For the last few months I’ve been taken with what is becoming an unwieldy fascination.  It’s called radio astronomy. Turns out to be something that amateurs can actually take up.  There are a few websites devoted to the subject.  It’s not like antique cars or photography for which there are hordes of devotees and whole industries supplying equipment.  Oh no.  This field requires some freakish overlaps of interest- e.g., RF electronics and astronomy.

For some years now I have been a volunteer at a local observatory. It is a very nice facility and it is operated by some gifted folk. We have a custom setup featuring an 18 inch Cassegrain in an automated dome.  Because of other obligations my participation waxes and wanes like the phases of Venus.  We volunteers give star talks to visitors who arrive in great squirming masses for a glimpse of the cosmos.  We give star talks because we often have to wait for the sky to darken or for the clouds to pass. When the sky opens up, we take a dozen visitors up into the dome and skate around the celestial sphere for the eye candy.

Being a chemist and not an astronomer, I have to avoid delving too deeply into the science during a star talk because, again, I’m not an astronomer.  But this business of being a chemist (an atom scientist) in an observatory has forced me to think about what it is that we’re really trying to do in introducing the public to astronomy. 

It is very easy to present astronomy as the science of telescopes and constellations.  After all, we navigate the skies by referencing the constellations and we look at the interesting objects through an impressively large, yet nimble, optical device.  People leave after an evening of viewing being greatly impressed with the telescope and the observatory.  You can’t help it.  It’s cool stuff.

But the telescopes and all the assorted apparatus are really not the focus of the activity. Astronomy is really about the stuff that is across the vast distance in deep space. How much stuff is out there? What is the stuff doing? And, what kind of stuff is it? They’re George Carlin questions. These are really the central questions of astronomy but we largely pass by the details of the stuff in favor of the show business aspect- the whizbang stuff that you need to keep everyones attention for 45 minutes.  But, the goal is to capture the fancy of K-12 students, so juicing up the show with some mind blowing stuff is OK.  It is fascinating to note that it is the adults that have the hardest time keeping on track.

Whizbang astronomy is necessary to keep the public coming in because most visitors do not have a physics background. To really appreciate the subtleties it helps to have some book learnin’.  Public outreach is not about true learning.  True learning requires struggle and most people are not inclined to struggle with a physics concept for very long. Public outreach is about info-tainment.  

This isn’t a condemnation or criticism. It just stems from the nature of population interest distributions and the bell curve.  I’d fall asleep at a car show or a botany conference.

So, the goal is to evaluate a modest radio telescope capability.  There are several parts of the spectrum that offer signals to detect that are within the realm of possibility for a hacker like myself.  One band is from 20 to 24 MHz. The other is the H(I) line at 1420 MHz, or 21 cm. The sun and Jupiter are active in the 20 MHz range. There is a program sponsored by NASA devoted to solar and Jovian radio observation called Radio Jove.  For a few hundred dollars it is possible to assemble a radio telescope- a receiver and a dipole antennna- to listen to 20 MHz signals eminating from Jupiter and Io.  Picking up 21 cm radiation will likely require a 3 meter dish in order to get enough decibels of signal gain going into the detector. Anyway, this antenna technology is part of my learning curve.

Introducing folks to radio astronomy will serve as a kind of counterpoint and will require that people venture away from the narrow optical band. It requires that we think about the observation of signals that have no visual counterpart and what clues it may afford regarding the condition of matter.

This post is about NASA. Yes, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.  I have been watching NASA-TV for a few months and have experienced a kind of crippling inverse rapture.  NASA-TV is video pageantry designed to spread the gospel of rocketry and aerospace and I guess that is fine.  But it is mostly whizbang content that lacks a bit of substance.

Well, duh.  Of course.  They’re in the launch business, dummy.

I’m actually not going negative on NASA.  I believe in what the agency is doing and I’m pleased to pay taxes to support it.  But if you listen to what NASA people say, much of what they do is related to supporting the “science package”.  This is because space scientists need rocketeers to hurtle things out of the gravity well for them.

But this NASA venue never seems to pony up the science itself.  I have yet to see NASA-generated programming that offers much of the actual scientific grits and gravy.  Obviously, every morsel is written up in journal articles and fashioned into PowerPoint presentations to be scrutinized by squinting fuss-budgets (you know, “scientists”) in colloquia everywhere.  If you want to see the actual scientific results then you have to plop down at a university library with a journal and read the article or pay to download copy.  That’s fine, but this only serves the specialists.

It may be due to the nature of the funding. A PI comes in with a big wad of cash from a grant and basically NASA just provides the launch and control services.  NASA has no particular claim over the data or its disposition. Perhaps someone can set me straight on this.

Irrespective of how NASA works, here is what I’m frustrated with. Seeing the drama of the launch, the machinations of getting a probe to it’s destination, and then receiving the pretty pictures as the only reward. It puts me into insulin shock.  NASA is good at programming this kind of content- the Hope and Crosby road trip angle. But what are the results? What measurements were taken and what did we learn? NASA teases us with the show business end of space exploration but comes up short in communicating the scientific results.

So, here is what I’d like to see.  I would like to see a few researchers, with the support of NASA, periodically present their results to the public on NASA TV. I’d like to see the data and their conclusions and uncertainties- warts and all.  The public needs to see this.  Endless footage of exuberant space reseachers gushing at the potential benefits for mankind have worn thin.  It is time for these folks to tell us exactly what they are finding.

But some suggest that maybe raw science is too advanced for the public audience.  I’ve heard this sentiment before and can only argue that it is not NASA’s job to decide if we’re smart enough to understand the results from this research.  If the launch is important enough to spend $300 million on, then lets see what we learned.

The message we give people is that space science is the science of telescopes and rockets. This equipment is inportant, but it is not the focus of the activity. We launch these packages so we can study the stuff that is out there. How much stuff is there, what is the stuff doing and, what is that stuff anyway?  Let’s hear more about the stuff.

The public needs to see how data is collected and how it is reduced to some kind of conclusion.  Much of NASA TV consists of video feed from the ISS.  It is often mind numbing in it’s tedium, watching astronauts floating in front of a work station twiddling this or that. To hell with that.  Let’s see some data.  Let’s hear the scientists interpret their results.  Let’s all experience the buzz of enlightenment as a new concept washes over our consciousness. That is the true excitement of science.