As the Stones arrive in Los Angeles to continue their No Filter tour, there’s a space-related twist in store at the Rose Bowl Stadium.
It’s been 25 years since the Rolling Stones played at the Rose Bowl Stadium, so SoCal fans of the legendary British rock band are understandably excited. But, for space fans, there’s a little something extra, as actor Robert Downey Jr. teased in a video he posted this morning:
So, what DOES the Rolling Stones, the Rose Bowl, NASA and Robert’s star sign (steady on now) have in common? As he’s an Ares, I’m thinking it’s Mars, a planet that NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (which is located near the Rose Bowl) knows more than a thing or two about. And the Stones have a song called “2,000 Light Years From Home”…? OK, I’m reaching a bit on the latter (besides, Mars is much closer to Earth than 2,000 light-years), but there’s definitely something a little Martian going on. Will Curiosity beep a Rolling Stones song from Mount Sharp? Has it got something to do with the upcoming NASA Mars 2020 mission? Will the Mars InSight lander make a cameo? Who knows. But I’m all for melding science with music, so I’m excited.
“One small step for (a) water bear, one giant leap for water-dwelling eight-legged segmented micro-animals.” —Teddy Tardigrade
Tardigrades are everywhere. And now they’re on the Moon [Public Domain]
Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Because if you are, you’re thinking that exposing tardigrades to high-energy cosmic rays can only mean one thing: super-tardigrades. From Live Science:
The Israeli spacecraft Beresheet crashed into the moon during a failed landing attempt on April 11. In doing so, it may have strewn the lunar surface with thousands of dehydrated tardigrades, Wired reported yesterday (Aug. 5). Beresheet was a robotic lander. Though it didn’t transport astronauts, it carried human DNA samples, along with the aforementioned tardigrades and 30 million very small digitized pages of information about human society and culture. However, it’s unknown if the archive — and the water bears — survived the explosive impact when Beresheet crashed, according to Wired.
Mindy Weisberger, Senior Writer
Well, OK, as tough as they are, it’s probably unlikely that those microscopic explorers will re-hydrate any time soon before being hit by high-energy particles that will then endow the tiny guys with Marvel-like superpowers, but it’s nice to dream.
But what are tardigrades? Let’s go back to Mindy’s Live Science article, because her explanation is simply too adorable not to reprint:
Tardigrades, also known as moss piglets, are microscopic creatures measuring between 0.002 and 0.05 inches (0.05 to 1.2 millimeters) long. They have endearingly tubby bodies and eight legs tipped with tiny “hands”; but tardigrades are just as well-known for their near-indestructibility as they are for their unbearable cuteness.
Moss piglets! Or should we now say moon piglets?
Light-hearted tardigiggles aside, it’s hard not to feel sorry for the tiny sleeping creatures. In a dehydrated state, they can remain hibernating (I’m not sure if that’s the correct term for being freeze-dried, but let’s go with hibernating) for a decade (!) while they wait for water to appear so they can go about their tardigradey business. They’ve been discovered in just about every environment on Earth, are extremely resilient and can even survive in space without a tiny spacesuit to keep them warm. In short, they’re pretty amazing. And now they’re on the Moon, which may or may not be a good thing (there’s a lot of cosmic rays up there).
Bonus: I’ll close with a short story:
The year: 2143. A tiny spaceship arrives in Earth orbit. Using a complex pattern of gargles, the alien beings communicate with the last humans who survived the End Times. "We're home," they said, "what did we miss?" https://t.co/FMv68nxiFG
There’s nothing subtle about this deadly consequence of global warming.
[Pexels]
While the recent record-breaking temperatures in Europe have grabbed the headlines, it’s worth remembering that such record-shattering heatwaves are nothing new to other regions of the planet. And many of those regions are fast approaching a grim reality: heat events that will overwhelm the body’s ability to function.
Once this wetbulb temperature threshold is crossed, the air is so full of water vapour that sweat no longer evaporates. Without the means to dissipate heat, our core temperature rises, irrespective of how much water we drink, how much shade we seek, or how much rest we take. Without respite, death follows – soonest for the very young, elderly or those with pre-existing medical conditions.
Wetbulb temperatures of 35°C have not yet been widely reported, but there is some evidence that they are starting to occur in Southwest Asia. Climate change then offers the prospect that some of the most densely populated regions on Earth could pass this threshold by the end of the century, with the Persian Gulf, South Asia, and most recently the North China Plain on the front line. These regions are, together, home to billions of people.
Tom Matthews, Climate Scientist, Loughborough University, The Conversation.
Matthews goes on to warn of “grey swan” events (read his research here, via Nature Climate Change), where overwhelming heat and moisture is coupled with mass power outages triggered by anthropomorphic global warming-boosted extreme weather events to leave vast populated regions physically unable to keep cool.
While many effects of climate change may seem subtle or “something for future generations to worry about,” this extreme situation will happen sooner rather than later, and as Matthews discusses, it has probably already been experienced.
Any debate about the realities of climate change is a distant dot in the rear-view mirror, and, according to a recent study, the scientific consensus that humans are driving global warming has passed 99 percent. (In reality, the consensus that humans are causing the planet to heat up has been an overwhelming majority for years, likely decades.)
Sadly, scientific consensus isn’t enough to stymie the emissions of greenhouse gasses—if it was, the oil rigs and coal mines would have been shut down years ago. It’s the human disposition for greed and myopic politics that will turn this once ecologically-diverse planet into an increasingly inhospitable place for humans to thrive.
The pushback has been political rather than scientific. In the US, the rightwing thinktank the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) is reportedly putting pressure on Nasa to remove a reference to the 97% study from its webpage. The CEI has received event funding from the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers and Charles Koch Institute, which have much to lose from a transition to a low-carbon economy.
Policy makers who claim to be “skeptical” about the overwhelming scientific consensus that humans are causing global warming aren’t necessarily uneducated fools. They simply do not care. Democracy has long been hijacked by special interest groups and corporations that care little about the future health of the environment and society. In the long run, their belligerent self-interest will undercut their bottom line. It won’t be long until our carbon-driven economy will collapse under the weight of relentless impacts caused by the continued burning of fossil fuels.
It’s the ultimate self-own, and it’s a shame they’ll take us with them.
The space exploration industry is booming, which is an encouraging sign for our future. But some pundits are arguing that rocket launches will exacerbate global warming.
A time-lapse photograph of a SpaceX launch at night [SpaceX]
When so many people, especially those in charge, seem so cavalier about the impact of global warming and climate change on our planet, it’s refreshing to see a perspective that worries about what we’re doing to our environment. Unfortunately, when that perspective focuses on a tiny contributor and seems to lack the understanding of what it criticizes, it needs to be called out. A number of pundits looked at the exploding private space industry and have grown concerned that rocket launches we will inject too much greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, exacerbating global warming and the attendant problems that come with it. And while it’s true that rocket fuel is far from clean, releasing plenty of unwanted chemicals into the atmosphere as it burns, we have to keep the big picture in mind.
When it comes to launching things into space, there aren’t that many alternatives to rockets and their toxic fuel. You can’t use an ion drive or any of the other seemingly sci-fi but realistic propulsion methods for traveling to other worlds and solar systems. Earth’s gravity and atmospheric pressure at sea level are very different from the vacuum of the cosmos where the tiniest push can really add up in the long term. The only way to get tons of supplies and machinery into orbit and beyond is through controlled explosions harnessed by rockets. There is simply no other way currently feasible, and there won’t be until we figure out how to build giant electromagnetic railguns, or how to harness antimatter, although that would come with a high risk of exposure to gamma radiation.
We could conceivably launch human crews in single stage to orbit planes, but their spacecraft are going to have to rely on good old-fashioned rocketry. That said, however, the plan is not to simply keep launching things from earth with no regard to the pollution thousands of rockets launched every year would cause. Launching payloads from Earth is expensive, both financially and energetically, so ideally, we would want to launch them from somewhere else. We would want to take off from the Moon or asteroids, somewhere where the gravity is in a fraction of what it is on our world, and we could use the same engines to propel anywhere between six and a hundred times the cargo. This is what we mean by infrastructure for space exploration. Forget about turning Earth into a giant launchpad. The ideal gateway to the rest of the solar system is the Moon.
Lacking an atmosphere, the Moon doesn’t particularly care how toxic the fuel is or how much greenhouse gas each launch produces. For all intents and purposes, the moon is a harsh and the radioactive wilderness with no environment to conserve. The same goes for asteroids we want to use as refueling stations, which are simply chunks of radiation-battered rock and metal floating through space we could harvest for fuel and building materials by using, of all things, steam powered asteroid-hopping robots. So, while it’s understandable to worry about the carbon footprint of everything that we do, considering the current inaction by so many on pressing climate issues, it’s important to keep things in perspective when doing so. If global warming continues apace, it won’t be thanks to rockets. It will be thanks to stubborn clinging to fossil fuels across the world and pollution from heavy industry and manufacturing.
If we were to push for serious investments in green energy, which is thankfully something that’s already happening, rocket launchers wouldn’t even be a blip on our carbon radar. Before we start asking ourselves how much carbon dioxide a SpaceX Falcon Heavy releases, and how many greenhouse gases it saves by reusing its booster cores, we need to ask ourselves how many coal plants are still powering cities and why, and what it will take to switch them over to clean, renewable sources. Otherwise, we’re doing the equivalent of trying to pay off the national debt by scrimping and saving on how many pencils public school teachers are allowed to get from their school districts. Which would be a funny analogy if it wasn’t true.
Gather ’round the campfire kids, it’s time to tell the sad story of a brave bat named Brian.
On March 15, 2009, we watched in terror as Brian, a Florida free-tailed bat, stubbornly remained attached to Space Shuttle Discovery’s external fuel tank moments before launch (left). On Thursday, ten years later, the European Southern Observatory released a stunning photo feature of the Bat Nebula (right). A coincidence? I think not. [NASA/ESO]
On March 15, 2009, Twitter was days away from its third birthday, Ashton Kutcher was one month away from becoming the first tweep to reach one million followers, and a community of space enthusiasts habitually live-tweeted the final space shuttle launches from the comfort of their homes. They were simpler times.
Wikipedia recognizes Brian’s sacrifice.
One launch, however, became infamous — nay, historic — not for the fact it was one of the last handful of launches of NASA’s shuttle program, but because there was a tiny stowaway attached to the shuttle’s bulbous orange external fuel tank minutes before ignition.
During the countdown to the launch of STS-119, as we watched in anticipation of the successful start of Space Shuttle Discovery’s International Space Station (ISS) servicing mission, something seemed amiss at Discovery’s launch pad. At the time, the assumption was that a fruit bat (a common species in Florida) had mistakenly thought the orange external fuel tank of the shuttle was a tree to latch itself onto. Follow-up investigations identified the bat as a free-tailed bat and, though its intentions were unclear, zoologists posited that the unfortunate critter may have broken its wing. This would explain why it didn’t fly away when the shuttle’s boosters ignited, carrying the bat to the heavens — literally and metaphorically.
No one really knows how long the bat held on for, but some creative-thinkers hypothesized that the bat remained attached for the duration, making it into space. I don’t think I have to explain why this didn’t happen — it was more likely booted from the fuel tank in the first seconds of launch enduring a fiery death via rocket booster exhaust — but it was a poetic thought. Regardless of the bat’s fate, it’s ultimate sacrifice made this routine launch special. What was “just another” live-tweeted shuttle launch, became a spectacle that rapidly evolved into an international news story. That bat was special.
And that bat’s name was Brian.
Why “Brian”? A bit of background: For some personal reason that I cannot fathom, I like to name things “Brian.” I’ve always done it. The squirrel that lives in my backyard? Brian. An interesting and unnamed rock on the surface of Mars? Brian. My first car? Brian. That gopher that demolished my newly-planted garden of impatiens in 2011? Brian. A random free-tailed bat hanging off the shuttle’s external fuel tank? Brian. There’s no reason and no logic behind this, Brian just seems to fit. It’s a personal mystery.
So, when lightheartedly tweeting about the bat on March 15, 2009, I called the bat Brian and the name stuck. I had no idea about its gender, and it didn’t have a nametag, but that bat was a Brian alright. Suddenly, other space enthusiasts following the launch called him Brian and, for reasons I have yet to understand ten years later, in those minutes before launch, “Brian the Bat” went viral and suddenly everyone was personally invested in that “routine” space launch. Yes, there were billions of dollars of hardware on that launchpad with seven brave astronauts on board, but everyone was talking about Brian who was shivering on the side of the vehicle, a place that no living creature should have been.
Was Brian confused? Was he frozen to the cold tank? Would he fly away in the nick of time? No one knew, but the clock was ticking and the commentator on the NASA live video stream seemed confident that, as the boosters began their ignition sequence, the bat would be scared by the vibrations and fly to safety.
For reasons known only to Brian, he remained attached. And as the boosters roared to life, he held tight. As the plume of smoke and steam enveloped Kennedy Space Center Launch Complex 39, I sat with the computer screen nearly pressed to my nose, seeking out the dark pixels of Brian in the place where he was last seen. But the resolution was too low and Brian’s fate was unknown. (Days later, NASA analysts reviewed infrared imagery from the launch, revealing two very sad facts. 1) Brian was warm while attached to the fuel tank, so he hadn’t frozen to death and was alive up to launch, and 2) he remained in place when Discovery lifted off.)
As the adrenaline ebbed and Space Shuttle Discovery soared into the atmosphere, solid rocket boosters separating and tumbling back to Earth, the sad reality crept in. Brian was, in all likelihood, toast.
But his legacy would live on.
Assuming that little space-launch chapter was over, I wrote a summary about Brian’s adventures for Universe Today and on Astroengine with the assumption that Brian would be soon lost to the annals of shuttle-era history. Little did I know, however, that Norwegian journalist Geir Barstein was paying close attention…
Brian landed as a science headline in the Mail Online on March 19, 2009. Read the full article here. [Mail Online]
Brian also made appearances in The Sun newspaper (but the article has since disappeared) and other smaller publications, and I participated in a number of radio shows devoted to that now-famous shuttle launch.
Not only was the whole event a poignant one, it also made me realize something about the power of social media. In all my years covering space stories, particularly when I was a producer at Discovery News (now called “Seeker”), shuttle launches would receive very little attention. Apart from a few outliers, such as the final shuttle launch, the articles I’d publish about one of NASA’s most significant programs would receive very little readership. The routine nature of these launches meant that, unless you were at Cape Canaveral, interest in seeing shuttles launch into space was lukewarm at best. As a space enthusiast, I was frustrated. Every launch in my eyes was special and certainly not “routine.”
Brian, however, made me realize by accident that you have to seek out the unique thing about that one launch that will hook readers to that story. Granted, not all launches have a “Brian the Bat” moment, but that doesn’t mean they’re not special.
Text from ESO: “Hidden in one of the darkest corners of the Orion constellation, this Cosmic Bat is spreading its hazy wings through interstellar space two thousand light-years away. It is illuminated by the young stars nestled in its core — despite being shrouded by opaque clouds of dust, their bright rays still illuminate the nebula. Too dim to be discerned by the naked eye, NGC 1788 reveals its soft colors to ESO’s Very Large Telescope in this image — the most detailed to date.” [ESO]
I like to think that the cosmos is doing Brian a solid by commemorating that brave little bat’s ultimate sacrifice.
The event may have been a footnote in humanity’s quest to explore our universe, but I truly believe that the viral social media (and then mainstream media) attention Brian whipped up created a buzz around a launch that may not have otherwise made an impact.
As a science communicator, I’m always on the lookout for interesting hooks to stories that wouldn’t otherwise be of interest, and on March 15, 2009, Brian was that hook — who knows what kind of impact that little free-tailed bat had on viewers who wouldn’t have otherwise been paying attention to one of the biggest endeavors in human exploration history.
So, tomorrow, on March 15, 2019, raise a drink to Brian’s legacy. He will live on in the spirit he inspired when he left our planet attached to the space shuttle’s external fuel tank.
The private spaceflight company SpaceX has done it again, and this latest achievement is an important one.
Crew Dragon berthed with the space station at 2:51 a.m. PT [NASA]
We space writers are very familiar with Elon Musk’s human spaceflight dreams that can be encapsulated in his well-known goal to “make humanity multi-planetary,” starting with a Mars settlement. And today, that goal took another step closer to reality.
I’ve been following Musk’s rocket adventures ever since his early days of exploding single-engine rockets in the South Pacific. Back then, Musk was a “dreamer” and more than a little eccentric. His eccentricities are well documented, but the world’s best known billionaire-entrepreneur is a dreamer no more. The first successful flight of a Falcon 1 happened on Sept. 28, 2008. (You can read my 2008 Space Lifestyle Magazine article on that topic, page 36) A little over a decade later, the Falcon 1 has rapidly evolved into the reusable Falcon 9 workhorse and the Falcon Heavy and, with key partnerships with NASA and companies that need to get stuff into orbit cheaply, SpaceX has developed the human-rated Dragon spacecraft to ultimately get astronauts to the space station, and beyond.
After proving itself in the cargo-delivery arena, the Dragon has now won its human-spaceflight wings: an (uncrewed) Crew Dragon is now attached to the International Space Station’s Harmony module and the outpost’s astronauts have entered the vehicle.
Building a commercially-viable space infrastructure is paramount if humanity is to truly become multi-planetary, and through partnerships between private business and government contracts, today’s achievement is proof that this model can work.
Too often, governments lack the long-term vision for human space exploration, instead plowing money into bloated, politically motivated, and ultimately doomed federally-funded projects. SpaceX may be an exhausting company to work for, but its ultimate mission is crystal clear. It’s not a satellite-launching company, it’s just doing that to build funds to do the Next Big Thing. Dragon’s autonomous berthing with the space station is That Big Thing that will drive more investment into getting stuff beyond Earth orbit.
Musk’s interim target — before getting humans to Mars — is the moon, to create a permanently-crewed lunar base. How that will shape up remains to be seen, but if there’s one thing I’ve learnt from following his dreams of getting into space on a reusable spaceflight infrastructure, it’s don’t bet against SpaceX and Elon Musk’s “eccentricities.”
Now that Opportunity’s mission is complete, many wistfully lament about “bringing our robot home.” There’s just one problem: it’s already home.
A rendering of Opportunity on Mars [NASA/JPL-Caltech]
I am fascinated with how we anthropomorphize robots, particularly space robots. We call them “brave,” “pioneers” and even give them genders — usually a “she.” We get emotional when they reach the end of their missions, saying they’ve “died” or, as I like to say, “gone to Silicon Heaven.” But these robots are, for all intents and purposes, tools. Sure, they expand the reach of our senses, allowing us to see strange new worlds and parts of the universe where humans fear to tread, but they’re an assembly of electronics, metal, plastic, sensors, transmitters, wheels and solar panels. They don’t have emotions. They don’t breathe. They don’t philosophize about the incredible feats of exploration they are undertaking. They don’t have genders.
Still, we fall in love. When watching Curiosity land on Mars from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, I teared up, full of joy that the six-wheeled hulk of a rover — that I’d met personally in JPL’s clean room a couple of years before — had safely landed on the Red Planet. After watching NASA’s InSight lander touch down on Elysium Planitia, again via JPL’s media room last year, there it was again, I was in love. I’m already anthropomorphizing the heck out of that mission, seeing InSight’s landing as another “heartbeat” on Mars. When the European Rosetta mission found Philae lying on its side like a discarded child’s toy on the surface of comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, I jumped up from my desk with joy. When Cassini’s mission at Saturn ended in 2017, I was miserable. When the Chinese rover Yutu rolled off its lander in 2014, I realized I was cheering the robot on. When Spirit got stuck in a sand trap in Gusev Crater, I set up a Google alert for any and all news on the recovery efforts.
These emotions aren’t just for the exciting science and engineering strides humanity makes, there’s a certain inspirational character that each robot brings. Undoubtedly, this character naturally emerges from the wonderful scientists and engineers who design and build these amazing machines, and the social media managers who often “speak” for their robots in first person. But if you strip away the science, the technology and the people who build them, we still personalize our beloved robots, giving them their own character and creating a cartoon personality. I believe that’s a beautiful trait in the human condition (except a few flawed cultural and stereotypical missteps) and can be used to great effect to captivate the general public with the science that these robots do.
Opportunity’s landing site inside Eagle crater [NASA/JPL-Caltech]
So there’s no great surprise about the outpouring of emotion for last week’s announcement that NASA called off the communications efforts with Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity. This kick-ass robot traveled 28 miles and lasted nearly 15 years, until a global dust storm in early 2018 starved it of sunlight. It landed on Mars way back in 2004, with its twin, Spirit, beginning its Martian reign with a hole-in-one, literally — after bouncing and rolling across the regolith after its entry and descent, encased inside a genius airbag system, it plopped inside the tiny Eagle crater. We’ve collectively lived through Opportunity’s adventures and the groundbreaking science it has done. There’s a huge number of terrific robot obituaries out there, so I won’t duplicate those efforts here. There is, however, a recurring sentiment that is somewhat misplaced, though entirely innocent.
Opportunity — like Spirit and all the Mars rovers and landers that have come and gone — died at home.
This may sound like an odd statement, but there seems to be this fascination with “returning” our space robots to Earth. I’ve seen cartoons of the Dr Who traveling through time to “rescue” Opportunity. People have argued for the case of future Mars astronauts returning these artifacts to terrestrial museums. There’s that touching XKCD cartoon of Spirit being “stranded” on Mars after NASA declared it lost in 2010, that is being resurfaced for Opportunity. We want our dusty Mars rover back!
Dusty rover [NASA/JPL-Caltech]
It’s understandable, that rover has been continuously exploring Mars for a decade and a half, many of its fans, including myself, could check in on Opportunity’s adventures daily, browsing the latest batch of raw images that were uploaded to the NASA servers. We love that thing. In the tradition of military service members who die abroad, we go to great efforts to bring their bodies home so they can repatriated; we want to repatriate our science service member back to Earth.
But Opportunity is a robot that was designed for Mars. Every single design consideration took the Martian environment into account. The Red Planet’s gravity is roughly 1/3rd that of Earth, so the weight on its actuators and chassis are 2/3rds less than what they’d experience on our planet. Its motors are too under powered to reliably drive the robot forward on Earth. On Mars, they’re perfect. Granted, the mass of the Mars Exploration Rovers (approximately 185 kg) are a lot less than their supersized cousin, Curiosity (899 kg), but if Opportunity and Spirit had a 90-day mission exploring the dunes of the Californian Mojave Desert, I’m betting they wouldn’t get very far; they would be under-powered and grind to a halt. They’d also likely overheat as they were designed to withstand the incredibly low temperatures on the Martian surface.
The robots we send to Mars are undeniably Martian. If we’re going to anthropomorphize these beautiful machines, let’s think about what they’d want. I’m guessing they’d want to stay on that dusty terrain and not return to the alien place where they were constructed. And, in doing so, they become the first generation of archaeological sites on the Red Planet that, one day, the first biological Martians will visit.
“You know what it means? You’re an artist, not a physicist.”
Twenty years later, those words still haunt me.
I was actually a bit surprised to remember this quote, but after a conversation with astrophysicist, science communicator and Twitter buddy Sophia Gad-Nasr, who was commenting on a tweet from @dsxnchezz, I found myself emotionally thinking back to a personal struggle I wanted to share.
The tweet:
Professors: the way you talk to your students matters. By telling your class you expect they learned something prior to taking your class, you *literally* create a learning block that will prevent them from asking important questions from fear of embarrassment. DO NOT DO THIS. https://t.co/pT8lQRKPFp
My first semester of studying physics at university was unexpectedly (though, in hindsight, not so surprisingly) rough: I had to confront a demon that I’d spent years running away from. You see, I’m bad at math (or, as we Brits like to call it, “maths”), to the point where I used to be convinced that I wouldn’t progress anywhere in physics. Mental arithmetic is very difficult, calculus is hell, I’m no fan of trig, and I have to spend an extra minute double checking my additions (employing the use of all my available digits). Usually, this would be a minor annoyance, but in the winter of 1999, it became an obvious gaping wound in my abilities as a wannabe astrophysicist. Throw this on top of my history of anxiety, rather than confronting the issue, I’d bury it. If I didn’t think about it, where’s the worry? Unfortunately, I had to think about it.
All the way through my GCSEs and A Levels (the qualifications that you’d take at school before going to university in the late 90’s in the UK) I was a decent student. I was never late with coursework, never skipped class and always tried my best. I was extremely lucky to have very supportive parents and very privileged to live 15 minutes from what I consider to be the best comprehensive (re: state-funded) school in my hometown of Bristol. While not a “straight A” student, I certainly performed well and, during my A Levels I was able to pick up a pleasing A, B and C, for Technology, Physics, and Geography, respectively, nabbing the exact number of UCAS points I needed to secure a place at my first choice university on the beautiful west coast of Wales — The University of Wales, Aberystwyth.
I was riding high and the future was bright. But I always had this baggage buried deep in the back of my brain: I’m bad at math.
If you’ve been through the UK route to university physics, you’ll notice a big, red, flashing neon sign of a problem with my choice of A Levels:
🚨 THERE’S NO MATHEMATICS 🚨
This fact wasn’t lost on the university representatives at the various higher-education fairs I’d attended from 1996 to 1998. A physics rep from one of the more “prestigious” universities had the biggest assholey reaction when I said that, yes! it is true that I’m not studying mathematics at A Level: “You can forget doing physics, then,” he scoffed, before chuckling about it to his buddy. Yep, chuckled. His disdain for the gall a math-anemic student had to approach him to inquire about their astrophysics course was too much for his stupendous brain to bear, it seemed. Fortunately, he was an outlier, the majority of other reps were generally kind, supportive and helpful, but it gave me pause. Was I under-qualified? Was my inability to grasp mathematics going to be a real problem for my dream of studying black holes, galaxies, alien worlds and the Big Bang?
Screw those guys, I thought. Fortunately the detractors at that phase of my education were rare and, though they did nothing to boost my confidence in math, they didn’t dull my excitement for studying physics university. Besides, I’d nailed my grades! Onward to Aberystwyth!
***Aside: Before I continue, I need to emphasize that all my (many) years at university were amazing. To have the wonderful good fortune to live and study in arguably one of the most beautiful places in the world was humbling. As a university town, Aber couldn’t have been a better choice. I made a diverse group of lifelong friends, got a wonderful education, somehow managed to spend a semester in the Arctic studying the aurora, grew as a person, lost an appendix, and developed an appreciation for the Welsh language, all while enjoying the highest density (at the time) of pubs per capita. I only have fond memories of the physics department and all the members of staff and fellow students. The following is more of a conversation about the culture in higher education and how certain assumptions can damage the confidence of students, possibly creating an intellectual barrier for their progression, inspired by the above conversation with Sophia.***
So, with my A Levels behind me, I was ready for university. I was 18 and excited to get the introductory physics courses out of the way so I could dive into the wonders of the cosmos. Ha! Sorry, I couldn’t write that with a straight face; I was excited the meet girls and have a great time playing pub golf and partying until 5am. But once the alcohol haze had lifted after Freshers Week, reality struck. Because I didn’t have a mathematics A Level, I had to take an introductory math course “to get me up to speed” with the mathematical tools I’d need to complete my undergraduate degree. This wasn’t an unfair ask and I had little problem with tackling it. The university had a system in place that made an honest and clear effort to make sure no student was left behind. In some ways, the fact that I had to confront my math angst head-on was reassuring. After all, how the heck could I navigate a career in physics while avoiding math at all costs? Spoiler: I couldn’t and I didn’t want to. It was a fresh start, a ripping of the Band Aid, an anxiety detox. I was ready. Hit me!
To say I enjoyed these early math lectures would be a lie, but I did get a sense of satisfaction from taking them. The lecturers were generally good and delivered a well-organized curriculum. Alongside the intro math, I was doing all the other stuff my colleagues were doing, except for the theoretical classes that left smudges of squiggled chalked integrals and partial differential equations on the blackboard in the lecture theater when my introductory class started. In these early days of my university career, those squiggles may as well have been Egyptian hieroglyphics. But, gradually, like a sapling unfurling from the dirt, I was developing my own way of dealing with math: repetition. I was making progress and I could imagine that, one day, I’d be like my physics friends who could stand up in front of a lecture hall, drawing squiggles with my piece of chalk and explaining why Fourier transforms are so great. Although much of my learning was done parrot fashion, without a lot of comprehension about what I was doing at the time, I was able to, at worst, wing it.
So far, so good, right?
The Pen Game
The whole point of this story is leading to one, singular — nay, pivotal — moment in a cramped office of my first-year supervisor. Every week, small groups of us had meetings with our allocated lecturer-supervisors. My supervisor (who will remain unnamed because he’s not really the point of this story, though he did get under my skin), an older, well-respected professor with thick-rimmed glasses and eccentric humor, really didn’t want to be there. And nor did I. Each week, he’d try to get the most entertainment out of his supervised students, including me and three others who were suffering from the same no-math affliction. These meetings were supposed to be for us to have a space to discuss our math-related struggles and progress, with no fear of embarrassment.
To pass the time, and enforce his own quirky way of teaching, the professor would have this recurring game where he’d drop a bunch of pens on his desk and ask us what number it represents. It was maddening, didn’t make sense and he’d always make us feel shitty for making a blind guess. What’s more, we didn’t get the point, was this a profound lesson in math? Philosophy? Counting the seconds until all the pens had stopped rolling? I took a flier: as the pens landed, some would cross another on the desk, coming to a stop, so I counted the number of crossed pens and shouted “Two!”
Without hesitation, he replied, “No! Wrong! You’re wrong!” And so he’d drop the pens again and ask the same silly question, “What number?”
Obvious eccentricities to one side, the good professor was pissing me off. And I suppose that was the point. So, the following week I went into that office and paid attention to everything. I made a note of the time, the air temperature, the number of other items on his desk… and then I saw it. The four of us sat down and the professor grabbed his usual pens and dropped them on the desk. Without waiting for him to say a word, I blurted “FIVE!”
He looked at my smiling face and nodded. Fireworks erupted in my brain, I’d passed his stupid test. My three colleagues looked at me in astonishment. “Let’s do it again,”—he dropped the pens a second time—”how many?”
“Eight!” I felt like I’d won the professor’s admiration and approval. I might be bad at math, but damn I’m good at this game. He smiled and nodded again. He asked me to tell everyone how I did it. Feeling cocky, I just said, “look at his fingers.” Every time he dropped the pens, he’d lean on the desk, extending a different number of fingers after each drop. All I was doing was counting his goddamn fingers!
And now for the lesson of this stupid game, words that I’ve never forgotten.
“Whenever I’ve played this game,” he started, “it’s always artists who guess it correctly, physicists focus too much on the pens. You know what it means? You’re an artist, not a physicist.” He pointed at me, no longer smiling.
Besides my confusion that it was apparently a bad thing to correctly find a solution to this stupid game, why was I being branded an “artist”? There is nothing wrong with being an artist, or so I thought, but I had chosen a career path to become a physicist. What’s more, I was in a class specifically focused on supporting students who lacked the math qualifications to do physics. It seemed like a teaching self-own. Over the years, I assumed it was his way to motivate me to work harder at math—yes! Reverse psychology! Shame me into doing better! But, nah, the opposite happened.
Impostor syndrome is something, I’ve recently realized, that goes hand-in-hand with my anxiety, so to get verbal confirmation of my personal doubt was like a punch to the gut. I was ready to quit; who was I fooling? I was out of my depth. My excitement for physics fell off a cliff and, with the endorsement of an authority figure who, for whatever reason wanted to make his students feel shitty, had rubber-stamped my self-doubt.
A Better Way
I didn’t quit, but if it wasn’t for the social group that I had, I might have. My challenge with math wasn’t the only mountain I was climbing at the time. Like most undergrad students at university, simply navigating life was hard. But I was lucky, I had a girlfriend and a solid group of friends, a supportive family and a love for the student life. However, drop-out rates in physics are high, or they were 20 years ago, and what was becoming abundantly clear was this arrogant assumption that to be good at physics, I had to be good at math.
After the Pen Game, I became acutely aware of the teaching practices of my lecturers. Lessons would begin with innocuous, throw-away statements like (I paraphrase), “you all know this already,” “you hibernated through school/lived under a rock if you don’t know this,” “let’s skip these steps, if you don’t get it, read a book,” and, my personal favorite, “don’t come crying to me if/when you fail.” Back then, those statements weren’t strange, they were simply educators—many of whom didn’t really want to be teaching, they had research grants to apply for—trying to be witty or, under pressure to deliver their class, they really wanted to make sure they could fit in the entire syllabus in the allotted time. I felt even more precarious when my introductory math courses finished and I should have been “up to speed” with the mathematical tools for a bright physics future. Alas, though I was undoubtedly better at math, my confidence had ebbed to zero.
Fortunately, my want to continue living the university life outweighed my anxieties and I learned to live with it. I didn’t ask for help (in hindsight, I should have), and math just became my dirty secret. It was a specter that followed me around the campus. That said, I was good at physics; I had a great conceptual grasp of all the topics and meandered my way through the math. But the real turning point for me happened when studying the final semester of my Masters year in the high-Arctic, on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard. The EU-funded exchange program (Reason 1,324 why I have very strong feelings against Brexit; I took for granted the research and study programs that the UK could seamlessly participate in and I’m devastated that the next generation of students/researchers may not have the same, broad opportunities), that gave me the chance to experience real research on the aurora and other space weather phenomena in this incredible part of the world, made me think of math differently. I’d found my passion—the sun-Earth interaction—and suddenly, I realized math wasn’t the barrier. It was my anxiety and fear. I’d built mathematics up into this impenetrable barrier rather than viewing it as the tool that builds physics theory. Long story short, I had to literally travel to the ends of the Earth (well, the top of the Earth) for me to realize that, ya know, math ain’t that bad.
I went on to do a Ph.D in solar physics—specifically coronal loops, an origin of space weather—and, during a random research trip to Hawaii to work with colleagues who were based in Honolulu, I met my wife. So, I have no regrets and, as I type this from my computer at home in Los Angeles, I remember my struggle with math with fondness, oddly enough. And I have no problems using all my available digits to do basic arithmetic. I even do it in public.
We live at a time where science is regularly overlooked and often derided (re: climate change deniers, anti-vaxxers, flat-earthers etc.) and we need all the most talented critical thinkers to take on careers in science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics (STEAM) in order to confront some of the biggest challenges facing our planet. So, educators of all levels, never make assumptions of the abilities of your students; just a throwaway comment like “I’m sure you already know this…” can boost needless anxiety in learning.
NASA’s Cassini mission captured this view of icy moon Enceladus on March 29, 2017. The crescent is lit by the sun, but the near-side green hue is reflected sunlight bouncing off Saturn’s atmosphere — a.k.a. “Saturn glow” (NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute)
The day before Cassini plunged into Saturn’s atmosphere, dramatically ending 13 years of Saturn exploration (and nearly two decades in space), I was sitting on a bench outside the Von Karman Visitor Center on the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory campus in La Cañada Flintridge with Linda Spilker, who served as the mission’s project scientist since before Cassini was launched.
“I feel very fortunate to be involved with Cassini since the very beginning … and just to be there, to be one of the first to see SOI [Saturn Orbital Insertion] with those first incredible ring pictures,” she told me. “I love being an explorer. I worked on the Voyager mission during the flybys of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune; that sort of whet my appetite and made me want more, to become an explorer to go to the Saturn system.”
Spilker especially loved studying Saturn’s rings, not only from a scientific perspective, but also because they are so beautiful, she continued. “It’s been a heartwarming experience,” she said.
Before Cassini crashed into Saturn’s atmosphere, it took a series of observations that created this mosaic of Saturn and its rings. Cassini plunged into the Saturnian atmosphere on Sept. 15 (NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute/Mindaugas Macijauskas)
But Cassini’s “legacy discovery,” said Spilker, was the revelation that the tiny icy moon of Enceladus is active, venting water vapor into space from powerful geysers emerging from the moon’s “tiger stripes” — four long fissures in the moon’s south pole. After multiple observations of these geysers and direct sampling of the water particles during flybys, Cassini deduced that the icy space marble hides a warm, salty ocean.
“What Cassini will be remembered for — its legacy discovery — will be the geysers coming from Enceladus with the ocean with the potential for life. It’s a paradigm shift.” — Linda J. Spilker, Cassini project scientist, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Sept. 14, 2017.
Alongside Jupiter’s moon Europa, Enceladus has become a prime destination for future explorations of life beyond Earth. Its subsurface ocean contains all the ingredients for life as we know it and Cassini was the mission that inadvertently discovered its biological potential. So now we know about this potential, Spilker is keen to see a dedicated life-hunting mission that could go to Enceladus, perhaps even landing on the surface to return samples to Earth.
Artist impression of Cassini flying through Enceladus’ water plumes venting from the moon’s south pole (NASA/JPL-Caltech)
As Enceladus is much smaller and less massive than Europa, its gravity is lower, meaning that landing on the surface is an easier task. Also, the radiation surrounding Saturn is much less aggressive than Jupiter’s radiation belts, meaning less radiation shielding is needed for spacecraft going to Saturn’s moons.
But if we ever send a surface mission to Enceladus (or any of the icy moons in the outer solar system), the planetary protection requirements will be extreme.
“If any life were found on these moons, it would be microbial,” said Larry Soderblom, an interdisciplinary scientist on the Cassini mission. “Some [terrestrial] bacteria are very resilient and can survive in hot acid-reducing environments. They can be tenacious. We have to make sure we don’t leave any of these kinds of Earthly bacteria on these promising moons.”
Soderblom has a unique perspective on solar system exploration. His career spans a huge number of NASA missions since the 1960’s, including Mariner 6, 7, 9, Viking, Voyager, Galileo, Magellan, Mars Pathfinder, the Mars Exploration Rovers, Deep Space 1, to name a few. While chatting to me under the shade of a tree on the JPL campus, he pointed out that the outer solar system was seen as a very different place over half a century ago.
“When I started to explore the solar system as a young guy just out of graduate school, our minds-eye view of the outer solar system was pretty bleak,” he remembered. “We expected lifeless, dead, battered moons with no geologic activity.”
After being involved with many outer solar system missions, this view has radically changed. Not only have we discovered entire oceans on Enceladus and Europa, there’s active volcanoes on Jupiter’s tortured moon Io, an atmosphere on Titan sporting its own methane cycle and surface lakes of methane and ethane. Other moons show hints of extensive subsurface oceans too, including distant Triton, a moon of Neptune. When NASA’s New Horizons flew past Pluto in 2015, the robotic spacecraft didn’t see a barren, dull rock as all the artistic impressions that came before seemed to suggest. The dwarf planet is a surprisingly dynamic place with a rich geologic history.
With a diameter of only 313 miles, tiny Enceladus is a surprising powerhouse of internal activity. Subsurface oceans are heated through tidal interactions with Saturn (and, possibly, radioactivity in its rocky core), forcing water through its south pole fissures (NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Sending our robotic emissaries to these distant and unforgiving places has revolutionized our understanding of the solar system and our place in it. Rather than the gas and ice giant moons being dull, barren and static, our exploration has revealed a rich bounty of geologic variety. Not only that, we’re almost spoilt for choices for our next giant leap of scientific discovery.
Missions like Cassini are essential for science. Before that spacecraft entered Saturn orbit 13 years ago, we had a very limited understanding of what the Saturnian system was all about. Now we can confidently say that there’s a tiny moon there with incredible biological potential — Enceladus truly is Cassini’s legacy discovery that will keep our imaginations alive until we land on the ice to explore its alien ocean.
For more on my trip to JPL, read my two HowStuffWorks articles:
A radio astronomy project intended to find signals from intelligent aliens has announced the intriguing detections of “repeating” fast radio bursts (FRBs) from a single source in a galaxy three billion light-years distant. This is definitely an exciting development, but probably not for the reasons you think.
The ambitious $100 million Breakthrough Listen project aims to scan a million stars in our galaxy and dozens of nearby galaxies across radio frequencies and visible light in hopes of discovering a bona fide artificial signal that could be attributed to an advanced alien civilization. But in its quest, Breakthrough Listen has studied the signals emanating from FRB 121102 — and recorded 15 bursts — to better understand what might be causing it.
FRBs remain a mystery. First detected by the Parkes Radio Telescope in Australia, these very brief bursts of radio emissions seemed to erupt from random locations in the sky. But the same location never produced another FRB, making these bizarre events very difficult to understand and impossible to track.
Hypotheses ranged from powerful bursts of energy from supernovae to active galactic nuclei to (you guessed it) aliens, but until FRB 121102 repeated itself in 2015, several of these hypotheses could be ruled out. Supernovae, after all, only have to happen once — this FRB source is repeating, possibly hinting at a periodic energetic phenomenon we don’t yet understand. Also, because FRB 121102 is a repeater, in 2016 astronomers could trace back the location of its source to a dwarf galaxy 3 billion light-years from Earth.
Now we ponder the question: What in the universe generates powerful short bursts of radio emissions from inside a dwarf galaxy, repeatedly?
Using the Green Bank Telescope in the West Virginia, scientists of Breakthrough Listen recorded 400 TB of data over a five hour period on Aug. 26. In these data, 15 FRBs were recorded across the 4 to 8 GHz radio frequency band. The researchers noted the characteristic frequency dispersion of these FRBs, caused by the signal traveling through gas between us and the source.
Now that we have dedicated and extremely detailed measurements of this set of FRBs, astrophysicists can get to work trying to understand what natural phenomenon is generating these bursts. This is the story so far, but as we’re talking radio emissions, mysteries and a SETI project, aliens are never far away…
Probably Not Aliens
It may be exciting to talk about the possibility of aliens generating this signal — as a means of communication or, possibly, transportation via beamed energy — but that avenue of speculation is just that: speculation. But to speculate is understandable. FRBs are very mysterious and, so far, astrophysicists don’t have a solid answer.
But this mystery isn’t without precedent.
In 1967, astronomers Jocelyn Bell Burnell and Antony Hewish detected strange radio pulses emanating from a point in the sky during a quasar survey to study interplanetary scintillation (IPS). The mysterious pulses had an unnaturally precise period of 1.33 seconds. At the time, nothing like it had been recorded and the researchers were having a hard time explaining the observations. But in the back of their minds, they speculated that, however unlikely, the signal might be produced by an alien intelligence.
“We did not really believe that we had picked up signals from another civilization, but obviously the idea had crossed our minds and we had no proof that it was an entirely natural radio emission. It is an interesting problem – if one thinks one may have detected life elsewhere in the universe how does one announce the results responsibly? Who does one tell first? We did not solve the problem that afternoon, and I went home that evening very cross here was I trying to get a Ph.D. out of a new technique, and some silly lot of little green men had to choose my aerial and my frequency to communicate with us.”
This first source was nicknamed “LGM-1” (as in “Little Green Men-1”), but far from being an artificial source, the duo had actually identified the first pulsar — a rapidly-spinning, highly magnetized neutron star that generates powerful emissions from its precessing magnetic poles as it rotates.
This is how science works: An interesting signal is detected and theories are formulated as to how that signal could have been generated.
In the case of LGM-1, it was caused by an as-yet-to-be understood phenomenon involving a rapidly-spinning stellar corpse. In the case of FRB 121102, it is most likely an equally as compelling phenomenon, only vastly more powerful.
The least likely explanation of FRB 121102 makes a LOT of assumptions, namely: aliens that have become so incredibly technologically advanced (think type II or even type III on the Kardashev Scale) that they can fire a (presumably) narrow beam directly at us through intergalactic space over and over again (to explain the repeated FRB detections) — the odds of which would be vanishingly low — unless the signal is omnidirectional, so they’d need to access way more energy to make this happen. Another assumption could be that intelligent, technologically advanced civilizations are common, so it was only a matter of time before we saw a signal like FRB 121102.
Or it could be a supermassive black hole (say) doing something very energetic that science can’t yet explain.
Occam’s razor suggests the latter might be more reasonable.
This isn’t to say aliens don’t exist or that intelligent aliens aren’t transmitting radio signals, it just means the real cause of this particular FRB repeater is being generated by a known phenomenon doing something unexpected, or a new (and potentially more exciting) phenomenon that’s doing something exotic and new. It doesn’t always have to be aliens.
h/t:
PSA: Things can go bump (or burst!) in the cosmos and be compelling/fascinating/intriguing without being ALIENS!
astroengine.com 