This Saturday in (Space Again) Science

Once again, our eyes turn to the stars for our (mostly) weekly feature we like to call 

This Saturday in Science

However, although our gaze is fixed skyward at a vastness too large to comprehend, we'll once again find the interconnectedness that affects us all, thus showing that the most vast and the most-micro are often one in the same.

Mount Sharp, on Mars, is where the rover Curiosity is headed.

Let's begin by wishing the Mars rover Curiosity a happy birthday.

Although a year on Mars (if you define a year by how long it takes to orbit the sun) is shorter than an
earth year, we have enough confusion in our lives. So we're sticking with earth time for this one.

Not exactly a speed demon, Curiosity is mid-way through a journey to the 18,000-foot Mount Sharp, where it is hoped clues to the planet's early days can be found.

It's only 4.4 miles away, but with AAA service station thousands of miles away, the drivers of the rover are taking it super slow -- to the tune of 100 yards per day.

According to NASA, Curiosity has already traveled more than a mile, taken more than 36,700 images and fired 75,000 laser shots to analyze rocks and soil.

The New York Times tells us more from this Aug. 5 article:

The rover, roughly the size of a car, ended up right where it had been aimed — within Gale Crater, a 96-mile-wide scar from an asteroid impact at least 3.5 billion years ago. In that time layers of sediment filled much of the crater, which were then somehow carved away, leaving Mount Sharp at the center.

There was no room for a birthday cake on Curiosity...

Observations from orbit pointed to the presence of clay minerals at the base of the mountain, named in honor of Robert P. Sharp, a prominent geologist and Mars expert. Because clays form in water that has a neutral pH, that made Gale Crater a promising place to look for signs that Mars could have once been hospitable for life.

Before it headed toward Mount Sharp, Dr. John P. Grotzinger’s team decided to send Curiosity on a detour to investigate terrain that looked to be an intriguing confluence of three different rock types. Along the way, Curiosity spotted what looked like an ancient streambed. At the site, in the first rock it drilled on Feb. 8 (Sol 182), it struck the jackpot — clays.

This rock in this part of Mars formed in watery conditions that were surprisingly Earthlike. “Unquestionably, Mars was a habitable planet in its ancient past,” Dr. Grotzinger said. Curiosity, however, does not have instruments that can directly search for life, past or present.

You can track Curiosity's daily path by clicking here.

This is one asteroid capture method NASA is exploring...

Another one of NASA's ambitious projects has to do with capturing near-by asteroids and putting them within hand reach in orbit around the moon.

We first told you about it in this April 13 post.

When the agency asked for suggestions, America responded with more than 400 proposals from private companies, non-profit groups and international organizations.

As Yahoo News reported in this July 26th article: 

The NASA asteroid retrieval mission aims to send a robotic spacecraft out to a near-Earth asteroid, snare it with a "space lasso" and tow it back to a parking orbit near the moon so it can be explored by astronauts.

The asteroid mission is NASA's way of pursuing the goal set by President Barack Obama that called on NASA to send a manned mission to a near-Earth asteroid by 2025, and then aim for a Mars flight in the 2030s.

On June 18, NASA also unveiled its Asteroid Grand Challenge, an effort to find and identify all of the asteroids that could pose a threat to Earth, as well as develop ideas to defend the planet against potential impacts. The effort is one of several national "grand challenges" announced by the Obama Administration and other government agencies in recent weeks to spur scientific progress and innovation.

And of course you can't talk about asteroids without thinking of the big one that crashed into earth and wiped out the dinosaurs.

That was one big boom

Now, the latest evidence by paleontologists indicates that the species living in fresh water fare much better than their brethren in the salty seas, not to mention land-lubbing species.

In this July 26 article from Yahoo News, we discover that because the fresh-water species were used to a freezing-thawing cycle, they were better able to adapt to the premature winter that arrived when a cloud of dust from the impact cut off sunlight for a very long time.

The disaster, which killed off at least 75 percent of all species on Earth, including all dinosaurs except for birds, was apparently triggered by a cosmic impact that occurred in what is now Mexico about 65 million years ago.

Water would have helped shelter life in rivers and lakes, as well as the seas and oceans, from the initial blast of heat from the cosmic impact. However, the giant extraterrestrial collision set fire to Earth's surface, darkening the sky with dust and ash that cooled the planet.

The resulting "impact winter" and its lack of sunlight would have crippled both freshwater and marine food chains by killing off microscopic photosynthetic organisms known as phytoplankton that are at the base of the marine and freshwater food chains.

Many a dinosaur dinner was interrupted on that fateful day....

Intriguingly, while marine communities were devastated by the mass extinction, losing 50 percent of their species, geophysicist Douglas Robertson at the University of Colorado at Boulder and his colleagues looked at a database of western North America fossils and discovered freshwater ones there survived relatively unscathed, losing only about 10 percent of their species.

The researchers note that freshwater organisms, unlike marine life, are used to annual freezes that ice over inland waters, severely limiting their oxygen supplies. As such, freshwater communities might have better endured the low oxygen levels in the wake of the death of photosynthetic life following an impact winter.

Speaking of the questions of life, it is often amazing how answers to really big questions are found in tiny places.

Conversely, answers to questions about really small things, we're talking sub-atomic here, are sometimes found in the vastness of space.

Consider this July 30 article from National Public Radio which reports on how the apparent

Black holes and quantum entanglement,
we're all connected, big and small.

connection between certain sub-atomic particles was discovered by studying black holes.

The first concept to wrap your head around is something called "quantum entanglement," which, by the way, would be a great name for a rock band.

NPR's Adam Frank explained it like this:

One of the deepest mysteries of quantum physics, however, is called entanglement — the ability of two widely separated quantum systems to instantaneously affect each other. Make a measurement on one member of an "entangled" pair of electrons and its twin, stationed, perhaps, at the other side of Universe will instantly be forced to change its own behavior.

 So, Star Trek aficionados are already saying to themselves "I know where this is going" -- and they're right.

Physicist Mark Van Raamsdook has recently argued that entanglement wasn't just another wacky, unexplained, throw-your-hands-in-air quantum effect, but a clue to the fundamental structure of space and time.

Juan Maldacena and Leonard Susskind recently published a paper which showed:

How a pair of black holes could be created with a wormhole strung between them. For those of you not watching too many science fiction movies, a wormhole is a kind of tunnel in space-time that can quickly connect two widely separated regions of the Universe (they are formally called Einstein-Rosen bridges).

That expression "widely separated regions of the Universe" is the key, since it also appeared in the explanation a few paragraphs ago of entanglement. What Maldacena and Susskind showed was that their black holes + wormhole system was also an entangled quantum system of space-time.

Cool huh?

The study's authors thought so too.

Maybe that's why they titled it: "Cool Horizons for Entangled Black Holes."

Well that's it for this week folks.

Remember to watch this blog for more science.

Get Your Space Geek On!

No, it's not the cover of a 1950s Sci-Fi pulp fiction novel. It's a rendering of what NASA did yesterday on Mars.

So if you grew up watching Star Trek re-runs on a black and white TV like I did; saw the first "Star Wars" movie in a theater with only one screen; or read Larry Niven, Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov science fiction novels until your eyes bled, chances are you're got your space geek on this weekend about what we did on Mars yesterday.

I never understood Star Trek "red shirt" jokes until I got
a color television.

In case you don't know, we landed a rover the size of a Mini-Cooper on the red planet by lowering it on cables from a platform hovering above the plant's surface that was held aloft by rockets.

James Bond would have been proud.

The maneuver was so complicated and difficult, that the NASA engineers who created it dubbed the approach and landing "Seven Minutes of Terror." Their terror turned to joy, (as the video below shows), when the entire landing went off without a hitch.

(In case the video embed didn't work, you can click here to watch the video.)


Their anxiety was understandable, I suppose, when you consider that the whole shebang was approaching the Martian surface at 13,000 miles per hour.

And while James Bond gets to drive cool cars wherever he goes, he's got nothing on Scott Maxwell.

Maxwell is one of a dozen people trained to drive Curiosity, as the rover is named, from a driver's seat more than 100 million miles away.

Photo poached from CNN
Why is this man smiling? Because Scott Maxwell
gets to drive a car on Mars.

Maxwell has a pretty simple explanation of what he does, offered on his blog, called, appropriately, "Mars and Me."

He wrote:  "At night, there's a small red light in the sky. On that light lives four hundred pounds of thinking metal sent from Earth. I tell that metal what to do, and it does it."

(You can also follow him on Twitter @marsroverdriver, as I just did, where he answers questions like "what kind of mileage does that thing get?")

I am not the only person in the Pottstown area excited about this.

The folks over at the Chestmont Astronomical Society had some links to the landing posted on their web site, which is where I found the video I posted above.

They have good reason to be excited.

The timing gets people excited about space exploration just in time for their annual Starfest star gazing event.

Dozesn of amateur astronomers set up some pretty spectacular telescopes, trained in specific celestial objects that you can view with their help.

The event is free, although making a donation would be much appreciated.

Held this Saturday from 4 to 11 p.m., this year's Starfest will be held at a new location: Hopewell Furnace National Historic Site. (The rain date is Sunday.)

This year's guest speaker, Dr. H. John Wood, is the lead optics engineer on the Hubble Space Telescope.

 Mars and Starfest have a strong local history together.

Back in 2003 when Mars got closer to Earth than it had been in 50,000 to 60,000  years, the Starfest held in Warwick County Park had a huge turn-out, estimated at 2,500 people.

In the lead up to that event, I had about as much fun as I've ever had writing something for The Mercury when I wrote a two-day package of stories about Mars, the history of our fascination with it, it's role in our culture and the science behind the latest discoveries about the planet.

(This link will take you to the first day's story, about the science of Mars close approach, published on Aug. 17, 2003.

This link will take you to the second day's story, published on Aug. 18, 2003, which dealt with how Mars has affected human culture and civilization. That day's package also had a timeline of Mars through human history.)

Oddly enough, in all my science fiction choices as a kid, and yes, currently as well, I always passed over works about Mars (with the exception of Bradbury's Chronicles) because it seemed too close; not exotic enough.

But given the stage we human beings are at with our space travel, you've got to play the game that's in town and I imagine, we will be focused on Mars for a long, long time.