Farside explorer: unique science from a mission to the farside of the moon

Farside Explorer is a proposed Cosmic Vision medium-size mission to the farside of the Moon consisting of two landers and an instrumented relay satellite. The farside of the Moon is a unique scientific platform in that it is shielded from terrestrial radio-frequency interference, it recorded the primary differentiation and evolution of the Moon, it can be continuously monitored from the Earth–Moon L2 Lagrange point, and there is a complete lack of reflected solar illumination from the Earth. Farside Explorer will exploit these properties and make the first radio-astronomy measurements from the most radio-quiet region of near-Earth space, determine the internal structure and thermal evolution of the Moon, from crust to core, and quantify impact hazards in near-Earth space by the measurement of flashes generated by impact events. The Farside Explorer flight system includes two identical solar-powered landers and a science/telecommunications relay satellite to be placed in a halo orbit about the Earth–Moon L2 Lagrange point. One lander would explore the largest and oldest recognized impact basin in the Solar System— the South Pole–Aitken basin—and the other would investigate the primordial highlands crust. Radio astronomy, geophysical, and geochemical instruments would be deployed on the surface, and the relay satellite would continuously monitor the surface for impact events.     

Reference data enhancement for geographic information retrieval using linked data

Gazetteers are instrumental in recognizing place names in documents such as Web pages, news, and social media messages. However, creating and maintaining gazetteers is still a complex task. Even though some online gazetteers provide rich sets of geographic names in planetary scale (e.g. GeoNames), other sources must be used to recognize references to urban locations, such as street names, neighborhood names or landmarks. We propose integrating Linked Data sources to create a gazetteer that combines a broad coverage of places with urban detail, including content on geographic and semantic relationships involving places, their multiple names and related non‐geographic entities. Our final goal is to expand the possibilities for recognizing, disambiguating and filtering references to places in texts for geographic information retrieval (GIR) and related applications. The resulting ontological gazetteer, named LoG (Linked OntoGazetteer), is accessible through Web services by applications and research initiatives on GIR, text processing, named entity recognition and others. The gazetteer currently contains over 13 million places, 140 million attributes and relationships, and 4.5 million non‐geographic entities. Data sources include GeoNames, Freebase, DBPedia and LinkedGeoData, which is based on OpenStreetMap data. An analysis on how these datasets overlap and complement one another is also presented.     

Filament generation off the Strait of Gibraltar in response to Gap winds

We present a case study of the generation of a cold filament rooted off the southwestern edge of the Strait of Gibraltar (Atlantic side) during the summer of 2000. The event is successfully simulated using high-resolution atmospheric and oceanic numerical models. It is shown that a sharp filament may develop oceanwards with little modification of the Atlantic inflow into the Mediterranean, contrary to usual expectations. The filament is essentially driven by the surface layer response to Gap winds occurring during Levanter conditions. The easterly wind funnelling in the Strait generates a strong wind jet and intense wind curl which impacts the oceanic surface layer through Ekman pumping and mixing processes. The generation and fate of the filament is very similar to the Gulf of Tehuantepec case, where strong Gap wind events produce asymmetric deformation and erosion of the thermocline that tends to favour anticyclonic mesoscale circulations. Our observations and model results from both realistic and idealized experiments suggest that similar phenomena are present in the Gulf of Cadiz, but they are altered by the persisting Atlantic inflow, so that the response to Gap winds is not as dramatic.     

Theoretical analysis and simulation for avoiding antenna oscillations without distributed resistance

The so-called Wu and King antenna pattern is widely used in GPR because of its simple design and construction features. The main disadvantage is its limited efficiency due to transmitter energy losses which occur through lumped resistors. Based on the analysis of the electromagnetic field behaviour across the antenna, it is possible to replace the effect of the resistors by either storing the energy of the electric pulses, or damp them by means of one matched resistor, which will theoretically improve the efficiency of the antenna. In this paper we provide a theoretical analysis using a modified transmission line model together with simulation based on delayed potentials among other electromagnetic software, and measurement results using an impulse transmitter with fast MOSFET switches and a matched resistor that support this idea.     

High-performance computing strategies for seismic-imaging software on the cluster and cloud-computing environments

Modern subsurface imaging techniques allow obtaining high-quality images but with high computational costs. Nonetheless, depending on the amount of data, their execution is limited by memory in the current generation's hardware. However, with the advancement of new hardware and cloud-based solutions, these problems are mitigated but still with the risk of work loss and instability. To mitigate the execution problems in memory-limited and fail-prone environments, we propose two high-performance computing techniques. The first is based on independent checkpointing alongside a fault-tolerant framework to store an execution state and recover from that state in case of failures. Besides, for memory-limited graphics processing units, we present a technique to reduce the amount of memory requirement that we call the hybrid strategy. The experiments showed that the independent checkpointing alongside the fault-tolerant framework is able to mitigate the performance penalty of node failures, with the independent checkpointing technique being more relevant when multiple nodes are terminated. Furthermore, the hybrid strategy technique has shown the possibility of execution of larger models that could make the graphics processing unit run out of memory otherwise. Finally, our implementation is scalable, allowing a significant improvement in performance when adding new nodes. In conclusion, our techniques can be used to deliver fast, high-fidelity subsurface imaging in unstable and memory-limited environments, such as the cloud.     

In-Well Degassing of Monitoring Wells Completed in Gas-Charged Aquifers

Total dissolved gas pressure (P_TDG) measurements are useful to measure accurate in situ dissolved gas concentrations in groundwater, but challenged by in-well degassing. Although in-well degassing has been widely observed, its cause(s) are not clear. We investigated the mechanism(s) by which gas-charged groundwater in a recently pumped well becomes degassed. Vertical P_TDG and dissolved gas concentration profiles were monitored in the standing water column (SWC) of a groundwater well screened in a gas-charged aquifer for 7 days before and 15 days after pumping. Prior to pumping, P_TDG values remained relatively constant and below calculated bubbling pressure (P_BUB) at all depths. In contrast, significant increases in P_TDG were observed at all depths after pumping was initiated, as fresh groundwater with elevated in situ P_TDG values was pumped through the well screen. After pumping ceased, P_TDG values decreased to below P_BUB at all depths over the 15-day post-pumping period, indicating well degassing was active over this time frame. Vertical profiles of estimated dissolved gas concentrations before and after pumping provided insight into the mechanism(s) by which in-well degassing occurred in the SWC. During both monitoring periods, downward mixing of dominant atmospheric and/or tracer gases, and upwards mixing of dominant groundwater gases were observed in the SWC. The key mechanisms responsible for in-well degassing were (i) bubble exsolution when P_TDG exceeded P_BUB as gas-charged well water moves upwards in the SWC during recovery (i.e., hydraulic gradient driven convection), (ii) microadvection caused by the upward migration of bubbles under buoyancy, and (iii) long-term, thermally driven vertical convection.     

The use of GPR for characterizing underground weathered profiles in the sub-humid tropics

Ground penetrating radar (GPR) has been used as a tool to access information about ground subsurface features. Such information is very important for different types of studies, varying from those related to archeological research to those studying geological elements of bedrock. More recently, however, GPR has been increasingly applied to environmental studies, especially for soil research. This paper presents the results of an application of GPR for the study of weathered profiles. GPR was used to discover the degree of trustworthiness of the information on the ground subsurface through the interpretation of the results of the radar sections as well as the data collected from boreholes, which reached until 21 m. The results show a relatively high degree of details obtained by GPR, indicating the possibility of speeding up ground subsurface surveys related to geomorphological, geological, and pedological studies.     

Stretch-free generalized normal moveout correction

The effective application of normal moveout correction processes mainly depends on four factors: the chosen traveltime approximation, the stretching associated with the given traveltime, crossing events and phase changes, the last two being inherent to the seismic data. In this context, we conduct a quantitative analysis on stretching considering a general traveltime expression depending on half-offset and midpoint coordinates. Through this analysis, we propose a mathematically proven procedure to eliminate stretching, which can be applied to any traveltime approximation. The proposed method is applied to synthetic and real data sets, considering different traveltime approximations and achieved complete elimination of stretching.