Cumbrian Sky

** WELCOME to Carnival of Space #60 readers! **

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Unless you've been in suspended animation for the past week you'll have seen this amazing image everywhere - on the net, in newspapers and magazines, on the TV... literally EVERYWHERE...

Why all the fuss over a couple of little pits dug out of the dirt on Mars? Well, as I've explained in a post below, this image shows nothing less than several small pieces (blocks? deposits?) of water ice evaporating on the surface of Mars. They're visible in the shadows on the image on the left, but look at the image on the right, the same view but taken 4 days (or sols) later and you'll see they've gone. That's why the picture is so important - it shows ice, martian ice, vanishing before the unblinking robot eyes of the Phoenix lander after being dug out from beneath the planet's surface by the probe's scoop-ended robot arm. It is, without any exaggeration, a historic image, because it proves, conclusively and inarguably, that there is frozen water on Mars now, right now, this very minute, this very moment as you read this.

Contrary to many reports in the media, Phoenix has not "discovered" ice on Mars; we were pretty sure it was there even before Phoenix left Earth, having already been told by the Mars Odyssey probe that Mars has huge deposits of ice hiding beneath its surface, and also having seen many images of Mars' amazing icy north pole like this one...

... and images of frost on the planet's surface too, like this one, taken back in 1976 by the Viking 2 space probe...

And who could forget the Mars Express image showing a veritable ice rink on the floor of a crater up near Mars' north pole, released a few years ago..?

The Phoenix team probably weren't too surprised to see the icy bits vanishing from the floor of that trench. After all, just a couple of days after it landed, Phoenix sent back this now famous image of a great slab of ice right underneath it...

However, that "Now you see it, now you don't" image of the trench is a paradigm-shifting one, because it announces to the world that Phoenix is the first probe to actually see real pieces of ice on the planet's surface, and see them change their appearance and state, so this is a Very Big Deal Indeed. So it's only right and fair that the trenches image has received such worldwide attention and acclaim.

But even as the world was oohing and aahing over the trench image, quietly, and without any fuss or fanfare, NASA also released another picture out into the wild. At first glance it doesn't look anything special, this grainy black and white picture...

... just a blurred slash of grey and white across a black canvas, with an elongated speck of white above it. What is it showing? Well, if I tell you that the photographer was Cassini, you'll know right away that it's a picture of Saturn, or Saturn's rings to be more precise. And that white speck? A grain of dust on the lens perhaps? Good guess, but let's zoom in on it...

Hmmm... that speck is actually two specks close together! So... two moonlets caught by Cassini's cameras, perhaps? Or a pair of Saturn's larger moons caught before or after an eclipse event? Sorry, not even close...

Those dots are actually stars. "Big deal!" I hear you cry. Wait a moment... those aren't just any stars, they're Alpha Centauri A and B, the two largest members of the triple "Alpha Centauri" star system which are the closest stars to the Earth after the Sun. (The third member of the system, A Cen C, is a red dwarf star, too small and too faint to show up in the image). 

Now, I'm sure most of you reading this will now be thinking "Wow! That's amazing!" as I did when I first saw the picture, but if anyone is thinking "Huh, so what? A couple of stars..." then think of it this way...

Those two stars are a lot like our own Sun, and, in cosmic terms, are on our celestial doorstep. Saturn is so far away it took Cassini 7 years to reach it after leaving Earth... so far away that it took the image over an hour to reach Earth after it was transmitted back to us by the spaceprobe... but those stars are 30,000x farther away than Saturn, over 4 light years away, so the starlight recorded by Cassini set off over 4 years ago. And if Cassini decided it was bored with photographing Saturn and its moons and wanted to go and check out the Alpha Centauri system instead , and set off for it, it would take over 200,000 years to get there...!

But, as I said, in cosmic terms, Alpha Centauri is our "neighbour star", and because of its (relative) closeness, and its similarity to our own star, it will without doubt be the target destination for the first unmanned interstellar probe, whenever that is built and launched.

Put simply - those two dots are where we're going, one day.

Looking at that picture you're looking at nothing less than Mankind's REAL first stepping stone into the universe beyond our solar system - a real place we will, one day, travel to, and rest at, before pushing on even further out into the cosmos, and starting our expansion out into the Milky Way. Those two dots are Mankind's horizon. Not the dusty plains of the Moon, or the rock-scattered landscapes of Mars. Those two dots are. 

And looking at that image made me realise something quite profound. In the years, decades and centuries to come, before that day when the first human beings turn their backs on the Sun and the system of countless planets, asteroids and god-knows-what-elses that orbit it, the astronaut explorers of the future will walk over much more ice than stone. They'll hear snow and frost crunching and crumping beneath their heated boots far more often than they'll hear the click-snick and snak of stones, rocks and pebbles cracking beneath their feet. Because Out There, ice, not stone, rules. Everywhere we're planning and hoping and dreaming to go and explore in the generations ahead is at least partly covered in ice...

Mars is, we now know, thanks to Odyssey and Phoenix, an ice world covered in a layer of rocks and dust. Future martian explorers will travel to the north pole to study the layers of ice there, looking at each one - just like scientists on Earth gaze at the rings inside the trunk of a tree - for clues as to what happened in Mars' past. And when colonists and settlers follow in their footsteps they'll use that ice as a resource, converting it into drinking water and rocket fuel. Who's to say that ice miners up at Mars' north pole won't pack maglev train containers full of chunks of ice cut out of the "ice rink" on the floor of that Ice Crater imaged by Mars Express and send them back to the bases, colonies and research stations, to keep them alive..

... while their families find other, more creative ways to use the ice...

After Mars, Jupiter and its moons will beckon, and here too astronauts, explorers, scientists and dreamers will find ice waiting for them. The fractured, iceberg-embroidered surface of Europa will be the logical place to set down first, and what a view will greet the people to look out of the portals of the first piloted lander to touch down on Europa...

( Click here for one of the highest resolution views taken of Europa's icy surface... yes, those ARE towering ice cliffs! )

Beyond Jupiter... Saturn will beckon next, and after scrunching across the petrified slush, orange ice-boulder covered surface of Titan...

... our future astronauts will land on Mimas, the famous "Death Star" moon, and after touching down inside the enormous Herschel Crater will lift up their eyes and see this spectacular, icy vista...

... before pushing onwards, onwards, to and then past Uranus and Neptune and finally Pluto, Eris and Sedna, and worlds beyond them, the Exiled Worlds so far from Sol's light and warmth that they are blanketed with iron-hard ice.

But why bother? Why go to all that trouble, and expense, to go to worlds so far away, with no obvious scientific or visual appeal or worth? Surely they're so far away that it would take a big chunk of someone's life to fly out there? What's the point?

Well, at the moment, there wouldn't be one. I'm talking about the future here, the far future, one, maybe two centuries ahead in all likelyhood. Right now sending an astronaut even to Uranus makes no sense at all, it would be almost a suicide mission. But in a century's time? I really think it will happen, because then, as now, people will want to push their own boundaries, see things no-one else has seen, set foot on ground no-one else has set foot on. I don't think these will be NASA or national missions, they'll be private enterprises, using ships built and operated by entrepeneurs and adventurers, not professional Govt-funded astronauts. And people will go to Pluto, and Sedna, and the worlds beyond for those age-old reasons: 1) Because They're There, and 2) Because It's A Cool Thing To Do. I mean, people still climb Everest today - great packs of them, lawyers, businessmen, etc - led by tour guides, simply because they feel drawn to it and WANT to. They could, like the rest of us, sit at home and browse for "Everest Summit" images on Google, but it's just not the same. And in the future, it won't be enough to just look at pictures of Pluto and Sedna sent back by probes; some people will want to go there themselves and see them with their own eyes.

From the petrified surface of Sedna they will marvel at this view...

... with, looking in one direction, the inner solar system reduced to a glowing, misty lens surrounding the faraway Sun, and the Milky Way looking like a wide, mottled vapour trail cutting the heavens in half... and in the opposite direction...

Stars. Just stars.

And that's the view we'll be stuck with for a while, because the technological advances necessary for us to take the physical and emotional leap from the edge of the solar system to another star are surely centuries beyond the day when astronauts reach the most distant of the worlds - sorry, dwarf planets, plutoids and Kuiper Belt Objects - that lurk out there in the Great Dark.

When will that day dawn? Probably not for two or three hundred years. Maybe not for a thousand, there's literally no way of knowing when we'll have an engine, and a spaceship, that can take us to other stars. But unless we blow ourselves up, or are made extinct by some natural cosmic catastrophe, eventually we will develop that capability, and having run out out of Solar System to explore, standing at its very edge, looking out into the endless ocean of space beyond, we'll hear the stars calling to us from the great dark depths of space, singing to us like sirens. And on one amazing day in some far off century, we'll be ready to Go. We'll have reached as far as we can go within our own solar system, and all those countless frozen, dark worlds whirling around the distant Sun on the edge of our solar system won't represent a frontier any more, but the icy black bars of our cosmic cage. But on that day fire up an engine that we can only dream about now, and we'll reach out our hands through those bars and grasp for the freedom and the wonder of the stars beyond.

I like to think that the first crewed starship will pause awhile at Saturn, maybe to refuel, or take on crew members from the Titan colony, maybe just to take in one last view of the famous rings shining and sparkling in the sunlight before they take their giant leap for Mankind out into the Black. Maybe one of the crew will take a moment to float over to a portal and, looking outside, see this...

I envy them - oh, how much I envy them. But at the same time I feel proud, and lucky, to be alive at the time when these amazing pictures - which will be celebrated and praised for centuries to come - were actually taken.

Don't you?

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• #1 Comment from hiddennook 
  6/28/08 11:55 PM | Permalink

  Great article Stewart!
  
  Its good to see the emotional side of space (instead of the hard, cold logic--although that can be fun too). ;-)
  
  Anyways, I think Europa, Io and Saturn's inner icy moons will be skipped over, mainly due to the vast amount of radiation emitting from their parent planets.
  
  There is hope for Ganymede, although I think Callisto and Titan will boast large populations early on (as they are the safest after Earth).
  
  As far as the image of Alpha Centauri goes, that is fantastic!
  
  I never thought Cassini would be able to image those stars like that!
  
  I hope someday we achieve the ability to "warp" over there. It would be even better if a civilization was waiting for us at the other end.
  
  ~Darnell (ColonyWorlds.com)