Tech & Science
Technology and Science news from Boulder, Colorado
CU-BOULDER SPACE SCIENTISTS READY FOR ORBITAL INSERTION OF MERCURY SPACECRAFT
Mar 15th
NASA’s MESSENGER mission, launched in 2004, is slated to slide into Mercury’s orbit March 17 after a harrowing 4.7 billion mile journey that involved 15 loops around the sun and will bring relief and renewed excitement to the University of Colorado Boulder team that designed and a built an $8.7 million instrument onboard.
“In 2004, this milestone seemed like it was a long, long way away,” said Senior Research Associate William McClintock, a mission co-investigator from CU-Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. “But here we are at last, poised to help solve some of the many tantalizing mysteries about Mercury.”
The smallest of the solar system’s four rocky planets, Mercury is about two-thirds of the way nearer to the sun than Earth and has been visited by only one other spacecraft, NASA’s Mariner 10, in 1974 and 1975. CU-Boulder scientists say learning what makes the hot, rocky planet tick will help them better understand the formation and evolution of planetary systems.
The refrigerator-sized spacecraft is carrying seven instruments — a camera, a magnetometer, an altimeter and four spectrometers. Designed and built by CU-Boulder’s LASP, the Mercury Atmospheric and Surface Composition Spectrometer, or MASCS, is a power-packed, 7-pound instrument that will make measurements of Mercury’s surface and its tenuous atmosphere, called the exosphere.
MASCS breaks up light like a prism, and since each element and compound has a unique spectral signature, scientists can determine the distribution and abundance of various minerals and gases on the planet’s surface and exosphere, said McClintock. “We now know Mercury’s exosphere is constantly changing,” he said.
During a 2009 MESSENGER flyby of Mercury, MASCS detected magnesium, an element created inside exploding stars, clumped in the exosphere. The team determined magnesium, sodium and potassium and several other kinds of atoms flying off Mercury’s surface were being accelerated by solar radiation pressure to form a gigantic tail of material flowing away from the sun, said McClintock.
“All of the instruments on MESSENGER had to be extremely light, which stretched our imaginations and creativity,” Lankton said. “We have learned a lot, and wound up getting a lot of bang for our buck.”
LASP Director Daniel Baker, also a co-investigator on the MESSENGER mission, is studying Mercury’s magnetic field and its interaction with the solar wind, including violent “sub-storms” that occur in the planet’s vicinity. Since Mercury is the closest planet to the sun, MESSENGER is equipped with a large sunshade and heat-resistant ceramic fabric to protect it, said Baker.
“The three successful flybys of MESSENGER past Mercury have already rewritten the textbooks about the sun’s nearest neighbor,” Baker said. “We are pleased by all we have learned about the space environment of the planet. But we think there is so much more to learn — we’ve probably just scratched the surface, so to speak.”
Baker said the orbit insertion of Mercury will be celebrated by all of LASP, including a solar science team that saw its $28 million instrument crash into the sea March 4 due to problems with a NASA-contracted launch vehicle. “A very important aspect of LASP is that it is like a big family,” Baker said. “Everyone shares the joys of success and the sorrow of failure, which has been a blessedly rare occurrence in our history.”
“We have all of our appendages crossed for a successful orbit insertion,” said LASP’s Mark Lankton, program manager for MASCS. “MESSENGER is part of NASA’s Discovery Program, and I’d be surprised if we don’t continue to be surprised. Once we are in Mercury’s orbit we are going to be getting a bounty of new data every day.”
Dozens of undergraduates and graduate students will be involved in analyzing data as information and images begin pouring back to Earth from MESSENGER, dubbed “the little spacecraft that could” by LASP scientists. “This mission is going to be a field day for students, not only at CU-Boulder, but for students all over the world,” said Baker.
CU-Boulder’s LASP is the only space institute in the world to have designed and flown instruments that have visited or are en route to every planet in the solar system. LASP also has a student-built dust-counting instrument on NASA’s New Horizons Mission, launched in 2006 to Pluto and now approaching the orbit of Uranus.
“LASP has some of the best people in the world pursuing great science, great engineering, wonderful mission operations, and superb administrative and managerial achievement,” said Baker. “When such a team is given the facilities and resources to thrive, the sky is the limit. But it all starts with our people, including our students.”
The data will be sent via NASA’s Deep Space Network to the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University — which is managing the mission for NASA — where mission scientists, including researchers and students at LASP’s Space Technology Building at the CU Research Park, will access it electronically, he said.
Sean Solomon from the Carnegie Institute of Washington in Washington, D.C., is the chief MESSENGER scientist. For more information on the MESSENGER mission, including images, photos, animation and videos, visit the website at http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/. For more information about LASP, visit http://lasp.colorado.edu/.
Located at 1234 Innovation Drive on CU-Boulder’s East Campus, LASP is hosting an open house March 17 to celebrate the MESSENGER spacecraft’s insertion into orbit around Mercury. Doors will open at 5:30 p.m. Lankton will give a talk on the mission and Clark Chapman of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder will give a talk on Mercury beginning at 6 p.m. NASA’s broadcast of the orbit insertion — a 15-minute maneuver — will take place beginning at 6:45 p.m.
City of Boulder Named IBM Smarter Cities Challenge Grant Recipient
Mar 9th
The grant provides Boulder and 23 other cities worldwide with access to IBM’s top experts to analyze and recommend ways Boulder can become an even better place in which to live, work and play. The approximate value of each Smarter Cities Challenge grant is equivalent to as much as $400,000.
The IBM Smarter Cities Challenge is a competitive grant program in which IBM is awarding a total of $50 million worth of technology and services to 100 municipalities worldwide over the next three years. Teams of specially selected IBM experts will provide city leaders with analysis and recommendations to support successful growth, better delivery of municipal services, more citizen engagement, and improved efficiency.
In its application for the IBM Smarter Cities Challenge, Boulder identified three potential projects to work with an IBM expert team. The projects focused on developing new technology applications to support community action in key areas: community engagement, sustainability indicators, and smart grid-enabled energy management. The project selected by IBM focuses on the smart grid, as Boulder is the home of the nation’s first fully integrated smart grid. The City of Boulder will explore the project scope and details with IBM over the next few weeks, as well as with Xcel Energy, which owns and operates the project, known as SmartGridCity™. IBM will help the city explore the potential for consumer-facing devices to help residents and businesses become more savvy energy managers, and increasing the potential for distributed renewable energy generation in the city.
“Over 46,000 homes and businesses have been enabled with communications technology that supports a smart grid platform,” said City Manager Jane Brautigam. “Energy management tools in the hands of our residents could be an integral part of optimizing smart grid technology for Boulder and other cities throughout the nation.”
IBM selected cities that made the strongest case for participating in the Smarter Cities Challenge. During these engagements, IBM technical experts, researchers and consultants immerse themselves in local issues and offer a range of options and recommended next steps. Among the issues they examine are healthcare, education, safety, social services, transportation, communications, sustainability, budget management, energy, and utilities.
“We selected the City of Boulder because of its commitment to the use of data to make better decisions, and for its desire to explore and act on smarter solutions to their most pressing concerns,” said Pete Lorenzen, IBM Boulder Senior Location Executive. “The cities we picked are eager to implement programs that tangibly improve the quality of life in their areas, and to create roadmaps for other cities to follow. The stakes have never been greater but we’re excited at the prospect of helping cities tackle the most pressing challenges of our time.”
Smarter Cities Challenge draws upon IBM’s intrinsic technological savvy, but also upon the field experience accumulated by IBM over the last three years from the company’s ongoing pro bono Corporate Service Corps grant program. Corporate Service Corps has deployed 100 teams of 1,000 top IBM employees from around the world with skills in technology, scientific research, marketing, finance, and business development. They work with local government, non profit civic groups, and small business to develop blueprints that intersect business, technology, and society.
Here are the 24 cities that earned IBM Smarter Cities Challenge grants in 2011:
Antofagasta, Chile
Boulder, CO
Bucharest, Romania
Chengdu, China
Chiang Mai, Thailand
Delhi, India
Edmonton, Canada
Eindhoven, Netherlands
Glasgow, UK
Guadalajara, Mexico
Helsinki, Finland
Jakarta, Indonesia
Milwaukee, WI
New Orleans, LA
Newark, NJ
Nice, France
Philadelphia, PA
Providence, RI
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Sapporo, Japan
St. Louis, MO
Syracuse, NY
Townsville, Australia
Tshwane-Pretoria, South Africa
Hillary Clinton declares international information war
Mar 4th
FROM RT The US is losing the global information war, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared while appearing before a congressional committee to ask for extra funds to spread US propaganda through new media.
Clinton said existing private channels are not good enough to handle the job, naming as rivals Al Jazeera, China’s CCTV and RT – which she watches, she added.
Clinton was defending her department’s budget in front of the House’s Committee on Foreign Affairs on Wednesday.
Clinton said the US should step up its propaganda effort and get back “in the game” of doing “what we do best.”
“During the Cold War we did a great job in getting America’s message out. After the Berlin Wall fell we said, ‘Okay, fine, enough of that, we are done,’ and unfortunately we are paying a big price for it,” she said. “Our private media cannot fill that gap.”
“We are in an information war and we are losing that war. Al Jazeera is winning, the Chinese have opened a global multi-language television network, the Russians have opened up an English-language network. I’ve seen it in a few countries, and it is quite instructive,” she stated.
Things have changed a lot since the days when Western media outlets, including BBC and CNN, had a monopoly on the coverage of world news. More and more viewers across the world tune into various foreign media to get a fresh take on events.
It is all in the numbers. For instance, RT’s presence on YouTube is a real hit: almost 300 million views, when CNN International is struggling to reach 3 million.
RT’s constantly growing audience is an indication that the days of media monopoly are over and that people are demanding more multi-polar thinking.
One of the latest examples is Al Jazeera’s coverage of the unrest in the Middle East and North Africa, which by most accounts outshone the US media’s presentation of events.
Not everyone, however, is happy with the wider variety of media options. The head of the federal agency that manages the US’s government-run international broadcasting has basically called all those foreign media enemies.
Last year Walter Isaacson, who heads the federal agency that manages the US’s government-run international broadcasting, including the Voice of America, warned against the influence of foreign media.
“We can’t allow ourselves to be out-communicated by our enemies,” he said, in a now-infamous pitch to get his agency more funding. He did, however, later backtrack on his statement, saying that he was misunderstood.