by Paul Gilster | Oct 20, 2008 | Research Tools |
Few places on Earth please me more than the Scottish highlands, to the point that I used to daydream about moving to Inverness (this was before that city’s population explosion, back when it weighed in at a sedate 50,000 inhabitants). But I’ll take anywhere in Scotland, and when I realized I wouldn’t be able to make the International Astronautical Congress in Glasgow this time around, I found myself sinking into a multi-day funk. Fortunately all is not lost, as the IAC, organized this year by the British Interplanetary Society, has left a digital record behind.
The Web is second best to being there, to be sure, but it helps to be able to listen in on key talks. I’ll leave you to page through the images and video from the event, pleased to note that Kelvin Long’s highlight lecture Fusion, Antimatter & The Space Drive is available in its entirety. Interstellar advocate Long is a member of the BIS as well as an active player in the Tau Zero Foundation. If you can set aside 45 minutes or so, you’ll find him ranging through interstellar issues from the magnitude of the distances involved to the basic technologies that could eventually bridge them, with nods to futuristic concepts like antimatter rockets and space drives. Given the BIS’ involvement in the now legendary Project Daedalus, the first serious engineering study of a starship, Kelvin’s knowledgeable comments on that proposal are well worth hearing.
We’re clearly building toward a future in which all major conferences become available through streaming and archival video, even if at present such coverage can be spotty. The recent Division of Planetary Sciences meeting in Ithaca, NY is a case in point, with all talks made available by the American Astronomical Society via webstreaming. Those of us with limited travel budgets have never had a better opportunity to participate in distant conferences than we have through Web-enabled sessions like these. With DPS 2008 now ended, the presentations are being assembled in a permanent video archive to be hosted by the AAS — I’ll pass that link along as soon as it becomes available.
Because I hadn’t checked the DPS site recently, I had to be reminded of the AAS contribution by last week’s Carnival of Space, which offered pointers to the Martian Chronicles blog. Ryan Anderson, Briony Horgan and Melissa Rice, the writers behind Martian Chronicles, are graduate students at Cornell with a passion for Mars. Last week Ryan devoted his attention to sessions he attended at the DPS conference, walking readers through discussions ranging from exoplanets to the mysteries of Titan.
As you wait for the archived DPS sessions, you can page through the Martian Chronicles entries, starting with this one, to get an idea of the range of studies presented last week. This is handy stuff for deciding which presentations you might want to view when the webstream archives become available. Controversial points are sprinkled throughout:
Another talk suggested that the methane in Titan’s atmosphere could be created by reaction of heavier organic molecules with hydrogen, but it was shot down in the questions session by people pointing out that the heavier organic compounds form from methane in the first place, and that when the heavy compounds lose their hydrogen, it escapes to space, making it a decidedly one-way sort of reaction.
A third Titan talk took a look at the absorption of infrared light when it goes through liquid methane and suggested rather controversially that some of the “lakes”that people are seeing may only be a few millimeters deep! This spurred a discussion of how well one can tell the depth of a body of liquid just by looking at it. One of the audience members said that “I wouldn’t gauge the depth of Cayuga lake by how deep I can see” but the counterargument was that, in the infrared, lakes are much clearer than they are at visible wavelengths.
Ryan is quick to note the places of unusual interest, as for example David Charbonneau’s discussion of an exoplanet 1.7 times as large as Jupiter but with roughly the same mass, a planet whose density is something like balsa wood. I’ll queue that one for playing, along with other presentations covering the discoveries now being extracted from transiting planet observations. Both the IAC and DPS sessions as preserved by the Net take a bit of the sting out of not being able to attend in person and should serve as a reminder to all conference organizers of the need to build and maintain permanent archives.
by Paul Gilster | Sep 6, 2008 | Research Tools |
I’m a great believer in the open courseware concept that MIT has done so much to promote. The idea is to do away with the password-protected gatekeeper function that so many university and college Web sites impose, opening access to those course materials an instructor chooses to put online. Some 1800 courses in 33 different disciplines have made their way to the Web via MIT’s gateway, their offerings ranging from audio of lectures, lecture notes and exams to PDFs and video files. It’s a pleasure to see that Bruce Irving is tracking MIT’s venture on his Music of the Spheres site, a post I’ve chosen to highlight from this week’s Carnival of Space collection.
Bruce notes one recent addition to the MIT catalog, a course called Space Systems Engineering that looks at design challenges in both ground and space-based telescopes, ultimately attempting to choose the top-rated architectures for a lunar telescope facility. But the MIT offerings are wide ranging. I’m seeing courses on aerospace engineering, structural mechanics, aerodynamics, space propulsion, satellite engineering, and one that caught Bruce’s eye as well, a course called Engineering Apollo: The Moon Project as a Complex System, with guest lectures by engineers who participated in Apollo.
What’s unusual to me isn’t MIT’s bold attempt to make university resources available throughout the globe, but the fact that open courseware hasn’t become more widespread. Against the objection that it diminishes the likelihood that a student will apply to a given school, its courses being available online, I can only state the obvious: No degree program flows from open courseware, nor does the online experience in any way equal the rich and interactive environment to be found on the actual campus. Open courseware does not try to replace traditional education, but to augment it by making the fruits of intellectual inquiry more widely available.
Making that point is simple once you’ve gone through some of MIT’s courses, seeing that some are far more complete than others in terms of materials. But what an exceptional resource for those trying to get a handle on how a subject is structured in a university environment, its basic premises and strategies, and the background materials by which to approach it. I think, too, of how many teachers in more remote environments may find stimulus here to revise and expand their current offerings through online suggestions. Bravo MIT, and here’s to open courseware spreading to other great universities.
by Paul Gilster | Aug 13, 2008 | Culture and Society, Research Tools |
I want to take a momentary detour from interstellar topics to talk about how we go about doing research, astronomical and otherwise. Some years back I debated the then new trend of online peer review with an opponent who argued for the virtues of traditional print journals and their methods. At the time, what would become the arXiv pre-print site was just beginning to grow, and the benefits of having a wide audience able to examine a scientific paper before it achieved print seemed manifest. Much good research, I reasoned, would become available for scrutiny, some of it unable to get past academic referees at a specific journal but now able to be included in a broadened scientific discussion.
Even so, certain trends did worry me, some of them now manifest again in a presidential report recently cited by James Evans, a University of Chicago sociologist. The report makes a jaw-dropping claim: “All citizens anywhere anytime can use any Internet-connected digital device to search all of human knowledge.” The sheer naiveté of this claim boggles the mind, the idea that the Internet, whose holdings are top-heavy with the most recent work and all but empty of the great bulk of earlier studies other than in the form of bibliographical references, is a complete library.
Evans agrees. We have no reason to doubt (and surveys of library practice confirm) that the use of print is waning because of the manifest advantages of searching online, not to mention exotica like citing going forward, meaning an earlier paper’s references can now be buttressed with links to subsequent research that refers back to that paper, thus deepening the perspective. Interested in learning more, Evans has published the results of his survey of a database of 34 million articles, with reference to their availability and the uses to which they are being put. This is from an essay he did on the Britannica Blog about his work, and now the implications of Web availability take a darker turn:
“…as more journals and articles came online, the actual number of them cited in research decreased, and those that were cited tended to be of more recent vintage. This proved true for virtually all fields of science. (Note that this is not a historical trend… there are more authors and universities citing more and older articles every year, but when journals go online, references become more shallow and narrow than they would have been had they not gone online).
And was my idea of spreading the availability of good material outside the primary journals accurate? Apparently not, at least in sociology. For Evans also learned that researcher attention has now shifted to the most prestigious journals. The result turns out to be counter-intuitively hostile to good research: With online searching more efficient and aided by hyperlinking, what we’re actually seeing is a narrowing of the range of scholarly findings and ideas being studied by scholars. And get this:
Ironically, my research suggests that one of the chief values of print library research is its poor indexing. Poor indexing—indexing by titles and authors, primarily within journals—likely had the unintended consequence of actually helping the integration of science and scholarship. By drawing researchers into a wider array of articles, print browsing and perusal may have facilitated broader comparisons and scholarship.
And, of course, we can relate this to the non-academic experience of the average Internet user, who may find that while access to a wide range of ideas is available, the actual practice is to look at the top page of search results and little else. With Google’s page-rank algorithms making the call, people wind up experiencing largely the same number of high-profile sites, to the detriment of serendipity, that wonderful process by which we blunder into a concept that cross-pollinates into a startling new insight.
Long live the computerized database and the pre-print server concept, but can’t we work on richer indexing methods and interface possibilities to keep the research environment as fertile as possible? Evans is exploring this in his work, and speculating that advances in natural language processing may help us sharpen up the relevance of our search techniques. Beyond that, of course, we have to expand our databases themselves to include the vast storehouse of papers that have accumulated over the course of scientific investigation, many of which, when coupled with recent findings, may offer insights that would otherwise be lost. This is a future priority for the Tau Zero Foundation.
The paper is Evans, “Electronic Publication and the Narrowing of Science and Scholarship,” Science Vol. 321 No. 5887 (18 July 2008), pp. 395-399 (abstract).
Addendum: Author Nicholas Carr also looks at this issue in his Rough Type blog, from which this:
When the efficiency ethic moves from the realm of goods production to the realm of intellectual exploration, as it is doing with the Net, we shouldn’t be surprised to find a narrowing rather than a broadening of the field of study. Search engines, after all, are popularity engines that concentrate attention rather than expanding it, and, as Evans notes, efficiency amplifies our native laziness.
by Paul Gilster | Sep 17, 2007 | Culture and Society, Research Tools |
By Bernd Henschenmacher
In Living off the Land in Space, Gregory Matloff, Les Johnson and artist C. Bangs discuss how mankind may colonize the Solar System and travel to nearby stars using energy and material resources provided by nature. The whole book is devoted to the ‘Living off the Land’ concept, which is introduced in the early chapters. Future space travelers, say Matloff et al., will use solar energy and mine the asteroids in order to reach other planets in our system and, later, stars like Alpha Centauri.
Given the huge distances involved and the difficulties of rapid transport from Earth, such methods are the only feasible way for mankind to leave its home. The authors draw on historical examples of colonization endeavors here on Earth to illustrate that living off the land is quite an old concept. Indeed, our species would still be confined to Africa if early humans had failed to use the resources they found along the way to new continents and islands.
After a short review of propulsion systems (Project Orion and Daedalus, interstellar ramjets, antimatter drives and even space warps), the authors focus on those concepts that may be available in the not too distant future. The reader will find chapters dealing with ion, solar thermal and chemical propulsion as well as space tethers and solar sails as methods of pushing into deep space. All have the advantage of requiring no fundamental breakthrough in physics to achieve the desired result.
Every propulsion system that has ever been envisioned for interstellar travel (even anti-gravity devices, the Zero Point Energy concept and the like are mentioned) is explained in an easy to understand way, laden with but a small amount of mathematics. Science fiction enthusiasts may be disappointed to read here that manned interstellar travel will probably take millennia and that warp drives are essentially impossible, but the authors’ admonition that breakthroughs happen leaves the matter open.
Nevertheless, the goal of the book is to provide a realistic view of what might be possible with technologies that are accessible in the near future. A wealth of references at the end of each chapter point the way to further resources. Living Off the Land in Space should satisfy anyone who wants to learn more about space colonization and the propulsion methods that will make it happen.
by Paul Gilster | Jul 3, 2007 | Research Tools |
NASA’s Institute for Advanced Concepts has now announced that its operations will cease on August 31st of this year. Director Robert Cassanova takes justifiable pride in the Institute’s accomplishments, and I want to quote from the letter he and associate director Diana Jennings posted on the NIAC site the other day:
Since its beginning in February 1998, NIAC has encouraged an atmosphere of creative examination of seemingly impossible aerospace missions and of audacious, but credible, visions to extend the limits of technical achievement. Visionary thinking is an essential ingredient for maintaining global leadership in the sciences, technology innovation and expansion of knowledge. NIAC has sought creative researchers who have the ability to transcend current perceptions of scientific knowledge and, with imagination and vision, to leap beyond incremental development towards the possibilities of dramatic breakthroughs in performance of aerospace systems.
A key fact that many people didn’t realize about NIAC was that NASA’s own researchers were not eligible to receive funding. The idea, as Cassanova told me in a 2003 interview, was to encourage ideas to flow from outside the agency, without the baggage of needing working relationships within NASA. Several people with NIAC studies — Geoffrey Landis comes immediately to mind — did go on to work for the agency, but only after they had completed their NIAC work. Landis’ study Advanced Solar and Laser Pushed Lightsail Concepts from 1999 remains of great interest in the interstellar community.
The NIAC site is to be archived, along with the library of all funded studies, and should continue to be available after August through the Universities Space Reseach Association. In a report on NIAC’s return on investment, Cassanova runs through the Institute’s history: 126 Phase I studies and 42 of the longer Phase II efforts since 1998. NIAC Fellows were recently asked to provide information about additional funding they received to continue their initial work. Twelve of these efforts, funded by NIAC at $5.9 million, have gone on to generate $21.2 million in additional support, not only through NASA but also through other agencies and the private sector.
Three of the twelve should have particular resonance to Centauri Dreams readers, as we’ve discussed them all in these pages, particularly the first two. Let me cite the report’s summaries:
-
Mini-magnetospheric Plasma Propulsion (M2P2), (Robert Winglee and John Slough, PIs) The M2P2 was included in the NASA Decadal Plan and funded by MSFC to continue experiments confirming computer models. A plasma sail review panel identified a number of technical issues needing further research before feasibility could be assessed. Subsequent research results have addressed most of these issues. Additional support: 700,000 dollars to continue development of Helicon component.
- The New Worlds Observer (Web Cash, PI). This concept for planet finding was only months into its Phase II funding when it burst onto the global scene by gracing the cover of Nature. This concept has benefited from continuing support from NASA and more notably, at least two million dollars in support for additional development from Northrup Grumman and its partners. Cash, the PI, says this concept would never have seen the light of day without NIAC backing. Additional support: at least two million dollars. NASA GSFC has also contributed substantial in-kind support but we do not have numerical data. Potential impact: the same, or better, science return than the Terrestrial Planet Finder, at a savings of five billion dollars.
- Lorentz-Actuated Orbits: Electrodynamic Propulsion without a Tether (Mason Peck, PI). This revolutionary concept relies on one of the last areas of classical physics that could be applied to propellantless propulsion. Additional funding: 550,000 dollars from DARPA and NRO. Potential impact: significant cost-savings in propulsion.
We should also note that Bradley Edwards’ work on space elevator concepts that would revolutionize access to low Earth orbit gained an additional $8.5 million following its NIAC report. These and numerous other visionary studies are available at the NIAC site. The question now turns to how and when attempts to fund research into such concepts can emerge from alternate sources. The role of the private sector will doubtless be crucial, and on that score I’m hoping we’ll have much to talk about in coming months.
by Paul Gilster | Dec 6, 2006 | Exoplanetary Science, Research Tools
A note from Ian Jordan (Space Telescope Science Institute) passes along the welcome news that presentations and webcasts from last week’s Astrophysics Enabled by the Return to the Moon 2006 workshop at STScI have been posted online (available here). There’s plenty to dig into here, but of specific note for exoplanet research are the presentations by Webster Cash, Maggie Turnbull, Sara Seager and Peter McCullough.
Centauri Dreams readers have read about all four of these scientists in the past year or so. Maggie Turnbull (Carnegie Institution of Washington) specializes in identifying stars that may have terrestrial planets around them. In an earlier post, we looked at some of her picks. Sara Seager (also at Carnegie) is particularly known for her work on HD 209458B, a hot Jupiter that transits its star and thus offers up much useful data. And Peter McCullough (Space Telescope Science Institute) is getting remarkable results from the XO telescope in Hawaii, collaborating with amateur astronomers looking for transits. They’ve already found a Jupiter-class planet around a Sun-like star in Corona Borealis.
As for Cash (University of Colorado at Boulder), he’s well known here for his work on the New Worlds occulter that holds so much promise for direct imaging of distant planets. Although New Worlds was not chosen in the latest round of Discovery mission studies, Northrop Grumman continues to pursue New Worlds as avidly as Cash himself, having backed the original concept of flying the mission in tandem with the James Webb Space Telescope. That idea may now be on hold, but Northrop Grumman’s Amy Lo is working to prove that New Worlds will work just as well with a smaller telescope (interestingly, Hubble is not up to the job for orbital reasons, as this article explains).
A starshade in the form of a flower-petal has a certain aesthetic appeal even beyond the numerous studies that show it to be good science. Odds are strong that New Worlds will work, and at a fraction of the cost of what Terrestrial Planet Finder had been evolving toward. Tens of meters across and made of kapton (similar to mylar), the shade may represent our best bet for direct detection of Earth-like worlds, which makes Cash’s comments at the STScI workshop well worth your time.
