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The Inside Line: Mayor Visits Apprentices as Council Creates Jobs

June 12, 2010 By vani Leave a Comment

Young people from Middlesbrough striving for a career in the motor industry have
received a major boost with the creation of a number of paid training roles.
LONDON–(Business Wire)–
Redcar & Cleveland Borough Council has teamed up with leading skills provider
System Training to invest money into the employment of young people aged 16-19
in the area. Mayor Ray Goddard and the Lady Mayoress took time to meet
apprentices and their training team at System Training`s facility at Queensway,
Middlesborough.

Eighteen apprentices have been placed on funded Fast Fit Apprenticeships with
System Training, which sees the youngsters undertake the first phase of a
potential three-year apprenticeship that gives them upfront practical training
in various aspects of the industry as well as providing classroom-based learning
that leads to nationally-recognised qualifications and an opportunity to move
into full-time employment upon completion of the course.

The innovative apprenticeship model and allows candidates to make a genuine
contribution to potential employers from the moment they start work.

In addition to the apprenticeship roles, System Training has expanded its
presence in Middlesbrough and taken on four new members of staff at its local
office – an administrator, an apprentice co-ordinator and two vocational
trainers – meaning additional quality jobs have been created in the area.

With 200 candidates now placed with a variety of different training providers
borough-wide, Redcar & Cleveland Borough Council is pleased its partnerships are
delivering employment and contributing to the overall regeneration of the
region.

Ray Goddard, The Mayor of Redcar & Cleveland, said:
“We`ve been delighted with the enthusiasm and commitment of the apprentices and
it clearly shows the desire of young people in the region to work. Our Routes to
Employment team and System Training have worked closely together to deliver this
exciting new initiative to offer training and employment opportunities to our
young residents in the motor vehicle repair trade.”

Tony Higgins of System Training said: 
“It`s a great achievement for us to help create some many jobs for young people
in the region. The model is new and our approach has ensured that apprentices
are fully trained when they go into their work placements, reducing the risk for
employers and actually allowing the apprentices to make a real difference at
work.”

This information was brought to you by Cision http://www.cisionwire.com

Further information on System Training and its training and workforce
development solutions is available from:
Stephanie Norman
t: 01228 574024
e: Stephanie.norman@system-training.com

Follow System Training on Twitter at www.twitter.com/systemtraining

Media contact:
Glenn Patterson
The Inside Line
m: 07872 470115
e: glenn@the-inside-line.co.uk

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Koschitzke hit with four-game suspension

March 30, 2010 By vani Leave a Comment

St Kilda big man Justin Koschitzke has been hit with a four-game suspension after being reported for engaging in rough conduct by the AFL match review panel.

Koschitzke was on Monday charged with a level three offence for his high bump on Sydney’s Nick Malceski at Sydney’s Olympic stadium on Saturday night, and his offence drew 476.02 demerit points.

The match review panel assessed the incident as reckless, of medium impact and high on Malceski’s body.

Koschitzke can reduce the penalty to 357.02 demerit points and a three-game suspension if he pleads guilty.

His team-mate Brendon Goddard also fell foul of the rules in round one, as he was reported for making negligent contact with a field umpire and was fined $1,200.

Goddard can reduce the sanction to $900 by pleading guilty.

Essendon breathed a sigh of relief as ruckman David Hille had his charging report against Geelong’s Jimmy Bartel withdrawn.

The panel ruled Hille made contact to Bartel’s body and shoulder while he had his eyes on the ball and was making a legitimate attempt to mark the ball.

-AAP

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NASA’s Swift satellite makes best-ever ultraviolet portrait of Andromeda galaxy

September 17, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, September 17 (ANI): NASA’s Swift satellite has acquired the highest-resolution view of a neighboring spiral galaxy ever attained in the ultraviolet.

The galaxy, known as M31 in the constellation Andromeda, is the largest and closest spiral galaxy to our own.

“Swift reveals about 20,000 ultraviolet sources in M31, especially hot, young stars and dense star clusters,” said Stefan Immler, a research scientist on the Swift team at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

“Of particular importance is that we have covered the galaxy in three ultraviolet filters. That will let us study M31′s star-formation processes in much greater detail than previously possible,” he added.

M31, also known as the Andromeda Galaxy, is more than 220,000 light-years across and lies 2.5 million light-years away.

On a clear, dark night, the galaxy is faintly visible as a misty patch to the naked eye.

Between May 25 and July 26, 2008, Swift’s Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope (UVOT) acquired 330 images of M31 at wavelengths of 192.8, 224.6, and 260 nanometers.

The images represent a total exposure time of 24 hours.

The task of assembling the resulting 85 gigabytes of images fell to Erin Grand, an undergraduate student at the University of Maryland at College Park who worked with Immler as an intern this summer.

“After ten weeks of processing that immense amount of data, I’m extremely proud of this new view of M31,” she said.

Several features are immediately apparent in the new mosaic.

The first is the striking difference between the galaxy’s central bulge and its spiral arms.

“The bulge is smoother and redder because it’s full of older and cooler stars,” Immler explained. “Very few new stars form here because most of the materials needed to make them have been depleted,” he added.

Dense clusters of hot, young, blue stars sparkle beyond the central bulge.

M31′s disk and spiral arms contain most of the gas and dust needed to produce new generations of stars.

Star clusters are especially plentiful in an enormous ring about 150,000 light-years across.

“Swift is surveying nearby galaxies like M31 so astronomers can better understand star- formation conditions and relate them to conditions in the distant galaxies where we see gamma-ray bursts occurring,” said Neil Gehrels, the mission’s principal investigator at NASA Goddard. (ANI)

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Antarctica’s plumbing system more dynamic than previously believed

September 2, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, Sept 2 (ANI): Scientists, using space-based lasers on a NASA satellite have created the most comprehensive inventory of lakes that actively drain or fill under Antarctica’s ice, which has revealed a continental plumbing system that is more dynamic than previously thought.

“Even though Antarctica’s ice sheet looks static, the more we watch it, the more we see there is activity going on there all the time,” said Benjamin Smith of the University of Washington in Seattle, who led the study.

Unlike most lakes, Antarctic lakes are under pressure from the ice above. That pressure can push melt water from place to place like water in a squeezed balloon.

The water moves under the ice in a broad, thin layer, but also through a linked cavity system. This flow can resupply other lakes near and far.

Understanding this plumbing is important, as it can lubricate glacier flow and send the ice speeding toward the ocean, where it can melt and contribute to sea level change.

But figuring out what’s happening beneath miles of ice is a challenge.

Researchers led by Smith analyzed 4.5 years of ice elevation data from NASA’s Ice, Cloud and land Elevation satellite (ICESat) to create the most complete inventory to date of changes in the Antarctic plumbing system.

The team has mapped the location of 124 active lakes, estimated how fast they drain or fill, and described the implications for lake and ice-sheet dynamics.

Smith, Helen Fricker, a geophysicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and colleagues extended their elevation analysis to cover most of the Antarctic continent and 4.5 years of data from ICESat’s Geoscience Laser Altimeter System (GLAS).

By observing how ice sheet elevation changed between the two or three times the satellite flew over a section every year, researchers could determine which lakes were active.

They also used the elevation changes and the properties of water and ice to estimate the volume change.

Only a few of the more than 200 previously identified lakes were confirmed active, implying that lakes in East Antarctica’s high-density “Lakes District” are mostly inactive and do not contribute much to ice sheet changes.

Most of the 124 newly observed active lakes turned up in coastal areas, at the head of large drainage systems, which have the largest potential to contribute to sea level change.

According to Robert Bindschadler, a glaciologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, “The survey shows that most active subglacial lakes are located where the ice is moving fast, which implies a relationship.” (ANI)

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Beefed-up diets of Asia’s middle class may lead to chronic food shortages

August 30, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, August 30 (ANI): Scientists have said that the beefed-up diets of Asia’s expanding middle class could lead to chronic food shortages for the water-stressed region.

According to a report in National Geographic News, the threat was highlighted in a study by the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), which estimate that Asian demand for food and livestock fodder will double in 40 years.
Asia’s growing economy and appetite for meat will require a radical overhaul of farmland irrigation to feed a population expected to swell to 1.4 billion by 2050, scientists warned at Stockholm’s World Water Week recently.
At current crop yields, East Asia would need 47 percent more irrigated farmland and to find 70 percent more water, the study found.
South Asia would have to expand its irrigated crop areas by 30 percent and increase water use by 57 percent.
Given existing agriculture pressure on water resources and territory, that’s an impossible scenario, according to the study authors.

Scientists urge modernization of existing large-scale irrigation systems, most of which were installed in the 1970s and 1980s.
It’s estimated that India, the world’s largest consumer of underground water, has 19 million unregulated groundwater pumps.
Groundwater in northern India is receding by as much as a foot (0.3 meter) a year due to rampant water extraction, most of it for crop irrigation, according to a study.
More than 109 cubic kilometres of groundwater were drained from the region between 2002 and 2008, according to the satellite image-based study led by scientists with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
“Governments’ inability to regulate this practice is giving rise to scary scenarios of groundwater over-exploitation, which could lead to regional food crises and widespread social unrest,” said Tushaar Shah of IWMI.

As for China, the country’s per capita “water footprint” for food production has almost doubled since 1985, according to Junguo Liu of the Beijing Forestry University.
“A switch from traditional rice and noodles to a meatier diet is behind the change,” Liu said. “Changes in food consumption are the major cause of worsening water scarcity in China,” he added.
Total water requirements for food production in China are predicted to rise by 40 to 50 percent in the next 30 years, he further added.
“Where do you get such a big amount of water? It is a really big question and a big challenge,” he said.
“If other developing countries follow China toward a Western diet, the global water shortage becomes even more serious,” he added. (ANI)

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Warped debris disks around stars a result of interstellar wind

August 29, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, August 29 (ANI): In a new research, a team of scientists has determined that the warped shapes of the dust-filled disks where new planets may be forming around other stars, may be due to interstellar wind.

The dust-filled disks where new planets may be forming around other stars occasionally take on some difficult-to-understand shapes.

Now, a team led by John Debes at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, has found that a star’s motion through interstellar gas can account for many of them.

“The disks contain small comet- or asteroid-like bodies that may grow to form planets,” Debes said. “These small bodies often collide, which produces a lot of fine dust,” he added.

As the star moves through the galaxy, it encounters thin gas clouds that create a kind of interstellar wind.

“The small particles slam into the flow, slow down, and gradually bend from their original trajectories to follow it,” said Debes.

Far from being empty, the space between stars is filled with patchy clouds of low-density gas.

When a star encounters a relatively dense clump of this gas, the resulting flow produces a drag force on any orbiting dust particles.

The force only affects the smallest particles – those about one micrometer across, or about the size of particles in smoke.

“This fine dust is usually removed through collisions among the particles, radiation pressure from the star’s light and other forces,” explained Debes. “The drag from interstellar gas just takes them on a different journey than they otherwise would have had,” he said.

Working with Alycia Weinberger at the Carnegie Institution of Washington and Goddard astrophysicist Marc Kuchner, Debes was using the Hubble Space Telescope to investigate the composition of dust around the star HD 32297, which lies 340 light-years away in the constellation Orion.

He noticed that the interior of the dusty disk – a region comparable in size to our own solar system – was warped in a way that matched a previously known warp at larger distances.

“Other research indicated there were interstellar gas clouds in the vicinity. The pieces came together to make me think that gas drag was a good explanation for what was going on,” Debes said.

“It looks like interstellar gas helps young planetary systems shed dust much as a summer breeze helps dandelions scatter seeds,” Kuchner said.

As dust particles respond to the interstellar wind, a debris disk can morph into peculiar shapes determined by the details of its collision with the gas cloud. (ANI)

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Music teacher called Jazz Lady had lesbian affair with pupil, 15, in UK

August 19, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

London, Aug 19 (ANI): A music teacher in Britain has confessed that she had a lesbian relationship with a teenage pupil.

Helen Goddard, who is called Jazz Lady by her students, could now face a 14-year prison sentence for it.

The 26-year-old woman taught the trumpet to girls at the City of London School for Girls, when she started having an illicit relationship with one of her students aged 15.

But her colleague was alerted about the affair by an anonymous tip off, which led to the disclosure, the Telegraph reports.

Now, she has admitted six counts of sexual activity with the girl between February and July this year.

Surprisingly, the parents of the girl, both highly educated professionals, are understood to be happy for the relationship to resume once she turns 16 in a few months.

Meanwhile, officers of the City of London police confiscated her mobile phone and examined it for evidence of any inappropriate text messages sent by her to the girl.

Helen pleaded guilty at Southwark Crown Court following which Judge Anthony Pitts said that sentencing options were open.

He said: “You pleaded guilty to these matters. They are obviously serious charges.”

Currently, the Jazz Lady is released on bail and sentencing has been adjourned until September 21. (ANI)

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NASA scientists make first discovery of life’s building block in comet

August 18, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, August 18 (ANI): NASA scientists have discovered glycine, a fundamental building block of life, in samples of comet Wild 2 returned by NASA’s Stardust spacecraft.

“Glycine is an amino acid used by living organisms to make proteins, and this is the first time an amino acid has been found in a comet,” said Dr. Jamie Elsila of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

“Our discovery supports the theory that some of life’s ingredients formed in space and were delivered to Earth long ago by meteorite and comet impacts,” he added.

“The discovery of glycine in a comet supports the idea that the fundamental building blocks of life are prevalent in space, and strengthens the argument that life in the universe may be common rather than rare,” said Dr. Carl Pilcher, Director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute, which co-funded the research.

Stardust passed through dense gas and dust surrounding the icy nucleus of Wild 2 on January 2, 2004.

As the spacecraft flew through this material, a special collection grid filled with aerogel – a novel sponge-like material that’s more than 99 percent empty space – gently captured samples of the comet’s gas and dust.

The grid was stowed in a capsule, which detached from the spacecraft and parachuted to Earth on January 15, 2006.

Since then, scientists around the world have been busy analyzing the samples to learn the secrets of comet formation and our solar system’s history.

“We actually analyzed aluminum foil from the sides of tiny chambers that hold the aerogel in the collection grid,” said Elsila.

“As gas molecules passed through the aerogel, some stuck to the foil. We spent two years testing and developing our equipment to make it accurate and sensitive enough to analyze such incredibly tiny samples,” he added.

Earlier, preliminary analysis in the Goddard labs detected glycine in both the foil and a sample of the aerogel.

However, since glycine is used by terrestrial life, at first the team was unable to rule out contamination from sources on Earth.

The new research used isotopic analysis of the foil to rule out that possibility.

“We discovered that the Stardust-returned glycine has an extraterrestrial carbon isotope signature, indicating that it originated on the comet,” said Elsila.

According to Dr. Daniel Glavin of NASA Goddard, “Based on the foil and aerogel results it is highly probable that the entire comet-exposed side of the Stardust sample collection grid is coated with glycine that formed in space.” (ANI)

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‘Bullet fingerprinting’ technique improves recovery rate of prints

July 13, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, July 13 (ANI): A team of scientists has developed ‘Bullet fingerprinting’ technology, which is a simple but effective method to visualize fingerprints even after the print itself has been removed.

The technology has been developed by Dr John Bond, from Northamptonshire Police Scientific Support Unit and an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Leicester’s Forensic Research Centre, in collaboration with University scientists.

Continuing work exploring this forensic technique in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Leicester is uncovering new ways of recovering fingerprints from metal surfaces.

Researcher Alex Goddard has uncovered a natural technique that he believes is so simple, which can explain why it has been overlooked until now.

The technique involves studying the chemical and physical interactions occurring between the metal and the fingerprint sweat deposit.

Using advanced surface imaging techniques, such as an Atomic Force Microscope, nanoscale observations of fingerprinted brass samples can identify optimum conditions to promote the natural enhancement of the fingerprint, vastly improving their recovery rate.

It has also proven that components of the sweat deposit survive washing and wiping of the surface.

According to Goddard, “Once a finger has touched the metal surface, a residue remains behind. This starts to react with the metal and an image of the fingerprint can be developed by use of elevated temperature and humidity, with the resultant image becoming a permanent feature on the surface of the metal.”

“Currently, fingerprint recovery from bullets is very low; less than 1 percent. This uses a natural process and even if it only leads to small increase in success rate, then that would be significant,” he said.

“Previous recovery methods include applying powder to the material which can actually damage the evidence,” said Goddard.

“This new technique promotes a naturally occurring process which does not involve adding anything to, or damaging, the evidence. Instead, it employs heat and humidity to promote the enhancement of the fingerprint image.

There are also indications that it could be used after other techniques have failed, perhaps as a last resort,” he added. (ANI)

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Earth may become ‘Waterworld’ if rise in sea level continues

July 2, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

London, July 2 (ANI): If the alarming rise in sea level is anything to go by, the fictional world depicted in the Hollywood movie ‘Waterworld’ may soon be a reality.

According to a report in the Telegraph, this grim picture of planet Earth has been painted by climate scientists, who say that sea-level rise is now inevitable and will happen much quicker than most of us thought – and will last for centuries.

Even if greenhouse gas emissions stopped tomorrow, the oceans will continue to swell as they warm and as glaciers or ice sheets slide into the sea.

Scientists say that the “official” estimate of sea level rise by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – 20cm to 60cm by 2100 – is misleading.

It could well be in the region of one to two metres, with a small risk of an even greater rise.

“When we talk of sea level rising by one or two metres by 2100 remember that it is still going to be rising after 2100,” said climate expert Dr Eric Rignot, of California University.

According to Dr Stefan Rahmstorf, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, “”There is a very close and statistically highly significant correlation between the rate of sea level rise and the temperature increase above the pre-industrial background level.”

His calculations suggest sea level will rise between 0.5 and 1.4 metres – and the higher estimate is more likely because emissions have been rising faster than the IPCC’s worst case scenario.

“I sense than now a majority of sea level experts would agree with me that the IPCC projections are much too low,” he said.Most of my community is comfortable expecting at least a metre by the end of this century,” said Dr Robert Bindschadler, of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland.

For many islands and low lying regions including much of the Netherlands, Florida and Bangladesh even small rises will spell catastrophe.

Large parts of London, New York, Sydney and Tokyo could be among cities submerged beneath the waves unless a massive engineering effort can protect them against the waves. (ANI)

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Hand-held devices that can detect presence of aerosols in air above oceans

June 30, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, June 30 (ANI): A team of scientists is developing hand-held devices that can detect the presence of aerosols in air above oceans by measuring how light scatters as it strikes the particles.

The portable photometers have been developed by Alexander Smirnov, an AERONET (Aerosol Robotic Network) project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland, and his team.

Aerosols, the tiny atmospheric particles that can have an outsized impact on the climate, are just as likely to be found in the air above the oceans as they are over land.

Yet, aerosols are scarcely measured over the oceans.

Now, Smirnov, who is leading a new effort called the Maritime Aerosol Network (MAN), will send researchers with portable photometers on oceanographic research cruises.

The hand-held devices can detect the presence of aerosols in air by measuring how light scatters as it strikes the particles.

Taking the measurements is relatively easy.

Several times a day, a researcher stands on a ship’s deck when the sun is fully visible, points the instrument at the sun, and pushes a button. The photometer performs a series of scans within a few seconds.

Smirnov has arranged to have the have handheld photometers carried aboard more than 50 vessels, both commercial and research, from 12 countries since November 2006.

Initial results show that data from the portable photometers correspond well with permanent AERONET stations on select islands.

The initial efforts have produced a tantalizing observation.

“Aerosol concentrations over the oceans at the high latitudes are not as high as satellite measurements suggest they should be,” said Smirnov. “We need to figure out why we’re seeing this difference,” he added. (ANI)

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Traces of microbes in shallow ice layers may help find life on icy worlds

June 27, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, June 26 (ANI): A new research has indicated that living microorganisms and the food that sustained them can be detected in shallow ice layers, which will help find life on icy worlds.

The research is a part of the Project SLIce, which means, Signatures of Life in Ice.

Dominique Tobler and Jennifer Eigenbrode of NASA Goddard Space Science Laboratory, and Liane Benning of the University of Leeds, UK, show that not only living micro-organisms, but also traces of long-dead ones, and the food that sustained them can be detected in shallow ice layers, using methods rigorously tested in one of our own planet’s most extreme environments.

“With SLIce, we wanted to figure out the nature of the organic matter in ice and how what we find on Earth can be the basis for comparisons with organic matter on Mars,” explained Benning.

“The organic matter we find could be alive or dead, representing extant or extinct life, or even the nutrients that made life possible, and we want to identify the biological signals that point towards ice-dwelling life,” she added.

The SLIce team went to a glacial region of Svalbard to try taking ice samples in exactly the way it would be done on Mars, using a sequence of procedures and tests that they had developed as part of the AMASE project, a long-running international research program that has established Svalbard as a test bed for planetary exploration.

“We’re using sample devices, primarily to be operated from a rover, but we’re also testing how we go about taking and testing samples and keeping them separate,” said Benning.

“For SLIce, we applied the protocol we had developed to take ice cores, process them and analyze them in the field just as would happen on a rover on Mars, and then of course we took them back to the lab and did a much wider range of tests, so we really knew what we had found,” she said.

“There could be microbes living in the ice, but there could also be the dead bodies of microbes that used to live there, and there could be biological molecules that blew in from dust and micrometeorites. We need to identify what we’ve got, so that we know what it’s telling us,” she added. (ANI)

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NASA’s Moon mission successfully completes lunar maneuver

June 25, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, June 24 (ANI): NASA’s Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, successfully completed its most significant early mission milestone on June 23 with a lunar swingby and calibration of its science instruments.

The satellite will search for water ice in a permanently shadowed crater at the moon’s south pole.

With the assist of the moon’s gravity, LCROSS and its attached Centaur booster rocket successfully entered into polar Earth orbit at 6:20 a.m. PDT on June 23.

The maneuver puts the spacecraft and Centaur on course for a pair of impacts near the moon’s south pole on October 9.

“The successful completion of the LCROSS swingby proves the science instruments are functioning as expected. It is a testament to the hard work and dedication of the entire team,” said Dan Andrews, LCROSS project manager at NASA’s Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, California.

“We are elated at the results from the maneuver and eagerly anticipate the impacts in early October,” he added.

During its swing by the moon, the spacecraft’s instruments were turned on and calibrated by scanning three sites on the lunar surface.

These sites were the craters Mendeleev, Goddard C and Giordano Bruno. They were selected because they offer a variety of terrain types, compositions and illumination conditions.

The spacecraft also scanned the lunar horizon to confirm its instruments are aligned in preparation for observing the Centaur’s debris plume.

“Each instrument returned good data that the science team will spend the next few weeks analyzing,” said Anthony Colaprete, LCROSS project scientist at Ames.

“These data will ensure we are as prepared as possible for monitoring and interpreting data we receive during impact,” he added.

LCROSS and its attached Centaur upper stage rocket are now in a long, looping polar orbit around Earth and the moon.

Each orbit will be roughly perpendicular to the moon’s orbit around Earth and take about 37 days to complete.

Before impact, the spacecraft and Centaur will make approximately three orbits.

LCROSS and the Centaur separately will collide with the moon at approximately 7:30 a.m. EDT on October 9, creating a pair of debris plumes that will be analyzed for the presence of water ice or water vapor, hydrocarbons and hydrated materials.

The spacecraft and Centaur are targeted to impact the moon’s south pole near the Cabeus region.

The exact target crater will be identified 30 days before impact, after considering information collected by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and observatories on Earth. (ANI)

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NASA spacecraft detects ultra fast hydrogen coming from Moon

June 20, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, June 19 (ANI): NASA’s Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) spacecraft has made the first observations of very fast hydrogen atoms coming from the Moon, following decades of speculation and searching for their existence.

During spacecraft commissioning, the IBEX team turned on the IBEX-Hi instrument, built primarily by Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which measures atoms with speeds from about half a million to 2.5 million miles per hour.

Its companion sensor, IBEX-Lo, built by Lockheed Martin, the University of New Hampshire, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and the University of Bern in Switzerland, measures atoms with speeds from about one hundred thousand to 1.5 million mph.

“Just after we got IBEX-Hi turned on, the Moon happened to pass right through its field of view, and there they were,” said Dr. David J. McComas, IBEX principal investigator and assistant vice president of the SwRI Space Science and Engineering Division.

“The instrument lit up with a clear signal of the neutral atoms being detected as they backscattered from the Moon,” he added.

From its vantage point in space, IBEX sees about half of the Moon – one quarter of it is dark and faces the nightside (away from the Sun), while the other quarter faces the dayside (toward the Sun).

Solar wind particles impact only the dayside, where most of them are embedded in the lunar surface, while some scatter off in different directions.

The scattered ones mostly become neutral atoms in this reflection process by picking up electrons from the lunar surface.

The IBEX team estimates that only about 10 percent of the solar wind ions reflect off the sunward side of the Moon as neutral atoms, while the remaining 90 percent are embedded in the lunar surface.

Characteristics of the lunar surface, such as dust, craters and rocks, play a role in determining the percentage of particles that become embedded and the percentage of neutral particles, as well as their direction of travel, that scatter.

According to McComas, the results also shed light on the “recycling” process undertaken by particles throughout the solar system and beyond.

The solar wind and other charged particles impact dust and larger objects as they travel through space, where they backscatter and are reprocessed as neutral atoms.

These atoms can travel long distances before they are stripped of their electrons and become ions and the complicated process begins again.

The combined scattering and neutralization processes now observed at the Moon have implications for interactions with objects across the solar system, such as asteroids, Kuiper Belt objects and other Moons. (ANI)

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NASA uses satellite to improve global crop forecasting

May 27, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, May 27 (ANI): NASA researchers are using satellite data to cultivate the most accurate estimates of soil moisture, which would improve global crop forecasting.

Soil moisture is essential for seeds to germinate and for crops to grow. But, record droughts and scorching temperatures in certain parts of the globe in recent years have caused soil to dry up, crippling crop production.

The falling food supply in some regions has forced prices upward, pushing staple foods out of reach for millions of poor people.

Now, NASA researchers are using satellite data to deliver a kind of space-based humanitarian assistance.

They are cultivating the most accurate estimates of soil moisture and improving global forecasts of how well food will grow at a time when the world is confronting shortages.

In this context, NASA scientist John Bolten described a new modeling product that uses data from the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer for EOS (AMSR-E) sensor on NASA’s Aqua satellite to improve the accuracy of West African soil moisture.

The group produced assessments of current soil moisture conditions, or “nowcasts,” and improved estimates by 5 percent over previous methods.

“Though seemingly small and incremental, the increase can make a big difference in the precision of crop forecasts,” Bolten said.

The modeling innovation comes at a time when crop analysts at agencies like the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) are working to meet the food shortage problem head on.

They combine soil moisture estimates with weather trends to produce up-to-date forecasts of crop harvests.

Those estimates help regional and national officials prepare for and prevent food crises.

“The USDA’s estimates of global crop yields are an objective, timely benchmark of food availability and help drive international commodity markets,” said Bolten, a physical scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland.

Crop analysts must estimate root-zone soil moisture, the amount of water beneath the surface available for plants to absorb.

But estimating the amount of water in soil has posed challenges and data gaps.

Under a new NASA-USDA collaboration known as the Global Agriculture Monitoring Project, Bolten and colleagues from the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service are using AMSR-E to fill the data gaps with daily soil moisture “snapshots.”

Since its launch in 2002, the instrument has “seen” through clouds, and light vegetation like crops and grasses to detect the amount of soil moisture beneath Earth’s surface.

Bolten says that results from AMSR-E are just a precursor to dramatic new improvements in data and prediction accuracy researchers expect from the Soil Moisture Active and Passive satellite, slated to launch in 2013. (ANI)

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Satellites’ launch to give boost to NASA’s ‘return to Moon’ mission

May 22, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, May 22 (ANI): NASA’s return to the moon will get a boost in June with the launch of two satellites that will return a wealth of data about Earth’s nearest neighbor.

On May 21, the agency outlined the upcoming missions of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO, and the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS.

The spacecraft will launch together June 17 aboard an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.

Using a suite of seven instruments, LRO will help identify safe landing sites for future human explorers, locate potential resources, characterize the radiation environment and test new technology.

LCROSS will seek a definitive answer about the presence of water ice at the lunar poles.

It will use the spent second stage Atlas Centaur rocket in an unprecedented way that will culminate with two spectacular impacts on the moon’s surface.

“These two missions will provide exciting new information about the moon, our nearest neighbor,” said Doug Cooke, associate administrator of NASA’s Exploration Systems Mission Directorate in Washington.

“Imaging will show dramatic landscapes and areas of interest down to one-meter resolution. The data also will provide information about potential new uses of the moon. These teams have done a tremendous job designing and building these two spacecraft,” he added.

LRO’s instruments will help scientists compile high resolution, three-dimensional maps of the lunar surface and also survey it in the far ultraviolet spectrum.

The satellite’s instruments will help explain how the lunar radiation environment may affect humans and measure radiation absorption with a plastic that is like human tissue.

LRO’s instruments also will allow scientists to explore the moon’s deepest craters, look beneath its surface for clues to the location of water ice, and identify and explore both permanently lit and permanently shadowed regions.

High-resolution imagery from its camera will help identify landing sites and characterize the moon’s topography and composition.

A miniaturized radar will image the poles and test the system’s communications capabilities.

“LRO is an amazingly sophisticated spacecraft,” said Craig Tooley, LRO project manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

“Its suite of instruments will work in concert to send us data in areas where we’ve been hungry for information for years,” he added. (ANI)

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NASA’s online game lets you peer through the James Webb Space Telescope

May 2, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, April 29 (ANI): NASA has developed a flash on-line game about telescopes, featuring its next-generation spacecraft, the James Webb Space Telescope.

The game, called “Scope it Out!” includes an introduction to telescopes and four matching games where you can compare simple telescopes to both Webb and the Hubble Space Telescope.

It was created at NASA Goddard by Maggie Masetti, with Dr. Anita Krishnamurthi providing oversight on the project.

Programmer Kent deVillafranca and artist Susan Lin, both of Science Systems and Applications, Greenbelt, Maryland, did the programming and graphics for this project.

“This is a great way to teach children and adults on how simple and complex space telescopes work,” said Krishnamurthi, the Education and Public Outreach Lead for Webb at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

The level of the game is for middle school students and above.

There are five levels of gaming in the “Scope it Out!” game from Level Zero to Level Four.

Most levels present an image of a young woman looking through a telescope, side-by-side with a space telescope.

Level Zero gives a basic lesson in telescope optics through animated graphics.

Level One is where the matching game starts, by asking the player to find the seven components in the simple telescope that match with those in the Webb telescope.

The game culminates in Level Four where players have to find the components of the Hubble Telescope that match up with the James Webb Space Telescope.

This game requires FLASH 8 or higher, and there are two versions.

One version is for large monitors (1024×768) the other is for smaller (800×600) monitors. Once a monitor size is chosen, the game will pop up in a separate window.

For convenience, there’s also a small toggle button in the lower left corner of the game to allow a player to change the quality of the graphics.

The James Webb Space Telescope is a large, infrared space telescope, scheduled for launch in 2013.

JWST will find the first galaxies that formed in the early Universe, connecting the Big Bang to our own Milky Way Galaxy.

It will peer through dusty clouds to see stars forming planetary systems, connecting the Milky Way to our own Solar System. (ANI)

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New NASA model to improve forecasting of deadly cyclones

April 14, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, April 14 (ANI): NASA has used satellite data and a new modeling approach that could improve weather forecasting and save more lives when future cyclones develop.

About 15 percent of the world’s tropical cyclones occur in the northern Indian Ocean, but because of high population densities along low-lying coastlines, the storms have caused nearly 80 percent of cyclone-related deaths around the world.

Incomplete atmospheric data for the Bay of Bengal and Arabian Sea make it difficult for regional forecasters to provide enough warning for mass evacuations.

In the wake of last year’s Cyclone Nargis, which was one of the most catastrophic cyclones on record, a team of NASA researchers re-examined the storm as a test case for a new data integration and mathematical modeling approach.

They compiled satellite data from the days leading up to the May 2 landfall of the storm and successfully “hindcasted” Nargis’ path and landfall in Burma.

“Hindcasting” means that the modelers plotted the precise course of the storm.

In addition, the retrospective results showed how forecasters might now be able to produce multi-day advance warnings in the Indian Ocean and improve advance forecasts in other parts of the world.

“There is no event in nature that causes a greater loss of life than Northern Indian Ocean cyclones, so we have a strong motivation to improve advance warnings,” said the study’s lead author, Oreste Reale, an atmospheric modeler with the Goddard Earth Sciences and Technology Center.

In their modeling experiment, Reale’s team detected and tracked Nargis’ path by employing novel 3-dimensional satellite imagery and atmospheric profiles from the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument aboard NASA’s Aqua satellite to see into the heart of the storm.

AIRS has become increasingly important to weather forecasting because of its ability to show changes in atmospheric temperature and moisture at varying altitudes.

Lau, chief of Goddard’s Laboratory for Atmospheres, believes that regional forecasting agencies monitoring the region can readily access AIRS’ data daily and optimize forecasts for cyclones in the Indian Ocean.

According to Lau, the same technique can be useful to forecasts of hurricanes in the Atlantic and typhoons in the western Pacific, particularly when the storm is formed over open oceans out of flight range of hurricane-hunting airplanes.

“With this approach, we can now better define cyclones at the early stages and track them in the models to know what populations may be most at risk,” explained Reale. “And every 12 hours we gain in these forecasts means a gain in our chances to reduce loss of life,” he added. (ANI)

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NASA Study: Arctic is warming due to growing amount of aerosols in Atmosphere

April 12, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

The US space agency NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) has stated that it has noted aerosols affecting climate by reflecting or absorbing the radiation of Sun, in the atmosphere. In its recent study, NASA has articulated that Arctic has been warming since 1976, due to the increase of aerosols in Atmosphere.

The NASA study has warned that the growing amount of aerosols could have damaging effects on climate, particularly if the amount of aerosols surpasses maximum-allowed limits. The sources of aerosols can be natural as well as human.

According to the team of researchers led by climate scientist Drew Shindell, the tiny airborne particles aerosols get into the atmosphere from the natural or human sources such as industrial pollution, volcanoes and residential cook stoves. The aerosols can reflect or absorb the radiation of the Sun. They can also seed clouds, or even change a few of their physical properties, such as the reflectivity.

Speaking from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in New York, Drew Shindell said, There’s a tendency to think of aerosols as small players, but they’re not. Right now, in the mid-latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere and in the Arctic, the impact of aerosols is just as strong as that of the greenhouse gases. We will have very little leverage over climate in the next couple of decades if we’re just looking at carbon dioxide. If we want to try to stop the Arctic summer sea ice from melting completely over the next few decades, we’re much better off looking at aerosols and ozone.

Shindell added, This is an important model study, raising lots of great questions that will need to be investigated with field research, Harvard University atmospheric chemist Loretta Mickley, who was not involved with the current study, added. It appears that aerosols have quite a powerful effect on climate, but there’s still a lot more that we need to sort out.

In the study reported in the journal Nature Geoscience, the researchers have reported that they used a coupled ocean-atmosphere model to study the climatic effects of changes in levels of carbon dioxide, ozone and aerosols. The researchers have reported that two main components of aerosols are sulfates and black carbon, coming from human activity; Sulfates come directly from the burning of coal. The researchers have concluded that the increasing amount of aerosols could have dangerous effects on climate.

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Aerosols play a key role in atmospheric warming in Arctic 1

April 9, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, April 9 (ANI): A new research by NASA scientists has suggested that much of the atmospheric warming observed in the Arctic since 1976 may be due to changes in tiny airborne particles called aerosols.

Emitted by natural and human sources, aerosols can directly influence climate by reflecting or absorbing the sun’s radiation.

The small particles also affect climate indirectly by seeding clouds and changing cloud properties, such as reflectivity.

A new study, led by climate scientist Drew Shindell of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York, used a coupled ocean-atmosphere model to investigate how sensitive different regional climates are to changes in levels of carbon dioxide, ozone, and aerosols.

The researchers found that the mid and high latitudes are especially responsive to changes in the level of aerosols.

Indeed, the model suggests aerosols likely account for 45 percent or more of the warming that has occurred in the Arctic during the last three decades.

Though there are several varieties of aerosols, previous research has shown that two types – sulfates and black carbon – play an especially critical role in regulating climate change.

Both are products of human activity.

Over the past three decades, the United States and European countries have passed a series of laws that have reduced sulfate emissions by 50 percent.

At the same time, black carbon emissions have steadily risen, largely because of increasing emissions from Asia.

Black carbon – small, soot-like particles produced by industrial processes and the combustion of diesel and biofuels – absorb incoming solar radiation and have a strong warming influence on the atmosphere.

In the modeling experiment, Shindell and colleagues compiled detailed, quantitative information about the relative roles of various components of the climate system, such as solar variations, volcanic events, and changes in greenhouse gas levels.

The regions of Earth that showed the strongest responses to aerosols in the model are the same regions that have witnessed the greatest real-world temperature increases since 1976.

The Arctic region has seen its surface air temperatures increase by 1.5 degree Celsius since the mid-1970s.

In the Antarctic, where aerosols play less of a role, the surface air temperature has increased about 0.35 degree C.

That makes sense because of the Arctic’s proximity to North America and Europe.

The two highly industrialized regions have produced most of the world’s aerosol emissions over the last century, and some of those aerosols drift northward and collect in the Arctic.

According to Shindell, “It appears that aerosols have quite a powerful effect on climate.” (ANI)

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