| | That's Why They Call It Space EXPLORATION ... Because you might just find something (right). Of course, even when you do, you may not know what it is you've found. Every once in a while, though, the questions prompted by the find are just too compelling to ignore, a point the public seemed to get back in 1968, when the film 2001: A Space Odyssey , based on Arthur C. Clarke's novel supposing a dramatic discovery on the Moon, came out.
Sadly, we seem to have lost this understanding, both with regard to exploration and to advances in space technology. Our society seems to have faded in its enthusiasm for space after being told for decades, by risk-averse establishment "experts", that we've done most all that can be done, without spending hundreds of billions of dollars. This is the worst kind of intellectual arrogance, thinking that we know it all before we even try.
Back in 1894, at the dedication of a lab at the University of Chicago, physicist Albert Michelson made an infamous quote, one of many (some more questionable) from around that time, implying much the same sort of overconfidence: "The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote . . . Our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth place of decimals."
 BUT  ... within two years William Roentgen had discovered X-rays (first X-ray, left). Just months later, Henri Becquerel, his experiment hindered by a rainy day, put his photographic plate and uranium salts away in a dark drawer, only to find parts of the plate (below, right) fully exposed. Working with Marie and Pierre Curie, they identified various radioactive materials. This discovery of radiation was such a monumental breakthrough that by 1903, all four scientists had won the Nobel Prize. Even a scientist of Albert Einstein's caliber took roughly 17 years to do the same.
 At the very point when the "experts" were saying that they knew just about everything and that, by the way, "Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible", the fields of physics and aviation were both on the verge of radical transformation. Within five decades, aviation would go from balloons to jet fighters and V-2 rockets. Physics would go from Newtonian mechanics to relativity, quantum theory and the atomic bomb. It is perhaps more than a bit ironic that a good piece of that physics research would occur right there at Chicago, site of Chicago Pile 1, the world's first nuclear reactor.
Well, that was then, this is now. Sadly, even today folks suggest that perhaps the big breakthroughs are going to be infrequent from here on out. Of course, anyone familiar with the massive progress occurring in so many fields of research, accelerated further by the internet, an incredible research tool, must wonder how anyone could come to such a conclusion! Without a doubt, biology is undergoing a revolution while Moore's Law, amazingly, seems to somehow keep going like the Energizer bunny.
Burt Rutan has remarked that he believes we may be at the beginning of a new golden age in space flight and exploration as well, and I tend to agree. We must expect to be surprised, and keep moving forward confident we'll find quite a few nuggets along our path, and some will actually turn out to be gold. Of course, this used to be a core competency of us Americans, one which needs to be regained, but every country has plenty of potential discoverers who could use some encouragement. Sometimes it takes a long time to really figure out what one has discovered.
 With this in mind, consider this new quote, by Kevin Baines of the Cassini visual and infrared mapping spectrometer team, about the north pole of Saturn:
"This is a very strange feature, lying in a precise geometric fashion with six nearly equally straight sides ... We've never seen anything like this on any other planet. Indeed, Saturn's thick atmosphere where circularly-shaped waves and convective cells dominate is perhaps the last place you'd expect to see such a six-sided geometric figure, yet there it is."
SpaceDaily reports further that "The hexagon appears to have remained fixed with Saturn's rotation rate and axis since first glimpsed by Voyager 26 years ago" even though the "actual rotation rate of Saturn is still uncertain." This is indeed curious ... Hopefully the Cassini orbiter will stay in good shape for at least a few more years, until seasonal shifts bring the north polar region, site of some beautiful auroras (blue ring in top image, surrounding hexagon structure) back into sunlight.
 The infrared images (top, left, video) obtained recently of the 25,000km-across hexagonal structure, descending to at least 100km below the cloud tops, can be obtained even at night. This is a fascinating discovery, considering we know very little of the outer planets' make-up below the upper cloud layers. Of course, there have been plenty of other interesting questions raised about the outer planets in recent years, as we've now sent third-generation missions to Jupiter (Galileo) and Saturn (Cassini), long after the Pioneer and Voyager flybys of the 1970s and 80s.
These sites ripe for exploration include the potentially life-bearing sub-surface oceans of Jupiter's moon Europa (false-color image, right), Saturn's relatively Earth-like moon Titan (visited recently by ESA's Huygen's Probe), and several new features in both planet's atmospheres. Of these, Europa seems to be the favored target, and NASA began an ambitious, but now-cancelled, Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter mission toward that goal. The mission was the victim of both budget and technical risk, the latter of which, as I have argued, will continue to work against the really interesting NASA missions until the agency gets serious again about a sustained space technology effort.
So what is it? ... I don't know  ... but I think we might want to find out!  |
