Japanese nuclear plant worker discusses choice to sacrifice his life

As Japan continues to grapple with catastrophic radiation leaks at the quake-damaged Fukushima Daichii nuclear complex, the plant's remaining workers have shown heroic dedication in the face of a task that amounts to a likely suicide mission.

The global audience following the Japanese nuclear drama has learned a little about these selfless heroes. But some of the most basic questions about them--who they are and what has motivated them to make the ultimate sacrifice--have gone unanswered. Now, however, the Agence France Press reporter Kimi De Freytas has published an interview with one of the Fukushima workers that sheds considerable light on how they understand their mission--and how they are holding up under under the extraordinary, mortal stress they are facing.

Hiroyuki Kohno, a 44-year-old plant worker who's been employed in the nuclear industry since he was a teenager, promptly answered the emergency call issued by his employer, a subcontractor for the Tokyo Electric Power Company. Shortly after last March's devastating earthquake and tsunami produced a power outage at the facility, Kohno's employers sent out an all-hands appeal via email.

"Attention. We would like you to come work at the plant. Can you?" De Freytas reports the email read. Kohno, who has worked at the Fukushima facility for the past decade, said he knew what the implications of heeding the call would be.

"To be honest, no one wants to go," Kohno told De Freytas. "Radiation levels at the plant are unbelievably high compared with normal conditions. I know that when I go this time, I will return with a body no longer capable of work at a nuclear plant."

Kohno told De Freytas that as a single man with no children, he felt obligated to answer the call and join the team that the media has dubbed the "Fukushima Fifty." Better that he face the risk, he explained, so as to spare his colleagues who have dependents counting on them. Besides, he added, the workers in the plant are his brothers and sisters, and he feels an allegiance to them.

"There's a Japanese expression: 'We eat from the same bowl.' These are friends I shared pain and laughter with. That's why I'm going," he explained to De Freytas.

Other workers among the Fukushima Fifty have apparently discussed the dire prospects ahead fairly openly. As the unidentified mother of a 32-year-old plant worker explained in a tearful phone interview with Fox News, "My son and his colleagues have discussed it at length and they have committed themselves to die if necessary to save the nation." Meanwhile, plant officials have sought to supplement the ranks of workers seeking to contain the spread of radioactive contamination from the facility with workers known as "jumpers"—contract employees who agree to complete designated tasks before fleeing in the hopes that they can shun sustained radioactive exposure. Workers in the "jumper" corps are being offered as much as $5,000 a day, Reuters reports—and many are still turning the offers down.

While the fate of Kohno and his fellow workers remains uncertain, their fellow citizens are already determined to commemorate their heroism.

Source: Yahoo! News

Big Dipper's Stars Pour on the Shine in Northern Sky

This sky map shows how the constellation Ursa Major, the Great Bear, appears in the night sky from mid-latitudes of North America at about 9 p.m. local time.
Credit: Starry Night Software

As the month of April begins, the northeastern U.S. states are experiencing an "Indian Winter" to — a lingering cold season well past the equinox — the way warm weather often hangs on into October, giving us Indian summer. And it seems that even the winter constellations are leaving us somewhat begrudgingly.

As darkness falls, the stars of Orion and his brilliant retinue are still readily visible well up in the southwest sky. And a month from now when it gets dark, those winter stars will still be visible, albeit hanging close to the western horizon.

Not too long thereafter, they will all be gone, reappearing in the eastern sky at the break of dawn in mid-summer.

A big dipper for spring

But as if to compensate for the loss of our brilliant winter stars, nature has provided us with a striking and well-known pattern to gaze at during the evening: the Big Dipper.

The seven stars of the Big Dipper are actually part of larger constellation, but can be easily recognized almost directly overhead at around midnight local time.

While many Americans recognize the ladle-shaped pattern as the Big Dipper, many other cultures regard as some kind of carriage or wheeled vehicle. In the United Kingdom, it's called the Plough.

Regardless of what these seven stars portray to various peoples, to Western civilization they have always been part of the larger Great Bear constellation, which we call Ursa Major.

The stars immediately to the west and south of the bowl of the Dipper form a pretty good stick figure of this creature. Only the bear’s tail, a longish one composed of the three stars that form the Dipper’s handle, is out of place since bears on Earth possess short, stubby ones.

Here’s an aside to our Internet friends who live in below the equator in the Southern Hemisphere: This is the time of year that you’ll get your best views of Ursa Major and the Big Dipper. But instead of appearing overhead, as they do in the Northern Hemisphere, the star patterns are oriented in the northern part of the sky. So the farther south one goes, the lower in the north the star patterns will get.

Still in view far south

Probably the most unusual view of the Big Dipper that I ever had was when I led a Halley’s Comet tour to Easter Island in April 1986.

From a latitude of 27.1 degrees south, I could see the Dipper hovering just above the northern horizon – upside down! Interestingly, back home in the fall, I can see the Dipper sitting at a similar distance above my local northern horizon, but right-side-up.

The upside-down Dipper, however, can now be glimpsed as far south as 30 degrees south latitude, which includes many far-southerly locations, such as Johannesburg, South Africa; Asuncion, Paraguay; and Sao Paulo, Brazil.

On page 24 of what I think is one of the very best guides to the constellations, “The Stars – A new way to see them” (available from Houghton-Mifflin Co., Boston), author H.A. Rey sketched a kangaroo with a baby joey in her pouch. The caption reads: “The Dipper? Never seen it …"

However, much of Australia can also see the Dipper now, as about three-quarters of the land area of that country is located above latitude 30 degrees south. But unfortunately, most of that country’s population is distributed below that imaginary line!

Now about that tail …

What is really remarkable about the Big Dipper stars is that in one way or another they’ve always comprised a bear to widely separated early peoples – not only to Old World ancients but to New World Indian tribes as well.

But over the years, in pointing out the Great Bear to audiences either in the Space Theater of New York’s Hayden Planetarium or under the real night sky, I have had to spend a minute or two trying to explain away the Bear’s unusually long tail. Perhaps the most common reason given is the one attributed to the British humorist and poet, Thomas Hood (1799-1845):

Hood wrote (with original spellings): “Imagine that Jupiter, fearing to come too nigh unto her teeth, layde holde on her tayle, and thereby drewe her up into the heaven; so that shee of herself being very weightie, and the distance from the Earth to the heavens very great, there was a great likelihood that her tayle must stretch. Other reason know I none.”

Source: Space.com

NASA: Mysterious Fireball Season Set to Light Up Night Sky

Spring has arrived in the Northern Hemisphere, which means that birds are chirping, flowers are blooming — and fireballs are lighting up the sky, NASA says.

For some mysterious reason, the number of fireballs — dramatic meteors that blaze brighter than any planet when they burn up in Earth's atmosphere — peaks at this time of year.

"Spring is fireball season," said Bill Cooke, of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Center, in a statement. "For reasons we don't fully understand, the rate of bright meteors climbs during the weeks around the vernal equinox." [Spectacular Leonid Meteor Photos]

Most of the year, a person gazing skyward from dusk to dawn can expect to see about 10 random — or "sporadic" — fireballs, researchers said. These bright shooting stars result when space rocks — fragments of broken asteroids and decaying comets — plow into Earth's atmosphere.

But in spring, the number of sporadic fireballs climbs by 10 to 30 percent.

"We've known about this phenomenon for more than 30 years," Cooke said. "It's not only fireballs that are affected. Meteorite falls — space rocks that actually hit the ground — are more common in spring as well."

The reasons for the surge of fireballs and meteorites remain mysterious — especially considering that the number of ordinary meteors peaks in the Northern Hemisphere's autumn season. At that time of year, Earth seems to sweep up a higher number of space rocks, and skywatchers can see dozens of normal-brightness meteors per night, researchers said.

"Autumn is the season for sporadic meteors," Cooke said. "So why are the sporadic fireballs peaking in spring? That is the mystery."

Some scientists think that the meteoroid population along Earth's orbit might vary with time, with a peak in big fireball-producing space rocks coming around spring and early summer. But more research needs to be done.

"We probably won't know the answer until we learn more about their orbits," said meteoroid expert Peter Brown of the University of Western Ontario.

Cooke is working to do just that. He's setting up a network of smart meteor cameras around the country to photograph fireballs and triangulate their orbits. Networked observations of spring fireballs could ultimately reveal their origin, researchers said.

But you don't have to know where fireballs come from to appreciate them. So go outside, crane your neck up on a clear night, and enjoy some of the blazing heralds of spring.

Source: Space.com

Sun Fades Away in Spectacular Eclipse Photo

A powerful NASA solar observatory has snapped an amazing view of the sun, a photo that shows the star partially obscured by the Earth.

The photo, obtained Tuesday (March 29) by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, was taken during the spacecraft's so-called eclipse season – a period of the year when the satellite slips behind Earth for up to 72 minutes of every day.

Sometimes, as the spacecraft swings behind the Earth, the probe is able to catch views of the planet as it blocks the sun. The result is an eerie view in which the sun's bright disk gradually fades from view.

The image is a striking departure from other SDO photos that show the moon eclipsing the sun, known as lunar transits, which cut a crisp shadowy bite out of the star. [Amazing New Sun Photos From Space]

"Earth's shadow has a variegated edge due to its atmosphere, which blocks the sun light to different degrees depending on its density," NASA scientists explained in a photo description. "Also, light from brighter spots on the sun may make it through, which is why some solar features extend low into Earth's shadow."

NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory experiences two eclipses seasons every year. The observatory was launched last year and is equipped with several high-definition cameras to beam back stunning views of the sun in different wavelengths.

The $850 million solar observatory is expected to last five years.

Source: Space.com

Scarred by Comets: Rings of Saturn and Jupiter Show Signs of Impacts

Strange formations in the rings around Saturn and Jupiter are the telltale marks of dramatic comet impacts that occurred in the last few decades, two new studies suggest.

The newly discovered ripples show that bits of a broken-up comet likely plowed through Saturn's C ring, one of many around the planet, back in 1983 — an event that went undetected by astronomers at the time. Similar structures appeared in Jupiter's gossamer rings in 1994, when the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 slammed into that gas giant's southern hemisphere, researchers said.

The new findings show that rings can act as historical documents, chronicling the violent pasts of their parent planets, researchers said. [Photos: Jupiter Struck by Space Rock Again]

"We may have a new record of the bombardment history of the outer solar system recorded in these rings," said Matt Hedman of Cornell University, lead author of one of the studies and a co-author on the other one. "It just shows you again how rings can be useful for studying the outer solar system."

Ripples in the rings

The researchers used observations from several different NASA spacecraft to detect the ring ripples.

By poring over data and images the Cassini probe took in August 2009 — when the sun illuminated Saturn's rings edge-on — Hedman and his team noticed waves extending across the planet's entire C ring. These formations have an amplitude of 6.6 to 66 feet (2 to 20 meters), and a wavelength of 18.6 to 49.7 miles (30 to 80 kilometers), researchers said.

In the other study, researchers led by Mark Showalter of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute saw two similar patterns in Jupiter's main ring. The ripples showed up in images taken by the Galileo spacecraft in 1996 and 2000, and by the New Horizons probe in 2007.

After characterizing and analyzing the waves, the researchers determined that they formed after the rings of the two giant planets were knocked slightly off-kilter in the past several decades. [Gallery: The Rings and Moons of Saturn]

Over time, the intially tilted ring sheets spawned the ripples through a shearing process, as the ring particles orbited Saturn and Jupiter.

"It's just a winding spiral that gets wound up more and more tightly as time goes on, and eventually it looks like a vertical corrugation," Hedman told SPACE.com. The ripples should eventually dissipate, he added, though that may take a while — perhaps a few hundred years for the Saturn formation.

The scientists think they know how the rings got tilted in the first place. Clouds of broken-up comet particles likely smashed into the planets' rings in separate events, pushing the structures slightly out of whack, researchers said.

Broken-up comet crumbs

Sophisticated modeling work, along with careful study of the ripples' properties, told the researchers a lot about how and when the strange structures likely formed and evolved.

They were able to determine, for example, that the Saturn C-ring tilt probably resulted from a collision with a debris cloud with a mass between 220 billion to 22 trillion pounds (100 billion to 10 trillion kilograms). That's roughly as much material as a 0.6-mile-wide (1 km) comet contains.

And they figured out that the impact with the C ring happened in 1983, probably around August or September. Saturn's D ring became inclined at the same time (researchers noticed ripples in that structure back in 2007).

Jupiter's main ring, on the other hand, was likely tilted twice, with the most dramatic impact occurring sometime between July and October 1994.

This latter date range coincides with a famous comet smash on Jupiter — the impact of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, which barreled into the planet from July 16 through July 20, 1994.

"If the [Jupiter] tilting event doesn't have something to do with Shoemaker-Levy 9, that would be very surprising," Hedman said.

The most parsimonious explanation is that a similar event produced Saturn's ring tilt, too, he added — especially since alternative theories aren't nearly as persuasive.

"We've considered other ideas, but thus far we haven't come up with anything that looks as plausible," Hedman said.

Big chunks of Shoemaker-Levy 9 likely didn't pass through Jupiter's main ring on their suicide path into the planet. Rather, clouds of smaller particles — formed when the planet's gravity tore the comet apart on previous passes — are likely to blame.

The same goes for the 1983 Saturn event, as well as the other, as-yet mysterious Jupiter impact that produced the main ring's secondary pattern, researchers said.

"You need a cloud that hits a broad region of the rings," Hedman said. A big solid piece would just punch holes in the rings, he added. "It won't produce the broad-scale tilt."

The researchers report their results in the April 1 issue of the journal Science.

Outer solar system's violent past

The rings of Jupiter and Saturn serve as a sort of chronicle of the bombardment history of those two giant planets, according to the new studies. The rings could help astronomers better understand how many comets may be racing around the sun.

"This could potentially provide some useful constraints on the number of small bodies running around the outer solar system," Hedman said.

The 1983 comet crash suggests that such impacts may be more common than researchers had previously believed.

"The outer solar system may be a more dynamic place than we sometimes give it credit for," Hedman said. "Maybe these events — where something crashes into the giant planets — aren't as rare as we might have originally thought."

Source: http://www.space.com/11269-comet-impacts-saturn-jupiter-rings.html

Saturn Returns to Earth's Evening Sky

The ringed planet Saturn is back in the evening sky.

Saturn reaches opposition – the time when it is exactly opposite the sun in the sky – on the night of April 3 and early morning of April 4. One side effect of this is that Saturn is now in the sky all night long, rising in the east as the sun sets, and then setting in the west when the sun rises.

As the most distant of the naked-eye planets (Uranus technically can be seen with the naked eye, but it takes a sharp eye and knowledge of its exact location), Saturn gets the least sunlight and so reflects the least amount of light back to Earth.

As a result, Saturn is not as bright as the other naked-eye planets. This sky map of Saturn shows where to find the ringed planet in the evening sky.

How to spot Saturn

Here's another way to find Saturn: Follow the arc of the Big Dipper's handle to Arcturus and then speed on to Spica. Make a sharp left at Spica and there you will find Saturn.

Almost every amateur astronomer remembers Saturn as one of their first views through the telescope. Although much smaller than most people expect from the pictures they’ve seen, Saturn with its rings is a uniquely beautiful and captivating sight.

Seeing the rings requires a telescope magnifying at least 20 times, but Saturn can handle just about any magnification above that.

For the last two years, most people have been disappointed because Saturn's famous rings have been "edge on" to Earth. Saturn’s rings are tilted towards a particular point in the sky so that as Saturn travels in its orbit around the sun, sometimes the rings are presented towards us and at other times they disappear when the Earth is in the same plane as the rings.

Having been next to invisible for the past two years, the rings are now revealing their northern surface towards the Earth.

In a telescope, look for the dark division between the main inner and outer rings. This is named Cassini’s Division after 17th century astronomer Giovanni Domenico Cassini, who first discovered it.

Search for Saturn's moons

Cassini also discovered Saturn's four brightest moons, all of which can be seen in a 4-inch telescope. He was particularly interested in the moon Iapetus which showed interesting variations as it moves around the planet.

Cassini correctly surmised was due to one hemisphere being darker than the other. This was recently confirmed by NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which is named for Giovanni, and is currently in orbit around Saturn.

Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, is the only moon in the solar system with an appreciable atmosphere and is readily visible in any small telescope. The smaller moons come into view with larger telescopes.

Source: http://www.space.com/11262-saturn-skywatching-tips-evening-sky.html

Japan nuke workers ‘have committed themselves to die if necessary’

The mother of one of the atomic "samurai" working to bring Japan's stricken nuclear plant under control has said her son and his colleagues expect to die as a result of their efforts. Meanwhile, there are reports that additional workers are being offered big money to dash into the radiation-drenched heart of the Fukushima Daiichi plant, perform a job, then withdraw.

In a phone interview with Fox News, the tearful mother of a 32-year-old worker said: "My son and his colleagues have discussed it at length and they have committed themselves to die if necessary to save the nation."

"He told me they have accepted they will all probably die from radiation sickness in the short term or cancer in the long term," the woman added.

"They know it is impossible for them not to have been exposed to lethal doses of radiation."

The woman did not give her name, because she said the workers had been asked by management not to speak publicly about their ordeal, in order to minimize panic.

There are also indications that the workers aren't being provided with some crucial safety equipment. Japan's interior minister said that not all of the workers were given lead sheeting to protect themselves from the floor--which may be contaminated by radiation--while sleeping.

"My son has been sleeping on a desk because he is afraid to lie on the floor. But they say high radioactivity is everywhere and I think this will not save him," said the mother.

In another bleak sign, there are reports of additional workers being offered up to $5,000 a day to act as "jumpers"--so called because they "jump" into highly radioactive areas to quickly perform a task before fleeing with minimal exposure. But even at those rates, many candidates are turning the work down, Reuters reports.

"My company offered me 200,000 yen ($2,500) per day," one subcontractor in his 30s told a reporter."Ordinarily I'd consider that a dream job, but my wife was in tears and stopped me, so I declined."

And Ryuta Fujita, 27, told the Tokyo Shimbun newspaper he was offered $5,000 to go into Reactor 2, but likewise declined.

"I hear that guys older than 50 are being hired at high pay," Fujita said. "But I'm still young, and radiation scares me. I don't want to work in a nuclear plant again."

Last week two workers in Reactor 3 were taken to hospital after their feet were exposed to 170-180 millisieverts of radiation. The average dose for a worker at a nuclear plant is 50 millisieverts over 5 years.

Because so few workers want to venture into the plant, it's proving hard for TEPCO, that company that runs it, to assess whether efforts to cool the fuel rods are working, or even to fully diagnose the problems.

Robots are usually used for this type of work, but Fukushima's interior is so filled with debris that it's difficult for robots to operate there.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookout/20110401/ts_yblog_thelookout/japan-nuke-workers-have-committed-themselves-to-die-if-necessary