Some hours ago, the Phoenix lander touched down on Mars, and just in the last few hours sent back some pictures. One of them has an interesting feature in it:

Click the image below this to see the entire picture and the strange white ‘blip’ in context. Whats interesting about the object is that it appears to have a shadow as well, which might mean it’s a real thing (and not a processing or data error). Neat. I’m really looking forward to seeing what comes out in the next couple of months from this project! To see more images from Phoenix, click this gallery link.

The oldest known nuclear fission reactor on Earth is about 1.5 billion years old and located in Gabon, Africa. Near a villiage called Oklo, a natural nuclear fission reactor was discovered in 1972 while mining uranium in the area. Wait a minute - who was building nuclear reactors that long ago? How is it possible to have such a technological marvel occur naturally? After all, doesn’t a nuclear reactor take a high degree of technology and manpower to operate?

Apparently nature beat us to it. The French scientists that discovered the reactor found that some of the uranium had either been undergoing spontaneous, intense nuclear reactions - or apparently was much older than the rest of the planet (Terry Pratchett mentions this in his excellent book “The Science Of Discworld”, a great read). Of course, the more plausible explanation is that the uranium underwent nuclear reactions naturally - not that it was dumped there by some ancient civilization that had atomic technology and then disappeared.

The Oklo reactor provided an important insight regarding one of the fundamental physical constants called the “fine structure constant“. The Oklo reactor gave evidence that the fine structure constant has indeed been just that - a constant - at least for the last 2 billion years or so. Interesting, but why is this important?

Calculations on what occurred in the early universe assume that so-called fundamental constants haven’t changed since then: the speed of light, the gravitational constant, the charge of an electron, etc. When what we believe now to be a constant can be shown to have changed over billions of years, then physics as we know it today must have been very, very different in the past.

In 1999 and 2001, two published papers (found here and here) indicated that in fact this particular constant has indeed changed : the behavior of atoms a long time ago was very different than what we observe today. The fine structure constant is, in fact, not constant - the universe that we live in now probably doesn’t work the same as it used to.  Just one more piece of the puzzle in our quest of understanding how the universe works.

I’ve been a long time fan of distributed computing projects. Back in 1999 I started donating spare CPU cycles to the SETI project. I was really just amazed that everyday people could - without much effort - contribute to a science project with the potential to actually make a discovery or solve an important problem.

Ok, so maybe SETI was just a long shot of a chance at making a discovery. But it certainly caught my interest, and since I started I have dedicated many thousands of hours of CPU time at the effort.

Now a days, other projects - possibly more useful in nature - have cropped up. An interesting new project hosted at www.malariacontrol.net has a noble goal: to model a simulation of the transmission dynamics and health effects of malaria. The Swiss Tropical Institute has developed a computer model for malaria epidemiology (the study of factors affecting health and illness of individuals and populations) that required an enormous amount of computing power to ” validate such models and to adequately simulate the full range of interventions and transmission patterns relevant for malaria control in Africa”.

Anyone can help! The actual client program (from malariacontrol) will only operate on a Windows or Linux PC. To get started, you must first download a program called “BOINC” . It allows you to participate in several different distributed projects. Here are some other projects you can contribute to as well that might be interesting:

SETI@home : Search for unusual signals that could be attributed to extra terrestrial life.
Einstein@home: Search through data from the LIGO and GEO gravitational wave detectors for pulsars.
climateprediction.net: An attempt at producing a forecast of the climate for the 21st century.
rosetta@home: Determine the 3D shape of proteins that may lead to finding cures for some of the major human diseases.

There are other projects, too, to check out. Start at the BOINC website to for more information!

I just ran across this most interesting website this morning: www.scorecard.org.  I plugged in my home zipcode in the US, and VOILA I got a great overview of the largest polluters in Wicomico County, MD and a summary of the interesting things the pollutants they emit can do for you. Mostly negative things, at that.

Turns out that the largest polluter is Perdue farms, with a mere 217,000 pounds of N-HEXANE which is a neurotoxicant, reproductive, developmental and respiratory toxant. Neat. Plus, with 217,000 pounds of it, that equals a hefty 2.56 pounds of the stuff per person in the county.

But at least my family living there isn’t as lucky as the poor chaps in neighboring Sussex County, Delaware - while the single biggest polluter (by weight it is NRG Energy in Indian River. Right behind that is Perdue again with 550,000 pounds of Nitrate compounds, with DuPont following with a smattering of Hydrochloric and Sulfuric acids, as well as Chromium and Mercury, with thier own contribution of 145,000 pounds of Nitrates) has halved toxic releases over the last four years, the current amount of toxic output ends up being a mere 17.4 pounds of waste per person. That includes some nasties like hydroflouric & hydrochloric acid (which isn’t that bad, if it spills on your pants you just have to wash it off fast enough.. and oh yeah, that is assuming that it’s not finely dipersed into the air you’re breathing, which this stuff is), as well as the dangerous chromium and other usual heavy metals (barium, copper, mercury, etc). Anyway, you get the point (I grew up in Sussex county, and they’ve got pretty bad statistics when it comes to pollution it seems!)

So check out your community today! http://www.scorecard.org

Looks like after only 3 flights, we’re done for this year. A nasty oil leak on the #1 engine, some instrument problems (PSR), and some cracks in a part of the aircraft (near the bombay) all held us up for a bit; in the end, the cracks worsened and ended it all. We didn’t get done eveything that we intended, but at least I won’t go home without any data at all. Its kind of a letdown to go through so much effort (on the part of everyone) to get here and make these flights, and then not get it done because of a seemingly small problem. I think I would have put more effort into trying to fix it here in the field (if I were somehow in charge) and just extended our stay a bit, but that’s not the way it is going (c’mon, just make a patch!) At least I get to go home early

I left from Stuttgart on Saturday headed for Ushuaia, a town on the tip of South America in Argentina. From here we’ll be flying to Antarctica to study sea ice in a Navy P3 (ours is getting inspected or some such business at the moment). We have several missions to fly, and they’re all about 10 hours apiece (I am not sure why they are not longer, however). Today will be the first time I’ve seen our installation, and will also be my first attempt at fixing some of the problems that I know exist with it.

I was expecting the town to be similar to Punta Arenas, but it’s really different.

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All went well during the 7 flights above St. Lawrence Island, St. Matthew Island, Barrow, and the other various places we flew over. Most of our flights were over sea ice, so they weren’t exactly the most scenic flights to go on (unless, of course, you are really into sea ice). Before we left, an article was run in the local paper. I’ll post some of my better pictures when I get a chance…

After some a few setbacks and delays, we finally left Wallops Island on Saturday afternoon to head to Fairbanks (via Spokane, Washington). Originally scheduled to leave earlier in the week, we had to wait for some equipment from Colorado to be installed at the last moment. Here is a summary of what has happened since….
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Looks like Europe will be going to the moon this July. According to this BBC article, an Ariane rocket will propel a spacecraft to space that will use an ion-thruster to make a long spiral-y trip to the moon. A spectrometer onboard will take measurements of the element composition of the moon to try to determine how the moon came about.

I’m glad that someone is interested in doing research on the moon still.. it’s a shame that the US isn’t really involved in any moon projects. It would be a good testbed for future trips planned to Mars, I think.

As of yesterday, we (mostly) finished the the install of our equipment on the P-3 in preparation for our flights in Alaska. We sucessfully tested the GPS rack, the INS, ATM2, ATM3, and (the new) ATM4. For a brief description of what our equipment does, read on…

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