February 27th radio show...

... is finally online and ready for downloading. The guest this week was Dr. Mark Clampin of Goddard Space Flight Center, the Observatory Project Scientist of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)- the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, and he discusses the science goals of this telescope and some of the technological challenges which must be overcome so that it will achieve its mission. However, there was plenty of news and scientific results as well, and on this program I discussed:

• Calendar of upcoming science events in the greater Poughkeepsie / New York city area
• Interview with Dr. Mark Clampin (NASA/GSFC) on the science and technology behind JWST - NASA's next major optical / near-infrared observatory
• News: SIDECAR instrument for JWST is completed; ALMA - a large radio interferometer (similar to the VLA) which will operate at radio frequencies not observable at most other radio telescopes - reaches the halfway point in its construction; SCUBA-2 camera - which operates at the same wavelength at ALMA but uses a different technology and not as sensitive or as high angular resolution, but much more sensitive that currently available instruments - installed at the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii; the upgrade of the VLA is now halfway completed as well - when finished, will increase sensitivity of this instrument by >10x without building new radio dishes; NASA and ESA announce the end of the Ulysses mission, which has been studying the Sun and its solar wind for the last 17 years.
• Extragalactic Astronomy / Cosmology: Spitzer and Hubble discovers a galaxy forming a very large number of stars just ~1 billion years after the Big Bang, sooner than previously predicted; using gravitational lensing, astronomers discover a dark matter structure >270 million light-years across - significantly larger than previously detected; COSMOS survey detects 67 galaxies gravitational lensed by a single foreground galaxy, many more than previously identified; initial results from using a new method of detecting dark matter particles on Earth by observing bubbles created when the dark matter particles interact with liquid are released, comparable to that of other methods.

As always, if you have any questions, comments, or concerns, please leave them below. Hope you enjoy, and thank you very much for listening!