Plenty of Nothing

The Darvaza Gas Crater

The Darvaza Gas Crater in Turkmenistan is a sinkhole on top of a natural gas deposit. It was opened accidentally in 1971 during gas exploration, and set alight in the hope that the gas would be exhausted in a few days, but it has continued to burn ever since.  I've categorized this under Space because although it looks like something from another planet, it could only have happened on ours, with its oxygen, natural gas deposits, and meddlesome humans. Watch this French documentary to see how the local bird life has adapted. The photo comes from here. D

Apollo-Soyuz

Today is the 36th anniversary of the final splashdown of an Apollo capsule. The Apollo-Soyuz Test Project was a one of a kind orbital mission that featured the first docking between spacecraft from different countries, presaging the comings and goings at the International Space Station today. The docking module that Apollo brought into orbit was basically an Apollo-Soyuz adapter, with incompatible docking systems at the two ends. The one at the Soyuz end became the model for all later docking systems, and the Americans, Russians, Chinese, Japanese and European Space Agency all use versions of it today. This mission was the one and only space flight for Deke Slayton, the last of the Mercury Seven astronauts to make it into space, his career bookending the first phase of the US space program.

After ASTP the Americans did not put an astronaut into orbit for six years, including the entire Carter administration. The space shuttle launched in 1981, and the final shuttle mission landed just the other day, closing the second phase of the US space program. It will be several years before Falcon/Dragon, or Atlas/Orion, or some other American combination starts hauling astronauts into orbit. In the meantime, though, and unlike the late Seventies, US astronauts will continue to get into orbit aboard the good old reliable Russian Soyuz.

Robert McCall painted the Apollo-Soyuz image above. He is perhaps best known for his 2001: A Space Odyssey posters.

Asteroid Brisbane

Minor planet 5277 Brisbane is shown here against its namesake Brisbane, Queensland. (Brisbane Times.) The city of Brisbane is named after colonial administrator and astronomer SIr Thomas Brisbane, who was born near Largs, Scotland, a connection that recently drew Mark Rigby, curator of the Brisbane Planetarium, to Largs for an interview with the Wee Paper.

The Kepler Orrery

An orrery is a clockwork model of the solar system. Kepler is a space observatory searching for exoplanets in the region of Cygnus. So far it has done better than expected, finding 1235 possible planets around 997 stars. The Kepler orrery by Daniel Fabrycky is an animation of those newly discovered systems. Follow the link to make the planets spin round.

Why Does Rice Play Texas?

Today marks the 50th anniversary of JFK's announcement to Congress that the US intended to put a man on the moon. This was an expensive and dangerous proposition, and the Americans didn't see the point of it until September 12,1962, when in his prepared speech to Rice University in Houston he pencilled in, "Why does Rice play Texas?" This won over the overheated crowd, and he went on to deliver the more famous line, "We choose to go to the moon in this decade, and do the other things, not because they are easy but because they are hard."

Chinese Space Station

China has unveiled plans for a very Mir-like (Mir-image?) space station and unmanned cargo freighter to be in service by 2020. The freighter looks a bit like the European ATV and would probably share its capacity for automated docking.

Coleman Anderson

The recent Cady Coleman/Ian Anderson flute duet in honour of the fiftieth anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's flight could be the Plenty of Nothing blog topic par excellence, combining outer space and classic Bach rock. Anderson gets the solos, and waggles the hell out of his eyebrows, but Coleman takes full advantage of weightless conditions to steal the show. D

Ellesmere Telescope

My only question being, why haven't we thought of this already?

Vostok

Fifty years ago today the era of human spaceflight began when Yuri Gagarin orbited the earth in a capsule equipped with an ejector seat. Other 1920s-looking schematics here.  

How Messenger Got to Mercury

Mariner 10 was the first spacecraft to visit Mercury, photographing it three times in 1974 and 1975 as it swung past in an elliptical solar orbit. The probe was the first to use the gravity of an intermediary planet (Venus) to bend its trajectory and conserve fuel.

Messenger's path is a much more sophisticated use of the same technique, involving multiple fly-bys of all three inner planets and a lot more time. The first year of the journey was spent on a rendezvous with ... Earth. Messenger has now inserted itself into orbit around Mercury where it will spend a year mapping the surface. For more detail see here. D