The sister of the suspect in the killing of four police officers in Washington was charged Wednesday, for helping another suspect connected to the crime elude authorities, prosecutors said.
«Pensez à une carte murale, dit Edward Wright, professeur d'astronomie à la carte UCLA.The mai montrer au monde entier", mais je n'arrive pas à comprendre d'elle où les parcs nationaux. Si j'ai un atlas avec une vue beaucoup plus détaillée, je peux planifier mes vacances. "Réaliser un atlas meilleur est ce que Wright et ses collègues espèrent à voir avec la NASA Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, ou WISE, mission spatiale. Prévu pour le lancement vendredi de Vandenberg Air Force Base en Californie, les 320 millions de dollars sonde va photographier le ciel de la nuit entière à la lumière infrarouge. Dans le processus, il saisira des centaines de milliers d'objets inconnus qui sont trop cool et trop sombre pour illuminer notre ciel nocturne.
By Leonard David (courtesy Space News)
Outer space has become Earth's largest junkyard.
It is an international dumping ground for derelict spacecraft, wreckage from colliding satellites, remains from mischievous anti-satellite testing, spent rocket stages, discarded lens caps and clamp bands, paint chips and, yes, at one point, even a lost-to-space tool bag.
All that riff-raff might be out of sight, but it is far from being out of mind. This week, experts from around the world are attending a wake-up call type of meeting.
NASA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) have teamed up to take a hard look at the issues and challenges of de-cluttering space of human-made orbital debris. The result: A first-of-its-kind International Conference on Orbital Debris Removal is being held today through Dec. 10 in Chantilly, Va.
Wanted: innovative solutions
Understanding the space debris problem is one thing. Hammering out viable operational concepts to eliminate the rubbish is another. Then toss in legal and economic issues, as well as incentives. And for good measure add to the brew international policy and cooperation requirements.
For many years NASA has considered means to “remediate” the near-Earth space environment, that is, removing human-made flotsam from Earth orbit – at both low and high altitudes, said Nicholas Johnson, chief scientist of NASA's Orbital Debris Program Office at Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.
“We have also evaluated the feasibility of numerous concepts proposed by other U.S. government organizations, the aerospace industry, academia, and the general public,” Johnson told SPACE.com. “To date, none of the techniques examined have proven entirely practical due to technical and/or economic reasons.”
Johnson said that, earlier this year NASA and DARPA – which is renowned for its innovative solutions to exceptionally difficult problems – agreed to host this week's international conference devoted solely to the subject of orbital debris removal.
More than 50 presentations from the United States, Russia, France, Germany, and Japan will be offered to address not only the technical and economic challenges, but also the legal and policy issues associated with orbital debris removal.
To promote the reliable operation of space systems in the near term, the removal of small orbital debris is of principal interest.
“To preserve the near-Earth space environment for the farther term, the removal of large debris…derelict spacecraft and launch vehicle stages, is required,” Johnson observed. “Consequently, a variety of orbital debris removal techniques will likely be necessary to handle the entire spectrum of orbital debris sizes at all altitudes.”
Tragedy of the commons
Indeed, over the years various schemes have been aired to deal with the untidiness of orbital debris, be it huge aerogel-laden puff balls to snare debris, various types of galloping gotcha tethers, even vacuum cleaner-type contraptions.
“This is a tragedy of the commons kind of thing,” said Jerome Pearson, President of Star Technology and Research, Inc. in Mount Pleasant, S.C. “No one country is responsible for cleaning up space.”
Pearson is a strong advocate for a roving space vehicle based on his work to fashion a propellant-less electrodynamic thruster system. This ElectroDynamic Debris Eliminator (EDDE) vehicle, he said, is the only viable method known for the plucking from space of large debris.
EDDE would be maneuverable, flying from place to place in low Earth orbit. This concept is reusable with each vehicle capable of removing many targets by simple debris capture, utilizing lightweight nets or a grappler.
Pearson, however, flags a knotty issue.
“You can't just go up there and move somebody's stuff without permission,” Pearson said. “Anything that can go up and grab a piece of debris and bring it down…well, it can also grab somebody's operational satellite and bring it down. That's a space weapon,” he cautioned.
What's needed is some kind of international agreement, Pearson said. “There's a lot to be done there. I think it may be more political…more diplomatic than technical,” he added.
Umbrella of technologies
One proposal to be aired at the conference is a revisit of Project Orion – an idea that received a NASA technical look in the 1990s.
The scheme uses rapid-fire laser pulses to blow off a micro-thin surface layer of targeted debris. That tiny bit of blow-off acts as a miniature rocket motor. It's enough oomph to tease the object's perigee – low point of its orbit – to where the Earth's atmospheric drag takes hold of the object, reentering the refuse to a fiery finale.
The concept of orbital debris removal via laser – whether by ground-based equipment, an airborne facility, or a space-based system – has greatly advanced over the years, said Jonathan Campbell, a physicist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.
Campbell said that one of the principle findings from the earlier Project Orion appraisal that he managed was that ground-based laser removal was feasible and affordable in the context of spaceflight budgets. At a cost of only a couple of thousand dollars per object removed, this remains true, he added.
Thanks to the continued progress in laser and associated sensor technologies, Campbell's view is that the ground-based laser approach should be even more effective and affordable than in the 1990's.
Campbell said that, while all technologies have their niche as partial solutions to the orbital debris problem, there's a sizeable load of lethal objects in low Earth orbit. That being the case, he said, only laser technologies offer any hope of removing hundreds of thousands of objects economically in a reasonable timeframe.
“There are some 300,000 objects larger than one centimeter…and they are all moving at hyper-velocity. The only way to address this huge population is with laser technology,” Campbell noted. “Orbital debris removal is a complex problem, one that will require an umbrella of technologies to do a complete solution,” he stated.
Tough conundrum
At this week's meeting, space law specialist, James Dunstan, along with Bob Werb of the Space Frontier Foundation are set to call for an Orbital Debris Removal and Recycling Fund.
It's the belief of Werb and Dunstan that the current legal regime creates perverse economic incentives that are greatly aggravating the problem of orbital debris. The quickest and surest path to resolving the problem, they contend, is to establish a legal and economic environment that places a high price on anyone generating new debris while simultaneously creating adequate rewards for anyone who mitigates debris.
“From the predictions I've seen of how the space debris population will grow in the coming years, it looks like the space community will need to take active measures soon to clean up at least some of the existing debris, or the problem could get away from us,” said Robert Hoyt, leader of Tethers Unlimited, Inc. of Bothell, Wash.
Hoyt is bringing to the DARPA/NASA event his notion tagged “RUSTLER”, short for Round Up Space Trash Low Earth orbit Remediation. It too makes use of a propellant-less electrodynamic tether, he said, along with two other unconventional technologies to enable safe and cost-effective removal of defunct satellites, spent upper stages, and other debris from orbit.
“The question has always been who is going to pay to clean up the mess? Nobody really wants to get stuck with that bill,” Hoyt said. How you distribute the cost fairly among the many nations and commercial entities that utilize space is a tough conundrum to address, he admitted.
“It's the communities that agree to share the cost of keeping their cities and environment clean that are able to prosper,” Hoyt suggested. “The international space community is going to have to come to that same sort of agreement if it is going to prosper in the long term.”
Paradigm shift
An upshot of this week's confab of gab by experts is bound to be what next?
For one, there's likely to be a multiple-choice of technologies that appear worth further study. Actual in-space testing of debris removal ideas also seems to be in the cards. Also, what space debris targets are good candidates?
All this means money.
“The conference is what I consider a paradigm shift. We're moving from defining the problem to looking for real solutions,” said Campbell.
Given this paradigm shift, Campbell said he was hopeful of seeing increased funding in this area as time goes along. “There's a need to turn this trend around in the growth of space debris. It's going to take some time to do it. But we seem to be heading in the right direction now,” he concluded.
NASA climate change: College Teachers in two schools have received a grant of $ 447,000 from NASA to offer undergraduates a year long class combination of classroom and field that studies the effects of climate change on birds.
Three years of NASA on global climate change education and the teaching of the grant funds research training activities that are scheduled to begin fall 2010 classes. The grant will fund autumn, spring and summer courses that teach students about global climate change models, research methods and design of field experiments.
The final course in the series of lectures and laboratory classes are held during the summer, students need to conduct their experiments in the field. This field experience will make students more competitive for graduate schools and jobs, said Jeffrey Hepinstall-Cymerman, assistant professor of landscape ecology in the Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources.
Hepinstall-Cymerman said students will use NASA data, models, spatial analysis, statistics and field methods while studying the effects of climate change on birds and bird migration.
“This training offers a unique opportunity for students to gain an understanding of the complexities and challenges involved in predicting the responses of flora and fauna to climate change, besides exposing them to important field and analytical methods at the forefront of applied ecology, “he said.
Hepinstall-Cymerman and two Warnell School professors, Robert Cooper and Michael Conroy, are the principal investigators of the grant, which also includes Marshall Shepherd, a professor at Franklin College of Arts and Sciences.
As part of the grant, the equipment ground sensors will be installed at Whitehall Forest, a research forest located off campus and managed by Warnell, and in the Coweeta Long-term ecological research station to allow students to compare measurements land with measurements taken with NASA satellites. This will allow students to see how satellite imagery covering large areas compared with the detailed information from the field, said Conroy. “This is an excellent example of using this technology for teaching,” he said.
The effect of climate change on birds sometimes forgotten when discussing the controversial issue, but notes that if Conroy springs keep getting hotter, then it is when it affects the primary food source for birds, insects emerge. If the birds do not conform to that change, he said, the newly hatched birds do not have enough food
Posted on December 10, 2009, 9:51 am, by admin, under
News.
The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer will capture hundreds of thousands of previously unknown objects that are too cool and too dark to be seen with most telescopes.
By John Johnson Jr.
December 10, 2009
One might think that after centuries of scanning the night skies, mankind would have a pretty clear idea of who our galactic neighbors are, and whether they mean us harm.
That’s not the case. Vast landscapes of the cosmos remain hidden to us because most of our telescopes plumb the heavens for light that can be seen by the human eye — and that constitutes only a narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum.
“Think of a wall map,” said Edward Wright, an astronomy professor at UCLA.The map may show the whole world, “but I can’t figure out from it where the national parks are. If I have an atlas with a much more detailed view, I can plan my vacation.”
Making a better atlas is what Wright and his colleagues hope to do with NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, space mission. Scheduled to launch Friday from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, the $320-million spacecraft will photograph the entire night sky in infrared light. In the process, it will capture hundreds of thousands of previously unknown objects that are too cool and too dark to light up our nighttime sky.
Like alleyway skulkers with hats pulled low over their eyes, these objects have been lurking around space for millions of years, yet hidden from view. These denizens of the dark are likely to include tens of thousands of asteroids between Mars and Jupiter — some of which could turn out to be an eventual threat to Earth; dozens of failed stars known as brown dwarfs; possibly even a giant planet out beyond Pluto.
Scientists say WISE could revise the familiar portrait of our solar system.
“What we’re doing with WISE is opening up the sky in a way that hasn’t been possible before. It will transform the picture of our solar neighborhood,” said Peter Eisenhardt, a scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge, where the mission is managed. “It will give scientists things to study for decades.”
Steinn Sigurdsson, an astronomer at Pennsylvania State University who is not affiliated with the mission, agrees that WISE offers “considerable prospects for significant discoveries.”
It’s even possible, he says, that the mission could find planets around other stars.
Of course, this isn’t the first time anyone has thought of scanning the sky in wavelengths other than the narrow region of visible light. Radio telescopes like the Arecibo instrument in Puerto Rico search deep space for the long radio waves emitted by many galaxies. Other instruments try to capture the intensely short and dangerous gamma rays released by exploding stars.
But some things, such as the process in which stars form from balls of hard-to-see interstellar gas, are much easier to study in the infrared, which can pick up very dim and relatively cool objects.
“From my perspective, this is an incredibly exciting mission,” said Andrea Ghez, an astronomy professor at UCLA who is not part of the WISE team.
The forerunner to WISE was NASA’s Infrared Astronomical Satellite. Launched in 1983, it probed the entire sky in the infrared, increasing the number of cataloged astronomical objects by a staggering 70%. It detected 350,000 new objects, including comets and wisps of invisible but warm dust clouds in almost every direction of space.
But by using just 62 pixels to measure the heavens, that satellite was a dim flashlight compared to WISE.
Each of WISE’s four detectors will scan space with 1 million pixels, making the suite of instruments thousands of times more sensitive.
After being launched by a Delta II rocket, WISE will settle into orbit about 326 miles above the Earth’s surface. The heart of the 9-foot-tall spacecraft is a 16-inch-diameter telescope housed in a shroud of solid, frozen hydrogen called a cryostat. This floating ice chest is designed to keep the instruments so cold — as low as minus 445 degrees Fahrenheit — that the four detectors will not accidentally pick up heat from the mission’s own electronics.
The first class of objects likely to pop out of hiding is a type of failed star called a brown dwarf. Brown dwarfs didn’t possess the sheer bulk necessary to sustain the nuclear fusion reaction that causes stars like our sun to burst into flames after collapsing from a ball of gas.
Brown dwarfs don’t shine, except in the infrared. Their temperatures, ranging from a downright icy minus 330 degrees to 1,300 degrees, are remnants of the heat generated by their gravitational collapse.
According to Eisenhardt, many scientists believe there are as many brown dwarfs in any region of space as regular stars. Within 25 light-years of the sun, there are about 100 known stars, only six of which are brown dwarfs. That means there could be another 90 or so brown dwarfs in that area awaiting discovery.
There is an even chance, Wright said, that one might be closer than the conventional star Proxima Centauri. Four light-years away, Proxima holds the record for our closest starry neighbor.
“That would be a very exciting discovery,” Eisenhardt said.
Within our solar system, WISE will probably uncover as many as 100,000 new asteroids in the rocky junk pile between Mars and Jupiter. The several hundred thousand asteroids we know now consist mostly of those with surfaces that reflect light well.
Further, the conventional way to measure an asteroid, Wright said, is to equate its size with its brightness. But some things just don’t reflect as well as others, regardless of size. Because WISE will see temperature differences, it will provide a much better tool for judging size, Eisenhardt said.
That doesn’t mean the spacecraft will find a “doomsday asteroid” that poses a threat to Earth. What it does mean is that the mission will help scientists judge the size of any threatening asteroid, giving greater advance warning about the ones that could be the next weapon of extinction, like the one suspected of wiping out the dinosaurs.
Finally, Eisenhardt and other members of the WISE team think there is a decent possibility of finding a new planet on the fringes of our solar system.
The solar system’s Wild West is the Kuiper Belt, where thousands of icy bodies roam, including Pluto, the former ninth planet in our solar system that lost its status when the International Astronomical Union decided several years ago that it was too small to be a planet. Beyond that is the Oort Cloud, the home of lots of comets that occasionally wander into the inner solar system.
“We know stuff is out there,” Eisenhardt said. “It’s possible there could be a planet larger than Jupiter.”
Roger Launius, a space expert at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., was skeptical of that kind of speculation. “There’s no theoretical work that suggests there’s a big planet out there,” he said.
Still, though Launius admits to bouts of cynicism in the face of NASA “ballyhooing” its missions, he said this one could yield important findings. “This is part of the electromagnetic spectrum where we haven’t done that much.”
The 'offensive' advert which Job Centre Plus allowed on the website but not on the instore display
Harold Swanson