Los Alamos DOE office will hold public BSL-3 scoping session today
The Department of Energy's Los Alamos Area Office will hold a scoping session on the Laboratory's proposed Biosafety Level 3 laboratory from 2 to 8 p.m. today in its main conference room, 528 35th St. in Los Alamos. The session is open to the public.
The Laboratory has asked DOE to prepare an Environmental Assessment of the feasibility of the facility, which would handle very small amounts of microorganisms, or their DNA constituents, for research purposes.
Questions about the Environmental Assessment or the scoping session can be directed to Elizabeth Withers at 7-8690 or ewithers@doeal.gov by electronic mail. For more information, see Feb. 13 Daily Newsbulletin.
This front view of the HETE-2 satellite on the Pegasus launcher shows the HETE-2 science instruments. The plastic sheet in the background is the "wall" of the clean tent set up around the spacecraft while it is on the rocket. Also visible in the background is the rear structure of the rocket itself. Photo courtesy of the Center for Space Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Satellite reveals "unusual something" early in mission
HETE-2, a gamma ray burst detection satellite, last week picked up a signal burst on the X-ray and gamma instruments that has captured the attention of Laboratory scientists. The satellite, launched last fall, has just reached operational status, working to check out all its systems for coordinated action.
Two of the detectors that were turned on as of Feb. 13, the Los Alamos-designed wide-field X-ray monitor and the French gamma telescope (FREGATE) almost immediately reported a burst of gamma and X-rays from a location possibly within our galaxy. While FREGATE, the gamma ray detector, has confirmed several gamma ray bursts that were also "seen" by other satellite systems, the latest results are characterized by Laboratory Fellow Ed Fenimore of Space and Remote Sensing Sciences (NIS-2) as "an unusual something, and it's always good to find unusual things."
This burst, known as GRB010213, doesn't quite fit the pattern of extra-galactic gamma ray bursts, the famous GRB's that are brighter than a billion suns and yet only last from one tenth to 100 seconds. It's also peculiar that it's not quite like a normal X-ray burst, which we see occasionally from stars within our galaxy, said Fenimore. So it's neither fish nor fowl -- at best, it's an entirely new, bizarre thing and will engender many new research papers and big theories. Alternately, and just as likely, it's just a slightly odd stellar event that we won't ever understand clearly but at least it tells us that HETE's out there being busy.
As of Feb. 2, the HETE satellite observatory had achieved operational status, along with its network of primary ground stations and its Burst Alert Network (BAN). Continued "tuning" of instruments and spacecraft parameters is anticipated over the coming months during a few orbits each day. HETE has an extensive community of ground-based optical observers who will receive e-mailed "GRB alerts" within moments of detection. Initially, the localization accuracy of GRB alerts will be checked before releasing the e-mail alerts, necessitating a delay of about one orbital period. Over the next one to two months, the team expects to transition to nearly immediate alert releases.
HETE-2 is equipped with instruments sensitive to gamma- and X-radiation. These instruments are capable of immediate inter-instrument communication, the key to their planned success at capturing the fleeting gamma ray bursts as they occur.
Each HETE-2 instrument operates independently of the others; however, if a burst is detected by one of the instruments, the others are notified and begin collecting data at higher temporal and energy resolution. All instruments use on-board sensors to determine safe and appropriate operational conditions.
The HETE-2 is a collaboration between the Laboratory; NASA; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; France's Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES), Centre d'Etude Spatiale des Rayonnements (CESR), and Ecole Nationale Superieure de l'Aeronautique et de l'Espace (Sup'Aero); and Japan's Institute of Physical and Chemical Research (RIKEN). The science team includes members from the University of California, Berkeley and Santa Cruz and the University of Chicago.
More information on this mission can be found at http://space.mit.edu/HETE/ online.
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New issue of LANL The Los Alamos News Letter will appear in all employees' mail boxes this week. This week's issue will highlight the changes in the new University of California contract, with a special guest editorial by Laboratory Director John Browne who addresses the contract challenges. This issue also has an article on the seismic studies project and the employee spotlight will focus on Lab employee Bob Robey of Integrated Physics Methods (X-3) who coaches a unique team of kids. Read all about it...and more in this week's issue of the Los Alamos News Letter. |
Browne to hold All-Hands Meeting
John Browne will hold a Laboratory All-Hands Meeting to discuss the "University of California Contract Challenges" beginning at 1:10 p.m. next Tuesday (Feb. 27), in the Administration Building Auditorium. This talk will be open to all employees and also will be shown on Labnet Channel 9.
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Craig Ihde, left, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., discusses some last minute preparations with Bradbury Science Museum (CRO-2) Director John Rhoades before speaking Tuesday evening about the ambitious explorations of the solar system undertaken by JPL. The lecture was part of National Engineering Week activities at the museum. In a special public presentation at 6:30 tonight, John Bretzke of Los Alamos' Project Management (PM) Division and Nick Nagy of the Laboratory's Computing, Communications and (CCN) Networking Division will discuss the many engineering challenges of constructing the Strategic Computing Complex for a supercomputer not yet invented. Bretzke is the project director and Nagy is the deputy project director for the Strategic Computing Complex under construction at Los Alamos' Technical Area 3. Photo By Michael Carlson, Public Affairs |
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