S. P. Hopper: First In-Situ Exploration of Lunar Polar Terrain

Intuitive Machines Mission - 2 (IM2) Nova-C lander is slated to land on the Spudis crater side of the Shackleton – de Gerlache connecting ridge (89.5°S, 222.0°E) in late 2022 or early 2023. The Nova-C carries three core payload elements: the NASA-funded Polar Resources Ice-Mining Experiment-1 (PRIME-1), a 4G/LTE communications network developed by Nokia of America Corporation on the Nova-C lander, the Micro-Nova and a Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform (MAPP) rover developed by Lunar Outpost Inc., and Micro-Nova, a deployable hopper robot developed by Intuitive Machines. Here we summarize the capabilities of the Micro-Nova (named S.P. Hopper for this mission) and its goals and objectives

Discovery of an Extremely Short Duration Flare from Proxima Centauri Using Millimeter through Far-ultraviolet Observations

We present the discovery of an extreme flaring event from Proxima Cen by the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP), Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), Hubble Space Telescope (HST), Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), and the du Pont Telescope that occurred on 2019 May 1. In the millimeter and FUV, this flare is the brightest ever detected, brightening by a factor of >1000 and >14,000 as seen by ALMA and HST, respectively. The millimeter and FUV continuum emission trace each other closely during the flare, suggesting that millimeter emission could serve as a proxy for FUV emission from stellar flares and become a powerful new tool to constrain the high-energy radiation environment of exoplanets. Surprisingly, optical emission associated with the event peaks at a much lower level with a time delay. The initial burst has an extremely short duration, lasting for <10 s. Taken together with the growing sample of millimeter M dwarf flares, this event suggests that millimeter emission is actually common during stellar flares and often originates from short burst-like events

Track A Basic Science

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/138319/1/jia218438.pd

Life-cycle performance of structural systems under uncertainty

The significant advances recently accomplished in the fields of modeling, analysis, and design of deteriorating civil engineering systems, are far from being explicitly addressed in design codes and effectively implemented into practice. There is, therefore, a strong need to promote further research in the field of life-cycle performance of structural systems under uncertainty and to fill the gap between theory and practice by incorporating life-cycle concepts in structural design codes and standards. An effort is currently ongoing within SEI/ASCE to meet this need. This paper is part of this effort and it is aimed at presenting a short overview of the main principles, concepts, methods and strategies associated with life-cycle assessment and design of deteriorating structural systems under uncertainty

Draft Genome of the Filarial Nematode Parasite Brugia malayi

Parasitic nematodes that cause elephantiasis and river blindness threaten hundreds of millions of people in the developing world. We have sequenced the ∼90 megabase (Mb) genome of the human filarial parasite Brugia malayi and predict ∼11,500 protein coding genes in 71 Mb of robustly assembled sequence. Comparative analysis with the free-living, model nematode Caenorhabditis elegans revealed that, despite these genes having maintained little conservation of local synteny during ∼350 million years of evolution, they largely remain in linkage on chromosomal units. More than 100 conserved operons were identified. Analysis of the predicted proteome provides evidence for adaptations of B. malayi to niches in its human and vector hosts and insights into the molecular basis of a mutualistic relationship with its Wolbachia endosymbiont. These findings offer a foundation for rational drug design