To that end, the United States has signed numerous intelligence sharing and data exchange agreements with partner nations worldwide. But collaboration has not usually applied to the acquisition of satellites or other space systems.
The Space Force is now working to advance collaboration with allies in development and acquisition programs, said Deanna Ryals, director of the Space Systems Command’s International Affairs Office in Los Angeles.
The U.S. has conducted a handful of cooperative space projects with allies in recent years, but Ryals argues that collaboration should be expanded further given the investments and innovations being made by other countries in space technologies.
“As our allies develop their own national space capabilities, we have an opportunity to partner more closely than ever before,” Ryals said October 11 during a webinar hosted by Payload. “We’ve been discussing ways to jointly architect systems and build capabilities together to avoid duplication and ensure interoperability.”
Steve “Bucky” Butow, director of the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit’s space portfolio, said allied partnerships should be an imperative for DoD because of the diversity of commercial space technologies globally. He pointed out that commercial companies are motivated to innovate and serve the global market.
“Partnerships with the commercial sector provide a natural nexus for international collaboration since commercial technologies are often not classified,” Butow added. While some export controls may apply, working together through commercial partnerships would be easier than iin traditional military programs.
Butow suggested expanded teamwork is essential to building a strong coalition that can outcompete China. “The challenges we face this century will likely require closer cooperation with allies than ever before,” he said.
Seeking to expand alliance
So far in 2023, Ryals’ office has hosted visitors from 14 countries, most recently a team of space acquisition experts from the Republic of Korea’s Korean Defense Acquisition Program Administration, and a German delegation of space operations planning officials.
The Space Force is trying to work with “as many international partners as we possibly can,” not just with the members of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance — Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom — that are the closest U.S. allies.
“There’s a lot of work underway to figure out how we can lower the level of classification and open this up not only to the Five Eyes,” she said.
Ryals said the Space Force for the first time will pursue discussions with allies on how to shore up space-industry supply chains in different parts of the world. “Can we help shape the resilience of the supply chain and make sure that we have a pathway to ensure capabilities are available to us?” she asked.
“Every one of the countries that we work with on a regular basis are in the process right now of developing national space capabilities,” she said. “So how do we proactively work together on our acquisition plans to take supply chain resiliency into consideration as put millions of dollars against our national capabilities?”
Butow said bolstering supply chains is important as the space industry today is highly dependent on China for things like solar panels, batteries and microelectronics. “Part of why we need to diversify our collective supply chains is so we don’t have dependencies on folks who we may be competing against for the next few decades.”
Collaboration in space projects has not been easy
Despite a growing willingness to entertain joint projects with allies, there are significant barriers due to the complexities of programs and policy hurdles, said a recent report by the RAND Corp. commissioned by the Department of the Air Force.
RAND analysts reached that conclusion after reviewing three space programs where the U.S. collaborated and shared resources with foreign partners: the multinational Wideband Global Satcom (WGS) communications satellites; the Arctic Satellite Broadband Mission in partnership with Space Norway; and an agreement to host a U.S. payload on Japan’s Quasi-Zenith Satellite System (QZSS) navigation satellites.
In all three programs, said RAND, cooperative efforts ran into obstacles due to the “large size and complexity of the programs … and insufficient human resources in the U.S. Department of the Air Force to enable the level of space security cooperation envisioned by the strategy.”
WASHINGTON — The startup GuardianSat announced Oct. 12 it won a grant from the National Science Foundation’s America’s Seed Fund to advance the company’s technology designed to protect satellites from collisions with debris objects in space.
GuardianSat, based in Delaware, won a Small Business Technology Transfer Phase 1 research contract worth about $273,000. In addition the company will get technical support from the Aerospace Corp. America’s Seed Fund invests up to $200 million a year in promising startups.
The company developed a debris-avoidance system for satellites, based on technology patented by one of its founders, Robert Briskman, who is a co-founder of Sirius XM satellite radio.
“Our patented solution is for high Earth-orbiting satellites,” said Huey Wyche, GuardianSat’s research lead. “It will include a subsystem to detect orbital debris, track potential collision threats, and autonomously adjust the satellite’s course to prevent accidents.”
Sensors for object detection
The debris-detection technology — called the Autonomous Satellite Orbital Debris Avoidance System — includes satellite control systems, sensor and tracking systems, and interfaces that cooperate with thruster and communication subsystems on a satellite, Wyche said. It is also designed to aid a satellite’s return to its original position after it maneuvers to avoid debris, and to share object data with other satellites to improve space domain awareness.
The NSF grant “will enable us to advance the development of our space domain awareness and avoidance systems,” said GuardianSat’s CEO Christopher Rohe. “We are excited to take the next steps in and continue advancing new and transformative solutions to keep space open.”
Rohe and Briskman founded GuardianSat in 2020.
Wyche said GuardianSat is taking a “multi-spectral approach to sensing orbital objects.” Multi-spectral sensors can differentiate between various types of objects based on their spectral signatures. “This capability is valuable for distinguishing between active satellites, defunct spacecraft, and space debris,” he explained.
The debris-avoidance system, Wyche added, is a companion technology to GuardianSat’s “anti-satellite countermeasure system” that is also in development. It uses microwave and lidar (light detection and ranging) to detect and track approaching objects.
TAMPA, Fla. — Viasat has ruled out ordering a ViaSat-3 Americas replacement as it expects to recover a fraction of the satellite’s 1 terabit per second (Tbps) capacity, the operator said Oct. 12 around three months after disclosing its antenna issue.
While the company only expects to recover less than 10% of the satellite’s planned throughput, it said this is enough to meet current and future broadband customer needs alongside other flexible assets in its 19-satellite fleet, additional spacecraft already underway, and third-party capacity deals.
ViaSat-3 Americas has $420 million in total insurance coverage. It is unclear how much the operator could receive after finalizing its claim before the end of the year.
The other big claim for 2023 is set to come from Inmarsat-6 (I-6) F2, which suffered an anomaly after launching to geostationary orbit (GEO) in February.
I-6 F2 became part of U.S.-based Viasat’s fleet in May following its $6.2 billion acquisition of British operator Inmarsat.
Viasat confirmed it has $348 million of insurance in place for I-6 F2 and will finalize its claim before the end of the year, but did not provide other details in the Oct. 12 news release.
“We are still working through root cause analysis for I-6 F2 to assess whether the satellite will be able to perform its intended mission,” Viasat spokesperson Jessica Packard said.
“Overall long-term planning and mitigation efforts continue to evolve in parallel with our anomaly investigation, and we will share more information as plans firm up moving forward.”
The operator also did not shed any more light on the mechanical issue that affected the deployment of a critical antenna on ViaSat-3 Americas at some point following its April 30 launch to GEO.
Viasat said it remains in commercial discussions regarding insurance coverage and could not comment further.
ViaSat-3 Americas is the first of three 1 Tbps satellites under contract with Boeing for global coverage from GEO.
The second ViaSat-3 satellite was slated to launch this fall on an Atlas 5 rocket from United Launch Alliance to cover Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA). The third was due to launch half a year later to target Asia Pacific (APAC) was due to launch half a year later.
The operator expects to have more information about corrective actions for ViaSat-3 EMEA, and an update to the launch schedule, when the publicly listed company next reports earnings results in November.
Viasat also said its integration of Inmarsat is proceeding ahead of plan. Even excluding the positive impact of satellite insurance proceeds, it now expects to reach sustainable positive free cash flow during the first half 2025 rather than the second half.
WASHINGTON — Scientists said they are thrilled with an initial assessment of asteroid samples returned by a NASA spacecraft last month even though they still don’t know how much material that mission brought back to Earth.
NASA unveiled samples of the asteroid Bennu returned by its Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification and Security – Regolith Explorer, or OSIRIS-REx, spacecraft during an Oct. 11 event at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. The center is home to an astromaterials curation facility that the agency delivered the OSIRIS-REx sample canister to a day after it landed in the Utah desert Sept. 24.
An initial analysis of material showed evidence of water, in the form of hydrated minerals, and a high abundance of carbon. Scientists said the material studied so consisted of 4.7% carbon by weight, among the highest levels of any meteorites studied.
Scientists had hoped that the OSIRIS-REx samples would help them understand the formation of the solar system and the building blocks of life on Earth, and that quick-look analysis appeared to confirm that.
“We picked the right asteroid and, not only that, we brought back the right sample,” said Daniel Glavin, a co-investigator on the mission at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, at the event. “This stuff is an astrobiologist’s dream.”
That analysis was based on a small amount of material, with an estimated mass of less than 1.5 grams, seen when the sample canister was opened. The bulk of the sample is inside the head of the Touch And Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism (TAGSAM), the device that plunged into the surface of Bennu during the October 2020 sampling run, capturing material from the asteroid.
The presence of that “extra bonus sample,” in the words of Nicole Lunning, OSIRIS-REx curation lead, was not unexpected. Immediately after the sampling run, material was seen leaking from the TAGSAM, which scientists believed was because the device was full of material, including particles large enough they could keep the TAGSAM head from sealing shut as designed. Spacecraft controllers then expedited the installation of the TAGSAM head in the sample canister to limit the loss of material.
The amount of that extra material, though, is slowing down efforts to open the sampling head. “We found a lot more sample than we were anticipating before even getting into the TAGSAM,” said Francis McCubbin, OSIRIS-REx astromaterials curator. “Because we need to very meticulously and carefully collect every grain, it’s taking us a little longer to get inside.”
Because of that methodical process, scientists have yet to measure exactly how much material the spacecraft returned from Bennu. Before the sample return capsule landed last month, scientists said they estimated there was 250 grams of asteroid material inside, with a margin of error of 101 grams. That is well above the mission’s goal of returning 60 grams.
Dante Lauretta, principal investigator for OSIRIS-REx at the University of Arizona, said in a call with reporters he expected to know the mass of the sample inside the TAGSAM head in about two weeks. “We’re already thrilled with the results” of the initial sample analysis, he said.
The overall process of curating the samples returned by OSIRIS-REx will take two years. That will include transferring some samples to partners on the mission, the Canadian Space Agency and Japan’s space agency JAXA, as well as samples that will go on public display in three museums. The bulk of the sample will be preserved at JSC to be studied by scientists for decades to come. “This is the legacy of OSIRIS-REx and of sample return broadly,” said McCubbin.
“There’s so much more to learn,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said at the event. “This sample return is proof again that NASA does big things, things that inspire us and unites us.”
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A new study links glyphosate, the active compound in the weed killer Roundup, to devastating cases of kidney failure in rural Sri Lanka.
For the past couple of decades, tens of thousands of people living in rural Sri Lanka have been devastated by kidney failure due to unclear causes, also known as CKDu. Similar incidences of mysterious kidney diseases have emerged in tropical farming communities around the world.
Researchers from Duke University conducted a massive field study of the wells supplying drinking water to the Sri Lankan communities and identified glyphosate as a potential culprit. Glyphosate is the most widely used herbicide in the world.
Roundup is a glyphosate-based herbicide used to control weeds and other pests. Because it is supposed to break down in the environment within a few days to weeks, its use is relatively under-regulated by most public health agencies. But when glyphosate encounters certain trace metal ions that make water hard—like magnesium and calcium—glyphosate-metal ion complexes can form. Those complexes can persist up to seven years in water and 22 years in soil.
“It was always thought that this chemical would break down very quickly in the environment, but it seems to stick around a lot longer than we expected when it complexes in hard water,” says Nishad Jayasundara, assistant professor of global environmental health at Duke. “We have to consider how glyphosate is interacting with these other elements, and what happens to glyphosate when you take that into your body as a complex.”
In certain agricultural areas of Sri Lanka, the high, dry climate combined with its geological formations creates the perfect conditions for hard water. It is also in these regions that CKDu has reached epidemic levels, with as many as 10% of children aged 5-11 years exhibiting signs of early onset kidney damage.
Jayasundara, who is from Sri Lanka himself, believed that glyphosate may play a role in CKDu incidence because of the region’s hard water, even though Sri Lanka has banned use of the herbicide.
To test his hypothesis, he teamed up with environmental chemist Lee Ferguson, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Duke and his PhD student Jake Ulrich. In collaboration with Mangala De Silva, a professor at the University of Ruhuna, Sri Lanka, the Duke team sampled more than 200 wells across four regions in Sri Lanka.
Ferguson’s lab at Duke employs high-resolution and tandem mass spectrometry to identify contaminants—even the barest trace of them—by their molecular weights. It’s a highly sensitive method of identification and quantitation that allows a broad view into the pollutants present in a water system.
Through this technique, the researchers found significantly higher levels of the herbicide in 44% of wells within the affected areas versus just 8% of those outside it.
“We really focused on drinking water here, but it’s possible there are other important routes of exposure—direct contact from agricultural workers spraying the pesticide, or perhaps food or dust,” says Ferguson. “I’d like to see increased study with more emphasis looking at the links among these exposure routes. It still seems like there might be things we’re missing.”
To this point, Ulrich also found elevated levels of fluoride and vanadium—both of which are linked to kidney damage—in the drinking water of most all of the communities with high incidence of CKDu.
The researchers agree that more attention must be paid to the potential contributions each of these contaminants is playing, either individually or in concert with others. But given the reasoning for their glyphosate-based hypothesis going into the study and the herbicide’s high levels of use worldwide, they also believe these results should serve as a serious warning when considering risk of exposure to glyphosate.
Part of Ferguson’s concern, he says, is that glyphosate’s fate profile resembles a contaminant that he’s studied closer to home—per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, which are also called “forever chemicals” because of their persistence in the environment.
“We think of PFAS as being a drinking water contaminant because it’s mobile and persistent. Now we’re realizing that glyphosate may also be quite persistent in hard water areas,” says Ferguson. “This gives me concerns about exposures here in the United States.”
The NIEHS (U2CES030851) and the Accelerating Higher Education Expansion and Development (AHEAD) Operation of the Ministry of Higher Education funded by the World Bank, (AHEAD DOR 02/40) funded the work.
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Experiencing days in which the temperature exceeds previous highs for that time of year affects people’s perception of weather trends, a study finds.
Published in Scientific Reports, the study finds that living in an area with record-breaking heat effectively increases perceptions that the weather is getting hotter.
In December 2022, the authors surveyed a nationally representative sample of 1,605 United States adults to determine whether more frequent record-breaking weather events affect weather change perceptions. The participants were asked, “To the best of your knowledge, how did excessive daytime heat across the United States in 2022 compare with previous years?”
“What matters to people is if one of those days gets the big red stamp that says ‘record-breaking.’”
Timothy Hyde, postdoctoral fellow in the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School of Public Policy and Dolores Albarracín, professor at Penn and director of the Science of Science Communication Division linked answers to this question with meteorological data collected by the National Climatic Data Center from 1949, when meteorologists first implemented a reliable record of climatic data, to 2022. Doing so allowed the researchers to determine which days in 2022 constituted a heat record in a particular area before correlating heat recordings with perceptions that temperatures were higher relative to previous years.
The study found that while record-breaking heat days have little or no effect on beliefs in the existence of climate change, they do affect evaluations of how much hotter the weather has become compared to previous years. This effect of record-heat days is such that the difference in answers between a respondent who experienced no record-breaking heat days and another who experienced 16 record-breaking heat days is as large as the average difference in responses between independent and Democratic respondents.
Whether a day has reached a record-breaking temperature in a locale can only be known after the fact. The average person cannot determine whether any particular day is a record heat day by simply walking outside. Instead, individuals must learn that a day broke the existing heat record by checking the news. Nor is the absolute temperature itself the key metric; what is important is whether the temperature surpasses records set in the same place over the last 72 years. “It doesn’t matter whether one day is 100 degrees and the next is 101. What matters to people is if one of those days gets the big red stamp that says ‘record-breaking,’” Albarracín says.
“Just because a record heat day can change a person’s opinions on the weather doesn’t mean it holds the key to changing opinions on climate change.”
The study also found that other indicators of climate change, including average heat levels, non-record-breaking extreme heat days, and severe weather, did not significantly affect the respondents’ views.
The season in which the record heat days occur is also associated with effects. Since the hottest days of the year typically occur in the summer, the scholars hypothesized that heat records during that time of year would have the most significant impact, as those days would have the highest temperatures a person would see in a year. Instead, they found that record-heat days in winter affect people’s perceptions of worsening heat most strongly. “This may be due to the difference in media coverage of temperature during different times of the year,” Hyde says. “That is likely because it sticks out to people when media discusses how warm a day is during what is supposed to be the coldest time of the year.”
While exposure to record-heat events has been found to cause people to believe that the temperature is hotter than in previous years, it had little effect on perceptions of the existence of climate change. These beliefs are less likely to change, the researchers say, because they are associated with political stances. “Since discussing changes in weather patterns is not necessarily political, it is reasonable to assume that people are more willing to update their opinions on weather change than climate change,” Hyde notes.
“Just because a record heat day can change a person’s opinions on the weather doesn’t mean it holds the key to changing opinions on climate change,” adds Albarracín. “Even if it did, we could not expose populations to extreme heat as we see fit to generate change. The most critical element is understanding how record-breaking heat days change opinions and then seeing whether communications about these events can change people’s beliefs.”
Exposure to a record-breaking heat day in a local area significantly affects individuals’ perceptions of increasing temperature, supporting the hypothesis that record-heat days can drive changes in the general perception that the weather is worsening.
“Since an individual can only recognize record-heat days through media reports and only understand the severity of them through media coverage, we know that continued research into how record-heat days change can’t only be about record-heat days. Understanding media reports on them will also be important for learning how to affect climate change perceptions,” Hyde says.
“After a dozen years designing and developing Euclid, it is exhilarating and very moving to see these first images. But you can’t just release them to the public; it takes time to get scientific validation. We expect the first science publication in January.”
Giuseppe Racca, Euclid project manager at ESA
PARIS — Launched atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral on July 1, the European Space Agency’s 2-ton Euclid space observatory is intended to scrutinize the universe in search of answers to the question of how undetectable dark matter and dark energy have been shaping the universe for billions of years.
It took a month for Euclid to arrive at the Earth-sun L-2 Lagrange point, a gravitationally stable spot 1.5 million kilometers from the Earth in the direction opposite the sun. Once there, the Thales Alenia Space-built spacecraft was expected to undergo a two-month commissioning phase before beginning science operations.
However, problems were detected during instrument-performance verification that, if unresolved, could prevent the telescope from providing the highest-resolution images of the deep universe in all conditions.
The hiccups were serious enough for ESA to suspend the commissioning process while engineers sought remedies to the issues confronting the mission.
Over the last few weeks, solutions have been put in place, and the situation has significantly improved, permitting Euclid to capture hundreds of mesmerizing initial test images of galaxies.
ESA’s Euclid project manager Giuseppe Racca spoke with SpaceNews reporter Frederic Castel about the initial problems that have affected the flagship astrophysics mission and how he expects it to perform over the next six years.
ESA’s Euclid project manager Giuseppe Racca stands in front of the Euclid space telescope. Credit: ESA
How serious were the problems that impacted the $1.5 billion Euclid telescope during the first few months of the mission?
Once Euclid was in orbit, we discovered that a very small amount of light was being reflected again and again — like a ricochet — on the spacecraft’s surfaces. This was producing stray light that was impacting the visible light detector and disturbing Euclid’s capability to observe very faint galaxies. This was a truly big issue that could end up compromising the mission.! To resolve it, we turned the spacecraft two and a half degrees around the axis of the telescope. That was enough to get rid of this stray light.
In August, another issue arose that prevented you from proceeding with the verification process, and ESA decided to backtrack and return to the previous phase. Why such a decision?
Early in the mission, as I said, we had some serious concerns over stray light that was interfering with Euclid’s observing instruments. To take multiple pictures or perform spectral and photometric measurements near the infrared, Euclid’s fine guiding sensor needs to be capable of maintaining the telescope in a very precise direction for 75 minutes using guide stars. But in some positions in the sky, high energy cosmic rays and solar protons were striking the sensor intermittently, creating signals that could be mistakenly interpreted as real stars. We had anticipated such interference in our ground simulations, but in the real space environment, the effect was stronger than anticipated.
We discovered the problem in early August, and on Aug. 18, we interrupted some test measurements where we had stray light, doing in the meantime other observations. It took about two months for industry to develop and test a new software to get around this issue.
Are these problems now resolved, and do you expect science observations to start soon? Would you compare your work with the break-in phase of a new vehicle?
This software patch has been working well for the last two weeks, but we want to be sure it will continue functioning correctly for the six years of the mission. Every morning, I carefully check the downlink data coming from the ESA deep space antenna in Malargüe, Chile, and so far, so good. Yes, you can compare what has happened during the initial phase of the mission to the initial running-in period of your car. Once the break-in phase is over, you can run the engine at any speed and begin testing other capabilities such as accelerations, turns and so on. That’s what we’re doing now.
The 1.2-meter diameter main mirror of ESA’s Euclid mission to unveil the dark Universe, seen during assembly, integration and testing. Credit: Airbus
We hear that some scientists have already been able to access Euclid images and have found them outstanding. How do you rate the mission’s performance so far, and when will you share these images with the public?
Things are looking extremely good in terms of image quality and wide field views. Quality is comparable with that of the NASA Hubble mission, but Euclid is able to cover in a single week what Hubble could do in five years. We have already collected over 1,000 pictures with an amazing level of quality.
However, obtaining nice pictures and conducting a good science observation campaign are two different things. After a dozen years designing and developing Euclid, it is exhilarating and very moving to see these first images. But you can’t just release them to the public; it takes time to get scientific validation. We expect the first science publication in January. Over the six-year mission, Euclid will observe billions of galaxies and create the largest 3D map of the sky ever made. Some 2,000 scientists around the world are already involved in communicating over Euclid’s initial images and data.
Will understanding the nature of dark matter and dark energy be the holy grail of the Euclid mission? Do you think results could bring the mission a Nobel Prize?
It’s true that calling both phenomena “dark” means that we don’t know their specific nature. We just assume that dark matter ensures the cohesion of galaxies and galactic clusters while dark energy is responsible for the accelerated expansion of the universe. Together, they represent 95% of the invisible content of the universe.
Euclid seeks to address very fundamental questions concerning the structure of the universe and how it has evolved over the past 10 billion years, when most stars and galaxies were formed. The mission could indeed lead to a Nobel Prize, especially if the data shows that our understanding of gravity needs to be changed in some fundamental way. And even if it doesn’t, simply confirming the theories with six years of measurements would prove quite significant.
What is NASA’s role in Euclid, and will NASA’s future Roman Space Telescope take over much of the same research?
NASA contributed to Euclid by providing the infrared spectrometer flight detectors and their readout electronics, and now Caltech will soon have an important role in processing data as part of the nine Euclid Science Data Centers
In May 2027, NASA’s Roman Space Telescope will join Euclid in exploring this cosmic puzzle with even more powerful instruments. Euclid and Roman have complementary strategies. Euclid’s earlier look over broad regions of the sky will allow it to serve as a scouting mission, allowing Roman to concentrate over a smaller area, probing the universe to a greater depth and precision.
In this 2023 ESA video, an animation of Euclid space telescope is shown scanning the night sky using a ‘step-and-stare’ method that combines separate measurements to form what ESA says will be “the largest cosmological survey ever conducted in the visible and near-infrared.”
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New research finds a stark association between Canadian wildfire smoke and increases in the number of people being seen for asthma-related symptoms in New York City emergency departments.
The findings confirm that harmful smoke from wildfires is capable of traveling great distances and can impact the health of people hundreds of miles away.
With smoke from Canadian wildfires once again descending on the Northeastern United States, residents of New England and New York are being urged to take precautions to protect their health.
While the wildfire smoke is not expected to be as bad as the thick orange haze that permeated the skies over New York City and the New England states last June, a heightened risk for health problems remains—especially among those with certain respiratory conditions.
The new study, which appears in the Journal of the American Medical Association, is unique because previous studies on the health impacts of wildfire smoke have focused on areas near the wildfires, but not the broader global regions affected by drifting smoke.
Looking at data from June 2023, the researchers found there was a significant spike in ambient fine particulate matter (PM2.5) in the air over New York City during a smoke wave that dropped down from Canada over a three-day period from June 6 to June 8.
On the same days that the spike in PM2.5 pollution occurred over New York, emergency department visits for asthma-related symptoms jumped to 261 per day across the city, compared with an average of about 182 visits per day during reference periods identified by the researchers before and after the smoke wave. Both the fine particulate matter and the emergency room visits peaked on June 7.
PM2.5 pollution has been shown to affect respiratory health, cardiovascular health, birth outcomes, and mental health, says lead author Kai Chen, an assistant professor of epidemiology (environmental health sciences) at the Yale University School of Public Health.
The findings should be taken as a word of caution for people living in regions immediately affected by wildfires as well as those downwind from the fires, the scientists say.
“People should take precautions for wildfire-induced air quality alerts seriously,” Chen says. “This means altering your daily routines as you would do for other extreme events like hurricanes.”
In the study, Chen and his team defined a wildfire smoke wave as a period of at least two consecutive days where the daily mean level of PM2.5 particulate matter exceeded the maximum level—56.8 micrograms per cubic meter (µg/m3)—during a baseline period between January 2021 and May 2023. The daily mean level of PM2.5 pollution from June 6 to June 8 was 100.9 µg/m3, compared with only 9 µg/m3 during the reference period.
The researchers also looked at how the wildfire smoke impacted subgroups in New York City, separating and analyzing data by borough (Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island) and by age (0-4, 5-17, 18-64, and 65 and over).
They found that all boroughs of New York City were affected by the June smoke wave. All age groups were also affected by the wildfire smoke, but data revealed that people between the ages of 18 and 64 were most likely to visit the emergency department for asthma-related conditions during that time.
Study limitations include data being limited to New York City, the examination of only one acute outcome, and a lack of accounting for changes in population activity patterns or movement.
Amidst the more frequent and larger wildfires in recent years due to a warming climate, the researchers emphasize the need for timely communication about limiting wildfire smoke exposure to protect vulnerable populations.
Additional coauthors are from Yale and Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health.
Ukraine’s successful military use of Starlink in its defense against Russia has become a poster child for the increased military reliance on commercial space systems among nations. Yet, military use of commercial space services could create as many problems as it solves. Recent media coverage of Ukraine’s reliance on Starlink since Russia invaded has raised a disturbing question: Might private space barons and state-controlled commercial space firms — e.g., Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, OneWeb and Guo Wang/StarNet — switch off critical systems, jeopardizing the security of major and lesser states?
This question is but one of many. Could an attack against a commercial space system constitute an act of war? Could it escalate to all-out nuclear war? What of space being a truly separate warfighting domain? Some argue that space isn’t a separate warfighting domain but merely an arena for conducting support operations for ground, air, and sea warfare. Supporters of this view insist that whatever military actions are taken in space stay in space. Are they right? Or is space a domain in which on-orbit hostile engagement can further catalyze ground, sea, or air engagements, as well as spark further in-space hostilities?
Should governments assume responsibility for defending commercial space systems? When, why, and how should they do so? Should governments remunerate commercial space system companies if an adversary damages their system? Or should wartime damage of space-based systems simply be considered a part of doing business, handled as other risks are — with light national regulations and private insurance? How, if at all, should governments facilitate such regulation? Is there a clear line between peacetime and war operations in space? What if a non-state actor uses commercial space systems to conduct attacks? Who, if anyone, should be held accountable?
If the answers to these questions are less than crystal clear, should Washington lay down minimum hardening or reconstitution requirements for all commercial satellite systems for companies contracting with the U.S. government? What role, if any, should international governance play in reducing the risks of military conflict and escalation? Also, what, if anything, should the U.S. and allied governments do to protect satellites (both commercial and military) or to enforce any rules that states might want? Are additional passive and active defenses needed? What about space bodyguard systems that could gently push potentially hostile robot spacecraft a safe distance away from critical satellites?
So far, the United States and other spacefaring nations have either mostly deferred or taken a hands-off approach to dealing with these questions. Instead, Washington has treated commercial space as it has the internet — as a special area where protecting First Amendment rights and free-trade entrepreneurialism trumps instituting new forms of regulation. With space, states are roughly where they were with sea power in the 1600s and air power before World War I. In these periods, dramatic acts of air war and naval piracy were about to ensue, but instituting national or international regulation hardly seemed urgent…until they were.
All of this raises a fundamental question: Just how sustainable is it for us to continue our current relaxed approach to the military exploitation of commercial space?
Game play
To find out, the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center (NPEC) designed and conducted a wargame this summer tailored to purpose.
The game’s play begins in 2027. India contracts with U.S. commercial satellite imagery firm Maxar to buy a controlling 51 percent interest in a three-satellite, sun-synchronous system. Washington backs the sale and not only buys New Delhi mobile ground stations, but blesses India’s controlling a 51 percent share, and places U.S. military payloads on the satellites to demonstrate the significance of this U.S.-Indian space collaboration.
Meanwhile, China develops a similar system and sells its imagery and communications links to a Pakistani government-blessed private entity. The entity is run by a retired Pakistani general who has close ties to Pakistani terrorist groups. Without asking for explicit Pakistani permission, the general gives one such group access to the Chinese satellite system’s “peaceful” commercial imagery and communications links.
The terrorist group wants Islamabad to take a stronger stand against India’s “occupation” of Kashmir. Towards this end (i.e., to force the hand of Pakistan and draw it into a major war), the terrorist group mates long-range drones with the Chinese satellite system’s imagery and secure communications links to strike India’s strategic nuclear air base at Ambala twice. The terrorists’ drones destroy several Indian nuclear-capable fighters and strategic nuclear forces command planes and kill dozens of Indian airmen.
U.S. intelligence and other open sources confirm that China’s satellite system supported the strike. A flurry of diplomatic and international commercial legal initiatives ensues. None, however, are ultimately acted upon. Under mounting domestic pressure to act, India uses a newly constructed ground-based space-tracking laser to dazzle the Chinese-Pakistani satellite system the terrorists used. This dazzling unintentionally damages the Chinese satellite’s optics.
China, in the game’s second move, retaliates by using its own ground-based laser systems to damage the optics of one of the U.S.-India Maxar satellites. Shortly after, a Chinese rendezvous satellite closes in on a second U.S.-India Maxar satellite as it comes within range of China’s laser system. This second satellite, including its American payload, goes dead. It is unclear what caused the satellite to stop functioning.
Meanwhile, India informs Washington that another Chinese rendezvous satellite is closing in on the third and last U.S.-India Maxar satellite. Shortly thereafter, this Maxar satellite also goes dead. As with the previous Chinese attack, the United States has no bodyguard satellites to deflect a possible Chinese rendezvous satellite assault. At this point, U.S. intelligence briefs the President, who authorizes a covert U.S. cyberattack against the offending Chinese rendezvous satellite, which disables it. China immediately blames Washington for killing its satellite.
Meanwhile, India launches a cruise missile attack against suspected terrorist sites in Pakistan. As the Pakistani government ponders what retaliatory military action it will take on the ground against India, the U.S. Space Command readies itself for a Chinese space counterattack.
Read the full after-action report, Commercial Satellite Use Catalyzes Nuclear-Armed States to Combat, at tinyurl.com/yc7nxzm3
Findings
The NPEC wargame’s final hot-wash discussion session supported four key findings:
1. Space combat can catalyze combat both on Earth and in space. Many experts like to believe that whatever happens in space stays in space. This game strongly suggested otherwise. India and Pakistan’s exploitation of commercial space satellite systems not only encouraged the United States and China to attack each other’s commercial satellites but intensified land warfare between India and Pakistan. What makes this finding worrisome is the continued lack of clarity as to what an act of war might be regarding commercial satellite systems that get “damaged” or are exploited for military purposes. Nor does it help that such military space operations can be conducted quickly and send complex, ambiguous signals to military and civilian space operators. In the game, no fewer than four nuclear-armed states struggled to determine who was doing what, and even what was happening, as India’s nuclear strategic forces were seriously degraded and a U.S. military space payload was destroyed. All of this could be quite escalatory. At a minimum, it recommends engaging all spacefaring nations in further talks to clarify what acts of war in space might be and determine how their detection might best be enhanced and verified. The latter would likely entail some combination of private national and public international efforts. Ideally, one might create a dedicated international body to verify illicit space activities that could credibly assign attribution. This international body’s surveillance requirements, in turn, could be used to help justify additional national funding of private space support contracts to increase the quality and availability of space situational awareness information. It is unclear what, if any, thinking is being done within the U.S. government or elsewhere to determine the optimal mix of private and international space surveillance and verification efforts. Beyond this, the United States and its spacefaring partners need to consider what, if any, new kinds of space capabilities, such as bodyguard satellites and active satellite defenses, might be needed to enforce desirable offensive space operations red lines.
2. As commercial satellite systems spread, rogue states and terrorists will try to exploit them, increasing the likelihood that major, nuclear-armed states could be dragged into wars. In the game, a terrorist group based in Pakistan uses commercial satellite systems to target strategic Indian nuclear assets with the aim of forcing the Pakistani government to side with them and wage a major war over Kashmir. What made this gambit relatively easy was the largely unregulated provision of “private” commercial satellite services and links to a wide variety of states, firms, and nonstate entities. At a minimum, this suggests the United States and other like-minded governments should encourage private firms operating under national jurisdiction to assume greater responsibility for their possible misuse. Specifically, spacefaring nations should explore creating commercial rules analogous to “knowyour-customer” rules used in the banking industry. Governments should apply these new rules to private space service providers, holding them responsible for the harm their customers inflict using their services in wars or through acts of terrorism. The challenge here will be to prevent smaller nations from offering licenses under little or no such regulation. In these cases, insurance premiums from reputable insurers should be set much higher than for properly regulated licensing or not be made available at all. Again, it is unclear to what extent governments and private firms are yet thinking through these matters.
3. With the increased use of commercial satellite systems, America’s credibility in mediating conflicts between nuclear-armed combatants will be questioned in new, demanding ways. Historically, Washington has acted as an honest broker in numerous Pakistani-India military crises. In this space scenario, the United States, however, deferred to India so much that Islamabad and Washington mistakenly concluded there was little point in engaging with one another and that India was free to take considerable action on its own. This resulted in Pakistan reluctantly conceding to heavy-handed Chinese bullying for Beijing’s pre-clearance of any Pakistani diplomatic crisis messaging. If Washington had done more to engage not just India, but Pakistan, on security issues prior to the conflict, this might have been avoided. Once conflict began, though, both India and Pakistan sought Washington’s information on what was occurring in space and on the ground. Unfortunately, neither Pakistan nor India knew how much Washington knew, and Washington’s lack of transparency created distrust. Because space warfare and its diplomatic management demand more space situational awareness than will ever be available, building trust is vital. One way to increase confidence and transparency is to encourage the private sector to provide more access to the space situational awareness information they might have (something the American team facilitated in the game). Governments, including the United States, might facilitate this by paying private firms to share what they know with international or multilateral space organizations that, in turn, would make it generally available both in peacetime and during crises. Another way to increase trust, that the game players discussed, would be to create new multilateral space security working groups starting with states in war zones (including those that have nuclear weapons on their soil) that Washington has working relations with (e.g., three-way talks among the United States, Pakistan, and India; with Turkey and Greece; among Middle Eastern states and Israel, etc.).
4. Leaving space activities as unmanaged as the internet is a prescription for military mischief. One of the major game discoveries is that satellite systems’ increasing duality makes it difficult to attribute the cause of destructive and disruptive space incidents or to determine appropriate responses. In the game, the United States puts a major U.S. military payload on a commercial spacecraft that India controls. China attacks it; the United States conducts a space counterattack, escalating the conflict. This play raised several questions. What military missions should only be conducted on government-owned dedicated military spacecraft? If the United States needs or wants to place military payloads on foreign-owned spacecraft, should it only do so if the United States has a military security agreement with the state from which the spacecraft is launched? Should governments or international organizations require a minimum amount of survivability features for all commercial satellites (especially those that are dual-use)? Should states condition any government protection or indemnification of private space assets against foreign military assaults? What should these conditions be — hardening, adequate insurance, being able to quickly reconstitute the targeted space system, supporting the deployment of bodyguard satellite systems to deflect possible hostile rendezvous satellite assaults, etc.? All of these questions were raised before or during the game; none were answered.
Henry Sokolski is executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center. Before founding NPEC, he was the Pentagon’s Deputy for Nonproliferation Policy from 1989 to 1993.
This article originally appeared in the October 2023 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
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A new material can reconnected severed nerves, a study in rodents shows.
Researchers have long recognized the therapeutic potential of using magnetoelectrics—materials that can turn magnetic fields into electric fields—to stimulate neural tissue in a minimally invasive way and help treat neurological disorders or nerve damage. The problem, however, is that neurons have a hard time responding to the shape and frequency of the electric signal resulting from this conversion.
Rice University neuroengineer Jacob Robinson and his team designed the first magnetoelectric material that not only solves this issue but also performs the magnetic-to-electric conversion 120 times faster than similar materials. According to the study in Nature Materials, the researchers showed that the material can be used to precisely stimulate neurons remotely and to bridge the gap in a broken sciatic nerve in a rat model.
The material’s qualities and performance could have a profound impact on neurostimulation treatments, making for significantly less invasive procedures, Robinson says. Instead of implanting a neurostimulation device, tiny amounts of the material could simply be injected at the desired site. Moreover, given magnetoelectrics’ range of application in computing, sensing, electronics, and other fields, the research provides a framework for advanced materials design that could drive innovation more broadly.
“We asked, ‘Can we create a material that can be like dust or is so small that by placing just a sprinkle of it inside the body you’d be able to stimulate the brain or nervous system?’” says Joshua Chen, a Rice doctoral alumnus and a lead author of the study. “With that question in mind, we thought that magnetoelectric materials were ideal candidates for use in neurostimulation. They respond to magnetic fields, which easily penetrate into the body, and convert them into electric fields—a language our nervous system already uses to relay information.”
The researchers started with a magnetoelectric material made up of a piezoelectric layer of lead zirconium titanate sandwiched between two magnetorestrictive layers of metallic glass alloys, or Metglas, which can be rapidly magnetized and demagnetized.
Gauri Bhave, a former researcher in the Robinson lab who now works in technology transfer for Baylor College of Medicine, explains that the magnetorestrictive element vibrates with the application of a magnetic field.
“This vibration means it basically changes its shape,” Bhave says. “The piezoelectric material is something that, when it changes its shape, creates electricity. So when those two are combined, the conversion that you’re getting is that the magnetic field you’re applying from the outside of the body turns into an electric field.”
However, the electric signals magnetoelectrics generate are too fast and uniform for neurons to detect. The challenge was to engineer a new material that could generate an electric signal that would actually get cells to respond.
“For all other magnetoelectric materials, the relationship between the electric field and the magnetic field is linear, and what we needed was a material where that relationship was nonlinear,” Robinson says. “We had to think about the kinds of materials we could deposit on this film that would create that nonlinear response.”
The researchers layered platinum, hafnium oxide, and zinc oxide and added the stacked materials on top of the original magnetoelectric film. One of the challenges they faced was finding fabrication techniques compatible with the materials.
“A lot of work went into making this very thin layer of less than 200 nanometers that gives us the really special properties,” Robinson says.
“This reduced the size of the entire device so that in the future it could be injectable,” Bhave adds.
As proof of concept, the researchers used the material to stimulate peripheral nerves in rats and demonstrated the material’s potential for use in neuroprosthetics by showing it could restore function in a severed nerve.
“We can use this metamaterial to bridge the gap in a broken nerve and restore fast electric signal speeds,” Chen says. “Overall, we were able to rationally design a new metamaterial that overcomes many challenges in neurotechnology. And more importantly, this framework for advanced material design can be applied toward other applications like sensing and memory in electronics.”
Robinson, who drew on his doctoral work in photonics for inspiration in engineering the new material, says he finds it “really exciting that we can now design devices or systems using materials that have never existed before rather than being confined to ones in nature.”
“Once you discover a new material or class of materials, I think it’s really hard to anticipate all the potential uses for them,” says Robinson, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and bioengineering. “We’ve focused on bioelectronics, but I expect there may be many applications beyond this field.”
The research had support from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.
