Science Made Cool

Space Prospectors

Crusty old space prospectors mining the asteroid belt for valuable minerals have been a staple of science fiction since the 1930s. In fiction they tended to fit the stereotype of the Klondike Gold Rush veteran: grizzled, fiercely independent, surviving in a patched-up old spaceship while searching for the one big strike that never comes.

Well, the space prospectors are here, and they're considerably more well-groomed. Planetary Resources, Incorporated is hosting a press conference today at the Museum of Flight in Seattle, where they're going to announce a new company which aims to begin mining near-Earth asteroids for valuable minerals within a decade. Among the backers are Microsoft tycoon and space tourist Charles Simonyi, X-Prize founder and serial space entrepreneur Peter Diamandis, space tycoon Eric Anderson, Google moguls Eric Schmidt and Larry Page, Titanic director James Cameron, and a number of other tech bigwigs.

These are serious people with serious money and serious expertise. If they think there's at least a sporting chance of making money on this venture, I'm inclined to belive them.

So does this mean the old science fictional stereotype will come true? Crusty old prospectors cruising the asteroids? Yes: but they'll be crusty old robots, not humans. If they do become ornery and independent-minded, things can get very interesting indeed . . .

The Ghoul Strikes Again

Back in the pioneering days of space exploration, probes launched to Mars had a shockingly high failure rate. It wasn't until the landings of the Spirit and Opportunity rovers that humans finally managed an overall 50 percent success rate. 

NASA engineers in the old days used to joke rather grimly about the "Great Galactic Ghoul" lurking in space, ready to gobble up vehicles heading for Mars.

Well, the Ghoul is still on the job. The Russian Phobos-Grunt probe (I didn't name it) suffered an engine failure in orbit. Instead of blasting off for Mars it will probably wind up dropping into an ocean somewhere.

The American Curiosity rover is set to launch in two weeks, and if it gets past the Ghoul it may be the last pesky Earth machine to bother Mars for a long time. The Administration is backing away from plans to send more missions in 2016 and 2018, and any thoughts of a manned voyage seem to be permanently on hold.

The Ghoul is winning.

Spying on the Moon

Wanna see some cool pictures? Look here. Those are photos of the surface of the Moon, taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Those squiggly lines? Those are the footprints of astronauts. The shiny blobs are Lunar descent modules and instrument packages left behind.

Next time some nitwit starts claiming that the Moon landings were faked, show her these pictures. The nitwit will of course declare them faked, but it gives you an excuse to look at photos from the Moon.

Maybe someday someone will go back. Someday . . .

The Ultimate Accolade

A pioneering geneticist has recently been awarded one of the highest honors in modern science. That's right: Gregor Mendel got a Google Doodle.

 

In other news, 42 years ago humans first left Earth bound for the Moon. Right now nobody's actively working on a return visit. Evidently six manned missions and a handful of landers have studied the Moon so completely that there's nothing new to learn.

 

 

Evolution in Action

Here's a pretty cool story from New Scientist: an experiment to get yeast cells to evolve multicellularity. To summarize an already short article, they bred up yeast cells, filtered them to separate any that remained single from those that formed clumps, bred up the clumpy ones, and repeated for hundreds generations. Hundreds of generations for yeast being a few weeks.

What they got was not just clumps but actual, specialized multicellular groups, in which some cells died off to improve the group's survival and reproduction odds. In other words, a previously single-celled variety of yeast had become a multicellular organism.

Now, the selection mechanism was entirely artificial, but nevertheless it seems clear that the jump from single-celled organisms to multicellular ones is not a hard step. It has apparently happened many times, among several different types of unrelated single-celled organisms. Other research indicates that it's not hard for cells to develop specialization rapidly.

Raising our eyes from the microscope to the radiotelescope, this has some interesting implications for astrobiology. Multicellularity is one of the potential bottlenecks preventing life on other worlds from developing into a technological civilization. This experiment seems to put that to rest. If you get life, it's not hard to get multicellular life.

The only question is, how easy is it to evolve intelligence? We're still trying to figure that out.

One Face World

The planet Gliese 581d is back in the news. It's a planet 20 light-years away, orbiting the red dwarf star Gliese 581. What makes it interesting is that Gliese 581d circles its parent star just at the outer edge of what's called the "Goldilocks zone" -- the belt in which the planet would be warm enough to have liquid water and a climate in which life might arise.

. . . Two Steps Back

The unfortunate news about the Allen Telescope array having to shut down saddens me, but not as much as it would have a week ago. That's because just a couple of days ago I discovered this: the SETI League.

The League is an all-volunteer group using actual backyard radiotelescopes to survey the skies, listening for possible radio signals from space. It's a great project, and if you're interested, toss 'em a donation. Or build your own antenna and join in. (I was tempted, but the high-tension power lines cutting across my property make this a bad location for radio astronomy.)

So the big research-class instruments aren't the only game in town. With government budgets squeezed by the demographic time bomb of retiring Baby Boomers, and charitable billionaires like Paul Allen squeezed by the tax hikes to pay for said time bomb, small and decentralized is the way to go.

Of course, radiotelescopy may be a dead end in the search for civilizations elsewhere in the Universe. Most of Earth's radio transmissions nowadays are digital, compressed, and often encrypted. They would be very hard to distinguish from random space noise if any alien radiotelescope could detect them.

BIG Space News

If you follow space-industry news, you already know about this. SpaceX, the private space-launch outfit founded by Internet billionaire Elon Musk, has unveiled their newest rocket, and it's a doozy. The Falcon Heavy can put fifty tons into orbit, for about a thousand dollars a pound. That's a lot of payload: the mighty Saturn V Moon rocket had a low-orbit payload of about 100 tons, so you could put together a pretty good manned space mission with a couple of Falcons. Or launch a small space station.

The size isn't the really big deal. The Saturn was hoisting bigger loads forty years ago and the Russian Energia can still out-lift the Falcon today. What is impressive is the cost. A thousand bucks a pound was the (entirely mythical) cost aim of the Space Shuttle program back in the 1980s. That was the threshold for "cheap access to space." At that level private groups like the Mars Society could quit lobbying Congress for NASA funding and just launch their own goddamned Mars missions.

Well, it looks like we've may have reached that point at last. The Space Age may finally be leaving its "pioneer era" and entering something more like the "airmail era" of the 1920s. Virgin Galactic just flew a spaceship to its new terminal in San Francisco and plans to operate suborbital flights from there beginning next year. For space enthusiasts, things are definitely looking up.

Taking the Pulse of Stars

The Kepler orbiting telescope has been a huge boon to planetary scientists. All by itself it's discovered more than 1,200 possible extrasolar planets, with 15 confirmed so far. But it turns out Kepler's also providing valuable data to astronomers interested in stars. The telescope's huge field of view lets it gather data from thousands of stars at once, tracking how their light brightens and dims. For some stars, this reveals the passage of planets in front of the star's disk, but for others it reveals changes in the star's energy output.

In particular, Kepler has allowed astrophysicists to track the pulsations of red giant stars as they shift from burning the last remnants of hydrogen fuel to burning helium. This is the real benefit to pure-science research. Not only do you find out what you were trying to learn, but you find out other things you hadn't expected.

MESSENGER Catches Mercury

The excruciatingly-acronymed MESSENGER Probe has finally caught up with the planet Mercury after a six-year chase involving gravity assists from Venus and Earth, and is set to enter orbit about the littlest planet* next week. While you're sitting in some Irish theme bar drinking green beer, see if you can talk the manager into turning one of the telescreens to the NASA TV channel so you can see the first images from Mercury orbit.

*Don't go there. Just don't.