December 18 - Space! The Last Frontier!

nPosted on December 18, 2019

Key Points

nOf course there’s plenty of stuff to explore here on planet Earth – we will hopefully make more discoveries about the ocean floor, the deepest trenches, and the interior of the Earth, for example, and of course there’s still TONS to learn about the complexities of living things and especially brains.

nBut as far as new lands to visit, explore, and maybe even settle – that we’ll only find in space.

nToday is the anniversary of several space-related events:

nOn this date in 1958, the world’s first communications satellite was launched.

nCalled Project SCORE (Signal Communications by Orbiting Relay Equipment), it was the world’s first purpose-built communications satellite, the second test of a communications relay system in space, and the first broadcast of a human voice from space. U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower did NOT go up in the Atlas rocket, of course (at this point in history, there had been no humans in space), but there was an on-board tape recorder that played a tape with Eisenhower’s Christmas message to the world!

nOn this date in 1966, astronomer Richard Walker discovered another of Saturn’s moons.

nBack in the olden days, all our discoveries about space began from observations made on Earth. Since then we have invented space telescopes and manned and unmanned explorers that fly by or orbit or land on a moon or planet or what-have-you.

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In 1966, some of this unmanned fly-by and lander stuff had already happened, but most discoveries were still done with a telescope and photographic plates and painstaking comparison of photographs. That kind of careful comparison is how Walker discovered what is sometimes called Saturn XI – the eleventh moon of Saturn’s to be discovered. (“XI” is the Roman numeral for “11.”) This moon has been named Epimetheus.

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Saturn’s moon Epimetheus (above) is named for
one of the Titans in Greek mythology (below),
even though the resemblance is not all that striking!

nOn this date in 1973, the Soviet Union launched Soyuz 13.

nThis manned spaceflight was the Soviet Union’s first mission dedicated to science. The Soyuz was especially changed in order to carry the Orion 2 Space Observatory, which collected information about stars’ ultraviolet spectra.

nOn this date in 1999, NASA launched the Terra platform with five Earth-sensing instruments.

nThis launch was performed by the U.S., but the Terra platform represented scientists from around the world. The platform name was the result of a contest among high school students; Terra means “Earth” in Latin. The various instruments on Terra included infrared sensors that create high resolution images of ice, clouds, and land surfaces; instruments that took spectral readings; and instruments that measured and tracked pollution. Data collected from Terra help scientists understand climate change, the way pollution spreads, and trends in aerosol and carbon monoxide pollution.

nOn this date in 2018, a meteor exploded over the Bering Sea.

nThe explosion was 10 times greater than the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Luckily, this meteor exploded 16 miles above a sea rather than right on a city! – and so nobody even noticed…

nWe were just talking about the instruments on the Terra platform (see above), and it turns out that the only reason we know about this 2018 explosion is because one of Terra’s instruments captured an image of the meteor’s remnant and its dark trail of smoke just a few minutes after the explosion. The white background is the surface of the clouds above the sea.