Rollling Plains Ramblings -- Beneath the Moon

by Morton Scott ©18 August 2005

Our Space program has made spectacular discoveries, including volcanoes on Io, water channels on Mars, an ice world on Europa and runaway global warming on Venus. The Hubble space telescope introduces us to awe-inspiring visions of a varied Universe, with beautiful colors swirling at vast distances.
Last week, we continued our space triumphs with the return of the space shuttle Discovery from the International Space Station and the launching of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
Many impacts of our Space program are more “down to Earth” (please pardon the pun). Most people don’t realize how often our Space program affects our daily life.

Do you watch television? You can watch programs on TV because signals transmitted to your screen have bounced off a satellite orbiting Earth. Old Codgers like me remember when you watched television programs only if you were in line of sight (about 50 miles) a metropolitan city. This led to some very tall antennas.
You probably watch weather reports on television. Not only do satellites transmit the weather broadcast itself; much of the information in those forecasts is gathered by satellites. We expect to see space pictures of weather fronts moving across the nation and of hurricanes swirling across oceans and land. The accuracy of our weather reports has increased substantially and we now get forecasts for a full week instead of two or three days.

Part of the increased accuracy comes from weather stations automatically recording conditions in remote places, bouncing on mid-ocean buoys and clinging to craggy mountain tops. They transmit data to satellites, which relay it down to weather centers.

You can order photo images for almost any place on earth (including your home). These photos are used by scientists, agricultural corporations, public planners and others to analyze crop patterns, soil types, wetlands, erosion, river silting, growth of deserts. This information can be used to determine how to produce the best crops, to control erosion, to locate urban development, to maintain water supplies, etc. This means more, cheaper, better food for more people.

The Global Positioning System (GPS) is rapidly becoming more common in our lives. GPS is possible because a constellation of satellites swarms around Earth. The system can tell you exactly where you are on Earth’s surface, down to the house number and street. This has enabled young children to contact help when their mother becomes sick while driving.

The GPS also helps airliners and ships to stay on course, injured mountain climbers to tell rescue teams their precise locations, vacationers to find a relative’s address or a camping site at a national park. GPS helps business corporations, or the military, know exactly where every car or truck is, at any second. The GPS helps our military in Iraq or Afghanistan \know exactly where all our soldiers are, again at the very second.
Global Position System helped Chunnel engineers make tunnels from France and England meet at the precise point needed and engineers building the bridge from Denmark to Sweden to places supports in the right place.
Perhaps the most revolutionary technical change in American, and worldwide, life is the internet. The internet would be impossible without spacecraft. Every e-mail you send travels to space and back down to a receiver, perhaps in your own town, in another state, or to a country on the other side of Earth in seconds.
The internet keeps us in contact with distant relatives, we pay bills over the internet, order books, send greeting cards\ and even this column; we read jokes; we discuss politics and religion with people we will never meet; we get to know people we hope to meet and perhaps love; the internet in many ways shapes our lives.

The Hubble Space Telescope brings us beautiful, awe inspiring, bewildering visions of distant, and near, planets, stars, nebulas, galaxies, and even mysteries.

Since the beginning of the Human Race, we have been on the move. We walked from southern Africa, through Europe and Asia, to North and South America. We have always wanted to see beyond the next hill, beyond the forest, the desert, the sea, beyond the horizon. This sense of adventure makes us what we are.
We have filled Earth. Space provides us with new horizons. We shall move on to the Moon, Mars, Europa and to places now unknown. Type NASA into your search engine and read about our destiny.
You may contact me, via space, at >fmortonscott@aol.com<.
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