NASA, humans, and the future

This week a new budget, and a new plan for NASA was announced. Because of the intense political and emotional feelings surrounding any big changes to such an important and visible program it can be easy to lose sight of the big picture.

NASA’s extraordinary accomplishments (backed up by an array of industries and the very fabric of an entire society) represent a key piece of human efforts to not only understand the universe around us, but to also make our first steps beyond the confines of our home world. Other nations have made, and continue to make, enormous contributions – from the Soviet, and now Russian, space program and its amazing feats of engineering, to the European Space Agency, the rapidly growing exploration programs of China, Japan, and an increasing roster of nations. It’s amazing to think that only half a century ago this was still all the stuff of science fiction.

Taken altogether one would be forgiven for thinking that space exploration is at present a rather rough-shod and haphazard affair. The truth is though that it’s no different than any other ambitious, exploratory, scientific enterprise. The multi-billion dollar effort to decode the human genome was, and still is, an evolving and fluid thing. The world of microelectronics has consistently veered off in many unexpected directions. Our efforts to understand the nature and origins of life on this planet are constantly adapting to new discovery and new opportunities. Given the size of the universe, and the incredible diversity of environments within just our own solar system, it’s actually amazing that the space programs of so many nations have managed to accomplish so much, and with so much coherence.

So NASA evolves, not necessarily in ways that everyone agrees on, but that’s ok – space exploration has to be a flexible and adaptable enterprise. While there are some givens – the need for vehicles that can lift large payloads into orbit, for example – the rest is, and may always be, a wide open blank slate – the final frontier. It’s an exciting time, private industry has never been more interested in getting into space, and while they face huge technical challenges, this may just be exactly the right moment for NASA to change its role – participate in a new way, while not discarding it’s vast treasury of knowledge and experience.

Time to watch the skies !

Posted in Future Programs, News, Project Aurora, Space
by: Caleb at 10:15 am Feb 2010

2 Comments

The school of hard knocks for Jovian moons

Callisto in True Color – Image Credit Galileo Project, JPL, NASA
Ganymede Mosaic – unlikely brothers

The planets and moons of our solar system are in many respects just the
fossil remains of the heyday of star and planet formation that occurred
some 4.5 billion years ago. Like the fossils of organisms here on Earth
they provide clues and insights to exactly what happened early on in the
history of the system – sometimes in unexpected ways.

Jupiter’s moons Ganymede and Callisto have long presented a curious
conundrum. While they are both large, and next to each other in their
orbits, Ganymede is clearly a layered or differentiated world, with a
rocky core and its own magnetic field. Callisto on the other hand is a
bit of a mess, it’s rock and ice is much more jumbled and it has only
a tiny core of denser silicates. It’s as if Callisto never settled down.
How could they be so different ?

A new work by Barr and Canup in Nature Geosciences
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/ngeo746.html
offers up a neat and compelling solution that surprisingly ties the fate
of these moons into the grander scheme of the solar system. Some 3.9
billion years ago the outer planets (in particular Saturn, Uranus and
Neptune) seemed to have probably undergone a significant orbital change,
with Uranus and Neptune digging into a disk of outer system material -
kilometer and larger sized remnants from planet formation, known as
planetesimals – as they moved outwards to their present orbits. This
resulted in a massive flurry of asteroidal material being scattered
inwards, pummeling the other worlds, decorating our Moon with craters
and pounding the young Earth.

Now Barr and Canup have shown that the Jovian moons would have also had
their share of knocks – but because Ganymede is that bit deeper in the
gravity well of Jupiter it would have had an extra beating. All of the
energy of those collisions could have helped melt and heat Ganymede much
more than Callisto – the upshot being that Ganymede could slosh and
settle to its present, layered and well ordered, state. Callisto on the
other hand never got this boost of energy, and so remained a bit of a
mish-mash of undifferentiated material.

It’s a great insight, and neatly ties together an observation today with
the early history of the solar system.

Posted in New Discovery, News, Planets, Space
by: mbambu at 12:47 am Feb 2010

2 Comments

space facts

Each year 40,000 tons of matter from space is added to the planet earth’s mass. This matter comes from space in the form of asteroids, meteoroids, interplanetary dust, and comet debris.


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