[update: fixed some links, added Mars Live link, added details on CNN coverage]
The Phoenix lander arrives at Mars' north pole region on Sunday night. This is an event I've been anticipating for over a year, since before the misson launched last August. Since then, the U of AZ team has been doing a fantastic job with outreach, and I'm seeing news of this event pop up all over the place, from the New York Times to Slashdot to CNN.
There is a flood of resources available on the net for this landing:
* Phoenix Mars Landing Real-Time Simulation -- great status display of what is happening when, updated live
* NASA's own Phoenix blog
* The Planetary Society's blog (by astro-hottie Emily Lakdawalla) --normally covering many topics, but for the next week or two wholy focused on Phoenix
* Mars Live blog (UK)
* Live status via Twitter -- very short blog post with the latest bits of status
* Live chat on night of Phoenix EDL: #space on irc.freenode.net -- this requires IRC software, something most people aren't familiar with
On TV, there will be multiple (!) ways to watch this. CNN will cover it, in fact they are devoting a whole hour to it on Sunday from 7pm to 8pm, when it'll all be over except for the cryin'. Miles O'Brien, former anchor and space fan, will be hosting the hour live from JPL in Pasadena and will have Steve Freaking Squyres on air with him as commentator. Wow! The Science Channel (one of the Discovery networks) will have coverage, but that channel is hard to find. Finally of course you can go to NASA TV (via cable/satellite TV or online via www.nasa.gov) -- their coverage starts at 6:30pm on Sunday. Afterwards, refer to this NASA TV schedule to find out when follow up press conferences will be aired; right now it looks like it will happen every 1-2 days in the afternoon, but check the schedule for that. I'd expect to see first photos come down around 9:30pm.
This is a terribly risky event -- as one of the mission managers said at the press briefing yesterday, EDL (Entry Descent and Landing) is just about the most complicated thing to pull off in the world of robotics. And there is a long history of Mars eating space probes that we hurl at it. The last time we successfully landed on Mars with retro rockets, Jimmy Carter was in the White House. The only two successful landings since then have been done using an airbag landing system, literally dropping to the surface and bouncing and rolling to a stop. This mission is too big for the airbag solution, so they're back to the old retro rocket design.
Watch the Phoenix landing animations and you'll agree that it just seems terribly difficult. Frankly I will not be surprised at all if they fail, not due to lack of confidence in their abilities, but because this is just so incredibly hard to do. It would be a crushing disappointment, especially for the people have been working on this for a decade. So you will indeed see the most deliriously happy engineers and scientists ever on Sunday night if they survive the landing. Less than 48 hours and I can't wait!
The rest of this blog post is about my interest in planetary exploration in general. As a kid in the 70's, I was rather obsessed with the Viking landers, and I can remember paging through the National Geographic reports over and over. My room was postered not with cars or girls (although that came later in college, late bloomer huh?) but with pictures of the planets from the Voyager flybys.
And I've remained interested through the years, but it's only the past 2-3 years that I've really come back to it. A lot of resources are appearing on the internet, and it's given me the luxury of being able to practically gorge myself on mission plans, launch and space activities, scientific data and discussions of all of the above. The latter is the best of all -- instead of relying on magazines or even net news sites for a sense of progress and community, in the last couple years there have sprung up internet forums where I'll find hundreds and thousands of guys like me who are poring over every last shred of news about each mission. Nasaspaceflight's forum is the best for manned spaceflight (i.e. the space shuttle and the International Space Station), and UnmannedSpaceflight's forum is the best for the robotic probes. Those guys are hardcore and I usually just sit back and watch.
The Planetary Society has been involved in this and pushing hard for decades now. They are essentially a lobbying organization, with thousands of members (inluding myself) who all believe that it is our collective human destiny and mandate to explore beyond earth. Emily Lakdawalla's blog is one of their outreach efforts, and she does a stellar (*rimshot*) job of illuminating the latest news and bringing it into context. Mat Kaplan hosts Planetary Radio, a weekly half-hour show that brings it even further down to Earth (is this mic on?); in Atlanta you can hear that show on WREK 91.1 FM on Sunday mornings at 8am, although I just listen via their archive at www.wrek.org; outside of Atlanta you can just go to their web page and download the mp3.
As you get into all this, one of the things that you learn is that manned spaceflight is horribly expensive, as compared to unmanned spaceflight. From the perspective of science and research, it is actually terribly wasteful to send astronauts into space. The shuttle and ISS programs inhale massive amounts of money, and the unmanned probes (Mars Rovers, Cassini, Swift, Hubble, etc etc etc) get by with the comparably little crumbs that are left over in the budget.
Further, even the manned spaceflight program lately seems to be heading in the wrong direction. In the year after the Feb 2003 Columbia shuttle accident, the Bush administration put together a new "Vision for Space Exporation" (VSE) that set out a long term plan for the manned space program, involving retiring the aging shuttle fleet and developing new rockets, with the new end goal being to put men on Mars. That is very exciting, and there's no question that a goal like that really captures the imagination of the public. However, in the VSE, the stepping stone to that goal is to return to the Moon.
And that is the rotten part. Returning to the Moon as if it's a stepping stone to Mars is a fraud on two counts.
First, the Moon is old news. We've been there, and scientists will tell you that there is NOT any compelling reason to go back. We already know it pretty well, and it's just not that interesting anymore.
Second, the orbital mechanics involved, specifically a concept called "the gravity well", mean that the Moon can NOT be used as a literal waystation or stopping point on the way to Mars. It's like saying that in order to get to Everest, you must first reach the peak of Kilimanjaro.
Which leads to the better idea: go to an asteroid as a stepping stone to Mars. That IS an interesting destination, and it COULD conceivably be a way station on the way to Mars. Certainly, getting astronauts out to an asteroid and back (millions of miles away, much further than the moon) would be a wonderful intermediate step to demonstrate all the engineering that would then need to be scaled up for the Mars trip (50+ million miles away).
With all that in mind, the Planetary Society recently convened a few "Town Hall" meetings around the country. Actually, they started with a VIP-only event at Stanford in February, where lots of space scientist luminaries got together to discuss this problem. Then they took it to the public in the form of public meetings where regular people could voice their opinion.
They actually only did it in two other cities: Boston and Atlanta. Why Atlanta, I don't really know, except that two separate contests that the Planetary Society had recently held were both won by two different Atlanta groups, so perhaps we were just high on their radar.
The meeting went on for two hours and it was clear that most in the room were strongly in support of the things I've talked about above, in particular the idea of going to an asteroid or two prior to the Mars jump, instead of going to the moon. And maybe all this whining by us space nerds has had an effect, because a couple weeks ago NASA announced that they are now considering a manned mission to an asteroid. Eeeeeexcellent. (spoken with the voice and fingers of Montgomery Burns)
Now, if we could just get AMS up to ISS before the shuttle retires ...
I'll close this long post with this. Here's a fantastic article by an astronomer about what it's like to work a night at the Keck telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii:
The Phoenix lander arrives at Mars' north pole region on Sunday night. This is an event I've been anticipating for over a year, since before the misson launched last August. Since then, the U of AZ team has been doing a fantastic job with outreach, and I'm seeing news of this event pop up all over the place, from the New York Times to Slashdot to CNN.
There is a flood of resources available on the net for this landing:
* Phoenix Mars Landing Real-Time Simulation -- great status display of what is happening when, updated live
* NASA's own Phoenix blog
* The Planetary Society's blog (by astro-hottie Emily Lakdawalla) --normally covering many topics, but for the next week or two wholy focused on Phoenix
* Mars Live blog (UK)
* Live status via Twitter -- very short blog post with the latest bits of status
* Live chat on night of Phoenix EDL: #space on irc.freenode.net -- this requires IRC software, something most people aren't familiar with
On TV, there will be multiple (!) ways to watch this. CNN will cover it, in fact they are devoting a whole hour to it on Sunday from 7pm to 8pm, when it'll all be over except for the cryin'. Miles O'Brien, former anchor and space fan, will be hosting the hour live from JPL in Pasadena and will have Steve Freaking Squyres on air with him as commentator. Wow! The Science Channel (one of the Discovery networks) will have coverage, but that channel is hard to find. Finally of course you can go to NASA TV (via cable/satellite TV or online via www.nasa.gov) -- their coverage starts at 6:30pm on Sunday. Afterwards, refer to this NASA TV schedule to find out when follow up press conferences will be aired; right now it looks like it will happen every 1-2 days in the afternoon, but check the schedule for that. I'd expect to see first photos come down around 9:30pm.
This is a terribly risky event -- as one of the mission managers said at the press briefing yesterday, EDL (Entry Descent and Landing) is just about the most complicated thing to pull off in the world of robotics. And there is a long history of Mars eating space probes that we hurl at it. The last time we successfully landed on Mars with retro rockets, Jimmy Carter was in the White House. The only two successful landings since then have been done using an airbag landing system, literally dropping to the surface and bouncing and rolling to a stop. This mission is too big for the airbag solution, so they're back to the old retro rocket design.
Watch the Phoenix landing animations and you'll agree that it just seems terribly difficult. Frankly I will not be surprised at all if they fail, not due to lack of confidence in their abilities, but because this is just so incredibly hard to do. It would be a crushing disappointment, especially for the people have been working on this for a decade. So you will indeed see the most deliriously happy engineers and scientists ever on Sunday night if they survive the landing. Less than 48 hours and I can't wait!
The rest of this blog post is about my interest in planetary exploration in general. As a kid in the 70's, I was rather obsessed with the Viking landers, and I can remember paging through the National Geographic reports over and over. My room was postered not with cars or girls (although that came later in college, late bloomer huh?) but with pictures of the planets from the Voyager flybys.
And I've remained interested through the years, but it's only the past 2-3 years that I've really come back to it. A lot of resources are appearing on the internet, and it's given me the luxury of being able to practically gorge myself on mission plans, launch and space activities, scientific data and discussions of all of the above. The latter is the best of all -- instead of relying on magazines or even net news sites for a sense of progress and community, in the last couple years there have sprung up internet forums where I'll find hundreds and thousands of guys like me who are poring over every last shred of news about each mission. Nasaspaceflight's forum is the best for manned spaceflight (i.e. the space shuttle and the International Space Station), and UnmannedSpaceflight's forum is the best for the robotic probes. Those guys are hardcore and I usually just sit back and watch.
The Planetary Society has been involved in this and pushing hard for decades now. They are essentially a lobbying organization, with thousands of members (inluding myself) who all believe that it is our collective human destiny and mandate to explore beyond earth. Emily Lakdawalla's blog is one of their outreach efforts, and she does a stellar (*rimshot*) job of illuminating the latest news and bringing it into context. Mat Kaplan hosts Planetary Radio, a weekly half-hour show that brings it even further down to Earth (is this mic on?); in Atlanta you can hear that show on WREK 91.1 FM on Sunday mornings at 8am, although I just listen via their archive at www.wrek.org; outside of Atlanta you can just go to their web page and download the mp3.
As you get into all this, one of the things that you learn is that manned spaceflight is horribly expensive, as compared to unmanned spaceflight. From the perspective of science and research, it is actually terribly wasteful to send astronauts into space. The shuttle and ISS programs inhale massive amounts of money, and the unmanned probes (Mars Rovers, Cassini, Swift, Hubble, etc etc etc) get by with the comparably little crumbs that are left over in the budget.
Further, even the manned spaceflight program lately seems to be heading in the wrong direction. In the year after the Feb 2003 Columbia shuttle accident, the Bush administration put together a new "Vision for Space Exporation" (VSE) that set out a long term plan for the manned space program, involving retiring the aging shuttle fleet and developing new rockets, with the new end goal being to put men on Mars. That is very exciting, and there's no question that a goal like that really captures the imagination of the public. However, in the VSE, the stepping stone to that goal is to return to the Moon.
And that is the rotten part. Returning to the Moon as if it's a stepping stone to Mars is a fraud on two counts.
First, the Moon is old news. We've been there, and scientists will tell you that there is NOT any compelling reason to go back. We already know it pretty well, and it's just not that interesting anymore.
Second, the orbital mechanics involved, specifically a concept called "the gravity well", mean that the Moon can NOT be used as a literal waystation or stopping point on the way to Mars. It's like saying that in order to get to Everest, you must first reach the peak of Kilimanjaro.
Which leads to the better idea: go to an asteroid as a stepping stone to Mars. That IS an interesting destination, and it COULD conceivably be a way station on the way to Mars. Certainly, getting astronauts out to an asteroid and back (millions of miles away, much further than the moon) would be a wonderful intermediate step to demonstrate all the engineering that would then need to be scaled up for the Mars trip (50+ million miles away).
With all that in mind, the Planetary Society recently convened a few "Town Hall" meetings around the country. Actually, they started with a VIP-only event at Stanford in February, where lots of space scientist luminaries got together to discuss this problem. Then they took it to the public in the form of public meetings where regular people could voice their opinion.
They actually only did it in two other cities: Boston and Atlanta. Why Atlanta, I don't really know, except that two separate contests that the Planetary Society had recently held were both won by two different Atlanta groups, so perhaps we were just high on their radar.
Held at Georgia Tech on May 7th, they brought in a couple Planetary Society bigwigs and added a few local folks to form a panel that started off the discussion. But then they stuck to their promise and handed the mic out to the people in the room. And moderating all this was ... Bill Nye the Science guy.
Now, I'm sure we all have our snickering opinions about the goofball we all saw on his PBS science show. But I have to say this: that guy is whip smart, he knows how to work a room, and he knows how to turn the most inane comment into a constructive point. The Planetary Society has a great asset in that man (he's their Vice President).The meeting went on for two hours and it was clear that most in the room were strongly in support of the things I've talked about above, in particular the idea of going to an asteroid or two prior to the Mars jump, instead of going to the moon. And maybe all this whining by us space nerds has had an effect, because a couple weeks ago NASA announced that they are now considering a manned mission to an asteroid. Eeeeeexcellent. (spoken with the voice and fingers of Montgomery Burns)
Now, if we could just get AMS up to ISS before the shuttle retires ...
I'll close this long post with this. Here's a fantastic article by an astronomer about what it's like to work a night at the Keck telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii:
http://www.mikebrownsplanets.com/2008/03/blue-hawaii.html
http://www.mikebrownsplanets.com/2008/04/bluer-still.html