Daily Archives: March 26, 2009

politics, politics and science

Redoubtable Volcano

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Monitoring the Eruption from Space and the Ground

The ash cloud from Redoubt Volcano as seen from MTSAT. (Click to embiggen.)
The ash cloud from Redoubt Volcano as seen from MTSAT. (Click to embiggen.)

Well, it sure is a good thing that we monitor volcanoes, isn’t it?  Redoubt volcano in Alaska just continues to send ash into the air, and is triggering floods and ash flows downslope.  Luckily, since there was ample warning from the monitoring network, the folks in the region had a chance to prepare.  But, even with preparation, the damage done by ashfall is pretty bad.

Monitoring stations on the ground and in space are showing pretty clear images of just how impressive this ash-eruption is. This view from space shows us that volcanoes are easily visible from space.  Heck, we’ve seen volcanoes on Io using spacecraft, so why not eruptions on our own planet? Seems like a perfectly good expenditure, particularly considering that it saves lives and teaches us more about our own planet.  This is particularly true of the Alaskan volcanoes, which are all located along a curved line called the Aleutian Arc, which is part of the Pacific Ring of Fire active region. These volcanoes are fired up in large part because there are active deep-ocean trenches and volcanic belts associated with plate movements.

Ash fall at Homestead Lodge, 35 miles from Redoubt Volcano in Alaska. Knowing this eruption was going to happen likely helped the people who live near here prepare for the worst. Credit: James Isaak. (Click to embiggen.)
Ash fall at Homestead Lodge, 35 miles from Redoubt Volcano in Alaska. Knowing this eruption was going to happen likely helped the people who live near here prepare for the worst. Credit: James Isaak. (Click to embiggen.)

The action heats up Earth’s crust in these regions; the heat has to go somewhere, and so it melts rock and powers the volcanoes. If you look at a map of the Ring of Fire, you’ll see that it extends all the way down the coasts of North and South America, as well as along the eastern part of the Pacific Rim.  And, there are lots of volcanoes along that arc — some active today, some quiescent but potentially dangerous in the future.

These regions also happen to be extremely well-populated. Some of Earth’s largest cities, richest fishing areas, and agricultural regions are also along the ring.

So, knowing the signs of incipient volcanic eruptions and the damage they can do is pretty important to a lot of people. Their lives — and ours, if we depend on their agriculture and fisheries — depend on being able to avoid and survive volcanic eruptions like the one we’re seeing happen at Redoubt now.

Redoubt Volcano on March 26, 2009. (Click to embiggen.)
Redoubt Volcano on March 26, 2009. (Click to embiggen.)

The views of Redoubt (aka “Jindal’s Bane”) from the ground continue to flow in from a Hut web cam that is running pretty much on battery power. Seismic monitors are giving a constant flow of data about ground movements, and I read earlier today that pilots were reporting visual confirmation of the ash cloud towering some 65,000 feet (that’s almost 20 kilometers) above sea level.

Today the volcano had one large eruption at 9:24 a.m. Alaska time. Volcanic tremors are increasing, which means there is movement of something below the surface. How it will all play out is anybody’s guess at this point.

If you’d like to continue getting news about Redoubt and other Alaskan volcanoes, check out the Alaska Volcano Observatory pages. You’ll find updates and a pretty amazing (and ever-growing) gallery of images.  This is science news we can use and appreciate!

astronomy

HST’s Next

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The Final Servicing Mission for a Venerable Telescope

The Hubble Space Telescope
HST during a 2002 refurbishing mission.

The folks down at the Kennedy Space Center are getting ready to move space shuttle Atlantis out to the pad, in preparation for the May 12 mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope. The crew includes two astronauts who have visited HST before: John Grunsfeld (who has visited HST twice) and Mike Massimino (who is making his second trip to the telescope). They’ll be replacing and repairing faulty components in HST and putting in new science instruments.

The first is the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) (designed by folks in the Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy (CASA) at the University of Colorado (my alma mater for both my degrees) and Ball Aerospace), which will be focusing on light streaming from extremely distant quasars (for example) and studying that light to understand the gases that lie between us and those quasars. It reminds me of egg-candling — a process that I learned as a kid on my grandparents’ farm. You hold up an egg to a light (a candle) and the light streaming through the shell (which is fairly porous to light) highlights what’s inside. We did this to check to see if an egg had been fertilized and had a chick growing inside it. In the case of COS, it will take the light flowing through the gas clouds and dissect it into its component wavelengths. The “fingerprints” of various elements show up when you do that, and the presence of those elements (like hydrogen, oxygen, etc.) tell you something about the cloud. And its history.

The second new instrument to go into HST is the new Wide Field Camera 3 (designed and built at Goddard Space Flight Center and Ball Aerospace. It’s going to be the telescope’s imaging workhorse — and it’s sensitive to some ultraviolet and infrared wavelengths, as well as optical light.  The WFC3 and the Advanced Camera for Surveys, which is a strong optical workhorse in its own right, will work together.  Along with the repaired STIS and the rest of HST’s science complement, the observatory should be ready to go for a number of years, observing the cosmos from above the atmosphere.

It’s kind of a shock to me that the telescope has been on orbit since 1990 — nearly 20 years now.  The day it was launched, I was back in school at CU, studying astronomy and physics and thinking that I’d head into grad school for the Fudd someday. I had been working at CU’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics on comet plasma tail studies and my boss was one of the two principal investigators for HST’s Goddard High Resolution Spectrograph. Eventually I ended up working on that team during grad school.  And, I ended up writing a book with him about the science HST was doing — a project I hatched as a graduate assignment during the dark days when HST’s spherical aberration was giving NASA a black eye.

Behind all the nasty media coverage, a handful of us knew that the telescope was still capable of doing science (albeit with some help) and that’s when I decided I wanted to bring THAT story to life –to counteract all the cutesy, nasty headlines that the media were using in place of actually delving into the truth about HST’s capabilities (even though they were degraded, we could still do work with the telescope). All the astronomy and astrophysics I was studying TOLD me what the scope COULD do, and that data could still be taken with it.  All of my journalistic and writing instincts TOLD me that there was more to the HST story than “Hubble trouble” stories.  And, here we are, nearly two decades and several servicing missions later, about to endow HST with new eyes.  It’s a heckuva story — and I’m pleased to see that it’s going to continue!