NASA's Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, also known as SOFIA. (Photo: NASA)

The new SOFIA observatory isn't your average NASA project. Engineers took a 30-year old 747 airplane, cut a hole in the side and installed a 17-ton telescope. Most telescopes are either on the ground or somewhere in orbit, but SOFIA falls somewhere in the middle, flying around at about 40,000 feet.

I got the chance to hitch a ride on one of its recent research flights as the plane left Moffett Field at the NASA Ames Research Center. It's definitely not the kind of flight where you get a bag of peanuts and movie.

The researchers take advantage of the nighttime sky, so we left at dusk for 10-hour tour flying zigzags across the Pacific Ocean. Each leg of the journey is carefully calculated so the telescope can pinpoint a far away star. The plane interior is packed with computers and equipment. It also lacks insulation since much of it was removed to install the telescope, so it's both cold and loud inside.

At four in the morning, the astronomers are still hard at work. If they're as tired as I am, they certainly aren't showing it.

"For me, this is very exciting," says Ian McLean, a professor at the University of California-Los Angeles. He usually works on the ground. "All my career has been ground-based astronomy. So, it's only my second flight."

McLean says there's a good reason to do astronomy in the stratosphere. The atmosphere is thinner, which means it's easier for the telescope to see the stars. "It's almost as good as space," says McLean. "Not quite, but almost."

And unlike the Hubble Space Telescope, this telescope lands everyday, which means the scientists can update and fix the equipment. "By the time you get a mission into orbit, the technology you're using is relatively old. Here we can stay state of the art all the time," says McLean. NASA began developing SOFIA in 1997 and almost cancelled the project at one point. It flew its first science mission in November 2010 and now costs about $80 million a year to operate.

Searching for a "Holy Grail"

McLean says the SOFIA telescope could show astronomers something that's considered a Holy Grail in their field: seeing a star being born. It happens in huge, dusty clouds – stellar nurseries, as Mclean calls them. "The cloud is huge, light years across and it's gradually contracting to form a whole nursery of stars."

Inside NASA's SOFIA Observatory, somewhere over the Pacific Ocean.

But there's a problem. Astronomers can't see what's happening inside the clouds because, once again, they're made of dust and it's hard to see through.

"We don't mean dust bunnies, but we mean little, tiny little grains of solid material. Doesn't matter how big a telescope you have, you can't see inside it," McLean says.

That's why SOFIA looks at a special kind of light called infrared light. If you look through a telescope on the ground, you're looking at the visible light from space – the light our eyes can see. Infrared light is invisible to us, but it penetrates space dust, which means the telescope can see through the dust too.

"You get to see what you can't see with your eye. It's like a window has been opened," says McLean. They're looking for exactly how stellar nurseries give birth to young stars. McLean says catching a star as it's forming can reveal clues about how own solar system formed.

But star birth isn't the only thing these researchers want to see. They're also looking at the way stars die.

A Star on the Way Out

As the plane makes as sharp right turn, the telescope focuses on an object called NGC 7027. It's a planetary nebula – also known as a dying star. Mclean and his team are capturing an infrared image of the nebula, which is about 3,000 light years away. They can also see what it's made of.

"It has a distinctive shape. It's oval. There's a hole in the middle and that's because it literally is a shell of gas that came off the star," says McLean.

7027 is dying because the star has run out of fuel – the same fate that our sun will face in about five billion years. As it dies, the star casts off its outer layers, shedding huge amounts of material to form a cloud around it. But it's not entirely a sad story.

"It won't be wasted," says McLean. "The material that was thrown off by that star in its dying phase, somewhere, millions, perhaps billions of years from now, will find its way into a new star and the planets that form around it."

From dead stars come new stars – and planets like our own. The oxygen and nitrogen in our bodies were once formed inside a star. "The cosmos is within us," as astronomer Carl Sagan once said. "We're made of star stuff."

As sky begins to lighten, we descend towards the Dryden Aircraft Operations Facility in the Mojave Desert, where the plane is based. The SOFIA telescope is now flying twice a week. Astronomers from around the world are lining up to get onboard.

Photo by Tama Leaver via Flickr

If, like me, you have traditionally though of SETI as an organization that searches for little green men, you'll be pleasantly surprised to learn that SETI's goals, projects and objectives have a significant impact on modern day science. "Celebrate Science" sounds like a great opportunities for families to learn more about SETI and what lies ahead.

"Celebrate Science" is a family event focused on activities for kids from 8 to 15. There will be a variety of hands on activities, such as learning more about the Institute's involvement with the Kepler mission, its ongoing search for life in space and even a solar telescope to take a close up look at what's happening on the sun!

The father of SETI and author of the Drake Equation, Dr. Frank Drake will be in attendance and Seth Shostak will be speaking about SETI and his book, "Confessions of an Alien Hunter". Moreover, this event is free to attend. More information can be learned on SETI's website.

Recently, SETI has fallen on hard times, with the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) being forced into hibernation due to lack of funds. The ATA comprises 42 telescopes in Northern California that scan for radio signals from outer space, searching for intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. In response to this funding deficit, SETI recently launched SETIstars, a kickstarter to raise $200,000 to bring the ATA back online. With 17 days left, its reached nearly half its goal but could still use help. If you'd like to donate or learn more, visit SETIstars, and help SETI bring back the ATA.

Watch KQED QUEST's story for more info: SETI: The New Search for ET

QUEST on KQED Public Media.

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Courtesy of yurisnight.net.

Yuri’s Night 2011 stats: 557 events in 75 countries on 6 continents on 2 worlds (Earth and the Space Station!)

50 years ago the launch of a bell-shaped capsule called “Vostok 1” on April 12th, 1961 by Soviet Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin made history as the first human to enter outer space. Exactly 20 years later, the United States innovated the space age by launching the Space Shuttle (April 12th, 1981). Twenty years later Yuri’s Night was created to connect and inspire the globe about human spaceflight –– honoring the past while looking forward to the next generation of spaceflight (think Space X, the Google Lunar X Prize and Virgin Galactic!) This year commemorates the 10th anniversary of Yuri’s Night, the 30th Anniversary of the US space shuttle and the 50th anniversary of human spaceflight!

This also marks the 3rd anniversary of California Academy of Sciences involvement with Yuri’s Night. The NightLife team first began working with NASA and the Yuri’s Night collective back in 2009. NASA decided to cancel their Saturday night party at NASA Ames and asked us to host it at NightLife instead. We had 3922 guests come out to celebrate spaceflight. One of the guests was even Buzz Aldrin! In 2010, we expanded our reach. We had another very successful Yuri’s NightLife at the Academy and then participated at NASA Ames on Yuri’s Night School day on Friday and on their Festival Day on Saturday.

This year, NightLife celebrated Yuri by focusing on space as the great frontier on Thursday, April 7th. The Planetarium showed Dawn of the Space Age, the Geodome was set up in the Piazza to show star talks and Hofeld Hall was set up to give tours of Alien Worlds. Fred Bourgeouis, III, the CEO of Team Frednet came into speak about how his team of over 700 volunteers is prototyping a rocket to fly to the moon to win the Google Lunar X Prize and Mary Roach wowed and amused guests about fodder in her new book Packing for Mars.

Around dawn on Friday April 8th, the Portable Planetarium along with some very sleep colleagues set out to NASA Ames in Mountain View to give star talks about the night sky. I was told by a friend at NASA, that there were 6432 kids in attendance that day. The planetarium was scheduled for 15 minutes talks each half hour but it was so popular the presenters found a way to give back-to-back shows every fifteen minutes from 9am to 3pm. The rest of us were on sticker duty, keeping the kids amused while they waited, giving information and answering the survey question – Which is visible now in the night sky? The answer being Saturn, we even had the appropriate sticker to give out. All in all, it was a great third year for the Academy’s Yuri’s Night festivities and two among 557 events that celebrated human spaceflight this year.

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Artist concept of Stardust-NExT approaching comet Tempel 1.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/LMSS

The human race is certainly leaving its marks on the Solar System. On Valentine's Day, NASA revisited the locale of one of those marks—comet Tempel 1—and far from being a simple "I was here" (like the three scratch marks left behind by Jules Verne's intrepid explorer in Journey to the Center of the Earth), this one was a crater 200 meters across created to see what makes the comet tick….

Cast your mind's eye back five years. Remember NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft, the one that lobbed a heavy metal projectile at Tempel 1 in hopes of seeing what came flying out of the blast, and more excitingly what the hole it made looked like afterward? The idea was to get a better grip on how the comet is put together (is it crunchy, powdery, ice-hard; is it light like Styrofoam, or weightier like block-ice, or concrete?).

Well, as it turned out back in 2006, Deep Impact successfully bullseyed the little 4.5-mile long ice potato—and the impact was so effective that the spectacular blast, as good as anything from the ILM special effects department, completely obscured the spacecraft’s camera-eye view, hiding the would-be crater from sight. The mission was a success, I should add; Deep Impact got plenty of good data and images of the comet and the blast plume—just not the man-made-object-made crater it made….

Fast forward to February 14, 2011. Exercising a good reduce-reuse-recycle ethic, NASA sent the "NExT" spacecraft past Tempel 1, visiting the same comet twice for the first time in history, and doing so with an existing spacecraft that had completed its initial mission years before.

Cast your mind's eye back to the Stardust mission, which flew through the tale of comet Wilde 2, collecting particles from the plume in a block of comet dust "fly paper" made of aerogel (basically glass spun up so light and fluffy as to barely register any weight or substance, a piece of which looks like a slab of solid smoke), and dropping the collector pod back on Earth for the first ever comet sample return mission. Stardust flew on, circling the Sun for several years, and was finally re-tasked as NExT—the "New Exploration of Tempel 1" mission.

It's as if NASA is playing a celestial shell game: Where's the spacecraft now? What is it named? Which comet is it going to this time?

NExT flew within 112 miles of the Tempel 1 nucleus and captured over 70 images. Yes, scientists hoped to capture an image of the crater left behind by Deep Impact—and they did; see if you can spot it too. But, there is plenty more to interest us than a hole in the snow. The fact that this comet had been visited five years prior means that we can compare images from then and now to see any changes that may have taken place. As it turns out, five years is not only the interval between the visits by Deep Impact and Stardust/NExT, it's also the orbital period of comet Tempel 1—so, the comet had made exactly one swing around the Sun between visits, providing the opportunity to study Sun-induced changes.

Tempel 1 is about 4.5 by 2.9 miles in size, and has an average density of about 0.62 grams per cubic centimeter—about five times denser than the densest Styrofoam, two-thirds as dense as ice, and 600 times more dense than aerogel…. Its elliptical orbit carries it between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter—and it is that range of exposure to solar radiation that has researchers looking for physical changes in the comet.

By the way, the Deep Impact spacecraft was also reused to make a second comet flyby. Five years after bombing Tempel 1, Deep Impact, renamed EPOXI, flew by the peanut-shaped comet Hartley 2, back in November. Between Stardust and Deep Impact, there were a lot of firsts: first sample return mission from a comet; first time a single spacecraft has visited two comets; first time two spacecraft have visited the same comet….

It's doubtful there is enough fuel left on either of these veterans for another opportunistic encounter, but talk about bang for the buck….

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NASA/courtesy of nasaimages.org.

Every February, comments from school kids come in about my previous "Famous African-American Scientists and Innovators" blog posts. It has become tradition every February to put out another post and this is my fourth installment. This year in April is the 50th Anniversary of Yuri Gagiran going into space, the 30th Anniversary of the first US Space Shuttle Columbia launching into space and the 10th Anniversary of Yuri’s Night. So in celebration of both famous African-American and space exploration, I am focusing this post on the exploration of the final frontier – space.

Robert H. Lawrence (1935 to 1967)
First African American Astronaut

At the age of 16, Robert Lawrence graduated in the top ten percent from Englewood High School in Chicago. At 20, he graduated from Bradley University holding a Bachelor's Degree in Chemistry and also became a Cadet Commander in the Air Force ROTC. At 21, he became an Air Force pilot after successfully completing training at Malden Air Force base. As an Air Force pilot, he accumulated over 2,500 flight hours, 2,000 being in jets. He flew the Lockheed F-104 to research the gliding of various un-powered spacecraft returning to Earth from orbit. In 1967, he was selected by the USAF as an astronaut in the Air Force's Manned Orbital Laboratory (MOL) program. This placement made him the first black astronaut. Unfortunately, in December of the same year he was killed in the crash of an F-104 Starfigher at Edwards Air Force Base in California. He was flying in the back seat and instructing a pilot on the steep-descent glide technique. The pilot made the descent but flared too late, both pilots ejected but Lawrence did so too late and struck the ground, killing him instantly. In his brief NASA career, Major Lawrence earned the Air Force Commendation Medal and the Air Force Outstanding Unit Citation.

Guion Bluford Jr. (1942 to Present)
First African American Astronaut to travel in space

In 1983, Guion Bluford Jr. became the first black astronaut to travel in space. Bluford participated in four space shuttle missions on Challenger between 1983 and 1992 and logged 688 hours in space. His first shuttle launch in the Orbiter Challenger was also the first night launch and night landing in NASA’s history. Guion Bluford was no stranger to being airborne before his career with NASA; he flew over 144 combat missions, logged 5,200 hours in jets and 1300 hours as an instructor pilot in his career in the Air Force. Over his career, he has been highly decorated as a war veteran, Air Force pilot, engineer and astronaut culminating in being inducted into the the International Space Hall of Fame in 1997 and the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame in 2010.

Mae Jemison (1956 to Present)
First Female African American Astronaut

Mae Jemison received a bachelor of science degree in chemical engineering from Stanford University in 1977 and continued on in her education to recieve a doctorate degree in medicine from Cornell University in 1981. In her career, Dr. Jemison became the Area Peace Corps Medical Officer for Sierra Leone and Liberia in West Africa. During her time in West African she developed and participated in research projects on Hepatitis B vaccine, schistosomaisis and rabies working alongside the with the National Institute of Health and the Center for Disease Control. Several years after returning to the United States, Dr. Jemison was selected for the astronaut program. She was the science mission specialist on STS-47 Spacelab that traveled in space from September 12-20, 1992. It was a cooperative mission between the US and Japan and consisted of 127 orbits around the earth conducting life science and materials processing experiments. Dr. Jemison was a co-investigator on bone cell research experiments conducted during the flight.

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Counting craters on a Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter image
of the Moon's surface. NASA/LRO

Ever been out on a clear, lazy night and tried to count the stars–or the kind that fall from the sky during a meteor shower? How about craters on the Moon, or distant galaxies in deep space?

If you like this kind of work, there is a job for you! Several, in fact….

In this day of the Internet and electronic databases, our ability to store, process, share, and, yes, be overwhelmed by information is greater than ever before. In fact, our ability to analyze data is only outmatched by our capacity to acquire it—which offers some pleasing challenges: buried in the riches of data of our Universe that we are piling up around us, there is plenty of opportunity for just about anyone to grab a shovel and dig in, sharing in the adventure of exploration of the Universe around us!

Okay, that was the sales pitch, here are some details.

Count some stars! Subject: stars visible to the naked eye; what's being investigated: the impact of urban light pollution on our access to the simple wonders of the night sky. Every year, Windows to the Universe conducts the Great Worldwide Star Count citizen science project, enabling anyone who can look up at the night sky and count some of the stars there to participate in real science. We're already into the Count, which runs this year from October 31st through November 12th. For details on how to participate, check out their website.

Results from the Great Worldwide Star Count are presented in a global map showing the "limiting magnitude" from thousands of locations where citizen scientists observed. The limiting magnitude is a measure of brightness of the faintest star that can be seen from a given location.

How about craters on the Moon? Looking at the Moon through a small telescope, you can count some of the largest craters—those that are typically at least a mile or so across. By virtue of the powerful LROC camera on NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), the surface of the Moon is rabidly being photographed to a level of detail that reveals craters as small as a foot and a half across!

Craters are a fantastically rich source of information regarding the history of our solar system, each one a record of a single meteoroid impact which, when examined in context with all the rest, allows scientists to forensically piece together the puzzle of the formation of the Moon and our region of the solar system.

While there are estimated to be at least 300,000 lunar craters with diameters of about half a mile or greater on the side of the Moon facing the Earth, smaller craters are estimated into the millions, and microcraters are most likely uncountably common.

This means science needs your help! And you can give it, at Moon Zoo. Log onto the Moon Zoo website, register yourself as an official lunar explorer, and have at it, friend. Examining LRO images of the Moon's surface, you will count and classify craters and boulders, and mark unusual and interesting lunar features, as you explore. There are so many images that have been acquired by LRO that in many cases you will be the first person ever to lay eyes on the particular patches of the Moon you examine—you might even run across something remarkable, like a derelict lunar robot from the 1960s (it's happened!). Best of all, your work will count, your data feeding into a growing database from Moon Zoo explorers all over the world.

A sibling site to Moon Zoo—Galaxy Zoo—lets you examine and classify galaxies imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope. And since there are millions upon millions of unclassified galaxies that have been caught in Hubble's telescopic net, you'll be covering unexplored territories of space and contributing to our planet's understanding of the Universe….

There's a lot of work to do out there, and the glittering treasure trove of data just keeps getting larger and larger—so get to work!

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Close-ups of asteroids captured by robotic spacecraft.

When you hear the word "asteroid," what image is evoked in your mind? A confusion of tumbling, skittering mountains in space suitable for a breath-defying spaceship chase? Blue-white digital outlines of big rocks flying around a video screen, ready to be blasted into pixel dust by your torpedo cannon? Or perhaps, as some science fiction stories would have it, a tiny barren world complete with a breathable atmosphere and giant space worms living in deep crater caverns….

Ah, gotta love science fiction.

As Sci-Fi is often more colorful than reality, are the facts about asteroids a bit more down to Earth (so to speak)? Big gray rocks, perhaps quite large, but otherwise less interesting even than the granite mountains of an Earthly place like Yosemite? Well…try scooping up a handful of sand; at first glance you may see only a pile of tawny-gray grains. Look more closely—with a magnifying glass or microscope—and a veritable treasure trove of colorful jewels is revealed.

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope is just such an instrument, and has revealed that asteroids may have more variety than once imagined.

Spitzer recently ran out of the supply of coolant that kept its infrared cameras cold—at least, cold enough to sense the subtle heat radiation emitted by distant celestial objects. Now that Spitzer's instruments have "warmed up" to a balmy negative 406 degrees F, observers have shifted their attention to other objectives, including asteroids.

In particular, Spitzer has observed the infrared emanations from a hundred or so Near Earth Asteroids: those that cross Earth's orbit in the course of their own elliptical routines. There are plans to observe 600 or more NEAs in the future—out of about 7000 currently known Near Earth Objects (which includes comets and meteoroids).

The observing program aims to give us a clearer focus on the individual characteristics of these flying mountains that Earth shares space with: the sizes, the composition, and even the age and origins of what is proving to be a diverse and rich population. Spitzer's infrared cameras see past the façade of mere visible light, which, at the distance of most NEOs, doesn't tell us much more than the amount of light they reflect. A big, dark asteroid and a small, light-colored one may reflect the same amount of light, giving those distant specks in the telescopic image the same appearance.

But throwing in an infrared measurement of an asteroid's heat emissions can reveal much more: the temperature of an asteroid is governed by the amount of sunlight it absorbs, which is in turn governed by size, color, composition, and its distance from the Sun.

Already Spitzer's initial 100 asteroid observations have revealed a wide variety of characteristics—maybe not unlike that handful of sand grains scrutinized under a microscope.

Meteorites, having fallen to Earth and been examined up close, have long revealed that their "source mountains" (their parent asteroids, from which they were broken away by collisions) are diverse in composition. We find stone meteorites, and meteorites of solid nickel-iron, sometimes embedded with crystalline gemstones of great beauty.

Combining the compositional data on NEOs gleaned from Spitzer with their orbital characteristics determined through ground-based observatories–such as Chabot's own Asteroid Search program—we are learning a great deal about the NEO neighborhood, and what exactly may be passing quietly in the night. It's all good information, giving us a better handle on how to protect our planet from possible impacts, and laying the groundwork for future missions of exploration to Earth-passing asteroids.

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Live solar observing at Chabot Space & Science Center

Our weekend daytime observatory volunteer team has assembled their own live solar observatory, using a SolarMax 70 hydrogen-alpha filter telescope, a video camera, a wireless transmitter, and a large flat-panel display screen—and now that the weather is beginning to cooperate, their offering to our visitors will take place on a more regular basis.

I was up there last Sunday to see the system at work, and was very impressed. With the telescope and wireless transmitter set up outside on the observatory deck, the image of the Sun captured by the video camera was transmitted into the dome of our large telescope, Rachel, where a receiver caught the signal and piped it into the large display monitor attached to the central pier.

Even though there were no sunspots that day—and sunspots are what people generally expect to see, if anything—the Sun put on quite a show in the "hydrogen alpha" wavelength of light (a select red color emitted by hot hydrogen in the Sun's atmosphere). While the Sun's visible surface is populated by features like granules (convection cells), sunspots, and faculae, the h-alpha scope revealed a layer of the Sun's atmosphere, the chromosphere ("sphere of color", named for the bright red light emitted by the hydrogen gas).

We observed several filaments and two or three prominences on this day, even though the Sun was relatively quiet and showing little surface sunspot activity.

Filaments and prominences are the same thing, really: "clouds" of hydrogen gas in the Sun's chromosphere, shaped and contained by the force of solar magnetic fields. When seen at the edge of the Sun's disk, these clouds appear as bright flame-like structures against the dark background of space, and we call them prominences. When seen within the Sun's disk, they appear as dark streaks and strands, the cooler gases in the clouds silhouetted against the brighter surface of the Sun; in this case we call them filaments.

Each of the little puffs of prominence we saw—like bonfires surging up from the edge of the Sun—were actually enormous structures, several times the size of the Earth. And we saw them change as well; in only minutes, the structures would shift and form new shapes, reminding us that the Sun is a very active and dynamic object, always on the go.

Solar activity is now on the rise, after a multi-year lull of quiet as we passed through the bottom of the 11-year solar cycle. We are seeing sunspots on more occasions, which are revealing areas of rising magnetic activity. The activity should only increase going forward, and is expected to reach a crescendo ("solar maximum") sometime around 2012 or 2013. Then, as was the case a decade ago when Chabot Space & Science Center opened, we can expect to see a dozen or so sunspots at any given time, and many more filaments and prominences.

I hope you can make it up to Chabot on a sunny weekend afternoon and see what our volunteers are up to. Forget about that sunny beach; come up to Chabot to learn about the object that makes that beach sunny!

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Artist's concept of a Pluto landscape, with moon Charon on
the horizon. NASA.

Observations of Pluto have been made by Hubble before, bringing us the most detailed images of that small world ever taken. Still, the images reveal little more than variations in shading, and in the most recent observations, some color.
The recent images show the dwarf planet from different angles, grabbed at different times as Pluto slowly rotates, once about every six days. The darker areas have been characterized as having a "molasses" color—I'm assuming that means very dark brown, as that's the color of molasses in the bottle in our kitchen.

So, is Pluto's surface oozing with syrupy sugars? First of all, nothing should be oozing at all under the temperatures Pluto routinely experiences. Since Pluto reached its closest approach to the Sun back in the 1980s—something that happens only every 248 years—temperatures have risen to their highest in our lifetimes, and are now up to about -385 degrees Fahrenheit. Yeah, minus. Global warming on Pluto….

While scientists don't yet know what the deep brown regions are, some expect it has something to do with Pluto's methane, the existence of which we've known for some time from spectroscopic measurements. Methane is a hydrocarbon—an "organic molecule"–whose chemistry is part of the basis of life on Earth.

That's not to say there's life on Pluto—but one theory about the molasses-colored patches is that it may be some sort of tar-like substance that has developed over millions of years from the Sun's weak rays interacting with Pluto's methane. Over its seasonal and orbital gyrations, Pluto's methane cycles from being frozen solid on the ground to being a gas and forming a thin atmosphere; right now that atmosphere is as thick as it's ever been in our lifetimes.

Will astronauts in the distant future have to worry about getting stuck in something sticky when they walk around on Pluto? Too early to tell….

Since childhood I've been fascinated by Pluto—probably more for our lack of knowing it than for anything we actually know (which isn't a whole lot: small, cold, dark, slow, patchy brown, methane, three moons; that's the lion's-share of our knowledge). It's a place of mystery, not unlike Mars and Venus, or Jupiter's Galilean moons, were long ago (like in my childhood), before we sent spacecraft to see them up close, and before we had the powerful eye of Hubble. Mars, at least, we're getting to know pretty well; it still holds plenty of mysteries, but somehow feels not so far removed, and familiar.

And, something else is on the horizon in the exploration of Pluto: in five years, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft will whiz by and in a few short hours collect an amount of information that will absolutely dwarf all that we have learned since Pluto was discovered in 1930. It's like the treks of Pioneer and Voyager all over again, back in the 1970s and 1980s, when we first visited the Gas Giant planets, and moons like Io and Europa went from being fuzzy blobs with variations in surface shading and color to worlds with craters and volcanoes and ice fissures and…well, let's just say I can hardly wait to get that up-close glimpse of Pluto.

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The Sloan Telescope used to conduct BOSS

One of those is BOSS, the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, is a new project to create a 3-D map of over 2 million galaxies and quasars representing the best data ever obtained on the large-scale structure of the universe. Baryon oscillations began as pressure waves through the hot plasma of the early universe. Those waves left an imprint on the matter that makes up the universe, including the dark matter. The survey will essentially act as a ruler, in order to measure how the universe has been expanding.

Next Monday, you’ll be able to meet David Schlegel, the principal investigator of BOSS. He’ll be part of a panel of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory scientists discussing their search for dark energy. As a primer, check out QUEST’s story on Dark Energy from last year. The piece features astrophysicist Saul Perlmutter, who will also be speaking at the event.

See QUEST's Video on Dark Energy below:

QUEST on KQED Public Media.

Dark Secrets: What Science Tells Us About the Hidden Universe

Where: Berkeley Repertory Theater, 2025 Addison Street, Berkeley

When: Monday, October 26th 7-830 PM

Cost: FREE

Details: No mystery is bigger than dark energy — the elusive force that makes up three-quarters of the Universe and is causing it to expand at an accelerating rate. KTVU Channel 2 health and science editor John Fowler will moderate a panel of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory scientists who use phenomena such as exploding stars and gravitational lenses to explore the dark cosmos.

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