Collaboration around the International Space Station: science for diplomacy and its implication for US-Russia and China relations

The recent years have seen a post-cold war all time low in United States and Russia diplomatic relations, with the U.S. (and Europe) using stern economic sanctions over Russia’s involvement in Crimea and Syria. While those tensions have resulted in some initial controversial statements and threats about the two countries' collaboration around space exploration, the two major agencies, NASA and Roscosmos, have not only recently agreed to collaborate until 2024 on the International Space Station (ISS), but have also announced plans for a new ISS 2.0 and further collaboration on Mars exploration. How can the two conflicting policies be reconciled, and how does space collaboration participate to the maintenance of strong diplomatic ties? What lessons can be drawn from the U.S.-Russia diplomatic relations around the ISS, especially with regards to US-China relations? It will be argued that the longstanding ISS collaboration between the U.S. and Russia has led to the creation of solid ties between the two agencies and locked their respective scientists in an interdependent, collaborative relationship to the point of becoming an anchor point amid geopolitical tensions. Using historical, Wikileaks documents and recent statements, it will be shown that scientific collaboration participates in creating stable, lasting ties through track II science diplomacy, across borders and political divides. It will therefore be recommended that, to further harness the power of space diplomacy, the U.S. should seek to engage China and Asian countries in its future space endeavors

Institutional Capacity for Science Diplomacy in Central America

Science, technology, and innovation (STI) is increasingly gaining in importance on the foreign policy agenda of governments worldwide. However, the implementation of science diplomacy strategies requires STI institutional capacity and strong interfaces with policy and diplomacy. This research first maps the STI public institutions of the six member countries of the Central American Integration System (Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama) and then draws their capacity to connect internationally in order to highlight their potential for science diplomacy. Variables such as the year of creation and mandates of scientific councils, secretariats, national academies, international cooperation departments and ministries are analyzed. The study reveals several public management challenges stemming from the institutional disparity and complexity of the region, already marked by significant asymmetries of human development between the various countries. Highlighting and understanding such challenges may be helpful for countries in the region in developing meaningful strategies around science diplomacy

The Spitzer Extragalactic Representative Volume Survey (SERVS): The Environments of High-z SDSS Quasi-Stellar-Objects

This paper presents a study of the environments of SDSS Quasi-Stellar-Objects (QSOs) in the Spitzer Extragalactic Representative Volume Survey (SERVS). We concentrate on the high-redshift QSOs as these have not been studied in large numbers with data of this depth before. We use the IRAC 3.6-4.5{\mu}m colour of objects and ancillary r-band data to filter out as much foreground contamination as possible. This technique allows us to find a significant (> 4-{\sigma}) over-density of galaxies around QSOs in a redshift bin centred on z ~ 2.0 and a (> 2-{\sigma}) over-density of galaxies around QSOs in a redshift bin centred on z ~ 3.3. We compare our findings to the predictions of a semi-analytic galaxy formation model, based on the {\Lambda}CDM millennium simulation, and find for both redshift bins that the model predictions match well the source-density we have measured from the SERVS data.Comment: 13 pages, 12 figures, Accepted by Ap

The Spitzer Extragalactic Representative Volume Survey (SERVS): Survey Definition and Goals

We present the Spitzer Extragalactic Representative Volume Survey (SERVS), an 18 deg^2 medium-deep survey at 3.6 and 4.5 μm with the postcryogenic Spitzer Space Telescope to ≈2 μJy (AB = 23.1) depth of five highly observed astronomical fields (ELAIS-N1, ELAIS-S1, Lockman Hole, Chandra Deep Field South, and XMM-LSS). SERVS is designed to enable the study of galaxy evolution as a function of environment from z ∼ 5 to the present day and is the first extragalactic survey that is both large enough and deep enough to put rare objects such as luminous quasars and galaxy clusters at z ≳ 1 into their cosmological context. SERVS is designed to overlap with several key surveys at optical, near- through far-infrared, submillimeter, and radio wavelengths to provide an unprecedented view of the formation and evolution of massive galaxies. In this article, we discuss the SERVS survey design, the data processing flow from image reduction and mosaicking to catalogs, and coverage of ancillary data from other surveys in the SERVS fields. We also highlight a variety of early science results from the survey