Just my little corner of the Interweb
The repairs were made to the rocket, and Swift launched today at 12:16 EST! The BBC has a story, complete with a link to a video of their coverage.
Congratulations Swift team!
I’m not sure this will replace the NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) as my primary journal article search engine, but Google has a beta of Google Scholar, a tool for searching scientific papers.
A search for “B. J. Mattson” +NASA turns up my earlier paper and conference proceedings, but does not turn up the two articles I have in the Astrophysical Journal from this year….maybe that’s why it’s still in beta. Next time I’m doing a literature search for my thesis, I’ll give it a try and compare the results to ADS.
[found via Pharyngula]
The Swift satellite, which will study gamma-ray bursts and their afterglows in three wavelengths was supposed to launch today from Kennedy Space Center. However, the launch was scrubbed due some technical difficulties and has been rescheduled for tomorrow.
This mission is headed by Goddard Space Flight Center, and I have assisted the Principal Investigator in some Swift-related materials, like a display on-site and an ApJ paper. I’ll be in the Goddard Visitor Center tomorrow to watch the launch through a live broadcast. If you get a chance, you can check out a live web-cast of the launch either at Kennedy Space Center’s Video Feed page or NASA TV. More information about the status of the launch can be found at Spaceflight Now.
I’m keeping my fingers crossed for a successful launch tomorrow!
Update: The launch has been rescheduled for Saturday at 12:10 PM EST. There was a voltage irregularity on the rocket, and some of the rocket’s safety system parts need to be replaced. Still keeping my fingers crossed!
There is going to be a total lunar eclipse tonight. It will be visible in North and South America, Western Europe and Africa, weather permitting. If you’re in the DC metro area, there are several places holding observing parties tonight, including the University of Maryland’s Astronomy Department (there’s a list on that site of other DC clubs doing public observationst tonight). I’ll be out on our deck, assuming the clouds ever lift.
Space.com has more information on lunar eclipses in general, and this eclipse in particular.
The last time there was a total lunar eclipse visible in DC, Andrew and I were at the Alexandria Symphony, where, oddly enough, they were performing Holst’s The Planets.
The Genesis spacecraft did not deploy it’s parachutes, and ended up crash landing in the Utah desert, instead of getting picked up by helicopters as was originally planned. CNN has the breaking story.
It’s unclear whether or not the science instruments and samples of solar wind were damaged in the crash…we’ll just have to wait and see.
A few notes from the world…er…universe of astronomy:
The story appears in the July 16 issue of Science, but can also be found in the astro-ph archive: Phase-resolved spectroscopy of Geminga shows rotating hot spot(s)
NASA officials emerging from a space station partners meeting July 23 declined to commit to a U.S. purchase of Russian Soyuz crew-transport and rescue capsules but said such purchases would have to be made to meet the goal of having between four and six astronauts permanently working at the orbital outpost.
In a conference call, NASA Associated Administrator Frederick D. Gregory and Bill Gersteinmeier, the agency’s space-station director, said NASA and its space station partners agreed that “more than three” astronauts should be working at the station on a permanent basis. A single Soyuz capsule can transport three astronauts.
While there’s nothing definate, at least it looks like plans are being made to start using the ISS to it’s original potential.
In Europe, Russian air scrubbers built for the space station Mir — and later installed aboard the International Space Station (ISS) — have been integrated into hospitals to protect staff and patients alike from airborne spores, bacteria and viruses.
[…]
Meanwhile, in California, NASA engineers are working alongside neurosurgeons to turn an infrared video camera normally used to study the Earth into a tumor-hunting brain scanner.
A few random items from the world of astronomy:
Robert Roy Britt, on Space.com, wrote a commentary on the latest push to use a manned mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope, Commentary: On Saving Hubble, NASA Chief Listens with One Ear. I nearly stopped reading the piece when I read this:
Astronomers depend on it to investigate the most fundamental questions of astronomy and cosmology. It is often the best tool for the task, and sometimes the only tool. No replacement is on the drawing boards.
Britt should know better. He’s been writing for Space.com for a while, and should be aware of the James Webb Space Telescope, which was originally known as the Next Generation Space Telescope. It is a replacement for Hubble that has been under development for years. The problem is that JWST will not be launched until 2011, assuming it’s schedule doesn’t slip. If Hubble is left to die, it will likely not operate beyond 2007, which will leave a 4-year gap in space-based optical astronomy. Astronomers don’t want to lose that time if they don’t have to…Hubble is just too valuable to let die.
I continued reading, and while I agree in principle with Britt’s point that a manned-mission should be performed, I do not agree with the primary reasons he puts forth.
In defending the manned-mission, he writes:
Robots are great. But they lack, well, human drama. No reality show would seize public attention like a risky, vital, televised journey into the black void to rescue a great American treasure.
Which makes the manned-mission sound like a publicity stunt. The reason for a manned-mission is not to create a great TV opportunity for NASA. Rather, it is preferred by astronomers because astronauts will be more likely than robots to perform all of the planned service for Hubble.
The minimum job of any servicing mission to Hubble is to arrange for a save way to de-orbit the satellite, this part is mandated by Congress and would not be terribly difficult for a robotic mission to accomplish. The next level of the servicing mission is to replace the gyros and batteries, which would extend Hubble’s operational lifetime. This task could be difficult for a robot, but is certainly within the realm of possibility. The final level of the servicing mission is to install new instruments. It’s this last bit that would be fairly unlikely to happen with a robotic servicing mission, which would be a pity, too, since these instruments have already been constructed and represent exciting science possibilities. A manned mission would be able to accomplish all of the tasks, where there’s much uncertainty that a robotic mission would be able to do more than just ensure a save de-orbit of the satellite.
Britt also comments:
Robots are fearless. They face risk with nary a thought. They might save Hubble, and astronomers are overjoyed that O’Keefe is seriously considering a robotic mission to do the job. It might even lead to a technological leap in space robotics.
But the larger question O’Keefe must answer right now is whether humans, too, can stare down danger for a noble cause.
We are not going to get the American public (and more specifically, the congresspeople and NASA muckity-mucks) behind a manned-mission to Hubble with a play-ground-esque dare for NASA to jump back into spaceflight. We’ll accomplish more by arguing that when NASA is ready fly shuttles again that the science (and, yes, public-relations) benefits of a fully-functioning Hubble is worth the risk.
I came across the following paper title while perusing the past week’s submissions to astro-ph:
The accreting neutron stars are quasars, and the universe does not expand
and I thought to myself, I wonder if this author is a crackpot.
The jury is still out. The basic theory is that quasars are not, indeed, cosmological objects, but rather they are local neutron stars with a dirty hydrogen cloud of material that is accreting onto the star. It is this accretion that gives a false redshift, making the star appear to be cosmological in distance.
I haven’t read the paper, and probably don’t know enough about the physics they are proposing to make a good judgement (plus, reports are that the author’s translation from French to English makes the article difficult to decipher). The underlying theory is called the Creil Effect, and briefly, states that photons coming from distant galaxies interacts with intervening atoms in such a way that while they lose energy (i.e. are redshifted), their direction is not affected. This would produce the redshift/distance relationship without invoking an expanding Universe.
There is a thread on the Bad Astronomy web site about Creil, in which several holes in the theory are brought up, such as the Creil Effect’s inability to explain that distant supernova experience time dialation effects that are best explained by relativisitic expansion.
While reading this, I came across a link to an article Why the Big Bang is Wrong by John Kierein. I did not read this article in detail, either, because others have ripped apart some of his arguments already (see this thread for a few arguments). But I laughed outloud when I came to this deficiency in the Big Bang theory:
How do galaxies collide if they are flying away from each other?
The ignorance of that statement is enough to make me discount anything Kierein has to say.
Unsurprisingly, Moret-Bailly (author of the original astro-ph paper that prompted this search) signed the anti-big bang petition, and I suspect that Kierein supports its sentiments (though I did not see his signature on the current petition page). (Preposterous Universe has a couple good posts about this petition: Doubt and dissent are not tolerated and Energy and intelligence)
This is not to say that the Big Bang theory is the end-all and be-all of cosmology. There are still things to be worked out in the theory. And, in working those issues out, parts of the theory may be proven false. That’s what science is all about. But for now, the Big Bang theory seems to be holding up fairly well.
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