Oooh, Oumuamua

Now this really is a fascinating discovery. If you've been following the NASA website or other space-related outlets, you'll have seen the news that we have the first confirmed sighting of an object from beyond our solar system. And it is most peculiar.

Spotted by the PANSTARRS, the first interstellar asteroid received the initial designation C/2017 U1, under the understanding it was a comet, and is now named 1I/'Oumuamua, with the initial part designating its unique nature as the first object of its type, and the formal name 'Oumuamua being Hawaiian for "messenger from afar, arriving first." It's utterly unlike any asteroid seen before, being distinctly elongated in a sort-of cigar shape, almost ten times as long as it is wide. In fact, it's a quarter of a mile long, and it travelling 87,000 miles per hour, coming at us from the direction of Vega in Lyra, although it is unlikely it originates there. It has probably been travelling through space for billions of years without coming into contact with another star system. Alternatively, it has been proposed that it was ejected from the stellar nursery in the Carina-Columba Association which would put its origin about 45 million years ago.

'Oumuamua will zip past Saturn in early 2019, but will take about 20,000 years to make it beyond the edges of the solar system. NASA scientists are debating the likelihood of success for a mission to send a probe to analyse the asteroid, but catching it will prove a challenge, as it may move beyond reasonable range before a mission can be developed. It's a tempting target, though, potentially telling us all sorts about the conditions possible in other star systems.

The fact that 'Oumuamua became visible during one of the various times that the catastrophic planet Nibiru is supposed to appear and end all life on Earth has not gone unnoticed, although a quarter of a mile of rock heading away from us is unlikely to cause any problems. It does look like it would make an excellent long-haul spaceship though. Is anyone else thinking Rama would have been a good name?

Twenty years of Cassini

On October 15th, 1997, a Titan IV rocket launched from Cape Canaveral, carrying a Flagship-class spacecraft named Cassini. For just under twenty years, Cassini, and its companion probe Huygens, travelled through space and set up home in the Saturnian system, until it was deliberately crashed into Saturn's atmospheric sea on September 15th, 2017.

A collaborative mission between NASA (who created and launched the orbiter, Cassini), the European Space Agency (who developed the probe Huygens and the bulk of its technology) and the Italian Space Agency (who provided Cassini's telemetry and radiocommunication equipment), the Cassini project took fifteen years to move from initial concept to launch. Originally scheduled to end in 2008, the Cassini mission was extended with the Cassini Equinox mission, and again in 2010, with the Cassini Solstice mission, before it was carefully and deliberately destroyed in its final plunge.

In its early years, the spacecraft made a flyby of Venus, looped back round and took some test photos of Earth's Moon, using the gravity of this flyby to boost towards the outer solar system. After three years in space, Cassini made a flyby of the asteroid Masursky, followed by a flyby of Jupiter, collecting the most detailed images ever of the great planet. While between Jupiter and Saturn, tests were made using radio signals to and from the spacecraft, which further proved the effects predicted by Einstein's theory of gravity. In 2004, Cassini reached its destination, entering Saturnian orbit and passing through the planets outermost rings, taking shots of several moons in the journey. Two new moons - named Methone and Pallene - were discovered, while the spacecraft made flybys of the largest moon, Titan.

At the very beginning of 2005, the Huygens probe landed on Titan, sending back telemetry as it did so. It revealed a world of icy "rocks" and marshes of liquid hydrocarbons, a strange, frozen inversion of Earth, the first time we could look beneath the dense, clouded atmosphere. Over the following years, Cassini continued to travel throughout the Saturnian system, making flybys of moons, and sending back new and surprising data, such as the revelation of water systems on Enceladus. It also sent back some of the most detailed, surprising and beautiful images of the great ringed planet itself. Over the two decades of its service, multiple fixes and adjustments were made by the mission control team remotely from Earth.

To that team, the mission's designers, and the spacecraft itself: I salute you.

The Earth, from Saturn.

See some of the most breathtaking images from the mission here at Vox.com

FILM REVIEW: Hidden Figures

It's hard, as a British person in the 21st century, to understand how many American states remained racially segregated until the latter half of the twentieth. That's not to say racism and illegal segregation don't exist today, or where I live, but the widespread and legally enforced separation of black and white populations has never existed here. The echoes of racial segregation can be seen throughout the United States today, and this is hardly surprising, considering that it was a simple matter of fact for so many people still alive today. While racial segregation is now illegal in the US, we can already see a modern form of segregation, against same-sex couples and transgender individuals, taking shape under the guise of "religious freedom laws." They're even trying to keep people from using public toilets again.

So Hidden Figures is a timely piece, both last year's bestseller by Margot Lee Shetterley and this new film adaptation. I confess to not having read the book (yet, it's now high on my too-read list), but the film was something I was eager to see as soon as I heard about it. Part of this was down to the excellent cast, but mostly it was a desire to see an underexplored side to the space race, a major part of 20th century history which has always held a fascination for me.

Hidden Figures centres around three African American women, working for NASA in 1961, on the eve of manned spaceflight. Katherine Goble (nee Coleman, later Johnson), played by Taraji P. Henson, was and is a remarkable woman who displayed one of the finest mathematical brains of the 20th century. (Katherine Johnson, now 98-years-old and described by all who meet her as "sharp as ever," received the Presidential Medal of Freedom two years ago and attended this year's tumultous Oscars with Henson.) Katherine is the central character of the film, but a great deal of focus is also given to her friends and colleagues, Mary Jackson and Dorothy Vaughan. Jackson, played by Janelle Monae, was one of the most notable engineers at NASA and a tireless advocate for equal workplace rights. Vaughan, played by Octavia Spencer, taught herself computer programming language and became a frontrunner in the field of computing. They were, respectively, the first black female engineer and supervisor at NASA. Of the three, I was previously aware of Vaughan and Goble/Johnson, but I hadn't heard of Mary Jackson until watching the film.

The cast are uniformly excellent. As well as the three leads, the cast includes Kevin Costner as the director of the Space Task Group, Kirsten Dunst as Vaughan's departmental supervisor, and Mahershala Ali as Jim Johnson, Katherine's suitor and then husband. Although given relatively little screentime, Ali is magnetic, and it's hardly a surprise to me that he was become the first Muslim actor to win an Oscar (for Moonlight, one of my must-sees for March). There's also a role for the now ubiquitous Jim Parsons's, as chief engineer Paul Stafford, who comes across as a straight version of his usual cerebral, socially inept characters. Glen Powell is suitably charismatic as the legendary astronaut John Glenn, albeit reduced in age somewhat for the film.

For all the support they have from the wider cast, though, the strength of the film lies with the leading actresses, in particular Taraji P. Henson. She grounds the film with a performance that paints Goble as both an exceptionally gifted woman and a very straightforward one, someone who is both down-to-earth and looking to the stars. Janelle Monae adds a sassier, sexier side as the highly intelligent engineer Jackson, displaying a refusal to ever submit to the unfair treatment of her state, while Octavia Spencer makes Vaughan the most fundamentally likeable of the trio, coming across as a quietly brilliant and highly compassionate woman. Both Jackson and Vaughan are portrayed as more ambitious than Goble, who is simply so remarkably intelligent that it is ludicrous that she shouldn't be included in the most important meetings of the Mercury programme, and proves herself indispensible.

This was a time when the word computer meant someone who sat and performed calculations with pencil and paper. In a time when we each carry a supercomputer in our pocket and there's serious talk about private leisure flights to the Moon, it's amazing to see the first men travel to space, and the very first, cutting-edge IBM systems installed at NASA (taking up a huge office space). But it's the attitudes that are the most alien. A big chunk of the film is taken up with Goble's treks across the NASA grounds to find a toilet she is allowed to use, a drawn out, repetitive sequence that hammers home both the tragedy and absurdity of the situation. Jackson has to petition to be allowed to attend an all-white college in order to gain the qualification necessary to apply to become an engineer. Black people live in fear of being stopped by a white policeman, unsure what will happen if they say the wrong thing... well. maybe some things haven't changed.

A film like this is bound to romanticise the facts somewhat. Even a little surface research shows that the screenwriters have altered the facts somewhat. The three women had already made significant strides in their careers by 1961, but aligning these events with the first manned spaceflights makes it all the more momentous. John Glenn really did insist that Goble check the calculations before he made his first orbital flight aboard Friendship 7, but it wasn't the breakneck, white knuckle rush that it's portrayed as here. Most notably, it was Mary Jackson who had to trek across campus to find a washroom, not Katherine Goble. She just used whichever lavatory she pleased. In reality, it seems that NASA, although far from perfect, was more equitable than is shown here. Nonetheless, the film works, because even if the facts don't quite align with what we see, it's making an important point. NASA may have been making strides forward, but America as a whole was lagging behind. The events play out against a background of civil rights protests and violent repurcussions. This was the society these women lived in.

While it tweaks events, the script doesn't play too loose with established facts. I was pleased to see that Alan Shepherd and Gus Grissom got their dues as the first and second Americans in space, before the glamour of Glenn's 1962 orbital mission. (Legendary as he is, there are those who erroneously think Glenn was the first man in space; he was the fifth.) It's a pity we couldn't hang on a little longer for the flight of Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space, but that would stretch the narrative out to mid-1963. While dominated at points by these world-changing events, this is a very human story, and as much is made of Goble's personal life and her romance with Jim Johnson as the mathematics, space flights and social upheaval. Genuinely excellent, this is a must-see.

The Worlds of TRAPPIST-1

The internet is alight with people sharing the news of NASA's latest announcement. After teasing us with talk of a discovery "beyond the solar system," NASA announced the existence of a seven-planet star system located less than forty light years away. What's most exciting about the discovery is that most of the planets are considered potential habitats for life.

The star known as TRAPPIST-1 is, like many modern stellar discoveries, named after the device used to detect it, in this case, the TRAnsiting Planets and Planetesimals Small Telescope in Chile. You may notice that this doesn't quite spell out TRAPPIST, but the inventors are obviously Belgian beer fans and I can support that. Located 39 light years away in Aquarius, TRAPPIST-1 is described as an ultra-cool dwarf star, on the borderline of a red dwarf and a sub-stellar brown dwarf. Three planets were discovered there and announced back in 2015, and since then, the NASA Spitzer telescope and the Very Large Telescope at Paranal have detected four more. The extent of the system was announced last night (Feb 22nd).

In spite of being such a cool, dim star, TRAPPIST-1 may make an effective sun for life-bearing planets due to their extremely close orbits. All seven known planets orbit the star closer than Mercury orbits the Sun, and at least three of them are considered right within the system's habitable zone. This makes the planets astonishingly close together; the first and second planets are only slightly further apart than the Earth and the Moon. Finally, elaborate skies hanging with enormous sister planets can be considered a reality, not just science fiction. 

OK, this is Vulcan, but you get the idea

The planets are named TRAPPIST-1b through to -1h, and, unusually for discoveries of this type, are labelled in order of distance from their star. Each of them is within Earthlike mass and radius, with at least three of them estimated as being smaller than the Earth, and all are considered to be rocky, terrestrial-type planets. TRAPPIST-1b and -1c are the closest, with featureless spectra that indicates either a cloudless, water vapour dominated atmosphere, or a thicker, Venus-type atmosphere. They most likely lost the bulk of their surface water while their star was still cooling, and are less likely as abodes for life. TRAPPIST-1d is more likely habitable, although still closer than the calculated Goldilocks zone. TRAPPIST-1e, -1f and -1g are right within this zone, and are probably fairly cool in comparison to their inner brethren, far more likely to hold liquid water, Depending on the thickness of the atmosphere, they may be cooler than the Earth, or more comfortably terrestrial. TRAPPIST-1h is less well analysed so far, but is likely cold and less hospitable.

While the relative positions of planets to the star suggest potentially life-supporting temperatures, we shouldn't jump to conclusions. As always, Earthlike is a relative term. Red dwarf stars, let alone ultra-cool dwarfs, are debatable as life-supporting stars, due to the extreme proximity of their planets. The year on these planets will be very rapid, in the manner of a few days (-1b's year lasts only a day-and-a-half in Earth terms, with -1h at no more than 35 days, probably less). They are also likely to be tidally locked, with one side of each planet permanently facing the star. Both facts would lead to extreme weather conditions on the surface. Equally, radiation from the star, including X-rays and extreme energy ultraviolet radiation, would bombard the planets constantly at that proximity, depleting the atmospheres and making it harder for life to form.

Still, there is reason to hope. Even if the planets are lifeless now, they may not be always. Stars' longevity is inversely proportional to their size and temperature, and an ultra-cool dwarf like TRAPPIST-1 is likely to last a thousand times as long as the Sun, remaining stable for trillions of years. TRAPPIST-1 is estimated at only 500 million years old at present, but it could become a host for life for many thousands of millions of years in the future. 

Click the link here for NASA's announcement and an artist's impression of planet TRAPPIST-1d.