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webmasterb@nationalvoicesite.com Science, Technology Aid Today’s Wars, Gird for Tomorrow’s By Jim Garamone WASHINGTON, Aug. 20, 2010 – The Defense Department’s science and technology effort has two overarching missions: to help today’s warfighters and prepare capabilities for tomorrow’s servicemembers. The trick is to put these two missions in synch, said Zachary J. Lemnios, director of defense research and engineering. During a Defense Writers’ Group breakfast yesterday, Lemnios said the Defense Department faces a range of challenges. When he arrived as director last year, he said, he framed four imperatives to ensure the office gets it right. “The first is accelerating delivery of technical capabilities to win the current fight,” he said. Second, he added, is to prepare for an uncertain future. These two imperatives are at the heart of the organization. The office must get technology to servicemembers in Iraq and Afghanistan to win today’s fights, but no one knows what type of threat will face the nation in the future, and science and technology money must be spent to combat as yet unknown enemies. The third imperative is reducing the risk, time and cost of acquisition systems, Lemnios said. “And the fourth is to make sure we have the underlying math, science and technology foundation that we need.” Responding to the needs of servicemembers in the field, Lemnios said, is the most important imperative. Lemnios said he has met with all 10 combatant commanders, and it has helped him shape how the department looks at science and technology base. “We are trying to put in place a science and technology portfolio that isn’t there just for fundamental science, it’s there for the combatant commanders and services and to support the future needs of the department,” he said. Lemnios receives joint urgent operations requirements directly from the combatant commanders. A requirement is a need that is “so urgent it has to be addressed in order to save lives,” he explained. “There have been several hundred of these requests,” he said. Lemnios’ office connects the science and technology community with the combatant commanders so they understand the art of the possible. Right now, these needs are centered on the fight to counter improvised explosive devices, on persistent surveillance and on body protection and armor, Lemnios said. “All [of the combatant commanders] want the 80 percent solution today rather than perfection five years from now,” he said. Examples of an urgent need rushed to the front are Aerostat balloons that contain surveillance cameras and other hardware to help in protecting forward bases, the director said. Forward operating bases in isolated areas need perimeter surveillance, he said, noting the balloons loft up to 1,500 feet and don’t take much manning to operate. “We’re now delivering these [balloons] to all forward operating bases,” he said. The office also is moving a helicopter alert threat system along. This system answers the need to protect helicopters from small-arms fire, and it was adopted from a system in place for Humvees. Sixteen microphones mounted on the choppers can pinpoint where ground fire is coming from. The system now is mounted on Black Hawk helicopters at Fort Drum, N.Y., and will deploy to the combat theater in October, he said. “Both systems were fielded in less than six months,” Lemnios said. “We blew through a bunch of barriers to make this happen.” The office also is working to detect improvised explosive devices – the leading killers of U.S. personnel. “Think of the IED problem as a system, in which the enemy has a vote,” Lemnios said. The department is addressing the threat through technology, foiling the triggers, attacking the networks and coming up with new tactics, training and procedures. Science and technology can help in all of these areas, Lemnios said. “This is less about individual technology and more about the system construct,” he added. All of this IED technology and surveillance results in tera-bytes of data, and sorting through it is a major stumbling block, he acknowledged. Lemnios said the department is going to tackle the data-to-decision challenge head on. His office has a tight tie with trainers at Twenty-nine Palms in California and Fort Polk, La., to see “where technology really does supply a lever and how do we supplement that technology concept with tactics, techniques and procedures.” But personnel 20 years from now will need capabilities, and the seed corn for these ideas is the basic research paid for today, Lemnios said. Industry looks for payouts and generally doesn’t fund basic research, he noted; historically, the federal government or universities do that. The Defense Department generally funds basic research when the department needs to have a pre-eminent position for a long time or when private industry finds the risk too high to fund it. A large effort is under way in the Air Force to open the next frontier in propulsion, Lemnios said. The Air Force is developing an engine that will use 25 percent less fuel at Dayton Lab in Ohio. Lemnios said he wants the department to fund the high-risk, critical technology development, then for industry to optimize the results and provide the technology back to the department. A simple example is the way the global positioning system was put in place 23 years ago. “That was a [Defense Department] investment,” he said. “Today, that’s a shrink-wrapped product that … is ubiquitous.” Another example is microelectronics. Originally, the Air Force drove that investment. Today, it’s private industry. The partnership still works. An example is the all terrain mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicle that has been deployed to Afghanistan in the thousands and is going to coalition partners also. It went from the idea to industry producing 1,000 vehicles a month in less than a year. “This was sort of on par with what the department did in World War II to produce aircraft,” Lemnios said. WISE Makes Progress on Its Space Rock Catalog
NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, is busy surveying the landscape of the infrared sky, building up a catalog of cosmic specimens -- everything from distant galaxies to "failed" stars, called brown dwarfs. Closer to home, the mission is picking out an impressive collection of asteroids and comets, some known and some never seen before. Most of these hang out in the Main Belt between Mars and Jupiter, but a small number are near-Earth objects, asteroids and comets with orbits that pass within about 48 million kilometers (30 million miles) of Earth's orbit. By studying a small sample of near-Earth objects, WISE will learn more about the population as a whole. How do their sizes differ, and how many objects are dark versus light? "We are taking a census of a small sample of near-Earth objects to get a better idea of how they vary," said Amy Mainzer, the principal investigator of NEOWISE, a program to catalog asteroids seen with WISE. So far, the mission has observed more than 60,000 asteroids, both Main Belt and near-Earth objects. Most were known before, but more than 11,000 are new. "Our data pipeline is bursting with asteroids," said WISE Principal Investigator Ned Wright of UCLA. "We are discovering about a hundred a day, mostly in the Main Belt." About 190 near-Earth asteroids have been observed to date, of which more than 50 are new discoveries. All asteroid observations are reported to the NASA-funded International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center, a clearinghouse for data on all solar system bodies at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass. "It's a really exciting time for asteroid science," said Tim Spahr, who directs the Minor Planet Center. "WISE is another tool to add to our tool belt of instruments to discover and study the asteroid population." A network of ground-based telescopes follows up and confirms the WISE finds, including the NASA-funded University of Arizona Spacewatch and Catalina Sky Survey projects, both near Tucson, Ariz., and the NASA-funded Magdalena Ridge Observatory near Socorro, N.M. Some of the near-Earth asteroids detected so far are visibly dark, but it's too early to say what percentage. The team needs time to properly analyze and calibrate the data. When results are ready, they will be published in a peer-reviewed journal. WISE has not found an asteroid yet that would be too dark for detection by visible-light telescopes on the ground. "We're beginning the process of sorting through all the objects we're finding so we can learn more about their properties," said Mainzer. "How many are big or small, or light versus dark?" WISE will also study Trojans, asteroids that run along with Jupiter in its orbit around the sun and travel in two packs -- one in front of and one behind the gas giant. It has seen more than 800, and by the end of the mission, should have observed about half of all 4,500 known Trojans. The results will address dueling theories about how the outer planets evolved. With its infrared vision, WISE is good at many aspects of asteroid watching. First, infrared light gives a better estimate of an asteroid's size. Imagine a light, shiny rock lying next to a bigger, dark one in the sunshine. From far away, the rocks might look about the same size. That's because they reflect about the same amount of visible sunlight. But, if you pointed an infrared camera at them, you could tell the dark one is bigger. Infrared light is related to the heat radiated from the rock itself, which, in turn, is related to its size. A second benefit of infrared is the ability to see darker asteroids. Some asteroids are blacker than coal and barely reflect any visible light. WISE can see their infrared glow. The mission isn't necessarily hunting down dark asteroids in hiding, but collecting a sample of all different types. Like a geologist collecting everything from pumice to quartz, WISE is capturing the diversity of cosmic rocks in our solar neighborhood. In the end, WISE will provide rough size and composition profiles for hundreds of near-Earth objects, about 100 to 200 of which will be new. WISE has also bagged about a dozen new comets to date. The icy cousins to asteroids are easy for the telescope to spot because, as the comets are warmed by the sun, gas and dust particles blow off and glow with infrared light. Many of the comets found by WISE so far are so-called long-period comets, meaning they spend billions of years circling the sun in the frigid hinterlands of our solar system, before they are shuttled into the inner, warmer parts. Others are termed short-period comets -- they spend most of their lives hanging around the space near Jupiter, occasionally veering into the space closer to the terrestrial planets. WISE's measurements of these snowy dirtballs will allow scientists to study their size, composition and density. Measurements of the comets' orbits will help explain what kicks these objects out of their original, more distant orbits and in toward the sun. WISE will complete one-and-a-half scans of the sky in October of this year. Visit http://wise.astro.ucla.edu to see selected WISE images released so far. JPL manages WISE for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The principal investigator, Edward Wright, is at UCLA. The mission was competitively selected under NASA's Explorers Program managed by the Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. The science instrument was built by the Space Dynamics Laboratory, Logan, Utah, and the spacecraft was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Boulder, Colo. Science operations and data processing take place at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA. More information is online at http://www.nasa.gov/wise and http://wise.astro.ucla.edu . Heavy Metal Rock Takes Center Stage
The European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft completed a close flyby of the asteroid Lutetia on Saturday, July 10. The estimated time of the flyby was 12:10 p.m. Eastern Time. PASADENA, Calif. - On its way to a 2014 rendezvous with comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft, with NASA instruments aboard, flew past asteroid Lutetia this Saturday, July 10. "Little is known about asteroid Lutetia other than it is about 100 kilometers (62 miles) wide," said Claudia Alexander, project scientist for the U.S. role in the Rosetta mission, from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif." Previous images of Lutetia were taken by ground-based telescopes and show only hints of the asteroid's shape. Rosetta and its instruments previously flew within 800 kilometers (500 miles) of asteroid Steins in September of 2008. The Lutetia flyby is the final scientific milestone for Rosetta before controllers put the spacecraft into hibernation early in 2011, only to wake up in early 2014 for approach to comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. NASA has contributed an ultraviolet instrument (Alice); a plasma instrument (the Ion and Electron Sensor); a microwave instrument (Microwave Instrument for the Rosetta Orbiter); and portions of the electronics package for the double focusing mass spectrometer of the Rosetta orbiter sensor for ion and neutral analysis (ROSINA), among other contributions to this international mission. NASA's Deep Space Network, managed by JPL, will be providing support for tracking and science operations.
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