The Taurus rocket. Credit: NASA
Last week’s loss of the $420 million Glory satellite has sent NASA into an intensive investigation to find out why two climate change missions in a row — flying aboard the same type of rocket — crashed due to what apparently was a similar technical glitch. Orbital Sciences out of Dulles, Va. is the company that designed the Taurus XL rocket that hosted both Glory and the Orbiting Carbon Satellite that crashed in 2009. They insisted last week that they’ll bounce back with the Taurus. But they may not be bouncing back on a NASA mission. Joy Bretthauer, NASA’s Glory program executive, acknowledged that the Orbiting Carbon Observatory 2, which will launch in 2013, is contracted to fly on none other than a Taurus XL. That may not stand, she said: “The bottom line is NASA will not fly in a launch vehicle that we do not have confidence in.”
Meanwhile, scores of researchers who poured their hearts into the mission are working to cope with the loss. Greg Kopp, the Boulder, Colorado-based principal investigator on the Total Irradiance Monitor that was supposed to fly aboard Glory, gave a thorough debriefing about his experience for the radio program Colorado Matters, on Colorado Public Radio out of Denver. It airs today.
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The ESO's La Silla telescope site in the southern Atacama Desert, Chile. Credit: Iztok Boncina/ESO
It’s difficult to imagine these white telescope domes towering over a parched brown landscape made even more arid by the near-constant whistle of high-altitude winds. It’s stranger still to consider that in the desert below those domes, tough and grieving women have been searching in vain for decades for the sun-bleached remains of loved ones stolen from them, killed and dumped in the void by Pinochet’s army.
Acclaimed Chilean film director Patricio Guzmán has woven these stories together into a documentary called Nostalgia de la Luz, or Nostalgia for the Light, that is both touching and stunning, human and other-worldly, emotional — and hopeful.
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Jupiter's aurorae, courtesy of NASA
The first time Peter Delamere saw an aurora, he sort of wished it would get out of the way.
Delamere was at the time an undergraduate student at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, and he was taking an observational astronomy course. Those pesky Northern Lights really obscured his view of the stars, he complained. One of his professors admonished him to appreciate every chance to see such a wonder.
Delamere has done better than that. At a public lecture on Tuesday, he described a trajectory of investigation that has led him not only to chase aurorae on Earth — but to reach as far as Jupiter for clues about the showy polar phenomena.
Long gone are the days when he failed to appreciate the aurorae.
“I can’t impress upon those of you who haven’t seen the aurora: If the opportunity arises, take hold of it,” he told a packed house, in the auditorium at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics.
The lab happens to be quite literally across the street from my home here in Boulder, and so I walked over to learn about aurorae on Jupiter. Astronomers and probably plenty of amateur space buffs have known about Jupiter’s aurorae (and Saturn’s for that matter) for years, but they were news to me — which is why I was motivated to bundle up and leave my house on a dark, chilly evening.
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Photo by Harold Dorwin
Not all accomplished scientists like talking to reporters, and not all of them are good at it. Brian Marsden embodied these rare characteristics: He was an amazing contributor to his field and he was approachable, helpful and kind, even on the tightest of deadlines. And so even though I never met the man, I feel his death as a personal loss.
Marsden was a supervisory astronomer at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and director emeritus of the Minor Planet Center.
Charles Alcock, director of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said in press release issued this afternoon that Marsden “was one of the most influential comet investigators of the 20th Century … and definitely one of the most colorful!”
He specialized in celestial mechanics and astrometry, collecting data on the positions of asteroids and comets and computing their orbits.
The comet prediction of which Marsden was most proud was that of the return of Comet Swift-Tuttle, which is the comet associated with the Perseid meteor shower each August. Swift-Tuttle had been discovered in 1862, and the conventional wisdom was that it would return around 1981. Marsden had a strong suspicion, however, that the 1862 comet was identical with one seen in 1737, and this assumption allowed him to predict that Swift-Tuttle would not return until late 1992. He was right.
Marsden also played a key role in the “demotion” of Pluto to dwarf planet status. He once proposed that Pluto should be cross-listed as both a planet and a “minor planet,” and assigned the asteroid number 10000. That proposal was not accepted. However, in 2006 a vote by members of the International Astronomical Union created a new category of “dwarf planets,” which includes Pluto, Ceres, and several other objects. Pluto was designated minor planet 134340. The decision remains controversial.
That basic information, and much more biographical detail about Marsden, can be found at the Center for Astrophysics; I won’t repeat it here.
Instead, I’ll reprint two of our email exchanges in tribute to his candor and his helpfulness, along with links to the stories he helped me write. Goodbye, Brian Marsden. Thank you for all of your contributions, large and small.
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Highway 163 through Monument Valley - a celebrated favorite! Photo by Anne Minard
“Off-line” is a bit extreme, I suppose. But gone are the heady days of obsessing over NASA’s Twitter feeds, habitually refreshing Google Reader and blogging every single day. Since the 2009-2010 Ted Scripps Fellowship, I’ve spent a lot less time on the Internet and more time engaged in the non-digital world. I’ve been writing for a few print magazines, teaching students who have inspired me in a journalism class at CU Boulder, visiting Native American tribes on the Colorado Plateau for a research and writing project, and enjoying loads of amazing scenery along the way. Many of the places I’ve been frequenting lack wireless Internet. Still, it bothers me to log onto my own website and see an outdated post from the first few days of the oil spill in the Gulf.
A freelancer’s life is always changing, and another transition is on the way. Soon, the project in the Southwest will end and I’ll be traveling a lot less. The semester at CU Boulder will come to a close. And I’ll be back to a “normal” freelancer’s life, meeting deadlines and keeping up the hunt for a fresh stream of story ideas. That means I’ll likely be here more, surfing the web for ideas, publishing more stories online as well as in the glossies, and breathing new life into my online presence.
Kudos and many thanks to David Herbold of Flagstaff, who recently reinvigorated the site with fresh new colors. It’s good to be back!
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