Chris Lintott’s Universe

The launch of COROT is excellent news, but the work is only just beginning for the team behind what will be the first of several planet-hunting missions. The hard bit is extracting the tiny signal which represents the transit of a Earth across the face of a star from the huge mass of data. COROT’s chosen tactic is to stick to one field for 150 days and then move on, and obviously being in space will also help with removing many sources of interference that affect ground-based searches. I hope they’re successful, but we’ve had an excellent warning as to how hard this is.

I was really pleased we featured SuperWASP on the Sky at Night – it seemed an excellent example of a rapidly put together, cheap, experiment based on a simple but brilliant idea (in this case, using camera lenses and top-quality cameras to survey the whole sky). At the time (2004, if memory serves) I expected it to produce a plethora of planet discoveries, but two years on and we’re only just reporting on the first two. I don’t mean to disparage their efforts, but it’s certainly surprised me how difficult this is. Let’s see how COROT gets on.

(More on this in my state of the Universe report coming up before New Year).

January is the 650th Sky at Night program, and we had a little party to celebrate when filming last week (normally we film very close to transmission, but with Christmas we’ve taken a gamble. This is probably the best way to induce a bright comet.). There’s a write-up in the Guardian.

I know, long time no post. All I can do is say sorry and move on! I’ve still got a post from California on the way, but this weekend I joined Omega Holidays on one of their trips to see the Northern lights. Unlike those I’ve done before, involving turning all the lights off and flying round in circles, this was a weekend trip to Finland (piggybacked on a trip to take kids to see Santa). The display was intriguing – changing curtains of light that began indistinctly and then brightened, remaining low down but remaining an erie prescence. A photo of the display taken by Ian Morison is available is available here, and as proof that I really do get to Finland I offer the following:

JPL was personally something of a disappointment. We got some wonderful interviews – which you’ll see in due course – with many of the people involved in Mars missions past and present, and I feel like I’m finally getting my head around exactly what the current state of our knowledge of the planet is. Why the disappointment? JPL has always had iconic status and yet, partly through pressure of time and partly through the security restrictions that applied to us as foreign nationals, I didn’t get to see much more than the outside of the buildings. I’m sad in particular that we didn’t make it to the control room.

We then drove across the desert to Tuscon, Arizona, where many of the people involved in the Phoenix mission are based. This is a lander, not a rover, which will stay in one place for three months, analysing the soil that we believe has significant amounts of water ice just beneath it. NASA’s strategy is to `follow the water’ on Mars, in the hope that it will lead us to an understanding of where life is, was or could be. (Incidentally, despite all the prompting from the Bush administration, it’s clear that landing man on Mars is as far off as it ever was; no-one is talking about even a robotic sample return mission this side of 2020.)

I’ve been musing about whether `follow the water’ is the right tactic. It’s true that the presence of water has an enormous influence on the geology and chemistry of the planet, and that that in itself constitutes a reason for investigating. But it seems to be that by pitching the program of Mars exploration as a quest for life, we (the scientific community) risk shooting themselves in the foot. The people I’ve talked to on this trip – for the most part geologists – are interested in Mars for its own sake, and for what it can tell us about the evolution of planets in general. Life is part of that story, but it would be a shame if in a decade’s time this enormous effort were to be seen as a failure because the answer was not the `correct’ one.

Of course, that’s easy for me to say! In the meantime, you are all required to go and marvel at the images provided by the HiRISE camera on MRO. There’s a LOT still to come.