The BLAST Team

• Mark Devlin, PhD – Cosmologist, University of Pennsylvania and BLAST Principal Investigator o The Reese W. Flower Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics, at the University of Pennsylvania, Mark Devlin is an experimental cosmologist. He designs and constructs the devices that collect the data that help us understand our universe. Rather than working out theories on a chalkboard, he's more likely to be found crawling inside the frame of a car- sized telescope, soldering gun in hand, or standing on the windswept ice of Antarctica preparing to send that high-tech appliance to the very edge of space on a NASA balloon. o Mark's recent projects include BLAST (Balloon-Borne, Large-Aperture, Submillimeter Telescope) a sophisticated scanning device that detects submillimeter light from distance star-forming dust clouds while suspended beneath a NASA high-altitude balloon at the top of the atmosphere. o The successful flight of BLAST in Antarctica in 2006 led to the verification that half the light in the Universe comes from these star-forming dust regions. The publication of this major astronomical discovery in the prestigious science journal Nature, led to international press attention. The experiment was documented in the movie BLAST! which has been screened at film festivals and on television world-wide. o Other current projects include ACT (Actacama Cosmology Telescope). The highest telescope facility in the world, ACT sits at 17,000 feet in the desert of northern Chile, observing galaxy clusters. Additionally, Mark has worked on the MUSTANG camera on the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia that makes detailed studies of clusters of galaxies. o Mark graduated from the University of Wisconsin with a BA in Physics and Math and went on to earn his PhD in Astrophysics from the University of California, Berkeley. He is a recipient of the 2000 Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship and the the National Science Foundation Career award.

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• Barth Netterfield – PhD, Professor, University of Toronto and BLAST Principal Investigator o Barth Netterfield is Associate Professor of Observational Cosmology, University of Toronto. Research focuses on measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) and with new measurements of the sub- mm sky. Research in Observational Cosmology is providing answers to long posed questions of wide general interest and long term relevance. With broad advances in technology, we are on the brink of settling long standing issues and perhaps opening doors to new avenues of inquiry. It is in this compelling field that Barth's research interests lie.

o Recent Projects include: BLAST, BOOMERANG, Saskatoon experiment and QMAP.

o Research Interests Research in Observational Cosmology is providing answers to long posed questions of wide general interest and long term relevance. With broad advances in technology, weare on the brink of settling long standing issues and perhaps opening doors to new avenues of inquiry. It is in this compelling field that my research interests lie. Currently, our group is involved in measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) and with new measurements of the sub-mm sky.

o Barth graduated from Bethel College with a BS in Physics and went on to earn his PhD at Princeton University. In 2008, NSERC Steacie Fellowship – one of Canada’s premiere science awards. A 2001 Sloan Fellow, Dr. Netterfield received the Canadian Association of Physicists' Herzberg Medal in 2007. He is also a fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advance Research.

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• Matt Truch – PhD, Researcher – University of Pennsylvania o Matthew Truch earned his BS (cum laude) in physics at Case Western Reserve University, in Physics at Brown University while working on the BLAST project. Matthew is now working as a postdoc at the University of Pennsylvania.

• Gaelen Marsden –PhD, Researcher- University of British Columbia o Gaelen Marsden is a researcher in the Experimental Cosmology Lab at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, B.C., in south-western Canada, where he completed his Ph.D. in physics in 2007 o His thesis, as well as information regarding his research interest can be found at http://www.physics.ubc.ca/~gmarsden/index.html.

18 Pre-Viewing Discussion Questions

1. Have you used a telescope before? Why? What did you see? If you were to look through a telescope now, what would you want to see?

2. Have you ever had the experience where a project or event on which you worked hard not going the way you planned? What happened? How did you respond? What was the outcome?

3. If you had to write a proposal to get funding for a science project or experiment, what information would you need to include? How might you word your request?

4. Do you think science and/or astrophysics is connected to other fields, like philosophy or art? Why or why not?

5. Why do we study the universe around us? What do we gain from this study?

19 Post-Viewing Discussion Questions/Journal Prompts

1. Why use a balloon to study the universe versus a satellite? Why a balloon instead of a telescope on the ground?

2. How does BLAST actually work?

3. What role does teamwork and the BLAST team play in the success of the undertaking? Would BLAST have been possible without the work of the team?

4. How do astrophysicists look back in time? Why do they want to?

5. What happened to BLAST after the first launch in Sweden? How did the team respond and adapt? How would you have felt in this situation? How would you have responded?

6. How does the weather and location affect the launch of BLAST? What does the team have to take into account before they can launch the balloon? How do you respond when factors outside of your control affect something that you want to accomplish?

7. Reflect on your own personal beliefs about the origins of the Universe. How does your understanding of the cosmos and astrophysics align, if at all, with those beliefs? Is there a conflict between the two? Why or why not?

20 Classroom Activities

Activity 1: The Expanding Universe Adapted from: http://btc.montana.edu/ceres/html/Universe/uni1.html

Objective: Students create a visual representation of the expanding nature of the universe.

Materials: Several medium to large sized balloons for each student, a flexible tape measure or string.

Procedure:

• Provide each student with a balloon. • Have students stretch out the balloons and mark several dots on the surface of the balloon and label each with a letter. • Instruct students to blow up the balloon slightly and use the string/tape measure to record the distance between the different letters on the balloon (e.g., a to b, b to c, a to c). • Have students blow up the balloon a little bit more and repeat the measurement process. Have students repeat this procedure several times until the balloon is completely inflated.

Debrief & Discussion:

• Students should notice that the greater the distance initially between two dots, the greater they move apart over time relative to nearby dots. • Emphasize that this is an analogy for how the universe expands over time. It illustrates the equation: o Velocity = Distance/Time (each additional inflation is one unit of time). • You can also use this activity to illustrate there is no true center of the universe. Just as it’s impossible to identify the center of the surface of the balloon, it’s impossible to identify the center of the Earth or other planetary bodies; one can only identify the relative relationship between two points.

21 Activity 2: The Basics of BLAST

Objective: Through a hands-on simulation, students understand the basic principal behind the BLAST Experiment.

Materials: A pair of binoculars (or handheld telescope) for the class

Procedure:

• First, stand in front of your class and open a page from any text book in front of your class. • Ask each student to read the text you are holding from his/her seat (be sure the book is in a regular sized font). Depending on how far away your students are from the front of the room and the size of the font, they will not be able to read all of the text without some kind of magnification. • Next, hand out a pair of binoculars and ask each student to read the text again from their seats. Challenge students to decipher all the text, including any small type on the bottom of the page. • If they cannot make out all of the text, invite them to move forward in increments towards the front of the room until the text comes into focus. Encourage them to move even closer until they see the details of the ink, the texture of the paper, etc.

Debrief & Discussion:

• Explain that in a very basic way, this activity mirrors what the BLAST scientists had to do in order to observe the specific details of the cosmos. • Ask: o Without magnification, what were you able to decipher from your seats? o What did you observe as you moved closer? o On a very large scale, this is the same process the BLAST scientists used to conduct the experiment. By moving the telescope closer to the cosmos, they were able to decipher the

22 specific information they set out to observe, including the following (taken from http://blastexperiment.info/): . Measure photometric redshifts, rest-frame FIR luminosities and star formation rates of high-redshift starburst galaxies, thereby constraining the evolutionary history of those galaxies that produce the FIR/submillimeter background. . Measure cold pre-stellar sources associated with the earliest stages of star and planet formation. . Make high-resolution maps of diffuse galactic emission over a wide range of galactic latitudes.

23 Activity 3: The History of Telescopes

Objective: Students understand the history of telescopes and how they have developed and evolved over time.

Materials: Internet access for all students, or lecture notes prepared for the facilitator adapted from the following websites:

• History of the Telescope: o http://www.scientus.org/timeline/telescope.html o http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/07/telescopes/telesco pes-interactive o http://ezinearticles.com/?The-Timeline-of-the-Telescope&id=1568129 • Science Behind the BLAST Project Telescope: o http://blastexperiment.info/

Procedure:

• Organize a lecture based on the information contained in the website above, or if students have Internet access allow them to work through the website on their own. • Begin by providing a general introduction of the telescope, including an explanation of the first telescope (Galileo’s Telescope from 1609). • Work through the timeline with your students noting the different technological developments at each step. • Next, introduce information on the BLAST experiment (taken from http://blastexperiment.info) noting the scientific advances of this new method of collecting information on the cosmos.

Debrief & Discussion:

• Ask students: o What are some of the most interesting developments in telescope science? o What technology do you find most interesting? o What elements from Galileo’s first telescope are still used by scientists today?

24 Activity 4: The Life of a Star

Adapted from http://school.discoveryeducation.com/lessonplans/programs/astarisborn/index.html

Objectives: Students identify how astronomers use their knowledge of a star’s behavior at various stages of its life to piece together a picture of the star’s entire life.

Materials: Reference materials on stellar evolution, including if possible, examples of images taken by Hubble space telescope of stars in different stages of development, images and information on star development taken from http://blastexperiment.info/results.php, a computer with Internet access.

Procedure: • Ask your students how they think astronomers can make inferences about the life of a particular star, from its birth to its death, taking into consideration that it is impossible to observe a star’s evolution through its entire lifetime • Make sure students understand that because a star’s initial mass largely determines how the star will behave at various stages of its life, observing a star at any of those stages can give astronomers information about the star’s initial mass and, therefore, about how the star was born, will evolve, and will die. • Tell the class that they will be dividing into teams to do research on a star’s life. Each team will focus on one aspect of the stellar evolution of a particular star. • Assign each of seven teams a star at a particular stage of stellar evolution: protostar (example: the Eagle Nebula, a stellar nursery), protoplanetary disk and stellar system in formation (example: Orion Nebula), cluster of young stars (example: the Pleiades), middle-aged, normal star (example: the sun), cluster of older stars—red giant (example: Betelgeuse), dying stage—supernova, planetary nebula, white dwarf (example: Supernova 1987A), end state of a star—black dwarf, black hole, neutron star (example: Cygnus X-1).

25 • Tell students to keep track of the sources for their facts so that they or other interested classmates can go back to those sources for further information. • Have teams report their findings to the class through a poster session, sharing of photographic or printed sources, PowerPoint presentation, or some other format of the students’ own choosing. • Next, ask students to compare the images they researched with star images from http://blastexperiment.info/results.php

Debrief & Discussion:

• Debate whether manned space missions should be scheduled during times of increased solar activity. Is space exploration worth the risk of exposing humans to harmful radiation? • Discuss what you would expect to see if you were observing a newly forming planetary system. How would the material be distributed? What events would you expect to see on the forming protoplanets? • How do the images collected from the Hubble Telescope compare to those collected through BLAST technology.

26 Homework Assignments

1. Research the Big Bang Theory and present key findings in a short written paper, journal entry, or prepared presentation to the rest of the class. What are the main facts of the theory? Its origin and development? Are there any competing or conflicting ideas or theories in circulation? How does the BLAST project intersect with the Big Bang Theory?

2. Investigate different types of telescopes, as well as specific telescopes that are currently in use. What are the similarities and differences? For what kinds of research are different telescopes used? Where are some well-known telescopes located? Be sure to include information on the telescope Mark Devlin is working with in Northern Chile at the end of the BLAST film. Present your findings to the class. (Alternatively, teachers may want to assign different types of telescopes to different students to research and present.)

3. Write a personal reflection on curiosity. Why are humans curious? What have we gained by being curious? Have there been negative consequences to our curiosity? Are we more or less curious than humans 500 years ago? Each reflection should include a specific topic about which each student is particularly curious

4. Review the steps of the scientific method, which are generally agreed to be: 1. Define the question; 2. Gather information and resources (observe); 3. Form hypothesis; 4. Perform experiment and collect data; 5. Analyze data; 6. Interpret data and draw conclusions that serve as a starting point for new hypothesis; 7. Publish results; 8. Retest Students should write a description about how specifically the BLAST project team went through each of these steps during the six years they worked on the project. For example, what was the question they wanted to answer? What was their hypothesis? What conclusions were they able to draw from the data they obtained? How did they retest?

27 Student Projects

1. What is a scientific hypothesis you want to explore or a question you want to answer? Each student should identify a scientific project they would hypothetically like to undertake. As they know from watching the BLAST film, scientific projects require funding. To get this funding, researchers write proposals for funds and research grants. Students should create a funding proposal for the project they have identified. Examples of proposals may be found online to review as examples/templates. Proposals should include a description of the project, what resources are needed, length of time the project will take, where work will take place, and amount of funding requested.

2. As the BLAST film references, an amazing number of discoveries in astronomy have been made in the past 500 years, with many more sure to come. Students should put together a creative representation of a timeline of major findings in astronomy over the past 5 centuries. Students may also be encouraged to imagine what some of the next discoveries might be in the coming century and add these to the end of the timeline. Timelines should include the findings, scientists associated, dates, and locations. Encourage students to present their timelines in interesting and creative ways, with graphics if possible.

3. If the BLAST team asked you to build a website for them, what might it look like? Keep in mind that the site should have an internal component for the team, where they can store and track BLAST data, keep an inventory of parts and materials they have and need, and organize travel plans to locations like Sweden and Antarctica. They might also want the site to have public pages, where people could track BLAST’s progress, see some of the data and photographs, and send messages to the team. What might this website look like? How would you build and organize it? If students have access to web publishing software they might mock up a potential website for the BLAST team including data from the film.

4. As referenced in the BLAST film, ideas on astronomy, our galaxy, and the cosmos have a place in popular culture and the place of these ideas in culture changes as we learn new and different scientific information. Students should research and compile some of the current ideas in popular culture that connect to astrophysics. For instance, what are some of the current debates around the origin of the universe and the human race? 5.

28 5. How and where do aliens show up in movies and fiction? What is the reaction in the press when scientific discoveries are made in space? How is the space program currently perceived? Students should examine these questions (and others, as identified) and present the current thinking on each in our culture. Students might also add a personal reflection on these topics as appropriate.

29 BLAST Student Viewing Guide

1. Where is the Esrange space station located?

2. Who are the BLAST Principal Investigators?

3. Why was the BLAST telescope designed? What is the team investigating?

4. What does BLAST stand for?

5. How are stars formed?

6. What kind of light does star dust emit?

7. How big does the balloon get when it reaches its maximum height?

8. What is the most important thing the team must get back from the Gondola at the end of the flight?

9. Why is it important to commence the BLAST experiment far north or far south?

30 10. How is BLAST funded?

11. How many years did the investigators spend preparing for BLAST?

12. Why do we use the term light-year to describe distance?

13. How long does it take for sunlight to reach earth?

14. How far is the nearest star from earth?

15. Why is the initial launch delayed?

16. Why does Netterfield compare astronomy to art?

17. What is the main problem the team experiences during the Sweden flight?

18. Where is the balloon expected to land at the end of the Sweden flight?

19. How does the team terminate the balloon?

31 20. What local animal does the team need protection from when they reclaim the balloon?

21. How many stars are in our galaxy?

22. What went wrong when they transported the telescope back from the landing site?

23. What motivated Devlin to become an astrophysicist?

24. What motivated Netterfield to become an astrophysicist?

25. Why must the team receive medical clearance before going to Antarctica?

26. What is the name of the research facility the team works out of in Antarctica?

27. Why will the balloon launched in Antarctica land relatively close to the launch site?

28. What important piece of information did scientists discover about galaxies only a century ago?

32 29. Who will stay to monitor the telescope in Antarctica when the rest of the team goes home?

30. How long did the Antarctica balloon flight last?

31. What goes wrong with the Antarctica balloon landing?

32. How many miles did the payload get dragged before they were able to recover it?

33. Why is it challenging for the team to find the pressure vessel? Why is the pressure vessel so important?

34. Why is it important to publish the data collected from the BLAST experiment as soon as possible?

35. How many more years of work does Devlin estimate it will take scientists to understand what the BLAST images mean?

36. What percentage of the universe do astrophysicists still believe is a mystery?

33 Links, References, and Resources

• BLAST! The Movie Homepage o http://blastthemovie.com/index.html • Learn More About the Science Behind the BLAST! Experiment o http://blastexperiment.info/ • Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysics Center o http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/ • NASA Cosmology Website o http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/universe/ • Cosmic Journey: A History of Scientific Cosmology (American Institute of Physics) o http://www.aip.org/history/cosmology/ • Time Line: A History of Telescopes (National Geographic) o http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/07/telescopes/telescopes- interactive • 2009 International Year of Astronomy o http://www.astronomy2009.org/

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