Stone of Remembrance

The Hubble Telescope, which has captured views of some of the most amazing deep-space objects, is likely getting a new lease on life.

Former NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe canceled a Hubble mission in the wake of the Columbia shuttle disaster that killed seven astronauts in 2003. Griffin, who succeeded him, said he would reconsider the decision if the space shuttles could return to flying on a regular schedule without serious problems.

A rehab mission would keep Hubble working until about 2013. It would add two new camera instruments, upgrade aging batteries and stabilizing equipment, add new guidance sensors and repair a light-separating spectrograph. Without a servicing mission, Hubble likely would deteriorate in 2009 or 2010.

The final report, Assessment of Options for Extending the Life of the Hubble Space Telescope, said in part: “a shuttle astronaut servicing mission is the best option for extending the life of Hubble and preparing the observatory for eventual robotic de-orbit.” Costs and attendant dangers had made the loss of Hubble a real possibility – a terrible waste after all it’s shown us.

According to the main Hubble site, this mission has been a possibility for some time, based on the success of previous missions (including the just-completed one in July).

The JWST is NASA’s project of the future, but given the mercurial nature of public and legislative support, it’s encouraging that there’s a good chance we can keep Hubble aloft until its replacement is launched sometime next decade. Score one for science.

Check this out: a commercial for DirecTV that mixes in footage from the second Star Trek movie. It’s hilarious.

“With what Starfleet just ponied up for this big screen TV, settling for cable would be . . . illogical.”

Great.

Tip o’ the hat to TrekMovie.com.

DISORDER, ANYONE? The electrically conducting structure of metallic water occurs at a more accessible part of the water phase diagram than formerly thought. Here, a snapshot from a first-principles computer simulation demonstrates the atomic disorder. Red spheres are hydrogen atoms, white spheres are oxygen atoms, and the electron density from a partially occupied electron state responsible for the conductivity is shown as gold. (Image courtesy of Sandia National Laboratories)

I was pointed to this article from a post to a mailing list I regularly read. It was mentioned by the poster that James Blish talked about “metallic water” many years ago in They Shall Have Stars, the first book in Cities In Flight.

Supercomputer simulations by two Sandia researchers have significantly altered the theoretical diagram universally used by scientists to understand the characteristics of water at extreme temperatures and pressures.

The new computational model also expands the known range of water’s electrical conductivity. The Sandia theoretical work showed that phase boundaries for “metallic water” — water with its electrons able to migrate like a metal’s — should be lowered from 7,000 to 4,000 kelvin and from 250 to 100 gigapascals.

(A phase boundary describes conditions at which materials change state — think water changing to steam or ice, or in the present instance, water — in its pure state an electrical insulator — becoming a conductor.)

The lowered boundary is sure to revise astronomers’ calculations of the strength of the magnetic cores of gas-giant planets like Neptune. Because the planet’s temperatures and pressures lie partly in the revised sector, its electrically conducting water probably contributes to its magnetic field, formerly thought to be generated only by the planet’s core.

We science fiction writers face the inevitable drift of the future into the present. It’s pretty cool when one’s forebears come up with ideas that turn out to have some validity. Now, all I have to do is to find some way to use this in a story . . .