Engineering knowledge requirements for sand and dust on Mars

The successful landing of human beings on Mars and the establishment of a permanent outpost there will require an understanding of the Martian environment by the engineers. A key feature of the Martian environment is the nearly ubiquitous presence of sand and dust. The process which the engineering community will undertake to determine the sensitivities of their designs to the current level of knowledge about Mars sand and dust is emphasized. The interaction of the engineering community with the space exploration initiative (SEI) mission planners and management is described

Status of MICE

Muon ionization cooling is the only practical method for preparing high-brilliance beams needed for a neutrino factory or muon collider. The muon ionization cooling experiment (MICE) under development at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory comprises a dedicated beamline to generate a range of input emittance and momentum, with time-of-flight and Cherenkov detectors to ensure a pure muon beam. A first measurement of emittance is performed in the upstream magnetic spectrometer with a scintillating-fiber tracker. A cooling cell will then follow, alternating energy loss in liquid hydrogen with RF acceleration. A second spectrometer identical to the first and a particle identification system will measure the outgoing emittance. Plans for measurements of emittance and cooling are described.Comment: Poster presented at ICHEP08 Conference, Philadelphia, USA, July 2008. 3 pages, 3 figure

Multiple Environmental Externalities and Manure Management Policy

Livestock waste pollutes multiple environmental media along multiple dimensions. This study explores the economic and environmental implications of single-medium and coordinated multi-media policies for reducing manure-related externalities, with particular attention paid to tradeoffs that occur when policies designed to correct an externality in one medium ignore externalities in other media.Environmental Economics and Policy,

Gaugino-Assisted Anomaly Mediation

We present a model of supersymmetry breaking mediated through a small extra dimension. Standard model matter multiplets and a supersymmetry-breaking (or ``hidden'') sector are confined to opposite four-dimensional boundaries while gauge multiplets live in the bulk. The hidden sector does not contain a singlet and the dominant contribution to gaugino masses is via anomaly-mediated supersymmetry breaking. Scalar masses get contributions from both anomaly mediation and a tiny hard breaking of supersymmetry by operators on the hidden-sector boundary. These operators contribute to scalar masses at one loop and in most of parameter space, their contribution dominates. Thus it is easy to make all squared scalar masses positive. As no additional fields or symmetries are required below the Planck scale, we consider this the simplest working model of anomaly mediation. The gaugino spectrum is left untouched and the phenomenology of the model is roughly similar to anomaly mediated supersymmetry breaking with a universal scalar mass added. We identify the main differences in the spectrum between this model and other approaches. We also discuss mechanisms for generating the mu term and constraints on additional bulk fields.Comment: LaTeX, 26 pages, 8 eps figure

Long-Wavelength Excesses in Two Highly Obscured High-Mass X-Ray Binaries: IGR J16318–4848 and GX 301–2

We present evidence for excess long-wavelength emission from two high-mass X-ray binaries, IGR J16318-4848 and GX 301-2, that show enormous obscuration (N_H ≃ 10^(23)-10^(24) cm^(-2)) in their X-ray spectra. Using archival near- and mid-infrared data, we show that the spectral energy distributions of IGR J16318-4848 and GX 301-2 are substantially higher in the mid-infrared than their expected stellar emission. We successfully fit the excesses with ~1000 K blackbodies, which suggests that they are due to warm circumstellar dust that also gives rise to the X-ray absorption. However, we need further observations to constrain the detailed properties of the excesses. This discovery highlights the importance of mid-infrared observations for understanding highly obscured X-ray binaries