Discovery Space: Cosmic Ray

Cosmic Ray is Moving

2009-11-12T17:16:19-05:00

Cosmic Ray is joining his blogger colleagues as part of Discovery News Space coverage. Check out the expanded Discovery News Space team to follow my future posts. Thanks for visiting!

Journey to the Center of the Galaxy

2009-11-10T11:14:17-05:00

Because of increasing light pollution, the most spectacular structure in the sky is seen by fewer and fewer people these days – the Milky Way. During the summer months you are in fact peering in the direction of the downtown hub of our pinwheel galaxy. The central region straddles the constellations Scorpius and Sagittarius that are low on the southern horizon when viewed from northern latitudes.

But even on the most pitch-black night you still can’t see much of the real core because foreground spiral lanes of stars and black dust obscure it. In visible light , we really see a just few percent of all the stars in the galaxy. It is definitely a backyard-only view.

Nothing less than the penetrating power of all three operating NASA Great Observatories was brought to bear on the mysterious galactic core that lies 27,000 light-years away. Their stunning panoramic image released today by NASA combines views taken in mid and near infrared light by the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, and seething X-rays captured by the Chandra X-ray Observatory.

The Spitzer (red) and Hubble (yellow) views reveal a firestorm of star birth throughout the region. Three known clusters of massive stars dominate it: the Central cluster, the Arches cluster, and the Quintuplet cluster. Large arcs of glowing gas form linear filaments that might follow strong magnetic fields.

A smattering of lone superhot stars may have formed in isolation, or they may have originated in clusters but then tossed out due to strong gravitational tidal forces. The brightest of these stellar loners, weighing in at 150 solar masses, is 10 million times the brilliance of our sun.

X-ray observations from Chandra complement this view by showing the super-hot massive stars as brilliant point-like X-ray sources. The X-rays reveal that the core is also peppered with the hot remains of supernovae exploding like hot buttered popcorn. The energy in turn heats the material between the stars.

The location of the exact center of the galaxy is just off the tip of Sagittarius’ “teapot spout.” Infrared observations with ground-based telescopes, painstaking collected over the past two decades, have gathered incontrovertible evidence for the presence of a 3 million solar mass black hole at the core of the galaxy.

The black hole has been “weighed” by measuring the slingshot motions of stars caught in the black hole’s gravitational pull. In one stunning observation a star whipped within 17 light-hours of the black hole and traveled the distance between the Earth and Pluto in less that a day!

Planets and stars actually form in the disk encircling the black hole. But their fate is terribly uncertain. Gravitational “pinball game” interactions among the stars might plunge entire planetary systems into the black hole pit. Alternatively, stars could get a slingshot kick out of the disk of the galaxy altogether.

The super-telescope trio unveils the most torturous neighborhood in the galaxy. Life as we know it would have a very tough time originating, much less surviving in this cosmic version of Vice City that is bathed in deadly radiation.

Alien Abductions: Idiocy of the Worst Kind

2009-11-06T00:08:31-05:00

Today the much-hyped film, “The Fourth Kind,” debuts in theaters with a predictable poster of a pair of other-worldly eyes staring out.

Sci-fi film buffs will remember Steven Spielberg’s sappy 1977 film “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” where flying saucers outfitted with disco lights buzz lone cars and farmhouses, and in a messianic ending aliens carry a few chosen people skyward in a “mothership” that looks more like a chandelier.

“The Fourth Kind” goes one step further and supposedly presents “real footage” clips from alleged alien abduction cases – the so-called “fourth kind” of encounter with extraterrestrials.

This film is structured as a “mockumenary,” and is being compared to the 1999 film “ The Blair Witch Project.” The Blair Witch has had many imitators including the hyper-hyped “Paranormal Activity” that debuted in theaters a few weeks ago as the deadliest boring horror film ever made.

The “Blair Witch” and “The Fourth Kind” deservedly should be joined at the hip. Ghosts and aliens go together like the early film comedians Laurel and Hardy. Both types of entities scare us: they sneak around at night, they stare at us with those creepy eyes, they often float though the air, their intent is mysterious, and they communicate telepathically.

In fact space aliens described in so-called abduction cases behave much like devils and other imaginary creatures that go back to antiquity. Based on this long history we must have a collective subconscious predilection to imagine such entities. This is especially true of the so-called Shadow Men phenomenon – black apparitions that are equally described at visiting ghosts or creepy aliens.

People were once burned as the stake for saying that they were cavorting with strange creatures (except on blind dates). Now we make them pop culture celebrities like the legendary Barney and Betty Hill UFO abduction case from the 1960s.

My favorite for its blue-collar chutzpa is the Travis Walton alien abduction as described in the book and film “Fire in the Sky.” If I could accept this tall-tale as true it would explain the Fermi Paradox – Why any self-respecting alien wouldn’t be caught dead within 100 light-years of our backwater planet.

Zillions of ghost stories tell us nothing about the prospects for life after death, and likewise UFO tall tales tell us absolutely nothing about life on other worlds. Zip, zilch, zero.

The “Fourth Kind” shows terrified patients who under hypnotic regression recount icky extraterrestrial encounters. The aliens could be arrested for molestation if you could handcuff one. The alarmed state of the patients in the trailer reportedly matches real-life reactions of people who believe they have been abducted by aliens.

The movie revolves around a series of real-life disappearances that took place in Nome, Alaska. Why aliens would go to Alaska to snatch humans is beyond me. With all due respect to the inhabitants of our 49^th state, this is not a special place to start looking for the best and brightest of our species.

As Alaskan newspapers have pointed out, the FBI ruled that the disproportionate number of disappearances was likely due to excessive alcohol consumption and the harsh winters. Now if I apply Occam’s Razor – that one should not make more assumptions than the minimum needed to explain a mystery – then the drunk Alaskans argument wins.

Even more fantastic is the absurd idea that aliens are smart enough to accomplish interstellar travel but have an uncomfortably carnal curiosity about Earth biology. Why should they even care? Do they want to raise us as pets on their home planet and see if we can be housebroken?

There is a lot of Internet discussion of aliens “shape shifting” and living among us in disguise. I wouldn’t give this an ounce of credence expect that we have the former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, who definitely doesn’t seem part of this Earth.

It’s plausible she could be an alien in disguise. It would explain her problems with the English language in piecing together words to say something coherent. It would also explain her lack of knowledge about world geography, political history and mass media publications.

Did Ms. Palin grow up that way or did she come down to Earth from the stars? If I again invoke Occam’s Razor, the extraterrestrial hypothesis does not seem so ridiculous.

Color-Challenged Astronomers Are Lost in a Latte' Universe

2009-11-04T08:30:10-05:00

God was sitting up late one night designing the universe. He took care of simple things first. Gravity would construct stars, galaxies and planets. Biological evolution would ensure a robust diversity of life forms.

But what color to make the universe? God looked down into his foamy cup of latte' and decided that the color beige would be just perfect. In reality God hadn't invented the other colors yet so He didn't have much of a choice at the time.

Last Monday the Astronomy Picture of the Day displayed nothing but a plain eggshell white panel. The caption declared that is how the entire sky would look if the light from all the stars and galaxies were smeared out into a homogeneous glow.

This snoozer-looser of a color interpretation was first popularized in 2002 by Karl Glazebrook of The Johns Hopkins University. He based “beige” on averaging the color spectrum of the light emitted by a whopping sample of 200,000 galaxies in a sky survey.

When the notion that the universe had a Pantone color was first popularized, the news media loved it. This was one of the biggest novelty stories ever to come out of astronomical research. It was a cinch to sell to science-adverse newspaper editors, and there were many popular articles.

But beige is not a color found in the rainbow. You don’t buy beige filters for your SLR camera. In looking at Hubble Space Telescope’s colorful photos of the universe we’ve never said, “it needs more beige!”

Color, by definition, is really all in the mind. Three sets of color receptor cells in the retina each cover 1/3^rd of the visible spectrum and assemble a full color image in the brain's vision center. The three additive colors parsed by the eye -- red, green, and blue -- create every hue perceived in the universe.

The problem is that many astronomers are color-illiterate according to my colleague Ken Brecher of Boston University. Any art or photography student will describe color as having three dimensions: hue, shade and intensity. But to an astronomers color is simply a matter of the wavelength where visible radiation falls on the electromagnetic spectrum.

An astronomer himself, Ken can be found at astronomy conferences doing impromptu floor demonstrations of how we perceive color and how easily it is misunderstood, even by inquiring minds.

Beige is only a desaturated yellow. It is produced by subtractive colors: the pigments cyan, magenta and yellow that are mixed together and reflect only certain wavelengths of light. So you’ll find beige in the Home Depot paint aisle, or a Crayola box of crayons, but not among the stars.

This color-illiteracy is painfully obvious in any number of space illustrations that show red giant or red dwarf stars as, well, cherry red. Wrong! Though the brighter stars have a perceptible hue when seen as points of light But if viewed close up they would all be blindingly white. Why? Because a star is radiating across the visible spectrum and the intensity of light would be so bright it would fire up all of your color receptors. hence the brain would perceive white. What's more, our sun's output peaks in the green portion of the spectrum, but that's meaningless when it comes to human color perception.

The term “brown dwarf” is just as misleading. Brown’s another color not found in the radiant universe. In the world of pigments, it’s a desaturated orange. A better term for these stillborn stars in "ultra-red dwarf."

Glazebrook was simply trying to give an everyday interpretation to his cumulative spectrum of stars. On a graphical plot average starlight color rises slightly at longer wavelengths because the quantity of blue stars is decreasing as the rate of star formation throttles back in an aging universe. Hence he says the data show the universe is evolving from blueish to caramel.

But the homogenized stellar spectrum is much flatter or “whiter” than that of an incandescent light bulb for example, which steeply rises to peak output at red wavelengths. Therefore, if a light bulb doesn’t look beige, neither does the universe. The sum of starlight is, perceptually, white.

But don’t feel so bad about losing “cosmic latte'.” Glazebrook’s initial interpretation of the survey data lead to a press release that reported that the universe was an Smurfee turquoise. The New York Times even ran a pistachio blue-green color patch on the front page to announce the "official" color of the universe.

Yuck! How could God ever have such bad taste!

The Night The Martians Took Broadway!

2009-10-30T08:42:17-04:00

The Balloon Boy saga from a couple weeks ago will go down in mass media history as one of the great hoaxes. Network news was riveted on following the wayward balloon for over two hours because they were convinced there was a stowaway child onboard. Maybe we were primed for this sort of hoax (more later).

But 71 years ago today the mother of all media hoaxes took place. On the night before Halloween in 1938 CBS Radio presented an hour-long adaptation of H. G. Wells' classic science fiction story “The War of the Worlds.”

The program was directed and narrated by the great actor Orson Welles (no relation to H.G. Wells) as an installment of his radio anthology series, Mercury Theater on the Air.

Unlike other radio drama broadcasts of the time, the first 40 minutes of the show was presented as radio bulletins from various locations where Martian spacecraft supposedly landed on Earth. In one of the most frightening scenes towering Martian war machines are described as wading the Hudson River. They lumber down Broadway to poison-gas panicked people “running like rats,” according to the on location radio reporter.

Some Americans who were radio “channel surfing” that night tuned in midway through the show and mistook it for an unfolding news story. Of the six million people who listened to the broadcast, an estimated one million panicked. Police stations and radio station telephones were jammed. Some people thought it was the end of the world (sound familiar?) A water tower in New Jersey was mistaken for a war machine and shot at.

The Next day Orson Wells was shocked and apologetic in a press conference. But some accused him of feigning remorse and that he was really out to pull off a Halloween shocker. The Mercury Theater was competing for airtime opposite a real dummy, the Charlie McCarthy ventriloquist puppet (Today all we have for dummies are TV reality show contestants). The stunt did enjoy great press: over 12,000 newspaper articles!

Today it’s hard to imagine anyone being so duped by a radio broadcast. But in a world without television, Internet and IPhones, instantaneous news was filtered through six-inch diameter radio speakers. More importantly, our nation was suffering through the Great Depression and Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany was on the rise. So some people may have been easily convinced it was the biblical End of Times.

Maybe this kind of thinking resonates with the 2012 doomsday hysteria. We are in the worst economic times since the Great Depression, we are dogged by worldwide terrorism and rogue nuclear nations, and we have a young U.S. President being accused of undertaking apocalyptic and unprecedented social re-engineering.

What’s still amazing is how readily some people accepted the notion that an advanced form of life could coexist in the solar system and travel here. There were lots of science fictions pulp magazines at the time. But 1938 was years before space travel or even those goofy reports of silvery flying saucers.

Regrettably, people today have only seen the H.G. Wells tale butchered in two misguided Hollywood films. The 1953 George Pal production felt compelled to replace the eerie “war machines” that walked on tripod legs, with souped-up flying saucers. The film flirted with a religions ending where a doomed saucer crashes at the doorsteps of a church full of praying people. Hallelujah!

The 2005 Steven Spielberg/Tom Cruise version was so overshadowed by Cruise soaking up so much screen time that the faithfully reproduce Wells tripod war machines make fleeting appearances.

The most remarkable thing about the original 1898 novel is that H.G Wells foresaw 20^th century warfare: fighting machines, invisible “heat-ray” weapons (lasers, particle beam weapons), use of poison gas, and directed attacks on population centers. Best of all is Well’s allusion to interplanetary contamination by microbes. The seemingly infallible Martians succumb to Earth viruses. Ah-choo!

Little might Wells have imagined that our government today would have a Planetary Protection office. Not for defending Earth from Martian invaders, but carefully handling Martian microbes that might return to Earth on a rock sample brought back from a future robotic mission. Even Well’s fervent imagination never foresaw that!

New Rocket Ready To Go Nowhere

2009-10-23T09:11:32-04:00

Like someone who just bought a new car, earlier this week NASA proudly rolled out its next generation spaceship, the Ares I-X. The spindly rocket looks anemic compared to its predecessors: the space shuttle, Saturn V, and Saturn IB. But at a height of 310 feet it casts a long pencil-like shadow over the Kennedy Space Center causeway.

Ironically, the Augustine Commission report that formally came out this week casts a black eclipse shadow over this arrow-craft that is scheduled for its maiden test flight in just a few days.

The commission will give a series of options to the White House for President Obama to consider for redirecting NASA’s future human space effort.

At yesterday's new conference at the National Press Club in Washington D.C., chairman Norman Augustine bluntly said the Ares I was the wrong vehicle at the wrong time for NASA.

Augustine used a lot of car analogies in his dialogue with the space press. He said the Project Constellation “Apollo-on-steroids” capsule atop Ares was “too sophisticated” to simply be a “taxi” to the International Space Station.

NASA should be taking the Constellation “sedan” to other places in the inner solar system. That is, except for the most coveted destination, the surface of Mars. The energy require to land and takeoff from the Red Planet is prohibitively expensive he said.

Augustine said that NASA should consider other ports of call that are less demanding in terms of energy consumption. He sounded like an AAA Triptik advisor plotting a cross-country course. Do a flyby of the moon or Mars, land on one of the martian moons, or visit an asteroid.

Maybe at a later date you could think of building a moon or Mars lander he said. Augustine compared his strategy to buying a car, and later a pop-up camper to tow along, rather that spending all the money upfront to buy a Winnebago.

As far as the upkeep of the $100 billion International Space Station, Augustine said NASA should invest in a “space truck” by working with private industry to develop a commercial vehicle to ferry crews to the ISS. It could be no more sophisticated that the 2-man Gemini capsule, which NASA managed to build and man-rate in just a few years in the early 1960s.

In sharp contrast, the Ares won't be ready for human flights until 2017. That's two years after NASA plans to dump the ISS into the ocean to save the high overhead costs (no pun intended) -- though Augustine recommends extending its life to 2020. Still, it would be like Cheops dynamiting his pyramid a few years after the capstone was added. But with ISS off the books, NASA could afford manned interplanetary forays by 2025.

He also adroitly shot down NASA’s mantra that the taxpaying public wants to see humans in space. Only put them in space if they have something interesting and inspiring to do he said (other than drinking recycled urine, naming a treadmill after a comedian, and bunking a circus clown, which were among the big ISS stories this year).

Given the state of the nation, NASA’s future is not at the top of the president’s to-do list. What’s more, people don’t vote on space policy – unless you work on Florida’s Space Coast, or in Clearlake, Houston, are a member of the Mars Society, or a Trekkie. So it's unclear how the Obama administration will act on the commission's report.

For those of us on the space astronomy side of the house, there could be a silver lining. Without moon expeditions sucking up the entire infrastructure, NASA could think of a human presence at Lagrangian point 2 where the next generation of great space observatories will reside, starting with the James Webb Space Telescope in 2014. Augustine talked of building a deep space “construction shack” for crews. The L2 location is a useful pit stop on the interplanetary superhighway.

Augustine also acknowledged that there is one big vehicle missing from NASA’s garage – an 18-wheeler, a.k.a. Ares V heavy lift booster that would loft 120 tons into low Earth orbit. This would be the muscle of manned interplanetary travel, and could also loft some exquisitely powerful space telescopes to search for life in the universe.

In his critique, Augustine invoked a higher calling for NASA – to expand the human species into the conquest of space. I call it Manifest Destiny. The problem is, he acknowledged, that assorted ideas for human space travel are like religion – “everybody’s got his or her own idea of God.”

Flying Saucer Scam Busts Pseudoscience

2009-10-20T12:26:33-04:00

The human melodrama aside, last week’s “Balloon Boy” debacle was also an inevitable demonstration of pseudoscience run amok.

I don’t want to give the purported hoax of the runaway flying saucer balloon any more attention that it has already sucked up in world news. But I do want to point out that beyond the reckless hubris of its accused perpetrator, Richard Heene, the event is an indictment of our sensationalist and fuzzy-brained TV culture.

Let’s start with the bubble-headed TV “reality shows,” like the wife-swapping program Mr. Heene appeared on, that cultivate and empower publicity mongers. The screwier you think and act, the better. Add to that the popularity of nutty-professor (sans PhD) pseudoscience shows that cash in on the big public appetite for junk food for the mind.

It was an inevitable “perfect storm” that some desperate entrepreneur would try to cash in on this culture with a bold and dangerous charade that managed to grab more public attention than NASA crashing a dozen rockets into the moon.

According to an article by his former collaborator Robert Thomas, Mr. Heene first sough to go one better than the celebrated 1947 Roswell New Mexico UFO fairy tale by launching a weather balloon shaped like a flying saucer. He was convinced that the balloon stunt: “will be a dramatic increase in local and national awareness about, the Heene family and, . . . the UFO phenomenon in general.”

The footage of his contraption drifting in Colorado skies (which CNN called the “love child between a flying saucer and Jiffy Pop”) is the most well-documented sighting of a flying saucer shaped aircraft I’ve ever seen. It beats six decades of phony, fuzzy photos of purported real alien spaceships.

Thomas also wrote that Mr. Heene was in a rush to snag a “science” based reality show because he was worried that Mayan calendar based predictions about the end of the world in 2012 will come true. So time was a wastin’. He needed money to be one of the few post-apocalypse survivors.

If Mr. Heene hadn’t been is a hurry to do anything to grab headlines, he might have actually sold cable TV a “science adventure” show that was going to dabble into just about every numbskull idea out there: seeing inter-dimensional entities, building antigravity machines, extracting electricity from rock crystals, telekinesis, lizard-alien shape-shifters (including Dick Cheney?), and the most macabre of all: measuring the soul’s mass departing a dying patient.

Regrettably UFO-chasing cable news outlets no longer have a science correspondent like veteran Miles O’Brien who I think would have expressed more skepticism at the live video of the runaway balloon.

Instead, media will subject us to more pop-psychoanalysis of the Heene family antics and a lot of indignity over the accusation of someone duping us at public expense and potential risk.

But TV and pop culture did a lot to make this monster. And, regardless of what legal actions that may take place, I think Mr. Heene will eventually be back in the spotlight because he’s too outrageous a carnival act to ignore.

It sure beats showing boring real science.

Forgotten Planet

2009-10-18T14:30:37-04:00

There’s another dwarf planet to add to the list of solar system bodies that share minor league status with Pluto.

Newly published Hubble Space Telescope pictures show that the large asteroid Pallas is nearly spherical. In other words the body has enough gravity to pull itself into ball where all surface features are essentially the same distance from the core.

This is one criterion for a planet according to the International Astronomical Union (IAU). Hubble’s sharp view can resolve the disk of Pallas and shows that it is slightly egg-shaped, and roughly the width of West Virginia.

Pallas is the third most massive asteroid following Ceres and Vesta. Serveral years ago Hubble showed that Ceres too is a sphere. But poor Vesta got ripped off. The southern pole was lopped off by a titanic impact that left Vesta distinctly non-spherical. So, by the IAU rules, it fails at planethood. The IAU purists might get hung up on semantics and argue that Pallas isn't a perfect sphere either. But frankly neither is Earth, it is pear-shaped.

The precise physical measurements of Pallas can be used to calculate a density that falls midway between it being a ball of all rock, or a ball of all ice. This means the Pallas probably formed from water-rich materials, like its bigger brother Ceres.

This all implies Pallas is made from ice and rock and differentiated because it is big enough to have a hot core of radioactive debris from one or more nearby supernova explosions that preceded our sun’s birth.

The Hubble team also thinks they see a large bowl shaped crater about 9 miles deep. This shouldn’t be a surprise, considering the pockmarked appearance of other asteroids. The absence of craters would worry me that maybe Pallas is the Star Wars Death Star.

Pallas in fact enjoyed planet status when discovered in 1802. By the mid 1800’s astronomers decided there were simply too many objects swarming in the vast 300 million mile wide gulf between Mars and Jupiter. so they demoted Pallas and other so-called minor planets to “asteroids” (for star-like). The demotion back in the 1800s didn’t cause all the fuss that Pluto’s demotion from major planet status did in 2006.

Therefore, a rational way to categorize the solar system is that it contains four classes of planets: terrestrial, gas giants, icy dwarfs, and rocky dwarfs. This is likely the standard makeup of typical planetary systems scattered across the galaxy.

If Pallas turns out to have a water-ice mantle, it is a potential abode of life. The asteroid would be an easier place to land on than Mars because of its much weaker gravitational field and lack of atmosphere. Unfortunately, it's hard to get to becasue its orbit is far out of the ecliptic plane where the other planets and most asteroids reside.

When We’ll Really Nuke The Moon

2009-10-14T02:47:56-04:00

The dust is still settling from the public blowup over NASA’s LCROSS experiment to go prospecting for water on the moon by crashing a rocket booster into it last Friday. The impact was a PR flub. There were no dramatic images for any evidence of the smashup.

Nevertheless, I have subsequently received a few angry e-mails from people who are incensed that we would harm Earth’s only natural satellite.

The tersest note was from a retired Marine:

“Stop bombing the fu*king moon.”

In a following e-mail he was more philosophical:

“Yes, worlds are being destroyed every second in our timeless universe, but through natural processes of creation and recreation . . .”

If I apply that logic, then we should do nothing in the future to deflect or destroy any Earth-bound asteroid, but instead let nature take its, er, natural course in “recreating” life on the surface of an incinerated Earth.

Another writer admonished:

“I just want NASA to leave the moon alone. Consider it an anti-littering position.”

The picture at the top of this blog is an example in interplanetary littering. It shows what happened when NASA deliberately crashed a 31,000-pound rocket booster into the moon in 1971. The booster was the upper stage of the Saturn V rocket that propelled Apollo 14 astronauts to the moon. The energy of the impact (nearly 10 times more powerful than the LCROSS impact) created small tremors that were measured by the seismometer placed on the Moon by Apollo 12 astronauts in 1969.

Now guess what? The 115-foot diameter crater with its fresh, bright ejecta rays is indistinguishable from any other lunar crater formed by a meteorite impact. In fact, you wouldn’t even know this was “planet littering” if NASA didn’t dutifully point out the man made crater in a recent high-resolution picture from their Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

Nobody got their nose out of joint when NASA quietly performed this seismic experiment nearly four decades ago to send vibrations through the moon’s surface to probe the internal structure of the lunar crust. But that was in the pre-Internet days. There was no cyberspace landscape for goofy ideas to freely pop up like whack-a-moles, or social networking for anonymous blabbering and carping.

What will NASA do to "despoil" the moon next?

NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland Ohio is developing a small nuclear device that would be launched to the moon to provide 35 kilowatts of power to a manned moon base. Heat from the 1,200 degrees generated by the decay of uranium would run four Stirling engines mounted on a metal truss above the reactor.

Why not use solar power? Simply because nights on the moon are two weeks long. And, rechargeable batteries would wear out. But a small nuclear reactor would run for years untended.

The U.S. president would have to approve launching a nuke to the moon. This could be sticky considering that Chicken Little protesters unsuccessfully tried to stop NASA's 1997 launch of Cassini, a Saturn probe carrying 72 pounds of radioactive plutonium.

I can just imagine the public hysteria and doomsday warnings over putting a trashcan-sized nuclear power planet on the moon. I’ll be getting e-mails: “Don’t make the fu*king moon radioactive!”

But if we want to send humans to live on the moon and Mars, nukes will have to go along with them. There's no room for misguided and pretentious interplanetary environmentalism when it come to surviving in space.

Moon Survives Unprovoked Attack!

2009-10-09T23:48:15-04:00

Internet traffic on blogs, YouTube, and discussion boards was nearly predicting the end of the world today.

It didn’t happen.

People warned that a missile launched by evil government scientists was going to plow into the virgin Moon and explode. The effects on Earth from disrupting the celestial harmony would be unpredictable but devastating: tsunamis, meteorite showers, volcanoes – and even more global warming.

What happened instead? Early morning news anchors were speechless at the NASA live TV feed. That’s because absolutely nothing was seen happening at the ground zero moment.

The LCROSS (Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite) two-ton Centaur rocket booster disappeared into the perpetual shadow of Cabeus crater without even a thud. (Just imagine Slim Pickins from the 1964 film “Dr. Strangelove” riding it down and shouting “Ya-hooooo!”) Its shepherding probe, serving as cameraman, fell silently out of the black lunar sky a few minutes later and was swallowed by 4 billion year old regolith.

This much anticipated space drama went off for the public like a lead balloon as observatory after observatory failed to seen any evidence of skyrocketing plumes of dust and ice crystals, so dramatically previsualized in NASA animation made for TV. Even Hubble Space Telescope seemed to come up empty handed as scientists poured over the data looking for signs of water vapor on the moon – the purpose of the experiment.

Just minutes before its ultimate death, the shepherding probe did send back an infrared view of a hot spot where the Centaur impacted. The greatly enlarged image showed the crash site as one pixel wide. Imagine, one pixel, not a ballooning nuclear mushroom cloud.

It would be an understatement to say that this was anticlimactic to the Internet bubbleheads who whined and bitched in the buildup to the LCROSS impact. The much anticipate collision sure wasn’t the exploding moon so dramatically illustrated in the “Time Machine” remake in 2002, or the late 1970s sci-fi soap opera “Space 1999.” Reality sucks.

I have lamented in previous blogs about how science illiterate and frivolous our culture has become. This was dramatically demonstrated in some of the public reactions to the LCROSS. It shocked and saddened me.

NASA, once the crowning jewel of American technological prowess and scientific boldness, was lambasted in blog after blog as extravagant, paramilitary, and arrogant. That’s because in our Bart Simpson culture being stupid is cool and smart is, er, being “stupid.”

Pop culture portrays scientists as geeks to be distrusted. Some people are so fearful of science they respond to it purely with doubt and ridicule. That is, except when geeks can engineer IPods and IPhones -- which only work because some eggheads a century ago developed quantum physics.

Some of the most caustic comments I’ve seen:

What difference does the result make anyway? Does it have the potential to stop global warming, or something?

NASA geeks think we should all pay for their cool firecrackers in space.

It’s time to pull the plug on NASA; they can all go home and play with their slide rules.

This is horrible and irresponsible and beyond dangerous. And all for, what, WATER!

Add to this the ongoing ridicule from those journalism flunky bloggers who find NASA a high-visibility target to go after for relentless accusations of government secrecy, cover-up, and excesses. These pundits will now blame NASA for hyping public expectations prior to the lackluster moon smashup. And, if the collision had been a phenomenal fireworks show, these same people would have accused NASA of failing to get the public engaged.

Even worse is the mawkish environmentalism some chat board discussions tried to graft onto space exploration. Many folks assumed NASA was sending nukes to the moon in violation of the 1967 U.N. Outer Space Treaty, not to mention the “natural laws” of the universe. So they got all huffy-puffy about our “right” to “despoil” other worlds.

Guess what folks? Our universe is a violent and deadly place to be feared. Worlds are destroyed every second -- literally -- by supernova blasts, gamma-ray bursts, black holes, and cosmic collisions. There is nothing our puny technology can do to upset the moon or other planets. (But if you place 7 billion people on a single planet, that’s a different story!)

Some LCROSS critics took a giant leap back to the Middle Ages by expressing a pre-Copernican view of the moon as mystic and romantic. They even ignored Newton’s Laws of Gravity that make it crystal clear the LCROSS impact energy was Lilliputian for slamming into something the mass of the moon.

Face it, the moon is simply a ball of rock with cold heart of solid iron. It has survived bombardment for 4.4 billion years, and will far outlast our brief tenancy on planet Earth.

Though all of us who viewed the impact were disappointed that there were no “instant results,” the mission was a good cold splash of reality for the science-phobics. This event came off for what it simply was, an innocuous experiment done out of pure curiosity.

Regardless of the science outcome, LCROSS embodies the spirit of exploration and inquisitiveness. It demonstrated that science is a careful step-by-step process to be respected for it perseverance.

Those who belittle such expressions of human curiosity are belittling all of us as an intelligent species.