Water Ice in 2060 Chiron and its Implications for Centaurs and Kuiper Belt Objects

We report the detection of water ice in the Centaur 2060 Chiron, based on near-infrared spectra (1.0 - 2.5 micron) taken with the 3.8-meter United Kingdom Infrared Telescope (UKIRT) and the 10-meter Keck Telescope. The appearance of this ice is correlated with the recent decline in Chiron's cometary activity: the decrease in the coma cross-section allows previously hidden solid-state surface features to be seen. We predict that water ice is ubiquitous among Centaurs and Kuiper Belt objects, but its surface coverage varies from object to object, and thus determines its detectability and the occurrence of cometary activity.Comment: 18 pages, 3 figures, accepted by ApJ Letter

Population of the Scattered Kuiper Belt

We present the discovery of three new Scattered Kuiper Belt Objects (SKBOs) from a wide-field survey of the ecliptic. This continuing survey has to date covered 20.2 square degrees to a limiting red magnitude of 23.6. We combine the data from this new survey with an existing survey conducted at the University of Hawaii 2.2m telescope to constrain the number and mass of the SKBOs. The SKBOs are characterized by large eccentricities, perihelia near 35 AU, and semi-major axes > 50 AU. Using a maximum-likelihood model, we estimate the total number of SKBOs larger than 100 km in diameter to be N = 3.1 (+1.9/-1.3) x 10^4 (1 sigma) and the total mass of SKBOs to be about 0.05 Earth masses, demonstrating that the SKBOs are similar in number and mass to the Kuiper Belt inside 50 AU.Comment: 15 pages, 3 figure

Exploring whole body interaction and design for museums

Museums increasingly use digital technology to enhance exhibition experiences for families, notably in relation to physically mediated installations for young children through natural user interfaces. Yet little is known about how families and children engage with such installations and the kinds of interactive experiences they engender in museum spaces. This paper addresses a pressing need for research to adopt an analytical focus on the body during such digitally mediated interactions in order to understand how bodily interaction contributes to meaning making in the museum context. It reports an observation study of families and children interacting with a whole-body interface (using Kinect) in the context of an installation in a museum exhibit on rare Chinese paintings. The study shows how the installation design engenders particular forms of bodily interaction, collaboration and meaning making. It also contributes design insights into whole-body interaction installations in museums and public spaces

Mobile experiences of historical place: a multimodal analysis of emotional engagement

This article explores how to research the opportunities for emotional engagement that mobile technologies provide for the design and enactment of learning environments. In the context of mobile technologies that foster location-based linking, we make the case for the centrality of in situ real-time observational research on how emotional engagement unfolds and for the inclusion of bodily aspects of interaction. We propose that multimodal methods offer tools for observing emotion as a central facet of person–environment interaction and provide an example of these methods put into practice for a study of emotional engagement in mobile history learning. A multimodal analysis of video data from 16 pairs of 9- to 10-year-olds learning about the World War II history of their local Common is used to illustrate how students’ emotional engagement was supported by their use of mobile devices through multimodal layering and linking of stimuli, the creation of digital artifacts, and changes in pace. These findings are significant for understanding the role of digital augmentation in fostering emotional engagement in history learning, informing how digital augmentation can be designed to effectively foster emotional engagement for learning, and providing insight into the benefits of multimodality as an analytical approach for examining emotion through bodily interaction

Future touch in industry: exploring sociotechnical imaginaries of tactile (tele)robots

This paper explores sociotechnical imaginaries for industrial robotics. It is motivated by the prospect of promoting human-centred industrial futures. Investigating the tactility of labour through a critical social perspective the research attends to the future of tactile (tele)robots and elaborates on the concepts of pedagogic, collaborative and superhuman touch. These concepts are offered as starting points to foster productive dialogues between social scientists, roboticists, environmentalists, policy makers, industrial leaders and labourers (e.g. union representatives). This paper is framed through literature and ethnographic fieldwork that contextualises and maps the dominant sociotechnical imaginaries for a future touch in industry, identifying the role of a comparative-competitive frame in sustaining a splintering of the imaginary towards utopic and dystopic extremes. Against this, the paper draws on interviews with leading roboticists to chart alternative futures where humans and robots may work together as collaborators, not competitors

Filtering Touch: An Ethnography of Dirt, Danger, and Industrial Robots

“Industry 4.0” marks the advent of a new wave of industrial robotics designed to bring increased automation to “extreme” touch practices and enhance productivity. This article presents an ethnography of touch in two industrial settings using fourth generation industrial robots (a Glass Factory and a Waste Management Center) to critically explore the social and sensorial implications of such technologies for workers. We attend to manifestations of dirt and danger as encountered through describing workers’ sensory experiences and identity formation. The contribution of the article is two-fold. The first is analytical through the development of three “filters” to grasp the complexity of the social and sensorial dynamics of touch in situ while tracing dispersed mediating effects of the introduction of novel technologies. The second is empirical, teasing out themes embedded in the sociosensorial dynamics of touch that intersect with gender, ethnicity, and class and relate to the technological mediation of touch

Migration of Jupiter-family comets and resonant asteroids to near-Earth space

We estimated the rate of comet and asteroid collisions with the terrestrial planets by calculating the orbits of 13000 Jupiter-crossing objects (JCOs) and 1300 resonant asteroids and computing the probabilities of collisions based on random-phase approximations and the orbital elements sampled with a 500 yr step. The Bulirsh-Stoer and a symplectic orbit integrator gave similar results for orbital evolution, but sometimes give different collision probabilities with the Sun. A small fraction of former JCOs reached orbits with aphelia inside Jupiter's orbit, and some reached Apollo orbits with semi-major axes less than 2 AU, Aten orbits, and inner-Earth orbits (with aphelia less than 0.983 AU) and remained there for millions of years. Though less than 0.1% of the total, these objects were responsible for most of the collision probability of former JCOs with Earth and Venus. Some Jupiter-family comets can reach inclinations i>90 deg. We conclude that a significant fraction of near-Earth objects could be extinct comets that came from the trans-Neptunian region.Comment: Proc. of the international conference "New trends in astrodynamics and applications" (20-22 January 2003, University of Maryland, College Park

The rotation and coma profiles of comet C/2004 Q2 (Machholz)

Aims. Rotation periods of cometary nuclei are scarce, though important when studying the nature and origin of these objects. Our aim is to derive a rotation period for the nucleus of comet C/2004 Q2 (Machholz). Methods. C/2004 Q2 (Machholz) was monitored using the Merope CCD camera on the Mercator telescope at La Palma, Spain, in January 2005, during its closest approach to Earth, implying a high spatial resolution (50km per pixel). One hundred seventy images were recorded in three different photometric broadband filters, two blue ones (Geneva U and B) and one red (Cousins I). Magnitudes for the comet's optocentre were derived with very small apertures to isolate the contribution of the nucleus to the bright coma, including correction for the seeing. Our CCD photometry also permitted us to study the coma profile of the inner coma in the different bands. Results. A rotation period for the nucleus of P = 9.1 +/- 0.2 h was derived. The period is on the short side compared to published periods of other comets, but still shorter periods are known. Nevertheless, comparing our results with images obtained in the narrowband CN filter, the possibility that our method sampled P/2 instead of P cannot be excluded. Coma profiles are also presented, and a terminal ejection velocity of the grains v_gr = 1609 +/- 48 m/s is found from the continuum profile in the I band.Comment: 11 pages, 9 figures, accepted by A&

Exploring methodological innovation in the social sciences: the body in digital environments and the arts

In this paper we examine methodological innovation in the social sciences through a focus on researching the body in digital environments. There are two strands to our argument as to why this is a useful site to explore methodological innovation in the social sciences. First, researching the body in digital environments places new methodological demands on social science. Second, as an area of interest at the intersection of the social sciences and the arts, it provides a focus for exploring how social science innovation can be informed by engagement with the arts, in this instance how the arts work with the body in digital environments and take up social science ideas in novel ways. We argue that social science engagement with the arts and the relatively unmapped terrain of the body in digital environments has the potential to open up spaces for innovative social science questions and methods: spaces, questions and methods that have potential for more general social science methodological innovation. We draw on the findings of the Methodological Innovation in Digital Arts and Social Sciences (MIDAS) project a multi-site ethnography of the research ecologies of the social sciences and the arts related to the body in digital environments. We propose a continuum of methodological innovation that attends to how methods are moved across research contexts and disciplines, in this instance the social sciences and the digital arts. We illustrate and discuss the innovative potential of expanding and re-situating methods across the social sciences and the arts, the transfer of methods and concepts across disciplinary borders and the interdisciplinary generation of new methods. We discuss the catalysts and challenges for social science methodological innovation in relation to the digital and the arts, with attention to how the social sciences might engage with the arts towards innovative research