The Longest, The Last

The Longest, The Last

   Nearly a decade will have passed...ten years!  And in a little less than two weeks, the longest U.S. reconnaissance satellite journey will start its main transmission.  The download, travelling at the speed of light, will take nearly five hours to reach earth; and there's a lot of it, so much data that it will take 16 months to complete it's transmission.  As the excited NASA scientists wait, the report from the satellite is that it is on schedule, on course and full of fuel (even after almost ten years of travel)...and it's apparently the last time NASA will ever send this type of mission.

   The satellite is called New Horizons and the destination is Pluto, a "planet" according to the planetary scientists, but not one according to astronomers (their reasoning is that Pluto does not have the necessary criteria to qualify as a planet).  But what is making the planetary scientists excited is that beneath this ice-cold planet is the possibility of a vast ocean, and thus the possibly of the existence of the elements of life.  Imagine, a "sky" made of ice, much like Jupiter's moon, Europa (on a side note, NOVA will feature the first series of photo transmissions in a special broadcast, July 15, 2015).

   There are a lot of satellites up there nearly 60 at last count in earth's space, each measuring everything from gamma rays to solar mass ejections.  And almost all of them are either past their useful life expectancy or about to end their useful life in just a few years.  And NASA's budget has been slashed, down to just a fraction of what it was in the days of putting a man on the moon (at that time, the NASA budget was nearly 4.5% of the entire U.S. budget; it now represents just half a percent).  All of which has caused a search for private companies to continue the quest for space exploration. But the recent failure of the SpaceX launch (it's third such failure) saw more than cargo and supplies destroyed, but valuable experiments that will take much longer to replace.  Still, cooperation with private companies is a necessity for NASA, according to Ellen Stofan, NASA’s chief scientist (there are 13 companies and countries working on getting a mission to Mars).

   In a recent article in Fast Company by Jon Gertner, this cooperation factor was elaborated on: Sending astronauts on a yearlong journey to Mars will involve extraordinary challenges (two major ones: making sure the crew doesn’t absorb too much radiation and figuring out how to safely land a heavy vehicle in the planet’s thin atmosphere).  Right now NASA doesn’t have the technology to pull off such a feat, but it needs to stay open to scientific shifts, which can come about suddenly and unexpectedly.   "We’re not going to get humans to Mars until at least the mid-2030s, and the world is going to change by then," Stofan says.  But she also remains excited at the possibilities: If they find evidence of living organisms, it could change our view of humanity.  "We may find that life did evolve on Mars, and there’s a chance life evolved on Jupiter’s moon Europa.  If we find that life is present in our solar system, we’re going to try to understand its implications for humans.  How much is it like life on Earth?  Does it have RNA and DNA?  It’s going to be mindblowing."

   But getting into "outer" or deep space is not all that easy.  Truth be told, NASA has had more than its share of failures, especially in its quest to reach Mars (one craft crashed simply due to a miscommunication between engineers, one side working in metric units and the other not, resulting in a miscalculation of landing distance and thus too fast an approach and landing speed, resulting in a total loss).  But on the private side, no craft has made it past low orbit, which is where the International Space Station resides.  Still, with so much at stake, human emotion and oversight enters the picture, as was recently demonstrated in the (successful) landing of the Curiosity rover on Mars when another miscalculation was recognized by NASA's chief engineer, a landing instrument placed a few inches higher than where it was said to be...should he say something (knowing what had happened before with the earlier craft)?  As the article in Discover said, "Maybe the mistake wouldn’t affect anything, but it could destroy the multibillion-dollar rover upon landing."  Here's how Miguel de San Martin put it (the landing was just a day away):  I went to see Pete Theisinger, the project manager, and I explained the error, taking full responsibility.  We took it to the board of experts that deals with these things, and they voted for “no change.”  I felt relieved that it was over.  But that night, I started thinking.  Did we consider all the aspects of this thing?  I got cold feet.  In this business, you need to be paranoid to be successful.  You have to assume that an error could be the tip of an iceberg of a bigger problem.  I didn’t sleep...Most people were voting “no change,” but when Pete’s turn came, he said, “I want the change,” overruling everybody.  Our equations convinced him.  There was grumbling, with some of the other members openly disagreeing and trying to change Pete’s position, but they couldn’t.  We had another meeting, this time with people from headquarters.  I’m feeling very small, walking with my tail between my legs...I was shaking at that point because I felt that I let him down.  Pete told me that “it was excellent because, first of all, you found it and got to the bottom of it; secondly, you came and told me about it.”  I felt relieved and was proud of being part of a culture that promotes openness.  We sent the programming fix to Curiosity that night.  The next day, landing went fantastically well.
   
   We all face decisions everyday, perhaps none quite as drastic as saving a hundreds of millions of  dollars project, but decisions nonetheless.  And while some criticize the possibility of sending people to other planets (the basic premise is, NASA can scrub clean the craft, but not the humans inside), there is again a certain rise to that morality side of our species, to make the right call even when the consequences for you, personally, might not be favorable.  Each space launch is a huge, cooperative endeavor.  The amount of planning and calculated equations is difficult to fathom (in our next Mars probe, the window to launch is small, the planets aligning once every 26 months).  But what goes up in space with our human morality is a sense of curiosity and a sense of discovery and a sense of wonder (such as why Pluto's moons wobble like footballs).  New Horizons is poised to fill out a bit more of that puzzle.