Albert Einstein to Mr. Spock: "Vulcan does NOT exist!"

To Boldly Go Where No Man Has Gone Before

I grew up in the sixties, watching Star Trek, the original series featuring Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock and Scotty, crew of the Federation Starship, the USS Enterprise, which was on a five year space exploration mission. My favourite character was Mr. Spock (Leonard Nimoy). He was portrayed as being half-human and half Vulcan, exclusively logical, always calm and absolutely devoid of emotion.

Sometime around the age of 9, it became a personal project for me to determine the location of Vulcan, home of Mr. Spock. I looked up the word in a mini encyclopedia set that we had at home and I learnt that the word 'Vulcan' referred to the Roman god of fire. At the time, this was not an expected discovery and to my mind, somehow, it just did not fit. Spock possessed a character that was as cold as ice so any association with fire seemed misplaced. Unfortunately that was as far as I could take my research at the time.

Stamps from the USA commemorating
the movie series "Star Trek"

This post is about a journey. It is a story about a two thousand year quest to understand the rules that govern the movement and motion of the many celestial bodies around us. If we do not understand their motion and dynamic characteristics, we cannot visit these places as we will be unable to accurately predict where these celestial objects will be when we are ready to arrive there.

Initially, the early astronomers used their eyes and their minds. It was only in the early 1600s that Dutchman, Hans Lippershey, assembled a crude telescope. This telescope was improved by Galileo Galile a year later but in essence, it was, and likely will be in the future, mathematics, observation and humankind applying their minds, that will allow us "to boldly go where no man has gone before".

Early Greek Thinking

The Greeks believed that Earth was a sphere from early times as they observed boats disappearing or appearing from below the horizon (the Greek, Eratoshenes, born about 250 BC even empirically calculated the approximate size of a spherical Earth). At the time however, the concept of gravitational forces had not been understood so the bothersome problem for the Greeks was that if Earth is a sphere, then how would those who lived in the southern latitudes remain connected with the planet? Would they not drop off into space?

in their minds at the time, there were two possible answers. Either the southern latitudes were not populated or Earth was at the center of the Universe - the center, in their minds being the point that attracted everything in the Universe.

There were those who contested this line of reasoning, notably Philolaus (of Croton), Heracleides (of Pontus) and Aristarchus (a philosopher, born in 310 BC) who all placed the Sun at the center of the Solar System. Unfortunately, their views were not taken seriously.

Claudius Ptolemy

Claudius Ptolemy was a Roman citizen who lived in Egypt between 100 AD and 170 AD. At the time, Egypt was a Roman province. Whilst history has portrayed Ptolemy as a mathematician, astronomer, geographer and astrologer, his greatest contributions have been in the field of cartography and the many concepts behind the drawing of maps.

As an astronomer, Ptolemy postulated that the Earth was at the center of the Universe, a view that was non-confrontational at the time with the biblical based teachings of the Church. These postulations, made in the early decades of the 1st millennium would subsequently take nearly 1500 years to change.

The Vatican Versus Science (Geocentrism And Heliocentriism)

From the times of Ptolemy and until 1543, it was believed that Earth was at the center of Universe. Before that, there were sporadic reports of alternative views but it was Nicolaus Copernicus, a Polish mathematician and astronomer who proposed Heliocentrism (i.e. the Sun being at the center of the Solar System). After a life of studies into the subject, it is reported that at the end of 1542, Copernicus was seized with the twin ailments of apoplexy and paralysis. On 24th May 1543, whilst in a stroke induced coma, Copernicus was presented with the final printed pages of his book - a life's work - in which he announced his ideas and observations which supported a Sun-centric solar system. Legend has it that he awoke from this coma, looked deeply at the final pages of his seminal work and then breathed his last shortly afterwards. Sadly, it appears that the preface of Copernicus' book had been amended. This introductory section contradicted much of the break-through work presented within the main sections of the book and it seems to have been been subject to tampering to placate the theologians.

Nicolaus Copernicus - first to propose Heliocentrism. The stamp  above is from the island 
of the Grenadines, located north of Grenada, an island country in the Caribbean Sea.

Tycho Brahe, a Danish astronomer and astrologer who was born in 1546, combined Copernican and Ptolemaic models, correctly postulating that the moon circled Earth. He also contended that all the planets of the Solar System, with the exception of Earth, orbited the Sun and, that the Sun orbited the Earth. This model was fundamentally flawed.

Tycho Brahe erroneously supported a combined Copernican and Ptolemaic
astronomical model. The stamp above is from Uganda, a country in East Africa.

His student, Johannes Kepler, on the other hand was an advocate of the Copernican model but had the difficult duty of supporting his mentor, Brahe, in public whilst concurrently harbouring an alternative academic view. It was only after the death of Brahe that Kepler was free to use some of Brahe's observational datasets to develop and justify his three laws of planetary motion. Indeed, had it not been for the death of Brahe, Kepler may not have had the unfettered access to data that he so required and which then allowed him to develop his laws of planetary motion.

During this era, the Roman Catholic Church was unmovable in its world view of the Universe. In 1600, Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake for proposing the Universe is infinite and that other stars could also have planets in which life could exist. It is clear that at this time, opposition to biblical views would not be tolerated.  Heliocentrism was also not accepted as it challenged some fundamental, deep rooted views of the Vatican. 

Giodano Bruno - An Italian Philosopher who was burnt at the stake in 1600 for
 opposing the view of the Vatican. Considered by some to be the "First Matyr of Modern  Science".

In the decades after Copernicus' publication, one of history's most celebrated and gifted scientist, Galileo Galilei, who supported the astronomical model of a heliocentric Solar System, was also subject to persecution and endured much personal sacrifice. Indeed, a Roman Inquisition, conducted by the Vatican, over a period commencing in 1610 and ending in 1633, concluded that Galileo Galilei was guilty of supporting the emerging scientific view that placed the Sun at the center of the Solar System and also found him ''suspect of heresy". He was forced to recant his belief but a contemporaneous painting and popular local legend report that after recanting his belief that the Earth moved around the Sun, Galileo Galilei allegedly muttered the rebellious phrase, "And yet it moves".

For his beliefs, Galileo Galilei remained under house arrest for nine years, until his death (in 1642), but it was only in October 1992, some three hundred and fifty years later, that Pope John Paul II acknowledged that the Church had erred in its condemnation of the scientist.

This stamp from Lesotho, a country located in the South of Africa honours
Galileo Galilei who was persecuted by the Vatican for heliocentric scientific views.. 

Sir Isaac Newton, on the other hand, did not have to shape scientific hypotheses around traditional religious beliefs. He was born in England in the year of the death of Galileo but by then, King Henry VIII had already separated England from the Roman Catholic Church (in 1533) and the Church of England was an established institution. Against this backdrop, Newton was able to work with an open mind and eventually recorded his work in the book "Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica". Here, the laws of motion and universal gravitation that formed the dominant scientific viewpoint of the period, and, other leading edge mathematical techniques were recorded.

In summary, it was Copernicus who rightly observed that the planets within our Solar System revolve around the Sun, Kepler who correctly defined their orbits and Newton who explained why they did so. This process took from 1543 to 1687. The quest for the truth continued but the Vatican was a formidable foe when trying to move the Earth from the center of the Universe.

Neptune and Le Verrier

I started this post by writing about Mr. Spock, who is characterized in the television series as being half human and half Vulcan. In fact, the planet Vulcan was not a fictional creation by the script-writer of the movie, "Star Trek".  Instead, it was proposed as a planet by the prominent French mathematician, Urbain Le Verrier. 

Le Verrier was highly respected, having built a formidable reputation for deeply appreciating the mathematical techniques and rules founded on the widely accepted laws of motion and universal gravitation developed by Sir Isaac Newton. Examining empirical data from the actual motion of Uranus (at that time, the farthest known planet from the Sun, discovered by William Herschel in 1781), Le Verrier predicted that there existed another unknown planet which was affecting the orbit of Uranus.

On the night of 23 -24th September 1846, Johann Galle, a German astronomer at the Berlin Observatory, looked into the sky at about the area predicted by the calculations of Le Verrier to be the position of the undiscovered planet. Using telescopic observational techniques, Galle confirmed the existence of a major planet, igniting a sensational moment for nineteenth century mathematics and Newtonian physics. Shortly afterwards, the British mathematician and astronomer, John Couch Adams, also claimed to have done calculations similar to those produced by Le Verrier but the Royal Society attributed the mathematical discovery of Neptune (as the newly discovered planet was christened), to the French mathematician. To this day, Neptune remains the only planet in the Solar System that has been mathematically discovered.

This stamp issued by the United States of America in 2016 shows Neptune.This planet remains the
only mathematically discovered planet of the Solar System. 

The significance of Urbain Le Verrier within the French scientific community of the day was such that when Gustave Eiffel selected the names of seventy-two French scientists, engineers and mathematicians to be inscribed on the four sides of the Eiffel Tower that was being constructed between 1887 and 1889, the name of Le Verrier found a prominent place.

Vulcan and Le Verrier

In 1840, Le Verrier, being skilled at calculations related to the Newtonian laws of motion and gravitation, was asked to study the orbit of the planet Mercury. Three years later, Le Verrier published his provisional findings. 

Mercury was due to transit the Sun in 1848 and this provided an ideal opportunity to validate the calculations of Le Verrier.  Unfortunately, at the appointed time, Le Verrier's predictions of the movement of Mercury failed to match the empirical observations. As once said by Thomas Huxley, the nineteenth century naturalist: "The tragedy of Science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by ugly fact."

Undeterred, Le Verrier continued to apply himself to the problem. In 1859, he published a more thorough study of Mercury's motion. To take into account small differences between theoretical calculations and actual observations, Le Verrier postulated the existence of an undiscovered planet, which he called "Vulcan". He named the planet after the Roman god of fire as this (as of then) invisible planet was expected to have an orbital path inside that of Mercury and would replace Mercury as the first planet from the Sun. Again, all  his predictive work was founded on the mathematics and the principles of Newtonian gravitational physics. 

Urbain Le Verrier 
French Mathematician 

Given his reputation and acknowledged expertise in the field, the International Astronomical Union confidently reserved the name "Vulcan" for this planet (and this remains a reserved designation until today). There were several claims at various times that Vulcan had been sighted but no substantive evidence was ever provided.

Urbain Le Verrier died in Paris in 1877 having mathematically discovered Neptune and mathematically predicted the presence of another planet called Vulcan, which apparently was difficult to sight from Earth. The resolution of the mystery of Vulcan required the intellectual genius of a particular German, one Albert Einstein, who was born two years after the death of Le Verrier.

Einstein

On the 14th of March 1879, the world was gifted with Albert Einstein. A theoretical physicist, he had, by the age of twenty-six, published four ground-breaking papers concerning;

• the photoelectric effect;
• Brownian motion;
• Special relativity; and

Mass- energy equivalence (E = mc², which asserted that matter could be turned into energy)In late 1915, he wrote a further paper on General Relativity, introducing his theory of gravitation. Einstein's theory challenged the Newtonian gravitational model which had stood supreme for about two hundred years. In Newton’s view, all objects — from the mythical falling apple to the planets and stars — exert a force that attracts other objects. That universal law of gravitation seem to work well for predicting the motion of planets as well as objects on Earth. It also had (and remains to have) other applications. But Newton's view of gravity did not work for some things, like Mercury’s peculiar orbit around the sun. Here was a problem that necessitated the introduction of an imaginary and invisible planet by Le Verrier (named "Vulcan") to close the gap between mathematical theory and empirical observation.

By offering a different model of gravity, Einstein offered an explanation for the orbit of Mercury that did not require the presence of a planetary body inside the orbit of Mercury. Instead of exerting an attractive force, as proposed by Newton, Einstein's General Relativity Theory reasoned that each object curves the fabric of space and time around it, forming a sort of "well" or depression that other objects — and even beams of light — fall into.

Albert Einstein - 1956 First Day Cover 
from Israel. The stamp shows the mass / energy equivalence equation.

This new model also elegantly solved the Mercury problem. Einstein's calculations demonstrated that the sun so curves space that it distorts the orbits of nearby bodies, including that of Mercury. A "Vulcan" was not required and in fact, did not exist!

But Einstein was German and in 1916, World War I between the Allied Powers (France, Russia, Britain and later the United States) and the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria) was ongoing. This was a war that saw approximately 16 million killed by the time it was over in 1918. Carnage and destruction were immense. Under these circumstances, not many on the side of the Allied Powers were readily willing to validate the groundbreaking hypothesis of a German. However, it was undeniable that several ground breaking benefits could be obtained if empirical proof of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity could be secured. In the first instance, an ever larger understanding of the laws governing the Universe might be obtained and as an added bonus, an answer explaining the apparently disorderly behaviour of the planet Mercury, which did not require the inclusion of the elusive planet Vulcan into the model of the Solar System, would finally have been provided !

Stamps from the Niger, a country in the west of Africa,  showing Einstein at his two passions:
Thinking and playing the violin. Initially he played the piano.

Eddington

Sir Authur Stanley Eddington was a brilliant English astronomer, physicist and mathematician. As a Cambridge undergraduate, he was the first-ever second year student to be placed as the Senior Wrangler (the top mathematics graduate at Cambridge University - described as the greatest intellectual achievement in Britain). He was also the first to postulate that the nuclear fusion of hydrogen into helium was the source of stellar energy.

Eddington had pacifist views, which evolved through his Quaker upbringing. He is reported as being objective and prioritized the popularization of science. He appreciated Einstein as an extremely talented physicist and mathematician and did not view him primarily as a German or an enemy of the state. He made it his objective to confirm the General Theory of Relativity so Eddington and Astronomer Royal Frank Watson Dyson organized two expeditions to observe the solar eclipse of 1919 so that the first empirical test of Einstein's theory (i.e. testing for the deflection of light by the Sun's gravitational field) could be conducted.

In pursuit of this objective, Eddington sailed to Principe, a remote island off the west coast of Africa to capture the necessary photographs of the apparent position of certain stars during the eclipse. Simultaneously, a separate team traveled to Brazil to capture similar photographs of the event to ensure at least one set of valid data would be obtained. Einstein's theory predicted that when light rays from the relevant stars passed near the Sun, they would appear slightly shifted because their light would be curved by the the Sun's gravitational field. Einstein had also provided a prediction for the extent of the shift.

Stamp from the island of San Tome & Principe, an island of the
west coast of Africa  honouring Sir Authur Eddington

Both sets of observations, from Principe and Brazil, were analysed over the months following the solar eclipse and Eddington's results were announced during a joint meeting of the Royal Society and the Royal Astronomical Society on 6 November 1919. In a tense atmosphere, Eddington presented his findings which validated Einstein's General Relativity theory. As a result, the application of Newton's laws of gravitation were henceforth limited to the realm of low terrestrial gravity where forces are weak. Einstein's theory on the other hand opened a new narrative, being equally applicable in weak and intense gravity environments. This new narrative also elegantly supported Mercury's independent orbit the Sun.

In 1921, Albert Einstein won the Nobel Prize for Physics for his explanation of the Photoelectric Effect.

Mr. Spock

Mr. Spock, quoting Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in the movie series "Star Trek" was once quoted as saying: "Once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."

Einstein gifted humanity with many scientific accomplishments and truths. He showed that light does not always travel in straight lines. As for the home of Mr. Spock, the planet Vulcan was shown to be fictional, as are the many star systems and galaxies, many light years away, visited by Captain Kirk and his team of the Federation Starship the USS Enterprise. Having said that, the day is not long in coming when humankind will "boldly go where no man has gone before".

Epilogue

Albert Einstein left this world at 1.15 a.m. in the morning of 18th April at the age of 76. He died at the Princeton University Medical Center after suffering an abdominal aortic aneurysm. He refused surgery, believing that he had lived his life and was content to accept his fate, "elegantly". His last words were spoken in German but the nurse present at his bedside was not conversant in this language. He was cremated later the same day, without funeral rites. These were his wishes.

Such was the level of his intelligence that even after death, his brain was apparently in demand. On the day following his cremation, in a front page article, The New York Times reported that his brain and eyes had been removed by the pathologist on duty at the hospital and that his body was not intact on cremation. The pathologist claimed that he had been authorized to remove Einstein's brain and eyeballs but no permit was ever produced. He was subsequently relieved of his position at the hospital but on leaving, took the preserved organs with him.

Several parties sought to secure Einstein's brain for research and it was eventually sectioned in 240 pieces and embedded into squares of celloidin. Initially, no research seemed to be conducted but some studies relating to Einstein's brain started being published more than three decades after his death.

Currently, the location of Einstein's eyeballs are unknown.
Post Scripts

• Singaporean readers of this post would be proud to be reminded that your Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong was the Senior Wrangler in Cambridge in 1974. 
• In recent years, researchers have been attempting to invalidate the General Theory of Relativity by testing it at the extreme conditions that prevail close to Black Holes. Others have offered alternative models but so far, to no avail. The General Theory of Relativity continues to stand.

Whilst writing this post there has been one thought which has repeatedly come to my mind and I thought I would share it here, at the very end.  -  Mr. Einstein could really have used the hair stylist of Mr. Spock !

All stamps and the First Day Cover shown above are from my collection.

End of Post 

The Vikings were Amongst the First on Mars

The Vikings of Yesteryear

There are several hypotheses relating to the origin of the word "Viking". It is an ancient word as it appears on Rune stones which are contemporaneous with the Viking age. Like words in other languages, its meaning and use have evolved over the centuries. Ancient Runic inscriptions suggest that a Viking was a man who left his homeland to seek adventure and profit elsewhere (Runic is an  ancient alphabet script, also called futhark, used to write various Germanic languages before the adoption of the Latin alphabet). 

There was also an expectation that the Viking would return to his home with fortunes that had been amassed during these travels. However this is not the exclusive definition of the word.  Some language scholars propose that the word originates from the word "vik"" which means "creek" or "bay" with a "Vikingr" being "King of the creek''. or "King of the bay". Other researchers of the subject contend that to be a Viking also required  participation in acts of plunder, pillage and terror.  Viking warriors were reputed to be fierce, trained in archery, spear-throwing and swordplay from the young age of ten years. The most fanatical warriors were called "berserkers"

The "Viking Age"  really comes to prominence in the late 8th century.  Then, the  Kings of the bay started leaving their Scandinavian  homelands and using  the Norwegian and Baltic Sea to provide maritime access, raided and  traded across wide areas of Europe. They were facilitated by advanced sailing  techniques and navigational skills with their "longship" being a key enabler of their maritime voyages, at times to new lands across unchartered waters. 

The stamp above is from the Faroe Islands show the route of the Vikings out of their homelands to new frontiers. 

The stamp above is from the island of Jersey and is a good representation of a Viking longship.

One of the pivotal moments in their history occurs when  a group of Viking  armed raiders attack the defenceless monastery of St. Cuthbert in Lindisfarne, on the coast of Northumbria, England in 793 AD.   This was the first Viking invasion of England. At the time, present day England comprised four separate and independent kingdoms which were East Anglia, Wessex, Northumbria and Mercia. Mercia was the strongest in military might.  

Led by the brothers, Halfdan and Ivar the Boneless, the Vikings  picked off the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England one by one until only the kingdom of Wessex remained, unconquered. Wessex  was ruled by King Alfred. 

Alfred was a king by default as his older brothers had died from sickness or in prior Viking battles. In January 878 AD, Alfred was caught by surprise in a Chippenham estate by the army of Guthrum but he escaped, regrouped and a little later, returned to defeat the Vikings at Edington, a small village in Wiltshire. For this achievement in saving his kingdom, he is the only native English ruler to be given the title "the Great". So, until today, he is acclaimed  as King Alfred the Great.

For nearly a century England was controlled by the Vikings in the Midlands and the North whilst the Kings of Wessex ruled in the South and South-west. It was only in 954 AD that the King of Wessex expelled the last Vikings and unified England under the House of Wessex. 

This First Day Cover below from the island of Jersey commemorates its Viking heritage.

As historians would later realize, it was not only the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms that were targeted by the Vikings. Within a few years of their Lindisfarne attack, Viking raiding parties had struck in Scotland, Ireland and France. It is also estimated that the Vikings arrived in the Faroes in the mid 8th century, subsequently using this as a base to sail further west across the Atlantic. In addition, there are detailed historical records of the Vikings arriving in Iceland in the year 872 AD where they set up an independent society, owing no formal allegiance to the Kings of Norway. Many years later, in 1960 AD, strong evidence of Viking settlements were discovered in the northernmost tip of Newfoundland in Canada, demonstrating that there was already northern European discovery of the Americas many centuries before the legendary travels of Columbus.

The series of stamps above commemorate the Viking presence discovered in Canada.

Present Day Mariners and Vikings 

Seafarers, adventurers, mariners, warriors, settlers, explorers and innovators are just some of the many words that have been used to describe the historical Vikings. Thus, when Edgar Cortwright, a  scientist, engineer and senior NASA administrator was contemplating a concept to name inter-planetary missions to Mars, Mercury and Venus, he paralleled his thinking to the maritime world and this resulted in the selection of  "Mariner" and "Viking" as names for the American robotic craft that were going to "travel to great distances and remote lands" within our Solar System. 

The First Proposals 

The first credible technical study for a mission to Mars was made by Wernher von Braun between 1947 and the early 1950s. Von Braun, developer of the V-2 ballistic missiles that so terrorized Western Europe at the end of World War II but anointed the ''Father of Rocket Science" for his work on the Saturn V multi-stage rocket that took American astronauts to the moon,  was a reader of the works of Hermann Oberth, himself one of the founding fathers of rocketry and astronautics. Oberth was a disciple of the fictional works of Jules Verne, particularly the classics, "From Earth to the Moon" and "Around the Moon" so it is not difficult to understand the links that inspired this generation of physicists and engineers to dream of journeys to the celestial bodies that seemingly floated in the space high above our heads.

The Mars Race 

I will write about this period between the launch of the Sputnik 1 in 1957 and the Apollo-Soyuz Test project in 1975 in a further post. Many call this period "the Space Race". Within this Space Race, there were other "high-stakes" competitions ongoing simultaneously, on the ground, at sea, in the air and in space. During this period, which was the height of the "cold war", it was the sovereign  pride and military might of the two protagonists nations, the United States and the Soviet Union,  which were at stake. Commendable achievements in the conquest of space were critical in the claim for global political, technological and military leadership. 

Once the Soviet Union had sent robotic missions to orbit Earth,  it was only natural for targets further away to become the objective of the nation. Even before Yuri Gagarin had made his first orbit of the Earth in 1961, the Soviets were already planning for a robotic mission to other planets. By October 1960 they launched the "Marsnik 1" spacecraft for a flyby of Mars. Sadly for them, it was destroyed on take-off. Four days later, "Marsnik 2" suffered the same fate. 

In 1962, with the Americans busy emulating the Soviet achievement of putting a man into orbit (John Glenn orbited Earth in February 1962), two further robotic spacecraft were launched by the USSR. The second probe, named  "Mars 1" traveled more than 106 million kilometres from Earth before a technical  glitch caused ground control to loose communications with it.  Later in 1962, a third Soviet probe was launched, but to no avail. It also failed in Earth orbit. The obsession to achieve objectives quickly (and almost frantically) did not seem to be yielding the much sought-after national pride and international respect that was being domestically demanded.

It was only in 1964 that the Americans  joined the race to Mars. In November 1964, "Mariner 3" was launched but one hour after lift-off, the curse of the Mars probes struck and the mission failed. It was then the turn of  "Mariner 4" which was launched in November 1964. It  reached Mars in July 1965 and was deemed a success for its time as twenty-one  photographs of the Red Planet were relayed back to Earth.  

The stamps above commemorate the successful Viking flyby of Mars of Mariner 4

Two days after the American launch of Mariner 4, the Soviets launched  "Zond 2" which also targeted Mars. Unfortunately for the Soviets, Zond 2 made it to the Red Planet but at a critical stage of the mission, its radios failed and it was unable to send back any planetary data or images. So far away and yet so close, all at the same time!

On 25th February and 27th March 1969, NASA launched Mariner 6 and 7 respectively. They reached Mars in late July and early August the same year, sending back a total of 201 photographs of the equatorial and polar regions of  the planet. Given that the United States had only just landed humans on the moon, the USA closed the decade in the pole position of a two nation space race. 

Landing on Mars 

Once it was demonstrated that it was possible to reach Mars, the next objective was to aim for a successful soft landing of a robotic spacecraft  on the surface of the planet. Once again, the quest for global political and military leadership motivated the actions of the cold war actors. Between 1969 and 1971 several attempts to launch space vehicles to Mars were made by both the USA and USSR but both nations were thwarted. 

On 30th May 1971, the United States launched the robotic spacecraft, "Mariner 9" which successfully arrived and orbited Mars just weeks ahead of the Soviet twins of "Mars 2" and "Mars 3". After its first orbit, Mariner 9 became the first spacecraft to successfully circle another planet. Mariner 9 arrived at a time when severe dust storms enveloped the Red Planet. After patiently orbiting Mars for several months, it relayed back to Earth more than 7300 clear photographs, covering approximately 85 percent of the Red Planet. These photographs captured high altitude volcanoes, riverbeds, long networks of canyons (one, even  more than 4,000 kilometres long) and the small Martian moons of Phobos and Deimos. Most spectacularly, the largest known volcano in the Solar System (Olympus Mons) was photographed. 

Mars 2 and Mars 3

Mars 2 and Mars 3 were twin robotic spacecrafts launched by the Soviet Union nine days apart with the objective of being the first probes to land on the Martian surface. Mars 2 was launched on 19 May 1971 whilst Mars 3 followed nine days later. Both spacecraft successfully orbited the Red Planet but the lander deployed by the Mars 2 spacecraft to touch down on the planet, crashed on the surface of Mars. The same was not true of the lander deployed by Mars 3. It successfully soft-landed on the planet but the lander failed  technically some fifteen seconds after landing. In that short time, it  relayed one image from the planet's surface which was not well defined. Notwithstanding the failure, this event is still recorded as the first controlled landing of a spacecraft on Mars.

Cometh the Hour, Cometh the Vikings

Like the Russian Mars 2 and Mars 3 spacecrafts, the design configuration of the Viking robotic probe combined  an orbiter with a lander module, with the lander being deployed for touch down after arrival at the planet. At that stage, the orbiter would be applied for remote areal imaging and also used to relay data back to Earth. 

Viking 1 was launched in August 1975. It was planned for a landing on Mars on 4th July 1976 in conjunction with the 200th anniversary of the adoption of the American Declaration of Independence. Unfortunately things did not proceed as planned as areal images of the primary landing site, received from the orbiter,  showed that the selected terrain was too rough for a safe landing. Consequently, the descent was delayed until 20th July 1976 (the seventh anniversary of the American moon landing). On that day, the lander deployed by the Viking 1 orbiter became the second spacecraft to soft-land on Mars and almost immediately commenced relaying clear images of the planet back to Earth. The Viking 1 lander (later renamed the Thomas Mutch Memorial Station) operated for 2307 days (over 6.25 years or 2245 sols; i.e. Martian solar days). 

The series of stamps above: These are from the island of Nevis and they commemorate the 30th anniversary of the Viking 1 landing on Mars on 20th July 1976.

The eventual fate of the Viking 1 orbiter is not explicitly known. When operations were terminated in August 1980, it had already made 1485 orbits around the planet and relayed back more than 57,000 images. A study in 2009  concluded that whilst it may have crashed onto the Martian surface, it was more likely to be still in orbit around the planet. 

This stamp is from the Central African Republic and it commemorates the landing on the moon (July 1969) and the landing on Mars by the Viking 1 Lander (July 1976).

A month after the successful touch down by the Viking 1 lander on the Mars surface, the lander deployed by the Viking 2 orbiter also successfully soft-landed. The Viking 2 lander  operated on the surface of Mars for 1316 days or 1281 sols (i.e. until 12 April 1980) whilst the orbiter remained functional until 25 July 1978, returning more than 16,000 images while orbiting the planet more than 700 times.

The stamp above: There were several failures and problems encountered during the many attempts to successfully land a robotic spacecraft onto the surface of Mars. This stamp, from the Central African Republic honours those who were in the front-line of spacecraft operations and suffered success and failure. 

This is another stamp from the Central African Republic commemorates the landing on the moon (July 1969)  and the landing on Mars by the Viking 1 Lander (July 1976).

The Lessons

In retrospect, the stories and statistics above, many of them representing major and expensive failures, may seem inconsequential after all these years. But I am certain that at the time, there were many tears. To me, these failures demonstrate the vision and single-minded perseverance of leaders, engineers, scientists and patriots to build a deep platform of knowledge and understanding of our universe, and our role and place within it. From Galileo to Newton, from Einstein to Lemaitre, from Hubble to Hawking and even Oberth, Korolev and von Braun and many others who turned theoretical dreams into a practical reality, they understood that not all questions could be answered from the planet and place that we inhabit. For some answers, we needed to move our frame of reference. 

The quest of the Vikings of Scandinavia, when exploring, conquering and pillaging far away lands may have been driven by economic necessity or personal greed but unequivocally, they were explorers and innovators, led by the overhead stars into the maritime unknown. 

History has recorded that the Viking Age lasted about three hundred years and that they reached the shores of NewFoundland in Canada. I wonder; the Space Age has only had a life of sixty-five years. Already, we have landed robots and rovers on Mars several times and we now are contemplating a manned mission in the next decade. Other probes like the Voyager 1 and 2, launched in 1977, are leaving the Solar System after decades of exploration in space. In fact, in 2012, data received from Voyager 1 indicated that it had become the first man-made object to enter inter-stellar space. In 2019, similar data was received from Voyager 2. 

When I look at the stars each night, I wonder where we will all be after 300 years of space exploration? How will the Space Age have rewarded our quest for knowledge and understanding? What will we find? And what will be recorded in the digitized history books, holograms and blog posts of tomorrow?

This stamp is issued by the island of Pulau and it commemorates the Mars Pathfinder mission.

End of blog post.

Note: All stamps and the First Day Cover are from my personal collection.

Terminator Rex: A Few Seconds That Changed The Future of Earth

My last post was about meteoroids. Prior to that, I wrote about comets. I must now fill the third apex of this triangle of space nomads and write something about asteroids. The bulk of my post will feature one asteroid that probably changed the course of evolution on planet Earth but  I will also cover a couple more in less detail. They need to be mentioned as they are interesting in their own right. First, some stamps about asteroids.

The stamp above: This stamp is issued by Luxembourg on 30th June 2018 in commemoration of "Asteroid Day"

The stamp below:  This is an unusual stamp, issued by the nation of Bhutan. When studied, it shows a space ship traveling through a field of asteroids. It is unusual because, when observed, there is a 3 dimensional effect that has been included in the stamp. 

Timelines

Before I get into the details about asteroids, it is important to be apprised of some basic facts. 

It is estimated that the age of our planet is 4.5 billion years. There is credible historical evidence in the form of fossils found in Western Australia which demonstrate that forms of life have existed on Earth since at least 3.7 billion years ago. Furthermore, there are cohorts of researchers who believe that life may have existed on Earth even earlier, say 4.3 billion years ago. 

In this timeline of events, the dinosaurs dominated most parts of the planet about 200 million years ago whilst human beings (homo sapiens) only appeared approximately 250,000 years ago. These are certainly unfathomable lengths of time when compared to the lifespan of an average human being. 

To fully appreciate some of the points I present in this post, it is also important to have a 30 second primer in geologic time scales. 

Here goes.....In order to describe the timing and relationship of events that have occurred over a long period of time (such as the Earth’s history), geologists, paleontologists and other Earth scientists have developed a geologic time scale (GTS). This is a system of chronological dating that relates strata in the geology of the Earth (stratigraphy) to time. For the purpose of this post, we only need to know that within the GTS, the Cretaceous is a geological period that lasted from about 145 to 66 million years ago whilst the Tertiary is a geologic period from 66 million to 2.6 million years ago. 

The Alvarez Theory

Now, let's apply some of this knowledge and understand the basis of Alvarez's Theory. In a previous post I had written briefly on how a comet could "die" by plunging onto a planet and I highlighted the devastating example of the comet Shoemaker Levy impact into Jupiter which occurred in July 1994. If a comet could plunge into a planet, then surely, also could an asteroid with an equally catastrophic effect.

The Alvarez hypothesis, attributed to Nobel laureate Luis Alvarez and his son Walter, held that an asteroid, the size of San Francisco, traveling so fast that it compressed the air beneath it so violently that the air temperature was briefly several times hotter than the surface of the Sun, plunged through the atmosphere of Earth and crashed into the planet approximately 65 million years ago. The asteroid itself was so large (estimated at between 10.6 km and 80.9km in diameter) that even at the instant of contact with the surface of the shallow water of the sea, the top of the asteroid would have towered nearly two kilometres above the notional flying altitude of a passenger aircraft. The impact set off earthquakes greater than 11 in magnitude, widespread tsunamis and the shrouding of the globe in a thick cocoon of sky-blackening dust and debris for many years. This cataclysmic event not only claimed nearly 75 percent of all the species of life on our planet, including the dinosaurs (leaving only birds to carry their legacy), but also most varieties of flora and fauna and many types of microscopic organisms. It effectively ended the reign of the domination of the dinosaurs and opened the door for the ascension of mammals.

The Coverscape below: This coverscape, with a relevant stamp captures this life extinction event.

The Alvarez hypothesis was accepted as theory by an international panel of 41 experts in geology, paleontology, and other related fields after an exhaustive review of the relevant data in March 2010. Seminal evidence substantiating the theory was initially obtained in 1977 from Gubbio, Italy where a thin layer of red clay, found (by Walter Alvarez, a geologist) between the limestone, marking the end of the Cretaceous period and the beginning of the Tertiary period, was about 600 times richer in iridium than the surrounding limestone. Iridium, a silvery-white metal is virtually absent from the Earth’s crust, but high concentrations are common in extra-terrestrial objects, such as asteroids.The evidence became more convincing when this same “iridium anomaly” was subsequently discovered in clay layers at locations in Denmark and New Zealand, and later, more than a dozen other sites around the world. The iridium-spiked layers of clay also contained an abundance of soot. Comparisons of ratios between iridium and several other key elements in the clay layers indicated that the widely scattered iridium anomalies all came from the same source – one that was not of this earth.

This asteroid that caused this life extinction event is called the the Chicxulub Impactor.

A Few Seconds More ...

Our planet rotates on its axis every 24 hours. It is this rotation that gives us day and night. If the Chicxulub Impactor had arrived a few moments earlier, it would have plunged into the deep sea of the Atlantic Ocean, somewhere between Africa and the Americas. Alternatively, if it had arrived a little later, it would have plunged into the waters of the Pacific Ocean (to the left of the Americas on the map below). The depth of the water would have absorbed some of the force of the impact and limited the expulsion of much of the associated toxic fumes that choked the atmosphere for many of the subsequent months and years. Large dinosaurs may have survived such an impact and homo sapiens may not have had a chance to evolve, many eons later. It must be recalled that 65 million years ago, the relative positions of the continents, due to plate tectonics movement were different as shown in the map below. It is the simplest, relevant map I could retrieve that explains the position.

Apophis

Now let's fast forward to present day.......

Apophis is an asteroid with an estimated diameter of 370 metres. It caused a brief period of concern in December 2004 as initial observations indicated a probability of up to 2.7% that it would hit our planet on 13th April 2029. 

Apophis was discovered on 19th June 2004 by R. Tucker, D. Tholen and F. Bernardi. Additional observations provided improved predictions that eliminated the possibility of an Earth or Moon impact in 2029. However, until 2006, a possibility remained that during its 2029 close encounter with Earth, Apophis would pass through a gravitational keyhole that would set up a future impact exactly seven years later on 13th April, 2036. It was only in August 2006 that Apophis's rating on the Torino scale was lowered to zero (a rating of 0 indicates an object has a negligibly small chance of collision with the Earth whilst a rating of 10 indicates that a collision is certain, and the impacting object is large enough to precipitate a global disaster). 

As things stand today, the closest known approach of Apophis will occur on 13th April 2029, when the asteroid comes within a distance of approximately 31,000 kilometres from Earth's surface. That distance is ten times closer than the Moon, and even closer than some man-made satellites. It will be the closest asteroid of its size in recorded history. It will be quite an event for the those interested in astronomy (and probably for many who are not!).

Hayabusa & Itokawa

The word "Hayabusa" translated in the Japanese language refers to a Peregrine falcon, a bird renowned for its speed in flight, having been recorded diving at more that 320 km/hr. Then in 1999, the Japanese motorcycle manufacturer, Suzuki, launched the Hayabusa (or GSX 1300R), which immediately won global acclaim as the world's fastest production sport motorcycle.

On 9th May 2003, the "Mu Space Engineering Spacecraft C", a robotic spacecraft developed by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (which also adopted the "Hayabusa" name), was launched with the objective of making a complex rendezvous with a small near-Earth asteroid named Itokawa (discovered on 26th September 1998). Hayabusa was also to land on the asteroid, collect a sample of asteroidal material and return the collected sample back to Earth. The asteroid itself was named after rocket scientist Hideo Itokawa (1912 -1999), who is regarded as the father of Japanese rocketry. In mid September 2005, the Hayabusa spacecraft arrived at the rendezvous point. It then landed on the asteroid in November 2005, performed its sampling objectives and lifted-off from the asteroid. It returned the collected samples to Earth on 13th June 2010. Hayabusa is legendary because it was the first robotic spacecraft to land on an asteroid, collect a sample, lift off, and then, successfully return the sample to Earth. 

The stamps below: These are issued by the nations of The Gambia (African continent) and again, also by Guyana (Latin America) commemorate the achievements of the Japanese Hayabusa mission. The series of stamps from Guyana are particularly instructive as they depict major milestones being achieved.

It is worthwhile to mention a few words about Guyana. There is a trend that some small countries issue beautiful stamps to commemorate a variety of international achievements and events as a means of raising national income. It was a relatively poor country but in 2015, ExxonMobil discovered vast quantities of oil in its offshore areas. The capital of Guyana is Georgetown.