March 2 has boasted some impressive engineering accomplishments over the years. There’s nothing particularly special about the date, at least as far as I know. It’s just a coincidence that various huge engineering projects have reached milestones on the same day of the year.
For instance, it was March 2, 1969 that the Concorde supersonic airliner had its first test flight. That was a long time ago, but the Concorde still looks like an airplane just introduced today. A lot of that has to do with engineering, not anything like graphic design. The project had started about fifteen years earlier when a British committee was formed to study the idea of a supersonic transport. It was less than ten years after Chuck Yeager became the first pilot to exceed the speed of sound — or “break the sound barrier,” as many of the popular headlines had it (there isn’t really a “barrier” in the way). Various studies claimed that a supersonic airliner would be an economical win, because a supersonic transport (SST) would be able to fly back and forth on a given route in much less time, so fewer airplanes would be needed. This advantage would, theoretically, overcome the problem that an SST used more fuel (a lot more fuel) in flight.
The studies turned out to be just so much hot air; the Concorde program produced just 14 operational airplanes (7 each for British Air and Air France), and because of enormous cost overruns the planes were only able to operate at a “profit” after the respective governments paid for all the development costs and sold the planes to the airlines at a discount. Nevertheless, the Concorde actually went into operation and kept flying for 27 years. The routes they flew were all transatlantic because they couldn’t cause sonic booms over populated land, but the travel time for every route was more than halved. So overall, an engineering win, even if the economics could be questioned.
The Concorde airliners flew much higher than other commercial jets. But the next March 2 engineering feet went a lot higher than that. On March 2, 1972, the Pioneer 10 space probe was launched in Florida. It became the first man-made object to encounter Jupiter. It then headed out of the solar system — one of only five “made things” to do that (so far). It kept sending data until 2003, when the generators probably ran out of power. There were three of them, and they were “radioisotope thermoelectric generators.” They contained plutonium, which generated heat that was converted to electricity by thermocouples. The design spec called for the generators to provide power for 2 years — but they ended up lasting over 30 years. It wasn’t the plutonium that ran out. That had a half-life of nearly 90 years. But the thermocouples wore out.
Pioneer 10 weighted nearly 600 pounds (on Earth), and contained eleven different sensors and experiment packages as well as the generators, antennas, and shielding. Even building it was quite the accomplishment, let along seeing it continue to work for decades. You have to wonder if somebody, someday, is going to try to find it, just as a prize in some future collection.
Another space probe, Galileo, wasn’t launched on March 2. Its contribution to the date was in 1998, when data it sent back to Earth (it also visited Jupiter) showed that the Jovian moon Europa has liquid oceans. The oceans are under thick ice, but all the data suggest that underneath that ice, the liquid is actually water. A lot of water; it’s probably up to 60 miles deep. The news from the March 2, 1998 data was compelling enough that NASA changed the course of the probe. It had been intended to crash into Europa, but oceans of liquid water hold enough of a possibility of life that Galileo was directed into Jupiter instead, to avoid the chance of contamination. That wasn’t Galileo’s first close encounter with Jupiter — it carried a detachable probe with a heat shield that entered Jupiter’s atmosphere, sending back data as long as it survived the journey. Since it entered the atmosphere at over 100,000 mph, and heated up past 28,000°F, it didn’t last very long.
Jupiter is the biggest planet in our solar system. But engineering also addresses the other end of the size spectrum, and the Fermilab particle accelerator (the Tevatron) near Chicago was built to investigate subatomic particles and energies. And sure enough, on March 2, 1995, researchers there announced that thanks to Tevatron experiments they’d discovered the top quark. Because it’s a particle much smaller than an atom (hence the term “subatomic”), there’s no way to see these things. That’s because we see with light, which is made of photons, which are themselves particles — and quarks are even smaller than photons. But you can see their effects, and that’s what the Fermilab team did. Now, I’m only reporting things here that I don’t understand, but the top quark is said to be the most massive of the elementary particles, and it couples with the Higgs Boson, which is…well, important in some way I frankly don’t have a clue about.
The Tevatron is a particle accelerator that’s a huge circle (almost 4 miles in circumference) of electromagnets. If you operate them in a ridiculously precise way, you can get subatomic particles speeded up to crazy velocities and crash them into other particles to see what happens. I know, I don’t get it either. But the engineering feat of a 4-mile circle of electromagnets controlled so perfectly that you can hit an invisibly-small thing with some other invisibly-small thing, well, that’s pretty impressive.
Circles are significant in engineering. They have all sorts of useful properties, not least of which is that they can spin. And that’s the key to the next engineering feat. This one occupies the same scale that we do; somewhere between Jupiter and a quark. And instead of billions of miles away, it’s right at hand — in fact, the handier the better. It was March 2, 1983 that compact discs (not to mention players) were first available outside Japan. Compact discs contain a spiral path of pits in a plastic surface coated with something shiny. Usually aluminum. A laser shines into the path, and the distortions of its reflections and refractions can be interpreted as data. Then that data can be transformed into practically anything, from music to spreadsheets. The discs were developed by a partnership between Sony and Philips, and originally intended for music. It was only later that they started to be used for other forms of data. When CDs were new, one held a great deal more information that a typical hard drive on a personal computer. But by about 2010, hard drives had blasted past the storage limitations of CDs, and held a thousand times as much. That, along with the discovery that CDs deteriorate with age (which at first wasn’t expected) led to a dramatic fall in their popularity. That, along with being able to subscribe to online music services, of course. The price of one disc now gets you access to hundreds of thousands of songs.
So in the main, March 2 is a good day to give a round of applause to the engineering field. You could even record your clapping on a recordable CD-R (if you can still find one). Although other than using it as a cheap rhetorical device, I can’t think of a single reason why you would.
Galileo space probe
