I’ve referred occasionally to the fact that I am a space enthusiast. I’m listening to an instrumental song and watching a montage of Cassini images this morning while simultaneously trying to figure out where and how to direct the desire to write. So why not write a little something on the subject of space.
Popular Science is presently obsessed with Mars and Jupiter. Not without reason, they are fascinating planets but also some of the most extensively observed. I’m almost looking forward to humans going to Mars just so we can stop sending Rovers and pretending they are discovering anything new. Part of the reason Mars and Jupiter are so popular is because they are fairly easy to get to from Earth. Anything beyond Jupiter requires more time (and rocket fuel) to get to; anything closer to the Sun than Earth requires elaborate and extensive maneuvers in order to shed the momentum given to it by the Earth. Mars and Jupiter happen to be in the sweet spot of study.
Again–not without good reason. Jupiter, for all it’s observation, is still fairly enigmatic. Personally, my favorite thing about Jupiter is it’s moons. My fascination there began with 2001: A Space Odyssey and has evolved since then. Ganymede with it’s varied terrain, Io with it’s volcanism. Europa I believe will be getting it’s own mission launched in 2022. Jupiter currently has a probe named Juno orbiting it, but due to a technical issue is stuck in a long 53 day elliptical polar orbit. I believe it was supposed to move into a tighter orbit around Jupiter but wasn’t able to. I don’t know how this has impacted the intended scientific study but the images have certainly been spectacular–prior to Juno no one had seen the Jovian poles.
For Mars, I think it’s been fairly established that there is currently water on Mars and it used to be a warmer, wetter planet. Mars’ molten iron core solidified and so it’s dynamic magnetic field disappeared, which allowed it’s atmosphere to gradually deplete and it turned into the deserted world we know and love today. We also can be reasonably certain there are microbes of some kind on Mars. Popular Science will call this “life” but that’s only to make people think of aliens–it’s the equivalent of going to Greenland and finding moss on a rock. It does not strike me as unusual that microbes would be on Mars–in fact, I would be rather surprised if they weren’t, personally. I would enjoy some detailed study of Mars’ moons but they are so small that it would be almost impossible to orbit them, let alone land on them. It would be more of a rendezvous sequence than a landing. Russia tried sending a probe named Phobos Grunt (Phobos Ground) but due to technical issues it failed to return any observations and may have crashed into Mars.
Saturn has captured the popular imagination mostly thanks to it’s rings and the Cassini mission, but because the Cassini mission was so successful I think it has sapped the will to send another Cassini style probe any time soon. Until technology improves, the only study we will get of Saturn will likely be in passing.
My favorite recent mission was the fly by of Pluto. I watched that fairly eagerly because prior to arrival the only images we had were extremely low resolution. Pluto is a fascinating and dynamic world, the visit by New Horizons raised more questions than answers. Far from being a homogeneous snowball, it had mountains and valleys and the heart-shaped region is an enormous sea of frozen nitrogen. I would be curious to see a follow up mission.
Probably the two planets I am most interested in learning more about are Venus and Neptune. Venus is a good, close candidate for research but steals money away from Mars Mania so has not gotten a favorable look. The challenges involved with getting there and then peering through the dense and toxic atmosphere increase the cost hurdle. Neptune is deserving of a Cassini style orbiter but is much farther away than Saturn. We haven’t been since Voyager 2 and there is suspicion that Neptune’s moon Triton is a captured Kuiper Belt object because of it’s superficial resemblance to Pluto and it’s retrograde orbit.
The trade-off with any mission to space is speed, and weight. A fast rocket can’t stay in orbit and can’t be heavy, so can’t make a lot of observations. A slow rocket can stay in orbit but takes a long time just to get anywhere–when it does we can have a Cassini style orbiter which spends more than a decade in orbit and get lots of observations. This makes it much costlier as a consequence. This trade-off could be eased somewhat if we could cheaply launch rockets from the moon, but that just shifts the costs earlier in the production cycle. We have to get out of the Earth’s gravity well somehow, and unless we source and process materials directly from outside of earth, the gravity well will remain a dollar well, too.
This has been a ramble about space.
Times-Dispatch of Vichy Earth 
Thanks for this interesting and informative ramble. It was of a length and depth perfectly suited to my interest in the Heavenly Bodies. Truth be told, I have Pascal’s reaction when I think too much about Space. I am afraid. A starry desert sky is beautiful at first. But not like a flower is beautiful. Space has a terrible beauty.
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A terrible beauty indeed! Space was my first introduction to the infinite, and I like to think my love of space has helped more than hindered my faith journey in that respect. A terrible beauty is a good way of describing it. I think if you can look at space, or otherwise contemplate the infinite, and not feel a hint of terror, then something is missing!
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