A shaded sun-powered future for Earth

The huge decrease in sun-spot activity for the next few decades will be a big savior for us. See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NOAAsourcebutnotofficialsunclimate_3b.gif

and

http://www.space.com/11960-fading-sunspots-slower-solar-activity-solar-cycle.html

Nice ! I guess good timing. 70 years would be more than enough (if it lasts that long) for humans to get rid of fossil fuel burning. But I wonder if we become a Type 1 civillization and convert most of the solar power on Earth's surface to heat, would that not be identical to reducing Earth's albedo, and thus cause global warming any way?

Well, it depends on whether the new panels' albedo is lower than the average albeldo of the area on which they are installed, which will surely be the case since they will be installed in a lot in sunny, sandy places.

I can see us having to setup some really serious cooling solution for Earth then. Basically if you are consuming 40% of sun's light as a Type 0.4 civillizaion, and those panels an albedo of 0.2, i.e. only reflecting back 20% of light, then you will cause an albedo to reduce to 0.2 from present 0.3.

However, the reduction will be bigger if all the areas getting replaced are bright deserty land which is the case.

As you can see here, the people who answered this very good question just were trying to be politically correct here: http://askville.amazon.com/solar-panels-Earth-retain-heat/AnswerViewer.do?requestId=5919445

True, for our current energy consumption, we will actually end up cooling Earth by using solar power as the alternatives heat up Earth even worse (every ounce of CO2 released by burning fuel stays in the atmosphere for millenia before plants and rain can scrub enough out). But I am talking about Type 1 civillization. Of course all energy in the galaxy comes directly or indirectly from stars and our solar system is no exception; all secondary sources such as nuclear, coal, hydel, wind are derived either from out Sun's solar energy, from from the star that came before (in case of Uranium for example). So a Type 1 civillization has nowhere to go but to become a solar power behemoth, consuming all of the energy it can coming down to Earth, plus some more in Space (on Mars, Moon, orbital stations, nearby stars etc.)

So getting back to how to fix this albedo problem for a Type 1 solar power civillization, which would be us in 100 years, if Earth ends up say absorbing 10% extra heat from all it gets, you would have to shade 10% of Earth to cancel that effect out.

There are several creative early 21st century ways to cancel this effect:

- Zero Albedo Reduction law (ZAR law- OK I coined it firt here on this blog!) for solar panel install: Require the land where solar panels are installed to have 0 overall albedo change. How it is achieved is left to the installer to pick from, e.g.:

- (a) a checker pattern of highly refelective white mirrors (albeo close to 1) alternating the solar panels, in proportion of the ground's albedo.

- (b) shine electromagnetic radiation vertically up in the night in a non-visual but transparent spectrum. This could be radio waves and source for free SETI transmitters back up :-) just kidding- pointing it back at the Moon's poles where the new colony sits would be fun too (again kidding but this could actually work), just kidding. Why would you just not produce less using (a)?

- (c) albeo trading: you could simply install new shiny rooftops in areas of the world where you don't need as much power for other areas where u reduce albedo. Of course this would still cause local climate changes- heating up areas of product, cooling down areas reflected- in fact (a) and (c) together can provide a way to engineer climate.

However, by the time we become a Type 1 civillization, by early 22nd century, we would have a more advanced non-early-21st century way of doing the above :-) A checker pattern robotic self-maintaining and producing asteriod material based solar sun-screen parked in an orbit 1 million or so km away from Earth towards the sun (one of the lagrangian points I believe), and reduce solar insolation to Earth as needed.


Cheers,
Gunjan

Way to go Space-X: first wave of colonization of the solar system starts

I love the way they show Mars and then say: "This enables landing on any solid surface in the solar system.":



The future is (almost) here!

And this certainly helps complete the picture ;-)



The ability to abort launch all the way to orbit will change the way people go to orbit, and the way risk is perceived: this paves way for the first wave of colonization of the solar system. Finally!

Next Generation launch-abort system from SpaceX!

SpaceX has proposed a next-generation launch-abort system to NASA that makes the previous systems look primitive in comparison.

I have been following the COTS launch-abort system that got completed a year ago, and was always wondering why SpaceX did not just bid to use it, since that was the major thing needed for Dragon+Falcon9 to be human-rated. I always thought it was because Elon was interested in keeping their operations simple by keeping minimal dependencies to other agencies/suppliers - which he has repeatedly stated in several interviews,articles & presentations. One could also speculate that it was because Orbital, a competitor for Space-X, built it.

But turns out there was a much bigger reason, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that out the following from http://www.spacex.com/updates.php.

"SpaceX has proposed an integrated launch abort system design, which has several advantages over the tractor tower approaches used by all prior vehicles:

• Provides escape capability all the way to orbit versus a tractor system, which is so heavy it must be dumped about four minutes after liftoff.
  
• Improves crew safety, as it does not require a separation event, whereas any non-integral system (tractor or pusher), must be dumped on every mission for the astronauts to survive.
  
• Reduces cost since the escape system returns with the spacecraft.
  
• Enables superior landing capabilities since the escape engines can potentially be used for a precise land landing of Dragon under rocket power. (An emergency chute will always be retained as a backup system for maximum safety.)"
  

Another related note; recently in his post-mission NASA breifing after the Demo Flight 2 of Falcon 9, Elon Musk had mentioned that they were thinking of controlled landing for future versions of Dragon. I was wondering why they were adding this complexity and how would they actually do that without making the Dragon system heavier- now we know the answer :-) (see above). They are going to use the launch-abort rocket and fuel to do that, since the launch-abort system comes back with the mission- not only does that provide full launch-abort capability all the way to orbit, it provides a free controlled landing! Brilliant!

What a great day today- Space-X & Dragon in Orbit!

SpaceX's follow on launch of Falcon 9 was a big success, and so was the splash down. I got up in the morning on the west coast (Seattle) just in time (T-6 minutes).

Watching the solid take-off of the Falcon 9 on a bright morning in Florida was an awesome sight, and knowing what it had riding on the top (first commercial manned-capable orbital spacecraft), and having followed SpaceX closely for a few years now, even if just on live webcams, made it more beautiful and inspiring than any other launch I have seen in the past, on either high-d or low-d video, because of what was riding on it: the dawn of a new era.

I was also glad to find out today that my predictions from June 2006 (see Slide 139, on the presentation in this related blog from 2006)
are still resembling reality 4 years later, given how hard it is to predict anything in this domain :-)

From that slide written in June 2006: "2021: Spurred by X-prize, NASA prizes and heating market competition, cost of large launcher that can launch humans to Moon and Mars drop radically with large, cheap private spacecrafts and launchers from many players from US, China, Russia, India. SpaceX is a prominent one among them. US scraps NASA launcher developments for Moon and Mars."

I can see now all that happening in 2021 more easily than even when I wrote it 4 years ago. Some of that is happening now, with the COTS missions in 2011.

Btw, Space-X now has Bigelow's inflatable habitats (Sundancer) on their launch schedule for 2014 on Falcon 9. And Bigelow is building 2 even much bigger ones. When they go up, in the next 10 years, the majority of the habitable volume and most of human launch capability into space would have both moved to just these two companies; Falcon 9's 9 engines are produced assembly-line style in very large numbers and Space X's factory is built to scale that up easily with demand. And Bigelow's plan is to move these stations into orbit around the Moon after that, or even to land the modules on the Moon for an instant base.

So yes, there is a real Version 2 Space Race on; not between India/China/US, but between goverment funded platforms (India and China) vs. commercial programs (US) where the government and private orgs are just launch and habitation buyers.

Way to Go Elon Musk and SpaceX. A hearty congratulations to the whole team!

I am excited and look forward to the COTS missions, and the coming into existence of the Flacon Heavy and even bigger boosters from SpaceX. They can realize their dreams now from the revenue that SpaceX generates from the NASA and other missions over the next 5 years.

Gliese 581g: the first Earth-like habitable planet found around another star!

This is a big day. Mark the date Sep 29,2010 - for the history books!

Space.com news link is here, and here is a link to the original paper announcing this discovery.

Over the next 3 to 10 years (thanks to Kepler and improving Earth optics), we should expect to hear more details about this one, and 100s more like this one, but with lots of variations (e.g. dwarf habitable moons- which CAN be easier to detect, by looking at secondary wobbles of the primary planet, but this is the first real one with just the right temperature, mass and everything.

Now we can finally start pointing our SETI telescopes in the right direction :-) Confirmation of life-signs might take another few years, using spectrometer and interferometer combinations, but the fact that Gliese 581g (look forward to a more personal, official name soon for this first habitable planet :-)), is smack in the middle of Gliese 581's habitable zone is awesome- no debates about habitability on this one, only the question about how much water is going to be there. That would determine whether it's a water-world with higher phase ice at the bottom of its oceans that completely block continental minerals from mixing, so that it turns out to be a water desert (also see http://www.egy.org/files/cloutier.pdf), and where water dominates so much that life occurs in islands and pockets of minerals left over by asteorid impacts an dusts only), or whether it's an Earthly desert (where life has adapted to dewdrops and oases). In either case it would be awesome, and leave a lot of possibilities for a complex biosphere, and we should soon know which of the two scenarios is the real one, when we get measurements of this planet's atmosphere content (how much water vapor). If it has less water, that is probably better for this planet, as too much water can be a very big problem for advanced life to evolve in the 7 to 11 billion years current age for this planet. However, note that since the parent Sun can live virtually forever (this star is 50 times dimmer-than-our-sun red dwarf even though it has 30% of Sun's mass, which gives it a very long life), even if there is too much water, eventually enough water-loss because of the solar wind would cause Gliese 581g to have just the right amount of water eventually to have continents protruding out. I am really hoping it has some water though :-) and conditions point to that being the case , when combined with the fact that it is much heavier than Earth, and is smack in the middle of the habitable zone.

Regarding verification of how much water it has, and the atmospheric composition (which would hugely increase our confidence in imagining specific forms of life there), I predict that the discovery of this planet is going to motivate lot of smart astronomer-engineers to come up with ways to measure the atmosphere ASAP, even if TPF-I does not launch for another decade or two. I also believe that these discoveries, as they mount over the next 2-5 years, will force the urgency in funding for such a telescope, just like the Mars exploration program got a huge boost from the discovery of recent volcanism, rivers, oceans on Mars, and even more- the recent discovery of liquid water, water-runoffs, and methane on Mars.

Obama needs to define concretely the next destination for NASA's manned missions

More water confirmed by radar data coming from NASA's instrument on Chandrayan 1. See this link.

The important note in that article: “According to NASA, the ice would have to be relatively pure ice and at least several feet thick to give this signature.”

This would be cool as it makes the water usable by manned missions, unlike the last discovery where it was in minute amounts. Not sure the quotation above is true or just exaggerated by the Wired reporter.

Two important uses of setting up a base on the moon are (1) testing hardware for Mars, especially rovers and dust protection suits etc. (2) setting up a large array of radio telescopes on the far side of the Moon which is shielded from Earth transmissions. Because of moon’s low gravity that telescope can be periodically serviced by manned missions (just like the way Hubble has been serviced) that could be based on the polar region where there is water.

I hope that Obama removes the fog soon and declares that the Moon is going to be the testing location. Right now there is no destination for NASA’s manned space program. I don’t like the intermediate asteroid mission that Planetary Society is lobbying for as that does not test any hardware needed for Mars, not to mention being an even less interesting destination than the Moon.

Buzz Aldrin is suggesting Phobos as the intermediate mission instead of the Moon. I think Phobos would definitely serve as a good test for the orbital hardware for Mars and it should be a destination along with the Moon, which can be a good testing place for the surface Martian hardware. But they HAVE to declare Mars as the concrete goal instead of beating around the bush. Otherwise nothing will happen and the “private enterprise” such as Space-X will be left with low-earth-orbit missions for another few years until the next president. I think this last scenario is most likely and the way we will break out of it will be when Space-X and Bigelow Aerospace use low-earth orbit revenue and experience to strike out to the Moon, 10 years from now. Together they have more than all the necessary technology (or in the process of building so) to get there.

I am predicting a race between Space-X+Bigelow group (partially funded by a sub-section of NASA after their next two efforts to build hardware directly fail, and they completely give up building or owning flight hardware by 2017) vs. ISRO vs. Chinese Space agency to the Moon around 2020.

Gunjan

The best evidence so far for recent (and future) water flows on Mars

These gullies have been involved in an ongoing debate over the past few years. Now with higher resolution images from MRO, it is becoming almost certain that some of these were formed by recent liquid water:

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/090302-mm-mars-gullies.html

And that such water on Mars is cyclic in nature- and will return again in the (geologically speaking) near future.

A connected picture is emerging where Mars's huge axis tilt variation causes liquid water regions (and habitable zones) to form on Mars every few 100k years- kind of the opposite of ice-ages on Earth; we get ice-ages every few 10k years, whereas Mars gets water-ages every few 100k years!

Phoenix results are also showing similar evidence of more watery past for some of the stuff found in the north-polar region. Along with the recently cofirmed localized yearly release of Methane on Mars, this bodes well for finding some biological hotspots in the next few years.