The inside story on the Curiosity rover

Rob Manning has been sending things to Mars for 34 years. A Whidbey Island native who was inspired about space by the far-out stories he read in National Geographic and Colliers, Manning is now the Mars Program Engineering Manager for the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab‘s Mars Exploration Program. He gave a talk this month at the Museum of Flight based on his book, Mars Rover Curiosity: An Inside Account from Curiosity’s Chief Engineer (Smithsonian Books, 2014).

Rob Manning, chief engineer for Curiosity, the Mars Science
Laboratory, gave a talk about the rover June 18 at the Museum
of Flight. Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

Manning opened his presentation by showing the now-famous video of the JPL crew during the “seven minutes of terror,” the lag between the moment of Curiosity’s landing on Mars and the moment when the team finally learned it had been a success. Engineers were laughing and crying and backslapping. Emotional engineers?

“We were very relieved,” Manning joked, noting that a lot of money had been spent on the mission and many of them had been working on it for many years. “We know how fragile these systems can be even though we put in an enormous amount of work to make them as reliable and sturdy as possible.”

“These are human enterprises,” he continued. “They are not built by institutions, they’re not built by abstract organizations. They’re just a bunch of people working together trying to make sure they didn’t make a mistake.”

NASA lost interest in Mars for a while after the Viking landers found a pretty sterile and hostile environment. Manning’s first mission was Mars Pathfinder, which he jokingly calls “the easy one.”

“One way to get good at something is to start simple,” Manning said, noting that the landing system for Pathfinder, which he called “a brick with wheels,” was even less complicated than that of Viking.
Manning said that each mission teaches lessons, even missions that fail, such as the Mars Climate Orbiter and the Mars Polar Lander. He said the Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, are essentially modified Pathfinders. Spirit and Opportunity, roving geologists, confirmed there was once water on Mars. The discovery raised questions that the roving geologists couldn’t answer, but that a roving geochemist could.

“The trouble is roving geochemists have a laboratory with all of this big lab equipment,” Manning said. “So we needed to figure out a way to take the lab equipment, shrink it down, put it in a rover, and send it to Mars.”

That became Curiosity, which Manning said has been doing great work.
“We’ve basically proven that Mars was a wet place, it had oceans, it had seas, it had a lot of water long ago,” he said, adding that early, simple life forms could have been perfectly happy there. Were they? We don’t know yet.

Next up is Mars 2020, which will collect rock and soil samples on Mars for a potential future return to Earth.

“We haven’t had the name-the-rover contest yet,” Manning joked. Its design will essentially be based on Curiosity, though in this case they are going to re-invent the wheels. Curiosity’s wheels have been punctured by sharp rocks that are essentially immovable, locked in place in Martian sediments.

“This is a failure of our imagination,” Manning said. “We had sharp rocks in our Mars yard (where they test out designs on Earth), but they weren’t glued down.” He said 2020’s wheels will be similar, but stronger, and not much heavier.

Manning’s current work is on that mission, and he’s also busy cooking up ways to slow down and land even larger and heavier spacecraft with an eye toward a possible human mission to Mars in the 2030s. Manning said that, because of its thin atmosphere, “Mars is not a very good place to land.”

We expect they’ll come up with a way to do it.

Big plans for satellite imaging company BlackSky Global

The latest Seattle-based entry into the private space business has announced ambitious plans to offer up “satellite imaging as a service,” selling color photos with one-meter resolution at a significantly lower cost and with far less turnaround time than is presently available in the market. BlackSky Global is aiming to launch two of its Pathfinder imaging satellites in the first quarter of next year and has the funding available to have a total of six of them up in orbit by the end of 2016. BlackSky’s long-term plan is to have a constellation of 60 high-resolution imaging satellites in operation by 2019.

Peter Wegner. Photo: BlackSky Global.

“We’re laying out the systems so that we’ll be able to take a picture essentially of anywhere on the planet and send it back to a customer on a timeline measured in minutes, and be able to do that at consumer kind of prices,” said Peter Wegner, chief technology officer for BlackSky. “It really is exciting; it’s something that’s never been possible before.”

The typical buyers of satellite images are governments, corporations, and other large entities working on security, border defense, environmental monitoring, and precision agriculture. Wegner expects those, and more, to be BlackSky customers.

“It’s going to open up all kinds of new markets, too,” he said. “There are a number of firms around the world that use satellite imagery to do analytical predictions of commodities or natural resources, energy. It really is, in some sense, about global market intelligence and feeding the demand to know what’s happening around the world everywhere, all the time, 24-7.”

Eventually it will be a consumer business. You could go onto the BlackSky website and, for a few hundred dollars, order up a photo of your backyard. The one-meter resolution of the images will reveal people or groups of people, but they won’t be identifiable.

Technician Jim Bowes checks out the Pathfinder spacecraft.
Photo: BlackSky Global.

“That’s important because there are a lot of concerns about privacy, and we also have those concerns as a company,” Wegner said. “This allows us to provide the capability to monitor what’s happening around your environment, but not get down to the level where it causes a privacy concern.”

BlackSky is an independent company owned by Seattle’s Spaceflight Industries, which specializes in launching small satellites as secondary payloads. Wegner said Seattle is a great place for BlackSky’s sort of business.

“There seems to be a growing center of gravity for small space companies to move to Seattle,” he said, noting that the mix of aerospace, high-tech, and web expertise is perfect.

“All three of those things are really important for our business, because if you’re going to make this a consumer-level product, you need the web-scale business experience, you need the big data experience, and you need the aerospace experience, which all fits uniquely where we are in this area.”

Book review: Photography Night Sky

We at Seattle Astronomy are not into astrophotography as such; while we enjoy the images created by others, our own interests in amateur astronomy lean strongly toward visual observation. Nevertheless, we have been known to do a little shutterbugging from time to time, and thus Photography Night Sky: A Field Guide for Shooting After Dark (Mountaineers Books, 2014) is an interesting read.

Authored by Jennifer Wu and James Martin, Photography Night Sky is not a guide for deep-sky photography, but rather a primer for shooting nightscapes, including stars, the Milky Way, star trails, the Moon, and twilight scenes. Wu and Martin also cover meteors, aurorae, false dawn, and other celestial phenomena.

The 100 gorgeous color photos included in the book are proof enough that the authors know what they’re talking about. They have the credentials to back it up, too. Wu has won a bevy of awards for her work and is a Canon “Explorer of Light” photographer. Martin has written and photographed professionally since 1989 and is the author of several books, including the best-selling Photography Outdoors: A Field Guide for Travel and Adventure Photographers, which had a new release last year.

Photography Night Sky is a highly accessible guide for the novice shooter, and we expect seasoned photographers also will find some good pointers within. Wu and Martin cover equipment and preparation for shooting, and get into such topics as composition, focus, and optimum camera settings for various conditions. They also address some of the challenges of photography at night, especially shooting in the cold. The book includes chapters about the various sorts of objects one might shoot in the dark, and a full chapter about post-processing of images.

We were especially interested in the sections about lighting and the methods, such as light painting, for enhancing the appearance of objects at night without washing out the stars you’re trying to capture in your images.

Wu was in Seattle to give a talk last month, but we had to miss it, as it was scheduled at the same time as a lecture by renowned cosmologist Jim Peebles. But we’re glad to have a copy of Photography Night Sky, and hope the advice from Wu and Martin will help improve our own imaging. Pick up a copy at the link or by clicking the cover photo above.

More:

• Jennifer Wu website
• Jennifer Wu Facebook
• Jennifer Wu Twitter
• James Martin website

One-sided race to the Moon nearly derailed

It’s a popular narrative that the race to land a man on the Moon in the 1960s was launched by President John F. Kennedy in a speech to Congress in May of 1961, and was a gung-ho, nonstop effort until the goal was achieved in 1969. In fact, the space policy expert Dr. John M. Logsdon says the whole thing was nearly undone in 1963.

Space policy expert Dr. John Logsdon
spoke June 13 at the Museum of Flight.
Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

Logsdon is the founder and longtime director of the Space Policy Institute at the George Washington University and author of John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and After Apollo?: Richard Nixon and the American Space Program (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). He gave a talk titled, “John Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and the American Space Program” last weekend at the Museum of Flight.

Logsdon pointed out some interesting contrasts between the two presidents. Richard Nixon was an early space booster, arguing for a civilian space agency when he was Vice President under Dwight Eisenhower. Some historians think of Nixon as the father of NASA. Meanwhile Kennedy didn’t have much interest in space until the Soviet Union launched Yuri Gagarin into orbit in April of 1961. This got Kennedy’s attention, and he gave his advisors the task of coming up with a space effort that the United States could win. Their answer was landing on the Moon, and that became Kennedy’s goal.

“It had very little to do with a view of humanity’s future in space or some romantic image of the space frontier,” Logsdon explained. “This was a Cold War, deliberate act of competition, seeing space as an area to demonstrate which social system, which governmental system was superior.”

Ramping up space spending

“Kennedy not only talked the talk, but he backed up his rhetoric with commitment,” Logsdon added. “This was a war-like mobilization of human and financial resources.”

Indeed, the NASA budget nearly doubled the first year and more than doubled again the second, and the skyrocketing cost came under considerable criticism. Kennedy was sensitive to this for a couple of reasons. He was concerned about the political impact of the Apollo program losing support, and worried that spending on space could be a negative in his 1964 re-election campaign. There was some talk of cutting the budget or relaxing the end-of-decade timeline for the goal. Kennedy also spoke openly of making the quest for a Moon a cooperative venture with the Soviet Union. Logsdon said that Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev originally expressed some interest in the idea, but was talked out of it by advisors worried that cooperation would reveal that the Russians really didn’t have lunar launch capability.

The one-sided race

“The United States was racing only itself,” Logsdon said of that lack of capability. “The Soviet Union, as of September of 1963, didn’t have a lunar program” and, in fact, didn’t decide to try until 1964.

“It was not reality as long as Kennedy was president. It became reality by the end of the decade,” Logsdon said.

Kennedy visited the launch center in Florida on Nov. 16, 1963 and was impressed by the rockets and the facilities.

“This visit excited Kennedy,” Logsdon said. “He came away from the visit full of regained enthusiasm for the program.”

On Nov. 21 Kennedy made a speech in San Antonio in which he said that the conquest of space must and will go ahead. He was assassinated the next day, and that ended any possibility that Apollo would be scrubbed. It became a memorial to the fallen president. Logsdon said it is interesting to speculate about what might have happened if JFK had lived or if Khrushchev had said “yes” to collaboration.
Logsdon said he doesn’t see Kennedy as a visionary in terms of humanity’s future in space.

“He was rather a pragmatic politician that saw a leadership-oriented space program as in the national interest in the particular situation of the early 1960s. He chose the lunar landing as a way of demonstrating the capabilities of this country,” Logsdon said.

Nixon and Apollo

Nixon was sworn in as president six months to the day before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the Moon with Apollo 11.

“Unlike Kennedy, who saw space in geopolitical and foreign policy terms, Nixon viewed the space program as an issue of domestic politics: of technology, of innovation, of job creation, of something that is part of what the government does to stimulate society,” Logsdon said.

He contends that Nixon made three key decisions about space. He didn’t set a grand goal like going to the Moon or Mars. He opted to treat space exploration as just another one of the things that government does, nothing special. And his administration approved the space shuttle, though Logsdon said they chose to, “build a program around the shuttle without a long-term goal for the shuttle to serve.”

Logsdon said there may have been some wisdom there. A big goal, and an accompanying big budget, could have been a target, while a small, sustainable space program didn’t attract much opposition.

“Nixon was totally convinced of the importance of human spaceflight and of keeping astronauts in orbit, and that human spaceflight was essential to a U.S. leadership position,” Logsdon said. “He was intrigued by the various national security uses of the shuttle, which never happened.”

Naturally, electoral politics entered into it as well. The shuttle program created jobs in California, and Nixon needed to win California to gain re-election.

Logsdon is an engaging speaker and used a lot of video and audio clips in his presentation. His books are worth a look for anyone interested in the history of the space program. To buy the books click the links or book covers above.

Understanding relativity

Jeffrey Bennett thinks we ought to be teaching kids about relativity in grade school because Einstein’s theories explain so much about everything, from why the Sun shines to gravity to how your GPS system knows where you are. His book What Is Relativity?: An Intuitive Introduction to Einstein’s Ideas, and Why They Matter (Columbia University Press, 2014) does a marvelous job of making sense of some of the seemingly strange consequences of relativity.

Jeffery Bennett spoke about his book
“What is Relativity?” at the meeting of
the Seattle Astronomical Society
 in April. Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

Bennett spoke about relativity at a meeting of the Seattle Astronomical Society in April. He’s on a tour marking the International Year of Light and the centennial of general relativity.

Bennett noted that a key idea of relativity is that it is motion that is relative. He illustrated this by talking about a plane flight between Nairobi and Quito, two cities on Earth’s equator. The plane leaves Nairobi, flies at 1,670 kilometers per hour, which happens to be the Earth’s rotational speed at the equator, and then lands in Quito.

A person standing on Earth would say the plane flew west at 1,670 kilometers per hour. However, a person watching this flight from the Moon would have seen the plane take off, hover while the Earth spun under it, and then land once Quito arrived. That person would peg the plane’s speed at zero. Who is right?

“Einstein’s answer is both are correct,” Bennett said, “and neither one makes sense unless you specify what you’re measuring your motion relative to.”

Absolutes are key in relativity

Bennett explained that the heart of relativity is not what is relative, but the two things that are absolute: the laws of nature and the speed of light. He used an airplane flight to illustrate the latter point as well.

If you’re in a plane going 500 miles an hour, and you throw a ball forward at 10 miles per hour, a person on the ground would see that ball going at 510 miles per hour—the speed of the plane plus the speed of the ball. However, if you shined a flashlight forward, the light would go at the speed of light, not light-plus-500. The motion of the plane does not effect the speed of light.

“It is not effected by motion of either the observer or the source,” Bennett explained. “It’s an experimentally measured fact that the speed of light is the same for everyone, and from this single fact, if you do thought experiments, you can derive all the seemingly strange consequences of relativity.”

Not so fast!

The book is loaded with such thought experiments that help one get a grasp on the concepts. One Bennett talked about at length is the impossibility of exceeding the speed of light. Imagine a spaceship with theoretically unlimited speed. If Bennett, as the pilot, turns on the ship’s headlights, both he and an observer outside the craft would see the light from the headlights moving ahead of the ship at the speed of light.

“If the headlights are going the speed of light then I’m going less than the speed of light,” Bennett explained. “We set no limits, and yet the fact that the speed of light is the same for everyone means I cannot reach it or exceed it.”

“This is not a challenge to be broken technologically,” he continued. “It’s something that simply cannot be done. In fact, the idea that you cannot go faster than the speed of light is so well established that not even science fiction writers try to break it. That’s why they go through wormholes or into hyperspace or make warp drive to bend spacetime, because science fiction writers know you cannot travel through the universe at a speed greater than the speed of light. It simply can’t be done because the speed of light is the same for everyone.”

Bennett explained that the predictions of the effects of relativity have been tested exhaustively, and much of what we see in our everyday lives serves as proof that it works.
“The sun shining is evidence that relativity is correct,” he said. “Every time you turn on a computer or a light our a cell phone you’re testing the theory of relativity and showing that it works. This is an extremely well-established idea.”

Uncommon sense

Bennett speaks about relativity often and finds that many people have a hard time with it because they feel it violates their common sense.

“The good news is it actually doesn’t violate your common sense,” Bennett said. “The bad news is the reason it doesn’t violate your common sense is because when it comes to these ideas, you just don’t have any common sense.”

Why not? Common sense, by definition, derives from everyday experiences.

“These effects of relativity become noticeable when you’re traveling at speeds close to the speed of light. And guess what? You’ve never done that,” Bennett said.

Gravity

When it comes to gravity, Newton had the math pretty well figured out, but even he thought the notion of one massive body acting somehow on another had sort of a weird, magical quality. Einstein came along and figured out that gravity is simply curvature of spacetime.

“This is one of the fundamental ideas of general relativity,” Bennett said. “Gravity is no longer a magical force at a distance, it’s just objects following the natural contours of spacetime as they are shaped by masses in the universe.”

Evidence that this is true includes gravitational lensing, gravitational time dilation, black holes, and gravitational waves. The first has been seen, the second measured, and we’ve seen the effects of the third. Bennett said scientists are optimistic they’ll actually detect gravitational waves in experiments this year.

Why relativity matters

Bennett feels that scientific knowledge, understanding of reality, and the inspiring human potential to do great things through science are among the reasons that relativity matters. A fourth reason is highly philosophical.

“In a sense, every action you ever take is a permanent part of spacetime,” he said. “Your life is a series of events, and this means that when you put them all together you are creating your own indelible mark on the universe. Perhaps if everyone understood that, we might all be a little more careful to make sure that the mark we leave is one that we are proud of. This may be a little naive, but I actually believe that if everyone understood the theory of relativity we’d all treat each other a little bit better.”

What Is Relativity? is an outstanding book that dives deeper into these concepts and leaves the reader with a better understanding of relativity.

Jim Peebles and the cosmic microwave background

Jim Peebles is a giant of science. He was studying physical cosmology long before it was considered a serious, quantitative branch of physics, and has done much to establish its respectability. Peebles also has contributed a great deal to the thinking about dark matter and dark energy.

Legendary physical cosmologist Jim
Peebles makes a point during a lecture
at the University of Washington May
19, 2015. Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

Peebles, the Albert Einstein Professor of Science emeritus at Princeton University, gave a lecture titled “Fifty Years of the Cosmic Microwave Background” recently at the University of Washington.

“The last 50 years have seen a truly transformative advance in our understanding of the world around us,” Peebles noted in opening the talk. He explained that the idea of the Big Bang had been bouncing around for a while, and in the early 1960s folks were setting out to prove it as fact. Peebles was a research associate with Bob Dickie at Princeton, and the two of them advanced the idea of the cosmic microwave background. Along with research associates Peter Roll and Dave Wilkinson, they built a microwave radiometer to detect the signature of a hot Big Bang.
Little did they know that the evidence had already been spotted and measured.

Several years earlier, Bell Telephone Laboratories in New Jersey had done an experiment in communication using microwave radiation.

“This was an important forerunner to the sight of our students wandering around campus staring at their cell phones,” Peebles quipped. The experiment also found a lot of background radiation despite the best engineering efforts to eliminate it. By 1963 Bob Wilson and Arno Penzias at Bell wanted to use the technology to do radio astronomy, but they needed to solve the problem of the system noise.

“The Bell people had this constant irritation,” Peebles said. “They were getting more radiation than they expected from their communications experiments.”

It must be the CMB

Peebles had already been doing lectures about the possibility of the cosmic microwave background. By 1964 the Bell folks and the Princeton people got together. Peebles and Dickie figured that the system noise plaguing Wilson and Penzias was actually the cosmic microwave background.

“We had the possibility of a great discovery,” Peebles recalled. “We already knew right away that this was something new. That was exciting because you have a new phenomenon, something new to measure, and something new to make theories about.”

Measuring to prove it

The measurement piece took a quarter century, and was accomplished with spectacular precision by two experiments just months apart in 1990: NASA’s Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite, headed by John Mather of the Goddard Space Flight Center and George Smoot of Berkeley, and a rocket-borne experiment launched by Herb Gush of the University of British Columbia, along with Mark Halpern and Ed Wishnow. Both projects, in development for about 15 years, made measurements that meshed perfectly with the theoretical predictions for the cosmic microwave background.

COBE all-sky map. Image: NASA.

“It’s a glorious piece of evidence, I would say an iconic piece, that shows tangibly that the universe had to have evolved from a different state, because this is a thermal spectrum,” Peebles marveled. “Our universe as it is now is transparent for this radiation. There is no way it could force the radiation to relax to this thermal equilibrium. The universe had to have evolved from a state in which it was dense and hot enough to have relaxed to equilibrium and then expanded away from it.”

Interestingly, this is a tale of “missed it by that much” when it comes to Nobel Prizes. Dickie, Peebles, and the Princeton team were well on their way to making the measurement when they learned that Wilson and Penzias had already stumbled across it. The latter two won the Nobel in 1978 for their work. Mather and Smoot won the Nobel in 2006 for their COBE measurements, but Gush may have beaten them to it had it not been for equipment troubles that delayed the launch of his experiment.