Daniel Saltman

Javiera Guedes who headed up a NASA-funded project to analyze the possibility of detecting an Earthlike planet in orbit around Alpha Centauri B, has shown that terrestrial planets are likely to have formed around Alpha Centauri B, and that these planets should be orbiting in the “habitable zone.”

“It's so close to us, and the position of the other stars is such that it should be very possible to find a small planet,” she explained. She also found that, based on astronomers' current understanding of how solar systems form, the existence of a planet the size of our own is very likely, and that there's also a chance that it would lie in the habitable zone.

Now, the planet-hunting team is using a telescope in Chile to keep an eye on the star for the next three years, in order to collect enough data to determine whether or not the next Earthlike planet lies next door.

“If they exist, we can observe them,” said Guedes also showed that such planets would be observable if a telescope was dedicated to their search.

Guedes used a series of planet formation computer simulations to determine that terrestrial planets have probably formed around the star. The team ran repeated computer simulations which ran on a time frame of 200 million years each time. They varied the beginning conditions each time, and thus created a different result each time. However, each time a system of multiple planets evolved with at least one planet – approximately the size of Earth – forming. In many of these simulations, this planet was often found to be orbiting within the habitable zone of the star.

Its brightness and its position in the sky are both positive factors that make the Alpha Centauri search plausible; the latter giving the team a long period of observability each year from the Southern Hemisphere.

But the profound implication of the iron-clad law of astronomical time is that we see Alpha Centauri only as it was 4.4 years ago.In other words any message from inhabitants of Alpa Cenauri saying “Our planet is dying!” and our reply would consume a total of almost nine years.

The effect becomes even more starkly dramatic at greater distances. If we look at the awesome beauty of the Orion Nebula, we see it as the inhabitants of the Roman Empire saw it 1500 light years ago. A radio message we sent to a planet in the region would take some 3000 years for us to get their reply.

An even more extreme example  would a message sent to us from the extreme outer edge of the Milky Way, which is 100,000 light years in diameter. Earth is located about 28,000 light years from the galactic center. A message reaching us now would have been sent 70,000 years ago.

To put astronomical time in an even more awesome perspective, scientists have located a giant 13-billion year old galaxy at the edge of the observable universe. The galaxy, which is 12.8 billion light-years from Earth, is as large as the Milky Way galaxy and harbors a supermassive black hole that contains at least a billion times as much matter as does our Sun. A message received from a planet that existed in this ancient would have to have been sent some eight billion years before the Earth was formed when the universe was only one-sixteenth of its present age. And, would that planet, indeed, that galaxy, still exist?

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Written by Nicholos Wethington

NASA is getting WISE to the Universe this Friday. That is, they're launching the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, a new infrared space telescope that will survey objects in our Solar System and beyond, looking for asteroids and brown dwarfs close to home, and protoplanetary disks and newborn stars far off.

The WISE mission is another in a series of all-sky surveys that have become so very effective for research. The satellite will spend six months mapping the entire sky in the infrared, after which it will make a second, three-month pass to further refine the mapping. Rather than looking at any specific objects, the satellite will survey everything it can see with its infrared eyes, providing a detailed catalog of infrared-emitting objects for followup with telescopes like the Spitzer Space Telescope, the Herschel Space Observatory and the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope.

Infrared instruments detect heat, so the instrument must be cooled to a chilly 17 Kelvin (-265 degrees Celsius/ -445 degrees Fahrenheit). Otherwise, it would detect its own heat signature. This is accomplished by packing it in a cryostat, which is basically a large thermos filled with solid hydrogen. The cryostat is expected to keep the instrument cool enough for about 10 months of observation after the launch.

WISE is all ready to go, with the chilled instrument stowed safely in the nosecone that will fit atop a Delta II rocket. WISE will launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on Friday, Dec. 11, between 9:09 a.m. and 9:23 a.m. EST. NASA will have live coverage of the launch available on NASA TV.

Objects that the WISE telescope will pick up include asteroids in our own Solar System that remain undetected because they are invisible in visible light. By doing an all-sky survey, WISE is expected to see hundreds of thousands of asteroids in our Solar System that haven't been discovered, hundreds of them lying in the path of the Earth's orbit. By cataloging these Earth orbit-crossing objects, astronomers can get a better idea of what threats from asteroid impact are lurking in the dark.

WISE will also be sensitive enough to pick up brown dwarfs, objects that straddle the line between planet and star. Though they are massive, they don't quite make the cut for igniting nuclear fusion in their cores, but are warm enough to emit infrared light. It's thought that there are quite a few of these objects in our own back yard waiting to be discovered, and WISE may double or triple the amount of star-like objects that are within 25 light-years of the Earth.

In addition to these smaller, closer finds, WISE will be able to see ultra-luminous infrared galaxies out in the distant regions of the Universe. These galaxies are bright in the infrared, but are invisible to telescopes that can only see in the visible light spectrum. The catalog may be a boon to extrasolar planet hunters, as the protoplanetary disks from which these planets form will be another object visible to the instrument.

The WISE telescope will have polar orbit with an altitude of 525 km (326 miles), and will circle the Earth 15 times each day. Snapshots of the sky will be taken every eleven seconds, allowing the instrument to image each position on the sky in the telescope's field of view a minimum of eight times.

Be sure to check back with us for further coverage of the WISE launch on Friday!

Source: NASA press release, WISE mission site

Filed under: Missions, NASA

Tags: Infrared Astronomy, WISE

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Center Pivot Irrigation in Saudi Arabia is typical of many isolated irrigation projects scattered throughout the arid and hyper-arid regions of the Earth. Fossil water is mined from depths as great as 1 km (3,000 ft), pumped to the surface, and distributed via large center pivot irrigation feeds. The circles of green irrigated vegetation may comprise a variety of agricultural commodities from alfalfa to wheat. Diameters of the normally circular fields range from a few hundred meters to as much as 3 km (2 miles). The projects often trace out a narrow, sinuous, and seemingly random path. Actually, engineers generally seek ancient river channels now buried by the sand seas. The fossil waters mined in these projects accumulated during periods of wetter climate in the Pleistocene glacial epochs, between 10,000 to 2 million years ago, and are not being replenished under current climatic conditions. The projects, therefore, will have limited production as the reservoirs are drained. Water, of course, is the key to agriculture in Saudi Arabia. The Kingdom has implemented a multifaceted program to provide the vast supplies of water necessary to achieve the spectacular growth of the agricultural sector. A network of dams has been built to trap and utilize precious seasonal floods. Vast underground water reservoirs have been tapped through deep wells. Desalination plants have been built to produce fresh water from the sea for urban and industrial use, thereby freeing other sources for agriculture. Facilities have also been put into place to treat urban and industrial run-off for agricultural irrigation. These efforts collectively have helped transform vast tracts of the desert into fertile farmland. Land under cultivation has grown from under 400,000 acres (1600 km²) in 1976 to more than 8 million acres (32,000 km²) in 1993.
NASA has teamed up with the Dubai-based Arab Youth Venture Foundation to provide students from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) the chance to work on NASA missions, the US space agency said Monday.

Under the program, up to 12 engineering students from the UAE will each year join US students to work on a research project at the US space agency's Ames Research Center in California.

The cooperative venture, run under the auspices of NASA's Education Associates Program, could begin as early as next month, NASA said in a statement.

“There is much work to be done to promote and deliver inspired science, technology, education, aerospace and math education in the Arab world that is hands-on and conducted in real world settings,” said Lisa-Renee LaBonte, chief executive officer of the Arab Youth Venture Foundation.

“This groundbreaking program, administered by NASA, will provide select UAE citizens the opportunity to work with NASA scientists, researchers, and engineers on actual NASA missions,” she said.

The Arab students' activities, including housing and transportation, will be covered by sponsorship from corporations and government entities in the UAE.

The Education Associates Program (EAP) has since 1998 allowed students, post-doctoral researchers and faculty members the chance to take part in NASA projects and develop skills in science, technology, engineering, math and other academic disciplines.

More than 1,500 US students have worked as researchers on NASA missions through EAP.

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Washington, Dec 8 (DPA) NASA’s newest “eye” to be launched Wednesday is a satellite equipped with unprecedented infrared sensitivity to scope out cosmic objects unseen by other cameras.

The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, is to be launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

Over the next nine months in orbit around the north and south poles, the satellite is to scan the entire sky one and a half times seeking out the “coolest stars, dark asteroids and the most luminous galaxies,” NASA said.

What sets this “eye” apart from other space cameras such as the Hubble telescope and deep-space probes is its ability to read four infrared wavelengths “with sensitivity hundreds to hundreds of thousands of times greater than its predecessors,” NASA’s Pasadena- based Jet Propulsion Laboratory said.

The resulting pictures will serve as navigation charts for the big space cameras like the Hubble, NASA’s Spitzer space telescope, the European Space Agency’s Herschel Space Observatory and NASA’s upcoming Sofia and James Webb Space Telescope.

“With infrared, we can find the dark asteroids other surveys have missed and learn about the whole population. Are they mostly big, small, fluffy or hard?” asked Peter Eisenhardt, the WISE project scientist at the Jet Propulsion Lab.

To keep WISE sensitive to infrared light, it cannot give out any infrared rays of its own, so its detectors are to be chilled to ultra-cold temperatures – below 8 degrees Kelvin, or minus 445 degrees Fahrenheit.

“Wise is chilled out,” project manager William Irace said.

By Sandi Martin, Public Relations Coordinator

University of Georgia professors in two schools have received a $447,000 grant from NASA that will offer undergraduate students a year-long combination of classroom and field classes studying the effects of climate change on birds.

NASA’s three-year global climate change education teaching and research grant funds instruction activities that are scheduled to begin with fall 2010 classes. The grant will fund fall, spring and summer courses that will teach students about global climate change models, research methods and designing field experiments. The final course in the lecture and lab series—to be held during summer classes—will have students perform their experiments in the field. That field experience will make students more competitive for graduate schools and jobs, said Jeffrey Hepinstall-Cymerman, an assistant professor of landscape ecology in the Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources. Hepinstall-Cymerman said the students will use NASA data, models, spatial analysis, statistics and field methods while studying the effects of climate change on birds and bird migration.

“This training offers a unique opportunity for students to obtain an understanding of the complexities and challenges involved in predicting floral and faunal responses to a changing climate, in addition to exposing them to important field and analytical methods at the cutting edge of applied ecology,” he said.

Hepinstall-Cymerman and two other professors in the Warnell School, Robert Cooper and Michael Conroy, are lead investigators on the grant, which also includes Marshall Shepherd, a professor in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences. As part of the grant, the team will install ground sensors at Whitehall Forest, a research forest located off campus and managed by Warnell, and at the Coweeta Long Term Ecological Research station to allow students to compare ground measurements with measurements made with NASA satellites. This will allow students to see how the satellite images covering large areas compare to detailed information gathered on the ground, Conroy explained. “This is an excellent example of how you use that technology to teach,” he said.

The effect of climate change on birds is sometimes overlooked when the controversial subject is debated, but Conroy notes that if springs continue to get warmer, then it affects when the primary food source for birds—insects—emerge.   If birds don’t adjust to that change, he said, newly-hatched birds won’t have enough food.

Global climate models are key tools for studying aspects of climate change. Shepherd, through funding from a Northeast Georgia PRISM (Partnership for Reform in Science and Mathematics) grant, implemented a fully functional educational global climate model called EdGCM into weather-climate exercises in the department of geography. “I was familiar with the NASA-funded EdGCM model from my previous tenure at NASA and felt that it was the ideal platform for integrating climate modeling in an accessible manner for today’s ‘digital native’ students,” said Shepherd. He will assist with implementation of EdGCM into the project’s instructional activities and provide climate science expertise.

Although the NASA grant primarily funds instruction activities, the summer undergraduate research will offer undergraduate students the type of field research experience generally found only at the graduate level and will tie in with work Cooper is doing on breeding bird productivity along an elevational gradient at Coweeta. “The mountainside is a surrogate for climate change,” said Cooper, “and leafout and insect emergence will be later at higher elevations. Migrating birds that arrive in the spring to breed may be right on time to hit peak insect numbers at higher elevations, but not at lower sites, a phenomenon that is likely to be even more extreme with increasing global temperatures.”

Contact Jeffrey Hepinstall-Cymerman at 706/583-8097 or jhepinstall@warnell.uga.edu, Robert Cooper at 706/542-6066 or rcooper@warnell.uga.edu, Michael Conroy at 706/542-1167 or mconroy@uga.edu, and Marshall Shepherd at 706/542-0517 or marshgeo@uga.edu.

Tags: climate change, Jeffrey Hepinstall-Cymerman, Marshall Shepherd, Michael Conroy, NASA, Robert Cooper