Note: There is a special note to teachers at the bottom of this post. If you’re a teacher, please be sure to check it out!

My friend Tina is a teacher at the Saegert Sixth Grade Center in Austin, Texas. She asked her sixth grade students to send me questions they had about astronomy, and I answer them on camera. There were so many I had to split this into five parts! I’ll be posting one part every day, first thing in the morning. Monday was Part 1, and below is Part 2.

I think y’all will like number 8 the best.

The questions asked in Part 2 are:

1) Why is gravity different on the Moon?

2) Why are planets round?

3) How deep do the gases on Jupiter go?

4) Are Uranus and Neptune solid ice?

5) Why is Uranus tipped over?

6) Can a moon have a moon?

7) Can you touch a comet and land on an asteroid?

8) Does Titan smell like poop?

9) Will my school get hit by a meteorite?

10) What would happen if you hit a golf ball on the Moon?

SPECIAL NOTE TO TEACHERS: Many schools block access to YouTube. There is another video hosting platform called TeacherTube, which is designed to be used in schools. I’ve uploaded this video (Part 2) to my channel there, where you can access it in your school (note: the video is in higher-resolution on YouTube). If you do, please let me know! I’d love to know what the students thought of the video — warts and all.

So I’m sitting at home today doing some work on my laptop and feeling decadent because I have the TV on as well. I decide to flip through the channels.

Home Shopping. click Infomercial. click Pat Robertson. click Same infomercial, different channel. click Poker. click Baseball. click Golf. click Infomercial. click Star Trek.

Win! Classic Trek! And it’s "Tomorrow is Yesterday", a good one. The Enterprise is thrown back in time to the 1960s, and they accidentally beam aboard an Air Force pilot, and antics ensue.

At the end, to get back to the future, they have to warp to the Sun, use its "magnetic field" to pull them in, and then that will somehow throw them first back in time a little way, and then forward back to their present.

OK.

So I’m watching, and I realize that this is one of the upgraded, refurbished Treks. They digitally remastered and cleaned up the old films, and added new computerized effects. Sometimes it’s good, and sometimes it’s not so good. In this episode, I got a chuckle out of seeing that they used special effects to make the ship’s chronometer be more digital looking, instead of the silly rotating tumblers they used to have back in the 1960s.

But then there was a "what-the-heck?" moment. As they warp past the Sun, they used a lot of the new effects, which looked OK. You see the Enterprise approach the Sun, and then move off to the right side of the Sun as it starts to warp around. The ship banks left, to port.

Now, I can forgive the idea that you don’t need to bank in space (no air, so nothing to bank against). I’m used to it. Plus, they had to put it in: in the original footage, we see the crew suddenly lean to one side when Sulu throws the switch.

But there was one thing the effects guys maybe should have thought through first. We see the ship banking to the left, to port, since it’s on the right side of the Sun. But in the original footage, everybody leans toward port!

Oops. If they bank to port, the crew would lean to the right, to starboard. Remember now, in 2006 someone went in and added that warp effect. And they screwed it up: the ship should have gone to the left side of the Sun, and the ship should have banked to starboard. Then the crew leaning to port would make sense.

I know, there are a million other things to nitpick on the show, but I give the original show a pass on a lot of them. In this case, some computer guys put the new effects long after the fact. They should have paid attention! They should be stripped of their Trek geek badges, too.

But it was still cool to see the old shows all spiffied up and pretty. Kirk rocks.

Alternate headline: Teeing Me Off

Well, despite many protests (here and here, for example) Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin went ahead and hit a golf ball off the International Space Station.

It was a stunt paid for by a golf club company, and the cash-strapped Russian Space agency eagerly accepted the money. I am of two minds about this, since I like the idea of private companies supporting space travel, but I also think it can go too far. Hitting the golf ball into space was a silly gimmick, but I also think it’s stupidly dangerous. It only massed three grams, but at orbital speeds it could destroy another satellite. The odds are low, but why purposely increase the amount of junk floating in space?

The company has already jumped in and, according to a peeved-sounding NASA official, grossly exaggerated what happened, too:

That drive went 1 billion miles (1.6 billion kilometers) — or will by the time it eventually comes down in a couple years — said Nataliya Hearn, the president of Element 21 Golf Company. […]

That’s a huge exaggeration, according to NASA’s lead spacewalk flight director, Holly Ridings. She said NASA’s calculations are that golf balls would only stay up two to three days, which would put the drive closer to a mere million miles (1.6 million kilometers).

I’ll say I’m surprised the ball will come down as quickly as a few days. That implies it will dip pretty low into our atmosphere, which will slow it and drop it more. I wouldn’t think a guy in spacesuit would be able to hit it hard enough to change the orbit of the ball that much.

Anyway, I can’t leave this issue without noting some Bad Astronomy by NASA:

NASA spacewalk commentator Rob Navias, who was not broadcasting in golf’s traditional hushed tones, noted that Tyurin’s shot sliced to the right.

That’s a joke, of course, but the pedant in me must point out that a golf slice happens due to the way the spinning golf ball interacts with the air. There’s no air up there. That’s why, in space, no one can hear you yell "Fore!"

Anyway, I fear this will not be the last of the dumb things done to make money in space. I’m not sure how much to worry about space banners, for example, which will be big lit-up banners in orbit hawking commercial products; this has been proposed realistically and could do serious damage to ground-based astronomy. The list goes on and on. I’m not a big fan of regulating what goes on in space, but if garbage like this golf shot keeps up, I may change my mind.

It had to happen eventually, I suppose: Madonna is interested into going into space. She mentioned it on a visit to Russia recently, and while it caused some distress in that country, I’ll just bet that they’ll acquiesce — if they’re willing to let an astronaut hit a golf ball off the space station, I think they’ll let Madonna go up as well. And if it helps give publicity to space travel, and, better yet, gets young girls interested in space and science, then I’m all for it.

In the meantime, I’ll avoid jokes about "Burning Up", "Lucky Star", and "Live to Tell", but I can’t help wondering: why did she go with the Russians, and not try to book with Virgin Galactic?

Tip of the pointy bra to James Oberg for the news, and yes, the image is from the actual Russian Novosti news article.

Physorg.com has an article (evidently syndicated through AFP) about the ridiculous and dangerous idea of a cosmonaut hitting a golf ball off the space station.

In that article is this line, about how difficult it is to hit the ball the way you want:

The ball thus could quite easily be mis-hit and travel only a couple of metres (a few feet), or be hooked or sliced and sent in entirely the wrong direction.

Um. Um. In space, with no air, what will stop the ball after "a couple of metres"? If it hits a strut or bulkhead, it’ll bounce off and continue on in another direction. And hooking or slicing it will prove difficult, since those shots depend on gravity and air (to be fair, by "hook" and "slice" the author meant the ball might be hit too far to the left or right, but technically those types of motion are due to the ball interacting with air).

Too bad the article has no byline, or I’d email the author. I tried the contact page for AFP, but they want my phone number! No way. Maybe this will filter over to them.

Incidentally, in the comments from my last blog entry is an ongoing conversation about the chances of the ball coming back to hit the station. I first thought yes it will, then I wasn’t so sure. But then I read the article linked above, where Heiner Klinkrad, acting head of space debris at the European Space Agency (ESA), had this to say:

For the ISS, the most probable collision velocity in the worst-case scenario is somewhere at 10 to 11 kilometres (six to 6.5 miles) per second… The international recommendations are that you should not throw out unnecessary objects, and I wouldn’t qualify a golf ball as a mission-related object.

He doesn’t give the odds, and so it’s hard to know how low the chances are of a collision later. But given all the uncertainties, this strikes me as a dangerously foolish stunt. If/when NASA’s people finish their study, I’ll post a synopsis here.

I heard about this the other day, and I almost did a comic double-take.

The golf club manufacturer Element 21 is planning a publicity stunt where an cosmonaut on the International Space Station will hit a ball off the station with one of its gold-plated clubs.

No, I’m not kidding. I wish I were.

You an read about it on their (incredibly annoying overly-flash-driven) website. The idea is that an cosmonaut will stand outside the space station and smack a golf ball with the club. The business arrangement for this was made with Russia, not NASA, incidentally.

The insanity of all this is so broad and deep it’s hard to know where to start. Instead, I’ll mention just the most insane thing about it: what happens to the ball after it leaves the station? I’ll tell you: it will go on a separate orbit around the Earth. Moving at approximately 18,000 miles per hour, it is the equivalent of an invisible mine, waiting to impact some other piece of space hardware. Maybe the Shuttle? Maybe some other craft?

Orbital mechanics being what they are, the ball’s orbit will intersect the Space Station’s, so that a collision between the two is highly likely certainly possible. I have no clue what the Russians are thinking about all this. NASA claims to have given this a preliminary once-over, but not the full safety treatment.

Has everyone lost their minds? What the hell is going on?

Keith Cowing wrote a very interesting and thorough piece about this nonsense on Spaceref.com. He takes NASA and Russia to task for this, rightly so. The Russians have proven to be compliant when money is offered for stunts; it makes a difference to them between having a space program and not having one. I can sympathize with this in general, but certainly not in this specific case.

And every safety officer at NASA should be screaming bloody murder about this. Now, I can think of several ways of mitigating the safety issues, but the best and most obvious one is to not do stupid stuff like this in the first place.

Sheesh.