Monthly Archives: August 2009

Space Imaging — From Explorer to Kepler

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Fifty years ago in space history — August 7, 1959 — the Explorer-6 satellite launched from Cape Canaveral on a Thor Able rocket.

(Explorer-6 satellite. Click to enlarge. NASA image.)

Explorer-6 was small and spheroidal, with four solar array “paddles,” and was launched to study space radiation, cosmic rays, and other phenomena. It also carried “a scanning device designed for photographing the earth’s cloud cover,” according to this NASA page, and sent back the first crude television images of earth from space.

And 40 years ago today — on August 7, 1969 — the Soviet Union launched the Zond-7 circumlunar spacecraft from Baikonur on a Proton-K* rocket. Zond-7 performed a lunar flyby on August 11 and returned to earth on August 14, carrying color photographs it had taken of the Earth and the Moon.

We’ve come a long way in terms of imaging technology, with the new Kepler space observatory having “captured the light of a gas giant orbiting a star over a thousand light years away.” From the Spaceflight Now story, “Kepler [was] able to detect the light of the gas giant, determine its phases and know when it had vanished from view behind its sun.” Here’s an animation showing the light curve Kepler detected and its interpretation.

Amazing.

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*It amazes me that the Proton rocket is still operating out of the Baikonur Cosmodrome, and I’m thankful that I got to see those operations.

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Trees or Forests? Metaphors for the Political Left and Right

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Some recent blog posts and the opening of a new (local) political season brought my thoughts back to the speechifying and responding we enjoyed* during the last Presidential campaign. It occurred to me that some of our country’s left-right dichotomy has to do with which side can’t see the forest for the trees, and which one sees the forest but not the trees.

It all depends on perspective … and, to a degree, on what issue is being discussed.

Take the economy, for instance. Those on the left seem unable to see the forest as they focus on single trees in the form of individuals hurt by the recession. Those on the right seem unable to see the individual trees because they are looking at the entire economic forest and the larger forces affecting it (and affected by it). The former would say a forest can’t be healthy if the individual trees are damaged or diseased; the latter would say it makes no sense to focus on individual trees if by doing so you neglect or even hurt the rest of the forest.

We can also see that difference in perspective with respect to healthcare. Those on the left see the trees — individuals and families without health insurance and saddled with staggering bills — and seem willing to sacrifice much of the forest of insured and mostly satisfied healthcare consumers in order to attend to those individual needs. Those on the right see the forest — a vast but untamed landscape of providers, customers, and insurers — and seem willing to let a few trees wither rather than take drastic action that may end up tantamount to clear-cutting.

What about other issues? What about your own perspective? Do you see the forest, or the trees?

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*Or, if you prefer, “endured.”

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This message has been brought to you by the Anti-Campaign. “I’m the Anti-Candidate, and I approved this message.”

Image Credit: Jonathan Gill, from Flickr, under Creative Commons

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Elusive Success, and Believing In Our Work

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A literary agent whom I hoped to query with my novel posted this message on Twitter yesterday:

Straight SF is very very hard to sell right now.

I wrote back that I hope I’m first in line when that trend changes.

I believe I’ve written a good book: it’s certainly the best book I could write at this time, and several early readers gave me very tough critiques that made it even better. I’ve got a great cover quote from a bestselling author, and have done everything I know how to do to increase its chances of success. Yet it is very possible that the current market will not accept a near-future, realistic, essentially hopeful SF story about colonists struggling to survive on the moon.

The uncertainty of succeeding with this novel makes me wonder . . .

In the grand if not the grandest scheme of things, does it matter, the success of a single person in any field of endeavor? What inventor or artist or thinker, if disease or injury or other calamity had prevented their accomplishments, would not have been replaced eventually? If not by a similar or even identical art (more likely in the realm of science than in any other), then by one that would be equally admired, equally revered?

So runs the train of thought headlong to disaster.

No — we must believe that our works have value for the moment and more than the moment. We must labor as if what we produce will make a difference on some scale — if not the universal, on the global scale; if not global, continental; if not continental, local; if not local, personal, even if limited to ourselves.

And so, onward.

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A Busy Launch Day in Space History

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Two interesting launches occurred 15 years ago today — August 3, 1994.

  • From Edwards Air Force Base, California, a Pegasus rocket launched the Advanced Photovoltaic and Electronic Experiments spacecraft off the wing of NASA’s B-52 carrier aircraft. APEX was part of the USAF Space Test Program, and carried instruments to study the effects of the Van Allen radiation belt.
  • And from Cape Canaveral, what might have been an “ordinary” launch (except that in space launch there’s still no such thing) of DIRECTV-2, except that this spacecraft carried the “SpaceArc” time capsule. SpaceArc — the “space archive” — consisted of a reel of 35-mm optical tape containing essays, poems, written music and artwork: “the personal expressions of more than 47,000 people from around the world, representing 52 countries,” according to the old web site. The archive included messages from then Vice-President Al Gore and his predecessor, Dan Quayle, and is intended to remain in orbit for thousands of years after the satellite’s useful life.

And five years ago — on this date in 2004 — the Messenger probe to Mercury was launched from Cape Canaveral. Messenger is scheduled to arrive at Mercury and begin orbiting the planet in March 2011 (591 days away, if you’re counting). Read more about the Messenger mission on the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory web site.

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