Archive for the ‘forms of communication’ Tag
Illustration: NASA
Now, doesn’t that sound like a great title for a sci-fi novel?
Actually, this story’s true and it is a great story for a movie.
Way back when Jimmy Carter was president, in 1978, the International Sun-Earth Explorer 3 was launched with the mission to investigate solar wind’s interaction with the Earth’s magnetic field. Later, it was renamed the International Cometary Explorer (ICE) to study comets. In September 1985, it passed through the tail of Comet Giacobini-Zinner, and in 1986 it was tasked with the mission to observe Halley’s Comet. During the same year, three rocket burns put it on a course to position it above the moon on August 10, 2014. With the ICE so near, a space shuttle could snatch it and return it to earth, and NASA had this in mind because it planned to donate it to the National Air and Space Museum.
After a few more missions, it was retired in 1997, although it loops around the sun in a 355 day orbit. It will catch up with and pass the Earth this August 2014. But in 1999, the Deep Space Network was upgraded and the transmitters that communicated with ICE were themselves retired, although no one said this to ICE, who continued its end of the bargain by remaining open to communication. It’s sort of like being kept on hold and waiting forever, without anyone telling you that the person who put you there went home a long time ago, leaving you to listen to horrible Kenny G music in the meantime.
And really, that should have been the end of the story. But it isn’t.
Within the confines of yet another decommissioned icon, an entrepreneurial engineer named Dennis Wingo has managed the impossible. He and his team have begun communicating with ICE once more. Mr. Wingo’s company is Skycorp and it’s located in an ex-McDonalds in a decommissioned Navy base that has been repurposed for nonprofits, academia and small technology firms.
A decommissioned satellite linked with a decommissioned burger factory is kind of cool. There’s something very Max Headroom about it. I like it.
Through Mr. Wingo’s determination, a group of engineers, including those who originally worked on the project, plus a crowd funding site RocketHub, they raised approximately $160,ooo to breathe life in the old gal. And NASA’s doing its part too, donating time on its Deep Space Network to help getting ICE going again.
ICE is still doing its job out there and observing solar flares and other phenomena, as was discovered. So there was great optimism to position it over the moon as originally planned, which now requires 400 pulses to place it over the sweet spot. There’s been a few minor setbacks, but if all goes well, Mr. Wingo and his team are all set to pull ICE into a moon gravity-based slingshot into an orbit around the earth, so it can receive instructions for a new mission.
I have to admit that this story has me cheering. Why should there be a whole pile of forgotten and unused satellites and space paraphernalia after NASA and all the world’s other space agencies no longer need them? It’s an excellent opportunity for others, corporations like Skycorp but also universities and even astronomy and engineering clubs to find other purposes for them? Sure, one can say that leaves opportunities for crimes we haven’t even imagined yet. On the other hand, I’m sticking with the belief that a lot of good can come from that zombie named ICE, and its other colleagues out there.
Just imagine the stories that can be dreamed up from this real-life adventure…
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Image: Lynette Cook, NASA
There’s a brisk business in the sci-fi fiction world wherein writers devise plots regarding worlds thousands of millions of light years yonder, only reachable by wormholes or imagination. At the same time, astronomers here on earth keep their eyes stuck to their favorite observing instrument of choice seeking out new planets, and, because there appears to be an obvious lack of wormholes (or so I believe; I could be wrong), they use their imaginations to conceive images of what these new worlds would look like.
On Independence Day, I sat on the porch of my parents’ house (so hard still to visit and not see my mother there) and flipped through the offerings on Endgadget. A posted article entitled, “The first potentially habitable alien planets we ever found – might not actually exist,” written by Richard Lawler caught my attention. In it, he writes about Gliese 581g, a planet orbiting Gliese 581, a star located in the constellation Libra. What made Gliese 581g so intriguing is its location in the “Goldilocks zone,” so called because it’s the correct distance from its sun to possess a moderate temperature for liquid water – not too hot or cold. It had also been determined that the planet didn’t spin on its axis and one side was perpetually in the dark. Artists created imaginative drawings, dreaming up visions of what this planet could look like.
Alas, it appears to have been all for naught. Spectrographic readings taken from Gliese 581 now indicate that 581g might actually not exist. How is that possible? The short answer is that the very signals that determined a planet might be located in a particular place also can be attributed to another source, say, “space stuff.” What would have produced a signal for the spectrometer to read no longer exists. It faded. Disappeared. Or, alternatively, may have been misread.
What a delicious idea for a plot.
Take it from the 581g’s point of view. Of course, that wouldn’t be the name of the planet. In my head, it’d be more like Ulele or Onodon – a whispery moniker reminiscent of mystery and exotica. For millennia the habitants, fiercely protective of their unique home, shrouded their visibility because of a unique feature Ulele/Onodon hosts. A signal accidentally launched by a careless Uleleian/Onodonite as it lit its cigarette on a rations replenish break, triggers a spectrograph that sits in the Earth lab of Dr. Jill Jackson, a red-headed ball of fire pouncing on a grand opportunity to stake her position as the sharpest astrophysicist in the universe. Having maxed out her credit cards and on the brink of credit collapse, she aims for the Nobel Prize and its generous financial reward and reveals her discovery to fellow scientists. Unbeknownst to her, the Ulele/Onodons are hot on her trail, thanks to sensitive instruments tuned to the merest hint of detective devices such as the one Dr. Jackson uses, and seek revenge…but not before re-cloaking their planet. Vowing to hunt her down like an unwanted cockroach in a Harlem apartment, Ulele/Onodon Fowler Falx is hot on her trail, and won’t stop until she’s obliterated and vanishes from view…just like 581g.
See, that explanation is much more entertaining than, “We thought we saw something…honest!…but it just…disappeared. Or, a similar incident as detailed above really happened and no one will admit it, because as any watcher of any sci-fi series involving space generally hide evidence regarding alien encounters. Since the jury is out on aliens’ actual existence, I’d like to seize this celestial development and give it a life, thicken its plot and give it hope for the future.
Keep your eyes to the skies, folks. The universe is filled with enigmas.
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Here’s a mystery for you: How can one recognize a sound if one doesn’t know what one is listening for?
Envision the sound of water dripping. To us, it’s immediately identifiable. A persistent plunk of droplets, often landing in unwanted places. That faucet with the worn valve, a pipe’s joinery weakening, even raindrops plopping a steady rhythm – all instantly recognizable, regardless of different circumstances. It’s water. We know that.
Now imagine that sound broadcast over light-years’ worth of distances. A resident of another galaxy hears it. Perhaps on his or her planet, water evaporates or freezes. Will this off-world listener misinterpret our ambient noises to be a distinct language?
As depicted in the movie, “Contact,” our broadcasts words, laughter, music, applause and other activity drifted out beyond our solar system’s outer reaches. We only know what passes for language here on Earth. How do other life forms communicate? Perhaps applause might not be recognized as having a function. Music might not exist at all. Laughing might be a language all unto itself.
We allege that our off-world companions might exhibit the same traits as we humans do. It’s only natural, since we don’t have any standard method of comparison. Our Earth is filled with a virtual cacophony of sounds, each bearing a unique interpretation, all providing information we need to assess our reaction, if any is necessary. How, then, do we describe to our off-world friend what exactly we are hearing when we cannot communicate the definition of it?
What happens when we hear our first off-world sounds from a habited planet? A friendly gesture might resemble explosions. Our experience tells us we are in danger. Our foreign friend freaks out when charged with guns and bombs, and then what? The Off-Worlder retreats or worse, dies.
Sound waves travel differently given the amount of resistance they encounter. A bell changes its tune as it rises in altitude. Temperature also affects sound. String instruments hate the cold. Drums can be cooperative, although animal skin drumheads shrink or expand with the temperature and humidity.
An off-world sound brought to Earth can lose its characteristics unique to its planet and present an entirely changed audio experience. How to identify a sound never before heard? Good question. I thought about that and wondered how I’d react. I’m curious and I’d investigate. I’d do that, though, only if the sound registers in my ear. If my cat ran off or the neighbor’s dogs started barking like crazy, and nothing was around to set them off, then what? Or if that sound destroyed object like a laser – a highly concentrated,focused beam of sound silently destroyed selected targets, I’d seriously worry.
Sounds like a mystery to me…
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Moon, Stars and Beyond 