Podcaster: Dr. Pamela Gay;
Title: Escape Velocity Space News – EVSN: Volunteer Stargazer
Organization: Cosmoquest
Link: http://dailyspace.org/
Description:
In this special episode we look at how volunteers throughout history have aided in scientific explorations and tell you how you can get involved with our latest community science projects.
Bio: Dr. Pamela Gay is a Senior Scientist at Planetary Science Institute and a Director of CosmoQuest.
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Transcript:
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Welcome to Escape Velocity Space News. I’m your host, Dr. Pamela Gay, and I am here to put science in your brain. The people in your life who work in space science, we’re not okay.
Approach us with caution, bring snacks, and no, we will ask you to call your Congress people because calling your Congress people seems to be working. I actually have a bit of good news. On July 9th, the Senate Committee on Appropriations did a markup on the Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act.
To quote from their meeting, the bill provides $33.9 billion for science agencies, NASA, and the National Science Foundation. For NASA, the bill reflects an ambitious approach to space exploration, prioritizing the Artemis program and human spaceflight by rejecting premature terminations of systems like SLS and Orion before commercial replacements are ready. We made crucial investments to accelerate our plans for boots on the lunar surface, but also in the technologies and capacity to land astronauts on Mars.
I believe the bill represents a careful balance of limited resources and demonstrates we can fund crucial programs while demonstrating fiscal responsibility. End quote. According to reporting by NASA Watch, when asked if the bill would restore science spending, Senator Jerry Moran of Kansas replied, quote, the answer is yes.
End quote. This is still less than ideal, but it is 10 billion more than the president’s budget proposal put forward. During the next month, the House and Senate will both be reviewing budget bills and determining just what research will be possible in this nation in fiscal year 26, please keep calling your Congress people.
And if you haven’t picked up your phone yet, it’s time to call and say something like, I want to see the U.S. continue its economy boosting excellence in science research, including space science research. Well, this one piece of news is amazing. We have a long ways to go and there are a lot of roadblocks before us.
Literally thousands of experienced researchers, engineers, managers, and other space professionals are leaving NASA with the most recent severance package offer. This is going to be a huge brain drain, and it is unclear what kinds of jobs these folks will now seek. And leadership at NASA is changing.
The secretary of transportation, Sean Duffy, has been asked to split his time between agencies and also serve as NASA’s interim administrator. By education, Duffy has an undergraduate degree in marketing and also a law degree. After being a reality star on multiple seasons of MTV’s The Real World in his twenties and thirties, a sentence I never thought I would say about a NASA administrator, Duffy went on to serve as district attorney in Wisconsin for eight years and joined the House of Representatives, where he served on the House Committee on Financial Services.
He left the house in 2019 to support a child with health issues and worked as a commentator on CNN until he was appointed as secretary of transportation. He doesn’t have any experience I can find related to transportation, aerospace, or space sciences. It is becoming more and more clear that for science to succeed in the United States, for science to be advocated for in the United States, scientists are going to need to redefine how we get our research done.
And we have some answers. In this episode, we’re going to do a deep dive into professional amateur collaborations and how they can allow everyday people to be part of the scientific process. We’re going to explore amazing accomplishments throughout history and stay tuned to learn how you can help us prepare for human exploration of the moon and Mars with new community science projects that I have been involved in developing.
All this and more is coming to you right here, right now on EVSN, a product of CosmoQuestX and supported by you through our Patreon. Across the centuries, people of all kinds have contributed to the field we now call science. From early developments in mathematics to systematic observations of how objects move in the sky and how changes take place in the landscape.
We’ve seen people systematically observing the world around them, looking to see what is mathematically definable and sharing what they learn. It is this last part, sharing what they learn, that makes someone a scientist. If you go outside tonight and you observe a bright spot on the surface of Saturn or Jupiter, or even on the shadowed side of the moon, but you never tell anyone beyond the lightning bugs in the yard with you, you’re not doing science.
If you document the time of your observations and where on the surface it appeared and share that information to a researcher so your results can potentially be confirmed, that is science. And that example I just gave, that’s just one kind of research that amateur astronomers contribute to all the time. This kind of science is made possible by modern digital detectors.
And the first discovery was made by Anthony Wesley on June 3rd, 2009. Other kinds of discoveries have been taking place almost since telescopes were invented more than 400 years ago, with the most impressive collection of discoveries, in my opinion, belonging to William and Carolyn Herschel. William Herschel was originally a musician.
He played the piano, the oboe, and the cello. He was the composer of 24 symphonies and in his spare time managed to discover Uranus, two moons of Saturn. Those moons were Mimas and Enceladus.
He also found two moons of Uranus, Titania and Oberon. He studied proper motions, cataloged double stars and nebulae, and is renowned for building some of the first great observatories. In 1872, William left behind his life as a musician and accepted a position with a pay cut.
He accepted a position with a pay cut to become royal astronomer. And the way he got engaged in astronomy is a story that even today would sound familiar. In 1873, William Herschel found his passion in the stars.
Between a book he was given and a friend who talked him into observing, he got hooked. He started building telescopes. He started studying the sky and recording everything he saw.
And one day in 1881, he saw a small blue disc. And a few days later, he saw that same blue disc, a moon. At first he thought it was a comet, just another wandering traveler shooting through our solar system.
But with careful observation, he came to realize that he had actually discovered the seventh planet in our solar system. He was the first person to find a new planet in all of recorded history. Herschel wasn’t looking to make a discovery.
He was just looking. And the more he looked, the more he discovered. Herschel realized as he hopped from known star to known nebula, that between all the known objects in the sky was a whole host of undiscovered fuzzy bits, what we now know of as galaxies and star forming regions and globular clusters.
They were all just there waiting to be discovered as he built better and better telescopes. He followed his passion for the stars until it led him to a whole new understanding of the cosmos. These are the contributions we’re most aware of, but it’s some of the side discoveries I find most amazing.
Herschel discovered infrared radiation accidentally by passing sunlight through a prism and holding a thermometer just beyond the red edge of the rainbow. This thermometer was meant to be a control to measure the ambient air temperature in the room. He was shocked when it showed a higher temperature than the visible spectrum.
Further experimentation led to Herschel’s conclusion that there must be an invisible form of light beyond the visible spectrum. Between his music and his astronomy, Herschel was also a family man, and after his parents passed, he took in his spinster sister. Carolyn Herschel is perhaps unfairly remembered as William’s grouchy younger sister and constant assistant.
Originally, astronomy wasn’t her thing. When she moved from her family’s estate in Hanover to join William in England, she originally gained notoriety as one of the most amazing soprano singers in the city of Bath. It was after her brother left music and began running most of his living through building telescopes that she began to become his assistant.
Eventually his passion became hers, and she became quite competitive in her ability to find things in the sky. And she became the discoverer of eight comets and a number of nebulae. When her brother married and began to spend more and more time traveling with his family, she mourned the loss of her dear brother by throwing herself into her work, and after his death, she continued on working with his son, John.
She’s actually the first woman to have ever received pay as a scientist when she was appointed as William’s assistant, earning 50 pounds a month. Even today, her eight comets in a single lifetime is an impressive accomplishment. It’s easy to see how a wealthy composer could afford the equipment and time needed to build massive telescopes and make somehow even more massive discoveries.
But let’s face it, most of us will never have that kind of wealth. This is where it’s important to remember that the sky belongs to all of us and all of us do have the ability to make contributions. In the modern era, it’s thought the first citizen scientists were probably American colonists who recorded the weather.
From John Campius Holmes recording storms in the mid-1600s to George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin tracking the weather during the founding of America, these men were united in a single purpose. They were trying to understand meteorology by recording enough data that when all their data and all the data of the people they inspired to help was all put together, maybe some sort of a pattern, an understanding of when and where storms will hit could be found in their records. It was Thomas Jefferson who first envisioned a network of weather observers.
According to the National Weather Service, Jefferson recruited volunteer weather observers in six states, including Virginia, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, New York, and North Carolina. It was on the foundations of this work that in 1849, the Smithsonian Institute set up a system for receiving weather data. By 1990, the number of observers had grown to 10,000 stations.
This system still exists in the form of the Cooperative Observer Program and is used by the National Weather Service. In 2010, there were over 12,000 stations in the network, but today it’s shrank to just 8,700 volunteers per the NOAA website. Another elder community science organization that has stood the test of time is the American Association of Variable Star Observers, or the AAVSO.
It’s actually an international organization with an out-of-date name. In 1882, Harvard College Observatory director Edward Pickering published a plan for securing observations of variable stars, in which he proposed enlisting the help of volunteer observers. As has so often happened, willing observers stepped forward to accept his offer of collaboration.
Three of these men, Seth Chandler, a skilled mathematician, Edwin Sawyer, a bank clerk, and Paul Yandel, a man who worked as a store clerk, a soldier, bank clerk, and draftsman. These men were all leaders in the volunteer efforts of recording the changing brightnesses of variable stars with thousands of observations and a library’s worth of publications between them. Their efforts paved the way for William Alcott to form the AAVSO in 1911.
The work done by these observers was, and always has, included observations made with the unaided eye, without telescopes. It takes no equipment to step into your driveway and check if a list of stars has either gone nova or dipped out of view as it was eclipsed. The human eye can even do good comparisons between stars of known brightnesses to allow it to measure changing brightnesses with sufficient precision to produce scientifically useful data for objects like pulsating red variables.
But let’s face it, it’s a whole lot more satisfying to be out there with a telescope and a digital camera, and not all of us can afford those. And this is where our new age of high-speed internet and massive catalogs of online data have radically changed how volunteers engage in space-related sciences. After a break, we’ll be back to look at the modern age of fully online community science, and how you can help us explore the Moon and Mars.
Stay tuned. Back in the spring of 1999, while one part of the internet focused in on still-unpatched Y2K bugs, another often-overlapping part of the internet focused in on something much more fun, the search for extraterrestrial life. The BOINC project at UCal Berkeley had released a new screensaver designed to use computers that would otherwise be sleeping to process radio astronomy data for the kinds of patterns that could indicate alien life.
I have to admit, my computer was deeply engaged in processing my dissertation data, so it didn’t get down time, and it spent all of its efforts looking for galaxy clusters, not radio signals from extraterrestrials. But the public computers at Macdonald Observatory had SETI at home installed, and it was way cool to watch the spiky noise flow across the screen as the computers processed data between researchers checking their email. This was the first fully online crowdsourcing campaign I’ve been able to identify in space science.
While human minds didn’t get utilized, this project has engaged 5.2 million participants, demonstrating that a lot of humans will contribute available resources to science. And all you have to do is ask. SETI at Home has spun off numerous other projects powered by the BOINC software, including Einstein at Home, which looks for pulsars in radio and gravitational wave data, and ClimatePrediction.net, which runs climate models. From utilizing unused computing resources, it wasn’t a big leap to ask people to volunteer their unused thinking resources. In August of 2006, folks from UCal Berkeley once again asked the public to help them process data. This time they had images of the aerogel flown by the Stardust mission.
In this gel, tiny grains of interstellar dust were trapped and waiting to be found in images and retrieved by scientists. The thing was, there were too many images for the science team to search in a reasonable amount of time. So they created an online interface and a proficiency test and invited the public to come help them out.
I have to admit, I’ve failed their proficiency test. I am no good at finding dust in the images. Back in 2006, I was a variable star astronomer.
I was working with amateur astronomers on various projects and serving on the AAVSO’s board of directors. Community science and podcasting were two major parts of my life. What I didn’t realize was the revolution that was about to take place as massive telescopic surveys began to flood researchers with data.
In 2009, the launch of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter led to the need for a way to get help from humans to map out lunar features. Along with Chris Lentight, I’d written the grants for the project that went on to become Zooniverse, and we launched MoonZoo on the heels of LRO. In 2011, CosmoQuest was started with funding from LRO, Messenger, Dawn, and New Horizons.
And over the years, we’ve helped numerous missions find the safe places to touch down and the scientifically interesting places to explore. I’d like to say, it’s super weird to be part of the news we’re reporting here. And I’ve made more mistakes reading this episode than normal because it is super weird.
But I’m super proud of what we’ve accomplished, and I’m super proud of everything our volunteers are capable of doing. I’m just the person behind the software and behind this particular camera. Those volunteers, they’re amazing.
In the summer of 2019, we mapped the asteroid Bennu in 92 days. In those 92 days, nearly 4,000 people made over 14 million annotations of rocks, boulders, and craters on the asteroid Bennu. The site selection team used this data and data from other teams to identify four potentially safe enough, that Bennu is not safe, to identify four potentially safe enough landing sites.
And that sample was grabbed, and research is being done with it today. Starting in January of this year, I began work on an entirely new citizen science project, WorldMappers, designed to support NASA projects studying the moon and Mars. I’m pleased to say I am back in the game of crowdsourcing science, and all of you are invited to come along.
We’re still in beta. I am the lone programmer, and I invite all of you to help me shape this project into a new way to explore the next two worlds humans are likely to visit. You can participate both as a mapper and as a contributor to our open source code database.
The first project, Mars Mosaics, asks for your help validating new mosaics of Mars images taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s context camera. Using today’s standard data processing techniques, researchers have to deal with mismatched images that make it hard to make out subtle features and identify changes on Mars’ surface as the seasons pass and as new craters form. Researcher Stuart Robbins is heading up a project to redefine how images are mosaic together, and for the most part, he’s getting amazing results.
But every once in a while, the software just says, nope, I’m going to make this region of Mars look like Picasso designed it. Software does that sometimes. We need your help finding these mistakes and flagging them so the software can be told to try again and maybe use more matching points on try two.
The second project is called Lunar Melt, and as the name implies, has folks looking at lunar melt. Specifically, we’re looking at Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter narrow angle camera data of the region around Little Lowell crater, where an impacting asteroid melted part of the lunar surface and melt did super weird and awesome geological things like create massive boulders that then got carried away in flows of melted rock. I want to say lava, but this is literally rock melted with the energy of an asteroid impact.
We currently have available tools for marking rocks, measuring boulders and identifying craters, and we’ll be adding in additional tools for melted faults, lows and other large scale features in the weeks to come. You can get involved over at mappers.psi.edu. Please join us. There are worlds to explore together.
Up next, we’ll be welcoming on Eric Mattis for this week’s Tales from the Launchpad. Stay tuned. Next up, I’m pleased to welcome on aerospace correspondent Eric Mattis for this week’s Tales from the Launchpad.
Hey, Eric.
[Eric Mattis]
Hi, Pamela. On June 23rd, SpaceX launched the Transporter 14 mission from Flick 4E in California. On board were 70 different spacecraft.
The one that caught my attention was Mission Possible by European company, the Exploration Company. It was a subscale demonstrator for their in-development next capsule. It rode into space on the top of the stack of spacecraft and separated after the second stage conducted its fuel burn.
The plan was to re-enter and to deploy parachutes for a soft water landing. It did survive re-entry, but according to the company, it did not deploy their parachute and they lost contact shortly after re-entry. On June 26th, Rocket Lab conducted the Get the Hawk Out of Here mission from their New Zealand spaceport.
On board was another satellite for Hawkeye 360, an American signals intelligence company. The satellite is designed to detect and characterize radio frequency signals. Up next is another Rocket Lab mission.
On June 28th, Rocket Lab launched the Symphony in the Stars mission, also from their New Zealand spaceport. The mission was for a confidential commercial customer deploying a single satellite into orbit. No other details were disclosed.
This mission launched less than 48 hours after the last one, making the fastest turnaround of Electron’s Launch Complex-1 yet. On June 29th, JAXA launched the GOSAT-GW satellite from a Tonic Astronomical Spaceport. GOSAT-GW, also called Ibuki-GW, launched on the 50th and final flight of the H-2A rocket.
It is designed to monitor greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrogen oxide. On July 1st, SpaceX launched the Meteosat third-generation S-1 spacecraft into stationary transfer orbit from Launch Complex-39A. The third generation of Meteosat has a new instrument designed to focus on storms and the atmosphere, called the Infrared Sounder.
It can provide a profile of temperature and moisture across the entirety of Europe every 30 minutes. Also hosted on the MTT-S1 spacecraft is the spectrometer for the Copernicus Sentinel-4 program by ESA. Wrapping up launches for this week is Progress MS-31, which launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on July 3rd.
Onboard was the usual complement of crew supplies, food, propellant, and gas bottles, typical of a Progress mission, totaling slightly more than 2.6 metric tons. The Soyuz rocket commemorated the 50th anniversary of the Apollo-Soyuz test project, with a small logo on the first stage of the booster. Let’s focus on one more mission in more detail, Axiom-4, which launched on June 25th.
Axiom-4 is a mission to the ISS commanded by former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson, Indian astronaut Subhanshu Shukla, Hungarian astronaut Tibor Kapu, and ESA Polish astronaut Sławosz Leszczyński-Wierzchniewski. Subhanshu and Sławosz are the second persons from their respective countries to go into space. Subhanshu is on the mission to gain space experience before launching on the first crewed flight of the Gagarin-4 spacecraft, Gagarin-4, no earlier than 2027.
This mission has had a troubled flow to launch. The Dragon capsule originally assigned to this mission was assigned to NASA’s Crew-10 due to delays in construction. Axiom-4 was originally set to launch weeks ago, but the mission was delayed to fix a leak in the rocket’s first stage.
SpaceX was prepared to launch with a minor fix, but according to Indian media, ISRO threatened to pull their astronaut from the mission if a proper repair was not made. SpaceX made the repair, but it took several weeks to complete and then redo the testing. Then a leak was discovered in the Zvezda module of the ISS, causing a further delay.
Zvezda has a further history of leaks and the rear docking port and hatch is now closed unless absolutely necessary. The delay in capsule switch did mean this crew would fly on a brand new Dragon capsule and get to name it. They chose the name Grace.
The Axiom-4 crew will spend two to three weeks in space performing experiments for their various agencies before returning to Earth. On June 29th, Blue Origin conducted the NS-33 mission from their West Texas Spaceport. The vision was delayed twice, both for weather.
On board were six passengers. Following launch, the capsule landed unusually close to the booster because of low widths. Blue Origin said this was nominal.
We keep track of orbital launches by launch site, also called Spaceport. According to RocketLaunch.Live so far this year, the United States has had 91 launches, China has had 37 launches, New Zealand has had 10 launches, Russia has had five launches, Kazakhstan has had three launches, French Guiana, India and Japan each have had two launches, and Norway has had one launch. This makes the total number of launches so far this year 153.
Of these 153 launches, there have been six failures, finding out the space is hard.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Thanks, Sarah. Before we go, I want to call your attention to an unassuming moving dot. Cataloged as 3i Atlas, this high speed dot is moving at more than the escape velocity of our solar system as it comes crashing through on its journey through the Milky Way.
This dot is moving at a whopping 68 kilometers per second. Folks, this is an interstellar object that originated from some other solar system. The Atlas Telescope in Chile discovered it on July 1st.
Amateur astronomer Sam Dean and others were able to find pre-discovery images taken by the Atlas and the Zwicky transient facilities. The pre-discovery images and new data combined to show that 3i Atlas will reach about the same distance from the Sun as Mars next October and will then begin its journey back out the other side of the solar system. We’ll have our best view from Earth next Christmas and if we’re lucky this will be visible from larger backyard telescopes.
For now it is a fuzzy dot and a whole lot more data is needed. We know it is a few to a few tens of kilometers across and that it has ices capable of melting as it moves toward the Sun. It’s also coming at us from a weird angle so it’s likely that it originated further out from the plane of the Milky Way or its path has been bent at a weird angle while it interacted with some other solar system or a rogue object.
To be honest, we don’t know a lot yet but we know it came from somewhere out there beyond our solar system and it’s bringing us a look at materials from other stars and that is really enough of a reason to get excited. Alright, one last piece of information before we go. This is our penultimate episode of EVSN’s 22 episodes season 3.
After our next episode in two weeks we’re gonna take a bit of hiatus and then we’ll be back for season 4. That’s it for now. Remember, go out everyone and look up.
Oh and please give this video a like and subscribe so the algorithm tells you and the world when new science is ready to be learned. Thanks. This show is made possible by our absolutely amazing patrons at patreon.com slash CosmoQuestX. I’m overwhelmed at how many new names I have to read this month and if you want to join, donate $10 or more at patreon.com slash CosmoQuestX. Thank you to BuzzNash, David Troge, Gary William Berklow, Janelle, Jeffrey David Marasini, Joe Holstein, Lenore Horner, Time Lord Iroh, Ambious Andrea Segal, Greg Thorvald, Jeff Harris, Les Howard, Mark Sykes, Masa Herleyu, Peter Richards, Semyon Torfason, William Fichner, Alan Gross, Bernad Schaffer, Bore Andro-Levsvall, Kami Rassian-Casnau, Doc Knappers, Don Mundes, Dustin Ralph, Gary Engelman, Glenn McDavid, Gordon Dewis, JustMeAndTheCat, Katrina Inkey, Kimberly Riek, Michael Perciata, OnTheDiagonal, Patrick Young, Robert W Farley, Sebastian Schieper, Sean Grossman, Simon Oliphant, The Real Fake Admin, and William Bridgman. Thank you all. Thank you so much.
[Closing]
Escape Velocity Space News is executive produced and written by Dr. Pamela Gay. The This Week in Aerospace segment is written and researched by Eric Mattis, Gordon Dewis, and Dave Billard. Audio engineering is provided by Ali Pelfrey.
Escape Velocity Space News is a production of the Planetary Science Institute, a 501c3 nonprofit dedicated to exploring our solar system and beyond. We are here thanks to the generous contributions of people like you. The best way you can support us is through patreon.com slash CosmoquestX. Patreon benefits include exclusive access to ad-free podcasts, full-length guest interviews, weekly video chats with our production team, and other bonus content. Like us? Please share us.
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365 Days of Astronomy
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The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is produced by Planetary Science Institute. Audio post production by me, Richard Drumm, project management by Avivah Yamani, and hosting donated by libsyn.com. This content is released under a creative commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license. Please share what you love but don’t sell what’s free.
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As we wrap up today’s episode, we are looking forward to unravel more stories from the Universe. With every new discovery from ground-based and space-based observatories, and each milestone in space exploration, we come closer to understanding the cosmos and our place within it.
Until next time let the stars guide your curiosity!