|
Randy Cassingham's BlogHistorical Details and Author's Notes from This is True® - the First For-Profit E-mail Publication (and Still Going Strong). |
Space Archives
Amazing Factoid
The first non-story commentary to appear in the newsletter:
Interest in the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet impact on Jupiter was so intense that people couldn't get enough of it -- despite lukewarm media coverage of the once-in-a-dozen-lifetimes event.
The Red Planet
The Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Mars Pathfinder and Sojourner rover have completed their primary mission on Mars, returning 9,669 pictures of the surface and a huge amount of other scientific data about our red neighbor.
When You Wish Upon a Star
Stardust, a NASA mission being managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, will fly by comet Wild-2 in 2004. Passing through the comet's coma (the gas cloud surrounding the comet's head), the spacecraft will suck up some cometary particles from the coma as it passes (at 14,000 miles per hour!) and return it to Earth in 2006 for detailed analysis.
One Small Step for [a] Man
It was 30 years ago Tuesday that Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong piloted the Eagle -- the first manned lunar-landing spacecraft -- to the surface of the moon. He had to land manually, as the onboard computer couldn't process instructions fast enough as they sped toward a field of boulders; landing on them would have surely meant death. But he settled down with less than 30 seconds of fuel remaining and, after a few hours of rest, stepped onto the surface of our moon, followed shortly by Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, while Michael Collins circled less than 10 miles overhead in the command module, Columbia. Driven by dreams -- and funded by a burning desire to beat the Russians -- the first moon landing on July 20, 1969, was a defining moment in history. Never before had so many people, in so many countries, watched a single event with such awe.
Art Imitating Life
I caught up this week with one of the few TV shows I'm watching -- the newest Star Trek series, Enterprise. The episode I saw this week had the ship come across a comet. A landing party went down to it, blasted out a crater, and took a core sample. (Nitpick for the producers: an 80km comet* doesn't produce full Earth gravity! Sheesh!)
Anyway, the entire concept is so much like real life, I have to mention it: the Deep Impact Mission just passed its critical design review. You may know I used to work at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Deep Impact is a JPL mission that will slam a probe into comet Tempel 1 on July 4, 2005. Mission planners expect the resulting crater will be about 90m wide and 30m deep (the comet itself is about 3km, or 1.9 miles around), yet even that impact isn't expected to change the comet's orbit at all**!
Let's Go to Pluto
You already know I'm a space junkie. One of my former colleagues at JPL got a mission to Pluto up and running -- the only planet we haven't sent a probe to yet. It's tough these days to get probes built and launched, not because of technology but politics. A reporter once asked my friend "What is the most difficult part of the mission to Pluto?" He said that was easy: "the part from here to Washington." He was too right: the mission was canceled because, Washington says, at $800 million it was over budget. The problem was it wasn't really over budget: the final cost estimate was actually $496 million. Former NASA Administrator Dan Goldin admitted later that they needed $200 million extra for Mars missions, so they took it from Pluto, which killed that mission. After all, Mars is a sexier planet, in part because it will take so long to get to Pluto (nearly 10 years!)
Space Shuttle Columbia Disaster
This weekend the Space Shuttle Columbia was destroyed during its atmospheric re-entry after a successful 16-day mission.
As many of you know, I started off my professional career with NASA, at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California; I went to work there the fall after the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion. In my 10 years at JPL, I met a fair number of astronauts and generally found them to be extraordinary people. They know what they do is inherently risky, and they choose to do their jobs anyway. While a few have big egos, to a man (and woman) they're not swaggering "forget the danger! Let's go!" types, but were rather very thoughtful explorers -- the essence of humanity.
Pluto Planet Day
Long-time readers know I have a special place in my heart for the planet Pluto. It's not just that I spent 10 years working at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and worked on the precursor project to the probe that's on the way there now. One of my earliest memories is going to the Griffith Observatory (I grew up in L.A. for the first 10 years), and insisting that I be allowed to buy a photograph of the outer planets at the gift shop. I remember Jupiter and Saturn being very clear, and Neptune being a bit fuzzy, and each taking up a quarter of the 8x10 print. In the fourth quarter: a field of stars with an arrow at a point of light labeled "Pluto". I wanted to know why we didn't have a much closer view! (This was definitely several years before Apollo.) I indeed was allowed to get the photo, and I had it for many years. Sadly, it disappeared during one of my moves.
