I just found a site features some interesteding technology news. Check it out.

Space Shuttlin'

...Across the Universe
They have started to move Space Shuttle Discovery to Cape Canaveral in preparation for the next launch scheduled in July.

Air Force Col. Steven Lindsey will command the next mission, designated STS-121. The shuttle is to dock with the international space station, delivering supplies and dropping off German astronaut Thomas Reiter.

Shuttle astronauts Piers Sellers and Mike Fossum are scheduled to conduct at least two spacewalks while the Discovery is docked with the space station.

The first will test the stability of the shuttle's new second robotic arm, called the Orbiter Boom Sensor System, as a work platform. The second is to repair part of the station's mobile transporter, a train track on the exterior that permits its robotic arm to move around.

If time permits, Sellers and Fossum may conduct a third spacewalk to test techniques to repair damage to the shuttle's thermal protection system.

NASA intends to retire the shuttle fleet in 2010 after completing assembly of the international space station.

The next-generation manned spacecraft, called the Crew Exploration Vehicle, is in the design stage. NASA says it hopes to begin test flights in 2012.

Here we go again. It's always scary.

More Apewatch
Some apes have demonstrated they have the capacity to think ahead.

Nicholas Mulcahy and Josep Call of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig tested whether our closest great ape relative--the bonobo--and our most distant--the orangutan--share our ability to plan for the future. The researchers first trained five bonobos and five orangutans to use a tool to get a fruit treat from a mechanical apparatus. They then blocked access to the treat but allowed the apes to handle suitable and unsuitable tools for the task before ushering them into a waiting room for an hour. After that hour, they were brought back into the first room and, if they had brought the right tool, they could use it to get the treat.

The apes both took a suitable tool out of the test room and brought it back in with them after the waiting period significantly more often than predicted by chance. A female orangutan named Dokana proved particularly adept, completing the task successfully in 15 out of 16 attempts. Even when the delay time was extended through the night--14 hours--Dokana succeeded in garnering the tool and the fruit more than half of the time. A bonobo named Kuno did even better with the long delay than the short one, completing the task in eight out of 12 attempts.
To determine whether the apes were simply associating the tool with the food reward, or whether they were actively planning ahead, the researchers devised two more tests. In the first, two of the bonobos and two of the orangutans faced a similar challenge but with only juice as a reward--to discount for the possibility that the apes had taken the right tool previously simply because they were currently hungry. Again, the apes proved capable.
Finally, some naïve apes were presented with tools but not the mechanical apparatus. If they brought back the right tool they were still rewarded with a treat. But most did not, seemingly disproving a simple associative link between the tool and the treat. "Apes selected, transported and saved a suitable tool not because they currently needed it but because they would need it in the future," the authors write in the paper presenting the research in today's Science.

That bonobos and orangutans can plan ahead suggests that the ability evolved in the great apes prior to 14 million years ago rather than in our hominid forebearers within the past 2.5 million years, the scientists note. And other creatures may have undergone convergent cognitive evolution. Indeed, another study published online yesterday by Science found that scrub jays hid and re-hid food depending on whether they were watched by other birds.

How come some people I know have lost this ability? :)

From The Mailbag
Pleaides sent in this link. We may have gone too far.

Record amounts of the Arctic ocean failed to freeze during the recent winter, new figures show, spelling disaster for wildlife and strengthening concerns that the region is locked into a destructive cycle of irreversible climate change.

Satellite measurements show the area covered by Arctic winter sea ice reached an all-time low in March, down some 300,000 square kilometres on last year -an area bigger than the UK.

Scientists say the decline highlights an alarming new trend, with recovery of the ice in winter no longer sufficient to compensate for increased melting in the summer. If the cycle continues, the Arctic ocean could lose all of its ice much earlier than expected, possibly by 2030.

Walt Meier, a researcher at the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Colorado, which collected the figures, said: "It's a pretty stark drop. In the winter the ice tends to be pretty stable, so the last three years, with this steady decline, really stick out."

Experts are worried because a long-term slow decline of ice around the north pole seems to have sharply accelerated since 2003, raising fears that the region may have passed one of the "tipping points" in global warming. In this scenario, warmer weather melts ice and drives temperatures higher because the dark water beneath absorbs more of the sun's radiation. This could make global warming quickly run out of control.

Dr. Meier said there was "a good chance" the Arctic tipping point has been reached. "People have tried to think of ways we could get back to where we were. We keep going further and further into the hole, and it's getting harder and harder to get out of it."

And so on.
bad news for the polar bears, it says.

Monkey News Day

Chimps And Human Speciation Was Messy According To DNA Analysis
This article is very troubling.
I've put in red the bit that got me chuckling with a kind of horror.

"For the first time, we're able to see the details written out in the DNA," said Eric Lander, one of the collaborators on the study. "What they tell us at the least is that the human-chimp speciation was very unusual."

Unusual, indeed. The researchers, from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, propose that humans and chimpanzees first split up about 10 million years ago. Then, after evolving in different directions for about 4 million years, they got back together for a brief fling that produced a third, hybrid population with characteristics of both lines.

That genetic collaboration then gave rise to two separate branches — one leading to humans and the other to chimps.

The work has inspired both admiration and skepticism. Many paleontologists have a hard time believing some of the humans that are known to have lived during that era could have been pairing up with apes.

"It's a totally cool and extremely clever analysis," said Daniel Lieberman, a professor of biological anthropology at Harvard who wasn't involved in the study. "My problem is imagining what it would be like to have a bipedal hominid and a chimpanzee viewing each other as appropriate mates — not to put it too crudely."
The research is the latest fruit of the Human Genome Initiative, the effort to transcribe and read out the entire genetic message of human chromosomes, which was completed in 2003.

Humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes that contain about 30,000 genes. Each gene is made of strands of DNA "letters" in a specific order, and the letters can change, by mutation, over time. The rate at which changes occur is fairly constant and very slow.

The number of DNA differences between two species' versions of the same gene is an indication of how long the species have been separate — or not interbreeding and sharing genes.

When the scientists at the Broad Institute compared the genes of humans and chimps, they found one of the chromosomes — the female sex chromosome known as X — was 1.2 million years younger than the others. It appeared the two species shared a common ancestor who gave them their X chromosomes and did so more recently than the ancestors who gave them the other chromosomes.

The best explanation for this, the scientists think, is that ancient humans and chimps broke away from each other not once, but twice. The first time was more than 6.3 million years ago. The second time was at least a million years later.

What probably happened was some of the evolving human ancestors bred with evolving chimpanzees. This was perhaps not as weird as it seems, for though there were some physical differences between the two groups, "the early humans must have looked pretty much like chimpanzees," said James Mallet, a geneticist at University College in London not involved in the new research.

The horror, the horror. It just feels *wrong*.
But now that I think about it, there's a human population out there that fuck sheep; why not chimps?

Monkeys Talk In Full Sentences Here's the article.

Putty-nosed monkeys put two different alarm calls together to create urgent warnings, according to observations recently made of the West African primates.

These monkey "sentences" appear to be evidence of what is widely considered to be a uniquely human ability: stringing words together to convey a message, or syntax.

"These monkeys combine different calls into more complex call sequences with novel meanings," said Klaus Zuberbühler, a psychology researcher at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

Zuberbühler co-wrote a study about the monkey calls appearing in tomorrow's issue of the journal Nature.

He and co-author Kate Arnold do not make a direct analogy between the monkeys' call sequences and human language. (Read related news: "Monkeys Deaf to Complex Communication, Study Says" [2004].)

But Zuberbühler said that their work shows that "the main carriers of meaning are not the individual calls, but the call sequence."

Monkey "Sentence"

Putty-nosed monkeys belong to a group of African monkeys called guenons. The species' most obvious distinguishing feature, and the one the animals are named for, is a bright white nose that stands out against a brown face.

The monkeys are found throughout the Ivory Coast (map of the Côte D'Ivoire), in parts of Liberia, and along the entire northwest coast of the Congo River.

Groups consisting of a single male accompanying 12 to 30 females and their offspring defend territories within this range.

Like other guenons, putty-nosed monkeys use two loud calls, usually referred to as "pyows" and "hacks." They use a series of pyows to warn of a leopard threatening the group and a string of hacks to indicate the presence of crowned eagles.

Zuberbühler and Arnold found that male monkeys often combine the two calls into a kind of simple sentence that they call a "pyow-hack."

Which is amazing because I've met humans who couldn't do exactly that. Some of them were in charge of science and space policy in Australia! :)

Not Good News

Part 1, How NASA Lost Its DART
NASA has losst onee of its satellites. The automated DART Satellite was supposed to rendezvous with a Pentagon satellite, but somehow it went awry.

The 800-pound (362-kilogram) DART spacecraft – short for Demonstration for Autonomous Rendezvous Technology – launched from California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base on April 15, 2005 atop an Orbital Sciences-built Pegasus XL rocket. The spacecraft was expected to rendezvous with MUBLCOM, or Multiple Path Beyond Line of Site Communication; a small communications satellite launched for the U.S. military in 1999.

DART’s $110-million mission called for the spacecraft to approach within 16 feet (five meters) of MUBLCOM and perform a series of intricate maneuvers near the older satellite, all without human intervention. The mission was to occur throughout a 24-hour period. But while DART ultimately found and approached the MUBLCOM satellite, it apparently closed to within 300 feet (91 meters) and ran out of fuel, bumping into the target spacecraft while both vehicles were 472 miles (760 kilometers) above Earth.

“Less than 11 hours into the mission, DART collided with MUBLCOM,” the investigation summary states. “MUBLCOM did not appear to experience significant damage, and the impact actually pushed it into a higher orbit.”

According to the mishap summary, DART’s velocity measurements by its primary global positioning system (GPS) receiver were off by about 1.9 feet per second (0.6 meters per second), an inaccuracy that persisted in the spacecraft despite a computer reset because the needed software patch was never installed. DART’s main computer repeatedly detected its velocity anomaly, reset itself, then again detected the same glitch, the summary stated.

An initial mismatch between expected and actual position appears to have started the continuous cycle – which forced the excessive thruster firings – but it was still not enough to lead DART into failure, according to the summary report. A computer logic setting that regulated how much weight the spacecraft gave its estimated and measured orbital speed and positions was set too high, allowing the initial glitch to continue, the summary stated.

Many of DART’s failings could have been avoided if the mission’s team members thoroughly reviewed and applied data and experience from previous NASA projects, investigators found.

And that is that. not a good show.

Global Warming Is Killing Coral Seas
I know this is a bit 'I Told You So', but I told you so.

Earlier studies focused on coral damage but today's report is the first to show the long-term impact on fish and other creatures of the 1998 event where global warming caused Indian Ocean surface temperatures to increase to unprecedented and sustained levels, killing off (or "bleaching") more than 90 per cent of the inner Seychelles coral.

The team, led by the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, and which comprises researchers from Britain, Australia and the Seychelles, publishes its findings today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The research in the inner islands of the Seychelles in 1994 and 2005 showed that, while the 1998 event was devastating in the short term, the main long-term impacts result when the damaged reefs were unable to re-seed and recover.

Many collapsed into rubble that became covered by algae. The collapse removed food and shelter from predators for a large, diverse amount of marine life. In 2005, average coral cover in the area was just 7.5 per cent.

Not a very pretty sight. Here's another entry from The Environmental News Service.

Lead researcher Nick Graham, of Newcastle University's School of Marine Science and Technology, said, "We have shown there has been very little recovery in the reef system of the inner Seychelles islands for seven years after the 1998 coral bleaching event."

While the 1998 event was devastating in the short term, the main long-term impacts are that the damaged reefs are largely unable to reseed and recover. "Many global warming bleaches simply collapsed into rubble which became covered by unsightly algae," Graham's team writes in their study, published Monday in the "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences," a U.S. publication.

"Reefs can sometimes recover after disturbances," said Graham, "but we have shown that after severe bleaching events, collapse in the physical structure of the reef results in profound impacts on other organisms in the ecosystem and greatly impedes the likelihood of recovery."

Bleaching occurs when corals encounter stressful environmental conditions, explain scientists at the Australian Institute of Marine Science in Townsville, a partner on the study team. High water temperature is the most prevalent stress leading to coral bleaching.

Stresses cause coral to expel zooxanthellae, the small algae living inside the bodies of coral. Because the zooanthellae give the coral their color, when they dissipate the corals suffer a loss of color, hampering the photosynthesis process. This eventually leads to death of the corals.

The collapse of the Seychelles reefs removed food and shelter from predators for a large number of diverse marine species. In their 2005 survey, the scientists found the average coral cover in the area to be just 7.5 percent.
The survey showed that four fish species are possibly already locally extinct - a type of butterfly fish, two types of wrasses and a type of damsel fish.

Six species are at critically low levels, the scientists found - a type of file fish, three types of butterfly fish and two damsel fish. Their decline probably started to happen soon after 1998, they said.

The survey also revealed that species diversity of the fish community had decreased by 50 percent in the heavily impacted sites. "Reduced biodiversity results in a more fragile and less stable ecosystem," the scientists wrote.

Smaller fish have been reduced in number more quickly than larger species but their decreased availability has started to have a more lasting effect on the food chain, the researchers found, and they projected that this effect is likely to be amplified as time goes on.

They observed a decrease in herbivorous fish, worrisome because these fish species control the spread of algae.

If more people in power only knew how beautiful these things were, they'd probably campaign to make sure they didn't die out like this. It's a tragedy and a travesty.

India To The Moon

Out Of The Blue
The Indian Space Research Organisation is sending 2 NASA Probes to the moon.

Marking India’s determination to keep up with spacefaring rivals such as China, Chandrayaan-1 will be propelled into space by a satellite launcher from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre at Sriharikota, 100km north of Chennai.

The first Nasa chief to visit India in an official capacity since the early 1970s, Michael Griffin, signed the two memorandums of understanding covering the symbolic collaboration at a ceremony in Bangalore.

The US imposed sanctions on India’s space programme in 1998 following the country’s nuclear tests, but resumed the granting of export licences in September 2001 and has been looking to collaborate with India in developing space technologies. “There was a period of time between our nations where, because of nuclear proliferation issues and other factors, the ability to co-operate on technical matters was less strong than it is today,” Mr Griffin said after signing the deal.

The Indian Space Research Organisation said the two devices – a mini synthetic aperture radar (MiniSar) and a moon mineralogy mapper (M3) – were selected on merit from among 16 firm proposals received from around the world.

The main objective of the MiniSar is to detect water in the permanently shadowed areas of lunar polar regions, while the role of the M3 is to characterise and map minerals on the moon’s surface.

I've added a link to ISRO on the side bar. I wasn't aware they were that advanced.
If even India has a Space programme, why doesn't Australia have one? Seriously.

Fusion Reaction

In Japan they're reporting that they've managed to keep plasma active for a world record 28 seconds.

「プラズマ」維持、世界最長を達成・原子力機構
　日本原子力研究開発機構は、原子と原子をぶつけてばく大なエネルギーを取り出す核融合に不可欠なプラズマという原子状態を、世界最長となる28秒間維持することに成功した。国際熱核融合実験炉（ＩＴＥＲ）の標準運転に必要な条件の下での実験で、核融合の実用化につながると期待される。成果は6月にイタリアで開かれる欧州物理学会で発表する。

　茨城県那珂市の研究施設にある臨界プラズマ装置「ＪＴ—60」で実験した。プラズマを加熱する高速イオンの損失を防ぐため、フェライト鋼という材料を真空容器内に装着。従来の炭素材タイルだけの場合に比べて磁場の形を改良し、プラズマをうまく閉じ込められるようになった。

　ＩＴＥＲの標準運転で想定する状態で、これまでの世界最長記録はＪＴ—60の16.5秒だった。今回の28.6秒はこれを1.7倍に延ばし、ＩＴＥＲの長時間燃焼が実現する公算が大きくなった。

Key points: They did in in Ibaraki prefectue using the Fusion module 'JT-60'. By using a ferrite alloy, they managed to control the magnetic field better inside the vacuum vessel.
It lasted 28.6 seconds, lengthening the time from the previous record of 16.5 seconds. They think that they've seen the light in getting a longer time record, which of course is the hope of fusion research.

You read it here first in English, because there's nary a report in English newspapers this minute!

The Names They Give Themselves

It turns out dolphins give themselves names:

The evidence suggests dolphins share the human ability to recognise themselves and other members of the same species as individuals with separate identities.
The research, on wild bottlenose dolphins, will lead to a reassessment of their intelligence and social complexity, raising moral questions over how they should be treated.

The research was carried out by Vincent Janik of the Sea Mammal Research Unit at St Andrews University in Scotland, who has found bottlenose dolphins to be among the animal world's quickest learners of new sounds.

"Each animal develops an individually distinctive signature whistle in the first few months of its life, which appears to be used in individual recognition," he said.

The research has its origin in the 1960s when dolphin trainers first noticed captive animals each had their own repertoire of whistles.

Which of course reminds me of the following Larsen cartoon:


Guess you had to be there.

Huygens Update

Movie Time
You can now view the Huygens module descending and landing on Titan in this video here.
An explanation is here.

A little more than one year after the spectacular descent of the European Space Agency's Huygens on Saturn's giant moon Titan, scientists from the probe's Descent Imager/Spectral Radiometer (DISR) have released two new movies of the descent. These represent the best visual product from the mission obtained so far and most realistic way yet to experience the landing on a far-away world.

These movies were built thanks to the data collected by DISR on 14 January 2005, during the 147-minutes plunge through Titan's thick orange-brown atmosphere to a soft sandy riverbed. The data were analysed for months after the landing.

The movie "View from Huygens on 14 January 2005" shows in 4 minutes 40 seconds what the probe actually "saw" within the few hours of the descent and the eventual landing.

"At first the Huygens camera just saw haze over the distant surface," said DISR team member Erich Karkoschka, from the DISR team at the University of Arizona and creator of the movies.

"The haze started to clear only at about 60 kilometres altitude, making it possible to resolve surface features as large as 100 metres" he continued. "But only after landing could the probe's camera resolve little grains of sand millions and millions times smaller than Titan. A movie is a perfect medium to show such a huge change of scale."

There is another movie here.

The second, more technical movie (called "DISR movie"), shows DISR's 4-hour operating life in less than five minutes, too. A detailed caption to explain how the movie is structured is provided with the video.

The scientists analyzed Huygens' speed, direction of motion, rotation and swinging during descent, represented in this movie. It also features Huygens' trajectory views from the south, indication of the large and unexpected parachute movements, the changing direction of view as Huygens rotates along with the relative positions of the sun and Cassini, and a clock to follow the actual sequence of events.

Sounds from a left speaker trace Huygens' motion, with tones changing with rotational speed and the tilt of the parachute. There are also clicks that clock the rotational counter, as well as sounds for the probe's heat shield hitting Titan's atmosphere, parachute deployments, heat shield release, jettison of the DISR cover and touch down.

And that is all I have today on Huygens. Enjoy the movies!

Eileen Collins Quits

Got Scared? I Would Too
The first female commander of the US Shuttle fleet called it quits citing family as a reason. I would've cited boredom between flights and you know, the issue that maybe the shuttle was nowhere near as safe as advertised when she first joined the ranks of astronauts.

Collins, 49, commanded NASA’s first shuttle mission – STS-114 aboard Discovery – since the 2003 Columbia disaster, and is a veteran of four orbiter flights throughout a nearly 16-year astronaut career.

"Eileen Collins is a living, breathing example of the best that our nation has to offer," said NASA chief Michael Griffin, in a statement. "She is, of course, a brave, superb pilot and a magnificent crew commander.”

But the experienced shuttle astronaut will not plunge into a post-spaceflight career immediately. Collins said she’s reserved the entire upcoming summer to spend with her husband, Pat Youngs, daughter Bridget, 10, and son Luke, 5.

“They’ve put up with all of my training schedules and then I was gone for five weeks over last summer,” Collins said of her family, citing the three weeks of quarantine and two weeks in space during her last mission, not to mention the many national and international appearances that followed her return. “Now that it’s been eight or nine months, I’m just going to chill out and finish the remaining work to be done from STS-114, then it’s on to something new.”

Collins said she hopes her retirement will also allow newer astronauts an opportunity to fly before the shuttle fleet itself retires in 2010. Though a native of Elmira, New York, Collins said she will remain in Houston, Texas – home to NASA’s Johnson Space Center – for the time being.

“It’s important to me that these young people get a chance to fly,” Collins said. “It’s very important to the country to have more people that have flown in space because we take that spaceflight experience with us, which is a valuable thing to have when you go on to design future spacecraft and educate young people.”

Errr, yeah Commander Collins. Let's all share around the death seat. I just couldn't bear to watch STS-114 come back down because it was so nerve wracking.

When I went to JAXA earlier in the year, I found myself looking at the experiment module JAXA had built at Tsukuba for the International Space Station. It's a very big module and the only thing that can get it up to orbit is of course the shuttle. Of course the shuttle quickly got suspended after STS-114, so I pointed out this module was at risk of never getting up to the ISS. You should've seen the grim looks I got.

One JAXA engineer spat out "I hate people who say shit tlike that!" and walked away.
The other JAXA engineer said "How do you know?"
I told him about the shuttle's structural woes and how fundamentally unsound it was and he said "Well, you've done your research. We're just praying it works well enough here."
So even people in the space exploration business are willing to admit that's that.

Shuttle Flight Scheduled For July

The space shuttle is going to fly again, this time in July.

"There was a strong, concerted opinion from several folks that we should wait until we have a good design on these pieces of foam and then change them before we go flying," Mr. Hale said, "That's not without merit and we considered it very strongly.

"But at the end of the day, it is appropriate to make one change at a time with the biggest problem we have, and then work our way to the next situation."

Reducing falling fuel tank debris has been a priority for NASA since the loss of the shuttle Columbia on Feb. 1, 2003. Foam insulation falling from the tank during the launching damaged Columbia's heat shield, causing the destruction of the craft and the deaths of seven astronauts as the ship attempted to return through the atmosphere from a science mission.

When Discovery flew last July on the first mission since Columbia, a greatly reduced but hazardous amount of foam still fell from its redesigned tank during the launching. Afterward, engineers removed more than 37 pounds of foam that formed two air ramps, or deflectors, that protected pressurized fuel lines and a tray guiding cables down the side of the tank, places from which the biggest pieces of foam fell in the last mission.

Mr. Hale said removing the ramps was "the largest aerodynamic change that we have made since the shuttle first flew" and its effects needed to be well understood before making more modifications.

"We're in a flight test program," he said. "When you make a major change, you should fly that major change and if you have to make additional changes then you make them after the flight."

Mr. Hale said a major factor determining when to launch Discovery is completing wind tunnel tests to confirm computer predictions that it is safe to fly the fuel tank with the large foam ramps removed. A final determination may not be made before the middle of June, he said.

There must be enough political pressure to keep this thing flying in piste of the significant risks. I can't watch any more. It's going to be the annual heart-attck-watch for the next few years as they keep flying these birds.

The Moon Is An Expensive Mistress

NASA says the moon's gotta pay for its own way.

Shana Dale, NASA's deputy administrator, said one clear goal was to do business.

"The teams recognize the critical importance of space commerce -- having real companies going to the moon and making money," Dale said at a telephone news conference. "The government needs to be a trailblazer and enabler (with) a desire to see commerce take off."

Other essentials for a global space strategy include public involvement and participation by international partners, Dale said.

The strategy workshop was the first of several scheduled for this year that aim to set out specific goals for future space missions to the moon and Mars, as described by President George W. Bush in 2004 in a sweeping "Vision for Space Exploration."

Delivered less than a year after the fatal 2003 shuttle Columbia accident, Bush called for a human return to the moon by 2020 and eventually a human flight to Mars.

Since the Columbia disaster, in which seven astronauts died, only one space shuttle has flown, and the shuttle fleet is to be retired by 2010.

A new Crew Exploration Vehicle meant to return humans to the lunar surface is still on the drawing board, and may not be ready until 2012 or later.

The last time humans went to the moon was aboard NASA's Apollo 17 in 1972. Since then, China has begun its own human space program and also sent representatives to this meeting, though Dale said they apparently did not attend the smaller working sessions.

Aside from the central issues of commerce, international cooperation and public engagement, the working groups also noted the need for lunar law early in the process.

David Beatty of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said an international legal framework would be helpful in the area of property rights, interoperability standards and making hardware from various countries work together.

Such laws could govern more prosaic issues as well, Laurie Lesin of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center said.

"At our group, we did mention once briefly how we're going to decide which side of the road we drive on, on the moon," Lesin said with a laugh.

Just reporting...

Gorby Goes To Bat

Solar Is The Way, He Says...
Mikhail Gorbachev who must be one of the most outstanding figures of late the Twentieth Century is pitching for better energy policy. Specifically, going Solar.

GENEVA (AFP) - Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev urged the world's biggest industrialized nations to set up a 50-billion-dollar (44-billion-euro) fund to support solar power, warning that oil or nuclear energy were not viable energy sources for the future.

Gorbachev -- who chairs an environmental thinktank, Green Cross International -- called on leaders of the Group of Eight (G8) industrialized nations to invest in renewable energy sources, in a statement marking the 20th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

As leader of the Soviet Union in 1986, Gorbachev led the immediate response to the world's worst nuclear disaster, which led to at least 4,000 deaths and sent a radioactive cloud over parts of Europe.

The Green Cross proposals were contained in a letter sent to the leaders of the Group of Eight industrialized nations who are due to meet in Russia in July. Some of the proposals were reported last week in the Financial Times.

"This idea reflects our vision of a way of helping the energy-impoverished in the developing world, while creating concentrations of solar energy in cities that could be used to prevent blackouts," Gorbachev said.

Solar energy would also "lower electricity bills, and would provide a source in the future for generating renewable hydrogen fuels," he added.

"The fund could easily be raised by cutting subsidies for fossil fuels like oil and coal."

Rising oil prices and supply concerns, as well as the growing need to combat global warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions, have raised the profile and economic viability of some renewable energy sources.

Those concerns have also sparked renewed interest in nuclear power as a source of climate-friendly energy.

The debate has been amplified by the need for some European countries to plan soon for the replacement of earlier generations of nuclear power stations that are due to come to the end of their lifespan in the next two decades.

But Gorbachev has said that nuclear power "doesn't add up economically, environmentally or socially".

"Nuclear power is neither the answer to modern energy problems nor a panacea for climate change challenges," he claimed.

Green Cross said nuclear technology requires huge amounts of initial capital, while decommissioning plants is hugely expensive and costs continue to be incurred long after a nuclear power station is closed.

Direct subsidies to nuclear energy in the United States totalled 115 billion dollars between 1947 and 1999 with a further 145 billion dollars in indirect subsidies, according to the non-governmental agency.

It said they dwarfed those spent on solar or wind power.

Solar energy is one of those beautiful promises that never seeems to take off. There's way too much invested in combustion aroudn the world. At least Gorbachev is pithing for a better energy regime than continuing carbon combustion.

NASA"s New Bird

It Could Be As Early As 2011...
Michael Griffin, the NASA administrator has been talking to Congress about the next program to replace the aging Shuttle fleet.

Currently, the target date for building a new vehicle is 2014.

With his pitch to Congress, Griffin underscored a point he has made previously about completing the spaceship on a faster time frame.

Pressed by Sen. Bill Nelson (news, bio, voting record), D-Fla., Griffin acknowledged an additional $1 billion could accelerate the program's completion.

The shuttle is to be retired in 2010, and lawmakers are concerned about when a replacement will be ready.

"If money were not an issue — going back to Apollo kinds of days — then I think it would be no technical problem to have an operational system available in five to six years," Griffin said after testifying before a subcommittee that oversees NASA spending.

Which is nice to know.

President Bush's budget calls for a 3.2 percent increase in NASA spending over last year. The House and Senate have authorized an additional $1.1 billion, but that is only a guide. The money must be appropriated by both chambers.

A Senate appropriations subcommittee was to scheduled to meet Wednesday to consider the proposed increase.

NASA will be shelving its three aging space shuttles in four years. The next generation of spaceships is supposed to carry astronauts to the moon by 2018 and eventually to Mars.

The so-called "flight gap" between the shuttles and their replacement could affect research and American space competitiveness, lawmakers said.

"We don't want a hiatus because we think that puts us in a security risk position," said Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas).

What Hutchison is really saying is he doesn't want a break in the flow of government money into Aerospace industries. Well, we'll see if he has any influence. The old shuttle? That's bad juju.

Second Scramjet Successful

Here's the Link.

Australian scientists have developed an advanced supersonic jet engine that could profoundly revolutionize warfare and jet travel. The Sydney Morning Herald reported Monday that a University of Queensland team headed by Professor Allan Paull launched their HyShot program -- a two-stage Terrier-Orion rocket carrying their innovative supersonic scramjet -- skyward more than 200 miles to a height of more than 180 miles before it crashed as planned into the desert 250 miles down range.

Scramjets use atmospheric oxygen to burn hydrogen fuel. If such engines were fitted to commercial aircraft they could eventually cut the traveling time between Sydney and London to two hours.

Within a decade. Think of the economic impact of that one!

Scramjet Tests At Woomera

I always complain we don't have a proper space programme in Australia, but there's the scramjet research going on, which occasionaly surfaces in the headlines.

A supersonic jet engine known as a scramjet, which could dramatically reduce the time of air travel around the world, has been tested in South Australia's far north.

Seconds after the jet set off, there was a supersonic boom across the Woomera test range.

It travelled more than 300 kilometres into the air before crashing ten minutes later, 400 kilometres down the range.

The University of Queensland is heading an international team testing the scramjet technology, which travels up to 8,000 kilometres an hour - almost eight times the speed of sound.

Team leader Allan Paul says the flight went well but it will take several months to analyse the data they have collected.

He says the team is happy with the result so far.

"I haven't seen them on such a high for a long time," he said.

"It's been a hard couple of weeks, in fact it's been hard since Christmas, and the team has really responded well."

He says the launch went according to plan but there were a few tense moments.

"You're looking at it as it goes up, and you're worried if it's going to make it," he said.

"It's probably a very unnerving feeling actually."

Dr Paul says they should have some preliminary results by tomorrow.

That's kind of cool that the scramjet project is still going on.
What's really interesting is that JAXA have their own scramjet engine ready to be tested in Australia:

The test in Australia was the first of three flights planned for this year by the international Hyshot consortium.

Another Hyshot engine designed by the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (Jaxa) will be next, followed in June by an engine capable of reaching Mach 10 designed by the Australian Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO).

The success of the weekend's test spurred researchers from the University of Queensland to run a second scramjet test in South Australia this week.

Scramjets were first tested in 2001, but the trial failed as the rocket carrying the engine flew off course.

Hmm. That'ss interesting. I did see that Woomera was one of the places where JAXA did their experiments.

Hard To Do

...Rockets Of Any Size
After having seen the JAXA facilities and spoken to the folks who do rockets, I can appreciate how diffciult it actually can be to launch rockets. So when I noticed this, I thought it was worth posting.

March 25, 2006— The low-cost, built-from-scratch Falcon 1 rocket faltered a minute after liftoff on Friday, dashing the hopes of Internet entrepreneur Elon Musk that after four years and roughly $100 million, his creation would be spared the fate that awaits most debut rocket flights.

"We had a successful liftoff and Falcon made it well clear of the launch pad, but unfortunately the vehicle was lost later in the first-stage burn," Musk, the founder of California-based Space Exploration Technologies, wrote in a blog shortly after the 5:30 p.m. ET liftoff from a remote launch site in the Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific Ocean's Marshall Islands.

The cause of the failure was not known. Claimed in the accident was a $750,000 science satellite built by U.S. Air Force Academy cadets that was to monitor how space plasma disrupts communications and navigation satellite signals.

Musk, who made his fortune designing and selling the electronic services firms PayPal and Zip2, had said many times prior to the launch that it would take more than one failure to derail his plans to build and fly a family of low-cost, mostly reusable rockets.

At least the man is willing to try.
The Falcon rocket is powered by Liquid Oxygen and Kerosene. It is multi-staged and this version was to have two stages. If you read the article, they discuss a nine stage model.
Looking at the photo above, the control facilities seem awfully close to the blast off area...

Back From JAXA Part 2

Rocket Science Ain't Rocket Science
The old adage "it's not exactly rocket science" implies that Rocket Science is difficult. Well, it's Ballistics so it's not like the science of it is much harder than High School Physics. Even the engineering is something quite comprehensible. So why is rocketry so hard? It turns out that launching rockets is difficult because so many things have to be coordinatedd perfectly; so System Engineering as it is known is the bit in rocketry that is truly difficult.

Here's an example. The main engines of the HII-A rocket consists of Liquid Oxygen and Liquid Hydrogen engines. The explosive power is derived from controlled combustion of the LOX and Liquid H2, and this much is high school chemistry. The actual appartus of making and storing LOX and Liquid Hydrogen are also old chemical engineering problems. The fuels must be refrigerated to -150degrees celsius to keep them liquid.

The thing is, with rockets, the super-cooled liquid fuel has to be delivered to the fuel tank of the rocket on the launch pad without leaks and breakages. Organising it so that the rocket arrives for the launch window in time with the fuel in place to be poured in to the rocket's fuel tank takes a chunk of system enginnering, and in turn this is why you build a space center.

Tanegashima Space Center
The most remarkable aspect of the Tanegashima Space Center is how far from the centre of civilization it feels. If not for the constant references to the space center and its rockets, the township of Minamitane is one of the furthest outposts from Tokyo. The place is historic in its own way, forever linked ballistics as the place where the Portuguese brought the musket to Japan; and it is here ballistics gets a second breath in the story of Tanegashima.

Tanegashima Space Center houses the facilities where they do the final assembly of the rocket; do the launch; but also test engines and assemble satellites. It's a big sprawling complex built on one of the most beautiful shorelines.

Surprisingly, the staff at Tanegashima are young. If you're used to meeting middle-aged men running institutions in Japan, you will get a rude shock here. There are many young men and women involved in important tasks; they're not window dressing. They have their degrees in rocket engineering and they are filled with hopes and ambition for the space program. One gets a sense of dynamism and activity quite unlike the stodgy bureaucratic feeling one gets from dealing with the main JAXA office. These operatives mean business. At one point I felt I missed my calling - I should've done rocket engineering.

What Is JAXA Like?
This is strictly my experience and therefore my own observation:
JAXA as an organisation is still very young.
You talk to the PR department and mostly they are enthisastic. You talk to the people on the ground actually running the rocket systems and they are incredibly enthusaistic. Even the big boss of JAXA has a long term vision as to where Japan's space program should be going.

Alas the thing that lets JAXA down is the level of management that is still a holdover from NASDA. It's really hard to get them to understand how important Public Relations can be for a space program. So even with the help of the PR department, you end up hitting strange, arbitrary walls that are set up by people who would rather keep things simple in their own minds by saying 'no'. Unfortunately, that's not good enough when Discovery Channel is spending big bucks to give you a 50minute commercial of your wares.

Some departments are very happy to show you what they are worrking on> Others say irrational things like "we can show it to you but you can't shoot it."
Well, what's the good of that? It's that kind of weird response that makes you think, "how seriously do they take the media?"

Indeed , it's symptomatic of large organisations in Japan that they do really bad PR, so JAXA are not an exception when their PR department can't convince their department heads to show off their wares. While I sympathise with the actual PR people I encountered the long term outlook on it is not very encouraging. If anything, it seemed they were drawing the wrong lessons and conclusions.

Other than that, JAXA is a young, dynamic organisation doing amazing things.

Back From JAXA Part 1

Here's that Photo Again...

33 Days On The Road - What Did I Find?
It was a tough little road trip, hopping from island to island, covering 2 documentaries for a very big documentary company. We went from Sydney to Narita to Okinawa (via Nagoya), then to Tanegashima (via Kagoshima) where they have the Space Center, then to Nagoya (via Kagoshimaa once more) and onto Tsukuba (via Narita), and then back to Sydney from Narita.

So Which bits exactly were JAXA? All of it except for Okinawa and Nagoya - Nagoya is where Mitsubishi Heavy Industries build rockets for JAXA. JAXA scatters itself widely across the Japanese archipelago. They have observations stations in Okinawa, and they have high altitude engine test-firing facilities, north of Sendai.

JAXA is what the old NASDA and a sundry bunch of organisations has been rolled into in ordert o be a more unified organisation. In the wake of the HII Rocket program being shutdown, a total re-organisation took place. Installled at the head of the organisation was Keiichi Tachikawa and theoretically, the whole organisation is meant to have unified into one big space development agency.

The Launch
The HII-A No. 9 launch we saw on the 18th of February represents a milestone accomplishment in many areas for JAXA. The No.9 launch delivered the largest payload into orbit, and it was part of a double launch that happened within a month of the 23rd January launch of the No.8 vehicle. In other words, it was the first time rockets were assembled parallel to one another in the big Vehicle Assembly Building and wheeled out to launch one after the other.

A lot of emphasis was made by the publicity people that what wass significant in this process was how two rockets were launched in quick succession; much more so than the issue of payload. Rocketry, it turns out is not comlex in its concept or in its component parts. If anything theey use tried and tested materials and parts. What is truly cutting edge about any rocket technology lies in the system engineering aspect, managing the diverse technological needs that go into successfully organising and assembling for launch. At the critical stages, at 270 seconds from laucnh the system goes into full automatic. People take shelter in the blockhouse or over 3.2 kilometres away.

The Rocket
The HII-A Rocket is the successor to the HII rocket. The HI Rocket was a rocket made mostly of imported technology. So the HII was developed during the 1990s with fully domestic Japanese technology. The problem was it turned out to be a very complex machine with too many parts, which in turn meant it was a very expensive machine to fire. This meant it was more vulenrable to failure and so when the HII program was cancelled, a concerted effort was made to streamline the cost of the rocket as well as reduce the number of parts. The result is the HII-A rocket.

The HII-A rocket has far fewer parts than its predecessor. The most important 'part reduction 'took place in the black ring you see in the above ph0to. A quick way to tell apart the HII and HII-A is the 'interstage section'. The HII had a yellow metal ring. In the HII-A, it has now been replaced by a composite black material that has 80% fewer parts.

The payload of the HII-A rocket is 10 tons for Low Earth Orbit and 4 tonnes for Geostationary Orbit. In the future, they are hoping to make the HII-B rocket with up to 16.5 tons of payload to Geostationary Orbit.

The HII-A rocket is a 2 stage rocket with a main drive using a Liquid Oxygen and Liquid Hydrogen drive. In addition to the liquid fuel are the Solid Rocket Boosters and the secondary strap on boosters that fire solid rocket at launch. What makes the HII-A interesting is how the second stage engine is turned off and on during its flight. The rocket itself weighs in at 285tons, but the combined thrust of the first stage liquid fuel engine and the boosters is in the vicinity of 500 tons. With the HII-A rocket, Japan's aerospace lift capacity matches that of the ESA's Arianne 5, and the USA's Delta. What's remarkable about it is the cost with which they achieve their lift-offs. However, I'll leave that discussion for tomorrow.

From The Road

After a 12 day stay on Tanegashima Island, I have emerged from the IT Blackhole that has kept me from posting up these pictures.

I really have to knuckle down and sort through some photos and tell the tale of how I came to see Japan's HII-A Flight 9 launched into space. In the mean time, please enjoy these official pickies from JAXA.

By the way, here's a video clip I took.

REVISIONS IN NEED OF REVISING: WHAT WENT WRONG IN THE IRAQ WAR

This is a report from the Strategic Studies Institute. I've only started reading it and already it has won me over:

...critics also have neglected the larger lesson thatthere are certain limits to
what military power can accomplish. Forcertain purposes, like the creation
of a
liberal democratic societythat will be a model for others, military
power is a
blunt instrument,destined by its very nature to give rise to
unintended and
unwelcomeconsequences. Rather than “do it better next time,”
a better lesson
is“don’t do it at all.”

The full report is here.