The Darkest Place

The European Space Agency has for about a decade researched the concept of a "hyper telescope," under the name Exo Earth Imager. EEI would be a fleet of 150 orbital 3-meter mirrors, spread across about 8,000 square kilometers of space, and synchronized to reflect and magnify the image of an earth-sized planet in orbit around a distant star, with high enough resolution to discern oceans, continents, forests, deserts and even major river basins. Maintaining the mirrors in their relative orbits with the level of precision needed would be challenging at least. Not insurmountably so, but certainly not trivial.

A possible solution for this is to instead mount the mirrors on a fixed surface. There have already been proposals for building large telescopes on the far side of the moon, shielded from terrestrial radio interference. NASA has even demonstrated that large astronomy-grade mirrors can be constructed in-situ from lunar regolith. A telescope of this scale would have many applications and purposes besides viewing exoplanets, but this would be its primary purpose.

I would like to propose that instead of the lunar far-side, a better location for an optical (and maybe radio as well) telescope would be inside the basin of Peary crater. I've discussed the unique properties of Peary in this blog previously, in the context of human colonization. But briefly, Peary crater, by virtue of being situated on the north pole, has the triple virtue of a basin which is constantly in darkness and protected from solar radiation, a rim that is in constant sunlight for solar power, and a substantial amount of water ice on the floor of the basin. Shackleton crater on the lunar south pole is similar in many respects, and would similarly be an excellent site for this; however Peary is about 80 km in diameter and Shackleton is only about 20 km, so Peary would afford space for a much larger telescope.

Because the basin is always "aimed" at the moon's northern sky, and the same part of the sky is always visible throughout the month and throughout the year, very detailed long-term observations could be made unhindered of this part of the sky. Yes it would be limited to only this part of the sky; however, many space-based telescopes, including NASA's Kepler Space Telescope, have similarly limited fields of view.

And yes, a small astronomical observation outpost and research facility could provide the seed of a human colony in Peary crater as well. In later posts we'll be discussing the advantages of establishing a lunar colony over either Mars, Venus or orbital stations; a moon-based space telescope (at whatever location) could be a very good beginning to a robust lunar city.

Pluto Day!!!

Some of us have been waiting a really long time for the New Horizons flyby of Pluto (it launched almost a decade ago). However, what we are going to see today is basically NOTHING, other than an endless string of NASA press conferences about how they don't have anything to tell or show us.

New Horizons must first be aimed at Pluto (and it's companion planet Charon; apparently NASA has officially stopped calling it a "moon") in order to get photographs and other data during the flyby. Closest point of approach to Pluto will be at 4:49am pdt, but it will continue photographing and collecting data on Pluto for at least several hours after the flyby. Then New Horizons will realign itself to aim its antenna back toward earth. It will first send a short ping to tell the mission team that the spacecraft made it through the Pluto system without mishap, and that the data was collected and is safely in NH's memory banks. This ping will take about four and a half hours to travel from Pluto back to Earth at the speed of light.

Then New Horizons will begin transmitting its preliminary data package. These will include low resolution (about the quality of a JPEG) images of Pluto and Charon during the flyby. Due to the highly attenuated signal crossing some three billion kilometers of interplanetary space, the baud rate of the transmissions will be maddeningly slow. Once received on earth they must be processed and analyzed.

Wednesday (15 July) at noon pdt, NASA will hold a press conference and release the first series of low resolution photos. This is the first new NASA press conference for this mission that will have any real information in it. High resolution photos are forthcoming, but will take about nine months to arrive.

Curiouser and curiouser

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Curiosity, killing us all

Yesterday, on NPR, NASA dropped a kind of big bomb, maybe.

John Grotzinger, who is the principal investigator for the Mars rover Curiosity mission for JPL, hinted pretty loudly yesterday that Curiosity had made a discovery of monumental importance. But they couldn't talk abut it just yet. The preliminary results from a series of soil samples taken at Rocknest (pictured above) a few weeks ago, if confirmed, will be "one for the history books."

The NPR article is here, for whatever details there are. www.npr.org/2012/11/20/165513016/big-news-from-mars-rover-scientists-mum-for-now

Okay.

So, lots of space blogs are now speculating that Opportunity has discovered (drum roll, please) Life ... On ... MARS!!!(tm).

Again.

So, alright. First off, this wouldn't be the first time that NASA gave a teaser for an announcement that turned out to be something other than the obvious conclusion informed people would likely come to based on the teaser. This isn't even the first time this has happened regarding the possibility of a discovery of life on Mars. It wouldn't even be the first time space blogs, including this one (cough), had made this sort of speculation which later proved wildly erroneous. To their credit, usually the actual announcements are pretty important, just not always as newsworthy to the general public. Remember the arsenic bacteria in Mono Lake? Incredibly important discovery from the standpoint of exobiology, but the average person on the street wasn't likely to care very much. Add to this the sad fact that the NASA budget is very much in the cross-hairs of the Sequestration ("Fiscal Cliff") negotiators, and the possibility that NASA is up to similar shenanigans is not entirely out of the question.

But maybe, just maybe, this is the time that Lucy isn't going to snatch the football away. Maybe.

Okay, let's look at what we actually know here.

Two different laboratories on board Curiosity have now studied soil samples from Rocknest. The first laboratory is called CheMin, which is NASA-ese for Chemistry and Mineralogy. It determines which types of minerals are in a soil sample. The second laboratory, which is the one generating all the excitement, is called SAM, for Sample Analysis at Mars. SAM is designed to analyze the chemical makeup of Martian soil and atmosphere, specifically to determine if there are organic molecules present.

In the past few weeks, these two laboratories have shown that water was once abundant on the surface of Mars (we knew that already, but it was a good confirmation), and that, at least at the sample site, there are not measurable amounts of methane, which on earth is mostly produced by biological processes. What SAM is really looking for is carbon and oxygen, and it has the ability to analyze these using laser spectrometry to determine if the carbon and oxygen it finds is of geological or biological origin.

This is what SAM does. It does not have the ability to directly monitor for metabolic change in the soil chemistry (as the Labeled Release experiment on the Viking missions did back in 1976), but it can and does analyze the basic chemical composition of the soil and atmosphere. Sam has been doing this at Rocknest on Mars for the past several weeks now. And NASA is really, really excited with whatever the preliminary results of that are.

As minimum, one can reasonably conclude that they have in fact found carbon and oxygen which seem to be of biological origin. By itself, that's a pretty big deal, because it would indicate pretty strongly that life of some sort has lived on Mars at some point in its history. That would be an awfully important discovery. But "one for the history books"? Well, yes, for a book about the history of exobiology. But for the average person on the street, probably not all that terribly interesting.

However, and this is purely speculative on my part, if there were really actual living micro-organisms in the soil samples, SAM might detect this as standard ratios of the CHONPS (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus and sulfur) elements which are the signature of life on earth. Or, as a similar ratio of organic chemicals which replace these, such as arsenic apparently does for some amount of phosphorus in the Mono Lake halobacteria. It is possible that this is what NASA has discovered on Mars this week.

And that would unequivocally be one for the history books.

But we wouldn't know anything else about that life. But that's ok, because once we know that there is definitely microbial life in the Martian soil, we have plenty of means to further study it. The most important of these will be genotyping, assuming that any organisms found there actually have genes to type.

There are essentially two possible (hypothetical) outcomes of this. One is that we will find that we share common ancestry with the Martian micro-organisms, either because they originated on earth, or we originated on Mars, or both Martian and terrestrial life originated from someplace else. Any of these are possible. The other outcome is that Martian life arose on Mars completely independently of terrestrial life, either with its own unique DNA or RNA, or else some other truly alien biochemistry. Either of these outcomes could provide tantalizing clues as to the relative ubiquity of life in the universe.

NASA will be announcing the results of the SAM soil experiments in the first week of December, once the data has been verified and re-verified. Until then, the media and blogs like this one are left to their own guesswork. I'll be posting here as soon as anything is known. Until then...

Shooting Venus

Contrary to all weather predictions from both NOAA and Environment Canada, the skies in the Strait of Juan de Fuca and on Vancouver Island were crystal clear this afternoon for the Venus transit. I brought my sextant with me on the boat just in case, it proved to be an excellent solar telescope.

After we passed the Romeo buoy I got the idea to try to shoot Venus during the transit as a celestial Line of Position. The boat was bouncing in the seas pretty well and I had to shoot through one of the wheelhouse windows, and I only had time for one very sloppy sight. My intercept turned out to be 0.8 nautical miles from my GPS position, meaning I was very lucky. Here's the raw data:

Watch Time: 16:58:04 pdt (+7), 5 June 2012 Height of Eye: 20 ft Instrument Correction: 0.0'

GPS Position: 48° 18.4'N 123° 04.6'W Course Over Ground: 303°T Speed Over Ground: 27.4 knots

Wind: 25 knots westerly Seas: 4 ft

Sextant Height (Hs): 38° 51.2'

Intercept: 0.8 nm Away Zn: 261.2° T

The red dot in the illustration is the actual GPS position of the boat, and the green line is the Line of Position for Venus.

All in all, a very good day.

That's my soul up there

If you're in the Seattle area and hoping to view the transit of Venus across the face of the sun today, it will be beginning around 3pm and continuing through sunset. It looks like NOAA is expecting around 75% cloud cover from about 5pm on, so we have some chance of getting lucky and seeing it. I'm working an afternoon shift on the boat, and will be bringing my sextant for the occasion. Something which many people found disturbing eight years ago when this happened was the realization of just how very tiny this planet (which happens to be roughly the same size as Venus) is. I think it's good thing to contemplate. Later this summer Venus will be bright enough to cast a shadow here on earth. Hopefully by then we'll have some clearer skies to be able to appreciate that!

Seattle WA, Astronomer's Paradise

Today in Seattle we are in for an especially rare treat. While the rest of the country is only going to see a small part of the sun eclipsed by the moon, here we're going to see the entire sky eclipsed by stratus clouds!!!

Annular Eclipse

If you happen to be in the Seattle area this Sunday, from 5:30pm to 7:23pm, we have a chance to see a partial eclipse of the sun. The maximum will be at 6:18pm. At this time if you measure the distance from the horizon to the sun, and look that same distance above the sun and a little t the left, there is a pretty good chance you will also see Venus.

The weather is not looking especially promising here, but I'll be bringing my sextant with me to work just in case.

Sextants for Venus

Next month (June 5 or 6 depending on where you live) the transit of Venus across the face of the sun will be visible for much of the planet. A lot of different sites have been discussing various ways to watch this once-in-a-lifetime event (actually twice in our lifetime, because Venus transits occur in couplets spaced eight years apart), such as pinhole viewers and special filters for binoculars and telescopes. All of which work fine.

However, earlier this week I was practicing some sunlines with my Astra 3b sextant, and I noticed that the large sunspot group AR 1476 was quite visible. Given that any time Venus is visible (even in broad daylight) it is very easy to see its planetary disk with a 4x40 sextant telescope, and given that during the transit Venus will be about 67,000,000 miles closer to earth than it is during apparent aphelion, it should be very easy to observe the transit using a standard marine sextant with its sun filters in place. If you happen to have a 7x35 scope for your sextant, the viewing will be that much better, but this is not at all necessary.

To use your sextant as a solar telescope, zero the index arm, and ensure that the filters are on both the index mirror and the horizon glass. Then, just look directly at the sun through the sextant telescope. Start with too many filters and then start taking them away until you can see the sun as a crisp disk. Do NOT look at sun unfiltered!! Note that the sextant in the graphic above does NOT have adequate filtering to safely look at the sun; it is a costume piece from a steampunk website, not an actual working sextant.

If you happen to live here in Seattle, you may have the added advantage of having the sun further filtered by dense layers of nimbostratus. Because in Seattle, that's how we roll.

Will be posting more about the transit soon, meanwhile there is much information here (click on image then right click and select "view image" to enlarge):

Gold Rush

Two press releases from two different commercial ventures today, each announcing projects to mine for platinum and other minerals in space.

Seattle's own Planetary Resources debuted its program to mine near-earth asteroids for platinum and a water, and Moon Express in California unveiled their plan to mine the moon for the same things.

A while back I wrote about different scenarios which could lead to permanent colonization of other worlds within our solar system. At the time I specifically discounted off-world mining as a major motivator.

From December 13, 2010: "Mineral or other wealth has always been a strong motivator, but there's no reason to imagine that we'll experience a Lunar or Martian Gold-Rush anytime soon. Mars has plenty of iron, but so does earth, and earth's iron deposits are a lot closer."

So much for my powers of prognostication!

The rationale is that there are some single asteroids with more accessible platinum than all the platinum on the surface of the earth combined. My first thought on this is, if this works, I'm really glad I never invested in platinum. I'm just old enough to remember when amethyst was considered a precious gemstone, before the massive deposits were fund in Brazil. Now kids can buy fist-sized chunks of it in science-center gift shops with their baby-sitting money. If these commercial operations are successful, platinum could similarly cease to be a precious metal. But it might make a nice building material.

Will be posting much more about this, soon.

Happy Spring!

Due in part to the leap-year, this is the earliest vernal equinox since 1896; 2216pdt this evening, March 19th.

Major Solar Storm

The largest solar storm since 2005 is anticipated to hit earth around 1400UTC (6am pst)tomorrow. Anticipate minor loss of radio and GPS on the sunlight side of the planet, and if the weather holds some really awesome auroras on the night side, possibly continuing into tomorrow evening.

Full details are here:

http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/

The reason for the season

Astronomical data for the solstice for folks in Seattle who care about such things:

The moment of solstice happens at 9:30pm pst on Wednesday, December 21st, and sunrise on the 22nd at the Admiral Overlook in Seattle will occur at 07:55:12 pst.

However, the weather for Thursday is looking overcast and rainy, so the solstice sunrise festivities may actually be watching the sky turn from dark gray to lighter gray. That's okay, Seattleites are used to a little cloud cover.

Selenelion

If you happen to be in the Pacific Northwest and also happen to have an unobstructed view of the horizon in both directions, tomorrow morning's lunar eclipse is going to afford a unique and implausible simultaneous view of both the rising sun and the setting eclipsed moon. This is called a selenelion and possible due to atmospheric refraction. For example, when you see the sun or the moon just sitting on the horizon, it isn't really there; the entire disk is actually just below the horizon, but we're seeing the image refracted over the curvature of the earth. With a selenelion both the sun and the moon are actually just below the horizon, but being refracted over it.

If you happen to be in Seattle, the bad news is that the Cascade and Olympic mountains will obscure the sun and the moon at the time of the selenelion, if the rain doesn't. The good news is that for the other 364 sunrises of the year, you also have a view of the Cascades and Olympics.

Into the dark

Two notable press releases from NASA today. The first, which got most of the coverage in the commercial media, is that the Kepler mission has confirmed the presence of a large rocky world within the habitable zone of a star some 600 light-years away. In and of itself, this announcement is actually only mildly interesting. What is more interesting is that in the year Kepler has been operational, it has already discovered 2,326 planet candidates, of which 28 have already been confirmed. Even more interesting is the fact that all of these were discovered in this very small section of the sky:

Statistically, this may bode very well for habitable worlds around stars within 10 light-years of our sun.

The more interesting story out of NASA today is that the two Voyager probes are reaching the outer limits of our sun's influence, and will very soon enter interstellar space. This will be our first direct observation of the Interstellar Medium, and will afford a great deal of insight into the realities of travel to the nearest stars.

Ain't like dusting crops, boy!

The recent discovery of more small moons orbiting Pluto flags the possibility of a debris field which could seriously endanger the New Horizons probe when it arrives there in 2015. The question is not whether the debris field exists, which it seems to. Rather, the issue is whether the debris field is in the form of a disk (such as Saturn's rings) or a cloud. The best indications right now are for the latter.

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SPACE.com:

Pluto's Moons Could Spell Danger for New Horizons Spacecraft

When NASA's New Horizons spacecraft reaches Pluto in July 2015, it may find the region more hazardous than anticipated. The discovery of several moons around Pluto — and the potential for more — increase the risks during the probe's flyby.

The main problem is debris. The small moons are under constant bombardment from nearby space rocks called Kuiper Belt objects, but the moons' low gravity prevents them from holding on to chunks of dirt and rock that fly into the air when hit. The debris instead finds itself caught in orbit around Pluto, where it could pose a serious threat to New Horizons.

"The most likely problem we would encounter is to be hit by something that is large enough to instantly destroy the spacecraft," New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas, told SPACE.com.

Though cameras on the New Horizons probe will begin observing the Pluto system several months before its closest approach, they won't be able to detect the fast-flying milligram-size particles that could spell instant death if they collide with the vehicle.

New moons on the rise

Pluto's first known moon, Charon, was discovered in 1978, nearly 50 years after the dwarf planet was found. The Hubble Space Telescope discovered the next two of Pluto's moons in 2005, only two and a half months before New Horizons was launched.

In July of this year, a fourth moon of Pluto was located, and there are hints that two more might exist.

With three of Pluto's four moons having been discovered in the last five years, scientists have a hunch there are likely more still hidden.

Due to these new additions, a group of experts recently convened to analyze the hazards New Horizons might face. After determining the threat was real, they discussed how to avoid it.

A harder look at the challenge could make a significant difference, scientists say. Continuing to study the system with the Hubble Space Telescope, as well as several ground-based telescopes, could help reveal other hidden moons and their orbits well before New Horizons arrives.

Hunting hidden moons

But searching doesn't necessarily mean success.

"If there are moons too small, meaning too faint, then we won't find them," Stern said.

With that in mind, the group also determined the need for a good "safe haven bailout trajectory," or SHBOT — an orbit that New Horizons could shift into that would keep it away from the most likely danger zones.

The best route would zip through Charon's orbit, but on the opposite side of the planet from the moon. The large body constantly clears debris from its path, creating a safe route for New Horizons to pass through.

This strategy works best if the debris remains in a plane, similar to Saturn's rings. If, however, it orbits Pluto in a cloud, the danger is heightened.

If New Horizons encounters dirt and dust from the moons, it could put an abrupt end to the first mission to Pluto.

"There is no wounded here — only dead or alive," Stern said.

Curiosity abounds

Very nice photo of the launch of the new Mars rover Curiosity. The vehicle is an Atlas V 541.

Europa back in the game

NASA announced today the presence of enormous salt-water lakes only several kilometers below the surface ice of Jupiter's moon Europa. From the standpoint of colonization (and also incidentally exobiology), this is vastly preferable to the ocean of salt-water which also exists on Europa, but at some 100 kilometers below the surface ice. This puts Europa back in the running as a plausible candidate for outmigration, and possibly even in the top tier.

With this data, the three best candidates for a permanent and self-sustaining colony are, arguably, Ceres, Europa and Enceladus.

Saturn's moon Enceladus is in some ways the most appealing, but by far the least accessible. At 1.5 BILLION kilometers, it is more than twice the distance to Jupiter/Europa, and six times the distance to Ceres. And it is the smallest of the three candidates. But essentially limitless supplies of water and energy are relatively accessible to anyone living on the surface, and from the standpoint of self-sustainability that's huge.

Europa now meets most of the same criteria, is six times larger than Enceladus (and just a bit smaller than our own moon), and is much closer. The biggest drawback with Europa is still the very high amounts of ionizing radiation from Jupiter that would be experienced on the surface. Burrowing under the ice would provide shielding, but you have to get down there first. It is also possible that we could use another of the Galilean moons such as Callisto as a base-camp while drilling down to to the Europan lakes.

Dwarf planet Ceres is practically in our own backyard, and about twice the size of Enceladus. It too is covered with water ice over a salt-water ocean, but we don't know yet how thick that ice-mantle is. When the Dawn spacecraft arrives there in 2015 we'll know a lot more. Ceres receives ample sunlight for solar power, so even if there were no geothermal energy such as on Europa, or whatever-the-hell is generating 16 gigawatts of energy on Enceladus, it could probably support a substantial colony even if the surface ice had to be melted for water. At this time, I'm inclined to think that Ceres may be our best shot at getting a permanent and self-sustaining colony established quickly, but we'll know a lot more once the Dawn spacecraft starts sending back data.

Many people have speculated that Ceres would be an important stepping-stone for colonization of the outer planets, but she may prove to be a critical destination in her own right.

Horseshoes and hand-grenades

Tuesday, around 3:28pm pst, asteroid 2005 YU 55 is going to pass within the moon's orbit of us. A quarter of a mile (400 meters) in diameter, this is the largest asteroid to pass within the moon's orbit that we have ever known about (certainly lots of bigger ones have come even closer, we were just blissfully unaware of them). We have NEO's every single day, but this is one seriously big son of an accretion disk. If it were to actually hit the earth (don't worry, it won't, at least not in our lifetimes) the equivalent kinetic force would be greater than if every single nuclear warhead on every single missile on every single ballistic missile submarine in every single navy -- US, UK, France, Russia, China and India -- were to successfully detonate at the same location at the same time. Really. Which is still miniscule compared the the K/T asteroid which wiped out the dinosaurs (which was some 30 times larger), but, still, this is a big effing rock coming by tomorrow.

This will provide astronomers a very close view of a pretty large asteroid that we won't have to leave home to see, which is valuable. Nearly as useful, it serves as a not-so-subtle reminder that we really need to have the capability to intercept and deflect such objects all the time, not just whenever congress decides that it might be fun to budget for such things.

It will be visible from most of North America Tuesday evening, tracking from Aquila through Pegasus in about 10 hours time, but at a maximum visual magnitude of 11.2 it will require at least a 6" reflector telescope to see. Here's the track, from Sky and Telescope magazine:

Below is a very well done graphic from Space.com, with lots more information about this and other large NEOs --

Faster than light

Last week CERN announced that they had observed neutrinos to be traveling faster than the speed of light in a vacuum. I seem to recall Fermilabs finding similar (although inconclusive) results a couple years ago.

I realize it may be asking too much of particle physicists to stoop so low as to ask for help from an astronomer. But it turns out that the astronomy community has been aware for quite some time that when a star goes supernova, the neutron stream from that reaches earth some significant amount of time (minutes or hours, not nanoseconds) earlier than the light from the same event does. It has been previously assumed that the neutrinos were somehow being released earlier than the light, which may still be true. But if instead the time lag is due wholly or partly to neutrinos traveling faster than the light, then the further away the supernova is, the greater the timelag should be. That should be a pretty easy lookup for somebody. I may look it up myself this weekend, but I'm at work and my lunch break is rather short.

Here's the CERN press release, for those who have only heard this from Fox News:

OPERA experiment reports anomaly in flight time of neutrinos from CERN to Gran Sasso
Geneva, 23 September 2011. The OPERA1 experiment, which observes a neutrino beam from CERN2 730 km away at Italy’s INFN Gran Sasso Laboratory, will present new results in a seminar at CERN this afternoon at 16:00 CEST. The seminar will be webcast at http://webcast.cern.ch. Journalists wishing to ask questions may do so via twitter using the hash tag #nuquestions, or via the usual CERN press office channels.

The OPERA result is based on the observation of over 15000 neutrino events measured at Gran Sasso, and appears to indicate that the neutrinos travel at a velocity 20 parts per million above the speed of light, nature’s cosmic speed limit. Given the potential far-reaching consequences of such a result, independent measurements are needed before the effect can either be refuted or firmly established. This is why the OPERA collaboration has decided to open the result to broader scrutiny. The collaboration’s result is available on the preprint server arxiv.org: http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897.

The OPERA measurement is at odds with well-established laws of nature, though science frequently progresses by overthrowing the established paradigms. For this reason, many searches have been made for deviations from Einstein’s theory of relativity, so far not finding any such evidence. The strong constraints arising from these observations makes an interpretation of the OPERA measurement in terms of modification of Einstein’s theory unlikely, and give further strong reason to seek new independent measurements.

“This result comes as a complete surprise,” said OPERA spokesperson, Antonio Ereditato of the University of Bern. “After many months of studies and cross checks we have not found any instrumental effect that could explain the result of the measurement. While OPERA researchers will continue their studies, we are also looking forward to independent measurements to fully assess the nature of this observation.”

“When an experiment finds an apparently unbelievable result and can find no artefact of the measurement to account for it, it’s normal procedure to invite broader scrutiny, and this is exactly what the OPERA collaboration is doing, it’s good scientific practice,” said CERN Research Director Sergio Bertolucci. “If this measurement is confirmed, it might change our view of physics, but we need to be sure that there are no other, more mundane, explanations. That will require independent measurements.”

In order to perform this study, the OPERA Collaboration teamed up with experts in metrology from CERN and other institutions to perform a series of high precision measurements of the distance between the source and the detector, and of the neutrinos’ time of flight. The distance between the origin of the neutrino beam and OPERA was measured with an uncertainty of 20 cm over the 730 km travel path. The neutrinos’ time of flight was determined with an accuracy of less than 10 nanoseconds by using sophisticated instruments including advanced GPS systems and atomic clocks. The time response of all elements of the CNGS beam line and of the OPERA detector has also been measured with great precision.

"We have established synchronization between CERN and Gran Sasso that gives us nanosecond accuracy, and we’ve measured the distance between the two sites to 20 centimetres,” said Dario Autiero, the CNRS researcher who will give this afternoon’s seminar. “Although our measurements have low systematic uncertainty and high statistical accuracy, and we place great confidence in our results, we’re looking forward to comparing them with those from other experiments."

“The potential impact on science is too large to draw immediate conclusions or attempt physics interpretations. My first reaction is that the neutrino is still surprising us with its mysteries.” said Ereditato. “Today’s seminar is intended to invite scrutiny from the broader particle physics community.”

The OPERA experiment was inaugurated in 2006, with the main goal of studying the rare transformation (oscillation) of muon neutrinos into tau neutrinos. One first such event was observed in 2010, proving the unique ability of the experiment in the detection of the elusive signal of tau neutrinos.