- Email: [email protected]
Telescopes on far side of moon help listen to early universe
For more technology stories, visit newscientist.com/technology
NASA/VRS/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
TECHNOLOGY
our planet’s radio chatter. “It is a very pristine environment for low-frequency observation,” says Jones. The first shot at radio astronomy from the moon’s far side will probably be a mission called the Dark Ages Radio Explorer, being designed by Jack Burns at the University of Colorado at
“Telescopes behind the moon will be shielded from Earth’s ionosphere and FM radio chatter” Boulder, and colleagues. If selected as a mission by NASA in its review next year, DARE will orbit the moon at an altitude of 200 kilometres. It will collect –Earth, eh? Always interfering– neutral-hydrogen signals between 40 and 120 megahertz. That corresponds to 80 million to 420 million years after the big bang. Its antenna is designed to pick up signals from the entire sky. The craft will be a little toughie, with parts made from an barrier,” says Dayton Jones of In the space behind the moon, no one can hear Astroquartz/Kevlar fibre, which NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory Earth scream – a perfect place for telescopes (JPL) in Pasadena, California. “You is very thermally stable – particularly handy when moving have got to go to space, and the million years after the big bang. in and out of sunlight as it orbits most promising location by far Anil Ananthaswamy To explore even earlier times, the moon. is the far side of the moon.” FORTY years after NASA ditched telescopes need to receive radio The DARE team has begun This is why astronomers were the idea of landing Apollo 17 on waves at frequencies below testing the probe’s antenna discussing it at an American the far side of the moon, the 100 megahertz. Interference from Astronomical Society meeting at remote locations on Earth, forbidden fruit is being sought radio sources on Earth such as FM in Anchorage, Alaska, this month. starting with the National Radio once again. Not by astronauts this radio and the planet’s ionosphere Telescopes behind the moon Quiet Zone surrounding the time, but by astronomers seeking can mess up these signals. “You Green Bank telescope in West would not have to contend with a quiet spot from which to get to the point where the Virginia. “It may be a radio quiet Earth’s ionosphere, and they observe the universe’s “dark ages”. ionosphere is just a hopeless zone, but it’s not quite,” says DARE would also be shielded from This was an epoch in the team member Abhirup Datta. development of the cosmos, “You can still see the FM bands Hide and seek which lasted for a few hundred coming in, and of course the The moon will periodically shield the DARE telescope from Earth’s radio interference, ionosphere is a problem.” million years after the big bang, giving it the chance to make pristine observations of the early universe before stars and galaxies began Not everyone reckons a spaceEach orbit, at 200km altitude, to form. The only way to observe based solution is needed to study lasts ~127 minutes the dark ages is to look for faint the universe’s dark ages. “Existing radio signals from neutral ground-based experiments Radio wave interference hydrogen – single protons orbited will yield good progress on this by single electrons – which filled problem at a tiny fraction of the LAUNCH RADIO QUIET ZONE the early universe. cost of a space mission,” says FROM EARTH ~15 minutes per orbit Telescopes on Earth, such as Steven Tingay of Curtin University the Murchison Widefield Array in in Bentley, Western Australia, who Western Australia, are searching headed the construction of the Radio wave interference for such signals, at frequencies Murchison array. above 100 megahertz. This can Burns disagrees. Preliminary probe the universe back to 400 tests reveal that the Earth’s >
View from the far side
30 June 2012 | NewScientist | 19
TECHNOLOGY
20 | NewScientist | 30 June 2012
Beating back the cyberbullies Artificial intelligence could ease the suffering for teens hurt by online bullying Julian Winslow/Corbis
< ionosphere is absorbing signals from space and re-emitting them as noise in frequencies below 80 megahertz. “If we can verify and characterise that, that slams the lid on any attempts to do this kind of experiment from the ground,” says Burns. Once DARE has done its job, his team want to deploy bigger telescopes on the lunar far side to image the first stars and galaxies. These antennas would be made of conducting material imprinted on extremely lightweight films of polyamide, micrometres thick. In one design, three 100-metrelong arms of such films are attached to a central box of electronics. The arms would be rolled up tight for launch and, once on the moon, a rover sent along with the unit will move it to its required spot and help unfurl the arms. The rover would likely have to be controlled by astronauts orbiting a Lagrange point over the lunar far side. To test this scenario, Burns’s team will work with astronauts based on the International Space Station next year. The astronauts will remotely operate a Mars rover called K-10. It is being outfitted to unwind films of polyamide on a simulated Martian landscape at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. “The ultimate experiment we’d like to do for cosmology on the far side would involve thousands of these antennas,” says Burns. But what if the basic idea proves unfeasible, in terms of cost or in overcoming obstacles in the terrain? At JPL, Jones and his team are working on another solution: rolled-up antennas that inflate like party blowers seconds before they touch the lunar surface. “They are essentially immune to whatever irregularities there are at the surface,” says Jones. Astronomers have their sights set on at least one site for such telescopes: the flat bed of the 180-kilometre-wide Tsiolkovskiy crater, exactly where the Apollo 17 astronauts first wanted to land. n
–So it happened to you, too?– Niall Firth
“I have been bullied my entire life. About how I look like a whale and how im not pretty enough. I cant get boyfriends because i refuse to have sex until I am married. I just dont know what to do anymore...:\” – Samantha, 16 Pleas for help like this one appear on social media and internet forums every day, written by desperate teenagers who live their entire lives online. Knowing you’re not alone can help. That’s
the idea behind new software that matches up such messages with similar posts from other worried teenagers, letting them know that what they’re experiencing isn’t unusual. It might also be possible to spot bullying behaviour as it happens online. Recent high-profile cases have made cyberbullying front page news. In January, 15-year-old Amanda Diane Cummings died after jumping in front of a bus on Staten Island, New York. She’d been subjected to a campaign of bullying on Facebook by other
pupils at her school. Last September, Jamey Rodemeyer, a 15-year-old boy from Buffalo, New York, killed himself after being teased online about his sexuality. The cases sparked lawmakers to push through legislation, passed by the state senate last week, that makes cyberbullying a crime. To help tackle one part of the problem, Karthik Dinakar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and colleagues have been working on a project that analyses the posts written by
NASA/VRS/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
TECHNOLOGY
our planet’s radio chatter. “It is a very pristine environment for low-frequency observation,” says Jones. The first shot at radio astronomy from the moon’s far side will probably be a mission called the Dark Ages Radio Explorer, being designed by Jack Burns at the University of Colorado at
“Telescopes behind the moon will be shielded from Earth’s ionosphere and FM radio chatter” Boulder, and colleagues. If selected as a mission by NASA in its review next year, DARE will orbit the moon at an altitude of 200 kilometres. It will collect –Earth, eh? Always interfering– neutral-hydrogen signals between 40 and 120 megahertz. That corresponds to 80 million to 420 million years after the big bang. Its antenna is designed to pick up signals from the entire sky. The craft will be a little toughie, with parts made from an barrier,” says Dayton Jones of In the space behind the moon, no one can hear Astroquartz/Kevlar fibre, which NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory Earth scream – a perfect place for telescopes (JPL) in Pasadena, California. “You is very thermally stable – particularly handy when moving have got to go to space, and the million years after the big bang. in and out of sunlight as it orbits most promising location by far Anil Ananthaswamy To explore even earlier times, the moon. is the far side of the moon.” FORTY years after NASA ditched telescopes need to receive radio The DARE team has begun This is why astronomers were the idea of landing Apollo 17 on waves at frequencies below testing the probe’s antenna discussing it at an American the far side of the moon, the 100 megahertz. Interference from Astronomical Society meeting at remote locations on Earth, forbidden fruit is being sought radio sources on Earth such as FM in Anchorage, Alaska, this month. starting with the National Radio once again. Not by astronauts this radio and the planet’s ionosphere Telescopes behind the moon Quiet Zone surrounding the time, but by astronomers seeking can mess up these signals. “You Green Bank telescope in West would not have to contend with a quiet spot from which to get to the point where the Virginia. “It may be a radio quiet Earth’s ionosphere, and they observe the universe’s “dark ages”. ionosphere is just a hopeless zone, but it’s not quite,” says DARE would also be shielded from This was an epoch in the team member Abhirup Datta. development of the cosmos, “You can still see the FM bands Hide and seek which lasted for a few hundred coming in, and of course the The moon will periodically shield the DARE telescope from Earth’s radio interference, ionosphere is a problem.” million years after the big bang, giving it the chance to make pristine observations of the early universe before stars and galaxies began Not everyone reckons a spaceEach orbit, at 200km altitude, to form. The only way to observe based solution is needed to study lasts ~127 minutes the dark ages is to look for faint the universe’s dark ages. “Existing radio signals from neutral ground-based experiments Radio wave interference hydrogen – single protons orbited will yield good progress on this by single electrons – which filled problem at a tiny fraction of the LAUNCH RADIO QUIET ZONE the early universe. cost of a space mission,” says FROM EARTH ~15 minutes per orbit Telescopes on Earth, such as Steven Tingay of Curtin University the Murchison Widefield Array in in Bentley, Western Australia, who Western Australia, are searching headed the construction of the Radio wave interference for such signals, at frequencies Murchison array. above 100 megahertz. This can Burns disagrees. Preliminary probe the universe back to 400 tests reveal that the Earth’s >
View from the far side
30 June 2012 | NewScientist | 19
TECHNOLOGY
20 | NewScientist | 30 June 2012
Beating back the cyberbullies Artificial intelligence could ease the suffering for teens hurt by online bullying Julian Winslow/Corbis
< ionosphere is absorbing signals from space and re-emitting them as noise in frequencies below 80 megahertz. “If we can verify and characterise that, that slams the lid on any attempts to do this kind of experiment from the ground,” says Burns. Once DARE has done its job, his team want to deploy bigger telescopes on the lunar far side to image the first stars and galaxies. These antennas would be made of conducting material imprinted on extremely lightweight films of polyamide, micrometres thick. In one design, three 100-metrelong arms of such films are attached to a central box of electronics. The arms would be rolled up tight for launch and, once on the moon, a rover sent along with the unit will move it to its required spot and help unfurl the arms. The rover would likely have to be controlled by astronauts orbiting a Lagrange point over the lunar far side. To test this scenario, Burns’s team will work with astronauts based on the International Space Station next year. The astronauts will remotely operate a Mars rover called K-10. It is being outfitted to unwind films of polyamide on a simulated Martian landscape at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. “The ultimate experiment we’d like to do for cosmology on the far side would involve thousands of these antennas,” says Burns. But what if the basic idea proves unfeasible, in terms of cost or in overcoming obstacles in the terrain? At JPL, Jones and his team are working on another solution: rolled-up antennas that inflate like party blowers seconds before they touch the lunar surface. “They are essentially immune to whatever irregularities there are at the surface,” says Jones. Astronomers have their sights set on at least one site for such telescopes: the flat bed of the 180-kilometre-wide Tsiolkovskiy crater, exactly where the Apollo 17 astronauts first wanted to land. n
–So it happened to you, too?– Niall Firth
“I have been bullied my entire life. About how I look like a whale and how im not pretty enough. I cant get boyfriends because i refuse to have sex until I am married. I just dont know what to do anymore...:\” – Samantha, 16 Pleas for help like this one appear on social media and internet forums every day, written by desperate teenagers who live their entire lives online. Knowing you’re not alone can help. That’s
the idea behind new software that matches up such messages with similar posts from other worried teenagers, letting them know that what they’re experiencing isn’t unusual. It might also be possible to spot bullying behaviour as it happens online. Recent high-profile cases have made cyberbullying front page news. In January, 15-year-old Amanda Diane Cummings died after jumping in front of a bus on Staten Island, New York. She’d been subjected to a campaign of bullying on Facebook by other
pupils at her school. Last September, Jamey Rodemeyer, a 15-year-old boy from Buffalo, New York, killed himself after being teased online about his sexuality. The cases sparked lawmakers to push through legislation, passed by the state senate last week, that makes cyberbullying a crime. To help tackle one part of the problem, Karthik Dinakar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and colleagues have been working on a project that analyses the posts written by