What's New Friday January 16, 2009

WHAT’S NEW   Robert L. Park   Friday, 16 Jan 09   Washington, DC 

1.  OBAMA’S SCIENCE TEAM: AIR FORCE GENERAL TO HEAD NASA.  
After eight years of continental drift in science policy the science 
community urged president-elect Barack Obama to act swiftly to fill 
science positions. But who expected a much admired professor of physics to 
be nominated as science advisor before Christmas?  Or a Nobel laureate to 
be Secretary of Energy?   No scientist could refuse the President’s call 
to serve their country and the world.  Do we only now have a leader who 
understands this?  The members of the Obama team are linked by their 
commitment to the environment.  Only the position of NASA Administrator 
remains to be filled.   It was no secret that Michael Griffin wanted to 
keep the job, but as NASA head he consistently ignored environmental 
concerns to push a hopelessly outdated space-cadet program of manned 
rockets and islands in space.   The great environmental observatory DSCOVR 
was left locked in solitary confinement.  Obama will name USAF Maj. Gen. 
Scott Gration, Ret. to head NASA, possibly today.  We know virtually 
nothing about Gration’s position on the issues, but Obama presumably 
knows; he spent a lot of time with Gration on a trip to Africa, where 
Gration was born to missionary parents.  This is the sort of person you 
put in charge when you want to sever the shackles of outdated tradition 
and totally reexamine its reason for existing.  

2.  FARTS ON MARS:  TIME TO PUT THE RED PLANET OFF LIMITS. 
Plumes of methane have been observed in the atmosphere of Mars.   Since 
methane is destroyed by sunlight, there must be a renewable source.  Could 
it be living organisms?    Methane seems to be a pheromone to Mars 
Trekkies, who immediately called for a human mission to check it out.  
Very bad idea; astronauts are huge bacteria cultures that must dump their 
contents daily for the 18 months the mission must remain on Mars.  Humans 
on Mars are certain to discover bacteria but they may look familiar.  
Astronauts resist being autoclaved, but methane plumes certainly justify a 
sample return mission. Remember the 1976 Viking lander that scooped up 
Martian soil, plopped it into a nutrient broth, and monitored the evolved 
gas for evidence of life?  And behold!  There it was.  However, NASA later 
backed down saying it was most likely an inorganic reaction.

3.  THE FERMI PARADOX: ACTUALLY, IT WAS A DUMB QUESTION.
Enrico Fermi, the great Italian physicist, fled Italy with his Jewish wife 
to escape Hitler and became a leader of the atomic bomb program.   When he 
was asked if he thought there are space aliens, he is said to have 
answered with a question: “Where are they?”  They’re where they’ve always 
been.  The bad news is that we can’t go there.  The good news is that they 
can’t come here.  We’re alone in our solar system and interstellar 
distances are far too great to visit another star.  But maybe we can see.

4.  SEEING:  THE INTERNATIONAL YEAR OF ASTRONOMY.
This year in March, 400 years after Galileo invented the telescope, the 
United States will launch a new orbiting telescope, Kepler, specifically 
to see Earth-like planets hidden by the light of their sun.  In May the 
final space shuttle trip will make a maintenance visit to the Hubble Space 
Telescope.  Designed to be serviced by the shuttle, and delayed three 
years by the Challenger disaster, Hubble was out of date and had a 
construction flaw before it was launched but it has given us a glimpse of 
the possible.

THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND.
Opinions are the author's and not necessarily shared by the
University of Maryland, but they should be.
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