12-4-12 Next Thursday is Yuri’s Night,
an international celebration of human achievement and ingenuity, in
recognition of mankind’s achievements in space exploration—with hopes of
inspiring a new generation to continue looking upward and reaching
outward. Fifty-one years ago, Yuri Gagarin was the first human to launch
into space. He later commented, “Circling the Earth in my orbital spaceship I marveled
at the beauty of our planet. People of the world, let us safeguard and
enhance this beauty – not destroy it!”
Do something on Yuri's
night. Look up some local or online event. Or just step outside with
someone impressionable, and infect them with a sense of wonder. And
determination.
How do we recapture our enthusiasm for space? Neil deGrasse Tyson examines
America’s ailing aerospace industry and NASA’s shrinking vision -- and
asks what it would take for America to remain the leading power in
space: “In fact we may be entering a new age of geopolitics, in which
economic strength wields greater power than military strength. If that’s
the case, we shouldn’t need reminders that innovations in science and
technology drive tomorrow’s economies. That’s been true since the dawn
of the Industrial Revolution. And so healthy investment in space
exploration—something we saw 50 years ago, and something many other
countries have just figured out—is like a new force of nature operating
on a nation’s economic prosperity. As nothing else does, the frontier of
space exploration, which draws upon a dozen fields of science and
engineering, attracts the ambitions of those who are still in the
educational pipeline. It is they who become the scientists and
technologists. It is they who invent tomorrow.”
Hear hear. Every
decade since the forties, some scientific breakthrough (or several)
enabled the U.S. to stay rich and vibrant enough to then spend it all in
the Great Buying Spree that propelled world prosperity and created a
world-majority Middle Class. That is, every decade except the first
decade of the 21st Century, amid the calamitous War on Science.
The
possibilities are there! See my video: Grand Scale Reasons to Explore Space. I am on the board of advisers for the NASA
Innovative and Advanced Concepts program. Last week in Pasadena we saw
some outtasight and amazing proposals, some of them both groundbreaking and apparently eminently practical. All we have to do is rediscover within ourselves the kind of people who step outside and look up, now and then.
==Exoplanets and Runaway Planets==
Turns out there could be billions of habitable planets around faint red dwarf stars in our galaxy. Well... maybe.
An international team, including astronomers from the European Southern Observatory (ESO), has applied the technique of gravitational microlensing
to measure how common planets are in the Milky Way, surveying millions
of stars over six years. The team concludes that planets around stars
are the rule rather than the exception. How was it done? Beyond
gravitational wobble and Kepler's occultation method, there's an added
method by which exoplanets are detected - via the way that the
gravitational field of their host stars acts like a lens, magnifying the
light of a background star. If the star that acts as a lens has a
planet in orbit around it, the planet can make a detectable
contribution, warping the brightening effect on the background star.
Microlensing
is a very powerful tool, with the potential to detect exoplanets that
could never be found any other way. But a very rare chance alignment of a
background and foreground star is required for a microlensing event to
be seen at all. And, to spot a planet during the rare event, an
additional chance alignment of the planet’s orbit is also needed.
Significantly, any one episode is likely never to be repeated, so you
can't learn much about the planet. This mostly helps by offering
statistics. In six year's worth of microlensing data used in the
analysis, three exoplanets were firmly detected... enough to suggest
that planets are very abundant. (In fact, we astonomers always expected
it to be so, because of angular momentum considerations; but it is good
to see proof.)
In other news: Astronomers believe that runaway planets may zoom
at a fraction of speed of light. When a solar system passed close to a
black hole, all sorts of wild stuff can happen, including planets being
expelled from the galaxy at relativistic speeds!
==Solar Tornadoes, Micro Black Holes&Civilization's End==
Astronomers present images of a solar tornado
as much as five times the width of Earth, an event they believe
triggers solar storms. Cool images! Reminding me of the days when I
was a solar observer at the Big Bear Observatory and caught on film the
Great Flare of ‘72. Yep! By crickey!
Should we fear collisions with micro-black holes?
Scientists seem convinced that such a tiny singularity (black hole)
would pass right through our planet without gobbling enough mass to slow
down. Fair enough. But what if the singularity were local? So in
much lower-velocity orbit in the Solar system? Or even (as I portrayed
in my novel EARTH) man-made? One of ten thousand possible explanations for why we seem to be alone in the universe?
Noted
author and futurist Vernor Vinge is surprisingly optimistic when it
comes to the prospect of civilization collapsing. “I think that
[civilization] coming back would actually be a very big surprise,” he
says in this week’s episode of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast.
And see a fairly wise article on SETI by my esteemed colleague Nick Sagan.
==Fusion Finally?==
of magnetically-confined inertial fusion, suggest we may be a lot
closer to workable fusion reactors than previously thought. Sandia Labs
will test the simulation experimentally in 2013. To which frequent blog
commentor Sociotard cogently replied: “A scientist performing a
detailed simulation of fusion is as close to making a meatspace model as
a middleschooler making out with her pillow is to actually reaching
second base.”
==Tech Updates==
Boston Dynamics does it again! See the "sand flea rover"
prototype of a wheeled robot that can also (sproing!) leap actual tall
buildings in a single bound. Amazing... and highly relevant to our
mission at the NASA Innovative and Advanced Concepts group. Watch the
video.
Patent Bolt has discovered that Microsoft has been secretly working on a video headset
since September 2010. A New Microsoft patent reveals that they’ve been
working two styles of headset: an aviation styled helmet aimed at Xbox
gamers, and one that resembles a pair of sunglasses for use with
smartphones, MP3 players and other future devices.
MIT Media Lab researchers have developed a camera that peers around corners.
It can “see” objects hidden behind walls... via a non-imaging method
akin to radar, bouncing off other walls. that are in-view. The system
can produced recognizable 3-D images of a wooden figurine and of foam
cutouts outside their camera’s line of sight.
Printing three dimensional objects with incredibly fine details is now possible using "two-photon lithography".
With this technology, tiny structures on a nanometer scale can be
fabricated. (I was involved in the earliest version of this technique,
back in the 1980s!)
Visualizing light in motion at a trillion frames per second..
== Great Sci-Television ==
Is There an Edge to the Universe? This episode of Morgan Freeman's Through the Wormhole will blow your mind!
Our
family liked the whole series. Well. Except the episode about "The
Sixth Sense." And the fact that they could have used a physicist sci
fi- author pundit, now and then...
