NASA's Global Hawk Completes First Science Flight

 NASA has successfully completed the first science flight of the Global Hawk unpiloted aircraft system over the Pacific Ocean. The flight was the first of five scheduled for this month's Global Hawk Pacific, or GloPac, mission to study atmospheric science over the Pacific and Arctic oceans.

The Global Hawk can fly autonomously to altitudes above 60,000 feet -- roughly twice as high as a commercial airliner -- and as far as 11,000 nautical miles. Operators pre-program a flight path, and then the plane flies itself for as long as 30 hours. (Credit: NASA/Dryden/Carla Thomas)

The Global Hawk is a robotic plane that can fly autonomously to altitudes above 18,288 meters (60,000 feet) -- roughly twice as high as a commercial airliner -- and as far as 20,372 kilometers (11,000 nautical miles), which is half the circumference of Earth. Operators pre-program a flight path, then the plane flies itself for as long as 30 hours, staying in contact through satellite and line-of-site communications links to a ground control station at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center in California's Mojave Desert.

"The Global Hawk is a revolutionary aircraft for science because of its enormous range and endurance," said Paul Newman, co-mission scientist for GloPac and an atmospheric scientist from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "No other science platform provides the range and time to sample rapidly evolving atmospheric phenomena. This mission is our first opportunity to demonstrate the unique capabilities of this plane, while gathering atmospheric data in a region that is poorly sampled."

GloPac researchers plan to directly measure and sample greenhouse gases, ozone-depleting substances, aerosols and constituents of air quality in the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere. GloPac's measurements will cover longer time periods and greater geographic distances than any other science aircraft.

During Wednesday's flight, the plane flew approximately 8,334 kilometers (4,500 nautical miles) along a flight path that took it to 150.3 degrees West longitude, and 54.6 degrees North latitude, just south of Alaska's Kodiak Island. The flight lasted just over 14 hours and flew up to 18,562 meters (60,900 feet). The mission is a joint project with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA.

The plane carries 11 instruments to sample the chemical composition of the troposphere and stratosphere, including two from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.. The instruments profile the dynamics and meteorology of both layers and observe the distribution of clouds and aerosol particles. Project scientists expect to take observations from the equator north to the Arctic Circle and west of Hawaii.

Although the plane is designed to fly on its own, pilots can change its course or altitude based on interesting atmospheric phenomena ahead. Researchers have the ability via communications links to control their instruments from the ground.

"The Global Hawk is a fantastic platform because it gives us expanded access to the atmosphere beyond what we have with piloted aircraft," said David Fahey, co-mission scientist and a research physicist at NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo. "We can go to regions we couldn't reach or go to previously explored regions and study them for extended periods that are impossible with conventional planes."

The timing of GloPac flights should allow scientists to observe the breakup of the polar vortex. The vortex is a large-scale cyclone in the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere that dominates winter weather patterns around the Arctic and is particularly important for understanding ozone depletion in the Northern Hemisphere.

Scientists also expect to gather high-altitude data between 13,716 and 19,812 meters (45,000 and 65,000 feet), where many greenhouse gases and ozone-depleting substances are destroyed. They will measure dust, smoke and pollution that cross the Pacific from Asia and Siberia and affect U.S. air quality.

Global Hawk will make several flights under NASA's Aura satellite and other "A-train" Earth-observing satellites, "allowing us to calibrate and confirm what we see from space," Newman added. GloPac is specifically being conducted in conjunction with NASA's Aura Validation Experiment.

GloPac includes more than 130 researchers and technicians from Goddard, Dryden Flight Research Center, JPL, and Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. Also involved are NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory; the University of California, Santa Cruz; Droplet Measurement Technologies of Boulder, Colo.; and the University of Denver.

NASA Dryden and the Northrop Grumman Corp. of Rancho Bernardo, Calif., signed a Space Act Agreement to re-fit and maintain three Global Hawks transferred from the U.S. Air Force for use in high-altitude, long-duration Earth science missions.

For more on GloPac, visit:http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/global-hawk.html

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NASA Chases Climate Change Clues Into the Stratosphere

Starting this month, NASA will send a remotely piloted research aircraft as high as 65,000 feet over the tropical Pacific Ocean to probe unexplored regions of the upper atmosphere for answers to how a warming climate is changing Earth.

NASA In its new white-and-blue NASA livery, an early development model of the Global Hawk unmanned aircraft rests on the ramp at the Dryden Flight Research Center, Edwards AFB, Calif. (Credit: NASA)

The first flights of the Airborne Tropical Tropopause Experiment (ATTREX), a multi-year airborne science campaign with a heavily instrumented Global Hawk aircraft, will take off from and be operated by NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base in California. The Global Hawk is able to make 30-hour flights.

Water vapor and ozone in the stratosphere can have a large impact on Earth's climate. The processes that drive the rise and fall of these compounds, especially water vapor, are not well understood. This limits scientists' ability to predict how these changes will influence global climate in the future. ATTREX will study moisture and chemical composition in the upper regions of the troposphere, the lowest layer of Earth's atmosphere. The tropopause layer between the troposphere and stratosphere, 8 miles to 11 miles above Earth's surface, is the point where water vapor, ozone and other gases enter the stratosphere.

Studies have shown even small changes in stratospheric humidity may have significant climate impacts. Predictions of stratospheric humidity changes are uncertain because of gaps in the understanding of the physical processes occurring in the tropical tropopause layer. ATTREX will use the Global Hawk to carry instruments to sample this layer near the equator off the coast of Central America.

"The ATTREX payload will provide unprecedented measurements of the tropical tropopause," said Eric Jensen, ATTREX principal investigator at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. "This is our first opportunity to sample the tropopause region during winter in the northern hemisphere when it is coldest and extremely dry air enters the stratosphere."

Led by Jensen and project manager Dave Jordan of Ames, ATTREX scientists installed 11 instruments in the Global Hawk. The instruments include remote sensors for measuring clouds, trace gases and temperatures above and below the aircraft, as well as instruments to measure water vapor, cloud properties, meteorological conditions, radiation fields and numerous trace gases around the aircraft. Engineering test flights conducted in 2011 ensured the aircraft and instruments operated well at the very cold temperatures encountered at high altitudes in the tropics, which can reach minus 115 degrees Fahrenheit.

Six science flights are planned between Jan. 16 and March 15. The ATTREX team also is planning remote deployments to Guam and Australia in 2014. Scientists hope to use the acquired data to improve global model predictions of stratospheric humidity and composition. The ATTREX team consists of investigators from Ames and three other NASA facilities; the Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. The team also includes investigators from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Center for Atmospheric Research, academia, and private industry.

ATTREX is one of the first investigations in NASA's new Venture-class series of low- to moderate-cost projects. The Earth Venture missions are part of NASA's Earth System Science Pathfinder Program managed by Langley. These small, targeted science investigations complement NASA's larger science research satellite missions.

For more information about the ATTREX mission, visit:http://espo.nasa.gov/missions/attrex

A digital ATTREX press kit is available at:http://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/events/2013/attrex.html

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United Airlines ends transport of research primates

United Airlines, the world’s largest carrier, will no longer ship non-human primates to research labs. Clarifying a policy that has been ambiguous since it merged with Continental Airlines in 2010, the airline today issued this statement: “We do not book, accept or transport non-human primates to or from medical research facilities domestically or internationally. We do ship non-human primates between zoos and sanctuaries within the 50 United States and Puerto Rico.”

With the adoption of similar rules by Air Canada last month, there are no longer any North American carriers that will move the thousands of primates that are imported each year to the United States and Canada. The number of major airlines that say they fly research primates has now dwindled to four: Air France, China Eastern Airlines, Philippine Airlines, and Vietnam Airlines.

United has been under pressure from activists with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), which launched a campaign after the merger, demanding that the merged airline explicitly adopt a policy banning research primate transport. Prior to the merger, Continental transported research primates; United did not. PETA says that its supporters sent 130,000 protest emails to the carrier, and demonstrated at its office in Sydney, Australia and at its Chicago headquarters. (Protestors are pictured there in May, 2012.)

The announcement marks an about face from a fiercely pro-research stance that a United official published on the website of the Animal Transportation Association in September, 2011. It challenges other airlines to review their policies forbidding research primate transport. It reads, in part:

“Virtually every major medical advance of the last century has depended upon research with animals … I know that the greater good of mankind can be served by our assisting this industry in the transport of these animals.”

Lisa Schoppa, the author of the statement and then the manager of United’s PetSafe programme, has since left the company. A United spokeswoman would not say when and why she left.

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Europe’s untamed carbon

The Belchatow power station in Poland is Europe’s largest coal-burning plant, but plans to capture carbon dioxide from it are in limbo.

With its carbon-trading market and tough emissions targets, Europe plays the part of responsible adult at climate-policy negotiations. But in a growing blemish on its low-carbon image, the region has fallen behind North America in the slow crawl to demonstrate systems for capturing greenhouse-gas emissions from power plants and industry — even as it increases its use of coal.

Announcements made just before Christmas underlined Europe’s troubles in launching large carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects. A European Commission fund set up two years ago in part to support CCS could not find a single scheme to finance, and instead gave €1.2 billion (US$1.6 billion) to renewable-energy projects. And in a mortifying side note, the International Energy Agency (IEA) noted that as the switch from coal to shale gas in the United States lowers the price of coal, Europe — where gas is expensive — is burning more of this dirtier fuel. “It is hugely embarrassing for Europe’s inter­national standing on climate,” says Vivian Scott, who studies the role of CCS in climate policy at the University of Edinburgh, UK.

Admittedly, no country is finding CCS easy to fund. The technology to sieve carbon dioxide from exhaust gases has been demonstrated on a small scale, and four large projects have successfully stored the gas underground. But not one large carbon-capture system is operating at a power plant anywhere in the world. Fitting a large power plant with CCS would increase the price of its electricity by 50–100%, requiring hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies.

Four years ago, the IEA set out a road map that called for building 100 CCS projects by 2020, together capturing around 150 million tonnes of carbon dioxide annually. Monitoring progress today, Scott says that the world will be lucky to see 20 completed in that time (see ‘Carbon capture sputtering’). “The reality is that incentives in place for renewable energy are not in place for CCS. Government policies are not ambitious enough to drive large CCS projects,” says Juho Lipponen, head of CCS at the IEA. Governments have pledged an estimated $20 billion for CCS demonstrations, but more like $100 billion would be needed to meet the IEA’s original road map, he adds.

European delays

Yet the CCS industry in Europe has been hit particularly hard, by a combination of economic recession, political reluctance and Brussels bureaucracy. Europe has favoured wind and solar projects, with both direct grants and ‘feed-in tariffs’ that guarantee high prices for low-carbon electricity. Per unit of electricity, these subsidies have been as generous as those needed for CCS — but because the projects are smaller, individual payments are less daunting. CCS has had some direct grants but no feed-in tariffs; instead, plant operators were expected to benefit from Europe’s emissions-tradingscheme, under which polluting industries trade allowances to emit carbon dioxide. Utility companies that built CCS projects would be able to sell excess carbon credits, and the sale of 300 million credits would also finance a European CCS funding scheme (known as NER300).

But the price of credits collapsed to €6–7 per tonne last year, as the recession cut industrial emissions. Last year, a sale of 200 million credits raised only €1.5 billion, one-third of what planners had hoped for. “The collapse of the emissions-trading-scheme price is the biggest culprit for the lack of progress,” says Howard Herzog, a sequestration researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

Even so, the commission’s fund had shortlisted ten CCS projects by July 2012, waiting for guarantees of co-funding from member states. But five of the six countries in which the plants were to be built — the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Poland, Italy and Romania — “didn’t step up to the plate,” says Chris Davies, a British member of the European parliament who advocated for the CCS fund. Meanwhile, a plan to capture carbon emissions from a French steel plant became a casualty when owners ArcelorMittal, based in Luxembourg, pulled out of the scheme.

The missed opportunity has delayed CCS in Europe by two years, says Philippe Paelinck, who oversees CCS development at French engineering firm Alstom, based in Levallois-Perret outside Paris. Alstom runs carbon-capture technology at a number of pilot projects and had hoped to scale it up at three NER300 candidate projects. Nevertheless, the NER300 fund will award a second phase of grants, potentially this year; Paelinck thinks CCS projects in the United Kingdom, Romania and the Netherlands are well placed to gain some funding. Separate funding schemes, such as a £1-billion (US$1.6-billion) CCS competition in the United Kingdom — which is revamping its electricity market to allow tariff-like support for CCS — could also launch projects. “There’s still activity for CCS in Europe: it’s just proving to be a much harder sell than initially thought,” says Lipponen.

A helping hand from oil

In the United States and Canada, CCS project developers have made faster headway by combining public subsidies with sales of the carbon dioxide they capture. Oil companies inject the gas — which sells for $20–40 per tonne — into the ground to help to loosen trapped oil. Two large North American projects are due to start capturing carbon in 2014: Canada’s Can$1.24-billion (US$1.26-billion) Boundary Dam project in Saskatchewan, a 100-megawatt project that would rebuild one unit of an existing coal-fired plant; and the US$2.4-billion Texas Clean Energy Project near Odessa, a new 400-megawatt power plant that would gasify its coal before burning. A similar $2.4-billion plant in Kemper County, Mississippi, is also scheduled to start operation in 2014 but is currently facing a legal dispute over whether it can raise local electricity rates.

“Time will tell whether this technology has a market. For now it’s important to see these plants up and running.”

Funding CCS by striking deals with oil producers is not an option in oil-poor parts of Europe, however. And Stuart Haszeldine, a geologist at the University of Edinburgh, cautions that although selling carbon dioxide for oil extraction may help to get the industry going, it comes at the cost of the carbon emitted from the extra oil: he claims (in unpublished calculations) that once oil production is factored in, CCS funded in this way could actually cut emissions by only 10%.

Still, CCS advocates say that large-scale demonstrations of the technology are crucial because CCS offers the only way to clean up emissions from coal, which the IEA predicts will overtake oil to become the world’s leading energy source by 2017. “Time will tell whether this technology has a market. For now it’s important to see these plants up and running,” says Julio Friedmann, head of the carbon-management programme at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. No country with long-term climate obligations could seriously meet them without CCS, he says. “Yet Europe is shutting down nuclear plants, building coal plants, and not keenly pursuing CCS. So the question is, is it serious about cutting emissions?”

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New World Record Set for Solar Cells: 44% Efficiency

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), and their industry partner Solar Junction, have just set the bar even higher in the race for ultra-high-effiency photovoltaic (PV) cells by achieving another world record of 44% efficiency.

The newest cells build on previous successes with multi-junction PV cells (which use layered semiconductors, with each layer optimized to capture different wavelengths of light) and combine them with low-cost concentrating lenses to multiply the intensity of the sun's energy hitting the cells.

Last year, NREL and Solar Junction set a record in efficiency with their SJ3 cells, which are designed for use in utility-scale concentrated solar photovoltaic projects. The SJ3 was verified as being able to convert 43.5% (at 415 suns - a measurement of the intensity of the sun's energy when multiplied) of the energy in sunlight into electricity, but this latest iteration set a new high of 44% efficiency (at 947 suns).

The breakthrough garnered NREL yet another R&D 100 award from R&D Magazine, their third so far, and according to them, it, along with other advances, could "pave the way for a 50%-efficient solar cell in the not-distant future".

Advances such as these are great showcases for the possibilities of public/private partnerships, as Daniel Friedman, manager of the NREL III-V Multijunction Photovoltaics Group states:

"This is really a classic example of NREL developing something and then industry picking it up and running with it and making it a great commercial success. We started with some very basic materials research. We took it to the point where it made sense for industry to take over and take it to the marketplace.

We conceived the cell, demonstrated the individual parts, and let the world know about it. But Solar Junction put all the parts together with record-breaking results, made it work with MBE, and commercialized it at a time when no one else seemed to be interested in or able to do it." - Friedman

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