The Herschel Space Observatory’s large telescope and state-of-the-art infrared detectors have provided the first confirmed finding of oxygen molecules in space. The molecules were discovered in the Orion star-forming complex.

Individual atoms of oxygen are common in space, particularly around massive stars. But molecular oxygen, which makes up about 20 percent of the air we breathe, has eluded astronomers until now.

“Oxygen gas was discovered in the 1770s, but it’s taken us more than 230 years to finally say with certainty that this very simple molecule exists in space,” said Paul Goldsmith, NASA’s Herschel project scientist at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Goldsmith is lead author of a recent paper describing the findings in the Astrophysical Journal. Herschel is a European Space Agency-led mission with important NASA contributions.

Astronomers searched for the elusive molecules in space for decades using balloons, as well as ground- and space-based telescopes. The Swedish Odin telescope spotted the molecule in 2007, but the sighting could not be confirmed.

Goldsmith and his colleagues propose that oxygen is locked up in water ice that coats tiny dust grains. They think the oxygen detected by Herschel in the Orion nebula was formed after starlight warmed the icy grains, releasing water, which was converted into oxygen molecules.

“This explains where some of the oxygen might be hiding,” said Goldsmith. “But we didn’t find large amounts of it, and still don’t understand what is so special about the spots where we find it. The universe still holds many secrets.”

The researchers plan to continue their hunt for oxygen molecules in other star-forming regions.

“Oxygen is the third most common element in the universe and its molecular form must be abundant in space,” said Bill Danchi, Herschel program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Herschel is proving a powerful tool to probe this unsolved mystery. The observatory gives astronomers an innovative tool to look at a whole new set of wavelengths where the tell-tale signature of oxygen may be hiding.”

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Astronomers using NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer may be closer to knowing why some of the most massive stellar explosions ever observed occur in the tiniest of galaxies.

“It’s like finding a sumo wrestler in a little ‘Smart Car,’” said Don Neill, a member of NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer team at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, and lead author of a new study published in the Astrophysical Journal.

“The most powerful explosions of massive stars are happening in extremely low-mass galaxies. New data are revealing that the stars that start out massive in these little galaxies stay massive until they explode, while in larger galaxies they are whittled away as they age, and are less massive when they explode,” said Neill.

Over the past few years, astronomers using data from the Palomar Transient Factory, a sky survey based at the ground-based Palomar Observatory near San Diego, have discovered a surprising number of exceptionally bright stellar explosions in so-called dwarf galaxies up to 1,000 times smaller than our Milky Way galaxy. Stellar explosions, called supernovae, occur when massive stars — some up to 100 times the mass of our sun — end their lives.

The Palomar observations may explain a mystery first pointed out by Neil deGrasse Tyson and John Scalo when they were at the University of Austin Texas (Tyson is now the director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York, N.Y.). They noted that supernovae were occurring where there seemed to be no galaxies at all, and they even proposed that dwarf galaxies were the culprits, as the Palomar data now indicate.

Now, astronomers are using ultraviolet data from the Galaxy Evolution Explorer to further examine the dwarf galaxies. Newly formed stars tend to radiate copious amounts of ultraviolet light, so the Galaxy Evolution Explorer, which has scanned much of the sky in ultraviolet light, is the ideal tool for measuring the rate of star birth in galaxies.
The results show that the little galaxies are low in mass, as suspected, and have low rates of star formation. In other words, the petite galaxies are not producing that many huge stars.

“Even in these little galaxies where the explosions are happening, the big guys are rare,” said co-author Michael Rich of UCLA, who is a member of the mission team.

In addition, the new study helps explain why massive stars in little galaxies undergo even more powerful explosions than stars of a similar heft in larger galaxies like our Milky Way. The reason is that low-mass galaxies tend to have fewer heavy atoms, such as carbon and oxygen, than their larger counterparts. These small galaxies are younger, and thus their stars have had less time to enrich the environment with heavy atoms.

According to Neill and his collaborators, the lack of heavy atoms in the atmosphere around a massive star causes it to shed less material as it ages. In essence, the massive stars in little galaxies are fatter in their old age than the massive stars in larger galaxies. And the fatter the star, the bigger the blast that will occur when it finally goes supernova. This, according to the astronomers, may explain why super supernovae are occurring in the not-so-super galaxies.

“These stars are like heavyweight champions, breaking all the records,” said Neill.

Added Rich, “These dwarf galaxies are especially interesting to astronomers, because they are quite similar to the kinds of galaxies that may have been present in our young universe, shortly after the Big Bang. The Galaxy Evolution Explorer has given us a powerful tool for learning what galaxies were like when the universe was just a child.”

Caltech leads the Galaxy Evolution Explorer mission and is responsible for science operations and data analysis. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena manages the mission and built the science instrument. Caltech manages JPL for NASA. The mission was developed under NASA’s Explorers Program managed by the Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. Researchers sponsored by Yonsei University in South Korea and the Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES) in France collaborated on this mission.

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NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center is flight testing two new supersonic shockwave probes to determine their viability as research tools.

The probes were designed by Eagle Aeronautics of Hampton, Va., under a NASA Research Announcement, and manufactured by Triumph Aerospace Systems of Newport News, Va. The probes were first tested in a wind tunnel at NASA’s Langley Research Center, also in Hampton.

The new probes are being flown on NASA Dryden’s F-15B research test bed aircraft.

Supersonic flight over land is severely restricted in the United States and elsewhere because the sonic booms created by the shock waves propagating from supersonic aircraft are an annoyance to many and can damage private property.

Sonic boom researchers hope the Eagle Aero probes will aid their understanding of supersonic shockwaves. The ultimate goal of NASA’s sonic boom research is to find ways to control the shockwaves and lessen the noise, so that it may be possible for supersonic flight to become more routine.

“Using these probes can be a real benefit in understanding and modeling the generation of shock waves and their associated sonic booms,” said Dryden research engineer Dan Banks. “They could allow us to accurately define the near-instantaneous flight conditions of the aircraft being probed, while defining that airplane’s flow field. At the same time, the probes provide flight condition data on the host aircraft,” Banks said.

The primary objective of the flight series is to determine the feasibility of using the Eagle probes for air-to-air shockwave probing. Additional objectives include determining the durability and robustness of the probes in flight, their sensitivity to flight conditions, and the accuracy of the software.

During the initial flight test phase, the probes are attached to an adapter that hangs on the aircraft’s centerline instrumented pylon, or CLIP. A large splitter plate separates the CLIP from the F-15B. This helps protect to the aircraft in the unlikely event of flutter, or damaging vibration, that might cause the probes to break off the CLIP.

The two probes are mounted beside each other on the CLIP, one wedge-shaped and the other is conical. Both are designed to make very accurate measurements of supersonic airflow, improving the quality of the shockwave data engineers can glean.

If the probe combo proves robust in this series of tests, researchers could develop a follow-on series with the probes attached one at a time to the F-15B’s nose so each has access to the clean airstream in front of the aircraft. Mounting such devices on the aircraft’s nose is the normal and preferred placement, which allows them access to the clean airstream ahead of the carrier aircraft.

Later test flights could include a second supersonic aircraft flying ahead of the probe-carrying F-15 to generate shockwaves for an early look at the probes’ shockwave-sensing capabilities.

Past supersonic shockwave probing efforts, such as the Lancets project flown at Dryden in 2008-2009, used a standard probe. The more streamlined Eagle Aero probes contain accurate high-response transducers that help to eliminate any lag or other errors as they measure upstream and downstream airflow conditions and can measure flow angles.

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A flat, light-toned rock on Mars visited by NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover in 2005 informally bears the name of the first human in space, Yuri Gagarin, who rode into orbit in the Soviet Union’s Vostok-1 spacecraft on April 12, 1961.

The team using Opportunity to explore the Meridiani Planum region of Mars since 2004 chose “Gagarin” for what they would call the rock that the rover examined beside “Vostok” crater. A target for close-up examination on Gagarin is called “Yuri.”

To commemorate Gagarin’s flight, a color image of the rock on Mars has been posted, here. The image combines frames taken through three different filters by Opportunity’s panoramic camera.

Early accomplishments in the Space Age inspired many of the researchers exploring other planets robotically today, who hope their work can, in turn, help inspire the next generation.

“The 50th anniversary of mankind’s first fledgling foray into the cosmos should serve as an important reminder of the spirit of adventure and exploration that has propelled mankind throughout history,” said Mars rover science team member James Rice of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. “We are a species of explorers; it is encoded into our very DNA.”

Rice continued, “Half a century ago Yuri Gagarin was lofted into a totally unknown, remote and hostile environment and in doing so opened up a new limitless frontier of possibilities for mankind. A mere 23 days later another brave human, Alan Shepard, climbed aboard a rocket and ventured into the starry abyss. Their courage and vision continue to inspire and lead us into the unknown. Hopefully, one day in the not too distant future it will lead humanity on a voyage to Mars.”

Opportunity and its twin, Spirit, completed their three-month prime missions on Mars in April 2004. Both rovers continued in years of bonus, extended missions. Both have made important discoveries about wet environments on ancient Mars that may have been favorable for supporting microbial life. Spirit has not communicated with Earth since March 2010. Opportunity remains active. This month, it has passed both the 27-kilometer and 17-mile marks in its total driving distance on Mars.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Exploration Rover Project for the NASA Science Mission Directorate, Washington. For more information about the rovers, see http://www.nasa.gov/rovers.

The 20th season of the Los Angeles regional FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Robotics Competition, held at the Long Beach Convention Center, March 25 and 26, proved to be a fierce competition between 63 high school teams from across California and as far away as Chile.

Students from three California schools — South High School, Torrance; West Covina High School, West Covina; and Diamond Bar High School, Diamond Bar, won the overall regional competition. Two other California schools also took top honors. Chaminade College Preparatory, West Hills, receied the coveted Regional Chairman’s award, while Foshay Learning Center, Los Angeles, a team mentored by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., took home the Engineering Inspiration award.

The winners will represent the California region at the FIRST championships April 27 to 30 in St. Louis, where they will compete against 51,000 other students on more than 2,000 teams.

The FIRST program was founded two decades ago to encourage students to pursue careers in science and technology through robotics competitions. With the help of engineers from JPL, aerospace and other companies and institutions of higher education, FIRST continues to grow and inspire students.

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NASA aeronautics researchers will judge the 2010/2011 Real World Design Challenge and provide technical advice and guidance to high school students participating in the aviation-themed contest.

Contest organizers hope the students will be inspired by their involvement to pursue careers in science, engineering, math and technology.

NASA is one of almost three dozen academic, corporate and government partners supporting Real World Design Challenge. Jaiwon Shin, NASA’s associate administrator for aeronautics research, helped kick off the national contest at the U.S. Capitol on Oct. 20.

“In the first century of flight, NASA made countless contributions to aviation by improving performance, efficiency and safety. Just as we needed the brightest minds for all those contributions, we need the brightest minds now and in the future to develop, operate and improve our future air transportation system,” Shin told students, educators and dignitaries gathered at the kickoff event.

“As the United States enters the second century of flight, NASA Aeronautics will maintain its commitment not only to excellence in research, but also to investment in education to prepare, inspire, excite, encourage and nurture the young minds of today who will be the engine of innovation of tomorrow,” Shin added.

Teams of three to seven high school students from at least 29 states and the District of Columbia will compete to design a more fuel-efficient airplane. They will use professional engineering software to design an airliner wing that is more efficient yet allows the use of lighter weight materials and structure than conventional wings.

Teams must register by Nov. 19 and submit solutions by Jan. 31, 2011. The winning team from each state will advance to the national finals in Washington, D.C. in April. For more information or to register a team, visit the Real World Challenge Web site.

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Space shuttle Discovery remains in the Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida as modifications and repairs are made to the external fuel tank’s support beams known as “stringers.” Additional support structures called radius blocks are being added to 94 stringers, meaning the entire circumference of the external tank will be strengthened by the time all the repairs and modifications are finished.

“The teams have done a tremendous job of staying focused and working this problem,” said Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA’s associate administrator for Space Operations. “There’s been lots of ups and downs but the team has really stayed focused.”

Meeting Monday, space shuttle management approved the modifications using the radius blocks. The repairs to the cracked stringers themselves have been finished.

“It’s been a long road,” said John Shannon, Space Shuttle Program manager. “I’m very confident we have it finally figured out and we have a fix. We’re going to fly with a lot of confidence in this tank.”

The radius blocks are 6-inch-long aluminum pieces that are only about a fifth of an inch thick. However, that is thick enough to keep the stringers flat as the liquid oxygen tank shrinks when the super-cold propellant is loaded before launch, Shannon said.

Without the radius blocks, the end of the stringers were bending in slightly as the tank contracted and the stress was causing the cracks to develop, Shannon said.

“It’s a very simple, elegant fix to the problem,” Shannon said.

The radius block modifications are not thought necessary for the tank to be used on STS-134 because it was made with a different batch of materials. However, the modifications will be made for the third of the three available tanks, Shannon said. That tank is set to fly on STS-135 later this year.

Discovery will not launch on the STS-133 mission before Feb. 24, but shuttle managers have not yet chosen a target date for the mission. The schedule depends in part on traffic at the International Space Station during that time frame. A European cargo spacecraft, ATV-2, is scheduled to launch to the station Feb. 15 carrying supplies and equipment.

The stringers became the focus of launch preparation when cracks were discovered in two of them following fueling operations during a Nov. 5 launch attempt. That attempt was scrubbed because of an unrelated problem with the ground umbilical carrier plate.

Since then, the shuttle’s intertank region, the ribbed portion that connects the liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen tanks, were surveyed with two types of powerful X-ray devices at the launch pad. The launch team also performed a fueling test Dec. 17, with 89 temperature and motion sensors on parts of the tank’s aluminum skin.

Discovery was rolled back to the VAB on Dec. 22 for more inspections and scans of areas that were not accessible at the pad. Those scans showed four more small cracks in three stringers on the portion of the intertank opposite Discovery.

While the scans and repairs took place at Kennedy, teams of engineers and managers at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama and the Michoud Assembly Facility in Louisiana have been analyzing the results and testing theories in lab settings to find a root cause and prove the fixes will work.

For example, the radius blocks are a known and practiced structural augmentation technique used on previous external tanks.

Discovery and its six-member astronaut crew will deliver experiments, supplies and equipment to the station during the 11-day mission, along with an experimental robotic crew member called “Robonaut 2.”

A team of NASA-funded researchers has unveiled a new theory that contends planets gained the final portions of their mass from a limited number of large comet or asteroid impacts more than 4.5 billion years ago. These impacts added less than one percent of the planets’ mass.

Scientists hope the research not only will provide a better historical picture of the birth and evolution of Earth, the moon and Mars, but also allow researchers to better explore what happened in our solar system’s beginning and middle stages of planet formation.

“No one has a model of precisely what happened at the end of planet formation—we’ve had a broad idea—but variables such as impactor size, the approximate timing of the impacts, and how they affect the evolution of the planets are unknown,” said William Bottke, principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute (SWRI) in Boulder, Colo. “This research hopefully provides better insights into the early stages of planet formation.”

The team used numerical models, lunar samples returned by Apollo astronauts and meteorites believed to be from Mars to develop its findings. The scientists examined the abundances of elements such as gold and platinum in the mantles, or layers beneath the crust, of Earth, the moon and Mars. Consistent with previous studies, they concluded the elements were added by a process called late accretion during a planet’s final growth spurt.

“These impactors probably represent the largest objects to hit Earth since the giant impact that formed our moon,” Bottke said. “They also may be responsible for the accessible abundance of gold, platinum, palladium, and other important metals used by our society today in items ranging from jewelry to our cars’ catalytic convertors.”

The results indicate the largest Earth impactor was between 1,500 – 2,000 miles in diameter, roughly the size of Pluto. Because it is smaller than Earth, the moon avoided such enormous projectiles and was only hit by impactors 150 – 200 miles wide. These impacts may have played important roles in the evolution of both worlds. For example, the projectiles that struck Earth may have modified the orientation of its spin axis by 10 degrees, while those that hit the moon may have delivered water to its mantle.

“Keep in mind that while the idea the Earth-moon system owes its existence to a single, random event was initially viewed as radical, it is now believed that large impacts were commonplace during the final stages of planet formation,’ Bottke said. “Our new results provide additional evidence that the effects of large impacts did not end with the moon-forming event.”

The paper, “Stochastic Late Accretion to the Earth, Moon, and Mars,” was published in the Dec. 9 issue of Science. It was written by Bottke and David Nesvorny of SWRI; Richard J. Walker of the University of Maryland; James Day of the University of Maryland and Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego; and Linda Elkins-Tanton of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The research is funded by the NASA Lunar Science Institute (NLSI) at the agency’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif.

The NLSI is a virtual organization that enables collaborative, interdisciplinary research in support of NASA lunar science programs. The institute uses technology to bring scientists together around the world and comprises competitively selected U.S. teams and several international partners. NASA’s Science Mission Directorate and the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate at the agency’s Headquarters in Washington, funds the institute, which is managed by a central office at Ames.

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On Dec. 6 at 1:31 a.m. EST, NASA for the first time successfully ejected a nanosatellite from a free-flying microsatellite. NanoSail-D ejected from the Fast, Affordable, Science and Technology Satellite, FASTSAT, demonstrating the capability to deploy a small cubesat payload from an autonomous microsatellite in space.

Nanosatellites or cubesats are typically launched and deployed from a mechanism called a Poly-PicoSatellite Orbital Deployer (P-POD) mounted directly on a launch vehicle. This is the first time NASA has mounted a P-POD on a microsatellite to eject a cubesat.

FASTSAT, equipped with six science and technology demonstration payloads, including NanoSail-D, launched Friday, Nov. 19 at 8:25 p.m. EST from Kodiak Island, Alaska. During launch, the NanoSail-D flight unit, about the size of a loaf of bread, was stowed inside FASTSAT in a P-POD.

“The successful ejection of NanoSail-D demonstrates the operational capability of FASTSAT as a cost-effective independent means of placing cubesat payloads into orbit safely,” said Mark Boudreaux, FASTSAT project manager at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. “With this first step behind us, we have demonstrated we can launch a number of different types of payloads using this common deployment system from an autonomous microsatellite like FASTSAT.”

“NanoSail D has multiple enabling technology demonstration objectives for this flight,” said Joe Casas, FASTSAT project scientist at Marshall. Casas said when the NanoSail-D sail is deployed it will use its large sail made of thin polymer material, a material much thinner than a single human hair, to significantly decrease the time to de-orbit the small satellite without the use of propellants as most traditional satellites use.

The NanoSail-D flight results will help to mature this technology so it could be used on future large spacecraft missions to aid in de-orbiting space debris created by decommissioned satellites without using valuable mission propellants.

“This is a great step for our solar sail team with the successful ejection of the NanoSail-D satellite from FASTSAT,” said Dean Alhorn, NanoSail-D principal investigator and aerospace engineer at the Marshall Center. “We had to carefully plan and calculate the ejection time, so we’d be lined up over the United States and our ground controllers to execute the next phase of the mission.”

After ejection, a timer within NanoSail-D will begin a three day countdown as the satellite orbits the Earth. Once the timer reaches zero, four booms will quickly deploy and the NanoSail-D sail will start to unfold to a 100 square foot polymer sail. Within five seconds the sail fully unfurls.

If the deployment is successful, NanoSail-D will stay in low-Earth orbit between 70 and 120 days, depending on atmospheric conditions. NanoSail-D is designed to demonstrate deployment of a compact solar sail boom system that could lead to further development of this alternative solar sail propulsion technology and FASTSAT’s ability to eject a nanosatellite from a microsatellite — while avoiding re-contact with the FASTSAT satellite bus.

NanoSail-D was designed and built by engineers in Huntsville and managed at the Marshall Center with technical and hardware support from NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. This experiment is a combined effort between the Space and Missile Defense Command, Von Braun Center for Science and Innovation, both located in Huntsville, Ala. and NASA.

FASTSAT launched on the STP-S26 mission — a joint activity between NASA and the U.S. Department of Defense Space Test Program. The satellite was designed, developed and tested at the Marshall Center in partnership with the Von Braun Center for Science & Innovation and Dynetics Inc. of Huntsville. Dynetics provided key engineering, manufacturing and ground operations support for the new microsatellite. Thirteen Huntsville-area firms, as well as the University of Alabama in Huntsville, also were part of the project team.

For more information visit http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/smallsats/fastsat/10-162.html

It all started with a Big Bang. Well, actually, it all started with a beach ball. Not just any beach ball, but one that is printed with data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP). This educational beach ball was developed at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and NASA’s Blueshift team decided to blog about it. As a result, they ended up visiting the set of the popular CBS sitcom about geeky scientists, “The Big Bang Theory.”

“We started Blueshift in 2007 to give the public a look at what’s going on behind-the-scenes in Goddard’s Astrophysics Division,” said Blueshift’s director, Sara Mitchell. “We’re always looking for interesting ways to talk about astrophysics and what we do here – content that goes beyond the press releases and really public stuff.” To that end, the Blueshift team gives the world a backstage pass to what’s going on through blogs, podcasts, and social media like Twitter.

In August of 2010, Blueshift’s Maggie Masetti started working on an article about the use of the WMAP beach ball as a unique teaching tool. In an interview, Britt Griswold, the designer of the beach ball, explained, “Imagine yourself at the center of this ball, looking in all directions. What you are seeing is the first visible light in the universe. It has been stretched by the very fabric of space/time as the universe has expanded so it now is microwave light, invisible to our eyes (but not WMAP’s telescopes!).”

Britt mentioned that the WMAP beach ball has been featured several times in pop culture; it was used by Alan Alda on “Scientific American Frontiers” and it also sits on the bookshelf in the apartment of Leonard and Sheldon, two physicists on the TV show “The Big Bang Theory.” The Blueshift team wanted a picture of the beach ball on the set for the article, but needed one they could use legally. On a whim, Sara tweeted at the co-creator/executive producer of “The Big Bang Theory,” Bill Prady, asking if there was an image they could post on Blueshift. He responded almost right away, offering them the chance to come out and take a picture of the beach ball on set themselves.

A few short weeks later, the Blueshift team met up in Los Angeles (a trip timed to coincide with a conference on after-school education they were already attending) for a tour of the Warner Brothers Studio. Bill Prady and his assistant, Tara Hernandez, met them outside Stage 25 (which was used for, among many other productions, Casablanca) and took them onto the show’s set. Waiting for them in the place of honor, right in the spot on the couch always reserved for Sheldon, was the WMAP beach ball!

The Blueshift team found it a thrill to see real astrophysical data on the set of a TV show, and it was very exciting for them to see the set itself. Leonard and Sheldon’s apartment is the envy of every NASA nerd with bookshelves full of science books, old scientific instruments, and other items of geek interest. Bill told Maggie that he imagined Leonard bringing the old instruments home from the Pasadena Flea Market.

White boards covered in scribbled equations and diagrams are common at Goddard, and it’s much the same here — the apartment has several of them. The show’s science advisor, Dr. David Saltzberg, a professor of physics and astronomy at UCLA, has a blog from which it’s clear that a lot of effort goes into what’s written on the show’s white boards. Though only a portion of fans are going scrutinize them, it’s nice to know that they care about appealing to that part of their audience. (When the Blueshift team was on set, the white boards were an homage to the movie “Real Genius” and its excimer lasers.)

Though currently in the entertainment industry, Bill Prady is actually a former computer programmer. In fact, he wanted to do a show about computer programmers — an idea that eventually morphed into a show about scientists and engineers that work at Caltech. Bill liked the idea that scientists don’t stop being scientists when they’re not at work. He also felt that the audience didn’t necessarily need to comprehend the science that the characters were doing to care about them or their lives.

On the other hand, Bill didn’t want scientists in the audience to cringe the same way that doctors often do when watching medical shows. For example, recently, two of the characters were collaborating on a research project. “The question was,” Bill told Sara during an interview, “What is this theoretical physicist working on that he pulls this astrophysicist into?” Dr. Saltzberg was able to come up with a plausible problem for them to work on. Bill added, “Of all the reviews the show has gotten, my favorite is, we’re the only situation comedy to have been reviewed, and reviewed favorably, in the ‘Journal of Science.’”

And then there’s a time when Bill and “The Big Bang Theory” were downright prescient. Bill explains, “We did a story where [aerospace engineer] Wolowitz realizes that the toilet that he’s designed and has been installed on the International Space Station is going to fail. And it’s going to fail in space. And it’s not going to be good. And about 2-3 weeks after the episode aired, the toilet on the International Space Station did fail and it failed almost exactly as we predicted it might. And I was kind of happy about this because we looked at the schematics for the toilet, and we said, ‘Where is this thing weak?’ so we could come up with what Wolowitz thinks might go wrong. We pinpointed what looked like a weakness and in fact that’s how the toilet actually failed! The moral of the story is, if you’re installing plumbing off the planet Earth, consult comedy writers!”

It was a great pleasure for the Blueshift team to go behind-the-scenes of “The Big Bang Theory” and to see how a show about fictional scientists is put together. As a thank you, the Blueshift team brought with them a variety of NASA outreach goodies from various NASA missions, including a scale model of the James Webb Space Telescope. Also included with the gifts was a special beach ball containing the latest WMAP data… and the signature of John Mather who, with George Smoot, won the Nobel Prize for his work on this first light in the universe and its relation to the Big Bang.

Though there was no expectation that these gifts would find their way to the show’s sets, the NASA Blueshift team admits to having hopes that they might. They were rewarded when several of their NASA items were spotted in the episode “The Apology Insufficiency,” which originally aired November 4, 2010. Appropriately, the Webb telescope model, plus some stickers, magnets, and a Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) poster, were used to decorate the apartment of astrophysicist Rajesh Koothrappali. Hopefully these objects will turn up in future shows, but in the meantime, keep an eye out for the WMAP beach ball, which still sits in its home on the shelf behind Leonard and Sheldon’s couch. “The Big Bang Theory,” created by Chuck Lorre and Bill Prady, airs Thursdays at 8 p.m. ET on CBS.

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