Blogs / 80beats

A lone wolf named Brutus is helping U.S. Geological Survey scientists study Arctic wolf migrations in remote regions of Canada. These migrations can traverse hundreds of miles in 24-hour winter darkness at temperatures that reach 70 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.

There’s no way humans can physically follow the wolves under these brutal conditions, so Brutus is sporting a GPS collar that beams his coordinates back to a satellite every 12 hours. As it turns out, the wolves are covering a lot of ground, as can be seen in the map above. Now, the fjords visible in the summer image above have frozen and can be crossed on foot. In one trip, the wolf and his pack traveled 80 miles from Ellesmere Island to Axel Heiberg Island and back in just 84 hours. Just through November 30, Brutus has traveled 1,683 miles [Wired.com].

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Groundwater levels around the country have been sinking as wells for drinking water and irrigation pull water out of aquifers faster than they can naturally recharge. Now, using gravity-measuring satellites, NASA and California researchers have documented the extent of water loss in California’s Central Valley, and the results aren’t good.

The measurements show the amount of water lost in the two main Central Valley river basins within the past six years could almost fill the nation’s largest reservoir, Lake Mead in Nevada [AP]. The total is about 30 cubic kilometer; one cubic km contains more than 264 billion gallons of water.

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Stars and other astronomical phenomena radiate across the electromagnetic spectrum, on both sides of the puny band of visible light that the human eye can pick up. NASA’s newest toy, set for a Friday launch into space, will map the infrared portion of that radiation—and do it across the entire sky.

The Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, has been under construction since 2006. The satellite will spend six months mapping the entire sky in the infrared, after which it will make a second, three-month pass to further refine the mapping [Universe Today]. Stars, galaxies, comets, and other objects will fall under the explorer’s purview.

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At least one start-up space company is finally getting off the ground. SpaceX, the company founded by Internet entrepreneur Elon Musk, had its first successful test launch last fall, and late last night it followed up with its first commercial space shot. The company’s Falcon 1 rocket took off from an atoll in the Marshall Islands and launched a Malaysian satellite into orbit. The spacecraft has black-and-white and color cameras to take high-resolution pictures of agricultural lands, forests, urban centers and other targets in Malaysia for commercial and government customers [Reuters].

The achievement is an important validation for SpaceX, which had three launch failures before getting its first test rocket into orbit in September 2008. Last year, SpaceX won a contract to supply the International Space Station after the shuttle retires, and this launch stands as the first physical proof that SpaceX can get the job done. To further develop their space delivery capability, SpaceX plans to follow this launch up later in the year with a launch of their larger rocket, Falcon 9 [Popular Science]. That rocket will be capable of carrying a cargo vehicle, called Dragon, to the low-Earth orbit where the space station resides.

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The U.S. government has announced increasing concern over the quality of its Global Positioning System (GPS), which could begin to deteriorate as early as next year, resulting in regular blackouts and failures – or even dishing out inaccurate directions to millions of people worldwide [The Guardian]. The possibility that new satellites would not be launched in time was announced in late April, but the warning was stepped up this week in a government statement that recognized cost over-runs of defence department space programmes [Nature] as part of the problem.

The functioning of GPS relies on a network of satellites that constantly orbit the planet and beam signals back to the ground that help pinpoint your position on the Earth’s surface [The Guardian]. GPS service cannot maintain its level of precision if old satellites wear out before new satellites are launched as replacements, and the ability of the system to provide full coverage could dip below 95% between 2010 and 2014, when the Air Force plans to begin replacing the current block of satellites with a newer generation [Nature], warned the report by the Government Accountability Office.

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NASA hopes to send a “nano-satellite” the size of a bread loaf into orbit tomorrow, where it will conduct experiments on yeast to determine how the microorganisms behave in space. Weighing only 10 pounds, the tiny satellite called PharmaSat is scheduled to lift off on board a U.S. Air Force four-stage Minotaur 1 rocket late on May 5. Once aloft and free of the rocket, the satellite will circle the Earth at 17,000 mph while carrying a micro-laboratory packed with sensors and optical systems [ComputerWorld].

The satellite’s lab will autonomously conduct drug testing in orbit, treating the yeast with anti-fungal drugs to see if the yeast responds differently to treatment when it’s free of the Earth’s gravity. “There’s data that’s coming back from shuttle and space station missions that indicates something is changing microorganisms in a microgravity environment making them more varied,” said Bruce Yost, PharmaSat mission manager…. Those genetic changes could make bacteria more resistant to antibiotics and medical treatment — something scientists are hoping to learn more about before attempting longer jaunts into space such as to the moon and beyond [The Register]. One recent study found that salmonella become more virulent after just 83 hours of growing in space.

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Thanks to a quintet of satellites and a backup posse of ground-based telescopes, researchers have gotten their best look ever at how auroras–also known as the southern and northern lights–begin to form in space. The dazzling light displays are provoked by “space tornadoes,” researchers say.

Whirling at more than a million miles per hour, these invisible, funnel-shaped solar windstorms carry electrical currents of more than a hundred thousand amps—roughly ten times that of an average lightning strike—scientists announced….  And they’re huge: up to 44,000 miles (70,000 kilometers) long and wide enough to envelop Earth [National Geographic News].

The observations were made as part of NASA’s THEMIS mission, which uses the satellites and telescopes to study how solar winds, the charged particles that stream from the sun, interact with the Earth’s magnetic field. On the Earth’s dark side, the solar wind stretches out the field, forming a region known as the magnetotail. The magnetotail is like a rubber band; when it is stretched too far, “eventually it snaps and releases the energy”, says team member Andreas Keiling [New Scientist]. That snap creates turbulence and forms the tornadoes, researchers announced at the European Geosciences Union meeting.

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A sophisticated satellite has been carefully placed into orbit just beyond the Earth’s atmosphere, and this week engineers switched on the super-sensitive instrument that will make ultra-fine measurements of Earth’s gravity. The sophisticated gradiometer will feel the subtle variations in Earth’s tug as it sweeps around the globe [BBC News].

The GOCE satellite, built by the European Space Agency (ESA), was launched on March 17, and mission controllers are now busy testing instruments and its cutting-edge propulsion system. In August or September, they will begin the scientific mission. Because the Earth’s mass is not distributed evenly around the planet (think of the mountains and the oceanic rifts), its gravity is not uniform. Mapping these variations has many applications but perhaps the biggest knowledge gains will come in the study of ocean behaviour. Understanding better how gravity pulls water – and therefore heat – around the globe will improve computer models that try to forecast climate change [BBC News].

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While the international community reacted with outrage to North Korea’s rocket launch on Sunday, calling it a provocative test of a long-range missile, North Korea’s isolated leader, Kim Jong-Il, continued to insist that the launch was an entirely peaceful enterprise. Kim has repeatedly said that the rocket was intended to send an experimental satellite into orbit, and said it would mark the beginning of his country’s space program. There was also disagreement on the basic question of whether anything reached orbit. Officials from the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) say the rocket’s payload splashed down into the Pacific Ocean, while North Korea claims that the satellite is already broadcasting from space.

The North Korean news agency reports that Kim is pleased and proud. “Expressing great satisfaction over the fact that scientists and technicians of the [North Korea] successfully launched the satellite with their own wisdom and technology, he highly appreciated their feats and extended thanks to them,” the agency said…. According to North Korea’s official media, not only did the country successfully send a communications satellite into orbit, but “it is sending to the Earth the melodies of the immortal revolutionary paeans ‘Song of General Kim Il Sung’ and ‘Song of General Kim Jong Il’” [CNN].

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The North Korean government announced yesterday that it’s preparing to launch a communications satellite on a North Korean-made rocket, a move that has been widely interpreted as a test firing of its long-range missile. South Korea and the United States say any test-firing, whether a purported satellite launch or a missile test, would be provocative since the technology is dual-use, and would breach UN resolutions [AFP]. Experts say that the long-range Taepodong-2 rocket has a range of about 4,200 miles, which gives it the theoretical capacity to hit Alaska. But in the only previous test of the long-range rocket, in 2006, it exploded 40 seconds after launch.

North Korea has insisted that the launch is a purely scientific endeavor. “The preparations for launching an experimental communications satellite … are now making brisk headway,” North Korea’s KCNA news agency said. “When this satellite launch proves successful, the nation’s space science and technology will make another giant stride forward in building an economic power” [Reuters]. South Korean news sources have reported that the rocket has not yet been moved to the launch pad, but that there is a great deal of activity around the site.

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A miniature plasma thruster could one day power satellites, and could potentially increase their maneuverability and prevent them from crashing into each other, researchers say. The shoebox-sized prototype, called the Mini-Helicon Plasma Thruster, is much smaller than other rockets of its kind and runs on gases that are much less expensive than conventional propellants. As a result, it could slash fuel consumption by 10 times that of conventional systems used for the same applications [Science Daily].

The system doesn’t use a chemical reaction to provide power, as most rockets do, but instead uses electrical power to accelerate a propellant. The thruster uses nitrogen gas, which is pumped through a quartz tube wrapped in a coiled antenna and surrounded by magnets. Radio frequency power, transmitted to the nitrogen from the antenna, turns the gas into plasma, or electrically charged gas.  The magnets help produce the plasma, and guide and accelerate it through the system [Wired News].

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The launch of the first satellite dedicated to studying carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere has failed, NASA is reporting. Says NASA spokesman Steve Cole: “The mission is lost…. At this point no one is exactly sure what the cause is” [Bloomberg].

The $278 million satellite, called the Orbiting Carbon Observatory, blasted off last night from California’s Vanderberg Air Force Base at 1:51 a.m. local time aboard a Taurus XL rocket. “Several minutes into the flight of the Taurus rocket carrying NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory spacecraft, launch managers declared a contingency after the payload fairing failed to separate,” the space agency said in a statement [Reuters]. The fairing is a clamshell-like structure that shelters the payload as the rocket screams upward through the atmosphere.

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If all goes as planned, the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) will be blasted into space early tomorrow morning, and will become the first spacecraft dedicated to studying carbon dioxide, the leading greenhouse gas driving global warming. Researchers say the satellite will answer long-standing questions. Thirty billion tons of carbon dioxide waft into the air from the burning of fossil fuels each year. About half stays in the air. The other half disappears. Where it all goes, nobody quite knows…. The new data could help improve climate models and the understanding of the “carbon sinks,” like oceans and forests, that absorb much of the carbon dioxide [The New York Times].

Annual variations in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere suggest that the carbon sinks may “fill up” some years and be unable to absorb more of the gas. These fluctuations make it hard to predict future conditions, says principal investigator David Crisp, of NASA: “People are asking us to predict how much the climate will change over the next 50 years…. How can I tell you how much CO₂-induced climate change there’s going to be if I don’t know how much CO₂ there’s going to be in the atmosphere?” he says. Even if it were possible to predict how much CO₂ humans will put into the atmosphere, “that’s still only half the puzzle,” he says. “I still need to know how much is going to be absorbed by the earth” [Technology Review].

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In an unprecedented space accident, two satellites collided in orbit yesterday, pulverizing each other and creating clouds of orbital debris that could pose a threat to other satellites and spacecraft. The accident occurred when a defunct Russian satellite and a U.S. communications satellite rammed into each other 491 miles above Siberia while each was traveling about 17,500 miles per hour. While NASA officials say this is the first such collision on record, they didn’t express much surprise. “We knew this was going to happen eventually and this is it — this was the big one,” said Nicholas Johnson [ABC News], who tracks orbital debris with NASA.

In their first estimate, NASA said at least 600 pieces of debris had spun off from the collision, and noted that even small chunks can pose a threat since they move at such high speeds. But the International Space Station is not thought to be imperiled because it’s in a lower orbit, 220 miles above the earth. Some pieces will drift down towards the station over time, but the risk to the station, Mr. Johnson added, “is going to be very, very small.” In the worst case, he said, “We’ll just dodge them if we have to. It’s the small things you can’t see that are the ones that can do you harm” [The New York Times]. The Space Station has maneuvered to avoid debris eight times in the past, NASA says.

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Iran says it has successfully launched a domestically built satellite into orbit using a rocket that was also made in Iran, marking the country’s entry into the league of spacefaring nations on the 30th anniversary of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Iranian state television showed footage of a rocket blasting off from a launchpad and lighting up the night sky as it streaked into space…. “Dear Iranian nation, your children have placed the first indigenous satellite into orbit,” President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said in a televised message [Reuters].

The announcement may prompt new concerns from the United States and Europe, as experts say that the rocket Iran used to blast its satellite into space could also be used to launch a ballistic missile. But the rocket launch was viewed in a different light by the Iranian government, which sees the accomplishment as an important milestone along the road to reclaiming Persia’s ancient claim to major power status, which it feels the jealous west is trying to deny it [The Guardian]. On Wednesday, senior diplomats from six nations will meet in Frankfurt to discuss Iran’s nuclear fuel enrichment program, which many fear could lead Iran to developing nuclear weapons.

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