{"id":121,"date":"2004-11-17T23:47:00","date_gmt":"2004-11-17T23:47:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ianridley.org.uk\/?p=121"},"modified":"2011-07-06T23:36:50","modified_gmt":"2011-07-06T22:36:50","slug":"2004-a-bbc-space-odyssey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/ianridley.org.uk\/?p=121","title":{"rendered":"2004: A BBC Space Odyssey"},"content":{"rendered":"

To tell the truth I’ve been rather busy this last year – hence no Blog. Anyway I’m back.<\/p>\n

I’ve been watching the BBC mini-series Space Odyssey: Voyage to the Planets<\/a>, which concluded last night. I suppose you could describe it as a docu-drama. In all it was pretty good although it got increasingly far-fetched towards the end.<\/p>\n

I know I write with a little knowledge in this area (an academic back ground in space science, not forgetting that crucial GCSE in Astronomy) but things I wouldn’t do on the first manned misson around the solar system:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Land on Venus – 400 deg C, acid rain, active volcanoes and enough air pressure to squash you flat….<\/li>\n
  2. Sling shot round the sun without any ability to dodge solar flares<\/li>\n
  3. Go through the “asteroid belt”. Even allowing for the fact that it’s not the dense collection of rocks that most people think it is (space is really big and you’d need a lot of rock to fill it) I’d still go outside the plane of most asteroids’ orbits<\/li>\n
  4. Land on Io – really active volcanoes, even more so than Venus. Plus Jupiter’s gravity well and radiation fields<\/li>\n
  5. Not land on Europa. Possibly the next most interesting thing around here next to Mars and they send a probe.<\/li>\n
  6. Stick your spacecraft in a gap in Saturn’s rings – how dodgy is that? And then do an EVA<\/li>\n
  7. Ignore all the Saturian moons apart from Titan. At least give one of Iapetus (albedo variation), Mimas (massive crater) or Enceladus (geologically active?) a look<\/li>\n
  8. Ignore Uranus or Neptune in favour of Pluto unless (as in the case of this programme) you really can’t make the orbital mechanics work for you<\/li>\n
  9. Land on a comet that is getting close enough to the sun to heat up<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    It’s amazing they got back at all.<\/p>\n

    Still it wouldn’t have been an exciting docu-thingy if they’d played it safe<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    To tell the truth I’ve been rather busy this last year – hence no Blog. Anyway I’m back. I’ve been watching the BBC mini-series Space Odyssey: Voyage to the Planets, which concluded last night. I suppose you could describe it as a docu-drama. In all it was pretty good although it got increasingly far-fetched towards […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[27,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-121","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-astronomy","category-space-flight"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6dbnw-1X","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/ianridley.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/ianridley.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/ianridley.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ianridley.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ianridley.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=121"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/ianridley.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":342,"href":"http:\/\/ianridley.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121\/revisions\/342"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/ianridley.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=121"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ianridley.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=121"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ianridley.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}