Preventing and managing plant diseases (2008)

"New 4/08/2M.""Master Gardener.

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

Soybean diseases (2008)

"New 9/00; Revised 6/08/6M.""This publication is part of a series of IPM Manuals prepared by the Plant Protection Programs of the University of Missouri. Topics covered in the series include an introduction to scouting, weed identification and management, plant diseases, and insects of field and horticultural crops.""Plant protection programs : College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources.""Integrated pest management.

Soybean rust

"Asian soybean rust is a serious foliage disease that has the potential to cause significant soybean yield losses. Although Asian soybean rust was identified on soybean plants in Hawaii in 1994, the disease was not reported in the continental United States until the fall of 2004. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) released an official notice of the confirmation of soybean rust on soybean leaf samples collected in Louisiana on November 10, 2004. Over the next few weeks the fungus was detected on plants from a number of additional states, including Missouri. Now that Asian soybean rust has been found in the continental United States, it is critical that anyone involved in soybean production be familiar with the disease and its identification and management."--Page 1.Laura E. Sweets (Department of Plant Microbiology and Pathology and Commercial Agriculture Program), J. Allen Wrather (Department of Plant Microbiology and Pathology, Delta Research Center), Simeon Wright (Plant Diagnostic Clinic)New 12/04/15MIncludes bibliographical reference

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

Ptolemy: operations at 21 Lutetia as part of the Rosetta mission and future implications

The Rosetta mission and Ptolemy: Rosetta is the European Space Agency ‘Planetary Cornerstone’ mission intended to solve many of the unanswered questions surrounding the small bodies of the Solar System – the comets, the asteroids and the trans-Neptunians. Launched in March 2004 it is now over halfway through its cruise, leading up to entering orbit around the nucleus of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in mid-2014. To date, this cruise has included three gravitational assist manoeuvres using Earth and one such manoeuvre using the gravity well of Mars, necessary to match the orbit of Rosetta to that of the target comet. In addition, targeted flybys of two asteroids have returned a plethora of data to be compared with the comet observations to come. These flybys were of the 5.3 km diameter E-type asteroid 2867 Šteins on September 5th 2008, and a similar 3,162 km flyby of the 100 km diameter asteroid 21 Lutetia on July 10th 2010, the focus of this work

The Lunar Volatile Resources Analysis Package

The presence and abundance of lunar volatiles is an important consideration for ISRU (In Situ Resource Utilisation) since this is likely to be a part of a strategy for supporting long term human exploration of the moon. The Lunar Volatile Resources Analysis Package (L-VRAP) is part of the provisional payload for the ESA European Lander [1] and aims to measure the abundance and chemical/isotopic composition of volatiles from regolith samples and the lunar exosphere

Ice cloud formation potential by free tropospheric particles from long-range transport over the Northern Atlantic Ocean

Long-range transported free tropospheric particles can play a significant role on heterogeneous ice nucleation. Using optical and electron microscopy we examine the physicochemical characteristics of ice nucleating particles (INPs). Particles were collected on substrates from the free troposphere at the remote Pico Mountain Observatory in the Azores Islands, after long-range transport and aging over the Atlantic Ocean. We investigate four specific events to study the ice formation potential by the collected particles with different ages and transport patterns. We use single-particle analysis, as well as bulk analysis to characterize particle populations. Both analyses show substantial differences in particle composition between samples from the four events; in addition, single-particle microscopy analysis indicates that most particles are coated by organic material. The identified INPs contained mixtures of dust, aged sea salt and soot, and organic material acquired either at the source or during transport. The temperature and relative humidity (RH) at which ice formed, varied only by 5% between samples, despite differences in particle composition, sources, and transport patterns. We hypothesize that this small variation in the onset RH may be due to the coating material on the particles. This study underscores and motivates the need to further investigate how long-range transported and atmospherically aged free tropospheric particles impact ice cloud formatio