Orion has a home

Lockheed Martin Corporation was awarded the prime contract for the Orion manned space vehicle today. The move is interesting since most analysts predicted the Northrop Grumman/Boeing team would win the contract considering their experience with manned spaceflight and heritage from the Apollo program. Instead NASA has opted to give the work to the largest defense contractor in the nation that specializes in unmanned rocketry. The contract award is the beginning of an ambitious project that could last until at least 2019 and end up doling out nearly $10 billion. Here's hoping all goes well.

Moon images

These images were taken last night, a nearly first quarter Moon. I scrapped afocal imaging with my standard digital camera and opted for a nifty and affordable little CCD camera designed for astronomical imaging. I'm amazed at how much the cost of astronomical CCDs has dropped in the past 10 years. These images are stacked (several dozen individual images averaged together to produce a sharper composite image) and were taken at 1/8 second exposure. The top image shows one of the heavily cratered landscapes near Mare Nectaris. The three larger craters on the right of the image are the same craters I posted an old photographic image of a month or so ago. The bottom image is Mare Serenatatis and the Apollo 17 landing site is toward the top right of the image. Note the mountains toward the lower left and the long shadows cast toward the terminator.

getting better...

I still have a long way to go, but my pictures of Jupiter are improving. Using the afocal method (manually holding the digital camera up to the telescope eyepiece) is far from ideal, but as you can see, it can capture some of the larger details of a planet. This image was a 1/25 second exposure with some minor post-processing brightening. I managed to escape any vignetting on this image, which is an optical effect similar to looking through a straw that results from using afocal imaging. At this point I'm more looking forward to imaging the moon because of the orders of magnitude more detail that can be captured. Right now the moon is 2 days past full so it's very bright and lacking in contrast, but I'll probably take a shot at it later tonight.

Dr. Van Allen

A fond farewell to Dr. James Van Allen, who died today at the age of 91. Van Allen just about single-handedly gave birth to the field of magnetospheric physics, the field in which I pursued my graduate studies. He discovered the Earth's radiation belts, regions near the Earth where energetic ions and electrons are trapped in the Earth's magnetic field. The discovery was made with a simple Geiger counter placed on the first United States satellite in 1958, Explorer I. While the United States was trying to respond to the Soviet success of Sputnik, the discovery of the radiation belts ushered in an entirely new field of geophysics.

James Van Allen also distinguished himself for being a vocal critic of manned space exploration. He believed that space exploration was more cost effective and scientifically rewarding when done robotically. While there is some legitimacy to this stance, I think a recent example shows how valuable human presence is in space exploration. I attended a symposium for work last year and one of the key note speakers was a staff scientist on the Mars Exploration Rover program. He showed how the rovers Spirit and Opportunity have provided an enormous amount of robotically acquired data that will keep scientists busy for years to come. However, he made sure to point out that all the science performed robotically by the rovers in 1 year on Mars could have been done in about an hour by a human. That's a sobering number, and it illuminates the incredible power of the human eye, human mobility in uneven terrain, and of course the human brain. Certainly robotics is making leaps and bounds in the approximation of human capabilities, but in the end the only way we can truly know a new environment is by going there and letting it engage our senses, our logic, and our wonder. We are currently heading into a period of more aggressive human space exploration that will require unprecedented financial and time commitments. Time will tell if Van Allen's approach to space exploration wins out in the end.

ultimate time capsule

The Alliance to Rescue Civilization, an advocacy group with the long term survival of humanity as their top concern, recently proposed the construction of a modern day Ark on the moon to preserve DNA of all life on Earth as well as a compendium of human knowledge. A modern day Ark is not a new idea of course. Numerous companies and organizations are springing up around the world that are collecting DNA from a broad spectrum of organisms (especially endangered ones) in the interests of preservation for a more environmentally friendly future. Libraries and museums are actively converting anything and everything into digital formats for long term storage. The Alliance to Rescue Civilization argues that an Earthbound storage facility is too risky because of the potential for large asteroid impacts that could destroy not only civilization as we know it, but any sort of DNA storage facility. The ARC therefore proposes putting such a facility on the moon, where it would supposedly be safer. I think this is a perfectly fine idea, the moon is a stark and sterile body well away from the prying hand of man. However, I do see some problems with the ARC proposal. First and foremost, such an effort is prohibitively expensive at this point in human history, regardless of the supreme importance of such an effort. Secondly, the moon is just as likely to be devastated by an asteroid impact as the Earth.

I would argue for a simpler approach. Put the DNA samples and a few terabytes of human knowledge (texts, artwork, photographs, music, etc.) onboard a spacecraft and place it in orbit around the sun. This could pretty much be done with current technology, making it affordable. As long as the DNA samples were kept in a part of the spacecraft shaded from direct sunlight, the cold of space offers the best possible refrigeration. Of course, fully sequenced genomes could be digitally stored, it's really not necessary to include the amino acid raw materials in that case. How about likelihood of being destroyed? A tiny spacecraft in orbit around the sun has an effectively zero chance of ever encountering another object large enough to destroy it. We've already sent a very scaled down version of this approach on a journey out of the solar system altogether with the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft. They carry audio, photographic, and symbolic information about humans, but nothing more.

Regardless of the approach, I think the ARC proposal has merit. Perhaps it is time to start thinking about putting a few of our eggs in other baskets.