If you’re a Hubble Space Telescope fan, odds are you will REALLY be a Webb fan. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), previously known as the Next Generation Space Telescope (NGST), is in the assembly phase. The Webb team is targeting a 2018 launch date. Webb offers several (forgive the pun) astronomical advances over the Hubble. For starters, the aperture, or eye through which the telescope looks into the universe, will be about five times larger than the Hubble’s. Webb will also be parked in a gravitationally stable point in space called the Lagrange Point two, or L2, that will always keep the Earth and the sun to its back — so not only will it be technologically able to see farther into the universe, but the light pollution from the sun will be minimized by keeping Webb in the shadow of the Earth.
How was the universe created? What would an alien invasion be like? Why do people like sex? It almost sounds like any given GWC podcast. In fact, if you put GWC on TV with amazing special effects as well as international expert guest hosts like Stephen Hawking, NASA experts, and Hollywood stars like Michelle Rodriguez, you’d have the new Discovery Channel program called Curiosity: The Questions of Life.
It’s a science fiction staple: Earth’s first interstellar missions (assuming we’re not contacted by some advanced race) begin with “generation” ships — spacecraft that travel at low, sub-light speeds, traveling to the closest stars over two or three lifetimes. Those who initially crew the departing ship will never reach the destination, but their descendants will. Now sci-fi fantasy takes the first step toward reality: The the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (you know, the people who bring you the Grand Challenges and the 2005 Challenge winner, the famous Stanford U team’s Stanley autonomous vehicle) are hosting a symposium this fall to identify and quantify the issues behind a “100 year starship.”
I’m a huge fan of NASA, which is why I love the recent shift away from NASA-as-shuttle-service to NASA-as-science. Assuming that this isn’t just a smokescreen to hide ditched funding, it makes perfect sense to me. Let commercial entities handle shipping things. They do a great job of it here on Earth, and there’s no reason they can’t do it in space, too. If the end of the Shuttle program pissed you off, I’m guessing it’s not because you just love the Shuttle and see it as the end-all of space vehicles, but rather because we don’t have a suitable replacement. I mean, if Rutan can get us (suborbitally, at least) into space on a shoestring sub-$10 million budget, what can a company like Boeing do with real cash? Answer: The CST-100.
The Operator tipped me to the above video this week — for obvious reasons. Here’s my take: Forget which side of the aisle your politics lean toward. Forget who you voted for in 2008, and forget who you’re going to vote for in 2012. I don’t care, and I don’t really want to hear about it. (I’m sure John Jackson is super awesome and so much better Jack Johnson. I believe you. You don’t have to tell me. Really!) Here’s something we can all get down on.
We need to dream. We need to continue learning about our universe, to keep learning about what makes the world go, and to keep exploring. Things down here are bad. But guess what? Things down here have always been bad. There’s never existed a single point in our short history in which we faced no socioeconomic issues. Yet exploration (both scientific and geographic) has always proven core to the process of growing society and improving our collective lot in life. Always.
A Depiction of the Inner Gliese 581 G Solar System. Image courtesy of NASA as created by Lynette Cook
The GWC Crüe mentioned in podcast 239 that a new “Earthlike” exoplanet, meaning a planet orbiting a star outside our own solar system, was found around the small red dwarf star Gliese 581 G. Scientists and exoplanet hunters have been finding exoplanets since 1992 and to date have cataloged over 400 of them. Most exoplanets found to date have been gas giant planets like Jupiter or Saturn or bigger. Although with new instrumentation and refined techniques I’ll bet exoplanet hunters will be finding many more planets in the very near future. I’m excited about this and feel like I’m living in an era similar to the years just prior to Leif Erickson or Christopher Columbus. So what is an “Earthlike” planet, why will more be found in the near future, and what are the ways to find exoplanets in the first place?
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- A Conception of a VASIMR® Powered Lunar Tug Spaceship.
I’d have to take a poll to be sure, but judging from the reaction to last year’s five week GWC Cosmos podcast arc I’d bet that a good percentage of GWCers are interested in space travel, space colonization, or just simple weekend sightseeing camping trips around the solar system neighborhood. Unfortunately, there are millions of challenges to overcome before those activities become a reality for humankind.
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Just came across this AP article describing how NASA Engineers are currently troubleshooting a software glitch on Voyager 2, which recently caused the probe to send its scientific data in an unreadable format. While reprogramming extraplanetary probes is nothing new (we’ve been doing it for years with the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity), there’s a few reasons why this particular problem is so interesting:
- Voyager 2 was launched in 1977, making the software over 33 years old
- Communications sent between Voyager 2 and Earth take over 13 hours at a rate of 160 bits per second – for comparison, at that speed, the podcast would take over forty days to transmit.
- At a distance of 8.6 billion miles from the Earth, this is likely the farthest away anyone has performed troubleshooting on a computer.
The Voyager team may be able to reprogram around the error, or find a way to decipher the format the probe is transmitting, but for now they’ve told the probe to stop sending the faulty data while they attempt to find a solution. Possible causes for the error are being investigated, but they don’t believe the age of the spacecraft is related to the problem. Voyager 2 has had a long mission, performing flybys of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, and is currently headed into deep space to perform some of the first observations from outside our solar system, and is expected to operate for another decade.
Let’s hope this glitch gets sorted out quickly, I’m not sure the Nerd Herd can do an on-site support call for this one.
Morning. Coffee synthesizer on the fritz. Again. I ask myself for the twentieth time why I hadn’t spent the extra cash for a Mac iBrew. Maybe I can grab a cup at work. I dress slowly, pulling on my jumpsuit, buckling the belt. Shuffle to the bathroom, where my shaved head stares back at me from the mirror. I look much better with hair, but hey, it’s the future, and that’s the law. I grab my transit pass and head out the door for the short walk to the E Station. The gathered crowd waits silently, avoiding eye contact. Looks like E-Tran’s running on time for a change! Preceded by a rush of air, the car approaches, stops, and as the doors open we enter, resembling a school of bald, colorfully jump-suited fish. The doors close, and we’re on our way. Fifteen thousand miles straight up. Yawn. Just another boring office commute…
- Ares I-X Test Flight; Oct. 28, 2009
In the wake of the epic Cosmos podcast arc, it seems fitting that the discussion about the future of space flight has come into the forefront of the news. With the Space Shuttle program due to be retired in 2010, NASA has taken a page out of the Apollo mission playbook in laying out the foundations for our next generation of spacecraft, seeking to take us beyond the boundaries of Earth’s orbit, back to the moon, and farther.
Yeah, auto-tune’s become all the joke lately, with enterprising folks applying T-Painery to everything from cats meowing to Mr. T. But the above video is no joke. It’s pretty darn bad-ass. And it’s significant when you consider that we’re just a few weeks away from taking a fun look at Cosmos.
The newly-refurbished Hubble Telescope is back in action. After several months of calibration and tests, NASA has released (Wed, 09-09-2009) a series of spectacular photos, and they clearly show that the magnificent images of the past might pale in comparison to what we can expect in the future. The old gal is back with a vengeance.
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