Making Space Sexy Again

Sir Martin Rees, Great Britain's Astronomer Royal, is the Paul McCartney of astrophysics.At the overhead projector in front to 2,000 cooing scientists, Rees presented a theory based on new observations concerning one of the great mysteries in astrophysics -- the origins and cause of gamma-ray bursts. The crowd nodded appreciatively as he laid out his theory with an hour of relentless calculus. Rees argued that colliding neutron stars, occurring only once every million years per galaxy cluster, was the likely cause of the outbursts, and with tens of billions of galaxies in the universe, it's not surprising our satellites detect one of these events every day. Knowing Sir Rees has cracked many astrophysical puzzles before, the gathered scientific community seemed excited to have a solid theory to either support or debunk as new data becomes available -- the scientific method at work.Across the hall, TV cameras whirred as reporters from the national and international press corps buzzed at the American Astronomical Society's (AAS) winter 1998 meeting in Washington, DC. Scientists presented findings that are changing what we know about the Universe. Like a Virgin Mary sighting for the secular world, scientists could feel the rush of a media spotlight returning after a painful decade of embarrassment and hand wringing for the entire astronomical community.The convention also featured graduate students presenting "posters" of their research to the larger astronomical community. Their research had been done in all-night observations using the nation's telescope facilities -- coordinated through the physics and astronomy departments of such schools as Berkeley, Princeton and MIT. The Ph.D. candidates literally stand by their research hoping to impress their colleagues with new data or get noticed by future employers. For many, this is the most important science fair of their lives.Weathering the StormWith glamorous moonshots a distant memory, the U.S. space program still reels from multiple setbacks in the 1980s and early 1990s -- the 1986 explosion of the Challenger space shuttle being the most vivid example. In just a decade: the fleet was grounded because of the leaky fuel lines; the Galileo mission to Jupiter suffered a broken antenna; the Magellan mission to Venus was losing contact with Earth; and the $2 billion Hubble Space Telescope (HST) was nearly a decade late, over budget and -- after finally getting into space -- didn't work.But the astronomical community is feeling better these days, and the "fixed" Hubble telescope is largely responsible. After its deployment in 1990, an optical flaw was discovered in its mirror, measuring only 1/50 the width of a human hair. It took until 1993 for the crew of the space shuttle Endeavor to install a corrective lens that restored functionality. Since its "rebirth," Hubble has been regularly wowing the astronomical community and the public with amazing images featuring far greater clarity than ground-based telescopes. Along with the "pretty pictures" came a new commitment to public relations and education orchestrated through a media-savvy crew at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore (STScI).The most dramatic breakthrough was an image known as the Hubble Deep Field. Over a period of 10 days in 1995 Hubble looked into one of the darkest parts of space. This keyhole out of our Milky Way Galaxy was used to take the first "core sample" of deep space. Using 15 to 40 minute exposures for more than 150 continuous orbits, Hubble returned an image 4 billion times fainter than the human eye can see, and it forever changed the way we see the universe. (The Hubble Deep Field image was unveiled to the world at a packed press conference on January 15, 1996.)"We are clearly seeing some of the galaxies as they were more than 10 billion years ago, in the process of formation. As the images have come up on our screens, we have not been able to keep from wondering if we might somehow be seeing our own origins in all of this," said a giddy Robert Williams, Director of STScI. (The Hubble Space Telescope is a cooperative program of the European Space Agency (ESA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to operate a space-based observatory for the international astronomical community. Hubble will operate until 2010 when a space shuttle will retrieve it. Until that time, competition will remain fierce for Hubble observing time. Only one of every five proposals is accepted. Many of the young graduate students presenting their cutting-edge research at the AAS conference spent the last year analyzing data from Hubble. Their projects often received funding indirectly from NASA through their universities for data analysis.)The tide clearly is turning for American space science.The Hubble Deep Field image increased the number of galaxies in the universe from 10 to at least 50 billion, assuming a uniform distribution in deep space. By December, 1995, space science had begun to emerge from it's darkest days. National Geographic described the repaired Hubble as "the modern equivalent of the one Galileo used to prove that the earth revolves around the sun -- a brilliant new device." LIFE magazine published a Hubble image of Mars on the cover and asked "Our New Home?" The public responded with enthusiasm and the STScI site became hugely popular on the internet.NASA: Smaller, Better, Faster, CheaperHoping to take advantage of the renewed public and congressional interest in space, NASA has launched an elaborate astronomy campaign for the 21st century. The program will be called ORIGINS and the PR campaign surrounding the project was enough not only to land the TIME Magazine cover story, but also for $1 billion in initial funding from Uncle Sam.(Carefully avoided by NASA fans is mention of the controversy that even a relatively small project can cause. The October launch of the plutonium-fueled Cassini space probe generated huge public concern and protest. Critics say an accident could result in plutonium re-entering the Earth's atmosphere and potentially poisoning millions of people. The controversy continues as Cassini is scheduled for a fly-by 312 miles above the Earth in 1999 on its way to Saturn. Not surprisingly, NASA claims the critics' fears are based on "bad science.")In it's effort to become more consumer friendly, NASA has developed the goals of the ORIGINS program based on the most popular questions asked by an attentive public. Slick PR materials ask in bold Star Trek tones, "Is there another Earth-like planet in our galactic neighborhood?" NASA boosters present ORIGINS as a penny-wise effort to produce hard science that will lay the groundwork for future missions.And the new NASA is doing more with less, says Dan Goldin, NASA administrator and project cheerleader. The Mars landings are a perfect example. While the Viking mission to Mars in 1976 needed 1,000 people on the ground in Houston for support; the Pathfinder mission which sent amazing pictures into millions of homes through the internet in 1997 only needed 50 support staff on the ground. Economy of scale has given way to small is beautiful. The goals of the ORIGINS project include the desire "to observe the birth of the earliest galaxies, to detect all planetary systems in the solar neighborhood and to find those planets that are capable of supporting life, and to learn whether life began elsewhere in the solar system." The strategic plan for ORIGINS for the years 2000 -- 2004 identifies relatively inexpensive satellite and land-based telescope projects that NASA will deploy to build on Hubble's success. This phase of the project with its bite-sized elements seems small enough to pass a budget sensitive Congress if the public support continues. Building on the ORIGINS mission, the future goals of NASA are far more ambitious. "We want to be able to discover Earth-like planets around other stars and to get there with our robotic explorers within a few generations," Goldin told the astronomers. He proposed a merging of space with life sciences and coined a sexy new term -- Astrobiology.Feeling the dark days had finally passed, Goldin could barely control his sugary optimism, "It's okay to dream again -- at NASA and in America."Pictures from Hubble are online at http://www.stsci.edu/ You paid for them, so check it out.SidebarNew Discoveries About the UniverseThe following discoveries made headlines from the American Astronomical Astronomy Society winter 1998 gathering.Black Hole Emits Radiation -- Cosmic Old Faithful A team from the California Institute of Technology discovered a black hole with 10 to 30 times the mass of the sun. This collapsed star, with such intense gravity that not even light can escape, is sucking the life out of a nearby star, and ejecting X-ray producing gas every 30 minutes.Another team from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center used infrared and radio studies to observe the same object. They confirmed that the inner part of a disk of hot gas moving around the black hole is ejected into space, at nearly the speed of light.Universe Will Expand ForeverMeasurements by five different international teams conclude with "95 percent certainty" that the universe is basically lightweight and lacks the necessary mass to produce a "big crunch" as previously believed. These results also show that the universe is 15 billion years old, much older than previously thought."All the indications from our observations of supernovas spanning a large range of distances are that we live in a universe that will expand forever," said the leader of one team, Dr. Saul Perlmutter of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. "Apparently there isn't enough mass in the universe for its gravity to slow the expansion, which started with the Big Bang, to a halt."Eventually all the fuel of the stars will be used and the universe will be no more than dead rocks floating apart. Fortunately, that won't happen for another 100 billion years or so.Black Hole At the Center of the Milky Way Galaxy A team of scientists from Germany has discovered a black hole at the very center of the Milky Way Galaxy. The object, known as Sagittarius A* was monitored by a team from the Max- Plank-Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics. They found that nearby stars move at speeds over 600 miles per second around the black hole. The black hole's total mass is 2.6 million times that of the sun but confined to a region of space no larger than our solar system.Another team from Northwestern University presented the results of 10 years of studies using the Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope in Socorro, New Mexico. They found a stream of ionized gas that moves at more than 2 million miles per hour toward the black hole at the Galaxy's center but does not get sucked in.Asteroid ThreatMissing the research grants from Ronald Reagan's ill-fated Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars), a team from Los Alamos Laboratory announced that an asteroid three miles across landing in the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and the West Coast would wipe out the Bay Area, and Los Angeles with a tsunami more than 300 feet high. If a similar asteroid hit the Atlantic, major cities on the East Coast and in Western Europe would face a similar fate. Fortunately, Earth is likely to take a hit from an object that large only once every 10 million years. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't be prepared."An impact from the smaller asteroids is one disaster that is preventable," said Jack Hills, an astrophysicist with the U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos Laboratory.But to deflect an asteroid on a collision course, first it must be seen ahead of time. Then a nuclear-armed rocket must be ready to intercept it. A nuclear blast in space could either shatter or re-direct the incoming asteroid. Currently, there is no such surveillance or defense capability in place.