Happy 50th Birthday NASA

Today I learned that yesterday was the 50th anniversary of NASA's founding, though they'll celebrate again later in the year with much more fanfare. On July 29, 1958, President Eisenhower signed the bill creating NASA into law; NASA formally came into being on October 1, 1958. In less than 11 years, NASA sent the first humans to the moon. In 50 years, NASA has sent probes to every planet in the solar system, launched multiple space telescopes, built two space stations, and much, much more.

When you think about it, our attitude toward space has changed drastically in that short span. In 1958, people argued over if humans could survive in space, or if it were even possible to send rockets to the moon. These days, we argue about whether to send humans to Mars, but the argument is over the cost, not over whether it is possible. Things we take for granted, like satellite communication and navigation, were only dreamed of (if even that!) 50 short years ago. How times have changed!

The strange world of embargoed science

Press releases on scientific discoveries are sometimes "embargoed," meaning that the press is given materials in advance, but only on the condition that the findings not be released before a given date (often the date of a press conference or publication of a magazine). Nature, one of the most prestigious scientific journals, is extraordinarily strict; at one point, they requested that scientists not publish their work as "pre-prints" (copies of articles distributed in advance of official publication, primarily to other scientists in the same field). That borders on being scientifically unethical, as science thrives only on the free flow of information. Thankfully Nature backed down on that request.

Anyway, I'm on a NASA email list with advanced notice of press releases. I'm not sure how I got on the list, but I get notices anyway (I may have requested membership somewhere at some point, but I don't remember). Typically the news is embargoed for a day or two.

Yesterday, I got an announcement about a press release that will be made tomorrow, and strict notice of the media embargo was given. Looking at the release, I had to laugh at how silly the embargo is. The topic is science close to what I work on, and the results have been freely available on our preprint server for six months! The results are also quite intriguing, so I've been chatting about it with colleagues, and I even spoke about it with the science teachers at the workshop I helped lead a couple of weeks ago. So the idea of an embargo is, frankly, silly.

Now, I won't spoil the fun and talk about NASA's release early (there are some cool pictures); I'll talk about it tomorrow. But I'd urge media outlets to re-think the purpose of an embargo. If you are going to make a press release, is there a good reason for embargoing the news? If you just want everyone to get the data at the same time, why not release everything at the time of the press conference (if there is one)?

When We Left Earth

Image Credit: NASA

Last night I watched the first two hours of the Discovery Channel's new NASA documentary, "When We Left Earth," a high-definition (and somewhat starry-eyed) look at NASA's first 50 years of manned spaceflight. Last night covered the Mercury and Gemini programs; next week will cover the Apollo moon exploration program, and in two weeks they'll cover the space shuttle. I thought it was a good documentary, and somewhat timely, as our first astronauts are aging all to quickly, and everyone my age and younger was born after the last moon landing. Alas, I don't have high-definition cable channels (I'm too cheap), so I missed the full impact of the program.

If you missed the program, I'm sure there will be re-runs; if you don't get the Discovery Channel, the DVD is already on sale (and probably available for rental).

It is easy to forget how little we knew about space just 50 years ago (Would the astronauts be able to swallow in space? Would Evel Knievel had been a better astronaut than Niel Armstrong?) and easy to forget how dangerous spaceflight really was and remains. And, as NASA prepares to send humans back to the moon, these are lessons we need to remember.

Sudden changes at NASA

Yesterday, I was talking with a colleague when another astronomer stopped by, poked his head in the door, and whispered worriedly, "Stern is out. Weiler is back in." My colleague's face fell.

This seemingly cryptic quote referred to a staff change at NASA yesterday, when the Associate Administrator for NASA's Science Directorate, Dr. Alan Stern, resigned abruptly. His temporary replacement is Dr. Edward Weiler, presently head of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

Dr. Stern took the job as head of NASA's Science Directorate (the people in charge of robotic space probes, space telescopes, and other non-human outer space science at NASA) just a year ago. Stern quickly endeared himself to many of us by giving a series of town hall-style meetings and making changes to details of NASA funding that most people seemed to think were positive. To have him leave suddenly is therefore quite a shock to many people.

I am not a NASA insider, and since very little of my funding comes through NASA, I've paid little attention to their policies and future projections. I try to stay informed, but I'm not a NASA policy junkie. Many of my colleagues, especially those with lots of NASA funding, understandably are quite tuned in to NASA. And they seem worried by this development.

Why did Stern resign? I really don't know. The resignation came a few days after a flap over funding for the Mars Rovers, and there have been some tough decisions that have been made or were about to be made regarding Mars exploration missions. Or maybe Stern just didn't fit in to the very political climate that exists at the upper echelons of any governmental organization. Or perhaps Stern's vision for NASA science didn't fit in with that of the Administrator (Michael Griffin) and that of the Bush administration (NASA's ultimate boss). Of course, rumors (many contradictory), speculation, and conspiracy theories are already flying around.

For most of us, we really don't know what this change may mean. But, if you like political intrigue and are tired of following the presidential campaign, maybe NASA will be able to give you a fix over the next few weeks.

The Dark Ring

The title to this post sounds like the title of a bad cross between Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, and maybe a little of Wagner's Ring Cycle to boot. But, actually, this is the topic of a press conference NASA will be holding later today to announce some new findings about dark matter.

I'm a little interested in what the press conference has to say, although I expect a lot of the announcement to be overblown (like NASA often does with scientific results). But what is the big deal?

Most of you have probably heard about dark matter -- matter that has gravity but doesn't interact with light, the way normal matter does. There are many different lines of evidence for dark matter. So why would it be big news?

One of the problems with dark matter is that we don't know what it is. Some physics theories predict particles with properties similar to dark matter, but until we actually detect dark matter in the laboratory, dark matter remains just a hypothesis.

There is a competing explanation for the observations of "missing matter" called MOND (for "Modified Newtonian Dynamics"). The MOND hypothesis is that there is not missing matter, just that our theory of gravity is wrong. One of the main problems with MOND has been that it has proven very good at "postdiction," or explaining observations once they have been made, but it hasn't made any predictions that can be tested and, if proven wrong, falsify the theory.

This is a crucial point. Any scientific theory must be able to make predictions that, if proven wrong, falsify the theory. Einstein's General Relativity made several predictions, such as the existence of gravity waves and the changing of time itself in gravity, that were crucial to the whole theory but were not tested until decades later. And relativity passed those tests. Until MOND can make a prediction that both differs from dark matter and, if shown to be wrong, falsifies the theory, MOND remains an interesting concept.

MOND adherents claim the same is true of dark matter, but the best dark matter theories do make a prediction that can falsify dark matter -- the existence of dark matter particles with certain properties. In the coming few decades, particle accelerators on earth should be able to detect signatures of these particles. If we don't detect them, dark matter is wrong.

Today's NASA press conference is going to be about the discovery of a "ring" of dark matter in a cluster of galaxies. We see the evidence for this ring because the gravity from the dark matter distorts light from more distant galaxies, bending them into funny shapes. And, when we look with a variety of instruments, we don't see regular matter shaped in the needed ring. So, the ring must be dark matter. Probably.

About a year ago, NASA made a similar press release from another galaxy cluster where the center of the gravitational pull of the galaxy cluster didn't match up with the visible, ordinary matter. There are probably dozens more galaxy clusters where similar observations can be made, so you will probably see many more press releases in the future. The fact remains, though, that until we detect dark matter in the laboratory, some reasonable scientists will doubt the existence of dark matter.

This may be the best legacy of MOND. I have lots of problems with MOND, too many to type out. But it is forcing astronomers to stay on their toes and look for new ways to test gravity and our theories about the makeup of the Universe. And that is a good thing.

Sad rememberances

This week represents one of the tougher weeks that NASA has ever had. NASA's worst three disasters all happened in a six day span (though spread out over 36 years).

On the late afternoon of January 27, 1967, Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee, the crew of Apollo 1, were running a full scale test of the first Apollo capsule in preparation for a launch sometime that spring. To simulate a launch realistically, the cabin was filled with pure oxygen and pressurized. That evening, as the test was winding down, a spark caused by a short in the wiring occurred, and a fire was started. Since the atmosphere was complete oxygen, the fire was basically an explosion. Opening the door from the inside required the astronauts to remove 12 bolts and to pull the door inwards against the pressure of the interior air. The astronauts had no chance to escape and were killed by smoke inhalation within 20 seconds of the spark.

The day of January 28, 1986 was a snow day for my school in southeastern Pennsylvania. I forgot that the shuttle was supposed to launch that morning (in 6th grade I already loved space), so I was sledding in the backyard when I heard the phone ring. It was my mom, calling from work, to say she heard something about the shuttle landing in the Atlantic Ocean. Being a space nerd, I knew that the shuttle had plans to ditch in the ocean if something bad happened at launch, so I guessed (wrongly) that had happened. I went and turned on the TV to find out that, horribly, the shuttle Challenger had exploded during liftoff.

That morning had also been a cold one in Florida. Ice had formed around the launch pad; no shuttle had been launched in such cold weather. But the launch was to go on. Two previous launch attempts had been scrubbed, and this was a high-profile mission, as teacher ChristaMcAuliffe was on board and would be broadcasting her spaceflight to schools across the country. But the cold weather doomed the space shuttle. In the cold weather, the rubber that made up the seals between parts of the Solid Rocket Boosters became less pliable, and one of the O-rings failed to seal. Hot rocket gas escaped from the side of one of the boosters, eventually causing the external fuel tank to fail, which led todisintegration of the entire vehicle. All seven astronauts, Michael J. Smith, Dick Scobee, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Christa McAuliffe, Gregory Jarvis, and Judith Resnik, lost their lives.

On February 1, 2003, I had just arrived in Tucson, Arizona to start a new job as a postdoctoral researcher there. I was temporarily renting a room in a graduate student's house while I waited for my own apartment to become free. I was going through my normal morning routine and turned on the TV to get the news. The story was alarming -- the Space Shuttle Columbia, returning from a two week mission, was "late" in showing up at Kennedy Space Center.

I knew this was disastrous. Space shuttles cannot be late -- once the rockets fire to bring it back in to the atmosphere, Sir Isaac Newton's gravity takes over. The shuttle's engines cannot fire during re-entry, so it cannot "circle" if there is bad weather or other problems. The fact that it was "late" meant that it was, in reality, lost.

The shuttle Columbia, unbeknownst to anybody, had a hole punctured in its wing during takeoff. During re-entry, super-hot gases (the same gases that burn up meteors) surround the spacecraft. The tiles on the out side of the shuttle protect it from that heat. (I remember seeing an episode of the Today show on a launch day many many years ago, and BryantGumbal was holding, in his bare hands, a shuttle tile that was glowing red-hot and being heated with a blowtorch.) Without protection from the hot gases, the metal on the interior of the wing melted, allowing even more gas in. Eventually the wing failed, and the shuttle tumbled out of control and disintigrated. Rick Husband, William McCool, Michael Anderson, David Brown, Kalpana Chawla, Laurel Clark, and Ilan Ramon, the seven crew members, were lost.

Space flight is dangerous. Human beings are not designed for space. So while it is very sad that these 17 astronauts (plus at least another four Russian cosmonauts, and many more from around the world killed in training accidents) died in space, they knew the dangers they were facing.

But the saddest part is that all of these three accidents were preventable. Before each accident, some people were worried about the root causes. And while we must remember that hindsight is always perfect, and remember that somebody is always worrying about something, and remember that we can never make spaceflight 100% safe, we must seek out the human failures that led to these disasters. We must make whatever cultural changes need to be made to prevent those human failures from causing any more deaths.

Sad to say, we will lose more people in space, someday. As private industry begins to send people into space, some of those will be killed, too. So now is the time for each of you to ask yourselves, what is an acceptable limit on losses? For what are we asking astronauts to risk their lives? How much risk should we allow private citizens who pay to go into space to be placed in?

These are questions that I cannot answer, because each person will have a different opinion. Over time, spaceflight will get safer and more reliable. We've seen this happen with airplanes. With boats. With cars. But also, we cannot be negligent and allow people to put their lives and those of others in needless risk. Having such discussions now, and not after the next disaster, should be the legacy of this week, of those we lost in our first tentative steps into the cosmos.

To read NASA administrator Michael Griffen's remarks on NASA's Day ofRemembrance, click here.