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In astronomy, when a celestial body passes across the face of a larger, more distant body, it’s called a transit. When the nearer body is large enough or close enough to completely block the more distant body, it’s called an occultation, instead.

The International Space Station (ISS) is probably not classified as a celestial body, but this view of the space shuttle
Atlantis and the ISS crossing the face of the sun from an earth-bound telescope has certainly captured a lot of attention. (I believe the yellow of the sun is artificially added.)

As it happens, ISS transits aren’t exceedingly rare. Ed Morana has a collection of photos and videos of the ISS crossing the sun and the moon. Watch the videos, but don’t blink — the ISS streaks across the picture very quickly.

From last night’s NewsHour on PBS, Silicon Valley venture capitalist Vinod Khosla talked with economics reporter Paul Solman about global warming and the choice of doing nothing:

Khosla: I won’t contend that I can prove with 100% certainty, but 98% of the scientists, maybe more, believe that we have a serious climate problem. … You can’t prove that your house is gonna burn down.

Solman: No, I don’t think my house is gonna burn down.

Khosla: No, you don’t. But you still pay — every year, year after year — your insurance premiums, to make sure, just in case. Are we willing to take that kind of risk at the planetary level, for earth, and not buy any insurance?

Since he took office, George W. Bush has stalled action to reduce greenhouse gases by calling for “more study” of global warming. Now, scientists seem to be forming a consensus that a catastrophic climate change is already under way, and conservatives are stalling action on greenhouse gases by saying it’s too late to fix the problem. From The New Yorker:

Antarctica is losing ice. The rate of loss, according to researchers at the University of Colorado, in Boulder … is around thirty-six cubic miles per year. (For comparison’s sake, the city of Los Angeles uses about one-fifth of a cubic mile of water annually.) … If the loss continues, it will mean that predictions for the rise in the sea level for the coming century are seriously understated.

The news from Antarctica follows a string of similarly grim discoveries. In September, satellite measurements showed that the extent of the Arctic ice cap had shrunk to the smallest area ever recorded, prompting a prediction that the Arctic Ocean could be ice-free in summer “well before the end of this century.” Around the same time, a group of British scientists reported that soils in England and Wales have been losing carbon at the rate of four million metric tons a year, a loss that is at once a symptom of warming and — as much of that carbon is released into the atmosphere — a likely cause of more. In January, researchers at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies concluded that 2005 had been the hottest year on record, and, in February, a team of scientists from NASA and the University of Kansas announced that the flow of ice from glaciers in Greenland had more than doubled over the past decade. … “People say climate change is something for our kids to worry about,” one official told the Washington Post. “No. It’s now.”

In the face of such news, how does a country, i.e. the United States, justify further inaction? Certainly, there isn’t much tread left in the argument that global warming is, to use Senator James Inhofe’s famous formulation, a “hoax.” …

The new argument making the rounds of conservative think tanks, like the National Center for Policy Analysis, and circulating through assorted sympathetic publications goes something like this: Yes, the planet may be warming up, but no one can be sure of why, and, in any case, it doesn’t matter — let’s stop quibbling about the causes of climate change and concentrate on dealing with the consequences. …

The beauty of this argument is its apparent high-mindedness, and this, of course, is also its danger. Carbon dioxide is a persistent gas — it lasts for about a century — and once released into the atmosphere it is, for all practical purposes, irrecoverable. Since every extra increment of CO2 leads to extra warming, addressing the effects of climate change without dealing with the cause is a bit like trying to treat diabetes with doughnuts. The climate isn’t going to change just once, and then settle down; unless CO2 concentrations are stabilized, it will keep on changing, producing, in addition to the “same old problems,” an ever-growing array of new ones. The head of the Goddard Institute, James Hansen, who first warned about the dangers of global warming back in the nineteen-seventies and recently made headlines by accusing the Bush Administration of censorship, has said that following the path of business-as-usual for the remainder of this century will lead to an earth so warm as to be “practically a different planet.”

On the plus side, think of the money we can save on the space program.

A CNN transcript of their coverage, three years ago today, when the space shuttle Columbia broke up on re-entry:

MILES O’BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: All right. Got a little problem on the space shuttle Columbia. It’s been out of communication now for the past 12 minutes. Let’s take a look at a live picture of Mission Control in Houston.
As we’ve been telling you all this morning, it is on its way in for a landing, and flight controllers there in Houston are busy going through their no-com procedures, in other words, lack of communication from the shuttle. They’ve been trying to raise the space shuttle Columbia for quite some time now.

…

And at this juncture, we — I cannot tell you honestly the significance of it, except to tell you that the space shuttle Columbia was due for a landing right about now. We are watching this very closely.

More of the transcript, plus other related transcripts, can be found here.

Twenty years ago today, the space shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after launch. The entire crew was killed: Dick Scobee, Michael Smith, Judith Resnick, Ellison Onizuka, Ronald McNair, Gregory Jarvis and Christa McAuliffe.

Former astronaut John Glenn, a U.S. Senator at the time, said what we were all thinking: that we always knew a day like this would come, but we always hoped it would not be this day.

This is a sad time of year for NASA. Yesterday, January 27, was the thirty-ninth anniversary of the Apollo 1 launchpad fire that killed Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee. Next Wednesday, February 1, is the third anniversary of the breakup on re-entry of shuttle Columbia, which killed Rick Husband, William McCool, Michael Anderson, David Brown, Kalpana Chawla, Laurel Clark, and Ilan Ramon.

Our astronauts are truly the brightest and the best this country has to offer. The things that NASA tries to do are fundamentally difficult, and fundamentally risky. The astronauts are ready to face great risk in order to achieve great things, but they have no intention of throwing their lives away carelessly, and we must never expect them to do so.

Let’s remember the dead astronauts, and honor their memory in the only way that matters: by carrying on their important work with the utmost care for the lives of the living astronauts.

We always know that days like those will come. When the next tragedy comes, as it surely will, let it never be because we valued the lives of our best people too lightly.

Update: Via Slashdot, MSNBC has an eight-part article about the Challenger disaster, written by correspondent Jay Barbree.

Thirty-three years ago today was the last time any human being walked on the Moon.

The first time any human being walked on the Moon was thirty-six years ago last July 20th.

Those were three and a half remarkable years. They seemed to show what human ingenuity and initiative could do when we harnessed our energies to solve a difficult problem. I watched the Apollo missions, and felt optimistic that, in my lifetime, we would make the world a better place for everyone.

I was a space nut. I still am. But, to me, the important thing about the Apollo program was not the moon rocks, or the big rockets, or any of the cool hardware. There was something else — something almost spiritual. The important thing was not that we landed on the Moon, but that we did something very hard. We didn’t shy away from the challenge.

The Apollo missions showed us something we keep forgetting: that we are strong, and smart, and resourceful. We don’t need to be weak and powerless in the face of great problems. There is greatness in us. It shows itself when we have the will to confront our problems.

That greatness should not be confined only to history books.

Al Franken talking with Chris Mooney, author of The Republican War on Science:

Franken: This is Bobby Kennedy Jr.’s phrase: biostitutes. And these are guys who are scientists who are for hire…. And they will go in, and for enough money, declare that global warming is just, “It’s an open question as to whether it’s happening.” … And they’ll turn out a good two or three page report. And people in the media will get it, and then they’ll get the peer-reviewed study which is 1200 pages long. And they’ll go like … “I guess there’s an open question as to whether global warming’s really happening.”

Mooney: The press is definitely part of the problem on some of these issues.

Franken: Would you say laziness?

Mooney: Yeah, or just — it’s part of the institutional culture, as well: the “he said, she said, we’re clueless.” On the coverage, I mean. That’s what I call it.

Franken: Wait — he said, she said, we’re clueless?

Mooney: Yeah. “We’re” being the journalists. So they just — they refuse to evaluate the quality of the information. And on some issues, there might be a real scientific debate, right? Depends on the issue. Global warming, no debate. It’s quite clear. Evolution, no debate. It’s quite clear what the scientific point of view is, and there’s people who want to create a controversy for political reasons.

From his HBO program Real Time, here’s Bill Maher on Intelligent Design:

New rule: You don’t have to teach both sides of a debate if one side is a load of crap.

President Bush recently suggested that public schools should teach intelligent design alongside the theory of evolution, because, after all, evolution is “just a theory.” Then the president renewed his vow to drive the terrorists straight over the edge of the earth.

…

There aren’t necessarily two sides to every issue. If there were, the Republicans would have an opposition party. And an opposition party would point out that even though there is a debate in schools and government about this, there is no debate among scientists.

Evolution is supported by the entire scientific community. Intelligent design is supported by guys on line to see The Dukes of Hazzard. And the reason there is no real debate is that intelligent design isn’t real science. It’s the equivalent of saying that the thermos keeps hot things hot and cold things cold because it’s a god.

…

“Babies come from storks” is not a competing school of thought in medical school. We shouldn’t teach both. The media shouldn’t equate both.

On January 28, 1986, I was working in the lab supply storeroom on the first floor of the Biological Sciences Building at the Ohio State University. A graduate student stuck her head in the door and said, “Did you hear, Mike? The space shuttle exploded!”

That — not the subsequent video replays — is the moment I’ll never erase from my memory.

I asked questions, but she didn’t have many details. What she had heard wasn’t encouraging. I hoped she’d heard wrong.

I imagined a hundred different scenarios. There had been a terrible accident on the launch pad, but everyone had gotten safely away. If the shuttle exploded in orbit, ground controllers would see only a loss of downlink: the radio would go silent, and the constantly-changing numbers on their consoles would stop changing. Then someone would observe that radar was tracking multiple targets. I didn’t want to think of the scenarios where the astronauts didn’t escape.

We’ve been putting people onto rockets since 1961, and every journey begins with a lump in the throat, and a sense of dread that takes the breath away, and makes us whisper “Godspeed.” When do we breathe easy?

Before the Challenger disaster, I think we breathed a sigh of relief when the shuttle cleared the launch tower. The rockets had all lit, and hadn’t exploded. The spacecraft was on its way. Everything was going to be alright.

The night of the Challenger explosion, I saw a high-school class cheer and groan when the shuttle exploded. The sequence of launch events had been explained to them. Most saw the two solid-rocket boosters (SRBs) flying away, and thought it was the planned SRB separation. Others sensed instantly that there was something wrong.

Later, we learned that the Challenger was destroyed by a flaw in one of the SRBs. After the Challenger disaster, we held our sigh of relief until after the SRB separation. I held mine for MECO — Main Engine Cutoff. I suspect the people really in the know didn’t relax even then.

The shuttle Columbia broke up on re-entry 17 years and 4 days after the Challenger disaster. Controllers lost their downlink. Radar started tracking multiple targets. Witnesses heard a sonic boom that lasted for thirty seconds or longer. What they heard was actually a sequence of sonic booms — the spacecraft had broken into pieces, and each piece made a separate boom.

Email from my brother living near Los Angeles:

At about 5:02AM Tuesday, August 9th, a double sonic boom rattled Southern California
announcing the return of the space shuttle Discovery.

It woke me up. ………. Hoorah!

I saved my sigh of relief until the wheels stopped turning.

Godspeed, Discovery, and welcome home.

There are some things you just can’t get from a book.

Magazines like Life and Look ran huge, beautiful photo spreads when Apollo 8, the first manned journey to the moon, brought back pictures like this.

We’ve all seen these photos. The images are so familiar now that it’s hard to understand that there was a time when they were astonishing and disorienting — a time when it seemed they just might revolutionize earthbound thinking.

I’ve spent many hours gazing at those photos. They show us ourselves, from a new perspective. Yet, I think my understanding falls short. We can’t adequately grasp this view of the world by looking at photographs. To fully understand it, I think, we must see it through a window. We must see it with our own eyes.

Earthbound thinking is tough to revolutionize.

Thirty-six years ago today, human beings first touched down on the moon in the Sea of Tranquility.

Most of the world’s population today were born after the landing. A man on the moon is not a hopeful futuristic idea, but a half-forgotten historical event.

In his autobiography, Last Man on the Moon, astronaut Eugene Cernan writes:

Sometimes it seems that Apollo came before its time. President Kennedy reached far into the twenty-first century, grabbed a decade of time and slipped it neatly into the 1960s and 1970s. Logic dictates that after Mercury and Gemini, we should have proceeded to build the shuttle, then an orbiting space station, and only then sought the Moon. As it was, we accomplished the impossible, then started over again.

Here are lunar panoramas and photographs from the Apollo missions.

While we await the launch of the Return to Flight mission of space shuttle Discovery, here is a moving essay on the people who fly these ships. On the final flight of the shuttle Columbia:

Perhaps ten minutes before eight am on Saturday morning, Rick Husband and Willie McCool started to pay attention to the data coming from the left wing sensors. It was 30 degrees warmer than normal in the left wheel well. Not much, considering the 2-3000 degrees on the leading edge of their wings and nose, but something to pay attention to. Anomalies are never good. There are no pleasant surprises in the flying business.

By 7:55 things were looking worse — a lot worse. Unbenownst to the crew, telemetry beamed to the ground showed that readings from the heat sensors in the left wing started to rise, and then dropped to zero. They were failing, in a pattern expanding away from the left wheel well. Tire pressures were way high on the left side, and then those sensors failed too.

Sensors fail all the time. But this was different. This was a pattern, and it was spreading. And something was starting to pull the ship to the left.

I don’t know the words he used, but I can hear the tone perfectly in my head, because it’s exactly the same tone I’ve heard dozens of times on cockpit voice recorders. It’s concern. Alarm, even. But it’s cool. Disciplined.

All right, we’ve got a problem here…

It’s a long piece, well worth reading.

Humans leave their mark on the planet:

The devastating impact of mankind on the planet is dramatically illustrated in pictures published on Saturday showing explosive urban sprawl, major deforestation and the sucking dry of inland seas over less than three decades.

Mexico City mushrooms from a modest urban center in 1973 to a massive blot on the landscape in 2000, while Beijing shows a similar surge between 1978 and 2000 in satellite pictures published by the United Nations in a new environmental atlas.

…

“If there is one message from this atlas it is that we are all part of this. We can all make a difference,” U.N. expert Kaveh Zahedi told reporters at the launch of the “One Planet Many People” atlas on the eve of World Environment Day.

…

“These illustrate some of the changes we have made to our environment,” Zahedi said. “This is a visual tool to capture people’s imaginations showing what is really happening.”

“It serves as an early warning,” he added.

Click the “Next” button under the photo in the story to scroll through a series of before and after photos.

Via this site, here’s Richard Feynman on discovering new laws of physics:

First you guess. Don’t laugh, this is the most important step. Then you compute the consequences. Compare the consequences to experience. If it disagrees with experience, the guess is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn’t matter how beautiful your guess is or how smart you are or what your name is. If it disagrees with experience, it’s wrong. That’s all there is to it.

The Hubble Space Telescope marks fifteen years of service.

Thirty-five years ago this evening, a spherical oxygen tank in the Apollo 13 spacecraft exploded, with a loud bang that rocked the spacecraft.

Flight controllers on the ground didn’t hear the bang, but they noticed sudden changes in numbers displayed on the computer terminals where they monitored the many systems that made up the spacecraft.

The controllers talk to each other with headsets wired into a communications channel called the loop. Many of the controllers are listening to two loops: the main flight controller loop, and a second loop connecting specialists in a particular mission sub-system. Thirty-five years ago tonight, the real action was on the EECOM loop, where the experts monitoring the environmental and electrical systems of the spacecraft’s command and service modules worked to understand the most serious problem America had yet faced in space.

Astronaut Swigert: Okay, Houston, we’ve had a problem here.

Unidentified voice #1: What’s the matter with the data, EECOM?

Unidentified voice #2: We’ve got more than a problem.

EECOM: Okay, listen, listen, you guys. We’ve lost fuel cell one and two pressure.

Unidentified voice #2: We lost O₂ tank two pressure. And temperature.

Astronaut Lovell: Uh, Houston, we’ve had a problem.

EECOM: Okay.

Unidentified voice #2: Standby, they’ve got a problem.

Astronaut Lovell: Main B bus undervolt.

Capcom: Roger, main B undervolt.

Later, EECOM Sy Liebergot realized, with dread, exactly what had happened:

Unidentified voice #3: I want to psych out what those fuel cells are doing here. We might have a pressure problem in the fuel cells, it looks like.

EECOM: Yeah, I see the N₂…

Unidentified voice #3: Two fuel cells simultaneously.

EECOM: That can’t be.

Unidentified voice #3: I can’t believe that, right off the bat, but — but they’re not feeding current.

EECOM: Yeah, if you believe that N₂ pressure, we blew a sphere.

Apollo 13’s lunar landing mission was doomed from the moment the oxygen tank exploded. Through the heroic efforts of the astronauts and the ground crew, the three astronauts were returned safely to earth.

For years, NASA considered the Apollo 13 mission a failure, and tried to sweep it under the rug. It took years to understand that Apollo 13 was not a failure. It was the most severe test imaginable of the people and the processes of the Apollo program; they passed the test. The other Apollo missions were engineering triumphs. Apollo 13 was more than that. The safe splashdown of the Apollo 13 command module was the greatest moment of the entire Apollo program.

Years later, Apollo 13 commander Jim Lovell wrote a book about the experience, called Lost Moon. Hollywood turned the book into the blockbuster movie Apollo 13, and Lovell’s book was renamed Apollo 13 to take advantage of the publicity. The book is well worth reading. (The movie is entertaining, but overly melodramatic.)

The best book about Apollo 13 is 13: The Flight That Failed, by Henry S. F. Cooper. I think I’ve read it five times. It’s never taken me much more than a day to read it, because I just can’t put it down once I start reading. If you have any interest in the Apollo program, Cooper’s book is the best place to start reading.