Watching Our Favorite Star

"The problem is with the sun."
"The sun? What is it?"
"A big ball of gas at the center of our solar system, but that isn't important right now."
--Airplane 2: The Sequel

Most of us have general notions about the star at the center of our solar system: bright, big (compared to Earth, average or small compared to a lot of other stars), yellow, type G, 4.6 billion years old (but wearing it well), warm enough to allow liquid water 93 million miles out, boring.

So why should we be concerned about it in Huntsville, Alabama, aside from the fact that we've had temperatures in the upper 90s for the last week? Well, the latest telescope for sun watching is being built for an observatory at Haleakala, a mountain in Maui, Hawai'i. The administrative and research offices for this new telescope need to be attached to a research university, and the competition is down to Boulder, Colorado, and Huntsville. The team here in Huntsville includes the National Space Science and Technology Center (NSSTC) and the University of Alabama-Huntsville, and they gave a public talk on Saturday about the Haleakala Advanced Technology Solar Telescope (ATST--yep, another acronym). The talk was sponsored by my friends at Huntsville Space Professionals, who hosted the space career fair at ISDC.

Dr. John Horack, head of UAH's research office, gave some introductory remarks about ATST, explaining the importance of attaching "the premier ground-based solar observatory to the premier space-based observatories"--specifically, the Japanese probe Hinode, the Solar Dynamics Observatory, and the Marshall Space Flight Center-based Solar Physics group, which had a hand in developing the big X-shaped solar telescope in Skylab back in the 1970s.

The bulk of the talk was given by Mr. David Dooling, who is also a member of the Huntsville pitch team. He provided some eye-opening pictures and thoughts about why we should be concerned about our allegedly "boring" stellar neighbor.

Let's start with what the sun is: a naturally occurring nuclear bomb, converting billions of tons of hydrogen into helium through nuclear fusion and generating radiation in nearly every wavelength. This bomb also has a very intense magnetic field, which twists around its axis of rotation and interacts with its charged outer reaches in cells, loops, and whorls, "as if the sun was covered with tens of millions of lava lamps," as Dooling put it. Sometimes those loops of magnetic force, many times the size of Earth itself, burst forth from the sun's surface as fiery arcs called prominences or escape the sun's gravity entirely and blast forth into the solar system as solar flares.

Solar "weather" events can be deadly to astronauts outside the Earth's magnetosphere, as they consist of highly charged particles. One of the largest solar flares ever recorded occurred between Apollo 16 and Apollo 17; had it occurred while our astronauts were on the moon, it is likely that the astronauts would of died of radiation sickness.

The sun can't just create havoc in space--it can do so here on Earth. In the 19th century, a solar event overloaded what was then the world telegraph network. During World War II, the German fleet was able to escape the British fleet in broad daylight, in part because a geomagnetic storm blinded British radar. A massive blackout in Quebec in 1989 was caused by solar activity, also damaging global positioning satellites in the process. For such a "quiet" or "boring" star, why does our sun have such violent tendencies? How are those tendencies created, and when are they likely to cause damage? These are the sorts of mysteries the new 4-meter telescope at Haleakala will attempt to unravel.

The Haleakala telescope is being designed to observe the sun in wavelengths ranging from near-ultraviolet to optical to far-infrared. It is being built and deployed on the ground because launching a 4-meter telescope into space is cost-prohibitive. Plus, thanks to adaptive optics developed by the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, formerly known as the "Star Wars" program), Earth-based telescopes can now account for distortions in the atmosphere, giving the ATST a clear view of the sun without needing to go into space. It will concentrate its studies on the 630.2 and 430 nanometer wavelengths, as these will provide the best views of the sun's magnetic field activities as well as provide high-contrast images of the sun's bright surface, enabling scientists on Earth to see the details of the sun in action.

How does a telescope this big work? Most people's personal experience with telescopes are with the optical telescopes one can buy at a science-themed hobby shop, where one looks right down the barrel toward the objects in question. Given that it's a bad idea to stare at the sun with the naked eye, it's an even worse idea to gaze up close at the sun. Like most modern astronomical telescopes, the ATST is a reflecting telescope, capturing light from a 4-meter opening in a rotating/elevating building, the primary mirror reflects it to another mirror, and then several others before it is broken up by a series of prisms and filters. The images of the sun are then directed into several different instruments, each looking for specific aspects of the sun's behavior in specific wavelengths. The instruments for ATST are still in development, and are expected to be finished in five years, just around the time the building itself is completed.

What all goes into building such a complex piece of equipment? The ATST has a budget ceiling of $298 million, $145 of that paid out of the "stimulus" bill, the rest to come through regular National Science Foundation funding. It's not going to be an easy project. The Hawai'ians are concerned about the ATST's location on a sacred mountain. It's also on literally shaky ground because Hawai'i lies on a fault line and is subject to regular earthquakes. The heat generated by all that reflected light of the telescope can create difficult heat management issues inside and outside the observatory, where temperatures must be kept constant within 1 degree. And at the end of its 50-year life, ATST is to be dismantled as part of its environmental remediation plans. It is not an easy project, and development work will no doubt continue throughout the mission.

And Huntsville is in the running to be the administrative and research center for the project. I'm cheering on the home team, of course, but I'm looking forward to the outcome of ATST's research, regardless. If you had a bomb in your back yard, wouldn't you want to know what makes it tick?

ISDC 2011: The Countdown Continues

We're now at about T-minus 9 days until the first ISDC activity starts: a tour of the United Launch Alliance plant in Decatur, Alabama. We're getting down to the brass tacks and nit-picky details that are the bane of any event planner's existence, but they're also things that need to get done. We'll get there, but I'll probably make myself crazy over the next nine days making sure that we do.

Speaking of tours, we have included tours to NASA Marshall Space Flight Center (due date for international visitors has passed, deadline for U.S. Citizens is TODAY!), the Von Braun Astronomical Society (full), and the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology (also full, or close to it).

The good news is that we have our primary speakers lined up, and we've got some impressive ones. Our keynote speaker at the Governors Dinner/Gala, Robert Bigelow, for one. His company has been building inflatable space stations, and one of our primary sponsors, Dynetics, has been building the reaction control system for the next one to go up there. We've never had Bigelow at an ISDC before, so that's something of a distinction (got to thank our friend at Dynetics, Tim Pickens, for that). We're featuring past astronauts, current NASA center directors, folks from commercial ("New") space, traditional aerospace companies, space advocacy groups, academia, and international organizations. If you're in the neighborhood and can't afford to do all four days, we do have a one-day registrations you can purchase, and you also can purchase meal tickets.

We've filled up our hotel block at Embassy Suites, but you might be able to find non-block rooms there. Holiday Inn is right across the street from Embassy, and last I heard they still had rooms. Most of the action will be happening at the Von Braun Center, though the one-day Space Investment Summit will occur at Embassy. If you're an ISDC attendee, your price for SIS drops from $125 to $50, so that's definitely worth investigating!

Among our participants are over 130 students from around the world, all of whom participated in the Space Settlement Design Contest. They'll be on hand to show off their work during poster sessions set in the exhibit area. We've got seven of the Google Lunar X PRIZE teams showing up for our Saturday plenary to talk about their projects and, hopefully, show off their hardware. NASA will have a 30' X 30' booth in the exhibit area, as will the U.S. Space & Rocket Center. We've also brought in UAHuntsville, Dynetics, ATK, Astro- und Feinwerktechnik Adlershof GmbH (please don't ask me how to pronounce that), NASA Federal Credit Union, and others. Our major sponsors include Boeing, Dynetics, UAHuntsville, Space News, and Space Canada.

In addition to the paid programming, we will have some freebie activities for the general public, including a space career fair for job seekers (participants include Dynetics and Aerojet) and a book fair, where eminent space authors will be discussing the future of space and signing/selling their books.

Exciting stuff! As it was while I was working at Walt Disney World, so it is here: my job is to make sure others are having a good time and getting the most out of their experience. I'll get to play tourist and have fun of my own later. Meanwhile, I hope to see you there. If you're interested in what the future of humans in space will look like, and learning how we can grow a spacefaring civilization "from the ground up" (our conference theme), then ISDC is the place for you, May 18-22. See you there!

What Hurts the Most

I had a good chat with one of my civil service customers yesterday about this situation. Neither of us like it. We'd both rather continue with The Mission. And that's one thing that gets left out of a lot of "calculations" about workforce and budgets: the people who come to NASA to work are there because they believe in human space exploration beyond low-Earth orbit. We're not there to kill or fill time (okay, there might be some like that, but there aren't many, and there are certainly easier places/jobs to do that, yes?).

I got a master's degree in technical communication so I could work in the space business. Specifically, I wanted to support human space exploration. The Space Station, Hubble Space Telescope, Mars Rovers, and the rest are all very cool, and it'd be fun to work on those, too, if it comes to that. But the reason I came to Huntsville, Alabama, was to work on a mission to send human beings where they'd never been before. The whole Star Trek thing.




That stuff matters, and it hurts to see it go away because a lot of us believed we were doing good work. I have not questioned going into work a single day at NASA. I know why I'm there, and I believe in the rightness of the task, even if my role is only communicating about it, not building the stuff. I salute those who do, and the ones brave enough to get up there and fly the hardware and put on hard suits to walk on other worlds. Regardless of the future direction of the agency, we will continue to need those skills and those people. The road to space will still go through Huntsville.

Potpourri CXIV

Got a lot of stuff that has backed up in my inbox, but I'll do my best to clear it out before I head off to do Food & Football Day with friends.

New from Hu:

• A report that says Mars life might've been brought to Earth. Swell...so where did the Mars life go? Death by global cooling?
• NASA looking at an asteroid mission as a prep for going to Mars.

From Doc: Jim Henson's company is still putting out new Muppet material. Here's Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" as rendered by the madness that is the Electric Mayhem. As Dr. OZMG would put it, "So cool it hurts."

From Lin:

• It's possible...just possible, mind you...that there might be a lot of waste included in the proposed government health care bill.

Found this on YouTube: a video on the Ares I-X mission by one of the folks down at KSC. Some great sites you normally don't see.

Another item from YouTube...an "autotune" mashup of Richard Feynman, Carl Sagan, Bill Nye the Science Guy, and Neil de Grasse Tyson.

From Father Dan, an online app from Disney that allows you to enjoy personalized holiday greetings. Gotta confess, I could only handle the cute for about a minute before closing. Your mileage may vary.

Speaking of Dr. OZMG, she introduced me to a couple of very large words/terms from her world of Psych-Doc-ness, which seemed interesting enough to share:

• Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)
• Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT)

And in case I can ever coax her into the space biz, she might give this book a look: Choosing the Right Stuff: The Psychological Selection of Astronauts and Cosmonauts.

Apparently the global warming/cooling/climate change debate isn't as "settled" as some would like to assume. A series of emails from the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) show that there was quite a bit of argument behind the scenes, as well as accusations that any data or arguments that might prove the human-made climate change thesis wrong were suppressed. Meanwhile, documents coming out of Britain's University of East Anglia show that data might have been massaged to downplay or gloss over the fact that average global temperatures have been dropping the past several years. I have no problem with investigating how climate works and what impact humans have upon it, but I think it's a dubious practice, at best, to start with a conclusion in mind and start dictating very costly policies when the data are either still inconclusive--or worse, being fabricated.

And speaking of the climate debate, there's a video out there that is particularly gruesome. To the sound of jets flying overhead, we see polar bears falling from the sky and landing on a cityscape in rather horrific and bloody ways. The message being: every short-haul air flight you make generates 400 pounds of carbon dioxide, the equivalent weight of a polar bear. See my comments above. This is just nasty.

Eighty-one members of the House of Representatives have signed a bipartisan letter of support of the space program.

A good Science @ NASA article on the SOFIA airborne telescope.

From my AIAA news feed:

• A cosmonaut complains that Russia's space program is falling behind and is unsustainable.
• An Indian university is offering its first space law class. Good!

NASA announced two winners in its Centennial Challenge competition to develop new astronaut "space gloves."

Huntsville got an unwelcome rating recently: the second-most dangerous military town. I find this hard to believe, given how many seaport towns there are with MUCH rougher reps than ours.

Guess that'll do it for now. The inbox is mostly cleansed. Happy Thanksgiving, all. I've plenty to be thankful for this year, so I consider myself supremely blessed. If you can't think of anything to be thankful for, consider the fact that you're here and able to think in the first place and start from there.

Potpourri XXXVII

Let's see, what's out there? Oh, yeah! Got to start with this: the Obama administration knew that the Supreme Court's ruling that the EPA could regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant even though they did NOT like the decision! Someone, of course, is in big trouble. There were all sorts of "green" laws that were going to happen under Obama. The whole article from The Hill deserves to be quoted in full:

OMB memo raises doubts about EPA findings
@ 4:17 pm by Eric Zimmermann
An EPA finding last month that greenhouse gases are a danger to public health rests on dubious assumptions and could have negative economic impacts, a memo from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) warned.
The memo has no listed author but is marked "Deliberative–Attorney Client Privilege." A spokesman for OMB told Dow Jones Newswires that the brief is a "conglomeration of counsel we've received from various agencies" about the EPA finding, the conclusions of which would trigger regulation of greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.
The author(s) of the memo suggest the EPA did not thoroughly examine the relationship between greenhouse gases and human health.
"In the absence of a strong statement of the standards being applied in this decision, there is concern that EPA is making a finding based on…'harm' from substances that have no demonstrated direct health effects," the memo says, adding that the "scientific data that purports to conclusively establish" that link was from outside EPA.
Additionally, the new regulations triggered by the finding would likely harm the economy, the brief warns.
"Making the decision to regulate CO2…is likely to have serious economic consequences for regulated entities throughout the U.S. economy, including small businesses and small communities," the memo reads.
Finally, in language sure to anger climate change activists, the memo questions whether climate change might bring benefits that would mitigate the costs.
"To the extent that climate change alters out environment, it will create incentives for innovation and adaption that mitigate the damages," the memo reads. "The [EPA finding] should note this possibility[.]"
The memo goes so far as to suggest that global warming might be a net positive for certain regions of the United States.
"It might be reasonable to conclude that Alaska will benefit from warmer winters for both health and economic reasons," the authors note.
At a Senate hearing today, Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) grilled EPA administrator Lisa Jackson about the memo.
"This is a smoking gun," Barrasso said, accusing the EPA of making the finding for political reasons.
Jackson responded that the finding was based on science and was in no way politicized.
"That analysis had been done really before I took the oath of office," Jackson said.
She acknowledged that curbing climate change might have economic impact, and added that the costs could be minimized through the administration's favored cap-and-trade system.
"We do understand that there are costs to the economy of addressing global warming emissions, and that the best way to address them is a gradual move to a market-based program like cap-and trade," Jackson said.

The genie is out of the bottle. Let the merriment and chaos begin.

Your Humble Narrator is famous, from an academic point of view. I’ve got a textbook here called “Societal Impacts of Spaceflight,” which was printed by NASA and based on a bunch of papers presented by historians, sociologists, and those sorts of folk at a symposium a couple years back. One of these writers actually cited one of my articles. Page 493, reference 43, links to my "Save Our Planet: Space Advocates See the Bigger Picture" article on Space.com. Wacky!

Tip o' the fedora to Michael Mealling for finding this article by George Will on the upside-down economy. Will references an article in Foreign Affairs that might be worth reading, if you're a subscriber.

Speaking of Mr. Mealling, a Masten Space Systems guy, Masten has performed a successful test of one of their rockets. Martin and I, of course, got into a lot of back-and-forth about the relative merits of government- vs. private-funded space travel. Martin's position is basically that "Physics is a beyotch" and that if there were a better way to get into space, someone would've come up with it by now. I beg to differ. And while I won't divulge any confidences or comments Martin made, I'm not shy about mine:

I agree that X-projects are the way to go. Unfortunately, we don’t do those anymore. If the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. To wit: if you have a large organization with lots of money (NASA, as opposed to a startup), then you are only going to think in terms of a multi-constituency, large-organization solution. The U.S. was working its way toward space using airplane-based thinking, with X-20 Dyna-Soar as the next step after X-15, but the Russians got there first using a ballistic missile, and the airplane-based approach was dropped. Airplane designers have a different approach to problems than rocket builders. We’ll never know how the U.S. space program would have turned out if we’d stuck with the airplane-based approach because we get sidetracked by the artillery shell approach. We’ll also never know what would’ve happened if we’d stuck with the company-based model of production instead of the government-based approach because we had Apollo. Can we go back to that? I don’t know. Maybe someone could try to build Dyna-Soar and find out the hard way.

Is business-based rocket travel “imminent?” Perhaps not. I’ve gotten my hopes up too many times to be that much of an optimist anymore. However, the big-government, big-rocket approach is also fundamentally flawed and needs to be rethought. The entrepreneurs should be encouraged and funded, even if it means doing things that are considered tacky, hucksterish, stunts, or Not Worthy of the Grandeur of Space, as NASA would have it.

Martin did have an interesting link to a Jeff Bell article on spaceplanes, which I will share.

New from Hu:

• The Mars Spirit rover is having road troubles.
• Boeing is moving its missile defense division from Arlington, VA, to Huntsville. Gosh knows we could use the business. Here's hoping Obama doesn't cut the missile defense budget.
• Vladimir Putin's price for signing the next Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) is for Obama to scrap our missile defenses. Reagan's answer at Rekjavik to such a gambit was historic and world-changing. One can only guess or hope with the current president
• Google is mating with a spreadsheet...and producing products that should help web searchers better organize their data. Sounds useful, but I'd like to see the final output.

Potpourri XXIV

I had to update my bio for work. Here's the latest version, in case someone asks (or even if they didn't):

*

Bart Leahy is a Senior Technical Writer at the Schafer Corporation, where he supports the Ares Projects at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Since 2006, he has written conference papers, speeches, articles, web content, presentations, brochures and other outreach materials on nearly all aspects of the Ares launch vehicles and the Ares I-X test flight. He leads the Technical Communicators Working Group as part of the Ares Outreach Team.

Prior to coming to NASA, Bart was a proposal writer for the defense industry and a technical writer for the Walt Disney World Resort.

During his time at NASA, Bart has been a member of four teams that received a Group Achievement Award. As a professional writer, he has produced papers for the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), the International Astronautical Congress (IAC), and the Joint Army-Navy-NASA-Air Force (JANNAF) conference, as well as over 30 articles for Ad Astra, NASA ASK Magazine, NSS.org (the National Space Society’s web site), Science@NASA, ScienceCheerleader.com Space.com, Space News, and The Space Review.

Bart has a Bachelor's degree in English Literature from Northern Illinois University and a Master's degree in Technical Writing from the University of Central Florida. His master’s thesis described methods of using targeted marketing to enhance the appeal of space exploration advocacy.

Bart is a true believer in the space cause. In his free time, he is a member of the National Space Society (NSS), which recognized him with an Award for Excellence as an advocate. He has written for and led NSS’s Space Settlement Calendar; led a campaign to send letters to the editor into the top 100 newspapers in the United States during “World Space Week”; and has written position papers and talking points for citizen lobbyists as part of the NSS Policy Committee. Bart is also Vice President of the local chapter of NSS, the Huntsville Alabama L5 Society (HAL5), a member of the Mars Society, the MarsDrive Board of Advisors, a public outreach writer for the Mars Foundation, and a regular member of the International Astronautical Federation (IAF), Society for Technical Communication (STC), and AIAA. He has been a convention speaker and panelist on a variety of space exploration topics.

*

New from Hu:

• Congressman Parker Griffin (D-AL) is doing his part to keep government money and jobs in the Huntsville area.
• Apollo 17 astronaut and former Senator Harrison "Jack" Schmitt will be giving the commencement address to UAH grads. He should have interesting things to say. Last time I heard about Jack, he had quit the Planetary Society for jumping on the global warming bandwagon.
• Jeff Foust makes a case for a suborbital version of the COTS program.

Another snappy article from my buddy Dauna over at Science @ NASA, this one on NASA-powered weather prediction hardware being used in Northern Alabama. I love Dauna's easygoing, reader-friendly writing style.

This one from Nick the Wiki Guru: Sending webheads over to the Middle East to inspire Web 2.0 businesses in Iraq.

That's MISTER Rocket to you, pal...a seriously big, 1:10 scale Saturn V rocket gets ready to fly.

Like we didn't have enough to worry about, Charles Osgood sounds an alarm about the state of our sun...and has some interesting things to say about global warming as well.

Another article about robots in warfare.

The Chief Financial Officer at Freddie Mac is dead from an apparent suicide. Things are getting tough out there.

Twitter tips for federal agencies.

I got the following Chicago Tribune cartoon from Father Dan. It's a rip on Obama's idol Franklin Delano Roosevelt, inked in 1934. What goes around comes around.

Here's a new one: personalized photos of the Earth, taken by a camera mounted on a satellite in geosynchronous orbit.

I owe my coworker Tracy some more thoughts on education reform/improvements (she's rather surprised that she, a hard-core Democrat, and I are in agreement about several things). And I also need to comment at some point about some comments I read about Obama on Facebook. As ugly as things have gotten from my point of view--and even according to some of my friends who voted for The One and are having a wee bit of buyer's remorse--there are folks out there who think he's doing a perfectly brilliant, superb job of handling the nation's affairs. Blue State America really is different. Wow.

And much to my delight, after a week of waiting I now have a working washer/dryer unit in my apartment. My grade school/Facebook buddy Janet thanked me for helping "save the Earth." I thanked her for giving me the benefit of the doubt (asked her if she'd considered a job in marketing), but pointed out that my carbon footprint would be right back up there once I got the machines working. Anyhow, for Janet's sake, I won't run the machines until the weekend. They do have more capacity than the older units, though, so maybe they're more efficient, too. They're at least a better color--white instead of some '70s-era "cream" color--so that's an aesthetic improvement right there.

Yuri's Night in Huntsville

Tonight was the first "official" Yuri's Night party in Huntsville, Alabama, which is surprising, given the number of space people here. Be that as it may, we started small, as most of these things do, with a party in a bar. The bar in question was Leeann's downtown. The crowd size was just about right for the amount of "stuff" we brought--giveaways, prizes, name tags, etc., though I think some of us overestimated the crowd size. Perhaps people were scared off by fallling temperatures?

Anyhow, I still haven't spent the time to learn how to use my overpriced camera correctly, so more than half my shots are barely visible due to lack of light. (If anyone knows how to make the flash on a Canon PowerShot S5 go on automatically, I'm all ears.)

Here's what our sign looked like outside the place.

This is the "registration" table. We gave out name tags for people to fill out, asked people to sign up for information about next year's party, and gave out free stuff (pins, patches, candy, etc.). I spent most of my time manning the table so I wouldn't have to go outside. Heck, I don't like the cold, either.

I have no idea who this young lady is, but she sat across from the registration table for awhile, and she was distracting enough that I thought I'd take her picture. She obviously didn't seem to mind.

Part of the crowd in line at the table. We ended up handing out around 100-120 door prize tickets, which isn't a bad-sized group for our first time out. The "we" was a combination of HAL5, Huntsville Alive, ERC, and STEDTRAIN, which was collecting donations to provide teachers with money to educate K-12 students in the sciences. They did pretty well: STEDTRAIN collected around $1,100, and ERC was going to match whatever was collected at the event, so we did our good deed for the day.

Next year we'll probably get more grandiose. I myself would prefer a less smoky location, but otherwise I had a reasonably good time. You can market the hell out of something, but you can't make people come. In the end, that's up to them.