The grooved surface of Ganymede
Click for original image.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, reduced to post here, was taken on June 7, 2021 when the Jupiter orbiter Juno did a close flyby of the moon Ganymede, taking four pictures.
Citizen scientists Gerald Eichstädt and Thomas Thomopoulos have now reprocessed parts of those images to bring out the details more clearly (the other new versions available here, and here).
I have chosen to highlight the picture to the right however because it so clearly shows the puzzling grooves that cover much of Ganymede’s surface. While these parallel grooves in many ways mimic the grooves often seen on top of valley glaciers on Earth and Mars, on Ganymede they do not follow any valley floor. Instead, they form patches of parallel grooves that travel in completely different directions, depending on the patch. At the moment their origin is not understood.
These grooves are one of the mysteries that Europe’s Juice probe will attempt to solve when it arrives in orbit around Jupiter in 2031.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Click for original image.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, reduced to post here, was taken on June 7, 2021 when the Jupiter orbiter Juno did a close flyby of the moon Ganymede, taking four pictures.
Citizen scientists Gerald Eichstädt and Thomas Thomopoulos have now reprocessed parts of those images to bring out the details more clearly (the other new versions available here, and here).
I have chosen to highlight the picture to the right however because it so clearly shows the puzzling grooves that cover much of Ganymede’s surface. While these parallel grooves in many ways mimic the grooves often seen on top of valley glaciers on Earth and Mars, on Ganymede they do not follow any valley floor. Instead, they form patches of parallel grooves that travel in completely different directions, depending on the patch. At the moment their origin is not understood.
These grooves are one of the mysteries that Europe’s Juice probe will attempt to solve when it arrives in orbit around Jupiter in 2031.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Robert wrote: “Citizen scientists …”
One of the things about citizen scientists is that they were the ones who made many of the advances we have had over recent centuries. It wasn’t until around WWII that scientists really started being paid by the U.S. government to make the kinds of discoveries that the government was interested in. For the century or so before WWII, we had many discoveries and inventions that dramatically changed the world. The steam engine, which soon was placed on locomotives to create the modern form of train and placed on ships to give mankind an independence from the whims of the winds. Electricity gave us the telegraph and its instantaneous communications, and electricity was seen as so useful — the electric light and most of the inventions that make the modern electric grid — that the Victorian Age population was convinced that it would power everything. They were not too far wrong, as electricity can be used to successfully power virtually anything, including all forms of transportation other than planes, ships, and rockets, and electricity can power almost everything in the home and the workplace. (When was the zipper invented? That made great changes in clothing.)
Telephones, phonographs, photographs, and moving pictures (with color and synchronized sound) made their own marks on lifestyles. The wireless telegraph turned into radio (voice & music) and television. Dynamite and TNT (high explosives), dyes and fertilizer. The discovery of germs and the solution of washing hands, anesthetics and surgery, and antibiotics. Air conditioning — what a difference that made — and refrigeration reduced food spoilage and improved food safety; ice became commonplace. The automobile, the airplane, and the rocket were invented before WWII, but a decade later the rocket was made practical, capable of taking payloads to orbit. To be fair, government commissioned the invention of the jet and made the rocket practical; both were for military reasons.
A decade after WWII, the transistor and the laser made their marks on life in a big way, but the government wanted the integrated circuit, which led to the microcomputer that we all have on our desktops (or laptops or cell phones) — but what we do with these computers is little different than the telephone, television, boardgames, and the camera.
Since about 1960, citizen inventors created the cell phone and additive manufacturing (3-D printing), but government scientists have only given us … what? … not the fusion power plant, which they have been promising since the 1960s. Not energy independence, which they have been promising since the Department of Energy was formed — energy independence being its raison d’être.
Once government took over science (STEM subjects), the rate of discovery and invention diminished. What we got in the eight decades before WWII — and the government’s takeover — is vastly greater than what we got in the eight decades since, and a majority of what we got was in the two decades that government transitioned into its control over STEM subjects. Most of the things that we got that are useful to we citizens came from citizen scientists and citizen inventors, such as computers from the microchip, communication satellites, cell phones, additive manufacturing, and the reusable, low-cost orbital launch vehicles. The internet was military until someone invented hypertext transfer protocol (http) to make obsolete the file transfer protocol (FTP). (By show of hands, how many BTB readers have ever used FTP? More than I expected, but not many.) Outside of that, our lives are shockingly similar to the lives of those who lived in 1942 (TV being a big difference, invented in the 1930s but became affordable in the 1950s). Those who lived in ’42 had lives vastly better than those who lived in 1862, who had lives that were better than those who lived in 1782 (around Jane Austen’s time). Before that, invention and the improvement of lives was slow, even slower than it is now. The 1970s and 1980s were bereft of breakthroughs.
At the end of the Cold War, the government declared that our military technology would become civilian technology, swords into plowshares. Several military bases and installations were converted into civilian property, but other than that, the only thing we really got from the military was universal access to the internet, and some of that was already happening in the 1980s through companies such as CompuServe. Not quite as many plowshares as we had expected.
It has almost always been the citizen scientists and citizen inventors who have improved our lives and found the universe’s greatest novelties and solved the greatest mysteries of life, the universe, and everything. When we let government do things, all we get is what government wants; when We the People do things, we get what we want. It is good that we have citizen scientists making a comeback. Our world has a chance of making the kinds of improvements that we got two centuries ago.