Science Meetings

I’ve spent a few days in science meetings before today — though it doesn’t happen frequently, yet, and I can still look on it with humor. Here are a few things I learned:

• You can always tell who the guy from headquarters is: he’s the one in a full suit and tie.
  The scientists, even when they dress up for a talk, rarely wear a jacket, let alone a tie. Many of the scientists don’t even bother to dress up for talks. That’s one reason I love this profession.
• A laser pointer in the wrong hands is a bad thing.
  Some people know that a laser pointer should be used to highlight a few things on their slides, and then turned off. Most think they need to constantly have the little, hypnotic light dancing across their slides.
• If something is truly “exciting”, you shouldn’t have to say it more than once or twice.
  Asserting that something is exciting ten or more times during your talk makes everyone a bit suspicious.
• Itineraries are just for show. Time limits don’t actually apply to someone as important as me.
• Even science meetings can turn into pissing matches.

Aurora

According to SpaceWeather.com, the sun has just experiences the most powerful flare in years, tossing a coronal mass ejection (CME) toward Earth. This might cause bright auroras October 29th or 30th. The director of the UMD observatory has set up a page to monitor the activity: UM Observatory: Aurora over College Park. If the meter gets into the yellow or if the activity on the map grows and covers the upper states, we might just be able to see the aurora here.

I’ve only see the aurora once. Once it came down as far as the Twin Cities — it was white, rather than colorful, but still magical. My brother had gotten home late, and woke me up to see it. At first I was mad that he’d interrupted a good night’s sleep, but I found myself going back outside after he’d gone to bed. I don’t know how to describe how it made me feel — it was like being in a dream world, or a world where magic is real.

Map of the Universe

A group (Gott et al.) has just published a map of the Universe. I saw the title in the astro-ph listings, and thought, “well, that sounds ambitious.” The map is done on a such a logarithmic scale so that they were able to get small features — like the solar system — all the way up to the cosmological features on the same map.

Check out the full map, or the paper.

Happy 45th Birthday, NASA!

On October 1, 1958, NASA was created! Yay for me, since they currently employ me.

I’m not going to go through all of NASA’s history , but it seems that lately people can only focus on NASA’s failures. While I don’t want to minimize the fact that at least two of these recent failures (meaning, those that have happened in my lifetime) cost human lives, I do want to point out that NASA has had far more successes than failures.

NASA’s great observatory program has successfully launched four observatories into space that have advanced our knowledge in the regions of gamma-ray, x-ray, visible and infrared astronomy.

• The first great observatory launched was also the one the public connects with the most: the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), launched in 1990. There were a few problems with Hubble, but even with the warped mirror, HST was sending down images that astronomers could use. Once the optics were fixed, HST’s science output was enormous. Hubble is still operating today, and will hopefully continue for another several years. One of the benefits of HST is that it’s in a low enough orbit that astronauts on the space shuttle can retrieve it for repairs when necessary.
• The second one launched was the Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory (CGRO) in 1991. This is one that the public heard little about. It observed the sky in gamma-rays, and while the pictures and results were not nearly as pretty as Hubble’s, they were the best that had ever been done. CGRO’s instruments advanced gamma-ray astronomy more in it’s nearly 10 years in operation than any other gamma-ray telescope in the 20 years before CGRO>
• In 1999, NASA launched Chandra , one of the top X-ray observatories so far. Like Hubble, it has produced many pretty pictures, though unfortunately, the public doesn’t seem to connect with them the way they connect to the HST images. (Probably because the human eye can see X-rays, whereas we can pretend that what HST is what we might see if we had really, really good eyes.)
• Finally, NASA has just recently launched the Space Infrared Telescope Facility (SIRTIF). I’ll confess that I don’t know much about SIRTIF, but it launched this past summer, and is currently undergoing it’s 90-day in-orbit checkout period. In a few months we should start seeing cool results.

Those certainly aren’t NASA’s only major achievements over the past few years, but I thought it might be nice to remind everyone that just because the news media prefers to dwell on what’s gone wrong doesn’t mean that NASA isn’t still setting and reaching major goals.