Ingenuity

 

It was a little more than a week ago, very early in the morning on the East Coast and even earlier here in the Western US, and not many people were watching.  The eyes of the news were on mass shootings, police killings of black Americans and the Chauvin trial.  But I happened across a link just as the NASA live feed was starting, so I got to see evidence of the first successful flight of a powered vehicle on another planet (or at least the first initiated by humans, that we know of) at the same time the people at NASA did.

 They were a dozen or so people around hotel convention tables arranged in a horseshow, all of them masked up, most of them wearing NASA orange smocks or golf shirts, peering at their own laptops and glancing up at the big screen at the end of the room.  Many of them had been working on this specific project for 6 years or more. 

 They were waiting to learn whether the flight of Ingenuity, a tiny Kleenix box of instruments attached to very long and ungainly shaped rotors, had actually flown a little earlier, since it takes hours for signals to traverse the distance between Mars and Earth.  Nobody really knew if flying would work in an atmosphere less than a percent of Earth's.

 The NASA channel—which, when I had it on our cable TV system and the Shuttles and Space Station had cameras always pointed towards Earth, I sometimes let just run with this portrait of our planet in real time, in the background—did a fine job of covering this Ingenuity flight story.  A brightly smiling interviewer elicited the pertinent information from various participants in the room, though the answers got less and less coherent as the big moment got closer and closer. 

 Then she did something pretty striking: she shut up, so we could just witness what went on in that room. As I watched the screen full of people watching their screens, I reflected on the deceptive amount of computer power in those laptops and inside that interplanetary tissue box on Mars, and the fact that the Apollo missions that landed humans on the moon had at their disposal much less computer power than a smartphone.      

 We who were watching (and some were: they had sent in questions through various social media) were primed on what to watch for.  So we got the quiet excitement when the initial data package came in, and it looked “nominal” (NASAspeak for A-OK.) The data went from one analyst to another, each adding more information until we all together got the first visual confirmation: a simple diagram, sent by Ingenuity via several links, that mapped its flight: it went straight up, flew sideways, stopped and came straight down, and landed.  That diagram was as exciting as HD video.  It meant it happened.  The first cheer went up in the room.

 A few seconds later we saw the first photo: a black and white snapshot taken by Ingenuity’s camera pointed straight down from the air, looking like a film photography negative, in which the shadow is Ingenuity itself.  There would be other photos and other flights this week, but this will remain the historic one. More cheers in the room, though social distancing meant no hugs.  But the project manager did jump up and down, in place.

 So it meant something to me to be watching this in real time, a memory to set beside seeing in real time the first human step onto the surface of another world When Neil Armstrong touched the Moon, we all did, in a way.  It was the same with Ingenuity’s flight.

 Ingenuity has flown farther and for a longer time, and will probably be pushed beyond its limits.  It’s a proof of concept device, and is unlikely to have a life even as long as the Martian rovers.  None of them are coming back.  It won’t be resting in the Smithsonian—at least, not anytime soon.

 This event, set against the others making news, like those irrational killings, and the raging flames of white supremacy, and within the complicated context of the pandemic, all the madness about masks and vaccines, reminded me again of a conversation I had several Christmases ago with young tech people in Menlo Park, about prospects for the future.  Though we had different intuitions of the outcome, we shared the basic idea of it being like a race—that is, a foot race or vehicle race—between the positive and negative, the creative and the destructive.

 Because it seems clear that as a society we are rushing furiously in two opposite directions at once (with many wiggling lines within the main ones going off slightly in other directions.)  Moreover, the race is timed.  Though we don’t know exactly when the game will be over, there may come such a moment that if destruction is winning, then self-destruction it will be.  And in terms of Earth as environment, that time is fast approaching.

 Who knows if flying a helicopter on Mars is going to contribute to saving the Earth.  (Not if it encourages the Elon Musks of this world to believe they can just leave this planet behind and start this madness all over again elsewhere.)  But those nerdy people in the orange shirts—Asian, black, and immigrant prominently among them—worked hard on this one problem for a long time, and they did something wonderful.  And they know it—they attached a shred of the first manned aircraft from Kitty Hawk to Ingenuity for its first flight.  Maybe future generations won’t care, but seeing something like this we call historic is at least a special experience for the now living.

Who Are The Martians?

 

Getting the joke of this cartoon probably requires knowing the basic plot of H.G. Wells'  novel, The War of the Worlds, in which Martians invading Earth are stymied when they fall prey to ordinary microbes here they don't have at home.  I post this today partly to celebrate the successful landing of NASA's latest rover on Mars.  It's primary mission--at last!--is to search for signs of life, even microbial life, that may have existed in earlier times when Mars had a decent atmosphere.  It will collect soil samples that, it is planned, will be analyzed by many labs using many methods when returned to Earth.  Returning anything from a planet has yet to be accomplished. 

I had higher hopes for this mission when I thought that returning the samples to Earth was part of it.  But it turns out not to be so.  The "plans" are vague, and the mission to do so is not yet scheduled.  If it happens at all, it likely won't be for another decade.  That's disappointing, because the discovery that life has ever existed beyond Earth, let alone that it exists now, would be so wonderful to experience.  I hadn't thought about it much recently, but I have come to believe that this discovery, if it is made at all, will be made some time in the next 50 years.  This looked like the best opportunity for it in my lifetime. Now it seems less likely.

But if some fossil microbial life is found on Mars, that in itself may not be the only discovery.  It is possible that evidence could help answer the question more and more scientists are now asking: did life on Earth originate on Mars?  Mars is much older and had a life-supporting environment much sooner.  Space rocks etc. are exchanged between the planets all the time, and some microbial life could make the journey intact.  Life arose on Earth suspiciously soon after the conditions were right.  Could it have been the blossoming of a Martian seed?  

And so the question above is asked again in actuality as well as fiction: who are the Martians?

A First on the Fourth

"We just did the hardest thing NASA's ever done," said participant Scott Bolton, as the spacecraft Juno confirmed that after a five year journey it had successfully gone into orbit around Jupiter.

The space age commenced with Sputnik, often described as about the size of a basketball.  Juno is a sophisticated, heavy shielded research vehicle that is the size of a basketball court.

Jupiter is in one of the most dangerous places in the solar system, due in part to the heavy radiation of this massive world.  Jupiter is also the first planet in the solar system to be formed, and so Juno's observations may shed light on obscure cosmic history.

In addition to all the scientific instruments, there is a camera, the JunoCam, that is reserved for public use.  As this New Yorker article notes: "Freed from the burden of scientific responsibility, amateurs and enthusiasts will be able to vote online to determine where JunoCam points and which features it captures. “It will provide the very first views of Jupiter’s poles, and the most incredible close-up views of the planet ever seen,” Bolton said. “I expect we will probably discover some new moons, too. But it’s really a public camera.” Already, JunoCam’s discussion boards are alight: six-year-old Bee wants more photos of the red spot, while Hogarth-11 is voting for a closer look at greenish dots near Jupiter’s equator."

Update: Washington Post expands on the science to come during this mission, and adds this about Jupiter: "Jupiter is so massive that it's heftier than everything else in the solar system (except for the sun) put together. More than 1,000 Earths could fit inside it. It's a mystery wrapped in an enigma — both its raging surface storms, which include the Great Red Spot, and its hidden core remain largely unknown to science — and learning more about the strange planet could help us understand the building blocks of life on our own planet and beyond."


NASA also extended the working lives of 9 ongoing spacecraft missions.  As Carl Sagan pointed out in the final episode of Cosmos--which by coincidence I watched again tonight, in its digital restoration--it was by studying other planets that scientists here discovered the ozone layer (recently showing signs of healing, thanks to efforts begun decades ago) and the likely phenomenon of nuclear winter.  Even earlier, James Lovelock began formulating his Gaia theory based on studies of Mars.

Recent observations by the Curiosity Rover suggest more strongly that Mars was once much like the Earth, with an atmosphere and watery oceans. What went wrong?  Venus is another cautionary tale, for it seems to be a lifeless victim of runaway greenhouse heating.  These planetary neighbors are reminders of how fragile is our purchase on this planet, with its wisp of an atmosphere as our life-giving protection.

Sagan remains a touchstone for the ethics of space exploration.  For him (unlike, say, the makers of the film Interstellar) it's not an either/or proposition.  Space exploration and care of the Earth must coexist, and the Earth always comes first.

The New Yorker article notes that several other space missions came to fruition on July 4.  This July 4 also happens to coincide with Earth's Aphelion, or the farthest point from the sun it reaches in its orbit.  (As this piece points out, that distance has a lot less to do with our surface temperature than the planet's tilt that determines the seasons, but it is thought to be related to periodical Ice Ages.)

These jostle with the other significant anniversaries on this date, such as the Declaration of Independence, the death of its author, Thomas Jefferson as well as John Adams, the birthday of George M. Cohan and--the 18th birthday of Malia Obama, whose father led the singing of Happy Birthday at a White House event.

Cosmos Thoughts

It's been a mostly gray week on the North Coast, not unusual for summer, at least until recent years.  This time the high gray of the marine layer (a more precise name for high uniform fog) was joined by darker and lower clouds that threatened rain but produced only a brief night shower.  On another night the combination also led to the light moisture in the air that accumulated wet touches on the leaves, barely discernible on the street, that's also characteristic of this place.

Today however was bright and windy--days like this seem more frequent.  And since it is the weekend, it was noisy with leaf blowers and lawn mowers, as well as two young men blasting around in what now is called a vintage car, but in the past was known as a hot rod.

Last night the sky was clear enough for me to see the moon and some stars, and a bright pin of red that I knew must be Mars.  It is particularly close now, though receding from its closest point this time around, in May.  Its orbit swings it nearer to Earth once or twice every 15 years or so (though its very closest pass which happened in 2003 won't be repeated until 2287.)

Interest in Mars perked up during a few such close encounters in the late 19th century, when more powerful telescopes picked up surface features, mis-reported as "canals," which were then aided by imagination in suggesting a civilization on that planet.  When Mars came close again in the late 1890s, England and America in particular were in the grip of Mars Mania, and more than 50 novels about Mars and Martians were published, including the one that is still read today: H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds.

That these novels were popular when Mars was big and red in the sky was not coincidence, but that I was watching episodes of Carl Sagan's 1980 Cosmos series was.  Sagan was a working scientist as well as an inspiring writer and personality, and he was heavily involved in the Viking missions, which landed the first spacecraft on Mars and sent back the first photos of the Martian surface.

His episode on Mars ("Blues for a Red Planet," also a chapter in the book version) begins with the opening of the H.G. Wells story, as emblematic of the hold Mars has had on imaginations.  Since then we've had the Martian rovers, Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy that chronicles terraforming the planet and the first generations of Martians from Earth, the hit movie The Martian, and Internet billionaires who are fixated on going to Mars in their lifetime.

Sagan also had that dream of human habitation and some form of terraforming, but he prioritized saving the one planet still known to be "graced by life," the Earth.  I'm not sure the same can be said about some scientists and Internet billionaires.

In another episode, "The Backbone of Night," Sagan tells of being a child in Brooklyn who occasionally saw the stars and wondered what they were.  He went to the nearest library and asked for a book on stars.  At first he was given a picture book of Hollywood luminaries.  But then he got the one he wanted and learned for the first time that "stars were suns, only very far away.  The Sun was a star, but close up."

(You might wonder why he didn't learn this in school.  What he doesn't say is that when he made this first trip to the library he was five years old.  Precocious Carl even had vivid specific memories of being taken to the famous 1939 World's Fair in New York, when he was four.)

"The Backbone of Night" refers to the Milky Way, which is the point of departure for this episode. The particular coincidence of seeing this episode was that, on the same day, I read the melancholy finding that 80% of  North Americans can no longer see the Milky Way due to light pollution.  Almost everyone in the US looks into a light polluted sky.

One of the scientists involved in the study commented: "There are still people that can remember when they used to be able to see the Milky Way when they would walk outside at night, but those are becoming fewer and fewer."  I guess I'm one of the few, though it seems so unusual now that I can hardly believe that the Milky Way was a commonplace sight in my early childhood, as I lived on a hill of a neighborhood that didn't have streetlights, outside a small town.

I probably had a better view than young Carl in Brooklyn, who might not have seen much more of the night sky as I do now, when on clear nights there are only a scattering of stars visible from my backyard.  Carl Sagan, who believed he got his analytical skills and skepticism from his mother but his sense of wonder from his father, combined them as no one else has.  Maybe some of the science in Cosmos is outdated (and there is a more recent series that follows in his footsteps: the 3 minutes of the video above with Sagan's narration from another of his books is from that series) but his voice remains eloquent in expressing this necessary combination.

Memorial

There have so far been three fatal disasters in the US space program, and though separated by decades, they each happened within five days of each other on the calendar year, in late January and early February.

They also represent three of the four parts of a space voyage.  Apollo 1 was running a pre-launch test on January 27, 1967. when fire ignited, killing astronauts Virgil Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chafee.  The Challenger space shuttle exploded moments after lift-off (pictured above) on January 28, 1986, killing its seven crew members.  And on February 1, 2003, the shuttle Columbia broke up on re-entering Earth's atmosphere after a successful voyage, killing its crew of seven.  There has yet to be a major disaster in the main part of the voyage, in space.

The anniversaries are naturally noted at this time of the year.  This year the media focused on Challenger, since it was the 30th anniversary.  For a few moments on that morning in 1986, the Challenger crew and I were in the air at the same time.  I was a thousand or so miles north, flying into Portland, Maine.  When I disembarked for a speaking engagement, the people who met me had ashen faces.  When they told me the shuttle had exploded, at first I thought they meant the New York to Washington shuttle.  I hadn't known that Challenger was going to be launched that day (it had been delayed before). Aboard Challenger was Christa McAuliffe, a teacher in neighboring New Hampshire.  Lots of children watched the launch, and the shuttle disappearing in smoke a minute or so later.

Gus Grissom, one of the astronauts on Apollo 1, was the second American in space, a major contributor to the Gemini program, and slated to be the first human to set foot on the moon.

 I was in high school when John Glenn became the first American to orbit the earth, the next Mercury mission after Grissom.  I was editor of my high school newspaper, and from a magazine I copped a photo of the seven astronauts with Alan Shepard (the first American in space), Grissom and Glenn together at the end,  clipped everybody off except those three, and printed it with a brief celebratory story.  I sent copies of the story to all three.  All three replied in some fashion.  Grissom sent a letter and enclosed the clipping I'd sent.  At first I was taken aback, until I noticed that under each figure in the photo was a signature.  He not only signed it himself, but got Shepard and Glenn to sign it as well.

Each of these disasters had causes both mundane and mysterious.  Apollo 1 had a number of fairly outrageous design flaws that combined to seal the fate of the astronauts, but the actual source of the fire itself was never found.  Columbia's fate was sealed by what current astronaut Mark Kelly describes in his memorial this week as "a pizza box-sized piece of insulating foam" that had flaked off the spacecraft, dooming its re-entry.

The Challenger disaster, attributed to tiny O rings that failed because of the cold during launch (although that's been disputed since), had the most protracted and public evaluation.  I followed it and wrote about it at the time, but until I read this article last week I was unaware that politics may have played a part--President Reagan reputedly wanted to refer to the teacher in space during his State of the Union address, so Challenger was launched despite the engineers who pleaded for a postponement because of the cold.

If there is anything in common in the causes of these disasters, it might be the flaws in communication and decision-making at least as much as technical flaws.  Each catastrophe resulted in better spacecraft and procedures.  But all three were avoidable, and so even as we remember the fine people who were lost, these disasters should haunt the process as it continues.  With the necessary audacity, we need humility.

News From the Neighborhood

For the foreseeable future, and probably well beyond that, the future of humans in space (if any, which is a big question) will occur in our cosmic neighborhood: the solar system.

And we really are exploring it, even if manned observation is only in the close Earth orbit of the international space station.  Far-flung instruments continue to produce new knowledge--as well as some great photos.

The most recent photos come from Pluto, a world that has generally gotten little respect until now.  Small and remote, demoted from planet status, so only a few scientists dare stake their careers on studying the meager information available, at least until the New Horizons spacecraft mission.

The latest photos show a world "more Earthlike than anyone could have imagined," in the words of this excellent National Geographic piece, and yet very alien--fogs and glaciers of nitrogen instead of water, mountains that formed in some mysterious way, and so on.  Yet it is not the bald featureless globe of prior illustrations.  It is a place.  Be sure to click on the photos here and at the NG piece--they're breathtaking.

Also this week:"NASA's confirmation of the existence of a vast global ocean on Enceladus casts a spotlight on Saturn's icy moon as the most potentially habitable spot beyond Earth in the Solar System for life as we know it," in the words of another excellent piece, this one at the Daily Galaxy.

It has liquid water, organic carbon, nitrogen [in the form of ammonia], and an energy source," said Chris McKay, an astrobiologist at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. Besides Earth, he says, "there is no other environment in the Solar System where we can make all those claims."

Yet it is not the only really good candidate for finding life in the solar system.  (The others also are moons rather than planets. This Daily Galaxy piece is a good summary, with links.)  It's news like this that prods my intuition that some form of life outside the Earth will be discovered in my lifetime.

American Exceptionalism

The United States has arguably been declining and falling for years, but occasionally there are new markers.  Apart from internal measures--decline in relation to principles and ideals, decline in relation to the past--there are comparisons with other countries.  Some of these are discounted, thanks to the collapse of the economic power of Japan, the country that scared America in the 70s and 80s.  But discounting everything is perilous.

We note this week that there is a new robotic rover on the surface of the Moon, and it is from China.  There was an apparently successful orbit of a living being and safe return, conducted by Iran.  At least some of the space activity these days is due in part to the U.S. outsourcing its own technology, and others quickly adapting it.  That technological and intellectual capital is being spent, and may not be renewed.

May not if trends in U.S. education continue.  There have been scary headlines and warnings for years, so what's new about the latest?  For one thing, the U.S. had fallen behind in average math achievement, but our best were still among the best.  No more.  Our best students languish "in the middle of the pack" internationally.  They can't keep up.

Add this to other downward trends, if not spirals: infant mortality, longevity, and above all, the enormous gulf between rich and everybody else--very likely the source of much of the rest, along with the retrenchment of governmental resources.  With even the modest advance in healthcare coverage in the Affordable Care Act under intense political fire, our healthcare system remains near the bottom of the industrialized world.   Instead the U.S. leads the world in gun violence and captial punishment--with no fear of relinquishing that dominance.

Despite this country's residual strengths and the advances in less quantifiable qualities, this all has the distinct aroma of decadence.  America is exceptional in its self-satisfied paralysis, its furious conflicts that stalemate action or even enough of a common diagnosis to proceed.

From the  New York Times editorial on Sunday:

In a post-smokestack age, there is only one way for the United States to avoid a declining standard of living, and that is through innovation. Advancements in science and engineering have extended life, employed millions and accounted for more than half of American economic growth since World War II, but they are slowing. The nation has to enlarge its pool of the best and brightest science and math students and encourage them to pursue careers that will keep the country competitive. 

But that isn’t happening. Not only do average American students perform poorly compared with those in other countries, but so do the best students, languishing in the middle of the pack as measured by the two leading tests used in international comparisons.... 

On the 2012 Program for International Student Assessment test, the most recent, 34 of 65 countries and school systems had a higher percentage of 15-year-olds scoring at the advanced levels in mathematics than the United States did. The Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland all had at least twice the proportion of mathematically advanced students as the United States, and many Asian countries had far more than that.

Other tests have shown that America’s younger students fare better in global comparisons than its older students do, which suggests a disturbing failure of educators to nurture good students as they progress to higher grades. Over all, the United States is largely holding still while foreign competitors are improving rapidly."

Meanwhile, the Chinese are talking softly about their rover on the Moon (the peaceful exploration of space) which they are conducting methodically, with plenty of resources committed to it.  But their longer range plans may be more complex.  This BBC story says they are looking at future potential for the Moon's minerals. This is not really a new or necessarily sinister idea, unless the fact that the Bush administration expressed interest in the same thing tilts the balance for you.  But it shows that while these days the only Americans thinking that far ahead are science fiction writers, the Chinese aren't just wondering, they're exploring.