Restoring Science to its Rightful Place -- With Colossal Cuts?

February 06, 2009

This blog is about space, astronomy, planetary science, cosmology, physics, etc. I like to keep an upbeat tone -- no matter how crummy the news -- because we could use more of that in the universe.

Today, though, I'm worried.

Heard about Barack Obama's $920 billion economic recovery/stimulus plan? I know, I know -- who hasn't. That's a colossal chunk of change I find it hard to imagine, but this helps.
Note: I offer no opinion on whether or not this is a good idea in the long run -- even if I was an economic expert, today that title doesn't garner much street cred.

But let's get to the bottom line:

Some extra cash for science budgets was part of this plan -- some might call it yummy icing on a foul-tasting budgetary cake, others a comforting restoration to what old science budgets were.
Note: To be clear, this is money additional to regular budgets. But most if not all are pretty damn dismal.

However you feel about it, money + politics = infighting. To boot that point: A group of bi-partisan senators are looking to hack stimulus money for science if their proposed ~$100 billion reduction to the plan goes through.

Below is a summary that I received from Shawn Otto, one of the brains behind last year's Science Debate 2008 project, and here is a link to all of the proposed cuts.

The bad news:*

Agency/Program	Original Stimulus Boost	Proposed Cut	Proposed Stimulus Boost
NASA Exploration	$1.5 billion	50%	$750 million
National Science Foundation (NSF)	$1.4 billion	100%	$0
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)	$1.222 billion	34.94%	$795 million
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)	$575 million	37.91%	$357 million
Dept. of Energy (DOE) - Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EREE)	$2.648 billion	38%	$1.648 billion
DOE - Office of Science	$100 million	100%	$0
Dept. of Defense (DOD) - Alternative Vehicle Technology Procurement	$100 million	100%	$0
DOE - Title 17 EISA energy technology loan program	$9.5 billion	47%	$4.5 billion
DOE - Uranium Enrichment Decontamination and Decommissioning Fund	$390 million	100%	$0
Smithsonian - Facilities Capital	$120 million	100%	$0

If you're a supporter of science, this = not good. It's even bad news for me, because there will be less great science going on than I was hoping for. And that's uncool, because really like writing and doing video about science.

Yet this could be bad news for everyone. It's not hard to see how efforts made in science benefit society. Here's a nice interactive feature about NASA to illustrate.

I called someone at the head of a government-funded science program that would be affected, and here's what that person had to say (under condition of anonymity because they don't want to lose their job):

Can Atom Smashers Really Vaporize Stuff?

January 06, 2009

What happens when you put stuff in the path of a particle beam?

In case you missed it, Emily Lakdawalla at the Planetary Society blog wrote a most excellent post about just that. Namely, what happens when you point one at a camera.

Check out this video of a guy aiming a particle beam at a webcam:

Nothing lighting on fire or anything, I know. But that's just a low-power particle beam...

What would happen to that camera if we stuck it in the path of something bigger -- say, the thing at right: Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory's (Fermilab's) Tevatron particle accelerator?

Read on!

(By the way: What you actually see is the Collider Detector at Fermilab, or CDF, being opened up for maintenance and/or upgrades. This device is where particle beams collide into a spray of more exotic particles.)

Strolling Through the Cosmic Woods

December 18, 2008

Thinking = a big part of being human. Trouble is, there are endless things to think about each day:

• What did I forget on my way out today?
• Will Obama turn out to be a good or lousy president?
• What am I making for dinner?
• Why is that guy at the bus stop staring at me?
• Did anyone just smell my fart?
• Should I be reading this post by some nerdy-looking guy named Dave Mosher on a Discovery Channel Web site?

Nothing wrong with thinking about any of the above, except for that last item.

But I like to crash perfectly mediocre thinking parties with some outlandish stuff. For example, watch this -- the Universe Song courtesy of Monty Python's "Meaning of Life":

Hope for Science Education?

December 02, 2008

In my video update last week, I showed off a work of art created by my 3 1/2-year-old niece.

Here it is again -- the moon -- plus a new work of art I didn't show you -- the solar system (yep, Pluto is still in the ball game):

Interview With a UFO Investigator

November 24, 2008

Discovery Channel's "UFOs Over Earth" series follows Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) investigations into reports of strange sightings and alien encounters. Discovery Space producer Dave Mosher interviews John Ventre, a MUFON investigator appearing on the show.

MUFON Guy (9:14 AM): Hi Dave, I'm on.

Dave on Earth (9:14 AM): Hey there -- strange, but I can't see you on my buddy list.

MUFON Guy (9:15 AM): I hit invisible.

Dave on Earth (9:15 AM): Ah, well there's our explanation. An unidentified typing object.
Jokes aside, you're appearing in a new Discovery Channel show called "UFOs over Earth." What did you do in the episode?

MUFON Guy (9:17 AM): Yes, I'm the Pennsylvania state director for MUFON and I helped conduct an investigation.

Dave on Earth (9:18 AM): MUFON... What is that ?

MUFON Guy (9:19 AM): The Mutual UFO Network. We have 3,000 members and 950 certified investigators.
We interview witnesses and conduct scientific investigations to explain their UFO sightings.

Dave on Earth (9:20 AM): UFO -- unidentified flying object -- sightings, correct?

Are You A Believer?

November 20, 2008

I just hopped off an online interview with a director from MUFON -- the Mutual UFO Network -- and felt the need to say something about it.

Our interview, by the way, regards a mini-site I'm building for a Discovery Channel show called "UFOs Over Earth". As of right now the schedule is:

- The Bucks County Flap - Nov. 24 (Mon.) at 9:00 pm ET.
Re-runs: Dec. 13 (Sat.) at 10:00 pm ET and 2:00am ET

- Mass Sightings in Mexico - Nov. 24 (Mon.) at 10:00 pm ET

- The Fayetteville Incident - Re-runs: Dec. 13 (Sat.) at 9:00 pm ET and 1:00am ET)

TV schedules are fickle, however, so for the most up-to-date one click this here link.

At any rate, back to the chat...

Time for a Rant About NASA

November 13, 2008

While Twitter implodes from the tremendous, monstrous and titanic exoplanet news now storming across the internet (how's that for a daily dose of big adjectives?) I thought I'd take a moment to rant.

Remember that bit last week about how magnetic fields could shield astronauts from high-energy cosmic rays?

Well, I thought it' be great to put together a list of the worst ways you could die in space. (Check the site soon for this bad boy.) You know, a timely piece to extract science from a touchy subject.

Confession: I'm fascinated -- scientifically -- by destruction, devastation and doom-n-gloom scenarios in general. What happens if we disappeared from the Earth? What would happen if we fell into a black hole? Needless to say, Phil Plait's new book (Death from the Skies!) is on my reading list.

But really... who isn't at least a little interested in these things? E.g. Most people know about the Large Hadron Collider because they (mistakenly) thought it would swallow the Earth.

NASA didn't seem too interested. Or at least not interested in sharing what they know with journalists.

I called a source-who-shall-remain-nameless at our civil space agency to get the skinny on dying in space. Mind you, this person was qualified to answer my questions. To their credit: When I asked something they weren't certain about, I was referred to others. Perfectly ok with that.

At any rate, during our chat I was courteous and gentle, and repeatedly described my goal: to put together a piece that would trick people into learning about science by appealing to their abject terror.

I employed this classic journalistic trick in anticipation of trouble: Start with with the fluffy stuff (radiation poisoning) and work down the list toward the less fluffy stuff, aka "door closers" (psychotic crewmembers murdering everyone on board, a la Event Horizon). It went well for awhile.

The proverbial poop hit the fan once I dropped this query: "What happens to the human body if directly and immediately exposed to the vacuum of space?"

There was some muttering about how this conversation was getting too negative, and how the person I was interviewing couldn't understand why I'd want to know something like that. Before I could thank them for their time...

*click*

*sigh*

It's not negative. It's addressing the fact that space is a dangerous place for humans to explore, and getting into the science of why.

NASA: Do you want us to be interested in space? In you? Furthermore, do you want the next generation of scientists to explore new ways to avoid lethal scenarios and advance the reach of humans into the solar system?

Yes, yes and yes? Well then, answer our stupid questions.

By not answering a journalist's stupid questions, no matter how sensationalist you assume their motives to be, you risk having that person spread incomplete and incorrect information about something. And that's bad.

I have plenty of other sources to go after, mind you, but I'm always open to giving the biggest and deepest pool of expertise in space -- NASA -- the first chance to shine.

Photo: Amazon.com

R.I.P. Phoenix Mars Lander

November 10, 2008

It's official now -- the Phoenix Mars Lander mission is over, and the spacecraft is probably as good as scrap.

Phoenix succumbed to the icy grip of Mars after Nov. 2, which is when we last heard from it. More than likely it's frozen solid.

I ran scared in my last post when Phoenix was going in and out of sleep mode (thanks to a diminishing supply of light on top of the red planet), and now the sobering reality is sinking in.

May its robotic soul rest in peace and Mars give it a quick burial under a crapload of carbon dioxide and water ice.

In honor of our lately departed buddy, I offer a collection of fun things cooked up by the Discovery Space team:

1. Best Phoenix Photos. The lander's end drew very near last week, so we put up a slideshow of its greatest hits.
2. Videos. We did a bunch of videos here at Discovery Space on Phoenix. Watch this new one, plus the rest of them here, here, here and here.
3. Blogging an Odyssey. Irene Klotz on the Free Space blog has put up some great posts about Phoenix -- comb through its odyssey here.
4. Searching for Signs of Life on Mars. I interview Mark Lemmon of Texas A&M University about his work on the spacecraft.
5. The Perchlorator. When Phoenix found perchlorate on Mars, just about everyone freaked out. I made a music video.

And if you're curious about a formal statement, here's what NASA had to say about the spacecraft:

Mission engineers last received a signal from the lander on Nov. 2. Phoenix, in addition to shorter daylight, has encountered a dustier sky, more clouds and colder temperatures as the northern Mars summer approaches autumn. The mission exceeded its planned operational life of three months to conduct and return science data.

The project team will be listening carefully during the next few weeks to hear if Phoenix revives and phones home. However, engineers now believe that is unlikely because of the worsening weather conditions on Mars. While the spacecraft's work has ended, the analysis of data from the instruments is in its earliest stages.

"Phoenix has given us some surprises, and I'm confident we will be pulling more gems from this trove of data for years to come," said Phoenix Principal Investigator Peter Smith of the University of Arizona in Tucson.

Looks like there's a shred of hope to re-establish contact, but it's just that -- hope. I wouldn't bet a penny on it happening.

Phoenix never found life, or direct signs of it, but that's not what it was after anyways. NASA and the University of Arizona teamed up to look for signs of habitability, and to some extent they found that (remember the asparagus-on-Mars thing that fizzled out?).

The big high-five for the mission -- decades in the coming -- was first-hand detection of water on Mars. And to that I pour one out (no pun intended) for you, Phoenix.

Photo: Dave Mosher; NASA JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

Phoenix Is Dying

October 30, 2008

Woe is me...

I don't like breaking the bad news, but our plucky friend -- the Phoenix Mars Lander -- is beginning to freeze to death. As Nancy Atkinson over at Universe Today has pointed out, it entered safe mode (translation: that's bad) but is at least still Twittering... for now.

Sooner or later the cruel Red Planet will claim yet another robotic life, and NASA folks are saying anywhere from days to weeks at this point. I know... I hear you shouting "Why?!" Hush, hush now -- below is an answer.

Let's talk temperature.

We're lucky to live on a planet that has an average temperature of about 15 °C (59 °F). Well above the freezing point of water, human bodies, car battery juice and electronic circuit boards.

What about Mars?

On average, the planet is about -60 °C (-76 °F) -- cold enough to chill radon or chlorine gas into a liquid and freeze a mercury thermometer solid. During a dustless Martian summer you'd be lucky to feel temperatures above 20 °C (68 °F), and it can quickly drop below about -140 °C (-220 °F) during winter nights.

Well, Phoenix is on top of Mars and sunlight is becoming scarcer by the hour -- just as it does during winter at high latitudes on Earth (Alaska, Sweden, Greenland, etc.). Temperatures in the Phoenix spacecraft's dusty hood are presently about -96 °C (-141 °F) at night and peak only at -45 °C (-50 °F) during the day.

If you remember chemistry 101 class, you'll recall that cold stuff shrinks and warm stuff expands (ice is one of those exceptions). Metals are the most susceptible to shrinkage in the cold.

Now let's put all of this together...

• Phoenix needs sunlight to power its gizmos and charge its batteries. That sunlight is fading.
• During the night, those batteries power heaters. There's gradually less power available.
• The heaters warm the batteries and other electronics. Phoenix scientists are now turning off some heaters to conserve power.
• Most Martian spacecraft* "prefer" to have their robotic guts above -40 °C (-40 °F) -- but can dip as low as -55 °C (-67 °F). Uh oh...
• Below that temperature, the metallic material in electronic circuits may shrink enough to snap. Bye-bye robot.

So there you have it: Phoenix is currently between a big red rock and a very cold place.

And no matter how much scientists micro-manage its power to keep it alive, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will soon freeze, snow down and bury Phoenix for months -- plenty of time to kill it.

It's been slightly more than five months since Phoenix landed, and (as we know from the Mars Exploration Rovers) you can keep going for years making discoveries on the Red Planet.

I simply can't believe Phoenix is already dying. What a cruel, merciless red-hued world.

In honor of Phoenix' eventual death, I offer you this tune:

Wish I could change the lyrics, though:

Across the city solar system you'll sleep alone, I followed
Lying wide awake until it the carbon dioxide ice comes, tomorrow(?)

And you're the one who cared enough to break carry out the extended plans made for us you

You're freezing up
You're freezing
And you're freezing up with no good reason again because your energetic juice is low

You're freezing up
You're freezing
You're freezing up with no good reason again because your energetic juice is low

* As for robots that fly among the stars -- such as Ulysses? They risk having their hydrazine fuel frozen solid by temperatures below just 2 °C (36°F) -- a more or less a dooming event for a spacecraft zooming through space on a precise path.

Photos: Dave Mosher, Discovery Space; NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/Max Planck Institute

BLAST! Yourself into the Nearest Theater

October 27, 2008

As my last science movie review shows, making good movies about science is hard. Really, insanely, ridiculously hard.

Making movies about astronomy? Even harder.

No surprise that my expectations were low when I hopped on the New York City subway to attend Nature Magazine's Imagine Science Film Festival last week.

Thursday's feature was a movie called BLAST!* by writer/director/producer Paul Devlin, who has a few Emmy's under his belt. * Balloon-borne Large-Aperture Submillimeter Telescope

What's it about? Brother Mark Devlin's 5-year odyssey to send a giant telescope to the edge of space... on a balloon.

Yet after sitting through the flick, I realized that Paul discovered the magic formula for a successful mainstream science movie:

1. drop the F-bomb three or more times within first 60 seconds of film
2. cover all scientific concepts in <18.3 seconds
3. show boatloads of amazing visuals
4. use Hollywood-style plot progression
5. reveal personal struggle in unflattering detail
6. ask scientists about religion

First things first: I won't bore you with a synopsis because you can get that here. But I will say that you see two launches of BLAST, and each ends in the fantastic destruction of the telescope. For example: being dragged into bits by skidding 120 miles over Antarctic ice on the end of a parachute. Gut-wrenching, yes, but strangely awesome.

Second: Go see BLAST!. Whether a nerd like me or someone only mildly curious about science, it's a crowd-pleaser. Aside from a few words such as !@#$ here and %^&* there, it's also a family-friendly affair.

BLAST! helps you see first-hand just how difficult, amazing and rewarding these kinds of scientific efforts can be. You'll laugh, you'll cry, and you'll walk away astounded that people can actually send a telescope to the edge of space and forever change how we see and think about about the universe.

What really struck me about this movie, however, was the artistry of it -- and I'm not talking about the cinematography.

When you finish watching, you're not entirely sure you've watched a "science movie." The explanations are cut down and wrapped up with visually engaging segments, and never get into detail that is a sure-fire way to kill a good movie.

I can almost hear Jane and Joe Viewer saying, "Weird -- I thought science movies were supposed to be awful and boring."

Zounds be, but I think Joe and Jane will actually grasp everything that happens in the movie:

• Reason for launching high-altitude observatories? Roger.
• Sub-millimeter wavelength astronomy? No problem.
• Space time and relativity? Check.
• Dark matter? Got it.
• Dark energy? C'mon.
• Scientific paper-writing, publishing and citation? Child's play.

I type this with confidence because after the showing in New York City, Mark and Paul got on stage to take questions from an audience of about 100.

Although there was a Neil deGrasse Tyson sighting, I'd say most people were clearly not scientists or even science enthusiasts. Many were film nerds, others tagged along with friends and family and some there simply to watch a free movie.

Paul Devlin said screen tests with "average" people went swimmingly, and based on the chuckles and smiling faces I saw when I looked around (even small kids), I'd say that's a valid conclusion.

As for scientists themselves? Including his brother Mark, Paul said scientists weren't entirely happy with the movie. They felt it gave too much screen time to personal sacrifice, exciting plot and -- naughtiest if all -- religion (personally, I felt it was delivered in a tasteful and open-minded manner).

"Where are all of the graphs and numbers and figures?" is what Paul said the scientists asked. If this was a movie for science purists, I'd be asking the same thing. But this flick was for everyone.

During the Q&A session, Paul said he'd like to get a DVD to every high school student in America, and I think that's a fine idea -- especially since it shows students building the telescope and traveling all over the planet. If that isn't inspiration for a career choice, I don't know what is.

The good news is that BLAST! has attracted the funding of BBC, Discovery Channel Canada and a handful of European networks. The bad news: the film has yet to pay off all of its bills six months after a world premiere.

"We've had problems in the U.S.," Paul said of pitching the film to American media companies -- including one I happen to be very familiar with. "Programmers hear 'science' and run away screaming."

If that's the truth, consider me depressed and the overall attitude toward science in the country I love worse than ever.

Photos: Courtesy Paul Devlin, BLAST! the Movie