Blogs / Bad Astronomy

According to Discovery News, NASA has a "Plan B" program in case something happens with the Constellation program. It’s an alternative way to get back to the Moon, and they made a video for it.

There are some obvious advantages with taking Shuttle parts and using them in a new program. For one, the technology already exists and has been tested in well over 100 launches. For another, the machinery and manpower already exist as well, which would save billions of dollars in new development and training.

But I’m a little nervous seeing things like the same external tank being used that sheds foam on launch (in the video, the hardware mounted on the ET is protected by a fairing, but still, that doesn’t thrill me), and is prone to hydrogen vent leaks, like the leak that has delayed Endeavour’s launch for weeks. Second, the solid rocket boosters as they exist now are not the best tech; they are expensive and cost a lot to refurbish.

Now, it’s easy for me to poopoo this; it’s always easier to cast stones after the fact. Maybe this is a better idea than Constellation, and maybe not. I’ve never liked the Shuttle Orbiters; they are hugely overbuilt and extremely expensive. They are exquisite and amazing and all that, but from a cost/benefit point of view they’re a colossal waste of money. We need cheaper access to space! So not having an Orbiter on this Plan B Moonship is a good start.

I’ll be honest: I have not been able to follow all the intrigue going on with Constellation right now because it’s complex and there are machinations afoot that are complicated. But I find it extremely odd that — with only a handful of Shuttle launches left before an at least four year gap in being able to get people into space — NASA is still presenting plans for a Shuttle substitute. Seriously, NASA: this should’ve been in the bag five years ago. Ten. Then we wouldn’t be facing a lengthy gap where we have to rely on foreign partners to get to space, and domestic companies that, while their futures are very bright, do not have the capacity to launch people into space and won’t for several years.

Still, I’d rather have alternatives discussed now rather than build an expensive and untested rocket that might prove to be another ISS or Shuttle program: bloated and unable to do most of what was initially promised.

And let me say that this very fact ticks me off. I want access to space, and I don’t want a lot of corporate maneuvering and political sideshowing. But with hundreds of billions of dollars at stake and a government agency in charge, it’s what we get.

I still support a return to the Moon… if done correctly. But it’s things like this that make me wonder if this whole thing is a good idea on paper, but an impossibility in reality.

A lot of books are coming out right now to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11. One of the best, called Voices from the Moon, is by my friends Andy Chaikin and Victoria Kohl.

Andy is familiar to Apollonuts: he wrote A Man on the Moon, considered by many (including me) to be the bible of Apollo, and he knows all the Apollo astronauts and their stories. I have a copy of Voices, and it’s a GORGEOUS book, loaded with extremely high-quality images of the missions, punctuated with wonderful stories from the astronauts themselves (hence the title).

The Hive Overmind has put up a gallery of beautiful images from the book, just to give you a taste of what’s there. If you’re looking for a gift for yourself or the space enthusiast in your life, this is the one to get.

[Update: Ken Bowley on Facebook clued me in that the LRO camera has a page where you can see the raw images, and zoom in — WAY in — on the image strips. They have 73 cm resolution, folks. Yikes.]

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has returned its first images from the Moon! Woohoo!

Check. It. Out!

Whoaaaa.

This image, taken in the Mare Nubium region of the Moon, shows a heavily cratered area. The scale here is amazing: the whole image is 1400 meters across, or just under a mile. That’s like looking out your airplane window… if you were over the frakking Moon! Even in this compressed image (click to embiggen) features just a few meters across are distinguishable. See that perfectly circular crater just to the right and a tad below the middle of the picture? It’s about 60 meters across, just a bit bigger than two tennis courts end-to-end. It would easily fit in a football stadium.

Holy Haleakala.

It’s a little difficult to interpret the image; for example, near the bottom in the middle I thought for a moment I saw a crater chain. I don’t think that’s real; our eyes tend to pick out linear features even when they aren’t there. Too bad, because that would be cool; crater chains form when an asteroid or comet breaks up before it hits, and we do see them on pretty much every cratered object in the solar system. You can also get them near a larger impact, when junk ejected from the crater splashes out and lands nearby.

I guarantee we’ll see lots of such chains as LRO snaps more pictures. Awesome.

Check this one too:

This image has the same scale as the other, and shows a region of low hummocks undulating across the Moon. I don’t have much to say scientifically about this particular picture, but I will say that it is eerily beautiful, and completely enthralling. I wouldn’t mind having that framed over my desk!

So there you go, folks. If you want to explore the Moon, all you have to do is sit back and wait for the images to roll in. And remember: when it settles into its final orbit, the pictures LRO takes will have a resolution of 0.5 meters, or 18 inches!

Wow. I cannot wait to see more.

P.S. If you liked this article, you might like this one as well where I dissect an image of the Moon taken from the space station.

Via Ian O’Neill and Richard Drumm I have one more set of shots of the explosive plume from the Russian volcano Saraychev Peak… but oh, is this so worth it. It’s an animation made up of single images taken by astronauts aboard the ISS.

Whoa. You really get a sense of how the plume is changing minute by minute, and the view of the pyroclastic flows is truly fantastic. A good way to see this is to let the video load, then use the controller to scroll back and forth in time along the footage.

As I look at it, I realize just how amazing this sequence is… the ISS is always up there, so it’s bound to see just about any explosive volcanic event on Earth. But it just so happens that it flew very close to being directly over this one, so we’re looking straight down the plume. Incredible.

Orbits can be a bit complicated. As the International Space Station orbits the Earth every 90 minutes or so, the Earth is spinning underneath it… and not only that, the orbit of the ISS is tilted by about 50 degrees to the Equator. All of this means that any one spot on Earth doesn’t see the ISS every 90 minutes, and in fact it can be days or weeks between favorable overhead passes.

To help you figure all this out, NASA has created a nifty applet to help you determine when the ISS (and a handful of other satellites, including Hubble) are visible at your location. You can enter your country or zip code and it will tell you when the next visible pass of the ISS occurs. You may have to click "Next Sighting" a few times to get one that’s at a decent time, but keep at it.

ISS and the Shuttle rising over the trees. I shot this picture in 2007.

As it happens, the next week or so yields many favorable overhead passages of the ISS in the US — think of it as a holiday celebration (even though there’s that pesky I in ISS). For me, in Boulder, the next good sighting is on Monday July 6, when it passes very close to directly overhead at 10:17 p.m. (there are a few sooner but they are early in the morning when I tend to be asleep).

This application also provides you with a map of the sky to help you out.

And while it’s nice and all, I still prefer to use Heavens Above, a fantastic resource on the web for satellite passes, sky mapping, and tons more. All you need to do is put in your latitude and longitude as accurately as you can (Google Maps will help there) and it will give you a table of dozens of visible satellite passes, including ISS, Hubble, and a gazillion more.

For you Americans out there, the Fourth of July is a great time for skygazing; even though the Sun doesn’t set until late, a lot of folks will be out after dark anyway. So why not stay outside a few extra minutes and watch the real fireworks?

[Update 2: According to Bob Jacobs, NASA Deputy Assistant Administrator for Public Affairs, the Sunday Express article I link to below "is a fiction". Sounds to me like I got duped, and I apologize to everyone for forwarding this story. Hopefully more info will come out soon, and I’ll update as I hear it.]

[Update: folks at CollectSpace are saying this article is a hoax. I have no evidence either way, which is why I wrote this post using the "allegedly" format. Hopefully more evidence one way or another will come out soon.]

On July 20, just weeks from now, it will be the 40th anniversary of the moment a human stepped foot on another world.

You’ve seen the footage: Neil Armstrong in his bulky suit, stepping off the lunar module’s footpad. Ironically, though, for such a momentous occasion, the video looks awful. Noisy, low-res, and washed out. Well, it turns out that’s because this iconic scene, shown millions of times in the ensuing years, is not the original footage. It was actually taken using a 16mm camera aimed at a screen at NASA’s Mission Control room. And the screen was only showing highly compressed data, so the end result is the lousy stuff we’ve grown used to.

ZOMG! I can see right through NASA’s lies! And through Neil Armstrong, too.

But all that may now change. The UK Sunday Express is reporting that the original tapes have been found! This means that we may finally, after four decades, get the high-quality footage of Neil Armstrong’s small step that we’ve always wanted.

The deal is this: the video stream from the Moon was of a decent quality, but far too large too be able to be be sent to TVs around the country and the world. Using the Parkes radio telescope in Australia, astronomers recorded the video beamed from the lunar surface in high quality, but what they transmitted to NASA was necessarily compressed. It’s the latter we’ve all seen. The thing is, the high quality tapes were then lost somehow. NASA admitted it a few years ago, and the search was on! According to the article the tapes were finally found recently in a storage facility on Perth.

This is very exciting, and I certainly hope it’s true. I’d love to see this moment once again, but this time with a beautiful clear picture!

And of course, me being who I am, I have to add this part:

Crucially, [the tapes] could once and for all dispel 40 years of wild conspiracy theories.

That is so wonderfully naive! First, conspiracy theories about the Moon landings aren’t based on facts. If they were, the hoax idea would have dried up and blown away 30 years ago. They have no facts. All they have is a zealous fervor and a gross misunderstanding of reality. Finding the tapes won’t help; you could fly a conspiracy theorist to the Moon and show them the equipment lying on the desolate surface, and they’d accuse you of drugging them. My advice: if you try this, leave that goofball on the Moon. That’ll give him plenty of time to think over his ideas.

Second, the use of the word "crucial" made me laugh. I’ve talked with dozens of people at NASA about the Hoax theory, and it’s hardly something that’s critical to them. They all regard it as an irritant, like a tiny pebble in your shoe or a pesky fold in your underwear you can only feel when you sit a certain way. Ignorable, but irksome when you’re reminded about it. And though they’d never admit it, I bet every single person at NASA loves how Buzz handled it.

And third, what the article author forgets is that, to a conspiracy nut, everything in the whole Universe is part of the conspiracy. So the fact that the tapes were missing is evidence of a coverup, and NASA finding the tapes is due to the massive pressure of the hoax community, and if the tapes aren’t exactly as promised that’s because NASA has doctored them, and if they are pristine and perfect then you can look just there and see the wires holding up the astroNOTS, and you still can’t see stars in the footage, and and and.

So, a few weeks before the 40th anniversary of this incredible moment in history, here’s what I think about the Moon Hoaxers: screw them. Let them gripe and moan and try to pee in the punch bowl of NASA. In reality, that punch bowl is way, way over their heads. I can see the magnificent achievement of Apollo for what it was, and I think the vast majority of people out there do as well.

Tip o’ the spacesuit visor to Fark.

The Big Picture once again does the International Space Station. My favorite picture? No contest:

Oh how I love this picture.

Of course I love shots of the Moon, but this speaks volumes. Note the Earth just below the Moon; the ISS was seeing the Moon through the top of Earth’s atmosphere. As you may know, light bends when it passes from one medium to another, like from water to air, which is why a spoon in a glass looks bent. The same is true when light passes from a vacuum through air; it bends. In fact, the amount the light bends depends on the angle it intercepts the boundary; so that light coming in from one direction may get bent more than if it comes in from another.

So here comes the cool part: the Earth’s atmosphere follows the curve of the Earth, so you can picture it as a thick shell of air around us. Here’s a diagram:

The Earth’s surface is the lower arc, and the air above the upper arc. The Moon is to the left, the ISS to the right.

The red lines indicate the line-of-sight view to the Moon. When an astronaut looks at the bottom of the Moon, the angle of the air/space boundary is a bit different than it is when he or she looks at the top of the Moon. In my diagram that angle is close to being 45 degrees for the bottom line, but is more like 30 degrees for the top line. That means the light coming from the bottom of the Moon gets bent more than the top. As it happens, the light from the Moon gets bent upward as it passes through our air… so the bottom of the Moon looks like it’s getting pushed into the top.

This squashes the view of the Moon! All of the light is getting bent, but by different amounts; the upper part of the Moon is closer to being a circle but is still distorted significantly. Making it worse, the Moon was not quite full in this picture, so the "left" side looks off, too.

What a mess! But it’s an explainable mess, and one that’s not even all that hard to do. The math is really just a bit of trig and a bit of algebra. In detail it gets more complicated, because the Earth’s air gets thinner with altitude, and I didn’t account for that. And I bet there are a hundred other variables as well.

But making some quick assumptions explains the gross characteristics of this picture just fine. And to me, that adds to my amazement of such a shot. Knowing more about it doesn’t detract from its beauty and its wonder; it enhances them.

I really love that about science. It’s easy to be awed when you don’t know how something works, but when you get a glimpse into the machinery behind it, get an idea of how it really works, what you see becomes that much more beautiful.