Ion Propulsion

Improved designs in ion engines may be the ticket for making trips to the outer solar system quicker and more feasible both for unmanned probes and (I hope) manned spacecraft. I haven’t been keeping up with space exploration as much as I used to, so I am glad to find this article in Gizmag which explains a little about ion engines and how scientists have been making them better.

The phrase “engage the ion drive” still has the ring of a line from Star Wars, but these engines have been used in space missions for more than four decades and remain the subject of ongoing research. Ion engines have incredible fuel efficiency, but their low thrust requires very long operating times … and therein lies the rub. To date, erosion within such an engine seriously limits its operational lifetime. Now a group of researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has developed a new design that largely eliminates this erosion, opening the gates for higher thrust and more efficient drives for manned and unmanned missions to the reaches of the Solar System.

There are many varieties and more proposals (the VASMIR engine comes to mind), but the operating principle is quite simple. There are two basic styles of ion engines, electrostatic and electromagnetic.

An electrostatic ion engine works by ionizing a fuel (often xenon or argon gas) by knocking off an electron to make a positive ion. The positive ions then diffuse into a region between two charged grids that contain an electrostatic field. This accelerates the positive ions out of the engine and away from the spacecraft, thereby generating thrust. Finally, an neutralizer sprays electrons into the exhaust plume at a rate that keeps the spacecraft electrically neutral.

An electromagnetic ion engine also works by ionizing a fuel. In this case a plasma is created that carries current between the ionizing anode and a cathode. The current in turn generates a magnetic field at right angles to the electric field, and thereby accelerates the positive ions out of the engine via the Lorentz force – basically the same effect on which railguns are based. Again a neutralizer keeps the spacecraft electrically neutral.

There are many varieties and more proposals (the VASMIR engine comes to mind), but the operating principle is quite simple. There are two basic styles of ion engines, electrostatic and electromagnetic.

 

There is a lot more in the article.

Even Scotty would be impressed by this.

Though, what we really need is warp drive. Anyone doing research on that?

Related articles

• Improved ion engines will open up the outer Solar System (gizmag.com)
• Magnetic shielding of ion beam thruster walls (space-travel.com)
• Magnetic shielding of ion beam thruster walls (phys.org)
• Magnetic shielding innovation improves ion beam rockets (rdmag.com)

 

The Asteroid that Killed the Dinosaurs

The hypothesis that an asteroid collision was the cause of the extinction of the dinosaurs has been around for several decades now, but recent research has provided new support for the theory.

The idea that a cosmic impact ended the age of dinosaurs in what is now Mexico now has fresh new support, researchers say.

The most recent and most familiar mass extinction is the one that finished the reign of the dinosaurs — the end-Cretaceous or Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event, often known as K-T. The only survivors among the dinosaurs are the birds.

Currently, the main suspect behind this catastrophe is a cosmic impact from an asteroid or comet, an idea first proposed by physicist Luis Alvarez and his son geologist Walter Alvarez. Scientists later found that signs of this collision seemed evident near the town of Chicxulub (CHEEK-sheh-loob) in Mexico in the form of a gargantuan crater more than 110 miles (180 kilometers) wide. The explosion, likely caused by an object about 6 miles (10 km) across, would have released as much energy as 100 trillion tons of TNT, more than a billion times more than the atom bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

New findings using high-precision radiometric dating analysis of debris kicked up by the impact now suggest the K-T event and the Chicxulub collision happened no more than 33,000 years apart. In radiometric dating, scientists estimate the ages of samples based on the relative proportions of specific radioactive materials within them. [Wipe Out: History's Most Mysterious Mass Extinctions]

“We’ve shown the impact and the mass extinction coincided as much as one can possibly demonstrate with existing dating techniques,” researcher Paul Renne, a geochronologist and director of the Berkeley Geochronology Center in California, told LiveScience.

“It’s gratifying to see these results, for those of us who’ve been arguing a long time that there was an impact at the time of this mass extinction,” geologist Walter Alvarez at the University of California at Berkeley, who did not participate in this study, told LiveScience. “This research is just a tour de force, a demonstration of really skillful geochronology to resolve time that well.”

The fact the impact and mass extinction may have been virtually simultaneous in time supports the idea that the cosmic impact dealt the age of dinosaurs its deathblow.

“The impact was clearly the final straw that pushed Earth past the tipping point,” Renne said. “We have shown that these events are synchronous to within a gnat’s eyebrow, and therefore, the impact clearly played a major role in extinctions, but it probably wasn’t just the impact.”

The new extinction date is precise to within 11,000 years.

“When I got started in the field, the error bars on these events were plus or minus a million years,” added paleontologist William Clemens at the University of California at Berkeley, who did not participate in this research. “It’s an exciting time right now, a lot of which we can attribute to the work that Paul and his colleagues are doing in refining the precision of the time scale with which we work.”

I can’t help wondering if there is any chance that some species of dinosaur might have been intelligence, perhaps even civilized. No fossils suggesting such a possibility have ever been uncovered, but given the haphazard way in which fossils are made and preserved, it is doubtful that that we know of even 1% of all the organisms that existed at any given time. If an asteroid were to kill us off, I wonder if any remains of our civilization would be recognizable after 65 million years. Considering that it seems that quite a few asteroids have passed, and will be passing extremely close by, maybe a far future paleontologist will be wondering what happened to the mammals.

By the way, I have been reading The Peshawar Lancers by S. M. Stirling. The book takes place in an alternate history in which an asteroid or comet struck the Earth in 1878, destroying civilization in the Northern hemisphere. One hundred fifty years later, the descendants of the survivors are finally reaching the levels of technology we had around 1920.

Related articles

• Asteroid Impact That Killed the Dinosaurs: New Evidence (livescience.com)
• Asteroid may have killed dinosaurs quicker than scientists thought (reuters.com)
• AN EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOM: Finally confirmed: An asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs. “A team of Ame… (pjmedia.com)
• New Evidence Clears Up How Dinosaurs Died (escapistmagazine.com)

 

Life on Mars

I read some interesting news in the Telegraph on the search for extraterrestrial life.

Prof John Parnell, 55, has co-written a theory with Dr Joseph Michalski, a planetary geologist at the Natural History Museum, that suggests they have discovered the best signs of life in the huge McLaughlin Crater on the surface of Mars.

The document, published today in Nature Geoscience journal, describes how they assessed the crater, created by a meteorite which smashed into the surface of Mars, flinging up rocks from miles below.

The rocks appear to be made up of clays and minerals which have been altered by water – the essential element to support life.

Speaking from his laboratory at the University of Aberdeen, geochemist Prof Parnell said: “We could be so close to discovering if there is, or was, life on Mars.

“We know from studies that a substantial proportion of all life on Earth is also in the subsurface and by studying the McLaughlin Crater we can see similar conditions beneath the surface of Mars thanks to observations on the rocks brought up by the meteorite strike.

“There can be no life on the surface of Mars because it is bathed in radiation and it’s completely frozen. However, life in the sub surface would be protected from that.

“And there is no reason why there isn’t bacteria or other microbes that were or still are living in the small cracks well below the surface of Mars.

“One of the other things we have discussed in our paper is that this bacteria could be living off hydrogen, which is exactly the same as what microbes beneath the surface of the Earth are doing too.

“Unfortunately, we won’t find any evidence of animals as the most complex life you might get in the sub surface would be fungi.

“But fungi aren’t even that far removed from plants and animals, so I think you could say that life on Mars could be complex, but small.”

I think that any life on,or in, Mars is likely to be very simple, perhaps similar to bacteria, assuming that there is any at all. We are going to actually go there and look specifically for life. Fortunately, that may be the next step.

Prof Parnell reckons that although the next mission to Mars will have a drill to examine possibilities of life beneath the surface of Mars, he says his new study suggests looking around the edges of craters would be easier and more beneficial.

He said: “What we’re really doing is emphasising that if we are going to explore for life on Mars, we need to go beneath the surface. So we need to find an approach beneath the surface.

“One approach to do that might be to drill and indeed the next European mission to Mars will have a drill on it, but that will only go down about two metres.

“And although drilling two metres on Earth would be a fantastic technological achievement, it’s only really scratching the surface.

I think they meant to write Mars instead of Earth.

“So the alternative is to use what nature has done for us and that’s why we are are particularly interested in the McLaughlin Crater that we have investigated in our paper.

“Because when a meteor lands, it excavates a big hole in the ground and throws rocks from the bottom of the hole outside the crater to where we could conceivably go and sample them.”

And while the craters on Mars may uncover secrets about the planet’s possibility of supporting life, Prof Parnell also revealed the results could show us how life on Earth began.

He said: “It’s very easy to draw parallels between what Mars looks like and what the early Earth might have looked like, because the rocks on Earth that we see now have been recycled a lot in ways that they have not been recycled on Mars.

“Mars has not had things like erosion and shifting of mountain ranges to destroy vital evidence from the past.

“So studying meteorite craters of Mars may well actually give us an indication to how life on Earth began.

“Although we all live on the surface of Earth, life did not originate here, but actually in the sub surface.

“It was only when life had taken hold below the surface that it gradually expanded and came up to the surface.

“In fact, there’s so much life below the surface of our planet that we are actually the unusual ones living above it.”

This sounds a lot like The Deep Hot Biosphere.

Related articles

• ‘Strongest evidence yet to there being life on Mars’ (talesfromthelou.wordpress.com)
• ‘Strongest evidence yet’ there being life on Mars… (telegraph.co.uk)
• ‘Strongest Evidence Yet’ Of Life On Mars (patdollard.com)
• Mars scientists find ‘strongest evidence yet’ that planet may have supported life (news.nationalpost.com)
• It’s life, but not as we know it: Martians may have occupied the Red Planet… but not in any recognisable form (dailymail.co.uk)
• Mars Planet (planets.org.uk)

 

The Nativity According to Matthew

The Adoration of the Magi

 

Matthew begins his Gospel with the genealogy of Jesus. I’ll skip the genealogy and go straight to his account of Jesus’s birth.

 

¹⁸ This is how the birth of Jesus the Messiah came about: His mother Mary was pledged to be married to Joseph, but before they came together, she was found to be pregnant through the Holy Spirit. ¹⁹ Because Joseph her husband was faithful to the law, and yetdid not want to expose her to public disgrace, he had in mind to divorce her quietly.

²⁰ But after he had considered this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. ²¹ She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.”

²² All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet: ²³ “The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel” (which means “God with us”).

²⁴ When Joseph woke up, he did what the angel of the Lord had commanded him and took Mary home as his wife. ²⁵ But he did not consummate their marriage until she gave birth to a son. And he gave him the name Jesus.

After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, during the time of King Herod, Magi from the east came to Jerusalem ² and asked, “Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him.”

³ When King Herod heard this he was disturbed, and all Jerusalem with him. ⁴ When he had called together all the people’s chief priests and teachers of the law, he asked them where the Messiah was to be born. ⁵ “In Bethlehem in Judea,” they replied, “for this is what the prophet has written:

⁶ “‘But you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah,
are by no means least among the rulers of Judah;
for out of you will come a ruler
who will shepherd my people Israel.’ ^“

⁷ Then Herod called the Magi secretly and found out from them the exact time the star had appeared. ⁸ He sent them to Bethlehem and said, “Go and search carefully for the child. As soon as you find him, report to me, so that I too may go and worship him.”

⁹ After they had heard the king, they went on their way, and the star they had seen when it rose went ahead of them until it stopped over the place where the child was. ¹⁰ When they saw the star, they were overjoyed. ¹¹ On coming to the house, they saw the child with his mother Mary, and they bowed down and worshiped him. Then they opened their treasures and presented him with gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. ¹² And having been warned in a dream not to go back to Herod, they returned to their country by another route.

¹³ When they had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. “Get up,” he said, “take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.”

¹⁴ So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt, ¹⁵ where he stayed until the death of Herod. And so was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet: “Out of Egypt I called my son.”

¹⁶ When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi. ¹⁷ Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled:

¹⁸ “A voice is heard in Ramah,
weeping and great mourning,
Rachel weeping for her children
and refusing to be comforted,
because they are no more.”

¹⁹ After Herod died, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt ²⁰ and said, “Get up, take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel, for those who were trying to take the child’s life are dead.” (Matthew 1:18-2:20)

 

Most people think that the slaughter of the baby boys in Bethlehem involved the murder of hundreds or thousands of innocents. Remember, though, that Bethlehem was a small village in this time with a likely population of a few hundred. It is doubtful that more than half a dozen children were killed, not enough to make it into any other sources we have for Herod’s rule. Herod was certainly ruthless enough to order such a massacre. He had no trouble killing members of his own family if he thought they threatened his rule. In fact, Herod being an Idumean (or Edomite) and not a Jew, was a foreigner and so was as despised by many Judeans as a Roman governor would have been. If he had heard that there was a potential rival to his throne, even a child, that the Jews might rally around, he would have wasted no time in disposing of that rival.

 

The word Magi usually refers to Zoroastrian priests. In Greco-Roman usage the term Magi had connotations of magicians or sorsorers, exotic figures from distant lands. It is not clear just who the Magi actually were. They may indeed have been Zoroastrians. The references to the Star of Bethlehem suggest that they may have been astrologers. The Babylonians had a reputation for being skilled in astrology and magic so the Magi may have come from Mesopotamia. They may also have been Jewish since they were seeking for a king of the Jews. The fact that they were unfamiliar with the prophets may prove that they were Gentiles. The number of the Magi is not given in the Gospel. The reason that three are usually pictured  is that there were three gifts; gold, frankincense,and myrrh.

 

It is also not clear just what the Star of Bethlehem actually was. There have been several theories presented, but none of them are entirely satisfactory. The star might have been a supernova, perhaps in a nearby galaxy. There is no way to know for certain since any supernova remnant so far away would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to detect. It might also have been a comet. This is rather unlikely. Although a comet would behave much as the star is said to behave, hanging in the sky over a certain location for several nights, comets were universally perceived as being harbingers of disaster in ancient, and not so ancient, times. The most likely explanation is a conjunction of the planets Jupiter and Saturn. The astronomer Keppler discovered that there was indeed such a conjunction in the year 7 BC. The following year there was another conjunction of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. This might have been very impressive to the Magi. It may also be that the Star was a supernatural phenomonem and one that cannot be studied today. Whatever the truth of the matter is, I hope everyone has a wonderful Christmas.

 

Related articles

 

• The Nativity According to Luke (davidscommonplacebook.wordpress.com)
• Herod and the Wise men – Reprise (adumois.wordpress.com)
• The Slaughter of the Innocents: An Advent Reflection on an Often Forgotten Story of The Season (Advent #3) (christisvictorious.typepad.com)
• A Voice Was Heard in Ramah, A Voice Was Heard in Newtown, Connecticut (vineoflife.net)

 

Planet at Alpha Centauri

I have been meaning to write about the planet astronomers have discovered orbiting Alpha Centauri. I think this is quite exciting since Alpha Centauri is the nearest star, except the the Sun of course, only about four light years away. Here is some information from the International Business Times.

A planet with a mass similar to Earth has been discovered in Alpha Centauri System, just right outside our Solar System. What makes this planet stand out among hundreds of exoplanets previously discovered?

Here are 10 Things You Need to Know about Alpha Centauri and this Neighboring Planet:

10. Alpha Centauri is composed of three stars: Alpha Centauri A, Alpha Centauri B and Proxima Centauri, which is shining close to the Sun, the star at the center of the Solar System.

9. Alpha Centauri is a complicated system because its stars orbit one another. Further studies were made to confirm whether the orbiting body is indeed a planet.

8. Alpha Centauri is only 4.3 light years away from Earth.

7. The recently discovered unnamed planet in the Alpha Centauri System has the same mass as Earth. It is the nearest planet to Earth compared to other planets – 840 so far – discovered in the past.

6. In contrast to Mercury’s distance to the sun during orbit, the newly-discovered planet is closer to the star it orbits, suggesting extreme temperature on the surface — about 1,500C, according to scientists.

5. The neighbor planet was found near Alpha Centauri B, six million kilometers away.

4. The Harps instrument spotted the planet from the European Southern Observatory’s La Silla facility in Chile.

3. Four years of observation revealed the planet orbits Alpha Centauri B in just 3.2 to 3.6 days, a far contrast to earth’s 365 days.

2. Normally, more planets are discovered once a planet and its star have been properly identified. “The prospects are excellent for finding further planets in this system. Everything we know indicates that when you find one planet like this you’re very likely to find additional planets further out, so it’s very exciting in terms of looking forward to further detection,” Greg Laughlin of the University of California at Santa Cruz told The Guardian.

1. The Alpha Centauri planet discovery is ordinary-but-promising in space exploration. “Even if the discovery just stands perfectly normal in the discoveries we have had up to now, it’s a landmark discovery, because it’s very low-mass and it’s our closest neighbor,” Stéphane Udry of Switzerland’s Geneva Observatory told BBC.

With a surface temperature of 1500 degrees Celsius, we won’t be colonizing that planet any time soon, and of course, with our present technology, it would still take thousands of years to get there. Well, if they ever invent warp drive, that that will be our first stop.

 

Related articles

• Earth-sized Planet Discovered in Alpha Centauri System (hawaiireporter.com)
• News Break: Planet with Mass of Earth Orbiting a Star in Alpha Centauri – Nearest Star System (2012indyinfo.com)
• Alpha Centauri Has a Planet! (blogs.discovermagazine.com)
• Earth-Sized Planet Discovered in Alpha Centauri Star System, 4.3 Light-Years Away (sciencespacerobots.com)
• ‘Next-Door’ Alien Planet Still Too Distant to Visit – for Now (space.com)
• Earth-sized exoplanet discovered in Alpha Centauri (slashgear.com)
• Discovery! Earth-Size Alien Planet at Alpha Centauri Is Closest Ever Seen (space.com)

RIP Neil Armstrong

Neil Armstrong died today. I was a little stunned when I read that, but he was 82 and had been having health problems. It is a little sobering to think that his historic footsteps on the Moon happened a lifetime ago, and there still are no plans for humanity to return. I think that the best legacy for Armstrong would have been a continuing American presence in deep space, but it was not to be.

 

We need to get back into the business of exploring the final frontier.

Mars Time

 

 

The Martian day, called a “sol” is 24 hours and 39 minutes, making it 39 minutes longer than an Earth day. In order to properly monitor a Mars rover‘s mission, many of the scientists and engineers involved switch to Mars time, at least for the first three months. A forty minute longer day may not seem like much of an adjustment, but that daily forty minutes adds up and before too long you are out of sync with Earth’s day and night. Here is the story from AP about a whole family that is trying the adjustment out.

Since the landing of NASA’s newest Mars rover, flight director David Oh’s family has taken the unusual step of tagging along as he leaves Earth time behind and syncs his body clock with the red planet.

Every mission to Mars, a small army of scientists and engineers reports to duty on “Mars time” for the first three months. But it’s almost unheard of for an entire family to flip their orderly lives upside down, shifting to what amounts to a time zone change a day.

Intrigued about abiding by extraterrestrial time, Oh’s wife, Bryn, could not pass up the chance to take their kids – 13-year-old Braden, 10-year-old Ashlyn and 8-year-old Devyn – on a Martian adventure from their home near the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory where the Curiosity rover was built.

“We all feel a little sleepy, a little jet-lagged all day long, but everyone is doing great,” Bryn Oh said, two weeks into the experiment.

Days on Mars last a tad longer. Earth rotates on its axis once every 24 hours – the definition of a day. Neighbor Mars spins more lazily. Days there – known as sols – last 39 minutes and 35 seconds longer than on Earth. The difference may not seem like much each day, but it adds up.

To stay in lockstep, nearly 800 people on the $2.5 billion project have surrendered to the Martian cycle of light and dark. In the simplest sense, each day slides forward 40 minutes. That results in wacky work, sleep and eating schedules. Many say it feels like perpetual jet lag.

The Oh family broke in slowly. A sign on their front door warns: “On Mars Time: Flight Director Asleep. Come Back Later.”

Days before Curiosity’s Aug. 5 touchdown, the children stayed up until 11:30 p.m. and slept in until 10 a.m. In the beginning, it wasn’t much different from a typical day on summer vacation. As the days wore on, they stayed up later and later, waking up in the afternoon and evening.

One day last week, the family ate a 3 p.m. breakfast, 8 p.m. lunch, 2:30 a.m. dinner and 5 a.m. dessert before heading off to bed.

To sleep when the sun is out, their bedroom windows are covered with aluminum foil or cloth to keep out any sliver of light. In the hallway, a handmade calendar keeps track of the days and schedules are written on an oversized mirror. A digital clock in the master bedroom is set to Mars time.

The article goes on about the various troubles the family has in essentially rotating their day and nights forward about a time zone every day. I wonder what effect the slightly longer Martian day might have on any colonists. They wouldn’t have the trouble of having to contend with Earthly time cues, such as sunrise and sunset, or with human activities, which on Mars would be in accord with the Martian day. I don’t think the extra forty minutes would be too hard to adjust to, if everyone in the colony were on the same time.

They would have to do something about their clocks. Would they divided a Martian day into 24 slightly longer Martian hours? What about minutes and seconds? The Martian year is about 687 Earth days. Would Martian colonists measure time by Earth years or Mars years? If I lived on Mars, would I be able to get away with saying I am 20 (Martian) years old?

It will be interesting to see how they figure these sorts of things out. I hope I live to see a colony on Mars.

 

Related articles

• Rover family switches to Mars time (bigpondnews.com)
• David Oh, NASA Engineer, Switches Family To Mars Time After Curiosity Landing (huffingtonpost.com)
• Like NASA rover, family switches over to Mars time (msnbc.msn.com)
• National News: Mars rover flexes its robotic arm (coventrytelegraph.net)
• Nasa’s Mars rover flexes its robotic arm (independent.co.uk)
• Where the Minutes are Longer: Time on Mars (theatlantic.com)

 

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

First the good. The rover Curiosity landed safely on Mars. Perhaps that doesn’t seem so big a deal, but each time a Mars probe succeeds in landing safely is a technological miracle. Reaching Mars is easy enough, but landing on a planetary surface is difficult, especially when you have no control over the spacecraft and there is about an eighteen minute delay in communications. Here is more from Foxnews.

 In a show of technological wizardry, the robotic explorer Curiosity blazed through the pink skies of Mars, steering itself to a gentle landing inside a giant crater for the most ambitious dig yet into the red planet’s past.

Cheers and applause echoed through the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory late Sunday after the most high-tech interplanetary rover ever built signaled it had survived a harrowing plunge through the thin Mars atmosphere.

“Touchdown confirmed,” said engineer Allen Chen. “We’re safe on Mars.”

Minutes after the landing signal reached Earth at 10:32 p.m. PDT, Curiosity beamed back the first black-and-white pictures from inside the crater showing its wheel and its shadow, cast by the afternoon sun.

“We landed in a nice flat spot. Beautiful, really beautiful,” said engineer Adam Steltzner, who led the team that devised the tricky landing routine.

It was NASA’s seventh landing on Earth’s neighbor; many other attempts by the U.S. and other countries to zip past, circle or set down on Mars have gone awry.

The arrival was an engineering tour de force, debuting never-before-tried acrobatics packed into “seven minutes of terror” as Curiosity sliced through the Martian atmosphere at 13,000 mph.

President Barack Obama lauded the landing in a statement, calling it “an unprecedented feat of technology that will stand as a point of national pride far into the future.”

Over the next two years, Curiosity will drive over to a mountain rising from the crater floor, poke into rocks and scoop up rust-tinted soil to see if the region ever had the right environment for microscopic organisms to thrive. It’s the latest chapter in the long-running quest to find out whether primitive life arose early in the planet’s history.

The voyage to Mars took more than eight months and spanned 352 million miles. The trickiest part of the journey? The landing. Because Curiosity weighs nearly a ton, engineers drummed up a new and more controlled way to set the rover down. The last Mars rovers, twin Spirit and Opportunity, were cocooned in air bags and bounced to a stop in 2004.

Right after that, President Obama reminded the engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory that they didn’t build Curiosity all on their own. Someone else made it happen.

This is exciting and the only thing that would have made it perfect would be if it had been a manned mission. I would really like to see a human on Mars in my lifetime.

Now the bad. Yesterday,  a man named Michael Page shot and killed 6 people at a Sikh temple in Milwaukee. The motive is unclear since Page himself was killed by the police. He appears to have been involved with white-supremacist groups.

The children were downstairs, in Sunday school.

The women were in the kitchen nearby, cooking the weekly meal that is free to all.

And the gunman was striding into the wide-open Sikh Temple, bent on killing as many people as he could.

Then came the shots, ripped off, according to a weapons instructor who lives nearby, “as fast as you can pull the trigger.”

By the time the shooter was done, six people lay dead or mortally wounded in what Oak Creek police said was being treated as a domestic terrorist incident – if so, one without precedent in Wisconsin.

Counting the gunman – fatally shot by an Oak Creek police officer – the death count stands at seven.

“This,” a temple leader said later, “is insanity.”

It is also the most deadly U.S. attack on Sikhs – who often have been mistaken for Muslims and targeted in hate crimes – in recent memory.

Within three hours of the mass slaying at the five-year-old temple, built on S. Howell Ave. to accommodate the Milwaukee area’s growing Sikh community, a task force of federal, state and local law enforcement officers was gathering on the scene.

Sikhism is a monotheistic religion, which is, in some ways, a blend of Islamic and Hindu traditions. It was founded by Guru Nanak in the Punjab about 500 years ago. Although Sikhism has spread throughout the world, the majority of Sikhs still live in the Punjab. People in in that region are generally considered to be Caucasians or white, so I am not sure why a white supremacist would target them, unless they weren’t white enough for him. Then again, a lot of those people hate Jews, who look as white as anyone. Maybe he meant to kill Muslims. Sikhs have been targets for hate crimes by the ignorant since 9/11. His motivation will have to remain as something of a mystery since he apparently didn’t leave behind any notes or manifestos.

And now the ugly. As one might expect, much of the ugliness in today’s discourse comes from the tolerant Left, the ones who incessantly lecture the rest of us about civility. I won’t bother to mention some of the vandalism directed at Chick-fil-A, this past week. Here are two stories I read today. First, Anti-hunting mob urges Team USA shooter Corey Cogdell to shoot herself

Corey Cogdell is a Trap Shooter who won a bronze medal at the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing and competed in the 2012 Olympic Games in London.

She also participates in trophy hunting (hunting of wild game animals).

After Cogdell published photos on Facebook of herself posing alongside animals she killed, anti-hunting activists took to Twitter to express their strong displeasure.

Natascha Bracale @TaschaB13

@CoreyCogdell pity the bus didn’t crash. You are a waste of oxygen and an embarassment to the human race.Karma is a bitch.

Konejira @Konejira

@CoreyCogdell please go shoot yourself in the knees. YOU ANIMAL MURDERER!! you’re a disgusting human being.
@pablito_honas

@CoreyCogdell I hope that someone someday shoot your whole familly just practicing.—
Pablo Honney (@pablito_honas) August 02, 2012

Nice people.

Then there is the latest action by the tolerant Atheist community.

26-foot tall cross emblazoned with the message “Jesus Saves” has become the center for more First Amendment debate in Indiana.

The cross stands on a public plot of land in the small Hoosier State community of Dugger, and has Americans United for Separation of Church and State threatening to sue.

“It’s a pretty flagrant display of the government saying ‘this is a Christian town,’” Gregory Lipper, the group’s senior counsel, told FoxNews.com. “Everyone gets freedom of religion …just because Christianity is this country’s religious majority doesn’t mean that they get to put their thumb on the scale and use taxpayer dollars.

“It doesn’t matter what religion the government is endorsing … it’s a clear violation of the Constitution.”

The land that the cross sits on is valued at about $3,000, and the little 955-person town cannot afford legal fees to save such a small spot of land.

“We’ve given the church 60 days to make a decision,” Dwight Nielsen, Dugger Town Board president, told FoxNews.com. “We may sell the land to a group of [churches].”

The cross was erected two years ago on behalf of the town’s Faith Community Church. The fixture sits on town-owned property near a high school baseball field, but the town approved the build.

“We wanted people to be able to see what the message of the cross represents and get it out to the world in need,” Shawn Farris, head pastor at the Faith Community Church, told FoxNews.com.

Farris does not believe that the town made a religious endorsement by letting the church put up the cross:

“We knew it was okay because when you look at the separation between church and state, it’s just a fact that the government couldn’t tell people how to worship … it would be the same if they allowed a crescent moon to be put up,” he continued.

The town will soon hold a meeting to discuss and finalize the future plans of the cross, officials said.

Religious freedom means they cannot put up a cross? How is anyone hurt by this? Would anyone object if some other religious symbol were erected? Why don’t the people at the Americans United for Separation of Church and State get a life, and stop harassing people?

 

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Ghost Galaxies

 

 

The Hubble Space Telescope is still making discoveries. In this case, astronomers have spotted galaxies, more than 13 billion light years away. These galaxies are so faint that the astronomers have referred to them as “ghost galaxies”. Because they are so far away, we are seeing them as they were long ago and this can tell  us something of how galaxies formed and the early history of our universe. I’ll let the account in Fox News provide the details.

The Hubble Space Telescope has captured images of three odd galaxies that may help scientists solve a 13 billion-year cosmic mystery.

The galaxies are so old and faint that astronomers nicknamed them “ghost galaxies” in a description. The objects are among the smallest and faintest galaxies near our own Milky Way galaxy, researchers said.

“These galaxies are fossils of the early universe: they have barely changed for 13 billion years,” scientists explained in a July 10 announcement. “The discovery could help explain the so-called ‘missing satellite’ problem, where only a handful of satellite galaxies have been found around the Milky Way, against the thousands that are predicted by theories.”

The three galaxies observed by the Hubble telescope are known as Hercules, Leo IV and Ursa Major. All three objects are small dwarf galaxies that appear to have begun forming about 13 billion years ago and then — for an unknown reason — their growth hit a cosmic wall. Since the universe is estimated to be about 13.7 billion years old, the galaxies were born sometime within the first billion years of the cosmos.

 

In the history of the universe, the reionization period marks a time when the cosmos transformed from being filled with cool neutral hydrogen (which carried no charge) into a universe with ionized hydrogen that had been split into its component electrons and protons. That change made the hydrogen fog of the early universe transparent to ultraviolet light.

The universe was filled with the neutral hydrogen about 300,000 years after the Big Bang, with the reionization period occurring sometime in the 1 billion years that followed, astronomers have said. Scientists suspect that radiation from the first stars and galaxies caused the reionization.

In the new study, Brown and his colleagues found that the same radiation that triggered the reionization of the universe may have also stunted star formation in dwarf galaxies such as those spotted in the new Hubble telescope views.

There is more at the article. I am continually amazed at the wonders of the universe we live in.

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The Final Frontier

I am a little disappointed by Charles Krauthammer‘s latest column, in which he laments the end of the space shuttle program.

As the space shuttle Discovery flew three times around Washington, a final salute before landing at Dulles airport for retirement in a museum, thousands on the ground gazed upward with marvel and pride. Yet what they were witnessing, for all its elegance, was a funeral march.

The shuttle was being carried — its pallbearer, a 747 — because it cannot fly, nor will it ever again. It was being sent for interment. Above ground, to be sure. But just as surely embalmed as Lenin in Red Square.

Is there a better symbol of willed American decline? The pity is not Discovery’s retirement — beautiful as it was, the shuttle proved too expensive and risky to operate — but that it died without a successor. The planned follow-on — the Constellation rocket-capsule program to take humans back into orbit and from there to the moon — was suddenly canceled in 2010. And with that, control of manned spaceflight was gratuitously ceded to Russia and China.

As s Conservative, Krauthammer should know better. He seems to be following the Liberal line that if the government does not provide a good or service, than it will not be provided. In fact, America is not ceding control of space. Private enterprise is picking up where NASA has left off. There are already several companies ready and willing to provide launch vehicles, including SpaceX and Virgin Galactic. As for Constellation, Rand Simberg has pointed out repeatedly that it is a waste of taxpayer money with no defined mission except to provide jobs to the aerospace industry, a kind of space Solyndra, if you will.

Krauthammer goes on.

Nor for the private sector to get us back into orbit, as Obama assumes it will. True, hauling MREs up and trash back down could be done by private vehicles. But manned flight is infinitely more complex and risky, requiring massive redundancy and inevitably larger expenditures. Can private entities really handle that? And within the next lost decade or two?

But they are. The first private manned spaceflight was back in 2004. Granted it was only a suborbital flight, but Space Ship One showed that a private manned space flight is not too complex and risky. Even now, there are plans for more manned flights and eventually space tourism. We are  not retreating from space. We are taking space exploration to its next step, ending the government monopoly on space travel and opening space up to private enterprise.

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