Space and space exploration

Space is big

Published on March 30, 2009

artistic impression of Pluto and Charon. From the New Horizons website

It’s hard to believe how far we are from anything else created by humankind. Except for our own, now-derelict third stage, nothing made by people or from the Earth — nothing — is within more than a billion miles of New Horizons.

From the latest news update of the New Horizons Project, NASA’s attempt to reach Pluto and the Kuiper Belt. The latter being the belt of Pluto sized planetoids at the edge of the classical Solar System. It’s some 30 to 55 Astronomical Units away; one AU being the distance from the Sun to the Earth, or about eight light minutes, or some 8 x 60 x 300,000 kilometres. Space is big, as Douglas Adams already noticed.

Space is not just big in distances, but also in time:

But you won’t have to wait another three years for our next significant distance and flight-time milestones — they come next year, when we cross the halfway point! But whenever quoting such milestones, I have to be careful about the meaning. So when will our spacecraft be halfway to Pluto? Well, that depends on which halfway you mean. (No, I am not kidding.)

If one asks, when have we traveled half the flight time to reach Pluto? That halfway milestone occurs on October 17, 2010.

But if one asks, when will we be half as far from the Sun as Pluto will be at the time of our encounter on July 14, 2015? That occurs somewhat earlier, on April 20, 2010.

And if one asks, when will we have traveled half the heliocentric distance to Pluto from our launch at Earth? That milestone occurs even earlier, on February 25, 2010.

So, as you can see, the answer to the halfway question depends on precisely what it means to be halfway. In fact, you could even ask when the halfway day was from New Horizons project inception on December 20, 2000, to Pluto arrival on July 14, 2015 — that was April 4, 2008. Or one could ask about the halfway day from when we began our push for a Pluto mission on May 4, 1989 (when we had our first meeting with NASA officials) until Pluto encounter — that was on June 9, 2002. So in some ways we’re already halfway there, and in other ways, we have well over a year to go to reach the halfway point.

In other words, any big deep space mission consumes a significant chunk of somebody’s career. Sure, a trip to Pluto is an extreme example, but even missions to our planetary neighbours like Mars or Venus require years of planning, preparation and monitoring.

Science fiction is too often impatient with these distances, zooming around the Galaxy through Hyperspace or Warp speed or whatever. It’s all so easy that real life space travel just seems unnecesarilly complex and difficult. Now I like a good space opera as much as the next guy, but I would like to see more attention paid to our own Solar System, because it is vastly more complex and big as Golden Age Science Fiction ever suspected. Surely it must be possible to write a good, exciting novel taking into account the realities of space travel rather than resorting yet again to shortcuts?

(Paul McAuley, from whose blog I plucked this link, has done his bit with The Quiet War, which makes full use of the latest research results on what our solar system actually looks like.)

A new ICE age

Published on October 10, 2008

Old spaceships don’t die, they just get parked in very long stable orbits to fade away, but sometimes what’s assumed to be dead is still there ready to serve us again, as seems to be the case with the International Cometary Explorer:

ISEE-3 was originally launched on August 12, 1978, as the International Sun-Earth Explorer to a halo orbit about one of the Earth-Moon libration points to study Earth’s magnetosphere and its interaction with the solar wind. Then, in 1983, it employed several lunar gravity assist flybys to send it on a new journey, for which it was rechristened the International Cometary Explorer, through the tail of comet Giacobini-Zinner. ICE approached within 7,800 kilometers of the comet on September 11, 1985. In 1986, it turned its instruments toward Halley’s comet, participating in the international observation campaign, and becoming the first spacecraft to investigate two comets.

[…]

ICE is actually on a return trip to Earth now; it’s in an orbit similar to, but slightly faster than, Earth’s, so measured relative to us, it’s taking a long, slow trip around the Sun. It will return to our neighborhood on August 10, 2014, targeted to return to the Moon, which is what originally launched it on this journey. A lunar flyby can recapture it back into Earth orbit, after which, Farquhar said, they are thinking of parking it in its original halo orbit again, from which they could launch it back out to explore more cometary targets.

So it returns home on my birthday, which is nice. There’s so much interesting stuff going unexplored in our solar system for lack of spacecraft, so it’s great to see a new purpose for an old soldier like this.

Found via Sore Eyes.

Happy birthday Sputnik

Published on October 4, 2007

Sputnik 1

fifty years ago today the first manmade object reached orbit. Science fiction fans everywhere thought it would be the start of mankind’s thriumphant conquest of space, even if it was the Russkies who did it, but it didn’t quite work out that way. While we’re using satellites for all kinds of important stuff, that whole idea that humanity had to leave its cradle behind seemed a lot less attractive in reality than science fiction had made it seem — quite a lot harder as well. We’re struggling to get a space station capable of keeping half a dozen astronauts living there for a month or two up and running, let alone that we can get the million inhabitants L5 colonies O’Neill dreams up going. For now, the future seems to be Earth orbit satellites and unmanned probes to the rest of the Solar System, plus the occasional hype of a new Moon or Mars programme

Should we be disappointed with this? That we have no giant space colonies, no Moonbase, no exploration of Mars, no interstellar expeditions? Or should we be happy instead with the things we do have: a Solar System far more interesting and odd than anybody had ever imagined, Earthbound telescopes powerful enough to detect planets around other stars, extrasolar planets where nobody would’ve believed planets could exist, an universe fastly more wonderful than any science fiction writer ever imagined?

Me, I’d rather go for wonder than for disappointment; I just wish much of science fiction would do the same and embrace the universe we live in rather than the universe we wished we lived in. Too much modern science fiction wallows in nostalgia or tries to refit the real universe into the old cliches.

The BBC’s Space Odyssey

Published on November 9, 20041 Comment

Tonight the BBC finally broadcasted the first episode of a new documentary series, Space Odyssey, which had promised us a look at what a manned Grand Tour of the Solar System could be like and what wonders could be found on the way. The trailers had made it sound like the series would be equally about the technology behind the expedition and the planets the expedition would visit: Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and Pluto. S— wanted to see the latter most, I was hoping the former would be dominant; unfortunately we both were disappointed.

The actual series you see, is neither fish nor fowl: it’s part astronaut drama ala Apollo 13, part reality tv about five astronauts living together for six years and only part science documentary. The information about the visited planets is shoehorned in between shots of the astronauts adjusting to their circumstances and demonstrating zero-g and Tense, Dramatic Moments, with appropriate closeups of the people in Mission Control, of the expedition in Danger. Tension while contact is lost with the Venus lander! Excitement at a dust storm on Mars! More excitement at a very close approach of a binairy asteroid! And all with the obligatory, sweeping, over-intrusive violin music. It made S—wonder whether it was a PBS co-production, while I guessed it would be Discovery Channel; rightly as it turned out.

It certainly shares the flaws of other BBC/Discovery co-productions like The Future is Wild: good central concepts but bad execution, the emphasis on special effects and pretty pictures over science and imparting knowledge, the speculation presented as fact and the fact presented without a good context to make sense of it, but as trivia. And of course, the science errors.

Radio lag? Neither seen nor mentioned until the dramatic asteroid approach when suddenly the script requires a 38 minute lag; the previous tense moments were all witnessed live by Mission Control. Then there were the Venus and Mars landers, both of which looked roughly like souped up Moon landers. But the moon has an escape velocity of only 2.38 km/s, which can be reached even by a puny lander; for Mars, (5.027 km/s) and especially Venus (10.36 km/s) with an escape velocity not that much less than Earth’s, you need something more. You need the same sort of big fuckoff rocket on Venus that it takes to put two people into orbit on Earth, basically. Another thing that bothered me about the Venus sequence: the need for a tough astronaut suit was mentioned, to withstand the sheer pressure and noxious fumes there; so why the huge clear plastic faceplate?

Unfortunately, the technical realities behind the expedition, what it would take to actually do it in real life got even less mention than the planetary exploration. What I would’ve liked to see was an approach similar to that of The Blue Planet, where each program had two parts. With Blue Planet, you would first get the wonders and miracles of whatever part of the oceans it was this time, followed by an explenation of how these wonders and miracles were filmed and the technology and science behind it. That would’ve been much more interesting here too, especially if the programme’s makers hadn’t tried to cram everything into two episodes.

A failure then, but an interesting failure.