We had many excellent lecturers on this cruise. They called them “Conversations” rather than lectures as most of the presenters encouraged questions. There were several experts on the history of the Pacific Islands and other topics, but the one I found most interesting was the rocket scientist.
Yes, we really had a rocket scientist on board. Frank Buzzard worked for NASA for 30 years and he was Chief engineer on both the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station. He also led the NASA Columbia Accident Investigation Task Force. And he was part of the team that made the “Go/No-Go” decision for launching the Hubble Space Telescope. The man has some pretty impressive credentials and he gave many fascinating lectures.
So what follows is just a smattering of the information Frank shared in his numerous Conversations. If you are not interested in space exploration or info about our universe, then this would be a good blog to skip. It’s not about the Picks or their adventures. It’s about the Milky Way they live in. (Not to be confused with the Milky Way candy that is in them).
First, I will say that the vastness of what is “out there” is beyond my comprehension.
Earth is one of 8 planets (well it was 9 until Pluto got demoted) in our solar system. And our solar system is just a small part of the Milky Way Galaxy. Our sun (a giant gaseous plasma ball with a surface temperature of 5500 degrees Celsius) is just one of 200 million stars in our galaxy. The Hubble Telescope looked at a small patch of space for 12 days and found 10,000 galaxies. Some scientists believe that there could be as many as one hundred billion galaxies in the universe.
And these are many, many “light years” away. One light year is 5.9 trillion miles. To give you some perspective The Constellation Orion which we can see on a clear night is in our own Milky Way galaxy and is 1344 light years away. Because of the speed at which light travels, if the sun blacked out right now, we would not know it for 8 minutes.
Are you starting to feel small and insignificant in the overall scheme of things? I am old enough to relate to Carl Sagan when he was talking about those “billions and billions” of stars.
So a galaxy is a huge collection of gas, dust and billions of stars and their solar systems which is held together by gravity. And there is a black hole in every galaxy. So the next time someone tells you that their email or something else went into the big black hole, you might want to believe them!
A black hole is an area where light cannot escape. We cannot see a black hole but we can see the dust and gasses around the black hole. Stars spiral toward, and are being eaten by, this black hole. Gravity is trying to make our sun disappear into a black hole. Eventually our sun, after it exhausts all its nuclear fuel, will become a white dwarf (not to be confused with one of Snow White’s 7 friends).
It is believed that the Milky Way and the “nearby” Andromeda galaxy (one of the few that we can see with the naked eye) are going to dance with each other and that will rip stars and solar systems apart. That’s probably how we’ll end. But don’t worry, you and I won’t be around.
Meanwhile new stars and planets are forming “out there”. The Hubble Space telescope is taking pictures of planets sweeping up dust and gasses and getting bigger.
So that’s the future. Now let’s take a quick look at our past.
Earth is Believed to be 4.54 billion years old. It was formed from the debris of previously exploded stars. Sixty-five million years ago an asteroid about the size of Mt. Everest struck Earth off the coast of the Yucatán peninsula. They found it looking for oil underground. This impact created gasses so hot that it destroyed much of the vegetation.
It created a tremendous change in earth’s climate so that all large animals disappeared, including the dinosaurs. For several decades there was nothing large animals could eat. Only small animals that lived in holes and had fur and feathers survived.
I don’t want our moon and the other planets in our solar system to feel left out, so here are just a few facts about them.
Our MOON
The dust on the moon’s surface looks exactly like the dirt on earth’s crust. Something the size of Mars struck the earth and spewed out some of earth’s crust which became the moon. That caused earth’s axis to tilt giving us seasons.
The moon is slowly accelerating and moving away from Earth. We can measure this movement with a laser and know that is moves a half centimeter per year. So at one time the Moon was much closer to Earth.
We never see the back side of the moon. (But if you moon someone you are showing them your backside. Sorry, I couldn’t resist.)
VENUS
Venus is close to our size and has an atmosphere of carbon dioxide. There are craters, volcanoes, and canyons on Venus. The pressure is 92 times higher than pressure on earth. The surface temperature is 860 degrees Fahrenheit and it is always clouded. The Russians put a spacecraft up there but it only survived 3 minutes before being crushed and burned up. That was an expensive experiment!
MARS
Scientists are debating whether our next destination to further explore should be the Moon or Mars. If we go to the moon, we can learn to live off the land. For example we can put lunar dust into a 3-D printer and make the furniture we would need up there! 3-D printers are being used now in the International Space Station. (Now that’s some advanced technology).
But Mars is intriguing. So much so that Matt Damon took us there in “The Martian”. It’s axis and rotation are similar to Earth and it has seasons.
Mars’ atmosphere is is 1/1000 of the atmosphere of Earth, so humans couldn’t go outside without a pressure suit and oxygen. But once you went out, you could set a world record in pole vaulting!
Landing on Mars is hard to do. The atmosphere is too thin for a parachute to work to slow down the lander. They used balloons which bounced 16 times before holding the rover in place.
We launched “Opportunity” which landed and has been going around Mars for 14 years. At one point, storms raged for 6-7 months which kept Opportunity from communicating with us. We are looking for methane out in space which might indicate that there is other carbon based life out there.
Mars had oceans for several billion years. It now has glaciers (ice) under the surface. The soil and dust that is over the ice keeps it from evaporating. The pressure on Mars now is too low to have a liquid. So water is either a solid (ice) or a gas. But there used to be liquid water on Mars because the pressure was greater then.
If we can find water on Mars we could make enough rocket fuel to get back. But if we ever send people up there to live, they will stay younger a lot longer since it takes 680 days to go around the Sun vs. our 365 on planet Earth.
Is there life on Mars? Frank believes that there are likely other forms of life that don’t need water.
JUPITER
Frank did all the programming for Voyager I and II to go to Jupiter and it is still working.
Jupiter is the largest planet and has very high radiation which cooks computers or any electronics that we send near it. The clouds are rose colored. Jupiter’s magnetic field is thousands of times stronger than earth’s magnetic field. (So when he tells her, “I’m attracted to you”, on Jupiter he really means it).
There should be a planet between Mars and Jupiter. But the gravity of Jupiter is so powerful it kept the planet from forming. Instead there is a large group of asteroids in this area.
PLUTO
So why was Pluto demoted?
Pluto wasn’t discovered till 1930 because it is so far away and not bright (kind of like the Disney character). It’s likely that Pluto used to be a satellite of Neptune, but was struck by something so big it accelerated and left Neptune’s orbit and went out on its own.
The farther away you are from the sun, the slower the revolutions. So it can take Pluto centuries to orbit the sun.
In 2006 we launched the spacecraft “New Horizons” on its way to Pluto and it took a little over 9 years to get there (vs. 8 months to get to Mars). So in 2015 we found out that we were wrong about a few things. We thought it would be dead and inactive. But there is ice on Pluto, and it has oceans of methane ice that create mountains that are 11,000 feet tall.
We can’t orbit Pluto since there is not enough fuel to slow down the rocket and put it into orbit. Maybe if we could land there we’d find something worthy of reinstating Pluto as a planet.
So that’s probably more than you wanted to know about space.
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