Category Archives: Space Science

Business, Political Commentary, Space, Space Science

Space Political Action Alerts

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As a result of the disastrous initial markup of the House appropriation for NASA last week, the Space Access Society, the Space Frontier Foundation, and Tea Party in Space have all put out alerts for everyone to call your Congressman (extra points if your congressman is one of the chairs of the appropriations committee or subcommittee, Hal Rogers or Frank Wolf).

Briefly, to summarize, the top line of the NASA budget has been cut back to pre-2008 levels (no shock, except to those living in denial), but the real problem is where the cuts are, and aren’t. The Webb Telescope was canceled, which was probably necessary given how out of control it was, but Commercial Crew and space technologies were severely chopped back as well, putting off further the day that we will no longer be reliant on the Russians for ISS, and that we can start moving humans beyond LEO. Instead, the Senate Launch System and Orion-by-another-name earmarks were actually increased, though there is still insufficient funds to build them in any timely manner, and no missions described or funded for them. Go follow one or more of the links, where there are useful instructions as to who to call and what to say. And as always in these matters, be firm, but polite. You have until tomorrow to make a difference.

[Update a few minutes later]

One other disastrous cut, though it’s small, is the CRuSR program. It’s only fifteen million, but it could really help jump start the suborbital industry. Given the trivial amount, it can’t really be about the money. I would guess that it’s pressure from the traditional sounding rocket people, who stand to be put out of business by low-cost reusables.

Science And Society, Space, Space Science, Technology and Society

About That Coronal Mass Ejection

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I was curious as to the effect that yesterday’s event will have on the space weather, so I asked my space weathergirl buddy, solar physicist Dr. Barbara J. Thompson at Goddard. She wrote:

There are three major effects from solar “events” – light from flares, magnetic field & mass from eruptions, and energetic particles (ions and electrons) that can be caused by both flares and eruptions (also called coronal mass ejections or CMEs). These three broad classes are monitored because of the effects they have – see the table at the bottom of this page.

The above image shows the alerts that resulted from the eruption/flare – taken from this page at NOAA’s web site.

In general, flares cause radio interference, CMEs cause geomagnetic storms, and energetic particles cause radiation hazards. However, it’s a complicated system and there are always exceptions to any generalization!

The three different types of phenomena have different ways that they reach Earth. There’s a great explanation here and they have the following diagram:

In the diagram above, the flare is occurring on the Sun at a location where it can be seen from Earth, and the light from the flare takes 8 minutes to reach Earth. The flare yesterday was an M-class flare, which is large but not as large as an X-flare (which is ten times larger), but it had enough strength to have some impact.

The CME (eruption of magnetic field & mass) takes 1-5 days to reach Earth’s orbit, depending on how fast it’s going (1 day is *extremely* unusual). In the figure, the CME isn’t heading towards Earth. However, the forecasts are difficult if the CME isn’t going straight towards Earth. It you look at the diagram above, the CME isn’t hitting Earth. However, what if the CME expanded just a couple of degrees wider than the forecast? The Earth could get a glancing blow from the CME – it could either be hit by the CME itself or by the compressed or shocked fields lines near the CME (shown at the large pink region). Glancing blows are really hard to forecast. Yesterday’s event was opposite of the diagram – the CME was to the right of the Earth instead of the left, but it still was far enough away that anything more than a glancing blow is unlikely. Yesterday’s forecast model is here.

So, the flare’s already finished, and the CME is unlikely to hit us. That leaves energetic particles, which can reach Earth in as little as half an hour after a flare, but can happen for days an eruption. The diagram shows the two sources of the energetic particles — flares and the shock from a CME (note: CMEs don’t always have shocks, it depends on their interaction with the solar wind). The energetic particles move (primarily) along magnetic field lines, and the solar wind makes a spiral shape. Where the Earth crosses the spiral determines whether particles will reach Earth. In the diagram, none of the field lines from the CME’s shock are connected to Earth, but the flare’s SEP might (the red line with the two blue lines around it show the estimated location of the solar wind magnetic field lines. Since yesterday’s CME happened to the right of Earth’s orbit (instead of to the left, as in the diagram), the solar wind field lines were very closely connected to Earth.

The alerts timeline shown above does indicate that there’s an elevated chance of energetic particles continuing through tomorrow.

So, bottom line, probably no biggie for us, though someone in transit to another planet might have to hit the storm shelter. There’s more info over at Space Weather, where they’re predicting a greater-than-25% chance of geomagnetic storms tomorrow.

[Update a little while later]

Barbara has a lot more here, including a cleaned-up version of this explanation (which was an email), though I don’t see much of anything wrong with it.

Media Criticism, Space, Space Science

Emily Lakdawalla

7 Comments

An interview. I strongly agree with this advice:

…cultivate your ability to write, to express yourself with brevity and clarity. Writing is important not only for explaining your research, but also for applying for grants and jobs. People who write well, with an engaging voice and correct spelling and grammar, make a positive first impression, giving them a leg up over their competition. My advisor at Brown made all his students submit abstracts to the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. The struggle to write those abstracts helped us identify holes in our knowledge or in the completeness of our work; presenting our work in posters or talks gave us poise and confidence in intimidating situations. So keep a journal, or start a blog. Just write.

I also find that writing forces you to think about what you’re saying much more than just talking about it.

General Science, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Space, Space Science, Technology and Society

I Wish Congress Wouldn’t Make NASA Waste So Much Money

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So they could afford to do things more like this.

It’s always a little unnerving to me to see them fly through the ring plane. It makes you realize that as striking they are in appearance, the mass density is very slight, and there’s plenty of open space in there. Not that they couldn’t have had a collision, but they haven’t.

OK, I know, even if they weren’t being forced to waste money, they’d still have trouble getting more funding for more planetary missions.

Space, Space Science

Detecting Extra-Solar Planets With Suborbital Flight

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Brad Cheetham of U of CO is giving a talk on seeing extra-solar planets using suborbital vehicles and star shades. Kepler and Hubble find planets by inference from star wobbles, but they’re proposing to actually shield the star with a shade to allow planets to be actually be seen. Showing a simulation of what earth would look like from deep space with the sun shielded. Allows planets to be viewed even if we’re not in their orbital plane. Also allow spectroscopy to detect habitability (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen in the atmosphere). Flagship mission would use a telescope with a star shade at ES-L2. Critical technologies — precise orbit/attitude control, precision edges/deployment, opaque membranes, etc. Need preliminary observations prior to selection of flagship mission targets. Need to work with them suborbitally over next three years, including some astronomy good enough to publish. Suborbital can prove out technology very cost effectively, allowing design iteration and refinement. Need a couple hundred million for the ultimate mission but this can provide an affordable way of technology advancement until funding is found. Have a proposal in using Masten Xaero with a starshade that flies over a ground-based telescope. Trajectory has to be accurate to ten centimeters. Can start as low as one kilometer and go higher as techniques improve. Ultimately hope to image an earth-sized planet in the habitable zone at Alpha Centauri (binary system) using suborbital. Holding alignment major technical challenge, using GBORN receiver (cigarette-sized, one or two watts) for augmented GPS solution using cell towers, etc. for high precision. Think it has potential to map Alpha Centauri and Tau Ceti systems within three years, with ability to map more distant stars in next decade as technology goes into orbit.

Education, General Science, Media Criticism, Space, Space Science

The Misnamed Blog Carnival

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The latest Carnival of Space is up.

For anyone interested, I’ve never participated in this, primarily because in my experience, they’re not really carnivals of space — they’re carnivals of space science, a subject in which I have little more interest in than other kinds, except to the degree that it provides knowledge of how to develop and settle it. This is a specific instance of a more general irk — when many people learn that I’m an expert on space policy and technology, or I do a radio interview, they assume that I’m both an expert on and interested in space science and astronomy and (even more annoyingly) UFOs. It’s the same kind of general public level of (lack of) knowledge that leads to phrases such as “rocket scientist.”