The Accidental Weblog

Two more Super Earths discovered in their primary’s habitable zone.

I’m crazy swamped right now, can’t say much more than wow.

Still. Wow.

So on the one hand, I think it’s kind of cool they’ve recovered components of the Apollo 11 F1 engines.

It’s heartening they bothered, impressive they managed what they did, and the historical significance of those incredible bits of metal is a very real thing.

And if it reminds people what was achieved—and/or better still—inspires people to reach beyond that achievement—all good and well done.

But it’s a bit sobering looking at that beast, dripping wet and corroded, sitting on the deck, there, in the photo…

The F1, it’s history now. Has been some decades. Hell, looking at that artifact in that context, it’s pretty much archaeology. Reminds me of looking at bits recovered from Mediterranean wrecks from the era of classical Greece.

And in the meanwhile, since those engines splashed into the ocean, while our species hasn’t exactly rested on any laurels—Hubble was also a huge achievement, Voyager I and II were beautiful things, Galileo and Cassini/Huygens and so on just as well—well…

(And maybe it’s odd timing to be getting all maudlin about this, in a time when one of those robotic probes has arguably just traveled beyond the edge of the very solar system, but still, well…)

Well, the farthest any actual human has been since Apollo 17 has been Earth orbit, and not especially high Earth orbits. Excepting Apollo, no one’s even topped the 1966 Gemini 11 apogee.

So like I said: a bit sobering.

Should we reach further? Granted, again, we certainly have, in our way…

With robots. And robots have many advantages. More bang for the buck, sure. More money on science, less on keeping things made of meat alive in an environment where that has tended to be expensive and difficult, I guess it does make a certain economic sense…

But I keep thinking: we should still be trying harder. Going further. Finding ways to do this anyway, and never mind, sure, it’s complicated, difficult, dangerous, so far. Getting out there, all the same. Recycle those oxygen and water molecules somehow, build powerplants that keep on ticking and cranking out the Joules needed to do that better and faster and cheaper. Really use the ISS for one of its claimed mandates: as a stepping stone, a staging area for further missions. Make it work, the depth of the gravity well against which we must struggle be damned. Get people to Mars and back, and then on and beyond.

We’ve drilled oil wells 10 km deep, starting at more than 1,000 meters below the ocean surface (and granted, the deepest of those didn’t go so well). We’ll chase fossil fuels that hard, engineer what must be to make it possible. Are we really seeking landfall on other planets with as much determination?

I was alive for Apollo, even Apollo 11 barely, though I was too young then to remember even a single liftoff, now. I’d like to hope my children will be able to say something similar.

So yeah. Mixed emotions. That’s a beautiful artifact, on that deck, there. Be nicer to have a working engine, tho’. And one in service. Or, better, a vastly more efficient and powerful descendant technology, taking us farther, still, even than those F1s did.

Yes, yet another one. And pretty much right next door, as stars go, anyway.

It’s a bit conjectural, as the data are pretty noisy, and apparently the team is pushing it to tease out these signals, but the particulars, anyway, are: Tau Ceti system, 12 ly from Earth, primary classified G8.5V (quite like our Sun). Technically, two of the planet candidates might have liquid water, but the more likely of the two is Tau Ceti e, at 4.3 Earth masses, orbital radius .552 AU, orbital period 168 days.

The paper as accepted is here (PDF). See p. 16 for inferred masses and orbital parameters.

Phil Plait has details.

Interesting note: at 13 Jupiter masses, this is an object right at the edge of the brown dwarf range. Phil’s got a bit more on how lovely it is to be able actually to see such an object.

HD 40307 g, announced yesterday.

Particulars: orange primary, 42 light years away. Orbital period of the planet in question is 320 days. Minimum mass of planet approximately 7.1 Earth masses.

Yet another. This is a pretty big deal.

I’m always—I guess naturally—a mite divided on these ‘not yet extinct at least’ stories.

But, yes, it turns out a couple of specimens found beached and dead on the New Zealand coast were in fact spade-toothed beaked whales—specifically, a mother and her male calf.

Which, on the one hand, is pretty awesome. It’s not quite a completely unknown species of whale turning up. But it’s pretty close, actually. Going from ‘these bones tell us there is such a thing’ (bone fragments were all anyone had ever seen previously) to having two whole actual specimens, actually being able to see one—albeit a dead one—that’s pretty huge.

But, of course, yes, they were also dead. And, of course, this brings the total number of specimens found to a grand total of…

Well, these two whole ones, and those couple fragments of bone.

So, you know. Good news/bad news. They’re still around, but probably not that many are. And given the general state of the world’s oceans of late, you get to wondering what chance they really have. And then you wonder if finding them is a bit like having a conversation with an aging relative: you’re grateful you got the chance, but bittersweetly so, precisely because any such conversation just might be the last.

So there’s been some buzz on the web this last week about an alleged proposal by NASA to put a manned station at the Earth-Moon L2 point—that being beyond the far side of the Moon.

Yes, apparently, they really did make such a proposal. Not kidding. Notion is: something a bit like the ISS—modular and manned—way out there, some 445,000 km from Earth.

The argument seems a bit of a mix of blue sky (the long term plan is essentially: get good at going and living there, build it up as a stepping stone, especially a fuel depot, for further missions), relatively practical (the L2 is in fairness a good place to be for that for a lot of reasons going back to simple physics), and bureaucratic/political muddle, honestly…

The last bit being: that SLS thing they’re so far building anyway would actually get them there… tho’ at some expense. Putting it gently…

… and then there’s the problems. The far side L2, for all its advantages, is a bit of an odd place to start, and especially to start with a manned base. See especially this critique which sez, more or less, this is all doing it a bit backwards, and probably, again, mostly because of that whole SLS thing. Doing the manned L2 thing does give it somewhere to go. And in the runup to budgets that probably have the SLS and NASA people gritting their teeth waiting for the verdict, you could see how that might have got ‘em off their asses to propose something a bit more ambitious…

Oh, and let’s remember putting something potentially very radio-noisy right there is a bit of a kick in the teeth to radio astronomers who’d really rather have a dish looking out on the Moon’s far side…

I dunno. I’m pleased to see they’re thinking big and far, anyway. And as much as this thing’s a bit of a bastard child of ambitions, it does have a certain crazy enough to work vibe. Not the smartest way, maybe, purely from the point of view of the physics. But from where we are, given the politics, if it gets people excited enough that they get it done, I guess it could be built upon, to push further out.

I really wonder if that whole ‘furthest we’ve ever been’ thing is part of it. It evokes a bit of that Apollo romanticism. See? Further. We’re really doing something, again, really exploring, really going out there, with further targets in mind. Maybe not the smartest thing, but then again, neither was Apollo, exactly, in rather a number of ways.

And hey, if it gets people thinking and talking, and looking outward again, that’s also good.

Early, early Monday wasn’t a convenient time for me. Travelling, with urgent errands in the morning, and a tight schedule all ‘round, so all I could really do at the time was pop up my head long enough to pull down some news on the phone, confirm that all had gone well.

And man, has it ever. Impressive, that, I have to say. It’s more than a mite inspiring, even, seeing an engineering team saying, again: ‘Sure, it’s crazy hard, but we’ve a solution…’

And actually seeing it work, that’s just gravy. Well done; very nice to see.

Reminder: Curiosity lands in another six hours. Cross your fingers.

Katherine Harmon of Scientific American spoke to the CDC’s Mike McGeehin about what heat waves do the human body.

This whole hotter planet thing, it’s really a pisser.