Probing Space

I've always been fascinated by space, when I was a kid I used to pore over astronomy books, reading about the findings of probes such as Viking 1 and 2.  I remember that I was really excited about the finding that the Mars atmosphere contained 1% oxygen (which apparently is wrong, I'm led to understand that it's actually 0.13%) because at the time I thought that it meant that, with some sort of oxygen extraction device, it could increase the feasibility of a Mars base.

Now, recently NASA reported that there appears to be quantities of hydrogen gas on Saturn's moon Enceladus, created by significant hydrothermal activity on its sea floor, as well as observing plumes of what appears to be water on Jupiter's moon Europa.

However, there's one thing when it comes to space exploration that puzzles me - why do space mission people feel the need to end their spacecraft?

The twin GRAIL lunar research spacecraft were smashed into the Moon into two impact sites named Ebb and Flow. The European Space Agencies' Rosetta spacecraft was slammed into a comet.  The Messenger spacecraft crashed into Mercury. And the Cassini spacecraft is shortly due to begin a final series of complex maneuvers before being sunk into the depths of Saturn, to be crushed by the heavy atmospheric pressures of the gas giant.

Illustration of Cassini Spacecraft's Grand Finale Dive
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

To be fair, the Cassini probe is hoped to carry out some unique research on its final descent into the planet.  And the Messenger one ran out of fuel.  But I'm not convinced that for at least some of these spacecraft the main intent of a crash landing isn't just to give an opportunity for one last press release, one high profile end to a long long story.  To give the mission team some closure.  And to be fair they probably deserve it after working on a mission for so many years.

But how much do these probes cost?  The Rosetta mission, for example, cost 1.4 billion Euros, while Cassini cost well over $3bn.  Seems like a lot of money spent on something if we ultimately wreck it - although, to be honest, I don't have a big issue with the cost, for me space travel is potentially one of the most important pieces of research that we can do, and as long as it completes its mission, I do think it's money well spent.

But what is more important to me is that I believe, in a few hundred years time, assuming that:

• Humans don't destroy themselves and the planet
• We actually manage to overcome our difficulties, and;
• We expand our civilisation into space

I suspect that we might actually like to recover some of these ancient artifacts of what will be primitive space travel.  We'll consider the casual destruction of these probes as historical crimes, and historians will spend a great deal of time and effort deciphering designs and textbooks to recreate impressions of spacecraft lost to time.  That is assuming that we have records of these spacecraft at all.

Think of the Early Middle Ages in Europe, how it is often referred to as the "Dark Ages", because we have so little surviving documentation that tells us what happened.  Or more recently, thousands of TV and radio shows have been lost because until the 1970s it was quite common to record over old tapes, or not record them in the first place.  I know the BBC have put great effort into recreating episodes of classics such as Hancock's Half Hour and Doctor Who, of which original recordings have been lost.

It's not too hard to imagine someone, several centuries from now, spending decades carefully analysing a modern day space probe - perhaps one of the Mars Rovers - desperately trying to obtain clues about our existence from the probes we sent out into space. Basic stuff - what did we eat? Who were our leaders? And what is a "selfie"?!?

Curiosity Self-Portrait at Martian Sand Dune
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

So my view is that rather than giving these craft a glorious but brief end, we should instead stick a M-Disc full of information in it (along with a DVD drive to read it), and when a probe has finished its expensive mission our mission controllers should allow it to rest safely, enabling future discovery.

Extra reading:

https://www.nature.com/news/saturn-spacecraft-begins-science-swan-song-1.21813 

https://www.wired.com/2016/09/ode-rosetta-spacecraft-going-die-comet/ 

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/apr/29/nasas-messenger-spacecraft-to-crash-into-mercury-ending-mission 

https://www.universetoday.com/99035/end-of-mission-grail-spacecraft-impact-a-mountain-on-the-moon/ 

History is a curious thing

Photo by RachelBostwick, licensed under CC0 Public Domain

Let me start this post off with a health warning (in defense of myself) - I don't mind to be disrespectful in this post, and I'm aware that some of what I say could be construed as such.  If anything, this post is a sign of my own ignorance!

History is not one of my strong subjects.  When I was a kid, my favourite subject in the world (or not, as it happens) was astronomy, and I followed that up with chemistry, and then geography as a third interest (maps were awesome, with their interesting little symbols and things).  History was something that I was aware existed, but never something I studied, I always thought of history as "boring".

Now, we all like something new, don't we?  Why do product manufacturers make new items to sell? Sticking on them a declaration that the new thing is "new and improved" as if otherwise they might have actually made it worse but tried to sell it anyway?

And in the Internet age, I think this desire is stronger than ever. I have currently published a total of 397 posts, and having looked at my latest Google Analytics data, in the last month the vast majority of people visiting my blog have looked at posts created in the last month.  Where they've been nice enough to re

ad a post and then stay to read another post, the next post (and even the post after that) have generally all been in the last month.  Now, if I look at the history of views since the blog started off, the most popular post apparently is one I wrote just before Christmas 2013 about my phone coming up with the really annoying message "Your internet connection is unstable" (my phone still does this, by the way, and it's still annoying - what does it expect me to do about it, tell my router to pull itself together?) but it sure isn't attracting much in the way of attention now, because it's old.

Now here's the bit which might annoy people.

I don't know a thing about the 1700s.

As I write this (and I'll do some research after I write this paragraph to give weight to this post - but this paragraph is written purely from what I can think of) I honestly do now know a thing about anything that happened in the eighteenth century.  Maybe one thing - something in America. I think (and think is the operative word) that the founding fathers of the USA wrote and signed their Declaration of Independence towards the end of this century.  About 1780 perhaps?  And I can infer that as a result the American Civil War kicked off about now. Did the American Civil War take place at the same time as America freeing itself from British rule?  I'm assuming so.

(Now I'll find out just how ignorant I am...) - okay, the Declaration of Independence was actually signed in 1776, so I wasn't too far out with that.  However, the war was actually the American Revolutionary War and it started before the Declaration was signed, and the American Civil War didn't take place until 1861.

So, although I wasn't totally wrong, there's some really significant stuff that I got totally wrong.  And taking the eighteenth century again, there must have been hundreds of thousands of major and minor events that took place in those hundred years.  Having a quick look at Wikipedia, there was the French revolution, Britain conquered India, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth ended, the Industrial Revolution began. Wikipedia lists a number of around 385 notable people that lived in that century, politicians, poets, crooks, musicians, artists, military geniuses, philosophers... well, I recognised 32 of the names. And of those 32, I probably couldn't tell you more than a sentence about any of them.

The world population in 1750 was around 750-800 million people. Imagine all of the interesting things those people experienced - the bizarreness that is everyday life, what they used to do for entertainment, what they liked to drink, their favourite recipes... however hard humanity has tried to catalogue and gather information, the amount we have lost over the millennia is countless.  Senet was a game played by ancient Egyptians,but the actual rules for the game... what are they? What information was lost in the Library of Alexandria in its (possibly multiple) fires?

Even more recent stuff - let's take Wil Wheaton.  I love Wil Wheaton, I think he's ace (as I wrote about here and here).  He taught me through his posts that it's okay to be a geek, and I remember several nights where I just spent hours reading some of his blog posts.

But, I have still only read some of them. He's been blogging for fourteen years, and I've maybe read a quarter of the posts, maybe not even that much. And I can't remember everything he wrote, nowhere near that amount.  There will certainly be people around that have read every post he's written, and one day I may be able to include myself in that list, but I can't think that it's in the thousands of people, perhaps not even in the hundreds.  And he's well worth reading.

I don't really have an ending to this blog post, it's been a bit meandering and ranty without having a real point to it.  I guess I'm just commenting on how we are forever making "new" stuff, but how much of the old stuff, which could be just as good - if not better - than the new stuff, are we losing?

Maybe history is worth taking a look at after all.

Do you like history? Or not?  Say hi in the comments!  And you could take a look at some of my older posts, like this one about Google Nose and some fun I had in CS: Source