When we went on a road trip to a new place when I was a kid my dad would pick up a map from the nearest gas station. There were no gas stations on the way to the Moon, but the first astronauts to land there had a map anyway, thanks to the work of Harlan “Buzz” Reese and colleagues. His son, Tom Reese, talked about his father’s work at the most recent meeting of the Seattle Astronomical Society.
“What I’m honored to share tonight are images mainly from our dad’s collection, which for more than 50 years was pretty much just stuffed in boxes and cardboard tubes, but we now think of them as artifacts,” Tom Reese said. His father, who passed away in 2013, worked for many years at the Aeronautical Chart and Information Center (ACIC) in St. Louis. It was an office of the Air Force and was considered the premier mapping organization in the country. The elder Reese was a civilian who worked on the project creating charts of the Moon for NASA.
“They worked with the photographs from any source they could get, the best pictures that were available,” Reese said. That included images made by ground-based telescopes and lunar orbiters, and later photos shot by astronauts during Apollo missions. There was no image-editing software in the 1960s, but the folks at ACIC did have a cut-and-paste operation; they literally pieced together many of their charts by making copies of photographs, cutting them out, and building maps of larger areas as mosaics of many images. Some of them were huge, room-sized. They’d sometimes build these maps on the entire floor of a large room and walk around in stocking feet so as not to damage them too much. The charts include handwritten notes and tell-tale identification of the people who made them.
This photo of the Apollo 11 landing site was made by Apollo 10 and includes a handwritten overlay by Harlan Reese. Photo: Tom Reese.
“My dad’s smeared fingerprints and careful mapping marks are also a down-to-Earth tribute to the other 400,000 human beings whose efforts made the journey possible,” Reese said.
Reese, an independent journalist, photographer, author, artist, and teacher whose work as a newspaper and magazine photojournalist was nominated for Pulitzer Prizes during his career at The Seattle Times, spoke of a sense of awe and wonder when making a photograph of the Moon.
“I think it was with the same sense of wonder that my dad saved all these things that were actually scraps of his work,” Reese said, “but I also think he thought of these as a gift to be shared.”
Part of that wish came true this year, when several of the charts were included in the Destination Moon exhibit that wrapped up earlier this month at the Museum of Flight. Reese said he hopes the entire collection can some day wind up in a place where it can continue to tell a part of the story of the Apollo missions.
Tom Reese spoke about his father's Moon mapping at the Sept. 18, 2019 meeting of the Seattle Astronomical Society. Photo: Greg Scheiderer
It’s amazing to think that the lunar orbiters that preceded Apollo were shooting photos using film, processing that film in space and then sending the images to Earth via radio. Today’s digital cameras on spacecraft capture far greater resolution. For the cartographers who mapped the Moon there was a good deal of art to go with the science.
“On the early maps of the Earth you can see where they would come to the limit of the known world and simply mark down ‘terra incognita’ or ‘beyond this point there be dragons,’” Reese said. “In the early mapping of the Moon precision was key, of course. But the audacity to fire three men packed into a rattling tin can to an unexplored world also required calculating on the unforeseen.” The mappers analyzed all of the data they had to give accurate representation of the sizes of and distances between lunar features so that the maps would be useful guides.
You can see many of the images Reese shared during his presentation on his website.
If there’s a war in space it won’t involve huge fleets of ships in a shoot-‘em-up accompanied by classical music, as battle is often depicted in science fiction movies.
“Our war in space won’t be particularly a Star Wars version,” according to Linda Dawson, senior lecturer emeritus in physics and space sciences at the University of Washington Tacoma and author of the recent War in Space: The Science and Technology Behind Our Next Theater of Conflict(Springer Praxis Books, 2018). Dawson recently gave a talk about the book at the Museum of Flight.
Linda Dawson, author of War in Space, spoke Sept. 14, 2019 at the Museum of Flight. Photo: Greg Scheiderer.
“Spacecraft with weapons in space are still pretty far in the future,” Dawson said. “We’re talking decades.”
Such a conflict would likely destroy every spacecraft in orbit, according to Dawson.
“That kind of a battle would end up disastrous for everyone involved,” she said. “The war would be over in a matter of minutes if that happened just outside of Earth orbit, and it would affect us on Earth for decades.”
That’s not necessarily what is preventing it from happening.
“Space is a very harsh theater of war,” Dawson said, listing the lack of air, extreme temperatures, radiation, and space junk as just the start of the problems such a war would face.
“Access [to space] is expensive and technologically challenging,” Dawson said. “It’s not like we would choose to go to outer space to engage in a war. It’s just that we have spacecraft up there that we all depend on, and so it is an area that is intriguing to countries that don’t agree with each other.”
The likely nature of war in space
War in space would be more subtle than a bunch of big explosions. A variety of weapons, including Earth-to-space, space-to-Earth, and space-to-space varieties are possible. Lasers, missiles, and various “kill vehicles” or “jammers” could be employed to foul up orbiting assets. Space debris itself could be a weapon. Take a look at this video from NASA:
Video Credit: NASA Orbital Debris Program Office at JSC
Earth is at the center of the graphic, and each of the dots represent spacecraft, whether working or not. There’s a lot of junk out there. The Kessler syndrome is a scenario proposed in 70s by NASA scientist Donald Kessler; it posits that if there’s a dense enough amount of debris in space, then one collision or explosion could create a chain reaction of other collisions or explosions.
“Pretty soon all you have is debris out there and you can’t get through it,” Dawson said. That would make it extremely difficult to operate existing satellites or launch new ones.
We sometimes don’t realize how much we depend on space systems. Wrecking all of those satellites would mess up a lot of things, from our GPS navigation systems to television signals, data exchange, air traffic control, communication systems, and weather forecasting. It would be a total pain.
Though a number of different entities are tracking space debris, it continues to get more challenging. Space X plans to launch 12,000 cube sats to create broadband service; these smaller objects are harder to track. There are unanswered questions about who owns space debris and who can or should clean it up.
“Major spacefaring nations have all been increasingly aggressive with military and surveillance operations in space,” Dawson added.
Preventing war in space
Dawson said the notion of preventing war in space is simple on its surface. It’s the same as preventing war on Earth. You use diplomacy, establish rules of conduct, and operate with openness and cooperation. She said we need more detail than is included in the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, a United Nations effort signed by more than 100 nations that set ground rules for peaceful exploration of space, and we need to figure out if and how existing international law applies to space. It’s all easier said than done.
“The international part of it is the difficult part,” Dawson said. The US has recognized its vulnerabilities in space and is working to protect its own assets, but other countries are doing their own thing.
“I try to be hopeful, but I think the international part of it is the biggest challenge,” Dawson said.
Apollo 11 command module Columbia. Photo: Eric Long,
National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution
The long-awaited exhibit Destination Moon: The Apollo 11 Mission, opens April 13 at The Museum of Flight. The centerpiece of the exhibit is the mission’s command module Columbia, which is on the last leg of a two-year, four-city journey that is the historic spacecraft’s first since being parked at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. in 1971. The Columbia took astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins to the Moon for the first Moon landing. The exhibit will be here through September 2, including the date of the 50th anniversary of the giant leap, July 20, 2019.
While some common elements of the exhibit have traveled to all four cities—Destination Moon stopped in Houston, St. Louis, and Pittsburgh prior to its Seattle trip—each museum has been able to put its own spin on the artifacts. At the Museum of Flight, Destination Moon represents an expansion of the Apollo exhibit that opened in May two years ago. (Here’s our article about the exhibit.) It’s here the the Museum of Flight has an edge, with the exhibit including two enormous F-1 engines that powered the launch of Apollo missions. Other museum artifacts are also included, as is a gallery about the legacy of Seattle-area industry, astronauts and engineers to the space program.
Your correspondent with the Apollo 11 command module
Columbia in August 2018 at the St. Louis Science Center.
Photo: Greg Scheiderer
Visitors can get pretty close to Columbia, but they can’t go inside. However, they can do so virtually through an interactive 3-D tour created from the Smithsonian’s high-resolution scans of the interior of the spacecraft.
The exhibit promises to be extremely popular. A free preview for museum members last weekend was well attended, and a host of special events for the first weekend are likely to draw many visitors. We were fortunate to see the exhibit in St. Louis last summer; it was near the end of the run and it wasn’t at all crowded. Waiting might be a good option if seeing it early and often isn’t a big deal for you!
The Columbia is a big deal artifact. I spent hours with it in St. Louis and a good bit of time at the member preview this week. Don’t miss this great opportunity to see a super cool piece of space history!
The helmet and gloves used by Buzz Aldrin when he walked on
the Moon, from the Destination Moon exhibit in St.
Louis. Photo: Greg Scheiderer.
With less than a month to go until its opening, the Destination Moon exhibit about the Apollo 11 mission is taking shape at the Museum of Flight. Museum staff announced in a news release this week that the helmet and gloves used by astronaut Buzz Aldrin during his walk on the Moon have been installed in the space. The centerpiece of the exhibit is the Apollo 11 command module Columbia, but it will feature many other artifacts of the historic mission.
I saw the exhibit when it was in St. Louis last summer (story here) and it was great. It opens at the Museum of Flight April 13 and runs through September 2, a stretch of dates that includes the 50th anniversary of the July 20, 1969 “giant leap for mankind.”
There will be some differences in the exhibit from when it was in St. Louis. For example, the Museum of Flight release notes that the helmet and gloves display will include a magnifying glass so that museum visitors can read the to-do list on Aldrin’s glove reminding him of his tasks during the moonwalk. A key item on the list: get a photograph of a boot print on the Moon!
Shelley Sterns-Blackburn, ELY, Inc, and Lisa Young, Conservator at National Air and Space Museum make some final adjustments to spacesuit gloves worn by Buzz Aldrin while on the surface of the Moon. Aldrin’s helmet and visor are in place on the left. Photo Ted Huetter/The Museum of Flight.
Tickets for all dates of the exhibit are now on sale on the Museum of Flight website. Tickets are $10, or $5 for museum members, and must be purchased in addition to museum general admission, which is $25 for adults, $21 for seniors, and $16 for youth. Kids under 4 years of age are admitted free.
In addition, there is a free member preview of the exhibit scheduled for Sunday, April 7, which sounds like an excellent reason to join up today. Several free days are planned during the run of the exhibit, though no details on those have yet been published.
When I saw the exhibit at the St. Louis Science Center I went on a weekday afternoon and there were no lines or crowds; I just walked up and bought a ticket. Weekends might be a different story.
NASA turned 60 on October 1, 2018 and last weekend the Museum of Flight hosted a talk by the agency’s chief historian, Bill Barry, as part of the anniversary celebration. Since we all know about the Moon landing, the space shuttle program, explorations of the planets, the Hubble Space Telescope, the International Space Station, and various NASA research and discoveries, Barry focused his talk on six things you may not know about NASA.
#6: NASA science data saved us from disaster
In a day and age when there’s significant distrust of science, it’s interesting to note NASA’s role in solving a difficult environmental problem. Researchers as early as the late 1950s noticed that there was a depletion of ozone in the atmosphere above the South Pole, but it was difficult to document.
NASA chief historian Bill Barry gave a talk at the Museum
of Flight Oct. 6, 2018 celebrating the 60th anniversary
of the creation of the agency. Photo: Greg Scheiderer
Barry explained that NASA used the Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS) on the Nimbus 7 weather satellite to confirm and map the hole in the ozone.
“It was pretty clear that the ozone hole was big and getting bigger,” Barry said, and that got people’s attention. Scientists postulated that the ozone depletion was caused by chemical reactions with chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) such as refrigerants and spray-can propellants, but again it was tough to prove. Observations made from NASA’s ER-2 aircraft and DC-8 Flying Laboratory eventually confirmed that the CFCs were the culprit.
This led to an amazing act of international cooperation on an environmental issue. In the Montreal Protocol in 1987 nations agreed to phase out CFCs and other ozone depleting substances. It’s working; Barry noted that the ozone is gradually recovering.
“Demographers suggest that this action saved us at least two million cases of skin cancer,” since then, he said.
#5: NASA almost didn’t happen
At the dawn of the space age, after Sputnik, the military became keenly interested in spy satellites and possible space weaponry. US Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy created the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), which later became the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, with the aim of collaborating with academic, industry, and government partners on military programs involving space.
In the meantime over at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) director Hugh Latimer Dryden had pushed the committee’s research agenda toward high-speed flight and space research. In January 1958 he wrote a key report suggesting that space efforts be a collaboration between the DOD, NACA, National Academy of Science, research institutions, universities, and industry. That’s pretty close to the ARPA mission, with a civilian bent.
Barry said that within about a month of the issuance of Dryden’s report, President Dwight Eisenhower went along with it, and sent Congress proposed legislation creating the National Aeronautics and Space Agency. Congress soon approved it.
In the early days of the collaboration there was still arm wrestling over control. A memo from Eisenhower directed that NASA would run all programs “except those peculiar to or primarily associated with military weapons systems or military operations.” The DOD took a broad definition of that—figuring putting people in space was military and so that was within their bailiwick.
Eisenhower intervened to clarify that the legislation made NASA a largely civilian organization.
“This key decision on Eisenhower’s part was really important,” Barry said. “NASA in some ways has become the world’s space agency, one of the most positive aspects of US international relations,” and the civilian nature of the agency is vital to that.
#4: NASA is a serial creator of new industries
There’s a common belief that Tang, Teflon, and Velcro were creations of the space program. Barry said those aren’t correct, but a lot of other stuff has NASA origins. Excimer lasers developed for ozone detection proved useful for laser surgery, for example, and the complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) chips in your smartphone camera were originally developed to build a better camera for space probes. Oddly, those never flew, but they’ve taken off here on Earth. NASA’s annual Spinoff magazine highlights stuff that originated in the space program.
Beyond those, NASA has spun off entire industries. Weather satellites and communication satellites (now a $2 billion/year industry) came from NASA. Under COTS (Commercial Orbital Transportation Services) companies such as SpaceX and Boeing are building crewed vehicles and plan to begin testing next year.
“We hope by the end of next year to be launching US astronauts from Florida again up to the International Space Station and paying American companies to do it for us,” Barry said.
#3: NASA revolutionized the understanding of the universe
One’s first response to that is, “Well, duh!” but Barry said it’s easy to take for granted what has happened over the last 60 years.
“We don’t often think about how much things have changed since 1958 when NASA was created,” he said. Sixty years ago otherwise sane people thought there may be civilizations and canals on Mars and dinosaurs on Venus. They figured the outer solar system was just boring ice. There were nine planets; we now know that virtually every star has at least one. We had no idea the Van Allen Belts existed. Now we have a photo of the cosmic microwave background.
#2: Why did we go to the Moon?
President John F. Kennedy wasn’t actually that big on space; in early speeches after he was sworn in he kept proposing that the US and Soviet Union team up on space projects.
The Soviet Union wasn’t too keen on that. They were using the success of their space program to proclaim the superiority of their system and to recruit allies in a world that had been “decolonized” after World War II. The Soviets were winning the propaganda war. JFK wanted a way to beat them without breaking the bank.
Trailing in the game, Kennedy moved the goalposts and declared the race to the Moon.
“The Soviet Union’s success in space was a major strategic strategic problem for the United States,” Barry explained, “so investing money in going to the Moon was a way to prove that the western, capitalist model of government was, in fact, at least as good as if not better than the Soviets.”
#1: The race to the Moon was closer than you think
JFK made his speech to Congress about setting the goal of “landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth” in May of 1961, shortly after Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space. It wasn’t until years later, with President Lyndon Johnson pushing the goal as Kennedy’s legacy, that the Soviets took notice.
“It’s really obvious by the summer of 1964 that the US was serious about going to the Moon and had the political will and the money to make it happen,” Barry said.
The Soviet response was the Zond program. They wouldn’t orbit the Moon, but would instead fling their spacecraft around it and then return to Earth.
The Soviets made five Zond launches in 1968 had a few successes. Zond 5 in September took some tortoises and other life forms along and landed back on Earth, though in the Indian Ocean rather than on land as intended. Zond 6 made the trip and landed on target in Kazakstan, but its heat shield failed. Tests weren’t going well on the N-1 rocket, the Soviet counterpart to the Saturn V that would be their way of launching people to the Moon. In December 1968 Apollo 8 and three US astronauts orbited the Moon.
“It was pretty clear they weren’t going to get their guys on the surface of the Moon before we did,” Barry said. But the Soviets didn’t give up. They sent up a Hail Mary.
The Soviets had been launching Luna spacecraft since the late 1950s, and in the space of six months they cobbled together a robotic craft that would land on the Moon, collect a few rocks, and bring them to back Earth.
A first launch attempt failed, but Luna 15 blasted off three days before Apollo 11. The Eagle got to the Moon first. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin did their Moon walk and were catching a few winks before launching to return to the command module Columbia.
“While they’re sleeping in the lunar module the Soviets fired the retro rockets on Luna 15 and landed on the surface of the Moon. It crashed,” Barry said. But he added that if it had landed successfully, the Soviets may well have been able to get their Moon sample back to Earth first.
“The race to the Moon ends July 20, 1969 after the first Moon walk actually happened,” he marveled. “It was that close.”
The New Horizons spacecraft is hurtling through deep space toward its New Year’s Day encounter with the Kuiper Belt object “Ultima Thule,” a nickname which is better than the object’s official moniker of 2014 MU69. New Horizons collected amazing photos and data during a 2015 fly-by of Pluto, and I’ve just finished reading the account of that mission, Chasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto (Picador, 2018). Penned by New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern and astrobiologist and author David Grinspoon, Chasing New Horizons is a fabulous read that tells the tale of the nearly 25 years it took to get the mission from a back-of-the-napkin concept to a real spacecraft that delivered those amazing images of the former ninth planet.
Stern and Grinspoon visited Seattle in May in support of the book. Grinspoon called the tale of New Horizons an unlikely story.
“The effort to send a mission to Pluto,” he said, “was one that had so many twists and turns, seeming dead ends, and inescapable traps that it’s still amazing to me that it happened.”
“I think there’s a lot of genuine suspense and drama, and yet, you know how it ends!” Grinspoon added. “It really is an adventure story as well as a nerd-fest of solving technical problems and ultimately succeeding spectacularly in this amazing exploration.”
The story truly is incredible. The New Horizons team that at its biggest included 2,500 people had to battle from the beginning. The first fight was simply getting approval just to do some preliminary work on a project as audacious as sending a mission to Pluto. They had to compete over whose proposed project would be selected, to get funding, to decide what science would happen, to actually build, launch, and fly the craft, to get it to the right place at the right time, and to deliver the science that was promised. Stern said they euphemistically referred to their challenges with the resident reptiles around the Kennedy Space Center in mind.
“There were so many alligators in the water at one point that we had no idea how we could solve all of the problems that we were having,” Stern said.
Yet—spoiler alert!—they did, and they accomplished it for a fraction of the cost of the Voyager mission, for example, and in a time frame that, by NASA standards, was break-neck.
Grinspoon interviewed Stern and more than two dozen others for the book, so it is really something of an oral history of New Horizons team members’ recollections of what happened along the amazing journey.
All of the jockeying makes for interesting storytelling, but the near loss of the mission just days before it’s Pluto fly-by, and how that was solved, is an incredible tale. Many of the team were taking a quick breather before the fly-by and trying to enjoy the Independence Day holiday when contact with New Horizons was lost. The work the team did to figure out what happened, to fix the problem, and to make sure the craft’s computers were ready for the complicated maneuvers ahead, is simply remarkable. Imagine doing that work around-the-clock with the whole mission hanging in the balance. For Stern, there was the real possibility that 25 years of work could go down the drain. That’s a whole lot of egg aimed right at your face. Cool heads, smart engineers, preparation, and a little luck prevailed. The science we got out of it is amazing.
“Pluto is an exotic, sci-fi world,” Stern said. “This book is a page-turner; it is a techno-thriller.”
You don’t necessarily want the author writing his own dust-jacket blurbs, but in this case we agree! Chasing New Horizons is highly recommended.
Last month New Horizons, about 100 million miles away from Ultima Thule, was able to spot its next destination with its own cameras, something the team announced on Twitter.
Ultima Thule in view! We’ve made our first detection of our next flyby target, more than 100 million miles out from our New Year’s 2019 close-up encounter in the Kuiper Belt. LEARN MORE >> https://t.co/DHNzillUDBpic.twitter.com/Rmz0EW4RWA
You can purchase Chasing New Horizons through the title link or by clicking the book cover image above. A small percentage of the fee comes to Seattle Astronomy and helps us create interesting astronomy stories. We thank you!
We tend to remember where we were at the time of major historical events, like when we found out that Elvis was dead or when a gimpy Kirk Gibson hit that home run against Dennis Eckersley to win the first game of the 1988 World Series. For space geeks and for anyone over age 56 or so, the ultimate such shared experience has to be when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot on the Moon. Estimates are that up to 600 million people worldwide and more than 130 million in the US alone watched the Moon landing on live television.
Your correspondent with the Apollo 11 command module Columbia
last month at the St. Louis Science Center. Photo: Greg Scheiderer
Thus, it was a thrill for me to recently stand about a foot away from an amazing piece of space exploration history, the Apollo 11 “Columbia” command module, at the St. Louis Science Center. Columbia hadn’t left the Smithsonian since doing a national tour in the early 1970s, but the historic space capsule is part of a touring exhibit called Destination Moon that will visit four cities before returning to the National Air and Space Museum as part of a new comprehensive Apollo exhibit. The tour started last year in Houston and the St. Louis stop wraps up Sept. 3, 2018. It will be on display in Pittsburgh starting later this month and then—get this!—its final stop on the tour will be the Museum of Flight in Seattle, where it will be on display beginning in March for a stay that will include the 50th anniversary date of the Moon landing. Huzzah!
The Destination Moon exhibit is great, with lots of information about how we got there, who the key players were, and why we did it. But the Columbia capsule was just completely mesmerizing, at least for me. I was a total space nut kid, kept scrapbooks of newspaper clippings of stories about the space flights, and was glued to the TV for launches and landings. Standing next to Columbia took me back to my almost-12 self. I dare say I was giddy in its presence. I spent a couple of hours in the exhibit, mostly just looking at this fabulous artifact.
There were a couple of other cool items in the exhibit. Aldrin’s helmet and gloves used on the Moon were there, as was a sample collection case in which he and Armstrong stowed their Moon rocks. They also have one injector plate from an Apollo engine, of they type around which the Museum of Flight has built its popular Apollo exhibit. Columbia’s escape hatch is on display separately from the capsule. There is a collection of gear such as first-aid items and a survival kit in case the capsule splashed down far away from its target upon return to Earth. And, oh yes, there’s a Moon rock, too.
Interestingly enough, I saw Moon rocks at both the St. Louis Science Center and Adler Planetarium in Chicago during a recent trip to the Midwest, and visitors showed little interest in either. THAT’S A HUNK OF THE MOON FOR CRYING OUT LOUD! OK, rant over. Maybe that’s not a big thing in the age of virtual reality and interactive exhibits. Alas.
Elsewhere in the St. Louis Science Center they have Mercury and Gemini capsules, too, and another current exhibit is Mission: Mars that is a lot of fun. The center is also home to the James S. McDonnell Planetarium, built in 1963 and named for the co-founder of McDonnell-Douglas, who kicked in a good chunk of change for equipment for the facility.
Membership has its privileges; I got $1 off admission to Destination Moon thanks to my membership in the Museum of Flight. Parking would have been free had I driven, but I took public transit to the center.
The Dawn spacecraft has found a lot of surprises at Vesta and Ceres. Debra Buczkowski
a geologist and planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab, gave a talk recently at the Museum of Flight discussing some of the findings from the mission.
Dr. Debra Buczkowski, a geologist
and planetary scientist at the Johns
Hopkins University Applied Physics
Lab, spoke about the findings of the
Dawn mission to Vesta and Ceres
recently at the Museum of Flight.
(Photo: Greg Scheiderer)
Vesta was Dawn’s first stop, entering orbit around the asteroid on July 15, 2011. Scientists expected to find volcanoes on Vesta. Buczkowski explained that this expectation traces back to meteorites found on Earth that are know to be from Vesta. These are known as HEDs: “howardite–eucrite–diogenite.” These closely resemble igneous rocks found on Earth, and those are made from volcanic activity. But the volcanoes aren’t there.
Before Dawn arrived at Vesta the Hubble Space Telescope showed that Vesta wasn’t spherical, but rather was significantly flattened out at its south pole. Scientists speculated that this was because of an enormous impact, and that proved to be correct. Dawn observed a huge impact crater, now called Rheasilvia Basin, the rim of which is almost as wide as Vesta itself.
“It really should have broken the asteroid apart,” Buczkowski said of the impact that created the basin, which has a huge central peak. Dawn also found a second impact crater, Veneneia Basin, which is almost as large.
Another surprise finding from Dawn is that Vesta is fully differentiated.
“Most of the asteroids are just kind of chunks of rock with one kind of rock all the way through,” Buczkowski explained. “Not Vesta; Vesta actually has a core, it has a mantle, and it has a crust.”
Vesta’s core is about half the diameter of the asteroid itself, about 220 kilometers.
“This is probably why Vesta did not fall apart when the Rheasilvia Basin formed, because it has this huge, massive core,” Buczkowski said.
The surface of Vesta was found to have lots of fractures, features larger that Earth’s Grand Canyon that look like faults. Buczkowski said they did a lot of computer modeling to see if an object the size of Vesta with a core the size of Vesta’s could develop fractures on the crust.
“The stresses that result from that huge impact kind of get redistributed because of the giant core,” she said of the findings. “Instead of being focused around the crater, they move to the equator and fracture at the equator. If we do this same model without the giant core, there’s no fracturing at the equator. So it’s because of the giant core that we have these huge fractures.”
Buczkowski said that was a little disappointing because they were hoping for volcanoes or magma-driven geology. While they didn’t find volcanoes, there is evidence of moving magma that didn’t break through to the surface. Rather, it pushed some of the surface upward, forming mounds.
On to Ceres
Dawn departed Vesta in September 2012 after spending about 14 months in orbit. As Dawn approached the dwarf planet Ceres there was much speculation about extremely bright spots on its surface that were found in Hubble images. Other observations had detected water vapor on Ceres. Since Ceres is relatively large but not dense, scientists were expecting to find ice. But there was more rock and less ice than anticipated. What they did find, Buczkowski said, was evidence of volcanism.
This image from NASA’s Dawn spacecraft shows Occator Crater
on Ceres, with its signature bright areas. Dawn scientists have
found that the central bright spot, which harbors the brightest
material on Ceres, contains a variety of salts. (Image
credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA)
“We’re not expecting magma on Ceres,” she said. “Ceres isn’t dense enough for the kind of magma that we’re used to here on Earth, made out of silicate rocks. This is something called cryomagma; it is basically ice with a little bit of rock.”
The biggest and brightest of the bright spots, named Cerealia Facula, is in the crater Occator. Many of the craters on Ceres are fractured, even on the crater floors, and the many bright spots on Ceres are associated with these fractures.
“What it’s looking like is that we’re having cryomagmatic activity underneath (Occator) crater,” Buczkowski said, “and what’s coming up out of these fractures is a pyroclastic spray, and the water, the volatiles in that, is sublimating away and all it’s leaving is the sodium carbonates.” Those are the bright spots we see all over Ceres.
Dawn also found that Ceres is covered in ammoniated phyllosilicates.
“Ammonia is interesting,” Buczkowski explained. “We don’t expect to find ammonia this close to the Sun, it’s usually something that’s found further out in the solar system.” They’re still studying whether Ceres may have formed further from the Sun and migrated in, or if the ammonia somehow made its way to Ceres from the outer solar system.
It turns out that Ceres had quite a few volcanoes, though most of them have now collapsed. There’s one that hasn’t, known as Ahuna Mons, that stands about five kilometers tall. It’s a cryovolcano.
“The volcano that we thought would be on Vesta is on Ceres,” Buczkowski noted. Ahuna Mons may be younger than the others, and also may collapse over time.
Like Vesta, Ceres was found to be differentiated, though only partially so.
“There’s a rocky core, there’s a volatile-rich mantle, and there’s a muddy slurry, a mud ocean” below the crust, Buczkowski said.
Ceres is now considered a dwarf planet, while Vesta still has asteroid status because of its lopsided shape from the giant impact. Buczkowski figures Vesta deserves dwarf-planet status, too. Whatever you call them, she thinks they’re fascinating to study because they’re kind of a bridge between the asteroids and rocky planets.
“These are more involved bodies than just plain, old asteroids,” Buczkowski said. “They’re not just chunks of rock floating in space. They’re actually like little mini-planets. They’ve got a lot of planet-like properties.”
Though they’re pretty small, they can teach us a lot.
“They’re interesting to us because they tell us a lot about how Earth and the other planets formed,” Buczkowski said. “Studying these little protoplanets we actually are looking back to the beginning of the solar system.”
The folks at the Museum of Flight have done their level best to make their new Apollo exhibit that opened last weekend all about the people who made the Moon landings happen. But there’s no doubt that two enormous F-1 engines that launched people to the Moon dominate the gallery. One is an unused engine that towers 18 feet tall above the exhibit and weighs nine tons. The other is mangled parts of engines from Apollo 12 and Apollo 16 that flew to space, did belly flops from 40 miles above the Atlantic Ocean, and then spent more than forty years some three miles deep before being found and recovered by Bezos Expeditions.
Geoff Nunn, adjunct curator for space
history at the Museum of Flight, explains
that the Apollo F-1 engines are really,
really big. (Photo: Greg Scheiderer)
The exhibit has been a couple of years in the making. Planning started with the opening of the museum’s Charles Simonyi Space Gallery the the acquisition of the Space Shuttle Trainer that is the centerpiece of that gallery. That moved the shuttle, post-shuttle, and looking to the future exhibits across the street, and gave museum staff the opportunity to create a new exhibit that focuses on the beginning of modern rocketry, the space race, the Moon landings, and the post-Apollo 1970s.
Geoff Nunn, adjunct curator for space history at the museum, said they had several objectives for the exhibit.
“We wanted to showcase the tremendous artifacts,” Nunn said at a press preview of Apollo. “We wanted to reintegrate the Pete Conrad collection into the broader story of the space race and the Moon landings. We wanted to showcase these incredible, one-of-a-kind artifacts that have been through so much in their life—through fire and, in the case of the Apollo 12 engines, lightning, and then impact with the sea floor and 40 years deep, deep under water.”
Indeed, the two Apollo engines provide an amazing before and after comparison, and there are other great artifacts on display. The exhibit also features:
A production version of the Apollo command module that was used for training
An engineering mockup of a lunar rover, built by Boeing in Kent
A mockup of the Apollo 17 lunar module ascent stage
A Viking Mars lander
The museum has a lot of artifacts from astronaut Pete Conrad, the Apollo 12 commander. Among those on display are a cuff checklist Conrad used to keep track of tasks on the Moon, a mix tape he played on Skylab that includes personal messages from the likes of Loretta Lynn, Conway Twitty, and Tom T. Hall, and a rock Conrad brought back from the Moon.
David Concannon is the deep sea explorer hired by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos to lead the search for and discovery of the F-1 engines. (See our story from November 2015 for more.) Concannon, who has also recovered artifacts from the Titanic, was still in awe at the press preview last week.
“These engines tell an magnificent story of a time in America when everybody came together, pulled together to do something magnificent,” Concannon said. “To me, that’s the story that these beat-up, burned-up artifacts tell.”
To work for the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) it would probably be helpful if you had some juggling skills.
“At JPL we have 24 flying missions in deep space,” said spacecraft engineer Terry Himes, who has had a hand on most of those craft. Himes gave a talk titled “Mars Insider” recently at the Museum of Flight.
NASA JPL spacecraft engineer Terry Himes
spoke at the Museum of Flight April 29,
2017 about his work on various missions.
Photo: Greg Scheiderer.
“Our job as spacecraft engineers is to keep the health and welfare of the spacecraft,” Himes said, and that’s a job that doesn’t always line up with the science goals of the mission.
“The science guys want to go to the worst possible places on the planet,” Himes laughed. “They want to go to horrifying places and land in crevasses and do all kids of crazy stuff. We (engineers) want to land on flat, sandy plains.”
Thus choosing a place to land is a battle from day one and can often be a lengthy discussion, Himes said. For the Mars Science Lab Curiosity, for example, the science team wanted to land as close as possible to Mount Sharp on Mars so they could explore the geology there. They were able to land in a tight spot by using the controlled descent of Curiosity’s incredible landing method. Himes noted that the target landing area for Mars missions, known as the “landing ellipse,” has been shrinking over the years. While Viking had a landing ellipse 300 kilometers long, they dropped Curiosity into a target of just 18 kilometers.
“It’s like hitting a golf ball in San Diego and making a hole-in-one in New York,” Himes said.
Once a lander is on the ground there’s another daily discussion about what it will do next. This is typically based on photos sent back from the activities of the previous sol, or Martian day. They consider interesting nearby objects, any hazards in the area, and the overall health of the rover. Himes noted that Curiosity’s wheels have taken a beating from hard and sharp rocks on Mars. He also related a funny story about the wheels.
A message in the sand
NASA had told the spacecraft team that they couldn’t put a logo or any other mention of JPL on Curiosity because the project involved all of NASA and scientists from other countries, too. They got around that by putting cutout grooves in the wheels that are Morse code for the letters, so that every time those wheels turn they leave J-P-L in the Martian sand.
“Don’t mess with engineers,” Himes laughed.
A little InSight about Mars
The next project for Himes will be InSight, which after a recent delay is now scheduled to launch next May and land on Mars in November of 2018. InSight, which is short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy, and Heat Transport, will help us figure out how rocky planets form and evolve. The craft will be a modified version of Phoenix, another mission Himes worked on, which found ice near the north pole of Mars in 2008. InSight will have a couple of new instruments.
This artist’s concept depicts the InSight lander on Mars
after the lander’s robotic arm has deployed a seismometer
and a heat probe directly onto the ground. InSight is the
first mission dedicated to investigating the deep interior
of Mars. The findings will advance understanding of
how all rocky planets, including Earth, formed
and evolved. Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech.
The first is the Heat flow and Physical Properties Probe, or HP3, which Himes says they’re calling simply “The Mole.”
“It’s a heat transfer mechanism,” Himes said. “We’re going to go into the surface of Mars and conduct heat experiments, see how much heat is there.” The mole will be driven some five meters into the ground on Mars.
The other instrument is the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure, or SEIS, a “very broad band” seismometer sensitive enough to detect meteor strikes way on the other side of the planet. These two instruments will give scientists information about the inner workings of Mars.
There are a couple more Mars missions on the drawing board. Mars 2020 will be a lander much like Curiosity—NASA can save some cash by re-using spacecraft designs if they can serve the purpose—and it will look for signs of past microbial life on Mars, explore the possibility for creating oxygen in the Red Planet’s atmosphere, and do a variety of other experiments.
NeMO, the “next Mars orbiter,” will provide another communication link should a current orbiter fail, and it also could be part of a plan to return pieces of Mars to Earth.
“Mars 2020 may be depositing samples that it gathers in canisters and leaving them around,” Himes said, “and then NeMO may have something that’s going to go down to the surface, pick them up, and come back, and return to Earth.” Himes noted that plans for NeMO are still quite preliminary.
As these missions are developed it seems likely that Himes will be in the middle of it all.
There’s a lot of excitement these days over at the Museum of Flight, where they’re working hard to complete their new Apollo exhibit by the time it opens for visitors on May 20, 2017. While the exhibit bears the name of the Moon-landing program, Geoff Nunn, adjunct curator for space history at the museum, notes that it will cover lots of ground from the start of the space race after World War II through the post-Apollo 1970s.
“We’re trying to re-focus on the Apollo story, re-integrate Pete Conrad’s artifacts, and showcase these amazing artifacts that we received from NASA by way of Bezos Expeditions: actual, Apollo-flown, F-1 engines,” Nunn said.
We covered the event in November 2015 when Jeff Bezosformally presented the engines to the museum, restored after an amazing search, discovery, and recovery from the depths of the Atlantic Ocean. Nunn said the museum recently received a new artifact on loan: an intact F-1 engine that was originally set to launch Apollo 16, but was switched out after a fire. It took some fancy engineering to get an engine 20 feet tall and 12 feet wide and weighing nearly 20,000 pounds into the gallery. It will provide an interesting contrast to the engines Bezos recovered.
“Our F-1 engine survived a million and a half pounds of thrust and burning rocket fuel, it survived a strike by lightning, and then a plummet from the edge of space down to smash into the ocean, and then 40-plus years on the bottom of the ocean,” Nunn noted. “That is an artifact!”
See a bit of the first airplane
The engines are just one of several of what Nunn calls “crown jewels” in the Apollo exhibit, which also includes Deke Slayton’s astronaut pin and a fabulous new addition.
“We are receiving on loan from Neil Armstrong’s family a couple of pieces of the original Wright Flyer that were carried to the Moon by Neil Armstrong on Apollo 11,” Nunn said. “They’re just little, tiny bits, but the first airplane made it to the Moon and we’re going to have a couple of those on display, so there’s going to be quite a few one-of-a-kind, amazing artifacts in this exhibit.”
Astronaut humor
Geoff Nunn, adjunct curator for space history at the Museum
of Flight, at an event when the Apollo F-1 engines were
formally presented to the museum in late 2015.
Photo: Greg Scheiderer.
The exhibit will also bring back many items from astronaut Pete Conrad that were part of the past Rendezvous in Space exhibit that was displaced at the museum by the construction of its Alaska Airlines Aerospace Education Center. Among the inventory is a cap Conrad wore on the Apollo 12 mission. It’s a standard type of navy cap, but Conrad had a propeller added.
“That cap is really indicative of Pete’s personality,” Nunn laughed.
The cuff checklist Conrad used on the Moon also will be on display. These lists spelled out the various steps for different tasks the astronauts would do on the Moon. For Apollo 12, the ground crew also slipped in some cartoons and Playboy playmate photos. Nunn said it was quite a challenge to tell that story while keeping the exhibit G-rated.
“When it comes to amazing and notable and hilarious things, Apollo 12 is really a gold mine as far as Apollo missions go,” he said.
More cool stuff to come
Many of us of a certain age remember exactly where we were and what was going on when we watched the Moon landings on television in the midst of the tumultuous 1960s.
“One of the things that we’re really trying to capture is just how much the space program interplayed with the context of what was going on at the time,” Nunn said of the exhibit. He noted that the opening of the Apollo exhibit is just the first chapter in the museum’s storytelling about the program. The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum is doing some remodeling, and has created a traveling exhibit called Destination Moon that will visit four cities. It will be at the Museum of Flight from March 16 through September 2 in 2019.
“On the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing—July 20, 2019—you can see Neil Armstrong’s space suit and the Apollo 11 command module here at the Museum of Flight,” Nunn beamed. “It’s going to be awesome.”
Astronauts on a mission to Mars would essentially be on their own for medical care, according to NASA flight surgeon Dr. David Reyes. With resupply or mission evacuation impossible, and with difficulty in communicating with the ground, astronauts would have to be trained and equipped to provide their own care.
Reyes gave an interesting talk about the history of space medicine last weekend at the Museum of Flight. He noted that being a flight surgeon is the opposite of being a typical doctor.
NASA flight surgeon Dr. David Reyes
gave a talk about the history of
aerospace medicine April 8, 2017 at
the Museum of Flight.
Photo: Greg Scheiderer.
“Regular medicine is taking care of sick people in a normal environment,” Reyes said. “Aerospace medicine is taking care of healthy people in an abnormal or unusual environment.” He added that the astronauts are usually super healthy, but the environments they deal with are challenging to say the least.
Much of the job of the flight surgeon is to help determine the medical risks of space travel, to help come up with and test gear to avert those risks, and to help astronauts learn about symptoms of conditions they may encounter.
For example, astronauts in training are put into an altitude chamber, and the air is pumped out of the chamber to simulate the atmosphere at 21,000 feet above sea level. Then they take off their oxygen masks. Reyes said this makes them “goofy” with hypoxia.
“The reason we put them in this chamber is so that they can recognize those symptoms for themselves,” Reyes said. “Everyone has a unique response to low oxygen.” If they’ve experienced it they can recognize it in the event oxygen problems occur in flight.
Mission medical kits
It was fascinating to look at the evolution of medical kits for various missions. In the days of Mercury, the kit was essentially a few bandaids, aspirin, motion sickness pills, and a couple of other remedies. It was not much more than a prudent backpacker would take on a day hike. Mercury missions were short and the astronauts, strapped into a small capsule, didn’t have to do much physical activity.
A Mercury medical kit. Photo: NASA
With Gemini and Apollo the kits were expanded as the missions became longer and more active, but they still weren’t all that extensive.
“This is like everything you might have in your medicine cabinet at home,” Reyes noted of the kits.
By the time of Skylab each crew received 80 hours of paramedic training. The medical kit was huge and even included a dental kit. The space shuttle went far beyond the home medicine cabinet. The International Space Station has a Crew Medical Officer who is an astronaut with additional medical training. It carries an extensive medical kit with nine different packs. It also employs a Crew Health Care System or CHCS—pronounced “checks”—that is the first robust medical system for space missions.
Given all of that, Reyes pointed out that, “Nothing really serious has happened in space flight.” Astronauts on longer missions suffer bumps and bruises and rashes, and insomnia, but the most serious condition has been a urinary tract infection on one Apollo flight.
Bones and eyes
These days the two problems they’re studying the most are bone mass loss and visual impairment. They’ve known about the bone mass challenge for a while, and it’s why the astronauts spend at least two hours per day exercising. Without it, “We’d send a 40- or 50-year-old astronaut up and they’d come back looking like an 80-year-old after six months in the space station,” Reyes said.
The vision issues only became apparent in the last seven years or so, and Reyes said they’re still researching those. A couple of things happen to some astronauts: fluid buildup in the eye because of zero gravity, and change of eye shape. They’ve developed adjustable eyeglasses should astronauts develop vision problems in flight.
Mars poses challenges
Missions to Mars would provide medical as well as ethical challenges. On all space missions so far, flight surgeons on the ground have been able to offer advice and counsel. For Mars, the long lag for radio signals, up to 22 minutes for transmission, would make conversation difficult, and during the time Mars is on the other side of the Sun from Earth there would be no communication at all.
“When you go to Mars, basically you’re on your own,” Reyes said of the astronauts.
There is debate about how much medical equipment and medicine to take on a Mars mission. Every item launched on a mission represents a tradeoff in mass and cost and whatever might not go along. An even bigger, ethical question involves what happens if an astronaut suffers a serious injury.
“If you have a limited set of supplies, and somebody gets severely injured and will require a lot of care, how much care are you going to give them?” Reyes asked. “If you use up your whole med kit, that puts everybody else at risk. So you have to think, ‘Is there some point that we’re going to withdraw care because we’re jeopardizing the rest of the mission?’”
It’s an on-going area of discussion.
Why be a flight surgeon?
Like many of us who are interested in space and astronomy, Reyes caught the bug from television.
“When I was a kid I watched the Moon landing on TV,” he said. “A black and white TV at my parents’ house.” He thought it was the coolest thing ever.
“I’ve always had an interest in space,” he added. His undergraduate major was in geology, and he studied some planetary science. He then went into the Air Force and medicine. He filled a free month during his residency with an introduction to aerospace medicine course at the University of Texas. He was drawn in by the lectures from real flight surgeons.
Forty-six years ago today Apollo 12 became the second craft to land people on the Moon. Today the Museum of Flight received an incredible treasure: parts of the Rocketdyne F-1 engines that blasted Apollo into orbit.
Doug King, president of the Museum
of Flight, announces the gift of the Apollo
F-1 engines at a news conference
Nov. 19, 2015. Photo: Greg Scheiderer.
The engines were found at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean in 2013 by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos and his team from Bezos Expeditions. Bezos requested that the engines be donated to the museum and NASA honored that request.
“This is truly a historic day for the museum, for our community,” said Doug King, president and CEO of the Museum of Flight. “I don’t think it’s too grandiose to say for our country and maybe even for humankind.”
“Exhibiting these historic engines not only shares NASA’s storied history, it also helps America educate to innovate,” said NASA administrator Charles Bolden in a news release. “This display of spaceflight greatness can help inspire our next generation of scientists, technologists, engineers and explorers to build upon past successes and create the new knowledge and capabilities needed to enable our journey to Mars.”
Bezos said he became interested in science and exploration as a five-year-old watching Neil Armstrong’s first small step on the Moon.
“You don’t choose your passions; your passions choose you,” he said. Bezos said he thinks about rockets at lot, and one day it occurred to him that it would be great to find and restore those F-1 engines. The engineers who built them were working to send people to the Moon, and few folks at the time were thinking about posterity.
Expendable stuff
“That first stage with these gigantic engines is expendable; it’s supposed to crash into the ocean, that was the whole plan,” Bezos said.
Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos talks
about his passion for space and the
project to recover the F-1 engines.
Photo: Greg Scheiderer.
“We’re working on changing that plan,” he continued. “I have this space company called Blue Origin; we’re trying to make reusable rockets because we don’t like throwing the hardware away.”
It took Bezos all of ten minutes of Internet searching to find the coordinates at which NASA said the Apollo 11 first stage rocket crashed. The hunt was on.
“That was going to prove to be the only easy thing about this project,” Bezos laughed. It was an incredibly complicated endeavor. Bezos Expeditions put together a team of more than 60 people who are experts in ocean recovery. They searched some 300 square miles of ocean with side-scanning sonar to find the engines and then pulled them out from under 14,000 feet of seawater, where they’d been at rest for more than 40 years.
The parts were restored at the Kansas Cosmosphere in Hutchinson, Kansas. Much of the damage to the engines was caused not by their high-speed crash into the sea, but by silt and corrosion from four decades in salt water, though the large and highly recognizable bell-shaped nozzle extensions were badly mangled.
Great museum pieces
Geoff Nunn, the adjunct curator for space history at the museum, said the engines that drove Apollo were marvels of engineering.
Geoff Nunn, adjunct curator for space history at the Museum of
Flight, talked about what makes the F-1 engines a special artifact.
Photo: Greg Scheiderer.
“The Rocketdyne F-1 was the largest single-chambered liquid-fueled rocket ever flown,” Nunn said. “Each engine produced over a million and a half pounds of thrust and stood 18 and a half feet tall.”
That’s quite a kick. King said all of the planes in the museum’s entire collection collectively have only half that much thrust. Five F-1s launched each Saturn V.
The first piece unwrapped at the news conference this morning, still in its shrink wrap from Cosmosphere, was an injector plate from one of the Apollo 12 engines.
“The injector plate is really what is key to making the F-1 engine an engine and not just a million and a half pounds of bomb,” Nunn explained. “It’s covered in these minute holes that release fuel and oxidizer in an incredibly precise mixture in order to ensure that the combustion that occurs is smooth and controlled.”
Bezos talks about the workings of the F-1 engine injector plate.
Photo: Greg Scheiderer
Some of the F-1 engine components will go on public display at the museum starting Saturday and will be out until early January. The full collection will be part of a new, permanent exhibit that will open late next year or in early 2017.
For Bezos, finding and restoring artifacts like the F-1 engines is not about looking to the past.
“It’s about today and it’s about the future,” he said. “It’s about building a 21st-century version of the F-1 engine. It’s about building reusable rockets.
“Civilization for many centuries has been getting better and better, and the point of recovering an object like this is to remind us of who we are and what we can do as we move forward as a civilization.”
The video below from Bezos Expeditions tells the tale of the recovery of the F-1 engines from the briny Atlantic.
The next time someone tells you that science and art don’t mix, point them to the work of the Hubble Space Telescope. Hubble images are the inspiration for a multimedia concert, “Origins: Life and the Universe,” coming up at 2 p.m. November 7 at Benaroya Hall in Seattle. Astronomer Bruce Balick and composer Nan Avant explained during a talk last week at the Museum of Flight how one segment of the concert was created.
Prof. Bruce Balick, in front of a slide depicting Galileo, talks about science and art at the Museum of Flight. Photo: Greg Scheiderer.
Balick, professor emeritus in the Department of Astronomy at the University of Washington, noted that science is, to a great extent, the result of our unique human ability to recognize patterns.
“Science is observing the world around us and describing the pattern, typically with mathematical formulas,” Balick said. “After that we puzzle over what these patterns might mean. We use the patterns as a means to gain insight into the way in which the natural world works.”
While Balick has spent his career studying planetary nebulae, he also loves the incredible images of those celestial objects that Hubble has returned to Earth.
“I want you to appreciate what I hope Nan has found in these pictures, namely glorious natural patterns that inspire music,” he said. “These objects are simply beautiful.”
Avant, a composer from Ballard, said the photos spoke to her.
Composer Nan Avant gestures while talking about her creative process on “Bijoux.” Photo: Greg Scheiderer.
“I was so inspired by what I’d seen with these brilliant colorful images,” she said. In addition, she was influenced by conversations with Balick about the Orion Nebula and the Carina Nebula, the two objects that are featured in her multimedia composition, “Bijoux.”
“There’s so much going on in the nebula I wanted to continue this into my concept of the music, so I created many themes or melodies to represent the nebula,” Avant explained.
Avant said her last year, working on the project, has been “astounding.”
“As a composer, I’ve learned about the nebula, the universe. I had conversations with a distinguished scientist of the nebula. I collaborated with a filmmaker,” she said. “And finally, I composed an orchestral work about the universe. I grew so much as an artist, a composer, and an orchestrator.”
The title of the piece, “Bijoux,” is French for “jewels.”
“When I was looking through these breathtaking, stunning images and the music was unfolding into rich melodies and textures, I wanted to find a word, just one word, that expressed the music and images all in one idea,” Avant said of the choice.
“Scientists, musicians, artists, all of them have so much in common,” Balick marveled. “We love pattern. We appreciate pattern. Pattern says something to us. It may be visceral, it may be scientific. It comes in the form of music, it comes in the form of art.”
The “Origins” concert is part of the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Department of Astronomy at the UW. The concert will feature the work of eight composers and accompanying celestial photography. It is a benefit for the scholarship program at the University of Washington Astrobiology Program in the Department of Astronomy. Tickets are $32, $22 for students, and are available online or by calling the Benaroya Hall ticket office at 206-215-4747.
Another chance to preview one of the pieces in the concert is coming up at 2 p.m. next Saturday, Oct. 17, at the Museum of Flight. Professor Matt McQuinn of the UW Department of Astronomy will take a close look at how our universe was formed and how small fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background grow into galaxies with stars and planets. Glenna Burmer, who composed a piece entitled “The Big Bang,” will discuss her musical and visual interpretation of the 13.8-billion-year history of our universe, exploring the process that composers and filmmakers use to bridge science and art. The talk, titled “Origin of the Universe and Everything in It,” is free with museum admission.
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.”
(Smithsonian Books, 2014).
