Tuesday
October 5, 2004
news@michigandaily.com

SCIENCE

5

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'U' space engineers set sights on Saturn
Cassini-Huygens mission arrives at ringed planet after seven-year flight

AOSS Prof. Andrew Nagy will use radiosci-
entific methods to determine the composition
of Titan and Saturn's atmospheres. Radio waves
beamed back at Earth will pass through Saturn's
atmosphere and be altered in a measurable way,
which gives the chemical signature of the
compounds present, Nagy said. This
may help explain the presence of five
to 10 times more water in Saturn's
ionosphere than previously
expected.
Atreya will have to wait
a few more months for the
instrument of his exper-
tise, the gas chromato-
graph mass spectrometer
to come online. It is part
of the Huygens probe that
will be released onto Titan
on Christmas Day. During
its three weeks of descent onto
the surface of the moon, it will
sample gaseous and solid particles
in Titan's atmosphere.
The thick atmosphere
and the presence of "pre-
biotic" carbon molecules on the
natural satellite make it especial-
ly interesting to scientists. "Titan
has all the constituents of life that
primordial Earth had," Atreya
said.
The extreme cold of Titan's
surface, however, makes it
unlikely to harbor life. Even the
instruments themselves need
thermal blankets and a radioac-
tive heat source to stay opera-
tional in the harsh -300 degree
Fahrenheit environment. It also
provides shielding from poten-
tially disastrous impacts with
micrometeorites.
The payoffs of exploration in
such a forbidding environment
are promising, Atreya said. Sat-
urn's rings of gaseous and solid
material are analogous in struc-
ture to the early solar system and
may shed light on the processes

of collisions and coalescing that form planets.
Marking the beginning of NASA's "faster, bet-
ter, cheaper" mission philosophy.Cassini-Huygens
still cost a substantial $3 billion. In addition, the
orbiter is larger than previous solar system explor-
ers - its fuel source alone is more massive than
the Galileo and Voyager spacecrafts combined.
Besides driving technological change, "there
are always several ways to justify costs," said
Gombosi, who goes on to cite the figure that "for
every $1 NASA spends, the national economy
benefits $10." The University did not contribute
money to the mission, though - "only brain-
power."
Currently, Cassini-Huygens has completed only
the first of its 76 planned orbits around Saturn. The
orbiter has so far met with early success: During
its flyby of Jupiter, other members of the AOSS
participated in taking measurements of Jupiter.
The release of the Huygens probe into Titan
will be the orbiter's next great challenge, Atreya
said. But he still keeps it simple. At the end of the
day, he said, he's just "trying to drop things onto
a planet."

FOR THE DAILY

On
Dec. 25, the Cas-
sini orbiter will release its
Huygens probe for a freefall descent into Titan,
the largest of Saturn's moons. Then, on board the
probe, a crucial component designed by Atreya, a
professor in the University's Department of Atmo-
spheric, Oceanic and Space Sciences, will begin
collecting data.
The Cassini-Huygens mission was launched
seven years ago - the result of a collaborative
effort between NASA and its European equiva-
lent, the European Space Agency, composed of 17
different nations.
After more than two billionmiles ofinterplan-
etary travel and accelerated by the gravities of

Venus,
Earth and
-rJupiter,the Cassini
orbiter shot through a pre-
cise gap in Saturn's rings and finally
sidled into orbit around the planet in July.
Several scientists in AOSS played leading roles
in the design and construction of instruments
included on the Cassini orbiter and Huygens
probe.
Prof. Tamas Gombosi, chair of the department,
said, "(The University) has the greatest univer-
sity involvement in Cassini." Over 20 members
of AOSS play leadership roles such as principal
investigators, co-investigators and team leaders of
various projects within the mission.
An interdisciplinary scientist in magnetosphere
and plasma physics, Gombosi will study Saturn's
ionosphere, a large magnetic region around the
planet composed of charged particles. He hopes
that studying this region will lead to a greater
understanding of Earth's own magnetic fields.

Chances are Prof. Sushil Atreya is anticipating
Christmas more than you are. He already knows
what he wants: a couple of dust particles, some
gas samples, and, if he has been really good, some
hydrocarbon-chain molecules. The only catch is
that these substances are some 600 million miles
away from Earth.

Random events, not global
warming, cause hurricanes
By Scott Siglin

The undergraduate winner of the Collegiate inventors Competition, Engineering senior Wei Gu, displays
his microfluidic circuit.
Award-winning inventor
inds his mlcroscopic ow

By Karen Tee
For the Daily

At first glance, his invention - a piece of silicon
rubber containing tiny channels that are controlled
by moving pins - is deceptively simple, nondescript
even. However, the microfluidic circuit that engineer-
ing senior Wei Gu has been working on for the past
two years means the world to scientists in the field of
microfluidics.
Gu's hard work was rewarded at the final round of
judging of the national Collegiate Inventors Compe-
tition, held Saturday in Akron, Ohio, where he was
awarded the undergraduate prize of $15,000.
Gu won the prize for creating a system that could
control the movement and flow of microscopic amounts
of fluids within a circuit. Gu etched channels into a
piece of rubber, sealed them with a second piece of rub-
ber on top, then used the moving pins of an electronic
Braille display set to deform the channels. The pressure
of the pins pushes tiny amounts of fluid through the
rubber circuit.
Gu's discovery is a major breakthrough in the field
of microfluidics. The biggest challenge faced in this
emerging science is to control fluid flow at the micro-
scopic level. Now that he has found a simple way to
overcome this obstacle, microfluidics can potentially
be used in the medical and environmental fields.
One benefit of microfluidics would be the ability to
introduce small molecules, like proteins, to analytical
instruments at a very small fixed rate. These molecules
could be individually analyzed in a way that has been
typically reserved for large, cumbersome machinery.
Gu also wrote a computer program which can pre-
cisely control the pattern of movement of the pins, so

environmental fields.
"I am particularly interested in the long term implica-
tions for health care and monitoring. If there was a working
fluidics circulatory system, you could potentially be look-
ing at a handheld system that can conduct many experi-
ments that currently requires big machinery,"he said.
"For example, if chemists could create a chip that
could do multiple analyses on blood cheaply and quick-
ly, it would become convenient to always keep an eye
on various aspects of health."
Donald Keck, who has been a judge of the com-
petition for the past five years, said he was greatly
impressed by this year's entries. There were a total of
14 finalists, shortlisted from 120 nationwide entries,
five of which were undergraduate entries and nine from
graduate students. On Saturday, the finalists made their
presentations to a panel of judges before the results
were announced that evening.
'There were very strong candidates who showed
remarkable creativity and diligence in pursuing their
targets. The judges looked to see if students made criti-
cal conjectures on their own and if their discoveries
would spawn a new leap in their respective fields of
technology," said Keck, a 1993 inductee of the National
Inventors Hall of Fame for inventing the optical fibre.
The Collegiate Inventors Competition is a yearly pro-
gram of the National Inventors Hall of Fame and is spon-
sored by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
Shuichi Takayama, assistant professor of biomolecu-
lar engineering and macromolecular science and engi-
neering at the University was awarded $5,000 for the
role he played as Wei's advisor and mentor.
Explaining the impact of this discovery for the scien-
tific community, Takayama said, "What is special about
Wei's system is that it is user-friendly, programmable and

Four hurricanes hit the state of Flor-
ida in the last month, a sequence of
disasters that has not occurred in the
last century and a half. The devasta-
tion and destruction caused by these
swirling storms was enormous, enough
for President Bush to declare the entire
state of Florida a natural disaster area.
Experts say this tirade of storms is
due to random events.
"There is no obvious human influ-
ence on hurricanes or even an El Nino,"
said Prof. Perry Samson, associate chair
of the Department of the Atmospheric,
Oceanic and Space Sciences. "Abnor-
mal weather is normal."
Jeff Masters. chief meteorologist of
the website Weather Underground, said
weather is unpredictable. "The odds of
Florida being hit by a major hurricane,
category 3 or higher, are about 23 per-
cent. If you do the math, the chance of
Florida being hit by 3 major hurricanes,
and one that was almost a category 3, is
one in every 300 years."
The only factor that may have some
sort of effect is the average tempera-
ture of the oceans, Samson said. Hurri-
canes obtain their enormous amount of
energy from the oceans, so the energy
is directly related to the temperature of
the water.
Recently, there has been an increase
in ocean temperature due to global
warming effects. The warming of
the oceans allows the average internal
energy of the oceans to increase as well.
The hurricane sucks up energy from the
ocean to the sky, and it begins to build
up in a billowing fashion, surrounded
by swirling winds. When a hurricane
essentially "grabs" the ocean water,
which is now at a higher temperature,
the hurricane's energy, and therefore its
power, will increase.
But Samson does not think ocean
temperature plays a major role in the
big picture of hurricane power. This
theory is still primarily speculation,
he said.
Samson added that the ocean's tem-
perature will only increase slightly

A satellite image collected on Sept. 25 shows Hurricane Jeanne making land-
fall near the southern tip of Hutchinson island, Fla.

because of the ocean's immense size
and thus wouldn't translate well into
hurricane power and frequency.
Samson also dismissed the notion
that El Nino has anything to do with the
recent increase in hurricanes. El Niio,
a phenomena that results in anomalous
weather conditions over the Pacific
Ocean, is mostly a west coast weather
event, he said.
But Masters believes that an El
Nino inhibits hurricane weather, and
an El Nino will possibly occur next.
Nonetheless, Masters predicts that
hurricanes will increase over the next
10 to 20 years, not including the El
Nino years.
"Florida went 14 years without
a major hurricane, which is pretty
remarkable," said Masters. "Looking
back at the '40s and '50s, hurricanes
were very prevalent, but then went

through a period from the '60s through
'90s where there were not many hurri-
canes." Masters believes that it is pos-
sibly that we will return back to the era
of frequent hurricanes
Samson dismisses speculation that
global warming is actually the cause
of the recent rash in hurricanes. With
the average temperature of the air ris-
ing along with ocean temperature, one
would think that this could possibly
affect weather climate, Samson said.
But he attributes this increase to
another El Nino.
"It's just the luck of the draw," Sam-
son said. The possibility of four hurri-
canes hitting the same state during the
same month again is exactly the same
as it was 150 years ago; extremely rare.
"It can happen next week or not for
another 75 years. Weather is extremely
unpredictable."


ARCTIC
Continued from page 1
Moore searches for climate clues
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ings suggest that warm Arctic waters
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who studied the PETM at Michigan,
also accompanied the expedition.
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w~ho hav lro 'rne a Ittf wo~L'rk n (the