US Air Force Deem Cyber Command a Good Idea
In what is nothing more than a really good geeky story, the US Air Force has decided to pursue forming Cyber Command. Its duty will be to defend the Defense Department and its subsidiary networks from cyberattacks, and to launch their own against enemies.
Apparently the decision was made at the Corona leadership conference in Colorado Springs. The leadership, including Air Force Secretary Michael Donley and Chief of Staff Gen. Norton Schwartz, made the decision last week in a continued effort to stand up the command, said Captain Michael Andrews, an Air Force spokesman.
The service put Cyber Command on hold in August just passed, saying that they wanted to postpone the program until the new senior Air Force leaders had the time to make a final decision on just what Cyber Command was to do.
Fears that the Air Force would lose sole control over any such project to a larger and all encompassing project were raised in May by Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England. Writing in a memo, England wrote: “Because all the combatant commands, military departments and other defense components need the ability to work unhindered in cyberspace, the domain does not fall within the purview of any particular department or component.”
“The conduct of cyber operations is a complex issue, as [Defense] and other interagency partners have substantial equity in the cyber arena,” Donley said. “We will continue to do our part to increase Air Force cyber capabilities and institutionalize our cyber mission.”
At the moment it looks as if the Air Force is looking to investigate ways that it can securely implement Cyber Command in a way that encompasses all aspects of the US military and defense.
NASA’s Exploration of the Solar System Continues
Never one to be set back simply by not having enough money to operate to its full efficiency, NASA is still making its present felt in space exploration. In a week where the attention of the populace is focused squarely on a collapsing economy (or a Tina Fey sketch), NASA is in the midst of prepping two exploratory missions to learn more about our solar system.
Already orbiting around our solar system is NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. Launched in 1997, the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft reached Saturn in 2004 to explore the planet and its moons. A cooperative project between NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency, the Cassini mission has been a huge success.
And now scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena are gearing up for a flyby of Saturn’s moon Enceladus on October 9. Its mission is to measure molecules in the space environment around Enceladus.
This may not seem like a vital mission, or even one of much scientific importance, but given Enceladus’ weak gravity and low atmospheric pressure, nothing could be further from the truth.
Cassini will be flying within 16 miles of Saturn’s sixth-largest moon, and will be able to identify individual molecules in the moons environment. Because the atoms that surround Enceladus come from interior regions that have changed little since the moon was originally formed, scientists are expecting the moon could hold clues to our solar systems past.
“This encounter will potentially have far-reaching implications for understanding how the solar system was formed and how it evolved,” said professor Tamas Gombosi, chair of the University of Michigan Department of Atmospheric, Oceanic and Space Sciences.
Yet to launch, but similar in its far reaching scientific aims, is IBEX, the Interstellar Boundary Explorer, which is due for launch on October 19. The two year mission, launching from the Kwajalein Atoll, will be the first mission to image and map the “dynamic interactions” that take place where the solar winds emanating from the sun impact with the outer regions of space.
“The interstellar boundary regions are critical because they shield us from the vast majority of dangerous galactic cosmic rays, which otherwise would penetrate into Earth’s orbit and make human spaceflight much more dangerous,” said David J. McComas, IBEX principal investigator and senior executive director of the Space Science and Engineering Division at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio.
This is not the first time that NASA scientists have directed their attention to the outer boundary of our solar system though. Voyager spacecraft 1 and 2 left the inner solar system long ago. Voyager 1 – now the farthest manmade object from Earth – has entered the heliosheath, the termination shock region that exists between our solar system and interstellar space. It is this region that IBEX will be focusing its attention on, though through a different means.
Image Credit: NASA/GSFC
MESSENGER Returning to Mercury
In a dual feat of astronomical science and acronym genius, NASA’s MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging, or MESSENGER, spacecraft is returning to Mercury for its second flyby on Monday, October 6, 2008.
The second of three planned flybys, MESSENGER scientists hope to see their spacecraft take some 1200 photos of the planet. However this time they will be visiting a side of the planet never before seen.
“The results from MESSENGER’s first flyby of Mercury resolved debates that are more than 30 years old,” said Sean C. Solomon, the mission’s principal investigator from the Carnegie Institution of Washington, referring to discoveries about the planets magnetic field, volcanic activity and size. “This second encounter will uncover even more information about the planet.”
This second visit will also provide MESSENGER with a critical orbital assist that will, in 2011, see the spacecraft be the first object to actually orbit Mercury.
During its first flyby of our solar systems innermost planet, MESSENGER captured photography of nearly 20% of Mercury’s surface, never before seen by space probes. It located ancient volcanoes ringing Mercury’s Caloris Basin; it discovered that an active dynamo resides within Mercury’s core; and found a surprisingly rich plasma nebula trapped in Mercury’s magnetic field.
“This second flyby will show us a completely new area of Mercury’s surface, opposite from the side of the planet we saw during the first,” said Louise M. Prockter, instrument scientist for the spacecraft’s Mercury Dual Imaging System at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md.
In addition to the photos that MESSENGER is to be taking, a laser altimeter on the spacecraft will measure the planet’s topography. This will allow NASA scientists the first opportunity to correlate their high-resolution images with their new high-resolution topography measurements.
MESSENENGER also hopes to be able to measure the chemical and mineralogical composition of Mercury’s surface.
Could the LHC Trigger a Bose Supernova?
You would be excused for getting the wrong impression from the above heading. We know that the Large Hadron Collider probably won’t suck us into an impromptu black hole, but new thoughts have suggested that the LHC could trigger a Bose supernova.
However, these supernovas have nothing to do with speakers that may be inhabiting your lounge room or car – though the idea for a fictional story is tantalizing – but rather with Bose Einstein Condensates.
Bose Einstein Condensate’s are matter that has become so cold, that their constituents occupy the lowest possible quantum state. Physicists have been experimenting with Bose Einstein Condensate, or BEC’s, since the early 1990’s, and have subsequently become quite adept at manipulating them in controlled conditions.
However in 2001, Elizabeth Donley and colleagues at JILA at the University of Colorado, Boulder, managed to cause a BEC to explode. These explosions, since labeled Bose supernovas, are a mystery to scientists, as they are entirely unsure how they occur.
This might not seem to be a problem for the LHC, which is all about smashing particles into each other, but for one little fact: superfluid helium is a BEC, and the LHC is currently housing some 700,000 liters of the stuff to bring the LHC down to requisite temperature. Add to that some of the most powerful magnets on the planet, and there is a small but marginally justifiable reason for worry.
Malcolm Fairbairn and Bob McElrath at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, have published a paper entitled “There is no explosion risk associated with superfluid Helium in the LHC cooling system.” In it they conclude that “there is no physics whatsoever which suggests that Helium could undergo any kind of unforeseen catastrophic explosion.”
However KFC at the physics arXiv blog notes, “That’s comforting and impressive. Ruling out foreseen catastrophies is certainly useful but the ability to rule out unforeseen ones is truly amazing.”
One can only really wait and hope that the LHC hasn’t accidentally stepped over that fine line between reasonable science and science that will blow us to kingdom come. So while it looks as if we can add superfluid Helium and BEC’s alongside black holes and strangelets, is there something that we haven’t come across?
Wall Street Collapse a Boon for Computer Science
You would have to be living underneath a rock if you hadn’t heard what is happening to the economy. Wall Street keeps managing to crash and burn. But not everyone is upset by this news.
Over the past few years since the 2001 dot-com bubble burst, university students have preferred careers in banking and finance to computer science related careers. “Many thought they could make more money in hedge funds, said William Dally, chairman of the computer science department at Stanford University.
Now, however, students are looking back at computer sciences as a way to earn a wage. John Gallaugher, associate professor of information systems in the Carroll School of Management at Boston College, has already noticed a shift back to computer sciences amongst his students. “Students have commented to me and written on their course wikis that they’re considering changing from finance, both based on the appeal of IS and concern over availability of finance jobs” in the future, Gallaugher said.
There is no real surprise that, after the dot-com burst of 2001, students decided to shift their priorities away from an industry that was, for all intents and purposes, dying. However now that a similar event has taken place in the middle of the finance sector, those students are heading back to an industry that has leveled off and gained a measure of stability.
This shift in perspective is especially important considering the lack of computer science students there has been over the past few years. Add to that the retirement of the baby-boomer generation and you have a growing need for computer professionals across the board.
Atop the US Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics “30 fastest-growing occupations, 2006-2016” is “Network systems and data communications analysts,” with the most significant source of postsecondary education or training being a Bachelor’s degree.
Randal Bryant, dean of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, saw his school’s student applications drop from a high of 3,200 to a low of 1,700 in 2001. However he added that that trend has been turning itself around over the past few years, with a total of 2,300 applications arriving last year.
“I like to tell students that if you make your career choice that quickly based on what is hottest this month, you’re going to be graduating in four years and that field may not be hot anymore,” Bryant said. “I tell them to major in something they like and not what’s a likely short-term fluctuation in the job market.”
