Category Archives: Space

Giving talks

Posted on May 14, 2007 | Comments Off on Giving talks

Back in the early 80s, shortly after the first space shuttle flight and landing, I joined a bunch of space enthusiasts in trying to figure out how to lobby for and promote an expanded space program. Not much happened, and things sobered up real fast after the Columbia disaster. But I remember one fellow, a computer programmer, whose main idea was that we should "give talks." I never gave any, and don’t remember anyone who did. But, 25 or so years later here’s a new forum for just that.

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The astronaut sham

Posted on May 14, 2007 | Comments Off on The astronaut sham

The so-called "Mercury 13," (or should it be 25?), a combination academic and media fraud, gets a going over by veteran space writer James Oberg. His piece is poorly edited, but the details are all there (just repeated now and then). How the University of Wisconsin lent credence to spurious claims of women denied astronaut status at the beginning of the space race. In fact, Oberg shows, they weren’t the test pilots President Eisenhower had stipulated, and so they could not be chosen.

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Ice miners

Posted on May 3, 2007 | Comments Off on Ice miners

NASA’s orbiter, Mars Odyssey, has found the perfect occupation for the first Martians: digging up all the ice for water to drink and grow things. The ice beds are estimated to be available on about a third of the planet, at varying depths.

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Tintypes from Jupiter

Posted on May 2, 2007 | Comments Off on Tintypes from Jupiter

New shots of Jupiter and its moons, from a passing NASA spacecraft on the way to Pluto, are pretty enough but raise the question of why all but a few are in black-and-white? No explanation I can find on the NASA sites. Maybe it’s because it will be so dark at Pluto, so far from the sun, that there’s no point in trying for color?

"New Horizons came within 1.4 million miles of Jupiter on Feb. 28 in a gravity assist maneuver designed to trim three years off its travel time to Pluto. For several weeks before and after this closest approach, the piano-sized robotic probe trained its seven cameras and sensors on Jupiter and its four largest moons, storing data from nearly 700 observations on its digital recorders and gradually sending that information back to Earth." 

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Today’s pretty picture

Posted on April 27, 2007 | Comments Off on Today’s pretty picture

m81deep_hallas720.jpg

You’ll never look at the Big Dipper again without remembering this item, 11.8 million light years beyond your vision, just off the lip of the cup. M81 in Ursa Major/Tony Hallas, via NASA

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Almost zero G

Posted on April 26, 2007 | Comments Off on Almost zero G

Famed physicist Stephen Hawking, advocate of humanity migrating into the solar system and beyond, will soon get his first experience with microgravity in a Boeing 727 on a parabolic flight:

"To be allowed to carry Prof. Hawking, Zero-G needed to obtain a unique certificate from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)–no one has ever flown a disabled person in weightlessness before. Prof. Hawking will be accompanied by a team of three doctors and at least two of the Cambridge professor’s experienced caregivers."

I had the chance for a similar flight out of Houston a few years before I retired, but passed on it. I get rather seriously seasick, and sometimes airsick, and while I would jump at an opportunity to go into space, a minute or less in microgravity (bookended by a stomach-churning 1.8 Gs) hardly seems worth it. Though it does look like fun.

UPDATE  Post-flight, Hawking tells the BBC: "It was amazing.The zero-G part was wonderful and the higher-G part was no problem. I could have gone on and on. Space, here I come!"

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Red sun, all the time

Posted on April 24, 2007 | Comments Off on Red sun, all the time

Imagine living on a world where the sun, a red dwarf, is twenty times the size of the moon, and hangs permanently in the sky. That’s because the planet doesn’t rotate, but has one side permanently light and the other permanently dark. The temperature range, however, is roughly that of Earth, meaning you might have running water. That’s if a new discovery by European astronomers, using telescopes in Chile, holds up. But because it’s 120 trillion miles away, and its information has to be inferred rather than seen, it might not.

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