Category — COSMOS

**Update**  Terrific Photo Spread in Boston Globe - Big Picture

Did SF become irrelevant after the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969?  This panel explored the relationship between the Apollo program and SF, and the ways in which SF did or didn’t live up to its visionary potentials after manned space flight became a reality.  Paul De Fillippo kicked things off by asking to what extent SF inspired the space program?  And to what extent did the eventual breakdown of the manned space program affect SF?

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Given the opportunity, I just couldn’t resist sending a little micro-chipped token of my affection to my favorite sub-miniaturized phantasm on Mars.  Aloha,  Perky Pat!  How’s the water at Lake Shalbatana?  Thanks to NASA, you too can send a Can-D gram to the red planet!   Don’t be Chew-Z, sign up today!

http://mars9.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/participate/sendyourname/index.cfm

By far the most downloaded images from Yunchtime are the astronaut and cosmonaut photos from the 1960 edition of Das Bildbuch der Weltraum Fahrt that I picked up in Vienna.  So I thought I should scan a few more.   This series features the extreme temperature tests conducted on U.S. spacesuits during the 1950s, and an astronaut getting the feel for handling the controls from his rocket seat.   The rubber gloves don’t look especially good for handling those knobs and switches, and the fact that the astronaut is stretched out like Plastic Man just to reach the controls shows you the state of ergonomics in those days.   The greatest thing about the rocket seat photo are the pilot’s lace-up shiny leather shoes.  DOH!  Mission Control, do you read?  I left my space boots in the locker at Canaveral, over!

If you’re into this sort of thing, check out our friends at SpaceFacts.   And some miscellaneous galleries:  Appollo Mission Photos,  NASA images, Today in Space History.

Finding your way around Mars just got a whole lot easier!  The European Space Agency has just released thumbnail images of their lush cartography of the red planet.   The glimpse above is from a 1:50,000 map of Iani Chaos region, with 50 meter contour intervals.

**Link to ESA Mars Hiking Maps

Thanks to Don Nadeau (Mass State Parks Cartographer) for the link!

Boys, it says here that GoogleMoon is buying up all the prospecting claims from Tycho all the way over to von Braun.    With the kind of muscle those guys are bringing in, our little stake will be washed up.  I’d say we need a new racket!

On this snowbound Solstice weekend in New England, I happened to be reading reviews of The Day The Earth Stood Still remake, and pondering the ways in which humans have envisioned our first contact with alien life forms.   Without going too heavily into the subject, I pondered the range of human-alien frission typically presented in SF, from the over-hyped assumption of instant warfare, or the however improbable love at first site, to the more nuanced anthropological approaches of Chad Oliver and the intensely portrayed psychological gestalts of Theodore Sturgeon.  At that point Sturgeon’s amazing story To Marry Medusa (aka The Cosmic Rape) popped into my mind, and in particular the lush red cover image for the 1968 paperback by Paul Lehr.

This image,  so typical of Lehr (with a mountainous half-organic construction looming in the center, while miniscule beings flit around it like so many fleas,)  represents the contact between human and alien minds in the realm of abstraction and metaphor.  In that sense it fascinates more than the familiar image of some athletic dork with a ray gun zapping the tentacles off of a bug-eyed wierdo.

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Interesting images captured by Cassini show us the sky over Saturn’s north pole, spanned by a hexagon of clouds in fixed rotation with the gas giant.  The scientists at NASA aren’t quite sure what is causing this phenomenon, unknown on any other planet in our solar system.   Still, doesn’t it make you wonder what the connection is between Saturn’s north pole and the hexagonal walls of a honeycomb?

What beauty is contrived by Nature when left to its own devices!  And why must humans always infer the hand of a higher being in the cosmic beauty all around us?  Isn’t it enough to simply accept reality as a mind-bending matrix of symmetry, of consciousness, of amazement?   What do we gain from dogmatic demands on our perceptions, after all.   Not much.  Unbidden neuroses and unnecessary fears.

What those self-righteous idiots – the self-proclaimed believers –  have done to our planet Earth is an atrocity.   Because they are the chosen people and because they will live forever in their bogus Eternity, they see no problem in laying our entire reality to waste.  In my opinion we should throw off the atavistic dogmas of the past and save our own planet, so that visitors observing us will see more than the deadly spume of pollution that we have made of our own atmosphere.

Yes, Virginia, we have visuals of extra-solar planets!   Of course, this is nothing new to astronomers…  Since Gallileo first spotted the moons of Jupiter we knew they were out there, spinning in their orbits several light years across the black pond.  But all the same, there is a moment to savor when the dust clouds of Fomalhaut revealed the visual track of her three planets!   Somewhat bigger than a breadbox, and yet smaller than 10 Jupiters, the planets take their lazy time circling Fomalhaut in orbits of 100 to 185 years.  So, distant partners in space time, what sort of mischeivous life-forms are you hatching?   Hordes of jolly little Fomalhautians?  Well, join the club, and be seeing you as soon as I can get this dang-blasted space-drive to start again.

Along with the landslide victory for Obama, mystery waves were thrashing the shore of southeastern Maine on Tuesday afternoon.    The Boston Globe reports that the water level suddenly rose 12 feet in a matter of minutes, and then drained away in a series of unusual whirlpools.    Storm surge, undersea landslide, sudden release of benthic gas?   Or just the usual shenanigans of the U.S. Navy and alien engineers from Planet Xabulon?

Of course, these rogue waves brought to mind John Creasey’s novel, The Depths, in which Dr, Palfrey, (the enigmatic leader of a global allied intelligence service,) tangles with a mad scientist who has harnessed the power of the sea.  The mad doctor sends gigantic tsunamis onto coastlines with the flip of a switch, part of his eugenics scheme to create a perfect race of humans under the oceans, far away from the dog-eat-dog world of surface dwelling scum.  Somehow the appearance of monster waves on election day sparked off random thoughts on the schemes of madmen.  Such as those of our current Vice President, which seem to a have sinister parallel to the downunder community called Topeka in the film adaption of Harlan Ellison’s Boy and His Dog;  as well as the farcical undersea missions of Hagbard Celine and his Golden Submarine fighting the ghost armies of the Third Reich.

Rogue waves or not, there are stormy waters ahead.  Let us hope they float all boats!

As Americans shudder beneath the shadow of their inter-galactic debts, the India Space Research Organization (ISRO) has successfully launched their lunar orbiter, the Chandrayaan-1.    The two-year mission of the Chandrayaan orbiter will capture high-resolution imagery of the lunar surface on multiple bandwidths, enabling the compilation of a super-accurate 3D-model of the moon.   Way to go ISRO!

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Successful launch of the Shenzhou 7 mission…    Taikonauts walk the walk…   and float back down to mother Earth at Siziwang Qi, Inner Mongolia.

The countdown has begun for tonight’s scheduled liftoff of the Shenzhou 7 mission, which includes the first EVA space-walk by Chinese Taikonauts.  The intrepid crew will be wearing Chinese made “Feitian” spacesuits, appropriately named for the flying genii figures that are one of the most pervasive art motifs in China since their introduction from Central Asia some 1,500 years ago.   Up up and away, Taikonoauts!   See you after a few whirls…

An interesting article by James Parker in this week’s Phoenix recounts Jack Borden’s life of cloud gazing. Struck by an amazing epiphany while lying on a grassy slope in 1977, Borden suddenly experienced the entire sky as direct connection with the cosmos. According to Jack, he was… “just waking up from a nap, and - there it all was! Close, out-of-scale, real close. It was scary. I looked at it for not longer than three seconds and I had to look away. It just plain blew me away! This tremendous scene, somewhere between majesty and frightfulness - it was as if the sky were saying, Goddammit, if I couldn’t do anything to wake you up, maybe this’ll do it!” After this satori, Jack went on to found the non-profit, For Spacious Skies, which has promoted the art and benefits of cloud gazing for more than twenty five years.

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With Phoenix Lander scooping ice cubes and sand castles from the polar beach of Mars, it seems that planetary geology is becoming popular. Images from the Messenger fly-by of six months ago are now being recycled through the news media, showing vulcanism on the surface of Mercury. Even the New York Times gets into the act, featuring articles on Moon rocks and lunar soil chemisty. However, these are just the latest pages in a long story, and can’t really compare to the excitement of the planetary geology craze that erupted during the time of the Apollo missions. Back in those days of the late 60s and early 70s, the first samples were carried back from the Moon, and whisked under armed guard to the Institute of Meteoritics at the University of New Mexico.

Luckily for me, my father became friends with the Institute’s Senior Research Scientist, Marty Prinz, who was one of the leading geologists working on Moon rocks when they first arrived to planet Earth. In recent years, I was sure that a Wikipedia page or other resource would provide a biography of Marty. After all, how many geologists have an asteroid named after them?

But strangely enough there is hardly a mention of him outside of the literature on spinels, llmenites, and electron microprobe analyses of Apollo lunar samples. So let me tell you a little bit about the wonderful Prinz family…

Marty was actually one of the most wordly and widely read people you can imagine. His bookshelf was no more dominated by books on geology and science, than any other kind of literature, ranging from the classical to the modern, from the serious and abstruse to the purely absurd. Vicky Prinz, Marty’s wife at the time, was equally gregarious. They were among the few people who could keep my father spinning and diving for cover during a dinner conversation. Of course, being the tender age of 12 or 13 years old at the time, I was mostly interested in playing with the Prinz’ children: Martha, Will and Michael. Say, if any of you three run across this article, drop me an email! We should put together a proper Wikipedia page.

But here is something you will not find out anywhere else: when I left New Mexico to go to college, I got a one-way ticket from Albuquerque to New York City. By that time, Marty Prinz had taken the job as curator of the Mineral collection of the American Museum of Natural History. Since he was probably the only person my family knew in Manhattan, he was asked to pick me up at the airport and escort me over to Columbia College. Well, Marty showed up in his Volkswagen van and swept me over the Triborough Bridge. In practically no time we were heading West along East 97th Street towards the Transverse Road that cuts through Central Park. While we were waiting for a stop light, being the first car behind the crosswalk, I was amazed to discover that the host of Masterpiece Theatre, no less than Alaister Cooke himself, was walking right in front of our car!

“Marty, that’s Alastair Cooke, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, so it appears,” said Marty and then proceeded to honk his horn and wave his arm in a menacing circle out of the driver’s window. Cooke scampered across the street with a terrified look in his eyes. The light had turned green while Cooke was in the crosswalk, and Marty stepped on the gas barely before the 70 year old had cleared our front bumper. Suddenly, the reality of being in New York City dawned on me in that little encounter…you might be a celebrity, you might be the bloody host of Masterpiece Theatre, but when you come to the big city, get the hell outta the way when the light turns green, okay buddy!

Needless to say, when Marty subsequently dumped me without ceremony on the corner of Broadway and 114th Street and then drove off immediately I had my own breathless taste of coping in a hurry. After that, Marty & I met occasionally for a chat over some Chinese food at Hunan Garden, or at the Museum where he showed me–with very uncharacteristic amount of trust, I always thought–the elaborate alarm system that he had installed to protect the amazing minerals collection, which included nothing less than the shimmering Star of India Sapphire.

Marty Prinz was always witty, sometimes irascible, and fond of bitingly humorous ripostes. Although he passed away in 2000, Marty’s Guide to Rocks and Minerals (edited with George Harlow and Joseph Peters) is still in print and considered the standard book on the subject. So as we turn once again to the craze in Moon rocks and harvesting the dust of nearby planets, let’s raise a toast to one of the pioneers in that field… ad astra, Marty!

It was a blast to watch the live NASA broadcast of Phoenix landing on Mars from sleepy Salem, Massachusetts! Since my buddy, Don, who lives in Beverly doesn’t have cable t.v. or internet, I called him up on my cellphone and turned up the volume so he could listen along to the first powered landing on Mars since Viking, 32 years ago. As we were all listening to the transmissions from Mission Control at JPL in California, the whole communications scenario appeared in my mind. What a far out world we live in! As a space vehicle hurtles into the atmosphere of Mars, heat shields flaring up to plasma, it is sending a live signal to the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter at 32 KB / second. This signal is then piped back to JPL on earth, taking 15 minutes to traverse the 173,000,000 miles of space that currently separates the two planets. At JPL, the communications of the Mission Control crew, along with video of them sitting in their closed booth, is sent out as a live t.v. broadcast, which is, in turn, converted into a live video stream over the internet. So, here in Salem, Mass, I logged on and while watching this all happen live, decide to ring up Don, across the way in Beverly. Therefore, Don, with nothing more than his cellphone, can listen to the live landing sequence on Mars, as he potters around his back deck lighting up some charcoal on the grill.  Is this amazing, or what?   Now back the hum-drum surface ops on twitter.