Rowing....in SPAAAACE!

Thanks for the top-tips on vacation destinations, NASA.

To be honest I was thinking that sailing the seas of Titan might be better, or skiing the polar caps of Mars or diving the waters of Europa, but then you never know until you've tried.

Sailing in SPAAACE - marks and lines

So how could you have start / finish lines and marks in space where this no up nor down and nothing is fixed?

A couple of ideas spring to mind, but its worth noting that space sailing is likely to be more like America's Cup racing with its virtual course borders, using electronic aids galore. In this case you could (for example) define locations with respect to an Earth Centred Inertial (ECI) coordinate frame.

Other ideas could be to use stations or satellites as marks, together with additional geometric constraints.

One such would be to define a sphere around a point or satellite. For example a race could have start to be the volume within 10 km of the International Space Station (ISS). This is simple to define but could end up with all solar sails clumped at the same, advantageous sector, most likely the point of the sphere furthest from the Earth.

Marks could be define also as sphere - for example, the figure above shows the various Earth-Sun Lagrange points, and you could imagine a race between them, such as:
- Start within 10 km of the ISS
- Pass within 100 km of L4
- Pass within 100 km of L3
- Pass within 100 km of L5
- Finish within 10 km of the ISS

This would allow solar sail craft to slightly cut the corners as they could be within 100 km while not actually going round the mark.

Alternatively the mark could be defined using a combination of distance from point or satellite plus at least as far from the central object (e.g. the Sun in these cases) as the point or satellite. More advanced ones could define solid angles using the line from the relevant central gravitational body to the mark point or satellite.

Therefore it is doable, there are ways to define such as race.

So let your imaginations go, look up at the sky, and imagine the windjammers of the future, tacking their way around the solar system.

Just keep an eye out for solar storms and those pesky space pirates!

Sailing in SPAAACE.... the RULES

The last post included a video that described how to sail in space using solar sails. But if you had two such craft then you could race... but what would the rules look like?

Back in 1992 the International Astronautical Federation proposed a Lunar Cup with a set of rules but I couldn't find them on-line but wondered.... what would they look like? How could port give way to starboard when in space neither concepts make sense?

An alternative could be to use the direction of motion of planets as in:

R1: Solar sail craft which has a thrust vector that when projected into the plane of the ecliptic has component clockwise must give way to those for which it is anti-clockwise (see graphic here)

But what about if they are in the same direction, what is the equivalent of windward / leeward? This is simpler as the solar sail thrust comes from photons from the sun, so that is the equivalent of windward, hence:

R2: Solar sail craft closer to the sun must give way to spacecraft further away

But what if they are on the same "tack" and same distance from the sun. The old rule remains a good one:

R3: Overtaking solar sail craft must give way to those being overtaken

There'd have to be the usual rules for safety of life, keeping watch etc. but also additional ones to handle eclipses, where a spacecraft is behind a planet so has no ability to maneuver, but similar rules to sailing could be used.

But how about marks? How could you define a course in 3D when everything is in motion?

Stay tuned for more...

Sailing..... in SPAAAAACE !

Two space music videos for you. The one above from the Planetary Society includes Carl Sagan talking about sailing.... in SPAAACE!

How cool would that be, tacking and gybing across the vastness of the cosmos.

Also from Public Service Broadcasting a video and song about Valentina:

Three planets and the Cosmonauts

This morning I got up at 05:30 to do a spot of astronomy. It wasn't as bad as it sounds thanks to the hour change, so in BST it would be the more reasonable 06:30.

The light was rather beautiful and I had just a handful of early rising birds for company.

The reason for heading out into the cold was the conjunction in the morning eastern sky of Venus, Jupiter and Mars, making a clear and bright triangle:

There's a nice little gif identifying each and describing their motion to be found here.

There's more space in London at the moment with a superb exhibition of early Soviet / Russian space technology in "Cosmonauts" at the Science Museum:

It was all rather brilliant, with lots of fantastic real engineering, such as Valentina Tereshkova's Vostok 6 capsule. The only downside was KGB levels of scrutiny to ensure that no photos were taken - apparently there were items on display that had to be specially declassified.

Well worth looking up in the night's sky if you have a cloud-free morning or visiting the Cosmonauts if you're in London.

Outbound and Inbound

My absolute most favourite thing to do on a plane is to look out of the window, which is almost always better than any in-flight entertainment system.

There is nothing is more frustrating than when there's a "keep the blinds down" policy (Is this North Korea? Aren't we allowed even to look out of a window? What other point is there to a window seat?).

Anyhow, here's one photo (above) outbound to Annapolis of the icy shore of Labrador and then I guess you'll know where this inbound flight photo is:

My absolute favourite phrase that I've heard this week is that New Horizons is now "outbound from Pluto".

Sigh.

Outbound from Pluto!!!

Do harpoons work on comets?

Golly, what an exciting afternoon! Double screen time with both twitter and live feed open.

Congrats to the Rosetta and Philae team for the (possibly bouncy) landing!

Loved the comic strip updates from the web comic xkcd as shown above - which have already been converted into an animated gif. And we still don't know whether harpoons work on comets.

Can't wait to see what pictures get released tomorrow.

Fingers still crossed, just in case.


Updated: Philae on the way down:

Where Philae should be and where it looks like it ended up after two bounces, one of around 1 km (from here).

Why offshore sailing is like space travel

I'm currently reading Chris Hadfield's book An Astronaut's Guide to Life (spoiler alert: its great) and he wrote this:

The rough-and-ready, improvisational quality to life on board is reminiscent of a long trip in a sailboat: privacy and fresh produce are in short supply, hygiene is basic, and a fair amount of the crew's time is spent just on a maintaining and repairing the craft.

There're more similarities in the preparation involved in getting into space and:

The first explorers who crossed the ocean in sailing ships didn't blithely set off without considering the practicalities and logistics. Before they even left land, they tried to figure out which kind of timber would hold up the best and what kinds of food would keep on a long voyage.

Must say I had a similar idea - I thought that the Inspiration flyby of Mars trip with two people on-board sounded just the thing for a long-distance double handed sailing team.

BTW: I like double handed sailing.

Foggy Thames, misty Mars

The last few mornings London has been covered with a thick blanket of fog, causing the Thames Clipper to sound its horn as it felt its way carefully up or down the river.

And it appears that the Earth is not the only planet to suffer from the seasonal vapours as can be seen by this photo from Mars which show the canyons covered in mist:

The Solent from SPAAAACE

This photo of the Isle of Wight and the Solent was taken by Chris Hadfield, the man with the coolest job title both on and off the planet, namely Commander of the Space Station.

I think that one's not going to get on this would-be space cadet's CV, but will settle for the chance to get out on these waters and hopefully soon.

London from SPAAACE

This very cool photo was taken by astronaut Chris Hadfield on the International Space Station who said:

From London on the Thames to the sea to the world, so much of history came from this brightly-lit city

And somewhere in that sprawl is JP HQ.

Iridium 9555 phone

For this trip we're taking the Iridium 9555 phone.

At the London Boat Show I asked around for packages and the cheapest option seemed to be to hire it. In the end I've got it for 2 months from these guys which was a bit longer than need be but it gave time to get used to it.

As explained in the previous post we're using it to download GRIBs onto an iPad. As the USB connection doesn't work with iThings we had to get an Iridium Axcess point wifi node together with Apps for the iPhone and iPad to drive it.

The Apps give email and web browsing tools that optimise use of the limited data rates available.

In addition you can send and receive texts which is useful so don't have to have the phone on all the time. There's even a web site to send texts which is very useful:
       http://messaging.iridium.com/

All these boxes require power, so it was important to get car charging adapters for all of them.

However now, fingers crossed, should be able to download GRIBs and find out what sort of weather we can expect to receive.

Full review on return.

Blogging from SPAAAACE

Ok not from space, but via space. This blog post went from iPad to wifi box to Iridium phone up to one satellite, bounce its way between a few more, download to Iridium hq, route through their server to blogger.com and hence to a post.

All that technology just to say "hello"

Happy New Year 2012

A lovely abstract for which the reality is as interesting: this is an image from the probe Cassini currently orbiting Saturn, as explained here.

Watch out Martian rocks

I can hear it now: "We come in peace.... take that you dirty Martian rock! Pzam! Pzam!!"

Very cool - apart from the fact that you would have thought NASA would know you wouldn't hear those pst! pst! sounds in space.

And it should have been sponsored by Pixar and called Wall-E, though I guess Curiosity is a good name (unless you're a cat).

Gagarin Paper Weight

Following up on yesterday's 50th anniversary with moon photo post here is a paper weight of Gagarin I picked up when in Tbilisi.

Remembering Gagarin

In honour of the 50th anniversary of Gagarin's successful first orbital flight here's another picture of the moon (taken this time with small tripod).

A sense of scale

I've been feeling overwhelmed by the scale of the planet, and its not just the sight of O'Docker's yacht in the midst of the wide seas.

I've been walking the streets of London imagining raging waters the height of three story buildings blast everything in it's path, racing up the Thames swallowing bridges and house boats with ease.

Then there's the picture above. It's a famous one, called the pale blue dot. And that one pixel is us; it's Earth.

In fact we are not even a single pixel, maybe 0.12 of a pixel. At this scale even if the whole of Japan has been shifted 2.4 m (a mind blowing concept) it would be invisible.

But what is even more amazing is that we can engineer a craft to travel 6 billion km away, command it to turn round, take a picture, then radio it back to us - and then be alive and conscious, able to wonder at it.

We might be tiny compared to the world, but as they say: size isn't everything.

Inflatable everything?

One of the things I was meant to do last weekend was another hunt for a suitable inflatable kayak, after failing to find one at the Boat Show.

While wandering the halls of the ExCel centre I had this thought - what about an inflatable sailing dinghy? Just as I was shaking my head at my own stupidity what should I see but the above, the SmartKat inflatable catamaran.

It looks surprisingly good for something that packs up into two bags, and is relatively straight-forward to put together, as can be seen in this YouTube video.

And if catamarans then what else? Well apparently even the sky is not the limit as this proposed module to the space station is to go by:

Blow me up, Scotty!

The truth is out there

A couple of days ago I posted Buff Spaceman's report on the "Spontaneous Crystalline DHMO Alien Sculpture Phenomena" or SCDASP in which he went on to suggest a link between SCDASP with the North Star, saying it was "the focus on an ongoing investigation."

Imagine my surprise when I read on the interwebby thing that NASA, as part of the SETI project, transmitted a message towards Polaris!

Spooky or what.

More on the search for ET in a great BBC4 documentary about the Drake Equation to be found on iPlayer here.

I was going to post a link to the Natural Navigator's puzzle about the picture above (basically asking what's wrong with it) but was too busy so the answer has already been supplied, by, err, me.

Anyhow, head over there so you can say "I could have told you that!"

Then you will see how these two stories are connected.