Hello from Houston - I was going to write a long post about yesterday’s adventures, but instead I’m trying to resolve problems with the Galaxy Zoo website. In the meantime, though, the latest comic from PhD comics is worth a look.
Update: Second comic here.
I spent yesterday trying to travel from California to Washington, where we’re visiting NASA HQ and the Goddard Space Flight Centre, so I’ve only just heard about some really shocking news. The STFC, which funds UK astronomy, has announced it’s planning to pull the UK out of the international Gemini observatory. As theseimportant people say, this is seriously worrying. Gemini North provides UK astronomers with their only state of the art visible light telescope in the Northern hemisphere; it is literally irreplaceable. The RAS have more details about why STFC’s plan is a bad one, but it essentially boils down to this. We’ve already spent £23 million to get the telescopes working well. They are now working well, as the flood of press releases from Gemini shows, and now we’re writing off all that investment in an attempt to save £4 million a year. We know that money is tight, but as the RAS point out the worrying thing is that this decision has been made without any attempt to consult astronomers, who will now be left without any access to half the sky.
The sad thing is I’d much rather be writing about results like this.
We do try to appear sophisticated, but really, when it comes down to it, any mission which involves hitting something is going to do well in the PR stakes. It was fantastic to spend the day in the company of the LCROSS team. LCROSS is the sister spacecraft to the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, and is due to crash an impactor the size of a large bus (and we did find a bus to film for comparison purposes) into the lunar South Pole just three months after launch, which should be in October. The time from being selected to launch is 30 months, which must be some sort of record, but everything seems to be going well. The stated goal is to provide the definitive yes or no as to whether there is water ice in substantial quantities in the region; very controversial evidence from previous missions and from radar has suggested there might be (and I, personally, wouldn’t put it any more strongly than that) and if there is then the South Pole becomes the absolutely default choice for future manned bases. Not because you’d need to drink it, but because it provides hydrogen and oxygen for rocket fuel. Anyway, regardless of whether the water is there or not, this is a way of digging beneath the surface of the Moon in a landscape very different from those which Apollo sampled. Even better, the flash LCROSS produces will be magnitude 6 (best guess), bright enough to be seen in binoculars and thus visible to almost anyone. I would suspect that the impact, in January 2009, will have more people looking at our nearest neighbour simultaneously than at any time since Apollo. In the meantime, you’ll only have to wait until March to see the wonderful interviews we filmed today, along with the bus.
I’ve just landed in California as part of a fairly epic Sky at Night trip around the US, conducting interviews for a couple of programmes about the new era of lunar exploration. I am slightly worried that we should really be in China or Japan, though, as both countries have successful new probes in orbit around the Moon right now. One of the things that surprises me - particularly when you talk to astronauts who were lucky enough to actually go there - is that the more we explore the Moon, our companion in space, the more we end up looking back home. That was true in the Apollo era, and it’s true with these amazing shots from the Kaguya probe.
Hat tip : Bad Astronomy.
Update : Better Bad Astronomy post.
This is as good an explanation as any as to why I haven’t been blogging much recently.
