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Posts Tagged ‘NASA’

Moon Fest 2009

Monday, July 20th, 2009

 

Yesterday I went to the Moon Fest at Ames Research Center, one of the events that NASA has organized in honor of the anniversary of the first moon landing. In every way except one, the afternoon left me very optimistic about the future of space travel.

First, one thing that impressed me was that there was a big crowd. This wasn’t “book reading at the bookstore” big or even “Friday night at the movie theater” big. It was “sports event” big, with a traffic jam waiting to get off the highway, traffic cops showing people where to park, etc. I would guess that at least a couple thousand people came. That’s pretty exciting — a couple thousand people for a science event!

Crowds at Moon Fest; Lunar Science Institute in semi-background; Hangar One in background

Crowds at Moon Fest; Lunar Science Institute in semi-background; Hangar One in background

Of course, there were lots and lots of kids, and somewhat to my surprise there was a very well-planned choice of activities for them. They could drive robotic “moon buggies” or look through a telescope at the sun or build and launch model rockets out of paper and plastic. If your rocket landed in a “moon crater” (a big bowl-shaped piece of plastic) you would win a prize. I don’t know if the kids realized it, but this game was intended to tie in with the LCROSS mission that is currently in orbit about the moon, and will smash into a lunar crater on October 9. Here are a couple of kids getting ready to launch their rockets:

Countdown begins

Countdown begins

The Gyroscope Effect

The Gyroscope Effect

And here’s another girl learning about angular momentum. She is standing on a rotating platform. When she tilted the spinning bicycle wheel, the conservation of angular momentum caused her to start spinning around.

For adults or more seriously minded folks, there was also a big tent set up for lectures. I got there in time for a lecture by Tony Colaprete, the principal investigator for the LCROSS mission. I did a short interview with him afterwards, which I will write about in a future post. Again, the size of the crowd was very respectable, probably at least 300 people.

The best speaker, though, was Donald Pettit, an astronaut who has flown aboard both the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station. In fact, he was one of the astronauts who was on board the ISS when the space shuttle Columbia exploded on re-entry in 2003, and he was stranded there until he could get back home on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. (He spent five and a half months in orbit.)

Kids love astronauts!

Kids love astronauts!

Astronauts are the closest thing that NASA has to rock stars. The questions after all the other talks were asked by adults, but after Donald Pettit’s talk the kids couldn’t wait to ask questions. They wanted to know how germs work in outer space, how long it takes you to get over your “sea legs” (or “space legs”) after you get back home, and how old you have to be to be an astronaut.

Pettit’s answer to that last question surprised me. He said there is no age limit, minimum or maximum. BUT most of the space shuttle and space station astronauts these days are scientists, which means they have to get a science degree and they have to make some kind of impression with their research. So the typical astronaut these days is in his or her late 30′s or early 40′s. That was older than I would have expected. By the way, I hope the kids caught the subtext of Pettit’s answer: You want to be an astronaut? Study science.

Pettit’s talk had lots of great video clips. He showed a simple gadget he invented for drinking tea in outer space, and he showed himself “eating” blobs of tea with chopsticks. He showed a film of sunrise as seen from the space station: from full darkness to full sunrise in seven and a half seconds! He showed how they recycle urine (“yesterday’s coffee”) so that you can drink it again (“today’s coffee”). His talk was light-hearted (“In space, you get to play with your food and call it science,” he said) but at the same time he did not miss any opportunities to point out that the knowledge we are gaining will be important to us as we continue to voyage in space. For example, recycling every little bit of water that we can will be vital in the nearly anhydrous environment of the moon or Mars.

Over and over, Pettit emphasized that “strange things happen at frontiers.” And that’s why we want to go to frontiers, because that is where we can discover new things and see the world in new ways.

So, as I said, I came back from the Moon Fest feeling good about space science.  The public interest is real, if you can engage it. I felt as if NASA is doing wonderfully with its educational mission. In the 1960s they could never have pulled off an event like this. Also, NASA still has a corps of talented and charismatic astronauts, like Donald Pettit, who can make a passionate case for why space is important. And there is still a whole universe out there of things to be discovered.

There’s only one thing missing from this picture. You’ve got the enthusiasm, you’ve got the talent, you’ve got the unexplored frontier – but you need to have a mission. You need something for all these people to get excited about. You need a challenge that is worthy of the talents of the astronauts and the scientists and the huge support staff behind them.

The Shuttle is good … but it’s retiring soon. A couple years from now, for the first time since the 1970s, the United States won’t have any spacecraft capable of taking humans into space. The next time Donald Pettit goes into orbit, he will have to hitch a ride with the Russians. The Space Station is great … but just a little bit too ordinary. I don’t think that it inspires very many people. There’s only one mission that NASA ever had that was transcendent, and that was going to the moon.

So that’s the missing piece. All of NASA’s literature still talks about returning to the moon by 2020, but I am far from convinced that it will happen. It will take leadership to stay the course, and I still haven’t seen the proof that our current leadership is committed enough to it. But we’ll see! Hopefully, when the 50th anniversary of Neil Armstrong’s “one small step” rolls around, we will either have people on the moon or we will have plans to get them there in the very near future.

Tags: Ames Research Center, anniversary, astronauts, frontiers, LCROSS, NASA, Neil Armstrong, optimism, recycling, shuttle, space station
Posted in Just for Fun, Media, Science | 2 Comments »

LRO First Picture!

Saturday, July 4th, 2009

Two days ago, on July 2, NASA released the first photograph from the new Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. And here it is! (Actually, this is just a small piece of it, but a very interesting piece, as I will explain below.)

LRO First Light

LRO First Light

The complete photograph is actually a very long strip, something like 500 by 50,000 pixels, taken near the edge of Mare Nubium in the moon’s southern hemisphere. The LRO website ways that the photo was taken near a crater called Hell … I’m not sure why. It doesn’t seem like the best place to start a mission!

If you want to find the location through a telescope or binoculars, it’s at about 30 degrees south latitude and 10 degrees west longitude. To the south is Tycho (one of the brightest craters on the moon), and to the north is an easily spotted trio of craters, Ptolemy, Alphonsus, and Arzachel. The best time for looking at this region was two days ago, when the picture was taken — and that is no accident. Photographers on Earth like to take pictures at sunset or sunrise, and so do lunar photographers! The lunar topography shows up most clearly near the “terminator” — the boundary between the day side and night side of the moon. The LRO spacecraft is currently in a terminator orbit, circling the moon from pole to pole and following the moon shadow around. This is the place to be if you want to take stunning photographs!

There are two very interesting things to notice in this picture. First, at the very bottom, you might notice a string of craters, like beads on a chain. Is this an accident? If not, how is a chain of craters like this formed? The answer is that they are “secondary craters” — craters formed by debris that is blasted off the moon’s surface by a meteorite impact. When the debris lands, it forms smaller craters all in a line. The first person to notice this phenomenon, I believe (perhaps some historians can correct me if I’m wrong) was Ralph Baldwin, an amateur astronomer in the 1940s. At the time, the conventional wisdom was that the moon’s craters were volcanoes. Baldwin put together many pieces of evidence, like this, to conclude that at least some of them were formed by impacts.  In this case, the amateur was right and the professionals were wrong.

Also, Baldwin noticed very large-scale linear patterns on the moon, which again seem to radiate outward from some of the great basin impacts. According to the LRO team, you can see some of the linear features in the photograph. I suspect that what they mean is the overall southwest-northeast orientation of the valleys in this photo. These furrows must have been scoured out by a vastly larger and earlier impact than the one that made the little chain of craters that I mentioned above.

As cool as the LRO pictures are, I want to mention that LRO is way, WAY more than just a camera. It has seven extremely cool instruments on it. I will list them below in no particular order of coolness. I will not translate the abbreviations into English — if you want to know what they stand for, check out the LRO website.

  1. LAMP. How cool is this? We are going to see the dark regions of the moon by starlight. The stars give off ultraviolet light, and the whole darned galaxy glows at one particular wavelength, and we can use this invisible (to human eyes) light to peer into craters that never see the sun.
  2. Diviner. We’re going to take the moon’s temperature. It’s not the same everywhere. Equatorial regions range from 150 degrees below zero (Celsius) to more than 100 degrees above zero (i.e., hotter than the boiling point of water).If you’re building a lunar base, that’s kind of tough to deal with. But near the poles, the temperature is much more even, although cold — roughly 100 to 120 degrees below zero.
  3. CRaTER. This one is interesting because it is specifically directed towards human habitation. How much radiation does the moon get from the sun and from outer space? The answer will tell us how long we can keep astronauts on the moon’s surface safely. Remember that the Apollo astronauts were there for only three days or less.
  4. LEND. Another instrument that will measure radiation — this time neutrons coming from inside the moon. This is kind of a repeat of the experiment that Lunar Prospector did to confirm the presence of hydrogen (and therefore maybe water) at the poles. An interesting point here is that it’s a Russian experiment flying on a NASA spacecraft — a nice example of international collaboration!
  5. LOLA. This laser altimeter will construct 3-D images of the moon’s surface.
  6. Mini-RF. A synthetic aperture radar that will search for ice at the lunar poles. This is similar to the Clementine experiment in 1994 that started all the excitement about water at the poles, but I assume it will be much better because it will have a lot more time to gather data and because it was designed for this purpose.
  7. LROC, the LRO camera, which by now needs no introduction.

I am by no means an expert in all of these technologies (or any of them), but I hope that over the coming months I will have a chance to interview some of the scientists involved with these projects, so that I can tell you how they work.

One thing that I find interesting about the web links is that almost all of them mention that they are “heritage” or “legacy” instruments — in other words, similar experiments have flown on other NASA missions, to Mars or to other planets. In our budget-conscious age, NASA wants equipment that is cheap and reliable. Still, one can’t help feeling a little bit nostalgic for the 1960s and the Apollo missions, when nothing was a legacy experiment — everything was being done for the first time!

Tags: craters, equator, ice, LRO, NASA, opinions, poles, radiation, technology, telescope, water
Posted in Missions, Science | 5 Comments »

Liftoff!

Friday, July 3rd, 2009

We're on our way!
We’re on our way!

To all space enthusiasts, especially those who are interested in the moon, welcome! I’m celebrating the launch of my blog, appropriately enough, with a picture of a rocket launch. On June 18, 2009, NASA successfully sent its first two lunar missions of this millennium into orbit: the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS). (Image credit: United Launch Alliance/ Pat Corkery.)

LRO Logo in center, LCROSS just above it

LRO Logo in center, LCROSS just above it

It’s an exciting time to start a moon blog. Not only have the LRO and LCROSS missions gotten underway, but also the Indian Chandrayaan-1 mission is still going and the Japanese Kaguya mission has just ended. We also have a big anniversary coming up: the fortieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 manned mission to the moon. Two days after that, the longest total solar eclipse of the 21st century will take place — and as you know, we wouldn’t have eclipses without the moon.

That is a sample of the topics I plan to cover in my blog. I also hope to include interviews with people who are working on moon-related projects, whether they be NASA or private, science or literature or art. Yes, I do intend this blog to be not just about lunar science. The moon plays a large role in our culture, so I don’t think that we should just stick it in a box labeled “Science” and forget about all the other things that the moon means to us. But that’s a topic, or discussion, or rant for another time!

This blog takes its name from the working title of a book that I wrote six years ago, which was published by John Wiley & Sons: The Big Splat, or How Our Moon Came to Be. It’s a figure of speech my grandfather used to employ often. If you “think so-and-so hung the moon,” that is another way of saying that you are a great admirer of said person.

Eventually, my editor and I decided that “Who Hung the Moon?” was not an appropriate title for the book. The main reason, for him, was that book titles should not be in the form of a question. This was news to me — hadn’t he ever heard of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”? My reasons were different. I was concerned that “hung the moon” might be an idiom from a specific region — the American South — and not everyone would understand it. And finally, “Who Hung the Moon?” didn’t quite say what the book was about. The title we chose, The Big Splat, or How Our Moon Came to Be, was a much more straightforward description of the book’s contents.

Nevertheless, I still like the abandoned title. But it was actually my SO (Spousal Overunit), Kay, who suggested reviving it as the title for this blog. She did more than suggest it — she designed the whole look of this webpage around it, so that by the time she was done I couldn’t possibly say no! If you like the design, please send your compliments to her (and check out her quilting blog, www.allaboutapplique.net).

See the “About” pages if you want to read more about my background and reasons for writing this blog. But now, let’s get started!

Tags: Apollo, Chandrayaan, eclipse, Kaguya, LCROSS, LRO, NASA, spousal overunit, The Big Splat
Posted in Missions | 4 Comments »

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