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Today I’m in…..

January 19, 2009 By

The MIRI engineering model, ready for testing

The MIRI engineering model, ready for testing

Today, and for the rest of this week, I’m in the city of Leuven, Belgium. Together with some colleagues from the Catholic University of Leuven and various other institutes in Europe I’m spending a few days working on some aspects of calibration and testing for MIRI, the mid-infrared instrument for the James Webb Space Telescope. The JWST, although offcially its “successor”, will differ from Hubble in that it will be optimised for observations in the infrared, rather than the optical or ultraviolet. Although great science can be done at the shorter wavelengths, achieving top notch image quality is more demanding at shorter wavelengths – with the costs for JWST far exceeding initial estimates as it is, who knows what the budget would have had to be for an optical JWST?

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Things are happening on Mars

January 15, 2009 By

Martian map showing red methane hotspots in the atmosphere

Earlier today, The Sun reported that evidence of little green men on the Red Planet had finally been spotted. Not so, said the scientists in a briefing this evening – or at least not necessarily, not definitively so. But it looks like we may have come just one small step closer to discovering if life exists on the Red Planet. For the first time, firm evidence has been found that active processes are taking place on Mars, possibly biological in nature, and this is an exciting find.

Using the Infrared Telescope Facility on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, a team of scientists led by Michael Mumma of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center have spotted methane being released into the Martian atmosphere. Remarkably the methane detection was confined to a few “hotspots” without being dissipated uniformly into the atmopshere by the wind, like we see here on Earth. This means that for some reason, the methane has a very short lifetime in the atmosphere, and is possibly being actively destroyed. The observed hotspots were seen in early 2003, during the Northern hemisphere sason on Mars; the following year they had disappeared.

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Life on Mars? The Sun weighs in!

January 15, 2009 By

Methane clouds released at the Martian poles could be the effect of Martian micorbes living under the surface of the planet, The Sun newspaper reports today.

NASA announced a few days ago that a press briefing would take place this afternoon (8 pm CET) to discuss new findings on the Red Planet. No press release has been issued so far.

I don’t really want to comment on the science, of which the details are sketchy in The Sun’s typically sensationalist style. Did The Sun break an embargo here? The Guardian and The Telegraph have also picked up on the story now, albeit in a more nuanced way (although the Guardian’s Roswell-like picture is not particularly helpful) .

I look foward to the press briefing and will most likely post a follow-up here later today or tomorrow.

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Big Science

January 15, 2009 By

In the New York Times this week, biologist Aaron Hirsh wrote  a very interesting column on the idea of Big Science. He argues that the most successful scientists of the 21st century so far are administrators – those who are good at herding people and resources. He pinpoints a shift in the way science is actually being done:

Across many different fields, new data are generated by a smaller and smaller number of bigger and bigger projects. And with this process of centralization come changes in what scientists measure — and even in what scientists are.

This idea of centralisation is of course not new. Particularly in experimental particle physics, large collider projects such as CERN have long been the norm, and papers written by one or just a few authors are virtually unheard of. While in some fields the increasing centralisation is unavoidable and essential for continuing progress, this way of working has drawbacks.

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Wednesday Food for Thought

January 14, 2009 By

I’m currently reading The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf. I have many thoughts about this book, some of them good and others not.

At one point she cites German philospher Friedrich Engels, who claimed that:

“When a woman displays scientific interest, then there is something out of order in her sexuality”.*

I’m going to sit here, at my desk, in a world-renowned astronomy department and be a little bit thankful.

*I’m not sure of the exact source of the quote. Wolf refrences it as cited in Ann Oakley, Housewife: High value/Low cost (London, Penguim Books, 1987), pp. 46-47

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