Other Source of Energy

GEs "Imagination Network" has an interesting video on smart grids from an Australian viewpoint - The Smart Grid".

The video cant be reduced in size and my blogger template isnt really compatible with large width embeds, so you might want to go to the link to watch it...

Ecoseed has a report on a large offshore wind farm planned for South Korea - South Korea to build $9 billion offshore wind farm by 2019.

South Koreas Korea Electric Power Corporation will build a $9 billion, 2.5-gigawatt offshore wind farm off the southwest coast of the Korean peninsula by 2019, the Ministry of Knowledge Economy said in a statement.

According to the ministry, the 51-percent government-owned Kepco will be buying wind turbines from eight local suppliers including Doosan Heavy Industries and Construction, Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering, and Hyundai Heavy Industries.
The wind farm project will be built in three phases, beginning with a $355-million demonstration project by 2014 which will consist of turbines having the capacity of between 3 and 7 megawatts.

The second phase 400-MW demonstration project will have an investment of $1.42 billion by 2016. To complete the third phase is a $7.26-billion investment to build a 2-GW wind farm by 2019.

The Independent has a report on global warming in the Arctic - Shock as retreat of Arctic sea ice releases deadly greenhouse gas.

Dramatic and unprecedented plumes of methane – a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide – have been seen bubbling to the surface of the Arctic Ocean by scientists undertaking an extensive survey of the region.

The scale and volume of the methane release has astonished the head of the Russian research team who has been surveying the seabed of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf off northern Russia for nearly 20 years.

In an exclusive interview with The Independent, Igor Semiletov, of the Far Eastern branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, said that he has never before witnessed the scale and force of the methane being released from beneath the Arctic seabed.

"Earlier we found torch-like structures like this but they were only tens of metres in diameter. This is the first time that weve found continuous, powerful and impressive seeping structures, more than 1,000 metres in diameter. Its amazing," Dr Semiletov said. "I was most impressed by the sheer scale and high density of the plumes. Over a relatively small area we found more than 100, but over a wider area there should be thousands of them."

Technology Review has a look at a number of clean energy startups looking to make renewable energy cheap enough to compete with fossil fuels - Praying for an Energy Miracle.

The companys breakthrough is strictly off-limits to outsiders. Work on the technology goes on in an unseen part of the sprawling one-story building, beyond the machine shop, the various testing and fabrication instruments, the large open office space stuffed with cubicles. What a visitor gets to see instead is a thin wafer of silicon that would be familiar to anyone in the solar-power industry. And thats exactly the point. The companys advance is all about reducing the expense of manufacturing conventional solar cells.

In its conference room is a large chart showing the declining cost of electricity produced by solar panels over the last three decades. The slightly bumpy downward-­sloping line is approaching a wide horizontal swath labeled "grid parity"—the stage at which electricity made using solar power will be as cheap as power generated from fossil fuels. It is the promised land for renewable power, and the company, 1366 Technologies, believes its improvements in manufacturing techniques can help make it possible for solar power to finally get there.

Its an ambitious target: even though silicon-based photovoltaic cells, which convert sunlight directly to electricity, have been coming down in price for years, they are still too expensive to compete with fossil fuels. As a result, solar power accounts for far less than 1 percent of U.S. electricity production. And 1366 founder Emanuel Sachs, who is the companys chief technology officer and an MIT professor of mechanical engineering, says that even though solar might be "within striking distance" of natural gas, existing solar technology wont be able to compete with coal. "To displace coal will take another level of cost reduction," says Sachs. Thats where 1366s breakthrough comes in. The company is developing a way to make thin sheets of silicon without slicing them from solid chunks of the element, a costly chore. "The only way for photovoltaics to compete with coal is with technologies like ours," he says.

Once photovoltaics can compete with coal on price, "the world very much changes," says Frank van Mierlo, the companys CEO. "Solar will become a real part of our energy supply. We can then generate a significant part of our energy from the sun."

In a number of ways, 1366 (the name refers to the average number of watts of solar energy that hit each square meter of Earth over a year) reflects the ambition of a whole generation of energy startups. These companies often refer to "game-changing" technologies that will redefine the economics of non-fossil-fuel energy sources. Many were founded over the last decade, during a boom in venture capital funding for "clean tech"—not only in solar but also in wind, biofuels, and batteries. Many have benefited from increases in federal support for energy research since President Obama took office. Though the companies are working on different technologies, they share a business strategy: to make clean energy sources cheap enough, without any government subsidies, to compete with fossil fuels. At that point, capitalism will kick into high gear, and investors will rush to build a new energy infrastructure and displace fossil fuels—or so the argument goes.

The problem, however, is that we are probably not just a few breakthroughs away from deploying cheaper, cleaner energy sources on a massive scale. Though few question the value of developing new energy technologies, scaling them up will be so difficult and expensive that many policy experts say such advances alone, without the help of continuing government subsidies and other incentives, will make little impact on our energy mix. Regardless of technological advances, these experts are skeptical that renewables are close to achieving grid parity, or that batteries are close to allowing an electric vehicle to compete with gas-powered cars on price and range.

In the case of renewables, it depends on how you define grid parity and whether you account for the costs of the storage and backup power systems that become necessary with intermittent power sources like solar and wind. If you define grid parity as "delivering electricity whenever you want, in whatever volumes you want," says David Victor, the director of the Laboratory on International Law and Regulation at the University of California, San Diego, then todays new renewables arent even close. And if new energy technologies are going to scale up enough to make a dent in carbon dioxide emissions, he adds, "thats the definition that matters."

Field of Mirrors

Few people have more faith in the power of technology to change the world than Bill Gross. And few entrepreneurs are as familiar with the difficulty of turning clever ideas into commercial technology. In the dot-com era, he and his company Idealab, an incubator that creates and runs new businesses, started up several of the eras hottest firms, only to struggle when the bubble burst.

Gross latched onto the clean-tech craze, founding a company called eSolar in 2007 to work on solar thermal technology (see Q&A, March/April 2010). These days, Web, social-computing, and energy projects are intermingled in Idealabs tightly packed offices in downtown Pasadena, California. In keeping with its dot-com-era heritage, the offices occupy a large loftlike space full of various companies or hope-to-be companies, some of them consisting of no more than a few desks dominated by large computer screens. Somewhere in all the brushed metal, exposed ventilation systems, track lighting, and designer desk chairs is Bill Grosss office, a small glassed-in cubicle.

Like almost every other founder of a renewable-energy startup, Gross gets right to the numbers. Pulling up a screen that compares the costs of energy from various sources, he points out how a technology being developed by eSolar could make solar thermal power less expensive and help it become competitive with fossil fuels. Solar thermal plants produce electricity by using a huge field of mirrors to focus sunlight on a tall central tower, where water is heated to produce steam that generates electricity. Large power plants using the technology can produce electricity more cheaply than ones using silicon solar panels, although the thermal approach is still more expensive than power derived from coal or even wind. Several such plants are operating around the world, and more are being built (see "Chasing the Sun," July/August 2009). In 2006, when the giant California utility PG&E put out a bid for a 300-megawatt solar thermal plant (now being built by a company called BrightSource), Gross got excited and began working with his employees to improve the economics.

Not surprisingly, Grosss solution is based on software. Large solar thermal plants cost more than a billion dollars to build, and one reason for the high cost is that tens of thousands of specially fabricated mirrors have to be precisely arranged so that they focus the sunlight correctly. But what if you used plain mirrors on a simple metal rack and then used software to calibrate them, adjusting each one to optimize its position relative to the sun and the central tower? It would take huge amounts of computing power to manipulate all the mirrors in a utility-scale power plant, but computing power is cheap—far cheaper than paying engineers and technicians to laboriously position the mirrors by hand. The potential savings are impressive, according to Gross; he says that eSolar can install a field of mirrors for half what it costs in other solar thermal facilities. As a result, he expects to produce electricity for approximately 11 cents per kilowatt-hour, enticingly close to the price of power from a fossil-fuel plant.

GoAuto has a report on plans to build an electric version of the Holden Commodore (its just a pilot at this stage though) - Fleet boost for electro-Commodore.

A FULL-SIZE factory-built Holden Commodore that consumes no petrol, delivers at least 160km of all-electric motoring, comes with a switchable battery leased from Better Place and costs no more than the model on which it is based will be available to all Australian within a few years.

That is the ambitious plan that took one step closer to reality today with the announcement that Australia’s largest fleet car buyer has joined forces with a consortium that will produce a Commodore EV initially for fleet consumption prior to its full-scale public release.

Melbourne-based start-up company EV Engineering (EVE), a consortium of five leading Australian automotive suppliers with global connections, revealed its $26 million project to produce an Australian-built rear-drive large electric car based on Australia’s top-selling model in February.

It now says it is on target to produce the first two concept vehicles by the end of this year, and to have a fleet of seven all-electric ‘proof-of-concept’ Commodores ready for real-world testing by mid-2012.

None of the vehicles will be ready to unveil at this week’s Melbourne motor show, but EVE today announced a significant boost to the project by announcing it has been joined by GE – the parent company of Australia’s largest company vehicle provider, Custom Fleet.

GE will join automotive component suppliers Futuris and its partner Air International, Bosch and Continental, and EV charging network company Better Place Australia, in the EVE consortium, which is funded partly by a $3.5 million grant from the federal government’s now defunct Green Car Innovation Fund (GCIF).

EVE and GE would not reveal financial details of the deal, but each existing consortium partner will supply both financial and technical support to the project, with GM Holden and the CSIRO to provide technical expertise.

Holden’s only involvement at this stage is the initial supply of vehicles, data for those vehicles and the use of its proving ground at Lang Lang, but EVE today indicated it was likely Holden would manufacture the Commodore EV.

“Clearly we will be working with them on the project and updating them on our progress and yes we’ll be happy to review plans for mass production as we get further down the track with the car," said EVE CEO and former senior Holden executive Ian McCleave.

The Economist has an article on the increasing popularity for using USB connectors for DC power distribution, declaring "The humble USB cable is part of an electrical revolution. It will make power supplies greener and cheaper" - Edison’s revenge.

Most phones and other small gadgets can charge from a simple USB cable plugged into a computer or an adaptor. Some 10 billion of them are already in use. Hotel rooms, aircraft seats, cars and new buildings increasingly come with USB sockets as a standard electrical fitting.

Now a much bigger change is looming. From 2014, a USB cable will be able to provide power to bigger electronic devices. In the long term this could change the way homes and offices use electricity, cutting costs and improving efficiency. ...

The big change next year will be a new USB PD (Power Delivery) standard, which brings much more flexibility and ten times as much oomph: up to 100 watts. In his London office Simon Daniel, founder of Moixa, a technology company, charges his laptop from a prototype souped-up USB socket. The office lighting, which uses low-voltage LED (light-emitting diode) lamps, runs from the same circuit. So do the monitors, printers and (with some fiddling) desktops. Mains power is only for power-thirsty microwaves, kettles and the like.

That could presage a much bigger shift, reviving the cause of direct current (DC) as the preferred way to power the growing number of low-voltage devices in homes and offices. DC has been something of a poor relation in the electrical world since it lost out to alternating current (AC) in a long-ago battle in which its champion Nikola Tesla (pictured, left) trounced Thomas Edison (right). Tesla won, among other reasons, because it was (in those days) easier to shift AC power between different voltages. It was therefore a better system for transmitting and distributing electricity.

But the tide may be turning. Turning AC into the direct current required to power transistors (the heart of all electronic equipment) is a nuisance. The usual way is through a mains adaptor. These ubiquitous little black boxes are now cheap and light. But they are often inefficient, turning power into heat. And they are dumb: they run night and day, regardless of whether the price of electricity is high or low. It would be better to have a DC network, of the kind Mr Daniel has rigged up, for all electronic devices in a home or office.

This is where USB cables come in. They carry direct current and also data. That means they can help set priorities between devices that are providing power and those that are consuming it: for example, a laptop that is charging a mobile phone. “The computer can say ‘I need to start the hard disk now, so no charging for the next ten seconds’,” says Mr Bhatt. The new standard, with variable voltage and greater power, enlarges the possibilities. So does another new feature: that power can flow in any direction.

This chimes with another advantage. A low-voltage DC network works well with solar panels. These produce DC power at variable times and in variable amounts. They are increasingly cheap, and can fit in windows or on roofs. Though solar power is tricky to feed into the AC mains grid, it is ideally suited to a low-voltage local DC network. When the sun is shining, it can help charge all your laptops, phones and other battery-powered devices.

The SMH has an article speculating that east african may be the next frontier for the gas age, imperiling new Australian coal seam gas projects - $100b LNG projects imperiled by African gas rush.

The discovery along Africas east coast of the worlds biggest gas finds in a decade threatens to undo investment plans on the other side of the Indian Ocean. Royal Dutch Shell, BG Group of the UK and Frances Total may scale back projects to build liquefied natural gas export plants in Australia and switch to Tanzania and Mozambique, where the new prospects lie and will cost about half as much, according to Jefferies International.

The LNG boom in Australia, where $180 billion of planned investment was set to make gas the countrys fastest-growing export over the next five years, risks losing strength as labor and material shortages force up building costs. As energy companies consider the next $100 billion of projects, a switch to East Africa would hold back Australias market share in China and India, where energy consumption is forecast to rise more than 60 percent by 2030.

“Because of the volume thats been discovered in East Africa, the economics look to be able to challenge Australian LNG projects, given the cost inflation they have experienced,” said Peter Hutton, an RBC Capital Markets analyst in London. “All companies will have that on their radar.”

The Asian market for LNG, gas thats chilled to a liquid for shipment by tanker, accounts for about two-thirds of global demand and will grow by 6 percent a year this decade, according to Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. Among six Australian projects scheduled to reach investment decisions in 2013, few will be approved because of climbing costs, Neil Beveridge, a Hong Kong- based analyst at Bernstein, said in a report this month.

Inhabitat has a post on a particularly unlikely plan for space based solar power - Japanese Corporation Plans to Turn the Moon Into a Massive Solar Power Plant.

Man hasn’t been back to the moon since 1972, but that hasn’t stopped a team of Japanese engineers from developing a plan to turn our celestial neighbor into a massive solar power plant. The disaster at the Fukushima nuclear power station has made Japan think more seriously about alternative energy, and as a result Shimizu Corporation‘s crazy plan has been gaining traction. The plan calls for a massive 12 mile-wide, 6,800 mile long “Luna Ring” of solar panels to be constructed on the moon’s surface. The solar belt would then harness solar power directly from the sun and then beam it straight to Earth via microwaves and lasers.

Shimizu Corporation’s plan would see 13,000 terawatts of continuous energy sent to receiving stations around the Earth, where it will be then distributed to the planet’s population. With NASA’s plans to return the moon currently on hold, Shimizu is planning on building the massive lunar construction project with robots. In fact, humans will barely be involved and will only be present in an overseeing capacity.

Medium has a look at the problem of coal ash - When the rivers run black.

The most toxic byproduct of coal-fired power isn’t carbon dioxide. It’s the residue that’s left over. When coal is burned in a plant, just like in a home, it produces two kinds of ash: fly ash, which rises, and bottom ash, which sinks to the floor of the furnace. Together, they comprise coal ash. In a power plant, all that ash has to be put somewhere.

For many years Kingston was the largest coal plant in the United States, which meant the facility produced a lot of coal ash. It was mixed with water to stop it from blowing around and dumped into the retaining pond, which quickly swelled with the waste. As the region grew, demand for electricity soared, more coal was burned, and the TVA built the walls of the pond higher and higher. By 2008, they stood 60 feet tall, and the pond held more than a billion gallons of coal ash slurry.

Shortly before 1 A.M. on December 22, 2008, the walls broke.

One corner of the dike, exhausted after a half-century of pressure and decay, collapsed. The coal ash sludge poured out, tearing a hole that kept on growing. Once outside, the slurry built up force and barreled over a sequence of outer dikes. ...

The TVA is the largest public power provider in the country, serving nine million people across seven states.

Like many other power companies, it has slowly been expanding its energy portfolio, but coal remains its backbone. And, like the rest, it has been upgrading that infrastructure, forced by the Environmental Protection Agency to make its plants run cleaner and more efficiently. Usually, that means installing scrubber systems in the smokestacks, which clean the emissions of pollutants like mercury, toxic metals, and acid-rain-causing sulfur dioxide.

The result is that the exhaust that emerges today is far cleaner than it was decades ago. But cleaning up the airborne emissions means that the solids remaining after the burn are far dirtier than before. In fact, coal ash is often loaded with arsenic, mercury, lead, and other contaminating elements. A 2012 study published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology found that cleaner air emissions are traded for “significant enrichments of contaminants in solid wastes and wastewater discharged from power plants.”

According to the American Coal Ash Association, the nation churns out nearly 65 million tons of coal ash annually. However, despite the fact that it is replete with toxins, coal ash is essentially unregulated by the federal government, with oversight meant to happen at state level. Yet most states handle the material with less precaution than your standard household garbage.

The “best” use for coal ash, say scientists, is to recycle it and use it in cement, which means the contaminants get locked in and cannot leach out. But there are a range of other recycling methods, including using it in asphalt and wallboard, spreading it as a soil amendment, or using it as a substitute for salt on icy roads. One particularly novel method of disposal is dumping it into abandoned mines. Most coal ash, though, is simply carted off to landfills or placed in retaining ponds like the one at Kingston. Many of the ponds, including Kingston’s failed one, are not just built to contain the coal ash, but actually use it as a construction material in their dams and dikes.

In Kingston, it was the dike that broke, but spills and contamination can happen in all kinds of ways. In 2005, a log wall broke in a basin at a Pennsylvania power plant, spilling at least 100 million gallons of coal ash into the Oughoughton Creek and Delaware River. In October 2011, a bluff at a Wisconsin power plant collapsed, spilling coal ash into Lake Michigan.

Environmental groups dislike pond storage, arguing that wet ash is more likely to leach contaminants into nearby water supplies, as well as being a far greater risk for catastrophic spills. A draft EPA risk assessment released in 2010 showed that coal ash ponds pose greater risk to human health due to leaching than landfills.

Charles Norris of Geo-Hydro Inc, a scientist from Denver who has testified before Congress on the subject of coal ash, says things are made even worse by using it as a construction material. Not only does this let even more contaminants leach out, but over time it compromises the structural integrity of the pond. Kingston, Norris believes, is unlikely to be the last incident of its kind. “The use of this as a construction material is new enough that we’re probably just looking at the beginning few failures,” he says.

Crikeys Guy Rundle reports that the Ron Paul era is coming to an end - The storm blows in the crazies to GOP-land.

Tossed palms at the street corners, the fraying and fading porches of Californian bungalows stretching back for kilometres, a low grey sky, and a foul tropical wind … St Petersburg has seen better days.

The city across the bay from Tampa was a product of the Florida land boom of the ’20s, sprawling across the peninsula, grid block after grid block. The boom laid down houses in their tens of thousands, bungalows with Japanese-style roofs and stone pillars, suggesting a new order of healthful nature, exotica, painted yellows and pinks and browns. Shops and garages at each corner, in art deco style — curved lines like cruise liners and seaplane wings, round windows, cherry-red light fittings, the streamlined and moderne, the past’s idea of the future. The city was the place to be in the ’20s. Then the Depression hit, and it’s been going quietly downhill ever since.

Some bungalows have been lovingly restored; others, houses that would give no change from a cool million in Melbourne or Sydney, rot away in the sea air. The shops on the boulevard have long glass display frontages, half-empty, or crowded with faded haberdashery and handicrafts. They make one tired merely by looking at them. At every intersection, they’ve punched in a shopping centre of the current style — dull-brown, slab-tilt, every sign — Walmart, Goodwill, Payless Shoes — general issue, undifferentiated, monopoly capital leaching away the sole virtue of the market, its exuberance. People drive up and haul away, as if at depots.

Today it’s bottled water. They’re coming out of the Walmart, loaded into carts, on palettes, going into the back of SUVs. The shelves near the registers are cleared of batteries, and torches are gone. Hurricane Isaac is coming, has hit the Florida Keys by now, and cities to the north are battening down. Tampa has already been entirely disrupted for the convention, the city criss-crossed with street-closures, concrete bollards pulled across, cyclone fencing around police stations. Casualty departments have been rehearsing decontamination scenarios. Everything has been oriented to the big gig at the Tampa Bay Times Forum, the hot centre of the city for three days.

In Tropicana Field, St Petersburg’s forlorn sports stadium, the opening party of the convention is going ahead tonight, but the convention proper has been put back a day to start Tuesday, in case Isaac — currently heading towards New Orleans — adopts the style of the moment and takes a sudden right turn and hits us with full force two. Delicious irony.

Should the Republicans fail to gain Florida — and hence lose the election — it will be because the Democrats managed to turn out the Jewish vote on the east coast. Was someone in the National Weather Service having a sly laugh when they named it such? Why did they not simply call it Barack and have done with it?

Last time the Republicans gathered, in the unlikely province of St Paul, Minnesota, they were pumped. The Democrats had held their convention, but they’d lost the news cycle almost immediately as the Republicans had announced their vice-presidential choice the day after, and Sarah Palin had set the country aflame, for a moment trumping the Obamamania. The financial crisis had not yet hit, and John McCain had not yet made a fool of himself by announcing that he was suspending his campaign and returning to Washington to sort it all out. Palin had not yet been, well, Sarah Palin, and the tales of a frontier state governor who could shoot a moose, and sold the governor’s jet on eBay had sent a shiver up the backs of the great and good.

That was a long long time ago, and the part is older and a little wiser, at least as far as VP choice is concerned. They have as their candidate Mitt Romney, a man who excites no one, not even Mitt Romney. To appease the base, but purportedly avoid the bad craziness of the Palin trip, they have chosen Paul Ryan, a thoroughly competent, highly intelligent, utterly lunatic Ayn Randian manorexic from Wisconsin. That may or may not work — Ryan has already been implicated in the Todd Akin “r-pe doesn’t cause pregnancy” scandal. Nevertheless, he’s not the type to say that he understands NAFTA because he can see Canada from Milwaukee, and that’s why he’s there.

But that doesn’t make for much of a party, and the gathering at Tropicana was, well, not subdued — the Republicans are too batshit crazy to be subdued — but lacking a certain genuine zest of yesteryear. “I cannot believe that the American people will re-elect a man who knows nothing about what America is,” said Jim, a huge man, near spherical, in a blue blazer and tan slacks. He was from Iowa, from whose name he removed the sole vowel, rendering it as “Ow”, like a cry of pain. He was angry with the media, which had been grudgingly admitted. His wife, Maeve, a delicately boned woman in a lace dress, was more conciliatory.

“You’re from Australia? Do you know about Barack Obama and what’s he done?” She peeked out from behind her husband, orbiting him like a moon. Did they think Romney would win? “Yessir, but it’s a battle,” said Jim. Maeve: “What with the liberal media …”

They had no doubt that Romney would win, but there was no swagger in their voice. In 2008, they could not believe that Obama would win. Hardly an extreme judgement — after all, in early 2008, the Democrats didn’t believe that Obama could win. Now that he was the President, that fact was a little harder to ignore. They had a candidate they liked better than John McCain, who had troubling inclinations towards bipartisanship, and a veep candidate they loved, a man who wanted to reduce government share of GDP spending to 3.75% (from around 24%, itself one of the lowest figures in the OECD).

Yet they had no air about them that commonsense and sanity would be restored. They were waiting to find out what their country would become — or in their minds, if it would exist at all after January 2013.The feeling spread across the vast St Petersburg-Tampa conurbation today, for over at the other corner, at the University of South Florida, Ron Paul was holding a one-day counter-convention, a second instalment on the “Paulapalooza” event he had held in Minneapolis in ‘08. This one was a little more subdued, if only because, in true form, there had been a split in the Ron Paul forces — with his more outre group staging a two-day “Festival of Paul” beforehand, at the fairgrounds, in which radical right-wing libertarianism mingled with heavy metal and the hardcore paranoia of the John Birch Society.

Paul skipped the fairgrounds fiasco — showing a circumspection he has not always displayed — and the split was significant, for it showed that the weird mix of boring Austrian economics and counter-cultural brouhaha that Paul’s supporters had pioneered, was coming apart at the seams. The crazies and the comb-overs were drifting back apart.

Paul himself is retiring, and his son Rand, a Kentucky senator, is taking over the family franchise. But he has nothing of Paul’s wiry charisma, and he is angling for a long career at the heart of the Republican Party, so he is toning down the one thing that has given the movement a broad appeal — Ron Paul’s uncompromising opposition to foreign adventures, and a US empire. Whether the Republicans win or lose in November, the Paul movement has peaked, and has started to fade.

Should the party win, many Paulites will happily fold into a fudged-up right-wing Romney era, satisfied that they have seen off an alien presence. The others will simply spin off into space, or into whatever bizarre movement endtimes American culture can come up with next.

But one way or another, the storm is coming in. You come out of an air-conditioned building, feeling like an iceberg lettuce, and into the hot wind twisting between the bungalows. There will be no relief, even should the storm come. The heat will not break, and so the whole city is held in suspension, but with no suggestion of what might end it, of what could.

Or of what would stop the slow wearing away, the flaking of paint, the salt air eating into the frame, that is now so all-pervasive in America as to be barely recognised.

The Atlantic has an interesting article on the bandwidth limitations to human cognition - How Poverty Taxes the Brain.

This understanding of the brain’s bandwidth could fundamentally change the way we think about poverty. Researchers publishing some groundbreaking findings today in the journal Science have concluded that poverty imposes such a massive cognitive load on the poor that they have little bandwidth left over to do many of the things that might lift them out of poverty – like go to night school, or search for a new job, or even remember to pay bills on time.

In a series of experiments run by researchers at Princeton, Harvard, and the University of Warwick, low-income people who were primed to think about financial problems performed poorly on a series of cognition tests, saddled with a mental load that was the equivalent of losing an entire night’s sleep. Put another way, the condition of poverty imposed a mental burden akin to losing 13 IQ points, or comparable to the cognitive difference that’s been observed between chronic alcoholics and normal adults.

I quite enjoyed reading Tim Wintons new book "Eyrie" last week, which takes a jaundiced look at my home state of Western Australia.

Port of Fremantle, gateway to the booming state of Western Australia. Which was, you could say, like Texas. Only it was big. Not to mention thin-skinned. And rich beyond dreaming. The greatest ore deposit in the world. The nations quarry, Chinas swaggering enabler. A philistine giant eager to pass off its good fortune as virtue, quick to explain its shortcomings as east-coast conspiracies, always at the point of seceding from the Federation. Leviathan with an irritable bowel.

The great beasts shining teeth were visible in the east, through the kitchen window. Not that he was looking. But he could feel it at his back, the state capital looming out there on the plain in its sterile Windexed penumbra. It was only half an hour up the Swan River, as close and as incomprehensible as a sibling. For while Perth had bulldozed its past and buried its doubts in bluster, Fremantle nursed its grievances and scratched its arse.

Winton is frequently compared to Australias other great writer, Richard Flanagan, though Wintons gaze tends to remain firmly focussed on his local space and time compared to Flanagans wider range of vision.

For me reading a Winton book is always an exercise that mixes the nostalgia generated by descriptions of places and people I grew up with combined with the general sense of loathing that these tend to inspire in me (not universally I should add).

The protagonist is Eyrie is a burnt out environmentalist, recently divorced and unemployed, and now weakly attempting to remain viable in a downtrodden apartment building in Fremantle - Wintons home neighbourhood these days and one he does a good job of describing. I enjoyed the series of caustic paragraphs describing the dog walkers of south beach, the weekend visitors to the cafe strip and the ugly sprawl of suburbia across Perths coastal plain.

I didnt think Eyrie was quite as strong as Wintons last book, "Breath", but enjoyed it nevertheless.

Crikey had an article on Wintons recent tour promoting the book - Tim Winton wants this taboo lifted.

Tim Winton, politely but insistently, would like a recently imposed taboo to be lifted. This taboo is taking away people’s opportunities and may crimp the “life and mind” of Australia, he argues. So what is it?

“It’s politically incorrect to talk about class,” Winton told a Melbourne audience last night. “You’re not allowed to talk about it.”

The popular Fremantle-based author argues the constraints imposed by social class, after a hiatus caused largely by Whitlam-era policies, are creeping back — but with the added burden that people are now not permitted to discuss (or rail against) class stratification. Such critics are now labelled as whingers who indulge in the politics of envy, he says — a label he has attracted himself.

And Winton reckons this is a problem because as the chains of class quietly settle back into place due to regressive government policy, no one is really talking about the implications. ...

As he sees it, Gough Whitlam’s prime ministership, much maligned for its perceived economic chaos, heralded an opening, a pulling down of fences via free education and other policies. This brought an age of prosperity and expanded “the life and the mind” of the country. But more recently, those very people who benefited from free education have been “putting the fences back up” as soon as they get into cabinet, via regressive policies on education, single mothers’ payments, etc.

The NYT has a look at manouevrings in the South China Sea and elsewhere looking to control offshore oil developments - A New Era of Gunboat Diplomacy.

IT may seem strange in an era of cyberwarfare and drone attacks, but the newest front in the rivalry between the United States and China is a tropical sea, where the drive to tap rich offshore oil and gas reserves has set off a conflict akin to the gunboat diplomacy of the 19th century.

The Obama administration first waded into the treacherous waters of the South China Sea last year when Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton declared, at a tense meeting of Asian countries in Hanoi, that the United States would join Vietnam, the Philippines and other countries in resisting Beijing’s efforts to dominate the sea. China, predictably, was enraged by what it viewed as American meddling.

For all its echoes of the 1800s, not to mention the cold war, the showdown in the South China Sea augurs a new type of maritime conflict — one that is playing out from the Mediterranean Sea to the Arctic Ocean, where fuel-hungry economic powers, newly accessible undersea energy riches and even changes in the earth’s climate are conspiring to create a 21st-century contest for the seas.

China is not alone in its maritime ambitions. Turkey has clashed with Cyprus and stoked tensions with Greece and Israel over natural-gas fields that lie under the eastern Mediterranean. Several powers, including Russia, Canada and the United States, are eagerly circling the Arctic, where melting polar ice is opening up new shipping routes and the tantalizing possibility of vast oil and gas deposits beneath.

“This hunt for resources is going to consume large bodies of water around the world for at least the next couple of decades,” Mrs. Clinton said in a recent interview, describing a global competition that sounds like a watery Great Game.

Such tensions are sure to shadow President Obama this week, as he meets with leaders from China and other Asian countries in Honolulu and on the Indonesian island of Bali. Administration officials said they expected all sides to tamp down disagreements, though that won’t mask the coming conflicts.

One of the pillars of the German renewable energy program is biogas. the German Energy blog has a post on a report looking at progress on this front - Biogas Monitoring Report 2013: Targets Difficult to Reach, Despite Strong Growth.

According to the 2013 Biogas Monitoring Report presented from the Federal Network Agency, 108 biogas power plants fed 413 million m³ of biogas into the German gas grids in 2012, a 50% increase compared with 2011 (77 plants; 275 million m³). However, this represents only 6.9% of the target of feeding 6 billion m3 into the German gas grids by 2020 pursuant to Section 31 Gas Access Ordinance (GasNVZ).

Compared with the target of feeding 10 billion m3 into the German natural gas grids by 2030, only 4.13% had been reached so far, the Federal Network Agency (BNetzA) said. Even if one assumed linear growth of biogas power plants, the targets would probably be missed, the agency added.

A Spiral Within a Spiral (5/21/12)

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope captured this image of the spiral galaxy known as ESO 498-G5. One interesting feature of this galaxy is that its spiral arms wind all the way into the centre, so that ESO 498-G5s core looks like a bit like a miniature spiral galaxy. This sort of structure is in contrast to the elliptical star-filled centres (or bulges) of many other spiral galaxies, which instead appear as glowing masses, as in the case of NGC 6384.

ESO 498-G5 – click for 1280×669 image

Ugo at Cassandras Legacy has an interesting graph (part of an article by John Laherrere at The Oil Drum) showing global oil production per capita - Peak oil? What peak oil?. Its certainly one peak of oil production that couldnt be argued with...

Better Place Australia has announced the Renault Fluence will be the first EV used in Better Places Australian recharge network - Better Place and Renault to bring first unlimited range electric car to Australia.

Better Place and Renault today announced they are expanding their global partnership by bringing the world’s first mass market, zero-emission car with a switchable battery to Australia. As part of the agreement, the two will jointly commence a marketing campaign for the Renault Fluence Z.E. in Australia leading up to launch in 2012.

“Today marks the natural next step between Better Place and Renault and builds on nearly four years of close collaboration between the two companies. Under this agreement we are giving Australian drivers access to fully electric cars and a ubiquitous charge network that present a real alternative to the tyranny of petrol prices. Together, Better Place and Renault are taking a critical step to accelerate the transition to sustainable transport in a large country like Australia”, said Evan Thornley, CEO of Better Place Australia.

When combined with the Better Place electric car charge network, the Renault Fluence Z.E. is the first mass-market, electric car with unlimited range. It gives Australian drivers the same freedom they enjoy with a petrol car, but with zero oil and zero emissions.

Under the agreement, Renault Australia will import the Fluence Z.E. and Better Place will provide the electric car charging network that makes the car more convenient and affordable for the mass market. Customers will buy the Fluence Z.E. from Renault and sign up for a Better Place membership package tailored for their driving needs. ...

Better Place has announced its plans to begin rolling out its electric car charging network in Canberra from later this year, with a progressive national rollout to follow. By 2013 Better Place will give Australia the largest electric car charge network in the world, which is expected to outpace current deployment plans in market-leading countries including the US and China.

Better Place has committed to purchasing 100% renewable energy for its network in Australia.

Todd Woody at Forbes has a post on a new, dispatchable solar thermal power plant planned for Nevada - Obama administration grants $737 million for a 24/7 solar power plant

The Obama administration on Thursday offered Santa Monica solar startup SolarReserve a $737 million loan guarantee to build a 110-megawatt solar thermal power plant in Nevada that can generate electricity 24 hours a day.

That’s the holy grail for intermittent sources of carbon-free energy such as solar and wind and the SolarReserve loan guarantee is a sign that the United States Department of Energy is willing to gamble on a technology untested on a commercial scale.
SolarReserve literally was founded by rocket scientists from United Technologies’ Rocketdyne division in 2007 and licenses its molten salt technology.

Like rival BrightSource Energy, SolarReserve will deploy massive arrays of mirrors called heliostats around a very tall tower – in this case, one that tops 640 feet – with a boiler attached. BrightSource’s heliostats focus the sun on a water-filled boiler to create steam that drives an electricity-generating turbine.

SolarReserve fills its boiler with millions of gallons of molten salt. Some 17,500 heliostats heat the salt to 1,050 degrees Fahrenheit. The liquefied salt then generates steam to drive the turbine before returning to the receiver. The salt retains heat that can be released at night or when the sun is not shining to continously to produce power.

“This solar technology is a genuine alternative to baseload coal, nuclear or natural gas burning electricity generation facilities," Kevin Smith, SolarReserve’s chief executive, said in a statement.
The Nevada project, called the Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Project, will be built on federal land in Tonopah, Nev., about 220 miles northwest of Las Vegas. SolarReserve said the molten salt can extend Crescent Dunes’ daily operation by 10 to 12 hours and the project can power 75,000 homes at peak output. Whether the utility that has contracted to buy the Crescent Dunes’ electricity, NV Energy, will want the plant to actually run around the clock depends on how it balances demands placed on the grid.

SolarReserve, which also has a license to build a 150-megawatt solar farm in the Southern California desert, is counting on the ability to provide carbon-free power when the sun isn’t shining as a competitive advantage. Rivals are also offering solar storage – Abengoa’s federally funded Solana solar trough power plant in Arizona, for instance, will feature up to seven hours’ storage.

The Australian has a rather weird article suggesting Australian exports to Asia of LNG from coal seam gas could be under threat from American exports of shale gas - US revolution puts Australian exports at risk. While shale gas seems to have solved the USs yawning natural gas deficit it doesnt look like the shale plays are going to supply the sorts of volumes in the long term that will underpin LNG export infrastructure.

THE shale gas revolution in the US could threaten long-term demand for Australian LNG exports as big energy players start to talk about exporting gas from North America to Asia.

While any export of shale gas is at least six years away, big energy players such as Apache are already mentioning the potential for shale gas exports to Asia.

As recently as five years ago, the US was expecting to need large volumes of LNG to offset a domestic gas shortage.

But technological leaps in shale gas extraction technology have unlocked previously unavailable resources.

The domestic US market is now oversupplied with low prices.

"Talk of new LNG re-gasification (import) terminals in North America has been replaced by talk of liquefaction plants, which means that US shale gas may find markets in Asia and compete against other suppliers, including Australia," Deloitte Australian oil and gas leader Stephen Reid said.

Deloitte focused on the issue in a report released yesterday.

The potential for shale LNG exacerbates earlier concerns that increasing shale and coal seam gas production in China could give Australia only a short time to line up LNG contracts for a host of planned multi-billion-dollar export ventures.

While analysts have raised concerns, most LNG producers maintain China-driven gas demand is likely to be strong enough to soak up all new supply.

Apache is looking to open Kitimat LNG terminal on Canadas west coast, producing 5 million tonnes a year, and has shale gas acreage that could eventually be shipped to Asia.

Encana has also talked about exporting LNG through Kitimat, while Houston-based LNG terminal operators Cheniere Energy and Freeport LNG have reportedly applied to US regulators for permits to export gas from the US Gulf Coast.

Last week, ConocoPhillips, which owns 50 per cent of the Australia Pacific LNG plant slated for Gladstone, said LNG demand was already rising because of Japans need for the fuel to replace power lost from nuclear plants at Fukushima.

"Rose" of Galaxies (4/20/11)

The newly released Hubble image shows a large spiral galaxy, known as UGC 1810, with a disk that is distorted into a rose-like shape by the gravitational tidal pull of the companion galaxy below it, known as UGC 1813. A swath of blue jewel-like points across the top is the combined light from clusters of intensely bright and hot young blue stars. These massive stars glow fiercely in ultraviolet light.

The smaller, nearly edge-on companion shows distinct signs of intense star formation at its nucleus, perhaps triggered by the encounter with the companion galaxy.

Arp 273 – click for 987×1000 image

More: here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Cosmology has, for a decade, had its "standard model", which largely explains most of the cosmological phenomena that astronomers are able to observe. Except for a relatively small number of things that dont seem to make sense in the model. Prominent among the latter are dwarf galaxies – by one definition, galaxies having less than 10% of the total mass of the Milky Way.

The standard model of cosmology is known officially as the Λ-cold-dark-matter model – ΛCDM. (This theory has no particular relation to the Standard Model of particle physics.) Cold dark matter (CDM) refers to the hypothesis that a large part of the detectable mass content of the universe consists of particles that are not accounted for by the Standard Model of particle physics. The dark matter is said to be "cold", because it appears to consist mostly of "non-relativistic" particles, meaning particles moving at speeds not close to the speed of light. That excludes, for example, neutrinos.

As weird as the idea of dark matter might seem, there is abundant evidence for it, which cant easily be better explained in other possible ways. (Although, many other possibilities have been proposed.) I havent written a lot about this recently, since the evidence for CDM just keeps piling up, but heres one important study. Dark matter is "observed" indirectly through its gravitational effects on ordinary visible matter. For instance, the motions of stars in the Milky Way have recently been analyzed closely enough to show that the dark matter in which the Milky Way is embedded has the shape of a squashed beach ball. (See here, here, here.)

Λ is the conventional symbol used for the "cosmological constant", which is a concept from Einsteins general theory of relativity. It is supposed to account for the observed phenomenon of "dark energy". This too is controversial, but there is much evidence for it, from a variety of different studies that are not all based on the same kinds of observations. I last wrote at length on the evidence here.

I need to write a lot more about recent evidence for dark energy, but Ill be very brief about it here. There is very recent evidence involving the motion of galaxies quite near our own (see here). Other than that, the evidence for dark energy is based on observations of distant Type Ia supernovae (about which theres a lot of recent news), "weak lensing" (see here), and "baryon acoustic oscillations" (a large topic).

In spite of all this evidence, ΛCDM isnt without its problems. As already suggested, one set of problems involves dwarf galaxies. There are at least two (somewhat related) parts to this problem. The larger part of the problem is simply that not enough very small dwarf galaxies (masses less than a percent of the Milky Ways) have been detected. This is often known as the "missing satellite problem".

Dwarf galaxies, being very small, are also intrinsically dim, and thus difficult to observe at all unless theyre very nearby. However, only about 11 dwarf galaxies are known to be satellites of the Milky Way – and such satellites should be the easiest of dwarf galaxies to detect. This is a serious problem, since simluations of expected galaxies sizes based on the way that dark matter should be expected to clump together predict as many as 500 dwarf satellites of the Milky Way.

The other problem is known as the cuspy halo problem. "Halo" refers to the cloud of cold dark matter in which all visible galaxies are expected to be embedded. Simulations indicate that the dark matter should be concentrated in the center of the halo instead of being evenly distributed throughout. This is intuitively reasonable – after all, most of the ordinary matter in our solar system is concentrated right in the middle, in the Sun itself.

This problem exists somewhat even for large galaxies like the Milky Way, but it is much more severe for dwarf galaxies. In fact, it seems as though the smaller the galaxy is, the greater the tendency for the dark matter (as indicated by orbital motion of stars within the galaxy) to be distributed fairly smoothly, with little or no density cusp in the center.

Related to this is a recent finding (see here) that smaller galaxies seem to have a smaller proportion of ordinary baryonic matter to dark matter than does the universe as a whole. And, in fact, the smaller the galaxy, the smaller the proportion of ordinary matter. In the universe as a whole, there is much evidence, based on detected abundances of light elements and observations of the cosmic microwave background, that there should be about 5 times as much mass in the form of dark matter as there is of ordinary matter. One might expect this proportion to be about the same in galaxies. Yet instead, in the smallest galaxies, astronomers can detect less than 1% as much ordinary matter (in the form of visible stars) as one would expect to find.

This would suggest that an important reason we cant detect very many small galaxies is that they simply have too few stars and are too dim to see. But it still doesnt explain why this should be the case.

In fact, I wrote 2½ years ago about a study that reported finding many small galaxies consisting of 99% or more of dark matter (here). The authors of the study even speculated that the reason such galaxies were mostly composed of dark matter was that "the fierce ultraviolet radiation given off by the first stars, which formed just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, may have blown all of the hydrogen gas out of the dwarf galaxies forming at that time." And they added, "The loss of gas prevented the galaxies from creating new stars, leaving them very faint, or in many cases completely dark. When this effect is included in theoretical models, the numbers of expected and observed dwarf galaxies agree."

Kind of makes sense, doesnt it? In fact, even for galaxies that began to form later, a large number of supernovae early in the life of a galaxy might be enough to blow away most of the hydrogen from which additional stars could form. And indeed, a recent much more detailed simulation of galaxy formation supports precisely this idea.

Why is it that previous simulations had not caught this? The reason is very simple: detailed simulations of galaxy formation and evolution are exceedingly demanding of computer resources. In order to make such simulations even possible – up until now – astrophysicists considered only the effect of gravitational collapse of a mixture of ordinary and dark matter. The effects resulting from star formation and subsequent supernovae were omitted entirely.

Duh.

Actually, this simplification is pretty understandable. The simulation that is the subject of the research under discussion here, that did take into account stellar formation processes, consumed an almost incredible amount of computing time. According to one report, "The simulation was carried out using about 250 processors running for about two months." Thats more than 40 processor-years.

And thats just for one simulation, involving a single set of initial conditions.

Heres the abstract:

Bulgeless dwarf galaxies and dark matter cores from supernova-driven outflows

For almost two decades the properties of ‘dwarf’ galaxies have challenged the cold dark matter (CDM) model of galaxy formation. Most observed dwarf galaxies consist of a rotating stellar disk embedded in a massive dark-matter halo with a near-constant-density core. Models based on the dominance of CDM, however, invariably form galaxies with dense spheroidal stellar bulges and steep central dark-matter profiles, because low-angular-momentum baryons and dark matter sink to the centres of galaxies through accretion and repeated mergers. Processes that decrease the central density of CDM halos have been identified, but have not yet reconciled theory with observations of present-day dwarfs. This failure is potentially catastrophic for the CDM model, possibly requiring a different dark-matter particle candidate. Here we report hydrodynamical simulations (in a framework assuming the presence of CDM and a cosmological constant) in which the inhomogeneous interstellar medium is resolved. Strong outflows from supernovae remove low-angular-momentum gas, which inhibits the formation of bulges and decreases the dark-matter density to less than half of what it would otherwise be within the central kiloparsec. The analogues of dwarf galaxies—bulgeless and with shallow central dark-matter profiles—arise naturally in these simulations.

Basically what the simulation has to do is to incorporate a level of granularity that reflects the size of a typical star-forming region: "Baryonic processes are included, as gas cooling, heating from the cosmic ultraviolet field, star formation and supernova-driven gas heating. The resolution is such that dense gas clumps as small as 10⁵ M_⊙ are resolved, similar to real star-forming regions."

It certainly wasnt possible to do a simulation where the granularity was on the order of the size of a single star – that could take 10⁵ times as long. Yet the results are very reasonable. The simulation produced a galaxy that closely resembles dwarf galaxies actually observed. In particular, the simulated galaxy has no "cusp" of dark matter density at the center, and no central bulge of visible stars in the center either.

And so the simulation adequately accounts for properties of real dwarf galaxies, which no previous simulation has done. The intense outflowing "winds" from supernovae that result from the heaviest initially-formed stars sweep all ordinary baryonic matter out of the central region. These winds are simply high-energy photons, which interact only with ordinary matter, not dark matter. However, the ordinary matter does interact gravitationally with the dark matter, which also then gets pulled away from the center.

The simulation does not directly settle the question of why so few very small dwarf galaxies are observed. Presumably, many small dwarfs actually do form. They just have so little ordinary matter that is able to coalesce into stars that the galaxies are too dim to detect at any great distance. This is in accord with other studies that show that the smallest galaxies have only a very small proportion of visible ordinary matter.

Governato, F., Brook, C., Mayer, L., Brooks, A., Rhee, G., Wadsley, J., Jonsson, P., Willman, B., Stinson, G., Quinn, T., & Madau, P. (2010). Bulgeless dwarf galaxies and dark matter cores from supernova-driven outflows Nature, 463 (7278), 203-206 DOI: 10.1038/nature08640

Further reading:

Supernova winds blow galaxies into shape (1/13/10)

Supernovae put dark matter in the right place (1/13/10)

New research resolves conflict in theory of how galaxies form (1/13/10)

Astrophysicists unwind Cold Dark Matter Catastrophe conundrum (1/14/10)

Puzzling Dwarf Galaxies Finally Make Sense (1/13/10)

Galaxy formation: Gone with the wind? (1/13/10)

NASA's Swift Satellite Catches a Galaxy Ablaze With Starbirth (2/26/08)

The Triangulum Galaxy is also called M33 for being the 33rd object in Charles Messier’s sky catalog. It is located about 2.9 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Triangulum. It is a member of our Local Group, the small cluster of galaxies that includes our Milky Way Galaxy and the Andromeda Galaxy (M31). Despite sharing our Milky Way’s spiral shape, M33 has only about one-tenth the mass. M33’s visible disk is about 50,000 light-years across, half the diameter of our galaxy.

Swift’s Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope (UVOT) took the images through three separate ultraviolet filters from December 23, 2007 to January 4, 2008. The mosaic showcases UVOT’s high spatial resolution. Individual star clusters and star-forming gas clouds are clearly resolved, even in the crowded nucleus of the galaxy. The image also includes Milky Way foreground stars and much more distant galaxies shining through M33.

M33 – click for 1440× 900 image

More: here, here, here

Heres the second article in a series Im going to do on NASAs advanced astrophysics and cosmology science program, which theyve called "Beyond Einstein". The first in the series is here. It provides background on the Bush administrations lamentable intentions to delay indefinitely or even abandon most of the more advanced of NASAs pure science programs, including Beyond Einstein.

My purpose in writing about this is to stimulate interest in the program among that part of the U. S. public that pays attention to basic science, especially advanced studies of the universe at large. Because, you see, as a result of last weeks elections, the character of the U. S. Congress is going to change significantly next year. Theres reason to hope priorities can change. When NASAs science budgets are discussed in future years, we can advocate that Congress reinstate funds for the missions that make up the Beyond Einstein program.

The main purpose of this post is to present background information on the program. But of course, a few words need to be said first about what the Beyond Einstein program is. Fortunately, NASAs home page of the project does a really great job of providing both an overview and detailed background information. See especially the science page, the mission descriptions, and additional resources.

In a nutshell, the various missions together and separately will investigate four of the most mysterious phenomena that we know of in the universe: black holes, gravitational waves, dark energy, and cosmic inflation. These phenomena are grounded in Einsteins general theory of relativity. Yet theres a great deal we dont understand about each one – hence the name "Beyond Einstein".

This graphic from the project site sums it up (click for full-size image):



If you go to this page, youll be able to click on individual parts of the graphic for more information. The items at the far left are space missions that have already been launched (except for GLAST, whose launch is scheduled for late 2007) or ground-based facilities (LIGO) that are currently working on different parts of the puzzle. Immediately to the right of those are two missions (LISA and Constellation-X) that are well-along in planning – but not yet approved and funded. They (as well as everything else to their right) are missions that were ditched, at least for the present, in NASAs 2007 budget.

LISA will use interferometry techniques, as does LIGO, to search for gravitational waves. But because the separation of the three observation points will be millions of kilometers, instead of a few thousand in LIGO, it will be vastly more sensitive. LISA should be able to detect gravitational waves resulting from supernovae or black hole collisions.

Constellation-X is to consist of four X-ray telescopes on a single spacecraft. It is a successor to previous space-based X-ray observatories, such as Chandra. Constellation-X will be able to study phenomena that are energetic in the X-ray part of the spectrum, such as physics in the vicinity of black holes and very hot gas found in large galaxy clusters.

The missions in the center of the chart are less far along in planning. Of the three, the dark energy probe appears to be farthest along. In fact, there are actually three possible designs in competition. In August, NASA authorized a comparative analysis of the three designs in order to identify the "best". Each of them will measure the effects of dark energy over the history of the universe by locating and studying 1000 or more Type 1a supernovae. They differ in the additional kinds of measurements they can make. However, the status of this mission (as well as the others discussed here) has recently been thrown into further uncertainty, as well explain in a minute.

The purpose of the inflation probe is to gather stronger evidence for the process of inflation that appears to have occurred beginning a mere 10^-35 seconds after the big bang. (As discussed here and here, back in March NASA announced that an analysis of WMAP data in fact gave preliminary evidence for inflation.) In addition, the probe will seek data that can discriminate among the many possible models which can describe inflation. There are different ways that the probe can study the problem, including a more detailed analysis of polarization in the cosmic microwave background, and a study of the evolution of large-scale structure in the universe.

The black hole finder, as the name implies, will be designed to locate and study black holes (both stellar-mass supernova remnants and supermassive black holes) in order to learn more about how they form and grow. As such, it will build upon work done by Constellation-X.

As for the two "vision missions", its really too early for scientists and engineers to define them in any detail. Much will depend on phenomena that are better understood from the results of earlier missions, and most likely phenomena we dont even know of yet. Understandably, these missions (and certainly others like them) are decades in the future.

And this brings us to the latest news. It should be clear enough that there are plenty of overlaps and interdependencies among the various missions. The capabilities of later missions will depend critically on what we learn from earlier ones. After all, until 1997, no one seriously suspected that dark energy even existed. (And some experts still doubt its existence.)

Because of this, as well as because of the severe present constraints on NASAs science budget, The National Research Council (NRC) of the National Academies has formed a committee – at the request of NASA and the U. S. Department of Energy – to conduct an assessment of the Beyond Einstein program. The first meeting of the committee was held last week (November 6-8). The agenda is here. Further information on the committee, including its membership and staff, is here.

This is the committees task statement:

1. Assess the five proposed Beyond Einstein missions (Constellation-X, Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, Joint Dark Energy Mission, Inflation Probe, and Black Hole Finder probe) and recommend which of these five should be developed and launched first, using a funding wedge that is expected to begin in FY 2009. The criteria for these assessments include:

a. Potential scientific impact within the context of other existing and planned space-based and ground-based missions; and

b. Realism of preliminary technology and management plans, and cost estimates.

2. Assess the Beyond Einstein missions sufficiently so that they can act as input for any future decisions by NASA or the next Astronomy and Astrophysics Decadal Survey on the ordering of the remaining missions. This second task element will assist NASA in its investment strategy for future technology development within the Beyond Einstein Program prior to the results of the Decadal Survey.

As of right now, I havent seen any accounts of what happened at the meeting last week. If anyone out there has some actual information about the meeting, or has seen reports of it, please let me know.

What I do know is that some people are pretty worried that the real purpose of this committee is to narrow down the Beyond Einstein program to just one mission, or possibly two, because of NASAs budget problems. This might entail not merely postponing other missions, but essentially killing them altogether. The problem is that, if some level of misson activity cannot be funded on an ongoing basis, then many researchers and their institutions will have to find other things to do, and it could be very difficult to bring teams back together when, or if, funding becomes available. See two posts here and here, from Steinn Sigurðsson for examples of the kind of speculation going around.

Oh yes, there is one other thing. Along with the announcement on October 31 (before the NRC committee meeting), that a final service mission will be flown for the Hubble Space Telescope, there were strong hints that other astronomy missions are on hold. The report on this printed in Science: Hubble Gets a Green Light, With Other Missions on Hold is available only to subscribers, but says at the end:

Griffins decision means that NASA will spend most of its astronomy budget on three major missions--the Hubble servicing flight, construction of the James Webb Space Telescope, and the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA). Technical troubles, schedule delays, and cost overruns plague the latter two. But Weiler [director of NASAs Goddard facility] says that the Webb is back on track after a rough couple of years, while SOFIA--which Griffin initially canceled only to revive in July--is slated to begin operations in 2009. Those large projects leave little room for smaller or future missions. For example, NASA halted work earlier this year on the extrasolar planet-seeking Space Interferometry Mission (SIM) in order to cover SOFIAs cost overruns. Those pressures worry some astronomers, who fear that the three missions will limit new efforts.

"Is the astronomy program with just [Webb], Hubble, and SOFIA a good astronomy program? You betcha," says Weiler. Although he acknowledges that there is a gap in smaller missions for the next few years, he notes that the cost of building the Webb will peak in 2008 and then decline over the next 5 years. "The big issue now is what to do with that wedge."

The four leading contenders appear to be the Joint Dark Energy Mission with the Energy Department, a mission called Constellation-X that features a bevy of x-ray telescopes, the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna to study black holes and the early universe, and SIM. NASA had intended to fund all in this decade and the next, but budget constraints likely will make for a competitive race.

Make of that what you will, but it certainly doesnt sound too good.

On the other hand, it certainly looks like the task of the NRC committee is to select at least one of the Beyond Einstein missions. Further, NASA is going ahead with other new astronomy projects. In addition to GLAST (launches late 2007), on October 13 there was an announcement that the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer will be launched in 2009 to do infrared sky maps, which would capture both nearby planetary systems undergoing formation as well as very distant galaxies – news report, further information.

So heres the bottom line I see for now: The NRC committee will take a year or so to ponder the situation. They may pick one project to go forward with initially. (Betting seems to be on the dark energy probe, because of the involvement of the Department of Energy.) Other missions in the advanced planning stage (LISA and Constellation-X) may wind up on hold, or one may be slotted as well.

The important point: there is plenty of time to make the argument before the appropriate Congressional committees that the NASA science budget should be increased enough so that the Beyond Einstein program can go forward, without having to sacrifice planning that has already been done and disrupting teams that are already in place.

Fortunately, as a result of last weeks elections, Congress will have new people in charge who should be inclined to place a higher value on basic science than those they are replacing.

Update 1 (11/13/06): According to a comment by Steinn, LISA and Con-X have been "approved", but only minimally funded.

Update 2 (11/14/06): Now Steinn says funding was cut off. In any case, theyre going noplace fast at this point.

----------------------------

Additional information:

Beyond Einstein: From the Big Bang to Black Holes

This is a 110 page document you can download in PDF format, and its very much worth the effort. Its profusely illustrated (full color) and describes all of the missions and gives a good overview of the underlying science. Only problem is it was published in January 2003. But the additional science that has been learned in the last four years mostly confirms the premises of the program.

----------------------------

Tags: astrophysics, cosmology, Beyond Einstein, black holes, dark energy, cosmic inflation, gravitational waves, NASA