Centauri's Thoughts

40 years ago today, man set foot on another world. Even though it was only a quarter million miles away (compared to say, the asteroid belt or Mars) it was the furthest we had gone and under the most severe conditions at the time.

I was in grade school at that time, and the way things were going, I thought sure we'd ALL have the opportunity to live and work in space if we chose to. Well, that certainly didn't happen. Those who get to work in space these days are few indeed.

I wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do out there, but I know I wanted to be involved. I studied as many things about the sciences as I could, and especially anything that could be useful for space. This started with chemistry, physics, electronics, and progressed later into the math involved for calculating orbits and masses, and finally the jump into astronomy. about that time the web took off and I was in heaven (In my own way). I could study ALL of these subjects as much as I wanted (and I did).

Sadly, we are still no closer for the “the common man” to go live and work in space, and by the time it DOES happen, I'll be too old!

We are exploring some robotically, and through space telescopes we are seeing even more, but our human presence in space is a mere 250 miles away.

I'd love to know that we have colonies in space and on other worlds, and have even had a hand (mentally) at designing such structures, although I haven't yet posted that.

I can only hope we do better in the NEXT 40 years!

this is interesting

The Langley group's conclusion: if you want a spaceship that operates like an airplane, power it with rockets and only rockets.

Trying to build a spaceship by making airplanes fly faster and higher is like trying to build an airplane by making locomotives faster and lighter - with a lot of effort, perhaps you could get something that more or less works, but it really isn't the right way to proceed. The problems are fundamentally different, and so are the best solutions.

I know they are looking at both approaches, and air-breathing hybrids with rocket engines seems in the news, so this gives pause for thought.

The Kepler mission is due to launch next week (March 6th)

It is the first mission with the ability to find planets like Earth -- rocky planets that orbit sun-like stars in a warm zone where liquid water could be maintained on the surface. Liquid water is believed to be essential for the formation of life.

"Kepler is a critical component in NASA's broader efforts to ultimately find and study planets where Earth-like conditions may be present," said Jon Morse, the Astrophysics Division director at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "The planetary census Kepler takes will be very important for understanding the frequency of Earth-size planets in our galaxy and planning future missions that directly detect and characterize such worlds around nearby stars."

The Kepler spacecraft will watch a patch of space for 3.5 years or more for signs of Earth-sized planets moving around stars similar to the sun. The patch that Kepler will watch contains about 100,000 stars like the sun. Using special detectors similar to those used in digital cameras, Kepler will look for slight dimming in the stars as planets pass between the star and Kepler. The Kepler's place in space will allow it to watch the same stars constantly throughout its mission, something observatories like Hubble cannot do.

The method used will be the “transit” method (star-crossing orbit). We have seen venus do this: here and here.

Of course, this method wont detect every planet orbiting a star, because the planet must pass directly in front of that star, and given solar systems random alignment compared to ours, the Kepler mission is figuring lower odds for detection. But given the large survey sample (100,000) they feel that the number found will tell us more about how common planets are in other solar systems.

References and more reading:
Keplers Home Page

space.com article

Scientific American Article

Given last weeks satellite collision, the issue of space junk will be getting more attention.

This is a subject I've pondered for well over ten years. Given the relative velocities of the objects involved, we cannot just fly up to things and “grab” them, but perhaps we dont need to.

My idea is this: a large blob of aerogel (perhaps 100 meters or so), positioned where the debris can impact into it, plus an attachment of a motor to position it a little in its orbital altitude.

Once it has captured enough debris, the question becomes what to do with it next.

Since aerogel is a very good insulator, it wont burn up on re-entry, but given its density, perhaps it doesnt need to. It might lose all its forward velocity and fall harmlessly to earth at perhaps 35 – 65 MPH (15.6 – 29.1 m/s). That depends on how much its overall density has increased because of trapped debris.

The other option is to push it up and out to the “parking orbit” where many dead satellites get sent, but from low earth orbit, this would require much more fuel than a de-orbit.

Remember too, that this idea can be used for more than one capturing blob, and in more than one orbit/altitude to speed up the cleanup process.

This can definitely take the load and scheduling problems off the Deep Space Network:

The Internet has entered the final frontier.

NASA has successfully tested the first deep space communications network modeled on the Internet, using it to transmit images to and from a spacecraft 20 million miles from Earth, it was announced on Tuesday.

"This is the first step in creating a totally new space communications capability, an interplanetary Internet," said Adrian Hooke, leader of the team that performed the feat and manager of space-networking architecture, technology and standards at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C.

NASA and Vint Cerf, a vice president at Google, in Mountain View, Calif., who is often called the father of the Internet, partnered 10 years ago to develop the software protocol used for space transmissions, called Disruption-Tolerant Networking, or DTN. The DTN sends information using a method that differs from the terrestrial Internet's Transmission-Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) communication suite, which Cerf co-designed.

The Interplanetary Internet must be robust enough to withstand delays, disruptions and disconnections in space. Glitches can happen when a spacecraft moves behind a planet, or when solar storms and long communication delays occur. For instance, the delay in sending or receiving data from Mars takes between three-and-a-half to 20 minutes, even at the speed of light.

If a disruption occurs in the pathway along which the information travels, each node in the network will hang on to its information until it's safe to communicate, unlike our Internet on Earth, which just discards the data packets.

Reference: deep-space-internet

The Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft was launched with an Indian-built rocket on October 22 from the country's southeastern coast.

"The operation to put Chandrayaan into lunar space went off very well," S. Satish, director of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) told AFP.

The spacecraft is now 1,000 kilometres (600 miles) from the moon, enabling its terrain-mapping camera to shoot pictures of it.

Scientists are preparing for the next major stage to enable the spacecraft to enter lunar orbit on Saturday and position itself about 100 kilometres from the moon's surface.

Once the mission is in the lunar orbit, it will stabilise in about a week, after which it will send a probe instrument to the moon's surface.

Chandrayaan carries 11 payloads -- five from India and others from abroad.

During a two-year orbital mission, it will provide a detailed map of the mineral, chemical and topographical characteristics of the moon's surface.

I found one thing in all this extremely interesting:

The mission will cost India 80 million dollars.

Seems rather reasonable, considering thats ALL the way to the moon.

reference: physorg.com

StarDust has come home, and it will be interesting to see the aerogel and the streak of material within it.

Also, amatuer astronomers can help look for these microscopic bits, see the article referencing stardust@home. That should prove interesting. Definitely worth a look.

At the beginning of this week, I happened upon a link to this site about building rockets, Delta V discussions, designs, and many other things. Good and interesting stuff. This site is also full of links to other things including a concept about having permanently eliptical orbiting craft that swings inward to earth and outward to mars or the asteroids to facilitate transfer of people ( or possibly even materials ), and that link is here

Today, I saw a plan for Mars travel outlined by Buzz Aldrin using this same technique. Its listed here in a Popular Mechanics article.

We really need to build a whole infrastructure for the long term, and these articles show that (I still think I was born 50 years too soon).

I found all this rather interesting:

A star 40 times the mass of the Sun collapsed to form a neutron star instead of a black hole, researchers said today.

When a massive star burns out, its outer layers crash down on the star’s core, creating a dense ball of matter from which nothing could escape. Scientists previously thought that when a massive star died and collapsed on itself, it had no choice but to create a black hole.

Now, new data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory suggests that massive stars have a little wiggle room, and sometime produces a neutron star instead.

“Our discovery shows that some of the most massive stars do not collapse to form black holes as predicted, but instead form neutron stars,” said study lead author Michael Muno of University California, Los Angeles.

Researchers discovered this neutron star, a dense neutron ball about 12 miles in diameter, in the midst of an extremely young cluster of stars. By estimating the age and mass of the other stars in the cluster, the scientists were able to determine that this neutron star’s parent was at least 40 times the mass of the Sun.

So many have gotten into heated arguments about black holes, and the collapse to an infinite point, where I had ALWAYS considered the fact of something just a little more dense than a neutron star could have an escape velocity faster than light (the real definition of a black hole).

The entire article is here

Looks like my thought on this was right after all:

Here's the thinking:

Newton's laws of physics explain why our solar system stays together. But the planets are negligible in the overall gravitational scheme, with the Sun being the total ruler and containing 99.86 percent of all the mass.

The same Newtonian physics were long ago applied to galaxies, and the rotation of stars couldn't be explained, so dark matter was invented to make theory work.

But a galaxy is much different than the solar system, Cooperstock explains. The conglomeration of all the matter -- stars, black holes, gas, and dust -- is collectively the source of the galactic gravity. Even a black hole at a galaxy's center typically packs less than 1 percent of the galaxy's overall mass.

The overall galaxy's gravity "feeds its own motion ... unlike the case of the solar system," Cooperstock told SPACE.com.

In fact, I was just talking to a friend the other night about these motions, and the fact that the closer to the center you are, the more mass is to the outside of the galaxy, relatively.

The whole article on space.com.