June 2007 - Posts
Billion-dollar science projects end up being about much more than the science, whether we're talking about particle physics, or fusion research, or the international space station, or missions to the moon and beyond, or the next-generation radio telescope. They're also experiments in national prestige, international cooperation and technological leadership - and they can end up lasting far longer than the regimes that started them.
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Alan Boyle / MSNBC.com |
A bare spot amid forested land in the distance shows where ITER's nuclear fusion
facility will be built in the French countryside. Construction is slated to begin in
2009. The tallest building on the complex will rise 160 feet (50 meters) high.
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Right now, the site of the ITER experimental nuclear fusion plant is literally just a bare spot on the ground in the south of France. But the grand energy vision is gradually taking shape on the computers and whiteboards at the ITER organization's temporary quarters nearby - and Gary Johnson is already worried about getting everything ready in time for the big reveal in 2016.
"A 10-year cycle to do all this is very tight from our standpoint," Johnson told me in his very temporary office, set up in a prefab building at CEA Cadarache, one of France's nuclear research centers.
"All this" refers to the long list of tasks that Johnson, one of the top-ranking Americans in ITER's hierarchy, will have to oversee. During this week's visit to Cadarache, I saw firsthand how the international effort to develop commercially viable fusion reactors is only now beginning to gather critical mass.
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Alan Boyle / MSNBC.com |
You can count on the French to add a little joie de vivre to the most unlikely of pursuits – for example, by bringing haute cuisine to the battlefield. So it shouldn’t be surprising that France’s nuclear industry has a bit of élan as well: Witness the Chateau de Cadarache, a medieval castle that serves as the home away from home for scientists and engineers working at the country’s top nuclear research site.
The setting is stunning: Far below the fortress, the Vordure River flows into the Durance, and on through Provence toward Marseille and the Mediterranean. The grounds boast plenty of walking paths, including a trail up to the stone chapel on a nearby hill. The chateau’s rooms seem spacious, and the restaurant menu includes glazed duck and a carefully thought-out selection of local wines. You might think you’re at a resort, rather than at the site where the future of fusion power could well be forged.
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Who will find the "God particle" first? Next year, CERN is due to start up its Large Hadron Collider on the French-Swiss border to hunt for the Higgs boson, the elusive subatomic particle that is thought to give rise to mass. But some scientists are wondering if Fermilab's Tevatron collider in Illinois might beat the LHC to the punch. For now, the wondering hasn't gone much beyond hints and rumors. Nevertheless, the Tevatron's operating life is likely to be extended to see if there's something real behind those rumors.
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CERN |
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Computer cases are lined up in CERN's Computing Center with room to spare.
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The World Wide Web was born in 1990 to manage the billions of bytes of data from experiments at CERN, Europe's particle-physics laboratory. Now the same laboratory is gearing up for a new round of experiments that could generate more than a quadrillion bytes of data every month - data that will have to be processed and delivered to researchers around the world. Is there anything in sight that could outdo the Web? Say hello to the Grid.
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Colin Hicks / MSNBC.com |
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Professor Joel Fajans of the University of California at
Berkeley, a member of the ALPHA antimatter
research team, looks over equipment at the
Antiproton Decelerator facility on the CERN campus.
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It's not often that a scientific experiment gets written up as a front-page news story, as well as a science-fiction twist in a best-selling thriller and a can't-miss movie script - but that's what's been happening to CERN's Antiproton Decelerator facility, the only place in the world where whole atoms of antimatter are built.
This summer, physicists at the facility are engaged in their own real-life thriller: Two teams of researchers are racing each other to be the first to trap atoms of antihydrogen in a magnetic cage. The researchers who do it first will grab the headlines once again. And the other team? "Being second is last in this game," said Jeffrey Hangst, a physicist at the University of Aarhus who is the spokesman for the ALPHA antimatter collaboration.
The race illustrates how competition kicks the science up a notch - and how hard it is to turn science fiction into science fact.
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Colin Hicks / MSNBC.com |
A worker on a crane checks one of the segments of the Compact Muon Solenoid, a
particle detector that will be part of CERN's Large Hadron Collider.
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The huge warehouse seems out of place in the French countryside, surrounded by pastures and cornfields. And if the farmers who work those fields were to take a look inside the structure, they might be forgiven if they thought space aliens had dropped a flying-saucer factory in their midst. Sticking up from the warehouse floor are massive disks of metal, lined up in a row and rising more than four stories into the air.
These are pieces of the Compact Muon Solenoid, one of the four major detectors being built for the world's most powerful particle collider. Right now, the rounds look as if they were cut from a giant metallic jelly roll, measuring 50 feet (15 meters) in diameter. But when all those slices are lowered through a hole in the warehouse floor and assembled, sometime in the next few months, the Compact Muon Solenoid will be a 13,750-ton (12,500-metric-ton) cylinder sitting in the guts of CERN's Large Hadron Collider, 330 feet (100 meters) beneath the countryside.
"It is the heaviest scientific experiment ever," said Steven Nahn, a physicist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is a member of the CMS research team.
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EIROforum / CERN |
A hardhat worker is dwarfed by the inner workings of the Large Hadron
Collider's ATLAS detector. The collider is due to begin operation in 2008.
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The future of particle physics is being built below ground, in a setting that's more appropriate for construction hardhats than lab coats. To get to the caverns where the world's most powerful particle collider is taking shape, you have to take an industrial-issue elevator down just one floor. But that floor is a doozy: It's about 100 meters below ground, roughly as deep as a 30-story building is tall.
The machines under construction in the depths are just as gargantuan: It's hard for any picture to capture the immensity of the ATLAS experiment's seven-story-tall, electronics-laden cylinder. You have to be there to get the full effect. So that's where we went today, and we've created three video postcards just to say "wish you were here."
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There's a thrill to logging onto the Internet from Europe's CERN nuclear research center for the first time, just as there's a thrill to your first sip of a latte at the original Starbucks coffee shop in Seattle's Pike Place Market. That's because the World Wide Web got its start right here, on a woodsy campus near the French-Swiss border.
But that's not the place's only claim to fame: It was here that physicists found the particles behind the weak nuclear force and figured out how neutrinos fit into the subatomic family tree. And the future is looking even brighter: In the leapfrog race to build ever-bigger particle colliders, the Large Hadron Collider - due to be turned on at CERN next year - is the biggest of them all, with no competitor currently in sight.
We'll be delving more deeply (literally!) into the Large Hadron Collider later in the week. But for now, let's talk about a more pragmatic concern: the housing crunch resulting from the hubbub here.
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For the next decade or so, if you want to see the biggest science projects on Earth, Europe is the place to go. One one hand, you have the $8 billion Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest particle collider, which is in the final stages of construction at the CERN nuclear research center on the French-Swiss border. And on the other hand you have the $13 billion ITER experimental fusion reactor to be built in the French countryside near Marseille.
The scientific shrines are already the object of pilgrimages - by researchers as well as journalists - and over the next 10 days, we'll be sending back dispatches from our own midsummer sojourn to the holy sites.
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Simon & Schuster |
World-famous physicist Stephen Hawking and his daughter Lucy have finished a fictional tale that's aimed at the middle-school set but takes on grown-up topics ranging from black holes to the origins of the universe. Lucy Hawking says the book, "George’s Secret Key to the Universe," should give kids a better grasp on the cosmic mysteries that are her father's specialties.
Has the father-daughter team come up with new scientific explanations that can turn cosmology into child's play? “There's something really great," Lucy Hawking told me, "but if I tell you, it would spoil the plot." Despite the Harry Potteresque air of secretiveness, she went on to drop a few hints about what kids will find when they crack the book open in October.
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NASA / JHU-APL |
NASA today released the first pictures from this month's flyby of Venus by the Messenger spacecraft, which is on its way to the $427 million mission's main event at Mercury. The black-and-white snapshots provide just a preliminary taste of what is said to be a spectacular portfolio comprising more than 600 images.
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How many people are still cranking along with a 12-year-old computer at work? If that's your situation, you might have a bit more sympathy for the astronauts trying to cope with the computer problems on the international space station. The system that controls the station's orientation as well as other key functions on the Russian side of the outpost basically uses 12-year-old chips that were designed using a 21-year-old architecture and sent into orbit seven years ago.
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The organizers of this year's $2 million Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge have just unveiled an upgraded Web site that tells everything the competitors want you to know about their rocket-powered hovercrafts.
Sometimes that's not much. In fact, one of the nine listed teams is going totally incognito for the time being. But the other eight provide at least some hints of what they're up to. For the record, those eight have been mentioned as likely entrants, but this is the first time the official list has been revealed.
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Jay VanRensselaer / JHU |
What happens in the Hall of Drunkenness, stays in the Hall of Drunkenness ... or does it?
Archaeologist Betsy Bryan and her team of students and researchers from Johns Hopkins University are back at the Temple of Mut, within Egypt's Luxor dig, to delve more deeply into the sex and booze of ancient times - and you can follow their exploits over the Web.
Over the past six years, Bryan's online expeditions have documented 3,400-year-old rites at the temple that were conducted to appease the gods and give vent to some of the age-old animal impulses in the process. The highlights apparently involved getting drunk on barley beer, then "traveling through the marshes" (a euphemism for having sex), then passing out, then waking up the next morning for religious services.
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Space activist Rick Tumlinson's latest venture aims to blend the thrills of spaceflight with the chills of skydiving, to come up with what he sees as the ultimate extreme sport: space diving. But as he revealed more details about his latest fiendish plan today, the conversation focused on the safety of it all as well as the thrill of it all.
Is it really possible to blend safety and danger, particularly when you're talking about a scheme that calls for jumping off a rocket ship with a parachute at an altitude of more than 120,000 feet? "The parachute is both a safety system and a sporting device," Tumlinson said. And besides, it'll make for a great TV stunt.
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Oklahoma-based TGV Rockets announced a milestone in its rocket development program today, saying that it "has successfully completed critical test firings of a technologically advanced throttleable rocket engine that the company believes will one day be able to facilitate the shuttling of equipment and sensor payloads on quick turnaround suborbital missions for the military and to help dramatically reduce the cost of geospatial imagery."
TGV's chief executive officer, Pat Bahn, said in a news release that the rocket tests, conducted over the past couple of months at NASA's Stennis Space Center in Mississippi, bring the company closer to its goal of replacing a "multibillion-dollar imaging satellite with a $10 million-class rocket ship."
The testing reportedly focused on basic ignition and verification issues for a 30,000-pound throttleable long-life rocket engine using military jet fuel. "The tests demonstrated consistent ignition at power levels of less than 20 percent and stable combustion throughout the operating range," TGV said.
Further testing is under way, under the aegis of a larger space vehicle development program funded through the Naval Research Laboratory, TGV said.
Andre Kurs' credit cards still work. So do the gizmos that he carries around with him. And the last time he checked, his head hasn't exploded.
That answers some of the questions that have popped up in the wake of this week's revelations from Kurs and his colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology about a new scheme for transferring electric power without wires. But there are plenty more questions yet to be answered: Is the method now known as "WiTricity" really, truly safe over the long term? Can it compete with other strategies to generate, transmit and store electrical power? How long until I never have to plug in my laptop again?
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Spaceship-building used to be an exclusively government-funded game, but software billionaire Paul Allen changed all that when he put $25 million or so into the venture that ultimately won the $10 million Ansari X Prize for private spaceflight. Now a bevy of billionaires and millionaires are getting into the act, ranging from Armadillo Aerospace's John Carmack and SpaceX's Elon Musk to Bigelow Aerospace's Robert Bigelow and Virgin Galactic's Richard Branson.
But it's going to take more than lone tycoons to build the personal spaceflight industry, and many "NewSpace" firms have had to court individual angel investors who were willing to put their money where their outer-space dreams were. Now, however, there's a change in the air: Just today, California-based XCOR Aerospace announced that it's received its first money from a whole team of angel investors to support the development of a new suborbital spaceship. XCOR's new relationship with the Boston Harbor Angels hints at the next stage in the space tourism industry's ascent.
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It's nice to see some forward motion on the final frontier:
- JP Aerospace sent advertising billboards to the edge of the atmosphere during high-altitude balloon tests last weekend. Among the advertisers were some blogging friends of mine: Keith Cowing at SpaceRef, and Clark Lindsey at HobbySpace. John Powell, the "JP" behind the company, says the next step is to test an airship capable of ascending to 110,000 feet. Check out the HobbySpace item for further discussion.
- Chuck Robinson, a bookstore owner in Bellingham, Wash., is the winner of a zero-gravity airplane flight that was put up by Quirk Books to spread the word about "The Space Tourist's Handbook," a semi-tongue-in-cheek guide written by Space Adventures' Eric Anderson and Joshua Piven. (Tip o' the Log to Diane Mapes ... by the way, I initially wrote that there was still time to enter a Quirk spaceflight contest, but it turns out the deadline has long passed.)
- This week's installment of the Carnival of Space highlights the recent International Space Development Conference in Dallas.
NASA / ESA / STScI / ASU |
CLICK IMAGE FOR SLIDE SHOWS
This 1995 photo shows the Pillars
of Creation in the Eagle Nebula.
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After an awkward infancy, the Hubble Space Telescope has turned into a teenage idol: At the age of 17, the 12-ton telescope has racked up a hit parade that would put even "American Idol" winner Jordin Sparks to shame. So is there one picture that ranks as Hubble's biggest hit?
To my mind, Hubble's "Pillars of Creation" is the highest highlight: Like 1968's "Earthrise" picture from Apollo 8, and 1990's "Pale Blue Dot" picture from Voyager 1, the space telescope's 1995 picture of the Eagle Nebula's starbirth regions reminds us how small and precious our own celestial neighborhood is. Seen on the scale of the Pillars, our entire solar system would be just one barely imaginable speck inside a fingerlet of dust.
So you'd think the iconic picture of the Pillars must be the most sought-after view from Hubble, right? At least that's what I assumed. Well, it turns out I was wrong. Here's the scoop on Hubble's hit parade, and an advance peek at the space telescope's coming attractions:
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Thousands of onlookers are expected to turn out for the launch of the shuttle Atlantis, now scheduled for Friday, and you'll find plenty of information about the best viewing sites around NASA's Kennedy Space Center. But if you're not inclined to fight it out with the crowds, you can elect to watch the liftoff on TV, on your computer or even on your mobile phone. Here's a viewing guide:
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Armadillo Aerospace |
Last year, Texas-based Armadillo Aerospace ended up just shy of winning $350,000 of NASA’s money in the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge. But over the weekend, the rocketeers under the leadership of video-game programmer John Carmack did everything they needed to do to win the prize - wowing legions of space enthusiasts in the process.
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Linden Lab |
Imagine hitching a ride to the moon on a pint-sized space probe - and experiencing every high point of the flight in real time, thanks to virtual-reality technology. If Pete Worden, the director of NASA's Ames Research Center, has his way, this dream could well become a reality - well, at least a beta version of reality - in a little more than a year.
Worden provided a preview of mass-audience space exploration last week during the International Space Development Conference in Dallas, delivered direct from the virtual world known as Second Life. The event marked the debut of Worden's very own Second Life avatar, called Simon Pete Raymaker. The computer representation looked sort of like Worden, only younger and thinner.
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