I have since learned that the white toy cat at Mission Control, keeping a watchful eye over the CAPCOM station, was not just some random toy: Its name is Artemis, from the anime series Sailor Moon.
In the meantime, however, I also noticed another plush animal, one wearing a little mask. I was wondering about its backstory.
Today, I found out, courtesy of Reddit. The plushie’s name is Eugene, and it was there, in part, in memoriam of the late NASA engineer and flight controller, Jennifer Grassman.
Earlier tonight, at 6:44 PM Eastern time to be precise, we saw this on NASA TV:
It was followed, 42 minutes later, by this image:
Yes, that tiny thing in the depth of space is Earth. Every human being currently alive, and the remains of every human being who ever lived, are there, except for the four people on board Artemis 4, the spacecraft that took these images as part of its live video feed as it circumnavigated the Moon. (And no, don’t worry, the Moon is still there in the second picture, it’s just that from their perspective it’s mostly dark. Soon thereafter, they actually experienced a solar eclipse in space, as the Sun vanished behind the Moon for about an hour or so.)
Meanwhile, a friend of mine sent me a picture of something that hangs on his wall:
Yes, it means exactly what it implies: he was a member of the recovery force that recovered the last human expedition to the Moon, after their successful return and oceanic splashdown, back in 1972.
I was not yet 10 back then. Now? I already celebrated my 63rd birthday.
Past and present, both now part of one of those rare arcs of history that are worth remembering for all the right reasons.
As the Artemis II crewmembers remarked after breaking the distance record from the Earth: they hope their new record will not remain unbroken for long.
And we heard the magic phrase earlier tonight: trans-lunar injection.
It happened. Whatever the outcome (and I hope it’ll be a good outcome) four humans are now committed to travel to the Moon, for the very first time in since December, 1972.
And the have a cat to watch over them. Not a real cat, but still: a cat at the Mission Control Center.
What can possibly go wrong when you have a cat supervising the flight? Nothing, I sincerely hope.
For the first time in 53 years, NASA’s Deep Space Network is communicating not with a robotic spacecraft but with a human spaceflight in deep space.
Presently just over 32,000 km from the center of the Earth, in, as I understand it, a highly elliptical orbit, not quite yet heading to the Moon: that will involve yet another phrase we have not heard uttered “live” in 53 years: trans-lunar injection.
I never thought (at least not in the past 25 years, give or take) that I’ll live long enough to see this.
Note the indicator I highlighted in the lower right.
Distance to the Moon.
For the first time since December, 1972.
I was not yet 10 in December, 1972. The world was troubled back then, just as it is troubled right now.
This launch? I was worried sick. A space launch system the design of which was very heavily influenced by politics. Political pressure to ensure launch. Frustrating issues with the rocket in the preceding months, with multiple delays.
And yet… so far so good. The launch proceeded without a glitch. The spacecraft is orbiting the Earth, soon to continue its journey to the Moon.
To the Moon.
I am astonished by my own reaction to these words. Thinking of Jules Verne, thinking of Apollo 8, of Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apollo 17… and then 53 years — more than half a century! — with no human traveling beyond Low Earth Orbit.
You know what. Let me insert something here that these days isn’t very popular, for a whole host of (valid) reasons.
It was 40 years ago today that the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded some 70 seconds after liftoff, a result of a faulty O-ring design in its solid rocket boosters, combined with an aggressively accelerated launch schedule overriding concerns about freezing temperatures.
It was also one of three tragedies during what is sometimes described as NASA’s “week of tragedy”. The Apollo 1 fire, which killed three astronauts 59 years ago, happened on January 27, and then there is of course the Columbia disaster, which took place on February 1, 2003.
I had a very busy day today. Or make that yesterday, since it’s almost 3 AM already.
I wanted write something about D-day. Eighty years. It’s been eighty years since Americans, Canadians, Britons and others of the Greatest Generation landed on the beaches of Normandy, opening a much-awaited second front in the global struggle against fascist totalitarianism.
The result: An imperfect, yet enduring world order, Pax Americana, which brought historically unprecedented peace, prosperity, and security to the majority of humans living on this planet.
Perfect it was not. Totalitarianism never vanished. Even after Stalin’s death, the USSR and its empire prevailed for another 36 years. Some of the worst excesses of communism were yet to come. And there were wars, big wars: I thought I’d list a few but there were too many. Even so, this was a period of global peace, a rules-based system that endured, beyond expectations I should say: When I was growing up, no sane adult existed anywhere I think who expected the world to survive beyond the year 2000 without a major nuclear war, yet here we are in 2024, and there are still no nuclear wastelands.
But eventually, all good things come to an end. This world order is crumbling. Will we survive without a civilizational catastrophe? I don’t know. I worry. Ukraine, the Middle East, Taiwan… who knows what else. The retreat of democracy and the rise authoritarianism. The storm is brewing.
Anyhow, enough about D-day. There were some good news. Boeing’s Starliner, though limping a little, made it to the International Space Station. Those astronauts were brave souls. Considering recent news from Boeing, their newfangled attitude towards quality control and safety, I expected, feared rather, a disaster. I am relieved that it has not happened, but NASA should still dump that overpriced, unsafe contraption.
Meanwhile, Musk’s SpaceX had a major success: Starship completed a full test, involving successful launch and “landing” (onto the ocean for now) of both its first stage and Starship itself. The re-entry was not without challenges, but they made it. This is a big milestone, a very big one. The promise of Starship is basically the holy grail of space travel: Fully reusable, rapidly refurnished vehicles. The fiery reentry was perhaps a bit more dramatic than planned, but the spacecraft made it, and that means that they can learn from the issues and improve both the vehicle and its landing procedure.
And I was only marginally paying attention because I am still struggling with forced upgrades: CentOS 7, the Linux version that I’ve been using since 2016, is coming up EOL (end-of-life) which means I must upgrade. But I cannot upgrade to CentOS because Red Hat turned CentOS into a bleeding edge version of Linux with a short support cycle. Joy. Anyhow, today I managed to complete another milestone of my transition plan, so I may still be able to get everything done in time.
Japan’s SLIM (Smart Lander for Investigating Moon) made it to the lunar surface. Well… sort of. It accomplished its main goal of a targeted soft landing.
Unfortunately, its solar panels are non-operational. It’s unclear for now why (one speculation I read is that the lander may have tipped over after landing). Its batteries can power it only for a few hours. They’re hoping that perhaps later in the lunar day, or in a next lunar cycle, the lander will get sunlight from the right direction to be able to recharge its batteries after all.
Even so, Japan is now officially the fifth country to have landed a spacecraft on the Moon that remained (at least partially) operational on the lunar surface.
I made some mistakes in the past. I never made a half-a-billion dollar mistake.
Neither did Chris Lewicki, but he came awfully close.
I just read this delightful account of how Lewicki almost fried the innards of the Spirit rover, destined for Mars, during an engineering test that took place just weeks before the rover was launched.
I can only imagine the sinking feeling in his stomach he must have felt when he thought that the rover was ruined. My mistakes never came close in value, but the sensation is uncomfortably familiar.
Fortunately, in his case, the disaster never actually materialized. In simple terms, yes, he plugged a cord into the wrong outlet, but fortunately, the other end of the cord was not plugged in.
To this day, Lewicki must feel like one of the luckiest persons on the planet.
The illustration is from his blog post, but its appearance suggests that it might have been produced by DALL-E. Or maybe Midjourney or Stable Diffusion? The style looks very reminiscent of AI-produced cartoon images.
I’ve been meaning to mention this: A few days ago, the sample capsule of the OSIRIS-REx mission returned safely to the Earth, carrying inside a sample taken from the asteroid Bennu.
This is a remarkable achievement, the first* successful sample return of its type. I wonder what we will learn from the material that was obtained, but I’m sure it will reveal some intriguing secrets, especially about the history and formation of the solar system.
Love the way the capsule was sitting on the ground, upright, not even tilted. Could it be more picture perfect than this?
I am also mildly (but pleasantly) surprised that I have not heard any panicmongering about a capsule bringing back extraterrestrial microbes or whatever. OK, I wasn’t specifically looking but still. It’s a relief.
* I don’t know what possessed me when I wrote “first”; granted, OSIRIS-REx brought back a lot more material, supposedly, but the first successful such missions were the two Hayabusa missions of the Japanese Space Agency.
Russia’s first probe to the Moon in nearly half a century, Luna-25, has crashed.
It would be easy to react to the news with glee, with schadenfreude. We are, after all, talking about a crash that denied a propaganda opportunity to Putin’s Evil Empire (maybe not quite as evil as Stalin’s regime but more evil, to be sure, than the USSR ever was in my lifetime).
But space exploration transcends, always transcended, national boundaries. Our petty squabbles look pretty… well, petty from the Moon. Chances are, if human beings are still around with an advanced technical civilization a millennium from now (or, if our machine descendants are still around) they’re far more likely to remember Armstrong’s first step on the Moon than Russia’s attack on Ukraine, the Cold War, or even WW2.
So this crash is sad news, Putin or no Putin. I hope India’s probe, Chandrayaan-3, is more successful. Fingers crossed. Things are looking good for now but it has yet to accomplish a tricky landing.
Another paper of ours, in all its 36-page glory, was accepted by Physical Review D and I am delighted.
One of the things we do in this paper is the use of symmetric trace-free tensors (STF) that allow us, among other things, to effect a rotation of spherical harmonic coefficients. This approach likely has many uses as a bit of practical math, beyond modeling gravitational fields.
I just asked GPT-4 using my freshly developed UI about Starship.
In the background, GPT-4 correctly utilized a facility to perform Google searches and make use of the resulting snippets (I’m sure I’ll find a way to prevent it from referencing those snippets, which are not visible to the user, in the actual answer). Here is the critical part of the conversation that took place in the background:
User: What happened to Starship this morning?
GPT: SEARCH(Starship event on 2023/04/20)
System: Snippet 1: 3 hours ago … The rocket got off the launchpad before exploding above the Gulf of Mexico. This segment airs on April 20, 2023. Audio will be available after …
Snippet 2: UPCOMING. April 19, 2023. STARLINK MISSION · April 20, 2023. Starship Flight Test.
Snippet 3: 6 hours ago … April 20, 2023 … SpaceX launches the inaugural test flight of the integrated Starship and Super Heavy rocket from the company’s Starbase …
Snippet 4: 5 hours ago … April 20, 2023. Elon Musk has called it the “holy grail” for space technology. Starship, a new SpaceX rocket system that launched for the …
Snippet 5: ATCSCC ADVZY 007 DCC 04/20/2023 OPERATIONS PLAN. MESSAGE: EVENT TIME: 20/0200 – AND LATER … THE SPACEX STARSHIP SUPER HEAVY LAUNCH FROM BOCA CHICA, …
GPT: This morning, SpaceX launched the inaugural test flight of the integrated Starship and Super Heavy rocket from the company’s Starbase. Unfortunately, the rocket got off the launchpad but exploded above the Gulf of Mexico during the flight test (Snippet 1, Snippet 3).
In case you are wondering, yes, it knows the current date, too, thanks to the way my UI sets it up.
And yes, Starship blew up. But it blew up after the job of the first stage was nearly complete, at separation, at an altitude of some 40 km. Which means that despite the spectacular RUD (rapid unscheduled disassembly) event, this launch is still a huge success.
Now if we could only convince Elon to spend more time building rockets and less time honing his skills at corporate value destruction at Twitter, pardon me, X Corp…
Students at the California State University, Northridge, are currently working on a short documentary film about our work on the Solar Gravitational Lens.
The project hopes to attract modest crowdfunding. They also produced a teaser trailer.
Of course I hope they succeed; our SGL work could use some good publicity.
More than 20 years ago, I wrote a program that showed what Mars would look like if it had oceans.
I wrote it originally in C++, but then ported it to Java and turned it into a Web application.
That was a long time ago. Unfortunately, browsers no longer support Java applets for security reasons. So my beautiful applet was not working anymore.
Today, I finally spent some time reimplementing the applet in plain JavaScript. It’s working again! (Apart from some minor cosmetics.) And it has data sets for Mars, Earth, Venus and the Moon as well.
Putting aside Trumpism, woke-ism, the politics of the day, populism, the whole kaboodle, here’s something to contemplate.
Tonight, Russia is continuing its efforts to subjugate the independent nation of Ukraine, not refraining from committing serious, intentional, criminal acts against the country’s civilian population to further its goals.
Also tonight, the space agency of the United States, NASA, is conducting a ground-breaking experiment, the first of its kind testing a method that might one day avert a global disaster, protecting the entire planet from an asteroid impact.
DART: View of the asteroid Dimophos 20 minutes to impact
I think it speaks volumes about the different ways in which these countries see their respective roles in the world.
I almost long for Soviet times. The regime was assuredly brutal, but at least it professed to seek noble goals. Not anymore, I guess.
Oops. It’s past midnight already, so technically it was yesterday but to me it is still today, September 12.
The sixtieth anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s famous “we choose to go to the Moon” speech. How many more years before another human sets foot on the Moon?
Oh, and it was thirty years ago that Ildiko and I became married.
