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Month: June 2017
Four Noted Science Fiction Writers To Hold A Panel at The 2017 Mars Society Convention
Updated] Mars Society Hosting Sci-Fi Panel on Human Future in Space at 2017 Convention
As part of the 20th Annual International Mars Society Convention, scheduled to take place at the University of California Irvine (September 7-10), a panel discussion involving four major science fiction authors has been organized to examine the human future in space and the role science fiction plays in its planning and direction.
The four scheduled participants, all award-winning writers, include:
- Gregory Benford, a science fiction author, professor emeritus at UC Irvine in the field of physics and contributing editor to Reason magazine,
- David Brin, an author of science fiction and non-fiction and a member of NASA’s advisory board on Innovative and Advanced Concepts group,
- Jerry Pournelle, a science fiction writer, essayist and journalist, as well as former President of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America,
- Larry Niven, a science fiction author and script writer for several science fiction-based television series.
The 90-minute panel discussion is set to take place on Thursdayevening, September 7th on the UC Irvine campus.
“This is going to be a gathering of some of the greatest contemporary science fiction writers of our time to discuss how humanity will plan and reach its goal of exploring and expanding into the solar system and beyond, ” declared Mars Society President Dr. Robert Zubrin.
For more details about the 2017 Mars Society Convention, including the confirmed speaker list, please visit our web site (www.marssociety.org). Registration for the four-day convention and Saturday evening banquet is available online (please note that discounts for early bird ticket sales end on Friday, June 30th at 5:00 pm MST).
The Curiosity Rover Detects What Looks Like Bones On The Surface Of Mars
A 100-Year Plan For Colonizing Mars
25 Facts You Should Know About The August 21, 2017 Total Solar Ecclipse
25 facts you should know about the August 21, 2017
total solar eclipse
This chart shows the paths of totality for 15 solar eclipses through 2028. // Astronomy: Roen Kelly after Fred Espenak, NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center
When I first wrote this blog, the event was more than three years away. Not anymore! Each day now seems to bring a new announcement of a talk, a workshop, or an event related to the eclipse. With tens of millions of people headed for the zone of totality, it’s going to be the biggest science event in history. In this blog I list 25 of the eclipse’s important details for our readership, the general public, and the media. Read them, and learn about the event. But for sure plan to experience totality. You’ll remember it for the rest of your life as the greatest thing you ever saw!1. This will be the first total solar eclipse in the continental U.S. in 38 years. The last one occurred February 26, 1979. Unfortunately, not many people saw it because it clipped just five states in the Northwest and the weather for the most part was bleak. Before that one, you have to go back to March 7, 1970.
2. A solar eclipse is a lineup of the Sun, the Moon, and Earth. The Moon, directly between the Sun and Earth, casts a shadow on our planet. If you’re in the dark part of that shadow (the umbra), you’ll see a total eclipse. If you’re in the light part (the penumbra), you’ll see a partial eclipse.
3. A solar eclipse happens at New Moon. The Moon has to be between the Sun and Earth for a solar eclipse to occur. The only lunar phase when that happens is New Moon.
4. Solar eclipses don’t happen at every New Moon. The reason is that the Moon’s orbit tilts 5° to Earth’s orbit around the Sun. Astronomers call the two intersections of these paths nodes. Eclipses only occur when the Sun lies at one node and the Moon is at its New (for solar eclipses) or Full (for lunar eclipses) phase. During most (lunar) months, the Sun lies either above or below one of the nodes, and no eclipse happens.
5. Eclipse totalities are different lengths. The reason the total phases of solar eclipses vary in time is because Earth is not always at the same distance from the Sun and the Moon is not always the same distance from Earth. The Earth-Sun distance varies by 3 percent and the Moon-Earth distance by 12 percent. The result is that the Moon’s apparent diameter can range from 7 percent larger to 10 percent smaller than the Sun.
6. It’s all about magnitude and obscuration. Astronomers categorize each solar eclipse in terms of its magnitude and obscuration, and I don’t want you to be confused when you encounter these terms. The magnitude of a solar eclipse is the percent of the Sun’s diameter that the Moon covers during maximum eclipse. The obscuration is the percent of the Sun’s total surface area covered at maximum. Here’s an example: If the Moon covers half the Sun’s diameter (in this case the magnitude equals 50 percent), the amount of obscuration (the area of the Sun’s disk the Moon blots out) will be 39.1 percent.
7. Solar eclipses occur between Saros cycles. Similar solar and lunar eclipses recur every 6,585.3 days (18 years, 11 days, 8 hours). Scientists call this length of time a Saros cycle. Two eclipses separated by one Saros cycle are similar. They occur at the same node, the Moon’s distance from Earth is nearly the same, and they happen at the same time of year.
8. Everyone in the continental U.S. will see at least a partial eclipse. In fact, if you have clear skies on eclipse day, the Moon will cover at least 48 percent of the Sun’s surface. And that’s from the northern tip of Maine.
9. It’s all about totality. Not to cast a shadow on things, but likening a partial eclipse to a total eclipse is like comparing almost dying to dying. I know that 48 percent sounds like a lot. It isn’t. You won’t even notice your surroundings getting dark. And it doesn’t matter whether the partial eclipse above your location is 48, 58, or 98 percent. Only totality reveals the true celestial spectacle: the diamond ring, the Sun’s glorious corona, strange colors in our sky, and seeing stars in the daytime.
Only being on the center line will allow viewers to see the diamond rings and the interval of totality between them. // Ian Wardlaw
10. You want to be on the center line. This probably isn’t a revelation, but the Moon’s shadow is round. If it were square, it wouldn’t matter where you viewed totality. People across its width would experience the same duration of darkness. The shadow is round, however, so the longest eclipse occurs at its center line because that’s where you’ll experience the Moon’s shadow’s full width.11. First contact is in Oregon. If you want to be the first person to experience totality in the continental U.S., be on the waterfront at Government Point, Oregon, at 10:15:56.5 a.m. PDT. There, the total phase lasts 1 minute, 58.5 seconds.
12. The center line crosses through 12 states. After a great west-to-east path across Oregon, the center line takes roughly nine minutes to cross a wide swath of Idaho, entering the western part of the state just before 11:25 a.m. MDT and leaving just before 11:37 a.m. MDT. Next up is Wyoming, where the umbral center line dwells until just past 11:49 a.m. MDT. From 11:47 a.m. MDT until 1:07 CDT (note the time zone change!), the dark part of the Moon’s shadow lies in Nebraska. The center line hits the very northeastern part of Kansas at 1:04 p.m. CDTand enters Missouri a scant two minutes later. At 1:19, the shadow’s midpoint crosses the Mississippi River, which at that location is the state border with Illinois. The center line leaves Illinois at its Ohio River border with Kentucky just past 1:24 p.m. CDT. Totality for that state starts there two minutes earlier and lasts until nearly 1:29 p.m. CDT. The center line crosses the border into Tennessee around 1:26 p.m. CDT. Then, just past the midpoint of that state, the time zone changes to Eastern. North Carolina has the midpoint of the eclipse from 2:34 p.m. EDT until just past 2:38 p.m. EDT. The very northeastern tip of Georgia encounters the center line from just past 2:35 p.m. EDTuntil not quite 2:39 p.m. EDT. Finally, it’s South Carolina’s turn. The last of the states the center line crosses sees its duration from 2:36 p.m. EDT to 2:39 p.m. EDT.
13. Totality lasts a maximum of 2 minutes and 40.2 seconds. That’s it. To experience that length, you’ll need to be slightly south of Carbondale, Illinois, in Giant City State Park. You might think about getting there early.
14. The end of the eclipse for the U.S. is not on land. The center line’s last contact with the U.S. occurs at the Atlantic Ocean’s edge just southeast of Key Bay, South Carolina. I’m pretty sure the crowd won’t be huge there.
15. Cool things are afoot before and after totality. Although the big payoff is the exact lineup of the Sun, the Moon, and your location, keep your eyes open during the partial phases that lead up to and follow it. As you view the beginning through a safe solar filter, the universe will set your mind at ease when you see the Moon take the first notch out of the Sun’s disk. Around the three-quarters mark, you’ll start to notice that shadows are getting sharper. The reason is that the Sun’s disk is shrinking, literally approaching a point, and a smaller light source produces better-defined shadows. At about 85 percent coverage, someone you’re with will see Venus 34° west-northwest of the Sun. If any trees live at your site, you may see their leaves act like pinhole cameras as hundreds of crescent Suns appear in their shadows.
16. This eclipse will be the most-viewed ever. I base this proclamation on four factors: 1) the attention it will get from the media; 2) the superb coverage of the highway system in our country; 3) the typical weather on that date; and 4) the vast number of people who will have access to it from nearby large cities.
17. Only one large city has a great view. Congratulations if you’re one of the 609,000 people lucky enough to live in Nashville. The city center and parts north of it will experience 2+ minutes of totality. Unfortunately, that’s the only large city with a great view. In the tally below, column 1 lists 25 other large metropolitan areas. The second column shows the amount of the Sun’s surface the Moon will cover as seen by viewers in each city.
| Atlanta | 97 percent |
| Boston | 63 percent |
| Chicago | 87 percent |
| Cincinnati | 91 percent |
| Dallas | 76 percent |
| Denver | 92 percent |
| Detroit | 79 percent |
| Houston | 67 percent |
| Indianapolis | 91 percent |
| Las Vegas | 72 percent |
| Los Angeles | 62 percent |
| Memphis | 93 percent |
| Miami | 78 percent |
| Milwaukee | 83 percent |
| Minneapolis | 83 percent |
| New Orleans | 75 percent |
| New York City | 72 percent |
| Oklahoma City | 84 percent |
| Philadelphia | 75 percent |
| Phoenix | 63 percent |
| Pittsburgh | 81 percent |
| Portland | 99 percent |
| Salt Lake City | 91 percent |
| Seattle | 92 percent |
| Washington, D.C. | 81 percent |
Now a brief follow-up: about half of both Kansas City (pop. = 464,000) and Saint Louis (pop. = 318,000) lie within the path of totality. Unfortunately, the center line doesn’t pass through either of them. An educated guess then, tells me that most residents interested in the eclipse will drive 30 minutes or so for an extra two minutes of totality.
18. A few small cities are well-placed. Here’s a list of smaller municipalities either on the center line or near it with their approximate populations.
| Carbondale, Illinois | 26,000 |
| Casper, Wyoming | 58,000 |
| Columbia, Missouri | 113,000 |
| Columbia, South Carolina | 132,000 |
| Grand Island, Nebraska | 50,000 |
| Greenville, South Carolina | 61,000 |
| Hopkinsville, Kentucky | 33,000 |
| Idaho Falls, Idaho | 58,000 |
| Jefferson City, Missouri | 43,000 |
| Paducah, Kentucky | 25,000 |
| Saint Joseph, Missouri | 77,000 |
| Salem, Oregon | 157,000 |
19. Totality is safe to look at. During the time the Moon’s disk covers that of the Sun, it’s safe to look at the eclipse. In fact, to experience the awesomeness of the event, you must look at the Sun without a filter during totality.
20. Yes, the Sun’s a lot bigger. Our daytime star’s diameter is approximately 400 times larger than that of the Moon. What a coincidence that it also lies roughly 400 times farther away. This means both disks appear to be the same size.
21. You won’t need a telescope. One of the great things about the total phase of a solar eclipse is that it looks best to naked eyes. The sight of the corona surrounding the Moon’s black disk in a darkened sky is unforgettable. That said, binoculars give you a close-up view — but still at relatively low power — that you should take advantage of several times during the event.
22. Nature will take heed. Depending on your surroundings, as totality nears you may experience strange things. Look. You’ll notice a resemblance to the onset of night, though not exactly. Areas much lighter than the sky near the Sun lie all around the horizon. Shadows look different. Listen. Usually, any breeze will dissipate and birds (many of whom will come in to roost) will stop chirping. It is quiet. Feel. A 10°–15° F drop in temperature is not unusual.
23. Maximum totality is not the longest possible in 2017. The longest possible duration of the total phase of a solar eclipse is 7 minutes and 32 seconds. Unfortunately, the next solar eclipse whose totality approaches 7 minutes won’t occur until June 13, 2132. Its 6 minutes and 55 seconds of totality will be the longest since the 7 minutes and 4 seconds of totality June 30, 1973.
24. The future is bright but long. The next total solar eclipse over the continental U.S. occurs April 8, 2024. It’s a good one, too. Depending on where you are (on the center line), the duration of totality lasts at least 3 minutes and 22 seconds on the east coast of Maine and stretches to 4 minutes and 27 seconds in southwestern Texas. After that eclipse, it’s a 20-year wait until August 23, 2044 (and, similar to the 1979 event, that one is visible only in Montana and North Dakota). Total solar eclipses follow in 2045 and 2078.
25. This event will happen! As astronomers (professional or amateur), some of the problems we have are due to the uncertainty and limited visibility of some celestial events. Comets may appear bright if their compositions are just so. Meteor showers might reach storm levels if we pass through a thick part of the stream. (Oh, and the best views are after midnight.) A supernova as bright as a whole galaxy is visible now, but you need a telescope to view it. In contrast, this solar eclipse will occur when we say, where we say, for how long we say, and in the daytime, no less. Guaranteed!
Sex In Space
When We Go To Mars, Will We Have A Real HAL-9000 Computer With Us?
When We Go to Mars, Will We Have a Real-Life HAL 9000 With Us?
How generations of NASA scientists were inspired by an evil Hollywood supercomputer
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The astronauts of “2001: A Space Odyssey” hide in a pod to discuss the troubling behavior of their spacecraft’s artificial intelligence, HAL 9000. In the background, HAL is able to read their lips.
Half a century ago, 2001: A Space Odyssey imagined a future fueled by high-tech computers that thought, learned and adapted. Central to this vision was HAL (Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer) 9000, the “sentient” computer that ran the crew’s ship, Discovery One. In the film, HAL stood in as mission control center, life support and sixth member of the crew, making an ambitious Jupiter mission possible for the ship’s six astronauts.
Today, as we look toward sending the first humans to Mars, the idea of HAL is shimmering once more at the forefront of researchers’ minds. Roughly 15 years from now, NASA plans to put the first humans in orbit around the red planet, which will mean traveling farther from Earth than ever before. Unlike moon-goers, these astronauts won’t be able to rely on ground control for a quick fix. If something goes wrong, they’ll be up to 40 minutes away from getting a reply from Earth.
“‘Houston, we have a problem’ is not really a great option, because the response is too slow,” as Ellen Stofan, former NASA chief scientist, put it last month at a summit on deep space travel hosted by The Atlantic. “I keep saying, we need a nice HAL.”
When it hit theatre screens in 1968, 2001 swiftly became an iconic thought-experiment on the future of humanity in space. Praised for its innovative vision and attention to scientific detail, the film was hailed in WIRED magazine as “a carefully wrought prediction for the future.”
HAL, by extension, became an important cultural reference for anybody thinking about artificial intelligence and the future of computers. It can speak, listen, read faces and (importantly) lips, interpret emotions, and play chess; In 2015, WIRED referred to him as a “proto-Siri.” The crew depends on it for everything—which becomes a problem when, 80 million miles from Earth, HAL begins to behave erratically.
That’s because 2001‘s HAL wasn’t nice. As the main antagonist of the film, it ended up turning on the crew in an attempt to “save” the mission.
Still, “many scientists are themselves a part of HAL’s legacy,” wrote David Stork, now a computer scientist at the technology company Rambus, in his 1996 book HAL’s Legacy. For the book, Stork interviewed some of those scientists on the occasion of HAL’s “birthday” (when it first became operational) in the timeline of 2001 novelization.
“You can’t help but be inspired,” says Jeremy Frank, a computer scientist who is leading development on AI and other automated technology for future human NASA missions, of 2001 and other sci-fi depictions of AI. He agrees with Stofan that AI will be vitally important for human deep space missions. “We’re absolutely going to have to have something.”
What that something will be isn’t clear yet, Frank says. A real-life HAL might be expected to monitor life-support systems at all times to avoid any disasters, manage power generation, perform basic autopilot navigation, keep an eye on sensors for any errors and more. But whatever it entails, this AI will help free astronauts of the day-to-day details so they can keep their focus on the mission and the science.
“The immense role for AI is to enable the humans to stay out of the trenches,” says Steve Chien, leader of the artificial intelligence group at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory that helps rovers and probes choose which data to send back to Earth, and even select objects and areas to study on their own. For AI, this means taking over many of the more mundane maintenance and operations tasks of the spacecraft (and potentially a Mars base) to allow human astronauts to focus on more abstract tasks like scientific experiments.
“That’s a much more effective way of doing science,” says Chien, whose team helped develop AI technology that’s been used for the Curiosity rover on Mars. “We don’t want the astronaut spending all their time making sure the life support system works.”
For a NASA mission to Mars, artificial intelligence could take on some of the work now done by dozens of people working around the clock at the mission control center in Houston, Texas
.But asking an AI system to perform all those tasks is no small feat, Frank warns. Even during normal operations, real-life HAL would have to manage many independent systems, some of which are complex to operate on their own. For AI to respond to various situations, its creators would have to anticipate and map out all of those situations. “It just takes a huge amount of time and energy to even describe the problem,” says Frank.
“There are going to be many complicated things, from temperature and pressure, to food and navigation,” says Stork of the challenges an AI would face on every minute of a space mission. In past space missions, these challenges have been handled by ground-based computers, diligent astronauts and even NASA staff with slide rules.
“You need extremely sophisticated computer systems,” Frank says. “We’re past the days of going to the Moon with the sort of computing power that’s in my iPhone.”
Anything used on a space mission has to be hauled out to space and work in the tight quarters of a spacecraft, Frank says, not to mention be able to run on a limited source of power, usually from a small nuclear generator. In short, the more sophisticated a space mission’s AI will be, the more computer you’ll need. Despite how far technology has come, Frank points out, “software has mass.”
Integrating all of that software together will be one of the biggest challenges to creating a spacecraft AI computer, Frank says—throwing together separate computer systems focusing on different aspects won’t work. Otherwise, one could end up with a situation like a team of uncooperative rowers on a ship.
“Those tools were never built to be integrated with each other,” Frank says, “never mind on a spacecraft that was built to run on limited computing.”
In 2001, the problem isn’t HAL’s ability to process and perform his designated tasks. Rather, when the astronauts try to disable some of HAL’s processing functions, he sets out to kill the humans to preserve himself. The concern that such a powerful computer could go rogue might sound like strictly the province of sci-fi. But in fact, it’s no small challenge in researchers’ minds.
“That question exists in every system that we build,” Chien says. “As we build more and more complex systems, it becomes harder and harder for us to understand how they will interact in a complex environment.”
It’s next to impossible to know how complex artificial intelligence actually works. In fact, many computer scientists still describe the way machines learn as a “black box.” Artificial neural networks often function much like the human brain. “Unfortunately, such networks are also as opaque as the brain,” writes Davide Castelvecchi for Nature. “Instead of storing what they have learned in a neat block of digital memory, they diffuse the information in a way that is exceedingly difficult to decipher.”
This makes it difficult to program in fail-safes, Chien says, because it’s impossible to imagine how a learning, growing, adapting AI will react to every single situation.
Frank believes it will come down to properly programming both the computers and the astronauts working with them. “You have to just consider the AI as just another part of the system, and sometimes your system lies to you,” Frank says. In 2001, HAL announces himself “foolproof and incapable of error”—but even today’s computers aren’t infallible. People working with an AI computer should know to not reflexively trust it, but treat it like any normal computer that could occasionally get things wrong.
Now, 50 years since the release of 2001: A Space Odyssey, how close is HAL’s legacy to Stofan’s vision for deep space travel?
“We have it in little bits and pieces now,” says Stork. Some of our advancements are remarkable—for example, a form of AI sits in many of our pockets with voice-recognition technology like Siri that we can talk to conversationally. There’s AlphaGo, the AI computer that beat a human champion of the intricate strategy game Go. AI computers have even written literature. But these efforts all took specially tailored machines and years of work to complete these singular tasks.
“AI is doing a lot of incredible things in a lot of focused tasks, but getting AI to be as strategic as a smart human?” Chien says. “That is the challenge of tomorrow.”
This prospect is made more challenging by the fact that NASA, unlike Silicon Valley, tends to be averse to the risks of trying new technology, Chien says. When it comes to spaceflight, he adds, this is understandable. “A million things have to go right for it to work,” Chien says. “Just a few things have to go wrong for it to not work.”
For Frank, it seems extraordinarily difficult to ever imagine an AI computer replacing all of the functions of the people working in NASA’s ground control center, which is always staffed with at least six people, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, like HAL was able to. “But the good news is that we don’t think you actually need to replace them all,” Frank says. For a mission to Mars, he points out, astronauts would still be able to rely on regular, though not instantaneous, contact with Earth.
In reality, AI will be more crucial for missions than Mars, where human astronauts aren’t part of the picture, says Chien. He and other scientists meet regularly to speculate on these kind of far-out futures, for instance: How would you send a probe to explore the deep seas of Europa, where no radio contact with Earth is possible? What about sending an automated spacecraft to an entirely different solar system?
“NASA wants to go and do things in places where you can’t send people,” Chien says. “These are just crazy ideas—that would really require AI.”
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Jupiter-A Growing Army Of Moons
A Growing Army of Moons
As far as planets go, Jupiter is not one to mess with.
Not only is Jupiter both the biggest and the oldest planet in our solar system, but its army of moons keeps on getting larger.
The planet was never exactly lacking in company. Now, astronomers have discovered two more Jovian moons, bringing the total number of its known satellites to 69, wrote Gizmodo.
Astronomers spotted the two moons accidentally on March 8, 2016 and March 23, 2017, respectively.
“We were continuing our survey looking for very distant objects in the outer solar system, which includes looking for Planet X, and Jupiter just happened to be in the area we were looking in 2016 and 2017,” astronomer Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution for Science told Sky and Telescope.
Planet X refers to a suspected extra planet in the solar system.
So far, not much is known about the two moons – dubbed S/2016 J 1 and S/2017 J 1 – aside from the time it takes them to orbit Jupiter and their small size. They measure only one or two kilometers across. S/2016 J 1 needs 1.65 years to fully orbit Jupiter, while S/2017 J 1 completes the trip in 2.01 years, said Gizmodo.
But more research is undoubtedly forthcoming on Jupiter’s new crew, they added.
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