The geek returns

He's been away for a while, but he's back and will make further guest appearances in the neat future. First up, two dandies from the Beeb for March 10. First:

Nasa's Mars rover Opportunity has begun recording eclipses on the Red Planet, the first time the phenomenon has been witnessed on another world. ...

Nasa will create animations of the phenomena by combining multiple still pictures taken at different stages during the eclipses. The pancams cannot capture continuous video.

But the moons' passes across the Sun are very fast, so mission scientists have to carefully time when to take the pictures.

"They both happen very quickly, Deimos ones take about one minute to pass across the Sun and the Phobos ones take about 20-30 seconds or so. We can only take images about once every five to 10 seconds," said Dr Bell.

I'm looking forward to those animations.

And second:

The Hubble Space Telescope has obtained the deepest ever view of the cosmos - which means, actually, the farthest back in time anyone has ever seen, to a time when the universe was just a few hundred million years old. Since it's now believed to be about 13.7 billion years since the Big Bang, that's roughly the equivalent of a 50-year old adult looking at a photo of themselves taken when they were less than 2 years old.

To get the image, called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, the telescope was repeated focused on a small patch of sky centered in the constellation Fornax over a period of nearly four months. The sum total exposure time was over 11 days.

The result? In an area that appears nearly empty to ground-based telescopes, Hubble found an estimated 10,000 galaxies. The image is

studded with a wide range of galaxies of various sizes, shapes, and colours.

There is also a "zoo" of oddball galaxies littering the field. A few appear to be interacting. Their strange shapes are different from the spiral and elliptical galaxies we see today.

These unusual galaxies chronicle a period when the Universe was more chaotic; order and structure were just beginning to emerge.

Recently I read an article - the link for which I have unfortunately misplaced - critical of programs such as these as simply wasteful so long as there is more to be done or learned right here. "Will they cure a single disease?" asked one. Another insisted that we know more about Mars than we do about our own oceans.

The latter claim came from a marine scientist, so maybe her choice of example was not exactly an unbiased one, but both points are well taken: It's not easy to see any clear practical result from the Mars mission, the Hubble telescope, or related extraterrestrial investigations and there are regions of Earth - including the depths of the oceans - which are largely still mysteries to us. Certainly, there is still much to be done, much to be explored, much to be accomplished right here. (On the other hand, the computer I'm typing at is full of microcircuits, the development of which was largely driven by the desire for fuel-saving miniaturization during the "space race" of the 1950s and '60s - and the claim that we know more about Mars than our oceans is frankly over the top.)

What disturbs me most about such sentiments, however, is that they almost always pit one science against another, one sort of research against another. Again, "will it cure a single disease?" The argument is not to spend more on health care research, it's to spend less on space-related research in order to spend more on health care research. And that's absurd.

What should be asked isn't "Why are we spending $800 million to send probes to Mars when there are needs here on Earth" but "Why are we giving tax cuts to gazillionaires while health care research funds are sickly," "Why are we sinking special favors into Big Business instead of sinking bathyscaphes into the ocean," "Why are we researching Star Wars instead of the stars."

There is an underlying value to space exploration - and by that I don't mean setting up colonies on the Moon or whatnot, I mean things like the Mars missions, astrophysical research and the like - that as far am I'm concerned can't be denied and is in fact the basic driving force behind it: answering the desire to learn, to understand, to discover. Answering the desire to know. To know what's out there, how it got there, how it works, what's going to happen to it. That desire to know is what makes us most human. It's the same desire that drives all so-called "pure" research. It's one that in all cases should be honored, not ridiculed or face demands for proof of immediate practical application.

Science research can't be allowed to become a zero-sum game.