Our best year in space yet!

This time we're looking outward... toward the vast, vast majority of all there is. And after decades of doldrums, it seems we truly are regaining some momentum in space exploration.  Have any of you been keeping track on a scorecard?

Hang on till the end, to read the news from NASA NIAC!

First... Citizen science. Nasa just launched a satellite to judge soil moisture. in order to calibrate it, Nasa needs lots of soil samples. So, they're inviting people to find out when the SMAP satellite is flying over their area, then collect a sample, weigh it, dry it, weigh it again, and report it.

Of course Pluto is still the biggest story. Data  and extraordinary images continue to stream in from the fabulously successful New Horizons mission. Of which we should all be very proud, a pinnacle in one of humanity's best years in space. 

(That is, unless you are one of these pathetic people who proclaim "it's all faked!"  In which case, why take on so many dazzlingly vivid accomplishments to fabricate? With that kind of special effects budget, you could, um, afford real space missions.)

But back to the show! Watch the video: Animated Flyover of Pluto. Then remind yourself that this is Pluto.  Say that to yourself while watching the video. It is freaking PLUTO!

And you did this. As a taxpayer and citizen. If you are not thrilled, then you badly need to next watch THIS video! Especially the end. 

And now this coda: "In a coincidence of astronomical proportions, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has conducted the first flyby of Pluto on the 50th anniversary of the first flyby of Mars. NASA’s Mariner 4 probe became the first spacecraft to capture up-close images of another planet when it flew past Mars on July 14, 1965."

Wow, has it been that long since my teenage brain had to adjust to there being no canals (or princesses) on the Red Planet?  I am mollified knowing that New Horizons still has fuel in its tanks and they hope to send her past another Kuiper Belt object, a billion miles further into deep, deep space.

== Had enough Pluto? == 

Nope, there's more. Another Plutonian mountain range!   And cool info on Pluto’s lesser moons.  The much-anticipated “eclipse” study of Pluto’s dark side shows the sun’s halo around the planet, revealing thick and high haze that may come from crystalized hydrocarbons. And closeups in Tombaugh Regio show “flow” shapes that suggest semi-liquid activity - possibly by partly melted Nitrogen ices (!) within the last few tens of millions of years! Signs of geologic activity recently? On Pluto? Oy.

And now what you’ve been waiting for… a tentative map of Pluto proposed place names! And for Charon, too. Pluto features many explorers and discoverers… plus some noted monsters. But Charon?  Charon’s craters and regions are tentatively named for… sci fi characters!  Kirk Crater… Sulu Crater… Ripley Crater … Skywalker Crater… Vader Crater plus some creators of sci fi like Kubrick, Clarke and Butler.  Zowee! 

(Notice the majority of Charon that’s still blurry?  Okay, there’s still time for me and my creations! Help make em classics so the next mission...)

== And Meanwhile... ==

The Philae lander on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko bobbled and skipped into a shadowed spot, falling out of contact... till it woke up in June as the comet moved closer to the sun. But latest data suggests something, possibly a gas emission, may have moved it again. Philae’s antenna may have been obstructed, and one of its transmitters seems to have stopped working. Well well, some of you recall I predicted this.  The violence of the comet's close passage to the sun will do this.  I hope they got some more good data.  More on 67/P in our next space update.

See this marvelous 3D topography model of the nucleus of 67P.

Had enough yet? We're just getting started. Now see exaggerated vertical relief fly over of Ceres. Ceres is apparently producing a periodic haze over the Mysterious White Spot, suggesting active venting. Looks like it is turning out to be an icy fumarole.

And our spectacularly successful Cassini mission in the Saturn system is still pouring out results.  One of my top ten favorite photos of all time was taken by Cassini's little Huygens Probe whil landing on Titan, clearly showing what Cassini confirmed to be lakes and seas of ethane and methane, fed by rain and by rivers flowing into waxy shorelines. But I want more! So just today, NASA released stunning Cassini closeups of the beautifully ravaged moon, Dione.

And none of this is to mention earlier -- within the last year -- news from Mercury and Venus... and recalibrated Earth-sensing that proves Ted Cruz to be a liar... and a comet sweeping past Mars, caught in the act by our orbiting probes!  And the science from that serendipity is (I hear) amazing.

More from Curiosity and Opportunity, our faithful emissaries to the planet solely occupied by robots. (Can you believe those spectacular successes are almost afterthoughts, in this list?)  And more insights into weird Titan! 

And news of a possible NASA Europa probe that might use methods pioneered at NASA NIAC (where I serve on the external advisory board.) More on NIAC below.

== Look Homeward Angel ==

Want to watch something even cooler than all that? How about a video of the Moon transiting in front of the Earth?  And this is the lunar backside we are looking at! Another gift of the Discovr (Deep Space Climate Observatory) probe, described giddily by Phil Plait, who is just having way too much fun during by far our best year in space since the 1970s and possibly ever.

Discovr sits at the Lagrange Point a million miles closer to the sun, warning us of solar storms (a vital service) but also fulfilling a proposal by Al Gore (one of the century's most-under-rated figures, whose Senate bill freed the Internet for all) that we needed a monitoring station to give humanity a round the clock daylight view of our planet as it turns. Can you believe we did not have this? Until now.

== Solar Sails to Space ==

I’ve served on the board of advisers of the Planetary Society and have long urged others to put them on your list of orgs to join, in making a better world. (Each of us, whatever our opinions, should have membership at least a dozen orgs who - via the miracle of Proxy Activism - then go forth and save the world for us. A modern convenience. Look up the concept here.)  

One favorite of mine? The Planetary Society’s ongoing efforts to accomplish what should have been done at the very dawn of the Space Era, almost a lifetime ago… developing useful, reliable, deployable light sails (or “solar sails”) to send small craft cheaply across the community of planets. Except for one small Japanese deployment, this whole realm has been almost utterly ignored by the major agencies and powers, a blatant case of neglecting-the-obvious that starts to look awfully suspicious. Moreover, the TPS efforts have been plagued by one episode of bad luck after another… like two successive blowups of Russian launch vehicles.  As one of the members of my blogmunity - Paul451 - put it: “Solar sails really are cursed. I call aliens. This is clearly the forbidden technology which violates the terms of our quarantine."

Though now there's tentative good news on this roller-coaster ride... the jinx appears to have struck again. But still, after a series of setbacks and silences, LightSail deployed!

Now that the first stage of this mission is complete, the Planetary Society is preparing their next phase of LightSail, scheduled for 2016.  Partially funded through Kickstarter, this solar sail will be launched into a higher orbit, 450 miles above the surface of the Earth. "There the solar sails will both deploy and catch the sun's photon breeze, sailing on the high seas of the interplanetary vacuum." Sign on to The Planetary Society's kickstarter!

And while you are at it please sign this easy Planetary Society petition online, asking Congress not to (again) slash planetary exploration funding -- and to support a new mission to Europa. 

== Not resting on our laurels ==

Let's hope this is just the beginning. That Elon Musk's SpaceX and Virgin Galactic and others get their legs back under them and get Earth to Orbit far more efficient and reliable... the core element in doing ever-more thing, ever-better.

Meanwhile, Planetary Resources and its competitors… and the B612 Foundation... are pushing forward their endeavors to either harvest asteroids for resources or at least detect and divert dangerous ones. (Seems worthwhile -- just don't touch my asteroid.) 

And there’s talk of making an inflatable space elevator! (Only 35 years after I broached the idea, in SUNDIVER.  Well better late than never.  Try harder to keep up, guys.)

And NASA's Innovative and Advanced Concepts group (NIAC) has just released its 2015 Solicitation For Proposals for small seed grants to enable brilliant, ambitious innovators to try out some bold idea.  NIAC is the tip, the entry wedge, and if your concept satisfies the requirements, you might win real money to transform how we live/work/explore outer space. NIAC is especially interested in beefing up its portfolio in Biology, by the way. And women researchers are encouraged to look into the possibilities.  And Yoiu know all this because I sit on the external board.

It all adds up to a great year in space.  Greater even than the glory days of Apollo? I deem that to be arguable!  We are accomplishing so much more, with such spectacular competence that it's happening with the tiny slivers of funding our society allocates to horizons.

Beyond interplanetary? Icarus Interstellar is one of several nascent groups aiming at taking look-ahead activism to the next level… pushing now for humanity to become an interstellar civilization. Join  their Kickstarter campaign and become a Charter Member of Starship Congress 2015! I did, as did Vint Cerf! Also don't forget also Centauri Dreams.

Finally... getting back to why so few of us are celebrating this greatest year of humanity in space... here again is a link to my TED talk about why we are letting anger rule our lives, when there are so many reasons instead to feel rising confidence. 

We are a people who are doing all these wondrous things, exploring our solar system with pennies out of each citizen's pocket... and so many other signs of progress down here on Earth... yet, we are letting dogmatists and indignation junkies of both the right and the left hijack the discussion, spreading fear and only fear of the future.

We are doing all this, and so much more!  We are a mighty folk. A folk of legend who will be subject of songs, in times to come. Call the doom merchants what they are -- ankle weights around the feet of a pragmatic, problem-solving people. Problem-solvers who will go ahead and save the world, despite them.  

And go on to the stars.

Space Funding, Nanotechnology and World Health

Time to do a quick update of ancillary matters. All sorts of misc stuff.

"The Administration is cutting missions of scientific space exploration and research to pay for space transportation," stated Louis Friedman of The Planetary Society. As always, under these guys, science is the big loser. Does anybody see a pattern? Please feel free to drop by the Planetary Society site and sign the petition (or join to show your support.)

Well, if government can no longer look ahead, at least some private and ad hoc groups are doing so. On Saturday and Sunday, January 20 and 21, members of the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology participated in a first-of-its-kind event. About a dozen people, representing four countries on three continents, and with training in a variety of disciplines, came together for a scenario creation project via virtual presence. They began the process of developing a series of professional-quality models of a world in which exponential general-purpose molecular manufacturing has become a reality. I am a member of CRN, though I was unable to participate in this event. It sounds like Global Futures Strategist Jamais Cascio and CRN Coordinator Mike Treder did a great job leading these vivid minds in an exercise that I plan to tap for ideas for my latest novel!

The urgent need for new nanotechnology policy is highlighted by breakthrough results from a recent British government funded project. For the first time ever, a group of high-level scientists assembled for the purpose of inventing something as close as they could get to the long-sought nanotechnology goal of building precise products atom by atom. The remarkably advanced projects those scientists produced suggest that the era of molecular manufacturing -- with its tremendous potential benefits and potentially grave dangers -- could arrive far more swiftly than previously imagined.

Devin Murphy clued me into this fascinating economic analysis of “econimic activity” on Second Life, or “virtual-avatar nonsense analyzed as a pyramid scheme.” And what do you expect on a frontier? Cheating and predation emerge out of human nature at any opportunity. If these people did not have a near monopoly on virtual worlds -- if VR were liberated to become an open-creative realm, the way it is when it comes to creating web sites -- then competition would alleviate such problems. It dazzles me how people can see the example of the Web right in front of them, and then forget about its lessons.

Of course, it does not help that discourse -- the exchange of cogent information -- takes place on Second Life at about the same level as caveman grunts... with apologies to cavemen,

February 22 I’ll be appearing at a conference on “Collective Intelligence Networks” near LAX, in Southern California.

Another thought provoking gem from the Progressive Policy Institute: World spending on health, according to the World Bank and the U.N.'s World Health Organization, was 10.2 percent of global GDP in 2003. This is the equivalent of about $3.7 trillion, or $500 per person. (The figure counts all money spent by governments, providers, and individuals on "preventive and curative" health services, family planning activities, nutrition programs, and emergency medical aid.) America's health bill that year came to 15.2 percent of GDP, far ahead of all competitors. So far ahead, in fact, that Americans accounted for nearly half -- $1.7 trillion of the total $3.7 trillion -- of the world's health spending.*

Now, one can already predict the cliched responses to this. Of course much of this is (the right wing answer) because we start out much richer and there is so much more care available in the US. It is also evident that (the left wing answer) there is vast healthcare inflation in the States, because the government takes almost no part in limiting price gouging or collusive market busting by powerful entities like drug companies.

Especially, there is the simple fact that medical care is obdurately immune to the corrective effects of market forces. If you or a loved one are deeply ill, you will not do normal price-comparisons when looking for hospitals, seeking “bargain” surgeons and/or other care providers. When price is no object, supply and demand are weak correctors. Hence, in most of the world’s nations, medical care has drifted into zones where socialism seems to make sense to a lot of people. Like public education, street maintenance, law enforecement and defense.

(Let there be no mistake here. One of my reasons for utterly despising the so-called “left-right political axis” has to do with the fact that, at last, we seem to have data needed in order to know what jobs government is good at and which should better be left to competitive accountability arenas. But simple-minded dogmatism infects and afflicts us, limiting our ability to be agile and re examine assumptions.)

In fact, the PPI numbers seem to reflect something fundamental. That the US subsidises the entire rest of the world by spending whatever it takes to move medical science and skills along at rapid rates. Much of that money reflects profit-driven research. And if that profit drive warps fairness in outrageous ways, in America, it also propels advances that - for example - Europeans get to exploit only a few years later, after prices have fallen. (I had personal experience with this, unable to even get an MRI in France, but paying through the nose for one here, back in 1991.) It is one more case where reflexive, indignant dogmatic-posturing simply does not accurately reflect reality OR fairness. Yes, there is more sense and justice to the European approach. But every single day thair system uses methods that have slipped a little farther down a learning curve that Americans, largely, paid for, Moreover, every day, many hundreds of people from those countries (those who can afford it, of course) climb onto jets in order to come here for treatments that are more cutting-edge than they are allowed access to, at home.

OTOH... one must always be wary of a theory that sounds just too pat! The PPI report continues:

More fundamentally, despite high spending, U.S. "outcomes" in some basic public-health indicators often remain mediocre. For example, a WHO list places the United States 30th of 192 countries in infant mortality. (Low rankings reflect in part failure to insure about 40 million people, and also failures outside health care systems per se: relatively high obesity rates, frequent road accidents, HIV incidence somewhat higher than the rich-country average, and other problems that insurers, doctors, nurses, hospitals, and pharmacists must address but can't prevent. There are also the problems inherent in absorbing fully half of the world’s total number of immigrants.) The World Health Organization lets you compare 171 health indicators across 192 countries: 
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I want to thank those of you who showed such interest in my posting about cell-phone autonomy and the desperate need for a second layer of operability in those sophisticated little radios so many people carry around in their pockets. It is outrageous that these seem designed to fail at the very time when we may need them most. Requiring a simple, peer-to-peer capability for passing text messages... even restricted to times when a cell tower is not available... could be the simplest step taken by our government to ensure that civilization is capable of the kind of robust resiliency displayed by New Yorkers and Bostonians on 9/11...

...instead of the enforced helplessness that was imposed upon the victims of Hurricane Katrina. I hope some of you will continue to help spread the word.

Two (of many ) crises needing our help...

One of the brightest places on the internet is WorldChanging.com. Yes, I have failed to support the site with much in the way of choice Brin-Verbiage, lately. I hope to change that. In any event, I want to pass on the following from co-editor Alex Steffen:

”Ed Burtynsky's photos sum up in images why we need to change the world. ... He has teamed up with Saatchi & Saatchi and composer Michael Montes to create a video slideshow of his work for us. It is truly mindblowing. See: http://www.worldchanging.com/campaign/

If you find it as powerful as we do, please consider sharing it with your friends. The video is also part of our first pledge drive. Worldchanging is a non-profit, and if you believe we do good work, we'd be honored if you'd consider making a contribution.

A real example of valuable proxy power. Worldchanging is one of the core sites espousing a confident and pragmatic modernist agenda.

And now, something just plain pathetic.

Planetary Society Presents to Congress a Better Path for NASA

"The Bush Administration's proposed 5-year budget for NASA, just submitted to Congress, is an attack on science," states the opening line of The Planetary Society's statement submitted to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Thursday morning, February 16, 2006. Read the complete statement on the Society's website .

The Society objects to numerous cuts or cancellations of such projects as a mission to Jupiter's ice-bound moon Europa, the Terrestrial Planet Finder mission, two Mars Scout missions, and more. The Society also criticizes the proposed budget for downplaying Mars as a goal for human exploration and cutting astrobiology research 50% and science research funding generally 15% across all Earth and space science disciplines.

Funding is being redirected to the shuttle program in order to complete the International Space Station. The Planetary Society, however, states that the commitment to 16 more flights of the shuttle for this purpose is the biggest danger to implementation of the Vision for Space Exploration. The Society asks what might be cut from the NASA budget in the future if there are more delays or higher costs?

In response to this budget, The Planetary Society has urged its members and interested members of the public to show their support for space science by writing to Congress and the Administration about the cuts. In the 2 days since the campaign began, more than 1000 messages have been sent to Representative Sherwood L. Boehlert and other members of Congress and the Administration via the Society's website.

The Society statement concludes with the following:
"The Planetary Society supports space ventures. We have supported the shuttle: it has been a great technical achievement, unequalled on Earth. We have supported the International Space Station: it should be completed as a pathway for human expansion into the solar system. And, from the moment it was proposed, we have strongly supported the Vision for Space Exploration, a long overdue redirection of human space flight beyond Earth orbit.

But we cannot support a proposal that hobbles, or eventually destroys, the NASA science program. Science guides not just robots but also humans into space. Science guides the public in creating a rationale for a $16 billion space program. Science guides exploration. And we ask, and hope, that support of science will guide you as you oversee the NASA program."

Yeah, yeah. We can’t afford it. Because we’re “at war”... even though the kleptos refuse to help pay for it. (A churlishness NEVER displayed before by the American aristocracy, in time of crisis.)

All I can say is that, if Osama can keep us away from Mars, then his worldview (and Bush's) really has won.
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