If you’ve been reading my blog for more than about three seconds, you’ll know that I am pretty vocal about the issue of science being under attack by political and religious extremists (just go to the "Categories" link on my sidebar and click on "Antiscience"… clicking on "Rants" will net you a few entries as well).

There are many groups whose voices are starting to be heard about this as well. One group that has just started up is called Defend Science. Their goal is, in their own words,

to rally broad opposition and resistance to the mounting attacks on science and scientific thinking which are unfolding in the United States.

I’m for that! In fact, I really am. They are having a rally tonight (Thursday) on the Berkeley campus at 7:00 p.m. I was invited to go, and I was really looking forward to it, but I have come down with a bad sore throat and cannot go. However, I implore you, if you’re in the area, to go. The speakers tonight include many scientists, who, like me, are fed up with this blatant, egregious, and frankly appalling attack on reality.

The group also has an online petition. Here is one part of it:

IN THE UNITED STATES TODAY SCIENCE, AS SCIENCE, IS UNDER ATTACK AS NEVER BEFORE.

The signs of this are everywhere. The attacks are coming at an accelerating pace, and include frequent interventions by powerful forces, in and out of the Bush Administration, who seem all too willing to deny scientific truths, disrupt scientific investigations, block scientific progress, undermine scientific education, and sacrifice the very integrity of the scientific process itself — all in the pursuit of implementing their particular political agenda. And today this dominant political agenda is profoundly allied and intertwined with an extremist (and extremely anti-science) ideological agenda put forward by powerful fundamentalist religious forces commonly known as the Religious Right. These fundamentalists now have extensive influence and representatives in major institutions of the U.S. government, including Congress and the White House. This itself goes a long way towards explaining why science itself is under such unprecedented attack.

It is commonplace under the current Administration for the government to deny funding, censor scientific reports, or in other ways undermine scientific research which might turn up facts which they don’t want to hear; to manipulate, distort, or outright suppress scientific findings they find objectionable; to attempt to reshape government scientific panels to obtain policy recommendations on issues ranging from health to the environment, based less on actual scientific findings than on the requirements of the Administration’s agenda.

On their list are a few astronomers I know, including Gibor Basri, Andrew Hamilton, and (planet-finder) Geoff Marcy. I added my name there today as well.

This is not some ivory-tower issue (which in itself would be bad enough). When people are denied medicine because of the narrow-minded beliefs of someone else, when we live on a planet on the brink (over the brink) of an environmental disaster of a scale not seen since the Pleistocene, when obvious and evidence-based reality is squashed, mangled, and tortured by a few people who happen to be in charge (and many if not most times have the media as willing accomplices), then this affects all of us, every single one of us.

I will not sit idly by and watch this happen. Groups like Defend Science won’t either. Support them.

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Tonight is Yuri’s Night, and also the 25th anniversary of the first launch of the Space Shuttle, so permit me to wax a moment on space travel.

The Detroit Free Press has an article called "Five Things About Space Travel" which is interesting (though the part about Kevin Spacey was a reach). I was struck by the part about how many Michiganders have been to space. As a U of M alum myself, I thought it was amusing that they missed one: Karl Henize.

Well, maybe not really amusing, but more chagrinning since Karl was a professional astronomer, and not too many of those have been to space. When I was at Michigan, Karl came and gave a talk to the astronomy department. This was in late 1985 or so, so I don’t remember much of his talk except that he was funny, warm, and engaging (and also that he was missing a part of one finger and was color blind, which he made a point of because astronauts need not be the perfect physical specimens they once were required to be).

A month or two after he gave the talk, Challenger exploded during launch. I was walking back to my dorm from work, and saw people crowded around a TV at a video store. I asked what was going on, and someone said the Shuttle had "crashed". My knees went weak; I remember that clearly. I watched for as long as I could take it; it was pretty hard to get any schoolwork done for that day… so I wrote a note to Karl, telling him how sorry I was, knowing that he had ridden Challenger just a few months before. He sent me a nice, brief note back. I still have it.

Karl died in 1993, of respiratory and heart failure. This may be unremarkable, since he was 67 years old. Maybe that’s a bit young, but, after all, he was climbing Mt. Everest at the time. I can hardly walk up a flight of stairs on some days, and I’m relatively in shape. He was an amazing guy.

NASA’s heading back to the Moon now, and more of my alumni brethren and sistern will be going along for the ride, no doubt. Maybe a friend of mine might be going. I won’t go; I like it here. I want to be on the Moon, but I don’t want to go there. No way will I strap a rocket onto my backside, but I’m glad others are willing to do it. I’m glad Karl did.

Go blue!’

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I love pareidolia! That’s the term for seeing patterns in random data. I talk about it quite a bit on my page describing a visitor in my bathroom shower, if you want more info about it.

Poking away at images of other planets will give you plenty of opportunities for pareidolia. After all, we have the Man in the Moon, the face on Mars (well, no we don’t), and on and on. Of course, there are even more whimsical examples as well.

What the picture above shows is the Happy Face crater on Mars. This feature was actually discovered a long time ago during the Viking missions in the 1970s. But the European Mars Express orbiter took some new shots of it, and they were just released. It’s not the best happy face I’ve ever seen (I’ve seen better ones in my own Hubble data (scroll to the bottom)), but hey, it’s not too bad.

Another orbiter, the Mars Global Surveyor, took an image of the crater a few years back. The crater, actually named Galle, was further around the limb of Mars, and so looks foreshortened, elliptical. Here is a side-by-side of the two:

Pretty cool. There are several articles about the new images on the web; the Space News Blog has a good one.

What else can I say, except…

Have a nice day.’

Just a quick note, since there isn’t a lot of info just yet, but: Venus Express has successfully entered orbit around our sister planet! Hooray!

Over the course of the next few days we’ll hear more about the health of the spacecraft, but for now everything looks great.

‘

Well, it’s been quite the week for solar system exploration!

As I write this, the European spacecraft Venus Express is just three hours away from starting up the maneuvers it needs to enter orbit around Venus. If all goes well, at 01:07 Pacific time (08:07 Universal or Greenwich time) on April 11, the first spacecraft since Magellan will become a moon of the otherwise moonless planet.

As usual with planetary stuff, the best place to get info is Emily Lackdawalla’s Planetary Society Blog. She has a timeline there, and lots more about the spacecraft and its mission. You can also poke around The Nine Planets website for more too.

I’ll note that this mission is heavily designed to study Venus’s weird atmosphere. You’ve probably heard about it before: 90 times the Earth’s pressure, flaming hot due to a runaway greenhouse effect, sulphuric acid rain, no water. Weird hardly begins to describe it.

But I’ll leave you with this: if you are an early riser, go outside tomorrow morning and face just south of east. See that incredibly bright star, low in the sky? That’s it. That’s Venus. It’s almost exactly the same size as Earth, but enshrouded in clouds, making it highly reflective. So even at its current distance of 120 million kilometers, it’s the third brightest star in the sky.

120 million kilometers. And our grasp has once again reached out across the sky to touch another small piece of the Universe.’

NASA is pretty serious about putting people back on the Moon. But you can’t just build a rocket, stick some folks on it, and ship them off. You need to have a good understanding of the lunar surface, which means high-resolution maps, excellent knowledge of the topography, and even mineralogy of the surface. All these allow you to pick the best landing sites, and not slam into a mountain on the way down.

NASA did mapping of the Moon before Apollo, and they’ll be doing it again before this next round of exploration. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) is the first step in this return to the Moon. It will have high-res cameras, an altimeter, and other instruments to help map the Moon. It’s scheduled to launch in 2008.

A few years ago, it was found that there might be water ice on the Moon, locked away in the permanently dark regions of deep craters at the lunar south pole. In reality, hydrogen was detected by earlier spacecraft, and the easiest way we know to have a repository of hydrogen is to lock it up in water (H₂O, right?), which is common in the solar system (for example, comet impacts might deposit water in the polar craters). The water doesn’t melt/evaporate there because some craters are very deep, and sunlight in these regions never reaches the crater bottoms. Studies have shown that water could stay in the bottom of these craters for many hundreds of millions of years. This water would make it a lot easier to place laboratories and colonies on the Moon; water is heavy and hard to transport via rockets, so finding some already there would save a huge amount of effort and, of course, cost. The problem is that the water was not directly detected, only hydrogen was. Confirming the existence of this water is a pretty big deal.

It’s so important that NASA decided to take a more pro-active course in finding it. As it happens, the LRO spacecraft is launching on a big rocket, so big that they room left over to add more hardware to the original spacecraft. So NASA got an idea: send a secondary spacecraft along with LRO. While LRO goes into orbit around the Moon, the second spacecraft can do something to try to detect that water.

NASA opened up this idea to the scientific/engineering community, and 19 proposals submitted. The winner was just announced in a press conference today. It’s called LCrOSS: the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite. LCrOSS is basically two pieces: one piece is a hunk of metal with steering rockets on it. That part will impact the Moon, sending up a plume of material that will hopefully contain water. The second piece of LCroSS has infrared and visual cameras on it which can detect the impact and the plume, determining if it indeed has water in it.

The impactor will hit the Moon at 2.5 kilometers per second, at an angle of 75 degrees (nearly vertical). The impactor weighs 2000 kilograms (two tons!), so the energy of impact is about equal to exploding more than a ton of TNT on the surface of the Moon. Bang!

The "follower" spacecraft with the detectors will observe the impact, and then 15 minutes later it will pass right through the plume, and then it too will impact the Moon– the course is set to be as close as possible to the impact site to get a good look at it, and the best way to do this is to have it hit the Moon as well.

This is all scheduled to happen well after LRO itself gets to the moon. LRO will get to the Moon first, get into its orbit, and go through the usual shake-down procedures to get it into shape. In the meantime, LCrOSS will be on a long orbit that takes it around both the Earth and the Moon. The orbit is 43 days long, and it will orbit twice (for a total of nearly three months) before the impact. This should be plenty of time to get LRO ready to observe the effects of impact as well.

The crater should be about 100 feet across and 16 feet deep, and the plume may reach heights of 30-40 miles above the lunar surface. It will be heavily observed by telescopes here on Earth, and engineers expect that the plume itself may be visible by amateur astronomers with big enough telescopes (I’ll be watching with mine: count on it!). Incidentally, the target crater is named Shackleton, which is appropriate enough: he was an explorer of the Antarctic, at the Earth’s south pole.

I’ll note that Lunar Prospector tried this same thing in 1999, but it hit at a very low impact angle, so the material was shot out sideways. Plus, the spacecraft wasn’t very massive, so it didn’t create a large plume. Nothing was seen, even by Hubble (much to my chagrin; I was on that project to get the data from Hubble). The difference now is that the LCrOSS impactor hits at a steep angle, and is much more massive, so the plume should be much larger and easier to see.

So what’s my opinion of this? At first I was skeptical; it seems pretty late to add something like this onto LRO. However, the LCrOSS spacecraft is separate from LRO. They launch on the same rocket, but they separate early on. The way it was described in the press conference, there will be minimal impact (har har) on LRO, so the added risk is small. They have a budget cap of $80 million, which is really not very much for a space mission, and it does add a lot of value to LRO, even if no water is detected.

Look: at some point, we need to find out if this water exists or not. A dedicated mission for this would cost a lot. Adding a special detector to a subsequent mission would be nice, and maybe even necessary, but this is perhaps the quickest and easiest way to look for the water. Sending up a plume makes it possible for telescopes on Earth to look for the water as well, and that provides a lot of backup.

I like the idea of doing this, since it’s not terribly expensive as these things go, has a high probability of working (we’ve done it before under more difficult circumstances), and can be done without affecting the main LRO mission. If — if — all this can be done, then I think this is a good idea.

Also, I think going back to the Moon is a good idea, and I know it won’t fly without public support. Doing something splashy like this (again, har har) will get a lot of attention, and is something people can actually go out and see with their own eyes (well, through a telescope). And it’s not just a stunt; real science may come out of this, science that has a direct impact on future exploration of the Moon. I think this has a pretty good chance of sparking interest in the public.

Based on what I’ve heard, I support this mission, and I’m excited by it! I’ll be very interested to see what happens next.’

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If you’re reading this, and you’ve been here before, you may notice the layout (called a "theme" in the blogosphere) has changed. This is Step 2 of an as-yet-undetermined-number-of-steps process to redesign the blog and, eventually, the main site. Step 1 was upgrading to the current version of WordPress, the blog software. Step 3 will be… a surprise. I have more coming, too.

Please let me know in the comments what you think, and especially if you find any layout errors or troubles. I have tested this with Firefox and (shudder) IE and found nothing obvious. Also, any suggestions for added features? Is there a menu rollover button under the logo I should add?

This theme is called daisyraegemini, and was written by (seriously) GeeksMakeMeHot, and then redesigned by atthe404.com. I liked the layout, but there were some coding errors, and quite a few things I thought could use improvement for my needs. I am not a CSS kinda guy, though I do have some coding experience, so I was able to puzzle out what I needed.

I’ll probably make some changes to it eventually, but I want to wear this version for a while and see how it fits.’