NASA 60th Birthday

In a relatively short space of time, humans have gone from tentatively sending the first artificial satellite around the Earth in 1960 to landing exploration probes on other planets and today is the 60th Birthday of NASA and the progress we have made is astounding.
Driven by the Cold war, the Soviet Union and the USA competed to go bigger and better and although the USSR achieved many firsts, it
was NASA who landed a human on the Moon to take the ultimate space race prize. 
The Apollo 11 Mission will forever stay the highpoint for NASA, or at least until a successful manned Mars mission, and the Earthrise photograph taken by Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders is amazing but there is a more poignant, thought provoking and beautiful photograph snapped in 1990 by Voyager 1 as it made it's way out of the Solar System.
At a distance of 40 Astronomical units or 3,757,059,000 miles, the space probe turned its camera back towards Earth and took a picture which became known as the Pale Blue Dot.
Astronomer Carl Sagan made one of the greatest speeches ever which puts it into perspective brilliantly:

'That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. Every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.'

Elegant and powerful words but yet we still we go on vandalising the only place that we have to live on.
 What the image and Sagan's bewitching words drive home as we look at that tiny pinprick of light in the vast blackness of space is how our place, for all our arrogance, is just a tiny, infinitesimal part of a colossal universe.

Space Exploration Just Got Sexy Again

In a quiet corner of the Universe, tucked away on the edge of a Spiral Galaxies arm, is a Planet that teems with life and the inhabitants of that Planet are reaching out to try and find other life and the first stop is a moon orbiting a planet in their own Solar System.
Luckily, the Planet with life is our own and it is us doing the reaching out and where we are reaching out to is Europa which one of Jupiter's many moons and is soon to be the recipient of a robotic landing craft to drill into it in a search of life.
Europa is considered to be the best chance of finding life in our solar system due to what is believed to be a vast ocean hiding beneath its icy exterior and NASA have been assessing landing positions for the craft.
A NASA scientist said: 'Europa may hold the clues to one of NASA’s long standing goals, to determine whether or not we are alone in the universe. The highest-level science goal of the mission presented here is to search for evidence of life on Europa'.
With a launch date pencilled in of 2020, space exploration is back on the agenda and exciting missions like looking for ET in our own backyard are the sexy missions that capture the public's imagination alongside the more mundane but crucial ones which will result in us going where no man has gone before as Captain Kirk said.

Coming Back For Their Weather Balloon

There are many reasons why we are less than amused that Hillary Clinton didn't win the American election but one of the main ones was because she promised to make public the Area 51 files and reveal if we are being watched by little green men or women from other planets. 
As it turned out she didn't win and the weak 'weather balloon' excuse still holds so unless Donald Trump sends out a tweet in the middle of the night spilling the beans, we are still none the wiser. 
What we also don't know is what NASA has called 'Massive Objects' which are hurtling towards Earth which they can't identify.
The NASA scientists think the first of these objects which is set to fly close to Earth this week, is a comet, however they have yet to determine what the other one is, as it isn't set to properly appear until February this year.
They have ruled out it being an asteroid or a comet as it isn't displaying the usual gas cloud around it but although they are baffled by exactly what it is, the objects present course will take it 32 million miles from the Earth and 'is not a threat at present'.
It's the 'at present' bit that is worrying, especially as they don't know what it is but my guess would be an alien probe from some far flung galaxy on it's way to explore our Solar System in a search for life.
It is due to arrive, and hopefully carry on past, on 25 February so may be a good idea to turns the lights out and pretend nobody is home because it may just be coming to claim the 'weather balloon' that it lost in this planets vicinity about 70 years ago.

Doubts For Plans To Catch An Asteroid

In an April 2010 speech at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, President Obama directed NASA to send astronauts to an asteroid as the next step in human spaceflight but that concept has evolved in the years since so instead of us going to an asteroid, we bring one here and send it into orbit around the Moon.
Recent NASA funding changes mean the project’s future now looks uncertain, but apart from the end of one of the coolest astronomical ideas ever, there’s still sound reasons for pressing ahead with it.
Once parked in orbit about the moon, the captured asteroid would provide an easily accessible target for a future crewed mission to practise landing on fast moving space boulders with an eye on asteroid mining but more importantly it provides opportunities to test ways of nudging asteroids out of their current trajectory which could be very useful when we find ourselves in the direct line of a lump of rock a few miles wide.
It would also be useful for working out how to extract water from asteroids and for hitching a ride by piggy backing on any set on a course of the far flung solar system.
If the NASA plan is in doubt due to cost, the European Space Agency and other nations should be chipping in and making it an international effort because it is something that we will all benefit from and it should not be left to whither away just because the USA alone are unable to fund it.

Can We Look Yet?

We can all breathe again as the 100-foot wide asteroid TX68 has whizzed by the Earth and as far as i can tell has avoided a collision with our fair planet.
Scientists stated that the asteroid, called 2013 TX68, was on course to pass between 11,000 miles and 9 million miles and it's distance has been put at 2.5 million miles which is approximately double the distance it zipped by our ball of rock two years ago.
We may have escaped this time but Professor Brian Cox said that we are at risk of being wiped out by asteroids and that: 'There is an asteroid with our name on it and it will hit us'.
The Earth did have a near-miss recently when 2014 EC came within 38,300 miles of us this month but we didn't even realise it was there until it had gone by. 
NASA is currently tracking 1,400 'potentially hazardous asteroids' and predicting their future approaches and impact probabilities in a massive game of cosmic roulette which the dinosaurs found has devastating consequences if you lose.

Our Pet Asteroid

Look up to the sky in March and you may just see another flaming ball of matter as well as the Sun because an asteroid is scheduled to fly by but NASA can’t quite tell how far away it will be with estimates ranging from 9 million miles to 11,000 miles, approximately 95% closer than the moon.
Astronomers have only just been able to track its path and they will narrow down the trajectory the closer it gets.
The asteroid, called 2013 TX68, is 100 feet (30 meters) in diameter but astronomers studying the space rock are almost certain that it is not on a collision course with our ball of rock so i am hoping that it is closer to the 11,000 miles than the 9 million.
In 2020 the Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) plans to grab an asteroid, tow it along and place it in orbit about the moon so shame we did not have the technology already in place because we could have a asteroid literally fall into our lap save us having to go find one.

Not Life On Mars Just Yet

The battle to keep people interested in all things cosmos has been on a bit of a roll lately with Pluto, then a Lunar Eclipse and now the discovery of running water on Mars. 
NASA explained: 'Liquid water runs down canyons and crater walls over the summer months on Mars which raises the chances of being home to some form of life'.
David Bowie must be very pleased because almost every TV and Radio bulletin has managed to shoehorn in at least a few lines from his song 'Life On Mars' to set the royalties till kerchinging.
If the overblown glam rocker is the winner, those of a religious bent are the losers as the inevitable question is thrown at them, 'If God created the heaven and the Earth, when did he squeeze in Mars?'
I have long made my peace with religion by just ignoring it but if it weathered the storm about being the centre of the Universe, oops, no it isn't then i expect it will explain away the idea that God's sole intent was to create people in his image here on Earth only, especially if we find something in the newly detected rivers of Mars.
The does open up new possibilities regarding manned mission to the Red Planet and bases and a distance of 140 million miles from the nearest radio playing 'Life on Mars'.

Space Exploration Calendar

For the moment Space is the new black due to the New Horizons trip to Pluto and the amazing images it is sending back to Earth over 3 billion miles away but being a fickle lot, the public's interest will soon wane and Space exploration will shift into the background.
What space needs to keep the public interested in it are those big sexy missions and a glimpse into the explorers calendar for the next few years shows that there are some things in the offing that could grip the nation once again.

2018 - David Bowie amongst others will be interested to find out if there's life on Mars and we may find out in three years time when the ExoMars Rover is due to land there. The rover is armed with a drill that is able to dig down to a depth of two metres into the Martian soil and the European Space Agency (ESA) just have to agree on which of the dried up river beds to place the ExoMars Rover.
Also in 2018 the ESA will be sending up a sun-observing satellite which will travel within 21 million miles from the suns surface, the closest to our Star we have ever been and it will send back pictures of unprecedented detail.
The Hubble Space telescope's replacement will also be launched as the James Webb telescope, which is larger and more sophisticated than its predecessor, will be able to provide greater detail of the thousands of exo-planets where the astronomers are hoping to find life.
2020 - The Rosetta Mission landed a spacecraft on a Comet but pencilled in for 2020 is the Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) which plans to grab an asteroid, tow it along and place it in orbit about the moon. The mission is in the planning stages but if it can raise the funding required, we could have our own pet asteroid.
2022 - The ESA Jupiter icy moons explorer (Juice) mission is due to launch in 2022 and will concentrate on the Solar Systems largest moon, Jupiter's Ganymede. Potentially this is the most likely other place in our solar system for life due to it's sub glacial lakes and the spacecraft will be looking beneath the icy surfaces using radar imaging.

After many decades of wasted time, it appears that the space exploration may be picking up the pace once again.

Hello Pluto

If an object was travelling at 32,400 mph in a vacuum how far would it travel in 9 and a half years may sound like one of those hypothetical maths questions that maths teachers enjoy torturing their students with but this is not a poser from a man with leather elbow patches on his jumper because the New Horizons probe has just done it and the answer is to Pluto, or 3.78 billion miles.
When it blasted off in 2006 it was set on a course for the ninth Planet but by the time it arrived Pluto had been kicked out of the Planets club and is now a Kuiper Belt Object or Dwarf Planet which must have caused much confused for horoscope writers around the World.      
As it is the first time we have had a close up look at Pluto, the first piece of information received by NASA was that it is ever so slightly bigger than we thought, having a diameter of 2,370km or just a touch over two third the size of the moon.
The first pictures show the expected pock marks of craters and as the probe gets closer before flying past onto the Kuiper Belt scientists are hoping it will clear up what is actually at it's dark pole.
Finally Pluto will get it's moment in the Sun, or not as it is 40 times further away than the earth from our star but anyway, the lonely little ball of ice and rock, last in the queue in the far flung reaches of our Solar System abandoned by the bigger boys and relegated to a dwarf planet is taking it's turn in the spotlight.

Strange Noises

Everyone must have seen the classic 70s film 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind' which depicted an imagined first contact with an alien civilisation and can hum that 5 note tune right now which is Spielberg's idea of how we would communicate with an alien life force.
Humans have been sending signals and radio waves out into the depths of space since the space programme began but as yet nobody has come over to see who it is making such a racket in the Milky Way but they may have sent a message back as we have received quite a few unexplained noises coming in our general direction that scientists have no explanation for.
One such signal was received in 1977 by the Big Ear radio observatory in Ohio, a 72 second signal which was never heard again and 40 years later can still not be explained by scientists who have ruled out satellites, aircraft, ground-based transmitters on Earth and general space noise.
This week NASA have picked up another unexplained and baffling sound from space, this time they traced it to the Perseus galaxy cluster, 240 million light years away.
What if the source of the 1977 and 2014 sounds were a signals coming from another planet probing the sky and directing signals towards location they themselves thought may contain life.
Two thoughts.
Firstly, if we are only now hearing sounds which were emitted 240 million light years ago, any alien civilisation that had the technology then to do what we are only doing now, would be so far superior to us that the feeble attempts to contact them that we are making would be as incompatible as trying to send a smoke signal to an email account.  
In the opposite direction, we will not have the technology to catch communications sent by a civilisation many millenniums further down the communications evolutionary time line than us.
Secondly, do we really want to announce ourselves to a hugely advanced civilisation that would view us with as much disdain as we view an insect?
It is just a shame that the mysterious sounds are not coming from Uranus, that would just be too much to ask but for now there is no noise coming from Uranus although by all accounts the smell isn't great. Oh grow up.

Mining The Moon

It's a well known fact, that if you stand on the Great Wall of China, you can see the Moon and if you have an especially decent telescope you can now see a small rover with Made In China stamped on the side as China becomes the third country to complete a moon landing.
The rover has made the 225,745 mile trip to carry out a three-month exploration of the surface looking for natural resources.
Prof Ouyang Ziyuan of the department of lunar and deep space exploration explained that one of the main motivations behind the drive to investigate the Moon was to bring back it's resources: 'The Moon is full of resources, mainly rare earth elements, titanium, and uranium, which the Earth is really short of, and these resources can be used without limitation' he said which i'm not sure if i find worrying or not.
The mass of the Moon is 81 quintillion tons, the Earth is 6.580 sextillion tons and they are involved in a celestial dance where the Moon is kept spinning around the Earth by a balance of acceleration and gravity equalling each other.
If we start tinkering with the mass of the Moon by transporting some of its mass back onto Earth, will this have an effect on us and it? 
Taking millions upon millions of tons of the Moons mass would surely, over time, have to have an impact on the Moon's gravitational pull on Earth, creating a change in the seas tides and currents and weather patterns. Would a less dense Moon be slowly pulled towards the Earth or flung out of the gravitational grip we hold over it which would slow the Earths rotation considerably, not to mention the potentially devastating Earth's wobbling effect that the Moon controls.
Maybe mining the Moon won't have any effect, it's too much to get my brain around so i have emailed NASA to get a definitive answer to the question of if we could be creating a problem for ourselves at some time in the distant future.
Meanwhile, congratulations to the Chinese for entering the theatre of Space Exploration and i hope that this is a first step to a manned mission so all the conspiracy theorists can celebrate China being the first country to put a man on the Moon.

Nuclear Accident Waiting To Happen

The anti-nuclear weapon brigade always make the same arguments about Britain maintaining a nuclear arsenal, mostly that they are very expensive and outdated as the biggest threats we use are not other countries but terrorists who nuclear missiles are useless against.
What is never considered is the threat that just having them around us poses to us as an article in the Guardian newspaper highlighted today.
A 1970 study by one of America's nuclear weapon laboratories stated that at least 1,200 weapons were involved in accidents in America between 1950 and 1968.
The most dangerous both happened in 1980, the first happened when one of the engines on a B-52 bomber caught fire while carrying four hydrogen bombs and eight short-range missiles with nuclear warheads. A strong wind kept the flames away from the weapons and a fireman climbed into the burning plane, put out the fire, and averted a disaster.
Days later a technician dropped a tool in the silo of an intercontinental ballistic missile, struck the side of the missile, pierced the skin and caused a fuel leak. The missile exploded but the warhead failed to detonate.
A 1992 a report by the Ministry of Defence, claimed that 19 accidents had occurred with British weapons between 1960 and 1991.
These accidents included an American B-47 bomber veering off the runway and slammed into a storage igloo containing Mark 6 atomic bombs. The aircraft careered through the igloo and exploded just beyond the igloo bank which was described as a miracle by bomb disposal officers.
Another bad accident occurred in 1961 when the under-wing fuel tanks of a US F-100D fighter were accidentally jettisoned when the pilot started the engines. The fuel tanks hit the runway and ruptured, igniting fuel and engulfing in flames the hydrogen bomb mounted beneath the plane. Firefighters managed to extinguish the fire before the bomb was badly damaged.
The worst accident to occur during the handling of nuclear weapons in the UK happened in 1987, when an RAF truck carrying two hydrogen bombs swerved and went off the road and skidded on to its side. An RAF truck behind it, carrying another two bombs, went off the road, too.
The closest we have come to blowing ourselves up came in 1962 when the two retrorockets on a missile suddenly fired while undergoing a routine check. After a suitable amount of time, the workers returned to find that the missile's nose cone, containing the warhead, had miraculously not been dislodged.
Maybe the CND should be making the argument that keeping our nuclear weapon deterrent around is more dangerous to our own health than to than of Russia or North Korea.

Happy Birthday Curiosity

It was a year ago today that NASA successfully landed the Curiosity rover safely on the surface of Mars. 
An amazing feat that you can't help think is something we should have done decades ago.
The Soviets landed a probe on Venus in 1966 and sent up another that landed and sent back readings in 1969, the same year that humans were stepping onto the moon but it took another 43 years until we picked up the thread again which is very frustrating because if we had carried on in 1969 just imagine how much closer to a manned visit to Mars or a colony on the moon we would be today.
We have sent probes to all the planets and most of their moons on budgets a fraction of what is spent on 'defence' and we have found out that the inner rocky ones that may have had an outside chance of hosting us in the future are all uninhabitable for humans.
I'm 44 and hoped i would be living on the moon by now or at least past the stage when we are still landing probes on planets to find out about them.
Hopefully we are entering a new 'space age' where we really move on and make up for lost time.

Curiosity Martian Hunting

On Monday morning, at approximately 6am GMT, the latest NASA mission will attempt to land a space rover in the Gale Crater on Mars after an eight and a half month journey travelling a distance of 354 million miles.
Using a giant heat shield, the world’s biggest parachute, eight rocket thrusters and a bunch of nylon cables, scientists hope Curiosity will not only survive the 13,000 mph entry but provide an answer once and for all to the question whether life exists, or ever existed, on the fourth planet from the Sun.
Brimming with sophisticated machinery, the rovers mission is to seek out any signs of organic material on Mars or evidence that the Planet once supported any form of life and will help pave the way for the humans who might one day follow.
'Putting men on Mars is not unachievable. It is just really hard and expensive' explained a NASA spokesman and as half of the previous Mars missions have ended in failure, i would add dangerous also but i find the whole space exploration programme since 1969 so disappointing.
We should have moon bases by now and we should be further down the road to a manned mission to Mars than we presently are considering the first time we landed a Rover on Mars was in 1971 and 4 decades on we are still at the same stage.
Frustratingly slow progress but there is a certain irony that our future generations feared Martians visiting the earth with superior technology and abducting us for experiments but we are the aliens with the superior technology who will be landing there and if we find life, abducting the local population for testing. I dare say if a valuable commodity was found on other planets, we wouldn't be averse to oppressing the local inhabitants and stealing it either just as we feared in countless sci-fi films.
That's a concern for future generations, my generation is hopefully the start of a renewed interest in space exploration, especially if Curiosity finds something, although there are many who question the cost of exploring other planets when we are facing such dire straights on our own one and that is a valid question.
My answer is that the US defence budget is $850bn per year, the NASA budget is $17bn which is $3bn less than what the American Government spends on air conditioning units for its troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. How's that for mixed up priorities when we spend fifty time more on killing each other than we do on finding possible new worlds to live on since we have trashed this one.

Moving on from NASA

I don't know why i like watching space shuttle launches, seen one seen them all, but i made sure that i was at home today by 4.30pm to watch the launch of Atlantis to bring down the curtain on Nasa's space programme.
As expected, nothing different to every other launch i have watched on television although there was a bit of excitement when the clock stopped with 31 seconds to go.
So there it with the magnificent pictures of the earth rapidly falling away as the rocket accelerated out of the atmosphere but i can't help thinking that our Space exploration seemed to fall away after 1969.
We have the Hubble telescope and we have satellites beaming back pictures from other planets but considering the amazing leaps we made between Sputnik in 1957 and Apollo 11 in 1969, it is a bit disappointing that we haven't really kicked on.
It has been over 40 years since Neil Armstrong stepped out onto the moons surface but that is still the highest pinnacle of manned space flight and our technology and understanding of space flight has improved immensely since then but still the moon is as far as we have gone.
We had a decade of collecting moon samples and then we seem to have given up on and the last time a human walked on the moon was 1972.
Of course the Cold War was the greatest driver of the Space Race and with the Soviet Union ceasing to be, the impetus to push the boundaries reduced and NASA seemed content to hang about in low earth orbit doing experiments which while very useful, never really caught the imagination.
Expense is another reason and why NASA have pulled the plug on their space programme so maybe their is an opportunity for the leading Space exploration countries America and Russia to join forces with the up and coming space programmes of China, India and the UK to join forces and have a global space exploration programme with everyone sharing the financial burden rather than individual countries.
A Moon base, manned flights to Mars and a chain of International Space Stations spreading out across our Solar System should be our aims and it shouldn't take another struggle between competing power blocks trying to prove a point before we take the next step.