Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Historic Opportunity for Students to Participate on “Extra” Shuttle Mission

Astronaut Jeffrey Williams doing plant cells vs. microgravity experiments aboard the ISS in December 2009. Credit: NASA

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A new opportunity for students to be part of history and fly an experiment on what could be the last space shuttle mission has been announced by the Student Spaceflight Experiments Program (SSEP) for the STS-135, the shuttle mission that might fly in June of 2011.

“We hope to get 50 communities and 100,000 students participating in the initiative which allows grade 5-14 student design of real experiments to fly aboard Atlantis, and engages entire communities,” Dr. Jeff Goldstein, the Director for the National Center for Earth and Space Science Education told Universe Today. “This is very unique opportunity for students and teachers to be part of a high visibility, keystone U.S. national STEM education program of the highest caliber.”

SSEP is a new program that launched in June 2010 by the National Center for Earth and Space Science Education in partnership with NanoRacks, LLC, a company that is working with NASA under a Space Act Agreement as part of the utilization of the International Space Station as a National Laboratory.

The company hopes to stimulate space station research by providing a very low-cost 1 kilogram platform that puts micro-gravity projects within the reach of universities and small companies, as well as elementary and secondary schools through SSEP. So, this is actually a commercial space program and not a NASA program.

This opportunity offers real research done on orbit, with students designing and proposing the experiments to fly in low Earth orbit.

Goldstein said the program is a U.S. national Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education initiative that gives up to 3,200 students across a community—middle and high school students (grades 5-12), and/or undergraduates at 2-year community colleges (grades 13-14)—the ability to fly their own experiments in low Earth orbit, first aboard the final flights of the Space Shuttle, and then later on the International Space Station.

For the STS-134 mission, now scheduled to launch in April 2011, 16 communities were chosen to participate from 447 student team proposals. Goldstein said the 16 selected experiments are now moving through formal NASA Flight Safety review.

But the end of the shuttle mission is not the end of this program – instead it is just the beginning. “This is meant to be a gateway to Phase 2 of the program, which will allow routine access to space for students conducting experiments, said Goldstein. “SSEP was designed to engage and inspire America’s next generation of scientists and engineers through immersion in real science. We believe that ‘student as scientist’ represents the very best in science education.”

What type of experiments would be accepted? Students and teachers should discuss what biological, chemical or physical system they would like to explore with no gravity off for 10 days. Examples of experiments are seed germination cell biology, life cycles of organisms, food preservation, and crystal growth. The SSEP program will help guide the teachers through implementation of the program in their classrooms.

Each participating school district will be provided an experiment slot in an easy-to-use real microgravity research mini-laboratory flying on Space Shuttle Atlantis. The SSEP center will then guide the school districts through an experiment design competition within the grade 5-12 range, which can be conducted across a single school, or district-wide to as many as 3,200 students. Student teams then design real experiments vying for your reserved slot on this historic flight, with designs constrained by mini-laboratory operation.

Other benefits of the program include a customized Blog for students and teachers to report on their program, and a design competition for each school to have a 4-inch x 4-inch emblem that we will fly aboard the Shuttle and returned to the school.

There is uncertainty, however, whether the STS-135 mission will fly. Funding for the additional STS-135 mission was authorized by Congress on September 29, 2010, and the authorization was signed by President Obama. NASA is currently awaiting Congressional allocation of funds for STS-135. On January 20, 2011, NASA formally added STS-135 to its launch schedule. Goldstein said there is now a high probability that STS-135 will indeed fly. But when it flies is the issue.

Because of the timing of when NASA needs to have a list of material that will be used in the experiments so that they can do a flight safety review, the SSEP program needs NASA to slip the launch date from June 28, 2011 until at least August 31, 2011. They fully expect this to occur given the significant launch slips that have occurred for STS-133 and STS-134, and the conversations already taking place in NASA.

But it is now time critical for schools to be able to participate. There is a proposal submission deadline of May 12, 2011. By the end of May, the flight experiments will be selected, so that NASA can be provided with the materials list 3 months in advance of launch.

For more information see the SSEP website

Testimonials for SSEP on STS-134

Watch a video of Dr. Jeff Goldstein talking about SSEP.

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Science Sees Farther: Extraterrestrial Life

Are we alone in the universe? Can we save the lives of millions with new vaccines? How can we manage the increasing demands on our planet’s resources? Scientists try to answer these questions and more as part of a celebration of the 350th year of The Royal Society, the UK’s national academy of sciences. The Society has unveiled a new section on their website today, called “Science Sees Farther”, which includes essays, interviews and more on 12 different scientific topics, including extraterrestrial life, aging, health, climate change, and geoengineering, as well as discussions of the always-present uncertainties in science and how the internet has changed the science landscape.
Continue reading “Science Sees Farther: Extraterrestrial Life”

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Anti-hydrogen Captured, Held For First Time

The electrodes (gold) of the trap used to combine positrons and antiprotons to form antihydrogen.N. MADSEN, ALPHA/SWANSEA

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Can warp drive be far behind? A paper published in this week’s edition of Nature reports that for the first time, antimatter atoms have been captured and held long enough to be studied by scientific instruments. Not only is this a science fiction dream come true, but in a very real way this could help us figure out what happened to all the antimatter that has vanished since the Big Bang, one of the biggest mysteries of the Universe. “We’re very excited about the fact that we can actually now trap antimatter atoms long enough to study their properties and see if they’re very different from matter,” said Makoto Fujiwara, a team member from ALPHA, an international collaboration at CERN.

Antimatter is produced in equal quantities with matter when energy is converted into mass. This happens in particle colliders like CERN and is believed to have happened during the Big Bang at the beginning of the universe.

“A good way to think of antimatter is a mirror image of normal matter,” said team spokesman Jeffrey Hangst, a physicist at Aarhus University in Denmark. “For some reason the universe is made of matter, we don’t know why that is, because you could in principle make a universe of antimatter.”

In order to study antimatter, scientists have to make it in a laboratory. The ALPHA collaboration at CERN has been able to make antihydrogen – the simplest antimatter atom – since 2002, producing it by mixing anti- protons and positrons to make a neutral anti-atom. “What is new is that we have managed to hold onto those atoms,” said Hangst, by keeping atoms of antihydrogen away from the walls of their container to prevent them from getting annihilated for nearly a tenth of a second.

The antihydrogen was held in an ion trap, with electromagnetic fields to trap them in a vacuum, and cooled to 9 Kelvin (-443.47 degrees Fahrenheit, -264.15 degrees Celsius). To actually see if they made any antihydrogen, they release a small amount and see if there is any annihilation between matter and antimatter.

The next step for the ALPHA collaboration is to conduct experiments on the trapped antimatter atoms, and the team is working on a way to find out what color light the antihydrogen shines when it is hit with microwaves, and seeing how that compares to the colors of hydrogen atoms.

CERN Press release

ALPHA collaboration

Nature article.

Posted on by Jason Rhian

ISS Particle Detector Ready to Unveil Wonders of the Universe

The AMS-02 will be mounted on the outside of the International Space Station's S3 Truss element. Image Credit: NASA

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The Principal Investigator (P.I.) for the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer-2 (AMS-02) experiment, Professor Samuel Ting, says that the experiment is already accruing data as it awaits its February 2011 launch date. Scheduled to fly aboard the final flight of the space shuttle Endeavour, STS-134, AMS-02 will search through cosmic rays for exotic particles, antimatter and dark matter. The experiment will be mounted to the outside of the International Space Station (ISS) and will require no spacewalks to attach.
Continue reading “ISS Particle Detector Ready to Unveil Wonders of the Universe”

Posted on by Tega Jessa

What are the Steps of the Scientific Method

Scientific Methods
Scientific Methods

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The scientific method is the important process by which all scientific knowledge is acquired. It is a tried and tested method that has been refined over the centuries leading to ever greater discoveries and a better understanding of the universe around us.

The scientific method began with the rules of logic established by the Greek philosopher Aristotle. Over time other philosophers and scientists improved on his work refining the process of inquiry and proving of theories and hypotheses. The current version of the method is 6 to 8 steps depending on whether you are looking to explain an observed phenomenon, coming up with new methods, or integrating old information.

The first step is to define the question. You look at the problem you are trying solve or the phenomena you are trying to understand and formulate a question that can get a solution. This step is the most important as asking the right question is more likely to lead you to the right answer.

The next step is to collect data and observe. This is the part where you either study previous bodies of knowledge or observe the phenomena for the first set of clues needed to find the answer to your question. Observation when done properly will draw your attention to information you may miss at the first glance.

The proceeding step is to form a hypothesis. This is your preliminary explanation of the answer to your question. If you are answering the question of whether an atom is divisible you would look at data of previous scientist observe an atom and make an initial hypothesis. You can say that given the data that the unique characteristics of different atoms must mean that atoms are made up of smaller particles that determine its differing properties.

After the hypothesis are experimentation and more data collection. You find a premise or test to prove or disprove your hypothesis. In the case of whether an atom is made up of smaller particles we can use the example of Rutherford Hayes polonium experiment. He used a radioactive material in the form of cathode rays to bombard a material to see if it was altered.

Data Analysis immediately follows your experiment. You look at the data to see if you found new clues. Depending on the data you may find evidence that proves or disproves your hypothesis.

You finally draw a conclusion and see if the data supports your hypothesis or if you need to remodel it. This step often has scientists restarting the process so they can better refine their hypothesis or try a new approach.

The final two steps involve publishing your findings and retesting where other scientists as well as yourself retest and experiment to see if the hypothesis holds up in all cases. Many times this can lead to the discovery of exception on theories and natural laws.

We have written many articles about scientific methods for Universe Today. Here’s a podcast about The Scientific Method, and here are some Science Fair Ideas.

If you’d like more info on the Scientific Methods, check out NASA’s Scientific Method Article. And here’s a link to Problem Solving Using the Scientific Method.

We’ve also recorded an episode of Astronomy Cast all about the Scientific Method. Listen here, Episode 90: The Scientific Method.

Source: How Stuff Works

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Could the World Run on Solar and Wind Power?

More than 3,300 solar panels have been erected on a vacant five acres at NASA's Kennedy Space Center. Credit: NASA/Jim Grossman

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Today, the total oil and natural gas production provides about 60 percent of global energy consumption. This percentage is expected to peak about 10 to 30 years from now, and then be followed by a rapid decline, due to declining oil reserves and, hopefully, sources of renewable energy that technologies that will become more economically viable. But will there be the technology breakthroughs needed to make clean and exhaustible energy cost effective?

Nobel prize winner Walter Kohn, Ph.D., from the University of California Santa Barbara said that the continuous research and development of alternate energy could soon lead to a new era in human history in which two renewable sources — solar and wind — will become Earth’s dominant contributor of energy.

“These trends have created two unprecedented global challenges”, Kohn said, speaking at the American Chemical Society’s national meeting. “One is the threatened global shortage of acceptable energy. The other is the unacceptable, imminent danger of global warming and its consequences.”

The nations of the world need a concerted commitment to a changeover from the current era, dominated by oil plus natural gas, to a future era dominated by solar, wind, and alternative energy sources, Kohn said, and he sees that beginning to happen.

The global photovoltaic energy production increased by a factor of about 90 and wind energy by a factor of about 10 over the last decade. Kohn expects vigorous growth of these two energies to continue during the next decade and beyond, thereby leading to a new era, what he calls the SOL/WIND era, in human history, in which solar and wind energy have become the earth’s dominant alternative energies.

Kohn noted that this challenge require a variety of responses. “The most obvious is continuing scientific and technical progress providing abundant and affordable alternative energies, safe, clean and carbon-free,” he said.

One of the biggest challenges might be leveling off global population, as well as energy consumption levels.

Source: American Chemical Society

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Is Ball Lightning Just a Shared Hallucination?

Is this ball lightning? Maybe you're just seeing things. Image from ThinkQuest.

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For hundreds of years, people have reported seeing ball lighning, a weird phenomenon that resembles glowing, hovering spheres of electricity sometimes witnessed during lightning storms. But scientists have never been able to explain what causes it or even what it really is. Even though some surveys say that 1 in 150 people have seen ball lightening, photographic evidence is basically nonexistent. There are dozens of theories of how ball lightning could form, including the burning of hot silicon particles produced when a lightning strike vaporizes the ground. When people who claim they have seen ball lightining try to explain what they saw, often they are told, “You must be seeing things!”

Perhaps they are.

A pair of physicists from Austria say that the magnetic fields associated with certain types of lightning strikes are powerful enough to create hallucinations of hovering balls of light in nearby observers, and that these visions would be interpreted as ball lightning.

Alexander Kendl and Joseph Peer from the University of Innsbruck analyzed electromagnetic pulses of repetitive lightning discharges and compared them to the magnetic fields used in clinical transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), which is a technique used by neuroscientists to explore the workings of the brain; it is also used for psychiatric treatments. Patients are subjected to a rapidly changing magnetic field that is powerful enough to induce currents in neurons in the brain. Patients will sometimes see hallucinations of luminous shapes in their visual field.

Rare but natural long (1-2 seconds) and repetitive lightning strikes produce electromagnetic pulses similar to what happens during TMS. The researchers calculated the time-varying electromagnetic fields of various types of lightning strikes for observers at various distances from the strike, from 20-100 meters away.
Their results suggest the variable magnetic fields produced by lightning are very similar to TMS, in both magnitude and frequency. Those people undergoing TMS have hallucinations, and see balls of light known as cranial phosphenes.

Kendl and Peer postulated that ball lightning could be hallucinations arising from lightning electromagnetic pulses affecting the brains of close observers.

“As a conservative estimate, roughly 1% of (otherwise unharmed) close lightning experiencers are likely to perceive transcranially induced above-threshold cortical stimuli,” said Peer and Kendl in their paper. They add that these observers need not be outside but could be otherwise safely inside buildings or even sitting in aircraft.

The calculations showed that only lightning strikes consisting of multiple return strokes at the same point over a period of seconds could produce a magnetic field long enough to cause cortical phosphenes. This type would account for around 1-5% of lightning strikes, but very few of these would be seen by an observer 20 to 100 meters away, and of those the researchers estimate seeing the light for seconds would occur only in about one percent of unharmed observers. The observer does not need to be outside, but could be inside an aircraft or building. Kendl and Peer also said an observer would be most likely to classify the experience as ball lightning because of preconceptions.

One of the earliest descriptions of ball lighting comes from way back in 1638 at a church in Widecombe-in-the-Moor, Devon, in England. Four people died and approximately 60 were injured when, during a severe storm, an 8-foot (2.4 m) ball of fire was described as striking and entering the church, nearly destroying it. Large stones from the church walls were hurled into the ground and through large wooden beams. The ball of fire allegedly smashed the pews and many windows, and filled the church with a foul sulfurous odor and dark, thick smoke.

That doesn’t sound like a hallucination, but many question whether the reports are accurate or not. Read some more reports of ball lighting at Wikipedia.

Have you seen ball lightning, or know someone who has?

Read Kendl and Peer’s paper.

Sources: PhysOrg, Technology Review Blog

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Watch History Live from the Large Hadron Collider

Particle Collider
Today, CERN announced that the LHCb experiment had revealed the existence of two new baryon subatomic particles. Credit: CERN/LHC/GridPP

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CERN announced that on March 30 they will attempt to circulate beams in the Large Hadron Collider at 3.5 TeV, the highest energy yet achieved in a particle accelerator. A live webcast will be shown of the event, and will include live footage from the control rooms for the LHC accelerator and all four LHC experiment, as well as a press conference after the first collisions are announced.

“With two beams at 3.5 TeV, we’re on the verge of launching the LHC physics program,” said CERN’s Director for Accelerators and Technology, Steve Myers. “But we’ve still got a lot of work to do before collisions. Just lining the beams up is a challenge in itself: it’s a bit like firing needles across the Atlantic and getting them to collide half way.”

The webcast will be available at a link to be announced, but the tentative schedule of events (subject to change) and more information can be found at this link.

Webcasts will also be available from the control rooms of the four LHC experiments: ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb. The webcasts will be primarily in English.

Between now and 30 March, the LHC team will be working with 3.5 TeV beams to commission the beam control systems and the systems that protect the particle detectors from stray particles. All these systems must be fully commissioned before collisions can begin.

“The LHC is not a turnkey machine,” said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer.“The machine is working well, but we’re still very much in a commissioning phase and we have to recognize that the first attempt to collide is precisely that. It may take hours or even days to get collisions.”

The last time CERN switched on a major new research machine, the Large Electron Positron collider, LEP, in 1989 it took three days from the first attempt to collide to the first recorded collisions.

The current Large Hadron Collider run began on 20 November 2009, with the first circulating beam at 0.45 TeV. Milestones were quick to follow, with twin circulating beams established by 23 November and a world record beam energy of 1.18 TeV being set on 30 November. By the time the LHC switched off for 2009 on 16 December, another record had been set with collisions recorded at 2.36 TeV and significant quantities of data recorded. Over the 2009 part of the run, each of the LHC’s four major experiments, ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb recorded over a million particle collisions, which were distributed smoothly for analysis around the world on the LHC computing grid. The first physics papers were soon to follow. After a short technical stop, beams were again circulating on 28 February 2010, and the first acceleration to 3.5 TeV was on 19 March.

Once 7 TeV collisions have been established, the plan is to run continuously for a period of 18-24 months, with a short technical stop at the end of 2010. This will bring enough data across all the potential discovery areas to firmly establish the LHC as the world’s foremost facility for high-energy particle physics.

Source: CERN

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Dark Matter Detector Heading to the ISS This Summer

AMS-2 during integration activities at CERN facility in Switzerland. Credit: ESA

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The long-awaited experiment that will search for dark matter is getting closer to heading to the International Space Station. The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) is undergoing final testing at ESA’s Test Centre in the Netherlands before being launched on the space shuttle to the ISS, currently scheduled for July, 2010. The AMS will help scientists better understand the fundamental issues on the origin and structure of the Universe by observing dark matter, missing matter and antimatter. As a byproduct, AMS will gather other information from cosmic radiation sources such as stars and galaxies millions of light years from our home galaxy.

ISS officials have been touting that science is now beginning to be done in earnest on the orbiting laboratory. The AMS will be a giant leap in science capability for the ISS. Not only is it the biggest scientific instrument to be installed on the International Space Station (ISS), but also it is the first magnetic spectrometer to be flown in space, and the largest cryogenically cooled superconducting magnet ever used in space. It will be installed on the central truss of the ISS.
Location of where the AMS will be located on the exterior of the ISS. Credits: CERN et Universite de Geneve
AMS had been cut from the ISS program following the 2003 Columbia shuttle accident, but the outcry over the cancellation forced NASA to rethink their decision. Most of AMS’s $1.5-billion costs have been picked up the international partners that NASA wishes to stay on good terms with. 56 institutes from 16 countries have contributed to the AMS project, with Nobel laureate Samuel Ting coordinating the effort.

In an interview with the BBC, Ting said results from AMS may take up to three years to search for antimatter in other galaxies, and dark matter in our own.
The instrument was built at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. The first part of the tests was also conducted at CERN, when the detector was put through its paces using a proton beam from CERN’s Super Proton Synchrotron accelerator to check its momentum resolution and its ability to measure particle curvature and momentum.

AMS’s ability to distinguish electrons from protons was also tested. This is very important for the measurement of cosmic rays, 90% of which are protons and constitute a natural background for other signals that interest scientists. AMS will be looking for an abundance of positrons and electrons from space, one of the possible markers for dark matter.

Once the extensive testing is complete, AMS will leave ESTEC at the end of May on a special US Air Force flight to Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It will be launched to the ISS on the Space Shuttle Endeavour on flight STS-134, now scheduled for July.

Source: ESA

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Glowing Plants Helps Biological Studies on ISS

plants in space
Arabidopsis plants imaged in white light (left) and Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP) excitation illumination, right. The arabidopsis plants are also part of the Plant Habitat-03 experiment. Image provided by Anna-Lisa Paul, Ph.D. and Robert Ferl, Ph.D., Department of Horticultural Sciences, University of Florida.

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Glowing plants from space? Sounds like science fiction or the next B-horror movie. But glowing plants, willow trees, potential biofuels and more are being studied on the International Space Station and are part of key research in biotechnology, physiology, life sciences, and physical sciences going on in space. “This is not your grandfather’s backyard garden,” said Dr. Robert Ferl from the University of Florida, Gainesville.” We are now understanding fundamental biological principals that essentially can only be studied when you leave the surface of the Earth.”

Scientists are abuzz this week with the newly proposed 2011 NASA budget which extends the life of the International Space Station to 2020, and perhaps beyond. “The possibility of an expanded budget for full utilization of the space station means that scientists can do the research and also the technology development that will fulfill the complete potential of ISS,” said Julie Robinson, program scientists for ISS, “and that we will be able to bring back to Earth all the benefits that our new knowledge and technology can provide.”

At a press briefing today at Kennedy Space Center, a group of scientists shared current and future science investigations for the ISS, and the highlight was seeing some plants that actually glow in different colors to give scientists cues to what is taking place within the plant.

Robert Ferl at a press conference at KSC with a device from the APEX-TAGES experiment. Image: Nancy Atkinson

The Advanced Plant EXperiments on Orbit – Transgenic Arabidopsis Gene Expression System (APEX-TAGES) investigation uses Arabidopsis thaliana, or thale cress that has genetically modified so it can glow.

“Plants don’t talk a lot,” said Ferl, “so molecular biologists have been able to equip plants with the tools to have them communicate with us. Plants can glow with certain colors when certain genes are activated, when things happen like changes in their environments.”

APEX-TAGES uses a new real-time imaging system in conjunction with the “glowing” that removes the need for harvesting thereby allowing the plant to continue to grow and making it possible to follow the development of stress in a plant over time. The experiment also doesn’t require a lot of time and interaction from the ISS crew, as digital images can be transmitted from the site of the experiment to the site of the researchers.

Plants get cues from things on Earth, such as light, gravity, humidity. The question is, Ferl said –which applies to all biology — is what happens to terrestrial biology when it is no longer on Earth? Key to the research is understanding the adaptations that have to take place in order for plants in space to continue to grow successfully and produce fruit.

“What are the limts to terrestrial biology? How far can it travel and explore?” said Ferl “50% of plant DNA is like ours, and 80% of plant genes are like ours. So plants can support us with food, air, and water revitalization, but they are interesting because by studying them we learn more about what happens to complex biology as it leaves the surface of the earth.”

Perry Johnson-Green with the Canadian space agency displays the type of Willow trees grown in the ISS. Image: Nancy Atkinson

Also highlighted at the briefing were studies of plant cell metabolism of a potential biofuel plant, Jatropha, and research done on the first trees ever grown on the space station, Canadian Cambium willow trees, that was sponsored by the Canadian Space Agency and performed on orbit by Canadian astronaut Robert Thirsk, who just returned from the ISS in November.

Robinson also discussed an experiment on the ISS that found a better method of producing microencapsulated drugs for cancer and diabetes. A patent was issued at the end of 2009 and clinical trials are now being scheduled.

With $50 million of the proposed budget going directly to ISS, as well as additional funds coming from the NASA’s Science Directorate and technology development, Robinson said that scientists and technology developers will be fully utilizing the ISS as a National Lab in the coming years.

For more info:
The International Space Station Science webpage.

The APEX-TAGES experiment.

Webpage of Dr. Werner Vendrame and his research with the Jatropha plant

Webpage from the Canadian Space Agency on the willow trees grown on the ISS.