January 2021 – Scienceandsf -A Blog Published by Robert A. Lawler

Space News for January 2021.

It’s the start of a brand new year and unfortunately 2021 is not off to a good start for space exploration. Two stories in particular illustrate the difficulties that often arise whenever we try to do something for the first time.

One story that didn’t get a lot of coverage but is nevertheless a big disappointment concerned NASA’s Insight Mars Lander. Insight touched down on the Martian surface almost two years ago, on the 26th of November 2018 with big hopes for discovering a great deal about conditions on the Red Planet. Insight was equipped with numerous instruments for observing the Martian weather and seismic activity, that is Marsquakes. The showpiece of the mission however was a robotic arm with a drill, known as the ‘Mole’, which it was hoped would drill down three meters into the Martian soil.

NASA’s Insight lander. The failed drill, the ‘Mole’ is foreground right while the seismograph is foreground left. (Credit: ABC News)

There were problems right from the start. As described by NASA engineers the Martian soil had an ‘unexpected tendency to clump’. Because of this the lander’s drill never got the leverage it needed to penetrate down more than a few centimetres despite the engineers trying every trick they could think of. The last attempt was made on January 9th to no avail. With no prospect of a successful resolution the Insight program managers have decided to cancel any further efforts.

But that doesn’t mean that the Insight lander is a total failure, its seismograph has already detected several Marsquakes and should continue working until at least the end of 2022. And once NASA’s Perseverance rover lands on Mars on the 18th of February NASA plans to use the weather instruments on the two spacecraft to establish the first ever weather network on another planet.

NASA’s Perseverance rover and it’s main scientific instruments. Perseverance will join the Curiosity rover on the Martian surface next month! (Credit: NASA Mars Exploration Program)

The big news however comes from back here on planet Earth where NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) suffered a ‘Major Component Failure’ during a critical ‘Hot Fire Test’ of its first stage on the 16th of January. The SLS, whose main contractor is Boeing corporation, is the big rocket launch vehicle that is the foundation of NASA’s Artemis program with a goal of returning American astronauts to the Moon in the next half dozen years or so. NASA has already spent $18 billion over the last ten years on development of the SLS and the program is more than three years behind schedule.

Ignition of the ‘Hot Fire’ test of the first stage of the Space Launch System (SLS). (Credit: SpaceNews)

The hot fire test, performed at NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi, was intended to be the last test of the SLS’s first stage prior to its being sent to the Kennedy Space Center. Once at Kennedy the rocket will be assembled with its upper stages and the Orion crew capsule in preparation for a first, unmanned lunar mission scheduled for sometime late this year. The plan of the test at Stennis was to completely fuel the first stage and, after clamping the rocket tight to the facility’s B-2 test stand, ignite the four main RS-25 engines, the same engines that powered the space shuttle. The length of the test was designed so that the engines would carry out an entire launch profile, about eight minutes firing.

At this moment all four first stage engines are firing perfectly. (Credit: SpaceFlight Insider)

For the first minute everything was proceeding well, the engines where producing 109% of nominal thrust and preparing to throttle down to 95% when a flash of light was seen near the thermal protection blanket on engine number 4. These blankets are designed to prevent engine parts from overheating due to the exhaust of the other three engines. Seconds later the rocket’s on-board computer system detected an as yet unknown fault and the computer ordered all four engines to shut down. The entire test lasted only 67 seconds.

While the post mortem is just underway and the precise cause of the shutdown still unknown the fact is that the test fell far short of a success and at the very least will have to be repeated. That means at least another month’s delay along with its associated cost on a program that is way over budget and behind schedule. And if it should turn out that there is a real design flaw that would certainly kill any chance of a launch later this year.

So far the SLS has gotten plenty of press coverage but the question is when will it finally launch! (Credit: Autoevolution)

Also, the multiple delays and cost overruns of the SLS are causing some members of Congress and even scientists at NASA to question the entire Artemis program given its dependence on an SLS that seems to be going nowhere. NASA has already spent $18 billion on the SLS along with another $18 billion on the Orion Space Capsule that will carry the astronauts to the Moon and back. Will we ever actually see a mission performed with those two very expensive pieces of equipment? Not at the rate we’re going.

The Orion capsule has cost as much as the SLS but at least it’s ready to go! Without a launch vehicle however it’s going nowhere fast. (Credit: Space.com)

And there is one last piece of bad news, for Boeing at least. In funding NASA’s Europa Clipper robotic space probe to that icy moon of Jupiter Congress had mandated that the launch vehicle for the space probe had to be the SLS. Well in NASA’s 2021 fiscal budget there was a slight change in those orders to only require that the SLS be used ‘if available’.

Now the Europa Clipper isn’t scheduled to launch until the mid-2020’s so the rocket’s current problems will hopefully be solved by then. Nevertheless the SLS will still be very costly and presumably every rocket will be needed for Artemis. In fact a cost analysis by NASA has indicated that if the Clipper were to be launched by the Space X Falcon Heavy it could save the space agency $1.5 billion!

Space X’s Falcon Heavy has only had one launch so far but it’s ready to start launching heavy space probes like the Europa Clipper. (Credit: SpaceNews)

Maybe for once the officials at both NASA and in Congress will do the right thing. The Space Launch System may be necessary to get us back to the Moon this decade but any attempt to use it in other space missions would simply be tossing good money after bad.

I’ll end today with a bit of administrative news. With the end of the Trump administration NASA director Jim Bridenstine has tendered his resignation and been temporarily replace by his deputy Steve Jurczyk until the position can be permanently filled. Although Bridenstine did a better job of running the space agency than I’d expected (feared?) nevertheless he was a politician taking a job that had always gone to a scientist.

NASA’s Deputy Administrator Steve Jurczyk has been chosen by President Biden as a temporary Director. With a long history of working for the space agency he might be a good choice for permanent director. (Credit: NASA)

Hopefully the new Biden administration’s choice for NASA director will return to the idea of science over politics. It’s worth noting that two decorations that President Biden has chosen for the oval office are a portrait of America’s founding scientist Ben Franklin and a Moon rock. Our new President certainly wants to promote truth and science over lies and conspiracy theories and that can only be a good thing!

Better Living through Chemistry. New research is discovering more sustainable materials and energy sources that can help solve our environmental issues.

Over the last two hundred years the science of chemistry has been so successful in developing new energy sources like coal and oil along with new materials like plastics that it has entirely changed the way people live. Seriously just consider all of the materials around your home that did not exist back in the 1820s and you’ll realize just how successful chemistry has been.

Did you have a Gilbert Chemistry set when you were a kid. I think this is the very set I had! (Credit: Pinterest)

But as the old saying goes, “too much of anything isn’t a good thing,” so that today the ‘scientific miracles’ of a few generations ago are now more trouble than they’re worth. The two biggest problems caused by our success with chemistry are undoubtedly climate change caused by the burning of fossil fuels and the enormous amount of trash being generated by single use plastics.

It just occurred to me that in this Blog I’ve shown a lot of images of exhaust pollutants. (Credit: Clean Wisconsin)

If we’re going to find solutions to these problems then we’re going to need chemists to work on alternative, more sustainable ways of generating power and performing the many tasks to which we put plastic. And in fact such research is being conducted in labouratories around the world this very moment. In this post I’ll discuss some of the results of those efforts.

Right now all over the World Chemists are working hard to find solutions to the problems that ironically they helped to create. (Credit: Pomona College)

Sustainable sources of power, such as solar panels or wind turbines are problematic in that while they produce large amounts of energy at certain times, when the Sun is out for solar panels, they produce very little energy at other times, at night for solar panels. The problem therefore is how to store the energy generated at peak production hours so that it can be used when production is low.

The amount of energy being generated by solar arrays is increasing rapidly but we need a more efficient method of storing that energy. (Credit: KATV)

One method of storing the energy is to use it to split water molecules into their constituent oxygen and hydrogen atoms. Then the hydrogen produced can be stored in gas cylinders for use in a fuel cell to generate electricity at a later time. Unfortunately the process of breaking down water in the first place requires a catalyst and even with the best-known catalysts the method is very inefficient, wasting large amounts of the energy we’re trying so hard to generate.

The basic operation of a fuel cell. Hydrogen and Oxygen go in and Water and Electricity come out. Couldn’t be cleaner! (Credit: Intelligent Energy)

Now a team of scientists at UVA and the California Institute of Technology along with the US Department of Energy’s Argonne National Labouratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Labouratory and Brookhaven National Labouratory has developed a unique catalyst that they hope will greatly increase the efficiency of the process. Unlike most catalysts, which are simply salts dissolved in the water, the chemists have developed titanium oxide nanocrystals that contain literally zillions of active catalytic sites on their surfaces. These sites operate at the atomic level to trigger what is known as the oxygen evolution reaction that separates the water molecules into their component gasses.

The definition of a catalyst is a substance that takes part in a chemical reaction, usually speeding it up, but is not consumed at the end of the reaction. (Credit: Slideshare)

While the titanium oxide nanocrystals themselves were developed at UVA the Argonne and Lawrence Berkeley Labouratories contributed to the project with the use of their synchrotron X-ray spectroscopy facilities that allowed the chemists to see the catalytic sites in action so that they could more accurately measure their performance.

Nanocrystals are a fascinating new field of study. Chemists have only begun to discover the many uses that they can be put to! (Credit: Researchgate)

The physicists at Cal Tech then analyzed those measurements using newly developed quantum mechanical methods. While large-scale implementation is still in the future the results of this team effort have already advanced the drive toward clean, sustainable energy storage.

And new methods are storing power are urgently needed because the installation of solar panels onto homes, businesses and other buildings is now one of the fastest growing industries in the world. And that growth could become even greater if researchers at Incheon National University in Korea are successful in developing transparent solar cells that can double as windows!

Transparent Solar Panels could be a real breakthrough. Imagine how much more power we could generate if every window produced electricity! (Credit: The Verge)

In order to develop their transparent solar cell the scientists needed to find two semiconductor materials that are clear in the optical portion of the spectrum but will absorb non-visible wavelengths of light in order to capture their energy. It’s at the junction of the two semiconductors that the absorbed light is converted into electricity.

Basic diagram of a solar cell. It’s at the interface of the n-type and p-type materials that the sunlight is absorbed and electricity is generated. (Credit: Energy Education)

The two materials that the researchers, led by Professor Joondong Kim, settled upon are titanium dioxide (TiO2) already widely used in the manufacture of solar cells and Nickel Oxide (NiO). Both are nearly transparent at visible wavelengths but readily absorb ultraviolet (UV) light. And on top of their optical properties both materials are relatively cheap, non-toxic, and environmentally friendly.

Titanium Dioxide is already a very useful chemical and a multi-billion dollar a year industry. Yes, we even eat some of it! (Credit: Food Additives.net)

Think about it, in addition to covering the roofs of buildings with solar panels now all of the building’s windows can add their area to producing more energy, and you know the sides of some of those big office are nearly all window! The amount of electricity generated by solar panels could almost double making a real impact in the drive to eliminate fossil fuels.

Replacing fossil fuels with cleaner, more sustainable energy sources may solve one of our environmental troubles but that still leaves the problem of what to do with all of the plastic we keep producing. It’s a real dilemma because plastic is so very useful that we really do need it. When we dispose of it however, it really doesn’t go away. Plastics can take centuries or more to degrade so all the bags, containers, utensils and almost everything you can think of just keeps on piling up until now they are a major environmental threat. What we need therefore is a material that can replace plastic but which is easily biodegradable.

Doctor Antoine Buchard of the Centre for Sustainable and Circular Technologies at the University of Bath in the UK has been investigating that very possibility. Dr. Buchard’s research centers around the sugar xylose that is readily available in wood and is actually the second most common sugar found naturally, in other words it’s cheap!

Xylose is a sugar and one of the most abundant chemicals in nature. (Credit: Science Direct)

Dr. Buchard has succeeded in using xylose to create long molecular chains similar to those in plastics called polymers. The polymer, which belongs to the family of chemicals known as polyether, can be manufactured as either a flexible or crystalline material. So far the material has shown that it can used to replace both polyurethane and polyethylene but Dr. Buchard hopes to also find entirely new uses for his discovery.

Polymers are simply long chains of smaller identical chemicals like xylose. (Credit: Live Science)

Presently the chemists at Bath are producing the new polymer in small quantities but anticipate that production could be easily scaled up to industrial quantities. Replacing fossil fuel derived polymer plastics with polymers obtained from naturally occurring sugars will go a long way toward reducing the amount of plastic trash that’s choking our planet more and more everyday.

Chemistry got us into these problems by ironically giving us very useful things that we really liked! And chemists are now working hard to find new materials to help solve those very same problems.

Glass is a material that we Humans have used for millennia but a new study illustrates how much we still don’t completely understand it.

One of the key measures of human progress surely must be a simple counting of the number of different materials that humans have been able to produce and use. Back in the Stone Age, stones were pretty much all our ancestors had to work with, along with wood and some animal bones.

The Pyramids are built of limestone, that’s it. Just one kind of material. I think if aliens had built them they’d have used some other metals or plastics or even something beyond our current technology. But one material only, that says primitive to me! (Credit: Wikipedia)

Then during the copper and bronze ages mankind first succeeded in acquiring the skills to use metals, ceramics and textiles. Then came paper, iron and the first use of chemicals such as tannic acid for making leather. The increase in the sheer number of materials used accelerated thereafter so that today we have plastics, semi-conductors, ferrites and petroleum products along with many others.

Sophisticated technology requires a wide variety of different materials! (Credit: Slideplayer)

Glass is one material that we first began to use more than two thousand years ago and today we use it in a thousand different ways. It may come as a surprise therefore to hear that we don’t really know what it is, is it a solid or a liquid! Seriously, when I took inorganic chemistry I learned that glass was an extremely, extremely viscous liquid. You know, something that flowed like a liquid but slowly like honey or molasses only glass is much, much more viscous. In a true solid on the other hand the molecules arrange themselves in a crystalline structure, something that is completely absent in glass.

The earliest evidence we possess for glass making comes from ancient Egypt as long ago as 3500 BCE. (Credit: Geology.com)

I’ve seen evidence for this. When I visited the Tower of London in the UK, during the tour I passed by a window whose glass panes were more than 500 years old. Well I could easily see how the glass in those panes was now much thicker at the bottom than they were at the top. The glass was flowing under gravity just like a liquid but it had taken centuries in order to see any visible sign of that flow.

View through old, distorted window panes. (Credit: Great Big Canvas)

Now describing glass as an extremely viscous liquid may be good enough for a freshman chemistry class. Real chemists however want to understand exactly what is going on, if only because there are a large number of other materials such as proteins, plastics and even some metals that exhibit the same borderline solid-liquid behavior.

A new study by Professors Andreas Zumbusch and Matthias Fuchs at the University of Konstanz and published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science has revealed new details about the behavior of glass like substances. The researchers carried out their experiments with a class of substances known as colloidal suspensions where very large ‘molecules’, usually formed from long chains of polymer plastics, are suspended in fluids. Now, colloidal suspensions are nothing new to chemists but in most experiments the polymer particles are spherical in shape and about a micrometer in diameter (1μm). What’s different about the experiments at Konstanz is that the polymer particles were especially made with an elongated shape of about 4μm in length by 1μm in width rather than being spherical.

The polymer particles used in the experiments at University of Konstanz. (Credit: Medium)

As you might imagine that change in shape of the polymer particles has little effect on the properties of the solution when there are only a very few of them in suspension. In such low densities the solution continues to behave like a liquid, able to flow easily in any direction.

As the researchers increased the density of the polymer particles however the solution soon reached a critical point at which the particles were so close together that while they could still move they could no longer rotate. As Professor Zumbusch put it. “At certain particle densities orientational motion froze whereas translational motion persisted, resulting in glassy states where the particles clustered to form local structures with similar orientation.

As more polymer particles are suspended in a fluid they begin to interfere with each other’s movements. (Credit: University of Konstanz)

Zumbusch and Fuchs have named their material, actually class of materials, as ‘Liquid Glass’ and are currently busy investigating the properties of Liquid Glass. Their twin goals are to both relate it to more familiar materials such as proteins, plastics and of course glass itself, but also to find more practical, commercial uses.

An artists impression of ‘Liquid Glass’. (Credit: SciTechDaily)

Human progress has always relied on the discovery and development of new materials. Liquid glass is an entirely new class of materials so it’s strange, fascinating properties hold great promise of future progress.

Archaeology News for January 2021: Archaeology helps to reveal the power, or lack thereof, of invading Armies.

History is full of stories about invading armies. Records dating all the way back to the early Bronze Age chronicle war after endless war of conquest. And since it’s the winners who write the history those chronicles are packed with what today we would call spin, arguments to justify the murder and theft because we were right and the loser was wrong. Even modern historians, dependent as they are on original sources all too often take those biased records at face value. And so the distortions of the truth written down by some ancient supporter of a cruel, bloodthirsty conqueror are propagated to a new generation.

Many of our oldest stories, like the Iliad of Homer, are about conquests by invading armies. I guess things really haven’t changed that much! (Credit: Brewminate)

Archaeology has no such prejudice, the artifacts and architectural remains excavated by archaeologists cannot lie or deceive, the evidence they give is without bias. Of course that evidence is subject to interpretation but as more evidence accrues eventually a fairer, more balanced picture of the events of the past can be gained by archaeology than by accepting the one-sided chronicles of the victors. In fact, over the last 150 years archaeology has many times overturned accepted history by restoring, to some degree, the voice of the losers.

The actual walls of Troy, recovered by archaeology their story may be hard to read but at least they don’t lie to us! (Credit: YouTube)

Perhaps the greatest empire of them all was that established by the city of Rome. It is true that the very word empire comes from the Roman word imperator, originally just a title for a victorious general. How a single city could found so large and long lasting a political system is one of the great questions in history. The Roman system was quite simple, ‘You accept our rule, and pay our taxes and you shall have peace and order. (Remove sword for emphasis) But you will accept our rule!’ The Romans could be both fair and just, but when opposed they were one of the most brutal regimes in history.

Often considered the best fighting machine before the invention of gunpowder, the Roman legions were the first real professional soldiers instead of just noblemen playing at war. (Credit: Quora)

One part of their empire that the Romans spent nearly 200 years conquering and pacifying was the Iberian peninsula, modern Spain and Portugal. Roman influence in Iberia began during the Punic wars against Carthage in the second century BCE but it wasn’t until the early first century CE that the entire peninsula was finally secured with the conquest of the rugged northwestern quarter of the peninsula.

The Romans only succeeded in finally conquering the entire Iberian peninsula in 19 BCE. (Credit: Spain then and Now)

A new study by archaeologists at the Archaeology Institute of Merida in Extremadura Spain, the University of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia Spain and the University of Exeter in the UK has revealed the extent of Rome’s efforts to subdue the region. Using the latest high tech archaeological tools, such as Aerial Photography, Satellite Imaging and Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) the paper, published in the journal ‘Geosciences’ details the locations and sizes of 66 fortifications spread throughout northwestern Spain and northern Portugal. Those fortresses were built by the Romans during the first century BCE and ranged in size from small forts with only a thousand or so square meters of area to large fortresses of up to 150,000 m². Based on their size the number of men garrisoning the forts could have been as small as a few score to thousands.

Distribution of Roman Forts discovered by archaeological team. (Credit: Sci-News.com)

Spread strategically around the countryside the large number of forts would have allowed the Romans to quickly attack any threat, strike back against any uprising, and from several directions at once. Typically such Roman military sites would have been used for training and storing supplies as well as quartering troops in both warm weather and the cold hard winters of that region.

All that remains of the fortifications that Rome built to control NW Iberia are a few lines in the soil but archaeologists can learn much from those few traces. (Credit: Blanco, Sanchez et al in Goesciences)

In a sense the fact that the Romans had to employ such military might to first conquer and then control northwestern Iberia speaks volumes about the resistance they faced from the indigenous population. The Roman historians may have portrayed that conquest as barbarians being civilized but the facts of archaeology clearly show how hard the Iberian people fought against Rome’s idea of civilization.

Of course not all conquests are by civilized people defeating barbarians, just as often the exact reverse is what happens. One well-known example of an orderly, prosperous society being destroyed by nomadic warriors is the conquest of the Central Asian river civilizations by the Mongol hordes of Genghis Kahn. According to history the cities around the Aral Sea were for nearly 2,000 years major hubs along the famed ‘Silk Road’ between the Middle East and the Far East. This wealthy, long-lived culture, estimated to have had as much as 50,000 square kilometers of irrigated land, twice the area of fabled Mesopotamia, was destroyed early in the 13th century by the invading Mongols.

The Mongol tactics of swift horsemen firing arrows in lightning attacks succeeded in conquering the largest empire in history. It didn’t last long however. (Credit: Pinterest)

Or maybe not, for a recent paper published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science disputes that long held view. The paper, led by co-authors Dr. Willem Toonen of Vrijje Universiteit in Amsterdam and Dr. Mark Macklin of the University of Lincoln instead puts the blame squarely on a more than 200 year long cycle of drought that sapped the strength of the river cities before Genghis Kahn and his cavalry came riding from the east.

Today the region between the Caspian and Aral seas is a pretty harsh desert but a thousand years ago it was more fertile and an important hub on the Silk Road. (Credit: Nature)

The archaeologists based their conclusion on a detailed analysis of conditions from habitated sites and irrigation canals of the Otrar oasis at the junction of the Syr Darya and Arys rivers in modern Kazakhstan. So extensive are the archaeological remains at Otrar that it has been named as a UNESCO designated World Heritage Site. What the scientists discovered there was that many of the cities had begun to decline as early as the 9th century due to the onset of a drought that lasted for centuries. By the time the Mongols arrived in 1219 CE many of the cities and canals at Otrar had already been abandoned. Genghis Kahn only delivered the final blow to a culture already in deep trouble.

A large archaeological site at the Otrar oasis. Sites like this one have received little attention from archaeologists so we have little idea of what discoveries are there to be made. (Credit: www.icomos.org)

A few of the remains from the civilization around the Aral sea. Few of these sites have been adequately excavated so there’s an entire ‘lost civilization’ waiting to be unearthed. (Credit: Stanford Al Lab)

According to Dr. Macklin. “Our research shows that it was climate change, not Genghis Kahn, that was the ultimate cause for the demise of Central Asia’s forgotten river civilizations.” In fact the archaeologists were able to show that the people of the Otrar oasis had recovered quickly after the earlier Arab invasions of the 7th and 8th centuries because the climate at that time was much more favourable. Hummm, climate change causing harm to a civilization, sound familiar!

All that remains of an irrigation canal made a thousand years ago. Today there isn’t enough rain to even make using a canal worthwhile. (Credit: EurekAlert)

These two studies illustrate how the knowledge gained by archaeology can be used to paint a truer picture of the conflicts of the past. History may be written by the winners but the losers still have a story to tell and archaeology is helping to recover those lost voices.

Review: E-Book and Website: “False Steps, The Space Race as it Might Have Been” by Paul Drye.

I recently came across a fascinating website containing a large number of articles concerning proposed manned space projects that never succeeded in making it beyond the drawing board. In looking over the website I happened to notice that all of the material it contained was available as an E-Book so of course I quickly bought myself a copy, and borrowed my brother’s Nook so I could read it! To anyone who is as interested in the history of manned space exploration as I am you’ll find ‘False Steps’ to be both a trip down memory lane and a revelation of unknown projects.

I don’t know if ‘Front Cover’ really applies to an E-Book but here’s the front cover of ‘False Steps’ by Paul Drye. (Credit: Paul Drye)

The projects described in ‘False Steps’ date from as early as the 1940s to as recently as the 2010s. And the projects discussed don’t just come from the US or even the US and USSR, they come from every country that has ever thought about putting a man in space. Author Paul Drye must have expended a great deal of effort hunting down and reading some of the information about the Chinese 1970s space program or Hermes the spaceplane France tried to talk the European Union into building, not to mention the rival British Multi-Role Capsule.

Though it went through several revisions the Hermes Spaceplane was a smaller version of the American Shuttle intended to carry passengers but little cargo. (Credit: Pinterest)

Some of the most interesting topics include the two, that’s right two failed Russian manned Lunar Programs, which I discussed a bit in my post of 14June2019. It’s a fact that the Soviets hoped to send men to loop around the Moon as early as 1967(!) using a completely different main rocket than their landing mission would use a few years later. While there were many reasons why the Soviets failed with both attempts certainly one of them has to be the competition for resources between two completely different programs.

The Russian Zond 5 mission actually succeeded in sending a few animals, like these turtles, around the Moon three months before the Apollo 8 astronauts!

But at the same time NASA, the American space agency also received several proposals from McDonald Aircraft Corporation, who build the highly successful Gemini spacecraft, to use the Gemini as a basis for a Lunar orbiter. Those proposals never became more than back of the envelope ideas however because NASA committed itself to Apollo and avoided any of the distractions that plagued the Russians.

Detailed configuration of McDonald Corporation’s plan to send a Gemini spacecraft around the Moon. NASA wisely just stuck to Apollo but the alternate possibilities discussed in ‘False Steps’ are fascinating! (Credit: The High Frontier Blog)

As I mentioned above ‘False Steps’ also contains a wealth of information about projects that came close enough to manned launches that there was some public discussion of them, i.e. I heard about them. The US air Force’s Manned Orbiting Labouratory (MOL) and the USSR’s Buran space shuttle are two examples. But ‘False Steps’ also contains information about projects that I had never heard of such as NASA’s plan to use Apollo technology to perform a manned flyby of the planet Venus in 1973. Another way out project was the Lunar Escape System or LESS that in the case of a disastrous Moon landing by the LM, would allow the stranded astronauts to use parts of the LM to built, on the Moon, an escape rocket!

The Manned Orbiting Labouratory (MOL) was another variant using the Gemini spacecraft that almost got into orbit. I remember reading about it when I was growing up. Only years later did we find out it would have been a manned spy satellite! (Credit: Secret Projects Forum)

Now in a sense ‘False Steps’ is all about might have beens. Reading it you think about how things could have been different. What if von Braun had been allowed to launch a satellite in 1956, a year before Sputnik? He was ready. What if Sergei Korolev hadn’t died in 1966? What if Nixon hadn’t done everything he could to kill the space program as president?

One problem with ‘False Steps’ is that Paul Drye only includes one image per article, and not always one. There are so many images available that there easily could have been more. For example Mr. Drye mentions the X-20 Dyna-Soar several times but never includes an image of the proposed spaceplane. (Credit: YouTube)

As I said at the beginning ‘False Steps’ is both a webpage, address below, and an E-book. So what you can do is visit the site, read a few of the articles and decide if you’d like to get the E-book, which you can do right from the site! If you find yourself as I did reading a half a dozen articles before you even realize it, get the book! You’ll be glad you did. The address is https://falsesteps.wordpress.com/. Have Fun!

Paleontology News for January 2021.

In this blog I have often discussed some of the latest research in paleontology. Sometimes the discussion was about the discovery of a new species of dinosaur or trilobite. Or perhaps I discussed the latest understanding about the way those ancient animals lived, or in the case of mass extinctions died.

I freely confess however that I haven’t talked a great deal about the fossil evidence from ancient plants. So when a story about a 100 million year old flower encased in amber caught my eye, well you’re reading the result.

There are a wealth of fossil plants that have been collected and cataloged but let’s be honest, they’re just not as cool as Dinosaurs! (Credit: WCAI)

Nevertheless a fossil flower encased in amber is a real find of great importance. (Credit: Sci-news.com)

The chunk of amber in question came from that mine in Myanmar that has produced some very amazing fossils during the last 3-4 years from a period of time some 100 million years ago ; see my posts of 16Dec2016, 1Jun2019, and 2Aug2020. Part of the reason that this fossil flower is so important is that the evolution of flowering plants is thought to have begun only a few million years earlier and indeed many of the details of the flower point to its being rather primitive.

Remember the dinosaur tail found in amber? Well the flower comes from the same mine which has produced a huge number of very important specimens. (Credit: The New York Times)

The flower had only male parts and comes from a new species, which has been given the name Valviloculus Pleristaminis. With a length of only 2mm, it is thought that the preserved specimen was probably one in a cluster of tiny flowers, something resembling a modern bluebell, with both male and female flowers.

Despite its small size the flower was preserved so perfectly that 50 individual stamens along with many other details can be easily discerned. The flower was described in a new paper by emeritus Professor George Poinar of Oregon State University who is a longtime expert on fossils in amber and whose work is considered to be part of the inspiration for the original novel “Jurassic Park”.

George Poinar of Oregon State University with a small part of his collection of fossils in amber! The idea for the book, and movie ‘Jurassic Park’ came from his work! (Credit: Oregon State University)

Paleontologists have many questions regarding the early evolution of flowering plants, technically known as angiosperms. It is hoped that this fossil flower, along with others from the same site, will provide new evidence to help answer some of those questions.

My second story for this month comes from almost the opposite end of the world, the land of my forebears, Ireland. Now Ireland is a small country and geologically the island is built on a bedrock of very old Paleozoic rock with a layer of much more recent glacial deposits on top. That means that while Ireland has a lot of fossils they are virtually all either more than 250 million years old, or less than about 20 million years old. In other words no dinosaur fossils!

Ireland has a wealth of fossils but virtually all, like these primitive amphibians are much older than the dinosaurs! (Credit: The Irish Times)

Now that doesn’t mean that Ireland never had any dinosaurs, it’s just that the evidence, the rocks that formed during the age of dinosaurs has been worn away by the Ice Ages of the last few million years. There could have been dinosaurs roaming around the Emerald Isle but without evidence we couldn’t be certain.

Until now, for the first reliably identified dinosaur bones have been discovered in county Antrim in Northern Ireland. The two bones were discovered by the late Roger Byrne, a schoolteacher and fossil collector who donated his collection to the Ulster Museum. Chemical analysis has determined that the two bones came from a small outcrop of Jurassic age rocks on the isle of Islandmagee along the east coast of County Antrim, dating the fossils to about 200 million years ago.

Dr. Mike Simms holds the first two dinosaur fossils ever collected in Ireland. (Credit: The Irish Times)

Mister Byrne believed that the two bones came from the same animal but an analysis of the fossils by a team from the University of Portsmouth and Queen’s University Belfast led by Dr. Mike Simms has concluded that they actually come from two very different species of dinosaur. One bone is a femur, heavy and dense that came from a four-legged plant eating armoured dinosaur similar to the ankyosaurus named Scelidosaurus. The other bone is lighter and much less dense and is part of the tibia from a two-legged meat eating theropod similar to the genus Sarcosaurus.

An artists impression of Scelidosaurus. (Credit: The Irish Times)

A reconstruction of Sarcosaurus. (Credit: The Irish Times)

And the importance of these two fossils goes beyond simple national pride in being Ireland’s first dinosaurs because they also represent the most westerly dinosaur fossils ever discovered in Europe. On top of that there has been a growing theory that the armoured plant eater Scelidosaurus lived a life similar to that of marine iguanas today, eating algae along shallow seacoasts. The Jurassic rocks on Islandmagee are considered to have been laid down in just such an environment so the discovery of a Scelidosaurus there lends further evidence to that theory.

The fossil of Scelidosaurus found in Ireland adds evidence to a growing theory that the dinosaur lived a life similar to the modern marine iguana. (Credit: Go Galapagos)

So there you are, two more discoveries from opposite sides of the world adding a few more details to our knowledge of the world of the dinosaurs. You can be sure that there are more discoveries to come and I will do my best to let you know about them.

A Fusion Reactor experiment in South Korea has succeeded in maintaining a temperature of 100 million degrees for 20 seconds. Is this a breakthrough or just steady progress?

Most people know that the energy source of our Sun is nuclear fusion. That deep within the Sun’s core, at temperatures and pressures far beyond anything here on Earth the nuclei of hydrogen are squeezed together to form helium releasing massive amounts of energy in the process.

The Process of Fusion in the Sun. Starting with four Hydrogen Nuclei (Protons) we end up with a Helium Nuclei and a lot of energy! (Credit: Quora)

However Fusion is only possible under the immense pressures and temperatures found in the very centers of Stars. (Credit: Physics LibreTexts)

We’ve known for decades that if we could harness the power of fusion our energy problems would be over. We could obtain huge amounts of energy from a cheap fuel; there are two atoms of hydrogen in every molecule of water after all, and do so without producing any CO₂ or other pollutants to poison our planet. Not only that but fusion is safer than nuclear fission because there are no long term radioactive waste products produced and since fusion requires such extreme conditions if anything goes wrong the whole reaction instantly shuts down. In other words no Chernobyls.

Once started a Fission Chain Reaction is hard to control, that’s what happened at Chernobyl. Fusion, on the other hard is so hard to keep going that after 70 years of trying we still haven’t succeeded in doing it! (Credit: USA Today)

So physicists and nuclear engineers have been working on the development of a fusion reactor since the 1950s, so far without success. The conditions needed to produce fusion, millions of degrees under enormous pressure are simply so difficult to achieve and sustain that for decades a successful experiment was one that lasted for milliseconds.

There has been progress however and in just the last ten years the second barrier has been broken. The current record, just achieved on the 24th of November, is continuous operation for 20 seconds at a temperature of over 100 million degrees Celsius. That success was made by the Korean Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTR) project located in the City of Daejeon in South Korea.

The Basic Design of a Tokamak Fusion Reactor. The plasma in contained within very strong magnetic fields. (Credit: Iter)

KSTAR is a Tokamak design where the hydrogen atoms are heated until they break apart into protons and electrons forming what is known as an electrically charged plasma. This plasma is then contained within a doughnut shaped ring by powerful magnetic fields. The plasma is then further heated by a variety of means such as radio frequency heating, just like your microwave, or neutron beam injection. If the plasma can be kept enclosed within the doughnut and brought up to high enough temperature fusion can be achieved. For the last 70 years containment has been the problem.

The interior of the KSTAR Tokamak. (Credit: Steemit)

In KSTAR the doughnut containment vessel is 1.8m across with a thickness of 0.5m. The major improvement in KSTAR has been the use of superconducting magnets generating a field of 3.5 Tesla, that’s about 70,000 times the strength of Earth’s magnetic field, a field strong enough to contain a maximum plasma current of 2 million amperes.

The exterior of the KSTAR Tokamak in South Korea. (Credit: Slashgear)

And KSTAR is not the only Tokamak based experimental reactor trying to push forward the technology needed to make fusion power a reality. In fact KSTAR is just one facility in the largest multi-national scientific program ever, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor or ITER. With seven main partners, the European Union, Russia, the US, China, India, Japan and South Korea, and 35 other contributing nations the goal of ITER is a Tokamak reactor that will actually produce more energy than it requires in order to run.

Construction of the ITER reactor is already underway in the Provence region of southern France with a scheduled completion date of 2025. The planned energy output of ITER is 500 Mega Watts for as long a time as twenty minutes. Experiments at ITER are expected to run from 2025 to 2035.

Construction is underway for the ITAR Tokamak reactor in Southern France. It is hoped that while ITAR will not produce commercially useful energy it will for the first time sustain a fusion reaction for a long enough period of time where useful energy could be produced. (Credit: BBC.com)

But ITER will still be an experimental reactor; there are no plans to even attempt to produce useful electricity from the heat generated by the reactor. Instead the lessons learned from ITER will be used to finally build and operate a commercial power plant using nuclear fusion. This planned power plant has tentatively been named DEMO although at present it has not been decided whether DEMO will be an actual reactor or a design that contributing member nations can then use to construct commercial power plants in their own countries. So there is real progress being made. Someday, in the not too distant future we will finally achieve the production of energy by nuclear fusion. However it is worth remembering that back in the 1960s people were predicting that fusion power was only 20 years away. That prediction has since become something of a joke. ‘Fusion power is 20 years away, and always will be!”

As Searches for Dark Matter continue to come up empty Physicists are beginning to reconsider theories of Modified Gravity.

Physicists and Astronomers have had a big problem now for a very long time. Once astronomer Carl Hubble recognized that a large number of the fuzzy objects out in space called nebula were in fact entire galaxies astronomers and astrophysicists starting trying to work out the dynamics of how those galaxies behaved. Take a typical spiral galaxy like our own Milky Way, it has a central globe about 20,000 light years in diameter surrounded by a thin disk 200,000 light years in diameter but only about 5,000 light years thick, see image below. The density of stars is greatest in that central sphere and slowly but steadily decreases the further out you go along the disk.

The galaxy M33 (Triangulum) is a typical spiral like our Milky Way with a concentration of stars in the center and the density growing less the further you go out from the center. (Credit: Astronomy Picture of the Day – NASA)

Physicists immediately recognized that such a galaxy would only be stable if all of its stars orbited around the center and indeed our Sun is calculated to orbit around the Milky Way’s center once every 200 million years. If astronomers could estimate the mass distribution of the stars then the physicists could use Newton’s law of gravity to work out a velocity profile for the galaxy. Basically that would give them a formula for the velocity a star would have as a function of its distance from the center of its galaxy. That formula could then be checked by using the Doppler effect to measure the actual velocities of stars at various places in a galaxy.

Capculated (expected) versus measured radial velocity as a function of distance from center for the spiral galaxy M33. It’s easy to see that something is wrong somewhere! (Credit: Dark Energy, Dark Matter, Dark Gravity)

It didn’t work. Dozens of studies, dating back to 1933 have shown that the stars near the outer edge of a galaxy are moving too fast. Indeed the whole profile of velocity versus distance indicated that galaxies should have more than twice the mass that we can see and that mass should be spread out more evenly from the center.

That’s where the idea of ‘Dark Matter’ comes from, some form of matter that doesn’t radiate light but possesses a great deal of mass. There have been a lot of ideas about what dark matter could be, several of which have even been given ‘cutesy’ names. MACHOS, which stands for Mass Concentrations, could be anything from brown dwarfs, objects too small to become stars but larger than planets, to stellar mass black holes. Problem with either alternative is that you need huge numbers of them; remember we have to more than double the mass of the galaxies. Astronomers have found a few brown dwarfs and stellar mass black holes but nowhere near enough to solve the problem of the missing mass.

Every now and then a physicist will suggest that Dark Matter is an enormous number of undetected primordial black holes. There is no evidence to support that idea and circumstantial evidence against it. (Credit: The Tribune)

Then there are the WIMPS or Weakly Interacting Massive Particles. These are elementary particles like electrons or quarks except that they are electrically neutral so they don’t interact with light, and they are very massive. Particle physicists like WIMPS because they can connect them to the particles predicted by theories of ‘Super-Symmetry’. Problem is that despite decades of searching, and building powerful particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN no evidence for any super-symmetric particles has ever been found.

One of the problems with Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPS) as Dark Matter is that there are so many possibilities that it’s hard to keep them all straight. (Credit: Physics (APS) American Physical Society)

A completely different approach was taken back in 1983 by Israeli physicist Mordehai Milgrom. Maybe he asked, Newton and Einstein were wrong about gravity, and then Milgrom proceeded to modify the gravitational field equations so that they would accurately predict the behavior of galaxies. Milgrom referred to his theory as MOdified Newtonian Dynamics or MOND the name by which it has since been known. If MOND or some similar altered theory of gravity is true then the failure to detect dark matter is easy to understand, there simply is no such thing as dark matter, gravity is different than what we thought.

Physicist Mordehai Milgrom has challenged both Newton and Einstein, not something for the faint of heart to try! (Credit: Wikipedia)

Now according to Newton and Einstein gravity obeys what is known as an inverse square law, see equation. 1. This means that the strength of gravity gets weaker the further two masses are by the square of the distance between them. Double the distance and gravity is one quarter as strong, triple the distance and gravity is one ninth as strong, four times the distance yields one sixteenth the strength and so on.

Newton’s law of Gravity is an Inverse Square Law and has been measured to be extremely accurate within our Solar System. (Credit: Wikipedia)

The changes Milgrom proposed to the inverse square law where very small. They had to be because Newton-Einstein works extremely well in our solar system and recently astronomers have even shown that stars orbiting around the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy follow Newton-Einstein very accurately, see my post of 6May2020. Crucially however, the small change proposed by Milgrom doesn’t grow weak as quickly with distance as inverse square. This means that at enormous distances, much larger than our solar system, tens to hundreds of light years, it is the modified term that starts to dominate over the Newtonian inverse square term.

In MOND a constant Ao is introduced that must be extremely tiny so that MOND only differs from Newton over huge distances. Physicists don’t like this kind of tweaking of equations just to make them fit the observed data without some rational behind it. (Credit: Slideserve)

All that makes it very difficult to test MOND or any similar small changes to Newton-Einstein. There is one difference however that just might be measured. One of the quirks of a pure inverse square law is that if you are sitting at the center of a mass distribution then you are being pulled by the gravity of those masses equally in every direction so that you literally feel no force! Think about it, if you are at the center of a planet there is a lot of matter all around you but you’re being pulled down just as much as up, back just as much as forward and to the left just as much as to the right. Being pulled equally in every direction you end up not being pulled in any direction, so you feel no gravity. This is known as the lack of effect from an external field.

Newton first performed the calculation that showed how there is no net gravitational force inside a uniform shell of matter. (Credit: Slideplayer)

In MOND however an external field can be felt and so the rotation curve of a galaxy at the center of a large cluster of galaxies would differ from the rotation curve of a similar galaxy that is far from any other large galaxy. To test this idea a group of astrophysicists from Sejong University in South Korea, Cardiff University and the University of Oxford in the UK along with Chase Western Reserve University and the University of Oregon in the USA has examined the rotation curves of 153 galaxies to see if there is any trace of such a difference. The study is entitled ‘Testing the Strong Equivalence Principle: Detection of the External Field Effect in Rotationally Supported Galaxies’ and has been published in the Astrophysics Journal.

What they discovered was that of rotational speeds of galaxies inside an external gravitational field were slowed when compared to the rotations in more isolated galaxies, something contrary to Newton-Einstein but exactly as predicted by MOND. Statistically the results so far give a 4σ confidence level, just below the golden 5σ confidence that physicists use to declare a ‘discovery’. With results so provocative you can be certain that the researchers will be working to both find more evidence as well as improve the data they already have.

Some of the data from the study in Astrophysical Journal in chart form. (Credit: Kyu-Hyun Chae et al)

If MOND does turn out to be correct it will not only eliminate the need for dark matter it will force a reevaluation of many other well established theories. Much of Cosmology and the Big Bang Theory are rooted in Einstein’s gravitational field equations but so far no one has ever been able to expand MOND to describe the Universe as a whole. So even while MOND has gained strong new evidence in its favour there’s still a long way to go before it becomes generally accepted by the majority of physicists. The problem of galactic rotation has been around a long time and it looks like it will continue to be so for a little while longer.

Book Review: Bowl of Heaven by Gregory Benford and Larry Niven.

A lot of Science Fiction is about future technology. Imagining structures, vehicles and devices beyond what we are capable of building today. Some novels are set in the far future with starships and colonies on other planets. Others may describe the world of tomorrow with AI networks controlling robots who have eliminated boring, repetitive manual labour so that people no longer have to (can?) work for a living.

What will our future habitats on other worlds look like? Is today’s Science Fiction tomorrow’s reality? (Credit: Space.com)

If that’s the kind of SF that you enjoy, if you’re interested in reading about a really big, really futuristic, ultimate high tech piece of engineering then I think you’ll like “The Bowl of Heaven” by Gregory Benford and Larry Niven. The story begins with a human starship on route from Earth to another solar system. The ship is named ‘The Sunseeker’ and it’s a sleeper ship taking centuries to cross interstellar space while the vast majority of its passengers and crew are hibernating. Once at their new world the sleepers will be awakened and begin their task of terra-forming a new home for the human race. As I began to read ‘the Bowl of Heaven’ the setup kinda reminded me of the movie ‘Passengers’ that I reviewed in my post of 28December2016.

The starship from the movie “Passengers” was a

And like in ‘Passengers’ the Sunseeker has something happen to it in mid-voyage that’s changes everything. Suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere a star appears not very far away from the ship. Now stars don’t just pop into existence so the only two non-sleeping persons on board the Sunseeker, a couple of engineers whose training is in monitoring ship’s performance not astronomy, decide to wake a scientist in order to make some observations of this strange phenomenon. Those observations result in more people being woken up and before long a couple of dozen people, including the ship’s captain, are awake trying to figure out what they should do.

The cover of ‘Bowl of Heaven’ by Gregory Benford (l) and Larry Niven (r). (Credit: Tor.com)

What they found was that the star had been hiding inside an incomplete Dyson sphere. What’s a Dyson sphere? Well the noted physicist Freeman Dyson once suggested that the ultimate energy source would be to completely enclose a star inside a sphere. Solar collectors would then gather the entire energy output of that star. Obviously only a highly intelligent, very technologically sophisticated race could even begin to build such a thing.

Physicist Freeman Dyson originated the notion of surrounding a star with a sphere in order to capture its entire energy output. (Credit: LabRoots)

Now in ‘The Bowl of Heaven’ the star isn’t inside a complete Dyson Sphere, it’s more like a bowl covering most of the star, hence the novel’s title. It’s when the Sunseeker moves to a certain angle that the star inside becomes visible through the top of the bowl. This accounts for the star seeming to appear from nowhere.

And if encapsulating an entire star doesn’t impress you how about this, mounted around the rim of the bowl are enormous magnetic field projectors that focus the star’s solar wind into a propulsive jet. This jet is propelling the star and it’s bowl across the galaxy. Not a starship but rather a shipstar, a star turned into a ship!

Turning a star into a ship! Now that’s imagination! (Credit: Gregory Benford)

This concept is in fact an expansion of the main idea in author Larry Niven’s earlier novel ‘Ringworld’ where a ring is constructed completely around a star, again capturing an enormous amount of energy. In ‘Ringworld’ the ring rotates around the star not only producing centripetal force to act as gravity for the inhabitants but also reducing the structural stress on the ring. The basic idea of ‘The Bowl of Heaven’ is an extension of ‘Ringworld’ turning an entire solar system into a vehicle for exploring the galaxy.

The cover of Larry Niven’s earlier novel ‘Ringworld’. The technology of ‘The Bowl f Heaven’ is an extension of that in Ringworld. (Credit:The Atlantic)

Attempting to make contact with the intelligences controlling the shipstar the crew of Sunseeker go inside the bowl and send a landing party to the surface. Well it turns out that the aliens are rather haughty and treat other species as nothing more than intelligent animals, quite a few of whom they’ve genetically modified to serve them on the shipstar. The human landing party escapes however and what follows is a series of adventures on the surface of the bowl.

Living on the inside of the Bowl you’d never see nighttime or any change of seasons! (Credit: Tor/Forge Blog)

And that’s my problem with ‘The Bowl of Heaven’ because while those adventures are interesting they are really beside the plot and they certainly go on for too long! After several hundred pages of the landing party roving around the bowl meeting different kinds of aliens and learning how to survive in such a strange environment you want to say. “Get on with it!”

But authors Niven and Benford don’t, because you see ‘The Bowl of Heaven’ is just the first installment of yet another series of novels. The story of the crew of Sunseeker in fact continues in the novel ‘Shipstar’. The problem with ‘The Bowl of Heaven’ is the problem with these series in general, too much filler so that the author or authors can turn one good idea into several books!

I have to admit that I’m getting a bit tied of all these trilogies or longer. I’d love to read another novel like ‘The Martian’ where the story actually ends when the book does.

The use of subplots to stretch out a story is very common and becoming more so in modern SF because of the large number of multi-novel series being written. The fact that they are so common doesn’t mean that they’re any good! (Credit: Gideon’s Screenwriting Tips)

Still, ‘The Bowl of Heaven’ was fun to read, and you can bet that I’ll be reading, and reviewing ‘Shipstar’ before very long. I do recommend it, but be aware that you’re going to have to read at least one more book in order to find out what happens in the end.