Mars and the asteroids...

In the bizarrely nonsensical words from my schooldays, "Mary Voraciously Eats Mother's Jam Sandwiches Under No Protest". In case your own childhood did not include that particular mnemonic phrase, it represented the sequence of planets in order of distance outward from the sun.

Pluto has since been demoted, and new mnemonics have emerged, but that needn't trouble us here because the imaginative focus of interplanetary attention is now on Mother's Jam: that is, on Mars and Jupiter. Last year, US president Barack Obama envisaged a human landing on Mars in the mid 2030s and NASA's Ames Research Centre has jointly invested with DARPA in the idea of a one way Mars colonisation project. Russian plans over similar time frames include robotic exploration of Mars' moons. As you read this, NASA's Juno mission will be several weeks into its five year journey to Jupiter.

At a less romantic but perhaps more immediately practical level, there is also interest in the sweep of rocky space between them: the asteroid belt. On one level, it is a valuable scientific repository of "cosmological memory". At another, all exploration has, behind its heroic image, investment in the hope of economic return. The asteroids hold out the tantalising dreams of achieving that return well within a human lifetime; Mars within a century; Jupiter only in the much more distant future. Obama's vision for NASA includes not only the Mars mission but an asteroid ready heavy lift rocket design to be complete "no later than 2015", and the realities of returning from asteroid to earth orbit are trivial compared to Mars.

Mars has, of course, so far been subjected to more extensive examination than any other extraterrestrial target apart from Earth's own moon. A dozen or so programmes have, despite numerous failures, built up a knowledge base upon which projected US, European, Russian and Chinese successors plan to build over the next decade or so. The asteroids have mostly been studied remotely, usually in passing while on the way to somewhere else, but greater direct attention is now being paid to them. From an economic standpoint, they represent a potential resource for materials which would otherwise have to be lifted out of Earth's gravity well (and finite supply) at immense cost.

In all cases, however, before the economic return comes investment in study based upon huge programmes of data analysis. [More...]

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Image: Orbital image of the Ma'adam Vallis flow channel, entering the Gusev crater at the top of the frame. [Source: NASA]

There should be stars up there*

Geoff Powell comments , en passant in relation to urban lighting and power demand, that “It was lovely when I, once upon a time, turned my gaze upon the stars and saw them...”

I, too, remember with affection and regret the days when I could see the stars and count the Pleiades...

Night time in town feels lonely, these days. I often can't find the Pleiades, never mind count them. Even out in the countryside, there is enough light spill to make the sky much less clear and less vivid than it was fifty years ago.

I try to describe to a European child, now, what the Milky Way used to look like (a great dreamy slash across the sky which clearly earned its name) and realise that they simply cannot begin to imagine it.

“When darkness hovers
And city lights take over
I am blinded to the words
"I am alone".
It's useless to cry
For a star in the sky,
For the city lights tell me
There's none.
But: what ... to ... do?”

What, indeed, to do. I agree with Geoff that it would “be nice and save so much energy if we stopped being paranoid and turned off street, shop and business lights at night”. I'm less convinced that we could instantly return to a golden age of safe dark city streets ... but it's probably an academic issue since both require persuading people to give up what they have come to regard as essential.

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• Melanie Safka, "In the hour" on Please love me, 1973, New York: Buddah Records. BDS 5132 or 2318 090.

* Post title also Melanie Safka: "(There should be) stars up there", on As I see it now, 1974, New York: Neighborhood Records. NRS 48001 or NH 3003

Here comes the sun...

Mediocre chemist though I am, one of my earliest heart stopping scientific epiphanies came with introduction to an equation summarising photosynthesis of water and carbon dioxide into sugars. It was so beautiful in its economical depiction of life’s dependence on our neighbourhood star. The sun is, both literally and figuratively, the centre of almost everything we are and do: there is little, if anything, in our world or our view beyond, which is not affected by it in some way. Though small on many astronomical scales (Cristiano Sabiu, in relation to work NGS hosted work on galactic distribution, comments^[1] that he treats "billions of stars ... as a point source mass"), from a terrestrial viewpoint it dwarfs and dominates everything else in its immediate eight cubic parsec vicinity.

Little wonder, then, that science has always studied its idiosyncrasies and mood swings, its large gestures and its microscopic effects, its long term behaviour and short term tantrums. With the arrival of scientific computing, that study has become ever more comprehensive and precise – but it will, at least for the foreseeable future, be a statistically driven enterprise.

[more...]

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1. See references list at [more...] link

Slow Light

Justin Quinnell is an amazing person, and his passion for the pinhole camera is one expression of it. (Others include the sex life of the aphid ... but that was in another country, and besides...)

He has always been willing to spend hours babysitting his hand crafted cameras to get (for example) a panorama of Bath's Royal Crescent using a batch of drinks cans. His latest project goes beyond even that, with six month exposures. The apparently insurmountable problem of overexposure is solved by working directly from the latent image – which, as anyone who has played with emulsions knows, becomes briefly visible after sufficient time.

Some of these images are available, with notes on their production, as a New Scientist gallery.

Beyond the skies

In a forest in southern England, Greg Parker runs a small astronomical observatory with the sort of individual love and enthusiasm that too often dies out as we leave childhood...

... ... ...

By the time an equivalent of Professor Parker’s observatory (run, of course, by a robot version of Professor Parker) gives us the first deep sky view from somewhere out on the orbit of Pluto, whether or not life has beenfound on the way, the solar system will be a fully wired (or, rather, wireless) data neighbourhood with its roots in the work being done today.

[Read full article here]