A neutron star and associated gravitational waves, yesterday. Thanks to NASA Explorers

Hubble, our media whore of a telescope observatory has been in the press again after the last mission to service was successful. The James Webb Space Telescope is in the “final” stages of clean up and test and ready to roll out soon (and I can’t wait!). But what else has been going on? Well, SWIFT has been re-certified as a NASA top priority, the recent Planck and Herschel observatories are still the talk of all the juke joints in town, and obviously we’re all chatting still about the successful launch and deployment of the LRO, sending man back to the moon for the first time in decades… Seems BIG space science is all the rage nowadays.

Or is it?

Just last week NASA announced that two new SMEX missions have been selected for funding. IRIS and GEMS will fly in the next few years, and for budgets an order of magnitude (or two!) less than some of their big name cousins.

The SMEX missions are a brilliant and hotly contested NASA initiative to get satellites and small missions launched as quickly and cheaply as possible. After the disaster of “faster, cheaper, shitter” (to paraphrase) a few years ago, including the terrible loss of life on Challenger’s STS-51-L mission, NASA administrators realized that serious science really does require serious investment. However, not all projects need to be as vast and grandiose as the ones discussed above.

The SMEX missions are Small Explorer missions. These missions "will implement projects that will study our sun and some of the most exotic objects in the universe, such as neutron stars and black holes,” says NASA, pointing out that the cost for each (not including launch vehicle) is capped at a little over a $100 million. While this is a staggering figure to a lowly biomedical scientist as myself (whose last grant requested a positively pathetic $600,000), the cost is relatively small and easily absorbed. By comparison the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph just installed on Hubble cost $88 million; the full cost of the repair trip was a staggering $1 billion.

The SMEX missions “demonstrate the value of the Small Explorer Program. For a relatively small investment, we’ll see an amazing amount of science generated," says Ed Weiler, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. I’m also happy to mention that my space faring chum, Joe, previously mentioned on this blog, is (albeit peripherally) involved in one of these SMEX projects: GEMS.

GEMS is the “Gravity and Extreme Magnetism SMEX”, and the PI is Dr. Jean Swank, at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in MD. GEMS will be measuring X-ray polarization from neutron stars and black holes at levels a 100 times more sensitive than has been previously possible. Joe’s PhD thesis was on measuring X-ray polarization using CCD detectors so she’s got a lot of experience in this field. I’m sure she’s excited about being involved in this “next generation” of detectors. As the press release says, “By studying the changes with time and energy of their polarized X-ray emission, the mission will probe the bending of space and the curving of light in regions of extreme gravity near these objects.”

I was recently talking with a friend of mine, a hairstylist by trade, who had been watching a show on the Discovery Channel about Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity and how mass bends space-time to “cause” gravity. We had a great chat over a few beers about the experiments to prove this theory by observing the apparent relative movement of a star during a solar eclipse. This proved once and for all that our local star was so heavy it bends the light of distant stars around it on their path to earth. Chris had never heard of any of this, and was actually really excited. But he had trouble trying to “picture” it (who doesn’t!) and had not heard the rubber-sheet analogy. I took the opportunity to wax lyrical to help him visualize how an object with mass bends space-time to “create” gravity, and how we can use this to imagine the orbits of the planets around the sun.

There is so much to learn about our universe still, and yet so much to teach here on earth. So, I raise my glass to GEMS and the SMEX missions. To Joe, and Dr. Swank and her team: A successful launch, and may your outreach be as successful as your observations.

I, and my friends, are eagerly waiting.