18 Burst results for "Space Telescope Science Institute"
Innovation Now
"space telescope science institute" Discussed on Innovation Now
"NASA's James Webb Space Telescope and the space launch system have been named 2022 time inventions of the year. This is innovation now, bringing you stories behind the ideas that shape our future. Engineered to see the first lights that turned on in our universe, the James Webb Space Telescope has already struck astronomers with awe, as it uncovers hidden secrets of the universe. NASA's Goddard space flight center manages JWST for the agency, and overseas work by the space telescope science institute, Northrop Grumman and other international mission partners. Now, time has named Webb, a best invention in the design category for 2022. NASA's space launch system is America's rocket, named a best invention in the experimental category, SLS is the most powerful rocket ever built. SLS is designed to evolve so it can carry both astronauts and large cargoes on increasingly more complex missions to the moon and Mars. More than 1000 companies and 45 states contributed to the rocket, which is managed by NASA's Marshall space flight center. Congratulations NASA for two entries on times 2022 list. A list honoring inventions that not only change history. But benefit the future of humanity. For innovation now, I'm Jennifer pulley. Innovation now is produced by the National Institute of aerospace. Through collaboration with NASA and is distributed by W HRV.
Innovation Now
"space telescope science institute" Discussed on Innovation Now
"NASA's James Webb Space Telescope and the space launch system have been named 2022 time inventions of the year. This is innovation now, bringing you stories behind the ideas that shape our future. Engineered to see the first lights that turned on in our universe, the James Webb Space Telescope has already struck astronomers with awe, as it uncovers hidden secrets of the universe. NASA's Goddard space flight center manages JWST for the agency, and overseas work by the space telescope science institute, Northrop Grumman and other international mission partners. Now, time has named Webb, a best invention in the design category for 2022. NASA's space launch system is America's rocket, named a best invention in the experimental category, SLS is the most powerful rocket ever built. SLS is designed to evolve so it can carry both astronauts and large cargoes on increasingly more complex missions to the moon and Mars. More than 1000 companies and 45 states contributed to the rocket, which is managed by NASA's Marshall space flight center. Congratulations NASA for two entries on times 2022 list. A list honoring inventions that not only change history. But benefit the future of humanity. For innovation now, I'm Jennifer pulley. Innovation now is produced by the National Institute of aerospace. Through collaboration with NASA and is distributed by W HRV.
60-Second Science
"space telescope science institute" Discussed on 60-Second Science
"Is seen in the mid infrared view. Some galaxies are shades of orange, while others are white. Most stars appear blue with long diffraction spikes, forming an 8 pointed star shape. There are also many thin, long orange arcs that curve around the center of the image. Beautiful. Here's corrupters reading one of hers. The background is deep blue with scattered points of light of different size and brightness. Running from left to right through the middle is a jagged line representing a light spectrum, a graph of brightness versus wavelength of light. The area below the spectrum has a rainbow pattern from red on the left, the purple on the right. The coloring is semi transparent, the blue story background is visible behind. And fades out toward the bottom. In the middle, superimposed on the starry background and part of the spectrum is a large hexagon outlined in gold with two hexagonal outlines behind it. Within the hexagon is an illustration of space with shapes representing objects and materials at different distances and points in time that web is investigating. A large planet with hints of cloud formation, beams of matter, jetting out from the center of a galaxy. Galaxies of different shapes and sizes nebulous cloudy wisps and stars with 8 pointed diffraction patterns. Thanks to the team from the space telescope science institute for describing these jaw dropping the beautiful images in such a powerful and scientifically accurate way. For scientific American 62nd science, I'm coming back.
TIME's Top Stories
"space telescope science institute" Discussed on TIME's Top Stories
"A web space telescope is expected to reveal a new exoplanet photo. By Jeffrey kluger. At some point, things were destined to settle down in the glass and mission control room at the space telescope science institute in Baltimore, Maryland, for much of this year the institute has been the center of the astronomical world. After all, it is there that each image captured by the new James Webb Space Telescope, first arrives, including the dazzling batch received and released in July. But the real work the institute team does, analyzing the scientific data embedded in the pictures, is quieter, less flashy stuff. Still, this week as NASA reports, that quiet was broken by a new analysis of one of the July images, and as time has just learned, Webb will stir even more excitement soon with a much anticipated first of its kind photo release. Together, the space telescope science institute teams continued photo analysis will tell us more than ever about solar systems beyond our own. And the possibility that life could exist there. To begin, this week, space telescope science institute researchers announced that Webb had taken a big step in its search for biology's chemical fingerprints on distant exoplanets, a planet's orbiting other stars. The discovery of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a planet known as wasp 39 B it marks the first clear detection of CO2 in the atmosphere of any planet outside of the 8 that circle our own sun. Wasp 39 B is what astronomers rather unscientifically refer to as a puffy planet. With a diameter 1.3 times that of Jupiter, but a mass only one quarter as great. It also orbits so close to its parent star that the atmosphere reaches a broiling 900°C equal to 1600°F. The presence of organic chemistry, notwithstanding, wasp 39 B is thus not the kind of place astronomers would expect to go looking for life. Still, the presence of CO2 on the planet, combined with water vapor, sodium, and potassium that the Hubble and spitzer space telescopes had already discovered there is one more bit of proof that the universe is, among other things, a giant organic chemistry set. One in which the stuff of biology is found pretty much anywhere. That holds promise for similar discoveries on rockier, more temperate worlds, where life could take hold. Detecting such a clear signal of carbon dioxide a wasp 39 B, bodes well for the detection of atmospheres on smaller, terrestrial sized planets, set astronomer Natalie batalha, of the University of California at Santa Cruz, who leads the team that made the discovery in a statement. With more than 5000 exoplanets having been spotted throughout the galaxy, astronomers now believe that virtually every star in the universe is circled by at least one planet, and many, like our own sun, by a whole litter of them. That's a lot of places for a biology to take hold. Meantime, expect bigger news from Webb in the coming weeks, and a lot more hoopla descending on the space telescope science institute mission control. While astronomers have been able to study the atmosphere of exoplanets by analyzing the changes in the wavelength of light that streams through the air of the planet, as it passes in front of its parent star, no one has ever captured a picture of an exoplanet itself. That, NASA administrator Bill Nelson told time and a conversation last week is about the change, thanks to Webb. Just a sneak preview, he said, the next photo you're going to get from Webb is of an exoplanet. I don't know when they're coming out with it, and I haven't seen it yet, but it's just opening up all new understanding of the universe to us..
WABE 90.1 FM
"space telescope science institute" Discussed on WABE 90.1 FM
"NPR news, Washington. Imagine a bunch of kids unwrapping a fancy new toy on Christmas morning that everyone wants to play with. How do the parents decide which kid gets to put their hands on at first? Well, if that toy were a $10 billion space telescope and the kids were astronomers from all over the world, then doctor Christine Chen would be one of the parents who figures out who gets to play with it. She's been working on the James Webb Space Telescope since 2008. And now that it's out in the universe, she manages the team sorting through proposals from scientists who want to use it for research. Doctor ten, welcome to all things considered. Thank you. Okay, so how many people actually want to play with this toy? Like how many proposals is your team sorting through? Oh my gosh. So we've had one proposal call so far and I think the response to that was about 1200 proposals and that's the second largest number of proposals we've ever gotten, even for Hubble. Well, because your group has experience from Hubble, there's a process in place. How do you decide whose research gets to the top of the pile? So lots of people from all over the world come with their best ideas for what they think would be great science to do. And the review process is a dual anonymous peer review system. So that means that not only do members of the community submit proposals, but members of the community also review them. When the proposals are reviewed, there are three criteria to determine how they rank. One is how the program will contribute to our understanding of a particular subfield in astronomy. Criteria two is if there's broader impact beyond that individual sub field. And then the third criteria is whether or not you really need Davis T because if you don't, then you should probably use a different facility. Okay, so about 1200 people submitted research proposals in this first round. What percentage got accepted? About 25% of proposals were accepted. We actually anticipate it'll become more competitive with time because now that James Webb Space Telescope is in space and people are seeing how well it's working, more and more people are just getting more and more excited. So we expect more and more proposals. Oh, it's proven to work. Exactly, yes. I'm guessing that some of these projects are long-term and involved while others might require just an hour or a day of the telescope's time. How does that factor into the considerations? So the vast majority of the proposals just take a year to execute. So they might be observations of something really cool that just happened like a supernova and at galaxy or someone wants to look at an extra solar planet as it goes in front of its host star. And so those observations are limited to just one cycle. But you're absolutely right that there are some projects for which people need to monitor targets to see if their behavior changes over time. And in those cases, they can actually ask for what are called multi cycle observations. So they can ask for time in the cycle that the proposal calls for, the one after it, and the one after that. So up to three cycles at a time. So after the research proposals have been greenlit. Who handles web's schedule, like is there a Google calendar or a daily planner? Does the telescope have a personal assistant? Yeah, that is a super complex problem. So there's two major constraints for scheduling observations. One is timing. When are they available to the telescope? Because sometimes you're looking for a particular thing to happen. So for example, with those transiting exoplanets, you might be waiting for the planet to go right in front of its host star. And people have measured their orbits very precisely so they know exactly when that's going to happen to the nearest minute. Constraint number two is data volume. The data recorder that's on James Webb Space Telescope. It has a somewhat limited capacity compared to all of the cameras and the spectrographs around the telescope. And so people have to be really careful so that you don't overflow the recorder and you can return everyone's observations down. Doctor Christine Chen is an associate astronomer at the space telescope science institute. Thanks for talking with us. Thank you. Ukrainian forces are now trying to retake the city of Harrison. That was the first major Ukrainian city occupied by Russian forces near the start of the invasion. As the occupation dragged on, one young man became increasingly desperate to leave hair song. He shared his harrowing attempts to escape with one NPR producer, while another correspondent in beds with the Ukrainian soldiers trying to advance. Both stories on today's episode of our daily news podcast. It's called consider this. You're listening to 90.1
WNYC 93.9 FM
"space telescope science institute" Discussed on WNYC 93.9 FM
"Her fixed at the dog park with the multiple, but she's not that spoiled yet to have multiple pools and hot tubs and all that. Back at the water park, 14 year old shockley says it's an oasis compared with what it's been like the rest of the week. So when all of it out, man. And there was no relief on the horizon. The forecast here calls for triple digit highs for at least another week. For NPR news, I'm Chris Polanski in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The celestial images captured by the James Webb telescope and shared by NASA almost defied description. Almost but not quite. A team of scientists, writers and educators, wanted visually impaired people to be able to appreciate distant galaxies and blazing stars too. Space is for everyone. It shouldn't matter who you are. That's Tim roo. He's an education specialist at the space telescope science institute. His team wrote descriptive labels using the alt text feature on social media apps, which is designed to make the Internet more accessible. That way a person using a screen reader would hear a description of an image. Alt text also helps when images on a web page won't load. Here's how one picture was labeled. A star field is speckled across the image. They range from small, faint points of light to larger, closer, brighter, and more fully resolved stars with 8 point diffraction spikes. The upper right portion of the image has wispy translucent cloud like streaks, rising from the nebula. Like most of us rue was astonished by the images the web captured, and he and his team wanted that astonishment to be shared by all. This is definitely a labor of love. There are so many things that make life difficult for people. But this is just pure joy, the universe out there. A large translucent red oval surrounds the central stars. From the red oval, cells extend in a mix of colors. The cells appear to have a filamentous pattern, similar to the surface of a cut citrus fruit. These alt text descriptions are being celebrated online. We love seeing people's face light up. We love seeing people really get the big picture and our place and it all. A picture now made just a little bit clearer for all of us. It's time now for StoryCorps. When Jeffrey Perry was growing up, his grandfather Tony came out to him
The Vergecast
"space telescope science institute" Discussed on The Vergecast
"Go do science. There's got to be some ceremony that happens here with that's like they knight each other with a sword. I don't know. There's got to be something. There will be some celebrations, I'm sure. I'd love to see them. But no, that's a great point that you made the optical or leaf feinberg who's the head of the optical instruments. I asked him, you know, how does it feel to be kind of transitioning control of the telescope? And of course, he's still going to have work to do, but things are moving into this new phase where, yeah, the scientists are kind of taking charge. And he was just expressing how happy he is to finally kind of sit back and discover the universe along with the scientists now. So all of this work up until this point has just been to get this thing into space and make sure that it works. And so now we actually get to see the fruits of that labor. And so it's a whole new era for this telescope that many people have been working on for decades. That's awesome. What do we know about the first year? Obviously, the science doers are starting to do science. And the first stuff is starting to come out. How much do we know about what's coming in the next, say, 12 months? Sure. So like I said, the first year is jam packed. There was a lot of proposals that were competitively bid. I did a story on it when JWT launched in December. There's a lot. I think if you go to the space telescope science Institutes page, they have a full list of what they're looking at. And it's everything you could possibly imagine. One that has the most time is this one called cosmos web, and it's just going to take like a full deep image of tons of galaxies and the deepest recesses of the universe, kind of like the Hubble deep field, but even bigger and more detail. And then one really exciting aspect of the science that JWST will do, which wasn't even envisioned when it was built, is looking at the atmospheres of exoplanets. So exoplanets are planets outside of our solar system. And it's really in relative terms. It's a very new field of study. You know, we didn't even know exoplanets existed until a few decades ago. And now we've discovered thousands of these worlds outside of our solar system. One thing that JWC will be able to do is peer into the atmospheres of these exoplanets and discover what the constituents are. So what kind of molecules are present and those certain types of molecules and their recipes and what kinds of mixes there are in those atmospheres could give us a better understanding if okay, maybe this planet might be able to host life as we know it. Not saying that we will get those answers, but there's plenty of exoplanet targets that are in the first year of science. Another exciting portion is a few years ago, they discovered a full planetary system with I believe 7 planets around one star. And so it's called the trappist system, and we'll be taking a look at that. It's a very exciting system. So there's a ton of stuff. I mean, and I'm only scratching the surface. The real big stuff is looking into, you know, the early cosmos, the first stars and galaxies that formed just a few 100 million years after the Big Bang. That's really what JWST was designed to do. It's also going to be looking at the planets and moons in our own solar system. It'll be tracking asteroids and comets, you know, I believe dark matter is involved in certain ways. You know, there's tons of applications for this telescope. That's what makes it so popular is because it's going to touch almost every aspect of astrophysics and astronomy. I think in like year 8, when the hype has died down and people are like, oh, James Webb, I don't even remember. We here at the verge cast. We're going to buy some time, and we're going to do some science on the telescope. I don't know what we're going to do, but it's going to be amazing. Yes. Lauren, thank you so much. This is really fun. Yeah, no problem. Okay, we're going to take a break and then I want to get back to my cable canceling adventure because I actually need some help with some things.
The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe
"space telescope science institute" Discussed on The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe
"Not indefinite time, just sometimes. That's what we're hoping for. If you know that a disease that you're going to die from a disease, and you can make the best use of your time, that's a huge boon. But our culture in our society looks at death like it's a failure. When it's something we all do. Right, at least so far. Well, and that's what faith healers and gurus, they tap into people's death anxieties. And they use it against them. Fears so powerful. It's everything. It is the backbone of the basically that entire industry. Listen to this. I'll wrap up with this because I was looking up kind of like the history Steve, some of the things that you were talking about. This has been around for this idea of mind cure, you know, your mind can carry thousands of years old. So there's tons of examples of it. Here's a more recent one. 10 May win. Former university lecture in Myanmar. And now advises people to approach treatment for cancers at this place called the horizon cancer center in the Philippines. And here's what she says. And this is a university lecture. Positive thinking, not putting too much pressure on yourself and always believing that you are in fact cancer free, living a happy life as you normally do. That is the key to being cured of cancer. I feel that our state of mind is extremely important to the treatment process. If we believe that we will be cured, we will be cured, believe me if you think that you won't make it, you won't. Oh my gosh. That is. That's terrifying. That is wicked. As far as I'm concerned. Totally brutal. All right, bob, you're going to finish up with some just hard science about free floating black holes. Yeah. No way. Yeah, 'cause black holes in the news again, this time two sets of researchers may have found the first free floating stellar mass black holes or black hole ever. Only about two dozen such black holes have ever been detected all in binary systems, not none ever alone. This research comes from space telescope science institute in Baltimore and from the University of California Berkeley, both teams use ground based telescopes for photometric data, which is essentially the light, the characteristics of the light detected, opposed to the other data that they got from Hubble, which was astrometric data, which precisely measure its positions and movements, and that is the key to this news item because that, that data specifically allows a more direct determination of mass distance and velocity, which is the information you need to really come to the conclusions that they did. So the black hole that they found is 5000 light years away in the Karina Sagittarius spiral arm of our Milky Way over there and I'm pointing to my left. It's a stellar mass. You guys just don't laugh at anything. I'm sorry about that. I actually left, but I have my it's in my mute on. It's going to assume that you are all mute at all times. This is a stellar mass black hole. So stellar mass, what does that mean? They're generally created by supernovae. They're from giant stars, the big boys, more than 20 times the mass of the sun. So we're talking about ending up with black hole masses from a few solar masses to as much as a couple of hundred. But there are pip squeaks, right? They're big and they're massive and they're all burly and tough, but they're pip squeaks, of course, compared to what we often talk about on the show, the supermassive black holes that are found in the centers of galaxies with millions or even billions of solar masses, though they're tiny, but still impressive and much in a lot of ways, much less well known, at least out on their own. And these stellar mass black holes that are by themselves, they're quite hard to see. They're very hard to see. Of course, if they don't have the binary partner, because typically, if a black hole is orbiting a star, you can see the star, and so it's easy to find that the black hole is there. And they're also hard to see if there's no accretion disk to light it up. So how did they detect such an invisible black hole then, two words, gravitational microlensing, talked about this on the show before. This is when a gravitational source doesn't just bend or distort background light, but generally or greatly amplifies it. So that's what happened. This 5000 light year distant black hole kind of passed in a sense in front of background, a background star that was 19,000 light years away, and greatly magnified it and distorted it in very diagnostic ways, ways that you can then use to determine how far away it is, and how massive the black hole that could actually do that level of distortion. So they used a lot of the same data, but these two teams came up with different results to a certain extent. The Berkeley team calculated a mass between 1.6 and 4.4 times that of the sun. So that's why they're not certain that it's a black hole. They can't be as confident as they want to be because why? Because a neutron star could potentially be up to 2.2 solar masses. So at the low end of their estimate, they may have potentially found a neutron star and not a black hole. So that's possible, but the other team, the space telescope science institute team, they claim that the mass of the black hole is 5.8 to 8.4 solar masses, meaning in their minds and in their numbers, this can only be a black hole. So the research is a stellar mass black hole. Obviously, so the researcher said, this is the first free floating black hole or neutron star discovered with gravitational microlensing. With microlensing, we're able to probe these lonely compact objects and weigh them. I think we've opened a new window onto these dark objects which we can't see any other way. So yeah, so there could be many more discoveries like this in the future, especially if the upcoming Nancy Grace Roman space telescope does as we hope what it will do. It's going to have an amazing accuracy and it could vet many thousands of microlensing events.
Astronomy Cast
"space telescope science institute" Discussed on Astronomy Cast
"Is it a measurement problem or is it a physics as we don't understand it? Problem. And they love it. So I wish there was a better term than the crisis in cosmology. But anyway, that's the term we're stuck with. So the thing is, for people who are even at the more senior levels and not retired and shouldn't be retired in astronomy, we still have people in their 90s not retired. I'm excluding them from this conversation. For all of those of us who are below a standard retirement age, when we were learning astronomy, all the really cool stuff was done before World War II. You had the mapping out of the atom where it went from the plum pudding model to our model today with the nucleus and the cloud. You had the resolution of quantum mechanics. You had all of this cool electromagnetism and quantum mechanics and gravity and it didn't really speak together real well, but other than gravity not behaving. All the big stuff we thought had been figured out and let's face it most of us are just like, okay, gravity, we have a problem. And it was a really hard one most of us didn't want to be embroiled in because string theory is ugly. But now we have an approachable problem that even observers like me can get in on and have opinions and thoughts and debates. Why don't we try this? Just do that. Yeah. So I guess what's the update? Because we've done an episode on the crisis in cosmology. So what is the update? So the update is that the folks who are using supernovae. This is Adam Reese's team out of Johns Hopkins and the space telescope science institute. The more and more supernovae they look at, it is still converging at a higher value. And they have gone through and they have compared their data with cepheids in nearby galaxies with supernovae nearby galaxies with cepheids in our galaxy. And Gaia data is allowing us to understand the cepheids as we have never understood them before..
On Being with Krista Tippett
"space telescope science institute" Discussed on On Being with Krista Tippett
"This is on being. Today I'm with a theoretical astrophysicist Mario livio. He spent 24 years at the space telescope science institute, which coordinates the science operations of the Hubble Space Telescope, which launched in 1990 and the James Webb telescope, which will be fully operational in 2022. This science has allowed the rest of us to see some of the phenomena Mario livio has studied. Extrasolar planets, neutron stars, white dwarf stars, and the formation of galaxies in the early universe. This is a classic on being conversation, taped in 2010, and it is as illuminating today. It's formed me across the years with a basic sense of how scientific advance meets recurrent mystery, including the very heart of mathematics as the element and language of science. In the book, it's got a mathematician and in a lot of your work you do take a long view of time and history. And so you trace the history of human fascination with mathematics and scientific work with mathematics beginning with Pythagoras and Plato, right? To the present day. And I wonder if there was anything that you saw in tracing that history that you learned about our present reality that really gave you something to work with this context that you hadn't quite seen before. Well, the same type of questions that mathematicians or scientists dealt with even thousands of years ago continue to intrigue us today. And in mathematics, even more so than in other sciences, I mean, okay, physics, for example, the physics of Aristotle is not the same as our physics today. I mean, the questions were the same. Yes, I mean, he also tried to explain the universe around him. And so do we. But we don't use the same physics. In terms of mathematics, we largely use the same, well, mathematics says evolved, but the mathematics that the ancient Greeks did is still true today in those areas where it is applies. So students today in school learn the same geometry that Euclid did at 300 BC. Right. The closest thing science has to eternal truth, I guess. Right. Although somebody once told me, and I think they were right, that philosophy is actually another area where, as you may know, you know, Alfred north Whitehead once wrote that all of western philosophy is just a series of footnotes to Plato. So in philosophy, we also still use many of the ideas of the ancients. But in many of the sciences we don't. That's interesting. I mean, one thing that strikes me reading and getting an historical view of this is it's only really a couple hundred years ago that religion overtly was taken out of the equation, right? I mean, Galileo Kepler, Copernicus, to some extent Darwin. I mean, they lived in a world that was infused with religion, and their religious imagination was not quite separate from their scientific imagination. But then that changed culturally and it changed in the culture of science and we have ever more increasingly sophisticated systems of logic and yet. In science right now and especially in physics. It seems to me that there's as much mystery as there ever was or more mystery that there's less determinism, right, but there's more that is simply bizarre and unanswerable. And if that just seems like kind of a paradox to me to have those two phenomena side by side yes, I mean, but you must realize that something somewhat similar happened also in terms of the relationship between philosophy and science. The Galileo's position was called the philosopher. Right. So all the people who dealt with natural sciences were at one point called philosophers. But once physics in particular started to become more mathematical and more quantitative than philosophy and science, like physics, sort of parted ways in some way. I mean, even though they continued to some extent to deal with the same or similar questions, they still went on somewhat different paths. The parting of religion and science. I think happened roughly around the same time. So physics became in particular more predictive than this is when people started to talk less in terms of religion and so on and more in terms of, okay, when they want to describe nature, they talk in terms of precise scientists, you know, and so on. So I think that that happened, now you're absolutely right. That with the realization of quantum mechanics and so on, we did discover that our world is not deterministic. It's not fully deterministic in the sense that we can not really predict the results of an experiment. We can only predict the probabilities of different results. Which is not the same thing. I mean, the probabilities are actually fully deterministic. I mean, we can use quantum mechanics to calculate the probabilities for different results. Okay. But we can not calculate the results themselves..
Short Wave
"space telescope science institute" Discussed on Short Wave
"Support for this podcast and the following message come from Zoom, half a million businesses connect using Zoom, a single platform for phone, chat, workspaces, events, apps, and video, zoom enables real-time collaboration for teams around the globe. Zoom secure and reliable platform, it's easy to manage, use, and customize for large enterprises, small businesses, and individuals alike. Zoom, how the world connects. All right, now let's say I want to use a space telescope. Can I just make a proposal? Basically, yeah. I mean, NASA wants to do the best, most promising science, you know, get the best bang for its buck with these telescopes that it's put in space. And astronomer Neil Reed told me, the agency isn't picky about where good ideas come from. Anyone from across the world can lead a proposal can be on a proposal Australia, China, Japan, Russia, and anywhere. You can put in a proposal to use other Hubble or JWST. JWST being the brand new James Webb space telescope, obviously, cool, cool. And what kinds of things are they looking for in a proposal? Well, you know, I mean, they want something that's not just like somebody's hobby. But some kind of science that's going to push the field forward, you know, answer a long-standing question or open new avenues of research or maybe just be like a cool new idea for something to look at or looking at in a way that's never been tried before. Okay. Okay, so the proposals they come in and what they convened like a committee of experts to review the proposals and rank them? Yeah. And so that's all managed by the space telescope science institute in Baltimore, where Reed works. It's long managed proposals for Hubble, and now it's doing the same thing for James Webb. And about a decade ago, someone asked read, do you know if the acceptance rate for Hubble proposals that are led by women is any different than the acceptance rate for proposals led by men? We didn't at that point because we don't actually collect that information. So they couldn't answer that question because they didn't ask submitters for demographic info like gender or race. Exactly, yeah. And so what Reed did is he went and gathered the names of people who had proposed and people whose proposals got accepted. And then he did just kind of the best study he could, you know, he had to make assumptions about gender, based on the name of the lead scientist or principal investigator. You know, the PI. I'm not super down with people guessing people's gender identity. Okay, read knew that. He knew that this was not perfect, but he was just trying to do a quick check with what he had. And we came up with this answer that there was this systematic difference every cycle that we looked at proposals led by mail PIs to better than proposal led by female PIs. Okay, what's a cycle in proposal speak? You know, it's like a call out for proposals and deciding which proposals go ahead. You know, it roughly correlates to a year. Once a year, more or less. And this difference between men and women was there in every cycle they checked. Reed says what really struck him was this consistency. I mean, proposals by men always had a higher acceptance rate. You know, it's like 14 cycles, I think. Everything was the same we wrote. So it was like taking a penny and tossing it 14 times and getting heads every time you think. There's something going on here. So he and his colleagues were like, we should do something. Yeah, no, that's not how penny's work. What did they do? Well, you know, at first they thought were scientists, we can solve this so they tried a couple of things, you know? The lead scientist name had typically been on the front page of proposals in big letters, so they tried, you know, putting it on the second page, and that didn't do anything. They tried using initials instead of names, and again, there was no effect. And we said, let's actually talk to some experts in social sciences because they can understand this better than we do. So who did they talk to? They reached out to a consultant named Stephanie Johnson. She's at the university of Colorado. And, you know, she was working with her then student Jessica Kirk, who's now at the university of Memphis. And they came in and just took a fresh look at the whole selection and review process. The whole kitten caboodle. They sat in on the committees that discussed proposals. And Stephanie Johnson says they noticed something right away. A lot of the discussion like half of it was not about scientific issues. But about people. Sometimes when a proposal, there might be a question about it. Like, oh, you know, this seems, this seems really good, but can they actually do this? Are they sure? A lot of times there's someone who will speak up in the room and say, you know, I know this person. They will figure it out because that's who they are. I see. So the biases of the committee were creeping into the process. Well, I mean, nobody really knows, right? I mean, you know, Neal Reed told me he didn't like to talk about biases because that assumes that he knows what was going wrong to create this gender gap difference, even though he said, you know, it's probably biases. But, you know, when you have these kind of personal subjective discussions about people who you know, what you think about people, you know, it means that some people might get extra considerations. Some people might get just sort of more of a pass than somebody else might. So what did the social scientists think should be done about all of this? So they recommended going to a completely anonymous process. So no names on the proposals at all. And not only that, scientists would be instructed to write their proposals in a way that made it basically impossible to know who was behind it. So, for example, you know, they wouldn't use phrases like as our past results show. You know, because that could indicate who it is. But rather, they should just cite the relevant scientific reference, like the journal article, more neutrally, like by last name and date rather than using words like our or mine or that kind of thing. Okay. And how is this proposed change received? By the astronomy community. I put that question to Lou, stroller. He also works at the space telescope science institute. He chaired their working group on anonymous proposing, and he said they solicited feedback to kind of gauge people's feelings. There were a lot of people that were for it. But I'm guessing that some people were against it. Oh, you know it, stroller told me they had objections. They ranged from this will totally upset how good science is done to you know, you're basically fool yourself into getting time to people who don't know what they're doing, and all sorts of things. And he told me, you know, there were trends in those who those responses tended to be from. Younger people and women were more likely to be for it. So the scientific community was split on this, but I'm guessing since we are talking about it that they forged ahead. Yep. So in 2018, they had their first completely anonymous proposal selection for time on Hubble. Priya natarajan is an astrophysicist at Yale University. She chaired the process. You know, everyone was a little nervous. She told me, you know, sometimes someone would slip and sort of start to guess who was behind a proposal, maybe like names some names. But the buy in from the community was so tremendous that there would be other people on the panels who would say, or not, come on, let's stick to the science. She thought the whole tenor of the discussion was richer and more scientifically interesting as a result. Yeah. It's very cool to hear Priya natarajan involved with this. She has been on our show before. So what were the results of all of this work? Did making everything anonymous make a difference in whose proposals ultimately got through? Well, I'll let loose stroll your tell you. For the very first time, female PIs out outperformed male PIs. Performance, the acceptance rates flipped. Boom. All right. So the proposals led by women had a higher acceptance rate. That's kind of an amazing change after.
Today, Explained
"space telescope science institute" Discussed on Today, Explained
"Mean, you might need an astronomer friend to help you out. Should we apply? You know, I looked into it and I think it's a little bit over our heads to do this. Yeah, it's pretty competitive to say the least. So in March 2021, the space telescope science institute, which runs the web and other space telescopes. They sent out emails to scientists who had applied to use the web. And these scientists were on this day where furiously checking their emails to see if like, oh, were there proposals accepted? And it's kind of like all huddling around and finding out who got parts in the school play. Exciting day. We totally felt like underdogs. It feels like a dream. It was honestly a truly amazing feeling. I think I was just stunned for a good minute there. I probably cried a little bit. I'm pretty sure I jumped up out of my chair in my office. And shout it out. Yes, yes, yes. And Brian, you've been talking to these scientists for the last few months, right? Yeah, I've been talking to scientists who have been awarded time to use the telescope. And these conversations I just leave me with a big smile. Just their sense of wonder and awe, these are people who get to explore the frontiers of the cosmos, and they just have so many unanswered questions. What kind of questions are they trying to answer? Questions about the search for life in the universe questions about the beginning of time about exploring strange new worlds that are way different than anything that exists in our solar system. Our strange. Oh, I'll tell.
WNYC 93.9 FM
"space telescope science institute" Discussed on WNYC 93.9 FM
"Something was going on The institute brought in a consultant Stephanie Johnson of the university of Colorado She and a research partner sat in on the committees that evaluated and ranked proposals to use Hubble And what they noticed is that a lot of the discussion centered on who was making a proposal There might be a question about it Like oh you know this seems really good but can they actually do this Are they sure A lot of times there's someone who will speak up in the room and say you know I know this person they will figure it out because that's who they are This means certain people got an extra leg up So Johnson and her colleagues recommended making the review process completely blind The evaluation committees wouldn't get to see any names and all proposals would be written in a way that made it impossible to know who the proposal was from The institute surveyed the astronomy community to see what it thought of this potential change And you can imagine the knee jerk reaction was actually pretty polar Lou stroger works at the space telescope science institute He says about half of the astronomers who responded were in favor of the idea These tended to be younger people and women The other half had objections They ranged from this will totally upset how good science has done to you're basically fool yourself into giving time to people who don't know what they're doing Still the institute plowed ahead In 2018 it did its first truly blinded review for Hubble proposals Astrophysicist Priya natarajan of Yale University was there She says occasionally someone would try to guess who was behind a proposal But the buy in from the community was so tremendous that there would be other people on the panels who would say or not come on let's stick to the science And sticking to the science had a real impact That year for the first time ever the acceptance rate for proposals led by women was higher than the acceptance rate for proposals led by men I was stunned that there was an effect right away And when reviewers were finally allowed to see who had submitted a proposal that they had just deemed worthy of telescope time lose stroller says they never objected that the person wasn't up to the job Although they often were surprised There were some That was not at all who I thought it was That's sort of reactions Data from the last few years suggests that this process continues to help narrow the gap between acceptance rates for men and women And it may have improved fairness in other ways too Stroller says there's been a dramatic rise in approvals for first time users astronomers who have never used Hubble before It went from something like a dozen per year to 50 per year All of this convinced NASA officials to adopt this approach for other space telescopes too And although the brand new James Webb space telescope has only gone through one round of proposal selection there's already signs that this anonymous process is working And that's important because a lot of astronomers are hoping to use web The first call for proposals drew in more than a thousand from 44 countries only about 300 made the cut Nell Greenfield boys NPR news This is NPR news This is WNYC later on morning edition as survivors of Sunday's deadly fire in the Tremont neighborhood figure out their next steps neighbors and Bronx members of the West African community are coming together to offer their support both spiritual and material We'll have the latest on that coming on And another BBC NewsHour at 9 the UN issues a new appeal for aid for Afghanistan In a medical first a human receives a genetically modified pig's heart and the head of kazakhs Kazakhstan's says Russia forces will leave his country this week That's on the BBC NewsHour coming up at 9 on 93.9 FM WNYC WNYC supporters include the Joyce theater presenting malpaso dance company the Havana based troupe whose work embodies.
WNYC 93.9 FM
"space telescope science institute" Discussed on WNYC 93.9 FM
"Sat in on the committees that evaluated and ranked proposals to use Hubble And what they noticed is that a lot of the discussion centered on who was making a proposal There might be a question about it Like oh you know this seems really good but can they actually do this Are they sure A lot of times there's someone who will speak up in the room and say you know I know this person they will figure it out because that's who they are This means certain people got an extra leg up So Johnson and her colleagues recommend it making the review process completely blind The evaluation committees wouldn't get to see any names and all proposals would be written in a way that made it impossible to know who the proposal was from The institute surveyed the astronomy community to see what it thought of this potential change And you can imagine the knee jerk reaction was actually pretty polar Loose stroller works at the space telescope science institute He says about half of the astronomers who responded were in favor of the idea These tended to be younger people and women The other half had objections They ranged from this will totally upset how good science is done to you're basically fool yourself into giving time to people who don't know what they're doing Still the institute plowed ahead In 2018 it did its first truly blinded review for Hubble proposals Astrophysicist Priya natarajan of Yale University was there She says occasionally someone would try to guess who was behind a proposal But the buy in from the community was so tremendous that there would be other people on the panels who would say or don't know come on let's stick to the science And sticking to the science had a real impact That year for the first time ever the acceptance rate for proposals led by women was higher than the acceptance rate for proposals led by men I was stumped that there was an effect right away And when reviewers were finally allowed to see who had submitted a proposal that they had just deemed worthy of telescope time lose stroller says they never objected that the person wasn't up to the job Although they often were surprised There were some That was not at all who I thought it was That's sort of reactions Data from the last few years suggest that this process continues to help narrow the gap between acceptance rates for men and women And it may have improved fairness in other ways too Stroller says there's been a dramatic rise in approvals for first time users Astronomers who have never used Hubble before It went from something like a dozen per year to 50 per year All of this convinced NASA officials to adopt this approach for other space telescopes too And although the brand new James Webb space telescope has only gone through one round of proposal selection there's already signs that this anonymous process is working And that's important because a lot of astronomers are hoping to use web The first call for proposals drew in more than a thousand from 44 countries Only about 300 made the cut Nell Greenfield boys NPR news This is NPR news At 6 19 this is listener supported WNYC later on morning edition has survivors of Sunday's deadly fire in the Tremont neighborhood figure out their next steps neighbors and Bronx members of the West African community are coming together to offer their support Both spiritual.
WABE 90.1 FM
"space telescope science institute" Discussed on WABE 90.1 FM
"Considered from NPR news A long awaited telescope is finally ready to launch into space named after a former NASA administrator the James Webb space telescope is bigger and more powerful than the iconic Hubble Space Telescope This new telescope has been in the works for decades and tomorrow morning at 7 20 Eastern Time It's scheduled to blast off NPR's Joe Parker is here for a preview of tomorrow's launch activities hi Joe Hi Ari Where is this telescope taking off from and where is it headed It's taking off from the European space agency spaceport in French Guiana its launching on an Ariane 5 rocket and it's the rocket that's big enough to lift this behemoth of a spacecraft for almost 14,000 pounds It's heading for a spot in space about a million miles away It's a point that has special properties where the sun and the earth gravity balance each other out So it's easy to stay in one place And it's also a spot that can keep it in touch with NASA ground stations around the clock And what's it going to be able to do that Hubble can't Well a lot Its main mirror is much bigger than Hubble It's 21 feet across as opposed to 9 feet across and the bigger the mirror the better You can think of a telescope as a bucket and light from stars are like raindrops the bigger the bucket the more rain you catch and the bigger the mirror the more light from distance stars Webb can see also at different wavelengths from Hubble and this is a big deal because this telescope is going to tell us things about why the universe looks the way it does For example Webb should be able to look at the atmospheres of distant planets and see which ones might be capable of sustaining life And it'll be able to see things that we're just starting to take shape in the early days of the universe Suarez ravindranath is an astronomer with the space telescope science institute Where would we be able to show us the very first galaxies and also the earliest stages of galaxy assembly That's going to be like seeing baby pictures of the universe soon after everything came into being incredible Some people are going to remember that Hubble had a problem that was discovered soon after its launch They had to send astronauts to fix it are there worries that something similar might happen with Webb In a word yes I think people are really terrified that that's a possibility and there is no repair mission at this point There's no way to get astronauts out that far And a lot of things a lot of things have to work right Webb has this giant sun shield about the size of a tennis court that has to unfold It's there to keep the spacecraft cool and it's an amazingly complex process to unfold this thing And even the so called simple things can mess up by mean if a solar panels don't apply their deploy properly There's no power if the antenna doesn't lock into position You can't get talking to earth It's a lot to go wrong How long is it going to take for the telescope to completely unfold before we know whether it's safe and working Well it's about two weeks to deploy It's the solar array the antennas I mentioned the multi day process of unfurling the sun shield and the mirrors partially folded up it has to unfold and it's kind of cool looking It's not like a telescope in a tube It's all naked so you can see all the parts right in front of you I've seen it on the ground almost fully deployed When it gets to it it also has to stop when it gets to its parking place So essentially the brakes have to work It's a rocket engine of course And then it has to cool down and it's only then that people will know for sure that it's going to work I'm starting to understand why this thing is 14,000 pounds When are we going to see photos if everything goes according to plan Well this is 6 month commissioning process and then that's where they test to make sure everything's working properly And then yeah the images should start coming in And from what they say it should be eye popping I'm looking forward to it We'll keep our fingers crossed NPR science correspondent Joe Parker thanks for the preview You're welcome This is NPR news The time is.
WABE 90.1 FM
"space telescope science institute" Discussed on WABE 90.1 FM
"From NPR news this is all things considered I'm also Chang in Los Angeles And I'm Ari Shapiro in Washington The Food and Drug Administration has given emergency use authorization to the drug maker Pfizer for its new antiviral COVID-19 therapy The new drug could be urgently needed because so far it looks to be effective against the omicron variant that is spreading quickly across the U.S. and pure science correspondent Joe Parker is here with the latest hi Joe Hey Ari what's this new drug and how does it work Well the drug is called pax lovid It's what's called a protease inhibitor It blocks a key enzyme inside the coronavirus called protease that the virus needs to grow once it gets inside someone who's infected You take the paxil in twice a day along with for 5 days along with a drug called Britannia that helps it work And you start taking the drug as soon as possible after symptoms appear the sooner the better but definitely within 5 days of detecting symptoms How well does it work against COVID-19 Well Pfizer conducted a placebo controlled study that's the best kind and in about 2200 people at high risk for developing severe COVID and the drug reduced the risk of hospitalization or death to close to 90% which is very good But I want to point out that most people in this study did not get sick enough to need hospitalization So it's not as if you're doomed if you get sick and get infected But of the people who did get sick the drugs especially the drug worked extremely well in preventing them keeping them out of the hospital and keeping them from dying The omikron variant arose so quickly it doesn't seem like it's been around long enough for the new drug to be tested on it Why are experts confident it will work against our Macron Well the interesting thing is that yes the omicron has a lot of mutations in it but most of the mutations are in this thing called the spike protein which is the protein that allows the virus to enter cells It does not have a lot of mutations in the protease enzyme protein And so they think and from lab tests and assays that they do inside a laboratory they think that this drug will continue to work against that protease even it's the same one that's in delta and the original strains and alpha and all the others So it should work against the omicron one as well And then let's talk about supply people have been struggling to get tests They've been struggling to get booster shots Are they now going to be struggling to get packs of it if they need it Yeah well unfortunately yes that is going to be the case There will be some supply fairly soon but that supply will be limited Mike McDermott is Mike McDermott as president of Pfizer global supply We actually already have tens of thousands of packs in the U.S. positioned at our Memphis Tennessee distribution center And McDermott says he expects the company will be able to produce a 180,000 treatment courses by the end of this year but he says those numbers should go up rapidly By the middle of next year 30 million and full year next year 80 million Now who gets those doses is up to the U.S. government at least initially because the government has bought 10 million doses of the drug which they'll distribute throughout the country And just briefly there's another one waiting in the wings right Yes there is another drug from Merck that might be getting emergency use authorization It doesn't seem to work quite as well but it should be useful because it too seems to work against the omicron variant And Paris Joe Parker thank you You're welcome For astronomers this is a somewhat surreal time NASA is finally about to launch the most powerful space telescope ever that James Webb space telescope It's named after a former NASA administrator Scientists have been waiting decades for this moment and as NPR's Nell Greenfield boys reports there was a time when it seemed like this telescope might not even make it In the late 1980s astronomer Garth illingworth was deputy director of the space telescope science institute in Baltimore Its first big project the Hubble Space Telescope was still a few years away from launching But one morning his boss told him look you've got to start work planning for the next great space telescope the one that will come after Hubble And I said oh no we can't do that We're all flat out working on Hubble And he said trust me it's going to take a long time A long time You know we started out with a little group of like three people talking about this And sketching concepts on bits of paper and then putting simple things in the rudimentary computers we had back in the 80s Over 30 years later what's now called the James Webb space telescope is waiting at a launch site in French Guiana The telescope is three stories tall and has a mirror that's 21 feet across It has a sunshield the size of a tennis court but to fit inside the rocket this massive telescope had to be designed to fold up and then unfold itself out in space says building it was a challenge Because we're doing one off technologies here in many cases There may be a lot of experience launching out the missions and surveillance satellites and all the rest But nothing is like James wave James Webb is unique Illingworth says back in the beginning there was a lot of pressure to keep costs down at NASA So the telescope started out with a budget of only around a $1 billion or so but that amount of money wasn't realistic And that haunted the project for 8 years And it caused a lot of political anguish I would say NASA kept asking Congress for more money And the launch date kept getting pushed back Things really came to a head about a decade ago in 2011 The House of Representatives moved to kill it There was a political fight We had teachers and schoolchildren.
Short Wave
"space telescope science institute" Discussed on Short Wave
"You're listening to shortwave. From NPR. Hey everybody, this is Rebecca Ramirez, and here at shortwave, we are incredibly excited about NASA's James Webb space telescope. Now today is Friday, December 17th, and the launch was supposed to be next Wednesday, but it's been delayed. And today, NASA should update us on a timeline. Regardless of when it launches, this telescope will be the most powerful ever put into space. It costs about $10 billion and it should be able to do some really amazing feats like see some of the earliest galaxies in the universe or search the atmospheres of planets beyond our solar system for signs of possible light. All of this is assuming, of course, that it doesn't just blow up on the launch pad. Okay, that's NPR science correspondent nel Greenfield boys with a cheery thought as always, I know. Hey, Rebecca. So now you've been reporting on the James Webb space telescope. How do astronomers feel? I mean, this is a huge moment for science, so are they, you know, as cheery as you are, clearly. I was talking to Neil Reed. He's an astronomer at the space telescope science institute in Baltimore. And I asked him to rank his terror level on a scale of one to ten with ten being maximum terror. And he said, it really varied, but at that moment, 7 and rising. We'll look forward to watching together and terror. All right, I will watch Sarah. He says the future of U.S. astronomy is kind of riding on this thing. It really does need to work. Oh my God, those are really high stakes. And the thing that gets me is that this launch is just the beginning, right? Like things have to go really well afterwards too. Yeah, NASA put out this video called 29 days on edge. You know, basically, once the telescope is in space, this three story tall instrument has to basically unfold itself. It'll unfurl a giant sunshield the size of a tennis court. And to me, the whole thing kind of looks like a giant silver and gold ray gun or something, you've got this gold mirror on top of this silver trampoline kind of thing. It looks like something an evil villain would build and use it to zap a planet or something like that. You know, I recently went to see an exact copy of that sunshield, the one they keep on the ground to help them troubleshoot if anything goes wrong. And I got to say a ray gun is a very apt descriptor. I'm sure you noticed there is a lot that could go wrong with this thing that they might have to troubleshoot. Oh, completely. And so today on the show, we'll talk about that as well as the astonishing stuff astronomers will see if this new telescope works as.
John Bachelor
NASA Returns Hubble Space Telescope to Science Operations
"Your generosity towards Bob's behind the Black during fundraising July is extremely appreciated. However, we go to one of Bob's four books, his biography of the Universe and Amir Hubble. Because Bob can help us understand the latest. We know of the patch or fix or remedy offered for hubba. Bob, Can you offer us a moment to believe that Hubble can be well again? Uh, no. I can tell you what's happening right now. But until it's done, we have no idea. NASA as now. This is actually engineers Goddard Space Flight Center in a Space Telescope Science institute that operate Hubble. They have now think they have determined exactly what caused the computer problem that shut the telescope down on June 13th more than a month ago, and they think it's a component in what in their science, instrument command and data handling unit that's computer, essentially And it's what they call the power control unit. Basically, think of the power supply unit and your desktop computer, which you can normally just take out and replace. But in this case, they can't do that. They have a backup for it, but it's part of a backup for the whole computer. Essentially, at least this whole command and data handling unit. And so they need to switch more than just the power control unit. Things may need to switch several units at once, and that's a complicated procedure. They've done a complete simulated test of that switch. On the ground successfully. They actually did a similar switch on Hubble back in, Oh, eight, and so whoever they and they have now begun began on Thursday, the 15th of July. They began that switch on the telescope. It's going to take several days to complete it, and then they once they completed they will do some additional tests, hopefully to make sure everything's working. And then put the telescope back an operation Now one will the test this switch work? We don't know until they've got it, too. Even if this does work, be prepared, be recognized that the telescope will no longer have backups to this computer computer data handling unit. So that