CU News
News from the University of Colorado in Boulder.
FORMER PRESIDENT OF MEXICO VICENTE FOX TO SPEAK AT CU’S MACKY AUDITORIUM
Mar 28th
Vicente Fox, former president of Mexico, will speak at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Macky Auditorium on Wednesday, April 13, at 7:30 p.m. He is coming to campus at the invitation of the Distinguished Speakers Board, a student organization at CU-Boulder.
Fox will present “Surveying the Geo-Political Landscape” and speak on his perspective on the state of the world. He will touch on the relationship between the United States and Latin America, the role of the United Nations and the promises of globalization, both fulfilled and unfulfilled. There also will be a question and answer session.
Tickets are $1 for students with a valid BuffOne Card. Community tickets are $15 for general admission and $30 for priority seating, and are being sold through Ticketswest.com and local King Soopers locations.
Doors will open at 6:45 p.m. No backpacks or skateboards are allowed inside the building.
“We believe Mr. Fox gives an important voice on the current geopolitical climate,” said Distinguished Speakers Board Chair Punam Chatterjee. “He can provide a new understanding of current economic and social challenges as well as provide his perspective on global leadership. We also believe he will connect with many students, as well as the community, because of his expertise in many fields and because of current events.”
Fox was the president of Mexico from 2000 to 2006. When elected he ended the rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party. During his term in office he succeeded in controlling inflation and interest rates, and in achieving the lowest unemployment rate in Latin America. He studied business administration at the Universidad Iberoamericana and afterward pursued a Top Management Diploma at the Harvard Business School.
Fox has four adopted children. He was born in Mexico City in 1942 and grew up on San Cristobal Ranch in the municipality of San Francisco del Rincon, in Guanajuato state. Post-presidency he wrote an autobiography, “Revolution of Hope: The Life, Faith and Dreams of a Mexican President,” and travels for public speaking engagements.
“Fox’s experiences as a businessman, educator, politician and leader in a foreign country are attractive to the CU community, which appreciates diverse perspectives,” said Distinguished Speakers Board Public Relations Director Taylor Coughlin.
The Distinguished Speakers Board mission is “to bring speakers of the highest caliber, who will intellectually stimulate the student body and the surrounding community. Ultimately, we hope to inspire people by bringing some of the world’s greatest minds to the University of Colorado Boulder.”
The board is a student-run organization and part of the CU student government. Previous speakers brought to CU-Boulder by the board have included Queen Noor, Thomas Friedman, B.B. King, the Rev. Desmond Tutu, Howard Dean and Karl Rove.
MEASUREMENTS OF WINTER ARCTIC SEA ICE SHOWS CONTINUING ICE LOSS, SAYS CU-BOULDER STUDY
Mar 23rd
The 2011 Arctic sea ice extent maximum that marks the beginning of the melt season appears to be tied for the lowest ever measured by satellites, say scientists at the University of Colorado Boulder’s National Snow and Ice Data Center.
The CU-Boulder research team believes the lowest annual maximum ice extent of 5,650,000 square miles occurred on March 7. The maximum ice extent was 463,000 square miles below the 1979-2000 average, an area slightly larger than the states of Texas and California combined. The 2011 measurements were tied with those from 2006 as the lowest maximum sea ice extents measured since satellite record keeping began in 1979.
Virtually all climate scientists believe shrinking Arctic sea ice is tied to warming temperatures in the region caused by an increase in human-produced greenhouse gases being pumped into Earth’s atmosphere. Because of the spiraling downward trend of Arctic sea ice extent in the last decade, some CU scientists are predicting the Arctic Ocean may be ice free in the summers within the next several decades.
The seven lowest maximum Arctic sea ice extents measured by satellites all have occurred in the last seven years, said CU-Boulder Research Scientist Walt Meier of the National Snow and Ice Data Center, who participated the latest study. “I’m not surprised by the new data because we’ve seen a downward trend in winter sea ice extent for some time now.”
Scientists believe Arctic sea ice functions like an air conditioner for the global climate system by naturally cooling air and water masses, playing a key role in ocean circulation and reflecting solar radiation back into space, said Meier. In the Arctic summer months, sunlight is absorbed by the growing amounts of open water, raising surface temperatures and causing more ice to melt.
“I think one of the reasons the Arctic sea ice maximum extent is declining is that the autumn ice growth is delayed by warmer temperatures and the ice extent is not able to ‘catch up’ through the winter,” said Meier. “In addition, the clock runs out on the annual ice growth season as temperatures start to rise along with the sun during the spring months.”
Since satellite record keeping began in 1979, the maximum Arctic sea ice extent has occurred as early as Feb. 18 and as late as March 31, with an average date of March 6. Since the CU-Boulder researchers determine the maximum sea ice extent using a five-day running average, there is small chance the data could change.
In early April CU-Boulder’s National Snow and Ice Data Center will issue a formal announcement on the 2011 maximum sea ice extent with a full analysis of the winter ice growth season, including graphics comparing 2011 to the long-term record.
For more information visit http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews.
CU-BOULDER SPACE SCIENTISTS READY FOR ORBITAL INSERTION OF MERCURY SPACECRAFT
Mar 15th
March 15, 2011
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.
