Dark Lancaster

In this position paper we'll outline a few ongoing and planned projects at Lancaster that are not all sweetness and light. In some we are interested in some of the darker aspects of human nature: frustration when things go wrong in order to design games with the right emotional impact; and anger of those seeking jobs in order to help train those who need to defuse fraught situations. In others we deliberately seek to design ‘bad’ situations; obviously this is necessary to study issues like frustration, but also we design bad things in order to understand what is good! Finally, there are times when good is dark and the bright light of day needs to be shrouded just a little

Ptolemy: An instrument aboard the Rosetta lander Philae, to unlock the secrets of the solar system

Ptolemy is a miniature chemical analysis suite currently on board the ESA Rosetta comet lander Philae. This poster describes the operation of the instrument, and presents data generated thus far during a comprehensive ground testing programme

Supporting Medicare health, equity and efficiency in Australia: policies undermining bulk billing need to be scrapped

Forget semantics; Federal health policies that undermine bulk billing and encourage \u27user-pays\u27 charging of patients for primary care move Australia towards a US-style health care system. They are expected to cost the health system more, not A$12 billion less, and undermine Medicare\u27s bottom-line universal access equity, efficiency and health outcome objectives

Spacecraft health and environmental monitoring from a CubeSat platform

The uncertainties in the outgassing/offgassing, dust/debris, and radiation environments within and surrounding spacecraft regularly lead to operational problems with technical, scientific and ultimately economically deleterious consequences. In this paper we present the outputs of a study into a small modular spacecraft health and environmental monitoring package deployed in a standard 3U CubeSat platform that will provide real time measurements of a spacecraft's immediate environment to inform operators and on-board systems of threats to spacecraft or payload "health" via a comprehensive and correlated dataset of many related environmental parameters. We also demonstrate a mission concept with this platform deployed in LEO orbit

Gas containment for in situ sample analysis on the Moon: Utility of sealing materials in the presence of dust

Lunar dust presents a serious challenge to all operations on the Moon, whether human or robotic. It can be especially problematic in applications where it is necessary to make high integrity, gas-tight seals, such as within payloads designed for in situ analysis of lunar ices and volatiles. The challenge has been addressed within the context of the ProSPA instrument being developed for the Luna-27 mission. Soft sealing materials are preferred in order to minimise the required sealing force to enable use of lightweight actuators. JSC-1A simulant was used to test and compare the sealing performance of the elastomer Kalrez® 7075 and of Indium. It was found that both materials were able to seal at dust levels of up to 0.90 mg/cm2 with an applied force of up to 400 N. Indium offers the best sealing performance (better than 10-7 mbar.l.s-1) but Kalrez® is capable of operation at higher temperature, which may be beneficial in applications in which samples are heated to release gases for analysis

Penetrators as a deployment tool for Mass Spectrometer instrumentation

We discuss penetrator deployment systems and Mass Spectrometer (MS) based instrumentation that offer the potential for future characterization and understanding of the volatile content at the surface and near-surface of airless bodies in the Solar System. We review previous penetrator missions, systems and instrumentation, before considering future options to bodies such as the moon and small solar system bodies

The operational plans for Ptolemy during the Rosetta mission

Ptolemy is a Gas Chromatography – Isotope Ratio – Mass Spectrometer (GC-IR-MS) instrument within the Philae Lander, part of ESA’s Rosetta mission. The primary aim of Ptolemy is to analyse the chemical and isotopic composition of solid comet samples. Samples are collected by the Sampler, Drill and Distribution (SD2) system and placed into ovens for analysis by three instruments on the Lander: COSAC, ÇIVA and/or Ptolemy. In the case of Ptolemy, the ovens can be heated with or without oxygen and the evolved gases separated by chemical and GC techniques for isotopic analysis. In addition Ptolemy can measure gaseous (i.e. coma) samples by either directly measuring the ambient environment within the mass spectrometer or by passively trapping onto an adsorbent phase in order to pre-concentrate coma species before desorbing into the mass spectrometer

HCV and the hepatic lipid pathway as a potential treatment target

Atherosclerosis has been described as a liver disease of the heart. The liver is the central regulatory organ of lipid pathways but since dyslipidaemias are major contributors to cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes rather than liver disease, research in this area has not been a major focus for hepatologists. Virus-host interaction is a continuous co-evolutionary process involving the host immune system and viral escape mechanisms. One of the strategies HCV has adopted to escape immune clearance and establish persistent infection is to make use of hepatic lipid pathways. This review aims to: update the hepatologist on lipid metabolism; review the evidence that HCV exploits hepatic lipid pathways to its advantage; discuss approaches to targeting host lipid pathways as adjunctive therapy