Rep. James Clyburn (D) of South Carolina said today on Meet the Press that he supports adding 4 new Justices to the Supreme Court. This would bring the total to 13. That is a common number people have focused on since there are 13 judicial circuits. In the distant past, the two numbers were kept in line. “13 is a pretty good number,” said Clyburn. “A baker’s dozen would be a good number to have on the Court.” This is a big deal. The particular number doesn’t really matter. I see adding 4 to get to 13 as sort of the minimum acceptable goal. But the point here is rapidly (in time for 2029) establishing Court expansion and reform more broadly as the consensus Democratic position. We don’t know if Democrats will get a trifecta in 2028. But it’s the first plausible opportunity to expand the Court.
Sometimes I’ll hear people say: Why start talking about it now? You complicate the 2026 midterms. Maybe you give the Republicans ideas? Why not just keep it close to the vest and spring it on them in January 2029?
Put simply, that’s just not how it works.
The inertial forces against reform are massive. Even among many elected Democrats who are pretty good on other issues, it’s often a very heavy lift. It’s only very recently that Court reform has even moved into the realm of conceivable for most of them. Change, building that consensus can only happen as a bottom-up process, making it clear that accepting the perpetuation of the Corrupt Court as it exists today is an unacceptable position for a Democrat, certainly at the federal level. As a bottom-up process, it can only be a public process. You’ll only know someone is on board when they say it publicly and clearly. Even then you can’t be totally sure. But once a politician has committed publicly, it’s much harder to shift. And when you’ve got the great majority publicly committing, the pressure heightens on those who remain opposed or silent in inverse proportion to their declining numbers. The same applies to abolishing the filibuster and a lot else.
As far as I know, Clyburn is the first Democrat in leadership in either House to announce for Court expansion, and one of the relative few generally. Jeffries has signaled general support or openness to reform in recent months. And that’s important too. But it only becomes hard and real when the details are attached.
Home alone all week (plus the cat) and not really in the mood for writing, so in brief:
I finally sorted out a big pile of old paperwork I brought back from Essex months and months ago. Sorting, scanning, filing, shredding.
Three trips to the gym, the week’s only exercise apart from…
…three hours of scything and collecting grass before the rain began. Only a little patch left to do now.
Weekly guitar lessons are going well and I’m practising most days so I assume I’m making progress.
Two afternoons taking Mum to appointments.
I did a super-efficient shopping trip on Saturday morning, driving into town, getting to Waitrose, Wickes, and three other shops, and then being home by 9.45am. Despite being the weekend places are quiet first thing.
One of the two home batteries has stopped working, showing a red “fault” light, but the person dealing with emails at the installer was away this week.
My toe is pretty much 100% now, eleven weeks on. Just a slight ache occasionally. Of course, this morning I stubbed the toe next to it. Idiot. (Not too badly though.)
I have finally got all of the satchels in Red Dead Redemption 2. Time well spent we can all agree.
The GTA6 preview looked amazing, graphics-wise, but despite all those advances it seems like convincing talking mouths are still beyond today’s technology. Maybe next time.
Ribbon-Cutting Event for NASA Deep Space Network’s Deep Space Station 23
PIA26779
Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech
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Ribbon-Cutting Event for NASA Deep Space Network’s Deep Space Station 23
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Description
Leadership from NASA Headquarters, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the Deep Space Network (DSN) stand in front of the recently completed Deep Space Station 23 antenna at the Deep Space Network’s Goldstone complex near Barstow, California, on Aug. 25, 2026.
From left: Germaine Aziz (project manager, DSN Aperture Enhancement Project, JPL); Bradford Arnold (manager, Telecom Programs & Oversight, JPL); Keyur Patel (associate lab director for Flight Projects & Mission Success, JPL); Wanda Peters (deputy associate administrator, Research and Technology Mission Directorate, NASA Headquarters); Jimmy Kenyon (associate administrator, RTMD, NASA Headquarters); John McCullough (acting director, Space Communications and Navigation Program, NASA Headquarters); Gregory Heckler (deputy program manager for capability development, SCaN, NASA Headquarters); William Marinelli (development manager, SCaN, NASA Headquarters), Michael Levesque (project manager, DSN, JPL); and Frank Kaufholod (project manager, NASA Glenn Research Center).
They gathered at the recently completed DSS-23 antenna for a ceremonial ribbon cutting on Aug. 25, 2026. It’s the latest antenna to be added as part of the DSN’s Aperture Enhancement Project, which began in 2009 to upgrade and expand the network by adding six new 34-meter (114-foot) multifrequency beam-waveguide antennas. These versatile Deep Space Network dishes can enhance many missions operating over different radio frequencies.
The DSN allows missions to track, send commands to, and receive scientific data from faraway spacecraft. It is managed by JPL, a division of Caltech, in Southern California for SCaN, which is located at NASA Headquarters within RTMD.
NASA Deep Space Network’s New Goldstone Antenna Goes Online
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Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech
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NASA Deep Space Network’s New Goldstone Antenna Goes Online
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Description
Long shadows are cast by the recently completed Deep Space Station 23 at the Deep Space Network’s Goldstone complex near Barstow, California, in August 2026. A 34-meter (114-foot) multifrequency beam-waveguide antenna, DSS-23 will boost the DSN’s capacity and enhance NASA’s deep space communications capabilities for decades to come.
NASA leadership and personnel as well as dignitaries gathered at the complete DSS-23 antenna for a ceremonial ribbon cutting on Aug. 25, 2026. It’s the latest antenna to be added as part of the Deep Space Network’s Aperture Enhancement Project, which began in 2009 to upgrade and expand the network by adding six new 34-meter multifrequency beam-waveguide antennas. These versatile Deep Space Network dishes can enhance many missions operating over different radio frequencies.
The DSN allows missions to track, send commands to, and receive scientific data from faraway spacecraft. It is managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of Caltech, in Southern California for the agency’s Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) Program, which is located at NASA Headquarters within the Research and Technology Mission Directorate.
Panorama Showcasing the 34-Meter Antennas of the DSN’s Goldstone Complex
PIA26777
Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech
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Panorama Showcasing the 34-Meter Antennas of the DSN’s Goldstone Complex
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Five antennas soak in the summer sun at the Deep Space Network’s Goldstone complex near Barstow, California, in August 2026. The recently completed Deep Space Station 23, a 34-meter (114-foot) beam-waveguide antenna, can be seen to the right of the frame in the foreground. The other three 34-meter antennas are, from left, DSS-26, DSS-25, and DSS-24. At farthest right is a smaller 26-meter (85-foot) antenna, the retired “Apollo Antenna” that was built in 1967 as part of the Manned Space Flight Network and earned its nickname for providing tracking for the Apollo Program.
NASA leadership and personnel as well as dignitaries gathered at the complete DSS-23 antenna for a ceremonial ribbon-cutting on Aug. 25, 2026. It’s the latest antenna to be added as part of the Deep Space Network’s Aperture Enhancement Project, which began in 2009 to upgrade and expand the network by adding six new 34-meter multifrequency beam-waveguide antennas. These versatile Deep Space Network (DSN) dishes can enhance many missions operating over different radio frequencies.
The DSN allows missions to track, send commands to, and receive scientific data from faraway spacecraft. It is managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, a division of Caltech, for the agency’s Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) Program, which is located at NASA Headquarters within the Research and Technology Mission Directorate.
President Trump's renaming* of Lake Ontario got me thinking about the famous song by Woody Guthrie, This Land Is Your Land. Its chorus is
"This land is your land, this land is my land From California to the New York island, From the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters; This land was made for you and me. "
I asked three LLMs to propose Trump versions, and got these three:
This Land Is My Brand by Gemini
Chorus This land is my land, it’s mostly my land, From Mar-a-Lago to the New York island, From Lake America to the Gulf of America, This map was drawn for only me. ########
This Gulf Is My Gulf by Claude:
It's my gulf now, it's my lake now, Change the name and don't look back now, One man's word is all it takes now — This map was made for me alone. #########
This map is my map, by Chat GPT
It’s America’s Gulf, it’s America’s lake, The greatest new names that a President could make! They’re beautiful names, everybody agrees— Ask anybody! Ask anybody! Ask anybody, please!
It’s America’s Gulf, it’s America’s lake, Tremendous decisions for history’s sake! The old names were terrible — frankly, a mess— But these names are the greatest! The greatest! God bless!
#########
*Names, like language itself, are largely equilibrium phenomena--even for entirely US based names, like Cape Canaveral, which was officially called Cape Kennedy only from 1963 to 1973, when it's earlier name was officially reinstated.
I didn’t mind the reduced pace of the NBA broadcast, which toggled
between cameras under each basket, but Stratechery’s Ben Thompson
felt strongly that the best option would’ve been a single
camera at mid-court, to completely eliminate the disorienting cuts
and replicate being at the game in person.
Apple’s approach with baseball, at least based on Friday’s game,
seems to lean toward Thompson’s preferred approach — and it does
benefit from it. Each half inning was shown from a single camera
on the dugout rail next to the on-deck circle, giving a great view
of pitcher and hitter and the infield, as well as the goings on
right in front of the dugout in foul territory. The camera
switched between innings, so you were always viewing from the
perspective of the at-bat team’s dugout.
Making it all work better was Apple’s addition of a “virtual
jumbotron” floating in the sky, a scoreboard with graphics and a
video feed of the standard 16:9 telecast on Apple TV. It was easy
to look up and catch a replay or even get a better view of
something happening in the far-off outfield, without getting in
the way of my view of the game itself.
I concur with Snell’s review. The camera placement was terrific. You watched each team bat from the perspective of its own dugout. Perfect. A few other thoughts:
The whole thing was legit exciting. Vision Pro continues to get a bad rap because Apple hasn’t sold many of them, and isn’t going to sell many of them until they come out with new models that are cheaper and lighter and less fussy. But there’s no denying that these immersive experiences are fucking cool. And an immersive live experience adds something else. It’s ineffable. Hard to say why, but feeling like you’re at another place watching something happen live is magic. Just a few years ago it would have required literal magic. It wasn’t possible. Now it is.
The immersive audio was terrific. It really sounded like being at Yankee Stadium, and truly added to the you-are-there feel of the experience. It seems corny to say this, but I really had the urge to stand during the national anthem, and it felt slightly wrong not to take the “hat” off my head (where the “hat” was the Vision Pro). It’s exciting to feel 43,000 fans roar around you. Baseball is a slow game but when the crowd roars, it erupts. That never comes across on regular TV broadcasts. It did here.
Like Snell though, I felt Apple’s commentators were too chatty. I’d love an option to toggle the commentary on and off, to just experience the natural audio of the ballpark.1
The only thing missing was aroma. Cement, grass, dirt, sweat, beer, peanuts, hot dogs with the works. Ballparks smell like fun. (Even Fenway.) But the you-are-there experience was so visceral I swear I could almost smell it. It’s like my brain was filling in the missing sensation. It didn’t feel like watching a 3D TV broadcast. It didn’t feel like a better version of TV broadcasting. It felt like something new and different. Something at least as different from watching on TV as watching on TV is different from merely listening on radio. It’s profound. TVs are small — laptops, tablets, and phones are even smaller. Yankee Stadium is huge. Watching this game immersively felt huge. Awesome, in the literal sense.
I love how you could look around and see how filthy everything really is in baseball: the on-deck mats, the interior of the dugouts, the tiny bits of schmutz on the warning track. It’s a lot of dirt and quite a bit of spit. That’s baseball, Suzyn.
There’s a resolution and/or depth of field limitation with the cameras, exacerbated by the fact that Vision Pro’s displays are, compared to reality, low resolution. They’re the highest-resolution VR displays on the market but I still couldn’t see the ball once it left the infield. When balls were hit to the outfield you just kind of had to judge what was happening by what the infielders and baserunners were doing. Ben Rice hit a double in the first inning and I thought the Sox outfielder caught it and I was confused why Rice was running to second base. Turns out the outfielder stopped running because Rice hit the ball over his head and he was waiting to play the carom off the left field wall. I was happy to be wrong. A few years from now, with better cameras and better Vision headset displays, these problems will be solved. But in the meantime, the outfield is fuzzy.
The best part about the immersive perspective compared to a traditional broadcast is watching how complex infield play really is. It’s fun to quickly look around the whole infield right before the pitch. You really see how much more stressful it is for the pitcher once there’s a runner on base — let alone more than one. It’s what I love about going to the ballpark — so much more complexity and intricacy is revealed — and watching this immersive broadcast enables the same thing. You can see the whole game, at all times, not just the pitcher, catcher, and batter.
The virtual “jumbotron” is a fine idea but I wish you could move it a bit higher, and it would be even better if you could configure it with the stats you want to see. But positioning it higher is my big request.
I have to admit I hadn’t used my Vision Pro in quite a few weeks before last night’s game. One thing that really struck me, almost certainly because baseball is a long game, is how heavy it is. My chin wants to droop and my face wants to look down when I’m wearing it. It’s the weight more than the isolation that makes it tiresome for anything other than short-form content, for me at least.
The whole thing was a great success. I’m writing these notes on Saturday afternoon while watching the old flat broadcast of game 2 of this 4-game series, and it feels ... well, boring. And small. Bodes well for the future of sports.
Even better would be an option to swap in the local radio broadcasts, like bringing a portable radio to the ballpark. Go skeuomorphic with the UI and make it look like an old handheld Sony or Panasonic transistor radio, and make the toggle “click” on and off. Go skeuomorphic with the audio too — make it sound like it’s coming out of a little speaker or a little earpiece and have the tuner play static as you switch between home/away (and English/Spanish) stations. That’d be so fun. And the regular old flat Friday Night Baseball telecast already supports swapping in local radio broadcasts — they’ve already got the rights. Bring that to these immersive games! ↩︎
After the bruising Michigan Senate primary, a new Fox News poll was published showing Abdul El-Sayed four points behind Mike Rogers, with Rogers himself at 51% (Rogers 51%, 47% El-Sayed). That was just one poll. But it crystallized for many Democrats and confirmed for many of El-Sayed’s critics that Democrats had just nominated a man who couldn’t win a general election in Michigan. Today EPIC-MRA, usually seen as the leading Michigan pollster, released a new poll showing El-Sayed at 47% and Rogers at 43%. In this case, we have another poll from EPIC-MRA released about exactly a month ago which showed the reverse: Rogers 46% and El-Sayed 43%. So we’re able to make an apples to apples comparison which shows El-Sayed’s standing in a pretty strong light.
And those aren’t the only polls. Since the election four polls had been released before the new EPIC-MRA poll. Two of those were partisan polls. One from the (Democratic) Senate Majority PAC (El-Sayed +6), one from the Trump-aligned and cringey-named League of American Workers (El-Sayed +3), and then two independent polls. One was from AARP (El-Sayed +1) and another from Susquehanna, a respected pollster but generally seen as GOP-aligned or at least mostly working for Republican candidates (El-Sayed +7).
The Senate Majority PAC number should be treated with especial caution — even more than the others, even the League of American Workers’ one — because that’s an internal poll which SM chose to release — mostly to calm people down about the Fox poll. I have no doubt it’s legit. But a campaign or campaign PAC only releases the good polls. So treat that one with caution. But overall we have a pretty consistent story here: five different polls, campaign polls, independent polls, the most recent and most respected poll, all showing El-Sayed ahead with margins ranging from 1 point to 7 points.
To be clear, I’m not saying El-Sayed is a lock to win. I’m not even predicting he will win. Even the textbook case of the “mainstream,” non-offending, middle-of-the-road Democrat, Elissa Slotkin, beat Rogers by a mere 19,000 votes, albeit in the pretty rough (for Democrats) 2024 cycle. There’s also some decent statistical evidence, as we discussed here, that in the last two midterm cycles summer polls have tended to slightly but measurably over-estimate Democratic strength. I’m simply saying that the idea that El-Sayed can’t win this race (and not just as a theoretical possibility), that he has baggage or extreme views that just rule him out of contention just can’t be squared with this data. If you believe that, it’s not on the basis of any numbers. It’s a hunch or a gut feeling. And maybe you’re right. But be clear with yourself that it’s a hunch.
This cumulative data also suggests that the run of fairly unfriendly news cycles for El-Sayed over the last few weeks, especially the recent Piker one, haven’t mattered on the ground in Michigan nearly as much as national commentary seems to suggest. This could just mean of course that El-Sayed is running a really good campaign. But I would suggest that at least in the short term, the movement is tied to the straightforward fact that a bruising — bordering on vicious — primary fight is going to depress support for the winning candidate vs the general election opponent (Mike Rogers) because the losing primary opponent’s supporters (Haley Stevens’, in this case) are going to be mad at the winner. It’s then on the winner to re-coalesce their coalition’s support for the general.
And indeed, the available evidence suggests that’s what’s happening. In the Fox poll mentioned above, only 69% of Democrats and Democratic-aligned independents who didn’t identify with the DSA were supporting El-Sayed. That was a pretty bad number. But the upside of that number was that unlike Rogers, who had 96% of Republicans behind him, El-Sayed had a lot of room to grow. And the trend of recent polls suggests El-Sayed is succeeding in bringing those non-DSA aligned Democrats back into the fold.
Again, my point here isn’t that Rogers is toast. I’m not saying El-Sayed has this wrapped up. I’m saying that the idea that he can’t win or that the results of the primary were some kind of decisive setback for Democrats’ chances just can’t be squared with the available evidence. At least not so far. This is very much a race and it’s one in which El-Sayed kind of has to be viewed as a favorite to at least some degree. The more adverse way of looking at this of course is that you’d gotta kind of suck as a Democrat to be losing in a purple to blue-ish state in an environment like this. But I don’t think any Democrats I know cares very much about why El-Sayed is well-positioned, just that he is. He just needs to win the seat. Maybe he’ll lose. Maybe these polls are all missing something. But if you think this race is now Rogers’ to lose because of whatever problems you ascribe to El-Sayed that’s a hunch, a gut feel, not something that you can easily back up with data.
Artist’s illustration of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
Using a donated Hubble-class mirror originally built for a spy satellite, NASA’s Roman Space Telescope is poised for launch Sunday on a $4.3 billion mission to open a new window on the universe, taking wide-angle, ultra-sharp images that would require a half million 4K TVs to show in full.
Put another way, officials say a single full-resolution image from Roman’s 300-megapixel wide-field camera would cover 45 city blocks or the entirety of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park.
And it will collect that data faster than any previous NASA spacecraft. The Hubble Space Telescope has beamed back about 172 terabytes of data over 30 years while Roman will downlink a staggering 2,500 terabytes over its five-year primary mission.
Put yet another way, Roman’s sensitive wide field camera and advanced detectors will scan broad swaths of the cosmos 1,000 times faster than Hubble, collecting as much data in one month as its older cousin could manage in a century.
A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket carrying NASA’s Roman Space Telescope was hauled to pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center overnight Friday to set the stage for launch. The right-side strap-on booster will be making its third flight while the central and left-side boosters are making their first. This will be the 13th flight of a triple-core Falcon Heavy, the most powerful operational rocket in SpaceX fleet of boosters. Image: Michael Cain/Spaceflight Now.
The flood of data is expected to shed new light on the nature of “dark matter, dark energy and the structure of the universe itself and accelerate the … discovery of potentially habitable planets outside our solar system,” said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. “Roman will give the Earth a new atlas of the universe.”
Said NASA science chief Niki Fox: “The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is a sheer powerhouse. It is literally a speed machine. The speed at which we’ll be scanning the sky, delivering vast amounts of data and returning results will be at an unprecedented rate, never done before.”
The 42-foot-long 18,000-pound telescope is named for the late Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief astronomer who championed the value of space telescopes throughout her career and was instrumental in the development of the Hubble Space Telescope. As such, she is often referred to as “the mother of Hubble.”
Spaceflight Now’s will live coverage starts about two hours prior to launch.
The the new telescope is scheduled for launch atop a triple-core SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket at the Kennedy Space Center at 7:26 a.m. EDT Sunday.
It is bound for Lagrange Point No. 2, a gravitational eddy of sorts about a million miles on the opposite side of Earth from the sun where it will remain in place with a minimal use of fuel. The James Webb Space Telescope is stationed in the same region for the same reason.
From the vantage point of L2, Roman will study the effects of dark matter, the mysterious substance that pervades the universe, holds galaxies together and accounts for most of the mass in the cosmos, acting as a brake on the expansion of space itself, which is carrying galaxies farther and farther apart.
At the same time, Roman will work to gain statistically significant insights into the nature of the equally mysterious dark energy, a repulsive force presumably present since the Big Bang that became dominant about five billion years ago as the universe expanded and thinned out. Ever since, the expansion of the cosmos has been speeding up.
Built for a classified spy satellite, the Roman Space Telescope’s 7.9-foot-wide mirror was donated to NASA by the National Reconnaissance Office when the original program was canceled. It is the same size as the mirror at the heart of the Hubble Space Telescope but it was ground to a different prescription, giving the new observatory an equally sharp but much wider field of view. Image: NASA.
Roman may help resolve a conflict between the strength of dark energy in the very early universe, as measured by probes studying the remnant three-degree glow of the Big Bang’s immediate aftermath, compared to Hubble observations of a specific type of supernova that indicate a slightly different value.
When the Hubble Space Telescope was launched in 1990, estimates for the age of the universe, from its Big Bang birth to the present, ranged from 10 billion years or so to 20 billion years.
Hubble was able to determine the speed of that expansion — the Hubble Constant — and thus the time that has passed since the Big Bang to an accuracy within 1 percent: 13.8 billion years.
But detailed studies by researchers using spacecraft studying the afterglow of the bang — the 3-degree cosmic background radiation — came up with a different number. The mismatch — known as “the Hubble Tension” — suggests some critical element is missing in the current understanding of the universe and the forces driving its evolution.
“We’re seeing evidence that the Hubble constant, as inferred from very early times, is not consistent with the Hubble constant that we measure closer to now, which is telling us that the model that connects those two things might not be quite right,” said Project Scientist Julie McEnery. “We have a slight tension in our expectations for how structure should grow and evolve.”
That “slight tension” indicates a potentially serious flaw in the standard model of cosmology, the current understanding of how the universe, and everything in it, has evolved over time. It might even indicate dark energy is not the constant force it is thought to be, but might somehow change over time.
“We’re probably not going to confirm the standard model of how the universe works,” McEnery said. “We’re very likely to demonstrate that our standard model is wrong, and to set ourselves on a path to figuring out how does our universe really work. It’s hard to get (a better question than) the fundamental nature of your universe!”
Roman’s wide-field camera is one of two instruments aboard the spacecraft. The other is an advanced coronagraph equipped with deformable mirrors that can block out the glare of a star to detect the vastly dimmer light reflected from the atmosphere of an orbiting planet.
Roman’s coronagraph is expected to detect Jupiter-size planets orbiting Earth-like stars. By analyzing that reflected light, researchers may be able to tease out the elemental composition of those atmospheres.
“We think that we will be capable of detecting exoplanets that are about 100 million times fainter than their stars, and with that capability, we are hoping to see … a Jupiter twin around a nearby star using visible light reflected from its cloud tops for the first time,” said Vanessa Bailey, the Roman coronagraph instrument scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “Then, we can use that light to study the composition of its atmosphere.”
About 6,200 exoplanets have been discovered to date using smaller instruments like NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope. Roman is expected to discover more than 100,000 exoplanets over 18 months of observations.
It will take three to four months to “commission” the spacecraft, calibrating is instruments and testing its myriad subsystems before science operations can begin in earnest.
The solar-powered Roman is built around a 7.9-foot-wide 410-pound primary mirror, one of two that were donated to NASA by the National Reconnaissance Office, the secretive agency that manages many of the nation’s high-end spy satellites.
The mirrors, the same size as Hubble’s, were built for a classified project that later was canceled. But both were ground to near-perfect prescriptions, allowing them to look down and focus on Earth, not out into deep space.
NASA has no plans or funding to utilize the second mirror, focusing instead on building a single “flagship” observatory.
The donated mirror’s curvature, smoothness and polish had to be modified to ensure the desired astronomical prescription and the telescope’s trusses and other components had to be altered to enable them to withstand the ultra-low temperatures at Lagrange Point 2.
“I think our engineering team thinks of it as we received a set of well tested parts that included highly calibrated optical systems,” said Project Manager Jackie Townsend. “But we really had to sort of start over and make it our own to work at our operating temperatures.”
In the end, the project came in ahead of schedule and under budget. But even with an effectively “free” primary mirror, the telescope will still cost taxpayers some $4.3 billion to build, launch and operate for its five-year primary mission.
Three “core” surveys are planned over the course of Roman’s planned five-year mission.
The High-Latitude Wide-Area Survey will focus on a huge swath of the sky looking out of the plane of the Milky Way — 12 percent of the entire sky — avoiding obscuring star clouds and dust marking the galactic disk. The goal is to catalog the distribution of a billion or more galaxies.
Light from Roman’s primary mirror will be reflected from two other mirrors before reaching the infrared focal plane detectors seen here. The detectors give Roman what amounts to a 300 megapixel infrared camera. Image: NASA.
Those data, collected over 520 days, will help researchers better understand how dark matter and energy have combined over cosmic time to drive the evolution of structure in the universe.
The High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey will require 180 days of observations over two years. The telescope will repeatedly image the same regions in an area of 90 full moons to make movies capturing short-duration events ranging from supernova blasts to the radiation emitted when stars fall into black holes.
McEnery described such transient events as “things that go bump in the night.”
The Galactic Bulge Time-Domain Survey will focus on the core of the Milky Way, the central bulge of stars, gas and dust where a supermassive black hole affects the trajectories of nearby stars.
Imaging across an area spanning 8.5 fill moons, Roman is expected to find tens of thousands of exoplanets by watching hundreds of millions of stars and looking for signs of “microlensing,” a phenomenon in which the light of a background star is enhanced, or magnified, by the gravity of an intervening object.
The late Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief astronomer, championed the value of space telescopes throughout her long career at the space agency. She is seen here in front of the James Webb Space Telescope’s primary mirror during the observatory’s assembly at the Goddard Space Flight Center. Roman, who died in 2018, is affectionately remembered as “mother” of the Hubble Space Telescope. The Roman Space Telescope was named in her honor. Image: NASA.
Mission managers have also left room for “general astrophysics” topics not covered in Roman’s three core surveys. The first such program, known as the Galactic Plane Survey, will monitor the disk of the Milky Way from one side to the other covering an area of 3,455 full moons.
Some 20 billion stars will be mapped along the way, providing the most complete portrait of the galaxy and its structure ever captured.
“What makes me most excited about Roman is the discovery potential,” McEnery said. “With two billion galaxies, we’ll have two thousand objects that are one in a million. We’ll be exploring patches of sky as a function of time with exquisite sensitivity. We’ll find new things that go bump in the night.
“I very much hope, and in fact expect, that the most exciting science from Roman will be a surprise, something we couldn’t predict. And that will set the stage for the next deeper set of questions for future missions to address.”
"A newly updated edition of the definitive guide for budding economists, with a new chapter of advice for young professors.
"In clear, accessible language—a model of what he advocates—William Thomson shows early-career economists how to make written and oral presentations both inviting and effective. A Guide for the Young Economist covers the basics of clear exposition, including such nuts-and-bolts topics as titling papers, writing abstracts, presenting research results, and holding an audience’s attention.
"This book is an invaluable guide for young economists working on their dissertations, preparing their first articles for submission to professional journals, getting ready for their first presentations at conferences and job seminars, or facing their first refereeing assignments. In this new edition, the author also includes a chapter of advice written especially for those young economists who have just received their PhDs. "
Here's my blurb:
“Thomson, a renowned teacher, explains clearly much of the invisible curriculum for becoming an academic economist, from pursuing a PhD to approaching tenure. Even old hands will find actionable advice.” —Alvin E. Roth, McCaw Professor of Economics, Stanford University; author of Who Gets What—and Why and Moral Economics
But don't just take my word for it: read all the endorsements:
My thanks to Finalist for sponsoring last week at Daring Fireball. Finalist is a remarkable, ambitious, and novel app for iPhone, iPad, and the Mac from indie developer Slaven Radic. It’s a planner inspired by paper day planners. I wrote quite a bit about Finalist when it first sponsored DF back in December — you should read that post. I’ve been using Finalist ever since. It’s a really good app. I’ll just reiterate from the first post that what really resonates for me is the idea of adding tasks to days, not assigning dates to tasks. If you add some tasks and then never actually do them, they’re still there, but they’re in the past, not harassing you in an ever-growing list of undone stuff today.
Finalist 4, which just came out a few weeks ago, is the biggest update yet. The headline new feature is notes, in the app or as a folder of Markdown files that round-trips with Obsidian. Tasks in those files land on the right day, next to your reminders and events, even inside the Mac menu bar app. Finalist’s rebuilt Timeline lets you pencil tasks into your day, and Apple Pencil gets special powers to sketch the plan in seconds.
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