Home | Writings | Resume | Links | RSS Feed
A Proud Member of the Reality-Based Community
About Me :
I'm a grownup nerd living in the Boston burbs. I write computer programs for a living and plays for fun.
I'm married to a wonderful woman, and we share a nice little house with our daughter and our cats.
I'm a humanist, a technologist, an artist, and an idealist. I believe in reason, freedom, love, equality,
and democracy. (Did I mention that I'm
an idealist? I did, OK.)
I'm also a pragmatist and an empiricist. I reject ideology and dogma, especially when they conflict with
practical facts (i.e., pretty much always). I particularly hate willful ignorance, which tends to go hand-in-hand
with ideology and dogma.
Like the alignment of the planets, this blog gets updated as I have the time, inspiration, and inclination to do so.
Like the alignment of the planets, this blog gets updated as I have the time, inspiration, and inclination to do so.
Tuesday, April 06, 2004
Good Week to be a Space Geek
Last week was a good one to be a space geek. On the heels of the revelation that the Opportunity rover sits at what was once the shore of a salty sea, there has also been the very exciting revelation that there is an unusually high concentration of methane in the Martian atmosphere. Where did the methane come from? Methane has an expected stability of only 300 years on Mars; if it's there in the steady state, that means something is replenishing it. But what? Two explanations have been advanced, and both of them are very exciting -- either Mars is volcanically active, which would be really cool, or else Mars has extant life on it, which is, of course, even cooler.
And then, on top of that, NASA successfully tested the X-43A scramjet! The vehicle set a new speed record for air-breathing engines – about Mach 7. Scramjet research and development is underway in many different places -- not just NASA -- and this could eventually turn into a practical engine technology for suborbital or even orbital flight. The vehicle has to be boosted to startup velocity (Mach 5, I think), which might limit its practicality, though; one indication of this is the fact that the research vehicle had to be mounted on a Pegasus rocket booster, which was itself launched from a B-52 bomber. Nevertheless, we're at least one step closer to practical, reliable, and inexpensive access to space.
(When are we doing a Mars sample return mission? Don’t hold your breath. Remember that we still have about a decade left of pouring money into the 2 sacred sinkholes of the American space program, namely the Shuttle and the ISS.)
Last week was a good one to be a space geek. On the heels of the revelation that the Opportunity rover sits at what was once the shore of a salty sea, there has also been the very exciting revelation that there is an unusually high concentration of methane in the Martian atmosphere. Where did the methane come from? Methane has an expected stability of only 300 years on Mars; if it's there in the steady state, that means something is replenishing it. But what? Two explanations have been advanced, and both of them are very exciting -- either Mars is volcanically active, which would be really cool, or else Mars has extant life on it, which is, of course, even cooler.
And then, on top of that, NASA successfully tested the X-43A scramjet! The vehicle set a new speed record for air-breathing engines – about Mach 7. Scramjet research and development is underway in many different places -- not just NASA -- and this could eventually turn into a practical engine technology for suborbital or even orbital flight. The vehicle has to be boosted to startup velocity (Mach 5, I think), which might limit its practicality, though; one indication of this is the fact that the research vehicle had to be mounted on a Pegasus rocket booster, which was itself launched from a B-52 bomber. Nevertheless, we're at least one step closer to practical, reliable, and inexpensive access to space.
(When are we doing a Mars sample return mission? Don’t hold your breath. Remember that we still have about a decade left of pouring money into the 2 sacred sinkholes of the American space program, namely the Shuttle and the ISS.)