Ad Astra: Trollheart's Guide to the Galaxy (And Beyond)

[Trollheart]

As a child, another of my nerdish interests was in space. Not quite so much astronomy - I tried that, but never really got into it in any sort of proper way, the same as I dabbled (using the word very generously) in photography and playing the keyboards - but space itself. This isn't terribly surprising when you consider a few factors. One, I was a kid. What kid isn't attracted by space, the stars, travel through the galaxy, aliens etc? Two, I was already into science fiction, so space was almost by default the backdrop for most of what I was reading, and three, space is interesting. It's interesting on the surface because there's so much of it and we have explored virtually none of it. The idea of strange and distant stars, planets which might support life (and life vastly different to our own, most likely), to say nothing of the likes of quasars, pulsars and of course black holes, is always attractive, if nothing else, due to the mystery of such phenomena.

Down with Science!

Not really. I'm not advocating the new Republican way, championed (if that's the right word) by an orange hobgoblin who never learned the first lesson of sportsmanship and how to lose gracefully. I'm not ignoring, challenging or denying science in any way. But hell, for a lot of us science is, what's the word, oh yeah, boring.

 In my initial search for books to support my research into this journal, I came across a lot of writing on particle physics, quantum theory, mathematics of the cosmos and so on, and I left them where I found them. While there has to be a certain amount of science in any exploration, even written, of our universe, I don't want to get bogged down in dry scientific details, and I don't have that sort of brain anyway. Much of what I would be reading would be incomprehensible to me. Marie Monday may be at sea when it comes to computer technology, but she can run (Saturn's) rings around me - indeed, most of us - when it comes to the likes of string theory and quantum mechanics, and good for her. But I hated maths as a child and young adult and I never quite got it, and the whole subject bores me. And while I may have no problem boring my audience with my many and varied journals, I'll be damned if I'm going to bore myself!

So what I intend to do here (how very original I hear you sneer) is to take you on a sort of travelogue of the galaxy, and, as the title promises, most likely beyond that too. I'm going to begin by investigating the planets that surround our sun and make up the solar system in which we live, and then range out further afield, going from star to star as if we're in a cosmic cruise liner (no, NOT a spaceship of the mind! Keep your allegations of plagiarism to yourself, Neal DeGrasse Tyson!) taking a trip through the wonder of space (no, you can sod off too, Brian Cox! Just because you're a professor science space guy doesn't mean you have a monopoly on talking about the universe!) and seeing what it has to offer.

I have the vaguest idea myself of the cosmos. I know all the planets of course - though probably, almost definitely not as well as I think I do, and we'll find that out here - and a few facts about stars, black holes, quasars, the usual stuff. I've heard of the Gates of Creation, the Horsehead Nebula, the Large and the Small Magellanic Clouds, wormholes, gamma ray bursts and binary star systems. I know what they believe the giant red spot on Jupiter is and I know that Venus is almost the same size as Earth. I know the atmosphere on Titan, Jupiter's largest moon, is made of methane, and that there are volcanoes on Neptune several miles high. But all of these facts, or even factoids, in most cases make up the sum total of my knowledge of each of these planets, while of course I know there is so much more to learn about them. And that's just the planets. I know Albedaran is a Red Giant, as is Betelgeuse. I know Proxima Centauri is our nearest star, that the Andromeda Galaxy is our closest neighbour, and beyond that I know the names of some stars - Vega, Altair, Cassiopeia, Sirius, Procyon and so on - but that's all I do know about them.

So this will be a journey of exploration and discovery for me as much as for anyone who reads this. Together we'll board the cruiser to the stars and head out into the vast reaches of the Milky Way, seeing all the sights we can and learning about the stars and maybe planets, and other stellar phenomena and cosmic points of interest in our own galaxy, before ranging further afield, and travelling to the very boundaries of the universe. I'd advise packing a lunch - replicator food does not come recommended. And make sure your phone is charged: I don't want any of you draining the precious resources of our ship.

While the intention is to give you some information here, to educate and explain, we'll be leaving the nuts and bolts and the textbooks to others more qualified than I. Hey, even if you don't learn anything (though you surely will) there's still going to be some amazing sights to be seen on our journey, and all you have to do is look out one of the windows. What? Viewscreens? What do you think this is: the starship Enterprise? You have any idea how hard it was to finance this trip? Viewscreens? You're lucky we have windows!

The name of that ship? Let's call it - hmm. Let's call it the Darwin. The man who would become the very father of evolution theory travelled to distant lands in search of the origins of life, so we can now emulate his journey on a cosmic scale, and therefore it only seems right that our interstellar cruise liner should bear his name.


Darwin. The man, not the ship. But then, you knew that. You, uh, did know that....?

So make sure you have your boarding passes, take your spacesick pills and - no you don't need to put your helmet on: this is a pressurised environment. Where do you think you are? The twentieth century? - prepare for the trip of a lifetime.

Oh, there are no refunds. Just thought I'd mention that.

Right then, in the immortal words of Captain Jean-Luc Picard: let's see what's out there!

[Trollheart]

So, it makes sense to start off with the planets in our solar system, right?
Well, not quite...


Chapter I: Dropping in on the Neighbours:
A Stroll Through Our Solar System

I: Sunshine on My Face: Our Local Star

Yeah, the most important part of our own solar system is of course that which gives it is name, Sol, or more commonly, the Sun, so that's where the Darwin is bound on the first leg of our local journey. Make sure you have your shades on: it's damned bright out there! Insurance? Umm.. oh! Look!

While a sun is in fact any star, and every single other star is named (some of which I've noted above) ours really never had a name other than "the Sun", though ancient astronomers did use their own name for the sun, that being Sol, and so sometimes, to distinguish it from other stars or suns, it is referred to as Sol. But really, it's quite rare that this happens and so throughout this journal I will be calling it the Sun. And it's our sun, our celestial father who provides us warmth and light and, well, life. No wonder the ancients used to worship it, both as an actual object and as a god, or personification of one. After all, without the sun we're all dead. Once that glowing orb in the sky that allows you to go bicycling or sitting in the park, or shines hard in upon you at your desk or as you trudge across desert sands, once it goes out, it's all over people. The Sun nourishes all the planets, keeps them together by the force of its powerful gravitational pull, and regulates their temperature and therefore their weather.

For a very long time, it was firmly believed that the Sun went around the Earth, not the other way around. This was, mostly, because people could not conceive of Earth as being other than the centre of the universe (as was known at the time, which was the few stars visible to the naked eye, and probably not even recognised as such). God, or the gods, had created the Earth, so it stood to reason that it was the most important object in the sky. Well into the sixteenth century, the Christian Church preached that Earth was the centre of the universe (and flat) and if you disagreed, it was off to the Inquisition with you, for a one-time only, all-expenses-paid single ticket to hell and damnation. No, the Church did not take kindly to having its laws questioned, and even Galileo Galilei, known to history as Galileo, was persecuted and tortured by them for daring to suggest otherwise.


(Well, Galileo did, at least, the Italian version. And he was not wrong... Say anything at all, or even look like you were going to say something that contradicted or even questioned Church dogma, and you could expect a summons. And I don't mean a subpoena either)

But as science began to throw back the shadows of superstition and ignorance, and humanity emerged out of the darkness, new lines of thinking began and, more importantly, advances in technology and science meant that certain facts, held to be unalterable by the Church, such as Earth's position in the cosmos, were proven completely baseless and untrue, and the reality was widely disseminated, along with actual proof. In 1992, more than three hundred years after he had been branded a heretic and condemned to house arrest after he recanted his "blasphemous" theory that the Earth revolved around the Sun, Galileo received a posthumous apology from the Church, when Pope John Paul II basically shrugged and said "sorry dude, we got it wrong. No hard feelings?" Well, I guess it was something, even if it was three centuries too late.

We now know the Sun to be the centre of our solar system, with eight (originally nine, until poor Pluto was demoted to the status of dwarf planet and removed from the solar system party invitations mailshot) planets orbiting it at different distances, one of which is of course ours. Contrary to popular belief for millennia, and to literary descriptions still used, the Sun neither rises nor sets, this effect being produced as the planet moves around the disc of the Sun, turning its face from the star (of course it's never fully turned from the Sun, which is why when it's day in the northern hemisphere, for example, it's night in the southern). Our Sun is a G-type star, which kind of means it's nothing special. It's not a Red or Blue Giant, nor is it a White or Red Dwarf. It's not a binary or trinary star and it's not a pulsar, luckily for us. It's the kind of star that might get mugged for its lunch money walking down the street by the likes of Arcturus or Rigel, or maybe that old bully Betelgeuse, and it would never get to take the pretty girl to the prom. It's ordinary, in other words.

But it's our Sun, and while Red Giant might sound like a cool name for a star, trust me, you would not want to live on a planet orbiting one. In reality, you probably couldn't, as we'll see later. The Sun is basically a massive hydrogen bomb, with about three-quarters of its mass made up of that element, the rest mostly helium, and 600 million tonnes of hydrogen get converted by the process known as nuclear fusion into helium every second. The Sun is a sort of middle-aged star,  four and a half billion years old, but it's a grizzled old man compared to the sprightly Red Giant Betelgeuse, which has only been around for a piddling ten million, or the blue supergiant Rigel, a mere whippersnapper at seven million (estimated). The oldest stars known to exist go back thirteen to fourteen billion years since their formation. And you thought you felt old on your last birthday!

Eventually though, the Sun will use up all its hydrogen - nothing lasts forever - and transform into a Red Giant, in the process taking out our nearest neighbours, Mercury and Venus, and wiping all life from our own planet. But no need to book a spot on Branson's Virgin Galactic just yet, you have time. This is estimated to occur in around five billion years, so lots of time put the kettle on and have a nice cuppa.

Under the hood: everything under the Sun

The Sun, like most stars, is constructed of several layers, at which we will now take a quick look. Don't get too close: the surface of the Sun reaches temperatures of about 5,500 degrees Centigrade (nearly 10,000 Fahrenheit) - talk about sunburn! It's actually so hot that no liquid or solid matter can survive there, and so the Sun is basically a giant ball of superheated gas. Want to land on its surface? Tough. Even if you could somehow construct a craft that would resist such matter-melting temperatures, there's nothing there to land on. You might as well attempt to plant your flag of stupidity on the surface of Jupiter - which, again, has none. In fact, quite a few of our planets are gas giants, but again we'll come to them in due course.



Core

This is, as you might expect, the very centre of the Sun, making up about a quarter of its surface, and is where those chemical reactions I spoke of earlier takes place. Hydrogen is fused to helium and produces energy. If you thought the surface of the Sun was hot (it is) then get this: in the core, temperatures regularly reach up to fifteen million degrees (I'm not going to translate that to Fahrenheit because a) what's a few million degrees between friends and b) my thermometers keep vapourising) and the pressure is immense (there are some science-y measurements but they don't mean anything to me and probably won't mean anything to you, so let's just say if you feel pressure about your impending nuptials or that promotion you're hoping for, or your upcoming gig, try doing it at the core of the Sun and see how you feel!) as hot, dense plasma is fused to produce the energy and heat the Sun gives off, and sent via several layer to the surface, first by radiation and then, once it's got through the denser layers, by convection.

Radiative Zone

Sounds like something out of a Superman comic, doesn't it? But no, this is actually the next layer of the Sun, where the energy released in the core is transformed by photonic radiation and sent on its journey towards the surface. Because the matter is so dense here, it can take over 170,000 years for gamma rays to get to the surface of the Sun, which is good news for us, as gamma rays are very dangerous and we don't really want to see the Sun spewing them out during our lifetime.

Tachocline

This is a buffer zone between the Radiative and the Convection Zone

Convection Zone

See? The Convection Zone (not to be confused with the Convention Zone, a floating space platform for those who constantly go to meets and symposia) is where the energy from the core of the Sun is pushed to the surface by convection (by the circulation of currents within the star) rather than radiation (via electromagnetic photons) as the solar plasma from the core loses density and heat, and currents develop to carry the energy to the surface.

Photosphere

The part of the Sun we're all most familiar with, the basic surface, the layer below which the Sun becomes opaque to visible light, and we see sunlight. This is the effect of photons escaping through this layer and the transparent atmosphere below it, becoming solar radiation, sunlight.

Atmosphere

We're used to hearing this word, and it describes the ratio of gases that surround a planet, making it either breathable or not. As mentioned earlier, Titan, Saturn's largest moon, has an atmosphere composed primarily of methane, which is poisonous to humans, whereas Earth's atmosphere is mostly Oxygen and Nitrogen, which is not. But the Sun's atmosphere refers more to the corona surrounding the star, which is made up of four separate elements.

The Chromosphere, transition region and corona are all hotter than the surface of the Sun. The transition region stands between the Chromosphere and the corona, the latter being the kind of halo we see around the Sun, and the thing we draw when kids as either wavy lines or spikes coming off the disc. It's also the sort of shimmery halo you see when there's a solar eclipse. It is in constant motion, moving at a rate of about 400 KM/second, called the solar wind. The final layer, the uppermost, is the heliosphere, and is filled with solar wind plasma.

Solar phenomena

We've all heard of the weird things stars - well, our Sun anyway - tend to do, but a quick checklist here.

We have solar flares, which are sudden flashes of brightness on the surface of the Sun, accompanied by ejection of coronal matter and which emit powerful radio waves, which, if the flare comes close to Earth, can penetrate the atmosphere and disrupt communications such as radio and television, and possibly internet too. They can also appear as bright auroras in the ionosphere.

Then there are sunspots. These are not, as you might possibly think, our native star having a bad case of acne, nor indeed places where holidaymakers go to escape the rain, but are in fact areas on the surface of the Sun - ranging in size from a tiny 16 km across to a maximum 160,000 - where the temperature has dropped slightly. They are indications of intense magnetic activity, and often give rise to the aforementioned solar flares, as well as coronal mass ejections. They travel across the surface at speeds of about a few hundred metres per second, and in the case of larger ones, can be seen with the naked eye. If, that is, you decide like an idiot to look directly at the Sun, which is not recommended.

Coronal mass ejections? Oh yeah I mentioned them didn't I? Well they're basically plasma thrown off the surface of the Sun, accompanied by magnetic field, and often, as I said already, associated with or follow solar flares. They, too, occur around sunspot areas and they can also arise during solar prominences, of which more in a mo. They get released into the solar wind, and at maximum solar activity there can be anything up to three a day, whereas on the other end of the scale, at minimum solar activity, you might be lucky to see one every five days. If a CME hits Earth atmosphere it can kick up a geomagnetic storm, like the big one in 1989, which took out Quebec's power grid for nine hours, plunging the city into darkness and leaving the area without electricity. CMEs can also carry SEP (Solar Energetic Particles) which are responsible for both the Northern and Southern Lights, at the North and South Pole respectively.

The last one I want to look at here (there are others, but hell, they're mostly boring, and we don't do boring) are solar prominences, which I rather foolishly believed until a few hours ago to be the same as solar flares. They're not. Solar prominences remain anchored to the surface of the Sun, creating kind of loops that go from the photosphere to the corona, and while they can break apart and become CMEs, usually this tends not to happen. They can last for weeks or even months and are huge - the largest on record almost the diameter of the Sun itself, about 800,000 kilometres. A prominence viewed against the Sun instead of against space is called a solar filament.

[Trollheart]

Well I'm afraid we can't ignore the science like the Republicans, and we have to check out some of those tedious specs about the Sun. So here they are.

Diameter: Approx 800,000 KM* (109 times that of Earth)
Volume:** Approx 1,300,000 times that of Earth
Mass: Equivalent to 333,000 Earths
Gravity: 28 times that of Earth
Distance from Earth: 150,000,000 kms (1 AU***)
Star Type: G
Sidereal rotation period (at equator): Yeah, like we're going to get into that kind of shit! Didn't you see the logo above? As if.

* As I couldn't be arsed constantly converting this to that, I've picked one measurement to go with and it's kilometres, where I can use it. You want miles, I got one word for ya: Google.

** The size of stars makes many of the measurements used a little hard to understand for a non-brainiac like me (see? I couldn't even spell brainiac without three attempts to do so!) and it makes it easier to use its relevance to Earth, so, rather like the annoying way they say on certain documentaries  "100 feet, that's two football fields" or whatever, here it's a case of that much larger than Earth or in some cases so many Earths bigger. You'll get the hang of it.

*** AU is the Astronomical Unit, which is basically, as above, 150 million km, or the distance from the Earth to the Sun. As we get out into space, things like kms don't really cut it so you'll find AUs being used a whole lot more, so get used to it.

Things I have learned about the Sun

Like I said at the start, this is a voyage of discovery as much for me as for you. Like most of my journals, I kind of know sod-all about the subject, or have a loose grasp of it, and supplement my knowledge through the time-honoured process of research. Or, to put it another, perhaps more accurate way, I look at the writing of people who know a hell of a lot more about me than the subject, steal it, rewrite it, and post it. Not literally obviously, and that's somewhat satirical, but in the end, isn't that what all research is? Looking to others to tell you what you want to know, and then imparting it to your readership?

As a result of this, I have already found out quite a lot about the Sun I did not know. And here is what I have found out.

The Sun is older than I thought. Not that I didn't know how old it was, I just didn't realise that it kind of straddles the middle age of stars, with the oldest being up to 14 billion years old (who's paying for the candles on that cake, I wonder?) and the youngest counting their age in mere millions.

I did not know that our Sun is technically classed as a dwarf star. It is, a yellow one to be precise (which, given its actual colour is said to be white, confuses me, but then I'm easily confused). I also did not know that up to eighty percent of the stars in at least our galaxy are also dwarfs of various colours.

I thought that solar flares and solar prominences were the same thing. They're not.

I had no idea that the Aurora Borealis (Northern Lights) and Australis (Southern Lights) are caused by eruptions from the Sun called CMEs, or Coronal Mass Ejections.

[Trollheart]

Fun factoids

Many of these you will know, but I'm going to tell you anyway.

Like I noted in the introduction, in ancient times the Sun was both worshipped as a god and as a representation of a god, which is to say, the Egyptians for example revered the sun-god Ra, and the Sumerians believed the Sun was Utu, the god of justice and twin brother of the queen of Heaven, Inanna. The Greeks and Romans explained the movement of the Sun across the sky by imagining it was draw in a golden chariot by Helios, who had to rest at night, thus darkness fell. They also were under the mistaken impression that the Sun was a planet, which is why they named the seven days of the week after seven known planets at the time, including the Sun. (These appear to have been the only ones that could be seen with the naked eye - so  Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, the Moon and the Sun - oddly, they didn't include Earth, whether they understood or believed it too was a planet I don't know).

Norse legend didn't have much about the Sun, but then, given how damn cold it is up there in Scandinavia, they probably didn't see it often enough to assign it the importance of a god, though the Chinese believed there were originally ten Suns but they messed around too much in the sky and burned the people, so a hero shot nine of them down, leaving just the one. Weird, but I suppose no weirder than thinking the sun was driven across the sky in a chariot. I mean, who would insure such a daily trip? And whoever they were, I bet Helios lost his no-claims bonus when his son Phaeton snagged the keys and the whole thing went tits-up. But I mean, come on: these people (the Chinese) also explained a solar eclipse as the bite of a magical dragon or dog. Right. Sure they did.

Ah well we Irish weren't much better. Sure we used to swear that the sun was a woman, honest! Even Christianity took the idea of using December 25 from a sun-worshipping crowd, as explained by the 12th century Syrian bishop Jacob Bar-Salibib (died 1191): "It was a custom of the Pagans to celebrate on the same 25 December the birthday of the Sun, at which they kindled lights in token of festivity. In these solemnities and revelries the Christians also took part. Accordingly when the doctors of the Church perceived that the Christians had a leaning to this festival, they took counsel and resolved that the true Nativity should be solemnised on that day."

Back in the real world, ultraviolet light from the sun is what causes sunburn if you don't use the old Factor 500 or whatever, and of course as we all know by now it also causes skin cancer, though it has its good points too, being responsible for varying degrees of human skin pigmentation due to its being filtered through the Earth's ozone layer at different latitudes. But back to bad stuff, and we all know that despite both U2 and Threshold (who?) writing songs called "Staring at the Sun", this is bad advice, and can result in temporary or even permanent blindness. That's just from looking at the sun with your eyes (though your natural defences make you blink and squeeze your eyes shut pretty quickly, so unless you're really stupid, or want, for some reason, to damage your eyesight, the chances of that happening are relatively low) - try using binoculars or a telescope and say goodbye to those eyes. Just because it's over 170 million kilometres away doesn't mean it can't sear your retinas after a few seconds, so don't even risk it.

And you might think (though again you'd be an idiot if you did) that it might be safe to look at the Sun during an eclipse, when most of it is blocked by the Moon. But it isn't. If you've ever participated in such an event, you should know that you need special protection even then to look directly at the sun, and you're placing your eyesight at grave risk if you ignore the safety instructions and don't take the recommended precautions. Why do you have to do this? Glad you asked.

Despite what we all think, the uncovered portion of the Sun left visible during the eclipse is still as bright as during a normal day, and not only that, but the human pupil opens more to compensate for the loss of light, about three times as wide, which actually allows up to ten times as much light into it as would normally be the case. Finally, you don't even feel your retinal cells dying. There's no pain, it just happens, and suddenly you have blind spots and trouble seeing. So basically, don't take the risk. This even happens during a partial solar eclipse, so just watch it. Or preferably, don't.



The thing about space exploration is that you really do end up getting bogged down in science-y talk and figures and jargon. The very first book I read to get information about the Sun, The Inner Solar System: The Sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars (An Explorer's Guide to the Universe) by Erik Gregerson bombarded me with so many crazy concepts - electrons, photons, protons and neutrons all doing their thing, this to the power of that, measurements I had never even heard of before, the angle of the ecliptic (well that wasn't there, but I've heard it before and thought I'd use it just to sound brainy. What is it? How the hell should I know?) and chemical symbols all over the place, that I became... what is that word? There's a word for what happened to me when I read it (or rather, scanned down it, going a little glassy-eyed in the process) - oh yeah. Bored. I got bored.

See, as I said at the beginning, and as the reappearance of the logo above should remind you, although this is to be a voyage of discovery it ain't a school trip, or an academic attempt to prove this or postulate that, or even a serious attempt to quantify the phenomena of the universe. Nah. This is, primarily, a sight-seeing tour, where I'll be pointing out items of interest and doing what I can to talk about them without sending you all, and myself, to sleep.

So I am studiously (if that's not a contradiction in terms, and if it is, then suck it) and deliberately ignoring the harder bits, the ones where these brainiacs go into deep detail and get all science tech and prove they could not only buy and sell me on their subject, but give me away as a free gift. They can do that, and more power to them (to the power of whatever). Me? I just like learning stuff, but not stuff that's going to crowd out my brain and make it hurt. Therefore, if, as we pull away from the Sun you're waving your arms and shouting but but but! You didn't explain how this works and I want to know about that and I don't understand the other, just sit down and get a grip, will you? Nobody cares, and if they do, there's this wonderful thing called the internet where you can find out anything you want and go as deep as makes you happy, but the rest of us will be off enjoying ourselves.

All sounds very frivolous, doesn't it? Good. While I will be ensuring we all learn the basics about things like planets, comets, galaxies, pulsars and asteroids shaped like dancing moose, I want to keep it interesting but also entertaining, light-hearted and easy to follow. So I guess you might call it The Universe for Dummies, though if you call me a dummy you may be asked to check that faulty airlock down on deck seven. Unless you're into science in a heavy way, like Marie, or do it for a living, it's usually been my experience that too much information can be a real pain and people lose interest very quick. So we're doing the basics, and no more. You want to find out more, be my guest. The rest of us are just here to enjoy the trip.

So break out the space beer - which is, basically, just beer you drink in space. So, yeah, beer. So break out the beer and let's visit the neighbours, as we leave the Sun behind and knock on the door of the guy who lives nearest the big yellow one.

[Trollheart]

II: (Sometimes) Hotter than Hell: Welcome to Mercury

Even the least informed among you will be aware that Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun, and therefore the hottest. Well not quite. I always thought this, but it seems that because Mercury has no atmosphere, and therefore no way to retain heat, despite its heat source being only 58 million km away, its surface temperature fluctuates wildly between day and night. In the day it can reach temperatures of up to 800 degrees Centigrade, whereas at night it plunges to -173 C. Anyone trying to list off the planets (come on, who would fail at such a task? Oh well, I remember someone on a quiz recently apparently forgetting the soil he stood on was part of a planet, and thinking it was Mercury, Venus, Mars....) will always know that Mercury comes first, so it's always uppermost in people's minds. It's also the smallest of the planets as you might expect, a mere 0.05 times the size of Earth, with gravity at 0.3, which I guess means you could fly on Mercury, if you weren't busy being fried to a crisp, that is. Or being reduced to tiny ice cubes.

Mercury is one of only two planets in our solar system devoid of moons, its nearest neighbour being the other. In some ways, Mercury displays some of the characteristics of our moon at least - pock-marked with craters, inactive, dead and without any atmosphere, although nobody to my knowledge has ever written a song called "By the Light of the Silvery Mercury" or suchlike. Just doesn't have the same romanticism. Another reason why, perhaps, Mercury doesn't figure all that much in human culture - certainly not as much as Mars, Saturn, Jupiter and Venus, for instance - is that it's very damned hard to see. Because its orbit is within that of Earth, and due to its proximity to the Sun, it can usually only be seen after sunset on the western horizon and before sunrise on the eastern.

It's a lot denser than Earth, by which I don't mean it gets a lower SAT score: its core takes up about 55% of the planet, whereas ours only extends to 17%, and Mercury is one of the richest sources of iron in the solar system. Long narrow ridges extend for several hundred kilometres along its surface, as well as mare*-like plains and craters, similar to those on the moon. Like the moon, it also has highlands, mountains, valleys and escarpments. Some of the craters are hundreds of kilometres wide, though some are quite small. The largest is called Caloris Basin or Plantitia, and is 1,500 km wide.

Due to the contraction which occurred as Mercury cooled, the surface has been deformed into things like wrinkle ridges and lobate scarps (curved or scalloped cliffs), as well as compression folds known as rupes or cliffs. The many volcanoes on the planet (billions of years dormant now of course) are all of the shield variety, which means they're almost flat to the ground, rather than the ones we're familiar with, caldera and mountains. Perhaps strangely, given its proximity to the Sun, it's theorised that ice may exist on Mercury. This is supported by the fact that the temperature at the poles, which never receive direct sunlight, is always at about -170 C, and cold traps have developed on the floors of deep craters at the poles. Messenger, a probe sent out in 2012, confirmed that there is enough water ice at the north pole of Mercury to "encase all of Washington DC in a block of ice two and a half miles deep". Hah! That'd show Congress eh? Shut down the government, indeed! No doubt it would be all blamed on Obama or Trump, depending on your political views. The next probe to visit Mercury, scheduled to arrive in 2025, will explore this further.

* A Mare is a flat, basaltic plain created by volcanic eruptions, the word coming from the old Latin for sea, which is probably how they were once viewed in early times.

Ever asked yourself if this day would ever end? Well thank your lucky stars you aren't on Mercury, where the day lasts 1,400 hours or approximately 58 Earth days! Try getting through that one without telling the boss where to shove his job!And, you know, burning up or freezing. As for years, well this is quite weird, because it seems Mercury spins faster on its axis than it rotates around the sun - a trip which takes it 87 days - meaning that one Mercury year doesn't even last two Mercury days! Imagine all the presents you'd be getting for birthdays! Then again, imagine how quickly you'd age if every year was only 87 instead of 365 days. Oh man! I'd be, what, well over two hundred years old! Bet I don't look a day over a hundred though.

Because the planet's tilt is almost zero, the least of any of the planets in our system, an observer on Mercury would see the sun rise almost two-thirds of the way over the horizon, then reverse and go back down and come back up, all in the same day! Hey darling, let's go watch the sun rise, set and rise again, shall we? It's so romantic! Oh but that's not the best of it. Once every Mercurian year (every other Mercurian day, in other words) at certain points on the planet's surface the sun goes overhead, reverses direction, comes back over again, reverses direction again and comes back over a third time. At this point, the Sun is basically stationery. No, that's not right is it? That would mean our native star suddenly became a load of pens and paper clips and notepads. Stationary, that's the one. Not moving. Stopped. Like the queue in the post office just when you have to catch that bus.

Kind of amazing to hear that a report issued in March 2020 suggested that life may at one time have existed on Mercury, although it's unlikely to have been bronze-suited Mercurians saluting the huge god that seemed always to be watching over them, but rather tiny micro-orgasms, sorry organisms. Not expecting too much in the way of written history, then. Interesting that several cultures all linked the planet with their version of the messenger of the gods, the Babylonians naming it Nabu, the Greeks Hermes and the Romans of course Mercury, which was the one which stuck. This might be because (Trollheart Hypothesis # 340, all rights reserved) it is the planet closest to the sun, which was generally seen as the father or creator god, so this planet would be designated as its messenger. Maybe. Who knows?

Probes sent

Mariner 10

Launched: 1973
Reached Destination: 1974
Results: Mapped about 45% of the planet, confirmed its very weak atmosphere of helium, the existence of  a magnetic field and also confirmed the highest deposits of iron found in any of the planets. Determined maximum and minimum temperatures on the surface of the planet.
Photographs taken: 2,800
Mission ended: 1975
Termination of probe: Deactivated remotely and believed yet to orbit the Sun

MESSENGER (MErcury Surface Space ENvironment GEochemistry and Ranging)
Note: Isn't it weird how everything associated with Mercury turns out to have to do with messengers? Obviously, this one was planned, but still. I mean, let's be honest, the acronym is about as forced as you can get. It could easily have been called the Monsignor, or I don't know, the Massager?)
Launched: 2004
Reached Destination: 2008 (but flybys only; entered Mercury orbit 2011)
Results:  Mapped 100% of surface, examined the atmosphere, made detailed study of the planet's geology from orbit, studied its magnetic field, its surface, the poles and the core. Discovered the presence of water, also volcanoes. The revelation that there were carbon-containing organic compounds on the planet led to speculation that life might have existed there once.
Photographs taken: 100,000
Mission ended: 2015
Termination of probe: Crashed into Mercury

Future probes

BepiColumbo

Launched: 2018
To reach Mercury: 2025

Mercury-P (Меркурий-П)

Launch date: 2031 (planned)
As you might have gathered from the characters, this is being launched, or at least its launch is proposed, by the Russian Space Agency, and if successful will be the first probe to actually land on the surface of Mercury.

[Trollheart]

It's time for some boring figures. Sigh. Let's get on with it then.

Distance from Sun: 70,000,000 Km - 49,000,000 km  (Because Mercury's orbit is so eccentric, two figures have to be used, one for when it's closest to the Sun - Aphelion - and one for when it's furthest away - Perihelion)
Distance from Earth: (approx) 85,000,000 kms
Diameter: 4,880 km
Density: 5.427 g/cm
Surface gravity: 0.38g
Satellites: None
Atmosphere: None, other than a very tenuous exosphere containing mostly helium
Length of day: 88 Earth days
Length of year: 58 Earth days
Axial tilt: 0.034 degrees
Mass: 0.055 Earths
Volume: 0.056 Earths
Surface Temperature Range: 430 to -180 degrees Centigrade
Weather: None

So after all that, what have we learned? Well, I don't know about you, but


That Mercury could be cold. I mean, who did? And SO cold!

That there was ice, or even water, on the planet.

That it had virtually no atmosphere

That the sun can rise, set and rise in the same day!

That one Mercurian year - two Mercurian days

That Mercury moved within the orbit of Earth

That there's a possibility the planet could have at one time sustained life, however basic

Look, let's just say I knew shit about Mercury, and now I know a lot more. And I hope you do too.

Interesting factoids

Why, do you think, the planet was named after the Roman messenger of the gods? Well, I gave one possible reason in the text, but it's also possible that the fact that the planet moves so fast, in relation to other planets, across the sky, is connected to the supposed fleetness of Hermes/Mercury, and even the Assyrians, some of the most ancient of the old races (sorry Cthulhu!) named it "the jumping planet". Asian mythology calls it, oddly, the water star, while Hindu belief had it linked to the god Budha, who was believed to preside over the day known as Wednesday - possibly why the French word for that day is Mercredi? Odin was certainly linked with both the planet and the day, actually giving us our modern denomination for it - Woden's Day (Odin was often called Woden) or Wednesday.

The Hubble Space Telescope, one of the most powerful and certainly most famous, and longest-serving, having been sent into orbit in 1990, is prevented from observing Mercury due to its proximity to the Sun. Just like I noted in the article on the Sun dealing with the dangers of blindness when looking into the sun with optical instruments, it would be catastrophic for anyone to view the tiny planet through the Hubble as the Sun would be too close.

Mercury is unique in the solar system in its rotation, as it spins three times on its axis for every two times it orbits the Sun. This, apparently, is referred to as a 3:2 spin-orbit resonance. Of course it is.

Although without question, the planet most championed by the writers of science fiction has traditionally been Mars (leading some people to refer, incorrectly, to all invading aliens as Martians, no matter their actual point of origin) Mercury has seen its fair share of tribute in print too. I remember reading Asimov's Lucky Starr books, one of which was called The Big Sun of Mercury, and it comes up in other of his stories, as well as works by C.S. Lewis, Kurt Vonnegut and Ben Bova, among others. Most notably, Arthur C. Clarke sets  his Rendezvous with Rama there, and Mercury is also the backdrop for books by Larry Niven, Kim Stanley Robinson, Stephen Baxter and David Brin. It also shows up in Star Trek Voyager, Futurama and Sailor Moon, to name but a few.

Oh, and you'll be completely unsurprised, I should imagine, to hear that the first telescopic observations of Mercury were made by (anyone?) - yes, the Church's Public Enemy Number One, Galileo.

So that's as far as we're going to explore Mercury. Anyone else finding it very hot in here? I think I need a drink. I'll be down in the bar if anyone wants me. Oh well surely you can guess where we're headed next? If not, just look out one of the windows. No, I told you we couldn't get funding for viewscreens, why don't you listen? Of course you won't fall out: they don't actually open! I mean, what kind of idiot opens a window on a spaceship? And why? To breathe in lungfuls of cool, fresh vacuum? We're in space, dummy, or did you forget? You want fresh air, head down to the arboretum. No, I know it's one skinny scraggly tree and hardly deserves the name, but it's better than nothing.

Or better yet, come with me down to the bar. I think it may be your round. No, no. I'm sure it is.

No, don't worry: they'll call us when we reach our next destination.

What do you mean, no funds for a comms system?

Damn it. Right, well, someone can come down and tell us.

Come on, come on: all this talking has made me thirsty!

[Trollheart]

III: A Woman Scorned: Venus in Heat

In recent times - or at least, I've only heard it recently - our nearest neighbour has been referred to as "Earth's evil twin". This is because Venus exhibits many of the main characteristics of our home planet, and in some ways, is almost a future vision of it, or what Earth may become if we don't get up off our arses and do something about global warming. You see, Venus is kind of the poster child, or indeed cautionary tale for climate change, having already undergone the effect of the release of greenhouse gases across the planet, thus making it uninhabitable, if it ever was so, and all but a vision of Hell, right on our own doorstep. Just shows how wildly inaccurate ancient astronomers were when they saw it in the heavens and decided to lavish upon it the name of the goddess of love.

Setting aside the surface similarities between our planet and Venus, there are marked differences and none of them are good, not for us and not for the planet. It is the hottest planet in the solar system, bar none (and this surprises me because before we began our little expedition I always assumed that to be Mercury) with temperatures reaching 464 degrees Centigrade, has an atmosphere almost entirely composed of carbon dioxide and features gentle, relaxing clouds of... sulphuric acid, lending a new meaning to the term acid rain! Atmospheric pressure on the surface is 92 times that of Earth's at sea level, or to put it another way, if you want to know what a brisk stroll on Venus would be like, dive into the ocean and descend to about 900m (that's 3,000 feet, and also the last time I'm calculating another measurement scale) and you'll get the idea.

As I indicated a few paragraphs ago, Venus has fallen victim to the runaway greenhouse effect. And no, that doesn't describe a thief legging it with your prize cucumbers. When the greenhouse gases on a planet's surface (we're all familiar with/fed up hearing about those) rise and block thermal radiation from leaving the planet, no water can form and any water vapour there is will be likely to escape through the stratosphere and out into space. Essentially, the planet can't cool down, and so it becomes a burning desert of a planet, dry and arid and exceptionally hot. The main greenhouse gases are water vapour, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and ozone. These gases are essential to life, but must be released into the air and dissipated. When this does not happen, as I say above, a runaway greenhouse effect results and you get a planet like Venus.

Venus is also the only other planet in the solar system not to have a single moon. In fact, in a weird coincidence, probably, the number of moons per planet increases as you move out into the solar system, with Mercury and Venus having none, Earth having one, Mars two and then of course the gas giants have them in the tens, Saturn having over eighty of them.

As if all the above though is not enough to classify Venus as a hell-planet, the atmosphere contains sulphur, and there may have been relatively recent volcanic activity on its surface. Let's just say we won't be landing there on our trip. I don't think our insurance would cover it. What do you mean, you thought I was arranging it? Well now that's just... tell you what, say nothing to the others. I don't fancy taking an unscheduled space walk, do you? Anyway, where was I? Oh yes. No need to worry about insurance, everything is fine. So Venus has no moons. Right. Nevertheless, it is the brightest object in the sky, and you've no doubt seen it, even if you haven't realised or cared what it was, on a clear night.

Most of the surface of the planet is covered by smooth volcanic plains, the rest composed of two highland plains, one of which, Ishtar Terra, boasts an eleven-kilometre high mountain (that's like eleven Everests stacked one on top of the other) and unlike Mercury the surface of Venus features few craters, and is relatively smooth. This means the planet is quite young, a mere babe in arms actually, no more than 600 millions years old (ahhh!) and possibly even as young as 300. Coochy-coo! Ahem. There are features called farra, which are mostly flat, pancake-like depressions, arachnoids, which are not, as you might fear, robot killer spiders that patrol the surface, but rather radial or concentric fractures which look like spiders' webs, coronae, circular rings of fractures which are often surrounded by a depression, and have nothing to do with the sun, and novae, radial, starlike fractures. All of these stem from volcanic activity.

Like its little brother, Mercury, the possibility for life seems to exist on Venus, although the detection of phosphine - a gas which scientists believed was impossible to create in Venus's chemical atmosphere, and could only have come from living organisms - in the clouds above the planet have actually given rise to speculation that life currently exists there, albeit, again, no life we would recognise. No Venusian war wizards, for instance, or nubile princesses living in sky cities. Sorry, Mr. Burroughs! Mind you, Carl Sagan had been saying this since the sixties: "While the surface conditions of Venus make the hypothesis of life there implausible, the clouds of Venus are a different story altogether. As was pointed out some years ago, water, carbon dioxide and sunlight—the prerequisites for photosynthesis—are plentiful in the vicinity of the clouds."

("Life in the Clouds of Venus?" - Carl Sagan and Harold Morowitz, Nature Magazine, September 16 1967)

Still, this hypothesis seems to have been discounted after October 2020, when a re-examination of the clouds seemed to show no signs of phosphine, and the belief is that - without going into scientific terms which I neither understand nor care about - somebody fucked up and detected something that was not there. Well, I suppose at least the Venusians won't be coming over here, taking our jobs, stealing our women...

The winds on Venus are very sluggish, but powerful nonetheless, mostly due to the very high density of the planet's atmosphere, and the dispersal by the winds of dust and small stones across the surface. It's pretty much the same wherever you go on the planet, or when, as neither seasonal changes nor geographic location varies across Venus, its axial tilt, while still a lot more pronounced than that of Mercury (but then, so is that of any other planet in the system) is a mere three percent and therefore doesn't permit much in the way of change. In fact, if you want to cool down you're best scaling that 11 km-high mountain, Maxwell Montes, where you'll be able to bask in the refreshing temperature of a nice cooling 350 degrees C. Lovely! Yeah, that's as cool as it gets on this planet. Oh, and that stuff that looks like snow on the peaks? Take my word for it, it's not.

Despite the slow winds on the surface, if you were to somehow attempt to fly on Venus you would find it a whole different matter, as the winds up in the clouds rush around at about 300 kph every four or five days. That's way faster and stronger than our Storm Force 10 winds on Earth, or the kind of winds that accompany the likes of hurricanes, which rarely reach over 120 kph. Venus has no seasons, no real weather, certainly no rain, ice or snow, though there is some speculation that it gets lightning storms. This however has not been proven, and there is plenty of doubt as to whether this could be possible in the dense atmosphere of the planet.

[Trollheart]

Venus differs from all other planets in the solar system by rotating clockwise, and very slowly, making its days longer than its years. A Venusian day is 243 Earth days while a Venusian year is only 225. Because of its atypical rotation, were it possible for it to be seen through the thick clouds of sulphur, the sun would be seen to rise in the west and set in the east on Venus. Although the planet has no moons, it's theorised it may have had once, but either the lack of solar tides destabilised it/them and made it/them crash into Venus, or a large impact event, thought to have taken place millions of years after the planet had formed, may have resulted in the same outcome. Venus does however have small satellite asteroids, called trojans, which orbit it. Sure they do Trojan work, they do! Sorry.

Transits of Venus are not tough rugged white vans that haul cargo between here and there, but times at which the planet passes between the sun and Earth, and therefore becomes visible against the surface of the sun as a black spot. These transits usually take hours to complete, are often visible to the naked eye, and occur very infrequently, normally with about a century between one and the next. They occur in pairs, usually eight years apart. They can be likened to eclipses, and in addition to providing a pretty spectacular sight, help scientists to work out all sorts of things, including, recently, the existence of exo-planets (planets outside of our solar system) and prior to that, the size of the astronomical unit (AU).

As one of the brightest objects in the sky, Venus can be, and has been, observed in daylight. I believe I may have seen it myself. The ancient Greeks believed it was two planets, as Venus vanishes behind the sun for several days and then reappears: they called it Phosporos, the bringer of light, when they could see it in the morning, and Hesperus, the star of the evening, when they saw it at night. Later these two words became Lucifer, light bearer, the morning star.

Venus was in fact the first planet humans ever visited, albeit not personally, and a glut of space probes headed there during the late twentieth century. However, because it is impossible to land there, and the planet couldn't be colonised or terraformed or mined, interest in its observation and exploration has waned in the twenty-first, as we focus on Mars and, um, Pluto? However before interest was lost, there was some discussion about terraforming the planet. Some of these ideas have to be read to be believed.


Terraforming Venus: Truth is weirder (and more hilarious) than fiction!

Can we terraform Venus?

Yes we can!
Maybe...

Note: if anyone reading this is affiliated with NASA or involved in this sort of research, I'm not laughing at your ideas. Well yes I am, but then who knows what's possible? They said men would never fly. They said the Earth was flat. They said the moon was not made of green... what? Really? You're sure about that, now, are you? Excuse me, I have to call my broker right away!

Making Venus habitable hinges on three important factors. First, lowering the temperature to at least a tolerable level that would not reduce any colonists to sticky slop on the ground. Second, filter the atmosphere: that carbon dioxide might be great for plants (not that there are any on Venus, as there is no water and they'd just burn up anyway) but it ain't good for we humans, and Venus's atmosphere is chock-full of it. Finally, as Venus has no oxygen, we'd have to get some in there. Call in the Oxygen Board! What do you mean, you're cutting us off as we didn't pay our bill?

Here's a fellow nerd to explain some of how it might be done...

And here's another, with cool animations...

Mirror, mirror, in the sky...

Look, I've read some crazy things about the proposed exploration and colonisation of Venus, among them the idea of people floating around in balloons and sky cities (I ain't kidding, you'll see!) but glancing down I see the words "space mirror" and, well, it's like candy to me. I got to go see what this is about.

Oh, man! That is like something out of Futurama. Except, it's real. Apparently. The idea is to combat the "two-month Venusian night" by having a 1,700 metre mirror on a satellite orbiting the planet, in order to dispel the darkness and light up the planet with the "luminosity of 10-20 morons." Oh, sorry, that's moons. Maybe my unfortunate slip was more accurate! Oh, dear. What else is there? This is comical.

Because it's there. Well, not yet it's not, but it could be.

Okay, okay. Also proposed was a 50km-high mountain that would be so high that the temperatures at its summit would be tolerable for human habitation, and everyone would live on this mountain. Oh dear lord. If you go for a walk, John, make sure you don't stray too close to the edge there. It's a long way downnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn....!


Ice, Ice baby: once in a blue moon

Oh merciful heavens, my sides! Look, this may all be accepted as sound scientific practice, but I just can't help laughing at some of these suggestions. How about crashing Venus into one of the ice moons on the outer edges of the solar system, where there is a plentiful supply of water in the ice there? Or is i the other way around? Yeah, probably. That should solve the water problem on the planet! How in the name of Captain Jean-Luc Picard are you supposed to do that? I worry about people like the guy who had this idea, one Paul Birch, especially when he quips "In theory, you could flick a pebble into the asteroid belt and send Mars crashing into the sun." What? I mean, what? No, like, I really mean, what??

You're fired, sun!

Futurists are weird people, but hey, this is a weird section, and to be honest, while supposedly all of this is doable, at least theoretically, it's rare science can be laughed at, so I'm taking the opportunity where I can. I'm not saying these ideas are crazy, but, well, you decide. The latest one here is for a process called starlifting to occur. Apparently, this involves siphoning off part of the Sun's hydrogen, via - wait for it - an ionised particle beam which he's decided to call a hydro cannon - and aiming it at Venus. This is supposed to do two things: thin the dense atmosphere and introduce hydrogen into the atmosphere, which will then react with the carbon dioxide and create h20. Okay. And they let this guy out on his own? No, seriously, I'm asking.

Taking the air - literally!

Even our buddy Carl Sagan has been at it. First he proposed, early in the sixties, introducing genetically engineered biological life forms into Venus's atmosphere which would convert the carbon dioxide into carbon, but that idea was shot down. He admitted the plan was predicated on insufficient data, as the Enterprise computer was often fond of saying, in his book Pale Blue Dot, published thirty years later:

"Here's the fatal flaw: In 1961, I thought the atmospheric pressure at the surface of Venus was a few bars ... We now know it to be 90 bars, so if the scheme worked, the result would be a surface buried in hundreds of meters of fine graphite, and an atmosphere made of 65 bars of almost pure molecular oxygen. Whether we would first implode under the atmospheric pressure or spontaneously burst into flames in all that oxygen is open to question. However, long before so much oxygen could build up, the graphite would spontaneously burn back into CO2, short-circuiting the process."

Yeah, Carl: I don't think we're too bothered about whether we implode or burst into flames. We'd prefer to do neither, thanks.

Then he had the idea to smash asteroids into the planet so as to shake the atmosphere off the planet. I guess that wouldn't work with most planets, as they have a strong enough magnetic field to retain their atmosphere, but Venus's is really really weak. Cartoon-like though, it was realised that if they didn't hit the planet hard enough and with enough asteroids the atmosphere might just hang around in space and then drift back down onto the planet. What a waste! The planet could even regenerate its lost atmosphere through a process called outgassing, apparently.

And hey: let's not forget that a mere few tens of millions of kilometres away is a planet we all know and love, and personally, the idea of bouncing bloody great rocks off our nearest neighbour in an attempt to get it to do a Taylor Swift and shake it off worries me. What if one bounced our direction? D'oh! We're talking about rocks at least 700 km across - that's like twice the size of Vienna - and not just one. They reckon it would take two thousand impacts! With that many asteroids of that size, can you really expect one or two not to go off-course and head our way? "Hey, it didn't work, but look on the bright side: at least we flattened Jersey!"

I, uh, I don't think his elevator goes all the way to the top floor, if you know what I mean!

Oh yeah, they're real, at least hypothetically. Space elevators. Sounds like something out of science fiction, but here's the deal. A cable is anchored to the planet and out into space, where, um, competing gravitational forces apparently hold it up, and then vehicles can travel along the cable, up and out of the atmosphere and into space. Are you shitting me? Would any of us even consider such a mode of transportation? You know what happens when one of those cable cars in Switzerland goes down, right? Well as it happens we would need this magic cable to be made out of a super-strong material which does not yet exist, so don't get your space-climbing boots on just yet! And as a solution for Venus, it's out even if we had the materials, due to the thickness of the atmosphere and the height of the planet's geostationary orbit. Uh-huh.

Then there's the space fountain. I am being serious! Listen, a tower created by a space fountain might work, it says here. Pellets are shot upwards in a stream to a ground station abo - what? I have no idea what kind of pellets, though I doubt they're the type you load your BB gun with. Don't ask stupid questions while I'm outlining a stupid idea. Well it sounds stupid, but what do I know? Anyway where was I? Oh yeah. The stream of pellets is directed downwards from the station at the top (I don't know how! Didn't I ask you to stop asking questions? Here, have some jelly babies) and, so it says, "the necessary force for this deflection supports the structure at the top and the payloads going up". Sure it does. Will. Would. Might. Oh look! The downside is apparently that if the containment fails and the stream breaks you're SOL. All I can say is I wouldn't want to be using one of these space fountains during space rush hour. Or, you know, ever. If I want to leave this planet, I'll do it the old-fashioned way, in a rocket ship. Or by getting high. Or reading a book.

The future's so bright I gotta wear shades

Solar shades sound like something a planet might wear to look cool, but in fact they are proposed actual parasols in space that would, I guess, presumably be mounted on a satellite? I don't know, I'm in the dark here (pun!) but the idea is pretty simple at its core (other, less immediately obvious pun), in that the shade thrown on Venus by these parasols (presumably again there'd have to be a lot of them, or they'd have to be really big) would reduce the heat and therefore cool down the planet. Placed in the correct position (no I am not going to use the proper scientific designation, that's not what we're about here) it could also deflect the radiation from the sun and block the solar wind.

And now it gets funny.

The proposed size of this theoretical shade is, wait for it, four times the size of Venus itself. But that's not the best part, oh no. If left to itself without supervision, the thing is expected to act as a solar sail, and just bugger off on its merry way, leaving Venus unshaded and NASA seriously out of pocket with no result to show for all that expenditure. So to prevent this rather embarrassing but certainly amusing accident from occurring, the idea is to either make it an artificial, controlled satellite, or staitite (I guess a portmanteau of static and satellite?) or - and here we're back to mirrors again - install huge mirrors at the poles which could reflect the light back at the rear of the solar panel and balance them, keeping them in orbit.

Float, float on...

Ah, we're finally dealing with those floating cities which occasioned so much mirth a while back. Yes, it's true. If we can't live at the top of miles-high mountains we can just drift about like those guys in Gulliver's Travels, or like the drifting never-ending party in The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Or even like those, well, floating cities in Star Trek. Here's the supposed hard science, though for my money there's a fiction missing at the end, and possibly even a humorous before it.

Human-breathable air is a lifting gas (as those of you who read my Aviation journal, particularly the section on the history of ballooning, will know, early balloons were filled with simple oxygen before others got around to using hydrogen and then helium) and in Venus's dense carbon dioxide-rich air would provide sixty percent of the lifting power of helium back home. Venus is a beautiful planet - until you hit the tops of the clouds on the way down. It's just the surface, the atmosphere, the clouds, all that area, that's shitty. If we could live - to quote the title of again my aviation journal - above the clouds, we'd be laughing. Well, I'd be laughing that's for sure.

So, cities drifting along lazily at an altitude of about fifty kilometres above the ground, inhabitants enjoying both the Earthlike atmosphere and  temperatures ranging from 0 to 50 C would only have to worry about those pesky winds I mentioned, which blow every four or five days around the planet at a speed of up to 340 kph. Right. For some reason, the eggheads don't seem to think this is a problem. I personally wonder what it would be like to look out of your apartment window into the clear blue sky and say "wind's not bad today! Only 300 kph!" as your best friend goes sailing by, madly hanging on to his smaller apartment. Also, how are you supposed to eat while up there? Where is anything going to grow? What about cattle and livestock? Would they adjust to being permanently in the air?

Look, I'm just going to copy/paste these paragraphs from Wiki. Note the first is headed "advantages". (Bolded text is added by me).

Advantages

Because there is not a significant pressure difference between the inside and the outside of the breathable-air balloon, any rips or tears would cause gases to diffuse at normal atmospheric mixing rates rather than an explosive decompression, giving time to repair any such damages.[11] In addition, humans would not require pressurized suits when outside, merely air to breathe, protection from the acidic rain and on some occasions low level protection against heat. Alternatively, two-part domes could contain a lifting gas like hydrogen or helium (extractable from the atmosphere) to allow a higher mass density.[14] Therefore, putting on or taking off suits for working outside would be easier. Working outside the vehicle in non-pressurized suits would also be easier.[15]

Remaining problems

Structural and industrial materials would be hard to retrieve from the surface and expensive to bring from Earth/asteroids. The sulfuric acid itself poses a further challenge in that the colony would need to be constructed of or coated in materials resistant to corrosion by the acid, such as PTFE (a compound consisting wholly of carbon and fluorine).

Yeah. I don't see not having to wear a spacesuit to go to the shops or football practice or the office necessarily an advantage, guy? And to categorise the fact that "any rips or tears" won't explode the balloon? Um, isn't this damning with faint praise? Shouldn't they be saying there is no possibility of rips or tears? I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but if I'm living in a city carried around on a potentially hostile, even deadly planet by fucking balloons, I really don't want to hear the words rip, tear or christfuck explosive decompression! And under "Remaining problems" (as if those weren't enough) we have two words which, again, nobody floating around in a balloon wants to consider: sulphuric acid. Sulphuric acid that falls from the clouds in showers of rain. All in all, I'd take my chances on the ground, thanks.

So, who's first to sign up for the wonderful Floating Balloon City on Venus? Anyone? Hello? Hello?

By the way, as an aside, you have to give it to NASA. Setting up a study to examine the feasibility of an atmospheric crewed mission to Venus, they called it the High Altitude Venus Operational Concept. That's right: HAVOC. Is there something wrong with these people, or have they just all got a twisted and warped sense of humour? Havoc? Why not call it Operation Doom while they're at it?

[Trollheart]

Back down to Earth, or I should say, Venus: it's time for those specs again!

Distance from the Sun: 107,000,000 km
Distance from Earth: 233,000,000 km
Mass: 0.815 Earths
Volume: 0.857 Earths
Surface Gravity: 0.9g
Pressure: 92 Atmospheres (ATM)
Satellites: None
Axial tilt: 2.64 degrees
Temperature: 464 degrees C
Length of day: 244 Earth days
Length of year: 227 Earth days
Atmosphere: almost entirely Carbon Dioxide

Probes sent

It should be noted for posterity and accuracy that in 1961 Russia - then the Soviet Union, or USSR - made two unsuccessful attempts to send probes to Venus, one of which exploded on the launch pad, the other of which did make its destination but had a catastrophic failure and was unable to send back any data. The US also tried with Mariner 1 in 1962, but this failed to achieve orbit and was destroyed, while the Russians gave it one more go literally two days before the launch of the second US attempt (which ended up being successful), but again the orbiter malfunctioned and this third attempt was also a failure, allowing the hated Americans to get there first. Maybe they saw it as revenge for Sputnik.

Russia would try a total of eight more times between 1962 and 1967, and rather interestingly finally succeed in launching its ninth probe two days before the next American one (there had been no further missions by the USA in the interim, possibly due to Vietnam?) and arriving in Venusian orbit literally one day ahead of it.

Note also that due to the fact that the Cold War was freezing both superpowers, and trust was at a minimum between them, information about the Soviet space programme was seriously and jealously guarded, and so the details we have here on their probes to Venus may be a little sketchy, but they're all I could find.

Mariner 2

Launched: August 1962
Reached Destination: December 1962
Type: Flyby
Nationality: American
Results: Measured the temperature of Venus, confirmed no real variance across the surface of the planet, also studied the solar wind, thickness of Venus's atmosphere, clouds. Mass estimated, confirmation of its rotating clockwise and its speed, and updated information on the astronomical unit size.
Photographs taken: None (No camera on board)
Mission ended: 1963
Termination of probe: n/a; still in heliocentric orbit (orbit around the Sun)

Venera 4

Launched: June 12 1967
Reached Destination: October 18 1967
Type: Atmospheric Entry
Nationality: Soviet (Russian)
Results: Analysis (for the first time) of Venus's atmosphere while within that atmosphere, measurements of the weakness of the magnetic field, confirmation (at the time - almost more educated speculation really) of the absence of water.
Photographs Taken: None
Mission Ended: October 18 1967
Termination of Probe: Crashed on surface

Mariner 5

Launched: June 14 1967
Reached Destination: October 19 1967
Type: Flyby
Nationality: American
Results: Analysis of the atmosphere, temperature, magnetic field
Photographs Taken: None
Mission Ended: October 14 1968 (technically, December 4 1967, after which contact was lost but re-established briefly in 1968)
Termination of Probe: Remains in heliocentric orbit

Venera 5

Launched: January 5 1969
Reached Destination: May 16 1969
Type: Lander
Nationality: Soviet (Russian)
Results: Confirmed temperature, pressure and atmospheric readings sent back by Venera 4; was the first man-made probe to land on Venus.
Photographs Taken: None
Mission Ended: May 16 1969
Termination of Probe: Crushed on the surface of Venus less than an hour after landing, due to the immense atmospheric pressure.

Venera 6

Launched: January 10 1969
Reached Destination: May 17 1969
Type: Atmospheric
Nationality: Soviet (Russian)
Results: Sent back data on samples taken from the atmosphere
Photographs Taken: None
Mission Ended: May 17 1969
Termination of Probe: Crushed on the surface, like its predecessor

Venera 7

Launched: August 17 1970
Reached Destination: December 15 1970
Type: Lander
Nationality: Soviet (Russian)
Results: Further information on the composition of Venus's atmosphere, surface temperature and for the first time, weak but definite signals confirming the planet has a solid surface and that there is (or was thought at the time) no water there. On landing, the vehicle seems to have fallen on its side, which scrambled the data it was sending back. This is thought to have been due to initial partial, and then complete failure of its descent parachute, leading to a harder landing than anticipated. Nevertheless, Venera 7 attained the distinction of being the first man-made probe to land safely on another planet.
Photographs Taken: None
Mission Ended: December 15 1970
Termination of Probe: Probably shut down on the surface and likely crushed flat.

Venera 8

Launched: March 27 1972
Reached Destination: July 22 1972
Type: Lander
Nationality: Soviet (Russian)
Results: Confirmed the temperature and pressure readings of its predecessor, noted that the cloud cover did not extend far down to the surface, and from beneath the clouds the atmosphere was relatively clear. Also determined that the light on the surface would be conducive to the taking of photographs. Venera 8 became the first ever man-made probe to land successfully on another planet.
Photographs Taken: None
Mission Ended: July 22 1972
Termination of Probe: Crushed on the surface, again.

Mariner 10

Launched: November 3 1973
Reached Destination: February 4 1974 (before moving on to Mercury, its primary target)
Type: Flyby
Nationality: American
Results: Mariner 10, though really intended as a probe to study Mercury, as we have seen in the article on that planet, became the first probe to send actual photographs back, though they were of course only from a flyby and so not very detailed. It was however able to photograph for the first time the clouds that cover Venus, and other instruments analysed the composition both of the clouds and the atmosphere itself.
Photographs Taken: 4,165
Mission Ended: February 13 1974 (for the Venus part of the mission - March 24 1975 for the full mission)
Termination of Probe: In heliocentric orbit

Venera 9

Launched: June 8 1975
Reached Destination: October 20 1975
Type: Orbiter/Lander
Nationality: Soviet (Russian)
Results: Took photographs for the first time of the surface of Venus, confirmed the light was about the same as Earth but without any direct sunshine due to the thick clouds above. Measured the atmosphere, pressure, the composition of the clouds and the surface temperature.
Photographs Taken: Yes, but number unknown (those secretive Russians!) :rolleyes:
Mission Ended: October 22 1975 (Lander) / March 22 1976 (Orbiter)
Termination of Probe: Unknown

Venera 10

Note: tensions were so high during the Cold War, and each of the superpowers (USA and USSR) trusted the other so little that when this probe was launched, the Soviet Union claimed it was only an orbiter, though a lander was also attached. Western sources assumed they were lying, and as it turned out, they were.

Launched: June 14 1975
Reached Destination: October 26 1975
Type: Orbiter/Lander
Nationality: Soviet (Russian)
Results: Measured surface windspeed, atmosphere, temperature and took more photographs of the surface of Venus.
Photographs Taken: Yes, but number unknown
Mission Ended: Believed to be June 1976
Termination of Probe: Unknown

[Trollheart]

Venera 11

Launched: September 9 1978
Reached Destination: December 25 1978
Type: Flyby/Lander
Nationality: Soviet (Russian)
Results: Catalogued gamma-ray bursts for the first time; studied the temperature, soil and atmospheric composition (soil analyser failed however), detected lightning on Venus for the first time.
Photographs Taken: Unknown
Mission Ended: February 1980
Termination of Probe: In heliocentric orbit

Venera 12

Launched: September 14 1978
Reached Destination: December 21 1978
Type: Flyby/Lander
Nationality: Soviet (Russian)
Results: Observed more gamma-ray bursts, analysed composition of the atmosphere, thermal balance and the nature of the clouds.
Photographs Taken: None; both cameras failed to operate on landing.
Mission Ended: April 1980
Termination of Probe: In heliocentric orbit

Pioneer Venus 1

Launched: May 20 1978
Reached Destination: December 4 1978
Type: Orbiter
Nationality: American
Results: Mapped the surface with radar, investigated the distribution of the clouds, the composition of the atmosphere, infra-red emissions, measured the magnetic field and the solar wind, monitored gamma-ray bursts. Also observed Halley's Comet from orbit around Venus.
Photographs Taken: None
Mission Ended: October 22 1992
Termination of Probe: Burned up in Venus's atmosphere after its orbit decayed

Pioneer Venus 2

Note: this was the first hybrid or multi-probe, containing five separate components - four probes and the spacecraft that carried them. The probes were dropped into Venus's atmosphere without parachutes, recording as they descended. They were not intended nor designed to survive the impact on the surface, though one did.

Launched: August 8 1978
Reached Destination: December 9 1978
Type: Atmospheric
Nationality: American
Results: Determined the nature of the solar wind, the development of the atmosphere, measured distribution of infra-red radiation
Photographs Taken: None
Mission Ended: December 9 1978
Termination of Probe: Destroyed on impact (3 probes); fourth one presumably crushed on the surface

Venera 13

Launched: October 31 1981
Reached Destination: March 1 1982
Type: Flyby/Lander
Nationality: Soviet (Russian)
Results: Took soil samples and analysed them; first ever recordings from another planet as the probe was fitted with microphones.
Photographs Taken: Yes, but number unknown. They appear to have been possibly the first ones in colour, too.
Mission Ended: March 1 1982
Termination of Probe: Again, unsure but presumably crushed by the pressures on Venus's surface.

Here's a hilarious little story. Seems some of the Russian scientists got really excited when the cameras from the lander picked up what they described as "a disc, a black flap and a scorpion (!) which emerge, fluctuate and disappear" on the photographs. Engineers later shook their heads wryly and said, "they're just the discarded lens caps from the cameras blowing in the Venusian wind, comrade!"

Venera 14

Launched: November 4 1981
Reached Destination: March 5 1982
Type: Flyby/Lander
Nationality: Soviet (Russian)
Results: Pretty much the same as Venera 13 (it landed only 4 days after it, and was more or less identical).
Photographs Taken: Yes, but number unknown
Mission Ended: March 16 1983 (orbiter)
Termination of Probe: Crushed on the planet

Another funny story (and you don't expect many of them to come out of the cold, hardline, humourless regime of the Soviet Union in the early 1980s): when the lander tried to measure the compressibility of the soil, it accidentally instead focussed on the discarded lens caps from the cameras (oh, those lens caps again!) which had popped off and fell beside its measuring arm. Oops!

Venera 15

Launched: June 2 1983
Reached Destination: October 10 1983
Type: Orbiter
Nationality: Soviet (Russian)
Results: Nothing exciting; a few experiments carried out with radar and imaging.
Photographs Taken: Unknown
Mission Ended: January 5 1985
Termination of Probe: Unknown


Venera 16

Launched: June 7 1983
Reached Destination: October 11 1983
Type: Orbiter
Nationality: Soviet (Russian)
Results: Identical to Venera 15, which preceded it into Venus orbit by one day. Yawnski.
Photographs Taken: Unknown
Mission Ended: July 1984
Termination of Probe: Unknown

Vega 1

Launched: December 15 1984
Reached Destination: June 11 1985
Type: Flyby/Atmospheric/Lander
Nationality: Soviet (Russian)
Results: Not much, due to high turbulence on the planet
Photographs Taken: None*
Mission Ended: January 13 1987
Termination of Probe: Orbiter in heliocentric orbit still; descent craft likely crushed, and a balloon capsule could still be merrily drifting through the lower atmosphere, for all we know. Or it may have burst, or crashed.

Note: after completing its mission on Venus, the orbiter headed off to take a butcher's at Halley's Comet.

* Because they landed at night, but apparently the probe took 700 shots of Halley's Comet.

Vega 2

Launched: December 21 1984
Reached Destination: June 13 1985
Type: Flyby/Atmospheric/Lander
Nationality: Soviet (Russian)
Results: As Vega 1
Photographs Taken: None*
Mission Ended: March 24 1987
Termination of Probe: In, you guessed it, heliocentric orbit

Magellan

Launched: May 4 1989
Reached Destination: October 10 1990
Type: Orbiter
Nationality: American
Results: Mostly mapping of the surface of the planet, which, with new high-resolution cameras was discovered to be volcanic, relatively young, with no plate tectonics or wind erosion.
Photographs Taken: Yes, but number unknown
Mission Ended: October 13 1994
Termination of Probe: Crashed on Venusian surface

Note: Magellan was both the first return to exploration of space by America in eleven years (while the Russkies got well ahead of them) and the first to be launched from the new Space Shuttles, this one being carried on Atlantis.

[Trollheart]

Galileo

Launched: October 18 1989
Reached Destination: February 10 1990 (when I say destination I mean of course Venus, though this probe was on its way much further out of the solar system, heading for Jupiter)
Type: Gravity assist
Nationality: American
Results: Not really sure; it only flew by Venus, and its main objective was Jupiter, so there isn't much about what, if anything, it did as it passed the second planet from the sun.
Photographs Taken: Unknown but probably none
Mission Ended: September 21 2003
Termination of Probe: Crashed into Jupiter

Cassini

Launched: October 15 1997
Reached Destination: April 26 1998 (as above; main destination was Saturn)
Type: Orbiter
Nationality: American
Results: None; seems to have used Venus, and Earth, as slingshots to get to Saturn.
Photographs Taken: None
Mission Ended: September 15 2017
Termination of Probe: Crashed into Saturn

MESSENGER


Launched: August 3 2004
Reached Destination: (as in, Venus) October 24 2006. Performed two flybys, a second on June 5 2007
Type: Gravity assist
Nationality: American
Results: Original flyby, nothing, as the position of the Sun inhibited radio communications. Atmosphere of Venus was imaged and studied on second flyby.
Photographs Taken: Yes, but number unknown
Mission Ended: April 30 2015
Termination of Probe: Crashed into Mercury

Venus Express

Launched: November 9 2005
Reached Destination: April 11 2006
Type: Orbiter
Nationality: European
Results: Longest - at that time - continuous study of the atmosphere of Venus from orbit. Original mission covering 500 days extended five times. Global maps made of the surface temperatures, surface characteristics of the planet studied as well as the plasma environment. First ever European space probe. Ozone layer detected, as well as cold areas in the atmosphere where it is postulated ice may form.
Photographs Taken: Yes, but number unknown
Mission Ended: December 16 2014
Termination of Probe: Crashed into Venus.

Akatsuki

Launched: May 20 2010
Reached Destination: December 6 2010, but failed to achieve orbit. Was eventually sorted December 7 2015.
Type: Orbiter
Nationality: Japanese
Results: After a five-year wait, the probe, the first ever Asian and first ever Japanese mission, finally achieved orbit in 2015. Akatsuki began observing cloud and surface of Venus, as well as its weather, and to investigate the claims of lightning there. Gravity wave detected in the winds above Aphrodite Terra, one of the two highland plains. Released the experimental solar sail IKAROS.
Photographs Taken: yes, but number unknown
Mission Ended: Still active
Termination of Probe: n/a

IKAROS

Launched: May 20 2010
Reached Destination: December 8 2010
Type: Flyby
Nationality: Japanese
Results: None, other than it's the world's first ever solar space sail!
Photographs Taken: None
Mission Ended: Still active
Termination of Probe: n/a

Shin'en

Launched: May 20 2010
Reached Destination: December 2010
Type: Flyby
Nationality: Japanese
Results: None; spacecraft failed after launch and though it flew by Venus, no communication has been possible
Photographs Taken: Unknown
Mission Ended: n/a
Termination of Probe: n/a

An interesting and unique experiment, Shin'en was a joint project between Japanese universities and I guess, certainly in terms of Venus anyway, was the first space probe launched which was not under the control of or financed by a national government. It was to be used to test the robustness, or otherwise, of computers built by the University, but contact was lost very quickly and now it's probably up there, looking for someone to transmit data to.

Okay, wait what? I don't get this. It says the dimensions of the probe are about a foot square, and this structure carries a payload of SIX computers? How small can those guys make the things? Answers on a postcard please...

Parker Solar Probe

Launched: August 12 2018
Reached Destination: October 10 2018
Type: Gravity assist
Nationality: American
Results: None; it seems to be another using Venus as a slingshot to get somewhere else, this time the Sun. It's enough to give a young planet an inferiority complex!
Photographs Taken: None
Mission Ended: Still active
Termination of Probe: n/a

BepiColumbo

Launched: October 20 2018
Reached Destination: October 15 2020 (Venus, on the way to Mercury)
Type: Gravity assist
Nationality: Japanese/European
Results: None as yet; possibility of detecting phosphine
Photographs Taken: None
Mission Ended: Still active
Termination of Probe: n/a

This would appear to be the first ever collaboration between two continents, Asia and Europe, in space exploration; certainly the first involving Mercury, which is where the probe is headed. It's expected to flyby Venus again in August of this year (2021) and arrive at Mercury sometime in October.

Solar Orbiter

Launched: February 10 2020
Reached Destination: December 2020 (Venus)
Type: Gravity assist
Nationality: European
Results: None; it's a solar probe
Photographs Taken: None
Mission Ended: Still active
Termination of Probe: n/a

And that's it for our exploration of Venus so far. No less than six probes are in development between 2023 and 2030, the first of these being a private US concern, then there's one from India, one from Russia (no longer the Soviet Union, and seeming to have abandoned its observations of Venus since the original glut in the last half of the twentieth century) and another European one, with NASA chafing to get theirs into orbit too. Beyond that, a total of nine proposed missions, some only in the drawing board stage, are being looked at, all except one being NASA's baby, including one intended to be the first rover on Venus.

It should in all fairness be pointed out that though Americans believe their country the best in the world (well, some of them do) the Russians, or at least the Soviet Union have them beat in space on almost all fronts. Leaving Sputnik aside, ignoring Yuri Gagarin's historic feat, look at the probes they sent to Venus. They were the first to land on another planet, the first to send back pictures of the surface, the first to record sound, the first to send back colour pictures, the first to observe gamma-ray bursts, the first to observe lightning, the first to confirm Venus even had a solid surface. Oh yeah, it's all down to the Russkies.

To be fair, there weren't too many surprises for me with Venus. I've read and heard a lot about it, and most of the information is reasonably current, so while I learned new stuff about it of course in going into detail about it, I didn't have the kind of revelation I had with Mercury, about which I knew little prior to researching it. I was intrigued by the ideas for terraforming it, sure, but that's not quite the same. So as far as familiarity is concerned, I think I knew Venus quite well.

And now it's time to engage the ion engines and move on.

Harmless.

Hey, what did you expect? I'm not going to spend time describing your own planet to you, the one on which you've lived all your life! If you want to know more about Earth, get off your arse and go explore it. You don't need a spaceship for that. Oh, very well.

Happy? No? Tough. Look, we're only making a brief stop-off here so that Marie can feed her cat and ISB can check his servers. And those of you who have to use the zero-G toilet can you PLEASE get it right? I am tired of encountering floating turds in the air every time I walk in. Read the manual. Thanks.

Right, our brief return to our homeworld over, it's time to - where is Dianne? Did anyone see... oh, there you are. Didn't you see there at the back. Right, is everyone here? Let's head off then. We're about to encounter our first ever moon. And you know what it's called?
Yeah.
The Moon.

[Trollheart]

IV: Magnificent Desolation: The Moon

Even if you have not the least interest in astronomy or the Heavens, we've all seen the Moon in the sky. It's impossible to miss, unless you happen to stay indoors and never venture outside at night, or only go out when the cloud cover is thickest. And even if so, you'll still have seen it on the telly. Of all the celestial objects written about, it's probably the one most featured in song, story, poetry, movies and television, and music. Even perhaps moreso than the Sun, the Moon has a certain romantic attraction for us, if only because it is the biggest and brightest thing in the sky at night, and so has become identified with night-time pursuits, from smuggling and robbery (to the practitioners of which it is an unwelcome intruder) to romance (where it is usually welcome). It's a backdrop to the night for us, something across which bats or birds or - occasionally - a boy on a bicycle with his pet alien - travel, silhouetted briefly by the pale yellow disc. It's been described as looking down, hiding, sailing on the clouds and many other poetic and lyrical themes have been afforded it.

It's also the only - at the time of writing - other body in our solar system to which we have physically travelled ourselves, and on which we have set our feet. It represents humankind's first tentative gropings out in the dark, our brief escape from our home planet, and our first manner foray into space. It exerts more than a romantic or fascinating influence on us though. The Moon controls the ebb and flow of the tides, allowing the Earth's oceans to be regulated, and of course it usually lights up our night sky, a sort of natural light bulb that throws back the veil of darkness which would otherwise swallow us for anything from ten to twelve hours a day. It's the nearest object to Earth, and therefore appears as the largest celestial object in our night sky, occasionally also visible during the day at certain times of the year and at certain latitudes. It features, not surprisingly, in most ancient mythologies, in which it is almost universally seen as being female, from Diana to Selene to Inanna, and usually the pale consort of the great god of the sky and ruler of the day, the mighty Sun.

The Moon is also said to exert a strange influence upon certain people, causing mood swings and sometimes madness - hence the term lunatic - and in legend invokes the process of lycanthropy, where someone bitten by a werewolf is doomed to become one at the rising of the full moon. As it rotates around the sun - taking roughly twenty-eight days to complete a rotation - the amount of visible light varies, showing in different aspects as seen from Earth, from a tiny sliver (new moon) to a full sphere (full moon). Here's a cool video for kids that explains and shows the phases. Hey, it's about our level, right?

Our home planet is the only one in the solar system with just the one moon, and though there are several theories as to how it formed, the mostly accepted one is that a large planet or body the size of Mars impacted the Earth about four million years ago (ah I remember it well!) and the resultant debris, formed in a ring around Earth, eventually coalesced into our own natural satellite. This is known in astronomical circles as the "giant impact hypothesis". The Moon has no atmosphere or course, and originally was much closer to Earth than it is today, hanging huge in the sky above us, but over time tidal friction caused it to move further away, till it occupied the distance it does now, about 239,000 miles away.

Gravity is much lower on the Moon than on Earth, as anyone who has watched the Apollo missions will know, those of us old enough to remember Armstrong and Aldrin bouncing along as if they weighed nothing. Basically a big iron rock, the Moon has volcanic craters - one of them being the second-largest confirmed impact crater in the solar system - and ridges, and areas in between known as "maria", Latin for seas, such as Mare Tranquilitatis and Mare Imbrium etc. Without an atmosphere to slow down and burn them up in, meteorites and asteroids have marked the surface of the Moon with many large craters, giving it a pock-marked appearance that can be seen almost with the naked eye, but certainly through a telescope. This probably gave rise to the old idea of the "Man in the Moon", the face formed by features such as craters and maria.

Although it was believed there could be no water on the Moon, recent research suggests that, rather like Mercury, this may exist in some form, perhaps as ice, in areas near the poles which are in constant shadow. The Moon is surrounded by a permanent dust cloud, from the millions of comet particles that strike the surface, estimated at about five tons a day. With no wind to move them around and no atmosphere to absorb them, they remain above the surface of the Moon, rising to about 100 km. The coldest temperatures ever recorded in the solar system are not on Pluto, but the Moon, in dark, frozen caverns at the poles, where the temperature has been measured at - 238 degrees Celsius at the south pole and - 247 at the north.

Lunar Eclipse

We've discussed solar eclipses in the chapter on the Sun, but there are of course lunar eclipses, when the Moon is in Earth's shadow and the two objects are more or less in a direct line with the Sun, in what is known as a state of syzygy. Because it is far closer to the Earth, though much smaller than the Sun, the Moon appears during a lunar eclipse to be the same size as our native star, and so can "block" it. Lunar eclipses only occur during a full moon, and unlike solar ones can be watched with the naked eye as they are nowhere near as bright. The moon at full eclipse does not turn black, as it does in a solar one, due to the sunlight passing through Earth's atmosphere and being refracted, giving it a reddish colour, often called a "blood moon". This is also used in Christian belief to signify the expected Second Coming of Christ and the Rapture (Judgement Day), tied in to a passage in the Book of Revelations in the Bible where John mentions the moon turning to blood.

Unlike solar eclipses, which occur but rarely, lunar eclipses happen at least twice and sometimes five times a year, though few of them are total eclipses. Lunar eclipses were of course viewed with suspicion, dread and fear by our ancestors, most of whom believed some sort of beast or demon was swallowing or eating the moon, and it could only portend bad times ahead. The Hindus, though, believed that bathing in the Ganges after a lunar eclipse was opportune, as it would help them achieve salvation. Why? I have no idea. Ask them. A rather amusing, in a dark way, story comes from the Mesopotamians, always good for a laugh, who believed that a lunar eclipse was the result of seven demons attacking the moon, and fearful that the demons would then turn upon their king, they got someone to stand in so that he would be attacked instead of the king. Once the eclipse was over, this helpful gent was poisoned. I doubt there were too many applicants for that job!

As late as the nineteenth century, the Chinese were still trying to ward off the dragon who was believed to eat the moon, and while traditionally this had been achieved through the ringing of bells, these modern lads used navy artillery to scare off the big lizard. That'll show it who's boss round here!

Moonwatching: Early Observation


Being the closest and most visible celestial object, the Moon has of course been studied since antiquity, and while Americans may have been the first to tread on its surface, I'm proud to say that the first ever depiction of the moon is in Ireland. In a burial passage in Knowth, in Drogheda, there is a representation on a rock which is believed to date back about five thousand years. In your face, America! Of course the Babylonians, well known historical and scientific eggheads, had been studying the Moon since the fifth century BC, and those clever Chinese were already able to predict lunar eclipses a century later,  and in 428 BC Asterix sorry Anaxagoras, an ancient Greek astronomer, sussed that the Moon was a big rock in space, and so was the Sun. Well, one out of two ain't bad.

A pretty big deal in the second century BC was when Seleucus of Seleucia (did they name the city after him, or him after the city I wonder?) worked out that tides were controlled by the Moon. I mean, this was before anyone knew what a telescope was, or even what the Moon truly was. That's mighty impressive. Not to be outdone, Aristarchus (who did not found Arista Records) gave working out the distance to the Moon a shot, and got it reasonably accurate, though later Ptolemy brushed up his figures and got more or less the correct measurement.

And then came our mate Galilieo.

It will come as no surprise to anyone that the Italian father of astronomy made big inroads into our understanding of our nearest and only satellite. He used his cool new invention, the Galileoscope (well, the telescope then), to make drawings of the surface of the Moon, and could prove that it wasn't, as his predecessors had all thought, smooth and without features. In fact, he detected craters and basins and mountains, though it would be another two hundred and fifty years almost before a proper geological and topographical map of the Moon could be produced.

Because the Moon is in synchronous rotation with the Earth (you surely don't need me to explain that term, do you?) the same face is always turned towards us. This gives rise to the idea of a dark side of the moon, but as yer man says on the Pink Floyd album, there is no dark side, it's just that we only see one side, and so the other seems dark to us all the time. The actual, proper term for the two sides of the Moon is the near side and - wait for it - the far side. Although the Moon has no tectonic plates to crash into and move against one another as they do here, causing earthquakes, tidal stress means that there are frequent "Moonquakes", though usually nothing on the order of even mild ones on Earth.

[Trollheart]

It's Only a Paper Moon: The Moon in Popular Culture, Literature and the Media

As I noted in the introduction, the Moon has played a huge role in everything from poetry and prose to movies as the centuries have gone by, and while a list of all works of fiction referring to or about or regarding the Moon would take till Christmas - 2024 probably - let's take a look at some examples. As usual, we'll do a timeline.

2 AD - 1550

Possibly the first story written that is set on the moon was Lucian's second-century novel A True Story, which describes a trip to the Moon and the people who live there.

Related in another of my journals, the tenth-century Japanese folk tale The Bamboo Cutter features a beautiful girl, the Moon Princess,  adopted by a bamboo cutter and his wife, and returning to her home the Moon at the end of the story.

If you thought that one weird, try Ludovico Ariosto's 1516 epic poem Orlando Furioso, in which a knight has to fly to the Moon (in Elijah's chariot, no less) to recover the wits of his friend, who has gone mad. Ariosto envisioned, for some reason, the Moon as the place where all things lost went, and so the knight finds the eponymous protagonist's wits and returns them to him, after which he becomes sane again.

Or for weirder, how about The Buried Moon, in which the Moon goes for a stroll on Earth and falls into a bog, where it is imprisoned by "evil creatures" and has to be rescued and set free by men. Right.

1541 saw the publication of Somnium by Juan Maldonado, an early form of satire of manners, while five years later John Heywood claimed that "the Moon is made of greene cheese." Well if it is, Neil Armstrong certainly isn't saying anything about it.

1600 - 1800

Francis Godwin had his hero pulled to the Moon in a chariot drawn by geese, in The Man in the Moone in 1638, and this inspired Cyrano de Bergerac to write Voyage dans la Lune twenty years later, though for propulsion our Cyrano used good old fireworks. Daniel Defoe wrote in 1705 of voyages from China to the Moon in The Consolidator and German writer Rudolf Erich Raspe had his Baron Munchausen visit the Moon in 1786, while Washington Irving wrote of the Conquest of the Moon in 1806.

Many of these stories were of course allegories, satires or pure fantasy, and not one of them featured, or could feature, actual facts about the Moon, so everything had to be made up. An exception would be Somnium (The Dream) (1634)  by actual astronomer Johannes Kepler, in which he did at least expound some theories, though in the guise of fiction, and Vejamen de la Luna (A Satirical Tract on the Moon) by Anastasio Pantaleón de Ribera, coincidentally published in the same year, though Kepler wrote his in 1610 and de Ribera in 1626), which seems to have referred to the theories of Kepler and Galilieo.

Timeline: 1800 - 1960

The Great Moon Hoax

On August 25, the following story appeared in the Sun, a New York newspaper:

GREAT ASTRONOMICAL DISCOVERIES
LATELY MADE
BY SIR JOHN HERSCHEL, L.L.D. F.R.S. &c.
At the Cape of Good Hope
[From Supplement to the Edinburgh Journal of Science]

Along with this drawing, purporting to be of an inhabitant of the Moon.

From the above headline it can be seen that the idea was that the information came from no less respected a source than the famous astronomer, John Herschel. The article claimed that life had been discovered on the Moon, thanks to an incredibly powerful new telescope, and that there were animals such as bison and goats, and weirder creatures like beavers who had no tails and walked on two legs, and men who had bat wings. It was also announced that there were trees, oceans and beaches on the Moon. This was all apparently related by one Dr. Andrew Grant, said to be the travelling companion of Dr. Herschel. He was of course completely made up.

The article became a series, as people hungrily bought up copies of The Sun (is it ironic that a story about the Moon was published in a paper called The Sun?) running for six in all, until eventually it was announced that the great new telescope had suffered catastrophic failure as it had unwittingly acted as a lens for the sun, which had then set fire to the observatory.

The man believed to have been behind the hoax was Richard Adams Locke, a reporter for The Sun who had taken exception to some of the wild theories astronomers were floating about the Moon, and also to lampoon a cleric, Reverend Thomas Dick (well named, add head) who had the crazy idea that every single planet in the solar system was jammed with life, and used the population of Britain as a yardstick to calculate how crowded our neighbours would be, coming up with the grand total of just over twenty-one trillion. Right. A few out there, Reverend! This meant that the Moon must have, according to Dick's calculations, about four billion people living on it.

The main reason though for the hoax was, as it has always been for reporters and editors, to sell more copies of the paper. Interestingly, it took six weeks before the hoax was revealed, and even then The Sun did not issue a retraction. Their circulation certainly increased though, and remained high even after the hoax was admitted. Also interestingly, Herschel was amused initially at the article, saying that it was certainly more colourful than anything he could talk about, but later he got pissed off that so many people believed it was true and kept asking him stupid questions about it.

Edgar Allan Poe was less amused. He claimed that the article ripped off a story he and written and he was probably right as - get this - Locke was his editor! Well then that seals it, doesn't it? But there's more. The story Poe wrote was first published as a supposedly true account in June, only two months before Locke's articles began, in another newspaper, the Southern Literary Messenger, but nobody took it seriously because, well, he didn't write it as a serious account. So he was probably annoyed not only that Locke stole his idea, but that the reporter got a lot more traction with it, making people believe where the great horror writer could not. Undaunted, Poe later published The Balloon Hoax in 1844, but that's nothing to do with the Moon so we won't go into that. Good to see though that, in true Poe style, he did get his bloody revenge, by publishing his hoax in the same paper, The Sun. All right, not a bloody revenge, not really a revenge at all, as he had to retract it two days later, but still, he played them at their own game.

The story he had  written was called The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfall, published in 1835, which described the protagonist using a giant balloon to reach the Moon, and while surely ripped off by Locke, it must have been the inspiration for the next one on our list.

The Princess of the Moon: A Confederate Fairy Story, written in 1860 by Cora Semmes Ives, envisions Moon men repelling an invasion of Union soldiers, who arrive in balloons. I find this interesting because, even if it does take much of the idea from Poe, while I haven't looked at everything on the list, this seems to me to be the first properly political story using the Moon as a backdrop, and also kind of transposing the Civil War there.

Then of course in 1865 there was the classic Jules Verne novel, From the Earth to the Moon which would later be adapted by George Melies and become one of the world's first properly-animated live action movies, as well as the first ever science fiction one. Less than forty years later another legendary writer would pen The First Men in the Moon (1901), as H.G.Wells ruminated upon the properties of a gravity-resistant element called Cavorite, the story containing his usual commentary upon man's warlike nature.

Around about now the medium of film began to appear, and as mentioned above we have La Voyage dans le Lune (1901) making history as the first ever science fiction movie, then shortly afterwards Fritz Lang brought out Frau im Mond (Woman of the Moon) in 1929, followed by Wells's Things to Come in 1936.

In 1925, J.R.R. Tolkein wrote Roverandom, a story about a dog having adventures on the Moon, to console his child for the loss of his favourite toy dog.  A few years later Hugh Lofting published Doctor Doolittle in the Moon (1928) - not quite sure why it's "in" rather than "on", as is more usual, and  C.L. Moore described in his Lost Paradise in 1936 how the Moon changed from a fertile planet to the empty barren rock it is today.  C.S. Lewis was typically championing Christianity when he wrote That Hideous Strength in 1945, though for some reason he calls the Moon Sulva, and in 1948 Disney had the love interest of one of the characters in his movie Melody Time thrown up to the Moon. Missing her, the protagonist howls up at the Moon, and is joined in sympathy by the coyotes, explaining (in a Disney way) why coyotes howl at the Moon.

Both Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke envisioned a first human flight to the moon in 1970 and 1978 respectively, the former writing in 1939 and the latter in 1951. Asimov was closest of course, being only one year out while Clarke missed it by nine, but still remarkably prescient. Clarke used the Moon as a backdrop for a later novel, Earthlight in 1955 and again in 1961 with A Fall of Moondust. Although Earthlight featured a human colony on the Moon, it was not the first to do so, that honour going to the less well-known Bohun Lynch, who in 1925 published the appropriately B-movie-titled Menace From the Moon.

The science fiction writer who used the Moon as a setting for his stories and novels the most though appears to be the prolific Robert A. Heinlein, who, between 1940 and 1966 wrote no less than twelve, including Rocketship Galilieo (1947), The Man Who Sold the Moon (1949), Nothing Ever Happen On the Moon (1949) and of course his classic The  Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966). He would later turn Rocketship Galileo into Destination Moon, an important science fiction movie released in 1950.

Timeline: 1960 - 2000

In terms of movies, the big one of course was 2001: A Space Odyssey, though it only features the Moon in early scenes, but just as film began to grow up in the early part of the twentieth century, it found itself with a baby brother, television, and this medium was not slow to capitalise on the interest in science fiction, with the Moon again being one of the major backdrops, probably second only at this point to Mars. The Moonbase, a short series shown in 1967, predates and foreshadows Gerry Anderson's highly successful Space:1999, of which more later, but most science fiction television shows preferred to show the deeps of space, alien creatures, alternate worlds, and shied away from the more prosaic setting of the Moon.

Film, on the other hand, featured the Moon in such releases as Flash Gordon (1980), two Superman movies (II and IV, 1980  and 1987), Star Trek: First Contact (1996), Starship Troopers (1997), The Fifth Element (also 1997) and, um, Airplane II (1982). TV series began to catch up with episodes of Doctor Who and the aforementioned Space: 1999, in which the Moon was torn from its orbit by a nuclear war on Earth and sent hurtling through space, complete with a very surprised Moonbase crew.

Given its harsh, remote and rugged features, the Moon has often been used as the setting for penal colonies in science fiction. 2000 AD's Judge Dredd had one called Luna City One, and we've already discussed Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress in which the Moon again is used for keeping prisoners, well, imprisoned. More usually though it is seen as a place for either colonisation or bases, such as in Star Cops, where it is a police base, The Moonbase and Space: 1999 as well as Anderson's other show, UFO, and it is also the base for the Justice League of America in DC Comics. Or they have a big telescope there. Or something. I'm not well up on Justice League. The Moon is a colony in, among others, Starship Troopers and The Fifth Element, while in Futurama it has been turned into a giant Disney-like theme park.

Of course, the Moon features in titles of movies, book, songs, plays, poems and other forms of media as merely a word, often nothing to do with the actual Moon, in musical compositions such as "Blue Moon", "Fly Me to the Moon", "Walking on the Moon" and of course Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata", films like Moon Over Parador and Hunter's Moon and books with titles such as Paper Moon or The Moon's a Balloon. Which science has proven not to be the case. Even outside of science fiction and fantasy, the Moon continues to exercise as much of an influence over our imagination and our emotions as it does over our tides.

And then there's lycanthropy.

I haven't been able to find any plausible explanation or reason for why werewolves are or were linked with the full moon, but I will guess that maybe it had to do with the idea of werewolves being seen as evil creatures and the worship of the moon as a pagan deity? Really not sure, but folklore and certainly later literature on the subject in fantasy and horror fiction holds that a person bitten by a werewolf would only transform into one themselves at the full of the moon. This is also linked to the idea that the full moon adversely affects some individuals' minds, ranging from heightened anxiety to actually sending them into a frenzy, hence, as I already noted, the word lunatic. Perhaps because animals are meant to bay at the full moon too (maybe because it's at its most visible when full)? I don't know; I'm no expert on werewolves, and here we're only concerned with the Moon.

[Trollheart]

Speaking of (and returning to) which, it's time for this.


It's time for some boring figures. Sigh. Let's get on with it then.

Distance from Sun: 150,000,000 Km (approx)
Distance from Earth: (approx) 400,000 kms
Diameter: 1,076 km (about a quarter that of Earth)
Density: 3.344 g/cm
Surface gravity: 0.1654g
Satellites: None; it is one. And our only one.
Atmosphere: None
Length of day: 29.5 Earth days
Length of year: 27 Earth days
Axial tilt: 1.542 degrees
Mass: 0.012 Earths
Volume: 0.02 Earths
Surface Temperature Range: -23  to -173 degrees Centigrade
Weather: None

Okay then, that's done with. Back to the - more or less - fun stuff.

Exploration of the Moon: Probes and Missions

As the Moon is the only planetary body we have so far explored ourselves, as in, not sent unmanned probes but actual human beings to (at the time of writing) I'm for the first and only time going to break this up into two sections, one for probes (which should be taken to be understood as unmanned) and the other for missions (where rockets carried men into space).

Probes sent

Once again, those Russians were first, with their Luna program.

Luna 1
Launched: January 2 1959
Reached Destination: January 4 1959
Type: Intended as an impactor, but failed and instead became an orbiter
Nationality: Soviet (Russian)
Results: First man-made spacecraft to achieve escape velocity from Earth, first to visit another planetary body. Studied Earth's radiation belt and outer space. Detected the lunar magnetic field. Observed and measured the solar wind.
Photographs Taken: 0
Mission Ended: January 5 1959
Termination of Probe: In heliocentric orbit

A note here says that the Americans did not believe the Russians had reached the Moon, as they received no transmissions themselves, but it sounds like a case of sour grapes to me.

Luna 2
Launched: September 12 1959
Reached Destination: September 12 1959
Type: Impactor
Nationality: Soviet (Russian)
Results: Planted Soviet flag on surface of the Moon; confirmed previous measurement of the Van Allen belt but was unable to detect a radiation field around the Moon. Measured the solar wind flux. Became the first man-made object to impact another celestial body. Score another for the stinkin' Commie Reds, huh?
Photographs Taken: 0
Mission Ended: September 13 or 14 1959
Termination of Probe: Impacted on the Moon.

In a direct response to the criticism from the USA about the previous probe, i.e. that they had made it all up, the Soviet space agency this time ensured to contact British astronomer Bernard Lovell in Manchester and provide to him all the data as the probe transmitted it. He then shared this with the American scientists, who seemingly grumbled that they still did not believe it, but no longer had any basis for such doubt.

Pioneer 3
Launched: December 6 1958
Reached Destination: Failed
Type: Flyby
Nationality: American
Results: Failed to reach the Moon, emulating David Bowie and falling to Earth
Photographs Taken: 0
Mission Ended: December 7 1958
Termination of Probe: Burned up in Earth's atmosphere

Pioneer 4
Launched: March 3 1959
Reached Destination: March 3 1959
Type: Flyby
Nationality: American
Results: Provided radiation data but went off-course and so was not close enough to the Moon for its photoelectric sensor to be triggered, thus no valuable information about the Moon was received.
Photographs Taken: 0
Mission Ended: March 6 1959
Termination of Probe: In heliocentric orbit

As far as I can see, in the early space race the Russians were miles ahead. They put the first satellite into space, had the first man-made object to escape the Earth's atmosphere, got to the Moon first, were the first to impact a satellite there, and later were the first to put a living creature (Leica the dog) and later a man into space, the first to spacewalk and the first to land a probe on Venus, the first to record sound and images on that planet. Sure, the Americans caught up, becoming the first humans to land on another planetary body, and from then on it was USA! USA! USA! all the way, but in the initial and perhaps more important early stages of space exploration, Russia, as in the Soviet Union, led the way.

The Ranger series, intended to compete with the mostly successful Luna Soviet satellite programme, could have more accurately been called Danger or Anger. The first six probes failed, and resentment arose in Congress over all the funds being appropriated for NASA with no real return; essentially a waste of money.

Ranger 1
Launched: August 23 1961
Reached Destination: Failed; only achieved Earth orbit
Type: Flyby
Nationality: American
Results: Very little as the probe didn't leave Earth orbit. Some miscellaneous data about radiation or some shit.
Photographs Taken: 0
Mission Ended: August 30 1961
Termination of Probe: Burned up in Earth atmosphere after batteries ran down

After no less than four failed attempts at launch, plagued by problems and no doubt leaving the Soviets pissing themselves laughing at the decadent Americans' incompetence, Ranger 1 finally launched on August 23. Immediately it began having problems and never got out of  Earth orbit, hanging around until its batteries went flat and it fell back to Earth. Not quite the success NASA had anticipated or hoped for. Reports of many Russian sides being split are impossible to corroborate at this time.

Ranger 2
Launched: November 18 1961
Reached Destination: Failed
Type: Test
Nationality: American
Results: n/a
Photographs Taken: 0
Mission Ended: November 20 1961
Termination of Probe: Fell back to Earth and burned up

If at first you don't succeed, balls it up again. Well, that's not quite fair. Ranger 2 was not meant to ever reach the Moon, it was merely a test vehicle to try to iron out the bugs that had bedevilled its predecessor. As it happened, it didn't. Iron them out, that is, and it suffered from similar problems and only achieved low Earth orbit. Back to the drawing board, guys!

Ranger 3
Launched: January 26 1962
Reached Destination: Failed
Type: Flyby (intended as an impactor)
Nationality: American
Results: Complete failure
Photographs Taken: 0 (some very weak images were taken but nothing of interest)
Mission Ended: January 31 1962
Termination of Probe: In heliocentric orbit

If Russian pilots believed they were dogged by gremlins, little creatures who destroyed the electrics and mechanics in their planes during World War II, they must have moved over to live in America, as a year into the Ranger programme, three after the USSR had proudly planted the flag of the motherland on the Moon, NASA still couldn't even line up their probes to reach the damn thing. Talk about hitting the broad side of a barn! Errors in telemetry sent Ranger 3 off course yet again, and then its computer died (damn you Bill Gates!) and that was more or less the end of it. Missed the Moon by several tens of thousands of kilometers and decided to spend the rest of its life in retirement in the sun, as it were. Noises began to emanate from Congress. "One more!" NASA pleaded. "Just one more. Or, maybe two. Three at the outside. Four, tops! We promise!"

Ranger 4
Launched: April 23 1962
Reached Destination: April 26 1962
Type: Impactor
Nationality: Proudly made in America
Results: n/a
Photographs Taken: 0
Mission Ended: April 26 1962
Termination of Probe: Crashed on lunar surface.

Hey, at least this time they reached the Moon! Problem was, everything failed. Although the launch was for once successful, problems began once the rocket lifted off and the solar panels failed to deploy on the satellite, then the computer grumped "Fuck this for a game of soldiers. Moon me arse!" and shut down. With no way to contact Ranger 3 and no way to control it, NASA could do nothing as it ploughed down onto the surface of the Moon without sending back any data. But at least the United States of America had finally landed something on another planetary body, and more, they landed on the far side of the Moon, not like those cowardly Russkies who had to land on the near side. Pussies.

NASA crowed that their probe was more sophisticated than Luna 2, which may be true, but the way you win the game is to put the ball in the back of the net, and the Soviet Union had proven to be (sorry not sorry if the football terminology confuses you: make up your own analogy) Manchester United while the USA was barely hanging on in the last relegation spot. Like, the Titanic may have been a hell of a lot more sophisticated than, say, the Mary Rose, but both went down the same way. Fucking Americans.

They were convinced they could do better. They had to, given all the taxpayer dollars they'd spent for nothing, and it wouldn't be hard to do better anyway. So, fifth time lucky?

Ranger 5
Launched: October 18 1962
Reached Destination: October 21 1962
Type: Impactor
Nationality: American
Results: Another failure
Photographs Taken: 0
Mission Ended: October 21 1962
Termination of Probe: In heliocentric orbit

Close, but no cigar! Again the computer had a melt-down, switching, for some reason, from solar power to battery power, which is, I suppose, like seeing your laptop is down to three percent and, having plugged it in, removing the lead again. Or something. Anyway, the batteries were never built to last that long, and what do you know? They didn't. Ranger 5 came the closest to the Moon (other than the one that crashed there of course), almost 450 miles short. Oooh! So close! Then off it went, riding into the sunset and leaving NASA techs tearing out their hair and no doubt congressmen and women and senators tearing up proposals for budgets.

Oh, but surely the next one would be the charm?
Yeah, about that...

In 1963  Congress had finally had enough and cut the budget for Ranger, slashing it by fifty percent. Thirteen planned probes had now to be cut to only nine, which meant NASA had only four last chances to make this work. It's not surprising that their budget was halved: in many ways, the US Congress is like a bunch of investors, and one thing investors want is a return on their money. If they couldn't get it back financially, Congress would want it back in terms of results, and so far, NASA had produced neither. In fact, all they had done was take the funds and basically piss them away on unreliable and shaky projects which either crashed, burned up or joined an increasingly large conga-line around the Sun. Something had to be done, or America would continue to be lampooned on Soviet State Television, probably, becoming the butt of such sarcastic retorts as "Da, comrade, I will believe that when an American reaches the Moon!".

They set up an internal board of inquiry to try to get to the heart of why they were so shit at making probes, and one of the issues that surfaced was the involvement of the US Air Force, so that was terminated. Now NASA would have complete control and oversight over their own projects. They also bit the bullet and admitted they weren't actually all that good at designing probes, and so outsourced the manufacture of the next Ranger probes to people who actually knew what they were doing. As 1964 began, they were ready to try again, fully aware that they were now on borrowed time. They had to show results or this time they would be completely shut down, and that would be it for the US space programme.

In terms of timing, it was both the best and the worst time for NASA. The US President had just been assassinated two months previous, and the nation was reeling from the shock. With his Vice-President, Lyndon Johnson, now in the White House, nobody was sure what the new president's view on NASA's money-down-the-drain record would be; would he lobby Congress to give them more time (and money) or less, or would he rely on and trust their recommendations, giving the space agency a short time in which to impress the new POTUS?

At the same time, with the country at its lowest ebb, the time might be right for a boost in morale, and if NASA could supply that - show that the Commies would not have it all their own way, and demonstrate that while the present was dark as night, the future could be bright - they might turn the weight of public opinion towards instead of against them. It really was make-or-break time for NASA, and they knew it.

Unfortunately, things did not quite go to plan.

[Trollheart]

Ranger 6
Launched: January 30, 1964
Reached Destination: February 2 1964
Type: Impactor
Nationality: American
Results: None, as the cameras malfunctioned
Photographs Taken: 0
Mission Ended: February 2 1964
Termination of Probe: Impacted on Moon surface.

This was pretty much disaster for NASA. Although the probe performed almost perfectly, and landed (impacted) on schedule, the failure of the cameras to operate meant that the mission was basically a further waste of money. As this had been an effort to photograph the Moon's surface in order to determine a safe site for the Apollo manned missions, the probe had just the one function: to take pictures. But it failed to do so, and therefore was less than useless. NASA tried to put the usual desperate positive spin on the mission, but it was clear Congress was running out of patience and could see through their bullshit. The next one had to work. There simply was no longer any alternative.

Ranger 7
Launched: July 28 1964
Reached Destination: July 28 1964
Type: Impactor
Nationality: American
Results: (Finally) successfully impacted on the Moon and sent back thousands of pictures
Photographs Taken: 4,308
Mission Ended: July 28 1964
Termination of Probe: Impacted on surface of the Moon.


After twelve unsuccessful attempts and two programmes, NASA had finally managed to land a probe on the Moon and send back clear, vivid photographs of its surface. They must have been shitting themselves at launch though, as the first countdown had to be abandoned when the battery failed, but the next day the rocket took off without a hitch. From then on it was, for the first time in NASA's history, plain sailing, and they were finally able to justify the massive cost of their Ranger programme. I mean, I don't know what probes cost back then, but I'm willing to bet that, unlike the guy in Robocop, Congress were not buying that for a dollar! It must have been in the billions, but I guess eventually it proved money well spent.

Not even the Russians, with all their successful probes and impacts, had managed to take photographs of the Moon, so America was the first country to do that, and though it may seem incredible, and does to me, that after all these failures, they would send a man to the Moon only five years later, NASA would seal the place of the United States in history when Neil Armstrong planted, by his own hand, the stars and stripes on the surface of the Moon. From that point on, it could be said that the space race was basically over, and America had won.

Ranger 8
Launched: February 17 1965
Reached Destination: February 20 1965
Type: Impactor
Nationality: American
Results: Photographed the Moon's surface in close-up
Photographs Taken: 7,137
Mission Ended: February 20 1965
Termination of Probe: Crashed on the surface of the Moon.

Now that they had had their first successful mission to the Moon - after so many futile years and so many failures, and way behind the USSR in terms of time but well ahead in terms of technology and achievement - there was no stopping the USA. More pictures were taken of the surface of the Moon, this time in close-up, enabling NASA to further plan the landing site for what would be the first human steps on the Moon four years later. For once, there were no problems with the launch, and though there was a slight scare with telemetry loss after lift-off, it did not impact the mission, which was carried out successfully.

Ranger 9
Launched: March 21 1965
Reached Destination: March 24 1965
Type: Impactor
Nationality: American
Results: More high-res photographs taken of the surface
Photographs Taken: 5,814
Mission Ended: March 24 1965
Termination of Probe: Impacted on the surface of the Moon.

The last of the Ranger missions, by now established as the most successful NASA had attempted and with Congress surely now ready to dole out the readies, this was the first time that real-time live transmission of pictures from the Moon were broadcast on television, another unlikely coup for the USA, which had only six years before lagged so badly behind the USSR that even Paddy Power, had he been in business, would have been unlikely to have taken that bet. All efforts now moved to the Apollo programme.

Meanwhile, the Reds were back.

With its last successful launch in September 1959, as above, all subsequent versions of the Luna probe failed either to launch or to operate properly. Russians being Russians, they were never exactly open about their failures, so the next one we know anything about is

Luna 9
Launched: January 31 1966
Reached Destination:
Type: Lander
Nationality: Soviet (Russian)
Results: Photographs taken of the lunar surface, confirmed surface stable enough to land on and Luna 9 made history as the first man-made probe to land safely on another planetary body.
Photographs Taken: 9
Mission Ended: February 6 1966
Termination of Probe: Still on the Moon's surface

Again, Russians being Russians, though there were only nine photographs taken, the Soviets were not about to release them to the public, but Jodrell Bank kind of hijacked them by using transmission equipment usually used by newspapers for receiving picture signals, and broadcast them around the world.

Luna 10
Launched: March 31 1966
Reached Destination: April 3 1966
Type: Orbiter
Nationality: Soviet (Russian)
Results: Studied the gravity, radiation of the Moon, solar plasma and geological studies; became the first artificial satellite of the Moon
Photographs Taken:
Mission Ended: May 30 1966
Termination of Probe: In orbit around the Moon

Surveyor 1
Launched: May 30 1966
Reached Destination: June 2 1966
Type: Lander
Nationality: American
Results: Returned live video from the surface of the Moon, transmitted over television
Photographs Taken: 11,000 (video form)
Mission Ended: January 7 1967
Termination of Probe: Still on the surface of the Moon

Another first for the now-ever-strengthening USA, with live video feed of pictures from the Moon and the first ever soft landing (as opposed to hard impact, which had been the only landings made up to now) on its surface.

Lunar Orbiter 1
Launched: August 10 1966
Reached Destination: August 14 1966
Type: Orbiter
Nationality: American
Results: Photographed the Moon from orbit, carried out various experiments with respect to impact craters, radiation and makeup of the Moon
Photographs Taken: 229
Mission Ended: October 29 1966
Termination of Probe: Impacted on Moon's surface

Though most of the photographs sent back by Lunar Orbiter 1 (couldn't they have come up with  a sexier name for it?) were relatively low-resolution, even for 1966, it did take the first ever photos of Earth from the Moon.

Luna 11
Launched: August 24 1966
Reached Destination: August 27 1966
Type: Orbiter
Nationality: Soviet (Russian)
Results: Studied gamma and x-rays to determine the Moon's chemical composition, analysed meteoroids near the Moon, checked out lunar gravity and radiation
Photographs Taken: 0 (Failure of camera to operate)
Mission Ended: October 1 1966
Termination of Probe: Presumably crashed on the Moon when the batteries ran out.

Surveyor 2
Launched: September 20 1966
Reached Destination: Failed
Type: Lander
Nationality: American
Results: Contact lost in flight
Photographs Taken: 0
Mission Ended: September 23 1966
Termination of Probe: Crashed onto the Moon's surface.

Whether the ghost of their previous failures resurfaced and NASA thought "here we go again" I don't know, but this was the first probe to fail in its mission since Ranger 6, a course correction knocking it off trajectory and crashing it into the Moon. Oops! Not quite the soft landing they had intended. Never mind.

Luna 12
Launched: October 22 1966
Reached Destination: October 25 1966
Type: Orbiter
Nationality: Soviet (Russian)
Results: Completed failed mission of Luna 11
Photographs Taken: Unknown
Mission Ended: October 19 1966
Termination of Probe: Unknown but presumably crashed onto the Moon

This was sent into orbit around the Moon to address the failure of its predecessor to obtain and transmit the photographs of the lunar surface required; as noted above, Luna 11's camera failed to operate due to some technical fault. Interestingly, the Soviets made sure not to have their transmissions hijacked this time by Jodrell Bank, switching between frequencies and confounding all attempts to intercept their signal. Those sneaky Commies!


Lunar Orbiter 2
Launched: November 6 1966
Reached Destination: November 10 1966
Type: Orbiter
Nationality: American
Results: Same as Lunar Orbiter 1
Photographs Taken: 817
Mission Ended: October 11 1967
Termination of Probe: Impacted on Moon's surface

Luna 13
Launched: December 21 1966
Reached Destination: December 24 1966 (Happy Christmas, Comrades!)
Type: Lander
Nationality: Soviet (Russian)
Results: Panoramic photographs of the lunar surface taken, also soil samples
Photographs Taken: 5
Mission Ended: December 28 1966
Termination of Probe: Contact lost; presumably still on the Moon

Lunar Orbiter 3
Launched: February 5 1967
Reached Destination: February 8 1967
Type: Orbiter
Nationality: American
Results: Same as previous probes
Photographs Taken: 526
Mission Ended: October 9 1967
Termination of Probe: Impacted on Moon's surface

Surveyor 3
Launched: April 18 1967
Reached Destination: April 20 1967
Type: Lander
Nationality: American
Results: Took soil samples from the Moon's surface
Photographs Taken: 0
Mission Ended: May 3 1967
Termination of Probe: Still on the surface of the Moon.

Hooray! Another success for the good old USA! This time the mission was not to take photographs but to test the soil as NASA continued to build up its profile of the surface upon which they intended man to set foot in two years. In 1969, after this had been successfully achieved, to America's lasting glory, this probe was partly cannibalised by astronauts from Apollo 12, making it the only probe on a celestial body to be visited by humans.


Lunar Orbiter 4
Launched: May 4 1967
Reached Destination:
Type: Orbiter
Nationality: American
Results: Almost 99 percent of the Moon's surface photographed
Photographs Taken: 426
Mission Ended: October 6 1967
Termination of Probe: Impacted on Moon's surface

Surveyor 4
Launched: July 14 1967
Reached Destination: July 17 1967
Type: Lander
Nationality: American
Results: Failed
Photographs Taken: 0
Mission Ended: July 17 1967
Termination of Probe: Believed to have exploded above Moon's surface.

Maybe the comedown after the high, the fate of Surveyor 4 was never established, though contact being lost with it as it prepared to descend to the surface, it was theorised that its rocket might have exploded before it landed. There were no problems on launch and the flight to the Moon was perfect, but then contact was lost and that was that.

Lunar Orbiter 5
Launched: August 1 1967
Reached Destination:
Type: Orbiter
Nationality: American
Results: Photographed, among others, the later landing site for Apollo 11
Photographs Taken: 844
Mission Ended: January 31 1968
Termination of Probe: Impacted on Moon's surface

Surveyor 5
Launched: September 8 1967
Reached Destination: September 11 1967
Type: Lander
Nationality: American
Results: Analysed the composition of the soil on the Moon, took photographs of its surface
Photographs Taken: 19.118
Mission Ended: December 17 1967
Termination of Probe: Remains on the surface of the Moon

Surveyor 6
Launched: November 7 1967
Reached Destination: November 10 1967
Type: Lander
Nationality: American
Results: Analysed the soil of the Moon, took photographs of its surface; first man-made probe to achieve powered flight after landing on the surface of an alien body.
Photographs Taken: 30,027
Mission Ended: December 11 1967
Termination of Probe: Remains on the Moon's surface

Although Surveyor 6 was identical to its predecessor, it was involved in one other experiment that had never been tried before, by anyone. Seven days after landing, its engines were reignited on the Moon and it rose twelve feet into the air and flew eight feet west before settling back down onto the surface of the Moon.

Surveyor 7
Launched: January 7 1968
Reached Destination: January 10 1968
Type: Lander
Nationality: American
Results: Obtained soil samples, took photographs, returned touchdown dynamics data
Photographs Taken: 21,091
Mission Ended: February 21 1968
Termination of Probe: Remains on the Moon's surface


Luna 14
Launched: April 7 1968
Reached Destination: April 10 1968
Type: Orbiter
Nationality: Soviet (Russian)
Results: Communications tested in support of later lunar landings
Photographs Taken: 0
Mission Ended: June 4 1968
Termination of Probe: Unknown

Lunokhod 201
Launched: February 19 1969
Reached Destination: Failed
Type: Rover
Nationality: Soviet (Russian)
Results: None
Photographs Taken: 0
Mission Ended: February 19 1969
Termination of Probe: Exploded after takeoff

This was the beginning of the Soviet Lunokhod program, to send robotic vehicles called rovers to land on, and investigate, the surface of the Moon. It was hardly the most auspicious start; not only did the rocket carrying the rover explode shortly after it lifted off, but the explosion spread the deadly radioactive chemical polonium 201 over much of Russia. Not surprisingly, they kept that one quiet!