In 2007, a young woman with no prior experience in astronomy made a discovery that led to dozens of astronomers using billions of dollars of equipment to figure out the solution to the mystery. The young woman, named Hanny, and the object — whimsically named the Voorwerp — wound up becoming a fantastic demonstration of how citizen science works, and how it can lead to a greater understanding of the Universe.
My friend Pamela Gay, an astronomer and educator, spearheaded an effort to get this story out to the folks who need it most: kids! She and her team created a comic book based on Hanny’s story, called "Hanny and the Mystery of the Voorwerp" – you can learn more about it at that link. The comic book (a panel is shown above) will be premiered at Dragon*Con this weekend, but you can pre-order a copy for $5. If you’re an educator, or are looking to get your kids interested in science, you should check it out.
It’s a cute story, but also an important one. You don’t need a big fancy degree or even years of experience to make a big discovery. Sometimes what you need is a bright, curious mind, and the desire to explore.
On August 30th, after seven years gathering data on ice sheets and sea ice dynamics, a NASA satellite met its fiery end in the Earth’s atmosphere before plunging into the sea. And it was University of Colorado at Boulder undergraduates plotted the satellite’s fatal course.
Happily this wasn’t the result of a Hacking 101 class gone awry, or a particularly sophisticated prank. The students’ destructive mission had NASA’s full endorsement.
NASA decommissioned the Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite, or ICESat in July, before turning the show over to the students, who worked with experts from the university’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics.
Students and faculty at the Laboratory control four other satellites for NASA and have also operated ICESat during its life, allowing the satellite to measure polar sea ice thickness, the mass of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, and the heights of vegetation canopies and clouds. Even if the students were old pros at satellite steering, the chance to crash these multimillion dollar craft is rare–the last NASA satellite reentered the Earth’s atmosphere in 2002 and NASA did the job themselves.
After seven-day work weeks computing the satellite’s location and predictions for NASA tracking stations, the students transmitted the satellite’s final course and told it burn all remaining fuel. As Popular Science reports, its charred remains safely splashed down in the Barents Sea north of Norway and Russia on Monday. Please tell me someone in that control room made an explosion noise.
Related content: Discoblog: How to White Balance a Satellite: Aim It at Lake Tuz Discoblog: Dang, What Was That? Astronomers Wonder What Just Whizzed by Earth Discoblog: Want to Monitor the Earth’s Magnetic Field? There’s an App for That. DISCOVER: Space Junk: How to Clean Up the Space Age’s Mess (gallery)
Image: Glenn Asakawa/University of Colorado
Once or twice before I’ve made a case for diversity as a hallmark of good science fiction. Regardless of one’s present political affiliations, we like our sci-fi casts to be a plurality of uncanny and unfamiliar characters. The future of our species is, in part, dependent upon how well we get along with other forms of sentient life. So which stellar explorers would earn the stamp of approval from the Rainbow Coalition of the 24½th Century? After weeding out (most) all-human crews (sorry BSG!) and some of the less well-known teams (sorry Bucky O’Hare!), I’ve come up with a top five list. We’ve got genetic mutants, alcoholic robots, holograms, bisexual aliens, snarky A.I., clones, cryonauts, cyborgs, and every variant of human being imaginable. Did I leave anyone out?
5. The Space Shuttle Discovery Crew Mission STS-116 (pictured above)
The only all-human (and real) crew on my list, the STS-116 mission broke all sorts of records, with two African-Americans, two women, two European Space Agency astronauts, and a Jewish-Korean American pilot. Normally I am loath to describe any group of people by their various identities, instead of their individual personalities and achievements, but in light of the homogeneous nature of the earlier space program and much of sci-fi, the fact that a crew this diverse already exists is wonderful. STS-116 is both an excellent sign we’re moving in the right direction and a perfect first entry for this list.
4. Red Dwarf
A British comedy, Red Dwarf is about the misadventures of the remaining crew from the titular mining ship. Due to a radiation leak and an serendipitous bit of stasis, David Lister was awoken after 3 million years to discover he was the last person alive in the whole universe.
The least diverse of the top five, the crew of the Red Dwarf is comprised of David Lister, the last (and most disgusting) human in the universe; Arnold Rimmer, a hologram of his former-self; Kryten, an anal-retentive, know-it-all android; Cat, a humanoid descendent of Lister’s cat, has fangs, narcissism, and style like no one else; and finally, Holly. Sometimes male, sometimes female, always maintaining a stiff-upper lip, Holly is an A.I. that keeps things ostensibly running on the derelict ship. For a show that pretty much just has these five cast members, Red Dwarf makes the most of its motley crew.
3. Star Trek
The various and varied crews of the USS Enterprise and its sister ships in Star Fleet are too numerous to list, but the first crew set a new precedent for television. Kirk’s crew, first introduced to Americans in 1966, had Uhura, Sulu, and Checkov on the main bridge, with Spock, an alien, as the first officer. Sadly, the original Star Trek is still a high-water mark for diversity on television, matched only by its successors, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Deep Space 9 and Voyager.
Complementing the already ethnically diverse humans, notable crew members from each series include: Worf, the first Klingon in Star Fleet; Data, the first sentient android; Odo, a changeling; and Seven of Nine, a de-assimilated borg. In addition to these prominent non-humans, many members of each crew are at least partially cybernetic (Picard has an artificial heart, Jordi’s trademark Chevy-grill visor), and, like Spock, many are half-human, half-alien. Roddenberry’s commitment to unique cultures for each alien, as well as his preservation of many human ethnic traditions deep into the future, created a universe that set the gold standard for how a human future in space might be.
2. Futurama
Futurama is that perfect blend of homage, pastiche, and parody. Gene Roddenberry’s future was a believable utopia; Matt Groening and David X. Cohen’s future is a believable madhouse. The Planet Express crew does the Star Trek: Next Generation Crew a step better, having not just a robot (Bender) and an alien (Zoidberg), but also a cryonaut (Fry), a mutant (Leela), and a clone (Hubert Farnsworth). Throw in the recurring cast members of Lt. Kif Kroker, Lrrrr of Omicron Persei 8, Robot Nixon, celebrity heads in jars, and Nibbler and, well, it’s hard to get more diverse than that.
But they do. This season, the entire crew switched bodies and Bender bent his sexuality (again). That nearly every member of Planet Express has made out with or been to the “Lovenaisium” with another species, a robot, and/or changed genders is, I believe, a unique achievement.
1. Mass Effect
Mass Effect may be the most important new sci-fi story out there. Cliff Bleszinski calls it the “Star Wars for the next generation,” and I’m inclined to agree. In the universe of Mass Effect, humans have only recently become an interstellar species. Not only are we relative newcomers to the intergalactic community, we don’t even have a seat on the Council, which governs the dozens of races present in Mass Effect’s universe. Unlike Red Dwarf, Star Trek, and Futurama, Mass Effect’s entire narrative puts humans in the position of the minority. By the end of Mass Effect 2, Commander Shepard’s crew on the Normandy consists of fifteen characters, the majority of which are non-human.
If you play Mass Effect as a female Shepard (as you should), your crew by the last mission has eight female members and seven male members. Among the humans, one is a clone (Miranda), one is telekinetic (Jack), one is a cyborg (Shepard), and the pilot (Joker) is crippled by a disease. All the non-human crew mates (there are eight) are either a unique alien race (among nineteen options) or are synthetic life, including EDI (the ship A.I.) and Legion, a member of the Geth (a collective robotic species). Among the various species, skin color and body type are only the beginnings of their differences. Sexuality, gender representation, gender hierarchy, immuno-response, diet, life-span, intelligence, thought patterns, aggression, empathy, and genetic variety all differ from species to species. These fundamental biological differences are reflected in the total culture of each species as well as within the individuals on the crew of the Normandy, creating a staggering potpourri of characters that populate the universe of Mass Effect.
As with all video games, the sense of immersion is even more intense than on a television series, which in turn makes the feeling of unity and loyalty to the crew unparalleled. The resulting effect is that you, the human, come to implicitly trust, care for, and even mourn beings that repulsed, angered, or horrified you. At the beginning of Mass Effect, you are a member of humanity. By the end of the second game, you are a citizen and hero of Council space, and see yourself linked to not merely your crew members, but the species and cultures they represent.
Like Futurama, Mass Effect is a work in progress. As the series both continue, expect more new and strange permutations to push the boundaries of whom we consider “one of us.”
Image of STS-116 crew via Wikipedia, Red Dwarf crew via Topless Robot, Futurama crew via Wired, and Mass Effect via the Mass Effect Wiki and my Photoshop skillz.
A group of researchers is questioning, again, if aliens visited India in 2001–in the form of red rain.
In 2001, a bizarre red rain showered India’s southern state of Kerala. Godfrey Louis, a physicist now in Cochin University of Science and Technology’s astrobiology department, decided to collect samples and take a closer electron-microscope look. He noticed some particles in the rainwater that looked like biological cells, but when he went looking for DNA, he found none. That enticingly strange result led Louis to speculate that he had found extraterrestrial bacteria.
The new paper (pdf) appears in Arxiv.org, not a peer-reviewed journal. But it repeats earlier work by Louis and a collaborator that they say shows the cell-like particles can survive and grow at high temperatures that would kill most life as we know it (around 250 degrees Fahrenheit). At room temperature, particles appear as inert as, well, odd looking red rain dirt.
Louis and his colleagues hypothesize that extraterrestrial cell-like particles could have traveled on a meteor that burst in Earth’s atmosphere and seeded the rain cloud responsible for Kerala’s unusual weather. That would provide support for the “panspermia” theory–the idea that life on Earth came from outer space.
Louis’s earlier paper in Astrophysics and Space Science made him a media sweetheart and a target for critics. Plenty of people weren’t buying Louis’s story. As Popular Science reported in 2006, other earth-origin red rain theories ran the spectrum from commonplace to bizarre, including algae, fungal spores, and red blood cells (which don’t have DNA) juiced out of meteor-struck bats.
Technology Review reports that the new paper seems sure to precipitate more controversy. The work again says that high temperatures cause “daughter” cells to form in “mother” cells, and also notes that after the team bombarded the cell-like structures with light their emission had “remarkable correspondence with the extended red emission observed in the Red Rectangle planetary nebula and other galactic and extragalactic dust clouds.”
Follow Discover on Facebook.
Related content: Discoblog: Man Claims That Aliens Are Pelting His House With Meteorites Discoblog: Alien Math Shows Why Grad Student Doesn’t Have a Girlfriend Discoblog: How To Chat With an Alien: The Official Guide DISCOVER: 10 Bizarre-Looking Tricks of the Weather (including red rain)
Image: Wikimedia / Louis and Kumar
There is a struggle going on for NASA’s soul. Is NASA all about sending human beings into space? Or is NASA about elucidating the secrets of the cosmos? The former is, of course, best embodied by the Apollo missions: pure, unadulterated rocket science. The latter is probably best associated with the Hubble space telescope (although NASA’s contribution to our understanding of the Universe goes far beyond Hubble). Of course, spacewalks and science are not mutually exclusive (as Hubble has demonstrated). But a singleminded focus on the former has led to significant weakening of the latter.
At present, it looks like there will be two more space shuttle launches. That’s it. Within a year, our nation will no longer have the capability to launch humans into space. For some this is a sure sign that America is sliding into mediocrity. Both the first and the last man to step on the Moon testified before Congress last May, speaking out against the Obama plan to shut down the Constellation program (video). Their testimony was reminiscent of a past age, where we proved our worth by beating the Russians to the Moon, and the natural next step is to now prove our worth by beating the Chinese to the Red Planet. The jingoistic associations are unsettling, and these arguments gloss over the staggering costs involved. To quote none other than Neil Armstrong: “If the leadership we have acquired through our investment is allowed simply to fade away, other nations will surely step in where we have faltered. I do not believe that this would be in our best interests.”
It is certainly amazing that we’ve had continuous human “inhabitants” in low-Earth orbit. Rocket science is, indeed, rocket science, and this should never be taken for granted. Launching people into orbit is a massive endeavor, and having them survive in the incredibly inhospitable environment of space is even more impressive. But the simple truth is that the contributions to basic science from the space station have been entirely negligible (especially in comparison with the staggering costs). Furthermore, I would argue that the Hubble space telescope has done significantly more to awe and inspire the world than the International Space Station.
A year ago we discussed an Academy report which criticized the direction of the manned space program, and recommended profound changes. Subsequently the Academy released a separate report sharply criticizing the scientific underpinning of NASA, and recommending similar changes. Two months ago the Obama administration outlined a new vision for NASA, in line with these reports, including the cancellation of the Constellation program (which was the new and improved version of the Apollo program). Given the immense sums of money involved, especially to influential states such as Florida and Texas, Congress has taken the liberty of trying to do an end-run around the White House, and fund Constellation despite the lack of a request for funding. In a triumph of politics over common-sense, money will be poured into building more rockets, rather than funding a broad portfolio of technological development (including better ways to get humans into orbit and beyond) and basic research (including unmanned probes and satellites elucidating the mysteries of the Universe). In the latest salvo, fourteen Nobel laureates, and a few astronauts for good measure, issued an open letter supporting Obama’s strategy, and advising Congress against throwing all of NASA’s eggs in the “heavy lift rocket” basket.
One thing is clear: for better or worse, the shuttle program is at an end. There is no clear successor, and it will likely be many years before another astronaut is launched into orbit by the United States. If you want to experience the thrill of sending humans into space (and it is an incredible, indescribable rush), you’d better hustle on down to the Kennedy Space Flight Center. The next-to-last launch is currently scheduled for November 1, 2010.
For two years, the Chinese science satellite SJ-06F flew solo orbits around the Earth (or, as solo as a machine could be in the expanding haze of space junk in orbit). But now it has a partner: Last month China executed the delicate maneuver of aligning another satellite launched this year, SJ-12, with its older counterpart.
Only the United States had executed such a satellite rendezvous before this, and it shows off China’s advancement in satellite sophistication. Three years ago the country blew one of its satellites to smithereens in a practice test—a test that created thousands of additional chunks of debris in orbit. The satellite meet-up is a more elegant trick, and one whose implications could be sinister or benign. Let’s explore both possibilities.
Don’t Worry
China’s game of catch-up, which has its space program closing in on America’s abilities in orbit, strikes fear into the hearts of some politicos. But malfeasance need not be the aim of the satellite maneuver.
“This set of skills serves a whole lot of purposes,” says Dean Cheng, a Chinese policy expert with the Heritage Foundation, a think tank in Washington DC. The most immediate application, Cheng says, may be testing sensors and control systems to help pave the way for docking procedures to be used with China’s first space station module, Tiangong-1, which is set to launch in 2011. “This sort of thing may very well be consistent with wanting to test drive the hardware and software before you test it on your space laboratory,” Cheng says. [New Scientist]
And speaking of space junk (as we were earlier), this kind of procedure could be used in the future to clear out the defunct equipment and debris that clogs the space around our planet and threatens useful machinery in orbit.
What of the worry that China could dock with our satellites and interfere with them? Brian Weeden of the Secure World Foundation, who I talked to for a story in the September issue of DISCOVER, tracked the rendezvous and says that’s unlikely. Weeden, whose organization is devoted to the peaceful use of space, says that there are easier ways to mess with enemy satellites, like shooting them with lasers from the ground.
OK, Worry
Whether or not China is pursuing space warfare in this instance, the country is certainly trying to measure up to whatever the United States can do.
“The Chinese would be absolutely incompetent to not be trying to reduce U.S advantage in space,” James Oberg, a former NASA space engineer specializing in orbital rendezvous, tells Danger Room. “No potential adversary in their right mind would give us permanent advantage in space operations.” [Wired.com]
China might not need rendezvous capability to tinker with another country’s satellites, but it would need that capability to spy on them—taking an up-close look at the competitor’s product. There may be no way to gauge true intentions.
According to Oberg, the satellite meet-up occurred in an orbit almost exclusively devoted to earth observation — spy and weather satellites, for example — where “a potential adversary would be most interested in rendezvousing. On the other hand, it’s also where a satellite might need refueling,” he adds. “It’s like you could be changing a screwdriver for a hammer, or you could be turning a peaceful ‘bot into a killer one.” [Wired.com]
Related Content: DISCOVER: Space Junk: How To Clean Up the Space Age’ Mess (Photo Gallery) 80beats: China’s “Heavenly Palace” Space Station Module Due to Launch in 2011 80beats: A Smashing Finale: China’s Lunar Probe Crashes Into the Moon 80beats: After a Successful Spacewalk, Chinese Astronauts Return Home 80beats: Video: Navy’s New Laser Weapon Shoots Down Drones 80beats: Amateur Sky-Watchers Track the Air Force’s Super-Secret Space Plane
Image: ESA
If you’ve read my blog for any length of time, you’ve read about my friend Nicole, aka Noisy Astronomer. She’s a young grad student studying radio astronomy at the University of Virginia (my alma mater!), and she’s very gung ho about astronomy outreach.
In a recent post about comets, I mentioned her and a project she and a bunch of other grads are working on: Dark Skies, Bright Kids. This is a terrific project that is doing a lot to bring the joy and wonder of astronomy to third graders in Albemarle County, the home of UVa (if you saw my show "Bad Universe" where I made the comet, I got that recipe from Nicole and DSBK!). One of their efforts is a bilingual book designed to make astronomy fun for the kids — I have a copy, and it’s very cute; as someone who has worked on astronomy education I know kids that age will love it. Nicole and her group have a big goal for the book, too: they’re looking to get a copy of it into the hands of every single third-grader in the county.
To do this, they applied for a Pepsi Refresh Grant, which, if they win, will get them $25,000! And you can help: all you have to do is go to the page and click a link to vote for them. To be fair, surf around and look at the other applicants if you want; there are other worthy efforts. But I’m voting for DSBK because I know how important it is to get kids to look up and have a sense of wonder about the Universe around them.
They also put together a short video of the children having fun while learning science:
Voting is open now, closes September 30, and once you sign up you can vote once per day. Thanks!
I have, from time to time, made a point that astronomers rarely if ever report UFOs. If UFOs really were buzzing us as much as the media and UFO proponents would have us believe, then astronomers would overwhelmingly report the majority of them: we spend far more time outside looking up than pretty much any other group of people.
So why don’t we see all these alien spacecraft? I think this is because we almost always understand what we’re seeing in the sky, so we know not to mistake Venus, the Moon, a satellite, or other mundane things for flying saucers.
While UFO believers love to make hay of this — showing me the extremely rare time when an astronomer has reported a UFO, thus proving my point, or falsely saying astronomers spend too much time at the eyepiece to note the broader sky (which is ridiculous) — the fact is, astronomers are familiar with the sky, so we know what’s going on.
Well, almost always know. John Woolley of the Greater Edmonton Skeptics Society has an amusing story of the time he and some other astronomers saw something they couldn’t immediately explain… and make sure you read Part 2.
And y’know, his story sounds pretty familiar…
So remember, despite the claims of the UFO crowd and the media that love to play this stuff up, seeing isn’t believing. Understanding is!
In a recent article, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) astronomer Seth Shostak makes an intriguing claim: SETI should start pointing its telescopes toward corners of the known universe that would be friendly not just to intelligent aliens but to artificial alien intelligence. The basis of his suggestion is that any form of life intelligent enough to generate the kinds of radio signals that SETI is looking for would be “quickly” superseded by an artificial intelligence of their creation. Here, going on our own rate of progress toward AI, Shostak suggests that this radio-to-AI delay is a small handful of centuries.
These artificial intelligences, not likely to have had the “nostalgia module” installed, may quickly flee the home planet like a teenager trying to pretend it isn’t related to its parents. If nothing else, they will likely need to do this to find further resources such as materials and energy. Where would they want to go? Shostak speculates they may go to places where large amounts of energy can be obtained, such as near large stars or black holes.
Stephen Hawking imagines aliens covering stars with mirrors to generate enough power for worm holes
Stephen Hawking has suggested one reason to go to high-energy regions would be to make worm holes through space-time to travel vast distances quickly. These areas are not hospitable to life as we know it, and so are not currently the target of SETI’s telescopes searching for signals of such life.
In the same article, Shostak also makes the argument that since biological intelligence is a short stepping stone to artificial intelligence, “the majority of the intelligence in the universe could well be artificial intelligence.” There’s clearly a missing premise here, which is that biological intelligence means an intelligence that invents radio or TV, or more broadly speaking, technology. But this is clearly false. From cuttlefish to corvids, the scientific evidence for high levels of intelligence in non-human animals is rapidly accumulating. At the moment, it’s not even clear that the invention of technology will be good for us as a species: an analysis of nine planetary boundaries within which human life can flourish shows that we are now transgressing three of these. Given that life has flourished for billions of years, for this to happen with just a few thousand years of agriculture and a few hundred years of industrialization shows that the step from advanced technology to artificially intelligent descendants roaming the galaxies is not one to be taken for granted.
In any event, given we can’t look everywhere, should thoughts about AI inform where we look? I don’t think so. First, based on our very limited experience, only Homo sapiens, just one of tens of millions of species of life on Earth, have developed technology. Were it not for our species, it’s unclear whether technology would ever have come about on Earth. Second, it’s far from obvious that our species will have the maturity to survive the power of our achievements for more than a blink of evolutionary time–the development of AI that leaves this planet, or at the very least serious efforts toward space colonies, is probably our best hope for long term survival–but we may not get there. Perhaps the situation is no different for other forms of life that have developed technology. They will have all emerged from a Darwinian primordial soup, a soup where certain vicious and short-sighted traits will have been essential to survival. Third, it would probably be both more successful and more scientifically useful to adjust our search strategy to improve the chances for finding extraterrestrial life, rather than intelligence.
My personal favorite for such a tweak to our search strategy is to look for places that have the hallmarks of increasing entropy. All forms of life take in energy that has some degree of entropy and re-emits it with increased entropy, such as heat. For our biosphere, we absorb sunlight and reflect heat, which appears as a “red edge” in the spectrum of reflected energy. The same, incidentally, seems likely to be true of artificial intelligence: it will require energy such as electric power, which will be radiated at higher entropy, such as the heat of integrated circuits. Sean Carroll has written an excellent explanation of the red edge in one of his postings over at Cosmic Variance. If we build better red edge detectors, we will both improve our chances of finding the much more common non-technologically savvy forms of life in the universe, and as an added side benefit, we might just detect the much rarer roaming AIs out there — although, as Hawking suggests, we may want to avoid hailing them down for coffee.
Image from Stephen Hawking’s Universe, “Fear the Aliens”
When I posted the awesome video of a fire tornado last week, I had only heard rumors of such things. Apparently, they’re more common than I thought.
Here’s another amazing video, and this one is even better: it’s longer, and you can see the rotating smoke cloud around the column of fire!
This really is a fantastic demonstration of how microscale weather works. Imagine: a fire starts. As the air is heated above the fire, it rises, and the upward motion can be very strong. This leaves a lower pressure spot at the fire, and the air from outside the fire rushes in to fill the gap. The air is very turbulent, and as the inward-moving air from one side hits air coming in from the other, swirls can form. These get amplified by the constant gale of air, and rotation on a larger scale can get started and sustained. The whirlwind gets pumped by the hot air rising, and the next thing you know you’ve got a full-blown tornado of fire. Watch the video; see how the fire tornado is narrow and well-focused, but the air outside it is rotating more slowly? That’s an outcome of a law of physics called the conservation of angular momentum: if you take something that’s spinning and shrink it, the rotation rate will increase. You’ve seen this a bazillion times; figure skaters start spinning, then draw their arms in. Their decreased radius increases their spin, sometimes very dramatically. Water draining out of a bathtub does the same thing, too.
We see it in astronomy all the time too: massive stars undergo core collapse at the ends of their lives. The core shrinks so much the spin rate can go up vastly, and we’re left with collapsed neutron stars — mind-numbingly über-dense objects with the mass of the Sun compressed into a ball only a few kilometers across, and they’re spinning quite literally a thousand times per second: faster than the blades of a kitchen blender.
Angular momentum is a powerful, powerful thing. And it’s also beautiful. On scales as titanic as an octillion tons of star matter collapsing to form a weird quantum mechanical fluid, down to an almost supernaturally awe-inspiring column of fire, physics is everywhere, and it’s an astonishing thing to watch.
Tip o’ the fireman’s helmet to Dave Mosher.