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We are living in a glorious new era of super marketing. Usually the results of this are rather hideous: our livelihoods are hostage to “keyword position metrics” and “analytic toolbars”. Every day the press is filled with histrionic drivel about threats which are statistically unlikely to hurt us (but which clearly drive hits). Yet there is a silver lining of a sort: in order to keep people’s attention, quotidian phenomena are being lavished with grandiloquent new names (or old poetic names which have been rediscovered and given new prominence). Speaking of which, don’t forget to check out tonight’s spring equinox super worm moon!
These days, the full moon on each month is given a sobriquet which is reputedly derived from ancient Native American lore. Here is a table of these names:
January: Wolf moon
February: Snow Moon
March: Worm Moon
April: Pink Moon
May: Flower Moon
June: Strawberry Moon
July: Buck Moon
August: Sturgeon Moon
September: Corn Moon
October: Hunter’s Moon
November: Beaver Moon
December: Cold Moon
Now I don’t remember any of this from when I was growing up (although this is possibly because I was playing Pacman rather than hunting migratory elk). The first time I remember hearing anything like this was in Disney’s “Pocahontas”. Yet the names have an obvious and evocative allure which speak to ancient annual rhythms.
The “Worm Moon” of March is called that because the ground softens and worms start to appear (although, come to think of it, the pinkish brown earthworms we all know so well are actually comparatively recent Eurasian invaders), but I like to imagine that it is the WORM moon when Lord Nergal, the God of Pestilence decides whether to winnow the overpopulated Earth. Or perhaps it is the Wyrm Moon, when dragons come out of their winter eyries in the south and fly off to their accustomed fantasy realms…
Ahem. At any rate, tonight marks an unusual occasion when the vernal equinox occurs at the same time the moon is full and at its perigee. This will be the final super moon of 2019 so go outside and enjoy it while you drink traditional spring spirits and discuss beautiful nomenclature.
I have been trying to spruce up my online presence by building some new web pages (more about that soon) and by fixing the site I already have which everybody loves [crickets], um, which is to say Ferrebeekeeper! Unfortunately trying new things doesn’t always work…so kindly forgive me if yesterday’s post looks a bit peculiar. We will work with the web guru to get it all taken care of. In the mean time, speaking of experimenting with new things, let’s check back in on JAXA spaceship Hayabusa2.
Artist’s conception of Hayabusa2 touching down on Ryugu
When last we checked in with Hayabusa2, the Japanese spaceprobe had entered orbit around Asteroid Ryugu (a carbonaceous near-Earth asteroid, which is believed to be composed of pristine materials left over from the dawn of the solar system). Hayabusa2 was deploying tiny 1.1 kilograms (2.4 pounds) hopping droids to jump around the ancient ball of rock and snow and learn whatever they could. These robots would be followed by a larger robot probe, Mascot, which would study the asteroid in depth before Hayabusa2’s glorious showstopping signature move–a descent to the surface in order to fire a projectile into the asteroid (in order to collect an asteroid sample). That’s right: while Americans have been utterly transfixed by the bloviations of our felonious leader, the Japanese have dispatched a spacefaring robot to drop hopping mechanized lice on a primeval space snowball and then to pop a cap in it! Respect to the Land of the Rising Sun!
The probe arrived in perfect condition back in September of 2018, but the next phase of the mission got off to a rocky start…literally! JAXA expected Ryugu to be covered with fine powder, but it was covered with jagged rocks. The tiny hopping bots MINERVA-II1 A and B were really meant to test the conditions for MASCOT, a shoebox like robot-probe with real scientific instruments. On a prior mission these hopping probes were too enthusiastic and, after a single touchdown, they hopped magnificently but suicidally into the infinite void (presumably yelling inaudible robot slogans of honor). Although conditions on Ryugu were not as expected, the second generation Minervabots did a better job this time: they delivered the necessary telemetry, astrionics, and surface conditions to bring the mission to the next phase. Mascot was duly dispatched back in October and it operated faultlessly for 17 hours before its battery ran out and the active phase of its mission ended. [As an aside, I am finding it challenging to describe all of the things happening on a planetoid inhabited entirely by various sorts of robots]
Animation of Mascot probe hopping around Ryugu…such balletic grace!
On February 22nd 2019, the Hayabusa2 spacecraft descended to the surface of the asteroid and physically collected a substantial sample of the regolith by shooting the asteroid with a small projectile. You can watch the video of the brief encounter here. There are a lot of pebbles and shards flying around, but apparently the craft was fine and is now back in orbit while the ground crew looks for a final site to sample in April.
The Surface of Ryugu as imaged by a robot probe (JAXA)
This mission is super exciting, but the precious samples aren’t home yet. We will keep you updated here on Ferrebeekeeper (and we will keep working on our own tech project of building a better site).
Did you know it has been 30 years since a spacecraft swung by Neptune? Voyager II was the first and last spacecraft to visit the strange ice world which (with the demotion of Pluto) is the outermost planet of our solar system. A ball of gas, ice, rock and iron 17 times the size of Earth, Neptune is the third most massive planet and is the most dense of all the giant planets. However we know surprisingly little about this distant neighbor–a fact which was vividly demonstrated this week when astronomers discovered an unexpected new moon orbiting the planet. This new moon brings the tally of Neptune’s moons to 14. Mark Showalter, a researcher at the SETI institute in California, discovered the little satellite accidentally, while working on another project and the new body was confirmed with the Hubble Space telescope (which is also still out there, by the way).
Neptune’s largest moon is the retrograde Triton. The second largest moon is Proteus, an irregular polyhedron with a diameter of 420 kilometers, named after the shape-shifting old man of the sea. The new moon, which is named “Hippocamp”, after a seahorse like Greek sea monster (above) has a diameter of about 20 kilometers (about the length of Manhattan) and seems to have been formed from ejecta left over from when some primordial body slammed into Proteus.
Astronomers have spent comparatively little time studying Uranus and Neptune compared to the other planets of the solar system–which is somewhat ironic since most of the exoplanets we are finding are ice giants. It seems like they might be noticing this gap in their knowledge. A new mission to the ice giants is the third top mission priority in a vote-based ranking of proposed probe missions (by astrophysicists…nobody asked me what I want *cough* balloon mission to Venus’ atmosphere). Hopefully we will get our act together and launch a modern robot out to the big blue ice worlds in the not-too-distant future.
Today’s post takes us back, once more, to Ultima Thule/2014 MU69, the distant snowman shaped planetoid at the edge of the solar system which was visited by the New Horizons space probe as it flies through the Kuiper Belt on its way out of the solar system (since that time, we also blogged about the color Thulian pink–which is based on the fantasy land at the northern edge of the medieval map). Well, space can be a confusing place, and, even with digital cameras, the way we see objects tumbling through the void can be misleading. As New Horizons flew away from Ultima Thule, it turned its cameras around and took the following shot (which hopefully shows up in all of its glory as an animated gif below).
Holy hemispheres! What is with that bright edge? Spheres certainly don’t have those! It turns out that Ultima Thule may not be a snowman as originally billed. Instead it seems more like a double pancake.
This news will please flat earthers (on the off chance they believe that New Horizons actually exists), but they shouldn’t read too much into it. Planets are spherical because they are so massive that the force of gravity causes them to collapse into the most efficient shape – a sphere. This is broadly true for objects with a diameter greater than 1000 kilometers (621 miles) and Ultima Thule was not even remotely that big (indeed we didn’t think it was a sphere before). I do wonder how these two smushed snowballs formed and came together though.
Enthusiasts of Kuiper Belt objects will have to discard the snowman analogy and look for an object which is a lumpy disk stuck to a smaller lumpy disk. It sounds like a hogchoker to me (see a picture of the flatfish below), but this may merely be a shallow pretext to link to my flounder art on Instagram. It might be a while before we discover anything even remotely shaped like a flatfish in space though so I am going to take what the universe offers. If you have better topological analogies feel free to share in the comments (after you follow my Instagram).
To follow up on the Chinese New Year’s Post, here is a drawing I made with ink and colored pencil to celebrate the Year of the Earth Pig. In this context, the meaning of the pig should be self-evident: this is the 2019 Earth Pig, the symbolic avatar of the present moment. We are fortunate that this is a lithe and good-natured piggy: I have seen some fearsome and intimidating hogs which are all shaggy and grim, but this little porker looks almost like a pet. The pig is carrying a giant doughnut with pink icing as a special treat for the Lunar New Year festival. Additionally, the pastry (which I drew “from life” from a Dunkin’ Donut which I then ate) is a reminder of the endless appetite and desire which is a part of life. Existence may be mass-produced and filled with empty calories, but, even so, it is SOOO sweet. Perhaps the torus-shaped pastry also represents the topology of the universe.
As ever, the flounder is my symbolic avatar for life on Earth (I promise I will write a post about why, out of all the organisms on Earth, I chose the flounder to represent us). Imbued with special spring festival felicity, this flatfish seems less tragic (and maybe also less ridiculous) than most of the other ones I have drawn. Considering its aquamarine hue, the fish also represent the life-giving element of water. A satellite suggests that humanity’s future (if we have one) lies in space and there, at the bottom right, is our beloved home world! It is such a good-looking planet, but it looks dwarfed by the great allegorical animals which are hovering in proximity to it. Perhaps the pig represents the continents and the flounder represents the seas….
My sassy anti-establishment friend Moira suggested that this artwork was somehow about the constabulary (she lives in fear that America is becoming a police state) but I see no evidence of such meaning in the work (although I do wonder if she is right about the nation). Yet the picture is not all rosy. If this picture is about having an appetite for life, it might also whisper sad and disturbing things about what that entails. Humankind’s principal relationship with pigs, flounder, and doughnuts is all too voracious. Is that also our relationship with our home planet? Only religious fundamentalists and Davos man (aka the planet’s super rich oligarchs) believe that humans are currently acting as responsible stewards of our home world. Both these categories of people seemingly believe that God gave them dominion over the Earth so that they could ruin, despoil, and kill it.
Whatever the case, both creatures are watching our world to see what happens next. I have always believed that humans can escape the curse of our insatiable nature only by directing our rapacity away from the finite planet and towards the infinite heavens (coincidentally this is the not-very-subtle meaning of every single one of my artworks for the last 15 years). Can we make any upward progress in the year of the Earth Pig? or are we just going to continue to pig out at a diminishing trough while destiny passes us by?
Two days ago, Ferrebeekeeper wrote about Earth’s magnetic field, an underappreciated invisible force-field which keeps the planet habitable by preventing solar wind from blowing away our atmosphere and oceans (we need those!). Long ago, Venus and Mars seemingly had liquid oceans and nice atmospheres, but something went wrong (?) with their magnetic fields a billion or so years ago, and just look at them now (tuts censoriously). But maybe we shouldn’t be so quick to judge our neighbors…Five hundred and sixty-five million years ago, the Earth underwent a magnetic crisis too.
Geologists have been studying fragments of plagioclase and clinopyroxene from the ancient continental shield of Canada to learn about the state of the planet’s magnetic fields in the ancient past. As they form, these crystals trap tiny magnetized iron fragments in place like the needles of little compasses. Scientists can thus study the deep history of the magnetosphere. As they studied magnetic crystals that were formed 565 million years ago, they found some troubling things: half a billion years ago, the Earth’s magnetic field was over 10 times weaker than what it is today. Additionally the poles were rapidly fluctuating between north and south at an unexpected rate.
A closer reading of all of this suggests that 550 million years ago the Earth’s magnetic field nearly collapsed! (for a look at what that means, just walk around Mars). Life was saved because the solid nickel iron core of Earth nucleated from the molten core at that time. Instead of a field collapse, our magnetic field became much stronger as the spinning solid inner core and the convection cycles of the molten outer core worked together to form a super geodynamo. Coincidentally, 541 million years ago is familiar to paleontologists as the inception of the Cambrian explosion, when multitudinous animal life forms appeared on Earth. It is such an important point that it divides the Phanerozoic (filled with mushrooms, megafauna, liverworts, and Roman centurions) from the Proterozoic (billions of years of bacterial soup). Just a coincidence?
In 2016 the Japanese Space Agency launched a quarter-of-a-billion dollar x-ray observatory named Hitomi into Earth orbit. The craft’s mission was to study extremely energetic processes at the far reaches of the universe. It was hoped that the data Hitomi provided would allow astronomers to understand how the large scale structures of the universe came into being (how galactic superclusters form, for example). The satellite initially worked perfectly, but, within 38 Earth days, the spacecraft was lost: a failure of attitude control sent it into an uncontrolled spin which caused critical structural elements to break apart.
The full story of what destroyed Hitomi is perhaps of greater immediate interest to living beings on Earth than how the meta-structures the universe came into being. When everything went wrong for the ill-fated space observatory it was passing over the southern part of the Atlantic ocean. For spacefarers, this region of the Van Allen Belt is analogous to what the Bermuda Triangle or the Namib Skeleton Coast is for sailors: it is a haunted and dangerous stretch of space. Astronauts who travel through it report strange phantasmagorical dots and streaks in their vision, even when they close their eyes. The Hubble Space Telescope does not make observations when it passes over the south Atlantic. Controllers turn off its delicate systems. The region is known to the world’s space agencies as “the South Atlantic Anomaly.” Hitomi was not its first victim–it is surmised that the South Atlantic Anomaly was responsible for the failures of the Globalstar network satellites way back in aught seven.
The existence of the South Atlantic Anomaly was known long before that. It was discovered in 1958 by Explorer 1, the first American satellite (which was equipped with a Geiger counter). Perhaps the Soviets would have discovered the anomaly by means of Sputnik, but, because the Cold War made scientific cooperation difficult, Australia did not hand over Sputnik data to the Soviets until later. Suffice to say, the South Atlantic Anomaly is an anomaly in the Van Allen Belt, the torus-shaped field of charged particles which are held in place by the magnetic field of Earth. Earth’s magnetosphere is important. Billions of years ago, Mars and Venus seem to have been exceedingly Earthlike, with water oceans and convivial atmospheres. But neither Mars nor Venus has a magnetosphere and their oceans have perished and their atmospheres have changed into monstrous things….although we don’t know exactly what happened on either of our neighboring planets (and the present priorities here on Earth are to make Michel Dell and Howard Schultz as rich as possible at everyone else’s expense, not, you know, to understand what planetary scale forces could make worlds uninhabitable).
Um, at any rate, the magnetic field of Earth is created by the mysterious processes beneath our feet at the center of the planet. The Earth’s inner core is believed to have two layers: an outer core of molten iron and heavy metals and an inner core of solid iron nickel alloy. The inner core is about 70% of the volume of the moon and it is nearly as hot as the surface of the sun with an estimated temperature of (5,430 °C) or 9806 °F, but the molten outer core is only as hot as the surface of an orange star (2,730–4,230 °C; 4,940–7,640 °F). Within the outer core, eddy currents form in the superheated metal. The complex relationship between these currents, the spinning planet, and the two core layers creates a geodynamo which produces the planet’s magnetosphere which in turn captures the particles which make up the Van Allen Belts. However, the eddy currents cause the magnetic poles to invert every few hundred thousand years (we are currently overdue for such a flip). The South Atlantic Anomaly is a manifestation of the “weather” in the molten outer core of Earth–a prelude to the magnetic polar flip. First generation spacecraft used solid state components and had big ungainly robust circuitry. Additionally they were hardened against radiation. Some of today’s craft make use of delicate & elaborate microcircuitry which is prone to failure when struck by esoteric radiation particles. This is how what happens far beneath our feet influences what happens to craft in outer space.
What with all of the holiday excitement, we have failed to compliment the Chinese Space Program on their successful lunar landing. On January 3rd, 2019, the Chang’e IV spacecraft landed on the South Pole-Aitken Basin, on the far side of the Moon, and deployed the Yutu-2 Rover. Here is a stunning photo taken by the rover as it began its explorations of the lunar surface. The spacecraft is, of course, named after the beautiful and sad Chinese moon goddess, Chang’e.
To quote the Smithsonian magazine, “[the Chinese lander will] collect mineral and geological samples of the moon’s surface as well as investigate the impact of solar wind on the moon. The craft even has its own little farm, or lunar biosphere, aboard—the first of its kind.” This miniature ecosystem consists of some potatoes, a few Arabidopsis plants (this is a hardy and universally known laboratory plant), and some living silkworm eggs in a special 3-kilogram (6.6-pound) aluminum terrarium (or lunarium?).
I realized as I write this that I don’t even know the Chinese Space Agency’s name. It turns out it is the Chinese National Space Administration “CNSA.” Their logo, immediately above, is a flying blue chevron with, I don’t know, blue wheat, or something–it looks like somebody mimeographed the Federation logo. But who cares about their logo? [cough, Chinese space administrators, you could hire a graphic artist to make a space phoenix, a rocket tiger, or galactic dragon or something for about ¥150.00 and outshine everyone before you even leave the pad]. The CNSA are now doing things which have never been done. This is the first landing on the dark side of the moon (which is not really dark, but which goes by that conceit since the moon is tidally locked).
United States triumphalism over our amazing moon program has obscured the fact that the first moon landing happened 50 years ago. Nobody has been on the moon during my lifetime, and I am not young. NASA has responded to budget cuts and whiplash conflicting demands from different presidential administrations by concentrating on robot probes of the unknown edges of the solar system. That is smart, practical, and amazing. Yet some of the thrill and prestige that NASA had even during its silver age in the eighties and nineties is now wearing away.
Of course America doesn’t even really have a functioning government right now, so perhaps it is better that we have decided to abandon our own bright dreams of moon bases and Mars missions…but it saddens me that we are so politically deadlocked that we are not pushing harder to explore and build in space. All day, every day, billionaires tell us how scarce resources are and how much better the private sector is at allocating these precious resources (to super yachts, offshore bank accounts, and regulatory capture, apparently). Well, resources are not scarce in space. There is infinite real estate. There are whole planets worth of matter. There are wells of energy which create all of the energy humankind has ever used throughout all of our history within a picosecond. Hopefully the brand new accomplishments of CNSA will remind the American people of our true nature–as scientists, explorers, and visionaries. However if we are too fixated on the crimes and inanities of Individual Number 1 to pay attention to the universe, maybe the Chinese can build a floating colony on Venus. I, for one, am looking forward to seeing what they have planned next.
Since the year is pretty new and my bright hopes and shining dreams for 2019 are still intact, here is a Friday evening blog post! I have been worried that I have not been devoting sufficient time to blogging. In particular I have lately been especially bad about responding in a timely fashion to anybody gracious enough to post a comment. I promise I will work hard on doing a better job writing and responding this year, so keep those comments coming! In the meantime, kindly find a picture of the first sculpture which I finished in 2019: “Galactic Fluke,” which is carved out of wood and adorned with a handmade polymer galaxy and plastic stars. When I pulled that galaxy out of the oven it looked like a millipede with hairy waving legs…and it was no picnic making it adhere properly to the fluke instead of to my fat fingers.
Regular readers of this blog will recognize the flounder as the quixotic avatar of all Earth life in my recent artworks. Concerned friends and relatives have asked why the Pleuronectiformes have so completely infiltrated my ouevre–so I will answer that question in greater depth in 2019 (the emotional side of the story involves a confessional story about my life, and the intellectual side of the story involves a treatise on environmentalism and musings about the future of all of humankind).
This sculpture however transcends such concerns–this is, after all, a galactic fluke…a very great flounder indeed! It represents the apogee of my desires–life transcendent and all-present at an incomprehensibly vast scale. One of my friends said that his mother, a devout Muslim, was worried that my art is idolatrous (!) which is difficult to respond to, but I do certainly try to imbue my conception of the numinous into my flounder works. I have never found a bunch of rules from ancient near-eastern sages to be particularly supernatural…but the interlocking destinies of lifeforms living together in complex ecosystems does inspire me with feelings of transcendent awe. The great web of life on Earth is the closest thing we know to divinity–save perhaps for the celestial grandeur of outer space with all of its scope and mystery. This small sculpture is an attempt to bring these two sacred concepts together in poplar, paint, and plastic.
It’s an exciting new year in space exploration and today we are getting back images from the most distant object ever explored by a probe spacecraft. Launched in January of 2006, NASA’s amazing New Horizons mission (pictured above) has been flying through the solar system ever since. Back in 2014 it reached its primary objective, the icy dwarf world Pluto, which has been the focus of considerable interest and, arguably, of even greater controversy concerning astronomical naming conventions (“My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us….Nothing.” could arguably teach us about astronomy AND independent food preparation, I suppose). Since that time, New Horizons has continued to fly further from the Sun and deeper into the Kuiper Belt, a dark distant band of icy pseudo-worlds at the edge of the Solar System. New Horizons just flew past one of these Kuiper Belt objects…the distant ice ball 2014 MU69.
This frozen miniature planet is only 35 by 15 km (20 by 10 miles in diameter) and it orbits the sun every 298 years. The most exciting part of this body is its shape. It is literally a snowman—a smaller spherical lump of ice frozen to a larger one. Just look at it! You can practically see Charlie Brown half-building it and then giving up with a silent outer space “Good Grief”
Sadly, the mission has generated another astronomical naming controversy. Scientists were dissatisfied with the way “2014 MU69” rolled off the tongue so they crowdsourced the problem to the internet to find names for this distant iceball. The internet suggested “Ultima Thule” which was a Roman and Medieval term for the unknown icy lands beyond the periphery of the known world. That is a pretty good name and the scientists split it into two for the weird binary snowman (the larger body is “Ultima” and the smaller is “Thule”). Unfortunately, though, Nazi occultists also found the name “Thule” back in the thirties and they used it as a mythical place of origin for the mythical Aryan Race (sorry Nazis, we are all originally African).
Like all good-hearted people, I despise Nazis…but this seems like a Roman name sullied by racist morons more than a millennium after its introduction. Do you think scientists need to rename this primitive snowman world? Or should we go with Ultima Thule? Or should we just stick with 2014 MU69 (since, frankly, unless New Horizons discovers some strange artifacts, alien beings, or something we are probably never going to think about this corner of the solar system again).
