Book Review: Starry Messenger Starring Neil deGrasse Tyson

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Credit: Henry Holt and Co.

Neil deGrasse Tyson has put out quite a few popular astronomy books over the years, including:

  • One Universe: At Home in the Cosmos (2000);
  • The Sky Is Not the Limit: Adventures of an Urban Astrophysicist (2004);
  • Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries (2007);
  • The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America’s Favorite Planet (2009); and
  • Astrophysics for People in a Hurry (2017). 

And while he often runs into the thick of current politics in his interviews, his books tended to stick to science. His latest book, Starry Messenger: Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization, is one of the exceptions and at least one reviewer is taking him to the woodshed.

Mr. Tyson says this in the book’s preface:

Starry Messenger is a wake-up call to civilization. People no longer know who or what to trust. We sow hatred of others fueled by what we think is true, or what we want to be true, without regard to what is true. Cultural and political factions battle for the souls of communities and of nations. We’ve lost all sight of what distinguishes facts from opinions. We’re quick with acts of aggression and slow with acts of kindness.

To The Washington Post’s Mark Whitaker, in his review titled “Neil deGrasse Tyson Tries Punditry, with Less-than-stellar Results,” Mr. Tyson may be going a little too boldly into the political realm. Mr. Whitaker writes:

When Tyson sticks to his orbit of expertise, he remains as engaging as ever, like the professor of a popular college survey course that students might take to satisfy their science requirement… Yet while Tyson extols the virtue of a skeptical mind-set in scientific inquiry, he often comes off as none-too-skeptical in his discussion of how that mind-set can be applied to human and political affairs.

Just as Mr. Tyson followed and updated Carl Sagan’s work, such as the remake of the television series Cosmos, he may be trying to update Dr. Sagan’s 1995 book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. Dr. Sagan was concerned about the future of mankind and its silly prejudices, which he also illustrated in his fictional book Contact. In The Demon-Haunted World, Dr. Sagan wrote:

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time – when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.

He wrote that almost 27 years ago and we are now living in the time of his children and grandchildren. His predictions seem true enough in a time of Facebook and “fake news,” as well as various denials throughout the world, from elections to climate change.

Maybe Mr. Tyson’s book is far from perfect, but if he can really continue Dr. Sagan’s work of chipping away at opinions masquerading as facts, then he is pursuing the same noble path even if it he hits a few bumps along the way. We may not be able to save what we have if we continue with our games for another 27 years.

Pic of the Week: Juno and Europa

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): Jupiter’s moon Europa. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Björn Jónsson CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

This week’s image is from NASA’s Juno spacecraft orbiting Jupiter and its moons. It is a beautiful image of Europa from the spacecraft’s Junocam. Europa is one of 80 known moons orbiting its host planet.

Here is a little more from NASA about this image:

JunoCam took its closest image at an altitude of 945 miles (1,521 kilometers) over a region of the moon called Annwn Regio. In the image, terrain beside the day-night boundary is revealed to be rugged, with pits and troughs. Numerous bright and dark ridges and bands stretch across a fractured surface, revealing the tectonic stresses that the moon has endured over millennia. The circular dark feature in the lower right is Callanish Crater.

Such JunoCam images help fill in gaps in the maps from images obtained by NASA’s Voyager and Galileo missions. Citizen scientist Björn Jónsson processed the image to enhance the color and contrast. The resolution is about 0.6 miles (1 kilometer) per pixel.

To learn more about JunoCam submissions go here.

Successful Start to NASA’s SpaceX Crew-5 mission

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): October 5, 2022 departure of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida carrying NASA’s SpaceX Crew-5 mission to the ISS. (NASA/Joel Kowsky)

Earlier today, SpaceX Crew-5 successfully departed from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on their way to the International Space Station (ISS). The four members on this flight are NASA astronauts Nicole Mann and Josh Cassada, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Koichi Wakata, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Anna Kikina. The population of the ISS will increase to 11 until 3 astronauts return to Earth a few days later.

Here is NASA’s bio on the new crew members:

  • As commander, Mann is responsible for all phases of flight, from launch to re-entry, and will serve as an Expedition 68 flight engineer. This will be her first spaceflight since becoming an astronaut in 2013. Mann was born in Petaluma, California, and will be the first indigenous woman from NASA in space. She is a colonel in the U.S. Marine Corps, and she served as a test pilot in the F/A-18 Hornet and Super Hornet.
  • Cassada is the spacecraft pilot and second in command for the mission. He is responsible for spacecraft systems and performance. Aboard the station, he will serve as an Expedition 68 flight engineer. This will be his first flight since his selection as an astronaut in 2013. Cassada grew up in White Bear Lake, Minnesota, and is a physicist and U.S. Navy test pilot.
  • Wakata will be making his fifth trip to space and as a mission specialist he will work closely with the commander and pilot to monitor the spacecraft during the dynamic launch and re-entry phases of flight. Once aboard the station, he will serve as a flight engineer for Expedition 68. With Crew-5’s launch, Dragon will be the third different type of spacecraft Wakata has flown to space.
  • Kikina will be making her first trip to space, and will serve as a mission specialist, working to monitor the spacecraft during the dynamic launch and re-entry phases of flight. She will be a flight engineer for Expedition 68.

Space Stories: JWST, a Galaxy Catalog, and a Stellar Graveyard

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): JWST image of the Tarantula Nebula, which is about 160,000 light-years away. (NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI)

Here are some recent stories of interest.

—Nature.com: “‘Bit of Panic’: Astronomers Forced to Rethink Early Webb Telescope Findings“

Astronomers have been so keen to use the new James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) that some have got a little ahead of themselves. Many started analysing Webb data right after the first batch was released, on 14 July, and quickly posted their results on preprint servers — but are now having to revise them. The telescope’s detectors had not been calibrated thoroughly when the first data were made available, and that fact slipped past some astronomers in their excitement.

—DailyScience.com: “‘Astronomers Map Distances to 56,000 Galaxies, Largest-ever Catalog“

How old is our universe, and what is its size? A team of researchers led by University of Hawaii at Manoa astronomers Brent Tully and Ehsan Kourkchi from the Institute for Astronomy have assembled the largest-ever compilation of high-precision galaxy distances, called Cosmicflows-4. Using eight different methods, they measured the distances to a whopping 56,000 galaxies. The study has been published in the Astrophysical Journal.

—University of Sydney: “Milky Way’s Graveyard of Dead Stars Found“

The first map of the ‘galactic underworld’ – a chart of the corpses of once massive suns that have since collapsed into black holes and neutron stars – has revealed a graveyard that stretches three times the height of the Milky Way, and that almost a third of the objects have been flung out from the galaxy altogether.

A Day in Astronomy: Launch of Sputnik

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Image (Credit): Artist’s rendering of the orbiting Sputnik 1. (thegravitywell.org/)

On this day in 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, humanity’s first artificial satellite, setting of a space race that continues to this day. The U.S. National Archives has a copy of minutes from an October 9 meeting between President Eisenhower and his advisors to discuss Sputnik I. The text accompanying the minutes demonstrates the shock this event caused:

At first, some in the Eisenhower administration downplayed the satellite as a “useless hunk of iron.” As David Halberstam wrote in The Fifties, “The success of Sputnik seemed to herald a kind of technological Pearl Harbor, which was exactly what Edward Teller said it was.” Others in America and around the world saw Sputnik as an ominous leap ahead in prestige and military ability, whether or not the new missiles could actually hit a target with nuclear weapons. President Eisenhower and some of his advisors, when they realized the significance of the Soviet achievement, met to discuss the alarming developments.

Of course, Russia is more of a wounded bear at the moment while China tries to take the lead in the latest space race. This is not to diminish what the Soviet Union accomplished in the last century, nor what Russia can accomplish tomorrow if it put its energy into science rather than war.