"SPACE BYTES" -- Columns By Thomas Wm. Hamilton

Columbia University Class of 1960 Paper: THE UNIVERSE OF 2005 COMPARED TO THE UNIVERSE OF OUR COLLEGE DAYS

45th Class of 1960 Reunion Luncheon Address, June 4, 2005, by astronomer THOMAS WM. HAMILTON, Columbia University Class of 1960

I want to begin not with September 1956, when we first entered Morningside Heights as Columbia freshman, but a bit over a year earlier, on July 28, 1955, almost exactly a half century ago.

That was the date on which former Columbia University President Eisenhower called a press conference to announce plans for America to launch a small satellite known as Vanguard.

This drew the headline in The New York Post, a newspaper founded by another Columbian, and known even 50 years ago for its restrained good taste, of a single word on the front page:

"SPACESHIPS!"

This event largely determined my later career. I had intended to go into astronomy almost from the first grade, but the creation of a space program opened up jobs to a magnificent extent.

When we entered Columbia a year later, astronomy was one of the long-established sciences offered as an elective. The textbook being used makes an interesting contrast to the textbooks used today. Our astronomy text in 1956 was the fifth edition of a book written by Fath, an astronomer best remembered today for having a small lunar crater named for him.The book cost $2.75 in the CU bookstre, new. I saved 50 cents by getting a used copy -- had to save some money after buying all those Humanities and CC books.

Fath's "Elements of Astronomy" fewer than 200 pages well represented the state of astronomy in those days. All illustrations were in black and white. A large amount of space was devoted to such things as determining the Hour Angle of the Mean Sun. Three planets had no moons, Saturn had nine and it was the only planet with rings. The hot news was that someone, unnamed, may have figured out how the Sun and others stars made their energy. Within a few years, Subramanyan Chandrasekhar of the University of Wisconsin would be the first astronomer awarded a Nobel Prize in Physics for this work.

Let's contrast Fath with a typical astronomy text being used today. The latest revised edition of Dixon's "Dynamic Astronomy," the text book I have favored for most of my introductory classes through the years, runs over 400 pages, has dozens of color photos, many shot either on location or from Earth orbit, and barely mentions the Mean Sun. Making up for that lamented lack are many topics unknown to Fath, such as black holes, brown dwarfs, pulsars, quasars, and even details of lunar geology, such as the anorthosite of the lunar highlands.

Saturn now has 31 moons, and is just one of the four planets with rings. Only two planets lack a moon. The equations for the Sun and similar stars making energy are spelled out, as are details on the methods used by some types of dissimilar stars. The clouds of Venus are no longer water, but sulfuric acid. And details of satellites and orbits are major topics.

HOW DID ALL THIS COME ABOUT?

Part comes from new telescopes. Even as we were starting at Columbia, plans were being laid for the great complex of telescopes at Kitt Peak in Arizona, Mauna Kea in Hawaii, Purple Mountain Observatory in China, and others in places such as Armenia and Chile came later. All these telescopes and the hordes of smaller ones benefitted from advances in computer technology and the replacement of simple photographic techniques wih more advanced electronic gadetry. But the most single important change is due to something that occured in our sophomore year.

I well remember the astronomy class meeting of October 9, 1957. The course met on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and this was the first class meeting since the USSR -- a nation which no longer exists -- had sent Sputnik 1 into space.

Our instructor was Professor Jan Schilt. He was of Dutch origin, and in the Netherlands he had been a student of the famous astronomer Jacobus Cornelius Kapteyn (1851-1922). If one traces Kapteyn's predecessors, the trail leads back to Johannes Kepler, although Prof. Schilt never mentioned this to his class, and a few students were aware, that they were joining such a distinquished educational dynasty.

Prof. Schilt entered the lecture Hall in Pupin with a big grin, and started with, "Well gentlemen, it is not often that we have something new in the sky to talk about." That is not a phrase any astronomer could start a class with today, when new planets are found literally on a monthly basis, Jupiter alone has 63 moons --more than twice the number known for the entire Solar System in 1957, -- and one of the political issues of our day is the President's plan for manned missions to Mars.

Not all the changes are due to the space program. Pulsars are an accidnetial discovery of radio astronomy (1967), a field which I was advised to avoid because it was nothng but a passing fad of no value. Today some of the largest and most expensive astronomical facilities on Earth are radio telescopes, particularly ones such as the Very Large Array, which can trace exceptionally fine features in distant nebulas and galaxies.

Even the size of the universe has been adjusted since our college days. Then the Andromeda Galaxy was believed to be a bit smaller than our own galaxy, and abu 700.000 light years away. Today we know it is 2,200,000 light-years away, and distincty larger than our own galaxy, just another step along the humiliating route that Copernicus started us on when he moved the Earth away from the center of the universe. We also know that Andromeda and our galaxy are just the two largest galaxies in a cluster of about three dozen galaxies, three-quarters of which were quite unknown in our college days.

Closer to home, having two Rovers wandering around Mars for the past year is a long way from arguing about the existence of canals on Mars -- which Fath, to his credit, doubted. The discovery by the Huyghens probe this past January of rivers, lakes and seas on Titan, Saturn's largest moon, was a bit of a surprise to us. Back in the Fifties it would have been a real shocker. Today we know a great deal about the processes by which planets form.

And I cannot resist ending on a personal note. While I was working on the Apollo Project in 1964 for Grumman Aircraft, the company looked ahead to the days when the Apollo missions to the Moon were complete. They sent around a memo asking for suggestions on non-lunar missions for Apollo. The 1975 joint Apollo-Soyuz spaceflight hook-up grew out of this.

But I suggested using an Apollo, complete with a lunar lander, to fly to one of the asteroids which pass near the Earth. I buttressed this with the results of some time borrowed from the IBM 7094 computer Grumman used. I was able to show that at least two of the eight asteroids known to pass reasonably near the Earth were within feasible range.

Grumman was enthused enough about this to pass the idea along to NASA. Unfortunately, NASA decided that fuel, time, and the equipment's dependability were too marginal to try it. However, when President Bush appointed a panel to make recommendations on the fuure of Amerca's space program last year, I proposed reviving this plan.

Today over 700 asteroids are known to approach the Earth close enough to reach, an average of one every six weeks or so. At least two of the nine members of the commission indicated strong support for the idea, which is now being considered as a step to be taken between building a permanent lunar base and a manned expedition to Mars.

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NOTE on PHOTOS: The photo of the astronaut is one of a well-travelled Russian cosmonaut. -- The photo of the rocket launching is the launch on April 11 of the Orbital Sciences Minotaur rocket from Vandenburg Air Force Base in California, successfully placing the 220-pound XSS-11 mini-satellite into a polar orbit. -- Lunar astronaut David Scott is shown on the Moon during NASA's Apollo 15 mission of July 2-August 7, 1971.]

BARNARD'S STAR CLAIMS TO FAME!

By Thomas Wm. Hamilton

Barnard's Star has nothing to do with a certain women's college in New York City. It is named in honor of Edward Emerson Bernard (1857-1923), its discoverer. This red dwarf star has several claims to fame. It is currently the second closest star to the Sun, at 5.96 lightyears (counting the three components of Alpha Centuri as one star -- one component is a red dwarf somewhat similar to Bernard's Star in size and temperature). It also has the highest known proper motion, i.e., it is moving relative to the Sun at a greater speed than any other star. And in about 8,000 years, this speed and its direction will make Bernard's Star the closest star to the Sun. At its nearest, around the year 11,800 AD, Barnard's Star will be about 3.8 lightyears away.

For those with telescopes, Bernard's Star is located in the constellation of Ophiuchus. I say telescopes, because despite its proximity, Barnard's Star cannot be seen with the unaided eye. Like all red dwarf stars, it is extremely dim. This is the consequence of two things: its small size and ts low temperature.

Bernard's Star is only about 160,000 miles in diameter (the Sun is 864,000), wih a surface temperature of 3,800 F (the Sun is 9,950 F). Thus, while the region where a planet around the Sun can have liquid water ranges from about 70,000,000 to 130,000,000 miles (depending on the planet's atmosphere), for Bernard's Star the range is 3,100,000 to 7,900,000 miles. If a planet exists 93,000,000 miles from Bernard's Star, the star would appear only five magnitudes brighter than the Full Moon does in our sky, and the planet would make Titan, with its liquid methane rivers, look warm.

The astronomer Peter van de Kamp (1901-1995), working at Sproul Observatory in Pennsylvania, devoted many years to studying Bernard's Star, believing that he had found evidence of two very large planets in orbit around it. However, the Hubble Space Telescope has in recent years been used to search for such planets and found nothing, and astronomers who were involved in the discovery of many of the exoplanets found in the last ten years have also looked and turned up no evidence of planets.

But Bernard's Star is of interest for another reasonm one related to its apparent rapid motion. All stars, including the Sun, are in orbit around the center of our galaxy. This center is about 32,000 lightyears away, and is a story for another day. The Sun, and most of its neighbors, take something ike 120 million years to comlete a single orbit of the galaxy. This orbit is fairly circular, and has a very small tilt with respect to the plane of our galaxy, which is remarkably flat. Think of a frisbee with a couple of spiral arms painted on ot coming out from the center. Most stars are concentrated in the arms, and those which are not, are concentrated in the areas in between.

Stars like the Sun, found in the spiral arms of the galaxy, are known as Population 1 stars. This has nothing to do with age or importance (except to s), it is just that these were the first studied. But astronomers have known for quite some time that there are stars outside the flat part of the galaxy. Think again of that frisbee, but imagine it embedded in a sphere of grains of sand. Those grains are the Population 2 stars.

Astronomers have learned that the Population 1 stars are relatively young, ranging fromstars that have just formed to stars like the Sun (about 4.6 billion years old) to stars up to 8 billion years old. But Population 2 stars are far older. The young ones might be a mere 10 billion years old, but the bulk of them are up to 13 billion years old.

The older a star is, generally the less it has elements with high numbers -- especially, and most significantly for us, from iron on up. Among other things, this means a lower likelihood of planets we could live on. Also, the older a star is, the more of its initial fuel (hydrogen) will have been used up. Only the longest lasting Population 1 stars are around after eight billion years. Our Sun will not last that long -- it is probably good for only another three billion years, and not in its current form either for the last billion of those years.

Contrary to what one might expect, the longest lived stars are the lightest weight. Heavy stars have more hydrogen, true, but the extra mass causes greater heat on the star's interior, making it use up the hydrogen faster. A star like Sirius, with a mass 2.2 times that of the Sun, is good for not much more than a billion years. Barnard's Star, with under 15% the Sun's mass, is already ten billion years old, and is believed to be good for another 30 billion years or so before finally running out of fuel.

But if Bernard;s Star is a Populaton 2 member, and they are found in a sphere distributed around the flat disk of Population 1 stars, what is Bernard's Star doing so close to us? The Pop 1 stars have orbits that are barely tilted at all with respect to the flat disk. While the Sun's orbit is tilted less than one degree, Pop 2 stars are typically tilted 40 or 50 degrees, and some no doubt are tilted at a full right angle to the disk, 90 degrees. But their orbits must occasionally carry them right through the disk. That is what is happening right now to Bernard''s Star. It is passing through the disk, an event it experiences only about every 60 million years or so.

Disk stars in our part of the galaxy average about four lightyears apart. In the reaches where most Populaton 2 stars are normally found, the average distance is more like 20 lightyears. Almost all Pop 2 stars are very old. The region where they exist, far outside the plane of the galaxy, is not making new stars, and has not for many billions of years. But the longest lived stars are the ones that use up their fuel the most slowly, i.e., the small, cool red dwarfs. This is what makes up almost all the Population 2 stars, the stars primarily found far from the plane of the galaxy.

The red dwarfs would all be invisible from one another without a telescope. The Population 2 stars that were similar in size and mass to the Sun or to Sirius died long ago, leaving only the red dwarfs and the burned out remants of shorter lived stars like the Sun. Quite likely there are also brown dwarfs scattered among the red dwarfs in Pop 2, but now we are talking about objects that are very hard to observe, since brown dwarfs that are billions of years old will be putting out only the weakest of infra-red glows.

A former student of mine, Fred Espenak, who is now NASA's resident expert on eclipses, while doing graduate work at Kitt Pea, found evidence that nearly all red dwarfs, including Bernard's Star, are variable stars. Red dwarfs have surface flares, much like the Sun's. However, red dwarfs are so small and dim that a flare which on a star like the Sun is noted more for its effects on space weather and auras than for what it does to the star's appearance, will for a red dwarf briefly double the star's brightness. Just one more reason why red dwarfs are unlikely to have habitable planets.

So while galaxies like ours do have a spherical structure, only the flat plane with the spiral arms is fairly densely packed with bright stars. The rest is almost invisible except to the largest telescops. And next time we'll take a look at our galaxy.

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STARS, "MEASURE FOR MEASURE"

By THOMAS HAMILTON

MARCH 2005 (Column #4) -- By the 1830's telescopes had developed to the point where astronomers believe that they finally would be able to get the measure of a star's distance.

For centuries the distance of no star was known, not even the Sun -- and the Sun's status as a star was not even secured for a long time. The problem facing the astronomers of the 1830s is easily phrased: If you are barely able to measure the distance to only the nearest stars, but are beginning with no idea which stars are the nearest, which star do you start with?

The solution was to seek clues. There are three possible reasons why a star might be bright. It could be close, it could be large, or it could be extra hot. Astrophysics had not yet developed to the point where an astronomer could point to a star and say, "That baby's a hot number," or "What a biggy!" Star colors were known and recognized, but no one had much of an idea of what they meant. For a long time the assumption was that all stars were about the same size and temperature of the Sun.

So a bright star could not automatically be assumed to be close. A second possible clue is in the star's motion. That stars moves goes back to Hipparchurus around 160 BC, as Ptolemy found over 300 years later that Arcturus seemed to have moved from positions recorded in Hipparchurus' catalog. This discovery got little attention during the centuries when the heavens were supposed to be "perfect and unchanging." Still, Arcturus was long recognized as the fastest moving of alll bright stars.

It was only in 2004 that the reason for this was determined to be Arcturus having been kidnapped from another, smaller galaxy.

The apparent motion of a star in space as seen from Earth is called its proper motion. To show how this motion is, Arcturus has moved roughly the width of the Full Moon since the days of Hipparchus. For normal stars that are moving in traffic much the same direction and speed as the Sun, closer stars will appear to be moving faster than the distant stars. Next time you are travelling in a car on a highway, notice that cars in lanes next to you appear to move quickly, while trees or buildings in the distance drift slowly from view. Yet these other cars probably are moving within 10 or 15 miles per hour speed, while the trees and buildings are standing still, meaning they are left behind at whatever your speed is. So, three astronomers decided to look for nearby stars whose distances could be measured. The technique required patience, as each selected stars would be observed at six month intervals. This gave the observers the largest possible baseline -- the diameter of the Earth's orbit, or 186 million miles. You can try this experiment with a slighly smaller baseline. Stretch out an arm, with one finger held up. Look at the finger, without moving it, first through one eye, and then the other. You will see the finger jump slightly against the background. This shift was noted by the ancient Greeks, who gave it the name "parallax." The largest possible parallex or shift available is to use the diameter of Earth's orbit. A star at a distance of 3.26 lightyears would have a parallax of one second of arc (full circle = 360 degrees, each degree = 60 arc seconds, each minute = 60 arc seconds, making for a very small angle). The smallest angle most humans can detect without help from instruments is about three arc minutes. "Just a moment!" I can hear some people screaming. Yes, the angle for a star at 3.26 lightyears measured using the diameter of the Earth's orbit is NOT one arc second. It is TWO arc seconds. The radius of our orbit (i.e., our average distance from the Sun) is 93 million miles or 150 million kilometers, and a star with a parallax of one second as measured from that 93 million miles or 150 kilometers long baseline is defined as having a distance of one parsec (PARallaxSECond), or 3.26 lightyears. So if a distance could be measured, the angle would be very small, but at least astronomers had several different units ready and waiting in which to express the distances. First was Friedrich Georg Wilhelm Bessel. He went for the star with the highest known proper motion, assuming it would be pretty close. Today, the highest known proper motion is held by Barnard's Star, which was discovered 60 years after Bessel's work. I'll discuss it another time. In Bessel's day the fastest known star was 61 Cygni, a pair of orangy colored stars a bit smaller and cooler than the Sun, located in a wing of Cygnus. Bessel got a result of about 12 lightyears. (A lightyear is the distance light goes in one year, travelling appromimately 186,282.3959 miles per second. That is about 5,866,000,000,000 miles.) Next came Otto Struve, at Pulkovo Observatory near St. Petersburg in Russia. (There were several Otto Struves in astronomy, the last Otto Struve dying in the USA in 1960.) He chose the brightest star, Sirius, getting a result of about nine lightyears. He was lucky not to chose the second brightest star, Canopus, as it's over 300 lightyears away, so far away that for an accurate measurement one would have to wait over 160 years, and require the use of the Hipparcos satellite. Third was Thomas Henderson at Table Mountain Observatory in South Africa. Henderson reasoned a bright star may not be at all that close (for example, Canopus), nor need a fast moving star to be close. But a star high on the lists of both bright and fast moving stars was bound to be near us. Alpha Centuri (which in any case was too far south for either Bessel or Struve to see from their home observatories) was fourth brightest and third fastest. It also turned out to be the closest at 4.3 lightyears. 61 Cygni was known to be a binary, a pair of stars travelling together in space. About a decade later Sirius was discovered to have a companion -- a mysterious object we'll look at next time. Alpha Centuri was believed to be a binary in 1838, but years later a third star was identified as part of the group. It is, in fact, the Sun which is odd for not having any stellar companions. For over 100 years astronomers slowly and painfully, star by star, increased the distance to which parallax could be measured. Finally, the ESA launched its Hipparcus satellite, which can measure stellar brightness, spectrum and distance with incredible accuracy. Such data is now collected for over 100,000 stars, enough so that we are even beginning to fill in details on the structure of our Galaxy. And we have found that while in our region of space, stars average about four lightyears apart near the center of the galaxy, they may average one percent of that amount. Above and below the plain of our Galaxy, which s a flattened disk, stars average more than 20 lightyears apart. ************************ NEXT TIME: A column on Barnard's Star, a red dwarf twice as old as the Sun. *********************************************************

SEE: FIRST DISCOVERER OF AN EXO-PLANET A CENTURY AGO?

JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2005 (Column #3)-- Thomas Jefferson See (1867-1960) had what is undoubtedly the most appropriate name ever held by an American astronomer. But today he is little remembered, although the Smithsonian has a collection of 30,000 of his papers.

See spent some of the early part of his career at Virginia's Leander McCormack Observatory. While astronomy was not nearly as specialized as it is today, See did concentrate on binary stars. These stars uniquely provide information on the stars' masses, if their orbits were accurately determined and their periord measured correctly. While early work on binaries by William Herschel and others came at a time when astronomers mostly questioned whether stars could really travel around in pairs, it was in fact due to Herschel's own tracking of several binaries that proved the stars were really associated.

One of the binaries discovered by Herschel was 61 Cygni, a fourth magnitude star located in a wing of the constellation Cygnus the Swan. 61 Cygni gained a greater fame when in 1838 it was the first star to have its distance measured. (This is an interesting story I will cover in our next column).

The two stars comrising 61 Cygni have not come close to completing their orbit since Herschel identified the pair nearly two centuries ago, so the orbital period is still not accurately known. Most estimates come in at around 650 years. See, working in the 1890s, had even less of a database to work with, and so even less of an accurate estimate for the orbital period. However, after collecting all the measurements available, he presented his work to the "Astronomical Journal" for publication.

This requires a bit of digression. The "Astronomical Journal" was founded in 1850 by the first American to earn a Ph.D. in astronomy, Benjamin A. Gould. After completing the degree at Heidelberg, he traveled around Europe seeking advice on how best to further the development of astronomy in the USA. The advice was to start a professional journal, which he did, and it's still around today.

Anyhow, See's work did not complete the mutual orbits of the two orange-tinted stars comprising 61 Cygni. That was impossible. But his findings suggested a third, less massive object was present in the system, with just enough gravitional influence to be detectable as slightly influencing the orbtal path of one of the known stars. He made no further claims. Any competent astronomer interested in his numbers could tell that See was claiming to have detected an object so lightweigh that it could not possibly be a star, i.e., that See had detected the first of what we now call exoplanets.

In the late 19th Century the general belief was that the Solar System had formed when another star passed close to the Sun, tearing out hot gases which then condensed to form the planets. (Incidently, this theory is impossible. Hot gases pulled out of a star would simply blow away in space as nebular material. not condense into planets.) Enough was known about the average distance between stars and their motions that it was extremely unlikely that more than two such near-collisions had occured during the entire life of our Galaxy. Given a Galaxy 100,000 light-years across and about 10,000 light-years at its thickest, the odds against two of the only four planetary systems in existence within 12 light-years of one another were fantastically remote. See's work was rejected.

See got nasty about it, and wrote an ill-tempered letter to the editor of the "Astronomical Journal." instead of printing a letter which in essence called the editor an idiot, the editor printed an editorial in which he announced that nothing further by See would appear in the "AJ" until he apoligized. See lived another 65 years, long past the lifespan of the editor, and never withdrew a word. The controversy quickly expanded to involve the astronomical community in those days. One of See's former students, Forest R. Moulton, jumped in vigorously denouncing See for hs intemperance on furthering then unbelievable results. Moulton, incidentally, about 20 years later was the author of the textbook on celestial mechanics which became the standard text in use everywhere until computers became widespread enough to make a next text viable.

See found not only publications closed to him, but he was dropped from using most observatories. He finally got work at the Naval Observatory, mostly doing mathematical work, a big step down. Embittered, he became something of a crank, writing articles ridiculing relativity theory, and later, quantum mechanics. No reputable professional publication would carry his work, although See occassionally would get quoted in things such as "Popular Science."

See's later career, although unfortunate, is not relevant to the question of whether he really did detect an exoplanet. The recent finding that 61 Cygni does have a planet accompanying the less bright star raises the question of See's possibly having been correct. No ne has looked at See's work in decades. The original findings and measurements are presumably in the 30,000 documents the Smithsonian claims to have. Perhaps someday an eager graduate students will go rrummaging through the fles, and we'll find out if See by Mayer by a century in discovey of the first exoplanet. Or the recently reported exoplanet of 61 Cygni will be disproved, leaving See again ignored.

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[EDITOR"S NOTE: The photo at the beginning of this column was taken of a star called 2M1207 some 230 light-years away, showing a possible exoplanet.The recent photo, taken last year by the ESO's Very Large Telescope in China, was followed recently be yet another photo, a clearer one that may establish that the first exoplanet has actually been photographed rather than inferred by a star's wobble. Also, National Geographic magazine's December 2004 issue had a fascinating feature cover story titled "Searching the Stars for New Earths" by magazine Senior Editor Tim Applenzeller.]

HIGHLIGHTS OF THE EARLY PILOTED SPACEFLIGHTS by Astronomer THOMAS WM. HAMILTON

DECEMBER 2004 (Column #2)--- The first manned spacecraft was launched into space on April 12, 1961 carrying 27-year-old Yuri Gagarin on a single Earth orbit. Considering the Soviet Union's professed public image as a revolutionary and proletarian state, it is ironic that they sent into space as the first human explorer someone bearing a very aristocratic name. In pre-1918 Czarist Russia, the Gagarins bore a title of Prince. However, knowledgable Soviets always claimed his name was an unrelated coincidence.

Gagarin rode in a small spacecraft called a Vostok (written BOCTOK in Cyrillic), which means "east" in Russian. One of the later Vostoks sent the first woman, Valentina Tereshkova, 26, into space (June 1963). When John Glenn followed Gagarin into space with a three orbit spaceflight 10 months later on February 20, 1962, his Mercury space capsule was also quite small. The total of six astronauts who rode in Mercury capsules said it had as much room as the driver's seat in a Volkswagen.

The next step for both nations was a spacecraft carrying two astronauts. The Soviet version was the Voskhod (BOCXOD in Cyrillic). The Voskhod ("eagle" in Russian) had a short life. During its first spaceflight (October 12, 1964) with a crew of three men cramped into the two-crew cabin, Premier Khrushchev was overthrown, and the crew was ordered to land prematurely after a day in space. There was only one more Voskhod flight, another one day mission with two men on March 18, 1965, and then there were no more flights of Voskhod.

The American Gemini was far more successful and productive, lasting from March 23, 1965 until November 11, 1966 with 10 missions. It was designed to rendezvous with a separately launched unmanned rocket, the Agena. Once linked, the Agena could be restarted, taking the Gemini to as much as 800 miles above the Earth. (To this day, only American manned spacecraft have flown that high -- and beyond to the Moon.) Of course, the first rendezvous attempt during the Gemini 8 flight (March 16, 1966) did not work properly, with the Agena target vehicle incorrectly wired, so that it fired uncontrollably. Neil Armstrong was the Gemin pilot and he reacted so coolly that he was later picked for another job -- Apollo 11.

Anyone checking the records will find that Gemini 7 launched before Gemini 6 on December 6, 1965. NASA did not forget how to count; 6 and 7 were to fly in tandem, but the launch of Gemni 6 was delayed for 11 days until December 15. They did manage to fly in tandem, something two Vostoks had done previously, firstly in August 1962 and secondly in June 1963, one of those craft flown with Tereshkova.

The next logical step was a spacecraft carrying three people. The Soviets, however, sent up only one man aboard the first Soyuz ("union" in Russian) on April 23, 1967. Their caution proved advisable, as the Soyuz, which ran into trouble before re-entry, crashed on landing, killing the astronaut, Vladimir Komarov. The Soviets had two methods for their astronauts to return. One was the obvious, to stay aboard until it landed. But there was an alternative, -- to jump out with a parachute as the orbiter descended on its own parachute. For the first Soyuz, the spacecraft spun, wrapping the parachute cords around iitself, and blocking the door, so the astronaut was unable to jump out.

The American three man spacecraft was the Apollo. During a ground test on January 27, 1967, three astronauts were killed by a fire caused by a simple error of trying to use a pure oxygen atmosphere -- fires can easily start spontaneously in pure oxygen. Redesign of the on-board atmosphere and other checks delayed the first Moon landing from a hoped-for May 1967 (a date once shrouded in secrecy) to July 1969. In addition, besides the six Moon landings, there were two tests in Earth orbit (Apollo 7 in October 1968 and Apollo 9 in March 1969): two circumlunar spaceflights (Apollo 8 in December 1968 and Apollo 10 in May 1969); the aborted Apollo 13 mission around the Moon in April 1970; three Apollos to the Skylab space station, all in 1973; and the last Apollo 18 mission was a rendezvous in Earth orbit with Soyuz 19 in July 1975, both spacecraft launched on the same day.

The Soviets lost three of their astronauts on the Soyuz 11 in June 1970 after 23 days in orbit. They had docked with a Salyut ("salute" in Russian) space station. When it was time to return to Earth, the Soyuz was supposed to unclamp, float free, and then fire its retro-rockets t deorbit. Instead, the clamps did not come loose, so when the return retro-rockets fired, stresses made some of the hull plating sprung leaks, exposing the unsuited astronauts to airless space upon descent, killng them. But the autopilot functioned perfectly, returning their lifeless bodies to Earth, their Soyuz a coffin.

The Space Shuttle is sufficiently contemporary that I don't feel its history needs to be summarized here. The Soviets were developing a close imitation to the shuttle called Buran ("snowstorm" in Russian), which made one unmanned two-orbit flight on November 15, 1988. Soon after the Soviet Union collapsed and the funding for Buran ran out.

Russia has continued to use two updated versions of the Soyuz, one often used for carrying foreigners into space. The other, Soyuz-T, is billed as a military vehicle. (An updated Soyuz capable of carrying five or six astronauts is under development.)

Recently the Chinese have developed their own launch vehicle (a Long March rocket) and manned spacecraft (the "Shenzhou"), which is said to be based upon the Soyuz, but with some differences. (On October 15, 2003 Shenzhou 5 carried the first Chinese-launched astronaut - "taikonaut" Yang Liwei, 38, - on a 14-orbit, 21-hour spaceflight. In September 2005. China plans to launch two astronauts on a five day orbital spaceflight.)

The first U.S. space station was the post-lunar mission Skylab in 1973, to and from which were flown the Apollo ships that were to be used for three remaining but cancelled lunar landing missions. Skylab was left in orbit for too long. There had been hopes that it would be available once the Shuttle started flying, but it fell back into the atmosphere in 1979, two years before the first Shuttle flight ("the Columbia') on April 12, 1981.

Skylab's successor is the International Space Station (ISS), initially called Space Station Freedom by President Reagan when he first proposed it. (On November 1, 1988 CBS-TV broadcast a Charlie Brown and Peanuts Special -- "This Is America, Charlie Brown: The NASA Space Station" -- in cooperation with cartoonist Charles Schultz and NASA to explain the workings of the station to the general public.) NASA invited members of the European Space Agency, Japan, Canada and Brazil to participate shortly after President Reagan proposed it. An Italian asked, "When do you plan to launch it?" A NASA representative said, "October 12, 1992, for obvious resasons." The significance of that date was missed by everyone except the Canadians and Brazilians.

The Soviet Union developed two types of space stations, Salyut in the early 1970s, and, later in the 1980s, the Mir ("world" or "peace" in Russian). Just as the USA has the National Air and Space Museum attached to the Smithsonian, Russia has its Cosmos Pavilion in the Park of Progress at the edge of Moscow. A Salyut replacement was ordered to be placed on display at the Cosmos Paviliion. The factory which turned out the Salyut produced an extra one and it was mounted for publc display.

Just as in the USA school groups visit. Just as in the USA ten year old boys play by pushing the buttons. Unlike in the USA, this extra Salyut was an extremely accurate replica -- and it came to life one day when a school child played with the controls. Attitude Control Jets tried to orient the Sun seekers to a floodlight. Other little things started happening. The entire park was evacuated, technicians were flown in from Star City to turn it off, the batteries and fuel were removed, and just to be safe, the control panels were covered by acrylic sheets. If you get a chance to visit it, visit without fear.

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Next time (January issue) we'll look at a nearly forgotten controversy: did an American astronomer first discover exoplanet a century before Mayer? For the first "Space Bytes" column, visit this journal's homepage.

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"Space Bytes" Copyright 2004@Thomas Wm. Hamilton.

SPACE BYTES by THOMAS WM. HAMILTON

"MY BIT IN SPUTNIK HISTORY"

NOVEMBER 2004 (Column #1) --- I thought that for this first column I would re-tell the tale of the very first satellite, and my not very important connection to it.

On July 28, 1955 President Dwight Eisenhower called the press to announce that the United States intended to launch an artificial satellite in conjunction with the studies of the IGY, International Geophysical Year (July 1957 - December 1958, not your ordinary Earth year).

No attention had been paid to a similar announcement by the Soviet Union in April. Headlines in the afternoon newspapers ranged from the simply factual in the NY Times, to the potentionally alarming in the NY Post (the single word "SPACESHIPS" filling the front page.)

The first satellite was, of course, Sputnik I, launched on October 4, 1957. I was eating dinner as the first word was announced. I left the table and rushed to radio station WKCR, Columbia University's FM station, where I was a sophomore working in the news department.

We lugged an incredibly heavy "portable" Ampex tape recorder across campus to the school's ham radio station, W2AEE, where we taped the beep, beep of Sputnik as it rose above the horizon from New York. The rest of the evening we frequently rebroadcast it.

The next morning at about 9:05 a.m., two men entered the station and flipped open wallets showing credentials that they were from the FBI.

After asking for confirmation that we had taped and been rebroadcasting Sputnik I's beep, they demanded and walked off with the tape. As I observed to my classes during over 31 years of teaching, they stole the tape, since they never paid for it, replaced it, or returned it.

It lated turned out that W2AEE was the second station in the United States to tape Sputnik I. First was an RCA facility near Riverhead, Long Island, where Sputnik rose a few minutes earlier. However, the RCA personnel then had to drive into Manhattan to get it on the air.

In those days the Long Island Expressway barely got to the Queens-Nassau border, beyond which one had to drive on the Jericho Turnpike. The drive took close to three hous, while we only had to walk one block across campus. WKCR, a ten watt FM station run by a bunch of college kids, was the first broadcast facility in the USA to carry Sputnik I's signal.

I was taking Introductory Astronomy at the time. The next time the class met, Professor Jan Schilt walked into the room and said, "Well, gentlemen, it is not every day that we have something new in the sky to talk about!" (A remark no one would dare make today.) He then spent the rest of the class period proving that the Soviets had deliberately launched Sputnik I into an orbit which it could not be observed in he USA for at least six weeks after launch.

The satellite beep was modulated to indicate its internal temperature, but otherwise made no readings. The signal died after a few weeks when the on-board batteries were exhausted -- no solar panels in those days.

Eventually, Sputnik I did become visible. It was in a very low orbit, and fell back into the atmosphere and burned up in January 1958, at a point when the only other satellite launched was Sputnik 2, a month after Sputnik 1's launch, which carried a dog named Laika aboard, the first live animal in space.

The USA had tried to launch a test Vanguard satellite on December 6, 1957, but after the rocket rose two feet, it fell back to Earth and exploded. And even the NY Daily News commemorated it with the classic headline, "What a Flopnik!"

The United States finally got a satellite into orbit on January 31, 1958, thanks to Wernher von Braun. After the Vanguard failure, President Eisenhower phoned von Braun and asked if he could get a satellite into orbit within 90 days. Von Braun promised to do it by the end of January and made hs self-imposed deadline by only 90 minutes with a nighttime launch from Cape Canaveral at 10:30 p.m. on January 31, 1958.

What is often forgotten is that the Unted States could have orbited its first satellite in September of 1956. A Jupiter-C rocket launched then would have put a satellite into orbit (von Braun used a Jupiter C for his first launch), except that some Pentagon fathead who was never publically identified ordered that the fuell tank of the last stage of the rocket be loaded with sand instead of fuel.

Sputnik 2 was launched on November 3, 1957. It weighed about seven times as much as its predecessor, and carried a dog. The third Sputnik was not launched until the following May 15, 1958, but by that time the United States had launched Explorer 1, Vanguard 1 and Exlporer 3. (Explorer 2 failed.)

The only one of all these satellites still in orbit today is Vanguard 1, the smallest. It was not much bigger than a medium sized grapefruit. Its transmitter failed in 1970, but it is still up there swinging between 420 and 2,400 miles above the Earth.

The public reaction to he first Sputnik was total shock and horror. Particularily after the dog was sent up, people were reacting as though they expected Soviet soldiers to dispatch troops onto the White House lawn. Not everyone was so upset. The Secretary of Defense, "Engine" Charles Wilson, said that Sputnik was a silly bauble and he was glad the Soviets were first, not the USA. This nearly got him impeached, and did lead to Eisenhower advising him to avoid further public comment.

Next time we'll look at manned spacecraft, and some of their experiences.

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[Photo above is of Major General Holger Nelson Toftoy with a converted V-2 rocket at White Sands Proving Grounds in New Mexico in the 1950s.]

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ABOUT THOMAS WM. HAMILTON

Hamilton was born in San Fransisco, was educated at Columbia University, worked on the Apollo Project as an "orbital analyst" at Grumman Aircraft, then wrote canned planetarium shows for plantarium manufacturers, followed by 31 years of college teaching, and writing and presenting planetarium shows at Wagner College and St. Johns University.

Hamilton had a federal grant in 1980 to write shows in 12 foreign languages and distributed these to 260 planetariums throughout the USA. He authored two books on computers, was editor for eight years of a newsletter for the planetarium field, wrote several dozen articles on planetariums and general astronomical topics, hosted an annual convention of the Science Fiction Research Association, and authored several Sci-Fi stories that appeared in "Changing the Times."

THOMAS HAMILTON: THE SCI-FI WRITER! Thomas Hamilton is not only a superb astronomer and columnist; he is also an excellent science fiction writer, with a lifelong interest in sci-fi as noted in his "Space Bytes' bio. Recently "Changing The Times," an "Alternate History" on-line and print magazine with "What If?"stories, published his latest thoroughly enjoyable story, "TIME FOR PATRIOTS." To read and exercise your imagination, be a "Slider" and just click-on below, with a link to Hamilton's complete sci-fi works, including his latest story! -- (And be sure to check your surroundings when you finish!)