Category Archives: Exploration

What Spring is Like on Jupiter and Mars

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This time of the year, it’s easy to go on about the weather. All I have to do is look out my window and see the icy evidence that nature is indifferent to my comfort or more likely, my existence at all.

At 10:41 pm night before last, I heard the rumble of thunder as the snow fell. I happened to look at my computer’s clock at that moment, so I know the time. Been a few years since I heard any thundersnow.

The beginning of a long snowy winter? Maybe. Winters tend to be unpredictable. For all I know there will be a snow drought after this week. Or a tiring series of hardcore blizzards to come before the first croci bud in the early spring.

Further away, much further, I was glad to hear that the InSight probe landed without incident on Mars. The weather at Elysium Planitia looks pretty clear, even if the air isn’t breathable. Even though spacecraft have been flying to Mars for over 50 years, and landing nearly that long, it’s still a thrill.

Could have a better name, that probe. Like New Horizons could be better. InSight sounds like a company that sells “software solutions” for vague problems, not one of the most sophisticated machines ever built and whose purpose is pure exploration. Must be that capital S.

Mariner, Viking, Pathfinder, even Spirit, Opportunity and Curiosity — those are names for explorer craft. Insight would arguably go with the latter three.

The American Geographical Society Library (Or Wow, Look at All the Globes!)

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At the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Golda Meir Library, which is the school’s main library, it isn’t hard to find a bust of the fourth Prime Minister of Israel. She was an alumna of the university’s predecessor institution, Milwaukee State Normal School.
Behind the bust is a mounted Milwaukee Sentinel article, dated August 27, 1987, about the sculptor, Maurice Ferstadt, whom I’ll give credit for not trying to idealize the prime minister’s face. On the morning of February 19 of that year, Ferstadt — who was 75 –finished the sculpture. That evening, he died of an aneurysm.

Part of the library participated in Milwaukee Doors Open last weekend. Special Collections is on the fourth floor. We spent some time there, looking at some of the old and rare books on display. Interesting.

Then we went to the third floor, which is home to the American Geographical Society Library.

The closer I got, the more excited I felt. That’s not a verb I use much in my well-established middle age. But as soon as I entered the library, that rare feeling came over me. This is best thing ever!

You know, that kid on Christmas morning feeling. The giddiness passed, of course, but I remained vastly impressed by the collection all the same.

According to the library’s web site, it “contains over 1.3 million items supporting instruction, research and learning. The collection is global in scope — ranging from the 15th century to present — and includes maps, atlases, books, periodicals, photographic and film media, and geospatial data.”

And I have to add, globes. Look at all the globes! That’s what we looked at most, though there were some fine maps on exhibit too. Old globes, new ones, globes in various languages, small orbs, much larger ones, thematic globes, and globes of the Earth, Moon, the Skies and probably Mars and some other planets that I missed.

What a beaut: a geological globe.

Here’s a relief globe, made in Italy ca. 1950.
I could have looked at and taken pictures of globes all day. Here’s one more. The granddaddy of all the globes in the collection.
The Library of Congress says, “In 1942 in the midst of World War II, U.S. Army Chief of Staff Gen. George C. Marshall sent a large globe to both President Franklin Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill as Christmas gifts from the U.S. Army. The U.S. Office of Strategic Services had compiled the maps, and the Weber Costello Co. constructed the globes. It is reported that 12 to 15 of these globes were produced between 1942 and 1955.

“The globe measures 50 inches (127 centimeters) in diameter, 13 feet in circumference, and reportedly weighs 750 pounds. It consists of two interlocking halves made of bent bands of wood over which the printed paper gores are pasted.”

One of the library staff confirmed to me that this indeed was one of those 12 to 15 globes — though not either of those given to Roosevelt or Churchill, since they are at Hyde Park and Chartwell, respectively.

In recent years, the American Geographical Society’s had its globe refurbished. Looks good for its age, I’d say.
As I mentioned, there were maps on display from among the library’s vast collection, laying flat on tables for a convenient look.
There were all kinds of maps, such as one of the rayon acetate (silk-like) escape maps that helped Allied POWs escape during WWII, highway maps, non-English maps, space maps, hobbyist maps, historical trend maps, and comedy maps, such as the MAD Pictorial Map of the United States from 1981, with artwork by the inimitable Sergio Aragonés (who’s still alive).

As fun as that was — and I spent several minutes looking at it, since any Sergio Aragonés work is going to be incredibly detailed — my favorite was a Swiss map: Die Eroberung des Weltraums.

Or rather, a schematic depicting the progress of space exploration as of the publishing date in 1968. Here’s a detail.

Not shown in my detail are the Moon, or Venus and Mars, though spacecraft had voyaged there by ’68. There had been no exploration of the outer planets or Mercury yet, so those weren’t depicted at all. What a remarkable lot of information the artist, whose name I don’t have, was able to pack into the image.

The McDonald Observatory

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He died a good many years before I was born, and in fact I’d never heard of him until last week, but I have to like William Johnson McDonald of Paris, Texas. In life, he made a considerable fortune, but that’s not his distinction. Rather, in death McDonald left behind money enough to found the McDonald Observatory in far West Texas.

That’s a fine use for the fortune of a childless man. Maybe McDonald would look into the night sky there in Paris — and it was probably still pretty dark in that town in the early 20th century — and think that mankind needed to find out more. Build better telescopes, see further.

In full, the facility is the University of Texas at Austin McDonald Observatory, completed in 1939 and which now has telescopes on Mount Locke and Mount Fowlkes, near Fort Davis. Unlike Big Bend, I wanted to visit the observatory when I was young. That was the kind of youngster I was. In the spring of 1979, I think, a high school friend and I wanted to go, but found out there was a six-month waiting list. Or at least that’s what I seem to remember happened. We shelved the idea.

So for me it had to wait until the spring of 2018. The day after I visited Big Bend, I drove from Marathon to Fort Davis and then up the winding two-lane road into the mountains. Actually, pretty much every road in West Texas has two lanes, except I-10, but anyway I arrived at the observatory in time for the 11 a.m. tour, which is supposed to include a look at the two major telescopes and a look through one of the smaller scopes at the Sun.

Except that the Sun wasn’t to be seen. After clear skies and temps near 90 F. the day before, a front blew in overnight. When I went to bed that night, my room at the Marathon Motel & RV Park was about as dark and quiet as a place can be. Occasionally a train would roar by, which was pretty loud but not that often, and from time to time, dogs barked in the distance. That was it.

I woke at 4 or 5 a.m., while it was still very dark, to a constant whoosh of wind outside. Not the winds I’m used to at home, which can be loud and strong, but tend to subside for a few minutes at a time. This West Texas wind was constant. I fell asleep to it, and a few hours later, at dawn or so, it still was blowing with the same intense regularity. A little more sleep — that’s how I tend to sleep — and after that, the blow was still blowing the same.

With the wind came clouds, a little drizzle and much cooler temps. By the time I got to the observatory, I was in some clouds. So much fog that at first I could barely see the observatory buildings.

Instead of a look at the Sun, our guide showed us images of the Sun in the visitors center’s small auditorium, and talked about it and other stars. He was an informative young man, an astronomy enthusiast who happened to get a job in public affairs at McDonald. As usual with these things, I already knew a fair amount, but not everything.

I didn’t know, for instance, that UY Scuti is now the largest known star, at about 1,700 times larger than the Sun’s radius and 21 billion times the volume. Enough at least to engulf the the entirety of Jupiter’s orbit. Luckily, it’s at a safe distance of 9,500 light years or so. A near neighbor in galactic terms, but not really that near.

The tour first took us to the Harlen J. Smith Telescope, named after the observatory director who oversaw its construction. The scope is under the dome at some distance from the visitors center.

Under the dome, it’s a commanding presence.

The instrument was a creation of the space race. “McDonald Observatory’s new director, Harlan J. Smith… convinced NASA to build one of those new telescopes at McDonald,” the observatory web site says. “The telescope brought new life and prestige to the observatory, helped recruit top young faculty members, and established McDonald as key player in the exploration of the Solar System.

“Planning began in 1964, and construction was completed in 1968 on Mount Locke. Built by Westinghouse for about $5 million, the new telescope was then the third largest in the world. Weighing in at 160 tons, it had a fused silica mirror 107 inches (2.7 m) wide that gave it a light-gathering power one-quarter million times greater than the unaided eye. It began regular observations in 1969.”

The Harlen was also where a laser was first set up to bounce a beam off the reflector that Armstrong and Aldrin left on the Moon, measuring the distance between Earth and Moon down to some ridiculously small (in inches) margin of error. If that’s not a cool factoid, I don’t know what is.

The final stop was at the Hobby-Eberly Telescope, completed in 1997, which is under this dome.

“It was designed specifically for spectroscopy, the decoding of light from stars and galaxies to study their properties,” the observatory says. “This makes it ideal in searching for planets around other stars, studying distant galaxies, exploding stars, black holes and more.

“The telescope’s mirror looks like a honeycomb. It’s made up of 91 hexagonal mirrors. To make good observations, the 91 segments must be aligned exactly, to form a perfect reflecting surface. The mushroom-shaped tower to the side of the HET dome contains a laser-alignment system that works to keep the segments in proper alignment. The mirror segments form a reflecting surface that is 11 by 10 meters.

“However, the HET is known as a 9.2-meter telescope because that’s how much of the mirror is actually in use at any given time. This makes the HET, scientifically speaking, the third largest telescope in the world.”

As I was leaving, the Sun came out. The afternoon cleared up and the night was fairly clear back in Marathon. Hope the astronomers got to collect their data from the dark West Texas sky that night.

Space Oddity

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I found out that pictures of the Roadster in Space were put into the public domain, and I couldn’t resist.

Wired reported: “SpaceX revealed last weekend that a mannequin wearing the company’s new spacesuit would ride in the driver’s seat of the electric sports car. Nicknamed Starman, the dummy will listen to some tunes on its long and endless journey: David Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity.’ ”

I watched the Falcon Heavy launch on my computer after the fact, as one does these days. Aside from the fact that it didn’t explode on the pad, the remarkable thing was the robust cheering from the crowd at launch.

Did Mr. Musk hire a cheering section? Probably not, but it’s a fun thought. Compare with the launch of Apollo 11 — you can hear faint cheering briefly right after liftoff. Maybe the microphones weren’t in position to get much crowd reaction in 1969.

An aside: Jack King, who announced the Apollo 11 liftoff, died only in 2015.

The Strangest Stamp You’re Likely To See For a While, Maybe Ever

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Because I was so busy today, I naturally took time out to watch a couple of episodes of Vintage Space, a series I happened across a few months ago. It’s always interesting. One installment I watched today, “Only Three People Have Died in Space,” was about the ill-fated Soyuz 11 mission.

The three would be the unfortunate Georgy Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov, and Viktor Patsayev, who died in space when their capsule depressurized suddenly just before re-entry. The spacecraft’s automated system then returned the dead crew to Earth.

I remember hearing about that. I was paying close attention to space news by 1971, even though I was 10. As usual with Soviet missions, and especially ones that didn’t go well, the information was a little vague at the time. I’ve read about it since, but it was good to hear host Amy Shira Teitel offer more detail about the accident.

Interesting to realize that for someone her age, just over 30, all of the early programs are purely history, without a memory component. I’m really glad I remember Apollo.

Toward the end of the segment, she discusses a set of stamps issued soon after the mission by Equatorial Guinea — certainly printed elsewhere for that nation — honoring Soyuz 11. That’s where things got strange.

One of the stamps, as seen above, gruesomely depicts the dead crew. “It is one of the strangest depictions of fallen heroes on a stamp that I have ever seen,” Teitel says. I’ll go further: it’s one of the strangest stamps I’ve ever seen.

The Frozen World of Bob

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This from a recent NASA press release: “On New Year’s Day 2019, the New Horizons spacecraft will fly past a small, frozen world in the Kuiper Belt, at the outer edge of our solar system. The target Kuiper Belt object (KBO) currently goes by the official designation (486958) 2014 MU69. NASA and the New Horizons team are asking the public for help in giving ‘MU69’ a nickname to use for this exploration target…

“After the flyby, NASA and the New Horizons project plan to choose a formal name to submit to the International Astronomical Union, based in part on whether MU69 is found to be a single body, a binary pair, or perhaps a system of multiple objects. The chosen nickname will be used in the interim.”

Well, well. The space agency directs interested parties here to suggest a name, or see what’s already been suggested. Such as Mjölnir and Camalor and Z’ha’dum. I might well suggest “Bob.” If it’s good enough for the cold, forbidding Northwest Territories, it’s good enough for space rock(s) in the cold, forbidding Kuiper Belt. I will not suggest some variation on Boaty McBoatface.

May Pause

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Back to posting on Decoration Day, May 30, which happens to be the day after Memorial Day this year. By then I might have seen a thing or two to post about, but no promises.

I picked up a NASA public domain image recently while reading about the spacecraft Cassini’s grand finale. It’s one of those images that’s more beguiling the more you stare at it.

8423_20181_1saturn2016More images of the planet and its moons are here, including one of oddball Iapetus. That moon, and a number of other Saturnian things, come up in a video made featuring Sir Arthur C. Clarke about a year before he died. Glad he lived long enough to see Cassini-Huygens explore Saturn.

Into the Silence

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When I went to Half Price Books the other day, I knew I’d come away with something. Even more because I had a gift card, though I don’t remember where or when I got it. The code on the back was scratched off, so I couldn’t tell whether it had any value by checking online. I figured the clerk could tell me, and so she did: $15.

More than enough to buy Into the Silence by Wade Davis (2011), subtitled “The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest.” That subtitle alone was almost enough to sell me on it. Not that I have a particular interesting in books about mountaineering, though I’ve read a few. But I do have an interest in the Great War and about journeys or expeditions to remote places, during which the participants die or not.

In this case, of course, Mallory and Irvine did not come back from Everest in 1924. Mallory managed to survive the war — which many of his friends did not — but Everest got him. I remember reading about the discovery of Mallory’s body in 1999. Irvine has yet to turn up, and no one knows whether they made the summit or not.

Also the fact that Wade Davis wrote the book was a recommendation, though I haven’t read any other books of his, even the one about Voodoo. Not yet. Anyway, he’s an insanely accomplished fellow, so I suspect I’m in for a good read.

Thursday Residuum

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Remarkably rainy January so far. Even when it hasn’t been raining these past weeks or so, the skies have looked pregnant with rain. So it’s been a wet January, not an icy one. That was the case at UIUC, as the last of clinging frozen matter thawed, as it might in a normal northern March.

UIUC January 15, 2017

Blame it on climate change? I’d be tempted, but weather isn’t climate. Besides, there’s a blizzard lurking out there in the near future, or at least heavy snow. Winter will not be denied.

A few days ago, I approached a four-way stop to make a left turn. Directly across the intersection another car arrived to make a left turn. To my left, a third car arrived to make a right turn. We all got there at about the same moment. We all made our respective turns concurrently. Can’t remember when that happened before. Had a fourth car to my right wanted to make a right turn, it would have been truly remarkable, but we had to settle for a three-way synch.

At a World Market last week, I saw bottles of Tito’s Handmade Vodka for sale. I couldn’t ever remember actually seeing any before, as opposed to hearing about it, though I don’t go to a lot of liquor stores.

Last month, I heard Tito himself on the radio, pitching his creation. He didn’t quite sound like his high school self, no one would, but it was him all right. I was pretty sure I hadn’t ever heard advertising for Tito’s beyond sponsorships on public radio (the ad I heard was on a commercial station). Maybe Tito’s needed to up his ad budget in the face of competition.

I’m most of my way through the book River of Doubt, about the Roosevelt-Rondon expedition into the deep Brazilian rainforest. Reading it, you think, how did anyone survive that trip? They faced untreatable diseases, looming starvation, dangerous animals, venomous bugs, an extremely hazardous river, a murderer among their crew, and the potential for Indians to attack at any time and wipe them all out. At one point, a very sick Theodore Roosevelt seriously contemplated overdosing on morphine. Not too end his pain, but to avoid being an impediment to the rest of the expedition. His son Kermit wouldn’t allow it.

Amazing how close TR’s bio came to ending with, “Led expedition down the River of Doubt in Brazil, 1914. Never seen again.”

The Air Zoo of Kalamazoo

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Mid-week between Christmas and New Year’s, I popped off by myself to Michigan, more specifically to Kalamazoo, the city with the most fun name in the whole state — just repeat it a few times and see — for a look around. One of its main attractions is the Air Zoo. I’ve heard about that place for years, but an air (and space) museum is a moderately hard sell for the family. Not for me. Spacecraft especially, but also aircraft.

The Air Zoo is relatively small, at least with the Museum of the U.S. Air Force still fairly fresh in mind, but it offers an excellent collection, including early airplanes, a lot of WWII aircraft, examples from the age of jet fighters, and a number of space-related objects. The museum is also in the major leagues of aircraft restoration efforts. A number of items that it had restored were on display, and later I read about a WWII dive bomber, a Douglas SBD-2P Dauntless, that was pulled from Lake Michigan recently and which will be restored by the museum.

Here’s a WACO VPF-7, something I’d never heard of, probably because it was only one of six ever built.

According to the museum, the ’30s-vintage aircraft “was designed as a trainer/combat aircraft for the Guatemalan Air Force. As an attack aircraft, the front cockpit would be covered and .30-caliber machine gun pods would be placed under the wings. However, this particular aircraft has no indication of machine guns ever having been attached.”

A Ford Tri-Motor. Also known as a Tin Goose, produced from 1925 to 1933. Indiana Jones got around in these sometimes, I believe.
Air Zoo“The Air Zoo’s 5-AT Ford Tri-Motor (N4819) came off the assembly line in 1929 with serial number 58 and was delivered to National Air Transport, where it probably delivered freight and mail,” the museum says. “It quickly went to Ford Motor Company for modifications and then was sold to Northwest Airways, flying the Minneapolis-St Paul-to-Chicago run. It was one of five Tri-Motors bought by [the company that] would become Northwest Airlines.”

Maybe so, but as a display item, the plane is painted as if it were in service of the U.S. Army. I’ve read that until last year, this very plane was airworthy, and the museum gave rides.

Here’s a B-25, one of almost 10,000 produced during the war.
Air ZooThis particular one made strafing runs with the 489th Bomb Squadron, 345th Bomb Group, according to the museum. I like that paint job.

Modern wars aren’t won just with fighting machines, but by getting materiel here and there as fast as possible. Enter the DC-3.

Air ZooTime flies, there are more wars. Jets do the fighting, such as this F-8 Crusader.
Air ZooThe sign said: “Photo reconnaissance variants of the Crusader flew several dangerous missions during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Then… the F-8 became the first U.S. Navy aircraft to routinely battle North Vietnamese MiGs.”

A small but distinctive collection of space artifacts is on display at the Air Zoo. I take ’em where I can get ’em. Such as this J-2 engine, famed for its attachment to the second and third stages of the Saturn V.

J-2 Air ZooThere aren’t many machines that have to be just so or they’ll blow up. Kudos to the engineers.

Here’s something I’d never seen before: a Gemini boilerplate.
El Kabong, Air ZooEl Kabong I is its whimsical nickname. I’d forgotten that, “as El Kabong, Quick Draw would attack his foes by swooping down on a rope with the war cry “OLÉ!” and hitting them on the head with an acoustic guitar …” (Wikipedia). Quick Draw McGraw made a fairly faint impression on me, even at an impressionable age.

Anyway, the boilerplate’s main job was to test the feasibility of recovering spacecraft on land using extendable skid-type landing gear, a steerable gliding parachute (para-sail), and solid-fuel retrorockets to help slow the spacecraft for landing, says the Air Zoo. I don’t think Gemini landed that way, but it sounds pretty cool.

The concept of the boilerplate spacecraft might be an obscure one to the public at large, but I like coming across them.