WHY ARE THE MAGNETIC FIELD DIRECTIONS MEASURED BY VOYAGER 1 ON BOTH SIDES OF THE HELIOPAUSE SO SIMILAR?

ABSTRACT The solar wind carves a cavity in the interstellar plasma bounded by a surface, called the heliopause (HP), that separates the plasma and magnetic field of solar origin from those of interstellar origin. It is now generally accepted that in 2012 August Voyager 1 (V1) crossed that boundary. Unexpectedly, the magnetic fields on both sides of the HP, although theoretically independent of each other, were found to be similar in direction. This delayed the identification of the boundary as the HP and led to many alternative explanations. Here, we show that the Voyager 1 observations can be readily explained and, after the Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) discovery of the ribbon, could even have been predicted. Our explanation relies on the fact that the Voyager 1 and undisturbed interstellar field directions (which we assume to be given by the IBEX ribbon center (RC)) share the same heliolatitude (∼34. • 5) and are not far separated in longitude (difference ∼27 • ). Our result confirms that Voyager 1 has indeed crossed the HP and offers the first independent confirmation that the IBEX RC is in fact the direction of the undisturbed interstellar magnetic field. For Voyager 2, we predict that the difference between the inner and outer magnetic field directions at the HP will be significantly larger than that observed by Voyager 1 (∼30 • instead of ∼20 • ), and that the outer field direction will be close to the RC

The InSight HP^3 mole on Mars: Lessons learned from attempts to penetrate to depth in the Martian soil

The NASA InSight mission payload includes the Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package HP^3 to measure the surface heat flow. The package was designed to use a small penetrator - nicknamed the mole - to implement a string of temperature sensors in the soil to a depth of 5m. The mole itself is equipped with sensors to measure a thermal conductivity as it proceeds to depth. The heat flow would be calculated from the product of the temperature gradient and the thermal conductivity. To avoid the perturbation caused by annual surface temperature variations, the measurements would be taken at a depth between 3 m and 5 m. The mole was designed to penetrate cohesionless soil similar to Quartz sand which was expected to provide a good analogue material for Martian sand. The sand would provide friction to the buried mole hull to balance the remaining recoil of the mole hammer mechanism that drives the mole forward. Unfortunately, the mole did not penetrate more than a mole length of 40 cm. The failure to penetrate deeper was largely due to a few tens of centimeter thick cohesive duricrust that failed to provide the required friction. Although a suppressor mass and spring in the hammer mechanism absorbed much of the recoil, the available mass did not allow a system that would have eliminated the recoil. The mole penetrated to 40 cm depth benefiting from friction provided by springs in the support structure from which it was deployed. It was found in addition that the Martian soil provided unexpected levels of penetration resistance that would have motivated to designing a more powerful mole. It is concluded that more mass would have allowed to design a more robust system with little or no recoil, more energy of the mole hammer mechanism and a more massive support structure.Comment: 34 pages, 15 figures, submitted to Adnaves in Space Researc

The InSight-HP³ mole on Mars: Lessons learned from attempts to penetrate to depth in the Martian soil

The NASA InSight lander mission to Mars payload includes the Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package HP3 to measure the surface heat flow. The package was designed to use a small penetrator - nicknamed the mole - to implement a vertical string of temperature sensors in the soil to a depth of 5 m. The mole itself is equipped with sensors to measure a thermal conductivity-depth profile as it proceeds to depth. The heat flow is calculated from the product of the temperature gradient and the thermal conductivity. To avoid the perturbation caused by annual surface temperature variations, the measurements need to be taken at a depth between 3 m and 5 m. The mole is designed to penetrate cohesionless soil similar in rheology to quartz sand which is expected to provide a good analogue material for Martian sand. The sand would provide friction to the buried mole hull to balance the remaining recoil of the mole hammer mechanism that drives the mole forward. Unfortunately, the mole did not penetrate more than 40 cm, roughly a mole length. The failure to penetrate deeper is largely due to a cohesive duricrust of a few tens of centimeter thickness that failed to provide the required friction. Although a suppressor mass and spring as part of the mole hammer mechanism absorb much of the recoil, the available mass did not allow designing a system that fully eliminated the recoil. The mole penetrated to 40 cm depth benefiting from friction provided by springs in the support structure from which it was deployed and from friction and direct support provided by the InSight Instrument Deployment Arm. In addition, the Martian soil provided unexpected levels of penetration resistance that would have motivated designing a more powerful mole. The low weight of the mole support structure was not sufficient to guide the mole penetrating vertically. Roughly doubling the overall mass of the instrument package would have allowed to design a more robust system with little or no recoil, more energy of the mole hammer mechanism and a more massive support structure. In addition, to cope with duricrust a mechanism to support the mole to a depth of about two mole lengths should be considered

Microglia Are Mediators of Borrelia burgdorferi–Induced Apoptosis in SH-SY5Y Neuronal Cells

Inflammation has long been implicated as a contributor to pathogenesis in many CNS illnesses, including Lyme neuroborreliosis. Borrelia burgdorferi is the spirochete that causes Lyme disease and it is known to potently induce the production of inflammatory mediators in a variety of cells. In experiments where B. burgdorferi was co-cultured in vitro with primary microglia, we observed robust expression and release of IL-6 and IL-8, CCL2 (MCP-1), CCL3 (MIP-1α), CCL4 (MIP-1β) and CCL5 (RANTES), but we detected no induction of microglial apoptosis. In contrast, SH-SY5Y (SY) neuroblastoma cells co-cultured with B. burgdorferi expressed negligible amounts of inflammatory mediators and also remained resistant to apoptosis. When SY cells were co-cultured with microglia and B. burgdorferi, significant neuronal apoptosis consistently occurred. Confocal microscopy imaging of these cell cultures stained for apoptosis and with cell type-specific markers confirmed that it was predominantly the SY cells that were dying. Microarray analysis demonstrated an intense microglia-mediated inflammatory response to B. burgdorferi including up-regulation in gene transcripts for TLR-2 and NFκβ. Surprisingly, a pathway that exhibited profound changes in regard to inflammatory signaling was triggering receptor expressed on myeloid cells-1 (TREM1). Significant transcript alterations in essential p53 pathway genes also occurred in SY cells cultured in the presence of microglia and B. burgdorferi, which indicated a shift from cell survival to preparation for apoptosis when compared to SY cells cultured in the presence of B. burgdorferi alone. Taken together, these findings indicate that B. burgdorferi is not directly toxic to SY cells; rather, these cells become distressed and die in the inflammatory surroundings generated by microglia through a bystander effect. If, as we hypothesized, neuronal apoptosis is the key pathogenic event in Lyme neuroborreliosis, then targeting microglial responses may be a significant therapeutic approach for the treatment of this form of Lyme disease

Insight into Microevolution of Yersinia pestis by Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats

BACKGROUND: Yersinia pestis, the pathogen of plague, has greatly influenced human history on a global scale. Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeat (CRISPR), an element participating in immunity against phages' invasion, is composed of short repeated sequences separated by unique spacers and provides the basis of the spoligotyping technology. In the present research, three CRISPR loci were analyzed in 125 strains of Y. pestis from 26 natural plague foci of China, the former Soviet Union and Mongolia were analyzed, for validating CRISPR-based genotyping method and better understanding adaptive microevolution of Y. pestis. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Using PCR amplification, sequencing and online data processing, a high degree of genetic diversity was revealed in all three CRISPR elements. The distribution of spacers and their arrays in Y. pestis strains is strongly region and focus-specific, allowing the construction of a hypothetic evolutionary model of Y. pestis. This model suggests transmission route of microtus strains that encircled Takla Makan Desert and ZhunGer Basin. Starting from Tadjikistan, one branch passed through the Kunlun Mountains, and moved to the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. Another branch went north via the Pamirs Plateau, the Tianshan Mountains, the Altai Mountains and the Inner Mongolian Plateau. Other Y. pestis lineages might be originated from certain areas along those routes. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: CRISPR can provide important information for genotyping and evolutionary research of bacteria, which will help to trace the source of outbreaks. The resulting data will make possible the development of very low cost and high-resolution assays for the systematic typing of any new isolate

The InSight HP3 Penetrator (Mole) on Mars: Soil Properties Derived from the Penetration Attempts and Related Activities

The NASA InSight Lander on Mars includes the Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package HP3 to measure the surface heat flow of the planet. The package uses temperature sensors that would have been brought to the target depth of 3–5 m by a small penetrator, nicknamed the mole. The mole requiring friction on its hull to balance remaining recoil from its hammer mechanism did not penetrate to the targeted depth. Instead, by precessing about a point midway along its hull, it carved a 7 cm deep and 5–6 cm wide pit and reached a depth of initially 31 cm. The root cause of the failure – as was determined through an extensive, almost two years long campaign – was a lack of friction in an unexpectedly thick cohesive duricrust. During the campaign – described in detail in this paper – the mole penetrated further aided by friction applied using the scoop at the end of the robotic Instrument Deployment Arm and by direct support by the latter. The mole tip finally reached a depth of about 37 cm, bringing the mole back-end 1–2 cm below the surface. It reversed its downward motion twice during attempts to provide friction through pressure on the regolith instead of directly with the scoop to the mole hull. The penetration record of the mole was used to infer mechanical soil parameters such as the penetration resistance of the duricrust of 0.3–0.7 MPa and a penetration resistance of a deeper layer (> 30 cm depth) of 4.9±0.4 MPa. Using the mole’s thermal sensors, thermal conductivity and diffusivity were measured. Applying cone penetration theory, the resistance of the duricrust was used to estimate a cohesion of the latter of 2–15 kPa depending on the internal friction angle of the duricrust. Pushing the scoop with its blade into the surface and chopping off a piece of duricrust provided another estimate of the cohesion of 5.8 kPa. The hammerings of the mole were recorded by the seismometer SEIS and the signals were used to derive P-wave and S-wave velocities representative of the topmost tens of cm of the regolith. Together with the density provided by a thermal conductivity and diffusivity measurement using the mole’s thermal sensors, the elastic moduli were calculated from the seismic velocities. Using empirical correlations from terrestrial soil studies between the shear modulus and cohesion, the previous cohesion estimates were found to be consistent with the elastic moduli. The combined data were used to derive a model of the regolith that has an about 20 cm thick duricrust underneath a 1 cm thick unconsolidated layer of sand mixed with dust and above another 10 cm of unconsolidated sand. Underneath the latter, a layer more resistant to penetration and possibly containing debris from a small impact crater is inferred. The thermal conductivity increases from 14 mW/m K to 34 mW/m K through the 1 cm sand/dust layer, keeps the latter value in the duricrust and the sand layer underneath and then increases to 64 mW/m K in the sand/gravel layer below

Design concepts for the Cherenkov Telescope Array CTA: an advanced facility for ground-based high-energy gamma-ray astronomy

Ground-based gamma-ray astronomy has had a major breakthrough with the impressive results obtained using systems of imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes. Ground-based gamma-ray astronomy has a huge potential in astrophysics, particle physics and cosmology. CTA is an international initiative to build the next generation instrument, with a factor of 5-10 improvement in sensitivity in the 100 GeV-10 TeV range and the extension to energies well below 100 GeV and above 100 TeV. CTA will consist of two arrays (one in the north, one in the south) for full sky coverage and will be operated as open observatory. The design of CTA is based on currently available technology. This document reports on the status and presents the major design concepts of CTA

Initial results from the InSight mission on Mars

NASA’s InSight (Interior exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) mission landed in Elysium Planitia on Mars on 26 November 2018. It aims to determine the interior structure, composition and thermal state of Mars, as well as constrain present-day seismicity and impact cratering rates. Such information is key to understanding the differentiation and subsequent thermal evolution of Mars, and thus the forces that shape the planet’s surface geology and volatile processes. Here we report an overview of the first ten months of geophysical observations by InSight. As of 30 September 2019, 174 seismic events have been recorded by the lander’s seismometer, including over 20 events of moment magnitude Mw = 3–4. The detections thus far are consistent with tectonic origins, with no impact-induced seismicity yet observed, and indi- cate a seismically active planet. An assessment of these detections suggests that the frequency of global seismic events below approximately Mw = 3 is similar to that of terrestrial intraplate seismic activity, but there are fewer larger quakes; no quakes exceeding Mw = 4 have been observed. The lander’s other instruments—two cameras, atmospheric pressure, temperature and wind sensors, a magnetometer and a radiometer—have yielded much more than the intended supporting data for seismometer noise characterization: magnetic field measurements indicate a local magnetic field that is ten-times stronger than orbital estimates and meteorological measurements reveal a more dynamic atmosphere than expected, hosting baroclinic and gravity waves and convective vortices. With the mission due to last for an entire Martian year or longer, these results will be built on by further measurements by the InSight lander