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New research gauges how people in structural disadvantaged communities feel about police responding to mental health crises.
Police officers often respond to incidents that do not involve crime or immediate threats to public safety but instead deal with community members facing unmet mental health needs. In response to this, many cities are experimenting with co-deploying police officers alongside health professionals or deploying teams entirely composed of civilian health professionals.
Recently, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing (Penn Nursing) explored the perspectives and preferences about these programs among residents in structurally disadvantaged areas where mental health distress is more common, mental health services are less accessible, and involvement with police is more frequent and fraught. The findings, published in the Journal of Community Safety & Well-Being, provide insights to guide efforts toward a healthier response to mental health crises.
The study reveals that while many respondents suggested that police presence is necessary during the response to mental health crises because of the risk of violence, they were simultaneously uncomfortable with police officer involvement. The discomfort with police involvement was especially pronounced among younger and Black residents. However, support for co-deployment was high across all subgroups.
First author Helena A. Addison, a PhD fellow, emphasizes the importance of considering help-seeking norms and the concerns and experiences of historically underserved community members, who often possess significant apprehension regarding police involvement in crisis response. “We can all agree that we want police involved as little as possible as mental health first responders,” Addison notes, “and the perspectives of community members is essential to effectively identifying and scaling better systems for supporting people in moments of crisis.
Coauthors are from the Thomas Jefferson College of Population Health; Columbia University; and Temple University. This work had partial support from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Institutes of Health.
In an era where space has become a contested domain, members of the U.S. Space Force, save for a select few astronauts, find themselves firmly grounded on Earth.
Unlike their counterparts in the Air Force, who engage in training missions up in the sky, or Navy sailors who practice combat drills at sea, Space Force guardians don’t get to directly experience outer space. Their training, instead, is confined to the boundaries of classrooms and traditional simulators designed for repeated practice of a specific skill.
While these established methods sufficed when military operators focused solely on satellite operations, the Space Force now shoulders a broader mandate. This includes safeguarding satellites from hostile actions, necessitating the adoption of more sophisticated training tools.
“The new space domain is far different from the one I grew up with,” said Gen. Chance Saltzman, chief of U.S. space operations. “It has taken on the characteristics of a more dangerous and dynamic security environment,” he said last month at the Air & Space Forces Association’s annual conference.
Satellites have to be protected from traditional threats like electronic jammers and also from cyberattacks and more destabilizing ground-launched missiles, on-orbit grapplers and directed energy weapons.
The very existence of the Space Force underscores the fiercely contested nature of space, he said. However, the formation of the Space Force is just the first step. The next objective, said Saltzman, is to build a dedicated Space Force that excels in the intensified U.S. competition with China and Russia — often referred to as great power competition.
The next phase of space training
To cultivate the requisite skills for competition with spacefaring global powers, the Space Force is exploring the use of technologies capable of making virtual and remote training far more realistic and immersive than previously possible.
“We spend a lot of time thinking about how we attack the advanced training, the specialty training that we need to instill the skills in our guardians to be prepared for competition and conflict,” said Maj. Gen. Shawn Bratton, who until recently led the Space Training and Readiness Command, known as STARCOM.
Bratton was nominated in July to be deputy chief of space operations for strategy, plans, programs and requirements. .
“The first challenge is how to explain the domain when you can’t put the person into it,” Bratton said at a National Defense Industrial Association conference. “We can’t carve out real estate on orbit and build a training location.”
STARCOM has hosted industry events and put out calls for information on technologies that could help guardians not only understand the mechanics of the space environment but also learn tactics to outmaneuver adversaries.
After the Space Force established STARCOM in August 2021, the command turned its attention to the preparation of incoming officers from the military academies and Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) programs on college campuses, said Lt. Col. Adam Wasinger, deputy commander of STARCOM’s Space Delta 13 Detachment 1.
Wasinger’s unit oversees space education programs at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, where since 2020 about 100 graduates each year get commissioned into the U.S. Space Force.
Incoming officers “have to be prepared to meet the Space Force mission, which is fight and win in contested, degraded space environments,” Wasinger told SpaceNews.
The Air Force Academy for years has had a space program, but it was short and limited in scope, Wasinger said. Last year, STARCOM introduced a three-week training course for space professionals offered to U.S. Air Force Academy and U.S. Military Academy cadets, U.S. Naval Academy midshipmen, as well as ROTC students considering a commission in the U.S. Space Force.
A central goal of the program, called Azimuth, is to “help prepare our future guardians to prevail in competition and conflict through innovative education,” said Wasinger.
The course introduces cadets to space and orbital dynamics through academics, zero-gravity experiments on parabolic aircraft flights, building rockets and satellites, and training in immersive mixed-reality environments.
Technologies like augmented and virtual reality are increasingly being applied in space training programs, he said, because they help operators understand the congested and contested space environment.
Immersive training tools typically are categorized as virtual, augmented or mixed reality.
Virtual reality generally means a computer-generated world experienced through a headset and haptic controllers. Augmented reality systems overlay digital information on real-world elements. In mixed reality, the user interacts with and manipulates physical and virtual items and environments.
About 150 students went through the Azimuth program this summer. They learned about the space domain via an augmented and mixed reality tool called Kwyn Solar, which ingests data from the military’s catalog of space objects and displays the space environment on the inside of the trainee’s goggles.
Wasinger shared that Space Delta 13 evaluated several products before it selected Kwyn Solar. Some students get so-called VR motion sickness and prefer augmented reality, said Wasinger. Using AR headsets, they can see all the satellites that are on orbit today, learn about their orbital paths, regimes, country of origin and even where their ground stations are located.
Reflecting on his own undergraduate training, Wasinger said much of it was confined to the pages of textbooks. While books and two-dimensional models are invaluable, they fall short when it comes to understanding the complexities of space, he said. Orbital mechanics, for instance, are tough to comprehend through a two-dimensional representation.
DARPA-funded technology
The Kywn Solar tool leverages visualization technologies that have rapidly matured in recent years, said Robert Hyland, principal scientist at Charles River Analytics, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based defense contractor that developed Kwyn Solar.
Charles River Analytics specializes in digital modeling and AI-powered software. The company in 2018 was hired by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to help U.S. military commanders better understand potential threats in space.
U.S. Air Force Maj. Gen. Shawn N. Bratton, Commander of Space Training and Readiness Command, speaks at the 2023 Space Symposium Satellite Forum Breakfast in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Credit: U.S. Space Force photo by Ethan Johnson
After the DARPA program ended in 2020, the company continued to further develop an augmented and mixed reality tool that it had designed for space situational awareness. The product transitioned to a commercial version named Kwyn Solar — short for Knows What You Need and Space Operation visualizations Leveraging Augmented Reality.
Hyland said Kwyn Solar empowers trainees to visualize and interact with satellite assets, helping their situational awareness and aiding their grasp of satellite roles in military operations. It also facilitates group training by challenging students to tackle hypothetical scenarios conceived by Charles River Analytics’ intelligence experts.
The tool also has been adopted at Officer Undergraduate Space Training and Enlisted Undergraduate Space Training programs at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California.
“What we heard from trainees and instructors is that they visualize things they never were able to before, such as an entire constellation,” Hyland said.
Tools more accessible
Augmented and virtual reality technologies have been around for decades, but have undergone significant evolution in recent years, Hyland noted. Lighter and more affordable headsets, coupled with the standardization of software and hardware accessories, have rendered immersive experiences more accessible.
The military is well-positioned to leverage these commercial products and exploit this technology for training without incurring substantial development costs, he said.
The Space Force stands to benefit from these innovations even more than other branches of the military due to the remote nature of its training, Hyland pointed out. This advantage is compounded by the fact that the incoming cadre of junior officers and enlisted guardians are from a generation of digital natives, and are able to adapt these tools with ease.
During the Azimuth course this summer, “they put the headsets on and within minutes the cadets were taking videos, passing them around, sharing and teaching each other,” Hyland said.
Considering the extensive array of subjects guardians must master, ranging from orbital mechanics to satellite parameter adjustments and conjunction analysis, the Space Force needs a more efficient pathway to acquire knowledge, which immersive training can provide, Hyland said.
Beyond the Air Force Academy, STARCOM is evaluating the application of immersive technologies to other training programs.
“We are looking at ways to make this technology more widely available to the operational force,” said Wasinger.
The experience of using high-tech tools during undergraduate training “gives them a taste of what’s to come,” he said. “What we’re trying to implement is a ‘crawl, walk, run’ kind of preparation.”
For example, the Space Force’s 533rd Training Squadron that oversees officer and enlisted education programs at Vandenberg is experimenting with augmented reality in an electronic warfare course, said Wasinger.
“We taught the students the basic fundamentals of electronic warfare and then using this digital capability we had them play in teams and try to prevent degradation of certain frequencies,” he said. The immersive technology is no substitute for the Space Force’s extensive electronic warfare education program, Wasinger noted, but it helps students sharpen their critical thinking, something that was hard to do when they only had textbooks.
Training for proliferated space
Another change happening in the Space Force — and likely to impact training programs — is the adoption of commercial-like proliferated constellations.
The military traditionally has operated a relatively small number of bespoke satellites such as GPS, communications and missile-warning spacecraft. Over the next several years, the Space Force’s Space Development Agency will acquire hundreds of satellites that will form a network known as the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture. This vast constellation in low Earth orbit will support military communications and missile threat detection.
As the Space Force prepares to bring these proliferated networks of satellites into the fleet, additional training initiatives will come into play, said Jeffrey Schrader, vice president of global situational awareness at Lockheed Martin Space.
Satellite operations units will need advanced tools to learn how to control large constellations and to automate tasks through artificial intelligence, he said. The Space Force wants to shift more resources to the protection and defense of space, so it needs to take advantage of AI and machine learning to manage satellite constellations with minimal staff, Schrader added.
Lockheed Martin is working on new products that automate numerous tasks typically requiring human intervention, he said. The company recently unveiled a cloud-based satellite operations center run by AI-driven software that can manage satellite data and predict and mitigate hardware malfunctions, said Schrader.
“As the Space Force moves towards fighting in a different way to deter adversaries,” he said, “it needs to utilize technologies that are out there to operate in a more efficient way.” .
Culture of ‘continuous improvement’
The Space Force has to be “purpose built” for the challenges of strategic competition, Saltzman said at the AFA conference. This means investing in exercises, wargames, training and education “to ensure that our personnel are equipped with the latest knowledge, skills, tools and experiences,” he said.
Saltzman also cautioned that the adoption of new technology requires changes in culture.
“It is not just about acquiring new weapons and equipment, but also about fostering a culture of continuous improvement,” he said. “We must continually evaluate how we train and educate our force so that we can prepare them to handle uncertainty, ambiguity and ‘black swan’ events.”
Saltzman mentioned the conflict in Ukraine as testament to the centrality of space in modern warfare. He also reminded the audience that “technology is not a force enabler on its own. It is about the readiness of the forces using that technology that will tip the scales toward success.”
This article originally appeared in the October 2023 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
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Tricks that supposedly get you cheaper plane tickets probably aren’t worth your time, say researchers.
Buy your ticket on a Tuesday. Search in your browser’s incognito mode. Use a VPN to pretend you live in Suriname.
“There are so many hacks out there for finding cheaper airline tickets,” says Olivia Natan, an assistant professor of marketing at the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. “But our data shows many of these beliefs are wrong.”
With four colleagues—Ali Hortaçsu and Timothy Schwieg from the University of Chicago, Kevin Williams from Yale, and Hayden Parsley from the University of Texas at Austin—Natan looked deeply into the structure and processes behind how prices are set at a major United States airline. The system that she found, which is representative of airlines around the world, was strikingly at odds with what most economists would expect—and most consumers assume.
“We initially didn’t know how to rationalize the things we were seeing,” she says.
Consider fruit jam at the grocery store. Consumers have many options. If a company raises the price on its strawberry jam, one might fairly assume that this would affect sales of both strawberry and neighboring raspberry jam, since consumers can substitute one for another.
The same can happen with plane tickets: when people visit a website like Google flights or Kayak and search for a ticket, a wide range of different flights from the same airline appear. Travelers tend to make selections that balance convenience and price: The price of one flight might push people to select a slightly less convenient but cheaper flight.
“But airlines don’t consider this kind of substitution,” Natan says. They think about the prices of seats on each individual flight rather than total seats sold in a day, “even though changing the price on one flight will affect the way people think about all their options.”
Perhaps most surprisingly, airlines also don’t incorporate the prices of their competitors in their automated price-setting. Typically, if one airline cut its prices, one would expect other firms to do the same. If they don’t, this dampens the benefits of a competitive market.
This unorthodox behavior, Natan explains, is the result of a specific pricing heuristic—or decision-making shortcut—that airlines use called Expected Marginal Seat Revenue-b, or EMSRb. The use of EMSRb, the researchers show, results in another outcome that consumers may not expect.
Despite how it may appear when looking for flights, airlines have a fixed and relatively small number of prices that they assign to tickets on each flight. Unlike other consumer sectors, where pricing can be adjusted and targeted down to the penny, airlines operate with large gaps between each possible price—sometimes upwards of $100. They may sell the first 30 economy tickets at the lowest price, and then the next 30 tickets at the next possible price, and so on.
“Airline tickets are sold through global distribution systems that make sure a travel agent in Wichita sees the same price as you do on your computer at home,” Natan says. This system emerged from an industry alliance to facilitate inventory management. Other businesses in the travel sector, like hotel rooms, cruises, trains, and car rentals do the same.
The downside is that airlines are relatively unresponsive to real-time changes in cost, as the next discrete fare is often a significant jump up. The researchers found that even if the airline would like to increase the price by $100—half the price of an average one-way ticket—they only do so about 20% of the time, since no fare is available at that price.
Today, airlines are starting to experiment with what’s known as “continuous revenue management,” which would, for instance, assign 100 different prices to a flight with 100 seats. “That would make pricing significantly more variable,” Natan says, “but even that would not be the kind of targeting that many consumers assume airlines use.”
One of the strangest discoveries from the research relates to the process airlines use to set their prices. To an economist, Natan explains, there is never a reason that firms would not raise prices if the increase assures an increase in revenue. But this is precisely what airlines do for essentially every ticket they sell.
“We talked to all of these managers who said the pricing team doesn’t know what it’s doing,” Natan says. The pricing team’s work is made more difficult in part by the set of discrete prices they have to work with, “but we found they could make more money today by selling fewer tickets at higher prices and not foreclose future opportunities. In practice, they seem to be choosing the menu of prices somewhat arbitrarily.”
Interestingly, the revenue management team corrects much of this underpricing. After prices are filed and before tickets go on sale, this team makes demand forecasts that determine final prices. These forecasts are routinely inflated, reducing the number of underpriced tickets shown to consumers by roughly 60%.
“It’s very strange,” Natan admits. “It could simply be a consequence of teams from different departments not communicating.” Two other possibilities as to why airlines don’t maximize short-term revenue, she speculates, are either to build customer loyalty or to avoid regulatory scrutiny.
Over the next several years, Natan says, airlines may start to adopt more dynamic pricing platforms, and non-business travelers may benefit from these changes. But for now, the hunt for an undiscovered trick to find lower fares is largely futile. What is clear is that it’s wise not to wait until the last minute. “What I can say is that prices do go up significantly 21, 14, and 7 days before a flight,” Natan says. “Just buy your ticket before then.”
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A protein found throughout the body plays a major role in immune system modulation during pregnancy and affects placental health, a study in mice finds.
Immune cells play a key role during pregnancy, adjusting immune system response in a way that enables the fetus to develop while also protecting the parent and fetus from outside assaults like viruses.
The researchers say findings could lead to new treatments for reproductive conditions in the future.
The study, led by Yale School of Medicine’s Reshef Tal, appears in the journal JCI Insight. A human fetus contains genetic material from both parents, which makes it partly foreign to the pregnant person’s body. The immune system, therefore, needs to make adjustments that balance a tolerance for the developing fetus with protection against harmful foreign insults like viruses.
Many of these adaptations happen within the decidua—tissue that surrounds and interfaces with the placenta. Prior studies by the same research team showed that early in pregnancy, bone marrow cells, including immune cells, migrate to the uterus and the decidua. And the researchers were interested in the mechanisms that recruit these cells to the pregnant uterus.
Previous research has shown that a protein called C-X-C chemokine receptor type 4, or CXCR4, and the protein that binds to it are critical for trafficking bone marrow cells in organs and tissues around the body. CXCR4 is also expressed in higher amounts in the uterus at the beginning of pregnancy.
“Previous findings imply there is an important function for CXCR4 in pregnancy,” says Tal, assistant professor of obstetrics, gynecology, and reproductive sciences at Yale School of Medicine and senior author of the study. “We wanted to understand its overall role in pregnancy maintenance and immune function in the decidua.” First, the researchers deleted the gene that codes for CXCR4 in adult female mice, effectively removing the protein from the body. Compared with normal mice, those without CXCR4 lost more fetuses during pregnancy and had smaller litter sizes. However, when CXCR4 was removed only in the uterus, there were no negative pregnancy effects.
“That finding suggested that it’s not the CXCR4 expression within the uterine cells themselves, but rather it’s the CXCR4 expression from outside of the uterus that plays an important role in pregnancy maintenance,” says Tal.
Since immune cells are recruited to the uterus from outside the organ, the researchers then looked at how CXCR4 deletion affected immune cell populations in the decidua. Early in pregnancy, the majority of immune cells in the decidua are what are known as “natural killer” cells. Around the body, these white blood cells destroy diseased cells, but in early pregnancy these natural killer cells in the decidua play a key role in the vast tissue and blood vessel remodeling required for the placenta to properly develop and for the fetus to begin receiving nutrients and oxygen from the parent.
In mice without CXCR4, fewer natural killer cells were trafficked to the uterus and those that were clustered abnormally. These natural killer cells also expressed a particular enzyme (granzyme B) at lower levels than usual, leading to an abnormal inflammatory response in the uterus. Additionally, the mice had irregular blood vessel arrangement in the placenta and decidua, which could affect the exchange of nutrients between parent and fetus.
To see if these changes were caused by immune cell dysfunction, the researchers transplanted healthy bone marrow from normal mice into mice without CXCR4. “We found that this rescued much of the effects,” says Tal.
Mice with transplanted bone marrow had fewer pregnancy losses than those without. They also had normal levels of natural killer cells, cell distribution, expression of enzymes, and blood vessel arrangement in the placenta, the researchers found.
“One of the main takeaways of the study is that you can harness the bone marrow cells’ ability to home to the uterus and affect both the immune status of the decidua and the vascular remodeling of the placenta,” says Tal.
This, he says, could inform new treatments for reproductive conditions like recurrent pregnancy loss and preeclampsia.
“In these conditions, there is thought to be an imbalance in the immune factors and the factors involved in blood vessel formation,” says Tal. “Our findings could potentially lead to a cell therapy approach to treat those types of conditions.”
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Adolescents ages 12 to 18 who live in the rural United States and drink heavily have a 43% greater probability of carrying a handgun in the following year, according to a new study.
“Our understanding of adolescent firearm use and related behaviors has come largely from adolescents in urban areas,” says Elizabeth Weybright, an associate professor in the human development department at Washington State University and coauthor of the study published in the Journal of Rural Health.
“Rural areas are geographically different and have their own unique culture. We wanted to examine whether the association between handgun carrying and other risky behaviors such as alcohol use shows the same positive association among rural adolescents as it does among urban adolescents.”
The researchers took data for the study from a longitudinal sample of 2,002 youths ages 12 to 26 in 12 rural communities throughout seven states, including Washington. They collected survey responses annually from 2004 to 2019, tracking participants through adolescence into young adulthood. Heavy drinking was defined as consuming five or more alcoholic drinks in a row at least once in the previous two weeks.
“An inherent strength of this data is that it followed the same individuals for so long. Not all studies do this,” Weybright says. “Longitudinal data shows how one behavior may impact another over time. This level of detail can help us understand which behavior comes first and point us in the right direction for targeting behaviors through prevention or intervention.”
The association between heavy drinking and handgun-carrying was also evident in young adults ages 19 to 26, notes senior study author Ali Rowhani-Rahbar, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Washington School of Public Health and pediatrics at the UW School of Medicine. Individuals in that age group who drink heavily are 38% more likely to carry a handgun.
The researchers say their findings can inform strategies to discourage drinking and thereby decrease the likelihood of handgun-carrying among youth and young adults in rural areas. The findings, coupled with existing evidence-based approaches, might also offer key tactics to lower the homicide and suicide rates among adolescents in rural areas, the study concludes.
“We desperately need prevention approaches and interventions tailored to rural communities,” Weybright says. “This study informs what these interventions can and should be targeting. Knowing there is an association between alcohol and handgun carrying means some prevention programs that target substance use could also impact handgun carrying.”
Understanding youth behaviors associated with carrying a firearm has significant safety implications. In 2020, suicide and homicide were among the leading causes of death among US individuals ages 12 to 26 years. About 91% of homicides and 52% of suicides among this age group involved a firearm, the study notes.
Recent evidence suggests that rural adolescents may start carrying a handgun earlier and with higher frequency and duration than their urban counterparts. Handgun-carrying is associated with bullying, physical violence, and other risk factors for violence, the study shows.
Preventing or delaying handgun-carrying among rural adolescents may be an important strategy for preventing firearm-related harm, the authors note.
“Adolescent behaviors are often carried into adulthood,” Weybright says. “If we can understand this pattern of behavior, we can support future adolescents by preventing them from engaging in behaviors we know are risky or are associated with risky outcomes. Targeting alcohol use may be an effective strategy for also reducing later handgun carrying.”
The study, funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is part of a larger project that seeks to fully investigate how rural adolescents view and engage with handguns.
Weybright, who contributed to the manuscript’s conceptualization and revision, was part of the group who applied for funding. She also coauthored a separate study on early prevention systems’ impact on handgun violence in rural communities.
Additional coauthors are from Washington State, the University of Washington, and Arizona State University.
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.
