October – Message in a bottle
We had an AGM in April to close the 2005/6 session, and started the 2006/7 session in September. They were pretty parochial events, which is my excuse to jump from March to October. Some of the things that took place in the interim include - an Astronomical Garden Party on Sunday June 25th, the observatory’s mains electric power supply reconnection in early July and the local historians Carl Barry & Lilian Fletcher's research project “William Crabtree of Broughton: Salford’s Great Astronomer” now available via the SAS’s website.
In the 1997 Hollywood movie Contact, Jodie Foster travels through space time using a superior technology machine built from data encoded in an extraterrestrial radio signal detected by SETI researchers. On arrival at the alien planet, this first contact with another civilisation is played out in a scene simulating her long dead father on a beach in Pensacola. In the ensuing dialog she discovers that there are many civilasations in the galaxy and asks the alien if “they all travel using the transport system they had built”. “We didn’t build it, we don’t know who did” the alien replies.
Our speaker for October, Andrew Lound, painted the picture where something like that could happen to us, although the level of technology could not be described as “advanced”. The only evidence of our civilisation that may one day be encountered by another are a couple of gold plated video discs attached to Voyager 1 and 2, launched 20th August and 5th September 1977. The disks contain images, greetings in 50 different languages, electrical signals from a human body and music. With passion and enthusiasm (and with the aid of a well produced multi media presentation), he painted the background against which the discs and their contents were eventually agreed and finalised. In that process all the noble human characteristics of equality, altruism, tolerance, compassion and love competed against personal egos, racial prejudice, political dogma and national ideology. This end product, a message in a bottle, is likely to outlast the civilisation which created it. At some distant time and place, it may represent who we are – or more likely, who we were.
Talking of man-made probes leaving the solar system. Here is something else that was launched in the 1970’s and is making the headlines once again:
Pioneer 10 and 11 were launched in 1972 and 1973. They were the first man-made objects to travel through the asteroid belt and visit Jupiter and Saturn and also on a one way ticket out of the solar system. Their original missions long accomplished, they were subsequently used in Project Phoenix by the SETI institute to “calibrate” their detectors at the outset of their regular SETI observations runs from Aricebo between 1995 and 2004. February 23rd 2003 was the final contact with Pioneer 10, which was supposed to be formally the end of the mission.
During the nineties, a
s both spacecraft headed out of the solar system on apposing trajectories, an anomaly in their expected positions was detected and has since been slowly developing, now known as the “Pioneer Anomaly”. Radio tracking data from both Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 exhibit a Doppler frequency shift indicating a small (8.74 ± 1.33) × 10−10 m/s2) acceleration towards the Sun – a sort of unexpected “slowing down”. Radio tracking of the two Voyager probes does not show a similar anomaly.
In an attempt to resolve this mystery, a recently created “Pioneer Anomaly team” is attempting a unique experiment. The team are on the hunt to gather all the Pioneer data since launch, then model it within a computer simulation and replay it one second at a time. With original data on punched cards, paper tapes and magnetic tape from over 3 decades ago, gathering and consolidation of the data is a formidable undertaking. The planetary society is sponsoring this investigation to resolve this anomaly, and the stakes are high. According to NASA this anomaly has the potential to undermine the laws of physics. The journey of discovery for the Pioneers is not over yet.
Back to Earth. October 28th marked the 35th anniversary of the opening of Salford Observatory in C
haseley field. The day was marked with an afternoon of food and socialising and the odd speech. The most remarkable was a recollection from Alan Vause who was actually there on the day – thirty five years ago. Alan recounted the formality and joy of the event, the presences of the lord mayor, Arthur Taylor, Tom Fern and many others who were instrumental in the founding of the Society only four years earlier. I would like to think they would be happy in the knowledge that the society has since that day in 1971 continued to serve the people of Salford and beyond.
In the 1997 Hollywood movie Contact, Jodie Foster travels through space time using a superior technology machine built from data encoded in an extraterrestrial radio signal detected by SETI researchers. On arrival at the alien planet, this first contact with another civilisation is played out in a scene simulating her long dead father on a beach in Pensacola. In the ensuing dialog she discovers that there are many civilasations in the galaxy and asks the alien if “they all travel using the transport system they had built”. “We didn’t build it, we don’t know who did” the alien replies.
Our speaker for October, Andrew Lound, painted the picture where something like that could happen to us, although the level of technology could not be described as “advanced”. The only evidence of our civilisation that may one day be encountered by another are a couple of gold plated video discs attached to Voyager 1 and 2, launched 20th August and 5th September 1977. The disks contain images, greetings in 50 different languages, electrical signals from a human body and music. With passion and enthusiasm (and with the aid of a well produced multi media presentation), he painted the background against which the discs and their contents were eventually agreed and finalised. In that process all the noble human characteristics of equality, altruism, tolerance, compassion and love competed against personal egos, racial prejudice, political dogma and national ideology. This end product, a message in a bottle, is likely to outlast the civilisation which created it. At some distant time and place, it may represent who we are – or more likely, who we were.
Talking of man-made probes leaving the solar system. Here is something else that was launched in the 1970’s and is making the headlines once again:
Pioneer 10 and 11 were launched in 1972 and 1973. They were the first man-made objects to travel through the asteroid belt and visit Jupiter and Saturn and also on a one way ticket out of the solar system. Their original missions long accomplished, they were subsequently used in Project Phoenix by the SETI institute to “calibrate” their detectors at the outset of their regular SETI observations runs from Aricebo between 1995 and 2004. February 23rd 2003 was the final contact with Pioneer 10, which was supposed to be formally the end of the mission.
During the nineties, a
s both spacecraft headed out of the solar system on apposing trajectories, an anomaly in their expected positions was detected and has since been slowly developing, now known as the “Pioneer Anomaly”. Radio tracking data from both Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 exhibit a Doppler frequency shift indicating a small (8.74 ± 1.33) × 10−10 m/s2) acceleration towards the Sun – a sort of unexpected “slowing down”. Radio tracking of the two Voyager probes does not show a similar anomaly.In an attempt to resolve this mystery, a recently created “Pioneer Anomaly team” is attempting a unique experiment. The team are on the hunt to gather all the Pioneer data since launch, then model it within a computer simulation and replay it one second at a time. With original data on punched cards, paper tapes and magnetic tape from over 3 decades ago, gathering and consolidation of the data is a formidable undertaking. The planetary society is sponsoring this investigation to resolve this anomaly, and the stakes are high. According to NASA this anomaly has the potential to undermine the laws of physics. The journey of discovery for the Pioneers is not over yet.
Back to Earth. October 28th marked the 35th anniversary of the opening of Salford Observatory in C
haseley field. The day was marked with an afternoon of food and socialising and the odd speech. The most remarkable was a recollection from Alan Vause who was actually there on the day – thirty five years ago. Alan recounted the formality and joy of the event, the presences of the lord mayor, Arthur Taylor, Tom Fern and many others who were instrumental in the founding of the Society only four years earlier. I would like to think they would be happy in the knowledge that the society has since that day in 1971 continued to serve the people of Salford and beyond.
