AstroNews May 2001Astronomy, space and ET news. http://www.kahl.net/astro
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Vol.3, No.5 |
AstroNews May 2001Astronomy, space and ET news. http://www.kahl.net/astro
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Vol.3, No.5 |
CONTENTS
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SETI@home
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ARE YOU THE NEXT VOYAGER?Would you spend $1 on a lottery ticket that promised the winner a trip to space? It's an old idea whose time may have finally come, courtesy of space tourist Dennis Tito. You probably heard about his recent trip the the space station - Dennis paid the Russians $20 Million to be the first space tourist ever.MirCorp is the joint U.S.-Russian company that financed the Mir space station's operation in its final days and brokered the original deal for Tito's trip. Only after Mir splashed into the ocean did Tito negotiate a spot aboard the International Space Station instead. A lottery is one of many high-flying ideas MirCorp might consider. A lottery -- by any private organization -- is more feasible in the post-Tito era, now that the barrier to space tourism has been broken and given the public's interest in the flight. Two years ago former astronaut Buzz Aldrin already announced a plan
to send 80 to 100 paying tourists to space in a specially designed spacecraft,
while saving a few seats for lottery winners.
WHERE ARE THE OTHER VOYAGERS?While Voyager returns to Earth on our TV screen several real world voyagers are headed out to the stars. Spacecraft launched from Earth that have traveled beyond the outer planets. Where are they now?VOYAGER 1 & 2
Voyager 1, which left Earth in 1977, is more than 6.8 billion miles away (that's more than 70 times the distance from the Earth to the Sun). It takes about 10 hours for Voyager's radio signals to get back to Earth. Nuclear batteries keep it's transmitter working as the spacecraft travels at 38,718 mph. The craft is heading northward out of the ecliptic plane, which is the plane in which most planets orbit the Sun. Voyager 2, now 5.3 billion miles from Earth, zips along at 35,463 mph, heading southward out of the ecliptic plane. Its signal takes eight hours to reach Earth. Scientists are still monitoring the two spacecraft as of early 1999. The mission is now called Voyager Interstellar Mission, and it is exploring the outer reaches of the Sun's magnetic field and the solar wind. NASA says that if Voyager 1 can keep going for another 10 years or so, it might actually get beyond these solar effects and enter the true area of interstellar space. If so, it would be the first human made object ever to go there. Did you know that the Voyager spacecraft each carry a special CD with messages, music and photos from earthlings? It's meant for any extraterrestrials who happen to find it. Voyager Project Home Page
PIONEER 10
Launched on 2 March 1972, Pioneer 10 was the first spacecraft to travel
through the Asteroid belt, and the first spacecraft to make direct observations
and obtain
Pioneer made valuable scientific investigations in the outer regions of our solar system until the end of its mission on 31 March 1997. The weak signal continues to be tracked by the Deep Space Network (DSN) as part of a new advanced concept study of chaos theory. Pioneer 10 is headed towards the constellation of Taurus (The Bull). It will take Pioneer over 2 million years to pass by one of the stars in the constellation. Ground controllers recently successfully received the deep space probe's faint radio signal, washing away fears that the craft had been forever lost. The round-trip light time from Earth to Pioneer is 21 hours, 45 minutes. Its speed relative to the Sun is 27,380 miles per hour. Officially retired in 1997, the craft now serves as a training tool for ground controllers. Its faint signal provides a radio beacon used by DSN and other facilities to confirm station tracking and receiver performance. PIONEER 11
The last communication from Pioneer 11 was received in November 1995, shortly before the Earth's motion carried it out of view of the spacecraft antenna. The spacecraft is headed toward the constellation of Aquila (The Eagle),
Northwest of the constellation of Sagittarius. Pioneer 11 may pass near
one of the stars in
Pioneer Project Home Page:
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ASTROTIPFAST WAY TO STARGAZENeed to get the sky in focus in a hurry? The Celestron NexStar 11 GPS telescope is for you.Just turn on this 279mm (11") Diameter Schmidt-Cassegrain scope to get an automated guide to the stars—no more aiming north and entering location and local time. How does it work? A built-in GPS receiver automatically sets the telescope up to the correct starting position. From there you can browse more than 50,000 celestial objects in the telescope's database, or take a preprogrammed sky tour. It even comes with multiple RS-232 Data Ports for communication with personal computers and other high tech accessories. List Price: $2,999 NexStar 11 GPS Website:
ARE WE ALL ALIENS?Nestled safely inside the belly of a comet orbiting some unknown star, a microscopic alien sits dormant. Somewhere in this vast universe -- perhaps a place like Earth -- a greater destiny awaits the microbe. A place to flourish, become a nematode or a rose or a teenager.Life, after all, is tenacious and thrives on change. Over time, gravity performs a few plausible, but not routine tricks, and the comet is ejected from its stellar orbit like a rock from a slingshot. For more than a 100 million years it slips silently across the inky vastness of interstellar space. Then gravity goes to work again. Another star tugs at the comet, pulls it in. A few giant gaseous planets whiz by, their bulks tugging at the comet, altering its course slightly. Ahead now, growing larger, looms a gorgeous blue and brown marble. Water and land. Maybe some air. Then with the force only the cosmos can summon, the comet slams into the third rock from a mid-sized, moderately powerful star. The alien microbe survives, emerges from its protective shell and spreads like the dickens. Thus began life on Earth, 3.8 billion years ago. Or so goes one aspect of a theory called PANSPERMIA, which holds that the stuff of life is everywhere and that we humans owe our genesis and evolution to a continual rain of foreign microbes. It means, simply, that we might all be aliens. It's an idea that has been around longer than Christianity, but which still struggles to gain strong support among most scientists. Two recent discoveries are breathing new life into the theory. One recent study shows that a space rock could successfully transport life between planets. Another report claims to have found and revived bacteria on Earth that were dormant, in the form of spores, hiding in New Mexican salt crystals for 250 million years. "Until recently, panspermia was not even regarded as a scientific hypothesis," says Chandra Wickramasinghe, the concept's leading proponent. "Now that has changed." Panspermia means we could have microbial ancestors, or even more evolved
cousins, in unexplored corners of the cosmos.
Learn more about Panspermia:
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BARGAINS IN THE AMAZONAmazon.com has an Outlet! The biggest bargains throughout the Amazon.com universe are here.
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DISTANT DISCOVERIES===================DISTANT DISCOVERIES =================== LIVING ON LUNAIn the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Valiant," Jake Sisko met Dorian Collins, who grew up on Earth's Moon and described to him the glorious experience of witnessing a lunar dawn. Researchers have now picked out what they believe to be the ideal location for a human-tended outpost on the Moon.The Shackleton crater at the Moon's south pole appears to hold a resource of hydrogen in the form of water ice, ammonia and other materials, according to a recent article on Space.com. Plus, an area right next to the crater is bathed in more-or-less continual sunlight, making solar energy usable all the time, ideal to build up an extraction industry. And there are permanently shadowed areas in the region where astronomical instruments could be operated with telescopic optics kept cold and stable. The evaluation was based on data from the Pentagon's Clementine spacecraft
along with ground-based radar, as well as results from NASA's Lunar Prospector.
The south pole of the Moon has been viewed with great interest since Clementine
revealed an abundance of frozen water there.
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FAR OUT FACTSSOLAR SAIL UPDATE Last
month we reported about the Earth's first operational solar sail ship,
the Cosmos 1. This is a privately funded effort by The Planetary Society
in cooperation with Russian space groups.
A test flight was scheduled for late April. But an accident occurred during a pre-launch checkout. This damaged the spacecraft that was to deploy a test solar sail on April 26. The test flight will be rescheduled once the extent of repairs and re-assembly are determined. "This is what tests are for — although we never want accidents," said project director Louis Friedman. "It may well turn out to be a blessing in disguise for the solar sail's orbital flight, which we still have scheduled for the end of this year." Cosmos 1 Solar Sail:
WARP SPEED!Star Trek has helped to spawn ideas many that may one day propel the human race into the cosmic community.Aerospace engineer Marc Millis is the head of NASA's "Breakthrough Propulsion Physics" project. His task? Making possible the impossible: inventing a space drive that can travel to the stars faster than the speed of light. Millis and his team have set out to discover fundamentally new energy production methods that eliminate or dramatically reduce the need for carrying propellant into space, and enable spacecraft to travel at incredible speeds. Even beyond the speed of light, which according to Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity, is unattainable with the technology and physics that we understand today. To help NASA achieve its goal of LAUNCHING AN INTERSTELLAR MISSION in 25 years, Millis' team is entertaining such out-of-the-box notions as manipulating gravity, changing the value of inertia, tapping into the tremendous energies that theoretically exist in a vacuum, and of course, warping space. A "warp drive" might become possible because — although Special Relativity
forbids objects to move faster than light within normal space-time — no
one knows how fast space-time itself could move. One possibility is that
an area of expanding space-time may be able to move faster than other parts
of space-time, and that a spacecraft could be dragged along by this "warp"
or "bubble" in the fabric of the cosmos. A warp drive would likely require
the ship to be wrapped by a field of "negative energy," a controversial
concept in physics analogous to negative numbers in mathematics, but even
if negative energy can exist, there would need to be a way to turn the
effect on and off.
NASA Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project
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COMING UP!JUNE: SUMMER SOLSTICE SPECIALJULY: SUMMER STARGAZING SPECIAL
LIFT OFF!
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