Blogging201

Landing on a Rocky Rubber Duck

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

It took over a decade for the Rosetta space probe to travel approximately four billion miles. While not exactly a meander through the inner solar system—for several years it has been traveling at 34,000 miles per hour—its looping journey to Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko actually led it be misidentified once, seven years ago this week, when astronomers noticed a previously unidentified asteroid heading our way. It was even given an asteroid name, 2007 VN84, before it was correctly identified and everyone laughed uproariously.

In August, Rosetta arrived at Comet 67P/C-G, its destination for the entire trip. Three times, the probe’s path brought it close to its home planet, which provided a gravitational swing each time to throw it farther away from the inner solar system. In one complicated months-long maneuver, it swung out by Mars, took a boost from that encounter to return to Earth at a faster speed, and then passed Mars again; that solar system pick-and-roll flung it into the asteroid belt, the rock quarry orbiting between Mars and Jupiter. The European Space Agency has provided an interactive website to illustrate this: “Where is Rosetta?”

The comet is as old as comets are, billions of years old; it is made of stuff left over from the formation of the solar system. Comet 67P is a comet stuck in a stable orbit around the sun; it does not venture far beyond Jupiter’s orbit and does not come much closer to the sun than inside Mars’ orbit. One orbit, one year on Comet 67P, is about six and a half years. Every three years it is as close as it will come to the sun and every three years it is as far away as its orbit takes it. Thus, for Rosetta and its lander, it offers no surprises but many discoveries.

Right now, the comet is in the asteroid belt and making its return to the inner solar system. For the first time, it has a hanger-on. Today, Comet 67P, the Rosetta space probe, and the Philae lander are traveling partners 310 million miles from Earth.

It is the ideal comet to attempt to land on. Other comets, with longer orbits, like Halley’s Comet and other Oort cloud objects, develop a long tail as they come close to the sun, heat up, melt a little, and throw off material. They become unstable. This was spectacularly seen one year ago, when Comet ISON disintegrated as it approached the sun. Comet 67P has been through this process countless times already and is probably not going to heat up and eject too much material, but if it does, science will have a close-up seat.

In September, it started to heat up and gave Rosetta some spectacular views:

comet 67p

Jets springing from Comet 67P

Right now, comet and company are traveling at over 40,000 miles per hour, or 18 kilometers per second. As remarkable as that is, the manipulations and maneuvers to land Philae on the surface—which is dusty and icy and rocky and there is no way to know how stable that surface is or how thick the dust is without getting close and risking everything in a one-and-done landing attempt—slowed the lander to a one-meter-per-second speed after dropping it off. So the lander was traveling 40,000 miles per hour with the comet, and one meter per second closer to the comet, and the landing was not smooth: It bounced, but not off the comet entirely. Harpoons were supposed to secure it, but they did not fire for reasons still unknown. A few footpad screws appear to have been enough to settle the lander in place; millions of miles of travel and it was just like building a desk from Ikea: the big bolts that you were sure you weren’t going to use were never needed in the first place.

As Rosetta approached the comet earlier this year, it became apparent that the object had a complicated shape, that it has one big section and one smaller section. It is shaped like a rubber duck, and my affection for ducks is well-known. The lander is on the comet’s head, which is the smaller part, only about a mile and a half by a mile and a half.

This may be the most amazing fact of the whole project: the comet is not the size of a planet or even an asteroid; it is tiny. There is no human-sized comparison one can make to this without sounding ridiculous. It is like shooting a paperclip at a taxiing 747 and hitting an open window and landing it in a seat in first class. Or: Imagine you are driving cross-country at top speed tomorrow morning. Let’s say you are in Texas and the road is wide-open; it is like the world belongs to you. You hear your cellphone ring, try to locate it, find it but bobble it awkwardly in your hands; you accidentally bounce it out your open window, and then learn that it landed in someone’s hands while they were on top of the Eiffel Tower. Sounds silly, but it does not come close to matching the feat that the European Space Agency successfully accomplished today.

And now comes the science-y part.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for November 12 asks, “Today you can write about anything, in whatever genre or form, but your post must include a speeding car, a phone call, and a crisp, bright morning. (Wildcard: you can swap any of the above for a good joke.)”

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‘So it goes …’

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Humans of New York, a website of photos and interviews with New Yorkers, was created and is operated by one young photographer who calls himself simply “Brandon.” It features Sidney Offit today.

Offit is a writer, nearly 90 years of age, who is better-known as a friend of the famous, a memoirist, and a curator of great writing—he helped found the National Book Critics Circle, which gives out one of the top-level book awards each year.

sidneyoffit

Sidney Offit

The caption to the photo at left reads: “Vonnegut said we live too long. He said: ‘You had your children. You wrote your book. Now don’t be greedy.’ Yet we all live with this fantasy of recuperation. We see an old photo of ourself, and we momentarily feel like that person again. We think: ‘I’m going to get back to that place.’ And we never get back there. But that desire gives us the ferocity to hold onto life no matter how bad it gets.”

Offit was great friends with Kurt Vonnegut for four decades. Vonnegut’s birthday is tomorrow, November 11. He would be 92. He lived to be 84 and he considered what he told Offit to be a sort of ideal, but it was one he fell short of again and again, as he published fiction past 75 and opinion pieces until the end.

The accidental beauty of a pacifist writer born on November 11, which is Armistice Day—Veterans Day in the U.S. since 1954—was not lost on the novelist.

In “Breakfast of Champions,” Vonnegut reflected on the coincidence:

So this book is a sidewalk strewn with junk, trash which I throw over my shoulders as I travel in time back to November eleventh, nineteen hundred and twenty-two.

I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

Kurt-Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut, 1922–2007

It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.

Armistice Day has become Veterans’ Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans’ Day is not.

So I will throw Veterans’ Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don’t want to throw away any sacred things.

What else is sacred? Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance.

And all music is.

The moment war ends is not a moment that ennobles the war effort that preceded it, or converts the two opposing sides into concrete moral certainties like right and wrong, but that one minute of peace is sacred. It may have been the only minute of serenity the world has known.

In Vonnegut’s work, remembering the past is sometimes the only way for a character to know that there even is a now. The past, the present, and the future may as well as be characters in his books. Three characters, each of whom considers the other two as being irritating and self-important.

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Here is a thought that I, Mark, visit and re-visit: I see an old photo of myself and I think I can return there. A previous year, another existence, is merely another place I have visited, lived in, breathed the air of. The 1990s are only as far away as a bus ticket whose price is a bit out of my reach; I think I can visit 1979 as easily as visit Phoenix if I would just save up for a couple months. I am going to see Vermont again, I am going to visit Iowa again; I have not seen the Pacific Ocean yet, but I know I will. Next year, maybe.

I know what the 1980s sounded like, what food tasted like then/there, just as I know what Cedar Rapids, Iowa, or Poughkeepsie, New York, sounds like. The ability to visit one (Poughkeepsie) but not the other (1983) offends me.

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Now is all we have and Vonnegut knew this, better than most. Reliving the firebombing of Dresden in February 1945 is fine, was necessary for him; coming to understand that February 1945 and November 1918 and November 2014 all co-exist in an eternal now is spiritual, somewhat; finding oneself frustrated at the expense of a bus ticket to 1983 is Hell in its exquisite pointlessness.

In one of his last interviews, recorded in October 2005, Vonnegut told public television’s David Brancaccio the point of it all. What life is too short and too long for.

He said that his wife asked him why he would go to the store for “an” envelope. Apparently he used to make his errands last all day: buy an envelope, bring it home, put the letter in it, bring it to the post office, and then treat the next letter with similar care. Vonnegut:

Oh, she says well, you’re not a poor man. You know, why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope.

I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don’t know. The moral of the story is, is we’re here on Earth to fart around.

And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And, we’re not supposed to dance at all anymore.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for November 10 asks, “Fill in the blank: ‘Life is too short to _____.’ Now, write a post telling us how you’ve come to that conclusion.”

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The Fall of the Berlin Wall

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The demolition of the Berlin Wall started 25 years ago today, November 9, 1989. Nine days later, I turned 21, so every minute of my first 21 years except for a week was lived in the bipolar world of the Cold War.

Us versus them. It was served with our breakfast cereal, our school lunches, and the nightly news watched during dinner. The Cold War was a fact, a background noise, a tinnitus-like hum heard 24/7, sometimes from far away and sometimes next door. Its removal seemed to make us aware that it had always been there, how loud it was, and that it had been driving us all insane.

Since 1989, there have been many movies set in post-apocalyptic nightmare futures but by the mid 1980s our movies were starting to entertain the notion of depicting the apocalypse itself; in 1964, “Dr. Strangelove” ends with a sequence of images of mushroom clouds, which is shocking and direct—and very far away. On November 20, 1983, ABC television aired a made-for-TV movie called “The Day After” which graphically depicted the moment of apocalypse. In Kansas. (According to its Wikipedia entry, it remains the highest-rated made-for-TV movie in American television history.

A military build-up in East Germany leads to a standoff and diplomatic breakdown and both sides launch missiles. The movie does not dwell in the plausibility of the geopolitical story, though, since that really would not matter to innocent citizens on the ground; it shows the missiles exploding and the instantaneous and not so instantaneous deaths everyday people would experience. Conscientious history teachers sent their pupils home with requests that the students be allowed to watch in order to participate in discussions the next day; ABC announced at what minute the most horrifying scenes would begin (I seem to remember the broadcast was commercial-free).

My parents did not sign; I remain one of the few who did not see “The Day After.”

vilniusbBy 1989, it appeared that the end was beginning. In January of that year, I traveled to the USSR with a school group. We saw what it looks like when a country maintains borders not to keep people out but to keep its own citizens inside. In Vilnius, Lithuania, a truly beautiful city, an elderly woman approached us (our professor was Lithuanian, so he translated) and declared, “God bless Reagan!” In Kiev, Ukraine, something similar happened but the elderly woman did not need to be translated; she said it in English. In Leningrad, the same thing.

(I happen to be a liberal, a Democrat usually, and this love for Ronald freaking Reagan was not winning any points with me. But even I understood what was happening. I just wanted some love for Michael Dukakis, who had recently lost to Reagan’s vice-president, George Bush, in November.) Even I understood what was happening. Asked why the people we were meeting, both those speaking freely and the minders who could not speak freely, were not praising Gorbachev and perestroika, our professor spoke metaphorically: “When a jailer removes a prisoner’s head from a bucket of water, the prisoner is not going to thank the jailer for his kindness.” Maybe it wasn’t all that metaphoric.

I do not know if we were more or less closely watched than other groups usually were during our two-week visit, but no attempt was made to conceal watching us. The professor and I were given a personal last-moment tour of the inner workings of an interrogation room on our way out of the country.

From November 9, 1989, until Christmas 1991, when the USSR declared itself closed for business, the Cold War came to a sputtering conclusion. One side won or at least declared victory. It began with an exclamation point, the crowds atop the Berlin Wall, and many revolutions in many countries unfolded over those two years before the final chapter was written. For generations before, from the late 1940s on, the Cold War was the defining fact of life for citizens in dozens of countries on the two declared sides.

For people 40 years old and older, we grew up in an era in which the end of the world was a legitimate conversation topic. The images of the happiest people on earth breaking through that terrible wall 25 years ago today are a reminder of “The Day Before,” a period when “The Day After” of our cultural imagining was unspeakable horror.

Ever since, both sides have been working hard to replicate that bipolar worldview, that us versus them mentality. It makes for an easier foreign policy, which sometimes makes for an easier domestic policy. Looking at the 25-year-old images is like getting a message from a stranger letting us know that it is still all over, but we do not know who the caller is or what is still all over.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for November 9 asks, “Someone’s left you a voice mail message, but all you can make out are the last words: ‘I’m sorry. I should’ve told you months ago. Bye.’ Who is it from, and what is this about?”

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