Category: Space Travel

Yardsticks

On By rolcottIn Astronomy: Techniques, James Webb Space Telescope, Space Travel, UncategorizedLeave a comment

“Hi, Cathleen, meet Mr Richard Feder, of Fort Lee NJ. He’s got a question that’s more in your Astronomy bailiwick than mine. Have a strawberry scone.”

“Mmm, still warm from Al’s oven. Thanks, Sy. Hello and what’s your question, Mr Feder?”

“Hiya. So if the James Webb Space Telescope is gonna be a million miles behind the Moon, won’t the Moon block its signals to us?”

“Oh dear, he said ‘miles.’ Sy, you’d better get out Old Reliable to look up numbers and do unit conversions. Mr Feder, I don’t think in miles.”

“Huh? What do you use instead, like paces or something?”

“Depends on what objects I’m considering and why I’m thinking about them. There are so many useful ratios out there it’s often easier to use ratios than huge numbers one can’t wrap one’s head around. Jupiter’s radius, for instance, is eleven times Earth’s, and the Sun is ten times wider still. Diameter and circumference follow the same ratios, of course. Square those ratios for relative surface area, cube them for relative volume. Who needs miles or kilometers?”

“Those numbers right, Moire?”

“Mmm … 6371 kilometers or 3959 miles for Earth, 71492 kilometers or 42441 miles for Jupiter, 695700 kilometers or 432300 miles for the Sun. The Jupiter/Earth ratio’s 11.2, the Sun/Jupiter ratio’s 9.73. The lady knows what she’s talking about.”

“Here’s a few fun factoids. The Moon’s distance is 10 times Earth’s Equator which is 100 times the International Space Station’s altitude. For that matter, if you wrapped a string around Earth’s Equator, it’d be just long enough to reach up to a GPS satellite and back. But all those are near‑Earth measurements where it makes sense to think in miles or kilometers. That’s too cumbersome for the bigger picture.”

“What else you got?”

“Within the Solar System I generally use one or the other of two convenient yardsticks. They measure the same distances, of course, but they have different applications. One is the nominal radius of Earth’s orbit, about 150 million kilometers.’

“That’s 93 million miles, Mr Feder.”

“I knew that one, Moire.”

“Anyway, we call that distance an Astronomical Unit. It’s handy for locating bodies relative to the Sun. Parker Solar Probe has gotten within a tenth of an AU of the Sun, for instance, and Neptune’s about 30 AU out. The Oort Cloud begins near 2000 AU and may extend a hundred times as far.”

“I ain’t even gonna ask what the Oort‐thing is, but I’m glad it’s a long way away.”

“We think it’s where long‑period comets come from.”

“Far away is good then. So what’s your other yardstick?”

“Lightspeed.”

“186 thousand miles per second, Mr Feder.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“It’s also 300 thousand kilometers per second, and one light‑second per second, and one light‑year per year. Within the Solar System my benchmarks are that Earth is 500 light-seconds from the Sun, and Pluto was 4½ light-hours away from us when New Horizons sent back those marvelous images. The Sun’s nearest star system, Alpha Centauri, is 4⅓ light‑years away, and when you compare hours to years that gives you an idea of how small we are on the interstellar scale.”

“Cathleen, when you mentioned New Horizons that reminded me of the JWST. We’ve gotten off the track from Mr Feder’s question. Why isn’t the Moon going to block those signals?”

“Because it’ll never be in the way.” <sketching on a paper napkin> “There’s a bunch of moving parts here so hold on. The Earth orbits the Sun and the Moon orbits the Earth once a month, right? The L2 point doesn’t orbit the Earth. It orbits the Sun, staying exactly behind Earth so yeah, once a month the Moon could maybe get between Earth and L2. But JWST won’t be at L2, it’ll be in a wide orbit around that point and mostly perpendicular to the orbits of the Earth and Moon.”

“How wide?”

“It’ll vary depending on what they need, but it’s big enough to keep the spacecraft’s solar panels in the sunlight.”

“Solar panels? I thought the IR sensors needed cold cold cold.”

“They do. JWST protects its cold side with a hot side featuring a pretty pink Kapton parasol.”

~~ Rich Olcott

A Diamond in The Sky with Lucy

On By rolcottIn Astronomy: Planetary Science, Space Travel, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Mid-afternoon coffee-and-scone time. As I step into his coffee shop Al’s quizzing Cathleen about something in one of his Astronomy magazines. “This Lucy space mission they just sent up, how come it looks like they’re shooting at either side of Jupiter instead of hitting it straight-on? And it’s got this crazy butterfly orbit that crosses the whole Solar System a couple of times. What sense does that make?”

Planned path of Lucy‘s mission to study Trojan asteroids (black dots).
After diagrams by NASA and Southwest Research Institute

“It shoots to either side because there’s interesting stuff out there. We think the Solar System started as a whirling disk of dust that gradually clumped together. The gravity from Jupiter’s clump scarfed up the lion’s share of the leftovers after the Sun coalesced. The good news is, not all of Jupiter’s hoard wound up in the planet. Some pieces made it to Jupiter’s orbit but then collected in the Trojan regions ahead and behind it. Looking at that material may teach us about the early Solar System.”

“Way out there? Why not just fall into Jupiter like everything else did?”

I do Physics, I can’t help but cut in. “It’s the many‑body problem in its simplest case, just the Sun, Jupiter and an asteroid in a three‑body interaction—”

Cathleen gives me a look. “Inappropriate physicsplaining, Sy, we’re talking Astronomy here. Al’s magazine is about locating and identifying objects in space. These asteroids happen to cluster in special locations roughly sixty degrees away from Jupiter.”

“But Al’s question was, ‘Why?‘ You told him why we’re sending Lucy to the Trojans, but Physics is why they exist and why that mission map looks so weird.”

“Good point, go ahead. OK with you, Al?”

“Sure.”

I unholster Old Reliable, my tricked‑out tablet, and start sketching on its screen. “OK, orange dot’s Jupiter, yellow dot’s the Sun. Calculating their motion is a two-body problem. Gravity pulls them together but centrifugal force pulls them apart. The forces balance when the two bodies orbit in ellipses around their common center of gravity. Jupiter’s ellipse is nearly a circle but it wobbles because the Sun orbits their center of gravity. Naturally, once Newton solved that problem people turned to the next harder one.”

“That’s where Lucy comes in?”

“Not yet, Al, we’ve still got those Trojan asteroids to account for. Suppose the Jupiter‑Sun system’s gravity captures an asteroid flying in from somewhere. Where will it settle down? Most places, one body dominates the gravitational field so the asteroid orbits that one. But suppose the asteroid finds a point where the two fields are equal.”

“Oh, like halfway between, right?”

“Between, Al, but not halfway.”

“Right, Cathleen. The Sun/Jupiter mass ratio and Newton’s inverse‑square law put the equal‑pull point a lot closer to Jupiter than to the Sun. If the asteroid found that point it would hang around forever or until it got nudged away. That’s Lagrange’s L1 point. There are two other balance points along the Sun‑Jupiter line. L2 is beyond Jupiter where the Sun’s gravity is even weaker. L3 is way on the other side of the Sun, a bit inside Jupiter’s orbit.”

“Hey, so those 60° points on the orbit, those are two more balances because they’re each the same distance from Jupiter and the Sun, right?”

“There you go, Al. L4 leads Jupiter and L5 runs behind. Lagrange published his 5‑point solution to the three‑body problem in 1762, just 250 years ago. The asteroids found Jupiter’s Trojan regions billions of years earlier.”

“We astronomers call the L4 cluster the Trojan camp and the L5 cluster the Greek camp, but that’s always bothered me. It’d be OK if we called the planet Zeus, but Jupiter’s a Roman god. Roman times were a millennium after classical Greece’s Trojan War so the names are just wrong.”

“I hadn’t thought about that, Cathleen, but you’re right. Anyway, back to Al’s diagram of Lucy’s journey. <activating Old Reliable’s ‘Animate’ function> Sorry, Al, but you’ve been misled. The magazine’s butterfly chart has Jupiter standing still. Here’s a stars-eye view. It’s more like the Trojans will come to Lucy than the reverse.”

~~ Rich Olcott

Zeroing In on Water

On By rolcottIn Astronomy: Planetary Science, Astronomy: Techniques, Space Travel, UncategorizedLeave a comment

<chirp, chirp> “Moire here.”

“Hi, Sy, it’s me, Vinnie. I just heard this news story about finding water on the Moon. I thought we did that ten years ago. You even wrote about it.”

“The internet never forgets, does it? That post wasn’t quite right but it wasn’t wrong, either.”

“How can it be both?”

“There’s an old line in Science — ‘Your data’s fine but your conclusions are … nuts.’ They use a different word in private. Suppose you land on a desert island and find a pirate’s treasure chest. Should the headlines say you’d found a treasure?”

“Naw, the chest might be empty or full of rocks or something.”

“Mm-hm. So, going back to that post… I was working from some reports on NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Its LAMP instrument mapped how strongly different Moon features reflected a particular frequency of ultraviolet light. That frequency’s called ‘Lyman‑alpha.’ Astronomers care about it because it’s part of starlight, it’s reflected by rock, and it’s specifically absorbed by hydrogen atoms. Sure enough, LAMP found some places, typically in deep‑shadow craters, that absorbed a lot more Lyman‑alpha than other places.”

“And you wrote about how hydrogen atoms are in water molecules and the Moon’s deep crater floors near the poles are sheltered from sunlight that’d break up water molecules so LAMP’s dark spots are where there’s water. And you liked how using starlight to find water on the Moon was poetical.”

“Uhh… right. All that made a lot of sense at the time and it still might be true. Scientists leapt to the same hopeful conclusion when interpreting data from the MESSENGER mission to Mercury. That one used a neutron spectrometer to map emissions from hydrogen atoms interacting with incoming cosmic rays. There again, the instrument identified hydrogen collected in shaded craters at the planet’s poles. Two different detection methods giving the same positive indication at the same type of sheltered location. The agreement seemed to settle the matter. The problem is that water isn’t geology’s only way or even its primary way to accumulate hydrogen atoms.”

“What else could it be? Hydrogen ions in the solar wind grab oxide ions from Moon rock and you’ve got water, right?”

“But the hydrogens arrive one at a time, not in pairs. Any conversion would have to be at least a two‑step process. The Moon’s surface rocks are mostly silicate minerals. They’re a lattice of negative oxide ions that’s decorated inside with an assortment of positive metal ions. The first step in the conversion would be for one hydrogen ion to link up with a surface oxide to make a hydroxide ion. That species has a minus‑one charge instead of oxide’s minus‑two so it’s a bit less tightly bound to its neighboring metal ions. Got that?”

“Gimme a sec … OK, keep going.”

“Some time later, maybe a century maybe an eon, another hydrogen ion comes close enough to attack our surface hydroxide if it hasn’t been blasted apart by solar UV light. Then you get a water molecule. On balance and looking back, we’d expect most of the surface hydrogen to be hydroxide ions, not water, but both kinds would persist better in shadowed areas.”

“OK, two kinds of hydrogen. But how do we tell the difference?”

“We evaluate processes at lower‑energies. Lyman‑alpha photons pack over 10 electronvolts of energy, enough to seriously disturb an atom and blow a molecule apart. O‑H and H‑O‑H interact differently with light in the infra‑red range that just jiggles molecules instead of bopping them. For instance, atom pairs can stretch in‑out. Different kinds of atom bind together more‑or‑less tightly. That means each kind of atom pair resonates at its own stretch energy, generally around 6 microns or 0.41 electronvolts. NASA’s Cassini mission had a mapping spectrometer that could see down into that range. It found O‑H stretching activity all over the Moon’s surface.”

“But that could be either hydroxyls or water.”

“Exactly. The new news is that sensors aboard NASA’s airborne SOFIA mission map light even deeper into the infra‑red. It found the 3‑micron, 0.21‑electronvolt signal for water’s V‑shape scissors motion. That’s the water that everybody’s excited about.”

“Lots of it?”

“Thinly spread, probably, but stay tuned.”

~~ Rich Olcott

Traffic Control

On By rolcottIn Physics: Fundamentals, Space Travel, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Jeremy Yazzie @jeremyaz
hi @symoire, this is jeremy. ive been reading about the osiris‑rex mission to astrroid bennu and how they’re bringing back a sample – so complicated – fancy robot arm, n2 squirter, air‑cleaner thingy – y not just vacuum the dust or pick up a rock?

Sy Moire @symoire
@jeremyaz – quick answer is that Bennu and OSIRIS-REx are already surrounded by the vacuum of space. Sample collectors can’t suck any harder that that. I’ll email you a more complete answer later

Hi, Sy, can you believe this weather? Temps last week were twice today’s high.

Not to a physicist, Sis.
Those 90s and today’s 45 are just Fahrenheit scale numbers.
Can’t do ratios between them, “twice” does not compute.
I don’t suppose it would help if we went centigrade and said last week’s highs were around 35 and today it’s 5?

No, that’s worse, today’s down by 85% from last week.

Centigrade’s another scale you can’t do ratio arithmetic in. Kelvins is the way to go.
Temp in K tracks the average molecular kinetic energy.
Starts at zero where nothing’s moving and rises in proportion.
Last week’s highs ran around 308 K, today is 278 K.
Today we’re only 10% cooler than last week.

Physicists! Grrrr. However you measure the weather, it still feels cold. No picnic this weekend ;^(

From: Sy Moire <sy@moirestudies.com>
To: Jeremy Yazzie <jeremyaz@college.edu>
Subj: OSIRIS-REx

Jeremy –

OK, now I’m back at the office I’ve got better tech for writing long answers.

First, the “grab a rock” idea has several issues

  • If you pick up a rock, you only have that rock, says nothing about any of its neighbors or the subsurface material it might have smacked into. Dust should be a much better representation of the whole asteroid.
  • The rock might not be willing to be picked up. When the scientists and engineers were planning the OSIRIS‑REx mission, they didn’t know Bennu’s texture — could be one solid rock or a bunch of middle‑size rocks firmly cemented together or a loose “rubble pile” of all‑size rocks and dust held together by gravity alone, or anything in between.
  • Have you ever played one of those arcade games where you try to pick up a toy with a suspended claw gadget and all you’ve got is a couple of control knobs and a button? Picking up a specific rock, even a willing one, is hard when you’re a robot operating 15 light‑minutes away from the home office.

So dust it is, but how to plan dust collection in low gravity when you know nothing about the texture? Something like a whisk broom and dust pan would work unless the surface is too uneven. Something like a drill or disk sander would be good, except to use either one you need a solid footing to work from or else you go spinning one way when the tool spins the other. (That was a problem on the International Space Station.) The Hayabusa2 mission to asteroid Ryugu used a high‑velocity impactor to create dust, but a bad ricochet or shrapnel could kill the OSIRIS‑REx mission. The planners decided that best alternative was puff‑and‑grab.

So why not an astronautical Roomba that just sucks in the dust? The thing about vacuum is that it’s a place where gas molecules aren’t. Suppose you’re a gas molecule. You’re surrounded by your buddies, all in motion and bouncing off of each other like on a crowded 3‑D dance floor. You stay more‑or‑less in place because you’re being hit more‑or‑less equally from every direction. Suddenly there’s a vacuum to one side. You’re not hit as much over there so that’s the direction you and a bunch of your buddies move. If you encounter a dust particle, it picks up your momentum and moves toward the emptiness where it could be trapped in somebody’s filter.

The planners decided to capture dust particles by entraining them in a flow of gas molecules through a filter. To make gas flow you need more gas on one side then the other. Gas molecules being few and far between in space, the obvious place to put your pusher gas is inside the filter. Hence the nitrogen squirt technique and the “air‑cleaner thingy.”

— Sy

Diagram of TAGSAM in operation
Adapted from asteroidmission.org/?attachment_id=1699
Credit: University of Arizona

~~ Rich Olcott

A Mole’s Tale

On By rolcottIn Astronomy: Planetary Science, Space Travel, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Chilly days are always good for a family trip to the science museum. Sis is interested in the newly unearthed dinosaur bones, but Teena streaks for the Space Sciences gallery. “Look, Uncle Sy, it’s a Mars rover. No, wait — it doesn’t have wheels — it’s a lander!”

Artist’s depiction of InSight — credit NASA/JPL-Caltech

A nearby museum docent catches that. “Good observing, young lady. You’re right, it’s NASA’s Insight lander. It touched down on Mars last Thanksgiving Day. While you were having turkey and dressing, we were having a party over here.”

“Is this the real one? How’d you get it back?”

“No, it’s just a model, but it’s full-size, 19½ feet across. We’re never going to get the real one back — those little bitty landing rockets you see around the electronics compartment are too small to get it off the planet.”

“Tronics compartment? You mean the pretty gold box underneath the flat part? Why’d they make it gold?”

“That gold is just the outside layer of a dozen layers of Mylar insulation. It helped to keep the computers in there cool during the super-hot minutes when the lander was coming down through Mars atmosphere. The insulation also keeps the electronics warm during the cold martian night. A thin gold coating on the outermost layer reflects the bad part of sunlight that would crumble the Mylar.”

“Computers like Mommie’s laptop? I don’t see any screens.”

“They don’t need any. No-one’s on Mars to look at them. The instructions all come in from Earth by radio.”

Sis is getting into it. “Look, Sweetie, the platform in the middle’s about the same size as our kitchen table.”

“Yeah, but it’s got butterfly wings. A flying kitchen table, whee!”

“Those wings are solar panels. They turn sunlight into the electricity Insight needs to run things and keep warm. They make enough power for three households here on Earth.”

“What’s the cake box about?”

SEIS —
Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure

“Cake box?”

“Yeah, down there on the floor.”

“Ah. That’s for … have you ever experienced an earthquake?”

“Yes! Suddenly all the dishes in the cupboard went BANG! It was weird but then everything was fine.”

“I’m glad. OK, an earthquake is when vibrations travel through the Earth. Vibrations can happen on Mars, too, but they’re called…”

“Marsquakes! Ha, that’s funny!”

“Mm-hm. Well, that ‘cake box’ is something called a seismometer. It’s an extremely sensitive microphone that listens for even the faintest vibrations. When scientists were testing the real seismometer in Boulder, Colorado it recorded a steady pulse … pulse … pulse … that they finally traced back to ocean waves striking the coast of California, 1200 miles away. Insight took it to Mars and now it’s listening for marsquakes. It’s already heard a couple dozen. They’ve given the scientists lots of new information about Mars’ crust and insides.”

“Like an X-ray?”

“Just like that. We’ll be able to tell if the planet’s middle is molten–“

“Hot lava! Hot lava!”

“Maybe. Earth has a lot of underground lava, but we think that Mars has cooled off and possibly doesn’t have any. That other device on the ground is supposed to help find out.”

HP3 — Heat Flow and
Physical Properties Package

“It looks like The Little Engine That Could.”

“It does, a little, but this one maybe can’t. We’re still waiting to see. That chimney-looking part held The Mole, a big hollow spike with something like a thermometer at its pointy tip. Inside The Mole there’s a hammer arrangement. The idea was that the hammer would bang The Mole 15 feet into the ground so we could take the planet’s temperature.”

“Did the banging work?”

“It started to, but The Mole got stuck only a foot down. The engineers have been working and working, trying different ways to get it down where we want it but so far it’s still stuck.”

“Aww, poor Mole.”

TWINS – Temperature
and Wind for InSight

“Yes. But there’s another neat instrument up on the platform. Here, I’ll shine my laser pointer at it. See the grey thingy?”

“Uh-huh.”

“That’s a weather station for temperature and wind. You can check its readings on the internet. Here, my phone’s browser’s already set to mars.nasa.gov/insight/weather. Can you read the high and low temperatures?”

“Way below zero! Wow, Mars is chilly! I’d need a nice, warm spacesuit there.”

“For sure.”

~~ Rich Olcott

Fly High, Silver Bird

On By rolcottIn Physics: Light and Relativity, Space Travel, UncategorizedLeave a comment

“TANSTAAFL!” Vinnie’s still unhappy with spacecraft that aren’t rocket-powered. “There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch!”

“Ah, good, you’ve read Heinlein. So what’s your problem with Lightsail 2?”

“It can’t work, Sy. Mostly it can’t work. Sails operate fine where there’s air and wind, but there’s none of that in space, just solar wind which if I remember right is just barely not a vacuum.”

Astronomer-in-training Jim speaks up. “You’re right about that, Vinnie. The solar wind’s fast, on the order of a million miles per hour, but it’s only about 10-14 atmospheres. That thin, it’s probably not a significant power source for your sailcraft, Al.”

“I keep telling you folks, it’s not wind-powered, it’s light-powered. There’s oodles of sunlight photons out there!”

“Sure, Al, but photons got zero mass. No mass, no momentum, right?”

Plane-polarized electromagnetic wave in motion
Plane-polarized electromagnetic wave
Electric (E) field is red
Magnetic (B) field is blue
(Image by Loo Kang Wee and Fu-Kwun Hwang from Wikimedia Commons)

My cue to enter. “Not right, Vinnie. Experimental demonstrations going back more than a century show light exerting pressure. That implies non-zero momentum. On the theory side … you remember when we talked about light waves and the right-hand rule?”

“That was a long time ago, Sy. Remind me.”

“… Ah, I still have the diagram on Old Reliable. See here? The light wave is coming out of the screen and its electric field moves electrons vertically. Meanwhile, the magnetic field perpendicular to the electric field twists moving charges to scoot them along a helical path. So there’s your momentum, in the interaction between the two fields. The wave’s combined action delivers force to whatever it hits, giving it momentum in the wave’s direction of travel. No photons in this picture.”

Astrophysicist-in-training Newt Barnes dives in. “When you think photons and electrons, Vinnie, think Einstein. His Nobel prize was for his explanation of the photoelectric effect. Think about some really high-speed particle flying through space. I’m watching it from Earth and you’re watching it from a spaceship moving along with it so we’ve each got our own frame of reference.”

“Frames, awright! Sy and me, we’ve talked about them a lot. When you say ‘high-speed’ you’re talking near light-speed, right?”

“Of course, because that’s when relativity gets significant. If we each measure the particle’s speed, do we get the same answer?”

“Nope, because you on Earth would see me and the particle moving through compressed space and dilated time so the speed I’d measure would be more than the speed you’d measure.”

“Mm-hm. And using ENewton=mv² you’d assign it a larger energy than I would. We need a relativistic version of Newton’s formula. Einstein said that rest mass is what it is, independent of the observer’s frame, and we should calculate energy from EEinstein²=(pc)²+(mc²)², where p is the momentum. If the momentum is zero because the velocity is zero, we get the familiar EEinstein=mc² equation.”

“I see where you’re going, Newt. If you got no mass OR energy then you got nothing at all. But if something’s got zero mass but non-zero energy like a photon does, then it’s got to have momentum from p=EEinstein/c.”

“You got it, Vinnie. So either way you look at it, wave or particle, light carries momentum and can power Lightsail 2.”

Lightsail 2 flying over Earth, against a yellow background
Adapted from image by Josh Spradling / The Planetary Society

“Question is, can sunlight give it enough momentum to get anywhere?”

“Now you’re getting quantitative. Sy, start up Old Reliable again.”

“OK, Newt, now what?”

“How much power can Lightsail 2 harvest from the Sun? That’ll be the solar constant in joules per second per square meter, times the sail’s area, 32 square meters, times a 90% efficiency factor.”

“Got it — 39.2 kilojoules per second.”

“That’s the supply, now for the demand. Lightsail 2 masses 5 kilograms and starts at 720 kilometers up. Ask Old Reliable to use the standard circular orbit equations to see how long it would take to harvest enough energy to raise the craft to another orbit 200 kilometers higher.”

“Combining potential and kinetic energies, I get 3.85 megajoules between orbits. That’s only 98 seconds-worth. I’m ignoring atmospheric drag and such, but net-net, Lightsail 2‘s got joules to burn.”

“Case closed, Vinnie.”

~~ Rich Olcott

Sail On, Silver Bird

On By rolcottIn Physics: Light and Relativity, Space Travel, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Big excitement in Al’s coffee shop. “What’s the fuss, Al?”

“Lightsail 2, Sy. The Planetary Society’s Sun-powered spacecraft. Ten years of work and some luck and it’s up there, way above Hubble and the ISS, boosting itself higher every day and using no fuel to do it. Is that cool or what?”

“Sun-powered? Like with a huge set of solar panels and an electric engine?”

“No, that’s the thing. It’s got a couple of little panels to power its electronics and all, but propulsion is all direct from the Sun and that doesn’t stop. Steady as she goes, Skipper, Earth to Mars in weeks, not months. Woo-hoo!”

Image by Josh Spradling / The Planetary Society

Never the rah-rah type, Big Vinnie throws shade from his usual table by the door. “It didn’t get there by itself, Al. SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket did the hard work, getting Lightsail 2 and about 20 other thingies up to orbit. Takes a lot of thrust to get out of Earth’s gravity well. Chemical rockets can do that, puny little ion drives and lightsails can’t.”

“Yeah, Vinnie, but those ‘puny’ guys could lead us to a totally different travel strategy.” A voice from the crowd, astrophysicist-in-training Newt Barnes. “Your big brawny rocket has to burn a lot of delta-v just to boost its own fuel. That’s a problem.”

Al looks puzzled. “Delta-v?”

“It’s how you figure rocket propellant, Al. With a car you think about miles per gallon because if you take your foot off the gas you eventually stop. In space you just keep going with whatever momentum you’ve got. What’s important is how much you can change momentum — speed up, slow down, change direction — and that depends on the propellant you’re using and the engine you’re putting it through. All you’ve got is what’s in the tanks.”

Al still looks puzzled. I fill in the connection. “Delta means difference, Al, and v is velocity which covers both speed and direction so delta-v means — “

“Got it, Sy. So Vinnie likes big hardware but bigger makes for harder to get off the ground and Newt’s suggesting there’s a limit somewhere.”

“Yup, it’s gotten to the point that the SpaceX people chase an extra few percent performance by chilling their propellants so they can cram more into the size tanks they use. I don’t know what the limit is but we may be getting close.”

Newt’s back in. “Which is where strategy comes in, Vinnie. Up to now we’re mostly using a ballistic strategy to get to off-Earth destinations, treating the vehicle like a projectile that gets all its momentum at the beginning of the trip. But there’s really three phases to the trip, right? You climb out of a gravity well, you travel to your target, and maybe you make a controlled landing you hope. With the ballistic strategy you burn your fuel in phase one while you’re getting yourself into a transfer orbit. Then you coast on momentum through phase two.”

“You got a better strategy?”

“In some ways, yeah. How about applying continuous acceleration throughout phase two instead of just coasting? The Dawn spacecraft, for example, was rocket-launched out of Earth’s gravity well but used a xenon-ion engine in continuous-burn mode to get to Mars and then on to Vesta and Ceres. Worked just fine.”

“But they’re such low-thrust –“

“Hey, Vinnie, taking a long time to build up speed’s no problem when you’re on a long trip anyway. Dawn‘s motor averaged 1.8 kilometer per second of delta-v — that works out to … about 4,000 miles per hour of increased speed for every hour you keep the motor running. Adds up.”

“OK, I’ll give you the ion motor’s more efficient than a chemical system, but still, you need that xenon reaction mass to get your delta-v. You still gotta boost it up out of the well. All you’re doing with that strategy is extend the limit.”

Al dives back in. “That’s the beauty of Lightsail, guys. No delta-v at all. Just put it up there and light-pressure from the Sun provides the energy. Look, I got this slick video that shows how it works.”

Video courtesy of The Planetary Society.

~~ Rich Olcott

Red Velvet with Icing

On By rolcottIn Astronomy: Planetary Science, Space Travel, Uncategorized1 Comment

“So Jupiter’s white stripes are huge updrafts of ammonia snow and its dark stripes are weird chemicals we only see when downdrafted ammonia snow evaporates. Fine, but how does that account for my buddy the Great Red Spot? Have another lemon scone.”

“Thanks, Al, don’t mind if I do. Well, those ideas only sort-of account for Spot. The bad news is that they may not have to for much longer.”

“Huh? Why not?”

“Because it seems to be going away.”

“Hey, Sy, don’t mess with me. You know it’s been there for 400 years, why should it go away now?”

“I don’t know anything of the kind. Sure, the early telescope users saw a spot 350 years ago but there’s reason to think that it wasn’t in the same location as your buddy. Then there was a century-long gap when no-one recorded seeing anything special on Jupiter. Without good evidence either way, I think it’s entirely possible we’ve had two different spots. Anyway, the new one has been shrinking for the past 150 years.”

“The big hole must be filling in, then.”

“What hole?”

Juno GRS image, NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Gerald Eichstädt

“The Spot. If the dark-colored stripes are what we see when the bright ammonia ice evaporates, then the Spot’s gotta be a hole.”

“A reasonable conclusion from what we’ve said so far, but the Juno orbiter has given us more information. The Spot actually reaches 500 miles further up than the surrounding cloud tops.”

“But higher-up means colder, right? How come we don’t see the white snow?”

“That higher-is-colder rule does apply within Jupiter’s weather layer, mostly, but the Spot’s different. There seems to be a LOT of heat pouring straight up out of it, enough to warm the overlying atmosphere by several hundred degrees compared to the planetary average. That suppresses the ammonia ice, lifts whatever makes the red color and may even promote chemical reactions to make more.”

“But Sy, even I know heat spreads out. You’ve just described something that acts like a searchlight. How could it work like that?”

“Here’s one hypothesis. You’ve got your sound system here rigged up so the back of the shop is quiet, right? How’d you do that?”

“Oh, I bought a couple of directional speakers. They’re deeper than the regular kind and they’ve got this parabolic shape. I aimed them up here to the front where the traffic is. Work pretty good, don’t they?”

“Yes, indeed, and I’m grateful for that. See, they focus sound energy just like you can focus light. Now, to us the Spot just looks like an oval. But it’s probably the big end of a deep cone, spinning like mad and turning turbulent wind energy into white noise that’s focused out like one of your speakers. Wouldn’t that do the trick?”

“Like a huge trombone. Yeah, I suppose, but what keeps the cone cone-shaped?”

“The same thing that keeps it spinning — it’s trapped between two currents that are zipping along in opposite directions. The Spot’s northern boundary is the fastest westbound windstream on the planet. Its southern boundary is an eastbound windstream. The Spot’s trapped between two bands screaming past each other at the speed of sound.”

“Wow. Sounds violent.”

“Incredibly violent, much more than Earth hurricanes. At a hurricane’s eye-wall the wind speeds generally peak below 200 miles per hour. The Great Red Spot’s outermost winds that we can see are 50 miles per hour faster but those triangular regions just east and west must be far worse. When I think about adding in the updrafts and downdrafts I just shudder.”

“Does that have anything to do with the shrinking you told me about?”

“Almost certainly — we simply don’t have enough data to tell. But the new news is that your buddy’s uncorked a fresh shrinkage mode. Since the mid-1800s it’s been contracting along the east-west line, getting more circular. Now it seems to be flaking, too. Big, continent-size regions break away and mix into the dark belt above it. Meanwhile, the white equatorial zone is getting darker, sort of a yellow-green-orange mix.”

GRS image courtesy of Sharin Ahmad

“Yucky-colored. Does that mean the Spot’s draining into it?”

“Who knows? We certainly don’t. Only time will tell.”

~~ Rich Olcott