NASA’s Space Shuttle Discovery successfully launched this morning from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, USA. The return to flight comes 2 ½ years after the Space Shuttle disaster claimed the lives of seven astronauts returning to Earth after a successful mission.

The liftoff occurred at 10:39 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time. The return to flight has been an arduous process of improving safety and inspecting equipment in the aftermath of the Columbia disaster. Experts believe the accident was caused by debris that damaged the space shuttle during launch. For this current launch, a plethora of surveillance equipment watched for similar incidents. The measures detected debris falling from Discovery but it does not appear that any damage occurred to the space shuttle’s skin. Video and images of the launch will be closely reviewed for the next several days and the crew will continue their own inspection throughout their mission.

The Discovery STS-114 crew includes:

• Commander Eileen Collins
• Pilot James Kelly
• Mission Specialist Charles Camarda
• Mission Specialist Wendy Lawrence
• Mission Specialist Soichi Noguchi
• Mission Specialist Steve Robinson
• Mission Specialist Andy Thomas

Their mission is to test new safety techniques developed over the past few years and to deliver supplies to the International Space Station (ISS). The crew will also undertake spacewalks to deploy new ISS modules.

The space shuttles were developed in the 1970s. NASA plans to retire the remaining fleet around 2010 while a next-generation Crew Exploration Vehicle is developed. NASA hopes to return humans to the moon by 2020 after President Bush outlined new space exploration goals last year focused on the Moon and Mars.

More Information

• NASA Returns to Flight
• STS-114 Crew

The exploration of the Lost City Hydrothermal Field continues. The IFE Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs) Hercules and Argus are capturing high definition video and images from sites around the Lost City hot springs system on a mountain top over 2,000 feet below the surface waters of the Atlantic Ocean. This data is then being streamed to researchers a quarter of the world away for analysis, while a live video stream has been made available to the public over the Internet. This Internet video stream at a resolution of only 352 x 240 pixels cannot match the torrent of information streaming over Internet 2 to researchers, but is a breakthrough for public outreach. Using Apple’s Quicktime video play, the video’s frame rate is relatively high and remains passable when the window is doubled in size.

The images from Lost City could be right out of a James Cameron movie. Hercules is attached to Argus by a long cable. While Argus takes context images from a safe distance, Hercules hovers close to the white and cr

The two goals of the mission were to return to Lost City for further exploration after its discovery in 2000 and to test technology for distributing data live to various research nodes on land. Previous missions required participating researchers to travel with the expedition. It is hoped that distributed data gathering using high definition video and images will increase scientific activity, allow more researchers to participate, and improve safety. Techniques learned during the Lost City 2005 mission may also be useful for future telepresence exploration of other bodies in our solar system. For example, future rover missions to Mars enabled with high definition video could increase scientific returns many times over the current Mars Exploration Rovers mission. A first step will be the ability of the 2009 Mars Science Laboratory rover to capture short video clips as it explores the Red Planet.

The Lost City 2005 mission continues through early next week, with live video expected throughout.

More Information

• The Lost City 2005 - Live video
• NOAA Ocean Explorer - The Lost City 2005
• Immersion Presents
• Jason Foundation for Education Lost City Hydrothermal Vents
• The University of Washington School of Oceanography
  • Dr. Deborah S. Kelley
• The University of Rhode Island Graduate School of Oceanography
  • Dr. Robert D. Ballard

In a remarkable display of the cutting-edge in robotics, telepresence, and ocean exploration, live video is streaming over the Internet from under the Atlantic Ocean. The public, students, educators, and scientists can all follow along as the crew of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s ship Ronald H. Brown use IFE Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs) to explore the Lost City Hydrothermal Field. Lost City is a hot spring system discovered late in 2000. The site is marked by gigantic white carbon carbonate chimneys and an active ecosystem fed by hydrogen and methane.

Mission data including high definition video and images is being streamed from robotic submersibles to facilities onboard the Ronald H. Brown that then retransmit the data via satellite and Internet 2 to participating research sites located on land. This new approach to research and public outreach could reshape scientific exploration of the oceans and lands of Earth as well as the rest of the solar system. The NOAA Ocean Explorer website provides a wealth of information about the mission, including the live video feed.

This weekend the Ronald H. Brown stopped first above a site several kilometers west of Lost City and sent down the ROV Hercules. This site has never been seen by human eyes and was picked because it is millions of years older than the Lost City but may contain a record of similar hydrothermal activity in the past. The ROV worked for several hours, returning video and images of a desolate landscape strewn with rocks. An operator onboard the Ronald H. Brown used Hercules‘ robotic arm to collected several rock samples. The operation of mechanic and robotic devices by a human at a distance is called telepresence. Popularized in such movies as Titanic, telepresence allows tactile exploration of sites that are too dangerous for a human to be present in person.

After recovering the ROV and the samples collected, the Ronald H. Brown is currently on route to Lost City where it will spend several more days in round-the-clock exploration. Located on top of a mountain near the Mid-Atlantic Ridge at a depth of over 2,100 feet, Lost City differs from the more commonly known “black smokers” hot springs found along sites where the ocean floor is spreading apart. While these other hot springs systems are caused by active magma chambers underneath the oceanic crust heating up seawater, the Lost City hot springs system is created by a chemical reaction between a rock called peridotite and seawater. Peridotite makes up much of the Earth’s mantle layer located below the crust, but at the Lost City site this mantle material has been exposed nearer the planet’s surface. As the peridotite and seawater react, they give off heat, resulting in a hydrothermal system.

Hot fluids within this system are laden with calcium and magnesium. When the fluid hits the colder seawater at the ocean floor, a second reaction produces calcium carbonate and brucite. These minerals give the growing chimneys at Lost City their distinctive white and cream colors. The process has been happening for at least 30,000 years. One of the mission goals is to determine the age of the site.

Lost City was first explored extensively in 2003. While total biomass is much smaller than other hot spring systems, researchers discovered there is much more diversity of creatures making the site their home. This includes microscopic methanogens that consume hydrogen and produce methane, as well as other organisms that consume this methane. Several new species were discovered. During the Lost City 2005 mission, researchers will look for even more new species while they try to better understand the Lost City and its formations. The complete mission exploration phase will last 10 days. The mission is led by Dr. Robert D. Ballard, the discoverer of the RMS Titantic, and Dr. Deborah S. Kelley, the co-discoverer of the Lost City Hydrothermal Field.

More Information

• The Lost City 2005 - Live video
• NOAA Ocean Explorer - The Lost City 2005
• Immersion Presents
• Jason Foundation for Education Lost City Hydrothermal Vents
• The University of Washington School of Oceanography
  • Dr. Deborah S. Kelley
• The University of Rhode Island Graduate School of Oceanography
  • Dr. Robert D. Ballard

The IFE ROV “Hercules” is sending stunning live video - broadcast over the Internet on the NOAA Ocean Explorer site - from near the Mid-Atlantic Ridge at a depth of over 2,000 feet. The mission? To explore the white carbonate chimneys and other geological formations at the “Lost City” site and surrounding areas.

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Image Courtesy NOAA, VBrick, EDS and TELEX/RTS.

I am watching live video footage from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean as I write this, courtesy of the NOAA Ocean Explorer site. The Lost City 2005 Expedition is using telepresence to operate the IFE ROV Hercules to explore the white carbonate chimneys and other geological formations from the “Lost City” site and surrounding areas. The spectacular locale at a depth of 2,100 feet was only discovered in the year 2000.

The expedition site is complete with information about the site and mission, blog updates from the crew, and the live video feed. The video is fascinating to watch, and truly dramatic reality television. For example, earlier this morning, the robot arm tried to place an orange object into its basket to take back up to the surface. However, the object appeared to be quite delicate and started to break apart. After several frustrating attempts, the operator was able to retrieve some of the object and drop it into the basket. Sounds lame? Just watch. This could turn out to be the most exciting movie I have seen all summer.

The expedition is scheduled to last through early August. I will provide further information and images on Frontier Channel.

The view from Tumamoc Hill west of downtown Tucson says it all. A wildfire has spread to consume approximately 20,000 acres about 40 kilometers (25 miles) south of the city of Tucson in Arizona, United States, after a lightning strike on July 07, 2005. The fire has been given the name “Florida” and has been slowly growing over the past several days while firefighters try to contain it. Several roads around the region have been closed, public access has been limited, and people in the area have been evacuated.

In hopes of preventing damage to the MMT Observatory on the summit of Mt. Hopkins directly in the path of the oncoming fire front, a slurry of wet material was sprayed on the grounds around the telescope. Observatory personnel were evacuated along with other people in the region, but a few have returned on a limited basis to better prepare observatory equipment and buildings.

According to a Friday, July 15, 2005 update by the Southwest Area Incident Management Team, a resource team of 858 members is making use of helitankers, helicopters, air attack, fire engines, water tenders, and dozers to combat the fire. The terrain is rugged and the team has been moving containment lines away from the flames to keep firefighters safe.

More Information

• USDA Forest Service - Florida Fire
• University of Arizona Press Release, July 14, 2005 - “Florida Fire Prompts Evacuation of Mount Hopkins, Madera Canyon”
• MMT Observatory

Cristian Pittaro is a diver, but if you are picturing a guy with gear on his back diving the sunlit open waters of the ocean, then you have it all wrong. Pittaro is a technical diver, the kind of diver that should inspire awe in us mere humans. His diving destinations include shipwrecks and underwater caves, some of them at depths that require helium in the breathing gas and decompression stops on the way back up. A new Internet-only video channel has been launched called the “Technical Diving Channel” that includes video captured by Pittaro during several of his dives.

Started by an Internet host that specializes in providing services for diving websites, the Technical Diving Channel can be found on Shoutcast TV, through the Winamp audio and video player. Shoutcast itself is free server software that brings television distribution to the masses and a number of early adopters are broadcasting everything from anime to adult material to pirated television series over the Internet. A healthy number of legal and interesting specialty channels have begun to appear, including the Technical Diving Channel.

Claustrophobic caves and ghostly shipwrecks emerging from murky depths might not have the same impact over the Internet that they do during the actual dive, but the diving videos on the Technical Diving Channel allow the audience to experience the thrill of ocean exploration, led by the enthusiasts that head there regularly. The videos on the channel are provided by Pittaro and a growing number of other technical divers.

Pittaro taught diving for several years in a local dive club in the city of Rio Tercero in the province of Cordoba in Argentina before becoming a professional diving instructor for an international agency. He moved to Florida in the United States and began technical diving around 2001. After his move, he created the “Neptuno’s World” website about caves and shipwrecks for divers and non-divers alike. The site also included GPS positioning information of interesting locations for other divers.

“Then I joined a technical diving forum called The Deco Stop,” says Pittaro, “and they started hosting websites to help support the forum. [.] I had a good deal from them, [with] plenty of bandwidth to show my photos and videos and space to store them, so I took it and [that] is how neptunoworld.com [was] born in 2003.”

When Robert Mayer, a student of Pittaro’s wife (who is a diving instructor and also a fellow technical diver) asked if he could use their diving videos for a 24/7 channel on Winamp, Pittaro thought it was an excellent idea. “Lots of people now [are] porting their videos to Robert’s project. [H]opefully [the channel] is going to be a place with tons of different videos that will keep people stuck there all day [while] amusing others that for any reason can’t dive.” Pittaro hopes that it will let the audience’s “imagination fly a bit.”

Technical diving, according to Wikipedia, is “a form of SCUBA diving that exceeds the scope of recreational diving. Technical divers require advanced training, extensive experience, and specialized equipment.” Technical diving also requires the diver to pay attention to a lot of different things, even before adding a video camera to the mix. Pittaro says that “in tech diving or cave diving you need to be very focused, you are already very over-tasked looking at your time, your depth, the current, your buddy, your gas, drysuit, you have lots of gear, deco bottles, flashlight, scooter, and [the list] goes on and on.” Trying to film a dive requires even more care. “[Y]ou can’t be making a video and kicking the silt in your back that could be fatal for you or somebody else if the water inside the cave turns [into] a ball of mud.”

While some may consider this activity dangerous, to Pittaro danger is relative. “I can’t work in a nuclear reactor if I don’t know anything about it,” he explains, “because [it] is more likely I’ll make it blow away and kill myself and put others in danger or even kill them. Cave diving is about the same, there are some levels risks on it, like silt, no direct access to the surface, no light, very complex tunnels systems and many others, but that is why we get trained [.] and get the best gear we can get, because all that is going to be what keeps us alive in there.”

“Cave diving isn’t dangerous,” he continues, “if you have the appropriate level of training for the dive you want to do. [.] You need to build up experience progressing from simple dives to more complex. [Y]ou can’t just do a dive 3000 feet inside the cave after your first cave certification; you need maybe several years of cave diving to go there safely.”

Cave diving provides an interesting perspective on these little-explored environments. “Caves are very special in every point of view,” says Pittaro. “They are [.] very fragile environment[s] that need a lot of care. Diving them, taking videos and pictures help me and hopefully others to understand them and to see how fragile and nice they are and how to preserve them.”

While cave diving is mostly about exploring and appreciating new environments, shipwreck diving is a unique way to explore history while paying respect to those who may have lost their lives during a battle or an accident. Sometimes technical divers discover something about a shipwreck that corrects the history books. The ship might have found its final resting place somewhere other than recorded, or sometimes it “is easy to tell that the wreck didn’t sink in the way the history said; for example one that [was] supposed to be broken in half and when you go and see it, [you] find it all intact and [in] one piece.”

Technical divers can be a close-knit group of enthusiasts. Pittaro met his future wife Lesley soon after they both started technical diving. They kept running into each other, became friends, and “we teamed up often when going out diving.” Pittaro says about their marriage: “If I can trust my life [to] her on a dive I thought it would be safe to marry her.” Neptunoworld includes a section that chronicles their several honeymoons together exploring new destinations, some of them actually out of water.

As the Internet continues to mature as the major distribution network for entertainment and educational content, expect new specialty channels to emerge. Content like the Technical Diving Channel allows the world to share in the sights and sounds of frontier destinations, captured by real explorers. Pittaro plans to continue documenting his dives with images and videos and make them available over the Internet.

What happens if Pittaro becomes too old to dive?

“I can [sit on the] couch with my wife and watch our own life on TV, [.] remember all those incredible places we had been, [and] maybe share it with new family members.”

More Information

• Neptunoworld.com
• The Deco Stop
• The Deco Stop Hosting
• “Technical Diving” entry at Wikipedia
• The “Technical Diving Channel” is located on SHOUTcast TV through the Winamp media player. Open Winamp’s media library, click on the “SHOUTcast TV” link under “Online Media” in the library list on the left, and double click on the “Technical Diving Channel” in the channel list on the right.

Google appears to be unstoppable. Their recent projects have involved turning static web pages into interactive presentations, each one more useful than the last. Often called “web services” these new features are taking the World Wide Web into a welcome direction. Google unveiled today their next step, a program called “Google Earth“.

The Earth in Your Computer

If you happen to remember Keyhole, Google Earth will be familiar. In fact, last year Google purchased the maker of Keyhole. Google Earth merges Google Maps with Keyhole’s 3-D globe of the Earth. You can zoom into any location on the planet with greater and greater detail. The satellite images that overlay the 3-D globe have been obtained over the past three years. When I zoom in on my residence in Tucson, Arizona, I can pinpoint nearby streets and the nearby parking garage, but the apartment complex itself is not there. The image was taken before the building was erected. Still, the detail that is available is incredible. Car size objects are identifiable in many regions of Google Earth.

Keyhole offered similar capabilities, but Google Earth adds welcome new features, including an overlay of their own Google Maps, allowing you to find destinations of interest and driving directions to get there. What to order a pizza? Throw out your phone book. In Google Earth, type in “pizza” and the town in which you live and you are just seconds away from a bird’s eye view of ten pizza locations near you. Driving directions are just another click away.

Word descriptions of driving directions are augmented by a map and image of the path you need to travel. If you need even more assistance, press the play button and you will watch a flythrough of your path, in 3-D perspective. This is great help in visualizing where you are heading; in other words, try it before you drive it.

There is a wealth of other features awaiting your discovery. For example, I discovered I could explore 3-D representations of the mountains surrounding Tucson. The visible shrubbery appears to be from satellite imagery as well. I can image great educational opportunities for young and old alike. You can also take a look at 3-D representations of the skyscrapers in some cities, read summary descriptions about interesting locations, and overlay layers of information specific to your interests.

There are a few flaws in the program (I need to explore the program further to determine if these are actual flaws or just me not knowing exactly how to proceed.) One example is the driving direction flythrough. If you stop the flythrough before your destination, Google Earth will jump back to the beginning of your trip when you press play again. There does not appears to be a way to resume the flythrough from where you left off. The flythrough can be a little nauseating, too, especially if there are a lot of turns. Also, the speed of the flythrough can be faster than the program is able to load images. Fortunately, you can change the speed in the program’s options.

You will need a fast computer, a good graphics card, and a broadband Internet connection to use Google Earth. Now that more people use broadband than dial-up services, it appears the interactive World Wide Web is here to stay. Google Earth is free, but there are two versions for sale that offer even higher resolution surface images and additional features. A commercial version runs $400 a year but appears to be packed with features that may be well worth the price.

Future Speculation

As technology improves, broadband connections increase in speed, and graphics cards yield more and more reality-like graphic, it is not hard to image future version of Google Earth. The next step will be higher resolution images that are more regularly updated, enhanced 3-D effects, and new layers of detail that include current weather and other global metrics. Soon after that will come a version with high resolution video overlaying the 3-D globe. This could become a useful tool for keeping tabs on current traffic before you leave for work, tracking animal migration patterns, or pretending you live in a foreign city.

Beyond that, we get into the science fiction imaginings of Neal Stephenson in his book Snow Crash. If you haven’t read the book yet, consider it a must read. Pay attention to the “Metaverse” and imagine what Google Earth could become in just a few years.

Personally, I am looking forward to Google Mars and Google Titan.

More Information

• Google
  • Google Earth
  • Google Labs
• NASA World Wind - Another 3-D globe project

The Desert Laboratory sits on Tumamoc Hill overlooking the city of Tucson, Arizona. Rainfall amounts here have been above normal this winter and the desert is in bloom. I am sitting in the office of Dr. Jay Quade, from where the view of both Tucson and the desert is spectacular. A faculty member in the Geosciences Department at the University of Arizona, Dr. Quade has recently returned from his latest trip to Ethiopia with samples of tuff - a rock of compacted volcanic ash barely distinguishable from soil - important for dating sedimentary layers in the region. Why does the tuff need to be dated? Somewhere between layers of datable tuff lies the dates of important events in the origins of modern humans.

With a climate similar to Tucson at its warmest, Gona Western Margin in the region of Afar in Ethiopia on the African continent has become a hot spot for scientists looking for fossil evidence of hominids, those evolutionary precursor primates related to modern humans. Dr. Quade is a member of the expedition that recently announced in the journal Nature the second discovery to date of fossil remains of Ardipithecus ramidus. This species may be one of the last common ancestors of humans and chimpanzees.

“I know “ramidus” means “root” in the local Afar language,” explains Dr. Quade, “and that’s the basic idea…is that this is near the base of the human tree, in fact, down in the root system somewhere.” The sample data used by the team for their Nature article “Early Pliocene hominids from Gona, Ethiopia” suggests the fossils are nearly 4.5 million years old. This is significant because around that time the hominid branch splits, leading to chimpanzees and modern humans. In fact, Ardipithecus ramidus has both human and chimpanzee characteristics.

“If you were to encounter these creatures in the street today, they’d look like apes. You’d say ‘that’s an ape,’ except for one thing…there is some evidence that they were bipedal - in other words, upright walking.” That bipedal ability is shared with modern humans. However, Ardipithecus ramidus likely had the brain size of modern chimpanzees.

Dr. Quade was asked to join the research team in 1999 during a panicked telephone call. The original geologist was no longer available. With the expedition about ready to begin, Dr. Quade agreed to head for Ethiopia. He brought to the team the ability to work with fine layers of sediments and trace these layers over long distances, in order to find samples that can be dated by current dating procedures. He also had experience in reconstructing paleoenvironments from the little evidence available in the geologic record. As the team began to explore As Duma in Gona, Dr. Quade was able to point the way to promising sites. Should interesting fossil fragments be found, he could then help restrict their age.

Why Ethiopia? “It’s clear that Africa is the cradle of mankind. When you look at the fossil record within Africa and then outside of Africa for, say, the Pliocene period, 4.5 million years ago, or 6 million years ago, the late Miocene, our antecedents are showing up in deposits in Africa, and mostly in Ethiopia, and they’re not showing up outside of Africa. So we know that Africa itself is the cradle, but we don’t really know where. You have to keep in mind that Ethiopia is famous for its fossils not necessarily because that’s where man developed, down in the Ethiopian Rift, in these big river valleys that occupy the Ethiopian Rift, but it is were they’re preserved.”

The geologic record is preserved in the basin formed by the rifting of Ethiopia. The land is being ripped apart by tectonics, and in a few million years the Red Sea will intrude further into the African continent. There are plenty of rivers in the region to deliver sediments to lower lying areas. The fossil fragments found tend to be in sediments deposited near lake shores. (Go to Page 2.)

More Information

• Page 1
• Page 2
• Tools of Time
• Geology, Famine and War
• RADIO Frontier Channel Episode 04 - the complete audio interview

(Continued from Page 1.) Meanwhile, volcanoes in Ethiopia lay down layers of ash, pumice and other fragments through frequent eruptions. As this material begins to cement over time, it becomes tuff. Tuff sticks out from other layers because it is so light in color. The river and volcano activity are preserved in the varying layers of sediments that make up rock sequences in the region. In the background image the tuff is visible as light tan layers and the sequence is capped by a dark layer of basalt. Researchers can start to build a chronology of events by analyzing rock layers above and below the layer that contains fossil fragments from Ardipithecus ramidus, thus narrowing in on an age for the fossils.

Two types of absolute dating were of particular importance for this research. Samples of tuff from layers above and below the discovered fossil fragments were dated using radiometric dating, specifically Argon-40/Argon-39 dating. While the ash itself cannot be dated using this technique, ash nearer volcanoes may contain tiny plagioclase (a mineral) crystals that formed when magma spewed by the volcano rapidly cooled, trapping a particular amount of potassium inside individual crystals. Over time some of this potassium decayed into argon. By measuring the amount of argon to original potassium, and knowing that the decay rate is constant, an age can be determined for the sample. (This process is described in more detail in “An Interview with Geologist Jay Quade - Tools of Time.”) Combining the radiometric data with paleomagnetic data (also described in “Tools of Time“) Dr. Quade’s team was able to determine that the Ardipithecus ramidus fossils are between 4.51 and 4.32 million years old.

The article in Nature is not the end of story. While he could not speak specifically about what has been found, Dr. Quade indicated that his recent trip back to Ethiopia was fruitful. “There is much more complete evidence now. Various groups have found it but it’s unpublished. So stay tuned. […] It’s an ongoing story and there’s a lot happening.”

While the story about human origins continues to unfold, Dr. Quade is continuing other lines of research, including refining the use of the geologic record to reconstruct ancient climates and environments and studying the Atacama Desert in Chile as a Mars analog.

A few million years of evolution have led us from Ardipithecus ramidus trying to survive the violence of the Ethiopian environment to Homo sapiens sapiens - modern humans - also trying to survive the violence of the same region (see “An Interview with Geologist Jay Quade - Geology, Famine and War.”) But there is a huge difference between these two species, evident in the professional and personal passion of scientists like Dr. Quade. Modern humans also return to Ethiopia to sift through rock fragments and study rock layers because they are passionate about their interests and curious about our origins. We reconstruct our past to build a better future by using our higher brain functions, a result of the sometimes violent evolution of the primate family, to pursue knowledge.

The beckoning fossil fragments have something to tell us. That we listen is the direct result of evolution at work. Our response to this new knowledge will indicate where humanity is heading.

More Information

• Page 1
• Page 2
• Tools of Time
• Geology, Famine and War
• RADIO Frontier Channel Episode 04 - the complete audio interview