Science

Sep 23 2009 - way to go, LRO ...
LRO does it again, water on the moon! That’s so cool! NASA is important people, we’re laying the foundation for future generations here.

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/090923-moon-water-discovery.html

And of course finding water is not the same as finding lakes, but imagine the potential for fuel sources and or human sustenance. Water is damn heavy, and not something we can easily take with us.

Pretty cool stuff.
Sep 1 2009 - LRO sends us some underwhelming evidence! ...
I remain a huge fan of projects like LRO, and personally still believe that the disbelievers are crackpots but I also have to admit to being a little underwhelmed by the photos listed here on NASA’s site for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LRO/multimedia/lroimages/apollosites.html

Still, I’m excited “we’re” (go NASA) going back, and if anything this just really highlights for me how damn big our “little” moon is. Easy to forget that the satellite that’s taking those photos is still 50 kilometers! away from the surface, so somewhat understandable that we’re not getting the close ups I’d love to see.

There is a pretty cute video of the LRO launch party here (check side bar) that is worth checking out. The highlight for me was seeing the communications in action, the laser ranging support for the data coming from LRO looks like a large robot with big green blinking eyes.

Congratulations and good luck LRO team, if you can now just convince Sarah then your mission can surely be called a great success.
May 6 2009 - Transcendent Man! ...
I read the singularity is near last year and really enjoyed it, despite a few misgivings for Kurzweil’s ego and some dubious use of statistics. One of the things I found myself really intrigued by was Kurweil himself and this movie looks like a fun look at the man and his ideas.

Do I believe him? Part of me wants to, definitely. The ultimate end-game of the singularity is fascinating and wondrous, but I actually found some of the more intermediate steps in his projections to be more fascinating. Maybe that’s just a factor of what I can relate to. One example of this was the idea that nano-technology will lead us to self-assembling products from base materials and an instruction set transmitted as information. So much of my life is already so information focused that the idea of being able to go 100% information based and the implications on how society is structured etc… it’s mind numbingly cool. Try to imagine how much energy, time and effort we put into moving goods around this planet and how incredible it would be for all of that to end.

Anyway, looking forward to renting this one when it becomes available.
Nov 11 2008 - Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter ...
A good friend of mine Sarah believes that the moon landings were a hoax. Despite being a huge science geek , a fan of NASA and a member of the planetary society she subscribes to the idea that man has not in fact walked on the moon, and the entire thing was a lie perpetrated in an effort to win the political war with the USSR. Or something along those lines.

Somehow this deeply disturbs me. Anything coming from Sarah carries considerable weight, so I can’t just discard her opinion. How could it be that the same person avidly following the mars rover mission also believes that we couldn’t land someone on the moon (or rather, didn’t)? I can say that I have not watched/read/been brain washed by the same materials that she has, but I’m expecting to be convinced to do so after this post.

Skepticism is vitally important to science, no doubt. I think scientific thinkers must challenge anything that doesn’t make sense to them. I myself am open to hearing the counter arguments, and I even spent a half hour or so reading the respective wikipedia articles on the matter…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Moon_Landing_hoax_accusations
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_evidence_for_Apollo_Moon_landings

I also think while conspiracy theories are fun (x-files we miss you) they are also wrong 99.99% of the time. In a time where science is considered elitist and unnecessary in one of the most important political, economic and scientific centers on earth, and when NASA continues to face diminishing budgets and smaller mandates it seems terribly unproductive to undermine those efforts being made by real engineers and scientists by giving credence to crack pot theories about hoaxes.

Consider how difficult it is to keep a secret. Imagine the incentive to those cynical people out there who wish to undermine the real achievements of science. Remember the movie contact and Ocham’s Razor? Do we make hundreds of assumptions about the ability for hundreds of people in the government, at NASA and elsewhere all keeping a secret about the landings? That the telemetry mirrors left behind were done by unmanned missions (and that we had the robotics capable at that time to do so?) That the long documentation trail left behind from all the steps leading up to Apollo 11 were somehow part of it? That the FIVE additional moon landings (after the public had already lost interest) were also faked just to add weight to the first faked landing? Or can we assume that no such plot exists and that NASA’s account is roughly accurate? I realize you can flip this and play the other side, but you can read the articles for the details rather than me iterating through the arguments that have already been made on both sides.

I have to admit, I want to believe. I want to believe that we really did achieve the mantel of a moon landing. That we as a culture were able to step outside of our regular bullshit to come together and accomplish something truly spectacular for mankind.

LRO - finally time to shut up the crackpots

In any case, the only real reason I started this post, besides to provoke you Sarah, was so that I could mention the upcoming Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter , a mission I will be really looking forward to. It looks like we’re going to get a lot more familiar with our friend the moon. This can only be a good thing as privatized space exploration steps up and produces more tourism and public interest in things beyond our humble planet. The moon may seem a bit provincial at this point, but if you were to seriously consider visiting it (when you make your millions on the internet) do you not get totally stoked? It seems like the next logical jumping point for our more grandiose visions. LRO is launching in early 2009 from Cape Canaveral this mission will include (from wikipedia)
And onboard instrumentation will most importantly include :
LROC — The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) has been designed to address the measurement requirements of landing site certification and polar illumination.^[11] LROC comprises a pair of narrow-angle cameras (NAC) and a single wide-angle camera (WAC). LROC will fly several times over the historic Apollo lunar landing sites, with the camera’s high resolution, the lunar rovers and Lunar Module descent stages and their respective shadows will be clearly visible. It is expected that this photography will boost public acknowledgement of the validity of the landings, and discredit the Apollo conspiracy theories.^[12]
It will be nice to put this to rest. Long live Elvis.
May 11 2008 - Saturday night science link (DNA Visualization) ...
Fantastic molecular visualization of how dna, rna and ribosomes work… where was this kind of stuff when I was going to school?

Chris Whitmore · Notes

Science