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Prince Andrew’s accuser was asked to carry Epstein’s baby – Telegraph.co.uk

Posted on March 25, 2020 by Danzig

The Duke of Yorks accuser was asked to be a surrogate mother for convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, a new book has disclosed.

Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who claims she was trafficked to the UK to have sex with Prince Andrew, was allegedly asked by Epstein and Maxwell to carry his baby when she was 19-years-old. In return she would be taken care of for the rest of her life.

However, she instead escaped during a trip to Thailand, according to a book written by American lawyer Bradley Edwards - who has represented Epsteins victims.

She had already been involved in the sex cult for over two years when she was asked to bear Epsteins child, Mr Edwards claims in his book, Relentless Pursuit, which is being serialised in the Mail on Sunday.

He describes how Epstein and Maxwell allegedly came up with a proposal that turned her stomach and included signing a contract agreeing that the baby was not her own, but the legal child of Epstein and Maxwell.

Mr Edwards has represented Epsteins victims for 11 years and pursuing Epstein on their behalf became his life mission, he writes in his book.

He describes how Ms Giuffre Roberts was a striking 16-year-old with drive and a determination to improve herself when she was first approached by Maxwell in 1999 and given an envelope with directions to Epsteins address.

Mr Edwards writes that after arriving at the property, Maxwell instructed her on every aspect of how to perform a massage before Maxwell ended up stripping off all her clothes and telling Virginia to do the same. Epstein then sexually assaulted Virginia. Doesnt that feel good? he asked.

Ms Giuffre Roberts would later show the lawyer the envelope, as well as travel and hotel receipts charged to Epsteins card, as proof of some of her allegations.

Not long afterwards, Virginia showed me a photograph of herself, aged 17, wedged in between Maxwell and Andrew, Mr Edwards claims in his book.

It was two years later that Ms Giuffre Roberts was asked to carry Epstein and Maxwells baby. At that point, Mr Edwards writes, she knew she had to escape.

The lawyer alleges that it was on a trip to Thailand, where Ms. Roberts Giuffre was dispatched to interview a young girl, and let Epstein know if she was qualified, that she fled and met an Australian man. The pair then married and flew back to Australia, where she had three children.

Ms Roberts Giuffre, now 36, has claimed repeatedly that she was trafficked by Epstein to have sex with the Duke when she was aged 17 at Ms Maxwells home in Belgravia, London.

The Duke categorically denied her allegation during his Newsnight interview, insisting it simply didnt happen and that on the day in question he was at a Pizza Express in Woking.

He has also strongly denied having sex with Ms Giuffre Roberts in New York and on Epsteins private island in the Virgin Islands.

Earlier this month, The Telegraph revealed that Prince Andrew has hired Clare Montgomery QC, Britains most respected extradition lawyer, to fend off an FBI inquiry into his friendship with Epstein.

Ms Montgomerys clients have included Augusto Pinochet, Chiles former dictator and Nirav Modi, wanted for Indias biggest fraud. She has been described as the most formidable member of the bar.

2 Private Schools in the USVI are Using Our Conference Call Tools to Teach Students Remotely – State of the Territory News

Posted on March 25, 2020 by Danzig

St. Thomas Two private schools in the U.S. Virgin Islands will be using our newsroom conference call tools this week to teach students remotely. The Memorial Moravian School and the St. Peter and Paul Catholic School on St. Thomas have signed up to use our complimentary service as the coronavirus pandemic continues to affect the territorys businesses, schools, and central government.

Last week, we announced that we would begin sharing our conference call tools with teachers in the territory free of charge! On Sunday, the Virgin Islands Department of Health announced that there were now eleven new confirmed cases of COVID-19 bringing the total in the territory to seventeen. The Virgin Islands government had just six confirmed cases on Friday.

If you are a teacher assigned to K-12 classes in the U.S. Virgin Islands, you can use our conference call tools to teach your class remotely or to coordinate with fellow teachers and support staff.

Educators in the territory will be using the same tools the Mint Team and our network of partners use to work remotely on big projects and community initiatives.Among the subjects being tough by teachers who recently signed up are Geometry, Algebra, and Professional Development.

Were here to help You can visit sottvi.news/remote-classroom for more information or email product.manager@sottvi.news for assistance or troubleshooting. Schools throughout the territory remain closed after Governor Bryan made the order earlier this month to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.

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2 Private Schools in the USVI are Using Our Conference Call Tools to Teach Students Remotely - State of the Territory News

Adulting in the Beyond | Review of Extra Ordinary – Washington Examiner

Posted on March 25, 2020 by Danzig

Extra Ordinary (dir. Mike Ahern & Edna Loughman. 93 minutes. R)

If, as a general rule, horror movies lose their appeal as you grow up, horror comedies tend to get better for the same reason that so many horror movies become horror comedies as you grow up. Horror makes you say, This cant be happening. Adulthood makes you say, Yeah, but it is, and find a way to laugh in the face of doom and soldier on. Extra Ordinary, written and directed by Irish duo Mike Ahern and Edna Loughman, captures this paradigm and bleeds it dry for laughs.

The archetypal horror-comedy hero Peter Venkman in Ghostbusters, Jack Burton in Big Trouble in Little China, Ash Williams in Army of Darkness is too exhausted to be terrified, too disenchanted to be, well, enchanted. He meets unspeakable evil with a one-liner and a shrug (and it's always a he). Extra Ordinary takes this formula and gives it a feminine (feminist?) twist: Our protagonist is Rose Dooley (Maeve Higgins), a middle-aged, small-town drivers ed instructor who lives alone and subsists on takeout. Who could be world-wearier than that?

To look at, Rose is very ordinary indeed, but she possesses paranormal abilities known as talents, the banality of the term spoofing both The Shining and the bogus terms of art encountered in ghost-hunting TV shows. (Later in the film, a gloating will turn out to be precisely the supernatural phenomenon it sounds like: a goat, floating.) Rose can, like her deceased father, see, interact with, and yes, bust ghosts, but she has sworn never to do so again.

To the limited extent that Extra Ordinary is about anything other than ghoulish fantasy, emetic sight gags, and deadpan dialogue, it is about midlife disappointment, regret, and squandered talent. For Rose, all of the above hinge on her father, the paranormal expert Vincent Dooley (Risteard Cooper), whom we see in VHS clips of his hilariously low-budget TV show, Investigating the Extraordinary. Rose was responsible for his death, guilty of dadslaughter, as she calls it.

Rose is also lonely, as befits someone who mainly communes with the dead, until a blandly attractive widower named Martin Martin (Barry Ward) comes to her for driving instruction. He knows full well how to drive. Hes just heard it whispered that Rose could help someone with his problem: a wife who routinely commits domestic violence from beyond the grave. He needs an exorcist.

Roses desire to refuse the job is complicated by the sinister machinations of Christian Winter (Will Forte), a has-been rock musician bent on sacrificing a virgin to enable a comeback, and his wife, Claudia (Loves Claudia ODoherty). These two give the best comic performances of Extra Ordinary. Forte veers wildly and without warning between campy irritability and delirious fits of shrieking and cackling. Christians 70s mustache, his vaguely Carnaby Street clothing, and his lone Top 40 hit, Cosmic Woman, are perfectly suited to his tacky diabolism he reminds one of Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham, who famously died in a house once owned by Aleister Crowley.

And because fans of Love are so used to seeing ODoherty play clueless and overeager, its delightfully jarring to see her play Claudia, an ersatz Lady Macbeth who connives at getting free Chinese delivery and who keeps asking of the sacrificial virgin, Cant we just kill the bitch? (Not yet: The virgin must die beneath a blood moon.)

When Christians intended victim is accidentally and prematurely blown up while levitating above a pentagram, a gory gag that clashes nicely with the films essential sweetness, he needs to locate a new virgin. He settles on Martins daughter Sarah (Emma Coleman). This leads Rose and Martin into the films madcap-race-against-time component, which involves a series of hasty exorcisms, the copious vomiting of ectoplasm, and some versatile performances by Ward, who is pressed into being temporarily possessed by a half-dozen or so ghosts.

How all this resolves itself might not be hard for a dyed-in-blood horror fan to guess. Suffice to say it relies on the horror clich of the difficulty of finding a genuine virgin, which has been used in films such as The Wicker Man, Andy Warhols Dracula, Once Bitten, What We Do in the Shadows, and Jennifers Body. In this case, the reveal is a final piece of character development that gives Extra Ordinary what passes, in the circumstances, for an emotional spine.

Its worth stressing what a nostalgia trip this film is. It has a meticulously 80s feel, with an understated but ominous synth-heavy soundtrack reminiscent of Goblin, the prog-rock band that scored many of horror maestro Dario Argentos films, and cheesy quick cuts, including an inspired montage of every character (including a sinister bird) screaming in succession. The appearance of the Evil One is an intentionally goofy special effect that recalls the original Ghostbusters, a movie Rose hasnt seen or heard of this films sly way of denying its biggest influence. Extra Ordinary is most creative in the recurring clips of Vincent Dooleys TV show, complete with the noise and garbled audio of a degraded VHS tape. Children of the '80s will understand.

Adulthood is hard, even if you arent gifted with the talents, and the hardest thing about it is becoming the person youre supposed to be. Its a banal message, sure, but its enough of a message to keep audiences invested in Roses preposterous plight. Extra Ordinary is also a pleasure in its burlesque of satanism and the unhinged power hunger behind so much modern ambition. Christian and Claudia Winter may be willing to sell their souls for a cheap kind of fame and fortune. Rose, who stands in for the best of us, is satisfied with friends, family, cultivating her excellences, and (this being a horror movie, after all) getting laid.

Stefan Beck is a writer living in Hudson, New York.

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Adulting in the Beyond | Review of Extra Ordinary - Washington Examiner

NASA: 60 Years of Space Exploration | Space

Posted on March 25, 2020 by Danzig

NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, is the U.S. government agency responsible for leading the nation's explorations of space. Its mission is "to reach for new heights and reveal the unknown so that what we do and learn will benefit all humankind." Since its formation in 1958, NASA has taken to the skies both on and off Earth.

Today, NASA consists of 10 different centers spread around the country. But it got its start by scrapping together pieces from existing agencies.

As part of the International Geophysical Year (from July 1, 1957, to Dec. 31, 1958), a cooperative effort to gather scientific data about the Earth, President Dwight Eisenhower approved a plan to put into orbit a scientific satellite. The Soviet Union quickly announced its own intentions, and then surprised the world by launching Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite, on Oct. 4, 1957.

"This had a Pearl Harbor effect on American public opinion, creating an illusion of a technological gap and provided the impetus for increased spending on aerospace endeavors," NASA's history website says.

The United States wasn't far behind their Cold War rivals. After some setbacks and failed rocket launches, the first U.S. satellite, Explorer 1, reached orbit on Jan. 31, 1958. Not content to simply circle the Earth, Explorer 1 sought to study the planet and its environment.

"Explorer 1 was also a science mission," Willis Jenkins, the program scientist for NASA's Explorer Program, said on the agency's website. "This wasn't just launched to get a satellite up in space, it was meant to bring science data back down."

Explorer 1 contained experiments that helped to identify the Van Allen radiation belts that surround the planet.

On Oct. 1, 1958, the United States consolidated its space exploration operations under a new agency, NASA, which replaced the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), founded in 1915 to explore aeronautical research when airplanes were just starting to take flight. Also absorbed by NASA were Langley Research Center in Virginia and Ames Research Center in California, both still operational today. NASA also incorporated other science groups, such as the Jet Propulsion Laboratoryin Pasadena, California, and the Army Ballistic Missile Agency in Huntsville, Alabama.

Since then, NASA has launched a series of satellites, orbiters and landers to explore Earth, the moon, other planets and the distant reaches of space. [Space.com Topic: Space History Photos]

On May 25, 1961, only 20 days after Alan Shepard had become the first American to reach space, President John F. Kennedy told the United States, "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before the decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth."

With Kennedy's announcement, getting to the moon became NASA's priority. The Mercury and Gemini programs tested U.S. technology and human endurance in space. The Apollo program was designed to take the final steps toward the moon. There were challenges and setbacks, such as a fire that killed three Apollo 1 astronauts, but by 1968, the agency sent astronauts around the moon, with Apollo 8. On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong became the first human to set foot on the moon, famously declaring, "That's one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind."

The Apollo program continued until 1972, with 12 astronauts walking on the lunar surface over 6 landing missions.

Although humans had finished walking on the moon at least temporarily NASA continued to send them into space. In 1973, NASA's Skylab program sent three human missions to stay aboard a relatively small workshop orbiting the Earth. "The Skylab program also served as a successful experiment in long-duration human spaceflight," NASA's website says.

In 1975, NASA and the Soviet Union cooperated to achieve the first international human spaceflight, the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, which successfully tested joint rendezvous and docking procedures for spacecraft from the two nations.

On April 12, 1981, NASA launched Columbia, the first space shuttle. The shuttle fleet eventually added four more ships Atlantis, Challenger, Discovery and Endeavor as well as Enterprise, a test shuttle that never made it to space. Two ships were lost in explosions, Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003, but when the program concluded in 2011, it had launched 135 missions and put more than 300 astronauts into space. [Photos: The Milestone Space Missions Launched from NASAs Historic Pad 39A]

The United States began work on what would become the International Space Station (ISS) in 1984, with Russia and other international partners joining the venture in 1993. On Nov. 2, 2000, the first humans began to inhabit the ISS.

NASA headquarters are in Washington, D.C. Agency leaders there oversee activities conducted at the 10 research centers scattered around the country:

Additional resources

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Global Deep Space Exploration and Technology Market (2020 to 2030) – Analysis and Forecast – ResearchAndMarkets.com – Yahoo Finance

Posted on March 25, 2020 by Danzig

The "Global Deep Space Exploration and Technology Market: Focus on Subsystem, Technology Mode, Mission Type, Application, And End User - Analysis and Forecast, 2020-2030" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

According to this report the deep space exploration and technology market is expected to showcase a significant growth due to the increasing space budgets by various government agencies, rising demand for deep space exploration small satellites, the emergence of private players in the space sector, and huge investments made by them.

The Global Deep Space Exploration and Technology Market report projects the market to grow at a CAGR of 6.42% on the basis of value during the forecast period from 2020 to 2030. North America is expected to dominate the global deep space exploration and technology market with an estimated share of 62.45% in 2020. North America, including major countries such as the U.S., is the most prominent region for the deep space exploration and technology market. In North America, the U.S. is estimated to account for a major market share in 2020 due to the rising number of space exploration missions led by the country.

In addition, the growth in the deep space exploration and technology market is highly driven by the increasing number of missions planned by various space agencies. These missions aim at investigating various intended celestial bodies such as Earth's moon, Mars, Jupiter's moons, Saturn's moons, the Sun, and asteroids. The purpose of these missions is to understand the planet's atmosphere and properties as well as look for the possibility of life. These missions are expected to present an opportunity for the deep space exploration and technology market.

Key Questions Answered:

Market Dynamics

Market Drivers

Market Challenges

Market Opportunities

Companies Profiled

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/uzmhez

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200325005605/en/

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Global Deep Space Exploration and Technology Market: Focus on Subsystem, Technology Mode, Mission Type, Application, And End User – Analysis and…

Posted on March 25, 2020 by Danzig

NEW YORK, March 23, 2020 /PRNewswire/ --

The Global Deep Space Exploration and Technology Market Anticipated to be $54.71 Billion by 2030

Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p05877537/?utm_source=PRN

Key Questions Answered in this Report: What are the major forces that tend to increase the demand for the global deep space exploration and technology during the forecast period, 2020-2030? What are the major challenges inhibiting the growth of the global deep space exploration and technology market? Which are the key players in the global deep space exploration and technology market? What is the estimated revenue generated by the global deep space exploration and technology market by segments (subsystem, technology mode, application, mission type, and end user) in 2020, and what are the estimates for the time period 2020-2030? What are the industry trends in the global deep space exploration and technology market? How is the industry expected to evolve during the forecast period 2020-2030? What are the new strategies adopted by the existing market players to catalyze deep space exploration? What are the major opportunities that the deep space exploration and technology stakeholders foresee?

Global Deep Space Exploration and Technology Market Forecast, 2020-2030

The global deep space exploration and technology market is gaining widespread importance owing to increasing efforts from the national space agencies as well as their increasing investment for deep space exploration missions. Development of technologies such as AI and emergence of private entities in the space sector are some of the factors that may propel the market growth.

Expert Quote

"The rising demand for global deep space exploration technologies, namely artificial intelligence, solar electric propulsion, navigation, and guidance technology, for supporting deep space missions is forcing the key stakeholders to develop products with advanced technologies. Moreover, the continuous efforts of the space agencies as well as the leading space companies is expected to drive the market."

Scope of the Global Deep Space Exploration and Technology Market

The purpose of the market analysis is to examine the deep space exploration and technology market outlook in terms of factors driving the market, trends, technological developments, and competitive benchmarking, among others.

The report further takes into consideration the market dynamics and the competitive landscape along with the detailed financial and product contribution of the key players operating in the market.

Market Segmentation

The deep space exploration and technology market is further segmented on the basis of technology mode, application, subsystem, mission type, end user, and region.While highlighting the key driving and restraining forces for this market, the report also provides a detailed study of the industry.

The report also analyzes different applications that include moon exploration, transportation, orbital infrastructure, mars exploration, and others (asteroid missions).In the technology mode segment, the market is segmented into rockets, landers, robots, satellites and, orbiters.

In the subsystem segment, the market is segmented into propulsion system, navigation and guidance system, and command and control system.

The deep space exploration and technology market is segregated by region under four major regions, namely North America, Europe, APAC, and Rest-of-the-World. Data for each of these regions (by country) is provided in the market study.

Key Companies in the Global Deep Space Exploration and Technology Market

The key market players in the global deep space exploration and technology market include Airbus Defence & Space, Lockheed Martin, The Boeing Company, Northrop Grumman, Thales Alenia Space, MAXAR Technologies, Sierra Nevada Corporation, SpaceX, Astrobotic, and Blue Origin, among others.

Countries Covered North America U.S. Canada Europe The U.K. Germany France Russia Rest-of-Europe Asia-Pacific China Japan India Rest-of-Asia-Pacific Rest-of-the-World Latin America Middle East Africa

Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p05877537/?utm_source=PRN

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Global Deep Space Exploration and Technology Market: Focus on Subsystem, Technology Mode, Mission Type, Application, And End User - Analysis and...

Parts of space exploration on hold due to Coronavirus – WTSP.com

Posted on March 25, 2020 by Danzig

From studying our planet, to space flight, to astronomy, everything we know about space exploration seems limitless. But not even the wonderful world of space can be immune to the coronavirus.

Just like the rest of the world, thousands of NASA employees are working from home, and already have been since mid-March. But a change in workflow is not the only impact seen within the space industry.

A big part of working towards the future comes with planning, most of which involve the great minds of the world coming together in one room. However, cancellations of multiple astronomy conferences took events off the table.

Education and research in the field of astronomy have also had a wrench thrown in plans -- not only for those looking to pursue a degree in this field but also for those making great strides in future projects and missions. Everything from networking, in-person meetings, to hands-on training, has quickly turned into a remote/online method.

RELATED: VERIFY: What are plasma treatments for COVID-19?

RELATED: 17 days: Thats how long the coronavirus survived on infected cruise ship surfaces, CDC says

As for future missions, NASA officials report that the mission surrounding the James Webb Space Telescope has been put on hold as California follows restrictions to help slow the spread of COVID-19. This telescope will aim to further expand the discoveries of the Hubble Telescope with longer wavelength coverage and improved sensitivity. And this is just one mission. Another revolves around NASA's next Mars mission, a launch that was scheduled this summer to carry the rover, Perseverance.

The concept behind postponing any aircraft-based science flights is that while some tasks can be tackled remotely, building a spacecraft to carry these experiments, cannot.

Down the road, well learn more about the impacts to future science experiments and space exploration, as a whole.

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Parts of space exploration on hold due to Coronavirus - WTSP.com

Commentary | Space and coronavirusany connection? – SpaceNews

Posted on March 25, 2020 by Danzig

It is obvious the tiny novel coronavirus is giving and will continue to give all of us a very hard time for a prolonged period.

When news of the COVID-19 outbreak and of its obvious severity first emerged, we may all have thought we were in for a hard time but I dont think any of us realized the truly massive impact this virus would have across Europe and the entire world. And it was just a matter of time before we in the space sector went from seeing the virus as a potential danger forcing us to concentrate on our most critical tasks to a disease affecting individuals in a very real and dramatic way.

Within ESA, this stage has now been reached with tens of people having the symptoms, at least two confirmed by testing. Our COVID-19-infected colleagues are apparently on their way to recovery.

Unfortunately, we have to expect that these were not the last cases of colleagues being infected. We set up a general ESA crisis group which meets daily (by Skype) to review the latest developments and take the necessary steps to adapt to the changing situation.

We have to accept that the spread of novel coronavirus is one of the negative consequences of globalization and the global mobility of people it brings with it. Of course, space alone cannot solve this problem; the power of the tiny virus is greater than all our combined efforts. However, at the same time, it does provide yet another example of the need for global cooperation. Modern communication technologies, with space in a supporting role, can play their part by disseminating information on the development of the pandemic and transmitting recommendations or instructions to be followed.

COVID-19 also clearly illustrates some general rules that apply when dealing with the unknown. For the purpose of this illustration it is useful to draw a parallel between COVID-19 and climate change:

The first step is DISCOVERY and IDENTIFICATION

In the case of climate change, the key discovery was on planet Venus and was made as a result of space exploration: namely, that Venus has a much stronger greenhouse effect than the Earth. Thus, understanding and identification were based on the discovery of an unknown aspect. Subsequently, the main influencing factors had to be found. The same thing happened with the coronavirus. No one was aware of its existence when the first people presented symptoms. Through discovery and identification, the root cause of the illness was detected.

The second step is MONITORING

For COVID-19 and climate change alike, observation of their development is of the utmost importance.

The third step is RAISING AWARENESS

To be able to counteract the threats posed both by COVID-19 and by climate change, we must begin by informing the public and raising awareness. Interestingly, when it comes to both of these phenomena, large numbers of people believe them to be nothing but a hoax.

Only then can we go for MITIGATION

Mitigation measures for COVID-19 and climate change are of a very different nature, but what they have in common is that only global solutions stand any chance of being successful.

Space can help with technologies to reduce emissions (navigation, telecommunication, solar power, fuel cells) as a means of counteracting climate change and may also be able to help mitigate some of the worst effects of COVID-19 because of what we know about how to organize quarantine or our experience with protective clothing for use in satellite production clean rooms.

I hope that all readers, their families and their loved ones have been able to find the best possible circumstances in which to cope with what has emerged.

I know that this must be very challenging and that it will take some time for everyone to become accustomed to these unique circumstances. Trying to telework in an apartment with schools closed and front doors locked is exceptionally difficult.

At the same time, this huge upheaval leaves many understandably deeply concerned about the economic impact they may be facing personally. I hope that many of them, like me, will have drawn comfort from witnessing the massive interventions announced by governments across the world, aimed at ensuring the global economy suffers as little short and long-term damage as possible.

Jan Woerner is the director general of the European Space Agency.

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Commentary | Space and coronavirusany connection? - SpaceNews

Rick Ambrose, EVP of Lockheed Space Segment, Named to 2020 Wash100 for Driving Satellite Capabilities, Future Lunar Missions and Space Exploration -…

Posted on March 25, 2020 by Danzig

Rick Ambrose

Executive Mosaic is honored to present Rick Ambrose, executive vice president of the space business at Lockheed Martin, as an inductee into the 2020 Wash100 Award for driving the companys satellite capabilities as well as the nations upcoming lunar and space exploration missions.

This marks the fifth overall Wash100 Award for Ambrose. Hes also received this honor for the last four consecutive years. Ambrose won a 2019 Wash100 Award for leading the improvement of space technologies, including utilizing the cloud for space missions.

Under Ambroses leadership, Lockheed Martin secured a potential $4.6 billion indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity (IDIQ) contract from NASA in Sept. 2019 to produce six Orion spacecraft to transport astronauts to the moon.

This contract clearly shows NASAs commitment not only to Orion, but also to Artemis and its bold goal of sending humans to the Moon in the next five years, said Ambrose.

The Orion Production and Operations contract includes a $2.7 billion initial order for three spacecraft for Artemis III to V lunar missions and an additional $1.9 billion for three vehicles in fiscal year 2022 to support Artemis VI through VIII missions.

This contract secures Orion production through the next decade, demonstrating NASAs commitment to establishing a sustainable presence at the Moon to bring back new knowledge and prepare for sending astronauts to Mars, NASA Administrator and fellow Wash100 award recipient Jim Bridenstine said in a statement published Tuesday.

In Jan. 2020, Lockheed Martin announced that Pony Express 1, the companys first smart satellite, had launched aboard its Tyvak 6U spacecraft. The upgraded satellite has integrated technology that will allow the company to conduct more thorough tests in-orbit.

"Early on-orbit data show Pony Express 1 is performing its important pathfinding mission very well. Lockheed Martin's HiveStar technology on board will give our customers unparalleled speed, resiliency and flexibility for their changing mission needs by unlocking even greater processing power in space," said Ambrose.

More specifically, Ambrose also had an interview later that month with Yahoo Finance regarding the current challenges of the space market and the upcoming manned lunar mission to return to the moon in the next five years. He believes that we have the capability to complete our current lunar mission, but we have to act quickly and reuse a lot of systems that we have today.

When asked about the national security risks posed by Chinas satellite projects, Ambrose said that, I like to put it in different framing as not a space race, but for space to be viable, it has to be a vibrant marketplace, like any other industry. Theres 75 space-faring nations today. And as we move forward, supply chains, competitors, for it to be vibrant, we have to have that level of competition, he added.

Executive Mosaic congratulates Lockheed Martin and Rick Ambrose for his 2020 Wash100 Award. Ambrose has accumulated a lot of experience across his 40 years in the defense, aerospace and space industries. His latest Wash100 Award win continues to demonstrate the level of vision and success that Ambrose has been able to achieve with the company and for the GovCon sector.

About The Wash100

This year represents our sixth annual Wash100 Award selection. The Wash100 is the premier group of private and public sector leaders selected by Executive Mosaics organizational and editorial leadership as the most influential leaders in the GovCon sector. These leaders demonstrate skills in leadership, innovation, achievement, and vision.

Visit the Wash100 site to learn about the other 99 winners of the 2020 Wash100 Award. On the site, you can submit your 10 votes for the GovCon executives of consequence that you believe will have the most significant impact in 2020.

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Rick Ambrose, EVP of Lockheed Space Segment, Named to 2020 Wash100 for Driving Satellite Capabilities, Future Lunar Missions and Space Exploration -...

Egyptian Space Agency Sign Cooperation Protocol With French Space Agency – Space in Africa

Posted on March 25, 2020 by Danzig

The Egyptian Space Agency (EgSA) has signed a bilateral space cooperation protocol with the French Space Agency (CENS) during a recently-held joint workshop in Cairo themed: Egypt-France Partnership and Cooperation in Space Science and Technology.

Dr Mohamed Elkoosy, CEO of EgSA and Mr Jean-Yves Le Gal, President of CNES, in the presence of His Excellency Minister Khaled Abdel Ghaffar, Egypts Minister of Scientific Research and Higher Education, signed the cooperation protocol for satellite developments, training and exploration of outer space, according to a media release by EgSA.

Commenting on the new partnership, Abdel Ghaffar said, the protocol is very important for cooperation between Egypt and France in the field of space science and technology. There has been fruitful cooperation in the past in many fields between Egypt and France.

The French Space Agency is considered the second most important space agency in the world and this is an opportunity that we gain experiences through this protocol from them, and this is not the first time that we cooperate with France, and the French Space Agency offered cooperation with Egypt in the manufacture of a satellite, training and outer space exploration, ElKoosy said.

Read: Egypt To Launch Two Experimental Satellites Ahead Of A Planned NGEO Constellation

Jean-Yves Le Gal commended Egypts leadership in Africa and applauded the North African countrys effort in hosting the African Space Agency. He described Egypt as the gateway to Africas emerging space endeavours while noting that the recent cooperation is not the first bilateral space cooperation between both nations; Egypt had earlier collaborated with France in launching the NileSat communications satellite programme.

Jean-Yves Le Gal invited EgSA CEO and his team to France and to discuss further cooperation in satellite developments between the two countries. Such cooperation, according to him, will be beneficial to the African Space Agency which will be hosted in Egypt.

Egypts space sector is growing rapidly with renewed government commitment to develop and domesticate space capabilities. The government on March 5 announced a 10-year National Space Programme aimed at developing indigenous capabilities in satellite development, applications in space weather, Earth observation and climate risk mitigation, the growth of the nations space industry.

Read: Peek Into Egypts Growing Capacity In Space And The Approved 10-year National Space Program

Egypt plans to collaborate with countries that have established space capabilities to achieve the goals set in the new national space programme. Signing bilateral cooperation with France, a look-time ally in Egypts space endeavours, fits into the goal contained in the new space plan.

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Egyptian Space Agency Sign Cooperation Protocol With French Space Agency - Space in Africa

Acclaimed time-loop exploration adventure Outer Wilds is heading to Steam in June – Eurogamer.net

Posted on March 25, 2020 by Danzig

As Epic Games Store exclusivityends.

Developer Mobius Digital's wonderful sandbox space exploration adventure Outer Wilds (which was named Eurogamer's favourite game of 2019, don't you know) will be waving goodbye to Epic Games Store exclusivity and hello to Steam on 18th June.

Outer Wilds, if you've not yet had the pleasure, casts players as intrepid adventurers itching to explore the gorgeously compact solar system spinning endlessly above their heads. It's a dreamily realised, deliciously off-kilter place, with its striking, often surreal planets gradually evolving in unexpected ways as time progresses in-game.

Thanks to violent celestial calamity, however, the entire solar system constantly resets every 20 minutes, sending players all the way back to the start, albeit with a headful of crucial new knowledge collected on their previous adventures to the stars. The idea, then, is to slowly pick apart the cosmos' secrets, using previous learnings to be in the right place at the right time, and perhaps even avert disaster when the dying sun goes supernova next time around.

Eurogamer's Christian Donlan was smitten enough with Outer Wilds' intergalactic delights to award it a Recommended badge in his review last year, and its charms ultimately won over the rest of the team, sufficiently so that it was crowned our favourite game of 2019.

"Outer Wilds is astonishing," enthused Donlan once more in his end-of-year write-up, "in an era in which you'd think that games would be running out of ways to astonish people.

"It gives you a clockwork solar system filled with planets whose evocative names are matched by dynamic, tempestuous, mysterious surfaces. It gives you addled, oxbow interiors filled with secrets, with a trail to follow. It gives you physics and memory and logic and sweetness and, in amidst the emptiness, a sense of camaraderie, of belonging to something folksy and pine-scented and cobbled-together with craft and will."

Those planning to venture forth and uncover Outer Wilds' ancient mysteries and long-forgotten secrets through Steam on 18th June can add it to their wishlist now.

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Acclaimed time-loop exploration adventure Outer Wilds is heading to Steam in June - Eurogamer.net

The Songs (and Sounds) of Space with Steven Drozd & The Flaming Lips – Via Satellite

Posted on March 25, 2020 by Danzig

And now for something completely different! Steven Drozd, multi-instrumentalist and songwriter with the world-famous Oklahoma City-based rock band, The Flaming Lips joins us on On Orbit for a discussion about how space and technology has influenced not only his music, but of the music of a generation.

Over the course of their nearly 37-year existence, the Flaming Lips have drawn inspiration for their music from the most fascinating and unique corners of science fiction, as well as some of the most important moments in space exploration history. Steven talks about how the NASA Moon landing, Voyager program, Mars mission, visual artist Moebius, David Bowie, the films 2001: A Space Odyssey and Logans Run, and composers Gustav Holst, Gyrgy Ligeti, and Igor Stravinsky all helped shape the Flaming Lips signature sound. We even discuss the musical instruments and tools that Steven used to recreate the space environments in his songs.

Escape the daily pandemic news for a moment and enjoy this conversation about the songs and sounds of space!

This episode also features samples of Flaming Lips songs, which are available through Warner Brothers, on all streaming services, online and retail record stores. The bands new album, American Head, will be released this summer. For more information on the band, visit flaminglips.com.

This episode of On Orbit is sponsored by the Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (or SEDS). SEDS is a non-profit that empowers young people to participate and make an impact in space exploration. Thank you so much to SEDS and all of their members for supporting this episode of On Orbit.

The Songs (and Sounds) of Space with Steven Drozd & The Flaming Lips - Via Satellite

The New Space Race – BFPG

Posted on March 25, 2020 by Danzig

Half a century since the Apollo 11 moon landing, space continues to be one of the foremost areas of geopolitical expansion and the projection of national capabilities. The UK is not alone in launching an ambitious space strategy: in November 2019, NATO foreign ministers recognised space as a new operational domain for the establishment of international governance and infrastructure. As Global Britain becomes a reality, space and the new space race will become a key frontier for the UKs redefinition of its role in the world.

But with space becoming increasingly important in many ways both in terms of developing new technology and in providing a new frontier for development and research a new space race, of sorts, appears inevitable. Dr Alice Bunn, Director of International Programmes at the UK Space Agency, noted this at the BFPGs recent event on the future of UK foreign policy in space, arguing that were coming back full circle (Donald) Trump is laying out his plans for boots on the moon and China is showing huge capabilities. We are coming back to a more competitive space.

But the new space race wont be as binary as the US-Russia Cold War contest to be the first to put man on the moon of the 60s. For example, both Dr Bunn and Liz Seward, Senior Strategist for Airbus Europe pointed to the capabilities of India which recently successfully launched an earth observation spy satellite. The new satellite can take high-resolution images during any time of the day, even under cloudy conditions, which will boost Indias all-weather surveillance capabilities.

Since the original space race of the 1960s, the world has changed in major ways. What back then was a battle for space supremacy between two competing ideologies, now incorporates not only governments around the world, but individuals and organisations. Elon Musk, soon after his company SpaceX launched the most powerful working rocket in the world into space launching a Musk-owned Tesla into orbit said: We want a new space race. Races are exciting. According to John Logsdon, founder of the Space Policy Institute: SpaceX has challenged the traditional launch industry in the United States and in Europe and in China and in Russia.

Space reflects more than the increased ability of billionaires to launch rockets into space its a microcosm of the ever-changing balance of power back down on Earth. Taking Brexit as an examle, the panellists at our recent event noticed that whilst the UKs withdrawal from the European Union has not magically opened doors for the UK space sector, it has massively increased the political will to ramp up our capabilities in space. As I wrote in a previous BFPG blog on space, the Conservative Party made a pledge to establish the UKs first Space Command in their December 2019 general election manifesto, and several Ministers have since made calls for the UK to embrace space as a new frontier in foreign policy. Spaceports have been proposed, and plans for new satellite systems drafted.

But that blog also noted that the comments made by Dr Bunn and Liz Seward on the idea that the new space race will not be binary is already proving true. Certainly, the UKs ambition is being matched across Europe. Sweden, for example, has committed to starting rocket launches from Kiruna by 2022. Norway aims to beat that and has 2020 in its sights. Portugal matches the UKs space ambitions and aims to open a spaceport in the Azores. France, Germany and Italy all spend a substantial amount more than the UK does on space exploration.

50 years since the first moon landing, space still ignites the imagination of millions around the world. As the global economy grows and becomes more cooperative, the space race is changing but its still there. With individuals, governments, organisations and more involved in the rapidly developing sector, Britain can have a huge role to play in writing the rulebook and convening exciting new coalitions.

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The New Space Race - BFPG

MasterClass is launching free, live Q&A sessions with big shots in their respective industries – TechCrunch

Posted on March 25, 2020 by Danzig

MasterClass is known for selling access to pre-recorded online classes by a long list of people who are among the best at what they do, from tennis great Serena Williams to writer David Sedaris to chef Thomas Keller.

More recently, however, the company added live Q&A sessions with these same stars as a member benefit, and now, for the foreseeable future, its opening these sessions to non-members, too. Its the San Francisco startups way of making itself more accessible to a broader audience that perhaps cant rationalize paying $90 per class or $180 for a yearly all-access pass, especially in this increasingly grim market.

The first free session streams live on Wednesday at noon PT from MasterClasss site and will feature Chris Voss, who was once the lead international kidnapping negotiator for the FBI. Voss had earlier created a module for MasterClass on the art of negotiation, and hell be talking to whomever wants to tune in with the help of a moderator who will be asking questions that have been submitted in advance by students.

Its just one of a bunch of such live Q&A sessions that will be made available, according to MasterClass CEO David Rogier, who we chatted with Friday afternoon and who half-kiddingly describes Vosss mission as partly to help families that are stuck at home to better negotiate who is going to use the big-screen TV at any one time (though more broadly the idea is to teach empathy).

Its a small step from MasterClass, which separately gives away 130,000 all-access passes each year to organizations in need and has committed to giving away an addition 200,000 of these passes this year. (Its opening up applications to these passes soon to organizations that can apply on its website, says a spokeswoman.)

Seemingly, MasterClass could lean in even further while much of America, and the rest of the globe, is trapped at home and looking for both entertainment and high-quality educational content.

In the meantime, Rogier is quick to note that MasterClass has a variety of kid-friendly content thats instructive if best consumed with parental supervision.

Among the now 80 classes available through the site including new classes by interior designer Kelly Wearstler, a class on self expression and identity by RuPaul, and Gabriela Cmara teaching Mexican cooking are classes, for example, by Neil deGrasse Tyson, who walks viewers through his take on scientific thinking and communication. Another segment stars Doris Kearns Goodwin, whose class centers on U.S. presidential history.

Other courses recommended by Rogier himself include Penn and Tellers class on the art of magic; a class on space exploration by retired astronaut and former Commander of the International Space Station, Chris Hadfield; and, for older kids who might be trying to make sense of the world right now, a class by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman on the economy.

As for how five-year-old MasterClass was doing before the world changed, Rogier declines to share specific growth stats, merely describing its numbers as great. He also notes that MasterClass is now available not only via its website and app but on the big screen through Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV.

Its also rolling out Android TV and Roku soon.

Pictured above: Former FBI hostage negotiator Chris Voss.

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MasterClass is launching free, live Q&A sessions with big shots in their respective industries - TechCrunch

The Next 10 Years of Planetary Exploration – The Planetary Society

Posted on March 25, 2020 by Danzig

Preparations at NASA are underway for creation of the next planetary science decadal survey, a roadmap intended to guide exploration of our solar neighborhood from 2023 to 2032. Six scientists, each considering a different world or class of objects, will share their thoughts and hopes. The Planetary Societys Emily Lakdawalla offers fun and fascinating science education suggestions for housebound families. Some lucky (?) listener will be getting a special message from Bruce and Mat if he or she wins the new Whats Up space trivia contest.

Bruce and Mat will record an outgoing message for your phone, if you dare.

Who was the first person to do a deep space EVA (extravehicular activity or spacewalk)? Deep space is defined as beyond low Earth orbit.

The Chandrasekhar limit is the maximum mass of a stable white dwarf star. In solar masses, what is the approximate value of the Chandrasekhar limit?

The winner will be revealed next week.

What is the second largest planetary moon in our solar system that orbits retrograde? (Neptunes Triton is by far the largest.)

Our solar systems second largest moon orbiting in retrograde is Phoebe at Saturn.

Mat Kaplan: [00:00:00] Planning the future through NASA's decadal survey, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome. I'm Mat Kaplan of The Planetary Society with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. They are intended to guide NASA's science and nearly the entire scientific community believes they are essential. As we approach formulation of the next decadal survey for planetary science, we'll survey the solar system through the eyes of six scientists. Like the rest of us, Emily Lakdawalla is learning to deal with the challenges of these strange times. My colleague is uniquely qualified to recommend ways to keep our minds and the minds of our children wandering the universe, even as we stay within our homes. She'll join us right after The Downlink headlines.

We'll close as always with Bruce Betts and What's Up. You'll get the chance to win a [00:01:00] personalized message from Bruce and me, if you want it. Here's this week's sample of the mission updates collected by Planetary Society editorial director Jason Davis for The Downlink. Like the rest of the world, the space community is being affected by COVID-19. All NASA employees except mission essential personnel are working remotely. Europe has taken similar measures, suspending its launches, even Buzz Aldrin is quarantined at home. It's unclear how severely the pandemic will affect upcoming mission schedules, but NASA officials say at least one is still on schedule for now, the Perseverance Mars Rover. Sadly, work on the James Webb Space Telescope has been halted by the pandemic.

There are signs that NASA's latest efforts to save the heat flow probe aboard the Mars InSight Lander may be working. The self-hammering instrument known as the mole has unsuccessfully been [00:02:00] trying to bury itself since March of last year. Engineers are now using InSight's robotic scoop to press down on top of the mole while it hammers. And when NASA astronauts make their first flight to the lunar surface as part of the agency's Artemis program, currently scheduled for 2024, they won't be making a pit stop at the Gateway, a small yet to be built lunar space station. NASA officials say they are still committed to building the Gateway later, but that it is no longer in the so-called critical path for the first moon landing, not counting Apollo of course.

More news and other great features are waiting for you online at planetary.org/downlink. You can also sign up to get The Downlink delivered to your inbox each week for free. Here's our solar system specialist, Emily.

Emily, thanks for joining me, uh, and this is such a critical time to be doing this. Of course, we are both doing it from home. [00:03:00] I know you're there with your daughters, uh, attempting to keep them busy and stimulated. My wife just left to, uh, go take care of our grandson while our, uh, our daughter works from home, and we're all looking at the same challenge. Those of us who are working with children and many of us, uh, [laughs] we're trying to keep our own minds busy. This is something you've given a lot of thought to I know over the years and it now seems more important than ever.

Emily Lakdawalla: Yes. Uh, it's certainly an interesting challenge for a lot of us to try to maintain our jobs and maintain our children's education, and maintain all of our sanity while we're stuck at home here.

Mat Kaplan: [laughs]

Emily Lakdawalla: Uh, we're actually doing pretty well. My daughters are older now. They're 13 and 10. The 13-year-old's, uh, schooling has transitioned seamlessly online. She's just going, uh, right along with all of her classes. The fifth graders, not so much, but she does have work to do every day. And then she is actually very good at keeping herself busy. But we all want to enrich our lives with science. We're all a little bored staring at the same four walls all day. So, let me give you a couple of ideas for [00:04:00] things you can do to keep the kids and yourself entertained, and then I can, uh, give you some suggestions for how to guide you in making your own activities up for your kids.

So first of all, uh, let's talk about just exploring museums from home. Most of the great museums around the world are really acting fast to put a lot of their exhibit materials online. Um, they've been doing this for years and years and now they're just foregrounding it all. And of course I'm gonna highlight the National Air and Space Museum whose two museums are now closed to the public, but they have something called Air and Space Anywhere where they have a, a single website that's a portal into all of their great online offerings. So you can go explore, uh, the United States' vast collections of space paraphernalia, aerospace, airplanes, spaceships, tours, uh, artifacts, all kinds of interesting things to look at and activities to do.

Another great activity, if you're interested in studying planets, is to study your own planet. And the Washington DC [00:05:00] Capital Weather Gang has something called Weather School for kids at home that they're operating off their Facebook page and they're encouraging children and their parents to go out and make observations of the world around them, of the changing weather, and those kinds of observations, they're science, it's the very first step into understanding how to make observations on other planets. So that's a really fantastic activity to do with your kids and it gets them outdoors as well. And observing how each day is different from the next day, which I think is really helpful right now when all the days seem to be blending together.

Mat Kaplan: [laughs]

Emily Lakdawalla: Um, the last ones, both, uh, more relaxed and I think really super fun, and that's something called Story Time From Space, where actual astronauts on the space station read books aloud while they are floating through the space station, and in different parts of the space station. The books that they read, a lot of them are picture books suitable for younger children, but they read middle school books as well. So, um, really kids of all ages and honestly even adults, uh, can really [laughs] enjoy [00:06:00] the astronauts, uh-

Mat Kaplan: [laughs]

Emily Lakdawalla: ... reading their books from station. Some of them are better reader than others, but it's all just wonderful. And periodically you'll see another astronaut floating around or, or hear pe-, hear cosmonauts talking in Russian in the background, and that's really fun.

The last couple of suggestions I have are back on The Planetary Society's website, planetary.org. A more passive, but really inspiring thing you can do is to just look through our vast space image library, planetary.org/images. We have so many gorgeous images from all over the solar system. If you look down at the bottom of each individual image page, there's keywords that you can click on and then you get a whole host of images that, uh, are tagged with that keyword. And so, um, there's so much to explore there. It's really fun. And then-

Mat Kaplan: It's a beautiful library. Yeah.

Emily Lakdawalla: Yeah. Um, I'm very proud of it. [laughs] So-

Mat Kaplan: You should be.

Emily Lakdawalla: Yeah. And then finally we actually have courses online that are suitable I think for both high school, uh, students and adults. I've created some space image processing tutorials where, uh, [00:07:00] I walk you through the very beginning steps of learning how to process space images. And of course, uh, uh, Dr. Bruce Betts has his own, um, uh, solar system, introduction to the solar system classes. You can get those at planetary.org/bettsclass, and you can take a whole course on the solar system. And so, uh, all of those things I think would be great activities for kids of all ages.

Mat Kaplan: And I got one more to mention and that is the course on how to become a space advocate. Maybe you already are in your own mind, but if you want to make it happen in the real world, there's Casey Dreier's course, uh, for that as well. All three of these are terrific, and of course we got much more on the website. You might want to check out The Planetary Report. Uh, that new Equinox, Vernal Equinox edition is, uh, available right now. And, uh, that's, uh, something, Emily, that, uh, you had tremendous influence over up until just recently when now that you've moved on to, uh, other things. Listen, we still have some time, at least for our podcast listeners, there's so much content out there, not all of it at the [00:08:00] level of quality of the, uh, stuff that you've just described. How can parents and others figure out, uh, what's worth giving time to?

Emily Lakdawalla: Well, fortunately there's guidance in something called the science standards, and every single state has its own set of standards, but an awful lot of them are guided by something called the Next Generation Science Standards. They're sort of a-a guide to the kinds of topics that are suitable for children. And it's not just, uh, a list of topics like, "In first grade you study Earth." No, it's not that simple. It's not about the, the subject matter. It's about the kinds of scientific work that kids of different ages can be expected to do. So I went to the Next Generation Science S-standards website and I just pulled the standards for one particular topic, which is Earth's place in the universe. And so you can see how at different grade levels, uh, the standards ask kids to, um, be able to think about Earth's place in the universe in different ways.

For a first grader or a second grader, [00:09:00] you might expect children to be able to make observations of the Earth at different times of year and relate the amount of day light to the time of year. So you might ask kids to notice when the sun rises, when does it set? They're also learning at that age, how to read time on clocks. And so you can tie reading clocks with looking at when the sunrises and the sunsets. And that's the kind of activity that's appropriate for six-year-olds, five- and six-year-olds.

When you're looking at older kids like who are, you know, nine to 10, fifth grade in the United States, they're expected at that age to develop and use a model of the Earth, sun, moon system to describe the cyclical patterns of lunar phases, eclipses of the sun, and moon. You can see how as kids get older, they're expected to be able to, um, uh, tie their observations to mental models, to things, pictures that they can hold in their head about how Earth, and sun, and moon move with respect to each other. You can't expect a six-year-old to do that, but you can expect a 10-year-old to do that kind of thing. In middle school, [00:10:00] they're expected to understand the role of gravity in motions of the solar system. And you know, it goes on to be more sophisticated as you get kids older and older.

Mat Kaplan: This is terrific. I mean, it's not just learning science, it's learning how to think, uh, how to be rational and, and appreciate everything that's around us. I, I, I think this is just, uh, terrific. So how can people learn more about these standards?

Emily Lakdawalla: Well, you go to the Next Generation Science Standards website and they actually have a really easy form that you can use to plug in the age of the child and the topic area that you're interested in, whether it's Earth and the solar system, or biology, or some other topic. And then you can ask it to spit out, uh, the kinds of topics, the kinds of, uh, subjects and also provides you with a, um, a download of the parti-, of a much longer description of the standards for that particular age. I highly recommend that the parents who are doing science education for their own kids to go there and read. And it helps you understand the, the capability of your child at their [00:11:00] particular age. Um, what they're able to, um, hold in their heads and observe at the same time, and the kinds of reasoning you can expect them to be able to do given their age. It's really valuable.

Mat Kaplan: Great. Great suggestions, Emily. Thank you so much for all of these. There is one more thing that I'm going to mention. Uh, and I only just learned about it in time for us to record this segment. Some of you out there may be able to participate in it live. If not, my assumption is though, I'm not sure, I believe I, I, it's hard to believe that they would not make this available as a recording on demand after the fact. But I was contacted, uh, minutes ago by Danica Remy who is a co-founder of Asteroid Day, and Asteroid Day has gotten together with space agencies around the world, especially the European Space Agency, on Thursday, Thursday, um, evening for some of us, Thursday morning for others, they are going to put together a series of live webcasts. Uh, you can find out about it [00:12:00] at spaceconnects.us, spaceconnects.us.

It's, uh, going to start at 3:00 PM GMT. That would be 8:00 AM Pacific Time. It's in five different languages, beginning with Dutch. The English broadcast will begin at 7:00 PM GMT. That's noon Pacific Time, Pacific Daylight Time, on Thursday, March 26th. Uh, the English portion will be hosted by physicist and science communicator, Brian Cox. So that alone would be worthwhile. But they are put, they have put together this tremendous list of celebrities, of scientists, and of astronauts. I mean, just in the English portion, uh, they've got Tim Peake from the UK, Tom Jones and Nicole Stott, both, uh, past guests on Planetary Radio. We don't have time to read all of these, but, uh, it is well worth checking out. Again, you can find out more at [00:13:00] spaceconnects.us, us. It's not continuous over this period. There are four half hour programs in Dutch, German, Italian, and French, and then an hour of English. Again, that's at 7:00 PM GMT and noon PDT.

Emily, if nothing else, most of us can go outside, stand in the yard or in front of wherever we live, and look up at the night sky if we're lucky enough to have a clear one, or maybe out the window. Because as, uh, my wife said, uh, just before she left to take care of our four-year-old grandson, we can all keep looking up. Thanks very much, and, um, keep sheltering in place.

Emily Lakdawalla: [laughs] And I'll be putting some more stuff out on video as time goes on. So, stay tuned to planetary.org for that.

Mat Kaplan: That's Emily Lakdawalla, our solar system specialists keeping our own minds and the minds of lots of children hopefully, uh, very busy during this unprecedented time around planet Earth. A new edition of The Planetary Report has been available to all for a [00:14:00] couple of weeks now. You'll find the digital version of the magazine at planetary.org. It offers a lot, including a main feature called The Next 10 Years, an introduction to the decadal survey. While there are surveys for each of the four science divisions of NASA, we're going to limit ourselves to planetary science.

The current survey's term ends in 2022. A new planning effort is just getting underway. It will lay out a recommended path for 2023 through 2032. It's remarkable how effective this process has been. With oversight by the National Academy of Sciences, it relies on scores of scientists for its formulation, with thousands more carefully following its progress and many attempting to influence it.

As the effort kicks off, The Planetary Society has invited six distinguished planetary scientists to give us an idea of what to expect. We'll hear from three of them [00:15:00] this weekend, and continue the conversations next week. We begin with Edgard Rivera-Valentin. Ed is a staff scientist with the USRA, the Universities Space Research Association, at the Lunar and Planetary Institute.

Ed, welcome to Planetary Radio. I, I guess from reading about you, we could have talked to you about, just about anything in the solar system since your interests are, are pretty much in everything, at least out as far as the outer planet. But you, uh, got Mercury in this, uh, issue, the current issue of The Planetary Report. I'm glad that we can start with you there and we'll work our way out from the sun as we, uh, progress through talking, uh, to your colleagues, who also contributed to, uh, the magazine this time around. And let me just say again, welcome.

Edgard Rivera-Valentn: Thank you. Thank you. I'm happy to be talking to you.

Mat Kaplan: Mercury, fascinating little world. As you look over the last 10 or 20 years, we've learned a lot about this little world, haven't we?

Edgard Rivera-Valentn: We definitely have. Um, Mercury [00:16:00] is I'd say one of the more interesting ones. Um, and I was happy to write about it because we've gotten so much radar data on it. One of the first weird things that we found on Mercury was the discovery that its poles might have ice. So you wouldn't expect that when you're talking about the planet that's closest to the sun, right? Uh, you'd imagine a very hot world, there's no way you could have water or ice there. Uh, radar return from both the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico and the Goldstone Solar System Radar showed that there was definitely something very bright right at the poles. And later, once we were able to send, uh, a spacecraft to Mercury, we were able to say, "Yep, there's definitely ice here," and there's still a lot of work going on trying to decipher what that ice is, how did it get there, and how is it forming or was it delivered? There's still a lot to learn about Mercury.

Mat Kaplan: So that's one of the things you'd like to learn more about.

Edgard Rivera-Valentn: Yeah.

Mat Kaplan: And i-i-is this ice, is it the same situation that we have on the moon where it's in these [00:17:00] permanently shaded areas that, uh, keep the sun from hitting it directly?

Edgard Rivera-Valentn: Correct. Yeah. So Mercury, it's still in its topography is in such a way that at the poles, some of the craters will have parts of them that will be permanently shadowed. They will never see the sun. And because of that, those areas actually can be really, really cold. Um, there you'll be able to store ice either right at the surface or right below the surface, covered by some regular. There are a little bit differences between the type of ice that we think we're seeing at Mercury versus the type of ice that we're seeing at the moon, because when you zap the moon with radar, the returns would tell you there's no such thing as ice there.

Mat Kaplan: Hmm.

Edgard Rivera-Valentn: Versus Mercury where it was immediate, there's definitely ice there. So we're thinking that the ice that's at the moon, it's, it's not a lot. It's port fi-, it's what we call port filling. So in the right width or the soil, there's some water ice that's filling in some of the holes inside the soil. While [00:18:00] on Mercury, it might be more like slabs of ice and ...

On Mercury it might be more like slabs of ice and-

Mat Kaplan: Huh.

Edgard Rivera-Valentn: ... soil mixed together. So there's a larger fraction of ice there compared to [inaudible 00:18:08].

Mat Kaplan: What else do we still want to know more about on mercury? I mean, after all, I mean, you mentioned other spacecraft. We had the Messenger spacecraft visit there, uh, and do terrific work up until recently. And, uh, this European spacecraft, BepiColombo, will be arriving before too long to, uh, tell us much more.

Edgard Rivera-Valentn: Mercury is more than just the ice. That's one of the things that I really like about it. Mercury is enigmatic from all the way from its formation. The type of data that we've gotten back from Messenger shows us that if you look at Mercury from a geophysics perspective it's mainly a core. About 85% of the volume of Mercury is its core. How did that even happen? Did you have... Did it form that way? Did it form by a bunch of objects that were just really metallic [00:19:00] and all of those metals ended up suddenly into a core or at one point or another they had a large impact combine strip away those outer layers leaving behind, uh, maybe just a mantle covering the core? We still don't know that part.

And also from a solar system formation perspective, uh, in a lot of these models that we use to try to understand how all the planets formed Mercury is really close to what's called one of those boundary conditions, the outer edge of those simulations. So we really can't quite get to making a Mercury. We can reproduce everybody else, but making a Mercury is a little bit more difficult in these types of models. We're getting some hints by looking at exoplanets, but we're still a little unsure how you even get a Mercury. Not only how do you reproduce the interior of it but how do you make it where it's at?

So there's a lot of information to learn about the interior of its body. From a geology perspective, it's covered in [00:20:00] just volcanic plains. There's pyroclastic deposits everywhere. So it was definitely a very active world at one point or another, even though we're seeing a quote unquote dead world today, but some of the data that Messenger brought back is showing us that it's actually still changing. It's contracting. So that's still changing its geology. ,

So BepiColombo when it gets there around... Let's see here. It launched in 2018. BepiColombo should get there on 2025. Um, it's still going to be elucidating a lot of these very important, very fundamental questions for Mercury. How did it form? How the heck do you get the interior, um, to be with something such a large core? And can we better understand the volatiles and the geochemistry that we're seeing on the surface?

Mat Kaplan: And there's one more factor which you mentioned in your TPR, uh, article, and that's the [00:21:00] magnetic field of Mercury, which is something that I... We've had conversations in the past with Sean Solomon about. Of course, he was the PI for the, the Messenger mission. It's still something that we need to learn more about?

Edgard Rivera-Valentn: Oh, for sure. The more you learn about magnetic fields the... in planetary science, the more you know that we don't understand them. [laughing] Um, that's the best way I could, uh, describe my mag- magnetism. Yeah, so there's still a lot to learn about how, uh, Mercury is actually generating its magnetic field precisely, better measurements, uh, across the planet at distances so we could better characterize it. BepiColombo will definitely be unraveling a lot from that perspective. I'm... That is one of the fields I am definitely not an expert in. It's just one of those, "Oh, that's really neat." [laughs]

Mat Kaplan: From everything that you've talked about, it sounds like just like with all the other bodies in the solar system, Mercury can teach us a [00:22:00] lot about everything in the solar system and maybe worlds outside the solar system as well. Am I, am I right about that?

Edgard Rivera-Valentn: Yeah, for sure. The more we understand the diversity of worlds that we have in our own solar system the better we can understand not only our place in our solar system but also put into context all this new data we're getting from exoplanets. Understanding each and every world, including the first world, Mercury, helps us in getting a better understanding of how even the entire galaxy works.

Mat Kaplan: I got one I got to ask you just because of my science fiction interests. Uh, it's gonna be a little bit out of left field. When I was growing up, when I was a kid, a long time ago, people thought that Mercury was tidally locked, that, uh, it always had one side facing the sun, one side facing away from. We know now of course that that's not the case, but it does rotate pretty slowly. Are you familiar with... There was a great book by a Kim Stanley [00:23:00] Robinson past guest on our show, 2312. And in it it's got a lot of highly speculative, marvelous stuff. He actually talks about a city on Mercury appropriately called Terminator, and this city crawls along tracks so that it can always stay in that twilight zone, the terminator zone. Uh, so that it's neither frozen nor roasted. I... A completely novel idea or have you ever heard of this?

Edgard Rivera-Valentn: No, I have not read this. Now I need to.

Mat Kaplan: I highly recommend it. There's a lot of other stuff in it like, like colonies on Io where I'm not sure I would ever want to even visit much less live there. It's an absolutely fascinating and... As is Mercury. I appreciate your taking a few minutes to, uh, introduce us to it. And I, I hope like with all of the, the articles by your colleagues, uh, that people will take a look at the digital version of the Planetary Report, which is available at [00:24:00] Planetary.org. I've got just one more question for you. I know you're very involved with sharing science, uh, with the larger community and including young people, and there's one, one group in particular I'm curious about. Correct me if I get it wrong, but I think it's the Boricua Planeteers. Why... What's that about?

Edgard Rivera-Valentn: Yes. So Boricua Planeteers is a group of Puerto Rican planetary scientists, including myself and a bunch of my friends from PR. We're spread across the US. The point of the group is to increase the visibility of latinx, specifically in this case, Puerto Rican scientists, but to also bring back planetary science to Puerto Rico. So PR we have the Arecibo Observatory, right? The best radar telescope, the second largest radio telescope. But education wise on the island astronomy hasn't been one of the major focuses. In fact out of the about a 100 universities that we have in Puerto Rico only three offer [00:25:00] bachelors degrees in even physics. And there's no astronomy degree granting program in PR yet.

So we thought of putting together this group to be able to increase the ability for students to get into planetary science, to give them those opportunities in Puerto Rico and across the US, and to let people know that there are such thing as latinx scientists doing really cool science.

Mat Kaplan: That's outstanding. Great outreach work and, and great science, uh, to compliment it. Thanks so much, Ed. I- I'm a very glad that, uh, you could join us to kick off this, uh, coverage of what's ahead the next 10 years for our solar system.

Edgard Rivera-Valentn: Thank you so much. It was a pleasure.

Mat Kaplan: Edgard Rivera-Valentin of the Lunar and Planetary Institute. We'll take up Venus next right after a brief break.

Deborah Fischer: Hi, I'm Yale astronomer, Deborah Fischer. I've spent the last 20 years of my professional life searching for other worlds. Now I've taken on the 100 Earths Project. We want to discover 100 earth sized [00:26:00] exoplanets circling nearby stars. It won't be easy. With your help, the Planetary Society will fund a key component of an exquisitely precise spectrometer. You can learn more and join the search at planetary.org/100earths. Thanks.

Mat Kaplan: Continuing our survey of the solar system, we move out one big rock from Mercury for a conversation with Joseph O'Rourke. Joe is an assistant professor in the school of earth and space exploration at Arizona State University. He serves on the steering committee of NASA's Venus exploration analysis group. Joe, welcome to Planetary radio as we, uh, continue our little tour of the solar system looking 10 years out. Glad to have you here.

Joseph O'Rourke: Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to talk about Venus.

Mat Kaplan: You say that it is the most Earth-like planet that there is. You're not the first person I've heard say that, but it still sounds slightly outrageous. Can you make that case?

Joseph O'Rourke: Yes. If we were an alien astronomer looking at our [00:27:00] solar system using the same telescopes that we use to study exoplanets today Earth and Venus would be indistinguishable. They have the same mass, the same radius to within reasonable uncertainties. Venus is just a tiny bit smaller than earth and they're both compositions are similar. So if you were an alien astronomer looking at our solar system to first order you would think that Venus and Earth are similar planets.

Of course, when you look more closely Venus is different than Earth in terms of its habitability. Venus is a hellish wasteland, whereas Earth has been [inaudible 00:27:35] for billions of years. If we want to understand anything about rocky planets, we need to understand why Venus and Earth are so different on the surface, but so similar in almost every other respect.

Mat Kaplan: You take me back to when I was a little kid. I remember seeing artists' concepts of the surface of Venus and it looked like something from 65, 70 million years ago on earth. [00:28:00] Huge plants. It was hot. It was tropical, and, you know, something like dinosaurs wandering around and then we got this rude awakening, right, which partly came from people like one of our founders, Carl Sagan. It's kind of toasty down there, a lot more than tropical.

Joseph O'Rourke: Yes, exactly. Uh, science fiction books would show pictures of a jungle Venus because we thought we... We've known for a long time that Venus has clouds that cover the entire surface. Early astronomers thought those might be water clouds like on Earth, uh, in which case Venus would be a sort of swampy muggy world. But we now know that those clouds are sulfuric acid. The atmosphere is over 90% carbon dioxide, and the surface temperatures on Venus are hot enough to melt lead. So not a place you'd want to spend much time.

Mat Kaplan: That is the great cliche yet so true. Don't bring anything made out of lead to the surface of Venus on-

Joseph O'Rourke: Yes.

Mat Kaplan: When you visit there as a tourist. Okay. So then along comes Magellan, that [00:29:00] enormously successful spacecraft. It's hard to believe that it arrived at, uh, at Venus 30 years ago. I love that you pointed... point out that you were 10 days old when it happened. And we learned a little bit more about, uh, Venus because we were finally able to look through those clouds with, with some kind of accuracy, right?

Joseph O'Rourke: Exactly. You can't see the surface with visible light, but you can see the surface with radar and in a few spectral windows using infrared light. So the Magellan mission produced these amazing global maps of the surface with a resolution of just over 100 meters per pixel. And those geologic maps revolutionized our understanding of Venus basically by revealing that we have no understanding of Venus. [laughing] The surface geology, it's, uh, revealed that Venus is... has a young surface. It's an active world, but the surface geology is unlike any other planet in the solar system.

Mat Kaplan: The only other two spacecraft, Venus Express, it's done did... finished its work in [00:30:00] 2014, Akatsuki, that that plucky little spacecraft that had such trouble getting into orbit, but it's still there today doing some work. Have we learned much more from them and, and what about?

Joseph O'Rourke: Yes, we've learned tons from both of those fabulous missions. My own background is in geophysics and geology. And those two missions were designed to study, uh, atmospheric science, uh, but Venus Express in particular carried an infrared instrument that provided some constraints on the surface. It's provided these fascinating hints that terrain called tessera on the surface might have granite light compositions, which would mean that they are analogous to continents on Earth and signatures of abundant liquid water at some point in the past. Japanese mission has discovered, uh, an array of amazing meteorological features, uh, such as this huge, uh, stationary wave in the atmosphere. And it's produced some of the best maps of 3D wind speeds in the Venus [00:31:00] atmosphere.

Mat Kaplan: That has, uh, come up, uh, before on our show, a little bit of, uh, those results from Akatsuki. Uh, we all know that there still nevertheless has been this long drought in, uh, missions to Venus as you mentioned, but maybe it's going to come to an end. You must be pretty thrilled as a Venus guy to see that, uh, there are a couple of missions that are now being considered as finalists or semi-finalists anyway, no finalists I think, by NASA.

Joseph O'Rourke: I would call them finalists. Uh-

Mat Kaplan: Yeah.

Joseph O'Rourke: Yes, the VERITAS and the Da Vinci Plus missions. Um, NASA should pick both of them. [laughing] The science, uh, that both the missions would do does not really overlap. They aren't redundant with each other. And the Venus community has consistently said that the science goals of these missions are top priorities for the Venus community.

Mat Kaplan: Would either of these or maybe both be able to give us some more evidence about those strange structures that indicated [inaudible 00:31:56] you, you say in the article, it's possible that once upon a [00:32:00] time Venus was a very different place and maybe it did have oceans as we have today on Earth.

Joseph O'Rourke: Yes. The VERITAS mission is the natural successor to Magellan. It would use a updated radar instrument and a much better infrared camera, uh, to return data that are at least in order of magnitude, often many orders of magnitude, better than Magellan. So I really want to see the VERITAS mission fly in order to answer some of these questions that the community has debated answers to over the past three decades. I would say that Venus absolutely has volcanic activity and tectonic activity that have occurred in recent times. Uh, we have lots of powerful evidence for recent volcanism on Venus.

Mat Kaplan: Mm-hmm [affirmative].

Joseph O'Rourke: You see what looked like volcanic flows that are probably fairly young and there are chemical species in the atmosphere that would decay within a few million years if they weren't being constantly replenished by volcanoes, uh, in recent times, at least what counts to [00:33:00] geologists as recent times.

Mat Kaplan: We all know that you, you geologists, your, your timescales are a little bit different from those of us who just deal with, uh, lifetimes of humans. Wha- what are we talking about? Millions of years ago or, or tens of thousands of years ago.

Joseph O'Rourke: Arguably tens... as early as tens of thousands. Uh, what would be really exciting with the mission, again, like VERITAS is you can use modern radar techniques to study active surface de- deformation at Venus. And so you could possibly see much stronger evidence for, um, active meaning today, not just geologically recent volcanism on Venus.

Mat Kaplan: So I take it that the radar we're talking about that we would be able to send now all these decades after Magellan would deliver far better performance than Magellan could.

Joseph O'Rourke: Absolutely. The maps of the surface of Venus we have now are comparable to what we had for Mars in the 1970s. And I think it's time that, uh, the most interesting planet in our solar system, uh, that we had comparable data from it, uh, that [00:34:00] we can achieve on any other planet.

Mat Kaplan: Let's go to a, a theme which I think is going to run through every one of these conversations, uh, with you contributors to the current issue of the Planetary Report, and that is how the study of a word like Venus can help us understand other worlds in our solar system and of increasing importance the worlds, we're discovering the thousands of them that we find circling other stars that we, we talk about a lot on this show.

Joseph O'Rourke: Yes. I think the exoplanet revolution is one of the most powerful motivations for further exploration of Venus. If we don't understand why Venus and Earth are different than we don't know in general how rocky planets evolve and what governs whether they're habitable or not. And in that case, if we can't understand Earth and Venus it's useless to speculate about the possible fates of, uh, rocky worlds around other stars. If we can't understand the exoplanet in our own backyard, [00:35:00] uh, how will we understand the exoplanets that we can't go out and touch, go out and observe at, at close range?

Mat Kaplan: Well, best of luck to you and all the other Venus scientists out there who have their fingers crossed that, uh, NASA picks at least one and to make, uh, you happy, both of those venous missions which are now being considered as discovery class missions and would, and would visit Venus for the first time in, well, quite a few years. Before I leave you though, I got to ask you, you, you warned me. In fact, we had to change the time of our conversation a little bit because you had to, uh, have a meeting with some folks from JPL. I'll say a remote meeting because of course you are observing social distancing like the rest of us. And you mentioned that it had something to do with a, a proposal that you guys have for a mission. What's this about?

Joseph O'Rourke: I am the principal investigator of a mission called Athena, which is a small sat about the size of a mini fridge before we extend the solar panels that would visit one of the largest [00:36:00] asteroids in the main asteroid belt, uh, to understand how [inaudible 00:36:04].

... -roids, and the main asteroid belt, uh, to understand how water-rich it is. To understand how water has influenced its, uh, formation and evolution, and thus to understand, um, how the, uh, planetesimals that were formed on the asteroid belt may have delivered water to the inner solar system in the earliest epoch of planet formation.

Read the original here:

The Next 10 Years of Planetary Exploration - The Planetary Society

NASA Space Rock Exploration Will Elude Building-Size Stones To Steal An Example About Bennu – NationEditions

Posted on March 25, 2020 by Danzig

Grabbing a bit of space rock Bennu should be well, difficult, yet positively reasonable: scope out the space rock, locate some level spots, swoop down at one, return home.

Grabbing a bit of space rock Bennu should be well, difficult, yet without a doubt reasonable: scope out the space rock, locate some level spots, swoop down at one, return home.

In any case, when NASAs OSIRIS-REx shuttle showed up at Bennu in December 2018, the researchers and architects on the crucial that the space rock was a whole lot rockier than they had anticipated. Like, rocks all over. Rocks are as large as structures. Stones you dont need your extravagant rocket to strike into.

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OSIRIS-REx, which propelled in 2016, has a lidar route framework that would have permitted the shuttle to perceive snags dependent on the echoes of a light pillar the test delivered. Be that as it may, when the strategic Bennus surface in the entirety of its rough greatness, researchers and designers concluded the time had come to think of something new.

The outcome is a procedure the group is calling Natural Feature Tracking, which depends on the huge picture database that OSIRIS-REx has developed in the months since it showed up at Bennu and started taking pictures of the space rock from all points imaginable.

It will start taking still progressively such photographs, which its PC framework will consequently contrast with the filed pictures demonstrating the way it ought to be following. On the off chance that those perspectives dont arrange, the shuttle will naturally withdraw for another endeavor, instead of hazard harm on the dangerous surface.

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On the off chance that the framework fills in as arranged, it should help OSIRIS-RExs exactness: Whereas its lidar framework was just intended for precision inside a site 164 feet (50 meters) over, Natural Feature Tracking will be sufficiently exact to handle an objective zone simply 10% that size, NASA authorities said in an announcement.

Researchers on the OSIRIS-REx crucial chose two objective examining destinations on Bennu, named Nightingale and Osprey. The missions window for examining opens in late August so as to guarantee that the shuttle can leave Bennu one year from now. On the off chance that all works out in a good way, researchers ought to have their space rock on Earth in 2023.

About Space magazine takes you on a sensational excursion through our close planetary system and past, from the astonishing innovation and shuttle that empowers humankind to wander into space, to the complexities of room science. View Deal

However, when NASAs OSIRIS-REx rocket showed up at Bennu in December 2018, the researchers and architects on the crucial that the space rock was a whole lot rockier than they had anticipated. Like, rocks all over the place. Rocks are as large as structures. Rocks you dont need your extravagant rocket to hit into.

OSIRIS-REx, which propelled in 2016, has a lidar route framework that would have permitted the rocket to perceive impediments dependent on the echoes of a light shaft the test delivered. Be that as it may, when the crucial Bennus surface in the entirety of its rough greatness, researchers and architects concluded the time had come to think of something new.

The outcome is a procedure the group is calling Natural Feature Tracking, which depends on the monstrous picture database that OSIRIS-REx has developed in the months since it showed up at Bennu and started taking pictures of the space rock from all edges imaginable.

As the test leaves on an inspecting endeavor, it will start taking still increasingly such photographs, which its PC framework will consequently contrast with the filed pictures demonstrating the way it ought to be following. In the event that those perspectives dont arrange, the shuttle will naturally withdraw for another endeavor, as opposed to hazard harm on the risky surface.

On the off chance that the framework functions as arranged, it should support OSIRIS-RExs precision: Whereas its lidar framework was just intended for exactness inside a site 164 feet (50 meters) over, Natural Feature Tracking will be sufficiently exact to handle an objective region simply 10% that size, NASA authorities said in an announcement.

Researchers on the OSIRIS-REx crucial chose two objective inspecting destinations on Bennu, named Nightingale and Osprey. The missions window for inspecting opens in late August so as to guarantee that the rocket can leave Bennu one year from now. In the event that all works out in a good way, researchers ought to have their space rock on Earth in 2023.

About Space magazine takes you on a sensational excursion through our close planetary system and past, from the astounding innovation and rocket that empowers humankind to wander into space, to the complexities of room science.

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Continued here:

NASA Space Rock Exploration Will Elude Building-Size Stones To Steal An Example About Bennu - NationEditions

A message from MIT astronauts: Accept the mission and find your motivators – MIT News

Posted on March 25, 2020 by Danzig

Keeping our distance from each other for an extended period of time is the most effective way to reduce Covid-19s reach. But the prospect of prolonged social isolation is uncharted territory for many.

To get some perspective on how we all might navigate lives of temporary separation, MIT News checked in with three MIT alumni who have spent months at a time living quite literally away from the rest of the world, on humanitys only outpost in space. Cady Coleman 83, Mike Fincke 89, and Greg Chamitoff 92 have all served long-duration missions aboard the International Space Station (ISS) as NASA astronauts. While orbiting some 250 miles above Earth, they lived and worked in quarters about the size of a large house, with only the occasional opportunity to step outside of that house, on spacewalks to repair or maintain the station.

Even as they were physically isolated from the rest of the planet for months at a time, the astronauts found ways to bridge the distance with family and friends, over the phone, and through video chats. Just as importantly, they also made sure to find time for themselves, and embrace their isolation. Coleman, Fincke, and Chamitoff shared some of the lessons they learned from living in space, and how we can all commit to a mission to live, at least for now, at a distance.

Q: What was it like for you to be isolated from the rest of the world for long durations, even with the ability to email and video-chat with people on the ground?

CHAMITOFF: Living on the International Space Station is very much like being stuck in your house with a few people for a very long period of time. The ISS has about as much living space as a six-bedroom house. And hopefully you like your roommates and have established mechanisms for getting along even when there are disagreements. In space you feel separated from the rest of society you are the only ones off the entire planet!

I expected to feel lonely during my six months in space, but it was quite the opposite. Having a daily sense of purpose, countless tasks and experiments to perform, and communication with people all over the world provided so much engagement with the world that loneliness was not a factor. There are some lessons here, perhaps, for everyone who now has to stay at home during this crisis.

COLEMAN: I think what makes everything work is the mission. As an astronaut, I was on the forward edge of exploration, representing the many people who make the ISS mission and experiments happen. Right now our mission is to keep each other safe here on Earth. I think keeping that mission in mind makes it easier to wash your hands that one more time when you really dont feel like it, and to tell friends who are more casual about social distancing things like, No, I really dont think its safe to do that together for now.

FINCKE: Were such social creatures that it is going to be a challenge for a lot of people to be a little homebound and not go out. For astronauts its something were used to it comes with the territory.

Q: What do you remember of some of your more challenging times of isolation in space? How did you work through it, mentally or physically?

FINCKE: My first long-duration mission was during a time when the space shuttle was grounded because of an accident, and there were only two of us aboard the ISS for six months, with no visitors. When youre in a confined space with someone else, you really have to make an extra effort to get along. We probably are all hard to live with. Some things Ive learned in space Ive taken back to the ground, for instance to tell my wife I appreciate her that much more, and things like that. You really learn to value relationships.

COLEMAN: We had one crew member whose mom passed away fairly unexpectedly while we were in space. We established wed have our own memorial service at the same time as the funeral back home. And I looked at the world map and realized we were going to be passing over his hometown at the time of the funeral. So the six of us were there in the cupola together, and we had a few moments of silence, and I really felt we were together with all the family on the ground. When the mission youve chosen forces you to be isolated, you find a way to be the best you can.

CHAMITOFF: Hurricane Ike struck Houston during my long-duration mission. Johnson Space Center shut down and people were evacuating the city. Operations on the ISS came to a near standstill. For almost a week onboard, we were much more isolated than usual, and were determined to get useful things done. We had a task list of unscheduled activities, and if we could do them without ground support, we did. Admittedly, we watched more movies, did more exercise, slept more, and spent longer periods together talking at meals. We were worried about our loved ones on the ground, but the slower pace was good for our morale and camaraderie onboard.

Q: Are there any tips that you can share to help people get through and perhaps even embrace this social-distancing period?

FINCKE: Maintaining a schedule, things to look forward to, and things to do and check off your list, can be a tool to help us all. Onboard the space station, as the mission progressed, we had things to look forward to, like the next cargo ship that came to give us new food, or a spacewalk, which is a really big deal. Same thing here: Just because I dont have to go into work doesnt mean I shouldnt get up and be showered and dressed just like I would. Going to the grocery store tomorrow, even if its a little thing, is something to look forward to.

Also, find out what your motivators are. For me, I read science fiction, and at one point, NASA was able to give me an e-reader and I read about 50-60 books when I was up there. That was my thing. It can be a little lonely. So you need to know what your own motivators are.

CHAMITOFF: Engage with people using FaceTime, Zoom, Skype, or whatever tools you like. Make virtual plans with people. Spend time outside. I believe that when this is all over, we will have stronger and closer relationships because of it. Talk to your family and friends perhaps more than you usually do. In space, I spoke to a friend or family member every night. It was a highlight of my day.

COLEMAN: One of the things you have to do is figure out how to have some ways you have your space, whether mental or physical. If theres someone in the house coming up to you every time they see a new notice about the coronavirus, you may have trouble having a straight thought about what were trying to do. So maybe say, lets read those things twice a day. There are a lot of things we cant control now. What are the things we can? We can control the things we learn. Im thinking I may take some Skype lessons for playing the flute, and learning Chinese has always been on my list, as well as practicing my Russian. There are projects I have on my list, from finishing my website to cleaning out my attic, and right now it feels like I may, in a joyful and not so joyful way, get them all done.

Q: What about the experience of being isolated for so long was surprising or unexpected for you?

COLEMAN: I think about the things I wish I did when I was up on the space station. One is get enough sleep. Probably my whole life Ive never gotten enough sleep, especially at MIT, right? So taking care of yourself is a really good thing prioritize that. And also, some kind of journaling or recording: Jot a few notes, capture this time for yourself, whether you plan to share it with anyone or not. Take pictures that help people realize what it was like for you. Because your experiences may be valuable to others in the future.

FINCKE: Having been more isolated, its times like these, where an outside forcing function is bringing us together, that I value this time with my family even more. Take this time to focus on the human relationships reach out, send an email, call someone, because theres a little more opportunity now.

CHAMITOFF: Life will be a bit different, but you will adapt to it quickly. We are an incredibly adaptable species. We live in all sorts of extreme environments, including zero-gravity. One thing we do need, however, is each other. We cant do this alone. Consider reaching out to others if you know they are alone. As long as we have family and friends to share this experience with, we will be okay.

Link:

A message from MIT astronauts: Accept the mission and find your motivators - MIT News

SSDP Club Educates the Campus on Drug Policy – The Beacon

Posted on March 25, 2020 by Danzig

Students for Sensible Drug Policy is a club here on campus that is dedicated towards a great course. MCLAs SSDP club is connected to the international organization for SSDP, that works with colleges globally.

According to ssdp.com, they are working towards, replacing the war on drugs with policies rooted in evidence, compassion and human rights. SSPD has 5,000 active members, made up of young people and students and mobilizes from 300 schools around the world.

Bridget Boryles 20, SSDP President, has made it her mission to help bring attention to this organization and topic to the MCLA campus.

Ive seen the way the war on drugs can really hurt people so I really care about this, she said. I know that there are so many other people that are affected by this so I just think its important that we raise our voices. We as young people have a lot of power to make change.

One of the ways works towards change is acting as a resource to students.

Our whole thing is that we dont judge people. We are here to help people and point them to the resources they need, Broyles said. We are also here to help people bring action on campus or in the community if they see a policy that they think is unfair then we can help them to combat that policy. Thats what were all about.

Broyles finds it is important to fight against the stigma surrounding people who struggle with addiction.

People who use substances are some of the vulnerable people and a lot of times the war on drugs often perpetuates itself in ways that predominantly affect marginalized groups, Broyles said. Weve had conversations about the way the war on drugs targets black men specifically.

The war on drugs is just another avenue to target people of color, poor people, and queer people. Its a problem and it needs to be talked about more openly and more honestly because its still seen as something that is so taboo, she continued.

The club works towards eliminating these stigmas and invites conversation regarding the war on by providing an environment for an open discussion through their various events.

Weve had fun events with food and drinks that were more of a party setting, Broyles said. Its just an opportunity for us to have a conversation about substances in am more fun setting rather than a, Im going to sit here in lecture you sort of setting.

They also have hosted more informational and educational events that help with campus and community harm reduction.

We had recently had a Narcan training where someone from Tapestry came by and she had a whole presentation about what Narcan is, what you can use it for, and distributed Narcan to everyone who came to the event for free, Broyles said.

In the future, Broyles hopes to see more engagement from other students within the club because of the importance of the subject matter.

Were looking really to partner with other clubs. We want to work with anyone whos interested and has some way to relate their club to drug policy, she said.

SSDP Club Educates the Campus on Drug Policy - The Beacon

Trump Tries On The Mantle Of ‘Wartime President’ – NPR

Posted on March 25, 2020 by Danzig

President Trump says he views the battle against the coronavirus through the lens of a wartime president. Patrick Semansky/AP hide caption

President Trump says he views the battle against the coronavirus through the lens of a wartime president.

On March 18, in the midst of a presidential news conference on the coronavirus, Donald Trump compared himself to a "wartime president."

This president has never been shy about casting himself in heroic roles. But his attempt to adopt the military mien raised more than a few eyebrows under the circumstances.

When a reporter referred to the battle against the virus as a war, Trump picked up on it immediately. "It is the invisible enemy," he said. "I view it as, in a sense, a wartime president."

Some of the commentary that followed dwelt on how Trump sat out Vietnam, the war of his own draft-age youth, with deferments for college and then for bone spurs in his foot (a diagnosis The New York Times has reported came from a doctor who was a tenant of Trump's wealthy father).

Others recalled candidate Trump saying in 2015: "I know more about ISIS than the generals do." Since then, he has been equally flattering about his own strategic vision, saying: "I think I would have been a good general." But the several generals who served in Trump's inner circle in his first two years in office including chief of staff John Kelly, Secretary of Defense James Mattis and National Security Adviser and H.R. McMaster are all conspicuous by their absence now.

There is, of course, nothing new about using war as a metaphor for a national mission. President Ronald Reagan declared a War on Drugs in the 1980s; President Lyndon Johnson a War on Poverty in the 1960s. In between, Jimmy Carter called the need to conserve energy in the 1970s "the moral equivalent of war."

But if Americans are accustomed to such language, they also expect it to be matched by governmental mobilization and performance on a broad scale. So the deeper skepticism that greeted Trump's use of the phrase "wartime president" may be related to his record as commander in chief battling the "enemy" to date.

Yuval Levin, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, this week praised "a more intense focus by the president on the problems we face." But he immediately worried that the president "has not been willing to speak to the public about the nature of the threat to the capacity of our health system."

In other words, duck and cover is not a good look for a wartime leader.

Mixed messages

First informed of the virus and its threat in January, Trump was loath to acknowledge it as a problem. He barred travelers from China on Jan. 31 (a decision he now touts on a daily basis, as he vilifies "the Chinese virus"), yet he also continued to dismiss the seriousness of the virus itself. And he maintained that denial for the next four weeks, a potentially crucial period during which the coronavirus was spreading throughout the U.S.

Throughout these early weeks of the year, there were elements of the government's disease-fighting establishment that were scrambling to deal with mounting cases in the U.S. (amid reports of rampant infection in parts of Europe).

But even as March began, the public Trump was not entirely on board. He continually downplayed the virus, saying it probably wouldn't amount to much in the U.S. and would soon be gone. Go about your business, he seemed to be saying, nothing to see here. And all the while, the virus was spreading and the chances of slowing and containing it were diminishing.

Presidential historian Richard Norton Smith summed up the president's attitude this way in an interview with The Chicago Tribune editorial writer Steve Chapman: "He wants to take credit for D-Day without accepting responsibility for Pearl Harbor."

On March 13, Trump gave in and declared a national emergency under the Stafford Act to free up various resources that could have been deployed weeks earlier. But in his news conference that day, he also promised a national Google project to link prospective patients to testing and treatment later that weekend. The company had to announce that, while one of its affiliated companies was working on a prototype of such a program, it would only be available in a few California counties.

Even in the past week, Trump continued to talk about a vaccine coming "very soon" and anti-malaria drugs that could be available "almost immediately" with a lot of promise for use against the coronavirus. It was left to Anthony Fauci, the government's leading expert on infectious disease control since the 1980s, to ratchet back these claims albeit gently and without criticizing the president, who continued to make the claims over the weekend.

The holding out of such hopes, and the continual references to defeating the virus sooner than experts say is possible, mix the messages emanating from the commander in chief. In one moment he says stay at home and save lives, in the next he offers an entirely alternative outlook.

Wartime presidents

When Americans think of wartime leadership, they are most likely to recall Franklin D. Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln, the presidents in office for World War II and the Civil War, respectively.

In her prize-winning volume Team of Rivals, historian Doris Kearns Goodwin recounts how Lincoln was able to assemble a Cabinet of men who had been his political enemies and detractors. One, the Ohio lawyer Edwin Stanton, had referred to Lincoln in the 1850s as "that long-armed Ape."

Writes Goodwin: "Unimaginable as it might seem, after Stanton's bearish behavior, at their next encounter six years later, Lincoln would offer Stanton 'the most powerful civilian post within his gift' the post of secretary of war."

Indeed, Stanton went on to organize the war effort that preserved the Union. In similar fashion, eight decades later, Roosevelt entrusted much of America's war effort to Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall later praised as "the organizer of victory" by Churchill himself.

Together, Marshall and Roosevelt would orchestrate the talents and egos of an exceptional cast of American commanders in Europe and the Pacific. The former included Eisenhower, whom Marshall plucked from a desk job in the Office of War Plans, promoted, and watched become the 34th president of the U.S. Various biographers of FDR (such as Joseph E. Persico in Roosevelt's Centurions) have seen his style of management as essential to winning the world's most destructive and consequential war to date.

Neither Lincoln nor FDR lived to see the end of their monumental wartime works. But they showed unmistakable qualities in common as they performed in office and then positioned others to finish the job. Both were masterful managers of other people, giving their subordinates power and freedom to bring their own genius to bear and playing them off against each other with interpersonal savvy and a measure of humor.

Eisenhower was the last general to become president. The first was, of course, George Washington, followed by Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, Franklin Pierce, Andrew Johnson, Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield, Chester A. Arthur and Benjamin Harrison (the latter five all being Civil War generals).

Others with significant military backgrounds included William McKinley, a brevet major in the Civil War, Theodore Roosevelt, who led a combat unit (the Rough Riders) in the Spanish American War as a colonel, and Harry Truman, an artillery officer in World War I. Both John F. Kennedy and George H.W. Bush saw combat as Navy lieutenants in World War II (Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan served in that conflict in non-combat roles).

Somewhat surprisingly, only one of these war-veteran presidents ever asked Congress for a declaration of war (McKinley, somewhat reluctantly, against Spain in 1898).

The other presidents who sought such declarations were James Madison (War of 1812), James K. Polk (Mexican War), Woodrow Wilson (World War I) and Franklin D. Roosevelt (World War II). None had much of a personal military history, although FDR had been assistant secretary of the navy.

Declarations of war

In the past 75 years, the notion of formal declarations of war has gone out of fashion. Truman and Johnson sought and received the support of Congress for major U.S. troop commitments in Korea (1950) and Vietnam (1964) that became protracted and costly wars even though undeclared. The onus of these conflicts contributed to both men deciding not to seek re-election, Truman in 1952 and Johnson in 1968.

The first President Bush got Congress to approve his military effort to remove Iraqi troops from Kuwait in what became the Persian Gulf War of 1991. That brief tour de force sent his approval skyward, peaking at 89% in the Gallup Poll. But the public soured somewhat on Bush when a recession began later in that same year, and he was defeated in a three-way presidential contest in 1992.

His son, George W. Bush, who served in the Texas Air National Guard in 1972 and 1973 but did not go to Vietnam, also sought congressional buy-in for major troop deployments after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. His first authorization for the use of military force (AUMF) was approved overwhelmingly in the fall of 2001 and is still used to justify various actions taken against what are deemed terrorist targets.

A separate AUMF was approved late in 2002 for use against Iraq, and this time the U.S. forces took Baghdad and drove Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein from power. What became known as the Iraq War enjoyed initial support from the public but became unpopular as the occupation of that country went on. Bush narrowly won a second term and his party lost control of both chambers of Congress in the elections of 2006.

In sum, the experiences of "wartime presidents" since FDR should be enough to give a successor pause before invoking that phrase.

Continue reading here:

Trump Tries On The Mantle Of 'Wartime President' - NPR

Watch The War On Drugs Debut New Songs On Instagram Live – Stereogum

Posted on March 25, 2020 by Danzig

The War On Drugs played their first shows in a year at the end of 2019, perhaps an indication that the follow-up to 2017s A Deeper Understanding is on the way. Maybe the band would have gone on tour this year to road-test new material as well, but with COVID-19 keeping everyone at home, that aint happening anytime soon. A pandemic-suppressing quarantine isnt keeping Adam Granduciel from showing off his new tunes, though.

Starting at 6PM ET, the foremost Warrior On Drugs is logging on to Instagram Live to play some new recordings/rough mixes through the speakers. Because everything must have a quippy topical name right now, hes calling it #QuaranTones, but we arent complaining because NEW WAR ON DRUGS, WOO!!! Granduciel explained the agenda on IG yesterday:

This week well go downstairs and Live for season 1 episode 1 of #QuaranTones . Lets listen to some new, almost finished songs, some experiments, some old multi tracks, or maybe well just listen to Automatic for the People through a Dimension D.Check back for when..stay healthy and safe xoxo

Head over to the bands IG account on mobile starting at 6PM ET to behold what Granduciel has in store.

UPDATE: Granduciel debuted mixes of three new songs, played an acoustic In Reverse and answered questions from friends and fans. Watch below.

Watch The War On Drugs Debut New Songs On Instagram Live - Stereogum

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