Tag Archives: JPL

Tarpinian: AltCar Expo Report

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Bill Goodwin, Greg Bear, and Howard V. Hendrix. (The image behind them is a 3D photo of a 50 mile section of Gale crater)

By John King Tarpinian: The AltCar Expo was held at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium on September 29. If you are in the market for a 100% electric BMW or a Dodge 2500 CNG pick-up this was the place to be. My little Volvo only has 26,000 miles on it so I’ll have to wait for next year when they show off the hovercrafts.

My attendance and the only reason to run the gauntlet known as Carmageddon was to hear the talk, “Mars and the Heart of Humanity: Ray Bradbury’s Million-Year Picnic.” Bill Goodwin, Greg Bear and Howard V. Hendrix each took turns talking about Mars in fiction and how it relates to reality, giving credit to Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, H.G. Wells and Edgar Rice Burroughs. It is hard to talk about Mars, in science, without mentioning these four gentlemen and their contributions to literature.

Charles Baker brought with him a $30,000 1/10th scale model of Curiosity along with a 20” diameter wheel from the sister rover that is used to test possible maneuvers here on earth before they try them on the Red Planet.

If you have seen photos of the rover you may have noticed holes in the wheels’ treads. The reason for the holes is so that sand/pebbles will “fall out” and not weigh down the rover. The original design had the openings be the letters JPL but politics got in the way. So they redesigned it with the holes. What the geeks at JPL did not mention was that the three rows on each wheel spell out JPL in Morse Code. The geeks won!!! (You can see the holes in the photo with the rover model sitting on top of the wheel.)

1/10th scale model of Curiosity Rover being held by Charles Baker.

An extra wheel for Curiosity.

Altcarmageddon

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AltCar Expo 2012, an exposition of the future of renewable energy and alternative transportation, takes place Friday and Saturday, September 28-29 at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. The event is free.

Leading sf writers and scientists will be there Saturday afternoon at 4:00 p.m. for “Mars and the Heart of Humanity: Ray Bradbury’s Million-Year Picnic,” a panel devoted to remembering Ray and discussing his favorite planet, Mars, “as it’s been imagined in the past, as it’s being discovered today and as it might eventually become.”

Appearing are Greg Bear, Hugo and Nebula award-winning author of over 40 books, including Hull Zero Three, Howard V. Hendrix, sf novelist, scholar and editor of Visions of Mars and The Mars Encyclopedia, and Charles Baker, Cruise, Entry, Decent and Landing Lead Mission Planner for JPL’s Curiosity Rover. Bradbury friend Bill Goodwin will moderate.

Of course, good luck getting there on Saturday if you’re not coming from a location west of the 405 freeway. Carmageddon II begins midnight Saturday, and for the next 48 hours they’re shutting down 10 miles of freeway on that side of LA to facilitate removal of a bridge in the Mulholland Pass.

People won’t need alternate cars that day, they’ll need alternate transporter booths.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian for the story.]

Looking for Mars?

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It’s hard to believe there’s any hoax e-mail or spam that misses my inbox, yet before today I’d read nothing about Mars looking as big as the Moon this week until I read msnbc.com today.

The orbits of Mars and Earth bring the two planets as close to each other as they ever get approximately every 26 months. Mars never looks very big, much less the size of the Moon, though it can regularly be seen glimmering in the evening sky. (Basic Marswatching info can be found at a site maintained by JPL’s Jane Houston Jones.)

According to Snopes:

[The] 2007 version of this e-mail is commonly headed by the line “Two moons on 27 August.” An amusing irony is that some parts of the world won’t even see one moon the following day, as a total lunar eclipse is slated to occur on that date.

Right now Mars is on the other side of the Sun. So this is one night you won’t need to “keep watching the skies!”

Lakes on Titan

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Yes, JPL says there are lakes on Titan, but they are lakes of a kind that would be more at home in Dante’s Inferno than here on Earth:

Scientists positively identified the presence of ethane, according to a statement from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, which manages the international Cassini spacecraft mission exploring Saturn, its rings and moons.

Liquid ethane is a component of crude oil.

Sierra Grace, Mars Rock

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Mars RocksSierra Grace visited the JPL Open House with Grandpa Steve and Grandma Anne on Sunday. When she got home I asked what was her favorite thing? My 6-year-old answered, “Playing a Mars rock.”

At the Open House, people could watch 700-pound robots glide under artificial stars in JPL’s Robodome, learn how spacecraft are prepared for their journeys in special clean rooms, and get an up-close view of full-scale models of Mars rovers. Nobody got closer than Sierra!

Sierra and other kids were invited to lay on the floor and pretend to be Mars rocks while a model rover drove over their backs showing how well the real ones handle the uneven terrain — no matter how ticklish the rocks may be.

[Thanks to Grandpa Steve for the photo!]