Jocelyn Bell Burnell: The Rosalind Franklin of Astrophysics

I’ll preface this by saying that while this is in the ‘Things I Like’ category, there is nothing I like about this situation. It is maddening how women in science are treated, but I placed it here because I think the short documentary is worth everyone’s time.

One of the great disappointments of history is the academic slights dealt to Rosalind Franklin with respect to her role in discovering the structure of DNA. To make matters worse, she died before any right could ever done unto her. It’s an infuriating thing to learn about in high school biology class, as I did, and something that has consistently stuck with me.

Now, enter Jocelyn Bell Burnell, the graduate student who effectively discovered pulsars using her lab’s radio telescope. She did this by analyzing miles of technical telescope print outs, at which point she found a particular anomaly that seemed significant — which her PhD advisor labeled ‘interference’. It was he who won the Nobel prize for the discovery; not Jocelyn, not Jocelyn and him, just him who I shall neglect to even name on the grounds of the fact that he made no effort to effectively recognize her. Rather, he labeled the whole situation just. He said that, after all, it was his telescope and his lab.

It always surprises me how such events unfold. That people would rather steal away any bit of fame and recognition they can purely for themselves instead of sharing the entire pie, so to speak. There’s a quote I like from a TV show I watched in high school (a rather soapy type drama at that) that goes "All of this means nothing if you’re alone”. But I guess to some people all of this means everything even if you are alone.

However, I’m happy to say that Jocelyn Bell Burnell has been treated better in recent years. She has a quite long list of accolades to her name, and in 2018 was awarded the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for her work with pulsars. It doesn’t make how she was treated ok, and it certainly isn’t enough especially after all these years, but it is a start.

If you want to learn more about her and the situation, I highly recommend the attached short documentary below.

How to Trigger a Lightning Strike

Today I learned that a research lab at the University of Florida has been launching rockets for some time now - with the purpose of triggering lightning strikes! The idea is very similar to Ben Franklin’s kite experiment, but instead of tying a key to a kite, you tie a very thin and long copper wire to a rocket that is grounded. You then proceed to launch it into a storm, bringing the copper wire with it, in the hopes that electricity will take the path of least resistance back down to earth, and vaporize the copper wire, thus triggering a strike. Some rockets even put cesium salts within their propellant, and thus rely on the conductivity of the salts to trigger the strike instead of a thin wire.

The interesting thing is that besides lighting research, this technique is actually also used for lightning control, as you can time when and where you would like the highest chance of the strike to hit. This reminded be of the Apollo 12 mission which was hit by lightning on ascent. The description of that mission was actually pretty great in Gene Kranz’s autobiography, in which he highlights Pete Conrad guessing they got hit by lightning, and EECOM engineer John Aaron’s famous ‘SCE to AUX’ fix.

So, while rockets and lightning have been foes in the past, I’m happy to hear they’ve since made up!

LVS (the other Elvis)

A while ago I read a great book called Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, from Missiles to the Moon to Mars. It’s a fantastic history of the role that women have had specifically at JPL in Pasadena, and was also a great story on the role of women in computer science; one that I think everyone should read, and more importantly, that everyone can appreciate. At its core, it’s a great story of human ingenuity and perseverance, which brings us to the topic of this post.

Also a while ago, the JPL YouTube channel released a video of a series of different tests they had conducted in preparation for Perseverance’s trip to Mars. I’ve linked it below, and I would highly recommend watching it. It’s just one of those videos that puts you in the wonderful glow of science and what we can do as a team. Which is cheesy, but something that I think is very necessary given the current state of the world.

What this video does fantastically is show the massive effort that landing Perseverance took(or rather, will take). The tests shown spanned states and disciplines, and no one component was built alone. Not to mention, how crazy some of them looked, like the centrifuge in Santa Clarita, or the LVS(Lander Vision System) hanging out of a helicopter over Death Valley.

When I first watched this video, the LVS test in Death Valley(or rather, over) caught my eye. It’s the Lander Vision System Test at around 1:17 in the video if you want to watch it again. I mean it’s just some scientists out in the desert testing a camera system for detecting landing hazards that happens to hang out of a helicopter, and have the likeness of Elvis taped to the side of it. Thus concludes our introduction to the wonderful Lander Vision System, or as I like to call it, the other Elvis.

The other Elvis.

The other Elvis.

My curiosity(haha, rover joke) was instantly piqued and a hop skip and a Google search later, I found this wonderful paper about the whole system. I won’t do a full recap of it here, but reading this paper was just amazing. I read it when I was really beginning to dig into the content of my computer architecture course last semester, and seeing the architecture design and actually understanding even a tiny part of it was really awesome. Besides that, I was just blown away by how they handled all of the different edge cases. I mean we’re talking about preparing for different angles of entry, what if the camera can’t get its bearings, what if the heat shield blocks the camera’s view? All of these little things that can go wrong, but they’re prepared for them. I think it’s just really wonderful.

And, SN9 launched today! And while probably not the flight the engineers had hoped for, I’m excite for what they do with SN10.

2021 Quotes

Sometime back in 2019 I made a post that I continually updated with quotes I came across that I liked or thought were interesting. As that post has become relatively long, I’ve decided to start a new thread here, of quotes I come across in 2021. New quotes can be found at the top. (Updated December 2021)

“Dealing with the pressure of several times the force of gravity pushing on my chest at liftoff, and keeping cool under the stress of landing on the moon with only a few gasps of fuel remaining in the tank was relatively easy compared to overcoming the enormous pressures and stresses that were unraveling in my life.”
— Buzz Aldrin, Magnificent Desolation: The Long Journey Home from the Moon
“Why only two dimensions and why only flat plates? Simply because, as Denys later noted, it was 1975 and computers weren’t yet sufficiently powerful in storage and memory capacity to allow for three-dimensional designs, or rounded shapes, which demanded enormous numbers of additional calculations. The new generation of supercomputers, which can compute a billion bits of information in a second, is the reason why the B-2 bomber, with its rounded surfaces, was designed entirely by computer computations. Denys’s idea was to compute the radar cross section of an airplane by dividing it into a series of flat triangles. Each triangle had three separate points and required individual calculations for each point by utilizing Ufimtsev’s calculations. The result we called “faceting” - creating a three-dimensional airplane design out of a collection of flat sheets or panels, similar to cutting a diamond into sharp-edged slices.”
— Ben Rich on the design of the F-117, Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed (1994)
“One experienced lady, who had brought along blankets, a jug of coffee, a transistor radio and a pair of high-powered binoculars, was both excited and unworried. ‘There’ll come a time,’ she said, gazing out at the searchlights in the distance, ‘when space travel will be as common as jet planes are today.’”
— A woman on the beach watching Alan Shepard's first launch, We Seven
“And we undoubtedly made some of the engineers a little sore at us sometimes with our bright ideas. But we figured that since we had to fly the capsule, it ought to be something that we wanted, not just something that satisfied the slide-rule pilots.”
— We Seven, Walter M. Schirra, Jr,
“But space travel is not all moon and stars and distance planets. There are many unusual duties that need to be done before we can launch a man safely on such a trip.”
— A Sharp Knife, Leroy Gordon Cooper, Jr.
“Seymour once said that all we do our whole lives is go from one little piece of Holy Ground to the next. Is he never wrong?”
— Seymour: An Introduction
“Don Griffin, a free soul if I ever knew one, then took a year’s vacation from rocket propulsion, spending it in the Hula-Hoop business. He said it made more sense.”
— Ignition! An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants, Clark
“The connection was so bad, I couldn’t talk at all during most of the call. How terrible it is when you say I love you and the person at the other end shouts back ‘What?’”
— Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters
“‘Don’t you have a home to go to?’ I asked him. ‘Who looks after you? The pigeons in the park?’”
— Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters
“Oh, God, if I’m anything by a clinical name, I’m a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.”
— Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters
“‘I mean it,’ the Matron of Honor said. ‘You can’t just barge through life hurting people’s feelings whenever you like it.’”
— Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters
“And there is one disconcerting thing about working with a computer — it’s likely to talk back to you. You make some tiny mistake in your FORTRAN language — putting a letter in the wrong column, day, or omitting a comma — and the 360 comes to a screeching halt and prints out rude remarks like ‘ILLEGAL FORMAT’, or ‘UNKNOWN PROBLEM’, or, if the man who wrote the program is really feeling nasty that morning, ‘WHAT’S THE MATTER STUPID? CAN’T YOU READ?’ Everyone who uses a computer frequently has had, from time to time, a mad desire to attach the precocious abacus with an axe.”
— Ignition! An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants, Clark
“‘(-bleep-) you, Stan’ I interrupted amiably. ‘If you think I’m going to tell my people to fire something without knowing what’s in it you’ve got rocks in the head.’”
— Ignition! An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants, Clark
“Say somebody dropped (accidentally or otherwise) a greasy wrench into 10,000 gallons of 90 percent peroxide in the hold of the ship. What would happen — and would the ship survive? This question so worried people that one functionary in the Rocket Branch (safely in Washington) who had apparently been reading Captain Horado Hornblower, wanted us at NARTS to build ourselves a 10,000 gallon tank, fill it up with 90 percent peroxide, and then drop into it — so help me God — one rat. (He didn’t specify the sex of the rat). It was with considerable difficulty that our chief managed to get him to scale his order down to one test tube of peroxide and one quarter inch of rat tail.”
— Ignition! An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants, Clark
“The separation of technology and art is both unnecessary and incorrect; one is not an enemy of the other. Instead it is essential to understand that technology is often a necessary component of art and that art helps technology to serve man better.”
— Why Buildings Stand Up
“People will do anything to survive, even become better.”
— The Case for Space, Zubrin
“‘Did you like it?’ he mimicked. ‘I loved it. I just adore airplanes. They’re so cute.’”
— Just Before the War with the Eskimos, Salinger
“Lew doesn’t remember the name of it, but it’s the most beautifully written book he’s ever read. Christ! He isn’t even honest enough to come right out and say he liked it because it was about four guys that starved to death in an igloo or something. He has to say it was beautifully written.”
— Uncle Wiggily In Connecticut, Salinger
“But listen: I want you to have some idea of your potential. It is great. Like me, when you’re good (as a person, versatilely), you’re very very good, and when you’re bad, you need rehabilitation; ergo: we both have a great deal of growing (maturing) to do, and it is by our relationships with other people (after all, what is life but people) that we will grow to ripe stature. In other words, the self-examinations that are induced by our problems and disappointments in relation to others are paradoxically the best incentives to growth and change we have. And it does take guts to grow and change, especially when your horizon is lighted up by what looks like the very best of good things. . .”
— Sylvia Plath, in a letter to her brother Warren
“Loading new software into new computers and using it for the first time was like playing Russian roulette. It demanded and got a lot of respect.”
— Failure is Not an Option, Gene Kranz
“Failure was an option at SpaceX, partly because the boss often asked the impossible of his team. In meetings, Musk might ask his engineers to do something that, on the face of it, seemed absurd. When they protested that is was impossible, Musk would respond with a question designed to open their minds to the problem, and potential solutions. He would ask, ‘What would it take?’”
— Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days that Launched SpaceX
“The problem of how to rigorously define the volume of V has to be faced, and we shall solve it in Section 5.2 by the classic method of exhaustion, or rather, in more modern terms, the method of Riemann sums.”
— Vector Calculus, Tromba
“I saw there, in the midst of this fire that burns not, the swift and elegant porpoise (the indefatigable clown of the ocean), and some sword-fish ten feet long, those prophetic heralds of the hurricane, whose formidable sword would not and then strike the glass of the saloon.”
— Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
“Friend Conseil, I like you very much, but not enough to eat you unnecessarily.”
— Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
“Screws provide such a powerful description that a great deal of the kinematics literature is phrased in the language of screw theory, providing an endless source of titillating puns.”
— Mechanics of Robotic Manipulation
“What kind of theory should we be attempting to build? Will there be a neat solution — some simple idea that will allow us to build robots with human-like abilities? Comparison with related engineering disciplines suggests otherwise. Nobody expects a single neat theory for the problem of building a car or a rocket. Artifacts of great complexity depend on a large diverse collection of scientific and engineering results, and a robot competitive with a human being will surely be more complex than anything we have constructed before.”
— Mechanics of Robotic Manipulation

SpaceX Starship SN8 Launch!

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Wow. Quite honestly, I was shocked in the best way possible while watching SpaceX’s Starship SN8 launch, reach an altitude of 12 km, and then fall gracefully back to Earth, nearly save itself, and then explode in a ball of fire. If you haven’t seen it yet, I highly recommend Googling it or watching any clip you can, because it is truly one of those things that you have to see to believe. I mean at its core, snate(my nickname for Starship SN8) is a stainless steel cylinder with a nose cone that nearly accomplished one of the most complex aeronautical vehicle maneuvers ever.

I think my favorite part of the launch was watching it fall back to Earth sideways. As snate descended, it looked almost as if it was floating; I think it’s an amazing feat of engineering to make something like that work. Not to mention when 2/3 Raptor engines reignited to so as to make snate stand upright again. That maneuver in itself just looked like pure magic. I had seen animations of how the Starship series was supposed to perform, but seeing it on a live broadcast. . . that was something else entirely.

As we look to the future of space exploration and where we might be in a couple decades, I wanted to document this moment so that I could look back on it. When they do successfully land a Starship, it’s going to be a ground breaking day for science and engineering. Just thinking about it makes me so excited for the future.

In honor of snate launching, I made my own mini-snate in Fusion that works with a C11-0 Estes rocket motor. It was the last motor I had after a semester a rocket launches, and unfortunately ended up being a dud, but I think the model still looked pretty cute on the launch pad at Rocket Field(my nickname for the field at which I launch rockets):