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February 23, 2009Page
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Be sure and partake in
the festivities at
CSM’s 19
th
Annual Wellness Day!
Each year, a variety of local health and wellness experts gather in the Ballroomsof the Student Center to share their wares with the CSM campus community. Thisevent is a wonderful opportunity to sample new products, get a massage, par-ticipate in health screenings and safety demonstrations, and just have a great time!Where else can you taste organic foods, get some quick health checks, dabble inacupuncture, try some yoga, and meet a naturopath all in one place? Did I mentionthe
FREE STUFF
?We continue to promote the
5 Dimensions of Wellness: Physical, Emotional,Social, Intellectual, and Spiritual
through this event. We have invited vendorswho represent all of these dimensions with the goal of broadening our views of Well-ness. Everything from traditional and alternative medicine, safety and prevention,outdoor recreation and travel, healthy eating and nutrition will be represented. Stu-dents and staff can enter drawings for great prizes after attending the event.
Wellness Day occurs Friday, February 27 from 10:30 AM to 1:30 PM in theStudent Center Ballrooms.
We’ll see you there!
Alexis Navarre-Sitchler, a MinesGraduate, studies weathering ratesin rocks. Her presentation in the Van Tuyl Lecture on Thursday focusedon porosity and its effects on weath-ering, especially in basalts. Fluids,particularly water, are paramount inthe weathering process.
“Interactions between uids and
minerals change rock propertiesand produce sediment and dis-solved minerals,” explained Sitchler.
“Weathering is the rst process in
soil formation.” As rocks are weath-ered, they are both chemically andphysically altered. As time progress-es, they produce what is called a
soil prole, which varies from the
top, being complete soil and zeroparent rock, to some mixture of thetwo, to solid rock, called bedrock.Sitchler demonstrated this with agraph that placed depth verses per-centage of parent rock. One portionof the graph contains 100% parentrock, another contains 0%. The areain between is called the “reactionfront,” the area where weathering isactively taking place. According to Sitchler, there hasalways been a “large discrepancybetween weathering rates foundin a lab and those observed in the
eld. There is a lot of work that goes
on to try and understand the dis-crepancy between what goes on
in the lab and in the eld.” For her
research, Sitchler hoped to modelthe rates of weathering for large
soil proles originating from basal
-tic rock. This was accomplished byusing individual basaltic rocks thathad developed something called a“weathering rind.” This weatheringrind was a portion of the outside of the rock, which had been chemi-cally weathered into other rocks. If she could accurately model the rateof weathering in these individualrocks, the same model could be ap-
plied to larger soil proles. Key bits
of information were the rock’s po-rosity along the interface betweenthe weathered and unaltered rock. This interface, just as in the larger
soil prole, is called the reaction
front. Each of these reaction fronts,
David Underwood
Staff Writer
Health Center promotes wellness
Next were class announce-ments; both the freshman andsophomore class presidents report-ed that their constituencies didn’tcare very much about the currentform of the plus-minus grading sys-tem, as it won’t affect them. Lisa Truong, Sophomore Class Presi-dent, also mentioned SophomoreSaturdays, an upcoming breakfast-for-dinner event, complete with Sat-urday morning cartoon viewing. After a few other minor an-
nouncements, Kevin Duffy made
the motion to install Vice President Anant Pradhan, Representative toBoard of Trustees Amy Dubetz,Graduate Treasurer Aaron Sumner,Senior Class Treasurer Brandon
Killinger, and himself as ASCSM
Election committee members. Thepurpose of the election committeeis to answer questions, advertise,and resolve disputes (if any) relatingto the upcoming ASCSM elections. The choice of graduating studentswas made so all committee mem-bers “do not have a vested interestin ASCSM” in the future. The mo-tion carried with only one in opposi-tion.
The nal motion of the meet
-ing was to add a Board of StudentOrganizations (BSO) representativeto the ASCSM Budget Committee,citing the BSO’s intimate knowl-edge of the organizations they rep-resented, and thus their better abil-ity to determine appropriate fundingfor their constituency. “Our solepurpose is to present and supportthe organizations on-campus thatwould not otherwise be directly rep-resented by other bodies at CSM...it’s our hope that our involvementwith the budget committee wouldresult in direct representation of organizations, and allow for betterquestion resolution during commit-tee meetings, especially as we haveunique insight into the functions of
organizations at CSM,” Karly Ad
-ams, BSO treasurer, stated. Themotion failed 4-12-5, however, asthe BSO currently has four repre-sentatives on ASCSM, and this ar-rangement is already considered acompromise. ASCSM may acceptor reject the budget, and thus itwas determined that the BSO hadenough power as it stood, thoughthe idea of a non-voting seat on theBudget Committee is not out of thequestion. This motion concluded the main
body of the ASCSM meeting. Kevin
Duffy stated that he was lookingforward to seeing everyone at theFaculty Senate meeting on Tuesdayat 2 PM in Hill Hall 300, and ad- journed the meeting.
ASCSM
addresses issues
It sounds like something straight
out of science ction. A satellite orbit
-
ing the earth res a laser towards the
surface and receives back informa-tion about the atmosphere. However,according to Carl Weimer from Ball Aerospace, this has been a reality foralmost three years.Speaking at the Heiland Lec-
ture last Thursday, Weimer clariedthe specics of the project named
CALIPSO, which is an acronym for,“Cloud and Aerosol Lidar and Infrared
Pathnder Satellite Observations.” Li
-dar is a laser system, but is differentfrom typical lasers, which are usuallyused for altitude measurements. Li-dar also gives information about themedium it is traveling through. “Theirgoal is to measure not just how longit takes to go out and back, but alsogive you some idea of what’s be-tween you and some backgroundscene,” Weimer said of lidar systems.Weimer continued his lecture withsome highlights of remote sensinglaser systems in space. “People usu-ally ask, ‘Have lasers been in spacefor very long?’ and they have, datingback to the Apollo days.” Most la-sers used for atmospheric observa-tion have been shot from the groundor from airplanes, which could bemaintained for greater data accura-cy. However, this is not the case forthe lidar on CALIPSO. “One of thebig challenges for space is gettingreliable laser systems,” Weimer ex-plained. Even with a laser that is sup-posed to be eye-safe at the groundand to aircraft, there have been a fewsightings of the CALIPSO laser. Onesuch sighting was reported as a UFOwhen a man suddenly experienced a
green ash late at night.
The CALIPSO mission waslaunched in 2006 and is nearingthe end of its term of duty. Weimer
claried, “It’s a three year mission...
NASA will keep it on longer. As longas the satellite is healthy, they’ll keepit up and working.” One of the rea-sons that the satellite was slated fora three-year mission was because
it was considered a pathnder mis
-sion. “This is not a technology mis-sion; it is a science mission using thelatest technology. But since it’s never
own for this application before, it isconsidered a pathnder.”
In designing the CALIPSO sys-tem, many constraints were broughtinto play. “The whole thing obviouslyhas to sit inside a rocket ferry. We’reon a medium sized rocket, the Delta2.” As a result of the payload is-sue, most of the satellite is made of a graphite structure, which is light
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1
on both the large and small scales,behaves similarly. Using variousmethods such as X-ray diffraction,micro-computed tomography, andneutron scattering, data was col-lected about the porosity and rate of decay along the reaction front. Her
rst attempts using X-ray diffraction
showed a glimpse into the porosityof the rock, but the model producedfrom this data “clearly didn’t work.” The next step was to increase theresolution using neutron scanning,which allows much smaller emptyspaces to be seen.Using this new data, a few otherapproaches, and a bit of a trial anderror, Sitchler was able to create a
model that accurately reected her
data. It appeared to successfullymodel the rate of weathering for aterrace she was studying in CostaRica given age data collected byother methods. She now hopes thatshe will be able to further prove hermodel once more data is collected.Sitchler also has hopes that her re-search will be applicable to otheruseful areas such as fracture propa-gation in rocks.
Faster erosion through porosity
and durable. There is also no needfor cooling tubes for the electronics,since the heat transfers out into theicy blackness of space. Still, many is-sues persist. “You also have to oper-ate in a space environment,” Weimersaid of the various hazards, whichinclude radiation and micrometeor-oids. The main reason why this mis-sion was launched was to help ad-dress important questions in climate
change and air quality. Specically, it
looks into aerosols in the atmosphere,“This is where CALIPSO comes intoplay.” These aerosols vary from mois-ture and dust to pollution and smoke
from res or volcanoes. Weimer said,
“We want to know the aerosols inclouds that can do different things.” These different things are the absorp-
tion or reection of light from the sun,
thus affecting climate change.With almost three years worth of data, CALIPSO has produced someinteresting results. Luckily, the datathat has been received is more accu-rate than similar data taken with lidarfrom airplanes.“You’re trying to collect datawhen you’re up 705 km away fromthe target that you’re looking at, soit’s very low signal to noise ratios.”Some conclusions drawn from thedata collected in-clude informationabout hurricanecreation, oceanwind speed andthe destruction of the ozone layerin Antarctica.More informationon the CALIPSOprogram can befound at http:// calipsooutreach.hamptonu.edu/
Benjamin M. Weilert
Staff Writer
Fighting global warming with lasers
An artist’s rendition of the CALIPSO satellite
PHOTO COURTESY WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
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