BMU #359 NOW ONLINE!

This week on Beam Me Up episode 359, I am kind of all over the place.  After the intro for this week's program I read Kallamis' weekly rundown of the events in science and science fiction that Kallamis has found interesting, from flights to the ISS to strange meteorites and Independence Day sequels  It turns out that Independence Day is one of Xnewsman's favorites for a couple of scenes in the movie. 

From here I read our first of two stories.

The first is a melancholy tale from K. A. Dearsley called Salvage. 

Next I serve up some Star Trek trivia With such diverse questions as Tribble origin's to the original first episode.

I have some Earth_Sky news with some new Milky Way news and a mysterious ring system forming in a distant section of our Milky Way galaxy.

And while we are on the subject Courtney sent in an article describing a most unusual black hole / star pairing where the gravity around the black hole is whipping the star around in an orbit of over 1 million miles per hour!

To finish off the hour, I read part 5 of Know How - Can Do by Michael Blumlein.

and th th th th that's all folks!

Trivia! Good Stuff about the HST

I was reading an absolutely fascinating op-ed piece about what was once called the biggest waste of money NASA had ever omitted. TechRepublic's Jay Garmon was writing about the Hubble Space Telescope and some really good back story. As we are all aware, the Hubble was launched with a significant flaw in it's primary mirror. This error crippled Hubble to near uselessness. Lots of bad words were thrown around but for the most part the fault has to fall at the feet of the manufacturer of the mirror assembly, Perkin-Elmer. The original mirror was checked for accuracy by a device called a null corrector. The problem was that Perkin-Elmer's corrector was faulty. To compound the problem, they used another null corrector to check the mirror at the end of production and THAT device caught the error. Perkin-Elmer chose however to believe the defective corrector's readings and therefor pass the ill fated mirror. You want to know how big the error was that crippled a multi-million dollar telescope? 2.3 microns. 1/3 the width of a human blood cell or 1/50th the width of a human hair. Unbelievable huh? Did you know that there were in fact 3 mirrors ground for NASA? Yep, the last 2 were perfectly ground....imagine!
Obviously they would not ever be used on the Hubble so they were "recycled". One is on display at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum and since these mirrors are among the finest ground mirrors in existence, as Jay puts points out, it would be a shame not to build a telescope around it. From the article:

• The second backup to the Hubble’s primary mirror is now the central optic of the 2.4 meter SINGLE Telescope at the Magdalena Ridge Observatory in New Mexico.
• The SINGLE went online Sept. 1, 2008 and is currently under contract with NASA to track Low Earth Orbit (LEO) objects and to support the operations and observations of the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope.

Of course what makes all this ironic is why NASA had 3 mirrors made - you ready? NASA wanted to guard against a problem in the manufacturing process.

Want more irony? Kodak and Itek put in a bid to make the mirror. They would each build one and then check each other's work. Perkin-Elmer was touting a computer controlled manufacturing process that was guaranteed to produce highly accurate mirrors. But NASA required Perkin to sub contract for conventionally ground backup mirror. Guess who they sub contracted with....oh yeah...Kodak / Itek. The final irony is that the sub contracted mirrors were perfect and it was the flawed computer controlled ground mirror that flew.

And that is why I like trivia!

Why did HAL sing Daisy at the end of 2001?

Do weird questions like that bug you? Yeah me to. I am constantly wondering why certain songs, or landmarks or lighting is done one way and not another. The funny thing is I never quite made the connection to why H.A.L. sang Daisy at the end of 2001 while he was being shut down block by block. It was far more poignant than in 2010 when he asked "will I dream?" At the time I read the book, I don't think I was aware of it, but later I had heard that the very first song that a computer ever sang was Daisy Daisy, but for some reason I never saw the homage Kubrick was paying to those early computer pioneers. Here is the 2001 and the original.



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