Koyal Group Research Information Magazine: Top Discoveries Awaiting NASA's Next Big Telescope

Astronomers eagerly await the launch of the $8 billion James Webb Space Telescope.

It will see back in time farther than any space telescope ever has before—back to the first light following the big bang.

It will watch the first stars and galaxies form.

And it will hunt for distant habitable planets by peering into their atmospheres.

Expectations are high for the science that will come from the $8.7 billion James Webb Space Telescope—the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. The telescope's four main science instruments are now all in one place, as are its 18 mirror sections. When assembled in space, they will create the largest orbiting mirror ever seen.

This long-awaited coming together is taking place in a vast clean room at the Goddard Space Flight Center in suburban Maryland. The last pieces have arrived, and now the two- to three-year task of assembling the telescope has begun.

On Monday, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, Senator Barbara Mikulski, Senior Project Scientist and Nobel laureate John Mather, and the Webb team celebrated this milestone. And, with equal enthusiasm, they anticipated the science that will come in once the Webb telescope is in orbit, about one million miles from Earth.

With a mirror six times larger in area than the Hubble's, the Webb telescope's possibilities are dramatic:

1. The James Webb Space Telescope is designed to see to the time when stars began to form in the universe.

Astronomers put that time at about 300 million years after the big bang, the period when the universe emerged from its dark ages. The Hubble has been able to see back to 800 million years after the big bang, an unprecedented feat but considerably less than the capability of the Webb telescope.

The first stars in the universe are believed to have been 30 to 300 times as massive as our sun and millions of times as bright. They would have burned for only a few million years before dying in tremendous explosions, or supernovae. The Webb will be able to detect the earliest of these explosions.

2. The Webb can peek inside galaxies.

The Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes have already identified many tiny galaxies that were pumping out new stars at a surprising rate more than 13 billion years ago. These galaxies are only one-twentieth the size of the Milky Way, but they probably contain a billion stars crammed together.

The Webb's large mirror is designed to see longer wavelength, invisible-to-the-eye infrared light, which can be used to see farther and to see through thick cosmic dust. This means the telescope will be able to see into the star-creating centers of galaxies as never before.

Webb telescope officials describe their goal as learning about the first galaxies when they were just babies. The Hubble telescope has been looking at toddlers.

3. Scientists now are convinced that each galaxy has, at its center, a supermassive black hole.

The Webb will test why and how these monster black holes came to exist. A favored theory says that the early massive supernovae spewed out chemical elements newly formed in the first stars before they collapsed into black holes or were destroyed.

The newborn black holes are theorized to have then consumed the gas, dust, and stars around them, becoming extremely bright objects called mini-quasars. Mini-quasars are suspected to have grown and then merged to become the huge black holes found in the centers of galaxies.

Understanding the connection between newly formed galaxies and the supermassive black holes at their centers would be an enormous breakthrough in astronomy.

4. The Webb will search for signs of extraterrestrial life.

Using the Webb telescope's spectrograph, scientists will be able to analyze the atmospheres of the billions of exoplanets now understood to orbit stars in the Milky Way. Depending on what chemicals are identified, researchers can come to conclusions about the likelihood of Earth-like conditions. The presence of large amounts of oxygen or ozone in the atmosphere, for instance, would strongly suggest that life was present on the planet.

"We'll be able to do so many things with the Webb that were never possible before," Mather said at the Goddard gathering. "It will revolutionize astronomy and, potentially, our understanding of the universe."

The Webb telescope is scheduled to launch in 2018 from the European Space Agency spaceport in French Guiana, and will settle at a point about four times farther from the Earth than the moon. Fifteen nations have contributed to the effort, and their scientists will be able to observe and discover alongside NASA's scientists.

Koyal Group Research Information Magazine: Learning from biology to create new materials

Researcher studies crystal growth that may lead to biomaterials for both and tooth repair

In nature, some organisms create their own mineralized body parts--such as bone, teeth and shells--from sources they find readily available in their environment. Certain sea creatures, for example, construct their shells from calcium carbonate crystals they build from ions found in the ocean.

"The organism takes brittle carbonate and turns it into a structural shape that protects it from predators, and from being bashed against the rocks," says Lara Estroff, an associate professor of materials science and engineering at Cornell University. "There is much scientific interest in how the organism controls the crystal growth, and what mechanisms are involved in strengthening and toughening the shells, especially in comparison to their components, which are brittle."

Researchers such as Estroff are very interested in synthesizing this kind of biology in the lab, and creating new organic and inorganic materials that mimic the "biomineralization" that occurs in nature, so they can gain a better understanding of how these natural processes work.

"We are trying to learn the techniques from the organisms, and apply them in the laboratory," says the National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded scientist, a synthetic chemist by training. "Part of it is creating simplified systems so that we can tease apart the more complicated mechanisms that are going on in biology. I am not recreating biology in the lab. I am learning from biology to create new materials."

Estroff's primary research focus is to discover the role of gels in crystal formation. Hydrogels, which are gels made in water, similar to Jell-O®, are involved in a number of natural biological systems, including the mother-of-pearl in mollusk shells, tooth enamel in mammals, even otoconia, which are tiny particles found in human ears. These substances are composed of both organic and inorganic materials; often the organic components form a gel. Estroff wants to know their purpose.

"Is there something special about a hydrogel in directing crystal growth?" she asks. "Does it change properties? Is it somehow responsible for giving rise to organic-inorganic composites?"

Understanding and controlling crystal growth is very important in many industrial fields, chief among them the manufacture of pharmaceuticals, since many drugs are in crystalline form, and "it's of vast importance to know how to modulate the solubility of crystals and how they pack into tablets," she says.

There also may be potential applications in producing biomaterials for bone and tooth repair, and in creating more functional inorganic materials, such as substances structured at the nanoscale that could enhance energy storage, for example in batteries. "Being able to manipulate these crystal structures down to the nanoscale opens up a lot of opportunities," she says.

Estroff is conducting her research under an NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award, which she received in 2009. The award supports junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organization. NSF is funding her work with $472,773 over five years.

The project focuses on observations, both in nature and in the laboratory, of macroscopic, single crystals with incorporated polymer fibers and other macromolecules. The project aims to understand the mechanisms by which these polymer networks become incorporated into macroscopic, single crystals.

Her lab, in studying crystal growth mechanisms in gels and their relationship to biomineralization, is trying to answer at least three questions. "First, what is the internal structure of these crystals, and where does the gel material become trapped?" she asks. "Second, can we understand the mechanism of how it is trapped to control how much is trapped? And, third, what effect does this material have on the mechanical properties of the crystals?"

To find the answers, her team developed a synthetic analog to the biological system. Using agarose, a more purified form of the gel agar-agar, they grew their own crystals in the lab, then compared them to crystals grown without gel in an ordinary water-based solution, and later to natural biological crystals.

During the process, they ran a high resolution electron tomography scan of their samples, creating a three-dimensional image of the gel-grown crystal, which "was the first time that people had actually seen how the organic phase can be incorporated in the crystal," she says. "A crystal is an order array of ions, and a polymer is a floppy, poorly-defined blob. How do you accommodate this floppy blob into this ordered array?"

In comparing their synthetic crystals to natural ones, "there were similarities and differences," she says. "We now have the best image of how these objects are incorporated and now can start asking questions about the structure-property relationships, including how this internal structure translates into changes in the mechanical properties. We've been poking at the crystals and looking at the response."

As it turns out, "these organic inclusions mechanically strengthen and toughen the material in both biological crystals and synthetic crystals," she says. "The organic material that is trapped within the crystals makes them stronger and harder--more resistant to fracture--than their geologic counterparts with no organic material."

The researchers' next step is to synthesize other materials. "We'd like to find out if we can grow different types of crystals in different types of gels," she says. "We're now pursuing that route."

As part of the grant's educational component, Estroff teaches a course on biomineralization for both graduate students and undergraduates. "One of my goals is to get them reading primary literature and analyzing it," she says. "They also go out and look for biomineralizing organisms on campus. They go to local streams and bring them back to the lab."

She also is trying to recruit more female students to her department. She is the faculty advisor to a group known as WIMSE, which stands for Women in Materials Science and Engineering, and has organized a mentoring program where freshmen and sophomores are paired with juniors and seniors who, in turn, are paired with graduate students. The enrollment of women in the materials science and engineering major has grown from 10 percent to 30 percent during the last five years.

"Having a group creates a critical mass," she says. "It's really had a positive impact."

--       Marlene Cimons, National Science Foundation

Investigators

Lara Estroff

Related Institutions/Organizations

Cornell University

Related Awards

#0845212 CAREER: Synthesis, Characterization, and Application of Gel-Grown, Polymer-Reinforced Single Crystals

Total Grants

$472,773

Koyal Group Research Information Magazine on Exploration and Discoveries

Discoveries: Art, Science & Exploration from the University of Cambridge Museums, Two Temple Place, London

Can you distil the intellectual life of centuries into an exhibition? If so, Cambridge’s eight major museums are uniquely placed to do so. Each is distinctive, from the Museum of Zoology, home of a Tinamou egg acquired in Uruguay by Charles Darwin (who cracked it by compressing it into too small a box on the Beagle’s return voyage), and the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences, whose founder Reverend Sedgwick bought a rare Jurassic ichthyosaur fossil for £50 in 1835, to high-minded Kettle’s Yard, where collector Jim Ede amassed rigorous modernist abstract sculpture by Gaudier-Brzeska and Henry Moore in a modest domestic interior. But all breathe the spirit of inquiry and freedom of thought associated with the university.

Many of the objects, moreover, lead double lives: as trophy display pieces and as tools for daily teaching and research that altered understanding of the world. The Zoology Museum’s Dodo skeleton found in Mauritius in 1870, for example, prompted awareness that man’s intervention in the ecosystem was responsible for its extinction, while the Fitzwilliam’s unique album of woodblock colour prints by Utamaro, collected and interpreted by Edmond de Goncourt in the 1890s, opens a window on the sophistications of 18th-century Edo.

It is a fascinating endeavour to pull such highlights together and transfer them to William Waldorf Astor’s ornate Gothic mansion in London. The result is a rich, diverse show with a strong historical arc: works recording Cambridge’s long scientific supremacy, such as Giovanni Pittoni’s “An Allegorical Monument to Sir Isaac Newton” and a reproduction of James Watson and Francis Crick’s 1953 skeletal model of DNA, are prominent. But there are also many eclectic pieces that surprise and delight anew in this changed placement: a copper lion, 3,000 years old, found in the Yemeni desert; the only known Sufi wooden and inlay Snakes and Ladders board, brought home by a Victorian soldier in India decades before the game was introduced to Britain.

Koyal Group Research Information Magazine: a focus on discovery

A decadal survey for human scientific exploration of space: a focus on discovery

The role of science in the nation’s human spaceflight program has been controversial since the inception of the Apollo program. That controversy continues to this day. It is the root cause of NASA’s failure to achieve national consensus on defining the first deep space mission objective for human spaceflight, and is an aspect that has most limited the nation’s progress on planning for human exploration of deep space. Despite nearly 50 years of advocacy that the focus of NASA’s human spaceflight program should be to enable scientific discovery, this program remains adrift as a result of a national space policy that fails to head this long-standing advice.

The omnibus spending bill that funds NASA and the rest of the federal government through the remainder of this fiscal year leaves the agency fully on-track to continue development of enabling assets for deep space exploration. However, no progress has been achieved on selection of an initial deep space mission objective since the National Academy of Sciences reported that no consensus exists within the nation’s science community in support of the Obama Administration’s direction to land an astronaut on an asteroid by 2025, as laid out in the 2010 National Space Policy.

Recognizing that this requirement could not be achieved within foreseen cost constraints, NASA proposed, in its 2014 budget request, a novel deviation to the this requirement first described in an obscure unpublished study, in which an asteroid would be transferred into lunar orbit to enable its exploration in not-so-deep space closer to home. The above spending bill appropriates funding to further flesh out this idea. However, the report language makes clear that Congressional support for implementation of this mission has not yet been achieved, and there is no evidence that significant support for it exists within the nation’s science community. If NASA’s “rocket scientists” are so smart, why have they seemingly fumbled the ball on selecting a first deep space mission for the astronauts? The science community of the United States consists primarily of very smart people. Unfortunately, they are held at arm’s length from the mission selection process for human exploration of deep space.

NASA’s Science Mission Directorate (SMD) has had unblemished success in implementing high consensus mission selections for the past 40 years. So why has building a consensus for the first human deep space mission become an intractable problem for NASA? The root cause is the unintended consequence of segregating science and human spaceflight management into separate organizations without specifying which should be supporting the other. NASA’s Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate (HEOMD) and SMD operate independently to such a degree that they have evolved immiscible internal cultures. For example, most Americans would take for granted that a modern effort by their government to explore the unknown would be a program of scientific exploration. History has shown that the alternative—non-scientific exploration—is much less efficient in terms of realized return on investment in the form of discovery. Yet, within the culture of HEOMD, the relationship between an exploration mission and the science motivation for it is ambiguous at best. In the organization of today’s NASA, when astronauts are added to the tool set of a spaceflight mission architecture, the mission becomes magically exempt from the norms of science mission selection that have served the nation well for the past 40 years. What are those norms?

The process of science depends entirely on transparency. Its practitioners are, by nature, driven by curiosity and skepticism. In the culture of the science community, discoveries, conclusions, and results are only accepted if they are achieved by fully transparent means. In the culture of science, the free exchange of ideas and the maintenance of a public arena in which ideas are competed, in a free and open way, are critical enabling aspects of scientific exploration. The culture of science is the culture of SMD, and the mission selection process utilized by SMD respects the above boundary conditions. As a consequence, its missions enjoy broad consensus across the nation’s science community at inception. How do they do it?

Under the direction of Congress, three agencies—NASA, the National Science Foundation, and, more recently, the Department of Energy—jointly fund the National Research Council (an organization of the National Academy of Sciences) to conduct a Decadal Survey of major science research areas, and to report on that community’s prioritized objectives for space science during each decade. SMD respects this prioritization in its allocation of funds and implementation of major projects. For smaller initiatives, such as Explorer-class missions, SMD competitively selects community-proposed missions through a unique solicitation vehicle in which the relative quality of scientific ideas, and their alignment with Decadal Survey priorities, is a selection factor along with the traditional factors of cost and risk.

In astrophysics, this process has been running in its current form since 1970 (with prior evolutions stemming from the 1960s). It has yielded the world’s most productive programs of exploration resulting in discovery, producing much of what we know about the universe and the history and fate of the Earth, resulting in multiple Nobel Prizes. The national consensus behind missions selected via this process results from the high transparency and broad community involvement in each step of it. For example, the set of ideas that were submitted to the most recent astrophysics decadal survey are readily available to anyone and they represent the best ideas that the whole science community can muster. Approximately 3,900 authors representing 3,000 institutions penned more than 300 white papers that the National Academy vetted to set SMD priorities for this decade. Five panels appointed by the National Research Council (NRC), consisting of more than 60 of the Nation’s leading experts on the relevant subject matter, did this vetting.

Congress recently directed the NRC to conduct a smaller-scale study of human space flight objectives. This NRC report is expected later this year. Although this one-time effort is a welcome first step in the right direction, it is not a substitute for the depth of public engagement that is achieved by an ongoing Decadal Survey process. Its impact on the nation’s space policy remains to be seen.

In sharp contrast to the transparency, direct public involvement, and strategic coherence embodied by decadal surveys, the process by which HEOMD’s current selection for its first deep space mission catapulted from a short unpublished study to the central objective of the nation’s human spaceflight program in less than a year’s time is entirely opaque to most stakeholders. Even if the in situ resource utilization goals of the asteroid program could be achieved within practical spending limits, lack of transparency in the process by which it achieved top national priority precludes any hope of building consensus acceptance by the nation’s science community. In this community, it is not enough to get “the right answer” to a problem: one has to show the work to get that answer as well. It must be clear what alternatives were considered, what rationale was employed in the prioritization of them, and the alternatives must be solicited in a free and open process to which anyone can respond with confidence that the playing field is a level one.

It is unlikely that the organizational ambiguity between SMD and HEOMD— the supported-vs.-supporting nature of the relationship between them—will be fixed internally. Although it is clear that humanity’s greatest scientific exploration productivity in space was achieved by the Hubble mission architecture in which SMD was supported by HEOMD (see “A values-based approach toward national space policy”, The Space Review, June 10, 2013), this model has not been embraced by the agency in its planning for HEOMD’s first deep space exploration mission.

The current appropriations bill leaves NASA on track to build the tools for human exploration of deep space. However, building a national consensus on the purpose to which these tools should be put will not be achieved until Congress directs NASA to implement a decadal survey process for prioritization of human exploration mission objectives. The SMD model can be readily and directly applied. Doing so is not rocket science. With near-term Congressional action, implementation of a decadal survey for human spaceflight can be achieved in time to yield a high consensus mission selection by the end of this decade, when the Space Launch System and Crew Exploration Vehicle will be ready. It is time to put the science community into the game to run this ball down the field via a decadal survey process for prioritization of the first and every subsequent human mission of scientific exploration.

Koyal Group Research Information Magazine: Two New Space Discoveries

Two New Space Discoveries Have Rocked the Science World — Each Will Be a Game Changer

The news: Two hot discoveries are rocking the way astronomers, physicists, and space scientists view the universe — and they're truly something.

The first is intense: Scientist John Bradley from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California took a microscopic look at the interplanetary dust particles lurking at the edge of Earth's stratosphere. He found minuscule bits of water hidden in the <25 micrometre flakes of dust, which are already half the width of a single human hair. New Scientist explains:

"The dust is mostly made of silicates, which contains oxygen. As it travels through space, it encounters the solar wind. This stream of charged particles including high-energy hydrogen ions is ejected from the sun's atmosphere. When the two collide, hydrogen and oxygen combine to make water."

Scientists have also previously found carbon and organic compounds in star dust.

According to researcher Hope Ishii, who was involved in the study: "The implications are potentially huge. It is a particularly thrilling possibility that this influx of dust on the surfaces of solar system bodies has acted as a continuous rainfall of little reaction vessels containing both the water and organics needed for the eventual origin of life."

The same dust is expected to be found across other solar systems as well.

In other words, the ingredients for life are likely spread throughout the universe, making it that much more possible humanity is not alone.

And in another stunning discovery: cosmologists from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg might have just viewed dark matter for the first time, as pictured above.

As BBC News explains:

"The cosmic web suggested by the standard model is mainly made up of mysterious 'dark matter.' Invisible in itself, dark matter still exerts gravitational forces on visible light and ordinary matter nearby.

"...  Cosmology theory predicts that galaxies are embedded in a cosmic web of "stuff", most of which is dark matter. Astronomers obtained the first direct images of a part of this network, by exploiting the fact that a luminous object called a quasar can act as a natural "cosmic flashlight."

Why is this so important? Their research adds significant credence to the standard model of cosmology, which predicts that as the universe expands and grows, it forms clusters and nodes under the influence of gravity, like a gigantic universe-spanning web. Invisible dark matter still forces gravitational influence on visible light and normal matter nearby.

According to the scientists, glowing hydrogen lit up by the quasar being studied traced out an "underlying filament" of dark matter attracted to it by gravity.

"We now have very precise measurements of the amount of ordinary matter and dark matter in the Universe," said Prof. Alexandre Refregier of the ETH Zurich, who did not contribute to the study.

"We can only observe a fraction of the ordinary matter, so the question is what form the remainder takes. These results may imply that a lot of it is in the form detected here."

Hell yeah, Science. Illuminating the universe since 1500 B.C.

If you were ever worried that you won't live to see the really cool stuff science discovers, rest easy. It's happening around you every day.