Whitworth University student scores competitive NASA scholarship

Whitworth University sophomore Brayden Hollis is keeping some pretty high-flying company. The Hillsboro, Ore., native is one of just 100 students in the U.S. to receive NASA’s Motivating Undergraduates in Science and Technology (MUST) Scholarship. It’s a great deal for science students; the scholarship provides up to $10,000 for tuition and fees and also includes a 10-week paid summer internship at a NASA field center.

Whitworth University sophomore Brayden
Hollis, a triple major in computer science,
physics, and math, has been awarded a highly
competitive MUST scholarship from NASA.
Photo: Whitworth University.

Hollis stumbled across a listing for the scholarship on the Whitworth website last year. The description said the program was available to students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Hollis said it sounded like him.

“I’m a computer science major, physics major, and math major, which covered three of those,” he said. “Plus I’d done some robotics in high school. I thought I sounded perfect for the scholarship.”

Noting his three majors and 4.0 grade average, NASA agreed and gave Hollis the word last summer that he’d been accepted for the MUST Scholarship. He’s hoping to hear some time in March where he’ll spend his summer internship. He’s applied for a couple of them at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland and another at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.

Hollis said he had not been considering a career in aerospace, but rather was leaning toward computer science.

“I like physics and math a lot as well, and they also all work together really well,” he said, adding that the scholarship is a great opportunity to get some experience.

“It will give me a chance to actually experience computer science and both physics and math in the real world. There are a lot of different opportunities I can apply for, so I can test out a few different ones and see where I want to go and what I want to do.”

The sciences are booming at Whitworth, where the number of science majors has doubled in the last ten years.  About a quarter of the university’s 3,000 students are now majoring in a science field.

“The programs here are really good,” Hollis said. “I’ve been really happy with all of my teachers and my classes. I feel like I’m learning a lot.”

Susan Mabry is Hollis’s NASA mentor, program advisor, and a Whitworth associate professor of computer science. She describes Hollis as an exceptional and well-rounded student who thoroughly enjoys being challenged.

“Brayden is one of those rare students who looks beyond grades or position – he focuses on learning, on mastering material and on seeking ways to employ that knowledge,” Mabry said.

Education is a key at NASA, as explained by its administrator, Charlie Bolden, on a recent visit to Seattle. The MUST Project aims to attract and retain underserved and underrepresented students in STEM through a progression of educational opportunities.

Investments in super bright students such as Hollis seem destined to return great dividends.

Stardust NExT a smashing success

NASA's Stardust-NExT mission took this image of comet Tempel
 1 at 8:39 p.m. PST on Feb 14, 2011, from a distance of approximately
185 kilometers (114.9 miles). The comet was first visited by NASA's
Deep Impact mission in 2005.
Photo credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell.

Stardust NExT flew by the comet Tempel 1 on Valentine’s Day, and investigators for the mission are labeling it a “100 percent success.” The mission met all of its goals, which included observing surface features that changed in areas previously seen during the 2005 Deep Impact mission, imaging new terrain, and viewing the crater generated when Deep Impact slammed an impactor into the comet.

Stardust NExT is the same craft that visited comet Wild 2 seven years ago and returned samples of comet dust to Earth. University of Washington astronomy Prof. Don Brownlee was the lead investigator on that mission, and a co-investigator on Stardust NExT. Brownlee said the spacecraft had a rocky approach to Tempel 1.

“The data indicate Stardust went through something similar to a B-17 bomber flying through flak in World War II,” he said. “Instead of having a little stream of uniform particles coming out, they apparently came out in chunks and crumbled.”

Alice’s Astro Info has a nice summary of Deep Impact and the two Stardust missions.

Stardust has Valentine's date with comet Tempel 1

Call it an outer space version of the seven year itch. That’s how long it has been since the Stardust spacecraft split with comet Wild 2 and sent a thimble full of comet dust back toward Earth. Monday—Valentine’s Day—the craft, now dubbed Stardust NExT, has a date to pass within 125 miles of comet Tempel 1. It will snap some photos of the crater made when a probe from Deep Impact smacked into the comet in 2005 and do some other analysis of the comet and the particles flowing from it.

Prof. Don Brownlee.
UW photo by Mary Levin.

There’s a University of Washington connection to the mission. Prof. Don Brownlee of the UW Astronomy Department was the lead investigator for Stardust, and is a co-investigator for Stardust NExT. Vince Stricherz has a great article about the missions on the UW news site. Stricherz writes that Brownlee says there’s been a bit of luck involved in the wildly successful mission.

“Had we known at the time of the Wild 2 flyby how comets worked, we would have been even more nervous. There were jets at sonic speeds, and there were clumps of material coming out from the comet and breaking up,” he said. "That’s scary when you know a particle larger than a centimeter across – less than half an inch – could destroy the spacecraft, along with years of planning and work.”

Interestingly, the mission provides a double-double. It’s the first time the same spacecraft has visited two different comets, and the first time a comet has been visited by two different spacecraft. It will be the last encounter for Stardust, however. It is about out of fuel and will pretty much just coast on its own from here on out. It’s been a pretty effective craft, though. It has traveled about 3.6 billion miles since it was launched in 1999. It carried about 22 gallons of hydrazine fuel. That’s 164 million miles per gallon!

Bolden urges kids to hit the books, blaze new trails

NASA administrator Charlie Bolden was in Seattle last weekend to celebrate the legacy of one of America’s fallen astronauts, Spokane native Mike Anderson, who died in the shuttle Columbia tragedy eight years ago. Today the Museum of Flight is home to the Michael P. Anderson Memorial Aerospace Program, which gives underserved children of color from around the state the opportunity to participate in the museum’s educational programs. Saturday dozens of kids, their parents, and a big crowd of community members gathered at the Museum of Flight.

NASA administrator Charlie Bolden spoke during a Black History
Month program Feb. 5 at the Museum of Flight in Seattle. "It's one
of my great pleasures as NASA administrator to talk to young people
about my experiences and help them decide if a career in science,
technology, engineering, or math is for them," he said.
Photo: Ted Huetter, Museum of Flight.

“Each February NASA joins with the nation in recognizing National Black History Month,” Bolden said. “It’s a time to recognize the enormous contributions of African-Americans to our nation’s achievements. It’s also a moment to reflect on how far we have come as a nation. When I was a young man, my service as NASA’s first African-American administrator under the nation’s first black president would have been nearly unthinkable. Through the efforts of many people of all races, our nation has really changed. Thanks to the space shuttle program and NASA’s cross-disciplinary missions, African-Americans and many others have had access to space and also to science and technological careers.”

“I like to tell young people that I hope they will take the progress of previous generations, the example of people such as Mike Anderson, and make it their own,” Bolden added. “That they will blaze their own trails.”

Doug King, president and CEO of the Museum of Flight, said there’s never been a better time for education at NASA.

“No agency in the federal government has done more for education, and I include the Department of Education, than NASA,” King said. “Over the years NASA has contributed in so many ways at every level of education. Not just in inspiration, getting young people excited, but in research, in helping people step through careers into aerospace and so many other fields.”

Bolden told the gathering that’s a key part of the agency’s mission.

“President Obama challenges us to focus heavily on science and technology development to meet the country’s future needs,” he said. “At NASA we’re proud of our continuing investments in the future of the U.S. science and technology workforce, investments that will help us to win the future with more opportunities and more capabilities. If all of us here today follow the example of Mike Anderson and dedicate ourselves to strive for excellence in all that we do, we’ll ensure that President Obama’s goal to out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build every other nation in the world becomes reality, and will guarantee that we maintain technological leadership in the world.”

This statue of astronaut Mike Anderson is outside
the Museum of Flight in Seattle. Anderson died in the
Columbia tragedy, but his legacy lives on through
the Michael P. Anderson Memorial Aerospace
Program. Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

Bolden embraces the educational mission.

“It’s one of my great pleasures as NASA administrator to talk to young people about my experiences and help them decide if a career in science, technology, engineering, or math is for them,” he said. “Certainly we need more people pursuing those careers, and we need more minorities and women in those careers. Those groups are underrepresented in high-tech careers, even though there are countless examples, most especially at NASA, of women and minorities who have excelled and really made their mark in these fields.”

Several other African-American aerospace professionals joined with Bolden to talk about their paths to success. The panel included former Tuskegee Airman Ed Drummond; Lt. Col. Kimberly Scott, an Alaska Airlines pilot and U.S. Air Force Reserve C-17 pilot; Lt. Col. Rod Lewis, commander of the C-17 squadron at Joint Base Lewis-McChord; and Alaska Airlines Capt. Michael Swanigan. U.S. Air Force Deputy Inspector General Maj. Gen. Harold “Mitch” Mitchell moderated the panel. They all urged the assembled students to hit the books and listen to their teachers, but hinted, too, at a bit of the rebel spirit that helped each get where they are today.

Bolden wrapped up his remarks with a stirring assessment of where NASA is today.

“It’s a history making time, an era at its dawning, and I for one am very excited about where we’re headed,” Bolden said. He talked about a variety of upcoming NASA efforts, including the final space shuttle flights, the Messenger mission to Mercury, the Mars Science Laboratory, the Juno mission to Jupiter, Solar Probe Plus, various Earth science missions, and planning how to get to Mars. But clearly Bolden looks fondly on the shuttle program, for which he flew four missions.

“The shuttle was instrumental in breaking down the color barrier in space, and giving women and people of many nationalities opportunities to fly in space and see our planet the way everyone really should: as a peaceful, beautiful place with no borders except the ones that nature has provided,” Bolden said.

Brian Greene talks multiverses at Town Hall Seattle

If there’s such a thing as a celebrity theoretical physicist, Brian Greene is it, and he packed the city’s premiere lecture hall at Town Hall Seattle Wednesday evening for a talk titled, “Is Ours the Only Universe?” The talk helped sell many copies of Greene’s latest book, The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos, and likely also led to a spike in aspirin sales as many of us, whose ideas of parallel universes are limited to evil Spock with a beard, tried to recover from getting our heads around quantum mechanics, general relativity, string theory, and the notion of exact copies of ourselves a cajillion light years away pondering the same concepts.

Greene noted that parallel universes are something of a logical progression of the Copernican revolution that started when Copernicus suggested that the Earth was not at the center of the universe.

“The ideas that we’re thinking about today suggest that even the universe is not the center of the universe,” Greene said. “The universe is not the center of a wider cosmic landscape that we call the multiverse.

“These are speculative ideas that we’re talking about here tonight,” he added. “We don’t know that this is true.”

Greene says a big part of the puzzle is that the Big Bang theory leaves out a key piece of information: Just what was the bang?

“The Big Bang theory doesn’t tell us what banged or how it banged or if it even banged,” he explained. “It only tells us that a split second after something occurred, the universe continued to expand and cool down allowing structures like stars and galaxies ultimately to coalesce. We’ve been trying to fill in what happened at the beginning; what the bang was.”

One theory posits that powerful repulsive gravity many have triggered many outbursts, so that the Big Bang was not a unique event.

“Our universe would be the aftermath of one of those big bangs, but other universes could be the outcomes of their big bangs,” Greene said. “This is known as the inflationary multiverse and it’s one of the ways in which our universe could possibly be one of many.”

Another fascinating theory is that there may be infinite numbers of universes with exact copies of us out there. It’s called the Quilted Multiverse.

Brian Greene spoke at Town Hall Seattle Feb. 2.

“In any finite region of space there can only be a finite amount of matter,” Greene explained. “In fact, by a little bit of quantum mechanics, there only are finitely many distinct configurations that that matter can assume.”

He used a deck of cards as an example. There are only so many cards, so if you keep shuffling long enough, the same arrangement of the deck is bound to repeat. Apply the same logic to the universe.

“If space goes on infinitely far, then the configurations of matter have to repeat too, because there are only finitely many different configurations that are possible,” Greene argued.

“If the configurations of particles of matter agree here and in some distant region, what would that mean? Well, we here are just a configuration of particles. We just are particles that make up you and me and everyone else in this room. So, if the particle configuration repeats out there, then we are out there. Copies of us are out there. In fact, if space goes on infinitely farther, infinitely many copies of us are out there in rooms like this having this conversation.”

It all depends on the assumption that space is infinite, and that quantum mechanics applies in the same way in the far reaches.

String theory started to gain momentum during the 1990s.

“The big puzzle for many, many years was that gravity as described by Einstein’s general relativity proves incompatible with the mathematics of quantum physics,” Greene said. “It’s as if you have one set of laws that work for stars and galaxies, another set of laws that do work well for molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles, but any time these two laws come together, the math just falls apart and becomes inconsistent.”

Many scientists assail the concept as unprovable. Greene says the math works.

“There’s no experimental evidence for string theory at all,” he said. “Zero. The reason we have some confidence that this is an interesting idea to pursue is because we believe in quantum mechanics; that is unassailable. We believe in the general theory of relativity; that is unassailable. We believe that the universe has to be governed by a consistent set of laws. Without string theory, quantum mechanics and general relativity are inconsistent. For us, that’s a very powerful reason for believing string theory may be going in the right direction, because it makes them compatible. That is no small feat.”

It was an interesting and thought-provoking evening with a celebrity theoretical physicist.

SAS hears the story of Palomar

There were lots of oohs and aahs Sunday at the Seattle Astronomical Society annual banquet as Scott Kardel, public affairs coordinator at Palomar Observatory, dazzled attendees with some of the latest work being done with the legendary Hale telescope and other instruments at Palomar.

Scott Kardel, public affairs coordinator for
Palomar Observatory, talked about the history
and current work on the mountain at the Seattle
 Astronomical Society's annual banquet Sunday.
Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

Kardel talked a little about the storied history of Palomar, pointing out that famed astronomer Edwin Hubble made the first astrophotographs with the 200-inch scope. Interestingly, with improved adaptive optics set to be installed at the scope this spring, they’re hoping to get better images from the ground-based telescope than we’re getting now from the Hubble Space Telescope. The new system will use a laser guidestar and nearly 3,400 actuators to adjust various secondary mirrors.

“We will be able to do visible light adaptive optics, which nobody in the world is doing,” Kardel noted. “Because our telescope is bigger than Hubble, if we can correct for the atmosphere we can get visible-light images sharper than Hubble.”

The whole system looks like a modern-day Rube Goldberg device, with more than a half dozen mirrors reflecting images to various devices.

While it doesn’t hold a foot-candle to the one to come, Palomar’s current adaptive-optics system is pretty good, with 241 actuators that adjust a secondary some 2,000 times per second.

“It’s all done with mirrors,” Kardel quipped, with a caveat. “We don’t bend the primary mirror of the Hale telescope. It’s two feet thick and weighs 14 and a half tons.” Even so, the results are fantastic.

“We can get the 200-inch telescope to hit its theoretical resolving limit,” Kardel said. “You correct for what the atmosphere is doing faster than the atmosphere changes.”

The results have been some amazing photos. Among the most breathtaking ones he shared were those shot the night NASA slammed the LCROSS probe into the Moon, hoping to find evidence of water. Media coverage suggested the resulting dust plume might be visible from Earth, even with backyard telescopes. Palomar was watching and took some beautiful landscape photos.

“Tragically, there was nothing to see,” Kardel said of the plume. “We were the first to report there was nothing to see.”

There’s lots of other work happening at Palomar. Mike Brown did his sky survey there that led to the “demotion” of Pluto, discovering many trans-Neptunian objects.

“Mike used the 48-inch telescope at Palomar to do that work, and revolutionized what we know about the Kuiper Belt,” Kardel said.

Palomar astronomers also have found nearly 27,000 asteroids and 992 supernovae at last count.

Light pollution is something of a threat at Palomar. Kardel pointed out that the population in the area was a mere 290,000 back in 1930 when the site was selected. Nobody really expected it to get to today’s level of about five million. Seattle astronomers don’t much like our clouds, but Kardel said they can be  useful at Palomar.

“We like clouds, because often we get clouds that are below us. The clouds come in from the ocean, and it’s like pulling the drapes on the cities,” he said. “Palomar gets darker nights when the marine layer blows in and we’re above the clouds and the cities are underneath. We can actually get a sky that is comparably dark to what we had in the 1940s.”

Kardel is clearly doing work that he loves, and it came through with his enthusiastic presentation.