Space Station Scores a Scientific Hit—Maybe

Long-time readers of this blog know that I have been less than complimentary to NASA, the International Space Station, and manned space flight in general.  So it’s only fair that when NASA-sponsored teams do something good, I should mention that too.  A few days ago, representatives of an international effort that produced a cosmic-ray detector that made it to the International Space Station on the next-to-last-ever Shuttle flight held a news conference.  They announced the first batch of results from their detector, and while they didn’t come right out and say they have figured out what dark matter is, they did say they found strikingly clear evidence that something funny is going on out there in interstellar space.  Dark matter, by the way, is what 80% of the universe is made of, only we don’t know what it is because it’s, well, dark, and most of it is far away.  The only way we know it’s there is because of its gravitational effects.

While experimental physicists don’t like to admit it, a whole lot of what they do is just engineering:  figuring out how to do a technical thing within a budget.  In the case of the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), the budget was about $2 billion, and involved the work of hundreds of scientists at dozens of institutions all around the world.  I counted the number of authors on the Physical Review Letters paper announcing the discovery, and there are 350 of them (349 if you leave out the researcher who died before it was published). 

The AMS had a rocky road into space.  Pieces of it were assembled as long ago as 1997, and I’m sure the planning took place well before then.  Just as it was about to be loaded aboard a shuttle for transport to the International Space Station in 2003, the shuttle Columbia disintegrated on re-entry, and the resulting delays knocked AMS off the shuttle’s manifest.  But the scientists pulled strings in Washington, and eventually got a special Congressional resolution passed in 2008 ordering NASA to get the thing up there somehow.  Finally, in May 2011, AMS flew on the penultimate shuttle flight and began collecting data.

Cosmic rays have been somewhat of a mystery ever since their discovery around 1910, when it became possible to measure them accurately.  Here at the bottom of the atmosphere, all you see is the decay products of the original rays, which are high-energy particles (mainly protons and atomic nuclei) that crash into air molecules and produce a shower of lower-energy particles.  While scientists can tell some things about cosmic rays from ground-based observations, it’s clear that to get the best idea of where they come from and what they are, you need to hoist yourself above the atmosphere and look at the things before they slam into air molecules.

           

That is exactly what AMS does.  It uses five different kinds of particle detectors and a great big magnet to bend the particle’s paths slightly in order to figure out energy, mass, and charge. While it might have theoretically been possible to put such a machine into unmanned orbit by itself, the size of the thing (it’s about ten feet on a side, roughly) and its power consumption made it a prime candidate for installation on the International Space Station.  I read the original paper describing the device, and while I don’t pretend to understand it all, I was impressed by the sheer magnitude of the task:  using over 600 microprocessors to compress 300,000 raw data inputs into a data stream that runs only 10 megabits per second, for instance.  They catch an average of about 600 particles (of all kinds) each second, and the paper describes results from eighteen months’ worth of data.

Now that you have the world’s greatest cosmic ray detector, what do you do with it?  Look for positrons, it turns out.  Why positrons, which are the electron’s antiparticle?  When a positron hits an electron, they both turn into energy and release gamma rays.  And the theorists say that when two hypothetical dark-matter particles called WIMPs (I did not make this up—it stands for “weakly interacting massive particle”) hit each other, they disappear and make a positron-electron pair.  Or something like that.  Anyway, according to reports, if you find a lot of high-energy positrons in cosmic rays, that is evidently strong evidence for something we don’t fully understand, and dark-matter collisions making positrons are one of the prime candidates for that something.

It’s sort of like if you lock up your house when you leave and the door is standing open when you come back:  you know something unusual is going on, but you don’t know exactly what yet.  That’s about where the AMS scientists are now.

They are not the first people to discover these high-energy positrons.  We are talking truly high-energy here:  they are concerned with energies from 10 billion electron volts (GeV) up to 350 GeV.  And the higher the energy they look at, the more positrons they see, as a fraction of the total of electrons and positrons together.  Obviously the trend has to poop out somewhere, but the size and shape of the curve has got them more excited than a cat who wanders into a dog park by mistake. 

The AMS experiment is not the first one to find this trend (an unmanned satellite instrument called PAMELA found similar results in 2008), but the AMS data covers a larger energy range and is more accurate.  The data will keep theorists busy for many months or years, and because AMS was designed to operate for at least 20 years, as time goes on they will have even more to work with in the future.

Was AMS worth the $2 billion it took to do it?  Supposedly, when Ben Franklin witnessed the first balloon ascension in Paris in 1783, he was asked what good it was.  His reply?  “What use is a newborn baby?”  I can find a reference to this only on the Scientific Urban Legends webpage, so it may be apocryphal, but Franklin really did witness the first balloon flight, which was the first time a human being left the ground under control (as opposed to falling out of a fifth-story window, for example).  Here 230 years later, more than a century after balloons were used for some of the first cosmic-ray experiments around 1910, we are still hoisting instruments high above the ground to look for the things.  Only this time, we may be closer to figuring out where some of them come from, and in the process we may learn more about what four-fifths of the material universe is made of.  Personally, I’d say that is worth $2 billion, especially if it was spread out over most of the world the way it was.

Sources:  The website Space.com carried an article “Potential dark matter discovery a win for space station science” at http://www.space.com/20499-dark-matter-space-station-ams.html on Apr. 3, 2013.  I also referred to Wikipedia articles on dark matter, WIMPs, PAMELA, and cosmic rays. 

National Research Council Gives NASA a C-

The U. S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has just been judged by a blue-ribbon panel appointed by the National Research Council (NRC) at the instigation of Congress.  That branch of government wanted an independent assessment of NASA’s strategic direction and goals in light of continuing fiscal constraints and national priorities.  The resulting 80-page report is the best summary I have seen of NASA’s past successes, present ills, and possibilities for improving itself in the future. 

Besides the agency’s spectacular successes, ranging from the 1969 lunar landing on down, NASA has also been the organization behind some of the most famous tragedies in the engineering ethics literature.  The losses of the space shuttles Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003 were both preventable disasters that revealed serious problems with NASA’s management and safety structures.  More strategically, NASA has been perceived by many as a set of solutions looking for problems, and the NRC report confirms this picture.

It’s a cliché to say that if you don’t know where you’re going, it will be hard to tell when you get there or how long it will take.  But that is the picture that emerges from the investigation and analysis performed by members of the NRC panel, who visited ten different sites in the widespread NASA organization and took most of a year to compile their results. 

The good news is that there are patches of well-organized high-achieving activity within the organization.  The unmanned space exploration effort, characterized by projects such as the Curiosity Mars rover, has had notable successes and largely stays within budget and on schedule.  It is significant that NASA carries out a periodic ten-year “decadal survey” of the science communities interested in these projects, and a strategic plan for them is thereby updated with extensive international input. 

But with regard to manned spaceflight, the picture is, if not dismal, at least discouraging.  For one thing, the target keeps moving around.  I happened to be in Washington, D. C. the day President George Herbert Walker Bush called for a manned flight to Mars, way back in 1989.  But President Obama has instead brought up the idea of a trip to an asteroid, without saying which one.  The NRC reports the lack of widespread enthusiasm within NASA for the asteroid journey, and in the meantime, if the U. S. wants to put a man in space for any reason right now, we have to go buy tickets from the Russians. 

In some ways, NASA is the victim of its own past successes.  During the Apollo buildup in the 1960s, expensive new facilities were built purposely in many different states to solidify Congressional support for the space effort.  NASA is now saddled with billions of dollars’ worth of real estate occupied by aging specialized test facilities which in many cases have lots of deferred maintenance needed.  Turning these facilities into commercial operations is a nice idea, and in a few places this has worked, but frankly there are not too many commercial users in need of a test stand for a Saturn-V rocket engine, for example.  About a third of NASA’s employees are government civil servants, not contractors, and there are special complications in shifting civil-servant staffing to meet changing needs.

The NRC report doesn’t simply list NASA’s ills; it contains a list of recommendations as well.  Many of the difficulties NASA has encountered result from trying too many ambitious things with insufficient funds.  The NRC realistically admits that the chances of increasing NASA’s total budget are small, so they don’t see an overall increase in funding as a realistic solution. 

They list three other options as more realistic possibilities.  One is strictly downsizing:  sell off underutilized facilities and lay off or retire surplus staff.  This option might work, but as someone who has lived through an organizational downsizing at a university, it creates a poisonous work environment and there is a possibility the treatment might succeed only in killing the patient.  A second option, which is compatible with downsizing, is to reduce the size of NASA’s program portfolio:  in other words, try doing fewer things well more than many things not so well.  To me, this makes the most sense, and is consistent with my blog of June 20, 2011, which examined a proposal for reorganizing NASA around the model of the U. S. Coast Guard. 

The most interesting option proposed by the NRC is to greatly increase national and international cooperative efforts with other U. S. government agencies, private industry, and foreign entities.  Currently, NASA is already moving in that direction with regard to future manned flight hardware, saying that it will assume more of a supervisory role to contractors, who will have greater freedom in developing spacecraft to go to wherever NASA finally decides to go.  But as other nations continue to develop space capabilities that in some ways outstrip those of the U. S., cooperation rather than competition would seem pretty sensible in many cases.

NASA was born in the midst of the Cold War between the U. S. and the USSR, and without that war that wasn’t a war, it never would have received the massive support for the race to the moon, which it did with almost no help from anybody outside the U. S.  Unfortunately, that “not-invented-here” attitude seems to have lingered on in the institution long after it has outlived its usefulness, at least with regard to major manned-flight programs.  But the result has been the end of the Shuttle program without a viable alternative to take its place.

The NRC report ends with an optimistic call to the executive branch and Congress to do something that will focus NASA on a meaningful strategic plan.  (The current NASA planning document is a fuzzy kind of thing that amounts to mom-and-apple-pie for space.)  Given the ongoing near-chaos in Washington, I am not hopeful that the NRC will get what it calls for, and what the rest of the nation deserves from an agency which still has great talent and capabilities.  But if we don’t get action from Washington that puts NASA back on track, at least we have heard clearly from the NRC about exactly what the problems are. 

Sources:  The NRC report (a draft version at this writing) can be downloaded in its entirety from http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=18248.