Marsport Deployable Greenhouse

To sustain a Mars exploration team, NASA\u27s reference mission IV includes a greenhouse facility requirement to supplement the crew\u27s food supply. This research project explores strategies for building, delivering, deploying, operating, and maintaining a greenhouse as a supplemental structure for the Mars environment. The MarsPort Deployable Greenhouse (MDG) addresses the issues of atmosphere, sunlight, energy, deployment mechanism, water and nutrients, crop collection, modular development for expansion, research module for Mars experimentation, and crew recreation

Marsport Deployable Greenhouse

To sustain a Mars exploration team, NASA\u27s reference mission IV includes a greenhouse facility requirement to supplement the crew\u27s food supply. This research project explores strategies for building, delivering, deploying, operating, and maintaining a greenhouse as a supplemental structure for the Mars environment. The MarsPort Deployable Greenhouse (MDG) addresses the issues of atmosphere, sunlight, energy, deployment mechanism, water and nutrients, crop collection, modular development for expansion, research module for Mars experimentation, and crew recreation

Myths, Metaphors, and Mass-Mediated Reality: U.S. Press Coverage of Bird Flu and Avian Influenza Pandemic, 1996-2006

This study examined U.S. press coverage of the H5N1 bird-flu virus and the possible influenza pandemic in the period 1996 - 2006. One elite and three regional newspapers were used. Framing analysis facilitated by the QDA Miner revealed that militaristic, race, natural disaster and Christian/biblical metaphors, as well as the myths of the “other world,” the “hero,” the “victim,” and the “plague,” created fear that helped to perpetuate the story and keep it on the media agenda. This was a story that the press constructed both scientifically and metaphorically, relying on scientific facts as well as on cultural myths and moral reasons. The social representation of bird flu and a possible influenza pandemic in U.S. press coverage resonated with representations of SARS, Ebola and other infectious diseases. The bird-flu and pandemic story was ripe with values of faith in science and scientific progress, belief and pride in good and generous people and nations, hard and persistent work in the name of public health. This was a compelling human interest story, descriptive of apocalyptic pictures, different worlds and different cultures, mysterious developments, fears of the novel, uncertain and unpredictable. Myths and metaphors, as parts of language, shared culture and understanding, helped the newspapers paint a vivid, descriptive, and informative picture of the bird-flu virus and the expectant avian influenza pandemic. There was consistency between the four newspapers. The myths and metaphors they used in their bird-flu and pandemic reports transcended the particularities of the papers. Myths and metaphors in coverage provoked and kept public interest in the topic, aided comprehension, and served as shorthand for complexity

Dynamic interaction of cracks in piezoelectric and anisotropic solids: A non-hypersingular BIEM approach

A non-hypersingular traction boundary integral equation method (BIEM) is proposed for the treatment of crack systems in piezoelectric or anisotropic plane domains loaded by time-harmonic waves. The solution is based on the frequency dependent fundamental solution obtained by Radon transform. The proposed method is flexible, numerically efficient and has virtually no limitations regarding the material type, crack geometry and type of wave loading. The accuracy and convergence of the BIEM solution for stress intensity factors is validated by comparison with existing results from the literature. Simulations for different crack configurations such as coplanar collinear or cracks in arbitrary position to each other are presented and discussed. They demonstrate among others the strong effect of electromechanical coupling, show the frequency dependent shielding and amplification resulting from crack interaction and reveal the sensitivity of the K-factors on the complex influence of both wave-crack and crack-crack interaction

Influence of Poroelasticity on the 3D Seismic Response of Complex Geological Media

Elastic wave propagation in 3D poroelastic geological media with localized heterogeneities, such as an elastic inclusion and a canyon is investigated to visualize the modification of local site responses under consideration of water saturated geomaterial. The extended computational environment herein developed is a direct Boundary Integral Equation Method (BIEM), based on the frequency-dependent fundamental solution of the governing equation in poro-visco elastodynamics. Bardet’s model is introduced in the analysis as the computationally efficient viscoelastic isomorphism to Biot’s equations of dynamic poroelasticity, thus replacing the two-phase material by a complex valued single-phase one. The potential of Bardet’s analogue is illustrated for low frequency vibrations and all simulation results demonstrate the dependency of wave field developed along the free surface on the properties of the soil material