| Contact established |
[23 Mar 2008|09:52pm] |
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From the time NASA launched its successful Viking 1 probe to Mars, to the time it received the first pictures and data from the Martian surface beamed back by the lander, just under eleven months had passed. It sounds like a long time, but Mars is a long way from here, and the probe had to:
ride to Earth orbit,
complete an almost ten-month transit to Mars,
spend a month in orbit while the landing site was chosen (the initial target site turned out to be full of rocks),
separate from the orbiter module,
deorbit by firing rockets,
slow down by atmospheric friction,
slow down some more with a parachute,
slow down still more with some final rockets,
land successfully (about 3 hours after separation from the orbiter),
make contact with the orbiter,
take its first picture, and
transmit the image (this alone took 4 minutes)
The first image from the surface of Mars. High-resolution version from NASA here.</p>
Then, of course, the radio signal had to make its way to Earth, and that can take between about 7 and 44 minutes, not counting delays at each link in the transmission chain. And after all this the probe still had to finish unfolding itself, deploy the rest of the equipment, and turn everything on.
After a mission launches out into the void, it can be a long time before those back home know if everything’s okay.
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| Partyline removed from Friends List |
[22 Mar 2008|05:16pm] |
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/syndicated.gif) partyline has been removed from the Friends List. It was formerly a multi-author political weblog including one of the other writers currently on my list, but has become a wordy, rambly, disagreeable and self-impressed evanglical serial spiel. It uses flourishingly grand language to drive home mundane and inarguable points, then burns through thesauruses expounding poorly-argued religious opinions as if they were just as obviously true. The over-grand language makes it look like the writer either takes pleasure in substituting ten-letter words for shorter ones to look smart, or writes in Korean and publishes in English via Babelfish.
There's no need for me to scroll past badly-written bad ideas about the supernatural to read updates from my actual friends.
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| Noordwijk 07-08 |
[25 Jun 2007|10:09am] |
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I’m all packed up. My bags are in the car, and in a few minutes my parents will drive me to the airport to leave for the ESA YGT in Noordwijk. It’s a longtrip, and afterwards it may be some time before I can get to the internet again. So in the meantime, I’ll leave you with the letter of application I sent to ESA last December, explaining why I aspired to join the program.
See you from the Netherlands.
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To: Applications officer, European Space Agency
From: Raymond Francis
Date: 14 December 2006
Re: Application for Young Graduate Trainee Program
Madam or Sir,
I wish to express my interest in the European Space Agency’s Young Graduate Trainee program. For a young person in my position – a recent graduate in engineering, with a mind as full of the aspirations and idealism of youth as it is with mathematics and science – a training contract with the ESA represents a tremendous and unique chance to learn, and grow, and prepare myself for an exciting career in space technology.
I live in Sudbury, a remote northern city surrounded by Canada’s boreal forest. The closest settlement large enough to be called a city is 150 km away, and much of Low Earth Orbit – including the ISS – is closer than the provincial capital. It’s a surprising spot for a city; not on any major rivers, far from the Great Lakes, cold and wintry. There’s a city here because of a vast mineral deposit; one that exists because of a meteorite impact 1.85 billion years ago. All of the history of this city, its settlement, growth, industrialization, resulting ecological devastation, and the engineered and ongoing recovery of the forest flow from that event. Sudbury is here because of how earth and space and humanity interact, and so am I.
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| 2 1337 4 *fleet? |
[24 Jun 2007|01:47am] |
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If Air Cadets and MCG left me with anything, it was knowing how to schedule my time. And there are a lot of things to do to get ready for the ESA YGT. Not that I’m complaining; I’m having fun with all the planning and preparation. I’m pretty well booked up until Monday, though, when I leave for Noordwijk. But things are well on their way.
Last week at the symposium, I ran into a freelance reporter who took great interest in my pending adventure to the Netherlands. She passed the information on to some of the agencies she works with, and as a result, last Thursday I was interviewed on CBC Radio ( the regional afternoon program ) about it. I enjoyed the interview, and it was also just fun being on the other side of things; I grew up listening to Quirks & Quarks and Ideas, and such.
I was also interviewed by a young man from one of the local newspapers, the Northern Life. The article appeared in yesterday’s paper; it was my barber who pointed it out to me, in fact. The online version is available here.
So now I’m famous? It’s more fun than when the paper printed a photo of me with a vacuum cleaner, when I was three. The best part, of course, is that some day about fifty years from now, about fifty light-years away from here, the Romulans are going to briefly scan to this otherwise unremarkable frequency and think: “Man, that isn’t a string of prime numbers, either.”
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| You tend to look up a lot when you come out of buildings |
[17 Jun 2007|10:59pm] |
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It’s okay not flying. It really is. Life is fine, and the world is full of interesting and exciting things. It’s a whole experience, and there’s an entire universe to explore and learn about, an entire life to learn how to live. And it’s just fine, walking around among the trees, under the sky.
Then you go flying again. And you come down. And you look up at the sky and long to return. And for a little while, you remember what it felt like to turn about up there, to manoevre, to think and plan and operate and control and fit in. And move, however briefly, throgh the air as if you belong there. Move the machine as an extension of yourself, the lifting surfaces only a few joints away, the open air just beyond your body.
If you wait long enough, that fades, slowly, and reaches a low, steady-state level at which you can almost forget it…
… until you go flying again.
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| Planetary and Terrestrial Mining Sciences Symposium |
[16 Jun 2007|05:10pm] |
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I was out most of this week again. This time, it was the Planetary and Terrestrial Mining Sciences Symposium. Representatives were there from a number of universities and from industry, as well as several NASA technical centres and the CSA. It’s hosted by the Northern Centre for Advanced Technology, who are designing a drill or two to be used on NASA and CSA geology missions to the Moon and Mars.
Most of the conference consisted of presentations of papers by various individuals and groups. There was the company developing a new way of doing highly comprehensive chemical analysis on rock samples with minimal preparation and non-radiaoactive equipment, and the one with a fancy new hybrid computing system for real-time equipment control. NASA showed off calculations for oxygen production from regolith for a moon base
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| If you read Zhuangzi in Spanish, the dream takes on a whole new meaning |
[09 Jun 2007|12:26am] |
Fun fact: No correlation has been found between east-Asian butterfly populations and the cycles of Atlantic hurricane intensity. The leading hypothesis is that this is simply because no one has looked, but gaining popularity is the supposition that when it comes down to it, Zhuangzi is a philosopher, not a scientist, and he’s just no good at dreaming about gas dynamics.
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| Single LGM seeks same |
[18 May 2007|07:41pm] |
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Searching for a partner-in-life is a lot like SETI, except there are a whole lot of Wow! signals.
In the first place, it’s a big universe, and there are a lot of stars out there. And it’s likely that somewhere in all that vastness, among or below those countless stars, there’s someone else who looks up at them rather like you do. So there’s hope. SETI is not a dead-end road.
But at the same time, it’s important to remember that the distances are large, and that you can expect it to take a long time to find anything. In fact, it’s difficult even to guess at how long it might be, because the factors that influence it are so variable. It could be quite a while, though, and so since we didn’t stumble across the United Federation of Planets in the first little while after we switched on the radio telescopes, there’s an important operating principle we must adopt: to accept that the search may take an indefinitely long time. We could bump into a Golden Record from Alpha Centauri next week, or we could still be looking a thousand years from now, even if we develop spectacular new technologies. It’s no reason to give up hope — as we said at the outset, it’s a big universe — but the realities of cosmic geography make the expected mean time to contact long. So we can’t depend on it.
For the forseeable future, we must accept that it’s just us here, no matter who may be just around the corner in the stellar neighborhood. We can’t hope that contact with aliens will happen soon, and give us the dose of perspective we need to get over our resource wars, our loyalty to man-made economic systems, our religious differences, or anything else we struggle with. This is our house, and it’s entirely up to us. We all live here, and nobody else is going to come save us, so we’d better get our lives in order and learn to get along. We can’t sit around waiting for the Vulcans to descend from the sky and say “You complete me.” We need to be able to live on our own in steady-state.
Which isn’t to say that we give up looking for companions in the cosmos.
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| When did you first realise you liked free-body diagrams? |
[17 May 2007|08:38pm] |
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Looking back, it almost seems obvious from the start I was going to turn out to be an engineer. Long before I moved away to university and started to live the lifestyle, I was already exhibiting all the telltale signs. And still my parents figured I’d be a priest or a politician. But, you know. They’re always the last to suspect. Anyway nowadays I’ve got boxes of brightly-coloured textbooks and I make caluculus jokes in mixed company… and I’ve got too much Lego to keep it in the closet anymore.
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| New housing |
[11 May 2007|05:56pm] |
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It used to be a beautiful spot, and there were even trees. But someone decided they needed to take those down to make living space. And now, well, places you used to be able to go for a walk overlooking the water have been completely transformed and are inaccessible. What used to be a smooth seam between the limit of the land and the clear blue is broken up with new dwellings, reflecting dimly in the water as if to suggest the redoubled effect the construction has had on the surroundings.
If you’ve got a favourite patch of woodland, be ready for it to be drastically altered once they get their grubby paws on it. Left to their own devices they don’t waste any time in completely transforming their environment, displacing countless other organisms with their work. Take out trees, alter the drainage, literally gobble up the forest and cover the rich, rolling soil with a perfectly flat expanse of new stuff that nothing can take root in, to ease transportation to and from the home.
Once it happens, you can bet the effects will be pretty much permanent. The land will never look the way it did again. And they’ll just expand until no attractive patch of waterfront land in the forest hasn’t been transformed and reworked to suit their lifestyle. The rest of nature can fit into their new environment, or go live someplace else.
But then, that’s their nature; that’s how they fit into this world. After all, they’re beavers.
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| Playground, garden, monument to a city’s rebirth |
[11 May 2007|02:36am] |
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I was out for a walk today, taking photos as I often do, strolling through The Forest. That’s perhaps a grandiose name for a patch of wooded land in the middle of a residential area, but it’s what I’ve always called it. I grew up in a house on the edge of these woods. The regional re-greening effort to recover from the effects of industrial pollution that had almost completely deforested this area had begun only a few years before I was born, and so I grew up at the same time as the forest.
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| Respect your elders |
[03 May 2007|11:04pm] |
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My doctor has his office inside a retirement home. The place is pretty nicely set-up, with wood-paneled walls, big windows, and nurses constantly pushing around carts piled up with sheets and towels. It’s surrounded by little landscaped hills with flowers and trees, and inside there are couches and large, open sitting rooms where septuagenarians quietly read the newspaper. It’s in a quiet neighborhood, and it seems pleasant enough.
The doors are all locked. 24/7. The exterior doors and the doors between sections of the facility. In fact, they’re electronically controlled locks, with a numbered code that you have to punch into a keypad to open them. There’s no moving between buildings or going outside unless you have the code and punch it in to activate the door.
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| The Centre: an introduction |
[03 May 2007|01:13am] |
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The Canadian Forces administer a youth program called the Royal Canadian Air Cadets for youth aged 12-19. Part of the program is flying training — familiarization rides for the younger cadets, and flying lessons when they’re older. I’m a military reserve officer, and my primary job with the Cadet program is running the flying program. I’m a flight instructor.
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| Course set. Preparing to get underway. |
[26 Apr 2007|10:18pm] |
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Almost exactly a year ago, I came home from university, successful. It had been five years of a relatively intense program, and the peculiar co-op sequence had seen me move to a new town and living space every four months for a big part of that period. But I’d planned for that. I’d been planning to make it to that date since the last months of high school. Just about six years ago, actually. And that’s as far as I’d planned. Financially, logistically, and just effort-wise, university was such a lengthy, unified thing that it consumed all my planning, and I hadn’t planned much beyond its end. The goal was always the end of university, and that’s what my sights were set on right up to the end of my last exam.
So a year ago I found myself coming back into port after a long voyage. Completing the path I’d laid out five years before, returning home after leaving for school, and not yet having another to follow. And my task was to figure out what the next one was.
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| The life cycle of steel and stone |
[19 Apr 2007|11:39pm] |
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The weather was pleasant and sunny yesterday, after an unusually snowy start to April. I availed myself of the opportunity to take a stroll. It gave me a chance to enjoy the weather, and also to wonder about some aspects of railway infrastructure.
I have a particular way of walking around when I have a camera. I suppose it changes the way you look at the world. If you’re just out for a walk, it’s you, your thoughts, and the environment. The things you notice get used to help navigate the world — obstacles, signs, etc — and as catalysts for thought and understanding. But when it’s for the camera, you have to get out of the habit of making intuitive 3-spaces out of your visual perceptions, and instead concentrate on how objects at different distances contrast, because it’s all going to get flattened into two dimensions. And when you do get to the point of taking a photo, you have to remember that it’s not what objects are, or what they mean, it’s what they look like. You have to try to make the two congruent, and to get the subject in a context that is significant and explanatory… if that’s what’s desired. Sometimes it’s just about finding things that look interesting.
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| The standard model predicts the existence of cognitons |
[17 Apr 2007|04:53am] |
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Sometimes I can see it. Sometimes I can see the whole… space… made up of those threads of thought. Artistic. Romantic. Analytical. Descriptive. Visual. Sensory. Sensual. Proud. Passionate. Rational. They’re all modes of operation that the human brain is able to work in. And they’re all related. Built of the same elemental algorithms, run by the same neurons. We just get used to using a few of them, each. Sometimes I feel like I can see them all, see the spaces where more should be that I don’t know about. See how I’d have to learn to run each of them better, see how as I get older my grey matter is calcifying into making some things hard to think at the same times as my parents begin to find some things hard to read.
It’s like taking an integral. You find something which can look like what you had, in certain places. Remember in… Calculus III, maybe? How two functions in different variables could have the same multivariate integral?
∫ 2x dxdy = ∫ 2y dxdy = x2 + y2
This was because the y-dependent term in that polynomial function doesn’t vary with x, so when you take the x derivative, it becomes zero.
Now, imagine that there are much more complicated terms than just x2 and y2, as well as terms that include more than one variable, so that they show up in some of the derivatives and not in others, and in each case a particular variable might have varying importance to the nature of the derivative. You can imagine, with a handful of variables, you can get all kinds of combinations in the derivatives, some where y has just a tiny role but is necessarily present, others where there are only four or five variables, others where you use a dozen.
Now imagine that each variable is a little process that your brain is able to carry out. a little programming function that it can execute. Then all the different modes of operation I described above are just derivatives of the same mammoth multivariate function. Each one combining some of the parts that are available, and ignoring others mostly or completely.
I won’t pretend that I can see the function. But sometimes, in a moment of insight, I feel like I can see many of the derivatives mapped out before me, and from the terms they contain, I can get a feel for the nature the master function — the big integral — must have. I start to see derivatives I never really used before, and recognize them as attitudes and skills and reactions that people and culture and turns of phrase have named, and that I’ve never felt or understood, only accepted as an unseen fact.
I’d never felt ‘pride’ until I watched my first students get their wings.
Even though people told me the motivation, I never understood why the pub on Cedar street has all-female serving staff with a uniform including a short skirt, until I went to the bar down the street with the handsome waiter.
I never understood realist art until I saw the reflection in the lamp of the oyster’s reflection in the bottle in still life (Willem Kalf, I think).
And there are plenty more. Emotions. Forms of artistic expression. The sorts of things that are easy to dismiss as incomprehensibly empty if you’re used to working with the derivatives with terms that add up to analysis and verbal description and such things.
Sometimes it seems I can see it. And sometimes I’m too busy with the mechanical minutiae of daily life, thinking about what to eat and how to earn a living.
Which is where the engineer in me comes in. I put a lot of work into trying to design a lifestyle that doesn’t take that much processing effort. As much as possible, I try to make all those parts of my life self-guiding and self-repairing, so I don’t have to waste time thinking about which shirt to wear today, and can instead indulge in working out problems or thinking about those derivatives.
Great works of engineering can improve and enrich societies by what they facilitate. Minor works of engineering do the same for individual lives.
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| Hello, Moscow? I’d like to close my flight plan. |
[12 Apr 2007|08:04pm] |
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On the morning of April 12th, 1961, Yuri Gagarin was having a bit of a rough ride. He’d already seen the sun rise twice that day, and now it might have seemed the fury of the sun was all he could see out his tiny window. The pleasant glimpses of South America and the Atlantic had been replaced by burning hot gases that enveloped his, the first-ever, manned space capsule. The instrument module had failed to properly detach prior to re-entry, and so the craft was gyrating wildly as it ploughed into the upper atmosphere, unstreamlined and out of balance.
 Gagarin’s Boctok-1 re-entry capsule. The name, pronounced ‘Vostok’, means ‘East’.
 The spacecraft configuration with the orbital instrument module attached to the re-entry module. In the case of Vostok 1, the instrument module had partly detached.
Besides drifting in and out of radio contact during his orbit and having to wait to find out if he was in a stable orbit at all, Gagarin now had to ride out these unplanned and uncontrolled swings in his craft’s trajectory. After more than an hour of weightlessness, the cosmonaut was experiencing 8 g’s or more; most people black out at 4 or 5, a g-suit is usually good to 7.
Gagarin exited the capsule at around 7 km above the ground, as planned, and he and the capsule parachuted separately to the ground in a farming area in southwest Russia. A farmer and child saw him descend out of the sky in his spacesuit and parachute, and were apparently apprehensive of this strange figure. He reportedly reassured them that he was no threat:
“I told them, don’t be afraid, I am a Soviet like you, who has descended from space, and I must find a telephone to call Moscow!”
My favourite part is this recovery plan. “One you come back to Earth, look around for a phone.” This logistical innovation brought to you by the people who put a dog in space… and left her there. (You should have seen her face.)
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