Happy Friday everyone. Don't forget to join us next Thursday for our monthly NASA retirees luncheon at Hibachi Grill at 11:30 am….
NASA and Human Spaceflight News
Friday – Jan. 30, 2015
HEADLINES AND LEADS
NASA astronaut memorial stirs memories for shuttle veteran
Jay Reeves - Associated Press via Orlando Sentinel
Each year around this time, NASA honors fallen astronauts, including the 17 men and women killed in three separate wintertime accidents in the sky and on the earth.
Why Russia Is Abandoning The International Space Station
With its programs aging, Russia has announced that it's pulling out of the International Space Station in 2020. Where does that leave space exploration for the rest of the world?
Elena Kudryavtseva - Kommarsant
An alarm went off in the American section of the International Space Station (ISS) on Jan. 14, warning that ammonia, which is used to cool the space station's energy system, had leaked into the atmosphere. Without it, the station would blow up like a can of food placed on an open flame. Following instructions, the three American astronauts fled to the safety of the Russian section, joining three astronauts there. It turned out that the space station's atmospheric monitoring system was simply malfunctioning.
Launch of SMAP slips to NET Jan. 31
Jason Rhian – Spaceflight Insider
Citing repairs that are needed to the Delta II 7320 launch vehicle, United Launch Alliance (ULA) has opted to delay the launch an additional 24 hours. The launch window will now open no earlier than (NET) 6:20 a.m. PST (9:20 a.m. EST) on Jan. 31, 2015. The launch site is Vandenberg Air Force Base's Space Launch Complex 2. The payload for this mission is NASA's Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) spacecraft.
Will NASA's TESS spacecraft revolutionize exoplanet hunting?
Tomasz Nowakowski - Spaceflight Insider
NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), planned to be launched in August 2017 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida, is designed to discover thousands of exoplanets. Led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), TESS will focus on stars 30-100 times brighter than those surveyed by the Kepler space telescope, thus, the newly-discovered planets should be far easier to characterize with follow-up observations.
European Satellites Still Heavily Dependent on U.S. Parts
Peter B. de Selding – Space News
More than one-third of the critical components embedded in European satellites, when measured by cost, are non-European, most of them provided by U.S. companies, according to the French space agency, CNES.
Massive Alien Ring System is Much Larger Than Saturn's - And May Contain Exomoons
Paul Scott Anderson – AmericaSpace
Astronomers today announced yet another mind-boggling finding – a ring system which orbits a distant giant planet has been found to be much larger and more massive than Saturn's ring system, the best known example in our own Solar System. There may also be exomoons hiding within it. The findings come from astronomers at the University of Rochester in the USA and Leiden Observatory in The Netherlands.
How Would The World Change If We Found Extraterrestrial Life?
Elizabeth Howell – Astrobiology Magazine
In 1938, Orson Welles narrated a radio broadcast of "War of the Worlds" as a series of simulated radio bulletins of what was happening in real time as Martians arrived on our home planet. The broadcast is widely remembered for creating public panic, although to what extent is hotly debated today.
Scientists and public at odds over GMO safety, other science issues
Gavin Stern - Scripps Howard News Service
Scientists and the public often don't see eye-to-eye, according to a Pew Research survey released Thursday. Safety Panel Criticizes Lack of Commercial Crew Transparency
Jeff Foust – Space News
An independent panel said Jan. 28 it could not evaluate the safety of NASA's commercial crew program because of the unwillingness of the agency's leadership to provide information the panel sought about it.
Pluto, here we come, whatever you are: Editorial
Los Angeles Daily News
NASA's New Horizon probe has been heading to the tiny demoted planet Pluto at the very edge of our solar system for nine years now, and last week the space agency reported the spacecraft has begun its final approach phase to Pluto, resulting in the first flyby on July 14.
The Life in Our Stars
Cambridge scientists are leading the search for inhabitable (and maybe even inhabited) planets, and they hope to find one…in our lifetime.
Chris Berdik|Boston Magazine
One spring day in 2011, Sara Seager, an MIT professor of planetary science and physics, invited 14 of the world's most influential astronomers to a birthday party of sorts. In an auditorium at the glistening MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Seager stood before her distinguished guests, including Harvard's Dimitar Sasselov, David Charbonneau, and Lisa Kaltenegger, and Berkeley's Geoff Marcy, dressed entirely in black, a hue that matched her raven hair and dark eyes. The only dashes of color were her red-and-pink scarf, red lipstick, and scarlet fingernails.
Asteroid Miners May Get Help from Metal-Munching Microbes
Asteroid mining may become a multispecies affair.
Astronaut takes awesome NASA photo with his dogs
Matt Levin | Houston Chronicle
COMPLETE STORIES
NASA astronaut memorial stirs memories for shuttle veteran
Jay Reeves - Associated Press via Orlando Sentinel
Each year around this time, NASA honors fallen astronauts, including the 17 men and women killed in three separate wintertime accidents in the sky and on the earth.
For Robert "Hoot" Gibson, it's a time to remember lost friends and some of their stunts, like playing a saxophone in orbit.
Gibson, who flew on five space shuttle missions, knew each of the 14 astronauts who died in the Challenger explosion on Jan. 28, 1986, and in the Columbia disaster on Feb. 1, 2003.NASA Remembrance Day 2015Red Huber, Orlando Sentinel29 years after the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, NASA honors all of its fallen astronauts on Remembrance Day, Jan. 28, 2015.
On Thursday, he lit a candle of remembrance during a ceremony at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. Behind him hung a photo of astronauts including Ron McNair.
Gibson and McNair were crewmates aboard Challenger during a mission in February 1984. McNair, a black belt in karate who also played jazz saxophone, serenaded the crew with music.
He played 'What the World Needs Now is Love,' and we put together a video," Gibson said in an interview.
The memorial came a day after the 29th anniversary of the Challenger explosion, in which McNair and six other astronauts died. Seven astronauts were killed aboard Columbia, and three died during ground testing of Apollo 1 in January 1967.
The memorial also honored another 40 one-time astronauts have died of various causes since NASA began.
Gibson left NASA in 1996 after post-flight work that included serving as chief astronaut. Now 68, the one-time Navy fight pilot lives in Murfreesboro, Tennessee.
Gibson feels fortunate to have flown in space, and he still remembers those who didn't make it back.
"You think about the contributions that those people made, and all the wonderful things they did and all the wonderful things that they were going to do in the future," he said.
Why Russia Is Abandoning The International Space Station
With its programs aging, Russia has announced that it's pulling out of the International Space Station in 2020. Where does that leave space exploration for the rest of the world?
Elena Kudryavtseva - Kommarsant
An alarm went off in the American section of the International Space Station (ISS) on Jan. 14, warning that ammonia, which is used to cool the space station's energy system, had leaked into the atmosphere. Without it, the station would blow up like a can of food placed on an open flame. Following instructions, the three American astronauts fled to the safety of the Russian section, joining three astronauts there. It turned out that the space station's atmospheric monitoring system was simply malfunctioning.
A similar incident had happened before, in May 2013, when the astronauts spent six hours trying to find the problem. "A sensor that goes off erroneously is a signal that the space station can't stay in use forever," explains Andrei Ionin, an expert in space technology at the Academy of Astronautical Science. "At the beginning, the International Space Station was supposed to work through 2015 — that is, until about right now. There was good reason for deciding on that period of time, since the various systems on board have a certain guaranteed length of service."
The number of malfunctions and errors will only increase from now on, which is among the reasons why Russia's decision to pull out of the ISS in 2020 was a wise one, Ionin says.
There have been other problems too. In August, and again in September, the station launched several micro-satellites on its own because of a system malfunction. Yuri Karash, a Russian space policy and rocket systems expert, says these kinds of non-programmed actions on the part of the onboard computer was one of the key reasons why the Mir Space Station was retired.
"The oxygen system and the onboard computers break down on the International Space Station relatively regularly," Karash says. "Theoretically, they can be fixed. But what can't be is the wear on the metal the station is made of. There are micro-fissures in the module walls, and air is starting to leak out."
Karash says that a space station that endlessly circles the earth, that has already been in use for decades, reminds him of running in place. "It was never going to pay for itself in an economic sense, but now it doesn't pay for itself in a scientific sense," he says. "We don't have anything new to do in orbit. Or on the moon, for that matter: 12 Americans have already been there and brought back 400 kilos of rocks and soil. Today we should only go forward — and that means to Mars."
What to do in orbit?
Initially, a space station in orbit was considered nothing more than a stopping point, a place for humankind to launch its conquest of the heavens. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, a Polish-Russian rocket science who is considered one of the founding fathers of astronautic theory, left many drawings of cylindrical orbit stations, where hundreds of engineers were supposed to live among greenhouses and assemble spaceships for longer flights.
The Soviet Union launched its first orbit station in 1971, after an unsuccessful attempt to reach the moon. At the time, the scientists were interested both in the technical aspects of the trip and in seeing how human beings held up over extended stays in space.
There was serious concern, for example, about astronauts' psychological state in space. When Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit earth in 1961, he had to do a simple logic task before he could control the spaceship's brakes, to make sure that he was still capable of thinking straight.
It turns out that these fears are well-founded, and there would be a similar problem on the route to Mars, where strong cosmic radiation would likely affect the human nervous system about halfway there. But we have been able to solve many riddles related to the cosmos, developing a whole field of science about how to survive in space and discovering where it is simply impossible to do so.
Just a decade after Gagarin's flight, reaching orbit began to seem mundane, and scientists were saying that we needed to go further. It just wasn't clear to where. And then the money ran out. So it was only logical to support the International Space Station, where it has been possible to carry out myriad scientific experiments, from micro-gravity environments to cultivating bacteria on the station's exterior.
"All of the participants in the International Space Station got what they wanted from it in the beginning," says Andrei Ionin. "In the 1990s, Russia couldn't have started a new project like the International Space Station on its own, and it was able to continue its space presence thanks to the ISS. Our Western partners were able to get access to unique technology and techniques at minimal expense."
Whither the ISS?
What will happen to the International Space Station now is an open question. The United States has said it is willing to support the work of the ISS even after Russia leaves the project in 2020. But experts say that's not realistic: They would have to learn to use the Russian technology, which is almost impossible, and it's not possible to maintain only one section of the station.
"The International Space Station was created as an integrated organism, because no one thought that one country might abandon the project," Karash says. "The American section depends on the Russian section to control the station's movement, and the Russian section depends on the American section's energy system. It would be easier to build a new station than to break up the International Space Station."
There's also no clear idea of where to go next in space exploration. Vice Premier Dmitrii Rogozin, who is responsible for the Russian space program, is convinced that we should build yet another orbiting station. The government also considers colonization of the moon important. When it comes to the moon, Russia has concrete plans: to launch two landing vessels and one satellite in the next five years.
The third priority Rogozin has mentioned is a trip to Mars. In one recent interview, he suggested throwing all of the space program's resources into developing an asteroid protection system for earth and looking for aliens. The lack of focus in Russia's space plans is disquieting, but experts say we aren't the only ones in this situation.
"The Americans won't leave the International Space Station, in my opinion, because they simply don't know how else to move forward with manned space exploration," Ionin says. "That's where this 'either the moon, or Mars, or to the asteroids' mentality comes from. The truth is that any of those projects would require at least doubling NASA's budget, and the American government is not planning to do that, because it doesn't see how that massive investment will lead to success."
Ionin speculates that the United States is taking a strategic break and is waiting for initiatives from the private sector, especially from Elon Musk's SpaceX. "When Musk focuses his project — I think he'll need another two or three years — then we'll see what direction the American space program is headed," he says. "But Russia, I think, will announce its priorities in space exploration this year."
Launch of SMAP slips to NET Jan. 31
Jason Rhian – Spaceflight Insider
Citing repairs that are needed to the Delta II 7320 launch vehicle, United Launch Alliance (ULA) has opted to delay the launch an additional 24 hours. The launch window will now open no earlier than (NET) 6:20 a.m. PST (9:20 a.m. EST) on Jan. 31, 2015. The launch site is Vandenberg Air Force Base's Space Launch Complex 2. The payload for this mission is NASA's Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) spacecraft.
ULA attempted to get the mission underway on Thursday, Jan. 29 at 6:20 a.m. EST, however; upper level winds forced the launch team to push the attempt to the end of the three minute launch window. The weather did not cooperate and ULA opted to scrub for 24 hours. A review of the launch vehicle noted that some repairs were necessary, thus forcing this latest delay. ULA noted the problems as follows:
During inspections following the Jan. 29 launch attempt, minor debonds to the booster insulation were identified. These insulation debonds are associated with cryogenic conditions experienced during tanking operations and a standard repair will be implemented.
Will NASA's TESS spacecraft revolutionize exoplanet hunting?
Tomasz Nowakowski - Spaceflight Insider
NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), planned to be launched in August 2017 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida, is designed to discover thousands of exoplanets. Led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), TESS will focus on stars 30-100 times brighter than those surveyed by the Kepler space telescope, thus, the newly-discovered planets should be far easier to characterize with follow-up observations.
NASA assumes that approximately 500,000 stars will be studied, including the 1,000 closest red dwarfs, across an area of sky 400 times larger than that covered by Kepler. The agency estimates that TESS will discover more than 3,000 transiting exoplanet candidates, including those which are Earth sized or larger. So is it a revolution in exoplanet hunting? David Charbonneau, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, whose research focuses on exoplanets, thinks so. "I do think TESS will have a huge impact," he told SpaceFlight Insider partner astrowatch.net. "The main impact of TESS will be to find many planets similar to the ones Kepler has been finding, but around stars that are much closer and hence much easier to study."
Previous sky surveys with ground-based telescopes have mainly picked out giant exoplanets. In contrast, TESS will examine a large number of small planets around the very brightest stars in the sky. TESS will record the nearest and brightest main sequence stars hosting transiting exoplanets, which will forever be the most favorable targets for detailed investigations.
Exoplanet candidates could later be investigated by the Automated Planet Finder telescope, the HARPS spectrometer and both the future ESPRESSO spectrometer and James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The development team at MIT has suggested that the first manned interstellar space missions may be to planets discovered by TESS.
"The TESS team currently predicts that TESS should find a handful of Earth-like planets – e.g. the same size and temperature – that transit, and hence perhaps would be accessible to spectroscopic studies of their atmospheres with JWST or the next generation of Extremely Large Ground-Based Telescopes," Charbonneau said.
Laura Kreidberg, a graduate student in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Chicago, who led a team of astronomers that characterized the atmosphere of a super-Earth class planet orbiting another star for the first time, also expects much from TESS. "TESS is expected to yield a sample of dozens of Earth-size, transiting planets whose atmospheres we can study with the James Webb Space Telescope," Kreidberg said. "These systems will be well suited to follow-up observations to characterize their atmospheres, in contrast to Kepler planet detections that were mostly around fainter distant stars."
TESS is designed to carry out the first space-borne all-sky transiting exoplanet survey. It is equipped with four wide-angle telescopes and associated charge-coupled device (CCD) detectors. Science data will be transmitted to Earth every two weeks. Full-frame images with an effective exposure time of two hours will be transmitted as well, enabling scientists to search for unexpected, transient phenomena, such as the optical counterparts to gamma-ray bursts.
The Kepler project has provided ground-breaking new insights into the population of exoplanets in our galaxies; among the discoveries made using data from Kepler is the fact that the most common members of the exoplanet family are Earths and Super-Earths. However, the majority of exoplanets found by Kepler orbit faraway, faint stars. This, combined with the relatively small size of Earths and Super-Earths, means that there is currently a dearth of such planets that can be characterized with follow-up observations.
"Kepler taught us so much! TESS will find planets of nearly the size of Earth around stars all over the sky, including around bright stars. These bright stars allow us to study the nearly Earth-size planets in fine detail, a wonderful prospect!" said Geoffrey Marcy, Professor of Astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley, the world's champion planet hunter, famous for discovering more extrasolar planets than anyone else.
The lead institution for TESS is MIT, which hosts the Principal Investigator, Dr. George Ricker. The MIT Lincoln Laboratory is responsible for the cameras, including the lens assemblies, detector assemblies, lens hoods, and camera mount. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center provides project management, systems engineering, and safety and mission assurance. Orbital Sciences Corporation (OSC) builds and operates the spacecraft. The mission is operated from the OSC Mission Operations Center.
European Satellites Still Heavily Dependent on U.S. Parts
Peter B. de Selding – Space News
More than one-third of the critical components embedded in European satellites, when measured by cost, are non-European, most of them provided by U.S. companies, according to the French space agency, CNES.
The situation has not materially changed in the past decade despite the technology-export red tape European and U.S. companies have faced in sending U.S. satellite parts overseas. It is one reason why CNES, the European Space Agency and the European Commission all include lines labeled "non-dependence" in their space research budgets.
For the European Commission, a program called Compet-T is part of the Horizon 2020 program, which has earmarked 200 million euros ($250 million) per year for space technology over seven years starting in 2014.
Horizon 2020 projects usually require co-funding by industry or national space agencies. The European Commission has budgeted 395 million euros over seven years for Compet-T, which in addition to reducing Europe's satellite-component dependence also funds in-orbit demonstration of technologies.
The first two calls for proposals for the Compet-T program related to component independence and in-orbit technology validation were budgeted at 60 million euros — triple the level of its predecessor, which was part of the European Commission's FP-7 Framework Program for Research.
CNES's "strategic components" research line has remained at about 2 million euros per year in recent years, a figure that is multiplied by co-financing from industry and occasionally with the European Space Agency as part of the European Components Coordination/Component Technology Board.
These organizations have all said their goal is to harmonize their programs to avoid duplication and achieve maximum effect.
"It goes without saying that if 30-40 percent of critical components of European satellites are made in Europe, that means at least 60 percent that we are importing from outside Europe," said Gilles Bellaiche of the CNES technology directorate during a Jan. 29 presentation of CNES's research priorities.
European companies and government agencies continue to have issues with U.S. technology-export restrictions despite the overall relaxing of many of the rules in the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, or ITAR. Since last November, many of the permissions for export of satellite components are now granted by the U.S. Commerce Department, and not the State Department.
But incidents like the 2013-2014 difficulty that European contractors faced in receiving timely U.S. export approval for parts to be used in the United Arab Emirates' Falcon Eye optical reconnaissance satellite system are still fresh in the minds of European governments and industry.
Despite its being softened, ITAR is still evoked any time European companies review their technology landscape.
For example, one of the Horizon 2020 program's two space-related Strategic Research Clusters deals with electric satellite propulsion to replace conventional propellant.
For this program, the European Commission has about half a dozen companies working on different technologies of ion and plasma propulsion. One of them, Ireland-based European Space Propulsion Ltd., is a unit of a Aerojet Rocketdyne of Sacramento, California.
That fact has been used by a competing plasma propulsion manufacturer to question whether the European Commission should be funding a company whose technology is from the United States and thus ultimately subjected to ITAR export rules.
During much of the past decade, the U.S. dollar's weakness relative to the euro made it difficult for European satellite builders to justify swapping out U.S. for European components even in those cases where a European alternative was available, which often was not the case.
U.S. builders had the advantage of a large domestic government market that enabled builders to maintain production lines that Europe's small government space market could not have sustained.
But with the spectacular fall of the euro in recent months, and the European Commission's new budget now joining the European Space Agency, CNES and other national agencies in Europe in pushing for autonomy in critical space components, that may no longer be true.
Massive Alien Ring System is Much Larger Than Saturn's - And May Contain Exomoons
Paul Scott Anderson – AmericaSpace
Astronomers today announced yet another mind-boggling finding – a ring system which orbits a distant giant planet has been found to be much larger and more massive than Saturn's ring system, the best known example in our own Solar System. There may also be exomoons hiding within it. The findings come from astronomers at the University of Rochester in the USA and Leiden Observatory in The Netherlands.
The rings were observed eclipsing the young Sun-like star J1407, about 430 light-years away. The planet itself, J1407b, is much larger than Saturn (estimated to be 10-40 times the mass of Jupiter), and the ring system is indeed huge, about 200 times larger in size than Saturn's rings. As co-author Eric Mamajek, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Rochester, stated, "You could think of it as kind of a super Saturn." The planet orbits its star in about a decade.
Matthew Kenworthy of Leiden Observatory further explained:
"The details that we see in the light curve are incredible. The eclipse lasted for several weeks, but you see rapid changes on time scales of tens of minutes as a result of fine structures in the rings. The star is much too far away to observe the rings directly, but we could make a detailed model based on the rapid brightness variations in the star light passing through the ring system. If we could replace Saturn's rings with the rings around J1407b, they would be easily visible at night and be many times larger than the full moon."
The discovery is based on new analysis of the data about J1407b; the ring system was first seen in 2012, but now the new information has shown astronomers just how large it really is. The system contains over 30 known rings, each of them tens of millions of miles in diameter, and the overall diameter is about 74 million miles (120 million kilometers). It is also calculated to contain approximately an Earth's worth of mass in dust particles. To get a better sense of the amount of ring material, Mamajek put it this way:
"If you were to grind up the four large Galilean moons of Jupiter into dust and ice and spread out the material over their orbits in a ring around Jupiter, the ring would be so opaque to light that a distant observer that saw the ring pass in front of the Sun would see a very deep, multi-day eclipse. In the case of J1407, we see the rings blocking as much as 95 percent of the light of this young Sun-like star for days, so there is a lot of material there that could then form satellites."
Apart from the rings themselves, there may also be some of the first evidence for exomoons. Gaps in the rings are thought to be regions where moons have formed or are still forming. At least one of them may be quite large, more planet-sized than typical moons:
"One obvious explanation is that a satellite formed and carved out this gap," said Kenworthy. "The mass of the satellite could be between that of Earth and Mars. The satellite would have an orbital period of approximately two years around J1407b."
Similar but smaller "shepherd moons" can also be seen in the rings of Saturn, Jupiter and Uranus, where some of them clear narrow paths within some of the main rings, while others orbit near the outer edges of rings.
The data was obtained from the SuperWasp project, which detects gas giant exoplanets as they transit in from of their stars. When first found in 2012, astronomers theorized that the unusual eclipses were being caused by a moon-forming disk of rocky debris orbiting a young giant planet or perhaps even a brown dwarf star.
The ring system may become thinner over the next few million years and eventually disappear, as moons begin to form and sweep up material. Gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn may have also had larger ring systems like this earlier on in their histories.
"The planetary science community has theorized for decades that planets like Jupiter and Saturn would have had, at an early stage, disks around them that then led to the formation of satellites," Mamajek explained. "However, until we discovered this object in 2012, no-one had seen such a ring system. This is the first snapshot of satellite formation on million-kilometer scales around a substellar object."
It is hoped that amateur astronomers will help to monitor J1407, to possibly catch the next time the rings eclipse the star and also better pin down the orbital period and mass of the planet. Observations can be reported to the American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO). Of course, it is also hoped that other similar ring systems will also be found. As Kenworthy noted, it "is the only feasible way we have of observing the early conditions of satellite formation for the near future. J1407's eclipses will allow us to study the physical and chemical properties of satellite-spawning circumplanetary disks."
The familiar beautiful rings we see around Saturn are already awe-inspiring; what would it be like to visit J1407b and its ring system which is 200 times larger? one can only imagine…
The new findings will be published in the Astrophysical Journal. The abstract and paper are available here. How Would The World Change If We Found Extraterrestrial Life?
Elizabeth Howell – Astrobiology Magazine
In 1938, Orson Welles narrated a radio broadcast of "War of the Worlds" as a series of simulated radio bulletins of what was happening in real time as Martians arrived on our home planet. The broadcast is widely remembered for creating public panic, although to what extent is hotly debated today.
Still, the incident serves as an illustration of what could happen when the first life beyond Earth is discovered. While scientists might be excited by the prospect, introducing the public, politicians and interest groups to the idea could take some time.
How extraterrestrial life would change our world view is a research interest of Steven Dick, who just completed a term as the Baruch S. Blumberg NASA/Library of Congress Chair of Astrobiology. The chair is jointly sponsored by the NASA Astrobiology Program and the John W. Kluge Center, at the Library of Congress.
Dick is a former astronomer and historian at the United States Naval Observatory, a past chief historian for NASA, and has published several books concerning the discovery of life beyond Earth. To Dick, even the discovery of microbes would be a profound shift for science.
"If we found microbes, it would have an effect on science, especially biology, by universalizing biology," he said. "We only have one case of biology on Earth. It's all related. It's all DNA-based. If we found an independent example on Mars or Europa, we have a chance of forming a universal biology."
Dick points out that even the possibilities of extraterrestrial fossils could change our viewpoints, such as the ongoing discussion of ALH84001, a Martian meteorite found in Antarctica that erupted into public consciousness in 1996 after a Science article said structures inside of it could be linked to biological activity. The conclusion, which is still debated today, led to congressional hearings.
"I've done a book about discovery in astronomy, and it's an extended process," Dick pointed out. "It's not like you point your telescope and say, 'Oh, I made a discovery.' It's always an extended process: You have to detect something, you have to interpret it, and it takes a long time to understand it. As for extraterrestrial life, the Mars rock showed it could take an extended period of years to understand it."
Mayan decipherments
In his year at the Library of Congress, Dick spent time searching for historical examples (as well as historical analogies) of how humanity might deal with first contact with an extraterrestrial civilization. History shows that contact with new cultures can go in vastly different directions.
Hernan Cortes' treatment of the Aztecs is often cited as an example of how wrong first contact can go. But there were other efforts that were a little more mutually beneficial, although the outcomes were never perfect. Fur traders in Canada in the 1800s worked closely with Native Americans, for example, and the Chinese treasure fleet of the 15th Century successfully brought its home culture far beyond its borders, perhaps even to East Africa.
Even when both sides were trying hard to make communication work, there were barriers, noted Dick.
"The Jesuits had contact with Native Americans," he pointed out. "Certain concepts were difficult, like when they tried to get across the ideas of the soul and immortality."
Indirect contact by way of radio communications through the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), also illustrates the challenges of transmitting information across cultures. There is historical precedence for this, such as when Greek knowledge passed west through Arab in the 12th Century. This shows that it is possible for ideas to be revived, even from dead cultures, he said.
It's also quite possible that the language we receive across these indirect communications would be foreign to us. Even though mathematics is often cited as a universal language, Dick said there are actually two schools of thought. One theory is that there is, indeed, one kind of mathematics that is based on a Platonic idea, and the other theory is that mathematics is a construction of the culture that you are in.
"There will be a decipherment process. It might be more like the Mayan decipherments," Dick said.
The ethics of contact
As Dick came to a greater understanding about the potential cultural impact of extraterrestrial intelligence, he invited other scholars to present their findings along with him. Dick chaired a two-day NASA/Library of Congress Astrobiology Symposium called "Preparing for Discovery," which was intended to address the impact of finding any kind of life beyond Earth, whether microbial or some kind of intelligent, multicellular life form.
The symposium participants discussed how to move beyond human-centered views of defining life, how to understand the philosophical and theological problems a discovery would bring, and how to help the public understand the implications of a discovery.
"There is also the question of what I call astro-ethics," Dick said. "How do you treat alien life? How do you treat it differently, ranging from microbes to intelligence? So we had a philosopher at our symposium talking about the moral status of non-human organisms, talking in relation to animals on Earth and what their status is in relation to us."
Dick plans to collect the lectures in a book for publication next year, but he also spent his time at the library gathering materials for a second book about how discovering life beyond Earth will revolutionize our thinking.
"It's very farsighted for NASA to fund a position like this," Dick added. "They have all their programs in astrobiology, they fund the scientists, but here they fund somebody to think about what the implications might be. It's a good idea to do this, to foresee what might happen before it occurs."
Scientists and public at odds over GMO safety, other science issues
Gavin Stern - Scripps Howard News Service
Scientists and the public often don't see eye-to-eye, according to a Pew Research survey released Thursday. The scientists – they're getting weary.
Genetically Modified foods (GMOs) were the biggest gap between scientists and the public. Nearly 6 in 10 Americans said that GMOs are unsafe to eat, while 9 in 10 scientists responded that they're generally safe.
Scientists were also overwhelmingly in favor of animal research (89 percent), childhood vaccinations (86 percent), evolution (98 percent) and the presence of climate change (87 percent).
Americans in general were more divided. About half said they were in favor of animal research and 68 percent support vaccinations. There were sharp political divides on human evolution (65 percent agreeing) and climate change (50-50 split).
Overall, people said they like science, even if they don't always believe the results. About 8 in 10 Americans said science makes life easier.
There was one issue where scientists and the public do meet eye-to-eye – the International Space Station. About two-thirds of all participants said that's been a good investment.
Scientists are getting increasingly concerned about the state of their fields. A slight majority said now is a good time for science, down from three-fourths of scientists in 2009. Most said their greatest problem was a lack of funding.
Many said the public and policymakers just aren't listening.
More than 8 in 10 scientists cited the public's lack of science knowledge is a major problem in their field. Most blamed poor science education in primary school.
For the study, Pew surveyed 3,748 members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and 2,002 members of the general public. The margin of error was plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.
Safety Panel Criticizes Lack of Commercial Crew Transparency
Jeff Foust – Space News
An independent panel said Jan. 28 it could not evaluate the safety of NASA's commercial crew program because of the unwillingness of the agency's leadership to provide information the panel sought about it.
In its annual report, the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP) said that efforts by the panel to gain insight into the program, including about contracts awarded last September to Boeing and SpaceX, were met with "a seamless set of constraints" regarding why that information could not be released.
"Regrettably, the Panel is unable to offer any informed opinion regarding the adequacy of the certification process or the sufficiency of safety in the Commercial Crew Program due to constraints on access to needed information," the panel's chairman, Joseph Dyer, said in a cover letter to the report delivered to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden.
The panel focused their criticism primarily on one official at NASA Headquarters, the director of commercial spaceflight development, a position currently held by Phil McAlister. "This lack of transparency has been a concern for a number of years," the panel stated in its report, despite a series of discussions with him and other senior NASA leaders.
"Over the last several years, the [director of commercial spaceflight development] has responded to ASAP's requests for information related to the plans on how commercial programs would be certified or how confidence would be gained on the safety of operations with a seamless set of constraints as to why the information could not be shared," the report states.
The report said that those explanations ranged from information being "pre-decisional" to ongoing evaluations of commercial crew proposals and, later, a protest filed by a losing bidder to the U.S. Government Accountability Office. "While these statements are all true, these conditions should not be absolute barriers to sharing information related to certification and safety," the panel argues in its report.
The panel said that it did receive some requested information from NASA in mid-December, but "only after the Panel made it clear that this failure to share information would be covered in this Report." That information, ASAP said, arrived too late to be incorporated into its 2014 report.
Blackout Period
At a Jan. 26 press conference at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, agency officials indicated that the commercial crew contracting process, including the GAO protest, had limited the agency's ability to share information about the program. "We had been in blackout for the past year while the procurement was ongoing, and then with the protest we were limited in the details of the contract that we could give you," said Kathy Lueders, commercial crew program manager.
Despite its criticism of the lack of transparency in the commercial crew program, the panel was broadly supportive of the overall program, including NASA's decision to award two contracts for the development of commercial crew vehicles. It did reiterate concerns in prior reports that the program may not be sufficiently funded, and "strongly encourages Congress in future years to appropriate the dollars necessary" to fully fund those contracts.
In a statement provided by NASA Jan. 29, Bolden did not directly address the panel's issues with the commercial crew program. "Safety remains our top priority as the agency continues to execute a long range plan for deep space exploration," he said. "The agency strongly agrees that continued robust funding for commercial crew is essential to NASA's work."
On-time Delivery?
ASAP also raised questions about the commercial resupply of the International Space Station. The panel noted that the seven commercial resupply missions flown through the end of 2014 — four by SpaceX and three by Orbital Sciences Corp. — suffered extensive delays from their initial contracted dates. The report data indicates that the missions experienced an average delay of more than 23 months, of which 22 months was caused by the companies.
Those concerns are exacerbated by the October 2014 failure of Orbital's Antares rocket carrying a Cygnus cargo spacecraft, leaving the burden on SpaceX until Orbital is able to fly a Cygnus on a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 in late 2015. "There will be additional pressure on cargo logistics while Orbital works through its plan to resume cargo missions," the report notes.
Pluto, here we come, whatever you are: Editorial
Los Angeles Daily News
NASA's New Horizon probe has been heading to the tiny demoted planet Pluto at the very edge of our solar system for nine years now, and last week the space agency reported the spacecraft has begun its final approach phase to Pluto, resulting in the first flyby on July 14.
Everyone who grew up in the middle of the 20th century was taught that Pluto, which wasn't discovered until 1930, was the last of the nine planets. Now, poor thing, it has been pushed down to dwarf planet status, and it may be that there are other objects out there in the Kuiper Belt of asteroids that are just as big as it.
In fact, when New Horizon was launched in 2006, Pluto very much was still in the pantheon, and the mission was described as our first robotic visit to the last unexplored planet in our system.
Unlike most extraterrestrial missions to parts unknown, this one isn't being managed out of JPL right here in La Canada Flintridge, though the local lab is providing some of the navigational know-how. Back in the cost-cutting '90s, other Pluto missions were scrapped as being too pricey, and this proposal out of Johns Hopkins and the Southwest Research Institute was chosen instead.
But the small JPL connection does still provide an irony, since Caltech runs the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and it was Caltech astronomy professor Mike Brown who did the research that dealt the fatal blow to Pluto's planetary status.
You can even join 20,000 others and follow Brown on Twitter: @plutokiller. Here's what he sent out to his fans last Saturday: "just did a BBC interview about New Horizons. Which is kinda like interviewing John Wilkes Booth about the Gettysburg Address, I think."
But some very much disagree with the downgrade to dwarf by the International Astronomical Union. New Horizon's principal investigator published the piece "Unabashedly Onward to the Ninth Planet" on the mission's website. And where is the arithmetic that describes what's a planet? (Well, adding up the two plus two that makes it just a big asteroid, answer the killers.)
Getting to the edge of our solar system is incredible, and fascinating science will come from it. Touchingly, New Horizon is carrying an ounce of the ashes of astronomer Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered the frozen, far thing, however we categorize it.
The Life in Our Stars
Cambridge scientists are leading the search for inhabitable (and maybe even inhabited) planets, and they hope to find one…in our lifetime.
Chris Berdik|Boston Magazine
One spring day in 2011, Sara Seager, an MIT professor of planetary science and physics, invited 14 of the world's most influential astronomers to a birthday party of sorts. In an auditorium at the glistening MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Seager stood before her distinguished guests, including Harvard's Dimitar Sasselov, David Charbonneau, and Lisa Kaltenegger, and Berkeley's Geoff Marcy, dressed entirely in black, a hue that matched her raven hair and dark eyes. The only dashes of color were her red-and-pink scarf, red lipstick, and scarlet fingernails.
In lieu of presents, Seager challenged her guests to bring her a new world. And not simply any world, but a planet just like ours, what scientists like Seager call an Earth twin—a small, rocky planet with liquid oceans and an oxygen-rich atmosphere, orbiting its sun at a comfortable, Earthlike distance. As recently as 25 years ago, this ambition would have been considered the stuff of science fiction. Back then, the idea that there were any planets beyond our solar system was merely theoretical; no one had ever seen one. Our observational powers were limited to the universe's brightest lights: its stars. A planet located beyond our solar system—what's known as an exoplanet—would be so dark as to be invisible. Yet as astronomers gazed into the universe, they were constantly haunted by the odds—with all those billions of stars, there were bound to be more planetary systems out there. We just didn't know how to find them.
And yet just two decades later, we now seem to be on the brink of answering one of mankind's greatest questions: Are we alone? Scientists like Seager are convinced that we will find signs of an Earthlike planet—soon. "I believe that in our lifetime," Seager said during a Cambridge TEDx conference in 2013, "we will be able to take children to a dark sky. And point to a star and say, That star has a planet with signs of life in its atmosphere. That star has a planet like Earth."
When that discovery is made, it will almost certainly involve a group of scientists who work in the Greater Boston area. In fact, the astonishing progress made in what we know about other planets in the universe can be traced largely to this pioneering group. Though they don't have the world's biggest telescopes or the most advanced equipment, these Cambridge scientists—among them Harvard's David Latham, 74, and David Charbonneau, 40; and MIT's Seager, 43—make up one of the highest concentrations of exoplanet experts in the world. And they reached the vanguard of the field by repeatedly defying prevailing scientific wisdom: They pursued seemingly outrageous theories, painstakingly chasing the unknown. Their story is a tale of brave thinking, impossible odds, and relentless optimism.
Last November, I went to see Seager at her Kendall Square office, which overlooks the Charles River. Though she was technically on sabbatical, that very morning she'd been in New York City with a team of people she's leading— including scientists from NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory—who are working on a giant gadget that should help our space telescopes see distant planets more clearly. (It's a star shade—essentially a huge flower-shaped umbrella with very precise notches where the petals join—that's designed to unfold in outer space and block the glare from a distant star, allowing scientists to see orbiting exoplanets.) A few days after our conversation, she would meet with fellow MIT and Harvard astronomers working on the next exoplanet-hunting satellite, which will scan the entire sky to find potential new Earths for telescopes in space and on the ground to study. And in a couple of weeks, she'd be off to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, California, to hear updates from a former student who is developing a small exoplanet-hunting "nanosatellite," which could be launched on the cheap and in a hurry.
At that birthday conference four years ago, Seager had pronounced her own life "half over," and told her audience she believed that her generation of researchers was destined to leave a legacy that would be celebrated thousands of years from now, when human beings might set sail across the final frontier. "Hundreds of thousands of years from now, when people look back on our generation, they will remember us for being the first people who found the Earthlike worlds," she said. "We are on the verge of being those people."
Now, as we spoke in her office, Seager unpacked a brown-bagged soup and salad and apologized for eating lunch as she talked. Answering the question of whether we're alone seems tantalizingly close, she said, hence the urgency in her voice. This moment is "the first time we have the capability to find life," she said. "It's within reach."
In the beginning, we listened.
In September 1959, two Cornell physicists published a paper in Nature suggesting the best radio frequency for transmitting interstellar messages. If aliens were out there and trying to communicate, the thinking went, we'd hear them—if we just put up the right antennae. Thus began the official search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). "The probability of success is difficult to estimate," the scientists concluded, "but if we never search, the chance of success is zero."
Over the next two decades, increasingly sensitive listening posts were built around the country, and by the late 1970s, SETI researchers even convinced NASA to back some of their efforts. But year after year, decade after decade, the aliens refused to oblige them. Meanwhile, our own solar system proved to be excessively harsh: Satellites and telescopes, lunar landers, and Mars flybys turned up only dead rocks, poisonous atmospheres, and dust—along with incinerating heat and blood-freezing cold. In the mind-boggling vastness of space, it seemed there was nothing remotely like life to keep our collective psyches company.
Eventually, Congress began to treat the search for extraterrestrial life as a grand folly. In 1992, NASA earmarked $100 million over 10 years to search the 1,000 nearest Sunlike stars—but the very next year, Senator Richard Bryan, a Democrat from Nevada, helped kill the funding, then danced on its grave. "The great Martian chase," he said, "may finally come to an end." He was right. From then on, NASA stayed away from the search for extraterrestrial life, and most astronomers followed suit. Instead, serious astronomers focused on solving other mysteries: how the universe was born, how it evolved, where it was headed.
Still, curiosity about life out there simmered among scientists, albeit quietly. Rather than search for life that has evolved beyond us, maybe we'd have more luck looking for life at its roots. That meant searching for life's incubators—planets.
One of the first people to take up this search was Harvard astrophysicist David Latham. Speaking to me one autumn morning via Skype from his home in the town of Harvard, down the road from Harvard University's Oak Ridge Observatory, Latham recalled the exact moment that he decided to start looking for astronomy's Holy Grail: It was Friday, September 21, 1984. He was in the astronomy department's computing room. A few days earlier, Latham had received a call out of the blue from an Israeli scientist named Tsevi Mazeh, who was visiting astronomers in California. Mazeh was in his late thirties, just starting out as an associate professor of astronomy at Tel Aviv University.
At the time, Latham was 44 years old and the associate director of Harvard's optical and infrared astronomy program, studying stars and the evolution of galaxies. Mazeh told Latham that he wanted to use Harvard's telescopes and digital speedometers to search for exoplanets. And he had a new idea about how to do it: by looking for wobbles in starlight caused by the gravitational tug of an orbiting planet. Latham was skeptical. His telescopes were only sensitive enough to detect a wobble if it was caused by something really big—a planet on the scale of Jupiter or bigger, orbiting close to its star. Prevailing theory at the time suggested that this was a paradox: A really big planet would be made largely of gas and ice crystals, and thus would have to orbit farther away from the star, where it's cold enough for gases to condense. In other words, the planet Mazeh proposed to find was one that "everybody knew" could not exist, Latham said.
"Well, you know," Mazeh told him, "the theoreticians could be wrong."
Latham thought the idea was crazy. But he kind of liked crazy. As a young astronomer in the early 1970s, Latham had moonlighted as a professional motorcycle racer, and his rule of thumb was that if he didn't fall off his bike at least once a day, he wasn't going fast enough. And in truth, he'd long been fascinated by the possibility that he could find planets—maybe even one that looked and acted something like Earth. "For many years, I co-taught a course where in the spring term we talked about life in the universe and the prospects for finding it," Latham told me. "The field didn't have a very good reputation at the time. It was a little far out."
As unlikely as Mazeh's plan seemed, Latham decided it was worth a look. The pair hunted for four years and found…nothing. But then, on the night of March 31, 1988, while working from home over a telephone link to the computers at Harvard, Latham detected a wobble from a star about 132 light-years away. He excitedly emailed his collaborators at other observatories, asking them to take a look, too. "By the time I hit send for the email, it was well into April Fools Day," Latham wrote in an essay about the find. "But I was not fooling."
As exciting as the evidence was, Latham recalled, it was difficult to pin down exactly what had caused the wobble. The object in question was at least 11 times as big as Jupiter, on the outer edge of how massive a planet could be, according to theory. Plus, whatever this huge object was, it orbited the visible star in about 84 days, a sign that it was circling too close—and hence too hot—for a gas giant to theoretically exist. He and Mazeh couldn't be sure what it was, so they hedged, describing the discovery as the star's "unseen companion" in a May 1989 Nature article. Only in their abstract did they dare suggest that it "may even be a giant planet." Still, that discovery kick-started what became a massive wave of exoplanet investigation.
In 1995, the Swiss astronomers Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz found another promising wobble around a star called 51 Pegasi. His data indicated that the orbiting mass was about half that of Jupiter's—certainly within the realm of a real planet. Excited by the find, two other exoplanet hunters, Berkeley astronomer Geoffrey Marcy and R. Paul Butler, now at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, DC, hurried to the Lick Observatory on California's Mount Hamilton and confirmed the wobble. New theories arose to explain these massive, close-orbiting "hot Jupiters": Maybe the gas giants had formed in a distant orbit but then migrated closer to their sun as their solar system evolved and changed. Within a few years, astronomers led by Marcy and Butler, along with the Swiss group, had discovered about two dozen new planets.
Or so they claimed. Many astronomers pooh-poohed their finds. A mere light wobble wasn't enough evidence, they said. They needed more proof. The next breakthrough would come from an enterprising Harvard grad student stationed in a wooden shed, staring at a bright star about 150 light-years from Earth.
On a warm day in mid-September, 1999, 25-year-old David Charbonneau was racing through Boulder, Colorado, gripping the wheel of the beat-up Ford Escort he'd driven out from Cambridge, where he was a Harvard doctoral student. He'd spent August making observations at Boulder's High Altitude Observatory, part of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). Now he was headed to the Boulder home of his adviser, Tim Brown, an NCAR astronomer. He had news—unexpected, history-making news.
Three years earlier, Charbonneau had planned to enter the well-established and respected field of cosmology—the study of how the universe has evolved since the big bang. But when he arrived in Cambridge in the fall of 1996, the first "hot Jupiters" were being detected and debated, and Charbonneau was intrigued. "[Exoplanets] just seemed so practical and tangible to me," Charbonneau, now an astronomy professor at Harvard, told me in his office near the Radcliffe Quad.
At the time, scientists were still debating whether light wobbles were really exoplanets—maybe the stars were just pulsating. Or the data was showing two stars orbiting each another—a quite common phenomenon, known as a binary star system. In response, Charbonneau's master's project adviser, astronomer Robert Noyes, had cooked up another way to detect exoplanets: look for light reflecting off the planet.
Easier said than done. A planet's reflected light would be about a billion times dimmer than its star—it'd be like trying to find a single Christmas-light bulb in front of a searchlight from a thousand miles away. Regardless, Charbonneau agreed to take up the pursuit. "The question of whether or not there are other inhabited worlds is the biggest question in all of science. That yearning has been with us for a long time." What's different, he said, is that for the first time in history, mankind has "the technology to actually answer that question."
For two years, Charbonneau searched for signs of light bouncing off an exoplanet—and found absolutely nothing, much to the amusement of the undergraduates in the off-campus co-op where he was a resident tutor. "Every day I'd go home, and they'd say, 'So, did you find the planet?' I'd say, 'No.' Then they'd all laugh and we'd make dinner," Charbonneau recalled. "Looking back, it could have been crushing. But it was pretty funny."
Charbonneau changed course for his doctorate: Rather than search for the light of distant planets, he would chase their shadows. If an exoplanet passed between its star and Earth's line of sight—an occurrence known as a transit—the planet would block a tiny fraction of that star's light, causing a teeny tiny eclipse. Combining a transit with a wobble would remove all doubt of a planet's existence.
Before the wobbles were discovered, hunting for transits seemed nearly as foolish as looking for planetary light. First, you'd have to have a planet with the correct orbit, relative to Earth. Then you'd need to stare at its star for months, or possibly years, hoping to spot a barely perceptible dip in its light. (A planet the size of Earth might dim its star by only about 80 parts per million—and for just a few hours. You'd have to be awfully lucky to catch that.) But now that he knew of a few stars that wobbled, Charbonneau knew exactly where to point his telescope. Plus, these planets were huge, so they would block much more of their sun than an Earth would—and thanks to their close orbits, they'd do so as often as every few days.
Noyes had recommended that Charbonneau head out to Colorado to work with Brown, who'd been searching for transits for more than a decade. "So I drove out there, and literally, it's like a garden shed," Charbonneau told me of Brown's research digs. Inside was a small telescope. He motioned across his office to a boxy black amateur scope, perched on a tripod about 6 feet tall, which he explained is almost identical to the one he used in Colorado. "And I'm like, Oh wow, that's my thesis."
At the end of that summer, Charbonneau aimed the telescope at a star called HD 209458, located near the Great Square of Pegasus. Back at Harvard, David Latham had recently detected a wobble in that star's light, suggesting a Jupiter-sized planet in a tight orbit. But when Charbonneau went looking for the transit, he couldn't find it.
"I plotted the light curve [of HD 209458] and it was flat, of course. It's extremely unlikely that there would be a transiting planet. But then I realized I had the indexing off. Literally, I forgot that in this software we count zero as the first number, not one." It was like forgetting to carry the one. He had made a minor computational error.
Charbonneau went back to the computer and re-indexed the data. "I replotted the light curve and all of a sudden, there was this dip. I thought, Oh shit!"
That eureka moment was both exciting and nerve-wracking. "It's actually very uncomfortable, because nobody's ever seen it before," he said. "You're really worried that maybe it's not really there."
He spent most of the day double-checking the data, and then he felt ready to tell Brown. Except his adviser wasn't there. Brown's elderly mother had fallen and broken her hip, and he was at the hospital waiting for her to come out of surgery. Tragically, she died on the operating table. A couple of days later, Brown had recovered enough to invite Charbonneau over to his house to hear the news. When Brown saw the data, he poured Charbonneau a congratulatory glass of scotch.
"In this very sad time, I showed him something that for him had been this scientific quest," Charbonneau said. "It was extremely emotional."
Within a couple months of Charbonneau's discovery of a transit across HD 209458, Marcy and other colleagues confirmed their findings from the Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. The revelation had a transformative effect on astronomical research. After that, most of Harvard's astronomers shifted their exoplanet efforts: Instead of looking for stars that wobbled, they focused on stars that blinked. "That was a strategic decision, and it really paid off," Harvard's Sasselov says. The transit method, which didn't require such powerful telescopes, would deliver an avalanche of new exoplanet discoveries, leading astronomers to conclude that in the universe, there are likely at least as many planets as there are stars. But did any of those planets contain life? Two Harvard researchers were determined to find out.
Transit discoveries didn't just confirm the existence of exoplanets; they also gave astronomers critical clues about a planet's composition. Transits could help scientists estimate a planet's size (based on how much light it blocked), temperature (using its orbit to calculate how close it was to its star), and density (when its size was combined with the measure of its wobble). Best of all, by analyzing the spectrum of the light skimming around a transiting planet, astronomers could deduce the elements in its atmosphere.
That's what Sara Seager suggested in a paper she published in 2000, a year after earning her doctorate at Harvard. Seager argued that gaps in the spectrum of light skimming a transiting planet could reveal gases swirling in its atmosphere. Charbonneau and Seager had been friends since their undergraduate days at the University of Toronto. Charbonneau knew about Seager's theoretical work, and the next year, he validated it by using observations from the Hubble Space Telescope to identify sodium in the atmosphere of the giant planet he'd found transiting HD 209458. The sodium itself wasn't anything special. But at least they now knew that the technique could work.
Seager figured that one day not too far in the future, astronomers would be able to spot small, rocky planets like Earth orbiting at a comfortable distance from their stars. When they did, Seager wanted to make sure that scientists had a reliable way to scour the planets' atmospheres for signs of life. Taking Earth as our one and only example, she knew that living organisms need liquid water—and that they either produce or expire molecular oxygen, carbon dioxide, and methane. (Life created all the oxygen in Earth's atmosphere by photosynthesis.) If scientists found these elements—known as biosignatures—in the atmospheres of other planets, they'd have good reason to believe that life was there, too.
But back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, devising ways to study exoplanet atmospheres seemed premature at best. At worst, it sounded ridiculous. Other astronomers derided exoplanet research as "stamp collecting," academic slang for small-time, useless pursuits. "I was on the faculty market and nobody would hire me," Seager says.
Still, Seager forged ahead. She credits her father, a physician, with fostering her intellectual curiosity and giving her the determination to follow it. Her parents had divorced when Seager was in grade school, and her dad used his weekends with his children to augment their education in the arts and sciences. He was the first one to show her the stars and the moon through a telescope at a star party hosted by an amateur astronomy club. "When I was small, my dad took me and my siblings on a camping trip. I stepped out of the tent in the middle of the night and looked at the sky," Seager says. She gasps a little, remembering, and clasps her hand to her chest. "I couldn't believe it. I never conceived there could be so many stars!"
When she was a teen, Seager attended an Astronomy Day at the University of Toronto, which cemented her ambition. But when she told her dad she wanted to be an astronomer, he surprised her by trying to talk her out of it. How could she make a living looking at the stars? He wanted her to be able to take care of herself—maybe become a doctor. Astronomy, he thought, was better as a hobby.
Her father's disapproval didn't deter her. After spending a few years as a senior researcher at the Carnegie Institution in Washington, DC, Seager returned to Cambridge in 2007 to become a professor at MIT, hoping to probe exoplanet atmospheres for biosignatures. Her research was vindicated when the Kepler Space Telescope—launched on March 6, 2009, with Latham, Sasselov, Seager, and Charbonneau all members of its science team—began sending data on new exoplanets back to Earth. Suddenly, Seager and other exoplanet hunters had a remarkable number of planets to study. "That's when the floodgates opened," Sasselov says.
Over its six-year mission—handicapped by a breakdown in the spring of 2013—Kepler found some 1,000 planets and more than 4,000 planet candidates awaiting confirmation. The vast majority of them are huge and sweltering, places where life as we know it wouldn't stand a chance. But as scientists continue to analyze Kepler's data, they've uncovered and confirmed a handful of Earth-sized planets in habitable orbits (three of these were announced in January 2015). In November 2013, scientists published a paper concluding that a whopping 22 percent of Sunlike stars may host Earth twins. Just like that, the possibilities have exploded. Our galaxy may harbor 40 billion planets that could support life. Billions more may be circling smaller, cooler M-dwarf stars, also known as red dwarfs, which outnumber stars like our sun by 10 to one.
"I get asked all the time, why I care so much about this," Seager says. "It's the drive to have meaning." About a year before her 2011 Media Lab conference, Seager's husband was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He would die that July, just days after her birthday, when their two boys were six and eight years old. Four years earlier, cancer had also taken the life of her father. Seager says she counts herself as somebody "who has a lot of experience with death," and those devastating encounters with mortality have motivated her quest.
"Everybody wants to have meaning in their lives when they wake up and face their day," she says. "For some people, it might be raising the next generation or working in a hospital and healing people. For me, it's finding an Earthlike world."
That search will be aided by the next generation of space- and land-based telescopes, larger than any before them, and equipped with special technology to counteract the blur of Earth's atmosphere and block out the glare of stars. How to analyze the data they collect in search of life is the domain of yet another Harvard astronomer.
For five chilly, gray days in late November 2014, Harvard astronomer Mercedes López-Morales huddled with a few dozen top scientists in a Bavarian castle south of Munich to talk about the problem of looking for life over incredible distances: The nearest confirmed exoplanets are some 87 trillion miles from Earth. It would take our fastest rockets thousands of lifetimes to reach them.
At the castle, López-Morales and her colleagues were plotting the exploration of these new worlds. The biggest item on their agenda: How should we weigh evidence for extraterrestrial life? Just because life on Earth is responsible for certain molecules, like oxygen, doesn't mean that on a strange new planet, these molecules couldn't be created by some volcanic or other geological phenomenon. "Just a year ago, we were thinking that if we detected oxygen, that would be proof," she says. "Now we're thinking there has to be methane, oxygen, and some other things, too."
López-Morales, 40, has short, graying hair and speaks quietly with the accent of her native Spain. She's a few years younger than Seager, and her reasons for joining the ranks of exoplanet researchers, as a postdoc in 2004, shows how quickly the field changed from a risky proposition to one ripe with opportunity. "A lot of it was job security and the prospects for future work," she says. "But most of all, it was that the science was really cool. I want to spend my life doing something that has meaning to me, and for society as well."
Like Seager, López-Morales studies exoplanet atmospheres, but with ground-based telescopes. She's on a team designing an optical instrument for the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT), an enormous new instrument in Chile that, beginning in 2024, will stare at celestial phenomena through an 80-foot-wide eye. Harvard is a partner in developing the GMT, one of three planned "extremely large telescopes" worldwide. It will have a resolution 10 times better than the Hubble, even though it must peer through Earth's atmosphere. And it will take advantage of the most sophisticated optics in history, using seven of the world's largest mirrors.
While her group hasn't yet found any critical molecules in an exoplanet atmosphere, López-Morales is optimistic. When we spoke a few days after her return from Germany, one of her postdocs had just measured the first ground-based transit of a planet closer to Earth's size. "We are slowly paving the way toward the detection of biosignatures in Earthlike planets," she said in a press release about the achievement.
But that release brought an admonishment from a senior colleague. "[He] sent me an email saying, 'Biosignatures are still a dream,'" she says. "My answer was, 'Well, 30 years ago, it was a dream to detect the wobble of a planet around a star. And look at where we are now.' So I'm just dreaming on."
Then, on December 16, 2014, well before any of the new telescopes came online, news flashed around the world that the Mars rover team had detected bursts of one such biosignature—methane—on the Red Planet. While it was just a trace detection of the gas—less than one part per billion—there could be only two explanations. One was geological: Methane could be released by carbon deposits in rocks reacting with either ultraviolet radiation or a mix of heat and water. That's right: water. The other was biological: Methane could be made by microbes living somewhere beneath the planet's surface.
"It's one of the most exciting announcements we've heard," Seager told me when I called her the next morning. "For an exoplanet, we want to see gases that don't belong. And methane is a nice one, because it's so short-lived in the atmosphere," she said—meaning that methane would not be detected unless something keeps continually generating it, possibly life. "If it ends up being attributed to life on Mars, it means life can get a hold in more than one location. It would mean a lot."
If we do find signs of life out there, the discovery will require a grinding process of replications and other studies to eliminate any other possible explanations. Even then, we may never be 100 percent certain. Unless, of course, that life source decides to say hello, something that Harvard astronomer and longtime SETI researcher Paul Horowitz is confident will happen someday.
The only telescope still being used at Harvard's Oak Ridge Observatory is Horowitz's Optical SETI project, which began operating in 2006. Rather than search for radio signals, it scans the night sky for nanosecond pulses of super-bright light, basically waiting for a flash from ET's high beams. "There are signals out there. That's guaranteed," Horowitz says, "but they're at some plane of technology that we have not reached."
SETI may be a long shot compared with looking for primitive life on exoplanets, he says, but it's also much cheaper. And with SETI, when we know, well, we'll know.
Seager, meanwhile, is currently working with a team to develop the Kepler telescope's $87 million successor, called TESS—the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, scheduled to launch in 2017— which is being led by MIT astronomer George Ricker. The science team includes several other astronomers from MIT and Harvard, including Latham, Sasselov, and Charbonneau. While the Kepler focused its gaze on a narrow band of outer space, TESS will scan the entire sky for two years. It's expected to find about 500 planets close to Earth's size, orbiting bright stars. These planets will be targeted for closer observations by the Hubble telescope's successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, which is scheduled for launch in 2018.
Astronomers, Seager explains, probably won't be able to use the transit method to study the atmosphere of a true Earth twin, because such a planet would be simply too small, compared with its star, to detect. Instead, they'll need to take a picture of the planet directly. And to do that, they'll first have to block the otherwise overwhelming glare of the star. Thus Seager's latest project: the development of that giant star shade, one that can hover in front of a space telescope as it peers out at planets.
One of Seager's MIT colleagues, Kerri Cahoy, is working on a version that would fit inside the space telescope when it's launched, paired with tiny mirrors to help focus the planet's tiny slivers of light. Once again, Seager is designing technologies for missions that don't yet exist. She's already planning for more-advanced exoplanet-hunting instruments that will follow the James Webb telescope. There's one called the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) that's already moving through NASA's lengthy mission-vetting process. The technical challenges are huge. It's not rocket science: It's much harder.
"The star shade and telescope have to be aligned, just so, at tens of thousands of kilometers apart," Seager explained in her 2013 Cambridge TEDx talk. "That's like asking a friend to hold up a dime at 5 miles away and line up right with you."
There are still huge budgetary hurdles. For the past several years, NASA's total budget has hovered around $17 or $18 billion—or about half a percent of the federal budget. With $18 trillion in national debt, there are plenty of people who question the wisdom of spending billions to explore space. Every year, the space agency makes its case to Congress and the public on the relevance of its work. An online video accompanying the agency's 2015 budget proposal, for example, included a not-so-subtle reminder that only NASA could save the Earth from a world-destroying asteroid. The Congressional committee that keeps tabs on NASA includes Congressman Paul Broun, a Republican from Georgia who has described evolution, and the big bang theory, as "lies straight from the pit of hell." In spite of him, Congress allocated $18 billion to NASA for 2015, a 2 percent increase from 2014 and $500 million more than the agency had requested.
In June 2013, Seager was the keynote speaker at an amateur weekend astronomy event in Toronto, put on by the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada—the same group that hosted the star party where, as a girl, Seager had first fallen in love with the night sky. There she met Charles Darrow, then president of the RASC's Toronto chapter. They struck up a friendship and started dating in early 2014.
"It's a long story," Seager tells me with a laugh. "But he's my fiancé. I'm getting married again now. It's so cool having him around. It's like being a newlywed."
Last summer, in the July issue of Astrophysical Journal, Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb and his colleagues suggested that we could find alien civilizations, or at least their remnants, by looking for industrial pollutants in the atmospheres of exoplanets, rather than just biomarkers like oxygen.
On a chilly fall evening, I drove out to visit Loeb at his home in Lexington. We went outside into the middle of his quiet street and looked up, something Loeb does most every clear night.
"When the moon is not bright, you can sort of see the stars of the Milky Way," Loeb said. On that evening, only the brightest stars were out, but Loeb walked over to some birch trees that blocked the glare of a neighbor's house lights, to give us a better view. "You know, the Milky Way is not standing still, relative to the universe. It's in motion, and I think of it like a giant spaceship that is full of lights," he continued. "And the basic question is, Are there other passengers on this giant spaceship streaming through space?"
After a pause, I asked him, "What do you want the answer to be?"
"I very much hope we'll find evidence for other intelligent civilizations," he said. "That would make the universe more fascinating and unpredictable." If it happened, Loeb said, "it would be the biggest thrill of my life. The prejudice people have—that we're alone, because we're special—that will go away. It will perhaps lead people to realize that we are part of the same team. It makes no sense for us to fight with each other over territorial boundaries on this two-dimensional surface of the Earth. There is a much bigger volume out there, and we'd better stick together, because in the big scheme of things, we have the same fate. In astronomical terms, if the Sun dies, we all have to move somewhere else."
Today, about one-third of the applicants to Harvard's graduate program in astronomy declare an interest in studying exoplanets, Charbonneau points out. This next generation of scientists has never known a universe without other worlds orbiting other stars.
They have already begun to take up the task of looking, meticulously, for signs of life. It could be as close to us as Mars—hidden beneath its sterile surface—or on Jupiter's moon, Europa, where scientists believe a liquid ocean hides beneath an icy crust. Or it could go the other way. Maybe in the next 50 years, Charbonneau says, we'll find hundreds of Earthlike planets, and "extensively study the 10 closest, Earthiest ones, and find nothing."
Charbonneau hopes that's not the case: "I started my career as an astronomer, and my hope is that in 20 years, I'll end up as a biologist…to study the biology on other planets."
Loeb says, "We make progress by showing how many of the things we assumed were true were actually wrong. Unless you put yourself in a position where you may be wrong, you don't learn about reality. It is the essence of science."
Asteroid Miners May Get Help from Metal-Munching Microbes
Asteroid mining may become a multispecies affair.
The asteroid-mining firm Deep Space Industries (DSI) is investigating the feasibility of injecting bioengineered microbes into space rocks far from Earth, to get a jump on processing their valuable resources.
"You could come back [to the asteroids] in 10 to 20 years and have a preprocessed pile of materials," Joseph Grace, of DSI and NASA's Ames Research Center, told Space.com last month at the annual fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco. [How Asteroid Mining Could Work (Infographic)]
Bacterial injection
The scientists working on the concept envision launching a small probe that DSI is developing, called Mothership, out to a promising near-Earth asteroid in deep space. Mothership would be carrying a number of tiny CubeSats, one of which would deploy and spiral down to the asteroid's surface.
The CubeSat would then inject into the asteroid a low-temperature fluid laden with bacteria, which would propagate through cracks and fissures generated by the injection process. Over time, the microbes — genetically engineered to process metals efficiently — would break down harmful compounds within the asteroid and/or transform resources into different chemical states that are more amenable to extraction.
This work would be slow, but the bacteria would be doing it for free (after the initial expenditure of getting them out to the asteroid, of course).
"The use of self-sustaining biomining mitigates the need for sustained docking, anchoring, drilling, processing or other technically challenging traditional mining approaches," Grace and his colleagues wrote in a poster they presented at AGU. "If shown to function, the use of life to preprocess valuable deep-space resources could change the economic practicality of a large range of human activity in space."
Early days yet
Biomining is an established practice here on Earth; a significant portion of the copper extracted on terra firma, for example, is processed with microbial help (though Earth mining uses "wild type" rather than engineered microbes, Grace said). But right now, it's unclear how well the approach can work in space.
The DSI team is trying to bring the picture into clearer focus. For instance, the researchers surveyed data about the 11,000 known near-Earth asteroids (NEAs), to estimate how many of them might have the right interior temperature profiles to support microbial life.
The results, presented in the team's AGU poster, were encouraging: About 2,800 NEAs appear to be potentially habitable, defined as possessing projected interior temperatures that hover between 23 degrees and 212 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 5 to 100 degrees Celsius) for extended periods, without ever exceeding 212 F.
Furthermore, 120 of these asteroids likely have a "preferred" interior temperature, with a range between 59 and 113 F (15 to 45 C) — again, never exceeding 212 F.
The next step involves seeing how well metal-processing microbes can live and metabolize within rock fractures in a vacuum environment. DSI has submitted grant proposals requesting funding to do this work, Grace said.
Mothership, which DSI is developing for a variety of asteroid missions, could be flying within three to four years, Grace said. But full-on asteroid mining is likely still 15 to 20 years away, he added.
DSI is committed to extracting water, metals and other resources from space rocks, whether or not microbial preprocessing is involved, Grace said.
"This is really out there; it's a special project," he said of the bacterial injection idea. "But even if it doesn't pan out, we'll still learn really interesting things about what the limits of life are."
DSI isn't the only asteroid-mining firm; billionaire-backed Planetary Resources also intends to extract water, metals and other materials from space rocks. Doing so could help open up the heavens for exploration, as well as return a tidy profit, representatives of both companies say.
Astronaut takes awesome NASA photo with his dogs
Matt Levin | Houston Chronicle
Photo via Twitter
An official NASA portrait of Leland Melvin and his dogs Jake and Scout.
Leland Melvin and his dogs pose for the camera in a NASA studio.
A photo of astronaut Leland Melvin made the rounds on the Internet on Thursday. And for a great reason: There are dogs! An official NASA portrait shows Melvin in his spacesuit with two very good dogs.
The photo reached Melvin (aka @Astro_Flow; he loves the rocket emoji) on Twitter. There, the astronaut confirmed he snuck the dogs into the NASA studio for the shoot. There's also a second photo of Melvin with his dogs, named Jake and Scout, on their best behavior. In addition to his awesome portraiture, the astronaut was a 11th round draft pick by the Detroit Lions in the 1986 NFL draft.
When football didn't work out for him, his Plan B was apparently to go to space. Melvin began working for NASA in 1989 and logged more than 565 space hours. He now hosts his own Lifetime program called "Child Genius."
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