#ophiucus radio

[badbackgroundscience]

The possibility of successfully navigating an asteroid field is no where near as low as 3,720 to 1

Episode of the Week: Mudd’s Women

Planet of the Week: Rigel 12 Villain of the Week: Harcourt Fenton Mudd. Redshirt Death Count: 0

TL;DR: If you think you’re a pretty lady, then other people think you’re a pretty lady. At least as long as you’re already played by a conventionally pretty lady. Also, McCoy doesn’t know where Spock’s heart actually is - only that it’s not where it’s supposed to be.

So, I’m re-watching TOS on Netflix, which unfortunately uses the re-mastered version with updated visual effects. In this episode’s open, said effects involve a cargo ship trying and failing to evade the Enterprise in an asteroid belt.

What was once this (The middle glowing thing is the ship; the other one’s a rock):

Became this (Less glowing, more rocks...):

In my own humble opinion, the new VFX look completely out of place with the rest of the 1960′s aesthetic (i.e. the typical set decoration...); I wish Netflix gave me the option of watching a remastered version that just tried to clean up the overall visual quality of the episodes.

But no matter the version I’m watching, I get to bring up the fact that asteroid belts - or at least the only space debris belts we’ve observed - aren’t all that dangerous to travel through. 

Our “Asteroid Belt” - the collection of space potatoes orbiting the Sun between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter - has a collective mass of about 3 sextillion kg, which is only 4% that of our Moon.* But the largest object - dwarf planet Ceres - accounts for roughly a third of that. So, you might look at an image like this:

and think it’s a miracle we’ve managed to get anything through that death trap. But those dots aren’t to scale at all...

Pioneer 10 was the first spacecraft to traverse the Belt, back in ‘72 - it’s estimated that the closest it got to an asteroid was 8.8 billion meters (5.5 million miles, or roughly 23 times the space between the Earth and the Moon). As this report states, the satellite failed to detect any particles larger than 1 millimeter during its passage through the region. 

[Note that super tiny bits of rock can be dangerous if they’re traveling at super high speeds relative to the craft they hit. As the ESA puts it, 

The consequences of meteoroid and debris impacts on spacecraft can range from small surface pits due to micrometre-size impactors and clear-hole penetrations for millimetre­-size objects, to mission-­critical damage for projectiles larger than 1 cm.

Any impact of a 10 cm catalogue object on a spacecraft or orbital stage will most likely entail a catastrophic disintegration of the target.

This is what a 1.2-cm ball traveling at 6.8 km/s (15,211 mph) does to a solid sheet of aluminum:

This is also why the Enterprise (and any other space-faring vessel) should have their deflector screens up way more frequently when zooming through the galaxy, and not - like Kirk instructs his team in this episode - just before entering an asteroid belt. They’re usually traveling way faster than any of our current craft go, which makes even less massive space bits just as bad for the hull...]

The first of our satellites to actually get close enough to an asteroid for a photograph was Galileo, in 1991.** And Galileo had to be specifically aimed toward it; it was part of the mission to fly by the rock - Galileo didn’t just come across it by accident.

None of the spacecraft we’ve sent through the asteroid belt have suffered sufficient damage from debris to threaten the mission. Neither have they suffered sufficient damage from traveling through the Kuiper Belt, when applicable; the KB’s the other space potato-’filled’ ring in our Solar System (It’s where the rest of the dwarf planets reside, including Pluto***). It’s even less dense than our asteroid belt.

Rotten luck, that cargo ship had, to be hit by two large hunks of rock...

Stepping back a minute or so, the cargo vessel’s engines burn out in its escape attempt, so the Enterprise has to extend its deflector shields around it while Scotty beams aboard the crew. This burns out three “lithium crystals”, which are a crucial power source to keep the ship running. Miracle worker that he is, Scotty gets both the cargo ship’s captain (self identifying as “Leo Walsh”)

and his ‘cargo’...

...just before the cargo ship’s hit by the afore-mentioned large space potatoes.

These women - Eve, Ruth, and Magda (respectively) - were bound for Ophiucus III to become settlers’ wives.**** While it’s difficult to tell from the above still, they’re abnormally beautiful. Of course they’re played by attractive actresses (what TOS woman isn’t...), but Kirk notes in his log, “These women have a mysterious magnetic effect on the male members of my crew, including myself.” Bones’s medical scanner does some weird bleeping when one of the girls stands next to it, but he can’t explain why. Later in the episode it’s revealed that the cargo captain - not Leo Walsh, but the smuggler Harry Mudd - has them hooked on some sort of illegal “Venus drug”. There’s withdrawal symptoms and everything, but they basically just get grumpy and ‘ugly’ (wherein ugly just means no makeup and messy hair):

As for the lithium crystals, the Enterprise only has one working after saving Mudd and the women. (It soon fails, leaving the ship and its life support system on battery power.) This is what one of the broken ones looks like:

In the real world, lithium is element number 3 on the Periodic Table, following Hydrogen and Helium. Hearing the term, you’re probably either thinking of lithium-ion batteries or medication. The former is more applicable to the Enterprise’s scenario, but - as the name implies - the batteries have lots of individual lithium ions (an Li atom with two electrons) floating around to conduct a charge, rather than having lots of atoms fixed in a crystalline structure.

In its pure state, lithium is a shiny silver metal, not a crystal. It reacts easily with oxygen (producing lithium oxide) and with water (producing flammable hydrogen gas), so it’s stored in oil.

The most abundant Li-containing mineral (which looks more "crystal"-y than pure lithium) is the (often) lilac-gray/rose-colored Lepidolite, which has the chemical formula K(Li,Al,Rb)2(Al,Si)4O10(F,OH)2.***** 

For those of you wondering about dilithium crystals - what the series eventually renamed the power source - those don’t exist, either. Two lithium atoms can bond together, and make what one could call “dilithium”, but these units don’t form crystals in the real world.

The Enterprise heads to Rigel XII to pick up new lithium crystals, and Mudd sees this as an opportunity to unload his cargo on those “lonely, isolated, overworked, rich lithium miners!”`* He uses a communicator Magda gets from a crewman to contact the miners; they, in turn, refuse to give Kirk the crystals unless they get to trade for the women.

Everyone ends up paired off, but Eve and the lead miner Childress aren’t fond of one another, mostly because Eve’s not feeling the whole situation. The next day(ish), after rescuing her from running away into some sort of sandstorm, Childress complains she’s not pretty anymore (calling her “plain as an old bucket”).

Kirk (still not having acquired his precious lithium crystals) shows up with Mudd in tow and forces the smuggler to confess to giving the women Venus drugs. The other two miners have already married their women via subspace radio ceremonies, and Childress naturally complains. With their wealth, he claims, they could have easily bought the most beautiful women in the galaxy (Because what beautiful woman wouldn’t want to spend the rest of her days on a basically uninhabited mining colony planet in the middle of nowhere?).

Eve chides him while grabbing the pills from Mudd’s box and downing them once again, and turns back into her beautiful self. 

Kirk then reveals he gave her a placebo, saying “You either believe in yourself, or you don't.” [McCoy does ask, about halfway through the episode, “Are they actually more lovely...than any other women you've known? Or is it that they just, well, act beautiful?” which foreshadows the placebo twist, but a placebo somehow capable of putting on eyeshadow, etc. and doing her hair...I mean...really?]

The episode ends with Childress and Eve deciding to give it a try - we never find out what the other two men think of their deceitful wives - and the Enterprise dragging Mudd back to civilization to stand trial. But don’t worry - he’ll pop back up in season 2.`**

* This is actually much less mass than astronomers estimate existed in the region when the Solar System started forming - gravitational jostling from (mostly) Jupiter interacting with all of the smaller masses threw a lot of rocks and dust out of the region, either hurtling them into the Sun or out of the System entirely. It also involves the planets (specifically the non-terrestrial ones) moving in/out in terms of their orbital distances. 

** I was taught the first asteroid imaged by a spacecraft was Ida (by Galileo, in 1993). Mike Brown (yes, that Mike Brown) lied to me.

*** Apparently, certain astronomers distinguish the Kuiper Belt from something else called the “Scattered Disc”, whose inner region overlaps with the Kuiper Belt and would contain Eris and Sedna. Objects in the SD have way more elliptical orbits than those in the KB, and they can be angled more steeply relative to the Solar System’s ecliptic. What sorts an astronomical body into the KB or the SD is whether or not it can be disturbed (i.e. scattered) by Neptune.

But in that class I took from Mike Brown (who, I’d argue, is one of the lead researchers studying this area of space), he never even made this distinction, so I’m still going to refer to the whole thing as the Kuiper Belt. But you can make your own choices.

**** Eve says she’s from “a farm planet with automated machines for company and two brothers to cook for, mend their clothes, canal mud a foot thick on their boots every time they walked in.” Because she’s definitely not going to be doing that for whatever settler she’s sold to...

***** Fun fact: the element Rubidium (Rb) was discovered by isolating it from a Lepidolite crystal

`* Mudd orders the women to flirt with the men on the ship to gather intel about the miners; why Kirk doesn’t restrict them to quarters like he does Mudd I don’t know. Eve is supposed to seduce Kirk, but when that scene comes up it’s obvious he’s not into it (and neither is she). Yes, canon!Kirk is not the sex-fiend he’s portrayed as outside the original series (I’m looking at you, JJ...)

`** According to Memory Alpha, Mudd is the only adversary - other than Khan - to face Kirk more than once in a live-action Star Trek production. 

TOS s1e06 - Teleplay: Stephen Kandel, Story: Gene Roddenberry, Directed By: Harvey Hart

Photo Credits:

Asteroid locations By Mdf, Public Domain

Hypervelocity Impact Copyright ESA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

pure lithium By Tomihahndorf, Public Domain