Aabservations

Tag: Science

  • Humans on board

    A week ago, Artemis II launched to the Moon, weighing 2,600 metric tons. But just a hundredth of a percent of that payload determined everything about the trip: the humans on board.

    You will have seen the headlines about the record-breaking distances travelled and the “sci-fi”-like images snapped. But my favourite bits are the parts—often under the radar—that are genuinely human.

    One moment I loved was when they were about to start the lunar observation period. The crew has spent three years training to observe the Moon during the seven hours of the fly-by, learning geology, travelling to Iceland, studying charts, and practising on the bespoke software that would cue their observations with military precision. Less than an hour before starting their meticulously-timed programme, astronaut Christina Koch called down to Mission Control: “Hey Jenny, just to make absolutely sure that we start observation time as expected, we are showing in [task software] Optimus that observation time starts in about 15 minutes, and in [another system] LTP that our first target starts in about 29minutes. Can you confirm that you’d like us to start Discussion #1 in 29 minutes at 19:00 GMT?” To which Mission Control replied, “Christina, we are tracking that Discussion #1 should start at 18:45, that’s 15 minutes from now” (see 1:32:40). The astronauts nearly missed their cue by 14 minutes—two craters’ worth of data out of 35 targets! We’ve all been there having the wrong time in our calendar, although not 250,000 miles from Earth with millions watching. Thankfully they were saved by having the humility to check.

    During lunar observation, the mission became even more human—intentionally so. Our eyes are better than cameras at picking up colour, at noticing the way images change as the angle of light changes, and—because we have two eyes—at seeing depth and topography. So while the astronauts took thousands of photos, the research team got much more scientific understanding by hearing them describe in words what they saw. They paired up at the tiny windows for this task, which they reported meaningfully improved the quality of what they observed. “Look Mom” is a skill we practise from childhood for a reason. We see more when someone else helps us notice the world around us—or in this case, the worlds beyond us.

    These precision instruments—the human eye and brain—do have some quirks, though. True, our lenses don’t fog up like telescope eyepieces or scratch or get fingerprints, but they do get tired. Initially, NASA blocked just five minutes for the pair to observe each crater. During training they realised this was too intense, so they increased to eight minutes, and had the astronauts pairs swap off every hour. Yes: these super high-performance, highly selected NASA astronauts had to have accommodation for their humanness. May this be a lesson to all of us who have worked beyond our capacity—those back-to-back meetings, those conferences without breaks, those “one more email” moments: giving a task enough time is actually really important to get it right, and to ensure that the glorious machine actually doing the work—the human—remains healthy long enough to complete the objective. I was impressed that NASA did not tell the astronauts to strive harder; they instead respected the human limits, and told their science team to prioritise fewer craters to observe.

    As the humans travelled around the Moon, they described what they saw — evocatively: the twin craters that look like a snowman; the dusting on the craters that looked like snow; the darker patch (Mare) that bulges like a healing wound. I usually thought of science as being about measurements, but I realised, listening to them, that the real frontiers of science have been about description. Description is about finding the right words. At one point, the crew were so amazed by what they saw they joked down to Mission Control, “Can you come up with a list of another twenty superlatives?” As the Artemis II crew made clear, science and exploration are not just about seeing and measuring things for yourself; it’s about sharing that experience with others. And what’s the medium of sharing science, or any other human experience? The humanities. I hope in future missions, astronauts will study poetry, literature and art alongside geology. If you need more evidence that this is a good idea, many astronauts actually take up painting when they return to Earth, to capture those impressions that photos couldn’t quite do.

    One of the highlights of this week was their viewing of a solar eclipse. But it almost had a huge hiccup—to look at an eclipse, you need to look right at the Sun, which can burn your retina. So just like on Earth, you need eye protection. But seeing a solar eclipse wasn’t really in the plan until the exact launch date was confirmed. Just a few weeks before the launch, someone at NASA realised “oh my gosh we need eclipse glasses!”, rummaged through a cupboard, and found leftover public engagement glasses from the 2024 eclipse event. Surely these paper eclipse glasses were the cheapest piece of scientific kit on the mission—and led to my favourite photo of the crew!

    The biological limits and needs of the humans on board have really come through the mission. Moreover these four super charismatic, likeable astronauts have also been able to share why human exploration is so different from robotic missions. Every press conference, journalists and members of the public want to know, as Victor Glover put it, “how it feels.” The “Moon Joy” that they and the team on the ground have been expressing through their smiles, thumbs ups, hugs, tears, fist pumps, and humour has been infectious; the whole team is having so much fun!

    I loved Christina Koch’s reflection on what she will miss most from the expedition: “I will miss this camaraderie. I will miss being this close, with this many people, with a common mission, getting to work hard every day, across hundreds of thousands of miles with the team on the ground… We are close like brothers and sisters.”

    It’s not just me that was more moved by the people than the rocket science. Commander Reid Wiseman reflected that for him, his early career was first about flying and then about space. Now, it’s about family.

    Reid cares greatly about the people exploring space. He’s made a decision to have all four astronauts fly the vehicle, not just him and the official pilot Victor Glover. I thought that decision was because he’s a nice, inclusive team leader. But he really wants to prove, technically, that you don’t need to be a test pilot to be a mission commander in the future. Removing that constraint opens up who can go into space, allowing more diverse skillsets and a broader pool of recruits into this new “Golden Age” of space exploration. I have seen many “diversity” programmes fail because they don’t get what Reid Wiseman gets; you can’t just say, “let’s have more ethnically diverse people or more women.” You have to make sure that biased barriers to entry are also removed, whether they are experience or certain favoured personality traits.

    NASA’s mission is to “explore the unknown in air and space, innovate for the benefit of humanity, and inspire the world through discovery.” When asked how to inspire, the crew said to just do it. Or as Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen said in a message to kids, “All you have to do on any given day is do your best. And find joy in your day, and try to contribute in a meaningful and positive way. And that’s it. We as humans put too much pressure on ourselves looking for perfection. If you look at what we are doing out here, it is far from perfection, but we are getting it done.”

    Artemis II will splash down near San Diego in a few hours. In their luggage will be tiny SD cards with thousands of images we will get to see in the coming months, and trays of cell samples; in their spacecraft will be system data to analyse and refine; in their bodies will be more saliva for scientists to measure; in their minds will be the wonders and impressions of this magical week at the Moon; and back in Houston are the next astronauts waiting to jump aboard Artemis III.

    Here’s going to the moon and back, and back, and back, and back…

    Liz

    http://www.lizaab.com

  • The 6pm moon

    A month ago, just as the sky softened into evening, I looked up—and there it was. The first quarter moon, exactly where I’d predicted, peeking through the clouds. I felt a small, quiet thrill: I was right.

    Until then, the moon always seemed so random – sometimes it’s on one side of the sky, sometimes the other, sometimes missing altogether.  I could only catch glimpses out my city windows or between buildings. What it looked like, and where, and when, was unpredictable, like the weather or the news.

    But surely there’s a pattern, like clockwork – like calendar-work. It’s just a sphere flying around another sphere. Of course there is. So here’s the secret that will brighten your day next time you look up: you will always see the same phases of the moon at the same part of the sky at the same time of the day, anywhere in the world.

    Try it. 

    At 6pm, when you are on your way home or heading out the door, look for the “waxing crescent,” the first sliver of light after the black “new” moon. It will be on the western horizon in the setting sun.  The new moon will have just passed in front of the sun (if it lines up perfectly we get an eclipse); it makes sense that the early crescent phase is still hugging close to where the sun has just set. 

    A week later, as the moon continues its journey around the earth, the half-lit “first quarter” moon will be overhead at 6pm.

    A week later, at 6pm, the full moon can be seen rising on the eastern horizon.  That makes sense too – for the moon to be full, it must face the sun head full on, from the opposite side of the earth. As the sun sets, the full moon rises, like in a puppet show.

    And then for two weeks on your way home from whatever you are doing at 6pm, you won’t see the moon at all.  That 6pm moon is blocked by the earth under your feet.  Goodnight moon.

    The moon is still there, of course.  If you miss seeing it, just wait until later in the night or get up early to watch it glide.

    You don’t have to look for the moon only at 6pm. You can trace its chariot across the night sky. It will, always, rise in the east. Just like the sun. Of course it does — the earth rolls it into view, and the earth only rolls in one direction.

    The moon won’t be perfectly overhead, both thanks to where you are standing, the moon’s askew orbit around the earth, and the sharp 23 degrees of earth’s tilt.  It will instead travel near the same seasonal paths that the sun travels – but half a year behind.  The low December sun in London dots behind buildings near my home even at midday; the moon will sneak behind those same buildings this June and be hard to spot in the bright summer evenings.

    Just as the moon is lowest in the summer, it rises highest in the winter. I suspect that’s part of the excitement of October’s Halloween or autumn harvest moons: not only are the days suddenly much darker as the full moon rises in the east, but the moon also shoots up higher in the sky.

    Summer is coming now, and I thought I shouldn’t publish this post; I thought you won’t be able to see the moon. But the emoji culture of the moon being a night-time-only phenomenon is just wrong. Yes, the full moon sets as the sun rises, so isn’t visible in the day. Yes, the sun is so bright that it makes seeing a new moon impossible and a nearby crescent moon hard.

    But our eyes are amazing at detecting contrast. The moon’s edge is sharp; the sky is uniform; our brains are built for that. Not all parts of the day sky are equally bright, as you’ll kind of know if you’ve squinted taking a photo facing the sun. A blue sky on the other side of the sky might be a hundred times dimmer than near the sun. Moisture in the atmosphere smears light across the sky, sometimes smudging the line between the moon and the sky, sometimes blocking it entirely. 

    But if the sky is crisp and dry, if the moon’s path rises high enough to clear buildings or nature near you, and if the moon is not a full moon or too blindingly close to the sun, you will see it at some point during the day.  The moon is not just a night-time friend.

    At twilight, we notice it the most, as our eyes adjust and the contrast between day and night starkly flips. As your light-sensing street lights flick on, the moon pops into life. Your brain hardly registers how dramatic that drop in light is; you find yourself sitting in a dark room squinting at your screen, unaware daylight has faded. But the light levels outside have plummeted a million-fold. By night, even a dim crescent moon is ten times as bright as the rest of the night sky and a full moon a hundred times. 

    Now you know where to look for the moon, look more closely at its shadows.  The bright half faces the sun, which sets to the west.  Waxing (i.e. getting bigger) evening moons, like the crescent or half moons, will always be bright on that western right side (in the northern hemisphere). That evening crescent C moon you’ve been drawing for years? It should always be a backwards C!  (The American children’s book “Guess How Much I Love You” gets this wrong. It should really say, “I love you to the moon and … backwards!”)

    The reflected light tells us where to find the sun; the shadow tells us where to find North. The moon’s shadows cut across from its south pole to north pole.  Since our north pole is roughly in line with the moon’s, you can trace the moon’s pole north up to find our own north. You can find your way home.

    Sometimes, you can see not just the shadow as a cut in the night sky, but a dark orb showing our entire rocky space buddy. That is the marvellous “earthshine”: light that bounces off our clouds and oceans and ice caps, rebounds off the dusty soil of the moon, and ends up back in your eyeball. All that photon pinballing, just for you. Wicked!

    As for the dark side of the moon: there is no dark side. All sides of the moon rotate into the sun, once a month. (To find true darkness, space explorers need to find shadowed craters.)

    The weather, politics, trees, health, people – these are complex things, hard to understand, hard to predict. But the moon?

    The moon is always there for us, predictable, a partner to our dance. It’s more than a sibling or pet, it’s really a clone: 4.5 billion years ago, a Mars-sized mass hit our planet, splitting us into the earth and the moon, and knocking us askew. (NASA has an amazing simulation of this event here.) We are all moon dust.

    So now, I hope you share my comfort and joy at knowing right where the moon is and where it’s going. At 6pm, it’ll either be a setting backwards C in the western sunset, a right-handed half circle above our heads, a full moon rising in the east, or sleeping under our feet. It’ll rise high in the winter and low in the summer. It’ll be there, day and night. We’ll see it, even during the day, unless it’s blocked from view or glared out by the clouds and sun.

    We always know where to find it. And even if we can’t see it today, it’ll always rise again.