Stephen Colbert + ISS =

Here's a bit of pop culture crashing into space science. As you may recall from an earlier post, NASA encouraged the public to help select a name for the new node on the International Space Station. Well, the public heard, and maybe not in the way NASA anticipated. Stephen Colbert, of the Colbert Report, encouraged his viewers to vote not for the NASA suggested names but for the name "Colbert" as a write-in. And they did. In fact, Colbert got more votes than any other name.
Does that mean that NASA is obligated to follow the vox populi and give Colbert his/its due? Nope. The fine print indicates that the agency will take voter feedback into consideration, but may select a different name. Did you vote?

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Space Module: Colbert - Name NASA's Node 3 After Stephen
comedycentral.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor NASA Name Contest

Saturn and Its Moons

Enjoy this beautiful image, and if you want to know more, read on!


This image is a quadruple transit of four of Saturn's moons: Enceladus, Dione, Titan and Mimas. Titan is the largest one, and you can easily see the shadow of Titan on the cloudy "surface" of Saturn. For a bigger image, click on the image to go the Hubble website. I definitely recommend it, it's breathtaking in high resolution.

GLOBE At Night

This week marks the start of GLOBE At Night. (This is known to those of us in the biz as GaN.) The goal of GaN is to get a broad survey of light pollution from all around the world. How can this be done? Simple - by you! All you need to do is look at their magnitude charts (magnitude is the measure of how bright something is), and compare your view of Orion with those charts to determine how many stars you can see. Then report your results (it takes about a minute and half the first time, less on subsequent visits). Lather, rinse and repeat as many times as you like between March 16 and 28.
Why would we do this? Is there any sort of point to this exercise? Of course. I wouldn't waste my precious blogging breath to tell you about it if there weren't. Many people have never even heard about light pollution, but I'm going to assume that you are intelligent enough to realize that light pollution is the result of so many city lights pointed up instead down that the light of the stars is drowned out. By participating, you're helping collect data on local light pollution. In short, you're odoing citizen science. In addition, you can download family activity packs, school lesson plans and nifty posters and postcards. So go out tonight and do your part!

Don't Let My Technical Issues Stop You...

...from finding out more about the launch of the Kepler spacecraft! NASA says that the launch window is 10:49 to 10:52 PM, with a second window at 11:13 to 11:16 PM ET. We'll be camping in the Everglades, so we will be on the lookout. (Hopefully Little Dudestronomer will be asleep by now.)
I meant to post more, but we're having some gigantic virus issues here at home, so you'll just have to wait to hear more from me. I'll be sure to update you when we get back from our little expedition and/or our computer will start up properly.

One In a Million

Well, really it's more like one in a hundred billion. We're talking about our Earth, and estimates of how many Earth-like planets there could be in our galaxy.
If you're as old as I am (or older, or a bit younger), you'll recall being taught in school that there were only 9 planets in the universe. Not our solar system, not our galaxy, only 9 in the entire universe. That's a total of nine worlds that we knew of, in all of space, everywhere we knew of. That was a pretty lonely prospect. And if you're like me, it made you think that solar systems like ours must be extremely (almost impossibly) rare.
That all changed when I was in high school. In 1995, the first year I worked at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, I came into the Space Lab for my work shift and saw a newspaper clipping on our news board. The article itself didn't seem anymore spectacular than the others we had up at the time, but when I read it, my heart skipped a beat: scientists had found a planet orbiting a star called 51 Pegasi. The planet was a gas giant about half the mass of Jupiter that orbited at an incredible 4.23 days! To put that in perspective, Mercury takes 88 days to orbit the sun.
This was the beginning of a revolution (no pun intended) in planetary science. First of all, we knew there were other solar systems out there. Secondly, this first one was dramatically different from our own. Finally, and perhaps most incredibly, no one could see this world - its existence was extrapolated using mathematics.
51 Pegasus b (as this planet has been dubbed - "51 Peg a" would be the host star) was found using a method called spectroscopy. If you're familiar with this technique, skip to the next paragraph. If not, it's not too complicated; read on. Anything with mass has gravity, and the more mass you have, the more gravity you have. That is to say, the sun exerts its gravity on us, but we also exert a lesser gravitational force on it. In fact, although we say we orbit the sun, both the sun and Earth orbit a central point that is within the physical space of the sun, but not at the sun's center. If you watched to sun from another point in space, you would see the sun orbit around this central point; it wouldn't make a huge arcing circle, it would just seem to wobble in place. Spectroscopy measures the wobble of stars by looking for very regular (but extremely slight) changes in its distance to Earth. This method is sometimes called Doppler spectroscopy because it relies on measuring the Doppler effect of these stars, light red-shifting or blue-shifting as it comes to Earth. Here's a diagram from Wikipedia:

Now astronomers use a variety of methods for detecting planets that orbit other stars. We'll discuss later in the week, as we get closer to the launch of the Kepler mission. You'll be hearing about it in the news, and I have no less enthusiasm for the topic than the rest of the world. So stay tuned!
In the meantime, console yourself with this thought - Earth may be one in a hundred billion, but at least it's not alone.

New News This Week

In this week's space science news, NASA announced a new launch date for the shuttle, pending safety approval on hydrogen flow control valves. The tentative date is March 12. They have also named a chair of the investigation committee for the failed launch of the Orbiting Carbon Observatory.
Anticipation is building for the March 6 launch of the Kepler spacecraft. You'll be hearing lots more about this one next week because I'm very excited about it, but in a sentence, it's a spacecraft designed to look for Earth-like planets orbiting other stars in our galaxy.
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has gone into safe mode after the automated safety response registered an anomalous event. Some conjectures as to the event include cosmic rays hitting the electronics panel. In the meantime, it continues to function and engineers hope to have it functioning normally again by early next week.
The Chandra X-ray Observatory has found the oldest pulsar ever observed. Despite its age (about 200 million years old), it's surprisingly active. It's also one of the nearest pulsars to us, at a mere 770 light years from Earth.
Finally, we'll end with the most controversial story of the week, the inclusion of $2 million for "the promotion of astronomy" in Hawaii at the Imiloa Science Center as part of the Omnibus spending bill. While certainly not one of the bigger ticket items, conservatives like John McCain have criticized this as pork. In fact, Sen. McCain went as far as to label it the #2 Porkiest Porkiest Project in a recent tweet. He says, "...because nothing says new jobs for average Americans like investing in astronomy." This isn't the first time McCain has expressed displeasure at spending in astronomical arenas. Towards the end of his campaign, he made frequent disparaging remarks about then-Senator Obama's proposed $3 million for renovations at America's first planetarium, the Adler Planetarium in Chicago; unfortunately, McCain repeatedly referred the the planetarium as an "overhead projector." The astronomy community is once again abuzz with discussion of the importance (or lack thereof) of astronomy education in our country.

Sad News For NASA Mission

NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory launched from Vanderberg Air Force Base at 1:55 AM local time, but as it headed its orbital path intended to study Earth's atmosphere, the shroud (a hard casing that protected the instrument during launch) failed to separate. This caused the satellite to crash into the Pacific Ocean near Antarctica. This 8 year project had an estimated cost of $278 million. NASA's press release is available at this link.
It's always interesting to me that when a spacecraft launches/lands/arrives successfully, NASA releases very exciting headlines. See this release from January 2004, when Spirit arrived on Mars. But when a mission goes badly, they come up with the most boring headline ever, as if they would prefer that you skip right over it. If you read the link I posted above for this most recent press release, you'll see that it avoids colorful terms like "crash," or "ruined;" it simply "failed to reach orbit." However, this Reuters release isn't nearly as circumspect; look for phrases like "dooming the mission" and "botched satellite launch." In the end, I guess NASA is only human.
Also, if you're the kind of person who thinks NASA is a huge waste of taxpayers' dollars and this is just one of many examples of that, now's the time to post your rant in the comments section. If you disagree, please feel free to say so as well. (Let's keep it civil, please.)

R.I.P.
Orbiting Carbon Observatory