After more than two years and 362 posts, the space blog is moving home. We're merging with Short Sharp Science, a blog for everything New Scientist covers in the world of science, technology and ideas.

You can view that new, super-blog here, and see only the space posts at this link.

For those of you viewing in RSS, please update your readers to subscribe to this new feed.

Maggie McKee, space editor

Fermilab, a US physics laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, hosted an overnight pajama party to watch and celebrate the start-up of the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland today. Fermilab has a remote operations center for the LHC, which allows physicists to monitor the LHC and operate one of its detectors, called CMS, from the US. The remote operations center has been used to manage night shifts at the LHC during tests leading up to today's switch-on.

Greg Landsberg, US physics coordinator for the CMS experiment, was one of more than 300 people who turned up at Fermilab's pajama party in the wee hours of Wednesday morning.

1:20 am - It's eerie to see the Wilson Hall full of people in the small hours of the night. Usually a deserted place with a few geeky physicists still working late, tonight it is buzzing with people. Some of them actually wearing pajamas or terry robes; and a few even look tasteful! Amazingly, there are a lot of high-school kids - I truly pity their first morning class teacher tomorrow!

After mingling with the crowd, I make my way through to the LHC Remote Operation Center, which looks like a mission control room on a launch day. Only a few pajamas here; a dozen people are sitting in front of computer screens monitoring events at CERN. There are simu-casts from pretty much every place at CERN brought to the monitors here.

Some 30 more people are in the room - most are my collaborators on the CMS experiment - one of the two large, general-purpose experiments at the LHC. CMS stands for Compact Muon Solenoid, and it's all but compact - a three-story-high giant detector filled with millions of electronic "eyes" watching the heart of the CMS, where protons will smash into each other in violent collisions. Hopes are high that once in while, the crashes will produce something completely new, as energy is converted into matter, in accordance with Einstein's famous E = mc².

1:40 am - CERN just announced that they will start shooting beams around 9:30 Geneva time, or 2:30 am in Chicago. Time for a coffee and a few pictures of the most colourful outfits! Here comes Fermilab's director, Pier Oddone, sporting a dark overall; his deputy, Young-Kee Kim, chose a matching red one! (I actually hope to never see them dressed down like that again!) Pier gets on a make-shift podium and welcomes the crowd; they cheer - apparently, they did like the outfit!


1:54 am - the countdown to the LHC first beam starts - 5 minutes, 50 seconds till they shoot the first bunch of protons right into the 27-kilometre-long abyss. The crowd starts cheering: six, five, four, three, two, one, GO! ... and nothing happens; except that CERN puts a cute animation up about how the protons run though the ring. In fact the LHC people are still tuning the machine, preparing to shoot the first beam in about 30 minutes. Good time to run for another espresso - it's going to be a long night!

2:35 am - the first beam went in the machine, but the protons only made it through 1/8^th of the ring - this was a part of overall preparations for the full circle.

2:50 am - the beam went a little bit further: 3/8^th of the ring. It was dumped just short of the CMS detector. The excitement is building up: the next shot should reach CMS!

2:55 am - we made it! The beam just went through the CMS detector and lit it up like a Christmas tree! Wow - this is really exciting! They made it through a half of the ring.

3:26am - the first beam finally made a full circle. The crowd started cheering and applauding. We have a machine! Congratulations, LHC!

Once we saw the first beam going all the way around the ring, the crowd moved to the cafeteria, where an early 4 am breakfast was served, along with some champagne. There is one advantage in being at Fermilab when CERN shoots the first beam: drinking champagne at 4 am is much more par-for-the-course than doing it before noon at CERN! Well, what they served wasn't really Dom Perignon 2000; but with all the excitement around, it surely tasted like it!

Greg Landsberg, Brown University, US CMS physics coordinator

When I saw protons make the first complete circuit of the world's most powerful particle accelerator, I jumped out of my seat and applauded along with 260 other journalists and countless cheering and beaming physicists.

I've made no secret of my love of big physics. So I am thrilled to be here at the CERN laboratory in Geneva, watching the start-up of the Large Hadron Collider.

It's a historic moment for physics. Scientists and engineers have spent nearly 25 years designing and building the 27-kilometre-round machine and its four gigantic experiments. They could tell us what dark matter is made of, what the origin of mass is, where all the antimatter went and throw up countless surprises about the cosmos along the way. However you look at the LHC, this is big.

And I am here! Admittedly I'm sitting in a building opposite CERN that looks like a giant wooden mushroom with the rest of the world's media. But we have live TV pictures beamed to us from the LHC control room and the atmosphere is infectious.

To be honest, the day has exceeded even my wildest expectations. Let's face it, when you build a machine as large and complex as the LHC you expect things to go wrong. As Lyn Evans, the project's director, puts it: "The LHC is its own prototype."

The day didn't bode too well. During the night, part of the cooling system that chills the LHC's 9300 superconducting magnets had failed. Last night's weather forecast provided some drama as well. Thunderstorms were due to roll in and there was always the danger that a lightning strike somewhere could lead to a power surge that would shut down the machine.

Then there was the very real fear that protestors, terrified that the LHC was going to destroy the Earth, would try to break into CERN and vandalise equipment.

Happily the weather held off and the protestors didn't bother turning up.

So the action kicked off as scheduled at 0930 local time. The plan was to send a proton beam clockwise around the accelerator, stopping it every few kilometres by letting it crash into "collimators" lying in front of all four of the LHC's detectors.

This would give Evans and his team a chance to adjust the steering and make sure that the protons didn't crash into any delicate equipment. If all went well, the beam would eventually be allowed to make the full 27-kilometre trip.

Evans and his team removed the collimators one by one to allow the protons to make it through the circuit. We waited with bated breath, watching images beamed from cameras inside the tunnel. The cameras were focused on thin fluorescent screens, which would light up when the proton beam slammed into them and signal that the protons had made it round.

Evans knew exactly when the screens should light up and counted down. I swear I stopped breathing. When two spots showed up on the screen, signifying that the beam had made it all the way around, the LHC control room erupted.

What amazes me is that Evans and his team did all this in under an hour. It can take hours - even days - to achieve as much as they have done. Evans even had a bet with his colleague Steve Myers that they could do it in under an hour. "It might have looked easy to you," says Evans, "but it was only easy due to the quality of the equipment, the quality of the software and the quality of the people operating the LHC."

By the afternoon, the team had even managed to send protons around the loop in the opposite (counter-clockwise) direction.

Of course, this is only the start. It could take months before we see collisions at the LHC. Evans and his team first have to aim the counter-rotating beams accurately enough to be able to collide, accelerate them to the full energy of 7 teraelectronvolts and smash the beams together.

Still, I don't think I've seen so many smiling physicists. And they have every right to be ecstatic. Today marks the start of a new era of physics and I will never forget it.



Valerie Jamieson, deputy features editor, CERN

The internet is abuzz over a leaked email from NASA chief Mike Griffin that outlines the predicament the agency is in: how to get to space after the shuttles are set to retire in 2010 and before their Ares/Orion replacements are scheduled to start flying in 2015.

Because of mounting tensions with Russia over the conflict in Georgia, Griffin wrote in the 18 August email that the prospect of getting Congress to agree to buy seats on Russia's Soyuz spacecraft past 2011 is "DoA" [dead on arrival]. (In a public statement released on Sunday, however, Griffin said White House policy "is to retire the shuttle in 2010 and purchase crew transport from Russia until Ares and Orion are available".)

"The alternatives are to continue flying Shuttle, or abandon U.S. presence on ISS [International Space Station]," the leaked email reads. "[The next administration] will tell us to extend Shuttle. There is no other politically tenable course."

Delaying the retirement of the shuttle does seem like an obvious fix, but it poses some problems.

Officially, the biggest stumbling block is the Columbia Accident Investigation Board's recommendation (accepted by NASA) that the shuttle should not fly beyond 2010 without "recertification". Nobody's quite sure what recertification would consist of, but it's clearly meant to imply major overhauls of the orbiters, checking them over carefully for signs of any problem that would limit their working lives.

The obvious snag is that such overhauls would be big, expensive, time-consuming projects. A more subtle difficulty is that such a search for problems would undoubtedly find some! The youngest of the orbiters, Endeavour, has been in operational service for 16 years; the others are a few years older. If NASA looks hard at these old vehicles, it almost certainly will find a few things that don't look quite right and ought to be fixed on general principles. There might even be some genuinely serious problems. This will run up the cost still further.

However, NASA can probably avoid opening that can of worms. The CAIB recommendation wasn't intended to say that the shuttle would be unsafe to fly after midnight 31 Dec 2010 exactly. The date was meant as a general guideline, at a time when NASA was talking seriously about flying the shuttle several times a year until 2020 or later.

The simplest way to fly the shuttle for a few more years would be to "stretch" the deadline a little instead, avoiding the recertification issue by being very conservative. Limit shuttle flights strictly to station crew exchanges (plus some associated cargo, as a bonus); that would mean flying it only about twice a year. Rigorously standardise the cargo configuration and mission plan, rather than custom-planning each flight. Set a payload limit well under the maximum, to give wide safety margins and minimise stress on the orbiters. And do at least a minor overhaul on the orbiters, as time permits - the vehicles won't be terribly busy on this schedule - partly to look for problems and partly to appease critics.

Another problem of keeping the shuttle flying longer would be spare parts: not just paying for them, but whether NASA can buy them at all. Almost all the hardware in the orbiters and their ground support systems is grossly obsolete, since it was mostly designed 30+ years ago.

NASA has already been forced to do some costly upgrades, e.g. the new cockpit displays that the orbiters got in the late 1990s, simply because it had become impossible to get parts for the original equipment. (If the production line has only recently closed, usually you can get some more parts made just by offering the supplier enough money. If it's been a while since the shutdown, though, then the specialised knowledge and facilities may be gone, so the supplier literally can't make parts that are guaranteed identical to the originals.)

How bad would this problem be for extended shuttle operations? It's hard to say from outside, but the news probably isn't good. In particular, I wouldn't be at all surprised if some problems getting spares got set aside because the shuttle was about to retire. Those will have to be dealt with if the shuttle is going to keep flying for a while. However, for the sort of minimum-stress plan I suggest above, I suspect this can be handled. Perhaps not easily, and it'll take extra money, but I think it could be done.

Mind you, I do think it would be important not to fixate on 2015 as the real, final shutdown date. As I've said earlier, Ares/Orion is already a troubled programme, and I expect it to run late. A safer bet would be that the last shuttle flight would be sometime between 2015 and 2020. (Personally, I expect it will be sooner, because there will be commercial flights to orbit before then...but the whole point of this exercise is that NASA doesn't think it can safely count on that.)

In short, I think the technical issues of flying the shuttle a few years longer are probably manageable - given a good supply of money and some cautious planning. However, there are some non-technical (and non-financial) problems which may be harder to solve; I'll talk about them in the third (and last) part of this article.

Henry Spencer, computer programmer, spacecraft engineer and amateur space historian (Image: NASA)

As I wrote a few weeks ago, NASA has a problem. Officially there will be no US manned spaceflights between the shuttle's retirement (set for 2010) and the delivery of its replacement, Ares/Orion (set for 2015, perhaps optimistically). But the US still wants to get crews to and from the space station during that time.

NASA's current contract with the Russians for Soyuz crewed and Progress cargo flights runs out in 2011. NASA had hoped to extend the Soyuz part of that contract for a few more years (cargo services can now be provided by ESA's ATV freighter, and perhaps also soon by US commercial freighters under NASA's COTS programme.)

But recent Russian military interventions in Georgia, and Western reactions to them, have cast doubts on whether that can be done at all, and if so, how much it will cost. (Note that for this discussion, it doesn't really matter who started the mess in Georgia, or who's in the right and who's in the wrong, or whose fault it is. All that really matters to NASA is that Russia is doing things that the West loudly disapproves of.)

Quick fixes to this are hard to find. One idea that keeps coming up is the obvious one: keep the shuttle flying longer. NASA has started to look at this internally, and Republican presidential candidate John McCain has openly urged Bush to tell NASA to "take no action for at least one year" that would preclude more shuttle flights. Unfortunately, it's not that simple.

The biggest problem is money. Quite simply, it costs $2 - 3 billion a year just to preserve the capability of flying the shuttle, regardless of how often it actually flies. Shuttle operations involve a lot of people, and they all have to get paid every month or they quit and go do something else. NASA's spending that right now, of course . . . but starting two years from now, it was supposed to be spent on Ares and Orion instead. (They're already behind schedule and starved for money.)

Still worse, "take no action for at least one year" is not enough. Shuttle-related facilities are already starting to close down.

For example, Lockheed Martin recently announced that the first layoffs among the workers building the shuttle external fuel tank (ET) will start in the next few months: the final batch of ETs is already well along in construction, and soon there simply won't be any work for those people to do. Worse, the modern ETs are made of a fairly unusual aluminium-lithium alloy, and the last batches of it were undoubtedly delivered months ago. The advance notice needed to get more of it could easily be a year or more, which would mean that there will be at least some gap in ET production.

The idea behind the "one year" is to give the next president, whoever he is, the final say. Unfortunately, delaying a decision is going to require spending extra money, and the amount required is already rising rapidly.

If NASA is going to retain the option of more shuttle flights, Congress is going to have to put up some extra money for that option, quickly. And it really doesn't help that Congress adjourned for summer vacation without passing most of this year's major budget bills. Almost certainly, NASA will end up operating for at least a few months on a "continuing resolution", which basically forbids spending money on anything that wasn't in last year's budget.

Congress does sometimes add a few new bits of money in a continuing resolution. If they do add some funding to keep open the option of extending shuttle operations, that would help; I'll talk more about the details in part 2 of this article. If they don't, I think the prospects are dim, especially if the continuing resolution ends up lasting a full year, which has happened in the past.

Henry Spencer, computer programmer, spacecraft engineer and amateur space historian (Image: NASA TV)

I attended the Great Planet Debate earlier this month in Laurel, Maryland, which featured plenty of scientific debate about the relative merits of different planet definitions.

But to me, what was most interesting about the conference was not the back-and-forth itself, but what it revealed about our love affair with Pluto and planets in general.

The intensity of that sentiment baffles some scientists. "Within our culture, there's a correlation between the word 'planet' and 'important' - I don't understand that," said Hal Levison of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. "To me, the coolest thing in the solar system is the Kuiper belt," referring to the ring of icy bodies orbiting beyond Neptune.

Bill McKinnon, a planetary scientist from Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, was also puzzled.

He says his students are astonished when they learn about the richness and diversity of Jupiter's four biggest moons, including Europa, which is thought to have a subsurface ocean that could host life. "They'll say, 'But I thought they were just moons!'," he said. "It's like there's an implicit hierarchy. If you are a planet, you are first class, A-list - you get inside the rope to the club, and otherwise you're nothing."

Not only is there a tendency to see planets as more important, but people feel an emotional connection with them.

Sara Seager, an astronomer at MIT, quoted the driver of the shuttle bus that brought her and other attendees to the conference: "As we were leaving, he looked at us very sadly and said, 'Please, please bring Pluto back'."

A teacher and self-described "space geek" in the audience described her surprise at receiving phone calls from people offering condolences after Pluto lost its planetary status.

But of all the attendees, the one with the most personal connection to Pluto was surely Annette Tombaugh, daughter of Pluto's discoverer, Clyde Tombaugh. "Some people like to demote heroes, and my dad was a hero," she said.

When the IAU demoted Pluto, "suddenly people were saying, 'Let's take the name off of the school that is named for him [and] let's take the street names off of the streets that are named for him," she said. "This had a social impact on our family." Some even questioned whether her father's telescopes were worth as much as they were before the decision, she said.

So why does the 'planet' label have so much cachet? Alan Stern, head of NASA's New Horizons mission to Pluto, argued that it's because Earth is a planet. "We live on a planet and therefore [people] identify much more closely [with planets] than they identify with a black hole or a star or whatever," he said.

David Weintraub, an astronomer and author of a book titled "Is Pluto a planet?", suggested the attitude was related to the cultural impact of horoscopes, prompting giggles from the audience.

"I'm very serious," he insisted. "Knowing where the planets were affected your life, if you believed that stuff . . . People for historical reasons have assigned an unrealistic importance to those objects and not to objects that are not planets."

What do you think? Putting aside the scientific issues, why do you think there is a tendency to attach more importance to planets than to other objects? Is it justified, or is it a wrongheaded way to look at things?

David Shiga, reporter (Illustration: NASA/JPL)

NASA has quietly released photos and video of a 31 July parachute test for its future Orion astronaut capsule that didn't go so well: the mockup capsule hit the ground pretty hard. Unsurprisingly, some have jumped on this, claiming that NASA is trying to cover up a failure.

The full story is a bit more complicated than that. I'm sure NASA wasn't eager to publicise this embarrassing episode, but it wasn't exactly a failure. There was a problem, yes, but it was in part of the test setup, rather than in the parachutes that would actually land an operational Orion after a trip to the space station or the Moon.

Testing a parachute drop of a heavy object is not simple. In particular, several auxiliary parachutes were used to help set up the right test conditions, so that Orion's own three-part parachute system would get a realistic test. Orion uses "drogue" chutes that ensure the capsule is stable, as well as "pilot" chutes that pull its main chutes out.

Unfortunately, some of the auxiliary chutes failed, and as a result the Orion parachute system was activated at high speed, in dense, low-altitude air. The drogue parachutes failed instantly on deployment in the unrealistically harsh conditions. Then the capsule began to tumble, main-parachute deployment was hopelessly messed up, and hope of anything resembling a soft landing was lost.

Foul-ups in testing are not uncommon, especially when the test setup is being tried for the first time. One of the headaches of high-tech test programmes is having to debug the test arrangements before you can start debugging the things you're trying to test.

Sometimes a malfunctioning test setup actually gives the tested system a chance to show what it can do in an unrehearsed emergency. During a test of an Apollo escape-system in the 1960s, the escape system successfully got the capsule clear of a malfunctioning test rocket.

But sometimes the test conditions are so unrealistically severe that there's no hope of correct functioning. Unpleasant though the result often looks, this isn't properly considered a failure of the tested system. That seems to have been what happened here.

Properly speaking, the outcome of this test is best summed up not as "failure" but as "no test". That's testing jargon for "the test setup messed up so badly that the test told us nothing about the tested system". Expensive and embarrassing, yes, but it doesn't indicate a problem with the Orion design.



Henry Spencer, computer programmer, spacecraft engineer and amateur space historian (Image: NASA)

If you took a stab at renaming NASA's gamma-ray telescope earlier this year, now's your chance to see whether the agency took your suggestion seriously. After asking the public to suggest a new name for GLAST, NASA is set to announce the winner at a press conference next Tuesday.

GLAST, or the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope, launched on 11 June. The satellite is searching for gamma rays produced in violent cosmic events and by decaying dark matter particles.

NASA's naming guidelines allowed for acronyms, and also for christening the observatory after scientists who have passed away.

The agency took name suggestions for less than two months. More than 12,000 suggestions were received, and 10,000 or so were unique suggestions, says astronomer Lynn Cominsky of Sonoma State University in Rohnert Park, California, which managed the public 'suggestion box'.

Cominsky says the selection process began by sorting the suggested names into categories, including mythological figures, famous scientists and popular figures. All names were then forwarded to NASA Headquarters, where a selection committee eventually whittled the suggestions down to a top-10 list. The winner was decided by HQ officials.

Telescopes have a history of changing names. Before the Hubble Space Telescope launched, for example, it was known as the Large Space Telescope, and later simply as the Space Telescope, after budget cuts. Some toyed with the idea of calling it the Great Orbital Device (GOD).

We asked for name suggestions in February that contained the letters "GR" for "gamma-ray." GLAST seems to wrap the "ray" part in with the acronym, so the field may be wide open. What do you think the name will be? And will it stick? We've gotten to know GLAST pretty well over the past few years.

Rachel Courtland, reporter (Illustration: NASA/Sonoma State University/Aurore Simonnet)