On Friday this week, NASA/Goddard filmmakers, writers, and animators will screen what they consider their best work of 2011. It’s called the Best of Goddard Film Festival, and it’s held every year about this time for Goddard employees. (For employees, the festival will run from 10:30 am to 12:30 pm in the Goett Auditorium, Building 3.)
Even if you are “outside the Center” and can’t be here with us, you can still watch and enjoy the entries to the festival that are available on YouTube on the NASA Explorer channel. They’ll run in groups this week on the blog.
Today, let’s look at videos created to promote the work that NASA does. It’s a variety of things, including contests and a video for kids about the NPP satellite.
OPTIMUS PRIME and NASA Team Up To Raise Awareness of NASA Technology
Animators: Walt Feimer (HTSI) (Lead), Chris Smith (HTSI)
Video Editor: Chris Smith (HTSI)
Narrators: Peter Cullen Chris Smith (HTSI)
Producers: Chris Smith (HTSI) Walt Feimer (HTSI)
Videographer: Chris Smith (HTSI)
Earth Day 2011 “Home Frontier” Video Contest Trailer
Video Editor: Matthew R. Radcliff (UMBC)
Producer: Matthew R. Radcliff (UMBC)
Writer: Patrick Lynch (Wyle Information Systems)
NPPy: Big Planet, Little Bear
Animators: Walt Feimer (HTSI) (Lead), Michael Lentz (UMBC), Ryan Zuber (UMBC)
Video Editor: Rich Melnick (HTSI)
Narrators: Katie Lewis (USRA), Marci Delaney (UMBC/GSFC)
Producers: Walt Feimer (HTSI), Rich Melnick (HTSI), Silvia Stoyanova (USRA)
Writers: Ryan Fitzgibbons (USRA), Chris Smith (HTSI)
NPP: Why another Earth observing satellite?
Producer: Silvia Stoyanova
See Goddard in 3D!
Producers: Victoria Weeks (HTSI), Michael Starobin (HTSI)
Scientist: David Adamec (NASA/GSFC)
Videographers: Victoria Weeks (HTSI), Michael Starobin (HTSI)
Writers: Michael Starobin (HTSI), Victoria Weeks (HTSI)
OH AND DID I MENTION? All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center. And while we’re at it, links to websites posted on this blog do not imply endorsement of those websites by NASA.
I just got off the phone with Jack Ireland and Alex Young, solar scientists who work at Goddard and are following Comet Lovejoy’s demise closely. Look what’s happening to the comet!
First, see how bulbous and weird the head of the comet is? That’s because the incredible brightness of the comet’s head is overwhelming the detectors on the SOHO satellite. The photons are “bleeding” out to form that cross-like pattern.
It gets interestinger and interestinger: Two distinct tails have formed. “The thick white tail is primarily dust breaking away from the comet nucleus,” Ireland explained in an email. “It’s the Sun’s radiation and solar wind that knocks the material off the comet nucleus.”
But to the left of the dust tail, do you see that faint wispy second stream? That is a tail of charged particles (ions) being deflected to the side by the magnetic field carried by the solar wind.
The coolest thing is that this is all happening right now.
Word is that the comet will pass behind the sun at around 7 pm tonight (EST). It may or may not come out the other side in its orbit. It depends how massive the comet is and how long it survives the pounding of the solar wind.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________ OH AND DID I MENTION? All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center. And while we’re at it, links to websites posted on this blog do not imply endorsement of those websites by NASA.
Steele Hill, NASA Goddard’s salesman of all things solar, just posted his latest weekly release of imagery, courtesy of NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. Steele creates the still images and video snippets for use in science museums and other public places. Here is his descriptive text for the image and video in this post.
NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory’s images of this Sun (Dec. 7, 2011) taken at almost the same time in several wavelengths at different temperatures and layers of the Sun. In addition, we superimposed an illustration of the Sun’s magnetic field lines to the view. We start off looking at the 6,000 degrees C. photosphere that shows the various sunspots on the “surface” of the Sun. Then, we transition into the region between the chromosphere and the corona, at about 1 million degrees C. where, in extreme UV light, the active regions appear lighter. We phase in a composite of three different wavelengths showing temperatures up to 2 million degrees C. To top it off, we overlay a science-based estimation of the complex magnetic field lines (partly made visible in the first UV image) extending from and connecting the active regions before going back to the sunspot image. Who says the Sun is boring?
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________ OH AND DID I MENTION? All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center. And while we’re at it, links to websites posted on this blog do not imply endorsement of those websites by NASA.
Astrophysicist Jane Rigby joined Goddard about a year ago; she studies the evolution of galaxies. On Saturday, October 29, Rigby gave a talk about space telescopes to the TEDxMidAtlantic 2011 event in Washington, D.C.
You may have heard of the TED phenomenon. In the organization’s own words, “Speakers at TED events — some of the world’s most fascinating, innovative and influential individuals — are challenged to give “the talk of their life” in 18 minutes or less. TEDx is a sort of franchise of Big TED, known as “independently organized TED events.”
Big TED put out a call earlier this year for auditions for its annual conference in Long Beach. Rigby teamed up with fellow Goddard astrophysicist Amber Straughn to produce a 40-second narrated Keynote presentation as their audition entry.
It worked. Rigby was invited, along with 16 other finalists, to give a 5-minute live audition talk, in a bar in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York City on May 24. In the end, Big TED did not choose Rigby for this year’s conference.
But Rigby DID meet a person named Nate Mook, one of the organizers of the Mid-Atlantic TEDx conference. And Rigby gave her talk; here it is.
John (Jack) Townsend, one of the founders of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, passed away on Saturday, October 29. Among many other things, Townsend helped to develop the Vanguard satellite program, before NASA even existed. That was a long time ago, but many people are still around who worked with Townsend in those days.
Dave Schaefer is such a man. About a year ago, it was my pleasure to make the short drive to Dave’s home in the leafy outskirts of Silver Spring, Maryland. I was accompanied by NASA computer scientist James Fischer, who, like Dave, spent decades developing Goddard’s high-performance computing capabilities.
Dave Schaefer stands by the rug in his home office woven with the image of Explorer 12, a spacecraft he helped to design.
Dave was a member of the team that developed an important component of the Vanguard satellite: the telemetry system, which captured data from the satellite’s sensors, stored it temporarily, and relayed it to Earth.
Vanguard was the first civilian satellite program, established for the International Geophysical year of 1957. “Vanguard was supposed to orbit the very first artificial satellite,” Schaefer says. “It had its troubles.” Sputnik took over the honor, in October 1957, of becoming the first artificial Earth satellite.
But years before Sputnik was even a gleam in the eye of the Soviet politburo, Dave Schaefer and fellow staff scientist Robert Rochelle went to work at the Naval Research Laboratory, helping to lay the foundations for the U.S. civilian space program. That was in 1949.
Dave and Jack first met later, in 1955. It was all because of a radio broadcast heard in a car bound for Kansas. Schaefer told us the story this way:
“I was out in Kansas coming back from having taken two cousins of mine out there, on this auto trip. It was 1955, and here we had the radio on, and here there was a broadcast and it said mankind was going to do the greatest, most wonderful thing that had ever been done!” he says, raising his voice to preacher tone for dramatic emphasis.
“We were going to orbit an artificial moon. My God! And this was going to be done at a place called the Naval Research Lab. Well, I was already working at NRL on magnetic amplifiers. I had been there since March in 1949.
“Well I went to Whitney Matthews, who was my boss’s boss, whose name should show up in the annals of Vanguard, and I said to Whitney, “Why are we working on stupid magnetic amplifiers when the greatest thing that mankind has ever done is being done two buildings down?” And I slammed the door. I could have been out of a job, but I wasn’t.
“So two days later Whitney came to me, he said, “I have invited someone from the satellite project over to talk to us. His name is John Townsend. Jack is going to come over and talk to us tomorrow afternoon.”
“So he arrived and he said, ‘We need a telemetry system.’ He said if we go out commercially to get it, it will weigh 20 lbs. We need one that weighs — I think he said four pounds or something. And he didn’t say a lot more. He said to us, “You all think you can do it?”
“And of course we said yes, yes, yes! We made sure he went down to the elevator. We made sure he was on his way back to his office two buildings down. Then you know what we did? We ran to the nearest dictionary to figure out what in heaven’s name a telemetry system, was!
“He’d said I’ll be back in a week to see how you’re doing. He was back in a week, because of our knowledge of magnetics, our group had a telemetry system operating for him. And it only weighed 8 ounces, including the batteries. It met the specs, and in fact it used so little power we didn’t need to turn it off at all.” Schaefer says Bob Rochelle was the main person responsible for this achievement.
Dave Schaefer points to the portion of the Vanguard electronics core he helped to build in the late 1950s. This was an actual working model of the electronics package built for the Vanguard satellites.
The United States — with the help of Dave Schaefer, Bob Rochelle, Jack Townsend, and many other people — attempted 11 Vanguard launches from 1958-59. They achieved orbit three times.
The grapefruit-sized Vanguard 1, the world’s first solar-powered satellite, launched St. Patrick’s Day (March 17) 1958 weighed just 3.35 pounds. It remains the oldest artificial objects orbiting Earth to this day. The Rochelle telemetry system flew on Vanguard 3, launched on September 18, 1959. This satellite is slated to remain in orbit for 300 years.
That same year, 1959, Jack Townsend jumped ship to the new civilian aerospace program, NASA, and helped establish Goddard Space Flight Center, assuming the role of Assistant Director for Space Science and Satellite Applications.
The rest is history — our history at Goddard Space Flight Center, and the origins of the nation’s aerospace agency. As Schaefer wryly points out, “The Vanguard telemetry system, the results of a ‘dare’ of Jack Townsend’s, will be in space, remembering him, for 300 years.”
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________ OH AND DID I MENTION? All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center. And while we’re at it, links to websites posted on this blog do not imply endorsement of those websites by NASA.
Yesterday I attended a talk here at Goddard by Michelle Thaller, our Assistant Director for Science Communication. Dr. Thaller trained as an astrophysicist and is a masterful public speaker, mostly because she has devoted her career to public outreach and she works hard at being good at it. She also has a wicked sense of humor and is pretty handy with a light saber.
Yesterday, she merely took on two of the greatest discoveries of modern cosmology: the microwave background “glow” of the Big Bang, and the quickening expansion of space/time due to dark energy.
Research in these areas have won Nobel prizes. Goddard’s John Mathershared one for discoveries made with NASA’s COBE spacecraft (he led the team that built it). More recently, Adam Riess and other scientists used NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to make observations that contributed to the Nobel-prize-winning discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe.
(UPDATE 4:30 p.m. — Gogblog sincerely thanks Goddard astronomer Jane Rigby for pointing out an oversimplification in the way I initially described Hubble’s contribution to the discovery of accelerating cosmic expansion. She pointed out that MANY observatories all over the world contributed to the work.)
Thaller had to tap dance pretty nimbly to cover all this ground, while throwing in a discussion of dark matter (which by the way makes up the vast majority of the universe, although we can’t see it much less understand it). Afterward, she kindly agreed to field a few cosmic questions:
gogblog: If you consider all the creative hypotheses bouncing around to explain dark energy, which is the one that you think would be the most strange and therefore the most interesting, if it were true?
Thaller: I’m quite intrigued by the idea that gravity may work differently in different parts of the universe. In college, I believe such theories were called “perverse cosmologies,” so they’ve got to be interesting, right? I’ve heard the words “tame space” and “wild space” thrown around lately. The idea is that gravity acts somewhat differently when you are deep in a gravity well (like we are around the Sun), as opposed to out where there really isn’t any mass around (like between galaxies). Maybe there is a correction factor that we haven’t discovered locally, because it is overwhelmed by other effects, but out in “wild space,” gravity really is weaker, and therefore the galaxies are accelerating away from each other.
gogblog: You mentioned in your talk that you didn’t initially believe the new data from Type 1a supernovae showing that the acceleration of the universe is increasing. Do you recall when you accepted that strange conclusion, and did you immediately grasp the implications of it?
Thaller: I’m still not totally sure I accept the accelerating universe measurement. The thing that sort of got me a bit more comfortable was that the change between the universe slowly decelerating to it beginning to accelerate turns
out to be fairly recent — about 5 billion years ago.
For one thing, I’m totally thankful that the turn-over isn’t right NOW, because that would make me very nervous about the “privileged viewer” problem. At least it happened a while ago. But 5 billion years ago is recent enough that the universe had pretty much the same chemical content, and I can believe that Type I supernovae weren’t very different.
I think Bob Kirschner (co-discoverer of accelerating cosmic expansion) won me over while we were dancing at one of the last AAS meetings. He was wearing old-style cinema 3D glasses at night, for no reason. He must know what he’s talking about.
gogblog: Finally, the God question. Let us stipulate for argument’s sake that there is an omniscient being you could communicate with meaningfully. And this entity grants you one question about the universe. What do you ask?
Thaller: I have to say that I’m very aware that we aren’t anywhere close to even phrasing the right questions. It’s getting fairly obvious that what we humans define as reality (space, time, causality, etc.) is only a small part of the whole schmiel, whatever that is.
Although I hate the term, there is a reason why people are calling the Higgs particle the God Particle. Somehow energy (which is massless and travels at the speed of light) gets turned into matter. HUGE amounts of energy have to coagulate to give you a tiny amount of mass. And think about what the universe is like to a photon — a bit of pure energy traveling at the speed of light. No space, no time, all the universe is sort of lumped together in a point of reality.
How do you get from there to slow, solid stuff like us? I’d really like to know how that works, and really KNOW why e=mc2.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________ OH AND DID I MENTION? All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center. And while we’re at it, links to websites posted on this blog do not imply endorsement of those websites by NASA.
From Steele Hill, solar image media maven of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, comes this trifecta of a video from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. It shows three “active regions” on the sun, where charged solar material (plasma) is flowing along vast magnetic loops on the sun’s surface. Several Earths could fit under those loops — amazing, ja? The video version is at the end of this post.
Here is Steele’s text, which is provided weekly to museums and science centers, along with the images and video:
Three active regions lined up vertically and each of the loop structures above them twisted differently (Oct. 15 – 17, 2011) when viewed in extreme ultraviolet light by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. The high arching loops of the top active region seemed to lean to the north; the one beneath it clearly coiled to the south; at the bottom one spread upright and to the left and right as well. The loops are tracing particles spiraling along magnetic field lines that have emerged from underneath the Sun’s surface. While the movie shows that the loops shifted and changed over 2.5 days, the basic structure of all three remained very much the same. It is not common to see active regions so neatly aligned atop one another.
An exploding star can release a massive amount of energy, an event called a gamma ray burst, as shown in this National Science Foundation illustration. But it's hard sometimes to tell the difference between a statistical blip in data from the real thing.
Phil Evans, an X-ray astronomer in England and frequent guest blogger for Geeked On Goddard, sends us this report on the fascinating nature of coincidence in science.
I have the power to make stars explode!
No, seriously. True, I can’t draw my sword and turn miraculously into a muscle-bound hero, like He-Man, nor can I turn my pet cat (Tinkabell) into Battle Cat, He-Man’s ferocious feline familiar.
But I really can make explosions at the other end of the universe. Skeptical? Here is the proof:
Last year, NASA’s Swift satellite (data from which I use in my work) was going through a bit of a lean observing period, with no gamma ray bursts (GRBs) detected for some time. GRBs are vast releases of energy from collapsing or collidign stars.
So, just as my duty week began at the University of Leicester, I tweeted, “Wake up universe!”
In the next 24 hours, Swift snagged four GRBs. Coincidence?
The only other time that we have had that many bursts in one day was the day celebrated science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke died? Coincidence?
Well, actually — yes. The thing is that coincidences happen all of the time.
A couple of years ago on her BBC Radio show, Sarah Kennedy asked people to send in their “coincidence” stories. Countless people mailed in about times they’d gone around the world on holiday, and met someone from three streets away. The response was continually, “Wow! Isn’t that amazing?” when what the was program actually demonstrating was that these “unlikely” events actually happen regularly.
In fact, when people respond to these stories by saying, “Small world,” they’ve got it totally wrong! It’s because it’s a big world that these things happen. Imagine something that only affects 1 in a million people. Pretty unlikely? Well, it will affect something like 300 Americans, and 60 Brits!
Image of possible gamma ray burst, or statistical blip? (click to make me big)
Coincidences happen. And this can be a real pain for astronomers. I’ve got some data, there’s a cluster of pixels close together. Is it a faint source, or just a coincidence that some background light has clustered? (See image at right.) This spectrum shows a blip. Is it a real feature, or just noise?
Fortunately, using statistics we can at least quantify how likely things are. Typically in astronomy we would only claim we’d found a source, for example, if there was less than a 0.3% chance that it was just a “lucky” fluctuation in the background. Even this happens, well, 0.3% of the time!
For Swift, we have to be even more conservative. When the Burst Alert Telescope (BAT) thinks it’s found a GRB, there has to be only a 0.0000000000008% chance that it’s just a fluctuation in the background [for us to interpret the observation as "probably real." This threshold was carefully determined to minimize the number of false alarms, without losing real (possible) GRBs.]
Despite this, we do get a few false alarms every year, because of the number of times and ways the BAT looks for GRBs. We tried a “subthreshold” test a couple of years ago, where we triggered on things which were more likely to be spurious, that is, there was a 0.00000000006% chance of them being a random change in the background. We expected, and got, about 2 false alarms a day.
Overall, I’d say we get maybe 5 false alarms a year — but about 100 real GRBs. And the false alarms we usually identify within 20 minutes or so, so they take very little of our time.
So, next time someone tells you something unusual that’s happened, and asks if it could be coincidence, the best answer is probably, “Yes!”
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________ OH AND DID I MENTION? All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center. And while we’re at it, links to websites posted on this blog do not imply endorsement of those websites by NASA.
This week, it’s been a feast of exoplanet science at Goddard, which hosted the Signposts of Planets meeting Oct. 18-20. The three-day conference gathered an international crowd of observers, computer modelers, and instrument builders to explore the relationship between exoplanets and the circumstellar disks in which they form.
Circumstellar what?
Circumstellar simply means “disks of gas and dust around a star or stars.” Astronomers have discovered some 687 planets around other stars, but ironically they rarely are able to “see” one directly. What the Hubble telescope and other instruments see are dusty disks.
Circumstellar disks are the “signposts of planets” referenced by the name of the conference. Want to find planets? Look for dusty disks.
Here is Goddard astrophysicist and Signpost meeting organizer Marc Kuchner explaining the lowdown on circumstellar disks, back when we only knew of about 400 extrasolar worlds:
The conference produced some show-stoppers in terms of new discoveries announced. Four were the subject of press releases:
Spiral signposts
At the meeting, Goddard astronomer Carol Grady announced the discovery of a type of exoplanet telltale predicted but never actually imaged before. In some circumstellar disks, the tug of a planet’s gravity can create subtle spiral features in the gas and dust. That is good news, because it means that disks with spirals could lead astronomers to planets.
“What we’re finding is that once these systems reach ages of a few million years, their disks begin to show a wealth of structure — rings, divots, gaps and now spiral features,” said John Wisniewski, a collaborator at the University of Washington in Seattle. “Many of these structures could be caused by planets within the disks.”
The newly imaged disk surrounds SAO 206462, a star located about 456 light-years away in the constellation Lupus.
Baby planet
Baby planet
Also at the conference, astronomer Adam Kraus explained how he used the mammoth Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea in Hawaii to image an infant planet. “LkCa 15 b is the youngest planet ever found, about 5 times younger than the previous record holder,” said Kraus, who is based at the University of Hawaii’s Institute for Astronomy.
Kraus did the work using a technique called interferometry, which allows a telescope to achieve the detail-resolving power equivalent to that of a much larger telescope.
Cool findings
In another report at the Signpost meeting, astronomer Kevin Luhman of Penn State University described his observations of a star with a cool planet-like companion. The object, a gaseous not-quite-a-star called a brown dwarf, has an outer temperature described as comparable to “a hot summer day in Arizona.”
Coolest brown dwarf ever
Luhman commented:
“Its mass is about the same as many of the known extra-solar planets — about six to nine times the mass of Jupiter — but in other ways it is more like a star. Essentially, what we have found is a very small star with an atmospheric temperature about cool as the Earth’s.”
OK, not quite a planet — but not quite a star either. Brown dwarfs lie in between. But they lie along a spectrum of objects that exoplanet researchers study.
Ever since brown dwarfs first were discovered in 1995, astronomers have been trying to find new record holders for the coldest brown dwarfs because these objects are valuable as laboratories for studying the atmospheres of planets with Earth-like temperatures outside our solar system.
Comet storm
And last but not least, comet storms!
NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has detected signs of icy bodies raining down in an alien solar system. The downpour resembles our own solar system several billion years ago during a period known as the “Late Heavy Bombardment,” which may have brought water and other life-forming ingredients to Earth.
Carey Lisse, senior research scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland., announced the finding at the Signposts conference. The research will be published in the Astrophysical Journal.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________ OH AND DID I MENTION? All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center. And while we’re at it, links to websites posted on this blog do not imply endorsement of those websites by NASA.
Do all polar bears look the same? Now star-mapping technology can help conservationists track individual bears based on speckly spots.
When people who support the space program talk about its value to society, often the issue of “spin offs” comes up. Spin offs are what might be called the unintended but happy consequences of aerospace technology development.
Space tech can have unexpected uses — like tracking endangered species. On Wednesday this week, Goddard astrophysicist Zaven Arzoumanian explained a “citizen science” project that he helped make happen. Conservationists are now using mathematical tools developed to match and compare astronomical images based on star patterns to identify and track endangered animals based on speckly patterns on their bodies. Both scientists and non-scientists collect the wildlife photos used for this purpose.
Arzoumanian has worked at Goddard’s X-ray Astrophysics Laboratory since 1999. He is also a founding Board member and the current President of ECOCEAN USA, a charity that promotes wildlife conservation through technology, research, and public engagement.
As a NASA summary of Zaven’s talk explains:
The project was initially developed to help biologists identify individual whale sharks through their unique spot pattern. The resulting ECOCEAN Whale Shark Photo-identification Library now contains images of over 1,600 whale sharks, providing a continuing data span that is helping researchers to learn more about the life histories and migration patterns of the elusive fish, as well as the status of the whale shark’s threatened population. The [technique] is now being used to track polar bears, ocean sunfish, and giant Eurasian trout.
If you want to read all the technical details, see this in-depth article by the NASA Office of the Chief Technologist.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________ OH AND DID I MENTION? All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center. And while we’re at it, links to websites posted on this blog do not imply endorsement of those websites by NASA.
