It is indeed a fantastic film, highly recommended.
Being married to a German, having lived in Berlin for seven years, and with both my kids having been born there, I have long felt that it's absolutely incumbent upon me to really try and understand what happened in 1930s and 1940s Germany, rather than continuing to hide behind the simplistic "we won, you lost, you killed lots of Jews, Germans are bad" attitude that was drummed into most of us growing up in the UK in the 1960s and 1970s.
That's not to condone or forgive anything at all, but it's important that we understand why a deeply civilised nation went so catastrophically off the rails in the first half of the twentieth century, if only to look inwards and ask ourselves, each and every one of us, what would it take for me to go down a similar road. Only then, I believe, can you try and avoid it. Again, it's too trivial to say "never" without thinking about it: we're all human and all capable of extreme actions in extreme circumstances, I believe.
In that regard, Der Untergang is a truly crucial addition to the literature (be it written or visual) on this very important topic.
I'm amazed that they've missed the fact that the July flight of Endeavour is due to carry the $2B particle physics experiment, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), to the ISS.
Spearheaded by Nobel-prize winner, Sam Ting, and built and funded largely outside the normal peer review process, AMS is one of the most significant physics experiments of recent years, but as much for political and sociological reasons as scientific. If nothing else, without AMS and its friends in high places, there would only two shuttle flights left: this one was added by Bush and ratified by Obama completely over the head of NASA's normal process.
That all said, AMS recently moved from testing at CERN in Switzerland to ESA's ESTEC in the Netherlands for electromagnetic and thermal-vacuum testing, and is on a really (really) tight timeline to get to KSC in time for the July launch. There are good reasons to suspect that that flight will be delayed into August and perhaps even moved later in the year behind Discovery's last flight.
I was on a VIP trip to KSC very recently and was thrilled to be shown around the Orbiter Processing Facility where both Endeavour and Atlantis are be prepared for their last flights at present, while Discovery was out on the pad. Very special for a space geek to be literally inches from all of those tiles on the underside of Endeavour and (sorry NASA:-) to have actually sneaked a touch of the undercarriage.
Also deeply, deeply sad to think that this will all be over very soon: the shuttle programme has been an inspiration all the way back to the drop tests of the Enterprise back in 1977, even in the darkest hours. While I understand all the technical and financial arguments for stopping it now, psychologically it seems crazy to do so, particularly in the absence of any successor. End of an era. There were moments when I was pretty choked up on that OPF visit, I have to admit.
I completely agree with you, it's very cool in a Joe-90, Thunderbirds kind of way. Then again, what else could we use for an international organisation with 18 member states?.org possibly, but it's a bit bland.
(Yes, I work for ESA and very much like my @esa.int mail address:-)
IAAPA (I am a professional astronomer), and I'm not stunned. Sorry. Nice work for a back-garden job, but any comparison with Hubble or any of our 4, 8, 10m class telescopes is utterly specious.
What's he and many other (admittedly very dedicated) amateurs are benefitting from is the enormous improvement in detectors (in this case, CCDs) over the past 20-odd years, plus the not-unrelated improvement in computer processing power to align, stack, and mosaic digital images. Obviously, professional astronomers have access to all that in spades, as well as much larger telescopes / telescopes above the atmosphere as well.
So yes, superficially similar and impressive coming from an amateur with limited resources, but to compare this with Hubble is completely lame-brained. Indeed, the cynic in me notes that TFA is puffing a book of his images: what a coincidence. A sidebar link takes you to a similar article in 2008 about another amateur who's "seeing the beginning of the Universe" from his shed: surprise, surprise, that article also puffs a book of his pictures. Of course, the article's in the Torygraph, which delights in celebrating a fifty years out of date vision of Britain populated by toffs, proles, and eccentric back garden amateur boffins, so hardly unexpected.
Going back to the point about better detectors, however, it's interesting to note that although we've built bigger and bigger telescopes over the past twenty years (as well as developing adaptive optics, space telescopes, broader wavelength coverage, etc.), the main gain we've experienced in terms of scientific performance has come from the vastly improved detectors. Problem is, we're now pretty close to detecting every photon that falls on the detectors and we can build detector arrays that almost fill the available focal plane.
To go further in ground-based astronomy then, we need much (much) larger telescopes, such as the E-ELT, TMT, and GMT. With their much larger collecting area and higher spatial resolution, you can expect truly fabulous things in the next ten years. From space, it's JWST, of course...
Because atmospheric drag will slowly bring the ISS lower in altitude until it re-enters. If you just let it do it on its own timescale, the decay will be unpredictable and there's always a chance it'll come down somewhere unpalatable, such as Miami. (I mean that it'd be unpalatable for it to fall on Miami, not that Miami is unpalatable. Or do I?)
After all, some large chunks of the ISS will survive re-entry more or less whole. The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer is due to be attached later this year and its main magnetic torus is a pretty solid thing with a mass of over two tonnes. Ouch.
So, rather than have it come down somewhere unpredictable, NASA and its partners are committed to a controlled de-orbiting over a pretty empty ocean, presumably the Pacific. Yes, you could keep revisiting it with unmanned tankers to reboost the orbit, but it kind of misses the point if you're trying to close it down and save money. (I agree, it'd be very little money compared to the amount spent so far and yes, I think it'd be the right thing to do, keep it up there for future use. But that's not how bureaucrats think, I'm afraid).
Same goes for the Hubble Space Telescope: it'll come down in time as well. Unfortunately, it's too heavy and/or no longer properly man-rated (since it has been substantially modified since launch) to allow it to be brought back in a shuttle, which'd be nice. So, it either needs to be de-orbited in a controlled manner or (my choice) boosted to a much higher "museum orbit", where it could be retrieved much (much) later when we have the appropriate hardware.
Of course, rather than invest hundreds of millions in developing a robotic de-orbiting solution for HST (the shuttle won't revisit it again), NASA could take out tens of millions in insurance policies against the very remote chance that it landed on anyone. I half imagine you'd have some terminally-ill folk people trying to work out where HST might indeed come down and try to get themselves under it, just for the glory (and a big pile of cash for their heirs). But the US government doesn't think that way, for a number of understandable reasons.
Doubtful. One thing you can be pretty sure of is that a mission that uses cryogenic expendables won't last much longer than planned. The tanks are built to a certain size and filled to brimming; working out how long that'll last is fairly straightforward. You might get perhaps 50% longer than calculated if you're very lucky (more likely you'll get less), but no way will it last five times longer.
As an example, the Spitzer Space Telescope was planned for 5 years before the cryogens ran out: it lasted roughly 6.3 years.
Err, that is exactly where the Europa Jupiter System Mission (EJSM) currently under study by ESA and NASA is suppose to go, as the name suggests.
Yes, it's more expensive than TiME and will, in principle, take longer to develop, because it's bigger and more ambitious than TiME, but it's much further along in terms of studying its technical feasibility, and so (IMHO) has a better chance of happening before TiME does. Plus, NASA is not exactly swilling in cash at the moment and if EJSM is chosen for implementation, it'd be a struggle to do TiME as well.
TiME does sound like a very exciting concept, but I too am worried about how they intend to get data back to Earth without an orbiter relay: the numbers don't immediately stack up for an omnidirectional broadcaster from the surface of Titan, as the power available is essentially the same as Huygens had (just much longer-lived) and there's no way we can count on Cassini to be working by then to act as a relay.
Saying that Huygens "wasn't much" and "was just a part of the larger Cassini mission" is pretty misguided thinking and borders on insulting the scientists and engineers who put this amazing probe together, IMHO.
Are you saying that designing a probe that survives, dormant, for almost 7 years in interplanetary space and then turns on perfectly "isn't much"? Are you saying that making a fully-autonomous descent and soft landing on an outer planet's moon and sending back a stunning image of the surface "isn't much"? Are you saying that providing essentially real-time (light travel delay notwithstanding) imaging of lakes and drainage gullies during the descent, along with atmospheric sampling, "isn't much"? Are you saying that getting all these signals back from 1.2 billion kilometres with just a 10 watt transmitter "isn't much"? Good grief.
It was also much more than "just" a part of the Cassini mission: it was an integral part of it, all the way back to the early 1980s when the joint mission was first proposed. The US-European collaboration had its political moments, but it worked. Yes, Cassini is still returning great data (including the Titan sea glint image), but Huygens was never going to survive long with just batteries to power it under Titan's atmospheric murk. It shouldn't be dismissed as a consequence.
As for TSSM, it's a massive overstatement to say that it's "scheduled": nowhere near. TSSM (or more properly, its TandDEM predecessor) was proposed to ESA as a large (L) mission as part of the Cosmic Vision process in 2007 and did go through to the beginning of the second round along with the (also joint ESA-NASA) LAPLACE mission to Jupiter. The latter was however chosen for study by ESA and NASA to pursue first and is now the Europa Jupiter System Mission (EJSM). EJSM, if selected as the first CV L-mission, would fly (probably) no earlier than 2020, thus pushing TSSM back to the mid-2020's at the earliest, with arrival at Saturn and Titan in the mid-2030's.
So, exciting as it would be scientifically, don't hold your breath.
The new Herschel image shows part of the constellation of Aquila, meaning the Eagle. However, this is not the Eagle Nebula or M16: that is in the constellation of Serpens which is, coincidentally, nearby.
To make matters more confusing, perhaps, the two blue parts of the image are star-forming regions, similar in principle to the Eagle Nebula. I believe that the left-hand one is Westerhout 40 and the right-hand one is Sharpless 62.
Well, I suspect this is a rather North American perspective. All data taken with the largest optical/IR observatory in the world, the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile, are archived and are freely available to researchers after a (typically) 12 month proprietary period. This is true for observations made on site by the astronomers who proposed them (so-called "visitor mode") and for observations made by ESO staff on behalf of the successful proposer, saving them the need to travel ("service mode").
Yes, it costs money, and yes, it should really be built in from the outset, as the telescope and it's systems are developed, but it's entirely feasible. Quite how much use is made of such archives in general is another question, of course, although Hubble's is well-used.
As already pointed out, the European project (Euclid) in question is being studied by the European Space Agency, not the EU: these are simply not synonymous.
Euclid is one of six missions currently under study for two so-called M-class mission slots within the first round of ESA's Cosmic Vision programme. The first two-year long study phase is over now and the results will be made public at a meeting in Paris on December 1, prior to ESA's scientific advisory working groups and committees coming up with a prioritised list of the top four (most likely) missions to go forward into a competitive definition phase for a further two years. At the end of that, there will be a final downselect to (nominally) two missions for actual implementation and launch in roughly 2018-2019.
So, don't be surprised if you start seeing more of these stories in the coming days and weeks, as the various mission proponents start jockeying for position ahead of the first downselect:-)
[FYI, the full set of M-mission studies currently running are (in alphabetical order): Cross-Scale (solar plasma physics), Euclid (dark energy), Marco Polo (asteroid sample return), PLATO (exoplanet discovery and asteroseismology), Solar Orbiter (detailed solar science close to Sun), and SPICA (far-infrared astronomy).]
Very cool indeed to see CO2 as a liquid in water (hell, to see it as a liquid at all:-).
What's the density of the liquid CO2 at that depth? From the video, it looks be to just a little greater than that of the water, given that it sinks, but not very quickly. Oh, a quick google tells me that it's 1093 kg/m3 at minus 20C and 20 bar (AirLiquide), while I also see from a paper in PNAS by House et al. (2006) paper that the density of CO2 is greater than that of water at pressures greater than 28 MPa (280 bar), which you get to in the sea at roughly 3000m depth. So that's where the CO2 needs to go to keep in liquid without any machinery to increase the pressure or lower the temperature, hence the reason you YouTube video was at 3300m:-)
Very interesting indeed. I also see from the House et al. paper that they calculate that "the total CO2 storage capacity within the 200-mile economic zone of the US coastline [is] capable of storing thousands of years of years of current US CO2 emissions". They argue it should be injected a few hundred metres into the sub-sea sediment to localise it and keep it from dissolving into the sea water and acidifying it.
Adaptive optics is not quite the same as raw diffraction-limited imaging, no, but it's getting pretty damn good. It's a lot more than buzz: all major telescopes use it routinely.
I've been using for many years already from ground-based 8-m telescopes and it really does deliver more than HST can... in the near-IR. Nope, it can't compete at optical wavelengths with HST...
You're thinking Arecibo: Puerto Rico and yes, it's radio.
Good job I put that bit in about "some of my best friends are Hawai'ans", eh, Dan, now that I've seen that you're a TO for the 88 inch...:`)
After all, it would hypocritical for me not to remember that through my Hawai'in friends (a fellow Englishman building IR instrumentation at the IfA, shall we say), I made good use of one of Klaus Hodapp's earlier "lashed-up" cameras on the 88 inch, the one with the first 256x256 NICMOS3 array in. This happened as part of the deal that was made when Hawai'i lost its bid for an HST IR instrument (HIMS) to Arizona's NICMOS: some of the Hawai'i folk got on the NICMOS science team and some of the detectors were tested in Hawai'i.
Since I was actually working in Arizona on the NICMOS instrument for HST at the time, this was a slightly curious happening, since Arizona themselves didn't even have such an array on the air at that point (1990-ish).
Ah, but ease of access translates to ease of upgrades. Hubble's infrared imaging capability is about to be upgraded from 256x256 to 1024x1024... meanwhile, folks in Hawai have been at 4096x4096 for six years already, since they developed the chips for the next (James Webb) space telescope's infrared camera.
It's slightly more complicated than that. JWST's near-IR detectors were manufactured by Teledyne (formerly Rockwell), with the University of Hawai'i involved under contract for development and testing. Specs were set at the project level and the detectors have also been tested under contract by the STScI Detector Lab and, of course, by the instrument teams using them (Univ Arizona for NIRCam, GSFC/ESA for NIRSpec, GSFC/CSA for FGS/TFI).
What Hawai'i have always been very good at is giving the impression that they develop detectors themselves:`)
While they're also good at getting them on the telescope quickly, it's often on small telescopes like the UH 88 inch in lashed-up dewars and (to be honest) not delivering much science.
4096x4096 pixel infrared mosaics are also now available on bigger telescopes such as the UKIRT 3.8m (WFCAM), CFHT 3.6m (WIRCAM) and the VLT 8.2m (HAWK-I). An even larger 8192x8192 pixel mosaic is currently under commissioning at VISTA. These are the current state-of-the-art, with bigger arrays coming for the ELTs.
(Not trying to rain on the Hawai'ians' parade particularly [some of my best friends are... etc.], just trying to set the record straight.)
As I said, ground- and space-based telescopes are actually highly complementary: it sounds greedy, but we really need both.
Space has the advantage of there being no atmosphere to block some of the incoming light and blur the image. Also, if you cool your telescope down (e.g. ESA's Herschel being launched tomorrow and NASA/ESA/CSA JWST in 2014), then you benefit from greatly reduced sky background at infrared wavelengths. This can result in an enormous increase in sensitivity in situations where the background matters, e.g. imaging of extremely faint sources.
Also, space-based telescopes can cover a wider wavelength range, including wavelengths that don't make it through the atmosphere, so some kinds of thing must be done from space (e.g. X-ray astronomy as in NASA's Chandra and ESA's XMM-Newton).
At the same time, space telescopes are much smaller than state-of-the-art ground-based ones, and thus the ground-based telescopes can catch many more photons over all. For some science (e.g. medium- to high-resolution spectroscopy of extremely faint objects where the background doesn't matter), it's all about the number of photons you can collect.
Also, if you can implement adaptive optics on your ground-based telescope, you can get higher resolution than in space.
As an example of true synergy, look at the many studies done jointly by HST and the ground-based 8-10m telescopes like the VLT, Keck, Gemini, and so on. In many cases, both were needed to complete the study.
Indeed, there are many of us helping develop both JWST and ground-based ELTs like E-ELT and TMT for exactly the same reason: we need both to get a more complete picture of what's going on out there.
The summary erroneously suggests that the TMT will have "resolving power 100 times that of Hubble": this is incorrect.
As the actual article notes on its first page, TMT will have roughly 100 times the collecting area of Hubble: this goes as the square of the diameter of the telescope, so with TMT = 30m and Hubble = 2.5m, that's about right.
Resolving power (if the TMT can be made diffraction-limited, which it is aiming to do, but which is hard nevertheless) gets better linearly with the diameter, so TMT will have roughly 10 times the resolving power of Hubble.
The more appropriate space-based comparison in 2018 will be JWST which has a diameter of 6.5m, although JWST and ground-based ELTs are more properly thought of as being complementary, not competitive: they do different things.
But as already noted, the more appropriate comparison is with the European E-ELT which is under Phase B study now and is baselined for 42m diameter.
More interesting is where the TMT and E-ELT will be located: same hemisphere or not? Current bets are on E-ELT being in Chile, with TMT possibly going to Mauna Kea. This would be a better outcome for us astronomers than having both in the south, IMHO.
Nope; it's right. The Moon is much smaller on the sky than you (and most people) think.
The angle subtended by an object with diameter x at distance y = x/y in radians, provided x is small compared to y. Thus for 450 feet at 65,000 feet, the angle subtended is 0.007 radians; to convert to degrees, multiply by 180/pi, yielding 0.4 degrees.
To look at it another way, the Moon has a diameter of about 3,500km and lies at a mean distance of 385,000km. Dividing the diameter by the distance yields 0.009 radians, i.e. 0.5 degrees, less than 30% bigger than the blimp.
By extension, a 230 foot long 747 at a distance of 10,00 feet does subtend a much larger angle than the full Moon, i.e. about 1.3 degrees. Problem is that you don't often look up and see them immediately overhead; the downrange distance will often be much larger than 10,000 feet or two miles, making the subtended angle correspondingly smaller.
To put it yet another way, a 230 feet long object at a distance of 230 feet will subtend roughly 1 radian; a radian is 57.3 degrees. Thus, to get to a subtended angle of 1.3 degrees, the object would have to be (57.3/1.3) = 44 times further away, and 44x230 is 10,000 feet.
Nevertheless, despite defending my mathematical integrity (!), I accept the arguments about the blimp being more linear (but not completely; blimps are pretty rotund things) and that it's not self-illuminated etc. But the point remains that this thing will not be as small as people think.
As for my comment about it having writing on the side readable from 65,000 feet, well, err, I was being facetious: I thought that that was half the point of \.
What's this business in the article about it being "nearly impossible to see"? A 450 foot dirigible at an altitude of 65,000 feet would subtend an angle of 0.4 degrees from ground-level directly underneath, just a little smaller than the full Moon.
Or will it be painted with big words on the side saying "Please ignore the spy in the sky", instructions that we all will no doubt dutifully follow, like the sheep we are?
See my post elsewhere in this thread, but this isn't true: if you read the Fomalhaut paper (as opposed to the PR), they're unsure quite what mix of reflected starlight, thermal self-emission, and additional reflected light from a circumplanetary disk makes up the light seen from Fomalhaut b, at both visible and IR wavelengths.
These objects are actually more similar than they are different, in my opinion.
As for HST still being king, well, yes and no: depends on what you're after. Ground-based AO has caught up and exceeded HST in some domains already, while HST still wins in others. Ultimately we need ground- and space-based telescopes to get the most complete view: today it's HST and the 8-10m telescopes, tomorrow it's JWST and the 30-40m extremely large telescopes.
HD189733b: not directly imaged, but has had a temperature map of it reconstructed from very careful analysis of the change in the light from the parent star as the planet transits in front of and behind it.
2M1207b: this orbits a brown dwarf, not a star.
GQ Lup b: not a planet by any reasonable stretch of the scientific imagination, unless you happen to have been a co-author of the original paper. Believe me: this one is dead, Jim, and was known by most of us to be so on arrival.
Rest assured, these were strongly coordinated: both teams knew full well of each others results well in advance, both were scheduled for simultaneous release via Science at 2pm EDT today, and indeed, both papers share one co-author. (I work in the same group as another co-author of the HR8799 paper, so believe me that this is first-hand knowledge). The HST press conference was scheduled (well in advance) for shortly after the Science embargo expired.
Of course, this hasn't stopped both groups trying to spin up their results in a perfectly understandable fashion. The downside is that many online press stories are showing very signs of confusion as to what's what, not at all helped by the blizzard of parallel press releases from various institutions on the HR8799 3-planet system result.
Indeed, the Gemini Observatory release shows images taken with their telescope showing just two of the planets, presumably because they don't want to cede any ground to the Keck, their rivals on Mauna Kea, where the third planet was found. Again, potentially very confusing indeed to the public.
As for the complementary aspect of the two discoveries, that's mostly the case and both discoveries are very important. But it's not true to say that one's (Fomalhaut) an old planet seen in reflected visible light while the others (HR8799) are young and shining in their own heat: both stars are roughly equally young and the Fomalhaut planet seems also to be shining in some mix of its own heat even in the visible (it's at 400K, possibly), plus perhaps some additional reflected light from a dusty disk around the planet (as opposed to the obvious disk around the star itself).
Also, I wouldn't say the HR8799 planets are close to their star: nothing like. They're out at the equivalent of Neptune's orbit and beyond, even though the Fomalhaut planet's a bit further out still.
Hope this helps allay your (understandable) scepticism.
Not true, I'm afraid: Darwin was not picked by ESA as one of the missions to be studied for the so-called L (large) slot for launch in 2017-2018 during the recent Cosmic Vision selection exercise. Large missions in the running for that slot are XEUS (large X-ray telescope), LISA (gravitational wave observatory), and TANDEM/LAPLACE (missions to the outer planets, Titan and Jupiter, respectively, only one of which would happen). All of these would be collaborations with other space agencies.
It was felt that the precision formation-flying and interferometric beam combination techniques needed to make Darwin work were not mature enough for implementation yet. The science it's aiming at is of very great importance and such a project will undoubtedly return for consideration in future rounds of Cosmic Vision, but I'd say there's little chance of something like Darwin flying prior to 2022-2025.
In passing, you're right that Darwin would have the angular resolution of telescope several hundred metres in diameter, but it wouldn't have the collecting area of such a telescope. For direct detection of terrestrial-mass exoplanets close to their bright parent stars, that's fine; for other science such as studying galaxies forming just after the Big Bang, a larger collecting area would also be required. Comparison of the parts of parameter space covered by projects as disparate as Darwin, LBT, JWST, and future ELTs (ground-based extremely large telescopes, diameters and collecting areas of 30-40m diameter, under development for 2015-2020) is non-trivial.
As someone closely associated with the selection process, let me add a little background that might be helpful to interested/.ers.
1. In principle just two of these missions will proceed to flight in 2017-2018, following studies of all seven over the next couple of years. However, the important number is the 950Meuro budget envelope allocated for this round of Cosmic Vision: depending on how costs shape up during the study phase, we go for a different mix of missions. That number is the cost to ESA itself: you also need to factor in anticipated additional contributions (e.g. for payload) from ESA member states and third party countries (e.g. US, Japan, Russia, China).
2. One poster suggested that either Laplace or Tandem was most likely to fly in one slot, with an astronomy mission in the other: this is in no way decided, at this point. We sent Laplace and Tandem through at this stage as NASA is looking closely at the same basic missions; indeed, for either to fly would require strong (majority) NASA partnership, as ambitious outer solar systems missions cost more like $2G, rather than the ~600-650Meuro ESA might put in. Following discussions and a selection process in the US, one or other of Laplace or Tandem will go through to the full European study stage. Then, in order to proceed to flight, we will need to decide whether we prefer that mission over XEUS or LISA for the 2017-2018 slot: they are the other L(arge)-missions selected for study.
3. Dune and Space were similarly selected in the full knowledge that the US is planning a Dark Energy mission as well. Further talks with NASA on competition, collaboration, and complementarity in ths arena are very likely.
4. Keep in mind that this is just the first round of Cosmic Vision: we anticipate a second selection round in 3 years or so, at which point other missions may be selected, perhaps from those of the seven here not finally picked for flight in the first round, perhaps from the 43 others which did not make it this far (some were felt to be extremely interesting, but not ready technologically for 2017-2018), or perhaps something new altogether.
5. Finally, yes, we'd all like to have more money available to ESA to fund these and other exciting missions: we have plenty of interesting ideas. Europeans should think about writing to their parliamentary / governmental representatives about exactly this point. That said, it's not quite true to say, as someone did, that we're newbies in this game: ESA has been involved in a whole bunch of excellent astronomy and solar system missions already (Giotto, Rosetta, ISO, SOHO, XMM, Mars Express, HST, to name but a few), some alone, some in collaboration. There are more to come over the next few years as well (e.g. Herschel, Planck, Gaia, JWST), so watch this space (sorry).
Slashdot Mirror
It is indeed a fantastic film, highly recommended.
Being married to a German, having lived in Berlin for seven years, and with both my kids having been born there, I have long felt that it's absolutely incumbent upon me to really try and understand what happened in 1930s and 1940s Germany, rather than continuing to hide behind the simplistic "we won, you lost, you killed lots of Jews, Germans are bad" attitude that was drummed into most of us growing up in the UK in the 1960s and 1970s.
That's not to condone or forgive anything at all, but it's important that we understand why a deeply civilised nation went so catastrophically off the rails in the first half of the twentieth century, if only to look inwards and ask ourselves, each and every one of us, what would it take for me to go down a similar road. Only then, I believe, can you try and avoid it. Again, it's too trivial to say "never" without thinking about it: we're all human and all capable of extreme actions in extreme circumstances, I believe.
In that regard, Der Untergang is a truly crucial addition to the literature (be it written or visual) on this very important topic.
I'm amazed that they've missed the fact that the July flight of Endeavour is due to carry the $2B particle physics experiment, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), to the ISS.
Spearheaded by Nobel-prize winner, Sam Ting, and built and funded largely outside the normal peer review process, AMS is one of the most significant physics experiments of recent years, but as much for political and sociological reasons as scientific. If nothing else, without AMS and its friends in high places, there would only two shuttle flights left: this one was added by Bush and ratified by Obama completely over the head of NASA's normal process.
That all said, AMS recently moved from testing at CERN in Switzerland to ESA's ESTEC in the Netherlands for electromagnetic and thermal-vacuum testing, and is on a really (really) tight timeline to get to KSC in time for the July launch. There are good reasons to suspect that that flight will be delayed into August and perhaps even moved later in the year behind Discovery's last flight.
I was on a VIP trip to KSC very recently and was thrilled to be shown around the Orbiter Processing Facility where both Endeavour and Atlantis are be prepared for their last flights at present, while Discovery was out on the pad. Very special for a space geek to be literally inches from all of those tiles on the underside of Endeavour and (sorry NASA :-) to have actually sneaked a touch of the undercarriage.
Also deeply, deeply sad to think that this will all be over very soon: the shuttle programme has been an inspiration all the way back to the drop tests of the Enterprise back in 1977, even in the darkest hours. While I understand all the technical and financial arguments for stopping it now, psychologically it seems crazy to do so, particularly in the absence of any successor. End of an era. There were moments when I was pretty choked up on that OPF visit, I have to admit.
I completely agree with you, it's very cool in a Joe-90, Thunderbirds kind of way. Then again, what else could we use for an international organisation with 18 member states? .org possibly, but it's a bit bland.
(Yes, I work for ESA and very much like my @esa.int mail address :-)
IAAPA (I am a professional astronomer), and I'm not stunned. Sorry. Nice work for a back-garden job, but any comparison with Hubble or any of our 4, 8, 10m class telescopes is utterly specious.
What's he and many other (admittedly very dedicated) amateurs are benefitting from is the enormous improvement in detectors (in this case, CCDs) over the past 20-odd years, plus the not-unrelated improvement in computer processing power to align, stack, and mosaic digital images. Obviously, professional astronomers have access to all that in spades, as well as much larger telescopes / telescopes above the atmosphere as well.
So yes, superficially similar and impressive coming from an amateur with limited resources, but to compare this with Hubble is completely lame-brained. Indeed, the cynic in me notes that TFA is puffing a book of his images: what a coincidence. A sidebar link takes you to a similar article in 2008 about another amateur who's "seeing the beginning of the Universe" from his shed: surprise, surprise, that article also puffs a book of his pictures. Of course, the article's in the Torygraph, which delights in celebrating a fifty years out of date vision of Britain populated by toffs, proles, and eccentric back garden amateur boffins, so hardly unexpected.
Going back to the point about better detectors, however, it's interesting to note that although we've built bigger and bigger telescopes over the past twenty years (as well as developing adaptive optics, space telescopes, broader wavelength coverage, etc.), the main gain we've experienced in terms of scientific performance has come from the vastly improved detectors. Problem is, we're now pretty close to detecting every photon that falls on the detectors and we can build detector arrays that almost fill the available focal plane.
To go further in ground-based astronomy then, we need much (much) larger telescopes, such as the E-ELT, TMT, and GMT. With their much larger collecting area and higher spatial resolution, you can expect truly fabulous things in the next ten years. From space, it's JWST, of course ...
Because atmospheric drag will slowly bring the ISS lower in altitude until it re-enters. If you just let it do it on its own timescale, the decay will be unpredictable and there's always a chance it'll come down somewhere unpalatable, such as Miami. (I mean that it'd be unpalatable for it to fall on Miami, not that Miami is unpalatable. Or do I?)
After all, some large chunks of the ISS will survive re-entry more or less whole. The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer is due to be attached later this year and its main magnetic torus is a pretty solid thing with a mass of over two tonnes. Ouch.
So, rather than have it come down somewhere unpredictable, NASA and its partners are committed to a controlled de-orbiting over a pretty empty ocean, presumably the Pacific. Yes, you could keep revisiting it with unmanned tankers to reboost the orbit, but it kind of misses the point if you're trying to close it down and save money. (I agree, it'd be very little money compared to the amount spent so far and yes, I think it'd be the right thing to do, keep it up there for future use. But that's not how bureaucrats think, I'm afraid).
Same goes for the Hubble Space Telescope: it'll come down in time as well. Unfortunately, it's too heavy and/or no longer properly man-rated (since it has been substantially modified since launch) to allow it to be brought back in a shuttle, which'd be nice. So, it either needs to be de-orbited in a controlled manner or (my choice) boosted to a much higher "museum orbit", where it could be retrieved much (much) later when we have the appropriate hardware.
Of course, rather than invest hundreds of millions in developing a robotic de-orbiting solution for HST (the shuttle won't revisit it again), NASA could take out tens of millions in insurance policies against the very remote chance that it landed on anyone. I half imagine you'd have some terminally-ill folk people trying to work out where HST might indeed come down and try to get themselves under it, just for the glory (and a big pile of cash for their heirs). But the US government doesn't think that way, for a number of understandable reasons.
Doubtful. One thing you can be pretty sure of is that a mission that uses cryogenic expendables won't last much longer than planned. The tanks are built to a certain size and filled to brimming; working out how long that'll last is fairly straightforward. You might get perhaps 50% longer than calculated if you're very lucky (more likely you'll get less), but no way will it last five times longer.
As an example, the Spitzer Space Telescope was planned for 5 years before the cryogens ran out: it lasted roughly 6.3 years.
Err, that is exactly where the Europa Jupiter System Mission (EJSM) currently under study by ESA and NASA is suppose to go, as the name suggests.
Yes, it's more expensive than TiME and will, in principle, take longer to develop, because it's bigger and more ambitious than TiME, but it's much further along in terms of studying its technical feasibility, and so (IMHO) has a better chance of happening before TiME does. Plus, NASA is not exactly swilling in cash at the moment and if EJSM is chosen for implementation, it'd be a struggle to do TiME as well.
More details at:
http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/object/index.cfm?fobjectid=42291
http://opfm.jpl.nasa.gov/europajupitersystemmissionejsm/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europa_Jupiter_System_Mission
TiME does sound like a very exciting concept, but I too am worried about how they intend to get data back to Earth without an orbiter relay: the numbers don't immediately stack up for an omnidirectional broadcaster from the surface of Titan, as the power available is essentially the same as Huygens had (just much longer-lived) and there's no way we can count on Cassini to be working by then to act as a relay.
Saying that Huygens "wasn't much" and "was just a part of the larger Cassini mission" is pretty misguided thinking and borders on insulting the scientists and engineers who put this amazing probe together, IMHO.
Are you saying that designing a probe that survives, dormant, for almost 7 years in interplanetary space and then turns on perfectly "isn't much"? Are you saying that making a fully-autonomous descent and soft landing on an outer planet's moon and sending back a stunning image of the surface "isn't much"? Are you saying that providing essentially real-time (light travel delay notwithstanding) imaging of lakes and drainage gullies during the descent, along with atmospheric sampling, "isn't much"? Are you saying that getting all these signals back from 1.2 billion kilometres with just a 10 watt transmitter "isn't much"? Good grief.
It was also much more than "just" a part of the Cassini mission: it was an integral part of it, all the way back to the early 1980s when the joint mission was first proposed. The US-European collaboration had its political moments, but it worked. Yes, Cassini is still returning great data (including the Titan sea glint image), but Huygens was never going to survive long with just batteries to power it under Titan's atmospheric murk. It shouldn't be dismissed as a consequence.
As for TSSM, it's a massive overstatement to say that it's "scheduled": nowhere near. TSSM (or more properly, its TandDEM predecessor) was proposed to ESA as a large (L) mission as part of the Cosmic Vision process in 2007 and did go through to the beginning of the second round along with the (also joint ESA-NASA) LAPLACE mission to Jupiter. The latter was however chosen for study by ESA and NASA to pursue first and is now the Europa Jupiter System Mission (EJSM). EJSM, if selected as the first CV L-mission, would fly (probably) no earlier than 2020, thus pushing TSSM back to the mid-2020's at the earliest, with arrival at Saturn and Titan in the mid-2030's.
So, exciting as it would be scientifically, don't hold your breath.
The new Herschel image shows part of the constellation of Aquila, meaning the Eagle. However, this is not the Eagle Nebula or M16: that is in the constellation of Serpens which is, coincidentally, nearby. To make matters more confusing, perhaps, the two blue parts of the image are star-forming regions, similar in principle to the Eagle Nebula. I believe that the left-hand one is Westerhout 40 and the right-hand one is Sharpless 62.
Well, I suspect this is a rather North American perspective. All data taken with the largest optical/IR observatory in the world, the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile, are archived and are freely available to researchers after a (typically) 12 month proprietary period. This is true for observations made on site by the astronomers who proposed them (so-called "visitor mode") and for observations made by ESO staff on behalf of the successful proposer, saving them the need to travel ("service mode").
Yes, it costs money, and yes, it should really be built in from the outset, as the telescope and it's systems are developed, but it's entirely feasible. Quite how much use is made of such archives in general is another question, of course, although Hubble's is well-used.
As already pointed out, the European project (Euclid) in question is being studied by the European Space Agency, not the EU: these are simply not synonymous.
Euclid is one of six missions currently under study for two so-called M-class mission slots within the first round of ESA's Cosmic Vision programme. The first two-year long study phase is over now and the results will be made public at a meeting in Paris on December 1, prior to ESA's scientific advisory working groups and committees coming up with a prioritised list of the top four (most likely) missions to go forward into a competitive definition phase for a further two years. At the end of that, there will be a final downselect to (nominally) two missions for actual implementation and launch in roughly 2018-2019.
So, don't be surprised if you start seeing more of these stories in the coming days and weeks, as the various mission proponents start jockeying for position ahead of the first downselect :-)
[FYI, the full set of M-mission studies currently running are (in alphabetical order): Cross-Scale (solar plasma physics), Euclid (dark energy), Marco Polo (asteroid sample return), PLATO (exoplanet discovery and asteroseismology), Solar Orbiter (detailed solar science close to Sun), and SPICA (far-infrared astronomy).]
Very cool indeed to see CO2 as a liquid in water (hell, to see it as a liquid at all :-).
What's the density of the liquid CO2 at that depth? From the video, it looks be to just a little greater than that of the water, given that it sinks, but not very quickly. Oh, a quick google tells me that it's 1093 kg/m3 at minus 20C and 20 bar (AirLiquide), while I also see from a paper in PNAS by House et al. (2006) paper that the density of CO2 is greater than that of water at pressures greater than 28 MPa (280 bar), which you get to in the sea at roughly 3000m depth. So that's where the CO2 needs to go to keep in liquid without any machinery to increase the pressure or lower the temperature, hence the reason you YouTube video was at 3300m :-)
Very interesting indeed. I also see from the House et al. paper that they calculate that "the total CO2 storage capacity within the 200-mile economic zone of the US coastline [is] capable of storing thousands of years of years of current US CO2 emissions". They argue it should be injected a few hundred metres into the sub-sea sediment to localise it and keep it from dissolving into the sea water and acidifying it.
Oh, there are many of us here, just counting down until ...
Well, Ed would say that, wouldn't he? :`)
Adaptive optics is not quite the same as raw diffraction-limited imaging, no, but it's getting pretty damn good. It's a lot more than buzz: all major telescopes use it routinely.
I've been using for many years already from ground-based 8-m telescopes and it really does deliver more than HST can ... in the near-IR. Nope, it can't compete at optical wavelengths with HST ...
You're thinking Arecibo: Puerto Rico and yes, it's radio.
Good job I put that bit in about "some of my best friends are Hawai'ans", eh, Dan, now that I've seen that you're a TO for the 88 inch ... :`)
After all, it would hypocritical for me not to remember that through my Hawai'in friends (a fellow Englishman building IR instrumentation at the IfA, shall we say), I made good use of one of Klaus Hodapp's earlier "lashed-up" cameras on the 88 inch, the one with the first 256x256 NICMOS3 array in. This happened as part of the deal that was made when Hawai'i lost its bid for an HST IR instrument (HIMS) to Arizona's NICMOS: some of the Hawai'i folk got on the NICMOS science team and some of the detectors were tested in Hawai'i.
Since I was actually working in Arizona on the NICMOS instrument for HST at the time, this was a slightly curious happening, since Arizona themselves didn't even have such an array on the air at that point (1990-ish).
Astro-politics: you've got to love it.
Ah, but ease of access translates to ease of upgrades. Hubble's infrared imaging capability is about to be upgraded from 256x256 to 1024x1024... meanwhile, folks in Hawai have been at 4096x4096 for six years already, since they developed the chips for the next (James Webb) space telescope's infrared camera.
It's slightly more complicated than that. JWST's near-IR detectors were manufactured by Teledyne (formerly Rockwell), with the University of Hawai'i involved under contract for development and testing. Specs were set at the project level and the detectors have also been tested under contract by the STScI Detector Lab and, of course, by the instrument teams using them (Univ Arizona for NIRCam, GSFC/ESA for NIRSpec, GSFC/CSA for FGS/TFI).
What Hawai'i have always been very good at is giving the impression that they develop detectors themselves :`)
While they're also good at getting them on the telescope quickly, it's often on small telescopes like the UH 88 inch in lashed-up dewars and (to be honest) not delivering much science.
4096x4096 pixel infrared mosaics are also now available on bigger telescopes such as the UKIRT 3.8m (WFCAM), CFHT 3.6m (WIRCAM) and the VLT 8.2m (HAWK-I). An even larger 8192x8192 pixel mosaic is currently under commissioning at VISTA. These are the current state-of-the-art, with bigger arrays coming for the ELTs.
(Not trying to rain on the Hawai'ians' parade particularly [some of my best friends are ... etc.], just trying to set the record straight.)
As I said, ground- and space-based telescopes are actually highly complementary: it sounds greedy, but we really need both.
Space has the advantage of there being no atmosphere to block some of the incoming light and blur the image. Also, if you cool your telescope down (e.g. ESA's Herschel being launched tomorrow and NASA/ESA/CSA JWST in 2014), then you benefit from greatly reduced sky background at infrared wavelengths. This can result in an enormous increase in sensitivity in situations where the background matters, e.g. imaging of extremely faint sources.
Also, space-based telescopes can cover a wider wavelength range, including wavelengths that don't make it through the atmosphere, so some kinds of thing must be done from space (e.g. X-ray astronomy as in NASA's Chandra and ESA's XMM-Newton).
At the same time, space telescopes are much smaller than state-of-the-art ground-based ones, and thus the ground-based telescopes can catch many more photons over all. For some science (e.g. medium- to high-resolution spectroscopy of extremely faint objects where the background doesn't matter), it's all about the number of photons you can collect.
Also, if you can implement adaptive optics on your ground-based telescope, you can get higher resolution than in space.
As an example of true synergy, look at the many studies done jointly by HST and the ground-based 8-10m telescopes like the VLT, Keck, Gemini, and so on. In many cases, both were needed to complete the study.
Indeed, there are many of us helping develop both JWST and ground-based ELTs like E-ELT and TMT for exactly the same reason: we need both to get a more complete picture of what's going on out there.
As the actual article notes on its first page, TMT will have roughly 100 times the collecting area of Hubble: this goes as the square of the diameter of the telescope, so with TMT = 30m and Hubble = 2.5m, that's about right.
Resolving power (if the TMT can be made diffraction-limited, which it is aiming to do, but which is hard nevertheless) gets better linearly with the diameter, so TMT will have roughly 10 times the resolving power of Hubble.
The more appropriate space-based comparison in 2018 will be JWST which has a diameter of 6.5m, although JWST and ground-based ELTs are more properly thought of as being complementary, not competitive: they do different things.
But as already noted, the more appropriate comparison is with the European E-ELT which is under Phase B study now and is baselined for 42m diameter.
More interesting is where the TMT and E-ELT will be located: same hemisphere or not? Current bets are on E-ELT being in Chile, with TMT possibly going to Mauna Kea. This would be a better outcome for us astronomers than having both in the south, IMHO.
The angle subtended by an object with diameter x at distance y = x/y in radians, provided x is small compared to y. Thus for 450 feet at 65,000 feet, the angle subtended is 0.007 radians; to convert to degrees, multiply by 180/pi, yielding 0.4 degrees.
To look at it another way, the Moon has a diameter of about 3,500km and lies at a mean distance of 385,000km. Dividing the diameter by the distance yields 0.009 radians, i.e. 0.5 degrees, less than 30% bigger than the blimp.
By extension, a 230 foot long 747 at a distance of 10,00 feet does subtend a much larger angle than the full Moon, i.e. about 1.3 degrees. Problem is that you don't often look up and see them immediately overhead; the downrange distance will often be much larger than 10,000 feet or two miles, making the subtended angle correspondingly smaller.
To put it yet another way, a 230 feet long object at a distance of 230 feet will subtend roughly 1 radian; a radian is 57.3 degrees. Thus, to get to a subtended angle of 1.3 degrees, the object would have to be (57.3/1.3) = 44 times further away, and 44x230 is 10,000 feet.
Nevertheless, despite defending my mathematical integrity (!), I accept the arguments about the blimp being more linear (but not completely; blimps are pretty rotund things) and that it's not self-illuminated etc. But the point remains that this thing will not be as small as people think.
As for my comment about it having writing on the side readable from 65,000 feet, well, err, I was being facetious: I thought that that was half the point of \.
What's this business in the article about it being "nearly impossible to see"? A 450 foot dirigible at an altitude of 65,000 feet would subtend an angle of 0.4 degrees from ground-level directly underneath, just a little smaller than the full Moon. Or will it be painted with big words on the side saying "Please ignore the spy in the sky", instructions that we all will no doubt dutifully follow, like the sheep we are?
See my post elsewhere in this thread, but this isn't true: if you read the Fomalhaut paper (as opposed to the PR), they're unsure quite what mix of reflected starlight, thermal self-emission, and additional reflected light from a circumplanetary disk makes up the light seen from Fomalhaut b, at both visible and IR wavelengths.
These objects are actually more similar than they are different, in my opinion.
As for HST still being king, well, yes and no: depends on what you're after. Ground-based AO has caught up and exceeded HST in some domains already, while HST still wins in others. Ultimately we need ground- and space-based telescopes to get the most complete view: today it's HST and the 8-10m telescopes, tomorrow it's JWST and the 30-40m extremely large telescopes.
HD189733b: not directly imaged, but has had a temperature map of it reconstructed from very careful analysis of the change in the light from the parent star as the planet transits in front of and behind it.
2M1207b: this orbits a brown dwarf, not a star.
GQ Lup b: not a planet by any reasonable stretch of the scientific imagination, unless you happen to have been a co-author of the original paper. Believe me: this one is dead, Jim, and was known by most of us to be so on arrival.
Of course, this hasn't stopped both groups trying to spin up their results in a perfectly understandable fashion. The downside is that many online press stories are showing very signs of confusion as to what's what, not at all helped by the blizzard of parallel press releases from various institutions on the HR8799 3-planet system result.
Indeed, the Gemini Observatory release shows images taken with their telescope showing just two of the planets, presumably because they don't want to cede any ground to the Keck, their rivals on Mauna Kea, where the third planet was found. Again, potentially very confusing indeed to the public.
As for the complementary aspect of the two discoveries, that's mostly the case and both discoveries are very important. But it's not true to say that one's (Fomalhaut) an old planet seen in reflected visible light while the others (HR8799) are young and shining in their own heat: both stars are roughly equally young and the Fomalhaut planet seems also to be shining in some mix of its own heat even in the visible (it's at 400K, possibly), plus perhaps some additional reflected light from a dusty disk around the planet (as opposed to the obvious disk around the star itself).
Also, I wouldn't say the HR8799 planets are close to their star: nothing like. They're out at the equivalent of Neptune's orbit and beyond, even though the Fomalhaut planet's a bit further out still.
Hope this helps allay your (understandable) scepticism.
Not true, I'm afraid: Darwin was not picked by ESA as one of the missions to be studied for the so-called L (large) slot for launch in 2017-2018 during the recent Cosmic Vision selection exercise. Large missions in the running for that slot are XEUS (large X-ray telescope), LISA (gravitational wave observatory), and TANDEM/LAPLACE (missions to the outer planets, Titan and Jupiter, respectively, only one of which would happen). All of these would be collaborations with other space agencies.
It was felt that the precision formation-flying and interferometric beam combination techniques needed to make Darwin work were not mature enough for implementation yet. The science it's aiming at is of very great importance and such a project will undoubtedly return for consideration in future rounds of Cosmic Vision, but I'd say there's little chance of something like Darwin flying prior to 2022-2025.
In passing, you're right that Darwin would have the angular resolution of telescope several hundred metres in diameter, but it wouldn't have the collecting area of such a telescope. For direct detection of terrestrial-mass exoplanets close to their bright parent stars, that's fine; for other science such as studying galaxies forming just after the Big Bang, a larger collecting area would also be required. Comparison of the parts of parameter space covered by projects as disparate as Darwin, LBT, JWST, and future ELTs (ground-based extremely large telescopes, diameters and collecting areas of 30-40m diameter, under development for 2015-2020) is non-trivial.
As someone closely associated with the selection process, let me add a little background that might be helpful to interested /.ers.
1. In principle just two of these missions will proceed to flight in 2017-2018, following studies of all seven over the next couple of years. However, the important number is the 950Meuro budget envelope allocated for this round of Cosmic Vision: depending on how costs shape up during the study phase, we go for a different mix of missions. That number is the cost to ESA itself: you also need to factor in anticipated additional contributions (e.g. for payload) from ESA member states and third party countries (e.g. US, Japan, Russia, China).
2. One poster suggested that either Laplace or Tandem was most likely to fly in one slot, with an astronomy mission in the other: this is in no way decided, at this point. We sent Laplace and Tandem through at this stage as NASA is looking closely at the same basic missions; indeed, for either to fly would require strong (majority) NASA partnership, as ambitious outer solar systems missions cost more like $2G, rather than the ~600-650Meuro ESA might put in. Following discussions and a selection process in the US, one or other of Laplace or Tandem will go through to the full European study stage. Then, in order to proceed to flight, we will need to decide whether we prefer that mission over XEUS or LISA for the 2017-2018 slot: they are the other L(arge)-missions selected for study.
3. Dune and Space were similarly selected in the full knowledge that the US is planning a Dark Energy mission as well. Further talks with NASA on competition, collaboration, and complementarity in ths arena are very likely.
4. Keep in mind that this is just the first round of Cosmic Vision: we anticipate a second selection round in 3 years or so, at which point other missions may be selected, perhaps from those of the seven here not finally picked for flight in the first round, perhaps from the 43 others which did not make it this far (some were felt to be extremely interesting, but not ready technologically for 2017-2018), or perhaps something new altogether.
5. Finally, yes, we'd all like to have more money available to ESA to fund these and other exciting missions: we have plenty of interesting ideas. Europeans should think about writing to their parliamentary / governmental representatives about exactly this point. That said, it's not quite true to say, as someone did, that we're newbies in this game: ESA has been involved in a whole bunch of excellent astronomy and solar system missions already (Giotto, Rosetta, ISO, SOHO, XMM, Mars Express, HST, to name but a few), some alone, some in collaboration. There are more to come over the next few years as well (e.g. Herschel, Planck, Gaia, JWST), so watch this space (sorry).