What's New Friday, May 22, 2009

WHAT'S NEW   Robert L. Park   Friday, 21 May 09   Washington, DC 

1.  TELESCOPES: KEPLER IS NOT AT L2, BUT IT SHOULD BE.
WN made a mistake last week: The Kepler Space Telescope was not sent to the 
L2 point as we said.  The two European space telescopes, Herschel and 
Planck, are there and the James Webb Space Telescope will go there when 
it's launched in 2013.  I jumped to the conclusion that Kepler would go 
there too, but Kepler is part of the NASA Discovery Program of low-cost, 
focused science missions, and its launch vehicle was not capable of 
reaching L2.  Assigned to look for Earth-sized exoplanets, Kepler is in a 
solar drift-away orbit like the Spitzer Space Telescope.  

2.  ROCKET FUEL: WE’RE GOING BACK TO THE MOON TO GET WATER? 
Last week, even as I was screwing up the story about the new telescopes, 
Science magazine was perpetuating the rocket-fuel-on-the-Moon fantasy.  I 
don't know where it got started, but in March of 1998, Alan Binder, the 
chief scientist on the lunar prospector mission, exulted that, "for the 
first time, we know that when we go to another planetary body, we can fuel 
up."  It seems that water, or ice, had been detected in lunar soil at the 
bottom of craters near the poles.  The water was not detectable 18 months 
later.   NASA is now sending two missions to the Moon to look again. 
Science magazine said last week that, "the lure of a resource easily 
convertible into to a high-energy fuel of oxygen and hydrogen has driven 
the decades long and often exasperating search for lunar ice." It's not 
nearly as exasperating as it will be in the unlikely event that they do 
find water and try to turn it into rocket fuel.  If our planet is indeed 
covered with rocket fuel to a depth of miles, why is there an energy crisis?

3.  THERMODYNAMICS: WHY CAN’T WE JUST BURN THE ASHES?
While I was trying to understand how Science magazine could have missed a 
turn in the road, a friend at the BBC called my attention to an April 30 
article in the business section of the New York Times.  To reduce the 
emission of carbon dioxide from power plants, there are plans to sequester 
it deep underground. You have to pay to extract it and then pay again to 
get rid of it. However, a company called Carbon Sciences has an audacious 
plan: Recycle the carbon by turning it into liquid hydrocarbon fuels. The 
author experiences a brief attack of self-doubt, "how much energy would it 
take to recombine carbon with hydrogen to produce a fuel that could then 
substitute for gasoline." But his self-doubts seem to be swept away when 
the company assures him they have a secret biocatalyst that will combine 
the hydrogen in water with the carbon in carbon dioxide without the usual 
large expenditure of energy. That's the same claim that inventor Sam Leach 
made almost 40 years ago when he scammed investors out of millions with an 
automobile that ran on water.

4.  CERN: AUSTRIA REVERSES ITS DECISION TO WITHDRAW.  
The abrupt decision of Chancellor Faymann to terminate Austria’s 50-year 
membership in the European particle-physics lab, just months before the LHC 
is expected to turn out its first results, was reversed just as abruptly 
this week after scientists warned they would become second-class citizens 
in international science.   

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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