Category Archives: Science – General

Launches and Manatees

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Attempting to take advantage of our proximity to the nation’s spaceport, we ventured east to the coast to see the recent launch of the Phoenix mission to Mars’s north polar region. The launch was scheduled for 5:26 a.m. local time. Confident that I could get to Cocoa Beach in 45 minutes, and that we were going to a spot slightly closer (Jetty Park), I planned to leave at 4:30. We missed our target departure time by only 2 minutes, but I was sadly mistaken on the time it takes to get Jetty Park. With almost no margin for error, we ended up scrambling to get to a viewing spot on the side of the road a scant 3 minutes before launch. This made for a stressful rather than anticipatory pre-launch wait, but the Delta 2 rocket made a spectacular and rapid ascent through a clear Florida sky, leaving behind enough exhaust at high altitudes to generate a colorful and ring-shaped high altitude noctilucent cloud.

Having learned from our experience of not leaving early enough for a launch, today we set out to Titusville to see the launch of Endeavour to the International Space Station two hours before launch, with a driving estimate to the viewing site of 30 minutes in normal conditions. We had not prepared, however, for the normal driving conditions just to get the five miles from our house to the road that leads to Titusville. Forty-five minutes later, we were still stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic and had traveled about four miles. This is the kind of thing that will eventually drive me insane. Amazingly, ten minutes and one mile later the traffic opened up suddenly and we were speeding to the private dock where our gracious host, UCF student Nate Lust, was waiting with reserved parking spaces on the edge of the Indian River (the name for the stretch of the Atlantic Intercoastal Waterway between Titusville and Kennedy Space Center). Still, I had not totally exhausted my means of messing things up. There are two shuttle launch pads, 39-A and 39-B. Both are visible from the shore in Titusville, but I could not visually tell which one actually had the shuttle on it. Opinion on the dock was mixed, and I confidently convinced myself (and anyone who cared to listen) that the shuttle was on the pad on the left from our vantage point. Thus, I happily trained my video camera and binoculars on this empty launch pad while the shuttle soared skyward completely out of my field of view. Of course, I quickly turned my gaze, but I missed that exciting first couple of seconds as the steam cloud first erupts and the shuttle with its bright solid rocket motor glare emerges from behind it.

Any disappointment was more than compensated for by the friendly visit of a manatee a few minutes later as we prepared to leave the dock. Anne-Marie’s eagle eyes spotted the manatee, and Nate simply turned on a hose, and the manatee appeared shortly, attracted by the fresh water. Very cool. I’ll post pictures of the manatee and crappy video of the shuttle launch shortly.

Alan Stern and Me

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It’s been a big year for Alan Stern. He has been named one of the 100 most influential people by Time magazine, his New Horizons mission to Pluto is well on its way, having completed a very successful flyby of Jupiter, and he has been named Associate Administrator for Science of NASA. This is following the establishment of the Boulder office of the Southwest Research Institute, now a leading center for planetary science.

But few people realize that his biggest honor was getting his Ph.D. in the same class as me, back in December 1989 from the Department of Astrophysical, Planetary, and Atmospheric Sciences (now just Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences) at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Getting his Ph.D. at the same time as me was such an incentive to Alan that he managed to finish grad school in just three years and one semester, having started a full year after me (that’s fast: only one other person in my class of a dozen graduated as early as I did, a full year longer than Alan). Since then he’s published roughly three papers for every one of mine (and had three children for every one of mine). Yes, our careers have followed slightly different trajectories since 1989, but oddly enough we’re both leaving the comfortable climes of Boulder this year for the muggy air of the East: Alan to D.C. and me to Orlando. In the brief time he’s been AA for Science at NASA there have already been some positive changes in communication between headquarters and the science community. I’m excited to see what comes next.

StarFest, Spaceships, and Hubble, Oh My

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My good friend and colleague Dr. Steve Lee and I had a standing-room-only crowd at StarFest 2007 in Denver last weekend. We took turns showing off the exploits of various robotic explorers of the planets to an enthusiastic and interested crowd. I started things off with a superficial overview at breakneck speed of Cassini’s many discoveries at Saturn, and a preview of upcoming visits to Pluto by New Horizons and Mercury by the MESSENGER spacecraft. Steve followed with an overview of the intrepid Mars Exploration Rovers, now operating after more than 10 times the duration of their nominal mission. Although Leonard Nimoy didn’t make it to our talk (incredible though that may seem), I attended his entertaining Q&A. Here he is shortly after I asked him about a ride on SpaceShipTwo, the sub-orbital hop being offered by Virgin Galactic at $200 grand a pop starting in 2009. You can tell he’s not overly enthusiastic about the prospect.
Leonard Nimoy at StarFest 2007

The next day I was off to D.C. where I got a chance to visit the National Air and Space Museum where the original SpaceShipOne craft that won the X Prize is on display. I was expecting it to be smaller than it was, though when you think about riding it to the edge of space it by no means seems big.
SpaceShipOne

What did seem positively gigantic, on the other hand, was the full-scale mockup of the Hubble Space Telescope. I tend to be a bit cocky in boasting that Cassini is the largest interplanetary spacecraft. Hubble positively dwarfs it. Part of that comes from the nature of the beast: Hubble is a telescope with a lot of empty space inside that tube, while Cassini is a more densely packed beast. Nevertheless, the mass of HST at 11,000 kg is almost double the mass of Cassini at launch (6000 kg), and half of Cassini’s mass at launch was fuel to use in deep space maneuvers, breaking at Saturn, and trajectory correction maneuvers.
HST at the Smithsonian

My last stop at the Smithsonian was to see the 3-D IMAX film Magnificent Desolation about the Apollo moon landings. The movie does an impressive job of rendering actual Apollo photos (many of which I recognized from the originals) in 3-D. Having grown up with Apollo and dreams of going to the Moon myself one day, and seeing the children in this movie announcing their determination to go there, I found the film surprisingly moving.

Conference on World Affairs

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Every April the University of Colorado hosts the Conference on World Affairs, a series of free and open panel discussions with experts from every discipline, from the arts to politics and science. It’s a tremendous experience, and since this is my last April in Colorado for a while I managed to get to three panels this week.

I moderated a panel on Space Trade, Transport, and Tourism with Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart, NASA astrophysicist Barbara Thompson, CEO of LiftPort Group, Michael Laine, and space flight systems engineer Juniper Jairala on the panel. Laine’s company is working on the idea of an elevator to space. While the engineering challenges are formidable, in principle it is a far more economical and efficient means of getting freight out of the Earth’s gravity well than rockets are. The panelists were trading bets on how soon (and if) the middle class will be buying tickets to space. Laine pointed out that transportation economy was largely fueled, at least originally, by freight, and Schweickart said the real space tourist boom will not be with Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShip Two flights to suborbital space for a few minutes, but the next generation of vehicles that will take passengers halfway around the world in an hour or two on a suborbital rocket plane (he’s betting Sir Richard Branson already has that in his business plan). The speed, by the way, is due to the gravity and size of the Earth; the rocket is just there to get you going fast enough so you don’t hit the ground until you’ve gone halfway ’round the planet. It takes 90 minutes to orbit the Earth, so a trip from Colorado to Japan is about 45 minutes of coasting, plus whatever time is needed for takeoff and landing. On the other hand, Schweickart also pointed out that “it is a long, long, long way” from suborbital flight (a la SpaceShip Two) to orbital flight (Space Shuttle) due to the much greater energy needed to get to orbital speed and the technical challenge of losing that energy safely when landing.

Michael Laine was also a panelist on the second panel I attended: “If Colbert Interviews Borat, How Many Personalities are in Your Living Room?”. Mark Levine, Terry McNally, and Nathan Johnson were the other panelists for an entertaining discussion of how reality is distorted not just by satirists such as Colbert and Sascha Baron Cohen, but also by what Levine called the “Fox Propaganda Channel” among others.

The third session I managed to attend was a plenary address by former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Joe Wilson. He joked that that used to be the first line of his obituary; now it is that he is the husband of the only covert CIA agent to be outed by her own government. It was a passionate address to a packed house at Macky Auditorium. He summarized the events leading up to “Plame-gate”. It is fairly sickening. Wilson initially attempted to get “redress for his grievances” as he phrased it (invoking the language of the First Ammendment) through private channels to officials in the U.S. government, including U.S. Senators. His grievance was that the administration used the threat of nuclear weapons in Iraq as a key justification for invading that country when it knew that there was no nuclear weapons capability or program there. Ultimately, failing to get action through direct channels, he published an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times (on Bush’s birthday, as it happens) outlining the facts for the American people. At that point he felt he had done his duty as a citizen. Little did he know what the Bush machine had in store for him and his wife. He attributed their mean and stupid actions to meanness, stupidity, and a failure to understand or appreciate the basic principles of how our government and society are supposed to work.

Zero-g Flights

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When I give talks on the Cassini mission or other aspects of the space program to students or the public these days I comment that as a child I wanted to be an astronaut so I decided to get a Ph.D. in astrophysics, but what I should have done to become an astronaut is become a millionaire. This week Microsoft executive Charles Simonyi is in space as the fifth paying space tourist. At some point in the foreseeable future the number of tourist astronauts will likely exceed the number of professional astronauts. For me personally, the closest I’ll probably ever get to the experience of being in space was when I flew on NASA’s fabled “vomit comet” to conduct scientific experiments in weightless conditions.

Now that experience is also available to paying customers. For $3500 the Zero-G corporation will take you up in their modified Boeing 727 airplane for a dozen or so parabolic maneuvers that give you about 20 seconds of weightlessness each. They recently announced scheduled flights out of Las Vegas starting this month. For my own experience, the “vomit comet” lived up to its nickname. I did a total of six flights over a period of a little over a year, and a total of 247 parabolas. The longest flight was 51 parabolas, and ironically that is the only time I didn’t puke, though I was terribly nauseous most of the time. Nevertheless, the experience of weightlessness was truly memorable. Even though I was generally too queasy or too busy to do somersaults or anything showy like that, the sensation of weightlessness permeates the whole body and gives an entirely new perspective on our daily battle against gravitational acceleration. When you are weightless you become aware of the absence of forces in your body that you are not normally aware of, such as the weight of your head on your shoulders, or the pull of your arms downward and even the weight of your organs on the organs beneath them. And of course there is the odd behavior of fluids, such as spherical bubbles of water. Fluid studies are in fact a major area of research experimentation on the NASA Weightless Wonder (as it is officially known).

Here’s a rather low-quality movie of me during one parabola. It’s not very impressive because I’m holding onto a strap on the ceiling to keep from drifting away or getting turned upside down and get sick, so that diminishes the impression of floating. Those bright spots on the wall are lights, not windows. In the KC-135 plane I flew on (now retired) there are only a couple of windows. During the parabolic maneuver there is very little impression of the outside orientation of the airplane. The sickening part, by the way, at least for me, was not zero-g itself, but rather the constant cycling between zero-g and about 1.8 g’s and the havoc that wreaked on my internal organs. I found taking ginger supplements and lying flat on the floor during the 1.8 g pull-up maneuvers helped. It was a great experience (and I’m finally even getting the paper on our experimental results written for publication), but I don’t think I’ll be coughing up three and a half grand to repeat it anytime soon.

Planet Earth

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I spend work thinking about other planets, but I am quite fond of the Earth. I have to say that the first episode of Discovery Channel’s series Planet Earth was truly spectacular. It made me wish I had an HDTV. The first episode, “Pole to Pole”, focused on the effects of seasons and latitude on life. The narration by Sigourney Weaver was solid, factual, and informative without sounding like a lecture. The show was primarily a visual treat, though, and by making use of steady-cams mounted on helicopters in communication with ground crews, the producers put together some truly astounding footage of wildlife that is like nothing I’ve seen before.

Ethanol Deal with Brazil

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The Bush Administration signed an agreement with Brazil (which also signed an agreement with Japan last week) on standardizing ethanol definitions and pledging an alliance on technological developments related to ethanol production. Combined, the U.S. and Brazil produce 70% of the world’s ethanol, with the U.S. producing about 18 billion liters per year and Brazil 17 billion. Brazil gets its ethanol from sugar cane and is able to do it cheaper than the U.S. To protect corn farmers, Brazilian ethanol has a 54 cent/gallon U.S. tariff at least through 2009. If the United States is to decrease gasoline consumption by 20% in ten years, a goal put forth by Bush earlier this year, that would require 132 billion liters of ethanol if there are not simultaneous savings through efficiency or using Hydrogen, for example. Even with Brazil’s current rate of expanding ethanol production of a new plant every month for the next six years, that only increases their number of plants by about 25%.

My favorite story on the signing of the cooperation agreement between Brazil and the U.S. is this one from ABC News Online, where, quoting Bush, they couldn’t resist the temptation to point out his misuse of English with the editorial “sic”:

“We all feel incumbent (sic) to be good stewards of the environment – and it just so happens that ethanol and biodiesel will help improve the quality of the environment in our respective companies and so I’m very much in favour of promoting the technologies that will allow ethanol an biodiesel to remain competitive,” he said.

I also liked Bush’s incisive grasp of the fundamentals of the problem exemplified in this statement: “As we diversify away from the use of gasolene by using ethanol we’re really diversifying away from oil.” Really! Gasoline comes from oil?

The spelling of gasoline above is the Australian spelling since this was quoted on the Australian ABC News Online web site.

What to do with the Space Station

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It was more than 23 years ago that U.S. President Ronald Reagan directed NASA to build a space station within a decade. It will take another three or four years before NASA pronounces the space station complete. Today John Glenn lamented that we will be losing a major investment in the space station.

I have mixed feelings about the space station. In 1992, when its future was in doubt (and no hardware had been launched, 8 years after the initial directive to NASA), I wrote Congress against the space station arguing that a return to the Moon would be a more sensible effort for the manned space program. The Moon has some major advantages over the space station as a permanent manned outpost, the most obvious one being that it is permanent itself. Low-Earth-orbit, which is only marginally easier to access than the Moon, has the disadvantage of the Earth’s upper atmosphere which causes orbits to decay. Furthermore, the infrastructure of an orbiting space station is not exactly rock solid, while the Moon is exactly rock solid.

At any rate, the congressional debate on space station funding in Congress in 1992 was cast in terms of support for the space program as a whole, rather than the space station versus some other ambitious manned space program. Such initiatives obviously require presidential backing. Although Bush the 41st had proposed human exploration of Mars, it did not have the specificity or urgency of Bush the 43rd’s exploration initiative of January 2004. So the space station got the go-ahead, and now there actually is something up there. Along the way, however, plans for a permanent crew of six were dumped when no one felt like paying for a new lifeboat vehicle that would guarantee a safe return to Earth for six residents of the station. The lifeboat for the space station is therefore a Soyuz capsule with a capacity of three. One problem with this is that it takes almost all the manpower of three astronauts just to take care of space station housekeeping and maintenance, leaving virtually no astronaut time available for scientific research, ostensibly the reason for building the thing in the first place.

A second problem is that once the station started to take form and Bush 43 stated that we would instead go to the Moon, all money for research on the space station was redirected to the new exploration initiative. Here is where my mixed feelings enter the picture. Once it was clear that we were going to build a space station I decided I might as well take advantage of it. I received significant funding for two microgravity research projects, one on the origin of planets and one on the behavior of dust in the solar system, which seemed to be heading toward experiments on the space station. However, the lack of funding, access to the station (virtually every pound of payload going to the space station is allocated to hardware to build the thing), and crew time resulted in cancellation of those projects and indeed the entire microgravity research program.

So, in the end, as Senator Glenn points out, we will have invested some tens of billions of dollars in a giant orbiting infrastructure and then direct our attention to a new giant piece of infrastructure, namely the Orion/Ares system for going back to the Moon. What to do with the Space Station? It basically looks like ESA and the other international partners are going to inherit it, so the scientific utilization of the facility, as well as the continued maintenance, may well become primarily a European and Russian operation. Europe has recently expressed renewed interest in developing the capability to launch astronauts, and the space station may be an attractive orbiting asset for them. I have European colleagues still working on experiments that they hope to fly to the station in the not-too-distant future. Here’s hoping they get the chance.