IAC2011 Newspaper - Day 4

South African astronomer Peter Martinez was among those awarded Ukraine’s Yangel medal

this week at the International Astronautical Con-gress, placing him among the top dozen space offi-cials in the world.‘‘This medal shows that South African space scien-tists can compete on a global level,’’ said Martinez, who chairs the South African Council of Space Affairs, a government advisory body which helps implement local space policy.Martinez, who brought the annual International Astronautical Congress to Africa this week for the first time in the history of space exploration, said the award was completely unexpected.‘‘It took me by surprise,’’ he said. Ukrainian space scientists said he was the only researcher from Africa to be honoured with the medal.The Congress, with more than 2,500 delegates, is expected to boost both Cape Town tourism and South Africa’s fledgling satellite manufacturing industry.‘‘This prestigious medal is a once-off award, conferred by a jury of six international and 6 Ukrainian experts,’’ explained Kechil Kirhkham of the Astro-nomical Society of South-ern Africa.The medal is named after rocket scientist Mikhail Yangel, a re-nowned missile designer for the

Soviet Union during the Cold War era, who is also im-mortalised in the Yangel crater on the Moon and the Yangel asteroid or minor planet, discovered in 1978.Martinez, who is based in Cape Town at the historic South African Astronomical Observatory, is among a dozen space heroes honoured with the Yangel medal this week.Yangel medallists include USA space shuttle pilot Charles Bolden, now the head of the National Aero-nautics and Space Administration (NASA).

The award was handed out by the 60-year-old Ukrainian space company Yuzhnoye, which was founded by Yangel and has moved from designing intercontinental ballistic missiles to satellites and rockets.

French rocket scientist Jean-Jacques Dordain, now the director-general of the 20-country European Space Agency, and India’s satellite

launching dynamo Madhavan Nair, the first non-American president of the International Acad-

emy of Astronautics, were also honoured.Nair will be addressing the unprece-

dented global space agencies summit on Thursday Oc-

tober 6 from 9 to 10 am.Also on Thursday: as-tronauts from the USA, Russia, Japan and France will hold a rare question and answer session at the Con-gress, from 2 to 3 pm,

in honour of the fiftieth anniversary of human

spaceflight.

UKRAINIANS AWARD A DOZEN YANGEL MEDALS

Peter Martinez was awarded the prestigious Yangel medal

Winners Charles Bolden (NASA) and Jean-Jacques Dordain (ESA), at the opening ceremony.

Thursday 6th October 2011

Igor Fierens, a British paediatrician, recommends that space travel should

be restricted to children over the age of 12.Fierens, who is based at London’s well-known Great Ormond Street Hospital, presented a paper on medical care for teenagers in space at the IAC.Such visits should be short-term to reduce risks of bone loss, was his diagnosis.“From a medical point of view, there is no problem in taking children over the age of twelve into space if it’s only for four minutes. The problem will be if they stay for a week or longer,” he said.Fierens, who spoke at a session on medical care for humans in space, said

that psychological support may be needed for space-travelling teenagers when they return to Earth.The session was chaired by Jeffrey Davis, the director of space life sciences at the National Aeronautics and Space Admin-istration (NASA) in the United States.Davis spoke about the collaborations between NASA, private companies and academics to find solutions to health problems faced by astronauts in space. One such challenge is to keep food fresh for the five years it could take for a spacecraft to reach Mars.One such partnership is with a Russian material scientist who is researching a package that may help conserve food over long periods of time.

CAN CHILDREN TRAVEL TO SPACE?

The Journal of Small Satel-lites (JOSS) is a new peer-

reviewed journal that will begin publication online at the end of this year.Adarsh Deepak, the managing editor of JOSS, encouraged master students to submit their research.“This conference has been a wonderful opportunity to reach out to African space science researchers and we hope they will consider it,” said Deepak, who runs his own journal publishing firm.Deepak also spoke yesterday at the first African Cube Sat event at the Cape Town Uni-versity of Technology (CPUT), one of the IAC exhibitors.“Most students don’t realise how important it is to publish a paper in a peer reviewed journal. It will become handy when they start looking for jobs,” Deepak said.More information is available at http://www.jossonline.org/

NEW JOURNAL FOR SMALL SATELLITE

RESEARCH

AN ELEGANT TOOL FOR QUANTIFYING IGNORANCE

Can an equation tell you if there’s life out there?

H. Paul Shuch discussed this in his useful introduction to the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) session this week.Shuch, the executive director emeritus of the SETI League in the United States, explained the Drake equation for the benefit of interested graduates.Frank Drake, the American astronomer and astrophysicist who founded SETI, developed the equation “as the agenda for the world’s first SETI conference” which happened to be a small private meeting of about a dozen experts held in the Green Bank, USA, in 1961.“The Drake equation appears in just about every astronomy textbook in the world today,’’ said Shuch, whose new book has already sold out at the Springer booth in the IAC exhibition hall. ‘‘It purports to allow you to compute the number of civilisations in the Milky Way galaxy with whom we on Earth could potentially engage with electromagnetic communication,” he explained.Shuch said that if we knew all seven factors of the equation, we would know

the number of civilizations in our galaxy with which communication might be possible. Unfortunately, the only one of the seven that we know at this stage is the approximate rate at which stars are born. This leaves a mere six unknown factors, he said.However, “this is not an equation that was intended to be resolved at all,” he said.The equation ‘‘was intended to guide our research in orderly fashion so that we could increase our knowledge of our place in the cosmos in a systematic matter”.“The value of the equation is that it guides, informs and inspires our research,” he said, adding that essentially, the Drake Equation “is an elegant tool for quantifying our ignorance”. Shuch concluded with a quote: “The probability of success is difficult to estimate; but if we never search, the chance of success is zero.”Shuch edited the book, Searching for Extraterrestrial Intelligence: SETI Past, Present, and Future, in honour of the 50th anniversary of the world’s first SETI experiment.

FIRST STOP, ASTEROID. LAST STOP, MARS.

Yoshiyuki Hasegana from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) spoke enthusiastically

yesterday about a global partnership to coordinate our discovery of space.Hasegana is the current chair of the International Space Exploration Coordination Group (ISECG), a joint effort by 14 space agencies including Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Korea, Russia, the Ukraine, the UK, the USA as well as the Com-monwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) and the European Space Agency.They’ve come up with the Global Explora-tion Roadmap, which has an Asteroid Next pathway and a Moon Next route. Asteroid Next would build from the asteroid belt to the Moon and then to Mars. Moon Next would begin with the Moon, then go to the asteroid belt and end with Mars.“This is a pretty big step to have 14 agencies to essen-tially agree on some basic concepts or a framework to go forward,” said William Gerstenmaier, the outgoing ISECG chair. “The general thinking of the group is that Mars is

the ultimate destination but we need to get some technology, infrastructure, hardware, systems, and operation concepts in place before we can really go to Mars,” the American aerospace engineer said.Expeditions would include both manned and robotic missions, explained Gerstenmaier, who has been NASA’s associate administrator for space operations since 2005.

“It’s not just human exploration, or just robotic exploration. It’s really exploration

in the broader sense. We need to combine robotic activity with the human experience,” Gerstenmaier said. “The purpose was to build a framework

for agencies on how they want to start contributing to these activities so by having two

options we make a broader range of cooperation available to partner agencies,” he said.

Gerstenmaier explained that the framework makes it easier for smaller agencies to participate in exploration.The group is encouraging community engagement and has invited interested parties to visit http://bit.ly/o1vccB for more information. They can be emailed at [email protected].

South African grade three students Gracia Mujinga, Claudia Oschman and Steffan Brundyn, winners of the primary school astronautical art competition run by local non-governmental organisation Living Maths, met American astronaut Cady Coleman and NASA chief Charles Bolden after Bolden’s well-attended talk at the International Astronautical Congress on Tuesday night. As examples of the IAC’s commitment to outreach activities, Elmarie Biermann of the French-South African Institute of Technology and Naomi Mathers of Australia’s Victorian Space Science Education Centre spoke on Monday about human capacity development, while Carolina Oedman-Govender spoke of the Next Einstein Initiative launched by the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences. You can find out more today at 3 pm in meeting room TS 13 in the session Calling Planet Earth: Space Outreach to the General Public, chaired by Gulnara Omarova of Kazakhstan and Olga Zhdanovich of the Netherlands.

Newsletter copy by Research Africa Design and production by Hippo Communications

Not-the-Stig: Spaceperson X was caught wandering around Cape Town on Wednesday as part of the gathering of astronauts, cosmonauts and space station scientists here for the International Astronautical Congress, underway at the convention centre until Friday.

FRESH GREENS IN OUTER SPACE?

The German Aerospace Centre (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft-

und Raumfahrt or DLR) is design-ing a greenhouse that could grow crops, fruits and vegetables in hostile environments, whether the Moon, Mars or Antarctica. Daniel Schubert, a team leader for space analysis at the DLR’s Insti-tute of Space Systems, said they hope to build and test the first pro-totype of the module in the “near future.”The bus-size module, being devel-oped in Bremen, will be used to grow crops such as soybeans, po-tatoes, and wheat under artificial light, powered by solar panels. It will not use soil but water and fer-tilizer, and is being designed to be extremely efficient.“Man will travel to the Moon and Mars eventually,’’ Schubert told

delegates at yesterday’s IAC ses-sion on long term scenarios for a human presence on the Moon or Mars. ‘‘We can use the plants as fresh food and to produce oxygen for the crew,’’ he said.‘‘There are also psychological ben-efits to a crew in space, who will be living in an artificial environment,” Schubert suggested.Because manned travel to Mars and the Moon may be a long time away, the institute is also looking at “terrestrial applications,” such as supplying fresh fruits and crops for polar researchers who “only get fresh supplies every six months.”The module could also be deployed in deserts, refugee camps and con-flict areas where it may be difficult to find land for mass production of crops and vegetables.

Satellites that help bring medical services to remote

parts of India could help solve the country’s health delivery backlog.Aafaque Raza Khan, a third-year Indian mechanical engi-neering student, is convinced that telemedicine could con-nect 700,000 villages to urban doctors.Khan, a student at the Maulana Azad National Institute of Tech-nology, said it was extremely difficult to offer healthcare to 1.2 billion citizens.India’s Space Research Organi-sation started a pilot project this year to connect a hundred medical institutions through-out India to a hub in Bhopal, where Khan is based.Khan’s project analysed the feasibility of patients to ‘‘visit’’ physicians live over the Inter-

net for immediate diagnosis and follow-up treatment.“When you scale out the whole project, it is still a bucket from the ocean,” Khan confessed. But still…you have to start some-where.Khan said the study revealed a broader network was re-quired that connects the whole city while utilising the diversity of technology - cloud comput-ing, internet and interactive communication systems - for doctors.“Telemedicine is good. It can help with faster treatment of patients. It can help doctors. But there will always be a need for a physical presence,” said Khan.Khan’s study was presented as a poster at the pre-conference workshop for developing na-tions, prior to the IAC.

A SATELLITE A DAY WHEN THE DOCTOR’S AWAY