Dear Friends,
My apologies for the long delays between posts, but you know how it goes. Space News topics for this e-mail are:
1. Leonid Meteor Shower – Nov. 17
2. China’s Space Program
3. Unexpected Rise in Carbon Dioxide Emissions
4. SOFIA Educator Program
5. Mission Links
6. Upcoming Events: San Francisco, Houston, Washington DC
In addition, I hope you might find the following to be of interest:
- My new children’s book, The Wizard Who Saved the World, published officially on Nov. 1. You can view sample pages with the “Look Inside” feature on the book’s Amazon page. It is available in a Spanish edition as well. Hope you’ll check it out, and if you do, please post reviews to Amazon.
- My new book for the general public, Math for Life, also published on Nov. 1. One reviewer wrote “Should be required reading for all Americans.” Hope you’ll check it out as well.
- And a freebie: I’ve posted an article titled “How my dog made it to orbit” for Astronomy Beat online magazine, which tells about how Max Goes to the Moon came to be read on the Space Shuttle this year, and a bit about my educational philosophy.
Best wishes,
Jeff
1. Leonid Meteor Shower–Nov. 17
It’s time for the annual Leonid meteor shower, which peaks this year on the night of Nov. 17. As usual for meteor showers, the best time to watch is before dawn — say, between 2 am and 5 am. Any dark site will do — you just need a clear view of the sky. No equipment needed; in fact, it’s best to use your naked eye and as much peripheral vision as possible, so you can catch meteors in all directions. More info on this year’s shower here.
For Classroom Discussion (repeated from prior e-mails):
- Meteors are sometimes called “shooting stars.” Do they actually have anything to do with the stars we see in the sky? (Answer: No. Meteors are created by particles of dust burning up in Earth’s atmosphere, which means they are right here on our own planet — unrelated to stars, which are very far away.)
- What’s the difference between a comet and a meteor? (Answer: People often confuse the two, but they are quite different: (1) A meteor is a flash of light in our own atmosphere, created as a piece of space dust burns up. Hence, meteors are visible for only a few seconds as they dart across the sky. (2) Comets are in space, orbiting the Sun. That means they are typically millions of miles from Earth, so they move only slowly relative to the stars; in a single night, you many not notice a comet moving relative to the stars at all, and will only notice that it rises and sets along with the stars that appear near it. (3) Comets are relatively rare in the inner solar system, and hence we only occasionally have one visible in our sky. In contrast, some 25 million meteors enter Earth’s atmosphere each day, which means you can see at least a few meteors on any clear night. (4) Despite these differences, there is a deep connection between comets and meteors: Most of the dust particles that enter our atmosphere to become meteors were actually shed by comets. That is, meteors are created by comet dust. A meteor shower occurs when Earth passes through the orbit of a comet, which is strewn with comet dust.)
2. China’s Space Program
As you may have heard, this past week China performed its first successful docking of two spacecraft in orbit. If you want the details, you can read this New York Times article about it, but I’ll focus on what it means to our own future as a nation. It’s easy to look at China’s success and be complacent, since the U.S. has been doing dockings like that for more than 40 years. But consider this: The first U.S. docking was in 1966, and barely 3 years later we landed on the Moon. The Chinese are not on quite that fast of a timeline, but they currently say they will put humans on the Moon by about 2020, which is only a bit over 8 years away. If we do not do something to reinvigorate our space program quickly, we face the very real possibility that a decade from now, the first permanent human base on the Moon will exist, and it will be one to which we’re not invited. Note that I’m not calling for a new space race; we’d be far better off working with the Chinese and other nations, to share the costs and share the inspiration that a Moon base could bring to the world. But our current politics have become so dysfunctional that virtually no one is even talking about the possibility of making such investments in our future. If we don’t wake ourselves up, our children will pay the price for our complacency. For more on why I believe that return to the Moon is so important to our future, please see my prior articles here and here; and, of course, this idea is also a major theme of my children’s book Max Goes to the Moon.
3. Unexpected Rise in Carbon Dioxide Emissions
Question: What’s worse than not investing in our future? Answer: Actively working to undermine it.
This week marked the release of data that further shows the extent to which we are undermining our own future by ignoring clear, incontrovertible, scientific evidence. In this case, it was the news that global carbon dioxide emissions spiked unexpectedly in 2010, to the point that the emissions are now higher than the worst-case scenarios that were considered by climate experts four years ago, in the IPCC report of 2007. You might think this would have been big news, but it barely registered a blip in the national media.
I know that some of you still think we’re talking about “unsettled” science, but global warming is not really such a complex issue. Its basic science has been understood for more than a century: Greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide absorb infrared light, leading to planetary warming. This “greenhouse effect” has been measured in the lab, and we cannot account for actual planetary temperatures without taking it into account. You will not find any scientist who disputes the existence of the greenhouse effect, nor will you find any dispute about the fact that human activity has been substantially increasing the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide. Given those two facts, global warming is to be expected, and measurements confirm that temperatures are indeed warming. Where is room left for doubt? Nowhere, unless you want to deny the basic validity of all scientific inquiry.
On that note, it’s worth pointing out that even the so-called “skeptics” are beginning to give up the game. A Wall Street Journal article by Richard Muller, a former hero of the “skeptics,” described his efforts to try to prove that global warming data were being misinterpreted and how he instead ended up providing even stronger evidence that the warming is real. He wrote, “There were good reasons for doubt, until now.” Actually, I don’t think there have been very good reasons for doubt for many years, but I give him great credit for examining the evidence carefully and without bias.
More importantly, any argument about global warming will not last long. Unless we act swiftly and decisively, the detrimental effects of global warming will become abundantly clear over the next few decades. Ask yourself: Fifty years from now, when your children or grandchildren ask what you did in light of the clear scientific evidence that something needed to be done, what answer will you be able to give them?
If you want to understand the issue further, there are of course a great many resources you can find out on the web, but I’ll point you especially to several summaries that I’ve written: online, you can read my global warming primer; for children (and parents), I’ve explained many of the issues in the Big Kid Boxes of The Wizard Who Saved the World; and you’ll also find extensive discussions of global warming in Chapter 6 and in the Afterword of Beyond UFOs and in Chapter 7 of Math for Life.
4. SOFIA Educator Program
NASA’s new SOFIA mission is a Boeing 747 with a hole cut in its fuselage to house a large, infrared telescope. SOFIA is thereby able to conduct infrared observations of the universe while flying at an altitude that puts it above much of the atmosphere’s water vapor, which is a prime obstacle to infrared observations from the ground. But more importantly to all the educators out there: Because it’s a large airplane, there is room for teachers to fly along during its observing runs. It’s a fantastic opportunity, and the SOFIA Airborne Ambassadors program is now taking applications from educators to participate in their workshops and fly on the plane. If you’re an interested educator, I encourage you to apply.
Incidentally, I have a long personal history with this program, which had its origins back when I worked at NASA Headquarters from 1991 to 1993 on a 2-year assignment to help leverage NASA’s astrophysics program for education and outreach. At the time, NASA had a mission called the Kuiper Airborne Observatory, which was the predecessor to SOFIA (with a much smaller telescope). A few weeks after I arrived, Larry Caroff (the director of infrared astronomy at the time) came to me with the idea of flying teachers on the Kuiper Airborne Observatory, which he had come up with in conjunction with astronomer Dan Lester from UTexas. The director of astrophysics, Charlie Pellerin, loved the idea, and put me in touch with Dave Koch and Edna DeVore at NASA’s Ames Research Center, who worked with me to develop a program called FOSTER, for “Flight Opportunities for Science Teacher Development” (an acronym that Dave Koch came up with). The first flight with teachers took place in about 1992, with a couple of Texas teachers flying on an observing run with Dan Lester. Under the guidance of Cherilynn Morrow, who took over my role at NASA HQ in ’93, the program was soon flying a couple dozen teachers each year. The new SOFIA program is the direct successor to FOSTER.
An interesting historical note: In the mid-90’s, SOFIA’s funding was in major trouble and it appeared it would be permanently canceled. The scientific community undertook a major effort to try to convince key Congressional members to restore the funding, but wasn’t getting anywhere. As I understand it, when it appeared to be hopeless, Dan Lester decided to take a couple of the teachers he’d flown with to meet with the Congresspersons, and it was the interactions with the teachers that turned the tide with Congress so that funding was restored. So in at least one significant way, the educational value of SOFIA for what is now the Airborne Ambassadors program is what made SOFIA possible in the first place!
5. Mission Links
I’ve tried over the years to keep you updated on exciting news from various space missions. I’ll continue to try to do so, but there are so many missions right now that I haven’t had time to create a new summary. Meanwhile, however, there’s a great starting point web site where you can explore the missions for yourself: Go to the NASA Science Missions web site to find a complete list of all missions that NASA is involved in. When you click on any link, it will take you to a page with some background about the mission, and from there you can click to the mission’s home page, where you will find much more detail.
6. Upcoming Events: San Francisco, Houston, Washington DC
Finally, if you happen to be in any of the following areas, I hope you’ll come join me at the following upcoming events:
- San Francisco, Dec. 4: I will be doing a “first public reading” of The Wizard Who Saved the World on Sunday, Dec. 4, as part of the AGU public events; the readings are at 1:30 and 3:30pm, Moscone South, Room 102. I’ll also have a booth at their Exploration Station that day.
- Houston, Feb. 2-4 (for teachers): I will be presenting several teacher workshops at the 18th annual Space Exploration Educators Conference; see the SEEC web site for registration fees and details.
- Washington, DC, April 27-29: The second USA Science and Engineering Festival will be held in Washington, DC, April 27-29 2012. All events are free, and it should be great if you have an opportunity to attend. I’ll be there with both an exhibit (for Big Kid Science) and doing a few presentations.
All for now…