Tag: Science Cartoon

What Color is Neptune?

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 10 Comments

Hello, friends!

Every now and then, science asks us to unlearn a thing we had previously learned.  Pluto isn’t a planet.  Some dinosaurs were covered in feathers.  And now, according to some newly published research, Neptune is less blue than we thought.  Rather than that rich, royal blue color we usually see in photos, Neptune is more of a light aqua color, similar to the light aqua of Uranus.

The original research, published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, was actually more about Uranus than Neptune.  As you probably know already, Uranus is tipped over sideways.  This sideways orientation causes some pretty wild seasonal variations in Uranus’s atmosphere, which leads to changes in Uranus’s color and brightness over the course of a Uranian year (which is equivalent to approximately 84 Earth years).

But aside from the sideways thing, Uranus and Neptune are very similar planets.  They’re about the same size, about the same mass, and they have almost the same chemical compositions.  So if you’re doing research about the atmosphere of Uranus (and the color thereof), then it makes sense to compare and contrast the colors of Uranus and Neptune.  And it’s at this point that the original research paper goes off on a long tangent, explaining that Neptune isn’t as blue as you probably think, and offering reprocessed imaging data to show what Neptune really looks like.

So how did everybody get this wrong for so long?  Well, to make a long story short, somebody at NASA was playing with the color contract.  In 1989, when the Voyager 2 space probe sent the first up close images of Neptune back to Earth, those images revealed some interesting features in Neptune’s atmosphere, like the Great Dark Spot and the South Polar Wave.  Adjusting the color contrast made those features easier to see, and so these color adjusted images were the images that got disseminated to the media and the public.

In NASA’s defense, they did try to call attention to the color adjustments they’d made.  The color enhanced photos originally had captions explaining that they were false color images.  Apparently NASA also showed a true color image of Neptune, side by side with the false color version, at a 1989 press conference.  Still, most people missed the memo, including a lot of people in the scientific community, leading to this popular misconception that Uranus and Neptune are dramatically different shades of blue.

Now I have seen a few amateur astronomy buffs object to this new research, saying that when they look at Neptune and Uranus in their telescopes, Neptune is clearly a darker shade of blue than Uranus.  The research paper does address that.  First, due to differences in atmospheric density, Neptune is a teeny-tiny bit darker than Uranus (but only a teeny-tiny bit).  Additionally, Neptune is farther away from the Sun, which means Neptune gets less sunlight than Uranus.  This makes Neptune look a teeny bit darker still. And also, if you’re observing Neptune from Earth, Neptune will appear to be smaller (and proportionally dimmer) than Uranus, once again due to the fact that Neptune is farther away.

It’s going to take me some time to get used to this, just like it took me some time to get used to the idea of feathered dinosaurs.  I sometimes like to call Uranus “the Turquoise Planet” and Neptune “the Other Blue Planet.”  But I guess I’ll have to change that.  From now on, I’ll have to call Neptune “the Other Turquoise Planet” instead.

WANT TO LEARN MORE?

I don’t normally tell people to just go look at Wikipedia, but I do think the Wikipedia page on Neptune is worth seeing.  Wikipedia was very quick to update its photo of Neptune after this new research was published.

The lead author on the original paper is a professor at the University of Oxford, so here’s the press release from the University of Oxford announcing the paper’s publication.

And here’s a YouTube video with a little more detailed information about Uranus, Uranus’s atmosphere and seasonal variations, and the updated color data for Neptune.

And lastly, for anyone who wants to read the original research paper itself, here’s the link.

P.S.: If you must make a Uranus joke in the comments, I will give you praise and credit if (and only if) it’s a joke I haven’t heard before.

Fly or Die: How Life on Venus Might Survive

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 2 Comments

Hello, friends!

So I recently found this 100% totally legit JWST image of Venus, revealing some of the weird and scary chemistry that happens in Venus’s atmosphere.  As you can see, Venus sure does love chemicals.  Super noxious, super toxic chemicals.  With all those noxious and toxic chemicals in her atmosphere, you’d think Venus must be a pretty unlikely place to find life.

Now add in a runaway greenhouse effect that makes the surface of Venus hotter than the daytime surface of Mercury.  Now add in atmospheric pressure that rivals the deepest, most-submarine-crushing depths of Earth’s oceans.  Now add in some sort of volcanic activity (the specifics of which remain mysterious) that seems to sporadically spread fresh lava over nearly the entire planet’s surface.

So yes, Venus is an unlikely place to find life.  Venus is among the least likely places in the whole Solar System to find life.  And yet, the possibility of life on Venus does come up in the scientific literature from time to time.  So how would that work?  How could living things survive on a planet so infamously hostile to life?

Have you ever heard the expression “sink or swim”?  Well, if any sort of life exists on Venus today, its motto must be “fly or die.”  Everything about Venus is dangerous and deadly, but the most dangerous and deadly conditions are found at the planet’s surface.  So if you’re a Venusian life form, don’t go to the surface.  Stay aloft in the atmosphere.  At an altitude of about 55 kilometers up, you should be safe safe-ish.  The global lava floods (however frequently or infrequently that happens) will be far below you.  The extreme pressure and temperature will be far below you as well.  You’ll still have to deal with all those scary chemicals in the atmosphere, but if you’re clever (or rather, if evolution is clever for you) some of those scary chemicals might be usable to you as nutrients.

If the idea of perpetually airborne life—of life that never, ever touches the ground—seems farfetched, then I need to tell you that microorganisms can and do live in the upper reaches of Earth’s atmosphere.  That’s not an ideal environment for them.  They’d much rather be down on the ground, where water and nutrients are more plentiful.  But microbes can survive way up there, if they have to.  Earth has a whole “aero-biosphere” of airborne microbes that scientists are only just beginning to understand.

And if Earth has an aero-biosphere, then maybe (maybe!) Venus could have some sort of aero-biosphere, too.  It may not be likely, but it’s not totally impossible.

WANT TO LEARN MORE?

Here’s a link to diagram, originally from a paper on the possible habitability of Venus, showing what the life cycle of Venusian airborne microbes might be like.

And here’s a short press release from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (A.P.L.) describing the so-called “Venus Life Equation,” which is sort of like the Drake Equation for life in the universe, but for just Venus.

And lastly, regarding the mystery surrounding Venus’s volcanic activity, we know Venus’s surface got “paved over” by fresh lava at some point in the recent past, but we don’t know how frequently this sort of thing happens.  It definitely happened at least one time.  Maybe it’s happened more often than that, or maybe it’s a continuing process that’s still happening today.  Here’s an article from the Planetary Society explaining why the global resurfacing of Venus remains such a big scientific mystery.

P.S.: Okay, I lied.  The image I used at the top of this blog post?  That’s not really from JWST.  Actually, I’m pretty sure JWST cannot safely observe Venus, due to Venus’s proximity to the Sun.  I drew that image myself.  And if you like my drawing of Venus, and if you want to do something to support what I do here on Planet Pailly, please consider visiting the Planet Pailly store on RedBubble.  There, you can buy my “Venus ‘Hearts’ Chemicals” drawing (and other drawings I’ve done) on a T-shirt, pillow case, spiral-bound notebook… personally, I think today’s drawing would look great on a little notebook, maybe for chemistry class!

Mercury A to Z: BepiColombo

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 18 Comments

Hello, friends!  Welcome to the second posting of this year’s A to Z Challenge!  My theme this year is the planet Mercury, and in today’s A to Z post, the letter B is for:

BEPICOLOMBO

Mercury is a pretty lonely planet.  Only two spacecraft have ever come to visit: NASA’s Mariner 10 space probe, which conducted a series of flybys in the 1970’s, and NASA’s MESSENGER Mission, which orbited Mercury for several years in the 2010’s.  But don’t feel too bad.  Soon, Mercury will be welcoming not one but two new guests, thanks to a joint mission by the European and Japanese space agencies.  And that name of that mission?  BepiColombo.

But first, a little history lesson.  Back in the late 1800’s, Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli determined that Mercury’s rotation rate (the time it takes for Mercury to spin on its axis) equals approximately 88 Earth days, or exactly one Mercurian year.  Unfortunately, Schiaparelli’s calculations were way off (we’ll talk about that more in a future post), and it took another Italian scientist, named Giuseppe “Bepi” Colombo, to fix Schiaparelli’s mistake.

In the 1960’s, thanks to new RADAR observations of Mercury, astronomers discovered that Mercury’s true rotation rate is approximately 59 Earth days, or precisely two-thirds of a Mercurian year.  And I do mean precisely two-thirds of a Mercurian year.  Odd coincidence, right?  Don’t worry.  We’ll talk about that more in future posts, too.  For now, all you need to know is that Giuseppe Colombo was the lead author on a paper that explained how Mercury could have gotten itself into this rather curious predicament.

The history lesson’s not over yet!  In the 1970’s, NASA was planning their first mission to Mercury, a mission known as Mariner 10.  But getting to Mercury isn’t easy.  Mercury is very small, and the Sun is very big.  The orbital mechanics of approaching such a small object in space, so close to such a big object, are really complicated.  NASA scientists thought the best they could do was aim carefully and do one quick flyby of Mercury.  But NASA was wrong, and once again, Giuseppe Colombo stepped in to correct the mistake.

Colombo showed NASA an alternative flight trajectory, involving a never-tried-before gravity assist maneuver near Venus, which would cause Mariner 10 to fly past Mercury, circle around the Sun, then fly past Mercury again… and again!  Thanks to Colombo’s orbital calculations, Mariner 10 was able to do three flybys of Mercury for the price of one.

Fast forward to modern times.  When ESA (the European Space Agency) and JAXA (the Japanese Aerospace eXploration Agency) decided to team up for a Mercury mission, they had no trouble picking a name.  In honor of Colombo’s outstanding contributions to the study and exploration of Mercury, the mission was officially named BepiColombo (one word, no space or hyphen—I’m not sure why it’s like that, but it’s one word).

BepiColombo is already in space, on route to Mercury.  When it arrives in 2025, it will separate into two spacecraft: the Mercury Planetary Orbiter (M.P.O.), built by Europe, and the Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (M.M.O.), built by Japan.  Together, these two spacecraft will follow up on some of the lingering mysteries about Mercury (i.e., other stuff that we’ll talk about in future posts).

WANT TO LEARN MORE?

I’m going to recommend this article from Univere Today, entitled “Who was Giuseppe “Bepi” Colombo and Why Does He Have a Spacecraft Named After Him?”

I’m also going to recommend this article from the Planetary Society, entitled “BepiColombo, Studying How Mercury Formed.”

And for those of you who enjoy reading scientific papers for fun, like I do, here is Giuseppe Colombo’s original research paper from 1965, explaining how Mercury’s rotation rate ended up being precisely two-thirds of a Mercurian year.

Mercury A to Z: Amorphous Ice

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 14 Comments

Hello, friends!  Welcome to my very first post for this year’s A to Z Challenge.  You don’t know what the A to Z Challenge is?  That’s okay.  You can click here if you want to learn more.  My theme for this year’s challenge is the planet Mercury, and in today’s post the letter A is for:

AMORPHOUS ICE

It gets really hot on Mercury.  You probably knew that already.  Mercury is, after all, the planet closest to the Sun.  But it may surprise you to learn that it also gets really cold on Mercury.  Extremely cold.  Like, we’re talking spit-goes-clink levels of cold.

Much like the Moon, Mercury has virtually no atmosphere.  That means there’s no atmospheric convection to transfer heat from the dayside of Mercury to the nightside.  Atmospheres can also act as a sort of blanket to keep a planet’s surface warm during the night.  But again, Mercury has virtually no atmosphere.  No blanket effect.  All the heat Mercury’s surface soaks up during the long Mercurian day is lost during the equally long Mercurian night.  As a result, the nightside of Mercury is one of the absolute coldest places in the entire Solar System.

Now, imagine if there were a place on Mercury where it is always night and never day.  Places like that exist at the bottoms of deep, dark craters clustered around Mercury’s north and south poles.  Shielded by crater rims and tall crater walls, the bottoms of those polar craters are cloaked in eternal darkness, and they are eternally cold.  Anything that happens to fall into one of those craters would freeze solid and could stay frozen for millions or even billions of years.

Back in the 1990’s, scientists began to suspect that those deep, dark craters around Mercury’s poles might be full of water (frozen water, obviously, but still… water).  And then in the 2010’s, NASA’s MESSENGER space probe took a closer look and confirmed it.  There is, in fact, water (in ice form) on Mercury.  Water on Mercury, of all places!

But I remind you again, the bottoms of Mercury’s polar craters are obscenely and stupidly cold.  Too cold for water to freeze the way it freezes on Earth.  On a molecular scale, the ice we find here on Earth has a neat and orderly crystalline structure.  Scientists call our Earthly kind of ice “ice Ih” or “hexagonal ice,” because the water molecules fit together in a hexagon pattern.  But the ice on Mercury is more likely to be what scientists call “amorphous ice.”

Amorphous ice is what happens when water freezes so fast that the water molecules don’t have time to arrange themselves in any sort of crystalline structure.  On a molecular scale, the water molecules are scattered haphazardly about.  No hexagons.  No patterns or shapes.  The ice is structurally shapeless—a.k.a., amorphous.  This doesn’t occur often here on Earth, except in certain astrophysics laboratories, but amorphous ice is extremely common out in space.

Comets and asteroids?  Whatever water they have is, partially or wholly, in the form of amorphous ice.  The surfaces of Europa, Ganymede, and the other icy moons of the outer Solar System?  They may be partially composed of amorphous ice.  And the ice inside those polar craters on Mercury (and similar polar craters on the Moon)?  You can bet on that being amorphous ice, too.

WANT TO LEARN MORE?

Water can freeze in so many different ways, with so many different crystalline and non-crystalline structures.  Here’s a brief video from Sci-Show about all the different kinds of ice scientists currently know about.

I also want to recommend this article from ZME Science, briefly summarizing the history of how water ended up on Mercury, how scientists on Earth first detected it, and how the MESSENGER mission later confirmed it.

Lastly, this is a far more technical source than the other two, but this paper on amorphous ice in the Solar System is the best source I could find stating, explicitly, that the ice on Mercury is probably amorphous ice. 

Sciency Words: Antitail

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 6 Comments

Hello, friends!  Welcome to Sciency Words, a special series here on Planet Pailly where we talk about the definitions and etymologies of scientific terms.  In today’s Sciency Words post, we’re talking about the word:

ANTITAIL

Did you see the comet?  Pretty much everyone I know has been asking me that question lately.  Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) had a wild ride these last few weeks.  First, she started glowing a lot brighter and a lot greener than expected, leading to some people calling her “the green comet.”  Then, due to some intense solar activity, a gap formed in one of the green comet’s two tails.  Shortly thereafter, almost as if the comet were trying to compensate for the damage to one tail, an apparent third tail became visible to observers here on Earth.  This apparent third tail is what astronomers call an antitail.

Definition of antitail: Comets typically have two tails: a dust tail and an ion tail.  These tails are supposed to point away from the Sun.  They’re caused by the solar wind sweeping gas, dust, and other lightweight material away from the comet and off into space.  An antitail is an apparent third tail pointing toward the Sun.  At least antitails look like they’re pointing toward the Sun, but this is actually an optical illusion.

Etymology of antitail: The prefix “anti-” can mean several things.  In this context, it means “opposite,” because antitails point (or look like they point) in a direction opposite to the direction cometary tails are supposed to point.  Based on my research, I believe this term was first introduced in the late 1950’s, following the appearance of comet Arend-Roland.

Okay, I’m going out on a bit of a limb claiming that the term was introduced in the 1950’s.  I cannot find any sources explicitly stating that, but almost every source I looked at seems to agree that Comet Arend-Roland had the most famous and noteworthy antitail in the history of antitails.  In 1957, Arend-Roland developed a large and protruding “sunward spike.”  In photos (like this one or this one), the comet reminds me a little of a narwhal.

Arend-Roland cannot possibly be the first comet ever observed to have an antitail, but it does seem to be the most spectacular and most widely studied antitail in recorded history.  Crucially, I was unable to find any sources mentioning cometary antitails prior to 1957.  Ergo, I think I’m right that the term was first introduced around that time, in reference to that particular comet.  But I could be wrong, and if anyone knows more about this topic than I do, please do share in the comments below.

Regardless of how much of a first Arend-Roland’s antitail really was to the scientific community at the time, it was not much of a mystery.  Within a matter of months, scientists were able to offer explanations, like this explanation published in Nature:

No extraordinary physical theory appears necessary to account for the growth of the sunward tail […]  The sunward tail must almost certainly have resulted from the concentration of cometary debris over an area in the orbital plane.  Seen at moderate angels to the plane, the material possessed too low a surface brightness to be easily observed, but seen edge-on it presented a concentrated line of considerable intensity.

So several things have to happen in order for us Earth-based observers to see an antitail.  First, a comet needs to shed some debris that’s too big and heavy to be swept off by the solar wind.  This extra debris will accumulate along the comet’s orbital path, rather than billowing off in a direction pointing away from the Sun.  Second, Earth has to be in just the right place at just the right time to see this debris field “edge-on.”  Otherwise, the light reflecting off the debris will be too diffuse for us to see.  And third, this has to happen at a time when the comet’s tails don’t overlap with the debris field (i.e., the debris and the tails have to be pointing in opposite directions, as seen from Earth).  Otherwise, the glow of the tails will obscure the light reflecting off the debris.

Last week, I was lucky enough to see the comet, but I didn’t see her bright green color (she was a hazy grey in my telescope), and I certainly didn’t get a chance to see the antitail.  I’m pretty sure I was a few days too late for that, and besides, there’s too much light pollution where I live to see faint details like that.

Still, I consider it a great joy and privilege that I got to see as much of the comet as I did.  And for all the cool sciency stuff I couldn’t see for myself, I can always turn to my research if I want to learn more.

WANT TO LEARN MORE?

Here’s the 1957 report from Nature that I quoted above, explaining what “must almost certainly” have caused Arend-Roland’s “sunward tail.”

And here’s a more recent article about Arend-Roland, reviewing the comet’s discovery, observation history, and the appearance of his antitail.

Lastly, here’s an article from Live Science about the recent “green comet” and her antitail.

Science Can’t Explain Everything

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 6 Comments

Hello, friends!

As you know, I love science.  I’m a little obsessed.  But there are people who get annoyed or even offended by my obsession with science, and every once in a while one of these people will remind me, sternly, that science can’t explain everything.  And you know what?  I generally agree with that sentiment.  But then people start declaring that science will never know this specific thing or that specific thing, and I immediately think of a certain 19th Century French philosopher named Auguste Comte.

Comte was not some scientifically illiterate buffoon.  He wasn’t one of those 19th Century evolution deniers, or one of those latter-day opponents to the heliocentric model of the Solar System.  In fact, Comte is regarded today as the very first philosopher of science, in the modern sense of that term, and he gets credit for coining the word “sociology” and for laying the philosophical foundation for that entire branch of science.  There’s also a wonderful quote from Comte about the mutual dependence of scientific theory and scientific observation.  Basically, you can’t formulate a theory without observation, but you also can’t make an observation without the guidance of a theory.

But that is not the Comte quote I think of whenever somebody starts lecturing me about the things science will never know.  It’s this quote about the stars: “[…] we shall never be able by any means to study their chemical composition or their mineralogical structure…”  Comte also declared that: “I regard any notion concerning the true mean temperature of the various stars as forever denied to us.”

Comte wrote this in 1835, and if you can put yourself into an 1835 mindset you can see where he was coming from.  There’s no such thing as rocketry.  We don’t even have airplanes yet.  And even if you could fly up to a star (or the Sun), how would you measure its temperature?  What kind of thermometer would you use?  And how would you go about collecting stellar material, in order to determine the star’s chemical composition?

According to Comte—a highly intelligent and very pro-science person—this sort of knowledge was utterly impossible to obtain.  And yet only a few decades later, thanks to the invention of the spectroscope, scientists started obtaining some of this unobtainable knowledge.  For those of you who don’t know, spectroscopes separate light into a spectrum.  Some parts of the spectrum may appear brighter or darker than you might otherwise expect, depending on which chemical substances emitted or absorbed the light before it reached the spectroscope.  And so by comparing the spectral lines of chemicals we have here on Earth to the spectrum obtained from the light of a star, you can determine the chemical composition of that star.

You can also measure a star’s temperature thanks to a concept known as black body radiation.  Basically, black body radiation refers to the fact that things glow as they got hotter.  If no other light sources are involved, then the color of a glowing object will be directly related to that object’s temperature.  Ergo, if you know what color a star is, then you can work out a pretty accurate estimate of what temperature that star must be.

Auguste Comte didn’t foresee any of this.  It is certainly true that science does not know everything, and there are surely things that science will never know.  But if you think you know, specifically, what science can never know, I question that.  Someday, some new invention (like the spectroscope) or some breakthrough discovery (like black body radiation) may turn an utterly unknowable thing into a matter of trivial measurements and calculations.

Maybe the one thing science truly can never know is what science’s own limitations are.

WANT TO LEARN MORE?

Here’s a very brief post about Auguste Comte, what he said about stars, and how epically wrong he was with that one prediction.

Also, here’s a short article about some genuine limitations that science has, like aesthetics, moral judgements, etc.

Does Evolution Want You to “Become Crab”?

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 15 Comments

Hello, friends!

So as far back as the mid-to-late 1800’s, scientists noticed that crab-like animals were oddly commonplace.  It seems that, for one reason or another, evolution favors crab-like body structures over other crustacean body types.  Well, maybe “favors” is the wrong word.  I wouldn’t want to imply that evolution plays favorites or that evolution has any sort of intended outcome.  That would be misleading.

When I read articles in the popular press about carcinization (the surprisingly common process of evolving a crab-like body), I feel like there’s a fundamental misunderstanding at work, not just about carcinization itself but about evolution in general.  Evolution doesn’t “prefer” this and it certainly doesn’t “intend” that.  There is no end-goal to the evolutionary process.

Evolution works by trial and error.  Organisms have problems, problems like “how do I find food?” or “how do I avoid becoming food?”  Some organisms manage to solve these sorts of problems; others do not.  The ones who solve their problems get to live, and they have the opportunity to pass their genes on to the next generation; the others?  They do not get to do that.

There are a surprising number of crab-like animals out there.  That must mean that being a crab helps you solve certain problems.  It does not mean that you’re evolution’s favorite, that evolution “wants” to create more crab-like creatures like you, or that being a crab is some sort of evolutionary end-goal.

All that being said, I have to admit it’s hard to avoid anthropomorphizing the concept of evolution just a little bit.  I mean, look at the stuff I do on this blog.  I anthropomorphize everything from atoms and molecules to planets and stars.  I imbue all sorts of things with wants and needs and strange personality quirks.  It’s only natural for me to say evolution “wants” this or “prefers” that, and I totally understand why so many other science writers fall into a similar trap.

So I guess what I’m saying is this: whenever you hear people talk about evolution’s “preferences” or “intentions,” bear in mind that those words are really just shorthand for something else.

Our Place in Space: The Great Red Spot

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 17 Comments

Hello, friends!  Welcome to Our Place in Space: A to Z!  For this year’s A to Z Challenge, I’ll be taking you on a partly imaginative and highly optimistic tour of humanity’s future in outer space.  If you don’t know what the A to Z Challenge is, click here to learn more.  In today’s post, G is for…

THE GREAT RED SPOT

Humanity is struggling right now.  There’s war and bigotry.  There’s disease and poverty and climate change.  Despite these problems, I still have tremendous hope for the future.  I still believe that we can work past our current problems and build a better future for ourselves and for our planet.  But when I think of this better and brighter future, there’s still one thing I worry about.  It’s a minor thing, but still… I worry: what’s going to happen to Jupiter’s Great Red Spot?  Will it still be there in the future, or will it slowly fade away and disappear?

In the late 1800’s, the Great Red Spot was observed to be approximately 50,000 kilometers wide.  For comparison, the entire Earth is only 13,000 kilometers in diameter.  But by 1979, when NASA’s Voyager space probes arrived at Jupiter, the Great Red Spot had shrunk to a mere 23,000 kilometers in width.  It was less than half the size it once was!  And today, it’s only 16,000 kilometers wide.  You see now why I’m worried.

I get a bit frustrated with news reports declaring that the Great Red Spot is certain to disappear.  I also get annoyed with news reports saying it’s certain not to disappear.  The popular press goes back and forth on this.  It’s sort of like those news reports you’ll hear about whether or not eggs are good for you.  First they’re good, then they’re bad, then they’re good if you cook them this way, then they’re still bad no matter how you cook them.  In a similar way, first the Great Red Spot is disappearing, then it isn’t, then it is again, and so on.

I think the popular press just doesn’t understand what it means when scientific research gets published.  Published research is best understood as part of an ongoing conversation.  One group of astronomers says they believe the Great Red Spot is disappearing for reasons X, Y, and Z.  Then another group of astronomers say they think it will endure for reasons A, B, and C.  Then maybe another group will contribute reasons J, K, and L to the discussion.  This back and forth discussion continues on and on in the pages of scientific journals, until some sort of scientific consensus is reached (or until the Great Red Spot actually disappears—that would also settle the debate).

But the popular press always seems to latch onto one published paper and present it to the general public as if it is the final word on the matter, as if it is a proclamation of scientifically proven fact.  That is until they latch onto the next published paper and present that as the final word.

So what’s really going to happen to the Great Red Spot?  Well, it’s undeniable that it has shrunk significantly over that last century or so.  Maybe it will keep shrinking until it’s gone, or maybe it’ll pick up steam again and start to expand once more.  Maybe the Great Red Spot goes through century-long phases of shrinking and expanding.  Maybe we just haven’t been observing it long enough to know that. Scientists are still studying this issue, comparing and contrasting their findings, and debating what it all means.  That’s often the way with science (and I hope you’ll keep that in mind the next time you see a news report that begins with the words “According to a new scientific study…”).

Even without the Great Red Spot, Jupiter would be an awe-inspiring sight.  I do hope, though, that it will still be there for all those future colonists on Callisto to see and enjoy.

Want to Learn More?

I found a few relatively recent articles that talk about the Great Red Spot and why it might or might not disappear.  These articles are, in my opinion, more responsible in how they present their information than other articles I’ve seen.

Our Place in Space: The Aldrin Cycler

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 23 Comments

Hello, friends!  Welcome to Our Place in Space: A to Z!  For this year’s A to Z Challenge, I’ll be taking you on a partly imaginative and highly optimistic tour of humanity’s future in outer space.  If you don’t know what the A to Z Challenge is, click here to learn more.  In today’s post, A is for…

THE ALDRIN CYCLER

Even in the future, space travel will be expensive.  True, new technologies should make it less expensive than it is today, but there’s one problem that will never go away, no matter how advanced our technology gets: gravity.

Anywhere you want to go in space, you’re going to have to fight against gravity to get there: Earth’s gravity, the Sun’s gravity, the gravity of other planets and moons—at some point on your journey, you’re going to have to fight against any or all of these gravitational forces.  And fighting gravity uses up fuel.  Lots and lots and lots of fuel.

And yet, despite the unforgiving and unrelenting force of gravity, human civilization will eventually spread out across the Solar System.  I’m not going to tell you it will happen in the next twenty years.  I won’t tell you it will happen in the next century, even.  But someday, it will happen.  I’m sure of it!  And so today, I want to talk a little about what the future transportation infrastructure of the Solar System might be like.

American astronaut Buzz Aldrin is, of course, most famous for being the second person to set foot on the Moon.  Aldrin is also a highly accomplished scientist and engineer.  In 1985, he did some math and discovered a very special orbital trajectory that would make traveling from Earth to Mars (and also from Mars back to Earth) far more fuel efficient.

The term “Aldrin cycler” refers to that very special orbital trajectory Aldrin discovered.  The term can also be used to describe a spacecraft traveling along that special orbital trajectory.  The initial investment to build an Aldrin cycler (the spacecraft, I mean) would be really high.  We’d probably want to build a rather large spacecraft for this, and once it’s built, maneuvering the thing into the proper trajectory would require a stupendous amount of fuel.

However, once we’ve done all that, the cycler will cycle back and forth between Earth and Mars, over and over again, pretty much forever.  Traveling to Mars would be a little like catching a train.

I was going to have the Aldrin cycler make a “choo-choo” sound, like I train, but then I realized that would be silly.  Things don’t make sounds in outer space.

Passengers would board the cycler as it flew past Earth; about five months later, they’d disembark and head down to the surface of Mars.  The cycler would then take a long journey (about twenty months) looping around the Sun before flying past Earth once more; then the “cycle” would begin again.

The trip from Earth up to the cycler would still require some amount of fuel.  So would the trip from the cycler down to the surface of Mars.   The cycler itself would also require a little bit of fuel for maneuvering thrusters; otherwise, over time, the ship could start to drift ever so slightly off course.

Obviously this is not a cost-free form of space travel, but I’m sure you can see how this could help keep the cost of space travel down.  And so I imagine in the distant future, the Aldrin cycler (or something very much like it) will be a key part of the Solar System’s infrastructure, just as trains are an important part of our modern day infrastructure here on Earth.

Want to Learn More?

Click here to see a short animation of the Aldrin cycler orbital trajectory, showing several cycles worth of Earth-to-Mars and Mars-to-Earth journeys.

I’d also recommend Buzz Aldrin’s book Mission to Mars: My Vision for Space Exploration, where Aldrin describes the Aldrin cycler (and other cool Mars related things) in more detail. Click here to see the book’s listing on Amazon.