Citizen Cartwright

Pushing back the 'frontiers of our own ignorance'

For me, one of the best counterpoints to the myriad mundanities of the activities of daily life is what we’re learning about our life in this universe, from the James Webb telescope.

 

It’s been about a year since the telescope’s first images were released, and The New Yorker has an interview with Jane Rigby, NASA’s top scientist on the project.

 

She’s skilled at making astrophysics accessible to the general public. She says:

 

— The pitch when the telescope first was proposed was that we’ll see “the baby pictures of the universe.” And we’re seeing back in time 13 billion years, to about 300 million years after the big bang.

 

— Within one or two decades we’ll have the technology to find out if there’s life on other planets.

 

— Astronomy underpins our lives. GPS uses general relativity that was developed and tested on astronomical objects. The digital camera on our phone was in large part developed for astronomy.

 

— "Fundamentally, astronomy is about knowing how we got here. And everyone has wondered that. What’s the point? What’s the big picture? What’s bigger than me? And what will be here when I’m gone?

 

“This is our origin story." 

Cleaning up our 'space junk'

More than 27,000 pieces of orbital debris, or “space junk,” were being tracked by the Defense Department as of 2021, NASA says. 

And much more debris — too small to be tracked, but big enough to threaten human spaceflight and robotic missions — exists in the near-Earth space environment, according to NASA.  Since both the debris and spacecraft are traveling at about 15,700 miles an hour in low Earth orbit, an impact of even a tiny piece of orbital debris with a spacecraft could create big problems.

And the United States granted Amazon authorization in early February to launch more than 3,000 satellites, says The Christian Science Monitor.

Starlink, a satellite-based broadband service rolled out by SpaceX, already has put about 3,500 satellites into orbit, CSM says.

The International Space Station has had to take evasive action more than 30 times in its 24-year history, says CSM. And falling debris has the potential to affect us humans on Earth. But right now, the most frequent risks are to satellites.

To address the threats, there are companies seeking to remove objects in orbit that are no longer functional – a process known as active debris removal. Concepts include the space equivalent of a net, magnet or harpoon.

And the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee, an international forum of space agencies, has put together guidelines that all satellites in low Earth orbit should be removed from that orbit within 25 years of end of mission – a number the United States recently unilaterally reduced to five years. 

On Valentine’s Day, a love letter to the universe

I love understanding what’s what about this human experience, and I particularly love it when the understanding is conveyed by good writing.

 

And a gift I've received on this day of love is a New York Times article by Dennis Overbey, whose bio says he’s “been covering the universe for more than 30 years.”

 

And lyrically, I’ve thought more than once. But never more than today:

 

"In the unfathomable darkness and time that is the universe, every star is an omen of hope, a promise of life and shelter, like the lights of a distant ship on a cold sea,” Overbey writes.

 

"And so, courtesy of the James Webb Space Telescope, here is another reminder of the fecundity and generosity of nature: thousands of galaxies, trillions of stars and unnumbered planets, a boundless realm of possibilities stretching back 13 billion years in a small patch of sky in the constellation Hercules.

 

"At lower center is a spiral galaxy known as LEDA 2046648. It looks like a dead ringer for the great galaxy in Andromeda, M31, or its twin, our own Milky Way galaxy — except that the LEDA galaxy is a billion light-years away.

 

"One billion years ago, when the light from this image was emitted, the first multicellular organisms had emerged on Earth and were groping their way up the evolutionary ladder toward plants, fish, dinosaurs, humans and whatever comes next.”

 

"Viewing this snapshot of eternity, it’s hard not to wonder whether microbes or something else were making a similar go of it in LEDA 2046648 or one of the other luminous blobs in the image, and whether we will ever know.”

 

Dennis Overbey, on this day I appreciate your appreciation of the vastness beyond.

 

Here is the Webb's picture of LEDA. 

The Webb telescope photos launching astronomy’s ‘next great era’

It must be way beyond exciting for astronomers right now. The James Webb Space Telescope, 100 times more powerful than the Hubble and capable of capturing longer infrared wavelengths, lets them see galaxies that are farther away and further back in time than ever before.

 

They're seeing "structures that, honestly, we don't even know what they are,” says Amber Straughn, deputy project scientist for Webb.

 

On Tuesday morning, Webb provided "a spectacular slide show of our previously invisible nascent cosmos,” says The New York Times. "Ancient galaxies carpeting the sky like jewels on black velvet. Fledgling stars shining out from deep within cumulus clouds of interstellar dust. Hints of water vapor in the atmosphere of a remote exoplanet.

"Their sum is both a new vision of the universe and a view of the universe as it once appeared new,” says the Times.

“That was always out there,” says Jane Rigby, the telescope’s operations manager. “We just had to build a telescope to go see what was there.”

 

Because the universe is expanding, those earliest stars and galaxies are rushing away from Earth so fast that their light is shifted to longer, redder wavelengths, much as the sound from an ambulance’s siren shifts to a lower register as it speeds by, says the Times. The light from the farthest away and earliest galaxies and stars, once blue, is now infrared “heat” radiation, invisible to the eye. As is the radiation from carbon, ozone and other molecules that are of great interest to astrobiologists.

 

Here are:

 

NASA images

 

Space Telescope Science Institute photo gallery, plus videos, posters, hands-on activities and more

 

CNET explanation of the wavelengths of light humans can and can’t see

What’s so great about the James Webb Space Telescope

On Tuesday morning at 10:30 a.m. EDT, NASA is to make public some of the telescope's first images. You can watch here.

 

On Monday, President Biden unveiled the first photo. I was disappointed that scientists didn’t explain in detail what we were seeing. Apparently, they have a lot of work to do to find that out themselves. Gotta say, though, that whatever it was we were seeing in the galaxy cluster euphoniously called SMACS 0723, it was impressive that we were seeing it as it looked 4.6 billion years ago.

 

“Webb can see backwards in time to just after the Big Bang by looking for galaxies that are so far away that the light has taken many billions of years to get from those galaxies to our telescopes,” says Jonathan Gardner, Webb’s deputy project scientist.

 

(A light-year is the distance traveled by light in one year, about 5,880,000,000,000 miles or 9,460,000,000,000 kilometers. Since it takes light as long to travel from there to here as the distance in light-years, when we look at an object that's a million light-years away, we see it now here as it was a million years ago there, NASA says. So looking deep into space is looking far back in time.)

 

Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s science mission chief, says that with the new telescope, the cosmos is “giving up secrets that had been there for many, many decades, centuries, millennia. It’s not an image. It’s a new world view that you’re going to see."

 

So let’s prepare for what we’ll see Tuesday by looking at the ways Webb is important and such an advance beyond the Hubble telescope that’s been operating for 30 years.

 

Webb is designed to look deeper into space than Hubble, to see the earliest stars and galaxies that formed in the universe and to look deeply into nearby dust clouds to study the formation of stars and planets.

 

Here are some excellent NASA graphics that explain how Webb will do this.

Here are FAQs about Webb, from NASA.

In challenging times, expanding our perspective

We humans behaving humanly can lead to some distressing news headlines.

 

But let’s put our experience in a broader context.

 

"We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star,” Stephen Hawking said.

 

Maria Popova, writer of the blog Marginalia (formerly Brain Pickings), said at her Universe in Verse 2022 event:

"The reason I love thinking about the evolutionary time scale is it reminds us that we’re actually a very young species in the scheme of things. We’re barely reaching our adolescence. 

"So suddenly there’s a way of shifting the self-blame and kind of self-flagellation with which we regard ourselves for the damage we’ve done to our house. 

"Shifting it from not being a malevolent grownup villain but just a kind of young creature, not knowing its strength, not knowing its limits, moving through its environment trying to make sense [of it]. 

"And that means there’s a realistic hope that as a young creature matures, so our species could mature to be a more conscious and conscientious inhabitant of home.”

 

Here are some pictures that put our planetary home in a universal context, from Big Think.

Celebrating a year roving Mars, with Perseverance

Let’s continue our effort to balance headlines of humans falling short with news of humans performing brilliantly.

 

It’s been a year since NASA’s Perseverance rover completed its 290-million-mile, seven-month journey from Earth.

 

One of the first things Perseverance did was to deploy Ingenuity, a small robotic helicopter and the first such flying machine to take off on another planet.

 

The helicopter was a late addition to the mission, intended as a proof-of-concept for flying through the thin air of Mars, The New York Times says.

On April 18 of last year, Ingenuity rose 10 feet and hovered for 30 seconds. Over the following weeks, the helicopter made four more flights, increasing in time, speed and velocity.

 

That was supposed to be the end of the helicopter’s mission, but NASA decided five flights weren't enough. 

 

As Perseverance set off to explore rocks to the south, Ingenuity scouted the terrain ahead of the rover. That's helped NASA avoid wasting time driving to unexceptional rocks that had looked potentially interesting in images taken from orbit, the Times says.

 

Perseverance is taking rock samples that are to be brought back to Earth by a future mission.

 

The rover also has demonstrated a technology for generating oxygen that will be crucial when astronauts eventually make it to Mars.

 

Two other spacecraft made the trip from Earth to Mars a year ago, during the last window when the two planets lined up, says a separate Times article.

 

China became the second country to pull off a lasting mission on the surface of Mars.

 

And the United Arab Emirates collaborated with engineers at the University of Colorado’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics to build a spacecraft that’s orbiting Mars, taking measurements of the atmosphere.

 

Here are ways you can join the NASA team celebrating Perseverance’s year on Mars.

Asteroid survival tips

On Friday, I ran an item on federal efforts to prevent an asteroid from slamming into the Earth.

 

But what if that effort failed?

 

My thanks to the reader who's sent me “How to Survive a Killer Asteroid,” from Wired.

 

If the asteroid in question was anything like the Chicxulub asteroid, which extinguished the dinosaurs 66 million years ago, survival wouldn’t be easy, says article author Cody Cassidy.

 

By the way, Cassidy is the co-author of the humor/science book “And Then You’re Dead: What Really Happens If You Get Swallowed by a Whale, Are Shot From a Cannon, or Go Barreling Over Niagara."

 

(The late physicist Paul Doherty, a former physics professor who was senior scientist at San Francisco’s truly great Exploratorium, co-authored the book.)

 

The Chicxulub asteroid unleashed 100 million times more energy than the largest thermonuclear device ever detonated, Cassidy says.

 

But if you make camp on the right continent, in the right environment, and you seek out the right kind of shelter, at the right altitudes, at the right times, you might stand a chance, according to Charles Bardeen, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research who modeled the asteroid’s fallout for the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences. 

 

Even if you are on the opposite side of the world at the time of impact — which is the only way you can hope to make it out alive — Bardeen recommends that you act quickly. As soon as you hear the sonic boom, which will be audible across the globe, immediately get to high ground and then find underground shelter there.

 

As they say in old-time Western movies, "Shoot me, I can't make it."

Nuking an asteroid that’s heading toward us

How I enjoy a snappy news lead:

 

"When the almost-certainly-inevitable day comes that we spot an asteroid hurtling toward the Earth, our best chance for survival may be launching a rocket to destroy or deflect it away from the planet before it frizzles us up like the dinosaurs,” says Futurism.

 

Or, in science-speak: 

 

"In the future, a hazardous asteroid will find itself on a collision course with Earth. For asteroids of moderate size or larger, a nuclear device is one of humanity’s only technologies capable of mitigating this threat via deflection on a timescale of less than a decade,” says a study from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

 

The LLNL study focuses on deflection as a safer and "gentler approach of pushing the asteroid onto a new trajectory” than fragmenting or pulverizing the asteroid into high-velocity debris.

 

Varying a nuclear blast’s neutron energy can change an asteroid’s deflected speed, and the researchers are pursuing the "optimal device for asteroid defeat" and the type of simulation to evaluate it.

 

I don’t get the math. But it’s good to know that someone is working on protecting our planetary dust speck when the universe is throwing rocks, huh?

The first human spaceflight was about much more than exploration

"The Soviet Union announced today it had won the race to put a man into space,” began The New York Times article 60 years ago Monday. 

 

Washington’s Air and Space Museum describes the setting of that first flight, and the stakes:

 

"Soon after World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union became locked in a global conflict pitting democracy against communism. Space became a critical theater in this Cold War, as each side competed to best the other's achievements in what became known as the Space Race.”

 

After putting the world’s first satellite into orbit with the successful launch of Sputnik in October 1957, the Soviet space program rushed to secure its dominance over the United States by putting a human into space.

 

The one orbit of the Earth by Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin came a month before American astronaut Alan Shepard's suborbital flight and 10 months before astronaut John Glenn became the first American to orbit the planet.

 

Gagarin, who came from humble beginnings and had a beautiful smile, was perfect for Soviet propaganda, says BBC News.

 

Born to peasant farmers, Gagarin's village was invaded by the Germans when he was seven years old; his family was evicted from their home and had to spend the next 21 months living in a mud hut. Yuri sabotaged German equipment and was lucky to survive the war, though he spent several months in a hospital. He was a gifted student – especially in engineering and math – but was equally good at sports and worked in a foundry while studying. Later, after graduating as a military pilot, he flew MiG fighter jets in the far north of Russia, near the Finnish border.

Gagarin's flight came at a delicate time in East-West relations. It was only a few months before the building of the Berlin Wall. He flew only a few days before the abortive U.S.-backed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. The Cuban Missile Crisis a year later will bring the world closer to nuclear confrontation than before or since.

 

Gagarin was launched into space inside a tiny capsule atop a ballistic missile that originally was designed to carry a warhead, says Scientific American.

 

Crushed into the pilot’s seat by G-forces, Gagarin saw flames outside his spacecraft and prepared to die. He told ground control: “I’m burning. Goodbye, comrades.”

Gagarin didn’t know that the inferno he saw through a porthole was a cloud of plasma engulfing his Vostok 1 craft during its re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere — and that he still was on track to return safely.

 

His flight made Gagarin a hero in the Soviet Union and an international celebrity.

 

Gagarin was killed in a still-unexplained training jet crash on March 27, 1968, at the age of 34. Not quite 16 months later, the United States beat the Soviet Union in the space race, when Neil Armstrong put the first human foot on the moon.

 

But a lingering sense of rivalry is apparent in this online comparison of the race to space between Gagarin and Shepard, from the Air and Space Museum.