Mars and the Wright Brothers

During my week in the Outer Banks, I braved rain and high water to visit the Wright Brothers National Memorial at Kill Devil Hills. Even on a do-nothing-and-relax vacation, as this one was supposed to be, I couldn't resist visiting something historical and museum-y.

 

This boulder and metal track in the ground mark the takeoff point of the Wright Brothers' Flyer, and the four smaller plaques in the distance mark where the first four successful flights landed on December 17th, 1903.

First successful flight of the Wright Brothers

One hundred and twenty feet. That's how far Orville Wright got on his first successful powered flight, which the brothers were smart enough to capture on film. It is amazing to me that there is a photograph of this huge step forward in technology, this incredible achievement. And this all happened in 1903, which isn't really all that far away if you think about it. Not much more than a hundred years from their success in flight, we used a rocket-propelled sky-crane to gently lower an automobile-sized rover onto the surface of Mars.

I bring up the Mars Curiosity rover not only because it's awesome and on Mars, my favorite planet that I don't currently live on, but because we stayed up late on Sunday night, in the big rented house on the beach in Avon, and hooked up the TV to the internet to watch the live feed from NASA as they monitored Curiosity's descent to the surface.

Four of us, and a couple of sleepy weenie-dogs, settled in on the cushy sofas for the whole thing, from the interviews with NASA engineers to the triumphant cheers and tears of joy on the big screen when a safe landing was confirmed. More than once that night, as we watched the camera pan over the control room and the excited and nervous NASA folks speaking into their headsets, I was overwhelmed with a sense of awe and insignificance. Not only are we at a place in our evolution as a species that we can safely place sophisticated technology onto other planets, but it's become routine enough that it's not much more than a blip on the news. Sure, the nerds and space geeks of the world were huddled in front of their TVs and computers to watch it all unfold, but there's a bit of a "been there and done that" feeling from the news coverage, and that makes me both happy and sad.

I'm happy, because it means that awesome feats like this have become common enough not to make a big splash. Not only can we send stuff to Mars, or Jupiter, or to explore giant asteroids, but we do it all the time. We are an amazing damn species. But I'm sad, because when events are common, they stop being news, and people stop caring. When people stop caring, people forget why we're doing all of this in the first place and see it as a waste of money and resources.

But it's not a waste. No, it's not directly ending world hunger or fixing the economy, but space exploration has brought us so many advances in technology, and is worth every penny put into it. And, frankly, it's only pennies that are put into it. NASA's budget is a joke, and the joke keeps getting smaller. This comparison puts it into perspective:

I'm not trying to get all political here - I still don't have a vote in this country - but when you see how little NASA gets from the US budget, it's hard to understand the folks who are complaining that we're spending so much money to visit other planets for nothing. Especially when you see this:

Not that I'm bashing the Olympics (just NBC's dismal coverage and overuse of Ryan Goddamn Seacrest), but in the grand scheme of things, we get so much out of space exploration, and it's silly to argue against funding it. It's not just about rockets, minerals, and spectral analyses. It's about engineering, programming, and robotics, and dozens of other applications to medicine and nutrition and memory foam mattresses.

Three days after I watched Curiosity touch down gently on Mars to begin its mission of exploring the planet, I stood in the spot where we first took to the air in powered vehicles, and I whispered a thanks to the Wright brothers and all those who built on their work, for what they've made possible so far.

Things.... in.... Spaaaaaace!

I like to get excited about space. Google can vouch for me: I have a gold Google News badge for reading 4 times as many articles about space than the average reader. It's just an internet badge, though, nothing I get to wear proudly pinned to a sash like a Girl Scout. Yet.

If only I was better at math, I'd have aimed myself at astronomy, because there are so many amazingly awesome things in space. And for once, I don't mean "awesome" as in "totally rad". I mean to say that space inspires awe. Mouth-hanging-open, mind-totally-blown, world-slowing-down awe. Can anyone look up into a starry sky and not feel like a tiny speck in a huge universe? Between Cosmos, Star Trek, NOVA, and televised Space Shuttle launches, a love of space was planted and nurtured in me well before I was out of elementary school. If I could have gotten away with it, I would have done every project, in every class, about Mars.

Part of what amazes me about space is the distances and sizes of things. How are we supposed to wrap our minds around the fact that we can fit over a million Earths inside the volume of the Sun? Venus is almost the same size as the Earth, and when it passed between us and the Sun on June 5th, this is what it looked like from our point of view:

Photo from a fancy NASA telescope

That little black dot on the top right is Venus. See how tiny it looks? Now here's the best part: it's still about 70 million miles from the sun! If it was right up against the sun, it would be too small to make out at all (not to mention completely incinerated). You can imagine that if you hollowed out the sun and started filling it with Venuses, it could very well take a million or more. And we live on a planet that's about the same size as Venus. In little tiny houses with little tiny yards where we can stand outside with little tiny telescopes and watch Venus travel across the sun, making us feel both completely insignificant and profoundly connected to it all.

I don't have a telescope, because I've always lived too close to big cities to make stargazing worthwhile, and because good telescopes are pretty expensive. So the best way for me to enjoy the transit of Venus across the sun was to find live pictures online. Someone posted a link on Facebook to a live Google+ "hangout" featuring Phil Plait (The Bad Astronomer) and other space nerds, and hearing those guys get giddy and excited about what they were seeing, made me need to try and see something outside. The sun was setting, and it was mostly cloudy, but I saw some rays poking through the clouds and figured it was worth a shot.

Obviously, staring into the sun is horrible for your retinas, so in order to see the transit safely, I rushed to make a pinhole camera.

There are many how-to guides online, and they all follow the same basic pattern. I opened a cereal box and put a roughly-cut-to-fit piece of white paper on the bottom to give me a nice viewing surface. Then I cut two small rectangles out of the top of the box and taped the box back together to hold its shape. I taped some tin foil over one hole and made a tiny hole in the center. I didn't have a pin handy, so I used the lead from a mechanical pencil, which worked fine. Here is my gorgeous sun-viewing device:

So there I was, standing in my front yard with my back to the sun, one eye squinted shut and a tin-foiled Cheerios box held up to the other, while neighbors walked their dogs past me and wondered why I was peering so intently into my cereal. If I'd been able to see anything, I would have invited them to have a look, but the image of the sun was too small for me to make out the tiny speck of Venus.

I'd make a better viewer for next time, using binoculars and a filter, but the next transit of Venus isn't until 2117. The best I'll be able to do is convince my eventual grandkids that they should look up.