Satellite Animation Shows February Return of the Pineapple Express

An animation of satellite imagery from NOAA's GOES-West satellite from Feb. 1 to Feb. 4, 2015 captured the movement of a stream of clouds associated with moisture called "The Pineapple Express." Image Credit: NASA/NOAA GOES Project, Dennis Chesters

The "Pineapple Express" has set up again and is bringing wet weather to the U.S. Pacific Northwest. An animation of satellite imagery from NOAA's GOES-West satellite from Feb. 1 to Feb. 4, 2015 captured the movement of a stream of clouds associated with moisture that is expected to bring rain and snow to the region over the next several days.

The ‘‘Pineapple Express’’ occurs when warm air and lots of moisture are transported from the Central Pacific, near Hawaii, to the Eastern Pacific Ocean.

A wide-field movie by NOAA's GOES-West satellite shows the Pineapple Express' stream of clouds and moisture moving into the Pacific Northwest. The video was created by NASA/NOAA's GOES Project at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

“Good news for Northern California and the Pacific Northwest," said Bill Patzert, climatologist for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "Beginning Wednesday, a series of storms pumped up by a moisture-laden ‘Pineapple Express’ system surging out of the warm tropical Pacific will deliver some small relief to rain and snow starved California. Though not a drought buster, we Californians are hoping this might be a preview of coming attractions for February and March. We are in the fourth quarter of our winter rain season and need a ‘hail mary’ to beat this drought down,” Patzert said.

On Feb.4 NOAA's National Weather Service Weather Prediction Center (NPC) in College Park, Maryland issued a short range forecast discussion about the Pineapple Express. NPC noted: A weather system that's tapping into abundant moisture in the Pacific will bring moderate to heavy rainfall to the Pacific Northwest beginning Wednesday. The rain will spread into northern California on Thursday and is expected to continue through the weekend. Some areas could see in excess of 10 inches of rain through early Saturday.

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The Pineapple Express is expected to affect areas from northwest California into coastal Oregon and Washington State. NPC noted that the "Express" is expected to produce mostly light to moderate rainfall totals for the coastal Pacific Northwest on Feb. 4, with much heavier totals expected the following two days.

GOES satellites provide the kind of continuous monitoring necessary for intensive data analysis. Geostationary describes an orbit in which a satellite is always in the same position with respect to the rotating Earth. This allows GOES to hover continuously over one position on Earth's surface, appearing stationary. As a result, GOES provide a constant vigil for the atmospheric "triggers" for severe weather conditions such as tornadoes, flash floods, hail storms and hurricanes.

Source: Nasa

The Michigan State University Gets USDA Grant to aid Michigan's Fledgling Farmers

                                                                  Image Credit: MSU
Michigan State University has long been a resource for small farms in Michigan. Thanks to a $750,000 grant from the United States Department of Agriculture, MSU will be able to help even more fledgling farmers get their start.

“This grant will enhance and create a vibrant network of farmer training across Michigan to help them negotiate the first five years of their endeavor,” said Mike Hamm, C.S. Mott Professor of Sustainable Agriculture and Director of MSU Center for Regional Food Systems. “Our programs will cater to different perspectives and needs while moving everyone who desires to farm along the path of building a viable business."

As part of the grant, the MSU Student Organic Farm will expand its Organic Farmer Training Program. Without programs like this, burgeoning farmers like Joannee DeBruhl, farm manager of Stone Coop Farm, may not have ever gotten her start.

DeBruhl, who spent much of her career in the insurance business, was laid off in 2009. Looking for a major change, she gravitated toward community gardening and eventually enrolled in MSU’s Organic Farmer Training Program.

“The program was great; it gave me lots of hands-on training and showed that it was possible and not just a dream,” DeBruhl said. “I think the USDA grant will be a huge benefit for small farmers because there’s not much money out there to help them get started.”

Training and help with startup costs are crucial, and this grant will be managed well by MSU, she added.

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Key to the project is MSU’s partnership with Michigan Food and Farming Systems, which runs the Women in Agriculture Collective Farming Initiative at Genesys Health System in Genesee County. This partnership will develop site- and people-appropriate training programs that help beginning women farmers build a successful business.

In addition to women, the grant also will develop training programs for Hispanic farmers. The number of Hispanic farms in Michigan continues to grow, and MSU will assist this historically underserved farmer population through training and site development assistance at the Farmers on the Move Cooperative in Battle Creek.

MSU also will launch new, and improve existing, programs that target the biggest challenges facing small-farm viability – land access, capital access, market access, business planning and strategizing for scaling up production.

Additional MSU contributors helping with this grant include: Jeremy Moghtader, Shakara Tyler. Michelle Napier-Dunnings, with Michigan Food and Farming Systems, also will be contributing to these efforts.

Source: Michigan State University

Study reveals how oxygen is like kryptonite to titanium

UC Berkeley scientists have found the mechanism by which titanium, prized for its high strength-to-weight ratio and natural resistance to corrosion, becomes brittle with just a few extra atoms of oxygen.

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Shown is a cross section of grade 3 titanium (containing 0.3 percent oxygen) that has been put under stress and deformed. The defects in the crystal are evident. Oxygen impurities forced the defects to spread onto different planes of the material. (Image by Qian Yu)

The discovery, described in the Feb. 6 issue of the journal Science, has the potential to open the door to more practical, cost-effective uses of titanium in a broader range of applications. The popular silver-gray metal can already be found in high-end bicycles, laptops and human implants, among other products. But high-grade titanium with low levels of oxygen is hard to come by, and the expense of purifying the metal has prevented its wider use in applications for the construction, automotive and aerospace industries.

“If you could process titanium in a way that retained its optimal properties but at a cost comparable to aluminum, you would find uses in cars, trucks, aircraft and ships,” said study senior author Andrew Minor, an associate professor of materials science and engineering and faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “The high corrosion resistance and excellent specific properties of titanium are very attractive, and reducing the costs to the level of aluminum would make using the material a no-brainer.”

Minor led a research team from the department of materials science and engineering that focused on solving the long-standing mystery in metallurgy of how oxygen causes such a profound change in the characteristics of metals.

“Oxygen is like poison to titanium,” said Minor. “With more oxygen, the material gets harder and more susceptible to cracks, qualities that are not desirable for structural materials.”

A good structural material will have the right balance of ductility — the ability to bend in response to stress — and strength. Minor noted that glass is strong and hard, but not ductile, which is why that material is not used to build vehicles or bridges.

The light blue lines in this schematic illustrate a moving defect, or dislocation, in titanium. The interaction between the dislocation and an oxygen impurity (red atom) leads to the creation of additional dislocations, shown as dark blue lines. (Image by Liang Qi)

Minor added that while many metals have the potential to become brittle with oxygen, titanium is particularly sensitive to even tiny bits of the element. Grade 3 titanium is only 0.3 percent oxygen, yet it is one-third as tough as grade 1 titanium, which is 0.1 percent oxygen. Understanding how oxygen hardens titanium offers a target for research into control of the process, the study authors said.

The researchers subjected various grades of titanium samples to nanocompression tests and examined the resulting impact using advanced transmission electron microscopy techniques and quantum mechanical predictions of defect structures. They found that the interactions between oxygen and the crystalline defects, known as dislocations, that are characteristic of titanium were key to how the material hardened.

The researchers found that oxygen atoms acted like bumps in the road for the corkscrew-shaped dislocations found in titanium. “The mechanical shuffling that occurs as dislocations pop up and over those atomic bumps creates a domino effect of more dislocations,” said study co-author Daryl Chrzan, a professor of materials science and engineering who led the theoretical effort in the project. With increased oxygen, the titanium becomes more difficult to bend and therefore more susceptible to cracking, the researchers found.

A similar effect is seen by bending a paper clip until it breaks. The more the metal bends, the greater the number of dislocations. Dislocations interfere with the motion of other defects, making the paper clip more difficult to bend. Eventually, the number of dislocations is so high that the paper clip can no longer bend, and instead it breaks.

“Now that we know what it is about the oxygen found in inexpensive titanium that causes the material to harden, we can work on figuring out a way to process it to move oxygen atoms to a place where they don’t cause problems,” said study co-author Mark Asta, a professor of materials science and engineering.

Minor noted that this is already done in the semiconductor industry since oxygen and other impurities are also damaging to silicon-based microprocessors.

Other co-authors of the study included researchers from the Berkeley Lab, Japan’s Nuclear Science and Engineering Directorate and Rolls Royce.

The Office of Naval Research helped support this work. Experiments were performed at the National Center for Electron Microscopy in the Molecular Foundry at Berkeley Lab, which is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy.

Source: UC Berekely

NASA Observatories Take an Unprecedented Look into Superstar Eta Carinae

In this supercomputer simulation, the stars of Eta Carinae are shown as black dots. Lighter colors indicate greater densities in the stellar winds produced by each star. At closest approach, the fast wind of the smaller star carves a tunnel in the thicker wind of the larger star. Image Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/T. Madura

Eta Carinae, the most luminous and massive stellar system within 10,000 light-years of Earth, is known for its surprising behavior, erupting twice in the 19th century for reasons scientists still don't understand. A long-term study led by astronomers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, used NASA satellites, ground-based telescopes and theoretical modeling to produce the most comprehensive picture of Eta Carinae to date. New findings include Hubble Space Telescope images that show decade-old shells of ionized gas racing away from the largest star at a million miles an hour, and new 3-D models that reveal never-before-seen features of the stars' interactions.

"We are coming to understand the present state and complex environment of this remarkable object, but we have a long way to go to explain Eta Carinae's past eruptions or to predict its future behavior," said Goddard astrophysicist Ted Gull, who coordinates a research group that has monitored the star for more than a decade.

Located about 7,500 light-years away in the southern constellation of Carina, Eta Carinae comprises two massive stars whose eccentric orbits bring them unusually close every 5.5 years. Both produce powerful gaseous outflows called stellar winds, which enshroud the stars and stymy efforts to directly measure their properties. Astronomers have established that the brighter, cooler primary star has about 90 times the mass of the sun and outshines it by 5 million times. While the properties of its smaller, hotter companion are more contested, Gull and his colleagues think the star has about 30 solar masses and emits a million times the sun's light.

Seen in blue light emitted by doubly ionized iron atoms (4,659 angstroms), these images of Eta Carinae were captured by Hubble's STIS instrument between 2010 and 2014. Gas shells created during the binary's 2003 close approach race outward at about 1 million mph (1.6 million km/h). Image Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/T. Gull et al.

Speaking at a press conference at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle on Wednesday, the Goddard researchers discussed recent observations of Eta Carinae and how they fit with the group's current understanding of the system.

At closest approach, or periastron, the stars are 140 million miles (225 million kilometers) apart, or about the average distance between Mars and the sun. Astronomers observe dramatic changes in the system during the months before and after periastron. These include X-ray flares, followed by a sudden decline and eventual recovery of X-ray emission; the disappearance and re-emergence of structures near the stars detected at specific wavelengths of visible light; and even a play of light and shadow as the smaller star swings around the primary.

During the past 11 years, spanning three periastron passages, the Goddard group has developed a model based on routine observations of the stars using ground-based telescopes and multiple NASA satellites. "We used past observations to construct a computer simulation, which helped us predict what we would see during the next cycle, and then we feed new observations back into the model to further refine it," said Thomas Madura, a NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellow at Goddard and a theorist on the Eta Carinae team.

According to this model, the interaction of the two stellar winds accounts for many of the periodic changes observed in the system. The winds from each star have markedly different properties: thick and slow for the primary, lean and fast for the hotter companion. The primary's wind blows at nearly 1 million mph and is especially dense, carrying away the equivalent mass of our sun every thousand years. By contrast, the companion's wind carries off about 100 times less material than the primary's, but it races outward as much as six times faster.

Madura's simulations, which were performed on the Pleiades supercomputer at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, reveal the complexity of the wind interaction. When the companion star rapidly swings around the primary, its faster wind carves out a spiral cavity in the dense outflow of the larger star. To better visualize this interaction, Madura converted the computer simulations to 3-D digital models and made solid versions using a consumer-grade 3-D printer. This process revealed lengthy spine-like protrusions in the gas flow along the edges of the cavity, features that hadn't been noticed before.    

"We think these structures are real and that they form as a result of instabilities in the flow in the months around closest approach," Madura said. "I wanted to make 3-D prints of the simulations to better visualize them, which turned out to be far more successful than I ever imagined." A paper detailing this research has been submitted to the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The team detailed a few key observations that expose some of the system's inner workings. For the past three periastron passages, ground-based telescopes in Brazil, Chile, Australia and New Zealand have monitored a single wavelength of blue light emitted by helium atoms that have lost a single electron. According to the model, the helium emission tracks conditions in the primary star's wind. 

The Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) aboard Hubble captures a different wavelength of blue light emitted by iron atoms that have lost two electrons, which uniquely reveals where gas from the primary star is set aglow by the intense ultraviolet light of its companion. Lastly, X-rays from the system carry information directly from the wind collision zone, where the opposing winds create shock waves that heat the gas to hundreds of millions of degrees.

"Changes in the X-rays are a direct probe of the collision zone and reflect changes in how these stars lose mass," said Michael Corcoran, an astrophysicist with the Universities Space Research Association headquartered in Columbia, Maryland. He and his colleagues compared periastron emission measured over the past 20 years by NASA's Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer, which ceased operation in 2012, and the X-ray Telescope aboard NASA's Swift satellite. In July 2014, as the stars rushed toward each other, Swift observed a series of flares culminating in the brightest X-ray emission yet seen from Eta Carinae. This implies a change in mass loss by one of the stars, but X-rays alone cannot determine which one.

Goddard's Mairan Teodoro led the ground-based campaign tracking the helium emission. "The 2014 emission is nearly identical to what we saw at the previous periastron in 2009, which suggests the primary wind has been constant and that the companion's wind is responsible for the X-ray flares," he explained.

After NASA astronauts repaired the Hubble Space Telescope's STIS instrument in 2009, Gull and his collaborators requested to use it to observe Eta Carinae. By separating the stars' light into a rainbow-like spectrum, STIS reveals the chemical make-up of their environment. But the spectrum also showed wispy structures near the stars that suggested the instrument could be used to map a region close to the binary system in never-before-seen detail.

STIS views its targets through a single narrow slit to limit contamination from other sources. Since December 2010, Gull's team has regularly mapped a region centered on the binary by capturing spectra at 41 different locations, an effort similar to building up a panoramic picture from a series of snapshots. The view spans about 430 billion miles (670 billion km), or about 4,600 times the average Earth-sun distance.

The resulting images, revealed for the first time on Wednesday, show that the doubly ionized iron emission comes from a complex gaseous structure nearly a tenth of a light-year across, which Gull likens to Maryland blue crab. By stepping through the STIS images, vast shells of gas representing the crab's "claws" can be seen racing away from the stars with measured speeds of about 1 million mph (1.6 million km/h). With each close approach, a spiral cavity forms in the larger star's wind and then expands outward along with it, creating the moving shells.
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"These gas shells persist over thousands of times the distance between Earth and the sun," Gull explained. "Backtracking them, we find the shells began moving away from the primary star about 11 years or three periastron passages ago, providing us with an additional way to glimpse what occurred in the recent past."

When the stars approach, the companion becomes immersed in the thickest part of the primary's wind, which absorbs its UV light and prevents the radiation from reaching the distant gas shells. Without this energy to excite it, the doubly ionized iron stops emitting light and the crab structure disappears at this wavelength. Once the companion swings around the primary and clears the densest wind, its UV light escapes, re-energizes iron atoms in the shells, and the crab returns. 

Eta Carinae's great eruption in the 1840s created the billowing Homunculus Nebula, imaged here by Hubble. Now about a light-year long, the expanding cloud contains enough material to make at least 10 copies of our sun. Astronomers cannot yet explain what caused this eruption. Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble SM4 ERO Team

Both of the massive stars of Eta Carinae may one day end their lives in supernova explosions. For stars, mass is destiny, and what will determine their ultimate fate is how much matter they can lose -- through stellar winds or as-yet-inexplicable eruptions -- before they run out of fuel and collapse under their own weight.

For now, the researchers say, there is no evidence to suggest an imminent demise of either star. They are exploring the rich dataset from the 2014 periastron passage to make new predictions, which will be tested when the stars again race together in February 2020.

NASA is exploring our solar system and beyond to understand the universe and our place in it. We seek to unravel the secrets of our universe, its origins and evolution, and search for life among the stars.

Source: Nasa

New research shows ocean warming poses "immediate threat" to keystone reef-building coral in the Caribbean

New research published in The Proceeding of the Royal Society - Biological Sciences provides new insights on the threat  ocean warming poses on coral growth in Mesoamerican barrier reefs.  The research, partially funded by CPO's Climate Monitoring program, used laboratory experiments to examine the adverse effects of ocean warming and acidification, and showed that the warming predicted by the IPCC for the end of the 21st century produced a five-fold decrease in coral calcification - the process by which corals produce calcium carbonate (CaCO3) and build reefs.

“The reef-building coral Siderastrea siderea exhibits parabolic responses to ocean acidification and warming,” is part of on-going work of NOAA-funded researcher Dr. Justin Ries that is looking at various aspects of climate variability, change, and ocean acidification on coral growth.  Dr. Ries and colleagues have been examining long term coral reef growth patterns at one of the largest barrier reefs in the world, off the coast of southern Belize. The research aims to create100 year records of coral growth at this reef by examining growth rates and environmental factors. As part of this work, Dr. Ries and his team found substantially decreasing growth rates over the last several years, at the same time that ocean acidification and temperature have been increasing.

Massive Starlet Coral (Siderastrea siderea) Image courtesy: D. Gordon E. Robertson via Creative Commons

This new research, led by post-doctoral researcher Dr. Karl Castillo, was designed to isolate the effects increasing ocean acidification and temperature had on Siderastrea sidereal, an important keystone and reef building coral species at the reef. By extracting coral colonies and returning them to the lab, researchers were able to design separate experiments around increasing temperature and decreasing ocean pH, and measure the coral response. While the most adverse effects on corals may arise from both acidification and temperature warming, researchers wanted to better understand the specific responses to these individually, which could aid efforts to predict and potentially mitigate the impacts of changing ocean conditions on coral.

They found that both ocean acidification and ocean warming had a “parabolic effect” on this important coral species. This means that while moderate decreases in the pH of seawater and moderate rises in temperature led to increases in coral building, in both cases researchers found a “tipping point” at which the coral calcification rates started decreasing. For ocean acidification, researchers recreated seawater conditions that would occur from the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration from pre-industrial up through the present, the predicted end-of-century value, and up to six times the present condition. They found the “tipping point” at which calcification started leveling off and finally decreasing was actually well past the acidifications that would be expected by the end of century. For this particular species, they concluded, ocean acidification expected over the next century alone may not have a significant adverse effect.

Figure 1: Rates of reef-building calcification observed during the experiment for (left panel) increasing levels of ocean acidification and (right panel) temperatures ranging from 25C to 32C.

For warming ocean temperatures, however, the results were very different.  For the temperature experiments, researchers grew the coral colonies in temperatures from 25C to 32C, which covers the range of annual minimum and maximum temperatures of ocean temperatures recorded near the reef over 2002-2014, as well as annual average seawater temperatures expected over the next century. Thus the researchers were hoping to capture how the coral responds to the year to year variability seen now as well as what general conditions are predicted to by like by the end of the century. They found that while reef-building calcification rates increased for corals at 28C relative to 32C, skeletal building dropped off dramatically – nearly 80% - in corals growing at 32C. This parabolic response indicates that for this important reef building species, ocean warming over the next few decades could be an immediate serious threat, as conditions pass what the research found to be a species tipping point. Researchers note that the actual reef will experience changes in both stressors – ocean acidification and ocean warming – together over the next century, and will continue to work to understand how this and other reefs may respond.

You can watch a YouTube video on this and other aspects of Dr. Ries coral reef research here:  



Source: CRO

Why do zebras have stripes?

A mother zebra with a foal in Tanzania’s Tarangire National Park. Credit: Brenda Larison/UCLA

One of nature’s fascinating questions is how zebras got their stripes.

A team of life scientists led by UCLA’s Brenda Larison has found at least part of the answer: The amount and intensity of striping can be best predicted by the temperature of the environment in which zebras live.

In the January cover story of the Royal Society’s online journal, Open Science, the researchers make the case that the association between striping and temperature likely points to multiple benefits — including controlling zebras’ body temperature and protecting them from diseases carried by biting flies.

“While past studies have typically focused their search for single mechanisms, we illustrate in this study how the cause of this extraordinary phenomenon is actually likely much more complex than previously appreciated, with temperature playing an important role,” said Thomas B. Smith, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology in the UCLA College and senior author of the research.

Larison, a researcher in UCLA’s department of ecology and evolutionary biology and the study’s lead author, and her colleagues examined the plains zebra, which is the most common of three zebra species and has a wide variety of stripe patterns. On zebras in warmer climes, the stripes are bold and cover the entire body. On others — particularly those in regions with colder winters such as South Africa and Namibia — the stripes are fewer in number and are lighter and narrower. In some cases, the legs or other body parts have virtually no striping.

Zebras evolved from horses more than 2 million years ago, biologists have found. Scientists have previously hypothesized that zebras’ stripes evolved for one, or a combination of, four main reasons: confusing predators, protecting against disease-carrying insects, controlling body temperature and social cohesion. And while numerous previous studies of the phenomenon focused on a single hypothesis, the Larison-led study was the first to fully test a large set of hypotheses against one another.

Analyzing zebras at 16 locations in Africa and considering more two dozen environmental factors, the researchers found that temperature was the strongest predictor of zebras’ striping. The finding provides the first evidence that controlling body temperature, or thermoregulation, is the main reason for the stripes and the patterns they form.
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Separate research by Daniel Rubenstein, a Princeton University professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and a co-author of the Open Science paper, and Princeton undergraduate Damaris Iriondo strongly suggests that boldly striped zebras have external body temperatures about five degrees Fahrenheit cooler than other animals of the same size — like antelopes — that do not have stripes but live in the same areas. The Rubenstein study is not yet published, but it is cited in the Open Science paper.

Larison has studied many zebras during her field work throughout Africa — including in Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda and Zimbabwe. Using the fact that their stripes are unique like fingerprints, she is able to distinguish one zebra from another.

In addition to Rubenstein, arguably the world’s leading expert on zebras, the study’s co-authors were Alec Chan-Golston and Elizabeth Li, former UCLA undergraduates in mathematics; Ryan Harrigan, an assistant adjunct professor in UCLA’s Center for Tropical Research; and Henri Thomassen, a former UCLA postdoctoral scholar and current research associate at the Institute for Evolution and Ecology at Germany’s University of Tübingen.

The research was supported by the National Geographic Society Committee for Research and Exploration.

Larison and her research team have also collected zebra tissue samples and have used cutting-edge technology to sequence zebra DNA to try to identify which genes code for striping. The team is continuing to study the benefits stripes provide.

Source: UCLA

NASA Launches Groundbreaking Soil Moisture Mapper

NASA's Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) observatory lifts off from Space Launch Complex 2 West at California's Vandenberg Air Force Base, beginning a three-year mission to map Earth's vital moisture hidden in the soils beneath our feet. Image credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls

NASA successfully launched its first Earth satellite designed to collect global observations of the vital soil moisture hidden just beneath our feet.

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The Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) observatory, a mission with broad applications for science and society, lifted off at 6:22 a.m. PST (9:22 a.m. EST) Saturday from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, on a United Launch Alliance Delta II rocket. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, manages SMAP for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington, with instrument hardware and science contributions made by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

About 57 minutes after liftoff, SMAP separated from the rocket's second stage into an initial 411- by 425-mile (661- by 685-kilometer) orbit. After a series of activation procedures, the spacecraft established communications with ground controllers and deployed its solar array. Initial telemetry shows the spacecraft is in excellent health.
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SMAP now begins a three-year mission that will figuratively scratch below Earth's surface to expand our understanding of a key component of the Earth system that links the water, energy and carbon cycles driving our living planet. SMAP's combined radar and radiometer instruments will peer into the top 2 inches (5 centimeters) of soil, through clouds and moderate vegetation cover, day and night, to produce the highest-resolution, most accurate soil moisture maps ever obtained from space.

The mission will help improve climate and weather forecasts and allow scientists to monitor droughts and better predict flooding caused by severe rainfall or snowmelt -- information that can save lives and property. In addition, since plant growth depends on the amount of water in the soil, SMAP data will allow nations to better forecast crop yields and assist in global famine early-warning systems.

"The launch of SMAP completes an ambitious 11-month period for NASA that has seen the launch of five new Earth-observing space missions to help us better understand our changing planet," said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. "Scientists and policymakers will use SMAP data to track water movement around our planet and make more informed decisions in critical areas like agriculture and water resources."

SMAP also will detect whether the ground is frozen or thawed. Detecting variations in the timing of spring thaw and changes in the length of the growing season will help scientists more accurately account for how much carbon plants are removing from Earth's atmosphere each year.

"The next few years will be especially exciting for Earth science thanks to measurements from SMAP and our other new missions," said Michael Freilich, director of the Earth Science Division of NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. "Each mission measures key variables that affect Earth's environment. SMAP will provide new insights into the global water, energy and carbon cycles. Combining data from all our orbiting missions will give us a much better understanding of how the Earth system works."

SMAP will orbit Earth from pole to pole every 98.5 minutes, repeating the same ground track every eight days. Its 620-mile (1,000-kilometer) measurement swath allows SMAP to cover Earth's entire equatorial regions every three days and higher latitudes every two days. The mission will map global soil moisture with about 5.6-mile (9-kilometer) resolution.

"SMAP will improve the daily lives of people around the world," said Simon Yueh, SMAP project scientist at JPL. "Soil moisture data from SMAP has the potential to significantly improve the accuracy of short-term weather forecasts and reduce the uncertainty of long-term projections of how climate change will impact Earth's water cycle."

The SMAP team is engaged with many organizations and individuals that see immediate uses for the satellite's data. Through workshops and tutorials, the SMAP Applications Working Group is collaborating with 45 "early adopters" to test and integrate the mission's data products into many different applications. Early adopters include weather forecasters from several nations, as well as researchers and planners from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, U.S. Geological Survey, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the United Nations World Food Programme.

During the next 90 days, SMAP and its ground system will be commissioned to ensure they are fully functional and are ready to begin routine science data collection. A key milestone will be the deployment of the spacecraft's instrument boom and 20-foot-diameter (6-meter) reflector antenna. The observatory will be maneuvered to its final 426-mile (685-kilometer), near-polar operational orbit, and the antenna will spin up to 14.6 revolutions per minute.

SMAP science operations will then begin, and SMAP data will be calibrated and validated. The first release of SMAP soil moisture data products is expected within nine months. Fully validated science data are expected to be released within 15 months.

SMAP's Delta II rocket also carried a JPL CubeSat into orbit. The GRIFEX (Geostationary Coastal and Air Pollution Events Read-Out Integrated Circuit In-Flight Performance Experiment) CubeSat was one of three NASA-sponsored CubeSat missions successfully deployed during the launch. About the size of a loaf of bread, GRIFEX will validate cutting-edge detector technology for use in future Earth-observing satellites.

JPL built the SMAP spacecraft and is responsible for project management, system engineering, radar instrumentation, mission operations and the ground data system. Goddard is responsible for the radiometer instrument and science data products. Both centers collaborate on science data processing and delivery to the Alaska Satellite Facility, in Fairbanks, and the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado in Boulder. NASA's Launch Services Program at the agency's Kennedy Space Center in Florida was responsible for launch management. JPL is managed for NASA by the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

Source: Nasa

Switching to vehicles powered by electricity from renewables could save lives - Video

Use of corn ethanol or electricity from coal worse than gasoline for public health

Driving vehicles that use electricity from renewable energy instead of gasoline could reduce the resulting deaths due to air pollution by 70 percent. This finding comes from a new life cycle analysis of conventional and alternative vehicles and their air pollution-related public health impacts, published Monday, Dec. 15, 2014, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The study also shows that switching to vehicles powered by electricity made using natural gas yields large health benefits. Conversely, vehicles running on corn ethanol or vehicles powered by coal-based or "grid average" electricity are worse for health; switching from gasoline to those fuels would increase the number of resulting deaths due to air pollution by 80 percent or more.

“These findings demonstrate the importance of clean electricity, such as from natural gas or renewables, in substantially reducing the negative health impacts of transportation,” said Chris Tessum, co-author on the study and a researcher in the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Geo- Engineering in the University of Minnesota’s College of Science and Engineering.

The University of Minnesota team estimated how concentrations of two important pollutants—particulate matter and ground-level ozone—change as a result of using various options for powering vehicles. Air pollution is the largest environmental health hazard in the U.S., in total killing more than 100,000 people per year. Air pollution increases rates of heart attack, stroke, and respiratory disease.

The authors looked at liquid biofuels, diesel, compressed natural gas, and electricity from a range of conventional and renewable sources. Their analysis included not only the pollution from vehicles, but also emissions generated during production of the fuels or electricity that power them. With ethanol, for example, air pollution is released from tractors on farms, from soils after fertilizers are applied, and to supply the energy for fermenting and distilling corn into ethanol.

“Our work highlights the importance of looking at the full life cycle of energy production and use, not just at what comes out of tailpipes,” said Bioproducts and Biosystems Engineering Assistant Professor Jason Hill, co-author of the study. “We greatly underestimate transportation’s impacts on air quality if we ignore the upstream emissions from producing fuels or electricity.”

The researchers also point out that whereas recent studies on life cycle environmental impacts of transportation have focused mainly on greenhouse gas emissions, it is also important to consider air pollution and health. Their study provides a unique look at where life cycle emissions occur, how they move in the environment, and where people breathe that pollution. Their results provide unprecedented detail on the air quality-related health impacts of transportation fuel production and use.

“Air pollution has enormous health impacts, including increasing death rates across the U.S.,” said Civil, Environmental and Geo- Engineering Associate Professor Julian Marshall, co-author on this study. “This study provides valuable new information on how some transportation options would improve or worsen those health impacts.”

The study’s authors are Marshall and Tessum (College of Science and Engineering) and Hill (College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Resource Sciences), at the University of Minnesota. Marshall and Hill are also Resident Fellows of the University’s Institute on the Environment. This research was supported by the University of Minnesota’s Initiative for Renewable Energy and the Environment (IREE), the Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy of the U.S. Dept. of Energy (EERE/DOE), and the Agricultural and Food Research Initiative of the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture (USDA/AFRI).

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Source: University of Minnesota

Japan tests new satellite on robotic tractors in Riverina

PHOTO: A drone hovers over the Japanese robotic tractor trialled at Rice Research Australia in south-west NSW. (Laurissa Smith)

How would you feel about leaving a tractor to drive itself in one paddock, while you work in another ?

To the busy farmer, struggling to find local labour, it's an appealing concept.

Around the world, manufacturers, engineers and researchers are now trying to turn that into a reality.

In Japan, they've designed a self-steering robotic tractor which can sow, plough and spray crops.

An advanced positioning signal is transmitted from Japan's Quasi-Zenith Satellite System to control the tractor's movements.

The Japanese Government is funding trials to test the tractor on crops at Rice Research Australia near Jerilderie in south-west New South Wales.

Engineering firm Hitachi Zosen, machine manufacturer Yanmar, Hokkaido University and several other Australian universities are working together on the project.

Phil Collier, research director with Australia's Co-operative Research Centre for Spatial Information, hopes the technology can help farmers run their equipment with more accuracy.

"The satellites in the sky determine the position of the tractor in a global frame of reference," he said.

"The additional information that comes from the QZSS Satellites brings the precision down from several metres to two centimetres.

"The whole objective is to bring down the precision to a reliable level and a consistent level to allow that tractor to navigate its way down the rows of crops so things aren't getting run over."

If the trials prove successful, people in rural and remote Australia will have access to precise positioning, without having to rely on the mobile network.

At the moment, the robotic tractor is being tested on rice crops and paddocks late at night and into the early hours of the morning, when the satellite is passing over Australia.

The boundary of the field, the tractor's path and the start and end point of where it can turn are all programmed on a computer inside its cab.

This is to ensure the tractor doesn't veer off into a fence or an irrigation channel.

The CRC's Phil Collier says the technology's application won't be limited to precision farming.

"From mining to automated guidance of cars, anything where there's a level of machine automation required that's outside, then this technology has got that ability to solve that problem.

"My prediction, if I can be so bold, is that this sort of technology will move from sophisticated installations in machines like this to mobile phones in due course and people will have it in their back pocket."

The Japanese Government intends to deploy another three satellites in the near future, which will give Australia 24 hour coverage of the advanced positioning signals, once the technology is commercialised.

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Source: ABC

The state of astronomy before Hubble and the difficulties of observing from the ground that drove the need for a space telescope' Videos

This video looks at the state of astronomy before Hubble and the difficulties of observing from the ground that drove the need for a space telescope. Image Credit: Space Telescope Science Institute

Dr. Nancy Grace Roman, first chief astronomer at NASA’s then Office of Space Science and the one who set up NASA’s astronomy program in the 1960s, speaks about the importance of building and launching a space telescope instead of building duplicates of the Earth-based Palomar 200-inch telescope.

"Astronomers have wanted for generations actually to get a telescope above the atmosphere,” Roman said. “I like to describe the atmosphere being something like looking through an old stained glass window… The glass has defects in it and that sort of keeps you from getting a sharp picture and the atmosphere also has defects." 

"The very sharp images it would produce would allow you to see things that were much fainter than would ever be possible from the ground," said C. Robert O'Dell, of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. O'Dell leads a research team that used Hubble and several ground-based telescopes to obtain the best view yet of the iconic Ring Nebula.
The video addresses several challenges at the time of Hubble's creation, including digital imaging at a time when the industry was in its infancy. The video also speaks on how the telescope has far exceeded its initial life-span.

The 4 minute and 23 second video was produced by STScI. The "Hubble 25th Anniversary" video series is available in HQ, large and small Quicktime formats, HD, large and small WMV formats, and HD, large and small Xvid formats.

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Source: Nasa Hubble

The Cosmic radio burst caught red-handed

A schematic illustration of CSIRO’s Parkes radio telescope receiving the polarised signal from the new ‘fast radio burst’. Credit: Swinburne Astronomy Productions.

Pasadena, CA— Fast radio bursts are quick, bright flashes of radio waves from an unknown source in space. They are a mysterious phenomenon that last only a few milliseconds, and until now they have not been observed in real time. An international team of astronomers, including three from the Carnegie Observatories, has for the first time observed a fast radio burst happening live. Their work is published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

There is a great deal of scientific interest in fast radio bursts, particularly in uncovering their origin.

“These events are one of the biggest mysteries in the Universe” noted Carnegie Observatories' Acting Director John Mulchaey. “Until now, astronomers were not able to catch one of these events in the act.”

Only seven fast radio bursts have previously been discovered, since the first one found in 2007. All were found retroactively by combing through data from the Parkes radio telescope in eastern Australia and the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico.

“These bursts were generally discovered weeks or months or even more than a decade after they happened! We’re the first to catch one in real time,” said Emily Petroff, a PhD candidate from Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia and lead author of the publication.
Swinburne is a member institution of the ARC Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics (CAASTRO).

In order to observe the fast radio burst in real time, the team mobilized 12 telescopes around the world and in space, including Carnegie’s Magellan and Swope telescopes. Each telescope followed-up on the original burst observation at different wavelengths.

Measurements of the interaction between previously detected fast radio burst’s flashes and the free electrons their signals encountered in space as they traveled to reach us had previously indicated that the bursts likely originated far outside of our galaxy. But the idea was controversial.

The team’s data indicates that the burst originated up to 5.5 billion light years away. This means that the sources of theses bursts are extremely bright and could perhaps be used as a cosmological tool for measuring and understanding our universe once we come to understand them better.

“Together, our observations allowed the team to rule out some of the previously proposed sources for the bursts, including nearby supernovae,” explained Carnegie’s Mansi Kasliwal who was on the team along with Mulchaey and colleague Yue Shen. “Short gamma-ray bursts are still a possibility, as are distant magnetic neutron stars called magnetars, but not long gamma ray bursts.”

Gamma ray bursts are high-energy explosions that form some of the brightest celestial events. Long bursts can signify energy released during a supernova and are followed by an afterglow, which emits lower wavelength radiation than the original explosion.

Another interesting piece of information the team was able to gather about the burst is its polarization. The orientation of the radio waves indicates that the burst likely originated near or passed through a magnetic field, information that can help narrow down potential sources going forward.

“As we continue to search for the source of fast radio bursts, Carnegie is well positioned to make big strides in the field,” Mulchaey said. “Quick access to big telescopes like Magellan may be the key to solving this mystery.”

Caption: A schematic illustration of CSIRO’s Parkes radio telescope receiving the polarised signal from the new fast radio burst. Image is credited to Swinburne Astronomy Productions.

Other co-authors are: M. Bailes (Swinburne University of Technology and ARC Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics); E.D. Barr (Swinburne University of Technology and ARC Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics); B. R. Barsdell (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics); N. D. R. Bhat (ARC Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics and Curtin University) ; F. Bian (Australian National University); S. Burke-Spolaor (Caltech); M. Caleb(Australian National University, Swinburne University of Technology, ARC Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics); D. Champion (Max Planck Institut für Radioastronomie); P. Chandra (Tata Institute of Fundamental Research Pune University Campus); G. Da Costa (Australian National University); C. Delvaux (Max-Planck-Institut für extraterrestrische Physik); C. Flynn (Swinburne University of Technology and ARC Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics); N. Gehrels (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center); J. Greiner (Max-Planck-Institut für extraterrestrische Physik); A. Jameson (Swinburne University of Technology and ARC Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics); S. Johnston (CSIRO Astronomy & Space Science Australia Telescope National Facility); E. F. Keane (Swinburne University of Technology and ARC Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics); S. Keller (Australian National University); J. Kocz (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Caltech); M. Kramer (Max Planck Institut für Radioastronomie and University of Manchester) G. Leloudas (University of Copenhagen and Weizmann Institute of Science); D. Malesani (University of Copenhagen); C. Ng (Max Planck Institut für Radioastronomie); E. O. Ofek (Weizmann Institute of Science); D. A. Perley (Caltech); A. Possenti (Osservatorio Astronomico di Cagliari); B. P. Schmidt (Australian National University and ARC Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics); B. Stappers (University of Manchester); P. Tisserand (Australian National University and ARC Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics); W. van Straten (Swinburne University of Technology and ARC Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics ); and C. Wolf (Australian National University and ARC Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics).

The Parkes radio telescope and the Australia Telescope Compact Array are part of the Australia Telescope National Facility, which is funded by the Commonwealth of Australia for operation as a National Facility and managed by CSIRO. Parts of this research were conducted by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics (CAASTRO). GMRT is run by the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. Research with the ANU SkyMapper telescope is supported in part through an ARC Discovery Grant. Part of the funding for GROND was granted from a Leibniz-Prize. The Dark Cosmology Centre is supported by the Danish National Research council. Other support came from Curtin Research Fellowship;, EXTraS, funded from the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration; Hubble Fellowships; a Carnegie-Princeton Fellowship; the Arye Dissentshik career development; the Willner Family Leadership Institute Ilan Gluzman (Secaucus, N.J.), the Israeli Ministry of Science; Israel Science Foundation; Minerv;, Weizmann-UK; the I-CORE Program of the Planning and Budgeting Committee.

The Carnegie Institution for Science (carnegiescience.edu) is a private, nonprofit organization headquartered in Washington, D.C., with six research departments throughout the U.S. Since its founding in 1902, the Carnegie Institution has been a pioneering force in basic scientific research. Carnegie scientists are leaders in plant biology, developmental biology, astronomy, materials science, global ecology, and Earth and planetary science.

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Source: Royal Astronomical Society

Peru’s indigenous people call for protections against environmental threats

As delegates from around the world gather in Lima, Peru, to work on a framework on climate change, thousands of Peruvians flocked to the capital to demand better protection for their lands and cultures. As part of our Culture at Risk series, Jeffrey Brown reports from Lima on the struggle to balance the protection of remote indigenous communities with industry and growth.
Credit: Jeffrey Brown

GWEN IFILL: International delegates have gathered for climate change talks in Lima, Peru, this week, hoping to build the framework for a plan to cut the world’s heat-trapping gas emissions.

Secretary of State John Kerry arrived there today to help with that new accord. But, for many Peruvians, the focus is local, as mining and timber operations encroach into once pristine areas inhabited by indigenous tribes.

Jeffrey Brown is in Lima, and has this report, part of his series Culture at Risk.

JEFFREY BROWN: There were dancers and drummers, banners and chants, traditional clothing of all kinds, a march of thousands, many of them tribal people, that shut down part of downtown Lima for several hours, demanding better protection of their lands and their cultures. They came from near and far, some very far.

This group from the Ucayali region in Eastern Peru had traveled for several days, by boat, plane, and bus, to get here from their remote homes.

Grimaldo Villacorta heads the group.

GRIMALDO VILLACORTA (through interpreter): For us, as an indigenous population, it’s important to be here, because we want to stop climate change. We used to have regular seasons, summer and winter, during which we planted our seeds. But now, with the climate changing, we can work the land, but sometimes we cannot plant seeds. There is no production.

JEFFREY BROWN: This demonstration was set up as a kind of counterpoint to the official climate talks going on across town. The idea is to raise awareness about the increasing and increasingly violent encroachment on tribal lands in Peru and elsewhere around the globe.

Throughout the crowd, portraits of one of the martyrs of this movement, Edwin Chota, a Peruvian environmental activist from the Ashaninka Indian tribe who’d spent years fighting illegal logging on his community’s lands.

In September, Chota and three others from the village of Saweto were shot and killed near the Brazilian border, in the vast Amazon Basin that’s home to about half of Peru’s more than 1,500 indigenous communities, with some 300,000 people. Chota had spoken of threats he received as he fought to gain official title to his lands and keep loggers at bay.

EDWIN CHOTA, Environmental Activist (through interpreter): They are loggers. They have arms. They have everything. And they are never going to pay attention to us. So we need the support of government institutions to protect the region at the border.

JEFFREY BROWN: Chota’s remains were found by a river near his home. Two loggers have been charged with his murder.

That and other incidents led the advocacy group Global Witness to declare Peru one of the world’s most dangerous countries for environmental activists. And by all accounts, illegal logging, mining, and drug trafficking have been on the rise in this area. The World Bank estimates, for example, that some 80 percent of Peru’s timber exports were cut without a permit.

In Lima this week, Patricia Balbuena, the vice culture minister who overseas indigenous relations, said the government is working to resolve land ownership disputes, but that administrations past and present have struggled to ensure legal rights and safety in these distant communities.

PATRICIA BALBUENA, Vice Minister of Intercultural Affairs, Peru (through interpreter): These are remote areas with very little government presence because of geographical barriers. For example, from the capital of Pucallpa region to the community of Saweto, it takes six to eight days by boat.

That is why the most important issue is to assure the government’s presence, not only in terms of a military or police presence, but also in what a government should provide to its indigenous populations: health, education, social services, and security.

JEFFREY BROWN: Encroachment deep into Amazon forests may also be behind scenes like this, as previously isolated or uncontacted tribes come into the open.

Last year, more than 100 members of the Mashco-Piro tribe appeared at a river in Southeast Peru.

Anthropologist Beatriz Huertas studies groups like this who’ve chosen to live apart from civilization. She thinks she knows why more are now making contact.

BEATRIZ HUERTAS, Anthropologist (through interpreter): I think that, first of all, it’s owed to the great pressures on their lands and natural resources, and that those are forcing these isolated peoples to alter their ways and are leading to their displacement.

JEFFREY BROWN: There are more such tribes than you might think. The advocacy group Survival International estimates there are 15 in Peru alone, and at least 100 around the globe.

The highest concentration is here in the Amazon. Citing the threat of contagious disease and other problems that have decimated previously uncontacted tribes, Beatriz Huertas says the government needs to take immediate action.

BEATRIZ HUERTAS (through interpreter): To protect them, it’s necessary to officially recognize their lands and to establish a series of protection mechanisms to guarantee their lives, their health and the right of these populations to decide for themselves what lives they want to live.

JEFFREY BROWN: I asked Vice Minister Balbuena the overarching question, how Peru can foster investment and growth, while also protecting vulnerable people and cultures.

PATRICIA BALBUENA (through interpreter): I think we always feel we need to do more. I think the demands of the indigenous peoples require us to act faster. And we can’t advance a peaceful society if we don’t find a balancing point between growth on the one hand and respect and protection of rights on the other.

JEFFREY BROWN: Achieving a balance has also, of course, been on the minds of attendees at the climate change summit this week in Lima. After years of setbacks and sidesteps, the goal here is for nations to commit, or at least commit to committing, to specific domestic emissions cuts.

The grand hope, a new global treaty to be signed at next year’s meeting in Paris. The effort got a boost last month with an agreement between China and the U.S., the world’s largest economies and polluters, to limit their greenhouse gas emissions over the next two decades.

In pavilions open to the public, Peruvians of all ages took in exhibitions that explained the tangible effects of climate change. There, conference attendee Chris Field told me he felt encouraged by what he’d heard so far at the meetings, but that huge challenges remained.

CHRIS FIELD, Carnegie Institution: The big challenge is ambition of mitigation, how much we decrease the emissions of heat-trapping gases, ambition of adaption, how much we invest in helping people cope with the climate changes that can’t be avoided, and how tightly those two things should be connected.

JEFFREY BROWN: And getting — and getting individual countries to actually make commitments.

CHRIS FIELD: Well, what you find is that, kind of constitutionally, there’s a difference between the perspective that the developed countries take, which is really focused on mitigation aspects, and the developing countries, who want to see much more of a interlinkage between investments in decreasing amounts of heat-trapping gases and increasing investments in helping people cope.

JEFFREY BROWN: Case in point, of course, is the host country itself, which faces many long-term environmental threats and, as tribal demonstrators shouted in the streets, immediate, urgent ones that demand answers and actions.

I’m Jeffrey Brown reporting from Lima for the “PBS NewsHour.”

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Source: PBS