Massimo's photoblog

So much for balmy California

I was expecting a nice warm weather (after all the first thing I saw when I arrived was a sign advertising “Sun” Diego) but the last couple of days we got instead a lot of rain, to the point that there have been extended flooding (the access road to the conference center parking lot now resembles a river, see photo above). I have read that in Los Angeles the situation is even worse, with mudslides destroying entire neighborhoods. Today however the Sun has come out and the place finally coincide with my idea of southern California.

The meeting is going well, even though it is quite exhausting. Yesterday it was a long sequence of talks and meetings, from 7:30 to midnight. In fact the first talk was at 8:30, but I was so tired the night before (whole day spent talking to people about my poster) that I messed-up the alarm and woke up one hour too early (and I didn’t find out until I walked into the meeting room to find it still deserted). The talk was worth the effort, though. It was about “evolutionism vs. creationism”, which is another way to say “science vs. religion fundamentalism”. Apparently a recent Gallup poll revealed that half the americans think that the world was created all at once 10,000 years ago. This kind of explains why, from time to time, school boards all around the country (especially in the fundamentalist “bible belt”) try to force teaching of creationism as if it was a scientific theory. It may be strange to have a talk about creationism at an astronomical meeting, but it is not so. The efforts to negate evolution theory is not just concerning biology, but it is an overall attack against science, and thus concerns science as a whole.

The highlight of the day, however, were two talks about NASA politics, concerning the Moon-Mars initiative that risks to swallow all NASA science resources for the years to come, and a talk about the future of the Hubble Space Telescope. As happens in those cases, NASA people were trying to convince the astronomical community that is better to adapt than fight the current, which is easy to say for planetary scientists and people involved in the “Origins” programs (researching the origin of life and stellar systems) , but tough for cosmologists and extragalactic astronomers seeing the funding for all their future initiatives jeopardized by the NASA change of heart. Regarding the Hubble Space Telescope is still difficult to say what will happen. Without a servicing mission the telescope is bound to fail in a few years, and NASA refuses to carry on the previously scheduled shuttle mission to repair it. The salvation may come from a robotic mission currently in study, but is not clear if this approach (which will cost over 2 billion dollars), is feasible and can be carried on in time before the HST will fail.

Today is definitely a quieter day (to the point that I can even find some time for this posting), and we have been entertained by a nice talk about the Chandra X-Ray Telescope (the X-Ray brother of Hubble) and an update about the two little rovers that have been scouting the Mars surface for one year (and that are still doing great).

As the meeting is going to end, I hope the weather will hold, to have some time to visit the San Diego area before coming back to the New England winter on Friday morning.