MASS

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.