Category Archives: Hubble Space Telecope

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It Was 21 Years Ago…

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That Hubble Went out to Play

To celebrate the 21st anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope's deployment into space, astronomers at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md., pointed Hubble's eye at an especially photogenic pair of interacting galaxies called Arp 273. This image is a composite of Hubble Wide Field Camera 3 data taken on December 17, 2010, with three separate filters that allow a broad range of wavelengths covering the ultraviolet, blue, and red portions of the spectrum. Hubble was launched April 24, 1990, aboard Discovery's STS-31 mission. Click to enlarge (and you WANT to see this one bigger).

And what a time it’s been!  As you can see by this image, the most famous of the Great Observatories is still crankin’ out some stunning visions of the cosmos.  Take this image, for example. It’s a pair of interacting galaxies, slightly farther along in their gravitational dance than the two I wrote about in my last entry. They are an interesting looking grouping called Arp 273.

The larger of the spiral galaxies in the group, known as UGC 1810, has a disk that is distorted into a rose-like shape by the gravitational tidal pull of the companion galaxy below it, known as UGC 1813. Not only are these two cosmic behemoths changing each other’s shapes, but in the process, they’re spurring huge swaths of star-forming factories in the process. Those are the blublogs at the top of UGC 1810, and the bluish clouds of light at the tip of the lower galaxy.  The image (embiggenate to see it better) shows a tenuous tidal bridge of material between the two galaxies that are separated by tens of thousands of light-years from each other.

Even more unusual are the off-center spiral patterns of each galaxy.  Even if you didn’t know anything else about these galaxies, just one look at the off-kilter spirals would tell you that something has happened. In this case, one galaxy has dived through the center of the other. The smaller one probably sliced right through its larger companion above it in this image.

Notice how the spiral arms of UGC 1810 (the upper one) are warped off-kilter with respect to each other.  The inner set is offset out of the plane of the galaxy.  This must have been a titanic interaction!

As if this wasn’t weird enough, there’s also a possible mini-spiral in the upper right arms of UGC 1810.

Astronomers have seen many interacting galaxies — enough to be able to understand something of how and why they form. In this case, the larger galaxy of the pair is about five times more massive than its smaller companion.   In unequal pairs such as this, the relatively rapid passage of a companion galaxy produces the lopsided or asymmetric structure in the main spiral. Also in such encounters, the starburst activity typically begins in the minor galaxy earlier than it does in the major galaxie. These effects could be due to the fact that the smaller galaxies have consumed less of the gas present in their nucleus — and that gas is what you need for stars to form. The gravitational shock waves spur “bursts” of star formation as the gas is compressed and heated during the interaction.

Arp 273 lies in the constellation Andromeda and is roughly 300 million light-years away from Earth. This image is just one of a stream of cosmic visions sent back by Hubble during its 21 years on orbit.  Currently, the telescope is in great shape and should continue its work for some time to come.

Hubble Space Telecope, legal decision

How to Use Hubble Space Telescope

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Schoolin’ Scalia

This past week the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a ruling that allows the government to nose farther into the private backgrounds of people who want to work for NASA. Mind you, this isn’t the nosing that people with security clearances need to endure. That’s an entirely different set of investigations for people with a Need to Know certain things.

No, this one applies just to scientists and other technical folk who work at NASA, specifically JPL. I don’t have the legal background to comment on ALL the merits of the case and this entry is not about those merits, although it does seem troubling that you must give up privacy rights to be a scientist (according to a read of the decision, which you can see here, if you wish: http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/10pdf/09-530.pdf). I did study law for a couple of semesters when I was in grad school, and part of that was an examination of such issues as right to privacy (particularly as it pertains to media), so I do know that privacy is not precisely enshrined in the Constitution of the United States, as such. So, there’s a little ambiguity there. And, the exploitation of that hole in our rights could result in some chilling practices.

What caught my eye in the decision is on page 31, wherein Justice Scalia (writing notes concurring in judgment) notes “Respondents do not even attempt to argue that the claim at issue in this case passes that test, perhaps recognizing the farcical nature of a contention that a right deeply rooted in our history and tradition bars the Government from ensuring that the Hubble Telescope is not used by recovering drug addicts.”

And this gave me pause for thought. The first thing that entered my mind is what’s the issue with a recovering drug addict? If they’re recovering, that means they’re not using drugs anymore. And if they’re not using drugs and are a good scientist, the drugs are in the past and the brilliant science part is NOW.  Does the Justice (in his mean-spirited-looking way) mean to imply that people lose their right to a job or privacy or a chance because they’re recovering from a drug dependency?  If so, and using the logic implied in the Justice’s sarcastic flippancy, can we please also see the drug dependency backgrounds of ALL federal employees, including the Justices and their clerks?  I mean, fair’s fair. If this is what the Justice is hinting at, then we wouldn’t want a recovering drug addict (including alcoholics) to be writing legal opinions or affecting the monetary policy of this country, for example.  And, by drugs and drug addicts to which the Justice infers, then I would infer we should include alcohol and other addictive substances and activities, since, by implication, those are also bad, right?

And, this brings up other questions, like what drugs is Mr. Justice Scalia thinking of? I mean, what if you ARE a recovering alcoholic? Or used to be addicted to sleeping pills? Or uppers?  Are those socially more acceptable to the Justice than some drug like meth that a person may be recovering from? How long before the Justice decides that the government needs to know who you sleep with before you can be allowed to work at JPL? Or what religion you belong to? Or who you associate with socially? Shades of McCarthyism here, and apparently Mr. Justice Scalia doesn’t recognize the camel’s nose sneaking inside the tent.

The other big question that popped into my mind is this: since when did ignorant sarcasm become a staple in Supreme Court decisions? Mr. Justice Scalia employs it  in an effort to get a point across, and fails because he uses an example he clearly hasn’t researched. Which looks somewhat unprofessional in someone who was touted by his appointing president as a “fine legal mind”.

It’s pretty clear that the Justice doesn’t know how HST gets used or what the process is for using it. Given his “fine legal mind,” I’m quite surprised that neither he nor his clerks bothered to look up the process (or heck, call STScI in Baltimore, and ask what the process is for getting to use HST) before throwing out a sarcastic comment in an otherwise staid-looking opinion. I’m no fan of Justice Scalia, but even if I was, I’d be raising my eyebrows at an opinion comment that is so clearly ignorant. You’d think “fine legal minds” would be sticklers for accuracy, particularly in cases where people’s rights and dignity are at stake. But, I’m guessing that he used sarcasm because he didn’t have anything else to fall back on (like knowledge).  I don’t know about you, but if the Supreme Court justices in this country are going to rule on things like this, it behooves them to at least find out what’s involved in science before commenting scathingly about it. Otherwise, to use a word that Mr. Justice Scalia loves to use, the SC Justices show an absurdly low level of knowledge of professions outside of their own.

So, Mr. Justice Scalia, since you’re clearly not in the know about how science gets done (particularly with HST)  this one’s for you. May you and your low-level clerks get it right the next time before you spout off using ignorant sarcasm in a judgment.

How Astronomers Get to Use HST

If you’re an astronomer with an idea about a cosmic object to study, first of all, you’re probably part of a big team of astronomers.  You’ve probably studied for years to get to the point where you can even think about putting in a proposal. Or, you may be a graduate student who has spent more hours in front of a computer analyzing data than you care to think about, and using that experience to move up to the next step in research (usually with permission and guidance from your much older advisor).  You’re not usually a drug abuser because you wouldn’t have gotten to where you are if you were.  You’re also not a lone wolf strolling up to the control center and ‘jacking the scope when nobody’s looking.

No, you are a professional researcher and you have to put in a proposal, outlining the scientific justification for using the Hubble Space Telescope. Generally, you are writing it up with the members of your team. You have to be precise and persuasive about just why — scientifically — you should have your object looked at with HST.

That proposal goes through a LOT of review before it gets sent to a time allocation committee that reviews the merits of the work and decides whether or not to allow use of the telescope.

Once a proposal is accepted for time on HST, it goes into a pipeline of activity that includes dozens of people who work on scheduling the time and getting the observation programmed into the telescope’s computer systems. (I’m paraphrasing here — there’s a lot of technical work that has to be done to get a winning proposal into the pipeline, more details than I have room to go into here — but you can find out by simply asking somebody at STScI or one of the science teams about it — it’s not a secret, so far as I know.)   No ONE person gets to run the telescope. It is done as part of a team of scientists who then rely on a team of controllers and technical staff to get the observation done for them. Just like any other NASA mission, like most other science projects.  It’s just NOT like a Supreme Court justice (who should be dealing in facts as they relate to law) imagines.

How do I know this? Back when I was in graduate school, one of my jobs was to work on team requests to use the telescope.  At no point did anybody’s personal life come into play. It just wasn’t relevant to the SCIENCE being done.  If anybody was a recovering drug addict — an irrelevant personal problem and we didn’t ask a scientist wanting time “Hey did you used to use drugs?” as a prerequisite to be answered before we could talk science — we didn’t know it.   Nor did we care who they were sleeping with. Or what church they went to.  In a team situation, we were focused on the science to be done. That’s what we were paid to do —  not sniff into people’s personal lives.  I also know about how it works because (with co-author Jack Brandt) I wrote a book about HST science and how it gets done. That means I asked questions about how it gets done — something Mr. Justice Scalia (or his minions) could also have done.

So, if you’re had the same idea Mr. Justice Scalia did and think that anybody can just walk up and use the HST, I hope I’ve shown you that it doesn’t work that way.  Teams of human beings work together to program HST and bring back the amazing data and images each day.  I’m glad it works this way: I just wish Mr. Justice Scalia had bothered to ask before employing the witlessness of sarcasm in his concurring opinion.  It leaves me questioning his “fine legal mind” even more. If he doesn’t bother to get THIS right, what else isn’t he getting right?  And I’d ask that question of anybody of any political persuasion who showed so little regard for getting the facts straight about how science works. Double that for anybody in a science job who did NO research and made witless comments based on what they “thought” it might be. Science has no place for such ignorance. I used to think law didn’t either… but now I wonder.