An artist concept of JWST Credit: NASA

This is unconfirmed by the way and it seems there is some he said/she said going on.

The following article by Keith Cowing will get you up to speed.

NASA May Slip Webb Space Telescope Launch as Late as 2024

Industry sources report that Northrop Grumman will begin to layoff personnel working on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) next month for budgetary and scheduling reasons. JWST was originally supposed to have been launched in 2007. This launch date has officially slipped to no earlier than 2017-2018. According to sources, NASA Associate Administrator Chris Scolese told a group of aerospace executives this week that running JWST at a rate of $375 million a year would result in a launch date of 2022-2024.

The cost of JWST has grown from an initial $1 billion estimate to $2 billion – then to $4 billion – and is now estimated to be $7 billion. In other words the cost increase sucks $6 billion out of NASA’s budget – money that would have otherwise gone to other space science projects.

If this continues, universities are going to see funds for non-JWST projects dry up. Contractors who might have had a chance to bid on other projects will now be forced to change their line of business to pursue other types of projects. The result of all of this will be loss of expertise int he work force in academia, the private sector – and at NASA.

NASA PAO has responded to NASA Watch stating: “The statement attributed to Chris Scolese is inaccurate. NASA is currently working with contractors and international partners to assess the budget and schedule and develop a sustainable path forward for the JWST program that is based on a realistic cost and schedule assessment. NASA is completing the assessments and developing a new baseline. NASA will complete its new baseline cost and schedule assessment for JWST in the summer of 2011. This information will be used in formulation of the FY 2013 budget request. A decision on JWST’s launch date is contingent upon the outcome of these activities.”

Keith’s 4:30 pm update: Note that NASA does not dispute the fact that Scolese mentioned that the annual $375 million spending rate would result in a slip to 2022-2024 – rather, that they are studying things … stay tuned.

Keith’s 7:15 pm update: According to Northrop Grumman’s spokesman Lon Rains “We are not planning a Webb layoff in June”.

NASA Watch stands by its sources.

This artist's conception illustrates a Jupiter-like planet alone in the dark of space, floating freely without a parent star. Astronomers recently uncovered evidence for 10 such lone worlds, thought to have been "booted," or ejected, from developing solar systems. Credit: PlanetQuest /NASA

LOL I fixed the rogue/rouge debacle.  Hey as long as Marian didn’t see it, she’d pick on me terrible.  

Planets without stars, sure why not? Finding them is the hard part considering how hard it is to find brown dwarf stars which do emit a little light.  Apparently these orphan planets have been found in a joint survey done by Japan and New Zealand in 2006 and 2007 looking toward the galactic center. Ten such planets apparently have been found between 10,000 to 20,000 light years from Earth and there is speculation the planets may be more common than stars.

I’ve GOT to find out more about this, for now this story from PlanetQuest will have to do:

PASADENA, Calif. — Astronomers, including a NASA-funded team member, have discovered a new class of Jupiter-sized planets floating alone in the dark of space, away from the light of a star. The team believes these lone worlds were probably ejected from developing planetary systems.

The discovery is based on a joint Japan-New Zealand survey that scanned the center of the Milky Way galaxy during 2006 and 2007, revealing evidence for up to 10 free-floating planets roughly the mass of Jupiter. The isolated orbs, also known as orphan planets, are difficult to spot, and had gone undetected until now. The newfound planets are located at an average approximate distance of 10,000 to 20,000 light-years from Earth.

“Although free-floating planets have been predicted, they finally have been detected, holding major implications for planetary formation and evolution models,” said Mario Perez, exoplanet program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

The discovery indicates there are many more free-floating Jupiter-mass planets that can’t be seen. The team estimates there are about twice as many of them as stars. In addition, these worlds are thought to be at least as common as planets that orbit stars. This would add up to hundreds of billions of lone planets in our Milky Way galaxy alone.

“Our survey is like a population census,” said David Bennett, a NASA and National Science Foundation-funded co-author of the study from the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Ind. “We sampled a portion of the galaxy, and based on these data, can estimate overall numbers in the galaxy.”

The study, led by Takahiro Sumi from Osaka University in Japan, appears in the May 19 issue of the journal Nature.

The survey is not sensitive to planets smaller than Jupiter and Saturn, but theories suggest lower-mass planets like Earth should be ejected from their stars more often. As a result, they are thought to be more common than free-floating Jupiters.

Previous observations spotted a handful of free-floating, planet-like objects within star-forming clusters, with masses three times that of Jupiter. But scientists suspect the gaseous bodies form more like stars than planets. These small, dim orbs, called brown dwarfs, grow from collapsing balls of gas and dust, but lack the mass to ignite their nuclear fuel and shine with starlight. It is thought the smallest brown dwarfs are approximately the size of large planets.

On the other hand, it is likely that some planets are ejected from their early, turbulent solar systems, due to close gravitational encounters with other planets or stars. Without a star to circle, these planets would move through the galaxy as our sun and other stars do, in stable orbits around the galaxy’s center. The discovery of 10 free-floating Jupiters supports the ejection scenario, though it’s possible both mechanisms are at play.

“If free-floating planets formed like stars, then we would have expected to see only one or two of them in our survey instead of 10,” Bennett said. “Our results suggest that planetary systems often become unstable, with planets being kicked out from their places of birth.”

The observations cannot rule out the possibility that some of these planets may have very distant orbits around stars, but other research indicates Jupiter-mass planets in such distant orbits are rare.

The survey, the Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics (MOA), is named in part after a giant wingless, extinct bird family from New Zealand called the moa. A 5.9-foot (1.8-meter) telescope at Mount John University Observatory in New Zealand is used to regularly scan the copious stars at the center of our galaxy for gravitational microlensing events. These occur when something, such as a star or planet, passes in front of another, more distant star. The passing body’s gravity warps the light of the background star, causing it to magnify and brighten. Heftier passing bodies, like massive stars, will warp the light of the background star to a greater extent, resulting in brightening events that can last weeks. Small planet-size bodies will cause less of a distortion, and brighten a star for only a few days or less.

A second microlensing survey group, the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE), contributed to this discovery using a 4.2-foot (1.3 meter) telescope in Chile. The OGLE group also observed many of the same events, and their observations independently confirmed the analysis of the MOA group.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena,Calif., manages NASA’s Exoplanet Exploration program office. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

The crew of STS-134 arrives at the ISS. Credit: NASA / NASA TV

The shuttle Endeavour in mission STS-134 has docked to the International Space station for probably the last time.

The hatch has been opened and the STS-134: Commander Mark Kelly, Pilot Gregory H. Johnson and Mission Specialists Michael Fincke, Greg Chamitoff, Andrew Feustel and European Space Agency astronaut Roberto Vittori were welcomed aboard by the Expedition 27 crew.

During the 16-day mission, Endeavour and its crew will deliver the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) and spare parts including two S-band communications antennas, a high-pressure gas tank and additional spare parts for Dextre.

Incidentally, Gabby Gifford, wife of Mark Kelly is undergoing surgery to replace the portion of her skull removed and reassembled after she was shot in early January.  She is having a plastic replacement as her actual bone has been contaminated. The plastic replacement is not out of the ordinary and is very tough, so all that is good news and the truly miracle recovery continues.  I can’t imagine how Marks mind must be racing with all that is going on.

The Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope, the largest fully steerable radio telescope located in Green Bank West Virginia. Credit NRAO

In a post I did a couple of weeks ago A Setback for SETI and how just when they had real targets the proverbial rug was being pulled from beneath them.

As it turns out they do have a little life yet (YAY! Personally I think it’s a waste not to spend money on the space program, after all it is a whooping penny per dollar of my tax money we spend more money on worse things). Just a few days after that post went up the search did begin on a limited basis when the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope dedicated an hour to eight stars with possible planets. The estimated 1-million SETI@home users will provide more detailed analysis once there is 24 hours of data on 86 Earth-like planets.

Yes all the planets being targeted are in the so called Goldilocks zone of their stars.

The University of California Berkeley press release:

Now that NASA’s Kepler space telescope has identified 1,235 possible planets around stars in our galaxy, astronomers at the University of California, Berkeley, are aiming a radio telescope at the most Earth-like of these worlds to see if they can detect signals from an advanced civilization.

The search began on Saturday, May 8, when the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope — the largest steerable radio telescope in the world — dedicated an hour to eight stars with possible planets. Once UC Berkeley astronomers acquire 24 hours of data on a total of 86 Earth-like planets, they’ll initiate a coarse analysis and then, in about two months, ask an estimated 1 million SETI@home (http://seti.berkeley.edu/) users to conduct a more detailed analysis on their home computers.

“It’s not absolutely certain that all of these stars have habitable planetary systems, but they’re very good places to look for ET,” said UC Berkeley graduate student Andrew Siemion.

The Green Bank telescope will stare for about five minutes at stars in the Kepler survey that have a candidate planet in the star’s habitable zone — that is, the planet has a surface temperature at which liquid water could be maintained.

“We’ve picked out the planets with nice temperatures — between zero and 100 degrees Celsius — because they are a lot more likely to harbor life,” said physicist Dan Werthimer, chief scientist for SETI@home and a veteran SETI researcher.

Werthimer leads a 30-year-old SETI project on the world’s largest radio telescope, the Arecibo receiver in Puerto Rico, which feeds data to SETI@home for a detailed analysis that could only be done on the world’s largest distributed computer. He was involved in an early SETI project with the previous Green Bank telescope, which collapsed from structural failure in 1988, as well as with the Allen Telescope Array (ATA), which also conducted a broader search for intelligent signals from space run by the SETI Institute of Mountain View, Calif. The ATA went into hibernation mode last month after the SETI Institute and UC Berkeley ran out of money to operate it.

“With Arecibo, we focus on stars like our Sun, hoping that they have planets around them that emit intelligent signals,” Werthimer said. “But we’ve never had a list of planets like this before.”

The radio dish in rural West Virginia was needed for the new search because the Arecibo dish cannot view the area of the northern sky on which Kepler focuses. But the Green Bank telescope also offers advantages over Arecibo. UC Berkeley’s SETI observations piggyback on other astronomical observations at Arecibo, and is limited in the wavelength range it can observe, which centers on the 21 centimeter (1420 MHz) line where hydrogen emits light. These wavelengths easily pass through the dust clouds that obscure much of the galaxy.

“Searching for ET around the 21 centimeter line works if civilizations are broadcasting intentionally, but what if planets are leaking signals like ‘I Love Lucy’?” Werthimer said. “With a new data recorder on the Green Bank telescope, we can scan a 800 megahertz range of frequencies simultaneously, which is 300 times the range we can get at Arecibo.”

Thus, one day on the Green Bank telescope provides as much data as one year’s worth of observations at Arecibo: about 60 terabytes (60,000 gigabytes) in all, Siemion said. If they recorded a similar chunk of the radio spectrum from Arecibo, SETI@home would be overwhelmed with data, since the Arecibo sky survey observes nearly full time for years on end.

“It’s also great that we will completely span the water hole, a canonical place to look for intentional signals from intelligent civilizations,” Siemion said.

The water hole is a relatively quiet region of the radio spectrum in the universe and a range of wavelengths not significantly absorbed by material between the stars and galaxies. The water hole is bounded on one end by the 21 cm emissions from neutral hydrogen and on the other by the 18 cm emissions from the hydroxyl ion (OH). Because life is presumed to require the existence of liquid water, and water is composed of hydrogen and hydroxyl, this range was dubbed the water hole and seen as a natural window in which water-based life forms would signal their existence. That makes the water hole a favorite of SETI projects.

“This is an interesting place, perhaps a beacon frequency, to look for signals from extraterrestrial civilizations,” Siemion added.

The 86 stars were chosen from the 1,235 candidate planetary systems — called Kepler Objects of Interest, or KOIs — with the help of Kepler team member Geoffrey Marcy, professor of astronomy at UC Berkeley. UC Berkeley’s targets include the 54 KOIs identified by the Kepler team as being in the habitable temperature range and with sizes ranging from Earth-size to larger than Jupiter; 10 KOIs not on the Kepler team’s habitable list but with orbits less than three times Earth’s orbit and orbital periods greater than 50 days; and all systems with four or more possible planets.

After the Green Bank telescope has targeted each star, it will scan the entire Kepler field for signals from planets other than the 86 targets.

A coarse analysis of the data by Werthimer and his team will be followed by a more thorough analysis by SETI@home users, who will be able to see whether they are analyzing Green Bank data as opposed to Arecibo data. The complete analysis for intelligent signals could take a year, Werthimer said.

“If you extrapolate from the Kepler data, there could be 50 billion planets in the galaxy,” he said. “It’s really exciting to be able to look at this first batch of Earth-like planets.”

# # #

The Green Bank telescope is operated by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, with funds provided by the National Science Foundation (NSF). SETI@home is supported by NSF, NASA and private donations.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I’ll be watching the 08:56 am (ET) launch.  All still looks good.

Oh BTW, Rob, I’ve not forgotten you, the riddle prize will soon be on its way.

Video

The figure to the left comes from a short paper in The American Journal of Human Genetics, A Revised Root for the Human Y Chromosomal Phylogenetic Tree: The Origin of Patrilineal Diversity in Africa. The paper is interesting because of two factors: 1) they sequenced more of the Y chromosome 2) their African data set of individuals was very large, in excess of 2,000. The weird thing about the results is that it upends one of the truisms in human phylogenetics: that African Pygmies and Khoisan are basal to other human lineages. By this, I mean that they “split off” first (this is why people say these are the “oldest” human populations). This is not what these researchers found. Rather, the basal Y chromosomal haplogroups were concentrated in Central West Africa and Northwest Africa! The map below shows the distributions of the two most divergent Y chromosomal lineages, red being the outgroup, and green being the second most divergent:

A second major point in this paper is that they recalculated the coalescence back to the last common ancestor ...

I’ve been pretty vocal about the impending specter of genetic paternalism in relation to personal genomics, which I believe to be futile in the long term, and likely to squelch innovation in the United States in the short term. Like any new product category there’s a lot of hype and confusion in the area of personal genomics, but I think it’s important that we allow some mistakes and misfires to occur. Innovation and creativity isn’t failure-free.

With that said, I also think it is incumbent upon the personal genomics community, if there is such a thing, to “police” the flow of information. I have seen references in the media to a new personal genomics kit, Sports X Factor, selling for $180, from AIBioTech. My initial intent was to ignore this, as there is real science and tech to be covered. This is just another case of a biotech firm trying to leverage public confusion and gullibility into revenue. But if I think such a thing, I should make my opinion known, shouldn’t I?

So here’s the bottom line: If you don’t want to waste $180, don’t purchase a Sports X Factor kit, it’s just not worth the ...

1) First, a post from the past: Pentecostals are stupid? Unitarians are smart?.

2) Weird search query of the week: “aki kaurismaki”

3) Comment of the week, in response to “Fixing science, in part”:

In one of Ben Goldacre’s books he cites a study about publication bias which shows that there’s a publication bias in studies about publication bias. Given reasonable assumptions about distributions, people aren’t publishing studies which would show only a small bias. I don’t k now if this is hilarious or just demonstrates how severe a problem publication bias is.

4) And finally, your weekly fluff fix:

Does penis radiological shadow indicate the side of hip fracture?
“Sir,

Hip fractures are common injuries in the elderly. Standard radiographic evaluation of the hip includes an anteroposterior (AP) view of the pelvis. For this additional purpose, radiograph of the pelvis is one of the commonest prescribed radiographs in emergency departments. Usually we notice the fractured hip side and the type of fracture, whenever we are looking at an anteroposterior pelvis radiograph. But we do not question if this radiograph represents a true anteroposterior view.

We have noticed that the radiological shadow of the penis almost always turns to the side of the hip fracture in male patients and especially in displaced fractures. Many surgeons have tried to explain this observation.

So we would like to test the hypothesis that the radiological shadow of the penis indicates the side of the hip fracture.

In our retrospective study, 712 male patients with hip fracture were included. In order to test our hypothesis we studied their first pelvis radiograph on admission, before operation. Intertrochanteric hip fracture was noticed in 475 cases and subcapital hip fracture in 237 cases. All the patients had no history of previous ...

In my last post, I noted that the Los Alamitos Unified School District has put in place a policy to “teach the controversy” over climate science. (News report here.) If this was evolution rather than climate science, such an action might draw a First Amendment, church-and-state lawsuit. But as I pointed out,

Last I checked, libertarianism does not qualify as a religion that cannot be imposed due to the separation of church and state. So what I’m wondering is, when a school district acts this way, what can one do?

Since then I’ve caught wind of an interesting legal theory. The notion is that if a teacher–global warming’s equivalent of John Scopes–were to teach good science in the classroom, refusing to engage in phony “balance” or teach a nonexistent “controversy,” and was then reprimanded/censored by a school board, you might wind up with a free speech claim, rather than an establishment clause claim.

I have no idea if this is a colorable legal theory. I am no First Amendment lawyer–but what do others think? Given the mounting number of conflicts around climate science teaching, I think it is worth asking what kinds of legal risks a school board may face if it tries to mandate the teaching of bad science–but not religion–in the classroom.