If you’re anywhere near New Orleans on Saturday, September 8, come join me for a free (Free! Free! Free!) writing workshop on “Building Believable Characters in Fiction.” From 1-4:30 at the Rosa F. Keller Library in Broadmoor. Sponsored by the fabulous New Orleans Writers Workshop. And did I mention that it was free? Free free free!
More info here: “Building Believable Characters in Fiction.”
Hello, old friend! I’m working hard to finish up a new novel. These things always take about four times longer than I imagine they will.
In the meantime, I’ll offer this song by Rebekah Del Rio, “No Stars,” seen on David Lynch’s new Twin Peaks.
I’ll be joining fellow UNCW grads Jake Hinkson and Sneza Zabic this Wednesday in Chicago for a reading and talk at City News Cafe. Come say hello. Have some scones. Find out if geography really is destiny, and then stay for some music.
“South by Midwest,” hosted by Packingtown Review.
Here’s a photo of me and Jake looking authorial:
I’m not a poet, but I’m looking forward to attending the New Orleans Poetry Festival, April 20-22, at the Healing Center here in, of course, New Orleans.
Saturday evening, I’ll be on a panel with writers Katy Simpson Smith, Kalamu Salaam, and Kristina Kay Robinson, talking about “Lonely Voices: Storytelling, Character, and Place.”
And then much later that night, if you’re lucky, you might catch me playing drums at the “Poets with Bands” after-hours party at Siberia Lounge down the street on St. Claude.
Here’s a picture of my drums:
A lovely short video from Wylie Overstreet and Alex Gorosh. Amateur astronomer Overstreet set up his telescope outside on the streets of Los Angeles and let strangers look through it. They were all amazed by what they saw. “Oh my god. That’s the moon?”
Says Overstreet, “It makes you realize that we’re all on a small little planet, and we all have the same reaction to the universe we live in. . . . It’s a great reminder that we should look up more often.”
More here, from The Atlantic:
On a whim, Wylie Overstreet set up his telescope outside his apartment. He wanted to look at the moon. He had no idea he would, in a matter of hours, inspire awe in hundreds of strangers on the streets of Los Angeles. “It’s incredible how many people have never looked through a telescope,” Alex Gorosh, a friend of Overstreet’s, told The Atlantic.“Many people thought the image wasn’t real—they thought we were playing a prank on them.”
Overstreet and Gorosh were so taken by strangers’ reactions to the moon through their telescope that the friends began to set it up in different locations across the city, filming as they went. “That’s when we recognized the powerful message of unity that we were capturing,” said Gorosh.
Their resulting film, A New View of the Moon, is a simple tribute to human wonder. Like last year’s total solar eclipse, Overstreet and Gorosh witnessed how a cosmic event has the power to bring people together. “It’s about taking a step back and appreciating the beauty and grandeur of the natural world around us,” said Gorosh. “It sounds cheesy, but if we were able to do that more often, it would be much easier to work through the divisions that we’re facing as a culture.”
“Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious. And however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at.” – Stephen Hawking
I’m excited to be joining the faculty of the New Orleans Writers Workshop. This spring I’ll be teaching a 4-week workshop on “Creating Great Characters in Fiction.” Below’s the course description and a link to more info. Come join us if you’re in the area. King Cake will probably be on the agenda.
Creating Great Characters in Fiction
Stories are often described as being “plot driven” or “character driven,” but all fiction, regardless of style or genre, relies on strong, memorable characters: people so vivid and real, we feel like we know them.
This four-week novel writing workshop will devote special attention to building memorable characters in long-form fiction. In addition to workshopping participants’ writing, we’ll also use guided exercises to help members explore and deepen their fictional creations.
Suggested texts are John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction and On Becoming a Novelist. Participants should bring in 10-25 pages from any chapter of a potential novel or a novel-in-progress. Recommended for intermediate to advanced level writers.
More at neworleanswriters.com
Probably safer to stay indoors. Probably best not to even get out of bed. But if you must see it, in the US those on the West coast will have the best view. Other locations might miss the eclipse, but you’ll still be able to see super blue blood moon. More here from NPR.
With all the disheartening news coming from Washington, DC, and elsewhere, here’s one piece of happy reporting:
Voyager I spacecraft, launched in 1977 and traveling outside our solar system now, 13 billion miles from the Sun, is still sputtering along.
Last week, scientists sent out commands to fire its thrusters, idle since 1980. The signal took 20 hours to reach the spacecraft, 20 hours to return–and it worked. The thrusters fired, the thing moved. The staff cheered.
And all this using technology that’s probably less advanced than your watch, and with a team of nine ancient engineers working out of a small rental suite in Altadena, CA.
Which proves, I like to think, that the US was once capable of amazing feats of scientific endeavor and, perhaps, still is.
This is the same Voyager spacecraft, by the way, that carries the famous “Golden Record”–a gold-plated copper disc engraved with Earth images, sounds, spoken messages, and music, including Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Stravinsky, Blind Willie Johnson, and Chuck Berry playing “Johnny B. Goode.”
(You can buy your own copy of the Golden Record, available for the first time this year in a special 3-album set, from Ozma Records.)
Below’s the full article from ArsTechnica on the firing of Voyager I’s thrusters. See also my August 4 post about the skeleton staff still operating the Voyagers, The Loyal Engineers Steering NASA’s Voyager Probes Across the Universe.
Cheers!
After 37 Years, Voyager I Has Fired Up Its Trajectory Thrusters
This week, the scientists and engineers on the Voyager team did something very special.
ARSTECHNICA
ERIC BERGER
12/1/2017, 2:45 PM
At present, the Voyager 1 spacecraft is 21 billion kilometers from Earth, or about 141 times the distance between the Earth and Sun. It has, in fact, moved beyond our Solar System into interstellar space. However, we can still communicate with Voyager across that distance.
This week, the scientists and engineers on the Voyager team did something very special. They commanded the spacecraft to fire a set of four trajectory thrusters for the first time in 37 years to determine their ability to orient the spacecraft using 10-millisecond pulses.
After sending the commands on Tuesday, it took 19 hours and 35 minutes for the signal to reach Voyager. Then, the Earth-bound spacecraft team had to wait another 19 hours and 35 minutes to see if the spacecraft responded. It did. After nearly four decades of dormancy, the Aerojet Rocketdyne manufactured thrusters fired perfectly.
“The Voyager team got more excited each time with each milestone in the thruster test. The mood was one of relief, joy, and incredulity after witnessing these well-rested thrusters pick up the baton as if no time had passed at all,” said Todd Barber, a propulsion engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.
In recent decades, Voyager had been relying on its primary thrusters to keep the spacecraft properly oriented so that it can maintain a communications link with Earth. But these attitude control thrusters have been degrading over time, requiring more and more energy each time they’ve been used.
By switching to the spacecraft’s “trajectory correction maneuver” thrusters, last used during the spacecraft’s encounter with Saturn in 1980, engineers say they will be able to extend the lifetime of Voyager by two or three more years before its waning power reserves expire.
Saturn’s rings captured by Cassini on Wednesday. Credit NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
CASSINI VANISHES INTO SATURN, ITS MISSION CELEBRATED AND MOURNED
New York Times
By KENNETH CHANG
SEPT. 14, 2017
PASADENA, Calif. — NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, the intrepid robotic explorer of Saturn’s magnificent beauty, ended a journey of 20 years on Friday like a shooting star streaking across Saturn’s sky.
By design, the probe vanished into Saturn’s atmosphere, disintegrating moments after its final signal slipped away into the background noise of the solar system. Until the end, new measurements streamed one billion miles back to Earth, preceded by the spacecraft’s last picture show of dazzling sights from around our sun’s sixth planet.
“The signal from the spacecraft is gone and, within the next 45 seconds, so will be the spacecraft,” Earl Maize, the program manager, announced in the control room at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory here, just after 4:55 a.m. local time.
His eyes teared and his voice wavered as he said, “I am going to call this the end of mission.” During a news conference later, he said, “To the very end, the spacecraft did everything we asked.”
The team members, some of whom had spent decades on the mission, started hugging each other when news of the spacecraft’s demise arrived.
Never again would Cassini send home the images and data that inspired discoveries and wonder during the probe’s 13 years in orbit around the ringed planet.
“For me, there’s a core of sadness, in part in thinking of the breakup of the Cassini family,” said Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist. “But it’s both an end and a beginning as these people go off and work on other things.”
The mission for Cassini, in orbit since 2004, stretched far beyond the original four-year plan, sending back multitudes of striking photographs, solving some mysteries and upending prevailing notions about the solar system with completely unexpected discoveries.
“Cassini is really one of those quintessential missions from NASA,” said Thomas H. Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator for science. “It hasn’t just changed what we know about Saturn, but how we think about the world.”
Cassini’s hazy origin story
Cassini had its origins in the brainstorm of two scientists, Daniel Gautier of the Paris Observatory and Wing-Huen Ip, then at the Max Planck Institute for Aeronomy in Germany.
NASA’s two Voyager spacecraft flew through the Saturn system in 1980 and 1981. Voyager 1, in particular, provided a close-up look at Titan that was enthralling and maddening. Larger than the planet Mercury, Titan was enshrouded in haze. The atmosphere was thicker than Earth’s and contained methane and other carbon-based molecules. What lay below, no one knew.
“Those discoveries led to many more questions,” Dr. Ip recalled.
In 1982, Dr. Gautier and Dr. Ip proposed to the European Space Agency that it collaborate with NASA on a Saturn mission: an orbiter paired with a probe that would parachute onto Titan.
The orbiter became Cassini, built and operated by NASA; the Titan probe was named Huygens, a project of the European Space Agency. The Europeans approved Huygens in 1988. A year later, NASA gave the go-ahead for Cassini. The craft were named for a Dutch astronomer, Christiaan Huygens, who discovered Titan and figured out Saturn had rings, and Giovanni Domenico Cassini, a French-Italian astronomer, who discovered four other major moons of Saturn, each in the 17th century.
To take advantage of the gravitational boost from a flyby of Jupiter to accelerate Cassini-Huygens, the spacecraft was launched on Oct. 15, 1997.
Discovering an Earthlike alien moon
Seven years later, Cassini swung into orbit around Saturn. A few months later, Huygens headed to its rendezvous with Titan, the first attempt to touchdown on a moon other than our own.
The lander was equipped with instruments to identify molecules in the air, measure the winds and haze, and take pictures on the way down.
Because the spacecraft designers did not know what the surface was made of, they had designed Huygens to handle several possibilities, including floating for a few minutes if it had turned out that Titan’s surface was a global ocean of methane.
Instead, Huygens bumped onto solid ground, surrounded by a complex network of small rivers. “If you would jump from your table or your desk, you would land on the floor at this speed,” said Jean-Pierre Lebreton, the project scientist for Huygens. “A very reasonable landing speed.”
Photographs at the surface showed what looked like rounded cobblestones that turned out to be blocks of water ice.
The data from Huygens, together with that gathered by Cassini in repeated flybys, revealed Titan as a world shaped by active geological processes with rivers, lakes and rain. But in the frigid temperatures there, about minus 290 degrees Fahrenheit, the fluid is not water, but methane. “Titan has really revealed an Earthlike world,” Dr. Lebreton said.
A journey toward disintegration
NASA spacecraft, if they survive to their destination, often just keep going.
Cassini stayed seven more years to watch changes in Saturn through the passing of seasons. It takes Saturn 29.5 years to orbit the sun, so Cassini has been there for almost half a Saturn year.
One of the mission’s most surprising discoveries was an ocean of water beneath the icy exterior of Enceladus that may be heated by hydrothermal vents similar to those at the bottom of oceans on Earth. The water on this moon and the carbon compounds it contains are some of the key ingredients needed for life that scientists would have thought unlikely on a moon just 313 miles wide.
Even at the end, 20 years after launch, Cassini and its instruments remained in good working shape. The plutonium power source was still generating electricity. But there was not enough propellant fuel left to safely send Cassini anywhere except into Saturn.
Any spacecraft, even one launched two decades ago, has unwanted microbial hitchhikers aboard. In particular, planetary scientists wanted to ensure that there was zero chance of the spacecraft crashing into and contaminating Enceladus or Titan, which could also be hospitable for life. And NASA wants to leave the Saturn system pristine.
In the very last phase of the mission, Cassini dove through the gap between Saturn and the planet’s innermost ring. That provided new, sharp views of the rings and allowed the craft to probe the planet’s interior, as another NASA spacecraft, Juno, is doing at Jupiter.
The last photographs taken by Cassini started streaming back to Earth on Thursday. An infrared image marked the spot high above the planet’s cloud tops where Cassini would disintegrate hours later.
Once these had been sent back to Earth, the probe was reconfigured for the final plunge.
Usually, Cassini would make observations, store them in its memory and beam them back to Earth later. This time, there would be no later. Instead, on the final plunge, the spacecraft kept its antenna dish pointed at Earth, as its instruments gave scientists their deepest direct look ever into Saturn.
As it moved into Saturn’s atmosphere, the drag of gas molecules started twisting the spacecraft, and its small thrusters could no longer keep the 30-passenger school bus-sized craft upright.
Cassini tipped over, its antenna no longer pointing at Earth. That is when the signal disappeared, at an altitude of about 870 miles.
The spacecraft disintegrated at about 7:31 a.m. Eastern time, and much of it melted quickly. The most resilient bits were probably the casings around its plutonium power source, designed to withstand re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere or an explosion at launch.
Studying final signals
Dr. Ip, who helped propose the mission in the 1980s, flew from Taiwan, where he is now a professor at National Central University, to join a commemoration of Cassini’s end at the California Institute of Technology. Hundreds of people gathered for what was part reunion, part celebration, part wake. In the predawn hours of Friday, he and his family were watching the mission’s final moments on giant screens placed on the lawn.
When the signal disappeared, Dr. Ip’s daughter, Anita, cried and hugged her father. “It’s hard to explain,” she said. “It’s always been part of the family.”
Dr. Ip himself was more stoic and bemused. How was he feeling?
“Oh, fine,” he said.
Not far away, William S. Kurth, a University of Iowa physicist who oversaw one of Cassini’s scientific instruments, was looking at a brightly colored plot on his laptop. The final data had already made the journey from Saturn to Australia to Pasadena to Iowa and back again to his computer on the lawn. He pointed out the radio emissions Cassini measured as it had entered Saturn’s atmosphere.
It was less than 10 minutes after word of Cassini’s death, and Dr. Kurth had homework to do.