Natural (Music) Selection (iPodolution)

I really like my iPod Nano (I know, everybody does). One thing I like about it is the rating system, which I'm using to figure out what music I really like. I started with around 980 songs, chosen fairly quickly from the 8000 or so on my home PC. So this was my "optimization starting point," hardly random to begin with, but subject to further "selection pressure" from the 5-star rating system. I rate the songs and remove the "weak" ones each week to make room for new music.

Starting from the bottom, I use one star to mean "delete" (next time I'm in iTunes). Two stars is a song that's OK and I might like to hear occasionally, though I might delete it if I need the space. Three is a good song that I'm happy to hear occasionally. Four stars is a really good song that I'm ready to hear any time, and five is basically the same, but also "undeniable" (truly awesome, classic, or both - or one of my own songs, some of which are fives to me at least!). I usually apply these ratings while listening, basically the only "input" allowed while listening to a song on the iPod (I can edit general information or delete songs only when plugged into a PC with iTunes).

With this system, I've so far rated 411 of the 977 songs currently on the iPod, with 131 of those getting five stars (copy/paste into Excel helps with this vital analysis). Some of my five star artists are Aimee Mann, Badfinger, Bare Naked Ladies, the Beatles, Billy Joel, and Bright Eyes. Scrolling to the end of the fives, I see Simon & Garfunkel, Sir Neville Marriner (for a Mozart piece), Stevie Wonder, Sting, Trisha Yearwood, U2, and Van Morrison.

Just thought you'd want to know. OK, you didn't, but I did.

Wide Open Spaces (on Mars)

This picture is so cool. It was the Astronomy Picture of the Day for October 17, 2006 which I just happened to see on the way to something else. It was taken by the the Mars rover Opportunity, posted with the title "Clouds and Sand on the Horizon of Mars." Color is exaggerated in this image.

MiGMan in the Danger Zone

My friend Peter "MiGMan" Inglis is a multitalented guy. In addition to being a professional classical guitarist (his Whole Guitarist web site is great) and author (Guitar Playing and How It Works), he's a flight simulation expert. For years he's been channeling his knowledge and enthusiasm for this subject into an amazing web site, MiGMan's Flight Simulation Museum. If you like airplanes, you will really enjoy exploring this site.

Recently MiGMan was invited to share his flight sim expertise with a much wider audience on the ABC Australia television show Good Game, where he talked about the joys of flight simming and gave a brief "master class" on the key points of takeoffs, aerial combat, and landing. Visit the museum to learn more and to view a nice streaming video (WMV) of his flight sim segment on Good Game. Excellent stuff!

Saturday Night (Space) Fever

I had the pleasure of watching (via NASA TV) the dramatic Saturday night launch of Discovery with a group of other astronomy- and space-minded people, members of the Aldrich Astronomical Society, of which I am a new member. Before the launch, I met and talked with some other members of the club, showed off some simulated shuttle activities in Orbiter, and had a look at the Orion nebula through one of the club's telescopes. Aldrich has been supporting amateur astronomers and educational outreach in Central Massachusetts since 1932.

Discovery of course made it to orbit without a hitch, and I just watched the last few minutes of its docking with the International Space Station on NASA TV. Very smooth all the way.

I WANNA GO!!!

I've just had a look at two of Virgin Galactic's promotional videos for their planned commercial space flights. It may be "only" suborbital, but wow, it is going to be incredibly cool. The first video is accessed from the ""view the movie" link on the main VG web page. It is mostly Richard Branson talking about the program, with clips of SpaceShipOne's X-Prize-winning flights and interviews with the test pilots (and a lot of emphasis on safety). There's some other really great content on the VG web site - after all, they are trying to sell you on a $200,000 product! You can download a 38 page PDF brochure for offline viewing and printing.

The other video is a computer animated movie that shows the entire SpaceShipTwo flight sequence. This is really the coolest part of all - it's very well done and makes it seem incredibly real and exciting. Test flights are supposed to start in late 2007 with commercial flights starting about a year later if all goes well.

I really want to go.

Mars is Moist, Maybe

This is a story that's showing up pretty big even in the mainstream media - signs of possible recent water flows on Mars. When talking about Mars, "recent" usually means "the last 300 or 400 million years" - but in this case, the changes are seen over the last seven years! Before NASA lost contact with Mars Global Surveyor (MGS), it was used to revisit hundreds of previously imaged high-slope gully areas in 2004 and 2005. Researchers then looked for changes between the old and new images and found some that are strongly suggestive of brief flows of liquid water (possibly from an underground geothermal source like a geyser). Coloration and other features suggest that these are liquid-based flows rather than shifting dust or debris. Pretty amazing stuff. The findings will appear in Friday's issue of the journal Science.

Does this increase the chances of finding life of some sort on Mars? That's what everybody thinks, hopes, wonders, or imagines. I suppose it makes it more plausible if not more likely. It would sure make Mars a more hospitable place for future human settlers. It's too bad that MGS went off line just before this big announcement, but the good news is that MRO is now in orbit and has just started its science phase, with even higher resolution instruments than the ones MGS used to make these observations.

USS Intrepid in NYC

I've been busy with work and preparing for an astronomy/space school event this Friday, so not much blogging time. There's lots of space news you can read about elsewhere of course - more details on NASA's Moon plans, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's imaging of the two Vikings and the Spirit rover, and the impending launch of STS-116. Cool stuff. No time.

But here's a quick flight related story - the USS Intrepid briefly takes to the water (towed to a New Jersey drydock for refurbishing). Intrepid is normally docked at Pier 86 in New York City, where it houses an excellent air and space museum. I love aircraft carriers, airplanes, and aviation history, and I visited the Intrepid museum several years ago. Then last April (2005) I had the good fortune to go along on a weekend outing with the Worcester Pilots Association, flying the Hudson River VFR Corridor at an altitude of 900 feet above the river. We flew down on the New Jersey side (passing the Statue of Liberty), turned around over the bay, then flew up the Manhattan side, passing close to the Intrepid. I interrupted looking for traffic and talking on the radio to take a few pictures, including the one shown here. I posted a couple of others on Flickr.

Real "Music of the Spheres"

I was looking through my space and astronomy books tonight, picking out some books to display at a middle school "star party" event I'm helping out with next week. I came across a book I hadn't looked at in a long time, Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record, originally published in 1978. This book was written by Carl Sagan and several other people who were involved in the project to develop a "record of Earth" that could be attached to the two Voyager spacecraft that were launched in 1977 to visit Jupiter and Saturn (and ultimately Uranus and Neptune as well, in the case of Voyager 2).

The "golden record" that was attached to both spacecraft contained a variety of information encoded on a gold-plated audio-video disc, with visual instructions for playing back the disc in the unlikely event that the spacecraft is recovered by some distant civilization. Distant civilization? Was this even possible? Yes, in theory, because the Voyagers were planned to be the first human-made objects that would leave the solar system and enter interstellar space, with Voyager 1 now having just left the "heliosphere" in 2004. It will take thousands of years or more for either spacecraft to reach any star system, but if one were recovered by someone in the far future, the mission designers wanted to include some sort of message about who its makers were and where this odd artifact came from.

Of course the Voyager record is really more of a message to (and from) the people of Earth, so a lot of thought went into what should be included to represent as much of humanity's heritage as possible - samples of many languages, photos and diagrams, sounds and music. The book Murmurs of Earth is a detailed telling of what was included and how it was all decided and compiled. It's still a very cool book, and it includes all the images that were on the record.

Some later editions of the book also included a CD-ROM with the actual contents of the "golden disc," but my 1978 first edition hardcover did not have this. All versions of the book are now out of print, but many used copies are available through Amazon and other sources. Unfortunately none of them seems to include the CD-ROM, but as you might expect, much of the information that was on that disc is now on the Web. JPL has a web site devoted to the Voyagers, and a section of this site is devoted to the Golden Record itself. There you can find links to many of the images on the record, and most of the sound samples (though none of the music, probably due to performance copyright issues).

One of the sound samples is called "Music of the Spheres" (.wav file) and is a sound rendition of Johannes Kepler's Harmonica Mundi. Here's what the book says about this (page 154):

Kepler's concept was realized on a computer at Bell Telephone Laboratories by composer Laurie Spiegel in collaboration with Yale professors John Rogers and Willie Ruff. Each frequency represents a planet; the highest pitch represents the motion of Mercury around the Sun as seen from Earth; the lowest frequency represents Jupiter's orbital motion. Inner planets circle the Sun more swiftly than the outer planets. The particular segment that appears on the record corresponds to very roughly a century of planetary motion. Kepler was enamored of a literal "music of the spheres," and I think he would have loved their haunting representation here.

How appropriate for the sphere-trotting Voyagers and for this particular blog!

P.S. Although Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 were launched earlier and are also departing the solar system, Voyager 1 "caught up and passed" these spacecraft in terms of distance from the Sun and reached a distance of 100 AU (astronomical units, i.e., 100 times Earth's average orbital distance from the Sun) in August 2006, and is now in a region called the heliosheath, a zone where the sun's influence is very weak, though this is still not considered "interstellar space" (that will take about 10 more years).

Light Action!

This seems to be the week for educational posts, and as they say on Monty Python, "now for something completely different" - a book about optics. I was just reminded of this by a caller who wanted to know about educational resources related to optics (triggered by my own Optics for Kids web site). I mentioned the book Light Action! (subtitled "Amazing Experiments with Optics," by Vicki Cobb and Josh Cobb, with illustrations by Theo Cobb). This book features a series of simple but enlightening experiments with light, using household materials such as flashlights, water, ice cubes, sunglasses, and TV remote controls. The experiments are easy to do and are followed by clear "here's what's happening" explanations of the optics involved.

This delightful 1993 science book for grades 6 and up went out of print some years ago, but I just checked Amazon and found that it's back in print, in a 2005 paperback edition from SPIE Press (SPIE is the optical engineering professional society).

Sally Ride Science

I just visited the web site for Sally Ride Science, an excellent resource for science education. Sally Ride is a Ph.D. physicist and of course also a former NASA astronaut who was the first American woman in space. Since leaving NASA, she has been a strong advocate for improvements in science education, and has written several children's books on space exploration in addition to starting her company (Sally Ride Science), which develops programs, publishes books, and sponsors science festivals and science camps for girls.

There is of course a need to encourage all young people to have an interest in science and math, but it is especially important for girls, who often succumb to stereotypes and shy away from technical subjects and careers once they reach adolescence. Sally Ride Science has an excellent PDF booklet for parents on encouraging your daughter's interests in math, science, and technology. This free 22 page booklet is a quick read with a lot of good ideas.

Amelia the Pigeon and Remote Sensing

The amount and quality of educational resources from many suppliers on the web is astounding. One example I stumbled on recently is NASA's The Adventures of Amelia the Pigeon. This is a Flash-based interactive web adventure for Earth sciences. It introduces the basic ideas of remote sensing to children in grades K-4. Rather than starting out with satellites in space, it uses the device of a young girl who explores her city with a small aerial camera carried by a homing pigeon. With the availability of Earth imaging products such as Google Earth and NASA's own WorldWind, there are plenty of opportunities available to explore the Earth from high above without ever leaving your computer. Amelia is a great way to introduce kids to how things look from above, and to how we interpret what we see in aerial and space based images. This is part of program called IMAGERS (Interactive Multimedia Education for Grade School Education Using Remote Sensing).

Orbiter Web: ar81 and Creative Orbitology

There are a number of creative and generous artists, software developers, teachers, and others who have contributed add-ons, scenarios, tutorials, and other things to the world-wide Orbiter community. One of the most creative and prolific is José Pablo Luna Sánchez, known as "ar81" on the Orbiter forums (3089 posts?!) and at Orbit Hangar. Pablo is a teacher who believes that young kids are smarter than you think, and he has taught many of his students to fly the Delta Glider in Orbiter (he even wrote a tutorial for this, to help others who wish to teach young kids). When he learned how to create and modify objects to improve and create planetary bases in Orbiter, he created some, and also created tutorials on how to do your own base modifications. His tutorials are always carefully organized and well written (he sometimes worries about English since it is not his first language, but his writing is excellent).

Pablo later expanded into modifying and creating add-ons, again contributing useful tutorials on such topics as using Vinka's spacecraft.dll modules. Moving beyond this, he developed something called Space Orbinomics, a space commerce game that is somehow linked to Orbiter (it looks cool but I've never tried it myself). Recently he created Mesh Wizard, a utility to help other add-on developers to visualize and work more easily with 3D "mesh" files. He has developed other utilities such as the Shuttle Fleet Launch Scenario Generator, and probably others as well. Most recently he posted an excellent tutorial (picture above) on using the free 3D modeling/animation tool Anim8or, the most common tool used by Orbiter add-on builders. He also contributed a cool "proof of concept" graphic novel using Orbiter graphics to illustate a brief adventure story.

You can find all (most?) of his Orbiter-related creations by searching for author ar81 at Orbit Hangar. Thanks to Pablo for all his contributions to the Orbiter community.

P.S. Unrelated except for the fact that I'm writing this while drinking a cappuccino at a Panera bakery/cafe in upstate New York, but Panera has free Wi-Fi at many of its US locations. Fast too.

Astronomynotes.com

I recently discovered an excellent on-line resource for astronomy and planetary sciences, Astronomy Notes by Nick Strobel. Although it covers the same ground as many astronomy education books and web sites (at the level of an introductory college astronomy course), I'm especially impressed with the way Strobel "unfolds" the complex subject matter, and with the clarity of his explanations and many diagrams. The diagrams are not especially artistic, but they cut to the heart of what is being explained better than many I have seen.

It's also nice that he often gives and shows examples - examples of calculations when equations are presented, as well as pictorial examples. In the section "Evidence of Warped Spacetime" (part of the discussion of special and general relativity), I like that there are both simple diagrams of gravitational lensing, and on the same page, Hubble images that show this effect.

Note that astronomynotes.com is the original version of Strobel's notes, parts of which have often been duplicated elsewhere, generally without the author's permission. It's a great resource, so use and give credit to the original. Strobel seems to be continuing to update it (I saw revision dates as recent as September 2006).

CameraMFD - Too Cool!

I've just tried out an extremely clever new add-on for Orbiter, the CameraMFD by Mike Richer ("Vanguard"). The second public beta (v0.11) is available on Orbit Hangar, and it seems to work well, especially considering that the conventional wisdom was that you couldn't do such a thing in Orbiter! He's essentially rendering a second, independently controllable 3D view inside an MFD screen.

There are some limitations, e.g., you have to be in virtual cockpit mode to see the ship you're in (which means the ship must have a VC, and many don't). In 2D mode, Orbiter doesn't render the ship you are in, so all you can see is an external view in the MFD (including other ships such as the ISS if you are trying to dock with it). This is still cool because you can control the direction, field of view, view angle, target tracking, and even "night vision" mode for those really really dark times on the dark side of whatever you are orbiting.

So far I've only tried it in the default shuttle Atlantis and in the Delta Glider. Mike apparently plans to add support for an attachment point on the shuttle's RMS (robot arm), which means you will be able to get camera views from there as they do in the real shuttle. Very nice job. I'm sure there will be some clever applications for this thing from the Orbiter community. One person mentioned using it to track a shuttle launch from a remote aircraft.

4Frontiers Takes Off

I just received an email from 4Frontiers Corporation indicating that their new web site is up, and it's pretty impressive, with improved design and organization, new content, and even a "just for kids" area called Crazy4Mars.com - cool!

There's also an extensive report on the launch meeting for their Generation II Mars Settlement Study that I mentioned in a recent post. I wondered then why there wasn't more information about Gen II on line, but they were just about to launch the new site, and now here it is, along with tonnes of other Mars information: previous studies, educational materials, comics, even some music. Material like this makes the idea of Mars settlements more tangible even though there is still so much to be done. I'm looking forward to hearing more about the settlement study as it develops in the coming months.

Excellent Shuttle Tutorial!

I haven't had much time for Orbiter these days, but I noticed a recent tutorial flight recording uploaded by Russ "Reverend" Purinton on Orbit Hangar that looked interesting, and I tried it out tonight. It uses the standard space shuttle Atlantis (not the Shuttle Fleet add-ons) and covers launch to orbit (necessarily manual with the Atlantis since it lacks a launch autopilot), various orbit adjustments, and rendezvous and dock with the ISS. With included time acceleration segments, it takes about 45 minutes to play back (almost four hours real time), and it includes extensive instructional on-screen text to explain everything that was done.

This tutorial is very well done and makes good use of the new Atlantis virtual cockpit that allows 7 or more MFD's to be displayed at once, so all the MFD's needed for orbit adjustments, plane alignment, orbit synchronization, and docking are all available by panning and zooming the virtual cockpit view. You can still switch to external and other internal views as desired. Very cool.

Note: As pointed out in the playback notes, you can use Control-F5 to bring up the time acceleration panel and uncheck "play at recording speed" if you want to override the recorded time acceleration (100x used mainly on long orbital segments between maneuvers). Also for some reason the playback does not open the payload bay doors (although it was done in the original flight), but you can open them manually as soon as you reach orbit, even in replay mode, using Control-Spacebar to access the payload bay control panel. This is critical in real life shuttle operations (for thermal control), but is only really necessary in the simulation when you reach the ISS, since the docking port is inside the payload bay.

Faith

Now, I don’t want to get off on a rant here, but what is faith? Well, essentially, faith is the voice in the back of your head that tells you to listen to the voice in the back of your head.

-Dennis Miller, I Rant Therefore I Am (page 82)

Dennis Miller is a mixed bag for me - equal parts funny and annoying (or maybe 40/60). But I happened to stumble on that quote, and I love it. And for once, I won't get off on a rant here.

P.S. OK, I lied about getting off on a rant, but I found that if I'm really 50/50 or even 40/60 on finding Miller funny, that I'm way above the norm. In an episode of The Simpsons, Lisa reads a "joke" t-shirt that says "C:\DOS\RUN" and we then hear:

Lisa: C:, C:\Dos, C:\Dos\Run. Ha! Only one person in a million would find that funny.
Frink: Yes, we call that the Dennis Miller Ratio.

National Geographic, Saturn, Life

Every year I wonder if I should renew my subscription to National Geographic magazine. It certainly is a beautiful and often interesting magazine, but with so much else to do and read, and so much information and imagery available on the web...

Then something like the December issue arrives with a special article on Saturn. I've seen many of the Cassini images of Saturn on the web, but there's something about NG's sharp, glossy color printing (and large format fold-out pages) that makes a big difference. And in this case there's also a special map/poster insert - I always love NG's maps and posters, and this one is a map of the solar system and its eight planets (sorry Pluto, but you and Eris still show up as dwarf planets). OK, so I renew once more.

Geographic also has good material on line, and in this case, there's a "zoomified" version of the solar system map (see graphic) that you can find here. The current issue also has an article on the early Earth, illustrated with photos by Frans Lanting of current Earth features such as volcanoes and geysers that resemble aspects of the early Earth. This article links to a special non-NG web site for a project of Lanting's, "LIFE - a Journey Through Time" which traces the nearly 4 billion year history of the life on Earth through a series of wonderful photographs and an amazing Flash-driven time line that uses the photos, captions, and music to bring the history to life.

That Piper Cub Feeling

I really like Piper Cubs and I should get off my butt and go finish learning to land one! The amazing just-about-to-land picture here really illustrates the fun of flying those little tail draggers, but it's not my picture (it was taken by holding the camera out the open door). It was one I saw in the new December issue of AOPA Pilot magazine, first place winner in the Pilots category of AOPA's 2006 General Aviation Photography Contest (it was taken by Arlo Reeves - I would like to provide a link to this and the other winning pictures, but they seem to only be available in the members area).

The other picture is one of mine, taken in late summer 2004 over Spencer, Massachusetts, looking north at Mount Wachusett from probably 2500 feet or so. Yeah, we don't have very big mountains in Massachusetts.

Another (Simulated) Way to Mars

Although we are still tweaking, testing, and documenting the Mars for Less add-on for Orbiter, Andy McSorley is also making great progress on an Orbiter add-on version of another Mars mission model. His new project is based on a variation of NASA's "DRM3," a "hybrid" design reference mission that originated in 1998 and is described in detail here (5 MB PDF).

DRM3 assumes the development of a LANTR engine (LOX augmented nuclear thermal rocket) to provide a high specific impulse (Isp ~850-1000 s) propulsion solution for the trans-Mars injection stage of the MTV (Mars Transfer Vehicle, shown above). Andy's model also includes an inflatable "TransHab" module to expand the habitable crew volume, and a number of other cool components and features. You can see some of the detailed work he is doing (including cutaway and translucent views of the TransHab) on Andy's Flickr site.

In what sense is DRM3 a "hybrid" mission? By this I mean that it combines attributes of previous NASA DRM's with some ideas made popular by Dr. Robert Zubrin in his Mars Direct approach to human Mars missions, in particular the idea of sending one of the spacecraft used in the mission to Mars in advance of the crew (typically called the ERV or Earth Return Vehicle, though it would not return to Earth in the DRM3 case). Once on the surface, robotic systems are used to manufacture propellant (methane and LOX) for later use (in situ resource utilization, ISRU, see this site for an excellent discussion of ISRU and many other aspects of human missions to the Moon and Mars). This reduces the total mass that must be carried to Mars.

Mars Settlement Study

One of my favorite blogs is Anthonares, a beautifully written blog that covers a diverse range of subjects, often but not always with a scientific slant. Anthony Kendall is a Ph.D. student in hydrogeology at the University of Michigan, and one of his not-so-secret passions is the planet Mars. He spent a month in the summer at 2005 at the Mars Society's FMARS Mars analog research facility on Devon Island in far northern Canada, and he later reported on his simulated Mars mission experiences in a long, detailed blog entry. Very cool indeed.

Recently Anthony has been busy with other things and not blogging as much as he did early in the year (I know the feeling). But a few days ago he posted an entry on an exciting new project he has joined, working with 4Frontiers Corporation on an eight month "Generation II" Mars settlement study. As the Mars hydrogeologist on the 35-person study team, Anthony will be working on water issues using hypothetical Martian aquifier software models and ground-penetrating radar data from ESA and NASA spacecraft. Grant Bonin, one of my co-authors on the paper (300K PDF) I presented at the Mars Society Conference this past summer, is also on the Generation II study, working on mission planning and analysis. Great stuff, guys! I look forward to hearing more about this exciting project that aims to pin down many of the details and realities of future human settlements on Mars.

Tree of Life Project

I'm continuing to slowly browse my way through Richard Dawkins' book The Ancestor's Tale, which as I mentioned in an earlier post is a journey backwards in time through the many generations of humanity's evolutionary ancestors, all the way back to the dawn of life. In one of the tales, a footnote referred to the Tree of Life web project, so I took a look. This is an amazing use of the web - a team of biologists and other contributors are building a huge on-line database of all of life on Earth, based on an evolutionary tree structure. The level of completion varies a great deal (there are some 4000 web pages so far, but there are a lot of life forms to document), but there is already a lot of information there, and various tools and suggestions for exploring and learning from it. This page explains the structure of the Tree of Life (the basic navigation graphic is shown above).

Blogs on a Plane

Here's a first for me: blogging from the air. I'm on a Lufthansa 747 somewhere over the North Atlantic, flying from Frankfurt to Boston, the final leg of the long trip home from New Delhi (which started at 3 am India time Sunday morning). Lufthansa has WiFi (a Boeing service) on many of its international flights, but for various reasons (including exhaustion and no room to work in most coach seats), I've never used it before. This time I have a bulkhead seat and my jet lag plan has gone out the window thanks to the 3 am departure and the stop in Frankfurt, so I'm pretty alert now, but will proably pay for this later.

India was interesting, a very useful business trip, and I did get to visit the beautiful Taj Mahal yesterday (which involved many hours of driving, always an experience in India - fortunately the driver had lightning reflexes, a basic requirement to survive on the chaotic India roads). It was only about 8 days but it feels like I've been gone forever. I finished several books on the trip, Baxter's Evolution (wonderful, mind-blowing book), Steven Johnson's Mind Wide Open (on my list for a long time, also great), and a surprise re-read of Carl Sagan's Cosmos (I found a cheap used copy of the paperback in a hotel gift shop). Cosmos is a little dated in terms of astronomical discoveries made since the early eighties (many of the things that Sagan mentions will be possible in decades to come have come to pass, including the Hubble, discovery of many extra-solar planets, and Mars rovers), but it is still an excellent read. Sagan's sanity and clear writing are always refreshing.

Peaceful Sights

India sure has its share of fantastic sights (and sites). Tomorrow I will get to visit the Taj Mahal in Agra, but this morning I was pleasantly surprised to find that the park behind my hotel is an amazing site in itself, the Lodhi Gardens in New Delhi. I took a 30 minute walk through this beautiful park that contains a tomb, a mosque, and several domes dating from the 16th century. Really amazing.

Yesssss!

Moving from Bangalore to New Delhi, I was caught in a 48 hour internet and news blackout (and minor hotel nightmare, now corrected). With both CNN and web access in the new hotel, I learned tonight that the Democrats have won both the House and the Senate, that Democrat Deval Patrick is the new Governor of Massachusetts, and that Donald Rumsfeld has resigned! That last one was an unexpected and welcome bonus.

So I will break my personal rule of "no politics" in this blog to say "yessss!" And also "woo-hoo!" And so on. In recent years I have often been traveling overseas on election day, so I usually vote by absentee ballot and hear the results through the web, CNN, or newspapers. But in November 2000, I was visiting a customer in Heerbrugg, Switzerland when one of the engineers told me the good news that my new president would be Al Gore. When I woke up in Munich the next morning, I learned that the news was a bit more complicated and much worse than that. I like tonight's news a lot better.

HST Goes Deeper

Optics and space, always a good combination for me. There's a good overview of the improvements that will be made on the Hubble Space Telescope by the now planned servicing mission in 2008, including a third-generation Wide Field Camera (WFC3) and the new Cosmic Origins Spectrograph that will greatly improve Hubble's ability to detect ultraviolet light.

The current WFC was used to make the famous Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF) image that went "back in time" further than ever before to reveal galaxies in the earliest stages of formation. I found a great "zoomified" version of HUDF (screen shot pictured). WFC3 will be almost an order of magnitude more sensitive than WFC2 - could Hubble go deeper yet?

Pale Blue Dot

This is a few days old (I've been busy traveling to India and stuff), but it's really cool, so I just have to mention it. Earth is seen from the Cassini spacecraft in approximate true color, framed by Saturn's rings and looking very much like the proverbial Pale Blue Dot (or pale blue orb, as JPL calls it). The inset shows a magnified monochrome view in which the Moon can just be made out as a slight bulge.

Booking My Flight

I'm heading for India today, flying to Bangalore via Frankfurt, around 33 hours of travel, give or take. I'm all packed and ready except for "booking my flight," which is to say making my final choice of reading materials to carry, always a difficult decision. Traveling in coach (alas) doesn't provide much space or an external power supply for extended computer use, so I tend to mostly sleep when I'm supposed to (on destination time to counter jet lag), and to otherwise read. I read fast so I need to carry several books, which means mass-market paperbacks for the most part.

Fortunately I have a lot of books around the house, many of which I bought some time ago and didn't read for some reason at the time, so I often find some unread "surprises." Two for the computer bag on this trip are Steven Baxter's Evolution and Dava Sobel's Longitude. Evolution is a sort of fictionalized counterpoint to Dawkins' The Ancestor's Tale, which is a huge trade paperback and will thus stay home (I'm about 135 million years back in that book, still a ways to go). Evolution is a long science-based narrative journey through pre-human, human, and post-human evolution which gets mixed reviews on Amazon, but those who like it seem to really like it. I think I will too - I've read and enjoyed several of Baxter's other "hard SF" novels. But I've got some backups in the checked luggage just in case.

Go Hubble!

It was expected but still very good news indeed that NASA will send a shuttle in 2008 to perform a fifth servicing mission (called SM4) on the Hubble Space Telescope. I heard from a NASA contact that 65 astronauts had signed a petition to go service Hubble. Seems it's a very popular spacecraft with astronauts as well as with the general public. It's also good that NASA will address the safety concerns by having a second shuttle ready to launch in case the first one runs into trouble, since Hubble provides no safe refuge as does the ISS on space station missions.

Toilet Paper Time Travel

Halloween is a day when toilet paper is sometimes used for things other than its normal function. Here’s another application: time travel. OK, not actual time travel, but a roll of toilet paper can be used as a really cool educational device for demonstrating geological time spans.

The Earth is about 4.6 billion years old. This is a very big number so it’s hard to relate to this in terms of our personal experience with time. Writers and teachers of Earth and space sciences make use of analogies to help students comprehend geological and cosmological time spans. One well-known analogy is the cosmic calendar, in which the age the universe (15 billion years, give or take) is considered to be one year, with the Big Bang occurring at midnight on January 1. On this scale (475 real years per cosmic calendar second), the solar system forms on September 9, life emerges on September 30, and early humans arrive at 11:50 pm on December 31. The whole of recorded human history (around 10,000 years) takes place in the final 21 seconds of the year. Astronomy Notes (great web site!) has a nice explanation of the cosmic calendar here.

But my current (ahem) bathroom reading is The Ancestor’s Tale by Richard Dawkins. This book is a backwards journey through time from present-day humans, through all of our tale-telling evolutionary ancestors, to the dawn of life on Earth, around 3.4 billion years ago. I was having some trouble grappling with the various spans Dawkins talks about, so I looked up “time scale analogies” in Google. That’s where I found the toilet paper analogy for geologic timescales. Jennifer Wenner has a great explanation of this classroom demonstration here (and here is another version). It requires a 1000 sheet roll of toilet paper, some time for preparation, and a delicate touch (for unrolling, labeling, and re-rolling the paper).

I won’t repeat Wenner's explanation here (she even links to an Excel spreadsheet that defines the key milestones and their sheet positions for marking, and allows you to scale to fewer sheets if the budget doesn’t allow for a full 1000 sheet roll). I haven’t tried this myself, but 100-some meters of unrolled toilet paper is striking even in the imagination. Early bacteria start on sheet 739. Insects arrive on sheet 87. The dinosaurs start on sheet 46 and end on sheet 14. What about us Homo sapiens? We never make it off the first sheet – all of human and proto-human evolution fall within two-thirds of the first sheet. Human history takes place within the first 0.02 cm (0.01 inch). Whoa.

Traveler's Guide to Mars

My brain is in a heavy pre-trip mode, since I'm heading back to India on Friday for a week of seminars and customer visits in Bangalore and Delhi. So I'm really focused on work, finishing up some projects and preparing for my presentations. My inoculations and new 10-year India visa are all set, and I've got my anti-malaria prescription and my "just in case" antibiotics. So I'm ready to roll and in my spare time, of course I've been reading a travel book about... Mars!

When I wrote about planetary scientist and artist William K. Hartmann last week, I got out his Traveler's Guide to Mars, which I've had for some time but had previously only browsed. So I started reading it, and it's great! Dozens of pictures from Viking and Mars Global Surveyor; brief and nicely written chapters focused on key features of Mars and their history and meaning; and a series of personal history "side bars" called "My Martian Chronicles" (which date back to Mariner 4 in the early sixties - Hartmann got into the Mars space probe business at the beginning).

This is a wonderful book for really getting to know Mars. Although Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter will be producing higher resolution views of Mars over the next few years, you still need to know the "lay of the land" to put it all in context, and this book is perfect in that role.

Inner Space: iPodization

I finally got myself an Apple iPod - a tiny, silver, 4 gigabyte Nano, holding about 1000 songs. I've got about 9000 songs on my PC at home (mostly ripped from my own CD collection, though I have also bought quite a few songs from iTunes and eMusic), so filling up an iPod is pretty easy. I've loaded about 800 songs in just a couple of days. I could have put my whole music collection on one of the hard-drive (video) iPods, but I can get by with 1000 songs - it forces me to be a little selective and helps to assure that whatever pops up in shuffle play will be something I like.

Although I bought iPods for both of my daughters ages ago (to avoid charges of child abuse), I've resisted getting my own, a fairly rare case of "do I really need this?" With songs on both the computers I use and a small 512 MB (~125 songs) iRiver MP3 player for use in the car and on planes, I haven't been lacking for music. But the iPod's interface is just so slick, and shuffling from 800-1000 songs is nicely unpredictable (Led Zep, Julian Bream, Joni Mitchell, Papas Fritas, The Maggies, some Indian music, Bright Eyes, Mindy Smith, me, John Mayer, a song from the amazing show Wicked, Beatles, etc.).

I've even subscribed to a couple of free weekly podcasts from NPR (public radio), one a science show (Nova scienceNOW) and the other a weekly live classical music show from WGBH. I feel so modern.

When Good Spacecraft Go Bad

The Martian winter is twice as long as Earth's winter, and this seems to be taking its toll on one of our friends there. This is a sad story but it needs to be told. Thanks to the Bad Astronomy Blog for pointing it out.

Flyboys: Great Flying Film!

I saw the recent World War I flying film Flyboys in a second-run theater yesterday, and I really liked it. Based on a true story, it follows a small group of young American men who volunteered in 1916 to fly with the French as members of the Lafayette Escadrille, before the US had entered the war. It has some of the most amazing aerial combat footage I have ever seen, a seamless and nearly dizzying blend of real aerobatic stunt flying and incredible computer generated digital effects. The script, atmosphere, and most of the acting are quite good as well, giving a good feel for what it must have been like to fly and fight in these underpowered and hard to control early airplanes.

Flyboys is the first film focused on WWI aerial combat in over 30 years. It was released on September 22 and doesn't appear to have done too well at the box office, sad to say. I'm glad I got to see it on a big screen but I'm also looking forward to the DVD release (1/1/2007) in hopes that it will include a good making-of special with behind the scenes material on the aerobatic flying. In the meantime there's a very interesting 62 page text-only document of production notes (PDF) available at the MGM web site. The picture above is not from the film - it's one I took in 2001 at Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome in New York - one of the few places where you can still see some of these WWI warbirds, many on the ground and a few in action.

Millennial Mars

Mars awaits us; a living world in kit form. It has the right orbit, the right seasons, the right day; it has a ready-made atmosphere; it even has hidden oceans. Mars needs only a touch of magic catalyst and it will explode into life. That catalyst is us.

-Marshall T. Savage, The Millennial Project, page 246

That's a super-optimistic view of colonization and terraforming of Mars, from a book that is generally super-optimistic about the future of humankind in space (its subitle is "Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps"). Published in 1992 and 1994 (1994 paperback has an introduction by Arthur C. Clarke), I bought a copy a few months ago and have kept it nearby for occasional browsing. Savage's scope and vision are truly amazing, even if many of the things he proposes would not be exactly "easy" and some of them probably not even necessary. Even if many details are not realistic (some may not even be physically possible), this is not science fiction either - he did extensive research into many technologies to flesh out the plans with details that at least aspire to practicality - with some examples succeeding more than others.

His early plan includes building floating colonies in tropical waters and using OTEC's (ocean thermal energy converter) to extract energy from the temperature differential between deep water and surface water. He proposes that such colonies could become self-sufficient and eventually even generate surplus energy and food (from mariculture) for export. The foundation that sponsors the development of these ocean-based colonies would use the profits and the knowledge gained to move on to colonies in space, on the Moon, and on Mars, and eventually beyond the solar system. Would people join such a project as residents of ocean-based colonies, space colonies, etc.? I don't know - there are social and political implications here too of course. Savage certainly has a utopian agenda.

I haven't read the whole book yet, in part because I am both impressed and skeptical. I'm probably most impressed by the fact that he has taken the long view and developed and documented such a boldly optimistic plan, whether it's practical or not. So I guess I need to suspend my disbelief on such things as his "Bifrost" (Earth-based mass driver) space launch system and just read the whole book for its scope and optimism.

He Pictures the Big Picture

I read an essay by the planetary scientist and space artist William K. Hartmann in a book I got recently, Worlds Beyond (The Thrill of Planetary Exploration, 2002, edited by S. Alan Stern, the principal investigator on NASA's New Horizons mission to Pluto). This is a very interesting book because in it, ten planetary scientists talk not only about their work, but about how they got interested in planetary science in the first place, and what it is they are most excited and curious about.

Hartmann is an especially interesting case - a planetary scientist who has done important scientific work (e.g., he was one of the originators of the now generally accepted theory of the Moon's formation as a large chunk of the early Earth's mantle ejected in a collision with a Mars-size object) but who has also painted many detailed, scientifically accurate, and attractive paintings of astronomical and terrestrial subjects. His paintings have appeared in many books and museums. He is also the author of the excellent Traveller's Guide to Mars (which I have) and other popular science works, not to mention a SF novel (Mars Underground) which I have not yet read. Quite an impressive resume and gallery! I've just ordered a used copy of another book co-written and illustrated by him, The Grand Tour (A Traveler's Guide to the Solar System).

The Hartmann painting above shows an asteroid approaching Earth. Hartmann believes that while science depends on details, it's also important to keep the big picture in sight - and his paintings help us do just that.

Earthseed

I’ve just finished two fine science fiction novels by Octavia E. Butler, The Parable of the Sower and The Parable of the Talents. Amazon somehow suggested them, and they did not seem at first to be the type of SF that I usually enjoy (I’m generally more of a “hard SF” fan). While I have read and enjoyed a number of SF novels of the near future post-apocalyptic genre, these books seemed to have a religious, cultural, and feminist orientation that I was not sure I would enjoy. But as it turns out, Butler was an amazing writer, there was more than enough realism, and even the religious aspects of the story touched me in unexpected ways. She brought me into a world that was in many ways uncomfortable to visit (largely because it seemed so plausible), and took me on a journey that was precarious, unexpected, thought-provoking, and ultimately rewarding.

The Destiny of Earthseed
Is to take root among the stars.

-EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING by Lauren Oya Olamina

The quote above is taken from a fictional work of inspirational poetry by the main character of the two Parable books, Lauren Oya Olamina (Butler wrote the quoted passages from this fictional work, many of which are collected here) . She starts out as a 16 year old African-American girl in suburban Los Angeles circa 2027. Global warming and other severe problems have led to a near-total breakdown in American society, and she and her family live in a walled neighborhood surrounded by poverty and chaos. Her neighborhood is finally destroyed and most of her family and neighbors are killed, but Lauren manages to escape and to make her way to northern California. Along the way she helps, is helped by, and starts to gather a group of people with whom she later builds a small, self-sufficient community called Acorn.

There are a number of special things about Lauren, but what is most notable is that since age 12, she has been thinking and writing about certain “truths” that she sees about the universe, about people and their problems and relationships, and about what the ultimate purpose or destiny of humanity might be. Through her writings and eventual teaching, she establishes a community-oriented, humanistic religion called Earthseed, with the central message “God is change” (her God is not a conscious entity, but more of an organizing principle) and the idea that humankind is truly “Earthseed” whose destiny is to take root among the stars. There is a long and torturous route to that destiny, and Lauren and her ideas are very nearly destroyed by "good Christian" citizens of an America that has descended into chaos, and whose leaders have allowed radical fundamental Christians to take over the agenda of what is left of the nation, forming what is essentially a Christian theocracy which bears more than a small resemblance to Taliban Afghanistan.

I won’t go into many more details here (see the excellent reviews of Sower and Talents by Russ Allbery for more discussion of the books). My biggest impression of this pair of books is that the environment within which the story takes place rings all too true. It struck me as the future “facts on the ground” of an America that continued to ignore “inconvenient truths” of global warming, poverty, inequality, and abuse of power until it was too late, and then gave even more power to religious fundamentalists, who blamed the problems of society on the victims, and on superstitious ideas along the lines of “these problems are God’s punishment for the wicked ways of people who are not enough like us – good, God-fearing, white, conservative Christians.”

In contrast, the teachings of Earthseed are inclusive, community-oriented, and flexible, with a text that offers inspiration and a base of shared ideas, some simple rituals that provide structure and are eventually comforting to members of the community, and which even provides a “destiny,” a long term and not immediately obvious goal – the idea of spreading humanity beyond the solar system, to colonize planets of other stars. This is the part that first appealed to me – and the fact that it was treated as a religious goal and not merely as a technological or economic goal was interesting and perhaps almost necessary. Maybe there is a little bit of “heaven” in the ideas of people (like me) who seek to send humans into space, to colonize Mars and other places in the solar system, and eventually to go beyond, to the stars. I don’t believe in any sort of immaterial soul or afterlife or in any sort of god who listens to and cares about people. I believe that as far as intelligence and purpose here on Earth, humanity is all there is (while not ruling out intelligent life elsewhere in the universe).

But humanity and its civilization are enough, and we are well worth preserving, here and elsewhere, with the “elsewhere” part forming a sort of space-based backup plan. I don’t think it’s actually “destiny” but it is in our genes and in our culture, a logical extension of the part of us that says “take care of the children, they are your future.” That is the route to immortality – when we send our ideas and our children into the future, a little bit of each of us will survive too. Like Earthseed.

My Piece of the "Long Tail"

File this one under "shameless self promotion" (but I won't create a topic label for that). I got an email from CD Baby, which is the independent artists' music site through which I sell my CD Jardin du Luxembourg. It was a reminder on how to use direct links to popular digital download sites to promote your music on the web, since many people today prefer to download songs rather than buy CD's (which of course you can still do through CD Baby). That's one of the nice things about selling through CD Baby - they take care of getting your songs to dozens of digital download sites automatically, and they even send you reminders about how to use this to promote your music!

So if you have iTunes, you can get to my page at the Apple iTunes Music Store here, or if you prefer eMusic.com (which specializes in indie music), you can go here. Both sites have 30 second previews, though you can hear much longer previews at my page on CD Baby itself.

I guess this is my little contribution to the "long tail" that the internet makes possible - all the zillions of obscure, low-demand, and specialized items that no physical store could possibly afford to stock but that you can now locate and buy on the web. I find it kind of ironic that my best seller in digital downloads is a song I wrote a few years ago for my younger daughter, called simply enough, "Daddy's Little Girl." Although the lyrics are personal and specific, people must like the title, and then presumably like the song when they preview it (at least enough to spend 99 cents). I've made a few hundred dollars from downloads of that song - so if you bought it, thanks!

Space History: The Real Sims

I'm just finishing an excellent book, Before Lift-Off: The Making of a Space Shuttle Crew by Henry S.F. Cooper, Jr. I file it under "space history" because it documents the crew training and the actual flight of the shuttle Challenger on STS 41-G which took place October 5-14, 1984, twenty-two years ago this week! Under the command of space veteran Robert Crippen, the crew of seven was the largest crew to fly to space up to that point, and the first to include two women, Sally Ride and Kathy Sullivan. They deployed a satellite, took radar images of the Earth's surface, and performed an EVA to test the feasibility of in-orbit refueling of satellites (with real hydrazine!). The photo shows a little optical connection - a picture of astronaut Dave Leestma's inverted image in a perfectly spherical zero-G water droplet, with Leestma himself out of focus in the background.

To write this book, Cooper was given regular but limited access to the crew through the many months of training for the flight, and more extensive access to the trainers who worked with the crew in hundreds of "sims" or simulations of various kinds. The shuttle was (and is) a complex vehicle, with hundreds of interacting systems and procedures to learn and practice. The many different types of simulators allowed the crew to learn how to operate each system and how to work together as a tightly integrated team. The trainers would generate a steady stream of simulated "malfs," "glitches," and "nits" to teach them how to recognize and recover from the many ways that the complex systems could fail.

The complexity and depth of this whole process is really impressive and requires tremendous dedication of everyone involved. When I "fly" a simulated space shuttle in Orbiter, as cool and realistic as it is in some respects, I know it's just the tiniest tip of the iceberg in terms of what's really involved in shuttle missions.

Blogger Beta

When I saved my last few posts, I noticed that Blogger was running a beta of a new version of their blogging software with some pretty cool upgrades. So I've given it a shot - actually more than that - since you can't go back, I'm committed. But it looks good so far.

Mainly I couldn't resist the lure of topic labels. I've actually toyed with the idea of moving my blog to Wordpress or another service that offers more control and features, especially the ability to assign topic labels that would allow readers (and me!) to more easily find previous posts with related themes. I read posts and articles about the moving process and it didn't sound like much fun. So I procrastinated, and for once, it paid off.

There are new templates (I've kept my dots for now) and various new features on the editing side (like practically instant publishing when you write or edit a post). But the most visible new features are the expanding year and month blog history labels (click the triangles to hide or show the months or posts below), and the topic labels list, which allows you to display all the posts that I've labeled "Mars" or "Orbiter" or "add-on." Cool. So far I have labeled about 60 of my two-hundred-something posts, trying to keep to a relatively small list of keywords. I'll probably finish this up in the next few days.

I like this - it makes my blog at least semi-useful as a reference, though I'm sure I will still use the Google trick of searching for
something-specific site:flyingsinger.blogspot.com
to find something-specific. And you can too.

Cool Video: The Space Elevator

I really like the brief Quicktime video found on this page. The page is part of the small personal web site of Dr. Bradley Edwards, the scientist who has done more than perhaps anyone to make the idea of a space elevator seem like a serious prospect for the near future. This short video clip gives you a quick idea of the mind-boggling possibilities. I think it's especially cool that there's a big optical connection here - space elevators will run on power beamed up to them with high-power lasers using adaptive optics. Here is another brief video (2:08 WMV) that explains the space elevator concept in simple terms.

I read Edwards’ book The Space Elevator about a year ago (discussed here, here, and here), just after I started this blog, and I was impressed with the scope and depth of analysis he had put into that book, which was the result of a second-stage study sponsored by NASA’s Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC). There are certainly challenges, but it seems they are mainly engineering challenges, including the big one of producing carbon nanotube ribbons of sufficient real strength (the theoretical strength of CNT’s is more than sufficient, but there have been questions raised as to whether the required strength can really be achieved in a ribbon of some 100,000 km in length). I said mainly engineering challenges, not merely engineering challenges.

In about a week, at the X Prize Cup 2006 in Las Cruces, New Mexico, the Space Elevator Games will draw more attention to the prospects of a space elevator as teams compete in two events, the Power Beam Challenge and the Tether Challenge (both part of NASA’s Centennial Challenges program, each with a $200,000 prize, a prize which will grow in value over the next few years).

Triggered in part by these upcoming challenges, there has been a lot of activity on the web, and some new publications. Web sites include the Space Elevator Reference Blog (edited by Dr. Edwards) and the Space Elevator Blog (official blog of the 2006 games), and the website and staff blog of Liftport Corp. I have not yet read any of the new publications, so I can’t really comment (I’m about to order and/or download a couple), but you can find information about them at the blogs and web sites noted above.

From what I have read, I do believe space elevators can be designed and built in the relatively near future. Whether that's 10, 15, 25, or more years, I can't say. Maybe there are some showstoppers that will make it much harder than many now believe. But when it arrives, it will revolutionize our access to space. I hope I'm around to see it, and maybe even ride it.

Amazing!

NASA held a video briefing today with key people from the MRO and MER (Mars Rover) teams to show off some amazing images and to discuss the synergy that is now possible with high-resolution orbital imagery from MRO and "ground truth" from the still active Mars Rovers (story here). The Rover Opportunity recently arrived at the 800 meter crater "Victoria" after a long journey. Three days ago, the MRO team used the HiRISE camera in its first "off-nadir" test - meaning they pointed the camera to one side of MRO's orbital path rather than looking directly below. The target was "Victoria" crater, and the detailed image showed Opportunity sitting on the edge of the huge crater! More pictures here.

The MER team also showed new images, including sections of a color panorama of Victoria crater that was NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day on October 2.

In unrelated astronomy news, NASA also announced new findings from the Hubble Space Telescope, the discovery of sixteen new extrasolar planets detected in the vicinity of our galaxy's center. Centauri Dreams has a nice discussion of these findings.

Big Fat Moon

That big, fat moon is gonna shine like a spoon,
But we're gonna let it,
You won't regret it.

-Bob Dylan, "I'll Be Your Baby Tonight"

This is not one of Dylan's most profound or original lyrics, but tonight it's really true. Today the Moon is at perigee (closest point in its orbit), and tonight's full Moon will also be the Harvest Moon (the full Moon closest to the autumnal equinox). Because it is also so close to perigee, the full Moon's apparent size will be 12% larger than that of the apogee (maximum distance) full Moon of February 2006 (here's a visual comparison). This article explains all this (and more) in some detail. This NASA article from 2005 talks about the Harvest Moon with a Martian spin, and this more recent one discusses some interesting things about the light from the Moon.

Missing the Air

It's a beautiful autumn morning in New England. The sunny blue skies and the leaves just starting to change colors are leading me to think about how much I miss flying. Not the commercial passenger kind (I still get plenty of that), but the low-and-slow kind in a little airplane like a Piper Cub. There's no better way to see the magnificent fall foliage, but unfortunately I'm not flying these days. I started to get back into it in the summer and fall of 2004 with some tail-wheel endorsement lessons in a Piper Cub, but weather and scheduling got in the way and I didn't complete the tail wheel thing, which was really a bit of nostalgia since a Cub was the first airplane I ever flew in, back when I was a kid in Civil Air Patrol. Summer and fall of 2005 were obsessed with Orbiter (I had discovered it in March and by summer was working on writing Go Play In Space).

So now it's another fall and I'm thinking about flying again (summer would have been a more practical time I suppose). Maybe I'll sign up for a few refresher lessons in a Cessna 172 and get current again. At least go up a few times and have a look at the leaves before they all fall as they so quickly do.

MRO Mars: I'm Zoomified!

The flood of imagery and data from NASA's Mars Reconaissance Orbiter (MRO) has started, and there are some great pictures from the HiRISE camera available on-line. The picture shown here (from the HiRISE blog) compares HiRISE imagery of a crater with imagery of the same area taken by Mars Global Surveyer, until now the highest available resolution imagery of Mars. The difference is beyond striking!

The best way (so far?) to view the HiRISE imagery is with a Flash application called Zoomify that is available on the HiRISE web site, so far with 11 HiRISE Mars images. When you use your mouse to zoom in and pan with this application, you soon get to a point where the image looks pretty detailed. Then you zoom in some more and see features as small as ~1 meter -- detailed views of all sorts of features such as a field of rocks with clear shadows as in this image. Amazing stuff.

Anousheh's Inspiration

I've mentioned Anousheh Ansari's "space explorer" blog several times already. Since returning from the ISS, she has continued to write in her informal, open, and honest way, and people around the world have continued to post comments. Yesterday she wrote a post titled "I couldn't sleep" in which she talked about being pleased with the success of her blog in reaching people, but admitted that some negative or critical comments, as relatively few as they have been, have been discouraging for her.

This comment has triggered a "silent army" of blog readers to come out and post encouraging notes and stories of their own inspiration (247 comments so far). It's really amazing to read these comments from people in Iran, Malaysia, Russia, the US, and many other places. There are many worthwhile things being said about working for the future, international cooperation and understanding, the value of hopes and dreams, and more. Here is one message (#227, no indication where the writer is from) that I found especially hopeful - a direct example of the kind of inspiration that many space and education advocates are trying to achieve, and that Anousheh actually is achieving.

Anousheh,
You are my hero!
Please don't take these negative comments to heart because what you have done is absolutely amazing.
You may not believe it but you have completely changed my life, I have always wanted to go into space and am at college on a course that i hoped would help me get there but a few months ago started to have second thoughts about the whole thing, especially because i am the only girl and surrounded by men who think that i am incapable of doing well for myself because i am a girl but after reading your blog and how you want "To inspire youth, and especially girls, around the world to pursue their dreams’", you have helped me become determind me to carry on but this time with more enthusiasm and drive to succeed.
You are amazing, thank you so much.
K x

Back to Mars

Andy and Mark are getting the Mars for Less add-on ready for release, and I'm back to doing some testing. Our new Mars entry orbit takes us down the length of Valles Dao and really looks cool. Andy has also posted our technical paper (300 kb PDF, from the Mars Society Conference in August) on his Mars for Less web page.