And The Winners Are…
By Paul Racette, posted on December 21st, 2009 in Education, Essay Contest 2009, Featured Person, Sustainability
Sustainability through Earth Observation and Engineering is pleased to announce the winners:
*First Place $500 to David Tshimba, Uganda Martyrs University, Kampala, Uganda for
“By Trying to Solve a Problem, Human Beings Have Now Created a New Issue”
**Second Place $250 to Sulaiman Tejan Jalloh, Institute of Advanced Management and Technology, Freetown, Sierra Leone, West Africa for “Agriculture”
***Third Place $150 to Benjamin-Axel Mugema, Uganda Martyrs University, Kampala, Uganda for
“Sustainability: From Modernity to Humanity”
The seven finalists will also receive Earthzine t-shirts; and the winners, letters of recognition to their universities.
This has been an exciting competition from the opening announcement on July 9, 2009 at the annual IGARSS conference in Cape Town, South Africa to the close of blogging on December 15. The contest received enquiries and essays from students around the globe. This response met our overall goal of stimulating thinking about sustainability worldwide. We are deeply appreciative of the efforts of all the contestants who submitted essays, the finalists for maintaining engaging blogs and the dozens who raised the level of discourse by posting thought-provoking comments and questions.
We are also deeply appreciative of the competition judges, who selected the seven finalists and chose the winners on the basis of their essay blogs. We also congratulate Dr. David F. Mullins, Associate Editor for Education, for doing an excellent job managing Earthzine’s first essay competition. We are grateful to the IEEE Foundation for sponsoring the competition and its prizes.
If you haven’t read these essays already, please take a few moments to do so. I think you will share our feelings of encouragement and hope that the passionate commitment evidenced by these students will be utilized in their home countries. Each essay demonstrates the great potential Earth observation has for discovering and implementing sustainable remedies for the difficult environmental problems we are experiencing on Earth.
Please stay connected to www.Earthzine.org for notice of the 2010 Student Essay Competition!
Paul E. Racette, D.Sc.
Editor-in-Chief
NASA Daily Image
Remnant of a Supernova
Vital clues about the devastating ends to the lives of massive stars can be found by studying the aftermath of their explosions. In its more than twelve years of science operations, NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has studied many of these supernova remnants sprinkled across the galaxy. The latest example of this important investigation is Chandra's new image of the supernova remnant known as G350.1-0.3. This stellar debris field is located some 14,700 light years from the Earth toward the center of the Milky Way. Evidence from Chandra and from ESA's XMM-Newton telescope suggest that a compact object within G350.1+0.3 may be the dense core of the star that exploded. The position of this likely neutron star, seen by the arrow pointing to "neutron star" in the inset image, is well away from the center of the X-ray emission. If the supernova explosion occurred near the center of the X-ray emission then the neutron star must have received a powerful kick in the supernova explosion. Data suggest this supernova remnant, as it appears in the image, is 600 and 1,200 years old. If the estimated location of the explosion is correct, this means the neutron star has been moving at a speed of at least 3 million miles per hour since the explosion. Another intriguing aspect of G350.1-0.3 is its unusual shape. Many supernova remnants are nearly circular, but G350.1-0.3 is strikingly asymmetrical as seen in the Chandra data in this image (gold). Infrared data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope (light blue) also trace the morphology found by Chandra. Astronomers think that this bizarre shape is due to stellar debris field expanding into a nearby cloud of cold molecular gas. The age of 600-1,200 years puts the explosion that created G350.1-0.3 in the same time frame as other famous supernovas that formed the Crab and SN 1006 supernova remnants. However, it is unlikely that anyone on Earth would have seen the explosion because of the obscuring gas and dust that lies along our line of sight to the remnant. These results appeared in the April 10, 2011 issue of The Astrophysical Journal. Image Credits: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/I. Lovchinsky et al; IR: NASA/JPL-Caltech