Some of you may have followed the threat to the historic Mt. Wilson observatory from the fires in Los Angeles earlier this month. Below is a fantastic time lapse video shot from one of the facilities on the mountain. You can see how close the fire came (though thankfully, the firefighters did a superb job in protecting observatory with targeted back burns to create firebreaks around the site).

As this video shows, astronomical observatories are frequently at risk from wildfires, since both tend to occupy dry remote mountaintops. Indeed, close to seven years ago, one of Australia’s major observatories on Mt. Stromlo was nearly obliterated by the fires that raced through the area:

Thankfully, Mt. Wilson survived this round.

PS. You can find a bit more about some of the ground breaking work that was done at Mt. Wilson along with some terrific old Life magazine photos here.

If you haven’t heard that Planck has seen first light, you haven’t been reading the right cosmology blogs: see Andrew Jaffe, Peter Coles, and Planck’s own Twitter feed. Planck is of course the European Space Agency’s microwave background satellite experiment, which was launched back in May. Since then it’s been tumbling in space about once every minute, doing a leisurely scan of the sky. The survey is not nearly completed, but all systems seem to be running smoothly.

Here’s the region it’s looked at so far, superimposed over a visual-light map of the Milky Way:

And here’s a zoom in on one region, as seen in two different wavelengths:

So far the scientists are playing with the data to learn about the instrument, not so much about the microwave background. Andrew predicts a big splash of papers from Planck in August 2012. We’ll be looking for a bunch of things: Are the overall features of the CMB consistent with predictions from inflation? Are there “non-Gaussian” features indicating extra power in some regions? Is the strength of the perturbations equal on all scales, or does it gradually diminish at smaller distances? Did we learn anything surprising from the polarization, such as tensor modes that could come from inflation or an overall rotation that could come from quintessence? Does the universe have a preferred direction?

I’m sure it will be front-page news, whatever that news turns out to be. Stay tuned.

The Review of U.S. Human Space Flight Plans Committee has just released a summary of their report. This “Augustine” report (named after chairman Norm Augustine, former CEO of Lockheed, not St. Augustine, which might have made for more entertaining reading) discusses the future of US manned space exploration. The full report should arrive within the month.

The summary makes one critical point: NASA is woefully underfunded to accomplish its stated goals (Let’s go to the Moon and Mars and beyond!). The committee’s basic message is that, under the current funding profile, NASA can barely retire the space shuttles and the International Space Station. Any ambitious manned space exploration plans will have to be delayed by a minimum of 15-20 years (Bush wanted us to be playing soccer on the Moon by 2020). The committee says an additional $3 billion/year for ten years is required to have a viable manned exploration program, on top of the roughly $10 billion/year currently being spent (for reference, NASA science programs weigh in at under $5 billion/year). As far as space exploration is concerned, the current trajectory isn’t going to get us anywhere.

One interesting aspect of this report is the absence of science. Out of 12 pages, science is mentioned twice. In the third line of the report, we are advised that spaceflight “really is rocket science”. Cute. Towards the end of the introduction, we are told “Human exploration can contribute appropriately to the expansion of scientific knowledge”. The emphasis is theirs, not mine. Perhaps they’re feeling a little defensive? As well they should. From what I can tell, nobody has articulated a compelling scientific case for human beings to go beyond low-Earth orbit. Or even leave Earth, for that matter. From a scientific perspective, the International Space Station has been an unbelievably colossal waste of money. As the Economist tells us, “the useful science that has been done on board could be written up on the back of a postage stamp.” (Sam Ting’s AMS would be an exception. But this is unlikely to have been the most cost-effective way to go about this experiment.) The space shuttle program, on the other hand, has been instrumental in producing amazing science, epitomized by the launching and servicing of the Hubble Space Telescope. Given the immense cost of the shuttle program, however, the science return on investment remains fairly slim. How many space telescopes could have been built and launched by conventional rockets, for the cost of all that shuttle development?

It could be argued that the manned space program is not about science at all. It’s about slipping the surly bonds of Earth and fulfilling our “natural destiny”. There is certainly something compelling about this, although I would argue that the current plans are ludicrously expensive and overly ambitious. My main concern is that the public misses the distinction: NASA sometimes appears to conflate human exploration and basic research. When we talk about sending humans to the Moon or Mars, we’re not talking about scientific exploration. If science is your goal, you send unmanned probes and satellites, at a tiny fraction of the cost. These missions carry no risk to human life, and considerably larger scientific payoff.

Like any science fiction fan, I’m intrigued by the idea of human colonies on the Moon and Mars and beyond. But if these long-term aspirations suck the oxygen out of the room for basic science, humanity on the whole loses out.

Remember a few months back, when we were all excited about the Space Shuttle taking a crew of astronauts to fix and upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope (HST)? At the time, it looked like the repairs worked well (as in, nothing obvious went wrong, electronics woke up and said “hi”, etc). However, until the instruments actually take data, one never knows.

Well, now we know.

The new and refurbished instruments officially kick astronomical butt.

Even better, I’ve been hearing rumors of killer numbers, at least for the imaging cameras — throughputs that are 15% better than measured from the ground, electronic read noises that are lower than before the instruments broke a few years back. I have no numbers on the spectrographs, but the press release photos show some nice looking spectra, which is a zillion percent improvement on the pre-repair state of the telescope, for which the only spectroscopic capabilities were grisms (which only the most studly of spectroscopists dare to use). Phil will probably have more, given his history with one of the refurbished spectrographs.

(For the near-infrared channel of the new imager WFC3, I can personally verify awesomeness. We got some imaging during the last month, and had to sign non-disclosure agreements that we would keep our mouths shut, which was nearly impossible because the data quality was insane.)

Anyways, everyone involved in making this happen should be very proud!

A very cool picture of our Solar Neighborhood. See this and a bunch more at The Neighborhood.

The collection isn’t complete; it focuses on relatively bright stars and those associated with known exoplanets. A slightly more realistic representation would have a lot more small, dim, red stars. Still, I like it.

Forty years ago today Neil Armstrong did what no other member of our species had ever done before when he stepped from the ladder of the lunar lander onto the surface of the moon.

This was an outstanding achievement, by any measure, and one that has become emblematic of what we are capable of. I couldn’t possibly do justice to what it must have meant to people at the time – I was just a few months old when this took place – but there are wonderful accounts all over the web, and I’ve been enjoying reading almost all of them. I’m sure I would have had the same emotions on that day if I hadn’t been busy drooling, filling my diaper, and being forced to take a nap.

Along with these initial reactions to the event, I’ve also been reading other accounts of how the directions of people’s lives were driven by the moon landing. These are also fascinating, and I have been particularly interested by scientists who feel that it was this event that helped fuel their interest in science, because my own experience was somewhat different.

Although I had a healthy interest in science (as well as a lot of other subjects) from an early age, I have never felt that the space landings had an effect on it. I was certainly enthralled by the space program, read magazines about it, and the newspapers, and watched anything that was shown on television about it. I thought about being an astronaut, and fantasized about the excitement of traveling to other planets and beyond. Star Trek presumably had a hand in all this. But what grabbed me was the exploration, and the adventure. Not the science.

My current view is that while there may be a reasonable argument for the manned space program on the basis of exploration (and I find the idea exciting myself), it is hard to make a scientific argument for it. I often hear the argument that the space program is nevertheless useful to science because it inspires people to become scientists, or at least to be interested in science. This must be true at some level, but I’ve never found it a compelling argument. Nevertheless, this isn’t the point I’m trying to support with my comments above – clearly many scientists have felt inspired to be scientists by manned space travel. It just happens that I wasn’t one of them.

In any case, having been suitably serious, awed and humbled by the heroic endeavors of NASA, Armstrong, Aldrin, Collins and those who followed them, I thought I’d leave you with something a little lighter. Here’s British transvestite comedian Eddie Izzard’s (NSFW, due to some naughty language) take on how the astronauts could have made the moon landing even more entertaining.

For a long time, the government has been responsible for space travel in the United States. That’s about to change.

Government is the appropriate agent for certain forms of collective action: roads, public schools, national defense. It’s also good for big-picture things without immediate financial payoff, like support for the arts or basic scientific research. It makes perfect sense for the government to shoulder the burden for developing the technologies to get us into space, and it will continue to make sense for them to play an active role in astronomical research in space. But for commercial purposes, like launching satellites, it ultimately makes a lot more sense for space travel to be a private-sector enterprise. We’re on the brink of seeing it happen.

SpaceX is a private company founded by Elon Musk, who previously co-founded PayPal and the electric car company Tesla Motors. For a while now, SpaceX has been developing reusable launch vehicles and space capsules. They’ve been awarded a contract from NASA to take over re-supplying the International Space Station after the Shuttle fleet is mothballed next year. And they’ve had one launch that reached orbit, but also a few failures; until yesterday, they hadn’t succeeded in putting a satellite into orbit.

But now they’ve done it. I was watching on live webcam last night as the Falcon 1 rocket launched a Malaysian satellite into orbit.

It’s incredibly exciting, but just the beginning. The idea behind the Shuttle was to make trips to orbit cheap, reliable, and routine; it failed spectacularly on all counts, and NASA’s capabilities and plans for space flight have become somewhat disjointed (while its science missions continue to have amazing success). Hopefully we’re moving past the point where we have to rely on the government to get us to space.

The space shuttle Atlantis made a safe landing yesterday morning, capping the end to a truly historic mission. Over the past two weeks the shuttle crew rendezvoused with the Hubble Space Telescope, performed five space walks, fixed two failing instruments (the Advanced Camera for Surveys and the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph), installed two new instruments (the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph and the Wide Field Camera 3), did a host of other repairs and refurbishment, and then released a completely transformed telescope.

We have a tendency to forget just how remarkable this is. It is a highly non-trivial endeavor to send seven people into space (and get them back down safely). It is nothing short of miraculous to have them spend over 30 hours space “walking”, performing a major overhaul of an aging instrument (12 meters by 4 meters, weighing over 13 tons [it's "weightless" in space, of course; though it might have some inertia if you tried to move it]). You’ve got bulky gloves on, you can’t hear anything, you’re floating around with no balance, and you really, really don’t want anything to go wrong. Even something as trivial as a sticky bolt can derail months of preparation and millions of dollars of investment. There is a very slim margin for error.

The Atlantis mission is one of the finest examples of what excites people about manned space flight. It was an incredible success, from start to finish. And we can hope for a decade of mind-blowing science to prove it. It helps that Hubble is perhaps the most remarkable scientific instrument ever built. (Okay, the LHC is pretty cool too, but it doesn’t produce pretty pictures. And it isn’t working yet.) Without a doubt, the fact that Hubble was “serviceable” has played a large role in its success. With its initially flawed optics, Hubble would have been a catastrophic failure. It took a servicing mission to fix it, and provide us with an unparalleled scientific instrument. And now it is as if we have launched a brand new, state-of-the-art Hubble. These appear to be strong arguments in favor of manned maintenance of space telescopes.

But this mission is historic for another reason. It is likely to be the last time in our lives that human beings go to space to “fix” an orbiting scientific instrument. [Granted, prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.] It is incredibly expensive to send human beings up to fiddle on stuff in space. Furthermore, Hubble was placed in low-Earth orbit (600 kilometers up) to facilitate these sorts of repairs, which is a sub-optimal location for a telescope. The successor to Hubble, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), will be placed 1.5 million kilometers away at Lagrange point 2 (WMAP is already there, and Planck and Herschel are on their way). It will be a very long time before humans venture out that far from Earth. JWST is not being designed to be repaired or upgraded; it’s a one-shot deal. The additional costs of sending humans into space far outweigh the benefits. If you want to know whether there’s water on Mars, you send a rover. You do not spend many orders of magnitude more to send a human to dig with a shovel. Although the space shuttle is undeniably cool, and this latest Atlantis mission was astounding, manned space flight is not the economical way to do science.

With the successful landing of Atlantis we celebrate a transformed Hubble telescope. And we mark the end of the current era of human beings tinkering with telescopes in space.

The astronauts have wrapped up repairs on Hubble, and released it back into orbit (as of 8:58 EDT this morning)! This mission was just astounding from beginning to end. I didn’t get a chance to blog about it (because hey, it was sunny for once in Seattle), but Sunday’s repair of STIS was another day of drama, with one of the astronauts literally having to rip a handle off the instrument to get access to the panel they needed to unscrew. (Oh, and get this — they then had to peel off a g*ddm sticker to get at some of the screws! Oy.) Monday featured installation of new “outer blanket layers”, which help insulate the telescope. Installation was smooth, except for an accidental head doink on an antenna by John Grunsfeld (which is the first sign that any of the people up there right now may in fact share genetic material with the likes of me). Phil has been doing a great job keeping up on the spacewalks on Twitter, if you want a more detailed blow-by-blow.

The next phase is “Servicing Mission Observatory Verification” (SMOV), during which all the new instruments are put through their paces. This process is expected to take about 3 months, with early release images coming out in early September, with science programs expected to start running not long after. I’m getting myself prepared to be blown away!

PS. Oh, one random bit from my trip to the launch. I got to meet Dennis Overbye. I felt a bit like an 11 year old girl meeting a Jonas Brother.

John Grunsfeld and Andrew Feustel, celebrating the successful installation of the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph and repair of the Advanced Camera for Surveys: