The latest amazing close-up shot of solar activity is available courtesy of Steele Hill and NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. Steele is a Goddard media specialist who sends out packages of sun images and videos that get displayed in hundreds of museums and science centers. In Steele’s own words. . .
“When a substantial active region rotated into view, it was a hot-bed of dynamic motion and loops (Mar. 21-22, 2011). As observed by Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) in extreme ultraviolet light, the region’s powerful magnetic forces tangled, broke apart and reconnected with a vengeance, even popping off a few flares. Very tight close-ups such as this one had not been possible until the SDO began operations just a year ago.”
Here is an extreme close-up view of the active region and its loopy magnetic fields:
. . . and a larger view of the magnetic loopiness and the sun’s boiling surface.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________ OH AND DID I MENTION? All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center. And while we’re at it, links to websites posted on this blog do not imply endorsement of those websites by NASA.
Japan Earthquake
After the March 12 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, it’s as if the world collectively gasped — and then what followed was almost a feeling of disbelief as the harsh facts begin to register. Entire seaside communities erased from existence. . . tens of thousands of lives feared lost. . . giant ocean swells flooding the coastline. . . cars and houses looking like toys bobbing in the water. And then there are the satellite images, which provide a critical wide-angle perspective.
NASA’s Earth-observing fleet has helped to reveal the full scope and power of the catastrophe. As Mark Imhoff, the Terra satellite project scientist at Goddard, said in a report by West Virginia Public Broadcasting:
“It’s been heart wrenching seeing some of these images because the first set images that we got in on the day after the earthquake on March 12, even though the resolution from of the satellite wasn’t very good, the data from the Miser instrument at Jet Propulsion’s Laboratory showed that there were a large area of coastline that really weren’t there anymore and so you could really get an impression that a lot of villages and agricultural areas had really been severely impacted by the ocean.”
NASA released a web feature on March 17, five days after the quake, showing tsunami after-effects documented by Landsat 7.
NASA Earth Observatory has compiled a gallery of earthquake-related images from various NASA spacecraft, including EO-1, Terra, Aqua, and astronaut photos from the International Space Station.
As usual, EO’s in-depth captions provide context and explanations for the various destructive effects of the earthquake on coastal Japan. An even larger selection of imagery is available in this NASA web feature about the disaster.
New LRO Data
On March 15, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission released the final set of data from the mission’s exploration phase, along with the first measurements from its new life as a science satellite. The press release explains the details. The slideshow below takes a look back at some of the coolest imagery from the mission so far. All the images in the slideshow, and many more, are archived here on the NASA LRO website, which includes detailed captions.
Messenger Makes It
The third major story out of Goddard this week was the arrival in Mercury orbit of the Messenger spacecraft. After three spectacular fly-bys earlier (see slideshow below), Messenger is now in position to really dig into its science mission to reveal the nature and history of the first rock from the sun. An earlier post discusses some of the research being conducted on Mercury’s thin “exosphere” of atoms and ions wispily clinging within the planet’s gravity.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________ OH AND DID I MENTION? All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center. And while we’re at it, links to websites posted on this blog do not imply endorsement of those websites by NASA.
A visualization of the sodium "exosphere" around Mercury courtesy of Matthew Burger at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
In the space exploration racket, there is no sweeter word than “first.” And so it was last night that a NASA spacecraft made an important First in planetary exploration:
“NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft successfully achieved orbit around Mercury at approximately 9 p.m. EDT Thursday. This marks the first time a spacecraft has accomplished this engineering and scientific milestone at our solar system’s innermost planet.”
We flung the Mariner 10 spacecraft past Mercury in fly-by missions in 1974-75. And Messenger itself did three fly-bys as it got into position for the final “orbital insertion.” Now it is the first space probe to park in orbit around the first rock from the sun.
Rosemary Killen, a researcher at Goddard, is one of the many scientists who will reap rewards from this so-far spectacularly successful mission. Her target is the thin “exosphere” of sodium, potassium, and calcium knocked off Mercury’s barren rocky surface by the “solar wind” streaming from the sun.
If you want all the scientific details, read a short explanation below by Rosemary Killen about her work And also read about some of the instruments that Goddard scientists and engineers helped to put on the spacecraft.
Otherwise, enjoy the slide show of Messenger images, 2004-2011, and an informative video by Tom Watters (below), a geologist in the Center for Earth and Planetary Studies at the Smithsonian Institution. He explains the goals of Messenger.
Rosemary Killen:
“I am a Participating Scientist on the MESSENGER mission and a member of the MASCS (Mercury Atmospheric and Surface Composition Spectrometer) team. MASCS is a spectrometer covering ultraviolet, visible, and near-infrared wavelengths. The MASCS ultraviolet and visible channel is designed primarily to observe the exosphere, or the very tenuous atmosphere about Mercury, by scanning over selected, diagnostic wavelength ranges.
“Our goals are to determine the composition of the exosphere (which is only partially known at present), and, over the mission lifetime, to determine its spatial and temporal variability. We do this by observing emission lines from atoms (and a few ions) in the exosphere above Mercury’s surface. In so doing we hope to determine the processes that eject atoms from the surface into the exosphere and that lead to the loss of material from the Mercury system.
“Important factors include the relationships among the exosphere and the solar ultraviolet flux, the solar wind and interplanetary magnetic field, and the planet’s intrinsic magnetic field. We hope to be able to determine the effects (if any) of meteor streams that may intersect Mercury’s orbit.
“One intriguing question is the nature of the deposits seen by Earth-based radar (specifically that at the Arecibo Observatory) in polar craters on Mercury, and what that tells us about the sequestration of volatiles. The visible and near-infrared channel of MASCS is primarily designed to measure the reflectance spectrum of the surface in order to determine the mineralogy of surface materials. Ultimately the goal is to unravel the history of the planet: its origin and evolution to the state it occupies today.”
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________ OH AND DID I MENTION? All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center. And while we’re at it, links to websites posted on this blog do not imply endorsement of those websites by NASA.
A big chunk of the Webb Telescope goes out for a spin: This week a web feature story came out about ongoing testing of the metal cage that will hold the various scientific instrument on the Webb Telescope – the heir to the Hubble Space Telescope now under construction here at Goddard and elsewhere in NASA.
Webb will undergo significant shaking when it is launched on the large Ariane V rocket. To be sure the telescope’s “chassis” is ready for this “bumpy road,” the ISIM is subjected to some extreme testing. During the testing process, the ISIM is spun and shaken while many measurements are taken. Afterwards, engineers compare the measurements with their models of the ISIM. If there are discrepancies, then the engineers track down why, and make corrections.
That centrifuge is a pretty impressive piece of hardware, let me tell you. Months ago, I got a chance to film a preliminary spin-up test of the giant centrifuge. This thing, at full throttle, can spin about once every two seconds. The test I saw was a lot tamer than that, spinning at roughly 2 rpm. Check it out:
The centrifuge room is pretty noisy, and the equipment is massive — on the order of a half-million pounds. And so it starts out slow. But gradually it picks up speed. At very high speed, it’s way too dangerous to be in the room. (The engineers work in a separate control room during actual tests.) If even a small bit of hardware were to fly off the centrifuge, it could cause a serious injury. My friend Jay Friedlander (the cameraman) and I were very grateful to the engineers for letting us witness an actual spin-up of the centrifuge — an uncommon site at Goddard.
Here comes the sun on the Goddard Flickr channel: The Goddard Flickr channel was all aglow this week with images of the sun, courtesy of NASA’s solar observing fleet. A web feature by one of Goddard’s newest solar scribes, Karen Fox, announced the 400-year anniversary of the first scientific publication about sunspots. Goddard’s Flickr photomistress, Rebecca Roth, obliged with an entire set of spectacular sun imagery. Here is my favorite, a super-high-resolution image of a sunspot by the Hinode spacecraft. Go to the Flickr set to see the rest.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________ OH AND DID I MENTION? All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center. And while we’re at it, links to websites posted on this blog do not imply endorsement of those websites by NASA.
UPDATE MARCH 4: Sadly, Glory launched this morning but did not reach orbit because the payload faring did not separate. The faring protects and encloses the satellite during launch and initial ascent. With this extra weight onboard, the launch system was unable to reach orbit and landed in the ocean. Condolences to the mission team that spent years designing and building the ill-fated Glory spacecraft.
To learn anything, you first need to know what you don't know. Let's call them the "known unknowns."
In climate science, one of the thorniest known unknowns is the impact of aerosols, microscopic particles that drift in the atmosphere absorbing and reflecting energy, and tweaking clouds. My colleague Adam Voiland — Goddard Space Flight Center's chronicler of all things aerosol — explained it this way in one of his many fine web features and press releases on the topic:
"The particles can directly influence climate by reflecting or absorbing the sun's radiation. In broad terms, this means bright-colored or translucent aerosols, such as sulfates and sea salt aerosols, tend to reflect radiation back towards space and cause cooling. In contrast, darker aerosols, such as black carbon and other types of carbonaceous particles, can absorb significant amounts of light and contribute to atmospheric warming."
The Glory mission, which is scheduled to go into orbit this week, will attempt a much better understanding of aerosols and — climatologists hope — lead to needed improvements in the computer simulations that predict where earth's climate is heading in the coming decades.
But for my part, the Glory mission actually takes me back a decade or so, to the mid-1990s when I worked for a now-defunct science magazine called Earth. The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had, in 1995, published its Second Assessment Report. Using a newfangled thingie called the World Wide Web, science reporters eagerly poured over the IPCC report's many hundreds of pages, trying to make sense of it all.
One issue that stood out was — you guessed it — the role of aerosols in global climate change. Here's what the panel authors said on page 525 of a portion of the IPCC report, Working Group I: The Science of Climate Change.
"Atmospheric aerosols (Chapter 2) also play an important role in the Earth's radiative budget. There are fairly reliable estimates of the amount of sulphur burned but these do not translate directly into number density of aerosols, for which the size, hygroscopic and optical properties, as well as their vertical, horizontal and temporal distributions, have not been well observed."
Allow me to translate: It's saying that we know how much sulfur-containing fuels we burn (coal, for example), which produces sulfate particles that have a cooling effect on climate; but that doesn't tell us how much of this aerosol is produced, how much energy it reflects, and where it is.
And on page 526, the report tells us why we should care about aerosols, from a practical point of view:
Thus, at present the uncertainty in aerosol radiative forcing is the largest source of uncertainty in the total radiative forcing of climate over the past industrial period. Since aerosols are very patchy in their distribution, they could create significant regional climate changes regardless of their effect on globally averaged forcing.
{If you have a lot of time on your hands or need something very heavy to hold doors open, download and print Working Group I: The Science of Climate Change by clicking HERE.}
So here is the punchline for this week: Glory will provide data needed to help resolve uncertainties about aerosols and climate. The hope is that computer models will be able to make better predictions of where Earth's climate is heading.
If you want to learn more, here is a series of recent videos about the Glory mission. And don't miss this and this web feature about Glory, by Adam Voiland.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________ OH AND DID I MENTION? All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center. And while we're at it, links to websites posted on this blog do not imply endorsement of those websites by NASA.
A "gateway" station between Earth and the moon could be a stepping stone out of Earth orbit for future deep-space exploration. (Artist concept of gateway station courtesy John Frassanito & Associates.)
Imagine it’s New Year’s Day, 2021. The previous year, NASA officially shuttered the International Space Station. The last astronaut has turned off the lights and landed safely.
Then what? Then WHERE?
This week, one of our senior civil servant scientists, Harley Thronson, University of Texas partner Dan Lester, and aerospace industry colleague Ted Talay published an intriguing scenario in the online journal Space Review. They explain how the United States could continue to field astronauts in space despite the recent decision to abandon the return-to-the-moon plan that reigned though most of the last decade.
The idea would be to establish a “gateway” deep-space station between Earth and the moon as a stepping stone out of low-Earth orbit for our astronauts. The coolest thing is: It could be done without the Space Shuttle, using existing launch systems such as the Delta 4, that routinely and reliably launch heavy payloads already. To save on weight, much of the station’s inhabitable space would be a thick-walled, multi-layer inflatable donut-shaped structure.
A TransHab inflatable module
Thronson, Talay, and Lester are by no means the first or the only ones to propose an inflatable gateway station. The concept has been in development in various guises and by various people – from NASA itself to the private “space hotel” company Bigelow Aerospace – since the late 1990s. Catch up on the tech here at the Wikipedia article about the “TransHab” concept for the lunar gateway.
Thronson is Associate Director for Advanced Concepts and Planning in the Astrophysics Division at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, and is involved in major initiatives to develop future large optical systems for use in space and the capabilities to build them. He started thinking about the space gateway concept in 1999, while serving on NASA’s Decade Planning Team. The group sketched out a number of next-generation concepts for human space exploration — including inflatable space habitat designs.
Thronson is still at it a decade later, and will be presenting his team’s ideas at various journals and conferences in the near future. In this week’s article, they describe their latest formulation for the gateway station. An earlier article, published in February 2010, gives additional background.
“Such a ‘Gateway’ could be the first step beyond [low-Earth orbit] in a flexible path, including returning humans to the Moon and supporting surface operations there. These habitats have also been proposed to demonstrate next-generation systems developed on the ISS that will be necessary for missions beyond the Earth-Moon system. This ‘beachhead’ for longer-range human operations at these libration points may eventually provide opportunities for other missions. For example, assembly and upgrade of complex science facilities and support for space depot systems may be carried out at these sites.”
Here are the basic bullet points for Thronson, Lester, and Talay’s gateway concept:
Launch a fuel tanker into low-Earth orbit.
Launch the station into orbit and refuel the Delta’s liquid-fuel second stage.
Boost outward to L1 or L2, locations between Earth and the moon where their gravity balances out and it thus requires minimal fuel to maintain the station’s position. This would be about 60,000 kilometers (37,300 miles) from the moon.
Send a crew of three to the station. Up to four crews could go to the station per year, each requiring two Delta 4 Heavy launches.
The pressurized interior volume of the station would be 170 cubic meters. (The space shuttle orbiter has 71.5 cubic meters, NASA’s Skylab had 283, and the ISS has around 1,000.)
The crew could remain for a few months at a time. This would be an opportunity to continue learning how to live and work in deep space in anticipation of future trips to near-Earth asteroids or Mars.
But here’s the really cool part. The station would be close enough to the moon to allow near-instantaneous communication with robots. Astronauts could explore the lunar surface using telepresence technology. Their view would be unhindered by bulky helmets ands suits, allowing them to experience and explore the environment in a way undreamt by the pioneering Apollo moon walkers.
That, my friends, would be Very Cool, not to mention electrifying to the public and to students.
In the end, the gateway model is a way of laying smaller, more achievable (not to mention affordable) “stepping stones” into space. And there’s still plenty to explore.
“The Apollo astronauts made only brief visits to only six places on the moon, all near the equator,” said Richard Vondrak, deputy director of the Solar System Exploration Division at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “Our most recent missions, such as LRO and LCROSS, are revealing new secrets of the moon and helping us to identify new places to go, such as the polar regions.”
Although the future of U.S. human space flight is somewhat uncertain right now, the dream of space exploration burns as brightly as ever.
Robonaut, a telepresence robot under development at NASA.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________ OH AND DID I MENTION? All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center. And while we’re at it, links to websites posted on this blog do not imply endorsement of those websites by NASA.
New results from NASA space observatories have revealed something surprising about the Crab Nebula: This famous supernova remnant — long considered a veritable “old faithful” of X-ray sources for the constancy of it energy output — appears to be dimming over time. We asked Phil Evans, gogblog’s on-call X-ray scientist and a member of the NASA Swift Observatory science team, to tell us why the inconstancy of the Crab is so important to astronomers.
The Crab Nebula has a prestigious history. It formed when a star exploded in a supernova, and was first observed and recorded by Chinese observers in 1054 AD. The glow of the supernova was so bright, people could see it during the day for more than 3 weeks!
The material which was blown off the star has been expanding since then in a complex structure with leg-like filaments that earned it its name. It’s also a very bright source of X-rays, and — particularly usefully — its brightness and spectrum don’t change; so astronomers can (and do) use it to calibrate their X-ray instruments. In fact, “a Crab” is an internationally recognized unit of measurement.
The problem is, these new results suggest that the Crab is not constant after all, according to a press release issued today by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. The measurements taken over the last few years by the Fermi, Swift, RXTE and INTEGRAL satellites show that the Crab actually varies by a few percent every year. This is not too disastrous right now: It’s pretty hard to calibrate high-energy instruments to an accuracy of 1 percent or so, and the definition of “a Crab” as a unit of measurement has a fixed definition. But as technology advances, we will probably find that the Crab is no longer the ideal calibration source.
This type of finding, by the way, is not unusual. It is often the case that an object described as the “protoype” of its class turns out to be atypical! Indeed the star Vega, long used as a standard in optical astronomy, was recently found not to be standard. The exciting thing about all of this is it shows us how much we still have to learn. The Crab is among the brightest X-ray sources in the sky, and yet it is able to jump out and surprise us.
In a related point under the same press release, recently published work from the NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and the Italian Space Agency’s AGILE satellite have found large gamma-ray flares from the Crab Nebula. Investigation is ongoing, but this may indicate a really strong electric field. As study coauthor Stefan Funk said, “The strength of the gamma-ray flares shows us they were emitted by the highest-energy particles we can associate with any discrete astrophysical object,” which in themselves present plenty of challenges.
The Crab nebula: exciting and enigmatic? Yes! Constant and well understood? No! A fantastic natural laboratory? You bet.
— Phil Evans
Follow Phil on Twitter to get updates on his life and work in X-ray astronomy.
@Swift_Phil
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________ OH AND DID I MENTION? All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center. And while we’re at it, links to websites posted on this blog do not imply endorsement of those websites by NASA.
The top 10 favorite SOHO solar images chosen by the public in 2005
Takes a licking, keeps on ticking — you could say that about a lot of “birds” developed at Goddard Space Flight Center. SOHO, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, is one of them.
On December 2, 1995, SOHO blasted into space from Cape Canaveral. The joint European Space Agency/NASA project soon began its work observing the sun. If you want to know the how, whats, and whys, please read the excellent press release by my colleague Karen Fox and the a short feature on The Sun Today website. Or browse the latest SOHO imagery of the sun.
But here are the take-homes:
“Fifteen years later, SOHO has revolutionized what we know about the solar atmosphere and violent solar storms produced by the sun.”
“SOHO has become an expert comet-hunter…”
“…helped create the field of near-real-time space weather reporting as we know it…”
“Placed into orbit around the L1 Lagrangian point between Earth and the sun, SOHO was able to observe the sun continuously without Earth ever obstructing its view.”
“SOHO is perhaps best known for its observations of coronal mass ejections, or CMEs.”
“…as of November 1, 2010, SOHO had spotted more than 1,940 [comaets.] (A contest to predict the day on which the 2,000th will be spotted is here.)”
“The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory or SOHO is by many accounts the granddaddy of modern solar astronomy.”
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________ OH AND DID I MENTION?All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center. And while we’re at it, links to websites posted on this blog do not imply endorsement of those websites by NASA.
An earlier post featured the scary “spacecraft house of horrors” video about the testing torments suffered by our satellites before we send them to orbit. The video was hosted by our own Kevin Boyce, a spacecraft systems engineer. These days, Kevin is part of the international team working on the Japanese Astro-H mission. Here’s an account of his recent trip to Japan to help design an X-ray instrument.
How do you say in Japanese, “If you don’t succeed, try, try again”?
ASTRO-E was to be Japan’s fifth X-ray astronomy mission, but unfortunately the spacecraft was lost during launch on February 10, 2000.
Ok, try again. A follow-on mission, Astro-E2, launched successfully on July 10, 2005 from the Uchinoura Space Center in Japan. Soon after launch, the mission was renamed Suzaku.
The ill-fated Astro-E spacecraft
Kevin Boyce can tell you all about it. Recently, as he was landing at Tokyo’s Narita Airport, it (almost) felt like coming home. “I’ve been here almost 40 times now,” he says. That started in the late 90′s with the ill-fated Astro-E project. Then he worked on the Astro E2/Suzakumission that followed.
Now he’s an instrument systems engineer on one of the instruments on a new spacecraft called Astro-H. As he disembarks from the plane, he wonders if he should take the usual trains to the hotel, or take the bus this time. He decides on the bus option, and gets some cash from the ATM and buys a Matcha Creme Frappuccino from the Starbucks. Yes, America has left its mark here too.
Artist's concept of Astro-H
Astro-H is Kevin’s third go-round with Japan’s space agency, JAXA, and Japan’s 8th space-based astronomy mission. It will launch into low-Earth orbit intending to trace the growth history of the largest structures in the universe, reveal the behavior of matter in extreme gravitational fields, determine the spin of black holes and study neutron stars, trace shock acceleration structures in clusters of galaxies, and investigate the detailed physics of galactic jets.
Um, is THAT all?
To do all that requires a gadget called a Soft X-ray Spectrometer (SXS), and Kevin is here in Japan to help shepherd the design of the instrument through a complex and high-stakes process that is difficult to carry out effectively solely by email or phone. It take as bunch of long plane rides and as many Matcha Creme Frappuccinos.
He’s in Japan for a week to participate in one of the quarterly Astro-H design meetings. “At these meetings all the various instrument teams report on their status, along with the spacecraft systems team,” he explains. “This generally lasts for two days.”
The rest of the time, the scientists and engineers pick apart the various sub-systems of the SXS. The devil is in the details, as the cliché goes. Miss a detail, and possibly buy lots of (expensive) trouble. Space missions take years and years and millions and millions of dollars.
SXS pushes X-ray observing technology. “Many of the people on both sides of the Pacific who are working on Astro-H, myself included, have been trying to get this technology operating on orbit since 1995,” he explains. “So it’s not just the trains and locations that make it feel like home. Some of my best old friends are here.”
This particular trip included a “hole.” Meeting took up Tuesday and Thursday, but Wednesday was a Japanese holiday, with no meetings scheduled. But you can’t fly home for a day. So what to do?
“Happily, some of our Japanese colleagues scheduled a bike trip into the mountains, and rented me a bike so I could join them,” he says. “We rode 50 kilometers up toward lake Yamanaka, climbing 700 meters in the process. And then back..”
Snow-capped Mt. Fuji forms the background for a bike ride into the mountains.
After that ride, the design meeting was almost anticlimactic. But very important! The reason the X-Ray Spectrometer failed on Astro-E2 was basically due to incomplete communication between Goddard Space Flight Center and the Japanese during the design of the instrument. “This time we’re meeting much more often, and exchanging far more information, so that doesn’t happen again,” Boyce explains. “It’s not enough to exchange drawings and requirements documents. Each side really has to understand the whole instrument, and indeed the whole spacecraft system.”
So this time, Boyce attends the Japanese design meetings and reviews, and they attend the NASA reviews, and they all spend a lot more time on airplanes. But it’s still worth it, because Japan gets an instrument they don’t have the expertise to build at this point, and the US gets access to a whole mission’s worth of scientific data for just the cost of an instrument. Everyone wins.
“But only if we make it work,” Boyce says. “So four, five, six, or more times each year several of us hop on a plane for a week in our other homes here in Japan. Kampai!”
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________ OH AND DID I MENTION?All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center. And while we’re at it, links to websites posted on this blog do not imply endorsement of those websites by NASA.
Goddard Space Flight Center is named after Robert Goddard, the liquid-fuel rocketry pioneer. And on this day in 1899, he had a crazy idea. It occurred to him in a cherry tree. Bob Goddard wondered if it would be possible to fly without wings to Mars. And he marked this day, October 19, for the rest of his life, calling it his “anniversary day.”
A trail of irony led me to learn about Robert Goddard’s dreamy day in 1899. I am a science writer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. When I started here, I would tell people that I work at Goddard Space Flight Center. Their reaction: awkward pause, puzzled look. Goddard what? Goddard who?
This is ironic, given that Robert Goddard was the most famous scientist in America between the world wars, according to David Clary, one of Goddard’s biographers. In his time, Goddard got more press coverage than Thomas Edison or Albert Einstein. He died in 1945.
Goddard helped to develop rockets that burned liquid fuel. In 1926, he launched the world’s first liquid-fueled rocket, and many more after that.
Liquid-fueled rockets rained V2 bombs on London. Liquid-fueled rockets took us to the moon. Today they take astronauts to and from the space station. And they may someday bring us to asteroids and to Mars.
The roots of Robert Goddard, rocket scientist, trace back to a cherry tree. On October 19, 1899, Goddard climbed into the tree to prune away some dead branches. He was 17 years old, and looking out over a meadow he was struck by a thought.
“I imagined,” he later recalled, “how wonderful it would be to make some device which had even the possibility of ascending to Mars, and how it would look on a small scale, if sent up from the meadow at my feet. . . I was a different boy when I descended the tree from when I ascended, for existence at last seemed very purposive.”
His dream was to break free of gravity and take to the sky. He was not the first person to have this dream. But that dream, Clary wrote in his book Rocket Man, “would not let him go.”
Goddard’s big dream was achieved eventually — well, except for the part about people going to Mars. And he celebrated this day, October 19, throughout his life. It was the day he thought his most important and biggest thought. Let’s call it Goddard’s Dream Day.
At its best, NASA runs on big dreams. One of the biggest at the moment is the James Webb Space Telescope. It’s an infrared space observatory that will unfold its mirrors like flower petals, 1 million miles from Earth, and look back to the beginning of the universe. The technology is advanced and it’s risky. But without big dreams, where would we be?
It’s October 19, Robert Goddard’s dream day, and it’s a good day to dream a big dream. What’s yours?
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________ OH AND DID I MENTION?All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center. And while we’re at it, links to websites posted on this blog do not imply endorsement of those websites by NASA.
The Crab Nebula has a prestigious history. It formed when a star exploded in a supernova, and was first observed and recorded by Chinese observers in 1054 AD. The glow of the supernova was so bright, people could see it during the day for more than 3 weeks!
