AirSpaceMag.com

The other day we posted some of Arthur C. Clarke’s philosophical words on the fate of human evolution, with the caveat that his predictions were still far into the future.

But here’s a neat video of astronaut Timothy Kopra on the International Space Station on August 15, 2009, conducting an experiment for the SPHERES project (Synchronized Position Hold Engage Re-orient Experimental Satellite).

Ten years ago, Dr. David Miller, Director of MIT’s Space Systems Lab, kicked off a new semester by showing a group of students the movie Star Wars. There’s a scene Miller especially likes, in which Luke Skywalker practices his light saber work with some help from the Force, and spars with a small, spherical, floating droid. Miller told the new students, “I want you to build me some of those.”

They built the three shown in the video below. The project’s goal was to demonstrate small, autonomous satellites that could “fly” formation in orbit using mini-navigation systems and CO2 thrusters to maintain or change their positions relative to each other. The research will lead to advances in algorithms needed for small, distributed, affordable satellites in Earth orbit and elsewhere in space, and improved docking methods for both manned and unmanned spacecraft.

The experiment last August, called TS18, was a success. But what we like about the video is the guy way down the corridor who keeps shooting back and forth in weightlessness as Strauss’ “Blue Danube” booms away (Stanley Kubrick paired the waltz with a couple of scenes in 2001: A Space Odyssey, including the one where a Pan Am space plane docks with a space station). “It’s sped up a little bit,” says the project’s chief scientist, Alvar Saenz-Otero, of the video, “but 2001 was the first thing we thought of when we saw it.” Hard to tell who the mystery astronaut is, because Expedition 20 was the first six-person crew on the ISS. Judging from the hair length, we can only rule out Nicole Stott.

So put on your headphones and turn up the volume for a truly Arthur C. Clarkian check on just how far we’ve come toward his predictions.

Avatar's Pandora (20th Century Fox)

In the three years since film director James Cameron wrote the script for his new blockbuster Avatar, a lot has changed in the field of exoplanet research (the study of planets around other stars). Nobody knows this better than one of its leading practitioners, Lisa Kaltenegger of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who marvels herself at how fast the young science is progressing. “We can actually overtake a sci-fi movie,” she says with a laugh.

Cameron set his story on Pandora, a moon orbiting a giant gas planet circling Alpha Centauri A, one of the closest stars to our sun. Recent, real-life searches have all but ruled out that scenario: Jupiter-size worlds don’t appear to exist around Alpha Centauri. But a new paper by Kaltenegger offers something perhaps more exciting: a near-term hope of finding signs of life around “exomoons” like Pandora.

One method used to find exoplanets is to watch how the light of their host stars dims and brightens as the dark planet crosses, or “transits,” the star’s disk. Kaltenegger realized that if a transiting planet had a large enough moon, and if the moon’s orbit extended beyond the star’s diameter as seen from our vantage point, the moon would also briefly appear to cross the stellar disk just before or after the planet finished its own transit. In that short interval when the moon partly eclipses the star, astronomers could analyze the starlight filtering through the moon’s atmosphere (if it has one), looking for oxygen, water, carbon dioxide, and other chemicals suggestive of life.

NASA’s Kepler telescope should soon tell us whether the technique is viable. Any exomoons discovered by Kepler will be too far away to inspect for bio-signatures, but if the method works, it could be applied to nearby stars like Alpha Centauri. Better still, we don’t have to wait for some exotic new instrument to be built. The 6.5-meter James Webb Space Telescope, due to launch in 2014, should work nicely.

The hunt for habitable worlds beyond Earth just picked up pace.

Courtesy Jewel Van Valin and the Palm Springs Air Museum

In late 2001, as a cost-cutting measure, Delta Air Lines decided to replace its first-class linen tray cloths with paper placemats. As flight attendant Jewel Van Valin told the Los Angeles Times in July 2008, the first time she set down a paper mat, a disgruntled passenger “stared at it and then rolled his eyes.”

Courtesy Jewel Van Valin and the Palm Springs Air Museum

That reaction led Van Valin to distribute crayons to the passengers, challenging them to an impromptu art show. The resulting sketches were taped to the aircraft’s interior walls, spilling out of first class into the main cabin. As passengers moved about, commenting on the drawings, Van Valin realized she’d hit on something, and decided to continue the practice—after contacting Crayola, asking them to keep her in art supplies (the company provides her with Rainbow Twistables, a four-color crayon).

Now, some eight years and 3,500 drawings later (Van Valin keeps every sketch), a sample of the in-flight art is on display at the Palm Springs Air Museum through January 25, 2010.

In the novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, written as Stanley Kubrick was adapting it to a screenplay for his 1968 film, author Arthur C. Clarke philosophizes deeply on the convergence of man and machine. While the human astronauts Frank Poole and David Bowman affect an almost robot-like discipline and detachment during their long flight to Saturn, their HAL 9000 computer struggles through an array of human emotions that belie his monotone delivery: pride over his high level of engineering, guilt and remorse from his concealment of the mission’s true purpose from Poole and Bowman, vindictiveness in killing Poole and trying to kill Bowman, and, in the end, terror at being disconnected by Bowman.

Clarke also reflects on the advances made in replacing body parts with prostheses, which, at some future point, would lead humans to discard flesh and blood altogether. Clarke supposes that the extra-terrestrials who had visited Earth at the beginning of his book were well past this stage: “…out among the stars, evolution was driving toward new goals. The first explorers of Earth had long since come to the limits of flesh and blood; as soon as their machines were better than their bodies, it was time to move. First their brains, then their thoughts alone, they transferred into shining new homes of metal and plastic. In these, they roamed among the stars. They no longer built spaceships. They were spaceships.”

For humans, Clarke wrote, “…eventually even the brain might go. As the seat of consciousness, it was not essential; the development of electronic intelligence had proved that. The conflict between mind and machine might be resolved at last…But was even this the end? A few mystically inclined biologists went still further. They speculated, taking their cues from the beliefs of many religions, that mind would eventually free itself from matter. The robot body, like the flesh and blood one, would be no more than a stepping-stone to something which, long ago, man had called ‘spirit.’ ”

We’re not there yet. But Clarke, who died in March 2008, would probably enjoy the following video.

Although, having freed himself (presumably) from matter, he may be working on a book about bigger questions…

Frequent contributor Stephen Joiner writes: “The 737 runway overshoot in Jamaica on December 8 reminds me of our Boeing Aircraft On Ground article (“Airliner Repair 24/7,” Oct./Nov. 2008), where Boeing’s Jim Testin told me gravely, “Something will ALWAYS happen on Christmas eve” (and then it did.) This year he was off by about 24 hours, but close enough to be an uncanny continuation of their decades-long streak of yuletide mangling.”

American Airlines Flight 331 landed in Kingston in heavy rain and skidded off the runway, ending up on an airport access road with the fuselage split in two just forward of the wings. All 154 on board survived. Thirteen people were hospitalized with minor injuries.