space
Венера
As enthusiastic as the US hurls probes at Mars to crawl the deserts, scratching around for a hint of water and life, the Soviets propelled craft after craft at Venus, hoping for some demystification. They were tenacious.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union no one has attempted to put a lander on Venus. Why? Doesn't Venus deserve as much love as Mars? Perhaps. The goals were legendary, anthropomorphic. The Soviets very soon found a completely hostile place. Finding life on Venus, assuming this is always a thinly veiled goal of any interplanetary mission, is fantastically unlikely. But Venus has other mysteries, still has mysteries.Now scientists have discovered that magnetic reconnection also happens on Venus, a planet with no intrinsic magnetic field. The finding, reported today in Science1, suggests that magnetic reconnection may generate auroras on Venus, and could have contributed to the loss of a thick, water-rich atmosphere that scientists believe surrounded the planet during its early history, some 4 billion years ago. ... more »
The landing of a craft on Venus at all is incredibly difficult.
Surface temps of 475C, an atmosphere so thick that probes get crushed. Think it's hard getting a submersible to the bottom of the marianas trench? Try sending it through space first. Also, once you're in the atmosphere, it's so dense that you're gonna have trouble getting your probe to the ground before your power runs out. Which is what happened to Venera-4. Venera-5 and 6 were crushed 18km above the surface. But the Soviets didn't stop.
That the Soviets were able to do it several times with the technology of the era is remarkable. That they didn't stop after failures was equally remarkable.gallery
The Edge Of The World
Buzz Aldrin above Earth, Gemini XIIThe immediate context is human. The background is the earth set against space. There are more impressive acts of pure science, and pure astronomy. There are many that are captivating: for instance, images from Cassini. There have been, recently, whole earth high-resolution shots. Famously, the blue marble, Sagan's "pale blue dot", a photo of Earth by Voyager 1.
What these other famous images lack however is the obvious display of human scale. Here, Buzz Aldrin, front and center. The relationship of his position, a man 261 kilometers above Mount Everest, a man embedded in technology. Like previous explorers, like journeys to the poles, to the most remote or extreme areas of the planet, the scale is human exploration fundamentally. Perhaps, these days, there's something embarrassingly self-centered about it, about the ego of the explorer, or the audacity of the raw politics of the attempt.
But I think this image represents best, even more than the moon footage, the early space era. There's something very concrete in Aldrin's expression (what we can see of it), an almost zen like intensity, a clarity that is compelling. From interviews with Aldrin he's matter of fact about the whole thing, lacking any deeply radical philosophy or wholeness shtick that may look good on greeting cards. When I look at this image, what I see is simply a very confident "yup, this is what we're built for."
And that's pretty cool.
more images via natgeoFly Over
Cassini
The piano has been drinking, not me.
Star Trek: The Motion Picture 1979However, a comprehensive message to the stars should not shrink from the details. Might not an advanced extraterrestrial species, savvy in the ways of intelligent being, notice that something was missing from our description of ourselves? An acknowledgment of our flaws and frailties seems a more honest approach than sending a sanitised, one-sided story. Honesty is a good starting point for a conversation that could last for generations. more »
"One of the standard assumptions [about composing messages] is we should talk about what we all have in common; we should avoid controversy," he says. "My concern is that if we do that, our messages may be pretty brief and pretty boring." more »
Lunokhod 1
At first, Murphy thought the blip might just be an artifact of the instrumentation, a common disturbance caused by turning the detector on and off. But no matter how McMillan tweaked the instruments, the signal kept showing up. By the next morning after analyzing the data, he was sure the blip represented something much more significant: contact with the first robot to roam a surface beyond Earth. Until NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter snapped photographs of the robot's tracks earlier that month, no one had been able to locate the Soviet rover Lunokhod 1 for nearly four decades. more »
The distance between Lunokhod 1’s reflector and Earth was calculated to within one centimeter (0.4 inches.) A second measurement 30 minutes later allowed scientists to triangulate the reflector’s position on the moon to within 10 meters (32.8 feet). Additional refinements are expected in the coming months. more »
You probably thought you saw something up in the sky other than Venus, but I assure you, it was Venus
surface of Venus taken by Venera 13 in 1982"Although Venus is believed to have formed under similar conditions to Earth, it is a completely different world from our planet with extremely high temperatures due to the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide and a super rotating atmosphere blanketed by thick clouds of sulphuric acid," explained Takeshi Imamura, Akatsuki's project scientist. "Using [Akatsuki] to investigate the atmosphere of Venus and comparing it with that of Earth, we hope to learn more about the factors determining planetary environments." more »
Nakamura discusses the history of Venusian exploration (considerable, back when the Soviets were still sending probes there, not as much in recent years), and then tackles the specific problem the PLANET-C probe is designed to, well, probe. Oddly, Venus’ CO2-heavy atmosphere circles the planet at about 60 times the velocity of the planet’s actual spin – the atmosphere circulates completely about once every four days, at speeds of up to 328 feet per second, as opposed to a Venusian day that lasts 243 Earth days. more »
In 1965, Venera-2 made the first attempt to photograph Venus from space. It probably did so, but the final telemetry contact to download its experimental data was never established. After that, the only Soviet cameras to study Venus from space were on the first artificial satellites of Venus, Venera-9 and 10. They did long-term high resolution cloud-dynamics studies, combined with linear photometric and spectrometric measurements more »
Not Quite Ice Skating In Clavius
Three different spacecraft — Cassini, Deep Impact, and Chandrayaan-1 — all see the signature of water (the first two swung by the Moon on the way to Points Elsewhere, and Chandrayaan-1 orbited the Moon). Water is composed of one oxygen and two hydrogen atoms. It can be formed when hydrogen combines with a hydroxyl molecule (OH-). When a water or hydroxyl molecule absorbs energy, the component atoms oscillate, like ping pong balls glued to the ends of a Slinky. Their favorite flavor of energy is near infrared light, specifically at 2.8 microns, roughly three to four times the wavelength of light our eyes can see. There’s lots of that kind of light from the Sun, which would normally just bounce off the Moon and be seen as reflected light by the spacecraft. But the water and hydroxyl molecules love to eat that 2.8 micron light, so they absorb it, and the spacecraft don’t see as much as expected. more »
In fact, signs of water turned up in samples from all of the lander missions, but were disregarded because of possible contamination...
Soil collected during all Apollo landings contained traces of water. And material scooped up by Apollo 16 had signs of methane and hydrogen cyanide, compounds found in comets – a possible source of the stuff. The ugly spectre of contamination was raised because none of the 12 "rock boxes" carrying the Apollo samples kept their vacuum during transit, with about half returning to the Earth's atmospheric pressure. more »Rockets Don't Always Go Up
Specifically the early Nedelin disaster -- where an ICBM rocket test, a rocket fueled by a particularly nasty mix of corrosive nitric acid and hydrazine, explodes before launch. Apparently the Soviets waited a full two weeks before planning more tests on the same pad, such was the missile gap. (Speculation is the Chinese Long March rocket explosion in 1996 may have taken a higher toll.)The recent opening up of the Cosmodrome to outsiders also opened up many of the workers' bitterness at the decades of official denial. "If you only knew of all the explosions and deaths," one museum official lamented to a visitor earlier this year, "you would be horrified at the size of the deceptions." Evidently much more is still held in secret Soviet archives or, worse, was documented in records the museum staff was regularly ordered to destroy. But none of those later accidents at the Cosmodrome (or another that killed 50 men at the Plesetsk rocket center north of Moscow in 1980) ever approached the death toll of that October evening only three years after Sputnik 1. more »
At 18:45 local time and around 30 minutes before the scheduled launch, an estimated 250 unsuspecting people were still around the rocket, the second stage engine came to life. Instantly, the roaring flame of the engine burst through the fuel tank of the first stage directly below, initiating an enormous explosion of the fully-fueled rocket. In seconds, a giant fireball, up to 120 meters in diameter engulfed the launch pad 41. Probably, many people were incinerated instantly, while many others died in the following several seconds of a living hell. Eyewitnesses described a horrifying scenes of burning people running from the rocket or hanging on the their safety harnesses from the access pads. Those who were on the ground and tried to escape the flames had to overcome the fence surrounding the pad and a fresh tar, which was melting under their feet. Some had no choice but to jump into the wells dug around the launch complex, only to suffocate from the poisonous propellant fumes released by the inferno. more »
The Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC)
The AGC was packaged in a sturdy, sealed, aluminum-magnesium box, anodized in a gold color, that measured about six inches, by one foot, by two feet, weighed 70 pounds and consumed about 55 watts. Its logic was made up of 5600 3-input NOR gates packaged two-each in flat-pack integrated circuits. Eldon Hall, the machine's principal designer, has related the bold decision to use integrated circuit technology for this computer despite its immaturity in the early 1960's. more »
Early on, the constraints of the size and the requirements of the computer forced the team to make some bold decisions. One of these was to use a fledgling technology known as integrated circuits - today, more commonly known as silicon chips. The first working circuit had only been shown off in 1958. "It was an extremely courageous decision that was probably vital to the success of the mission," said Mr Eyles. To simplify the design and manufacture - and, crucially, minimise the risk of failure - the computer used just one type of circuit. The decision also ensured that the fast-changing silicon industry had an incentive to continue to produce the chips for the whole of the Apollo programme. more »
