The Artemis I mission is scheduled to last 42 days 3 hours 20 minutes, sending the Orion spacecraft on a round trip mission that would reach 40,000 miles beyond the moon and travel a total of 1.3 million miles.
The James Webb Space Telescope was designed to tunnel deeper into space and farther back in time than any previous observatory, with the audacious goal of seeing the very first galaxies that lit up the young universe. Creating pretty pictures was always a pleasant but ancillary feature of having this amazing new piece of hardware out in space.
Today, 365 days after NASA unveiled the mission’s first batch of data and images, it’s clear that the JWST can produce the hard science and the beauty shots with equal aplomb. NASA is marking the first anniversary of the JWST’s scientific debut with the release of a new image, demonstrating the telescope’s ability to re-envision the universe. The dramatic, somewhat hallucinatory image captures the dynamism of the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, the closest star-forming region to Earth, where planetary systems like our own could be in the initial stages of forming.
“The telescope is working better than we could have possibly hoped for,” said NASA astrophysicist Jane Rigby, who earlier this month became the senior project scientist for the JWST.
The scientific community was a little conservative in planning their agenda for the first year of observations, but this next year of science will take full advantage of what the telescope can do, Rigby said. “We’re getting bolder in year two.”
Every so often we have to put things into perspective and realize that our world is barely a speck in the Milky Way, which is barely a speck in the visible universe.
]]>It was December 7, 1972 at 12:33 a.m. when NASA last sent a mission to the moon with Apollo 17. I stood on the porch of my third-floor apartment in Coconut Grove, Florida, and even though I was some 300 miles south of Cape Canaveral, I could see the Saturn V rocket light up the sky as it arced through the upper atmosphere. We knew that would be the last trip to the moon for the Apollo program, but I don’t think anyone really believed it would be another fifty years before we’d send another mission to the moon, and an unmanned one at that.
If Artemis I makes it off the pad this morning at 8:33 a.m., it will be the just that: unmanned and a test flight. The next trip, in 2024, will have astronauts aboard, but they won’t land. That will happen with Artemis III in 2025. According to this piece in the Washington Post, it’s been a long road just to get to today’s launch.
The Artemis I mission is scheduled to last 42 days 3 hours 20 minutes, sending the Orion spacecraft on a round trip mission that would reach 40,000 miles beyond the moon and travel a total of 1.3 million miles.
But in a way, the odyssey to get to this point has been even more arduous — an at-times painful path that shows how Washington works, and, ironically, why NASA has been unable to return to the moon since the last of the Apollo missions 50 years ago.
Standing atop its launchpad, the SLS is a glorious sight, but also a contradiction. More powerful than the Saturn V that launched the Apollo astronauts to the moon, the SLS is a symbol of engineering prowess and American might that evokes the 1960s-era exploration nostalgia. But costing more than $23 billion, it also is a monument to parochial congressional interests, stultifying bureaucracy and contractor mismanagement.
And as the commercial sector continues to develop new rockets, the future of the SLS is unclear.
As Casey Drier, chief advocate and senior space policy adviser at the Planetary Society, recently asked in an essay, “Given its cost, the existing launch capabilities provided by private companies such as SpaceX, Blue Origin and RocketLab, and the real progress of super heavy-lift private rockets, why does the SLS still exist?”
Looking back at the Apollo program, it was a marvel that we got to the moon in such a short time with such primitive equipment. There is more computing power in your average cell phone than there was in all the computers in Mission Control in 1969, and we went from Alan Shepard’s suborbital flight in 1961 to Tranquility Base in less than nine years. It’s taken that long to get the specs right on Artemis I. But at least we are trying, and the Artemis program is supposed to be the steppingstone to going to Mars. Then again, in 1969 we thought we’d be on Mars by 1989.
$23 billion is a lot of money to spend on anything, and there are a lot of people who have a lot of good ideas on how to spend the money closer to home and on things that would be more practical and beneficial. But I still think we have the capacity to look upward and explore, and I still remember the thrill of watching the grainy pictures of Neil Armstrong setting foot on the moon in July 1969 or seeing that streak of brilliant flame in the Florida night sky in December 1972. And if we deny that, then we’re missing out on a vital part of what makes us who we are: curious about what’s out there.
Update: The launch was scrubbed due to hardware issues. The next try could be as early as Friday, September 2.
I mean that literally. This is a photo from the new James Webb Space Telescope.
It’s human nature to think of ourselves as the most important person, or our country as the greatest in the world, or whatever. But if this picture doesn’t give you a new perspective on exactly where we fit in the universe, then keep looking at that picture. Then do what you have to to make this little corner of space a little better. Everybody else here — and out there — will appreciate it.
]]>From the aboriginal Australians to the Zuni people, human civilizations have celebrated the winter solstice for as long as we’ve comprehended the seasons. It is a time for optimism, hope, miracles, and light. Even before we understood the solar system, we knew the basics: at a certain point, less sun gives way to more. These days, we’ve figured out a lot more about our place in the universe, but that doesn’t make this moment any less special. Humans look up, and forward; it’s who we are.
This morning’s launch of the James Webb Space Telescope got me thinking about where we’re at as a species. We live in an age of wonders, but it doesn’t always feel that way. For better and worse, we’ve atomized; we don’t have as many universals as we used to; sometimes it seems like solstice celebrations are one of the few things we have in common any more. We’ve broken down a lot of old structures and sources of meaning, which has been great for a lot of people, but we sort of forgot to replace them with anything. People report having fewer friends than they used to. Deaths of despair have skyrocketed in this country, and lots of people feel lonely and isolated, a situation that the last two years have not improved. Maybe it’s all a big coincidence that we’ve forgotten how to talk to each other, but I’m not so sure. People need communities and shared goals and things bigger than themselves.
Which brings me back to thinking about that telescope, about the thousands of people who worked together for decades to build a device which, if it works, might revolutionize our understanding of reality. If we want to find meaning in something, work together, and better ourselves, we could do worse than focusing on space. It’s how we will press forward with figuring out what the universe is; it’s how we will defend our planet from species-destroying asteroids; it’s how we will find extraplanetary life. These represent big tasks and big questions. Space exploration is broadly popular, too, and it’s not even that expensive, in the grand scheme of things–the James Webb telescope only cost $10 billion.
There’s something deeply humbling about cosmology and space exploration; something awesome, in the old sense of the term. They inspire feelings in me that a less atheistic person might find in religion. Carl Sagan had it right when he convinced NASA to turn Voyager 1 around and take one last picture: Astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.
So I guess my message on the darkest week of the year is: there are worse directions to look than up!
Doonesbury — Get it right.
]]>In 2007, Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid called his colleagues Ted Stevens and Daniel Inouye to a specially secured room in the Capitol where highly classified information was discussed.
Stevens, a Republican from Alaska, and Inouye, a Democrat from Hawaii, controlled funding for supersecret Pentagon operations. Reid wanted to put an idea on their radar, one that needed to be kept hush-hush not just for national security but because it was, as Reid’s aides told him, kind of crazy.
He wanted the Pentagon to investigate UFOs.
“Everyone told me this would cause me nothing but trouble,” said Reid, a Democrat who represented Nevada, home of the military’s top-secret Area 51 test site, a central attraction of sorts for UFO hunters. “But I wasn’t afraid of it. And I guess time has proven me right.”
That’s because official Washington is swirling with chatter — among top senators, Pentagon insiders, and even former CIA directors — about UFOs. What was once a ticket to the political loony bin has leaped off Hollywood screens and out of science-fiction novels and into the national conversation. There are even new government acronyms.
For some Navy pilots, UFO sightings were an ordinary event: ‘Every day for at least a couple years’
“This used to be a career-ending kind of thing,” said John Podesta, who generally kept his interest in UFOs to himself when he was President Bill Clinton’s chief of staff. “You didn’t want to get caught talking about it because you’d be accused of walking out of an ‘X-Files’ episode.”
But now there isn’t just talk.
Last summer, the Defense Department issued a news release with the following headline: “Establishment of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force.” The mission of the UAPTF, an acronym mouthful, “is to detect, analyze and catalog UAPs that could potentially pose a threat to U.S. national security,” according to the Pentagon.
A few months later, as part of President Donald Trump’s spending and pandemic relief package, the Senate Intelligence Committee, led by Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.), included a provision calling for the director of national intelligence to help produce an unclassified report on everything government agencies know about UFOs, including scores of unusual sightings reported by military pilots.
That report is due sometime next month.
I have no doubt that there are other forms of life out in the universe who have evolved to sentient beings in some form or another — perhaps humanoid, perhaps not — and that they have also evolved to the point of space travel. The odds are a trillion to one that we are not alone, based solely on the number of stars and galaxies in the universe and the fact that we’re already seeing planets orbiting nearby stars. What’s keeping them from actually contacting us in the manner depicted in science fiction may have to do with the distance — it’s a few light years to the nearest star — or that they have determined we’re not worthy of contacting. In the Star Trek universe, explorers on the Enterprise wouldn’t conduct first contact with a civilization until they had achieved faster-than-light space travel. We’re not there yet because of Einstein’s theory that nothing can travel faster than light.
If somehow these emissaries have achieved faster-than-light capabilities and we are actually contacted by them, it would certainly change things. But if they’ve been listening in on our radio and television transmissions — the only signals we have generated that travel at the speed of light — I’m afraid we’d have a lot of explaining to do about the events of the last 100 years.
Maybe the best thing it could do is convince us to clean up and grow up so as not to appear to be so primitive and tacky to the people next door.
]]>It has given us a good reason to hope that at last we’re going to have Infrastructure Week.
Meanwhile, NASA is doing what NASA does best.
NASA rover Perseverance landed safely Thursday on Mars to begin an ambitious mission to search for signs of past Martian life and obtain samples of soil and rock that could someday be hauled back to Earth for study in laboratories.
“Touchdown confirmed! Perseverance is safely on the surface of Mars, ready to begin seeking the signs of past life,” announced Swati Mohan, the guidance and control operations lead for the mission at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
Cheers, clapping and fist-pumps erupted in the control room, which was half-empty because of the coronavirus pandemic. Someone shouted: “TRN, TRN,” referring to the terrain relative navigation system that allowed Perseverance to land in a rugged area full of natural hazards.
Perseverance, the first multibillion-dollar NASA mission to Mars in nine years, quickly produced two low-resolution images of the landing site — a forlorn landscape pocked with small craters. Dust kicked up by the landing covered the glass shields on the cameras. The pair of photos showed the rover casting a shadow on the Martian landscape.
Throwing a dart 128 million miles and hitting the bullseye is really worth celebrating. The new Mars rover Perseverance did exactly what it was supposed to do. It landed, softly, in the Jezero Crater, which is probably an ancient river delta and now, for the next two years, it will look for fossilized pond scum, which would be the most important pond scum in the history of pond scum, which goes back to the beginning of time, both here and there.
[…]
It’s hard to explain to people too young to have lived through it what it was like when what was then called The Space Race was going on. It wasn’t just the astronauts, although they certainly commanded the stage. It was all the failed attempts to land anything on the moon, all those Pioneers and Lunas that failed to achieve Earth orbit or flamed out if they did. Finally, on September 12, 1959, the Russian Luna 2 hit the moon, which was all it was supposed to do. It took another five years for the U.S. to match that feat, when this country managed to hit the moon with Ranger 4. In 1966, Surveyor 1 landed and sent data back for two months before going dark.
And there were adventures elsewhere, too. Mariner 2 flew by Venus while, in 1970, the Russians landed a probe there. Mariner 4 flew by Mars and Mariner 10 flew by Mercury. By 1988, the USSR had collapsed, and the U.S. had the cosmos to itself. The Pioneers and Voyagers explored Jupiter and beyond. The machines always took the back seat to men, but the machines were our eyes in so many distant, wonderful places. We often need prompting to lift our eyes to the sky, but we almost never regret it when we do.
I remember when I was in grade school in the early 1960’s they would wheel in a TV on a cart to the gym so we could watch the grainy black-and-white pictures of the launch of Alan Shepard and John Glenn, when going to space was still the stuff of science fiction. We made it to the moon, and then turned our dreams of space travel over to Gene Roddenberry and George Lucas. But NASA and JPL and the proud nerds who devote their lives to searching for signs of ancient life in the dried-up ponds on our next-door neighbor are continuing the mission we as humans have always had: looking for life, and even if all we find is fossilized microbe poop, it’s evidence that that we’re not just a one-time knock-off; that we’re not alone, even if they can’t answer back.
]]>Has the State of Israel made contact with aliens?
According to retired Israeli general and current professor Haim Eshed, the answer is yes, but this has been kept a secret because “humanity isn’t ready.”
The 87-year-old former space security chief gave further descriptions about exactly what sort of agreements have been made between the aliens and the US, which ostensibly have been made because they wish to research and understand “the fabric of the universe.” This cooperation includes a secret underground base on Mars, where there are American and alien representatives.
If true, this would coincide with US President Donald Trump’s creation of the Space Force as the fifth branch of the US armed forces, though it is unclear how long this sort of relationship, if any, has been going on between the US and its reported extraterrestrial allies.
But Eshed insists that Trump is aware of them, and that he was “on the verge” of disclosing their existence. However, the Galactic Federation reportedly stopped him from doing so, saying they wished to prevent mass hysteria since they felt humanity needed to “evolve and reach a stage where we will… understand what space and spaceships are,” Yediot Aharonot reported.
As for why he’s chosen to reveal this information now, Eshed explained that the timing was simply due to how much the academic landscape has changed, and how respected he is in academia.
“If I had come up with what I’m saying today five years ago, I would have been hospitalized,” he explained to Yediot.
He added that “today, they’re already talking differently. I have nothing to lose. I’ve received my degrees and awards; I am respected in universities abroad, where the trend is also changing.”
Eshed provided more information in his newest book, The Universe Beyond the Horizon – conversations with Professor Haim Eshed, along with other details such as how aliens have prevented nuclear apocalypses and “when we can jump in and visit the Men in Black.” The book is available now for NIS 98.
While it is unclear if any evidence exists that could support Eshed’s claims, they did come just ahead of a recent announcement by SpaceIL, the group behind Israel’s failed attempt to land a spacecraft on the moon in 2019.
Uploaded to social media with the text “Ready to get excited again?,” the announcement contained a 15-second video of the moon with text saying “Back to the Moon,” followed by the date of December 9, 2020.
It is likely that this is a follow up to the Beresheet spacecraft, which crashed after engineers lost contact with it just minutes before it was due to land. However, the follow up project, titled Beresheet 2, is expected to take three years to be ready.
But sadly, we may never know the truth.
The Jerusalem Post was unable to reach out to this supposed Galactic Federation for comment.
Joan Rivers once said that a flying saucer would never land in a Jewish neighborhood because everyone would turn it over to see who made it. (Hey, she said it, not me.)
Via Adam L. Silverman at Balloon Juice:
]]>After three hard years of fuming over President Trump, it has been a reassuring summer for Democrats. The Biden campaign had a strong convention, capped by a best-of-career speech by Joe Biden. Party fundraising is surging, and the polls look excellent. But a good campaign is a paranoid campaign, especially 70 days before an election.
So even though I think Biden is likely to win, I’m spending my time worrying about how he could lose. Here is what could go wrong:
Biden could still fumble the definition war. Opinions of Trump are etched in stone; we love him or we hate him. Right now, the haters are in the majority and polls show the country is itching to fire him. Trump could try to improve his image, but his braying tone and clumsy tactics never change. Don’t count on the Donald to heal himself. But if Trump is well defined, Biden and Kamala Harris are not. Heading into next week, the Trump strategy is brutally simple: change the focus from firing Trump to fearing Biden and Harris.
The Republicans will pound away at Biden and Harris with all the golden oldies that worked for them before. I was there when Republicans did a nasty new paint job on the once shiny Michael Dukakis. Whether they want to or not, Americans will be watching Fox News-style programming next week as the GOP tries to recast “Pop and Momala” as wild tax-and-spenders, enemies of private health insurance, dangerously soft on illegal immigration, destroyers of the suburbs and purveyors of vote fraud.
Democrats may scoff at this, but these attacks will take a toll. (And truth be told — a rarity in GOP politics these days — the ideological critique isn’t imaginary; Harris in particular has a notably liberal voting record.) Barack Obama used the same define-him-first playbook to end Mitt Romney’s White House hopes in 2012.
The debates worry me, too. So far, the election has mostly been Trump vs. covid-19, and the virus has won every round. Biden’s terrific convention speech smashed Trump’s dire hints about Biden’s mental acuity, but now that he’s a proven home-run hitter, Biden will face much higher expectations. As a Motor City native, I greatly enjoyed Biden’s new video with his classic Corvette. Now get back to debate prep, Joe.
One more worry. I fear a black-swan scenario based on the most reliable force of all: human nature.
We know covid-19 is the true special feature of this election. It has crushed the president’s poll numbers. It has hurt millions of Americans, flattened the economy and made the electorate fearful and uneasy. The fatigue we all share is powerful, draining, exhausting; Americans desperately crave some good news.
Which means you can count on our cornered and unrestrained president to try to manufacture some. He’s already tried with phony cures including old malaria drugs, Clorox and the healing power of ultraviolet fish tank cleaning lights. But in a few weeks, Dr. Trump may “discover” a far more powerful elixir: Tens of thousands of patients are already in advanced trials for experimental vaccines. Whatever the ultimate outcome of these trials, it is certain that murky, highly preliminary news will leak.
Even a whiff of promising results, regardless of how premature they might be, will spark a surge of euphoria. The breathless media of our digital age will erupt. A cure is on the way! Markets will rocket higher and businesses will rush to open, as a huge wave of relief envelops a country sick of wearing masks. It’s all based on our understandable hunger for something good to happen.
This could make for an interesting October.
Trump will move fast to exploit this moment with the full power of his office. Whether any of it is scientifically true will be irreverent [sic] to Trump. It will be also be irrelevant to many voters; as every dodgy operator knows, people just want to believe; be it a Bernie Madoff scam, a magic diet book, a Trump University hustle or any other of the cons, large and small, in human history. Trump, of course, understands that all too well.
I still think Biden beats Trump. I’d bet money on it. But not too much money. Only about 7 or 8 percent of the vote is really in play. Some will be convinced that Biden and Harris are too risky a choice. And if only half of the rest feel the cure craze and change their minds, everything can change. Don’t underestimate manias. The most famous example comes from wealthy 17th-century Holland. As most people know, in one particularly speculative moment, the price of a tulip exploded from virtually nothing to the price of a house. How long did it take for reason to go out the window? About 75 days.
It was probably a crazy time. But what would you call this?
See you in November.
Look to the Skies — An asteroid is heading to Earth just in time for Election Day.
(CNN) Well, 2020 keeps getting better all the time.
Amid a pandemic, civil unrest and a divisive US election season, we now have an asteroid zooming toward us.
On the day before the presidential vote, no less.Yep. The celestial object known as 2018VP1 is projected to come close to Earth on November 2, according to the Center for Near Earth Objects Studies at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Its diameter is 0.002 km, or about 6.5 feet, according to NASA’s data. It was first identified at Palomar Observatory in California in 2018.
NASA says there are three potential impacts, but “based on 21 observations spanning 12.968 days,” the agency has determined the asteroid probably — phew! — won’t have a deep impact, let alone bring Armageddon.The chance of it hitting us is just 0.41%, data show.
CNN has reached out NASA for any additional or updated information but has not heard back.
Doonesbury — Everybody wants to get in on the act.
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