It’s July 20th, the 37th anniversary of the first time human beings walked on the moon. My opinion that this day ought to be made a national holiday has not yet found any support from the Powers That Be, and, poking around the Interweb today, I’m disappointed to see so little discussion about the anniversary or human spaceflight in general. I did find one op-ed by Buzz Aldrin, who was at Tranquility Base with Neil Armstrong when he took his small step, and Rick N. Tumlinson, the founder of an organization called the Space Frontier Foundation. Their sentiments will no doubt sound corny to some, but they appeal to the idealistic core I keep hidden under my cynical exterior:

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I’m a week or so behind the curve with this item, but these days I seem to be running late all the time anyway, so what’s one more item on the overdue list?

It seems that when the space shuttle Discovery lifted off on the Fourth of July, it carried a new feature: webcams attached to the nose and tail of both solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. (For those who aren’t up on their spaceflight trivia, the SRBs are the skinny rockets attached to the sides of the thing that provide the initial lift-off boost; they separate a few minutes into the flight, after they’ve burned out all — well, most — of their fuel, and drop into the ocean, where they’re recovered to be used again.) While I suspect the cams are part of the post-Columbia paranoia protocol, intended to document any potential damage during the launch phase, they have the positive side-effect of providing some unprecedented and seriously cool video of a process we’ve all seen 121 times now. Click the image below to see Discovery throttling up its own on-board engines and pulling away as the SRB separates:

Just like a Viper peeling off on the old Battlestar series, isn’t it? Makes an old geek’s heart swell to see reality reflecting fantasy like this…

Note: more images and videos from the current mission can be found at NASA’s Web site. If you’re into this sort of thing…

This is pretty cool: astronomers have recorded a meteor impact on the surface of the moon. The resulting explosion appears as a white flash in the black-and-white video clip, looking to my eye like the dust speckles you frequently see in old movies. However, this particular dust speckle was about 10 inches wide, detonated with a force equal to four tons of dynamite, and left behind a crater 14 meters wide and three meters deep. Meteors hit the moon all the time, of course, but it’s pretty wild that this one was actually captured on film. (Or tape, or a chip, or whatever…) Go check it out!

As long as I’m posting photographs today, here’s a real doozy (and one that I imagine will be of particular interest to Jen B., our resident geology buff, if she’s out there):

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I’m looking at a couple of interesting tidbits as I while away the last few minutes of work before the holiday weekend.

The first is news that the Voyager II space probe, launched way back in 1977, seems to be approaching the “edge” of our solar system, which is defined by a phenomenon called the “termination shock.” This is where particles blown outward by our sun start to turn back inward because of a flow of incoming particles from outside the system. The interesting thing is that the termination shock seems to occur sooner in the “southern” region of our system, where Voyager II is, than in the northern region. (Voyager I crossed the northern termination shock about a year ago, but it was farther away when the event occurred than its sister ship is now.)

The other item is further evidence in support of one of my pet theories, which is that the world is becoming more and more like Star Trek all the time: scientists believe we might be able to build an actual cloaking device before too many more years using “metamaterials” that bend electromagnetic energy around them. A more detailed article on this research can be found here. Very cool news. I really wouldn’t mind living in a Star Trek world. As long as we don’t all end up wearing velour or spandex jumpsuits, or suits with feet in them like jammies…

Courtesy of Scalzi’s AOL Journal, here’s a lovely true-color photo of our little corner of the universe. It’s a mosaic assembled from multiple satellite images. I’ve seen pictures similar to this before, but they never fail to take my breath away. I especially like the glint of sunlight over Baja. That’s a detail that all those Star Trek episodes seemed to miss. Click on the picture to see it larger, click here for other (and even larger) images…

In the vein of yesterday’s post about historical events that took place on my birthday, I’d like to point out that today, April 12th, witnessed two major milestones in the history of space exploration.

First (and perhaps most significantly), on this date in 1961, Yuri Gagarin of the Soviet Union became the first human to travel into space. Twenty years later, on April 12, 1981, Americans Robert Crippen and John Young piloted the first orbital space shuttle flight. (I have reluctantly come to accept that the shuttle program has mostly been an expensive disappointment, but the Columbia and her sister ships were still the first reusable spacecraft, surely a noteworthy accomplishment.)

According to Boing Boing, “Yuri’s Night” events are planned in cities all over the world to commemorate these landmarks in human spaceflight. Unfortunately, I just found out about all this and have nothing planned, so I plan to simply raise a quiet toast on my back deck this evening as I gaze out at the stars and remember what we puny primates can accomplish when we set our minds to it…

Space journalist James Oberg comments on yesterday’s news about the discovery of liquid water geysers on Saturn’s moon Enceladus and why it matters:

But why? Do improved science textbooks and even exciting news headlines offer rewards for the effort needed? If there are signs of life — past, present, or even future — on Enceladus, or Europa or Titan or even below the bitterly-cold ice shells of Pluto or the newly discovered Sedna, what does that benefit us?

 

The fundamental and potentially infinite benefit is that we, too, are “life,” with our particular biochemical processes that allow us in a time-tested but slapdash fashion to grow, survive temporarily, replicate and occasionally stare at the stars. To understand this process that briefly keeps each of us alive, we study the examples we have — ourselves and our cousins from the same creche — and speculate. But examples from another creche could show the range of possibilities that was irreversibly narrowed here on Earth as this particular DNA-based “life form” spread and dominated.
How would another microorganism pass on blueprints for progeny, and how does this other process compare to the successes of “our” life, and how does it fail? How does it repair itself against environmental hazards? Do cells on Europa get cancer? Do they even have DNA-tagged “counters” that on Earth enforce cellular death after so many divisions? Do they allow some — but not too much — replication variation that enables environmentally-driven or behaviorally-driven evolution?

 

The answers to these and other questions will tell us about the potentialities and design limits of the life processes that comprise ourselves. And that, most definitely, we want to know, and take advantage of.

 

The “answer book” to all these questions isn’t just lying out there at Enceladus already bound and decoded, for us to go out and pick up and read at our leisure — but pages, or even paragraphs of it, could well be. And this lucky concurrence of watery geysers and of current space capabilities offers a rewarding strategy to do what humans have done, and benefited from, since they became humans: wonder, and then go find out.

Wonder, and then go find out… that’d make a pretty good motto, don’t you think?

I’ve just read that the final attempt to contact the Pioneer 10 spaceprobe has failed. The probe actually hasn’t been heard from since the year 2000, but this month the Earth moved into a position more favorable for picking up a signal, if there was one, and the folks at JPL (the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which built and operated the Pioneer and Voyager probes) were hopeful. Their failure to detect anything indicates that the little ship either doesn’t have enough power left to run its transmitter, or its power systems have failed entirely. In any event, this was the last time any attempt at contact will be made.

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Here’s something cool for you all to look at, courtesy of The Planetary Society’s Weblog: it’s a photo taken by a guy named Ed Morana of the International Space Station transiting (i.e., crossing in front of) the Moon on February 13th.

According to the blog entry I nabbed this from, the image is composed of eight exposures from a video camera taken as the Station moved from right to left. Morana’s site features movies, if you’re into that whole motion thing…