International Action Against Ozone Depleting Substances Claim Gains

Minimum concentration of ozone in the southern hemisphere for each year from 1979-2013 (there is no data from 1995). 

Each image is the day of the year with the lowest concentration of ozone. A graph of the lowest ozone amount for each year is shown.

Image Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/M. Radcliff

Worldwide action to phase out ozone-depleting substances has resulted in remarkable success, according to a new assessment by 300 international scientists.

The stratospheric ozone layer, a fragile shield of gas that protects Earth from harmful ultraviolet light, is on track to recovery over the next few decades.

The Assessment for Decision-Makers, a summary of the Scientific Assessment of Ozone Depletion 2014, provides new information to affirm that the 1987 international agreement known as the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer has successfully resulted in global international policies to reduced levels of ozone-depleting substances.

The report is conducted by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), and the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP), and co-sponsored by NASA, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the European Commission.

Science teams from these organizations and other countries have been monitoring the ozone layer on the ground, by balloon and with a variety of satellite instruments dating back to NASA's Nimbus 4 satellite, launched in 1970.

The most current ozone hole satellite data comes from the Ozone Monitoring and Profiler Suite (OMPS) instrument on the NASA-NOAA Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership satellite (Suomi NPP), and the Ozone Monitoring Instrument and Microwave Limb Sounder (OMIMLS) on NASA's Aura satellite.

"It is particularly gratifying to report that the ozone layer is on track for recovery to 1980 benchmark levels by mid-century," said Paul A. Newman, chief scientist for atmospheres at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and a co-chair of the WMO/UNEP report.

"Many of these early signs of ozone improvements are due to decades of work and contributions by NASA and NOAA instruments and scientists."

Ozone depleting substances are also powerful greenhouse gases. The Montreal Protocol provided a double benefit: stopping ozone depletion, and slowing the growth of greenhouse gases.

“Substitutes for ozone depleting substances are ozone safe, but many are powerful greenhouse gases.

These substitutes could offset the climate gains achieved by the Montreal Protocol in the future," Newman said.

The Assessment for Decision-Makers, a summary of the Scientific Assessment of Ozone Depletion 2014 is the first comprehensive update in four years.

The full report will be available in early 2015.

ESA ATV-4 docked to ISS Zvezda Module: Ready for Action

ATV-4 docked to Zvezda.

Albert Einstein, ESA’s unmanned cargo ferry at the International Space Station, will start pumping propellants today into the orbital outpost. 

This will be followed by air and oxygen transfers before it resumes boosting the Station’s orbit.

ATV-4 is the fourth Automated Transfer Vehicle to serve the Station; it was launched on 5 June and reached the complex nine days later. Since then, this European cargo carrier has been firmly attached to the Station, acting as an additional module.

All 2489 kg of dry cargo has now been carried into the Station and the crew has already loaded 1213 kg of waste into ATV.

Around two more tonnes of unused equipment, rubbish and other material will be packed into the vehicle before it completes its mission in spectacular fashion as a cosmic rubbish removal van in late October, burning up safely as it reenters the atmosphere.

So far, ATV’s mission has been quiet, as everything goes according to plan. “We like having this kind of mission,” says Jean-Michel Bois, Head of the ESA Operations Team at the ATV Control Centre in Toulouse, France.

“Of course, there have been small issues – there always are – but they keep us on our toes. Everything is in a great state and ATV is working beautifully.”

The 60-strong team from ESA, France’s CNES space agency and industry at the control centre constantly monitor ATV’s health and they are always ready for unscheduled actions, like avoiding orbital debris by changing the Station’s orbit with ATV’s powerful engines.

Albert Einstein has already preformed a major planned reboost, using 200 kg of propellant and raising the Station’s orbit by about 10 km.

The only significant unplanned event came last week, when one of ATV’s three computers was automatically shut down by onboard software.

Then a second computer failed on Sunday – not a problem as ATV can operate fine with just one unit.

Even so, critical activities require all computers to be working normally so some of the Toulouse centre’s key personnel cut their holidays short to tackle the problem.

With this additional help, the two computers were soon restarted. ATV was then ready to go ahead with preparations for the propellant transfer.

The ESA ATV Control Centre in Toulouse, France.

The fuel pipes were pressurised on 31 July, leaving ATV ready to pump 860 kg of fuel and oxidiser into the tanks of Zarya module on Thursday afternoon.

All of the available propellants will be transferred during the 1.5-hour operation, after which the pipes will be purged and evacuated to avoid any problems when ATV undocks.

Then air and oxygen will flow into the Station on 12 and 13 August. ATV-4 holds 66.3 kg of air and 33.3 kg of pure oxygen for the crew. It also arrived with 564 kg of water in its tanks, 23% of which has already been pumped into the Station’s tanks.

On 14 August, ATV will light up its engines for another orbit reboost, followed by another on 28 August.

According to planning, ATV will undock and head for the fiery end to its mission on 28 October.

NASA SDO Image: Heart of space weather observed in action

An overlap of data from two NASA spacecraft confirms a sighting of magnetic reconnection on the sun, a process of realigning magnetic fields that lies at the heart of space weather. 

The teal image, from SDO, shows the shape of magnetic field lines in the sun's atmosphere. 

The RHESSI data is in orange. 

Credit: NASA/SDO/RHESSI/Goddard

Two NASA spacecraft have provided the most comprehensive movie ever of a mysterious process at the heart of all explosions on the sun: magnetic reconnection.

Magnetic reconnection happens when magnetic field lines come together, break apart and then exchange partners, snapping into new positions and releasing a jolt of magnetic energy.

This process lies at the heart of giant explosions on the sun, such as solar flares and coronal mass ejections, which can fling radiation and particles across the solar system.

Scientists want to better understand this process so they can provide advance warning of such space weather, which can affect satellites near Earth and interfere with radio communications.

One reason why it's so hard to study is that magnetic reconnection can't be witnessed directly, because magnetic fields are invisible. Instead, scientists use a combination of computer modeling and a scant sampling of observations around magnetic reconnection events to attempt to understand what's going on.

"The community is still trying to understand how magnetic reconnection causes flares," said Yang Su, a solar scientist at the University of Graz in Austria. "We have so many pieces of evidence, but the picture is not yet complete."

Now Su has added a new piece of visual evidence. When searching through observations from NASA's SDO, Solar Dynamics Observatory, Su saw something particularly hard to pull from the data: direct images of magnetic reconnection as it was happening on the sun.

Su and his colleagues reported on these results in Nature Physics on July 14, 2013.

While a few tantalizing images of reconnection have been seen before, this paper shows the first comprehensive set of data that can be used to constrain and improve models of this fundamental process on the sun.

Magnetic field lines, themselves, are indeed invisible, but they naturally force charged particles – the material, called plasma, which makes up the sun – to course along their length.

Space telescopes can see that material appearing as bright lines looping and arcing through the sun's atmosphere, and so map out the presence of magnetic field lines.

Looking at a series of images, Su saw two bundles of field lines move toward each other, meet briefly to form what appeared to be an "X" and then shoot apart with one set of lines and its attendant particles leaping into space and one set falling back down onto the sun.

"This is the first time we've seen the entire, detailed structure of this process, because of the high quality data from SDO," Su said. "It supports the whole picture of reconnection, with visual evidence."

Su said that with these images they could make estimates as to how quickly the magnetic fields reconnected, as well as how much material goes into the process and how much comes out.

Such information can be plugged into magnetic reconnection models to help refine theories about the process.

Chandra Movie of Vela Pulsar: Neutron Star Action

The Vela pulsar, a neutron star that was formed when a massive star collapsed. (X-ray: NASA/CXC/Univ of Toronto/M.Durant et al; Optical: DSS/Davide De Martin).

This movie from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory shows a fast moving jet of particles produced by a rapidly rotating neutron star, and may provide new insight into the nature of some of the densest matter in the universe.

The star of this movie is the Vela pulsar, a neutron star that was formed when a massive star collapsed.

The Vela pulsar is about 1,000 light years from Earth, spansis about 12 miles in diameter, and makes over 11 complete rotations every second, faster than a helicopter rotor.

As the pulsar whips around, it spews out a jet of charged particles that race out along the pulsar’s rotation axis at about 70% of the speed of light.

In this still image from the movie, the location of the pulsar and the 0.7-light-year-long jet are labeled.

The Chandra data shown in the movie, containing 8 images obtained between June and September 2010, suggest that the pulsar may be slowly wobbling, or precessing, as it spins.

"It's like having an unsecured fire hose and a flow of water at high pressure," said co-author George Pavlov, principal investigator of the Chandra proposal at Pennsylvania State University in University Park. "All you need is a small bend in the hose and violent motion can result."

"We think the Vela pulsar is like a rotating garden sprinkler, except with the water blasting out at over half the speed of light," said Martin Durant of the University of Toronto in Canada, who is the first author of the paper describing these results.

NASA Mars Rover Curiosity: Dust Removal Tool in Action

This image from the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) on NASA's Mars rover Curiosity shows the patch of rock cleaned by the first use of the rover's Dust Removal Tool (DRT).

The tool is a motorized, wire-bristle brush on the turret at the end of the rover's arm. Its first use was on the 150th Martian day, or sol, of the mission (Jan. 6, 2013).

MAHLI took this image from a distance of about 10 inches (25 centimeters) after the brushing was completed on this rock target called "Ekwir_1."

The patch of the rock from which dust has been brushed away is about 1.85 inches by 2.44 inches (47 millimeters by 62 millimeters). The scale bar at bottom right is 1 centimeter (0.39 inch).

A view of Curiosity's turret shows the DRT on the right side of the image and the MAHLI at the center.

Honeybee Robotics, New York, N.Y., built the DRT for Curiosity. Malin Space Science Systems, San Diego, built the MAHLI.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

Raytheon’s real-life Iron Man suit in action

It doesn’t have wrist cannons, and it will probably never fly. It isn’t quite ready for battle, nor will it make (most) ladies swoon. But Raytheon’s XOS 2 exoskeleton, the the next refinement of 2008’s XOS robo-suit, lets users easily lift hundreds of pounds with a single hand, and punch harder than a heavyweight boxer. The project, like seemingly every borderline sci-fi contraption in development today, has its roots in a DARPA request.

The agency solicited various designs for a powered exoskeleton all the way back in 2000, and has been funding this design ever since. The basis for the XOS suit was conceived by a company called Sarcos, which was later subsumed into the Raytheon empire.

The suit’s primary purpose is to make heaving lifting easier, which is accomplishes using a powerful hydraulic pumps connected to a sturdy, Mecha-like frame.

The XOS 2 bears a strong resemblance to its predecessor–a sign that the project is maturing, not stagnating. The latest upgrades, according to Dr Fraser Smith, VP of Operations for Raytheon Sarcos, are meant to be subtle:

The first exoskeleton was essentially a proof of concept. It shows that our vision could be translated into reality, that we could augment the wearer’s capabilities without impeding his or her natural range of motion or reflexes. XOS 2 is lighter, faster, and stronger, yet it uses 50% less power. And its enhanced design also means that it’s more resistant to environmental damage.

In real terms, the differences are actually kind of staggering: While the previous suit could make 60 pounds feel like ten; the new one can take that same amount of effort and lift 170. It manages this while using just half the power, though it’s still not truly autonomous, unable operate unless hooked by cable to an external power source.

The suit is evidently easy to use and more comfortable than you might expect of a 150-pound metal body suit. Its test engineer, Rex Jameson, says wearing it “doesn’t feel any different in terms of effort whether you throw a huge payload on the back of the suit or walk around with a single weight in each hand,” Essentially, “I feel like me, only a faster, stronger version of me.”

Action and Reaction - He who draws first Loses

Niels Bohr once had a theory on why the good guy always won shoot-outs in Hollywood westerns. It was simple: the bad guy always drew first. That left the good guy to react unthinkingly – and therefore faster. When Bohr tested his hypothesis with toy pistols and colleagues who drew first, he always won.

Andrew Welchman of the University of Birmingham, UK, has now taken this a step further. Bohr may have won a Nobel prize for his work on quantum mechanics, but it turns out the answer to this puzzle is more complicated than he thought.

Welchman pitted pairs of people against each other. The task? Lift your hand off a button, push two other buttons, then return to the first. There was no start bell. "Eventually one decides it's time to move," Welchman says. "The other player will then try to move as fast as possible."

The reacting players took 21 milliseconds less time to move, on average, than the first ones. Welchman thinks reaction movement involves a faster brain pathway than intentional movement. So Bohr was right? Not quite.

There was also a "reaction time", a delay of 200 milliseconds before the players started to respond to their opponent's actions. So although they moved faster, they never won.