Trip through the universe.

How big is the universe?

Well, let's assume Garrett Reisman has built a rocketship that can travel at the speed of light, which is 186,000 miles per second. And he could totally do it.

Let's start the trip at midnight on January 1st.

We would travel 93 million miles in just 8 minutes and 19 seconds. Put on your shades. You're at the Sun!

After 5 hours and 31 minutes, we pass Pluto.

We have travelled over 3.5 billion miles. It is still January 1st.

Now, we travel perpendicular to our solar system. A year passes. Two years. Three. Four. On April 19th of the fifth year, we arrive at Alpha Centauri A, the nearest star (other than our Sun) to our solar system.

We have travelled 25 trillion miles. Our journey has just begun.

At ten light years out, the stars in our galaxy now appear to converge.

At one thousand light years out, the Milky Way's arms become more defined.

After we have travelled 100,000 years at the 186,000 miles per second, the Milky Way galaxy's entire spiral is finally visible.

From here on, every light we see is not an individual star but an entire galaxy.

5 million light years out, the Milky Way is part of a 30-galaxy cluster known as a "local group."

50 million light years out, we encounter a "burger cluster" containing over 2,000 galaxies.

After ten billion years of traveling at 186,000 miles per second, we can see countless billions of galaxies, each one the size of a tiny dot. We have traveled 58,695,882,360,000,000,000,000
miles. That's 58 sextillion, 695 quintillion, 882 quadrillion, 360 trillion miles, for those of you scoring at home.

After thirteen billion years...

Maybe you'd be here. I don't know. Douglas Adams' guess is as good as anyone's, I suppose.

Perspective

Click here. Right now. Seriously. Right now.
(P.S. Be patient - it takes five or six seconds to start.)

If Garrett had been there...

he'd have let the pieces fall into a bowl and eaten them like Grape-Nuts. I digress.

Listen up, kids. This is a good one.

On June 28, 1911 a Martian meteorite fell near Nakhla, Egypt, breaking into 40 pieces before striking the earth. To add insult to injury, a farmer reported that one of the fragments hit his dog, which was standing in a field. The dog was, according to the farmer, instantly vaporized.

This story was never proven (no bits of dog were ever recovered) but, as the folks at NASA said, it was never disproven either.

Part of the Nakhla Meteorite:

Bonus Material:

Statistically, more meteorites fall in June than at any other time of the year - and 30 June is a particularly hazardous day. Since records began, 116 meteorites have plunged to Earth in June - their high season - compared with only 57 in March - their low season. At least 17 people are said to have been killed by meteorite impact.

Fund. the. space. program.

And also, encourage your kids to read science fiction. They may be the ones who make it science fact one day.

June 26, 2008: "Hold your hands out to the sun. What do you feel? Heat, of course. But there's pressure as well – though you've never noticed it, because it's so tiny. Over the area of your hands, it only comes to about a millionth of an ounce. But out in space, even a pressure as small as that can be important – for it's acting all the time, hour after hour, day after day. Unlike rocket fuel, it's free and unlimited. If we want to, we can use it; we can build sails to catch the radiation blowing from the sun."¹

These words were spoken not by a NASA scientist but by a fictional character – John Merton – in Arthur C. Clarke's short story The Wind from the Sun. If all goes well, Merton's prophetic words are about to become fact.

Read the entire article over at NASA's webpage.

Today in Space History

1962 - X15 High Alpha Mach-6 Test Mission
6,603 Km/h (Unofficial world speed record.)

To put this speed in perspective, if you took off from Chicago and flew for just an hour, you could be in London, England.

You could fly to Guatemala City. And back.

You could fly to Honolulu, Hawaii.

You could fly to New York City and back. Three times.

Also on this day:

In 1969, the decision as to who will be the first man to step foot on the moon is made. Rumors swirl that Neil Armstrong "pulled rank" on Buzz Aldrin.

In 1995, STS-71 (Atlantis) launches to Mir, carrying, among other things, an IMAX camera. The astronauts film the IMAX movie "Mission to Mir" during this journey.

Today's birthdays:

• 1908 - Boris Vasilyevich Petrovskiy. Russian Government Official. Birth Country: Russia.

• 1911 - Louis N Ridenour. American Manager. Birth Country: USA.

• 1935 - Eduard Pavlovich Kugno. Ukrainian Engineer Cosmonaut. Birth City: Poltova. Birth Country: Ukraine.

• 1937 - Joseph Percival 'Joe' Allen IV. American Mission Specialist Astronaut. Birth City: Crawfordsville. Birth State: Indiana. Birth Country: USA.

• 1951 - Sidney (Sid) McNeil Gutierrez. American Pilot Astronaut. Birth City: Albuquerque. Birth State: New Mexico. Birth Country: USA.

• 1956 - Sultan Salman Abdel-aziz Al-Saud. Arab Saudi Payload Specialist Astronaut. Birth City: Riyad. Birth Country: Saudi Arabia.

It sounds so benign.

+

=

TA-DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!

Will someone PLEEEASE...

tell me which space-themed movie used part of Holst's Jupiter in its soundtrack?
It drives me nuts every time I hear it.

If you are unfamiliar with the piece, scroll to the bottom of the page and on my playlist click Jupiter: Bringer of Jollity.
The part I'm talking about occurs about two minutes into the piece.

I googled it, and all I can find is that it was used in "Annie Hall."
And that is NOT what I'm thinking of.
(In fact, I do not recall it being in "Annie Hall" at all, and if you'd have bet me, I'd have lost bigtime.)

I am absolutely unable to appreciate this piece of music because it scrambles my brain.
(I knew I should have gone to this. If memory serves, they have a Q&A after the concert. That would have been my question: "Yeah, yeah, great concert, thanks a million -- PLEASE tell me what movie used Jupiter before I go insane!"

Space, as my father taught me

So Cathy says I should post about my dad and space. All this happened before she was born. It seems impossible that she was not born when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, but, hey, she's just a baby.

John Glenn orbited the earth on my 6th birthday. My family lived on MacDill Air Force Base during that time. I remember our teachers at Tinker Elementary taking us outside to watch the rockets going up. Florida, being a skinny state, was a good spot for watching because we could see the rockets going up even though we were on the west coast.

When Apollo 11 went up, I don't remember watching. I do remember my father making sure that we (me and my sisters and brothers) all stayed up past our bedtimes to watch the moon landing, which, as I remember it, happened about 10 pm our time.

We watched on our little black and white tv, and then my father took us all outside where he had set up a telescope that, I still have no idea where he got the money to buy. He trained that telescope on the moon and made us all look through it.

"There are men walking on that moon right now," he said. "See if you can see them."

Of course, we all thought we could. And he never disabused us of the notion that we had.

My father told me that you could see Orion and then figure out all the constellations following or preceding him. The Pleaides, the seven sisters, who were being followed by Taurus the Bull, who was being followed by Orion the Hunter who was trailed by his faithful dog, Sirius.

To this day, my sisters and I are enthralled with the night sky. I live in Atlanta where the city lights tend to dim the sky. But I have been diligent in making my friends pay attention to the sky. In 2006, the Leonides meteor shower was supposed to be spectacular over Atlanta. I got 20 or so friends to bring blankets to a park near my house to watch the meteor shower. It was 4 am and we had 15 or so people in a park close to downtown Atlanta to watch. One of my friends who lived near the park brought out hot chocolate and coffee, and we laid back on blankets and watched the meteor shower for hours.

When Comet Kohoutek was visible, I took my next door neighbor's kids to the telescope at the Fernbank Science Center because I thought they SHOULD see it.

My sister, Mary, was the commander at Coast Guard Station Port Canaveral. She got to see numerous shuttle launches. For some she got to say, "SCO is go." For launches, there are always people saying, "Such and such is go." For Mary, it was "Secure Coastal Operations (SCO) is go." I think that is so cool.

I love the night sky. I wish everyone loved it like I do.

So this is my answer to Cathy, who said I should write about my dad and why I am the space nut I am.

While we're on the subject of quotes.

This is sort of off-topic. Hey, it's a slow day at work. Sue me.


I don't generally like Sci-Fi. (Gasp!)
I enjoyed C.S. Lewis' Space Trilogy and I loved Buck Rogers when I was a kid, and Star Wars is where I developed a still-existing crush on Harrison Ford, but other than that, I'm not a fan.

But I do love Douglas Adams' masterful "Hitch Hiker's" series.

I think these books are some of the most enjoyable, entertaining volumes ever written.
I remember the first time I read them. I could not put The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy down. I just loved it, and I still do. Adams was subtly clever and his books were great fun, and his death was a great loss.

If you'd like to read them, here are short reviews of three Adams books.

Here is how Hitch Hiker's Guide begins:

The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.

Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

This planet has — or rather had — a problem, which was this: most of the people on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.

Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.

And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, one girl sitting on her own in a small cafe in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.
Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone about it, a terribly stupid catastrophe occurred, and the idea was lost forever.

This is not her story.

Read the WHOLE THING here!

And here are some quotes from the books:

• He hoped and prayed that there wasn't an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn't an afterlife.
• It is no coincidence that in no known language does the phrase 'As pretty as an Airport' appear.
• There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
• Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.
• The last time anybody made a list of the top hundred character attributes of New Yorkers, common sense snuck in at number 79.
• Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.
• You live and learn. At any rate, you live.
• Flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.
• He was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher... or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.
• If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family anatidae on our hands.
• This must be Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays.

In direct violation of my "No toilet humor" rule...

This --- this is...
It's just --- too funny not to post.
Ever since about day two of this blog's existence, I've been considering posting it.
I was just mulling it over and waiting for the right time.
In my defense, it's not technically "toilet humor" because it's not really the "toilet" part that makes it funny. It's the whole thing. Take away one element, and it loses something. It's got numerous qualities of funny: surprise, embarrassment, a brilliant astronaut talking like a hayseed hillbilly, silly subject matter, a supposed private conversation becoming very, very public.

I laugh hysterically every time I read it.

Every time I see a can of Tang (potassium-enriched Tang is what Young was actually referring to when he said "citrus fruit" - another funny element), I chuckle and think, "There is NO WAY I would ever buy that crap."

Thanks a lot, John Young.

P.S. The official transcripts of Apollo 16 (which I have read. I know - behold: Superdork!) replaced the "f" word. Silly NASA.

Without further ado:

Young: "I got the farts again. I got 'em again, Charlie. I don't know what the hell gives 'em to me. Certainly not....I think it's acid in the stomach. I really do."

Duke: "It probably is."

Young: "I mean, I haven't eaten this much citrus fruit in twenty years. And I'll tell you one thing, in another twelve ......days, I ain't never eating any more. And if they offer to serve me potassium with my breakfast, I'm going to throw up. I like an occasional orange, I really do. But I'll be damned if I'm going to be buried in oranges........"

Capcom: "Orion, Houston."

Young: "Yes, sir."

Capcom: "Okay, John. You're...where.... you have a hot mike."

Young: "H..How long....how long have we had that?"

Above: John Young during a happier moment of the Apollo 16 mission