2009年8月1日星期六
Apollo 11: 40 years on, where is software engineering today?
Nasa releases remastered Moon landing footage
Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin erecting the US flag at Tranquility Base during the First Lunar walk Photo: NASA
The footage shows US astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin become the first men to land on the Moon on board the Apollo 11 space shuttle.
It has been restored and digitally enhanced using state-of-the-art technology and will be much clearer and less grainy than previously released footage of the 1969 landing.
It features 15 key moments from the historic lunar walk, and is part of Nasa's comprehensive Apollo 11 restoration project which is expected to be completed by Autumn.
The US space agency said it had used "the best available broadcast-format copies of the lunar excursion, some of which had been locked away for nearly 40 years."
The initial video released on Thursday is part of a comprehensive Apollo 11 moonwalk restoration project expected to be completed by Autumn.
The film release comes ahead of the 40th anniversary of the first manned moon landing on July 20. As part of the celebrations, Nasa is collecting footage, images and other Apollo 11 memorabilia from space enthusiasts around the world.
Neil Armstrong, now 78, has kept a low profile since leaving Nasa in 1971 and has reportedly declined to attend a press conference with other astronauts to mark the anniversary on July 20.
Crew includes Twittering skipper, singer, ER doc
STS-127 crew members from left, Mission Specialists David Wolf, Christopher Cassidy, Thomas Mashburn, Flight Engineer Timothy Kopra, Mission Specialist Julie Payette, of Canada, Pilot Douglas Hurley, and Commander Mark Polansky pose for a photo before boarding the astronaut van and a trip to launch pad 39-A and a planned liftoff on the space shuttle Endeavour Wednesday July 15, 2009 at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. (AP Photo/Chris O'Meara)
The astronauts headed to the international space station include a Twittering skipper, a classically trained musician who named her son after one of Columbia's fallen astronauts, and a former Navy SEAL who went into Afghanistan two weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Space shuttle Endeavour's motley crew of seven blasted off Wednesday. When they join the six residents at the space station on Friday, it will be the first time so many have been in orbit together. A brief look at each:
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Commander Mark Polansky is about to become only the second astronaut to tweet from space.
Polansky 鈥?known as Astro_127 because of the mission number 鈥?has been posting Twitter updates for a couple of months. He's also seen on YouTube, making a pitch for questions he can answer during the flight.
He follows Michael Massimino, who provided brief Twitter messages during the May shuttle flight.
"I'll be the first to admit that I didn't know a tweet from a Twitter from a Facebook from MySpace before I got into this. But as I've done it, I've learned that there's a whole community of people who love this stuff," said Polansky, 53, a former Air Force pilot. "I hope that we draw a lot of people in."
Polansky, who's from Edison, N.J., will be making his third trip to the space station. He's been an astronaut since 1996. Before that, he was an engineer and research pilot for NASA.
He and wife Lisa, who used to work with flight crew equipment, have a 4-year-old daughter and a 2-year-old son.
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Pilot Douglas Hurley helped strap in the seven astronauts who died aboard Columbia in 2003.
On Wednesday, it was his turn to climb aboard a space shuttle for liftoff.
"It's a risk business, that's just part of the job," the space rookie said. "I had to come to grips with that many, many, many years ago flying fighters and flying off aircraft carriers."
Following the accident, Hurley served on the Columbia reconstruction team. He said he never considered quitting NASA. Rather, his objective was "what can I do to make this business as safe as it can be?"
Hurley, 42, a Marine lieutenant colonel with the customary crewcut, flew F/A-18s throughout the 1990s. "From there, it was kind of like, 'OK, what else can I fly?'" He became an astronaut in 2000.
He is from Endicott, N.Y., and likes to point out that three other astronauts are from the same 60-mile stretch of Route 17. "Must be something in the water up there," he joked.
Hurley is a huge NASCAR fan. His cousin is married to Greg Zipadelli, crew chief for the No. 20 Home Depot team.
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Dr. David Wolf is an electrical engineer, physician, competitive aerobatic pilot, one-time NASA inventor of the year and chief of the astronaut spacewalking branch.
So it's no surprise he's the lead spacewalker on this mission. He will venture out on three of the five spacewalks.
"I guess I've never wanted to do anything else more than be an astronaut and fly in space," he said. "To me, it's the most fulfilling spot on the team and it gets more fulfilling every day, every flight."
Wolf, 52, who's from Indianapolis, joined Johnson Space Center in Houston in 1983, working on medical equipment for space travel. He became an astronaut in 1990. But he unwittingly got caught up in an FBI kickback and bribery sting at Johnson in 1992 and 1993, and although he did nothing wrong, apologized on national TV. He spent four months on Russia's old Mir space station in 1997, supposedly as penance.
When he got called into the boss' office 1 1/2 years ago, he had no idea he was about to be offered a fourth spaceflight. "I thought I was in trouble," he said.
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Army Col. Timothy Kopra will move into the space station for just more than a month, then hitch a ride back on another shuttle.
When Kopra was growing up in Austin, Texas, in the 1960s and 1970s, NASA was landing men on the moon and "at least every boy wanted to be a fireman, a policeman or an astronaut." He recalled staying up late to watch the moon landings on TV.
"That sense of adventure and the excitement from that experience stuck with me," he said.
Kopra, 46, a former Army aviator and platoon leader, served in operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm in the early 1990s and went on to test pilot school. He was assigned to Johnson Space Center in 1998 as an engineer, working in the space station program, and became an astronaut two years later.
This will be his first spaceflight. He will perform one spacewalk before settling into his space station duties. He's packed several biographies and audio books about early American history, for leisure.
He and wife Dawn have a 13-year-old daughter and 12-year-old son.
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Christopher Cassidy has been in some pretty scary situations as a Navy SEAL, especially in Afghanistan in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Cassidy acknowledged space has its own dangers, but noted: "There won't be people shooting at me."
"In spaceflight, I think the risk is all of the unknown things that we don't know are looming out there to trip us up," he said. His biggest fear? "I just don't want to screw up."
Cassidy, 39, a Navy commander from York, Maine, was awarded the bronze star and a presidential citation for leading a nine-day operation at a cave complex on the Afghan-Pakistan border. He picked up another bronze star a few years later.
His resume reads like James Bond's. As a 10-year member of the SEALS, Cassidy was skilled in building assaults, ship boardings, desert reconnaissance, combat diving, underwater explosives, parachuting and rappelling.
"I like a little bit of a thrill," he explained with a chuckle.
NASA picked him as an astronaut in 2004. This is his first spaceflight. By virtue of his seating on the shuttle, he will become the 500th person to fly in space, and he will perform three spacewalks.
He and wife Julie have two daughters, 14 and 12, and a 10-year-old son.
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Dr. Thomas Marshburn, a former emergency room doctor and preacher's son, has been fascinated with space ever since he was 6 鈥?as old as his daughter is now.
He read every book about space he could find at the school library while growing up in Statesville, N.C., and Atlanta, and ordered every space film.
He didn't realize his passion, back then, was obvious to everyone else until recently. "I remember you talking about that in 10th grade," he said classmates told him.
Marshburn "fell madly in love with medicine" and worked in emergency rooms around the country before becoming a NASA flight surgeon in 1994. He worked with U.S. astronauts aboard the Russian Mir space station and later shuttle and international space station crews. He joined their ranks in 2004.
This is his first spaceflight. He will perform three spacewalks.
Marshburn, who is married, is the youngest of seven children. His brothers and sisters were at the launch.
An interesting tidbit: Marshburn backpacked from Canada to Mexico in 1980, covering 2,600 miles.
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For Canadian astronaut Julie Payette, space is addictive. That's why she's returning for a second shot after 10 years.
She will join fellow Canadian Bob Thirsk at the international space station. It will be the first time two Canadians are in orbit at the same time, something Payette downplays.
"Maybe in some distant future, we're going to look back and stop counting that kind of thing because it will be normal for human beings to be in space," said Payette, 45, an engineer from Montreal who will serve as the chief robot arm operator.
Payette said she feels guiltier now about space fatality statistics than she did when she flew in 1999 to the orbiting outpost. That's because she now has a family.
Her son, Laurier, 6, is named after friend Laurel Clark, who died aboard Columbia in 2003. He was born 4 1/2 months after the accident. Her husband is a test pilot for Lockheed Martin Corp. She also has a teenage stepson.
A Canadian Space Agency astronaut since 1992, Payette is flying a drop of water from the three oceans surrounding Canada and all five Great Lakes for a water awareness exhibit.
She plays the piano and has sung with orchestras in Canada and Switzerland.
(Agencies)
Satellites can spot tsunamis: study
Satellites can spot the leading edge of a tsunami, U.S. government researchers said on Wednesday in a study that might lead to better ways of detecting the giant waves and get people out of their way.
They went back and looked at satellite images in the Indian Ocean as the December 2004 tsunami raced across to destroy coastlines in Thailand, Sri Lanka and elsewhere. They found clear patterns in the water.
"We've found that roughness of the surface water provides a good measure of the true strength of the tsunami along its entire leading edge," Oleg Godin of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, Colorado, said in a statement.
"This is the first time that we can see tsunami propagation in this way across the open ocean."
A giant earthquake in Indonesia triggered the 2004 tsunami, which killed more than 228,000 people.
Governments have since rushed to complete an early warning system of mid-ocean buoys that would detect such waves as they pass by. But such a system is imperfect and might miss areas, especially as the buoys cannot be placed everywhere.
Tsunamis can only usually be seen when they enter shallow water. In the depths of an ocean, the water they displace barely shows -- although this tiny movement can also be detected by satellites.
The satellites that can do this, however, do not cover all the world's seas.
Godin's team found that tsunamis crossing the open ocean stir up and darken the surface waters along the leading edge of the wave. Many ordinary satellites can detect the dark pattern, they reported in the journal Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences.
(Agencies)
Bruce beamed moon landing to the world
In preparing to celebrate the event, Forster鈥檚 Bruce Ekert, who worked at the Honeysuckle Creek transmission station near Canberra at the time of the landing, has reflected on the role Australians played in bringing the historical moment into living rooms across the globe.
Video operator, Ed von Renouard, seated at the console of the Apollo 11 TV scan-converter at Honeysuckle Creek tracking station in July 1969.
IT was 1969, and a moment by which humanity would come to measure itself flickered from a wall of monitors before Bruce Ekert鈥檚 eyes.
As Neil Armstrong stepped from the lunar module Bruce, 23, prayed that the signal beaming the pictures to earth wouldn鈥檛 fail. It was his job, at the Honeysuckle Creek transmission station near Canberra, to make sure it didn鈥檛.
鈥淲e were told not to touch anything,鈥?he said, 鈥渦nless it stopped working. Sort of an 鈥榠f it ain鈥檛 broke, don鈥檛 fix it鈥?approach. So we sat there drinking tea, just hoping nothing would go wrong.鈥?/p>
Now Bruce, his face filled with computer glare, is scrolling through a web page in his Forster flat.
鈥淭here he is,鈥?he says, swivelling in his seat. On the screen is a black-and-white photo of a man in thick glasses glued to a monitor.
鈥淭hat鈥檚 the moment the first person on Earth saw pictures of the landing. His name鈥檚 Ed von Renouard.鈥?/p>
Bruce, a couple of rooms across, absorbed the same vision a split-second later. Doesn鈥檛 it follow, then, that he was among the first dozen or so witnesses of the moon landing?
鈥淵eah, I would鈥檝e been in about the first 20,鈥?he says.
Monday is the 40th anniversary of the day Armstrong and Apollo 11 crewmates Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins became the most famous men on Earth.
NASA had decided at the last minute it would be worth the cost of sending cameras to capture it, and more than six hundred million huddled around TVs and radios to hear the first words crackle from another world.
Armstrong鈥檚 鈥淥ne small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind鈥?was scripted. Aldrin鈥檚 description of 鈥淢agnificent desolation鈥?was his own.
But, days earlier, NASA hit a snag.
鈥淭hey realised that, at the time of the landing, the moon would be on our side of the Earth,鈥?Bruce says.
鈥淎merica would be out of communications. So they looked for tracking stations that could pick it up. There was one at Parkes, and one at Honeysuckle.鈥?/p>
It鈥檚 worth noting that the Parkes station, romanticised in Rob Sitch鈥檚 comedy The Dish, was never actually the sole link to the mission. There was always additional contact through Honeysuckle and Goldstone, California. But Parkes was in a position, at one point, to provide the best signal, thus briefly becoming the focal point of the broadcast.
Bruce and three other technicians had set up a microwave link between Honeysuckle, the Apollo 11 spacecraft and mission control.
It would be wrong to say a failure of Bruce鈥檚 monitors would鈥檝e been a complete disaster. There was a backup connection. But it would have been one giant leap toward losing the telecast.
鈥淲hen Honeysuckle was chosen as one of the transmission stations, it had pretty old infrastructure. Even for the time,鈥?he says.
鈥淚t was old valve equipment, not the new transistors. It could fail anytime. It could get hot and鈥?- Bruce clicks his fingers - 鈥渏ust die.鈥?/p>
As the pictures beamed through, neither Bruce nor his workmates spoke of making history, or watching it unfold.
鈥淭here was a cheer when it happened, but more of that feeling came later when we watched the news reports,鈥?he says.
鈥淲e didn鈥檛 see the celebrations happening like everyone else. And we didn鈥檛 know all the children had been given time off school to watch the landing.鈥?/p>
With a 40th anniversary reunion 鈥?鈥淚 haven鈥檛 seen some of those people since 1969鈥?鈥?coming up, Bruce wants more credit for the Australians who brought the moment into living rooms and moved Walter Cronkite to tears.
鈥淭here were about 100 Australians behind the scenes, and we worked as hard as anyone for very little recognition,鈥?he says, looking out at the traffic below.
The giant dish that loomed over Honeysuckle and skimmed history鈥檚 most famous pictures across the globe is now at Tidbinbilla Deep Space Tracking Station, ACT. It鈥檚 about to be decommissioned.
Asked if he hopes the dish will be preserved, Bruce chuckles.
鈥淚t鈥檚 26 metres across. You鈥檇 need a big museum,鈥?he says. But then he folds his arms over his grey woollen jumper, and smiles faintly.
鈥淏ut I used to think it was quite a sight, that enormous dish turning across the sky.鈥?
Cosmic surprise: Many asteroids are comets
This November 2000 NASA file image shows a meteor streaking across the sky during the Leonid meteor shower. Many of the primitive bodies wandering the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter are former comets, tossed out of orbit by a brutal ballet between the giant outer planets, say a team of astrophysicists. (AFP/NASA-HO/File)
Many of the primitive bodies wandering the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter are former comets, tossed out of orbit by a brutal ballet between the giant outer planets, say a team of astrophysicists.
A commonly accepted theory is that the asteroid belt is the rubble left over from a "proto-planetary disk," the dense ring of gas that surrounds a new-born star.
But the orbiting rocks have long been a source of deep curiosity. They are remarkably varied, ranging from mixtures of ice and rock to igneous rocks, which implies they have jumbled origins.
The answer to the mystery, according to a study published by the British journal Nature on Wednesday, is that a "significant fraction" of the asteroid population in fact comprises ex-comets.
Famously described as "dirty snowballs" of ice and dust, comets are lonely, long-distance wanderers of the Solar System whose elliptical swing around the Sun can take decades.
Researchers in France and the United States ran a mathematical model of the development of the early Solar System, when the planets were accreting from clustering masses of dust and gas.
According to this model, the nascent giant planets -- Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune -- orbited at this time in a pretty compact configuration, between five and 15 astronomical units (AUs) from the Sun.
An AU is a standard unit of measurement for Solar System distances. It equals the distance from the Earth to the Sun, or around 150 million kilometres (93 million miles).
Beyond the giant planets was a disk-shaped mass of comets, known as trans-Neptunian objects, between 16 and 30 AUs from the Sun.
As the giants became bigger and bigger, their orbits became unstable.
Eventually, after around 600 million years, Uranus and Neptune were kicked out by gravitational jousting.
They rammed into the disk of comets and scattered its members throughout the Solar System, according to this model. Many of them were captured by the weak gravitational force of the asteroid belt, where they remain to this day.
"It's a paradigm shift," said Matthieu Gounelle of France's National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in a press release.
"The asteroid belt is not just a leftover from the formation of the Solar System, but also that of violent phenomena" including the great planetary migration.
If the model is right, it implies that the difference between the most primitive asteroids and comets is even slimmer than thought.
It would also shed light on the controversial origin of micrometeorites, or tiny extraterrestrial particles that survive the fiery passage through Earth's atmosphere.
Micrometeorites are different from meteorites in composition and texture, and this could be explained if they derive from comets, which are richer in organic material and crumblier than native asteroids.
(Agencies)
40 years ago the world's attention was focused heavenward
Forty years ago this week people all over the world had their eyes fixed on the heavens.
We were all anticipating a watershed moment that became "a small step for man and one giant leap for mankind."
Of course, we're talking about the Apollo 11 mission and the moon landing.
Since that time, space travel has become more common, but it still captures our imagination.
It also has practical applications.
A recent AP story quotes President Barack Obama saying, "The Apollo program itself produced technologies that have improved kidney dialysis and water purification systems; sensors to test for hazardous gases; energy-saving building materials; and fire-resistant fabrics used by firefighters and soldiers. And, more broadly, the enormous investment of that era -- in science and technology, in education and research funding -- produced a great outpouring of curiosity and creativity, the benefits of which have been incalculable."
One of the great aspects of the space program today is its international scope.
At the time of Apollo 11 there was a rivalry with the Soviet Union. Today, we join hands in space and share our knowlege. It's the way it should be.
Canada is part of this international effort and we have been for some time.
Fifty years ago, the Canadian government announced to the world its plan to be the third country to launch its own satellite into space. Recently, reporter Michael Purvis profiled Sault resident Jack Dacey, 79, who was working at the Defence Research Telecommunications Establishment in Ottawa at the time, testing electronic equipment for the military, and developing some of the first solar cells.
Of course, the city is also home to Roberta Bondar.
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