“Space – what a waste of money…!”

How many times have I had that fired at me after I’ve given one of my Outreach talks? I’ve lost count. From now on I’m going to refer people who say things like that to this excellent blog article, which lists some excellent “space spin-offs”…

http://onlinesciencedegrees.net/25-everyday-technologies-that-came-from-nasa

Perfect plumes…

I’ve been “into space” for a long time – a LONG time. Over three and a half decades, in fact. So I’m pretty hard to surprise and amaze now. Not hard to impress, not hard to delight, but hard to actually amaze. It’s not often that an image comes back from ‘out there’ that makes me go wide-eyed and slack-jawed with astonishment. The last time that happened was probably when Oppy rolled up to the edge of Victoria Crater and gazed out across it to the other side, that literally choked me up.

Today it happened again.

The Cassini spaceprobe has taken tens of thousands of images of Saturns, its rings and system of moons by now, and many of them are stunningly dramatic, beautiful and striking. Today, Cassini sent back some pictures that might well go down in the history books as being among the most important of its entire mission – images of the plumes that are spewing out of the geysers at the little moon’s south pole.

We’ve seen images of these geysers before, of course. But today’s images were, well, literally breathtaking.

This is how we’ve seen the geysers before today…

… bright wafts and shafts of material jutting out into space from the south pole, almost like the prominences seen around the edge of the Sun during a total solar eclipse. But today Cassini flew so close to the plumes, and over them, that it was able to take images of the plumes from the side and from above too, allowing us to see them properly for the very first time.

This is what Cassini sent back – and armchair explorers all around the world saw on their monitors – earlier today…

Look closely – click on that picture to enlarge it – and you can see, at the top there, jets of material shooting out of the surface of Enceladus. Several of them. LOTS of them. That’s not an artist’s impression, it’s not a computer graphic, I haven’t gone nuts in Photoshop, that’s a real picture of the geysers of Enceladus shooting out into space. Let’s take a closer look – and yes, I have played about with and enhanced this crop from the original image…

I’m not exaggerating when I say that I never expected to see an image like that for another twenty or so years, until a post-Cassini probe headed out to Saturn and undertook a detailed photographic survey of the icy moon. Unbelievable!

But Cassini didn’t just take images of the plumes. It took some very detailed images of Enceladus’ surface too. So, put on your 3D glasses (not the migraine-inducing ones needed for the Channel 4 programs last week!)  and feast your eyes on this…

And finally… here’s a panorama I (crudely) stitched together, showing more plumes than you can shake a spaceprobe camera at…

Don’t know about anyone else, but this encounter with Enceladus has made me feel an almost childlike sense of wonder again. I thought I’d have to wait maybe another 20 years to actually see the plumes coming out of Enceladus, on images taken by a post-Cassini orbiter, yet there they are, and I’ve been able to mess about with them and not just gawp at them.

This is nuts, absolutely nuts. On exceptionally still and clear evenings here in Cumbria I’ve seen Enceladus through my humble 4.5″ scope. It looked just like a pinprick of light close to Saturn, a hole in the black velvet of space made by the point of a needle… now I see it, on these very pages, thanks to the Cassini team and all my friends and fellow explorers here, as a world, a real world, criss-crossed with meandering canyons of ice, covered with fields of snow and slashed by deep, axe-wound gorges out of which gush geysers…

One day people will walk up and down those canyons, running their gloved hands along their sides, maybe stopping to carve out intricate designs in the ice, leaving their mark as humans are always moved to do. One day spacesuited children will bound across those snowfields, boots crump-crumping as they land, laughing and giggling in the low gravity. One day explorers will stand on the edge of Baghdad Sulci and stare wide-mouthed at the beauty of the scene, leaning back to stare up at the geyser erupting out of the ground before them. Seen through the geyser’s veil, the Sun will be surrounded by glorious haloes of rainbow-hued light, and the stars above them will shimmer and dance…

And standing there, beside that geyser, they’ll wonder how it felt like to be us, here, in 2009, to be the first people to see the beauty of their homeworld, on grainy images taken by a tiny, Mayfly-fragile spaceprobe sent out across the gulf of space by a generation that Wanted To Know.

Amazing.

Waiting for word…

All around the world, planetary scientists and “space geeks” (and, as one of them, I use the term with love and respect!) are waiting anxiously to hear if the Mars Exploration Rover “Spirit” has started to move out of its dustbowl trap. It’s been stuck there for months now, bogged down in talcum-fine powdery sand, going absolutely nowhere. Earlier today commands were sent to the rover that the MER team hope will start the process of slowly backing it out of – or “extricating” it from – the buried crater that has been its nemesis all these sols. We’re all keeping a close eye on the website that shows the “raw” images sent back by the rover, and while no-one is expecting to see that Spirit has popped out of its sandtrap, we are all obviously hoping that we’ll see some kind of movement, however small. 

One thing’s for sure – if Spirit could be pulled free by the amount of goodwill there is for her, she’d be standing proudly on all wheels again by now!

Fingers crossed everyone!

See the SPACE STATION!

This is a great time to see the International Space Station from the UK! Just go here http://cumbriansky.wordpress.com/space-station-spotting for your full “How To” guide!

There’s no place like home…

I love Mars, as you all know – and if you didn’t know that, wow, where have you been?!?!? – and I often refer to it, only half-jokingly, as “my real home planet”. I love its volcanoes, its canyons and craters with a passion. I see an image of it taken by an orbiter, a space telescope or even just an amateur telescope and I literally let out a sigh, I find it so beautiful. I love Mars.

But then I see an image like this, and I know that, just like Dorothy said,  there’s no place like home…

Officially, technically, scientifically, that’s an image of Earth taken by the OSIRIS camera onboard the European Space Agency probe “ROSETTA”, which is flying past Earth for the third and final time during  its long journey to rendezvous with a comet – Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko – in 2014. It was taken at around 1.30pm earlier today, from a distance of some 633,000km.

But none of that matters, does it? Not really. That’s a portrait of Home. That’s Where We Live. That’s our lush, sopping wet, sweet-aired green, blue and white oasis shining like a christmas tree ornament, like a beacon of light and life, in the vast, black, unforgiving desert that is space. There may be a thousand, a million, even a billion worlds that look like it “Out There”, and in the centuries and millennia to come voyagers from Earth will travel to, land on and raise families, civilisations and empires upon them, but there will never, ever be another planet that will ever come close to having the heart-stopping beauty of Earth.

Click here to find out more about the image – and see more stunning images of Earth as they come in from ROSETTA…

The latest on Spirit…

There was a big news teleconference today, updating everyone on the situation with “Spirit”, the poor Mars rover that has been stuck in a sand trap for the past 6 months. I’ll paste the official press release in at the end here, but basically this was the news:

* Spirit is in big, big trouble, the worst she – or either of the rovers – has ever been in. It’s very possible that she might not get out of this dust trap, and will end her mission where she is now.

* It turns out that the rover actually drove over the lip of and part way onto a small, ancient, buried crater. When her left wheels broke through a layer of brittle “duricrust” covering the crater, they then sank into the talcum powder fine dust filling the crater beneath its crusty surface.  

* To make matters worse, there are rocks underneath the rover, one of which may or may not even be touching the rover’s underbelly.

* The MER team has decided that the best thing to do is to try and reverse the rover out of its current sandtrap, following its own tracks as it were. Driving forwards might just mean all the rover’s wheels get bogged down in the sand, instead of just the ones that are now.

* The first attempt to drive Spirit out of its trap – or “extricate” it – will be made on Monday / Tuesday next week. It is NOT expected that the rover will just “pop out” of the dust trap, and it’s likely that it will take weeks if not months to get Spirit out of where it’s stuck – if that is even possible. It might not be.

* We should know more about the rover’s progress late on Tuesday, when images taken will show how much / if the rover has moved.

So, there you have it. Spirit has been riding her luck for a long time, but her luck might finally have run out. The MER team were being very realistic about the situation – their rover is in deep, deep trouble, and they haven’t figured out a plan that would definitely work. But that doesn’t mean they’re going to stop trying! And, if the worst comes to the worst, and she is stuck, Spirit will still be able to do fantastic science until she stops working. She will be able to monitor the weather; check for seismic activity; study the powdery material she’s bogged down in; make astronomical observations. And, of course, take and send back even more breathtakingly beautiful images of the surface of Mars.

All we can do now is wait and cross our fingers that, for a change, Spirit gets some luck thrown at her, instead of having to fight tooth and nail for every inch she drives.

Big day Monday. Check back here for news.

Here’s the full NASA press release, with a lot more science in it…

News release: 2009-164                                                                      Nov. 12, 2009

NASA to Begin Attempts to Free Sand-Trapped Mars Rover

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2009-164

PASADENA, Calif. — NASA will begin transmitting commands to its Mars exploration rover Spirit on Monday as part of an escape plan to free the venerable robot from its Martian sand trap.

Spirit has been lodged at a site scientists call “Troy” since April 23. Researchers expect the extraction process to be long and the outcome uncertain based on tests here on Earth this spring that simulated conditions at the Martian site.

“This is going to be a lengthy process, and there’s a high probability attempts to free Spirit will not be successful” said Doug McCuistion, director of the Mars Exploration Program at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “After the first few weeks of attempts, we’re not likely to know whether Spirit will be able to free itself.”

Spirit has six wheels for roving the Red Planet. The first commands will tell the rover to rotate its five working wheels forward approximately six turns. Engineers anticipate severe wheel slippage, with barely perceptible forward progress in this initial attempt. Since 2006, Spirit’s right-front wheel has been inoperable, possibly because of wear and tear on a motor as a result of the rover’s longevity.

Spirit will return data the next day from its first drive attempt. The results will be assessed before engineers develop and send commands for a second attempt. Using results from previous commands, engineers plan to continue escape efforts until early 2010.

“Mobility on Mars is challenging, and whatever the outcome, lessons from the work to free Spirit will enhance our knowledge about how to analyze Martian terrain and drive future Mars rovers,” McCuisition said. “Spirit has provided outstanding scientific discoveries and shown us astounding vistas during its long life on Mars, which is more than 22 times longer than its designed life. “

In the spring, Spirit was driving backward and dragging the inoperable right front wheel. While driving in April, the rover’s other wheels broke through a crust on the surface that was covering a bright-toned, slippery sand underneath. After a few drive attempts to get Spirit out in the subsequent days, it began sinking deeper in the sand trap. Driving was suspended to allow time for tests and reviews of possible escape strategies.

“The investigations of the rover embedding and our preparations to resume driving have been extensive and thorough,” said John Callas, project manager for Spirit and Opportunity at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “We’ve used two different test rovers here on Earth in conditions designed to simulate as best as possible Spirit’s predicament. However, Earth-based tests cannot exactly replicate the conditions at Troy.”

Data show Spirit is straddling the edge of a 26-foot-wide crater that had been filled long ago with sulfate-bearing sands produced in a hot water or steam environment. The deposits in the crater formed distinct layers with different compositions and tints, and they are capped by a crusty soil. It is that soil that Spirit’s wheels broke through. The buried crater lies mainly to Spirit’s left. Engineers have plotted an escape route from Troy that heads up a mild slope away from the crater.

“We’ll start by steering the wheels straight and driving, though we may have to steer the wheels to the right to counter any downhill slip to the left,” said Ashley Stroupe, a JPL rover driver and Spirit extraction testing coordinator. “Straight-ahead driving is intended to get the rover’s center of gravity past a rock that lies underneath Spirit. Gaining horizontal distance without losing too much vertical clearance will be a key to success. The right front wheel’s inability to rotate greatly increases the challenge.”

Spirit has been examining its Martian surroundings with tools on its robotic arm and its camera mast. The rover’s work at Troy has augmented earlier discoveries it made indicating ancient Mars had hot springs or steam vents, possible habitats for life. If escape attempts fail, the rover’s stationary location may result in new science findings.

“The soft materials churned up by Spirit’s wheels have the highest sulfur content measured on Mars,” said Ray Arvidson a scientist at Washington University in St. Louis and deputy principal investigator for the science payloads on Spirit and Opportunity. “We’re taking advantage of its fixed location to conduct detailed measurements of these interesting materials.”

More on Marquette…

Oppy is now getting up close and personal with “Marquette Island”, a great slab of layered rock that she first spotted a week or so ago. I’m covering the rover’s trip to Endeavour Crater on my “The Road to Endeavour” blog, and you can find lots of images of this new ‘island’ – like this one, but in colour - there…

Almost at Marquette…

Slowly but surely, Oppy is closing in on “Marquette Island”…

More details here… http://roadtoendeavour.wordpress.com

 

What’s in a name?

As you read these very words, halfway across the solar system, on the dusty, dune-ripled Meridiani Plain on Mars, the Mars Exploration Rover OPPORTUNITY might be trundling towards yet another meteorite. A couple of days ago she sent back images showing this dark, blocky “something” up ahead…

Since it was spotted lots of MER-watchers have been wondering if it might be yet another piece of nickel iron that’s fallen from the Red Planet’s sky. We should know by this time tomorrow.

Could there be a clue in the fact that it has already been named – like all the fascinating meteorites spotted by Oppy so far – after an American island..? Hmmm!

Whatever it turns out to be, “Marquette Island” has, like “Block Island”, “Shelter Island” and “Mackinac Island”, been named after a small island off the coast of the US. But have you ever wondered why NASA been naming great chunks of starstone, found out on the plains of Mars after islands? I know I did, after Mackinac was given its name, which led to a bizarre internet coincidence I’ll describe later.

So. Islands. On a purely visual level it definitely makes sense. The Meridiani Plain that Oppy is crossing is, in effect, a vast sea of dust, with dunes of dust and sand rippled across it like waves frozen in a moment in time. Anything that sits on top of or between those dunes does look very much like an island.

But why THESE islands? Is there some special selection criteria for naming a martian meteorite after an island? After “Mackinac” was christened – and I wrongly, at first, thought it hadn’t been named after an island, but was set straight by several people! - I decided to try and find out, and after an email to the Public Affairs office at NASA (hi Veronica! ) I had my answer…

“Mackinac was proposed by James Ashley at Arizona State University. He’s  the Payload Downlink Lead and Payload Uplink Lead for the Miniature Thermal Emission Spectrometer, and a Mineralogy/Geochemistry Science Theme Group Lead for mission planning sessions.”

Here’s what James had to say about it…

“Yes indeed; when I sense an opportunity to suggest a name for a cobble on Mars, I choose a Michigan island because… …I was born and raised in Grand Rapids, Michigan.  So we now have the unofficial names of Isle Royale, Drummond, and Mackinac Island for three of the rocks that we have come across since exiting Victoria Crater (Mackinac is the only one of these three to be imaged close up).  For reasons that are familiar to Michiganders, Mackinac Island is one of my favorite places to visit back home. ”

Aha! Mystery solved! Well, at least as far as Mackinac was concerned. What about the other islands tho? Why had they been chosen? Was it for a specific reason – maybe someone on the MER team had a personal or family link with an island that made them want to honour it, and immortalise it on Mars? Or was there just a “My First Big Book Of Islands” sitting on a desk at JPL that people were opening at random to help them choose names?

There was one certain way to find out. I decided to email the man who is responsible for giving the world “Spirit” and “Opportunity”, and all their hundreds of thousands of photographs; the engineer who designed, built and landed on Mars arguably the two most successful unmanned spacecraft in the history of planetary exploration; the amazing scientist who was recently awarded the “Carl Sagan Medal” in recognition of his amazing achievements in spreading the word about space exploration through his work on the MER mission – Steve Squyres.

Now, obviously, Steve is a very busy guy, and I was quite prepared to not hear back from him, what with his ridiculously busy schedule and everything. But, generous with his time as ever, Steve emailed me back just a few days later, and shone a light on the naming process for these fascinating meteorites…

“We are naming the isolated rocks that we find out in this sea of sand and sulfates after islands. Beyond that, there isn’t much rhyme or reason to it. We have a long list of island names from which we can draw as desired. What name gets assigned is pretty much at the whim of who’s on the science team the day the rock is found. In this particular instance, the suggestion came from James Ashley, a member of the team with a strong interest in meteorites. Why he suggested Mackinac I don’t know, but it was a good name, consistent with our naming convention, so that’s what we went with.

Cheers, SS“

So, there you have it! Personally I like the fact that it’s not a cold, scientific selection process, but an absolutely human one, ‘pretty much at the whim of who’s on the science team the day the rock is found’ as Steve put it.

So, let’s take a look at the meteorites Oppy has found on her meandering trek across Meridiani, and at the islands they’re named after.

First, “Block Island”. Block Island remains the largest meteorite spotted on Mars so far – a huge, heavy chunk of gnarled, gnawed iron that sits on Meridiani Planum like a worn down statue, or a piece of a temple. What was it named after? Well, it turns out it was named after this island, off the coast of New England…

Next was “Shelter Island”, which was named after this island, a little to the west of Block Island…

And then, my personal favourite, “Mackinac”…

As I said earlier, it was this meteorite that set me on my quest to uncover the reasons behind the meterites’ names in the first place. Soon after I posted the above picture of Mackinac on Twitter, to my surprise and delight I saw it had been reTweeted ( that’s ‘forwarded to other people’, for those of you who don’t use Twitter) by Mike Forrester, a Twitter user who actually lives ON Mackinac Island, and writes a blog about it! I sent him a message, thanking him for using it, and soon we had struck up something of a correspondence. Mike told me he had passed on my picture to a local school, and – and here’s where it all really got started, I guess – he asked me why NASA had chosen to name the meteorite after his beautiful island home..? I replied that basically NASA named just meteorites encountered by Oppy after US islands, but didn’t know why one was chosen over another… and that got me wondering about it. That’s when I emailed JPL, and Steve Squyres, too…

When I checked out Mike Forrester’s blog, a picture came up of a beautiful hotel that looked very, very familiar…

Aaaggghhh!!! Where had I seen that hotel?!?! It was maddening! Then it came to me… I’d seen it in one of my all-time favourite films… and this might shock, amuse or horrify some of you when you see what it is, you have been warned…

“Somewhere In Time” was a chick-flick before the term was even invented, and I love it to bits. If you aren’t familiar with the film, Christopher Reeve plays a writer who travels back in time to be with a beautiful actress – played by Jane Seymour- who he fell in love with after seeing her portrait on a gallery wall. Sadly, he is stopped from being with her when he is thrust back to his own time, and he then basically starves himself to death pining for her… but when he dies the lovers are reunited…

By now you’re either going “Awwwwww!” or “Bleughhh!!” into a bucket! But I don’t care, it’s a beautiful story, with great characters, and even if it is cheesier than a warehouse full of mature cheddar it’s just a lovely, escapist film. And come on, you can’t watch rockets and starships and aliens ALL the time..!

Anyway… that hotel looked so familiar because it is featured in the film. Personally I think that’s quite a spooky chain of events… my favourite martian meteorite comes to be named after an island which has the hotel featured in one of my favourite films, and I only found out about it after someone I didn’t even know existed saw my picture on Twitter! I LOVE the internet!

But now we have “Marquette Island” – which island is it named after? here it is…

Strange shape, isn’t it? I can’t wait to see what shape its namesake on Mars turns out to have..!

So, there you have it – the story behind the naming of the meteorites found on Mars by Opportunity so far. I’m sure many more are just sitting there, waiting to be found. No doubt there are lots of US island names ready and waiting to be used, but here I’d like to officially start an internet campaign to have one named after an island that the good people at NASA and JPL probably won’t be aware of – this one…

That’s “Craggy Island”,  home of these wonderful people…

Oh go on NASA, name a meteorite Craggy Island, you know you want to. Ah, go on, go on, go on…

(CUMBRIAN SKY gift for “Father Ted” fans – “My Lovely Horse“) (and if you’ve never seen or even heard of it, take a look…!)

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P.S. If you’d like to see some more images, showing the meteorites and their islands, here you are – please click on the pictures to bring up full size versions…

Cassini sees Enceladus’ plumes…

Wow… (and I’m only using that word ‘cos I can’t possibly use the swear word I wanted to when I first saw the images half an hour ago!)… Cassini has been sending back new images of the plumes gushing out of Enceladus’ south pole, and they’re amazing…

Closer…

… and closer still…

Tweaking and enhancing and generally piddling about with one of the images results in this startling view…

I’m pretty stunned by these images, and to be honest, after doing this stuff, after living space and space exploration for all these years it takes a lot to actually stun me… I mean, I’m sitting here in my flat in Kendal, at 6.40 in the morning… I will be heading out to work in less than half an hour, walking through curtain after curtain of lashing, icy rain, and I’ll get there literally soaked to the skin… but I’ll get there with a head full of images of geysers of icy water spewing out of a moon orbiting Saturn, remembering something my good UMSF friend nprev said… that yesterday, when Cassini flew though these plumes, because some scientists believe that the material in these plumes contains bacteria or micro-organisms that shelter and thrive in the water below the pole, for the first time in human history perhaps a machine built by mankind touched alien lifeforms… I just can’t shake that thought when I look at these glorious pictures…

And trust me, now you won’t be able to, either…