A Radio Signal From 15 Billion Miles Away

An aging spacecraft turned on a radio transmitter it hasn’t used in decades.

47-year-old Voyager 1 is back in touch with NASA. A technical issue caused a days-long communications blackout with the historic mission, which is 15 billion miles away, in interstellar space. While engineers work to understand what went wrong, Voyager is now using a radio transmitter it hadn’t used since 1981.

Launched in September 1977, the NASA team has slowly turned off components to conserve power. This has allowed the aging spacecraft to send back science data from time to time.

The probe is the farthest spacecraft from Earth, now operating beyond the heliosphere, which is the sun’s bubble of magnetic fields and particles that extends well beyond Pluto’s orbit. Now Voyager’s instruments can directly sample interstellar space.

The new problem is one of many the vehicle has faced in recent months, but the Voyager’s team keeps finding creative solutions.

Occasionally, engineers command Voyager 1 to turn on some heaters to warm components that have sustained radiation damage. The heat can help reverse the damage. Messages are relayed to Voyager from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory through the Deep Space Network. A system of radio antennas on Earth helps facilitate communications with Voyagers 1 and 2, and other spacecraft. When Voyager 1 sends data about how it is responding to the commands, it takes about 23 hours for a message to travel one way.

But when a recent command to the heater was sent, something triggered the spacecraft’s autonomous fault protection system. If the spacecraft draws more power than it should, this system shuts off non-essential systems. The team discovered the latest issue when it didn’t get the response signal.

Voyager 1 has been using its X-band radio transmitter for decades. Its second transmitter, called the S-band, hasn’t been used since 1981 because its signal is much fainter. The team believes the fault protection system shifted the spacecraft to the S-band transmitter, which uses less power.

The team won’t command Voyager 1 to turn on the X-band transmitter until it figures out what happened, which could take weeks. They want to determine if there are any risks to turning on the X-band. But if the team can get the X-band working again, they may get some data that reveals what happened.

In the meantime, they don’t want to rely on the S-band for too long, because its signal is too weak.

You’ve got to give it to NASA, when they build something, they build it to last. Billions of miles further than a car would.

 

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/aging-spacecraft-starts-up-a-radio-transmitter-it-hasn-t-used-since-1981-from-15-billion-miles-away/ar-AA1tkOkQ?ocid=hpmsn&cvid=6a178edabc1e45ac98d75dfb769caebc&ei=81

The Sky is Falling

If you follow me on facebook, you may have noticed that I have shared many articles on climate change and that I have started using the comment, “The Sky is Falling.”

It seemed more appropriate than saying, “The Boy Cried Wolf.” In that story, the boy is lying, only looking to introduce some excitement into his own life, without regard for the consequences.

Chicken Little, on the other hand, was telling the truth, as best he knew it. Something (a raindrop) had come down from the sky and hit him. He had never experienced anything like that before, so the logical conclusion was that something terrible was happening, the sky was falling! Chicken Little ran around the farmyard squawking his terrible news, trying to warn all the other farm critters.

Even that doesn’t exactly fit the problem of climate change. Chicken Little was very young and inexperienced. But it’s scientists who have been trying to warn the world’s population that the climate was changing far quicker than it should. They have lots of experience at studying climate and how it has changed in the past, and they have a pretty darn good idea where it’s headed.

In the past week, I have read several articles concerning the number and severity of heatwaves that have been happening around the world. Not only has the world been having more of them, not only have they broken records for daytime high temperatures, they’ve broken records for the highest low temperatures as well. That means that after a sweltering day, you don’t get much relief during the night, because the heat that has accumulated all day doesn’t dissipate fast enough.

I think Europe has already broken several summer records during a heatwave in June of this year. There’s no guarantee they won’t have another later this summer. Or this fall, or... whenever. A heatwave can happen at any time on the calendar, because it is a comparison between the present and what has been ‘normal’ previously.

The scientists don’t ‘think’ any particular place will start having a heatwave every year. But it could happen. After all, they wanted us to keep the warming of the Earth to 2°C or less. What are they saying now, that it’s officially reached a warming of 1.8°C? But in Europe, the temperatures reached +4 to +8°C over ‘normal’.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t get much done when the temperature gets to 95°F. I sure don’t want it to consistently reach 123°F. Or higher.

Maybe Chicken Little isn’t the best story for me to quote to try to get my point across, but it’s the one I can remember as the summer heat settles in. So I’ll keep squawking my warning and hope somebody is listening, because...

The sky is falling.

Check Your Facts

Several years ago, I got an idea for a science fiction short story. It involved the young captain of a ‘worn-out’ asteroid mining ship who found herself pregnant. Such a thing is hardly novel on Earth, but I had the idea stuck in my head - with no idea where I had gotten it - that it wasn’t possible to get pregnant in space. The entire crew is left wondering, “How did that happen?”

Not terribly original, I suppose, but I hoped I was treating the story ‘differently’ from everybody else who had ever written a ‘mystery pregnancy’ story.

So I took the story to my writing group, where everybody told me that of course, she got pregnant; nobody was using birth control, and there’s no reason why people can’t get pregnant in space.

Bummer. That was one of the things that convinced me that my science knowledge was out of date, where-upon I subscribed to and started reading various science magazines, trying to do some catch-up. Until a week ago, I had tried to shove that space pregnancy story out my mind, figuring it had taught me a lesson; Check your ‘facts’.

I was wrong. But not in the way I thought.

Imagine my surprise when I came to an article in the May/June 2019 issue of Discover about how scientists are studying the problem of human reproduction in places that are not on Earth. The problem being that it doesn’t seem possible. Which would make colonies hard to sustain.

As I remember it, they started with lizards and amphibians, which they took to the space station for a period of time. Those didn’t seem bothered by the lack of gravity, or the increased radiation, but some of their off-spring weren’t right.

Then they tried the same experiment with mice, who are mammals, and - biologically - quite a bit like humans. (That’s a lovely thought, isn’t it?) Strangely, the mice must have been freaked out by the no-g or the radiation, or something, but they were not nearly as interested in sex as mice usually are. And even when they did indulge in sex, they didn’t have any offspring.

Apparently, there is a piece of the female mouse’s sexual organs that rapidly decreases and then completely disappears while the mouse is in space. If the same thing happens to human females, then Earth would be the only place where we can make more humans.

Now, that’s a Bummer. But... I was right! (To a degree.) If technology provides a method of humans to begat humans, but only in places that more or less replicate conditions on Earth, then the first human baby conceived without those conditions would indeed be a shock. Not only for the parents, but for the entire race. And that’s the kind of shock I was trying to portray.

So, yes, you should check your facts that you are putting in your stories. And even if everybody in your writer’s group says your fact is wrong, maybe you should check their facts, too.

Be Cool, Star

Unfortunately, I only have 1 reference article for this week’s blog, and it was listed as ‘Opinion’. So, if you don’t already, take this week’s blog with 2-3 grains of salt. I did try to follow the link to the original article in the Astronomical Journal, but I’m not subscribed to it, so couldn’t get past their first page. From the looks of some of the titles listed for their current issue, their articles are seriously geeky, which is why I sometimes have to rely on someone else to explain it to me. Having said all that, hand me an ice cube for my drink, and let’s get started.

NASA’s Spitzer space telescope (launched in 2003) has found 14 of the coldest stars known, but it’s expected that far more are waiting to be discovered. These 14 objects are hundreds of light-years away and are thought to have temperatures 350 to 620 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s bitterly cold for stars.

These are ‘failed stars’, also known as brown dwarfs, which have been known to exist for years. Spitzer and its sister, WISE, could recognize them by the hundreds before too long. Spitzer was assigned specific patches of space to study, but WISE has been tasked with studying the entire sky. WISE’s task is 40 times the size of Spitzer’s.

Brown dwarfs form like any other star, out of collapsing balls of gas and dust. But they are puny things, and never collect enough mass to ignite nuclear fusion and start shining. The smallest known so far are 5 to 10 times the mass of Jupiter, and there are giant gas planets of that mass around other stars. Without nuclear fusion, what little internal heat these bodies started with eventually faded away.

It’s possible that WISE could find an object about Neptune-sized (or bigger) in the far reaches of our solar system. Raise your hand if you’ve heard the story of Planet X, a large planet so far out we can’t see it, but it has some disruptive tendencies for the orbits of the outer planets, dwarf planets and other objects we know of. Some scientists speculate it might even be a brown dwarf companion to our sun.

So are these 14 examples of planets or stars? Well, they’re hot for one, and unbelievably cold for the other. I assume someone will decide what they are, eventually.

www.networkworld.com/article/2231137/nasa-finds-14-new--seriously-chilled-stars.html

Weird Planets 7

We are about to start our whirl-wind tour of some of the remaining weird planets, but first, please pay attention to the following non-safety-related information:

Who designed the way stars and planets are named? I’ve more or less figured out how it works, but it really doesn’t give you any information about that star or planet. First, there’s some designation that I think indicates who/what ‘discovered’ the star. I recognize ‘Kepler’, which in its 2^nd stage of life is denoted as ‘K2’. But WASP? CaRoT? No Idea. Then comes a number to designate the star. And finally, a letter to designate the planet within that star’s system. The planets are lettered as they are found, so smaller planets probably have later letters than big planets, even if they are closer to that star.

Please keep your hands and legs inside this blog at all times, as I am both driver and tour guide, and we have a lot of space to cover!

The first planet we’ll visit in this 3^rd leg of our tour is PSR J1719-14 b (AKA the Sun Hugger), which is only 3,900 light-years from Earth. This is a possible member of the diamond-planet family (I told you about one of those in an earlier blog), and it races around its star in only 2.2 Earth hours, which makes it the fastest planet in the Ultra-Short-Period-Planet category. Also, it’s a pulsar planet, because its star is a pulsar.

Now, out the other window, take a peek at PSR J1719-1438-?, another pulsar planet orbiting a pulsar 4,000 light-years from Earth. Scientists think this planet was once a star, but when its companion became a pulsar, the huge gravity field stripped most of it away, leaving it with only the mass of Jupiter, and exerted pressure on what was left to make it a diamond planet.

Now around here – somewhere – we can see the PSR B1257+12 system discovered in 1992 and 1994. These pulsar planets at one time were the smallest planetary bodies known to exist outside our own solar system.

Here we’ve reached 12,400 light years from Earth to view PSR 1620-26 b (AKA Methuselah). As you might have guessed, it got its nickname by being old. Too old, some say, because it’s 13 billion years in age, almost 3 times as old as Earth! It would have formed less than 1 billion years after the Big Bang, even though it was thought there wasn’t enough material (I assume they mean heavier elements) to create a core for a planet. So, what’s it made of? I don’t know, they didn’t say. At that distance, maybe they can’t tell. So how do they know how old it is? Do you suppose they counted its wrinkles? J

Okay, you can take a little break now while I get us in another section of the universe.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/deep-space/g1265/space-oddities-8-of-the-strangest-exoplanets/

www.space.com/159-strangest-alien-planets.html

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/20-intriguing-exoplanets

Weird Planets 2

I did find some exoplanets listed on more than one list. But none of them showed up on all 4 lists! So much for ‘Weird is weird.’

The first one we’ll look at is 55 Cancri e, which somebody has nicknamed ‘The Diamond Planet. It is only 40 light-years from us, and one list says it is worth about $26.9 nonillion ($26.9 followed by 29 zeroes). None of the other planets on these lists come with a price tag, so why does this one? Because they figure about 1/3 of its surface is made of diamonds. It is only twice the size of Earth, but it is almost 8 times denser than Earth. There must be something there that is denser than Earth’s rocky core. There is speculation that it has a ‘weird’ chemistry from what we know on Earth, and that it might consist of graphite and other forms of carbon.

So why would so much of it be made of diamond? Diamonds are carbon that is exposed to high temperatures and intense pressure over time. And 55 Cancri e has plenty of both! Despite its size, it orbits its sun closely, about 1/25th the distance from our sun to Mercury. At that distance, its ‘year’ is 18 hours long, and it is tidally locked, meaning the same face of the planet is always pointed at its sun. On that sunny side of the planet, the temperature could be about 3900 degrees F. Plenty hot, I would think. And as dense as it is, anything that is not actually laying on the surface would soon find itself squeezed so hard, its molecules get really up close and personal. If that item was mostly carbon, that pressure and heat would produce a diamond.

So far, 3 of the lists agree about it, but the NASA list included some thoughts about it that the others didn’t. It has been proposed that 55 Cancri e has a rocky core surrounded by a layer of water in a ‘supercritical’ state where it is both liquid and gas. It is also thought this planet is topped by a blanket of steam.

Does that negate the idea of a big chunk of it being diamond? I don’t know. NASA didn’t mention graphite, carbon or diamonds. Yes, the name on each list is 55 Cancri e; I double and triple checked. I suppose all 3 lists could be right, but those who compiled the lists only mentioned the tidbits of information that they found fascinating. What do you think?

Weird Planets

A couple years ago, one of the panels I ‘moderated’ at mid-west sf conventions was about some of the definitely-odd exo-planets that had been found. Since astronomers are scientists and are never happy with what they know, they keep looking out into space. And they keep finding things, a certain percentage of which can be called ‘weird’. So I thought I’d take a fresh look at their current list of odd-balls. This could take more than one post, because I’ve found 3 different lists; one of 8 planets, one of 10 planets, and another of 20 planets.

Wait.

Yes, this is definitely going to take more than 1 posting, because I scrolled down the google page of search results, and found more lists. I decided I would not bother with other lists of 8 or 10, because they were probably just repeats or rewrites of one of the lists I already had. But I did decide to look at the list of 25 planets, because... well, I didn’t yet have a list that large.

That gives me - potentially - 63 planets to look at. Of course, I am hoping that there are some that are on more than 1 list, just to whittle that number down a bit. I mean, weird is weird, right? So each of the planets on the list of 8 should also be on the larger lists. Right?

Maybe. NASA’s list of 20 planets calls them ‘intriguing exoplanets’, and ‘intriguing’ does not necessarily equal ‘weird.’

Well, Jumping Jupiters. I spent so much time researching these planets that it’s time to post a blog, and all I’ve gotten written is this intro. Which is rather long for an intro to a blog post.

But, being an intro to a series of blog posts, maybe it isn’t too long. Okay, consider this the intro to the entire series of blog posts on ‘weird planets’. Next week, we’ll look at 1 - or maybe 2 - of the exoplanets that show up on the most lists that I’m working with. Exactly what will make them ‘weird’?

I can hardly wait!

http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/deep-space/g1265/space-oddities-8-of-the-strangest-exoplanets/

http://www.express.co.uk/news/science/643662/The-10-weirdest-planets-to-have-been-discovered-so-far

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/20-intriguing-exoplanets

www.space.com/159-strangest-alien-planets.html

Space Pollution

For millennia, mankind has used Earth’s resources however it wanted, and when we were done with something, we simply abandoned it. Most of this stuff will - eventually - return to its component parts, thanks to weather and other natural events.

But there is no weather in space, so what happens to stuff that gets abandoned there?

Mostly, it stays where we left it, usually in some kind of orbit around Earth. Lose contact with an old satellite? That’s okay, we need a new one anyway; we’ll just put the new one in a new orbit. Somebody lost their wrench while working outside? I think the job can still be done with this other wrench and a little ingenuity. The lost wrench? Oh, just move the station another kilometer higher, and you should be fine.

Yes, we’ve been cavalier about the junk we’ve left out there. Some gets sent into a ‘graveyard orbit’ at the end of its usefulness. Other stuff eventually is pulled toward the Earth and (hopefully) burns up before it hits the ground. Remember Skylab? That was scary, to know this big thing was coming down, that it would not burn up completely, but not know exactly where it would hit. Then it broke into pieces, some of which still made it to the surface, and even more uncertainty where they would hit.

Some satellites had a nuclear reactor to power their equipment. At the end of their ‘life’, many were sent to a graveyard orbit, but others fell to Earth, where they became a problem. Even those in the graveyard could be punctured by a micro-meteor and leak coolant from the reactor. The coolant would solidify and become droplets of more junk.

So, let’s see, we have dead satellites, booster stages, fragments of booster stages that have exploded, fragments caused by collisions, and lost equipment, just to name a few categories of space pollution. Now, the movies always depict (these days) a tool as having a tether to connect it to the astronaut, but it apparently took time to think of doing that. The ‘lost equipment’ category includes: a glove, 2 cameras, a thermal blanket, bags of garbage, a wrench and a toothbrush. Okay, those bulky space suit gloves can make it difficult to maintain a grip, but how does an astronaut lose one of his gloves?

People try to keep track of all this stuff, try to avoid collisions with equipment still in use. I don’t know who supplied these numbers, but there are over 170,000,000 pieces of debris smaller than 1 cm, as of July 2013. Additionally, there are 670,000 pieces between 1 and 10 cm (3.9 inches), and 29,000 pieces larger than 10 cm.

So, who cares? Most of it’s tiny, and if it’s big enough to do damage, you just move your ship or satellite out of the way. Yes, most of it is tiny, but at the speeds they travel, even the tiny ones pack quite a punch. And the equipment can’t always move out of the way.

The Kessler syndrome theorizes that once space debris reaches a particular density, there will be a chain reaction of collisions, each breaking its components into smaller pieces, which go on to have more collisions... It’s uncertain whether the Earth has already reached that point, but it’s not something we want to happen. The Earth could become completely swaddled in debris to the point that we could no longer launch ourselves into space. There goes our glorious dreams of a Space Empire! Or even of just getting off this rock to colonize... any place else.

Would such a debris cloud cut the amount of sunlight that reaches us? That might help mitigate global warming! If not, then I guess we’ll just bake ourselves on the ground as we kick ourselves for making it impossible to move away.

There have been many suggestions on how to remove space debris. At least one country has built their idea and sent it up for testing, but couldn’t get it to work. Most don’t see it as ‘cost effective’.

So, here’s my idea. If you have a big problem, you need to think big. Build a space station. I know, we have one, but that’s not big enough. We need a big one, with manufacturing capabilities and housing/entertainment for the workers. Use a small space tug to go out, grab debris and bring it back as ‘raw material’ for building interplanetary space ships.

Or maybe you prefer to sit back and wait for ‘nature to take its course’?

By the way, have you seen the movie Gravity? That was the Kessler syndrome in action.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_debris

How Black is a Black Hole?

Have you seen the Disney movie, Black Hole, from 1979? It was typical Disney fare; clueless good guy, camouflaged bad guy, comic relief characters… And all the action happened on a ship that sat in space, just outside the ‘point of no return’ of a Black Hole, which was depicted as a whirlpool of light.

Even then, I knew a black hole was ‘a region of space having a gravitational field so intense that no matter or radiation can escape.’ So that depiction of a black hole bothered me. If light can’t escape, then the black hole would not appear as a whirlpool of light. It should be black. Even light from stars beyond the black hole shouldn’t be seen; it would be bent and swallowed before it reached the observer. Right?

That’s what I was thinking, anyway.

These days, the idea of a Black Hole is not quite so… black and white.

NASA says a black hole is a place in space where the gravity is so intense, light cannot escape. In the same article, they say that if a black hole is located close to a star, high-energy (invisible) light is released. I suppose this is a special case, but I think they should have started by saying no visible light can escape.

Another NASA webpage states that black holes cannot be seen, because (visible) light cannot escape. But anything in the vicinity is effected. Dust bits will fall into the black hole, getting closer and closer until they hit that ‘point of no return’, when the light reflecting off them can no longer escape. The gravity will tug at any stars and planets in the area, making them wobble as they try to resist. Stars might even be pulled apart, and slurped up. As the star matter accelerates toward the hole, it emits x-rays, which can be detected by the proper equipment.

But something can and does escape from black holes, in a way. Some matter that is falling into a black hole ricochets off the event horizon (point of no return) instead of going through it. It bounces away at a speed so great, the jet of material can be detected relatively easily.

If that’s not enough for you, then consider a super-black hole that spins really, really fast. This spin creates a charge-separated magnetosphere, which forms parallel electrical charges around the poles. Particles accelerate to very close almost the speed of light and are thrown out into space as gamma radiation bursts. Bursts have been observed from the massive black hole at the center of Galaxy IC310. However, the description of how they are created is just a theory, since no one can see inside the event horizon to see what’s going on.

So, Black Holes are pretty black, unless something is escaping.

www.nasa.gov/audience/forstudents/k-4/stories/nasa-knows/what-is-a-black-hole-k4.html

https://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/focus-areas/black-holes

http://www.space.com/15421-black-holes-facts-formation-discovery-sdcmp.html

Martian

By now, I'm sure you've heard there's water on Mars. Free-flowing, very salty water. The announcement came a day or two after I saw "The Martian", and I decided to dig deeper into this Martian water issue.

In the late 19th century, Giovanni Schiaparelli reported seeing 'canali' on Mars' surface, meaning channels. A few years later, Percival Lowell confirmed long lines on Mars' surface, and suggested they were an attempt by an advanced Martian culture to save their drying planet by moving water from the poles. Ultimately, these canali / canals did not exist. I haven't found any explanation for why or how they were 'seen' in the first place.

Most of Mars' northern hemisphere is fairly flat with few impact craters; the southern is covered in impact craters. In between is an area of mesas, flat-floored valleys with cliff walls, and other rough terrain. Some features imply that water was present in the distant past, that free-flowing water created paths through the stones. Where did it all go?

Some is still there. Surrounding the bases of those mesas and at the bottoms of those cliffs are what appear to be masses of rock, called lobate debris aprons. In Alaska, we saw a glacier that was so covered in dirt and rocks (picked up during its travel), it just looked like a muddy pile on the edge of the bay. That's what these debris aprons are... solid ice covered in rocks and dirt.

Recent reports from SPICAM, which is circling Mars to study its atmosphere, show that the Martian atmosphere is super-saturated with water vapor. Water vapor doesn't just form droplets when it gets chilled, it needs a speck of dust or something to condense around. If there isn't enough dust, the vapor keeps pushing upward. Eventually, that vapor gets so high, it splits into hydrogen and oxygen, which escape into space, but the article I read said even at 50 km, the atmosphere was super-saturated.

So, Mars is not the super-arid place we thought it was.

How would that have changed the survival techniques used in "The Martian"? In his attempt to produce water to grow crops, could he have 'mined' it from one of these rock piles? Devise a method to condense it from the air? Purified the salty stuff?

What do you think?

More on Pluto & Charon

Last week, I made a prediction to a friend that, alas, has come true. My prediction was that by this week, NASA’s look at Pluto and Charon would have fallen out of the news as being too old, and the ‘news’ programs will have returned to dissecting and analyzing some politician’s speech or statement made last week... or even earlier. As exciting as the Pluto/Charon photos and info are, the people analyzing that information are scientists who want to be sure they understand what they have before making any big announcements like “Life found on Pluto!” or “Charon a huge alien generation ship!”

I find Pluto and Charon far more interesting than all this way-too-early political jibber-jabber we’ve been getting for what seems like the past decade. So I’ll take this opportunity to go through my reasons why I feel Pluto (& Charon) should go through yet another reclassification.

In my research reading the past couple of days, it seems there is no upper size limit to ‘dwarf planet’. One article actually said that if an object larger than Mercury were found in the Keiper Belt, it would be classified as a dwarf planet, because it has not substantially cleared out its neighborhood of debris. Can you imagine? If Earth were located in the asteroid belt, it would be a ‘dwarf planet’! 

The lower size limit of ‘dwarf planet’ is pretty fuzzy, too, but from what I gathered, the lower size for a rocky planet is about a radius of 372 miles.

Pluto’s radius is 1,430 miles, about half the size of Mercury, and definitely bigger than that lower limit. NASA’s new photos show it as round and rocky/icy. But look at this; Charon’s radius is 751 miles (about half Pluto’s size), also bigger than that lower limit, and it is also round and rocky/icy. So, why is it still considered by most to be a moon and not a dwarf planet?

Technically, Charon does not revolve around Pluto. Both Charon and Pluto revolve around a common point that is located outside Pluto’s body. If Earth and Mars were in the same orbit and both revolving around a common point, they would be a binary planet. Why not just jump in and classify Pluto/Charon a binary dwarf planet?

I have to imagine that Pluto’s ‘other’ 4 moons probably revolve around that same point, or run the risk of slamming into Charon. If they’re small enough, they could zip around Pluto inside Charon’s ‘orbit’, but from what I understand, Pluto and Charon are pretty close.

The European Space Agency referred to Earth/Moon as a binary planet, and the moon is 1/4 the size of Earth. Another website said that unequivocally, Earth/Moon is not a binary planet, because the moon does not orbit the sun, as set forth in the current definition of planet. Really? How does the moon orbit Earth and not go around the sun at the same time? By that reasoning, binary planets are impossible, because their primary orbit would not be around their star. So, what would they be?

To be fair, I did glimpse some websites that indicate there are others who - like me - think Pluto and Charon are a binary dwarf planet. I hope the idea spreads. Pluto deserves to be somewhat special, in my mind.

What do you think?

Waste Not, Want Not

Years ago, people started talking ‘disposable’. We became a ‘disposable’ culture, in that whenever something didn’t work anymore, we were expected to toss it and get a new one. Shall we blame NASA for that mentality? After all, every time they sent someone or something into space, they had to build a whole new rocket, new capsule, and who knew what.

I hate to blame NASA. I believe in NASA, although I sometimes chaff at how slow their progress can be.

I don’t want to blame NASA, so I blame business. It’s a conspiracy, you know. Business figures that if they sell you something you want and need, but which quickly ceases to work, you’d be back to buy another. And then another.

How long does a ball point pen work? I’m not talking about expensive pens, I’m talking about the cheap ones you buy in packages of 10 or 30, that your workplace buys by the cratefull. They don’t last long. When was the last time you put an ink refill in one? You probably don’t; you just toss it and pull out a new one. They’re cheap, and you don’t even think about it, do you?

Well, pause right now and think about the hundreds, thousands, millions of dead ball point pens taking up space in landfills. Think about what remains of each one; a drop or two of ink, a tiny bit of metal, and the rest is plastic.

One or two million drops of ink would, I assume, eventually lose its ‘moisture’ into the surrounding compost, the color components forming bits of color. Millions of bits of metal would corrode at some point, possibly forming a metallic ‘lode’ for future people to dig up and use.

But what about the plastic? What’s the half-life of plastic? What does it form, if and when it finally breaks down? From what I’ve gathered, most plastics don’t break down in landfills. Some break down when exposed to sunlight for days on end, but when they do, they form nasty toxins. There are newer, ‘biodegradable’ plastics, but they don’t degrade well in landfills, either; they degrade in compost where heat is present. So, millions of plastic pens are thrown into landfills where they will probably remain dead pens for a heck of a long time. If they do manage to degrade, they will form toxins to sicken any plants or animals that ingest them.

Long after I’m dead and gone, all those ball point pens I’ve thrown away will be out there, forming toxins. That is not the kind of legacy I wanted.

Pluto & Company

Sometimes, reading science fills my imagination.

Remember when Pluto was declared NOT a planet? Mercury is also tiny, I objected. Turns out, Pluto’s diameter is half of Mercury’s. They are both small, but that is a significant difference. Still, they have decided Pluto IS a planet, although they stuck ‘dwarf’ in front. I didn’t realize that until today.

Pluto has a moon. Charon is big enough, compared to Pluto, that it doesn’t revolve around Pluto; they both revolve around a point between them. Weird. I don’t know of any other planet & moon that does that. Today, I discovered Pluto has 4 additional moons. Way to go, Pluto!

There are other dwarf planets in our system, way out in the nether regions, so Pluto is not alone. At least 3 have names. Our system has more planets than the 9 I grew up learning about.

Pluto has an atmosphere. What? How can it? It’s so tiny, so little gravity, so cold- Some times. When Pluto gets closer to the sun (it comes within Neptune’s orbit), some of the surface thaws into a thin atmosphere, mostly nitrogen with methane and carbon monoxide for flavor. When it’s not that close, that atmosphere freezes and falls to the ground.

In 2006, NASA launched a probe for Pluto. It woke up in December 2014, and is seeing if it needs to correct its trajectory. In July 2015, it will reach a point 6,000 miles from Pluto, and it will snap pictures and take readings as fast as it can. At some point after that, it will send its observations to Earth. Just think, if you had snuck onto that spacecraft just before it launched, you’d... Well, you’d be dead, because it wasn’t built for passengers, but your body would almost be there to not see it for yourself!

The most interesting bit of today’s research was that frozen dwarf planets may be the most numerous type of planet in the universe. Really? I figure we should set up bases on/in ours. Why would we want to? Once we figure out how to colonize Pluto and its cohorts, we would know how to colonize frozen dwarf planets in other systems; to study, to serve as a base, a stepping stone.

Yeah, when I dream, I can dream big. I got that from the science fiction I read as a kid.

What do you think? If you were designing a colony for Pluto, would you build on the surface or dig inside?

It’s Fixed, Kind of

I’m always leery of doing a follow-up to a science-type blog. I still have the original article that inspired the first blog, but trying to find ‘up-dates’ can be tricky. Still, some subjects are worth the effort. Let’s hope I can find actual facts on this one, because otherwise, it’s mostly rumors.

Fact: The Kepler Space Telescope discovered hundreds of planets around other stars, and it did it by staring at just one tiny section of space. Fact?: Then, boom, it developed some kind of problem that kept it from staying aligned to stare at that one speck of space. At the time, I wasn’t sure what the problem was. A mis-firing attitude rocket? A stabilizing fly-wheel that went wonky? Not knowing the design, I had no idea, so I wasn’t even sure this wasn’t a rumor, except that the rate of newly discovered exo-planets suddenly fell to near-zero.¹

Fact: No, NASA couldn’t send a team to repair it, like they did with the Hubble Telescope. Hubble is in orbit around Earth. Kepler is in orbit around the sun, at some distance from Earth. Just planning such an expedition would take years, with more years needed to develop a ship capable of such a thing. Rumor: The Kepler Telescope was dead.

Rumor: Late last summer, I heard from a convention panelist that Kepler was not actually dead, just crippled and unable to perform the same task it was designed to do. It still was a telescope², and NASA was now developing ways to get some use out of it.³

Rumor?: Kepler is back! And to celebrate, it discovered a super-Earth to whet our imaginations.

Okay, now for updates.

1. Kepler had 2 of its 4 reaction wheels seize. These are flywheels for spacecraft, especially spacecraft that must stay focused on one thing, like a tiny patch of space.

2. Kepler’s second mission, since it couldn’t do the first, was to study whatever it could; black holes, exploding stars, whatever.

3. Somebody suggested they let the pressure of the sun’s light point the telescope. Solar wind streams past the machine anyway, why not use that wind to help stabilize it? It would always point away from the sun, and it wouldn’t be perfectly stable, but the remaining flywheels and alignment rockets could easily correct any drifting. It also would not be aligning with that original patch of space, but this gave it the chance to explore more patches of space.

Ergo, Kepler is back! Although not specifically looking only for exo-planets, it found one during a test run in February (2014, I believe), which is called HIP 116454b. HIP 11 (as I like to call it) is a super-Earth, having a diameter about 2.5 times that of Earth, and it (closely) circles a red dwarf located 180 light-years away. Its existence has been confirmed by the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo in the Canary Islands.

I love a happy ending.

Exploration

I've heard NASA has awarded contracts to SpaceX and Boeing to provide rides for astronauts to the space station, starting in 2016/2017. I figured something like this was coming, because I knew that

1) they discontinued the shuttles because Congress won't let them do more than one project at a time. I guess that's one 'transportation' project, because there's been loads of science projects done at the same time.

2) they were paying Russia a b**tload to carry astronauts to the station, but recent events in Ukraine have made that arrangement tenuous.

3) private companies have already been given contracts to take supplies and equipment to the space station, including mice and other lab animals, so why not people?

I've also been thinking about the history of exploration, of people moving into new and unknown territories. Most of it happened before any notes were kept, before the only government was tribal hierarchy. But from what I can remember of world history, there was a pattern to exploration and settling a new 'unknown' territory.

The pattern seems to be that a government would send people out to explore. Sometimes the ruler would accompany his army, such as Alexander the Great, but in other instances, the government merely provided the means, such as for Christopher Columbus.

Alexander may have been 'seeing what was there' for himself, but his great venture was more about conquest than exploration, and the lands he went were already well occupied and settled, so there was not much in the way of resettling.

But in the case of the Americas and Australia, there was still plenty of land available. And people set out to claim their own little piece. (Yes, this was not voluntary in the case of Australia, I know that.)

The point is that governments may have 'found' and 'explored' unknown territory, but businesses and individuals then did the actual moving in. Yes, it's more dangerous to leave Earth for a space station, the moon or another planet than to sail across an ocean of water. But as a government agency, NASA has done its job in producing a space station, exploring the moon and is now moving on to more distant territories.

It's time for (some of) us to move out there to start homes and businesses.

Going to Mars

Every once in a while, I happen across a bit of information that indicates The Future Is On Its Way! It doesn’t seem to be arriving in a way that’s logical or methodical (to me), but I’m not in charge of these things.

I would have thought it logical to build the space station into an actual way station, possibly even a place to build things like space ships. They could be ‘launched’ without having to battle their way out of the Earth’s gravity.

They could be built with resources mined from the moon, which has much less gravity, so getting those materials into space would take less fuel. That would mean there would need to be some kind of working colony on the moon, to provide workers for the mine, and possibly for refining the materials, or even making the pieces for the space ship. And, of course, to care for the support systems for the workers; the food (garden), air and water supplies.

Eventually, some of that mining could be moved to the asteroid belt. More stations could be built out there, as way stations/refineries/colonies. From there, it seems it would be relatively easy to move on to Mars.

I know, I’m talking old school science fiction stories. Well, a lot of the science fiction authors I read as a young person were also scientists, so they tended to think these things out logically.

Instead, I find articles about thousands of people being whittled down to a handful of colonists for Mars. (How are they getting there? Where will they live? How many supplies will they need to take with them? I haven’t heard anything about any of that.)The space station humans worked so hard to create is all but forgotten. Same with the moon. A warp-speed ship is being designed, even though no one knows how to create warp speed.

The latest article I saw is about NASA’s plan to create one component of rocket fuel on Mars. No humans required. Although, once those humans did arrive, they could breath the component, since the robots NASA plans to send will be converting carbon dioxide into oxygen. The other component needed for rocket fuel - hydrogen - was mentioned in the article, but as an after-thought. As if all the colonists would need to do is run down to the local grocery store and get some.

I’m excited by the prospect of humans going to Mars and that someone is thinking far enough ahead to spend time designing a warp-speed ship. BUT I really think these things need a support system behind them. Otherwise, we are just asking for failure. One tiny little failure could doom a colony that had to rely on Earth for help. It would still take time for help to arrive from an asteroid colony, but not as much time.

Okay. We’ve taken a couple baby steps into space. Now we’re reaching for the big shiny toy in the next room, completely ignoring all the not-as-shiny toys between us and there.

Fact Follows Fiction

Hey, remember that last Star Trek tv show? The one that was a ‘predecessor’ to the Original Series, and thus to all of the Star Trek shows? Earth had just built its first warp-drive spaceship, and sent Capt Archer out to explore the galaxy with a Vulcan First Officer.

I recently stumbled across a news article that pretty much blew my mind and made me think of that show. It seems NASA scientists are designing a warp-drive space ship. Yes, the disk-shape that is so familiar to Trek fans is part of the design. And yes, it is called Enterprise. The IXS Enterprise, to be exact.

I’m not sure how well they can design a warp-drive ship when they haven’t figured out warp drive yet. How much room will they need for engines / warp drive, and how will that equipment need to be distributed around the ship?

In the meantime, scientists are working on warp drive. They think they’ve found a possible ‘loophole’ in the Law of Relativity (which says you can’t go faster than light.) I can’t really explain this ‘loophole’ because the physics are way over my head, but just the thought that they are exploring the possibility is exciting!

Of course, this isn’t the first time that the fiction of Star Trek has become real life fact. If the first ST show hadn’t had those cute flip-top communicators, we might not have cell phones. Their electronic ‘clip-boards’ might well be a predecessor of ipads and ereaders. Cloaking devices? Almost perfected, although not yet ready to be used on starships. And 3-d printers could be a step toward replicators.

Next week - or maybe next month - I expect to hear that some scientist thinks he can make transporter beams. Although, I’m kind of with Dr McCoy on that one. I’m not sure I want my atoms ripped asunder and then reassembled in a new place.

How about you? What science fiction technology would you like to see them start on?

Kepler Keeps On Giving

When I heard, several weeks ago, that the Kepler Telescope was crippled, and it was stationed so far from Earth that repairs were not possible in the foreseeable future, I really got depressed. That's it, I thought. No more exciting news about newly discovered, exotic planets outside our solar system.

Last week, I was really bowled over with the news that scientists had discovered another 715 planets, including systems with more than one planet in them. When I read further into the article, they were announcing 715 planets circling 306 suns. So, just doing some simple math, one can see that in that batch, the average is about 2.34 planets per star. Of course, no one ever claimed that 'nature' could do even the simplest of math, AND Kepler may not have been watching long enough to see evidence of planets further out from their stars.

My head was starting to whirl at this point, but I believe that brings the total of planets discovered outside our solar system to a little more than 1,700. Now, remember, Kepler only stared at one tiny, tiny area of our galaxy.

And, perhaps the best news this article gave me - the scientists had only analyzed 2 years of Kepler's 4 years of data. I am all atingle, waiting for more information on what Kepler saw in its all-too-brief, 4 years of life.

On Vacation

I do apologize for not having a blog to post today. Yes, I'm on vacation, but I usually manage to get a post written and posted, even on vacation. Unfortunately, not this time.

On Friday, we were on the road, and drove as far as Muscokee OK before we stopped for the night. After a quick supper, we settled our brain-dead, road-weary bodies into the motel bed and gave in for the night.

Saturday, we finished the driving, finally arriving on the south side of Houston TX. Having reached our destination, we settled in for a quiet evening. Unfortunately, hubby decided to check his email, and his inbox was so full (after 2 days) that by the time he got done, there was no time left for me to do anything on the computer.

Today, we went to the Space Center Houston. Once we looked around and saw what was there, it seemed we could do it all in one day, therefore saving us the money of going again tomorrow. And we did get done, but it was a long day, and we were both limping by the time we returned to our motel room. I was too tired by then to try and write a blog.

So, my apologies, and I will try very hard to actually have a blog next Sunday. Yes, I will still be on vacation. Yes, I will be at WorldCon in San Antonio. Yes, I am on staff at WorldCon in San Antonio. However, by Friday, my staff stuff will be done, so if I haven't gotten one written by then, I will be able to take half an hour to type one up. I hope. Worldcons always seem to have something going on.

NASA News 2

NASA News 2

 

Now to get back to that informational talk NASA personnel gave at the Orlando Science Center. I believe the next subject was the Kepler telescope.

The purpose of the Kepler telescope is to examine one tiny section of this galaxy looking for planets. That's all. And it does a wonderful job of it, including some planets that are more or less earth-like AND in that star's Goldilocks Zone. Personally, I was surprised to learn that the Kepler telescope does not orbit Earth, but is actually located quite a distance from us. I was dismayed to hear that a short time ago, the second of its 4 stabilizers went out. It had been working 'okay' with only 3, but with 2, it is now rotating, unable to keep track of the section of the galaxy it's supposed to examine. Since it is so far away, chances are it will not be repaired. And that is a bummer.

Then we turned to Mars. I don't remember a specific number being mentioned, but there have been a lot of attempts to land a probe on Mars, by many different countries. The US is the only one who has managed to have any of their Martian probes still function after landing.

Apparently, Mars is very difficult to land on. It has enough gravity to pull things down really fast, but not enough air for wings or parachutes to do much good. If I remember correctly, the density of Martian air at the surface is only 17% of Earth's atmosphere density at sea level. It's why we've gotten so creative with our landing methods, from bouncey balls to floating cranes.

Discovery is our most recent probe sent to Mars, and it's about the size of a van. Can you imagine tooling around Mars in an intelligent van? It has to have some ability to make its own decisions, because calling for help, waiting for humans to figure out the answer and send it back takes too long.

Intelligent robots. The future is here. And we sent it to Mars.