Tag Archives: Spacecraft

Across the Universe: Dramatic Science

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This entry is part 64 of 184 in the series Across the Universe

This column first ran in The Tablet in April 2008. We ran it here in 2016. From a glass-enclosed visitor’s gallery at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, I watched three technicians, encased in white suits, slowly affix bits of equipment to a large aluminum frame, the platform of an SUV-sized rover to Mars. Two sets of steering rockets were already attached; two large metal spheres painted black and gold were seated nearby. “Those are the fuel tanks, right?” I asked my friend Steve, an engineer on the project who guided my tour. “Like the ones that blew up the Mars Orbiter in the 1980s?” Every piece has a necessary function, and every piece has a history of what can happen if it goes wrong. Even with a recent string of triumphs, Mars probe failures still outnumber the successes. Each piece is added in a carefully scripted order, with a quality-control specialist looking on: the torque wrench must not overtighten … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Europa

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This entry is part 55 of 184 in the series Across the Universe

This column first ran in The Tablet in February, 2009; we ran it here for the first time in 2016. Under the dim light of a distant sun, a cold white ball smaller than our Moon orbits a huge gas planet, garishly striped with colored clouds. Galileo first saw this jovian moon – to be named “Europa” by his rival, Simon Marius – on January 7, 1610. In 1805, Laplace had worked out Europa’s mass (using an elaborate theory of the moons’ orbits), and other 19th century astronomers timed the way the Jupiter moons shadowed each other to estimate their sizes. By the end of that century clever instruments allowed Pickering to estimate its brightness. All the information was there. From these data, any schoolchild could have calculated that Europa was less dense than rock, more dense than ice, and brilliantly white. But no one actually put all that information together until 1908, when Pickering finally noted the low density and … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Stardust messages

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This entry is part 15 of 184 in the series Across the Universe

First published in The Tablet in January, 2006; we ran it here in 2015. Thirty [now more than 40!] years ago, when I was a doctoral student at the University of Arizona, our campus in Tucson lay beneath the landing path of the Davis-Monthan Air Force Base and every few minutes our planetary science classes would be interrupted by the roar of a jet fighter. But an occasional plane would cross overhead with a different sound… an odd, almost quiet whine. Looking up you’d see the large black cruciform, long straight wings and a thin fuselage, of a U-2 spy plane. For twenty years they’d flown photography missions over Soviet Russia and other cold war hotspots. But one U-2 was different. Rather than spooky black, it was painted pure white. And instead of air force emblems, it flew NASA insignia. A visitor to our Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, Don Brownlee from the University of Washington, explained those flights to us. … Continue reading →

Voyager 2 Spacecraft Enters Interstellar Space

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For the second time in history, a human-made object has reached the space between the stars. NASA’s Voyager 2 probe now has exited the heliosphere – the protective bubble of particles and magnetic fields created by the Sun. Members of NASA’s Voyager team will discuss the findings at a news conference at 11 a.m. EST (8 a.m. PST) today at the meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in Washington. The news conference will stream live on the agency’s website. Comparing data from different instruments aboard the trailblazing spacecraft, mission scientists determined the probe crossed the outer edge of the heliosphere on Nov. 5. This boundary, called the heliopause, is where the tenuous, hot solar wind meets the cold, dense interstellar medium. Its twin, Voyager 1, crossed this boundary in 2012, but Voyager 2 carries a working instrument that will provide first-of-its-kind observations of the nature of this gateway into interstellar space. Voyager 2 now is slightly more than 11 billion miles (18 billion … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Souvenirs from Space

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This entry is part 38 of 184 in the series Across the Universe

This column first appeared in The Tablet in October, 2004; it ran here at The Catholic Astronomer in 2015 Typhoon 23 and I arrived in Japan on the same day. My mission (I can’t speak for the typhoon) was to attend an international workshop on sample returns from asteroids. Our hosts were the  scientists and engineers of  the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency who are eagerly awaiting the arrival next summer of their spacecraft, Hayabusa, at asteroid Itokawa. (The remarkable challenges and eventually successes of Hayabusa can are described nicely at its Wikipedia site.) Astronomers usually have to be content with observing their objects from afar. But nothing beats actually going to a place to see what it’s really like. Itokawa is a potato-shaped lump of rock less than half a kilometer in diameter that apparently drifted into our neighborhood from the asteroid belt; though it looks like a typical asteroid, its orbit is not out beyond Mars but rather much … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Deep Impact

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This entry is part 182 of 184 in the series Across the Universe

This article from The Tablet was first published in June, 2005, thirteen years ago, just before the “Deep Impact” probe hit. (And rerun here in 2015.) It’s interesting to see what we were hoping to learn… how little we knew; how little we know. The folks who work out the celestial mechanics of space probes are a clever bunch, with a techie’s sense of humor. A few years ago, the NEAR spacecraft arrived at asteroid Eros on Valentine’s Day. The ill-fated Beagle 2 probe was designed to land on Mars on Christmas morning (not the only present that Christmas to arrive broken, I suspect). And this year [2005], on the Fourth of July, an American probe called “Deep Impact” hopes to make a splash as dramatic as any fireworks display by plunging at 37,100 kilometers per hour – London to New York in nine minutes – into the nucleus of the comet Temple 1. Before the space age, all one could see of … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: By Paper, to the Stars

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This entry is part 177 of 184 in the series Across the Universe

This column was first published in The Tablet in June, 2004, and first published here in 2015… read the end to find out what happened! The people who design airplanes say that a plane can’t fly until its weight is matched by the weight of its paperwork. The same must be true for launching spacecraft to another planet. Last month [May 2004] I took part on a NASA panel in Washington DC, reviewing five competing plans to build a planetary probe; in the run-up to the panel I was shipped 30 pounds of paper to read. NASA’s “New Frontiers” program is a development of another project driven by piles of paperwork: the Solar System Decadal Survey commissioned by NASA and executed by the National Academy of Sciences in 2002. After hearing from hundreds of planetary scientists at meetings around the world (and reading white papers solicited and gathered by various international  societies) a committee of graybeards outlined where NASA should be … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Original Proof

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This entry is part 160 of 184 in the series Across the Universe

First published in The Tablet in February, 2005… and on The Catholic Astronomer several years ago. Note that Spirit and Opportunity, originally designed to be a 90 day mission, have now been in operation for more than 5000 days! In January [2005], the Opportunity rover that has been trundling across Mars came upon a pitted lump of iron and nickel, about the size of a basketball. The rover’s chemical tests confirmed that it had found an iron/nickel meteorite, a stray bit of a broken-up asteroid fallen from the sky, with a composition like those that have fallen onto the Earth. A lump of metallic iron is not what one would expect to find on Mars. The Martian atmosphere is rich in carbon dioxide; the oxygen from that carbon dioxide, and from the water we now know once flowed on the surface, should be enough to turn metallic iron into a rusty pile of iron oxide. And in fact, oxidized iron … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Confronting Fear and Terror

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This entry is part 92 of 184 in the series Across the Universe

This column first appeared in The Tablet in October 2011 Following the Phobos session at the joint European-American Planetary Science Conference, held[in 2011] in Nantes, France, my colleague Dan Britt commented, “You know the origin of Phobos and Deimos…” These moons of Mars, named for the Roman gods of fear and terror, are 10-km sized potato-shaped piles of rubble. Pockmarked by craters, they look just like the kind of dark bodies you see in the neighbouring asteroid belt. “They’re captured asteroids, right?” I replied. “That’s what we think in America,” Dan replied. “But in Europe, apparently, everyone is convinced that they are actually made from material splashed off the crust of Mars by a giant impact.” For years, Dan had been trying to convince NASA to spend a spacecraft to Phobos. He argued that if you could collect enough rocks from its surface and bring them back to Earth, you would get not only asteroidal material but also an occasional rock that might … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Featureless Features

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This entry is part 91 of 184 in the series Across the Universe

At the end of September 2016, Rosetta finally ended its mission by crashing into its comet. This column, about an earlier aspect of the Rosetta mission, first appeared in The Tablet in October 2010   Back in July [2010], ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft, en route to a comet rendezvous in 2014, flew past asteroid Lutetia, a 100 km pile of rock orbiting between Mars and Jupiter. The result of that encounter was a hot topic of both the European Planetary Science Conference in Rome in September and a meeting of American planetary astronomers in Pasadena in October [2010]. Studying asteroids has always been challenging. Even in the largest telescopes they’re mere dots of light, too small to show any shapes, much less surface details. We can only infer their nature from the most subtle of hints: how their brightness varies as they spin, how much infrared light they radiate, their visible and infrared colours. Minerals that contain iron oxide or water reveal themselves by … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: A Damp Kaboom

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This entry is part 90 of 184 in the series Across the Universe

This column first appeared in The Tablet in October 2009 “Where’s the kaboom?” asked my friend, imitating the whiny voice of the cartoon character Marvin the Martian. “There was supposed to be a Moon-shattering kaboom!” We were watching live television coverage of NASA’s LCROSS lunar orbiter impacting into a dark crater on the Moon. The idea was that water ice might be hidden in the shadows of craters like this one, set in a region of the Moon’s south pole where sunshine never reaches. Water vapor from all the comets that have hit the Moon over the last four billion years might be trapped and frozen there. By slamming a rocket into those shadows, a giant plume of rock and ice would be lifted out of the shadows and into the view of the nearby spacecraft, and telescopes on Earth. Or so proclaimed the hyperactive NASA press office. In fact, at the impact, only a faint infrared blip was visible in the spacecraft images. … Continue reading →