‘NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory Project is using Curiosity during a two-year prime mission to assess whether areas inside Gale Crater ever offered a habitable environment for microbes. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the project for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington.’
-Unlike Earth with its dynamic interior and tectonic plates, relatively strong magnetic field, thick and dynamic atmosphere etc., Mars is a bit like a time capsule. With just over 50% the diameter of Earth, about 38% the gravity, and less than 1% the atmosphere we’ll be able to get a much better picture of what happened during the formation of our solar system about 4 1/2 billion years ago as it’s much less disturbed. The trip up the rock face in Gale Crater over the next few years is like a trip back through time. What happened to Mars? Did the Earth and Mars have common experiences?
A December 4th, 2012 livestream overview of the mission. Ashwin Vasavada’s talk starts about min 15:25, and is pretty easy to follow for non-scientists and lay people like myself:
My belated condolences to the family, friends, and colleagues of Roger Sandall, who passed away on August 11th, 2012. He was an Australian thinker and critic of cultural relativism, romantic-primitivism and the Noble Savage. He was a keen observer of the ways in which certain strains of Western thought interact with the non-Western, and often, tribal worlds.
While not as strong as in Australia, we’ve seen the rise of multicultural apologetics in the U.S. regarding the native population: “Well, we robbed this land from the Indians, anyways.” Sandall highlights the problems and hubris of such sentiment, and what can become the “Disneyfication” of the natives and the historical record.
‘The real feat achieved by Gropius and his cohorts was to have recognized and exposed the sociopolitical and moral power of architecture and design. They wanted to exert “effective influence” on “general conditions,” fashion a more just world and turn all of this into a “vital concern of the entire people.”‘
I’m always a little skeptical of such grand visions. Utopianism runs deep.
Here’s Robert Hughes saving some choice criticism for the Empire State Plaza in Albany and the centralization of power through architecture as he saw it (a rich mix of the corporate and the bureaucratic from 50’s and 60’s America):
They’ve made a wind map of Gale Crater based on the data received, and there are possibly dustless dust-devils, or convective vortices that occur around noon of a Mars day passing over the Rover. The Rover has stopped at a place called Rocknest, and from this article:
‘Scientists theorize that in Mars’ distant past its environment may have been quite different, with persistent water and a thicker atmosphere. NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, or MAVEN, mission will investigate possible losses from the upper atmosphere when it arrives at Mars in 2014.
With these initial sniffs of Martian atmosphere, SAM also made the most sensitive measurements ever to search for methane gas on Mars. Preliminary results reveal little to no methane. Methane is of interest as a simple precursor chemical for life. On Earth, it can be produced by either biological or non-biological processes.
Methane has been difficult to detect from Earth or the current generation of Mars orbiters because the gas exists on Mars only in traces, if at all.’
Still driving towards Mt. Sharp. Some cool pics in slideshow format. Link to NASA videos.
Addition: Have they already found some data suggesting proof of sub-surface microbial life at Rocknest? Stay tuned.
Brief update on the potential evidence for liquid water.
Here’s a video from JPL comparing similar features here on Earth:
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New photo of the Rover’s first scoop of Martian soil.
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Felix Baumgartner’s jump from 23 miles up, livestream here.
Addition: Baumgartner made it! Highest manned balloon flight. Highest free fall to Earth from about 127,600 feet or so, or just over 24 miles (perhaps not the longest in duration as he was at 4 min 22 sec and Kittinger was 4 min 36 sec). He may have been the first to achieve the speed of sound without being in a craft.
Another Addition: That’s 128,100 feet, 4 min 20 sec freefall, and he did break the sound barrier. He did not have the longest free fall: This record still belongs to Kittinger.
“From the size of gravels it carried, we can interpret the water was moving about 3 feet per second, with a depth somewhere between ankle and hip deep,” said Curiosity science co-investigator William Dietrich of the University of California, Berkeley. “Plenty of papers have been written about channels on Mars with many different hypotheses about the flows in them. This is the first time we’re actually seeing water-transported gravel on Mars. This is a transition from speculation about the size of streambed material to direct observation of it.”
Apparently, it’s sedimentary conglomerate. Rounded rocks smoothed by water and deposited in a cement like structure, which is now jutting above the surface as it lays in a large alluvial fan bed. Comparison photo from Chile, back on Earth, of what appears to be a similar phenomenon. The Rover is still headed towards Glenelg.
Video comparison on alluvial fans between Las Vegas and L.A. and on Mars, where the Rover sits:
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Thanks to everyone in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory living on Mars time!
They’re still heading to Mt. Sharp, driving the rover 400 meters toward Glenelg:
‘Sol 38 (Sept. 13, 2012) was destined to be a driving day for NASA’s latest edition to the Martian landscape. Curiosity perambulated over 105 feet (32 meters) of unpaved Gale Crater during yesterday’s drive. The rover’s odometer now clocks in at 466 feet (142 meters) covered since the landing on Aug. 5.’
Australian art historian, thinker, and (sometimes savage) critic of modern art. Video above is the first of his 8 part “Shock Of The New” series, which presents a modern art historian’s sweep of 20th century political and intellectual history and how images, ideas, art, and artists themselves are woven throughout.
Addition: Simon Schama has a piece on Hughes life and work.
Also On This Site: Denis Dutton suggested art could head towards Darwin (and may offer new direction from the troubles of the modern art aimlessness and shallow depth…the money and the fame) Review of Denis Dutton’s ‘The Art Instinct’
Scheduled landing is at 10:31 pm PDT, today, Sunday, August 5th, 2012 (1:31 am EDT). Videos, a countdown clock, and links to live NASA feed.
Here in Seattle, there’s a free event at the Museum Of Flight with activities for the kids and speakers from NASA, Aerojet, and the UW leading up to the landing..
Let’s hope all goes well! Here’s the dramatic 7 minutes of terror video:
It sent back some thumbnail photos from either side of the Rover before the feed was lost and Mars set. Thanks to everyone at the Museum Of Flight, NASA, and the thousands of people who worked on Curiosity for so long. Yes!
Some ideas I picked up at the event (for other interested non-scientists/astronomers):
-Curiosity isn’t necessarily looking for life, but it’s looking for the conditions that make life possible here on Earth with its 10 instruments, such as trying to determine the origins of the methane on Mars’s surface by being better able to analyze the kind of carbon (12 or 14) in the atmosphere to find its source. It’s also much better able to look for amino acids (the building blocks of life on Earth) and better able to analyze the rock and crystal samples it picks up. It’s got a cool laser. It’s about the size of a Mini-Cooper.
-Unlike Earth with its dynamic interior and tectonic plates, relatively strong magnetic field, thick and dynamic atmosphere etc., Mars is a bit like a time capsule. With just over 50% the diameter of Earth, about 38% the gravity, and less than 1% the atmosphere we’ll be able to get a much better picture of what happened during the formation of our solar system about 4 1/2 billion years ago as it’s much less disturbed. The trip up the rock face in Gale Crater over the next few years is like a trip back through time. What happened to Mars? Did the Earth and Mars have common experiences?
When I went looking for a good hard-boiled detective novel, I found Chandler’s High Window. Here are some quotations of his, if you’re interested.
A lot of writers end badly; and according to the review, Chandler was no exception, though he did give us observations like these:
“Los Angeles was just a big dry sunny place with ugly homes and no style, but good-hearted and peaceful. It had the climate they yap about now. People used to sleep out on porches. Little groups who thought they were intellectual used to call it the Athens of America.”
Here is the link. It’s been a long time since they just reviewed the book and not the author.
“The results are preliminary but the 5 sigma signal at around 125 GeV we’re seeing is dramatic. This is indeed a new particle. We know it must be a boson and it’s the heaviest boson ever found,” said CMS experiment spokesperson Joe Incandela. “The implications are very significant and it is precisely for this reason that we must be extremely diligent in all of our studies and cross-checks.”
They’re still going over the 2012 data, but an apparent triumph for the Standard Model and the structure being built atop 20th century physics.
Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.
At rest on a stair landing,
They feel it moving
Beneath them now like the deck of a ship,
Though the swell is gentle.
And deep in mirrors
They rediscover
The face of the boy as he practises tying
His father’s tie there in secret
And the face of the father,
Still warm with the mystery of lather.
They are more fathers than sons themselves now.
Something is filling them, something
That is like the twilight sound
Of the crickets, immense,
Filling the woods at the foot of the slope
Behind their mortgaged houses.
‘Curiosity is scheduled to land at approximately 10:31 p.m. PDT Aug. 5 (1:31 a.m. EDT, Aug. 6).’
and
‘The landing target ellipse had been approximately 12 miles wide and 16 miles long (20 kilometers by 25 kilometers). Continuing analysis of the new landing system’s capabilities has allowed mission planners to shrink the area to approximately 4 miles wide and 12 miles long (7 kilometers by 20 kilometers), assuming winds and other atmospheric conditions are as predicted.’
My fiftieth year had come and gone,
I sat, a solitary man,
In a crowded London shop,
An open book and empty cup
On the marble table-top.
While on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessed and could bless.
University of California TV interviews Vivek Sharma in Spetember 2011, who is in charge of finding the Higgs if it’s there. Thanks to a friend for the link, for interested laypeople like myself.
Mt. Sharp sits in Gale Crater, where Curiosity is headed.
“Mount Sharp is the only place we can currently access on Mars where we can investigate this transition in one stratigraphic sequence,” said Caltech’s John Grotzinger, chief scientist for the Mars Science Laboratory. “The hope of this mission is to find evidence of a habitable environment; the promise is to get the story of an important environmental breakpoint in the deep history of the planet. This transition likely occurred billions of years ago — maybe even predating the oldest well-preserved rocks on Earth.’
The water find is less probable. Expected landing date is August 6th, 2012. Let’s hope it goes well.
A little more detail about the February 11th, 2012 5.9 earthquake off the coast of Oregon.
Related On This Site: The last big Cascadia subduction zone earthquake likely occurred on Jan 27th, 1700, at magnitude 9.0. The article suggests an occurence anywhere from 300-350 year intervals up to 400-600 year average intervals (new research suggests the former). It’s just over 311 years and counting.
“The problem of how a judgment can be synthetic and a priori, then, presents itself to Kant as the problem of how two concepts, neither of which includes the other, can be connected in a way which does not rest upon past experience and is not vulnerable to future experience.”
On Locke at the Stanford Encyclopedia Of Philosophy:
‘Some philosophers before Locke had suggested that it would be good to find the limits of the Understanding, but what Locke does is to carry out this project in detail. In the four books of the Essay Locke considers the sources and nature of human knowledge. Book I argues that we have no innate knowledge. (In this he resembles Berkeley and Hume, and differs from Descartes and Leibniz.) So, at birth, the human mind is a sort of blank slate on which experience writes.’
The previous point must be tempered with the fact that Peirce increasingly became a philosopher with broad and deep sympathies for both transcendental idealism and absolute idealism. His Kantian affinities are simpler and easier to understand than his Hegelian leanings. Having rejected a great deal in Kant, Peirce nevertheless shared with Charles Renouvier the view that Kant’s (quasi-)concept of the Ding an sich can play no role whatsoever in philosophy or in science other than the role that Kant ultimately assigned to it, viz. the role of a Grenzbegriff: a boundary-concept, or, perhaps a bit more accurately, a limiting concept. A supposed “reality” that is “outside” of every logical possibility of empirical or logical interaction with “it” can play no direct role in the sciences. Science can deal only with phenomena, that is to say, only with what can “appear” somehow in experience. All scientific concepts must somehow be traceable back to phenomenological roots. Thus, even when Peirce calls himself a “realist” or is called by others a “realist,” it must be kept in mind that Peirce was always a realist of the Kantian “empirical” sort and not a Kantian “transcendental realist.” His realism is similar to what Hilary Putnam has called “internal realism.” (As was said, Peirce was also a realist in quite another sense of he word: he was a realist or an anti-nominalist in the medieval sense.)
Perhaps you haven’t heard about the Levitated Mass at the Los Angeles County Art Museum:
‘…an artwork by Michael Heizer comprised of a 456-foot-long concrete-lined slot constructed on LACMA’s campus, upon and at the center of which is placed a 340-ton granite megalith. As visitors walk along the slot, it gradually descends to fifteen feet deep, running underneath the megalith before ascending back up.’
This is L.A., but…still. Our author at the American Interest wonders:
‘It would be interesting to know whose idea was to move the 340-ton rock from a quarry (at a distance of almost a hundred miles) to the Los Angeles County Museum—an operation costing millions, necessitating extra police forces to deal with the traffic problems caused by the slow progress (five miles per hour) of a gigantic truck (“196-wheel transporter”) specially made for this project.’
Wonder no further:
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Well, at least it was paid for by private donations. Even so, a great nation deserves great art. This piece fills a spiritual and cultural void at the heart of the Angelino multicultural experience, creating a communal space (absence) in which the public can find meaning through public Art by incorporating Nature itself (a large rock…prescence) into their rootless, isolated, traffic-weary daily lives. It is a mass for the masses!
While passing under the megalith, it may slowly dawn on some Californians that what seemed like levitation or another mildly interesting new art installation actually has a terrible weight to it, and could potentially crush them to death. This may even inspire fear or resignation (like the California debt burden), or perhaps like the Hajj it will become a pilgrimage destination, even uniting people in a state of passive reverence for something so mildly holy (as only good, secular, public Art projects can do).
There was also a gala opening for the rock as though it were Oscar night. From the American Interest:
“In the final analysis, moving this rock to a museum may be seen as an apt symbol of the cultural/aesthetic relativism that has of late engulfed much of our society. Admiration of the rock also illustrates a rare agreement between elite groups (such as curators and benefactors of museums) and ordinary people about what should be regarded as an object of art. Perhaps most importantly it reflects a growing incapacity of many Americans to distinguish between events which are appropriate occasions for reaffirming social bonds and experiencing exhilaration and those which are meaningless and wasteful spectacles.”
Indeed, but I suppose that’s up to the people of Los Angeles to decide. They may like it. The L.A. Times blog writes more here (comments are worth a read).
See also: Tergvinder’s Stone, a poem by W.S. Merwin. Maybe you could see this coming.
Addition: Apparently not everyone recognizes an attempt at postmodern public art blurb satire when they see it.
“Nigel: Has relativism had its day as an influential philosophical position?
Simon: No – and I don’t think it should ever die. The danger is that it gets replaced by some kind of complacent dogmatism, which is at least equally unhealthy. The Greek sceptics thought that confronting a plurality of perspectives is the beginning of wisdom, and I think they were right. It is certainly the beginning of historiography and anthropology, and if we think, for instance, of the Copernican revolution, of self-conscious science. The trick is to benefit from an imaginative awareness of diversity, without falling into a kind of “anything goes” wishy-washy nihilism or scepticism….”
It looks like we’ve been dealing with such a problem for a long time, in one form or another.
I’ve had to think a fair amount about art lately (life could be worse), so I thought I’d post this despite the current national frenzy for the importance of (A)rt.
“…a widely honored artist known for melding Chicano themes and Western history in exuberant sculpture.”
and on this sculpture:
“The eyes are light-emitting diodes, which burn red like taillights. They are an homage to Mr. Jimenez’s father, who ran a neon-sign studio in El Paso, Texas... “
That could work. Are we getting close to kitsch art and possibly Chupacabra territory here?…do the skill and artistry transcend that?
It seems powerful, serious and proud…a little scary even…a mythic figure. Is it possible Jimenez was poking fun at the serious belief people have in such figures and myths…? Maybe not.
Sad fact: “He was killed on June 13, 2006, in his studio when a large piece, a mustang intended for Denver International Airport, fell on him severing an artery in his leg.”
A view of the tornado from the south. More with Greg Forbes, at the Weather Channel. More from Jeff Masters at Weather Underground on the outbreak. Via the IndyStar, some more video and eyewitness reports. Via the Tucson Citizen:
‘In Henryville, an EF-4 tornado — the second-highest on the Fujita scale that measures tornadic force — brought 175-mph winds and stayed on the ground for more than 50 miles’
As always, thoughts and prayers with those lost, their families and loved ones, and the communities affected.
Addition: Link sent in by a reader. Surveillance camera footage from the Henryville Junior/Senior High School.
‘The longest record for a subduction zone is from Cascadia, where scientists have linked buried marshes and submarine landslides with a series of about 22 megaquake quakes going back 10,000 years. The time between quakes ranges from 200 to 1,000 years, with an average of about 500 years’
Related On This Site: The last big Cascadia subduction zone earthquake likely occurred on Jan 27th, 1700, at magnitude 9.0. The article suggests an occurence anywhere from 300-350 year intervals up to 400-600 year average intervals (new research suggests the former). It’s just over 311 years and counting.
Opportunity is still going! NASA’s rover page with photos. Wikipedia’s page on the Martian climate. From an interested observer, thank you to everyone who has put so much into these missions.
“A man’s delight in looking forward to and hoping for some particular satisfaction is a part of the pleasure flowing out of it, enjoyed in advance. But this is afterward deducted, for the more we look forward to anything the less we enjoy it when it comes.”
