Something for kids to get excited about

CubeSats in Mars orbit (artist illustration) - NASA

There was great jubilation on Monday as NASA’s latest mission to Mars, the Insight lander, successfully touched down. This $828 million mission is nearly parsimonious when compared to the $150 billion cost of the International Space Station. And it is hoped to answer a deeply existential question – what happened to Mars’s oceans and atmosphere?

Some researchers believe that, long ago, Mars was potentially able to support life with liquid water and a relatively thick atmosphere. But its lack of a strong magnetosphere, such as Earth possesses, allowed the solar wind to eventually sweep away much of the atmosphere thereby allowing the oceans to evaporate into space. Insight will perform seismic studies to allow us to understand the dynamics of Mars’s core and perhaps the cause of her fate.

But in all the excitement, short thrift was given to another remarkable achievement. Insight did not fly alone, but was accompanied by a pair of diminutive, briefcase-size companions flying in formation with her. Two identical miniature spacecraft, each about 30 pounds, detached from Insight once underway and accompanied her across deep space, then went into orbit around Mars as Insight landed. Named MarCO-A and MarCO-B, Jet Propulsion Lab engineers whimsically nicknamed them WALL-E and EVE after the animated characters in the 2008 film WALL-E.

MarCO-A and -B are communication satellites and relay data between Insight and Earth. They were the first to report Insight’s successful landing. More importantly, they have proven that CubeSats (which they are) are capable of withstanding the rigors of a 300-million mile journey through deep space and arrive with pinpoint accuracy. 

A CubeSat is a standardized miniature satellite whose specifications were established in 1999 by California Polytechnic University and Stanford University. Since then over 800 CubeSats have been launched into low Earth orbit to perform a wide variety of purposes. One of the key differentiators of CubeSats is that they are hitchhikers and don’t have their own primary launch vehicle. This is the major contributor to their low cost.

CubeSats have been designed and deployed by a variety of commercial, governmental, and academic establishments, including universities, high schools, and even middle schools. That last bit is incredibly important.

Robertsville Middle School in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, recently was notified by NASA that their student proposal to loft a CubeSat into orbit had been approved. The photos of exuberant girls and boys are enough to warm the heart of any STEM teacher. RamSat (so named because the school mascot is a ram) will launch as soon as next year and will use imaging data to determine forest coverage lost to wildfires.

Peter Thornton, a scientist from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, says it well.

“This is such an exciting opportunity for the students. They will now have the chance to design, build, carry out and own a satellite mission. They will be the mission scientists, the communication specialists, and the logistics experts. They will calculate orbits, learn to aim their satellite camera at selected targets on the ground, radio their commands to RamSat, and receive and interpret the digital data streams broadcast by RamSat, containing imagery and all the other important data gathered on-board.

“They’ll be working as a team to identify and solve problems, and they will be working with NASA professionals to integrate RamSat into the launch and deployment mission,” Thornton said. “I can’t think of a more exciting project to ignite the students’ curiosity and passion for science and engineering.”

It is very likely that the girls and boys working on this project will be able to answer the age-old question of first year Algebra students: “When will I ever use this stuff in real life?”

Robertsville Middle kids will be living it. Maybe Wamsutta will be next?

Why we thank our veterans

World War II Memorial

Just this week we celebrated Veteran’s Day, a very special one since it has been 100 years since the hostilities of World War I ended. The Armistice, a truce between Germany and the Allies, went into effect on the "eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month" of 1918.

Also this week we mourned the 80^th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the night of 9-10 November in 1938 when the Nazi persecution of Jews became violently physical. These two events, separated by a mere twenty years, are not unrelated.

The causes of World War I were many. The simplest, and best known, was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary at the hands of a Serbian assassin. This was a tribal act driven by the desire of Serbia to take Bosnia and Herzogovina from Austria-Hungary as their native populations were all Slavic. This caused Austria-Hungary to attack Serbia, who had a mutual defense pact with Russia, the subsequent attack by which pulled Germany, who had their own pact with Austria-Hungary, into the conflict. But France had a defense pact with Russia, thus entering the fray. Germany attacked Belgium on the way to getting at France which caused Britain (who had a pact with both France and Belgium), and later the United States, to pile on. Japan opportunistically entered on the side of the Allies in order to claim German possessions in Asia. Italy, promised territory in secret negotiations, later entered on the side of the Allies.

To say it was complex is a vast understatement. WWI was to be the war to end all wars but we know how that worked out. Let’s take an abbreviated tour of the major chain of events since.

First, when WWI ended, Germany was permitted to accept a truce rather than surrender. This allowed her to retain a small standing army. More importantly, harsh reparation (repayment) terms were imposed, causing great hardship to the German peoples as the worldwide Great Depression unfolded. Conditions were ripe for a savior, and indeed, Adolph Hitler rose to power promising to return Germany to her former glory. Hitler’s Nazi party was racist and believed that their Aryan race was superior. To them, Jews, Romans, and Slavs were inferior and undesirable. This led, inevitably, to the Kristallnacht in 1938, the Holocaust that followed, and the state of Israel today.

World War II was predictable due to German and Japanese expansionism. The communist state of the Soviet Union (which formed during the interwar period – you were warned that this is abbreviated), first entered the conflict on the side of Germany but then was figuratively stabbed in the back by Hitler and switched alliance to the Allies. Our relationship with the Soviets was one of convenience, not shared values.

Then WWII was won, but this time Germany (and Japan) were required to surrender. Their leaders were deposed, governments disassembled, and they were occupied by Allied forces with the goal of building democratic institutions. That Japan and Germany are today peaceful, democratic, and rank as the world’s 3^rd and 4^th largest economies speaks to the grand success of this approach (in stark contrast to Iraq).

In the post-war years began the great struggle against communism, the Cold War.

In addition to the Soviet Union, Mao Zedong’s communist party revolted in 1947 and came into control of that country. (A vestige of free China exists in Taiwan. While China has risen to be the number two world economy, it has done so at the expense of repressive policies over its peoples in the most highly surveilled nation on earth.)

The Korean War was a dispute between the south (democratic) and the north (communist). China (openly) and the Soviet Union (covertly) lined up to support the north while the United Nations (mainly staffed by US forces), fought for the south. This conflict was the opening salvo in the Cold War and has not to this day been resolved.

The Vietnam War, which many misunderstand, was another major “hot” struggle of the Cold War, with China and the Soviet Union supporting the communist north and the United States the democratic south. Vietnam was an example of a political war with strategies and limitations set in Washington. The generals were not allowed to win the war and, even when we did win an enormous battle (such as the Tet Offensive and the Battle for Hue City), our domestic media presented it as a loss. When Americans were captured by the enemy, they were cursed and spat upon. When our military returned home, they were likewise cursed and spat upon. Those that did so had no grasp of history.

If there is one lesson, it is that the peace and prosperity of the world is largely due to America’s place in it. When we step back, the world becomes more dangerous. When we step forward, it becomes more safe. That is what you should really be thanking our veterans for.