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Dr. Mian Abbas, a space science researcher at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., watches as a single grain of lunar dust -- taken from the Moon during the Apollo missions of the late 1960s -- is isolated in a vacuum chamber. Photo credit: NASA/MSFC.

If you don't read NASA Science News [1] regularly, then you're missing out. Sure, they routinely post the same old recycled astronomy content about eclipses, equinoxes and such but it is a daily thing and that's got to be hard to find new stuff all the time. Goodness knows I'm sure not able to do that. In any case, more often than not you do run across some really fascinating work being done.

Such is the case with this recent article profiling space science researcher Mian Abbas [2] who is studying moondust literally one speck at at time. Working with samples returned by the Apollo 17 astronauts in 1972 and the Russian Luna-24 robotic probe in 1976, Dr. Abbas has found that the moondust has some really interesting properties.

The 12 men who walked on the surface of the moon between 1969 and 1972 quickly discovered that moondust was extraordinarly sticky. It got on everything. It fouled tools and spacesuits and moondust coated equipment absorbed sunlight causing it to overheat. It got tracked by the astronauts back into the lander where it was inhaled after they took off their helmets. Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt said of the moondust [3], "When you go weightless again, it shook up from the floorboards. It smelled like spent gunpowder."

Dr. Abbas and his colleagues in the "Dusty Plasma Laboratory" at the National Space Science and Technology Center [4] in Hunstville, Alabama are looking into what makes the moondust so sticky. Injecting a single grain of lunar dust into a chamber, Dr. Abbas suspends it in mid-air using electric fields and then pumps the air out of the chamber to simulate the lunar vacuum. After the grain of dust is properly suspended in the chamber, the light from an ultraviolet laser is directed onto the grain. The UV laser imparts an electrical charge to the grain of moondust causing it to move. Dr. Abbas must carefully adjust the chamber's electric fields to keep the grain centered so that it's changing electrical charge can be measured.

What Dr. Abbas and his colleagues have found is that the UV light charges the moondust 10 times more than would be predicted and that bigger grains charge up more than smaller grains, the opposite of what theory would predict. But that's only the first half of Dr. Abbas' experiment and only helps tell us what happens to the moondust in the lunar day. In early 2006 Dr. Abbas hopes to explore what happens to the moondust's electrical charge when the sun sets by replacing the UV laser with an electron gun to test the theory that the dust becomes negatively charged at night by free electrons carried by the solar wind.

Dr. Abbas' work is important because when astronauts finally return to the moon in 2018 (almost 50 years after Neal Armstrong first set foot on the moon) they will need to understand the moondust to effectively deal with it. Unlike the Apollo astronauts who were only on the surface of the moon for a brief time and then only in daylight, the next generation of lunar explorers will be living on the moon for extended lengths of time. They will need effective strategies for dealing with the moondust, both mechanically and biologically. As Russell Kerschmann [5], life sciences chief at NASA's Ames Research Center [6] says, "How much of a problem this is, we don't know. And that's a problem."

Beyond that though, Dr. Abbas' research into the electrical properties of moondust is solid basic science -- the kind of basic science with no immediate applicable technological benefits that has been so under attack in the George W. Bush administration. And what the hey, it's an easy cut for most lawmakers to make. Basic research is hard to communicate to the public. It's not necessarily that they're stupid, but rather so much of foundational research requires complex, specialized knowledge or higher mathematics to even begin to understand what the scientists are talking about.

When it comes down to it, often scientists don't even know where their research is taking them or where it'll take us down the road. They work on a problem because it's interesting and helps them understand a tiny part of the bigger picture. Perhaps a decent analogy would be of a person encountering a jig saw puzzle for the first time. They have no idea what a jig saw puzzle is and must examine each and every piece first, trying this piece with that until they eventually come to understand that all the pieces somehow fit together to form a picture. So much of science is studying the jigsaw pieces without understanding the bigger picture into which they fit.

So when push comes to shove, it's really simple to say, with all the problems faced by our nation today, with all the hardships endured by so many, if any particular piece of scientific research will not result in noticeable benefits in the short term then we would be foolish to throw away money on it. This I think is at the heart of a certain elemental disrespect for science in our country. Lacking the knowledge or math skills necessary for understanding it all comes down to "Yes, but what have you done for me lately."

That's a problem. There's no way of knowing what most scientific research will lead to tomorrow, what problems it might solve, what problems it may create. When Newton first set out to explain why apples fall to earth, he simply couldn't have envisioned that his work would one day lead to the physics that allowed men to visit the moon and return with the dust for Dr. Abbas's research, or put the sattelites in orbit that us to view and communicate with the other side of the world in near real time. When we pick and choose [7] which science to support, when we decide on "good science" vs. "bad science" we don't know what we're throwing away and we can't even be sure that the science we have invested in will pay off.

And who knows... maybe that "good science" will create problems for us down the road that could have been solved or avoided by the "bad science" we decided we didn't have money for.

Of course, we can't just fund all scientific research. The money isn't there, and that's especially true in a time when we've decided that war is a better investment in the future than science. It's not easy, and somewhere, somehow, someone must decide which science to fund. Should that be the politicians though? Most members of Congress are lawyers. I don't think there's a single professional scientist in all of the House and Senate. If we, as ordinary citizens, can't understand the research then why should we expect Congress to do so? To complicate matters, Congress closed the Office of Technology Assessment [8] in 1995 which had been formed in 1972 to do precisely that job -- advise Congress on matters of science and technology.

Where does that leave us? We live in a world that is impossible to understand without complex specialized knowledge with a public and a government that is fundamentally apathetic at best, and often antagonistic toward science. Congresspeople routinely make laws concerning issues related to the same complex specialized knowledge that they themselves are unable to understand. Those same Congresspeople disbanded the very office meant to help them understand those issues. The result is funding for basic science research is curtailed in favor of partisan objectives often based on flawed or manipulated scientific findings [9].

Admittedly, it's a tough problem and although the current Republican leadership has raised it to whole new levels, the blame also rests on the left. This is what I would like to see in my fantasy world:

• Reformation of the Office of Technology Assessment as the Office of Science and Technology Assessment* with the principle duty of informing members of Congress on science and technology issues related to legislation in a nonpartisan objective manner.
• Formation of an Office of Science Education with a mission similar to that of the the National Endowment for the Arts [10] to encourage science education in the schools and the public.
• Federal block grant funding of scientific research allowing individual states, universities and companies to decide how and on what research the money should be spent. I know that last part is anathema to most liberals but the fact of the matter is that large companies in other countries often do basic science research [11] and as long as the results are publically published then they should be encouraged to do so.

I'm not a scientist and the above proposals may be naive, but I think they'd be a good start to addressing three fundamental problems in this country that seem to me to be interconnected; that of decreasing funding for basic scientific research, a lack of understanding of science and how it relates to our workaday world and public attitudes toward science. Too, for the most part, these are problems we don't even know we have. And, paraphrasing Russell Kerschmann, when you don't know you have a problem, that's a problem.

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