NASA Pursues Mars Methane Orbiter

Via The Great Beyond: NASA pursues Mars methane orbiter.

When Michael Mumma, of Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, finally published his methane-on-Mars results in Science, it certainly caused a stir. So far, the people tasked with picking a spot for the Mars Science Laboratory rover have resisted the allure of a landing site that sits within a broad methane hotspot, arguing that the hotspots are still too uncertain. Well, NASA is going to get to work on that uncertainty: it announced today that it is considering a "Mars Science Orbiter" (MSO) mission in 2016 that would specifically look to see when and where Mars is belching up the natural gas. (Methane can be produced via natural geologic processes but could also point towards hives of microbes living and burping underground.)

NASA Mars Program Chief Doug McCuistion described what the agency calls its "baseline" plan at the Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group meeting in Virginia on Tuesday, a chance for the science community to offer feedback on these long-term plans, which are often very tentative -- and very fluid. The plan would include an MSO in 2016 followed by a exobiology lander or rover mission launched during a particularly juicy launch window in 2018 (the best since the Spirit and Opportunity rovers, McCuistion says). That plan would satisfy two longstanding NASA program requirements: keeping continuous communications orbiters in place for lander missions (Odyssey and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter will be getting old), and continuous practice with the tricky task of landing spacecraft on the surface (gotta keep those engineers employed). The plan would also follow a natural progression: MSO would map the methane

Gravity Anomalies Mapped By Satellite

Allegedly these are useful in the search for oil and gas. Don't ask me how.

Technical University of Denmark: Global Gravity Field Model.

The global gravity field model shows the gravity variations over the global ocean as mapped by satellite. On land the field have been augmented with the best available terrestial gravity field com complete global coverage. Gravity changes are mainly caused by the changes in the attraction of mass under the surface.

What changes in the attraction of mass are occuring under the surface?

Galaxies Defy Gravitation and Big Bang

A new Hubble Space Telescope image shows three galaxies defying the myth of gravitation and the Big Bang myth: Stars forced to relocate near the Southern Fish.

The three pictured galaxies — NGC 7173 (middle left), NCG 7174 (middle right) and NGC 7176 (lower right) — are part of the Hickson Compact Group 90, named after astronomer Paul Hickson, who first catalogued these small clusters of galaxies in the 1980s.

Let's take each myth separately.

The Gravitation Myth

First the occult 17th century myth known as gravitation.

Quoting from Newton's Principia, General Scholium, Book III:

"...lest the systems of the fixed stars should, by their gravity, fall on each other, he [God] hath placed those systems at immense distances from one another." -- Isaac Newton, mathematician, 1687

According to Newton's so-called "theory" of universal gravitation the stars are immobile and "fixed" and God has placed them at distances such that gravitation has no effect on them.

In actual physical reality however, the stars are in motion and God has not placed the galaxies at immense distances from eachother thus falsifying Newton's so-called "theory."

When assessing the sanity of contemporary scientists, keep in mind that as recently as 2005, the religious fundamentalist and occult alchemist was voted the "world's greatest scientist."

The Big Bang Myth

If the universe is expanding, how is it possible for galaxies to collide?

And if gravitation is strong enough to counteract the inertia from the Big Bang, how can the universe be expanding?

Hubble To Point At Arp 274

Arp 274 won the Hubble Site vote and no doubt my vote was the decisive one...:P

67,021 votes vs. second place which was only 11,451 votes.

I think this vote pretty much sums up where the public is on the Arp redshift controversy.

Now, let's get to the facts.

This is yet another system where the redshifts of the objects show them to be at drastically different distances, but they are in obvious contact.

Redshift velocities for the three components are - A 7483 km/sec, B 8654 km/sec and C 7618 km/sec.

Arp 274

By conventional theory A and C are fairly close, but B should be a background object, anywhere from 17 to 23 Mpc in the background. This is the distance from us to the main Virgo cluster, so how is there interaction?

Methane On Pluto

There must be a lot of cows, cyanobacteria, and dinosaurs living on Pluto to produce all this biogenic fossil fuel: The lower atmosphere of Pluto revealed.

Using ESO's Very Large Telescope, astronomers have gained valuable new insights about the atmosphere of the dwarf planet Pluto. The scientists found unexpectedly large amounts of methane in the atmosphere, and also discovered that the atmosphere is hotter than the surface by about 40 degrees, although it still only reaches a frigid minus 180 degrees Celsius. These properties of Pluto's atmosphere may be due to the presence of pure methane patches or of a methane-rich layer covering the dwarf planet's surface.

"With lots of methane in the atmosphere, it becomes clear why Pluto's atmosphere is so warm," says Emmanuel Lellouch, lead author of the paper reporting the results.

Biogenic C13 Cult Shot Down Yet Again

Another article reiterating that C13 isotope depletion is not a biomarker: Controversy Over World’s Oldest Traces Of Life.

Research carried out in 1996 argued that a five metre wide outcrop of rock on the island contained graphite with depleted levels of 13C. Carbon isotopes are frequently used to search for evidence of early life, because the lightest form of carbon, 12C (atomic weight 12), is preferred in biological processes as it requires less energy to be used by organisms. This results in heavier forms, such as 13C, being less concentrated, which might account for the depleted levels found in the rocks at Akilia. ...

The new research, led by Martin J. Whitehouse at the Swedish Museum of Natural History and Nordic Center for Earth Evolution, casts doubt on this interpretation. The researchers present new evidence demonstrating that the cross-cutting relationships are instead caused by tectonic activity, and represent a deformed fault or unconformity. If so, the age of the intrusive rock is irrelevant to the dating of the graphite, and it could well be older. Because of this, the scientists turned their attention to dating the graphite-containing rocks themselves, and found no evidence that they are any older than c. 3.67 billion years.

"The rocks of Akilia provide no evidence that life existed at or before c. 3.82 Ga, or indeed before 3.67 Ga," they conclude.

The age of the Earth itself is around 4.5 billion years. If life complex enough to have the ability to fractionate carbon were to exist at 3.8 billion years, this would suggest life originated even earlier. The Hadean eon, 3.8 – 4.5 billion years ago, is thought to have been an environment extremely hostile to life. In addition to surviving this period, such early life would have had to contend with the ‘Late Heavy Bombardment’ between 3.8 and 4.1 billion years ago, when a large number of impact craters on the Moon suggest that both the Earth and the Moon underwent significant bombardment, probably by collision with asteroids.

The Importance of Stupidity in Scientific Research

Martin A. Schwartz: The importance of stupidity in scientific research.

I recently saw an old friend for the first time in many years. We had been Ph.D. students at the same time, both studying science, although in different areas. She later dropped out of graduate school, went to Harvard Law School and is now a senior lawyer for a major environmental organization. At some point, the conversation turned to why she had left graduate school. To my utter astonishment, she said it was because it made her feel stupid. After a couple of years of feeling stupid every day, she was ready to do something else.

I had thought of her as one of the brightest people I knew and her subsequent career supports that view. What she said bothered me. I kept thinking about it; sometime the next day, it hit me. Science makes me feel stupid too. It's just that I've gotten used to it. So used to it, in fact, that I actively seek out new opportunities to feel stupid. I wouldn't know what to do without that feeling. I even think it's supposed to be this way. Let me explain.

For almost all of us, one of the reasons that we liked science in high school and college is that we were good at it. That can't be the only reason – fascination with understanding the physical world and an emotional need to discover new things has to enter into it too. But high-school and college science means taking courses, and doing well in courses means getting the right answers on tests. If you know those answers, you do well and get to feel smart.

A Ph.D., in which you have to do a research project, is a whole different thing. For me, it was a daunting task. How could I possibly frame the questions that would lead to significant discoveries; design and interpret an experiment so that the conclusions were absolutely convincing; foresee difficulties and see ways around them, or, failing that, solve them when they occurred? My Ph.D. project was somewhat interdisciplinary and, for a while, whenever I ran into a problem, I pestered the faculty in my department who were experts in the various disciplines that I needed. I remember the day when Henry Taube (who won the Nobel Prize two years later) told me he didn't know how to solve the problem I was having in his area. I was a third-year graduate student and I figured that Taube knew about 1000 times more than I did (conservative estimate). If he didn't have the answer, nobody did.

That's when it hit me: nobody did. That's why it was a research problem. And being my research problem, it was up to me to solve. Once I faced that fact, I solved the problem in a couple of days. (It wasn't really very hard; I just had to try a few things.) The crucial lesson was that the scope of things I didn't know wasn't merely vast; it was, for all practical purposes, infinite. That realization, instead of being discouraging, was liberating. If our ignorance is infinite, the only possible course of action is to muddle through as best we can.

I'd like to suggest that our Ph.D. programs often do students a disservice in two ways. First, I don't think students are made to understand how hard it is to do research. And how very, very hard it is to do important research. It's a lot harder than taking even very demanding courses. What makes it difficult is that research is immersion in the unknown. We just don't know what we're doing. We can't be sure whether we're asking the right question or doing the right experiment until we get the answer or the result. Admittedly, science is made harder by competition for grants and space in top journals. But apart from all of that, doing significant research is intrinsically hard and changing departmental, institutional or national policies will not succeed in lessening its intrinsic difficulty.

Second, we don't do a good enough job of teaching our students how to be productively stupid – that is, if we don't feel stupid it means we're not really trying. I'm not talking about `relative stupidity', in which the other students in the class actually read the material, think about it and ace the exam, whereas you don't. I'm also not talking about bright people who might be working in areas that don't match their talents. Science involves confronting our `absolute stupidity'. That kind of stupidity is an existential fact, inherent in our efforts to push our way into the unknown. Preliminary and thesis exams have the right idea when the faculty committee pushes until the student starts getting the answers wrong or gives up and says, `I don't know'. The point of the exam isn't to see if the student gets all the answers right. If they do, it's the faculty who failed the exam. The point is to identify the student's weaknesses, partly to see where they need to invest some effort and partly to see whether the student's knowledge fails at a sufficiently high level that they are ready to take on a research project.

Productive stupidity means being ignorant by choice. Focusing on important questions puts us in the awkward position of being ignorant. One of the beautiful things about science is that it allows us to bumble along, getting it wrong time after time, and feel perfectly fine as long as we learn something each time. No doubt, this can be difficult for students who are accustomed to getting the answers right. No doubt, reasonable levels of confidence and emotional resilience help, but I think scientific education might do more to ease what is a very big transition: from learning what other people once discovered to making your own discoveries. The more comfortable we become with being stupid, the deeper we will wade into the unknown and the more likely we are to make big discoveries.