Month: January 2019

  • Government Shutdown and Science

    A sign on the door of The National Museum of the American Indian states that the museum is closed as the partial shutdown of the U.S. government goes into the 12th day, on Jan. 2, 2019 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

    The government shutdown has wreaked havoc on scientific progress, as The Post reported last week. Because the shutdown has lasted into the new year, the Smithsonian museums and the National Zoo are closed. Visitors are barred from seeing the pandas and the Hope Diamond. And Smithsonian scientists around the world must return home.

    They must go silent, too, which is sure to frustrate their collaborators. “You absolutely cannot use your government email,” Nick Pyenson, curator of fossil marine mammals at the National Museum of Natural History, told me last week. “You are not allowed to communicate, period.”

    Has the shutdown affected your science? A few readers chimed in via email: “The proposal review process is interrupted and the flow of research is correspondingly disrupted. I will have a lot of catching up to do once my active status is restored,” said a furloughed NSF employee.

    One reader mentioned that more than 3,000 scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s labs in Gaithersburg and Boulder have been furloughed, too.

    If you have a perspective on science and the shutdown, let me know at: ben.guarino@washpost.com.

    — Ben

  • NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft just visited the farthest object ever explored

    AOY6EUQK2AI6TCKCB32EFZMQSQAn artist's impression of NASA's New Horizons spacecraft encountering 2014 MU69, nicknamed Ultima Thule, a Kuiper belt object that orbits the sun 1 billion miles beyond Pluto. (NASA) (Nasa/Jhuapl/Swri/Handout/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)

    January 1 at 10:40 AM

    The nerdiest New Year’s party in the solar system happened 4 billion miles from Earth, where a lone, intrepid spacecraft just flew past the farthest object humans have ever explored.

    There was no champagne in this dim and distant region, where a halo of icy worlds called the Kuiper belt circles the outermost edge of the solar system. There were no renditions of “Auld Lang Syne” (in space, no one can hear you sing).

    But there was a minivan-size spacecraft called New Horizons. And there was a puny, primitive object called Ultima Thule, a rocky relic of the solar system’s origins, whose name means “beyond the borders of the known world.”

    At New Horizon’s birthplace, the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., scores of space scientists gathered Tuesday morning to wait for the signal confirming that New Horizons had survived its encounter with Ultima Thule.

    The call came at 10:31 a.m. eastern: The spacecraft’s systems were working. Its cameras and recorder were pointed in the right direction. The flyby

    “We have a healthy spacecraft,” mission operations manager Alice Bowman announced. “We are ready for Ultima Thule science transmission -- science to help us understand the origins of our solar system."

    At mission control, and in an APL auditorium where the rest of the science team was watching, people jumped from their seats and broke into cheers.

    Click here for the complete article: