Washington’s first student-built satellite preparing for launch
A University of Washington satellite smaller than a loaf of bread will, if all goes well, launch this weekend on its way to low-Earth orbit. It will be the first student-built satellite from Washington state to go into space.
HuskySat-1 is one of seven student-built satellites from around the country scheduled to launch at 9:30 a.m. Eastern time Saturday, Nov. 2, from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility on the Virginia coast.
“It will be exciting once it’s in orbit,” said Paige Northway, a UW doctoral student in Earth and Space Sciences who has been involved since the project’s inception. “To me, the completion will be when we can get data from the satellite and send instructions back.”
HuskySat-1’s last moments on Earth will be broadcast live on NASA TV. The satellites are hitching a ride on the Cygnus cargo spacecraft, whose first stop will be the International Space Station to resupply astronauts and swap out materials. In early 2020 the spacecraft will leave the station and fly up to an altitude of about 310 miles (500 kilometers), where a NASA engineer will eject the student-build satellites.
The UW creation is a type of CubeSat, a small satellite that measures exactly 10 centimeters (about 3 inches) along each side. HuskySat-1 is a “three-unit” system, meaning it’s the shape of a stack of three CubeSat-sized blocks. These miniature satellites were first created as a way for engineering students to test software with smaller, cheaper devices they could build from start to finish in a few years. But the devices are growing in popularity, with Planet and other companies now using nanosatellites for commercial ventures.
Small but mighty: five small things that have big impacts
To better understand big picture issues, it can sometimes be useful to bust out the magnifying glass and zoom in on the smaller details. Over the years, University of Washington College of the Environment researchers have discovered a multitude of ways in which seemingly small things can have giant impacts on much larger systems.
We’ve compiled a list of five of the best examples of things UW researchers discovered that are small, but mighty.
1. Certain animals are “keystone species” — species that entire ecosystems rely on
Pisaster ochraceus
In the 1960’s, UW Biology researcher Robert T. Paine first coined the term “keystone species”, which indicates an animal whose presence in certain habitats supports other animals and ecosystems at large. If a keystone species is removed from their habitats, entire ecosystems can collapse. The original animal that Robert T. Paine labelled as a keystone species, Pisaster ochraceus, has recently seen massive population declines in the Salish Sea as a result of sea star wasting disease. The population decline has resulted in booming sea urchin populations that are rapidly eating kelp forests relatively unchecked by their former predators.
Salmon
Salmon are another example of a keystone species in the Pacific Northwest. As they migrate inland to spawn, they carry with them essential nutrients gathered during their time spent in the open ocean. After they spawn and die, their decomposing bodies deliver nitrogen and other key nutrients to the landscapes around them, supporting riparian vegetation and more. Additionally, bears that eat the salmon later leave nutrient rich gifts near trees further from the streams. It’s also no secret to those in the PNW that salmon are essential for the health of the Southern Resident Killer Whales. Without salmon, animals and ecosystems both offshore and inland would face major challenges.
2. Leave it to beavers! These hard-working rodents play a huge role in river health
River systems can become degraded and unhealthy for many reasons. School of Aquatic and Fisheries Sciences (SAFS) researcher Gordon Holtgrieve was involved with a research team proposing that a certain semi-aquatic rodent might actually have a semi-solution to the process of river restoration. Beaver dams provide rivers with a plethora of restorative effects, including the generation of cooler pools of water for fish and the support of important riparian vegetation growth. Without hard-working beavers creating dams in river systems, restoration challenges would be much more difficult. While beavers provide some clues for more effective restoration processes, restoration ecology is is incredibly complex.
3. Tiny fish provide essential life support to large coral reef systems
Large, connected coral reefs can be some of the largest living organisms on the planet. SAFS researcher Luke Tornabene recently found that almost 60% of the fish food that organisms living in coral reefs eat comes from the tiny larvae of tiny fish like gobies and blennies. Some of these essential species have lifespans of only 65 days! Without this cycle of life and death, and the consistent flow of tasty larvae into the reef systems, the colorful, life abundant reefs (less so now due to climate change) could be far less spectacular.
4. Young prawns might be the answer to reducing one of the worst diseases on the planet
Blood flukes, small parasitic flatworms, are responsible for what the World Health Organization has designated as the second most devastating socioeconomic disease on the planet next to malaria: schistosomiasis. Before these flatworms reach adulthood and lay eggs inside humans, they first live inside intermediate freshwater snail hosts. At some point, the snail releases a free-swimming larval stage of the parasite that can directly penetrate the skin of unsuspecting humans on contact. Dams have been popping up in some regions where these freshwater snails live, with the unintended consequence of expanding the snails’ habitats. Even worse, the dams can sometimes separate the snails from one of their most common predators — prawns. Recently, SAFS’ Chelsea Woods found that reintroducing small prawns upstream from these dams can drastically reduce the prevalence of schistosomiasis in these regions. As an additional benefit, by the time the reintroduced prawns are big enough to eat, they no longer prey on the freshwater snails. So bringing back these tiny prawns will not only reduce the numbers of schistosomiasis infections, but can also contribute to the food supply!
5. Microscopic bacteria are big time neighbors for trees and plants
Trees and plants are capable of living in remarkably harsh environments. Some plants can survive in arid, scorched deserts, and others can survive at altitudes as high as 5,200 m – like the Poaceae high up on Nevado Sajama in Bolivia. While trees deserve a lot of credit for their resiliency, they wouldn’t get nearly as far without tiny little microbes. Sharon Doty from SEFS and the UW Microbiology department recently partnered to investigate how tiny microbes can actually keep trees alive in harsh conditions by delivering nitrogen or excess water when the trees communicate through chemical signaling that they need help!
Swordfish as oceanographers? Satellite tags allow research of ocean’s ‘twilight zone’ off Florida
Researchers from the University of Washington are using high-tech tags to record the movements of swordfish — big, deep-water, migratory, open-ocean fish that are poorly studied — and get a window into the ocean depths they inhabit.
The researchers tagged five swordfish in late August off the coast of Miami: Max, Simone, Anthony, Rex and Oliver. Their movements can now be viewed in near-real time. And although swordfish are a prized catch, these ones aren’t at higher risk, researchers say, since the website updates only every few hours and these fast-swimming fish spend most of their time far from shore.
This is the first time satellite position tags have successfully been placed on swordfish caught off the coast of the United States.
Earlier tags on swordfish relied on measurements of temperature and light to approximate the animal’s position, which resulted in errors greater than 60 miles (100 km). The new tags act together as a pair: One records detailed temperature, light and depth measurements as the fish is swimming, while the other beams back the precise location when the fish surfaces each day.
“That’s why we’re so excited,” Braun said. “Swordfish are a particularly good platform to help us make observations in the deep ocean, while at the same time giving us a better understanding of why and how this predator makes a living.”
World Tsunami Awareness Day: what are the risks and how can we prepare?
In the depths of the Pacific Ocean, just off the upper West Coast of the United States, a collision between an unstoppable force and an immovable object has been gathering energy for hundreds of years. The Cascadia Subduction Zone (CSZ), where the Juan de Fuca and North American tectonic plates meet, must release this pent up energy eventually in an event many refer to as “the really big one”. This release of tension could produce an earthquake with a magnitude so high that it will share a table with only five other quakes in recorded history.
The earthquake, however, will not be the only concern for residents near the coast. Shortly after the shaking stops and people begin to process what has happened, a surging wall of water will inundate some Washington State communities.
Today, World Tsunami Awareness Day, is “a good day to check in with the places you spend time,” said Carrie Garrison-Laney, a tsunami hazard specialist with Washington Sea Grant. “If you work in, or if you live in, or often visit places that are in hazard zones, inundation zones, then you need to have a little bit of extra awareness of what you will do if you feel a stronger quake.”
Tsunami sources
Hazard zones, inundation zones and the amount of time to evacuate to higher ground will change depending on the source of the earthquake, explained Garrison-Laney. Here are three of the riskiest sources:
The Cascadia Subduction Zone
The Cascadia Subduction Zone, where the Juan de Fuca plate is sliding eastward underneath the much larger North American plate, wasn’t discovered until ocean floor mapping became more widespread in the late 1960s. Still, researchers weren’t too concerned following its discovery. “There was a recognition that there was a subduction zone there, but the thought was that it was dormant or quiet,” Garrison-Laney said.
Levels of concern were low because this fault hasn’t generated any earthquakes in modern historical times, Garrison-Laney said. Other similar subduction zones around the globe, in Japan and Chile for example, have produced earthquakes in modern historical times, but this one? Silence.
In the late 1980’s, UW Earth and Space Sciences Affiliate Professor Brian Atwater, colleague David Yamaguchi and others found evidence that the CSZ was responsible for not just one, but seven earthquakes, Garrison-Laney said. In 1997, they also managed to identify the timing of the most recent quake down to the hour: January 26th, 1700, at 9:00 p.m.
Pinpointing the timing of this earthquake down to the hour, an event that occurred nearly one century before most things were written down in North America, required piecing together a complex puzzle. Earthquake induced avalanches of seafloor mud and coastal tsunami sand deposits told one part of the story. Orphan waves, or waves unassociated with earthquakes, appear in Japanese historical records around the year 1700 — the same year that tree ring analyses by Atwater and Yamaguchi pointed to sudden deaths of “ghost trees” along the West Coast as the land they stood on quickly subsided multiple meters into saltwater below. Pacific Northwest Native Americans have passed down stories of shaking and flooding over multiple generations, further corroborating other evidence. Tsunami models limited the source of these waves to just one area of the globe: the CSZ. For a more detailed and complete explanation of the remarkable efforts that went into identifying the timing of the most recent Cascadia Quake, read The Orphan Tsunami of 1700: Japanese Clues to a Parent Earthquake in 1700.
A tsunami resulting from a subduction zone quake could be immensely powerful and devastating to the Pacific coastal communities. However, while a tsunami from a Cascadia quake would definitely reach Seattle, Garrison-Laney said, the wave would not be nearly as big as it would be on the coast, although currents would still be strong. Additionally, a Cascadia tsunami wouldn’t reach coastal communities for 15-20 minutes, giving people more time to get to higher ground.
The Seattle fault zone
Far more concerning to the Seattle area, but much less likely to occur anytime soon, would be a tsunami resulting from an earthquake in the Seattle Fault Zone (SFZ). This fault zone passes East to West underneath the city, and would bring massive waves into the densely packed city, and much more quickly following the earthquake shakes. A tsunami from an SFZ earthquake could give people only 1-2 minutes to get to higher ground.
Evidence of one of these earthquakes happening 1100 years ago exists, Garrison-Laney said, and if the exact same scenario were to play out today the resultant tsunami would be just one small component of a much larger disaster. Fortunately, the chance of an identical event occurring in the near future is significantly lower, a function of the longer timescale between crustal quakes, and the multitude of different cracks and lines that make up the Seattle fault lowering the chances of an identical quake.
“It would be a really big disaster if that happens again like it happened before,” Garrison-Laney said. But, the way the SFZ runs through the city, makes it possible for the quake to originate in a bunch of different spots, so “there’s no guarantee that the next time there’s an earthquake it’ll unfold the same way. But that’s kind of what we have to work with.”
Deep quakes and landslides
Much more common are tsunamis generated from landslides, but the levels of devastation from these tsunamis can vary widely depending on where and when they occur. Landslides can be generated by earthquakes that happen deep in the Juan De Fuca plate, and Washington has seen several landslide generated tsunamis in the state over the past 100 years, Garrison-Laney said.
Preparation and awareness
In any tsunami scenario, seek higher ground immediately. Several resources exist that can be used to maximize the amount of time you have to respond, including an earthquake early warning system called ShakeAlert, emergency phone alerts, and Twitter notifications from earthquake and tsunami alert accounts.
Twitter, Garrison-Laney said, is actually one of the best resources for timely natural disaster alerts. If you have a Twitter account, you can follow and get notifications from an experimental National Weather Service tsunami warning account.
You can look up if the areas that you spend the most time in are within hazard or inundation zones online via the Washington State Department of Natural Resources. Washington Sea Grant also has several resources available to the public for raising tsunami awareness, including this tsunami hazard overview made by Garrison-Laney for Washington Sea Grant.
Garrison-Laney recommends additional preparation: “If I lived in a tsunami inundation zone, I would definitely have a go-bag with me, and I’d have one in my car and in my house,” she said.
Personalized go-bags can include food, water filters, flashlights and batteries, medicine, warm clothes and more. In the event of a major earthquake in the Seattle area, power could be out for months, and clean water could be hard to find, meaning go-bags could prepare you for the aftermath.
It’s also smart to leave a flashlight and a pair of shoes next to your bed at night, Garrison-Laney said. Tsunami generating earthquakes will scatter glass shards everywhere, and can happen day or night, so foot protection and light could be the difference between making it to higher ground in time or not.