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Change of Pace — and Puzzle

Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010

I will say more in the very near future about the Obama administration’s decision on the NASA budget, which was the subject of my last post. Today, however, I’d like to offer a change of pace. When I began this blog, I intended to include posts about the moon in our culture in addition to posts on the science of the moon. So far, however, I’ve done very little of the former.

I read only two web comics on a regular basis: Sinfest, written by Tatsuya Ishida, and Piled Higher and Deeper, written by Jorge Cham. Yesterday, Tatsuya had a delightful comic that has to do … sort of … with the moon.

Sinfest, Feb 1 2010

"Sinfest," Feb 1 2010

Probably no explanation of this strip is necessary. But if any of you are curious,  Sinfest is sort of about modern life and sort of about religion and is highly irreverent about both. It’s definitely satirical but I would not say it’s anti-religious. It just pokes fun at the little foibles of all religions. (Except Islam — I’ve never seen Ishida say anything, pro or con, about Islam, probably because that can be hazardous to a cartoonist’s health.)

The little Buddha on a cloud and the dog (named Pooch) are recurring characters. Every now and then Ishida draws a strip where he illustrates how the Japanese symbol (kanji) for some word could plausibly come about. I like these calligraphy strips very much. He usually plays it very straight. The humor lies, to me, in the whole idea of rationally explaining something as irrational as language. You could do the same thing with English spellings.

I’m not completely sure what the “mu!” at the end of yesterday’s strip means. When I go online and look up the free English-Japanese dictionaries, it’s easy enough to find out that the kanji shown here is pronounced “tsuki” and means “moon.” On the other hand, “mu” means “six.” Can anyone explain to me what six has to do with the moon? Or what the point of the joke is otherwise? (Perhaps “mu” is how dogs bark in Japanese?)

Tags: comics, kanji, Tatsuya Ishida
Posted in Just for Fun, Popular culture, websites | 3 Comments »

Guide to the Cosmos, gold, New Scientist

Monday, January 11th, 2010

As of today, I’m on a podcast! Check out “Guide to the Cosmos,” a podcast hosted by Dr. Robert Piccioni, at www.guidetothecosmos.com. It was actually Christmas Eve Day when we recorded this interview over the phone, and it’s a two-parter. The first part, in today’s episode, is about water on the moon, and I talk all about the recent discoveries by Chandrayaan-1 and LCROSS. The second part is about the origin of the moon, and that part of the interview will air in February.

The audio part of the podcast is actually on a different site, called WebTalkRadio. You can go to their main site, www.webtalkradio.net, and then look for “Guide to the Cosmos” under the “Show podcasts” tab. But I’ll make it easy for you and give you a direct link. Dr. Piccioni also puts some images up on his own website to go with the podcast, which you can look at here as you listen to the interview.

When I recorded the interview I did not know which images he was going to have up on his website, so I wasn’t able to refer to them directly. Let me fill in that gap here. Image #1 shows the impact plume from LCROSS’s crash into the Cabeus crater.

Cabeus impact plume

Cabeus impact plume

This cloud of debris was not visible from Earth. The photo was taken from the “shepherding satellite” that passed directly overhead and crashed into the moon 4 minutes later. The spectrometers on the shepherding satellite analyzed both the absorbed and emitted light from this cloud to look for traces of water and other compounds. Image #2 is just a pretty picture of the full moon, nothing else. The LCROSS impact happened way down at the bottom of that picture, in the bumpy area around the south pole. Image #3 is a “wiggly line” from the ultraviolet and visible spectrometer.

Spectrum showing sodium emission line plus something interesting

Spectrum showing sodium emission line plus something interesting

Interestingly, this is not the data set that Tony Colaprete, the main project scientist, has talked about the most. Unlike the near infrared spectrometer, whose readings they understand pretty well and which show definitive evidence of water, the UV/VIS spectrum requires more interpretation and they are just beginning to work on it. The peak on the right is actually not water but sodium. (This emission band looks yellow to the naked eye, and explains why a sodium lamp is yellow. See this Wikipedia entry to read more about it.)

You can also see two shorter peaks on the left that have not been identified yet. At the AGU meeting in December, Tony said they think that one of them could be gold! Yes, gold on the moon. You read about it here first.

Back in the days before Apollo went to the moon, there was a slightly kooky scientist named Tommy Gold who said that the moon was covered by a layer of dust so deep that any spacecraft that landed on the moon would just sink into it and never be seen again. Fortunately, this didn’t turn out to be the case, but for a while NASA had to take the possibility seriously, and his hypothetical surface layer became known as “Gold dust.” But now lunar gold dust may take on a whole new meaning!

I did not report on this earlier (“LCROSS Strikes Gold!”) because they really don’t know what the peaks are yet, and so Tony’s comment was at least partly meant in jest. If they ever get more serious about it, I’ll be sure to let you know.

Last month I wrote an article for New Scientist online about the moon sessions at the AGU meeting, called “Are We Looking in the Wrong Places for Water on the Moon?” This was a very ticklish article to write, but I was happy with it in the end. Basically, the story is that one of the instruments on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has been seeing lots of indications of water in places where it isn’t supposed to be.

LCROSS went to a permanently shadowed crater because that is where theory says that lunar water, if it exists, should concentrate. It went to Cabeus, in particular, because that is where the Lunar Exploration Neutron Detector (LEND) on LRO saw the highest concentrations of water. But what’s interesting, and controversial, is that LEND has seen no correlation so far between permanent shadowing and hydrogen deposits! There are other regions with just as much water as Cabeus that aren’t in shadow.

What made the article ticklish to write is that there are some people who frankly don’t believe the LEND data yet. I tried to hint at this without pouring oil onto the fire. But there are three groups–one in Russia, two in the U.S.–who are working on the LEND data and they all are saying pretty much the same thing. You can’t just ignore this fact and pretend it isn’t there, while at the same time singing the praises of LCROSS and the LRO camera and the other experiments on LRO. That’s why I felt it was important to write this article, even if the jury is still out on what the results mean.

In a blog I think I can be more adventurous than I can in print, so I’ll hazard a guess as to what it might mean. The LCROSS results are hinting that there is way more water than you can produce by bombarding the moon’s surface with the solar wind–some of the water has to be from meteoroids or comets. LEND can see beneath the surface, and Igor Mitrofanov, the principal investigator for LEND, says that he thinks they are seeing deposits of hydrogen that lie beneath the surface, covered by a layer of dry soil. Putting two and two together, I think that the water is delivered by meteoroids/comets, and is then buried by some process we don’t understand yet (or maybe it’s just in a sufficiently thick layer to begin with?). Once it’s buried, it doesn’t need a permanently shadowed crater to keep it from evaporating. Sure, it might be associated with a permanently shadowed crater, but really any crater will do. Or maybe even something that isn’t a crater! One of the most puzzling things about the LEND data was that one of the hydrogen deposits seemed to be on one side of a mountain range. But maybe that makes sense, if the mountain range was created by the meteoroid/comet impact.

Well, this is just my feeble amateur speculation. The specialists will, of course, hash it out and either come up with an explanation, or agree to disagree. One thing that’s pretty certain is that there is a lot we don’t know yet.

Tags: Chandrayaan-1, hydrogen, LCROSS, LEND, lunar origin, New Scientist, podcast, Robert Piccioni, Thomas Gold, water, WebTalkRadio
Posted in Media, Meetings, Missions, NASA, Science, websites | 2 Comments »

I’m a Geoblogger!

Thursday, December 17th, 2009

 

At the American Geophysical Union meeting this week I dicovered that I belong to a small community that I didn’t even know about: I’m a geoblogger! There was a luncheon on Wednesday for people who blog about earth or space sciences, and so I got to meet about fifteen other people who do the same thing.

One of the things that struck me was the diversity of the blogs: the different types of sites, the different reasons for blogging, the different people doing it. Every blog has its own flavor. The majority of the geobloggers were graduate students or faculty, but there were a few journalists too.

So who was there, you ask? Let me introduce you!

Reia Chmielowski came from the longest distance — all the way from Milano. She is a postdoc in metamorphic petrology. Her blog, The Musings of a Life-Long Scholar, takes a personal tone, and it might be of interest to academics outside of geology.

Larry O’Hanlon is a professional journalist who will be blogging for “two more weeks” at Discovery News before passing the blog on to someone else; however, he will still remain very much involved with the site.  He notes that it’s kind of hard to tell the blog apart from the regular news now, because a recent redesign of the site has merged the two.

Claus Haslauer, Dave Petley, Pawam Gupta, and Steve Easterbrook had different approaches to the faculty blog. They are your go-to guys if you are interested in geostatistics, landslides, aerosols, and climate change informatics respectively. To a large extent their blogs are oriented toward colleagues rather than to the public. (Gupta said this explicitly — the purpose of his blog is to “review peer-reviewed papers.”) However, Petley’s blog in particular gets a lot of hits from outside academia, especially when a natural disaster hits. He also says that he attracts a lot of students with his blog, and has begun to be better known for his blog than for his own research! Faculty everywhere, take note!

Carrying the grad student torch were Cassaundra Myers and Julian Lozos, both of UC Riverside. Cassaundra’s blog, UCR GEOP Chalkboard, is more of a departmental blog that other students contribute to (but she does the most work on it). Julian was a wannabe musician, and is now a wannabe seismologist. He has been doing social media of one sort or another since he was a kid, and said that his choice of topics has graduated from “What is your favorite Pokemon?” to “Earthquakes are not the bogeyman.”

Actually, this last comment raises an interesting point. Julian says that people always ask him how he can study something as depressing as earthquakes, but in fact earthquakes give us lots of fascinating information about our planet. Like carnivores with big claws and big sharp teeth, they get a bad rap. To read more about them, check out his blog, Harmonic Tremors.

If there was one blog whose title made me immediately want to go read it, it was probably Brian Shiro’s. He is currently in training to become an astronaut. By some quirk of fate, he learned about an opportunity to apply for astronaut training the very same week he started his blog, Astronaut for Hire. That’s right, he started his blog first and then became an “astronaut for hire”! This is a true example of the power of positive thinking. By the way, his “geo” credentials are that he works at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, and his blog contains some posts about that topic as well.

There were two interesting blogs from people who, like me, are academic castaways. Andrew Alden is a former geologist with the US Geological Survey who now is the Geology Guide for about.com. He uses his blog as a front end to his main informational pages on about.com, which get the most traffic. He noted that when he started with about.com, he would write long informative posts, but he has since found that about 80 percent of the people who visit the site just want to look at pictures of rocks!

I hope that Michael Tobis doesn’t mind me describing him as an “academic castaway” because he is in fact employed at the University of Texas, but it sounds as if his job is not really his raison d’etre. “My blog has been the core of my intellectual and social life for the last two years,” he said. His passion is climate change and his blog is called Only In It for the Gold, and you need to check it out.

The name, by the way, is a reference to something someone once said to Tobis at a party. When he told the hostess that he worked on climate change, a hush fell over the room. (Living in Texas, in the heart of oil country, that’s probably as good a conversation-stopper as saying you are an atheist.) His hostess, fumbling for something cheerful to say, said, “Well, I’m sure there is good money in that!”

Finally, three representatives of mainstream publications were also there. Carolyn Gramling blogs for www.earthmagazine.org, Mouse Reusch is one of several writers for the Big Wide World graduate student blog at www.newscientist.com, and Harvey Leifert is a rather infrequent blogger at the Climate Feedback blog at www.nature.com. We forgive Harvey because he is the former public information officer for the American Geophysical Union and thus has done more to promote public understanding of geophysics than all the rest of us put together.

I apologize to any other bloggers who were there whom I haven’t written about, because I had to duck out of the lunch early (actually, at its scheduled ending time) to hear the great debate over the Younger Dryas Boundary. The question: Did an impact from an extraterrestrial object cause the climate cooling 12,900 years ago that maybe caused sabertooth tigers to die out and the Clovis culture to end? To me, the most convincing talk by far was given by Alan Harris of the Space Science Institute. The intrinsic probability of such an event, a 4-kilometer asteroid hitting Earth in the last 13,000 years, is so low that you need extremely compelling proof to overcome it. As a mathematician, I would use Bayes’ Theorem to explain this, but there is an old saying of Carl Sagan that works just as well for non-mathematical folks: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” And the evidence for the alleged impact, so far, falls way way short of being extraordinary.

Well, none of this has much to do with the moon, but it’s just an example of the incredible variety of interesting stuff you can hear about at the AGU meeting.

Tags: aerosols, AGU, astronaut, climate change, Discovery Channel, Earth Magazine, earthquakes, extraordinary, geobloggers, geostatistics, landslides, Nature, New Scientist, off-topic, Younger Dryas Boundary
Posted in Meetings, Science, websites | 5 Comments »

History Channel Appearance — Next Tuesday!

Thursday, August 20th, 2009

 

The episode of “The Universe” on which I will appear — though probably only briefly — has now been scheduled! It will have its first showing on the History Channel at 9:00 pm (8:00 pm Central time) on the History Channel. For those people who don’t get the History Channel, I think that it will also be available on the Web. Go to the main page for “The Universe” and click on “Watch Full Episodes.”

The title of the episode is “The Day the Moon was Gone.” It looks at various scenarios for what Earth would be like if we had no moon. What if we had never had a moon? What if the moon suddenly disappeared?

Also, for those of you who missed my first appearance on ”The Universe” in 2007, they are re-running that episode (simply called “The Moon”)  just before the new one — 8:00 Eastern time, 7:00 Central.

If you have been following my blog entries — this one, this one, and this one – you know already that I have some concerns about the upcoming episode. I have not yet seen the episode, but I am worried that the show is going to exaggerate certain claims.  Some ideas might be presented or emphasized not because they are good science, but because they are good TV. After the show has aired, please feel free to ask me what I think is good science, what is doubtful, and what is just plain bogus. Keep in mind, though, that anything I say is just one person’s opinion! I can be wrong, too.

By the way, I have no such reservations about the earlier episode. On the whole I think that the History Channel (or really, Flight 33 Productions, which has produced all the episodes of “The Universe” except one) did a really nice job with that episode, and I am proud to have appeared on it.

Tags: Flight 33 Productions, History Channel, television, The Universe
Posted in Media, websites | No Comments »

History Channel and “This Week’s Finds”

Friday, July 31st, 2009

 

Just a little update on the History Channel program … I must have talked with Adrian, the writer/producer, about fifteen times this week. Today was his deadline for the script, and he kept on checking little details with me. Even as recently as Monday he said that persons unknown had snuck some words into the script about the giant impact creating the oceans, which is NOT TRUE!!

I am not in the television biz, but it amazes me that anyone would have the audacity to put statements of fact (especially false ones) into a writer’s script without checking with the writer first. I write for the print media, and I don’t think that any of my editors would ever do that. If they did, they wouldn’t be my editor for long!

Anyway, I’m confident that Adrian is trying his best to get the story right, and I hope that he will get the last word.

Today I found a reference to the giant impact theory in an unexpected place on the Web: Physics World magazine. The article is called “The Earth — for physicists,” and it talks about four catastrophes that Earth has been through, including the giant impact that formed the moon and the “late heavy bombardment” that formed most of the moon’s large impact features. The article says complimentary things about my book, so I’m happy to reciprocate with a link to it!

I found the article intriguing for a reason you might not expect. The author, John Baez, was perhaps the first blogger on the World Wide Web. He was certainly the first physics blogger. I interviewed him one time (for reasons that I have now forgotten), and he pointed out that he had been writing his blog since before the word “blog” existed! It’s called “This Week’s Finds in Mathematical Physics,” and he has kept it going since January 19, 1993. It is now up to Week 276.

If you do the math, you’ll see that he has not written an entry every week. Nevertheless, his blog is a fantastic place to learn about math or really theoretical kinds of physics, because he thinks hard about how to explain difficult concepts in the most straightforward, informal, intuitive way. Usually, the only way you can get this stuff is to talk with someone at the blackboard. That’s what John Baez’s blog is like. A really great blackboard session. And somehow he manages to do it over and over … not every week, but pretty darned often.

Anyway, Baez is usually into very cerebral math-y stuff, and so it amazed me to see him writing for Physics World about something as concrete as how the moon formed, how we got an oxygen atmosphere, etc. It amazed me in a good way, I hasten to add.  After all, I was also in a previous life a card-carrying mathematician, and look what I’m writing about now!

Tags: blogs, giant impact, John Baez, late heavy bombardment, physics, television, world's first blogger?
Posted in Media, Science, websites | No Comments »

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