Sunday, February 16, 2014

The "Grand Challenge" of the 100 Year Starship

I picked up a little book my folks gave me back in 1950, "Things A Boy Can Do with Electricity"by Alfred Morgan. It is copyright 1938 and my copy was printed in 1949.
...
Chapter 2, Contents: A Curious Mineral which Leads to Adventures in Magnetism – An Experiment Hundreds of Years Old ; Magnetic Substances ; What is Magnetism? ; We Live on a Magnet ; Making a Compass ; Making a Magnet ; An Adventure ; An Experiment Showing Something Which Appears to Exist but Does Not Exist. 
...
One probably doesn't have a Model T spark coil to play with today but it was fun making a Jacob's Ladder with sparks climbing up between two coat hangar wires, that is until dad called me up on the intercom to tell me I was messing up our black and white TV. :-)  Today there are more safety rules and my high voltage neon sign transformer would probably be frowned upon. :-)

All of this started me thinking, what would a young experimenting teenager do on an Interstellar Starship?  
Would some nuclear physicist provide me with a 256GB flash drive with the technical manual "Things A Boy Can Do with Nuclear Energy"? :-)

Science fiction has us riding on many starships with many exotic propulsion systems, the cost of which makes you think twice about why we should even think about the challenge of a 100 Year Starship, but there are a lot of things that would need to be considered and that is what makes it great.  How would you prepare to go on a trip of many life times?. And then stop and think how would you better prepare for many life times on Starship Earth.
- LRK -

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Meet the 100-Year Starship project, which aims to propel humanity to the stars. It won't be easy, but getting there could help solve this world's problems along the way.

Mark Hachman March 11, 2013

A voyage to the stars: Science fiction authors typically just assume we can do it. The awesomely ambitious 100-Year Starship project, however, was formed, quite literally, to help perform the heavy lifting.

Project members spoke in a session at the South by Southwest (SXSW) conferenceon Monday in Austin, where they laid out some of the problems humanity will have to overcome for humans to leave the planet. The issues range from simply finding a planet that could support human life to constructing a spacecraft that could get us there to developing some form of propulsion that would enable a manageable trip length. Then there are more prosaic concerns, like creating a self-sustaining food source and even a social structure that would preserve society over a voyage that would likely take decades, or even longer.
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A very dynamic presentation.
- LRK -

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It’s a dynamic star map that shows the closest star to you directly overhead when you look up. And since the Earth is constantly moving, our logo features different stars based on where you are and what time it is. For example, the sky will look different to someone in Turkey at 6 pm than it would to someone looking up in Brazil at 6 am.

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Back in 2011 a SPACE.com notice.
- LRK -

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NASA's 100-Year Starship Project Sets Sights on Interstellar Travel

Shooting for the stars will first require a lot of down-to-Earth elbow grease, as NASA's new 100-Year Starship project illustrates. The effort, to journey between stars in the 2100s, began with a workshop and now is in the study phase.

NASA's Ames Research Center and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) are collaborating on the $1 million 100-Year Starship Study, an effort to take the first step in the next era of space exploration.

The study will scrutinize the business model needed to develop and mature technologies needed to enable long-haul human space treks a century from now. Kick-started by a strategic planning workshop in January, the project has brought together more than two dozen farsighted futurists, NASA specialists, science fiction writers, foundation aficionados and educators.
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And the Wikipedia article.
- LRK -

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The 100 Year Starship (100YSS) is a joint U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) grant project to a private entity in order to work toward achieving interstellar travel.[1] The aim of the project, announced in January 2012, is to work toward achieving interstellar travel within the next 100 years.
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Thanks for looking up with me. 
- LRK -
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WHAT THE MIND CAN CONCEIVE, AND BELIEVE, IT WILL ACHIEVE - LRK -

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Saturday, February 15, 2014

Cosmos 11: The Persistence of Memory - will you be remembered?

I am still trying to make space in my garage so that I might set up an old Amiga computer that is buried somewhere in the stuff I have from back in the 80's when I started work at NASA Ames Research Center.  Now what do I do with the stacks of BYTE and Scientific American magazines? 

I would like to share Shane L. Larson's blog post, Cosmos 11: The Persistence of Memory.
Our digital society just keeps changing and my boxes of floppy disks are looking for some device to read them.
The CompuPro S-100 bus computer has gone the way of electronic recycle and the 8 inch floppies have no one to read them.

I still have book shelves, although many of the books are rusty red with acid age.  
Hopefully the newer ones that are made with acid-free paper will survive longer.

What would some future generation ask of us if they had nothing but our empty cities to look at?
- LRK - 

Cosmos 11: The Persistence of Memory

by Shane L. Larson
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As scientists, when we look at the crumbling remains of lost civilizations, we try to let our minds imagine how it happened.  When I stare into the ruins of a society long since vanished from the Earth, such as the Anasazi of the American Southwest, the Tiwanaku of western Bolivia, or even the ancient Romans, I often wonder what happened near the end?  Did they know their civilization was crumbling, that it would soon be subsumed by the slow and steady march of time?  What did the people think and do as their society was collapsing around them?
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Times change, new inventions hit the market, old devices end up in the trash.
There is a box of vacuum tubes (valves to some) out there in the garage looking for a roll chart tube tester.
They came out of my desk in my room over my folks garage that I slept in as a teenager.
Now no more as the house and garage were sold and have been replaced with two houses and two garage apartments.
No secret vault behind the removable rock in the rock wall next to the patio fireplace. Gone, making room for that second garage apartment.
- LRK -

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Valve amplifier

A valve amplifier or tube amplifier is a type of electronic amplifier that makes use of vacuum tubes to increase the amplitude of a signal. Low to medium power valve amplifiers for frequencies below the microwaves were largely replaced by solid state amplifiers during the 1960s and 1970s. Valve amplifiers are used for applications such as guitar amplifiers, satellite transponders such as DirecTV and GPS, audiophile stereo amplifiers, military applications (such as radar) and very high power radio and UHF television transmitters.
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Decline

From the 1970s the silicon transistor became increasingly pervasive. Valve production was sharply decreased, with the notable exception of cathode ray tubes (CRTs), and a reduced range of valves for amplifier applications. Popular low power tubes were dual triodes (ECCnn, 12Ax7 series) plus the EF86 pentode, and power valves were mostly being beam tetrode and pentodes (EL84, EL34, KT88 / 6550, 6L6), in both cases with indirect heating. This reduced set of types remains the core of valve production today.
The Soviets retained valves to a much greater extent than the West during the Cold War, for the majority of their communications and military amplification requirements, in part due to valves' ability to withstand instantaneous overloads (notably due to a nuclear detonation) that would destroy a transistor[citation needed] .
The dramatic reduction in size, power consumption, reduced distortion levels and above all cost of electronics products based on transistors has made valves obsolete for mainstream products since the 1970s. Valves remained in certain applications su
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Thanks for looking up with me. 
- LRK -
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WHAT THE MIND CAN CONCEIVE, AND BELIEVE, IT WILL ACHIEVE - LRK -

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Wednesday, February 5, 2014

Write Science - A collaborative project to practice the craft of communicating scientific ideas.

While looking for some information on Mars I ran across this blog and started reading some of the posts. 
You may enjoy them as well.

Another reader asked when the blog began and how to track them from past to present. See link below

I will also pass you the link about Mars.  Easy reading by Shane L. Larson. 
If you find the posts interesting you can also sign up to follow and get alerts to new posts.
- LRK -

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in the beginning . . .

This is an experiment, though not a scientific one.  We should know.

The premise of this space is that scientists could be better communicators on many different levels.  One place to start is through the written word.  Writing is a tool to clarify our ideas, as well as a means to get others to understand these ideas.  We spend time in front of chalk boards, behind podiums, standing on desks with bowling balls, or lying upon a table offering a bed of nails.  We think that this exudes understanding, and in some ways it does.  But it doesn’t tell the whole story.

So, this space allows some of us to practice.  Each month, one of us gives the rest of the group a topic.  This could be a single word, a topic sentence, a premise, a question . . . perhaps the creativity starts with the prompt itself.  The entire group, including the person who creates the monthly assignment, gets to write to that prompt.  Everyone gets to read each other’s work, comment, reflect, reconsider, etc.  There are no answers, no prizes, and no losers.  We’re just trying to get a sense for the craft, get better at writing, and perhaps even get better at communicating and doing science.
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Here is the blog about Mars that caught got my attention.
- LRK -

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Cosmos 5: Blues for a Red Planet

Posted on January 1, 2014 by  |
More than any other world in the solar system, Mars has captured the imagination of the human race (except maybe for Pluto, but it’s not a planet, right?). Mars has dominated our imaginings of other worlds for more than a century, beginning with H.G. Wells’ masterpiece of invasion, The War of the Worlds.  Since The War of the Worlds was first written, many other tales of adventure, danger and horror have been penned or filmed concerning Mars — Kim Stanley Robinson’s epic Mars Trilogy, the classic 1964 film Robinson Crusoe on Mars, Elton John’s sonorous musings that Mars is no place to raise a family in “Rocketman,” and many many more.
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Beginning of Shane's COSMOS series.
- LRK -

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Cosmos 0: It’s Time to Get Going Again


At midnight on a December night in 2001, I waited breathlessly in a darkened theatre in Los Angeles, surrounded by my friends from Caltech, for the world premiere of Peter Jackson’s monumental film based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s masterpiece, The Fellowship of the Ring.  In the 47 years following the publication of the first volume of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien’s work had ascended to become a cultural icon, and had launched the worldwide obsession with fantasy, swords and sorcery.  It was, by all accounts, the gold standard against which all other fantasy novels were measured. To dabble with trying to translate Middle-Earth to the screen was foolish at best, and had failed before.  There was, and still is, much arguing and hand-wringing about the translation, but by-and-large it was successful. If nothing else, it introduced a whole new generation of people to Hobbits, Ents, and the Rohirrim.
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Thanks for looking up with me. 
- LRK -
 
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WHAT THE MIND CAN CONCEIVE, AND BELIEVE, IT WILL ACHIEVE - LRK -
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Tuesday, February 4, 2014

Psychological and sociological issues affecting space travel

Do you want to sign up for MARS ONE and be one of the first to establish a permanent settlement on Mars?
Will you be able to put up with your fellow crew members on the long trip out in confined quarters?

In the Navy I attended a 5 week leadership course where we had three men to our sleeping quarters and were subject to strict discipline requirements that had me ready to punch out one of my room mates. Gear adrift, just a feather on my bed. Continual adjustment of towels hanging on locker or checking of furniture alignment. OK, maybe a bit sensitive to boot camp requirements all over again as I was now a Chief (E7) in the Navy. Maybe I would not be of sound mind after a six month cruise to Mars in a tin can.
- LRK -

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Psychological and sociological issues affecting space travel
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Psychological and sociological issues affecting space travel are important to human spaceflight, particularly to long-duration expeditionary missions. Although robotic spacecraft have landed on Mars, plans have also been discussed for a human expedition, perhaps in the 2030s,[1] or as early as 2021[2] for a return mission, or even in 2018 for a 501-day flyby mission for a crew of two with no landing on Mars.[3]
A typical Mars return expedition is projected to last two to three years and may involve a crew of four to seven people,[citation needed] although shorter flyby missions of approximately one and half years with only two people have been proposed,[3] as well as one-way missions that include landing on Mars with no return trip planned.[4] Although there are a number of technological and physiological issues involved with such a mission that remain to be worked out, there are also a number of behavioral issues affecting the crew that are being addressed before such missions fly. In preparing for such an expedition, important psychological, interpersonal and psychiatric issues occurring in human spaceflight missions are under study by national space agencies and others.
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MARS-500 an experiment to see how a crew might fair on a long space mission.
- LRK -

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MARS-500
The Mars-500 mission was a psychosocial isolation experiment conducted between 2007 and 2011 by Russia, the European Space Agencyand China, in preparation for an unspecified future manned spaceflight to the planet Mars.[1] The experiment's facility was located at theRussian Academy of Sciences' Institute of Biomedical Problems (IBMP) in Moscow, Russia.[1]
Between 2007 and 2011, three different crews of volunteers lived and worked in a mock-up spacecraft. The final stage of the experiment, which was intended to simulate a 520-day manned mission, was conducted by a crew consisting of three Russians (Alexey Sitev, Sukhrob Kamolov, Alexander Smoleevskij), a Frenchman (Romain Charles), an Italian (Diego Urbina) and a Chinese citizen (Yue Wang). The experiment helped plan the interplanetary mission, identifying possible problems and solutions. The mock-up facility simulated the Earth-Mars shuttle spacecraft, the ascent-descent craft, and the martian surface. Volunteer crew used in the three stages included professionals with experience in fields such as engineering, medicine, biology, and human spaceflight.
The Orbital Piloted Assembly and Experiment Complex (OPSEK) is the Russian successor to the International Space Station (ISS), with the primary mission of supporting deep space exploration. OPSEK is being assembled whilst attached to the ISS. Rassvet, a planned OPSEK module, arrived in orbit in 2010. All the main components of a Mars expedition would first dock at the station, before leaving for Mars.[2][3]
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http://www.space.com/70-mars-500-mock-mission-to-mars.html
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Lessons learned from Mars-500, not for everyone.
5 Things Russia’s Fake Mars Mission Says About Space Travel (And Office Life)

After spending 17 months in a simulated Mars-bound spaceship in Moscow, six study participants selected by the Russian Academy of Sciences and the European Space Agency have returned to the outside world with new data about how people cope with life in confined spaces—including terrestrial office cubes.
It sounds like the setup for a horror movie: Lock six people up on a confined space together for 17 months and see what happens. But the Russian Academy of Sciences and Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, put together the Mars-500 project in the interests of science—and the half-dozen participants managed to avoid killing one another. 

Read more: 5 Things Russia’s Fake Mars Mission Says About Space Travel (And Office Life) - Popular Mechanics
Follow us: @PopMech on Twitter | popularmechanics on Facebook
Visit us at PopularMechanics.com
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I didn't get to see the Canadian mini-series "Race to Mars" but it sounds like it would have given us an idea of what it would be like to go to Mars.
- LRK -

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Race to Mars is a 2007 Canadian television mini-series about a fictitious mission to Mars that is based on contemporary international research. The first part aired on Discovery Channel Canada and its High Definition channel on September 23, 2007 and the second part on September 30. It was produced in association with Galafilm Inc. William Shatnernarrates the miniseries.
A companion book of the same title, written by Dana Berry, was also published in September 2007. It was offered as a selection of the Science Fiction Book Club.
Mars Rising, a companion 6-episode documentary mini-series, aired from October 7 to October 21, 2007, using sequences shot for Race to Mars.
PLOT
The four-hour mini-series begins in the year 2026, with a test lander exploding on landing. Jumping to 2029, the narrator explains the mission, 'Project Olympus' and shows the fourNTR spacecraft: Cargo lander Shirase, Mars Surface Habitat Atlantis, Mars lander Gagarin, and Crew Transfer Vehicle Terra Nova. In early 2030, the international crew of sixastronauts from the United States, Russia, France, Canada and Japan board Terra Nova to begin their 582 day-month journey to Mars and back. They suffer numerous equipment failures along the way, eventually traced back to fraud on the part of a subcontractor. The international team is racing against China, who have already landed a robot on Mars. The astronauts successfully land on Mars, but astrobiologist Hiromi's arm is broken by a faulty landing gear. Later, the Chinese robot finds water, but it contains too much calcium chloridefor it to contain life. Meanwhile, the crew's drilling equipment is irreparably damaged by a Martian dust devil. The crew sends an impassioned plea back to Earth to asking to allow them to cannibalize the Chinese robot lander, saying that the exploration of Mars should be for humankind and not be limited by politics.
The crew's proposal is accepted, and they redouble their drilling efforts. After days of non-stop work, they finally strike water, but crew member Hiromi is killed when pressure builds in the well causing an explosion that knocks over a beam of the drilling platform and crushes his spacesuit. After they ascend back to the main spacecraft for the journey home, the entire crew becomes gravely ill. They suspect infection by Martian microbes, but commander Rick Erwin refuses to open the seals on their Martian samples for fear of further contamination. It is discovered that carbon monoxide poisoning is the actual culprit, and they manage to deal with the problem. On final approach to Earth it is discovered that the Terra Nova's braking thrusters are malfunctioning making a safe return impossible unless repairs are carried out. After a dangerous spacewalk they repair the damage, but astronaut Antoine Hebert is nearly killed by electrocution. The mini-series ends as Olympus' crew module prepares to land and then cuts to a scene in the year 2095 to show a Mars base named for Robert H. Goddard, situated near to Hiromi's grave site.
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http://www.racetomars.ca/mars/article_effects.jsp
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Maybe a television series would tend to play on the sensational aspects of a long duration human mission.
Still, we have enough Earth bound examples of psychiatric effects of solitary confinement for inmates.
Even though those volunteering to go to Mars probably wouldn't be considered prisoners or be as restricted in activities, it might prove beneficial to be aware of potential problems from long term isolation. 
- LRK -

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Overview: Neuropsychiatric Effects of Solitary Confinement
Stuart Grassian, M.D.

My observations and conclusions regarding the psychiatric effects of solitary confinement have been cited in a number of federal court decisions, for example: Davenport v. DeRobertis, 844 F.2d 1310, and Madrid v. Gomez, 889F.Supp.1146. I prepared a written declaration for Madrid describing the medical literature and historical
experience concerning the psychiatric effects of solitary confinement and of other conditions of restricted environmental and social stimulation. I have prepared the general (non-institution specific) and non-redacted (non-inmate specific) portions of that declaration into a general Statement, which I have entitled “Psychiatric Effects of
Solitary Confinement”; a copy of this statement is attached hereto. It describes the extensive body of literature, including clinical and experimental literature, regarding the effects of decreased environmental and social stimulation, as well as specifically, observations concerning the effects of solitary confinement on prisoners. I offer here a general overview of the issue:

It has long been known that severe restriction of environmental and social stimulation has a profoundly deleterious effect on mental functioning; this issue has, for example, been a major concern for many groups of patients including, for example, patients in intensive care units, spinal patients immobilized by the need for prolonged traction, and patients with impairment of their sensory apparatus (such as eye-patched or hearing
impaired patients). This issue has also been a very significant concern in military situations and in exploration - polar and submarine expeditions, and in preparations for space travel.
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Whether it is appropriate to spend money to go to Mars is another question.
- LRK -

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A space race in the developing word: India's latest mission causes controversy
By Anisha Chadha
TUESDAY FEBRUARY 04, 2014

On November 5, 2013, the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) launched a rocket that is projected to reach Mars in September 2014. The object of the mission, called the Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM), is to use a satellite to identify the geological source of methane that is present in the Martian atmosphere.

If India’s vessel, called Mangalyaan, successfully reaches Mars, it will be the fourth space program to achieve this feat, behind the Soviet Space Program, the U.S. Space Program (NASA), and the European Space Agency.

As the Indian government only announced the mission in 2010, the ISRO put together the project in a relatively short period of time. MOM cost just less than $75 million USD, inexpensive compared to the amount other space programs have spent on projects of this scale.

One of the reasons the ISRO was able to keep the cost of the project low was because of technological support from NASA. India is also using a less powerful rocket than could be used for the mission. The rocket will not enter the Martian orbit directly, but instead will orbit Earth before entering the trajectory that will cause it to arrive at Mars.
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Thanks for looking up with me. 
- LRK -
============================================

WHAT THE MIND CAN CONCEIVE, AND BELIEVE, IT WILL ACHIEVE - LRK -

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