One
of the CSO's discoveries was covered in "Birth of the Oceans" of
National
Geographic Channel. 
National Geographic
Channel, Naked Science, covered a discovery at the CSO toward
understanding where the water on the Earth comes from, in one of their
episodes entitled
"Birth
of the Oceans". To obtain a hint on the
origin of the Earth's oceans, Dr. Darek
Lis, a senior research associate in Physics at Caltech, led a series of
observations at the CSO
using one of the
heterodyne receivers. From the observations using the
CSO telescope,
researchers successfully detected a line of of heavy water (or
deuterated water) and
measured the ratio of heavy water in a comet. The result was that
the comet Hyakutake
contains a very high ratio of the heavy water compared to the ratio of
the heavy water
on
the Earth. This result, together with other observational
results, implies that the origin of
the Earth's
water is not mainly from the water in comets which came from
outer parts of
our Solar system.
You can find the full story of "Birth of the Oceans" in the
National Geographic Channel
Naked Science. The program was aired on the 5th of March
2009.
Figure
1. Spectrum of the HDO (heavy water) in Comet
Hyakutake (c/1996 B2) at 464.925 GHz
(Lis et al.
1996; Bockelee-Morvan,
Gautier, Lis, Young, Keene, Phillips, Owen, Crovisler, Goldsmith,
Bergin, Despois, and Wootten 1998). Excellent
weather together with CSO's sensitive
heterodyne
system and the telescope were essential to the detection of the heavy
water line.
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