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  • How wave warnings work

    NOAA / USGS
    This color-coded map models how high waves rose in the wake of the Samoa
    Islands earthquake. The color key is calibrated in centimeters above sea level.

    Five years after a catastrophic Indian Ocean quake pointed up serious shortcomings in the world's tsunami warning network, a beefed-up monitoring system worked quickly to sound the alarm about this week's undersea shocks in the Pacific, seismologists say.

    The tsunami alarm may not have gotten out quickly enough to avoid the loss of life in Samoa, and there are still gaps in the system. Nevertheless, this week's response demonstrated how much things have changed since 2004.

    "It's night and day," Stuart Weinstein, deputy director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii, told me today. "So much more has transpired in the intervening five years."

    The best news about the past five years is that the network of sensors watching for seismic and ocean activity has expanded dramatically. Satellite communication systems pass along readings from those sensors every 15 minutes or less.

    "Back in 2004, when the Sumatran disaster struck, there were only four instruments in the Indian Ocean that were transmitting their data and making it available in near real time," Weinstein said. "Now there are over 50."

    Back then, about 20 seismometers around the Pacific Rim were watching for earthquake activity. "Now, typically, we're bringing in well over 200 seismic stations from around the world," Weinstein said.

    Paul Whitmore, director of NOAA's West Coast and Alaska Tsunami Warning Center in Alaska, said the network also receives data from about 400 tide gauges around the world. "Five years ago, it was less than half that, and the data was often delayed one to three hours," he said.

    15-minute warning
    This week, the center in Hawaii sent out its first tsunami bulletin just 15 minutes after the first signs of the magnitude-8.0 South Pacific quake were detected. That's a dramatic change from the hours that were required to get a good fix on the magnitude of the 2004 quake and tsunami. But it still wasn't soon enough for Samoa, which was already being hit by tsunami waves rising as high as 20 feet (6 meters) by the time the bulletin was issued.

    The system's performance varied from agency to agency. A warning system run by the European-backed Global Security and Crisis Management Unit reportedly failed to evaluate the tsunami's impact in real time due to a hardware failure. Tsunami-watchers in Australia and New Zealand, meanwhile, said that their warning systems worked well.

    The impact of tsunami waves can vary dramatically, depending on the direction and depth of a seismic fault as well as the nature of the underwater terrain. The South Pacific quake had such an effect on Samoa because the most powerful waves radiated in that direction - and strangely enough, America's West Coast was another directional target.

    The West Coast and Alaska Tsunami Warning Center could see those waves coming, and Whitmore said an appropriate advisory was issued for Californians and Oregonians.

    "We didn't need them to be evacuating, and we didn't want them to be doing nothing," he told me. "Our estimates were a little bit high, but I believe the emergency management systems that I'm familiar with took the right action in keeping people out of the harbors."

    Whitmore said the center's bulletin estimated that waves could be 4 to 25 inches (10 to 65 centimeters) above sea level. The actual maximum wave heights were 1.4 feet (42 centimeters, in Arena Cove, Calif.). The timing estimate for the waves' arrival, about 11 hours after the quake, was "very good," Whitmore said.

    The Pacific center had yet another potential threat to assess just hours after the tragedy in Samoa. When today's magnitude-7.6 quake hit western Indonesia, experts had to decide quickly whether a tsunami might follow. "We were not expecting a destructive wave, but sometimes you can't tell," Weinstein said. So a regional tsunami watch was sent out 10 minutes after the quake was detected.

    According to reports from the scene, fears of a tsunami caused thousands of people to flee the Sumatran coastal city of Padang in panic. But it turned out that no giant waves were generated, and the tsunami watch was canceled 65 minutes after it was issued.

    Far from perfect
    Tsunami-watchers admit that the warning system is still far from perfect. "While we have come a long way in five years, there's still a lot of analysis yet to be gained," Whitmore said.

    Forecasters rely on computer models to take the data from widely spread sensors and figure out which way the waves are heading. And the models are constantly being tweaked to reflect real-life events such as this week's shocks. "That's going to be an ongoing, never-ending battle," Whitmore acknowledged.

    There's also a serious issue relating to maintenance of the sensor network: Just three months ago, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility issued a report pointing to what it said were "gaping holes" in the tsunami warning system. NOAA's records indicate that 10 out of its 39 deep-ocean pressure monitoring stations, also known as DART buoys, were failing. Still more deep-ocean sensors operated by other countries are on the blink.

    Weinstein noted that neither of NOAA's two DART buoys in the Indian Ocean are currently functioning - which certainly didn't help when it came time to assess the impact of today's Indonesia quake. "They probably need to be checked out," Weinstein told me.

    The important thing is for folks in coastal communities to be prepared - even before authorities sound the alarm.

    "If you feel an earthquake, get to high ground as fast as you can," John Bellini, a geophysicist with the National Earthquake Information Center in Denver, told Inside Science News Service. "Five minutes was not enough time for emergency services to move into action. It is hard to get a warning out faster than five minutes, so people have to know to move to higher ground."

    Update for 9:45 p.m. ET: This Web page points to a must-see animation showing how the waves propagated across the Pacific after the Samoa quake.

    The Associated Press' story about tsunami science notes that the quake was centered not all that far beneath the sea floor, which means little energy was lost. The epicenter was in a part of the ocean where the water was deep, which means bigger waves. What's more, the seismic activity took the form of an "outer rise" quake, which means the sea floor is broken in a way that concentrates the energy and pushes water up to create powerful waves.

    Those waves raced away at speeds approaching 530 mph, reaching Samoa within minutes. "The people of American Samoa didn't stand much of a chance," AP's Seth Borenstein writes.

    More on tsunami threats:

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  • Winning sites on the scientific Web

    Congratulations to the winners of this year's National Academies Communication Awards, announced today. The awards are given annually to recognize excellence in reporting and communicating science, engineering and medicine to the general public, and I'm proud to be a past recipient. This year's honorees will receive their $20,000 prizes during a Nov. 20 ceremony in Irvine, Calif.

    One of the best parts of the awards exercise is that it provides a great opportunity to see great science writing (and broadcasting) you may have missed the first time around. Here are links to the winners' Web sites:

    ... And here are a few more links to fill out your daily diet of science:

  • Green energy needn't be grim

    Noah Berger / AP file
    The Rocky Mountain Institute's Amory Lovins has been called a
    "techno-optimist" on energy issues.

    If someone told you America's long-term energy needs could be met without oil or nuclear power, would you think he was crazy? The craziest thing about Amory Lovins is that he says the financial numbers prove it.

    "We feel very comfortable that we're likely to have an important and coherent story about the profitable journey beyond fossil fuels, to stuff that works better and costs less than the present arrangements," Lovins, co-founder of the Colorado-based Rocky Mountain Institute, said in an interview.

    The institute's story will get a full airing this week at "Reinventing Fire," a two-day symposium in San Francisco focusing on energy efficiency, renewable energy and the prospects for creating an economy that has no need for fossil fuels. The event is one of the year's highlights for Lovins' institute, a "think-and-do tank" that advises corporate and government clients on energy issues.

    Over the past year, crude-oil prices have been swinging dramatically up and down. This week has been marked by something of a down cycle, with per-barrel prices settling in the mid-$60s. But when Lovins talks his way through the calculations, he almost makes you wonder why anyone is buying oil at all.

    "If the average cost of saving half the oil is, as we showed, 12 bucks a barrel in year 2000 dollars, and the average cost of displacing the other half with natural gas and advanced biofuels unrelated to food is 18 bucks a barrel, then the average cost of getting off oil is $15," he said. "And I don't care what the price is, that's still going to make sense and make money."

    Lovins' key to cost saving is making energy-consuming devices radically more efficient — for example, by using lighterweight materials in cars, designing them to be more aerodynamic and giving them better drive trains and tires.

    "We save half the oil by tripling the efficiency of cars, trucks and planes," Lovins said. Sure, that requires a big investment in retooling, but Lovins said his numbers suggest that a $180 billion investment (a number selected when $180 billion "sounded like a lot of money," he joked) could reap a net return of $70 billion a year. "A very handsome return," he said.

    The way Lovins runs the numbers is to add up efficiency factors and shrink the cost of operation further and further toward zero. For example, going to hybrid cars would cut gasoline consumption in half, he said. Making them lighter and more aerodynamic would cut the cost in half again. Using 85 percent cellulosic ethanol in the fuel tank would reduce the cost by three-quarters, and by the time you add in plug-in electric recharging, you're driving a car for 3 percent of the operating cost of a gas-guzzler.

    Plug-in power
    In the past couple of years, Lovins has putting more emphasis on electric power as a replacement for liquid fuels. Last year, the Rocky Mountain Institute spun off Indiana-based Bright Automotive as a for-profit venture to develop a super-efficient plug-in hybrid, an idea that Lovins has been kicking around for more than a decade. The 100-mpg Bright IDEA fleet vehicle was finally unveiled in April and is slated for mass production in 2012.

    To keep those IDEAs running, Lovins foresees the development of "smart garage" technology that can charge up cars at home or at work, and even use those car batteries as a backup power supply for the country's future "smart grid."

    The energy for that smarter grid would come increasingly from solar, wind, geothermal, hydro and other renewable energy sources. Even now, wind power can be more economic than, say, using natural gas to generate electricity, Lovins said.

    "Some smart operators were buying firm wind power and selling it into the peak to free up gas from those inefficient simple-cycle turbines, and then they would sell the gas on the gas market," Lovins said. "It was like buying gas for four to four and a half bucks and selling it for, at the time, about $7 or $8. That was much more lucrative than just selling wind power."

    And what about nuclear power? Some energy experts believe more nuclear plants will have to be constructed if energy markets turn away from coal, oil and gas.

    Not Lovins.

    "Well, unless you're thinking of adopting a centrally planned economy and forcing taxpayers to pay for them, it's not going to happen," he said, "because they're hopelessly expensive to build."

    Fans and foes
    All this has won Lovins legions of fans in the renewable-energy field — and plenty of awards as well, ranging from a MacArthur "genius grant" to the Right Livelihood Award. But Lovins also has some outspoken critics, particularly for his views on nuclear power. NEI Nuclear Notes' David Bradish, for instance, devoted a whole series of blog posts last year to what he saw as the "flaws and inconsistencies" of the Rocky Mountain Institute's energy claims. Bradish and others claim that Lovins and his colleagues at the institute cook their figures to make nuclear look overly bad and make renewables look like a sure thing.

    Other critics worry that Lovins is just too much of a techno-optimist, a "voice crying in the wilderness" who takes energy efficiency to an unmatchable extreme. Even his super-efficient Colorado home, equipped with a greenhouse suitable for growing bananas, has attracted rants as well as raves. Last month, The Wall Street Journal's Jeffrey Ball wrote that a recent renovation of the house "serves as a reminder of the still-enormous gulf between what is technologically possible and what society is able or willing to pay for."

    Lovins sticks to his central claim that energy efficiency need not entail sacrifice, even when it comes to cultivating those bananas.

    "I don't think anybody would find it a burden or a sacrifice to live here," he said. "It's just an extra bonus that you can eat your fresh bananas as you walk in out of a February snowstorm, and then you realize that there's no furnace. That's because you build it right."

    The way Lovins sees it, his prescription for fixing America's energy economy has been getting through more easily now with President Barack Obama and Nobel-winning Energy Secretary Steven Chu in office. "If anybody can fix it, it's Steve Chu's team," he said.

    But Lovins said his prescription doesn't depend on carbon taxes, renewable-energy subsidies or any other federally mandated changes in the economics of energy.

    "The sort of energy policy I would love to see — and I hope I do live to see it — is an economically conservative one that allows and requires always to save or produce energy, to compete fairly, at honest prices, regardless of their type, technology, size, location or ownership," the 61-year-old said. "Let's see who's not in favor of that. Hint: It will be many of the incumbent corporate socialists masquerading as free marketeers."

    More on Lovins and green energy:

    This report is also available in msnbc.com's Green Innovation section.

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  • Lights, camera ... Hubble!

    NASA
    Astronaut Drew Feustel looms large as he moves a corrective-optics package from
    the Hubble Space Telescope to a stowage position during May's final servicing
    mission. This view was captured by the Imax 3-D camera in Atlantis' cargo bay.

    "Hubble 3D," due to premiere next March in super-screen Imax theaters, is shaping up as a fitting sendoff for the world's best-known telescope as well as the most complicated flying machine ever built.

    Atlantis' trip to the Hubble Space Telescope in May may have marked not only the last time that astronauts put their hands on the crown jewels of NASA's astronomical assets, but also the last opportunity for filming a Hollywood-style production aboard a space shuttle.

    "It made me sentimental," admitted Toni Myers, the film's producer, director and editor.

    Myers has been involved in half a dozen big-screen space documentaries, including "Hail Columbia!" - which dates back to the dawn of the space shuttle age in 1981. Almost three decades later, "Hubble 3D" may be the last of the breed.

    "The film age is definitely pretty much coming to an end," she said. It so happens that the space shuttle age is nearing its end as well. If NASA sticks to its current schedule, the fleet's final flight will take place in the latter part of next year - perhaps just as "Hubble 3D" is coming out on DVD.

    Of course, you're missing the whole point if you wait for the DVD. The idea behind Imax 3-D is that you get a seven-story-high view of the cosmos, as seen through polarized glasses that make you feel as if you can reach out and touch the spacesuits.

    Myers' 2002 film, "Space Station 3-D," set the precedent for the Hubble epic - but for May's mission, which focused so heavily on five lengthy spacewalks, the Imax camera equipment in Atlantis' cargo bay had to be shrunk to the size of four shoeboxes. That's a particularly stiff challenge because the 70mm Imax film is twice as wide as standard movie film. What's more, the 3-D effect requires the use of a complex lens system that exposes one frame for the left eye, then one frame for the right eye, cycling 24 times a second.

    The camera has to push through 672 feet of film for every minute of shooting, and because the remote-controlled camera was shooting in Atlantis' open cargo bay, there's no opportunity for changing film. "That camera takes a single load of film a mile long, and that mile gives us eight minutes," Myers said.

    NASA
    Camera operator Peter Kragh, at left, moves the Imax 3-D camera to film
    astronauts Mike Good (foreground) and Mike Massimino (inside a Hubble mockup)
    as they rehearse repair procedures underwater at NASA's Neutral Buoyancy Lab in
    Houston in April, a month before their flight.

    If you have only eight minutes of film to cover an eight-hour spacewalk, you have to choose your shots wisely. So, in the months leading up to the mission, the "Hubble 3D" film crew and Atlantis' space crew meticulously planned a list of shots for each outing.

    Shuttle pilot Greg Johnson was put in charge of controlling the cargo bay camera from inside the crew cabin. After taking a look at the footage he shot, he pronounced himself satisfied with his gig as a cinematographer.

    "I can tell you I didn't mess it up, I didn't screw it up," he told me last week during a talk at Seattle's Museum of Flight. "That was not a given, because of the changing lighting."

    In fact, some of the footage is downright spectacular, Myers said. She marveled over one shot in particular, during which spacewalker Drew Feustel floated right in front of the camera while carrying a huge corrective-optics package away from Hubble. "You can see every stitch in his suit," she said.

    You'll see the spacewalkers do their incredibly complex jobs in fine detail and glorious 3-D, against the backdrop of a sparkling telescope and a shining Earth. But you probably won't see a lot of footage about the mission's hairier moments - for example, the time spacewalker Mike Massimino had to wrench off a handrail with his gloved hands to get at an instrument in need of repair.

    Although the movie refers to those twists and turns in the mission plan, Myers said she would have required a TV special to delve that deeply into Atlantis' tale. In fact, that's exactly the approach taken in "Hubble's Amazing Rescue," a "Nova" documentary due to premiere on PBS on Oct. 13.

    The "Nova" show explains the nuts and bolts of the Atlantis mission - figuratively (by getting into the detailed mechanics behind the problems that spacewalkers encountered) as well as literally (by telling how engineers on Earth created specialized tools to help the spacewalkers unscrew more than 100 tiny screws).

    "Hubble 3D" complements "Hubble's Amazing Rescue" by focusing on the big picture. "The main theme is to celebrate Hubble and its legacy - and that legacy is ongoing," Myers said.

    To supplement the 3-D views captured during the spacewalk, Myers uses on-the-ground imagery as well as digital video that was taken in 2-D aboard Atlantis - and then converted to synthetic 3-D with Imax's DMR software.

    Then there are the 3-D renderings of actual Hubble pictures, which could well outdo the spacewalks when it comes to jaw-dropping cosmic awesomeness. The telescope itself doesn't take 3-D pictures, but Myers' team worked with Hubble's handlers at the Space Telescope Science Institute to add the third dimension to some of the orbiting observatory's greatest hits. The movie will also feature imagery captured after Hubble's upgrade.

    Myers said one sequence will take viewers on a 3-D flight from Earth to the Orion Nebula's Trapezium Cluster. Another will zoom out from the Milky Way out to the gobs of galaxies in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, and from there out to the large-scale cosmic web. This YouTube fly-through of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field hints at what you can expect, but the 3-D effect will give you even more of a sense that you're moving through the universe at warp speed.

    Will "Hubble 3-D" be Myers' swan song? Don't count on it: Film cameras may be on the wane, but Myers said professional-quality digital cameras will soon be ready to take their place in space. And even though the shuttle program may be entering its twilight time, Myers still has lots of space visions she'd like to pursue. For example, she's dreaming about a follow-up to "Blue Planet," a 1990 Imax film that featured outer-space imagery of Earth.

    "I would dearly love to update that film," Myers said.

    What about NASA's program to develop new spacecraft to replace the shuttle? Is there a "Project Constellation 3-D" in the works? Not yet, Myers said. There's still too much about that program that's, well, up in the air.

    "For the public, you have to plan some kind of film that has some payoff to it. ... You can't really go shooting footage of some engine test with no hope of resolution," she said.

    But when NASA sets a course beyond Earth orbit - whether it's heading to the moon, or Mars, or some other far-off destination - you can bet the 3-D cameras won't be far behind. In fact, virtuality may be the way that most people experience outer space a generation from now. At least that's where Myers is heading with "Hubble 3-D" and her other big-screen movies.

    "That's definitely an aim of the films," she said, "to introduce people to the wonders of space, perhaps people who haven't thought about it before."

    More 3-D delights:

    Imax and Warner Bros. Pictures are due to bring out "Hubble 3-D" on March 19, 2010.

    Join the Cosmic Log team by signing up as my Facebook friend or following b0yle on Twitter. And reserve your copy of my book, "The Case for Pluto," which is coming out next month.

  • Back to the lunar future?

    NASA
    An artist's conception from 1978 shows a processing plant for lunar soil.

    Is this week's revelation that water ice is more prevalent on the moon than scientists expected a "game-changer" for future spaceflight, as some experts think? Actually, the rules of the game for going beyond Earth orbit haven't changed - but the latest findings could bring new attention to options in the old playbooks.

    The publication of three studies in Science about ice on the moon, plus yet another study about buried water ice on Mars, comes at an interesting time. More than five years after the White House set a goal of sending humans back to the moon by 2020, an independent panel chaired by retired aerospace executive Norman Augustine is wrapping up a full report that takes a second look at all the options for human spaceflight. (A summary report was sent to the White House earlier this month.)

    At the same time, NASA is on the verge of taking two significant steps in its renewed moon effort: On Oct. 9, the LCROSS probe is due to slam into a crater near the lunar south pole, a dark pit that could contain usable reservoirs of ice. Later next month, the space agency will go ahead with a test launch of its prototype Ares I-X moon rocket.

    For all these reasons, the back-to-the-moon plan - which was turning into a case of "been there, done that 40 years ago" - is starting to look sexy again.

    "If we have water, we have the core elements needed to support life," Rick Tumlinson, co-founder of the Space Frontier Foundation, said in a statement issued after the latest moon-ice reports. "H2O is a magic formula: We can drink it, raise crops with it, or even break it down for oxygen to breathe. We can even recombine the hydrogen and oxygen to make rocket propellant. Confirming the widespread existence of moonwater means we have a nearby oasis in space around which we can build the true human communities beyond Earth. There will be flowers on the moon in our lifetimes."

    Second thoughts?
    You might think the latest research is sparking second thoughts among the members of the Augustine panel, formally known as the Review of Human Space Flight Plans Committee. But that's not necessarily so: It turns out that panel members were given a confidential briefing on the research while they were working on their report.

    "The research we heard about was at a very early stage of development," Charles Kennel, a panel member and chairman of the National Academies Space Studies Board, told me in an e-mail exchange. "It certainly has exciting implications, if true, but it is way too early to base any planning for human spaceflight on it, in my view."

    Another member of the panel, XCOR Aerospace CEO Jeff Greason, said the findings were "incredibly important." At the very least, the options for exploiting that lunar ice needed to be investigated further, he said.

    "The real question has been, it's hard to know how serious to get about planning for the economic exploitation of lunar resources," he told me, "because No. 1, we haven't done it, and No. 2, nobody's sure there's enough to worry about. Now the preponderance of evidence is that there's enough to worry about."

    The moon is not literally an oasis, of course. The most optimistic estimates put the water content of lunar soil at one part per 1,000 - which is drier than the Sahara Desert. According to Brown University's Carle Pieters, the lead researcher behind one of the Science studies, you'd need to process a baseball diamond's worth of dirt to get a drink of water.

    But if you could turn the processing of lunar dirt over to robots, like a space-age Sorcerer's Apprentice, eventually the machines would build up enough water for drinking and irrigation, enough oxygen for breathing, and enough hydrogen for fuel. If nothing else, the moon could serve as a low-gravity fueling station for deep-space journeys headed for elsewhere.

    "I would hope that an outgrowth of whatever direction national policymakers take NASA in would include developing a transportation system such that reaching the lunar surface is economically sensible," said Greason, who emphasized he was speaking merely for himself rather than the committee.

    Moon first, or Mars first?
    You might think the "Moon First" option - the option that NASA is now basically pursuing - should remain the favored path. But that's not necessarily so, either: Greason emphasized that the panel didn't see the choices facing NASA as sticking with the International Space Station vs. landing on the moon vs. landing on Mars vs. going to other places in space.

    "When we started, we were thinking about it like that," he said, "and the menu of things was pretty much, there's ISS, there's the moon, there are lower-gravity bodies, Lagrange points, near-Earth asteroids, the Martian moons, and then there's Mars. What do we do? As we worked on the problem, it became clear that ISS had value, that it was likely going to be an enterprise that it made sense to carry on at least for a little while.

    "Now it's not a 'versus,'" he said. "It's 'we're going to do ISS, and then what? Why are we doing this?' It's our view that the organizing theme is that we're embarking upon the work of becoming a multiplanet species. Mars is a key destination for that, but we're not ready to do it right now."

    There'll always be a moon vs. Mars rivalry, because both destinations have their pluses and minuses. Robert Zubrin, a rocket scientist who is president of the Mars Society, said "there are discoveries waiting to be made" on both worlds. But he argues that the Red Planet should be the main focus because it offers so many more resources - and so many more possibilities for addressing the big questions about life's origins and humanity's future.

    Zubrin said the options being presented to the White House are fundamentally flawed because they don't set an ambitious goal for the next decade - the kind of goal that President John Kennedy set back in 1961. "We could be on Mars by the end of the next decade," Zubrin said.

    This week's revelations about the discovery of nearly pure water ice close to the surface at Mars' northern midlatitudes reinforces Zubrin's opinion. "It makes a settlement on Mars sustainable, because you don't have to bring resources from Earth," he said.

    Tumlinson, however, sees things differently. The moon is close enough to make the perfect test bed for the technologies required for Martian settlement, he told me. And knowing that there more water ice than expected on the moon could make for an easier sell.

    "The next planetary destination obviously should be the moon," he said. "The moon is a harsher mistress than Mars. If we can learn to make it there, we'll make it anywhere."

    First, take one small step
    The news about ice on the moon, and on Mars, highlight the need for technologies aimed at water extraction and purification - technologies that would be useful virtually anywhere we could land in the solar system (even Mercury!), and perhaps useful here on Earth as well.

    One unorthodox extraction technique calls for "nuking" the moon with microwaves from lunar orbit, which would turn embedded ice into water vapor. The water would be collected when it refreezes at the surface.

    NASA is working on other methods for pulling resources out of lunar soil, and next month, teams will vie for prizes in a contest for moon-digging robots.

    Schemes for processing materials from the moon have been kicking around for decades, as illustrated by this concept from 1978. Maybe it's time to blend those 30-year-old dreams with some 21st-century innovation. Developing new technologies for water extraction would fit right in with a step-by-step "flexible path" to deep space - an option that got a sympathetic hearing from Greason and his fellow panel members.

    "The whole question of 'do we do this, or that, or the other thing' is a false choice," he said. "The only question is, 'What order do you do these things in?'"

    There's one other question, however: "What can we afford to do?" The key decision facing the Obama administration has to do with how much NASA's budget could be boosted to fund future exploration. Just today, the Government Accountability Office released a report saying that NASA's current plan for future spaceflight was underfunded and lacked a "solid business case."

    The Augustine panel estimated the annual cost of a solid exploration program at $3 billion per year. If sufficient funding can't be found for NASA's ambitious goals in space, America "should accept the disappointment of setting lesser goals," the panel said.

    Is it realistic to expect a $3 billion boost in the space budget? Can NASA make a strong business case for going beyond Earth orbit? Maybe that's where this week's revelations could make a difference. But don't expect the money to flow easily, particularly if the space effort takes a business-as-usual approach.

    On Thursday, The Orlando Sentinel quoted an unnamed NASA official as saying that some of the agency's top managers were "unfortunately caught up in the fantasy" that the space agency would get the extra $3 billion. Administration officials were said to consider that kind of increase "highly unlikely."

    What do you think? Are this week's revelations about water a big deal? Do they make going to the moon (or Mars) more attractive? Register your opinion about that on our Newsvine discussion board - and feel free to join the Cosmic Log discussion by leaving a comment below.

    Update for 3 a.m. ET Sept. 26: It so happens that NASA is looking for a few good ideas for future prizes aimed at promoting "significant advances in technologies of interest to NASA and the nation." I call dibs on a competition for extracting water from simulated lunar dirt. (Actually, there was once a contest for extracting oxygen from simulated lunar regolith, so it's not a completely original idea. Although that particular prize is no longer being offered, researchers are still working on the oxygen-extraction challenge.)

    Do you have ideas for future prizes? Discuss them here if you like, then pitch them to NASA.

    More about the moon:

    Join the Cosmic Log team by signing up as my Facebook friend or following b0yle on Twitter. And reserve your copy of my book, "The Case for Pluto," which is coming out next month.

  • Dino-bird link strengthened

    Hu Dongyu / University of Bristol
    This artwork shows how a birdlike dinosaur known as Anchiornis huxleyi
    might have looked in life, more than 150 million years ago.

    A recently discovered fossil has led Chinese researchers to conclude that a previously identified dino-bird species was an honest-to-goodness dinosaur. The new findings, laid out in the journal Nature, lend further support to the view that birds really did descend directly from dinosaurs.

    Over the past few decades, paleontologists have found increasing evidence that present-day birds and ancient dinosaurs were long-lost cousins: Both sections of the evolutionary tree had species with feathers as well as similar skeletal characteristics. But did dinosaurs give rise to the first bird species, or did the two types of animals spring from a common ancestor that was technically neither a bird nor a dinosaur?

    Fossils of a dino-bird species known as Anchiornis huxleyi, which first came to light almost a year ago, play a key role in addressing that big question. At first, researchers thought Anchiornis might have been a transitional species - something that seemed to fall between birds and dinosaurs, or perhaps an early bird like Archaeopteryx. But in the newly published Nature paper, Anchiornis' discoverers say they've found a much better-preserved specimen. The fossils show more clearly that the critter was a four-winged, feathered dinosaur - specifically, a member of the troodontid family.

    The fact that Anchiornis (dated at 151 million to 161 million years old) was around long before Archaeopteryx (dated at less than 150 million years old) is used to argue that the features distinguishing early birds were present previously in dinosaurs. The researchers say "this new find refutes the 'temporal paradox'" surrounding the origin of birds.

    Predictably, the find is being heralded as a "missing link" in the long-running dino-bird debate. Here are more links that shed light on the discovery:

    The researchers behind the Nature study, released online in advance of Oct. 1 in-print publication, are Hu Dongyu, Hou Lianhai, Zhang Lijun and Xu Xing of Shenyang Normal University's Paleontological Institute. Hou and Xu also are affiliated withe the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology.

    Join the Cosmic Log team by signing up as my Facebook friend or following b0yle on Twitter. And reserve your copy of my book, "The Case for Pluto," which is coming out next month.

  • Water found (and lost) on Mars

    NASA / JPL-Caltech / Univ. of Ariz.
    Water ice surrounds a 26-foot-wide meteorite impact crater on Mars in this HiRISE picture, taken in November 2008.

    Researchers have caught Martian water ice in the midst of a triply amazing disappearing act. Why triply amazing? The ice was spotted amazingly close to the Red Planet's surface, and amazingly far away from the north pole. The third amazing thing about the observations, made using NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and reported in Friday's issue of the journal Science, is that the researchers knew it was 99 percent pure water ice because of how slowly it disappeared.

    The findings should cheer up astrobiologists, who have said even a little trickle of liquid water might sustain life beneath Mars' forbidding surface. It should also cheer up would-be space explorers, who are already over the moon because of this week's reports that lunar ice deposits are more prevalent than previously thought.

    "We knew there was ice below the surface at high latitudes of Mars, but we find that it extends far closer to the equator than you would think, based on Mars' climate today," the University of Arizona's Shane Byrne, a member of the research team for the orbiter's High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE), said in a news release issued today.

    The ice was identified using three of the scientific instruments on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

    First, scientists sifted through images captured by the spacecraft's wide-angle Context Camera in August 2008. They found dark patches of debris, apparently thrown up from impact craters when meteorites crashed into the Martian surface.

    That gave the scientists a list of targets to look at more closely starting a month later, using the higher-resolution HiRISE camera. They were elated to find that, in some cases, bright blue-white material had been thrown up from the craters along with the dark stuff. They became even more elated when they saw that the material slowly faded away over the months that followed.

    That's just the kind of signature researchers saw last year when NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander came upon subsurface water ice during its diggings. That ice slowly vaporized once it was exposed to Mars' thin, dry, cold atmosphere. (On Mars, atmospheric conditions are such that water usually passes right from the solid to the gaseous state, as carbon dioxide "dry ice" does on Earth.)

    NASA / JPL-Caltech / Univ. of Ariz.
    These before-and-after pictures show how water ice gradually disappeared from impact craters.

    The icy patches spotted by HiRISE did the same thing. In fact, the scientists worked out a mathematical model to determine just how much the ice and soil were mixed together, based on how quickly the dark material shrank away. Based on a conservative reading of the model, Byrne and his colleagues estimated that the water ice was 99 percent pure.

    The model provided one line of evidence that the bright material was really water ice. If it were, say, frozen carbon dioxide, the frozen stuff would have disappeared more quickly. But just to make sure, the scientists checked the readings made with a third instrument, the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM). The right readings were available for one of the craters, and they matched the spectral "fingerprint" of water ice.

    "Everyone thought it was water ice, but it was important to get the spectrum for confirmation," Kim Seelos of Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory, a CRISM team member and co-author of the Science paper, said in NASA's news release.

    Malin Space Science Systems' Megan Kennedy, another co-author who is on the Context Camera team, said that "we now know we can use new impact sites as probes to look for ice in the shallow subsurface."

    So much care was taken to confirm the detection of water ice in part because the location of the ice was unexpected.

    Substantial water ice deposits had been previously detected above 60 degrees latitude on Mars, roughly equivalent to the locations of Anchorage, Alaska, and Helsinki, Finland, on Earth. Indirect signs of buried ice  have been seen at lower latitudes. But the latest research reveals visible ice deposits at northern latitudes of 55 degrees and even 45 degrees, which is about where Seattle and Paris are on Earth.

    By rights, that ice shouldn't be there, Byrne told me.

    "Probably what happened was, in the recent past, Mars had a more humid atmosphere," he said. "That allows water ice to be more stable."

    Byrne explained that Mars appears to be going through a climate cycle lasting thousands or tens of thousands of years. During the more humid times, water vapor would be more easily transported through the atmosphere to lower latitudes, where it would freeze out and get mixed up with Martian soil. The ice deposits seen by the HiRISE camera are likely leftovers from that phase of the climate cycle.

    Based on the depths of the craters, the scientists figured out that a layer of almost pure ice, perhaps measuring 20 inches (half a meter) or so, must lie no more than a couple of yards (meters) beneath the surface at the sites that were studied.

    The crater sites are all roughly in the same region where the Viking 2 lander touched down in 1976, and NASA said the latest results suggest Viking might have struck water ice back then if only it had dug 4 inches (10 centimeters) deeper than it did.

    How could a layer of ice that pure have formed so close to the surface?

    "One way to do that is to use this mechanism called 'frost heave,'" Byrne said. On Earth, thin films of liquid water can form around grains of ice, even at temperatures below freezing. That liquid water can migrate through the soil to form a pure frozen "lens" on top of the ice table.

    Frost heave is a big nuisance on Earth, because the movement of the ice can create cracks in pavements or building foundations. But if this is what's happening on Mars, that opens up a couple of intriguing possibilities.

    First, it could have provided that precious trickle of liquid water for, say, subsurface microbes of the kind found in Earth's polar regions. Astrobiologists have theorized that microbial life just might still exist beneath Mars' surface if there were a source of liquid water. "They'll definitely be excited about this," Byrne said.

    Second, those ice lenses could someday provide a valuable resource for colonists from Earth, at latitudes that would be more hospitable for exploration and settlement than the polar regions. "It would probably be a little bit easier to get drinking water from a block of pure ice instead of a block of 50-50 material," Byrne observed.

    NASA / JPL-Caltech / Univ. of Ariz.
    This series of pictures shows how the ice detected at two Martian impact craters
    gradually faded and became completely covered over with dust.

    But once the ice is exposed to the thin Martian air, it doesn't hang around all that long. Almost all of the ice that was spotted last year is now gone. "We were able to image one crater where there's just the slightest trace of ice still left, and that won't last long," Byrne said.

    Which means it was a good thing that the scientists in charge of Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's various instruments worked together to monitor the disappearing act as it unfolded. "If we had taken HiRISE images just a few months later, we wouldn't have noticed anything unusual," Byrne said. "This discovery would have just passed us by."

    Update for 6:35 p.m. ET Sept 24: Several commenters asked how the researchers knew that the ice seen in the craters was not actually ice that came down with the object that created the impact crater. I had to admit that's a question I didn't think to ask, so I went back and asked Byrne about that in a follow-up e-mail. Here's his answer:

    "The objects that created the craters are quite small. Their volume is probably only a fraction of a percent of the volume of the crater. So the amount of material they could have contributed is pretty minor. Also, icy objects this size probably wouldn't make it to the surface but rather break up in the atmosphere. The impactors are much more likely to be fragments of rocky or iron-rich asteroids, which are stronger."

    This report was last updated at 5:52 p.m. ET Sept. 24.

    In addition to Byrne, Kim Seelos and Kennedy, the authors of the Science paper include Colin Dundas, Alfred McEwen and Ingrid Daubar of the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory; David Shean, Bruce Cantor, Kenneth Edgett, Tanya Harrison and Liliya Posilova of Malin Space Science Systems; Michael Mellon of the University of Colorado's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics; Selby Cull of Washington University at St. Louis; Scott Murchie and Frank Seelos of Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory; and Andreas Reufer and Nicolas Thomas of the University of Bern. 

    Join the Cosmic Log team by signing up as my Facebook friend or following b0yle on Twitter. And reserve your copy of my book, "The Case for Pluto," which is coming out next month.

  • The science of 'Surrogates'

    Touchstone Pictures
    Click for video: A lifelike face is installed on a robot in a scene from
    "Surrogates." Click on the image to watch a video about the trends behind the film.

    Bruce Willis' latest action movie takes place in a world where humans mostly stay behind closed doors and interact using lifelike cyber-substitutes. These robotic "surrogates" pass along all their sensations - during work, play and even sex - via virtual reality. In this wired-up world, you can be anybody you want to be through your surrogate: a healthier, younger version of yourself, or a super-athlete, or a supermodel. (Will that be male or female?)

    So "Surrogates" is meant as pure science fiction, right? Wrong. The filmmakers and futurists behind the movie say they're aiming for an only slightly enhanced version of present-day trends.

    "In the near future, robots are going to start to look like humans," said James Canton, founder of the San Francisco-based Institute for Global Futures. "I think within 10 years you're going to have the world of the surrogates."

    You don't even have to wait 10 years to experience the kind of virtual life that eventually goes so wrong in "Surrogates," said the film's director, "Terminator 3" veteran Jonathan Mostow.

    "Right now on the Internet you can go and you can shop, talk with your friends, get the news. You can express your opinion. You can pretty much live a full human life without ever leaving your home," Mostow told me.

    Not that the movie is a Michael Moore-ish diatribe against the Twitterpated lives that many of us lead nowadays. Like most folks in Hollywood, Mostow recognizes that the film will not fly unless it's the entertaining, thrill-a-minute action ride theatergoers expect from a Bruce Willis movie. But he also means it to be something more.

    "We do know just from the test audiences who have seen the movie that people are finding it very thought-provoking," Mostow said. "It's a little bit different from your typical Hollywood thriller."

    How is it different? Here's an explanation from Canton, who helped out on the film project: " 'Surrogates' is clearly a near-future vision when you mash up nanotechnology, and of course computing, robotics and the advances in materials science. All these technologies are converging so quickly, and that convergence is what 'Surrogates' covers so well, without getting into the details."

    If you want to delve into the real-life details, you can look at the research being conducted in Japan to create sociable robots suited to serve the country's aging population. More signs of change can be seen on far-off battlefields, where the military is using surrogates ranging from bomb-defusing robots to bomb-dropping drones.

    Other trends include the rise of online worlds such as "Second Life," where users guide avatars through activities ranging from cyber-boinking to virtual commerce to the same headaches people experience in real life. Then there's the milieu created by Twitter, Facebook and other online networks. Researchers say the personal interactions on social-networking sites can be just as complicated - and occasionally just as boring - as real life.

    Canton said he's already caught glimpses of the road ahead. Imagine, for instance, an extension of the force-feedback technology currently used to make video-game controllers shake and kick back in your hands. "I can tell you I've seen work in the labs that take force-feedback and make it totally sensory and cognitive," he told me.

    Like his fellow futurist Ray Kurzweil, Canton believes the time is fast approaching when machines will be more intelligent than natural-born humans - part of a phenomenon dubbed "the singularity." But Canton thinks the age of the surrogates - a society in which machines are used as extensions of human capabilities rather than self-actuating entities - will come well before the singularity.

    Baby-boom demographics could accelerate the current trend, he said.

    "It's likely that one of the key areas will be memory loss due to Alzheimer's," Canton told me. "Well before we have drugs to mediate memory loss, people will have both cloud-computing and wetware implants to help them with retrieving information. You're going to see this emerge much quicker, and it's going to be driven by baby boomers and baby-boomer economics."

    Canton isn't saying that the approach of the singularity - or the surrogates - will be totally a good thing. In fact, that's what the movie is all about. He said the Bruce Willis character "is challenged by a world that has been so dominated by these surrogates that the level of authenticity and humanness has been modified or even mutated."

    "That's the big challenge," he said. "There's a wonderful social message in this that I think audiences will find both interesting and provocative as well as entertaining."

    That's certainly the way director Jonathan Mostow feels about the film.

    It's not as if Mostow started out with a completely blank slate: The movie's screenplay is based on "The Surrogates," a graphic novel by Robert Venditti and Brett Weldele that came out in 2005. And that work, in turn, was inspired by "The Cybergypsies," a book about online addiction in the dial-up modem era. (Those two works, by the way, make a perfect dual selection for the Cosmic Log Used Book Club - a semi-regular listing of books on cosmic themes that have been around long enough to turn up at libraries and secondhand-book shops.)

    Even though the concepts that gave rise to "Surrogates" go back a quarter-century, Mostow told me the movie includes a few twists that should give today's Twitterers, texters and Facebookers something to think about.

    Here's an edited version of my Q&A with Mostow:

    Cosmic Log: How does the vision behind this movie differ from the vision behind, say, "Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines," which you also directed?

    Mostow: With "Terminator" and the tradition of science fiction that is about sentience - thinking robots - the core is that somehow we are surrendering control to the computers. That goes back a very long way. In the last 25 years you can think of the seminal movies on that theme - like "WarGames." You remember that movie? The "Terminator" franchise, which has been around for 20 years, is asking that same question: Isn't it dangerous to surrender control to the machines, because look at what machines can do.

    This movie asks a different question. The robots are not independently thinking robots. They're simply tools. They're sort of a physical manifestation of ourselves on the Internet. Right now on the Internet you can go and you can shop, talk with your friends, get the news. You can express your opinion.  You can pretty much live a full human life without ever leaving your home.

    Q: … And it can be a different life from the actual life that you're leading offline. I suppose that in the movie, as in the graphic novel, you can have somebody sitting on the couch eating potato chips and pretending that he's a beautiful woman at the club.

    A: Yeah, absolutely. And that's certainly one of the side effects, if you will, of what happens when we live that way. But the bigger question is really, in a world where we are seemingly more connected with each other than ever before, you could argue that were actually more disconnected from each other than ever before - because we're actually, really not interacting with each other on a personal basis.

    What does that do to people? How does it change society, and how does it change the people in it? Those are very different questions this movie is posing, as opposed to all the other robot movies that have come before it.

    Q: Are there things that you or the actors brought from their own lives? I think a lot of the people in Hollywood today are pretty savvy on this whole idea of mediated online identity nowadays. When you were putting together the movie, could you draw upon real-life experiences in that area?

    A: Yes. I think anybody who lives anywhere where you can be connected via the Internet has on some level a love-hate relationship with this technology.

    Q: Any examples?

    Stephen Vaughan / Touchstone Pictures
     Director Jonathan Mostow works on "Surrogates."

    A: For example, during the Christmas holiday before we started shooting, Bruce was on the beach in the Bahamas - and he had his BlackBerry, and he couldn't stand the fact that even in the most remote, beautiful place on earth, he was getting e-mails, text messages and phone calls. He just took his BlackBerry and flung it out in the ocean. And he watched the glow of the screen as it sunk beneath the surface of the water - there was this great feeling that he had.

    In fact, that's sort of what Bruce does in the movie - not so much with a BlackBerry, but with his own connection to technology.

    Q: Is there something that you'd like moviegoers to know as they walk into the theater - something to watch for that may not be obvious if you're just looking for a fast-paced action thriller?

    A: Well, I think that the movie is first and foremost entertainment, but what the movie hopefully also does is ask some questions. I hope it kicks off a conversation at the end of the movie, about taking a step back and looking at our relationship to technology. In fact, the inspiration for the author who wrote the graphic novel was a book about the addictive behavior of people on the Internet - people who simply could not pull themselves away from the computer. And this was in the mid-1990s. That seems like ancient history to us now, right?

    Q: Right …

    A: That was before Facebook, before Twitter, before all these social networking places. You had e-mail, and most of us were using dial-up modems. Even back then, people just couldn't let go of it. So it's interesting that the core of human behavior as far as technology goes hasn't really changed.

    [It was also interesting to listen to the recording of this Q&A and hear the blings, boings and tweets going off from the e-mail, instant-messaging and Tweetdeck software on my computer nearby - sounds that I had tuned out during the interview.]

    Q: Was there any research into online identities that you personally drew upon when you were working on the film, or was it more a case of your informal research … just seeing how people use the Internet.

    A: I think a lot of is … yeah, it's living life. If you have an online presence, if you use the Internet, you understand how these things work. And that will be taken from your own personal experience. If you use that as the basis for a movie, you're much more likely to stumble upon the truth of something.

    Q: Are there any technological innovations that are introduced in the movie that could help people see this in a different light? Any twists that play off what's happening in the Twittersphere?

    A: Well, I don't want to give away any of the plot … but we do know just from the test audiences who have seen the movie that people are finding it very thought-provoking.  It's a little bit different from your typical Hollywood thriller.

    Q: That's fair. Can you say if working on this movie has changed the way that you or the other folks you worked with think about social networking? Are you trying to reduce the time you spend on the BlackBerry or the iPhone because of the work that you've done here?

    A: That's a great question. I have to say that, when I'm on the computer now, I'm aware that I'm on the computer. I'm aware that that clock is ticking. I'm aware that for that time when I'm online, that's time that I'm not spending offline. And so every hour that you're on the computer is an hour that you're not actually in real life, you're not doing something for real.

    Is all this food for thought, or is it much ado about another action-thriller? Feel free to weigh in - or have your surrogate weigh in - with a comment below.

    Join the Cosmic Log team by signing up as my Facebook friend or following b0yle on Twitter. And reserve your copy of my book, "The Case for Pluto," which is coming out next month.

  • Season of sky oddities

    Daryl Pederson
    Daryl Pederson says he captured this shot of an "albino rainbow" while he was out
    on his sailboat, making his way through the fog in Alaska's Prince William Sound.

    Now that fall has arrived in the Northern Hemisphere, we can look forward to more of those misty, foggy, even icy mornings and evenings. And that's prime time for atmospheric curiosities such as sundogs and halos, sun pillars, moon rings and fogbows.

    Fogbows, otherwise known as seadogs or "albino rainbows," are particularly easy to see at this time of year, as evidenced by the selection offered up at SpaceWeather.com.

    You do have to know what to look for, however. Rainbows, the showiest kinds of atmospheric displays, are created when raindrops act like tiny prisms. When sunlight shines through the drops, some of that light is broken down into a spectrum of wavelengths and bounced back toward observers. The result is an arc of light displaying, naturally, the colors of the rainbow.

    Some rainbows are more colorful than others, however, and one of the reasons for that has to do with the size of the drops. The smaller the drop, the less the light is separated into different colors.  (Here's a demonstration showing how droplet size affects the look of a rainbow.) If you get down to the size of droplets in a cloud bank or fog bank, the light is hardly broken down at all. Instead, the diffracted light is a ghostly white.

    It's easy to miss that faint ghost of a rainbow, but if you happen to have the sun on one side and mist on the other, keep an eye out for the effect. That's what photographer and storm chaser Tyler Burg did last month when he scouted out his surroundings on a foggy morning near Pisgah, Iowa.

    "These were the first fogbows I've seen, and man, were they bright!" he wrote in his SpaceWeather posting.

    Burg, who displays his photos at TonightsSky.org, provided a bit more advice in an e-mail exchange: "Just look opposite the sun at a wall of fog," he told me. "You can't be in the fog, or else it's harder to see. They can occur with any light source. A few mornings after that one I saw some from my headlights. I just walked 50 yards in front of my car, and it just appears out of nowhere. Pretty cool stuff. I've heard you can get them from the moon, and streetlights, too. You just have to be willing to get up early and look."

    Tyler Burg / TonightsSky.org
    Photographer/storm chaser Tyler Burg took this picture of a fogbow framing a
    farmhouse near Pisgah, Iowa, on Aug. 30. Burg's shadow is visible in the
    foreground. Check TonightsSky.org to see more of Burg's work.

    A fogbow was staring Daryl Pederson in the face while he sailing off Alaska last month. "I was out on my sailboat, making my way through the fog in Prince William Sound, and suddenly an albino rainbow appeared," he told SpaceWeather.

    SpaceWeather.com is a great place to find out about atmospheric phenomena as well as other sky shows, ranging from meteor showers to sunspots to the latest crop of auroral displays. But for the definitive rundown on halos and bows, rays and glories, and everything else air and light have to offer, the Atmospheric Optics Web site is the place to go. The site even provides an Optics Picture of the Day, modeled after the long-running Astronomy Picture of the Day.

    Submitted to FirstPerson
    This bright cloud, spotted from Virginia, was created during an experimental rocket launch Saturday evening. Click on the image for a larger version.

    One of the latest additions to the atmospheric menagerie cropped up on Saturday evening when researchers used a rocket launch to create the first-ever artificial night-shining cloud.

    Some scientists suspect that night-shining clouds, also known as noctilucent clouds, may be popping up more frequently due to global climate change. A couple of years ago, NASA launched a satellite called AIM (Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere) to study the phenomenon. This Discovery Channel video delves more deeply into mesospheric mysteries.

    Another satellite, known as STPSat-1, tracked the vestiges of Saturday night's cloud as it dissipated in the atmosphere. One of our readers shared a picture of the light show - and you'll find still more photos at SpaceWeather, including this particularly spooky view from John A. Blackwell of Exeter, N.H.

    This YouTube video tracking the launch and the dispersal of the artificial cloud is scary-cool. And this video clip from WFMZ-TV in Pennsylvania, in which eyewitnesses describe the sight in UFO terms, is just plain scary.

    Do you have sky views you'd like to share, or oddities you'd like to ask about? You can upload cool pictures of sky or space phenomena to our FirstPerson inbox, and feel free to send along your questions or observations as a comment below.

    Update for 3 p.m. ET Sept. 23: Tyler Burg sent along a very cool demonstration of the car-headlight fogbow effect, conducted just this morning at a lake near his house.

    Join the Cosmic Log team by signing up as my Facebook friend or following b0yle on Twitter. And reserve your copy of my book, "The Case for Pluto," which is coming out next month.

  • Springtime stunners from Saturn

    NASA / JPL / SSI
    Click for slideshow: Saturn's rings have darkened almost to invisibility in this
    portrait captured by the Cassini orbiter on Aug. 12, just after equinox. This view
    highlights the start of spring for Saturn's northern hemisphere. Click on the image
    to see a slideshow featuring pictures from the ringed planet and its moons.

    The Cassini orbiter has sent back a spectacular set of pictures taken during Saturn's equinox, including a moody portrait of the giant planet's rings at their darkest. Taken together, the pictures reveal that Saturn's rings are bumpier, more active and more complex than previously thought.

    An equinox simply marks the precise time in a planet's orbital cycle when day and night are of equal lengths. It's one of the traditional markers of seasonal change. Thus, the photos herald the return of spring to Saturn's northern hemisphere after almost 30 earthly years (which means fall has begun in the south).

    On Earth, this week's equinox puts people in a mind to think of fall leaves (in, say, New England) or spring flowers (in Australia). On Saturn, however, the main significance of the Aug. 11 equinox is that it provided scientists with an unprecedented opportunity to see how the giant planet's rings are structured.

    Because Saturn's orbital cycle is nearly 30 Earth years long, Cassini's equinox encounter marked the first time scientists could take a close-up look at the rings under conditions that were ideal for fine-resolution observations.

    "It's like putting on 3-D glasses and seeing the third dimension for the first time, " Bob Pappalardo, Cassini project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, explained today in a news release. "This is among the most important events Cassini has shown us."

    Because Saturn's rings are edge-on with respect to the sun during the equinox, the shadows cast by small features within the rings are grossly exaggerated, like the shadows of trick-or-treaters at sunset. Those bumps, ruffles and peaks go unnoticed when sunlight falls upon the rings on an angle. The peculiar circumstances of the equinox revealed, however, that such features are actually not small at all. Some of them rise as high above the main plane of the rings as the Rocky Mountains on Earth, NASA said.

    Ripples and ridges in the rings
    That plane is nowhere near as flat as a plain. In the old days, scientists thought the rings were only 30 feet (10 meters) thick in the main rings (designated by the letters A through D). Cassini's observations confirm that the rings actually ripple up and down in vertical formations spanning as much as 500 miles (800 kilometers). Scientists don't yet know what caused those ripples.

    "It looks like something happened in the early 1980s to get this pattern going, but we are still trying to figure out what could have disturbed such a large part of the rings," said Cornell University's Matthew Hedman, a Cassini imaging team associate.

    There's a lot going on within those rippling rings: Cassini's shadow pictures helped astronomers spot a wall of ring particles that rose as high as 2.5 miles (4 kilometers), whipped up by the gravitational influence of the Saturnian moon Daphnis.

    "We thought the plane of the rings was no taller than two stories of a modern-day building, and instead we've come across walls more than two miles high," said Carolyn Porco, a planetary scientist at the Colorado-based Space Science Institute who leads the Cassini imaging team. "Isn't that the most outrageous thing you could imagine? It truly is like something out of science fiction."

    Cassini also spotted streaky clouds of tiny particles floating above the ring plane. That phenomenon suggests that yard-wide bits of interplanetary debris are continuing to rain down upon the rings, throwing up those clouds and contributing to the evolution of the rings. There are also larger-sized "moonlets" that apparently stir up the ring material, creating clumps that whirl like propellers.

    Cassini's previous observations confirmed that the rings are made up of chunks of ice and gunk, in varying sizes. During the equinox, those chunks and bits cooled down to new lows, as recorded by the orbiter's Composite Infrared Spectrometer. Temperatures in the A ring, for example, dipped to 382 degrees below zero Fahrenheit (43 Kelvin). That's not quite as chilly as the permanently shadowed craters at our moon's south pole, which last week was dubbed the coldest spot in the solar system. But it's pretty darn close.

    See the full show
    Our latest Saturn slideshow presents a selection of the equinox pictures, and for more, you can click on over to the Web sites for the Cassini-Huygens mission and the Cassini imaging team. Here's a NASA slideshow complete with spacey audio track, and a video explaining the geometry behind the equinox mission.

    I don't think there's any doubt that the highlight of today's selection is the full frontal image of Saturn, its rings and its moons, captured on the day after equinox. In a large-format version of the image, you can spot the moon Janus in the lower left, Epimetheus near the middle bottom, Pandora outside the rings on the right, and Atlas inside Saturn's thin F ring on the right.

    Did you spot them all? If so, that's because the picture has been enhanced to make the rings and moons more visible. The bright side of the rings was made 20 times brighter relative to the planet itself, and the dark side's brightness has been bumped up 60 times. The moons have also been brightened by a factor of 30 to 60. Without the brightening, the rings would essentially fade to black, according to the imaging team.

    In an e-mail exchange, Porco told me that more equinox pictures will be coming from the Cassini team. "But they will be like the ones we captured as the sun was setting, probably more moon shadows, and images taken here and there," she said.

    Porco said she was deeply satisfied with Cassini's coverage of Saturn's equinox, and noted that "it will be a very long time before any of us sees anything like this again." Almost 15 years, to be precise.

    "This has been a moving spectacle to behold, and one that has left us with far greater insight into the workings of Saturn's rings than any of us could have imagined," she said in a news release summarizing the latest findings. "We always knew it would be good. Instead, it's been extraordinary."

    Update for 7:25 p.m. ET Sept. 22: Check out Brian Williams' take on the new pictures from Saturn, which aired on "NBC Nightly News." 

    More about Saturn:

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  • Making space power pay

    Mafic Studios
    Click for gallery: Get a step-by-step look at how a space-based solar power system might work.

    Power-beaming systems are moving from drawing boards and computer slideshow presentations to actual demonstrations on tabletops and in exhibit halls. But what will it take to turn power beams into profitable outer-space ventures?

    Strangely enough, the challenge of constructing a sheet of thin-film solar cells that unfolds to a width of 1,000 feet (300 meters) in orbit is not the issue uppermost in the mind of William Maness, chief executive officer of Everett, Wash.-based PowerSat Corp. The problems that lead his list have more to do with earthly affairs - such as getting investors, utilities and regulators to buy into the idea.

    Maness told a small gathering at a National Space Society meeting in Seattle this week that the pitch for space solar power has been directed too often at space enthusiasts who don't have a financial stake in the issue, rather than energy utility executives who do.

    "This is one of the reasons why this concept has taken so long to start to catch on," he said.

    Maness favors a more market-centered approach to the issue, and there are signs that the approach is taking hold. But other signs show why the challenge facing Maness and his colleagues in the space-power business is so daunting.

    The Solaren story
    First, the positive side: Maness pointed to Solaren Corp.'s deal with San Francisco-based Pacific Gas & Eelectric for a 200-megawatt space solar power pilot project as a potential success story. "That was some brilliant work," he said.

    The deal still must pass regulatory muster, however, beginning with approval by California's Public Utilities Commission. Cal Boerman, Solaren's director for energy services, told me today that he expected the commission to make its decision in October or November. The company is also continuing its talks with potential launch providers such as United Launch Alliance, Boerman said.

    Solaren's plan calls for sending power-generating satellites, or powersats, into space on four Atlas 5 heavy-lift rockets. The satellites would convert solar electric power into microwave energy for beaming down to a ground station, based within a mile or so of the existing power grid. Proximity to the grid is key, Boerman said: Neither PG&E nor the PUC wants to put in miles and miles of new high-voltage electrical lines to make use of solar-generated power.

    The scheme would have to gain approval from the Federal Aviation Administration (because of the commercial launches) and the Federal Communications Commission (because each powersat is essentially a big telecommunication satellite), as well as from all the regulatory agencies who have a say in how the ground power station is built. Then Solaren would have to put the system into operation by 2016, or risk penalties prescribed by its PG&E contract.

    Some say the Solaren deal is a "scam ... pure and simple." One scenario suggests that PG&E pursued the deal because it's a no-risk way to line up an excuse for falling short of California's renewable energy standards ("Gee, we tried our best, but our suppliers just couldn't follow through on their promises"). Maness, however, thinks that Solaren has displayed enviable business savvy so far. He counts the company as a rival to be respected. 

    Cost vs. benefit
    Maness' vision for PowerSat would go far beyond Solaren's pilot project to put 300 powersats into orbit, forming a constellation capable of generating 2,500 megawatts of power. That would be an impressive resource, equal to more than a third of Grand Coulee Dam's electrical output. The only problem is, right now the project's numbers don't add up.

    PowerSat Corp.
    PowerSat Corp. CEO William Maness

    To be competitive with other power sources, Maness figures that the powersat system's launch costs would have to be around $100 per pound - which is roughly one-hundredth of the current asking price. Launch costs may be heading downward, thanks in part to the rise of SpaceX's Falcon rockets, but Maness can't yet predict when the charts tracing cost and benefit will cross into the profitable zone.

    For now, Maness is targeting the 2017-2018 time frame for a space demonstration project. In the meantime, he's hoping to work through a tangle of regulatory issues and also keep an eye on his potential competitors - including not only Solaren but also Space Energy Inc., Space Island Group and Welsom Space Consortium.

    "It's a race for us right now," Maness said.

    Demonstrations in the works
    Just in the past month there was quite a buzz over reports that Japanese companies were planning to join a $21 billion effort to set up a powersat system - but it's now clear that those reports were overblown.

    The near-term investment is more on the order of $2 million for a demonstration of power-beaming technology, Maness said. If the technology works successfully in Earth-based tryouts, the Japanese plan to launch a test powersat in 2015. But a 1,000-megawatt space generating system of the sort mentioned in the initial reports is probably two decades down the road.

    Japanese researchers have already made progress in the Earth-based demonstration phase: During a powersat symposium conducted this month in Toronto, Kobe University researcher Nobuyuki Kaya and his colleagues demonstrated an antenna system that could beam enough microwave energy across a 30-foot (10-meter) exhibit hall to power a small rover.

    Alan Boyle / msnbc.com
    PowerSat CEO William Maness' wireless power demonstrator lights up tiny LED
    lights, just to show it's possible to beam electrical power through the air safely.

    Maness has his own earthly demonstrations in the works: At the Seattle talk, he showed off a wireless power generator the size of a breadbox that transmitted enough power (5 watts) to light up LED lights about a foot away. And he has grander plans for building a demonstration power beamer mounted on a 20-foot truck, capable of transmitting 10 kilowatts over a distance of about 300 yards (meters).

    The clock is ticking, however - not only for the powersat market but for other energy alternatives as well.

    Terrestrial solar power may have its drawbacks. In addition to potential environmental concerns, large-scale solar farms can't generate a steady flow of electricity at night, or during cloudy weather. But if engineers ever figure out a way to store up the intermittent energy generated by solar cells or wind turbines, at levels high enough to keep utilities flush with power, Maness thinks that would deal a heavy blow to his powersat dreams.

    "At that point, I take my marbles and go home," he said.

    What do you think? Is space solar power little more than a sci-fi dream - at least until the space elevator is built? Or is it an idea whose time is about to come? Feel free to leave your comments below.

    An earlier version of this report mischaracterized Space Canada as a potential PowerSat competitor rather than a nonprofit organization to promote powersats.

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  • Tiny T. rex? Big surprise!

    Mike Hettwer
    Click for video: University of Chicago paleontologist Paul Sereno adds the
    toe claw to a well-preserved skeleton of the tyrannosauroid known as Raptorex
    kriegsteini. Click on the image to hear Sereno discuss the find. 

    Who would have thought Tyrannosaurus rex had such a murderous "mini-me" in its family tree?

    Not Stephen Brusatte, a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History. "This was completely unexpected," he said.

    And not University of Chicago paleontologist Paul Sereno, who along with Brusatte and other colleagues figured out that the tiny tyrannosauroid had virtually all the lethal weapons brandished tens of millions of years later by a behemoth 90 times more massive.

    "From the teeth to the enlarged olfactory bulbs, the enlarged jaw muscles, the enlarged head, the small forelimbs, the lanky, running, long hindlimbs with thick-pressed foot for hunting prey - we see this all, to our great surprise, in an animal that is basically the body weight of a human," he told reporters.

    The 125 million-year-old fossil dinosaur, unearthed in China and dubbed Raptorex kriegsteini, is "as close to the proverbial missing link on a lineage as we might ever get for tyrannosaurs," Sereno said.

    The researchers laid out their conclusions in a paper published online today by the journal Science.

    A T. rex expert who wasn't involved in the research, the University of Maryland's Thomas Holtz, agreed that the findings resolve some of the mysteries surrounding one of history's most fearsome predators. "It is unexpected, in a sense," he told me. "It really helps clarify what was previously a missing portion of the tyrant dinosaur family tree."

    T. rex's tangled tale
    Holtz, Sereno and many other paleontologists have been piecing together T. rex's family tree for decades. Before Raptorex, they knew that the species Tyrannosaur rex had similar-looking cousins in various parts of the world - Albertosaurus in Canada, for example, and Tarbosaurus in China. These creatures, known collectively as tyrannosaurids, weighed as much as 8 tons and occupied the top of the food chain when the age of dinosaurs ended 65 million years ago.

    Todd Marshall
    Weighing only a fraction as much as Tyrannosaurus rex, the 125 million-year-old Raptorex nevertheless exhibits a similar body plan in this artwork depicting both species.

    Scientists also knew that these giants sprang from much smaller, more primitive ancestors that existed 125 million years ago, designated tyrannosauroids (with an extra "o"). The little 'roids had some characteristics in common with the big 'rids, but not the traits that made T. rex so special - for example, the little arms or the long runner's legs.

    Some experts suggested that those changes in body plan must have arisen less than 125 million years ago, and somehow served as the decisive factor that made T. rex as big and dominant as it was. As the rest of the tyrannosaur became super-sized, the forearms dwindled into useless appendages. Or so the theory went.

    Sereno said Raptorex refutes that claim by showing that the killer body predated the super-sizing trend. The creature measured only about 10 feet (3 meters long) in life, compared with the 40-foot (12-meter) head-to-tail span for Tyrannosaurus rex. But it had all the characteristics that have made T. rex so memorable in the popular imagination.

    "This is part of a beautifully designed predatory blueprint, and it certainly was one of the most successful," he said.

    How Raptorex came to light
    The surprising features were found in a nearly complete fossil skeleton that was excavated years ago in northeastern China, one of the world's top fossil hot spots. "The specimen was found perhaps in the dark of night, spirited out of China and possibly sold," Sereno said.

    The dinosaur bones - still encased in a block of sediment - turned up at an Arizona fossil show about six years ago, and were purchased by Henry Kriegstein, an opthalmologist and private fossil collector from Hingham, Mass. Kriegstein told me he paid "on the order of tens of thousands of dollars" for the specimen and had it sent it off to experts in Utah for preparation.

    At first, Kriegstein and the paleontologists who advised him assumed that the fossil was a juvenile Tarbosaurus. But they eventually came to the realization that the creature was nearly full-grown - and might even represent a new genus and species. That's when Sereno was called in to study the case.

    "I immediately agreed that I didn't want to have it in my living room," Kriegstein said.

    Kriegstein and Sereno also agreed that the species name would pay tribute to Kriegstein's parents, who were born in Poland, survived internment in Nazi labor and concentration camps and made their way to the United States. (The genus name, Raptorex, is a catchy title basically meaning "King of the Raptors.") Kriegstein donated the specimen to the University of Chicago, with the understanding that the bones would eventually be returned to a museum in China.

    Deciphering the bones
    Sereno and his colleagues analyzed the sediment from Kriegstein's purchase, as well as clamshells and fish bones found alongside the dinosaur bones, to determine where the specimen came from and how old it was.

    The fact that the bones were still encased in their surrounding soil when Kriegstein acquired them argues against the possibility that the bones were thrown together to create a fraud, as has sometimes been the case, Sereno noted.

    Researchers also took pains to confirm that Raptorex was nearly fully grown: They cut through a fossilized femur bone to check the growth rings, and concluded that Raptorex was 6 years old, nearing maturity. The way that various bones were fused together supported that assessment.

    Detailed measurements of the skeleton showed that Raptorex was, in most respects, a scaled-down version of T. rex - "jaws on legs, as it were," Sereno said. The pint-size predator used its fast-running legs to run down its prey, and perhaps run away from rivals as well. Its jaws were the first line of offense. Although its clawed forearms were small, they were likely well-suited for grasping and manipulating Raptorex's victims once they were enmeshed in the powerful jaws.

    Sereno guessed that Raptorex's "most delectable" prey might have been parrot-beaked dinosaurs, with other small dinosaurs, ancient birds and turtles filling out its diet.

    How did T. rex get so big?
    When Raptorex lived, 125 million years ago, there were far bigger predators to look out for - allosaurs and spinosaurs, for example. During the 40 million years that followed, however, Raptorex's descendants apparently bulked up dramatically and inherited the earth. So what happened? The results reported today indicate there was no dramatic evolutionary innovation that gave T. rex an edge.

    To be sure, a big T. rex was more dangerous than a little Raptorex. For one thing, the teeth became deadlier, Sereno noted. "The jowls stick out from the side of the skull, you get more of a brow, the neck becomes more like that of a fullback. Most of these things are a natural consequences of body size," he said.

    But the basic blueprint was already set tens of millions of years earlier. "We cannot say that this incredibly successful, scalable blueprint for a predator was responsible for their total domination" among predators in the time frame between 85 million and 65 million years ago, Sereno said.

    So what happened to the little tyrannosauroid's bigger rivals? "We don't know what, and we wish we did," Holtz said. Maybe there was a mass extinction that hit the bigger dinosaurs harder, clearing the way for tyrannosaurs - just as the eventual demise of the dinosaurs cleared the way for mammals. Maybe Raptorex's descendants just gradually chewed away at the big guys. The fossil record doesn't provide a clear answer.

    For whatever reason, Sereno says, "these other guys went extinct - a fact that always happens periodically with any lineage of dinosaurs - opening the way for the expansion of these predatory, long-limbed, short-forelimbed, big strong-jawed predators like Raptorex to expand in body size."

    "And when they did, there was no turning back until the asteroid hit," Sereno said.

    Raptorex doesn't bring all the mysteries surrounding T. rex and its ancestors to an end. There are lots more gaps to be filled in when it comes to the tyrannosaur timeline, and Sereno and Brusatte have heard rumors that more revelations about early tyrannosaurids may be on the way.

    In the meantime, Raptorex's bones will remain with the University of Chicago for further study. Eventually, they'll be shipped to their once and future resting place in Inner Mongolia, following what Sereno hopes will become "a pathway for other important specimens" that have been spirited out of China and should by rights be returned.

    Kriegstein, the fossil collector who got all this started, will never have the bones in his possession again. But he does have the honor of a scientific name ("kriegsteini"), the satisfaction of knowing he did the right thing ... and a full-size resin cast of the skeleton that now occupies a prominent place in his home.

    More on dinosaurs:

    This report was updated to correct a reference to fish (not bird!) bones found amid the Raptorex skeleton. Many thanks to Paul Sereno for pointing that out.

    In addition to Sereno, Brusatte and Kriegstein, co-authors of the Science paper include Lin Tan of China's Long Hao Institute of Geology and Paleontology, Xijin Zhao of the Chinese Academy of Science's Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, and Karen Cloward of Western Paleontological Laboratories in Utah. The Raptorex find will be addressed in "Bizarre Dinos," a TV special due to premiere Oct. 11 on the National Geographic Channel.

    Join the Cosmic Log team by signing up as my Facebook friend or following b0yle on Twitter. And reserve your copy of my book, "The Case for Pluto," which is coming out next month.

  • A new equation for life

    NASA / msnbc.com
     What factors go into a planet's "habitability index"?

    Astrobiologists are trying to work out a mathematical equation to quantify how suitable other planets are for life, similar to the famous Drake Equation for judging the chances of contacting extraterrestrial civilizations.

    The exercise could help future generations figure out where to look for aliens - or where to settle down. But coming up with a new "habitability index" isn't just a matter of arithmetic.

    "To be honest, it's really difficult to find a way forward here," said Axel Hagermann, a planetary scientist at The Open University in Britain who is raising the habitability issue at this week's European Planetary Science Congress in Potsdam, Germany.

    Hagermann and a university colleague of his, Charles Cockell, are aiming to develop a single indicator that combines all the factors thought to make life as we know it possible. "What we're looking at is, 'If you've got this, and that, and the other, you've got life. Otherwise, you can't have life,'" Hagermann told me.

    Based on their study of earthly examples, scientists generally list three factors: the presence of liquid water, chemical compounds that can be combined in organic reactions, and an energy source to fuel those reactions. But is it possible to quantify the factors behind habitability to such an extent that you can give Mars a habitability index of 0.5, the ice-covered moons of Jupiter and Saturn a 0.2, or the faraway planet called CoRoT-7b a 0.001?

    Hagermann said the problem of measuring habitability is "getting more and more complicated, and more and more interesting."

    Life on Earth ... and beyond?
    The more researchers learn about life on Earth, the harder it is to draw a line between habitable and non-habitable zones. Organisms can be found in places that seem absolutely inimical to life - for example, the Antarctic sandstone outcroppings where microbes lurk or the deep-sea volcanic vents where weird creatures thrive.

    Looking beyond Earth, Hagermann is finding that the questions become more complicated, even when he focuses exclusively on how the light from an alien star could help or hinder the development of life.

    "For instance, while visible and infrared wavelengths are important for life and processes such as photosynthesis, ultraviolet and X-rays are harmful," he said in a news release. "If you can imagine a planet with a thin atmosphere that lets through some of this harmful radiation, there must be a certain depth in the soil where the 'bad' radiation has been absorbed but the 'good' radiation can penetrate."

    Some astrobiologists hold out hope that may be the case on Mars, where a few inches of soil and a trickle of subsurface water might yet provide a haven for Red Planet life. But how do you quantify that?

    "I feel like we're looking at a toolbox here," Hagermann told me. "We've got a problem: 'Put nail in wall.' Now we've got the toolbox, and we're trying to figure out which tool to use to solve that nail-in-wall problem ... but we don't know what the nail looks like."

    One possibility would be to factor in the characteristics of an alien star's radiation, the distance from that star to a planet, measurements of the planet's atmospheric filtering ability, the composition of the surface, the chemical potential for transforming energy inputs into organic outputs, and ... well, you now see how complicated the calculations can get.

    Hagermann hopes his presentation will generate more discussion - and eventually help astrobiologists nail down exactly what it is they're looking for when they look for alien life. "In a way, it's not about maths, it's about methods," he said. "A cry for help? That might be a way of putting it."

    Sympathy from SETI
    Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute in California, sympathizes with the British researchers. "It's a good thing to try to do, and if nothing else, it confronts you with the difficulty of doing it. Which tells you something," he said.

    He pointed out that "there's no definition of life that really works very well." Even if you were able to define life as we know it, you might be missing out on life as we don't know it.

    Shostak and others involved in SETI (the search for extraterrestrial intelligence) are primarily interested in the complex kind of life that broadcasts its existence. In fact, some of those broadcasters may not be life forms at all, but spacefaring machines sent out by alien civilizations, Shostak said.

    The way Shostak sees it, not-so-intelligent life should be much more common in the universe than intelligent life is.

    "If you're willing to settle for microbes, then there are lots and lots of habitats," he noted. There could be as many as seven such habitats in our own solar system, not counting Earth. (The list includes Mars, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto, Enceladus, Titan and maybe Venus. In fact, water's disappearance from Venus was the subject of another presentation at the European science meeting.)

    Veteran radio astronomer Frank Drake, the author of the Drake Equation and the director of the SETI Institute's Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe, agrees with the view that primitive life is probably widespread in the universe.

    "Any planet that's like Earth is going to produce it," Drake told me. "There are so many pathways to the origin of life that it's going to happen. ... If you knew a system had planets with bodies of water on them, that would be a habitability index of 1."

    Drake's equation takes initial assumptions about the prevalence of habitable planets in our galaxy, and multiplies that number by other factors to come up with a smaller number for the prevalence of intelligent civilizations. But when it comes to rating the potential habitability of specific alien planets, Drake thinks we have to learn more about those planets first.

    "Once we learn more, we can start to do this seriously," he said. "Right now, our information is so incomplete that we can't do a good job of coming up with something like a habitability index."

    What do you think? Check out our Drake Equation calculator, then see if you can develop your own formula for life in the universe. Leave a comment below to let the rest of us know what you come up with.

    More on the habitability question:

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  • Xombie rocket goes halfway

    Masten Space via X Prize Foundation
    Masten Space Systems' Xombie rocket prototype fires its engine on Sunday to
    hover above a test pad while tethered to a safety crane, partly visible on the left.

    Masten Space Systems' Xombie rocket got halfway through a round-trip flight in the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge but apparently sprung an engine leak. As a result, the Masten team called off today's initial bid to win a $150,000 prize from NASA.

    This morning's 93-second flight began auspiciously: Xombie rose from its pad in California's Mojave Desert, made its way over to a second pad and landed just a few inches (17.5 centimeters) off the target point. (Here's a YouTube video showing a rocket-cam view of Xombie's rise and its surroundings.)

    However, during the post-landing inspection, Masten team members noticed a leak in Xombie's engine chamber. They decided to end the attempt without making the required return trip to the starting point.

    "Not worth the risk to vehicle to fly again," organizers of the contest reported in a Twitter update.

    Later, team leader Dave Masten said "we know the prob[lem] and will try again." Masten still has a few weeks to qualify for the $150,000 second prize in the Lunar Lander Challenge's Level 1 contest. (Armadillo Aerospace took the $350,000 first prize in Level 1 a year ago and is currently in the lead for a $1 million Level 2 prize.) The next attempt is currently scheduled for Oct. 7-8.

    Even if Masten succeeds, the team won't know whether it gets the money until a competitor, Unreasonable Rocket, takes its turn at the end of October.

    Keep up with the action by doing a Twitter search for #NGLLC - and read on for further background about Masten's quest:

    First posted 6:30 p.m. ET Sept. 15: Days after Armadillo Aerospace's Scorpius rocket qualified for a $1 million rocket prize, Masten Space Systems is readying its own Xombie lunar lander prototype for a slightly easier blastoff challenge. Although the potential payoff isn't as big, the drama could be just as high.

    The Xombie is due to begin its first trial at 7 a.m. PT Wednesday, shortly after the sun comes up over the test site in Mojave, Calif., according to organizers of the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge. And the team leader behind the Xombie's rise, company founder David Masten, says the flight could be a nail-biter.

    "We're a lot tighter than actually what I'm comfortable with now," Masten told me Monday afternoon, "but things are looking good."

    Masten's Xombie - which took on that title because the team got tired of calling the rocket by an even geekier name, XA-0.1B - is going after the second prize in a NASA-backed contest that was won last year by Armadillo. When Armadillo won the $350,000 top prize in that Level 1 competition, the $150,000 runner-up purse was carried over to this year's contest. Now Masten and another California-based team, Unreasonable Rocket, are vying for the Level 1 leftovers, as well as the richer prizes offered in the Lunar Lander Challenge's Level 2 contest.

    Here's the difference between the levels: For the Level 1 contest, rocketeers have to send up their lunar lander prototype by remote control, have it rise to at least 50 meters (yards) in altitude and stay in the air for at least 90 seconds. The rocket has to maneuver over to land on a nice, flat pad at least 50 meters away. Then, after refueling, it has to retrace its hop back to the original launch pad.

    The Level 2 contest increases the hang time to three minutes and adds some moon-style boulders and craters to the destination pad, all of which makes things more complicated for the rocket-builders.

    Nip and tuck
    Building a whole new rocket to satisfy the Level 1 requirements is complicated enough, as Masten and his teammates have found out. On Sunday, the team made substantial progress by firing Xombie's rocket engine for more than the required 90 seconds of hover time - not just once, but twice. However, those tests took place while the craft was hanging down from a tether that was attached to a crane as a safety measure.

    "Our next thing is getting off the tether and seeing if any of the vehicle response changes at all without having that tether hanging off the end of the vehicle," Masten said.

    And then there's the landing gear. The team found that the epoxy used for one of the joints on the lander's legs wasn't strong enough to hold together during landing - meaning that the structure could have fallen apart halfway through the Lunar Lander Challenge. "We're basically doing an overkill fix" by bolting the joints together, Masten said. "It's a little heavier."

    Weight is a big issue for designing this type of rocket, and although Masten said "we do have a little bit of margin," it could be nip and tuck when it's time to fly.

    One advantage that Xombie should have over Scorpius is the California weather: Masten doesn't have to worry about the rains that worried Armadillo's team in Texas, but he does have to watch out for the winds that sweep over the Mojave Desert. Those winds are traditionally calmest during morning hours, and that's why the Xombie is an early riser.

    Even if Xombie flies the required Level 1 route, Masten and his teammates will have to wait until late October to find out whether they've won anything because Unreasonable Rocket still needs to take its turn. In the meantime, Masten Space Systems is still working on Xombie's lighter-weight sibling, known as Xoie (aka XA-0.1E), for next month's Level 2 try. Or tries.

    "We reserved two dates for the Level 2 attempt for the specific reason that we weren't sure we'd be able to make the first date," Masten said. Right now it looks as if they may have to pass up the first launch window (Oct. 7-8) and focus on the second one (Oct. 28-29).

    What's the point?
    You might wonder why Masten, who is drawing upon the money he made during his previous life as a computer programmer and network engineer, is putting all this cash and effort toward prizes that almost certainly won't cover his expenses to date.

    You could say the same about several other teams of rocketeers. Michael Mealling, vice president of business development at Masten Space Systems, noted that Armadillo's John Carmack estimated his rocket spending at "somewhat over $2 million" as of 2006. "If you compared everybody side by side, we've all spent close to the same amount of money, to the same order of magnitude," Mealling observed.

    The real point of the Lunar Lander Challenge is not to win a prize and then go home. Nor is it to develop an actual lunar lander, although some have pointed out that the energy requirements for winning the prize are similar to the requirements for blasting off from the moon into lunar orbit.

    "It's an incentive to get us to move a little bit faster in a particular direction, but we're all in this to build a business," Mealling said. "It's fortuitous that NASA decided to put some money in for something we were going to do anyway. Without the challenge, I don't think any of us would be as far as we are."

    Whether Xombie and Xoie win $150,000, or $1 million, or nothing at all, Masten sees the Lunar Lander Challenge as merely the beginning of his company's road to space.

    "We can take a Level 2 vehicle and put an aeroshell around it and start going for altitude and speed,"  Masten told me. "I don't think it'll quite make space, but you'll be able to see the curvature of the earth from it."

    In the medium term, Masten is targeting a share of the market for suborbital space research. "We're actually rather surprised," he said. "We did a lot of market research about how big the market would be. ... It turned out that there's so much market there that we could have five or six companies and still not serve everybody."

    And in the long term?

    "In the longest term, the truly final goal is solar system domination," Masten said, almost matter-of-factly. "World domination just doesn't seem big enough."

    Update for 7:55 p.m. ET Sept. 15: Masten reports that Xombie's first free flight was a "success" this afternoon, setting the stage for Wednesday's efforts to qualify for a prize.

    You can keep track of Xombie's progress by searching for Twitter updates tagged with #NGLLC, or by following NGLLC09 and Mastenspace. The X Prize Foundation, which manages the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge on NASA's behalf, provides updates via The Launch Pad blog.

    Join the Cosmic Log team by signing up as my Facebook friend or following b0yle on Twitter. And reserve your copy of my book, "The Case for Pluto," which is coming out next month.

  • Lost symbols found?

    CIA / Kryptos © 1988 James Sanborn
    The Kryptos sculpture at CIA Headquarters was featured during the buildup to publication of "The Lost Symbol," Dan Brown's latest thriller.

    Mystery sleuth Greg Taylor knew years ago what "Da Vinci Code" author Dan Brown would be talking about in the follow-up thriller now known as "The Lost Symbol," which is due for release on Tuesday. So he rounded up a whole book's worth of found symbols with puzzling histories, all having to do with Washington, the Founding Fathers and Freemasonry.

    You don't have to read "The Lost Symbol" to get hooked on the historical puzzles lying in and around the nation's capital - including a puzzle that even super-symbologist Robert Langdon would be hard-pressed to solve.

    We're talking about the Kryptos sculpture at CIA Headquarters in Langley, Va. The swoopy copper creation, devised by James Sanborn, was placed on a spot of the agency's campus that's off limits to the general public - but for almost 20 years, professional and amateur code-crackers from around the world have been trying to decrypt the message stamped into the metal.

    Actually, make that four messages: Three of them have been deciphered, but the final 97-character (or is that 98-character?) message is still uncracked. There's a whole Web site devoted to the puzzle, and this Wired article provides a nice update on the state of play.

    As Taylor notes in his book, references to Kryptos popped up in the puzzles that Brown left behind after "The Da Vinci Code" was published, and some Brown-watchers are even hoping that "The Lost Symbol" will bring the puzzle closer to solution. Now that would be news.

    Keys to the city
    Brown's previous Robert Langdon books were packed with references to architectural curiosities in Rome, Paris and London (plus Rosslyn Chapel, of course). Although Washington isn't quite as ancient, the city offers plenty of monuments you could turn into mysteries, particularly if you're trying to play off tales of a Masonic conspiracy amid America's roots.

    In fact, the working title for "The Lost Symbol" was "The Solomon Key," which is an allusion to one of the ritual keys said to be part of Masonic lore. Is the Solomon Key the Lost Symbol? You'll find ample references on bookshelves and on the Web to the supposed connections between Freemasonry and the Founding Fathers. One of the historical twists has to do with the cornerstone for the U.S. Capitol, which was laid by George Washington amid Masonic pomp and circumstance but went missing. (Was it later found? Maybe ... maybe not.)

    Another popular focus for the Masonic Washington meme is the layout of the capital itself, with lots of pentagrams, triangles, crosses, circles and other odd shapes. All these shapes can easily be worked into a conspiracy theory ... or a thriller plot.

    And then there are the zodiacs. Whole books have been written about the various zodiac motifs found scattered amid the city's monuments - for example, the "Zodiac Fountain" across the street from the National Gallery. David Ovason's "Secret Architecture of the Nation's Capital" claims that special attention was given to the constellation Virgo.

    The Masons say Ovason is reading way too much into the astrological lineup - but Taylor notes that the Virgo angle could link up handily "with Brown's use in 'The Da Vinci Code' of a secret society which worships the female aspect of divinity."

    "The sacred feminine goes international!" Taylor writes.

    End of a long wait
    In "The Guide to 'The Lost Symbol,'" Taylor delves into the murky historical background behind the rise of Freemasonry and its connection to the Founding Fathers. (Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Hancock, Paul Revere are counted among the Freemasons involved in the nation's founding.) There's virtually a whole chapter given over to the supposedly Masonic symbolism of the Great Seal printed on dollar bills.

    Tuesday's release of "The Lost Symbol" marks the end of a long wait for Taylor, and you can't say the guy hasn't been prepared. From his home base in Queensland, Australia, Taylor has been monitoring the hype surrounding the book for years on a Weblog called The Cryptex. He's also been passing along updates on The Daily Grail, a Web site devoted to "science, magick, myth and history."

    Taylor told me he was running out to buy a copy of "The Lost Symbol" as soon as it was available in Australia - hours before its release in the United States.

    He won't be alone: The book is already easily No. 1 on Amazon's bestseller list, and there'll be plenty of buzz about it on NBC's TODAY show (including an interview with Brown himself). If you're hungry for even more information about "The Lost Symbol," you can check these Web sites:

    Update for 9:30 p.m. ET: Here's an edited version of an e-mail Q&A I did with Greg Taylor across several time zones:

    Cosmic Log: Do you finally feel vindicated for doing "The Guide"? Are there some guesses you wish you could take back? Have you heard back from anyone about how close your book came to "The Lost Symbol"?

    Greg Taylor: The book was never about being absolutely right - it was, as I mention in the introduction, written in the spirit of Dan Brown's books themselves: tracking down clues, interpreting them to find possible answers, but also enjoying the chase as much as the final outcome. The journey, as they say, is sometimes the most important part - and I think the book will have educated readers to some little-known history which might challenge their preconceptions about the founding of the United States and the beginnings of the scientific era.

    I have no doubt some of my guesses were off the mark, but I'm happy with the book as a whole - it appears I was correct on a lot of the topics. And what I was wrong about was still fun and educational, I think!

    [SLIGHT SPOILER ALERT] Looking through the first few chapters of "The Lost Symbol," it seems that the "new" topic that will benefit from "the Dan Brown effect" is Noetic Science. The female lead in the new book is a Noetic scientist, which reminds me quite a bit of Marilyn Schlitz from the Institute of Noetic Sciences. As you know, parapsychology researcher Dean Radin is also an IONS scientist - so all of these "heretical science" topics (like the Global Consciousness Project) are likely to come to the fore and generate much debate.

    Given that my Web site The Daily Grail covers news on both alternative history theories and fresh science, such as that being done at IONS, I'm feeling as if it could be a busy year ahead!

    Q: Can you list two to four of your favorite mysteries relating to Washington, Freemasonry and other topics? I'm quite taken by Kryptos, for one, but I expect there are others. For a while, for example, it sounded as if the Capitol cornerstone, laid by Washington in a mason's apron, was missing ... but that's now apparently been found. Or was it???

    A: I recently heard from a documentary producer that they definitely know where the cornerstone is, so that one might be solved. Probably my favorite mysteries are Skull and Bones and the Great Seal. I still can't believe that more hasn't been made of the fact that the 2004 election was a contest between two members of Skull and Bones, a small but influential secret society. Both George W. Bush and John Kerry refused to speak about their membership because they were bound by secrecy, and journalists seemed happy with that answer and didn't pursue it any further. Given Italy's problems in the past with the insidious influence of the pseudo-Masonic lodge "P2" (Propaganda Due), surely journalists and investigators should have been more concerned with this Skull and Bones influence.

    The Great Seal of the U.S. is just a wonderful Dan Brown-ish plot device: Here's this symbol of the most powerful nation on Earth, and it is filled with esoteric iconography. Not to mention the ability to spell out "MASON" by drawing a Seal of Solomon on the seal. The truth of the matter seems to be that the designers were not in fact Freemasons ... but you do get the feeling that maybe Benjamin Franklin dropped over to their house with a few beers and mentioned casually some of the things he might like to see in there.

    And there's also the topic of Deism. Considering the influence of fundamentalist Christianity in America, and how often it is proclaimed a "Christian Nation," it's rather ironic to think that Franklin, Washington and Jefferson were likely all Deists rather than Christians. And Thomas Paine was actually rather hostile to Christianity. These Founding Fathers were aiming at a country free of the strictures of an influential religion or ideology dictating individual freedoms - something worth keeping in mind when we see the influence of religion in politics today.

    Q: Do you think "The Lost Symbol" will spark a larger debate about history, as "The Da Vinci Code" did about the Nativity and other Bible stories? Or was "The Da Vinci Code" a perfect storm that would be quite hard to match?

    A: I think "The Da Vinci Code" was a perfect storm - people have these internal questions about religion, and especially the dictates of organized religion, and "The Da Vinci Code" all of sudden opened a huge floodgate for those thoughts to come out into the public arena. Freemasonry, while interesting, doesn't have that same allure to most of the public. I think, if Dan Brown is smart, the best method for stirring up debate would be to concentrate on the pagan and Deist influences on the Founding Fathers of the United States, as I outlined earlier. That certainly is something that would excite the passions of most Americans, whether Christian or otherwise.

    Do you have other pointers to "Symbol" secrets? Feel free to pass along your Web links and your comments - but please, no spoilers!

    Join the Cosmic Log team by signing up as my Facebook friend or hooking up on Twitter. And reserve your copy of my upcoming book, "The Case for Pluto."

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