What's New Friday May 15, 2009

WHAT'S NEW   Robert L. Park   Friday, 15 May 09   Washington, DC 

1.  TELESCOPES: THIS MUST SURELY BE THE YEAR OF THE TELESCOPE.
As Americans were transfixed by images of astronauts wrestling the 
venerable Hubble space telescope into the cargo bay of Atlantis, the 
European Space Agency sent two space telescopes to the Lagrange-2 point.  
L2 is 1.5 million km from Earth, in the direction opposite from the Sun.  
At that point the gravity of the Sun plus Earth gives a satellite an 
orbital period about the Sun period exactly equal to that of Earth. 
Herschel is the largest space telescope ever launched.  It will examine the 
universe and the solar system in the far infrared, while the Planck 
telescope is designed to examine the Cosmic Microwave Background remaining 
from the Big Bang.  The ESA telescopes will join Kepler at L2.  Launched 
two months ago by the US, Kepler will search for earthlike planets orbiting 
other stars.  In a few years, other telescopes, both US and European will 
join the search for answers.  

2.  PEOPLE: THE AMERICAN PUBLIC CAST A VOTE FOR HUBBLE.
Because of the risk, the final Hubble repair mission was initially 
scratched by NASA.  The American public wouldn't hear of it.  I was the 
recipient of some of the public irritation after WN was quoted in some 
newspapers this week saying the shuttle was "at the root of Hubble's 
problems."  How could I say such a thing?  Without repairs by shuttle 
astronauts Hubble would have been abandoned at birth as a nearsighted 
failure.  Let me explain: the hero's welcome given the Apollo astronauts 
persuaded NASA that there should be astronauts on every mission.  It was 
decreed that nothing was to go into space except by means of the shuttle.  
That included Hubble, which had to be designed to fit in the cargo bay, and 
worst of all, it had to go into an orbit the shuttle could reach. That 
ruled out the L2 point, which by every measure is the ideal place to locate 
a telescope.  That is, unless you want to look at Earth; then you need the 
L1 point on the side toward the Sun.

3.  MONEY: AND THEN THERE WAS THE THING ABOUT PAYING FOR IT.
Only by projecting a need for almost weekly shuttle flights could NASA 
justify such a huge investment. Of course, it never did better than a 
flight every two months.  In the days before the shuttle, NASA followed a 
policy of redundancy; a duplicate was built for every mission. The cost of 
making two was only slightly greater than the cost of one.  If the first 
failed, appropriate changes could be made in the second; if the first 
worked fine the second could be sent on a different mission, as in Pioneer 
10 and 11, and Viking 1 and 2.  The cost of human spaceflight is so great 
that it would be far cheaper to send replacements than to make repairs.

4.  QUESTION:  WHAT IS IT WE'RE LOOKING FOR?
Humans, tiny specks of self replicating matter, have succeeded in finding 
out just how insignificant we are.  It's not enough.  We also need to 
understand the atoms we are composed of, and how they came to be assembled 
into life forms.  The LHC may soon explain how the energy of the Big Bang 
became atoms. Nicholas Wade in today's New York Times tells us that John 
Sutherland, a chemist at the University of Manchester, may have unraveled 
the chemistry of the origin of life.  We will, at a time perhaps not far 
distant, be able to explain everything that exists, but we will still not 
know why.

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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