Nostalgic rants and curmudgeonly rambles from R. Jason Bennion. I'm a writer, a wanderer, a movie buff, and a pack rat. But mostly I'm just an analog kind of guy lost in a digital world...
If you're fortunate enough to live in an area where the glow of urban lighting hasn't completely washed out the nighttime sky, you may have spotted the International Space Station zooming overhead. I've seen it several times myself, a golden spark flashing across the Salt Lake Valley at breakneck speed. On one memorable occasion, it had a companion spark, one of the space shuttles running alongside just after undocking to come home. (I don't remember which shuttle it was... I really should make notes about that sort of thing). Anyhow, you may have wondered just exactly how big the station is to be visible to the naked eye like that. And if you're like me, the usual description -- that it's the size of a football field, the largest object we've ever put into space -- doesn't really help much. (I can't help it if I'm not sports-minded!)
Earlier this evening, my friend Jeff Farr posted the following chart on Facebook:
And now I have no trouble visualizing it at all. Why didn't somebody just say it was nearly as wide as the Enterprise's saucer section... sheesh!
The origin page for this nifty graphic has some more information about the station, its systems, and how long it's going to be up there, if you're interested...
A few hours ago, the familiar roar of a rocket motor boomed through the humid air of Florida's Cape Canaveral, but it wasn't a space shuttle or a military Atlas launch. It was instead a privately owned rocket called the Falcon 9. After an aborted launch attempt earlier this morning, this gleaming debutante lifted off from its pad and streaked skyward without any obvious problems, carrying at its nose a mock-up spacecraft that may shortly replace the retiring shuttles. Behold:
(Stay with it until the end -- the stage separation seen from the onboard camera is really neat!)
The Falcon 9 and its Apollo-style counterpart, the Dragon capsule, are designed, built, and operated by a company called SpaceX, which was founded by Elon Musk. You may not know his name, but you've likely heard of his other businesses: PayPal and Tesla Motors, the electric sports-car builder. Musk's vision for the Falcon/Dragon combination is essentially to fulfill the promise made by the shuttle development team 30 years ago: a "space taxi" that will offer reliable, relatively cheap access to Earth orbit. Unlike NASA's various spacecraft that are pieced together from contributions made by many subcontractors, SpaceX keeps everything in-house. The launch vehicle, the spacecraft, and the rocket motors are built by SpaceX itself. And the company is striving for design simplicity by using the same rocket motor -- the Merlin, it's called -- on all its launch vehicles, including the Falcon 1, the Falcon 9, and a future heavy-lift vehicle. In the same spirit of keeping things simple, SpaceX plans for the Dragon to carry either cargo or passengers, depending on the craft's internal configuration, rather than designing separate vehicles for different jobs. Moreover, the boosters and the Dragons are all intended to be reusable.
It all sounds good on paper, at least. And even though I'm sorry to see the shuttle program winding down, I have to admit I am excited about SpaceX's plans. Musk's vision sounds workable to me, and I like that someone in the private enterprise sector is thinking about practical spaceflight applications. By contrast, Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic, as nifty as the SpaceShipTwo and WhiteKnight technology is, really strikes me as more of a rich man's playground that won't lead to much. I hope I'm wrong about that -- I'd love to see a sky filled with many different kinds of spacecraft doing all sorts of activities, including recreational ones -- but it's just my hunch at the moment. And anyway, the SpaceShipTwo vehicles Branson has commissioned are only suborbital cruise ships. To truly replace the shuttle, we need something that will aim a bit higher.
SpaceX already has a contract with NASA to send cargo to the International Space Station in 2011; several more test flights are planned through the rest of this year. And there are other private entities looking to fill the gap left by the shuttles, as well, including a partnership between Boeing and Lockheed-Martin called the United Launch Alliance and a supersecret venture funded by Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com. We're not living in the space-faring 21st century I used to imagine, but maybe there's a chance we'll get some version of it after all...
I'm sure everyone has heard by now that space shuttle Atlantis returned safely to Earth this morning, concluding her 32nd -- and final -- mission. The old girl isn't quite ready for mothballs yet; she will be prepped again as per the usual turnaround routine to serve as the "launch-on-need" vehicle -- that'd be a "back-up" to you and me -- for Endeavour's final flight in November, which will be the last of the shuttle program. Barring any problems with Endeavour, however, Atlantis is effectively finished. I won't reiterate again how sad this makes me. Instead, let's just paste a couple of souvenirs into our online scrapbook, and enjoy the memories while they're still fresh.
First up, Twittering astronaut Soichi Noguchi captured a really gorgeous portrait of Atlantis as she pulled away from the International Space Station a couple days ago; click on the thumbnail below to see the full-size version:
And here is NASA's official video coverage of the landing. This is what the future looked like when I was a kid, and even though I know a lot of people now see this as the past -- the 1970s, to be precise -- I never get tired of seeing it. For a vehicle that was once derisively referred to as "the flying brick," the shuttle always strikes me as incredibly graceful in the air and surprisingly delicate when it touches down.
The next scheduled launch will be Discovery in mid-September...
Actor-writer-blogger-geek-extraordinaire Wil Wheaton has a brief but evocative post up about his memories of the Challenger disaster and watching the launch of Atlantis the other day. Here's the bit that resonated the most with me:
When mission control gave the order to go with throttle up, I held my breath like I have every single time since the shuttle program was reinstated in 1988, and when the shuttle separated from the boosters and glided into orbit, I got something in my eye. Just take a moment, if you don't mind, and think about what it means that we can leave our planet, even if we've "only" gotten as far as the dark side of the moon. Think about what it means that something as incredible as putting humans into space and bringing them back safely to Earth today earns less media attention and public excitement than the typical celebrity breakup.
It is amazing that we can do this, and even though I've come to believe the shuttle program isn't the best way to spend NASA's tiny budget (which is a pitiful fraction of what it should be), I hope that there was a child watching the launch today who will feel inspired to reach out to the stars and see what's out there.
We humans are a flawed species, to put it mildly, and I think we could do a much better job taking care of our planet and each other ... but when I see what we're capable of doing, it gives me hope that the future I pretended to live in twenty years ago will actually arrive some day.
(For anyone who doesn't catch the reference in the final sentence -- and I know at least one of my Loyal Readers probably does not -- Wil played Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation.)
Just about one hour ago, space shuttle Atlantis lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center for the final time.
It was a textbook launch into a beautiful cerulean sky, and the shuttle is now safely on orbit and chasing after the International Space Station for a rendezvous two days from now. Mission STS-132 is scheduled to last 12 days; in its payload bay, Atlantis carries a Russian laboratory module -- the first time a Russian-built ISS component has flown on an American spacecraft -- as well as an assortment of replacement parts and batteries for the station.
Atlantis, the second youngest of the shuttles, flew for the first time in October 1985, and has racked up an impressive list of "firsts" in the 25 years since. Here's a fairly nifty video produced by NASA to commemorate her life:
(And yes, I know I was just bitching about not having any time to blog, let alone watch space shuttle videos. So I'm rebelling a little, give me a break...)
Shuttle Discovery is back on the ground this morning after 10 days in orbit, servicing the International Space Station. A nice video of the picture-perfect landing is here.
Next up will be the final flight for shuttle Atlantis, then the swan song for Endeavour, and finally Discovery will fly one last time to close out the shuttle program.
Jaquandor points us today to an opinion piece by comic-book writer and novelist Warren Ellis on the public's waning enthusiasm for manned spaceflight. Ellis is a bit more curmudgeonly than myself -- I know, difficult to believe, but as misanthropic as I sometimes get, I can't quite bring myself to suggest that Twilight fans "could be rendered down into their constituent chemicals and scattered on barren land as organic fertiliser." The woman I love reads those books, you know, and I'd rather not see her turned into Gro-Mor. Go figure.
I also don't share Ellis' concern with getting people into space as a hedge against extinction. This is a good reason for colonizing other worlds, to be sure, and it's one many people believe ought to be paramount, but I myself have never been able to warm to this particular line of thinking. I'm just not enough of a doomsday-ist, I guess; I am less inspired by fear than by nobler sentiments.
Which is why Ellis' rant doesn't start to echo my own thinking until right about here:
Exploration has always been central to the human drive. Not because of population pressure, nor trade necessity, but because it's in our essential nature to wonder what and where is next. We are unique in the biosphere as creatures of imagination. Robot missions do not thrill us because the empathetic engagement is on a level with watching a Roomba do a decent job of hoovering some carpet fluff. It is nowhere near the same as seeing and hearing one of us walking somewhere brand new and telling us about it in the knowledge (however misguided that might eventually prove) that more of us, the rest of us, will follow.
We're almost resentful of human space flight now, because politicians and greedy technocrats screwed us out of the translunar Martian colony future we all thought was coming. We're just a little too resigned to another few years of puttering around in low Earth orbit, of quickie space tourism and trying not to fart in the International Space Station for 30 days at a time. Even the Chinese, the current eager lions of crewed missions, admit that their Moon missions may prove to be robotic.
In my life I've seen a species go from believing it will live in space to accepting, all too easily, that it will die on the same old dirt its ancestors rot in. Having a nice robot phone is not an acceptable substitute for a future.
Here, here. I have a lot of respect and affection for those Mars rovers that Ellis sneeringly dismisses as "skateboards" (actually, I think I'm guilty of calling them that myself), but it's the idea of human eyes looking out on those fantastic, literally unearthly landscapes that fires me up. Being human means you do some things simply because no one else has ever done them before, and somewhere along the line, I think we've lost touch with that aspect of our nature. I couldn't care less about the latest cell phone, myself. Buttons, touchscreen, telepathic interface... who cares? It's a phone. But crossing the horizon, just to find out what's over there? Now that's exciting!
My friend Mike Gillilan sent this to me last night, and I thought it warranted sharing:
That's the space shuttle Discovery (obviously) arriving at the International Space Station. I believe the structure in the upper part of the photo is one of several Russian spacecraft currently docked there; the Soyuz and Progress capsules serve as taxis, resupply ships, garbage disposal units, and, in an emergency, escape pods for the station crew.
Sorry the thumbnail is so small, but this is apparently how Twitter codes images for embedding on other websites. If you click on it, you'll be taken to the full-size Twitpic version. It's worth a click, believe me; the sharpness of the original is breathtaking.
After you look at this picture, be sure to check out the entire feed. It's the personal Twitter account (or whatever the hell you call it) of a Japanese astronaut named Soichi Noguchi, and he posts at least a couple new photos every day. Here are a couple of my recent favorites:
That's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the day Discovery launched. The two roundish features to the right are the launch pads, one of which would've been occupied by the shuttle when this was taken. And here's one that's not so great, technically speaking -- there's quite a bit of "noise" in the image -- but is beautiful and awesome -- in the original, pre-1980s sense of that word -- nonetheless:
The green glow that looks like classic Star Trek phaserfire is in fact the aurora borealis, the famed northern lights; a pair of Soyuz capsules are in the foreground.
As much as I gripe about the way the 21st century has turned out (as opposed to the way we all imagined it), how incredible is it that we have people living in space, taking photographs of what they're seeing, and sending back to us via the Internet?
This was the scene in Florida early this morning as space shuttle Discovery lifted off before dawn for a rendezvous with the International Space Station:
Watch that video a couple of times, kids, and savor it with a bit of melancholy nostalgia, because this will be the last time anyone ever sees the golden flare of a space shuttle's main engines and solid-rocket boosters combined to banish the darkness. This flight is the last scheduled nighttime launch, and the last that will feature a full crew complement of seven astronauts. After this, only three missions remain before the surviving shuttles are sent off to the museums... and the way things are going, manned American spaceflight may be going with them.
I've been wanting to write for some time about the impending end of the shuttle program, as well as the president's desire to spike the Constellation program that would replace it, but it's such an emotional issue for me, and I am so ambivalent about the details, that the subject tends to elude me. Still, here are a few quasi-coherent thoughts:
Somewhere in the vast and dusty recesses of the fabulous Bennion Archives, I've got a cache of old Science Digest magazines from the early '80s. I subscribed for a time in middle school, or, more accurately, my parents subscribed me, first as a birthday gift, I believe, and then for a few more years because I was actually reading the things and -- apparently -- getting something from them. To be honest, what I was mostly getting was the foundation for a lot of future disappointment when all the crazy-cool stuff promised by the speculative articles failed to materialize. No high-speed underground maglev trains whisking us from LA to New York in an hour. No gigantic cargo blimps full of consumer goods gliding serenely through the skies on silent electric motors. No manned missions to the moons of Jupiter. You get the idea. The standard "where's my jetpack?" sort of thing.
But not all of the magazine's predictions turned out to be bull, and every so often deja vu will strike like a zap of static electricity as it occurs to me that I first read about some aspect of modern life years and years ago in the pages of SD. Cell phones and prepaid phone cards come to mind, as well as DNA sequencing and growing replacement body parts in laboratories. These ideas were only two steps removed from science fiction 25 years ago, but they're now commonplace, or soon to become so in the case of lab-grown organs. The really big ideas, though, the ones requiring some kind of monumental engineering project... those were all just poppycock, right?
Well, maybe not. I read this morning that a California company called the Solaren Corporation wants to orbit giant solar-power collectors and beam the energy back to Earth in the form of radio waves. I immediately recognized the proposal as yet another concept I first learned of while sitting crosslegged on the floor of my old treehouse in the heat of a far-off summer day, listening to the old car radio my dad rigged up to run on AC and thumbing through the pages of the latest Science Digest. I remember thinking back then that it was a cool idea, and I still like the sound of it. No doubt it would be an immensely expensive and complex undertaking, and it probably won't work for all sorts of reasons, but the basic idea itself is so elegant, so... obvious. It's something from the happier Buck Rogers future I always thought I would be living in, instead of the considerably less ambitious and less hopeful future we actually got, and I hope this Solaren company actually attempts it.
Who knows, if this orbital power station thing works, maybe I'll still get my maglev train someday as well...
This will be short because I'm trying to finish a bunch of mundane chores and miscellaneous loose ends so I can leave tomorrow on a last-minute adventure with a clear conscience, but I couldn't let this pass without mention. Remember Lisa Nowak, a.k.a. The Jealous Astronaut? The woman who drove nonstop from Florida to Texas while wearing a space diaper so she could confront (and possibly do major damage to) her romantic rival?
When last we encountered Captain Novak roughly 18 months ago, she had entered a "not guilty" plea. Well, I just spotted the news that she's now pled guilty to lesser charges of felony burglary of a car and misdemeanor battery as opposed to the original charges of attempted kidnapping, burglary and battery. The prosecutor in the case has complained that Nowak's attorney has "chipped away" at the case until there's nothing left, i.e., the defense has fought to have evidence thrown out and managed to get a prohibition on any discussion of the diapers.
Nowak and her paramour, Commander William Oefelein , were both throw out of the astronaut core in 2007. The woman Nowak was apparently after is now living with Oefelein and they're reportedly engaged. So I guess that's the end of this strange tale. I have to admit that it feels rather anti-climatic...
It was a beautiful launch this morning for the Ares 1-X rocket, a unmanned prototype for the next-generation Constellation spacecraft that are intended to replace NASA's aging space shuttle:
It looks to me like the ship wobbles a little bit right after ignition, when it's balancing on the thrust column but hasn't actually started lifting yet, and I had a nervous moment when I wondered if it was going to spiral over and blow up like some of the spectacular accidents from the very early days of spaceflight (many of which are shown in the movie The Right Stuff, if you'll remember). But I haven't seen anyone commenting on that motion, so perhaps it's normal for this design. Or maybe I'm not seeing what I think I am.
The Ares is really kind of strange-looking, in my opinion, oddly proportioned with an anorexic body -- which is actually a derivative version of the solid rocket boosters you see on either side of the shuttles during their launches -- beneath a bulky payload section way up high. It looks top-heavy, although I would guess the weight of the propellant balances it out. Strange or not, though, this is what the future of American manned spaceflight is going to look like. Assuming there is one, of course. Right now, that's somewhat questionable, since the shuttle is slated to stop flying next year, the International Space Station may very well be abandoned after its funding runs out in 2015, and the Constellation ships -- the Ares booster combined with a manned Orion capsule -- likely won't be ready to safely fly humans until sometime after that. Meanwhile, there's a lot of talk in space circles about sending people back to the Moon or on to Mars, but frankly I don't see that there's much public or political interest in doing either, and some experts are now questioning whether the Ares rockets are even the right hardware to meet those goals. So we're essentially developing a whole new spacecraft system with no clear idea of where we're going to send it or what we're going to do with it.
That's not smart. Especially these days, when everyone is so concerned with return on investment instead of merely wanting to do great things for the sake of doing great things. But still, no matter what the future holds, I have to admit that I got a genuine thrill this morning as I stood in the coffee shop, watching on the flatscreen over the counter as a whole new type of bird took flight over Cape Canaveral. It reminded me of those early mornings when I was a boy, getting up before dawn to watch the first few shuttle launches with my dad.
Via Wil Wheaton, a little tidbit that ought to be of interest to some of my Loyal Readers, particularly Cranky Robert:
It seems that the prog-rock band Pink Floyd performed live instrumental music during the BBC's coverage of the Apollo 11 landing, something I'd never heard before. David Gilmour refers to it as a "jam session" in his remembrance today in the Guardian newspaper. The piece was called "Moonhead," and, if I'm understanding correctly, they played it during cutaways when the NASA action slowed down. The entire 12-minute piece was played uninterrupted later in the broadcast. You can hear it on YouTube, naturally; according to the notes on the video clip, it's never been officially recorded but has turned up on a couple of bootlegs.
Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon
July 1969 A.D.
We came in peace for all mankind
(The Lunar Module Eagle touched down at 14:17:40 MST on July 20, 1969, if you didn't get the significance of the time code on this entry. The text above comes from a plaque mounted to one of the Eagle's landing legs. It's still there at Tranquility Base, along with the descent stage Armstrong and Aldrin left behind. The photo is, of course, Buzz Aldrin, as photographed by Neil Armstrong. If you look closely, you can see Neil and part of the LM reflected in Buzz's visor.)
The image above is something I meant to comment on Friday, when it was first released, but obviously I didn't get around to it. What you're looking at there, if you haven't already seen and heard about it, is a photo recently taken by a spacecraft called the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which is currently circling the moon. Similar to the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter that took that awesome photo of the Martian rover a couple years ago, the LRO is a mapping probe equipped with a powerful camera. When the probe's system check-out is complete and it has entered the proper mapping orbit, it's going to start photographing the entire surface of the moon at a high resolution, theoretically as preparation for the return of humans to our nearest neighbor. Regardless of whether that actually happens in our lifetimes, though, the LRO promises to send back some astoundingly detailed images of the lunar landscape... and naturally some of the first pictures it's taken during this check-out phase are of places we've already been, namely five of the six Apollo landing sites.
They all show exactly what you'd expect to see, the squarish, reflective, obviously artificial shapes of the descent stages that were left behind when the astronauts returned to their Command Modules. And yet these fuzzy low-rez photos -- the LRO's camera isn't operating at its full capabilities yet; better-quality photos of the Apollo sites are promised for later on, after the calibrations are complete -- raise the hair on my arms and fill me with pride. Those shiny little objects were made by human hands and sent across a void of a quarter-million miles -- think about that, a quarter-million miles -- and they're still there, untouched in the vacuum of space, silent testimony to the inventiveness and determination of the silly hairless apes swarming across the face of the blue planet next door. They're still waiting for us to come back, you know, those abandoned artifacts.
You can see the rest of the LRO Apollo photos here. The image of the Apollo 14 site is especially fascinating; on that one, the lighting conditions were such that you can see the foot trail left by the astronauts who carried a scientific package out away from their Lunar Module. I can't wait to see the full-rez shots.
In the meantime, if you haven't been listening to that time-capsule audio stream of the Apollo 11 transmissions, now is the time to tune in. The Eagle has just cast off from Columbia, and Armstrong and Aldrin are getting ready for their descent... exciting stuff, even if I already know how the story turns out!
So, for the past several hours, I've been listening here at work to that Apollo audio feed I wrote about last night. It's something of a strange experience, to be honest... I'm very conscious of the fact that this is a recording, that I'm sitting in my cubicle in the year 2009 and that everything I'm hearing happened two months before I was even born, and yet it all seems so immediate. I find myself feeling genuine anxiety as I wait for the next exchange, wondering what's happening up there and what the astronauts and controllers are doing right now. And then I remember that I ought to be thinking in the past tense, that there is no spacecraft currently zooming outward from the earth at 11,000 feet per second, that some of the voices on this feed belong to people who aren't even alive anymore, and I feel a little silly. But I keep listening anyhow.
Only a few hours from now, we will mark the 40th anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11, the spaceflight mission that delivered Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Mike Collins to the moon. I personally consider the Apollo program the greatest achievement of the human species, a feat of engineering, scientific know-how, and technological advancement that has yet to be matched or surpassed, as well as a testament to humanity's perseverance and courage. It breaks my heart that so few people today seem to care that once, not so very long ago, mankind found a way to actually leave our planet and go somewhere else. In person, not by robotic proxy. To stand on soil that had never felt a human footprint and just... experience it. To fulfill our heritage and our destiny as explorers, just like the first hunter-gatherers who decided to walk over the hill and see what was over there. How can people not find that absolutely thrilling? And let's not even speak of those who don't believe we went. I never will understand how those folks can be so cynical or hold such a dim opinion of their fellow humans as to think we couldn't possibly have figured out how to do it.
I'm just a tad too young to have experienced this amazing moment in history as it unfolded. I wouldn't be born for two more months after Armstrong made that giant leap. And even though I've seen the documentaries, read the books, and grew up just generally knowing about all this stuff, it's hard for me to imagine what it must've been like for my parents and other people living at that time. Fortunately at times like these, we at least have the Internet.
I've learned that NASA is going to begin streaming actual audio recorded during the mission, starting tomorrow morning at 6:32 central daylight time, two hours before the giant Saturn V booster rocket launched the Apollo spacecraft out of the atmosphere. The idea is that we'll be hearing the transmissions between astronauts, ground teams, and Mission Control at the exact same moments they were broadcast in 1969. It'll be just like being there... almost...
Details on this nifty simulation can be found in this press release. The audio will be streaming here.
The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library is hosting another similar, but more visually punchy site called WeChooseTheMoon, a reference to JFK's famous speech that set the ball rolling inexorably toward Tranquility Base. And if you'd like a visual to go with the audio, here's a video recording of the actual TV coverage that you would've seen had you been watching the tube on this morning four decades ago. The quality isn't great, sadly, but I still defy you not to feel a tingle down your back when those mighty engines start to rumble...
I have nothing else to say about this, except to note that as best I can determine it is not faked or "enhanced" with special effects. This is our galaxy, our neighborhood, our place in the cosmos. And I wish somebody would hurry up with inventing that dang warp drive already so we could get out there for a good, close-up look...
And now for something that has nothing to do with International Talk Like a Pirate Day but is still pretty dang cool:
I grabbed this awesome photo from Damaris, a woman who works at Kennedy Space Center and is in training to become an astronaut herself. It's not especially rare for two shuttles to be on their launch pads at the same time, but it is quite unusual for them to both be visible like this, because usually there's a massive gantry called the Rotating Service Structure surrounding them and blocking the view. (The RSS is the bulky-looking mess of girders to the left of the shuttle in the foreground... not that upright tower, but the other part with the white center.) This particular photo is actually 18 years old; that's the late, lamented Columbia and her sister ship Discovery back in September of 1990, the last time anyone saw this particular spectacle. But as Damaris explains, we'll get the chance again tomorrow when Endeavour and Atlantis take their places out there at Launch Complex 39 and, for a few hours at least, will be standing naked beneath the Florida skies.
There's nothing earth-shattering here, just a neat picture of something you don't see everyday, and some interesting trivia. Click the pic to enlarge it, and then head over to Damaris' blog for the whole story...
[Update: Damaris just updated her blog with pics of Endeavour and Atlantis on their pads, including a really gorgeous aerial shot that even includes a rainbow! Go check 'em out...]
Via SF Signal, here's an interesting link to a PDF that lists the books, movies, TV shows, and music stocked on board the International Space Station for the crew's off-duty entertainment. It's quite a nice little library that covers a pretty wide range of topics, genres, and quality levels (i.e., "hammock reading" versus Literature-with-a-capital-L).
Titles that caught my eye among the books were The Brothers Karamazov, Darwin's Origin of Species, the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, The Da Vinci Code (of course -- is there anywhere you can't find a copy of that one?), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and, amusingly enough, several years-old issues of both Analog and Asimov's Science Fiction. (How weird would it be to read science fiction while floating weightlessly in a tin can that whips around the planet once every 90 minutes? But wait... it gets weirder...)
The Bad Astronomer reminds us that today is the 18th anniversary of the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope. It's hard to believe that Hubble has been sending back incredible photos of the universe around us for nearly two decades. Time flies.
To celebrate the anniversary, NASA has released 59 images of galaxies colliding with other galaxies, the largest collection of Hubble images ever released to the public in a single package. The image above contains some highlights. Click on it to see 'em large, or go here for the complete gallery.
Do you remember Buran, the space shuttle the Russians built back in the '80s that looked so much like ours? Ever wonder what happened to it after the collapse of the USSR? Well, I have, and today I finally satisfied my curiosity.
At the Natural History Museum in New York City this morning, gazillionaire Richard Branson and aeronautical engineer Burt Rutan have just unveiled the design for SpaceShipTwo, the follow-up to Rutan's X-Prize-winning SpaceShipOne, which, you may remember, was the first privately built, manned, and reusable vehicle to reach outer space. That's a photo of the new spacecraft up there, slung between the twin fuselages of the White Knight 2 launch vehicle that will carry it aloft; click to embiggen and have a good, close look at the future. The White Knight 2 is said to have the same wingspan as a B-29 bomber, while SpaceShipTwo is large enough for passengers to get up and walk around during their suborbital tourist flights. The dual vehicle will fly for Branson's Virgin Galactic and there are reportedly already 100 wanna-be astronauts on the waiting list.
It's unlikely the fares for this thing will ever drop low enough for anyone other than venture capitalists and trust-fund babies to take a ride, but it's still pretty exciting. Even as we're reading that government-funded manned space missions may never happen, the private sector is forging ahead with its eyes on the stars. We may get there yet. If nothing else, this vehicle could open up the possibility of fast sub-orbital passenger flights around the world. Imagine flying from Los Angeles to Sydney in only a couple of hours (or less) instead of the better part of two days...
An asteroid between Mars and Jupiter has been renamed 7307 Takei in honor of the actor, best known for his role as Hikaru Sulu in the original "Star Trek" series and movies.
The celestial rock, discovered by two Japanese astronomers in 1994, was formerly known as 1994 GT9. It joins the 4659 Roddenberry (named for the show's creator, Gene Roddenberry) and the 68410 Nichols (for co-star Nichelle Nichols, who played Lt. Uhura). Other main-belt asteroids have been named for science fiction luminaries Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov.
I've had the honor of meeting Mr. Takei on two occasions. The first time was at one of those "meet 'n' greet"-style conventions I've written about before, those impersonal things where you pay an outrageous admission fee for the privilege of standing in line for an hour or three so you can experience 20 seconds of face-time with your celebrity hero, snap a personal photo (if you're lucky, anyway; some stars -- Shatner, for example -- don't allow those), and walk out with an autographed 8x10 glossy.
The second occasion was much more interesting and satisfying. It was intended to be a big meet 'n' greet with a lengthy roster of genre talent, but it wasn't very well organized or advertised and, well, nobody showed up. To be honest, I wouldn't have gone myself if a friend of mine who knew the promoter hadn't gotten me some freebie tickets. My buddy seemed so pleased with himself for doing me this huge favor that I simply couldn't find a reason not to at least check it out.
At first glance, it was one of the most depressing events I've ever attended.
Thirty years ago today, the Voyager 2 space probe was launched on a groundbreaking mission to explore the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn, followed a couple of weeks later by its twin, Voyager 1. (I never have heard why number two went first...) Like those amazingly durable Mars rovers that appear to have survived even a planetary-scale dust storm, the Voyagers have far outlived their designed lifespan of five years and continue to send back useful data from beyond the orbit of Pluto as they coast toward interstellar space. Lots of interesting information can be had in this article, including the facts that Voyager 1 is currently the most distant human-made object, with a one-way radio message taking 14 hours to reach it, and both craft are getting by on a mere 300 watts of electricity -- equal to the output of just a couple of standard three-way lightbulbs -- which is provided by tiny nuclear powerplants because they're too far away for solar power.
The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which built and operates the Voyagers, has a website devoted to the ongoing mission, and from there you can download a retrospective about those famous "golden records" afixed to the sides of the two spacecraft -- you know, the "message in a bottle" that invites the alien to Earth so he can become Jeff Bridges and have sex with Karen Allen in Starman...
Hm, here's an interesting bit of trivia: today is the 45th anniversary of the launch of Telstar, the world's first communications satellite. We take instantaneous global connectivity pretty much for granted these days -- think about how routinely TV news programs like The Today Show interview people who are on the other side of the planet, or how easy it is to make a phone call to another continent -- but I imagine such stuff must've seemed dowright miraculous in 1962. That must've been such an exciting time to be alive, what with all the boundaries expanding and miracles happening right and left. They're still happening today, of course, but I don't think we notice so much. Today's miracles are far more subtle, and more integrated into our daily lives. Indeed, we've come to expect new miracles on a regular basis, and we get really impatient if they don't work quite the way we want them to.
Telstar Logistics blogs about his namesake here, and he includes some fascinating links and factoids. For instance, I did not know that Telstar is still up there, an orbitting piece of space junk that's been dead since its electronics failed in February of 1963. I thought it surely must've re-entered and burned up years ago. I don't know why, but I think it's really cool that it's still there...
It's another of those cursedly busy, damnably hot days here at the New Proofreaders' Cave, deep within the bowels of one the glorious metropolitan skyscrapers in fabulous downtown Salt Lake City. (My Corporate Overlords recently decided that my proofreading team needed to move to a different part of the building, hence the "new" descriptor. The NPC isn't bad, but I've lost my window view, which is a major bummer, and we also have roomies now, which is proving to be somewhat, ahem, difficult. They like to play Guitar Hero. While I'm trying to proofread. This, as my friend Jack would say, is sub-optimal. But what're you going to do, short of having an over-the-top temper tantrum that ends with a desk phone being thrown through a television set, followed by a visit from an HR representative?)
Anyhow, since I'm probably not going to find the time to anything substantial here today, how's about a cool photo? Behold:
That's the space shuttle Atlantis moored to the International Space Station during its recent mission there. What's interesting about this photo -- beyond the fact that it's a nice expansive view of the entire structure -- is that it was taken from the ground as the ISS passed 190 nautical miles overhead. As usual, you can click the image for a larger view, or you can go here for details on how this was done.
Scalzi points the way this morning to what he calls "the coolest picture you'll see today", and I've got to agree: it's amazing. It's a shot that was taken back in 2003 by the Mars Global Surveyor space probe, in orbit around the Red Planet. Click here, then click the photo for maximum bigness. You'll see the half-phase Earth and moon at the top of the photo; scroll all the way to the bottom and you'll see Jupiter and three of its moons. That's the third and fifth planets of our system seen in the same frame, photographed from the fourth planet. And the photo has a high-enough resolution that both planets are easily identifiable, even by a non-astronomer type. With a little digital massaging, you can even tell which hemisphere of our world was turned toward the camera. Beautiful...
If you're interested in the technical details, go here. But whatever you do, have a look at the photo...
The crew of the space shuttle Atlantis had better angle the deflector shields and charge up the main guns! Oh, wait... that's just the International Space Station, looking rather TIE fighter-ish with its newly symmetical shape following Atlantis's successful construction mission. Just another one of those photos that amuse me...
(For a comparison of how the ISS has changed during this mission, click here for a 2006 photo, then here for a current one.)
Last night, just before 11 PM, I walked out of my parents' back door and looked off to the northwest. It was a clear night, but living as close to a good-sized city as my parents and I do, I couldn't see many stars because of all the light pollution. Orion and the Big Dipper always stand out, and a handful of other constellations whose names I don't remember, but the sky over Salt Lake generally looks pretty empty, so I was dubious that I'd be able to see the International Space Station, as the TV weather guy had been breathlessly promising for several days. And really, I wasn't sure why I was bothering.
In the emerging field of private space tourism, Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne and Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic venture tend to get all the attention, but there are other entrepeneurs out there who've decided it's time to find a way to get human beings off this rock, if only for a few minutes.
One of those is Jim Benson, whose Benson Space Company has been working on a space ship modelled after NASA's HL-20 "lifting body" concept.
Today, however, I'm reading that BSC is abandoning its lifting-body work and will instead base its Dream Chaser sub-orbital spacecraft on a melding of several other vehicles with impressive track records -- the X-2 and X-15 experimental planes, and the venerable T-38 trainer. And it'll look something like this:
Here's a cool little item that I was planning to include in my recent round-up of space news, but somehow missed; it's a promotional trailer (ostensibly put out by NASA) hyping the planned return of human beings to the Moon:
"Hero" is a word that's lost much of its meaning in recent years due to overuse and misuse. All too often, in my not-so-humble opinion, it's a label that gets applied to people who don't deserve it. The general public tends to confuse heroism with mere celebrity, while those who would influence the public aren't above trying to create artificial heroes when it suits their purposes or advances a cause.
But there are still genuine heroes in the world, even if we sometimes have to look backwards to see them. One of them died this week: Wally Schirra, age 84, of natural causes. Not a very heroic death, that, but everyone dies and most people do it in rather mundane fashions. What matters is what you do while you're alive. And he did some amazing things.
I've come across lots of interesting space-related items in the past few weeks (er, months), but I've been too busy or too preoccupied with other matters to mention any of them here, so I think it's time for another exciting installment of... Drive-By Blogging!
(I'm thinking of turning this into a regular feature here at Simple Tricks, by the way. It seems like there are always many more items that I want to comment on than I ever manage to actually devote entire entries to. Sigh...)
I don't know if anyone else is following this story or cares in the least, but I have a morbid fascination for it, so here's what's happening with former astronaut Lisa Nowak:
Her attorneys formally entered a "not guilty" plea last Thursday. (The article notes that this is in addition to an earlier, written plea, which I'm assuming is the one I mentioned here; I'm still not certain how or why you would plead twice like this.)
Lisa, a US Navy officer who was technically just on loan to NASA, has a new assignment developing flight-training lesson plans at an air base in Corpus Christi, Texas. A Navy spokesman indicated that she would be working in "more of a course developer role, rather than be[ing] a direct instructor." No doubt this is a tactful way of saying that she'll be safely confined to a cubicle somewhere and not allowed to interact with the impressionable trainees.
And finally (and not surprisingly), NASA has announced the formation of a new committee to review the healthcare services the agency currently offers to astronauts, as well as how astronauts are screened for both mental and physical health. I imagine one of the goals of this review is to figure out how Nowak's, um, condition went unnoticed until she became dangerous.
Lisa Nowak's trial is expected to begin on July 30.
This is no surprise: NASA has fired Lisa Nowak. Or, as this somewhat more detailed article more politely phrases it, she has been "pulled... from her spaceflyer detail in a mutual agreement with Naval authorities." (Nowak is a captain in the U.S. Navy who has been on assignment to NASA as an astronaut.)
NASA's spokesperson was quick to point out that this action was "not a reflection of NASA's belief in Nowak's innocence or guilt," but was done simply "because the agency lacks the administrative means to deal appropriately with the criminal charges facing Nowak.”
I imagine the agency was also eager to distance itself from this whole situation, too, before the dirt starts flying in the courtroom. But maybe I'm just cynical...
Astronaut Lisa Nowak was formally charged with attempted kidnapping today for that little cross-country drive and assault stunt she pulled on a romantic rival. (Florida prosecutors have "declined to file an attempted murder charge [as] recommended by police"; apparently, when she pled not guilty a couple weeks back, it was not "not guilty to attempted murder" as I wrote, but not guilty "on all counts that police recommended." I've never heard of that one before. Come to think of it, I've never heard of anyone entering any kind of plea before being actually charged. This case just keeps getting weirder...)
Also, in a related development, prosecutors have released e-mail exchanges made between astronaut Bill Oefelein, the object of Nowak's obsession, and her apparent rival in this triangle, Colleen Shipman. Copies of these messages were found in Nowak's possession, and there's speculation that reading them led to her breakdown. There's a news story on the e-mails here, and ABC News is publishing the text of some of them here, if you're feeling especially voyeuristic.
The death of Anna Nicole Smith and Britney Spears' decision to emulate Sinead O'Connor's coiffure (or lack thereof) have pushed whacko astronaut Lisa Nowak out of the media spotlight, so I thought I'd pass along the word that she has entered a plea of "not guilty" to the charge of attempted murder.
Just doing my part to help out those poor, overworked tabloid writers...
[Update: In a related story, it seems that NASA has contigency plans for what to do if an astronaut wigs out while in space. It's pretty interesting... it involves duct tape, bungee cords, and forced administration of drugs. Just as I've always imagined. Oh, all right, I've always imagined that you'd just stun the nutbar with a phaser, but since NASA doesn't have phasers...]
Why don't we take a break from all the doom and gloom of the Trolley Square thing and enjoy a little music video by The Phantom Surfers, inspired by the strange story of astronaut Lisa Nowak:
As long as we're thinking about astronauts today, Wired.com reminds us that the first extra-terrestrial round of golf was played on this date back in 1971 by Alan Shepard of Apollo 14. So-so quality YouTube video of the event below the fold:
When you live in Utah, you get used to hearing weird news stories that have some kind of local connection. From Howard Hughes' "Mormon Mafia" and the tale of Melvin Dummar in the '70s to the White Salamander bombings and cold fusion kerfuffle in the '80s to anything related to the polygamist colonies of the Four Corners area in the last ten years, the more bizarre the story, the more likely it either happened here or has some kind of link to my home state.
Today's weirdest news story is no exception to the rule, but it is really a wild tale: astronaut Lisa Marie Nowak is being charged with attempted murder after she drove 900 miles from Houston to Orlando while wearing a diaper (so she wouldn't have to stop for potty breaks), intending to kidnap or otherwise harm a rival for a fellow astronaut's affections. Nowak, who is a married mother of three and who flew on shuttle Discovery last summer, accosted Colleen Shipman in an airport parking lot while disguised in a wig and trench coat and carrying pepper spray, a mallet, a BB gun, gloves, a folding knife, rubber tubing, and trash bags. She later told police she only wanted to "scare Ms. Shipman into talking with her." Um, yeah... you always go loaded for bear when you just want to talk.
According to the Orlando Sentinal, these are likely "the first-ever felony charges filed on an active-duty astronaut."
Weird indeed. But what's the Utah connection, you're wondering? Well, as it happens, Nowak is a cousin of Tony Caputo, the owner of one of Salt Lake's most popular eateries and a bit of a local celebrity in his own right. I imagine he's screening his phone calls today...
A quick scan of Joel Schlosberg's Carl Sagan meta-post would suggest that the Memorial Blog-a-Thon was a success -- by my count, Joel links to roughly 125 blog entries and online essays, many of them in languages other than English (I'm honored to be among them, not too far from Scalzi's listing), and I imagine there are others around the 'net that did not get listed by Joel for one reason or another. I've read a number of them, and they're all moving tributes. But the best thing I've read in conjunction with all of this is, not surprisingly, the remarks made by Carl's own son, Nick Sagan. He remembers Carl not as some inspiring idol-figure or media personality, but simply as Dad, a human being with hobbies and quirks, just like the rest of us. I was amused to learn, for instance, that the great astronomer and science advocate Carl Sagan liked to play pinball, that he loved basketball and grew to appreciate The Simpsons after a bad first impression, but never enjoyed Beavis and Butthead or Aliens, and that he "talked" with dolphins in their "native tongue." And then there was this touching father-son moment:
Today is the tenth anniversary of Carl Sagan's death and the Memorial Blog-a-Thon I mentioned the other day is now underway. (See Joel Schlosberg's big meta-post for links to participating blogs. Not surprisingly, John Scalzi has a tribute worthy of your time, as does Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy and Lou Friedman of The Planetary Society, which Sagan co-founded.)
I love space exploration because it takes energy that could be spent destroying the planet or hurting people, and uses it to expand what we understand and what we can see in our lifetimes.
--Wil Wheaton
For various reasons that I won't get into right now, I've been trying lately to articulate exactly why I find "space stuff" so interesting and exciting. I'm not sure Wil's thinking on the matter exactly matches my own, but it's probably a big component. And it's nicely stated. The rest of his entry from which that line comes is worth a click, too...
This is kind of cool... Nick Sagan, the son of the late astronomer Carl Sagan, reports on a plan to commemorate the tenth anniversary of his father's passing:
Good news: the Jones Soda Company (previously mentioned on this blog here, here, and here) has announced that it will discontinue using high-fructose corn syrup in its products in favor of cane sugar. I personally believe that the food industry's switch to cheap HFCS back in the '80s is a major component of why Americans are getting so damned fat -- if you read the nutritional labels, the crap is in frakkin' everything these days -- and real sugar tastes better anyway. Don't believe me? Then do a taste-test of this stuff versus the "mainstream" Dr. Pepper made with corn syrup.
Now, if only we could get the original-formula, made-with-sugar Coke that I remember drinking as a kid. Preferably in a glass bottle. It always tasted better in the glass bottle...
It doesn't look good. Scientists are still analyzing the images sent back by the Mars Reconaissance Orbiter as it tried to find its companion, the Mars Global Surveyor, but there doesn't seem to have been any "definitive sighting." Emily at The Planetary Society isn't willing to write off the MGS just yet -- there is still an effort underway to relay a signal from the MGS through the Opportunity rover down on the planet's surface. However, a number of space-related blogs and websites are already writing eulogies for the missing probe. This one includes a cool photo taken by the MGS in its salad days, as well as a good list of the mission's highlights.
The Opportunity rover up on Mars has now reached its 1000th "sol" (or Martian day) of operation. If you'll recall, Opportunity's brother Spirit reached the same milestone a few weeks ago.
To celebrate these twin achievements, a multi-media producer and rover enthusiast named Doug Ellison has created a pair of posters that he sent as gifts to the rover teams at Cornell University and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). The posters are mosaics composed of images taken by the rovers themselves, and they're pretty cool. Emily over at The Planetary Society has the details; you can see the Spirit poster here, and the Opportunity poster is here.
Not all of today's news from the Red Planet is happy, though: the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS), yet another of our intrepid robot proxies, has vanished. Mission controllers haven't heard from the spacecraft since November 5. They are hopeful that the MSG is still operational and has simply oriented itself at an angle that makes communication difficult (i.e., the antenna is turned away from Earth). Plans are afoot to try and spot the missing spacecraft with the cameras on board the Mars Reconaissance Orbiter (that's the one that photographed the Opportunity rover a while back) and then to use the rovers to relay a signal to the MGS. For more information, check out the Planetary Society's complete article.
Space.com has just posted the latest on the search for those missing slow-scan television (SSTV) recordings of Neil Armstrong walking on the Moon. (I've blogged about this search previously here, here, and here.) To cut to the chase, they haven't found them yet.
The inquiry into the whereabouts of the SSTV tapes has not proven easy.
Budget cuts at NASA in the post-Apollo years meant that many day-to-day records were discarded. Jobs and entire divisions that dealt with data records were eliminated.
Since there was no official requirement to archive data like this, [Bill] Wood added, the SSTV tape could have gone the same way that many old television programs did: TV stations degaussed the tapes and reused them.
NASA made a bittersweet announcment yesterday: they plan to send the space shuttle Discovery to service the Hubble Telescope one last time before the three remaining shuttles are retired. There has been some debate over whether this mission is worth the risk -- in the new, ultra-cautious, post-Columbia era, safety protocols demand that the shuttle be able to reach the International Space Station in the event of a damaged heat shield or any other problems; however, orbital mechanics make it impossible for a Hubble-bound shuttle to meet up with the ISS if it had to.
Another major milestone for the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit: today is its 1000th "sol" (i.e., Martian day) of operation. The Martian day is slightly longer than a 24-hour Earth day, so that plucky little skateboard of science has actually been running for about 1028 of our days. Recall if you will that it was originally intended to function for only 90 sols. I think the taxpayers have gotten their money's worth on this project.
The image above (which looks like a postcard from Southern Utah to me) is a 360-degree panoramic view of the hilltop where Spirit has been perched with its solar panels tilted toward the sun as it waits out the long Martian winter. As always, click the picture for a larger view. Details on the image as well as what Spirit has been up can be found in this press release, and a hi-rez version of the photo is here.
Among our various robotic minions currently exploring the solar system is a vehicle called the Mars Reconaissance Orbiter (MRO). As its name would suggest, the MRO is circling the red planet, mapping the martian surface in greater detail than ever before. It's also taking some spectacular photographs with its on-board high-rez camera, including the one below, which Phil Plait of the Bad Astronomy Blog calls "the best Mars picture EVAH" (i.e., ever, for those who don't speak Hipster):
How's about we start the day with a little jolt of wonder:
That's the space shuttle Atlantis pulling away from the International Space Station. Cool enough on its own, but what makes this so wondrous is that the photo was taken from the ground and that it's a shot of the two spacecraft transiting in front of the sun. Here's the complete image:
The search for the missing Apollo 11 tapes continues, with NASA's Goddard Flight Center now conducting a formal, "full-scale look" (previously, the search was pretty much the province of one man, Richard Nafzger, working in his spare time). Details for those who are interested are here. There's a PDF of a nifty flyer about the search here, and here is an official report from May that lays out in the most detail I've yet encountered exactly what this is all about. Especially interesting are the side-by-side photo comparisons on page 9, which demonstrate the difference between the original transmissions recorded on those missing tapes and what the public actually saw on their televisions. Also, the report brings up a critical time issue:
The Data Evaluation Lab (DEL) at the Goddard Space Flight Center is the only known place
that has the equipment and expertise to playback the tapes and to recover the data.
The DEL is slated for closure in October 2006.
...
It is vital that the DEL (or some elements of it) remain open and functional, otherwise none
of the Apollo data tapes can ever be played back and the historic information recovered.
I hope they find those tapes in time. Meanwhile, in other news, we're back down to eight planets in this system, and we didn't even have to build a Death Star to do it. I know a lot of bloggers are expressing strong feelings on both sides of this whole Pluto "demotion" issue; me, I don't care so much. My biggest complaint is that this decision has rendered obsolete all those episodes of classic Battlestar where characters make reverent mention of a semi-mythical system with nine planets...
The word about those missing Apollo 11 tapes that I wrote about the other day has hit the streets, and more information about what they are and where they may have gotten to is coming out. Here are a couple of worthy follow-up articles:
Have you ever had a vivid dream of being at work, and then your alarm sounds and you end up all disoriented and bummed out because you thought you were already at work but now you realize you have to get up and actually go to work? Yeah, that's how my day started, and it hasn't gotten much better since then.
Luckily, I've had the InterWeb to provide me with some distraction: I've been catching up on my spaceflight-related news. Here are some highlights for any loyal readers who may be interested:
A few days ago, I received an e-mail that breathlessly announced that we're about to experience the once-in-a-lifetime spectacle of the planet Mars looming as large in the nighttime sky as our own Moon. Never mind the fact that the Moon is much, much closer to the Earth than the fourth planet of our solar system, and common sense tells you that the nearer object will always look bigger than the farther one. Astronomer Phil Plait debunks this urban legend/spam message here. He's pretty testy about seeing it again (this same message has circulated before), but, on the positive side, it does give him the chance to post a way-cool image of Mars and the Moon, which I've borrowed and am posting here for the enjoyment of my three loyal readers:
It's July 20th, the 37th anniversary of the first time human beings walked on the moon. My opinion that this day ought to be made a national holiday has not yet found any support from the Powers That Be, and, poking around the Interweb today, I'm disappointed to see so little discussion about the anniversary or human spaceflight in general. I did find one op-ed by Buzz Aldrin, who was at Tranquility Base with Neil Armstrong when he took his small step, and Rick N. Tumlinson, the founder of an organization called the Space Frontier Foundation. Their sentiments will no doubt sound corny to some, but they appeal to the idealistic core I keep hidden under my cynical exterior:
I'm a week or so behind the curve with this item, but these days I seem to be running late all the time anyway, so what's one more item on the overdue list?
It seems that when the space shuttle Discovery lifted off on the Fourth of July, it carried a new feature: webcams attached to the nose and tail of both solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. (For those who aren't up on their spaceflight trivia, the SRBs are the skinny rockets attached to the sides of the thing that provide the initial lift-off boost; they separate a few minutes into the flight, after they've burned out all -- well, most -- of their fuel, and drop into the ocean, where they're recovered to be used again.) While I suspect the cams are part of the post-Columbia paranoia protocol, intended to document any potential damage during the launch phase, they have the positive side-effect of providing some unprecedented and seriously cool video of a process we've all seen 121 times now. Click the image below to see Discovery throttling up its own on-board engines and pulling away as the SRB separates:
Just like a Viper peeling off on the old Battlestar series, isn't it? Makes an old geek's heart swell to see reality reflecting fantasy like this...
Note: more images and videos from the current mission can be found at NASA's Web site. If you're into this sort of thing...
This is pretty cool: astronomers have recorded a meteor impact on the surface of the moon. The resulting explosion appears as a white flash in the black-and-white video clip, looking to my eye like the dust speckles you frequently see in old movies. However, this particular dust speckle was about 10 inches wide, detonated with a force equal to four tons of dynamite, and left behind a crater 14 meters wide and three meters deep. Meteors hit the moon all the time, of course, but it's pretty wild that this one was actually captured on film. (Or tape, or a chip, or whatever...) Go check it out!
As long as I'm posting photographs today, here's a real doozy (and one that I imagine will be of particular interest to Jen B., our resident geology buff, if she's out there):
Courtesy of Scalzi's AOL Journal, here's a lovely true-color photo of our little corner of the universe. It's a mosaic assembled from multiple satellite images. I've seen pictures similar to this before, but they never fail to take my breath away. I especially like the glint of sunlight over Baja. That's a detail that all those Star Trek episodes seemed to miss. Click on the picture to see it larger, click here for other (and even larger) images...
In the vein of yesterday's post about historical events that took place on my birthday, I'd like to point out that today, April 12th, witnessed two major milestones in the history of space exploration.
First (and perhaps most significantly), on this date in 1961, Yuri Gagarin of the Soviet Union became the first human to travel into space. Twenty years later, on April 12, 1981, Americans Robert Crippen and John Young piloted the first orbital space shuttle flight. (I have reluctantly come to accept that the shuttle program has mostly been an expensive disappointment, but the Columbia and her sister ships were still the first reusable spacecraft, surely a noteworthy accomplishment.)
According to Boing Boing, "Yuri's Night" events are planned in cities all over the world to commemorate these landmarks in human spaceflight. Unfortunately, I just found out about all this and have nothing planned, so I plan to simply raise a quiet toast on my back deck this evening as I gaze out at the stars and remember what we puny primates can accomplish when we set our minds to it...
Space journalist James Obergcomments on yesterday's news about the discovery of liquid water geysers on Saturn's moon Enceladus and why it matters:
But why? Do improved science textbooks and even exciting news headlines offer rewards for the effort needed? If there are signs of life -- past, present, or even future -- on Enceladus, or Europa or Titan or even below the bitterly-cold ice shells of Pluto or the newly discovered Sedna, what does that benefit us?
The fundamental and potentially infinite benefit is that we, too, are "life," with our particular biochemical processes that allow us in a time-tested but slapdash fashion to grow, survive temporarily, replicate and occasionally stare at the stars. To understand this process that briefly keeps each of us alive, we study the examples we have -- ourselves and our cousins from the same creche -- and speculate. But examples from another creche could show the range of possibilities that was irreversibly narrowed here on Earth as this particular DNA-based "life form" spread and dominated.
How would another microorganism pass on blueprints for progeny, and how does this other process compare to the successes of "our" life, and how does it fail? How does it repair itself against environmental hazards? Do cells on Europa get cancer? Do they even have DNA-tagged "counters" that on Earth enforce cellular death after so many divisions? Do they allow some -- but not too much -- replication variation that enables environmentally-driven or behaviorally-driven evolution?
The answers to these and other questions will tell us about the potentialities and design limits of the life processes that comprise ourselves. And that, most definitely, we want to know, and take advantage of.
The "answer book" to all these questions isn't just lying out there at Enceladus already bound and decoded, for us to go out and pick up and read at our leisure -- but pages, or even paragraphs of it, could well be. And this lucky concurrence of watery geysers and of current space capabilities offers a rewarding strategy to do what humans have done, and benefited from, since they became humans: wonder, and then go find out.
Wonder, and then go find out... that'd make a pretty good motto, don't you think?
I've just read that the final attempt to contact the Pioneer 10 spaceprobe has failed. The probe actually hasn't been heard from since the year 2000, but this month the Earth moved into a position more favorable for picking up a signal, if there was one, and the folks at JPL (the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which built and operated the Pioneer and Voyager probes) were hopeful. Their failure to detect anything indicates that the little ship either doesn't have enough power left to run its transmitter, or its power systems have failed entirely. In any event, this was the last time any attempt at contact will be made.
Here's something cool for you all to look at, courtesy of The Planetary Society's Weblog: it's a photo taken by a guy named Ed Morana of the International Space Station transiting (i.e., crossing in front of) the Moon on February 13th.
According to the blog entry I nabbed this from, the image is composed of eight exposures from a video camera taken as the Station moved from right to left. Morana's site features movies, if you're into that whole motion thing...
Now here's something I didn't know: Polaris, a.k.a. the North Star, is actually three stars, a trinary system consisting of a supergiant much larger than our own sun and two smaller companions. One of these companions can be seen with a small telescope, but the other is in so close to the big one that its presence has only ever been deduced, never directly observed. Until now.
In this photo, the supergiant is the big white blob, naturally, while the companion star is the much smaller bright spot in the seven o'clock position. Not surprisingly, the image was captured by the amazing Hubble Space Telescope, which had to be cranked up to its maximum resolution in order to accomplish the job; details can be found in this press release from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Pretty cool.
AN EXTRAORDINARY "hyperspace" engine that could make interstellar space travel a reality by flying into other dimensions is being investigated by the United States government.
The hypothetical device, which has been outlined in principle but is based on a controversial theory about the fabric of the universe, could potentially allow a spacecraft to travel to Mars in three hours and journey to a star 11 light years away in just 80 days, according to a report in... New Scientist magazine.
The theoretical engine works by creating an intense magnetic field that, according to ideas first developed by the late scientist Burkhard Heim in the 1950s, would produce a gravitational field and result in thrust for a spacecraft.
Also, if a large enough magnetic field was created, the craft would slip into a different dimension, where the speed of light is faster, allowing incredible speeds to be reached. Switching off the magnetic field would result in the engine reappearing in our current dimension.
Ever wonder where you fit into the Big Picture? Well, now we have a pretty good idea:
Using a network of radio telescopes spread across the globe, astronomers have determined that the distance from our solar system to the nearest spiral arm of the galaxy (we're in the gap between two arms) is 1.95 plus or minus 0.04 kiloparsecs, or about 36,000,000,000,000,000 miles. That's a pretty long trip, even at "point-five past lightspeed." Just a little something to think about on this chilly Friday morning...
I won't make the "that's no moon, that's a space station" remark, because every other blogger who's ever posted a picture of Saturn's moon Mimas has already said it. Even so, I gotta say that this thing looks enough like the Death Star to give me the willies. We'd better hope that really is just a big impact crater there in the upper hemisphere, and that this thing doesn't someday start moving toward Earth under its own power...
Technical note, for those who may care: this image of Mimas against the backdrop of Saturn's rings was taken by the Cassini spacecraft. Details can be found here.
You don't hear much about space exploration on the nightly television news these days, but if you do a little googling, you'll find that there's actually a lot of activity going on Out There. Between the various US organizations, the ESA (European Space Agency), and the Japanese, our species has placed its mechanical proxies all over the solar system, everywhere from the very edge of interstellar space back to Jupiter and Saturn, and all the way inward to the sun. But the missions that seem to draw the most public attention are the ones focused on Mars, especially the rock stars of robotic space probes, those two intrepid little rovers. The first rover to land on the Red Planet, Spirit, has just celebrated its first year there -- its first Martian year, that is, which is actually equivalent to about two Earth years. Not bad for a machine that was only supposed to last 90 days. The official press release puts this milestone into some perspective:
During Spirit's martian year, the seasons have changed from summer to winter and back again. In its orbit around the Sun, Mars has returned to where it was when the rover first landed. Having survived seven times its expected lifetime and traveling over 3 miles (about 5,000 meters), Spirit is still going strong.
If you have a minute, give that entire press release a look; it's an interesting recap of Spirit's various discoveries as well as its arduous climb up the Columbia Hills, with several pictures and a map of the rover's wanderings. You might also want to check out the "special effects" photos prepared by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to commemorate the anniversary. Basically, they've combined a Hollywood-style digital model of the rover with actual images sent back from Mars to give us an external view of how Spirit might look in the Martian environment. My personal favorite of is this one. I like the romantically bittersweet feeling of the little probe all alone in the coming night of an alien world...
We've seen it hundreds of times on TV and in the movies: an entire planet shrinking away from the camera, swallowed up by the darkness of space in a matter of seconds as the Enterprise warps out of orbit or the Millenium Falcon races away from pursuing TIE fighters. Ever wonder what it would really look like to watch our homeworld slide into the distance behind us? Then check out this movie, which is composed of several hundred images taken by the spacecraft Messenger during a "gravity assist manuever" that will slingshot the unmanned probe toward Mercury. The photos were made over the course of 24 hours, so we get to see a complete rotation of the planet during the film. This makes Earth look something like a toy top spinning at an unnatural, crazy speed, but it is a beautiful sight nonetheless. I was especially fascinated by the golden sun-highlight in the upper quadrant; that's something no special-effects guy has ever thought to add to his shot, at least not to my knowledge.
I still believe and hope that someday a human being will see this view with their own eyes instead of through a trick of technology...
For any who be interested, here's another article about the James Webb Space Telescope. This one is a little more generalized and "big picture" than the one I linked to yesterday...
My entry awhile back on the recent space shuttle mission triggered a comment-section discussion between myself and my friend Robert about, among other things, plans for a new space telescope to replace the aging Hubble. Well, Robert, just for you, I'm linking to this article about that new telescope, which has just reached a big manufacturing milestone related to its primary mirror. Fantabulous factoids about said mirror and the telescope to which it belongs follow:
The [James] Webb [Space] Telescope features a 6.5-meter (20 feet) aperture primary mirror comprised of 18 beryllium segments and will be the largest deployable telescope ever launched. ...JWST will peer into the infrared at great distances to search for answers to astronomers' fundamental questions about the birth and evolution of galaxies, the size and shape of the universe and the mysterious life cycle of matter. The space-based observatory will reside in an orbit 940,000 miles from Earth at the L2 Lagrange point.
The Lagrange points, for the non-geeky among us, are places in space where an object will be stationary relative to both the Earth and the Moon, rather than continuously changing position like ordinary satellites.
This has been another interesting but essentially useless exercise in trivia, courtesy of Simple Tricks and Nonsense. You may now return to your regularly scheduled Web surfing.
There are some interesting tidbits over at Space.com today that probably won't make it onto the evening news, so I thought I'd provide a valuable public service and bring them to the attention of my three loyal readers.
I'm sure everyone knows by now that space shuttle Discovery landed safely yesterday morning at Edwards AFB in California. I'm pleased about that, of course, and also pleased that the mission went as well as it did, including the unprecedented repairs to the shuttle itself that were performed by astronaut Steve Robinson. Post-landing glow aside, however, this Interested Observer found himself deeply troubled throughout most this flight, and it wasn't because of the constantly looming specter of another Columbia-style disaster.
After a two-and-a-half year hiatus, America resumed manned spaceflight yesterday morning with a picture-perfect launch of space shuttle Discovery. You'd think that would be a fairly big deal, wouldn't you? I certainly did. However, when I tuned into my 10 o'clock news last night, the lead stories were about an Amber Alert in the Sugarhouse area and a legal decision involving the goofball who kidnapped Elizabeth Smart. Yes, that's right: instead of the cool video footage I hoped to see from Discovery's new external-tank-cam, I found myself looking once again at Utah's overexposed ambassador of sticky namby-pambiness, Elizabeth's father Ed. I wanted to scream. In fact, I think I may have, very quietly so as not to wake the S.O. in the other room. Ed Smart has that effect on me.
Now, I'm not saying these missing-children stories aren't important, and I'm not naive enough to believe that everyone shares my interest or belief in the relevance of spaceflight. But I do believe our media's choice of lead stories says something about where our culture is at right now, psychologically speaking, and it's not a place I find particularly inspiring. Instead of looking upwards, we're looking inwards. Instead of can-do optimism and a spirit of adventure, we feel fear and anxiety. And instead of celebrating what human beings can accomplish through pluck and applied intelligence, the news wallows in sensational stories about all the bad things that happen to little blond girls. (They're always blond, have you noticed? You'd think that nothing ever happens to brunettes, redheads, or -- gasp! -- little-girls-of-color!)
I don't know about you, but I personally find this a pretty damn depressing state of affairs. More later...
The news about James Doohan diverted my attention earlier, but I couldn't let today pass without acknowledging something very important: this is the 36th anniversary of the day human beings first set foot on another world, namely Earth's own Moon.
Hi, kids -- I hope everyone out there in InternetLand had a good Fourth of July. The folks at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory certainly did. Their Deep Impact space mission (which I previewed for you a month ago) went off without a hitch, slamming its impactor probe into the comet Tempel 1 just before midnight Salt Lake time on Sunday, July 3rd. The boom resulting from an object the size of a washing machine connecting with an object half the size of Manhattan Island at roughly 23,000 miles an hour apparently surprised even the people who designed the probe:
The collision was photographed by the Deep Impact "fly-by spacecraft" (which, conveniently enough, is also the vehicle that released the impactor) as well as the Hubble telescope and a number of other probes, satellites, and observatories. As a result, the Internet today is awash in cool images like the one above. There's even video taken from the impactor as it approached its final destination. Think back to those missile-cams that so impressed us back during the '91 Gulf War and you'll get the idea. If you're interested in this stuff, you'll want to start with the mission home page, which includes a gallery of images, video, animation, and artwork. There's also lots of information about the impactor and the flyby spacecraft, Tempel 1 and comets in general, the technology used to make this happen, and the reasons why scientists thought it would be a good idea to deface one of the other objects in our solar system.
With no sign of the Cosmos 1 solar-sail spacecraft two days after its launch, members of the Planetary Society's operations team are packing it in and returning to their regularly scheduled lives. Before the project's official blogger Emily signs off, however, she leaves us with this typically hopeful message:
At the Society, we're already talking about what to do next. A few hours ago, Bill Nye -- the Science Guy, and also the Vice-President of The Planetary Society -- asked all of the staff to gather together in the living room of the 100-year-old house in which we work. He opened and poured champagne for all of us, and we raised several toasts. We toasted Cosmos 1, first of all; it was an audacious dream, that we arrogantly compared to the flight of the Wright Brothers. We toasted [project director] Lou Friedman in absentia, for whom it must have been a pretty rough week. We toasted the staff and volunteers of the Society, for all the work it's taken to bring Cosmos 1 to the world. We toasted Ann Druyan, the chief sponsor of Cosmos 1, for making it possible, and for being the mission's spiritual leader. We toasted our members, for their devotion to our cause and their support. Finally, we toasted: Cosmos 2? Many of our members are telling us they're ready to try again. We can't say whether or not we'll try again with this mission until we find out what really happened. But we'll certainly stay in the business, and try more audacious things, like the Solar Sail, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Mars airplanes, or Venus balloons we've advocated in the past.
Disappointing news for space enthusiasts: Cosmos 1, which was to have been the first solar-sail spacecraft, has disappeared and was most likely destroyed following its launch yesterday aboard a Russian-made ICBM. The Planetary Society, the private organization that planned and provided most of the funding for the project, issued a statement this morning:
In the past twenty-four hours, the Russian space agency (RKA) has made a tentative conclusion that the Volna rocket carrying Cosmos 1 failed during the firing of the first stage. This would mean that Cosmos 1 is lost.
While it is likely that this conclusion is correct, there are some inconsistent indications from information received from other sources. The Cosmos 1 team observed what appear to be signals, that looks like they are from the spacecraft when it was over the first three ground stations and some Doppler data over one of these stations. This might indicate that Cosmos 1 made it into orbit, but probably a lower one than intended. The project team now considers this to be a very small probability. But because there is a slim chance that it might be so, efforts to contact and track the spacecraft continue. We are working with US Strategic Command to provide additional information in a day or so.
If the spacecraft made it to orbit, its autonomous program might be working, and after 4 days the sails could automatically deploy. While the chances of this are very, very small, we still encourage optical observers to see if the sail can be seen after that time.
The excellent Space News Blog is reporting that NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft is scheduled to hit a comet called Tempel 1 on July 4th. Before you shed any tears, though, be aware that this crash is deliberate; the idea is to gouge a hole in the thing to see what comets are like on the inside. Tempel 1 is reportedly about half the size of Manhattan, and the crater made by the spacecraft's "impactor" -- which is a detachable projectile that will slam into the comet while the rest of the Deep Impact probe remains safely behind to observe -- may range in size from a large house to a football stadium, and be up to 14 stories deep.
Comets are already known to be "dirty snowballs" composed mostly of dust and ice, but no one has any idea what their internal structure is like, and they are also believed to contain material that's been relatively unchanged since the formation of our system. This should be interesting...
For the record, my favorite scene in all six Star Wars films is also perhaps the most iconic one, the moment in the very first movie when Luke Skywalker watches two suns sink toward the barren horizon of Tatooine. It's a beautiful scene no matter how you examine it: visually, thematically, musically, emotionally. It's a powerful evocation of youthful restlessness, both melancholy and hopeful. And it's magical because it takes something that is mundane, if beautiful -- a simple sunset -- and transforms it into a novelty, the double sunset of another world. We identify with the image because we see something similar all the time, but we thrill at its strangeness. It is simultaneously familiar and unearthly.
How'd you like to see something like that scene, only for real? Something as close to standing in Luke Skywalker's boots as we're likely to get any time soon? My friends, please click "Continue Reading" to experience the unspeakably cool...
If you're still hanging around the computer on this beautiful, sunny, pre-MemDayWeekend afternoon, you're more than likely looking out the window and longing for anything other than work to occupy your attention. Allow me to help by tossing out a few links I've been meaning to post for a while...
Meanwhile, on the other side of the solar system...
It's a foggy day here in the Salt Lake Valley, the kind of weather that shrinks your world down to a couple hundred feet in any direction and coats everything in a clammy layer of moisture that isn't quite substantial enough to be actual water but is definitely a couple of notches below "dry." I usually don't mind days like this -- unlike a lot of people I know, I don't find them depressing and they don't make me feel claustrophobic -- but today I'm longing for some broader horizons. I'd love to be able to fly like Superman, so I could pierce through that numbingly gray ceiling and soar up into the sky, higher and higher until I reach the colorful and wonder-filled universe that lies above the earth. I can't actually do that, of course... but through the magic of the InterWeb, I can vicariously experience some of the wonders that a little machine called Huygens has found.
[Ed. note: if you don't know Huygens from Jergens, read the preceding entry first.]
UPDATE (Sunday night, January 16): I discovered earlier today that the links I've provided to various ESA pages have been intermittently unavailable. I'm guessing that there's been more demand than the ESA anticipated and they didn't have the server capacity to keep up with it. In any event, the links seem to be working now, and I apologize to any of my loyal readers who've been clicking these links only to receive the dreaded "Server Not Found" screen for their troubles.
Here's the first photo from Huygens, showing the surface of Titan.
Also, here's an article about the microphone I mentioned before. God, I hope that works. There was a similar instrument on one of the Martian probes that went missing a couple of years back, and I remember feeling incredibly disappointed by that. I really want to hear what another world sounds like...
It's an exciting day in space, as the European Space Agency's Huygens probe has touched down on the surface of Titan, a moon orbiting the ringed planet Saturn.
The excellent website Space.com has an article today about what's going to happen next following SpaceShipOne's victory in the race for the X-Prize. If you're at all interested in manned civilian spaceflight, give it a look -- it's pretty exciting stuff.
SpaceShipOne has won the X-Prize following a successful -- and apparently flawless -- second flight this morning. I don't have much else to say on this subject that I haven't said already. Oddly enough, this news is something of a let-down for me because it all happened so according-to-plan. Not that I wanted to see the vehicle explode or anything, but it just seemed to be so... easy. Even a little ho-hum, as if this privately funded civilian spacecraft thing has already become old hat. But then that's the way we want it to be, isn't it? Nice and easy, nothing remarkable. Easy enough for an ordinary person to book a flight to the orbiting Hilton for the weekend. The future is coming, my friends...
It's been an exciting day for spaceflight enthusiasts, almost like the one 24 years ago when my dad woke me at the crack of dawn to watch the first launch of space shuttle Columbia. That day so long ago was one of the rare bonding moments I shared with my father as I was growing up. Dad worked odd shifts at his job and I rarely saw him when I was very young; to this day, we don't know much about each other and it's difficult for us to talk, something we both regret. On the day of Columbia's first flight, Mom had told us not to wake her until T-minus thirty, so it was just us boys, sitting in front of the old console TV with the clunky manual knobs, suffering through interminable countdown delays while we waited for that gleaming white fantasy-machine to hurl itself skyward. I remember that Dad fixed me my very own cup of coffee that morning. It was more milk than coffee, and I'd had the sticky mixture before so it wasn't any big coming-of-age ritual or anything, but it was a rare, precious experience to be dunking coconut-chocolate chip cookies and drinking coffee with my dad as we impatiently waited for something to occur.
It�s another one of those grab-bag days here at Simple Tricks when I�ve got a whole mess of items that I want to write about, including celebrity deaths, human achievement, human striving, and stuff that�s just plain cool. Some of these have been kicking around my brain pan for a couple of weeks now, so my apologies if this is old news to some folks.
Well, it's Friday afternoon, and if you're at all like me, you're just watching the clock in the corner of your desktop and waiting for Mr. Slate to pull that little pteranodon's tail feathers for the last time this week. Under these circumstances, it's a fair bet that you won't be too interested in reading anything too heavy, so in place of the usual pedantic rantings and meandering attempts at criticism, I'll offer up a selection of the fun stuff I've encountered during my recent surfing.
One of my earliest ambitions was to be a Starship Captain. At some point, however, I realized that the human race was still a helluva long way from building anything like James T. Kirk's USS Enterprise, so I lowered my sights a bit and decided instead that I would become an astronaut. This was around the time that NASA was glide-testing its newest toy, the space shuttle Enterprise (which was named after the fictional Star Trek vessel), by taking it aloft on the back of a 747 and releasing it to fly, unpowered, back to the ground. It was an exciting time for a young boy who was interested in space, but too young to remember the Apollo missions. It seemed like we -- the human race in general and Americans in particular -- were on the verge of Great Things. I used to imagine myself piloting (or at least working aboard) a second-generation space shuttle, commuting between a busy spaceport on Earth and a wheel-shaped station in Earth orbit. I didn't think this was a mere daydream. I was convinced that it would happen. It seemed inevitable that human beings would one day answer the same siren song that has always compelled us to see what was over the next hill, the same call that caused us to walk out of Africa and go sailing across the uncharted oceans. I used to believe that humans would go to the stars simply because they're there, and that it would happen in my lifetime.
