geologist with the museum’s Center for Earth and Planetary Studies, discussing “The Changing Face of the Moon: Exploring the Ancient History of Giant Impacts and Volcanism.”  Tickets are free but you must reserve one here.  Lecture starts at 5:45 p.m.; observing at 6:45 p.m.

Click over to the full list of lectures and save the date for your favorites.

Apollo 11 moon rocks. Photo credit: NASA

This recently found moon rock is one of about 200 small fragments presented as gifts to foreign nations, U.S. states and territories. All were sliced from a single Apollo 17 sample, number 70017, and many are unaccounted for today. Various investigations have been pursued over the years to track down these and other missing moon rocks, including Operation Lunar Eclipse, the joint sting operation between NASA, the U.S. Postal Service and U.S. Customs that recovered the Goodwill Moon Rock originally given to Honduras.  Another somewhat famous escapade includes the interns at Johnson Space Center who smuggled out a 600 pound safe containing samples from all the Apollo missions (the F.B.I. caught them).

NASA’s Office of the Inspector General keeps tabs on any information surfacing about moon rocks, both to collect missing pieces and to sweep counterfeit rocks off the market. Updates are published in the office’s semi-annual reports — just last year they recovered a Goodwill Moon Rock intended as a gift to Cyprus (pdf), however, “The plaque had been intended for delivery by a U.S. diplomat to the people of Cyprus as a gift when hostilities broke out in that country. The plaque had remained in the custody of the diplomat until his death and was recovered from his son.”

Wikipedia’s moon rocks page collects more stories, such as the ill-fated gift to Ireland: the Apollo 11 rock ended up in a landfill. (Their Apollo 17 rock is safe in a museum, at least.) Clearly, some of these will never be recovered.  But sometimes, every once in a while, you can just open a box.