Tag: Real Science

Geeking Science: Tumbleweed Rovers

Erin Penn Leave a comment

Pink Lady in the Negev Desert, credit to OEWF/AMADEE20.

Exploring space is challenging, especially on a budget, but the challenge can bring innovations. For example, instead of robots landing on Mars under a controlled descent, they now bounce some of them, saving fuel and materials, devoting the weight to better things. If you want to learn more about landings on Mars, check out Nasa’s article on “How We Land on Mars”. ( https://science.nasa.gov/planetary-science/programs/mars-exploration/mission-timeline/how-we-land-on-mars/ )

After landing, the next question is how to explore the planet. Ever present-telescopes and satellites provide a lot of information, but to really get to know a planet, you need to get in the dirt. The first Mars landers stayed in place. Next came the wonderfully determined rovers. Most recently humans have added drones, little hovercraft, atmosphere permitting – which Mars does have, as our eyes on planets far away. (9/21/2023 Geeking Science: Drone Ingenuity) Earlier this year, I talked about the development of wormlike rovers to explore ice planets (2/20/2025 Geeking Science: EELS) and a variation on space RVing, taking the laboratory with you. (4/23/2025 Geeking Science: T is for Toyota RV Lunar Life)

The most recent innovation – blowing in the wind. The “rover” is a tumbleweed with minor control having a weight encouraging the device to roll one way or the other in the wind. Instead of rovers measuring progress in inches a day, or even yards with the wonderful Ingenuity, these sixteen-foot spheres may average 0.22 miles per hour. Scientists say under optimal conditions, a tumbleweed rover may cover as much as 1,740 miles. (Mendenhall) Although, the expectation is to average 250 miles in the 100 sol life expectency.  To put this in perspective, hard-working Opportunity traveled 28.1 miles total (Beck).

Because of the small, light size of the design, the Tumbleweed Mission doesn’t plan to drop one or two rovers, but a swarm of ninety of them. (Kingsnorth) Some will be dropped randomly providing maps for future explorations and settlements. Some may be dropped in “hill country”, places where rovers can’t climb, but look like water has flowed. Plans are still being formed.

These designs have been in the works over fifteen years. (Discover) They have reached the concept testing point of wind tunnels and live tests (under Earth’s gravity and wind). Next trip out to Mars, funding permitting here in America or in one of the other National space agencies like EU or Japan or China, might scatter this wind-blown explorers.

Isn’t science amazing?

 

Bibliography 

Beck, Kellen. “Every rover, rankled by distance traveled on the moon and Mars.” Mashable.com. 2021 August 14. https://mashable.com/article/moon-mars-rover-distance-driven – Last viewed 10/9/2025.

Cooper, Keith. “Tumbleweed-inspired Mars rovers could be blown across the Red Planet.” Space.com. 2025 September 30. https://www.space.com/space-exploration/mars-rovers/tumbleweed-inspired-mars-rovers-could-be-blown-across-the-red-planet – Last viewed 10/9/2025.

Discover. “Tumbleweed Rovers Could Explore Mars.” 2010-ish (says 15 years ago). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JQyPKLCYPQ – Last viewed 10/9/2025.

Europlanet. “Press Release: Tumbleweed Rover Tests Demonstrate Transformative Technology for Low-Cost Mars Exploration.” https://www.europlanet.org/epsc-dps2025-tumbleweed-rover-tests-demonstrate-transformative-technology-for-low-cost-mars-exploration/ – Last viewed 10/9/2025.

JPL. “Tumbleweed Rover Concept for in situ Martian Exploration.” Nasa.gov. (undated) https://www-robotics.jpl.nasa.gov/what-we-do/research-tasks/tumbleweed-rover-concept-for-in-situ-martian-exploration/ – Last viewed 10/9/2025.

Kingsnorth, James, et. al. “A Swarm of Wind-Driven Tumbleweed Rovers for in-situ Mapping of Radiation, Water‑Equivalent Hydrogen and Magnetic Fields on Mars.” Europlanet – Division for Planetary Sciences. https://meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/EPSC-DPS2025/EPSC-DPS2025-1779.html – Last viewed 10/9/2025.

Mendenhall, Brooks. “The wind-driven future of Mars exploration.” MSN.com. 2o25 October. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/the-wind-driven-future-of-mars-exploration/ar-AA1NOXYu – Last viewed 10/9/2025.

Nasa. “How We Land On Mars.” Nasa.gov. undated (likely updated after each new landing on Mars). https://science.nasa.gov/planetary-science/programs/mars-exploration/mission-timeline/how-we-land-on-mars/ – Last viewed 10/9/2025.

Team Tumbleweed. “The Next Generation of Mars Exploration.” Website. https://www.teamtumbleweed.eu/mars/ – Last viewed 10/9/2025.

Other Cool Blogs: Sky and Telescope

Erin Penn Leave a comment

3i/ATLAS is hurdling our way, the third confirmed and recorded interstellar object, believed to have come from much closer to the Milky Way core on its way out to the infinite.

David L. Chandler on July 28, 2025 did an article for Sky & Telescope “Interstellar Comet 3i/ATLAS: What We Know Now”. Lots of cool details about this fleet-footed visitor. What I enjoyed most about the article is the section on “Capturing the Comet at Perihelion”. Timing is crucial to see Comet 3i/ATLAS closest approach to the sun, and for Earth observation, it’s not happening. We will be on the other side of the sun. But because we have machines scattered throughout the system, there is a chance for the satellites we have around Mars and Jupiter to see what happens when this unique comet is at its warmest. It will take some finagling and cooperation. What sends me Geeking is we have OPTIONS, even when Earth isn’t in the right spot. This is what science does. It gives so many options.

If Sky & Telescope publishes stuff that is your jam, you might want to go over to that Other Cool Blog, read up on 3i/ATLAS and other astronomy news. – full URL: https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/interstellar-comet-3i-atlas-what-we-know-now/

Other Cool Blogs: Jeremy Keeshin (@jkeesh) 4/8/2025

Erin Penn Leave a comment

Over on Threadreaderapp, Jeremy Keeshin hosts a blog thread about making computer science more engaging. The one post assembled on April 8, 2025 is a reconstruction of 23 tweets on X (an app whose owner would asphyxiate to realize that the structure of modern software was created by women).

See, men made a machine, but entering numbers and what-not, well that is women’s work. “Human computers” that put men on the moon, that calculate missile trajectories during WWII, that entered all the data for income taxes, etc. Women did meticulous detail work, not men.

To program the first machine so it could actually calculate numbers, six women were hired: Betty Holberton, Jean Bartik, Kay McNulty, Ruth Teitelbaum, Marlyn Meltzer, and Frances Spence.

Find out more on the thread reader app: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1909626044845621299.html

Other postings by Mr. Keeshin include a female blogging about life under Taliban rule, MIT’s interrogate program,  and details about Alan Turing and why he got erased from history.

 

Geeking Science: The Forever Storm

Erin Penn Leave a comment

Photo by NASA Hubble Space Telescope on Unsplash

Do you ever think about the Great Red Spot of Jupiter? About exactly what that storm represents?

It’s Geeking Cool!

Our brains are pretty hard-wired that planetary surface stay the same. It’s a planet right? Sure Jupiter is a gas giant and we take lots of pictures of the swirling gases, but that Great Red Spot reassures our instinctive assumption that planets are still fixed even when gaseous.

Except, no, it isn’t the case.

“The first record of the Great Red Spot is a drawing made in 1831 by German amateur astronomer Samuel Heinrich Schwabe of the “Hollow” in which the spot sits.” (Britannica) And the spot has been continuously observed ever since 1878.

There was a storm recorded in 1665 by Italian astronomer Gian Domoenico Cassini, of which records stopped in 1713. Some scientist think it may have been the Great Red Spot, but more likely the “Permanent Spot” storm subsided and a new storm arose a hundred and sixty years later. Further supporting evidence of a new storm is the Great Red Spot is in the Southern Hemisphere and the drawn records of the Permanent Spot seem to place the phenomenon in the Northern Hemisphere.

Whether long-lived storms flowed over Jupiter’s surface before 1665 can only be speculation. Use of concave lenses to study the sky is recorded in the very early 1600 in Western Europe and spread to China within a decade. (Wikipedia: History, Wikipedia: Chinese) These solidified into telescopes by mid-1600s. Scientists long journaled and drew about the dance in the heavens, but telescopes took the images possible to a whole new level. Before then, while Jupiter is visible to the naked eye, details would not have been able to be picked out.

Having been visible 194 years at this point (oh, do you think we can have a 200-year anniversary in 2031?), the storm has started to shrink, presently a third of its largest size. A “mere” 16,000 kilometers long (still larger than Earth), down from 48,000 kilometers. (Ashford) Scientists are not sure if the storm is winding down, or just changing its shape.

On Earth, when large storms reduce in size over the ocean feeding them energy, the eye of the storm solidifies into hurricanes, the winds increase, and the damage once it makes landfall kicks up the ranking on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane wind scale. On land, hurricanes are cut off from their energy and disperse – growing wider, weaker, until they fall apart.

The Great Red Spot is clearly the eye of a storm, a nearly 200-year-old hurricane the size of the Earth. But modeling it off of Earth weather gets weird because the planet’s atmosphere runs on liquid ammonia not liquid water, and doesn’t have solid ground reducing the power of storms. The mechanism of shrinking storms getting faster winds hasn’t proved to be the case based on data being gathered from satellites in Jupiter’s orbit. Instead, the Spot is deepening, like a swirling funnel cloud forming in green clouds, then lowering down through the atmosphere until it hits the ground as it gets smaller and faster. Jupiter has no ground; how far down can the Great Red Spot go?

Okay, I need a second to recover from the image of a tornado the size of Earth dropping a funnel cloud through layer after layer of Jupiter’s atmosphere. Don’t ask me why an Earth-sized tornado is scarier than an Earth-sized hurricane, but it just is.

I am curious to see if Jupiter’s Forever Storm will dissipate in my lifetime, like a tornado falling apart. If it does fall apart, is Jupiter in “hurricane season” and the atmospheric energy will make a new one or even a chain of new ones? In the meantime, will the deepening of the storm bring new materials from the lower atmospheric levels to the top of Jupiter’s atmosphere for us to study?

The Great Red Spot, so geeking cool.

Bibliography

Ashford, Ade. “Don’t miss Jupiter’s ‘unravelling’ Great Read Spot.” Astronomy Now. 2019 June 6. https://astronomynow.com/2019/06/06/observers-urged-to-monitor-jupiters-unravelling-great-red-spot/ last viewed 6/13/2025.

Britannica. “Great Read Spot.” (undated). https://www.britannica.com/place/Great-Red-Spot  last viewed 6/13/2025.

NASA Goddard. “Jupiter’s Great Red Spot Shrinks and Grow.” YouTube. 2018(?). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDi4IdtvDVE&t=126s last viewed 6/13/2025.

Wikipedia. “Chinese astronomy.” (undated). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_astronomy last viewed 6/13/2025.

Wikipedia. “History of the telescope.” (undated). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_telescope last viewed 6/13/20256.

Editing Rant: Why AI is a No-No

Erin Penn Leave a comment

Image acquired from the Internet

A recent contact I got was a “Hi, I am an illustrator who uses AI.” To which I immediately responded my publisher (and I) have a strict no-AI policy. (points to them for admitting the AI use up front.)

Well, they wrote back and asked why? They said they got a lot of responses like that and were wondering why the publishing industry is so against this tool everyone in the business world is embracing.

I needed to present an argument that wasn’t “well, AI is evil and makes Sarah Connor cry.” Because this person is trying to make a living with art, which means creating art fast in a variety of forms. AI can be a tool like the collage-type art of early photoshop. And for some people everything is shareable – I remember early pirate sites for music and books created by those that thought all data should be free. So what argument to use?

I gave the person the “the courts have declared AI-created materials are not copyrightable.” The fact is who do you attached the “creative” part: the people whose materials and skills the database is built-on (whether the material was bought legally or collected for AI training (like most medical interpretation softwares), mass-trained through people licensing the equipment and uploading suggestions (like many editing softwares), or mass-scrapped/stolen (like most artwork and writing softwares)); the assemblers creating the database; the programmer/team/company that created the search engine/AI platform; or the person using the AI to create the image per their specifications.

When publishing companies (and other companies) cannot attribute copyright ownership, they can not go the AI route. Contracts require clear lines of ownership to distribute rights. (Side-thought: Companies using AI-generated marketing materials, really should rethink their choices, because I bet if you can’t get copyright, you can’t get trademark either.)

Anyway, the person thanked me, saying no one explained it that way to them before.

AI isn’t inherently evil, but there are other considerations and maybe we writers and artists should start pointing out the “bottom line” for companies using AI isn’t protected rather than argue the ethical and moral stances. Many people only are able to listen to money. No copyright, no contract, no clink-clink.

That being said, many aspects of how humans are implementing AI are counter-productive to society as a whole and individuals in general, which ethically and morally could be interpreted as evil.

Ethically, the database builders doing the mass-scrapes, stealing materials under copyright is wrong. Especially when the follow-up programming to access that database includes suggesting prompts where copyright is worked around: create a drawing in the Style of Disney or write a horror book in the style of Stephen King. Both are clear violations of society’s agreement to protect people’s intellectual property so their efforts are paid and they have the opportunity to continue to create what people think is worthy of purchase. The owners of the creative materials did not agree to this use. Ethical sourcing of the materials for the databases needs to be required.

Morally, the electric and water required for datacenters, when the infrastructure is already stressed and normal people are constantly being asked to save irreplaceable energy resources like uranium, coal, and oil, is abhorrent.  While on some levels, the mass-use of the AI-products expands the capability and considerations of LLM (large language models) and AIs (artificial intelligences), making developing of productive uses of AI easier. For example, using AI to figure out how to water crops and target pesticides increases food for all. Also using LLMs to look over medical tests and crunch numbers beyond what humans are capable of save lives. Both of these uses are beneficial, and having everyone exploring LLM products is bringing down the price while also encouraging programmers and companies to discover more uses.

But programs like ChatGPT are being used indiscriminately because people aren’t seeing the cost. Right now the companies are underwriting it in the hopes to make even more money later, but “a single 100-word email in Open AI’s ChatGPT is the equivalent of consuming just over one bottle of water.” (Garrison) Making five quick pictures of you as various Disney Princes is equal to a day’s worth of water for one person. And that isn’t even counting the energy use. (The water is used to cool the heat generated by datacenter computers.)

People are using ChatGPT to write grocery lists. Is a grocery list really worth a bottle of water plus energy? The destruction of trees and habitat for the large area needed for these centers?

I know one email doesn’t matter, but just imagine several cities worth middle schoolers figuring out which version of Pokémon is the best version of their pet, with all the twenty-somethings using it for groceries lists, and all the tech bro saying “send out an email on a meeting about using paper straws to save the environment,” and you can see where the waste of limited resources becomes objectionable.

With the present issues with climate change, is the energy and water use of the datacenters for entertainment purposes appropriate ethically and morally? Is it appropriate to build datacenters on an already stressed electric grid with rolling blackouts just so people can have help writing simple 100-word emails? And is AI/LLM programs and apps the best way to write those emails?

TL/DR: Authors, artists, and other creatives have a love-hate relationship with AI, balanced between an exciting new creative tool and the exploitive, illegal tapping of the creative community by scraping intellectual property for training LLMs. Publishers and those whose business model is based on protecting intellectual property cannot put AI-generated material under contract because of legal considerations of rights and ownership. Additional ethical and moral consideration of the wide-spread use of LLM and the related datacenter industry required to support them makes causal business and entertainment uses of LLM and AI questionable.

Final Thought: I want machines to do the boring grinding repetitive tasks so I can make art and write books.

 

Bibliography

Garrison, Anna. “How Does AI Use Water and Energy? Unpacking the Negative Impact of Chatbots.” GreenMatters. 2025 Jan 10. https://www.greenmatters.com/big-impact/how-much-water-does-ai-use – last viewed 6/8/2025.