The Invisible Sky

I’ve got a tiny scar just beside my left eye, the result of a careless act involving me as a five-year-old jumping around near the front door of my house, stumbling and hitting the side of my head on the door’s lock.

The scar though is nothing compared to the one that now graces the planet Jupiter. In fact, the damn thing is so big it is actually the size of Earth.

Looking like a big black dot (pictured above at the top), it was discovered this week, I am proud to say, by a man from ‘Down Under’, 44-year-old amateur astronomer Anthony Wesley, who then contacted scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

In his Observation Report, Wesley first caught sight of the intriguing spot through his big-ass telescope just before 1am, just as he was about to pull the plug on the night’s planet-gazing to watch a bit of cricket and golf.

He initially thought it was just a “normal dark polar storm”. “However as it rotated further into view, and the conditions improved I suddenly realised that it wasn’t just dark, it was black in all channels, meaning it was truly a black spot,” he wrote.

“My next thought was that it must be either a dark moon (like Callisto) or a moon shadow, but it was in the wrong place and the wrong size.

“Also, I’d noticed it was moving too slow to be a moon or shadow. As far as I could see it was rotating in sync with a nearby white oval storm that I was very familiar with – this could only mean that the back feature was at the cloud level and not a projected shadow from a moon. I started to get excited.

“It took another 15 minutes to really believe that I was seeing something new – I’d imaged that exact region only two days earlier and checking back to that image showed no sign of any anomalous black spot.

Anthony Wesley and his 14.5 inch telescope.

Glen Orton, from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told New Scientist, that the spot was most likely the result of a comet or asteroid crashing into the giant gas planet.

NASA collected its own images after being notified by Wesley using its Infrared Telescope Facility in Hawaii.

“Our first image showed a really bright object right where that black scar was, and immediately we knew this was an impact,” Orton said. “There’s no natural phenomenon that creates a black spot and bright particles like that.”

The discovery came 15 years to the day would you believe after the comet Shoemaker-Levey 9 was seen slamming into Jupiter.

Wesley told The Sydney Morning Herald that we humans should feel fortunate our big Jovian brother was protecting us from receiving our own batterings from object from outer space.

“If anything like that had hit the Earth it would have been curtains for us, so we can feel very happy that Jupiter is doing its vacuum-cleaner job and hoovering up all these large pieces before they come for us.”

SOURCES:
Observation Report
New Scientist
The Sydney Morning Herald

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The Chinese are coming … just like legendary author Arthur C. Clarke predicted 27 years ago.

In his 1982 book ’2010: Odyssey Two’ – the follow-up to his mega hit novel, and movie by Stanley Kubrick, ’2001: A Space Odyssey’ – Clarke envisioned China entering, and then leaping ahead of both the US and the then USSR, in a prolonged Space Race.

While the makers of the ’2010′ film adaptation – released in 1984 – chose to leave them out of their version, the Chinese in fact played a pivotal role in Clarke’s earlier novel.

The story obviously takes place nine years after the Discovery‘s disastrous mission to Jupiter to investigate a giant monolith that had parked itself near one the planet’s moons, the icy Europa. The on-board computer HAL went a little nuts and crew member Dave Bowman became a ‘Star Child’ after disappearing into the monolith.

It is hoped a joint American-Soviet rescue mission will shed light on what happened, but not if the Chinese get there first.

Not long before the spacecraft the Leonov blasts off, a Chinese space station orbiting Earth reveals itself to be a rival craft named the Tsien, which rockets away to Jupiter, and ultimately reaching everyone’s destination first.

The fact that the Chinese mission meets a rather untimely demise after the Tsien lands on Europa and is attacked by an indigenous life-form is not important … well, to this post anyway.

Now we only a year out from 2010, don’t expect to see any Chinese missions to Jupiter, or any other planet in our solar system for that matter, in the very near future.

But do expect them to target another heavenly body a little closer to our own, the Moon, in the next decade – according to the experts.

While debate might still rage over whether that famous moon-landing by the US – in particular Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin – in 1969 did in fact happen or whether it was faked (and for this post let’s suppose it did), the US is keen to get back up there.

And just like they famously wanted to beat the Russians almost 40 years ago, this time they want to outdo the Chinese.

It has been 27 years since the 12th and last American, Eugene Cernan – as part of the sixth and last NASA Apollo mission – achieved the feat.

During that time, no other country has made an attempt.
The Space Race was won. Competition over.

Until now.

Last September an amazing milestone was reached when Zhai Zhigang carried out China’s first ever space walk.

The country follows just the US and Russia to achieved such a technological accomplishment, and came five years after China first sent a man into space.

No doubt the Chinese are setting their sights a little higher – or a little further away – the moon.

With that in mind the American Aerospace Industries Association came out strongly earlier this year when it urged the US Government to step up its space exploration campaign.

Speaking at the Reuters Aerospace and Defense Summit in Washington, Marion Blakey, chief executive of the Aerospace Industries Association, said “It has been a long time since we’ve had anyone breathing down our necks. Now we do.”

And then, with a touch of arrogance, I might add, said, “The idea that the next boots on the moon are probably going to be Chinese is something that the public has not realized.”

Professor Alan Smith, head of the UK’s Moonlite Mission to the Moon, one of a growing number of scientific programmes to send probes to the lunar surface, spoke to BBC News and raised some great points.

“The Apollo missions left the Moon unfinished. The programme was scrapped after the public lost interest in it in the early 1970s,” he said. “However, the science was barely touched, so we need to go back and complete the science.

“Now, the US plan, unlike Apollo, is to have a semi-permanent base on the Moon – that involves a much more elaborate infrastructure being established.”

Former US president George W. Bush said as much during a 2004 speech outlining a bid to return to the moon in 2020.

“We can use our time on the Moon to develop and test new approaches, technologies and systems,” he said, before adding, “We will then be ready to take the next steps of space exploration. He stated that these included “missions to Mars” and to “worlds beyond”.

It was probably one of the most intelligent things he has said during his eight-year reign as president.

While Bush has departed the White House, new president  Barack Obama looks like focussing some of his own attention on the growing space race.

It was reported recently by bloomberg.com, that Obama will “probably tear down long-standing barriers between the US’s civilian and military space programs to speed up a mission to the moon amid the prospect of a new space race with China”.

That means the Pentagon and NASA linking up for the first time.

NASA chief Michael Griffin, who is believed to be against the idea, visited the Chinese Space program in 2006, and according to bloomberg.com he believes the countrywill put a man on the moon before the US does.

“Chinese state-owned companies already are assembling heavy-lift rockets that could reach the moon, with a first launch scheduled for 2013. All that would be left to build for a manned mission is an Apollo-style lunar lander,” the article says.

It later adds, “China plans to dock two spacecraft in orbit in 2010, a skill required for a lunar mission”.

Let the race begin…

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