MOPRA: A real interstellar explorer but its days are numbered

The MOPRA telescope will find itself out of commission in a year. 

Credit: Balt Indermuehle

Australia's MOPRA telescope, nestled in NSW's Warrumbungle National Park, is earmarked for closure in a year thanks to CSIRO funding cuts, but this one-of-a-kind telescope is well worth saving.

Few of us get the opportunity to explore space, yet the "last frontier" retains an aura of mystery that fascinates us.

The film Interstellar not only is a Hollywood blockbuster, but also provides realistic simulations of what interstellar space might look like, at least if one has the misfortune to find oneself near a black hole. So what really is out there and how do we see it?

While the astronomer's telescopes may not allow us to journey to space, they do let us peer out into the cosmos, to a realm dominated by stars and galaxies.

Mopra, located at the foot of Siding Spring Observatory, has a unique view of a section of our galaxy hidden from northern hemisphere sight. This remote outpost has been mapping the centre of the Milky Way for four years, but funding cuts only give it one more year to complete this massive task.

Interstellar exploration (from Earth)

The southern galactic plane passes directly over Australia each night and contains the richest part of our galaxy, with its dynamic centre and the majority of the active star-forming clouds in its spiral arms.

The 22m diameter Mopra radio telescope, with the author alongside. 

Credit: Cormac Purcell, CC BY-SA

The Mopra telescope has been engaged for the past four years in its cartographic survey of the fourth quadrant of our Milky Way galaxy.

This is the sector that cannot be seen from northern skies, but contains the most dynamic parts, its centre and the most active star forming clouds.

It's what we call its delta quadrant; the least explored region of the galaxy.

Mopra's survey is now two-thirds completed. Some 60 degrees of sky have been mapped along the heart of the galactic plane, and the telescope is working near perfectly.

Mopra is a radio telescope which measures interstellar gas between stars. This gas makes up 99% of the interstellar medium and provides the raw material for galactic evolution, driving the birth and death of stars.

These interstellar molecular clouds are the coldest environments in space, and may harbour the raw ingredients for life in the form of simple organic molecules.

In the Milky Way, clouds of this gas are spread over several light-years and can be a million times heavier than our sun.

With a dish 22m in diameter, the view of these gas clouds from Mopra is more than ten times sharper than the best such map astronomers currently have of the southern galactic plane.

Over the past decade, astronomers have been building up an exquisitely detailed picture of where the dust in interstellar space lies using a variety of infrared space-based telescopes.

A 10-degree portion from the new map of the galactic plane, showing molecular gas (in red) overlaid on atomic gas (in blue). 

Credit: Catherine Braiding

We know from them where the stars and gas are largely found, but we know little about the detailed distribution of gas and of the activity its clouds are engaged in.

The spectral fingerprints of the gas must be measured at longer wavelengths which requires much larger telescopes, such as Mopra.

Threadbare UK moon landing funded by Kickstarter, public charitable contributions - Video

A British-led consortium has outlined its plans to land a robotic probe on the Moon in 10 years' time, despite, and because of, UK government's lack of investment in science and innovation.

Its aim is to raise £500m for the project from Kickstarter, i.e. donations by the public.

In return, donors would be able to have photos, text and their DNA included in a time capsule which will be buried under the lunar surface.

Lunar Mission One aims to survey the Moon's south pole to see if a human base can be set up in the future.

The plan has received the endorsement of a host of well-known scientists and organisations.

These include Prof Brian Cox, the Astronomer Royal Lord Rees, and Prof Monica Grady of the Open University.

David Iron, who is leading the project, said he was setting up the initiative because governments were increasingly finding it difficult to fund space missions.

"Anyone in the world will be able to get involved for as little as just a few pounds. Lunar Mission One will make a huge contribution to our understanding of the origins of our planet and the Moon," he said.



Immortality

The team hope to raise £600,000, using the international crowd funding web service Kickstarter, in the next four weeks to fund the initial phase of the project.

For the next four years, funds will be received through contributions from the public, who will be able to buy digital storage space on the lander for their own personal text messages, pictures, music and videos.

They will also be able to pay for an immortality of sorts by sending up a strand of their hair, which the project team claim could survive for one billion years.

The cost of a short message will be a few pounds, a compressed photo will be a few tens of pounds while a short compressed video will be about £200. The cost of sending a hair sample will be around £50.

The lander will also contain a public digital archive of human history and science which will be compiled as a legacy which will survive even if our species becomes extinct.

Mr Iron believes the fact that people will have a stake in the mission will make it all the more engaging.

Legacy

"The project's long-term legacy will be a new way of funding space exploration," he told reporters.

"Rather than just watching the mission, people can be directly involved, not just through funding but helping to make key decisions such as the selection of the landing site or what should be included in the public archive."

All the money raised by the project will go to funding the mission, and any money left over will be put into a charitable trust whose proceeds will be spent on future space exploration. Mr Iron described it as "a Wellcome Trust for space exploration".

The mission will also have a scientific component. The aim is to drill and analyse a sample from underneath the lunar surface, something which has never been done before.

A key aim of the project is to educate and inspire a new generation to become engaged in science in the same way that the Apollo Moon landings did in the 1960s and 70s, and as indeed the Rosetta landing did just last week.

NASA Spitzer coolant loss: Future of Warm mission

Faced with a budget crunch, NASA is likely to shutter its Spitzer space telescope, an infrared space observatory, the fourth and final of NASA's Great Observatories.

The decision may help the US space agency to pump in the saved money to fund the functioning of Hubble, Kepler, Chandra and other orbiting observatories, the US space agency said in a statement.

NASA took stock of its fleet of orbiting astrophysics telescopes and decided which to save and which to shutter based on the findings of an independent review panel and turned down the Spitzer space telescope’s request for an extension.

“To me it is really sad that this country can not find just a few million bucks more to throw into this to keep these things active and running as they should be,” senior review panel chair Ben R. Oppenheimer, an astronomer at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, was quoted as saying.

However, for many, the end of road for Spitzer do not appear as abrupt as they could see it coming.

Spitzer was launched in 2003 as a multipurpose observatory targeted at the low-energy infrared wavelengths of light blocked by earth’s atmosphere.

Spitzer finished its prime mission in 2009 when it exhausted its supply of liquid helium coolant used to chill the instruments.

The loss of the coolant left two of Spitzer’s three instruments unusable, but two of the four wavelength bands on its main camera continued to operate as the Spitzer Warm Mission, Nature reported.

“Right now it can take images in a couple wavebands at tremendous sensitivity, but compared to what it used to do, its capabilities are far reduced,” Oppenheimer said.

“The committee felt that instead of chopping off a bunch of money from other missions, if we end that one large mission we can save everything else,” he explained.

This infrared image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope shows the Helix nebula, a cosmic starlet often photographed by amateur astronomers for its vivid colors and eerie resemblance to a giant eye.

The Helix nebula, located about 700 light-years away in the constellation Aquarius, belongs to a class of objects called planetary nebulae.

Discovered in the 18th century, these colourful astronomical beauties were named for their resemblance to gas-giant planets like Jupiter.

Read more about the future of a warmer Spitzer and its role in providing new scientific discovery in the stark coldness of space. 

NASA Spitzer Closure: Decreased funding battle means loss of Science

As NASA funding continue to dissipate, space agency officials are left trying, frustratingly, to figure out what's worth paying for and the Spitzer Space Telescope is just the latest in a growing list of defunded and soon-to-be-extinct projects.

Since the Apollo missions to the moon ended in 1973, NASA's budget has steadily declined, from 1.35 percent of the federal government's total expenditures to less than 0.6 percent today.

Although the 2014 budget recovered a small portion of previously cut funds, the writing has been on the wall for some time now: do more with less.

Or just do less. So far, that's been the approach -- a run of tough decisions, a run of cuts. The Space Shuttle program was retired.

More recently, Congress cut funding for NASA's Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), a 747 jetliner outfitted with a telescope that climatologists use to study the infrared-absorbing properties of the atmosphere's water vapour.

"It turned out that we had to make very difficult choices about where we go with astrophysics and planetary science and Earth science, and SOFIA happened to be what fell off the plate this time," NASA administrator Charles Bolden said shortly after the latest budget proposal came out.

Even more recently, a NASA review panel, convened every two years to determine the merits of various NASA programs, decided to decommission the Spitzer Space Telescope, the the first telescope to directly capture the light from extrasolar planets. A last ditch effort to save Spitzer looks likely to be unsuccessful.

Yet as NASA funding shrinks, the possibilities of scientific exploration continue to grow, leaving NASA's task of project decision making tougher than ever.

Go back to the moon, some say. How about a mission to Jupiter's moon Europa? What about deep-space exploration? Or Mars?

The House is expected to soon vote on a spending bill that would fill some gaps in NASA's funding. Even so, NASA's purse strings are likely to remain tight and tangled for the foreseeable future.

NASA Funds Study of Sideways Flying Supersonic Plane - Video

NASA has approved a $100,000 grant for development of a supersonic plane concept pioneered by Gecheng Zha, a professor at the University of Miami.

Called the Supersonic Bidirectional Flying Wing, the concept addresses the main conflict in supersonic design: a supersonic vessel needs large wings to get off the ground, but small wings to achieve supersonic speeds.

Zha has dealt with this problem by the simple expedient of creating two sets of wings.

The wings are positioned at 90° to each other.

Once the plane has taken off using the longer wings, it rotates and uses the lower drag wings to go supersonic.

It is expected to take decades to develop the technology to the point of implementation. The project is one in a new wave of technology development in the realm of supersonic and hypersonic flight.

In August, Boeing’s X-51A Waverider, developed for the US AirForce, failed to go hypersonic in a flight test. Russia is developing Hammer, a hypersonic booster intended to launch satellites of up to 800 kg into low Earth orbit.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk, CEO and founder of SpaceX, has spoken of developing a hovering supersonic electric jet.

The only commercial supersonic passenger jet ever developed, the Concorde, was retired in 2003 when it was unable to achieve commercial success following a combination of a 2000 fatal crash and the reduced air traffic that resulted from the 2001 New York terrorist attacks.

The fastest passenger plane in use today is the Mach 0.9 Cessna Citation X which carries 7 passengers.

Budget Cuts Hit NOAA Aquarius Underwater Laboratory - YouTube

The future of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Aquarius Reef Base laboratory, the world's only undersea lab appears bleak owing to budget cuts from the Federal Government.

The NOAA was under orders to tighten up and the $3 million annual budget for Aquarius was eliminated, ABC News reported.

Though an Aquarius Foundation is trying to raise funds to maintain the lab, its efforts may not raise adequate funds to fund active work from the lab. Meanwhile, the lab's supporters are hoping a large donor will come forward amidst criticism that it is expensive to maintain.

Even when not in use, divers must ensure that its systems work properly every week in salt water.

Aquarius is the only undersea laboratory dedicated to marine science operating in the world.

Owned by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and managed by the University of North Carolina at Wilmington (UNCW), Aquarius operates 4.5 kilometers offshore of Key Largo, Florida 20 meters beneath the surface.

Aquarius was originally conceived and funded by NOAA's National Undersea Research Program (NURP) in the mid 1980s.

The underwater laboratory was built by Victoria Machine Works in 1986-87. Initial deployment in the U.S. Virgin Islands before Hurricane Hugo struck in 1989, and devastated St. Croix.

Aquarius was retrieved from the seafloor in 1990 and was moved to North Carolina where it was refurbished and then redeployed in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary in 1993.