Category Archives: Deep Space 770

The Moon at Midnight

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James H. Burns: I was seven, on this special evening, forty-six years ago.

I had broken my arm, just after school let out for the season, in

June. A crummy way to start the summer, certainly. But while there must have been many missed days at the beach, and elsewhere, my mind is filled now, only with the recollection of family barbecues, and reading comic books, and how good it felt, when the cast finally came off!

(Which meant somewhere, there was swimming, later in the season.)

I was a space adventure veteran, having traveled with Flash Gordon for a few years, and flown with all of those terrific super hero cartoons we got to see in New York, a boon of syndication, both American animation, and Japanese (The Marvel Super Heroes, Astroboy, Gigantor, 8th Man, Prince Planet….) Scott McCloud Space Angel was a particular favorite, a daily five minute serialized adventure about a planet hopper. I had already seen 2001: A Space Odyssey and Planet of the Apes…  (But becoming a fan of Star Trek, although I had seen bits and pieces, remained a few years off.  Now, I realize, I even saw a few moments of the original broadcasts of The Outer Limits.)

For my father, only forty-four that July, the moon landing was the fulfillment of a promise he had first heard whispered in his own childhood, as a burgeoning science fiction fan.

It was only because of him that I saw Neal Armstrong’s first steps on the moon.

I wonder now, if people remember how late in the evening the walk came, late at least for a little child, anyway, just a few minutes before 11 p.m.

My parents had promised to wake me, in time. But I was steadfast in slumber. In those days, most often I’d be dreaming with Amy, my Siamese, by my side, and Peter, one of the greatest dogs ever, by my feet. (It was only as an adult that I realized that Pete had taken it as his responsibility to protect me.) Henry and Nicky, our other cats, were surely nearby.

Apparently, the family had given up on rousing me, but my father wouldn’t give up on his word.

After all, he had also flown, with Flash and Dale (and Doctor Zarkov).

I also wonder, if folks are honest, how many people remember how tough it was, to make Armstrong out, on the lunar module’s ladder, at least from the perspective of a nineteen inch TV…..

I won’t write now of the sadness that the cancellation of our manned space program presented. (Heck, maybe I’ve written about that enough, including here and here.

Today should always be about a celebration of what can be, when imagination, intelligence and determination are magnificently combined toward a  goal of worth, and grace.

Centuries from now, the time that passed between our trips to the moon may well seem like the blink of an eye. And this night — that night, on July 20th, 1969 — will always be the beginning.

For years now, on evenings that are illuminated, I’ll look up at our moon, wondering what it would have been like, living there, gazing at an Earth that would have had to have been different.

And I smile, knowing that if not now, sometime soon, someone else will be smiling back.

Burstein Remembers Planet Pluto

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Michael A. Burstein was interviewed for a piece by Lyndsey Layton and Elizabeth Koh in the July 15 Washington Post — “One of today’s great generation gaps: Whether you think Pluto is a planet”.

Described as “a science writer and former teacher,” Burstein was quoted for his role as co-founder (with his wife Nomi) of the Society for the Preservation of Pluto as a Planet, and he talked about how Pluto should be a planet again.

“It’s more an emotional argument,” said Michael A. Burstein…. “Up until now, Pluto was the only planet discovered by an American astronomer, the only planet discovered in the 20th century and generations have learned about nine planets. It seemed abrupt that we would downgrade it.”

[Thanks to Martin Morse Wooster for the story.]

Close Enough To Kiss Pluto

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The New Horizons probe made its closest approach to Pluto on Tuesday morning, carrying the ashes of the man who discovered the dwarf planet, along with spectrometers to analyze Pluto’s surface, and one telescopic camera taking so many pictures it will be more than a year before NASA receives them all.

“Perihadean Achieved” was Steven H Silver’s headline at SF Site News. Silver, a true Pluto aficionado, uses as his Facebook profile picture a 1980 snapshot of him standing with Pluto discoverer Clyde Tombaugh, whom he corresponded with for two years before meeting.

A New Horizons tribute video has been assembled by NPR from images returned by the probe. The words that accompany the video come from Ray Bradbury, who read his poem “If Only We Had Taller Been” at a celebration of a NASA mission to Mars in 1971.

“With all the data collection on the menu (and the incredibly slow download rate), NASA estimates that New Horizons will be sending home the data it collects on Tuesday for the next 16 months,” says the Washington Post.

On NASA’s Facebook page someone asked the New Horizons team if they expect to find more moons around Pluto. The answer is —

I think most people on the NH team were expecting we’d find a small moon or two. We haven’t seen any yet, but there is a lot of data that still needs to come down

And the mission isn’t done yet:

New Horizons To Make Closest Pluto Approach 7/14

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nh-surfaceWhat will the Pluto probe find tomorrow?

Probably not this —

life on pluto

Probably not this either —

Ski Pluto

In less than 13 hours New Horizons will make its closest approach to Pluto, continuing all the while to reclassify science fiction stories as fantasy.

Follow the probe’s activities on the JPL’s New Horizons site or NASA’s New Horizons site.

Here’s a sample of New Horizons’ latest findings – accurate measurements of Pluto and Charon:

This graphic presents a view of Pluto and Charon as they would appear if placed slightly above Earth’s surface and viewed from a great distance.  Recent measurements obtained by New Horizons indicate that Pluto has a diameter of 2370 km, 18.5% that of Earth’s, while Charon has a diameter of 1208 km, 9.5% that of Earth’s.

nh-pluto-charon-earth-size

Pluto, Before and After New Horizons

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CRIRES model-based computer-generated impression of the Plutonian surface, with atmospheric haze, and Charon and the Sun in the sky.

CRIRES model-based computer-generated impression of the Plutonian surface, with atmospheric haze, and Charon and the Sun in the sky.

Gregory Benford reviews science fiction’s most imaginative uses of Pluto for Smithsonian’s Air & Space, and explains how the New Horizons mission will affect future science.

This is the last planet we’ll see up close for the first time—at least until we can send starships to other suns. We can expect, when New Horizons’ flies past Pluto, some confirmations of our many theoretical models. Far more important, we can expect surprises. First will come fresh pictures. Then will come streams of data about the fields and particles surrounding the planet. From that we can fashion a deeper understanding of this small, dim, world.

What we learn will apply not just to Pluto and our own solar system. Soon we’ll have many more to deal with. The Kepler spacecraft and other telescopes have found more than a thousand solar systems around distant stars. To puzzle out how they form, understanding our own is essential. Only by such comparisons can we learn whether life is widespread in our galaxy.

Space Brain – Fact or Myth?

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By the time astronauts reach Mars will they forget why they are there?

A recent study argues radiation exposure en route to Mars may cause the mission crew to develop brain damage.

“What happens to your brain on the way to Mars”, a paper in Science Advance, by a group of radiation researchers, reports memory loss to mice caused by administering very large doses of galactic cosmic ray (GCR)-like high-energy radiation. They contend that long-term galactic cosmic ray exposure leads to dementia-like cognitive impairments, with serious implications for human Mars explorers.

The lead author of the study, Charles Limoli of the University of California Irvine, adds in a university press release:

The researchers found that exposure to these particles resulted in brain inflammation, which disrupted the transmission of signals among neurons. Imaging revealed how the brain’s communication network was impaired through reductions in the structure of nerve cells called dendrites and spines. Additional synaptic alterations in combination with the structural changes interfered with the capability of nerve cells to efficiently transmit electrochemical signals. Furthermore, these differences were parallel to decreased performance on behavioral tasks designed to test learning and memory.

However, Mars mission crusader Robert Zubrin challenges several components of the study in “Debunking the invalid claims of a space radiation paper” in The Space Review.

The four-millionfold difference in dose rate between the lab study and spaceflight is of critical importance. It is a well-known finding of both chemical and radiation toxicology that the effects of large doses of toxins delivered suddenly is entirely different from the effect of the same amount of toxin delivered in very small amounts over a long period of time. The difference is that the body’s self-repair systems cannot deal with a sudden dose, but can easily manage the same dose if received over an extended period. For example, if an individual were to drink one shot of vodka per second for 100 seconds, he would die. But if the same person drank one shot of vodka a month for 100 months, he would experience no ill effects at all. This is about the same ratio of dose rates as that separates the invalid work reported in the paper (1.6 rad per second) from what astronauts would actually experience in space (1 rad per month.)

It is shocking that the authors neglected to caveat the significance of their results by admitting these differences. Not only that, they kept the information about actual dose rates employed buried deep within the paper (it can be found in the middle of a text paragraph towards the end entitled “Animals, heavy ion irradiation, and tissue harvesting”), thereby allowing it to easily be missed by popular science writers duped into reporting the allegedly sensational implications of their irrelevant work.

But one commenter on the article asked, if the study is as bad as Dr. Zubrin states, why did NASA recently give these researchers $9 million to follow up on their work?

[Thanks to Martin Morse Wooster for the story.]

Worden Steps Down as Ames Research Center Director

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Simon “Pete” Worden, director of NASA’s Ames Research Center, has announced he is retiring.

Worden funded Gregory and Jim Benfords’ Starship Century book and conference, together with UCSD.

He spent the last nine years at Ames and during that time, he told Space News –

We have launched dozens of small, low-cost satellites – and helped ignite a major new industry in this area. Ames people have revitalized space biology and begun to apply the new field of synthetic biology…. Ames has provided entry technology for the emerging commercial space launch sector. We have helped launch small satellites working with a number of nations. And we’ve hosted and inspired thousands of students.

He said he plans to ““to pursue some long-held dreams in the private sector.”

Free Read: Dead Media Ebook

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All the posts from Bruce Sterling’s Dead Media project of 20 years ago have been collected and released as a free 921-page ebook.

Back in 1995 Sterling offered a “crisp fifty-dollar bill” to the first person to write and publish a project he and Richard Kadrey had dreamed up — a handbook “about media that have died on the barbed wire of technological advance, media that didn’t make it, martyred media, dead media…”

Such as: the phenakistoscope. The teleharmonium. The Edison wax cylinder. The stereopticon. The Panorama. Early 20th century electric searchlight spectacles. Morton Heilig’s early virtual reality. Telefon Hirmondo. The various species of magic lantern. The pneumatic transfer tubes that once riddled the underground of Chicago. Was the Antikythera Device a medium? How about the Big Character Poster Democracy Wall in Peking in the early 80s?

But somebody else would have to do it, explained Sterling, because “[we], after all, are just science fiction writers who spend most of our time watching Chinese videos, reading fanzines and making up weird crap.”

When nobody stepped forward (big surprise) Sterling appealed for help collecting stories and notes about dead media. These were hosted at Deadmedia.org and eFanzines’ Bill Burns was one of the participants. Burns described an example of dead media in USA Today’s 1997 story about the website:

The notes illustrate something often lost in today’s relentless barrage of technological hype: Innovations that were once the latest and greatest can vanish without a trace.

Who remembers the Regina players that once filled homes, bars and hotels with music? A cross between a record player and a music box, they were 20-inch metal disks that interacted with tiny sprockets that in turn twanged small tone bars. The players required no electricity, merely a good strong arm to crank them up.

“They lasted from the 1890s to about 1912,” says Bill Burns, an engineer on Long Island who collects them. “All the popular tunes of the day came out on these stamped steel or zinc disks. It was an entire industry.” Gone without a ripple, in the wake of the phonograph.

Download the book free at Amazon and at itunes.

[Thanks to Bill Burns for the story.]