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Scientist Brings Outer Space to Monmouth County Library Headquarters

Groundbreaking science has allowed NASA to better understand our surrounding planets and solar systems through the eyes of a new telescope. Dr. Mark Clampin, observatory project scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) at the Goddard Space Flight Center of NASA, presented a seminar titled “Oberserving Exoplanets” at the Monmouth County Library  on Thursday, Aug. 4. Clampin discussed the JWST that NASA has been working on and what it will do to advance the field of astronomy.

“You’ll see tonight that the James Webb Space Telescope is making lots of impressive technical progress and we are looking forward to have the opportunity to launch this mission,” said Clampin.

The James Webb Space Telescope is the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and it uses infrared technology to allow the most distant of galaxies to be visible. When it is launched, around 2018, it will be about a million miles from earth. It is larger than the HST so it can collect more light and allows the atmosphere of the exoplanets, planets outside our solar system, to be studied. This will allow science 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, compared to the HST that has a 45 minute delay while it rotates to the bright side of earth (it takes the HST 90 minutes to travel around earth), according to Clampin.

“It allows us to do the same broad swath of science that the Hubble Telescope does that appeals to lots of different fields,” Clampin explained. “But it really gives us a major new gain in capability compared to what we have done with the Hubble in a new wave length.”

People always ask if there is life on other planets and studying exoplanets is one of the first steps, Clampin said. First, he explained, we need to see if the exoplanet is similar to our solar system and then if there are conditions suitable for life.

The first exoplanet was discovered in 1996 and now there over 550 and the number goes up almost daily, with another 1,200 that still need to be confirmed.

Work on the program was started around 2001. Last year, it passed critical design and building real hardware has begun, Clampin said. In a few years ground testing will start to assure that is working properly.

Clampin has been with NASA since 2003 and before that worked at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Maryland. He was a member of the team that helped install one of the larger cameras on the HST.

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Even a century ago, scientists working out equations on paper understood that gases in the atmosphere absorbed and emitted energy, keeping Earth from being a ball of ice. Today they use supercomputers to make increasingly refined predictions about how the Earth’s climate will change.

The new efforts take the question from global to local scale. Nations, states and communities have lots of climate-related questions: Should they divert water from one area to another? Build higher sea walls? Store and manage water the way Israel does today? Plan for many more 100-degree days in future summers?

“We can’t answer those questions with the capabilities we have today. That’s why we’re using supercomputers to push the limits of what we understand and how well we can predict,” said James Kinter. He’s a professor in the climate dynamics Ph.D. program at George Mason University in Virginia and the director of the Center for Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Studies.

“We know with a high degree of certainty that the planet is warming up, and so just on average every place is going to be warmer,” Kinter said. “But nobody lives on the average.”

Scientists have used computer-generated models for decades to understand the past, present and future climate by studying the interaction of the oceans, atmosphere, land and ice. Kinter said climate models today showed changes on a continental scale, but that faster computers would be able to make better predictions at regional and local scales.

Better computers should help with the difficult climate problem of clouds. Clouds interfere with the flow of energy between the Earth and the sun in two ways, Kinter said. They reflect some of the sun’s energy back to space, a cooling effect. But they also absorb and send back some of the energy that the Earth emits, just as gases such as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere do. That’s a warming effect.

Recent models looked at the Earth as if it were covered by a grid of 2 degrees by 2 degrees, or boxes that were more than 19,000 square miles each, which is roughly half the size of Kentucky. The computer model sees everything within the box as being the same, but of course no clouds are that big.

Today’s models are better. And scientists hope to have a computer that’s 1,000 times as powerful as those today by the end of this decade. That still won’t be robust enough to deliver models as precise as desired, but they’ll be closer than today’s, Kinter said.

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