Spirit. Your quest, our quest.

How can words fail you and emotion take over when you speak about a machine?
How can metal and wires give you a knot on your throat, make your eyes go teary and your heart to squeeze?
You become part of my life, everyday during these last 6 years, during its ups and downs, there you were, there we were, side by side in our hardships and glories, entangled in our far apart existences, I, from here, enticing you to go Onward! Always Onward…only to find myself amazed by listening to you, from the cold, harsh distance of Mars, whispering to me that everything is possible. E-V-E-R-Y-T-H-I-N-G.
And now, funnily enough, until the end, here we are, together, with the space in between, facing once more, abreast, an uncharted territory: Settling down.

A friend forever, how could I possibly forget you my beautiful Spirit? It is not a secret that you are my favourite, MY martian rover, my arms, legs, eyes on that dusty, rusty, barren landscape. I walked along with you from the days you were young and shiny under the martian sun, brave on your crossing of deserts and climbing of mountains, conquering summits, intrepid pioneering through unknown dominions, reaching lands of myth and dream, I have walked with you along the rugged terrain, the treacherous dunes and inner basins…how can I ever forget you?
How can I ever forget each Sol since the first Sol? Each new look towards a new world? Each new discovery? Each new joy? Each drama, triumph and relief? What a wonderful 6 roving years these were…

Your quest was my quest, your wandering was my wandering, who cares if you are a machine and I am a human? You were all of us there, in your valiant resistance to a planet that took the decision of not making it wasy on you, to challenge you, test you, the same planet that now honours you and welcomes you. Encircled by the Columbia Hills, on Gusev Crater, Planet Mars, there you will now rest my amazing gal, from an extraordinary, oniric, unique quest, in a place called Troy. There, I am sure, you will never forget us, those who dreamed you, those who built you, those who sent you on your journey beyond Earth, those who, from the cradle, took care of you each and every day and those who, like me, were conquered by your example, friends, companions, fellow pilgrims on an epic quest we made also our own…you will never forget home, Ithaca, facing the dunes of Eldorado, the Eldorado you have searched and reached at your own effort, riding, boldly riding.

May the winds of the Red Planet spread your tale.
Thank you Spirit. For making our lives richer. For sharing an adventure out of this world. For teaching us how to to resist, to discover, to go Beyond.
For being, truly, the little rover that could.
Ultreya good old pilgrim, the real journey starts here!

Here’s to you, our music, our poem, the poem you, once, many years ago, sent me from that distant world, Mars:

Filed under: editor's note , Mars, Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit

Behind the scenes @ Cassini – A guided tour with Sarah Milkovich

I have a multiplanetary working life.  It’s gotten rather complicated.

Half of my time, I am a science planning engineer on Cassini, and the other half of my time I am the Investigation Scientist for the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.  (Sometimes it seems like the hardest part of operating spacecraft is getting the work done in between all the meetings.)

Today I’m going to talk to you a little bit about some of my work for Cassini.  I hope you’ve been following along with us last year as we observed the Saturn equinox (check out all our great images on the Astronomy Photo of the Day archives!) and had some fabulous moon flybys.

Cassini is a hugely complicated spacecraft to operate, and there are a large number of people who work behind the scenes to get the stunning data that you see online.  I want to give you a taste of the amount of effort, and the many decisions, that get made by a lot of people who you rarely ever hear about in the press releases.

Filed under: Cassini, Sarah Milkovich , Cassini, Enceladus, HiRISE, MRO, Sarah Milkovich, Saturn

Editor’s quicknote

These words have as single objective, to congratulate one of Beyond the Cradle collaborators for her latest success.

Sarah Milkovich has become, officially, the HiRISE investigation scientist.

In a recent exchange of words, Sarah expressed her hapiness for being back “on” Mars and the window for new stories back here at BtC is now open after a time where…well…time wasn’t abundant.

So,  dear Sarah, here I am, waiting by the mailbox, waiting for you, your Mars, your HiRISE, your writing, and for that cold to go away fast.

Knowing how happy you are with the recent news and how long  the battle has been let me just tell you how proud I am to count with you, to learn with you, onboard this vessel of adventure, discovery and knowledge.

Filed under: Sarah Milkovich , HiRISE, Mars, Sarah Milkovich

Holes

As 2009 prepares to slip gloomily and morosely into 2010, with the world still hunched under the weight of recession, and truly godawful weather battering the UK, sitting here at my computer, listening to the rain skrish against the window, over and over and over, like handfuls of thrown shingle, I’m starting to wonder, and worry, if I’m having a bit of a mid-life crisis.

No, I haven’t grown a ridiculous ponytail, or bought myself a pair of cowboy boots and a Harley and taken to the road, or started hanging around bars trying to look 20 years younger than I really am in the hope of impressing long-legged blondes young enough to be my daughter; no, this lifelong, space-nut, who has always looked forwards and not backwards, who has always lived for the future and not looked back at the past, has started to get very, very interested in history. Specifically, deep, deep history – i.e. the origins of Mankind.

What the hell happened? What made me put aside my books on Mars, the Moon, and the space program and reach instead for books describing the evolution of Man and the development of Stone Age tools and art? I don’t know what triggered this off, I really don’t. Maybe it was always there, at the back of my mind. I’ve always been interested in archaeology and “old things”, to a degree; I love stalking the echoing corridors and halls of castles, running my hands across the rocky surfaces of the monoliths that make up ancient stone circles, and wandering through museums, peering into the display cases, but this feels different. Suddenly I’m absolutely fascinated by mankind’s origins and evolution, and I’ve started to amass quite a collection of books about it. Now, after a few weeks of succesful scavenging from the shelves of charity shops here in Kendal, I’m learning all about the Olduvai Gorge, the various “branches” of early humans, and the way they developed into – well, what we are today. And I’m really enjoying it.

But why?

Filed under: Stuart Atkinson , Mars Exploration Rovers

Добро пожаловать на борт, доктор Зайцев!*

Beyond the Cradle as the pleasure of counting with the collaboration of someone who’s career has been has diversified as recognized. That someone is Dr. Alexander Zaitzev, Chief Scientist of the Radio Engineering and Electronics Institute, Russian Academy of Science, who was kind enough to share his time and vision with BtC readers.

To know more about Dr. Zaitzev’s work please visit the Collaborators page, in the meanwhile stay with the words he adressed to the readers.

*Welcome aboard Dr. Zaitzev!

 

My Vision of SETI and METI Missions

In a distant, primeval, medieval past, Mankind lived with both their feet on a flat Earth,
considered, dogmatically, to be the center of the Universe, and we, people of the world, at the mercy of gods, were alone in the vastness of space and time.

Time made us earn the knowing that Earth is not the center of the Universe, neither our Sun, not even our galaxy…

It is my hope that, in a future where SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) has been successful in his quest, people from the land may, still with both their feet on solid ground but their hearts and minds spread in the distance, live with the certainty that we are not alone in the Universe.

We, people of the present, live in an intermediate, ambiguous state, if one of our feet is already stepping into the future, beyond the abyss of the dark times where the position of the Earth among the celestial tapestry was not questioned and the existence of other worlds beyond the solar system were considered an heresy, we have still one foot behind in the past, because we have not yet been privileged with an answer that will permit us to be released from the burden of seing us as the center of life in the Universe, which will permit us, to get both our feet in the position that will make us, undoubtfuly, evolve as a species.

That is SETI’s mission, to detect the answer, to detect exo-civilizations, this will permit us to give the definitive step onward. And Active SETI’s goal, or METI (Messaging to Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) consists in overcoming the Great Silence in the Universe by bringing to ETIs the long awaited news: “You Are Not Alone!”. With METI we try to help THEM to be on the same position as us, ready to give one more step.

Filed under: Uncategorized , Alexander Zaitzev, METI, SETI

500 million kilometers closer

Alan Stern, New Horizons Principal Investigator, as a new entry on his captain log.
While we are still 2,050 days away on a 9.5 years journey towards Pluto, on December 2009 NH will be closer to Pluto than to Earth, somehow this gives me a strange feeling of seing the spacecraft as a student finally leaving its parents home and heading towards a distant university, where it will do what she is supposed to be doing, to learn and to share knowledge in order to make of us a richer species.
As 2009 reaches its end, New Horizons keeps the steady pace towards an unknown world, step by step, during this year, Pluto became 500 million kilometers closer. 

Image Credit: Thierry Lombry

Filed under: Pluto , Alan Stern, NASA, New Horizons, Pluto

Getting to know the aliens

If there is one theme that pervades the very concept of “space” in the public mind, it is the assumed ubiquity of alien life. This probably tells us a lot more about the way that human beings perceive the Universe through a lens of assumptions and evolutionarily-implanted deep instincts then anything about the nature of life beyond Earth.
            Although it may seem quaint and rather naive today, just a few centuries ago many learned Europeans took it for granted that the Moon and the planets were doubtless populated by human beings of some type. The “proof” of this paradigm was often theological: God would not possibly waste His valuable time creating uninhabited celestial bodies, after all!

Filed under: Nicholas Previsich , Nicholas Previsich

Sagan Medal for Steve Squyres

Filed under: Uncategorized , Carl Sagan, Cornell, Mars, Mars Exploration Rovers, NASA, Steve Squyres

Mapping Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity to improve understanding of the Earth’s water cycle – By Mark Drinkwater, Head, Mission Science Division (European Space Agency)

The European Space Agency’s Earth Explorer series of research-driven satellite missions continues with the upcoming 2nd November launch of the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission. Known as ESA’s Water Mission, SMOS is the first satellite dedicated to providing global measurements of soil moisture and ocean salinity. The mission’s new technologies will extend key European capabilities in Earth Observation and help advance research towards improving our understanding of the global water cycle.

Filed under: Mark Drinkwater , CDTI, CNES, EADS CASA Espacio, ESA, INDRA, Mark Drinkwater, SMOS, Thales Alenia

HAT-p-7b and the Grail quest – With Jon Jenkins

I went to bed the evening of May 13th exhausted from the long, intense campaign of commissioning the Kepler spacecraft. The long march started about a week after launch when we began to receive data from the photometer and needed to process it to verify that it was behaving as we expected and to prepare all the data products needed for nominal science operations. These included taking very special data sets to characterize the 2D bias frame of the CCDs (the image you get with no light falling on the detectors), the noise characteristics, the sky to pixel mapping, the science data compression tables, and the detailed shape of the stellar images (the Point Spread Functions) across the focal plane. We had been calculating the PSFs and getting our first science target tables together while the Combined Differential Photometric Precision (CDPP) data set was being collected during the last ten days of Commissioning. This was the first science-like data to be collected. So we had a target table in place with 52,496 targets and were compressing the 30-minute samples for each pixel of interest and storing these on board the Solid State Recorder. (During nominal science operations we collect pixel data for ~145,000 stars.) On Monday May 11 we turned the spacecraft to point the High Gain Antenna to Earth and downlinked the CDPP data set, all ten days of it, to the Deep Space Network, who transferred it through our Ground System* to the Science Operations Center at NASA Ames Research Center where we process the pixels, extract the photometric light curves and search for transiting planets. Nominal science operations commenced on May 12 and we could turn our attention to processing the CDPP data.

Filed under: Exoplanets, Jon Jenkins, Kepler , HAT-p-7, HAT-P-7b, Jon Jenkins, Kepler, NASA, Natalie Batalha, TrES-2, William Borucky