Space Marvels! Be prepared to be wow'd... and proud...

Don't cheat yourselves of joy and pride. See just a glimpse of the marvels revealed by your Cassini mission to Saturn, the most discovered by curious humanity since God asked Adam to "name all the beasts." We're fulfilling that mission, and magnificently, gorgeously. You have reason to be proud to be a member of a species, civilization and nations that do stuff like this!

Another truly excellent article recaps in more detail the accomplishments of the spectacular 13 year Cassini-Huygens mission that explored Saturn, Titan, Enceladus and so much more.

On 12 October, asteroid 2012 TC4 will pass Earth, by as little as 4,200 miles. NASA is using this opportunity to test out some of its planetary defense systems. Measuring between 30 and 10 feet wide, it is just a little bigger than the Chelyabinsk meteor that explodeded over Russia in February 2013, shattering thousands of windows and injuring hundreds. Planetary defense systems currently used by NASA focus on observations and monitoring via a network of observatories.  

I am on the advisory board of the Asteroid Institute and the B612 Foundation, which are dedicated to protecting the Earth through detection, research and diversion. 

Astrometry measures the positions and placement of heavenly objects and the Europeans have specialized in this art, with the Hipparcos and later Gaia missions. The most urgent finding from this paper? Gl 710, a K dwarf will pass close to the Sun in about 1.3 Myr, perhaps just 16 000 AU away, which will bring this star well within the Oort cloud, possibly perturbing a lot of comets. I propose that we urgently begin planning now! 

See where I propose a method to deal with this by moving the Earth. (The only plausible method that I know.)

In my short story “The Crystal Spheres,” generations of humans spend their lives battling a cometary infall.

I am also on the advisory External Council of NASA's Innovative and Advanced Concepts program. Here’s one of the crazier notions we've recently funded at NIAC. The Automaton Rover for Extreme Environments (AREE) project was first proposed back in 2015. AREE is a rover that uses Venus’ harsh conditions conditions to its advantage, relying on wind to power its mechanical computer and to communicate with a high altitude balloon via semaphore!  Steam punk indeed.   “Since Venus’ atmosphere is about 90 times denser than Earth’s  and heats up to about 864 degrees Fahrenheit (462 degrees Celsius), designers have to make something hearty enough to sustain seriously hellish conditions.”  I gave the young innovators a combined attaboy with many technical finger wags. And this year they came up with much better designs.

Only... as I was rising to ask them a question, it came to me in a flash how to make a video camera that has almost no electronics!  Just one high-temperature photo-diode and three impact spark crystals... and all the rest consisting of a lens and some gears! After all, what would a Venus lander be, without a camera? ;-)

== More space! More space! ==

At the Mars Society Conference last month, at UC Irvine, I served on a panel with Larry Niven, Gregory Benford and Geoffrey Landis, while Mars Society president Robert Zubrin posed questions. You can listen in to the podcast thanks to the Planetary Society, as we speculate on matters of human destiny in space. Jerry Pournelle was supposed to participate and sent his regrets... the last any of us heard from him, alas. RIP.

Veering closer to home. There's a lot of buzz because it was announced at the recent AGU meeting that the moon's lava flows suggest there's some water in the lunar mantle. Does this prove that I am wrong and there truly are accessible resources on the moon... other than small deposits of ice at the poles?

Sorry. The moon has lots of good stuff.  But almost none of it is FRACTIONATED or separated into highly concentrated ores. On Earth fractionation or separation mostly happened from geo processes, magmatic or especially water streams above and below ground.  In asteroids separation happened because a proto planet began to form and then broke up.  Nothing like such processes happened on the moon.  If there is mantle water, it is in parts per million and you’d need to dig very deep, then crush and melt the rock.  Good luck with that. Indeed, good luck finding anything useful to humanity on the lunar surface, for our immediate needs, across the next few decades. That polar ice should be left to future lunar colonists, since we can get plenty from asteroids.

== And yet more space! ==

A chain of small volcano cones has been found at the bottom of Valles Marinaris on Mars, dating back only a couple of hundred million years. Almost yesterday!

More utterly awesome images sent back by Juno from Jupiter. Wow ...  And these. And these. Enjoy.  And be proud.  I mean it. If you cannot find it in your heart to be fantastically proud of these... then be ashamed.

A way cool new amateur astronomy telescope co-sponsored by the SETI Institute frees the amateur from any need to handle tracking or identification of sky objects, does image enhancement and even let’s the scope automatically participate in pan-sky online surveys for research groups.

The BEAM, the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module has spent more than 14 months attached to the Space Station.  Inflated to 14 cubic meters, its success opens the way for whole deployable-inflatable space stations, starting around 2020.

The Kepler telescope hunts for planets by looking for tiny dips in the brightness of a star when a planet crosses in front - known as a transit. To search for exomoons – moons circling a discovered exoplanet -- researchers are looking for a dimming of starlight before and after the planet causes its dip in light.  A candidate have been found, and a whopper!  This "exomoon" is likely to be about the size and mass of Neptune, and circles a planet the size of Jupiter but with 10 times the mass.  Very likely, the exomoon has moons.  What a universe.

A super-Earth has been discovered orbiting Tau Ceti, a star very much like our sun, just 12 light years away. The method – measuring radial velocity wobble – is different than the transit occultation approach and has more long term potential.  Scientists can almost  detect the wobble caused by an Earth sized body.

OMG how bizarre can the cults get? Apparently they can encourage evolution in action: people applying sunscreen directly totheir eyeballs in order to watch the solar eclipse. Yep we are a... diverse... species.  The "fermi" theory that makes sense? We're kept isolated because we provide incredible entertainment.

Cool video of a single cell ciliate “walking” along a stem.

Are neutron stars preyed upon by tiny black holes that them eat them from the inside? Might this explain many mysteries, such as Fast Radio Bursts and the existence of large quantities of Platinum-Uranium heavy elements?

Using the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, scientists with the Breakthrough Listen initiative—a massive project dedicated to finding signs of intelligent alien life—recorded 15 repeating fast radio bursts (FRBs) on August 26. “Several explanations for FRBs have been suggested. One is a cataclysmic event, such as a neutron star collapsing into a black hole. But such an event would produce only one burst and therefore does not explain the repeating pattern of FRB 121102. Another possible explanation is that they are coming from a young, highly magnetized neutron star, but so far nothing like this has been detected in this region of space. Despite widespread speculation, the possibility of the signals coming from an advanced alien civilization has been largely ruled out.”

Did Wernher Von Braun have a Twilight Zone predictive moment? "The Martian government was directed by ten men, the leader of whom was elected by universal suffrage for five years and entitled 'Elon.' Two houses of Parliament enacted the laws to be administered by the Elon and his cabinet." page 177 of The Mars Project.

An amazing, actually globular, image of Antares hints at stellar storms.

== Politics and Space == 

See a choice interview by Walter Cronkite with both Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein on the day humanity landed on the Moon, when Heinlein said we should change our calendars. We were a people like this!  In fact, we are vastly greater and better now… except in one way. Belief in ourselves and the can-do spirit. Those who have deliberately undermined that spirit are predators. They are the enemies of your children.

Space and science should not be "political" , except in the sense of calmly assigning budgets and priorities in a grownup and ambitious program of outreach. Certainly NASA's budget has been safer than almost any other science agency - perhaps because it lets Republicans claim: "Who, me? How can I be at war against science when I fund astronauts?"  Of course let's put aside the cancelation of almost all climate or resource or environmental monitoring satellites, or the banning of use of the word EARTH from most NASA mission statements...

...because this goes much deeper. Tune in here and see the high quality of perspicacious individuals Paul Ryan appoints to science related committees, as Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif. of the U.S. House of Representatives' Committee on Science, Space and Technology's Space Subcommittee asks a panel of planetary scientists to speculate about the possibility of a Martian civilization thousands (not billions) of years ago.

Others will comment on this and joke about it.  Or sob that this is the U.S. House of Representatives' Committee on Science. But let me draw your attention to a point most will miss... Rohrabacher's reference to the Moon, which is the destination beloved of Republicans, who want the U.S. to join Russia, China, Europe, India and billionaires in scurrying to repeat dusty footprints on a sterile, useless (for the immediate future) rock.

A coalition of nearly all space scientists, Silicon Valley investors and - yes, democrats - prefer to go prospecting asteroids, whose resources might make mining on our planet obsolete, pouring forth riches of mind boggling proportions.  But then, that fact underlies the GOP eagerness to stop the asteroid platinum rush. 

Their ruling caste has sunk costs in Earthly resource extraction.  There's nothing on the moon to render those investments worthless.  So by all means, back to the lunar dustball!

The Oklahoma Republican congressman President Trump tapped late Friday as NASA’s next administrator is one of the Climate Denialists that the GOP have packed onto the U.S. House “Science Committee.”  Jim Bridenstone doesn’t have a formal science background. His last job before being elected to represent Oklahoma’s 1st District in 2012 was as executive director of the Tulsa Air and Space Museum & Planetarium.  Ah.

Okay. Let’s be fair and give the fellow room. Though it’s hard to judge from dismal articles like this one: “Bridenstine has made it clear he wants the U.S. to re-establish its dominance on and around the moon, a destination that the Obama administration had largely ignored as it focused NASA’s resources on a long-term mission to Mars.”

A cosmically stupid lie. The immediate goal set by the Obama Administration and by almost every scientific advisory board was a cis-lunar or lunar orbital station. Such a station would allow testing of duration methods for a Mars journey, true, but would also serve as an ideal place to bring samples from asteroids — where the real wealth out there is to be found. Additional uses for such a station include certain defense applications, plus... one nifty idea I had...

...such a lunar orbital station might provide (for profit!) services to other nations who wannabe next to plant dusty footprints on the utterly useless (for the foreseeable future) lunar surface. Put up a Lunar Orbit Hotel and Rest Stop and Lander Garage for all the paying tourists and national pride seekers!

More seriously, I remain perplexed. Why is this issue partisan? What’s with the Republicans’ quasi-religious obsession - cancelling anything to do with asteroids and insisting instead on replicating Apollo, going back down to the same dusty plains we visited decades ago, just like all the other wannabes? I can think of no reason for this GOP fixation, other than “if the scientists and Silicon Valley guys and Obama wanted something, we must cancel it and do the opposite.”

But let’s always hope. Welcome, Director Bridenstone. Here’s wishing you – and our hopes – well.

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