[Maggie's blog] Next Gen Engineers and Scientists Study a Next Gen Telescope

Another school year has come and gone – as has another RealWorld/InWorld (RWIW) Engineering Design Challenge, this year sponsored by the James Webb Space Telescope. I last wrote about this awesome student program in November – and since then we’ve had InWorld Q&A’s with James Webb Space Telescope project members, the presentation and evaluation of the six finalist teams’ projects – and had the winning team out to NASA Goddard to present their work and tour our facilities here.

The Six Finalists, Credit: NIA

RWIW is a terrific Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) project, developed by teacher Sharon Bowers, that allows teams of middle and high school students to solve engineering problems rooted in real life. The Real World portion of RWIW takes place in the classroom – and at the end of that unit, students can elect to move into a virtual world much like Second Life. The cool thing about the InWorld portion of this project, is that the student teams don’t have to be geographically located in the same place. In fact, when the winning team came out to Goddard to present their project, it was actually the first time they’d presented it while all being in the same room together! One of the other finalist teams had members spread out all over the US as well as a team member in Germany!

In this year’s RWIW engineering design challenge, teams chose between coming up with new mirror or a new sunshield design for the James Webb Space Telescope, as well as an associated spin-off technology. The winning team chose to develop a sunshield design, and their spinoff was a starshield.

Here are some screenshots of their presentation:

Credit: NIA

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[What's This?] #4 – The big reveal!

In our latest entry in the What’s This? series, we posted a mysterious image and asked for people to guess what they were looking at.

So what is this tall thing in NASA Goddard’s cleanroom?

We had a lot of great guesses – a number of people guessed it was a stand of some sort. Or a Russian rocket gyro nose piece. Or the secondary mirror boom for JWST. Or a UV lamp. Or a “nose-picker.” Or where the NASA 8-ball team stores their pool cues. We even had someone ask if it was cheating if it was his budget that pays for what goes on top of it. (Yes, Scott, it is!)

But the only person to get it right (though we don’t know how much inside info they had), was Anthony Cotto, who said it was a “massive theodilite stand.”

The full answer is that it’s a metrology tower. (Metrology, simply put, is the science of measurement.) In this case, techs put theodolites (which are precision instruments for measuring angles) on the towers and then measure positions on hardware, much like surveying, but with more emphasis on all three dimensions rather than just two. The red object nearby is another metrology tower, just shorter. Many towers are height-adjustable. With several theodolites on different towers, positions on things like science instruments and mounting points on space hardware can be measured with pretty amazing precision, down to thousandths of an inch.

Many thanks to Paul Geithner for this explanation.

And congrats to Anthony for guessing the correct answer!

[podcast] Ring around the Exoplanet

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Transcript (Text, PDF)

A college friend of Maggie’s, Dr. Eric Mamajek, discovered a cool potential exoplanet system that might also have a ring system – we reported on it last January after the American Astronomical Society exhibit. We checked with Eric a year later to talk more about his discovery, any updates, and the art done of his potential exoplanet system by Ron Miller, who we also recently interviewed (part one, part two).

Here is Ron Miller’s artwork, showing one possibility of what this system might look like.

Image courtesy of Ron Miller

Image courtesy of Ron Miller

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[What's This?] #4 – May 28, 2013

We haven’t had a What’s This? in a long time! This one is a little different than the previous ones we’ve done. Your hint is that this image is from our giant cleanroom at NASA Goddard. So check it out and try to figure out… what’s this object?

Post your guesses as comments to this post, comment on our Facebook wall, or tweet them to us (@NASAblueshift) with the #whatsthis hashtag.

We’ll reveal the answer at the end of the week, and we’ll also post the names of those who guessed correctly!

Please note: Comments on the NASA Blueshift blog are moderated, and we’ll approve them as quickly as we can during business hours on business days.

[podcast] The Art of Space, Part 2

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Transcript (Text, PDF)

This is the second part of our interview with space artist, Ron Miller. He’s an author, illustrator, former art director for the National Air & Space Museum’s Albert Einstein planetarium, and his work is truly inspirational! Here is Part 1 of our interview where we talk about how he got into the digital medium, his philosophy on space art, and how he researches his pieces. In Part 2, we talk more about exoplanets, and look at and discuss specific pieces of his art. We followed these episodes about space art with an interview with Dr. Eric Mamajek, whose discovery of a potential exoplanet system was visualized by Ron Miller.

Below you’ll find the art we discuss in the podcast.

These pieces have very realistically rendered nebulae which we thought resembled real Hubble data.

“Rogue Planet” Image Courtesy of Ron Miller

This one is an artist’s impression of planets orbiting a pulsar. The first exoplanet system discovered was one around a pulsar. Dr. Aleksander Wolszczan from Penn State was one of the scientists who made this discovery. He was an astronomy professor of both Eric Mamajek (whose own exoplanet discovery we discuss in this podcast) and Blueshift’s Maggie Masetti, not long after his discovery.

Image Courtesy of Ron Miller

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[Blueshift ponders...] What’s one misconception in astronomy that drives you crazy?

Blueshift has covered the bad science in movies. In today’s “Blueshift Ponders,” we asked several of our colleagues:

What’s one misconception in astronomy drives you crazy?

Here are are their answers! What are yours? Tell us yours either in the comments, or on Facebook or Twitter!

Korey Haynes: The “dark” side of the moon misnomer. It’s just the far side! But I think the misleading terms people use contribute to why it’s so hard for most people to understand how the moon moves with respect to us and the sun. Maybe we need to launch a campaign to make Gary Larson more famous than Pink Floyd?

The far side of the moon, Credit: Apollo 16 Crew, NASA

Brian Williams: The misconception that drives me crazy is how people view scientists in general from a societal standpoint. The “stereotypical” scientists are socially awkward geeks (usually male) who could easily be picked out of a crowd of “normal” people. Television shows and movies don’t do anything to help here, with shows like The Big Bang Theory (which I do generally like, but still) reinforcing these stereotypes to the extreme (4 nerdy scientists who hang out with a pretty blonde girl). As funny as shows like this are, the fallacy being promoted is that you can be cool or you can be smart, but you can’t be both. In truth, we’re just like everyone else, and some of us are actually pretty cool people. :)

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[podcast] The Art of Space, Part 1

Click to listen! (10MB MP3, right-click to save)
Transcript (Text, PDF)

Blueshift recently interviewed space artist Ron Miller. Not only is he an amazingly talented illustrator, but he’s also the author, consultant, and former art director for the National Air & Space Museum’s Albert Einstein planetarium. He’s written and illustrated many books, one of which, “Out of the Cradle,” is a classic and a huge inspiration to our generation.

We recently came across his art illustrating a news article about an unusual exoplanet system which might actually have a ring system like Saturn’s. This led us to Ron and resulted in a two part podcast all about his extraordinary work. This is part 1. You’ll find examples of Ron’s art below. You can also listen to the second part of this interview with Ron, and a follow-up interview with Dr. Eric Mamajek about a potential exoplanet system that he discovered and Ron visualized.

Artist impression of Kepler 47c.
Image Courtesy of Ron Miller

Artist impression of the birth of KOI 55-01 and KOI 55-02.
Image Courtesy of Ron Miller

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[Maggie's blog] Come Together

If you’re at all a fan of astronomy, you’ve probably marveled over the many beautiful photos of spiral galaxies that are out there. Like this one of NGC 3344 captured by the Hubble Space Telescope.

Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA

But you may not know that galaxies have not always looked this way. The grand spirals we are so familiar with were formed over the course of billions of years by the collisions of smaller galaxies. Though, when spirals collide with a similar-sized galaxy, the disruption can cause them to merge and evolve into a giant elliptical galaxy. According to an article in Nature News, based on a survey of galaxy shape and structure (current to 2009), it is thought that “nearly all massive galaxies have undergone at least one major merger since the Universe was 6 billion years old.”

Giant elliptical galaxy, M87, located in the Virgo cluster

When we look at very distant galaxies, we see a completely different picture. Older galaxies tend to be small and clumpy, often with a lot of star formation occurring in the massive clumps. The question of how these clumpy galaxies evolve and develop structure over time is a big open question in astronomy, and we hope that the powerful up-and-coming James Webb Space Telescope will help astronomers to learn more.

Clumpy galaxy spied by the Hubble

Clumpy galaxies spied by the Hubble

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[Maggie's blog] Comet Watch

If you’re an astronomy buff, you might know that Comet Pan-STARRS has been gracing our early evening skies over the last few weeks. I was pretty excited about this because when I was in college, we had two spectacularly bright comets appear – Hayakutake and Hale-Bopp – a year apart.

Pan-STARRS definitely wasn’t the same experience for me as those two bright comets were. Though Pan-STARRS did apparently get bright enough to be naked-eye visible, you had to be at a dark location. It was also a tricky comet to view, because it was at its nearest approach to the Sun, which put it close to the Sun in the sky. This also meant that the comet was very low on the horizon, and it wasn’t visible for terribly long after sunset. It was a balancing act of waiting for the comet to be dark enough to view, without it being too low in the sky. Another disadvantage we had was that Washington, DC is directly to the west of our house, so the lights of the city tend to wash out that part of the sky. Without a known dark-sky site within a reasonable distance, my husband and I tried to be backyard astronomers instead.

We tried twice without binoculars with no luck. Then we ordered a pair, and the timing worked in our favor. We were clouded out for a few days, but by the time the binoculars arrived, it had cleared up. One more try from the backyard failed, and then we got the idea of going up onto the roof of our house. Almost immediately the comet was spotted… just before it set behind the trees.

We managed to catch it on a second night – and I am glad I saw it. But I’m still hoping that Comet C/2012 S1 (ISON), due in November, will be even brighter and as spectacular as the comets of my youth.

I did attempt to see if an iPhone could register Pan-STARRS through binoculars. The answer? Yes. But it looks like a single bright pixel:

Credit: Maggie Masetti

In contrast, here are *cough* scans of film pictures I took of Hayakutake (top) and Hale-Bopp (bottom) – Hayakutake was particularly stunning, and in a dark sky, its tail seemed to span the whole sky.

Credit: Maggie Masetti

Credit: Maggie Masetti

Though my pic of Pan-STARRS was unspectacular, there have been some really lovely photos of it. Some of my friends volunteered their own, and others I’ve seen online.

Here’s one taken by my friend Craig Markwardt from NASA Goddard:

Credit: Craig Markwardt

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[Koji's blog] A Victorian Scandal

A recent event reminded me of a scandal of a sort that happened around 1850. At the center of it was John Russell Hind, a British astronomer (I mentioned him in a previous blog about archives).

Hind was a superb observer who knew the sky very well. He discovered many interesting objects outside the solar system, but his main passion was the discovery of asteroids. He ended up discovering 10 of the first 30 asteroids known, which is quite a feat considering how hot this field was at the time. As the discoverer, he got to name these asteroids. At the time, asteroid names were picked from mythology – such as Ceres, Pallas, Juno, and Vesta, the names of the first 4 asteroids known.

Hind named the first two asteroids he discovered (nos. 7 and 8 overall) Iris and Flora. These sound more like old-fashioned women’s names to me, but they certainly are names from classical mythology, and so they passed without comments. Hind then picked the name “Victoria” for one of his later discoveries.

There was a reaction to this choice: “we are not amused” would be one way to put it. “You can’t name an asteroid after *your* queen,” would be another. Hind claimed, however, that he took the name from Roman mythology, in which Victoria is the goddess of victory. It was pure coincidence, according to him, that his sovereign, the Queen of the British Empire, was also called Victoria.

This composite image shows the comparative sizes of eight asteroids. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/JAXA/ESA

Fast forward 160 years or so. Recently, there was an internet poll to pick the names of a couple of small moons of Pluto. The clear winner: Vulcan. Some people said “you can’t name a moon of Pluto after a Star Trek planet.” (Sounds familiar?) Others countered
“but Vulcan is the god of fire in Roman mythology.” (Sounds familiar?) Some things never change, or so it seems, including the name of the asteroid no. 12 – still called Victoria, despite the initial objections.

So, the Star Trek connection probably will not disqualify the proposed name, Vulcan. Still, I’m not a big fan of this pick – wouldn’t you rather name a much hotter world after the god of fire, like one of the “hot Jupiters”?

Right now, exoplanets have relatively boring names – designated with lower case “b”, “c” etc. after the name of the parent star. Things could get very interesting, if astronomers ever decide to give them proper names.

Pluto and its moons, as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope, Credit: NASA, ESA, and L. Frattare (STScI)