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.

Rich Straka, deputy general manager for operations for the Orbital Sciences launch systems group,  said during a NASA press briefing that the problem with both launches had to do with a protective covering called a clamshell fairing, held onto the vehicle with frangible, or breakable, joints meant to explosively fracture when commanded to do so.

“The fairing is then in two halves and there are piston pushers that push the fairing off,” Straka explained.

But in neither launch — the OCO in 2009 or Glory last week — did the fairing come off the rocket. In both cases, it stayed put and weighed the satellite down, preventing its flight toward orbit.

“We went into this flight confident that we had nailed the fairing issue,” said Ron Grabe, executive vice president and general manager of Orbital Sciences’ launch systems group. “We went so far as to completely change out the initiation system to a system that we use on one of our other vehicles, and in the intervening years that system flew successfully three times.”

Specifically, the company had previously used a hot gas system to drive the pistons that would push the fairing halves apart. But they traced the OCO launch loss to an initiation failure in the hot gas system. Orbital Sciences redesigned the Taurus XL rocket to use a cold gas system, starting with a pressurized bottle of nitrogen, just like the one in use on their Minotaur rocket.

NASA’s Bretthauer said she and others in the agency are heavy-hearted, but also baffled that their review of the OCO failure didn’t rule out the same mishap for Glory.

“We really thought we had it right,” she said. “We obviously never would have launched if we had not strongly believed the OCO failure had been mitigated.”

Kopp, a solar physicist at CU Bouder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP), said Bretthauer herself asked a key question during early meetings to investigate the Glory failure: If a thorough investigation by both NASA and Orbital Sciences missed a key problem, how can we trust the process the second time around?

Meanwhile, Kopp and others are regrouping to see how much of Glory’s science can be salvaged. His instrument, the TIM, was supposed to carry on an ongoing measure of the sun’s energy reaching Earth, to try to better understand the sun’s role in climate change. For now, older instruments like SORCE are carrying the torch. And it’s possible that missions currently in the pipeline — like the Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS), a collaboration between NASA and NOAA – might be sped up to fill in the gaps.

More information: See also NASA’s Glory and OCO pages, a previous story about the Glory mission, and two stories about the OCO crash in 2009, here and here. This story is cross-posted at Universe Today.

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.

The film played at the Toronto International Film Festival and at Cannes before lighting up a packed theater at 10 a.m. on a Sunday morning in Boulder, Colorado, a community with a special fondness for space science owing partly to the presence of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP), Ball Aerospace, NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center and the Southwest Research Institute.

In fact Jason Glenn, an astronomer at the University of Colorado at Boulder, took the podium for a few moments before the start of the film to announce plans for the Cornell-Caltech-Atacama (CCAT) telescope proposed to go atop the Chilean mountain Cerro Chajnantor — and to request donations toward its construction. CCAT, a submillimeter telescope, will be used to probe primeval galaxies, star formation and extra-solar planetary systems.

The film opens with awe-inspiring images of galaxies, close-up views of the pockmarked lunar surface, and eerily beautiful shots of the vast Atacama. The desert lies west of the Andes Mountains in Chile, and is generally regarded as the driest place on Earth. That, plus its high altitude, make it a perfect place for astronomy. The Atacama supports the ESO’s Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), the Very Large Telescope (VLT) and numerous other instruments. Many Chileans, the film intimates, grow up loving astronomy.

Meanwhile the people of Chile continue to heal from Pinochet’s bloody rule beginning in the early 1970s, when thousands of his political opponents were taken from their families and disappeared. The film captures the perspectives of people on all sides of the tragedy — from the grieving mothers and wives, the archeologists working to decipher both the recent and distant human past, survivors of Pinochet’s concentration camps and even astronomers who, tucked in offices underneath the massive telescope domes, might not seem to have much in common with the grieving women. But they do.

Gaspar Galaz, an astronomer at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, says in the film that both he and the women pursue quests to learn history; they’re all chasing rare clues in dauntingly vast spaces. Galaz peers far across the cosmos to study diffuse galaxies, whose origins are unknown, and the women comb the 40,600 square mile (105,000 km2) desert for minute fragments of bone. The difference: At the end of his workday, Galaz says, he can get a good night’s sleep, “but these women must have trouble sleeping after they search for human remains.”

Nostalgia de la Luz is worth seeing for any of its parts — the glimpses through the powerful Atacama telescopes, the desert scenes, the cultural insights or the beautifully human and optimistic ending, which I won’t give away here. Taken together, the film’s elements are an experience not to be missed.

Several trailers for Nostalgia de la Luz are available on YouTube; upcoming showtimes include, according to Facebook, March 8 and 9 at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, March 18 at the IFC Film Center in New York and April 22-28 at Landmark’s Nuart Theater in LA. Today’s showing was at the Boulder International Film Festival.

This review is cross-posted at Universe Today.

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.

Delamere began by showing incredible videos of other-worldly aurorae here on Earth, ribbons of green light flowing over northern landscapes. Aurorae begin when solar plasma is belched (not Delamere’s word) from the surface of the Sun and sent hurtling toward Earth. At that point, it’s called solar wind, and it comprises highly charged particles that would ordinarily bombard Earth’s surface and make life impossible, if it weren’t for Earth’s protective magnetic field. Charged particles can’t cross magnetic field lines, so they get diverted down them, which stretches and elongates those field lines on the side of Earth opposite the Sun. If the ejection of solar material was powerful enough, the particles will snap a magnetic field line like a rubber band, Delamere said, although he added that the physics of the rupture is one of the most compelling mysteries in his field. However it happens, the two ends of this figurative rubber band release showers of the charged solar particles that go hurtling toward Earth, agitating elements in Earth’s atmosphere and causing them to glow as Northern and Southern lights simultaneously — the aurorae.

Northern Lights

Following Delamere’s undergraduate education (and his introduction to the aurorae), he moved on to graduate school in Fairbanks, Alaska, where he got to participate in experiments to test the behavior of Earth’s magnetic field lines by shooting barium along their paths. The experiments confirmed the basics of the interactions between charged particles and the field lines.

But these experiments fell short, because the charged particles in question were heading in a direction opposite that of solar wind. Delamere really wanted to artificially create an aurorae for study by bombaring Earth’s magnetic field lines with plasma that could mimic the solar wind. Turns out, he didn’t have to — there was an experiment already set up elsewhere in the solar system.

“Jupiter’s got its own plasma-injecting experiment. It’s called Io,” he said, referring to Jupiter’s innermost, volcanically active moon (pronounced E-o). “I thought, why bother with these artificial experiments when we’ve got one occurring naturally in the solar system? Let’s go and study it.”

Io, as it turns out, is a plasma-generating machine, orbiting in a torus of its own volcanic gas, causing charged particles (electrons) to stream along the giant planet’s magnetic field lines and bombard Jupiter’s atmosphere along the giant planet’s magnetic field lines, as shown in the top of the next image. That’s one key difference between the aurorae on Earth and Jupiter — Earth’s is caused by solar wind, and most of Jupiter’s is not. There, Io (along with fellow moons Ganymede and Europa) appears to be the root cause of an internally-driven polar light show.

Credit: J. Clarke and G Ballester (University of Michigan), J. Trauger and R. Evans (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) and NASA

There are other, more mysterious parts of Jupiter’s aurorae, likely caused by the planet’s hugely powerful magnetosphere and possibly, to a much lesser extent, by a bit of solar wind. Delamere said the aurorae related to the moons create sporadic rings of light around the poles, while the other sources fill in that ring. So, whereas Earth’s aurorae form giant rings of light around the poles, Jupiter’s poles get caps of lighted weirdness, as shown in the Hubble images at the bottom. There’s no real seeing Jupiter’s aurorae, even for amateur astronomers with powerful telescopes. Even though they’re 100 times as energetic as the Northern and Southern lights, the Jovian aurorae happen primarily in the UV — out of the range of human sight.

We’ll just have to be satisfied with our own aurorae, spectacular enough to have driven ancient cultures to war and religion. The best places to see them, on about 100 nights a year, are Alaska and Canada. Probably best to wait a few years, as the Sun is just now emerging from a low point in its 11-year activity cycle. Alternatively, hopeful viewers could stay home and hope for the best. The aurorae are not nearly as spectacular in Boulder, Colorado or Mexico City, but they do appear — about once a year in Boulder and once every 10 years over Mexico.

While I wait, I’ll be attending some other lectures over at LASP. That was fun!

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.

July 2008, on reading a draft for a story about the new protocol being used to name Makamake, the fourth known dwarf planet …

Dear Anne,

Only one really substantive error, in the last paragraph under the second subheading:

“All except for the ones that orbit TWO times for Neptune’s every THREE times, that is. Those planets, locked into the same rhythm as Pluto, are to be named after underworld mythological deities.”

In the first paragraph of that section, since I am actually a member of both naming committees, it would perhaps be better to say:

“Brian Marsden has recorded the names of more than 12,000 asteroids and other planetary bodies during his 30-plus years at THE IAU’s Minor Planet Center. He IS ALSO THE SECRETARY OF the Committee on Small Body Nomenclature, one of the two IAU committees that must approve new dwarf planet names.”

One could argue that, given the chronologically earlier 2003 EL61, Makemake is the fifth dwarf planet, rather than the fourth.  But it is the fourth one to be named, and your second paragraph rather implies that.

And in the seventh paragraph, the point is that the naming came just a month after the IAU established the _name_ “Plutoid” for the category.  The category of dwarf planets (most of them to be transneptunian, together with the oddball Ceres) was actually defined two years ago, at the IAU General Assembly in Prague.

I liked the last paragraph: swindled or scooped, indeed!

But does Mike really want to be on record as a “believe[r] in astrology”?

Regards
Brian

In September of 2008, for another quirky dwarf planet naming story, about Haumea …

Anne Minard

Dear Anne,

You might say it is “a sort of compromise”.  After all, Mike Brown certainly discovered the satellites, and there is no evidence that the Spanish team found what they describe as the “discovery observations” of the primary (i.e., the observations of March 2003) before Mike Brown found the first of the satellites (in Jan. 2005).

Photo by Harold Dorwin

The leader of the Spanish team claims that the student usually credited with the discovery informed him of the discovery on 2005 July 25, which was 5-6 days after Mike Brown effectively announced the discovery in his AAS-DPS Abstract and 3-4 days before the Spanish team informed the Minor Planet Center of their discovery.  What I have always wanted to know is precisely _when_ the Spanish student actually first “saw” the March 2003 images, and what he did with this knowledge before informing his advisor.

Furthermore, Mike Brown had every right to propose names for the satellites, and it would be normal to have some connection between the names of the satellites and the name of the primary.

Without the answer to my question above, I don’t see how we can ever really completely resolve the issue.

Regards
Brian G. Marsden