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.

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.

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!

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

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

First of all, the town lies next to some mountains (I have a nice view of them from my hotel room), and the city seems a little more touristy. The hotel we are staying in is nice, but outrageously expensive, which is a little bit disappointing – I would rather stay in the town and get an idea of what it’s really like here. It’s never that great to travel somewhere only to stay in a place that is just like everywhere else that you’re used to. When things are up and running and the convenience of being near my colleagues has disappeared, I’ll think about moving.

Yesterday there was an airshow that was impressive from up here (the hotel is situated a ways up the mountain), and today there is an anniversary celebration of some type that we’ll check out later. The Navy P-3 arrives sometime this afternoon – which I’m looking forward to, since our Laser stuff isn’t working yet. Hopefully, with some duct tape and rigging, it’ll be working by Thursday morning (our first supposed flight).

I can’t really say much about this place yet, since I’m still getting an idea of what it is like. The downtown shopping area has almost anything you could want (although we still haven’t located a bathroom mirror, or walkie-talkies) so it’s not really that far away from the rest of the world. I haven’t really figured out what the main attractions are yet – I suppose I should ask a normal tourist why they decided to come here in the first place…

On Saturday we waited around for the P-3 maintenance to finish. There was a problem with some kind of valve related to the pitch of the prop on the #1 engine (details, details) that needed to be repaired from the test flight the day before, and it didn’t look like it would get finished in time to leave until Sunday. We did end up leaving even after a “no-go” from the pilots and mission manager (and a lot of speculation on our part).

The flight to Spokane took longer than expected due to the 100+ knot headwind..we were expected to fly for 6 hours or so, but ended up being more like 8 hours instead (for a while there I thought we would be landing in Montana). As soon as we arrived in Spokane it started snowing (and snowed all through the night!).

A few Alaskan Ambers later and a night of bad sleep, we were off to Fairbanks.

We did run into a small snag on the way out to the runway – one of the instruments uses nitrogen to operate properly, and for some reason there was no nitrogen in any of the tanks. An hour or so later, we had a new bottle of nitrogen and were on our way anyway…

The flight to Fairbanks was fast (5 hours) and we immediately set up the GPS ground station on the roof of the hangar (I’ll be posting pictures soon of the hangar and surrounding airplanes – lots of old planes laying around in pieces). We had the next day off (well, not off, we just didn’t fly).

Tuesday was the first scheduled flight day, but in the morning an engine part problem prevented us from taking off… better luck tomorrow!

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.

The position of the plane is recorded using our Ashtec Z-12 gps receivers (of which we use four for redundancy). With the combination of additional ground receivers, we are able to compute the trajectory of the plane to a very high accuracy, even over long distances. Of course, a lot of work is involved in error reduction to get the best trajectory possible, and I don’t know a whole about the details.

We have a Navigation rack on the plane that shows the pilots where we would like to fly, with pre-defined flight lines that are created with some kind of science work in mind – flying over a glacier or a beach, for example.

The ATM racks (Airborne Topographic Mapper) are used to scan a surface with a laser and get a range from the position of the plane to the ground. Since the position of the plane is known (GPS), and the orientation of the plane is known (INS), the range computed can be translated into a surface elevation. Each ATM records ranges at 5000Hz and the laser is fired onto a rotating mirror which produces an ellipsoid-ish scan pattern on the ground.

ATM4 has been my project, and I have it in a prototype stage that will hopefully prove itself in Alaska. This system works differently than ATM3 or ATM2 in that it records waveforms, not ranges. In recording waveforms, the range can be computer more accurately than with the old hardware (ATM2 and 3), and more information can be found from the data. Trees, for example, will produce multiple returns from the laser pulse, and so we will be able to detect the top of the tree as well as the ground below, enabling us to know how tall the tree is and what the bare surface looks like below the tree. There are other uses, too, like determining water depth along beaches or coastlines and other things.

ATM4 also records surface temperature (using a radiometer), GPS (just a rough trajectory), and will be fitted to record INS data as well as other bits of information.