Space: quotes, facts and reflections - Page 2

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WonderSpace

Beatrice Tinsley, a New Zealand astronomer, showed in the late 1960s and 1970s that galaxies change colour and brightness as their stars age. Her computer models changed how astronomers read the light of distant galaxies.

Tinsley was born in Chester, England, in 1941 and grew up in New Zealand. After she married a fellow physics student, university rules kept her from working where he was employed, and in 1963 she followed him to Dallas. She earned her doctorate at the University of Texas at Austin in 1967, as the only woman in its astronomy programme. Her key point was that we see a distant galaxy as it was long ago, when its stars were younger, so it would look different even if nothing else had changed. Astronomers had to allow for this before using galaxies to measure the universe. Despite her influence, she found no permanent post until Yale hired her in 1974; in 1978 she became its first woman professor of astronomy. She died of melanoma, a skin cancer, in 1981, aged 40.

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WonderSpace

Wang Zhenyi, an 18th-century Chinese scholar, explained lunar eclipses with a round table as the Earth, a hanging crystal lamp as the Sun and a round mirror as the Moon. Moving them showed how the three line up.

Wang lived from 1768 to 1797 in Qing-dynasty China, where women were rarely allowed to study astronomy. She learned from her grandfather's large library and from her family, and taught herself most of her mathematics and astronomy. She argued that the Earth is round, against the old idea of a flat Earth under a round sky, wrote on the slow shift of the equinoxes, and rewrote the mathematician Mei Wending's difficult Principles of Calculation in simpler language for beginners. Only about ten of her scientific papers survive, partly because much of her work was destroyed during her final illness; she died at 29. She also left 13 volumes of poetry and prose, and wrote that women and men have the same reason to study. A crater on Venus is named after her.

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DriveSpace

Dorothy Vaughan led the West Area Computers, a segregated group of Black women mathematicians at NACA, NASA's predecessor, and in 1949 became its first Black supervisor. When electronic computers arrived, she taught herself and her staff the programming language FORTRAN.

Vaughan was a mathematics teacher when she joined the Langley laboratory in Virginia in 1943, during the Second World War, as a 'human computer', someone who did engineers' calculations by hand. Under Virginia's segregation laws, the Black women of West Area Computing worked, ate and used bathrooms apart from their white colleagues. In 1949 she became acting head of the unit, the first Black supervisor at NACA. When NASA replaced NACA in 1958, the segregated unit was abolished and she joined the new Analysis and Computation Division, where she became an expert FORTRAN programmer and worked on the Scout rocket, which launched small satellites. She retired in 1971. Her story reached a wide audience through Margot Lee Shetterly's 2016 book Hidden Figures and the film based on it.

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DriveBiography

Mary Jackson became NASA's first Black woman engineer in 1958. To qualify, she had to petition the City of Hampton, Virginia, for permission to attend evening classes held at a school for white students only.

Jackson joined the West Area Computing unit at NACA's Langley laboratory in 1951, as a 'human computer' doing calculations by hand. In 1953 she went to work for the engineer Kazimierz Czarnecki in the Supersonic Pressure Tunnel, a wind tunnel that blasted models with air at almost twice the speed of sound, and he urged her to train as an engineer. The courses she needed were run by the University of Virginia at Hampton High School, which was for white students only, so she asked the city for permission and won it. She wrote or co-wrote 12 technical papers, many on the thin layer of air flowing next to an aircraft's surface. In 1979, having reached the most senior engineering title open to her, she took a demotion to run programmes helping women and minorities advance at NASA. NASA named its Washington headquarters after her in 2020.

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DriveBiography

Annie Easley joined NACA, NASA's forerunner, in 1955 as a 'human computer' doing calculations by hand, then became a programmer. Her code supported the Centaur rocket stage, which later sent probes such as Voyager and Cassini into space, and research on energy and batteries.

Easley was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1933. When she joined the Lewis Flight Propulsion Laboratory in Cleveland, Ohio, she was one of only four Black employees among about 2,500. As machines took over the arithmetic, she learned the programming languages FORTRAN and SOAP. Centaur, a rocket stage that fires after the first stage is spent, was the first to burn liquid hydrogen with liquid oxygen, and her programs supported its analyses. Her energy work included simulations that supported early battery research for hybrid vehicles. She finished a mathematics degree at Cleveland State University in 1977 while working full time. As an equal employment opportunity counsellor, she helped resolve discrimination complaints, and she encouraged girls and minority students to take up science. She retired in 1989.

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DriveBiography

Evelyn Boyd Granville, one of the first Black American women to earn a PhD in mathematics, wrote computer programs at IBM that calculated orbits for Vanguard and Mercury, the early US satellite and crewed spaceflight projects. She later worked on the Apollo programme.

Granville grew up in Washington, D.C., studied mathematics and physics at Smith College and earned her doctorate at Yale in 1949. Among Black American women, only Euphemia Lofton Haynes, in 1943, had earned a mathematics PhD before her; Marjorie Lee Browne finished hers the same year. Top academic posts were closed to Black women, so she taught at Fisk University, then joined IBM in 1956. At its Vanguard Computing Center in Washington she turned the mathematics of orbits into computer programs, and she later worked on trajectory calculations for Apollo at North American Aviation. From 1967 she was a professor at California State University, Los Angeles, co-wrote a textbook on mathematics for teachers and ran maths enrichment programmes for young children. She died in 2023, aged 99.

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WonderBiography

American astronomer Annie Jump Cannon sorted about 350,000 stars at Harvard by the pattern of dark lines in their light. Her classes, O, B, A, F, G, K and M, running from the hottest stars to the coolest, are still the standard way to group stars.

Cannon was one of the “Harvard computers”, a team of women hired to study photographs of the night sky on glass plates, often for about 25 cents an hour. When starlight is spread into a spectrum, a band of colours, dark lines appear that are left by the elements in the star. Earlier schemes used many letters; Cannon reordered and simplified them into one clear sequence, and in 1925 Cecilia Payne used her data in work showing that the sequence follows temperature. Nearly deaf after an illness, Cannon worked at legendary speed, classifying up to three stars a minute, and her results filled the Henry Draper Catalogue, published between 1918 and 1924. In 1925 she became the first woman to receive an honorary doctorate of science from Oxford University.

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WonderScience

A cloud chamber makes invisible charged particles visible: as one passes through air loaded with vapour, it leaves a trail of tiny droplets, like the vapour trail of a jet. Scottish physicist Charles Wilson invented it, and its photographs helped reveal new particles.

Wilson's idea began on the summit of Ben Nevis in 1894, where rings of coloured light around shadows cast on cloud made him want to recreate clouds in the laboratory. In his chamber, a sudden expansion cools moist air until the vapour is on the point of turning into droplets. A passing charged particle knocks electrons off air molecules, leaving a line of charged atoms, or ions, on which droplets form. He photographed the first tracks in 1911. With a magnet around the chamber the tracks curve, and the direction and tightness of each curve reveal a particle's charge and momentum. In 1932 Carl Anderson used such tracks to discover the positron, the first known particle of antimatter. Wilson shared the 1927 Nobel Prize in Physics for the chamber.

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DriveHistory

In 1960–61, thirteen American women pilots, later known as the Mercury 13, passed the same first-phase medical tests that physician William Randolph Lovelace had helped design for NASA's first male astronauts. The private project was never an official NASA selection and was stopped before they could go further.

Lovelace began in 1960 with the record-setting pilot Jerrie Cobb, who passed all three phases of testing and ranked in the top 2% of candidates of either sex; she then helped him find the other women, and the aviator Jacqueline Cochran paid for much of the work. NASA, however, required its first astronauts to be military jet test pilots with a degree in engineering or the equivalent, and women could not train as military test pilots. In July 1962 Cobb and fellow pilot Jane Hart asked a congressional subcommittee to let the testing continue; astronaut John Glenn argued against it, and nothing changed. The name “Mercury 13” was coined in 1995. Sally Ride became the first American woman in space in 1983, and in 2021 Wally Funk, one of the thirteen, finally flew to space at 82.

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WonderLiterature

Mark Twain was born on 30 November 1835, two weeks after Halley's Comet swung round the Sun. In 1909 he said he expected to go out with it. He died on 21 April 1910, one day after the comet's next closest pass.

According to his biographer Albert Bigelow Paine, Twain said in 1909: 'I came in with Halley's comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it.' He described himself and the comet as 'two unaccountable freaks' that had come in together and must go out together. The dates are the comet's perihelions, its closest passes to the Sun, and they frame his life almost exactly: he was born a fortnight after one and died a day after the next. Halley's Comet returns roughly every 76 years; it is next due in 2061.

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WonderScience

NASA's Pioneer 10 and 11 space probes, launched in 1972 and 1973, each carry a small gold-anodised aluminium plaque showing a man, a woman and a map of where the probe came from. They were the first messages deliberately sent on spacecraft bound to leave the Solar System.

Carl Sagan and Frank Drake designed the plaque, about 23 by 15 centimetres, and Linda Salzman Sagan drew the figures. Its key is hydrogen, the most common element in the universe: a hydrogen atom can flip between two energy states and give off radiation of a fixed wavelength, about 21 centimetres, which offers any finder a universal unit of length and time. Using that unit, a map shows the Sun's position relative to 14 pulsars, collapsed stars that spin and send out radio pulses at precise, recognisable rates. The nude figures drew complaints, and some newspapers censored them. The plaques are mounted where the probes shield them from interstellar dust. Voyager 1 and 2 followed in 1977, carrying the more elaborate Golden Record.

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WonderScience

The Carrington Event of September 1859, the strongest solar storm on record, spread auroras as far south as Cuba and made telegraph equipment spark. On the line between Boston and Portland, operators unplugged their batteries and kept sending messages for two hours on the storm's current alone.

On 1 September 1859 the English astronomer Richard Carrington was sketching sunspots at his observatory in Redhill, Surrey, when two patches of intense white light flared up on the Sun. He and another observer, Richard Hodgson, made the first recorded sightings of a solar flare. About 17 hours later a cloud of charged particles from the Sun struck Earth's magnetic field, driving electric currents through long telegraph wires. The Boston and Portland operators' exchange was reported in the press: working without batteries, one wrote that the line was 'better than with our batteries on'. On 23 July 2012 a storm of similar size crossed Earth's orbit where Earth had been about nine days earlier. A direct hit today could damage satellites and power grids, which is why forecasters still plan for 'another Carrington'.

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