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latest from US EMBASSY TRIPOLI LIBYA Evacuate!
Feb 23rd
February 22, 2011
A U.S. Government chartered ferry will depart Tripoli from the As-shahab Port in central Tripoli, located on the sea road across from the Radisson Blu Mahari Hotel, for Valletta, Malta on Wednesday, February 23. Processing of passengers will begin promptly at 10:00 a.m. local time. U.S. citizen travelers wishing to depart should proceed as soon as possible after 9:00 a.m. to the pier and arrive no later than 10:00 a.m. U.S. citizens will be processed on a first-come, first-served basis, with priority given to persons with medical emergencies or severe medical conditions. The ferry will depart no later than 3:00 p.m.
Travelers should bring valid travel documents and any necessary medications.
Each traveler may bring one suitcase and a small personal carry-on item. Although pets are allowed on the ferry, any pets transported to Malta must meet stringent European Union requirements, which can be found at http://ec.europa.eu/food/animal/liveanimals/pets/ list_third_en.htm. The U.S. Embassies in Tripoli and Valletta are unable to assist U.S. citizens in obtaining the necessary documents and/or meeting other EU requirements for pet travel. Please note it is routine for pets to be rigorously examined and quarantined for six weeks upon entering Malta. Kenneling to meet Maltese pet requirements will be at the expense of the owner.
U.S. citizens seeking evacuation should be prepared to wait several hours. Travelers are advised to bring food, water, diapers and other necessary toiletries with them to the pier.
U.S. citizens requesting evacuation on U.S. Government-chartered transport must sign paperwork promising to reimburse the U.S. Government for transportation costs at a later date. Exact transportation costs are not yet available, but will be comparable to a one-way commercial ferry trip of a comparable distance on the date of travel. U.S. citizens who travel on U.S. Government–chartered transport will be expected to make their own onward travel plans from Malta.
Immediate family members (spouses and children) who are not U.S. citizens must be documented for entry into the safe haven country and/or the United States, if that is your final destination. A U.S. citizen child may be escorted by one adult, preferably a parent, who has appropriate travel documents. If a family has more than one U.S. citizen child, the one-adult rule still applies. All U.S. citizen travelers and their spouses and children, are required to have valid travel documents. The U.S. Embassy in Tripoli will assist U.S. citizens with travel documents. U.S. citizens who do not hold a valid U.S. passport or visa and are interested in departing Libya via U.S. Government-chartered transportation should contact the U.S. Department of State and U.S. Embassy Tripoli by sending an email to LibyaEmergencyUSC@state.gov or by calling 1-202-501-4444 .
LATEST: US to evacuate Americans from Libya by ferry
Feb 23rd
Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — The State Department said late Tuesday it has chartered a ferry boat to evacuate Americans from Libya by sea amid increasingly violent unrest in the North African state as Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi vowed further crackdowns on opponents seeking his ouster.
In a notice sent to U.S. citizens in Libya, the department said Americans wishing to leave Libya should report to the As-shahab port in the capital of Tripoli with their passports starting at 9 a.m. local time on Wednesday. The ferry will depart for the Mediterranean island of Malta no later than 3 p.m. local time.
It said boarding the vessel would be on a first-come, first-served basis, with priority given to those with medical emergencies or severe medical conditions. Travelers will be allowed one suitcase and one small carry-on item, the notice said, adding that pets would be allowed on the ferry but that they must meet European Union requirements.
Those who want be evacuated should be prepared to wait several hours and bring food, water and other necessities to the pier, which is on the sea road across from the Radisson Blu Mahari Hotel in Tripoli.
Those who take the ferry will be expected to reimburse the government for the cost, estimated to be equivalent to the one-way commercial ferry crossing of the distance from Tripoli to the Maltese capital of Valletta, it said. Any onward travel from Malta must be paid for by the passengers, the notice said.
Immediate family members of U.S. citizens who are not themselves citizens will be able to board provided they have travel documents valid for their final destination.
The evacuation comes amid deteriorating security conditions throughout Libya, with Gadhafi vowing to defeat opponents that now control cities in the eastern part of the country.
Unsuccessful attempts were made Monday and Tuesday to evacuate by airplane 35 non-essential American diplomats and family members of U.S. Embassy personnel, prompting heightened fears for their safety.
The State Department believes there are about 600 U.S. citizens along with several thousand dual U.S.-Libyan nationals currently in Libya.
FEB. 23 NASA MISSION TO TOTE $28 MILLION CU-BOULDER INSTRUMENT AND TINY STUDENT SATELLITE
Feb 22nd
Designed and built by a team from CU-Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, the instrument called the Total Irradiance Monitor, or TIM, will point directly toward the sun to measure both short- and long-term fluctuations in the sun’s energy output as it reaches the top of Earth’s atmosphere. Such measurements are important because variations in the sun’s radiation can influence long-term climate change on Earth, said LASP researcher Greg Kopp, principal investigator on the TIM.
The Taurus XL rocket ferrying the Glory satellite also will be carrying a tiny CU-Boulder satellite designed and built by about 100 students, primarily undergraduates, who are participating in the Colorado Space Grant Consortium. The CubeSat satellite will be ejected from the rocket at about 400 miles in altitude to orbit the Earth and study new space communications techniques.
The CU-Boulder solar instrument on Glory is the most accurate instrument ever made to study the energy output from the sun and will continue a 32-year-long data record of solar radiation by NASA and other agencies, said Kopp. NASA’s Solar Radiation and Climate Experiment, a $100 million satellite designed, built and operated by CU-Boulder’s LASP and launched in 2003, is equipped with a first-generation TIM instrument as well as three other solar measuring instruments.
“We’d like to know how the sun’s energy changes over both the short and long term,” said Kopp. “This spacecraft is carrying extremely sensitive instruments for monitoring solar variability, which makes the mission especially relevant given climate change on Earth and the importance of determining the natural influence on those changes.”
Glory will join five other NASA Earth-observing satellites as part of the Afternoon Constellation, or “A-Train,” a tightly grouped series of spacecraft that circle the globe several times each day to gather information on Earth’s biosphere and climate, including hurricane behavior and climate change. The A-Train spacecraft follow each other in close formation, flying mere minutes apart. The A-Train orbits Earth about once every 100 minutes.
The second primary instrument on the Glory mission, called the Aerosol Polarimetry Sensor, or APS, was built by Raytheon Space and Airborne Systems in El Segundo, Calif. Scientists hope to learn how tiny liquid and solid aerosols — most smaller than the diameter of a human hair — influence climate on Earth.
Using Glory as well as prior and subsequent missions to measure solar radiation changes, scientists hope to determine how much energy reaches Earth on timescales of decades to centuries, influencing Earth’s long-term climate.
Scientists previously have shown that the overall output of the sun can change up to about 0.1 percent over the duration of a solar cycle, which lasts about 11 years. But such short-term variations cannot explain the warming seen on Earth in the past several decades. The vast majority of climate scientists agree global warming is due primarily to human-produced greenhouse gases building up in the atmosphere.
“In attributing climate change causes, solar variability measurements such as those from Glory are necessary to discriminate the natural from the human-caused effects on the climate,” Kopp said.
LASP has a long record of measuring solar radiation with various satellites and sounding rockets, including the Solar Mesosphere Explorer satellite that flew from 1981 to 1988 and which was dubbed “The Classroom in Space.” SME measured ozone and solar radiation and involved undergraduate and graduate students in virtually every phase of the effort, from design and development to hands-on control of the satellite from campus.
Because of technological advances, the TIM riding on Glory is expected to be three times more accurate than the TIM flying on CU-Boulder’s SORCE satellite, according to Kopp. The improvement is due in large part to better electrical design and more precise calibrations of solar space instruments that are being made using a new NASA-funded facility at LASP.
The second CU-Boulder payload, a CubeSat satellite dubbed Hermes that was designed and built by students, primarily undergraduates, is about four inches on a side — roughly the size of a Rubik’s Cube. The goal is to improve communications systems in tiny satellites through orbital testing that may pave the way for scientists to downlink large quantities of information, said Colorado Space Consortium Director Chris Koehler.
The students will be in contact with the Hermes satellite from atop the Discovery Learning Center, part of CU-Boulder’s College of Engineering and Applied Science, said senior aerospace engineering sciences major Nicole Doyle, Hermes project manager. Ten CU-Boulder students will be traveling to California for the Hermes launch.
Hermes is part of NASA’s Educational Launch of Nanosatellites, or ELaNa, project. Two other CubeSat satellites will be aboard the Taurus rocket with Glory, one from Montana State University and one from Kentucky Space, a consortium of Kentucky state institutions.
Doyle said when she first came to CU-Boulder she was surprised to discover that undergraduates had regular opportunities to design, build, test and fly spacecraft. “This has been an incredible experience for me,” she said. “We learn from other CU students who are working on other space projects and who have experience in the kinds of research we are doing with Hermes. This is a great opportunity for students like me who want to work in the aerospace industry after college.”
Other LASP personnel on Glory include Project Manager Tom Sparn, lead systems engineer Brian Boyle, lead mechanical engineer Alan Yehle, lead electrical engineer Aref Nammari and lead integration and test engineer David Gathright. LASP students, including several undergraduates in conjunction will several professionals, will operate the orbiting TIM instrument from LASP’s Mission Operations Center on CU-Boulder’s East Campus.
Glory is managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. Launch management is provided by NASA’s Launch Services Program at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
For more information about NASA’s Glory Mission visit http://www.nasa.gov. For more information on LASP visit http://lasp.colorado.edu/home/. For more information on the Colorado Space Grant Consortium visit http://spacegrant.colorado.edu/.
-CU-