Title: The Hunt For Vulcanoids

Podcaster: Bob Hirshon

Organization: American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS): http://www.aaas.org

Description: For nearly a hundred years, scientists have wondered if there might be a band of asteroids as large as 60 km wide orbiting the Sun, in a gravitationally stable zone that’s closer to the sun than the orbit of Mercury. The MESSENGER mission to the planet Mercury is now hunting for the elusive objects, and could soon solve the mystery.

Bio: Bob Hirshon is Senior Project Director at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and host of the daily radio show and podcast Science Update. Now in its 23rd year, Science Update is heard on over 300 commercial stations nationwide. Hirshon also heads up Kinetic City, including the Peabody Award winning children’s radio drama, McGraw-Hill book series and Codie Award winning website and education program. He oversees the Science NetLinks project for K-12 science teachers, part of the Verizon Foundation Thinkfinity partnership. Hirshon is a Computerworld/Smithsonian Hero for a New Millenium laureate.

Today's sponsor: This episode of "365 Days of Astronomy" is sponsored by the Education and Outreach team for the MESSENGER mission to planet Mercury. Follow the mission as the spacecraft helps to unlock the secrets of the inner solar system at www.messenger-education.org

Transcript:

Hello, and welcome to the 365 days of astronomy podcast. I’m Bob Hirshon, host of the AAAS radio show and podcast Science Update. Now if you glanced quickly at today’s podcast title and are expecting a report on the pointy-eared, human-like inhabitants of the planet Vulcan, from Star Trek, you may be disappointed. Today we’ll be reporting on the search for a very different variety of vulcanoid. These are hypothetical rocky bodies orbiting very close to the sun— in fact, inside the orbit of hte planet Mercury. Clark Chapman is senior scientist at the department of space studies at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, CO. He says vulcanoids were named not for any characters or planets on Star Trek, but for another mythical planet. Chapman: For a long time there’s been speculation that there might be a planet named Vulcan sort of in the earth’s orbit but on the opposite side of the sun where we couldn’t see it.

Hirshon: The existence of the planet Vulcan was disproved back in 1915. But it's from that mythical planet that we get the name vulcanoids. Chapman says the vulcanoids scientists are searching for are remnants from the period billons of years ago when our solar system formed-- remnants that today would be orbiting between Mercury and the Sun.

Chapman: They would be leftovers from the time when the solar system was forming out of swarms of small bodies called planetessimals. All of the planets are thought to have grown at least in part out of these smaller bodies. And it turns out that this region inside Mercury’s orbit, partway to the sun, is a stable region. So that bodies once orbiting there could still be orbiting there. Unlike the areas between Earth and Venus or Earth and Mars, where any original bodies would have not been able to last the age of the solar system.

Hirshon: So for decades, scientists have focused their attention on this region. But the intense glare of the sun has made observation difficult. Studies with telescopes have ruled out the existence of large bodies there, above 60 km in diameter. Now Chapman and his colleagues are using the cameras aboard the MESSENGER spacecraft to take a closer look.

Chapman: MESSENGER, on the spacecrafts’s route to go into orbit around Mercury, has been orbting the sun a quite a number of times, and it’s flown past Mercury itself three times. But every time it’s at its perhelion distance—that’s the closest distance in the orbit to the sun, which is roughly near the orbit of Mercury—there’s an opportunity to view part of the volume of space occupied by vulcanoids. MESSENGER’s instruments cannot point closer than a certain angle toward the sun. But we’re able to get a pretty good slice of the volume of space that vulcanoids might be orbiting in by sort of looking as close to the sun as we’re allowed to with the camera system. And we’ve been doing this for several of the past perhelion passages of the spacecract.

Hirshon: They’ve now begun to analyze the images to see if they can find any orbiting bodies. Chapman: We’ve seen some strange things in the pictures that turn out to be little pieces of dust and debris right near the spacecract. But they look pretty spectacular in the images. But we ruled out that they’re any kind of real significant celestial objects. So so far we haven’t found any, but we have plans to make more observations in the future.

Hirshon: He says that one thing complicating the search is that no one knows what the hypothetical vulcanoids are made of, how big they might have been originally, or what they might look like today.

Chapman: It’s uncertain how big original vulcanoids might have been, but since they go around the sun very rapidly and in a relatively confined space inside Mercury’s orbit, they run into each other and collide. So we would expect that there would be a distribution of sizes ranging from whatever the largest size would be all the way down to very small, where other forces like solar radiation pressure would sweep them out. So really the largest vulcanoid—there’s a limit set by the searches that have already been done, by rockets and observations from balloons, and observations during total eclipses and so on, and it’s several tens of kilometers in size. Things of 50 kilometers or 100 kilometers would already have been detected. So we’re talking about relatively small bodies that remain too small to have been ruled out by previous searches. But bodies that are very small would have been swept out by strong radiation forces from the sun.

Hirshon: And while they haven’t spotted any yet, they still have a lot of photo analysis to conduct. If they end up ruling out the existence of medium to large vulcanoids, that will lead to speculation as to what happened to them.

Chapman: One reason why they might not be there is that they sort of bumped into each other and collided with each other and over the course of four and a half billion years ground themselves down into nothing. But of course if they were able to do that, that would say something about how strong the material was. You know, if they were, for example, made of solid nickel iron, you might expect that they’d last despite all the collisions. Whereas if they were made of very weak materials, then they wouldn’t. So you can kind of set a bound on that.

Hirshon: If they do find them, that will lead to questions of what to do next.

Chapman: Certainly if they were found, they would be remnants from the solar nebula and the materials that were there at the very earliest times in solar system history and would presumably be made out of materials that can withstand the great heat that exist there that close to the sun. So it would be very interesting material to study. I don’t know how simple it would be to have a sample return mission to a vulcanoid, which is in a hotter region than Mercury itself. The MESSENGER spacecraft has been designed very carefully to withstand the heat of the sun at Mercury’s distance. So it would be a very touch mission. But sure, if we could get a sample of a vulcanoid, that would be very exciting.

Hirshon: Primordial material from the birth of our solar system. That would certainly be, to quote Mr. Spock, quite fascinating. For the 365 days of astronomy, I’m Bob Hirshon.

End of podcast:

365 Days of Astronomy
=====================
The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is produced by the Astrosphere New Media Association. Audio post-production by Preston Gibson. Bandwidth donated by libsyn.com and wizzard media. Web design by Clockwork Active Media Systems. You may reproduce and distribute this audio for non-commercial purposes. Please consider supporting the podcast with a few dollars (or Euros!). Visit us on the web at 365DaysOfAstronomy.org or email us at info@365DaysOfAstronomy.org. Until tomorrow...goodbye.

Title: Go for Launch! A Conversation with George Diller from NASA TV

Podcaster: Nancy Atkinson

Description: If NASA TV is part of your daily diet of space media, you will likely recognize the voice of George Diller, who does the TV commentary for launches from Kennedy Space Center. George shares some of the highlights of his 29 years at KSC.

Links: Listen to and read additional interviews with more people who work at NASA TV at Kennedy Space Center at Universe Today, "Behind the Scenes at NASA TV.: NASA TV on the web, Universe Today, Astronomy Cast

Bio: Nancy Atkinson is the Senior Editor for Universe Today, a producer/researcher for Astronomy Cast, and the project manager for the 365 Days of Astronomy podcast.

Today's sponsor: This episode of "365 Days of Astronomy" is sponsored by Maurice Cahill and dedicated to Dennis Byrnes whose enthusiasm for astronomy inspired me, and to the folks at 365 days of Astronomy who have kept me informed, challenged, and entertained for over a year (especially with the "überfar shout"!).

Transcript:

Hi, this is Nancy Atkinson from Universe Today. Right now I'm at Kennedy Space Center, and I've had the opportunity to see a couple of launches and cover other events here that normally, I'd be back home watching on NASA TV. I had the chance to talk with some of the people who work at NASA TV at Kennedy Space Center, or KSC TV as they call it, to find out about the things that they do. One of those people was George Diller, one of the voices of KSC TV.

Nancy: The next voice you'll hear you will probably recognize. He's the voice of, I think almost all the launches here at Kennedy Space Center for the past several year. It's George Diller. Hi George, thanks for talking with us today.

George: I do a lot of the launches but the shuttle launches we tend to spread out between among some of us in the office because there is a tremendous amount of preparation that goes into one of those so its hard for one person to do them all. I do do a lot more of the expendable launches, the unmanned launches and I really enjoy those particularly because the payloads are so different. They are deploy-able spacecraft that tend to be focused on space science, planetary exploration, astrophysics – those are the ones to me that have a certain amount of fascination, and always have way back from when I started here back in the late 70's. In fact I cut my teeth as a newsman covering the space center for about five years and became particularly interested in the expendable vehicle launches with Viking, Voyager and Pioneer Venus. I've been here 29 years now and that still has the same attraction for me. We did launch those kinds of payloads on the shuttle for awhile and I got to work with those payloads in preparation for launch. But those all transitioned over to the expendable launch vehicles completely after the Challenger accident and the space shuttle was refocused on building the International Space Station.

If I look back probably at some of the missions that I have most enjoyed working on and doing the launch commentary for, probably the Hubble Space Telescope would the one that would be the highlight because I was directly involved with the telescope and the spacecraft payload testing and doing the commentary for launch, as well as for all the missions that have been done since that have gone up to service the telescope. So it really is quite a feeling to look back and say that I was a part of that for all of those Hubble Missions, both for the launch and all the flights that have followed to service it.

Probably the most memorable spacecraft that I have been directly involved with have been involved with particularly would be Cassini that went to Saturn and sent a probe down to Titan, one of Saturn's moons. Also Galileo that went to Jupiter and that was such a great success and the Magellan mission to Venus. So, I think I enjoy those kinds of missions because they are leaving low Earth orbit and going so much farther out that we can only hope that one day we'll one day go to those places ourselves.

The shuttle missions have really become focused on the space station, and it's kind of been fun on those flights to focus on a particular piece of flight hardware that's going up to be attached to the station, and later on when there is some kind of reference to a particular component or something particular that has been attached to it, you can remember some involvement that you've had with it.

But I think the space station, is, when is all finished and we look back at the science that was done over the next 10 or 15 years, I think we are going to look back at it as probably one of the wonders of the world in terms of modern accomplishments just as we have the Hubble Space Telescope, because I think so much will come out of it that is focused to us right down here on the ground. It will translate to benefits such as new metals, new pharmaceuticals, new computer substrates; new potential cures for diseases, medicines that we can get to synthesize only in the microgravity – zero gravity environment of The potential of the space station is almost mind boggling.

And I'm hoping to be around long enough to look back at the history of the space station program and say, well, I was with NASA when we were putting this together, and I may be retired eventually, but I can look back and say, look at all of the great things that now have come from the program.

Nancy: As you see the end of the space shuttle program coming, what are your personal feelings about that?

George: Well, the shuttle is something that gives us the kind of capability and flexibility that we never had before and that we do not have any plans to have again. It has the tremendous ability in terms of being able to deploy payloads, to take large payloads to space, to be able to services things in space, to be able to service things in space, to be able to construct things in space, also to be able to take things up and bring them back. And looking forward we're going to have more capable rockets but they don't have the same flexibility in terms of the weight that they can bring up or bring things back or be able to servicing that the shuttle has become so famous for being able to do for things already up there. So I think we'll miss that, but it's going to be fun to be able to look back and say the shuttle gave us the only way could have ever built the space station. I think it is a very storied program in the history of NASA. I'm proud to say I was here for the first launch and I'll be here for the last launch and I was in some way a part of that story.

Nancy: Could you tell us about what it takes to put everything together to do a launch commentary for NASA TV?

George: The launch commentaries are, when you start planning for one, not only are there all the materials that you have to put together, but you also have to work with the TV people on all the things you want to show during the broadcast. That means scheduling all the video to be shot over a certain amount of time as the spacecraft is being prepared for launch, then all the things you want to do to tell the story, such as the animations you want to show and you have to figure out where in the broadcast its going to fit with what you are doing. Then have to schedule for it, so it’s a lot more than just writing it. Although there's a lot of it now that, as far as the shuttle is concerned, I can work from an outline. I really don't have to read from a script, although if I'm doing something very mission specific I might need a script for some part of it, if it is very mission specific. So, for anybody doing a launch commentary, it's not something you can just pull together in just an afternoon. It takes a fair amount of time to pull all that together, and then work with the TV people and tell them where you want to include it and you have to work out your shot sheet of the sequence you want all these things in, so I think it's good, in a way, that we kind of rotate the shuttle launches in particular around the office because it takes a fair amount of work to put it together. It's a lot of fun, but it’s a lot of work!

Nancy: I've noticed that it seems recently you've had extra people come on and talk about different things going on with the mission during the launch countdown.

George: On the shuttle side, yes. On the ELV side we've always kind of done that. Our ELV commentary is usually divided into two parts, because the commentaries run usually between two and two and a half hours, as a rule on an unmanned launch. The first part of it picks up at a certain point in the countdown, but it is very heavy on interviews and things that are associated with the mission aspect. Usually you're doing all that while they are fueling the vehicle. So, it gives you the chance to talk about fueling and things going on, but basically it gives you time for the color.

And then the second half of it is really focused on the launch itself and the launch operations. So it is divided into two parts that way.

On the shuttle, its more of a desire on the part of NASa to include much more activity both in terms of the mission as well as features that tell a story in the countdown and include more background that the average guy watching NASA TV can relate to. So it has meant more features, and some are related to the mission and some are related to the countdown, some are more related to the astronauts, some are more related to the people that have been involved with it, so we try to broaden it out a little bit. I think that is the reason behind that, because the count is on for such a long time. It's one for five to five and a half hours. I think there was a feeling that we needed to do that and we had enough time to do that.

Nancy: I know I always enjoy watching as much as I can because it is fun to watch the whole process of what takes place. And now that I've been here and have gotten to see that, like the astronauts walking out and seeing it live and in person, its been really fun being here.

George: There have been a coupel that have almost been extravaganzas because of the nature of the mission, like the John Glenn mission. That one, there was so much you could include in the commentary because of the history of John Glenn. And he is so modest. He didn't want us to do any more than we customarily do. But how can you not? And he is such a favorite around here. When he was here for the countdown dress rehearsal and the training, it was hard to get him through these exercises and these tests because he was just being mobbed by the NASA workers and the KSC employees. They were pulling dollar bills out of their wallets to get him to sign. And he would never be rushed. The trainers would try to keep things moving, but he would not be rushed. He took time to talk to everybody and sign their bills.

When we had the Challenger accident, he was the first person on site after the accident. He flew down here immediately and was on a briefing that afternoon over in the news center. He absolutely loves this place. He's never forgotten it and those are the kinds of missions that have a lot of public interest. Plus the return to flight missions after Challenger and Columbia those were always big because in each case it meant a re-focusing of the program in some way.

And of course the last one will just be a blowout.

Nancy: Thanks very much for talking with us today, this has been a lot of fun.
George: All right!

Nancy: If you'd like to hear from more people that work at KSC TV, I have about 30 minutes of interviews with directors, producers and technicians that you can hear over at Universe Today. You can find the link to those interviews in the show notes for this, the March 5, 2010 edition of 365 Days of Astronomy on 365daysof astronomy.org, or go directly to Universe Today and search for "Behind the Scenes at NASA TV." Thanks very much for listening.

End of podcast:

365 Days of Astronomy
=====================
The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is produced by the Astrosphere New Media Association. Audio post-production by Preston Gibson. Bandwidth donated by libsyn.com and wizzard media. Web design by Clockwork Active Media Systems. You may reproduce and distribute this audio for non-commercial purposes. Please consider supporting the podcast with a few dollars (or Euros!). Visit us on the web at 365DaysOfAstronomy.org or email us at info@365DaysOfAstronomy.org. Until tomorrow...goodbye.

Title: The Parkes Dish

Podcaster: Eran Segev

Organization: The Skeptic Zone Podcast - www.skepticzone.tv

Description: The 64 metre radio telescope at Parkes in NSW, Australia played an important role in the first moon landing. This is the story of that day and the experiences of some of those who were there.

Bio: Eran Segev is an IT consultant, but his passion is science in general and astronomy in particular. He is the President of Australian Skeptics (www.skeptics.com.au) and participates in the Skeptic Zone podcast (www.skepticzone.tv).

Today's sponsor: This episode of "365 Days of Astronomy" is sponsored by Mick Vagg, a grassroots astronomy punter in appreciation of the efforts of all contributors to the 365 Days of Astronomy project. Thanks for keeping me interested on those all too frequent cloudy nights!

Transcript:

This is Eran Segev from Australian Skeptics and the Skeptic Zone podcast, with the story of Parkes, a small town 380km west of Sydney.

Monday, the 21st of July 1969 was a very special day for Parkes. While most of the world remembers the first landing on the moon as having happened on the 20th of July, the time difference between Australia and the US means that when the Eagle landed in the Sea of Tranquillity at 4:18PM EDT, it was 6:18AM of the following day at Parkes. The reason that that event has special meaning for Parkes is that it is host to a 64 metre radio telescope which played an important role in that momentous event.

Two members of the Parkes team who were there during the crucial hours in 1969 are Neil “Fox” Mason, who was responsible for driving the telescope, and Cliff Smith, who was in charge of telescope maintenance. Neil and Cliff agreed to share some of their experiences with me.

The radio telescope at Parkes is operated by the CSIRO, Australia’s Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation. It started operations in 1961 as the brainchild of Taffy Bowen, the Chief of CSIRO's Radiophysics Division and was headed by John Bolton, a legendary radio astronomer. To this day, it is one of the largest radio telescopes in the world. In the Southern hemisphere, it is only surpassed by Tidbinbilla, near Canberra in Australia, and Arecibo in Puerto Rico, which is not a moveable dish.
In the mid to late 1960’s, the Parkes dish became part of NASA’s Deep Space Network.

Fox Mason explains why Parkes was chosen to be involved with Apollo 11:

“We had tracked different flights at different times, but Tidbinbilla was the main NASA tracking station, down in Canberra, and it was a smaller dish. Why they got Parkes for the Apollo 11 was because of the television pictures and things coming back and we got a greater collecting surface. We were the biggest steerable dish in the Southern hemisphere at the time”

At the time of the moon landing, the tracking station communicating with Apollo 11 was Goldstone, in California. As is now well known, the original plan was for Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to sleep for six hours before preparing for the EVA. This would have seen them leave the LM about 10 hours after landing, by which time the moon would have been under the horizon for Goldstone and Parkes would have been tasked with receiving the TV transmissions from the first human steps on another world.

Fox Mason describes the preparations at Parkes:

“First up at about, I don’t know, about 11:30, we tipped the dish over just to check the receivers were working ok and the pointing was correct. We went and calibrated on one of the radio sources that was particularly well know at the time, Hydra A, and then we calibrated the… checked our pointing, and the calibration of the receivers then after that we spent about an hour and then I suppose and then we got the dish into position and tipped the dish right down so it was pointing at the horizon so we were in a very vulnerable position tipped right over the 60 degrees waiting for the moon to rise”

As it turned out, Neil and Buzz were not in the mood for sleep – no prizes for guessing why – and asked for permission to go ahead with the EVA immediately. Permission was granted and they started preparing.

For Parkes, this looked like all the hard work they had put in, in anticipation of the landing, would come to naught. However, Aldrin and Armstrong took longer than expected to prepare for the EVA

Fox Mason recalls:

“They were going to have a sleep and then come later on in the day, but once they got there they were too excited they wanted to get out there as quickly as they could. But then they had trouble depressurising their spaceship and getting their space suits on so by the time they were ready, Parkes was just about ready as well.”

The delay meant that six hours later the astronauts were still not quite ready to step out of the LM, and time was running out for Goldstone. Unfortunately, the moon had not yet risen at Parkes, but there was still some time to go before the EVA.

Meanwhile on the ground, the weather took a turn for the worse. July is the middle of winter in Australia and as everyone was waiting for the EVA the wind around Parkes picked up. This was particularly bad news as the dish was at its maximum tilt of 60 degrees in order to receive the signal from the moon as soon as it rose.

Cliff Smith was outside in the wind, and he tells his story:

“We didn’t expect what happened, but for twenty minutes of the first observing period it blew and a squall hit us and in fact where I was at the back of the telescope to make sure everything stayed that way, as good as it was; because as you well know that telescope is one of the best sails you ever saw.”

And it was not in a position for this kind of storm, was it?

“It was not. It blew in from the west and unfortunately we were pointing east.”

As Cliff said, under normal circumstances the dish, a 64 metre sail weighing 300 tons, would not be allowed to be subjected to such winds, which were in excess of 100kph, without being aimed at the zenith and anchored, as there was a real risk of catastrophic failure. However, these were not normal circumstances, and John Bolton and Taffy Bowen decided to take the risk. As the moon was approaching the horizon and the astronauts were getting ready to leave the LM, the wind subsided.

At 12:54PM local time, just as the moon rose over the horizon at Parkes and John Bolton managed to get a signal on the off-axis receiver, Aldrin activated the TV signal.

Fox Mason was not watching, as he was busy tracking the signal:

“No, I wasn’t able to watch at the time, because I was too busy, engrossed in my own task, keeping the dish pointed in the right area.”

Can you tell us how the physical tracking was done? How did you know you were pointing in the right direction?

“Well, we had sets of coordinates that ANSA had sent us and then we checked all the positions and found them ok and then we had a voltmeter up on top of the desk so we could see when we were getting the strongest signal all the time.”

So basically every time the signal got a bit weaker you moved in the direction that you thought was right?
“Moved it, yes, a little bit one way or the other, either in azimuth or declination to pick up on the best signal.”

The signal was also picked up by the 64 metre dish at Goldstone and by the 26 metre dish at Honeysuckle creek near Canberra. For a few minutes NASA alternated between the signals in search of the best picture, but after 9 minutes the moon was high enough over the horizon for the signal to be received by the main detector at Parkes and for the rest of the moon walk, the Parkes transmission was used.

Naturally, those who were involved in the moon landing have an opinion about the moon landing hoax believers, so I asked Fox and Cliff what they thought of the conspiracy theorists.

Fox Mason recalls a visit by Phil Plait in 2004, a visit which I was lucky enough to be part of:
“There was an author come up here, a skeptic, Philip Plait, he made a good book about bad astronomy and all the rest of it. I mean, a lot of people still think it was made in Disneyland and we’ve never been to the moon. I don’t know what we’ve got to do to convince them. A lot of people, you’d never convince them of anything unless they can see and touch it themselves and that’s the nature of human beings, I suppose.”

Cliff Smith in turn, offers the best evidence he can that Neil and Buzz really walked on the moon:
“Well as a matter of fact, I’m led to believe and I’m sure this happened, was the fact that we pointed the telescope at the moon, and we got a signal. Not only once, but we got a signal on the offset aerial and we got a signal on the main aerial. And if they sent that from the Mojave Desert as those clowns say we must have, somebody must have been up there to have an echoing chamber or something like that. We received the signal from the moon, is all I know.”

There is a lot more to tell about the dish at Parkes. For more information and the full story, go to www.parkes.atnf.csiro.au/news_events/apollo11. To hear the full interviews with Fox Mason and Cliff Smith, go to the website of the Skeptic Zone podcast – www.skepticzone.tv.

Thank you for listening to the 365 Days of Astronomy podcast.

End of podcast:

365 Days of Astronomy
=====================
The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is produced by the Astrosphere New Media Association. Audio post-production by Preston Gibson. Bandwidth donated by libsyn.com and wizzard media. Web design by Clockwork Active Media Systems. You may reproduce and distribute this audio for non-commercial purposes. Please consider supporting the podcast with a few dollars (or Euros!). Visit us on the web at 365DaysOfAstronomy.org or email us at info@365DaysOfAstronomy.org. Until tomorrow...goodbye.

Title: BLAST!

Podcaster: Nancy Atkinson

Links: BLAST website, BLAST the Movie website,

Description: BLAST is the Balloon-borne Large-Aperture Sub-millimeter Telescope, that flew in 2006 from Antarctica to look back to the earliest galaxies. Today, Nancy Atkinson talks with Mark Devlin, Principal Investigator of the BLAST project, and his brother Paul Devlin, an Emmy-award winning filmmaker who created a documentary about the BLAST mission.

Upcoming screenings of BLAST!:
Wednesday, February 17th at 7pm
Free screening open to the public!
Columbia College
Collins Hall
624 S. Michigan, 6th floor
Chicago, IL
Q&A with director Paul Devlin

Friday, February 19th at 8pm
Fermilab
Batavia, Illinois
with guests Paul, Mark, and Thomas Devlin
Open to the public. For tickets, call 630/840.ARTS (2787)
Batavia, Kane, Illinois 60510 (map)
See the BLAST! website for more screenings and when it might be on a PBS station near you.

Bio: Nancy Atkinson is the Senior Editor for Universe Today, a producer/researcher for Astronomy Cast, and the project manager for the 365 Days of Astronomy podcast.

Today's sponsor: This episode of "365 Days of Astronomy" is sponsored by Elizabeth Fracek (FRAY-SEHK), and dedicated to the Chicago Academy of Sciences, the original home of my good friend, the Atwood Sphere.

Transcript:
Nancy: Hi, this is Nancy Atkinson from Universe Today. A basic question we all seem to have is where were came from and how the Universe began. Astronomers and cosmologists are trying to answers those questions by looking back to the early universe. One very unique telescope that did just that was the BLAST Telescope, the Balloon-borne Large Aperture Sub-millimetre Telescope. With me today are Mark Devlin, the who is a cosmologist from the University of Pennsylvania and the Principal Investigator for BLAST, and his brother Paul Devlin an Emmy Award-winning filmmaker. Mark, could you tell us about BLAST and how you and your team came up with the idea for this telescope.

Mark Devlin: Sure. BLAST, as you said is the Balloon-borne Large Aperture Sub-millimetre Telescope, so that pretty much defines what it is. It flies on a balloon, it works in the sub-millimeter spectrum and the reason we built the experiment was very specifically to target the early galaxies. But when you go back in time, and you look at the first galaxies and you find one and it is a large galaxy with a hundred million stars in it, you realize very quickly that if that galaxy existed when the universe was only a few billion years old, it must have been forming stars at a rate which is several thousand times of the rate that stars are being formed today. In some sense it's like those galaxies are in a very high growth rate of being human and now we're in our late 20's or early 30's when we're done growing. So we want to look at these galaxies when they are forming stars at that fantastic rate.

Unfortunately you can't look at them in the optical because all that activity is being obscured. However the energy gets out eventually and it gets out by warming up the cloud of gas. And that light that is emitted by this warm cloud of gas isn't in the optical, it is in the submillimeter part of the spectrum. And that would be easy enough for us to observe, except that the atmosphere absorbs almost all the submillimeter light that comes from the galaxy as it comes toward the Earth. So to see them and to see all that activity, you have to get above the atmosphere.

And you could do that of course in two ways, or really three. You could go to a very high telescope site, there are some down in Chile or Mauna Kea but those aren't really high enough to make the atmosphere clear enough the submillimeter part of the spectrum. You could fly satellites, but satellites are very pricey pieces of equipment, they cost a million dollars or more. Or you could do something in between, which to get above 99% of the atmosphere by flying on a balloon, like we did with BLAST. The advantage of doing it on a balloon is that it is rather quick; we can do it in a few years rather than a decade or more. And it is much less expensive because you don't have to launch it into space. And the other advantage is that you get to do it with a bunch of students and people who are very young and get to do the whole process from start to end.

We got our idea for doing it because there was actually a ground-based telescope in Mauna Kea called the James Clerk Maxwell telescope where they actually saw one or two or three of these galaxies early on. But in order to do the cosmology, you need thousands of these galaxies. And so BLAST was designed to find thousands, and we succeeded in our last flight.

Nancy: What so far is the biggest from the data collected from BLAST?

Mark: There are a couple of things. I should say that BLAST was a precursor to a satellite that is now launched, called the Herschel telescope which is a mostly European telescope but the US played a major role in it, actually making detectors for it. And the goals are the same, to go and resolve out the cosmic microwave background into individual galaxies and understand the evolution of those galaxies over cosmic time. So I would say that when I started the experiment and wrote the original proposal, I had this vision that I would see them all. We would go measure a piece of sky and we would find all the galaxies out to a certain brightness and we would be able to talk about individual galaxies, and say here's a list of a thousand of them, here is how far away they each are, what their redshifts are, and that tells you when they were formed, and their brightness, and get a catalog like that. And from that define this evolutionary aspect, to the galaxies. That really turned out not to be the case for two reasons. One is that there are so many, many galaxies out there that are forming. And because there are so many they are actually quite close together.

Now for an optical telescope like the Hubble Space Telescope, that is not aproblem. There is sufficient resolution for HST to be able to pick out each one. But the Hubble telescope can't see these galaxies because they are in the submillimeter. When you work in the submillimeter you are limited by the physical limitations of the size of the photons you're dealing with, which are substantially bigger than they are in the optical. And so our resolution is much coarser than they are for an optical telescope.

And so all the galaxies – except for the very brightest ones – start to blend together and become just what you call noise – a mottled clumping of galaxies. So what we found is that we were actually able to combine data from other instruments like the Spitzer Space Telescope, to really eek out extra resolution from our instrument. What I found most satisfying is that my colleagues and I were able to employ essentially statistical techniques when we studied the cosmic Microwave Background to go beyond the resolution limits of our own instruments and really find out what was going on.

In fact I recently saw initial results from the Herschel Space Telescope that are secretive, but they have published a few things, which show that the predictions based on our measurements and their measurements lay right on top of each other. So we had a $10 million experiment and they had a $1 billion experiment, and they saw what we told them what they were going to see. And that was amazing when I saw that, I saw it just a few days ago. So I was very pleased

Paul Devlin: Congratulations Mark!

Nancy: Also with us is Paul Devlin, you are Mark's brother and you filmed a movie about Mark's adventures. Can you tell us about the movie?

Paul: Yes. The movie called BLAST! after the telescope. Back in 2005 when Mark was doing his first launch in Sweden, he invited me to document the launch because he had a filmmaking brother and he thought we could get some of the launch on tape, and maybe for the website, or whatever to get a historical document of it. I decided to go ahead and shoot it, expecting to be there just a few days. But because of weather delays and technical delays I wound up being there for 4-5 weeks. And while I was there I started exploring what my brother was doing and getting video and interviews of the participants and finding out what was going on. I found out it was actually pretty interesting stuff going on here. And the dramatic tension that was going on because of the delays was actually a pretty good story.

After the Sweden launch there was catastrophic failure I didn't really think I could make a movie out of this. But when they decided to make a second attempt in Antarctica, I realized I had an epic and I had an opportunity because of the access through my brother to tell the story of what it is really like to do this difficult, risky, high adventure science. And to show what it is like to be a scientist. I think we don't often see that in the media. Far too often scientists are characterized in the media, and here we saw scientists doing really fantastic, amazing stuff. So we got it in detail along with this dramatic Hollywood story. That's how the movie sort of evolved.

Since then we have been out for about two years playing it in film festivals all over the world. We've also been having international broadcasts of the movie. We recently compiled ratings data and found that over 1 million people have seen BLAST! across the world. And at this time we're going to start US syndication through PBS, so it is going to start appearing locally on PBS stations around the US. IT has been very gratifying to show science in this new way and to get the word out. We've had a lot of great press, writeups in the New York Times and Variety. The movie has got the attention of NPR's Science Friday which then got the attention of Stephen Colbert who then put my brother on the Colbert Report for a very interesting interview!

All this is compiled on the website, at www.blastthemovie.com. So I think this has been a great opportunity to publicize astronomy in particular, and science in general and inspire people on how exciting this kind of science can be. And by the way, BLAST! was a special project of the International Year of Astronomy 2009, and so we were very honored to participate in that initiative.

Nancy: That's good to know because the 365 Days of Astronomy is a project of the IYA as well!

Paul: Excellent! So we're kindred spirits!

Nancy: Exactly! Paul, you have some screenings coming up for the movie, can you tell us about those?

Paul: There is a complete screening list on the website at blastthemovie.com, and there is a complete page there to go to that is being updated all the time. We're adding dates all the time and now that we're syndicating on PBS stations around the country those dates will be coming in. So I definitely recommend those who want to see the movie go to blastthemovie.com. Upcoming screenings are at Columbia College in Chicago, Illinois on February 17, Wednesday at 7:30 pm. And then we're going to be screening it at FermiLab, where Mark and I used to spend out summers because our father is a high energy particle physicist and we used to hang out there when he did his research, so it will be nice to go back to Fermilab to have a screening on February 19th at 8 pm, and Mark and I will be attending as well as our father, so we are looking forward to that.
Also, recently the BLAST! DVD has been released to the educational market, and that information is on the website as well. This is a special two-disk DVD that has three different versions of the movie for various classroom uses and lots of extras including a really nice teachers guide that gets students engaged into the experiments, the movie and astronomy in general. We haven't released to the home market yet, but it is available for universities, schools and institutions to buy the DVDs.
Nancy: OK, wonderful! I highly recommend seeing the movie. It's a great look at science in action. Well, thank you Mark and Paul for talking with us on the 365 Days of Astronomy podcast , and everyone, check out BLAST!

End of podcast:

365 Days of Astronomy
=====================
The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is produced by the Astrosphere New Media Association. Audio post-production by Preston Gibson. Bandwidth donated by libsyn.com and wizzard media. Web design by Clockwork Active Media Systems. You may reproduce and distribute this audio for non-commercial purposes. Please consider supporting the podcast with a few dollars (or Euros!). Visit us on the web at 365DaysOfAstronomy.org or email us at info@365DaysOfAstronomy.org. Until tomorrow...goodbye.

Title: Earth Clones

Podcaster: Chris Impey

Links: http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov/
http://exoplanet.eu/
http://kepler.nasa.gov/
 http://www.chrisimpey.com/

Description: There are over 400 planets know orbiting other star, but most are gas giants like Jupiter and likely to be uninhabitable? How long before we find a clone of the Earth? This podcast talks about the issues involved in detecting terrestrial planets and the likelihood that they will be discovered in the next few years.

Bio: Chris Impey is a University Distinguished Professor and Deputy Head of the Department, in charge of all academic programs. His research interests are observational cosmology, gravitational lensing, and the evolution and structure of galaxies. As a professor, he has won eleven teaching awards, and he has been heavily involved in curriculum and instructional technology development. Impey is a past Vice President of the American Astronomical Society. He has also been an NSF Distinguished Teaching Scholar, a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar, and the Carnegie Council on Teaching’s Arizona Professor of the Year. Impey has written over thirty popular articles on cosmology and astrobiology and co-authored two introductory textbooks. His first popular book “The Living Cosmos,” was published in 2007 by Random House; his second popular book called “How It Ends,” will be published in 2010 by Norton. He recently was a co-chair of the Education and Public Outreach Study Group for the Astronomy Decadal Survey of the National Academy of Sciences. Impey is a 2009 Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Today's sponsor: This episode of "365 Days of Astronomy" is sponsored by -- no one. We still need sponsors for many days in 2010, so please consider sponsoring a day or two. Just click on the "Donate" button on the lower left side of this webpage, or contact us at signup@365daysofastronomy.org.

Transcript:

365 Days of Astronomy Podcast

January 27, 2010

Chris Impey, Professor, University of Arizona

Welcome. This is a podcast for 365 Days of Astronomy for the year 2010. My name is Chris Impey I'm a professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona. My research is on cosmology but I take a keen interest in Astrobiology, the search for life in the universe. And my topic today is Earth clones - what will it take to find twins of Earth out there in deep space.

As I'm sure you know - the success of exoplanet hunting is phenomenal. In 1995 we knew of no planets beyond the solar system. Now we have over 400. However almost all of those planets are gas giants, Jupiter mass ranging down to Neptune and Uranus mass. Almost certainly they're uninhabitable, we don't think there is life in Jupiter or Saturn's atmosphere. So what's really interesting is pushing down the mass limit towards terrestrial planets so we can find planets that might harbor biology. What will it take to do this?

Simulations and theory give us the expectation that terrestrial planets exist out in space even though we haven't found them yet. The current record holder for a low mass planet beyond the solar system is a planet 1.9 times the mass of Earth. However it's not in the habitable zone of its star. Simulations however suggest that for every gas giant planet that forms at the periphery of a solar nebula there will be a handful of terrestrial planets on orbits much like those of Earth, Venus, and Mars.

If we scale up these numbers to the Milky Way we conclude a phenomenal billion habitable worlds in the Milky Way, including moons of giant planets as well. And possibly a tenth of those or about a hundred million will be planets like the Earth, Earth-clones more or less. That's an amazing amount of habitable real estate in just one galaxy in the universe.

So how do we find such planets, with four hundred in the bag but none of them Earth-like? Well the most direct method, making an image, is the most difficult. The Earth reflects less than a billionth of the light of the Sun, and as seen from afar would be like trying to detect a firefly in the glare of nearby stadium floodlights. Essentially impossible with current technology. So we can't image these planets. Also, the Doppler Effect, which has been most successful in finding almost all of the 400 known exoplanets, runs out of steam when it goes to the low mass planets. By the time we get down to a terrestrial planet, the Doppler shift, the wobble on the star caused by the orbiting planet, is a small enough velocity that it can be confused by turbulent motions in the star atmosphere. Essentially noise from the star itself prohibits us detecting earths with the doppler method.

The method that may work, and we hope it will work, is the eclipse method. Every now and then, seen from the right orientation, a terrestrial planet will pass in front of its parent star dimming it very slightly in proportion to the ratio of the area of the planet to the area of the star.

For an Earth-like planet orbiting a Sun-like star, this dimming is tiny, about one hundreth of a percent. That can't be detected from the Earth. But from space, with the stability of that environment it is possible.

Last year the Kepler spacecraft was launched with the deliberate purpose and agenda of detecting terrestrial planets and Earth clones. Kepler has gone through its early paces and has shown that it has the stability and the sensitivity to detect eclipses by Earth-like planets. It's staring at a region of sky containing over 100,000 stars and it'll stare at it for several years trying to detect the momentary dimming of the star. Remember, it's one hundreth of a percent. Imagine trying to stare at a 100W lightbulb to see if it'd dim by hundreth of a watt. It's a difficult task but Kepler has shown it's up for the job.

We'll have to be patient however. An Earth-like planet in orbit around a Sun-like star will of course transit only once every year. And Kepler will need to see the eclipse recurr maybe twice or three times to be sure it's detected a real planet. That means, we'll have to wait a couple of years before Kepler starts announcing Earths. But they are expected.

Nobody really knows how many Earth-like planets Kepler will find. It could be dozens, or it could be as many as hundreds. Meanwhile, we have to look after Earth 1.0. We're not going anywhere else soon. Even if we find an Earth clone, a place that might be hospitable to life, or a place where we might go and colonize, it's going to be very far away. Most of the stars that Kepler is looking at are dozens, if not hundreds, of light years away. With current technology, that would take hundreds or thousands of years to get to. Even with a space probe, and we have no way of sending humans that far.

Alpha Centauri, it turns out, is the nearest place we might look for a terrestrial planet, only about 4 light years away. Careful work on that double star system may well find Earth-like planets within the next few years. This whole work of finding Earth clones will put into sharper focus the next stage in the search for life in the universe. Because once we start finding places with all the ingredients for life: energy from a star, organic material and liquid water on the surface, it should only be a matter of time before we can detect the signs of life on one of those planets.

This has been 365 Days of Astronomy, and this is Chris Impey signing out. Goodbye.

End of podcast:

365 Days of Astronomy
=====================
The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is produced by the Astrosphere New Media Association. Audio post-production by Preston Gibson. Bandwidth donated by libsyn.com and wizzard media. Web design by Clockwork Active Media Systems. You may reproduce and distribute this audio for non-commercial purposes. Please consider supporting the podcast with a few dollars (or Euros!). Visit us on the web at 365DaysOfAstronomy.org or email us at info@365DaysOfAstronomy.org. Until tomorrow...goodbye.

Title: Film Astrophotography

Podcaster: Zachary Kessin

Description: Find out how you can do wide-field astrophotography on the cheap, and get results like professionals.

Bio: Zachary Kessin is a software engineer with Mytopia in Petach Tikva Israel. He lives in the city of Ariel with his wife and 4 children. Zachary holds a BA in physics from Brandeis university in Waltham Ma. He enjoys observing from Israel's Negev desert.

Today's sponsor: This episode of "365 Days of Astronomy" is sponsored by -- no one. We still need sponsors for many days in 2010, so please consider sponsoring a day or two. Just click on the "Donate" button on the lower left side of this webpage, or contact us at signup@365daysofastronomy.org.

Transcript:

***Transcript coming soon.***

End of podcast:

365 Days of Astronomy
=====================
The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is produced by the Astrosphere New Media Association. Audio post-production by Preston Gibson. Bandwidth donated by libsyn.com and wizzard media. Web design by Clockwork Active Media Systems. You may reproduce and distribute this audio for non-commercial purposes. Please consider supporting the podcast with a few dollars (or Euros!). Visit us on the web at 365DaysOfAstronomy.org or email us at info@365DaysOfAstronomy.org. Until tomorrow...goodbye.

Title: Annular Eclipse in India

Podcaster: Jay Pasachoff

Organization: Williams College: http://www.williams.edu/astronomy

Working Group on Eclipses of the International Astronomical Union: http://www.eclipses.info

Description: In 2010, there will be two central eclipses of the sun: an annular eclipse on January 15 and a total eclipse on July 11. This podcast discusses the annular eclipse, which will be visible in a path from Africa, including Kenya, across the Indian Ocean, over the Maldive Islands, across the southern tip of India and the northern end of Sri Lanka, and then across parts of Bangladesh and Myanmar. The band of annularity winds up crossing China. A partial solar eclipse will be visible for hundreds of miles to either side of the band of annularity. At the center of the band of annularity, the 92% coverage of the sun's diameter lasts over 10 minutes. Safe solar observing procedures, including a solar filter for direct view or projection methods for indirect view, must be used throughout the annular eclipse, even during annularity, since part of the solar photosphere remains visible.

Bio: Jay Pasachoff, Chair of the International Astronomical Union's Working Group on Eclipses, is Field Memorial Professor of Astronomy at Williams College. He has viewed 49 solar eclipses, and is an expert on both their use for scientific observations and their use for public education. Pasachoff is past president of the International Astronomical Union's Commission on Education and Development. He received the Education Prize of the American Astronomical Society. Pasachoff is the author of textbooks on astronomy and of the Field Guide to the Stars and Planets.

Today's sponsor: This episode of "365 Days of Astronomy" is sponsored by Craig Clark.

Transcript:

This is Jay Pasachoff, I'm the Field Memorial Professor of Astronomy at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and the chair of the Working Group on Solar Eclipses of the International Astronomical Union.

There will be two eclipses of the sun in the year 2010. The first is an annular eclipse of the sun that will occur on the 15th of January. An annular eclipse is when the moon is a little further than average away from the earth, in its elliptical orbit around the earth, and its angular size in the sky is therefore slightly smaller than the angular size of the sun. So the moon can be silhouetted against the sun but doesn't cover the sun entirely, and we see a ring, or annulus, of everyday sunlight around the black disk of the moon. This is known as an annular eclipse. It never gets completely dark outside during an annular eclipse, at least not the 92 percent coverage that we will have at this annular eclipse. Sometimes they're close to one hundred percent. Because it doesn't get completely dark, we won't be able to see the solar corona, the diamond ring, or the fantastically interesting and beautiful phenomena that one sees at a total solar eclipse, but still annular eclipses are interesting to see. You have to keep a solar filter on to look through for the whole time. The partial phases that last an hour and a half and the annular phase, which, for this eclipse, lasts, in many places, over ten minutes - very long for an eclipse. The longest total solar eclipse possible is only in the seven minutes, and the ones that are occurring these days are never as long as seven minutes, whereas I will have over ten minutes of annular eclipse at the southern tip of India on the 15th of January, 2010.

One doesn't do a lot of science at annular eclipses usually because you can't see the corona, but there are some things you can do scientifically, including radio observations. In India they have a wonderful radio telescope known as the Giant Metre-wave Radio Telescope. It’s near Pune, which is east of Mumbai, and we're arranging to use it in collaboration with some Indian scientists to observe the sun. In particular, if there are active regions on the sun (and this is by no means certain because we're at a very low minimum in the sun spot cycle), as the moon covers the active region on the surface of the sun, its radio emission diminishes and we can tell very precisely where on the sun these regions are and how big they are. You get two cuts across each region on the sun, one when it's covered and one when it's uncovered, and the two together give you the position very precisely. So we're hoping for an active region on the 15th of January so we can do those radio observations.

I'll be at the very southern tip of India, the cape there, south of Trivandrum. There will be millions of people around; it's a very heavily populated part of India. And it will be very interesting to watch the phenomena, the moon gradually cover the sun over an hour and a half or so, and then the ten minutes on annularity, and then the uncovering at the end. The path of annularity begins in the middle of Africa, comes over Nairobi and Kenya and goes over the Indian Ocean. It then passes the Maldive Islands, which we've heard a lot about recently because they're so low-lying that they'll be some of the first casualties of the continued rising of the oceans from global warming. Then the eclipse hits the southern tip of India and the northern part of Sri Lanka and goes back over the ocean. It will hit a very southern protuberance of Bangladesh and go through Myanmar and into China. That's the path of annularity, a hundred or so kilometers wide, but then for a thousand or so kilometers to either side of that there'll be a partial eclipse, so may tens of millions of people will be in a zone where they will be able to see a partial eclipse. It will be fun to watch but not as dramatic as a total solar eclipse.

The total solar eclipse that will occur in 2010 will be on July 11th, and that won't be seen by very many people at all. It is largely over the Pacific Ocean, where it will cross some normally uninhabited atolls not far from Tahiti, so there'll be some ships there and some few expeditions out of Tahiti to see that. The major land in the way is a very unusual island, Easter Island. It's in the middle of the Pacific, some 4000 miles west of the coast of Chile, and it is part of Chile. At sunset the eclipse reaches the Patagonia region of Chile very low in the sky with very poor weather forecasts at that time in Chilean winter, so there isn't a good possibility of seeing it from the ground there, though perhaps there'll be some air flights. Certainly it's a wonderful opportunity to see a total solar eclipse, especially if you can get to a site like Easter Island or out in one of the ships or in the air over Chile or anywhere else.

The two central solar eclipses, the annular eclipse of January 15th and the total eclipse of July 11th, 2010, will be succeeded by a year, 2011, when there are no central eclipses at all. There will be four partial eclipses in 2011 visible at various parts of the globe.

This is Jay Pasachoff, professor of astronomy at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and chair of the International Astronomical Union's Working Group on Eclipses. We spend a lot of time and effort from the Working Group on Eclipses of the International Astronomical Union in educating the people in the various countries on how to watch the eclipse safely, what kind of eye protection they need for all times except when there is a total solar eclipse. The partial phases or an annular eclipse require eye protection or looking away from the eclipse in a projected image, either from a telescope or binoculars, or from even a simple pinhole camera, a hole punched in a piece of paper, projecting an image of the shape of the remainder of the sun onto a cardboard or onto a wall or even just under a tree from the interstices of the leaves onto the ground. So it will be interesting for all kinds of people to see these eclipses - partial, annular, and total.

End of podcast:

365 Days of Astronomy
=====================
The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is produced by the Astrosphere New Media Association. Audio post-production by Preston Gibson. Bandwidth donated by libsyn.com and wizzard media. Web design by Clockwork Active Media Systems. You may reproduce and distribute this audio for non-commercial purposes. Please consider supporting the podcast with a few dollars (or Euros!). Visit us on the web at 365DaysOfAstronomy.org or email us at info@365DaysOfAstronomy.org. Until tomorrow...goodbye.

Title: Fighting the 2012 Hoax

Podcaster: Bill Hudson

Links: http://2012hoax.org
Music by Kevin MacLeod: http://www.incompetech.com/

Description: Bill Hudson from 2012hoax.org issues a call to action for all amateur astronomers, stargazers, and people just interested in space science. The 2012 doomsday hoax is gaining traction in a vulnerable population: school children.

Bio: Bill Hudson is an amateur astronomer in California. He has spent the last decade looking up, and is involved in astronomy outreach programs in the California central coast area. He is the publisher of 2012hoax.org, a wiki that seeks to document and debunk all of the doomsday rumors surrounding the year 2012.

Today's sponsor: This episode of "365 Days of Astronomy" is sponsored by no one. Please consider sponsoring an episode in 2010 for only $30.

Transcript:

This is Bill Hudson from 2012hoax.org. I’m very happy to be participating in the 2010 edition of the “365 days of astronomy” podcast. This is the first of 4 episodes that I’ve signed up for over the course of the year, and I hope to have some guests with me on future episodes. Today I’m going to be talking about a subject that is very important to me, and from the title of this episode, as well as the name of the website, you can probably guess that I’m going to talk about 2012. However, this is not a “2012 debunking “ episode, those will come later in the year. This is a call to arms, or a call to action.

If you are listening to this podcast, then you are interested in astronomy in some way. Many of you are amateur astronomers, like I am. You might be in a local astronomy club, or perhaps you are an occasional stargazer, or are just interested in astronomy in general without actually having astronomy as a hobby. Regardless of your level of participation, your interest in astronomy makes you uniquely qualified to debunk the “2012 doomsday” nonsense. So… I’m calling on you to help.

I became interested in the “2012 doomsday” nonsense because of my outreach into local schools, where I go into elementary school classrooms and give a talk on astronomy. I’ve been doing that for about 4 years. A couple of years ago I started getting a lot of questions from the kids about “the end of the world” and whether it was going to happen in 2012. I have spent a great deal of my free time in 2009 researching and debunking the various “2012 doomsday” rumors, and writing about them on 2012hoax.org. There are several people who are writing content for the site, and that is a big help, but I’m not here today to ask for more authors. What I am here to do today is to challenge you.

It is not enough to write about why the “2012 doomsday” is nonsense on a website. One website, or ten, or even a hundred, can’t compete with the vast sea of nonsense that is the “2012 phenomenon”. Sites like Yahoo!Answers and YouTube are full of people saying all kinds of crazy things about what will happen in 2012. There are thousands of videos on YouTube predicting various catastrophic events.

Even that is not as pervasive and persuasive as the shows that are playing on various cable and satellite channels. Channels such as the History Channel that once could be relied on to show quality programming have bowed to the pressure of ratings, and are now showing things like “Nostradamus 2012”, which is essentially an hour long brain-numbing mix of misleading statements, bad science, and outright falsehoods.

All of this has lead to what is perhaps the most persuasive vector of disinformation: Word of mouth. Consider that companies spend quite a bit of money in attempting to get a new movie or product to “go viral”, where people tell their friends about it. The marketing executives know that if your cousin tells you something, then you are more likely to listen than if a complete stranger tells you the same thing, and that if your parent or child or sibling tells you the same thing, you are more likely to listen than if it was your cousin.

This brings us to the most chilling aspect of this hoax: School kids. As much as this hoax has spread among adults, it is running like a wildfire through schools, especially at the upper elementary and junior high level, propelled by word of mouth. Kids are telling other kids that “the world is ending in 2012” and that the adults are keeping it secret. This appears to “sell” really well in the ten to eighteen year old age group, judging from the ages of people leaving comments at 2012hoax.org

So, what are we to do? Obviously, I’ve taken the approach of documenting and debunking, to the best of my ability, all of the 2012 rumors I can lay my eyes on. I hope that the website is useful as a resource, and that it serves to calm people’s fears, but this is not enough. Obviously the audience of the website is limited. Kids who may not have regular internet access are hearing about this from their classmates at school (remember, “Viral Marketing”) What is needed is a way to get the essential information, that the “2012 doomsday” is a hoax, directly to the kids to counteract the rumors.
This is where you come in.

As I said before, I became involved in this through my outreach into the local schools. This is where we can be most effective. I challenge you as amateur astronomers, as astronomy clubs, or as hobbyist stargazers to contact your local schools, libraries or other venues where you can reach a lot of kids, and talk them into letting you do a program on why “2012” is not real.

This is a perfect opportunity to teach these kids the differences between science and rumor. Use it to educate them about how science really works, and introduce the scientific method to them. Talk about things that we know are impossible (such as invisible planets on 3,600 year orbits), but also talk to them about what we know is real.
So, there you have it. This is my challenge to you. I’m throwing down the gauntlet. Get out of your comfort zone. Don’t just shake your head and wonder how this rumor, this hoax, this fraud got to be so widespread, but rather get out and do something about it.

If you think I am taking this way to seriously, then I invite you to read some of the comments in the forums at 2012hoax.org. What I am afraid of is that kids will become so distraught by this hoax that some of them will take their own lives.

So yes, I do take it seriously.

Do you?

End of podcast:

365 Days of Astronomy
=====================
The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is produced by the New Media Working Group of the International Year of Astronomy 2009. Audio post-production by Preston Gibson. Bandwidth donated by libsyn.com and wizzard media. Web design by Clockwork Active Media Systems. You may reproduce and distribute this audio for non-commercial purposes. Please consider supporting the podcast with a few dollars (or Euros!). Visit us on the web at 365DaysOfAstronomy.org or email us at info@365DaysOfAstronomy.org. Until tomorrow...goodbye.

Title: Dark Days of Winter

Podcaster: Alice Enevoldsen

Organization: Pacific Science Center, Seattle, WA: pacificsciencecenter.org

Alice's AstroInfo: alicesastroinfo.com

Description: In today's podcast Alice answers a phone call from a friend, and they explore the dark days of the northern hemisphere's winter: the solstice, the day of the earliest sunset, the day of the latest sunrise, perihelion, and examine why these dates don't all coincide. She'll show you how to make an analemma, explain why you don't need to think of the equation of time as an equation, and guide you through a kinesthetic way to visualize the different short, dark, cold days of winter.

Bio: Alice Enevoldsen is currently the planetarium specialist at Pacific Science Center in Seattle, Washington, a part-time evening Astronomy instructor at South Seattle Community College, and volunteers as one of NASA's Solar System Ambassadors. She has been working in planetariums since 1996, has a B.A. in Astronomy-Geology from Whitman College, and a Masters in Teaching from Seattle University. Her fascination with the stars led her to try her hand at astronomy research, where she realized that her calling in life was actually to share her love of the stars and excitement about astronomy with as many people as possible.

Today's sponsor: This episode of "365 Days of Astronomy" is sponsored by no one. We still need sponsors for several days in 2010 -- please consider sponsoring a day! Contact us at signup@365daysofastronomy.org

 Transcript:

Telephone ring.
Hello, this is Alice. Oh hey hi, I'm glad you called. Yeah, yeah you're right. Yesterday, January 3 was perihelion - the Earth's closest point to the Sun. Pretty cool that that happens in winter, isn't it? Yeah, I know, kinda mind-blowing.

Anyway the real reason I wanted you to call, I wanted to talk about the fact that January 3 was also the latest sunrise of the year. Yeah no, not December 21 the solstice, but January 3. Yeah, I always thought that the latest sunrise and the earliest sunset took place on the solstice because that's the shortest day therefore it should have the latest sunrise and the earliest sunset. That makes sense, right? But it's not true! The earliest sunset takes place weeks before the solstice, round about December 6th here in Seattle. That's the earliest sunset. And the latest sunrise isn't all the way until January 3.

So it's kinda weird about why this is. It has to do with this thing called the equation of time. Now, you can represent the equation of time as and equation, but you can also see a representation of it by looking at an analemma. So let me tell you a little bit about how you get an analemma.

Start with noon. Think about where the Sun is at noon. Point out the window, where is the Sun at noon? Now, I hope you're not pointing straight up because most people in the world don't actually get to see the Sun straight up over their heads at noon - ever, any time of the year. Now, there are some. Everybody who lives between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn gets to see it at least one day out of the year. But the rest of us, we don't get to see it. Generally it is going to be, if you're in the Northern Hemisphere, it will be directly above South. Some number of degrees above South will be the highest point that the Sun gets to. And if you live in the Southern Hemisphere it will be some number of degrees above North that you'll be able to see the Sun at noon.

Now, when it gets to that highest point in its path across the sky, that's called astronomical noon. That's the definition of astronomical noon. Next time you see it right there at its highest point look at your watch: probably isn't reading noon, because we have time zones and all kinds of things like that. But also, even more importantly, that's not the noon that really matters.

We've got two different kinds of time that we're dealing with. Apparent solar time, which is what I just told you about. It's noon when the Sun is at the highest point in the sky. You can read this with a sundial a little bit, you can also read it by measuring the angle of the Sun and making sure that it is exactly halfway across its path across the sky. So you've got apparent solar time, but you also have mean solar time. Now, mean solar time is what we really use in terms of determining the number of hours that have really passed. Mean solar time is if you took a clock, a perfect clock, and on the vernal equinox, March 21, you set that clock to noon the second you saw the Sun cross over the meridian - the second you saw the Sun get to its highest point - and then you let that clock run for a year, at the end of that year on the next vernal equinox, March 21, when that clock reads noon, the Sun will be right there exactly where it should be: at its highest point. Okay, so that's mean solar time. It means that we're averaging it out over a year.

Now the Sun, as we move around the Sun, it appears to move a little faster or a little slower through our sky because of the equation of time. Most of this is because of the eccentricity of the Earth's orbit around the Sun. We're not orbiting in a perfect circle. A little bit of it has to do with the tilt of the Earth, so it's really a pretty complicated little equation, but the effects are interesting and fun.

So, we have the equation of time affecting how fast the Sun is moving across the sky. (Yes, it's not the Sun moving, but effectively, from our point of view, while we're watching the Sun rise and set it looks to us like the Sun is moving.) So, effectively, as the Sun is moving across the sky, some days of the year it moves a little slower and some days it moves a little faster. So, when noon comes, some days it's behind where it should be. It's not yet at its highest point. And some days its in front of where it should be, not yet at its highest point or, oops, past being at its highest point actually.

Now, with your perfect watch, if you go out, you set up a camera, and you take a picture of the Sun every day at noon by your perfect watch, what you're going to see, when you put all those pictures together, is a figure-8 shape. That is the analemma, it is also a great representation of the equation of time. Okay, now if you don't want to spend a year waiting to see that picture, just Google "analemma" or you can stop by my website: www.alicesastroinfo.com, and I'll put up a picture for you. Also 365 Days of Astronomy will have a link up to my website from their website if that's easier for you.

So, how does the equation of time make the earliest sunset happen before the solstice and the latest sunrise happen after the solstice? Let's get back to that. It's because the entire day is shifting a little bit. And I keep wanting to say it's shifting left to right because I've laid out the hours on a number line, and that's how I'm visualizing this. So, why don't you visualize it with me? And I found it a little too complex to lay out the entire number line for a day, so I'm just using the numbers one through ten: they're representing hours. I'm pretending we have a ten-hour day. Instead of a 24-hour day, we've got a ten-hour day. We've just got a number line: one through ten. Also, you've got ten fingers, so if you're sitting on the bus, you can just hold your hands out in front of you and you've got that number line that you can look at.

Now, think about this: if we've got a solstice that's four "hours" long, it starts at "three" and it ends at "seven." So, the Sun rises at "three" and it sets at "seven". So noon is at "five" there. Okay? So we've got a pretty short solstice day there. Now, I'm not even going to go into minutes. I'm going to say everything changes by whole hours. The day after the solstice has to be a little bit longer. So instead of being four "hours" long, it is going to have to be at least five "hours" long. All right? And, let's go with the one that has the latest sunrise. So let's say the sunrise is just an hour later so instead of our solstice starting at "three" we have our day starting at "four" and then you've got to count a five "hour" day beyond that: six, seven, eight, nine - so the Sun sets at nine. So we've shifted our entire day to the right.

Let's do earliest sunset, okay? So the earliest sunset, to get our earliest sunset it's going to have to happen before "seven" so it will have to happen at "six" which means our sunrise is going to have to happen at "one." Now remember, these aren't real hours we're working with because we're just doing a ten-hour number line. I'm just showing you how the whole day is shifting left to right. But, from "one" to "six" is once again a five-hour "day" instead of that four-hour "day" that our solstice was. And our solstice does not have the latest sunrise or the earliest sunset like that. Now, in the real world we have to deal with a lot finer methods of measuring, and it turns out these sunsets are only off by a couple of minutes from each other.

And you can look this up. I get a lot of my information from the U.S. Naval Observatory. They have a couple of great resources: one is "Sun and Moon Data for One Day," they'll also give you an entire year's worth of sunrises and sunsets if you'd like, and so you can look at those. They also have a really great post called "The Dark Days of Winter" which is where I got a lot of the information for this so check that out. But in Seattle, that earliest sunset is 4:18pm. The sunset on the solstice was 4:20pm - so we're not talking about a big difference here.

Alright, well, we've talked about a lot of things today. Lot of vocabulary words, and I hope you go and look some of them up. If you have any more questions give me a call. I will talk to you later. Okay, yeah. Bye!

And in case you didn't catch that, my name is Alice Enevoldsen, I'm the planetarium specialist for Pacific Science Center in Seattle, Washington - pacificsciencecenter.org and the writer for Alice's AstroInfo alicesastroinfo.com.

End of podcast:

365 Days of Astronomy
=====================
The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is produced by the Astrosphere New Media Association. Audio post-production by Preston Gibson. Bandwidth donated by libsyn.com and wizzard media. Web design by Clockwork Active Media Systems. You may reproduce and distribute this audio for non-commercial purposes. Please consider supporting the podcast with a few dollars (or Euros!). Visit us on the web at 365DaysOfAstronomy.org or email us at info@365DaysOfAstronomy.org. Until tomorrow...goodbye.

Title: Water on the Moon

Podcaster: Nancy Atkinson

Links: Universe Today, Astrosphere New Media Association. LCROSS mission info, and links to download the song "Water On the Moon" by John Marmie

Description: 2009 was a "watershed" year for lunar exploration, as five different spacecraft were involved in discoveries of water on the Moon. Let's take a look back at the discoveries and look ahead to what explorations lie ahead.

Bio: Nancy Atkinson is the Senior Editor for Universe Today, and works with the Astronomy Cast podcast and 365 Days of Astronomy.

Today's sponsor: This episode of "365 Days of Astronomy" is not sponsored. Please consider sponsoring a podcast in 2010.

Transcript:

Music from "Water On The Moon"
Dr. Carle Pieters: Well, the Moon continues to surprise us. Widespread water has been detected on the surface of the Moon. You have to think outside the box on this. This is not what any of us expected a decade ago. But widespread water has been detected on the surface of the Moon.

Nancy Atkinson: That was Dr. Carle Pieters at a press conference on September 23, 2009 announcing that three different spacecraft had confirmed there is water on the Moon. But the news of water on the Moon didn't end there in 2009. Later on, two other spacecraft were involved in more scientific findings that has given us a whole new outlook on our closest companion in space. Hi, this is Nancy Atkinson from Universe Today. We're starting a whole new year for the 365 Days of Astronomy in 2010, but I'm taking this opportunity to look back at one of the biggest space news stories from 2009 – which actually ended up being two big news stories.

Let's start with the first one: In September, data from three spacecraft –indicated that water exists diffusely across the moon as hydroxyl or water molecules — or both — adhering to the surface in low concentrations. Additionally, there may be a water cycle in which the molecules are broken down and reformulated over a two week cycle, --the length of a lunar day. This finding did not constitute ice sheets underneath the lunar surface, but actually water directly on the Moon's surface. However, the amount of water in a given location on the Moon isn't much more than what is found in a desert here on Earth, perhaps a few teaspoons across an area about the size of a football field. But there's more water on the Moon than originally thought.

The spacecraft involved were the the Chandrayaan -1 lunar orbiter and its Moon Mineralogy Mapper instrument, or M cubed, which found evidence of hydroxyl- and water-bearing materials, then there was the re-purposed Deep Impact probe, on its way to rendezvous with another comet in 2010. In June of 2009, the spectrometer on board also showed strong evidence that water is ubiquitous over the surface of the moon. And then archived data was reanalyzed from the Cassini spacecraft that flew by the moon in 1999 on its way to Saturn, and that data as well agreed with the finding that water appears to be widespread across the lunar surface.

If the data was there before, how could we have missed this previously?

Robert Green, project instrument scientist for the M cubed instrument gives this response to that question:

Robert Green: It's quite fascinating that no one has found this before because Apollo was there for decades, we've had robotic missions, the Japanese were there and the Chinese were there and they didn't see it. We saw it because we went there with the right instrumentation. The Moon Mineralogy Mapper has an extended spectrometer footprint region that was sensitive to the variety of water we are finding.

And what about the Moon rocks returned from Apollo missions? How could we have missed seeing the water in those rock, which we actually have here on Earth to study? Robert Green again provides insight into what happened:

Robert Green: The Apollo astronauts many important samples which includes soils and rocks, and all those rocks and soils were brought into the command module which had a humid atmosphere which the astronauts were living. So the water in the atmosphere interacted with those rocks, and put a signature in those rocks, which is just like the signature that we are seeing, but by the time they came back to Earth we assumed that signature was due to terrestrial contamination; from being in the command module, on Earth and in the Pacific. So those rocks have those signatures but up until today we assumed it was all associated with contamination. But now we've measured this signature directly on the Moon, there's no question of contamination and so that's the difference between what we've discovered and the extraordinary work that was done in the age of Apollo.

Nancy Atkinson: And the process for how water can actually be on the moon's surface is a little complicated, so I'm going to let Robert Green explain it:

Robert Green: One of the hypotheses were are working with is that there is oxygen in the rocks on the surface of the Moon, there is hydrogen coming from the sun hitting those rocks. Oxygen and hydrogen together make water, so there could be a process with the solar wind carrying the hydrogen which makes water on the surface of the Moon.

Nancy Atkinson: Ok, now let's move on to the second part of our water on the Moon news from 2009. On October 9, , the LCROSS mission, or the Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite successfully crashed an impactor into a permantley shadowed crater near the moon's south pole. Even though the impact didn't create a plume that was much hoped for by those attempting to observer the impact from Earth, the science team from LCROSS announced on Nov. 13 that they had hit paydirt, or pay-regolith, perhaps. Here's Tony Colaprete, principal investigator for LCROSS:

Tony Colaprete: Indeed yes, we found water. We didn't find just a little bit, we found a significant amount. If you remember about a month ago we were talking about teaspoons into glasses from an area about the size of a football field, well now I can say today in the 20-30 meter created by LCROSS, we have maybe about a dozen of these two gallon buckets worth of water.

Nancy Atkinson: Colaprete said they also found signatures of other compounds as well in the impact site in Cabeus Crater, including sodium and carbon dioxide, which they are still analyzing.

There are potentially two types of water on the moon: exogenic, meaning water from outside sources, such as comets striking the moon's surface, and endogenic, meaning water that originates on the moon. The LCROSS team says that where the water in Cabeus crater came from is yet to be determined, whether it was delivered there by comets and meteorite hits or if some process within the Moon or on the surface is creating the water. The M cubed team, suspects that the water they're seeing on the moon's surface is endogenic, that it is coming from the process on the Moon itself that Robert Green talked about.

Mike Wargo, NASA's chief lunar scientist, said the cold traps in the permanently shadowed craters of the Moon are like the dusty attics or junk drawers of the solar system, and that they collect stuff from the solar system's evolution. And he added, We're only just begun to tap into our understanding of the Moon.
The other spacecraft that played a part in the LCROSS findings was the Lunar Reconnaisaince Orbiter, that newest lunar orbiter, which made observations of the crater and plume created by LCROSS.

Mike Wargo talked about how LCROSS and LRO will help our future explorations of the Moon:

Wargo: Well overall both of these missions have been highly successful, so far. The fact that LCross was able to confirm the presence of water in these permanently shadowed regions has significant scientific implications. It confirms prior theories and it gives us potential to have resources to us when we continue to explore beyond lower earth orbit.

The real beauty of both of these missions is that NASA is using the best it has to get the information it needs to continue to explore we knew that the scientific community was the place to go to get the experts and about how to make the measurements on the moon that we’ll need to explore safely and effectively as we go beyond lower earth orbit and LRO is delivering in spades."

Nancy Atkinson: As another member of the LCROSS team said, these new findings have really turned our understanding of lunar water on its head, and that we need to keep our minds open of what this is telling us. It's no longer Apollo's Moon, its our Moon.

As we look ahead to what new information we'll garner from our explorations of the Moon in 2010 and the years beyond, I'll leave you with a clip from a song called "Water on the Moon" written by LCROSS Deputy Project Manager John Marmie.

End of podcast:

365 Days of Astronomy
=====================
The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is produced by the New Media Working Group of the International Year of Astronomy 2009. Audio post-production by Preston Gibson. Bandwidth donated by libsyn.com and wizzard media. Web design by Clockwork Active Media Systems. You may reproduce and distribute this audio for non-commercial purposes. Please consider supporting the podcast with a few dollars (or Euros!). Visit us on the web at 365DaysOfAstronomy.org or email us at info@365DaysOfAstronomy.org. Until tomorrow...goodbye.