The Challenge for NASA

Someone recently sent me a link to an interview with Robert Zubrin, where he discusses the financial value of an astronaut’s life. Zubrin points out that NASA is so risk averse it is essentially paralysed, which is a bit harsh and over simplistic, but I understand his point. For what it’s worth, I think NASA’s biggest challenge is the need for projects to transcend politics, as they require decades to come to pass. And NASA is such a behemoth, that it lacks the lean focus it had with Apollo.

When it comes to space travel, the problem with a risk averse culture is risk is subjective. I read an article that said the last shuttle had a 1 in 100 chance of ending in catastrophe. But this is not a crap shoot in Las Vegas, where every role of the dice is essentially the same, and so a random result can bring predictable outcomes over a long enough sequence. Just because two shuttles have been destroyed, didn’t mean the next launch was any more or any less likely to have a catastrophic failure, particularly as following those failures intense scrutiny was given not only to the cause of the failure but to all aspects of the mission. If anything, catastrophic failures drive down the odds of a repeat, because such scrutiny drives precision.

Rocket science is well understood. It’s a complex mix of interdependent systems, admittedly some of these have low tolerances and excessively dangerous consequences, but that’s just as true of air travel. The airlines have used the investigative model for decades to drive down accidents following air disasters. In the same way, the shuttle became safer rather than more risky over time.

The real problem for Columbia was not that NASA didn’t have enough risk averse managers at the time, it was that their aversion was selective. Foam strikes were so frequent they had become common place. What should have been alarming, that something as banal as Styrofoam could damage something as critical as the heat shield, should have demanded attention long before Columbia broke up. And this highlights the problem with a risk averse culture, it is based on hindsight not forward thinking.

It is over simplistic, though, to say risk aversion alone has stifled space exploration by NASA.

As much as I’d like to point the finger at bureaucracy, that’s not to blame either. The reality is, space is really, really big. The distances involved are astounding, beyond everyday recognition.

Consider this…

• Earth to ISS, the International Space Station, is 220 miles
• Earth to the Moon is 238,900 miles, which is over a 1000x as far as ISS
• Earth to Mars is 228 million miles, on average, which is almost a 1000x as far as the moon, and over a million times as far as ISS

Let’s put this in perspective… If a journey from Earth to Mars was scaled down to a flight from New York to Los Angeles, then…

• The International Space Station would orbit just beyond the curb outside your house
• The moon would orbit around New Brunswick, New Jersey, just outside of New York

As much as I’d like to get steamy-eyed about a mission to Mars, operating a manned mission at those distances is simply beyond our capability. Unless there is a paradigm shift in space travel, like the advent of a space elevator, we’re going to be stuck in and around this gravity well we call Earth for quite some time to come.

The astounding success of the Mars rovers hints at the role robotics should play in future exploration. Personally, I’d love nothing more than to see a science rover on Enceladus or Europa, looking for evidence of frozen microbial life in the overturned ice.

 

Zoology

Like the HiRise satellite in orbit around Mars, Galaxy Zoo is a serious scientific endeavour that has a crowd-sourcing aspect allowing the common man to have a hand in the exploration of the cosmos. The University of Oxford, to their credit, saw a unique opportunity in something that seemed utterly impossible, manually compiling a catalogue of millions of galaxies.

The problem was, we can scan the heavens so well and so fast that there simply aren’t enough trained astronomers to categorize all the galaxies that are out there. Galaxies, it seems, are a dime a dozen. In fact, with an estimated two hundred billion to five hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe, they’re a dime a billion. Computers can count them, but their shapes and the angles on which we see them make it nigh on impossible for a computer to categorise them. There clearly aren’t enough astronomers to tackle the task, although, wouldn’t it be nice if there were billions of astronomers, and so the university did what no government department would ever do, it asked the public for help with Galaxy Zoo.

Zoouniverse is an extension of the Galaxy Zoo civilian scientist program, asking for our help with a number of other crowd-source projects:

• Categorizing galaxies
• Exploring the surface of the moon to categorize craters, identify old weathered craters, spot irregular geological features and, perhaps, stumble upon Apollo landing sites
• Assist in understanding how galaxies merge
• Search for supernova in distant galaxies
• Help Kepler in the search for planets around other stars (highly recommended)
• Assist in identifying the formation of new stars in nebula
• Find possible targets in the asteroid belt for the New Horizons probe to explore
• Categorise solar storms raging across the surface of our sun
• Model climate change from records made by the British Royal Navy
• Gather information to assist in the study of ancient Greek ruins
• Categorize whale calls

In short, there’s something in the zoo for the whole family. I sat with my two girls for about an hour tonight, going through galaxies, looking at their subtle differences, pointing out irregular shapes, bars in the core, and two wonderful examples of gravitational lensing.

Crowd-sourcing is an interesting phenomena. Essentially, it says all of us are smarter than any one of us individually. You or I may not be geniuses, but, pool our thinking together and, hey, presto, genius. And there are hundreds of crowd-sourcing projects exploiting this immense resource pool we call humanity.

Got some spare time on your hands? Fancy looking at some photos of the heavens? Instead of surfing the net, why not surf the stars?

Be sure to check out the Galaxy Zoo and the Zooniverse as a whole, and give science in the 21st century a helping hand.

 

Dr. Evil Hijacks Martian Satellite

At first, it sounds like a plot from Austin Powers, with Dr. Evil surreptitiously plotting to take control of a satellite in orbit around Mars, but, that’s exactly what you can do with NASA’s HiRise satellite.

HiRise is currently in orbit around the red planet and has a resolution or 1/3 of a metre, or roughly the length of your forearm, which is significantly better than you currently get when you look at your house with Google Maps (1 metre resolution).

Now, here’s the clincher. The folks at NASA have decided to enlist us civilian scientists in a crowd-sourcing experiment, allowing us to propose targets for HiRise to photograph in detail. How cool is that? Yep, that’s right. You really can (kinda) take control of a satellite in orbit around a planet some 250 million miles away. Dr Evil would be proud.

HiWish is the crowd-sourcing site where you can review maps of Mars, look for curiosities, check out the sites others have proposed and review footage from previous runs. And if your proposed site is selected for photography, you’ll get an email with a link to the results.

I proposed looking at the edge of the Hellas impact crater in the southern regions of the planet and, in particular, focusing on the burst edge of what looks like a lake (that has now dried up). The “lake” has irregular walls rather than crater walls and there’s a broad run-off stretching down to the left, eroding the land as it falls away inside the Hellas basin. It seems to me that the lake wall appears to have burst and that might reveal some clues about Mars’ water past.

I must confess, I’m a bit skeptical about vast amounts of water existing for any length of time on Mars, simply because Martian gravity is so weak (it’s closer to the Moon’s than the Earth’s), and without an active molten core, Mars lacks a protective magnetosphere, which allows the Sun’s radiation to strip away its thin atmosphere, leaving the planet with such a low pressure atmosphere that water can barely exist in liquid form. But, that’s in the here and now, perhaps things were radically different in the past. Certainly the recent discoveries of ice water on Mars and the appearance of subterranean run off gives hope that there’s still some kind of watery brine below the surface.

If you pick out a spot on Mars for the HiRes to photograph, please tell me about what you chose and why (paste the link in your comment)

Update: Time Magazine has an interesting gallery of photos showing the evidence for water on Mars