Earth

The Late Cretaceous Grassy Lake and Cedar Lake amber deposits of western Canada are among North America’s most famous amber-producing localities. Although it has been suggested for over a century that Cedar Lake amber from western Manitoba may be a secondary deposit having originated from strata in Alberta, this hypothesis has not been tested explicitly using geochemical fingerprinting coupled to comparative analyses of arthropod faunal content. Although there are many amber-containing horizons associated with Cretaceous coals throughout Alberta, most are thermally mature and brittle, thus lacking the resilience to survive long distance transport while preserving intact biotic inclusions. One of the few exceptions is the amber found in situ at Grassy Lake. We present a suite of new analyses from these and other Late Cretaceous ambers from western Canada, including stable isotopes (H and C), Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectra, and an updated faunal compendium for the Grassy an...

This paper explores Karoline von Günderrode’s metaphysics and argues that the place Günderrode assigns human beings in her cosmology requires a reconceptualisation of the relationship between human beings and the nonhuman world and the development of communities that include the nonhuman. First, analysis of Günderrode's pieces “Idea of the Earth” and “Letters of Two Friends” shows that she presents human beings as embedded in, and the same in kind as, the nonhuman. Part two uses the philosophical dialogue “Story of a Brahmin” to argue that, consistently with this metaphysical picture, Günderrode denies that human beings are justified in adopting a dominating relationship to nature or the nonhuman (or each other). The third part of the paper explores Günderrode’s claim that human beings live in three ways—as animal, as human, and spiritually—and considers how these relate to Günderrode’s concept of earth. Finally, the paper explores how Günderrode’s account translates into concrete ideas about community. I argue that Günderrode’s normative restraint, ideal of harmony, and view of human beings as part of and the same in kind as the rest of nature contribute to a vision of community in which genuine connections can flourish between human beings at the same time as connections to what is beyond the human. Rather than providing a program for ideal social relations or attitudes towards the natural world, Günderrode describes conditions for the emergence of small communities of friends in harmony with nature. On Günderrode’s model, these could potentially grow and eventually, perhaps, enable the emergence of the single, perfect organism she calls the “realised idea of the earth.”

El siguiente trabajo tiene como objetivo abordar la problematización fenomenológica del mundo natural. Con esta intención, nos centraremos en la comprensión de la Tierra como suelo originario de experiencia desde algunos de los planteos realizados por Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty y Jan Patočka. Más allá de las diferencias existentes entre estos autores, es posible ver en ello una comprensión de la Tierra que no se reduce, como lo hace la ciencia moderna, a ser un cuerpo girando en el vacío al lado de otros cuerpos. Desde esta perspectiva la interpretación de la Tierra se manifiesta como el resultado de la lógica objetivante de las ciencias modernas que tiene como correlato la reducción de la naturaleza a la noción de objeto. Por el contrario, desde la perspectiva fenomenológica, la Tierra emerge como el topos que habito y donde mi existencia se despliega junto a los otros.

ABSTRACT Distributed Space Missions (DSMs) are gaining momentum in their application to Earth science missions owing to their ability to increase observation sampling in spatial, spectral, temporal and angular dimensions. Past literature from academia and industry have proposed and evaluated many cost models for spacecraft as well as methods for quantifying risk. However, there have been few comprehensive studies quantifying the cost for multiple spacecraft, for small satellites and the cost risk for the operations phase of the project which needs to be budgeted for when designing and building efficient architectures. This paper identifies the three critical problems with the applicability of current cost and risk models to distributed small satellite missions and uses data-based modeling to suggest changes that can be made in some of them to improve applicability. Learning curve parameters to make multiple copies of the same unit, technological complexity based costing and COTS enabled small satellite costing have been studied and insights provided.

The roles and interactions of activity planning and scheduling for Earth Observing Satellites are based on factors such as mission objective, system assets and resources, system and spacecraft constraints, planning criteria, scheduling strategies, timelines, and desired level of automation and operator interaction. Activities are generalized into four categories: accomplish the mission objective, support the mission objective, manage the system resources,