Posts tagged science
Boulder High, CU grad astronaut Scott Carpenter dies at 88
Oct 11th
Carpenter, a Boulder native, entered CU-Boulder’s astronautical engineering program in 1945, eventually earning a bachelor of science degree. He orbited Earth three times on May 24, 1962, in NASA’s Aurora 7 capsule before splashing down in the Atlantic Ocean.
Carpenter was the first of 18 CU-Boulder astronaut affiliates to have flown in space. As one of the first NASA astronauts, Carpenter and his colleagues were celebrated in the Tom Wolfe book, “The Right Stuff,” which told the story of early military test pilots and the original Mercury 7 astronauts.
Born in Boulder on May 1, 1925, Carpenter and graduated from Boulder High School in 1943. He then entered the Navy’s V12a flight training program at Colorado College in Colorado Springs. He spent the next year training in California and Iowa, returning to Boulder in 1945 to study at CU-Boulder.
“In his two-decades long career as a Naval aviator, astronaut and aquanaut, Scott Carpenter brought honor and distinction to CU-Boulder while embodying the adventurous spirit of our nation,” said CU-Boulder Chancellor Philip P. DiStefano. “Our space program, and all space and ocean researchers everywhere, owe him a debt of gratitude. He will be sorely missed.”
In 1965 Carpenter took a leave of absence from NASA to participate in the Navy’s Man-in-the Sea Project as an aquanaut in the SEALAB II project off the coast of La Jolla, Calif. where he spent 30 days living and working on the ocean floor at a depth of more than 200 feet. Because of his groundbreaking deep-sea diving experiences with the Navy, Carpenter is hailed by many to be the first person to conquer both outer and inner space.
“My colleagues and I are deeply saddened by the passing of Astronaut Scott Carpenter,” said CU-Boulder aerospace engineering sciences Chair Penina Axelrad. “He has long been a member of the CU family and a tremendous inspiration for our aerospace faculty and students.”
In a 2012 interview with CU’s alumni magazine, the Coloradan, Carpenter spoke about his historic space journey. “I still remember what a thrill it was being up there — I liked the feeling of weightlessness, and the view I had of Earth.”
Carpenter and the other Mercury 7 astronauts created the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation in 1984. The foundation now involves more than 80 astronauts, awards 28 $10,000 scholarships annually and has dispersed more than $3 million to promising students in science and engineering since 1986.
As one of the original Mercury 7 astronauts, Carpenter followed Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom and Glenn into space and was followed by Wally Schirra, Gordon Cooper and Deke Slayton.
Carpenter was commissioned in the U.S. Navy in 1949 and flew a variety of missions during the Korean War. He attended Navy Test Pilot School in Maryland in 1954 and was assigned as an Air Intelligence Officer on the USS Hornet aircraft carrier. In April of 1959 he was selected by NASA to be an astronaut.
Although he was one course requirement short of graduating with a bachelor’s degree in aeronautical engineering when he left CU in 1949, the university awarded him his degree in 1962 following the successful Aurora 7 flight. When presenting the degree to Carpenter, then-CU President Quigg Newton noted that “his subsequent training as an astronaut has more than made up for his deficiency in the subject of heat transfer.”
In 1967 he became the Navy’s director of aquanaut operations during the SEALAB III experiment. After retiring from the Navy in 1969, he founded and became CEO of Sea Sciences Inc., a venture capital corporation that developed programs aimed at enhanced use of ocean resources and improved health of the planet. He worked closely with noted diver and scientist Jacques Cousteau and members of his Calypso team, and subsequently dove in most of the world’s oceans, including under Arctic ice.
Carpenter later became a consultant to industry and the private sector and has lectured around the world, narrated TV documentaries and written several books, including the 2002 New York Times best-seller, “For Spacious Skies: The Uncommon Journey of a Mercury Astronaut” co-authored with his daughter, Kris Stoever.
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CU researchers: Our brain is like a computer
Sep 23rd
Now, researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder have demonstrated that our brains could process these new situations by relying on a method similar to the “pointer” system used by computers. “Pointers” are used to tell a computer where to look for information stored elsewhere in the system to replace a variable.
For the study, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the research team relied on sentences with words used in unique ways to test the brain’s ability to understand the role familiar words play in a sentence even when those words are used in unfamiliar, and even nonsensical, ways.
For example, in the sentence, “I want to desk you,” we understand the word “desk” is being used as a verb even though our past experience with the word “desk” is as a noun.
“The fact that you understand that the sentence is grammatically well formed means you can process these completely novel inputs,” said Randall O’Reilly, a professor in CU-Boulder’s Department of Psychology and Neuroscience and co-author of the study. “But in the past when we’ve tried to get computer models of a brain to do that, we haven’t been successful.”
This shows that human brains are able to understand the sentence as a structure with variables—a subject, a verb and often, an object—and that the brain can assign a wide variety of words to those variables and still understand the sentence structure. But the way the brain does this has not been understood.
Computers routinely complete similar tasks. In computer science, for example, a computer program could create an email form letter that has a pointer in the greeting line. The pointer would then draw the name information for each individual recipient into the greeting being sent to that person.
In the new study, led by Trenton Kriete, a postdoctoral researcher in O’Reilly’s lab, the scientists show that the connections in the brain between the prefrontal cortex and the basal ganglia could play a similar role to the pointers used in computer science. The researchers added new information about how the connections between those two regions of the brain could work into their model.
The result was that the model could be trained to understand simple sentences using a select group of words. After the training period, the researchers fed the model new sentences using familiar words in novel ways and found that the model could still comprehend the sentence structure.
While the results show that a pointer-like system could be at play in the brain, the function is not identical to the system used in computer science, the scientists said. It’s similar to comparing an airplane’s wing and a bird’s wing, O’Reilly said. They’re both used for flying but they work differently.
In the brain, for example, the pointer-like system must still be learned. The brain has to be trained, in this case, to understand sentences while a computer can be programmed to understand sentences immediately.
“As your brain learns, it gets better and better at processing these novel kinds of information,” O’Reilly said.
Other study co-authors include David Noelle of the University of California, Merced, and Jonathan Cohen of Princeton University. The research was supported by an Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity grant through the U.S. Department of the Interior.
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$6 million CU-Boulder instrument to fly on Sept. 6 NASA mission to moon
Aug 29th
A $6 million University of Colorado Boulder instrument designed to study the behavior of lunar dust will be riding on a NASA mission to the moon now slated for launch on Friday, Sept. 6, from the agency’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.
The mission, known as the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer, or LADEE, will orbit the moon to better understand its tenuous atmosphere and whether dust particles are being lofted high off its surface. The $280 million LADEE mission, designed, developed, integrated and tested at NASA’s AMES Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., will take about a month to reach the moon and another month to enter the proper elliptical orbit and to commission the instruments. A 100-day science effort will follow.
“We are ready and excited for launch,” said CU-Boulder physics Professor Mihaly Horanyi of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, principal investigator for the Lunar Dust Experiment, or LDEX. “We think our instrument can help answer some important questions related to the presence and transport of dust in the lunar atmosphere.”
One unanswered question since the days of the Apollo program is why astronauts saw a pre-sunrise glow above the lunar horizon, said Horanyi, who directs LASP’s Colorado Center for Lunar Dust and Atmospheric Studies. “The glow has been suggested to be caused by dust particles that were electrically charged by solar ultraviolet light, causing them to lift off from the moon’s surface.”
About the size of a small toaster oven, the LDEX instrument will be able to chart the existence, size and individual velocities of tiny dust particles as small as 0.6 microns in diameter. For comparison, a standard sheet of paper is about 100 microns thick. A collision between a dust particle and a hemisphere-shaped target on LDEX generates a unique electrical signal inside the instrument to allow scientists to detect individual particles, said Horanyi.
Horanyi said clouds of dust specks seemingly observed by astronauts hovering over the moon likely weren’t clouds at all. “If you watch a cement truck on the highway, it seems to be carrying a dust cloud along with it. But what is actually happening is that every speck of dirt coming off the truck is falling onto the highway,” he said.
“The specks have very short lifespans, and the cloud that appears to surround the truck is actually a continual rain of dust from the vehicle to the pavement,” he said. “Similarly, the smallest lunar dust particles could also continually lift off and fall back onto the surface.”
Knowing more about the behavior of lunar dust could be of use for future human expeditions to the moon, including potential colonization efforts. Learning more about lunar dust also might help scientists better understand dust on other moons in the solar system — like Phobos and Deimos that orbit Mars – that have been suggested by some as possible initial landing posts for crewed missions headed to the Red Planet.
LADEE also is carrying an ultraviolet and visible light spectrometer, a neutral mass spectrometer and a lunar laser communications demonstration.
Astronauts walking on the moon sank into a shallow layer of dust, thought to be a product of millions of years of meteoric and interstellar particle bombardment, he said. “The beauty of physics is that we believe the same processes occur throughout the universe,” he said. “What we see on the moon may well apply to Mercury, Phobos, Deimos or asteroids, which all have very tenuous atmospheres.”
When the LADEE spacecraft is inserted into an elliptical orbit, its closest approach will be less than 20 miles from the lunar surface. “The closer we can get to the surface the better,” he said.
“This is a very exciting mission that will answer an almost 50-year-old question in space science,” said CU-Boulder graduate student Jamey Szalay, who is writing data analysis software for the mission that will allow the team to analyze science results immediately after data is received from the spacecraft. “Given the convenient duration of the mission and promising science return, I’m very fortunate to be a part of the science team — it’s a dream project for any graduate student in space sciences to be working on.”
Horanyi also is the principal investigator on CU-Boulder’s Student Dust Counter, a simpler instrument than LDEX flying on NASA’s New Horizons mission that was launched in 2006 to explore Pluto and the Kuiper Belt, a massive region beyond the planets containing icy objects left over from the formation of the solar system. The Student Dust Counter was designed, built, tested and operated entirely by students, primarily undergraduates, at LASP and has been collecting data for the past seven years. New Horizons is now more than 2.5 billion miles from Earth and will arrive at Pluto in two years.
CU-Boulder researcher David James, who now is working on LDEX, got his start helping to build SDC. “Although I was a student in a lab back then, it was almost like working in the private sector,” said James, who eventually received his doctorate from CU-Boulder. “We were building an instrument that was going to Pluto. It was an amazing experience with huge responsibilities, it pushed us to do our best, and it definitely shaped who I am today.”
The LDEX instrument, as well as many previous LASP instruments launched into space since the 1970s, will carry a laser engraving of the CU mascot, Ralphie the Buffalo, as well as the names of all university people who participated in the project, from students and scientists to engineers and administrative support staff. “It’s like adding a touch of history to the mission, perhaps for good luck and pride,” said Horanyi. “After all, this is the University of Colorado.”
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