A year long Curiosity

Just a few quick thoughts.  This week marks the one year anniversary of the Mars Science Laboratory Rover, Curiosity, landing in Gale Crater on the surface of Mars.  A year ago we deposited a ton of nuclear-powered robot on the surface of another world. 

NASA/JPL-Caltech

Since then it is have been roving, scooping, dusting, vaporizing rocks, and just sciencing the heck out of the red planet.  36,700 images, 76,000 rock-zapping laser shots, and 1.6 kilometers driven so far.  It still has about an 8 km drive to go to get to the lower layers of the 5.5 km tall Mt. Sharp.  Just in it’s first year Curiosity has already a world that looks downright “habitable” in the distant past – spectacularly finding the remains of a pebbled riverbed.

NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS / PSI

So happy “birthday” to the MSL Rover Curiosity – may there be many more rocks to bother in your future.

Houston, Futura has landed.

I generally get a kick out of looking at the evidence of humanity that we have thrown around the Solar System, so with the Apollo 11 Moon landing anniversary just past I thought I would look at the the first words brought to the Moon by it – the Apollo 11 Lunar plaque.

Like all of the Lunar plaques brought by the Apollo missions this is a 9” x 7 5/8” stainless steel plaque, attached to the Lunar Module’s ladder.  It features the signatures of the three astronauts, the President on the United States, and a message of peace.  Classy look message eh?  You might recognize the lettering from the titles of Stanley Kubrick’s films, or more recently Wes Anderson’s work.  Like the Saturn V rockets that carried men to the moon, the font on the plaques they brought with them, Futura, was designed by a German.

Futura was designed by Paul Renner, and release to the public in 1927.  It’s a very clean geometric font.  No extra serifs, frills, or decorations are found. Now, I’m not a font expert by any means so I can’t go into the details of what exactly sets Futura apart from other fonts of the time, and how the various child-fonts it has spawned  differ from each other.  What I can say is that despite being a 86 year old typeface it still, to me at least, looks to the future, a future perhaps when the Apollo 17 plaque won’t be the last words we left on the Moon.



Right now this 41 year old plaque from Apollo 17 in an 86 year old typeface are the last words humanity personally left behind on the Moon.

Conjunction Junction, what's your function?

(My apologies to Schoolhouse Rock)

This weekend people around the world were treated to a very nice viewing of three planets all very close to each other in the sky.  An astronomical conjunction of the two interior terrestrial planets, Mercury and Venus, and the gas giant Jupiter.  Since I don’t want to get into the muddle of online digital image rights I took a screen capture of what the conjunction would look like from here in Virginia using the free open source planetarium program Stellarium.  You can tell it’s software since the planets don’t generally have large name labels when you look in the sky.



Neat huh?  All three planets are arranged in a triangle covering about 5 degrees of the sky (the whole pattern could be easily covered by your fist held at arm’s length).  Now this looks neat, but what is the importance of this event?  I mean while these planets are viewable together in a tightly compact portion of the sky they are still hundreds of millions of kilometers apart from each other and from the Earth.  What’s the significance?  Nothing… except the fact that we knew it was going to happen, and we can accurately determine when such alignments have happened in the past, and when they will happen in the future! 

For example, I can state with some certainty that the next time Jupiter and Saturn will be extremely close to each other in the sky will be on December 21st, 2020.  The last time these two gas giants were in conjunction was on May 31st of 2000.  Notice the time separation of 20 years.  This conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn happen about every 18 to 20 years because of the difference in times between the Earth’s orbit (1 year), Jupiter’s orbit (~12 years) and Saturn’s orbit (~30 years).  All of these worlds orbit round and round the Sun, and every now and then the math adds up just right and they are all in a line.  Not only do I know when this event will take place, but where it will be – the constellation of Aquarius.

Stop for a moment and think just how amazing that it that we can say such things.  We, people living on a small blue world, have the agency and know-how to accurately model, predict, and explain the motions of the planets, worlds unto themselves as they swiftly travel through space.  So what’s the significance of the conjunction?  Nothing but a beautiful demonstration of our exploration of the natural world around us.

Oh, and we’ve thrown robots at them as well.

Believing in comet dust

Well, I have a few things to add since my Comet Kerfuffle post a few months back.  Since then I've had the chance to take some images of comet C/2012 S1, aka Comet ISON through a fairly decent sized telescope (3.5 meter).  I'm starting to believe that we are in for quite a show this fall.  Why?  Well here's my reasons to be optimistic:


1.  At about 5 AU, where Jupiter orbits, the comet already has a very pronounced coma and tail.  This is still far enough out that it isn't getting warmed all that much by the Sun, and in fact not all of the gas species that drive the coma and tail have even reached sublimation temperature yet.  As one would would expect from an Oort Cloud object making a fresh return to the inner solar system, it is a very, very active comet.

Comet C/2012 S1 @4.9AU (Hammergren, Solontoi, Gyuk)

2. Its going to pass close to the Sun.  Really close.  Close enough that the tidal and thermal forces associated with the comet's passage by the Sun may cause it to fragment.  If that happens it will be quite a show for sure.  Unfortunately from the look of the orbit that event would most likely happen with the comet behind the Sun viewed from Earth.

3.  Folks who have been tracking the observed magnitudes of this thing are saying that it is fairly odd.  Most comets brighten suddenly and then "level off" at a certain point (if you're squinting at them in the right logarithmic axis!).  This one looks like it may have already gone through this change due to the way it is increasing in magnitude.  If that's the case it isn't a wild prediction to say that C/2012 S1 is trending toward "lunar" magnitudes - potentially as bright as the Moon!

Now I'm not saying that I am predicting that this is going to be a day-time comet - it will be hidden by the Sun when it is at perihelion for instance.  Many, many things can and will change in this comet's life between now and November of this year, but the way things are shaping up I am starting to really think that this comet will be spectacular in one way or another.