We live in a totally awesome universe. I like it. Do you?

It never ceases to amaze me how awesome the universe has become in the last thirty-odd years.

The Horsehead nebula, Barnard 33, as seen by Hubble. Wonderful, wonderful imagery. NASA, public domain.

Take astronomy. Back in the late twentieth century, half the stuff we know now was a pipe dream. Even sci-fi authors didn’t imagine what we’ve actually found. Exoplanets? In 1994, stuff of science fiction. There was a slight indication that one might exist around Barnard’s Star, (V2500 Ophiuchus) - now disproven – but nothing else.

Now? We’ve found hundreds – 877 as of the end of April 2013, in fact. With hundreds more lurking in data already collected. And do these planetary systems obey Bode’s Law? No they do not. They include super-Neptunes. Water worlds. ‘Eyeball’ worlds tidally locked so one face forever faces their sun. Hot Jupiters. Planets whose very atmospheres are boiling into space. We’ve even directly imaged some of these extra-solar worlds, around Formalhaut (Alpha Piscis Austrini). How cool is that?

Hubble picture of the planet around Formalhaut. NASA, public domain.

Planets are only the half of it; we’ve also found detail in nebulae that we never thought could exist. And black holes. I won second prize in a regional high school science contest in 1978 with a display on black holes – in which I outlined how the event horizon works as a direct consequence of Einsteinian physics, for which I did the math and plotted graphs. Not that I had learned any of this at my high school. I missed out on first prize – explicitly because I’d presented theoretical physics and the judges were looking for kitchen chemistry experiments. It was a high school science contest. Yes, I know that sounds like a Sheldon answer, but it’s true.

The point is that back in 1978 nobody had seen a black hole. Theoretically, they could have been just that – black. Invisible, maybe, apart from the possibility of picking up a lensing effect from the way they distorted space-time.

Now we know different. They’re amazingly visual. Dynamic, exciting – shrouded in violent clouds of swirling hot gases and debris which belch X-rays as tidal forces crush and heat them.

The PIllars of Creation – star nurseries in M-16, the Eagle Nebula. Click to enlarge. NASA, public domain.

We’ve even integrated quantum theory into the mix – which was done by Stephen Hawking. Thanks to him, we know that black holes themselves radiate at particle level (it’s a consequence of superposition). Small ones radiate away to nothing, which is why the CERN supercollider won’t create an earth-swallower.

In just thirty years we’ve realised that it’s all out there – this amazing, dynamic, ever-changing universe. It’s totally different from the rather bland void, possibly populated with clones of our own solar system, that we imagined in the mid-twentieth century.

And there is so much more to learn. I think that’s pretty wonderful. I hope you do too.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

More Martian dumbness: NASA drew a giant WHAT on the red planet?

The other day my wife ordered a latte – which she then had to photograph because of the way the coffee and soy happened to mix, a kind of ‘ooer, that looks a bit rude’ shape, if you looked at it the right way.

The point being that NASA has been getting stick for apparently drawing the same thing. Thing, I did say ‘thing’, didn’t I? A sand drawing, with its Spirit rover, right there on the Martian pud, I mean pug.

Of course, by the time I went to check the JPL site, the pic had been replaced by this one… Public domain, NASA.

Purely accidental. Honestly, officer. (“Pfft, chortle, ooer, that looks a bit rude“).

OK, so if ”paredoilia’ is seeing faces in random patterns, what’s the word when people perceive what in old Devonshire dialect was a ‘tallywag’, outlined in Martian tyre trails (but only if you look at it sideways).

The good news? In 2023, four lucky people will get the chance to see NASA’s – er – artwork in person. Maybe. A Dutch fellow is looking for people to go on a one-way trip. Unlike Denis Tito’s  plan for a couple to spend a 501-day marital sojourn in a Dragon capsule, lining the walls with their own excrement, this one will involve landing on Mars. Also in modified Dragon that, I suspect, would be like living in a 1960s police phone box which, alas, wasn’t bigger on the inside.

Taking off again? Uh…no…

Conceptual artwork by Pat Rawlings of a Mars mission rendezvous from 1995. NASA, public domain, via Wikipedia.

Which means the life support system has to last forever. I expect it’ll be made of duct tape. Eventually. Oh – and the voyage’s going to be turned into reality TV.

Would I go? Plus side…

1. I’d be on a different planet from Justin Bieber and his monkey.

2. It would get me on TV along with re-runs of The World’s Greatest Loser.

3. You don’t have to line the walls with your own excrement like Tito’s crew.

4. If I wanted to be called the next Jeddak of Barsoom, I’d be in the right place, unlike now when they all look at me funny.

5. I’d get a front row seat for the next ‘NASA drawing’ on Mars.

But I have to say that the green hills of Earth are looking pretty good about now.

Would you go on a one-way trip to Mars? And what do you think NASA should draw next on the Red Planet?

 Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

The truth behind the Moon landing conspiracy

This week Jeff Bezos fished an F-1 motor from an Apollo mission out of the Atlantic. The biggest rocket engine ever used. That’s seriously awesome.

There is a reader of this blog whose Dad was pad safety officer for Apollo 11 – who was brought up in the middle of the whole project. Ultra cool (I am sooooo jealous!).

I still recall sitting in front of TV aged seven, while a shadowy, black-and-white Neil Armstrong descended to the lunar surface. It was an unforgettable moment. Armstrong – along with Aldrin, Collins and the other Apollo astronauts – were heroes in the truest sense.

Neil Armstrong in the LM, after the first moon walk, 20 July 1969. His face says it all. Photo: NASA

That was the real space age. Even New Zealand was seized by the dream; we had Apollo hardware kits in our cornflake packs, there were moon ice-creams. Humanity was doing what it does best -stretching the limits, pushing the unknown. Publicly, spectacularly. It was an exciting time to grow up.

Not that any of this has stopped lunatic claims that the whole lot was faked by NASA. The argument rests on a trawl for supposed consistency errors and gaffes perpetrated by the top scientific minds in the US, yet easily discoverable by enthusiasts. What’s more, the whole deception has, we are told, been kept secret for decades by tens of thousands of government and private-sector employees, officials, and others involved in the lunar programme, including international scientists such as New Zealand’s Sir William Pickering, who ran JPL at the time.

Quite. Needless to say, most of the pro-hoax arguments pivot on flat ignorance of the science involved. The claims are trivial to debunk – check out here and here.

Buzz Aldrin descends to the lunar surface, 20 July 1969.Photo: NASA, public domain.

I can show you a disproof myself. Check out Armstrong’s photo of Buzz Aldrin descending to the Moon. Notice how he’s lit on the shadowed side of the Lunar Module? That, hoax-advocates insist, is the smoking gun. Dumb old NASA had to add a second light to get around the fact that they’d lit the wrong side of the LM on their sound stage.

The reality?  The ladder was in shadow because Armstrong and Aldrin landed with the sun behind them soon after lunar dawn. No second light is needed in this photo; Aldrin is lit by reflected light from the regolith behind Armstrong, the photographer. You can see this principle for yourself. Here’s a photo I took of the Tom Parker fountain in Napier, New Zealand.

A photo I took of the Tom Parker Fountain, Napier, January 2013.

The shadow side of the fountain (facing the camera) should be as dark as the shadows under the topiary. Actually, it’s as bright as the sunlit side.  Yet the sole illumination is the sun, from top left. Sunlight reflected from the water on the side of the fountain to the right is illuminating the shadow side. The atmosphere makes little difference – it scatters the light, but not enough, evidenced by density of other shadows. Here’s how it works:

I made this myself. Oh man, I love being a geek!

What I’m showing here is the principle. Water reflects light in specular fashion, and at this angle it’s reflecting 90-95% – rendering the fountain’s shadow side over-exposed. By contrast, lunar regolith reflects about 2% light. And if you check out the moon photo, you’ll see not much light is reflected on Aldrin; Armstrong has set the camera to expose on that shadow. The regolith beyond (as bright as what’s illuminating Aldrin, from the other direction) is grossly over-exposed. That nails the point. Aldrin looks well lit. Actually, he isn’t – and that’s as you’d expect from lunar dirt reflectivity.

I have often wondered why something as stupid as the moon hoax claim could gain traction. Part of it is that we never went back – Apollo ended 40 years ago. Today it seems like a dream. But it also occurs to me that the hoax idea proxies one of the key aspects of the human condition. Humanity, it seems, likes to see patterns where none exist and attribute meaning without reference to context – or by referring to a context that isn’t the one shared by others.

The hoax traction is also, I think, derived at least partly from powerlessness - wanting to find explanations within bound of what the individual knows, as a way of asserting control over a huge and frightening world around. If we assert what we think we know, over what we don’t know, we regain a sense of control. It’s how conspiracies work – the detail of the hoax claim itself is merely symptomatic at this level.

It’s impossible to argue against such people, because what they assert is tied into their sense of self-worth.

What are your thoughts?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Next week: the real moon-landing hoax – Moscow style. And coming up, more how-to posts on writing, more fun stuff, and – well, you’ll see!

Unleashing the inner geek put me into a comet coma, I think

I tried photographing Comet C/2011 L4 (PANSTARRS) last week. No joy. It was so close to the Sun there was only a short window to see it in New Zealand, right on sunset, and – it turns out – masked by hills.

Oh well, it’ll be back in another 110,000 years. It was kind of amusing, I suppose – standing on the beach with tripod and camera at dusk. Every so often I’d glance up at Orion to check that Betelgeuse hadn’t exploded yet (one day it will).

Wellington harbour – Port Nicholson/Te Whanganui-A-Orotu, at sunset from Petone beach. The odd colour of the beach shingle is caused by the sodium-vapour street lights behind me, coupled with a 2-second exposure. I was meant to be taking a picture of a comet…

A woman on her evening walk turned up and said to my wife, ‘You a photographer widow? My husband does that too.’

After a while I packed up the inner geek and we went home.

I’ll have another chance with C/2012 S1 (ISON), this November. And in mid-October 2014, ‘Siding Spring’ C/2013 A1 will skim past Mars. Or hit, creating a fireworks show the like of which we haven’t seen for a while – the last was in 1994, when Hale-Bopp ploughed into Jupiter.

We’ve come a long way since comets were seen as harbingers of doom. Or maybe luck. Back in 1861, Gabriel Read, the man who found gold in Otago, thought it a good omen when he looked up with the nuggets in his hand and saw the ‘Great Comet’ of 1861, Not so in America, where the comet appeared just as the Civil War brewed up.

Astronomers took a while to figure out what they were. The key figure was Edmund Halley, a prodigy who became a Fellow of the Royal Society as a nipper, age 22 (the youthful rotten swine!). He paid to have Isaac Newton’s work published, and in the 1690s proved that some comets have closed elliptical orbits. The comet he used to prove the point now bears his name.

Back them, nobody knew what comets were. Now we know they are chunks of ice and rock that usually originate in the Kuiper Belt or Oort cloud, on the edges of our solar system. Every so often, gravitational interferences tip one into an orbit that skims towards the inner solar system, sometimes coming close to the Sun.

Cometary orbits displayed via my trusty Celestia installation. Clockwise from left: Hale-Bopp, Ikeya Zhang, and Halley. The two planets are Neptune and Uranus.

Along the way, an encounter with one of the planets – typically Jupiter – can bend the comet into a shorter period orbit. After a while, the ice and volatiles are burned off by close passes to the Sun, and the comet breaks into trails of gravel. Or it can be broken by tidal forces. There are a lot of variables.

Earth often ploughs through these trails. It’s where regular meteor showers come from, such as the Leonids. These are associated with debris spewing off Comet Tempel-Tuttle, and which we mow through every November.  Usually the chunks are so small they burn up in the atmosphere. But every so often a larger chunk comes through, like the one that burst over Tunguska in 1908. Or over Russia just a few weeks ago.

Have you seen a comet lately? And do you see them as 0mens – or cool science?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Do you believe in Russell Crowe’s UFO – or any UFO?

Russell Crowe filmed a UFO over Sydney’s Botanical Gardens this week. Nobody else saw it, but the video’s on U-tube if you want to check it out. (I know what I said.)

The Botanical Gardens are on the left in this picture I took from Sydney Harbour in 2010. No aliens, though.

Aha! He saw a flying saucer. Or something. My bet is with the ‘or something’. Still, aliens are among us…aren’t they?

Uh. No.

A ground view I took of the gardens.

Certainly people see things in the sky they can’t themselves explain. And their description may not have enough detail for science to explain it either. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t an explanation – or that the unlikely one must be true.

I actually saw a UFO once. It was over Wellington, New Zealand, one autumn night in 1987. It was parallel to the horizon, a glowing ball of red fire that threw sparks and, as I watched, tumbled and broke up into fragments that died away from sight.Very, very impressive. And even as it went out, I knew what I’d seen. The colour of the fireball, size, behaviour, trajectory on the usual satellite orbital track made it obvious. I’d witnessed a re-entering satellite. Collectors here occasionally pick up the trash NASA and ROSCOSMOS drop on us. Spherical bits of titanium and the like.

Memories of a bygone age. This is “Atlantis” over the South Island, New Zealand – as simulated by me using Celestia (seriously, seriously cool science package).

As for ‘alien spacecraft’ – no. I don’t think anybody’s seen a single one Not one. Nada. Zip.

Why? Well, as I say, funny lights in the sky for which the watcher has no explanation don’t prove a hypothesis. But in any case, space is big. Really, really, mind-blowingly big. If the Earth were the size of a pea, the Sun would be nearly 120 metres away, and the nearest star – Proxima Centauri – would still be 30,000 kilometres distant.

Look out at the night sky. Most of the stars you see with the naked eye are within 200 light years, a trivial distance compared to the scale of the galaxy (let alone the visible universe).

I set Celestia up to look back at the Sun from Beta Pictoris - this is the view. Note that the brightest stars in our own neighbourhood (Sirius A and Vega) are visible. The Sun isn’t. You’d need a telescope. Did I mention Celstia is tres cool? I did, didn’t I.

If you were in space near the super-Jupiter we’ve found orbiting Beta Pictoris, which is about 60 light years away, you couldn’t see our sun with the naked eye. That’s how insignificant we are. Sixty light years – invisible. In a galaxy 100,000 light years across. Quite apart from the scale of the whole universe which is 45,700,000,000 light years across,.

Sure, you might be able to pick up I Love Lucy from Beta Pictoris, along with Cold War microwave radar transmissions and the like. But our radio broadcasts are still a tiny, tiny dot against the galaxy. Here’s a diagram.

We’ve also made a concerted effort to find another civilisation that might be broadcasting. Nothing. Alien civilisations are probably out there. The problem is finding them – and vice versa. And then communicating. By the time we get a signal from Zog the Tentacle Monster, 5000 light years away (5 percent the size of the galaxy), Zog’s whole civilisation might have died. And that’s without considering the 5000 years it would take our reply to get back. Space, as I say, is big.

There’s another dimension to it, too – time. Earth has been around about a third of the life of the universe. We’ve had complex life for 600 million years, and modern humans have been around for about 200,000. Civilisation has been around less than 10,000 years, and at the rate we’re consuming resources, I doubt it’ll be around another 10,000. The chances of another civilisation popping up within range, just when ours appears, is even more remote.

But my real problem with the  ’UFOs are aliens’ idea is that the conception is utterly human-centric -  and culture-specific to the west. Aliens who look like us with big heads, small bodies and big eyes, who travel like we do, who have the answers to specific human (western) moral problems, and whose existence is hidden by The Authorities (playing into western pop-culture fantasies of large-scale public deception)? Come on! This isn’t reality – it’s very, very bad science fiction.

Our inner solar system vs the Kepler 22b system. NASA/JPL, public domain.

The science is clear. As J B S Haldane pointed out, the universe is not only stranger than we imagine. It’s stranger than we can imagine. I’m in no doubt we’ll find an Earthlike world.  But who says it will have life? Or life we recognise? It might be algae. That’s what life was here for most of Earth’s existence. Would we recognise them as intelligent? Would they recognise us? Who says intelligence might develop at all? Or be restricted to just one species per planet? Or that ‘they’ travel in things that look like our concept of a vehicle? Indeed, is civilisation even automatic?

The answer to all these questions is that we have a sample of one, us, which isn’t enough to generalise - and for the rest, ‘we don’t know’. However, the fact that ‘we don’t know’ doesn’t make every crackpot theory automatically right.

Besides, were aliens to turn up here, we would know. It would be impossible to hide. And it would be the greatest irony, given all our conceits, fantasies and arrogance, if they didn’t bother with us.

What do you think? And do you figure that writers could – and should – invent a better sort of alien contact story?

 Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013  

Coming up next week: More writing tips, inspirations, and other fun stuff.

Dennis Tito’s Mars 2018 flyby is a dumb idea and I won’t be going.

What do you think of Dennis Tito’s plan to send a married couple on a 501 day trip past Mars?

Composite panorama of Mars. Not going to be seen by the 2018 expedition, as they’ll fly past the night side. NASA, public domain.

I think it’s dumb. Three-course dumb, with a side-order of dumb.

What Tito’s apparently proposing is to jam two people into a sealed space the size of a large camper van – which means, in practise, that they will be living inside a commode after about Day 5 – soaked with radiation that will lift their chances of cancer by 3 percent. Or kill them, if there’s a solar flare. To get back, they have to endure a risky skip re-entry on Earth – where, if anything is wrong with the angle, they’ll incinerate on the first plunge or bounce into deep space forever, assuming the heat shield hasn’t broken. All that, just so they can scoot past the night side of Mars at interplanetary speeds. Uh – hello?

What happens if something breaks? Or one of them dies, leaving the other to spend eight or nine months trapped with the rotting corpse of their spouse? Ewwww.

Yeah, there’s the point of being the first humans to get near another planet, it’s heroic, the human spirit and the rest.

I took that into account when forming my opinion.

Cut-away of the modified Apollo/SIVB ‘wet lab’ configuration for the 1973-74 Venus flyby. The rocket stage accelerates them on the interplanetary transfer orbit, and once the LOX is burned, the astronauts move in and set up house (hence ‘wet’).  NASA, public domain, via Wikipedia.

Flyby is not a new idea. The Soviets toyed with schemes in the 1960s, NASA studied ways of using Apollo hardware to send a modified Apollo CSM/Skylab on a Venus flyby. It was feasible, but the engineers couldn’t guarantee the astronauts would be alive at the end.

We know now they would likely have died. The mission was scheduled for 1973-74, and there was a coronal mass ejection on 5-6 July 1974, when the astronauts would have been in deep space on the return leg – heavy radiation, months away from home.

In the event, nobody could see much science from it anyway, and Congress killed the scheme on the drawing board in 1968, along with most of the rest of the Apollo Applications Programme.

To me, that zip science return is likely true of Tito’s Mars flyby, quite apart from the marginal safety of the venture. I suppose the FAA will see it the same way.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t go to Mars – but let’s do it properly. It comes down to energy. Chemical rockets don’t provide enough That’s why the journey takes so long – everything we send has to use a Hohmann-type transfer orbit.

Conceptual artwork by Pat Rawlings of a Mars mission rendezvous from 1995. NASA, public domain, via Wikipedia.

The problem is that the laws of physics are clear about what can be done, and the more exotic your energy source, the harder it is to contain and direct it. We’re already pushing what metals, plastics and even carbon can do. However, the VASIMIR electric-ion system looks promising. In theory, VASIMIR might reach Mars in 39 days with the right planetary alignments - round trip in five months. That reduces the radiation, life-support and maintenance problems straight off.

There is one catch. Solar escape velocity at Earth’s orbit is 29.8 km/sec. Peak speed during the trip is 34 km/sec. If the motor breaks before your deceleration burn, you’re on a one-way trip to interstellar space. (“Goodbyeeeeeeee….”)

What it will really take is political will. Money. And, I think, wide public engagement of the Apollo-era variety – something which, alas, may not happen again.

What do you think of Tito’s idea? Would you go yourself? What do you think of sending humans into space anyway, when robots can do a cheaper job without risk to life? I’d love to hear from you.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Note: I was going to cover UFO’s this week – but Tito’s announcement is more interesting. ‘Inspirations’ moves to Wednesdays. And coming up, more writing tips, more ‘write it now’, and other fun. Stay tuned.

Russian meteor could be Pope resignation conspiracy, but I prefer science

It was one of those awful coincidences. Last Friday evening I was having a few beers with a friend, in a local pub. He was calculating the likely impact energy if 2012 DA14 – due to make a close pass over Indonesia – were to ever hit us.

Earth. An image I made with my Celestia installation (cool, free, science package).

There are websites with Java script that do this, but it’s easy yourself if you have figures for velocity and mass –  a function of volume and density – plus the formula and a calculator. (Yes, I know it had been published, but it’s fun to do the math. I’m a geek and so are my friends. Remember…geeks won….)

Nobody realised another object was about to explode over Chelyabinsk – ‘Tankograd’ of Second World War fame.

The 1200 injured from flying glass is the largest human toll recorded from a meteor strike. The cost to Russia will be in the millions of roubles. Not to mention the fact that thousands of people are facing sub-zero temperatures in windowless homes, until they can be fixed.

All that because the Pope resigned. Well, it’s obvious. The Conspirating Ruling Archaic Poodles, a secret cabal nobody has ever heard of, used their stooges to drop one of their orbiting Bombs Utilising Low Level Seekrit Hyper Invisible Termination on the Vatican, thus covering up the Pope’s resignation, but because secret organisations always make basic arithmetical errors, it hit Russia instead. I have proof this is true, because they fly in invisible black helicopters. Well, have you seen one? Quite. Proves they exist…

And yes, I know that is a really, really stupid theory…but hey, it’s not the dumbest one out there.

Needless to say, the science involved actually answers all questions. First off – the energy involved is mind-blowing on the scale of us mere humans.

How mind blowing? Try this. The Russian rock was maybe 10,000 tonnes mass and 17 metres diameter, by NASA estimate. Yet still exploded with an energy equivalent, some estimates suggest, of around 500,000 tons of TNT. How come?

Well, it’s entirely to do with kinetic energy, which you calculate according to the formula 1/2 MV<exp>2.  It was moving at over 63,000 km/h when it hit the atmosphere. That gave it a kinetic energy (roughly) of around 500,000,000,000,000 joules. Translated into human terms, that’s what a 1-kilowatt fan heater would emit if run constantly for 15,844 years (it would run out in about March in that last year).

That’s a lot of energy. So why did it explode? At the speed this sucker hit us, it was moving so fast it couldn’t push the atmosphere out of the way. The air was compressed ahead of it, got super-hot, and then began vapourising the front side of the meteor. But the back side was still ice-cold. After a while, differential thermal stresses exceeded the tensile strength of the object – and boom! A lot of the kinetic energy translated into a massive shock wave, shattering glass over that huge area, and powerful enough to be detected in Alaska. Some became heat. Some was retained in the fragments of meteor that hurtled into the ground, which will be found sooner or later (they’re looking now).

The take-home lesson from Friday? The odds of a damaging meteor hitting us, by human time-spans, are low . But these things do happen. And we didn’t see this one coming despite a determined effort of late to detect everything in our vicinity that might be a threat. We’ve even found the S-1VB stage from Apollo 12, which is lobbing around in a weird orbit nearby. But Friday’s rock – still a city-buster – was too small.

A Hubble picture of Jupiter after it had been machine-gunned by Comet Shoemaker-Levy in 1994. NASA, public domain, via Wikipedia.

Worse, even if we had seen it, there was nothing we could have done.  The laws of physics are clear; Bruce Willis and a gang of Texan oil-riggers aren’t going to save the day at the last moment. I’ve explained why in an earlier post – check it out. Even if you could carry enough rocket fuel to get to an incoming rock and blow it up (which you can’t….trust me…) most of the bits will still hit the Earth with the same net kinetic energy. And it’s that energy that’s the problem.

That doesn’t mean we can’t find ways of handling it. Given decades of warning,  even spray-painting the side of a space rock black will work, by changing the way it re-radiates solar energy, asymmetrically. Over years, that will change the orbit.

Of course, space debris usually isn’t isolated. A comet can break up, leaving trails of objects following its original orbit. Jupiter was slammed by just such a train ‘o doom  in 1994. There’s a fair chance that we might have to try and deflect half a dozen potential impactors all at once.

Personally I’m not going to lose sleep over it. No point worrying about things we can’t control. And the prospect of being slammed by a space rock is pretty far down the list. Here in New Zealand, for instance, it’s more likely we’ll be hit by an earthquake – in fact, there was a small one in my city on Saturday and another tremor this morning.

What’s your take? Should we worry about that which we cannot control? Or get on with life?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

‘Kindness 2013’ returns next week. Coming up this week: more sixty-second writing tips, Write It Now part 6 – and more.

Forget the Mayan rubbish – this is the REAL astro-apocalypse. Now.

Although there’s no basis to the new-age ’Mayan Apocalypse’, there are two ways Earth can be dealt to, apocalyptically, from space. Neither will make the Earth disappear, but at worst most of us will die, and survivors will be back to living in caves.

Hypothetical near-earth asteroid mission. Image: NASA.

Method No. 1 is gamma ray burst from an exploding Wolf-Rayet star. A 3-10 second burst from 10,000 light years away can destroy our ozone layer. The energy is mind blowing.  NASA’s SWIFT satellite detects them. We’d be unlucky to be caught in the beam at lethal distance, but afterwards life would be nasty. One might have caused the Ordovician-Devonian extinction event, 440 million years ago. Eta Carinae, a star radiating 5,000,000 times the energy of the Sun, circa 7500 light years distant, could cause one.

Method No. 2 is being hit by an asteroid about 10 km in diameter or more, at a speed of more than 11-12 km/sec. One of those impacts, 65 million years ago, helped trigger the ‘Cretaceous extinction event’.  So far, nothing big has hit a city – though had the Tunguska meteor of 1908 been five hours earlier, it would have destroyed St. Petersburg.

I made this diagram of Toutatis’ orbit relative to Earth with Celestia. Seriously, seriously cool science software.

On 11-12 December – this week– Asteroid 4179 Toutatis passed us at 4.3 million miles. It has a diameter of 4.5 x 2.4 x 1.9 km and escape velocity is 0.0019 km/s, about 6.8 km/h or 4.27 mph. You could jump into orbit from the surface. A handy asteroid impact simulator  tells me impact with Earth would release energy equal to 365,000,000,000 tons of TNT. It’ll be back at the end of 2016. Will it hit us? No chance in the next 600 years. The orbit – with 4:1 resonance to ours and 1:3 to Jupiter’s – is well known.

Smaller things hit more often. The thing that exploded over Tunguska in 1908 was likely a fragment of Comet Encke, which has shed material as two Taurid meteor stream. The Tunguska fragment likely came from the B-stream and was mostly ice. Compression heating when it hit the atmosphere meant one side was white hot while the other was cold. Lots of thermal stress. Boom!

For obvious reasons, we’ve been looking for potential rocks. Most of the risk-objects have been found – uh, we think. Well, we’ve even found the S-IVB stage from Apollo 12. Pretty cool.  The only objects of any danger are Ag5, a 140-metre rock which has a 1 in 500 chance of hitting us in 2040; and Vk-184, a 130-metre rock that has an 0.055% chance of hitting us in 2048.

Can we deflect one coming for us? Yes, if we get years of warning. Even spray-painting black on one side would do it, because of differential radiation effects.

Apollo 12 lifting off. The SIV stage is the one just clear of the tower. Moments after this photo was taken, spacecraft and tower were hit by lightning. Photo: NASA http://www.hq.nasa.gov/ alsj/a12/ ap12-KSC-69PC-672.jpg

Suppose we found one just four weeks off, like in the movie? Could Bruce Willis save us by landing on the asteroid and nuking it? Uh… no. Supposing you could get something on the launch pad instantly, you’d still have to accelerate away from Earth to meet the intruder, needing fuel to change velocity (delta-V) by at least 12-15 km/sec. Then you have to stop, requiring about 1-4 km/sec delta-V (Earth’s gravity slows you on the outward leg). Then you need to accelerate back towards Earth to catch the interloper. If it’s incoming at 15 km/sec per-second (like Vk-184), you need that much delta-V. Mission energy is 34 km/sec delta V. Oh…and you’re on course to hit Earth with the asteroid. More delta-V, please.

The Saturn V moon rocket could accelerate Apollo to 11.2 km/sec; and the Apollo SM had 2.8 km/sec delta V in vacuum. The xenon-ion electric driven Dawn probe that’s just departed Vesta, en route to Ceres in 2015, has 10 km/sec delta-V. (Hey folks – we visited one of the biggest asteroids, past Mars!) But ion thrusters have less puff than human breath and take months to get the probe into a new orbit.

There’s always Project Orion, a US idea from 1959 that would have pushed a spacecraft by lobbing atomic bombs out the back. Dumb? Absolutely. The worst part is, it worked on test. There was even a paper done on the world increase in cancer rates they’d induce by launching Orion spacecraft from the ground. (Were they MAD in the Cold War? Arrrrggghhhh!)

But all this is academic for our four-week warning asteroid. What does the damage is the net kinetic energy the asteroid delivers to Earth. If you hit an incoming asteroid with a nuke, it’ll turn into a cloud of fragments, most still heading our way with virtually all the original kinetic energy, this time spread over a larger area. Neatypoos.

So there you have it – a couple of astronomical doom scenarios that involve proper science. When will they happen? Nobody knows. But I don’t lose any sleep over it. Do you?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2012

A tribute to Neil Armstrong and visions of a heroic age

Neil Armstrong passed away today, aged 82. It seems incredible that it is over 40 years since he took those first steps on the Moon.

Neil Armstrong in the LM, tired but elated after the first moon walk, 20 July 1969. Photo: NASA

Looking back, I cannot help thinking what an astonishing achievement that was. Especially in the human sense. Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins put their lives on the line. Collins, later, admitted in his autobiography Carrying The Fire that he figured Armstrong and Aldrin had a 50 percent chance of coming home. One of the reasons why they made it back was that astronauts were top-rate test pilots and scientists, closely involved in the spacecraft development  – and Armstrong was one of the best; cool, capable, analytical.

He steered Eagle down manually, using the last of their fuel, after he realised the autopilot was driving them into a boulder field. Fantastic piloting by a fantastic pilot. When the time came to blast off, they poked a ballpoint pen into the circuit breaker of the ascent engine, after Aldrin’s backpack snapped the original fitting in the tight confines of the LM.

I was six in July 1969, and I remember that day as if yesterday. I came home from school at lunchtime. Mum had made a ‘moon lunch’ (with cheese). By the time I got back to school, they had radio going with the voice feed from Mission Control in Houston, as Eagle came down into the Sea of Tranquility - no live TV in 1969 New Zealand. Nobody knew anything. The teacher – listening to the landing broadcast - told us Armstrong had stepped on the Moon, hours before he actually did. One of the girls in the playground told me Armstrong had fallen off the Moon.

Buzz Aldrin descends to the lunar surface, 20 July 1969, illuminated by reflections from the regolith. Photo:NASA.

Later, an RNZAF Canberra flew cans of film from Sydney bearing precious footage of the first moon walk, which we saw on TV – shaky, ghostly, black and white images that remain my lasting memory of that first moon landing.

Armstrong was followed by 11 other moon walkers. And then, almost as if it had never happened, that first heroic space age was over.Some sad types claim it never happened - they are, of course, wrong. There was a ‘moon landing conspiracy’, but it was Soviet – their own lunar programme failed, so they pretended they’d never had one. Today their LK lunar lander prototype is on public display in Moscow.

That underscores the context; the moon landings were a cold war adventure, flowing from a crisis of US confidence, reflecting the mid-twentieth century ‘Thunderbirds’ notion that huge engineering could answer every problem. Even the rocket the moon walkers flew on was founded in that era - a German Second World War V2 on super-steroids. The lineage was direct; it was even designed by the same man.

Buzz Aldrin and the LM, 20 July 1969. Photo: NASA

Time and tide have moved on; and yet, for all the criticisms we have of the thinking of that age – and they are manifest – things got done. Enormous, heroic things. And like it or not, our world is founded in them. It is easy to criticise space spending as wasteful when people are hungry on Earth. And that has a good deal of truth. But serendipity is a wonderful friend. The Apollo project gave us everything from teflon to memory foam, it helped found the micro-processor age – and more.

Armstrong’s moon walk, back in 1969, also reminds us that even when things seem impossible – when it seems too hard, too difficult, too expensive or too challenging – humanity can, if it wants, do them. It takes vision – and courageous, talented, capable people like Armstrong, who helped lead the way.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2012