Month: December 2021

Enlarge / Roscosmos head Dmitry Rogozin visits the construction site for the launch pad for the rocket boosters of the Angara family, at the Vostochny Cosmodrome. (credit: Yegor AleyevTASS via Getty Images)

A long and strikingly critical article that reviews the state of the Russian space program was published in the state-aligned newspaper MK this week.

None of the findings in the 2,800-word article were particularly surprising. Western observers who track the Russian space industry realize the program is deeply troubled, and to a great extent running on the fumes of its past and very real glory. What is notable, however, is that a major Russian media outlet has published such a revelatory article for a domestic audience.

Increasingly, Russia's space program seeks to project its greatness in space through symbolic acts rather than technological achievements—such as the launch of a Russian movie star, sending a robot nicknamed Fedor to space, or making (entirely) hollow promises about a Moon landing in 2030. But now it has been called out on these acts in a publication closely aligned with the Russian government.

Directed by James Herron, edited by Sean Dacanay. Click here for transcript. (video link)

Coming in under the wire here is our last video for 2021—and we tried to make it a fun one. If you play games, chances are you've played something that Warren Spector was involved in creating—with stints at Origin, Ion Storm, and Disney, he helped design and/or produce a whole giant pile of famous titles, including Wing Commander, various Ultimas, System Shock, and the title we're focusing on today: the original Deus Ex.

But even for someone with Warren's pedigree, and with an amazing and talented design team backing him up, Deus Ex was a challenge to pull off. The idea was to produce a game that enabled the player to approach things in whatever way the player wanted. If you're playing a shooter like Doom and you run into a difficult section that you can't get through, there often isn't an alternate path that involves not shooting; similarly, if you're playing a sneaker like Thief and you run into a difficult section of a heist where you keep getting detected, you can't just pull out your sword and start whacking things. (Well, you can, but you'll quickly wind up dead.) Frustrated by the gameplay linearity of most genres, Warren wanted to do things a different way and make a game where all play-styles were valid.

Enlarge / The polygons of Sputnik Planitium. (credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI)

Expectations for active geology on Pluto were pretty low prior to the arrival of the New Horizons probe. But the photos that came back from the dwarf planet revealed a world of mountains, ridges, and... strange lumpy things that don't have an obvious Earthly analog. One of the more prominent oddities was the plain of Sputnik Planitia, filled with nitrogen ice that was divided into polygonal shapes separated by gullies that were tens of meters deep.

Scientists quickly came up with a partial explanation for these structures: convection, where heat differences cause deeper, warmer nitrogen ices to bubble through the soft material toward the surface. The problem is that the planet has no obvious sources of heat deep inside. Now, however, a group of European researchers is suggesting that the convection could be driven by surface cooling, rather than heat from the planet's interior. The secret is the sublimation of nitrogen ices directly into vapors.

Lacking heat

Explaining the formations on small, icy bodies like Pluto is difficult because scientists expect that they lack the heat sources that drive plate tectonics, like those on Earth. These icy bodies are small enough that any heat generated by the collisions that built them, and the dwarf planet, dissipated long ago. And they don't have enough metallic materials for radioisotopes to provide ongoing heat generation. The few exceptions to this, like Europa and Enceladus, are heated by gravitational interactions with the giant planets they orbit, but that's not an option for Pluto, either.