The VLT is what is called a "facility telescope", meaning that the facility is open to researchers from around the world to apply for time there to do research. Basically a PI comes up with a proposal for what he wants to do with the scope and how much time he needs at what part of the year, and submits that proposal to a TAC (Time Allocation Committee). The TAC decides which proposals make the grade, and at the appropriate time of year the PI (or more likely their grad students.;-) catch a plane to Chile and do their observations.
So yes, in answer to your question, all sorts of different projects and observations are going on at the VLT, just as at Keck or any of the other major scope facilities.
One caveat to this is that the details of who gets how much time are very much wrapped up in the funding of the telescope. The organizations which fund the telescope understandably get the bulk of the time, even if they do offer some of the time out to observers at large. The VLT was funded by the ESA, so most likely the time is allocated out primarily to European observers, although I haven't checked the specifics of the TAC policies myself.
What this really points to is that Someone (be it NASA administration, Congress, or the Executive Branch) needs to get their head out of the '70s protest movement. "Make Science Not War" sounds pretty fscking stupid when it's costing taxpayers tens of millions of dollars in overlapping work and delays.
First off, the space program has never been about making money. Not that money in space is bad - I'm a big fan of the privatization of the space industry, and wish nothing but success to Kistler, Beal, and co. The recent efforts of MirCorp to commercialize Mir thrill me. But NASA is not about making a buck. As has been said, international cooperation is a stated goal of the project. If we have to pay some more money for that, so be it.
I could see your point if science were really the single biggest goal for the ISS. But it's not, even though that's the party line. The ISS is going to be an OK platform for certain kinds of science, but if your goal was just to fund research, the money could have been far better spent elsewhere. But that wasn't the goal. The goal is to develop infrastructure for all sorts of space endeavors, from basic science to future exploration of the planets to commercial industry and beyond. International collaboration can and should be an acceptable goal for part of that project.
Is it just me, or is the US getting absolutely zip out of this deal?
Well, if by "zip" you mean "access to forty years of Russian technology and expertise, specifically including two decades of experience building and managing multi-segment structures in space", then yes. The US approach has always been that if something breaks, you hit the panic button, land, get the crew out, and then have techs go in and fix whatever went wrong. But you can't land the ISS. In contrast, everything that the mass media makes fun of about Mir - things strung up with duct tape, faulty oxygen systems, even the crew having to put out fires on board - translates to real experience about how to run a real space station and keep it up there. The crew has to be able to fix *everything* - there's no calling in the engineers in person.
Furthermore, the Russian Energia booster is way bigger than anything we've got now. Having them on board means we can put up bigger modules than would otherwise be possible.
Lastly, there's the side benefit of pouring a lot of money towards some of the smartest sectors of the Russian economy. There are a lot of really brilliant people over there who deserve not to starve just because their economy has gone to hell. Every person who leaves space engineering and becomes a taxi driver to pay the bills is a huge loss to the scientific establishment. Keeping the Soviet space program from completely falling apart is well worth the money we've spent so far, if you ask me. I mean, by letting these other countries in on the project, do we gain leverage in global trade disputes, the Security Council, strategic arms treaties, or conflict negotiations?
There's a very good reason for not upgrading the shuttle's computers: They don't need it.
Think about it. How many other computer systems can you think of that have been running for the last twenty years? How many other systems have had the tens of thousands of hours of testing and, even more importantly, have worked flawlessly every time? The shuttle computers work. They have never failed in flight, period. Some new system? Hah. We all know how solid most applications are today. The above jokes about running CE on this shuttle show that for sure.;-) The shuttle today does fundamentally the same thing it did twenty years ago; the calculations needed for launch and landing haven't changed. So why replace the most tested piece of code in the world with something new? Would you like to ride in the first flight with brand new software? Thought not.
Next question: So then why upgrade the displays? Partly it's economic - those bulky old dials weigh a lot, and it's still ten kilobucks a pound to LEO. Beyond that, the interface can be made far better and more adaptable than anything you can do with gauges and switches in hardware. Anything that can be done to make the pilot's life easier is a net win. They way they did it, they basically put in a new system which takes the data and runs the displays, leaving the main computers pretty much untouched, running the same ol' rock-solid code.
Another point about the backup system. As Detritus posted elsewhere, the four main machines all run a program called PASS, the Primary Avionic Software System , while the fifth computer runs BFS, the Backup Flight System. These two programs were written by completely independent groups of programmers. To this day, no one who has worked on one of them is allowed to ever see the code for the other. They're completely indepentent. The idea behind this is called "diverse design". The more dissimilar two systems are, the more improbably it becomes that both will fail at the same time. They originally wanted to have totally different hardware for the backup too, but that was nixed to save on costs. Lastly, the backup system most certainly doesn't kick in automatically, under any circumstances. It's the mission commander's call, whether to hit the big red button on the control stick or not. (And yes, it actually is a big red button.) The designers judged that it was better to keep a human in charge than blindly trust the software.
Yeah, Hawking is in town for the month shooting the breeze, so to speak, with the profs in the physics dept here at Harvard. He gave two talks this past week, on Mon & Tues, in Sanders Theater, the very same space as used for the Igs. He'll be giving another talk on next Tuesday, and then on the 7th there's a lecture at the Wang center open to the public. Tix for the tuesday lecture are sold out, though; dunno about the later one.
FWIW, I'm a senior astrophysics major, and I understood quite little of his second lecture; the stuff he's doing is just way over my head even after a couple years studying this stuff. The first lecture, though, was more at the level of Brief History, and was pretty accessible even to nonphysicists.
He's an amazingly impressive man and I'm very glad to have had the chance to see him in person. Go check him out next week if you can; you won't regret it.
Remember, the site is mirrored at both chandra.nasa.gov and chandra.harvard.edu, although both are being slow right now...
*grin* So all of us here at the CfA packed into our main auditorium to watch the press conference via NASA TV (Chandra is being run from here in Cambridge, but the press conference was down at NASA HQ in DC.) As we were walking out of the auditorium around 2, after the conference ended with a display of the two URLs, I overheard one of the astronomers up ahead of me mutter under his breath "OK, now we're gonna get slashdotted." And indeed, by the time I got back to my office, the chandra server was already being reaaaal sloooooow. AFAIK, it's a pretty hefty Sun, but I guess not quite hefty enough.
Luckily, there are other servers which have all the actual data on them for people to do work with. Unluckily, those are all internal-only right now, so y'all are going to have to wait a bit.
X-rays aren't visible to human eyes at all, so of course you have to process the image to display them in visible wavelengths. This is standard practice for all astronomy outside of visible light (which is most astronomy these days, actually.) The image of Cas A was mapped onto a red scale, where
white = highest intensity yellow = high intensity red = low intensity black = lowest or no intensity
The quasar image was done similarly, only using a blue scale rather than red. Right now, these colors are pretty much arbitrary, but later on, we'll probably start coming up with color maps that have a bit more science behind them, especially once we get into spectroscopic imaging.
Trust me, you don't want us to start displaying the images in "true-color" X-ray unless you have some passing desire to fry your eyes. Oops.;-)
The new results agree with what we knew before, they're just more precise. So now it looks like we're definitely in for permanent expansion.
The biggest question remaining is just how fast that expansion will be in the future - slowing down or speeding up? This depends on the value of the cosmological constant, a value which is highly contested right now.
Godel's original paper is actually quite readable to anyone with even a basic mathematical background. I took a course on mathematical logic last spring, and the prof just had us all read the paper itself rather than using any text. You can probably pick up a copy at your local university library. It's well worth the read if you're having trouble understanding what his theorem is all about.
Slashdot Mirror
So yes, in answer to your question, all sorts of different projects and observations are going on at the VLT, just as at Keck or any of the other major scope facilities.
One caveat to this is that the details of who gets how much time are very much wrapped up in the funding of the telescope. The organizations which fund the telescope understandably get the bulk of the time, even if they do offer some of the time out to observers at large. The VLT was funded by the ESA, so most likely the time is allocated out primarily to European observers, although I haven't checked the specifics of the TAC policies myself.
First off, the space program has never been about making money. Not that money in space is bad - I'm a big fan of the privatization of the space industry, and wish nothing but success to Kistler, Beal, and co. The recent efforts of MirCorp to commercialize Mir thrill me. But NASA is not about making a buck. As has been said, international cooperation is a stated goal of the project. If we have to pay some more money for that, so be it.
I could see your point if science were really the single biggest goal for the ISS. But it's not, even though that's the party line. The ISS is going to be an OK platform for certain kinds of science, but if your goal was just to fund research, the money could have been far better spent elsewhere. But that wasn't the goal. The goal is to develop infrastructure for all sorts of space endeavors, from basic science to future exploration of the planets to commercial industry and beyond. International collaboration can and should be an acceptable goal for part of that project.
Is it just me, or is the US getting absolutely zip out of this deal?
Well, if by "zip" you mean "access to forty years of Russian technology and expertise, specifically including two decades of experience building and managing multi-segment structures in space", then yes. The US approach has always been that if something breaks, you hit the panic button, land, get the crew out, and then have techs go in and fix whatever went wrong. But you can't land the ISS. In contrast, everything that the mass media makes fun of about Mir - things strung up with duct tape, faulty oxygen systems, even the crew having to put out fires on board - translates to real experience about how to run a real space station and keep it up there. The crew has to be able to fix *everything* - there's no calling in the engineers in person.
Furthermore, the Russian Energia booster is way bigger than anything we've got now. Having them on board means we can put up bigger modules than would otherwise be possible.
Lastly, there's the side benefit of pouring a lot of money towards some of the smartest sectors of the Russian economy. There are a lot of really brilliant people over there who deserve not to starve just because their economy has gone to hell. Every person who leaves space engineering and becomes a taxi driver to pay the bills is a huge loss to the scientific establishment. Keeping the Soviet space program from completely falling apart is well worth the money we've spent so far, if you ask me. I mean, by letting these other countries in on the project, do we gain leverage in global trade disputes, the Security Council, strategic arms treaties, or conflict negotiations?
Think about it. How many other computer systems can you think of that have been running for the last twenty years? How many other systems have had the tens of thousands of hours of testing and, even more importantly, have worked flawlessly every time? The shuttle computers work. They have never failed in flight, period. Some new system? Hah. We all know how solid most applications are today. The above jokes about running CE on this shuttle show that for sure. ;-) The shuttle today does fundamentally the same thing it did twenty years ago; the calculations needed for launch and landing haven't changed. So why replace the most tested piece of code in the world with something new? Would you like to ride in the first flight with brand new software? Thought not.
Next question: So then why upgrade the displays? Partly it's economic - those bulky old dials weigh a lot, and it's still ten kilobucks a pound to LEO. Beyond that, the interface can be made far better and more adaptable than anything you can do with gauges and switches in hardware. Anything that can be done to make the pilot's life easier is a net win. They way they did it, they basically put in a new system which takes the data and runs the displays, leaving the main computers pretty much untouched, running the same ol' rock-solid code.
Another point about the backup system. As Detritus posted elsewhere, the four main machines all run a program called PASS, the Primary Avionic Software System , while the fifth computer runs BFS, the Backup Flight System. These two programs were written by completely independent groups of programmers. To this day, no one who has worked on one of them is allowed to ever see the code for the other. They're completely indepentent. The idea behind this is called "diverse design". The more dissimilar two systems are, the more improbably it becomes that both will fail at the same time. They originally wanted to have totally different hardware for the backup too, but that was nixed to save on costs. Lastly, the backup system most certainly doesn't kick in automatically, under any circumstances. It's the mission commander's call, whether to hit the big red button on the control stick or not. (And yes, it actually is a big red button.) The designers judged that it was better to keep a human in charge than blindly trust the software.
Yeah, Hawking is in town for the month shooting the breeze, so to speak, with the profs in the physics dept here at Harvard. He gave two talks this past week, on Mon & Tues, in Sanders Theater, the very same space as used for the Igs. He'll be giving another talk on next Tuesday, and then on the 7th there's a lecture at the Wang center open to the public. Tix for the tuesday lecture are sold out, though; dunno about the later one.
FWIW, I'm a senior astrophysics major, and I understood quite little of his second lecture; the stuff he's doing is just way over my head even after a couple years studying this stuff. The first lecture, though, was more at the level of Brief History, and was pretty accessible even to nonphysicists.
He's an amazingly impressive man and I'm very glad to have had the chance to see him in person. Go check him out next week if you can; you won't regret it.
Remember, the site is mirrored at both chandra.nasa.gov and chandra.harvard.edu, although both are being slow right now...
*grin* So all of us here at the CfA packed into our main auditorium to watch the press conference via NASA TV (Chandra is being run from here in Cambridge, but the press conference was down at NASA HQ in DC.) As we were walking out of the auditorium around 2, after the conference ended with a display of the two URLs, I overheard one of the astronomers up ahead of me mutter under his breath "OK, now we're gonna get slashdotted." And indeed, by the time I got back to my office, the chandra server was already being reaaaal sloooooow. AFAIK, it's a pretty hefty Sun, but I guess not quite hefty enough.
Luckily, there are other servers which have all the actual data on them for people to do work with. Unluckily, those are all internal-only right now, so y'all are going to have to wait a bit.
X-rays aren't visible to human eyes at all, so of course you have to process the image to display them in visible wavelengths. This is standard practice for all astronomy outside of visible light (which is most astronomy these days, actually.) The image of Cas A was mapped onto a red scale, where
white = highest intensityyellow = high intensity
red = low intensity
black = lowest or no intensity
The quasar image was done similarly, only using a blue scale rather than red. Right now, these colors are pretty much arbitrary, but later on, we'll probably start coming up with color maps that have a bit more science behind them, especially once we get into spectroscopic imaging.
Trust me, you don't want us to start displaying the images in "true-color" X-ray unless you have some passing desire to fry your eyes. Oops. ;-)
- Marshall
mperrin@cfa.harvard.edu
The biggest question remaining is just how fast that expansion will be in the future - slowing down or speeding up? This depends on the value of the cosmological constant, a value which is highly contested right now.
Godel's original paper is actually quite readable to anyone with even a basic mathematical background. I took a course on mathematical logic last spring, and the prof just had us all read the paper itself rather than using any text. You can probably pick up a copy at your local university library. It's well worth the read if you're having trouble understanding what his theorem is all about.