Category: Space Exploration

Why Write About Space Robots (and How Big Is the Solar System)?

March 7, 2023 / Katie L. Carroll

I was very excited to discover that SELFIES FROM MARS: THE TRUE STORY OF MARS ROVER OPPORTUNITY earned an orange banner for being a #1 new release in children’s aeronautics & space books!

I have several other works-in-progress about space robots, including a fictional story about the real Mars rover Perseverance (and Mars helicopter Ingenuity) and a nonfiction one about the Voyager space probes. And it got me wondering, What it is about space robots that has sparked my imagination?

Considering the size of the universe, and even of the solar system, human space travel is–to put it mildly–very limited. The farthest we’ve been is the moon, on average 238,855 miles from Earth. That’s about the size of 30 Earths, and can be considered really far away in terms of Earthly travel.

How about Mars? Humans haven’t been there yet, but we’ve sent a bunch of robots there, and we might even get there soon. The answer here varies because of the constant rotation of the planets around the sun, but on average, Mars is 140 million miles away from Earth and it get as close as 35 million miles. A lot farther than the moon!

Looking at the solar system, it doesn’t really make sense to talk about it in millions of miles because it’s so large. So scientists use the Astronomical Unit (AU) to describe distances of that size. One AU is 93 million miles, which is the average distance between the sun and the Earth. Neptune is 30 AU from the sun, or 2.8 billion miles. The Kuiper Belt, where Pluto resides, isn’t even the end of the solar system, and that can be as far as 50 AU from the sun.

Depending on how you define the end of the solar system (and there isn’t necessarily consensus on this in the scientific community), our solar system can be measured from 122 AU (at the heliopause, the place where solar winds meet interstellar winds) all the way to 100,000 AU from the sun (at the Oort Cloud, the farthest reach of the sun’s gravitational influence).

So really, really large. And that’s just the solar system, never mind the mind-bending that is required to think about how big the universe is! Still with me?

That brings us back to, What does the size of the solar system have to do with my interest in space robots? Space robots can travel much, much farther than humans can.

Mars currently has two working rovers on it, Curiosity and Perseverance, and a helicopter named Ingenuity. The space probe Voyager 1 has been traveling through the solar system for more than 45 years. At 159 AU (approximately 14.8 billion miles from the sun), it is deeper out in space than any other human-made object, and has traveled beyond the heliopause. And there are numerous other space robots out exploring the sun, other planets, other moons, etc.

Space robots are our ambassadors to space! We can’t go there yet, so we send out these robots. Some of them even look a little like us, and they’re all robot scientists, communicating their findings back to Earth. We learn from them, but they also represent us.

Voyager 1 even contains a Golden Record with sights and sounds from Earth and mathematical instructions on how to listen to it. I love picturing aliens (or future humans) coming across Voyager 1 and listening to that record. What would they (or what would future humans) think of the humans that sent the record out into space?

Anyway, that definitely sparks my imagination. I think it’s also important to learn about those space robots that are out there representing humans in space: our interstellar ambassadors!

SELFIES FROM MARS Release Day!

February 13, 2023 / Katie L. Carroll

Today’s the day! SELFIES FROM MARS: THE TRUE STORY OF MARS ROVER OPPORTUNITY is out in the world. It truly feels like a miracle every time a new book comes out. I also finally have an author newsletter, and you get two free short stories when you sign up!

@katielcarrollauthor
Opportunity was the robot that just kept on roving on Mars! #mars #marsrover #roveropportunity #spacebooks #stembooks #selfiesfrommars #nonfiction #rover #goodnightoppy #robots #spacerobot
♬ Natural Emotions – Muspace

Bringing a nonfiction book into the world was a complicated, wonderful learning experience. There were image credits and song lyrics rights to consider. Many facts to check and double-check. Even the type of paper to use for the print copies proved to be a new challenge to tackle. So many hours went into the design of this book, but I’m so thrilled with how it came out.

In addition to the main narrative for rover Opportunity (with some rover Spirit in there, too), there are so many facts and figures to discover in Selfies From Mars. I can’t wait for young readers to meet little Oppy and read the Fact Files.

I know this is a nonfiction book, but the ending makes me so emotional every time! After all, it was the emotional end of Opportunity’s incredible mission that inspired me to go into a deep dive on this rover and become enamored by it.

Who can forget the poetic interpretation of Opportunity’s last message to Earth? “My battery is low and it’s getting dark.” Or that the rover’s team played a love song, Billie Holiday’s version of “I’ll Be Seeing You,” as a goodbye? Pay particular attention to the last few lines (or read the book to see which lyrics I’m talking about!).

SELFIES FROM MARS blurb:

From evidence of water to stunning images,
Mars rover Opportunity allowed humans to
experience the Red Planet as never before.
Ride along on the 15-year mission
that captured hearts a world away!

Available from Bookshop.org, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, IndieBound, or Book Depository (for international folks). Coming soon signed copies from Katie’s bookstore.

Signed Books, SELFIES FROM MARS Pre-order, & Self-Publishing Workshop

December 5, 2022 / Katie L. Carroll

Since it’s that gift-giving time of year, a reminder that signed copies of my books are available to be shipped right to you on my Purchase Books page. If you want those goodies to arrive by Christmas, you should get your orders in now. And a reminder that you can also purchase them on all the usual online book retailers or order them from your local indie bookstore.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with my books, my award-winning YA fantasies, Elixir Bound and Elixir Saved, are great for teens or adults who love epic fantasy with cozy vibes. Pirate Island and Witch Test are contemporary middle grade with a hint of the supernatural, great for the 8 and up crowd but particularly perfect for 10-14 year-olds.

The Bedtime Knight is an imaginative, interactive picture book that’s a fun read aloud. And finally, Mommy’s Night Before Christmas is a modern take on the classic Christmas poem that is just as much for the adults as it is for the kids. This one is a great stocking stuffer for all the moms in your life.

Speaking of books (as if I talk about so many other things here!), I have a new one coming your way February 13, 2023, and it’s up for pre-order now. Meet Selfies From Mars: The True Story of Mars Rover Opportunity! It’s STEM with heart. This has been a passion project of mine that I’m so excited to bring to readers. It’s my first nonfiction children’s book, and I have loved working on it, particularly using all the amazing NASA images from Opportunity’s mission. I also navigated the tricky world of music licensing for this book.

At Indie Author Day at the Norwalk Public Library, there was a lot of interest from other authors to learn more about self-publishing children’s books. So I’ve been convinced to offer up my self-publishing workshop “What to Expect When Self-Publishing” in January. This is digital workshop, so you can attend from anywhere (details and sign up here)!

Yes, I’ve been very busy! I wouldn’t want it any other way. What have you all been up to this fall?

Gaining a Sense of Awe and Perspective from the JWST Images and the Vastness of the Universe

July 20, 2022 / Katie L. Carroll

As a writer, most people know me as a purveyor of words and stories, but I occasionally geek out here on scientific topics, like the Fibonacci Sequence, space exploration, and the Big Bang. I’ve been combining my love of writing and science in picture books drafts about the Mars rovers and the Voyager spacecraft. My hope is to bring these stories, both fiction and non-fiction, to readers starting next year!

First Deep Field
Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI

When NASA released its first wave of images from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) on my birthday last week, it felt like the universe was giving me the best birthday present ever: awe and perspective. The above image is known as the First Deep Field. From our earthly perspective, the amount of space we’re looking at in the image is the size of a grain of sand held up to sky at arm’s length (so a very, very, very, very tiny amount).

Many of the reactions to this image were similar to my own of amazement and excitement, but I did see a few less-than-enthusiastic responses. One in particular was along the lines of not getting why people were so excited about a picture of space looking like, well, space.

Without context (and President Biden’s press conference on this image was not exactly illuminating as to the significance of this image), I totally understand the “so what?” reaction. So what is the significance?

First of all, the First Deep Field shows that tiny patch of space in greater detail than we have ever observed before. There are a few stars from our own galaxy there, those are the bright ones that look like sparkly stars. They’re cool to look at, but from a scientific perspective, fairly ordinary. More interesting is that this single image shows a galaxy cluster that contains thousands of galaxies. Our own Milky Way galaxy contains somewhere between 100-400 billion stars, so this image is showing a whole lot of space stuff with an incredible level of detail!

Even more interesting are the distorted-looking galaxies that have a kind of smudged appearance. Due to a phenomenon called gravitational lensing, light can bend around objects and be magnified. So those smudged galaxies are behind other galaxies and are at a much greater distance than we’d normally be able to see.

The thing about light is that it’s very fast, but the universe is so vast, light can travel for a very long time before reaching us here on Earth. Our sun is about 8 light-minutes away, so the sunlight you see right now (please don’t look directly at the sun and damage your eyes!) is 8 minutes old. From Earth, we can only see the sun as it was 8 minutes ago. Light allows us to see into the past!

One distorted galaxy in the First Deep Field is 13.1 billion light-years away. So we’re seeing it as it was 13.1 billion years ago. The farther into the universe we can see, the farther into the past we can observe. This galaxy is so far away that we’re seeing to within 1 billion years of when the Big Bang occurred. And that will allow us to discover more about how the universe was formed–the history of literally everything we know!

That’s only a fraction of the exciting information that will come from this one image from the JWST. Gazing at an image of this tiny bit of space makes you realize how very vast the universe is, large on a scale that is hard to comprehend. There is so much space stuff out there, and we here on Earth are a “pale blue dot” in a soup of many, much larger dots.

At first that makes me feel small and insignificant. I’m one person of billions on Earth. Earth is one planet among countless others circling countless stars in the countless galaxies of the universe.

But then I think of how amazing it is that we’re here at all. In all of that space, we have our beautiful, bountiful planet Earth. I breathe in the oxygen and drink the water with my body that is made of stardust. And I sit here at my computer with a brain complex enough to contemplate the vastness of space and the history of the universe. So when a person shows skepticism about a picture of space looking like space, here’s what I have to say.

Images like this give people a sense of awe, both in the beauty of space and the vastness of it. It simultaneously makes us feel insignificant and helps us realize how special it is that we are here at all. At least that’s why I’m so excited. I hope you find something that excites you today!

I’ll leave you with a couple more awe-inspiring images from the JWST.

Stephan’s Quintet, group of five galaxies
*Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI*

Cosmic Cliffs, Carina Nebula
*Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI*

What Nonfiction Picture Books Teach Us About How Rich A Billionaire Is

October 19, 2021 / Katie L. Carroll

Despite the seemingly unrelated headline, this is in fact the third installment of posts about space exploration. To further understand my stance on the first space exploration post of “Let’s Stop the Billionaires from Controlling Space Exploration”, I think it’s important to look at exactly how much a billionaire is and who are the billionaires that are trying to corner the market on space exploration.

Whenever I want to explore a complicated topic I’m unfamiliar with, the first place I turn to are non-fiction or informational fiction picture books (check out “Nonfiction vs. Informational Fiction vs. Narrative Nonfiction: What’s the Diff?” by Wendy Hinote Lanier for more about these different categories of children’s books). If you want a concept explained in an engaging, uncomplicated way, a picture book is where it’s at!

To understand how much a billion really is, I turned to the book MILLIONS, BILLIONS, & TRILLIONS: UNDERSTANDING BIG NUMBERS by David A. Adler, illustrated by Edward Miller. (My kids really enjoyed this book, too!)

A billion (that’s 1,000,000,000) is one thousand million. In the book, it says in order to count to one billion, “at a rate of one number per second without stopping, it would take you almost thirty-two years to reach one billion.”

The book also says, “Someone with one billion dollars could give away ten million dollars every year for one hundred years.” That’s only one billion…imagine having $177 billion dollars, which according to Forbes 2021 Billionaire List was the net worth of richest person Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and “space” explorer, at the beginning of 2021, up $64 billion from his 2020 net worth of $113 billion.

On this same list Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX, was listed at the second-richest person with $151 billion net worth. An article from earlier this month, “Elon Musk trolls Jeff Bezos as he widens his lead as the richest person on Earth” by Ramishah Maruf, now has Musk leading the charge with $222 billion. So while we were all working on the front lines or from home and helping our kids learn virtually during this pandemic, these guys were making billions and billions of dollars.

According to the 2021 Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report, the top 1.1% of people control 45.8% of wealth in the world. A report in June by ProPublica analyzed IRS data and found that the richest 25 Americans actual pay a very low tax rate when comparing their wealth to how much they paid in taxes (see “Richest 25 Americans have a ‘true tax rate’ of almost nothing: Report” by Aimee Picchi). So most of the wealth is controlled by very few people, and those people aren’t even contributing their fair amount to society.

Two of the billionaires I’ve been talking about in regards to space travel paid zero taxes some years. Jeff Bezos paid zero federal income tax in 2007 and 2011, and Elon Musk paid zero federal income tax in 2018. In 2020, the median income for an Amazon (of which Bezos was CEO) employee was $29,007, while that year Bezos’s Amazon income was 58 times that at $1,681,840.

I know I’m throwing a lot of numbers around in this post. If those don’t interest you or convince you that these massively wealthy guys don’t exactly play fair and shouldn’t be in charge of something as important as space exploration, then maybe their ideas about space might convince you. Unfortunately that would make this a very long post, so stick around and I’ll be exploring that topic next.