Interview with Dr. Stephen Hawking

For some light entertainment, you may want to view John Oliver's interview with Dr. Stephen Hawking as the discuss time travel, artificial intelligence, and parallel universes.  Dr. Hawking proves he has a sense of humor though all of it.  The HBO show is called Last Week Tonight, and the series is called Great Minds: People Who Think Good. 

Dr. Hawking has spoken on artificial intelligence in other more serious forums and provides us with a pretty dire warning.  In The Independent, Dr. Hawking wrote:

One can imagine such technology outsmarting financial markets, out-inventing human researchers, out-manipulating human leaders, and developing weapons we cannot even understand. Whereas the short-term impact of AI depends on who controls it, the long-term impact depends on whether it can be controlled at all.

Something to ponder as we rush headlong into the future.

Questions About NASA's Budget Plans

Phil Plait had a good article in Slate earlier this week that questions NASA's reliance on the planned Space Launch System (SLS), noting it may be a drag on entire space program, enrich large contractors over smaller, more nimble competitors (e.g., SpaceX), and keep us on a path that relies on the Russians for entry into space.  Not a very good series of events.  He notes, 

Bottom line: [Senator] Shelby’s addition makes it easier for SLS to get built, and harder for commercial companies to build their own vehicles to send humans into space (and, importantly, can do it far, far cheaper than SLS can). That means we’ll have to rely on the Russians more for the time being. That’s something we really, really need to stop doing. They’re gouging us for rides to space, and their political situation isn’t exactly the most conducive for us right now...And worst of all, we still don’t have a clear and sustained purpose for SLS. Our government wants to spend billions upon billions of dollars on a rocket for no defined reason. It’s maddening. 

This is what you get when you run a space program via a committee of 535 politicians who are more interested in the jobs for their districts than the overall benefits for mankind.  Maybe the silver lining concerning tensions with Russia is that we start to think of competing in space again.  That seemed to get us to the moon, and it may be necessary to get us to Mars.

Image Credit:  NASA - http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/623766main_8143_Singer-AD_industry_day-021312_FINAL3.pdf

The Returning Ghost Ship

If you recall the first Star Trek movie in 1979, a returning spacecraft caused quite a bit of carnage on its way back to Earth.  In that case it was V'GER, but we are now faced with a real returning spacecraft from many years ago called ISEE.  It sound as mysterious, if not all-knowing, but we have this one figured out from the start.

The International Sun-Earth Explorer-3 (ISEE-3) was launched back in 1978, one year before the Star

Trek movie, to study solar winds.  It was later re-purposed as the International Cometary Explorer (ICE) to study the plasma tail of Comet Giacobini-Zinner on September 11, 1985.  The spacecraft was decommissioned in May 1997 and NASA lost the ability to communicate with the spacecraft in 1999.  But now it is back, and the rest of the story involves space piracy, a McDonald's restaurant, and a company called Skycorp that sounds a lot like a company from the movie Terminator (and we know how that ended for everyone). 


ISEE-3/ICE is approaching the Earth and a few private scientists have asked NASA for permission to communicate with the spacecraft one last time using funds obtained through crowd-funding.  The scientists hope to reorient the spacecraft so it can conduct more solar wind work.  The whole story and cast of characters was well-told in a New York Times article last Sunday.  It's quite a tale and we can only hope ISEE-3/ICE is a little less confused than V-GER as it approaches Earth. 

Update:  The attempt to restart the spacecraft failed earlier this month.  The team stated, "...we think there is a chance that the Nitrogen used as a pressuring for the monopropellant Hydrazine propulsion system may have been depleted."  However, the team is not giving up.  They believe they can heat up the fuel tank to free up the required Nitrogen.  Stay tuned. 

Beware the City-Busters from On High

Don Yeomans from the Near Earth Object Program Office in NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has been in the news discussing the risk of asteroid strikes here on Earth.  Back on June 9th he was the featured scientist in Time magazine's "The Man Who Guards The Planet," and more recently he has interviewed on 60 Minutes by Anderson Cooper in an episode titled Cosmic Roulette.  The story accompanying the 60 Minutes piece notes:

Though scientists are keeping an eye on most of the large asteroids and comets capable of causing global destruction by colliding with Earth, they have been able to track only one percent of the smaller ones that are capable of destroying an entire city, Anderson Cooper reports this Sunday on 60 Minutes. Cooper's story also reveals that NASA scientists first learned about the asteroid that exploded in Russia in February from Twitter and YouTube. There was no advance warning.

The issue is getting attention, but it is getting funding?  Barely, at about $40 million in 2013.  We are not too good about self-preservation unless the danger is clear and present, which is unlikely on the cosmic scale we need to deal with here.  And few nations have the luxury of peering into the heavens while man is so capable of creating a hell here on Earth, the latest being Ukraine, Syria, and Iraq.  With the U.S. carrying about 98 percent of the burden, it would be nice to have a few more nations on board. 

You can visit the NEO website if you want to learn more about the asteroid detection process and even learn about the next near approaches by the monitored asteroids.  As you can see from the table below, two were scheduled to make near passes today (2014 HN178 and 2007 FY20). 

I'm glad someone is tracking these items, though I am not so sure we will have the necessary 20-30 years warning to properly prepare. 

Crater Image and Table Credit:  http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/images/meteorcrater.html

Don Yeomans Image Credit:  Time magazine

Looking for that Next Earth

A lot of attention is being paid to the newly discovered Kepler 10c, a planet twice as large as Earth and 17 times heavier.  About 560 light years from Earth, this planet takes 45 days to orbit its sun.  In the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics press release announcing the finding, researcher Dimitar Sasselov, director of the Harvard Origins of Life Initiatives, stated "This is the Godzilla of Earths!" But unlike the movie monster, Kepler-10c has positive implications for life."

What I find even more interesting is the age of  the solar system hosting Kepler-10.  It is about 11 billion years old, having formed less than 3 billion years after the Big Bang.  So in addition to a planet more than twice the size of Earth, it is also more than twice as old.  What does this rocky world tell us about the available elements for planet building.  And what has been happening on that planet all this time? 

Estimates on the number of Earth-like planets and the likelihood of life continue to abound.  One recent paper, Assessing the Possibility of Biological Complexity on Other Worlds, with an Estimate of the Occurrence of Complex Life in the Milky Way Galaxy, put the estimated number of Earth-like planets about about 100 million in the Milky Way alone.  The paper concludes, "It supports the view that the evolution of complex life on other worlds is rare in frequency but large in absolute number." That provides ample ammunition for many more stories about new worlds. 

Great Image: Hubble Ultra Deep Field

Last week NASA released an amazing image of the universe from the Hubble Space Telescope that took 9 years to create. It is a beautiful composite of of more than 10,000 colorful galaxies stretching back to the beginning of the universe.  Here is the official explanation from NASA: 

Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have assembled a comprehensive picture of the evolving universe – among the most colorful deep space images ever captured by the 24-year-old telescope.

Researchers say the image, in new study called the Ultraviolet Coverage of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, provides the missing link in star formation. The Hubble Ultra Deep Field 2014 image is a composite of separate exposures taken in 2003 to 2012 with Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys and Wide Field Camera 3.

Astronomers previously studied the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF) in visible and near-infrared light in a series of images captured from 2003 to 2009. The HUDF shows a small section of space in the southern-hemisphere constellation Fornax. Now, using ultraviolet light, astronomers have combined the full range of colors available to Hubble, stretching all the way from ultraviolet to near-infrared light. The resulting image -- made from 841 orbits of telescope viewing time -- contains approximately 10,000 galaxies, extending back in time to within a few hundred million years of the big bang.

Image Credit:  http://hubblesite.org/news/2014/27

One Step Closer to US Flights to the ISS

With the unveiling of SpaceX's Dragon V2 last week, the United States is that much closer to flying its own astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) as it once did under the US space shuttle program.  After multiple successful Dragon V1 resupply missions to the ISS, SpaceX is taking the next step to carry humans.  Elon Musk walked an audience through the features of the spacecraft at the unveiling. 

What will be unique about this reusable spacecraft is that it will return to Earth and land like a helicopter, unlike the sea-splashing capsules or even the plane-like landing of the shuttles.  The Dragon V2 will still have a parachute for emergency backup during landing.  And the new spacecraft can carry up to seven astronauts, though they will sit in two tiers while being transported to the ISS.  The Dragon V2 is a capsule and not a working platform similar to the shuttle where the astronauts can move around and conduct their work.  However, SpaceX has also created the unmanned DragonLab that serves as a stand-alone platform for research.

In partnership with NASA, SpaceX is moving us in the right direction and away from dependence on the Russians.