Discovery Space: Next Generation

NASA-JPL is a Hotbed of Student Activity

About 300 students at all levels, from high school through graduate school, have been working at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California over the summer. And the 25 different programs that the lab offers for students are not just summer work -- about half of them are academic-year positions.

And they span the gamut, from engineering to data analysis to planetary science.

These are amazing opportunities for anyone interested in working in space science of any kind. Here's just a few examples of the work students have been doing at what is certainly the world's premier center for designing and operating planetary exploration missions. (No offense to Ames, which is NASA's other principal planetary research center, but which doesn't actually build and operate as many robotic missions).

-- Yuri Carillo, 18, is a sophomore in electrical engineering Cal Poly who has been working there this summer. She actually put in her first stint working at JPL while she was still in high school. She's worked on a gadget to help a Mars robot change drill bits, and on batteries for a future rover. "Before I came I thought it was going to be very serious and uptight, and then I realized it's more like a college campus," she says.

-- Brandon Jones, at 28, is a bit farther along -- he's a PhD student in aerospace engineering at the University of Colorado who has been working on satellite navigation systems, tracking the positions of the GPS satellites that are used to track everything else. He spent a previous summer working at Johnson Space Center in Houston, so he's really racking up his mileage at NASA.

-- It's not just hard-core technology types who can find a niche at JPL. Take Erin Edkins: She's a 28-year old student who spent time as a personal fitness trainer and a restaurant manager before deciding to go back to school in planetary science at  UC Santa Barbara. Now a senior there, she's putting in her second summer at JPL. She works on planetary atmospheres and is analyzing the swirling storm systems on Jupiter.

As part of that job, she enjoys being often the first person to see new planetary images that arrive from a distant planet. Her advice to other students is to just go ahead and apply for a JPL internship, as she did.

"Go for it," she says. "Definitely the worst thing that could happen is you could contact someone to work with at JPL and they say no. Then you're in the same position you started in."

You can read up on JPL's student opportunities on their web site. There's something for just about anybody who's interested in doing space-related work. Go ahead, give it a try!

photos: top, Yuri Carillo. bottom, Erin Edkins. photos courtesy of NASA/JPL.

Guest Blogger: A Student's Eyes on the Skies

This is the first of a new regular feature for Next Generation, a guest blog by a student scientist. If you're a student working in the areas of astronomy, space research or any related field and would like to write a guest blog post in coming weeks, let me know at dlc@davidlchandler.com.

Today's blogger is Rachael Beaton, a first-year graduate student at the University of Virginia who has had a chance to make observations at some of the world's leading observatories, including the newly-commissioned Large Binocular Telescope outside Tucson, Arizona. She has already made a significant discovery -- a dwarf galaxy that is within our local group, a companion to Andromeda, but is moving too fast to be part of the group and must be just passing through.

Here's Rachael's post:

The job description for a graduate student in astronomy can seem fairly grim on paper. We spend our days in class, working towards the ivory towers of our "dissertation", attacking our homework assignments, grading papers and doing whatever tasks fall under the definition of "teacher's assistant."

When we’re lucky, in the evenings we escape our offices and teach sections of observing labs or operate telescopes for introductory classes. This can make for a grueling eighteen to twenty hour day.

If we had a union, we'd most certainly strike and picket the department chair for less work -- but I must admit that I have been somewhat dishonest in my portrayal and have left out the perks of the job.

For a handful of nights every year, we astronomers pack our bags, fill up our coffee cups and settle into an observatory to collect the data we spend the remaining 350 odd days of the year trying to understand.

In an effort to avoid the lighting that accompanies modern life, astronomical observatories have been pushed to highest, driest, most remote and -- by no coincidence -- most beautiful portions of the earth. Getting to these sites make all the trials of air travel only the beginning of the trip. Access roads to observatories vary greatly. Observatories like Kitt Peak outside of Tucson, AZ, for example, have luxuriously separate lanes for each direction of travel.

In contrast, the Multiple Mirror Telescope has one dirt lane with few guard rails, stomach wrenching over looks and can result in white rental cars changing to a delightful shade of brown (oops). When making the trip in the evening headlights are not allowed, once requiring me to lean out of the passenger window with a flash light to illuminate the road ahead.

Finally, the jet-lagged astronomer arrives at the helm of a multi-million (or even multi-billion?) dollar facility, jived more on anticipating the night ahead than on the gallons of coffee downed on the journey. Or, in my case, doses of Dramamine.

Large aperture telescopes ( > 4 meters in diameter) are magnificent feats of engineering. I don't think I've been introduced to one that hasn't taken my breath away. They have the same majesty of Roman architecture, one feels dwarfed and yet is so taken by awe as to feel a part of the structure itself.

Despite their enormity, modern telescopes move with the greatest of ease to any point in the sky. Its a sin to come so far and not spend a significant amount of time admiring the object that does the brunt of the work for your data collection. Normally, I watch the sunset and take in the telescope, as the telescope operator puts in the last bits of liquid nitrogen to keep the instrument cool for the night. As the Sun sinks below the horizon, the real romance of astronomy begins. I take my seat at the instrument controls, and the operator theirs by the telescope controls.

My thesis project involves a deep survey of the outer limits of the Andromeda galaxy in an attempt to characterize its newly discovered stellar halo.

Often the data I collect are the very first deep images of a region of the night sky. So, when the first image in a field comes up on the computer screen, mine are the first eyes to trace the stars and count the galaxies that it contains.

Viewing your data for the first time is the most exciting part of observing. Sometimes it's breathtaking in its perfection, and other times it''s numbing in its unforeseen problems (winds, bad focus, or pointing inaccuracies). During the course of the night, I routinely go outside and check the weather. Naked eye astronomy at ~10,000 feet is incredible. The skies are alive with stars and the arms of the Milky Way are encompassing, seeming to embrace the Earth within them.

What is more impressive, however, is that the telescope is pointed at an area on that sky that is infinitely dark to my eyes, but that is revealed to be replete with stars and galaxies. Its times like these that the hours spent bent over a computer or an assignment feel so worthwhile. Every night that I observe, I get reminded of the awe and curiosity that fuel my scientific endeavors. Once and again, I fall helplessly in love with astronomy.

The last perk to being an astronomer is seeing the sun both rise and set on a single day.

Most people are lucky or perhaps loathe to see either, let alone both. Just as I watched the sunset from the telescope dome to start my night, I watch it rise from there to end the night. Sometimes I see that the telescope operator too has paused in his work to stow the telescope to watch the Sun return. When our eyes meet, it's one of those wordless conversations that one can have with someone they do not know well.

At the end of the night, I receive a call from my adviser. As my eyes droop and the adrenaline from the night begins to fade, I mumble a report for the night. Then pack up my things and head down to the dorms to grab a few hours of sleep before starting it all over again.

Observing  is a very solitary event and I am usually craving the company of friends and family by the end, but even so leaving the mountain is sorrowful. I spend the afternoons scrambling around the observatory taking in the scenery and getting my fill of the desert. At night, though accompanied by the operator, I spend much of my time lost in my own thoughts about the data that we have, the data we’re taking and the data to take next. This, however, is only a muted form of the astronomer's romance.

Before the advent of the CCD camera, the astronomer prepared glass plates, rode with the telescope all night and then developed the plates, getting only a glance of sleep before doing it all again.

Still, even in its isolation, observing is what drives the observational astronomer. It's only with the collection of new data that we really get to stretch our legs into new discovery and push the limits of our field. I spend most of my time locked into that grim job description of the ever working graduate student, but for a few precious nights a year, I feel more like Columbus sailing through uncharted waters in search of the Indies, except I ride on the back of a telescope, my oceans stretch to the very limits of the Universe and I am searching for whatever the data will reveal.

Photos: top, Rachael with the KPNO 4 meter in the background (by George Trammell); middle, University of Virginia graduate students with the Large BinocularTelescope; bottom, access road to Cerro Tololo Intercontinental Observatory, Chile

Celestial Roundup

Today, we'll have a little grab-bag of items. Fill up your plate, it's an all-you-can-eat smorgasbord!

Telescopes without mountains

You don't have to be on a high mountaintop in Arizona, Hawaii or Chile to do astronomy. Although more and more colleges and universities are now equipped to run distant observatories from computer consoles on campus, there's nothing quite like the experience of actually working at the telescope itself, and plenty of campuses have or are getting telescopes nearby, wherever they may be, to offer hands-on experiences to their students -- and the capability of doing real research. It's a big sky out there, and among the billions and billions of celestial objects to observe, there are plenty of worthwhile observing programs that can be conducted from less-than-optimal sites.
So, here's one new example: Purdue University Calumet, in Indiana, just announced last week that they are proceeding, with the help of a $150,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, to get a 20-inch advanced Ritchy-Chretien telescope, which will be set up in an observatory in a nearby state park. It will be equipped for robotic observations from campus, but also can be used by students from the university, as well as special field trips by local high schools, to get that firsthand experience.
“Purdue Calumet students will soon have the ability to learn the science of astronomy through discovery from authentic data that they themselves obtain with the robotic telescope," says Shawn Slavin, a professor of astronomy at the university.

Portal to the Universe

It sounds like a device from a science-fiction story, sort of like the "stargate" in 2001. But no, this is a project, organized as part of the International Year of Astronomy (next year), to provide a comprehensive guide to the astronomy related websites, news, clubs, observatories, image sources, and so on. At their website, they are inviting people to contribute links and information on any sources that fit this bill.
They plan to launch the site at the end of the year. It looks like it will be a useful resource for all of us, if it works out. Good luck to them, and I envite everyone to help out by contributing information on sites, groups and facilities that you are involved in or know about.

Fly your Thesis

The European Space Agency has just announced a new program, similar to NASA's longstanding Microgravity University, which I described here in an earlier post (and gave a specific example of in another post).
ESA's program is smaller in scope -- far fewer students will get to participate, and they'll have to wait much longer to do so. But it's also structured to foster more ambitious use of the opportunity. As with NASA's program, students are invited to propose experiments that can be flown aboard an airplane that provides brief periods of weightlessness by flying on a roller-coaster-like trajectory of parabolic hills and valleys.
The NASA program is aimed at undergraduates, and students generally propose experiments that may be part of a class project, or may just be an ad-hoc idea that a group of students come up with. ESA, on the other hand, is looking for graduate students who want to do work that will actually be part of their thesis research.
I'm delighted to see that European students will now have an opportunity to share in the kinds of experiences that American students have been able to take part in for more than a decade. And although fewer will get to take part, it's an admirable idea to use these opportunities to foster advanced level serious research. I look forward to seeing what kinds of projects will result.

Students in the Dark

Finally, a footnote to the coverage by my fellow bloggers Dave Mosher and Alan Dyer about the August 1 total solar eclipse.
I was very envious reading their accounts of their adventures watching the eclipse from two different airplanes. I've see four total eclipses in my life, and they are definitely one of the two number-one all time greatest categories of skywatching experiences (see Alan Dyer's posting on his rating system of the top celestial sights) I've ever had the pleasure of seeing (the other category that equals it being an all-sky auroral display, which I saw in spring of 1988). But it's been a long time since the last one I saw -- which was awesome and spectacular, on the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii in 1991, surrounded by the world's leading telescopes.
Anyway, I just read an item about a couple of lucky undegraduates, Katie Dupre and Marcus Freeman, who got a chance to see this latest eclipse in the company of the world's leading eclipse researcher, Jay Pasachoff of Williams College. For Jay, this was his 47th eclipse! The lucky dog. They watched it near Novosibirsk, Siberia, and took part in research on the sun's inner corona, which can only be observed during total eclipses.

(Photos: Top, observatory sketch courtesy of Purdue University Calumet; Middle, zero-g plane courtesy of ESA; Bottom, solar eclipse photographed by Luc Viatour, licenced under the GNU free documentation license.)

Setback for SpaceX is Setback for Student Space Projects

SpaceX, short for Space Exploration Technologies, is one of the most interesting companies in the world right now to keep an eye on. If I were a billionaire -- and hey, I'm only a billion or so short of being one -- I would be pouring investment money into the company, and expecting a handsome return on it in a few years.
Yesterday, Space-X had their third launch failure in as many attempts. Or, as the company's founder Elon Musk prefers to describe it, their third "partial success." Ok, he has a point -- most of the innovative Falcon 1 rocket's parts worked perfectly. The first stage, using a brand-new rocket motor and structure and control system, worked without a hitch. But, for the second time, there was a problem with the separation between the first and second stages, and so the payload -- in this case, three separate satellites -- never made it to orbit.
Musk, who made his fortune in the Internet, by founding PayPal and then selling it to eBay, vows to keep on trying. In a letter posted on the SpaceX website, he declared flatly "There should be absolutely zero question that SpaceX will prevail in reaching orbit and demonstrating reliable space transport.  For my part, I will never give up and I mean never."
I admire Musk and his innovative plans, and I believe his commitment is real. And in addition to his personal fortune of a few hundred million, he says he has obtained substantial outside investment to keep the company's plans on track. And even NASA is backing him, as part of its COTS (Commercial Orbital Transportation Services) program to provide resupply services to the International Space Station.
Why does any of this matter to students? In fact, it matters in a big way, because SpaceX is one of about a half-dozen companies that are working hard to bring down the cost of sending things into orbit by at least an order of magnitude, and hopefully by two orders of magnitude, over the next few years. And if he or any of the others succeed (and frankly SpaceX is one of the top two or three candidates, and the one likeliest to succeed first), it will completely revolutionize the entire space business.
And among the very first people to benefit from that dramatic cost reduction will be students and academic researchers. A whole host of science and engineering research projects that would have been too costly to even attempt could suddenly open up as practical and within reach. And other projects that might have taken many years to get to the point of actually getting into orbit might be able to get there on a timescale of months instead. It will truly be a new era for university-based projects in astronomy, communications, materials research, biology in microgravity, and exploration.
In fact, Musk has specifically already offered cut-rate launch services to some of the student teams that are competing in the Google Lunar X-Prize challenge, including a team from Carnegie Mellon University.
So we should all be rooting very hard for SpaceX, as well as for the other companies competing in this arena: Blue Origin, founded by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos; Xcor, a company based in Mojave, California that has the most explicit plans to make its planned low-cost launch services available for academic research; Armadillo Aerospace, founded by John Carmack, creator of the videogame Doom; and  Virgin Galactic, the partnership between X-Prize winner Burt Rutan and Virgin  Group founder Sir Richard Branson. While Virgin Galactic's business plan is mostly focused on the tourist market, it is clear that their vehicles -- both the SpaceShipTwo rocket, and its carrier plane White Knight Two -- could be a great platform for research as well.

Musk says that he has another Falcon 1 rocket ready to go, and he's also going full-tilt toward test flights of the much bigger Falcon 9, which will be the most powerful US rocket in existence. I wish him well, and will be keeping a close eye on his progress, and will keep you all posted on new developments here in this blog. (By the way, the best way to keep track of developments in real-time when there's a SpaceX launch about to take off is through a blog by Elon Musk's brother Kimbal, called Kwajalein Atoll and Rockets after the Pacific island site where the tests are conducted). There's also a good analysis of yesterday's failure, and of Musk's overall approach, on the blog Space Transport News.
Good luck to all of the new generation of space pioneers represented by these daring startup companies, that are poised to revolutionize the way the space business works.

(Photo: Falcon 1's second launch attempt from Kwajalein Atoll last year, courtesy of SpaceX)

Texas State U. Students Trace Caesar's Conquest

There's been an ongoing debate among scholars as to exactly when and where Julius Caesar first crossed the English Channel and entered Britain -- one of the furthest outposts that he conquered.

Okay, that debate was news to me. But it turns out a team from Texas State University, including two undergraduate honors students, have now settled the controversy once and for all -- by analyzing how the moon affected the tides that Caesar and some of his troops described.

Solving the puzzle involved an ingenious mix of scholarly research -- both on the Roman texts and doing the calculations of the moon's position during the dates in question -- and hands-on research at the locations involved, which included sailing a small boat along the shoreline to figure out whether Caesar turned left or right along the coast from the point he first reached land (the text, apparently, just says he turned, but doesn't say which way).

And in an especially nice touch, it also involved throwing some apples into the water off a pier, to provide a highly visible (and presumably highly biodegradable) indicator of which way the currents were flowing -- at exactly the right time.

Kellie N. Beicker and Amanda F. Gregory, the two honors students, traveled to England last summer with professors Don Olson and Russell Doescher to recreate the scene of the invasion. August 25-26 of 2007, it turns out, just happened to be exactly the right time to replicate exactly the timing of the moon's cycle with the time of the year as it was in 55 BC, the year of the invasion. The last such perfect match was in 1901, so it was important to seize the occasion this time around -- the next match isn't until 2140.

Olsen has been doing this kind of thing -- a specialty he calls "forensic astronomy" -- for many years now. It's a key feature of his highly popular astronomy class, called "Astronomy in Art, History, and Literature."

Very often, as in this case, it leads to new findings that are described in articles for Sky & Telescope magazine (this one's in their August issue, just out). In the past, the classes have pinpointed the timing of a crossing of Boston Harbor before Paul Revere's famous ride, traveled around France to identify the exact dates and places that Van Gogh depicted in several of his paintings, and dated a famous photograph by Ansel Adams. They've also studied an amazing array of very sophisticated astronomical references in Shakespeare's Hamlet, and identified pivotal World War 2 landing conditions. Almost always, a few lucky undergrads get to go along, and often, as this time, they get to share the credit with the two profs when the results get written up for Sky & Telescope. And they also learn some very creative thinking.

You can read more about some of these projects here in stories I wrote for the Boston Globe science section, about trips investigating  Columbus'  use of astronomical knowledge, the timing of the Boston Massacre, and investigating Van Gogh's paintings. There are also interesting pieces here and here.

Roger Sinnott, an editor at Sky & Telescope who has been working with Olson on these articles for many years, got to go along on this trip with the Texas team, and he's blogged about the experience. He has nice photos of the White Cliffs of Dover where Caesar originally arrived. It's all very scenic I'm very envious.

And my fellow Discovery blogger Jennifer Ouelette has a very good entry about it on Twisted Physics, going into much more detail about what they actually determined, and how they did it.

Photos - top: courtesy of Don Olson; bottom: courtesy of Sky & Telescope

Can You Help a NASA Mission? You Bet Your GLAST!

The launch of the next satellite in NASA's ongoing series of space observatories has been postponed again,  from Saturday to next week (Wednesday the 11th at the earliest). It's called the Gamma-ray  Large-Area Space Telescope, or GLAST, and it will be the most powerful telescope ever launched to observe gamma rays -- which are the most high-energy form of radiation. These rays come from the biggest, baddest events in the universe, colossal outpourings of energy from things like neutron stars or black holes crashing into each other, or super-energetic objects like blazars that thrash around in the centers of some hyperactive galaxies.
GLAST will "see" gamma rays at least 30 times better than any previous telescope, according to NASA's information on the mission.
GLAST has two separate instruments, one designed  specifically to home in on brief events called gamma-ray bursts, and the other a wide field detector that covers one-fifth of the sky at once, and can observe the whole sky every three hours. This  should allow it to discover thousands of new sources of gamma rays, and really pin down our understanding of the different types of gamma-ray bursts.
And yes, as the title says, you may be able to help out with all this.
NASA has spent $690 million on this mission, but it could still use some help from students, teachers, and amateur astronomers around the country, and around the world.
When a gamma-ray burst is detected, or a new source of gamma rays identified, it's important to get followup observations quickly, and the world's largest telescopes are tightly scheduled months in advance. So, under the direction of Lynn Cominsky, an astronomer at Sonoma State University in California, NASA has established a small network of college observatories, schools, and private amateur observatories to carry out these observations. There are online forms to sign up to take part in what they call GTN-- the Global Telescope Network -- right here.
And you don't even need a telescope. The network includes a telescope at Sonoma State called GORT (a nice homage to the alien robot in the 1950s clasic film "The Day The Earth Stood Still") which stands for GLAST Optical Robotic Telescope. Students anywhere can sign up to use the telescope, or to help analyze its pictures.
I'll talk more about exactly what's involved in this project, and how you can take part, as we get closer to the launch. Please stay tuned!