The Darkest Place

The European Space Agency has for about a decade researched the concept of a "hyper telescope," under the name Exo Earth Imager. EEI would be a fleet of 150 orbital 3-meter mirrors, spread across about 8,000 square kilometers of space, and synchronized to reflect and magnify the image of an earth-sized planet in orbit around a distant star, with high enough resolution to discern oceans, continents, forests, deserts and even major river basins. Maintaining the mirrors in their relative orbits with the level of precision needed would be challenging at least. Not insurmountably so, but certainly not trivial.

A possible solution for this is to instead mount the mirrors on a fixed surface. There have already been proposals for building large telescopes on the far side of the moon, shielded from terrestrial radio interference. NASA has even demonstrated that large astronomy-grade mirrors can be constructed in-situ from lunar regolith. A telescope of this scale would have many applications and purposes besides viewing exoplanets, but this would be its primary purpose.

I would like to propose that instead of the lunar far-side, a better location for an optical (and maybe radio as well) telescope would be inside the basin of Peary crater. I've discussed the unique properties of Peary in this blog previously, in the context of human colonization. But briefly, Peary crater, by virtue of being situated on the north pole, has the triple virtue of a basin which is constantly in darkness and protected from solar radiation, a rim that is in constant sunlight for solar power, and a substantial amount of water ice on the floor of the basin. Shackleton crater on the lunar south pole is similar in many respects, and would similarly be an excellent site for this; however Peary is about 80 km in diameter and Shackleton is only about 20 km, so Peary would afford space for a much larger telescope.

Because the basin is always "aimed" at the moon's northern sky, and the same part of the sky is always visible throughout the month and throughout the year, very detailed long-term observations could be made unhindered of this part of the sky. Yes it would be limited to only this part of the sky; however, many space-based telescopes, including NASA's Kepler Space Telescope, have similarly limited fields of view.

And yes, a small astronomical observation outpost and research facility could provide the seed of a human colony in Peary crater as well. In later posts we'll be discussing the advantages of establishing a lunar colony over either Mars, Venus or orbital stations; a moon-based space telescope (at whatever location) could be a very good beginning to a robust lunar city.

Bespin

This is HAVOC, NASA's new proposal for utilizing lighter than air craft to explore and colonize Venus. This is an enormous paradigm shift for them. For years the common wisdom has been that Venus was utterly uninhabitable, with surface atmospheric pressures 92 times that of earth (about the equivalent of one kilometer under water on earth), and surface temperatures above 500° C. But of course, if we were to explore an earth-analog planet with oceans like ours, we would probably not begin exploring that at one kilometer down, either. By the simple physics of adiabatic lapse rate (the higher you go in the atmosphere, the colder and less dense it becomes), at some altitude above the surface of Venus the atmosphere is of terrestrial densities and temperatures. There are issues; sulfuric acid, for example, falls as rain there. But life support in this environment would be trivial compared to the Martian surface.

The transit times for a mission to the atmosphere of Venus and back to earth are much, much less than for trip to and from the surface of Mars. The Delta V budget to the Venusian atmosphere is higher than a landing on Mars (25 km/sec vs 19 km/sec), but this penalty may well be outweighed by the smaller amount of hardware needed to survive above Venus. This has very, very serious potential to be the first human exploration and colonization of another planet.

Ice Castles

Apparently this is still so classified that it cannot be read by a blogspot embed code, but the URL here is good.
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This is a previously classified video about the US Army's nuclear powered under-ice facility in Greenland, called Camp Century. It didn't work very well, because the Greenland ice sheets were far more mobile than had been previously understood. But the techniques used here could be adapted to Ceres, Europa, or Enceladus. Note however the enormous logistics that were required to make this happen.
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www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ujx_pND9wg

America's Second Space Station

Part of the new NASA SLS/Orion program is a new space station at the Earth/Moon L-2 Langrangian orbit, literally beyond the far side of the moon. It is called Skylab II. Like the original Skylab concept, it is built out of the liquid hydrogen tanks of a single SLS launch, as opposed to the ten years and 115 flights required to build the ISS. With this same technology NASA will be able to quickly (and relatively cheaply) deploy space stations with more living area than the ISS, basically anywhere in the solar system. Charlie Bolden's master plan is starting to emerge here. It's actually kind of brilliant. And it's starting to look a helluva lot like Wernher von Braun's.

By naming this "Skylab II" I think NASA is implicitly acknowledging that the International Space Station is and always was mostly a Russian endeavor, more "Mir II" than "Freedom," more "Beta" than "Alpha." This isn't a bad thing; were it not for the Russians and Roscosmos right now, we would not have any human presence in space at all, and the ISS would be just an empty and decaying shell of space junk, if it had ever existed at all. But I am very happy to see the US back in the game.

NASA administrator Charlie Bolden, pilot of the space shuttles Columbia and Discovery, and commander of the space shuttles Atlantis and Discovery, seems to be shifting NASA's narrative away from the space shuttle and ISS, and toward SLS/Orion as a continuation of the Saturn V/Apollo program. It isn't a bad narrative. When the SLS program was first announced, it looked a lot like a Saturn V + spare space shuttle solid boosters + a rebuilt Apollo space capsule + a lot of duct tape. It looked like we were planning to go to Mars on a rocket built out of spare parts. But SLS/Orion has evolved a great deal since then, both as an actual spacecraft and as a concept, and as the cornerstone of a new, rather bold space exploration program. I wasn't a huge fan of the Ares/Constellation program, not for any technical reason, but because I wanted to see NASA's budget spent more on unmanned probes deeper into space. The Mars landers and rovers have changed my opinion on this. From Viking to Curiosity they have performed amazing science. But realistically, all of the science performed on Mars combined since 1976 could have been accomplished by one reasonably bright human in one reasonably productive afternoon. It's time to get boots on the ground. SLS/Orion is going to make that possible, soon. Charlie Bolden's "rocket to everywhere" is rapidly becoming a very fine piece of hardware, indeed.

Warp Drive. For real.

If you've ever read the book The Physics of Star Trek by Lawrence M Krauss (and if you haven't, you should!), you already know that in 1994 physicist Miguel Alcubierre proved that a Star Trek-like warp drive was theoretically possible, but would require an insane amount of energy. Interesting, but not altogether useful.

It seems that a solution to this has been found which makes the power requirements for a functional warp drive reasonable and plausible.

The article below, from Space.Com, is poorly organized and disjointed, and appears to have been cut and pasted from a longer press release. Nonetheless, it gives the general sense of the discovery.

If in fact we have the ability to build a drivetrain which propels vessels at speeds which are functionally greater than the speed of light but physically lower than 5% of the speed of light, then interstellar travel is genuinely within our grasp. This research is still in its infancy. But it is the first real indication I've ever seen that we could ever attain supralight transport.

If we can, presumably others can as well. This potentially has enormous ramifications for the Fermi Paradox. Even without supralight drivetrains, the apparent absence of technologically capable extraterrestrial species here on earth is statistically suspect. If warp drive or other technologies can provide feasible faster-than-light travel, the plausibility that we have not been contacted by other worlds becomes vanishingly slim.

Anyway, here's the article from Space.com. ==========================================

SPACE.COM — A warp drive to achieve faster-than-light travel — a concept popularized in television's Star Trek — may not be as unrealistic as once thought, scientists say.

A warp drive would manipulate space-time itself to move a starship, taking advantage of a loophole in the laws of physics that prevent anything from moving faster than light. A concept for a real-life warp drive was suggested in 1994 by Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre; however, subsequent calculations found that such a device would require prohibitive amounts of energy.

Now physicists say that adjustments can be made to the proposed warp drive that would enable it to run on significantly less energy, potentially bringing the idea back from the realm of science fiction into science.

An Alcubierre warp drive would involve a football-shape spacecraft attached to a large ring encircling it. This ring, potentially made of exotic matter, would cause space-time to warp around the starship, creating a region of contracted space in front of it and expanded space behind.

Meanwhile, the starship itself would stay inside a bubble of flat space-time that wasn't being warped at all.

"Everything within space is restricted by the speed of light," explained Richard Obousy, president of Icarus Interstellar, a non-profit group of scientists and engineers devoted to pursuing interstellar spaceflight. "But the really cool thing is space-time, the fabric of space, is not limited by the speed of light."

With this concept, the spacecraft would be able to achieve an effective speed of about 10 times the speed of light, all without breaking the cosmic speed limit.

The only problem is, previous studies estimated the warp drive would require a minimum amount of energy about equal to the mass-energy of the planet Jupiter.

But recently White calculated what would happen if the shape of the ring encircling the spacecraft was adjusted into more of a rounded donut, as opposed to a flat ring. He found in that case, the warp drive could be powered by a mass about the size of a spacecraft like the Voyager 1 probe NASA launched in 1977.

Furthermore, if the intensity of the space warps can be oscillated over time, the energy required is reduced even more, White found.

"The findings I presented today change it from impractical to plausible and worth further investigation," White told SPACE.com. "The additional energy reduction realized by oscillating the bubble intensity is an interesting conjecture that we will enjoy looking at in the lab."

White and his colleagues have begun experimenting with a mini version of the warp drive in their laboratory.

They set up what they call the White-Juday Warp Field Interferometer at the Johnson Space Center, essentially creating a laser interferometer that instigates micro versions of space-time warps.

"We're trying to see if we can generate a very tiny instance of this in a tabletop experiment, to try to perturb space-time by one part in 10 million," White said.

He called the project a "humble experiment" compared to what would be needed for a real warp drive, but said it represents a promising first step.

And other scientists stressed that even outlandish-sounding ideas, such as the warp drive, need to be considered if humanity is serious about traveling to other stars.

"If we're ever going to become a true spacefaring civilization, we're going to have to think outside the box a little bit, we're going to have to be a little bit audacious," Obousy said.

New SLS video

New video update for NASA's new Space Launch System.

So, for those folk who are just tuning in, a quick recap. NASA is in the process of building the largest and most powerful rocket of all time, which will take human explorers deeper into space than has ever been previously attempted. SLS will take humans to the nearest asteroids, possibly back to the moon, and eventually to Mars. It will be fully flight-ready by 2021, its first uncrewed test flight is scheduled for 2017.

Oh, and NASA is doing all of this with no budget, cannibalizing spare parts from the space shuttles, the Saturn V and the Orion space capsule which was already being designed for the Constellation project, before it got the budgetary axe.

Yes, Virginia, NASA is going to Mars on a rocket built out of bench-spares. More significant is the fact that nearly two years into this project, and nobody outside of the space industry and folks who follow space blogs like this one have any idea that this is happening.

On the one hand, good on NASA for not wasting lots of taxpayer dollars on advertising. But, really? Look at this video. It's not bad. It's fairly informative, even. But it looks like a low-budget shareholder's promo for some second-tier airplane manufacturer. If NASA were churning out videos like this every month or so it would be less surprising, but I think this is the first SLS promo since the original one back in early 2011.

It's not just that the general public isn't enthusiastic about SLS, if they're even aware of it. NASA itself seems pretty luke-warm on the project. This is understandable, it was foisted upon them by a congress who not only didn't have any answers, didn't even comprehend the questions being asked them. And even if they come in on time and under budget (which, so far, seems quite possible), Elon Musk and SpaceX, with the help of NASA subsidies, will probably land humans on Mars before SLS can. So I can understand why NASA might not be pouring their hearts and souls into this project.

But, in spite of all this, I think SLS will be a pretty good platform, at a pretty good price, and I think it will be a real work-horse for inner solar system exploration. The aircraft company who always dreamed of designing the Concorde is instead building a Boeing 737. Of the two, the 737 was arguably the better aircraft, but it was far less sexy. The SLS is about as un-sexy as a spacecraft could possibly be. But it's going to get the job done, better than much of its competition.

NASA, be proud of the work you're doing with SLS. You have a good, solid, robust platform here which will take us to Mars, and possibly beyond. That's not a small thing.

It ain't love. But it ain't bad.

A still more glorious Dawn awaits

The ion-powered Dawn spacecraft is about to leave its orbit of the asteroid Vesta, and begin it's mission to the minor planet Ceres. This has been buried in this week's news cycle, but it's really important. Depending on what Dawn finds, Ceres may rocket to the top of the list of candidates for human colonization. Larger than Enceladus but smaller than Europa, Ceres also seems to have a rocky core surrounded by liquid water covered with ice. It lacks the massive radiation from Jupiter that bombards Europa, and is much closer to Earth than either Europa or Enceladus; close enough even for current solar power cells to function. And unlike our moon or Mars, there is plenty, plenty of water.

It will take almost three years for Dawn to reach Ceres. Stay tuned, it may well prove worth the wait.

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PASADENA, Calif. – NASA's Dawn spacecraft is on track to become the first probe to orbit and study two distant solar system destinations, to help scientists answer questions about the formation of our solar system. The spacecraft is scheduled to leave the giant asteroid Vesta on Sept. 4 PDT (Sept. 5 EDT) to start its two-and-a-half-year journey to the dwarf planet Ceres.

Dawn began its 3-billion-mile (5-billion kilometer) odyssey to explore the two most massive objects in the main asteroid belt in 2007. Dawn arrived at Vesta in July 2011 and will reach Ceres in early 2015. Dawn's targets represent two icons of the asteroid belt that have been witness to much of our solar system's history.

To make its escape from Vesta, the spacecraft will spiral away as gently as it arrived, using a special, hyper-efficient system called ion propulsion. Dawn's ion propulsion system uses electricity to ionize xenon to generate thrust. The 12-inch-wide ion thrusters provide less power than conventional engines, but can maintain thrust for months at a time.

"Thrust is engaged, and we are now climbing away from Vesta atop a blue-green pillar of xenon ions," said Marc Rayman, Dawn's chief engineer and mission director, at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "We are feeling somewhat wistful about concluding a fantastically productive and exciting exploration of Vesta, but now have our sights set on dwarf planet Ceres.

Dawn's orbit provided close-up views of Vesta, revealing unprecedented detail about the giant asteroid. The mission revealed that Vesta completely melted in the past, forming a layered body with an iron core. The spacecraft also revealed the scarring from titanic collisions Vesta suffered in its southern hemisphere, surviving not one but two colossal impacts in the last two billion years. Without Dawn, scientists would not have known about the dramatic troughs sculpted around Vesta, which are ripples from the two south polar impacts.

"We went to Vesta to fill in the blanks of our knowledge about the early history of our solar system," said Christopher Russell, Dawn's principal investigator, based at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). "Dawn has filled in those pages, and more, revealing to us how special Vesta is as a survivor from the earliest days of the solar system. We can now say with certainty that Vesta resembles a small planet more closely than a typical asteroid."

The mission to Vesta and Ceres is managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., for the agency's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Dawn is a project of the directorate's Discovery Program, which is managed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.

UCLA is responsible for the overall Dawn mission science. Orbital Sciences Corp. of Dulles, Va., designed and built the spacecraft. The German Aerospace Center, the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, the Italian Space Agency and the Italian National Astrophysical Institute are part of the mission's team. The California Institute of Technology in Pasadena manages JPL for NASA.

For more information about Dawn, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/dawn and http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov .

Neil Alden Armstrong, 1930 - 2012

It is an unavoidable reality of my (excellent) maritime employment that at certain times of year my posts to this blog are rather sparse. Ironically, due in part to this, it happens that the title of my last post was a direct paraphrase of the words of Neil Armstrong, who passed away today at the age of 82.

On July 20th of 1969, at 20:17:39 GMT (they didn't call it UTC back then), Neil Armstrong became the first human being to set foot on another world. Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin spent only two and a half hours exploring the moon's surface outside the Lunar Module, and then returned to an earth forever changed by them.

I was five years old when Armstrong took his "one small step for man". He was my hero. He still is.

One small step for robot

This is one of the first images sent back from Mars by the rover Curiosity. It is the rover's own shadow. Much more to come.

Countdown to Touchdown

Conan the Bacterium

A couple of months ago I wrote a post entitled "Dune Buggies", about possible microbial life on Mars, and the unlikelihood that such could in any way interact with terrestrial organisms, or vice versa. It turns out, I was not quite correct.

In that post I wrote that "The average surface temperature on Mars is -63° C (-81° F). Rarely, at the equator, temperatures at the very surface reach 20° C (68° F), but even then the temperatures just a few inches above that are sub-arctic. Average barometric pressure on earth is 1013 millibars. Average barometric pressure on Mars is about 6 millibars, which is less than the inside of an early vacuum tube. Martian atmosphere is 95% carbon dioxide, with 210 ppm water vapor. Earth's atmosphere is 78% nitrogen and 21% oxygen, with about 25,000 ppm water vapor at the surface." All of this is true. The implication was that any organism which lived comfortably inside a human being could not possibly survive in that environment.

I was wrong. Meet Deinococcus radiodurans.

It is highly resistant to radiation, dehydration, heat, cold, vacuum, and acid. It can survive being nuked so well that scientists have experimented with encoding information into is DNA to survive a nuclear holocaust (starting, ironically, with Disney's song It's a Small World). In other words, it would survive just fine on the surface of Mars.

Oh, and it lives in our poop.

Polyextremophiles such as D radiodurans could in fact cross-contaminate between terrestrial and martian ecosystems. And this, Houston, could be a problem.

Mars One, Take Two

So, I've had a couple days for the Mars One announcement to percolate in my brain a bit. Here are some thoughts, in no particular order:

About a year ago I posted here about possible motivations for humans to establish a permanent colony on Mars. I have to admit, "reality tv show" never entered my mind, but it may prove to be the single best commercial incentive we have right now to colonize off-world. And they're planning to land boots on Mars over a decade earlier than NASA could. So, tentatively, I'm supporting this.

However, there is a cynical part of me which does not believe that the viewers who boosted RuPaul's Drag Race to the top will have the same enthusiasm for 20+ years of the same four astronauts in the same tiny habitat squabbling over who gets the last grape Tang until the next cargo ship arrives. Certainly it will be the greatest achievement of exploration in the history of our species, but will it actually be interesting to watch? The first launch and first landing will be, for sure. But attentions wane rather quickly.

Remember all the excitement of the Apollo 16 mission? Yeah, neither do I. NASA TV also played with having live cams on the International Space Station. Really, there are only so many ways you can videotape a weightless astronaut drinking a bubble of water through a straw before the novelty and charm wear off. Mars won't even have that going for it.

What about emotional and interpersonal conflicts? Here is a serious dilemma for the show's producers. The types of personalities which will be necessary for the mission to be successful, especially the initial four colonists, are going to be type of consummate professionals who aren't going to permit a lot of personal drama. Great for the mission, lousy for the ratings. Other people's cabin-fever isn't especially interesting to watch either, unless it's directed by Stanley Kubrick.

What about relationship conflicts? Those are always fun to watch. The first issue here is gender division. From the standpoint of entertainment, two males and two females has obvious appeal, for about a month. By which point all of the possible combinations of tabs A and slots B will have been explored, and by the end of the sixth month or so everyone will be settled down like old married folk. Great for a new colony, lousy for ratings. A new shipment every 26 months of "fresh meat" probably helps, but Hohmann transfer orbits don't coincide especially well with Sweeps Week.

But, there's a problem even with this. As NASA has been discovering with the ISS, males are not well adapted to space travel. It is unclear why certain low-gravity ailments such as papilledema affect men and not women, but nonetheless they seem to, and having half your crew arrive on Mars permanently blind would be disastrous. So, hopefully, they will be smart enough to send all-female crews. Which will probably garner a rather different viewership, but that's what it is. The other advantage of an all-female crew, from the standpoint of establishing a permanent colony, is that twice the number of uteri doubles the number of potential native colonists. It may well be that the first men on Mars will be born there. And will have two mommies.

Probably more interesting from a viewer's standpoint than the day-to-day rigors of colonization itself will be the selection and training process for the colonists while still on earth. Even if they start out with one hundred candidates, only four can be selected. That has potential for some real entertainment. But once they get to Mars, nobody gets to vote anyone else out of the habitat. We hope.

This raises another question which bears consideration. When interest in the show wanes and the ratings fail and the money runs out, what happens to the colonists? Do they then become the wards of NASA to continue providing supply ships to them indefinitely? Assuming that the colony otherwise thrives, it will only be a few seasons before it is far too large to bring back to earth quickly. Food production will of course be a priority, but it is almost inconceivable that the first generation or two of Martian horticulture will be able to keep up with population growth, so food will need to be supplemented from earth on a pretty regular basis. Assuming four new colonists from earth every 26 months, and only one new baby born on Mars each year, eleven years after the initial four astronauts land on Mars the colony will be 35 people strong. That's a respectable start. But it's also an awful lot of mouths to feed on a world which cannot support terrestrial plants and animals.

Manufactured goods will also need to be imported from earth, at least at first. I don't know what the manufacturing facilities look like to make a single space suit, but I'll bet it's more than can be carried by any existing rocket, or easily fabricated out of Mars rocks.

The Mars to Stay concept has been around for a long time now, and I've always been a fan of it. However, there is at least one aspect of the Mars One method of achieving this which I find pretty amusing. I call it the crappy-camper syndrome, and Mars One exemplifies it.

Let' say I wanted to go camping on the Oregon coast with three of my friends. There are a number of ways we could accomplish that. First off, we could hike there with little or no provisions, choosing instead to wildcraft and live off the land. Easy enough to do, on the western slope of the Cascade Mountains. Or, we could backpack a little bit heavier, bring freeze-dried food and small tents with us. Or, we could pack up our car with food and a bigger tent, and pitch the tent at a campground and cook the food we brought on a camp stove. Or, we could park a camper with all of the amenities of home at the campsite, and just day-hike around a little bit (and annoy the hell out of the other campers with our generator). Or, if the camper with the hot running water and the refrigerator and the wifi and the satellite tv was still too much like roughing it, we could just find a Motel 6.

This is the Mars One method. First they're going to send robots to build the motel, and the telecommunications infrastructure so that there's always a good television feed, and massive solar panels to ensure that there's plenty of power for everything. Cargo ships full of stores will be there already waiting for the the colonists. Once the colonists finally arrive, the robots which are not actively involved in building more infrastructure can be used as dune-buggies. In addition to lower gravity, each of the beds in the colony will have a coin-operated vibration function, to help the colonists relax.

Okay, I just made up that last part. But you get the idea. Mars One is based out of Holland, and it's hard to imagine a Dutch company settling another planet any other way. And who better than the Dutch to attempt such a thing? Exploration for profit is one of the things they've always done best.

One way Mars One differs from other Mars settlement projects is that there is less need for mission specialists, because so far as I can tell there isn't really any mission at all, other than set up a colony and survive, and get good ratings. A few skill sets will be essential. Contrary to the belief of certain writers who have never landed an aircraft of docked a large boat or ship, one of each crew will need to be a very skilled pilot to be able to safely land at the prepared site. This isn't a job which can be relegated to the autopilot.

Also, one of the original four will need to be a physician (probably specializing in in-vitro fertilization and midwifery or obstetrics, but also low gravity issues and sub-Armstrong limit atmospheric exposure accidents). One advantage of the Mars to Stay approach is that although the colonists bone and muscle tissue will atrophy under the weaker Martian gravity, this won't matter because they won't ever be returning to earth. Another member of the original crew will need to be a very competent engineer to ensure everything keeps running properly. Everyone on all of the crews will need to be trained in horticulture and husbandry. Hopefully they'll get some scientists along the way as well, but that doesn't really seem to be the point of this exercise.

So what exactly is the point of the exercise? Mostly, so far as I can tell, entertainment. Which may be as good a reason as any to go to a planet which otherwise doesn't have all that much to offer. Absent the impetus of a Cold War, maybe this is what it takes to start colonizing offworld. While this certainly does not paint a flattering picture of our global priorities in this early part of the 21st century, it does seem to paint a fairly accurate one.

I had originally planned to title this post Dutch Lesbians on Mars and Other Stories, but I don't want international copyright laws to deprive the good people at Mars One of an awesome title for their show. So, Mars One, this is my gift to you. Godspeed, and goddess bless.

Mars One

This is a promotional video from a company calling itself Mars One. They plan to start a human colony on Mars, with the first colonists arriving there in April of 2023. Less than eleven years from now. They will start with four colonists, and then add four more colonists every two years. Really.

Oh, and it's going to be a reality tv show.

More on SLS

This is a pretty good infographic from Space.com about NASA's new Space Launch System (SLS). I've read a lot of criticisms of the SLS lately, and some of the criticisms certainly have some merit; these are the perils of a space program which is at the mercy of an utterly dysfunctional Congress. However, I think that as this comes together, NASA is going to have a very good and functional platform here.
Source: SPACE.com: All about our solar system, outer space and exploration

Gold Rush

Two press releases from two different commercial ventures today, each announcing projects to mine for platinum and other minerals in space.

Seattle's own Planetary Resources debuted its program to mine near-earth asteroids for platinum and a water, and Moon Express in California unveiled their plan to mine the moon for the same things.

A while back I wrote about different scenarios which could lead to permanent colonization of other worlds within our solar system. At the time I specifically discounted off-world mining as a major motivator.

From December 13, 2010: "Mineral or other wealth has always been a strong motivator, but there's no reason to imagine that we'll experience a Lunar or Martian Gold-Rush anytime soon. Mars has plenty of iron, but so does earth, and earth's iron deposits are a lot closer."

So much for my powers of prognostication!

The rationale is that there are some single asteroids with more accessible platinum than all the platinum on the surface of the earth combined. My first thought on this is, if this works, I'm really glad I never invested in platinum. I'm just old enough to remember when amethyst was considered a precious gemstone, before the massive deposits were fund in Brazil. Now kids can buy fist-sized chunks of it in science-center gift shops with their baby-sitting money. If these commercial operations are successful, platinum could similarly cease to be a precious metal. But it might make a nice building material.

Will be posting much more about this, soon.

Dune Buggies

Possible nanobacteria embedded in Martian meteorite

There are in this world a small number of very fortunate people who are able to make an honest and decent living by writing blogs. Good on them, that's an impressive accomplishment. I, on the other hand, have never made a dime writing this blog. Which is fine; this is a hobby for me, and I make my living in other ways which I love and which I think are at least as cool as blogging. However, one of the realities of the fact that I am gainfully employed in the maritime industry is that 1) there are occasionally longish gaps in this blog, some of which occur at times that I might otherwise want to contribute to it and 2) sometimes when I finally am in front of a computer I am unable to find links to news articles and other things which occurred when I did not have access to the internet.

As a rule I try to source anything I post here which I myself do not write. Due to the aforementioned, with apologies, this won't be one of those times.

So. Somewhere in the past week, I saw an article (believe it or not, I don't think it was Fox News this time) discussing the current NASA budget. Specifically it was discussing the fact that prior to landing humans on Mars, we want a robot probe to bring a sample of Martian soil back to earth to analyze for possible microbial life.

This much is essentially true.

However, the article then went on to state that the reason for this is that NASA is concerned that martian microbes might bear disease which could infect human explorers.

Oh dear.

I am, for the record, not a biologist, so perhaps my understanding of such things is too limited. But it seems to me rather unlikely that an organism which has evolved over millions of years to thrive on a parched, frozen and nearly airless world would find the warm, wet interior of a human body a very hospitable place.

On earth, disease organisms tend to be very host-species specific, and co-evolutionary with their hosts. There are a few diseases such as rabies which are transmissible between different mammals, and still fewer diseases which are transmissible between endothermic vertebrates (such as avian influenza). But this is not the general rule. Veterinarians do not need to be nearly so cautious about fluid-borne pathogens as their human-medicine counterparts, for this very reason.

Even more rare on earth are pathogens which are not transmitted by other organisms, but rather directly from the environment. Amoebic dysentery is an example of this, where a prokaryote which thrives in warm, still water also happens to thrive, unsurprisingly, in the human body. Trichophyton (athlete's foot, ringworm etc) and other fungal infections also require warm, wet environments.

Similarly, on earth there have been many examples of organisms from one region being introduced into a different region and thriving, even in some cases out-competing native organisms of similar niches. One of the most extreme examples of this is kudzu, an ornamental ivy from Japan which now threatens to eradicate most of the US states in the southeast (although probably not quickly enough to have any beneficial effect on the 2012 elections). Again, the new temperate environment was only slightly different from the old temperate environment.

When we relocate species from their native environment to a radically different one, even within the same climatological zone, we find a very different outcome. Consider two terrestrial vertebrate apex-predators, the Bengal tiger and the great white shark. A healthy adult great white shark deposited in the grasslands below the Himalayas is probably not going to successfully out-compete the native tigers. Similarly, a healthy adult Bengal tiger relocated to the middle of the Indian ocean is not going to seriously impinge upon the shark's hunting grounds. And yet, these two environments are remarkably similar, in terms of temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, gravity, environmental chemistry, solar and cosmic radiation; even the length of the day and year are similar. More importantly, the organisms themselves are remarkably similar. Form does, after all, follow function, and they also have a common evolutionary ancestor. And yet, neither can survive for more than a few minutes in the other's native habitat.

Now, consider Mars.

The average surface temperature on Mars is -63° C (-81° F). Rarely, at the equator, temperatures at the very surface reach 20° C (68° F), but even then the temperatures just a few inches above that are sub-arctic. Average barometric pressure on earth is 1013 millibars. Average barometric pressure on Mars is about 6 millibars, which is less than the inside of an early vacuum tube. Martian atmosphere is 95% carbon dioxide, with 210 ppm water vapor. Earth's atmosphere is 78% nitrogen and 21% oxygen, with about 25,000 ppm water vapor at the surface.

Martian life, if such exists, cannot survive in earth's atmosphere, or within the bodies of organisms which evolved within that atmosphere. Just as importantly, terrestrial organisms cannot survive on Mars. In the case of Mars, we do not need a "microbial Prime Directive". We could bombard Mars with terrestrial bacteria for weeks, and within minutes of their landing on the Martian surface they would all be dead and frozen. Similarly, we do not need to worry about an "Andromeda Strain" being returned from Mars to earth. The greatest difficulty will be keeping any organisms alive long enough to study them.

To rocks and the red planet: the NASA FY 2013 Budget Estimate

Here we are, again.

NASA's 2013 budget looks, well, an awful lot like the 2012 budget. But at least now we have some more specifics, and something a bit sexier than the ISS as a centerpiece.

Looking at what is on the docket, to quote John Mellencamp, "it ain't love, but it ain't bad".

In no particular order--

Space X and other commercial operators will begin regular crew and cargo flights to the ISS and other low earth orbit destinations.

The SLS/Orion project will continue, with uncrewed missions beginning in 2017 and crewed missions beginning in 2021. The only destinations mentioned (repeatedly) were near-earth asteroids and Mars. No mention of the moon or the earth-moon L1 or L2 Langrangian orbits. Back in November there had been discussion of building a semipermanent space station at the Earth-Moon L2 orbit, that seems to have been tabled. Lunar landing is apparently completely out of the question, or at least completely out of the budget, so it looks like NASA is opting to bypass the moon entirely. For the asteroid and Mars missions, much emphasis was placed on the integrated roles of humans and robots. The missions of Mars Science Laboratory and the rover Curiosity appear to be especially focused on research and preparation for crewed missions to Mars.

Research satellites for astronomy, atmospherics, space-weather and asteroid tracking continue to be a priority, as does research in advanced aviation technology.

The James Webb Space Telescope continues to be funded, now looking to launch in late 2018. I consider the JWST to be the single most important project NASA has ever been involved in, but Congress does not share my enthusiasm; I'm very glad it made the cut, again.

Given the current austerity of the federal budget a a whole, this is probably the best we could hope for at this point. Here is the 2013 budget estimate in its entirety:

http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/622655main_FY13_NASA_Budget_Estimates.pdf

One small step for woman...

NASA is finding that some male astronauts, subsequent to a six month mission on the International Space Station, are suffering debilitating and possibly permanent vision loss due to papilledema.

I am not an opthamologist, I have no idea what papilledema is, or what that means. Here is the link to a pdf from NASA which gives good medical information for those inclined and capable to decipher such.
http://ston.jsc.nasa.gov/collections/TRS/_techrep/TM-2010-216114.pdf

I don't know why it seems to affect only men and not women. I don't especially care. It simply happens to be.

The relevant point is, six months is about the minimum amount of time we could get astronauts to Mars from Earth, using the technology of the SLS rockets and Orion spacecraft. Astronaut Mike Barratt, who is one of the individuals experiencing papilledema, believes that the solution is to wait for better and faster technology to shorten the length of time in space. This is not unreasonable for a crewed mission to Mars, but as we venture further afield to Ceres and the icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn, barring building the real (atomic pulse) Orion we probably are going to need to exist in space for greater than six months time.

The first step, obviously, is to extend the missions on the ISS to see if other health issues arise with longer stays in space. ISS is close; if somebody starts to exhibit serious health problems it's pretty easy to get them back to earth quickly. This will not be true for Mars.

The second, as Barratt proposed, is to continue R&D on better propulsion systems, such as the ion engines being used by the Dawn spacecraft, and solar sail technology.

Third, continue developing SLS, and continue with the already planned Mars missions. For exploration missions, send crews of only women. For colonization missions, send crews of only women, with a sperm bank. This isn't rocket science.

Even without the papilledema issue, women are arguably better candidates for space flight than men. Simple gender dimorphism has provided women with bodies which are smaller, and consume less food, oxygen and water than their male counterparts. Their body-fat is also better distributed for thermal insulation, and women are less susceptible to trauma-induced shock. And all the worlds we're likely to explore and colonize have significantly less gravity than Earth, so it isn't as likely that upper-body strength would be a major hindrance.

Women are probably just better suited to boldly go, where no man has gone before.

======================================================


Astronaut feels space's toll on his body

(CNN)
It’s not really why he signed up to be an astronaut, but like it or not, Mike Barratt and his eyes have become a science project.

The eye charts he reads, the red drops that turn his eyes yellow and the ultrasounds being performed on him could determine whether he or any other astronaut ever journeys into deep space or sets foot on other worlds.

NASA’s new priority is how to protect astronauts from going blind on the years-long trip to get wherever they are going.

“I absolutely agree that this is our number one priority,” Barratt said.

Why?

Because when Barratt blasted off to the international space station, he needed eyeglasses for distance. When he returned to Earth, his distance vision was fine, but he needed reading glasses. That was more than two years ago. And he’s not getting better.

“We really need to understand this. This is a critical point for understanding how humans adapt to spaceflight,” he said.

In the past few years, about half of the astronauts aboard the international space station have developed an increasing pressure inside their heads, an intracranial pressure that reshapes their optic nerve, causing a significant shift in the eyesight of male astronauts. Doctors call it papilledema.

Female space travelers have not been affected.

Some of the astronauts slowly recover. Others have not.

Space station astronauts typically spend about six months in orbit.

Barratt is one of 10 male astronauts, all older than 45, who have not recovered. Barratt returned from a six-month stint aboard the station in October 2009 and has experienced a profound change in his sight.

He used to be nearsighted. But now, the space veteran says he’s eagle-eyed at long distance but needs glasses for reading. There is no treatment and no answers as to why female space flyers are not affected.

CNN spent part of a day with Barratt, watching as doctors monitored his progress with high-resolution testing as they try to understand how the weightless environment of space is causing half of all space station astronauts to have this vision change. Today, space station astronauts fly with specially designed variable focus glasses to help combat the vision shift.

“The big benefit of these is that they allow us to adjust for significant prescription changes,” said Dr. Robert Gibson, a senior vision consultant, who was brought in to help study the problem.

Doctors have found that Barratt’s retinas have microscopic folds or wrinkles on them, and the back of his eye, the optic nerve, is no longer round but has flattened.

“I think this is showing that there are physiologic aspects of adaption to spaceflight we weren’t seeing before,” said Barratt.

This raises a red flag for all of NASA’s plans for long-duration human space flight. The space station is supposed to be the test bed for how humans would learn to live in space, but it opens profound questions on whether humans will ever venture to Mars or to an asteroid if they are unable to figure out how the outer-space environment is affecting the eyes.

“This has all of our attention,” said Terry Taddeo, the acting chief of space medicine at Johnson Space Center in Houston.

“It is a serious problem and one we are going to have to understand more about before we would be able to send somebody into a long-duration mission away from Earth, where they would be away for years,” he said.

Right now, the only data that doctors have are from six-month tours of duty on the space station.

NASA has begun doing extensive preflight and postflight eye exams, including high-resolution MRIs of the eyes. There have been anecdotes from some space shuttle astronauts who also complained about vision change, but it does not appear they had long-lasting effects from the much shorter space flights that typically lasted up to about three weeks.

“What we’re seeing appears to occur within the first couple of months of flight and appears to level off, plateau after about four to five months,” Gibson said.

“If it’s just a matter of giving them a stronger prescription, we can live with that,” he said. “But if there is an elevated intracranial pressure as the cause of this, we have to be concerned about other neurologic effects."

That means there could be other effects on the body that haven’t become apparent.

This is why a three-year mission to Mars is in question.

It would be humans' next great leap, and NASA is spending almost $18 billion over the next five years to develop a heavy lift rocket that would take astronauts to the Red Planet or even to an asteroid. They would travel in a new spacecraft, Orion.

But right now, a trip to Mars is still more science fiction than fact. No one is calling this vision problem a showstopper, yet the program’s price tag begs for a solution to be found fast so NASA won’t be building the world’s largest, fastest rocket to nowhere.

Dr. Bruce Ehni, a neurosurgeon at the VA Medical Center at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, has consulted with NASA and is the only neurosurgeon on their panel.

“If they can’t predict who is at risk ... they put his health in jeopardy. They put, possibly, the mission in jeopardy if he can’t see or do his job effectively,” he said.

But Barratt thinks that any deep space venture to Mars is still 20 years away. He’s hoping that spacecraft will be a whole lot faster than anything the space agency can fly now.

“You fly fast, and you don’t worry,” he said, with a grin.

“I’m still hopeful that in 20 years, we’ll have advanced propulsion capabilities that can get us there in a matter of weeks to a few months. Then, a lot of these problems go away,” he said.

Newt for the Moon!

Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich has just promised a large group of Space-Coast Republicans that if he is elected President, by 2020 we will have frequent manned flights to Mars and a permanent colony of 13,000 individuals on the moon, which will become our 51st state!

WOOOT!!!!!!

How could such a visionary possibly not get elected? Can anyone name ONE GOOD REASON why this man cannot be elected president, so that we can get a colony on the moon?

Oh, right. Two-thousand, nine-hundred and ninety-six good reasons.
Or, just four little words.

No. War. For. Monica.

Oh well.

Who needs a stupid old moon base, anyway.

Into the dark

Two notable press releases from NASA today. The first, which got most of the coverage in the commercial media, is that the Kepler mission has confirmed the presence of a large rocky world within the habitable zone of a star some 600 light-years away. In and of itself, this announcement is actually only mildly interesting. What is more interesting is that in the year Kepler has been operational, it has already discovered 2,326 planet candidates, of which 28 have already been confirmed. Even more interesting is the fact that all of these were discovered in this very small section of the sky:

Statistically, this may bode very well for habitable worlds around stars within 10 light-years of our sun.

The more interesting story out of NASA today is that the two Voyager probes are reaching the outer limits of our sun's influence, and will very soon enter interstellar space. This will be our first direct observation of the Interstellar Medium, and will afford a great deal of insight into the realities of travel to the nearest stars.