*michael parekh on IT*

ON A PLAN B FOR SPACE TRAVEL

FINAL FRONTIER

There are a lot of questions of late as to what NASA should really be focused on over the next few years, especially under the new Obama administration.  This piece in the Orlando Sentinel recently reviewed some of the pragmatic options.

But reading this op-ed by Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute really got me thinking different about what our space efforts might be focused on.  First he takes us back to the reality of space that many of us might not have thought about since childhood:

"The fastest rocket ever launched, NASA’s New Horizons probe to Pluto, roared off its pad in 2006 at 10 miles per second. That pace would be impressive in the morning commute, and it’s passably adequate for traversing the solar system, something we’ve done and will continue to do.

Combustion rockets, like New Horizons, can deliver you to the Moon in a matter of days, Mars in a matter of months, and the outer planets in a matter of years. But a trip to Proxima Centauri, the nearest star beyond the Sun and 100 million times farther from us than the Moon, would consume a tedious 800 centuries or so. You’ll want to upgrade..."

The piece then goes into the technical, monetary and biological hurdles to take us to where we've really wanted to go ever since we first started to gaze at the stars.

And it gets depressing just like when we first found out there is no Santa Claus.

But he then starts to talk about the glass half full:

"But there’s another technology that’s developing at a breakneck clip, and with which our grandchildren could make virtual trips to other solar systems. It’s called telepresence — a collection of technologies that extends vision, hearing and touch far beyond the corporeal confines of our nervous system.

Consider that in 1965 the Mariner 4 spacecraft made the first fuzzy photos of Mars with a black-and-white TV camera boasting 40,000 pixels. The HiRISE camera now operating onboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter sports 200 million pixels. It can snap photos of objects just three feet across.

That’s resolution comparable to what’s on Google Earth, which many people use to examine remote parts of the globe or inspect cities known only from the nightly news. Google Mars takes advantage of the high-quality imagery being collected by our robotic orbiters, enabling armchair astronauts to peruse the red planet in considerable detail without the angst of transporting their delicate protoplasm 34 million miles into space.

Photography from the Mars Exploration Rover is so good that the data have been interpreted in an IMAX film, giving audiences a near-lifelike experience in strolling the red planet’s rusty, dusty desert. The Phoenix Mars lander has sent back pictures of individual sand grains. In other words, it’s already possible for anyone to make a rigorous reconnaissance of another planet — even though not a single human has yet stomped his boots in the Martian dust."

Almost like being there, no? 

The whole piece is worth reading.  And then maybe it may make sense for President Obama to think about this more pragmatic mission for NASA. 
Who knows, even Google may want to help.

ON MARS ROVERS DOING THEIR DUTY

ABOVE AND BEYOND

We all know the children's tale of the little engine that could.  Now we have a real-life story of the two rovers that could.  The New York Times reports:

"NASA expected its two Mars rovers to survive only three months in the dusty and freezing Martian conditions. But Saturday was the five-year anniversary of the first robot’s landing.

The Mars rover Spirit landed on Mars on Jan. 3, 2004. The second, named Opportunity, landed 21 days later. During the past five years, the two rovers have traveled only about 13 miles while sending back a quarter of a million images of Mars.

Data from the rovers, including photos of sedimentary rocks, has proved that there was once water on the planet’s surface.

But the rovers have experienced quite a bit of wear and tear. Spirit has a jammed wheel, according to the BBC, and it must drive backwards. And Opportunity has a broken electrical wire, limiting movement on its robotic arm."

They do evoke the  image of the indomitable Wall-E, last year's Pixar movie.  Only these two don't fall in  love, but they give us enough reason for us to get really curious about Mars again.

As Time magazine put it:

"So far, Spirit and Opportunity have beamed home a quarter of a million images and 36 gigabytes of data and revealed more about Martian history than any other spacecraft in a half-century of space travel. And by all indications, they could be keeping it up for a long time to come."

Here's hoping these two keep phoning home for a little while longer.

ON GETTING HALO'D

SO NEAR...

Contrary to yesterday's post, life is imitating art in the arena of next-gen battle gear and uniforms in the Armed forces.  Engadget nails it with the headline to their post:
"South Korea to develop new high-tech battle uniform-Halo fans approve wholeheartedly.
In an obvious attempt to seduce impressionable teenage gamers into their armed forces the Republic of Korea will begin development of their own totally badass science fiction battle uniform
In addition to a whopping 95% increase in awesomeness, the uniforms will feature a number of other technical enhancements, including a multifunction helmet with video transmitter, GPS display and voice recognition, a backpack with command / control and friendly-or-foe identification systems, a BDU that offers protection from nuclear, biological and chemical attacks, and the laser-guided, multi-function XK11 assault rifle, which shoots both standard NATO 5.56mm rounds and 20mm grenades. early next year."
This CNET story has more details on the all-important rifle, complete with video:

"The rifle has already been tested and could come online sooner than the rest of the outfit. The double-barreled K-11 assault rifle lets the shooter fire either NATO 5.56- or 20-millimeter grenades, all off the same trigger. Day and night aiming is accomplished with a thermal target seeker and laser that calculates distance automatically--a true point-and-shoot."

Only thing missing is a space ship, and of course the Covenant bad-guy aliens from Halo.

ON FLYING A ZEPPELIN AGAIN

BLUE SKIES AGAIN

As a long-time aviation geek, I've been fascinated by Airships for decades. 

But unless you had a good friend at the Goodyear company, it wasn't possible for mere mortals to get a ride on one of these until this past month. 

Airship Ventures is a new company in the San Francisco/Bay area that is offering Airship rides to mainstream passengers for the first time in decades.  And it's in a whole new Zeppelin no less, the name that's been associated with Airships for most of the 20th century. 

More from this CNET story last month:

"For residents of the San Francisco Bay Area, that's about to change. A company called Airship Ventures is bringing just such an aircraft to its new home at Moffett Field in Mountain View, Calif., sometime in the coming days.

Sightseeing flights (the company calls it "flightseeing") will start later this month from Mountain View and in early November from several other locations, with ticket prices starting at $495 per person...

This photo shows the Airship Ventures Zeppelin on its maiden flight in May over Friedrichshafen, Germany.

(Zeppelins, also sometimes known as dirigibles, have a rigid frame that provide the distinctive, cucumberlike shape, and a soft material such as canvas is wrapped around the frame. Blimps and balloons, by contrast, have no framework and get their shape directly from the internal pressure of the gas providing the lift.)"

This 2 minute video review of the ride gives a better sense of what it feels like in a Zeppelin 2.0:

The story of how the company got founded is also a good one, involving the passions and hard work of a husband and wife team, Brian and Alexandra Hall.

I for one am looking forward to a Zeppelin ride on a future trip to the Bay area.

ON MAPPING THE STARS

FINAL FRONTIER

A story that starts with this opening line absolutely gets my attention:

"SUNSPOT, N.M. -- It's fair to say that Dan Long has seen more of the universe than anyone but God."

It goes on to add:

"Month after month, year after year, Long has sat in a windowless room atop a windy mountain peak, watching the heavens scroll by on 12 monitors connected to the Apache Point Observatory's 98-inch telescope.

He saw stars, galaxies and clusters of galaxies banded together like giant herds of animals on an unending savanna roll by. Less frequently, exotic denizens of deep space would pop up -- blinding quasars and supernovae, flaring up as brightly on the bank of TV screens as entire galaxies."

And we get to understand the true scope of this endeavor:

"This summer, after eight years of charting the cosmos, Long and his colleagues completed the deepest, most comprehensive map of the heavens ever produced.

Known as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, it is a remarkable three-dimensional model of the universe that allows an observer to travel, as if by rocket ship, from the dwarf galaxies hugging the skirts of the Milky Way to the frontier campfires of the most distant quasars, blazing billions of light-years away.

In its 5 terabytes of data are 217 million individual objects, including 800,000 galaxies (which themselves contain billions of stars and planets) and 100,000 quasars -- creatures once so rare and strange that they weren't even detected until 1962.

"Nobody's ever done anything like this before," said Bruce Gillespie, administrator of the Astrophysical Research Consortium, made up of 300 astronomers who helped carry out the $100-million sky-mapping project. "They'll still be looking at this data in 50 years."

The piece goes into a lot more detail on a pretty impressive project.  Can't wait for the IMAX movie.  Until then, check out the project web-site for some spectacular pictures.

ON SUPER-COLLIDER EXPLORATIONS

HERE WE GO

If watching the financial markets of late has seemed like the end of the world is near, something else has started a few thousand miles away, that may make all those problems seem so puny in comparison. 

As the New York Times reports, the Hadron super-collider at CERN was finally switched on and may provide better understanding of how the universe really began so very long ago.

"After 14 years and $8 billion, scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, outside Geneva, succeeded in turning on the most powerful microscope ever built for investigating the elemental particles and forces of nature.

At 4:27 a.m., Eastern time, the protons made their first circuit around a 17-mile-long racetrack known as the Large Hadron Collider, 300 feet underneath the Swiss French border, and then made a return journey."

If all the science discussed in the article has your head spinning, then this rap video made by some smart students may help shed some more light on things while providing a beat you can dance to:

If the video still leaves you wanting for more info, there's this comic from PhD Comics that may do the trick.

For Hadron wanna-be geeks like yours truly, we can follow the progress of this historical scientific experiment on blogs like Cosmic Variance, maintained by some serious rocket scientists.  There are some other sources to follow online as well this recent post explains:

"Of course we are not the only blog covering this.  The US/LHC Blogs have lots of information, and Tommaso Dorigo offers some inside scoop.  There is also main CERN page for the event, and one for press releases."

Full speed ahead, Scotty.

P.S.  Google even has a special logo for this day:

ON GETTING READY FOR SPORE

HERE IT COMES

Like a lot of gaming geeks, I've been looking forward to the release of Spore, due out this Friday.  It's a truly original "game", from the creator of the blockbuster SIMS franchise, as this New York Times piece explains (image):

"After years of rumors, the game goes on sale Friday. Spore’s designer, Will Wright, is best known for creating a game called the Sims in 2000. That game, which let players run the lives of a virtual family, has sold 100 million copies.

It is the best-selling video game franchise of all time — an impressive achievement in an $18-billion-a-year industry that is now bigger than Hollywood.

Spore, produced by Electronic Arts, promises much more than the day-to-day adventures of simulated people. It starts with single-cell microbes and follows them through their evolution into intelligent multicellular creatures that can build civilizations, colonize the galaxy and populate new planets.

Unlike the typical shoot-them-till-they’re-all-dead video game, Spore was strongly influenced by science, and in particular by evolutionary biology."

If that doesn't vet your appetite for Spore, maybe this Spore trailer on YouTube will:

If you liked that, there's more...YouTube has a whole channel devoted to Spore videos.  Hope that keeps you going until Friday. 

ON STAR TREK MUSICAL "MALARKEY"

REMEMBERING

Like millions around the world, I've been a life-long fan of all things Star Trek ever since the original series launched on TV in the 1960s.  So this sad weekend development deserves to be noted and remembered in my book.  Here's the headline item from CNN.com:

"LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- Alexander "Sandy" Courage, an Emmy-winning and Academy Award-nominated arranEdit Post | Post | *michael parekh on IT* | Your Weblogs | TypePadger, orchestrator and composer who created the otherworldly theme for the classic "Star Trek" TV show, has died. He was 88."

Don't remember the original Star Trek music theme?  Let me help you with this one minute clip from YouTube:

Now Mr. Courage obviously accomplished a great deal more in his life than just this iconic theme that went onto the be the basis of every Star Trek music piece over the last four decades.  But this piece of course is what he'll be most remembered for in the mainstream consciousness.

Of course, how the piece got developed is an interesting story in itself.  Here's an account from the Washington Post:

"His fanfare-style introduction to "Star Trek," eight notes played by the brass section, followed by the wordless melody with a prominent soprano voice won him enduring recognition among generations of "Trekkies" and even casual viewers of the science fiction show.

"Star Trek" originally aired on NBC from 1966 to 1969 and has been in perennial syndication.

He told an interviewer that he never was a science-fiction fan. "I think it's just marvelous malarkey," he said. "So you write some marvelous malarkey music that goes with it."

Apparently, the show's creator, the legendary Gene Roddenberry, didn't want any modern electronic music.  So Mr. Courage had to look elsewhere for inspiration.

"To write the "Star Trek" theme, Mr. Courage thought back to a pop song from his childhood that conjured images of going into the far distance. He came up with "Beyond the Blue Horizon," popularized by Jeanette MacDonald, and featuring a fast, train-like rhythm pulsating beneath the soaring melody.

Mr. Courage adapted the idea to the "Star Trek" job, which he completed in a week. His vision of the music included a soprano singer (Loulie Jean Norman), a flute, an organ and maybe a vibraphone. But he said the show's producer, Gene Roddenberry, wanted to accentuate the female voice. When Roddenberry was done, he said, the music "sounded like a soprano solo."

And like most great show biz stories, there's an interesting twist about money, as the Washington Post piece goes on to explain:

"Burlingame, author of "TV's Biggest Hits," said Roddenberry went further to annoy Mr. Courage by adding words to the instrumental theme. The lyrics begin: "Beyond the rim of the star-light/My love is wand'ring in star flight."

"It was horrible," Burlingame said. "Courage was never consulted, but Roddenbury from that point on was entitled to take 50 percent of royalties. . . . This upset Courage, understandably, not that he wrote a lyric, but that he wrote a lousy lyric that would never be sung anywhere."

Exploiting that loop-hole, Gene Roddenberry managed to get a 50% discount on the theme for a long, long time.  Given that this is the music business, it's not anywhere that others have not gone before.

ON REAL SUPER-HERO FLYING

FINALLY

Every boy from 2 from to a 100 (and a bit more), is going to like this story titled "Rocket man flies on jet-powered wings", as told by MSNBC:

"Former fighter pilot Yves Rossy, 48, accelerated to 186 miles an hour May 14, 2008, over the Swiss Alps during his first public flight while strapped to his self-made, jet-powered wings."

The piece goes into the actual experience (and has a video to boot):

"Steering only with his body, Rossy dived, turned and soared again, flying what appeared to be effortless loops from one side of the Rhone valley to the other. At times he rose 2,600 feet  before descending again with a trail of special-effects smoke in his wake.

"It's like a second skin," he later told reporters. "If I turn to the left, I fly left. If I nudge to the right, I go right."

And Rossy's next challenge:

"He said he is ready now for a bigger challenge: crossing the English Channel later this year. The stunt, which will be shown on live television, will test his flying machine to the limit. Rossy said he plans to practice the 22-mile trip by flying between two hot-air balloons."

Forget joy-rides into outer-space for folks willing to pay the freight.  This is the ride most of us boys (and I suspect quite a few girls), would happily sign up for, as and when available for mere mortals.

ON A TRUE FLIGHT OF FANCY

NO LIGHT TASK

The third and last full day of TED 2008 was full of memorable talks and ideas.  See both Bruno Giussani and Ethan Zuckerman's blogs for a fuller flavor of the highlights.

You can get some of my impressions from my Twitter blogging on the day here.

I think the one image that stays with me most from yesterday, was this photo of Stephen Hawking enjoying his first Zero-Gravity moment, thanks to a concerted effort by a core group of his ardent fans.  Ethan Zuckerman's post on this is an excellent summary:

"Peter Diamandis shares a wonderful, brief story with us, and a terrific photo. He runs a business that allows people to experience weightlessness via parabolic flight.

He was able to give professor Stephen Hawking the chance to experience weightlessness - they brought a large medical team, expecting that Hawking might have physiological problems in space. He had such fun, the team ended up taking him through eight different parabolas.

It’s pretty unmistakable that that’s joy on his face."

 

Yes, it is, and thanks to Peter Diamandis and his team's efforts, a whole new example of "Yes, we can".