Mosaic Of The Nebulae In The Orion Constellation

We will not leave the crew hanging!

The crew module uprighting system rotates Orion should it come to rest upside down when landing in the water.

Ep. 20 Challenger - HD and the Void

January 28th was the anniversary of the Challenger space shuttle disaster, and while I do discuss what happened, I talk more about the American space shuttle program and what the repercussions of this disaster were for NASA as an agency. I have cl...

I had to skip last week to finish an article on STEM but it got me a really awesome intro to a very serious episode. Learn this week about 1) Sally Ride (a bit, just like the highlight reel on her) 2) NASA’s space shuttle program 3) the Challenger disaster that occurred January 28, 1986. It was the anniversary of this tragedy yesterday and I wanted to learn more about it and why it happened and what, ultimately, came out of that difficult time in the space shuttle program. 

I have a quick and easy way for you to cut out listening to the actual recap of the disaster if you don’t want to hear about it and just want to hear the fun space shuttle facts and the changes that NASA undertook in learning from Challenger’s destruction. Below the cut are my sources, music credits, a vocab list, and the transcript of this episode. I’ve bolded those sources I mention in the podcast, and I do have a trigger warning for the actual, live-coverage footage of the Challenger disaster. Please let me know what you think I should research next by messaging me here, tweeting at me at @HDandtheVoid, or asking me to my face if you know me. I’d love it if you would subscribe on iTunes (especially since I seem to have so many problems this month with consistent timing), rate my humble little podcast and maybe review it, and tell friends if you think they’d like to hear it!

(My thoughts on the next episode are national radio quiet zones, or I could go into the transit of Venus. The next episode will go up February 12th.)

Glossary

gimbaled - moveable. In a gimbaled thrust system for rockets, the exhaust  nozzel of the rocket can be swiveled from side to side, which changes the direction of that thrust relative to rocket’s center of gravity.

pitch - in flight, this is rotation around the side-to-side axis. If the object’s nose points upwards or downwards, this is changing its pitch.

roll - in flight, this is rotation around the front-to-back axis. If the object’s wings spin from horizontal to vertical, it’s rolling.

yaw - in flight, this is rotation around the vertical axis. If the pilot turns the object so they can see more to the left or to the right, with no change in the horizon’s position, this is changing its yaw.

Script/Transcript

Sources

Sally Ride (for K-4) via NASA

Sally Ride bio via NASA

Sally Ride via the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum

Sally Ride and her sexuality via Slates blog ‘Outward’ (May 2014)

Sexual Orientation Discrimination Policy via NASA

“Employees should expect to find a diversity of sexual orientations at NASA. In the past, it was common practice to fire or to refuse to hire suspected homosexuals in the Federal workplace. Employees have been physically threatened, verbally abused, and subjected to hostile working conditions. Laws and policies have changed, and all NASA employees need to be aware of their responsibility to prevent this form of discrimination and to ensure that lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) individuals are an accepted and valued part of the diverse NASA workforce.”

Space shuttle era via NASA

1983-1986: The Missions and History of Space Shuttle Challenger via NASA Spaceflight

Space shuttle process via NASA (archived)

Space shuttle components via NASA

Gimbaled thrust via NASA

Roll, Pitch, and Yaw via the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum

Typical shuttle mission via NASA

Challenger via Space.com (Nov 2017)

Challenger disaster via History.com — contains an autoplay video

Challenger disaster live on CNN via YouTube (Jan 2011)—tw: destruction occurs at timecode 1:35

Challenger myths debunked via National Geographic (Jan 2016)

Intro Music: ‘Better Times Will Come’ by No Luck Club off their album Prosperity

Filler Music: ‘Repent’ by Dreamend off their album And So I Ate Myself, Bite By Bite, which has cover art that scared the hell out of me when my friend gave it to me because I was on painkillers for a shattered radial head. Really good band, though.

Outro Music: ‘Fields of Russia’ by Mutefish off their album On Draught

Soviet Cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev stuck in space during the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991

Unable to return home, he ended up having to stay in space until further notice.

The cosmonaut eventually returned back to earth on March 25, 1992, after 10 months in orbit - to a nation that was very different to what it was when he had left. The Soviet Union had fractured into 15 nations, presidents had changed, and even his hometown of Leningrad had become St. Petersburg.

Interestingly, at the time, Krikalev was supposed to serve in the military reserves, and was almost issued a warrant for desertion – before the army realised that their reserve soldier was not even on the planet.

The 10-billion-year life cycle of the Sun, illustrated by David Meltzer for National Geographic, May 1974.

What was the hardest part in training to go to space?

One of the most challenging parts of space training was learning how to use the space suit.  We weigh over 400 pounds in the space suit, and since it is pressurized, each movement of your hands is like working against an exercise ball.  Since the suit needs to be quite bulky in order to protect us from the environment of space (vacuum, radiation, micrometeoroids, extreme temperature) while doing a spacewalk, it makes body movements a bit awkward.  Dexterity is quite compromised with the bulky gloves as well.  Although it is challenging, however, it is likely also the most rewarding, because, well, you are in a SPACE SUIT!!!  Hopefully I’ll get to do a spacewalk and look down on the our planet from above on a mission to the International Space Station in a few years. 

Physicists Have Figured Out Where The Sun's Plasma Jets Come From

Things are heating up.

After over a century of observations and several theories, scientists may have finally nailed the origin of the high-speed plasma blasting through the Sun’s atmosphere several times a day. Using a state-of-the-art computer simulation, researchers have developed a detailed model of these plasma jets, called spicules.

The new findings answer some of the bigger questions in solar physics, including how these plasma jets form and why the Sun’s outer atmosphere is far hotter than the surface.

“This is the first model that has been able to reproduce all the features observed in spicules,” Juan Martinez-Sykora, lead author and astrophysicist at the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute in California, told ScienceAlert.

Continue Reading.

TODAY IN HISTORY: The first-ever color image of Mars, taken by NASA’s Viking 1 lander on July 21, 1976. (San Diego Air & Space Museum)

Ep. 28 Tidal Forces - HD and the Void

Tidal forces are not only the cause of ocean tides, but affect how satellites orbit objects in space, and they can even tear some objects apart under their extreme stresses. Learn about types of tides on Earth and in our solar system.

This episode’s been a long time coming because the topic’s come up before. I originally conceived of this podcast as a way for me to learn about space things I’d always taken for granted, and truly, there is nothing closer to home that I’ve just agreed to believe than the statement that the tides are affected by the Moon. What? How? Why? All these questions and some I didn’t even realize I had will be answered in this episode on tidal forces!

Below the cut are my standard glossary, transcript, sources, and music credits. Send me any topic suggestions via Tumblr message (you don’t need an account for it!). You can also tweet at me on Twitter at @HDandtheVoid, or you can ask me to my face if you know me. Subscribe on iTunes to get the new episodes of my maybe now monthly-updated podcast (we’ll see how the weeks unfold), and please please please rate and review it. Go ahead and tell friends if you think they’d like to hear it, too!

(My thoughts on the next episode are Stephen Hawking and his theories, or famous comets. The next episode will go up in September—ideally, September 10th!)

Glossary

barycenter - the common center of mass between two objects that allows them to orbit.

Roche limit - the distance in which a celestial body will disintegrate because of a second celestial body's tidal forces exceeding the first body's gravitational self-attraction, or the force that’s holding it together. Within the Roche limit, orbiting material disperses and forms rings, like how Saturn’s rings are within the Roche zone; outside the limit, material tends to coalesce.

spaghettification - when extreme tidal forces pull an object apart in space.

tidal force - an apparent force (sometimes also called the differential force) that stretches a body towards another, more gravitationally-strong body’s center of mass. This can cause such diverse phenomena as tides, tidal locking, breaking celestial bodies apart to form ring systems within a Roche limit, and in extreme cases, spaghettification. It arises because the gravitational force exerted on one body by another is not constant across its parts: the nearest side is attracted more strongly than the farthest side.

Types of ocean tides:

diurnal tide - a daily tidal cycle with only one high and low tide each lunar day, and a period of a little over 24 hours.

meteorological tide - a tidal change due to weather patterns. Wind, or unusually high or low barometric pressure causes variations between the actual sea level and its predicted height.

mixed tide - a daily tidal cycle with two high and low tides that differ in their peaks. This difference in height between successive high or low tides is called the diurnal inequality. They have a period of 12 hours and 25 minutes.

neap tide - a type of bi-monthly tidal cycle that occurs when the Sun, Earth, and Moon are positioned at a 90-degree angle, so the tidal forces of the Sun are acting against the tidal forces of the Moon. During a neap tide, the difference between high tide and low tide is the least extreme.

semidiurnal tide - a daily tidal cycle with two nearly equal high tides and low tides every lunar day. They have a period of 12 hours and 25 minutes.

spring tide - a type of bi-monthly tidal cycle that occurs when the Sun, Earth, and Moon line up so that the gravitational forces of Sun and Moon are working together to form a large tidal bulge. During a spring tide, the difference between high tide and low tide is at its maximum.

tidal locking - when long-term interaction between two co-orbiting astronomical bodies causes at least one of the bodies to rotate in such a way that one face of the body is always pointed at the body it’s orbiting. This is also called gravitational locking or captured rotation. An example is that the same side of the Moon always faces the Earth, and its synchronous rotation means that it takes just as long to rotate around its own axis as it does to revolve around the Earth.

Script/Transcript

Sources

Tidal Cycles in Tides Explained via beltoforian.de

“a tide is a distortion in the shape of one body induced by the gravitational pull of another nearby object.”

Meteorological effects on tides via the New Zealand Government website

Tides and Water Levels via the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)

Tides by R. Nave, my dude, my guy, my friend and yours, of Georgia State University

The Tidal Force by Neil deGrasse Tyson via Hayden Planetarium (Nov 1995)

“A mild increase in distance between two objects can make a large difference in the strength of the tidal force. For example, if the Moon were just twice its current distance from us, then its tidal force on Earth would decrease by a factor of eight. At its current average distance of 240,000 miles from Earth, the Moon manages to create sizable atmospheric, oceanic, and crustal tides by attracting the part of Earth nearest the Moon more strongly than the part of Earth that is farthest. (The Sun is so far away that in spite of its generally strong gravity, its tidal force on Earth amounts to less than half that of the Moon.) The oceans respond most visibly in being stretched toward the direction of the Moon.” 

“When Earth's rotation slows down until it exactly matches the orbital period of the Moon, then Earth will no longer be rotating within its oceanic tidal bulge and the Earth-Moon system will have achieved a double tidal lock. In what sounds like an undiscovered wrestling hold, double tidal locks are energetically favorable (like a ball coming to rest at the bottom of a hill), and are thus common in the universe.”

Forget “Earth-Like”—We’ll First Find Aliens on Eyeball Planets via Nautilus (Feb 2015)

High Tide on Io! via NASA (Mar 2012)

Tidal forces and spaghettification via NASA handout

Spaghettification via Cosmic Funnies

Single atoms feel tidal force via Physics World (May 2017)

Robbins, Tom. Still Life with Woodpecker. Bantam Books: New York, 1980.

“Being four times larger than the moon, the earth appeared to dominate. Caught in the earth’s gravitational web, the moon moved around the earth and could never get away. Yet, as any half-awake materialist well knows, that which you hold holds you.”

Sobel, Dava. The Planets. Viking: NY, 2005.

Intro Music: ‘Better Times Will Come’ by No Luck Club off their album Prosperity

Background Music: ‘Sad Business’ by Patients aka Ben Cooper, who primarily releases music as Radical Face but also has at least three other bands or band names he’s working with/has released music as.

Filler Music: ‘It’s Getting Boring by the Sea’ by Blood Red Shoes off their album Box of Secrets

Outro Music: ‘Fields of Russia’ by Mutefish off their album On Draught

Great detail of the famous crawler that transported the mighty Saturn V and all the space shuttles to the launch pads.  An engineering feat in its own right.