This movie was first featured (as far as I know) on UnmannedSpaceFlight.com, but has since shown up practically everywhere.

Not only is the method used to make this movie really cool, it also showcases how using a good visualization tool can unearth otherwise hidden treasures concealed within a dataset.

The movie is made by taking overhead 2D shots of Mars from MRO’s HIRISE camera and combining them with data from the laser altimeter to create a colored 3D model, and then doing a fly-through with a virtual camera. Horizontal resolution is 1 m, and vertical resolution is 25 cm.

Eye Candy? Well, go ahead and fast-forward to the last 15 seconds or so. Right there – yes – at 2:30. See that dark streak in the middle of the white area? The way it gets narrower looking uphill on its “leading” edge (as we fly by) and then withers away as the camera heads uphill again? From the 2D data, it is just another color band on the surface. But coupled with the very fine 3D data, showing the topographical context – wow.

Generally, the pressure on Mars is lower than the triple point of water, and so liquid water cannot exist on the surface. But that’s true for liquid sweet water. Salty water can remain liquid in lower temperatures, and this could potentially be very briny stuff. Or, of course, something that only looks like liquid. But if it is, it is sure pulling off a pretty good imitation.

I would LOVE to be able to actually access this dataset with a live 3D tool, so I can measure inclinations, for example, and chart topographical contour lines. Man, I bet someone at Google has such access and is walking the Martian surface even at this very moment.

The cost of launch depends as much on the complexity of ground operations as it does on the cost of the hardware. So when it takes several tens of thousands of people to directly support the launch operations of a rocket (as opposed to designing it, for example), the cost quickly escalates. Complexity begets complexity, and as the rocket gets complex, so do the operations required to support it. Complex operations mean that it sometimes takes months to prepare a single launch, which means that indirect costs get distributed on less launches – and things get even expensive.

There’s also the matter of innovation. The opposites of innovation are “Tried and True”, “Flight Proven”, and “Incremental Evolution”. These concepts have their place, of course, in a mature industry where there’s relatively little room for improvement. But once every so often someone’s got to take a risk of doing something better, and with risk comes opportunity.

With this in mind, you can see why SpaceX is a big deal. SpaceX launched its first rocket to orbit with less than 200 people on staff. Today, as it is poised to launch the Falcon 9 and is doing business with the government and around the world, it employs less than a 1000 people. Its Falcon 9 rocket will launch 10 tons to LEO for $50M.

The rocket is still a Kerosene-Oxygen vertically launching multi-stage rocket, but it is designed from scratch in the 21st century, it is reusable, and it is simply plain better. Today SpaceX completed a successful pre-launch static firing of their Falcon 9 rocket at the launch pad in Cape Canaveral, and is getting ready to launch the maiden flight in mid April.

The operational cycle is remarkably elegant. as part of the launch sequence, Falcon brings all engines to 100% capacity, makes sure everything is hunky-dory, and only then lets go the latches that hold it rocket down – a procedure that can prevent loss-of-vehicle if the rocket can’t lift off properly. If something is not per spec, it just shuts the engines off, and the recycle time for a re-try is extremely short. The large number of engines is also a great plus, since the rocket can continue flying normally if an engine has to be shut down mid-flight. Finally, the rocket can launch at an hour’s notice, and integrate payloads less than 12 hours from launch.

There’s a reason why SpaceX and the Falcon are so different. SpaceX is a private venture, led by a starry-eyed CEO (Elon Musk) who has also financed the company out of his own pocket. This stands in stark contrast to CEOs that belong to the industry’s old boy club and are well compensated for not making mistakes – not for leading their companies on adventures. There have been other SpaceX-like attempts before, and as is expected with risk taking and with taking on the big boys, they never made it.

SpaceX seems to be on the right track for success, and will reap the rewards – they earned it.

SpaceFlightNow.com is carrying this story about one of my personal favorite space probes – the Japanese Hayabusa (Falcon) mission.

Hayabusa collecting a sample off of asteroid Itokawa

The proper name for this mission should have been 巨大睾丸, or “kyodai kōgan” – seeing that with a minuscule budget in US standards ($100M) they are attempting what is essentially a space Iron-Man triathlon: Fly to an Asteroid (using ion engines +10 points for traveling in style), get into orbit, drop a hopping rover onto the surface, land, collect a sample, blast back to Earth, and return the sample capsule for a soft landing.

Hayabusa is now on its return leg to Earth, though the mission was anything but a walk in the park. Hayabusa faced a set of challenges of an almost epic scale – an edge of your seat nail-biter that could not have been scripted better if it were completely fictional. Hayabusa is coming back with almost all of its systems broken. The solar panels were fried, along with some of the electronics, by two solar flares. A propellant leak developed during the landing, and autonomous computer decisions caused the mini-rover to be lost into space. All four ion thrusters ran into issues related to the previous ones, but JAXA’s mission control salvaged propulsion capability by jury-rigging one last engine out of two failed ones. So Hayabusa is coming back, and appears to be able to drop the sample return capsule as originally intended.

But here’s the clincher: Nobody’s sure whether the sample collection procedure worked as expected and grabbed a bit of asteroid dirt. The return capsule may actually be empty… So there’s a final moment of suspense waiting for us even after the capsule lands. As I said – Holywood could not have scripted it better.

The illustration below is so mind-numbingly cool I just had to insert it at full size. I’ve seen illustrations like these 100 times before, but this one just slam-dunks it. Space is big. (update: It is all over the web, it turns out… I just somehow managed to miss it till now.)

Study the images in numerical order. In the last one, the Oort cloud extends to about 1 light year, a quarter of the way to the next star.

The context for the image (which I’ve modified a bit) is this story, which is equally amazing – so here goes:

It could be, and with all of our space observation prowesses we can’t rule it out, that there’s a super-Jupiter (or mini-Sol, depending on your general outlook on life) orbiting the sun, somewhere inside that blue cloud in part 4 of the illustration. According to the story, the rather extreme orbit of Sedna (red ellipse) hints towards that possibility

No kidding – not a Pluto-type planetoid, and not part of the Kuiper belt – an object that will basically make our solar system a binary system. And consider this – it may of course have planets (moons) of its own

And the most amazing thing about this is not the actual possibility – after all most solar systems we’re seeing out there are binaries. It’s the fact that this is the twenty-bleeping-first century, we have telescopes large enough to play baseball on, and something as fundamental and significant as this can be lurking out there right under our noses and we wouldn’t even know about it.

I love it when we find out stuff that causes elementary school texts to be revised. (Well, at least in most states. I’m looking at you, Kansas. An asteroid killed the Dinosaurs, mmmkay?). If indeed this turns out to be the case, then in 5 years kids will learn about a very different Solar system then we did.

Just in time to save the day, the WISE infrared sky survey is now under way, and it will be able to locate this object if it exists. It will also help with another question that’s always been bothering me – how many long-duration and dark comets are out there. Today, we only consider NEOs as potential hazards to Earth, but I think there’s good reason to believe the risk from such comets might be comparable.

On April 15th, President Obama will detail his plans for a new direction for NASA, and I can’t remember the last time I was so giddy with anticipation, not since the 1984 Celtics vs. Lakers finals.

Make no mistake about it – this is the most important decision Obama will make in his presidency. Most everything else will get washed away a decade from now, but this will determine the course of human event in the next half century.

Watching VSE develop was announced it was like fingernails on chalkboard. Everything about it was wrong. The reliance on “Tried and True” technology, as if we’ve already mastered all the necessary building blocks, the moon as a stepping stone to Mars, as if anything about a moon mission is relevant to Mars, and the fat fat NASA launch business, which yielded Shuttle and is now taking us back to solid rocket booster with Ares. I hope it is dead and gone, but just like in “basic instincts”, until I see a body, I will not breath easy.

But enough bad vibes. There’s a month till 4/15, and I can only hope the new plan will be to my liking. So here’s my personal wish list for it:

• A strong emphasis on a manned program, with a declared long-term goal of a base on Mars. Not a short trip to Mars, but the beginning of habitation. At the end of the day, the manned program is all that matters – being able to live and work in space will enable space science like nothing else can.
• A series of short term escalating goals, as has been discussed elsewhere – Manned trips to L2 (5 years), manned trips to an NEO (10 years), Phobos (15 years), and Mars (20 years). Each of the steps leaves us with the capability to repeat it, but does not leave us with a piece of infrastructure that is a money sink.
• In parallel, a strong robotic program for Mars, starting right away with missions that will lead to ISRU – power generation, soil handling, water extraction, Oxygen, Methane, etc. We have 20 years before the first people land, remember?
• Telerobotics on the moon. Telerobotics are possible when the communication lag is only a few seconds. Telerobotics will play a very large role in planetary exploration, and while they can be practiced on Earth, they are also an ideal way to explore the moon, since it is such a hostile environment.
• From a science perspective, landers on Enceladus and Europa, and a Terrestrial planet finder.
• A space gravity wave detector, just for kicks, since I was once a part of this project and it’s a really interesting way to probe the universe.
• From a core technology perspective: Nuclear power for in-space propulsion and for Mars, Electric rockets and VASIMR, leap frogging Mars aerobraking and descent. Power beaming. Strong tethers.
• From a launch business perspective: get NASA out of it. Commercialization is it. Not only SpaceX, though SpaceX is the catalyst. I am sure LMCO and BOEING can compete with SpaceX if the environment is so structured that they have to. They didn’t become the fat slobs that they are because it was in their genes. If you feed you kids junk food, don’t be surprised when they can’t fit through the door.

So voila. I’ll be revising this list as more things come to mind, but this is a good start.

In parallel, and totally related, I’m watching SpaceX getting ready to launch their first Falcon 9. I am looking forward for the day when there’s one of those getting launched every week, and then every day. So here’s one more thing for the Christmas list: a successful first launch for F9

Universe Today is carrying a nice original piece by (Jean Tate) today regarding one of my favorite topics – Fermi’s paradox.

Crazy Eddie says:

As I argue in this page, it is very unlikely that the rise of different civilizations in the galaxy are random independent events, since if even a single civilization sets its heart on colonizing the galaxy, it can do so in a time span that is very short in evolutionary terms  (about 20 million years in the scenario I set up)

Ice everywhere. Kinda.

Update (5 days later…) No further corrections, so the published number is still 600 Million Tons, and I still have a hard time believing it. As an engineer, I always try to put such reports into context, just to fit them into the larger pictures. So here goes:

Recently, NASA crashed the LCROSS probe into the heart of a permanently shadowed crater, to kick up some dirt and see how much water is in it. a 20 m diameter crater (300 m²) was formed, and 100 kg of water ejected. This was a direct hit to the “most shadowed” area of a crater – it stands to reason this was a good water excavation event.

The total permanently shadowed area on the moon (more on that later) is estimated anywhere to be between 50 and 15,000 km². (The larger number is based on a simulation-based prediction that leaves a lot to be desired, but let’s go with it for a moment, keeping in mind we’re way too liberal here.)

Multiplying the amount of water excavated by LCROSS, which should be a high estimate compared to the average, by the larger of the shadowed crater area estimates, we get 0.1 ton x 15,000 E6 m² / 300 m² = 3.6 million tons – not even 1% of the published estimate. If we go with the lower area estimate, we get an even larger discrepency

So what gives?

Well, the clue is in the more detailed press release on the mini-SAR web site. If you read the press release, you’ll notice it only says that: “Although the total amount of ice depends on its thickness in each crater, it’s estimated there could be at least 1.3 trillion pounds (600 million metric tons) of water ice. “ They never really even say they measured that amount of ice.

Reading further, the methodology is described pretty clearly, and it is obvious that the instrument has no ability to estimate actual amounts. It can only generate a signature which is indicative of either ice, a rough surface, or other phenomena. Since the signature is shown to be correlated with permanently shadowed surfaces, they assume it is ice, and only very indirectly make a guess as to its thickness.

The same signature also appears on fresh craters. But old craters differ from fresh craters mostly by the amount of thermal cycling they see… Could it be that permanent shadowed craters are simply preserved better? Could it be that they accumulate micro-dust instead of water? mini-SAR can’t tell.

In short, what we have here is a series of conjectures based on a radar image, mixed in with with some assumptions, and multiplied by additional enthusiasm. This is not good science. What they should have said was: “Radar measurements support the previous results of the Neutron Spectrometer Lunar Prospector, in that there is likely water ice in permanently shadowed craters.” and left it at that without the sensationalism.

See here for a summary of water-on-the-moon announcements.

Everyone is covering the latest Shuttle launch of course

Crazy Eddie says:

Being a space enthusiast, I'm really counting down the launches until the Shuttle is retired. I itching to go somewhere. Four launches per year and no progress seems like such a pointless endeavor. I think we are capable of so much more, and the focus on Shuttle/ISS has cost us 20 years of progress. It is so time to move on.

So with that, good luck Endeavor, hope you have an uneventful flight, and let's start thinking about the next steps.

Both Universe Today and NASA Watch are reporting today on “Project M”, shown in this NASA video.

Crazy Eddie says:

Right…