Author: John F. Lindner

  • It’s Geology, But Not As We Know It

    John F. Lindner

    In a famous Star Trek misquotation, Mr. Spock says to Captain Kirk, “It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it”. Well, yesterday the New Horizons spacecraft returned its first closeup of Pluto, and it’s geology, but not as we know it. The Tombaugh region of Pluto contains a craterless expanse dotted with two-mile high…

  • The Double Planet

    John F. Lindner

    Next week the New Horizons spacecraft falls through (or “flies by”) the Pluto-Charon binary system. This week New Horizons photos reveal dramatic differences between Pluto and Charon, despite their presumed common origin in an interplanetary collision. (By the way, some astronomers — and apparently the New Horizons science team — pronounce “Charon” more like “Charlene”,…

  • Chaos in the Clockwork

    John F. Lindner

    The work of Newton and Laplace suggested to many that the solar system was like a giant clockwork, which was illustrated by beautiful mechanical models called orreries. The controversial Molchanov hypothesis avers that every oscillatory system evolves to a resonance governed by a family of integers, like the 3/2 resonance between the orbits of Pluto…

  • The Flight of the Dragon

    John F. Lindner

    Last week, SpaceX conducted a successful pad abort test of its innovative Crew Dragon spacecraft. Powered by hypergolic monomethylhydrazine CH3(NH)NH2 fuel and nitrogen tetroxide N2O2 oxidizer, which ignite on contact, the Super Draco engines accelerated Dragon from 0 to 100 mph in 1.2 seconds — that’s faster than a Tesla (the electric cars made by Elon Musk’s…

  • The Unveiling of Pluto

    John F. Lindner

    As a kid, I poured over diagrams in Popular Science magazine describing possible Grand Tours of the outer solar system (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto) made possible by a rare alignment of the planets. Unfortunately, budget cuts reduced the Grand Tour to the Voyager missions to Jupiter and Saturn. While Voyager 2’s mission was ultimately…

  • Strange Nonchaotic Stars

    John F. Lindner

    On the second day of my University of Hawai’i sabbatical, I began to work with space telescope data that would invigorate the study of variable stars and justify my NASA T-shirts. While the brightness of stars like the sun is nearly constant, the brightness of other stars changes with time. Exploiting the unprecedented capabilities of the planet-hunting Kepler space…

  • Wooster Physics in Hawai’i!

    John F. Lindner

    Aloha! Thanks to Wooster’s generous sabbatical program, I’m spending the 2014-2015 academic year at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa on the island of O’ahu in Honolulu, and I’m learning my Hawaiian accents. I live in a very small studio apartment with spectacular views of the ocean, Diamond Head or Lē’ahi (which I call Lily Crater), and…

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