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21 March: Planck Day

March 21, 2013 by Leave a Comment
planck_microwave

The microwave sky as seen by Planck. Most of the signal originates in the Milky Way, the faint CMB pattern can be seen in the background.

A big day for science today, as at last we’ll find out some of the first cosmology results from the Planck telescope. Planck was launched together with the Herschel Space Telescope back in 2009, to perform an all-sky survey at microwave wavelengths. The survey will produce – or rather, has now produced – the most detailed and sensitive map of the Cosmic Microwave Background to date.

The CMB is essentially flat and constant all over the sky, but on closer (much closer) inspection, small fluctuations become visible. These tiny fluctuations, at the level of 1 part in 100,000 or so, are thought to be the precursors to the large scale structures we see today in the Universe – from the largest Galaxy clusters to individual stars.

Looking for and studying signals this faint is very involved and challenging work – a lot of foreground signal originating in our own Galaxy or those in the vast Universe around us have to be accounted for and removed. These “noise” was released to the community some time ago, so the rest of us could play around with the data for our menial star formation or galaxy clustering research. The Planck consortium have chosen not to release the real goodies, the cosmological results, until they felt confident about the results – which is apparently today. The level of “lockdown” and secrecy surrounding these results is quite unprecedented in astronomy as far as I know, and I’ve talked with many people who don’t agree with their chosen policy. “Open science” it definitely isn’t – but if anything, it’s a good way to ensure that your results will make a big splash on their release. However you feel about  the road the mission leaders chose, these scientists deserve their moment in the spotlight. I look forward to seeing the exciting new results!

ESA is hosting a media briefing at 10 am this morning, and an open session will take place from 14:00 to 15:45 (CET) this afternoon. You can watch it live on ESA’s webpage, here.

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Siding Spring Observatory under fire

January 13, 2013 by 3 Comments

For once that headline is not about some astro-political hullabaloo, as today Siding Spring Observatory, Australia’s largest optical observatory, lay in the path of a fearsome bushfire. Australian bushfires bring back bad memories for Australian astronomers, as exactly 10 years ago this week another one of their observatories, at Mt Stromlo, was severely damaged in a similar fire. So it’s been an anxious day for the Australian community, and for all of us worldwide who were stuck helplessly reading blogs and tweets from those in the country.

Fortunately, it seems like all the staff were safely evacuated and the telescopes are ok – though, as I understand it, damage assessment is still under way.

Amanda Bauer (astropixie to most of you) has an excellent and extensive set of updates, links and pictures, and her blog post has gathered a large number of comments from astronomers and locals.

Stay safe, Ozzies!

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Summer update: .Astronomy, kittens, Mars and superwomen

August 20, 2012 by 5 Comments

It’s mid-August and in recent months lots of milestones were passed here in Heidelberg: .Astronomy was a big success, I gave a talk at the super fun and interesting Galactic Star Formation conference here in Heidelberg (my slides are here), and I successfully managed to take my first 2-week holiday in some years.

I wandered round for a few days, feeling lost like a mother cat without her kittens (for kittens, read: laptop, astro-ph, infrared bubbles etc) – luckily I found some bona fide replacement kittens living behind the garden shed, and with that relaxation was achieved, a tan procured.

So back to work it is, and here’s a bit of a recap on what’s been happening…..

  • We’ve revamped our .Astronomy web presence with an attractive new site – excellent work from Rob on that. It contains little snippets and links on the hacks that were produced at the conference, and links to the great talks we heard. Stuart did an awesome jon on creating a nifty Javascript-based tool that syncs up the slides of the talks with the audio, tweets and other content, such as links. Thanks to him, you can now relive some of our keynote talks on the site.
  • Rob wrote a nice post on the hack we worked on at .Astro together with Karen Masters – I should say that I stole the idea from Brad Voytek, passed it on to Rob and Karen, who did all the hard work [NB. I think Hogg would approve of this hack-management approach].  Alasdair Allan then picked it up and wrote some nice words on O’Reilly Radar. Basically we wanted to examine trends in the astronomy literature by mining ADS; the idea is that the ability to do this will then allow a more sophisticated analysis to uncover hidden relations between concepts. I’m incredibly impressed with Rob’s efforts.
  •  NASA landed a very cool rover called Curiosity on the surface of Mars. It was lowered onto Mars with a crane! It has nuclear fuel! It zaps rocks with a laser! Mars looks just like Arizona! OK, you probably know all about this already.
  •  The Guardian posted a few good articles on life in academia that struck a note with me:  (1) The superwoman fallacy: what it really takes to be an academic and parent by Melissa Terras at UCL, and (2) The two body problem: trials and tribulations of a trailing spouse by writer Simon Perks. Notes were struck because (1) I’ve been working incredibly hard and my mind is suffering a little for it; and (2) oh joy, job season is a’knockin’ once again.

September always comes along with a flurry of meetings, telecons, trips and deadlines, so for the next week or 2 I’m enjoying the remainder of the summer quiet, while it lasts.

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Department of Defense Telescope Yard Sale

June 6, 2012 by 2 Comments

The US Department of Defense isn’t known for its charitable giving. So there’s been much chatter this week over the surprise news (to me, in any case) that the agency has gifted NASA with two 2.4-m telescopes. That’s the same size as the Hubble Space Telescope, but with a much bigger field of view (100 times bigger, says the Washington Post).

They were just…. Sitting around. An impulse buy. Bought them in the wrong size. They were last season’s colour. Or something.

Of course, a telescope, even if it’s space qualified and ready to fly, does not an observatory make – and NASA will still have to stump up the cash to build some instruments for them and launch them into space. That costs a lot of money, which is famously in short supply at the agency. So in a sense this “gift” is a poisoned chalice lightbucket.

Particularly excited are the folks with an interest in the WFIRST project. This proposed space-based dark energy (and exoplanet) mission received top space-mission billing in the 2010 Decadal Survey, but was essentially a non-starter due to NASA’s budget problems. With their large field of view, one of these telescopes could perhaps be repurposed for such a mission (at considerable extra cost, of course).

For now this is all speculation, and it’ll be interesting to see what NASA decide to do with their new toys.

 

 

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MIRI is ready to go

May 4, 2012 by

Image: STFC

It’s been a busy few months for MIRI, the mid-infrared instrument for the James Webb Space Telescope, since we had our Acceptance Review at the start of the year. The team’s engineers have performed some final tests on the instruments to cross a few final t’s, dot the last i’s, both in Europe on the actual flight hardware and on spare parts over in the US.

My fellow test teamers and I are currently working on the calibration procedures for the instruments, or how to get the best scientific information out of the photons hitting the detectors. That should keep us busy for a few more months.

But the big news, fresh in my inbox, is that MIRI has now been officially cleared for shipping and delivery to NASA. This means that the panel charged with examining all our design documentation and test results are satisfied that MIRI is ready to be integrated with the rest of the spacecraft.

This is super good news for the whole team.

Of course, the further integration of MIRI won’t happen in a day either, and there’s still a long road ahead for the telescope, the instruments and the whole spacecraft before JWST will be ready for launch.

Next Wednesday we’re having a ‘do in London to present our work and our test results from MIRI to an audience of Big Wigs and Important People. A press conference has been planned so expect some MIRI-related items in the news next week as well (I hope). While I have got a little bit fond of Didcot and the Rutherford Labs after so many trips there, it does add a sense of occasion to have this event in a swanky venue in London.

I’ll be presenting the test results from the instrument’s low resolution spectrograph to round off the performance presentations – saving the best for last, obviously. (I kid, I kid.) See you there!

 

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