The Beagle has Landed!

Some years ago – certainly before 2003 – I went to a lecture given by Colin Pillinger. Think mad scientist, big sideburns, strong west country accent. This guy had a dream of landing a probe on Mars to search for evidence of life. Well, that would cost a fortune and probably need to be done by NASA or ESA, wouldn’t it. Well, not if you beg, borrow, steal, persuade and finish up hitching a lift on another spacecraft going to Mars. He didn’t do it on his own, of course, but he must have been the driving force behind it. The probe was named Beagle 2, after the ship that carried Charles Darwin on the epic voyage which helped formulate his views on evolution.
Beagle 2 was due to touch down on Christmas Day 2003 and I remember hovering near the radio all day to hear the news. The news didn’t come. There was no signal from the probe and it was assumed that it had crashed on entry. Pillinger didn’t have the sort of face that showed despair but he must have felt it. And I am sure that many people had the view that amateurs should not be messing around in interplanetary missions. Pillinger died last year.
But now, pictures from the Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter have shown an object which is almost certainly Beagle 2. The pictures are not sharp enough to give much detail but they seem to show that the solar panels are at least partially deployed. If that is right then it means that Beagle 2 did land safely and started its deployment, even if that eventually failed.
Is this still a failure? Well, it depends on your view. I suspect Pillinger would have said something like: “Well, we nearly got there. Let’s try again.” What a pity he did not live see this news.

Moondogs and Rainbows

I use the internet a lot but I don’t do much random browsing. Occasionally I get diverted into following other links when looking up something. But then I used to do that when reading encyclopaedias when young. Actually [grumpiness warning] I get quite depressed with the internet sometimes. It could be a great power for good – spreading knowledge and keeping people in touch – but it sometimes seems to be drowning in a sea of commercialism, trivialisation, sex and so on. [end of grumpiness warning]
But one website I do try to look at most days is the NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day. On 11 December 2014 it had a picture of a moondog, or paraselene. This is an optical phenomonon caused by refraction in small ice crystals. You can get sundogs too – I’ve seen those but never a moondog.
I’m not going to try to describe this in any more detail because APOD included a link to Atmospheric Optics. Now this site is a shining example (no pun intended) of what I think the internet should be doing. It is crammed full of interesting, thorough and well written descriptions of all sorts of atmospheric phenomena, including moondogs and sundogs.
It also includes a lot on rainbows. Now I remember one of my childrens’ encyclopeadias which showed a light ray being refracted through a raindrop and creating a rainbow. OK as far as it went but it didn’t answer all the questions: why does it form a bow? how big is the bow? why do you soemtimes see a double bow? and so on. It was some years later when I read an article in Scientific American which gave a much more thorough explanation. Well, Atmospheric Optics goes even further than that. I won’t even begin to summarise – just go look at the site.
Richard Dawkins has written a book called Unweaving the Rainbow, taking its title from the Poem Lamia by John Keats. Keats poem is an attack on ‘cold philosophy’ (“Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings“), perhaps referring to Isaac Newton, but Dawkins tries to show (and in my opinion succeeds) that science reveals the true beauty of the natural world, rather than destroying it.

Thoughts on a New Year

I caught the New Year’s day concert from Vienna on BBC 2 today. Interesting memory – when involved in an IAEA consultants’ meeting a few years ago I managed to get to a Mozart concert in the Musikverein.
I had not realised that the younger Strauss was influenced by science and technology. We heard the electromagnetic polka and the explosions polka, the latter commemorating (if that is the word) the invention of gun-cotton.