What’s behind people’s hesitancy towards vaccination?

Peer-Reviewed Publication

THE POLISH ASSOCIATION OF SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY

 

IMAGE: A POLISH STUDY BRINGS UP THE IMPACT OF THE ACTIVELY COMMUNICATED ATTENTION-GRABBING ANTI-VACCINE ARGUMENTS, AS WELL AS THE OVERALL SKEPTICISM TOWARDS THE BIG PHARMA, SCIENCE AND HEALTH PROVIDERS. view more 

CREDIT: PRASESH SHIWAKOTI ON UNSPLASH

In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, it becomes essential to understand why people refuse or indefinitely delay vaccination. A new Polish study, conducted at the Jagiellonian University (Krakow, Poland) and the SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities (Wroclaw, Poland) and published in the peer-reviewed scholarly journal Social Psychological Bulletin, brings up the impact of the active spread of attention-grabbing anti-vaccine arguments, as well as the overall distrust in the Big Pharma, science and health providers. 

In their study, using data from a total of 492 participants, who have self-identified as either ambiguous towards or opposing vaccination, the research team, led by Dr Katarzyna Stasiuk, conclude that vaccine deniers are mostly led by a generalised negative attitude to vaccines. 

The arguments were collected during a conference, where people opposing the vaccination presented their stand on the subject. Curiously, even though they often reported their stance to be founded in their own or observed negative experience with vaccines, when asked about their reasoning, they were rather vague in their explanations. Many reported that they didn’t remember the source of information, while others attributed autism, allergies or children being sick to vaccines, despite the missing evidence of correlation. 

Such instances can be explained with people’s tendency to remember negative reports, even if those have simply been read online. 

“Confirmation bias consists of an individual actively seeking information consistent with their pre-existing hypothesis, and avoiding information indicative of alternative explanations,” say the researchers. “Therefore, a pre-existing negative attitude toward vaccines may cause individuals to interpret negative symptoms as consequences of vaccines, further reinforcing the negative attitude.”

The research team also reminds that when given similar information from multiple sources, people tend to forget how they have learned it, often confusing it with their own experience or those of their close ones. As a result, they could turn into yet another source of misinformation.

All in all, vaccine deniers believe that vaccines lead to serious negative side effects, don’t protect the individual and the society against infectious diseases, and are not sufficiently tested before introduction. Further, they are convinced that anti-vaccination leaders are better informed about vaccines than physicians, and that it is rather the former that act in the public interest. 

Interestingly, when compared to the group who self-reported as vaccine-hesitant, opponents of vaccines were more inclined to believe that modern medicine is able to handle an epidemic.

Meanwhile, the vaccine-ambiguous participants in the survey were mostly confident in the efficacy of vaccines, as well as them being properly researched. However, they were still susceptible to the anti-vaccine movement’s statements about side effects and the “Big Pharma conspiracy”. Moreover, if presented with well-prepared arguments, they are likely to become vaccine deniers.

In conclusion, the scientists note that existing evidence is quite pessimistic about the possibility of changing the attitudes of vaccine opponents, and thus recommend that efforts need to be focused on persuading the vaccine-ambiguous group, so that their concerns about negative effects are reduced. They also suggest that they need to be presented with prosocial arguments about why medical professionals recommend vaccines, in order to strengthen the positive points of their attitude.

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Original source:

Stasiuk, K., Maciuszek, J., Polak, M., & Doliński, D. (2021). Profiles of Vaccine Hesitancy: The Relation Between Personal Experience With Vaccines, Attitude Towards Mandatory Vaccination, and Support for Anti-Vaccine Arguments Among Vaccine Hesitant Individuals. Social Psychological Bulletin, 16(2), 1-20. https://doi.org/10.32872/spb.6525

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JOURNAL

Social Psychological Bulletin

DOI

10.32872/spb.6525

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Profiles of Vaccine Hesitancy: The Relation Between Personal Experience With Vaccines, Attitude Towards Mandatory Vaccination, and Support for Anti-Vaccine Arguments Among Vaccine Hesitant Individuals

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

29-Jul-2021

COI STATEMENT

n/a

 

Could residential heat pumps be part of the climate solution?

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

FACULTY Q&A

ANN ARBOR—Deploying residential heat pumps more widely across the United States has the potential to help reduce carbon pollution while also saving homeowners money, according to a new study by a University of Michigan researcher and colleagues.

However, in most parts of the country the electricity grid will have to get cleaner and electric heat pumps will have to get cheaper before these devices become both environmentally and financially compelling, says Parth Vaishnav of the Center for Sustainable Systems at U-M's School for Environment and Sustainability.

The study was published online July 28 in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

The other authors are Thomas Deetjen of the University of Texas and Liam Walsh of Carnegie Mellon University.

What is a residential heat pump? I've seen them described as essentially an air conditioner that is slightly modified so that it can run in two directions, cooling the home in the summer and providing heat in the winter. Is that correct?

That's exactly right. Heat naturally flows from hot places to cold places, just as a car will roll downhill. During the summer, air conditioners move heat from a cold place (the inside of your home) to a hot place (the outside). During the winter, air conditioners can operate as a heat pump and do the same thing, except that the cold place is the outside and the hot place is your home. Just as you need to do some work to push a car uphill, you need to do some work to push heat from a cold to a hot place. What makes heat pumps efficient is that you usually can transfer two or more units of heat for every unit of work.  

Heat pumps are widely discussed as tools to help fight climate change. How could electric heat pumps help reduce fossil fuel emissions, and what is the potential for their widespread adoption across the United States?

Most homes in the U.S. are heated by burning a carbon-containing fuel (natural gas, propane or oil) within the house. Doing this emits greenhouse gases. There is no easy way of eliminating the GHGs from this combustion. For example, it would be very expensive to capture small amounts of carbon dioxide from hundreds of millions of homes and sequester it permanently. However, heat pumps run on electricity, and there are many good and relatively inexpensive ways to decarbonize the electrical grid.

Our study shows that, if we assume moderate decarbonization of the grid over the lifetime of a heat pump installed today, heat pumps would cut greenhouse gas emissions everywhere. We should, however, keep two things in mind. One, heat pumps would raise heating costs for some houses, especially if we did not tax fossil fuels for the harm that they do to human health and the environment.

Second, electricity generation from coal and natural gas also produces harmful pollutants like oxides of nitrogen, fine particulate matter and sulfur dioxide. In some parts of the country, the electrical generation mix is dirty enough that emissions of these pollutants do enough damage to overwhelm the benefits of reducing carbon dioxide emissions.

Accounting for all this, our study suggests that switching about 30% of single-family homes to heat pumps right now would cut harms to the environment and human health and save households money. We ought to begin by switching from resistive electric heating, oil and propane to natural gas. The best places to start are the parts of the country that have a moderate climate.

We also ought to clean up the grid as fast as possible. If we commit to doing that, our previous studies show that heat pumps can reduce environmental and human health harms virtually everywhere in the country. 

How was the Environmental Research Letter study done, and what was the most important finding?

We used a database called ResStock, developed by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, to simulate 400 houses in each of 55 U.S. cities, for a total of 22,000 houses. Each set of houses was chosen to be representative of the housing stock in that city. We then used the U.S. Department of Energy's EnergyPlus model to simulate the hourly energy use for each of those 22,000 houses. We ran two versions of this analysis: one with heat pumps, and another with whatever heating fuel the house currently had. We compared these two runs to work out the benefits and costs of a switch to heat pumps.

To assess damages to human health, we used integrated air quality models developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon. To assess harms from the environment, we used the social cost of carbon.

The most important finding was that you could save money and reduce social harms—right now—by doubling the proportion of homes that have heat pumps.

What percentage of U.S. houses could benefit financially—in the form of reduced utility bills—from installing an electric heat pump, and what percentage of those homes could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by installing a heat pump?

About a third of single-family homes would benefit financially, after accounting for the extra cost of installing heat pumps relative to a gas furnace. All of those homes would reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

What are some of the main impediments to achieving widespread heat pump adoption across the United States?

 From the point of view of a homeowner, the key barrier is the perceived higher cost of installing heat pumps. I say perceived because in many parts of the country, heat pumps would more than pay for themselves over their lifetimes. Also, if a homeowner needed to replace a furnace and an air conditioner, installing a heat pump—which can heat and cool—might be the cheapest option. Another key barrier is that installers may not know enough about heat pumps to inform customers adequately.

What is the potential for residential heat pump adoption in a cold weather state like Michigan?

 In the long term, very good. In terms of their ability to "do the job," heat pumps have gotten much better at working reliably and efficiently in cold climates. They will continue to improve. As the summers get warmer, the fact that heat pumps can also serve as efficient air conditioners will become more and more valuable.

That said, we ought to continue to invest in making heat pumps cheaper and more efficient. We also ought to invest in making our housing stock more efficient by supporting weatherization. Apart from the cold climate, one of the challenges is that the electrical grid in the Midwest is still too dependent on coal and natural gas. We ought to either shift to sources that do not produce carbon dioxide emissions at all, or we ought to capture emissions from coal and gas plants and permanently sequester them.

Study: U.S. residential heat pumps: The private economic potential and its emissions, health, and grid impact (doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ac10dc)

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JOURNAL

Environmental Research Letters

DOI

10.1088/1748-9326/ac10dc

 

Trauma Informed Care can help break the cycle of violence

Multidisciplinary American College of Surgeons ISAVE group proposes strategies for trauma centers to address root causes of violence

Peer-Reviewed Publication

AMERICAN COLLEGE OF SURGEONS

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VIDEO: ROCHELLE A. DICKER, MD, FACS, DISCUSSES HOW TRAUMA CENTERS CAN HELP ADDRESS ROOT CAUSES OF VIOLENCE, IMPROVE HEALTH, AND REDUCE INEQUITIES IN MARGINALIZED COMMUNITIES. view more 

CREDIT: AMERICAN COLLEGE OF SURGEONS

Key takeaways

• Trauma Informed Care accounts for both the mental and physical aspects of trauma.
• Trauma centers and hospitals should invest directly in at-risk communities to create opportunities for financial and educational inclusion.
• Engaging at-risk communities can help address structural racism and social determinants of health and create a solutions-based narrative.

CHICAGO (July 30, 2021): Trauma surgeons are often the first point of contact with the health care system for victims of violence. However, their role can extend beyond caring for a patient’s physical injuries. Trauma centers can help address root causes of violence, improve health, and reduce inequities in marginalized communities, according to the American College of Surgeons (ACS) Improving Social Determinants to Attenuate Violence (ISAVE) workgroup. The ISAVE workgroup published four strategies to help break the cycle of violence in an article published on the Journal of the American College of Surgeons website in advance of print.

“Violence, in and of itself, is very much the end result of social determinants of health, structural racism, and structural barriers in our country that have existed for a long time,” said Rochelle A. Dicker, MD, FACS, of the division of trauma and critical care, University of California at Los Angeles Geffen School of Medicine. “The strategies we propose are very action-oriented. Trauma is not just about the physical injury but has a broader definition. We need to be more comprehensive and aware of that as we treat our patients.”

Four strategies to address the root causes of violence

The ISAVE workgroup proposes four strategies to improve health and health care for marginalized communities that are disproportionally impacted by violence:

• Development and Implementation of Trauma Informed Care in All Trauma Centers
• Integrating Social Care into Trauma Care
• The Trauma Center’s Role in Investing in At-Risk Communities
• Advocacy

These strategies form ISAVE’s vision of the future of care for victims of violence. These efforts extend beyond the confines of trauma centers, reaching into communities plagued by this violence epidemic.

A key feature of the ISAVE strategies is the Trauma Informed Care (TIC) curriculum. The authors note that trauma has traditionally had two definitions: 

1. From the mental health perspective, a deeply distressing and disturbing experience 
2. From the perspective of trauma surgery and emergency medical services, an acute physical injury

The authors note that having two different definitions of trauma can lead to a fragmentation of care. The TIC curriculum takes into account the full scope of trauma and can “foster a sense of empowerment, autonomy, and partnership in the injured person to help patients thrive, not just survive.” 

Focusing on at-risk communities

The authors address violence and the social determinants of health with a broad lens, noting the risk of perpetuating a cycle of inequity, disparity, and inequality if underlying causes of death and ill health are not addressed. The authors suggest a strategy to invest directly in at-risk communities to treat patients with a full scope of understanding the underlying factors.

“It is important that people have access to trauma centers, but the other piece is hospitals investing in their communities,” Dr. Dicker said. “For example, putting in place vocational training programs so that the community is part of the employment process in a hospital itself. Also, whether the hospital uses local vendors for food; that’s an investment in the local community. Investment truly is the ability to put dollars into the communities that are in such great need.”

Health and wealth are inextricably tied to one another, the authors note. “Black and Brown communities suffer heavily from a racial wealth gap relative to white communities, although rural white Americans are also deeply impacted by this gap and share a common lack of access to mechanisms to build financial security,” they write. “Creating opportunities for financial and educational inclusion may not be seen on the surface as a health-related matter but, in fact, it is at its core.”

Advocacy is the overarching theme that informs the strategies proposed by ISAVE. The authors note that it is an intrinsic duty for trauma center personnel to use advocacy to address the social determinants of health that lead to violence. Specific policy suggestions include engaging hospital and health system administrators to leverage the Affordable Care Act’s Community Health Needs Assessment to encourage hospitals to engage in addressing poverty and unemployment.

“Physical trauma leads to psychological trauma and psychological trauma predisposes to physical trauma. Optimally addressing one, requires addressing the other,” the authors conclude. “Although complex, effective interventions for violence are not as complex as those required to combat a novel corona virus pandemic, and as the COVID-19 pandemic has plainly demonstrated, we are all in this together. What affects one of us, affects all of us.”

 

CAPTION

Four ways for trauma centers to address root causes of violence.

CREDIT

American College of Surgeons

The ISAVE workgroup was established in 2019 by the ACS Committee on Trauma (COT) and  first outlined steps the medical community must take to understand and address the root causes of firearm violence at a panel presentation during the 2020 ACS Clinical Congress virtual. The ACS COT has been working to prevent firearm related injury, death, and disability by working together to address the root causes of violence and simultaneously making firearm ownership as safe as possible. Learn more about the ACS COT’s efforts that focus on treating firearm violence as a public health problem.

Article coauthors with Dr. Dicker are Arielle Thomas, MD, MPH; Eileen M. Bulger, MD, FACS; Ronald M. Stewart, MD, FACS; Stephanie Bonne, MD, FACS; Tracy A. Dechert, MD, FACS; Randi Smith, MD, FACS; Altovise Love-Craighead, MS; Fatimah Dreier, MA; Meera Kotagal, MD, FACS; Tamara Kozyckyj, MPH; and Holly Michaels, MPH.

The article authors have no relevant financial relationships to disclose.

“FACS” designates that a surgeon is a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons.

Citation: Strategies for Trauma Centers to Address the Root Causes of Violence: Recommendations from the Improving Social Determinants to Attenuate Violence (ISAVE) Workgroup of the American College of Surgeons Committee on Trauma. Journal of the American College of Surgeons. DOI: doi.org/10.1016/j.jamcollsurg.2021.06.016.

 

About the American College of Surgeons
The American College of Surgeons is a scientific and educational organization of surgeons that was founded in 1913 to raise the standards of surgical practice and improve the quality of care for all surgical patients. The College is dedicated to the ethical and competent practice of surgery. Its achievements have significantly influenced the course of scientific surgery in America and have established it as an important advocate for all surgical patients. The College has more than 82,000 members and is the largest organization of surgeons in the world. For more information, visit www.facs.org.

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JOURNAL

Journal of the American College of Surgeons

DOI

10.1016/j.jamcollsurg.2021.06.016

ARTICLE TITLE

Strategies for Trauma Centers to Address the Root Causes of Violence: Recommendations from the Improving Social Determinants to Attenuate Violence (ISAVE) Workgroup of the American College of Surgeons Committee on Trauma

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

30-Jul-2021

 

Army award-winning research to transform Soldier-robot communication

Grant and Award Announcement

U.S. ARMY RESEARCH LABORAT

 

IMAGE: ARMY RESEARCHERS DEVELOP GROUND-BREAKING TECHNOLOGY THAT WILL ENHANCE HOW SOLDIERS AND ROBOTS COMMUNICATE AND CARRY OUT TASKS IN TACTICAL ENVIRONMENTS. view more 

CREDIT: NEIL ADAMS

PHILADELPHIA, Md. -- Army researchers developed ground-breaking technology that will enhance how Soldiers and robots communicate and carry out tasks in tactical environments.

This research sets out to develop a natural language understanding, or NLU, pipeline for robots that would be easily ported over to any computational system or agent and incrementally tames the variation that we see in natural language, said Army researcher Dr. Claire Bonial from the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command, known as DEVCOM, Army Research Laboratory.

This means that regardless of how a Soldier chooses to express him or herself to the robot, the underlying intent of that language is understood and can be acted on, given both the current conversational and environmental or situational context.

To do this, the NLU pipeline first automatically parses the input language into Abstract Meaning Representation, or AMR, which captures the basic meaning of the content of the language, Bonial said. It then converts and augments the AMR into Dialogue-AMR, which captures additional elements of meaning needed for two-way human robot dialogue in particular, such as what the person is trying to do with the utterance in the conversational context, for example give a command, ask a question, state a fact about the environment, etc.

“This is unique in comparison to other NLU components within dialogue systems, many of which forego any kind of semantic representation in favor of a deep-learning approach,” Bonial said.

This research was presented at the 14th International Conference on Computational Semantics, or IWCS 2021, where it received the Outstanding Paper Award.

The award citation noted that “The authors are not afraid of using old-fashined hand-written rules when they do the job, something which is lacking in much current work in NLP,“ and that “Anyone who wants to work on human-robot dialogue will want to see this first go at parsing in this new domain.”

“This award was incredibly gratifying for several reasons,” Bonial said. “First, this paper represents research efforts that were planted and have been growing since I was a doctoral student. I was part of the first group of researchers establishing what has become one of the most widely used semantic representations in natural language processing, AMR.”

Bonial started work with this group in 2010, and has been actively involved in refining and extending the representation ever since. Thus, this paper represents a body of research spanning over a decade for Bonial.

This includes work to represent language expressed through semi-idiomatic constructions, for example “the higher you fly, the harder you’ll fall!,” and most recently extending AMR so that it can better capture two-way dialogue, and specifically task-oriented, situated dialogue between people and robots, in an augmented version of the representation called Dialogue-AMR, she said.

Efforts to develop Dialogue-AMR started in 2018 with dialogue expert Dr. David Traum as part of the University Affiliated Research Center previously established between DEVCOM ARL and the Institute for Creative Technologies at the University of Southern California.

Dialogue-AMR draws upon ARL and ICT’s Bot Language research collaboration focused on robot dialogue systems, which was initiated by one of the IWCS paper’s co-authors, Dr. Clare Voss, in 2012.

Second, Bonial said, this paper reports on a critical step in the research trajectory: the researchers’ experiments to robustly and critically evaluate Dialogue-AMR as a computational semantic representation, as well as the NLU pipeline used to automatically obtain the correct Dialogue-AMR representation when given unconstrained natural language input.

These experiments were also done in collaboration with Traum of ICT, as well as an ARL student intern and recent graduate of Georgetown University, Mitchell Abrams. Abrams was recently selected as a Department of Defense Science, Mathematics, And Research For Transformation scholar, and will be coming back to the lab after completing his fully-funded doctoral program.

This evaluation is significant because the researchers evaluate in two problem domains: first, the domain of human-robot dialogue for collaborative search and navigation tasks, and second the domain of human-human dialogue in the virtual Minecraft gaming environment, where participants are collaboratively building blocks structures.

The Minecraft dialogue data that made this comparative evaluation possible was obtained from Dr. Martha Palmer of the University of Colorado, Boulder, and Dr. Julia Hockenmaier of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Evaluating in these two domains gets at a key question regarding the utility of such a representation and the NLU pipeline in general.

Bonial questioned how efficiently and with what accuracy the pipeline and representation can be applied in one problem domain, and then transferred and refined to a new problem domain. Or, in other words, how feasible is it for us to use this approach for communicating with a robot when that robot needs to tackle new problems and environments?

“Any Army application requires a system that can efficiently and flexibly act in dynamic circumstances,” Bonial said. “Our evaluation demonstrates that our NLU pipeline can obtain human-level performance in the first, human-robot dialogue domain, such that the output Dialogue-AMR representations agree with, or are similar to, human gold-standard representations at a rate similar to representations manually created by different humans.”

Further their evaluation demonstrates that with just a small amount of additional training data (several hours’ worth of annotation work amounting to about 200 additional training instances for the machine learning elements of the pipeline), the NLU pipeline obtains promising performance in the second domain of human-human dialogue in the Minecraft domain, she said.

The researchers noted that while the performance is somewhat lower than performance on the original human-robot dialogue domain, it is comparable or better than the performance of other automatic semantic parsers for other semantic representations and language domains.

“These promising results demonstrate that this NLU pipeline leverages a valid approach for communicating with robots in collaborative tasks across multiple domains,” Bonial said. “I am very excited for the promise of this research to provide transformational overmatch in our computational systems’ ability to understand the underlying meaning of Soldiers’ instructions, despite difference in their dialects, accents and other types of noise sure to arise in Army-relevant applications.”

In the research team’s next steps, they are connecting the output semantic representation with a system that grounds the pieces of the representation to both entities in the environments and the executable behaviors of the robot in joint work with Dr. Thomas Howard of the University of Rochester.

“We are optimistic that the deeper semantic representation will provide the structure needed for superior grounding of the language in both the conversational and physical environment such that robots can communicate and act more as teammates to Soldiers, as opposed to tools,” Bonial said.

Visit the laboratory's Media Center to discover more Army science and technology stories

 

Spatial relationship between damaged understory and felled trees in a shelterwood forest

Peer-Reviewed Publication

SHINSHU UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: THE UNDERSTORY WILL NOT BE DAMAGED UNLESS IT IS HIT DIRECTLY, ESPECIALLY ON THE TRUNK. view more 

CREDIT: DAI OTSUKA, SHINSHU UNIVERSITY

The shelterwood forest system is a natural regeneration method of forest management that supplies the next generation of trees from overstory tree seeds without planting. This method lowers the cost of forest management by reducing the need for artificial reforestation through planting. This means that the understory trees must be preserved from felled trees during harvest.

However, protection of understory trees reduces harvesting efficiency, and thus increases the cost of logging. To evaluate whether the conservation of understory trees is commensurate with the increase in harvesting costs, it is necessary to quantitatively clarify the relationship between removing the overstory trees and the emergence pattern of the understory loss. A research group led by Dai Otsuka of Shinshu University's Faculty of Agriculture has proposed a model to measure such damage to the understory spatial distribution.

Researcher Otsuka states that the group was able to come to a simple but clear conclusion that, "felled trees should be worked on so they do not come into contact with conservation targets." The group counted the number of understory trees before and after final cutting, as well as the extent of damage to the trees per spatial grid. Geographic Information System was used to reproduce the felling direction and physical contact between the harvested trees and understory trees. Logistic regression was performed using the extracted frequencies of physical contact as explanatory variables and variables important for reproducing the spatial pattern of the damaged understory were selected.

This method of avoiding damage to the understory has a low barrier to entry for forest management. The research made clear that widely assumed ideas from the field are not wrong. Through a real damage model, forest owners can predict in advance potential losses for harvesting. This will be useful especially in natural renewal operations.

In upcoming research projects, Otsuka hopes to minimize damage to understory in areas targeted in this paper. He hopes to also clarify if natural renewal operations are cost-effective or disadvantageous compared to general clear-cutting, which requires the cost of artificial planting.

This study was supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Grant 15H04508 and 20H03023. 

For more information, please read Spatial relationship between damaged understory and felled trees during the final cutting in a shelterwood forest in the International Journal of Forest Engineering

CAPTION

The forest before harvest.

CREDIT

Dai Ostuka, Shinshu University

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JOURNAL

International Journal of Forest Engineering

DOI

10.1080/14942119.2021.1943801

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Spatial relationship between damaged understory and felled trees during the final cutting in a shelterwood forest

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

1-Jul-2021

Disclaimer: AAAS an

 

SwRI scientists help identify water vapor in atmosphere of icy Jupiter moon

Ganymede’s atmospheric composition varies significantly on day, night sides

Peer-Reviewed Publication

SOUTHWEST RESEARCH INSTITUTE

 

IMAGE: USING HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE DATASETS AND COMPARING THEM TO THE EXPECTED VALUES OF ATMOSPHERIC EMISSIONS, SOUTHWEST RESEARCH INSTITUTE SCIENTISTS PLAYED A CRUCIAL ROLE IN THIS DISCOVERY OF WATER VAPOR IN THE ATMOSPHERE OF JUPITER’S ICY MOON GANYMEDE, SHOWN HERE IN A RECENT IMAGE CAPTURED BY THE JUNO SPACECRAFT. view more 

CREDIT: NASA/JPL-CALTECH/SWRI/MSSS/KEVIN M. GILL

SAN ANTONIO — July 26, 2021 — Using spectral images from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), a team of scientists led by Dr. Lorenz Roth of the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, has determined that water vapor forms a large fraction of the atmosphere of Jupiter’s icy moon Ganymede. Southwest Research Institute scientists played a crucial role in this discovery, looking at the HST datasets and comparing them to the expected values of atmospheric emissions.

Ganymede’s atmosphere is produced by charged particle erosion and sublimation of its icy surface. Sublimation occurs when an ice changes directly into a gas without first turning into a liquid. Previous far-ultraviolet observations found both molecular oxygen (O2) and atomic oxygen (O) in the moon’s atmosphere but did not detect the water scientists had expected to find. The new observations find that H2O is more abundant than oxygen near the subsolar point, when the Sun is at its zenith, directly overhead, where the Sun's rays strike the planet most intensely.

“Sublimated water vapor at high noon on Ganymede, where the surface is relatively warm, is likely a key feature of the tenuous atmospheres of Jupiter’s icy moons,” said SwRI’s Dr. Kurt Retherford, a co-author of the Nature Astronomy paper describing this research. “As we prepare to launch NASA’s Ultraviolet Spectrograph (UVS) instrument, built and led by SwRI, aboard the European Space Agency’s (ESA’s) Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) mission next year, this new understanding of Ganymede’s atmosphere will let us better plan our observations and enhance our science return.”

Scientists expect that molecular oxygen is globally the most abundant constituent in Ganymede’s atmosphere, as it is gravitationally bound, stable and less likely to react with surface materials. The lighter products of the ice surface erosion, atomic hydrogen (H) and hydrogen gas (H2), escape quickly and are less abundant. Ganymede’s surface temperatures range from 80 Kelvin (-315 F) to perhaps as high as 150 K (-190 F), but water molecules only sublimate and fly off where it’s hotter than 110 K (-260 F) and get stuck frozen on colder surfaces, limiting the abundance of water elsewhere in the atmosphere. Atmospheric modeling suggests a dichotomy in the atmosphere between an H2O-dominated atmosphere near the warmer region where the Sun is overhead, and an O2-dominated atmosphere everywhere else.

“Showing that water vapor is a large fraction of the atmosphere of Ganymede — at least where the Sun is high — is a very timely result,” said SwRI’s Dr. Randy Gladstone, another co-author. “NASA’s Juno spacecraft is currently making close-up observations of Ganymede, including the emissions observed by HST, and these new results will be used to plan future observations with JUICE, which is designed to orbit Ganymede in 2033.”

“It’s interesting to think of an atmosphere that has a very different composition on its dayside relative to its nightside, with completely different processes driving the production of gases at different locations,” said Dr. Philippa Molyneux, a third SwRI co-author. “Imagine if Earth’s atmosphere worked that way, and how life might have evolved to adapt to that changing environment.”

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For more information, see paper at DOI: 10.1038/s41550-021-01426-9, visit https://www.swri.org/planetary-science.

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DOI

10.1038/s41550-021-01426-9

ARTICLE TITLE

A sublimated water atmosphere on Ganymede detected from Hubble Space Telescope observations