OrbitalHub

NASA dixit:

On the cusp of our atmosphere live a thin group of seasonal electric blue clouds. Forming 50 miles above the poles in summer, these clouds are known as noctilucent clouds or polar mesospheric clouds — PMCs. A recent NASA long-duration balloon mission observed these clouds over the course of five days at their home in the mesosphere. The resulting photos, which scientists have just begun to analyze, will help us better understand turbulence in the atmosphere, as well as in oceans, lakes and other planetary atmospheres, and may even improve weather forecasting.

On July 8, 2018, NASA’s PMC Turbo mission launched a giant balloon to study PMCs at a height of 50 miles above the surface. For five days, the balloon floated through the stratosphere from its launch at Esrange, Sweden, across the Arctic to Western Nunavut, Canada. During its flight, cameras aboard the balloon captured 6 million high-resolution images filling up 120 terabytes of data storage — most of which included a variety of PMC displays, revealing the processes leading to turbulence. Scientists are now beginning to go through the images and the first look has been promising.

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Video Credit: NASA

Wikipedia dixit:

ICESat-2 is a follow-up to the original ICESat mission, which was decommissioned in 2010. When the project entered its first phase in 2010, it was expected to be ready for launch as soon as 2015. In December 2012, NASA reported that they expected the project to launch in 2016. In the following years, technical issues with the mission’s only onboard instrument, ATLAS, delayed the mission further, pushing the expected launch back from late 2016 to May 2017. In July 2014, NASA submitted a report to Congress detailing the reasons for the delay and a projected budget overrun, as is required by law for NASA projects which spend at least 15% over budget. In order to finance the budget overrun, NASA has diverted funds from other planned satellite missions, such as the Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem (PACE) satellite. The launch took place on 15 September 2018 at 15:02 UTC from Vandenberg Air Force Base Space Launch Complex 2 aboard a Delta 2 7420-10C. To maintain data continuity in the interim between the decommissioning of ICESat and the launch of ICESat-2, NASA’s airborne Operation IceBridge mission has continued to collect polar topography data using its onboard ATM lidar sensor.

Video Credit: ULA

I recently watched a very interesting DEF CON 26 talk given by three investigative journalists. The journalists present their findings about fraudulent pseudo-academic conferences and journals. There are fake science factories that are cashing in on millions of dollars every year, while giving studies scientific credibility. We should not underestimate the damage these pseudo-academic conferences can do to society.

Predatory open-access publishing is an open-access academic publishing business model that is charging fees to authors without providing the services associated with legitimate journals. The model is exploitative. Academics are tricked into publishing whithout benefiting from editorial and publishing services.

Similarly, predatory conferences/meetings, despite being set up to appear as legitimate scientific conferences, do not provide proper editorial control. These conferences also claim involvement of prominent academics, which are not involved.

The characteristics associated with predatory open-access publishing include:

• Accepting articles quickly with little or no peer review or quality control, including hoax and nonsensical papers.
• Notifying academics of article fees only after papers are accepted.
• Aggressively campaigning for academics to submit articles or serve on editorial boards.
• Listing academics as members of editorial boards without their permission, and not allowing academics to resign from editorial boards.
• Appointing fake academics to editorial boards.
• Mimicking the name or web site style of more established journals.
• Making misleading claims about the publishing operation, such as a false location.
• Using ISSNs improperly.
• Citing fake or non-existent impact factors.

Characteristics of predatory conferences/meetings include:

• Rapid acceptance of submissions with poor quality control and little or no true peer review.
• Acceptance of submissions consisting of nonsense and/or hoaxed content.
• Notification of high attendance fees and charges only after acceptance.
• Claiming involvement of academics in conference organizing committees without their agreement, and not allowing them to resign.
• Mimicry of the names or website styles of more established conferences, including holding a similarly named conference in the same city.
• Promoting meetings with unrelated images lifted from the Internet.

You might ask, why mention this on a space blog? Well, this affects the scientific community overall, and there are quite a few aerospace pseudo-academic conferences out there that employ these practices. Heads up!

The above-mentioned DEF CON talk is available on YouTube and I encourage you to take the time to watch it: DEF CON 26 – Svea, Suggy, Till – Inside the Fake Science Factory.

References and other useful links:

Predatory open-access publishing

Predatory conference

Beall’s List

Low frequency sounds of the Sun explained by NASA heliophysicist Alex Young.

Video Credit: NASA Goddard

Wikipedia dixit:

“Clean technology refers to any process, product, or service that reduces negative environmental impacts through significant energy efficiency improvements, the sustainable use of resources, or environmental protection activities. Clean technology includes a broad range of technology related to recycling, renewable energy (wind power, solar power, biomass, hydropower, biofuels, etc.), information technology, green transportation, electric motors, green chemistry, lighting, Greywater, and more. Environmental finance is a method by which new clean technology projects that have proven that they are “additional” or “beyond business as usual” can obtain financing through the generation of carbon credits. A project that is developed with concern for climate change mitigation (such as a Kyoto Clean Development Mechanism project) is also known as a carbon project.

While there is no standard definition of “clean technology”, it has been described by Clean Edge, a clean technology research firm, as “a diverse range of products, services, and processes that harness renewable materials and energy sources, dramatically reduce the use of natural resources, and cut or eliminate emissions and wastes.” It notes that “Clean technologies are competitive with, if not superior to, their conventional counterparts. Many also offer significant additional benefits, notably their ability to improve the lives of those in both developed and developing countries”

Video Credit: ESA

NASA dixit:

“A combination of lightning, drought, and human activity caused fires to scorch more than one-third of Yellowstone National Park in the summer of 1988. Within a year, burn scars cast a sharp outline on the 793,880 acres affected by fire, distinguishing wide sections of recovering forest, meadows, grasslands and wetlands from unburned areas of the park. After more than two decades, satellite instruments can still detect these scars from space. In this time-lapse video, a series of false-color images collected by USGS-NASA Landsat satellites from 1987 to 2018 show the burning and gradual regeneration of Yellowstone’s forests following the 1988 fire season. Landsat Project Scientist Jeff Masek talks about how Landsat satellites detect the burn scars from space and distinguish them from healthy, un-burned forest and from new growth. Watch as burn scars (dark red) quickly replace large expanses of healthy green vegetation (dark green) by 1989. Notice how the scars slowly fade over time as new vegetation begins to grow and heal the landscape.”

Video Credit: NASA Goddard