Russians are back in the space exploration business?

The Russians are planning two spacecraft missions in the relatively near future. The first is a sample return from the Martian moons. This would be a follow-up to the failed Phobos missions, I suppose, from the Soviet era. This time it is a sample return mission. The second mission is to the moon. If the first could be called ambitious this one is rather more so:

The ambitious flight, entering initial design, will include a lunar orbiter that, under the current plan, will also simultaneously deploy 13 probes across diverse regions of the lunar surface. This will include two penetrators that will be fired toward the Apollo 11 and Apollo 12 landing sites to acquire subsurface data to build on the manned exploration and instrumentation left at those locations 37 years ago by U.S. astronauts.

The Russian flight is also to shower 10 other higher-speed penetrators on the Moon that will form a seismic network to help solve questions about the Moon's origin.

The mother ship for the penetrators is then to drop a soft lander into a south polar crater to search for signs of water ice that would complement data from the planned 2008 U.S. Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing impactor mission to the same region (AW&ST Apr. 17, p. 26). The new "Luna-Glob" mission is now a formal part of the Russian space plan with launch set for 2012, says Nikolay F. Moiseev, deputy director of the Russian space agency. With the new lunar flight, Russia finally joins the U.S., China, India, Japan and Europe in renewed exploration of the Moon. But the program is also subject to future budget and technical risks.

From here.

Considering they've not flown a space probe outside low earth orbit in a long time - Soviet Era, iirc, and that's 15+ years ago now! - I hope they're not biting off more than they can chew. Their last attempt was the Mars 96 probe and that didn't work out so well...alas.

Another Crater Candidate for the PT Extinction

Oz is the popular place to look for craters for the PT Extinction for some reason. The book I am reading as I try to recuperate is Extinction. The author notes that there have been at least two or three attempts to claim impact craters from the PT Boundary from there. Then while I am reading, lo and behold, a researcher comes out with this:

A massive crater in Antarctica may have been caused by a meteor that wiped out more than 90 percent of the species on Earth 250 million years ago, an American geologist said Wednesday.

The 300-mile-wide crater lies hidden more than a mile beneath a sheet of ice and was discovered by scientists using satellite data, Ohio State University geologist Ralph von Frese said.

Von Frese said the satellite data suggests the crater could date back about 250 million years to the time of the Permian-Triassic extinction, when almost all animal life on Earth died out, paving the way for dinosaurs to rise to prominence.

The crater was found in what's known as the Wilkes Land region of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet.

"This is a strong candidate for the cause of the extinction," von Frese told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from Ohio.

"This Wilkes Land impact is much bigger than the impact that killed the dinosaurs, and probably would have caused catastrophic damage at the time," he said.

Similar claims were made in 2004 when a team led by Luann Becker of the University of California reported that a crater off the northwest coast of Australia showed evidence of a large meteor impact at the time of the early extinction.

Read the rest here.

If the impact is so much bigger than the KT one, why is there so much less evidence for it than the KT impact? Amusing comment, would this have been opposite the Siberian Traps on the globe?

Island Dwarfism in Dinos

Researchers found 11 different specimens of these dwarf sauropods, both adults and juveniles, in Germany. The animals lived on an island, a type of environment where limited food resources often encourage species to evolve into smaller forms over generations.

The quarry where the 150-million-year-old fossilized bones were found, near the town of Goslar in northern Germany, was part of an island during the late Jurassic period.

Read the rest here.

Some General Observsations

So, as I said, I am back. I am alive and I am kicking. I am actually feeling well enough that I might consider going to work tomorrow...or not. We'll see. I need to restock all the food and such that we purposefully drained away just prior to leaving. There are quite a few errands to run as well. However, that said, I have some general comments about Ukraine.

1. Things are better. If you live in Kiev, Donetsk or in Crimea things are definitely looking up. Not only are they looking up, they're looking damned fine. Life looks good from the cities and tourist destination. The cities are booming. Things are getting cleaned up and regularized.

There are actually a fair number of fat Ukrainians. That was very rare when I first went 4 years ago. It's not so rare now: the University students don't look half starved now either!

Additionally, there is a baby boom going on. This is based on nonscientific sampling, but there are a fracking lot of baby carriages running around compared to the previous three trips. That isn't just limited to the cities, btw. There might be a political reason for that. too.

2. And much worse. We ran smack into the Mafia within a couple hours of being there and ended up tangling with them. We survived and actually got the best of them, which is...interesting. I'll have a post called 'Inept Corruption' that will be put together before Monday. I'll talk about that then. It was funny, scary, heatening, and depressing all at once.

Prices have gone astronomical...for Ukrainians. The inflation went nuts and the prices look very much like what you'd find in nominal Western European countries: gasoline less, but food exactly on par. The problem is that most Ukrainians don't make that much money - the Mittal paid steel workers get $320/month making them, for Ukrainians, pretty well paid...but if a loaf of bread costs about $1...

Alcoholism is still killing the men. A friend and I shared a train car with a pair of Ukrainian day laborers who was so absolutely thrilled with actually meeting a pair of Americans that they went all out to hospitable. They were funny, friend, and to them, everything was, in their poor, mangled English, BEAUTIFUL! If I consumed in a bottle of vodka and 4? huge bottles of beer in 12 hours while sleeping 8 of them, the world have a certain outlook too. I felt horrible for the two guys, one with a pregnant wife back in Shotska. THey were brothers aged 20 and 25. The 25 year old was a tad more responsible, less high strung, and with better English, but...I doubt he'll live past 35. His liver just won't take it. :(

3. The funny part was we were in the midst of a political scandal. The USS Advantage - a logistics ship - showed up in Feodosia and caused quite a stir. It was hilarious, in retrospect, about how the rumor mill works in Ukraine. For most Ukrainians, at least that we were exposed to, the mass media isn't really existant. The game of telephone and all its goofiness was alive and well. We first heard of it while we were in Gorlovka, where my wife's family lives. A woman who was over for other reasons puffed out that there was war! in Crimea. The US Navy had shown up and there was fighting. Or wuld be. Between the Russians and Americans over Crimea. The Russian fleet had been wiped off the map. Sevastopol was burning! The American fleet had been sunk. Things were just wild. It all boiled down to the fatc that the Defense Minister hadn't informed parliament (or so sayeth the pols) that the US military was visiting and participating with the Ukrainians in a peace keeping exercise. *sighs* The rumors were just plain wild to listen to.

Crimea was fun. My wife needs to learn to not put people who are unable through Ukrainian death marches. We revisited a restaurant that Lyuda and I went to in Jan of 2003. I listened to an American and a Russian speaker dicker of a business deal when Avrora couldn't sit still any more. The American didn't want it to be a person to person business deal by personal word: the Russian speaker did. It was interesting to catch snippets, as much as a 15 month old baby running around a restaurant would let me, of two warhorses of their business cultures tried to hammer something out.

Working on my in-laws house was interesting. That place needs a minimum of six months of work constantly by a pair of hefty guys. They got one and half hefty guys for a week. That helped. I had the most fun playing monkey, climbing up on the roof and smashing down a chimney brick by brick in a totally unsafe, Ukrainian style. I loved it, but got a brick landing on my good knee for my troubles when one came loose and fell unplanned. Luckily it was just a bruise. REALLY luckily.

No pictures until my wife and daughter return. They are in Crimea right now. They'll be coming back to the US on July 2nd. I really, really miss them right now. :(

I'll write more later.

Back and Toasted

I am back from Ukraine. Lyuda and Avrora are still there for another three weeks. I've got a lot! of stories to post. Some good, some bad, some damned amusing.

Right now, I'm hungry and tired....and want a SHAVE!

It's Done

Posting this a little after the fact, but...

China completed construction on Saturday of the giant Three Gorges Dam wall, a milestone in the world's largest hydroelectricity project which is also designed to tame the flood-prone Yangtze river.

Chinese nationalist leader Sun Yat-sen proposed the project as early as 1918, and Mao Zedong once waxed poetic on his hopes for a "great wall of stone" from which "a smooth lake" would arise among the gorges.

Workers and officials marked the completion of the massive wall on Saturday, in a ceremony broadcast live on state television.

A brass band played and confetti rained over the site after workers poured the last batch of concrete.

In contrast to the launch of work on the dam in 1997, attended by both then- President Jiang Zemin and then-Premier Li Peng, no top officials attended Saturday's event.

State media praised the development company's decision to forego a plan to spend upwards of 1 million yuan ($125,000) on the ceremony and opt instead for a simpler one that cost only hundreds of yuan, saying the move emphasized that the wall's construction marked only a partial completion of the project.

Officials stressed that although construction of the dam's main span was now complete, much of the work remained.

Read the rest here

If it ever fails...*shudders*

Fusion Energy, Another Step Forward

Physicists working in the United States believe they have cracked an important problem facing man-made nuclear fusion, touted as the cheap, safe, clean and almost limitless energy source of the future.

[...]

many experts have been shaking their heads at the many challenges facing the ITER designers.

One of them is a phenomenon called edge localised modes, or ELMs.

These are sudden fluxes or eddies in the outer edge of the plasma that erode the tokamak's inner wall -- a highly expensive metal skin that absorbs neutrons emitted from the plasma.

Erosion means that the wall has to be replaced more often, which thus adds hugely to costs. Eroded particles also have a big impact on the plasma performance, diminishing the amount of energy it can deliver.

Writing on Sunday in the British journal Nature Physics, a team led by Todd Evans of General Atomics, California, believes that the problematic ELMs can be cleverly controlled.

They found that a small resonant magnetic field, derived from special coils located inside a reactor vessel, creates "chaotic" magnetic interference on the plasma edge, which stops the fluxes from forming.

Read the rest here.

It would be amusing if scientists working on smaller, much less expensive testbeds cracked the problem prior to ITER's finish.

When Chinese Politics and Science Collide

Just when U.S. universities are pushing to form alliances with their counterparts in China, accusations of scientific fraud are zinging across the Middle Kingdom. Beijing's determination to make China a scientific superpower seems to have created a Wild West climate where top researchers, under intense pressure to produce, are tempted to fake results or copy the works of others. Amidst charges and countercharges -- some of them spurious -- scientists worry that a witch hunt is starting up that could besmirch the credible research along with the suspect.

The outcry reached a crescendo on May 12, when Shanghai Jiaotong University announced the firing of star professor Chen Jin for allegedly faking research on computer chips. Chen is just one in a crowd of academics accused of everything from falsifying or plagiarizing results to embellishing resumes. While some have lost their jobs, ``there are many, many known cases where the academics are still in senior positions,'' says Yuen Ying Chan, a University of Hong Kong professor and dean of the journalism program at Shantou University in Guangdong province.

One of the leading Chinese whistle-blowers is biochemist Shi-min Fang. He runs a highly influential Chinese-language Web site (www.xys.org) that details charges of fraud and abuse among China's scientists. Since his site launched in 2000, he claims to have exposed 500 cases of illegal or unethical behavior. ``Misconduct is so widespread among Chinese academics that they have almost become used to it,'' Fang said in an e-mail exchange. ``They don't think it's a big deal at all.'' [emphasis added]

The turmoil comes at a particularly embarrassing time for President Hu Jintao. He and other leaders have been flogging their vision of China as an economy that relies on high-end innovation more than low-cost manufacturing. To realize this brains-based future, Communist Party leaders urge scientists to seize the leading edge of nanotechnology, stem cell research, and other emerging fields.

Such ambitious goals may be inspiring the unethical behavior.

Read the rest here.

When politics and science collide, it's often a very messy picture. Climatology and the Bush administration and now the PRC's leadership's goals and Chinese Academia in general.

Astounding Hypocrisy!

If Arnold Schwarzenegger had migrated to Mexico instead of the United States, he couldn't be a governor. If Argentina native Sergio Villanueva, firefighter hero of the Sept. 11 attacks, had moved to Tecate instead of New York, he wouldn't have been allowed on the force.

Even as Mexico presses the United States to grant unrestricted citizenship to millions of undocumented Mexican migrants, its officials at times calling U.S. policies "xenophobic," Mexico places daunting limitations on anyone born outside its territory.

In the United States, only two posts — the presidency and vice presidency — are reserved for the native born.

In Mexico, non-natives are banned from those and thousands of other jobs, even if they are legal, naturalized citizens.

Foreign-born Mexicans can't hold seats in either house of the congress. They're also banned from state legislatures, the Supreme Court and all governorships. Many states ban foreign-born Mexicans from spots on town councils. And Mexico's Constitution reserves almost all federal posts, and any position in the military and merchant marine, for "native-born Mexicans."

Recently the Mexican government has gone even further. Since at least 2003, it has encouraged cities to ban non-natives from such local jobs as firefighters, police and judges.

Mexico's Interior Department — which recommended the bans as part of "model" city statutes it distributed to local officials — could cite no basis for extending the bans to local posts.

Reading the steamy, hypocritical rest here.

I cannot put into words how enraged this makes me. Mexico pressing for extraodrinary clemency on the part of the United States towards its citizens and now this!

For an even further contrast to this let's look North, to something commendable that the Canadians have done in stark contrast.

USA as EU

Goofy thought.

The EU has been evolving into the United States of Europe and more than one EUer has stated they'd more than happy with cutting and pasting the original US Constitution for themselves. Sooo...

WI: the US sets itself up to conduct an EU style soft power expansion. Nations, who want to apply, not coerced, are admitted to be states. They go through a multistage transition period of aid and reform like the EU does with its new participants. The US has gone through and solved a large number of what the Euros are having problems with (Large state vs small state balance issues, how federal to be, etc).

We become the United States of the Americas...

Interesting. Interesting, but daft, I'm sure. It would make Canadians nervous again. ;)

Russia on the SCO Expansion

Iran, Belarus and other countries expected to become full members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, will not join it in the foreseeable future.

The reason is the organization's need to address economic integration of Central Asia and creation of a common sphere of humanitarian regional cooperation. This was evident from the meeting of SCO foreign ministers' council, held in Shanghai a month before its anniversary summit. The SCO will celebrate its 5th anniversary simultaneously with the 10th anniversary of its predecessor, annual summits on common border security.

It was the anniversary that prompted SCO member states to realize that without clearly defined borders of the region, the organization will fall into a crisis, when geopolitical games hinder its real efficiency.

From here.

We'll see what the Chinese say.

An Analysis of Putin's Speech

Russian President Vladimir Putin's address to parliament last week was perhaps less interesting in its "how-to-spend" content than in what was left out. The secrecy around the drafting of the speech had been tighter than around Stalin's war plans or Brezhnev's health bulletins, but observers with any amount of insight had expected two key themes: Russia's profile as an "energy superpower" and foreign policy in the context of the upcoming G-8 summit (Vedomosti, May 3; Moskovskie novosti, April 21). The reasoning behind those expectations had appeared solid indeed: energy is at the top of Putin's priorities, and his lieutenants have put much spin on the idea of "super-powerness." Furthermore, Kremlin analysts have touted the July St. Petersburg summit as the crowning moment of Putin's presidency (Expert, March 27). Yet in the actual address, the energy theme was reduced to technicalities, such as organizing markets for trading oil and gas in rubles and Russian territory, while the G-8 was not mentioned at all (Kommersant, May 11). There are several reasons that explain Putin's change of focus.

Read the rest here.

So, to summarize, Russia's military is still broken, but looks strong because they're building new nuclear weapons...so we can't criticize them. hm. Have to think about that.

So much for fixing that!

India said on Tuesday that poor nations had to give priority to ending poverty rather than fighting global warming at 189-nation U.N. climate talks criticized by environmentalists as a rambling talk shop.

Nations from Papua New Guinea to Iceland gave speeches during a novel two-day U.N. "dialogue" trying to bridge huge policy divides about how to slow a rise in temperatures that many scientists say could trigger catastrophic climate changes.

In one of the most forceful talks, India told rich nations to take the lead in cutting emissions of heat-trapping gases from fossil fuels, saying India needed more energy to end poverty for the 35 percent of its people living on less than a dollar a day.

"Removal of poverty is the greater immediate imperative" than global warming, Prodipto Ghosh, Secretary of India's Environment Ministry, told the 1,600 delegates.

Read more here.

Doug and Claudia made the plea to "do something. Anything. Please." I fear unless China and India sign-on, we're pretty much screwed. After all, as more than one third of the world's population moves up to First World consumption and wealth without curtailing the similar appetite that the US has for energy, we're pretty much screwed. The First World combined population is somewhere around 1/4 of India and China's...

Make sure that you are at least 35m above sea level for any long term housing plans.

CFE Treaty Politics...ick

Amid a deep secrecy that belies its democratic professions, the OSCE is preparing to hold a Conference to Review the Operation of the Treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) in Vienna at the end of this month. Some West European chancelleries are seeking ways to give in to Moscow's main goal at this conference: ratification of the 1999 treaty at the expense of a few small countries in Europe's East. Thus far, Moscow has only managed to persuade Belarus, Ukraine (during Leonid Kuchma's presidency), and Kazakhstan to ratify that treaty.

Originally signed in 1990, the CFE Treaty underwent adaptation at the 1999 OSCE Istanbul summit, in one package with the Final Act that includes what came to be known as Russia's "Istanbul Commitments"; namely, to withdraw its forces from Georgia and Moldova. While the original 1990 treaty remains in force, the 1999-adapted treaty never entered into force because Russia has not fulfilled those commitments. Moreover, Armenian forces deploy Russian-supplied heavy weaponry exceeding CFE treaty limits in areas seized from Azerbaijan, out of bounds to international inspection.

Meanwhile, Russia seeks to extend the CFE Treaty's area of applicability so as to include the three Baltic states, which were not parties to the 1990 treaty (they were still occupied by Moscow at that time). Since the Baltic states joined NATO, Russia seeks to bring them under the purview of the 1999-adapted CFE treaty and start negotiations with them about limiting allied forces that might hypothetically be deployed to the Baltic states' territories, for example in crisis contingencies. Legally, however, the Baltic states cannot join an unratified treaty.

Thus, Russia is now pressing for the treaty's speedy ratification by all state-parties, so as to make possible the Baltic states' accession to the ratified treaty, while still keeping Russian troops on Georgia's and Moldova's territories in Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and Transnistria. Moscow calculates that Western consent to ratification of the 1999 treaty in such circumstances would legitimize, prolong, and even legalize the stationing of Russian troops in Georgia and Moldova as "peacekeepers."

Read more here.

The War for the Eurasian Soul

Right now there is something pretty profound going on in Eurasia. The interesting thing is that is seems that people are not talking about it, even, as far as I can see, the analysts or at least they are not online. You see there is a 'war for the soul' going on and that war may end up either sundering the efforts of politicians of the last five years or sealing the fate of the eastern part of the continent for the next fifty years or even the rest of the century. So where is this 'war of the soul' taking place? Within the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.

Right now there are two heavy weights within the SCO: Russia and China. Russia has been acting as though it was the leader, since it helped to found the whole shinding. China has been trying to steer the organization its way, whatever that is, since it feels it is the heavy weight in the org. In some ways, it looks like a case of what Germany did with the Soviet Union: the weaker power, but believing itself a greater power held down, allied with the up and coming power that the older, weaker, even fading power felt was its peer. Russia continues to think that even with its demographics, economics, and fallen technological state that its rightful place in the sun is the peer of the United States as the Soviet Union was. China, on the other hand, is very cognizant of its place as the up and coming power to rival the US. Russia had been trying to steer the SCO to its own ends. China has been trying to steer the SCO to its own ends. Neither of these should be a surprise. Every state tries to bend things to its own end. The question is what end is each seeking?

The 1990s were emphatetically not kind to the Russian vision of their place in the world. NATO crept eastern despite their cries of foul. Their former client states paid homage to Brussels and Washington. Then after Sept 2001 events, even the Near Abroad went on pilgrimages to the United States and then, to add insult to percieved injury, the US swept away the Taliban was shocking ease, taking and largely to the extent that the US wanted to, held down that country with very few causalties compared to what the Soviet Union did.

The Chinese were suddenly nervous about the US sitting on its relatively vulernable backdoor. The geopolitical balance had suddenly shifted with the US basing all over Central Asia. This added another intelligence front that the Chinese had to watch. Bringing Central Asia squarely into the American Hegemony rather than under the weak Russian one was not in China's interest. Under the Russians, little was to fear since Russia was so weak and looked to remain so. Under the Americans, who were anything but...

Hence, they came together to build the Shanghai Cooperation Organization as a way to push the US out of Central Asia. The Russians thought that they could steer the whole thing their way. The Chinese felt they could their way. These visions are about to run into each other rather roughly. Right now China wants to invite more nations into the SCO.

Russia does not. Russia has stated what they have in mind for the SCO. They want to leverage it as a way to push the US out of the Near Abroad and to limit the damage done by the so-called Color Revolutions to Russian interests. Note the difference in trajectory between Kyrgyzstan and Georgia, frex.

China would like it to be the anti-USA camp, as far as I can tell, in world affairs. One aligned with its interests. It would like to invite a few nations into the fold. Most notably and especially Iran. This doesn't necessarily mean that China is headed to a position, in the near term, as the Enemy Of The United States (*cue appropriate music*), but rather to protect itself with a nice buffer around it with the anti US voices simply in harmony. What was interesting was that Russia and China exercised their military forces together a number of times already. Even Belarus went to Beijing to inquire about joining the SCO...without consulting Moscow.

What contradicts this PoV is that India is involved. China could be looking for the idea that they are simply trying to make this into an antiterrorist rather than a NATO of the East. It could also be that India is simply trying to negate the potential of the SCO being an anti-India alliance. At the same time, China has been rather angered by the Indian moves closer to the US. It may subtly withdraw the offer or make it one that India can't accept. If that happens, life gets...interesting.

If it does happen, Russia is stuck in the bed of its own making. The Chinese population is growing rather quickly. It's faced with lots of unhappy and demographically expanding minorities. It's ethnic 'Russian' demographics are as bad as they come. I have to question whether or not Russia's going to win this Eurasian war for the soul, but...we'll see. I have made comments that some have called 'cheap shots', but, honestly, I have to stand by them. I think Russia's in trouble and they signed up fro something that they're not going to be able to control.

*chuckles*

If I were predictive, I'd say the indicator would be when China opens a military base in Belarus. Doesn't have to be a big one, just a small one, but it'd be pretty profound if it happened. We'll see. I'd be happy to be wrong, really. I would, but...I have serious doubts.

Surface is toast

Scratch one show I watched.

It wasn't that compelling, really, but its gone now and reduces the stuff to watch during early morning stomach crunches.

Appendum: It seems that all the SFnal series (which I didn't watch, rankly) got canned on the major networks: ABC dashed Invasion and Threshold got dumped a while ago.

It also seems that E-Ring is toast.

Baby Pictures - May before the trip

Some MilSpace Budget Developments

So far, little attention has been paid to a potentially important new start in the Fiscal Year 2007 US defence budget: the first funding line in years to be dedicated to a military, partially reusable space launch vehicle. If it survives this year's budget deliberations in Congress, the Affordable Responsive Spacelift (ARES) programme could start with flight tests of a small X-plane demonstrator as early as 2010.

Another little-publicised new development in 2005 was that the new-start SpaceX (Space Exploration Technologies) company announced an order for the Falcon 9 expendable launcher from an unspecified US government customer. The US Air Force (USAF) had previously ordered launches from SpaceX, covering the small Falcon 1, but this was the first US government order for a medium-class launcher from a non-traditional company.

From Janes's.

Approach with caution. This is Bill Sweetman after all.

An Interesting Family Tree

Oy! MAKE IT STOP!

Getting a little overwhelmed again. I have to get a bunch of stuff done prior to the trip to Ukraine on May 23rd.