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RedOrbit named me one of their blogs of the day today. Go me! I had come across them a time or two before. They are a space/tech news site. Not bad for that sort of thing and certainly less spammy and clunky than Space.com.
Whenever I hear the word enormity used to describe how gi-freakin-normous something is, I always willfully misinterpret it to mean an act of extreme evil or extreme wickedness. Now before you start screaming prescriptivist and throwing Kleenexes drenched in the snot of sociolinguistics at me — I’m not being a prescriptivist. Of course people have the right to use enormity that way. It is certainly the trend for that word and it probably will be within my generation that almost everyone forgets its original meaning. I just so like the meaning of extreme wickedness that I want to be able to use it to mean that without being misinterpreted. And a lot of people only know that word to mean gigantic.
So I was listening to a promo video (below) by Richard Branson of Virgin Galactic. Branson opens up with this line:
”Astronauts of the past 45 years have all returned to Earth struggling to convey the enormity of what they have discovered and with their perceptions clearly changed.”
And quite frankly, the sinister music blends with my interpretation of enormity far better. Astronauts have all returned overwhelmed by the vast wickedness they encountered in space. Awesome! I totally wanna go now. Actually, I’ve always wanted to go and probably would go even if I was told I had a 50/50 chance of making it back alive, so enormity just ups the thrill level.
This T-shirt just cracked me up:
Of course, it actually could have been this way. I think the US even had a defacto assumption that the moon was ours. This is very much not the case. With the recent Japanese and Chinese probes to the moon, the upcoming German probe, and rumors of more probes and missions to the moon, there are many claimants. There was a Moon Treaty that was supposed to hand control of all heavenly bodies over to the international community (that is, the UN). However, this useless piece of paper was only ratified by the likes of Mexico, France, India, Chile, Australia, and the Phillipines (and several other small countries), none of which have a manned space program.
The moon is potentially a gold mine (or rather, a helium-3 mine). What it is not, is a waste of time. If we ever do manned exploration of other worlds, a lunar base would be a great base of operations. For one, it’s good practice. For another, the lower lunar gravity could allow people to reside there longer with slightly reduced health effects while still providing an easy base to launch from. Of course, the moon has its dangers. NASA is planning a new lunar base on the lunar pole, where danger from solar radiation is diminished while still allowing for energy gathering from solar arrays.
It will be interesting to see how things turn out on the moon. Will there be borders and bases manned by robots and people from many different countries? Or will we see international cooperation as we have seen with the space station? At this point, it’s anyone’s guess.
One of the dark horses of the inner solar system makes its closest approach to Earth since it was discovered in 1983 soon. Phaethon is an asteroid (perhaps the burnt out core of a comet). We pass through its debris trail every December, resulting in the Geminid meteor shower. This year, the Geminids will peak on December 13-14th. Bonus: the Geminids are likely to be even better than the Perseids this year. Unfortunately, it’s cold out. Plus I have an exam on the 14th. This meteor shower didn’t get the memo I sent out that it had to fall on a weekend.
So what’s special about the Geminids? Phaethon is a source of denser meteors than are found in most other meteor showers. This results in meteor paths that can be jagged and more meteors that break apart and split. According to Space.com, the Geminids have a history of slow, bright meteors and faint meteors, but few medium-brightness ones. The moon will be a faint crescent and peak times will see 60-120 meteors per hour.
For more on the discussion of whether Phaethon is a burnt out comet or an asteroid, check out Astroprof’s page on the topic. If you happened to download Celestia when I talked about it before, you can also download an add-on that includes a few thousand near-Earth objects. Phaethon is included in that pack (it doesn’t come with Celestia by default, or at least I couldn’t find it). That site (the Celestia Motherlode) has a number of very awesome additions to Celestia, so I recommend checking it out.
When I was around 12 or 13, I first got a hold of my stepfather’s physics text book. It was magic. The rules that governed the physical world were right there in the form of equations on a page. I was totally captivated. Newton’s laws of motion, gravity, angular momentum, and the theory of relativity. When I first learned about relativistic time dilation, it was life-changing. I resolved to become an astrophysicist. A lot of changes happened in my life that turned that dream into my current one. But, like all first loves, it never went away.
When I got my first computer, I had hopes of writing a program that would plot the positions of the stars as they were in space (3-D) versus how they appeared in the Earth’s sky (2-D). I achieved a little bit of success getting the vectors worked out from the distance, right ascension, declination and so on. I had no easy way of visualizing it though. Doing 3-D plots in BASIC back in 1990 wasn’t the easiest thing in the world. So that project died.
Then like a ghost, Celestia came to me last night. Wrapped up in her open source glory, I dared not even dream that she could perform what I had so long abandoned all hope of. But she did my friend, she did. (My wife won’t like this imagery :))
The second fantastic photo of Earth from space I’ve come across in as many days was taken by the Rosetta comet probe sent up by the European Space Agency (ESA). The Rosetta craft made big news recently when it was mistaken for an asteroid that was going to make a near-Earth pass. The Minor Planet Center failed to cross check the object against known probes and so sent out an alarm before realizing their mistake. Rosetta is using the Earth as a slingshot to propel it into the outer solar system (4.4 billion miles) to the Comet 67/P Churyumov-Gerasimenko. After that it will return to Earth for another gravitational slingshot.
One day our grandchildren will look into the morning sky and see this and think, I wonder what it’s like to live there… This is the first high definition view of Earth rising over the moon. It was taken by the Kaguya spacecraft put in lunar orbit by the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). [source]
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| Credit: JAXA/NHK |
Which will be the newest extraterrestrial body humans will set foot on? (Aside from the moon, of course.) According to Pascal Lee of the Mars Institute, “[Phobos and Deimos] are the most accessible planetary bodies in our solar system.” New Scientist has a report on the conference at Ames Research Center on Wednesday where ideas were thrown around for the human exploration of Mars. Astronauts could set foot on one of them within a decade. So cool.
Phobos and Deimos are similar in nature to C-type asteroids. Phobos is porous and has an extremely low orbit, subjecting it to tidal forces. These forces will eventually cause it to either break up or crash into Mars (in about 30-80 million years). In the meantime, it would make an excellent base of operations for a manned mission to Mars. Escaping the gravity of Phobos or Deimos would be much less difficult than escaping that of Mars.
One of the biggest problems with such a venture according to the New Scientist article is dust. With such a weak gravitational field, Phobos could have as much as 5 meters of dust accumulated on its surface. Also, a long journey like this would expose astronauts to too much radiation, giving them a 5% chance of dying of radiation poisoning (above the 3% NASA allows). But wouldn’t it be cool, to stand there on that dusty rock, a mere 6000 miles above Mars, looking at that giant red orb in the sky?
There is a somewhat rare opportunity for people in the US and southern Canada over the next two days. The space shuttle Discovery just undocked from the International Space Station and is currently drifting just in front of it. It will be passing nearly overhead just before dawn, the best time for viewing. As the space station comes into the sunlight while the Earth below is still in darkness, the solar panels reflect the light and it stands out brighter than most stars in the sky. Both the ISS and Discovery will be visible to the naked eye. In fact, the ISS is four times brighter than the brightest star in the sky and about equal in brightness to the planet Jupiter.
To see when the space station will pass overhead, check out the NASA Skywatch website. You can also use the most excellent real-time satellite tracking website, n2yo.com. I mentioned this website before, and it continues to impress me. You can create prediction maps for up to 5 days in advance, showing exactly where it will pass near you. Tomorrow morning at 6:12am, Pittsburgh will have a very nice, nearly overhead view of the ISS and Discovery.
Discovery lands Wednesday around midday, so your chances for viewing are limited to Tuesday and Wednesday (Nov 6th & 7th).
Astronomers have theorized for years that there must be more mass out there than we can see. Based on the movements of galaxies, star systems, and gas clouds the number of stars just can’t account for it all. Enter dark matter. Matter we can’t see. Special stuff. Even a whole Dark Galaxy.
On a side note, I’ve always thought that would make the perfect penal colony for an intergalactic empire.
“Mr. Adams, for your crimes against the Blagoblag, you are hereby sentenced to spend the rest of your natural life exiled to … the Dark Galaxy.”
“Noooooooooo!! Please, execute me instead!”
So a couple of Canadian astronomers (why their Canadaness is important, I don’t know) have proposed a new theory of gravity that dispenses with the need for dark matter altogether. From a strictly lay viewpoint, since I don’t have enough of a physics background to make an informed assessment, dark matter has always struck me as ad hoc. So dispensing with it would be much more elegant, in my opinion. Of course it would mean the end of the Dark Galaxy and my dreams of a vast network of prisons for political dissidents from the Rebel Alliance.
Last summer, observation of a galactic collision in the Bullet Cluster was touted as an event that caused dark matter to separate from the regular matter in galaxies and was considered evidence of dark matter’s existence. Enter Canadian astronomers: claims of dark matter’s existence premature. They have proposed a modified theory of gravity (MOG), which would account for everything observed in the collision. Excellent. Note: they are not announcing the theory, which has been around for a year or so, but the application of the theory to actual observed data.
John Moffat, the lead researcher, makes a great point that mirrors my feelings about dark matter quite well. He compares theories of dark matter to the 19th Century theory of the luminiferous aether, the hypothetical medium of space through which light was able to travel. “They saw a glimpse of special relativity, but they weren’t willing to give up the ether. Then Einstein came along and said we don’t need the ether. The rest was history.” [source]
I caught Randy Pausch on Oprah yesterday (and yes, a dying CMU professor IS the one of the few things that will make me endure watching Oprah). His last lecture focused on the importance of childhood dreams and he mentioned the landing of men on the moon as a pretty fundamental motivator. Heck, it inspires me still and I wasn’t even alive. So I especially love it when NASA gets kids involved in the space program (I’ll return to this after a brief rant). Too much today, launches of the shuttle, the existence of the International Space Station, and probes sent to other planets are just routinely ignored or sidelined by the mainstream press. Discovery launched today carrying the Harmony module to the ISS and it got about 3 seconds on the Today show. The result? People think the space program is totally useless. It doesn’t help when Nobel laureates like Stephen Weinberg call the space station an “orbital turkey” that “has produced nothing of scientific value.” That brings to three the number of Giant Turds with Nobel Prizes (joining James Watson the Racist and Al Gore the Murky-Green Fraud). For a nice rebuttal of the Weinberg gibberish, there is this article from adAstra that mirrors the point by Randy Pausch a bit.
Anyhow, returning from my rant. NASA has announced a contest for school kids to name a place for the Cassini probe to point. Cassini is currently in the Saturn system. It recently left Iapetus, which I indicated looks like the Death Star. Currently it is focusing on Saturn’s moon Titan and will be doing some close flybys of it over the next few months. For students to participate the contest, they need to write a 500-800 word essay on why Cassini should look at one of four possible targets on November 30, 2007. So if you know a kid in grades 5-12, let them know.
Four Targets:
- Mimas (a moon) coming out from behind Saturn
- Saturn’s rings and a lot of moons
- Prometheus (another moon) and the F-ring (Prometheus seems to actually steal matter from the ring)
- Tethys (yet another moon) and its Odysseus impact basin
If you were going to build a death star, then hide it, what would it look like? SciAm Observations today has an array of desktop backgrounds of the moon Iapetus, which orbits Saturn. Iapetus is an especially fascinating moon for many reasons. For starters, it has a giant impact crater. Also there is an equatorial ridge which encircles the entire moon, making it slightly resemble a walnut. The moon is heavily pockmarked with craters.
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Image courtesy of NASA and JPL. Taken by the Cassini probe. |
Well, this ain’t no Federation baby. Unlike the world of Star Trek, where money isn’t much of an issue for your average Star Fleet officer, money is an issue in our world. And soon to be off our world, as well. In one of those bizarre, possibly pointless moves, some scientists have created a currency fit for space. Paper bills and metal coins just won’t work. If a metal coin develops a jagged edge, that could be deadly in space. Plus, ever try counting dimes in a spacesuit while the Galactic Burger King drive-thru guy looks at you impatiently? Never again, says I!
The Solution
Rather than using paper, which isn’t durable, or metal, which isn’t safe, or credit cards, which have magnetic strips that may interfere with certain electronics (or be destroyed by the solar wind), scientists have settled on using polytetrafluoroethylene, aka teflon. This currency was developed by a group funded by Travelex, a currency exchange firm. The name is a bit grandiose and nauseating at the same time: QUIDs. Quasi Universal Intergalactic Denomination. A single QUID will be worth about $12.50 US (£6.25, €8.68). So despite being a bit of a pun, it’s also just plain overstretching. Intergalactic? Not unless we develop FTL (faster than light) drives sometime this eon.
Besides being a load of hype, there could be an actual application for this currency. If Virgin Galactic gets off the ground (or one of the other contenders), and space tourism becomes a real thing, these chips will come in handy. And I propose we nickname them chips. How sci-fi that would be.
Another potential killer asteroid was rediscovered after being lost since the 60’s. Revolving around the sun once every 4.7 years, this asteroid isn’t a threat for the foreseeable future, but if the orbit shifts, that could change. It’s just one more to keep an eye on, joining a family of 886 objects larger than 500 feet across that pass within 4.6 million miles of Earth, according to Space.com. Good times.
George Takei, better known as Sulu to the world of non-hardcore Trek fans, now has an asteroid named after him. I say non-hardcore Trek fans because hardcore Trek fans know his real name. Or maybe it’s semi-hardcore. Super hardcore probably have lost all touch with reality and believe he really is Sulu. In any case, asteroid 7307 is now 7307 Takei, joining the mighty ranks of 4659 Roddenberry and 68410 Nichols (Lt. Uhura’s real name). In an unfortunate bit of news, the asteroid was knocked off a balcony roof in New York and fell to its death.
Wired has announced the winners of the NASA slogan contest they were running a while back. As I said in a previous post, I made a submission, but not long after doing that I soon regretted it. My choice of slogan was more of a sci-fi joke, so had no chance. I thought it was at least mildly amusing, but it got voted down pretty harshly, so apparently not.
“Earth is not room enough.”
So the winners were announced today and they aren’t bad. The top 3 are:
- Exploring Other Worlds, Understanding Our Own
- NASA: Explorers Wanted
- NASA: Bringing the Universe to Your Doorstep
Well, they aren’t great. The first choice is definitely my favorite of the three. They also listed the entire top 25, but I won’t reproduce them all here. My favorites of those are:
- Fueling Imagination
- Innovation Through Exploration
- The Universe is Waiting
And my favorite amusing entry:
- Ad Astra, Per Asparagus
The Dawn spacecraft is currently sitting on the launchpad at Cape Canaveral, where it will wait until September 26th for launch. NASA always chooses these vague, optimistic names for spacecraft. The Mars rovers have names like Spirit and Opportunity or old probes with names like Voyager and Pioneer. Of course there are the dreadfully functional names like Mars Polar Lander. And of course, the odd barbarian always finds his way into the crowd: Viking. But I think that Dawn is named well. Here we have a spacecraft that is actually going to the asteroid belt and examine the asteroid Vesta and the dwarf planet (ala Pluto) Ceres. Of course, Ceres is a smidge smaller than Pluto having a radius of 475 km versus Pluto’s 1153 km. The great thing about asteroids, though, is that their escape velocity is relatively minor. Ceres is only 1.2 km/s, or about 4320 km/h (2685 mph). This is nothing when you consider the escape velocity of Mars is 18,097 km/s (11,247 mph). The bonus here is that spacecraft going to Ceres expend less fuel in their approach (slowing down) and less fuel on take-off.
Dawn will only be orbiting these bodies, not landing on them. Dawn’s mission is to study the formation of these two objects, but I think the longterm effects are much more important. For one, it will give us experience in working with the asteroid belt. Many sci-fi writers have speculated that the asteroid belt will be a great place for space stations and mining operations. If Dawn finds the right things, it could spur further exploration of the asteroid belt. Maybe one day my great grandchildren will visit the space mining museum on 243 Ida (below) and spend the night at the bed and breakfast on its moon Dactyl (the speck on the right).
NASA is looking for a new slogan and Wired wants one of its readers to be the one who comes up with it. Vote for mine or come up with your own. My proposed slogan is “Earth is not room enough.”
Space.com: “Spaceport America: First Looks at a New Space Terminal”
So awesome. I’ve been very skeptical of the prospects for this most delicate of industries: space tourism. It seems like it’s probably just one catastrophe away from being set back 20 years or more. Seeing the artist’s rendition (below) of Spaceport America sets afire something in me that has lain dormant since my childhood: hope. Hope that I may go into space one day. Hope that there will be a colony of people living on the moon, in a space station, on an asteroid, on Mars. Is it a sign of my nerdiness that I have to hold back tears?
As a big fan of both Star Wars and the International Space Station, you would think that the upcoming marriage of the two would delight me. You would be wrong.
Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber will be flown to Houston, where it will be sent off by Chewie and a host of other minor Star Wars characters, including R2 and some stormtroopers. Then, it will be carried along with the new Italian-built Harmony node to the space station by STS-120 (Discovery) on October 23rd. At the end of the mission, it will be brought home and probably gain a few tens-of-thousands of dollars in value as a result. The reason for this gimmick is the 30th anniversary of the Star Wars franchise.
I suppose the reason I hate this cheap, pointless exercise so much is that I am really angry with people not appreciating the sheer awesomeness that is the International Space Station. Most Americans would be shocked to learn that there are currently people living in space. The fact that they don’t already know it says to me that something has gone horribly wrong in our national psyche. So NASA feels the need to allow this gimmick to proceed, perhaps in hopes of increasing awareness and therefore funding. Maybe it’s not so much anger I feel as it is sorrow, for the futility I sense in trying to change the status quo with such a cheap trick.
Or maybe I’m just being way too dramatic — a charge that has oft been levelled at me. I will not deny it. Probably the LucasArts people wanted to generate some buzz for their franchise and the NASA geeks, having a high probability of being devoted Star Wars fans, accepted gladly.
Space.com: “NASA Shuttle to Launch Luke Skywalker’s Lightsaber”
Gmail features web clips over the menu bar that you can customize and often spew some sort of advertisement. One such is for the Coffee Fool. They make the claim that fresh coffee should be a sweet drink and that bitterness and flatness are a result of the roasting process. I’ve been very curious to try it out, but the price is anywhere from 50-200% more than Starbucks, which is already expensive enough. I might cave soon, though, as I have been given scientific justification to spend money (and frankly, the thinnest pretexts will do when it comes to spending money). So boffins have concluded that the bitterness is coffee is not due to caffeine as it had been supposed, but due to roasting. It seems the Coffee Fool knows what they’re talking about.
“Battling Bitter Coffee: Chemists Identify Roasting As The Main Culprit“
On an almost completely unrelated note, Germany will be deploying a satellite to go into orbit around the moon. The goal is to create a stereoscopic view of the moon and thereby produce 3-D images. It will also capture 3-D data of the moon’s magnetic field. All this is part of a drive to go back to the moon. With W’s call for a manned moon mission by 2020, the world must surely be seeing a critical need to not allow the US to spread its hegemony there as well. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting the world thinks the US will be taking over the moon, per se, but that early influence will lead to American dominance of the birthright of all mankind (which is itself debatable, I know).
The moon is basically a giant nugget of gold protected in the deepest cave and guarded by a pack of crazy monkeys. It’s damn hard to get at, but whoever does will be rich. The moon is loaded with Helium-3, which — if fusion does become possible — will be the fuel. So there’s a bit of a chance here and potentially worth billions. Now we just need to get fusion working…
As I mentioned in a previous post, I visited my family in Ohio this past weekend. The Perseid meteor shower peaked Sunday night/Monday morning, but the shower was going fairly strong Saturday night/Sunday morning. For the first time since the early 90’s I got a chance to sit out beneath the stars in perfect weather with no moon to watch a meteor shower.
The Perseids meteor shower peaks around August 11-12 every year. This year I’m going to visit my dad and uncle (and their families) in rural Ohio. There is absolutely no light from cities there so this should be a great viewing this year. I’ve only been able to view the Perseids from a remote location once before, sometime in the early 90’s, so I’m looking forward to it. Also, there will be no moon, so viewing will be optimal. Unfortunately, I’ll be viewing them Saturday night and the peak is going to be Sunday night/Monday morning. Right now the weather forecast is extremely favorable, calling for clear conditions. I hope (and pray) that this time the meteorologists get it right.
