Category Archives: NASA

Lunar exploration, NASA

Walkin’ on the Moon

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How Important is It?

The Altair Lunar Lander, proposed by NASA

I’ve been swapping a lot of email with a colleague lately about the future of space exploration. He and his minions are working on a project that explores humanity’s future, not just in space, but in science research in general. One of the core “nubs” of our conversations have been about what it takes today to get people excited about the ideas and technologies needed for space exploration.

The political environment today is very mixed and muddled about space exploration. For example, at least one candidate for U.S. president, Barack Obama, has called for a postponement of some NASA programs (notably the Constellation program) and the money saved to be put into education. Of course, the obvious fact is that we (as a country) are pouring a lot of money into education already. So, I have to ask, how will the little dab (comparatively) of money that is taken from NASA benefit the behemoth that is U.S. education, especially if ALL that other money didn’t do the job? If we really want to pour some money into education, well, there’s a whole big military budget that could use a little trimming…

Now, I’m NOT anti-education, so don’t go there. But, if we’re going to go to space in the future (and this is something that the U.S. as a country HAS pursued for these many years, then we need to have educated workers. No doubt about it. But, it’s not smart to take away the projects that will provide the jobs that we’re educating the kids for… I think that is pretty obvious.

Well, we COULD do what Senator Obama wants to do, although I doubt we should. Reality will set in for the senator, pretty fast. But, the bigger issue here is, how do we excite people about the future in space? Particularly when things here on the ground are SO unsettled?

Is it going to take another space race? The U.S. isn’t the only player in town when it comes to off-Earth research and development (and future plans for such). Plenty of other countries are interested in and working toward some sort of space-based presence for humans. Is this the future? Will seeing a group of Chinese/Japanese/Russian/French/you name the country entrepreneurs building a hotel on the Moon be enough to spark the planet’s will to put differences aside and go to space?? What is it about space that will excite the next generation to want to live there, travel there, study the other planets?

These are questions we continue to mull…

Asteroids, NASA, pseudo-science claims

It’s Not the Impact You Think It Is

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But Some Folks Don’t Get It

You may have heard (or seen in the news) about an asteroid that’s due to pass close to Earth on January 29 (next Tuesday). It’s called 2007 TU24, it’s about the size of the Sears Tower in Chicago, and it will flash past at a distance of about 537,000 kilometers. To put it in perspective, the Moon lies 383,180 kilometers away, so this thing isn’t getting as close to us as the Moon is.

This is a rare chance for astronomers to image a near-Earth asteroid and use instruments such as the Arecibo radio telescope to accurately measure its size, spin rate, and orbital speed.

Stuff like this passes near our planet rather frequently; after all, space is full of debris left over from the formation of the solar system, and not all of it has been swept up by planets, moons, and ring systems. That’s the beauty of having an evolving planetary system. Now that we have good instrumentation, we can study these pieces of debris and learn a variety of things: what they’re made of; and from their orbital measurements, we can figure out the larger picture of orbital dynamics. And, of course, we can learn more about how to spot these things and determine if (and very, very rarely when) they might pose a threat to the planet.

Now, there are a few whack jobs out there who are using this upcoming event to draw attention to themselves by making outrageous claims. It’s the usual huffing and puffing and uninformed bloviating about how NASA is hiding evidence that the rock is actually going to HIT Earth, yadda, yadda, yadda. And I have to wonder just how much physics these folks ever studied, or doing a general orbit calculation isn’t rocket science—kids in high-school math and physics probably cut their teeth on these things in middle school these days) and I’m here to tell you it’s not difficult. And what you learn tells you pretty quickly just how much chance there is an impact vs. a flyby.

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