Science

Away Team Report: (2012.0223) Academy of Sciences – ‘Robots!’

Posted by Zach Perkins on 2012.0424
Posted in: Away Missions, Science.

Yep, we went again. At this rate, I’m starting to think that we should just re-name the USS Loma Prieta’s ship’s bar to “the Academy”. Our ‘bar’ would be like Ten Forward, the arboretum, AND the holodeck combined. Best ship’s lounge ever, amirite??

An away team lead by myself, Capt. Zach Perkins, and accompanied by LtCmdr. Tom Hesser, Lt. Samantha Dolgoff, En. Cindy Bee, and En. Kristin Koperski beamed down to the luxurious landing pads of the California Academy of Science to survey their impressive array of artificial lifeforms and various other automated works of art.

Lt. Dolgoff and I first rendezvoused with Admiral David Nottage of the USS Golden Gate, and together we attended an in-depth holographic simulation and briefing on NASA’s 21st century robotic missions to explore Sector 001. Afterwards, we re-grouped with the rest of the USS Loma Prieta crew for a bite to eat at the Academy’s mess hall. The crew proceeded to sample some fine Earth beverages until our servos were sufficiently ‘lubricated’ to proceed with our survey.

Our first discovery was a set of robots made out of household items, like kitchen dish brushes, which were thoroughly amusing. We again encountered the same pre-Borg spheres that we had discovered during our previous Academy away mission (this time they threatened us with an eerie electronic cry of “EXTERMINATE!!!”), as well as an R2-D2 style droid made out of a discarded Heineken mini-keg, and even a pair of small spider-like robots that seemed intent on trying to mate with our shoes.

Before the evening concluded, we learned that the Academy of Sciences would soon be hosting a Night Life celebration for Yuri’s Night, on April 12th, which is a global celebration Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space. We immediately knew that this wouldn’t be the last time the Loma Prieta paid a visit to the Academy…

~Capt. Zach Perkins
Commanding Officer
USS Loma Prieta
Starfleet, Region 4

Away Team Report: (2011.1117) Academy of Sciences – ‘Into Space’

Posted by Chief Engineer on 2012.0123
Posted in: Away Missions, Report, Science.

Chief Engineer’s Log: Having successfully traveled back into the early 21st century, we arrived at the California Academy of Sciences, and the crew of the USS Loma Prieta split into teams to examine various aspects of this historic building which. By the mid 22nd century, this bastion of scientific wonder was relocated to make way for the construction of Starfleet Headquarters and Starfleet Academy.

Leading the Engineering team, and accompanied by Ensign Cindy Bee, we proceeded to examine future engineering technology as it applied to space travel during the early 21st century.  Our attention was drawn to the NASA table containing the Kepler project. The Kepler project, or just “Kepler”, is NASA’s first attempt to find class M planets outside our own solar system.  At this point in Earth history, the only manned space exploration has been to the Earth’s moon.

Using a specially designed, very sensitive, wide-field telescope called a photometer, Kepler seeks to detect planets that can support life, by detecting light from nearby stars that is periodically blocked by orbiting planetoids.  Kepler was launched into orbit around the Earth’s sun (Sol) on March 6, 2009  and functions as a very precise light meter. Data from at least three transits of a planetoid must be collected in order to ensure that it is indeed a planet orbiting the given star. Transits occur when the orbit of a planet is along our line of sight to a star. These transits can last from a few hours to about half a day and happen once per orbit.

Once enough data has been collected, scientists can determine both the planet’s size and its orbit from the transits. The planet’s size determines if you could have a life-sustaining atmosphere. Knowing the orbit and type of a star, scientists can determine if the planet is in the “HZ” of that star. The HZ refers to the “habitable zone” and is the range of distance from a star where liquid water can exist on a planet’s surface.  With the current understanding of carbon-based life, water is required for the chance for life to develop on a planet outside our solar system, at least life similar to our own. Of course, finding such a planet does not guarantee that it will support life, but this is the first step that NASA has taken to determine this without resorting to further manned missions within the galaxy.

Kepler is pointed at a rich star field in the Cygnus and Lyra regions of our galaxy, the Milky Way, and continuously monitors more than 100,000 stars to look for planets.  In the early 21st century, the world was still using a system called the Internet to communicate and store information. By current Starfleet standards, the system was laughably inadequate. Using this medium, information regarding the project could be found at the internet address of http://kepler.nasa.gov. It is amusing to note that Starfleet crews have visited thousands of class M planets in its history, and one has to wonder if the Kepler project had detected any of those beforehand. Upon completing our research, myself and Ensign Cindy Bee concluded our reports and went in search of synth ale, however it hasn’t been invented yet so we had to drink a regional version of beer instead. I have to say, programmers for the replicators and manufacturers of synth ale should really come back in time and get some samples of beer so that they can more closely duplicate the flavors. If only the Academy had been dispensing whiskey, now that would’ve been a wonderful history lesson.

~Lt. Tom Hesser
Chief Engineer
USS Loma Prieta
Starfleet, Region 4

Flight Control Report (2011.1020): Warp Theory for Dummies

Posted by Jon Sung on 2011.1021
Posted in: Report, Science.

Warp Drive Explained: How Starships Move Faster Than Light

If you’ve ever watched a rerun of Star Trek and wondered what the crew of the Enterprise means when they say they’re traveling at “warp speed,” then this is the article for you: an explanation of the theory behind warp drive.

The galaxy’s a big place. In fact, just going from one star to the next involves distances so great they break the mind. Take our sun, for example: our closest neighbor is a star called Alpha Centauri. It’s 4.4 light years away. A light year, by the way, is the distance a beam of light covers in the span of a year (keep in mind that light travels 186,000 miles in one second), which means the 4.4 light year distance to Alpha Centauri translates to 25.81 trillion miles, equivalent to going around the world a billion times. Yes, a billion. And that’s our closest neighbor!

So if you’re going to make a TV show where people fly around in a starship having adventures in different solar systems, the ship should probably have some way of traveling faster than light in order to make the show exciting. Let’s say you want it to be plausible — not 100% true-to-life documentary-quality accurate, but it should at least be sort of believable. It’s a good goal, right?

There are a couple of problems with trying to travel faster than light:

  • The laws of physics. Technically speaking, light’s the fastest thing there is, which makes lightspeed the speed limit of the universe. Nothing can go faster than light. It’s the law!
  • Energy. A rocket engine, the best kind of engine we currently know how to build, works by creating thrust: it makes a controlled explosion whose force is vectored out the end of the rocket, making it move. But rockets can be inefficient: the rocket engines needed to make a single space shuttle go fast enough to escape the pull of Earth’s gravity are huge, noisy, and messy, and they don’t go anywhere near lightspeed. Think about how fast light travels: how would you build a rocket big enough to push something that fast? Where would you put all the fuel? The design challenges are immense, even for a TV show.
  • Relativity. The short version goes like this: Einstein’s theory of relativity states that the closer you move toward lightspeed, the slower time will move for you. Say you get on a ship and I stay here on Earth. Your ship somehow manages to get close to lightspeed while you’re looking at your watch, and you count ten seconds before the ship comes to a halt. Ten seconds passed on your watch, but on mine at home, a year went by. We celebrated my birthday, somebody had a kid, and a whole season of Parks & Rec came and went while you counted off those ten seconds on your ship! The relativity problem makes faster-than-light travel a little weird, to say the least. If you want to make a TV show about a starship, not time travel, you’ve got to find a way around relativity.

On Star Trek they have warp drive. That’s not a name they chose at random. The Enterprise doesn’t use rockets; its engines don’t create thrust or leave a trail of exhaust. Two basic things make warp drive work:

  1. Magical TV sci-fi technology that bends the fabric of space.
  2. The universal truth that objects that are twisted up will always try to untwist themselves naturally — crumple up a sheet of parchment paper and watch it relax, for instance.

Warp drive literally warps the fabric of space to propel a ship faster than it should legally be allowed to go.

Imagine a football. Now dip it in some lard or engine grease (or both, why not). What would happen if you tried to grab it? The football would squirt out of your grip: the act of trying to close your hands on its tail end causes it to pop out of your clutches.

That’s what the engines on the Enterprise do. They put out a “warp field” that bends the fabric of space, creating a kind of bubble of twisted space around the ship that’s like a giant greased-up football. That’s the first thing in action. The second thing (objects that are twisted up always try to untwist themselves) comes into play immediately thereafter: the fabric of space is always trying to untwist itself around the warp bubble, which is shaped in such a way that the untwisting closes on its tail end, squirting the ship forward.

And since they’re doing it by warping space itself, they don’t have to play by its speed limit: the Enterprise can move faster than light. Much faster, as it turns out: the top speed of the Enterprise on Star Trek: TNG is about 1500x lightspeed.

This is also how they get around the relativity problem: inside the warp field bubble, time moves at the usual rate because technically speaking, the ship isn’t actually moving — space is warping around it, making it move.

That’s the theory behind warp drive. According to quantum physicists, it’s apparently mathematically sound. The trouble is that nobody knows how to actually do that first thing: how to make that warp field bubble. The technology, if it even exists, is way beyond us, at least for the moment. But at least we can imagine how it would work, and that’s pretty cool, too.

~Lt. Jon Sung
Chief Helm Officer
USS Loma Prieta
Starfleet, Region 4