Tag Archives: European Space Agency

My name is Steve and I’m a sub auroral ion drift

Photo: The Aurora Named STEVE Couresty: NASA Goddard

That stunning image is one of a series, many of which were taken by amateur photographers as noted in a March 14, 2018 US National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA)/Goddard Space Flight Center news release (also on EurekAlert) by Kasha Patel about how STEVE was discovered,

Notanee Bourassa knew that what he was seeing in the night sky was not normal. Bourassa, an IT technician in Regina, Canada, trekked outside of his home on July 25, 2016, around midnight with his two younger children to show them a beautiful moving light display in the sky — an aurora borealis. He often sky gazes until the early hours of the morning to photograph the aurora with his Nikon camera, but this was his first expedition with his children. When a thin purple ribbon of light appeared and starting glowing, Bourassa immediately snapped pictures until the light particles disappeared 20 minutes later. Having watched the northern lights for almost 30 years since he was a teenager, he knew this wasn’t an aurora. It was something else.

From 2015 to 2016, citizen scientists — people like Bourassa who are excited about a science field but don’t necessarily have a formal educational background — shared 30 reports of these mysterious lights in online forums and with a team of scientists that run a project called Aurorasaurus. The citizen science project, funded by NASA and the National Science Foundation, tracks the aurora borealis through user-submitted reports and tweets.

The Aurorasaurus team, led by Liz MacDonald, a space scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, conferred to determine the identity of this mysterious phenomenon. MacDonald and her colleague Eric Donovan at the University of Calgary in Canada talked with the main contributors of these images, amateur photographers in a Facebook group called Alberta Aurora Chasers, which included Bourassa and lead administrator Chris Ratzlaff. Ratzlaff gave the phenomenon a fun, new name, Steve, and it stuck.

But people still didn’t know what it was.

Scientists’ understanding of Steve changed that night Bourassa snapped his pictures. Bourassa wasn’t the only one observing Steve. Ground-based cameras called all-sky cameras, run by the University of Calgary and University of California, Berkeley, took pictures of large areas of the sky and captured Steve and the auroral display far to the north. From space, ESA’s (the European Space Agency) Swarm satellite just happened to be passing over the exact area at the same time and documented Steve.

For the first time, scientists had ground and satellite views of Steve. Scientists have now learned, despite its ordinary name, that Steve may be an extraordinary puzzle piece in painting a better picture of how Earth’s magnetic fields function and interact with charged particles in space. The findings are published in a study released today in Science Advances.

“This is a light display that we can observe over thousands of kilometers from the ground,” said MacDonald. “It corresponds to something happening way out in space. Gathering more data points on STEVE will help us understand more about its behavior and its influence on space weather.”

The study highlights one key quality of Steve: Steve is not a normal aurora. Auroras occur globally in an oval shape, last hours and appear primarily in greens, blues and reds. Citizen science reports showed Steve is purple with a green picket fence structure that waves. It is a line with a beginning and end. People have observed Steve for 20 minutes to 1 hour before it disappears.

If anything, auroras and Steve are different flavors of an ice cream, said MacDonald. They are both created in generally the same way: Charged particles from the Sun interact with Earth’s magnetic field lines.

The uniqueness of Steve is in the details. While Steve goes through the same large-scale creation process as an aurora, it travels along different magnetic field lines than the aurora. All-sky cameras showed that Steve appears at much lower latitudes. That means the charged particles that create Steve connect to magnetic field lines that are closer to Earth’s equator, hence why Steve is often seen in southern Canada.

Perhaps the biggest surprise about Steve appeared in the satellite data. The data showed that Steve comprises a fast moving stream of extremely hot particles called a sub auroral ion drift, or SAID. Scientists have studied SAIDs since the 1970s but never knew there was an accompanying visual effect. The Swarm satellite recorded information on the charged particles’ speeds and temperatures, but does not have an imager aboard.

“People have studied a lot of SAIDs, but we never knew it had a visible light. Now our cameras are sensitive enough to pick it up and people’s eyes and intellect were critical in noticing its importance,” said Donovan, a co-author of the study. Donovan led the all-sky camera network and his Calgary colleagues lead the electric field instruments on the Swarm satellite.

Steve is an important discovery because of its location in the sub auroral zone, an area of lower latitude than where most auroras appear that is not well researched. For one, with this discovery, scientists now know there are unknown chemical processes taking place in the sub auroral zone that can lead to this light emission.

Second, Steve consistently appears in the presence of auroras, which usually occur at a higher latitude area called the auroral zone. That means there is something happening in near-Earth space that leads to both an aurora and Steve. Steve might be the only visual clue that exists to show a chemical or physical connection between the higher latitude auroral zone and lower latitude sub auroral zone, said MacDonald.

“Steve can help us understand how the chemical and physical processes in Earth’s upper atmosphere can sometimes have local noticeable effects in lower parts of Earth’s atmosphere,” said MacDonald. “This provides good insight on how Earth’s system works as a whole.”

The team can learn a lot about Steve with additional ground and satellite reports, but recording Steve from the ground and space simultaneously is a rare occurrence. Each Swarm satellite orbits Earth every 90 minutes and Steve only lasts up to an hour in a specific area. If the satellite misses Steve as it circles Earth, Steve will probably be gone by the time that same satellite crosses the spot again.

In the end, capturing Steve becomes a game of perseverance and probability.

“It is my hope that with our timely reporting of sightings, researchers can study the data so we can together unravel the mystery of Steve’s origin, creation, physics and sporadic nature,” said Bourassa. “This is exciting because the more I learn about it, the more questions I have.”

As for the name “Steve” given by the citizen scientists? The team is keeping it as an homage to its initial name and discoverers. But now it is STEVE, short for Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement.

Other collaborators on this work are: the University of Calgary, New Mexico Consortium, Boston University, Lancaster University, Athabasca University, Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Alberta Aurora Chasers Facebook group.

If you live in an area where you may see STEVE or an aurora, submit your pictures and reports to Aurorasaurus through aurorasaurus.org or the free iOS and Android mobile apps. To learn how to spot STEVE, click here.

There is a video with MacDonald describing the work and featuring more images,

Katherine Kornei’s March 14, 2018 article for sciencemag.org adds more detail about the work,

Citizen scientists first began posting about Steve on social media several years ago. Across New Zealand, Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom, they reported an unusual sight in the night sky: a purplish line that arced across the heavens for about an hour at a time, visible at lower latitudes than classical aurorae, mostly in the spring and fall. … “It’s similar to a contrail but doesn’t disperse,” says Notanee Bourassa, an aurora photographer in Saskatchewan province in Canada [Regina as mentioned in the news release is the capital of the province of Saskatchewan].

Traditional aurorae are often green, because oxygen atoms present in Earth’s atmosphere emit that color light when they’re bombarded by charged particles trapped in Earth’s magnetic field. They also appear as a diffuse glow—rather than a distinct line—on the northern or southern horizon. Without a scientific theory to explain the new sight, a group of citizen scientists led by aurora enthusiast Chris Ratzlaff of Canada’s Alberta province [usually referred to as Canada’s province of Alberta or simply, the province of Alberta] playfully dubbed it Steve, after a line in the 2006 children’s movie Over the Hedge.

Aurorae have been studied for decades, but people may have missed Steve because their cameras weren’t sensitive enough, says Elizabeth MacDonald, a space physicist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and leader of the new research. MacDonald and her team have used data from a European satellite called Swarm-A to study Steve in its native environment, about 200 kilometers up in the atmosphere. Swarm-A’s instruments revealed that the charged particles in Steve had a temperature of about 6000°C, “impressively hot” compared with the nearby atmosphere, MacDonald says. And those ions were flowing from east to west at nearly 6 kilometers per second, …

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

New science in plain sight: Citizen scientists lead to the discovery of optical structure in the upper atmosphere by Elizabeth A. MacDonald, Eric Donovan, Yukitoshi Nishimura, Nathan A. Case, D. Megan Gillies, Bea Gallardo-Lacourt, William E. Archer, Emma L. Spanswick, Notanee Bourassa, Martin Connors, Matthew Heavner, Brian Jackel, Burcu Kosar, David J. Knudsen, Chris Ratzlaff, and Ian Schofield. Science Advances 14 Mar 2018:
Vol. 4, no. 3, eaaq0030 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aaq0030

This paper is open access. You’ll note that Notanee Bourassa is listed as an author. For more about Bourassa, there’s his Twitter feed (@DJHardwired) and his YouTube Channel. BTW, his Twitter bio notes that he’s “Recently heartbroken,” as well as, “Seasoned human male. Expert storm chaser, aurora photographer, drone flyer and on-air FM radio DJ.” Make of that what you will.

NASA, super-black nanotechnology, and an International Space Station livestreamed event

A super-black nanotechnology-enabled coating (first mentioned here in a July 18, 2013 posting featuring work by John Hagopian, an optics engineer at the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration [NASA’s] Goddard Space Flight Center on this project) is about to be tested in outer space. From an Oct. 23, 2014 news item on Nanowerk,

An emerging super-black nanotechnology that is to be tested for the first time this fall on the International Space Station will be applied to a complex, 3-D component critical for suppressing stray light in a new, smaller, less-expensive solar coronagraph designed to ultimately fly on the orbiting outpost or as a hosted payload on a commercial satellite.

The super-black carbon-nanotube coating, whose development is six years in the making, is a thin, highly uniform coating of multi-walled nanotubes made of pure carbon about 10,000 times thinner than a strand of human hair. Recently delivered to the International Space Station for testing, the coating is considered especially promising as a technology to reduce stray light, which can overwhelm faint signals that sensitive detectors are supposed to retrieve.

An Oct. 24, 2014 NASA news release by Lori Keesey, which originated the news item, further describes the work being done on the ground simultaneous to the tests on the International Space Station,

While the coating undergoes testing to determine its robustness in space, a team at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, will apply the carbon-nanotube coating to a complex, cylindrically shaped baffle — a component that helps reduce stray light in telescopes.

Goddard optical engineer Qian Gong designed the baffle for a compact solar coronagraph that Principal Investigator Nat Gopalswamy is now developing. The goal is [to] build a solar coronagraph that could deploy on the International Space Station or as a hosted payload on a commercial satellite — a much-needed capability that could guarantee the continuation of important space weather-related measurements.

The effort will help determine whether the carbon nanotubes are as effective as black paint, the current state-of-the-art technology, for absorbing stray light in complex space instruments and components.

Preventing errant light is an especially tricky challenge for Gopalswamy’s team. “We have to have the right optical system and the best baffles going,” said Doug Rabin, a Goddard heliophysicist who studies diffraction and stray light in coronagraphs.

The new compact coronagraph — designed to reduce the mass, volume, and cost of traditional coronagraphs by about 50 percent — will use a single set of lenses, rather than a conventional three-stage system, to image the solar corona, and more particularly, coronal mass ejections (CMEs). These powerful bursts of solar material erupt and hurdle across the solar system, sometimes colliding with Earth’s protective magnetosphere and posing significant hazards to spacecraft and astronauts.

“Compact coronagraphs make greater demands on controlling stray light and diffraction,” Rabin explained, adding that the corona is a million times fainter than the sun’s photosphere. Coating the baffle or occulter with the carbon-nanotube material should improve the component’s overall performance by preventing stray light from reaching the focal plane and contaminating measurements.

The project is well timed and much needed, Rabin added.

Currently, the heliophysics community receives coronagraphic measurements from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) and the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO).

“SOHO, which we launched in 1995, is one of our Great Observatories,” Rabin said. “But it won’t last forever.” Although somewhat newer, STEREO has operated in space since 2006. “If one of these systems fails, it will affect a lot of people inside and outside NASA, who study the sun and forecast space weather. Right now, we have no scheduled mission that will carry a solar coronagraph. We would like to get a compact coronagraph up there as soon as possible,” Rabin added.

Ground-based laboratory testing indicates it could be a good fit. Testing has proven that the coating absorbs 99.5 percent of the light in the ultraviolet and visible and 99.8 percent in the longer infrared bands due to the fact that the carbon atoms occupying the tiny nested tubes absorb the light and prevent it from reflecting off surfaces, said Goddard optics engineer John Hagopian, who is leading the technology’s advancement. Because only a tiny fraction of light reflects off the coating, the human eye and sensitive detectors see the material as black — in this case, extremely black.

“We’ve made great progress on the coating,” Hagopian said. “The fact the coatings have survived the trip to the space station already has raised the maturity of the technology to a level that qualifies them for flight use. In many ways the external exposure of the samples on the space station subjects them to a much harsher environment than components will ever see inside of an instrument.”

Given the need for a compact solar coronagraph, Hagopian said he’s especially excited about working with the instrument team. “This is an important instrument-development effort, and, of course, one that could showcase the effectiveness of our technology on 3-D parts,” he said, adding that the lion’s share of his work so far has concentrated on 2-D applications.

By teaming with Goddard technologist Vivek Dwivedi, Hagopian believes the baffle project now is within reach. Dwivedi is advancing a technique called atomic layer deposition (ALD) that lays down a catalyst layer necessary for carbon-nanotube growth on complex, 3-D parts. “Previous ALD chambers could only hold objects a few millimeters high, while the chamber Vivek has developed for us can accommodate objects 20 times bigger; a necessary step for baffles of this type,” Hagopian said.

Other NASA researchers have flown carbon nanotubes on the space station, but their samples were designed for structural applications, not stray-light suppression — a completely different use requiring that the material demonstrate greater absorption properties, Hagopian said.

“We have extreme stray light requirements. Let’s see how this turns out,” Rabin said.

The researchers from NASA have kindly made available an image of a baffle prior to receiving its super-black coating,

This is a close-up view of a baffle that will be coated with a carbon-nanotube coating. Image Credit:  NASA Goddard/Paul Nikulla

This is a close-up view of a baffle that will be coated with a carbon-nanotube coating.
Image Credit: NASA Goddard/Paul Nikulla

There’s more information about the project in this August 12, 2014 NASA news release first announcing the upcoming test.

Serendipitously or not, NASA is hosting an interactive Space Technology Forum on Oct. 27, 2014 (this coming Monday) focusing on technologies being demonstrated on the International Space Station (ISS) according to an Oct. 20, 2014 NASA media advisory,

Media are invited to interact with NASA experts who will answer questions about technologies being demonstrated on the International Space Station (ISS) during “Destination Station: ISS Technology Forum” from 10 to 11 a.m. EDT (9 to 10 a.m. CDT [7 to 8 am PDT]) Monday, Oct. 27, at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

The forum will be broadcast live on NASA Television and the agency’s website.

The Destination Station forums are a series of live, interactive panel discussions about the space station. This is the second in the series, and it will feature a discussion on how technologies are tested aboard the orbiting laboratory. Thousands of investigations have been performed on the space station, and although they provide benefits to people on Earth, they also prepare NASA to send humans farther into the solar system than ever before.

Forum panelists and exhibits will focus on space station environmental and life support systems; 3-D printing; Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) systems; and Synchronized Position Hold, Engage, Reorient, Experimental Satellites (SPHERES).

The forum’s panelists are:
– Jeffrey Sheehy, senior technologist in NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate
– Robyn Gatens, manager for space station System and Technology Demonstration, and Environmental Control Life Support System expert
– Jose Benavides, SPHERES chief engineer
– Rich Reinhart, principal investigator for the SCaN Testbed
– Niki Werkeiser, project manager for the space station 3-D printer

During the forum, questions will be taken from the audience, including media, students and social media participants. Online followers may submit questions via social media using the hashtag, #asknasa. [emphasis mine] …

The “Destination Station: ISS Technology Forum” coincides with the 7th Annual Von Braun Memorial Symposium at the University of Alabama in Huntsville Oct. 27-29. Media can attend the three-day symposium, which features NASA officials, including NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, Associate Administrator for Human Exploration and Operation William Gerstenmaier and Assistant Deputy Associate Administrator for Exploration Systems Development Bill Hill. Jean-Jacques Dordain, director general of the European Space Agency, will be a special guest speaker. Representatives from industry and academia also will be participating.

For NASA TV streaming video, scheduling and downlink information, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/nasatv

For more information on the International Space Station and its crews, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/station

I have checked out the livestreaming/tv site and it appears that registration is not required for access. Sadly, I don’t see any the ‘super-black’ coating team members mentioned in the news release on the list of forum participants.

ETA Oct. 27, 2014: You can check out Dexter Johnson’s Oct. 24, 2014 posting on the Nanoclast blog (on the IEEE [Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers] website for a little more information

Data transmisstion at 1.44 terabits per second

It’s not only the amount of data we have which is increasing but the amount of data we want to transmit from one place to another. An April 14, 2014 news item on ScienceDaily describes a new technique designed to increase data transmission rates,

Miniaturized optical frequency comb sources allow for transmission of data streams of several terabits per second over hundreds of kilometers — this has now been demonstrated by researchers of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and the Swiss École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in a experiment presented in the journal Nature Photonics. The results may contribute to accelerating data transmission in large computing centers and worldwide communication networks.

In the study presented in Nature Photonics, the scientists of KIT, together with their EPFL colleagues, applied a miniaturized frequency comb as optical source. They reached a data rate of 1.44 terabits per second and the data was transmitted over a distance of 300 km. This corresponds to a data volume of more than 100 million telephone calls or up to 500,000 high-definition (HD) videos. For the first time, the study shows that miniaturized optical frequency comb sources are suited for coherent data transmission in the terabit range.

The April (?) 2014 KIT news release, which originated the news item, describes some of the current transmission technology’s constraints,

The amount of data generated and transmitted worldwide is growing continuously. With the help of light, data can be transmitted rapidly and efficiently. Optical communication is based on glass fibers, through which optical signals can be transmitted over large distances with hardly any losses. So-called wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) techniques allow for the transmission of several data channels independently of each other on a single optical fiber, thereby enabling extremely high data rates. For this purpose, the information is encoded on laser light of different wavelengths, i.e. different colors. However, scalability of such systems is limited, as presently an individual laser is required for each transmission channel. In addition, it is difficult to stabilize the wavelengths of these lasers, which requires additional spectral guard bands between the data channels to prevent crosstalk.

The news release goes on to further describe the new technology using ‘combs’,

Optical frequency combs, for the development of which John Hall and Theodor W. Hänsch received the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics, consist of many densely spaced spectral lines, the distances of which are identical and exactly known. So far, frequency combs have been used mainly for highly precise optical atomic clocks or optical rulers measuring optical frequencies with utmost precision. However, conventional frequency comb sources are bulky and costly devices and hence not very well suited for use in data transmission. Moreover, spacing of the spectral lines in conventional frequency combs often is too small and does not correspond to the channel spacing used in optical communications, which is typically larger than 20 GHz.

In their joint experiment, the researchers of KIT and the EPFL have now demonstrated that integrated optical frequency comb sources with large line spacings can be realized on photonic chips and applied for the transmission of large data volumes. For this purpose, they use an optical microresonator made of silicon nitride, into which laser light is coupled via a waveguide and stored for a long time. “Due to the high light intensity in the resonator, the so-called Kerr effect can be exploited to produce a multitude of spectral lines from a single continuous-wave laser beam, hence forming a frequency comb,” explains Jörg Pfeifle, who performed the transmission experiment at KIT. This method to generate these so-called Kerr frequency combs was discovered by Tobias Kippenberg, EPFL, in 2007. Kerr combs are characterized by a large optical bandwidth and can feature line spacings that perfectly meet the requirements of data transmission. The underlying microresonators are produced with the help of complex nanofabrication methods by the EPFL Center of Micronanotechnology. “We are among the few university research groups that are able to produce such samples,” comments Kippenberg. Work at EPFL was funded by the Swiss program “NCCR Nanotera” and the European Space Agency [ESA].

Scientists of KIT’s Institute of Photonics and Quantum Electronics (IPQ) and Institute of Microstructure Technology (IMT) are the first to use such Kerr frequency combs for high-speed data transmission. “The use of Kerr combs might revolutionize communication within data centers, where highly compact transmission systems of high capacity are required most urgently,” Christian Koos says.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Coherent terabit communications with microresonator Kerr frequency combs by Joerg Pfeifle, Victor Brasch, Matthias Lauermann, Yimin Yu, Daniel Wegner, Tobias Herr, Klaus Hartinger, Philipp Schindler, Jingshi Li, David Hillerkuss, Rene Schmogrow, Claudius Weimann, Ronald Holzwarth, Wolfgang Freude, Juerg Leuthold, Tobias J. Kippenberg, & Christian Koos. Nature Photonics (2014) doi:10.1038/nphoton.2014.57 Published online 13 April 2014

This paper is behind a paywall.

A Planetary Order opens in Berlin’s (Germany) Christian Ehrentraut gallery on Jan. 10, 2014

Next Friday, January 10, 2014, artists Martin John Callanan, Rebecca Partridge, and Katie Paterson will be celebrating the opening of their new show, A Planetary Order, at Berlin’s Christian Ehrentraut gallery. From a Jan. 3, 2014 announcement here’s more about the show and the artists (Note: Links have been removed),

I {Martin John Callanan] would like to invite you to the first opening of 2014 in Berlin at Galerie Christian Ehrentraut, Friday 10 January 2014, 17-21h

A Planetary Order
Martin John Callanan, Rebecca Partridge, Katie Paterson
Galerie Christian Ehrentraut, Berlin
10 January – 15 February 2014

A Planetary Order brings together three artists who, though working in very different media, all explore meta-narratives of time, landscape and systematic abstraction with a combination of sincerity and playfulness. The juxtaposition of painting, sculpture and new media works emphasises the conceptual concerns of the artists who also share a meticulous minimalist aesthetic. The works hover between seriousness and humour, the romantic and the rational, reduction and sublime scale, all within a dialogue which encompasses works made both with highly traditional means and the most current new media technology. The exhibition reflects a growing interest in a return to metaphysical themes, which though sincere, is not without critical distance and awareness of the comical.

The exhibition found it’s name in Martin John Callanan’s A Planetary Order (Terrestrial Cloud Globe) a 3D printed globe which, sitting directly on the gallery floor, on close inspection reveals the cloud cover of one single moment in time. This inconspicuous piece is in fact an ambitious ‘physical visualisation of real-time scientific data’ taken from cloud monitoring satellites overseen by NASA and the European Space Agency. [emphasis mine] Callanan’s transformation of data into artworks which articulate both the enormity of interconnected global systems and our place within them, continues with his most recent work, Departure of All; a flight departure board displaying the flight information for every international airport around the world. Running in real time, the speed of global transit creates a dizzying account of single moments.

Katie Paterson provides a counterpoint to this overwhelm with her imperceptibly slow work, As The World Turns; a record player which, rotating at the speed of the earth, plays Vivaldi’s Four Seasons audible through headphones to only the most attentive listener. As with Callanan, Paterson’s artwork occupies a space far greater than the actual work- activating an imaginative space which is both metaphysical and comic; the record player suggesting the turning earth which we are able to look down upon.   Along the long wall of the gallery hangs Rebecca Partridge’s Notes on The Sea, a series of twelve minimal photorealist paintings calmly depicting fog veiled seascapes as polarities of night and day. In this work the archetypal romantic image enters into a contradiction with itself as it becomes part of a system. Playing with notions of duration, mathematic abstraction, and the possibility of painting a beautiful landscape, Partridge’s attempt to rationalize the epitomised romantic landscape is both meditative and absurd.

Martin John Callanan’s (1982, UK) artwork has been exhibited and published internationally, he has recently been awarded the prestigious Philip Leverhulme Prize for outstanding research within visual arts. Recent solo exhibiitons include Departure of All, Noshowspace (UK) and Martin John Callanan, Horrach Moya (Spain). His work has been shown as part of Open Cube White Cube, (UK), Along Some Sympathetic Lines, Or Gallery (Germany), Es Baluard Modern and Contemporary Art Museum (Mallorca), Whitechapel Gallery (UK), Ars Electronic Centre (Austria), ISEA, Future,Everything, Riga Centre for New Media Culture (Latvia), Whitstable Biennale (UK), and Imperial War Museum North (UK). Callanan graduated with an MFA from the Slade School of Fine Art, London in 2005, where he is currently Teaching Fellow in Fine Art Media. He lives and works in Berlin and London.

Rebecca Partridge (1976, UK) gained an MA in Fine Art from the Royal Academy Schools, London in 2007, since which time she has been exhibiting internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include In The Daytime at Kunsthalle CCA Andratx (Spain), Cabinet Paintings at Newcastle University, (UK), as well as numerous international group exhibitions most recently Verstand und Gefühl, Landscape und der Zeitgenössiche Romantik at Springhornhof Neuenkirchen. In 2008 she was awarded a fellowship from Terra Foundation of American Art in Giverny (France). Other awarded residencies include the Sanskriti Foundation (New Dehli, India); Kunsthalle CCA (Spain); Nes residency (Iceland) and the TIPP Program for Contemporary Art (Hungary). She is currently working on several curatorial projects and is a Lecturer on both BA and MA Fine Art at West Dean College, UK. She lives and works in Berlin and London.

Katie Paterson (1981, UK) graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art, London in 2007. Paterson’s work is known internationally, recent solo exhibitions include In Another Time, Mead Gallery (University of Warwick, UK) Katie Paterson, Kettle’s Yard (Cambridge, UK) Inside This Desert, BAWAG Contemporary (Vienna) and 100 Billion Suns at Haunch of Venison (London). Her works have been exhibited in major exhibitions such as the Light Show at the Hayward Gallery (London); Dissident Futures, Yerba Buena Centre for the Arts (San Francisco); Light and Landscape at Storm King Art Centre (Hudson Valley, USA); Marking Time at MCA (Sydney) Continuum at James Cohan Gallery (New York) and Altermodern at Tate Britain (UK). She is represented in collections including the Guggenheim (New York) and Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Edinburgh). She lives and works in Berlin.

I think, given the portion of text I’ve highlighted, this show could be described as an art/science effort. For those who like to see their visual art, here’s A Planetary Order (Terrestrial Cloud Globe) from Cullinan’s website ‘Cloud’ page,

Martin John Cullinan's A Planetary Order (Terrestrial Cloud Globe)  [downloaded from http://greyisgood.eu/globe/]

Martin John Cullinan’s A Planetary Order (Terrestrial Cloud Globe) [downloaded from http://greyisgood.eu/globe/]

Given the title of Katie Paterson’s piece, As the world turns, I wondered if she was familiar with the US television soap opera of the same name,, but she seems to be from the UK, I don’t think so. In any event, while this image is interesting I suspect the impact of the piece is lost if you can’t hear it (from the Planetary Order exhibition page for Paterson’s piece),

katie paterson: as the world turns, prepared record player, 2011 photo © peter mallet courtesy haunch of venison, london

katie paterson: as the world turns, prepared record player, 2011
photo © peter mallet
courtesy haunch of venison, london

 

Finally, here’s one of the Rebecca Partridge pieces from the Planetary Order exhibition page for Partidges’s piece),

rebecca partridge: notes on the sea: day- part 1, II, oil on board, 70 x 56 cm, 2013

rebecca partridge: notes on the sea: day- part 1, II, oil on board, 70 x 56 cm, 2013

You can find out more about the Christian Ehrentraut Gallery and A Planetary Order here, Martin John Cullinan and his work here,, Katie Paterson and her work here, and Rebecca Partridge and her work here. If you should happen to be in Berlin, I imagine the artists and the gallery owner would be happy to see you either at the opening or at some time from January 10 – February 15, 2013.

This all brought to mind a song written by Leonard Cohen, First We Take Manhattan (then, we take Berlin). Here’s Cohen performing the song in July 2013 in Berlin. You can get a better quality *sound by searching YouTube for other videos but I don’t think anything can top this Berlin crowd’s appreciation and Cohen’s response to it,

This runs a little longer than most of the videos I embed here at approximately 6.5 mins.

* ‘sounding by searching YouTube’ was changed to ‘sound by searching YouTube for other videos’ on Jan. 3, 2014 at 4:41 pm PDT.

Simon Fraser University’s (Canada) gecko-type robots and the European Space Agency

The European Space Agency’s ESTEC technical centre in Noordwijk, the Netherlands has tested Simon Fraser University researchers’ (MENRVA group) robots for potential use in space according to a Jan. 2, 2014 news item on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) News online website,

Canadian engineers, along with researchers from the European Space Agency, have developed lizard-inspired robots that could one day be crawling across the hulls of spacecrafts, doing research and repair work.

The science-fiction scenario is a step closer to reality after engineers from B.C.’s Simon Fraser University created a dry adhesive material that mimics the sticky footpads of gecko lizards.

“This approach is an example of ‘biomimicry,’ taking engineering solutions from the natural world,” said Michael Henrey of Simon Fraser

I have written about an earlier version (so I assume) of this called a Tailless Timing Belt Climbing Platform (TBCP-11) robot in a Nov. 2, 2011 posting, which features a video. As for Abigaille as the robot is currently named, here’s more from the CBC news item,

“Experimental success means deployment in space might one day be possible,” said Laurent Pambaguian of the ESA.

The adhesive was placed on the footpads of six-legged crawling robots, nicknamed Abigaille. Each leg has four degrees of motion, Henrey said, meaning these crawling robots should be able to handle environments that a wheeled robot can’t.

“For example, it can transition from the vertical to horizontal, which might be useful for going around a satellite or overcoming obstacles on the way,” he said.

The Jan. 2, 2014 European Space Agency news release, which originated the news item, describes the gecko’s special abilities and why those abilities could be useful in space,

A gecko’s feet are sticky due to a bunch of little hairs with ends just 100–200 nanometres across – around the scale of individual bacteria. This is sufficiently tiny that atomic interactions between the ends of the hairs and the surface come into play.

“We’ve borrowed techniques from the microelectronics industry to make our own footpad terminators,” he [Michael Henrey of Simon Fraser University] said. “Technical limitations mean these are around 100 times larger than a gecko’s hairs, but they are sufficient to support our robot’s weight.”

Interested in assessing the adhesive’s suitability for space, Michael tested it in ESA’s Electrical Materials and Process Labs, based in the Agency’s ESTEC technical centre in Noordwijk, the Netherlands, with additional support from ESA’s Automation and Robotics Lab.

“The reason we’re interested in dry adhesives is that other adhesive methods wouldn’t suit the space environment,” Michael notes.

“Scotch, duct or pressure-sensitive tape would collect dust, reducing their stickiness over time. They would also give off fumes in vacuum conditions, which is a big no-no because it might affect delicate spacecraft systems.

“Velcro requires a mating surface, and broken hooks could contaminate the robot’s working environment. Magnets can’t stick to composites, for example, and magnetic fields might affect sensitive instruments.”

Here’s what one of these robots looks like,

‘Abigaille’ wall-crawler robot Courtesy: European Space Agency

‘Abigaille’ wall-crawler robot Courtesy: European Space Agency

You can find out more about Simon Fraser University’s (located in Vancouver, Canada) climbing robots here on the Menrva Group webpage. which features both the gecko-type (also called Tank-style robots) and spider-inspired robots.

Nanotechnology and European space technology initiatives

They’re holding a conference right now (Nov. 29 & 30, 2010) in Belgium about space technology and scientific areas such as nanotechnology, not usually directly associated with space, that might be useful. From the Nov. 29, 2010 news item on Nanowerk,

Dr. Alberto Tobias from the European Space Agency (ESA) commented: “Space shares the technology and industrial base with other sectors and open innovation is the rule. In some domains technology advances faster in terrestrial sectors and if space enters the game, it can become a lead user. Bringing the two domains together offers many benefits: better products and lower costs for space; and an increased innovation for terrestrial industries, driven by space research.”

TECHBREAK combines a forward view of space sciences with the forward view of technology coming from non-space areas. It will be using a classification of non-space disciplines under the broad headings of ‘Key Enabling Technologies’ which were identified in 2009 by the European Commission as being likely to be the driving forces behind future European developments. During the launching conference, participants will present the different problems, their work, goals and limitations, and brainstorm and answer related targeted discussions. Participants to the conference will then attempt to match key enabling technologies from both space and non-space and identify gaps and to define if necessary the contents of further specialised workshops in support of this activity.

You can read more about the TECHBREAK conference here. (I gather this initiative is being funded by the European Science Foundation.)