Kalimba Magic NEWS

Message from Mark
My Job Before Kalimba Magic
The ALMA Telescope in Chile

Sunset on the ALMA site in Northern Chile. Photo: Simon Radford.

The Altiplano above San Pedro de Atacama, at the base of the high peaks of the Chilean Andes, reaches 16,500 feet (5000 meters). Immediately to the west is the Atacama desert, one of the driest place on earth. There are some places there where rainfall has never been reported. In the 1990s, I worked tirelessly to help select this site for what is now known as the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), a radio telescope that will help shed light on the mysteries of the birth of stars, the life cycles of galaxies, and the evolution of the universe.

Naturally occurring millimeter wavelength radio emissions from outer space are both absorbed and distorted by the unevenly distributed water vapor in the earth's lower atmosphere, but this site is above 95% of the water vapor that you would have to look through if you are at sea level. And you can drive there in a Honda Civic!

One arm of the VLA in New Mexico.
Image courtesy of NRAO/AUI

The idea for ALMA was born in the early 1980s after the Very Large Array (VLA) was completed in New Mexico by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO). While there had been professional radio astronomers ever since the end of World War II, when the Brittish government thought it would be a good idea to keep radar and radio scientists busy with something interesting until the next time national security required their services, it was really the VLA that pulled back the cosmic veil and revealed the extreme beauty and complexity of the centimeter wavelength radio universe. Just like stars emit a lot of visibile light that we can see with our eye and with optical telescopes, it turns out that the space between the stars emits brightly at radio wavelengths. That space between the stars is not at all empty, but is filled at a very low density with dust, molecular gas, atomic gas, ionized gas, or relativistic electrons - or sometimes you see all of these things all mixed up - and seeing their emissions at radio wavelengths gives us unique information about what is happening in that space between the stars.

W50 Supernova Remnant. Image courtesy of NRAO/AUI.
I stitched this image together from 50 smaller images
made by the VLA. The interpretation: a blast wave from
an ancient supernova - an exploded supermassive star -
was poughing through the dense interstellar medium in a
more-or-less spherical form, but a few hundred years ago,
the blast wave broke into a hotter, less dense region both
to the far left and the far right, where the blast wave
travels much faster. The small dots that litter the
image are mostly quasars in background galaxies.

After scientists started to see the wonders that were being revealed by the VLA, they next turned their imaginations to the millimeter wavelengths. A number of pioneering millimeter wavelength telescopes, starting with the NRAO 12 meter Telescope on Kitt peak outside my home of Tucson, AZ in the 1960s, proved to the world just how interesting millimeter wavelength astronomy is. The big discovery came in 1970 when the 12 m Telescope discovered CO - carbon monoxide - in outer space, which was previously thought to be such a hostile environment that no molecules could exist there! Now, astronomers realize that cold molecular gas - self shielding from harsh ionizing radiation - is one of the natural environments in outer space. Clouds of cold molecular gas are the incubators where stars form, and the molecular gas shines brightly at millimeter wavelengths, which means that millimeter wavelength telescopes are the perfect tool to study these clouds and the process of star formation.

To date, about 170 different molecules have been discovered in outer space, mostly through millimeter wavelength radio telescopes. The millimeter wavelength emissions from these different molecules can be studied to tell us different things - some molecules act as thermometers, others are present only in certain environments. Basically, many of these different molecules can be used as different probes of outer space, and it will take astronomers decades to work it all out. One of the most exciting possibilities is the study of organic molecules in outer space, which could have been the seeds of life on earth and other planets. By observing frequency shifts in the molecular emissions caused by the Doppler effect, we can study the dynamics of the molecular gas, how it is moving, where it is going, and we can even use the gas dynamics as a scale to measure the mass of what is near the gas cloud or gas clouds.

Even though the field of millimeter astronomy was ripe with possibilities, there were only small telescopes with small numbers of antennas. They did not really have the power to look deeply or make high fidelity images. In the 1980s, we realized that what was needed was a Very Large Millimeter Array.

Why do astronomers use an array of multiple antennas? An array of several antennas can operate with the equivalent resolution of an antenna as large as the separation between the most widely separated antennas. An array of small antennas separated by a mile can produce images with the same level of detail as a single antenna a mile across, but an array of small antennas is a lot cheaper to build! However, the more antennas you have in your array, the better an image you can reconstruct.

The ALMA Telescope (simulated image).

One of the main concepts behind the ALMA millimeter wavelength radio telescope is that it would be massive - many antennas with very accurate surfaces (they need to be parabolic to a fraction of a millimeter) and excellent pointing specifications could provide sensitive high fidelity images that would undoubtedly transform our understanding of the universe. That ended up being over 50 antennas, each 12 m (39 ft) across.

I was hired in 1989 as the first full time NRAO employee to work on the Milliemeter Array (MMA), which eventually became the ALMA telescope as the North American effort was joined by similar efforts in Europe and Japan. I worked on the MMA and then the ALMA project until the NRAO/Tucson office shut down in 2006 (the project got funded, but that resulted in closing down the old 12 m Telescope on Kitt Peak, and closing the NRAO/Tucson office). I had been hired to address problems posed by ALMA's critics ..."It might not work because of THIS or THAT." As long as these problems hung over ALMA, it would never get funding from the National Science Foundation and funding agencies in Europe and Japan.

So I became jack of all astronomical trades, working on computer simulations, atmospheric transmission models, antenna and array specifications, imaging algorithms (how to turn the esoteric data we collect into high quality images), calibration, site selection, logistics, software, and some operational details. When a technical problem came up, I often had to learn about it, do a calculation to determine if it was a big problem or a little problem, and come up with a way of addressing that problem or getting around it. So smart people outside the project could look at the ALMA design and say "They've done their homework, this project looks good, and it deserves to be funded." When the array was finally funded to the tune of over a billion U.S. dollars (split among the U.S., Europe, and Japan), and construction of the antennas began, my part of the job was done. Around this time my relationship with the kalimba began to demand more of my time and soon I was working full time on my next endeavor: Kalimba Magic. While kalimbas and millimeter wavelength astronomy seemingly have little to do with each other, I bring just as much excitement, intelligence, hard work, and soul to Kalimba Magic as I did to ALMA.

An ALMA antenna being transported
from a lower elevation assembly
site to the high site. Photo: Simon Radford.

Now the ALMA telescope is actually coming together. There are six operational antennas at the 16,500 ft high site and about 20 others in various states of construction and operation at a 12,000 ft elevation support facility. A program of early science observations will soon make groundbreaking discoveries and help shake the bugs out of the system. But the real discoveries will come when the full array becomes operational, and over the next 10-20 years as scientists learn how to use the extremely complex ALMA telescope.

I want to make a few points that relate to the ALMA telescope and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), the U.S. organization that operates the VLA and is part of the coalition that is running ALMA.

First: When the US congress slashes tens of billions of dollars in domestic spending, one of the things that will feel these cuts is the NRAO. Of course there are hundreds of departments and projects and divisions and programs all across the country that will be affected by the budget cuts. Some of them may have waste or fraud, but many of them are centers of excellence similar to the NRAO.

Second: ALMA is a very complex system, but it is simple compared to an economic system such as the United States of America. While I have no special economic training, I do have a lot of experience with complex systems. I know that when people are concerned over a particular effect, that effect is almost always real, but it will often be irrelevant - that is, there are other effects that will dominate and make the problem you were worried about almost invisible. Some effects take place on small time scales, some on longer time scales, and they combine.

While it is clearly a bad thing for the U.S. government to spend more money than it brings in, the negative impact of that problem is likely to be on a long time scale, but the impact of cutting $38 billion in domestic spending is likely to eliminate something like 400,000 jobs in the short scale - and more private sector jobs will be lost as the public sector jobs are no longer resulting in certain people paying for houses, coffee, groceries, insurance, etc. And when someone loses a job at NRAO, they are not likely to return to radio astronomy - rather, they'll likely find a job doing something like selling cell phones and radio controlled garage door openers - which won't pay what a radio astronomy job pays. So those replacement jobs, when they finally come through, will fuel the surrounding economy to a lesser extent.

By the way, we might want to look at why the US government had something like a $1.5 trillion deficit in the 2011 budget. Three dominant reasons: 1) The 2008 financial meltdown resulted in the loss of between $5 and $10 trillion of wealth to the citizens of the U.S. in lost jobs and lost real estate value - and that has resulted in lower tax receipts and larger federal expenditures to keep indivividuals and the economy floating. 2) Well over $1 trillion has been spent to date on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, making these the most costly and longest wars the U.S. has been involved in. (The total spent on these wars, including veterans' benefits and health care of injured soldiers, will exceed $2-3 trillion when all is said and done). 3) The Bush tax cuts, a gift mainly to the wealthy at a time of zero deficit, now add over $250 billion to the deficit each year. When these three factors are combined, it is clear we have been hit very hard in recent years by some extreme situations, so it is not surprising that we are currently running an unprecedented deficit. I myself make it a rule not to run credit card debt, and I don't go out buying things that I can't afford. But when I myself had a huge financial problem, I did go into credit card debt temporarily so that I could continue to pay my mortgage and my family could eat.

Third: One of the studies I did for the ALMA telescope was to estimate the effects of global warming on the millimeter wavelength transparancy of the atmosphere. As the average temperature of the air increases, it will hold more and more water vapor, which will make high frequency ground based radio astronomy less and less effective. I estimated that ALMA's effective life time at submillimeter wavelengths will be only about 30 or 40 years. In other words, all things must pass. (Of course, the effects of global warming on radio astronomical observations will be the least of our worries in 30 to 40 years.)

Fortunately, I got out ahead of the game - and started writing kalimba books and selling kalimbas.

All in all, I feel that I have been blessed with a very interesting life. Thank you, dear kalimba community, for all you have done to help me with this chapter of my life.