Anthonares

February has been another busy one here at Anthonares.net! Early in the month I moved the blog from Blogger over to Wordpress software and haven’t regretted it for a second. Daily readership continues to grow, which I’m glad to see means that more comments are coming in. Nothing sustains a pro-bono blogger better than feedback from readers, even (and especially in my case) if that feedback disagrees civilly with me.

Next month will probably be a bit slower here as my wife and I close on our first home and spend our spring break on home improvements. But, I am going to be introducing a feature to the space blog world that seems to me sorely lacking: The Space Blog Carnival. It will be a bi-weekly feature of the best original thinking that I can find (or others contribute). Look for a formal announcement soon. Also on the horizon you may have noticed that “Space Wiki” link on the sidebar. That’s an early planning design of a more comprehensive site I have planned to interface closely with Wikipedia in an effort to disseminate space knowledge and drive the improvement of Wikipedia’s space-oriented articles. Also don’t forget to check over at DamnIntersting.com where I publish a new article every week or so!
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When fully operational, the US Department of Energy’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) will focus 192 of the most powerful lasers ever constructed onto a target no larger than a BB. The lasers will combine to produce 2 MJ of energy in a split second–a very split second. For the 4 nanoseconds that the lasers illuminate their tiny target, they will produce 500 TW, roughly 40 times the total energy consumption of the entire world! All of this energy focused on such a tiny target will literally vaporize it, via nuclear fusion.

The NIF is currently under construction at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories (click for Google Earth placemark), where 4 of the lasers are complete. They expect to finish construction by the end of this year and see “first light” a year later. NIF will be used to study nuclear fusion for both commercial energy generation and nuclear stockpile maintenance purposes. Because of this highly sensitive mission, it is unlikely that you or I will soon see the actual facility itself. So I thought I would take us all on a tour of this fascinating project to see how many laser beams it takes to implode a BB (sounds like the intro of a very nerdy joke).
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Paul Gilster at Centauri Dreams writes about a potential replacement for Terrestrial Planet Finder Coronagraph (TPF-C) that would be “faster, better, and cheaper.” The basic idea is that the Coronagraph part of the TPF-C would be an independent, free-flying “Occulter” that would be combined with the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to recreate the scientific mission of the TPF-C. The best part is that the Occulter could fit within the budget of NASA’s Discover class of vehicles, for which it currently has solicitations for proposals.

In light of the pressure being applied to NASA because of TPF and Europa Orbiter delays, it seems to me that this potential Occulter mission has risen to a very high scientific priority. Also, combining the effective budget of the TPF mission with the JWST would help stop the slide in its launch date. While I can hardly wait until April when the proposals are due, I am buoyed by the prospect of TPF proceeding after all. Thanks Paul!

The image on the right is an artist’s conception of the view of the Pluto/Charon system from the surface of P2, one of Pluto’s recently discovered moons (credit: NASA). While we’ve known for a month or so that Pluto has two “new” moons the paper announcing the discovery was just published Thursday. Their discovery is a truly fine example of observational astronomy, and I thought I would share some top-rate science with you all. Here I examine a pair of papers, one announcing and detailing the discovery of P1 and P2, the other speculating on their genesis and implications for the nature of the Pluto/Charon system.

Citations

• Weaver, H.A. and 8 others (2006), “Discovery of Two New Satellites of Pluto”, Nature 439(7070), pp. 943-945 [online at CiteULike.org]
• Stern, S.A. and 8 others (2006), “A Giant Impact Origin for Pluto’s Small Moons and Satellite Multiplicity in the Kuiper Belt”, Nature 439(7070), pp. 946-948 [online at CiteULike.org]

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I have been happily attending Michigan State University since the fall of 1999. It has awarded me undergraduate degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Astrophysics, and is now hosting and funding my studies in the hydrological geosciences. Based in East Lansing, Michigan, MSU is only about an hour from my childhood home, and as such has been my college of choice since at least third grade. In fact, I did not apply for a single other school, and chose to stay here for graduate school because of the amazing opportunities it has given me. At a point in my life where I have watched good friends move away year after year, MSU has been my community. I want to see it thrive and grow as much as perhaps anyone.

So I was truly disappointed when I read in today’s issue of Science that the Rare Isotope Accelerator (RIA) project is being delayed for at least five years. MSU’s National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory has been competing against the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Argonne National Laboratory to design, build, and operate RIA for the last five years or so. The teams have spent millions on development and preliminary designs. And for good reason. In 2003 the DOE listed the RIA project third in a list of 28 major facilities it wished to build.
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Over geologic time, sea level depends on the relative balance of the water stored in ice versus that stored in the oceans. Most of the Earth’s ice is stored near its poles where global warming has had the greatest effect thus far, and is projected to be most severe in the future. Thus predictions of sea level rise largely depend on what happens in Greenland and Antarctica over the next century, but the physics of ice sheet melting are poorly understood. The result is that the most reliable projections of sea level rise use linear extrapolations of ice sheet melting, if this term is incorporated at all. (image credit: JA Dowdeswell)

Late last week we found out that those linear extrapolations may be significant underestimates. Today’s Published Research Synopsis focuses on a paper in Science that provides comprehensive estimates of the rates of melting across Greenland over the last decade. Using combinations of satellite and aerially-sensed data, the velocities and depths of glaciers draining the bulk of Greenland were measured in 1996, 2000, and 2005. The researchers found that between 1996 and 2005, the rate of ice sheet melting has more than doubled across Greenland.

Citation

Rignot, E. and Kanagaratnam, P. (2006), “Changes in the Velocity Structure of the Greenland Ice Sheet”, Science 311(5763), pp. 986-990 [online at CiteULike.org]
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Mapping has finally come to the masses, and its name is Google Earth. Last June, Google released a software capable of quickly displaying satellite, aerial image, and map data for the entire globe. Since then, Google Earth has been used to aid rescue and recovery efforts along the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina, and in Pakistan after the earthquake there last fall. Its enormous rise in popularity is evidence of a deep desire in everyone to be able to see the world, and Google Earth offers the world just as we want to see it. It zooms in, tilts, displays maps, images, 3-D structures, and allows anyone to fly over the landscape effortlessly.

Last week, Nature ran a series of articles [free online access: 1, 2, 3] (and a couple of news updates today: 1, 2) about Google Earth and its NASA-borne cousin World Wind (collectively called Virtual Globes). Continuing their excellent coverage on how technology is reshaping science, the hit the nail right on the head, and I paraphrase:

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) give users the ability to manipulate and analyze spatial data in ways that were absolutely impossible before. But due to their complexity, many potential users were intimidated and GIS use was limited primarily to specialists. Google Earth and World Wind are changing all that by whetting scientists’ and the publics’ appetites for visual and spatial data.

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Fans of the Space Elevator (a great Wikipedia entry) concept may be aware of the company LiftPort whose stated goal is to build an elevator to geosynchronous orbit by April 12th, 2018 (they have a counter on their website). LiftPort recently achieved a milestone in development of their technologies with the launch of high-altitude balloons suspending a mile-long tether up which a climber robot rose about 1,500 feet before failing due to problems with nylon gears.

What I found most interesting though was that the LiftPort team is working with the Mars Society to deploy a balloon-borne radio relay at the Mars Desert Research Station in late March. This type of deploy-anywhere temporary radio relay could have real economic value and would be the ideal solution for Mars (which lacks an ionosphere, thus all communications are line-of-sight). While I was at FMARS last summer, our crew commander stressed the importance of this constraint in our simulation. This in some ways severely limited our exploration range. But, learning those lessons is exactly what makes simulated exploration so valuable.
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While out to dinner last night (Valentine’s Day) a quick glance about revealed that more than half of the people in the restaurant were drinking wine. Some red, others white. But I’m sure that very few of them were thinking about what makes that wine so distinctive and delectable. Neither was I.

This morning, though, my scientific materialism kicked in again while looking at last week’s issue of Science. It featured a series of perspectives on the field of aromatic compound research, including a short review article on the molecular basis for wine grape quality. Since I’m always of the opinion that whenever I understand something I can appreciate it more thoroughly, as probably are many of you, here’s a Research Synopsis all about that Dionysian delight.

Citation (online at CiteULike.org):
Lund, S.T. and Bohlman, J. (2006). The Molecular Basis for Wine Grape Quality–A Volatile Subject. Science 311(5762), pp. 804-805.
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For those of you who have not yet run into the wonderful science blog carnival that is Tangled Bank, check out issue #47 presented by Kete Were. This is also the second issue of Tangled Bank that features Anthonares.net content (#46 did two weeks ago, as well). The diversity of entries in Tangled Bank is always enjoyable, and I seem to come away from each edition with a few more blogs in my feed aggregator.

If you haven’t yet checked it out, please do. And, if you come from Tangled Bank, welcome! Be sure to check out the About page, and feel free to browse the Archives.

Update: Also, Science and Politics has a Teaching Carnival up today. My post about standardizing higher education is in there, as are some really great science education writings.