Kepler!

The Kepler Mission is one of the little NASA spacecraft that so frequently comes along, exceeds all expectations and changes our perspective of the universe.

There is a good Quick History of the transit method and Kepler Mission concept on the website.

Otto Struve noted in his seminal 1952 note that planetary “eclipses” of their parent stars ought to be detectable by photoelectric methods, a proposal that some two decades later was quantified by Rosenblatt, and then explored in detail (including development research) by Borucki and collaborators at NASA Ames.

A space based transit mission was first proposed more than 20 years ago, and was highly rated, IF the detector technology could get to the point where very low transit amplitudes could be measured and small radii planets detected. The review also noted that there would be significant secondary astrophysical science accomplished by any such mission.

A decade later, Kepler was finally selected, the fourth time it was proposed to the Discover class medium size NASA mission. By that point the detector technology was mature, a testbed demonstrator had been built, and the concept of transit observations of exoplanets had been demonstrated both from the ground, and from space, using the Hubble Space Telescope. The latter demonstrated that very high precision relative photometry was in fact achievable from space.

Kepler launched in March 2009, just over 4 years ago.
It had a nominal mission life of three years, and a main mission goal to find earth size planets in the habitable zone of solar like stars.

After the nominal mission, Kepler was given a three year mission extension to 2016, to continue the continuous monitoring of the 150,000 or so stars in the Kepler field.

Kepler Field

Kepler has discovered almost 3,000 planetary candidates, of which about 100 have been confirmed through a variety of techniques, and, statistically, most of the rest are likely to be real planets.

Kepler has not quite found earth like planets in the habitable zone, yet.
It is heartbreakingly close to doing so.
More time for observations is needed, primarily because the stars being observed are a little bit noisier than expected. The periodic signal from the planetary transits can be dug out of the noise, but more observations of repeated transits are needed to get the signals out as you approach the limit of detectability.
Six years of observations ought to get Kepler to its goal of detecting earth size planets orbiting stars similar to the Sun at a distance where liquid water can persist on the planet’s surface.

To operate, Kepler’s orientation has to be held very stably to view the stars it is looking at. To do that it uses reaction wheels:

Kepler Reaction Wheel

Kepler needs three reaction wheels to stay on target.
Any less and the spacecraft drifts, losing lock on the stars.
It has thrusters but cannot use those to stay on target for any length of time before they run out fuel.
Kepler carries 4 reaction wheels. They are heavy and expensive.
That is one spare.

One reaction wheel, wheel #2, failed in 2012.
A second reaction wheel started to show symptoms of degradation a few months ago. Twice in the last few weeks the spacecraft has safed, gone to a rest pointing, while the reaction wheels were despun with the thrusters, and diagnosis tests runs.
Reaction wheels are moving parts, they wear and tear, and have finite life expectancies.
Since the reaction wheels are all the same, they are vulnerable to common mode failure.

Then, last night Kepler went into a safe mode, again.
Switching back to reaction wheel mode the diagnosis showed reaction wheel #4 had seized.

That is the end of Kepler’s primary science mission.
The data is in the archives available for analysis. There will be no more.
It is just short of finding the other Earth.
So very very close..

Kepler can do some stuff with only three reaction wheels, basically driftscan observing. It is a wide band wide field optical telescope with a 1 m mirror.
Whether it is worth doing so to keep the spacecraft going will be an interesting decision.

If you are an active researcher, a student planning on getting into astrobiology, or an interested member of the community, this is your chance to provide input on the direction of research.
This is your future.
Be there, or we will choose for you.

The NASA Astrobiology Roadmap exercise is under way, and will continue over the next two weeks.

NASA Astrobiology

The next two topics will kick off with webinars on Monday 13th of May.

Prebiotic Evolution – 1-2 pm EST

Evolution of Advanced Life – 3-4 pm EST

The webinars are run as free flow discussions with people calling in for comments and questions. A panel of researchers provides points for discussion and keeps the conversation going.

After the webinars, the panel curates a one week open online discussion for people to provide input, suggestions and questions.
The format will be similar to that for Solar System Exploration.

The Roadmap input period culminates the week of May 20th with sessions on Early Evolution of Life and the Biosphere and Planetary Conditions for Life.

NASA’s Astrophysics is doing a Roadmap exercise, with the stated intent to look at science goals, technology and capabilities up to 30 years out!

White papers were solicited a few weeks ago, and about 100 were received and are archived online, about 3/4 on science and 1/4 on technology.

There was originally supposed to be a workshop for presentation of selected white papers, but in the world of sequestration that was not feasible, so instead there was a two day online townhall meeting, run over Adobe Connect

Much of my time this week was spent keeping half an ear on the roadmap presentations, for a while in parallel with trying to follow the concurrent first part of the Astrobiology Roadmap web chat!

There were typically just under a 100 participants online at any given time, many of which were the Roadmap Team Members

Several things struck me about the presentations: one is that the technology talks were incredibly interesting, and suggested not only that we are about to get lets of fun new toys, but that for many areas of astrophysics we are approaching perfect detectors – a phrase I first heard quoted about modern radio receivers.

Our detector technology is asymptoting to reaching quantum limits in efficiency across all wavebands and modes of detection.
Further, as with the Planck mission, for some observations we are approaching the point where we will observe all there is to detect – improved equipment will not give more or better signal.

What struck me about the science presentations, is that they tended to be narrow, focused on narrow science goals in small subfields, and they were all about old stuff – stuff we’ve been thinking about or trying to do for at least a decade, for the most part.

I also did not see the word “exoplanet” in any of the presentation titles. Of the white papers selected for online presentation, that is.
Maybe we’re about to get a new division in NASA’s Science Mission Directorate?

But that is details, the real question is what DO we want to be doing 30 years from now, and in the time leading up to then?

Well, everything!

Seriously, we ought to be monitoring the whole sky at all wavelengths, synoptically, as a matter of routine, thirty years from now.
We know we can have the technological capabilities, we know how it could be done, and the cost is finite.
The cost is actually trivially small on the scale of the world economies over that same time.

I don’t think we are really arguing over that, the discussion is really about priorities, what to start first, what order to do things in, and how quickly to proceed.
This is important mostly because with current funding constraints we can’t move ahead on all fronts, so some fields will be left for later. Which means firing a lot of the current researchers and giving up existing capabilities, on our way to the bright and glorious future.
Bummer.

Beyond that, one can argue about when enough is enough – like will the cosmic microwave background measurements be done after the next round? Synoptic surveys are unlikely to be productive for the CMB on decadal time scales…
Then one can argue about details, like cadence for the synoptics, and how deep to go on individual targets. It is likely that high resolution spectroscopy will be capability limited even three decades from now, and probably also really deep imaging. eg we will be limited in target selection for spatially resolved imaging of exoplanets for the foreseeable future, even if we go to arbitrarily large optically perfect mirrors.
As long as there are small numbers of facilities, and steering is limited, targets will outnumber facilities.

I think the distinction here is important – we really ought to be observing everything, true astronomical panopticons.
What we are really talking about is prioritizing the order in which we do things with finite resources, not what we ought to try to do at all.

What is sad is how small the numbers we argue about are. The NSF cuts are based on budget crunches in the tens of millions of dollars per year, while the NASA shortfalls for science to keep going at the pace we’re trying to maintain are order a billion dollar per year.

With a little bit more money really astonishing science could be done in the next few decades, but we are reduced to political infighting over a shrinking pot, each subfield hoping to survive long enough to still be there when things get better.

NASA Astrobiology

NASA is going through a series of Roadmap exercises by the different directorates, trying to set medium and long term policy for science goals, technology development and capabilities.

The NASA Astrobiology Program is doing a rolling series of Roadmap input sessions for four themes for Astrobiology.
Each theme kicks off with a web chat session to define the issues for discussion, followed by a one week open input session for suggestions for new ideas and open issues from the community.

The first week kicked off with Solar System Exploration, with the web chat taking place last monday from 2-3 EST.
A forum at astrobiologyfuture.org provides a transcript of the web discussion, and a curated discussion forum for people to raise issues, pose open questions and present new ideas.

Next week is the discussion on Prebiotic Evolution, followed by Early Evolution of Life and the Biosphere and then Planetary Conditions for Life.

It is very very important that interested members of the community provide input to these fora. Please read over the ongoing discussion and tell us what you think is important in interesting.

The pedagogy was revolutionary, university level material freely accessible by vast, unimaginable numbers – set to revolutionize education.

Yes, The Open University was a revelation when I discovered their late night television broadcasts as a callow teen, bored with O-level chemistry. Here was real learning, advanced material presented much better than at school (I had a bit of an issue with our chemistry teacher, we did not have good chemistry).

The Open University is almost 50 years old, it has hundreds of thousands of students, over a million graduates and is one of the largest universities in the world.
It provided cheap access for distance learning, mature students, people looking to get additional qualifications or learn new skills.

When later I got to university, over the holidays we’d see OU students come on campus to get that brief taste of “real university life” – and man did they work hard and party hard!
Many went on to complete their degrees in resident courses, or transfer to other universities, or move on to advanced degrees.

And through it all, enrollment in UK universities skyrocketed.
The OU did not undermine university enrollment or siphon students away from the campuses, it was part of the increase in enrollment and greater access for disadvantaged populations and reentrant students.

I liked the chemistry videos in particular, I still remember many vividly.

In practice I probably assimilated more material from the OU maths videos, though I chafed at the absence of really advanced maths. The physics videos I dismissed with a sneer, baby stuff, I was well past that level already.

Yeah, I’ve been reading up on MOOCs, just plowed through yet another special edition of the Chronicle, bookmarked more online articles and geared myself for another in-house meeting on the future of general education and role of online and blended learning.

There will be MOOCs.
Some will be good.

They will probably not disrupt higher education.
No more than the book did.
There are 20 million students in higher education just in the US.

There is a persistent pattern that ~ 10% of the students who dabble initially in a MOOC will complete it.
This is consistent with about 10% of students being driven enough to self-educate given access to resources, some skeletal framework and some free time – they don’t need much else.
One of the good things about MOOCs is that the 10% who will do this are not always the same 10% who are ready at 18 +/- 1 to go to higher education. Portals for re-entry are generally a good thing.

MOOCs will also serve roles for learning rapidly changing material, your canonical “latest trendy comp sci lite must learn” stuff; MOOCs will leverage post-bachelor professional learning; and MOOCs will let some fraction of students learn the basics and the general stuff, often better than they could in high school or at whatever higher education establishment they had access to. All these are valuable and significant in terms of likely demand volume.
People who do MOOCs are generally very good practiced teachers, and will connect effectively with a good fraction of the students who stick with the course.

I will be surprised if MOOCs replace universities – or even substantially make a dent in enrollments.
I think MOOCs will likely help to increase interest and demand in higher education, in the long run, on average.
“Here, try a MOOC, it is free! You’ll like it!”

Further, the current demand for MOOCs is distorted by pent up demand. Even with access to the whole world, the rate of demand for some courses will taper off a bit and reach some steady state.
That is fine. But, administrators will not react well to initial enrollments of 100,000++ plummeting to mere 20-30,000 per offering…

People who think MOOCs will totally disrupt universities generally misunderstand the purpose of university: it is not for job training, mostly, there are some institutes of higher education which focus on vocational training but most universities only do so incidentally or through their professional schools.

This does not mean all will be happy happy as the MOOC fad passes through: the leverage of the MOOCs will lead to some efficiencies that will displace teachers; eventually, hopefully, that efficiency gain will lead to more long term education demand, but the transition may hurt, badly, in places.

Or I could be wrong, and MOOCs could be a totally disruptive force, and the universities are collectively cutting their own throats, leaving us soon with a couple of hundred star lecturers and the few thousand administrators critical to the operation. World wide.
Of course we only need each star lecturer once, then they also will be done.

That will be interesting.

Why Cheaper Computers Lead to Higher Tuition – Steven Pearlstein

Haircuts and the Cost of Time – GOPlifer blog

College Education and Costs Therein – Scalzi

Clay Shirky on Higher Education and the MOOCs – Printculture

My Department and MOOCs – Doc FreeRide

Open Letter From SJSU Philosophy Department on MOOCs

Measuring Baumol and Bowen Effects in Public Research Universities

The Open University has about as many students as the largest institute of higher education in the US, in a country with less than a quarter of the population.

Inquiry Science rocks: Or does it – David Klahr tries to test the efficacy of discovery learning (APS News 12. 2012).

Direct Instruction rocks: Or does it – Richard Hake takes issue with Klahr’s inferences.

To be contrasted with:

The Efficacy of Student-Centered Instruction in Supporting Science Learning – Granger et al Science 338 105 (2012) [sub]

The amount of data on the efficacy of the different teaching methods is still pathetically small.

I am inclined to believe that student center instruction or inquiry science is better for learning, and I plan to expand my use of it next year, but I remain worried by various confounders which I have not seen adequately explored.

One issue is that the curriculum I have seen for instruction science tends to accommodate the pedagogy by reducing content.
It is, all things being equal, easier to get proficient if there is less to learn.
Also, there are persistent whisper of propensity to “teach to the test” when the pedagogical alternatives are tested, particularly when working towards the best metrics for learning like the Concept Inventory tests – certainly the temptation must be there by the instructor, whether subliminal or volitional.
Impossible to prove.

Based on my personal, anecdotal experience, I suspect that more basic issues in science teaching are that courses are not in tight enough sequence and fail to repeat, reinforce and build on previous material, and, due to the same modularity, testing is concurrent and therefore does not test for retention of concepts.
A much stronger test of learning is to revisit the material ~ a year later and test for comprehension and retention then.

I don’t have the answers, and I don’t think there is one unique approach that works better for all students – but it gets to be very discouraging to see new pedagogial fads come through, with nary a mention of the previous fad, or the one before that…

In the meantime:

A Truly Devastating Graph on State Higher Education Spending – from the Atlantic

Ok, it is end of semester and I am out of excuses.
Time to clear out some backlog of stuff to read.

• Am I Wrong? – Bruce Alberts, Editor in Chief of Science, worries about the future.
  He is rarely wrong.

• Time Crystals – interesting article from the increasingly pro-active Simons Foundation on Frank Wilczek’s provocative idea on multi-stable ground state configurations that may cycle through different but energetically equivalent configurations. Berkeley group is trying an experimental test of the concept. Won’t be definitive, but may be suggestive.
• “Shame versus guilt in community responses to wrongdoing.” – the always insightful Janet Stemwedel
• Ethics and Evil – interesting musings from the AstroWright.
• Opinions, Morals and What Science Could but Shouldn’t Tell Us – the always insightful Sabine Hossenfelder’s take.
  With added references to Sean and Lubos, in agreement.

• Proximate and Ultimate Causes for Publication… – B. again.
• Eating your Sleeplessness – why lack of sleep is bad for you in so many ways.
  “Sleep is for the Weak!”

• Stephen Wolfram Uncovers Life on Facebook
  In my experience the primary evolution in life, a la fb, is that at some point that very energetic girl from your elementary school finds you for the 10^N reunion, and all her friends then find you.
  It is a curiously universal and essential process.
  Get your α analytics here

• Oldest European Medieval Cookbook Found! – on facebook, natch.
• A Map of the US generated from dollar bill movements. – Fascinating.
  What it really proves is that the velocity of money goes to zero right at State College, PA.
  I think this is a corollary of the No Hair Theorem…

• State College Ranks as Third Top College Town after Ithaca NY and Ames IA
  As Lubos would note, you are free to reject the metric used…

• Math Teacher Explains Math Anxiety
• Understanding Student Weakness
• Turn Your Mobile Into a Scientific Tricorder with These Real-Life Apps – The Evolution of the iPhone

Don’t worry, semester is over, there will be more…

Many years ago, I heard this, I Did It Their Way, on Garrison Keillor’s “A Prairie Home Companion”, originally by Bob Blue.

I still have that rendition on a cassette tape somewhere.

But now, finally, there is an excellent youtube rendition:

“And so, my fine young friends, now that I am a full professor,
Where once I was oppressed, I’ve now become the cruel oppressor.
With me, you’ll learn to cope. You’ll learn to climb life’s golden stairway.
Like me, you’ll see the light, and do it their way.”

Dedicated to all our prospies…

TITLE: Emission Lines Accompanying Gamma-Ray Flares from the Tidal Disruption of Dyson Spheres by Binary Intermediate-Mass Black Holes at z ~ 10.

Special Lunch Talk, Monday, April 1, 2013
by Professor Rajesh Koothrappali, Circumference Institute
[Host: Hofstadter]

ABSTRACT: “I will begin this talk in medias res by assuming that Dyson spheres can exist as early as z~10. I will describe general relativistic electromagenetohydrodynamic simulations of the disruption of a Dyson sphere by an intermediate mass black hole and present a calculation of its multi-messenger signature. A characteristic feature of the electromagnetic spectrum are strong, semi-permitted lines from the most abundant constituents of the spheres, dilithium and tritanium. In particular, the [Tr XIX and [Di VIII lines in the mid-IR remain strong for several centuries after the disruption. Thus the emission lines from the burst can be observed with the OWL and BFD telescopes currently on the horizon. The prompt sterile-neutrino signal from such disruptions should be detectable by the Vanilla-Ice instrument. I also propose that such an event is responsible for the unusual burst Swift J1644. Remnants of past events can be found by employing peta-scale computing and data mining techniques to look for objects with unusual infrared colors in existing data archives. The results of this archival search can provide the most strict constraints to date on the contributions of the shadow sector to the dark side. In the second half of the talk, I will ask whether the raw materials needed for the construction of Dyson spheres will have been available to extraterrestrial civilizations at z~10. Using the most up-to-date models for nucleosynthesis in post-main sequence stars, I will demonstrate that sufficient quantities of tritanium can be produced by isolytic reactions during the onset of gigantoerythrotropism in pop 4 and pop 5 stars even as early as z~20. Therefore, high-redshift intelligent civilizations could have constructed Dyson spheres out of tritanium nanotubes. I further speculate that the large “Dyson machines,” needed to construct Dyson spheres should be detectable around transiting extrasolar planets through the photoeccentric effect.”

————

BRIEF BIO:

Dr. Koothrapali

Dr Koothrapali carried out his doctoral research at the Roddenberry Institute for Fantastic Science (RIFS) where he worked under the supervision of M. Scott and J. LaForge on the development of dilithium crystals with variable phase inverters for gravitational wave detection. As a postdoc, he turned his attention to astro-statistics and, in collaboration with D. Adams, he proved the maximum improbability theorem and pioneered its application to the analysis of heteroskedastic data. For his ground-breaking work on this problem he later won the Beeblebrox Award. He is now the deputy director of the Circumference Institute and is also serving as the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Irreproducible Results. His most recent work is at the interface between astrophysics and mathematics and focuses on the topology of Dyson-Hoberman spheres, the volumes of red balls, and alternative explanations of the Banach–Tarski paradox.

Anyone interested in joining our speaker for dinner see Lenny.
As it is monday night, dinner will be Thai.

Additional highlights of Dr. Koothrappali career

• Visalization of the Gödel Universe
• WMAP-9
• Who Wrote Shakespeare’s Plays? – Astrophysicist lets you pick the priors and decide…
• Harvard did WHAT?
• “Detection of Carbon Monoxide and Water Absorption Lines in an Exoplanet Atmosphere” – Konopacky et al Science (sub) – HR8799 good S/N spectra
• “Direct imaging discovery of 12-14 Jupiter mass object orbiting a young binary system of very low-mass stars” – Delorme et al (arXiv) – substellar circumbinary companion to an M dwarf binary

why, yes, I am procrastinating…
and there is Moore:

Moore’s Law in Astronomy and UFOs

The Prose Awards: academic books
“Modern Statistical Methods for Astronomy, With R Applications”
By Eric D. Feigelson and G. Jogesh Babu
winner in Cosmology and Astronomy

and…

The Physics of the Kip, and not in the way it mean to me for decades. It only looks impossible.