Author: Adam

Carnival of Space Week #73

Carnival of Space #73 is up at Alice’s Astro Info and it has some real fascinating ones.

First up – The Martian Chronicles ponders a crashed moonlet.

Second – Starts With A Bang ponders whether galaxies have more stars than bodies have cells. Has the interesting fact that human somatic cells only number about 4 trillion, with another trillion white blood cells, a trillion platelets, 30 trillion red blood cells, and a whopping 40 trillion bacterial cells living in our guts. Are you your human DNA alone???

Third – Twisted Physics discusses the Pioneer anomaly, and its possible origins in MOND.

Fourth – AstroENGINE seeks evidence of varying radioactive decay in Cassini’s RTGs. Apparently the researchers pondering varying decay think Cassini’s Pu-238 might be the wrong isotopes for the job. Not big on beta-decay, which is a neutrino susceptible weak-force mediated decay that the researchers are studying. Nice to know alpha-decay can be relied on…

SpaceX… options

Space Exploration Technologies, SpaceX, has numerous rockets on offer. I thought I’d do a handy summary here.

Falcon 1/1e
Falcon 9
Falcon 9 heavy
Dragon

Vehicle LEO Payload (kg) GTO Payload TLI Payload Cost $USD millions
Falcon 1 420 ** ** 7.9
Falcon 1e 1010 ** ** 9.1
Falcon 9 12500 4640 1925 36.75-57.75
Falcon 9 heavy 29610 15010 6230*** 94.5-104.5
Dragon >2500 * * *

* – figures for Dragon are currently not very detailed on the SpaceX page.
** – Falcon 1/1e need a ‘kick motor’ to launch a payload to the Moon. Only the 1e can realistically launch enough mass for a small lander.
*** – no TLI mass is quoted for the Falcon 9 heavy, but if the proportion remains the same as for the Falcon 9 between GTO and TLI, then this is the estimate.

The TLI mass for the Falcon 9 heavy might indicate a luna capability for Dragon with the right heat-shield. A two-launch Luna mission might allow a lander. The old Apollo LM massed just ~ 15 tons, thus combined with a TLI stage, this might allow landing on the Moon. Assuming ~ $210 million for the two launches, and ~ $1.5 billion for the LM (aerospace vehicle development costs ~ $100 million per ton the old way), and you’d have a lander mission for under $2 billion. Cheap!

Chinese Space-Station… coming soon

The next Chinese space-craft, Shenzou VIII and Shenzou IX, will be unmanned – to start with – but the next manned mission, Shenzou X, will dock with one (or more) and form an orbital laboratory complex. In otherwords a Space Station. Attach a couple of propulsion modules and the Lab could be launched Moonwards, forming a Moon-Lab, just like the proposed “Wet-Lab” Skylab II that was discussed in the late 1960s as a cheaper Moon-Lab option.

Chinese News Coverage on the Plan

Interdimensions and Jewish Legends

There’s a lot of old style SF ideas in religious legends. The classic “first SF” tale is Enoch’s encounter with various angels in various layers of the heavens in the old “Book of Enoch” (c.200BC-100AD… has various ‘editions’ that are hard to date.) But creative interpretations of Bible stories didn’t stop with “Enoch”. Later Jewish legends are even more interesting from an SF point of view. Apparently, in Ginzberg’s “Legends of the Jews”, there was a belief in 7 worlds inhabited by Biblical ‘races’…

The Seven Earths

  • First: Erez ~ a place of darkness, yet flames with the rotating sword that guards Eden
  • Second: Adamah ~ lit by reflected light from its sky. Heavens seen are only images. Inhabited by “phantoms” which can become evil-spirits in our world.
  • Third: Arka ~ Cainites, both giants and dwarfs, but two-headed. They plant trees, but there’s no grass-derived crops.
  • Fourth: Ge ~ home of the Babelites, who possess great wealth and science.
  • Fifth: Neshiah ~ place of “forgetting”. Inhabited by dwarfs without noses, breath through holes.
  • Sixth: Ziah ~ very wealthy, but very dry (name means ‘drought’.) The inhabitants sometimes pass into our world through “water-springs”.
  • Seventh: Tebel ~ our world.

    • …from Ginzberg, available here. There’s a lot of resonances here with UFO-lore and classic SF. Imagine wormholes linking a number of worlds, and you’d have a story ready made.

    Another surprise for me was the Kabbalah’s take on the Tower of Babel, that it was a flying machine, originally built for good, but then used to subjugate the world. Alternatively it stretched over several billion kilometres, to the limits of the solar system (a garbled account of its range perhaps?) Very odd imaginings by the Ancients. And you thought our current SF was a new idea?

Carnival of Space Week #72

The Carnival of Space Week 72 is up and running. Informative stuff.

Also informative is this little gem… Space Elevator: Physical Principles …which covers the derivations and consequences of the main physical aspects of a basic space elevator. Written by Ranko Artukovi? of Zadar, Croatia, and definitely worthwhile for all hard-core applied maths freaks and space-nuts.

From impeccable mathematical applied-physics to dubious applied physics we have Brian Wang’s latest on the EM-Drive… Superconducting Radio-Frequency Cavities for High Q …the table he gives makes me rather dubious about the EM-Drive’s utility.

Effect of increased Q for the Emdrive

  • Q=50,000 (1st gen.) Static thrust=315 mN/kW Specific thrust at 3km/s=200mN/kW
  • Q=6,800,000 (supercond) Static thrust=42.8 N/kW Specific thrust at ??km/s=??N/kW
  • Q=5×10^9 (supercond) Static thrust=31.5 kN/kW Specific thrust at 0.1km/s=8.8N/kW
  • Q=10^11 (supercond) Static thrust=630 kN/kW Specific thrust at 0.1km/s=??N/kW

    • “Q” appears to be the number of reflections within the microwave cavity before the wave is absorbed. So while the static thrust of a high Q cavity is very high it very rapidly loses thrust as speed increases, so much so that to levitate with such a drive seems rather unstable. It would be an incredible thing, if true, but the EM-Drive is yet to be demonstrated in free-fall. That will prove whether it really does convert EM energy directly into kinetic energy. By my rough figuring the first quoted figure above indicates that the EM-Drive is turning EM energy into KE at 60% efficiency at 3 km/s. Not bad.

Charles Pellegrino on the Jesus Tomb and the Shroud…

A bit over a year ago the World was stunned by claims that the Tomb of Jesus had been found, called the Talpiot Tomb because it was found in the Talpiot Hills near Jerusalem, with forensic evidence that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married and had a child. What’s happened since then? Knee-jerk reactioneering by all the usual suspects – fundamentalists of all stripes calling it a hoax, and nut-bag atheists saying it had to be untrue because Jesus didn’t exist (sic). Once the Attention Deficit Disordered media forgot about the Tomb new findings by its researchers have opened up a whole new picture – the Tomb might be what it was claimed to be but the “Holy Couple” of Jesus and Mary Magdalene is looking less and less likely. Dr. Charles Pellegrino was involved in the indepth study of the Tomb from the start, and is a good friend of James Cameron. Here’s his conclusions on the Tomb and its relationship to the Shroud of Turin…

Discussion Page on Talpiot Tomb… see post Thu Sep 18, 2008 8:24 am by Charlie P.

…basically the Tomb ossuary marked with Jesus’ name appears to have contained two different cloths consistent with the Shroud. Also fibres from the Shroud show signs of being left to accumulate a mineral patina from a tomb, just like the Talpiot Tomb.

Second, Mary wasn’t married to Jesus but Jesus did adopt a son, Judas Didymus Thomas, and this adoption is recorded in some very early traditions in The Gospel of Philip, an Apocryphal Gospel containing some genuine early tradition. It was customary in those days for adoption to be considered the legal equivalent of birthing a child, and to avoid reprisals against Thomas, Jesus also called him “brother” legally. Roman Law generally left siblings alone – remember Jesus had been executed on what amounted to sedition charges, so making Thomas ‘brother’ would protect him.

All in all, an incredible boost to the basic facts of Christianity, more light on Jesus’ family, and a big boost for linking the Shroud directly to Jesus.

Addendum
Dr. Pellegrino has kindly let me reproduce one of his comments, summarising his current understanding of the Tomb and the Shroud…

More details are above and on other threads in this discussion group, related to the Talpiot Tomb. At this point, given the unique biological anomalies in fiber traces recovered from Jesus ossuary bio-concretions – (all consistent with the Turin fibers), and other evidence including consistent patina fingerprint, and a tentative date on one fiber collected on sticky tape from the Turin Shroud (bracketing 1st century AD) – to say nothing of the fact that that I would never have accepted the cuts for the C-14 tests allowed by Cardinal Pellegrino over 20 years ago (too many recorded cuts and reweaves during the past 400 years, in the permitted sampling corner) – I’m willing to give it a maximum probability ceiling of 50%, that the Turin Shroud (regardless of whether or not the image of the Turin man is a Medieval artistic enhancement over the blood stains), is real and is original with the Jesus ossuary.

Much more data is required, to either negate or confirm this. One random fiber that seems to date, by C-14, from the right period (the shroud being consistent with wool weaves from another Jerusalem tomb and with flax herringbone weaves from Masada fabric) has my attention. Very well, then. What we await is permission to date ten more fibers from random points on the Turin Shroud, along with some blood stained fibers to see if mtDNA can be recovered and matches mtDNA from the Jesus ossuary bio-concretions. Jesiuts and Franciscans, by the way, have been extremely supportive and helpful, during the past year, with research on the Talpiot Tomb and apocrypha related to it. Also on Turin.

Full text can be found here…

Forming Planets: part1

The Gemini telescope has spotted a possible planet around another star… First Picture of Likely Planet around Sun-like Star …though its mass range and orbit are extreme for it to be called a planet. Firstly it masses somewhere between 7 to 12 Jupiter masses (8 being the most likely), so it’s close to the deuterium-burning mass of 13 Jupiters, which some see as the natural line between ‘planet’ and ‘brown-dwarf’. Still it’s not burning deuterium or anything else, so a “planet” is a reasonable box to put it in.

But it’s also 330 AU from its primary (see this table) and that’s rather far out for a planet proper to form. Anthony Whitworth and colleagues have developed a model that quite efficiently makes such objects… Brown dwarf formation by gravitational fragmentation of massive, extended protostellar discs …and also showed, as much as an SPH model can, that nothing much forms via disk-instability closer than 40 AU… Can giant planets form by gravitational fragmentation of discs?

That does seem like a natural division – planets form via core accretion within 40 AU, brown-dwarfs via gravitational instability further out. Except forming planets via core accretion is yet to jump the very important hurdle from dust to planetesimals. After that everything works, but the small details are still recalcitrant to the best efforts of the theorists! Andrew Youdin gives a lecture on the current problems facing theorists like himself… From Dust to Planetesimals