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Countdown! World’s most sophisticated thermometer blasts off into space

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Arianespace sent into orbit a scientific satellite known as the Planck scientific observatory, for the European Space Agency.  The launch process took the new instrument from the ground into space in less than an hour. Image courtesy ESA

On 1:12 pm on Thursday, May 14, the Planck satellite — arguably the world’s largest thermometer — lifted off from the European Space Agency’s launch pad in French Guiana.
The launch began with a 6-second vertical climb. The onboard computers optimized the motion of the rocket in real time, in order to minimize fuel consumption. The main stage engine took the launcher into an intermediate orbit before the end stage carried the payload into the final orbit. The main stage of the launcher fell back, just off the coast of Africa in the Atlantic Ocean. The launcher will remain at an altitude of about 852 kilometers travelling at about

Profile: Freya Blekman, from hockey to Higgs An active researcher, Freya Blekman has responsibility for some of the software which will process data from the (CMS) detector. As such, she will be right at the forefront when investigations into the particle collisions begin. (iop.org) Image courtesy SET-Routes Editor's note: As part of an ongoing series on women in grid computing, iSGTW presents profiles of women researchers.   What do you do, and where are you located?I work as a physicist for Cornell University in the United States, but effectively I am stationed at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. What's the best thing about your job?As a scientist, I learn something new every day, and I expect that it will be like that for the rest of my career. At CERN, I am fortunate enough to work with some of the brightest people in the world. This is very special: when you're doing science, you find out that it doesn't matter whether you come from Abu Dhabi, Adelaide, Amsterdam or Arkansas. We all work toward a commo

Feature - Single and playing hard to get Cecilia Gerber of the University of Illinois at Chicago presented the DZero result at a seminar at Fermilab, followed by Rainer Wallny of UCLA who presented the CDF result. Image courtesy of Fermilab. Scientists from the CDF and DZero collaborations at Fermilab announced last week the discovery of the top quark produced as a single particle. This comes almost 14 years to the day since these same teams first observed top quark pairs in 1995 – the production of single top quarks proved much harder to identify experimentally. The analysis tools and techniques that yielded this discovery also significantly advance the scientists’ goal of observing the Higgs particle at Fermilab.To make the single top discovery, physicists of the CDF and DZero collaborations spent years combing independently through the results of proton-antiproton collisions recorded by their respective experiments at the Tevatron. “Already 25 years ago theorists suggested that top quarks sho

Link of the Week - "Particle physics is the new rock 'n roll" CERN does have "The Canettes," and Fermilab has an a cappella singing group . . .  Image above courtesy of Josiah Norton, sxc.h. Previous image on front page courtesy Gus Cunh, sxc.hu The extraordinary questions that particle physics hopes to answer has attracted the attention of some high profile, and unusual, fans. Or so said The BBC, which ran a show saying that "Particle physics is the new rock 'n roll." Among others, they number fans such as Robin Williams, Mick Jagger, Queen guitarist Brian May, (now Dr. Brian May, proud recipient of a PhD in astronomy), magician David Blaine and Madonna. Alexandra Feachem, the BBC producer behind Big Bang Day – Physics Rocks, said "Particle physics may sound like a topic meant only for . . .  those loveable nerdy types who think a fun night out involves an anorak and a thermos of soup. But like any true convert to a greater good, I have seen the light; I know there is no

Science is awesome, dude "Year of the nerd." Image courtesy of The Boston Phoenix A positive review of physics appeared in a rather unlikely source — the popular, young, hipster, downtown, alternative weekly known as The Boston Phoenix, which we picked up while on the "T," outside Cambridge, Massachusetts. Big Science even made the cover: "Year of the Nerd: Obama! Tina Fey! Tampa Bay Rays! Hadron Collider! Twitter! 2008 was the year we totally geeked out." Amidst the sometimes colorful language, the authors showed they really got the message about the need for basic research on fundamental questions: "When people discussed the LHC, they scarcely mentioned all of the cool **** (expletive deleted) it can do — how it could recreate the conditions extant around the time of the so-called Big Bang, or how it could unlock the secrets of gravity. Most people probably didn't even know about half of that stuff. They just heard 'it could kill us all' and then freaked t

Feature - LCG, a challenge in 4-D: size, complexity, adaptability, funding Image courtesy of Les Robertson Les Robertson, a key player behind the development of the LHC grid, retired in 2008 after 35 years at CERN. The following highlights a speech he gave at GridFest last October.In a few words, it is hard to say something about computing that can compete with the wonders of the machine and its detectors.Nevertheless, I shall try. I hope to give an overview of the project, where it has come from, the challenges we faced, the computational structures and human collaborations we built to overcome these challenges, and a map of where we intend to go in the future.As we have seen, this accelerator creates extremely high-energy particle collisions, which in turn create new particles that decay in very complex ways as they move through the detector. The detector registers the passage of these particles with a vast number of sensors and, finally, creates a digitized summary that is recorded as what we call an “event.” Physici

Statistic of the week - WLCG rates No. 2 in The Times’ 2008 technology stories  A network of supercomputers providing the greatest data processing capacity yet unleashed has been created to cope with information pouring from the Large Hadron Collider. Image courtesy of TimesOnline Grid of 100,000 computers heralds new internet dawn reads the headline of the TimesOnline article of 29 September 2008, about the World-wide LHC Computing Grid. This article ranked number 2 in the journal’s top 50 most-read technology stories of the year, trailing only Billion pixel panoramas from your own camera. This is both good news and bad: it's wonderful to have so many people curious about the grid.  On the other hand, while much of the article accurately represents what the LCG is and what it can do, some aspects of it are misleading.  For example, calling the LCG “the Grid” is like calling google.com “the Web”.  The LCG acts as a metagrid, in a sense. It brings together the contribute

Feature - ALICE prepares for study of primordial plasma Image courtesy of scq.ubc.ca. Although scientists cannot travel back in time to study the primordial particle “soup” of the very early universe, they can do the next best thing–recreate it. In addition to accelerating and colliding protons, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN will collide high-energy lead ions one month each year primarily for ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment). ALICE scientists hope to use these collisions to recreate inside the detector tiny drops of primordial matter, the so called quark-gluon plasma, that presumably existed a few micro-seconds after the Big Bang. Before the universe cooled enough for quarks to be bound inside protons and neutrons as they are today, quarks (elementary particles that constitute matter together with electrons) and gluons (particles that carry the strong force that holds nuclear matter together) moved around freely in a kind of plasma state. ALICE collaborators will study this primordial plasma to

Feature - NYSGrid and the Lord of the Wings

This illustrates the pressure contour plot of the air flow field around a rotator wing that is at the highest angle of attack over 50% and 99% position of span. (Top is 3-D representation, bottom  is 2D.)Image courtesy of Ercan Dumlupinar.

British actor Sean Bean won’t fly. On at least one occasion during filming of The Lord of the Rings, he forced the air-lifted cast to wait on a snowy mountaintop while he ascended on foot to join them.  He just didn't trust the helicopter.  Bean (and his future colleagues) might be happy to know that somebody’s working to make helicopters safer.A research team, led by Vadrevu Murthy from the department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Syracuse University, studies aerodynamic loads on helicopter rotors that transfer directly to the vehicle’s control system. The team’s numerical simulations of air flow are expected to advance helicopter rotor technology and lead

Announcement - Ultralight/PLaNetS tutorial, 2 December, Miami Kovens Conference Center at FIU Image courtesy of kovens.fiu.edu  This tutorial aims to teach students and young faculty how to use the Physics Lambda Network Services (PLaNetS) to support Large Hadron Collider (LHC)/Compact Muon Soloid (CMS) data analysis and other applications.When: Tuesday, December 2, 2008Where: Florida International University, Kovens Conference Center in Miami, Florida Web site About PLaNetS: PLaNetS augments the Open Science Grid software stack with UltraLight’s real-time services. To optimize the overall throughput among the grid sites, these services estimate, monitor and track performance, and build managed data channels or complete network paths for high priority data transfer tasks as needed. PLaNetS exploits the full capabilities of long range networks, in partnership with UltraLight. UltraLight is a state-of-the art facility based on a hybrid optical packet- and circuit-based dynamic network infrastructure with more than twe

Link of the week - How the Large Hadron Collider might change the web LHC computing grid resourcesImage courtesy of CERN “When the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)” begins smashing protons together this fall inside its 17-mile (27-kilometer) circumference underground particle racetrack near Geneva, Switzerland, it will usher in a new era not only of physics but also of computing.” Scientific American writer Mark Anderson discusses how the “tsunami of raw data” expected from the Large Hadron Collider at CERN will put the Globus middleware through a “trial by fire”. If project scientists can tame massive, worldwide fields of networked data and computing cycles in particle physics, he asks, might their solutions apply across the Internet—in much the same way that Berners-Lee's specialized HTML invention morphed into the very backbone of modern technological society? Read more.  

Image of the week - Plus ça change... Then and now Top: Indication of first beam in the main accelerator ring at Fermilab (known then as National Accelerator Lab) in Batavia, Illinois, 30 June 1971.   The captions read:Left: Beam injected at A-11 (a location on the accelerator ring) from Booster Right:1st turn, 21 microseconds later after travelling around 4 miles (the full circumference)This ring was later upgraded with superconducting magnets to become the Tevatron. Image courtesy of Fermilab History and Archives project, Adrienne KolbBottom: Indication of first beam in the LHC at CERN, 10 September 2008.  Analogous to the upper image, the dot at lower left indicates successful injection, the dot at upper right indicates the beam completed its first full circuit of 27 km. Image courtesy of CERN and David Ritchie.Also see: CERN Control Centre video broadcast of first LHC beam  Evidence of first beam—1971 at Fermilab in Illinois, and 2008 at the Large Hadron Collider on the French-Swiss border—was