#01

The next month will be a critical one for the future of manned space exploration. NASA and SpaceX have set May 27th as the target date for the first crewed rocket launch from American soil since the end of the Space Shuttle era a decade ago, but not without health precautions due to the ongoing pandemic. Meanwhile, Boeing has said they will perform another uncrewed test of the Starliner capsule after a troubled flight at the end of 2019. The re-flight will likely occur sometime this fall.

In other news, SpaceX gives a masterclass in the 'fail early, fail often' development methodology by blowing the top off yet another Starship prototype. 

#02

"Most high school students think of the Age of Exploration as the time period between the 15th and 17th centuries when European men with pointy beards and pantaloons sailed around the planet, ordering up silk and spices. Yet drones and robots are ushering in a new era of investigation, enabling mankind to go farther out in space, dive deeper down into the ocean, and even uncover new facts in places where researchers have looked many times before." Learn scientists using drones to map ancient landscapes, and engineers building robots that can explore caves and cliffsides.

#03

This year marks the 50th anniversary of Earth Day which was established in the wake of a large oil spill off the coast of southern California in 1969. Much of the oil washed up on the shores Santa Cruz Island. Since then, Santa Cruz Island has become a conservation success story. Nat Geo describes the near extinction and recovery of the island fox, one of the many species of plants and animals the can only be found on the islands. (Editor's note: The effort was so successful that if you visit Santa Cruz today you might be lucky enough to have a fox try to steal your lunch, or as was the case on one memorable occasional, your girlfriend's boot from underneath the vestibule of your tent at 3am.)   

#04

The Perseverance Mars rover is still on track towards a July launch. The rover will carry a helicopter to the surface of the red planet, and you can learn more about the drone from one of the skilled engineers who made it happen. Also, say hello to Hope, the first ever mission to Mars led by an Arab country.

The Curiosity rover has, rather remarkably, continued operations throughout the pandemic with almost the entire operations team working from home. In another spacecraft operational success, the BepiColombo spacecraft successfully flew by Earth (and produced a cool video of the event) along its circuitous path to Mercury.

#05

"In January 2018, she approached Google and asked if they might be able to help her find the signal of humpback whale songs amid all the other ocean noise, like dolphin calls or ship engines. Using 10 hours of annotated data, in which the whale songs and other noises were identified, Google engineers trained a neural network to detect the songs, based on a model for recognizing sounds in YouTube videos..." A.I. Is helping scientists understand an ocean's worth of data.

#06

"You can't skype meetings with coral" and some of the many other ways that coronavirus is affecting long-term field science.

The Bookshelf

When I was a kid my dad once picked up a book from the church rummage sale called A Fine and Pleasant Misery by Patrick McManus. He then spent the next couple days laughing out loud while reading the book on living room sofa while the rest of us looked on quizzically. A recent reread of the book proved to have a similar affect on myself, McManus is simply hilarious. His satirical short stories reflect a life enjoying the outdoors including the terrifying experience of camping in your backyard as a kid, a hunting dog Strange who "would see a horse or cow and yell, 'Its a big one! Shoot! Shoot!'", or how the local mountain man, Rancid Crabtree, tried to shoo a hibernating bear out from under a woodpile. McManus's book is a humorous read and welcome reminder of some of the fine and pleasant miseries that make life in the outdoors enjoyable for so many.

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This newsletter was produced as a private venture and not in the author's capacity as an employee of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology or of Griffith Observatory. Any views and opinions expressed herein or on exploreandobserve.com are his own and not those of his employers.

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