For the curious reader of science fiction (scifi) and fantasy
Thanks to the tip from reader Tim, I browsed to CBS News online and watched some video clips recently taken with Neil Armstrong, interviewed by Ben Bradley. It’s interesting to see the thoughts of the first human on the moon, a very private man, several decades later. (The commercials before the clips get pretty tiresome, though.)
P.S. Kudos on Discovery‘s safe landing today!
Okay, this is cool. Astronomy Picture of the Day has an animated GIF of Discovery flying away from the spent solid rocket boosters, taken with cameras mounted on the boosters themselves.
There’s a smoother version of it, but with less supporting text, on NASA’s site. You can see some other videos, as well, including the external tank falling toward the atmosphere. Oh, and be sure you watch the one called “STS-121 Right Forward Solid Rocket Booster Video” for a rocket’s-eye view of the liftoff, followed by a long, graceful fall back into the ocean.
By the way, having spent last weekend at Readercon, I’m now really burrowing into work on Sunborn. I’ll post an update soon.
I haven’t been at my computer much the last couple of days, so I’m celebrating the Fourth of July online a little late. (For you folks from outside the U.S., that’s Independence Day, or the birthday celebration for the United States of America.)
This year my family went to see the Boston Pops do their traditional outdoor concert down by the Charles River—only we went on July 3 for the rehearsal performance, which was theoretically less crowded. It was a great time. Just one thing: no fireworks. Now, I love fireworks. But the best fireworks this Independence Day were about 1500 miles to the south of me—at Cape Canaveral. Here’s what they looked like:
Yes, Discovery is back in space! Let’s hear it for NASA and all the people who worked to make it happen. And let’s pray for a safe mission.
Now, that’s what I’m talkin’!
Okay, enough with the politics for a while. I’ve got something cooler. It’s free software from NASA, and it’s called World Wind.
By now, I expect most of you know about Google Earth. It’s a sort of World Wide Earth browser that lets you see the surface of the Earth from satellite imagery and turn it all around and zoom in close enough and clearly enough that, depending on where you live, you may be able to pick out your own house and tell whether you (or at least your cars) were at home when the photo was taken. In fact, here is a picture of my house, taken from Google Earth.
You can’t quite see how cracked the driveway is, but I can tell it was taken before we rebuilt the deck, so it must be a few years old. (That faint fuzzy patch to the right of the deck that looks like a giant grey dandelion puff is actually a pretty good sized pin-oak tree.) If they get a little better with it, we could use it to inspect our roofs and chimneys! My office window is high on the end of the house overlooking the deck. You can’t quite see me hard at work.
World Wind from NASA is similar, but different. You can rotate and zoom in, and add all sorts of fancy overlays—but you can do it not just with Earth, but with the Moon, Mars, Venus, and Jupiter. Also the stars. (And someone added a plug-in for the Death Star.) The resolution of Earth isn’t as fine, but I like it better for the planets, anyway. For Mars and Venus, it’ll show you where all the spacecraft have landed. (I was amazed how many there were.) Here are two pix of Mars. You won’t see it here, but if you mouse over the icons, it’ll tell you the spacecraft names and dates. It also has a bunch of scientific overlays if you’re interested.
This second one is the landing site of the Opportunity robot buggy.
The software is Windows only, I’m afraid. And although I found the installation easy, I had to reinstall something called .NET framework from Microsoft before it worked. But the instructions are pretty clear if you speak even pidgeon-geek. Give it a try!*
*But if it breaks your machine (heh-heh), you didn’t hear about it from me!
It’s been over a year since the Huygens (that’s pronounced hoy-gens) probe landed on Saturn’s moon Titan, penetrating for the first time the opaque clouds that have hidden Titan’s surface. Scientists have now released a pair of videos, created from a vast number of still images, to let us share the view as Huygens descended. They’re about 5 minutes long, and well worth a look.
You can read an article about it on space.com, which will help you to understand what you’re seeing.
The first video, View from Huygens, gives the best view, with narration. (I couldn’t hear the narration the first time I played it, but when I replayed it, for some reason it came on. Oh, and you have to watch an ad for space.com before the video comes on.)
The second, Descent with Bells and Whistles, is more SFnal, with lots of squeaks and funny noises, but harder to understand. (I wish they had a larger version available, because it has lots of telemetry stuff around the image, but too small to be very readable.)
Huygens turned up evidence of flowing liquid methane, but I’m still waiting for pictures of methane lakes!
Well, I got those pesky taxes done and out of the way with time to spare! (Let’s see, about a hundred hours to spare, I figure.) So I sort of, almost, kept my New Year’s resolution to not fall behind and do my taxes at the last minute this year. We wound up owing a bit, so it’s not like we lost out on getting an early refund.
And having finished that, I’m now back to wrestling with a far more challenging problem: making sense of Chapter 13 in Sunborn. (It didn’t come out so well in the first draft. I think I’m getting there, though.)
Astronomically speaking, I just read a couple of interesting stories. Venus, that greenhouse hothouse of a planet, has a new visitor—the European Space Agency’s probe Venus Express, which entered orbit around the planet just yesterday. Here’s to Venus Express [takes a swig of Winterhook Ale].
Out at the other extreme of the solar system, Hubble scientists have taken a look at Xena, aka 2003 UB313, considered by some to be (maybe) the long-sought 10th planet. The Hubble people put its diameter at 1490 miles, rather than the original estimate of 1860 miles. That would make it almost exactly the same size as Pluto. Says Space.com: “Since 2003 UB313 is 10 billion miles away not even as wide as the United States, it showed up as just 1.5 pixels in Hubble’s view. But that’s enough to precisely make a size measurement, astronomers said.” If they can really do that, that’s…impressive.
And finally, consider RS Ophiuchi. It’s a binary star system, a white dwarf and a red giant. Like many such pairs, it’s also a source of fireworks, as matter falling from the giant onto the white dwarf periodically causes the smaller star to explode. What’s different about this star is that it blows up inside the atmosphere of its larger buddy. This is something new, never seen before.
And if you periodically worry, as I do, about what’s going to happen to the Earth a billion years from now when our own sun blows up into a red giant (incinerating us), some astrophysicist types named Fred Adams, Gregory Laughlin, and Don Korycansky have an answer: use carefully aimed asteroids to give Earth a gravitational boost and move it to a safer orbit! It’s a sort of long-term project, with each pass of the asteroid (every 6000 years) nudging the Earth a little farther from the sun. (“Captain, our orbit is decaying!” Nope—not anymore!)
I almost forgot! My name’s on that New Horizons spacecraft! Literally.
As a member of The Planetary Society, I am among the thousands whose names are inscribed on a CD carried on the New Horizons craft. The reason is that the mission to Pluto was cancelled over and over by NASA, by Congress, by Bush. Each time, the public constituency for planetary exploration, led primarily by The Planetary Society, rallied around to the cause. And each time, it was restored.
So this really is an example of power to the people.
What a great time to be alive, if you’re interested in space! Today, NASA successfully launched the New Horizons mission to Pluto. Apparently everything is working perfectly, and tonight at 11:00 p.m. EST, the spacecraft will whiz past the Moon. (That’s nine hours after launch. The Apollo spacecraft took three days to make the trip.) It’ll zip past Jupiter a year from now for a gravity boost, and should reach Pluto in 2015, nine years from now.
A few days ago, the Stardust mission returned to Earth bearing grains of Comet Wild 2’s dust in its Aerogel collectors.
A new movie by NASA and MIT scientists shows 10 years’ worth of X-ray images of the Milky Way, gathered by the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer. Watch neutron stars and black holes light up for the camera!
And finally, the Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, are coming to the IMAX screen in the Disney production, Roving Mars. See fantastic images of Mars on an IMAX screen near you, starting January 27.
It’s easy to become jaded, but this is really cool stuff!
Let’s start with the Good. Astronomy Magazine has a year-end wrap-up of the top ten stories of the year. Ordinarily I feel pretty jaded about lists like that, but 2005 really was an extraordinary year in astronomy. Here are a few of the highlights:
Still with the Good, but closer to home, my local paper just ran a nice story about my soon-to-appear novel, Battlestar Galactica: the Miniseries. You can even read it online. (By the way, if any of you sees the book in a store, please post and let me know. The writer is usually the last to know that his book is out.)
All right. The Bad.
What else? Bush. This time it’s news of his almost-certainly illegal wiretap spying on American citizens following 9/11. And he’s still claiming it’s within his constitutional powers! I guess, if you believe you’re anointed by God, you think these things. Like you think it’s okay to be free to torture people, even though you of course would never actually do it.
Did I say that the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge was safe for the moment? Only a moment, as it turns out. They’re at it again, and this time they might sleaze it through—by attaching it as an amendment to a military bill, which will probably be voted on in the next two days. If you oppose this drilling, as I do, call your senators!
There is Good in all of this, however. Increasingly, moderate Republicans are stirring, recognizing that the radical right has gotten out of control. Kudos to Senator McCain for sticking to his guns on the ban on torture! Thank God for people of integrity on both sides of the aisle. And kudos to the Iraqi people for turning out in record numbers for their election. Despite my criticism of the war, I do want to see things turn around for that embattled nation.
The Ugly.
Manufacturers have been putting lead in vinyl lunch boxes made for children. According to the Consumer Products Safety Commission (quoted at snopes.com), the amount is small. But why should there be any?
So go back and read the Good part. No reason to end this on a downer.
Apropos of the discussion of oil and drilling in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge, today’s email brought a message from the Union of Concerned Scientists,* concerning a public comment period on proposed new government regulations on fuel standards for vehicles. There’s an interactive animation called “Extreme Auto Makeover,” which is mildly amusing, and which takes you to an email comment page. But more to the point, in terms of information, is the page you can reach by clicking the button for Extreme Data.
The short version—there’s a lot the auto industry can do to improve fuel economy and safety, using existing technology and without serious impact on either the cost or the luxurious driving experience that we all enjoy (me, too). All that’s required is the will to do it. But they’re not going to do it without strong persuasion.
For the record—I’ve been a Ford shareholder for several decades (since I bought five shares of stock upon graduating from high school; it’s up to about fifty shares now). I would be more than willing to see my dividends trimmed a little, if that were required to implement these changes. I don’t think it is necessary, though.
*President of UCS: Kevin Knobloch. Also known as “Coach,” to my daughters’ soccer team a few years ago. A good guy. Very sharp, tuned in, and civic minded.