The Best Australian Science Writing 2012

by Elizabeth Finkel

  Two more little odd bods and we’re done. One is from Lachlan Bolt, who was just 12 years old when he penned his ‘wee story’, an entry into a Double Helix magazine science writing competition. What a command of writing and what a good mind!

  And finally to the sublime. As Darwin showed us, science writing can be beautiful. When you come to the end of the anthology, still your mind for a moment with the beauty of Vanessa Mickan’s ‘Dream of goldfinches’.

  Storytelling

  Scientists with a cause

  Muscular writing

  Gateway to heaven

  Wilson da Silva

  If humanity has a beachhead to the stars, this is it: Cape Canaveral. This sandy promontory, jutting out into the Atlantic from a barrier island on the midway point of Florida’s eastern coast, is the site of most of the manned space launches in human history.

  Inhabited for more than 12,000 years, and the scene of some of the first encounters between Europeans and Native Americans, it’s often hot and humid, a lowland speckled with marshy lagoons in every direction. Often sunny year-round, it’s also prone to sudden thunderstorms and lightning.

  To the north is the Canaveral National Seashore, a national park of pristine beaches and sand dunes that are sanctuary to an abundance of wildlife, from dolphins and manatees to giant sea turtles. It’s a spawning ground for saltwater fish, and alligators swim the rivers and lagoons. It is from this subtropical setting that more than 880 passengers have been lofted into the cold of space.

  As long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to come here to see a manned launch. And ever since staying up as a child to watch live pictures on TV of the first space shuttle heaving into the sky in April 1981, I’ve wanted – most of all – to see a shuttle launch.

  So here I was, 30 years later, as the bold – and at times tragic – era of the shuttle draws to a close, and with the last three remaining orbiters facing retirement, finally ready to see my first manned launch, and my first shuttle takeoff. I’d come to see the farewell flight of Discovery, the most travelled and successful of them all.

  Discovery was the third shuttle to join the fleet, and made her maiden voyage in August 1984 – when Ronald Reagan was in the White House, Bob Hawke was in his first term as prime minister, sprinter Carl Lewis had just won four gold medals at the Los Angeles Olympics, apartheid reigned in South Africa and Prince’s Purple Rain was top of the charts.

  The actual spacecraft is even older: construction began in August 1979, based on designs proposed a decade earlier. In fact, the whole fleet’s tailor-made onboard avionics computer had 424 kilobytes of magnetic core memory, could process 400,000 instructions per second, had no hard drive, and loaded software from magnetic tape. Upgrades in 1990 boosted memory capacity to about 1 megabyte and processor speed to 1.2 million instructions per second.

  Considering how often the space shuttle is billed as the most complex vehicle ever built, and its decades-long poster child status for everything futuristic, it’s amazing just how much of a technological relic it is. My iPhone has more memory than the avionics!

  But it was the first civilian craft to use a computerised fly-bywire digital flight control system, with no mechanical or hydraulic links between the pilot’s joystick and the control surfaces or thrusters – the kind we take for granted on modern aeroplanes. It did not burn out its heat shield on re-entry, and it was the first reusable spacecraft.

  Since its maiden flight, Discovery has completed 39 missions, making it the most successful in NASA’s fleet. It benefited from lessons learned in the construction and testing of its sister craft, which is why it weighs some 3000kg less than the first shuttle, Columbia.

  Unofficially, it’s considered ‘the lucky shuttle’: after the disasters that destroyed Challenger at takeoff in 1986 and Columbia on re-entry in 2003 (its two sisters from the original fleet of three), Discovery was twice chosen to restart the shuttle program.

  And she has indeed had a colourful run: launching the Hubble Space Telescope, flying the first female shuttle pilot, Eileen Collins (who also became the first female shuttle commander, also aboard Discovery). It was the first – and the last – shuttle to dock with Mir, Russia’s space station, put Australia’s first communications satellite, Aussat 1, into orbit, twice repaired Hubble, and was the first shuttle to dock with the International Space Station. It flew the highest altitude, and carried the oldest human into space: John Glenn, who was 77 and a US Senator at the time, and who had made his name as the first American to orbit the Earth in 1962.

  ‘It’s just amazing what this vehicle can do,’ astronaut Eric Boe, the pilot for Discovery’s final flight, told a news conference. ‘It can launch like a rocket, go into orbit, change into a spacecraft and then land as a hypersonic airplane. What’s amazing is just how well she sails. It’s an honour and privilege for all of us to get the chance to fly on her final voyage.’

  * * * * *

  The drive to the launch site is a collage of multi-lane highways and abundant elephant grass interspersed with rivers and lagoons and, of course, bridges and causeways. It’s not hard to believe that there are almost 7800 lakes and 19,000km of waterways in Florida.

  More surprising is the unending banality of crass Americana: multi-coloured signs atop tall towers are everywhere, advertising Dennys, Jack in the Box, Burger King, TGI Fridays, U-Haul – along with a plethora of makeshift signs hollering daily specials in large magnetic letters.

  I’d arrived the night before in Orlando, the nearest international airport, and driven to my motel in Titusville, a sizeable town just across the Indian River from the Kennedy Space Center. Having breakfast at a diner that morning, I watched the morning news shows excitedly discussing the last flight of Discovery, with a live cross to reporters at Cape Canaveral, in between weather forecasts and live traffic updates.

  Although only a short drive away, I hadn’t factored in that 40,000 people had descended on the region – known as the Space Coast – to see this historic last hurrah. Despite giving myself what seemed plenty of time, I was immediately caught in a massive traffic jam that stretched across the causeway and into the outskirts of Titusville. And this was almost seven hours before the scheduled launch. On the radio, I heard that at 10.30am the last parking spots in the premier viewing areas around the cape had already been snapped up.

  More than six weeks earlier, I’d applied for a press pass to see the takeoff from the Launch Complex 39 Press Site, where journalists and camera crews have been covering manned flights since Apollo 8 in 1968. But getting there required peeling back four layers of security, and validating my documentation at various buildings before I could pick up my site access and press passes. With all three approaches across the river clogged with slow-moving cars, it took some time – and patience.

  With my passes in hand, I barrelled down the road towards the Vehicle Assembly Building, reputedly the fourth-largest building in the world by volume: 160m high and enclosing 3.7 million cubic metres. Originally built to allow the vertical assembly of the Saturn V rocket that took men to the Moon, it’s now where the shuttle orbiter – the ‘spaceplane’ component – is mated with the massive orange-coloured external fuel tank and the two solid rocket boosters.

  The whole assembly sits atop a mobile launch platform that is moved slowly to the launch pad – 5.6km away – on a Crawler-Transporter, a gigantic self-powered land vehicle that can move 7900 tonnes at a top speed of 1.6km/h. Two of these were built, for US$14 million each, in the 1960s. Each has two control cabins at both ends and requires a team of nearly 30 engineers, technicians and drivers to operate the vehicle on its six-hour journey.

  * * * * *

  Launch Pad 39A is where shuttles fly from, part of a launch complex built for the Apollo program. Its sister, 39B, was deactivated in 2007, and Discovery was the last to use it; NASA is now offering the pad and facilities to private companies for the commercial space market.

  By the time I reached the press site, engineers had begun l
oading the shuttle’s external tank with about two million litres of cryogenic propellants. The orbiter’s onboard fuel cells, inertial instruments and communications had been activated. Almost 4.8km to the northeast, I could see the orange external tank and just make out the white livery of Discovery. The beast was awakening.

  Soon the six astronauts would begin making their way to the pad. I took a vantage point near the iconic digital countdown clock, which is not just big – it’s mammoth. A little the worse for wear, it uses large, old-school incandescent light bulbs to shape its numbers. Behind it, there’s a long series of lakes, coves and creeks between the elevated mound where media facilities are located, and the launch pad. More than 200 people were already on the site, and the foreshore was festooned with camera tripods.

  The News Centre, as the area is known, has several buildings: a 100-seat auditorium for press conferences, 15 site support offices, common workspace for journalists, and two libraries. Major outlets such as CBS, NBC, CNN and Reuters have their own prefab shacks. The main press room has six large LCD screens with direct feeds from various sites: the gantry leading into the orbiter, weather and radar maps, and multiple angles of the launch pad.

  In the hours that followed, the astronauts entered the orbiter in their bright orange spacesuits and strapped in, their helmets by their sides, and began a long list of verbal checks with Launch Control at the Kennedy Space Center and Mission Control at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. Technicians in white overalls, baseball caps and head-mounted radios closed the hatch, checked seals for leaks and went through seemingly hundreds of detailed crosschecks.

  * * * * *

  Discovery was named after two historic vessels of the past: one used by 17th century English navigator Henry Hudson to explore Canada’s Hudson Bay and search for a northwest passage from the Atlantic to India; and one by British explorer James Cook in the 1770s in voyages in the South Pacific, leading to the discovery of the Hawaiian Islands.

  ‘We’re wrapping up the space shuttle program,’ astronaut Steve Lindsey, commander of Discovery’s last mission – known as STS-133 – told reporters before takeoff. ‘Besides the excitement of completing the International Space Station and all the things we do, I hope people get a sense of the history of what the shuttle is and what we’ve done and what’s ending. Because they’ll probably never see anything like it flying again.’

  And Cape Canaveral has been where all the journeys began. Since 1961 there have been 165 manned launches here – from the nearby Cape Canaveral Air Force Station where the pioneering Mercury and Gemini capsules were launched, to the Kennedy Space Center, built for the Apollo missions.

  Since they first lit up the skies in 1981, space shuttles have been the workhorses of human spaceflight, taking more than 800 passengers into space. The most diligent of them has been Discovery, which in 39 missions has spent a total of 365 days in space and travelled more than 238 million kilometres orbiting the planet.

  Takeoff was scheduled for 4.50pm, but with nine minutes to launch, the clock suddenly froze. The Air Force’s range safety computer – which monitors data from sensors dotted along the coastline – indicated a problem, and put the launch in doubt. Discovery had a razor-thin three minute launch window before the attempt had to be postponed till the following day, and tension mounted as NASA engineers scrambled to determine the cause. Taking a gamble, they restarted the clock in the hope that the Air Force would uncover a false alarm and the launch could proceed.

  But as no word came, the countdown was again stopped, at the T minus five minute mark. There it held. Finally, with time running out, NASA engineers received a call saying the glitch was resolved. They resumed the countdown, and at exactly 4.53:24 pm – with just three seconds to spare – Discovery blasted off.

  When the engines ignited, there was a blinding flash and the whole structure began edging upwards. At first it seemed to gently hover above the launch pad. This was an illusion; it was actually rapidly accelerating, and within a split second was punching through the air, riding an eye-searing waterfall of white-hot flame as it tore into the clear blue sky.

  I’d waited for decades to see it, and had watched countless shuttle launches on TV, but still, my mind found it hard to accept what I was seeing. A building 19 storeys high was rising effortlessly into the air, trailed by billowing clouds of superheated steam that raced away in all directions. The plume of flame spewing from the solid rocket boosters was incredibly bright – almost like looking at the Sun. Nothing had prepared me for that.

  And the sound. It’s hard to describe: a rumbling growl so low it reaches into your stomach, with a resonant thundering of pops and bangs that quickly overwhelms the cheering, whooping and rapid-fire camera shutters going off around you. There is a moment – 50 or so seconds in – when the sound is completely overwhelming, seemingly on top of you, and silence descends on the crowd.

  My pulse was racing and I found myself watching openmouthed. It did not close again until two minutes into the flight, when the shuttle had ditched its twin solid rocket boosters 48.7km above us. Curling clouds of steam marked its trajectory, and the orbiter – its engines now burning fuel from the attached external tank – was a tiny white speck in the deep blue sky that, eventually, vanished. My senses told me something very large and very powerful had growled to life nearby, done something incredible, and all I could do was stare after it, transfixed.

  It had been a remarkable show. Discovery was on its way, and its engines would continue firing for another six minutes before the tank was drained and fell away, to burn up on re-entry. It would loop the Earth several times over the next two days, working its way through complicated orbital dynamics, before gently docking with the International Space Station.

  ‘The shuttle program … has given us a lot … and it has taught us what is needed for the routine access to space,’ Andy Thomas, the Australian-born NASA astronaut who flew aboard Discovery in three of his five flights, told me in an email. ‘But that has come at a significant cost, both financial and human.

  ‘We now recognise that the shuttle technology, while brilliant in what it can do, is very fragile, costly to maintain and unforgiving to mistakes. So it is time to retire it and move on.’

  History

  Relics

  Neutrinos and the speed of light … not so fast

  Jonathan Carroll

  The bartender says, ‘We don’t serve your kind in here’ …

  A faster-than-light neutrino walks into a bar.

  * * * * *

  The media is champing at the bit to proclaim a discovery of faster-than-light travel by a subatomic particle known as a neutrino, with some going as far as claiming ‘Einstein was wrong: relativity theory busted.’ Startling stuff. If it’s true, then time travel – the stuff of science fiction – may be for real. The scientists responsible for the experiment and analysis let slip that they have some preliminary data that suggests that these particles travel faster than light, but they seem to be the only ones not jumping to conclusions just yet. The team at the Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus (OPERA) in Gran Sasso, Italy – a laboratory sheltered from cosmic rays 1.4km beneath Gran Sasso, the highest peak of the Apennines – regularly detects neutrinos emitted from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland, 730km away. Neutrinos, which are electrically neutral subatomic particles, are indifferent to the presence of trivial things such as Earth and zip through without so much as a passing interest. Owing to their small mass they should do so at approximately the speed of light (c), the speed light travels in a vacuum, known quite well to be 299,792,458 metres per second.

  Using GPS timing and position data, the OPERA team claims to know the distance between the point at which neutrinos are emitted from the LHC and the point at which they are detected in Italy to a precision that allows them to predict the neutrino’s arrival time to within 10 nanoseconds (a nanosecond being a billionth of a second).

  What they claim to have found, thoug
h, is neutrinos arriving 60 nanoseconds (0.00000006 seconds) early. If accurate, this would be a six standard-deviation result – enough to convince physicists that something is genuinely awry. The scientists concerned have released the findings to the scientific community in the hope that, if something has been overlooked, it will be picked up by their peers. The peer-review process is usually quite efficient at eliminating likely sources of error, and in this case there are plenty of possibilities. But on the face of it, it seems the OPERA team has been very careful.

  There’s the issue of knowing the exact positions of the source and detector to within the quoted uncertainty – keeping in mind that in the extra 60 nanoseconds the neutrinos are supposedly travelling, they will cover a total of 18 metres. This means knowing those two positions – and the geodesic distance between them (the ‘straight’ line they follow is actually a straight line in curved space thanks to General Relativity and the mass of the Earth) – to within 3 metres out of 730,000 metres. Though traditional civilian-grade GPS has an accuracy of about 15 metres, the OPERA experiment used the top-of-the-range technology known as ‘carrier phase tracking’, which offers better than 1 centimetre accuracy over 730,000 metres. However, it still requires the GPS antenna to be above ground, so one also needs to take into account the timing for signals to travel along wires to the underground experiments. For this purpose, the OPERA scientists also made use of a cesium atomic clock. Overall, the accuracy they achieved was 20 centimetres out of 730,000 metres – well within the required range.

  Presuming for now all the possible sources of error are accounted for, what would this result mean? Time-travel seems to be the go-to topic when faster-than-light particles are mentioned, but don’t hold out hope for a TARDIS just yet.