Though the author of “2001: A Space Odyssey” died in 2008 in Sri Lanka, scientists from NASA today announced plans to send his DNA into orbit around the sun in 2014 aboard the Sunjammer, an astonishing solar-powered spacecraft.
Called the Sunjammer Cosmic Archive (SCA), the flying time capsule is a first in the history of space travel, carrying digital files of human DNA including Clarke’s aboard the sun-powered space ship.
'Clarke certainly imagined himself going to space someday, and that day is finally arriving.' — Stephen Eisele, vice president of Space Services, Inc.
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The DNA is to be contained in a “BioFile.” Other so-called MindFiles, including images, music, voice recordings, and the like, provided by people all around the globe, will also be included in the cosmic archive for future generations -- or perhaps other civilizations -- to see.
“Clarke certainly imagined himself going to space someday, and that day is finally arriving, ” said Stephen Eisele, vice president of Space Services, Inc., a NASA contractor on the project. The name Sunjammer comes from the writings of Clarke, but the goal is all-encompassing.
The archive is one part of an amazing new NASA mission based on a vision outlined by astronomer Johannes Kepler, in a letter to Galileo in 1610: deployment of a technology that harnesses the light of the sun to propel spaceships.
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”Provide ships or sails adapted to the heavenly breezes, and there will be some who will brave even that void, ” Kepler wrote to Galileo.
In interviews during the days before the Thursday announcement, developers outlined for the overall scope of the Sunjammer project, which NASA’s mission manager Ron Unger, at the Marshall Space Flight Center, described as a “game changing technology” that could alter mankind’s approach to space travel.
Simply put, the technology is a “solar sail” that gathers light from the sun and turns it into a propulsion source for a spacecraft, Unger said. It seems like something out of Clarke’s sci-fi writings, which is one reason that his DNA, which he left to science upon his death, is the payload for the mission, Eisele said.
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This NASA-funded technology demonstration is designed to highlight the efficacy of solar sails for space propulsion applications; it’s now being built by Sunjammer team leader L'Garde, Inc., based in Tustin, Calif.
According to Nathan Barnes, president of L’Garde, the ship will launch in the fall of 2014 on a 1.9-million mile voyage to the sun from Cape Canaveral, Fla.
The diminutive spacecraft -- it’s literally the size of a standard kitchen dishwasher -- will be carried as a secondary spacecraft aboard a Falcon rocket 932, 000 miles from Earth, where it will be released into space.
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For NASA, Sunjammer will demonstrate deployment and navigation of the solar sail technology at nearly a million miles from Earth. Solar sails, sometimes called light sails or photon sails, are a form of spacecraft propulsion using the radiation pressure of a combination of light and high-speed gasses ejected from the Sun to push large, ultra-thin mirrors to high speeds.
These spacecraft offer NASA the possibility of low-cost operations with lengthy operating lifetimes. They have few moving parts and use no propellant, and they can potentially be used many times for delivery of different payloads.
“Sunjammer will morph -- much like a butterfly - into a Space Shuttle-sized ship capable of maneuvering solely by riding the photonic pressure of the Sun, ” Barnes tells . “Such propellant-less space travel has been the subject of human dreams since at least the time of Galileo, and holds great promise.
A C C I M T
Here’s the physics of how it works, in a simplified form: Solar radiation creates a pressure on the sail due to reflection and a small fraction that is absorbed, and this absorbed energy heats the sail, which re-radiates that energy from the front and rear surfaces.
The first formal design of a solar sail was conducted in the 1970s, at the height of Sir Clarke’s fame as a sci-fi writer and futurist, at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. A conference on solar sails was held just last month in the U.K., and researchers from NASA, a number of leading British universities, and L’Garde were present, discussing the potential of the Clarke-ian technology.
But now the technology is finally moving toward deployment on a major mission as a result of President Obama’s reorganization of NASA during his first term, and the agency’s search for technologies that can rapidly be commercialized, Eisele told .
Arthur C. Clarke. The Exploration Of Space. London: Temple Press
In addition to the payload including the DNA of Sir Clarke, scientific experiments will be conducted, once this craft is in space to demonstrate the use of solar sails in monitoring space weather, for example, which could provide early warnings of potentially dangerous solar storms.Visions of space … New Horizons arrives at Pluto by David A Hardy. Hardy says: ‘I painted the planet in 1991; the NH probe was added in 2015’
He has seen the impossible, painting outer space long before man got there. He has made book covers for Arthur C Clarke and spaceships for Doctor Who. David A Hardy is the oldest living space artist ... and he has never made a mistake
I n 1950, a 14-year-old boy found an astronomy book at his local library. As he pored over it, a light bulb lit up over his head. “It inspired me, really, to do it myself, ” says that boy, David A Hardy, 65 years on. Not to become an astronaut, but to draw outer space with incredible military accuracy. Today, he is the world’s oldest living space artist. He’s 79 and he lives in the suburbs of Birmingham, churning out visions of the universe while his wife makes him cups of tea.
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Chances are, if you’ve read books by Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke, the covers were painted by Hardy. He worked with Sir Patrick Moore for over half a century. He has created spaceships descending upon Big Ben for Doctor Who and the Daleks. His art has been the backdrop for Pink Floyd gigs, and he counts the Rolling Stones and Queen among his collectors.
On 7 November, Hardy opens a new exhibition called Visions of Space alongside 19 fellow space artists. Space art (or astronomical art) is an art movement just like modernism or impressionism. Its early pioneers included American artist Chesley Bonestell, who painted what he saw in a telescope, and French astronomer-artist Lucien Rudaux, who made an atlas of the Milky Way – and created impossibly accurate paintings of Mars in the 1920s and 1930s. Together, they’re known as the Fathers of Modern Space Art.
Space art must absolutely not be confused with sci-fi and fantasy art. “Sci-fi is based in the imagination, ” explains Hardy adamantly. “With space art, you need knowledge of chemistry, physics, astronomy and volcanology.”
Arthur C. Clarke. Sands Of Mars. New York: Gnome, [1952]. First
Eta Carinae by David A Hardy – an exploding star, ejecting two giant balloons of gas. Painted for Futures: 50 Years in Space by David A Hardy and Patrick Moore (2004)
Long before the first man on the moon, people like Hardy shaped our view of outer space. “Without space art, nobody would know what Mars would look like, ” he says. “We knew Mars had an atmosphere – but was it red, blue? It had a peachy colour and with the dust, an orangey colour. We had to change that over the years, as we got more information.”
It all began for Hardy back in 1954. Shortly before he was due to join the air force, a friend showed one of his artworks to Moore. “Next thing I know, ” says Hardy, “I get a telegram (there were no phones in those days) asking if I could do an image for his upcoming book Suns, Myths and Men. I only had five days to do the illustrations ... but I did them anyway.” He remained close to Moore – history’s longest-running TV host of The Sky At Night – until his death in 2012, and the pair co-wrote two books.
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After a stint as an illustrator for Cadbury’s, Hardy worked on films like The Neverending Story, and drew new astronomical discoveries like Pluto’s moon Charon, way back in 1999. The biggest challenge is getting the details spot on. “If you make one mistake, someone somewhere will always say ‘That is wrong!’, ” says Hardy. “You have to get the colour of the atmosphere right, the right kind of rocks – and if it’s an icy planet, is it nitrogen? We have to imagine ourselves on to the surface of a planet, and paint it just how it would look in a photo.” He claims to have never made a mistake in his art – he was even given an award recently by the American Astronautical Society for “sustained excellence in spaceflight history”.
Space art may have reached its peak as psychedelic space rock hit the mainstream. Hardy made an image for Hawkwind’s 1974 album Hall of the Mountain Grill. One day, on their way to a gig, the band piled out of a minivan into Hardy’s suburban home – and his wife couldn’t handle how scruffy the singer Lemmy
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