Lego Dinos

 From New Scientist 10th Jan, Backpages...

Dinomammoths

Feedback really doesn’t want to keep doing items about Lego. People will start to think we have an animus against the toy bricks, or that we are doing stealth marketing for them, neither of which is the case. However, palaeogeneticist Ross Barnett has drawn attention to a little book the company has produced, How to Build LEGO Dinosaurs. It contains instructions for 30 models.

A closer look reveals the issue. There are four models on the front cover, one of which is a pterosaur, which isn’t a dinosaur. We might let them off on that one, because it is, at least, an archosaur from the correct geological era. However, the back cover has a number of additional models, perhaps the most prominent being a woolly mammoth. Some of the others are a little hard to pin down (is that another pterosaur or an Archaeopteryx?), but as Barnett says, “I reckon 5/8 of the main images aren’t dinosaurs.”

Perhaps all this is pedantic, but then Feedback can think of no more pedantic an audience than 7-year-olds who are into dinosaurs. That said, full marks to the book’s creators for including instructions for a bespectacled dinosaur, Doyouthinkhesaurus. Feedback does enjoy a good dad joke, and also a bad one.

Space Probes I

A few months ago, the regular email I get from New Scientist magazine mentioned the then-upcoming launch of the Lucy space probe.  This mission is designed to explore the Trojan asteroids in the orbit of Jupiter.

I thought this interesting, and watched the launch online in October, on NASA TV,  which itself a very strange channel: there’s a sense that people who just want to geek out about space and engineering are perpetually holding themselves back, probably to stick to the corporate messages. 

The Lucy mission has a complex trajectory – this is what the NASA site said in late November:

The spacecraft is traveling at roughly 67,000 mph (108,000 kph) on a trajectory that will orbit the Sun and bring it back toward Earth in October 2022 for the spacecraft’s first gravity assist. That manoeuvre will accelerate and direct Lucy’s trajectory beyond the orbit of Mars. The spacecraft will then swing back toward Earth for another gravity assist in 2024, which will propel Lucy toward the Donaldjohanson asteroid – located within the solar system’s main asteroid belt – in 2025.

Lucy will then journey toward its first Trojan asteroid encounter in the swarm ahead of Jupiter for a 2027 arrival. After completing its first four targeted flybys, the spacecraft will travel back to Earth for a third gravity boost in 2031, which will catapult it to the trailing swarm of Trojans for a 2033 encounter.[1]

It’s a complicated series of manoeuvres, and I suspect the looping curves shown on the site don’t really do it justice.  Lucy will carry a number of instruments, including an infrared imaging spectrometer, a thermal emission spectrometer and a range of cameras. 

This mission captured my imagination, in part because of the number of science fiction stories I’ve read set on the asteroids.  Admittedly, these were more often about mining the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, but still there were stories set among the Trojans. 

Later, there was if anything a more SFNal mission launch: Dart, which will attempt to nudge a large space rock, as part of experiments of planetary defence systems.  The ‘Double Asteroid Redirection Test’:

 is a planetary defence-driven test of technologies for preventing an impact of Earth by a hazardous asteroid. DART will be the first demonstration of the kinetic impactor technique to change the motion of an asteroid in space.[2]

This is more than a little worrying, given the number of stories there are out there, where such a mission goes wrong and wreaks catastrophe on the Earth.  Still, I’m sure they’ve though of all that?

Following the launch of Dart, on Christmas Eve, came the much-delayed launch of the James Webb Telescope is due.  Webb, once deployed, will primarily look in the infrared spectrum, and if successful will tell us a lot more about the earliest era of the Universe.

Which got me thinking: given this triumvirate of interesting launches in the last three months of 2021, what is already up there, and still working?

 Staying in the same vein as the James Webb launch, there’s the Hubble Telescope, of course, which is still in operation, capturing ravishing images, in the visible and ultraviolet wavelengths.

There are many other space-borne telescopes, such as the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, launched in 1999 and still contributing to research on black holes, dark matter and dark energy. Chandra has four mirrors focusing X-rays.  Images and spectra can be captured. 

Operating well beyond its expected lifetime, NASA's Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE), launched in 1997, still sits at the Earth-Sun L1 point to collect and analyse particles of solar, interplanetary, interstellar and galactic origins.  ACE continues to provide space weather reports and warnings of geomagnetic storms that can disrupt communications on Earth and harm astronauts in space.

 More recently, again just last December, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched NASA’s Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) satellite. The IXPE is the first satellite capable of measuring the polarization of X-rays that come from cosmic sources, such as black holes and neutron stars.  The satellite has three telescopes that can track and measure the direction, arrival time, energy, and polarization of light.

There’s also the Parker Solar Probe, which in November completed its 10th close approach to the Sun, coming within 5.3 million miles of the solar surface.

It isn’t all about NASA.  BepiColombo is Europe's first mission to Mercury. Launched on 20 October 2018, it is on a seven-year journey and should arrive at Mercury in late 2025.  It has already had a close flyby of the planet, at 199 km in early October 2021, when it began sampling the magnetic and particle environment around the planet.   The mission comprises two spacecraft: the Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO) and the Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (Mio). BepiColombo is a joint mission between ESA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).

More to follow

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[1] See https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/missions/lucy/in-depth/

[2] See https://www.nasa.gov/planetarydefense/dart

Hamster

I was given this book (How to Fossilise your Hamster and other Amazing Experiments for the Armchair Scientist) for my birthday last year (thanks Garie). I kind of set it aside, and let others read it, because it had quite a lighthearted cover and sounded very shallow.

Finally, I read it. It is much better than it seemed. Lots of short simple experiments demonstrating bits and bobs of science. Some of them are quite clever (have a look at the one involving a bar of choclate and a microwave oven - I will have to try that myself). And the experiments have explanations that are mostly correct.

I say mostly, because sometimes I get the impression they have been written by someone who doesn't quite get it. They are seemingly strong on chemistry and biology, but some of the physics explanations feel a little awry. See for example the one about the candle on a revolving turntable. Still, it is mostly pretty good.

Is this a trend? The Clay Shirky book (Here Comes Everybody:The Power of Organizing without Organizations) has a similar problem. With an irritating title and a lighthearted cover, it comes across as the worst of popular science books, when actually its quite serious and interesting. Fun, even. But someone seems to have concluded it has to be packaged differently in order to sell.

Sigh. You can't judge a book by...