The news about James Doohan diverted my attention earlier, but I couldn’t let today pass without acknowledging something very important: this is the 36th anniversary of the day human beings first set foot on another world, namely Earth’s own Moon.
Hi, kids — I hope everyone out there in InternetLand had a good Fourth of July. The folks at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory certainly did. Their Deep Impact space mission (which I previewed for you a month ago) went off without a hitch, slamming its impactor probe into the comet Tempel 1 just before midnight Salt Lake time on Sunday, July 3rd. The boom resulting from an object the size of a washing machine connecting with an object half the size of Manhattan Island at roughly 23,000 miles an hour apparently surprised even the people who designed the probe:
The collision was photographed by the Deep Impact “fly-by spacecraft” (which, conveniently enough, is also the vehicle that released the impactor) as well as the Hubble telescope and a number of other probes, satellites, and observatories. As a result, the Internet today is awash in cool images like the one above. There’s even video taken from the impactor as it approached its final destination. Think back to those missile-cams that so impressed us back during the ’91 Gulf War and you’ll get the idea. If you’re interested in this stuff, you’ll want to start with the mission home page, which includes a gallery of images, video, animation, and artwork. There’s also lots of information about the impactor and the flyby spacecraft, Tempel 1 and comets in general, the technology used to make this happen, and the reasons why scientists thought it would be a good idea to deface one of the other objects in our solar system.
With no sign of the Cosmos 1 solar-sail spacecraft two days after its launch, members of the Planetary Society’s operations team are packing it in and returning to their regularly scheduled lives. Before the project’s official blogger Emily signs off, however, she leaves us with this typically hopeful message:
At the Society, we’re already talking about what to do next. A few hours ago, Bill Nye — the Science Guy, and also the Vice-President of The Planetary Society — asked all of the staff to gather together in the living room of the 100-year-old house in which we work. He opened and poured champagne for all of us, and we raised several toasts. We toasted Cosmos 1, first of all; it was an audacious dream, that we arrogantly compared to the flight of the Wright Brothers. We toasted [project director] Lou Friedman in absentia, for whom it must have been a pretty rough week. We toasted the staff and volunteers of the Society, for all the work it’s taken to bring Cosmos 1 to the world. We toasted Ann Druyan, the chief sponsor of Cosmos 1, for making it possible, and for being the mission’s spiritual leader. We toasted our members, for their devotion to our cause and their support. Finally, we toasted: Cosmos 2? Many of our members are telling us they’re ready to try again. We can’t say whether or not we’ll try again with this mission until we find out what really happened. But we’ll certainly stay in the business, and try more audacious things, like the Solar Sail, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Mars airplanes, or Venus balloons we’ve advocated in the past.
Sounds about right to me…
Disappointing news for space enthusiasts: Cosmos 1, which was to have been the first solar-sail spacecraft, has disappeared and was most likely destroyed following its launch yesterday aboard a Russian-made ICBM. The Planetary Society, the private organization that planned and provided most of the funding for the project, issued a statement this morning:
In the past twenty-four hours, the Russian space agency (RKA) has made a tentative conclusion that the Volna rocket carrying Cosmos 1 failed during the firing of the first stage. This would mean that Cosmos 1 is lost.
While it is likely that this conclusion is correct, there are some inconsistent indications from information received from other sources. The Cosmos 1 team observed what appear to be signals, that looks like they are from the spacecraft when it was over the first three ground stations and some Doppler data over one of these stations. This might indicate that Cosmos 1 made it into orbit, but probably a lower one than intended. The project team now considers this to be a very small probability. But because there is a slim chance that it might be so, efforts to contact and track the spacecraft continue. We are working with US Strategic Command to provide additional information in a day or so.
If the spacecraft made it to orbit, its autonomous program might be working, and after 4 days the sails could automatically deploy. While the chances of this are very, very small, we still encourage optical observers to see if the sail can be seen after that time.
The excellent Space News Blog is reporting that NASA’s Deep Impact spacecraft is scheduled to hit a comet called Tempel 1 on July 4th. Before you shed any tears, though, be aware that this crash is deliberate; the idea is to gouge a hole in the thing to see what comets are like on the inside. Tempel 1 is reportedly about half the size of Manhattan, and the crater made by the spacecraft’s “impactor” — which is a detachable projectile that will slam into the comet while the rest of the Deep Impact probe remains safely behind to observe — may range in size from a large house to a football stadium, and be up to 14 stories deep.
Comets are already known to be “dirty snowballs” composed mostly of dust and ice, but no one has any idea what their internal structure is like, and they are also believed to contain material that’s been relatively unchanged since the formation of our system. This should be interesting…
For the record, my favorite scene in all six Star Wars films is also perhaps the most iconic one, the moment in the very first movie when Luke Skywalker watches two suns sink toward the barren horizon of Tatooine. It’s a beautiful scene no matter how you examine it: visually, thematically, musically, emotionally. It’s a powerful evocation of youthful restlessness, both melancholy and hopeful. And it’s magical because it takes something that is mundane, if beautiful — a simple sunset — and transforms it into a novelty, the double sunset of another world. We identify with the image because we see something similar all the time, but we thrill at its strangeness. It is simultaneously familiar and unearthly.
How’d you like to see something like that scene, only for real? Something as close to standing in Luke Skywalker’s boots as we’re likely to get any time soon? My friends, please click “Continue Reading” to experience the unspeakably cool…
It’s a foggy day here in the Salt Lake Valley, the kind of weather that shrinks your world down to a couple hundred feet in any direction and coats everything in a clammy layer of moisture that isn’t quite substantial enough to be actual water but is definitely a couple of notches below “dry.” I usually don’t mind days like this — unlike a lot of people I know, I don’t find them depressing and they don’t make me feel claustrophobic — but today I’m longing for some broader horizons. I’d love to be able to fly like Superman, so I could pierce through that numbingly gray ceiling and soar up into the sky, higher and higher until I reach the colorful and wonder-filled universe that lies above the earth. I can’t actually do that, of course… but through the magic of the InterWeb, I can vicariously experience some of the wonders that a little machine called Huygens has found.
[Ed. note: if you don’t know Huygens from Jergens, read the preceding entry first.]
UPDATE (Sunday night, January 16): I discovered earlier today that the links I’ve provided to various ESA pages have been intermittently unavailable. I’m guessing that there’s been more demand than the ESA anticipated and they didn’t have the server capacity to keep up with it. In any event, the links seem to be working now, and I apologize to any of my loyal readers who’ve been clicking these links only to receive the dreaded “Server Not Found” screen for their troubles.
Here’s the first photo from Huygens, showing the surface of Titan.
Also, here’s an article about the microphone I mentioned before. God, I hope that works. There was a similar instrument on one of the Martian probes that went missing a couple of years back, and I remember feeling incredibly disappointed by that. I really want to hear what another world sounds like…
It’s an exciting day in space, as the European Space Agency’s Huygens probe has touched down on the surface of Titan, a moon orbiting the ringed planet Saturn.
The excellent website Space.com has an article today about what’s going to happen next following SpaceShipOne’s victory in the race for the X-Prize. If you’re at all interested in manned civilian spaceflight, give it a look — it’s pretty exciting stuff.