We think that because we have mobile phones in our pockets, communication is easy.
It's not always the case, but our live link with the International Space Station certainly seemed to work like a dream.

European Space Agency astronaut Paolo Nespoli came through loud and clear on the BBC World News Channel today.

There was several seconds' delay, but that is normal.

To get a live link with the ISS requires the sound and video be sent on a rather circuitous route.

The event is co-ordinated from Mission Control in Houston, Texas. They establish the path up to and from the platform; a second leg then has to be set up with the participating TV station.

Holding a conversation requires a little patience because of the delay, but Paolo was in entertaining form, spinning himself around and squirting water into the weightless surroundings of Esa's Columbus laboratory.

We had some familiar questions about how you wash yourself in space, and how you get to sleep when you are floating; but we also had some really quite fascinating questions about what sort of weather systems were apparent from an altitude of 350km and, my favourite, about time-keeping on the station. It's London time, says Paolo:

"We actually use GMT time. We are a little bit shifted towards the Moscow time, so we do things a little bit earlier than if we were in London, but it's actually the London time [we use here]. It's true we are rotating around Earth so fast that every 90 minutes we have a sunrise or sunset - so 16 sunrises and sunsets per day.
 
"If you would be looking outside the window, you could get totally confused. But we actually synch our body-clock according to the working day, so we try to go to bed around 10, 11, midnight - wake up around six, and then we have the working day.
 
"It's still a little bit strange when in the middle of the day I look outside and it is pitch dark down on Earth, or it's time for me to go to bed and I look outside the window and it's sunny somewhere. It's shocking at the beginning but the body becomes adjusted pretty quickly."

Paolo is due to remain on the ISS until May. His mission is called MagISStra.

Paolo Nespoli's view of the UK

The name combines the Latin word "magistra" for a female teacher, with the acronym of the International Space Station. He'll be performing 30-odd experiments during his stay on the ISS.

And as is always the case, he'll be doing a lot of educational and outreach work.

He's an ambassador for the international "Mission X: Train Like an Astronaut" project which is aimed at eight to 11-year-olds and encourages them to learn the basics of good health.

He's also taking part in the "Greenhouse in Space" initiative. He'll be growing plants on orbit and recording how they are doing, while schoolchildren grow the species of plant on the ground.

It will illustrate very neatly how gravity influences so many systems and processes we think we know so well.

If you haven’t caught his Tweets, you can follow them here. He’s also taking a stream of pictures of the Earth like the one of the UK on this page.

And the MagISStra home page can be found here.

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One scientist's noise is another scientist's data, and this applies particularly to Europe's spectacular Planck space telescope.

Hurled to an observing position more than a million km from Earth, this observatory has been routinely scanning the sky now since August 2009. It’s on a grand quest.

 

Its mission is to make the definitive map of the famous Cosmic Microwave Background, or CMB. Some call it the "afterglow" of the Big Bang; I like to think of it as the "oldest" or "first" light in the Universe. It fills the sky around us.

It comprises those photons, or particles, of light that were first allowed to sweep out across the cosmos once it had cooled sufficiently to form neutral hydrogen atoms.

Until that time, the photons bashed into free electrons at every turn; the Universe was opaque. Previous studies have indicated this "uncoupling" of radiation and matter occurred about 380,000 years after the moment of creation, or about 13.7 billion years ago if you are looking through our end of a telescope.

These ancient photons' first contact is with Planck's super-cold, super-sensitive instruments. That's an extraordinary thought. All that time, all that space; and it ends with the photons striking the telescope's detectors.

Planck views the sky at nine frequencies. This allows it to pick apart - and eventually extract - the different components that obscure the CMB.  In these nine views, all you see is the "reject data".  

Scientists can identify tiny temperature variations in the CMB that give them insights into the early structure of the Universe and the blueprint for everything that came afterwards. All the structure we see around us today was set in motion by that initial framework.

Nasa's Cobe and WMap telescopes have already extracted a good deal of information from the CMB, and these efforts have rewarded a number of scientists with Nobel Prizes.

Esa's Planck observatory is designed to pull out every last detail, with the expectation also that it will generate "Swedish gongs".

As a consequence, Planck's data is jealously guarded. It’s one reason why announcements about the mission tend to be few and far between.

The last time the European Space Agency made a big song and dance about this flagship endeavour was back in the summer with the release of Planck's first all-sky map.

It was a stunning picture that found its way on to front pages across the globe (see bottom of posting). It contained some CMB information, carefully rendered so as not to give away any secrets, but the image was dominated by an obscuring foreground – largely light coming from our own galaxy, the Milky Way.

All of this foreground "contamination" has to be removed if scientists are to get a clear view of the CMB. And this week in Paris, the Planck Consortium (the hundreds of scientists working on the mission) published a great long list of these "rejected" sources of light in a vast catalogue.

I call it contamination, but of course this pollution is actually pure signal to the researchers who study these sources of light.

The catalogue contains thousands of items. Some are within our galaxy; others are much deeper in space.

They range from nearby ultra-cold clumps of gas and dust where future stars will form, to the diffuse light coming from galaxies shrouded in dust billions of years in the past, and which were forming stars at rates some 10 to 1,000 times faster than we see in our own Milky Way Galaxy today. Planck's project scientist Dr Jan Tauber told me: 

"All this light – the CMB, the closest galaxies, distant galaxies – is mixed up, and in order to do science we have to go through a process we call component separation. We have to split apart these components. And at the end of this process, which is basically a software process, we end up with different maps. The CMB, our ultimate objective, is one of the faintest signals in the sky and therefore one of the most difficult to extract. We can’t talk about it yet because we still need to work on the data quite a bit. But some of these other signals are very strong, like the ones coming from our own galaxy and we can start to talk about them now."

The collection of nine all-sky maps on this page is what Planck sees in the nine frequencies across its two instruments.

Planck sees the spinning dust in a narrow frequency range, around 30GHz (red colour)

Studying these different frequencies allows the scientists to tease out what the different sources of contaminating light are and what they are doing.

With an eye on the British contribution to all this research, I'll pick up on one fascinating example referred to as "anomalous microwave emission" (AME).

It's a glow most strongly associated with the dense, dusty regions of our galaxy, and its origin has been a puzzle for decades. But the work by Clive Dickinson, from Manchester University, and colleagues has pretty much established now from the Planck data that this AME must be coming from dust grains that are spinning at several tens of billions of times a second. Extraordinary.

This furious behaviour is a result of collisions, either with other dust grains or with photons of ultraviolet light. Clive told me: 

"This emission seems to only emit in a narrow frequency range, around 30GHz, which is exactly the frequency range that the low-frequency instrument of Planck is observing. And although it's been observed before – we’ve known about it for a number of years now – Planck data have really allowed us to map it out and create very precise spectra of these dust regions. What we’re finding is that the only real possibility for this anomalous microwave emission is electric dipole emission from spinning dust grains. It sounds horribly complicated but basically these dust grains spin extremely quickly, so quickly that they end up emitting in the microwave regime. It's one of about four components that really confuses the CMB, and we need to understand it so we are able to subtract it and therefore clearly see the CMB."

Planck continues to scan the sky. It hopes to picture everything around us five times over. This should be more than enough data to get a very clean picture of the CMB.

Planck's full-sky image released back in the summer. The gas and dust (blue/white) in our Milky Way Galaxy dominates the foreground. The CMB is seen in the magenta and yellow splodges behind

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Any timeline of key UK space events in 2011 will have to include the start of the new financial year in April.

This is the point at which the new UK Space Agency formally comes into being, and with its own budget.

The year will start from my point of view with an update from Europe's Planck space telescope

No longer does the body for co-ordinating space activity in Britain have to go cap in hand to government departments and research councils, looking for cash to run a programme.

Responsibilities previously scattered across Whitehall and Polaris House in Swindon (home to the research councils) are being passed to the UKSA along with their cash.

The two major exceptions are the Met Office and the money it pays to belong to Eumetsat, the pan-European organisation charged with operating the continent’s weather satellites; and oversight of the MoD’s Skynet satellite telecommunications system which is run by a private company. These stay outside the UKSA.

The recent allocation of science and research funding [500k PDF] for 2011/12 to 2014/15 saw the UKSA being given £769,685,000 (926,028,000 euros) for the period.  This is all programmatic money; administration is separate.  Also not included here is the capital allocation for the period of about £76m which covers buildings and hardware costs.

The programmatic budget equates to a little shy of £200m a year, although the money is slightly front-loaded because the agency has some large, immediate commitments, most notably funding the UK’s part of GMES, which is Europe’s big environmental monitoring project.

There is also money to offset exchange rate movements that have made membership of the European Space Agency (Esa) more expensive.

Set against the current baseline, the UKSA’s funding is projected to increase by about 109%. Inflation is quite strong at the moment so by 2014/15, the allocation will probably work out as a small cut in real terms.

This is the "flat cash" settlement the coalition promised to science; and compared with other areas of science, the UKSA has done better than average, as I predicted back in October.

This almost certainly reflects the recognition of the economic importance of space and what it can contribute to future growth. Industrially, this is a sector, remember, which is expanding and taking on people.

It is worth noting also that the UKSA now sits inside the science funding “ring fence”, which ought to mean its cash cannot be raided if there is a problem elsewhere in government.

A lot of people are still reflecting on the fact that science escaped the large cuts meted out to other areas of government-supported activity; there remains a sense of relief in the air. But you can be sure that as the months and years go by, the government will again be asked to demonstrate its commitment, especially if other nations continue to pump large sums of money into their science base.

Both France and Germany dwarf the UK in terms of space spending; their budgets are five times that of the UK, and they are increasing their budgets.

What is more, not only do France and Germany pay big sums into the European Space Agency (Esa), they have a large amount of money reserved for national programmes.

Once the UK has met its Esa subscription, there’s not a huge amount left in the tin.  UK space scientists and engineers, though, are masters at stretching a pound to make it do remarkable things.  

And so we gallop ahead. What am I looking forward to most? Well, I’ve got quite enough on my plate already this week, thank you. Tomorrow (Tuesday), we get the first big science results from Esa’s Planck telescope.

I’ve had a sneak preview and it’s impressive stuff.  British research is to the fore, too.

In fact, we’ll be focusing quite a bit on Esa this week at the BBC.

If you are in a part of the globe that can pick up the BBC World News Channel, you will be able to see our link-up with the International Space Station on Thursday at about 1415 GMT.

Tim Willcox will be talking live with Italian astronaut Paolo Nespoli. He will be showing viewers his new home and taking some questions.

I took part in an event with Paolo back in the summer at a science festival in Turin, and he is an excellent communicator. If you haven’t caught his Tweets, you can follow them here. He’s also taking a stream of pictures of the Earth.

The hope is we will also have the UK’s Esa astronaut-in-waiting Tim Peake in our studios; certainly the director of human spaceflight at Esa, Simonetta Di Pippo, will be there.

It will be a chance to find out where Europe thinks it is going with the ISS. Esa member-states are committed to the extension to 2020, but they’re some way off approving a budget to make it happen.  This matter is quite pressing now and something they really have to sort out in the next few months. 

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