Tag: science

Apollo 13

Posted on by Brian Garthwaite
News release announcing the upcoming Apollo 11 launch in 1970.
We all saw the movie, right?

Fifty-five years ago saw the launch of the Apollo 13 lunar mission, on 11 April 1970. It didn’t go to plan, of course. Things took a bad turn, could have been worse, but who can blame them for optimism in the weeks leading up to it all? Moon science is cool!

Check out that pure 1970 map illustration!

Maps, plans, a pretty tight itinerary. It’s expensive and difficult to go to the Moon, so you don’t waste time. But don’t those hand-drawn maps just make it so inviting? Presumably the astronauts carried maps which were much more detailed and useful, if less likely to get the kid inside all of us super-excited.

Apollo 14 would reach the Fra Mauro highlands in early 1971, though Lovell, Swigert, and Haise never flew into space again.

More Sodium

Posted on by Brian Garthwaite
You’d think it would be more complicated inside.

Here, our more modern sodium light sources, using a clever design that enabled a reduction from the minimum 35W to as little as 18W in 1977. Cool, yeah?

Unfortunately, Philips finally bowed out of the low pressure sodium lamp game in 2019, mean we’ve got these dinosaurs running for as long as we can scour spare lamps online. Once the supply’s gone, it’s gone.

Pure sodium!

Hey, look! Sodium metal! Highly reactive, so it’s inside with a mixture of 99% neon and 1% argon, neither of which deigns to react with, well, anything. That’s why, when it starts up, we see a purplish glow from the noble gases before tube reaches 260°C and vaporizes the sodium. After that, it’s an intense monochromatic yellow-orange that’s hard to look at.

Bespoke Breadboard

Posted on by Brian Garthwaite
Long piece of aluminum, in process of machining mounting holes.
So many.

Need a thing, but can’t get it in the right size, right shape, right odd set of dimensions? That’s one reason to keep a workshop in the basement. If we can possibly make it, we’ll certainly try.

Pictured: a custom optics breadboard, for a very specific apparatus, with many, many drilled, tapped, and cleaned 1/4″-20 mounting holes. It’s big, and shiny, and has a bright future ahead!

Probably with lasers or something. Lots of lasers around here.

News Release: Space Frogs

Posted on by Brian Garthwaite
Press release, "Orbiting frogs doing well"
Space travel is only fun if you signed up willingly.

We’re all relieved to hear that. While the American bullfrog enjoys a large natural range throughout eastern North America, and are celebrated jumpers, they are not typically encountered at heights above the earth that one would consider “in orbit.”

Whatever it’s like to think like a frog, we can safely assume that the rocket launch and orbital microgravity experiences were weird by any frog standards.

Doppler Ball

Posted on by Brian Garthwaite
Orange foam ball on cable
The noise is more obnoxious than the color.

An electronic buzzer buried inside a foam ball, on a long cable with a switch and handle at the end. Flick the switch, and a piercing 2,500 Hz signal begins. Whirled in a big circle around your own head, the tone persists. For everyone else in the room, it creates a cyclic Doppler shift, a repeating weeee-oooo, weeee-oooo that sticks in the brain even after it’s done, like when you see phosphene images behind your eyelids after catching a glimpse of something way too bright.

We can’t overstate the wonderful modifications to the original object, back in 2010, which added the cable and switch. Your bog-standard Doppler ball – available from several scientific apparatus purveyors – requires one to open up the ball, turn on the buzzer, then close it back up. Tossing it back and forth between students illustrates the concept.

Then, when you’ve had quite enough and just want it to stop, you have to pry it open and shut the whole thing off. (This vintage version, pre-mod, required full-on battery removal.) The Doppler ball: it teaches us all kinds of new lessons!