The scene: July 9, 2005, nearly midnight. A large conference room at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center full of assorted scientists, engineers, and support staff. This was the launch party for Astro-E2, a joint Japanese-American satellite mission strapped to a rocket thousands of miles away from Goddard at Uchinoura Space Center in southern Japan. The lucky few were at the launch site, and the rest of us showed up at work on a Saturday night to celebrate.
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Astronomers have a funny way of talking about things sometimes. Take temperature, for example. When scientists say something is “hot,” they aren’t talking about “hot” like the Sahara desert, or “hot” like the seat of your car on a summer day. No, they’re talking about an unimaginably high temperature beyond that which any humans (or spacecraft) can stand. Then when they say “cold,” they might mean an equally extreme temperature… or a temperature that doesn’t seem that cold to our bodies. Compared to the searing heat of the Sun, the Earth’s climate seems downright frigid!
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Some people just have a knack for building things, or taking things apart to make them work better. My grandfather is one of these people – he looks at the stuff he uses everyday and tinkers with it to make it better suit his needs. As a kid, I laughed at his toaster tongs (so you don’t burn your fingers), his long-reach grasping device (so you can reach things beyond arm’s length), and his half-sized roll of paper towels (so you get exactly how much you want). As an adult, I recognize the sheer practicality of each of these items. And I’ve also seen very similar items pop up on the shelves of the supermarket or on late-night infomercials.
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If you look at a calendar, it seems like every day is a holiday somewhere in the world. Today is Flag Day in Aruba. It’s also celebrated as the Pillsbury Doughboy’s birthday. And tomorrow is National Chocolate Caramel Day… I’m not kidding. It also seems like every year is the “year of” something. Some of these have cultural or mythological significance. Others are decreed by national or international governments. 2009 has been chosen as the International Year of Astronomy by the International Astronomical Union and endorsed by the United Nations. So it’s official, but what does it mean? Why should we care?
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It took a couple of extra days to get our latest episode finished, thanks in part to our first real winter storm of the year! In Maryland, we definitely experience all four seasons. We get hot, humid summers and cold, crisp winters – plus occasionally some extreme weather like snow, hurricanes, and tornadoes. This “weather sampler” is a taste of everything in moderation, but it’s generally a temperate and comfortable place to live.
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Growing up just outside of Washington, DC, I didn’t have many opportunities to observe the sky and see more than a handful of faint stars. It was exciting to go camping farther from the city and see so many more twinkling lights in the sky. And I always enjoyed my trips to the planetarium – a chance to see what the sky was supposed to look like!
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Today’s episode focuses on a surprising result found by a NASA balloon-borne experiment. We chose this story because it highlights the excitement and uncertainty in any scientific experiment – you never know what you’ll find. Will your data support your predictions, contradict them, or point you in an entirely new direction? ARCADE was launched to look for the radio signals of the first stars in the Universe, but their detector found a strange, strong signal coming from deep space. What is it? Good question.
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If you’ve visited Blueshift before, you’re probably wondering… hey, where have you been for the last year? We released six podcasts in 2007 but got a lot of mixed feedback from listeners about the content and structure. We decided to take some time off to re-think and get a better handle on our Blueshift audience and what they wanted. We asked questions – a lot of questions – and finally felt like we knew what you wanted us to create!
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Blogs | Sara Mitchell | 
May 18, 2009 3:59 pm | 
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