SLAC 3,200-megapixel camera: World's largest digital camera

SLAC is leading the construction of the 3,200-megapixel camera, which will be the size of a small car and weigh more than 3 tons. 

The digital camera will be the largest ever built, allowing LSST to create an unprecedented archive of astronomical data that will help researchers study the formation of galaxies, track potentially hazardous asteroids, observe exploding stars and better understand mysterious dark matter and dark energy, which make up 95 percent of the universe. 

Credit: SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

Plans for the construction of the world's largest digital camera at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have reached a major milestone.

The 3,200-megapixel centerpiece of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), which will provide unprecedented details of the universe and help address some of its biggest mysteries, has received key "Critical Decision 2" approval from the DOE.

"This important decision endorses the camera fabrication budget that we proposed," said LSST Director Steven Kahn.

"Together with the construction funding we received from the National Science Foundation in August, it is now clear that LSST will have the support it needs to be completed on schedule."

Science operations are scheduled to begin in 2022 with LSST taking digital images of the entire visible southern sky every few nights from atop a mountain called Cerro Pachón in Chile.

It will produce the widest, deepest and fastest views of the night sky ever observed.

Over a 10-year time frame, the observatory will detect tens of billions of objects, the first time a telescope will catalogue more objects in the universe than there are people on Earth, and will create movies of the sky with details that have never been seen before.

LSST will generate a vast public archive of data, approximately 6 million gigabytes per year, that will help researchers study the formation of galaxies, track potentially hazardous asteroids, observe exploding stars and better understand dark matter and dark energy, which make up 95 percent of the universe but whose nature remains unknown.

"The telescope is a key part of the long-term strategy to study dark energy and other scientific topics in the United States and elsewhere," said David MacFarlane, SLAC's director of particle physics and astrophysics.

"SLAC places high priority on the successful development and construction of the LSST camera, and is very pleased that the project has achieved this major approval milestone."

This is a rendering of the LSST observatory (foreground) atop Cerro Pachón in Chile. 

When LSST starts taking images of the entire visible southern sky in 2022, it will produce the widest, deepest and fastest views of the night sky ever observed. 

Over a 10-year time frame, LSST will image several tens of billions of objects and create movies of the sky with unprecedented detail. 

Credit: Large Synoptic Survey Telescope Project Office

The LSST team can now move forward with the development of the camera and prepare for the "Critical Decision 3" review process next summer, the last requirement before actual fabrication of the camera can begin.

Components of the camera, which will be the size of a small car and weigh more than 3 tons, will be built by an international collaboration of labs and universities, including DOE's Brookhaven National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and SLAC, where the camera will be assembled and tested.

"Many excellent, hard-working people have been developing LSST for a long time and it is gratifying to see the quality of their efforts being recognized by the DOE approval," said Steve Ritz of the University of California, Santa Cruz, the lead scientist of the camera project. "We are all excited about the amount of great science that LSST will enable."

IceCube World's largest particle detector detects first high-energy neutrinos from the cosmos

This is the highest energy neutrino ever observed, with an estimated energy of 1.14 PeV. 

It was detected by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole on Jan. 3, 2012. IceCube physicists named it Ernie.

Twenty-eight events with energies around and above 30 TeV were observed in an all-sky search, conducted between May 2010 and May 2012, for high-energy neutrino events with vertices contained in the IceCube neutrino detector. Credit: Credit: IceCube Collaboration

The IceCube Neutrino Observatory, a particle detector buried in the Antarctic ice, is a demonstration of the power of the human passion for discovery, where scientific ingenuity meets technological innovation.

Today, nearly 25 years after the pioneering idea of detecting neutrinos in ice, the IceCube Collaboration announces the observation of 28 very high-energy particle events that constitute the first solid evidence for astrophysical neutrinos from cosmic accelerators.

Francis Halzen

"This is the first indication of very high-energy neutrinos coming from outside our solar system, with energies more than one million times those observed in 1987 in connection with a supernova seen in the Large Magellanic Cloud," says Francis Halzen, principal investigator of IceCube and the Hilldale and Gregory Breit Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

"It is gratifying to finally see what we have been looking for. This is the dawn of a new age of astronomy."

Details of the research appear in a manuscript published in the Nov. 22, 2013 issue of the journal Science.

Because they rarely interact with matter, the nearly massless subatomic particles called neutrinos can carry information about the workings of the highest-energy and most distant phenomena in the universe.

Gregory Breit

Billions of neutrinos pass through every square centimeter of the Earth every second, but the vast majority originate either in the sun or in the Earth's atmosphere.

Far rarer are neutrinos from the outer reaches of our galaxy or beyond, which have long been theorized to provide insights into the powerful cosmic objects where high-energy cosmic rays may originate: supernovas, black holes, pulsars, active galactic nuclei and other extreme extragalactic phenomena.

IceCube, run by the international IceCube Collaboration and headquartered at the Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center (WIPAC) at UW–Madison, was designed to accomplish two major scientific goals: measure the flux, or rate, of high-energy neutrinos, and try to identify some of their sources.

This is an artistic rendering of IceCube DOMs below the Antarctic ice. Inside IceCube, a total of 5,160 sensitive detectors hang from 86 steel cables. 

Credit: Jamie Yang, The IceCube Collaboration.

The analysis presented in the Science paper reveals the first high-energy neutrino flux ever observed, a highly statistically significant signal (more than 4 sigma) that meets expectations for neutrinos originating in cosmic accelerators.

"From hints in earlier IceCube analyses, we have used improved analysis methods and more data to make a significant step forward in our search for the elusive astrophysical signal," says collaboration spokesperson Olga Botner, of Uppsala University.

"We are now working hard on improving the significance of our observation, and on understanding what this signal means and where it comes from."

More information: Evidence for High-Energy Extraterrestrial Neutrinos at the IceCube Detector; The IceCube Collaboration; Science (2013); DOI: 10.1126/science.1242856

Large communities of bacteria in the Mariana Trench

Deep sea trenches act as hot spots for microbial activity because they receive an unusually high flux of organic matter, made up of dead animals, algae and other microbes, sourced from the surrounding much shallower sea-bottom.

An international research team announces the first scientific results from one of the most inaccessible places on Earth: the bottom of the Mariana Trench located nearly 11 kilometers below sea level in the western Pacific, which makes it the deepest site on Earth.

Their analyses document that a highly active bacteria community exists in the sediment of the trench - even though the environment is under extreme pressure almost 1,100 times higher than at sea level.

In fact, the trench sediments house almost 10 times more bacteria than in the sediments of the surrounding abyssal plain at much shallower water depth of 5-6 km water.

Deep sea trenches are hot spots
Deep sea trenches act as hot spots for microbial activity because they receive an unusually high flux of organic matter, made up of dead animals, algae and other microbes, sourced from the surrounding much shallower sea-bottom.

It is likely that some of this material becomes dislodged from the shallower depths during earthquakes, which are common in the area.

So, even though deep sea trenches like the Mariana Trench only amount to about two percent of the World Ocean area, they have a relatively larger impact on marine carbon balance - and thus on the global carbon cycle, says Professor Ronnie Glud from Nordic Center for Earth Evolution at the University of Southern Denmark.

Ronnie Glud and researchers from Germany (HGF-MPG Research Group on Deep-Sea Ecology and Technology of the Max Planck Institute in Bremen, Scotland's (Scottish Association for Marine Science), Japan's (Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology),  and Denmark (University of Copenhagen), explore the deepest parts of the oceans, and the team's first results from these extreme environments were published in the widely recognized international journal Nature Geoscience.

BRITE: World's smallest space telescope launched

BRITE, the smallest astronomical satellite was launched Monday as part of a mission to prove that even a very small telescope can push the boundaries of astronomy.

The satellite was designed and assembled at the Space Flight Laboratory (SFL) of the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies (UTIAS).

It will be launched from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, India, along with its twin, also designed in Canada, but assembled in Austria.

Each nano-satellite in the BRIght Target Explorer (BRITE) mission is a cube 20 cms per side, and weighing less than 7 kilograms.

The BRITE satellites are part of the new wave of nano-satellites that can be designed, assembled and deployed fast and relatively cheaply.

"SFL has demonstrated that nano-satellites can be developed quickly, by a small team and at a cost that is within reach of many universities, small companies and other organizations," says Cordell Grant, Manager of Satellite Systems for the Space Flight Laboratory at UTIAS.

"A nano-satellite can take anywhere from six months to a few years to develop and test, but we typically aim for two years or less."

Up to now, such nano-satellites had been used only to monitor the earth and experiment with new technologies.

"Researchers, scientists and companies worldwide, who have great ideas for space-borne experiments, but do not have the means to fund a large spacecraft, can now see their ideas realized," said Grant.

"BRITE has the potential to open an entirely new market for low-cost high-performance satellites."

BRITE is the first nano-satellite mission intended for astronomy, and the first-ever astronomy constellation -more than one satellite working toward a common objective- of any size.

The previous world-record holder for small astronomy satellites was the MOST satellite, designed and assembled in part by SFL at UTIAS.

Launched in 2003 and still operating, MOST was the first entirely Canadian satellite for astronomy, weighing in at 53 kilograms. Compared to the 11 metric tons of the Hubble Space Telescope, MOST was aptly called a micro-satellite.

"BRITE is expected to demonstrate that nano-satellites are now capable of performance that was once thought impossible for such small spacecraft," says Grant. But only small telescopes can fit within a 20 centimetre cube.

Therefore, BRITE is not intended to take pretty pictures, but will simply observe stars and record changes in their brightness over time.

Such changes could be caused by spots on the star, a planet or other star orbiting the star, or by oscillations and reverberations within the star itself -the analogue of earthquakes on stars.

The study of these so-called "starquakes" is called astero-seismology.

China Launches their own GPS satellites with Military Capability

China has launched commercial and public services across the Asia-Pacific region on its domestic satellite navigation network built to rival and negate their dependency on the US global positioning system (GPS).

The Beidou, or compass, system started providing services to civilians in the region on Thursday and is expected to provide global coverage by 2020, state media reported.

Ran Chengqi, spokesman for the China Satellite Navigation Office said the system's performance was "comparable" to GPS, the China Daily reported.

"Signals from Beidou can be received in countries such as Australia," he said. It is the latest accomplishment in space technology for China, which aims to build a space station by the end of the decade and eventually send a manned mission to the moon.

China sees the multi-billion-dollar programme as a symbol of its rising global stature, growing technical expertise and a further step on their expansion plans towards global domination.

The Beidou system comprises 16 navigation satellites and four experimental satellites, the paper said. Ran added that the system would ultimately provide global navigation, positioning and timing services.

The start of commercial services comes a year after Beidou began a limited positioning service for China and adjacent areas.

NASA Robonaut2: Fisheye Image

Fisheye image the NASA ISS crew captured of Robonaut2 while it was using sign language to say "Hello World".

ESA Astronaut and Earth Hour: The 2012 Official Video - YouTube

This Earth Hour 2012: 8.30pm, Saturday 31 March, celebrate your action for the planet with the people of world by switching off your lights for an hour, then go beyond the hour.

André Kuipers takes Earth Hour into orbit
For the first time, Earth Hour will extend to the International Space Station, where ESA astronaut and WWF ambassador André Kuipers will keep watch over our planet as the lights switch off on 31 March, sharing photos and live commentary of his experience.

Since inception in the city of Sydney, Australia, in 2007, Earth Hour has become the world's largest voluntary action highlighting climate change and the need for sustainability.

In 2011, 5251 cities took part, reaching 1.8 billion people in 135 countries across all seven continents.

This year, Earth Hour will take place at 20:30–21:30, at participants' local time, on Saturday, 31 March, and the event will be observed from space by ESA Astronaut André on the International Space Station. 

ESA Columbus & ISS Keeps Watch On World's Sea Traffic

ISS Keeps Watch On World's Sea Traffic

As the ISS circles Earth, it has begun tracking individual ships crossing the seas beneath. An experiment hosted by ESA's Columbus module is testing the viability of monitoring global traffic from the Station's orbit hundreds of kilometres up.

The ship-detection system under test is based around the Automatic Identification System (AIS), the marine equivalent of the air traffic control system.

All international vessels, cargo ships above certain weights and passenger carriers of all sizes must carry 'Class A' AIS transponders, broadcasting continually updated identification and navigation data.

AIS allows port authorities and coastguards to track seagoing traffic, but the system relies on VHF radio signals with a horizontal range of just 40 nautical miles (74 km). This makes it useful within coastal zones and on a ship-to-ship basis but open ocean traffic remains largely untracked. However, AIS signals travel much further vertically - all the way up to the International Space Station.

Global overview of maritime traffic
"The COLAIS (Columbus AIS) experiment was switched on at the start of June," said Karsten Strauch, ESA's project manager.

"To give an idea, more than 90 000 Class A AIS messages were gathered between 19:00 GMT on 2 June and 09:00 GMT the following day, giving a global overview of maritime traffic."

With commissioning completed, the experiment is run remotely and the results are routed via the Columbus Control Centre in Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany to COLAIS teams.

"We are currently testing the NORAIS receiver, built by the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment and Kongsberg Seatex," explained Mr Strauch.

"In three months' time the Station crew will switch it with a second receiver called LUXAIS, the work of Luxembourg companies Luxspace and Emtronix. For the next two years we will go on swapping between these receivers."

The Station's orbit crosses all major shipping lanes. The main challenge is simply that far too many vessels are detected at once, leading to signal overlaps and interference. The Station's 7 km/s speed also distorts the signal. The receivers therefore need to be capable of high-performance signal detection and message decoding.

Being hosted on the ISS, COLAIS can be kept updated in the future simply by astronauts swapping receivers, or fixing any problems that arise.

Integrating AIS information with other satellite data, such as from remote-sensing satellites, should significantly improve maritime surveillance and boost safety and security at sea.

ESA is planning a dedicated initiative in this area as part of its Advanced Research in Telecommunications Systems (ARTES) programme.

UK Boy has world's rarest Genetic Disorder

Every little boy is unique to their parents but six year old Mackenzie Fox-Byrne is also special to the scientific world. He is thought to have the world's rarest genetic disorder because he is the only person on earth known to suffer from it.

Mackenzie, whose condition has given him learning difficulties and left him unable to speak, is the result of a gene mutation doctors have never seen before.

his development appeared to be behind that of her other children, Kamara, 14, and Katie, 12.

At three months old, he was still not lifting his head from his cot, he found it difficult to hold down food and had trouble sleeping.

Doctors initially feared he might have the muscle-wasting disease Muscular Dystrophy, but instead tests results showed a much more bewildering picture.

Mrs Fox-Byrne, 40, of Market Drayton, Shropshire, said: "They knew it was unique and told me excitedly that they had found something rare that no one else has.

"Unfortunately, that was all they could tell me. They couldn't tell me how he is going to progress or whether he might fall ill in the future.

"No one else on earth has ever had this condition."

Mackenzie's test results showed he had a triplication of a small region on the long arm of his X-chromosome.

At the moment the little boy cannot speak, has low muscle tone, is still in nappies and has no sense of danger.

He also has learning difficulties which mean he has the mental age of a two-year-old and goes to a special school in Shrewsbury.

Mrs Fox-Byrne, who lives with her partner Andy, 47, said: "It's quite terrifying to be told he is the only person in the world to have this condition.

"Although we worry about what might happen to him in the future, I just try to put it out of my mind. You could go crazy thinking about it."

Karen Temple, professor of medical genetics at Wessex Clinical Genetics Service confirmed Mackenzie was a totally unique case.

She said: "We have to learn what we can from the little boy as he grows up.

"The problem with Mackenzie isn't that he has got genes missing – as is the case sometimes – it's that he has got extra parts.

"This little boy has had this chromosome problem since he was conceived, we can learn from how he is now and that helps us to predict his future."

Flourescein Dye used to study world's thinnest sheet

The world's thinnest material is being studied with a dye used to stain the Chicago River green on St. Patrick's Day, scientists in Illinois said.

The dye flourescein, also used to find old blood stains at crime scenes, is being used to examine graphene, a one-atom thick sheet, Northwestern University scientists said.

Graphene has the potential to be used to make low-cost carbon-based electronics that are transparent and flexible, researcher Jiaxing Huang said in a release Wednesday.

Using flourescein to examine graphene and its derivatives avoids the use of expensive and time-consuming techniques such as atomic force microscopy and scanning electron microscopy.

"It's a simple and dirt-cheap method that works surprisingly well in many situations," Huang said of the flourescein imaging. Huang and his team have named their technique "fluorescence quenching microscopy."

Song Pitch Of Blue Whale Songs Is Declining Around The World

The sound level of songs blue whales sing across the vast expanses of the ocean to attract potential mates has been steadily creeping downward for the past few decades, and a scientist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego and his colleagues believe the trend may be good news for the population of the endangered marine mammal.

Mark McDonald of WhaleAcoustics in Bellvue, Colo., along with John Hildebrand of Scripps Oceanography and Sarah Mesnick of NOAA Fisheries Southwest Fisheries Science Center studied blue whale song data from around the world and discovered a downward curve in the pitch, or frequency, of the songs.

The decline was tracked in blue whales across the globe, from off the Southern California coast to the Indian and Southern Oceans.

"The basic style of singing is the same, the tones are there, but the animal is shifting the frequency down over time. The more recent it is, the lower the frequency the animal is singing in, and we have found that in every song we have data for," said Hildebrand, a professor of oceanography in the Marine Physical Laboratory at Scripps.

The study's results are published in the most recent issue of the journal Endangered Species Research.

The researchers examined a list of possible causes for the frequency drop-from climate change to a rise in human-produced ocean noise-and believe it may be explained by the increase of blue whale numbers following bans on commercial whaling activities.

While the function of blue whale songs is not known and scientists have much more to learn, they do know that all singers have been determined to be males and that the high-intensity, or loud, and low-frequency songs propagate long distances across the ocean. Blue whales are widely dispersed during the breeding season and it is likely that songs function to advertise which species is singing and the location of the singing whale.

In the heyday of commercial whaling, as blue whale numbers plummeted, it may have been advantageous for males to sing higher frequency songs, the researchers believe, in order to maximize their transmission distance and their ability to locate potential mates (females) or competitors (other males).

"It may be that when (blue whale) densities go up, it's not so far to get to the closest female, whereas back when they were depleted it may have been that the closest female was a long way away," said Hildebrand.

In the 1960s, when blue whale numbers were substantially reduced and recordings of the animals were first made, there may have been a tradeoff in which the male suitors chose to sing higher frequencies that were louder and heard over greater distances, Hildebrand said. In more recent years, as population sizes have increased, it may now be more advantageous for males to sing songs that are lower in frequency rather than louder.

"When they make these songs they need to use most of the air in their lungs," said Hildebrand. "It's like an opera singer that sees how long he can hold a note. The (male) songs are made to impress the females and/or other males, so I think that's how the boy blue whales are impressing the girls, or are showing off to other boys: by making a loud and long song."

The scientists say the same downward pitch phenomenon may be true in other whales such as fin and humpbacks, but the blue whale song, with a comparatively easier song to analyze, is a good springboard to study other species. Hildebrand says such knowledge about whale songs could be important in monitoring whale populations and recovery efforts.

During the study the researchers analyzed thousands of blue whale songs divided into at least 10 worldwide regions. These include the Northeast, Southwest and Northwest Pacific Ocean; the North Atlantic; the Southern Ocean near Antarctica; and the North and Southeast Indian Ocean.

Blue whale songs have been recorded for the last 45 years through scientific and military applications by seafloor seismometers tracking regional earthquakes and dedicated whale acoustic recording packages.

In addition to NOAA National Marine Fisheries Service's Southwest Fisheries Science Center, Mesnick is affiliated with Scripps' Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation.

This research was funded by the U.S. Navy, NOAA and the National Science Foundation.

World's Largest Milky Way Image Unveiled

The world's largest picture of the Milky Way, taken by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, is being unveiled today at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago.

The new image is of galactic proportions, covering an area that is 120 feet (37 meters) long, 3 feet (1 meter) tall at its sides and 6 feet (2 meters) tall in the middle, where our galaxy's central bulge is depicted.

The panorama represents the combined effort of two Spitzer survey teams, who used two of the telescope's onboard instruments, the Infrared Array Camera (IRAC) and the Multiband Imaging Photometer.

The large image was made from stitching together 800,000 individual pictures taken by Spitzer, for a total of 2.5 billion infrared pixels. It covers an area of the sky about as wide as a pointer finger and as long as the length of arms outstretched, which might sound small, but covers about half of the entire galaxy, says Robert Hurt, of the Spitzer Science Center at Caltech.

"This is the highest-resolution, largest, most sensitive infrared picture ever taken of our Milky Way," said Sean Carey of the Spitzer Science Center, who led one of the teams that created the image.

"I suspect that Spitzer's view of the galaxy is the best that we'll have for the foreseeable future. There is currently no mission planned that has both a wide field of view and the sensitivity needed to probe the Milky Way at these infrared wavelengths," said Barbara Whitney of the Space Science Institute in Madison, Wis., also part of one of the Spitzer teams.

The image is set to be unveiled by the scientists who created it at 3 p.m. EST at Chicago's Adler Planetarium.

Hong Kong's carbon Footprint second highest in World

Hong Kong's carbon footprint second highest in world: report

Hong Kong (AFP) Nov 30, 2009
Hong Kong has the second highest carbon footprint per capita in the world, due to the city's high consumption patterns and large volume of imports according to a survey released in Norway.

The study, conducted by a group of Norway-based scientists, compared the greenhouse emissions of 73 economies and found Hong Kong with a per capita footprint of 29 tonnes per year, second only to Luxembourg's 33 tonnes.

The results prompted calls for Hong Kong, a city of seven million, to strengthen measures to cut its greenhouse gas emissions.

Titled "Carbon Footprint of Nations: A Global, Trade-linked Analysis", the research paper was published in the Environmental Sciences and Technology Journal in June. But the results did not come to the public's attention until they were reported by the daily South China Morning Post on Monday.

Using global data from 2001, the study put Hong Kong's carbon footprint among the highest, larger than the United States' 28.6 tonnes, Singapore's 24.1 tonnes and United Kingdom's 15.4.

Most of the environmental impact comes from the manufacturing and transportation of imported goods, with only 17 per cent of emissions from domestic activities.

The figure is significantly higher than one released by the Hong Kong Environmental Protection Department -- 6.7 tonnes per capita -- which took into account local emissions, such as from transport and power generation, but excludes emissions from the production of imported goods.

A spokeswoman for the Environmental Protection Department declined to comment on the statistics but said the government abides by international guidelines on greenhouse gas emissions.

Bill Barron, a professor from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology's Institute for the Environment, said the government needs to tackle the problem.

"Hong Kong is an economy that is extremely dependant on trade. Therefore the city is tied to the ecological footprints that these imports make," Barron said.

He added that the government is avoiding its responsibility to reduce greenhouse emissions.

Pollution has become an increasing health and economic problem for the financial hub in recent years.

Emissions from the southern Chinese factory belt over Hong Kong's northern border have combined with local emissions from power generators and transport to park a thick haze over the city for most of the year.

Mosquito: The Human World's Deadliest Enemy

AP/PA Photos

The mosquito rarely lives longer than a month and is not as ferocious or visually intimidating as a raging carnivore, but it comes in much more regular and intimate contact with humans, than any other dangerous creature. It also rapidly spreads deadly and contagious diseases, leading to the death of more humans, than any other member of the animal kingdom. By injecting parasites and viruses into the blood stream, the mosquito causes upwards of two million deaths a year. According to Dr. Mark Rowland of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, malaria is responsible for 800,000 to one million of those deaths. Malaria, Elephantiasis, West Nile virus, dengue fever, yellow fever, etc are all deadly diseases that are spread by mosquitoesand there are many more. While the most dangerous breeds of the bug are local to Africa, Asia and North America, it’s still a good idea to stock up on bug repellent for those humid, mosquito-filled nights.