(This is kind of a rough draft there is some more to work on here but just posting what I have at the moment)
Not only is the universe stranger than we think, its stranger than we can think. Werner Karl Heisenberg
There are a lot concepts in this book which can be new some people so I will go thru a few before going down any of three roads.
One of the most fundamental if not the most fundamental thing is that there is nothing outside the universe, they could if you believe in such things a go or gods but those will have no bearing to the discussion. This means that since we exist in the universe we can’t be outside the universe. Also nothing can travel faster than the speed of light of 3.0*108m/s. It has been figured out the universe is 93.6 billion light years across but since light can only travel at a fixed speed and the universe is only 13.6 billion years we can’t see most of the universe. Since the universe is expanding, in a billion years we could actually see more of the total universe. I live in a dip between two hills and at the end my driveway I can only see what is between the hills. But if I go down the road and up the hill I can see over to next ridge and see the communities between the ridges. But this has a implication that there are three things we can say for sure, there are things we know are false, there are things that are true and there are things we can’t really know.
In quantum physics a particle can be in a number of states at the same time until something interacts with it. There are two main ways of understanding this there is the many worlds and the Copenhegan interpretation. The Copehegan interpretation states there is no knowing the outcome of quantum system until it is measured. The many worlds system states that every time a particle interacts with another particle or groups of particles, it splits into all the possibilities that system can have. Another way of seeing it is if there were different observers measuring the outcome according to what they wanted to know. One way of thinking about a quantum system is like after a potluck dinner sometimes there are leftover sandwiches, some are meat, some are vege, and some my least favourite egg salad. Now you go and get a sandwich and you can not tell which is which until you bite into one. I would be happy with anything but egg but somebody else you who is upset with me would love if it was egg. This way of thinking came about in the 1950’s by Hugh Everett, If you know what you looking for in a quantum system you can deduce what properties you can set an experiment to measure what you want in a quantum system.
The first concept to get your head wrapped around is space can be seen in discrete units of volume or area. If you take a cube centimetre and cut in half in all three dimensions you have have 8 smaller pieces. You can do this to the point where each side is a Planck length, a point where there is nothing shorter, around 10-35 m. If you cut each of these in half the combined volume of the each of these pieces will actually be bigger than the piece that you started off with. The underlying concept of Quantum Loop gravity comes from is from the field of super conductivity. Superconductivity is a property of some materials when they there is an electrical current is passed thru a substance there is no resistance to current, this usually happens near absolute 0k around -253C but there are materials that exhibit this near room temperature. When a something with a magnetic field passes by a superconducter the magnetic field breaks apart into tiny discrete field lines. Also in sub atomic regime quarks have never been seen alone. If you take two quarks and try to separate them no matter how far apart there is still some force keeping them together. Ken Wilson came with the idea that on that the scale of a Planck length you can imagine that is like a sheet of graph paper where the quarks only exist on where the lines cross and the lines are quantized tubes of electrical force that connects the quarks, About the same time in Russia Polyakov came up with a similar idea but it was not dependent on the structure of space, quarks could be separated by all kinds of distances. The author and others eventually used these ideas to come up with quantum gravity. One the biggest things to do was work in the variable geometry that relativity needed. Because gravity bends and twists space it change the underlying geometry.
Now let us review the equivalence principle. If you accelerate in a spacecraft without windows at an acceleration of 1g that is the same acceleration as in the Earths gravity you couldn’t tell the difference between being on the Earth and being in a spacecraft. But some more unusual consequences can happen under these conditions. If you had a thermometer and a Geiger counter in the spacecraft you would notice that the thermometer would show an increase in temperature and the Geiger counter will detect radiation. This has not been observed yet because to detect it you need to accelerate a craft a great deal. This was deduced but Unruh in the 1970’s, his law states that an accelerating observer will will see themselves embedded in a hot photon gas proportional to the acceleration. Also there Bekenstein came up with, that every horizon setups a boundary separating it from the a region that hides the entropy and information inside the boundary. But there seems to a relation between entropy and geometry. Entropy and the surface area of a black hole is related by S=1/4A/(ђG). This has some interesting implications, one if two black holes combine the surface area increase so, so does the information and the entropy. If the black hole absorbs a particle the surface area and therefore entropy and information of the black hole increases. But the opposite is true if a back holes surface area decreases the information of the surrounding space increases, so there seems to a relationship between the quantum realm and geometry.
One way to demonstrate particles is what is referred to as a Feynman diagram which was invented by Richard Feynman in the 60’s. On a two dimensional graph a the y axis is used to demonstrate the movement in time and the x axis is for space. One particle like an election is a straight line and a boson like a photon a dotted line is used. If there are two particles then two lines are used and if there is a interaction between the two particles with a photon carrying the electromagnetic force would be demonstrated with a wavy dotted line. Now for string theory the line is changed to a tube and if there is an interaction between particles the tubes merge during the interaction and if the particles repulse one another the tube splits back into two tubes. The strings actually winds around the outside of the loop and vibrates different frequencies for different particles. String theory is space dependent because it needs space to form around. In string theory the particle of gravity is the graviton but no one has worked on a way for the graviton to work. Plus another issue with string theory or string theories there are hundreds of versions of string if more than four spacial dimensions the number of theories go down to five if there are 9 dimensions there are five theories. Also for the theories to match reality the theorists have to set certain values for the strings. Quantum loop gravity might help because the strings could be made out of the loops, the author including others are working on way of working the two theories together. There could be a central theory that could link all the string theories together called M theory.
There are several solutions to all theses theories, that string theory and M theory are not the solution to gravity. That M theory is false but there is a string theory that works out to be real but in the beginning of the universe there would have been an outside force to set the values so life like ourselves would be able to exists. There is a term called the strong anthropic principle that states that the universe was set up on purpose for life to come about. M theory could be the solution but there are multiple solutions for string theory and we happen to live in a universe that allows life this is called the weak anthropic principle. So there could be multiple universes with life with many universes that there is not set for life. Some theorists think that inside black holes there could be new universes, and they could be be very similar to our own because they were born form objects that were governed by our laws of physics. The author of the book thinks that the theory that will work will be a hybrid of the ideas that floating around currently plus some that people have not even come up yet.
On the way back from a trip to the Hopewell rocks on the other end of the Bay of Fundy this past summer, a couple of us stopped by a nearby town. I took a quick trip into the local Wal-Mart and of course had to check out the electronics department and took a quick look in the discount bin and found Passengers.
Passengers like most Sci-fi movies have several science, technological and moral issues in that should be looked at. The ship the Avalon is a colony ship head to a planet that will take 120 years to reach it at a speed of half the speed of light so it could be within a sphere of 60 light years from Earth., called Homestead II, after the company that owns it. All the 5228 crew and passengers are in a suspended animation or hibernation leaving the day to day operations of the ship. The design of the ship is a long a central axis with a spinning curve, screw like outer areas so there could a gravity like conditions in the outer regions. In the the front of the ship there is a shield generator. When you have a particle with charge it has a volume of space around it that has influence on. If in this field you have a like charge the charge will be repulsed and if the charge is different there would be an attraction. Also the reason we feel things as solid is because of the repulsion between particles. So if there is strong enough of a field it could either deflect debris or the debris would be destroyed on collision. (In Star Trek the blue glowy bit in the front of vessels is the deflector dish just for this purpose.) In the first part of the movie the ship runs into an asteroid field, it is much denser than the one around the Sun. The asteroids, collide into the shield, the shield takes the first small hits well but it gets overwhelmed by the size and numbers and some get thru. This damages several systems on Earth and the main computer on board deals with most of the first failures onboard. But one pod is damaged enough that it has to wake up the passenger in it. Tom, when first awakened eventually realizes he is on this giant craft by himself except for a robotic android bartender that is somehow on for 120 years without any on to serve. For the first year he tries to find ways of distracting himself, luckily this vessel is like a cruise ship in space. But near the end of the year he gets lonely, he spots a woman in of the pods and after soon soul searching he decides to break her pod wakes her up, with another 89 years to go. This is a very sketchy thing to do if not down out illegal depending on the laws. For the next year is basically their courtship until her birthday comes up and he plans on proposing. But he told the android bartender that there are no secrets, so he told Aurora what tome had done. They avoid each other for several days until one of the crew members wakes and they find that craft has fatality damaged.
Here is one of the major issues I have with the movie. If I was to set up a space craft like this one there would be a shift or two of crew always on duty. They probably be awake for a year or longer than back into hibernation and another batch is awaken. Plus on the ship the don’t have a way of putting people back into hibernation except for a medical device called an auto doc. If they had someone duty at all times most of these issues would of been would be dealt with but then again no movie. Also the faith that they have in technology is kind of alarming, as it today with some people today and few have died because they were not paying attention to the situation. They all think they hibernation pods can not break down or they can leave a ship going in space for over 100 years without any issue arising, which is just silly because all machines fail even the biological ones.
With our current understanding of physics it will be always a one way trip to stars. The voyager spacecrafts that are travelling at 42.500 km/h will take 40,000 years to get to two light years from Earth. Plus the speed of light limits how fast you can travel plus it has an effect on the energy you use. The kinetic energy on the craft is E=γm2 where γ=1/sqrt(1-v2/c2). This mean if you are travelling at half the speed of light you would need double the energy then at lower speeds, at .9c you would need 10 times the energy and at 0.99c it would need 100 times the energy. So unless there is a breakthrough in physics or there is discovery of a wormhole it will probably be a one trip. The payment plan for the passengers varied one plan you could just pay for the trip there and like Aurora back again, ok taking about 250 years. Or you can apply to go and on the company dime and give them 20% of your future income’ like Tom. All your family and friends would be dead if you went back and communicating with them would be severally delayed so almost worthless. But if are like Tom who wants to build something for himself, or others who are trying to get away from problems back on Earth like the convicts going to Australia, trying make you fortune. Similar systems have existed in the past, indentured servants signed a contract to work for someone for a certain time to pay off the journey to like North America, they were others who did not get paid or had a choice in the matter. Aurora is a writer looking for a story and thinks this is going to be a great stroy no one else has ever told. There are people in the future who probably who would be happy to live in the cities letting robots doing most of the work form them and going to the local coffee shop and such. Me depending on the situation would entertain the option, I probably wouldn’t be the only one because there is some the urge to explore and travel form time to time. As Tsiokovsky said over a century ago “The Earth is the cradle of Mankind, but one cannot stay in the cradle forever.”
Today while going thru the archives, I found an essay I meant to publish at an earlier date.
Where and when did the modern skepticism start, probably like modern science it began with a handful of familiar characters. There is Copernicus who started to study the heavens and started the idea that the planets went around the Sun instead of the Earth. There is Kepler who instead of trying to make the orbits of the planets orbit in circles he eventually found a curve that the data gave him. There was Galileo who among others used a new instrument to peer onto the heavens and started unveiling there secrets, he probably could of dealt with it better. One person people who probably wouldn’t think as a beginner of the skepticism but I think should be included is Martin Luther. He was religious leader but he had criticism of the ways the church at the time was basically selling pardons out of hell thru indulgences, he also had 94 other points that he nailed to the church door, the 16th century version of posting something to the internet. This did lead to the splitting of the Christian faith and starting the thirty years war, but this started the questioning of churches, and some of the new branches promoted a more individual way of thinking about spiritualism. Guttenberg who invented the movable type printing press to print bibles in German. The mass printings would allow everyone to own a bible and promoted literacy. Literacy is kind of the genie in the lamp once it is out it is hard to put back in. Along with bible printing other books was possible. Plus a lot of jobs had a lot of time to fill, like being shepherd, so a lot of new thoughts could be spread around with more and more people who could read them.
For the next couple hundred years, science progressed. Scientist went form Issac Newton who was great with math and physics but still tried to find codes in the bible and trying to turn lead into gold. The last bit was part of an ancient field alchemy, which some ways lead to modern chemistry. Eventually scientist using microscopes to study cells and microscopic lifeforms and finding matter was made out of certain building blocks we call now elements. Another great leap at the time was people trying to figure out all the lifeforms on Earth came about. One of the early theories of Evolution was Lamarckism which was based one the premise that if an organism acquired a trait it would pass it on to its future offspring. Then there was Darwinism that was based if a organism had a trait that allowed to survive until they could reproduce than they could pass the trait to it offspring. There were some who embraced this theory but a lot didn’t and caused a lot of public debate over it and it still goes on. He did thru a study of a kind bird called a finch that were located on an isolated group of islands called the Galapagos. Finches who ate one kind of seed had a slightly different beak than another, each generation passed down genes that allowed a beak shaped to eat a certain kind of seed.
The first of the modern set of skeptics probably starts with Houdini. Houdini was a well known escape artist in the late 19th century and the first part of the 20th century. During this period psychic mediums were popular at the time. He knew most of the tricks that they used to deceive their patrons and never found one that had any that had any powers. He worked with Scientific American that had a prize to any one who could prove they had powers. The next three did not come about for almost 50 years, bu they were James Randi, Carl Sagan and Joe Nickell They came from different backgrounds, Randi is a magician, Sagan was a scientist,Nickell is a paranormal investigator. They all brought something the other didn’t, Randi knew the tricks that the magicians and fakes would use. Sagan background in science and his ability as a communicator. Nickell has the experience in investigating hauntings, not waving a few meters around and saying there are cold spots, but finding way there are cold spots and em readings might be going crazy, or if device is just a piece of junk. They also had a friend in the media, non other than Johnny Carson host of the Tonight Show, like Randi Carson was a magician and was skeptical of some of guests he had on the shows abilities. Plus Johnny was into astronomy and liked to have Carl Sagan to talk about astronomy and Sagan’s series Cosmos. In 1976 Sagan along with Paul Kurtz and others formed CSICOP, Committee for the Scientific Inquiry of Claims of the Paranormal. Randi eventually started his own foundation and offered a million dollar prize for who could demonstrate paranormal abilities, no one was able to claim the prize. The money is now used as grants for those a committee deems worthy.
The next generation of skeptics started in the age of blogs and podcasts. The first one was a little known astronomer who worked on projects like Hubble, and that was Phil C. Plait otherwise known as the Bad Astronomer because of the website Bad Astronomy, where wrote about space, science and other skeptical issues. Then the podcasts started with Skepticality and the Skeptics guide to the Universe and soon many others like the Skeptic Zone in Australia hosted since the beginning by Richard Saunders and the Skeptics with a K from Merseyside in England. It does seem a bit male centered when the Skeptics Guide to the Universe lost one of their original hosts Perry DeAngelis (Monkeys rule) passed away they did replace him with Rebecca Watson One of the founders of Skepchick a collective blog and after she left after many years was replace Cara Santa Maria a podcaster and science reporter. Many more blogs, podcasts and video podcasts are out there now. They have been a few issues that have come up over the years such as elevatorgate, some male members doing stuff to females that they should not have done and other issues. There are problems there different approaches to what the movement should be. Me it is a personal matter and it should be a personal matter for all in what they believe as long as it doesn’t impact others. Plus there is now the misuse of the word skeptic just to mean I don’t believe in it, which is not what a skeptic is. A Skeptic needs information from different sources to make up their minds. But some have decided they would more like to be called a critical thinker like Adam Savage from Mythbusters. The movement in general is doing well, there more podcasts in different languages from different countries we are not trying to take over the world but just wants everyone to make better choices.
Why is there a need for a skeptical community in this day and age of the internet and cell phones where you can look up anything and get the answers you want. Well that is kind of exactly why we need a skeptics movement. In 2008 a ten month baby died in Australia because not enough people in the surrounding area did get vaccinated, the Australian Skeptics have been very vocal about what was called at the time the Australian Vaccination Network an anti vaccination group. The Good Thinking Society and Merseyside Skeptics have been campaigning against homeopathy and had taken off the lists of approved treatment. Phil Plait career blasted off because he wrote a book and essays on why we went to the moon after a documentary on Fox tried to claim the opposite. Even things that you think that have been defeated like the Flat Earth have been making a come back even tho some claim this is like a the old Flat Earth Society of being a basically a debating society. There are still people who claim that they speak to to dead. Plus people who claim who come up with new medical treatments and new theories of physics. Plus there are people who still try get evolution thrown out of science classes and replaced with other theories.
From the Origin of Species There is Grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, have been originally by the creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved. Charles Darwin
As the three of them got out of the helicopter they saw a tall skinny lieutenant with glasses. There were two seaman loading a large chest like cooler onto the copter and plugging into the electronics of the bird. On the flight deck there was the smell of burning gas, some split fuel, There were a couple of other sailors attaching a fuel line to the copter. The pilot was filling out his log as he was waiting.
“Hi, I am Lieutenant Rawlings communication and information officer for the task group, come with the brass wants to met you.”
Off the stern of the carrier the could see to object, it was about 80 m long, 20 m wide and about 10 m high, it had a blotchy appearance to it, there were red spots but mostly a greyish white like snow with ash in it. There was a liquid going down the sides, and gases rising into the atmosphere. They briskly walked across the deck and entered the tower thru a hatch and went up to the top of the tower to bridge. On the bridge was a shortish blond woman, a slightly taller woman and a man that kind of reminded him of the doctor from Doc Martin.
”This Rear Admiral Wright, Captain Day and Lieutenant Commander Brown.”, Rawlings explained, as he pointed to the blond, brunette and the man. They all walked to the rear of the bridge to view the object.
” I real sight, never seen anything like over my years sailing the world.”, the admiral declared.
”Commander, Canadian chopper requesting to depart.” A young ensign declared.
”Any other traffic?”, inquired the Commander.
”None for a couple of minutes.”
”Let them go to Stanfield, then to Gagetown.”
”Any idea of what is made of.” the three scientist asked the military personal.
”Carbon dioxide and monoxide detectors are going off but we really don’t know. Send samples to St. Mary’s, Dalhousie, UNB and other universities for testing. All personal that go near that are required to wear protective gear. By morning the NOAA research vessels the Sagan and Fairweather should be here. The Tarter will be sent out to the mid ocean site and the Jacques Cousteau from the Europeans is out in the Med at the moment.”, they made a quick look at the observer.
”The boat is named after a mountain in Alaska. Any chances of getting onto it, and what about the other objects?”
”Not until the research vessels get here, we have a room set up for you to conference with the other groups.”
The three scientist were lead down several decks to conference room normally used to brief and debrief fighter pilots. Several rows of chairs were in the room and six flat screen monitors were set up on a wall, there was Hacker, on another couple on monitors was a couple of American naval captains.
”Of course your colleague on the first monitor and Captains Lindquist and Laquella of the Eisenhower and JFK on the other two monitors.”, explained Rawlings.
Now I have the feeling how Picard and Kirk felt like.”
”What is going on out there?”, asked Hacker.
”Just taking samples and waiting for research vessels to arrive, not much known at the moment. Send samples to different places to get analysis, probably not much will be known for a few hours. I was wondering what was going at the other sites.”
”Our piece is about 100m long, 20m wide and about 15 m long in the mid atlantic.” replied Laquella.
” Ours have the same dimensions as the one at the Arc Royal.” stated Lindquist.
”Permission to find a rack and catch a few z’s until the research vessels get here?” requested the young scientist.
”Permission granted.”came from all three monitors.
This first part is bit pf primer on asteroids, comets and meteorites. First comets and meteorites and the asteroids. This is because comets were known first, way back into ancient times when a sighting of a comet was called a disaster or bad star.
Comets come from two regions of the solar system, one the Kuiper belt and the other the Oort cloud. The Kuiper belt is a region from about Neptunes’ orbit at 30 AU to 50 AU out, when these objects are disturbed out of there orbits and make an orbit closer to the Sun they have orbits of less than 200 years. There is also the Oort cloud which has 1012 to 1013 objects and spread out form 3000-100,000 AU, with a total mass of with a mass of 100 Earth masses and these comets have a periods up to hundred thousand years to a million years but cane change with interactions when the interact with the planets. But no matter where the comets come from theysub generally have similar composition that is 80% H20, 10% CO, 3.5% CO2, a few percent (H2CO)n or chains of formaldehyde, there could be volatile hydrocarbons. Not all comets are exactly the same because most probably formed were they are but they could formed closer to the sun and because of gravitational interactions with the planets could of ejected further out. As comets get closer to the sun usually between the orbits of Jupiter and Mars the ices like carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide sublimate or go directly to gas in the nucleus this forms a cloud like are around the nucleus this is what we see in the front of the comet. Also coming from the sun is a stream of particles called the solar wind which has density of 5-6 particles per cubic centimeter but does push the particles away from the sun along with the fact the light it self exerts a pressure and therefore a force because pressure is just force over an area. Comets can have two tails one is the main tail and the other is an ion tail and both flow from the coma away from the sun. The tail comes about because some of atoms and molecules loses an electron or more and creates ions which interact differently then the other particles in the main tail. Since comets contain a lot of water there are theories that most of the water on Earth came for them crashing into the early Earth. But there are theories that the water came from the rock that formed the Earth and under pressure and heat the chemicals in the rocks came out. Also comets contain a lot of organic even glycine an amino acid which is a building block of proteins, another building block found in comet 67/p is phosphorus which a key element in DNA and the cells energy molecule ATP. But many of these molecules could be destroyed on entering the Earths atmosphere. The comets leave a lot of small particles behind and often just stay in space unless the particles are left in the path of a planet. These fall to Earth we often call them shooting stars or meteors most left by comets burn up in the upper atmosphere but some that make it to the Earth are then called meteorites.
Frad=[S]σ/c [S]= the Poynting vector which the energy of the wave light given by the product of the magnitude of the Electric and magnetic fields and for this case the Luminosity of the sun is used 3.828e26 W
c=is the speed of light
σ= the effective radius of radius for this case it is the particles from he comet 4/3*π*R2*ρ
So Frad=Lsunπ*R3ρ/4*π*r2*c
R is the radius of the particle.
And the suns gravity tries to pull the particles towards it.
Fg= GMsunmpart/r2
where the mass of the particle mparticle is given by 4/3 *π*R3ρ
So the effect the of gravity from the sun on the particles is (the comet has gravity of course but since the mass of the comet is so much smaller than the sun its gravity is much less and is not considered.)
r is the distance form the sun to the particle
Fg=(GMsun4*π*R3* ρ)/(3r2)
Now we compare the two forces to get how big these particles in the tail are.
Rearranging for the radius of the particles (R) for the max size of particles that are in the tail is Rcrit=3 Lsun/(16 π GMsunρ*R )
Which comes out to 1910 Angstroms an Angstrom is 10-10m.
Ceres
The first asteroid was not found until 1801 and that was Ceres which is the largest asteroid which 473 km in diameter and has a mass of 8.958 *1024 kg, which is large enough for gravity to form into a roughly spherical shape, the total mass is about 5 *10-4 the mass of the Earth. The belt ranges from about 2 AU to 4 AU, not uniform in composition, shape or size. There are several types of asteroids mostly dependent on composition and location. Also there different groups that have orbits that can cross the orbit of a planet, orbit in the same orbit or close to a planets orbit. The Atens orbit within the orbit of the Earth, the Apollos cross the Earths orbit, the Amors between the Earth and Mars, and the Trojans between orbit in two points 60 degrees ahead and behind Jupiter in what are called the Lagrange points which are points where the gravity form Jupiter and the Sun balance out. S-type asteroids are in the main belt and they have orbits from 2-3.5 AU they do not reflect much of the light they receive or the y have low albedo of 0.1 to 0.2 and on the surface are rich in magnesium silicates and rich in iron-nickel. E-type very similar to S-type but have a higher albedo to 0.25 to 0.60 and have orbits of 2 AU. M-type are metal rich such as nickel and iron have an albedo of 0.10-0.18 and in similar orbit as S-types. C -types are about 95% of the asteroids in the main belt orbits around 3 AU low albedos around 0.03-0.07 about 2/3 of this type contain volatiles particularly water. B-F-G types are similar to C types but different adsorption spectrum. P and D types are on the outer edge of the belt form 3-5 AU with low albedo of 0.02-0.06 reddish in color contains ancient organic couponds, some of Jupiter moons could be captured D type asteroid. The asteroid belt is not like the dense field seen in the move the Empire Strikes Back, but the distance between each asteroid is huge, also there a gaps in the belt called Kirkwood gaps, one at 3.3 AU and the other at 2.5 AU, this is due to the gravity of Jupiter tugging at asteroids in these regions.
There will be follow up entries about the claims of Electric universe but as said before this bit of a primer for me and the readers.
He sat there overlooking the city, watching the sun come up. He spent the night searching for objects that might hit the Earth, distant objects at the end of the solar system and planets around other stars. He had a few tomato and basil plants growing up here an the tomatoes were rip and he had some ham warming up on the grill he had up here, hopefully the director will come here until he gets back down. Also he a couple of pieces of bread toasting on the grill. Then in the direction of the sun he noticed a cloud getting bigger and bigger a lot fast than it should. Then he realized it was getting closer and closer. He turned the grill off and went into the dome and shut the door and headed down the staircase. He ran down all 23 stories of stairs to the ground floor faster he thought he could trying not to fall down the in his sleepy state. As he got down he saw the cloud just pass over right where he was a moment ago. Then it towards the Atlantic ocean, he realized it probably won’t be long before it hit out there and there should a large wave as it hit. Hopefully it won’t do as much damage as the explosion during the first world war.
Then he noticed the director of the observatory and the director for outreach driving into the parking lot Dr. Daniel Paine and Dr. William Hacker, they were getting of their cars in the parking lot. They turned to the operator and asked, “What was that?”.
“Don’t it just came out of the direction of Sun just at sunrise, it would of been too close to the Sun to observe. ”
”And what were you doing up there then.”
asked the observatory director.
”Closing down, doing some cleanup, doing some image analysis.”
They both looked at him like “yeah right”. Then Hackers phone starting to ring, the communications officer was calling. The call lasted for several minutes. “Well it looks like the media wants to know what is going on. It landed just of cost of Yarmouth. Several naval vessels are headed that way at the moment a couple of ours, and a British task force that is in the area including an aircraft carrier. And you headed out there, you will picked up by on old student from here Lieutenant Colonel Richard Singer and an instructor form the Coast Guard College, Dr. Chris Chapman.
”I know them had a few classes with them, they were couple of years ahead of me.”
”Richard will be flying in CFB Greenwood in a few moments.”
Then a minivan came to the curb and a bearded man with glasses got out and you could see two kids in the backseat, this was Chapman arriving. Then you heard the sound of the chopper passing overhead. The Griffon landed on the football field, “finally a good use for that field”, he thought to himself. A tall man with curly hair wearing a green field uniform came out and directed them into the helicopter handing them a set headphones.”
”Did you remember to turn the bbq up there?” Yelled the two directors.
”Yes, but didn’t have time to eat the sandwich.”
“Guess, we help ourselves, could use a few tomatoes”
”Darn social media”, he thought to himself as he felt the back of the aircraft lift up first as they took off. They got up above the city and started to head down the coast and saw to frigates under full speed. “Pilot, what ships are those?”
”HMCS Fredericton and Halifax headed to whatever splashed down out there.”
Colonel, any way to find out is going while we headed down?”
”It would be better if we wait until we get to the Arc Royal, but we know multiple objects came landing from the Mediterranean to here. Several tasks groups are investigating including the Eisenhower in the Med and the JFK in the mid Atlantic.”
”More than I knew. Do you guys carry any gravel on this thing?”
.
”Nope, but we have this?” the observer was handled a small paper bag.
”Thanks. Chris how the kids?”
”Their doing great. Too bad you haven’t found anyone.”
”Came close a couple of times but there was some jackass in the way.”
”One of them went to the SETI institute trying to tell then what their job was?”
”I was there during that conference, he just came off as an idiot. I going to try to catch a few winks before we got the carrier.”
He tried to nod of but the nausea and the noise of the helicopter kept him awake. After being in the air for about an hour he could see the distinctive flight deck of the Arc Royal. He could see a little further off a large amount gasses. He could see small zodiacs getting close the object with helicopters trying to scoop samples off of the top of the object. Then he saw a fighter taking off the carrier. “whay do they have to launch those for?”
”to keep unauthorized airplanes and helicopters from entering the area, more for their own protection we don’t know what could happen.”
Pilot, “we have permission to land on the Arc Royal.” then they felt the craft bank as it it made its final approach to the landing pad on the deck of the carrier. Then they felt the front gently touchdown and then the rear came down. “Well folks time for me gas up, and for you guys to get to work,”
Based of what I have seen of his other videos this might be series dealing with this persons views on science and skepticism.
In this video this person calls himself a “high IQ Skeptic”. Being a skeptic is not just saying since I do not like this or like this I will deny it, or just reading a skeptic magazine or just buying a magazine. Being a skeptic is constantly researching stuff and weighing the evidence and the sources of the evidence to determine what is more likely to be correct. He says he has multiple screens open and doing high IQ skepticism but can’t get Eratosthenes way of finding the circumference of the Earth some 2000 years ago. Eratosthenes lived in Alexander and worked at the great library there and was an astronomer, mathematician and general smart guy. He know that a town south of him Syene there was a well where the light went straight down to the bottom. He hired a person to walk to Syene and record the distance in Stadia (we lost track exactly how long a Greek Stadia was but probably around a sixth of a kilometer). He put a stick straight upright in Alexander and found the angle between Alexander and Syene was 7⁰ which is about 1/50 the radius of Earth and the distance was measured to be 5000 stadia and the circumference was determined to be 250,000 stadia which comes to be about 42000 kms, and the modern value comes to be 40,000 kms. He goes on how schools just drill facts int kids heads. What schools taught me is how to do math, read and write. I had to learn form other sources about what real skepticism and reason is. I think modern schools modern schools should teach some kind of class on skepticism mostly because of people like this guy. We live in a age were knowledge is increasing at a faster and faster pace, and there are more and more people distorting the facts so people need how to screen out the real stuff versus stuff like this.
In this second video he tries to say that space is not real because science fiction is not real or fantasy. First of the word fiction means it is not real, there are plenty of non fiction books and TV shows on space. There are people who think I don’t know the difference between science and science fiction, these people have other axes to grind and just making mountains out of mole holes. Some of my other writings there I do use science fiction as a way to discuss certain topics, like the original authors intention. Or use a sci-fi references as a bit of creative way to describe stuff. But most people know we do not have warp drive or hyperspace travel, why would most of us be here if we did. He mentions that there have only been 560 people to space, the main reason for that it is expensive and difficult. Soon there will be an increase in the rate of people going to space with SpaceX and other private companies plus more countries with plans to go to space.
There are some people who think individuals like this man and Red Orphan are just lulling our legs and making fun of the Flat Earthers, this called Poeing. I really don’t think they are making fun I think either they really think this stuff is real or they are doing this to get people to pay them and that will make it a crime called fraud and if it is fraud they should be taking down and probably have charges pressed. It also reinforces the fact people need to be taught how to screen this stuff out.
After being sucked into a black hole of dealing with internet trolls I decided to pull a movie out of my limited collection, sorry for the old movies but I do not have access to Netflix or other streaming services and live a distance from a movie theater. I decide to watch the Arrival which can be described as a first contact movie. First contact refers to when humans first encounters aliens from another planet, movies like Contact, Independence Day, Star Trek:First Contact and Close Encounters of the Third Kind can probably go into this category. This category is interesting because it not only what the aliens will do but how we will react to the fact we are not alone in the universe. There will probably be several different reactions to this fact, to the people who think it is just a matter of time and some of which are looking for the aliens probably be happy for a while until some realize they probably be out of a job and these people will be cautious but generally welcoming to the the experience. The reaction that could be troubling is the people who think we are the only intelligent life in the universe Some will think that is fake or a conspiracy, thinking that the people who found the aliens are looking for money to keep their research going or to force theory values on the world. Some of these people could be violent to the alien supporters or to the aliens directly. There are some people having who fight tooth and nail about the chances of life in the universe by going well we have not found that many Earths or planets are not around the right type of star or too close or too far away. The Kepler mission did not find an Earth in a similar orbit is that the gyros failed after 2 years into its mission and you need more than 2 orbits to conform its orbit, there have been studies to find things like a starspots, flares and that might mimic a planet.
One criticism in the movie and in real life is that the military take charge of the many of the 12 landing sites that the aliens in the movie appear. This is not such a concern for me because the military seems like the logical group in most cases for this because they would have the infrastructure to create the facility to support such a mission. Most of the military is actual support units such as engineers, doctors, truck drivers and cooks. Plus they usually have the gear needed already in bases throughout whatever country they are in, the US army has stuff like C.S.H (Combat Surgical Hospital, pronounce cash)a the descendant of the MASH units that I think there was a sitcom based off of, and probably other units that can be deployed in a hurry. Plus they can defend us from the aliens, probably not for long, or us from the aliens or any possible transfer of diseases.
The aliens in the movie speak a language unlike any language on Earth and they require a specialist in that field to find a way to communicate with them also with a astrophysicists to find out how they were able to get to Earth. The aliens themselves a giant 7 footed creatures that exist in a different environment then the humans and able to emit a black floating ink that they use to write circles that represent words or concepts. During the movie there is a problem with the the translation that everyone thinks they were going to use a weapon or give a weapon and it is actually meant to be the gift of their language. To completely to understand their language we have to change our understanding our understanding of time. This change in the understanding in time will give us a better understanding of physics. This might help be in helping to overcome the hurtles in string theory and might lead to things like anti-gravity, new elements, and communications over large distances. In the movie these aliens give the gift because they will need humans in three thousand years, it is not said in the movie but it might take this amount of time for the humans to catch up.
There is a subplot in the movie that deals with the linguist Louise and astrophysicist Ian eventually get married after the events of the movie and have a daughter Hannah. The scenes in Hannah’s life are not seen in a linear time line and are seen throughout the movie and Louise knows what happens to Hannah even before Hannah is born. Which brings up interesting questions about if you know what will happen good or bad. Will you still do it even if ends in tragedy, my answer depends on the situation is, yes, a persons life might end before it should but you don’t know how that life will effect others around that person. The title of the book the movie is based from is “The Story of your Life.” Which probably more dealt with the life of the girl than the the move. The Movie in generally will suck you in and the 2 hours for me went fast, and the movie is very thought provoking with not that much action in the movie. If you have not seen it go and watch it.
Tho above show the last seconds of a Ranger space craft that were the first to take images of the moon. Also before start all the measurements are in imperial because the book was written for an American audience.
The first moon hunter was an accidental moon hunter because he didn’t know there was more than just the one that he and others for centuries saw above him and of course this was Galileo. On Jan 7, 1610 he pointed his telescope towards the planet Jupiter and he noticed 4 small stars that he didn’t know about before. Over the next few nights he noticed that these stars were moving around Jupiter and even saw one go behind Jupiter. He realized these objects must be going around Jupiter itself. He wanted to name them after his benefactors the Meducis a wealthy and powerful family in Italy. Eventually they named after characters in Greek mythology that were associated with the Zeus and these were Io, Europa, Callisto and Ganymede. Soon after that Huygens found an orangish smudge near the rings of Saturn and this was to be named Titan after the Titans that Zeus overthrew in mythology. When Herschel found Uranus he soon found the moons Oberon and Titania named after characters in Shakespeares play A Midsummer’s night dream I believe the King and Queen of the fairy folk, then he found Enceladus and Mimas . The moons of Saturn Iapetus, Rhea, Thethys and Dione were found by Cassini. On the first day of the of the 19th century Giuseppe Piazzi discovered an object between Mars and Jupiter in what is now known as the asteroid belt and was called Ceres. Over seventy years later on a steamy night in Washington DC at the Naval observatory Aseph Hall was looking near Mars 53 million miles away and saw two small smudges orbit Mars these two were at max 20 miles in diameter and were captured by Mars from the asteroid belt. Then of course Pluto was found but Charon was not until 1978 after I was born.
William Pickering was probably the driving force behind the early years of the unmanned space program. When he left New Zealand in 1929 to go to Caltech he wasn’t interested in rocketry at all he was more interested in helping bring hydroelectric power to his home country. Soon after he got his Ph.D he was offered a job to teach at the school basically what he was taught but he was allowed to go out into the dessert with the rocket scientists to a dried up canyon that they called the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Eventually the War came (yes that conflict influenced a lot of science) him and the other engineers in dessert had some success but nothing like what was happening on the side of the planet in Germany. There Werhner Von Braun was working on his V-2 rocket. The V-2 was a 47 ft. 29000 lbs death machine that flew over the Baltic Sea from Poland to hit London. There was one problem with the early versions, they didn’t make to there test targets, they would go up but nothing came down. This was a mystery Until Von Braun drove the 2 hours to the target and waited in the very spot it was suppose to land. When it came down the skin of the rocket and fall apart just short of desired location, there was a re-design.
After the war Von Braun moved to the states and worked at the White Sands research facility in Ne w Mexico where he developed the Redstone rocket which was a streamline V-2 and Pickering worked still worked at JPL developing solid fuel rockets. In 1957 Pickering was asked to build a civilian version of the Redstone for space exploration and to launch a satellite. At the time Pickering and Von Braun had combined their rockets into a Redstone main stage and a second stage of 11 small solid stage rockets and another stage of 3 more solid state rockets. They dis this because they could get to to 250 miles above the surface of the planet but could get enough speed to place something in orbit. The Redstone couldn’t be used because what would called today the optics of the situation. On the 4th of October 1957 the Russians launched Sputnik into orbit, all it did was send a simple morse code message. A couple of months after Sputnik the US Navy developed their Vangaurd rocket to try to launch a satellite. The rocket lifted off for a couple of feet then consumed itself in flames the satellite fall to the ground bounced and landed in front of the blockhouse. This was dubbed by the US media as Kupnutnik. After that the hybrid rocket was used now dubbed the Jupiter-C and Pickering and JPL worked to get a cosmic ray detector built James Van Allen re-configured for the new rocket and satellite and called Explorer-1, launched January 31, 1958.
Soon after that the National Advisory Committee on Aerodynamics was renamed the National Administration for Space and Aerodynamics (NASA) was formed. NASA went around to different public and private organizations to fund research. JPL and Caltech were approached, Pickering agreed only if they could explore the outer solar system someday. The first program that came about was the Ranger program. The Rangers were to go the moon and crash on the surface and on the way down with its six cameras was to take pictures of the moon looking for landing sites for the Apollo program. The Rangers each consisted with a first stage of an Atlas rockets which was 66 ft and cost 9 million dollars each, then the Agena second stage at 5 million dollars each and 12 ft tall, finally there was the ranger itself costing 8 million and ten feet tall, plus additional costs of labour and such each Ranger came to a total of 25 million dollars. When launched the Atlas would carry all three stages to about 80-90 miles and separate. Then the Agena would fire and carry the craft to 115 miles and separate then the Ranger would go the rest of the way. The Rangers had 6 cameras on board and when they got the moon 250,000 miles away they would be travelling at 6000 miles per hour, when the got to a distance of 1500 miles would wake the cameras up and take pictures and crash on the moon. They transmitted their pictures back to Earth and they would be displayed on a screen and a camera would take a picture of the screen and the film would be sent a developer in Hollywood. And the Gerard Kuiper would do the analyses. The first Ranger was suppose to go twice the Earth-Moon distance, to tests on the craft. It was launched on August 23 1961, it launched normally but when the Ageana stage was to separate, the Agena failed to fire. The craft orbited for 111 orbits for 7 days and crashed back to the Earth. It was found out that the Agenas had a design flaw, there was a valve that opened to allow oxygen into the burn chamber but was to close to the chamber and would fail sometimes if it was used more than once. For most cases this was fine but when it needed to fire twice it could fail. Ranger 2 also failed. Then Ranger 3 was launched and was suppose to go the Moon. It was to carry a 36 inch balsa wood ball on the top. This was done to hold a seismograph that the geologist requested. When the Ranger craft would get close to the moon it would launch the ball and the ball would land on the moon. After it was launched on April 12, 1963. There are connectors between each stage of the rocket. When there was a separation the connection would be broken like unplugging a plug, actually a very similar design. When the Ranger 3 separated there was a plug with prongs hanging out and a bunch of metal flakes floating around and on get stuck between the prongs and shorted out the craft. But the radio still sent a signal, so several days they tracked the craft going down on the moon by tracking the difference in the wavelengths as it got faster and faster as it getting closer and closer to the Moon.
Now back to the Russians, in 1958 they got Lunik 2 crash on the moon. By Feb 1962 the Russians had sent the probe Venera 1 to fly near Venus, 62,000 miles from the surface, the pictures just showed a white sphere. In 1962 the Americans sent Mariner 1 probe to get just over halfway closer to Venus at 23,000 miles, the Mariners were basically modified Ranger probes. The first probe to every get to the surface of Venus was Venera 9 by the Russians and did not last long because the atmospheric pressures is 90 times that of the Earth at sea level and is about 453 F, enough to melt and crash a lot of materials.
Then came Ranger 5 which got all the way to the Moon, the cameras were told to turn on a5 minutes before crash down, but they never got a signal, that was 125 million dollars and no success. Then came Ranger 6, the top scientist was replaced and made the number 2 of the mission. Ranger 6 was built in a clean sterile room unlike the other Rangers and the programming was completely redone because on one mission there was a mix up between left and right. But again it failed, this time a theorist from a different department figured it could of been plasma. Plasma is a when the elections and protons separate form one another but they stay close to each other. It was proposed that there was a gap in the outer casing and the plasma that surrounded the rocket got in and since it allowed a current it shorted out the circuits inside. Then on July 28, 1964 Ranger 7 was launched and was successful and took 4.316 picture, the next two missions rangers 8 and 9 were successful as well. That was that for the Rangers then there were the Surveyor probes that actually landed and took a lot more pictures each taking around 16,000 -17,000 images each in the Ocean of Storms and the Sea of Tranquility.
Then came the most error prone, most delicate probes of them all the humans. There were 7 attempts to land on the moon with 6 being successful. Each of the missions brought back samples from the various landing locations, the first few missions were in the maria or seas, the large craters on the near side of the moon. A few missions went to the highlands and Appenines in the north part of the near side and gathering some 838.2 pounds of rocks. During training the astronauts went thru a geology boot camp. They went out to the desert with a geologist to study rocks and rock formations so they know what to look for while on the moon. Scott while looking around thought he saw a green rock, which is odd for the moon. This rock had stayed there since the volcano that it erupted from 4.5 billions years ago, soon after the moon formed. Samples from the rest of moon like the Sea of Tranquility of 3.89 billion years old, Sea of Stars 3.6 billion years, Sea of Nestor 3.93 billion years, Craters like Copernicus and Tycho were found to be 800 million and 110 million years old. So soon after Thea crashed into Earth and the ring of debris combined to form the moon big asteroids impacted the moon to form the seas and then smaller asteroids came in and formed the smaller craters.
In 1966. Burke the former lead on the Ranger program figured out that the outer planets of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune would be lined up in in the first time in 176 years and would take another 176 for it to happen again, the year that it would happen in was in 1979. So the planning started to begin. The platform that the mission was based off of was the Mariner probes, but there were several problems like communications, computing power and an energy source. You could use solar panels to power the craft but they would have to huge plus the power that is received from the sun decreases as an inverse square so by Jupiter that is 5.5 times away as Earth you get about 1/30 the power, by the time you get to Neptune which is 30 times away from Earth you only get 1/900 the power. Batteries but to power the craft for such a long time journey they would be very heavy requiring a lot more fuel to launch the craft. Eventually a system using plutonium 238 in three clusters of 8, they heat a piece of metal against a cold metal and the temperature difference would generate a current this is what is called a radio-thermal generator, this design was used on missions like Galileo and Cassini. The radio transmitter on the Rangers/Mariners would not be able to transmit the amount of data fast enough so it needed to be upgraded to a 12 foot wide dish, that can transmit up to 115,200 bits per second. The new computer system on board would have 3 main processors and 2 backups but eventually down size to 3 processors. The original name of the program was the Thermo Electric outer Planet Spacecraft or TOPS, then it was renamed to MJS77, for Mariner Jupiter Saturn in 77, Uranus and Neptune were dropped, then finally got the name of Voyager. There were two voyager probes one would go to Jupiter than to Saturn and fly under Titan and make a close pass at Titan going up to the north pole of the moon and keep going in the same line. Then Voyager 2 would go on a path on the same plane that the planets orbit around the Sun (or the ecliptic), so after it passed by Saturn it could just happen to pass by the other two planets. Each probe had an ultraviolet spectrometer, two imaging cameras, and a photopolarimeter. Each of the 2 craft had a golden record on it produced by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan which had music clips, and photographs on it and is discussed on this podcast, to be played by aliens if the aliens find them. On September 5 1977 the first of the two were launched.
Voyager 1 did not arrive at Jupiter until July of 1979. Press day was usually on Thursdays or by noon Friday at JPL just in time for the reporters to file their report back to their papers, radio stations/networks, tv stations/networks. Late Friday night Linda Morabito was one of the navigators/ pilots of the Voyager1, she was looking images to verify were the probe was, while looking at an towards the planet and she could see Io the innermost of Jupiters’ moons and noticed a fuzzy bit right at the 3 o’clock position above the moon. The plume was estimated to be 160 miles into space this was the first image of a volcanic eruption outside of the Earth. The next major discovery that happened in the Jovian system was when Voyager 2 flew within 20,364 miles of Europa. Europa for a long time was none to have a lot of ice on it but there were some details that weren’t known. It wasn’t known if the moon was covered with craters from impacts during the early days of the universe or smooth. If the moon was covered in old craters then the moon was in active, if it was smooth it meant that the moon was active and warm enough to melt the outer layer. When the image came on the screen in front Carl Sagan and a retinue of grad students it was smooth with dark cracks. Also later there was found angular pieces of ice, these were icebergs that were formed on an ocean and floated on the ocean until until the ice froze. Along with the known moons of Jupiter new ones were found also, several small moons that orbit close to the planet. Thebe was found when a small spot was found on an image, after analyzing many images it was found to be 138,000 miles above Jupiter at a size of only 60 miles. Then Synnott, the person who found the first one, found another one this one only 25 miles wide and only 79,360 miles above Jupiter, this new one called Metis.
The planet flyby was Saturn, Voyager 1’s pass was going to complicated one it had to fly by Saturn and go around and fly up Titan just to see if they get a glimpse of what might be underneath and the clouds were to heavy to see anything and then straight up out of the solar system. The entire trip around Saturn took 35 hours 4 minutes. The most distinctive feature of Saturn is of curse the rings which were found by Cassini and the main gap in the rings is named after him. While Voyager was there it did find moons in the rings that were keeping the rings stable or shepherding the rings. These moons are Pandora and Prometheus each about 40 km in radius. Janis and Epimetheus are only 31 miles from each other and every 4 years, swap orbits. There is of course Enceladus a 310 mile wide moon that nearly reflects all the light that it receives.
In the early days of planning the Voyager program the scientists always wanted to include Uranus and Neptune but congress did not want give the go ahead. But after Saturn Voyager 2 was still operating and could run for a while longer so the mission got extended. The first was Uranus, the planet is odd for on thing mostly and that its’ south pole is constantly pointed towards the Sun, it kind of rolls along it orbit with the north pole constantly in summer and the south pole in constant darkness. Uranus has a faint ring system, they were detected from Earth because they are positioned in a way that stick up from Uranus and from time to time block light from stars in the background. The planet was found to be 83 % hydrogen, 15 % helium and 2 % methane. The most interesting moon in the system is Miranda, it looks like it was smashed into a pieces and rearranged. Then came Neptune a blue planet with a giant blue spot. At 96 633 miles wide it was winds of 1200 miles per hour and the cyclone has a winds of 700 mile per hour, the top of the atmosphere has a temperature of -360 F and the lower levels the temperature is 900 F. Triton the largest moon of Neptune and also the coldest place in the solar system at -391 F with frost made from NH3. During the flyby 6 new moons were discovered, between 36-119 miles wide.
Miranda
The second to last chapter mostly deals with Galileo the space prob launched in 1989 from the space shuttle and arrived in 1995. Unlike the Voyagers, Galileo was to go to Jupiter and to insert into an orbit around the planet. The spacecraft had a probe that was launched into the atmosphere where it was found that the upper atmosphere was 200 F and the atmosphere was really gusty at 330 miles per second in the upper atmosphere and 450 miles per second in the lower atmosphere. There is also a discussion about missions to be from the point of view of the author in 2000, there was no Cassini or New Horizons and there have been many moons found since then such as Nix, Styx around Pluto and moons around asteroids. That is a summary of the book, it is very info rich although I wish the Americans would catch up to the rest of the world and switch to metric, it is a book that needs to be updated.
Tho above show the last seconds of a Ranger space craft that were the first to take images of the moon. Also before start all the measurements are in imperial because the book was written for an American audience.
The first moon hunter was an accidental moon hunter because he didn’t know there was more than just the one that he and others for centuries saw above him and of course this was Galileo. On Jan 7, 1610 he pointed his telescope towards the planet Jupiter and he noticed 4 small stars that he didn’t know about before. Over the next few nights he noticed that these stars were moving around Jupiter and even saw one go behind Jupiter. He realized these objects must be going around Jupiter itself. He wanted to name them after his benefactors the Meducis a wealthy and powerful family in Italy. Eventually they named after characters in Greek mythology that were associated with the Zeus and these were Io, Europa, Callisto and Ganymede. Soon after that Huygens found an orangish smudge near the rings of Saturn and this was to be named Titan after the Titans that Zeus overthrew in mythology. When Herschel found Uranus he soon found the moons Oberon and Titania named after characters in Shakespeares play A Midsummer’s night dream I believe the King and Queen of the fairy folk, then he found Enceladus and Mimas . The moons of Saturn Iapetus, Rhea, Thethys and Dione were found by Cassini. On the first day of the of the 19th century Giuseppe Piazzi discovered an object between Mars and Jupiter in what is now known as the asteroid belt and was called Ceres. Over seventy years later on a steamy night in Washington DC at the Naval observatory Aseph Hall was looking near Mars 53 million miles away and saw two small smudges orbit Mars these two were at max 20 miles in diameter and were captured by Mars from the asteroid belt. Then of course Pluto was found but Charon was not until 1978 after I was born.
William Pickering was probably the driving force behind the early years of the unmanned space program. When he left New Zealand in 1929 to go to Caltech he wasn’t interested in rocketry at all he was more interested in helping bring hydroelectric power to his home country. Soon after he got his Ph.D he was offered a job to teach at the school basically what he was taught but he was allowed to go out into the dessert with the rocket scientists to a dried up canyon that they called the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Eventually the War came (yes that conflict influenced a lot of science) him and the other engineers in dessert had some success but nothing like what was happening on the side of the planet in Germany. There Werhner Von Braun was working on his V-2 rocket. The V-2 was a 47 ft. 29000 lbs death machine that flew over the Baltic Sea from Poland to hit London. There was one problem with the early versions, they didn’t make to there test targets, they would go up but nothing came down. This was a mystery Until Von Braun drove the 2 hours to the target and waited in the very spot it was suppose to land. When it came down the skin of the rocket and fall apart just short of desired location, there was a re-design.
After the war Von Braun moved to the states and worked at the White Sands research facility in Ne w Mexico where he developed the Redstone rocket which was a streamline V-2 and Pickering worked still worked at JPL developing solid fuel rockets. In 1957 Pickering was asked to build a civilian version of the Redstone for space exploration and to launch a satellite. At the time Pickering and Von Braun had combined their rockets into a Redstone main stage and a second stage of 11 small solid stage rockets and another stage of 3 more solid state rockets. They dis this because they could get to to 250 miles above the surface of the planet but could get enough speed to place something in orbit. The Redstone couldn’t be used because what would called today the optics of the situation. On the 4th of October 1957 the Russians launched Sputnik into orbit, all it did was send a simple morse code message. A couple of months after Sputnik the US Navy developed their Vangaurd rocket to try to launch a satellite. The rocket lifted off for a couple of feet then consumed itself in flames the satellite fall to the ground bounced and landed in front of the blockhouse. This was dubbed by the US media as Kupnutnik. After that the hybrid rocket was used now dubbed the Jupiter-C and Pickering and JPL worked to get a cosmic ray detector built James Van Allen re-configured for the new rocket and satellite and called Explorer-1, launched January 31, 1958.
Soon after that the National Advisory Committee on Aerodynamics was renamed the National Administration for Space and Aerodynamics (NASA) was formed. NASA went around to different public and private organizations to fund research. JPL and Caltech were approached, Pickering agreed only if they could explore the outer solar system someday. The first program that came about was the Ranger program. The Rangers were to go the moon and crash on the surface and on the way down with its six cameras was to take pictures of the moon looking for landing sites for the Apollo program. The Rangers each consisted with a first stage of an Atlas rockets which was 66 ft and cost 9 million dollars each, then the Agena second stage at 5 million dollars each and 12 ft tall, finally there was the ranger itself costing 8 million and ten feet tall, plus additional costs of labour and such each Ranger came to a total of 25 million dollars. When launched the Atlas would carry all three stages to about 80-90 miles and separate. Then the Agena would fire and carry the craft to 115 miles and separate then the Ranger would go the rest of the way. The Rangers had 6 cameras on board and when they got the moon 250,000 miles away they would be travelling at 6000 miles per hour, when the got to a distance of 1500 miles would wake the cameras up and take pictures and crash on the moon. They transmitted their pictures back to Earth and they would be displayed on a screen and a camera would take a picture of the screen and the film would be sent a developer in Hollywood. And the Gerard Kuiper would do the analyses. The first Ranger was suppose to go twice the Earth-Moon distance, to tests on the craft. It was launched on August 23 1961, it launched normally but when the Ageana stage was to separate, the Agena failed to fire. The craft orbited for 111 orbits for 7 days and crashed back to the Earth. It was found out that the Agenas had a design flaw, there was a valve that opened to allow oxygen into the burn chamber but was to close to the chamber and would fail sometimes if it was used more than once. For most cases this was fine but when it needed to fire twice it could fail. Ranger 2 also failed. Then Ranger 3 was launched and was suppose to go the Moon. It was to carry a 36 inch balsa wood ball on the top. This was done to hold a seismograph that the geologist requested. When the Ranger craft would get close to the moon it would launch the ball and the ball would land on the moon. After it was launched on April 12, 1963. There are connectors between each stage of the rocket. When there was a separation the connection would be broken like unplugging a plug, actually a very similar design. When the Ranger 3 separated there was a plug with prongs hanging out and a bunch of metal flakes floating around and on get stuck between the prongs and shorted out the craft. But the radio still sent a signal, so several days they tracked the craft going down on the moon by tracking the difference in the wavelengths as it got faster and faster as it getting closer and closer to the Moon.
Now back to the Russians, in 1958 they got Lunik 2 crash on the moon. By Feb 1962 the Russians had sent the probe Venera 1 to fly near Venus, 62,000 miles from the surface, the pictures just showed a white sphere. In 1962 the Americans sent Mariner 1 probe to get just over halfway closer to Venus at 23,000 miles, the Mariners were basically modified Ranger probes. The first probe to every get to the surface of Venus was Venera 9 by the Russians and did not last long because the atmospheric pressures is 90 times that of the Earth at sea level and is about 453 F, enough to melt and crash a lot of materials.
Then came Ranger 5 which got all the way to the Moon, the cameras were told to turn on a5 minutes before crash down, but they never got a signal, that was 125 million dollars and no success. Then came Ranger 6, the top scientist was replaced and made the number 2 of the mission. Ranger 6 was built in a clean sterile room unlike the other Rangers and the programming was completely redone because on one mission there was a mix up between left and right. But again it failed, this time a theorist from a different department figured it could of been plasma. Plasma is a when the elections and protons separate form one another but they stay close to each other. It was proposed that there was a gap in the outer casing and the plasma that surrounded the rocket got in and since it allowed a current it shorted out the circuits inside. Then on July 28, 1964 Ranger 7 was launched and was successful and took 4.316 picture, the next two missions rangers 8 and 9 were successful as well. That was that for the Rangers then there were the Surveyor probes that actually landed and took a lot more pictures each taking around 16,000 -17,000 images each in the Ocean of Storms and the Sea of Tranquility.
Then came the most error prone, most delicate probes of them all the humans. There were 7 attempts to land on the moon with 6 being successful. Each of the missions brought back samples from the various landing locations, the first few missions were in the maria or seas, the large craters on the near side of the moon. A few missions went to the highlands and Appenines in the north part of the near side and gathering some 838.2 pounds of rocks. During training the astronauts went thru a geology boot camp. They went out to the desert with a geologist to study rocks and rock formations so they know what to look for while on the moon. Scott while looking around thought he saw a green rock, which is odd for the moon. This rock had stayed there since the volcano that it erupted from 4.5 billions years ago, soon after the moon formed. Samples from the rest of moon like the Sea of Tranquility of 3.89 billion years old, Sea of Stars 3.6 billion years, Sea of Nestor 3.93 billion years, Craters like Copernicus and Tycho were found to be 800 million and 110 million years old. So soon after Thea crashed into Earth and the ring of debris combined to form the moon big asteroids impacted the moon to form the seas and then smaller asteroids came in and formed the smaller craters.
In 1966. Burke the former lead on the Ranger program figured out that the outer planets of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune would be lined up in in the first time in 176 years and would take another 176 for it to happen again, the year that it would happen in was in 1979. So the planning started to begin. The platform that the mission was based off of was the Mariner probes, but there were several problems like communications, computing power and an energy source. You could use solar panels to power the craft but they would have to huge plus the power that is received from the sun decreases as an inverse square so by Jupiter that is 5.5 times away as Earth you get about 1/30 the power, by the time you get to Neptune which is 30 times away from Earth you only get 1/900 the power. Batteries but to power the craft for such a long time journey they would be very heavy requiring a lot more fuel to launch the craft. Eventually a system using plutonium 238 in three clusters of 8, they heat a piece of metal against a cold metal and the temperature difference would generate a current this is what is called a radio-thermal generator, this design was used on missions like Galileo and Cassini. The radio transmitter on the Rangers/Mariners would not be able to transmit the amount of data fast enough so it needed to be upgraded to a 12 foot wide dish, that can transmit up to 115,200 bits per second. The new computer system on board would have 3 main processors and 2 backups but eventually down size to 3 processors. The original name of the program was the Thermo Electric outer Planet Spacecraft or TOPS, then it was renamed to MJS77, for Mariner Jupiter Saturn in 77, Uranus and Neptune were dropped, then finally got the name of Voyager. There were two voyager probes one would go to Jupiter than to Saturn and fly under Titan and make a close pass at Titan going up to the north pole of the moon and keep going in the same line. Then Voyager 2 would go on a path on the same plane that the planets orbit around the Sun (or the ecliptic), so after it passed by Saturn it could just happen to pass by the other two planets. Each probe had an ultraviolet spectrometer, two imaging cameras, and a photopolarimeter. Each of the 2 craft had a golden record on it produced by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan which had music clips, and photographs on it and is discussed on this podcast, to be played by aliens if the aliens find them. On September 5 1977 the first of the two were launched.
