ModerateDirector Browne gives update on NW Directorate review
Laboratory Director John Browne last month established a special committee to review the Nuclear Weapons (NW) Directorate. He provided the following update to the Newsbulletin:
"I have been briefed on the work of the special committee
I appointed to examine how we might more effectively and efficiently
manage the complex set of activities currently assigned to the
Nuclear Weapons (NW) Directorate. I am impressed with the thoroughness
of the committee's effort and pleased by how it encouraged and
gathered input from the entire Lab via their Web page and personal
contacts.
"I have asked to have the Senior Executive Team and representatives
of the University of California President's Council briefed today.
Thereafter, I expect to consult with the SET, carefully review
the committee's work and develop a path forward, including possible
changes to program planning, execution and organization, which
I will review by mid to late August at an All Employees meeting.
We are on schedule to complete the review and implement any changes
by Oct. 1."
For more information, see the June 1 Daily Newsbulletin.
An artist's rendering, left, of the Genesis spacecraft and its payload. The concentrator (solar wind concentrator), ion monitor and electron monitor were designed and built by a team of scientists and engineers in Space and Atmospheric Sciences (NIS-1) and Space Instrumentation (NIS-4). The solar wind concentrator is designed to collect a high concentration of oxygen and return the sample back to Earth for analysis. The ion and electron monitors instantaneously determine which type of solar wind is passing the spacecraft at any time and translate that knowledge into actions for the solar wind concentrator and solar wind collector arrays. At right, Dan Everett, left, of Space and Atmospheric Sciences (NIS-1), the lead concentrator technician and Rick Paynter, right, of Quality Assurance at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, perform a final check on one of the solar wind concentrator grids during the final assembly of the instrument. They are using a flashlight to inspect a portion of the grid near the outer edge of the assembly. At one-fourth the diameter of a human hair the individual grid wires are difficult to see. Everett and Paynter are working in a class-100 cleanroom built for instrument assembly. Class-100 means a maximum of 100 dust particles per cubic meter of air are allowed. Photo by LeRoy N. Sanchez, Public Affairs
Los Alamos instruments are on NASA's Genesis mission
Three of the instruments aboard Genesis, a remote-controlled NASA space mission designed to capture particles from the sun and return them to Earth, were designed and built by the Laboratory. Genesis is scheduled to launch next Monday, (July 30) from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.
The Los Alamos-built instruments aboard Genesis are the solar wind concentrator, designed to collect a high concentration of oxygen, and the solar wind ion and electron monitors, designed to provide information about the solar wind to the concentrator and the solar wind collector arrays.
Genesis' main goal is to determine isotopic ratios of different elements in solar matter, with a focus on oxygen -- an element making up two thirds of everything found on Earth, according to Roger Wiens of Space and Atmospheric Sciences (NIS-1), who led the payload instrument development at Los Alamos. Oxygen isotope amounts vary among the different planets in the solar system and this puzzles scientists because all solar system bodies were supposedly formed from the same raw materials. An isotope is a variation of an element - it has more or fewer neutrons in its nucleus so is heavier or lighter than the standard form of the element.
Scientists believe the solar system possibly began with a dense cloud of gas and dust that collapsed in on itself. Most of this "solar nebula" condensed to form the sun, while outlying particles coalesced into the diverse planets, moons and comets that make up our solar system.
Although scientists have a general understanding of the formation of the solar system, the composition of the initial nebula remains relatively unknown. Fortunately, nature provides a fossil record of the solar nebula. The pristine composition is preserved for the most part in the outer layers of the sun. The solar wind provides a continuous flow of this material into space.
This is the rationale of the Genesis mission -- to collect samples of the solar wind to reveal the makeup of the cloud that formed the solar system nearly five billion years ago. "To understand how the planets were formed with their different compositions, we need to know the starting materials," explained Wiens.
The solar wind concentrator is designed to collect a high concentration of oxygen and return the sample back to Earth for analysis. The concentrator takes the solar wind and passes it through a series of electrically charged grids into a bowl-shaped mirror, which reflects the filtered stream of elements heavier than hydrogen upward into a collector tile, poised in the center (of the solar wind concentrator), where the oxygen and other elements embed themselves.
The several layers of charged grids are made of incredibly strong and durable wires one-quarter the diameter of a human hair. The wire grids possess different electrical charges to direct the ions to the collector tile and filter out the much more numerous hydrogen ions, according to Beth Nordholt of Neutron Science and Technology (P-23) and one of the leaders on the concentrator instrument.
The collector tile is made of four pie-shaped pieces of ultra-pure materials: one industrial diamond wedge, two silicon carbide wedges and one wedge of silicon topped with thin diamond. The entire interior of the concentrator is coated with a very thin layer of gold to keep all the surfaces oxygen-free.
"The concentrator is the first solar instrument sent into space that we will ever see again. All other instruments aboard spacecrafts remain in space indefinitely, or like Lunar Prospector are intentionally crashed after their mission ends," said Nordholt. "This is the first mission in three decades, since the Apollo missions in the [1970s], that will bring extraterrestrial samples back to Earth for analysis," she said.
The surface of the concentrator's bowl-shaped mirror was specially treated to reflect the sun's incoming light back out of the instrument to avoid damaging the collector tile with focused sunlight.
"We used a solar simulation, initially a spotlight purchased from Hollywood, to test how the concentrator will respond to sunlight in the vacuum of space," said Wiens of NIS-1. "During the test, we had to monitor the shapes of the fragile grids. If the grids get any damage, like wrinkles, this could change the path of the ions so that they don't reach the collector tile and this would give skewed results."
Genesis' ion and electron monitors instantaneously determine which type of solar wind is passing the spacecraft at any time and translate that knowledge into actions for the solar wind concentrator and solar wind collector arrays - five large meter-sized panels containing 55 coaster-sized tiles made of a variety of materials selected to trap specific elements in the solar wind as they bombard the arrays.
The monitors will distinguish between three types of solar wind by recognizing their characteristic temperature, velocity, direction and composition, said Bruce Barraclough of NIS-1. The onboard computer will use the information collected by the monitors to adjust the solar wind concentrator for optimum oxygen concentration and to select the appropriate collector arrays for exposure to the wind.
The ion monitor measures the density, temperature and energy of protons and alpha particles -- helium atoms stripped of their electrons - in the solar wind. About 96 percent of the solar wind is composed of protons, four percent alpha particles and less than one percent minor ions, one being oxygen.
Genesis' electron monitor will primarily determine the direction of travel of the solar wind's electrons. It is located on the edge of Genesis' equipment deck so that it can view the whole sky as the spacecraft rotates.
Genesis will collect just 10 to 20 micrograms of solar wind - or the equivalent of a few grains of salt - and return it to Earth for analysis.
The instruments were built in clean rooms to guarantee their materials are extremely pure so that the atoms analyzed are of pristine solar origin and not due to terrestrial contamination. They were designed and constructed by a team of scientists and engineers from NIS-1 and Space Instrumentation and System Engineering (NIS-4) headed by Wiens, Barraclough, Eric Dors and Daniel Reisenfeld of NIS-1, Nordholt of P-23 and Donald Mietz of NIS-4.
Genesis is the first spacecraft to have a completely robotically-controlled sample collection system in which data from science instruments is used to control sample collection. The software to control the payload was developed jointly by Los Alamos and the spacecraft builder, Lockheed Martin Astronautics in Denver.
The mission is led by Donald Burnett, a professor in the Geology and Planetary Science Division at [California Institute of Technology], and is managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The collector tile portion of the payload also was built at JPL.
During flight, the entire payload will be under the control of Los Alamos. Scientists will monitor the health of the payload instruments and will keep a history of all solar wind conditions and array exposure times. These data will be made available to the scientific community at large for use in contextualizing the data obtained from the samples, which will be returned to Earth in 2004 after three years of collection.
--Shelley Thompson
Newsday writer, book author to speak at Lab today on global health
Laurie Garrett, a science writer for Newsday and author of two books on global health, will talk at a Director's Colloquium at 1:10 p.m. today in the Administration Building Auditorium at Technical Area 3. "Global Health at a Turning Point?" will explore the decline of public health resources around the world, which coincides with a multi-billion-dollar United Nations program this year intended to battle tuberculosis, malaria and HIV in poor countries.
The talk, which is unclassified and open to the public, will be broadcast live on LABNET Channel 9. For more information, see the July 18 Daily Newsbulletin.
Cerro Grande flooding issues to be discussed at open house on Wednesday
The Interagency Flood Risk Assessment Team (IFRAT) is hosting an open house to discuss Cerro Grande Fire risk assessment issues on Wednesday at Northern New Mexico Community College in Española.
The open house is from 6 to 9 p.m. in the Nick L. Salazar Center for Fine Arts Theater, 921 Paseo de Onate, on the community college campus in Española.
IFRAT was formed to better understand how contaminant transport from increased flooding might affect downstream property owners, water users and the general public. The purpose of the open house is to make results of the risk assessment known to the public and hear comments and concerns on the team's report.
Representatives from the New Mexico Environment Department, Environmental Protection Agency, the Laboratory, Department of Energy, University of New Mexico and the New Mexico Department of Health will present results of the assessment.
For more information, contact Kirby Olson of the New Mexico Environment Department at (505) 428-2545, or write to kirby_olson@nmev.state.nm.us by electronic mail.
--John Bass
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Special issue of Dateline: Los Alamos focuses on bioscience research at the Laboratory The latest issue of Dateline: Los Alamos is available. In 1999, a new division dedicated to biosciences was created. The formation of the Bioscience (B) Division marked the beginning of an exciting era for the Laboratory. Bioscience involves the convergence of biological, chemical, physical and computational sciences that serve as the tools to begin to unlock some of the secrets of the molecular machines and networks that operate on a cellular level. This special issue of Dateline: Los Alamos outlines research the Laboratory is doing in this field. The important knowledge gained in this new scientific frontier will provide benefits to national security, public health and the environment. To view the special Dateline: Los Alamos issue go to http://lib-www.lanl.gov/la-pubs/00818334.pdf online. (Adobe Acrobat Reader required) |
Tri-Lab Engineering Conference call for
abstracts
The fourth Tri-Lab Engineering Conference on Modeling and Simulation,
held every two years, is now accepting abstracts for both classified
and unclassified technical presentations on computer modeling
and simulation in support of engineering design, product performance
and manufacturing processes.
Abstracts from the Laboratory should be submitted to Jeff Hill of Design Engineering (ESA-DE), Amy Robertson of Engineering Analysis (ESA-EA), or Dave Becker, also of ESA-EA, by Aug. 1.
This year's conference is scheduled for Oct. 23-24 at the Department of Energy Training Center in Albuquerque.
Topic areas for the conference include multi-scale modeling and analysis; multi-physics modeling and analysis; modeling of micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS); electrical engineering; mechanical engineering; manufacturing and process modeling; and uncertainty and sensitivity.
The tri-lab conference is an informal information exchange among the scientists and engineers at the participating laboratories. Written papers are not required and only abstracts will be published. Previously presented papers from other conferences are accepted and publication at the tri-lab conference does not preclude presentation or publication elsewhere. Abstracts of 300 words or less should be submitted to Hill, Robertson or Becker through electronic mail as a Microsoft Word file. All abstracts should be unclassified, even if the presentation will be classified. Authors are responsible for getting the Lab's approval for unlimited release of the abstract prior to submission, including an LA-UR document number.
Abstracts should include a title, author name, organization, Lab name and location, abstract summary, level of classification and keywords. Presentations will be limited to 20 minutes or less, including a question and answer period.
This year's conference has been organized to facilitate the exchange of information on new developments in computer hardware, software and applications by scientists at the three labs. The benefits of the conference include interaction with peers from the other labs, sharing information on new computer codes and modeling processes, discussion of engineering problems and solutions and exploring trends in computer hardware/software in the arena of engineering simulation.
For more information see the tri-lab conference website at www.esc.sandia.gov/trilab/home.html online. Or contact Hill at 7-9590, or jhill@lanl.gov; Robertson at 5-7246, or robertsa@lanl.gov; or Becker at 5-9064, or dbecker@lanl.gov by electronic mail.
--Kevin N. Roark
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Cause and effect A large group of students and teachers from schools throughout southwestern states came to the Laboratory to participate in some hands-on learning activities associated with rehabilitation of areas affected by forest fires. The students came to Los Alamos as part of a Summer Environmental Academy sponsored by WERC, a consortium for environmental education and technology development, based at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, N.M. Numerous Laboratory and Department of Energy employees acted as mentors to the students during their one-week stay in Los Alamos. Teams of students went into burned areas on Laboratory property to assess damage caused by the Cerro Grande Fire, to perform remediation activities such as placing erosion-inhibiting devices in the areas (photo at top) and to learn how to sample soil, ash and runoff to determine whether they contain contaminants. After their field experience, and with the help of mentors and teachers from southwestern schools, students developed conclusions within their teams about how best to study, stop and interpret fire damage. After they reached their conclusions, the teams developed presentations about their findings. They shared their findings with mentors, teachers and Summer Environmental Academy sponsors during their final day at Los Alamos. Photo courtesy of KOAT-TV |
 WERC students from one group present their findings on sediment transfer. From left to right, students are: Darren Wilson, Andrea Moore, Bryan Nelson, Benny Martinez, Tyson Shorty, Phillip Martinez and Dark Scott. Matt Johansen from DOE's Los Alamos Area Office acted as this team's mentor, along with Bryan Swain of WERC. Photo by LeRoy N. Sanchez, Public Affairs |
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