New Rocket Ready To Go Nowhere

October 23, 2009

Like someone who just bought a new car, earlier this week NASA proudly rolled out its next generation spaceship, the Ares I-X. The spindly rocket looks anemic compared to its predecessors: the space shuttle, Saturn V, and Saturn IB.  But at a height of 310 feet it casts a long pencil-like shadow over the Kennedy Space Center causeway.

Ironically, the Augustine Commission report that formally came out this week casts a black eclipse shadow over this arrow-craft that is scheduled for its maiden test flight in just a few days. 

The commission will give a series of options to the White House for President Obama to consider for redirecting NASA’s future human space effort.

When We’ll Really Nuke The Moon

October 14, 2009

The dust is still settling from the public blowup over NASA’s LCROSS experiment to go prospecting for water on the moon by crashing a rocket booster into it last Friday. The impact was a PR flub. There were no dramatic images for any evidence of the smashup.

Nevertheless, I have subsequently received a few angry e-mails from people who are incensed that we would harm Earth’s only natural satellite.

The tersest note was from a retired Marine:

“Stop bombing the fu*king moon.”

In a following e-mail he was more philosophical: 

“Yes, worlds are being destroyed every second in our timeless universe, but through natural processes of creation and recreation . . .”  

If I apply that logic, then we should do nothing in the future to deflect or destroy any Earth-bound asteroid, but instead let nature take its, er, natural course  in “recreating” life on the surface of an incinerated Earth.

Moon Survives Unprovoked Attack!

October 09, 2009

Internet traffic on blogs, YouTube, and discussion boards was nearly predicting the end of the world today.

It didn’t happen.

People warned that a missile launched by evil government scientists was going to plow into the virgin Moon and explode. The effects on Earth from disrupting the celestial harmony would be unpredictable but devastating: tsunamis, meteorite showers, volcanoes – and even more global warming.

What happened instead? Early morning news anchors were speechless at the NASA live TV feed. That’s because absolutely nothing was seen happening at the ground zero moment.

Super Ring Dwarfs Saturnian System

October 07, 2009

Though NASA’s Cassini orbiter has been surveying Saturn and its moons in stunning detail for the past five years, it missed -- not surprisingly -- the 800-pound gorilla in the Saturnian system. 

Infrared astronomers announced yesterday the discovery of a huge puffy and tenuous ring of ice and dust encircling Saturn well beyond the orbits of most of its satellites.

The ghostly ring is way too faint to be seen with optical telescopes. It took the infrared eyes of NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope to pick up the telltale glow of warm dust in the ring. The ring sets a new record as the largest structure seen around any planet.

Apollo 11 Site in Higher Defintion

October 05, 2009

What a difference the time of day makes on the moon. 

NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has re-photographed the Apollo 11 landing site on the Sea of Tranquility. The first picture released on July 17 showed the long shadow of the lander because the sun was low in the sky. It was essentially late afternoon on the moon.

In the new picture the afternoon sun is 28 degrees above the horizon and the site looks noticeably different with better contrast and brightness. 

In particular, you can see the trail of footprints of the first man on the moon, Neil Armstrong, as he walked to the 100-foot wide Little West crater for a close-up look.

Could Lunar Poles Hide More Than Water?

September 19, 2009

Quick, how far would I have to go to reach the coldest place in the solar system? Most people would say Pluto. But this is a trick question.

It was widely reported this week that NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has measured a record-breaking temperate of -367 degrees Fahrenheit on the moon. 

It gets this cold at the bottom of the permanently shadowed impact craters at the poles. Unlike Pluto, the crater floors have not seen sunlight for billions of years.

Bootprints On The Moon

September 07, 2009

Last month a reader left a comment on this site wondering where the “Apollo artifacts” were that I said NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) would photograph.

Well this is the coolest picture to date from LRO that captures the activities of Apollo astronauts at a moon-landing site. It is littered with hardware! 

But even more intriguing, we see the astronauts' footprints. From LRO's altitude they look like the humble little tracks of small birds across newly fallen snow. 

LRO flew over the flat lava plain in western Oceanus Procellarum where Apollo 12 landed on November 14, 1969. The unmanned Surveyor 3 landed there two years earlier.

The Crater That Time Forgot

August 27, 2009

Erlanger crater, located at the moon's north pole, looks like a bottomless pit. That's because its floor is perpetually in pitch-black shadow. It's a place where sunlight hasn't fallen over 4 billion years. It would be a great place for aliens to stash a 2001-style monolith.

NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter made this eagle-eye photo as it swept over the moon’s north pole to look down on the gaping abyss.

At six miles wide, the lunar crater is coincidentally the diameter of  Crater Lake near Eugene, Oregon.

Imagine how eerie it would be to climb down into this crater and look up toward a star-saturated sky. The circumpolar constellation Draco the Dragon would wrap around the center of your field of view. The star Polaris and the bright star Vega would, farther out,  flank either side of Draco. The Mikly Way would arc high overhead.

One Giant Leap Into Past Glory

July 20, 2009

Of all the Apollo 11 decadal anniversaries, this one is particularly made poignant with the passing of the "journalist’s journalist" Walter Cronkite. Alongside astronaut Wally Schirra, he shared our collective excitement about the historic Apollo 11 moon landing on July 20, 1969. 

I remember camping out on the living room couch, like waiting for Super Bowl, to watch the landing actually happen. Cronkite was like having an uncle in the living room sharing the intimacy and wonder of what was unfolding in real time. I needed this because the only real person in the living room was my widowed mother’s boyfriend, who did nothing but curse out the landing as a waste of his taxed blue–collar wages.

Ground Truth: Apollo Sites Photographed

July 17, 2009

Today, in an uncharacteristically low-key press event, NASA released photos we’ve been waiting 40 years for: the first images takes from space that are sharp enough to resolve the Apollo landers. (There was only a press teleconference; NASA-TV kept all the airtime for showing the space shuttle Endeavour docking with the International Space Station.)

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter pictures soon exploded across the Internet.  Web sites are now abuzz with people mercilessly lambasting the moon conspiracy whack-jobs who for four decades have tried to discredit the Apollo program, and the technical prowess of the United States. My favorite new term for the conspiracy nuts – posted on YouTube – is “hoaxtards.”