Science Made Cool

Requiem for a Dream?

NASA's in trouble. Big trouble. This article in NewScientist describes some of the agency's problems, most of which come down to Not Enough Money. One point stands out: if President Obama was to throw his support behind the struggling Ares/Orion program (to develop a new manned rocket for missions to orbit, the Moon, and possibly Mars) it might survive. The problem? In President Obama's recent speech on science funding, manned spaceflight was conspicuously absent. Not good news at all.

Does this mean America is getting out of the human spaceflight business? Personally, I don't think so. I think we may actually be getting into the actual business of putting people in orbit. That's "business" as in "for-profit venture" rather than "government monopoly." NASA has already hired SpaceX to deliver supplies to the International Space Station -- although a rival launch consortium has challenged the contract because they claim they made the better offer. But if actual corporations are fighting over the contract, that means someone expects to make money off the job.

So there may be a silver lining here: the age of NASA may be drawing to a close, forty years after their greatest triumph. But out of the ashes we may see a more robust private space infrastructure rise, one that isn't subject to the whims of political leaders.

If not, well, maybe we can hitch a ride with India. 

Wired Mystery Issue

I had all kinds of plans for blogging this weekend. Then I opened the latest issue of Wired, and all my free time vanished into the gaping maw of puzzle obsession. The overt puzzles were bad enough -- then I started finding the hidden ones. I'n self-aware enough to know that I won't be able to stop myself until I've finished them all, and I'll probably drag the rest of the family into the game as well. But I won't be first -- that honor goes to Steven Bevacqua, and he did it before the magazine had arrived in my mailbox. Bravo, Steven.

UPDATE: April 29, 2009

Only 3 puzzles left. 

Twittering Brains

Our resident cyborg passed along this amazing new development: using brainwaves to send text messages via Twitter. Now, at one level this seems almost nightmarishly trivial, using advanced brain-interface technology to allow idiots to bore us with their lives more than they do already. But consider the case of people with severe spinal damage or other conditions which prevent them from communicating by speech or sign language. A brainwave interface holds incredible potential for them -- they can Twitter, in a few years it may let them talk, it could someday even allow them to control mechanical limbs.

Space Power For Real?

Pacific Gas & Electric, the big California power utility, has contracted to buy 200 megawatts of solar power generated in space from a company called Solaren, beginning in 2016.

The idea of generating power in space isn't a new one. Peter Glaser came up with it back in 1968, and Gerard K. O'Neill and his space colonization acolytes made the construction of powersats the goal and justification for building habitats in orbit. The concept is pretty simple:  build arbitrarily large photoelectric generating panels in space, and send the power to Earth using microwave beams.

The devil is in the details:  one would need something on the order of 700,000 square meters of photovoltaic panels in orbit to generate that much power -- 140 football fields' worth. Even if it was as thin as aluminum foil, an array that size would be about 300 tons, not counting the framework, the microwave beam equipment, controls, and various space doodads and solar thingmajigs. Assume (very optimistically) a total of 400 tons for the 200 MW system.

How is Solaren going to get all that stuff up to geosynchronous orbit by 2016?  Right now the biggest heavy-lift rocket available is the Delta IV, which can put 13 tons into geosynch. Maybe one could talk the Russians into digging up some old Energia boosters, which can manage 20 tons. Either way, you're talking about 20 or 30 launches of some really huge rockets over a span of only 7 years -- and that's if the whole thing was ready to go right now. Either Solaren is going to revolutionize the space launch business, or they're going to miss their scheduled completion date.

Of course, an old-school Orion booster could put the whole shebang into orbit in one launch, but if you start using nuclear energy to solve environmental problems who knows where that might lead . . .

150-Year-Old Friday Parasites From Japan

At the delightfully cephalopodian Pink Tentacle Web log, there's a wonderful post about a Japanese work from the 1860s called Kenbikyu Mushi No Zu, which features illustrations of insects as seen through an imported microscope. Think of it as Hooke's Micrographia, but in a kimono.

...A Problem

Thirty-nine years ago today something went bang. The something was a tank of liquid oxygen aboard the Apollo 13 spacecraft, which at that moment was speeding toward the Moon with three astronauts on board. Not a time or place for bangs.

The explosion crippled the Command/Service module combination, the spaceship which was supposed to carry the crew to and from Lunar orbit. They had to take refuge aboard the Lunar Module Aquarius, a cramped vehicle with about as much interior space as a closet and walls slightly thicker than aluminum foil.

By now everyone knows the saga of how they made it back safe and alive, even managing a pinpoint landing in sight of their recovery ship. The Tom Hanks/Ron Howard film from 1995 did an excellent and fairly accurate job of depicting the mission from start to finish. NASA has lots of stuff here.

There is an amusing consequence of the Apollo 13 accident. Space Shuttle missions were originally numbered STS-Whatever, where Whatever was the sequential number of the flight. This lasted from STS-1 in 1981 through STS-9 in 1983. Then, for some mysterious reason, the system changed. Flights were lettered by their order within a given fiscal year, so you had flights 41-B, -C, -D, and -G in 1984, 51-A through -J in 1985, 61-A and so on in 1986. Then Challenger blew up and Shuttle flights halted for a year and a half. When they resumed, with no explanation given, they reverted to the old numbering with STS-26. That system continues to this day.

The bizarre "fiscal year" numbering system seems like nothing but an excuse to not have an STS-13. Now I see that one of the Constellation series of "return to the Moon" missions will have the numbering Orion-13. I will bet a roast beef po-boy sandwich that if that mission ever flies NASA will come up with some reason to renumber it.

A Scientific Feast

This is about astronomy, etymology, history, Passover, Easter, and a bunch of other stuff.

A couple of days ago, on Passover, I got to wondering if there was a connection between the Hebrew word "Pesach," meaning Passover, and the word "Paschal" referring to Easter in Church Latin and various Romance languages. Thanks to the mighty OED, I was able to determine that, yes, there is. Paschal is derived from Pesach. In the Romance languages, Easter is Passover. Indeed, in nearly every language spoken by Christians, the name for Easter is derived from Pesach. Only in our mongrel hybrid English did the feast somehow pick up the name of a minor Anglo-Saxon fertility goddess with a thing for rabbits.

Failure is in the Eye of the Beholder

Failure sells. That’s the only explanation I could come up with when I read last week’s reports on the Indo-German LOHAFEX expedition: every story I saw focused on how the iron-fertilization experiment didn’t manage to pull large amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, sequester it on the sea floor, and provide a ready-made solution to global warming. But I’ve got news for you -- just because an experiment doesn’t turn out the way you really really really hope it will doesn’t actually make it a failure. In fact, if you take the time to read through the reports posted on the expedition website, it’s clear that the scientists who designed the project thought through several logical alternative outcomes to the experiment, and the whole point was to find out which one of those hypotheses also described the real world.

So the expedition carried out a classic, if very large, perturbation experiment: they took an environment – in this case a patch of ocean in the South Atlantic, they changed one part of it – dropping a total of 20 tons of iron sulfate into the iron-poor water, and they watched and measured what happened in response for as long as they could. And because so little is known about the ecology of open ocean habitats, pretty much any data they collected that could shed light on natural interactions in these free floating communities was going to be of value.

There Goes the Sun

Has anybody found the remote for the Sun yet? Its output is now lower than it has been at any point since 1913.

The idea of the Solar cycle dates back less than 200 years, though it stems from discoveries made in the 17th century. Bear with me: Galileo started observing the Sun around 1610 and discovered sunspots. He also went blind -- don't stare at the Sun, okay?

Anyway, in the 19th century some stereotypically methodical German astronomers, Samuel Schwabe and Rudolf Wolf, began counting sunspots and analyzing their frequency. They discovered something kind of neat: sunspots go in an 11-year cycle. Every 11 years the number of sunspots drops off to nearly zero, then starts building up again.

Right now we're in the middle of an unusually long sunspot minimum. What does this mean? Well, in good news it means less heating of the upper atmosphere, less radio interference, less solar flare risk to astronauts, and in general a quieter environment in space. On the other hand, it might plunge the Earth into an ice age. Plus no auroras.

What exactly causes this cycle is not well understood. Obviously it has something to do with how the Sun's core produced energy, or how the Sun's outer layers release that energy, but as one might imagine it's hard to study the interior of a star.

In the meantime, if you do run across the remote, turn the power back on.

It All Fits Together

I may need to use all the subject tags on this one. It's got Giant Rocks From Space, DARPA mad scientists, killer robots, parasites, pirates -- oh, and it just may answer some of the Big Questions about life, the universe, and everything.

Weirdness fans may recall that last autumn a group of Somali pirates hijacked an Iranian vessel on the high seas, but then started becoming mysteriously sick. At the time, radiation sickness was suspected, but that was later ruled out.

Now a team of DARPA researchers have identified the culprit in the mystery illness: a parasite infection. Apparently the pirates (and some of the Iranian crew) show signs of a "systemic parasite infestation" similar to our old friend the Sacculina barnacle. Similar, but not identical: the pirates' infestation is an unknown type.

But that's not the weird part. The weird part is what was discovered when investigators used robots (see, I told you there'd be robots) to examine the possibly-radioactive cargo hold of the captured ship. The good news: it wasn't radioactive. The WEIRD news: the hold contained "4.1 tons of stone and iron, identified as meteoritic material from the Nubian desert."

So, to sum up: the pirates have an unknown brain-controlling parasite and a ship full of meteor fragments. It doesn't take H.G. frickin' Wells to see what this means.

They're here.