Carnival of Space #12: Galactic Extra!

Welcome to the dozenth edition of the Carnival of Space. As usual the space and astronomy blogging community is all over the cosmos, but some of us have been thinking even Bigger Thoughts than usual, looking at and thinking about galaxies. And as Carl Sagan didn’t exactly say, there are billions and billions of them out there – galaxies, not blog posts, though there are plenty of those this week too.

Much of the galactic excitement is coming from the Galaxy Zoo, a marvelous use of the distributed intelligence of people on the web. This newly launched online science project is asking internet users to help classify a million galaxies imaged in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). This might seem at first glance an esoteric activity, but the Galaxy Zoo project has quickly become a worldwide phenomena. As one of its organizers at Oxford, Chris Lintott has written several posts about the project, including a nice summary of a week inside the Galactic Zoo (Chris also suggested the image of the mysterious "green galaxy" above, though it's actually a supernova remnant). That’s just the first week, mind you, and I read elsewhere that some 30,000 visitors classified some 650,000 galaxies in that whirlwind first week. Wow!

But is the Galaxy Zoo too much of a good thing? Stuart Atkinson, who signed up on the Zoo's opening day, takes a look at why the site is so addictive, and describes what it's like to become trapped in the Galaxy Zoo. And as he has often done when inspired by things astronomical, he has also added a new poem to The 'Verse.

Astropixie resorts to astronomical jargon to describe the Galaxy Zoo as “so super cool” and recalls her earlier experience with SDSS, when she had undergraduate summer jobs working with thousands of spectra collected by the survey. Other bloggers commenting on the Galaxy Zoo include the Bad Astronomy Blog and many, many more (10,221 hits on a Google Blog search for “galaxy zoo”).

While you could sign up for the Zoo and look at hundreds of galaxies on your coffee break, you could easily dwell for quite some time on a single one of those distant jewels. Annas Rahman has done this with M51, and he concludes that it’s the subject of the Best Space Image Out There. Of course the Galaxy Zoo contains maybe 999,999 other contenders.

My own galactic connection this week is also a historic connection – a pilgrimage (of sorts) to the 100 inch telescope at Mount Wilson, California, where Edwin Hubble figured out that galaxies are galaxies, that the Universe is really, really big, and that it’s expanding. Telescopes in 1917 were built to last, and the Hooker Telescope looks like it's part of a battleship.

Closer to Home

Not all the wonders in the universe are galaxies, of course. Astroprof has been writing a cool series of posts about the Seven Wonders of Space Exploration, which he argues are at least as wondrous as the original or new ground-based “seven wonders.” Robot Guy points us to some historic video from one of those wonderful space wonders.

Brian Wang of Advanced Nanotechnology is thinking about future wonders of space exploration, namely nuclear rockets. He says they can have 2 to 200 times the performance of chemical rockets, that the science is solid and straightforward, and that we just have to have the courage to become a truly interplanetary civilization. I say go for it! Centauri Dreams goes farther out on the wonder scale, writing that nanotechnology may one day allow us to build huge structures in space - vast colony worlds of the sort envisioned by Gerard O'Neill may even become practical. Will one or more of these eventually become "worldships," leaving the Solar System behind to travel to the stars? And if there are worldships, could there perhaps be pirates? Surfin' English looks into the possibilities in the latest entry in his obstacles to space exploration series.

The solar system was not neglected this week. A Babe in the Universe writes of the Icy River Styx, reporting that astronomers using the Gemini North Telescope atop Mauna Kea have announced evidence of liquid water on Pluto's moon Charon! Liquid water on a world so distant from the Sun indicates an internal source of heat. It could also make Charon and many other Kuiper Belt objects potential homes for extraterrestrial life. And closer to home, Astroblog writes about the phases of Venus and presents a rather nifty animation of the phases, made with simple amateur equipment. Space Watch Michigan writes about Venus and Jupiter and how the brightness of astronomical objects can affect your eyes’ perception of their size. And if you can't get to space, why not bring space here, with a space simulator? Spacefiles has some cool pictures (these are gigantic space environment simulators, not to be confused with space flight simulators like Orbiter). Even closer to home (over at MIT), Brian Dunbar at Space For Commerce turns to spacesuits for a little comic relief in pass on the dessert, but thanks (L. Riofrio provides a bit of background here).

But wait, there's more! Mars is my favorite planet (after Earth, usually), and I'm happy to say that two Mars related posts arrived just as I was about to click "publish post." The Planetary Society Weblog raises the rap-worthy question, will Phoenix' thrust raise too much dust? Emily Lakdawalla notes that when Phoenix lands near Mars' north pole with Viking-style retrorockets, it will be blasting the ground with nitrogen-rich hydrazine. The Phoenix team is still trying to figure out what that will do to their landing site, which they plan to sample so carefully. And after that near-term Mars environment question, Colony Worlds asks the more provocative long-term question, Mars: Future Slum World, Or An Industrial Paradise? There is great promise but also financial peril lurking in those red sands (and whatever else might be there).

Finally, how about a little romance? Kevin of From Inner Mind to Outer Space (cool blog name) writes about some great feedback he received from a friend who is “in love with our night sky,” in part as a result of his outreach efforts. That’s the kind of thing we space and astronomy enthusiasts really like to hear.

Whew! That certainly was a galactic-scale carnival, but I hope you enjoyed the tour. Next week the carnival will be hosted by LiftPort Blog. Here's how to participate.

Great Canary Telescopes, Batman!

Just when I finally get a look at the world's largest telescope of 1948, and make plans to visit its successor (the 200 inch Palomar telescope near San Diego) in late August, I read about the first light celebration for the new GTC (Gran Telescopio Canarias) in the Canary Islands. Compared to the Mount Wilson scope's puny 100 inch (2.54 meter) primary mirror, the GTC has a 10.4 meter primary (that's 409.4 inches). Of course it's not a single piece of glass like the big ones of old. It will be made up of 36 independent hexagonal mirrors. I say will be because at first light, only 12 of the mirrors were installed. The optics are pretty cool - this diagram is from GTC web site.

This thing will be gathering a lot of light, and with frequently excellent seeing conditions at this site, it should produce some amazing images and scientific results over the next few years. It's just incredible the numbers and sizes of optical telescopes that are popping up around the globe (here's a list - Keck in Hawaii is still the biggest fully operational one at 10.0 meters). I think there really is something to this whole optics thing. Makes me proud to call myself an optical engineer, though none of my designs has ever made it out of the simulation software and into glass and metal.

Somebody STOP Me!

I had rationalized myself out of jumping to buy the new Apple iPhone for a number of practical reasons (need to change cell phone carrier, costs, fear of any 1.0 software product, etc.). This was working fine until last night when I happened upon an Apple Store, spent 15 minutes playing with the iPhone, and had a new attack of technolust. I tried all the cool interface features I had read about and seen in demo videos, and even called and left myself a message on my voice mail. The Safari browser is awesome. It's really as cool as they say, and the size is quite reasonable. I want one again!

Not every buyer is thrilled, as this post suggests, though if you read the replies, you find that a lot of buyers are indeed thrilled and find the problems to be minor. I think I can wait until the end of the year to see what happens with the various issues. Meanwhile I remain painfully iPod-less. OK, it's not that painful.

Mount Wilson Pilgrimage

High above Pasadena, California, Mount Wilson is more or less the Mount Olympus of astronomy. It's where Edwin Hubble discovered that spiral nebulae are actually distant galaxies that lie outside our own Galaxy, demonstrating that the Universe is much bigger than was commonly estimated. From further observations of variable stars in these galaxies, and the red shifts of their spectra, he determined that the Universe is expanding (first published in a 1929 paper) and thus provided the basis for modern cosmology, leading to the now widely accepted Big Bang theory. Not bad for a night's work (it actually took a few nights).


Hubble based his work on photographic plates taken with the 100 inch Hooker Telescope (named for its financial backer), which was the biggest telescope in the world from 1917 to 1948. Today I got to see this amazing instrument on a tour of the Mount Wilson observatories. It was a beautiful day, and we had spectacular views of Los Angeles and the surrounding mountains.




There are a number of other instruments on the mountain, many of them quite old (the 150 foot solar tower was built in 1910) and most of them still in use. But it's not all historical instruments: the 6-telescope CHARA (not to be confused with Charo) array entered service in 2005. Using interferometer techniques, these six widely separated telescopes give the array the resolving power of a 250 meter aperture (though not the light gathering power, since each telescope has a 1 meter aperture, 2 of their silver domes shown here). In May, CHARA was used to make an image of the surface of the star Altair (distance: 16.7 light years) whose rapid rotation causes it to expand at its equator and shrink at its poles. Here's a diagram including an analogy that shows just how good CHARA's resolution is. Cuchi-Cuchi!

You can take a virtual tour of Mount Wilson here.

Carnival of Space #11

Check out "a cacophony of eclectic posts" at the eleventh Carnival of Space over at Space for Commerce (July 11 post). The range of topics is even more diverse than usual. And it's usually pretty diverse.

Next week I will take another turn hosting the Wide World of Space (Blogs), so write something spacey and send it in. Here's how.

The Last Mimzy

It's a busy week for work and travel, but tomorrow I should have some pretty cool astronomical stuff to blog about. In the meantime...

I don't usually watch movies on airline flights, but this morning I happened to watch one I hadn't even heard of and was pleasantly surprised. The Last Mimzy is a family-friendly SF/fantasy movie about a brother and sister who find a box of mysterious objects on the beach one day. These "toys" can do some pretty wild things, and before long, so can Emma and Noah. And of course there's a special explanation for how and why the toys have shown up. Although the plot has a lot of elements borrowed from E.T. and invokes a bunch of paranormal "stuff" that I usually wouldn't buy, for me it all worked, and I really enjoyed the movie. It's just out on DVD.

(Book) Space Race

This is really a TIME and SPACE race - my usual big dilemma on a business trip, what book(s) to take for in-flight reading. This is only a quick trip to LA in the middle of a very jam-packed business week, not an endless Asia flight with 24+ hours to play with. But still, the book decision weighs on my mind and computer bag. Space AND time are limited, and there's always the risk of serendipity at the airport bookshop (though not as likely with a 6:45 am flight). So here are the candidates. Only one will fit in the PC bag, with probably one backup book in the small suitcase. The candidates are

• The Cobra Event by Richard Preston - a bioterror novel by the author of the scary but excellent non-fiction book The Hot Zone
• The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson - an old SF friend (this would be read #3 for this one)
• The Gold Coast by Kim Stanley Robinson - #2 of the Three California's Trilogy of alternate future SF
• Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban - read it many years ago, a post-apocalypse tale written in an invented future English variant; meaning to re-read for years
• Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson - a 2000 page slippery slope, 900 in this first of three volumes of the Baroque Cycle of hard-to-say-what-kind-of verbose fiction by a favorite author, a big book to carry even in paperback
• Astroturf by M.G. Lord - a memoir by a daughter of the golden age of space, a small hardcover I've been browsing in (serendipity on another Pasadena trip), connected to JPL and quite cool.

Decisions, decisions. I want to go with Quicksilver, but it scares me. At least the sequels are done if I do get hooked.

P.S. I re-read Riddley Walker on the trip - it was just OK this time. Maybe I'm not as post-apocalyptic as I once was. Maybe I'm post-post-apocalyptic (1981 NYT review here for a more positive view). It wuz vere clevver tho. We hav boats in the ayr & masheans uv Warr but Im glad we dint have the Berstin Fyr (the 1 Big 1, or nuclear war).

Phoenix in Orbiter

The Dawn launch has been postponed until September, because the available launch windows in July are limited after this weekend, and they did not want to run the risk of delaying the planned August launch of the Phoenix Mars mission.

Speaking of which, there's a great Orbiter add-on for the Phoenix Mars mission too, courtesy of (you guessed it) Brian Jones (search for phoenix_mission_v2.zip at www.avsim.com). I tried it out the other night, with the dramatic night launch scenario as well as the Mars arrival scenario (I skipped the admittedly vital interplanetary navigation bit for now, though Brian provides helpful notes on using IMFD to navigate to Mars and set up an approach for the planned latitude and longitude).

Starting from the supplied Mars approach scenario (one hour before landing), with basically no user inputs, the spacecraft successfully enters the Mars atmosphere and performs an automated landing, with aeroshields, chutes deployed, landing rockets, the whole nine yards (the whole 8.2296 meters for you metric folks). You can then deploy the solar panels and camera mast and operate the robot arm. Unfortunately you can't drive it around - Phoenix is not a rover. But it's got a long robot arm and it can dig some pretty deep trenches (up to half a meter). There are on-board chemical analysis and atmospheric measurement instruments (and cameras), so hopefully it will dig up something interesting in the arctic regolith.

New HST in Orbiter

There's a great new model of the Hubble Space Telescope available for Orbiter over at Orbit Hangar (listed as v1.3 with several modifications over the last week or so, 6.5 MB zip file). The basic Orbiter installation includes a model of the HST, but it doesn't have a lot of detail and texturing. This model by "marg777" is made up of parts from two earlier modelers who are credited in the Orbit Hangar description. It's quite a nice "mash up."


The telescope doesn't actually work in this model (not that you would expect it to!), but there's a workaround of sorts, the new Telescope MFD (version 0.1) by Artlav which allows you to pick a target like Jupiter and then zoom in on it from where you are. Cool! You sometimes have to use the F1 key twice (toggle to external then back to internal view) to refresh Orbiter's display so it will load the right level image for the FOV you have selected (field of view or zoom level, smaller FOV, higher magnification).

Carnival of Space #10

The tenth Carnival of Space is up, hosted this week by Why Homeschool. Henry Cate has gathered an unusually diverse collection of posts this week, ranging from science to technology to art. Interesting reading!

Dawn in Orbiter

The Dawn mission to Vesta and Ceres can now be flown in Orbiter, thanks to an excellent new free add-on package by Brian Jones (available at avsim.com, registration required). This mission presents some challenges due to the ion engines, which have small thrust but are fired continuously over a long period of time. Most rockets and spacecraft use chemical rockets with relatively large thrust but short burn times. For maneuver calculations, such engines can be considered to produce an impulsive (nearly instantaneous) thrust which quickly changes the spacecraft's velocity and position, allowing the trajectories to be approximated as a series of simple curves (circles, ellipses, hyperbolas, parabolas). Engines are then turned off during the "cruise phase" of the flight. Calculations and guidance to reach other planets are relatively simple in this case (and supported by various Orbiter instruments or MFD's).

Ion engines make it harder. Since the spacecraft is under small but constant acceleration, its path is more of a spiral than a simple conic section. Orbiter doesn't have any good navigation tools for such constant thrust cases (like the Transfer MFD or IMFD which allow you to plan engine burns to get to a certain place at a certain time), but Brian has supplied a few new "autopilot" modes to at least help keep the spacecraft thrusting in a useful direction (e.g., prograde or retrograde). He also has some nice animations as well as solar panels that automatically track the sun.

This is a cool add-on, but for maximum value, you should also download Brian's Delta II Missions v.2 (so you can run the Dawn launch mission, maybe even launch this Saturday at the same time as the real launch) and Nighthawk's Asteroid Pack 1.00 (on Orbithangar) in which you can find Ceres, Vesta, and a few other major asteroids to carefully add to sol.cfg (solar system configuration file) in Orbiter. There are a few other requirements, so read the readme files and forum carefully on this one. More pix at Flickr.

Mars Standard Time

I just received an update from the Mars Society on the progress of the Mars analog simulation they are running at FMARS, their Mars surface simulation site on Devon Island in the Canadian Arctic. Four months is substantially longer than previous Mars analog missions, and they have reached the mid-point. The seven member crew has been staying "in sim" and conducting geological and biological field research, following procedures similar to what would be required on Mars, although of course life support requirements are considerably easier on Earth than on Mars, even in the high Arctic.

They have just started something new: operating on Mars time! A Martian "sol" is 39 minutes longer than an Earth day, and since the lighting doesn't change much through the day at their latitude (75° N) at this time of the year, they can operate on Mars time without being bothered much by changes in day and night lighting. This means they will fall out of sync with Earth time by 39 minutes a day, returning to Earth time in 36 days. Pretty wild, though it's not completely unprecedented for Earthlings to operate on Mars time. MER operations team members at JPL did this for a time in early 2004, just after the landings, in order to stay in sync with the rovers on Mars. They found it pretty exhausting and disorienting, like working nights, but worse, and as the rovers continued to operate well past their 90 sol "warranties," the MER teams went back to normal Earth time, scheduling operations and shift changes as needed to provide needed staff coverage. Of course the FMARS crew won't be surrounded by other people operating on normal time, so maybe it will work better.

You have to do something special for time keeping with a 24 hour 39 minute sol. The update says, "To simulate the longer Martian daily cycle, the crew will move its own clock backward 39 minutes per day, black out the hab windows between their clock's 6 PM and 6 AM to simulate night, and schedule meals, sleep cycles, and outdoor work accordingly." Sounds familiar, and not only from daylight savings time changes. In Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars, there is the idea of the Martian time slip, a 39.5 minute period between midnight and 12:01 that "stops the clock" each night to allow practical use of an Earth-like 24 hour clock despite Mars' slightly longer rotational period. It sounds like this is what they are doing at FMARS, more or less.

There's a lot of information around on Mars analog missions, including Robert Zubrin's 2003 book Mars on Earth. I also really like Anthony Kendall's FMARS journal of his two months on Devon Island in the summer of 2005.

Waiting for Dawn

This weekend I spent a bit of time watching the actual sky, especially the horizon-hugging and seemingly huge full Moon (with Jupiter and Antares nearby), and in the early evenings, looking west, Venus and Saturn appearing very close together (but getting too low to see for long before the sky got completely dark). At our Saturday astronomy club meeting, we set up three telescopes, but fast-moving clouds spoiled the view, except for a very brief glimpse of Jupiter with the four Galilean moons sharply visible.

At the meeting we also watched a NASA video on the upcoming Dawn mission to main belt asteroids Vesta and Ceres (Ceres is currently considered a dwarf planet - at 933 km in diameter, it's about 41% the size of Pluto, 27% the size of our Moon). This excellent 13 minute video is narrated by Leonard Nimoy and does great job of explaining the mission with animations, diagrams, and interview clips. Dawn is scheduled to launch on July 7, and is a very ambitious mission. With huge solar panels to generate the needed electrical power, Dawn will use a low-thrust but long-burning ion engine (shown in a still from the video - there are actually three, though they are used one at a time) to make its way to Vesta (September 2011, after a 2009 gravitational assist from Mars), where it will orbit for 7 months before making a second long journey to Ceres (arriving February 2015).

The mission is called Dawn because its investigations of these two proto-planets are expected to shed new light on conditions in the earliest history of the solar system. The mission will also add to our experience in working with smaller bodies in the solar system, which is a key development in our ability to eventually harvest the resources of the solar system for many purposes (though near-Earth asteroids will probably be used before those in the main belt). As usual there is a very helpful PDF press kit (2 MB, 26 pages) available for the launch.

On Not Missing the Boat (to Space)

Anthony Kendall is one of my favorite bloggers, though he seems to be busy with other things these days and posts only occasionally. He wrote an interesting post a couple of weeks ago suggesting that the role of the boat in the expansion of human civilization throughout the world is a better analogy for private space development than the often used analogy of aviation development in the early 20th century.

The solar system is the new ocean, and while we are still splashing around in the shallows of low Earth orbit (a few Moon walkers and robot surrogates notwithstanding), we will build bigger and better boats to explore and eventually live on the more distant shores. Note that this corny paraphrasing of the analogy is mine, not Anthony's!

The picture is just one that I happen to like from my France trip - but it has a few boats in it.

Galileo Astronomy Stores - Formidable!

On my just completed trip to Munich, Germany and the south coast of France, I had a chance to visit GALILEO, a cool astronomy store in Hyères (Provence), one of a chain of stores in several cities in France, Switzerland, and Belgium. If you live in Europe and are interested in astronomy, it’s well worth a visit to one of these stores. They have a wide range of telescopes and astronomical accessories, including some large and high-end telescopes and domes. Their store web sites have a lot of useful information (in French or German, or English if you choose the Brussels store).

They also have an interesting product for day time astronomy, the SolarScope. With the help of clear and cloud-free skies, I got to try out the larger version of this safe and easy to use device for viewing the Sun. It projected a large and clear image of the Sun (only a single small sunspot happened to be visible at the time). It’s available in Europe and the U.S. through the SolarScope web site (there are several models differing in size and materials). I ordered one of the larger educational versions to use for day-time astronomy demos and to be ready for the next solar eclipse.

The Saturn Show

Just back from two weeks in Europe and there's a lot to catch up on at the office and at home. I have some interesting things to blog about once I can find some time - maybe this weekend. In the meantime, let me point you to a really nice JPL slide show marking Cassini's three years at Saturn. The picture here compares the size of a radar-imaged lake on Titan (most likely liquid ethane and methane) with our own Lake Superior. That's a lot of rocket fuel!

Cassini happens to be making another planned low pass over Titan today. I grabbed today's orbital state vectors from the JPL Horizons system yesterday and used them in Orbiter to simulate the low pass at an outreach event at my local library last night. I started about 138,000 km out and used a view option (target-to) to keep the camera pointed at Titan through the pass, getting as low as 2000 km above the clouds. Time acceleration makes this pretty dramatic to watch - it looks like a crash is inevitable, but of course that's just the design of the orbit.

Super Sized Mars Rover

The Planetary Society's weblog has a great report by Emily Lakdawalla on her visit a few days ago to JPL's newly expanded "Mars yard" and the unveiling and demonstration of the mobility model (no instruments or "brains" so naturally called the scarecrow) of the Mars Science Laboratory. This is one super-sized rover as shown in her photos and video clips. MSL is under development for a 2009 launch. It will not use solar panels for power (radioisotope thermal generators instead), so it won't be dependent on serendipitous Martian dust devils and wind gusts to blow away dust to keep power levels high as are its smaller cousins Spirit and Opportunity.

Mars Human Factors

Astroprof wrote an interesting post the other day called "Mars Mission: The Human Factor." I started to respond on his blog, but I realized that my comments were getting pretty long, so I decided to turn it into a blog post here. Please read Astroprof's post first for context. I have a few related comments, noting that none of this refutes the basically correct notion that many human factors as well as technical issues could be show stoppers on a multi-year Mars mission.

1. Analogs? I agree that Earth based analog missions do have a lot to teach us, and longer duration ones need to be done (with or without alcohol). There are also a lot of people thinking about the problems of long duration missions and human factors - for example, there were many papers related to this that I unfortunately could not attend at ISDC in Dallas. Of course thinking and planning and even simulation don't replace real experience, and the convenience and safety of staying on Earth for the tests makes them less authentic - life support system failure most likely won't kill the crew at an analog site in Russia.

2. SF Writers - SF doesn't replace experience either, but there have been a lot of good ideas explored in Mars novels, such as Benford's The Martian Race (based on Mars Direct) and Robinson's Red Mars (though it starts with the second generation colony ship for the "first 100" settlers, and that thing is huge). Another one that gets very detailed in the systems area of a Mars Direct style mission is Shadows of Medusa by Brian Enke, which offers an interesting solution to crew relationship problems.

3. Inflatable crew space? NASA signed the inflatable trans-hab over to Bigelow for space station development, but this could be licensed back if it works out - this still would not be a Battlestar Galactica-size spacecraft, but it could give a substantial increase in volume for living space for relatively small mass and launch size penalties.

4. Orbital assembly? Zubrin doesn't like orbital assembly very much, but some have proposed variations on Mars Direct using medium launch vehicles (like Ariane-5, Delta IV Heavy, possibly others) and orbital assembly. I worked on an Orbiter simulation of this with Andy McSorley, Mark Paton, and Grant Bonin in a version called Mars for Less (MFL), first designed and published by Grant. I gave the paper at Mars Society in DC August 2006 (see this page for more details and my various MFL blog posts). Our HAB and ERV were smaller than Zubrin's (so they would be even MORE cramped), but this was just a concept thing, and using the transhab idea or linking together additional hab and boost modules could help (orbital assembly should be more scaleable, especially if the modules are designed to assemble by docking with minimal astronaut EVA's needed).

5. Reliability? Long term reliability of critical systems is a big, big question. One of the NASA astronauts who spoke at ISDC talked about the importance and fragility of the toilet system on the ISS. It would often have problems requiring service, and this would become job #1 until it was fixed. Toilets and other parts of life support have to work better than what we have now for 2+ year Mars missions with limited spare parts and backups, and with the life support system being closed (full recycling or very close to it, which has not really been achieved). ISS experience is a valuable start, but if things get too crappy up there (sorry), they can escape in a waiting Soyuz spacecraft on fairly short notice. This is clearly not an option for a Mars-bound crew.

6. Pseudo G by Spinning? Then there's pseudo-G (spin the spacecraft on a tether) which someone should really test out in Earth orbit sometime. Six or more months in zero G could be depressing.

If getting humans on Mars becomes a top priority for the world (or just for a group with enough money and resources), these problems could certainly be worked out, though if I were on the mission, I'd want to know that the critical life support systems had been tested under realistic space conditions for at least two years if that would be the needed lifetime for mission success (pre-landed backups should be available once you reach Mars). It would take time and effort but I believe it still could happen in 15 or so years, though it is unlikely to be the US government's top priority for a while, so it might have to be some other group of countries and/or commercial entities.

Exploration de la Planète

Not much time for blogging - I'm actively involved in planetary exploration for a few days, in an area called the Côte d'Azur on a planet called la Terre. Pretty sweet little planet. That's Monaco in the picture.

Carnival of Space #8

Just a quick "neuer post" to say that the latest Carnival of Space is up, this week at Universe Today (Blogger's "dashboard" always changes languages to remind me what country I'm in).

The Longest Day

Today is the summer solstice, and the Astronomy Picture of the Day has a cool composite picture with the atmosphere "turned off" so that the Sun and the stars are visible, showing the Sun surrounded by stars of the constellations Gemini and Taurus.

In the northern hemisphere, summer solstice is the longest day of the year, and the Sun is farthest north. You can use Stellarium to make a similar picture, turning off the atmosphere for a dark sky in daylight hours, and turning off the ground so you can see the entire sky (even the part blocked by the Earth). In this picture (click for a bigger view), I set the time to 14:06 EDT and turned on the ecliptic line (Sun's orbital path, in red) and the projection of the Earth's equator (blue line). I've zoomed out so you can see where these lines cross, and see that the Sun is indeed at its highest point relative to the equator. I've also turned on constellation lines and labels so you can see the Sun's position against the stars, surrounded by Gemini, Auriga, Taurus, and Orion.

Encyclopedia Smithsonian

The Smithsonian Institute has a number of great museums in the Washington, DC area including the Air and Space Museum. It also has a wide range of materials on line. One way to access the material is through the Encyclopedia Smithsonian, an alphabetical listing of major topics, e.g., space history. If you drill down in any topic, you will find links to a variety of on line exhibits, including the Apollo Program, from which I grabbed this picture of a gritty-looking Dr. Harrison Schmitt in the Apollo 17 Lunar Module following the third EVA on that very last (so far) Moon landing mission. of course there are more comprehensive collections of Apollo information and imagery on line, but this exhibit is "just enough" for many purposes and collects most of the best-known images from the missions.

Shuttle Fleet in Orbiter

The STS-117 mission is continuing on overtime, although they are winding down and have been pronounced ready for reentry and landing following the repair of the thermal blankets on the OMS engine pod. A fourth EVA was also done today, to complete ISS work that was started Friday. I’ve been traveling and didn’t get to see much of the mission, but they seem to have done a great job overcoming various problems.

An interesting thing happens during shuttle missions down here in the Orbiter simulator world. Actually it doesn’t just happen – it requires a lot of work by Dave Hopkins (one of the main developers of the amazing “Shuttle Fleet” add-on series for Orbiter, Dave413 on Orbiter Forums and at Orbithangar). Dave puts together updated shuttle and ISS add-ons, scenarios, instructions, etc. to allow Orbiter users to re-create key events of the actual shuttle missions, sometimes even in real time (he often updates scenarios to use actual times and orbital elements from the real mission as it progresses).


As an example, on June 14th he posted a scenario for the OMS thermal blanket repair which took place on the June 15. This did not include the actual thermal blanket defect and repair (it’s not quite that detailed), but it does show how astronaut Danny Olivas was positioned on the robot arm for the repair, giving insight into the geometry (it’s also cool to view the entire ISS complex in 3D,with the Atlantis docked there). Other scenarios include various pre-docking states and robot arm (RMS) checkout (the SRMS system is more detailed in the shuttle fleet than in the default Atlantis and includes a sequence editor and an arm camera view, shown in the yellow outlined inset here - this inset view was done graphically, not in Orbiter).

Thanks to Dave for putting together these great add-ons as well as the data, instructions, and scenarios needed to make use of them for particular missions as they occur. Note that you need to follow instructions carefully as to which add-ons to install. The STS-117 scenarios require the patched 3.9.3 shuttle fleet, the expansion pack, the 1.0 version of the ISS (not the same as the default ISS in Orbiter), the STS-117 scenarios pack, and the new OMS repair scenario. These are all available for free download on Orbithangar. For best results, read the excellent included documentation for these detailed add-ons.

Reflections from Earth Orbit

The STS-117 and ISS crews got some important things squared away today - EVA astronaut Danny Olivas repaired a gap in a thermal blanket with the help of a medical stapler, while cosmonauts were able to get the troublesome Russian ISS control computers back up and running. Let's hear it for Yankee and Russian ingenuity! Plus a few engineers on the ground working overtime I'm sure. This picture is not from today's spacewalk - it's just one I found in the day 4 gallery and especially liked.

I also liked the book Reflections from Earth Orbit by Winston Scott. Scott, whom I met briefly last weekend at Space Expo 2007, has written a truly down-to-Earth astronaut memoir. It's relatively brief (128 pages) and includes anecdotes about growing up in Miami in the 1950's (attending segregated schools until tenth grade), his experience as a young and talented trumpet player, and his transition from a Florida State music graduate to a US Navy pilot (starting in helicopters and ending up in the F-14 Tomcat!). Of course he also describes many details of his two space shuttle flights (STS-72 in 1996 and STS-87 in 1997).

Scott relates it all with modesty and with respect for the non-technical reader who is simply curious about what space is like. I really enjoyed this little book - it might be just the thing to inspire a young reader or engage a person without a huge interest in "space stuff." It has a lot of old-fashioned human interest and the feel of a conversation with a friendly guy who just happens to have been a fighter pilot and an astronaut, and who can also blow a mean trumpet. Scott also reveals what he believes to be the true soundtrack of outer space: In A Silent Way by Miles Davis. I'll have to check it out.

Optimization Game

50 mpg! Do I hear 51? 52? I have a new mini-obsession, training myself to drive my new Prius to optimize its gas mileage. It has a real-time display of current gas mileage as well as a histogram of the last 30 minutes of mileage on its very space-age multi-function display. Also steering-wheel-mounted controls for audio and climate (HOTAS!) and an MP3-CD player! And a HUD! And hover engines! And it runs on sugar water! Well it has most of that anyway. It's all very 21st century to me (my last car was a 1998 Camry).

The optimization bit is really working. I haven't kept a daily record, but on my 20 mile, 25 minute drive to work, I started out a week ago (new) getting 48 mpg and now I routinely get 50 and sometimes 51. It's mostly being smoother on the gas and brakes, not getting faster than I need to get, taking advantage of terrain (coasting whenever possible), stuff like that. Sometimes traffic hurts me, as does the A/C if I have to run it (not much recently - it's been cool for June). The savings in doing 51 vs. 48 mpg on a 20 mile trip is not significant - but I still like this optimization game, as well as whatever small contribution the Prius makes to the environment by burning less fuel.

Oh yeah, the picture. My other car is an F-4 Phantom. With an A-10 Warthog nose sticking out of it. Covered with tarps. At an air museum.

Carnival of Space #7 Is Up

Check out Carnival of Space #7 over at Star Stryder. There are some really interesting posts including a Space Cynics item in favor of something, and a blog with a series of planetary cartoons (would that be a clog?). One of mine is in there somewhere too.

Virtual LM

I'm crazy busy at work and have not been closely following let alone writing about the STS-117 flight - that's OK, there's plenty of coverage by other blogs and web sites, starting with NASA's own. It will be interesting to hear about how the "sewing kit" repair of the thermal blanket gap will be done later in the extended mission. Learning to live and work in space means fixing stuff when it breaks, and fortunately the shuttle crews and their ground support teams are prepared to do this when it's needed.

I did spend a little time this evening browsing through a book I bought at ISDC, Virtual LM by Scott P. Sullivan (subtitle: A Pictorial Essay of the Engineering and Construction of the Apollo Lunar Module). What an amazing vehicle, and the book is quite amazing too. It's essentially 250 pages of detailed and annotated color-shaded 3D CAD drawings of all the systems and sub-systems of the Apollo Lunar Module. Of course there was no CAD in 1962-1969 when the LM was designed and built by "Grumman Iron Works," but using CAD to peel away the many layers of complexity is a brilliant approach. Perhaps a book only a space geek or a mechanical engineer could love, but if you're a space geek, you will really love it.

New Stellarium 0.9.0

There's a new version (6/6/07) of the freeware planetarium program Stellarium, version 0.9.0. It has some interesting new features, including the ability to fly directly to a selected planet or moon (though you won't see the object you flew to - best to jump to Phobos if you want to see Mars up close). There's also the ability to use a much larger star catalog, which you must locate and download separately (hint: go to the downloads page on Sourceforge, cancel the download if necessary, and select "Browse all files" on the download tab).

It looks a bit better than the 0.8 version, though it seems to me the planets are now oversized - maybe this is a scale setting somewhere that I haven't found yet. There are more settings not in the GUI, many with single key commands you will find in the manual. But those are little things. As with previous versions, it's a fantastic planetarium program with an easy zoom and pan interface and atmospheric effects that make the sky look very much like what you see outside. And it's free!

Space Island Group

One of the sponsors and exhibitors at yesterday's Space Expo 2007 in Connecticut was Space Island Group, a commercial company "dedicated to the development of commerce, research, manufacturing, and tourism in space." Sounds good to me - I was surprised I hadn't heard of them before, and that they were not (as far as I could tell) present at ISDC 2007, where there was a special forum on the financing of space ventures as well as a lot of private space activity.

Space Island Group is talking about building solar power satellites in the near future, and they say they have some things going with China and India to pursue this. I heard the figure $2 billion bandied about. Their promotional handout talks about "20,000 jobs in Earth orbit by 2020." They are also big on using to-be-developed shuttle ET- and SSME-derived heavy lift launch vehicles (different from NASA's Ares V and the DIRECT proposal, as far as I can tell), and on using the empty external tanks to build various structures in Earth orbit.

I'd like to find out more about Space Island Group (the president and CEO, Gene Meyers, was at Space Expo, and I met him very briefly just as I was leaving - I was quite busy with Orbiter "flight instruction" and didn't have much time for the other exhibits, alas). It would be great if solar power satellites could be developed and commercialized over the next 15 years. Does anyone know anything about their plans and partners?

The picture here (space station built from shuttle external tanks) is from an Orbiter add-on, not one of the many cool graphics on Space Island Group's web site.

Orbiter for Educators: Next Frontier?

Is this the launch pad for the future of space flight? A bare table with a couple of PC's, a joystick, a projector, and a bunch of wires, in front of a WWII era F4U Corsair? Actually it's just my Orbiter table at today's Space Expo 2007 at the New England Air Museum, but there a couple of dozen young people got to watch a simulated shuttle launch, experience docking with the ISS and landing the space shuttle, and learn a bit about forces and motion in the process. I also introduced Orbiter to a few educators and fellow space enthusiasts (most of whom declined a test flight).

There were some 400 attendees all together, with around sixteen exhibits, plus retired NASA astronaut Winston Scott, who was probably the biggest draw. I spoke briefly with him and invited him to check out Orbiter (I told him I had even installed an add-on F-14 in his honor, since he flew Tomcats in the Navy), and while he expressed interest, he just didn't have the time. He's an excellent speaker and a very modest and down-to-Earth guy. I would have liked to talk with him more, but there were a lot of people, so I'll just have to learn more from his book, Reflections from Earth Orbit, which I bought today.

Orbiter "test flights" were pretty popular with kids and their parents, most of whom had the usual reaction ("it's free?"). I had a single page information sheet to give to visitors to help them find Orbiter on line and get started with it. I also had two printed copies of Go Play In Space to show (one of which disappeared from the table). A few observations:

The joystick is a draw, and is pretty essential for landing the shuttle (for which I used a playback until short final when the visitor would take the stick). It's not really that great for docking, but it's more fun than the key pad. I made up large labeled diagrams for RCS control with the stick (I programmed buttons for translation and hover engine controls).

Working with one kid at a time like a coach or flight instructor worked quite well with about 10-20 minutes spent with each one. I also had the notebook running with the projector, usually an Orbiter flight recorder playback of the STS-115 shuttle launch and climb to orbit.

I need to carry a small model of the shuttle or even an aircraft to use when explaining rotation vs. translation. It was pretty silly doing this with a water bottle or piece of paper.

All in all, an interesting and enjoyable space event for the general public.

Nominal = Awesome

I hate it when I'm so busy with simulated space stuff that I miss a real launch. I watched some STS-117 replays a few minutes after the fact, and it was a really nice launch. It was pretty much "nominal" all the way (NASA for "awesome"), judging from the fact that several questions at the post-launch press briefing on NASA TV related to "so what do think about when you don't have problems to worry about?"

Meanwhile I have some really cool scenarios set up for kids of all ages to play with at Space Expo 2007 at NEAM tomorrow. Only 14 test-flight slots (20 minutes each), so if you come to the event, be sure to sign up early.

Universe Awareness (UNAWE)

I learned about this in the June Physics Today. UNAWE is an international astronomy outreach program aimed at inspiring young and disadvantaged children around the world. I need to learn more about this. It's hard to disagree with the basic goals as described in the PT article:

Teach tolerance. Inspire awe. Instill self-confidence.

Atlantis, Real and Simulated

First of all, welcome to any first time visitors who arrived here for the Carnival of Space or from various sites that linked to it. There's a lot of space-related educational material here (among other things), so I hope you will take a look around and tell me what you think.

This week I've been practicing docking the shuttle Atlantis with the International Space Station (ISS) - simulated in Orbiter, of course. This is preparation for Saturday's Space Expo 2007 at the New England Air Museum at Bradley Airport, near Hartford, CT. I've got a scenario set up to allow visitors to dock either Atlantis (docking port is "up") or the fictional Deltaglider (docking port is in the nose, easier to do) from 10 meters out using a joystick (not really needed, but more fun than the numeric keypad). If this is too easy for some people, I can make it harder pretty quickly even from 10 meters out.

This will be especially cool for two reasons. If all goes well and the launch takes place Friday evening as planned, the real Atlantis (STS-117) will be in orbit (though not docking until flight day 3). Plus astronaut Winson Scott will be at the Space Expo in person, talking about his real shuttle flight experience (and giving Orbiter a try, I hope).

P.S. If you want a lot of information on STS-117 or other shuttle misisons or ISS expeditions at your fingertips, check out shuttlepresskit.com and download a PDF press kit. The STS-117 press kit PDF is 5.8 megabytes.

The Carnival of Space #6 - ISDC Edition

This may be a space blog carnival, but the recent International Space Development Conference (ISDC 2007) in Dallas was a veritable space circus, with at least eleven rings and various side shows. Truly a feast of a space conference (if I may mash up a few metaphors). So the main dish of this week’s Carnival of Space is ISDC, with a generous serving of non-ISDC posts for your reading pleasure.

After co-chairing this year’s ISDC, Ken Murphy decided to find out what really went on at his conference. What he discovered on the web was a blogsplosion of stories about the staggering potential of space and about how much fun everyone had at ISDC, the largest citizen space conference in the country (and maybe the world). Ken also picked up a lot of great conference freebies to add to the Lunar Library. The Exploring Meteorite Mysteries teacher guide from NASA has proven to be a very popular addition.

With Ken’s comprehensive listing as a framework, we can start to drill down and extract core samples from selected ISDC presentations and events. My own ISDC Wrap-up concentrated on a few of ISDC’s “greatest hits,” including Buzz Aldrin, Dr. Steve Squyres, a SpaceShipTwo preview from Virgin Galactic’s Alex Tai, and more. Private space was big in Dallas, as MSNBC’s Allen Boyle discussed in his Cosmic Log post Coming Attractions in Space. A Babe in the Universe sat next to Buzz in one session and reported on a private Moon flight scoop from Space Adventures CEO Eric Anderson’s lunchtime speech at ISDC. I was there too, but she managed to pick up on a few details that I missed.

I met a few fellow space bloggers in non-cyberspace at the ISDC space blogger “summit,” which is cool, since blogging is normally a rather solitary activity. Megablogger Glenn Reynolds, a.k.a. Instapundit, was there, amazingly enough, and wrote about it here (so now I’m blogging about talking about blogging about space blogging, more or less).

I've enjoyed Astroprof's ISDC posts (and many others), and I actually got to talk with him there. His Astroprof’s Page discussion of Dr. Robert Zubrin’s “going straight to Mars” presentation is a nice summary. I also liked his “blogging about space blogging” post in which he asked readers why they read his blog, and they told him! I spoke briefly with Jeff Foust, who organized the space blogging events and claims to not actually have a million blogs. Among other things, he reported on SpaceDev’s revised Dreamchaser spacecraft design in Personal Spaceflight.

One of the many afternoon presentations I attended at ISDC was one by Jerome Pearson, who discussed the use of orbiting reflectors and similar sun-shading ideas to reduce global warming. But Universe Today points out that such geoengineering comes with huge risks. Policy makers hoping that a technological silver bullet will hold off rising temperatures from global warming need to consider those risks. While this was not an ISDC post, it was closely related to Pearson's presentation - I raised a question along these lines after his talk, but he was out of time.

Those are just a few of the many posts and articles that came out of ISDC. It really was a great event, but it’s not the only thing in the universe worth talking (or blogging) about. I mentioned that Buzz Aldrin was at ISDC, and of course he flew on both Gemini and Apollo missions. But Halfway There reminds us in Hurrah for Schirra that the late Wally Schirra was the only NASA astronaut to fly aboard all three of the Moon project's spacecraft: Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo. He epitomized the astronaut spirit and was one of NASA's key players in the success of the manned space program.

There were quite a few NASA people and presentations at ISDC (NASA was also the main sponsor), and many speakers and attendees could be heard wondering aloud about NASA’s future and about the Vision for Space Exploration. The conversation continues in the blogosphere with OK, smart guy, so how SHOULD the VSE be done? in which Robot Guy asks,
what should NASA be doing, beyond just developing enabling technologies? If they are going to go about doing the Vision for Space Exploration, then what is the better way to do it? He says the solution is to decouple the mission from the implementation.

Meanwhile the Space Cynics wonder, So What IS Their Mission? They point out that in Mike Griffin's recent interview in Space Daily, he essentially dismissed any more detailed action studying global warming because it wasn't in the NASA Authorization. The question that comes to mind is, what other activities are not in the Authorization, and will he be doing some trimming of NASA based on this criteria... or was it just a cop out?

It turns out that ISDC was not the only cool conference taking place in the last couple of weeks. Fellow JPL Solar System Ambassador Steve Hammond attended Where 2.0 2007 in San Jose and reports in Ridiculous Thoughts that it was about much more than location, location, location on Earth. He even discovered several astronomical applications of Google Earth. And while there is no Google Venus (yet?), in A Watery Venus, Chris Lintott of Chris Lintott’s Universe (none of this dodgy FlyingSinger/Astroprof/Robot Guy stuff for Chris) talks about an interview that got him thinking about how what we know about Earth tells us about Venus and vice versa.

I can also recommend two fine tributes: one to a late and sorely missed astronomer, author, and science educator, the other dedicated to an up-and-coming outer solar system body. To retain her spare e e cummingsesque typography i will quote astropixie directly on her slightly older but well worth remembering remembrance:

pale blue dot
this one comes from last december for the 10th anniversary of carl sagan's death. i talk about his contributions to astronomy, space exploration, skepticism and science public outreach. i tell the story of how i decided to go into astronomy.

And last but not least, Stuart Atkinson of Cumbrian Skies explains why a pale-orange-dot in the vicinity of a ringed giant has been rising on his personal solar system hit parade in Titan - the new New World. But not content to honor smoggy Titan in prose alone, Stuart also wrote a rather nice poem about her (him? it?) entitled TITAN. This is one of many astronomical subjects that Stuart explores poetically in The 'Verse.

I hope you have enjoyed this ISDC (and other) edition of the Carnival of Space. If you wish to submit posts for future carnivals, the guidelines are here. Next week's carnival will be hosted at Dr. Pamela Gay's Star Stryder blog. Until then, Clear skies! Ad astra! On to Mars! And as Homer Simpson says, "Mmmmm... forbidden donut" (scroll to the bottom of that page for more).

SF by Wernher Von Braun

Apogee Space Books had a booth at ISDC, and of course I couldn't resist buying a few space books, especially from the $10 bargain rack, including NASA mission reports on Apollo 11 (2 volumes) and Deep Space (outer solar system probes from Pioneer 10 to Cassini), plus a volume on women astronauts for my outreach collection.

But the most surprising find was a new book by Wernher Von Braun, Project Mars: A Technical Tale. Not exactly new, but a never-before-published SF novel about a voyage to Mars, written in 1949. I've just started reading it, and while the prose is a bit old fashioned, and the technical details figure very prominently, it looks like a pretty decent story of a huge Mars expedition.

The story takes place in the 1980's (30+ years in the future from 1949, following several more world wars and the establishment of an effective world government). The book includes a technical appendix which shows the calculations and diagrams that Von Braun used to make sure that the story was technically accurate, to the level of knowledge of Mars and space technology in 1949. It's surprisingly modern in many respects. The book includes a nice selection of color plates of Mars expedition paintings by Chesley Bonestell.There's a description of the book by Von Braun himself here.

Mars Science Lab Landing Animation

This is a really cool animation of JPL's Mars Science Laboratory (next generation rover launching in 2009) landing on Mars. Thanks to Greg Burch for the tip. Videos for download - possibly the same and maybe others, I haven't looked - are available here.

Space Expo 2007 at NEAM

Next Saturday (June 9) I will participate in Space Expo 2007 at the New England Air Museum in Windsor Locks, Connecticut (by Bradley Airport). The 10-5 event (PDF flyer here) will feature NASA astronaut Winston Scott, mini-robots to drive, a chance to try on a space suit, and more. There will also be three JPL Solar System Ambassadors on hand to talk about space stuff, including yours truly. I will give a presentation and then set up a table with one or two PC's running Orbiter, giving attendees a chance to try their hand at ISS docking or flying around on the Moon. The museum also has a great collection of aircraft. If you live in New England, come check it out.

I Feel the Earth Move

One of the blogs I discovered through recent space carnivals is Astropixie, which I really like. Her recent post on heliocentrism referred to a blog where the idea is seriously considered that the Earth is the fixed center of the universe, around which everything else revolves. It’s essentially Ptolemy’s ancient Greek “music of the spheres,” although I’m sure its proponents don’t especially like Ptolemy because he wasn’t a Christian (he couldn’t help it, he was born too soon).

The “proof” of this fixed Earth theory seems to consist of three things: (1) I don’t FEEL the Earth moving, (2) the sun, stars, and planets APPEAR to move around us, and the clincher, (3) the Bible says the Earth is fixed. As with people who believe in Creationism, Intelligent Design, Intelligent Falling, or that humans are a plague on the Earth and should become extinct, this got me thinking: what is up with that?

I never learned to build or fix a car or airplane engine, and I know only broadly how they operate, but I can still drive a car and fly a small airplane. I know that engines work on physical principles that are well understood by many people, and that specialized engineers and technicians understand these principles (and a lot of practical details) especially well and can design, build, and fix engines so I can safely drive or fly. If I believed instead that Carburetor Fairies, the Magneto Demon, the Spaghetti Monster, or the Hand of God caused the engine to produce power, I could still drive or fly. The existence of such beliefs doesn’t especially hurt anything as long as there are people who can actually build and fix engines so they work. And of course there are many people (perhaps most) who have no special beliefs about how their car engine works and don’t especially care as long as it runs, and when it doesn’t, they take it to a mechanic.

The fixed Earth people might be similar to this – on the basis of their direct senses and their belief in the Bible, they maintain that the Earth is obviously fixed, and that everything rotates around us. As long as these people don’t try to launch satellites or space probes, or make their opinions about this subject the law of the land, no great harm done. Just as quantum mechanics is implicitly proved every time you turn on a device with transistors or lasers in it, a rotating Earth is required (along with the rest of the well understood and well demonstrated heliocentric system) every time a satellite is launched in an eastward direction to take advantage of the velocity boost provided by the spinning Earth. If you make use of satellite based weather reports, satellite TV, or GPS, you are benefiting from the knowledge and work of people who understand these principles and how to apply them. You don’t have to know or care how these things work (or even that they exist at all) unless you want to.

The funny part is when someone with such a belief tries to straddle the fence, accepting and applying certain parts of physics and rejecting others to try to build a case for their alternate view – “teach the controversy,” as it were, though the controversy here is comparable to the question of who is the stronger god, Zeus or Thor? (obviously Thor, duh).

An example is this page on a fixed Earth web site “falsifying the geosynchronous satellite concept.” Assuming these people are serious (they seem to be), they go to some pains to explain that GEO orbits are based on various unproved assumptions. Although you can’t see GEO satellites with the naked eye, they do accept as directly observable that there are satellites which remain fixed at a distance of 22,236 miles above certain points on the equator, but since they deny that the Earth rotates and that the satellites are in circular orbits with periods set to match the Earth’s rotation rate, they need a way to explain why these satellites don’t simply fall straight down.

Their answer: electromagnetism (they show a small metallic globe that is suspended magnetically to illustrate this idea). They don’t say how these powerful “beams of magnetism” are generated, and of course no one has ever observed or measured the alleged tubes of localized electromagnetic forces that keep these satellites suspended over the supposedly fixed Earth. But it works for a 3 inch model Earth, so why not for a 22,236 mile high tube of magnetic force?

Of course if any of this were true, rocket launches and satellites (not to mention the Moon) would have to operate quite differently from what physicists, astronomers, and engineers have been telling us since Newton in 1687. This would involve a vast and intricate conspiracy of government, private industry, scientists, engineers, and many others all around the world. Why wasn’t I asked to join when I got my physics degree? It is not clear whether this is a conspiracy to launch spacecraft that operate differently from what we have learned in school, or whether the conspiracy has simply faked every space flight since 1957 (with great special effects, I especially like that GPS trick). None of this is very clear actually.

I suppose I’ve spent more time on this than it’s really worth and I should simply accept that whatever it is, there is probably someone somewhere who believes it. It’s just really astounding to me. There’s a lot of stuff in the Bible that is debatable, and probably a lot that is valuable. But as an orbital mechanics resource, it’s just plain wrong. I don’t expect to convince anyone who accepts the Bible as fact to change their opinion based on my remarks here. But considering the political source of Astropixie’s original link to this fixed Earth stuff, I wanted to also point out that depending on how things go in November 2008, science may not quite be out of the woods when Bush finally leaves office.

Stellar & Galactic Bling

Here's a nice little slide show of colorful stellar and galactic images from Hubble, Spitzer, and other spacecraft sources, courtesy of JPL.