The SpaceX Dragon berthed to the International Space Station's Harmony module. Credit: NASA TV

Launched early morning Tuesday from Cape Canaveral in Florida, the capsule flew to within reach of the ISS’s robotic arm on Friday morning and was captured at 9:56 AM EDT.

The mission is a demonstration flight by Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, as part of its contract with NASA to have private companies launch cargo safely to the International Space Station.

Dragon is a free-flying, reusable spacecraft developed by SpaceX under NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program. The craft consists of 3 main elements:

• a nosecone to protect the vessel during launch
• a pressurized capsule for cargo requiring a pressurized environment (including, in the future, astronauts), plus avionics, the RCS system, parachutes, and other support infrastructure
• an unpressurized compartment for cargo not requiring a pressurized environment, plus the solar arrays and thermal radiators.

NASA’s $1.6 billion contract with SpaceX calls for a minimum of 12 flights, with an option to order additional missions for a cumulative total contract value of up to $3.1 billion.

Atmospheric carbon produced by the OECD* nations in 2011 declined 0.6%, while non-OECD countries saw an increase of 6.1% over the previous year.

China remains the largest carbon emitter, whose 9.3% increase in 2011 contributed the most of any nation to the global rise. India’s emissions rose by 8.7%.  Still, per-capita emissions in China and India remain well under the OECD average (63% and 15% respectively).

Carbon emissions in the U.S. in 2011 dropped 1.7%, primarily due to the power industry’s shift from coal to natural gas and an unusually mild winter. U.S. emissions have now fallen 7.7% since 2006 — the largest reduction of all countries or regions.

2011 CO₂ emissions in the EU declined 1.9%, as sluggish economic growth cut industrial production and a relatively warm winter reduced heating demand.

Japan’s emissions increased by 2.4%, largely as result of using fossil-fuel to partially replace electrical capacity lost as most of the country’s nuclear reactors where taken offline in the wake of Fukushima.

With India’s 2011 emissions moving ahead of Russia’s, the five largest carbon emitting countries are now China, the United States, the European Union. India, and Russia.

Implications for Global Warming

The 450 Scenario of the IEA’s World Energy Outlook 2011, which sets out an energy pathway consistent with a 50% chance of limiting the increase in the average global temperature to 2°C, requires CO₂ emissions to peak at 32.6 Gt no later than 2017, i.e. just 1.0 Gt above 2011 levels.

The 450 Scenario sees a decoupling of CO₂emissions from global GDP, but much still needs to be done to reach that goal as the rate of growth in CO₂ emissions in 2011 exceeded that of global GDP.

“The new data provide further evidence that the door to a 2°C trajectory is about to close,” said IEA Chief Economist Fatih Birol.

This mission is a demonstration flight by the private company Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, as part of NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program to develop private-sector launch capabilities after the retirement of NASA’s space shuttle fleet.

Shortly after launch atop a Falcon 9 rocket, SpaceX’s Dragon cargo capsule entered Earth orbit and successfully deployed its power-producing solar array. Between now and Friday, the capsule will undergo checkout procedures to test its various systems. On Thursday it will fly to within 1.5 miles of the ISS, in preparation for a rendezvous on Friday.

If all goes according to plan, the Expedition 31 crew on board the station will use the orbiting complex’s robotic arm to capture Dragon and dock it on the bottom side of the Harmony node.

The Dragon features an unpressurized trunk and a recoverable capsule, protected during launch by a nose cone. Within the capsule is a pressurized section for cargo and, eventually, crew. On this flight, Dragon is packed with food and provisions for the residents aboard the ISS, student experiments, and other cargo destined for the outpost.

Dragon is expected to return to Earth loaded with more than a thousand pounds of science experiments, station hardware and crew items.

The 157-foot-tall Falcon 9 rocket is a two-stage, liquid-fuel design, whose first stage is powered by 9 Merlin engines. A high-pressure reading in one of those engines was responsible for the aborted launch on Saturday a half-second before liftoff. Over the weekend, a faulty check valve was discovered and replaced.

Parallel to NASA’s COTS program is the Commercial Crew Program, intended to spur development of new spacecraft and launch vehicles from the commercial sector able to safely, reliably and cost-effectively transport astronauts to low Earth orbit and the space station.

Saudi Arabia revealed plans to make just such an investment earlier this month, aiming to install a whopping 41 gigawatts of solar power — or 20% of the country’s needs — by 2032 while adding other alternatives including wind, nuclear, waste-to-energy and geothermal to its energy mix.

While the oil-rich nation has acknowledged the threat of global climate change, its push toward renewables is about more than carbon emissions.

Not only is demand for electricity growing in Saudia Arabia, but the country is dependent upon energy-intensive desalination plants for most of its fresh water — plants which currently consume millions of barrels of oil daily. On the scale now envisioned, solar would reduce national consumption by more than a half-million barrels per day.

Moreover, domestic consumption of oil is heavily discounted — in some cases, priced as low as $5/barrel, whereas that same oil on the world market could be sold at $100/barrel.

Looking beyond its own borders, Saudia Arabia also recognizes the economic and employment opportunities in becoming a major player in the global solar industry, and aims to develop its own supply chain and manufacturing facilities.

As if to demonstrate how serious the Saudi’s are about their alternative energy strategy, solicitation of bids for the first phases of implementation will begin immediately.

An abundance of sunshine makes Saudi Arabia one of the world’s most attractive locations for solar development, and its particular form of government makes aggressive, top-down initiatives easier to implement than in western democracies. Those facts, combined with the economic benefits of cutting highly-subsidized domestic consumption while creating jobs, certainly put the country in a unique position to move forward with ambitious strategies for developing alternative energy.

Nevertheless, when an oil-rich nation recognizes that the time for massive investments in renewable energy is now, it makes populist slogans such as “drill here, drill now” sound like something out of the last century.

Agricultural and rural development are getting more money in some African countries. Source: Flickr/Oxfam International

[NAIROBI] The number of African countries delivering on the Maputo Declaration to boost investment into agricultural and rural development to ten per cent of their national budgets is growing, a conference in Kenya has heard.

Five more countries — Burkina Faso, Guinea, Mali, Niger, and Senegal — have met the pledge made at the Second Ordinary Session of the Assembly of the African Union in July 2003, according to Estherine Fotabong, director of programme implementation and coordination at the directorate of the NEPAD Planning and Coordinating Agency.

They had also invested in research, food production, and provided financing and market access support to farmers, she said.

“Significant progress has been made towards encouraging African countries to increase their budgetary allocations to agriculture. About 12–13 countries [in total] have achieved the ten per cent target,” she told the told the 8th Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme Partnership Platform Meeting this month (3–4 May).

Countries such as Burkina Faso, Ethiopia and Rwanda are investing more than ten per cent, she added, noting that these nations had also shown good governance, addressed institutional capacity and focused on producers.

But despite the positive trend, she said that there were still significant challenges to attracting private sector investment, policy coordination, funding agricultural research and fighting corruption.

She warned that failure to overcome these problems could undermine the ability to attract funding from the public, donor and private sectors for research and infrastructure.

Gibson Guvheya, senior partnership officer with the Kenya-based African Capacity Building Foundation, told SciDev.Net: “There is still the need to strengthen the capacity of key actors in the sector for more agricultural transformation in Africa”.

“Surprisingly, countries just emerging from conflicts, such as Central African Republic, Liberia and Sierra Leone, have scored well in terms of capacity for agricultural transformation [compared with] countries that have been reforming for some time,” he said.

Selina Sannu, a participant from Kenya, gave a cautious welcome to Fotabong’s comments, noting that: “It is true that more countries are now investing in agriculture, but the question is where the funding is going to. If it is just paying salaries and buying vehicles, this will be wrong. It should be directed at smallholder farmers.”

Participants at the meeting said domestic funding through private-public partnerships should be a priority for Africa, instead of relying heavily on foreign donors. They called for greater investment in infrastructure, and loans for smallholder farmers at lower interest rates.

Ash from Mexico’s Popocatepetl volcano forced the closing of the international airport serving the country’s fourth largest city, Puebla, on Saturday – the third such closure in less than a week.

Eruptions Friday night and Saturday morning sent red-hot rock more than a mile from the crater and a cloud of ash and vapor 4 km (2.5 mi) into the air, as tremors and loud rumbling sent residents scurrying into the streets as far as 10 km away. The weekend activity was strongest since the alert level was raised to yellow stage-3 last month – fifth on a seven-step scale.

More than 30 million people live within sight of the 17,900 ft. volcano, located 30 km (18.6 mi) west of Puebla and 80 km (50 mi) southeast of Mexico City in Central Mexico.

Although no evacuations have yet been called for, emergency centers have been set up in the event the eruptions intensify. Those living near the volcano have been urged to be prepared to leave on short notice should conditions change.

Popocatepetl’s most recent, major eruptions occured in 1994 and 2000, the latter causing nearly 50,000 residents to evacuate.

Launched in March 2002, the eight-ton spacecraft exceeded its intended 5-year lifetime by a factor of 2 before falling silent without warning on April 8.

Over the course of its 10-year mission, Envisat data supported than 2,500 scientific papers and 4,000 projects in over 70 countries. Loss of the craft represents a major setback to many of the ongoing projects that were dependent upon its continuous flow of observational data.

As the largest non-military satellite ever built, Envisat carried 10 sophisticated instruments that provided precise information about Earth’s land, oceans, ice caps and atmosphere and contributed to our understanding of climate change.

Envisat: 10th Anniversary Video

Envisat documented the gradual shrinking of Arctic sea ice and the regular opening of the polar shipping routes during summer months. Together with other satellites, it monitored global sea-level height and regional variations, as well as global sea-surface temperatures with a precision of a few tenths of a degree. Years of Envisat data also led to a better understanding of ocean currents and chlorophyll concentrations.

In the atmosphere, the satellite observed air pollution increase in Asia and its stability in Europe and North America. It measured carbon dioxide and methane concentrations and also monitored variations in the Antarctica ozone hole.

Over land, it mapped the speed of ice streams in Antarctica and Greenland. Its images were used regularly to update the global maps of land use, including the effects of deforestation.

Using its imaging radar, Envisat mapped ground displacements triggered by earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, improving understanding of tectonics and volcanic mechanisms.

In addition to providing scientific data, Envisat also monitored floods and oil spills, helping civil authorities to manage natural and man-made disasters.

Where possible, Envisat’s most critical data-gathering responsibilities are being shifted to other satellites, but loss of the craft only highlights the need for ESA to meet its often-delayed schedule for launching the next generation of earth-observing satellites known as Sentinals 1-5. The first of those missions is now scheduled for 2013.

Optical, radar and laser observations of Envisat during the past month indicate that it continues to circle the Earth in a stable, near-polar orbit. Given its mass and altitude, and left to its own devices, the satellite appears destined to become the largest piece of orbital space-junk before falling to Earth in about 150 years.

The fragile and rapidly changing Arctic is home to large reservoirs of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. As Earth’s climate warms, that methane is vulnerable to possible release into the atmosphere, where it can add to global warming.

Researchers have known for years that large amounts of methane are frozen in Arctic tundra soils and in marine sediments (including gas hydrates). But now a multi-institutional study led by Eric Kort of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has uncovered a surprising and potentially important new source of methane: the Arctic Ocean itself.

The photograph above was taken by Kort, and it shows leads and cracks in the ice cover of the Arctic Ocean north of Alaska. During five research flights in 2009–10, Kort and colleagues measured increased methane levels while flying at low altitudes north of the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas in a National Science Foundation/National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Gulfstream V aircraft as part of the HIAPER Pole-to-Pole Observations (HIPPO) airborne campaign.

The methane level detected during the flights was about one-half percent higher than normal background levels.
 But where was the methane coming from? The team detected no carbon monoxide in the atmosphere, which would have been a signature of methane coming from the human combustion of fuels. And based on the time of year, the location, and the nature of the emissions, it was unlikely that the methane was coming from high-latitude wetlands or geologic reservoirs.

By comparing the locations of the enhanced methane levels with airborne measurements of carbon monoxide, water vapor, and ozone, the researchers from six institutions pinpointed a source: the ocean surface, in places where there were cracks and openings in the sea ice cover. The cracks were allowing methane in the top layers of the sea to escape into the atmosphere. The team did not detect enhanced methane levels over areas of solid ice.

Kort noted that previous studies had detected high concentrations of methane in Arctic surface waters, but no one had predicted that this dissolved methane would find its way into the overlying atmosphere. Scientists are not yet sure how the methane is produced, but Kort suspects biological productivity in Arctic surface waters may be the culprit.

“It’s possible that as large areas of sea ice melt and expose more ocean water, methane production may increase, leading to larger methane emissions,” he said. “While the methane levels we detected weren’t particularly large, the potential source region, the Arctic Ocean, is vast. So our finding could represent a noticeable new global source of methane.”

Source: NASA Earth Observatory


The nationally-averaged temperature for the period May 2011-April 2012 registered 2.8°F above the 1901-2000 long-term average.

Looking just at temperatures for this year to date, temperatures ran 5.4°F above the long-term average, making this the warmest January-April period since recordkeeping began in 1895.

Twenty-six states, all east of the Rockies, were record warm for the four-month period and an additional 17 states had temperatures for the period among their ten warmest.

Last month also ranked as the third warmest April on record, following on the heels of the warmest March ever recorded.

The U.S. Climate Extremes Index (USCEI), an index that tracks the highest and lowest 10 percent of extremes in temperature, precipitation, drought and tropical cyclones across the contiguous U.S., was a record 42 percent during the January-April period, over twice the average value.

Extremes in warm daytime temperatures (82 percent) and warm nighttime temperatures (68 percent) covered a large area of the nation, contributing to the record high value.

No cause has yet been determined for either the dolphin or pelican deaths, nor is it known whether the two are related.

Peruvian officials rejected earlier reports that the dolphins died from the morbillvirus as inconclusive, although they did confirm indications that the mammals suffered some sort of immune system depression and that investigations were ongoing.

As for the dead pelicans, officials have ruled out the avian bird flu, which is contagious to humans, and seem to be focused on starvation caused by a lack of feeder fish in the area due to changing water temperatures from the recent la Nina.

With the peak tourist season now past, the beach alert will have less economic impact than it would have had a few months ago. Many local fisherman and restaurant owners, who thus far are unaware of any human illness connected to the UME, seem unfazed by the government’s warning. Nevertheless, this UME ranks as one of the worst ever recorded.

Marine Conservationist Hardy Jones Discusses
Peru’s Mass Pelican and Dolphin Die-offs on CNN