The recent announcement by Dennis Tito about a manned flyby trip to Mars caught my imagination. Thinking about what such a trip would be like, I began writing a blog entry, but it soon became a bit too long for my blog, so I moved it to my Web site instead. Anyhow, here is the link: http://www.vttoth.com/CMS/personal/257.
Cancel the alarm: the Dragon’s wings are fine.
Whatever the actual anomaly was, it appears SpaceX was successful in resolving it and the Dragon now unfurled its solar array wings.
Yippie!
I was watching the seemingly flawless launch of SpaceX’s resupply flight to the ISS and like others, I was flabbergasted when the Webcast was suddenly blacked out (“Please Stand By”), then the flight director came on, announced that the spacecraft was experiencing an anomaly and more information will be provided at a press conference in a few hours and… that’s it. Webcast ends.
So like other good early 21st century netizens, I turned to Twitter: the speculation is that the spacecraft may have failed to deploy its solar arrays, perhaps because there was no fairing separation. This is Bad News. Some speculated that Dragon has sufficient battery power to make it to the ISS and that a spacewalk might fix things, but I don’t think things are that simple.
I guess there is nothing to do but wait for that press conference.
The live video was breathtaking, by the way. Watching the bell of the second stage engine glow yellowish-red was amazing.
So… my fingers remain firmly crossed.
The news is that Dennis Tito, the first ever space tourist to go to the International Space Station, is planning a privately financed manned flyby mission to Mars in 2018.
I don’t know how feasible it is. I actually have doubts that they will succeed. And the scientific value of such a mission would likely be negligible.
Even so… I dearly hope that they succeed. And if they asked me to go, I’d sign up without hesitation, despite the prospect of spending 500 days with another human being locked up in a tiny capsule, despite the significant probability that we won’t make it back alive.
It is okay to think about the economics, technical feasibility, and scientific value of a space mission, but all too often these days, we forget that other thing: inspiration. Sometimes, that’s worth a great deal. A generation of Soviet scientists and engineers inspired by Sputnik or the flight of Gagarin, and a generation of American scientists and engineers inspired by Apollo and Armstrong’s “one small step” can bear witness of this.
Chances are that if you tuned your television to a news channel these past couple of days, it was news from the skies that filled the screen. First, it was about asteroid 2012DA14, which flew by the planet at a relatively safe distance of some 28,000 kilometers. But even before this asteroid reached its point of closest approach, there was the striking and alarming news from the Russian city of Chelyabinsk: widespread damage and about a thousand people injured as a result of a meteor that exploded in the atmosphere above the city.
What I found rather distressing is just how scientifically illiterate the talking heads proved to be on television. First, it was CNN’s turn to be ridiculed after their anchor, Deborah Feyerick, actually asked the astonishing question, “Is this an effect of, perhaps, of global warming, or is this just some meteoric occasion?”
But then came the rest. I think it was on the Canadian network CTV (but I might be misremembering) where an anchor announced that an asteroid “the size of Texas” is about to fly by the Earth. Well… 2012DA14 is not the size of Texas, not unless Texas has shrunk a great deal since the last time I visited the Lone Star State (which was just a few weeks ago); the asteroid was only about 50 meters across.
And then the impact event in Russia. Initial estimates that I heard indicated an object weighing a few tons, traveling perhaps at 30 km/s; that’s still a significant amount of kinetic energy, maybe about a quarter or half of a kiloton if I am not mistaken. But then, a later and apparently more reliable estimate said that the object was perhaps 15 meters in diameter, traveling at 18 km/s. That, depending on the density of the object, is consistent with another estimate that I heard, 300 kilotons of energy released. If this latter estimate is valid, this means the biggest event since the Tunguska impact of 1908.
So where does the illiteracy come in?
One CNN anchor, describing the event, mentioned that thankfully, it occurred over a sparsely populated area, and the outcome would have been much worse had it occurred over a major population center. I wonder if residents of Chelyabinsk, a city of well over a million people, are aware that they qualify as a “sparsely populated area”.
And then there were the completely inconsistent size and mass estimates. A release by The Planetary Society spoke of an object 15 meters in diameter and weighing 8 tons. Say what? That’s just four times the density of air. The object in question actually weighed more like 8,000 metric tons.
Another CNN anchor was interrogating a physicist, wondering what causes these meteors to explode. The physicist was unable to explain coherently, and the anchor was unable to comprehend, the concept that it is just the kinetic energy of a very rapidly moving object that gets converted into heat pretty much instantaneously, heating up the air, which then rapidly expands and creates a shock wave. Come on guys, this is really not that hard!
Later in the afternoon, 2012DA14 finally did make its closest approach, as harmlessly as predicted, but there was obvious confusion in the news media about its visibility; yes, it was over the Indian Ocean at the time, but no, even there nobody could see it with the naked eye, much less find it “spectacular”.
I don’t think I am needlessly pedantic, by the way. On the contrary, I find it alarming that in our world which relies on increasingly sophisticated technology, people who are entrusted with the task of keeping us informed are this illiterate on matters of science and technology. Or even geography.
I came across this image on a Facebook page dedicated to the former glory of the Soviet Union. It is titled “Russia and the USSR: similar, yet noticeably different.”
There is, unfortunately, far too much truth in what the image depicts. It does not make me wish for Soviet times to return, but it does make me wonder why so much good had to be thrown away along with the bad.
And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas and God bless all of you – all of you on the good Earth.
– Frank Borman from Apollo 8, December 24, 1968
In just a few minutes, it will be exactly 40 years that the crew of Apollo 17 took off from the Moon, ending humanity’s last excursion to date on our satellite.
Incredibly, no human ventured beyond low Earth orbit since.
Imagine a world with weather. Hydrocarbon rains falling from an orange sky onto a deadly cold surface with chunks of ice as hard and as dry as rock; or onto vast hydrocarbon seas driven by freezing winds.
Meanwhile, through the orange haze overhead, you may glimpse a giant orb, filling half the sky, and surrounded by an even more magnificent flat ring.
This world exists. It’s Saturn’s moon Titan, the only body in the solar system other than the Earth with a stable liquid on its surface and genuine weather with precipitation and a “hydrological” cycle.
And now we know for sure that Titan has real rivers. Dubbed “Mini Nile” on NASA’s Web site, this 400 km long hydrocarbon river is the largest seen to date, and it appears to be filled with liquid along its entire length.
I truly envy those humans who, hopefully on a not too distant day in the future, will stand on the banks of this river, perhaps not even wearing a pressure suit just heated clothing and a breathing mask, and stare at this river in awe.
What will they find in the liquid? Is it harboring some primitive form of life?
One of my favorite photographs ever, in fact one that I even use on my Facebook timeline page as a background image, was taken by a certain Bill Anders when he was flying almost 400,000 km from the Earth. Anders was one of the first three members of our species who flew to another celestial body (albeit without landing on its surface; that came a bit later.)
Yesterday, I read a very interesting article about Anders, both his trip on board Apollo 8 and his life afterwards. The article also touched upon the topic of religion.
The message radioed back by the crew of Apollo 8 is probably the most memorable Christmas message ever uttered by humans. (Or maybe I am biased.) And yes, it starts with the words from Genesis, but I always viewed it the way it was presumably intended: as an expression of awe, not as religious propaganda.
The curious thing, as mentioned in the article, is that it was this trip around the Moon that changed the traditional Christian viewpoint of Anders about Earthlings created by a God in his own image.
“When I looked back and saw that tiny Earth, it snapped my world view,” Anders is quoted as saying. “Are we really that special? I don’t think so.”
Well, this pretty much sums up why I am an atheist. I’d like to believe that it’s not hubris; it’s humility.
An article we wrote with Slava Turyshev about the Pioneer anomaly and its resolution, at the request of IEEE Spectrum, is now available online.
It was an interesting experience, working with a professional science journalist and her team. I have to admit that I did not previously appreciate the level of professionalism that is behind such a “members only” magazine.
Wow. If these plots are to be believed, Voyager 1 may have reached the heliopause at last:
This is, well, not exactly unexpected but still breathtaking.
The discovery of the heliopause was one of the “holy grail” science objectives of the extended “interstellar” mission of the twin Voyager spacecraft. If confirmed, it means that Voyager 1 is the first man-made object to have entered the interstellar medium, traveling through a region in the outer solar system that is no longer dominated by charged particles from the solar wind. (Gravitationally, this is still very much our Sun’s domain; there are comets out there with elliptical orbits that extend to many thousands of astronomical units.)
Not bad for a spacecraft that was launched over 35 years ago and flew by Saturn just a few months into the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Its twin finished its flyby of Neptune when the Berlin Wall was still standing. And they are both still alive and well. Voyager 1 is more than 120 astronomical units from the Sun these days. It takes about 17 hours for its radio signal to reach the Earth. If all goes well, it has sufficient electrical power to operate its on-board instruments for another decade or so.
55 years ago today, the Space Age began when the Soviet Union launched “Elementary Satellite 1”, better known as Простейший Спутник-1; or, in Latin transliteration, as (Prosteishii) Sputnik-1.
Inadvertently perhaps, but Sputnik-1 also launched what is nowadays called “radio science”: observations that utilize a spacecraft’s radio signal to determine the spacecraft’s position (and thus, the forces that act on the spacecraft) and the properties of the medium through which the signal travels. In the case of Sputnik-1, this meant deducing the density of the upper atmosphere (from the drag force acting on the satellite) and the electromagnetic properties of the ionosphere.
Sputnik-1 spent a total of about three months in orbit (22 days operational) before it fell back to the Earth. By then, the Space Race was running full steam ahead, culminating in the manned Apollo Moon landings in 1969… an accomplishment that, today, seems to be more in the realm of fiction than back in 1957.
Busy celebrating our 20th wedding anniversary yesterday, I forgot that there was another important anniversary on September 12: it was fifty years ago yesterday that a certain John F. Kennedy uttered the words, “We choose to go to the Moon. We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.” And with those words, an astonishing sequence of events took place, and before the 1960s came to an end, two Americans indeed landed on the Moon… a technological feat the like of which the world has not seen since 1972, when the last of the Apollo Moon shots took place.
Nature had a nice editorial a few days ago about the Pioneer Anomaly and our research, titled “…and farewell to the Pioneer anomaly” (so titled because in the print edition, it is right below the obituary, titled “Farewell to a pioneer”, of Bernard Lovell, builder of what was at the time the world’s largest steerable radio telescope at Jodrell Bank).
Farewell, yes, though I still hope that we will have the wherewithal to publish a longer article in which we provide the details that did not fit onto the pages of Physical Review Letters. We ought to update our review paper in Living Reviews in Relativity, too. We need to prepare for the release of the data used in our analysis. And, if possible, I’d like to spend time tackling some of the open questions we discuss near the end of our last paper, such as analyzing the spin behavior of the two spacecraft or making use of DSN signal strength measurements to improve the trajectory solution.
First things first, though; right now, my priorities are to a) earn money (which means doing things that I actually get paid for, not Pioneer) and b) get ready to have our upstairs bathtub replaced (the workmen will be here Monday morning), after which I plan to do the wall tiles myself (with fingers firmly crossed in the hope that I won’t mess it up too badly.)
Yes, sometimes such mundane things must take priority.
The first human being ever to walk on the surface of the Moon is no longer with us.
Good bye, Neil Armstrong.
Ray Bradbury would have turned 92 yesterday. Were he still alive, perhaps he would have appreciated this birthday gift: the landing site of NASA’s Curiosity rover on Mars was just named in his honor.
And Curiosity is now leaving tracks in the Martian dirt at Bradbury Landing.
We now have a beautiful view from space of Curiosity descending to the Martian surface.
Space exploration proceeds a lot slower than envisioned back the 1960s, but the human infrastructure around the Red Planet is slowly taking shape, as evidenced by this picture and also by the real-time relay of Curiousity signal during landing by Mars Odyssey.
Curiosity landed on Mars and its first image was returned successfully.
Yippie!
Good-bye, Sally Ride. America’s first female astronaut died today, at age 61, after a battle with cancer. When she flew on board Challenger in 1983, Ride was also NASA’s youngest astronaut to have made it to space.
Ride is also known as the only person who publicly supported Roger Boisjoly, the Morton-Thiokol engineer who tried to warn NASA that Challenger was in mortal danger, only to be overruled by his bosses. Boisjoly himself died earlier this year, at age 73.
The world’s first female astronaut, or rather, cosmonaut, is still alive: Valentina Tereshkova is 75 this year, seemingly in good health (judging by her appearance in recent press photographs). May she enjoy many more happy years!