Episode 6 Traveler's Tales

I'm writing this post on Thanksgiving night. It was a great convention today for the Mueller's and I'm fighting off the tryptophan sleep-inducing effects as I type this. My job at Courts+ will be calling me at 3:30AM tomorrow morning to help people work off the excesses of today.
 
Things didn't go so well for the two space items that occurred today. First the comet ISON swung around the Sun and achieved a top speed of 844,632 mph. Not bad for something that weighs 2 billion tons. Unfortunately, the gravity of the Sun ripped it apart and it evaporated before it came out from behind El Sol. Here it was going to be "the greatest comet of all recorded time" during December, drat! I'm glad Carol and I tried to see it last Sunday morning. We spotted the planets Saturn and Mercury but no luck for comet ISON even with binoculars. Fifteen minutes of searching in 10 degree temperatures in a field a couple of miles away from my house was a noble effort. I had hoped that it would be a naked-eye object after swinging past the Sun.

Second, SpaceX made its second attempt to launch its first geosynchronous satellite for Luxembourg. The countdown got down to 2 seconds and then the engines sensed something wrong and shut down. I haven't seen a new launch date published yet. This will be the first commercial satellite launch for a US company since 2009. The US has lost the satellite-launching market to Europe, Russia, and China. SpaceX is only charging $60 million for this launch. Europe's Ariane 5 rocket costs at least $200 million. It will be a great day for the cost of putting stuff into orbit if SpaceX can be successful at its current pricing.

Now for Carl Sagan's Traveler's Tales. Carl compares the 1977 launched Voyager space probes to the sailing ship exploration voyages of the 1600's. When he spoke about the space probes they had only gotten as far as Jupiter. Both would continue on to Saturn and Voyager 2 would also visit Neptune and Uranus. I fondly remember going to the Field Museum to listen to a NASA person relate the discoveries at each planet. This was before the Internet, so information was much harder to come by.

Because Voyager 1 only traveled past two planets, it was slingshotted sooner and faster out of the solar system. As of tonight, its distance from the Sun is 11.7 billion miles or 126.1 AU (AU being the distance between the Sun and the Earth). A round trip radio signal to Voyager 1 takes 35 minutes and 12 seconds. Scientists have finally agreed that Voyager 1 has left the heliopause that surrounds the Sun. It is now impacted by interstellar particles rather than solar ones. It has a long way to go to reach the distance of the nearest star. At 126 AU it is over 4 times farther from the Sun than Pluto but the nearest star is 4.3 light years or 272,500 AU away. Space is big!

Carl also contrasts how different cultures can influence their scientists. He mentioned how the tightly Catholic Church controlled Italians did not receive new ideas with open arms. Galileo was condemned for professing that the Earth revolved around the Sun and spent the last 8 years of his life under house arrest. Another Italian,Giordano Bruno, was burned at the stake for speculating about beings on other planets. Whereas the Dutch who were very open to new ideas and treated Christiaan Huygens as a celebrity even though he had the same views as both of these Italian scientists. The Dutch went on to established the largest world trading organization while the Italians seemed to slip into a much more stale society and soon weren't a world power. I'd like to see us get more science savvy representatives in the US government. I don't think congressmen that profess the Earth was made in 4004 BC, help us make informed decisions on many topics critical to the US.

I have just one nit-picking complaint with Carl on his pronunciation of Jupiter's moon, Io. I've always pronounced it eye-oh. I even have a running joke with my oldest grandson, Jack, about how do you spell, Io. The joke doesn't work if you use Carl's pronunciation of ee-oh. The controversy evens gets a footnote on page 156 of his book, "Cosmos".  During the episode one of the young female astronomers uses eye-oh but Carl insists on the Eastern Mediterranean origin of the word and uses the non-British pronunciation.

My final point is that I feel pretty dated with all the main-frame computers shots at JPL. I remember computers with blinking lights, card punches, line printer output on fan-folded green stripped paper and 80 megabyte hard drives that were the diameter of a large pizza and 6 inches tall. I still remember when I carried one of the disks on a plane. Under its blue plastic case was printed 80MB. I was worried that it looked too similar to BOMB.

Remember MASS members that we will be getting together on Friday, December 6. Part of the program will be Episode 1 of Cosmos with Dean's study guide as an accompaniment. I'm still keeping up with the Planetary Society schedule for viewing the programs. I hope you don't mind hearing about the episodes a little early in the blog.

Episode 5 Blues for a Red Planet

Carl is right that Mars has a lot of features that make it seem to be a planet with life. Earth-like features such as: polar caps, a 24-hour day, clouds, dust storms, seasons, to name a few.

It surprised me that the H.G. Wells story, "War of the Worlds" was written so long ago, 1897. The episode also dramatized part of the story and mentioned the 1938 Orson Welles version that was a Halloween prank that panicked much of the country. That production just celebrated its 75th anniversary earlier this month. By coincidence, a week after this Halloween, I convinced two of my grandkids, Cara age 10 and Jimmy age 7, to listen to the broadcast. It seemed a contrast in technology to play off the Internet on my smartphone a 1938 radio recording. It took a while for the kids to realize that there was no picture to watch. You merely listen and use your imagination. I think they enjoyed it and now have a better sense of what life was like before TV, cell phones and computers.

This pictures from the July, 1976 Viking landers seem a little washed out and lacking detail compared to the snapshots we've been getting from later rovers and landers, especially the most recent, Curiosity Rover. Curiosity with its nuclear power source is immune to the seasonal limitations of solar panel power. I hope it keeps rolling up Mt. Sharp for quite a few years. The fact that it can zap rocks with its laser from 20 feet or more reminds me of a reverse "War of the Worlds" with the Martians being attacked this time.

NASA in a few days plans to launch the MAVEN spacecraft that will orbit Mars and try to determine how it lost its atmosphere. MAVEN will also be the communication relay for the current and future assets on the surface of Mars. There is another rover planned in 2020 and after that probably a "sample return" series of missions. The long term goal is to send people in the 2030's. I'd believe that goal more if it wasn't for the fact that every administration since Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew in the early 1970's has said we should go to Mars in the next 20 years.

Scientists have quite a concern about bringing samples of Mars back to Earth because of possible contamination issues. I've heard that they are only confident in bringing the samples back to the International Space Station. I wonder whether they would ever bring the samples down to the Earth's surface.

There also is a Mars contamination concern if we ever send people to explore Mars. Remember that the human body has bacteria and other foreign cells that outnumber the human body cells by a factor of 10. I don't know how we could ever explore with our breathing and other bodily functions and not spread a little of us around the place.

As a final topic, Carl discusses terraforming Mars into a more habitable place if we find that there is no Mars life. Some people probably would consider that effort as the ultimate pollution scenario. But I feel objects like Mars and asteroids are resources meant to help the human race become a multi-planet species. One does wonder what authority here on Earth will have jurisdiction over making those climate changing decisions.

Hope you watch the episode. Comments are much appreciated. Jim

Episode 4 Heaven and Hell

The episode begins with the Tunguska Event in 1908 Russia. I'm always amazed that it took 20 years for Russia to explore the event. But when I see the extreme environment of a bug-infested swamp, I get a better comprehension for the difficulty.

He lists the size of incoming object as a football field (~100 meters). More recently I've heard the size estimate as 40 meters or 130 feet. I think additional research into the damage caused by air burst simulations has reduced the size required to cause the damage.

I'm amazed he listed the possibilities of it being an anti-matter object or an alien spaceship. In fairness, part of the episode was about not rejecting unlikely hypotheses just because they are weird. Hopefully, the recent Chelyabinsk event which occured uncannily close to Tunguska with a similar air burst will demonstate that a comet or stony asteroid can cause a lot of damage without leaving much debris or any crater.

Comets were always believed to be the harbingers of evil. Carl didn't call the sphere of comets around the Sun its current name of the Oort Cloud. I've read that the Oort Cloud might hold up to 2 trillion comets and begins about 2000 astronomical units (AU) from the Sun and ends just short of half way to the nearest star (~100,000 AU).  The AU is the distance from the Earth to the Sun or about 93 million miles. Alpha Centauri, the nearest star, is 4.3 light years away. There are 63, 115 AU in a light-year. Half the distance to Alpha Centauri is 135, 700 AU. For comparison, the Voyager 1 spacecraft that has been traveling since 1977 is only 126 AU away from the Sun about three times Pluto's  40 AU distance. Space is big!!

Venus is definitely a rough environment with a crushing atmosphere of 90 times that of Earth's and sulphuric acid clouds. The 900+ degree Farenheit temperature doesn't help the hostile environment either. Those conditions are definitely making Mars the exploration planet of choice. There hasn't been many recent launches to Venus. Europe's last launch was the Venus Express in 2005 and the US's last one was Magellan in 1989. Russia's last launches were in 1984 when a couple of Venus landers piggy-backed on Halley's comet missions.

He dwells a little about the relatively new science of Ecology and in the 10 year follow-up spends most of his time warning us that we must be should become better shepherds of the Earth's environment. Get more fuel-efficient cars, increase renewable energies and control our population explosion. 

Hope you enjoyed the episode. Let me know what you thought about it. 

Jim