Last week ended with the encouraging cosmological news that the Heterodyne Instrument for the Far Infrared (HiFi), on the Herschel Space Observatory, is once again working. How stars are born, and the influence of the environments in which this takes place is, as you might imagine, an important astrophysical question. Part of Herschel’s mission is to address this issue by using HiFi, which is a high-resolution spectrometer, to provide detailed measurements of the composition of stellar nurseries. This question is also important for cosmology, where we are increasingly interested in the details of how galaxies formed and evolved over cosmic time, in order to be able to separate out the astrophysics from the features of large scale structure that are sensitively dependent on the background cosmology.

Herschel, which was launched along with the Planck satellite, but a few months into operation, HiFi developed an electronics problem and was switched off. This week, after a careful study of the incident, HiFi’s reserve electronics were switched on, and appear to be working correctly. While HiFi was down, Herschel’s other two instruments – Pacs and Spire were able to hog the observing time and do some lovely far-infrared and sub-millimeter science. To make up for this, the plan is now to give HiFi a larger slice of the observing pie for a while, in order to make sure it can accomplish its mission.

All in all this is wonderful news for cosmology and I’m delighted that another of our suite of outstanding experiments is once again up and running. One thing did make me giggle a little though. Speaking to the BBC, Frank Helmich, who leads HiFi, pulls one of my favorite academic tricks, saying

“I don’t watch much television but I know Crime Scene Investigation and this was just such an investigation – but in space! We found out what happened and then we designed all the mitigating measures,”

The CSI angle is a mild attempt to connect with popular culture for the benefit of the large and diverse readership of a BBC story, and I think that isn’t a bad idea at all. But what I find hilarious is the initial qualification. Although irrelevant to the point, it has to be said anyway, to satisfy what I’ve referred to before as the unspoken academic code, which I’ve paraphrased as

“Do not engage in any activity that is part of popular culture. Such activities include, but are not limited to; playing video games, playing card games (bridge excepted), watching movies without a serious social message and watching television (PBS, in particular NOVA, occasionally excepted). Any violation of the above may lead to a stubborn stain on your intellectual reputation, which may only be removed by repeatedly attending highly experimental theater.”

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to some interpretive dance.