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| Science Forum Index » Miscelaneous » [BOBPARKS-WHATSNEW] What's New Friday, May 22, 2009... |
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| Bob Park... |
 Posted: Fri May 22, 2009 12:57 pm |
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WHAT'S NEW Robert L. Park Friday, 21 May 09 Washington, DC
1. TELESCOPES: KEPLER IS NOT AT L2, BUT IT SHOULD BE.
WN made a mistake last week: The Kepler Space Telescope was not sent to
the
L2 point as we said. The two European space telescopes, Herschel and
Planck, are there and the James Webb Space Telescope will go there when
it's launched in 2013. I jumped to the conclusion that Kepler would go
there too, but Kepler is part of the NASA Discovery Program of low-cost,
focused science missions, and its launch vehicle was not capable of
reaching L2. Assigned to look for Earth-sized exoplanets, Kepler is in a
solar drift-away orbit like the Spitzer Space Telescope.
2. ROCKET FUEL: WELast week, even as I was screwing up the story about
the new telescopes,
Science magazine was perpetuating the rocket-fuel-on-the-Moon fantasy. I
don't know where it got started, but in March of 1998, Alan Binder, the
chief scientist on the lunar prospector mission, exulted that, "for the
first time, we know that when we go to another planetary body, we can fuel
up." It seems that water, or ice, had been detected in lunar soil at the
bottom of craters near the poles. The water was not detectable 18 months
later. NASA is now sending two missions to the Moon to look again.
Science magazine said last week that, "the lure of a resource easily
convertible into to a high-energy fuel of oxygen and hydrogen has driven
the decades long and often exasperating search for lunar ice." It's not
nearly as exasperating as it will be in the unlikely event that they do
find water and try to turn it into rocket fuel. If our planet is indeed
covered with rocket fuel to a depth of miles, why is there an energy
crisis?
3. THERMODYNAMICS: WHY CANWhile I was trying to understand how Science
magazine could have missed a
turn in the road, a friend at the BBC called my attention to an April 30
article in the business section of the New York Times. To reduce the
emission of carbon dioxide from power plants, there are plans to sequester
it deep underground. You have to pay to extract it and then pay again to
get rid of it. However, a company called Carbon Sciences has an audacious
plan: Recycle the carbon by turning it into liquid hydrocarbon fuels. The
author experiences a brief attack of self-doubt, "how much energy would it
take to recombine carbon with hydrogen to produce a fuel that could then
substitute for gasoline." But his self-doubts seem to be swept away when
the company assures him they have a secret biocatalyst that will combine
the hydrogen in water with the carbon in carbon dioxide without the usual
large expenditure of energy. That's the same claim that inventor Sam Leach
made almost 40 years ago when he scammed investors out of millions with an
automobile that ran on water.
4. CERN: AUSTRIA REVERSES ITS DECISION TO WITHDRAW.
The abrupt decision of Chancellor Faymann to terminate Austriamembership
in the European particle-physics lab, just months before the LHC
is expected to turn out its first results, was reversed just as abruptly
this week after scientists warned they would become second-class citizens
in international science.
THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND.
Opinions are the author's and not necessarily shared by the
University of Maryland, but they should be.
---
Archives of What's New can be found at http://www.bobpark.org |
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