Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Janna informs us that today is the BIG DAY: The Webb Space Telescope is unfolding its mirrors, which will take some time. Watch the action live below, though of course there is no camera on the scope. But the left side of the NASA video shows a real-time animation of what’s happening.
Unfolding the forward UPS included dozens of individual steps, NASA officials wrote. The successful maneuver marks the first step in the five-day-long process of preparing the sunshield, which will protect Webb’s sensitive instruments from the sun’s radiation.
“While the actual motion to lower the forward pallet from its stowed to its deployed position took only 20 minutes, and the lowering of the aft pallet took only 18 minutes, the overall process took several hours for each because of the dozens of additional steps required,” NASA officials said in a statement. “These include closely monitoring structural temperatures, maneuvering the observatory with respect to the sun to provide optimal temperatures, turning on heaters to warm key components, activating release mechanisms, configuring electronics and software, and ultimately latching the pallets into place.”
The sunshield deployment process will likely finish around Jan. 3, although each stage of the deployment sequence is controlled from the ground and the timeline can be adjusted as NASA and its partners see fit.
After unfolding the two UPS structures, Webb’s next key steps will be to unfold the Deployable Tower Assembly, release the sunshield cover and begin unfurling the sunshield itself.
If all goes according to plan, the observatory will be in its final configuration and orbit within one month of launch. The spacecraft will orbit Earth-sun Lagrange point 2, or L2, a point located nearly about 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) away from Earth on the side opposite to the sun. Like the delicate sunshield, this location is crucial for allowing the instruments to gather infrared observations.
MERRY CHRISTMAS! Here’s a present to the world from science—international science.
I know people are up in Europe, and if you’re an early riser in America, you’ll want to see this too (the Kiwis and Aussies will be asleep unless they’re night owls). The James Webb Space Telescope will be launched today, on Christmas Day, at 7:20 Eastern U.S. time, or 6:20 Chicago time. I’m already up at 4:30 to do my ablutions and have coffee before the big takeoff. The good news is that many Americans will be forced to be awake by early-rising kids who want to open their presents.
When this is posted it will be 6 a.m. Eastern U.S. time: 1 hour and 20 minutes to go! And the NASA feed below will have begun.
You know what’s happening: the space telescope, far more powerful than the Hubble, will provide oodles of scientific information, including detecting infrared light from billions of years ago. You can read about it at Wikipedia, or at the NASA site
Here’s the NASA live feed:
Fingers crossed!
A feed from the NASA site that does have commentary (click on screenshot to go to NASA t.v.):
And another live feed:
I believe all conditions are go (things are “nominal”, as they say), and only weather or one other thing could mess up the launch (xkcd cartoon courtesy of Matthew):
On Wednesday, as the 13-minute “60 Minutes” segment below explains, the $10-billion-dollar James Webb Space Telescope will be launched. Thirty days later, it will be nearly a million miles from Earth, in orbit around the Sun.
One of its goals is to detect leftover radiation traveling over billions of light years, giving us a glimpse of the past and, perhaps, into what “dark matter” is. But, as you’ll see, it can also answer many other questions.
I’m continuslly stunned by what humans can do with simple materials extracted from the Earth. And it’s great that this effort involves international cooperation.
My friend Jim Batterson, a astronaut and space buff, sent me the following message, which I reproduce with his permission:
Just a heads up that there will be a SpaceX launch of four astronauts Wednesday night scheduled for 9:03 pm Eastern time. It is called Crew3 as it is the third crewed launch by SpaceX. The launch window is instantaneous, which means it must go on time or wait until Thursday or Friday again with instantaneous launch time because things must be carefully timed to allow for the crew to catch and rendezvous with the ISS.
It has been interesting over the past few weeks as weather and then an astronaut medical issue delayed the launch and then a decision was made to bring back four astronauts this past week in the Dragon capsule that we saw go up last spring and has been docked on station since. That was the “diaper” kerfuffle.
Coverage should start on the SpaceX website and Nasa TV about four hours before the 9pm est launch.
Jim recommends watching at the SpaceX site here, and pressing the “watch” window at the bottom.
Alternatively, you could watch it on the NASA site, and there are others as well. If you’re game, set your clocks for about 8:30 p.m. Eastern time tonight.
It appears that William Shatner made a pointed remark about global warming after his successful 11-minute trip to space in the Blue Origin capsule, but, as reader Plunky says, “This perspective wasn’t widely reported in MSM” [mainstream media]. Shatner’s musings on life and death, and his emotional reaction to the trip, however, was reported all over the place.
Indeed, if you search for “William Shatner global warming” on the Internet, you find precious little save at yahoo! entertainment and MEDIAite, and nothing about the omitted sentence that this piece gives. (Of course, I must have missed some stuff.) Plunky called my attention to the piece below from Informed Comment (click on screenshot) noting the omission. They impute it to Bezos cutting off Shatner because of possible bad publicity for his mission.
From Cole’s reporting:
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – On Wednesday, pop culture icon William Shatner, Star Trek‘s Captain James Tiberius Kirk, explained the enormity of seeing the earth from a suborbital flight on Blue Origin’s New Shepherd space craft. Part of what he said when he returned from 66 miles up got lost in all of the news reports I’ve seen, and it is the most important part.
Here’s a portion of what CNBC printed in what they alleged was the complete transcript of Shatner’s remarks:
“I mean, the little things, the weightlessness, and to see the blue color whip by and now you’re staring into blackness. That’s the thing. This covering of blue is this sheet, this blanket, this comforter of blue around that we have around us. We think ‘oh, that’s blue sky’ and suddenly you shoot through it all of a sudden, like you whip a sheet off you when you’re asleep, and you’re looking into blackness – into black ugliness. And you look down, there’s the blue down there, and the black up there, and there is Mother Earth and comfort and – is there death? Is that the way death is?”
But here’s the crucial takeaway, the last phrase of which is omitted by CNBC:
“What I would love to do is communicate as much as possible the jeopardy, the moment you see how vuln– the vulnerability of everything. It so small. This air which is keeping us alive is thinner than your skin. It’s a sliver. It’s immeasurably small when you think in terms of the universe. It’s negligible, this air. Mars doesn’t have it. It’s so thin. And to dirty it…”
In fact, Shatner adds, after “to dirty it”, “I mean that’s another whole subject.” So it wasn’t just the four words that were omitted, but an entire sentence. And then Bezos breaks in. I have to say that he looks like a bit of a jerk, especially when he interrupts Shatner to spray champagne all over the place.
Informed Comment continues:
“The jeopardy . . . And to dirty it!” To fill this precious atmosphere, unique in our solar system, with clouds of burned coal dust and with greenhouse gases, Shatner says, is . . . what? Despicable. Unthinkable.
Just when Shatner is getting on to the subject about how what he saw reinforced his horror at the way we are polluting the atmosphere and imperiling the earth with man-made global heating, Bezos interrupts him: “It goes so fast.” Bezos doesn’t want Captain Kirk expounding on the evils of climate change on his promotional clip. He gets him talking about the experience again. Not the conclusion he drew from that experience.
And yes, Shatner did say that and yes, Bezos interrupted him. You can see it at 7:13 in this video, as well as the “I mean, that’s another whole subject” comment.
It was unbelievable … To see the blue cover go whoop by. And now you’re staring into blackness. That’s the thing. The covering of blue, this sheet, this blanket, this comforter of blue that we have around us. We say, ‘Oh that’s blue sky.’ And then suddenly you shoot through it and all of a sudden, like you whip the sheet off you when you’re asleep, you’re looking into blackness.
. . . You look down, there’s the blue down there, and the black up there. There is Mother and Earth and comfort and there is … Is there death? I don’t know. Was that death? Is that the way death is? Whoop and it’s gone. Jesus. It was so moving to me.
You’ll be hard pressed to find that whole paragraph beginning “What I would love to do is communicate as much as possible the jeopardy. . . ” in the mainstream media, ad I haven’t found “And to dirty it. . . ” anywhere, not even The New Yorker’s report. The Informed Comment piece observes that Shatner has been deeply concerned with climate change for at least five years.
I suppose are a couple of explanations for their omission. The innocuous one is that the MSM just omitted one phrase from Shatner’s soliloquy—a fragment that wasn’t even a complete sentence (but was followed by a complete sentence, also omitted!). After all, the “MSM” largely leans Left, and reports frequently on climate change, so what motivation would they have for omitting that bit?
On the other hand, that phrase was important, and should have been part of the story, even though in some accounts (not the NYT’s above), they do say Shatner’s worried about humans despoiling our planet.
Informed Comment appears to be a progressive Leftist site, so they of course impute this to Bezos trying to keep Shatner from damaging the Blue Horizon enterprise, which of course is a for-profit operation. Cole quotes the Washington Post‘s 2016 interview with Shatner to show his concern, and winds up this way:
“People like yourself — young people like yourself should be screaming at the top of your lungs to the people who lead.”
That’s what Shatner wanted to say on his return to earth. He wanted to say that our thin, fragile, vulnerable, unique atmosphere is in danger from petroleum, gas and coal, that this mothering “blue blanket” of the earth is in danger of being enveloped by the grim blackness of galactic emptiness because of the way we are treating it.
That is what for-profit news did not report about Shatner’s profound experience and his articulation of it. He wants you screaming at the top of your lungs that our pale blue dot is in danger of being burned up and engulfed by an unfeeling, black cosmos. And that only we can stop it from getting worse, because we are the ones making it worse.
Well, maybe Cole is wrong trying to psychologize Shatner in this way. After all, Shatner did say “that’s another whole subject”, and may have left it there. But surely the media could have reported that final phrase, particularly in what was purported to be a complete transcript.
The window for tonight’s SpaceX Inspiration4 launch begins at 8:02 p.m. Eastern U.S. time, and the window will be open for five hours. Be sure to tune in to the live feed below, or one of the others listed, to see four “civilian” astronauts, who trained for six months, to go into orbit for three days.
We’re about an hour from the first open launch time, so click below and watch the takeoff. The probability of a launch this evening is given at about 90%, so things look copacetic.
UPDATE: Everything went perfectly during the 10+ minute flight; the booster made a bullseye back to the landing pad, and all the astronauts are fine and excited.
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Reader Bat sent this note, which I reproduce in its entirety. Be sure to watch the launch, set for 9 a.m. Eastern Time, or 8 a.m. Chicago time. (I believe that’s 2 p.m. Greenwich time, though one site said 1 p.m. Greenwich time. If you’re a Brit, do check.) Bat’s words:
Just a reminder that Jeff Bezos’s “Blue Origin” space launch, designed to reach just beyond the 100km altitude that marks the “edge of space” (62 miles), is planned for this morning. Liftoff is scheduled for 0900 Eastern U.S. time (0800 Chicago time at the west Texas launch site), with live coverage beginning at 0730 Eastern Time (0630 Chicago time) at the link below.
There will be four people on board: Jeff Bezos, his younger brother, an 82-year-old famous female aviator (Wally Funk), and an 18 year old paying passenger selected in an earlier lottery.
The entire mission will take about 8-10 minutes and is a standard one-stage booster rocket with crew capsule that separates from booster when the booster engines cut out a couple of minutes into the flight. The capsule continues on in a parabolic trajectory to just above the 100km high Karman altitude, giving 4-5 minutes of weightlessness to the crew. Both vehicles continue trajectories back to Earth with the booster landing upright for re-use and the capsule hitting down on the desert floor close-by under parachutes. All is done autonomously; there is no pilot.
Be aware that times may change. Bat adds this:
But we have to remember that these are scheduled times for a very complicated process. Even scheduled airliners run late on occasion. So there is every possibility of a hold in the count or a scrubbed mission. In their April launch which carried out the full mission but sans crew, there were several holds in the countdown. They do have an escape system for the capsule in case of a booster failure.
Update: Anne-Marie sent a cartoon that appeared in La Presse, a French-Canadian newspaper this morning. (Serge Chapleau is a famous artist/cartoonist.) Yes, the booster and capsule does look like that. Translation: “Jeff Bezos presenting his souvenir poster of his first space trip.”
