Mercury Transit
(AKA: holy crap! Another post!)

I saw a partial solar eclipse when I was in seventh grade. I saw it projected on a wall through a piece of cardboard with a hole in it and only for a few seconds, so everyone in the class could have a turn.

Until the day I see a total eclipse or a transit of Venus, yesterday's transit of Mercury will likely remain the coolest thing I have ever seen. The planet Mercury, seen as a tiny and perfectly round black speck creeping across the face of the sun, is an incredible sight to behold. A lunar eclipse has nothing in this celestial fireworks show. Sadly, the photo to the left (Mercury is the tiny dot in the lower left) seems to barely justify my excitement. It is proof that a transit really is something you have to see to fully appreciate.

The transit lasted about five hours, but, in the Midwest, the sun set before it finished, thus limiting our viewing time to the first four hours. Due to the fact that I live in perpetually cloudy western Michigan, I only was able to watch about thirty percent of the event before clouds permanently obscured the sun. I also missed first and second contact while I set up my equipment. Nonetheless, the part that I was able to experience was awesome. On a side note, it annoys me that today, when there are exactly zero once in a decade astronomical events taking place, there is not a cloud to be seen. Michigan sucks sometimes.

Transits of Mercury happen, on average, every seven or eight years and another will not occur until 2016. Transits of Venus are, I'm told, much more impressive on account of Venus being larger and closer to the Earth. These happen much less frequently, coming along in pairs separated by 120 years or so. The next one is scheduled for 2012, so, assuming clear skies, yesterday's events will most likely be dethroned. Unless something truly spectacular and unexpected; a huge naked eye comet for example, appears in the next six years, our smallest planet can expect to enjoy a six year reign at the top of my 'cool' list.

I made some interesting discoveries while observing the transit. First, the roof my my garage makes, if you are looking south, a wonderful observatory. Second, the wireless network that Christian installed at our house delivers a quite strong signal to the garage roof, which makes me happy that our network is secure. And lastly I found that a #80 Blue filter greatly enhances solar observation. It turns the sun a very pale gray and delivers fantastic contract between the solar disk and dark features like sunspots and transiting planets.

Thirsty Moon
(AKA: Holy Crap! A post!)

New research has all but buried the hope of finding water on the surface of the moon. Water, if it existed, would be of immense assistance to future astronauts attempting to set up and maintain permanent bases on the lunar surface.

The moon, as far is we know, is a dead and airless pile of rock. But, if a water rich comet struck the surface of the moon (and from the looks of the moon's battered face, I'd guess it safe to say that more than a few have) the comet would be pulverized an spread across the surface. In this way, water in some form could find its way onto the moon's barren landscape. Sadly, without an atmosphere to filter out the sun's intense heat, said water would all evaporate within a matter of minutes.

Someone had a brilliant idea. The floors of some crater at or near the poles are so deep that they never see daylight because the sun never rises enough above the horizon to illuminate them. In theory if any water found its way onto these crater floors, it could exist indefinitely.

It was a good theory and research seemed to back it up. Data returned from earthbound radar studies and from Clementine both showed the signature of water ice on the floors of a few craters at the moon's south pole. Scientists were giddy with delight.

This is science we're talking about and the scientific thing to do after a discover of this magnitude is this: rerun all of the experiments at a higher resolution to see if the findings still stand (it's good science and it's cheap). In this case they did not. New studies showed the alleged water ice signature not only on the crater floors, but on the openly sunlit surface as well, indicating that the signature is not from water but from something else entirely. And just that quickly, the hopes of the scientists, like those of a reader of a Steinbeck novel, were dashed.

I've never been super excited about this topic, but I've read a few discussion boards and it seems that a lot of people, scientists and laymen alike, are pretty broken up about new findings. Apparently they all stood poised, ready to begin drawing up plans for 2001: A Space Odyssey style moon bases and are now crestfallen that their plans have to wait. The moon bases that they had in mind would act as jumping off points for further manned trips to Mars, which is another topic I'm not thrilled about. But that discussion can wait for another day.

The Usual Gripes

Human exploration of space has, in my opinion, become largely unnecessary. On the basis of scientific study, there is nothing that humans can do in space that a robot can’t do better and for less money. On a purely exploratory basis, I am not convinced that we really need to return to the Moon, or send men to Mars. I believe that the Space Shuttle is a scientifically useless deathtrap, and the International Space Station (ISS) is a money pit. These are my opinions.

For these reasons it annoys me that NASA continues to siphon funds from scientifically valuable astronomy missions in order to keep the shuttle, the ISS and the nebulous but still money hungry “To the Moon by 2018” plans alive. All this after NASA big-wigs made a show of talking up the importance of space science and insisting that missions would not be cancelled but only delayed. On that note, several missions in which I held particular interest have, in NASA’s latest budget, been canceled entirely.

First, the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter mission to study Jupiter’s moon Europa fell to the financial axe some time ago. This mission was an obvious choice because it was massively over budget, behind schedule and showed no signs of reigning in its spending or, for that matter, ever getting off of the drawing board. Many in this latest round of ill fated missions were not so mired down.

One such mission was NuStar, a proposed orbiting X-ray observatory that had not only been approved, but was also on budget and on schedule, basically everything that JIMO wasn’t. The cancellation of something in such good shape is essentially unheard of, especially when that something would have been of so much use to astronomers everywhere trying to understand the mysterious X-ray band of the spectrum.

Dawn, a planned rendezvous mission to the asteroids Ceres and Vesta, for another example, was cancelled only months from being launch ready. A move that saves NASA $30 million, a piddling sum when you consider that they had already spent over $300 million getting it to the point at which essentially all that was left to be done was strap the thing to a rocket and shoot it into space. I’m so excited that my taxes helped pay for a spaceship that is now going to sit in a warehouse somewhere.

Terrestrial Planet Finder, a mission designed to detect Earth mass planets around other stars, is also slated for cancellation. I am especially disappointed about this one. One of TPF’s objectives was to locate potentially habitable planets apart from our own in the hope that life elsewhere in the universe might be found. That is not the reason that this mission excited me. I happen to be very interested in extra-solar planetary systems, not from an “are we alone?” standpoint, but from a “planets are really flippin’ cool” standpoint. As a result I am firmly behind any mission that will add more planets to the list. I am sad to see this one go.

I am not a scientist. These budget cuts do not affect me on a professional level. NASA’s financial spring cleaning also include layoffs, which mean that there will likely be a lot astro-physicists looking for work in the next couple of years. There are physics students out there who are currently distracted from their doctoral theses by the worrisome notion that the research jobs they had lined up may no longer exist.

I am irritated. Members of the scientific community are, as they should be, outraged and I think that we are all upset about the same things. We are upset that NASA, after talking up the importance of space science, cuts funds from that very thing to keep pet projects, of no immediately apparent importance, alive and in so doing potentially jeopardizing the state of astronomical research for years to come. Or, put more personally, it gets on your nerves when missions that I gladly pay for with my taxes are canceled in favor of other things that I don’t give a crap about.