Starman - Sparking the Exploration Imagination

What a fantastic and inventive way to highlight the launch of new space hardware! A red Tesla and a Starman going where no sports car has gone before! Epic! Whimsical! Totally fun! Way to go SpaceX!

When was the last time you got to use those adjectives when talking or writing about the U.S. Space program? A VERY long time I'll wager. 

I worked at Johnson Space Center in Houston, TX for 13 years at the beginning of the Space Shuttle and International Space Station programs. It was super interesting and we made history nearly every day, albeit incrementally. 

The senior scientists and engineers said it was not as exciting as the "good old days" of Gemini and Apollo when we knew very little about space and were exploring it with primitive and limited data processing capabilities. 

Now a forward thinking, early-adopter, inventor, billionaire has sparked our collective imagination with a visual we will never forget. The generations to come will have a positive benchmark in their push to the stars. Go science!

CIBER Spots Outcast Stars

Data from the Cosmic Infrared Background Experiment, or CIBER, provided support that background infrared light in the universe (seen by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope), comes from distant stars ejected from parent galaxies. 

"We think stars are being scattered out into space during galaxy collisions," said Michael Zemcov, Ph.D., experimental astrophysicist at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.

Using smaller suborbital NASA rockets, CIBER spotted two cosmic infrared (IR) wavelengths shorter than those measured by Spitzer. The light appears to come from a previously undetected population of stars between galaxies and CIBER measurements suggest the IR glow between distant galaxies is caused by orphan stars.

To test whether stray stars have been spun off from parent galaxies, future CIBER experiments will check to see if the stars are still located in roughly the same neighborhood. Go science!