Space Bull

Have you ever heard of the Pioneer Anomaly? If so, have you ever wondered what exactly it is?

The Pioneer Anomaly is based off of observations from the Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 spacecraft that NASA launched in the early 1970s. These spacecraft were flybys of Jupiter and Saturn. They are currently the furthest man-made objects from the Earth, measuring out at about 90 AU, and about 80 AU. (AU, or Astronomical Unit, is the distance of the Earth from the sun (about 93 million miles). So 90 AU would be 90 times the distance to the sun, or 8.4 billion miles away! To put this in perspective, Neptune is 30 AU from the sun, or 2.8 billion miles away.)

This is where the anomaly comes into play. It turns out that under the current theory of gravity, with the sun slowing them down, they are actually closer than they should be. There have been many possible explanations, some as wild as new physics that have not been previously discovered, to simple ones such as a gas leakage on the spacecraft. There's even been a theory posted that maybe our data analysis from the 70s and 80s were not as accurate as they are today!

Luckily, there are a few research avenues to help explain this mystery in the near future. The New Horizons spacecraft, currently en route for a Pluto flyby, might be able to duplicate the effect. This would rule out any particular Pioneer spacecraft problems, such as the gas leak. Alternatively, if it doesn't happen to New Horizons, then it would be a Pioneer problem. The Planetary Society is also funding a research initiative to look further into the 30 years of data on the mission, hoping to find clues. There is a proposed mission that would go out to 200 AU to analyze the solar wind and how it interacts with the interstellar wind.

With all of this research coming into play, hopefully we can close the book on this anomaly. At that time, we can end this article with a definitive answer to a question that has perplexed great scientific minds for years!

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_anomaly for more details!

For the answer to this question, we have to go back a little further to the creation of the parent star. Imagine a young star, with a disk of gases and rocks circling it. Imagine Saturn with it's rings, except it's a star and not a planet. Also, it's a much larger disk of material. This disk of material is called an "Accretion Disk".

While this accretion disk is rotating around the star, the small bits of gas and dust and rocks are condensing around the larger pieces of rock. This naturally happens because the larger pieces of rock have more mass, and thus more gravity. As they collect more and more debris, they become larger and larger, creating more gravity and mass. After millions of years, most of this accretion disk will have formed into one or more planets. The pieces that didn't form into planets have either left the orbit of the star, or fallen into the star.

There are three types of planets. The first, called Terrestrial planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars) are mostly rocky bodies. They may or may not have an atmosphere. The second type of planets is called a Gas Giant (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune) are planets that have little or no rocky surface. They are made of mostly gases. There is another type of planet called Ice Giants (Uranus, Neptune). It's really more of a sub-category of gas giants. They got their name because their atmospheres have little or no hydrogen and helium, and have more rock and ice on their surface. They're also much smaller than the other two, Jupiter and Saturn.

Thus, after millions of years of accretion, we now have a complete solar system with planets.

Saturn's rings have long been observed. We've had a few spacecraft fly by them, and we've learned a lot. It seems that we happen to be at the right place at the right time to observe the rings.

The rings haven't always been there. At least, not this large of a ring system. But after years and years of debris building up from Saturn's moons and asteroids flying by, it's become large enough to be seen even from Earth with the simplest of telescopes.

As moons around Saturn were orbiting close to the planet, and moving closer, the gravity of the planet pulled the moon apart, ripping the rock apart and creating a stream of rocks and ice which slowly spread out to become a ring. After billions of years, the ring system has expanded enough to be seen from our home planet.

The obvious question now is, why didn't the debris slowly fall into the planet? Interesting answer. There are moons within the ring system, and just outside of it. These moons have a gravitational pull on the debris ring, and keep it in a relatively stable orbit.

There's also a moon in the Saturian system called Enceladus, which has been recently discovered to have ice geysers erupting into the ring system. This ice feeds the ring system, helping to replenish any debris that may have fallen into the planet.

There's also a theory which states the ring system is a rare event. It's possible that we just happen to live in a special time where the rings actually exist. It's been hypothesized that the ring system hasn't always existed in it's current form, and that soon they will be gone.

Whatever the truth behind these rings are, we have beautiful rings to admire and ponder. In time, maybe these rings will give up their secrets. Here's a link to the Wikipedia article about space rings in general.

When I was a child, growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, I became addicted to a Role-Playing Game called Ultima. Actually, the first one I ever played was Ultima 3, on my friend's Commodore 64. It was the mid-1980s. My dad had bought an Amiga, and we were at the computer store looking for games. I saw Ultima 4, and grabbed it. I was transfixed with this game, and almost beat it without any strategy guides (if you know anything about a ten year old, you'd know that was quite an achievement!). Since then, I've followed those games religiously. I got Ultima 5 in the early 1990s, as well as Ultima 6. I played Ultima 7 and Ultima 7 part 2 all the time during my junior high school days. Ultima 8 came out when I was a Freshman in high school. I bought it, played it, and eventually beat it. Ultima 9 didn't come out for years afterwards. I was just out of college when I found it, and I ended up purchasing a computer just for this game. Origin Systems (the maker of the game) was known for pushing the technology in graphics to the limit. When Ultima 9 came out, it was very difficult to play on even a powerful PC. So I based my needs for a new PC on the recommendations of the game. In fact, the game still had issues with memory, as I had to reboot my machine every now and then when it became to choppy!

I can trace a lot of my life back to the Ultima games. My first CD-ROM I ever bought (1994) was Ultima 1-6 on a single CD. I learned how to tweak my PC way back when all we had was a 386SX, because I was trying to play Ultima 7 on it. I attempted (I stress attempted) to learn how to program with graphics, because I wanted to program my own RPGs based on Ultima-like style. I wrote a novella based on the Ultima world, or something like it. It really had enveloped me.

The person who originally designed Ultima is named Richard Garriott. He started writing Ultima back in high school. The success of the first one (Akalebeth) made him found a software company (Origin Systems) and become quite rich. His father, Owen Garriott, was a NASA astronaut, who flew on the Skylab 3 mission. He was also a part of the early days on the Space Shutle, fly ing on STS-9 for Spacelab-1.

Richard Garriott is now the next paying space tourist to go to the International Space Station in 2008. Although there are rumors that he might be pushed out for another astronaut. He's also might become the first tourist to perform an EVA for some extra payment.

Take a look at http://www.richardinspace.com to track his progress on his blog.

Memoirs of a NASA contractor...

In 1970, this guy was going to school to work on underwater habitats. He ended up working for NASA as a Co-op. His time there is chronicled. He was in a small basement working on little electronics, soldering this and that. But his tales of meeting famous people (Warner Von Braun for one) are worth reading about. His tale of Apollo 13 is also of interest.

He also has some good thoughts on how he felt as Apollo was winding down, but oceanography was coming up. This is definitely worth a read for anyone interested in the history of NASA (especially Apollo years) from the viewpoint of an employee on the sidelines...

With all of the articles hitting the web right now on the DAWN spacecraft, I figured it was about time for me to write up what the spacecraft was doing, where it was going, and why it was going to do these things.

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