ISS Astronauts Plan Emergency Spacewalk to Fix the Station’s A.C. | 80beats

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spacestationSaturday night just before 8 p.m. Eastern time, some 200 miles above the Earth’s surface, a circuit breaker tripped: No one on board the International Space Station is in danger, but the outpost is now one cooling loop down. NASA said in a statement that they are planning an emergency spacewalk to fix this part of the station’s cooling system later this week.

The cooling loop moderates the station’s temperature and regulates other station avionics controls, by keeping cooling ammonia circulating through it. Without any cooling system, the three Americans and three Russians currently on board might find conducting research difficult:

According to NASA figures, without thermal controls the ISS’s sun-facing side would roast at 250 degrees Fahrenheit (121 Celsius), while the outpost’s dark side would plunge to some minus 250 degrees Fahrenheit (-157 Celsius). A statement posted some years ago on NASA’s website suggested: “There might be a comfortable spot somewhere in the middle of the Station, but searching for it wouldn’t be much fun!” [AFP]

Besides the cooling loop, the malfunction also took down two of the station’s four gyroscopes, which are used to position the station, but one is already again up and running, and NASA says that three out of four is enough to operate the station for now.

Flight control has already given preliminary approval for a spacewalk later this week, the first of two walks to fetch repair supplies stored elsewhere on the station and install them. The walks will replace a scheduled spacewalk to install a power cable and platform for robotics work.

Although a final decision on a new spacewalk plan is still pending engineering and timeline analysis, the most likely scenario would call for an initial spacewalk no earlier than Thursday by [Doug] Wheelock and [Tracy] Caldwell Dyson to replace the Pump Module and structurally bolt it into place on the S1 truss, with an additional spacewalk by the duo two or three days later to mate fluid and electrical connections. [NASA]

NASA plans to vent any residual ammonia in the cooling loop’s lines (for the repair-astronauts’ protection) and says that the astronauts will perform the repairs no sooner than Thursday. A NASA TV briefing planned for 4 p.m. (Eastern time) today may give more details.

Related content:
80beats: Shuttle Astronauts Add the ISS’s Last Major Piece
80beats: “Interplanetary Internet” Will Soon Bring Twitter to the ISS
80beats: Strife on the Space Station: Russians Can’t Use American Toilet
80beats: Space Junk, Spacewalks, and Pee Trouble: News From the ISS
80beats: Russian Invasion of Georgia Imperils U.S. Access to Space Station
DISCOVER: 20 Things You Didn’t Know About… Living in Space

Image: NASA


Career Advice Needed

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Dear All,

I have completed my BE in Mechanical engineering and right now i have been working in a multinational organisation(a thermal power plant) as trainee engineer mechanical(boiler).

what i have seen the engineers doing here is planning outages , procurring spares, carrying ou

A Prize For Young Scientists Who Reach Out | The Loom

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A new prize from AAAS recognizes one of the most important things a scientist can do:

AAAS Early Career Award for Public Engagement with Science
Nomination Deadline: 15 October

The Award

The AAAS Early Career Award for Public Engagement with Science, established in 2010, recognizes early-career scientists and engineers who demonstrate excellence in their contribution to public engagement with science activities. A monetary prize of $5,000, a commemorative plaque, complimentary registration to the AAAS Annual Meeting, and reimbursement for reasonable hotel and travel expenses to attend the AAAS Annual Meeting to receive the prize are given to the recipient.

For the purposes of this award, public engagement activities are defined as the individual’s active participation in efforts to engage with the public on science- and technology-related issues and promote meaningful dialogue between science and society.

The award will be given at the AAAS Annual Meeting.

Eligibility

Nominee must be an early-career scientist or engineer in academia, government or industry actively conducting research in any scientific discipline (including social sciences and medicine). Groups or institutions will not be considered for this award. AAAS employees are ineligible. One scientist or engineer will be chosen to receive the award on an annual basis.

“Early career” is defined as an individual who has been in his/her current field for less than seven years and pre-tenure or job equivalent. Post-doctoral students are eligible for this award.

Nominee will have demonstrated excellence in his/her contribution to public engagement with science activities, with a focus on interactive dialogue between the individual and a non-scientific, public audience(s).

Types of public engagement activities might include: informal science education, public outreach, public policy, and/or science communication activities, such as mass media, public dialogue, radio, TV and film, science café, science exhibit, science fair, and social and online media.

Entries

All nominations must be submitted fully completed and postmarked on or before midnight, 15 October. Nominations may be mailed, faxed, or emailed to the AAAS Center for Public Engagement with Science and Technology.

Nominations may be made by AAAS affiliate organizations, universities, government agencies, media, research organizations, and individuals.

Prior nomination does not exclude a candidate from consideration in subsequent years.

The selection committee will include distinguished scientists, engineers, science communicators, and science popularizers named by AAAS. The decisions of the committee will be final.

During the award year, AAAS will expect the recipient will continue participating in public engagement with science activities and initiatives.

Nomination Procedures

You should provide: name, position, institution, professional address and e-mail, professional phone and fax, home address and home phone number of the candidate; name, position, institution, and professional address and phone of the nominator; a statement of the public engagement activities that form the basis for the nomination; at least two representative material samples or other documentation which illustrate or describe the candidate’s contribution; the candidate’s vitae; and the names of two supporting persons whom AAAS may contact for more information on the candidate and his/her contributions.

All materials submitted become the property of AAAS.

Submit

Please submit information to:

AAAS Center for Public Engagement with Science and Technology
Attn: Tiffany Lohwater
1200 New York Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20005
Phone: 202-326-8737
Fax: 202-789-0455
E-mail: tlohwate@aaas.org
Deadline

All materials must be received by 15 October.

[Prize site]


Sealing Air Flow and Pressure

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Dear All,

i have been using Bergemann long retractable type soot blowers but since very beginning we are facing too much cost of maintenance. often the lance bend inside the boiler. the reason of very frequent lance failures is still under investigation by me and insufficient sealing is one

A Hurricane Season Outlook and FAQ with Greg Holland | The Intersection

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greg holland

To more broadly inform the US public about the upcoming hurricane season, the Project on Climate Science this morning arranged a national radio satellite tour with Greg Holland, a hurricane expert with the National Center for Atmospheric Research and director of its Earth System Laboratory. Some of the shows were live, some were taped, but I was allowed to listen in on both.

The experience was very revealing, and provided a lot of perspective on the upcoming season. Some highlights:

The Atmospheric/Ocean Conditions: Holland explained that this year is shaping up a lot like 2005, the worst year on record. On a Westchester, New York show, he commented that “unfortunately, the conditions that are out there at present are very similar to what we observed in the lead up to Katrina.” In particular, Holland pointed to the very warm ocean (with sea surface temperatures at “all time record levels”) and the fact that we’re coming out of an El Nino, which suppresses hurricanes in the Atlantic. The current conditions do the opposite.

“I sure hope the forecasts are wrong, but forecasts are going anything from 14 up to the mid 20s for the number of storms this year,” Holland said.

The Influence of Global Warming: There has been massive debate over just how much hurricanes could change due to the changing climate. Many parameters could be altered, including average storm intensity, average storm numbers, standard storm tracks or regions of occurrence, and so forth.

On a South Carolina show, Holland admitted that when it comes to the frequency of storms, “there’s a lot of debate.” He said that while people like himself think the total numbers will go up, other experts think the opposite.

As far as intensity is concerned, though, Holland asserted that there is “no real debate…if there is warmer sea surface temperatures and all other things are equal, you will get on average more intense cyclones.” And he went further. Down the line due to climate change, Holland argued, he expects “a very substantial, perhaps even a doubling of the category 4 and 5 hurricanes, even if the total number may not change much.”

When it comes to climate impacts on hurricanes, one other factor that we often don’t talk about is precipitation. A warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, and that will surely show up in the hurricane rainfall tally. On the Westchester show, Holland said the current prediction is that hurricanes “will carry about 20 percent more rainfall due to global warming.”

Specific Vulnerabilities: On a radio satellite tour, different regions of course want to know how they in particular could be impacted by hurricanes. It varies, but there are some pretty big specific vulnerabilities.

Take New York City. As Holland told the Westchester show, a big enough storm surge “could completely shut the city down for a long period of time if it got into the subway and knocked out your communications.” This is one of the hurricane worst case scenarios for the U.S. that I detailed in my book Storm World. Every year, the possibility arises again. The odds may be low, but some day, it will really happen.

The Oil Slick. There were questions about what happens when cyclone meets slick, of course. Holland’s view was that it was a good news/bad news situation. He said a storm would actually mix up the slick, breaking it into smaller “globules” that would be more easily consumed by bacteria.

But of course, if a storm headed towards shore across the slick, its storm surge could also “drive some of the oil into the fragile wetlands, where it will be a lot harder to remove it.”

How Does This Affect the Average Citizen? On an Ocean City, Maryland show, Holland was asked what this means for the average person looking ahead to a rough year, or many rough years. He made two points. First, for those living in storm-prone areas, the best idea is to get ready now in case you have to evacuate–and then, if the forecasts turn out to be wrong and we have a calm year, “the worst that’s happened is you’ve cleaned around the house and you’ve got a nice plan together.”

More broadly, Holland said we have to get ready for many years like this one. ”These are the sort of conditions we’re going to have to put up with,” he said. We have to adapt to that. Not pretty, but probably not avoidable, either.


The Fine Handiwork and Impressive Bravery of Stone-Age Humans | Visual Science

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The browser you are currently using does not support the Discover photo galleries. Supported browsers include recent versions of Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer (version 7 or later), Google Chrome, and Apple Safari.

If you have any questions or feedback, please email webmaster@discovermagazine.com. Thank you for reading Discover, and we apologize for the inconvenience.

<p>Unfinished needle or a completed awl made of bone or antler dating from 12,000 to 18,000 years ago.</p><p> </p><p>Axheads from the late Neolithic period, about 5,000 years ago. These axheads were fitted with wooden handles and may have been used to clear trees, chop wood, or even dig and plant.</p><p> </p><p>The point on this flint was made between 30,000 and 25,000 years ago and still holds its edge. The bone fragment on the right, likely from a prey animal like reindeer, shows cut marks that may have come from a tool used to slaughter the animal.</p><p> </p><p>Top left: two polished stone axes from the late Neolithic period were found in Normandy. Bottom left: Fine points found at the same site in France were probably used in hunting or combat.</p><p> </p>

Impressive Physics Display

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From Geeks are Sexy Technology News:

Here's Newton's laws at work for your amusement once again.Warning: Do not, I repeat do not try this at home.For those of you who are not patient, the fun starts at 0:50.

Watch the video

Why Space Isn't Filled with White Holes

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From Technology Review RSS Feeds:

Black holes are among the most exotic of astrophysical objects and consequently one of the most deeply studied. White holes, on the other hand, are largely ignored by astrophysicists. So it's time, therefore, to change the balance with some deeper

The tiny moon with the long reach | Bad Astronomy

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When I was a kid, Saturn had one big, flat ring system divided up into maybe three or four broad sections separated by gaps, and that was it.

Turns out, we were wrong. Saturn has thousands of rings made up of billions upon billions of tiny ice particles. There aren’t just a handful of gaps, there are thousands of them, too, and there are moonlets in those gaps. Those tiny moons tug and pull on the rings, distorting them into weird and fantastic shapes. And "flat"? Not quite. The Cassini mission apparently delights in showing us just how wrong we were:

cassini_ringwaves

This image from Cassini shows Saturn’s broad A ring, the one you can see in small telescopes from Earth. On the right is the Encke Gap, a space carved out by the tiny moon Pan. On the left is the narrower Keeler Gap, where the even tinier moon Daphnis orbits Saturn. Daphnis is a lump, only about 9 kilometers (5.5 miles) across. But it has gravity, however feeble, and it’s enough to affect the rings. The waves you see just inside and outside the Keeler Gap are from Daphnis poking and prodding at the ring material. Stuff closer to Saturn (to the right) orbits faster than Daphnis, and stuff farther out (to the left) moves slower.

In the picture above, the ring particles move roughly from the bottom of the picture to the top. Remember, everything is in motion here. As the particles closer to Saturn pass the moon, they get tugged, and as the moon passes particles farther out, they get tugged too. This causes the ripples you can see in the rings.

Here is the same image, rotated and zoomed a bit for clarity:

cassini_ringwaves2

Man, that’s bizarre.

But it gets even weirder. The orbit of Daphnis is not exactly circular, nor is it exactly in the plane of the rings. It bobs up and down by a few kilometers (very roughly its own diameter) every orbit. This causes it to pull the ring particles out of the ring plane, and sometimes it pulls harder than other times. This motion and its effects are extremely complicated (as this technical paper outlines), but the cool thing is, Cassini shows us what happens.

This picture, taken when the Sun was shining straight along the edge of Saturn’s rings in 2009, shows Daphnis slightly out-of-plane of the rings, casting a long shadow on them. You can also see that the ring particles are also being pulled out of the plane; the waves cast shadows too!

What this and other pictures from Cassini are showing us is that the Universe isn’t all that simple. When we first look at something, we may get low-resolution, fuzzy pictures, and that means our understanding may be equally fuzzy. The closer we get, the harder we scrutinize, the more we learn… and in turn we find out that the Universe is more complicated, more interesting, and more beautiful than we first thought.

Tip o’ the Whipple Shield to Carolyn Porco (and for the link to the tech paper, too). Image credits: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Related posts:

- Saturn’s rings do the wave
- Like the fist of an angry god
- More Saturn ring awesomeness
- Ring shadowplay on a Saturn moon
- Ringless


Tamsin van Essen's "Contaminated" Ceramics

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From Neatorama:

British designer Tamsin van Essen has created ceramic cups that appear to have been colonized by various bacteria. Pictured is streptococcus. No matter how thirsty I was I couldn't be convinced to drink from that vessel . The raw clay for these cups was contamina

NDIR Sensor Calibration

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Hi

I am looking for help and information to calibrate a NDIR co2 gas sensor for temperature and pressure compensation using the beers law extension coefficients.I have found some limited information through going through the web.

This is straight through gas cell made in the lab wi

Ancient DNA and Norden | Gene Expression

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Genetics is now being brought to bear on whether there were non-trivial population movements in the prehistorical period. Or more precisely, a combination of genetics and archaeology, whereby the archaeologists retrieve and extract genetic material which the geneticists amplify and analyze. This has helped establish that European hunter-gatherers were not lactase persistent. This is totally unsurprising, but was a nice proof of principle. When it comes to ascertaining genetic relationships among populations, as opposed to specific traits whose genetic architecture is well established, it’s a bit trickier. Who knows how many population movements may have interposed themselves between the present and a particular period in the past from which you have samples?

A new paper in PLoS ONE reports findings which do little to clarify, though add weight to skepticism as to the definitiveness of earlier results, Genetic Diversity among Ancient Nordic Populations:

Using established criteria for work with fossil DNA we have analysed mitochondrial DNA from 92 individuals from 18 locations in Denmark ranging in time from the Mesolithic to the Medieval Age. Unequivocal assignment of mtDNA haplotypes was possible for 56 of the ancient individuals; however, the success rate varied substantially between sites; the highest rates were obtained with untouched, freshly excavated material, whereas heavy handling, archeological preservation and storage for many years influenced the ability to obtain authentic endogenic DNA. While the nucleotide diversity at two locations was similar to that among extant Danes, the diversity at four sites was considerably higher. This supports previous observations for ancient Britons. The overall occurrence of haplogroups did not deviate from extant Scandinavians, however, haplogroup I was significantly more frequent among the ancient Danes (average 13%) than among extant Danes and Scandinavians (~2.5%) as well as among other ancient population samples reported. Haplogroup I could therefore have been an ancient Southern Scandinavian type “diluted” by later immigration events. Interestingly, the two Neolithic samples (4,200 YBP, Bell Beaker culture) that were typed were haplogroup U4 and U5a, respectively, and the single Bronze Age sample (3,300–3,500 YBP) was haplogroup U4. These two haplogroups have been associated with the Mesolithic populations of Central and Northern Europe. Therefore, at least for Southern Scandinavia, our findings do not support a possible replacement of a haplogroup U dominated hunter-gatherer population by a more haplogroup diverse Neolithic Culture.

Here’s a review of an earlier paper on this topic. Here’s an important section from the discussion of the current paper:

…Given our small sample sizes from these crucial time periods further studies are certainly required. However, the frequency of Hg U4 and U5 declines significantly among our more recent Iron Age and Viking Age Danish population samples to the level observed among the extant Danish population. Our study therefore would point to the Early Iron Age and not the Neolithic Funnel Beaker Culture as suggested by Malmström et al. (2009)…as the time period when the mtDNA haplogroup frequency pattern, which is characteristic to the presently living population of Southern Scandinavia, emerged and remained by and large unaltered by the subsequent effects of genetic drift. In contrast to Hg U4, which is only found in the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age samples, Hg U5 was observed in ~9% (5/53) of the remaining ancient samples and identified at all sites except Kongemarken and Skovgaarde.

I wouldn’t put too much stock in these specific results. The sample sizes and representativeness issues are probably such that each new paper is going to change our assessment. But, I think the section which I emphasized points to a shift in the Zeitgeist. Until recently there’s been a very strong bias among historical geneticists to assume that the genetic variation is more strongly affected by deep time events, and that recent replacements and perturbations will have less impact. I think there were good reasons for this assumption, and still are, generalizing from broader patterns. But the over-extrapolation of the rule-of-thumb may have led to models which will soon be falsified in many specific instances.

On a slightly bittersweet note, ancient DNA will be able to answer questions about the origins of many circumpolar populations, but will have far less to tell us about societies and cultures further south, simply because of less favorable conditions for preservation. The main exception to this truism will presumably be desert societies. For example, Tutankhamun has been typed as of the R1b Y lineage.

Using a Delay Timer as an Off Delay Timer

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I was wondering if some body could tell how you would use an on delay timer as an off delay timer. I know how both timers work, I want to be able to use the on delay timer i have to function like the off delay timer. A circuit diagram would be handy cheers

Mystery Guest?

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Just a Monday morning curiosity question, who are the mystery guests? they outnumber us nearly 6 to 1. With 204 people logged in and only 34 with an identity, am I missing something?