From R2-D2 to Curiosity: Good Fiction to Great Science

NASA’s Curiosity rover is scouring the Martian surface at Gale Crater with drills, cameras and even a laser so it can find out more about the Red Planet. Curiosity carries no people, instead taking all of its readings by remote control and radioing them back to eager scientists on Earth.

It’s a biography familiar to “Star Wars” fans, thousands of who gathered in Orlando, Fla., for Celebration VI. For lovers of the galaxy far, far away, the idea of a robotic traveler working diligently far from home is reminiscent of R2-D2′s various journeys to Tatooine, Dagobah and Bespin or the Imperial Probe Droid’s search around the ice planet Hoth.

“From what I’ve seen, people being able to command to steer a robot on Mars from so far away is truly amazing,” said Ben Burtt, the sound designer on the “Star Wars” films who gave R2-D2 a voice mix of electronic sounds with human inflections.

He was also trained as a scientist, having majored in physics.

“I never could have imagined that being the case back 40 years ago when we started on the first Star Wars. At that time, even the R2 on the set could barely move down the hallway.”

While Curiosity represents the technological cutting edge for robots landing on other planets, it still lacks the personality and other high-level attributes of the fictional “Star Wars” machines. No worry, say fans of the film franchise. Reality will catch up soon enough.

“I think good science fiction motivates good science,” said Brian Pauley, an Ohio fan who dressed as young hero Luke Skywalker for the event. “When you see something, you say, ‘I’d like to do that’ and you set about doing it and then you accomplish it.”

If they had the chance to send R2-D2 on a scouting mission to a real planet in the solar system, Mars would still get most of the attention.

“Mars, that’s the best bet,” said Evan Greenwood, portraying Glen Marek, or Starkiller. “It’s probably the only one that will be terraformable at some point. Not nowadays, but it has the best chance. It’s the closest to Earth, it’s a mini-Earth, so it’s the best place for a base. So if an asteroid hits Earth, and if there’s people somewhere else, the human race can survive. Until we do that, we’re in peril.”

A more Hoth-like world also got a vote, though.

“Pluto would probably be the best to send it to because we don’t know anything about Pluto,” said an Imperial Officer-costumed Jasmine Seale. “It’s so far away, it’s so hard to figure anything out. So I’d love to send R2-D2 out there where we can’t reach that well.”

The most important thing, the fans said, was to keep exploring, and pushing the boundaries of knowledge outward.

“I think we’re just scratching the surface,” said Tim Martinez, dressed in the menacing black armor of Darth Vader. “I was a big astronaut buff when I was young and Mars has always intrigued me and I think the more that we explore, the more we’ll learn and the more there is to explore. Maybe we’ll travel there one day.”

Just as astronauts followed robots in real-life, no one expects the machines to be the only planetary voyagers.

So what “Star Wars” character would have the best chance of becoming an astronaut?

“Han Solo,” said Storm Trooper look-alike Christopher Garrison. “He made the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs. If anyone can do it, Han Solo can do it.”

Mariana King, a.k.a. Oola, agreed to a point.

“Han Solo has the courage, but he’s kind of reckless,” King said.

Luke Skywalker also was a popular choice.

“The best astronaut would have to be Luke Skywalker because he’s like the pioneer of Star Wars, he’s done everything,” said Marcus Richardson, who donned the flowing blue robes of Lando Calrissian for the “Star Wars” celebration.

At least one fan would pick a legion of astronaut candidates.

“I think the best astronauts would be the stormtroopers because they’re trained so much,” said Annette Cheney, an Australian fan who dressed as a Wookie. “They can do anything, so I think they could pick up NASA space training the fastest and easiest.”

Why not send the stormtroopers’ boss, Darth Vader, said Martinez.

“He’s already equipped to breathe in space, he needs nothing else, he’s ready to go,” Martinez said.

When science fiction shows or books offer a vision of what space travel and other worlds might look and feel like, people become intrigued to find out more about real planets, the “Star Wars” fans said.

“Every time NASA takes another step out, I feel like that was the reason I fell in love with ‘Star Wars,’ said fan Kara Gardner. “Because I wanted to know what was out there. Now we’re finding out what’s on Mars and it’s kind of like, well, that reminds me of this planet in the ‘Star Wars’ universe.”

“Every step we take gets us a little bit closer,” said David Atteberry, wearing a detailed Mandalorian armor costume similar to Boba Fett’s attire, “and that’s one of the things I found about the Curiosity rover, it’s like we’re finally getting out there, back into space and getting closer to that dream of being able to explore our galaxy.”

By Steven Siceloff, www.nasa.gov

NASA’s John F. Kennedy Space Center

Good Vibrations

Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley Researchers Record First Direct Observations of Quantum Effects in an Optomechanical System

A long-time staple of science fiction is the tractor beam, a technology in which light is used to move massive objects – recall the tractor beam in the movie Star Wars that captured the Millennium Falcon and pulled it into the Death Star. While tractor beams of this sort remain science fiction, beams of light today are being used to mechanically manipulate atoms or tiny glass beads, with rapid progress being made to control increasingly larger objects. Those who see major roles for optomechanical systems in a host of future technologies will take heart in the latest results from a first-of-its-kind experiment.

Scientists with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC) Berkeley, using a unique optical trapping system that provides ensembles of ultracold atoms, have recorded the first direct observations of distinctly quantum optical effects – amplification and squeezing – in an optomechanical system. Their findings point the way toward low-power quantum optical devices and enhanced detection of gravitational waves among other possibilities.

“We’ve shown for the first time that the quantum fluctuations in a light field are responsible for driving the motions of objects much larger than an electron and could in principle drive the motion of really large objects,” says Daniel Brooks, a scientist with Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division and UC Berkeley’s Physics Department.

Brooks, a member of Dan Stamper-Kurn’s research group, is the corresponding author of a paper in the journal Nature describing this research. The paper is titled “Nonclassical light generated by quantum-noise-driven cavity optomechanics.” Co-authors were Thierry Botter, Sydney Schreppler, Thomas Purdy, Nathan Brahms and Stamper-Kurn.

Light will build-up inside of an optical cavity at specific resonant frequencies, similar to how a held-down guitar string only vibrates to produce specific tones. Positioning a mechanical resonator inside the cavity changes the resonance frequency for light passing through, much as sliding one’s fingers up and down a guitar string changes its vibrational tones. Meanwhile, as light passes through the optical cavity, it acts like a tiny tractor beam, pushing and pulling on the mechanical resonator.

If an optical cavity is of ultrahigh quality and the mechanical resonator element within is atomic-sized and chilled to nearly absolute zero, the resulting cavity optomechanical system can be used to detect even the slightest mechanical motion. Likewise, even the tiniest fluctuations in the light/vacuum can cause the atoms to wiggle. Changes to the light can provide control over that atomic motion. This not only opens the door to fundamental studies of quantum mechanics that could tell us more about the “classical” world we humans inhabit, but also to quantum information processing, ultrasensitive force sensors, and other technologies that might seem like science fiction today.

“There have been proposals to use optomechanical devices as transducers, for example coupling motion to both microwaves and optical frequency light, where one could convert photons from one frequency range to the other,” Brooks says. “There have also been proposals for slowing or storing light in the mechanical degrees of freedom, the equivalent of electromagnetically induced transparency or EIT, where a photon is stored within the internal degrees of freedom.”

Already cavity optomechanics has led to applications such as the cooling of objects to their motional ground state, and detections of force and motion on the attometer scale. However, in studying interactions between light and mechanical motion, it has been a major challenge to distinguish those effects that are distinctly quantum from those that are classical – a distinction critical to the future exploitation of optomechanics.

Brooks, Stamper-Kurn and their colleagues were able to meet the challenge with their microfabricated atom-chip system which provides a magnetic trap for capturing a gas made up of thousands of ultracold atoms. This ensemble of ultracold atoms is then transferred into an optical cavity (Fabry-Pferot) where it is trapped in a one-dimensional optical lattice formed by near-infrared (850 nanometer wavelength) light that resonates with the cavity. A second beam of light is used for the pump/probe.

“Integrating trapped ensembles of ultracold atoms and high-finesse cavities with an atom chip allowed us to study and control the classical and quantum interactions between photons and the internal/external degrees of freedom of the atom ensemble,” Brooks says. “In contrast to typical solid-state mechanical systems, our optically levitated ensemble of ultracold atoms is isolated from its environment, causing its motion to be driven predominantly by quantum radiation-pressure fluctuations.”

The Berkeley research team first applied classical light modulation to a low-powered pump/probe beam (36 picoWatts) entering their optical cavity to demonstrate that their system behaves as a high-gain parametric optomechanical amplifier. They then extinguished the classical drive and mapped the response to the fluctuations of the vacuum. This enabled them to observe light being squeezed by its interaction with the vibrating ensemble and the atomic motion driven by the light’s quantum fluctuations. Amplification and this squeezing interaction, which is called “ponderomotive force,” have been long-sought goals of optomechanics research.

“Parametric amplification typically requires a lot of power in the optical pump but the small mass of our ensemble required very few photons to turn the interactions on/off,” Brooks says. “The ponderomotive squeezing we saw, while narrow in frequency, was a natural consequence of having radiation-pressure shot noise dominate in our system.”

Since squeezing light improves the sensitivity of gravitational wave detectors, the ponderomotive squeezing effects observed by Brooks, Stamper-Kern and their colleagues could play a role in future detectors. The idea behind gravitational wave detection is that a ripple in the local curvature of spacetime caused by a passing gravitational wave will modify the resonant frequency of an optical cavity which, in turn, will alter the cavity’s optical signal.

“Currently, squeezing light over a wide range of frequencies is desirable as scientists search for the first detection of a gravitational wave,” Brooks explains. “Ponderomotive squeezing, should be valuable later when specific signals want to be studied in detail by improving the signal-to-noise ratio in the specific frequency range of interest.”

The results of this study differ significantly from standard linear model predictions. This suggests that a nonlinear optomechanical theory is required to account for the Berkeley team’s observations that optomechanical interactions generate non-classical light. Stamper-Kern’s research group is now considering further experiments involving two ensembles of ultracold atoms inside the optical cavity.

“The squeezing signal we observe is quite small when we detect the suppression of quantum fluctuations outside the cavity, yet the suppression of these fluctuations should be very large inside the cavity,” Brooks says. “With a two ensemble configuration, one ensemble would be responsible for the optomechanical interaction to squeeze the radiation-pressure fluctuations and the second ensemble would be studied to measure the squeezing inside the cavity.”

This research was funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the National Science Foundation.

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Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) addresses the world’s most urgent scientific challenges by advancing sustainable energy, protecting human health, creating new materials, and revealing the origin and fate of the universe. Founded in 1931, Berkeley Lab’s scientific expertise has been recognized with 13 Nobel prizes. The University of California manages Berkeley Lab for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. For more, visit www.lbl.gov.

NASA'S Kepler Discovery Confirms First Planet Orbiting Two Stars

Whitney Clavin

Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

 

Trent J. Perrotto

Headquarters, Washington                                   

 

Michele Johnson

Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.                         

WASHINGTON -- The existence of a world with a double sunset, as portrayed in the film Star Wars more than 30 years ago, is now scientific fact. NASA's Kepler mission has made the first unambiguous detection of a circumbinary planet -- a planet orbiting two stars -- 200 light-years from Earth.

Unlike Star-Wars' Tatooine, the planet is cold, gaseous and not thought to harbor life, but its discovery demonstrates the diversity of planets in our galaxy. Previous research has hinted at the existence of circumbinary planets, but clear confirmation proved elusive. Kepler detected such a planet, known as Kepler-16b, by observing transits, where the brightness of a parent star dims from the planet crossing in front of it.

"This discovery confirms a new class of planetary systems that could harbor life," Kepler principal investigator William Borucki said. "Given that most stars in our galaxy are part of a binary system, this means the opportunities for life are much broader than if planets form only around single stars. This milestone discovery confirms a theory that scientists have had for decades but could not prove until now."

A research team led by Laurance Doyle of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., used data from the Kepler space telescope, which measures dips in the brightness of more than 150,000 stars, to search for transiting planets. Kepler is the first NASA mission capable of finding Earth-size planets in or near the "habitable zone," the region in a planetary system where liquid water can exist on the surface of the orbiting planet.

Scientists detected the new planet in the Kepler-16 system, a pair of orbiting stars that eclipse each other from our vantage point on Earth. When the smaller star partially blocks the larger star, a primary eclipse occurs, and a secondary eclipse occurs when the smaller star is occulted, or completely blocked, by the larger star.

Astronomers further observed that the brightness of the system dipped even when the stars were not eclipsing one another, hinting at a third body. The additional dimming in brightness events, called the tertiary and quaternary eclipses, reappeared at irregular intervals of time, indicating the stars were in different positions in their orbit each time the third body passed. This showed the third body was circling, not just one, but both stars, in a wide circumbinary orbit.

The gravitational tug on the stars, measured by changes in their eclipse times, was a good indicator of the mass of the third body. Only a very slight gravitational pull was detected, one that only could be caused by a small mass. The findings are described in a new study published Friday, Sept. 16, in the journal Science.

"Most of what we know about the sizes of stars comes from such eclipsing binary systems, and most of what we know about the size of planets comes from transits," said Doyle, who also is the lead author and a Kepler participating scientist. "Kepler-16 combines the best of both worlds, with stellar eclipses and planetary transits in one system."

This discovery confirms that Kepler-16b is an inhospitable, cold world about the size of Saturn and thought to be made up of about half rock and half gas. The parent stars are smaller than our sun. One is 69 percent the mass of the sun and the other only 20 percent. Kepler-16b orbits around both stars every 229 days, similar to Venus' 225-day orbit, but lies outside the system's habitable zone, where liquid water could exist on the surface, because the stars are cooler than our sun.

"Working in film, we often are tasked with creating something never before seen," said visual effects supervisor John Knoll of Industrial Light & Magic, a division of Lucasfilm Ltd., in San Francisco. "However, more often than not, scientific discoveries prove to be more spectacular than anything we dare imagine. There is no doubt these discoveries influence and inspire storytellers. Their very existence serves as cause to dream bigger and open our minds to new possibilities beyond what we think we 'know.'"

For more information about the Kepler mission and to view the digital press kit, visit http://www.nasa.gov/kepler.

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