The 42nd crew of the ISS has an official poster that honors Douglas Adams Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy. The folks at Space Dot Com have a great image they claim is the official Expedition 42 poster, I am linking to them because I couldn’t find a copy at NASA.
This Sunday, 21Sep14, The Planetary Society will be doing a special live broadcast to welcome MAVEN to Mars: Planetary Radio Live: MAVEN Arrives at Mars. It starts at 6PM on the west coast, 9PM on the east, and I have no idea what time it will be on Mars. If you happen to be in California for the event, you can attend free if you RSVP, but I suspect most folks will be attending online. They will be tuning into NASA TV for the landing itself, here are the list of folks doing the show:
Moderator:
Mat Kaplan: host and producer, Planetary Radio for The Planetary Society
Guests:
Bruce Betts: Director of Science and Technology, The Planetary Society
Emily Lakdawalla: Senior Editor and Planetary Evangelist, The Planetary Society
Bill Nye the Science Guy: CEO, The Planetary Society
Richard Zurek Ph.D: Chief Scientist for the Mars Program Office and Project Scientist for the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)
It does seem just a little strange to me that a bunch of engineers would be calling a video presentation a radio show, they usually tend to be more accurate with their nomenclature than that. It should be pretty exciting, I for one will be enjoying the program, I hope you will be too.
Maven is the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN spacecraft, and it arrives in Mars orbit in just a few weeks. It’s purpose is to collect data that will allow researchers to figure out how Mars went from a warm wet world just like Earth to the cold, dry globe it is today. This could be very useful knowledge if we want to keep the same thing from happening to our planet. The non-NASA home page for this project is the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
Starting this evening the Science Channel is running a 3 part special about an aspect of the new race for space, with topics that include mining the Moon, colonizing Mars, and protecting Earth from low flying rocks like the one that wiped out the Dinosaurs. This isn’t science fiction or wishful thinking; these are engineers and scientists working for companies who have a business plan that they expect is going to make them a lot of money by utilizing resources previously inaccessible.
I contributed to a Kickstarter project called ARKYD who’s goal started with building a flock of orbital cameras to spot incoming meteors and asteroids. They have launched a bunch of them already with more in the pipe, and they are starting to map orbits using the Asteroid Zoo app and site. Step two is to do launches, both manned and robotic, to capture and change the orbits of the ones that come close enough so we can mine them for resources such as metals and volatiles (fuel and food). The ones coming too close and posing a danger to Earth? You just use that same capture and change orbits process to make sure they do us no harm, mining them for whatever they have to offer in the process. I suspect the third special might be about them.
Using the Asteroid Zoo web site, you can contribute to the hunt for asteroids by simply applying your Mark II Eyeball and its Wetware computing processing which evolved over millions of years to spot patterns such as the visual differences caused by things that move. It was refined to help us spot things trying to eat us, things falling on us, and things we could eat, but it also makes us the optimal processing instrument for spotting planets, comets, meteors, and asteroids from sky survey photographic sequences. What makes spotting such objects useful and worth your time? The answer depends on whether you are an optimist or a pessimist. The pessimist will be looking for things trying to fall on us, alerting NASA, the ESA, and others so we can destroy or deflect them before they can impact and damage our world. The optimist will be looking for low flying rocks that we can capture and mine for resources such as metals and volatiles (fuel and food). Whatever your reason, it contributes to humanities knowledge and the protection of the world, so it is a good thing. Thanks to the folks at Planetary Resources for making it possible, and thank you if you contributed to the programs Kickstarter funding.
Ready to be a part of the first permanent human settlement on Mars? Then you might want to check out Mars One, a group planning on landing the first 4 people in 2024, with 4 more scheduled to arrive every two years after that. The initial missions beginning in 2018 will be to land supplies and robots to build a habitation for the humans who follow.