Category Archives: Future

Space

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In, Through, and Beyond Saturn’s Rings

Image Credit: Cassini Imaging Team, ISS, JPL, ESA, NASA

Explanation: A fourth moon is visible on the above image if you look hard enough. First — and farthest in the background — is Titan, the largest moon of Saturn and one of the larger moons in the Solar System. The dark feature across the top of this perpetually cloudy world is the north polar hood. The next most obvious moon is bright Dione, visible in the foreground, complete with craters and long ice cliffs. Jutting in from the left are several of Saturn’s expansive rings, including Saturn’s A ring featuring the dark Encke Gap. On the far right, just outside the rings, is Pandora, a moon only 80-kilometers across that helps shepherd Saturn’s F ring. The fourth moon? If you look closely in the Encke Gap you’ll find a speck that is actually Pan. Although one of Saturn’s smallest moons at 35-kilometers across, Pan is massive enough to help keep the Encke gap relatively free of ring particles.

As you’ll note in the side bar one of my favorite sites is APOD Astronomical Picture Of the Day, the above picture from Saturn is from the APOD. the single largest segment of memory on my iPad is devoted to these pictures. I understand that a human’s limited senses would not see these views but they still haunt me with their beauty and inaccesibility. Here is wonder and beauty we cannot destroy.

Have to admit I’m a mite disappointed in humanity right now…hence the mooning over moons. We have a huge amount of capability and mountains of resources at our finger tips but we seem to have lost the magic sauce of leadership. I don’t know if we (humans) are going through a phase change right now or just hitting a rough patch or perhaps we have reached Lemming Stage (too many people period and some deep programming sets us at a metaphorical run towards the nearest metaphorical cliff.) I hope it’s no LS just a rough spot in the singularity….whatever that turns out to be.

Good luck Curiosity, let’s just hope you’re no cat.

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A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket carrying NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) Curiosity rover lifts off from Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Cape Canaveral, Fla., Saturday, Nov. 26, 2011. The rocket will deliver a science laboratory to Mars to study potential habitable environments on the planet. (AP Photo/Terry Renna)

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Graphic of the Mars Science Laboratory, an elite six-wheeled vehicle powered by nuclear fuel, is scheduled to launch at 10:02 am (1502 GMT) from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida atop an Atlas V rocket

The size of a compact car, nuclear powered, autonomous guidance, what’s not to geek love? Of course it’s a full press design very low fault tolerant landing system, albeit really cool, and probably warranted to work for years…exact opposite of the last two plucky cheap little explorers we sent. So I have to hope all goes well. This is not likely to be repeated for a decade if it goes thump.

Good luck Curiosity, let’s just hope you’re no cat.

Space Junk to Resource

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I saw this picture elsewhere and lost it, its cool and a bit worrying, thought of course the scale is so out of kilter it’s almost sublime, but if you figure this only the big stuff and that it’s all in motion all the time and new stuff is going up there, then the worry is not so out-of-place.

The real cloud up there
Junk, very expensive Junk, maybe reusable Junk
All sorts of solutions for removing this stuff has been proposed, from robo tugs to catchers mitts, and evaporating them with lasers.  That last has been under study since the 1990’s and you don’t have to blow them to ‘microns’ you just have to slow them down enough so they did into the outer atmosphere and come crashing to the ground.
 
Basic equeipment and geometry to deorbit debris

A very high tech broom (click through to Wired article)

And in the end I think the laser broom will be used, to deorbit bolts, dropped tools, smashed up debris etc, not worth recovering.

 
But a lot, even most of the material up there probably can be reused.  If we could cheaply catch the small stuff, maybe my using the Laser Broom to guide it into a catch basket, there is plenty of solar power and vacuüm to smelt the metals and create new things. 
 
Using spare material, sunlight, natural vacuüm and microgravity environment it seems reasonable that we could design and build a large-scale Additive Fabrication Machine in orbit that could build space craft parts from scrap.  In the long run we then start getting the materials from asteroids or the moon and off we go into the solar system.
 

Regression as a good thing!

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This article seems to have very exciting implications. Cellular regression in diseased heart tissue with the help of oncostatin M: Credit: MPI for Heart and Lung Research-press. They have found a channel where heart muscles can be regressed to stem cells (dedifferentiate?) which then can multiply and re-differentiate into healthy heart muscle tissue. This has huge implications not only for heart attack victims but many other diseases and treatments. As Glenn Reynolds would say “Faster Please.”