Month: October 2016

 
Look up tonight, October 7, and you might notice the sky filled with shooting stars—or you might not notice anything at all. Them’s the breaks with the Draconids meteor shower, which peaks tonight after sunset, washed out slightly by a waxing crescent moon.

It wasn’t always that way. In 1933, the shower was alarmingly powerful, with meteors falling “as thickly as the flakes of snow in a snow storm,” and counts reported from around the world reaching 100 to 480 per minute.

Things have died down a bit since then as the Earth has crossed into less-dense fields of debris from comet Giacobini-Zinner, the source of the Draconids. Under good conditions, you might see 10 or so meteors per hour. Not exactly a “snow storm,” but if you catch 10 good meteors—dust- and sand-sized particles from the comet’s debris field smashing into our atmosphere and burning away—it should be well worth the wait.

You may not be familiar with Giacobini-Zinner, a lump of ice, dirt, and rock sailing through the solar system, but it means much more to humankind than the annual October meteor shower it gives us.

Giacobini-Zinner is the first cometary tail through which planetary scientists and engineers ever flew a spacecraft. This feat was the result of opportunity, creativity, trajectory witchcraft, and a willingness to act first and ask permission later.

What happened was this. Launched in 1978, the International Sun/Earth Explorer 3 (ISEE-3) spacecraft was designed to measure space weather. It was sent to the “L1 point” between the Sun and the Earth—a point exactly between the Earth and the Sun at which the two bodies have their gravitational pulls nullified and an object can thus be suspended. An object at that point thus has an orbital period identical to that of Earth. ISEE-3 was, in a sense, a space buoy whose scientific payload was chosen to measure space weather and the interactions of solar winds and the Earth’s magnetosphere.

After completion of its mission in 1982, scientists and engineers proposed doing the same thing for solar winds and a cometary atmosphere. The spacecraft was not designed for this, and the maneuvers required to target and cross through a comet’s plasma tail were a shade shy of impossible. Here is what the maneuvers required to complete this mission looked like:

 
Spaceflight isn’t generally like something you might see on Star Trek. Intercept courses are almost never a straight line. You don’t say, “Let’s go to comet Giacobini-Zinner,” fire thrusters, and move from point A to point B. Instead, the precious little fuel carried on these spacecraft, coupled with the physics challenges of gravitational attractions of bodies in space, mean that to reach a destination, you have to use little fuel and catch rides on the gravity of other bodies. These “orbital assists” allow a spacecraft to move along with virtually no fuel expended, while being accelerated simultaneously to ludicrous speeds along some precise, adjusted azimuth. Do this enough times to enough bodies and you can go just about anywhere.

There are maneuvers and there are maneuvers, and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory’s Bob Farquhar—the “grandmaster of celestial maneuvers”—could design maneuvers that had spacecraft arrive not only at staggeringly precise points in space, but even plan to have those arrivals take place on some particular day. (He liked to plan trajectories so that major space encounters would be achieved on days such as his wife’s birthday, or his wedding anniversary.) Farquhar was responsible for the ISEE-3 plan. His elaborate maneuvers—none of which the spacecraft was designed to achieve, for a mission it was not designed to accomplish—took the spacecraft through the comet’s plasma tail on September 11, 1985, making it the first spacecraft to ever do such a thing.

Farquhar then upped the ante by sending the spacecraft to comet Halley, which it rendezvoused with in March 1986. ISEE-3 then became the first spacecraft to fly through the tails of two comets. Again, this spacecraft was designed to do neither of these things. The fact that it did both is a testament to Farquhar’s genius.

That’s why Giacobini-Zinner is historically important and its burning-up debris worth consideration tonight, even if the dark sky won’t exactly teem with meteors. The good news is that unlike many meteor showers, you don’t have to stay up until midnight or later to see the main event. The Draconids shower comes alive just after nightfall. If you’re unable to escape the light pollution or just don’t feel like dealing with the mosquitoes, you can also watch a presentation of the meteor shower on Slooh at 8 p.m. EDT, where observatories in the Canary Islands, the UK, and Canada will be watching on your behalf. In addition to live commentary on the history and origin of the meteor shower, astronomers will offer a lesson on astrophotography and explain how you can use your DSLR to take meteor shower photographs of your very own.

As you chow down at your local Chinese restaurant, Indian eatery, or Mexican joint, are you eating dishes that are truly authentic to their countries of origin? From corned beef to chicken tikka masala to chimichangas, here are six national dishes that didn’t originate in the region you’d expect.

1. CRAB RANGOON

Deep-fried anything tastes good, so when you deep-fry a dumpling stuffed with cream cheese and crab meat, prepare your taste buds for a heavenly experience. Crab Rangoon is often on the menu at Chinese and Thai restaurants in the U.S., but you probably won’t find it in Asia. Although wontons are popular in China, the idea to put cream cheese inside them probably emerged in the 1950s, thanks to a chef at Trader Vic’s, a Polynesian restaurant chain in San Francisco. They claimed that the recipe was a traditional one from Burma (now Myanmar) and named it after the former capital Rangoon (now Yangon).

2. CHICKEN TIKKA MASALA

Along with tandoori chicken and saag paneer, chicken tikka masala has become synonymous with Indian food. But the dish of chicken in a spicy, savory tomato sauce was probably invented in the UK, not in India. Food historians debate the dish’s exact origin, but a Pakistani or Bangladeshi restaurateur chef in either London or Glasgow, Scotland probably invented it in the 1960s or ’70s, possibly heavily inspired by butter chicken, which was a dish that was becoming popular in India a few years before. There’s more at stake than mere bragging rights, though. The dish’s invention became contentious in 2009 when a Scottish member of Parliament failed to convince the European Union to grant the dish a Protected Designation of Origin, which would have given Scotland the patent for chicken tikka masala’s name.

3. GENERAL TSO’S CHICKEN

You can find General Tso’s chicken—pieces of fried chicken coated in a sweet, tangy sauce—in just about any Chinese restaurant in the U.S. Although the dish takes its name from a real Qing dynasty military commander, Zuo Zongtang (also spelled Tso Tsung-t’ang), General Tso’s chicken as we know it was first created in America. Stories vary, but the dish is believe to have emerged in Taiwan during the 1950s, after chef Peng Chang-kuei fled China in the aftermath of the Chinese Civil War. But his original version wasn’t fried and wasn’t sweetened. Those changes would be made when the dish migrated to New York in the 1970s in order to suit the American palate. And it succeeded.

4. CHIMICHANGA

What’s better than a regular burrito? A deep-fried one, of course! Historians aren’t sure who invented chimichangas, but they might have been created in the 1940s or ’50s when a cook in Tucson, Arizona accidentally dropped a burrito into a nearby fryer. The nonsensical curse word she shouted when she realized her mistake? Chimichanga! Another theory is that a restaurant owner in Phoenix, Arizona deep-fried burritos to make them last longer. While burritos are an authentically Mexican food (albeit not the hyper-stuffed burritos popular in the States), it seems that chimichangas are solidly American.

5. CORNED BEEF AND CABBAGE

Touristy pubs and restaurants in Ireland probably have corned beef and cabbage on their menus, but the dish doesn’t exactly hail from Ireland. Historically, the Irish used cows for dairy rather than meat and celebrated St. Patrick’s Day by eating pork or lamb. To escape the Great Famine in the mid-19th century, many emigrants who left Ireland for the U.S. settled in New York City. When these Irish-Americans combined traditional vegetables from their homeland, such as cabbage and potatoes, with kosher brisket, a meat dish that was popular amongst Jewish immigrants in New York, they created a novel twist on salt-cured meat. Corned beef and cabbage caught on, and President Lincoln chose corned beef, cabbage, and potatoes for his first inauguration’s luncheon menu in 1861.

6. CHOP SUEY

Unlike the other entrants on this list, food historians are increasingly coming around to the idea that chop suey is actually Chinese—which makes it doubly ironic because chop suey has long been sold as the definitive Chinese-American dish. According to the most popular legend, chop suey was invented when a group of American miners were in the the Golden City hoping to hit pay dirt during the Gold Rush. One evening, the miners were drunk and hungry, so they made a late-night stop at a local Chinese restaurant. The owner quickly plated a mixture of scraps that had already been cooked, and the miners loved the meal mash-up. Chop suey caught on, and it became incredibly popular across the rest of the U.S. But a few food scholars have traced it to a dish called tsap seui from the Toisan district of China. And as Joseph Conlin points out in Bacon, Beans, and Galantines, “It does seem hard to believe that a people wracked by poverty had not thought to put together ‘miscellaneous stuff’ before they arrived at the ‘Golden Mountain.'”

Today, Friday, October 7, Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos was named 2016’s Nobel Peace Price recipient. The committee bestowed the honor on Santos “for his resolute efforts to bring the country’s more than 50-year-long civil war to an end.”

As reported by The New York Times, the announcement comes less than a week after Colombians voted to reject a peace deal with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). The treaty was meant to signal the end of a bloody, 52-year conflict between the nation and the rebel group. After President Juan Manuel Santos and FARC leader Timoleon Jimenez came together to sign the deal following four years of negotiations, all that was needed to move the plan forward was a vote from the Colombian people. In a shocking development, the agreement was stricken down by a slim majority of 50.2 percent.

The future of the South American nation remains uncertain, but the Nobel Prize committee stresses that the news shouldn’t be seen as the defeat of peace. While that specific agreement has been discarded, President Santos—who was elected in 2010—hasn’t given up his goal of progressing towards peace.

The committee said in a press statement, “The Norwegian Nobel Committee emphasizes the importance of the fact that President Santos is now inviting all parties to participate in a broad-based national dialogue aimed at advancing the peace process.” In addition to recognizing President Santos’s commitment to peace, the award is meant to pay tribute to all parties fighting for peace in Colombia, to the citizens who’ve yet to give up hope of achieving it, and “not least, to the representatives of the countless victims of the civil war.” 

[h/t The New York Times]
 
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