Alarm On The Moon! – Science Podcast – The Moon Landing had its fair share of ‘adventures’ for the astronauts. On July 20th 1969 an alarm sounded menacingly in ‘The Eagle’ spacecraft… Here is the real life tale of an Alarm On The Moon!

In this audio read by Dr Tony Phillips we learn about the gripping events of July 20th 1969, and leave you to think if you would have been as calm in the astronauts position… (Lasts 8 Minutes)

You can read the article version of this podcast here – Alarm On The Moon!

By Dr Tony Phillips

Neil Armstrong was supposed to be asleep. The moonwalking was done. The moon rocks were stowed away. His ship was ready for departure. In just a few hours, the Eagle’s ascent module would blast off the Moon, something no ship had ever attempted before, and Neil needed his wits about him. He curled up on the Eagle’s engine cover and closed his eyes.

Neil Armstrong's footprint on the Moon.

But he could not sleep.

Neither could Buzz Aldrin. In the cramped lander, Buzz had the sweet spot, the floor. He stretched out as much as he could in his spacesuit and closed his eyes. Nothing happened. On a day like this, what else could you expect…?

July 20, 1969: The day began on the farside of the Moon. Armstrong, Aldrin and crewmate Mike Collins flew their spaceship 60 miles above the cratered wasteland. No one on Earth can see the Moon’s farside. Even today it remains a land of considerable mystery, but the astronauts had no time for sight-seeing. Collins pressed a button, activating a set of springs, and the spaceship split in two. The half named Columbia, with Collins on board, would remain in orbit. The other half, the Eagle, spiraled over the horizon toward the Sea of Tranquillity.

“You are Go for powered descent,” Houston radioed, and the Eagle’s engine fired mightily. The bug-shaped Eagle was so fragile a child could poke a hole through its gold foil exterior. Jagged moonrocks could do much worse. So when Armstrong saw that the computer was guiding them into a boulder field, he quickly took control. The Eagle pitched forward and sailed over the rocks.

Meanwhile, alarms were ringing in the background.

“Program alarm,” announced Armstrong. “It’s a 1202.” The code was so obscure, almost no one knew what it meant. Should they abort? Should they land? “What is it?” he insisted.

Mission Control during the Apollo 11 descent

Scrambling back in Houston, a young engineer named Steve Bales produced the answer: The radar guidance system was pestering the computer with too many interruptions. No problem. “We’ve got you…” radioed Houston. “We’re Go on that alarm.”

And on they went. Things, however, were not going exactly as planned. The Sea of Tranquillity was supposed to be smooth, but it didn’t look so smooth from the cockpit of the Eagle. Armstrong scanned the jumbled mare for a safe place to land. “60 seconds,” radioed Houston. “30 seconds.” Mission control was hushed as the telemetry came in. Soon, too soon, the ship would run out of fuel.

Capcom later claimed the “boys in mission control were turning blue” when Armstrong announced “I [found] a good spot.” As for Armstrong, his heart was thumping 156 beats per minute according to bio-sensors. The fuel gauge read only 5.6% when the Eagle finally settled onto the floor of the Sea of Tranquillity.

Houston (relieved): “We copy you down, Eagle.”

Armstrong (coolly): “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”

Immediately, they prepared to leave. This was NASA being cautious. No one had ever landed on the Moon before. What if a footpad started sinking into the moondust, or the Eagle sprung a leak? While Neil and Buzz made ready to blast off, Houston read the telemetry looking for signs of trouble. There were none, and three hours after touchdown, finally, Houston gave the “okay.” The moonwalk was on.

At 9:56 p.m. EDT, Neil descended the ladder and took “one small step” (left foot first) into history. From the shadow of the Eagle, he looked around: “It has a stark beauty all its own – like the high desert of the United States.” Houston reminded him to gather the “contingency sample,” and Neil put some rocks and soil in his pocket. If, for any reason, the astronauts had to take off in a hurry, scientists back on Earth would get at least a pocketful of the Moon for their experiments.

Soon, Buzz joined him. “Beautiful view!” he exclaimed when he reached the lander’s broad footpad. “Isn’t that something!” agreed Armstrong. “Magnificent sight out here.”

“Magnificent desolation,” said Aldrin.

Buzz Aldrin and the Eagle.

Those two words summed up the yin-yang of the Moon. The impact craters, the toppled boulders, the layers of moondust – it was utterly alien. Yet Tranquillity Base felt curiously familiar, like home. Apollo astronauts on subsequent missions had similar feelings. Maybe this comes from staring at the Moon so often from Earth. Or maybe it’s because the Moon is a piece of Earth, spun off our young planet billions of years ago. No one knows; it just is.

Truly, much of the scene was weird. The airless landscape jumped out at the astronauts with disconcerting clarity and, as a result, the horizon felt unnaturally close. The whole world seemed to curve, a side-effect of the Moon’s short thousand-mile radius. “Distances [here] are deceiving,” noted Aldrin.

The sky was equally baffling. Although the Eagle had landed on a bright lunar morning, the sky was as black as midnight. An astronomer’s paradise? No. Not a single star was visible. The glaring, sunlit ground ruined the astronaut’s night vision. Only Earth itself was bright enough to be seen, luminous blue and white, hanging overhead.

Armstrong was particularly fascinated by moondust, which he kicked and scuffed with his boots. On Earth, kicking dust makes a little cloud in the air – but there is no air on the Moon. “When you kick the surface, [the dust goes out in] a little fan which, to me, is in the shape of a rose petal,” recalls Armstrong. “There’s just a little ring of particles – nothing behind ‘em – no dust, no swirl, no nothing. It’s really unique.”

Enough of that. It was time for work.

Almost forgotten in Apollo lore are the checklists sewn to the forearms of the spacesuits. These “honey-do” memos from NASA were jam-packed with activities – from inspecting the lander to deploying the TV to collecting samples. Some of the tasks were as detailed as bending over and reporting to Mission Control how it went. They had a lot to do.

Buzz Aldrin totes experiments from the Eagle onto the lunar surface.

Neil and Buzz deployed a solar wind collector, a seismometer and a laser retroreflector. They erected a flag and uncovered a plaque proclaiming, “We came in peace for all mankind.” They took the first interplanetary phone call – “I just can’t tell you how proud we all are,” said President Nixon from the Oval Office. They collected 47 lbs of moon rocks and took 166 pictures. Check. Check. Check.

Finally, after two and a half busy, exhilarating hours, it was time to go. The checklist continued: Climb back in the Eagle. Stow the rocks. Eat dinner: Beef stew or cream of chicken soup. And finally, sleep.

That was the limit. “You just are not going to get any sleep while you’re waiting [for liftoff],” Aldrin said after the mission.

The Eagle was not a sleepy place. The tiny cabin was noisy with pumps and bright with warning lights that couldn’t be dimmed. Even the window shades were glowing, illuminated by intense sunshine outside. “After I got into my sleep stage and all settled down, I realized there was something else [bothering me],” said Armstrong. The Eagle had an optical telescope sticking out periscope-style. “Earth was shining right through the telescope into my eye. It was like a light bulb.”

To get some relief, they closed the helmets of their spacesuits. It was quiet inside and they “wouldn’t be breathing all the dust” they had tramped in after the moon walk, said Aldrin. Alas, it didn’t work. The suit’s cooling systems, so necessary out on the scorching lunar surface, were too cold for sleeping inside the Eagle. The best Aldrin managed was a “couple hours of mentally fitful drowsing.” Armstrong simply stayed awake.

When the wake-up call finally came,

“Tranquility Base, Tranquility Base, Houston. Over.”

Armstrong answered with alacrity,

“Good morning, Houston. Tranquility Base. Over.”

It was time to go home, to Earth, for a good night’s sleep.

Magnetic Energy Gets Unleashed! – Science Podcast – NASA is going to launch a mission to get to the bottom of the mystery of how criss-crossing magnetic field lines can trigger a fierce explosion. It’s called MMS, short for Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission, and it consists of four spacecraft which will fly through Earth’s magnetosphere to study reconnection in action.

In this audio read by Dr Tony Phillips we explore exactly what the MMS is and what NASA has in mind for the mission (Lasts 4 Minutes 41 Seconds)

You can read the article version of this podcast here - Magnetic Energy Gets Unleashed!

By Dr Tony Phillips

Magnetic reconnection could be the Universe’s favorite way to make things explode. It operates anywhere magnetic fields pervade space – which is to say almost everywhere. On the sun magnetic reconnection causes solar flares as powerful as a billion atomic bombs. In Earth’s atmosphere, it fuels magnetic storms and auroras. In laboratories, it can cause big problems in fusion reactors. It’s ubiquitous.

The problem is, researchers can’t explain it.

The basics are clear enough. Magnetic lines of force cross, cancel, reconnect and – Bang! Magnetic energy is unleashed in the form of heat and charged-particle kinetic energy.

A cartoon model of magnetic reconnection on the sun.

But how? How does the simple act of crisscrossing magnetic field lines trigger such a ferocious explosion?

“Something very interesting and fundamental is going on that we don’t really understand – not from laboratory experiments or from simulations,” says Melvyn Goldstein, chief of the Geospace Physics Laboratory at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

NASA is going to launch a mission to get to the bottom of the mystery. It’s called MMS, short for Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission, and it consists of four spacecraft which will fly through Earth’s magnetosphere to study reconnection in action. The mission passed its preliminary design review in May 2009 and was approved for implementation in June 2009. Engineers can now start building the spacecraft.

“Earth’s magnetosphere is a wonderful natural laboratory for studying reconnection,” says mission scientist Jim Burch of the Southwest Research Institute. “It is big, roomy, and reconnection is taking place there almost non-stop.” In the outer layers of the magnetosphere, where Earth’s magnetic field meets the solar wind, reconnection events create temporary magnetic “portals” connecting Earth to the sun. Inside the magnetosphere, in a long drawn-out structure called “the magnetotail,” reconnection propels high-energy plasma clouds toward Earth, triggering Northern Lights when they hit. There are many other examples, and MMS will explore them all.

An artist's concept of the four MMS spacecraft flying in formation through the space around Earth.

The four spacecraft will be built at the Goddard Space Flight Center. “Each observatory is shaped like a giant hockey puck, about 12 feet in diameter and 4 feet in height,” says Karen Halterman, MMS Project Manager at Goddard.

The mission’s sensors for monitoring electromagnetic fields and charged particles are being built at a number of universities and laboratories around the country, led by the Southwest Research Institute. When the instruments are done, they will be integrated into the spacecraft frames at Goddard. Launch is scheduled for 2014 onboard an Atlas V rocket.

Any new physics MMS learns could ultimately help alleviate the energy crisis on Earth.

“For many years, researchers have looked to fusion as a clean and abundant source of energy for our planet,” says Burch. “One approach, magnetic confinement fusion, has yielded very promising results with devices such as tokamaks. But there have been problems keeping the plasma (hot ionized gas) contained in the chamber.”

Inside a Tokamak. Image credit: Lawrence Berkeley Labs

In light of this, you might suppose that tokamaks would be a good place to study reconnection. But no, says Burch. Reconnection in a tokamak happens in such a tiny volume, only a few millimeters wide, that it is very difficult to study. It is practically impossible to build sensors small enough to probe the reconnection zone.

Earth’s magnetosphere is much better. In the expansive magnetic bubble that surrounds our planet, the process plays out over volumes as large as tens of kilometers across. “We can fly spacecraft in and around it and get a good look at what’s going on,” he says.

That is what MMS will do: fly directly into the reconnection zone. The spacecraft are sturdy enough to withstand the energetics of reconnection events known to occur in Earth’s magnetosphere, so there is nothing standing in the way of a full two year mission of discovery

See the march of the planets rolling on by as you engage in the visual feast of the universe in this science video accompanied by Bizet

In Search of Antimatter Galaxies MP3 – In this audio we explore NASA’s latest plan to hunt for Antimatter Galaxies, and look at some of the key players and technology that is involved in making it happen. (Lasts 7 Minutes 17 Seconds)

You can read the article version of this podcast here - In Search Of Antimatter Galaxies

By Patrick Barry

NASA’s space shuttle program is winding down. With only about half a dozen more flights, shuttle crews will put the finishing touches on the International Space Station (ISS), bringing to an end twelve years of unprecedented orbital construction. The icon and workhorse of the American space program will have finished its Great Task.

But, as Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs might say, there is one more thing…

An act of Congress in 2008 added another flight to the schedule near the end of the program. Currently scheduled for 2010, this extra flight of the shuttle is going to launch a hunt for antimatter galaxies.

The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer. Image courtesy MIT.

The device that does the actual hunting is called the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer–or AMS for short. It’s a $1.5 billion cosmic ray detector that the shuttle will deliver to the ISS.

In addition to sensing distant galaxies made entirely of antimatter, the AMS will also test leading theories of dark matter, an invisible and mysterious substance that comprises 83 percent of the matter in the universe. And it will search for strangelets, a theoretical form of matter that’s ultra-massive because it contains so-called strange quarks. Better understanding of strangelets will help scientists to study microquasars and tiny, primordial black holes as they evaporate, thus proving whether these small black holes even exist.

All of these exotic phenomena can make their presence known by the ultra-high energy cosmic rays they emit–the type of particles AMS excels in detecting. “For the first time, AMS will measure very high-energy cosmic rays very accurately,” explains Nobel laureate Samuel Ting, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who conceived of the AMS and has guided its development since 1995.

Antimatter galaxies, dark matter, strangelets–these are just the phenomena that scientists already know about. If history is any guide, the most exciting discoveries will be things that nobody has ever imagined. Just as radio telescopes and infrared telescopes once revealed cosmic phenomena that had been invisible to traditional optical telescopes, AMS will open up another facet of the cosmos for exploration.

“We will be exploring whole new territories,” Ting says. “The possibility for discovery is off the charts.”

An aerial view of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer is a sort of "mini-CERN" in space.

Ting often compares AMS with high-powered particle accelerators at facilities such as CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. Rather than detecting high-speed cosmic rays from across the galaxy, these underground accelerators make their own particles locally using tremendous amounts of electrical power. To study the particles, CERN and AMS employ the same basic trick: Both use strong magnetic fields to deflect the particles, and arrays of silicon plates and other sensors inside the detectors track the particles’ curved paths.

Many terabytes of data pour out of these sensors, and supercomputers crunch that data to infer each particle’s mass, energy, and electric charge. The supercomputer is part of why AMS must be mounted onto the ISS rather than being a free-flying satellite. AMS produces far too much data to beam down to Earth, so it must carry an onboard supercomputer with 650 CPUs to do the number crunching in orbit. Partly because of this giant computer, AMS requires 2.5 kilowatts of power — far more than a normal satellite’s solar panels can provide, but well within the space station’s 100 kilowatt power supply.

MIT physics professor Samuel Ting, 1976 Nobel Laureate and leader of the AMS team.

“AMS is basically an all-purpose particle detector moved into space,” Ting says.

There are two important differences between AMS and underground accelerators, though. First, AMS will detect particles such as heavy nuclei that have vastly higher energies than particle accelerators can muster. The most powerful particle accelerator in the world, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, can collide particles with a combined energy of about 7 tera-electronvolts (TeV, a common way to measure energy in particle physics). In contrast, cosmic rays can have energies of 100 million TeV or more. The other important difference is that accelerators smash particles into each other to learn about the particles themselves, while AMS will sample high-energy particles from deep space for the sake of learning more about the cosmos.

For example, a longstanding mystery in cosmology is the case of the missing antimatter. According to physicists’ best models, the Big Bang should have produced just as much antimatter as matter. So, where did all the antimatter go? It can’t be nearby, because if it were, we would see bright X-ray emissions where the antimatter came into contact with matter and annihilated.

One explanation could be that some distant galaxies are made entirely of antimatter instead of matter. Since antimatter doesn’t look any different than ordinary matter, astronomers would not be able to tell whether a distant galaxy is made of matter or antimatter just by looking at it. However, AMS would find strong evidence of antimatter galaxies if it detected even a single nucleus of anti-helium or a heavier antimatter element.

Collisions among cosmic rays near Earth can produce antimatter particles, but the odds of these collisions producing an intact anti-helium nucleus are so vanishingly small that finding even one anti-helium nucleus would strongly suggest that the nucleus had drifted to Earth from a distant region of the universe dominated by antimatter.

Other instruments such as the Italian PAMELA satellite have looked for anti-helium nuclei, but none have been sensitive enough to rule out the existence of antimatter galaxies. AMS has about 200 times the particle-collecting power of anything that has flown before. If AMS detects no anti-helium nuclei, Ting says scientists will know that there are no antimatter galaxies within about 1000 megaparsecs — or roughly to the edge of the observable universe.

An artist's concept of the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer installed on the International Space Station.

Another mystery that AMS will help solve is the nature of dark matter. Scientists know that the vast majority of the universe is actually made of unseen dark matter rather than ordinary matter. They just don’t know what dark matter is. A leading theory is that dark matter is made of a particle called the neutralino. Collisions between neutralinos should produce a large number of high-energy positrons, so AMS could prove whether dark matter is made of neutralinos by looking for this excess of energetic positrons.

“For the first time we could find out what dark matter is made of,” Ting says.