Thread by @People_Of_Space

#CountdowntoMars Were it not for Covid, this week. Much of the world’s journalists, “space gypsies” and social media mavens would be descending on the von Kármán Auditorium at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for the #Perseverance landing

https://twitter.com/NASA/status/1361360733460652037?s=20

Very few people today know who Theodor von Kármán was, why the press room is named after him, even though a great deal of history has taken place there – some of the most astounding about Mars

Very few people today know who Theodor von Kármán was, why the press room is named after him, even though a great deal of history has taken place there – some of the most astounding about Mars

Consider the "gasps" when it looked like Mariner 7 had discovered methane in August 1969 -- a story told in full here: twitter.com/i/events/13467…

Theodor von Kármán was a pioneer who helped create what became the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He was a pioneering aerodynamicist whose biography was called “The Wind And Beyond”

And he was a Martian – or at least one of the Hungarians who were nicknamed that thanks to a response to the famous “Fermi Paradox” question – which is this: if the universe is teeming with life, where are they?

In one version of the story Leó Szilárd said: "They are already here among us – they just call themselves Hungarians." This account is featured in a number of books and here is a piece I did about Szilard and the observation in a London street in 1933 for which he is best known

Alas, my own early dreams of wanting to look at the weather on Mars as a day job were somewhat dashed by the fact the mathematics needed is way beyond my ability (and as Robert Zimmerman hath also spake, you don’t need a weatherman to tell you which way the wind is blowing)

I just needed my teachers to give me good advice. My headmaster once said “You have the gift of the gab, you like causing trouble and heaven knows you can write, but one day you’ll go too far”. If that isn’t a job description for a newspaper journalist I don’t know what is.

When I did a book about the ozone layer just after the Peloponnese Wars, I was at least able to quote Lewis Fry Richardson, irishtimes.com/news/science/l…

Richardson famously understood the chaotic nature of the Earth's atmosphere - see the quote below -- and is widely seen as the father of numerical weather forecasting

No prophet is ever honoured in his own land – just look at the faces as he talked. But Richardson was remarkable and the Met Office named its weather forecast building after him theguardian.com/news/2017/sep/…

Theodor von Kármán wrote a key paper called “The Engineer Grapples With Non Linear Problems”. What that is called today is “Chaos Theory” – which goes to show, come up with a snappier title and people will sit up and notice

Me, I just like looking at chaotic flows – and here is some more on VK and his own thoughts on vortices wunderground.com/cat6/Whirls-Cu…

I have tweeted before about my pal Al Hibbs, and will do again here purely because his own PhD was “How the wind makes waves” (still a mystery in many cases)

It was all the stranger for his supervisor being a quantum physicist – Dick Feynman - but that was because they felt they could bring something new to the subject ie they loved a puzzle

If people asked Feynman what great subject could they study under him, he would politely shoo them away. If someone came with a puzzle, he would say yes if he was interested

As to how I got into their orbit, I still pinch myself. How lucky a break was that?

twitter.com/i/events/99906…

I turned up five years after Viking 1 landed. Al Hibbs, who had arranged my visit, was the voice of that mission and here he is "talking down" the lander

I count myself lucky that I spoke to most of the Viking scientists at various times for hours on end. Most are gone now, but their words live on in our book.

And I would like to think that they are sitting in the great von Kármán audiotorium in the sky this week and saying “Good luck you groovy youngsters” to the latest generation of professional Martians at JPL

As of a short while ago, we are more than 99% of the way there. Here was the #CountdowntoMars clock. It's getting real, folks – so time for me to sign off from this thread