Minotaur rocket puts on an impressive sunset show
Those of you living in southern California might have seen the impressive spectacle that was the six-foot Minotaur rocket blasting off a half an hour after sunset last night. Residents as far away as Utah, Nevada, and Arizona reported seeing the impressive corkscrew-like contrail caused by winds in the upper atmosphere, and authorities were inundated with calls wondering what had just happened.
The Minotaur lifted off at 7:24 PDT, carrying an experimental military spacecraft, but clearly the most impressive thing about the launch were the accompanying photos. You can check out the Flickr photostream for more photos. I haven’t found any particularly good high-resolution photos, but I did come across an old NASA Photo of the Day, showing a similar missile launch of a Minuteman II rocket — which is, incidentally, my new desktop background. The Minotaur actually uses decommissioned Minuteman 2 ICBM missile and solid-propellant motors for its first two stages.
The rockets obviously do not fly in a corkscrew pattern. The swirls come from unburned fuel and water from the contrail being frozen in the less dense upper atmosphere where it is twisted by the wind currents. These frozen particles are high enough in the sky to be reflected by the sun, creating the fantastic spectacle.
This Spaceflight Now article has more details on the actual satellite that was launched.
The fury of a brightening Mars
Back at the beginning of July, I wrote about the Mars hoax, which stated that Mars was to come closer to the Earth than it has in recorded history. This, of course, isn’t true, but as with almost every rumor, there is a grain of truth behind the absurdity: Mars is getting closer to Earth. On October 13, Mars will be within 69 million kilometers of Earth, which isn’t the closest it’s ever been, but it’s closer than normal, and is the closest the two planets will get for the next 13 years. (In August of 2003, Earth and Mars came within 56 million kilometers of one another.)
As a result of the two planets getting closer together, Mars appears to be getting brighter, and it will become brighter still until October. Right now, Mars appears to be an intensely bright red-orange star to the east. Between now and October, Mars will double in brightness. It will appear brighter than it did in August of 2003 because it’s higher in the night sky, (66° as opposed to 34°) — this is good news for backyard astronomers who will be able to see the purple haze on Mars’s north pole as Martian winter begins.
On August 10, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter lifted off on its six month journey.
In other related news, Mars appears to be more volatile than previously thought. It is suspected that the planet endures more earthquakes than before, and climate warming appears to be melting the polar ice caps of Mars. The findings come as a result of geological surveys conducted on the red planet: gullies are appearing where there previously were none three years ago. Researchers also discovered several boulders that rolled down a crater wall sometime over the course of 13 months. The suspected cause is seismic activity.
A planet which is still having tectonic activity suggests that the planet is still warm at its core, which could mean volcanos. Seismic activity on the planet has not been measured because the two Viking landers had broken equipment, and the the two rovers still in operation do not have such equipment because their own movement would interfere with the readings.
NASA has an interesting an animated GIF of the progression of change in the ice caps that you can check out here. It’s 8MB.
Bullets: tongue biters, London crackheads, and the return to the moon
Woohoo bullets!
- NASA is going back to the moon. On paper, anyway. Probably most of you have heard about this by now, so I’m not going to do an extensive writeup on it. Ars has the best coverage, as usual, and New Scientist also has san article on it.
- A few days ago, I wrote about Cymothoa exigua, the tongue biters who strangle or eat (it’s still unclear) the tongues of their host fish, substituting themselves instead. But why stop at one tongue biter when you can have two? That page also has more pictures of normal fish tongues and other cutaway photos of the fish.
- Apparently one in every hundred Londoners could be a crack cocaine user. Sounds like they’ve got the same problem as Italy. Maybe Virgin should start a cocaine refinery: Virgin Coke.
On the subject of NASA returning to the moon… while this is nice to see, and the moon provides a good stepping stone on the way to Mars or a similar mission, I can’t help but feel just a little disappointed. While no one in my generation has ever seen anyone walk on the moon, we have seen the Apollo 11 video footage. My mom was 14 when Apollo 11 landed, and I’m 22 years old. It’s been decades since we’ve been to the moon, and now, all of a sudden, we’re going back and there’s this big to-do about it, as though something extraordinary is about to happen.
We were on the moon in the sixties. Almost 40 years ago. Why should we be excited to go back to a place we went to two to three generations ago? This is not new or spectacular. This is redundant. Unlike Halley’s Comet which comes around once every 75 years, and is constant, science and technology is fluid and always progressing. The moon is the best we can do, now, 51 years after we did it the first time? Please tell me I’m not the only one disappointed by this. Is a moon landing something that’s only going to happen once every 50 years, so we should simply get used to it and enjoy it while it’s here? Or are we going to make a decision to finally push beyond the bounds of Earth and keep going instead of throwing up our hands only to sit back complacent in the knowledge that we “did it” and there’s nothing more to be done?
I realize that the space race was a political tool more than anything else, and that it served its purpose (along with the nuclear arms buildup) in bankrupting the Soviet Union, but I would have expected a little more out of NASA than merely a plan to return to the moon 50 years after the first landing. If not NASA then a private corporation, though I suppose that (right now) there isn’t much money to be made in space simply because of the prohibitively high cost of transportation. Anyway, so is this return to the moon to accomplish some major political end, or is it finally in the interest of science? I don’t know the answer, but I hope it is the latter, because if it is, there’s actually a chance that we’ll stay there or even push on instead of returning to Earth once it’s “mission accomplished.”
Hubble to scope out the lunar surface
A little while ago, I covered the LROC that NASA will be sending up in 2008. Now there are plans to use Hubble to look at the lunar surface in an effort to find, you guessed it, suitable locations for lunar bases.
Why the redundancy between the two craft, I don’t know. The LROC seems to have UV mapping capabilities similar to Hubble. The LROC will be going up long before any lunar bases will, and it will offer far greater detail than anything that Hubble could do, and that will be the only task dedicated to the LROC. Hubble cannot photograph anything less than 50 meters wide. (Initially it was reported as 60 meters, but this New Scientist article says 50 meters; I’m not sure which one it is.) In any case, Hubble still won’t be able to photograph the Apollo relics, the largest of which is 9 meters.
Reportedly, the UV capabilities of Hubble are second-to-none, and astronomers want to identify a mineral called ilmenite — or iron titanium oxide — which has previously been found in lunar soil samples. This mineral seems to be the Swiss Army knife of rocks:
It contains oxygen, which could be extracted for breathing, as well as hydrogen and helium absorbed from the solar wind. Heating the mineral would release the gases, which could then be used as a power source for the base, says Hapke. Iron in the mineral might eventually be used to produce construction materials, such as steel, for lunar buildings.
By analyzing areas where the concentration of ilmenite is known to be found, astronomers will be able to calibrate their UV light measurements so that they can accurately measure their concentrations on other parts of the lunar surface where astronomers have not walked.
But I still wonder why they want to use Hubble instead of waiting for LROC. If the UV capabilities between the two instruments are that dissimilar, I’d love to know, otherwise this seems like a waste of time and money.
748 days in space
At 748 days, Sergei Krikalev, the commander of the International Space Station, has set a new record for cumulative days in space. Aside from his new record, Krikalev has done some pretty impressive things before this most recent achievement as well.
Krikalev, who was born in Leningrad, Russia, in 1958, won the top national prize for daredevil aerobatic flying in 1986 and later received numerous international honours, including “Hero of Russia”, for his spaceflights. He flew twice to the Russian space station Mir - once staying on for back-to-back six-month tours when one of the subsequent two flights to Mir was cancelled.
He also flew on the first joint US-Russian space shuttle mission in 1994, the first mission to assemble the International Space Station in 1998 and was a member of the first crew to live onboard the ISS in 2000.
Widely considered the best, Krikalev apparently has no fear. Not of bone loss, radiation exposure, being alone, or anything else. Or if these things worry him, he doesn’t let anyone know. Some would argue that for doing the incredible things that he’s done, the stories he could tell are worth the risk. God knows, that’s how I would feel if the loneliness didn’t kill me. After all, who wouldn’t want to go into space? I’m not so sure I’d want to spend two years there, though, especially if I had a family waiting for me back on Earth.
But when Krikalev finally does come home, he will have something to worry about: his physical condition. Radiation exposure in space can alter DNA, creating oncogenes, or cancer precursors. When DNA is damaged by radiation, it is repaired, except that when it is repaired, it can be fixed incorrectly: during repair, the strands are stuck back together and smoothed out, and no comparison to the original strand is made, which can lead to incorrect DNA sequences. (This incorrect repair is also the reason that people can get skin cancer when their skin cells are damaged by UV light.)
Cancer risks aside, cosmonauts and astronauts also sometimes have difficulty adjusting to social life on Earth again. Thus far, Krikalev has been remarkably resilient to the depression-like symptoms that often take hold of space travelers after the initial euphoria and excitement of being in space wear off, so this probably won’t be much of a problem for him, given that he’s done a one-year stint in space before this mission. Not that frequency of occurrence makes social adjustment any easier, of course.
Perhaps the biggest, most immediate health concern is over the density of his bones. Even with methods in place to reduce bone density loss, astronauts and cosmonauts lose an average of 1.5% of their bone density for every month they are in space, and he’s been there for almost 25 months, and it will be 27 months by the time he finally comes back home. The average post-menopausal woman loses about 1.5% of her bone density per year. So in theory if he were a post-menopausal woman, Krikalev will have lost the equivalent of 27 years of bone density when he comes back to Earth. Growing bone-mass back can be achieved, but it is a long process, and it is unknown how the quality of bone mass compares to that which was lost. Recall that bone marrow turns into fat as people age, and Krikalev has done quite a bit of aging in the last 2 years. I wonder if astronauts and/or cosmonauts take any osteoporosis drugs like Fosamax or Actonel? Hrm. I wonder who I could ask that would know…
Update: Bisphononates like risedronate and alendronate have been studied in bedrest studies (physiological equivalents to extended space travel), but not used in space missions.
The problem of static
Mars has been in the news quite a lot lately, especially with the success of the recent Sojourner landing and “Mars hoax“. Well, the red planet is back in the news again due to an issue that most people — unless you’re in the electronics sector — much on earth: static electricity. On Mars, though, it’s a much bigger problem for two reasons. Firstly, the potential to create an electrical charge is much greater on Mars, than it is on Earth.
When certain pairs of unlike materials, such as wool and hard shoe-sole leather, rub together, one material gives up some of its electrons to the other material. The separation of charge can create a strong electric field.
Here on Earth, the air around us and the clothes we wear usually have enough humidity to be decent electrical conductors, so any charges separated by walking or rubbing have a ready path to ground. Electrons bleed off into the ground instead of accumulating on your body.
NASA will have to overcome this obstacle in order to establish Mars and lunar bases. But the problem isn’t as simple as it might seem at first glance. Here on Earth, the moisture in the air and the ground makes absorbing the excess electrons that build up quite easy. But on Mars (and the moon), there is almost no moisture. An astronaut touching, for instance, the door to a lunar or Mars base could fry the sensitive electrical circuitry in his suit. Apollo astronauts didn’t have this problem, probably because they were not active enough to create the static charges necessarily to create an electrical shock. But astronauts on Mars, using heavy equipment, might.
On Earth, the best ground is, well, the ground. But on Mars, it might well be the martian atmosphere itself, with a little help:
On Mars, the best ground might be, ironically, the air. A tiny radioactive source “such as that used in smoke detectors,” could be attached to each spacesuit and to the habitat, suggests Landis. Low-energy alpha particles would fly off into the rarefied atmosphere, hitting molecules and ionizing them (removing electrons). Thus, the atmosphere right around the habitat or astronaut would become conductive, neutralizing any excess charge.
Solving the same problem on the moon, though, might be a little bit different:
Achieving a common ground on the Moon would be trickier, where there’s not even a rarefied atmosphere to help bleed off the charge. Instead, a common ground might be provided by burying a huge sheet of foil or mesh of fine wires, possibly made of aluminum (which is highly conductive and could be extracted from lunar soil), underneath the entire work area. Then all the habitat’s walls and apparatus would be electrically connected to the aluminum.
As always, more research and testing needs to be done. Regardless, frying space suits is a sure way to get oneself stranded on terra firma far away from home.
The cracked 10th “planet” and sub-orbital space tourism
You’ve probably been living under a rock if you haven’t heard the recent news regarding the new “planet” orbiting the sun. The new planet is larger than Pluto and likely has two moons orbiting it. The planet extremely far away from the sun, in the Kuiper belt.
But what you probably don’t know about the new planet is that its existence has actually been known since 2003. A cracker recently broke into the not-so-secure secure server run by Michael Brown, the researcher behind the recent findings. The cracker threatened to release the finding himself if the information was not made public. Why premature? Well, Dr. Brown has been fact-checking to be sure of the accuracy of his information, and was not ready to publish his findings.
In any case, the new planet can be seen by amateur astronomers.
Backyard astronomers with large telescopes can see the new planet. But don’t expect to be impressed: It looks like a dim speck of light, visual magnitude 19, moving very slowly against the starry background. “It is currently almost directly overhead in the early-morning eastern sky in the constellation Cetus,” notes Brown.
A new name hasn’t been released, but there is one in the process of being approved by the International Astronomical Union. And it’s really quite awful. Planet Xena? Ugh.
In other space news, Richard Branson and Burt Rutan have teamed up to form The Spaceship Company, and they are working on SpaceShipTwo (SS2), a nine-person suborbital craft that is expected to be twice the size of SS1, and completed in two and a half to three years. The expected price tag is expected to be about $200,000.
Yeah. I’d buy that for $200,000.