It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Monday, June 07, 2021
HIP CAPITALI$M
HIPGNOSIS SONGS FUND NOW OWNS A MUSIC CATALOG WORTH OVER $2.2 BILLION
(Henry Diltz / Warner Records) Hipgnosis acquired 50% of the Neil Young song catalog in its last FY, in a deal worth around $150 million
Hipgnosis is the owner of a catalog that has been independently valued at USD $2.21 billion, the UK-listed company revealed today (June 7) in a financial update.
That catalog, valued as of the end of March 2021, contained 64,555 songs across 138 catalogs, according to a preliminary annual financial filing.
The $2.21 billion valuation, said Hipgnosis, reflected a multiple of 17.96x historical annual net publisher share income.
The valuation is over $200 million larger than the approximate $2 billion Hipgnosis cumulatively spent on the catalog following the firm’s IPO on the London Stock Exchange in 2018.
That ≈$2 billion cumulative expenditure, said Hipgnosis today, represents an average/blended acquisition multiple of 15.32x.
In the 12 months to end of March 2021, said Hipgnosis, it acquired 84 catalogs for $1.06 billion – an average per-deal price of $12.6 million.
These acquisitions included music catalogs from the likes of Neil Young, Lindsey Buckingham, Chrissie Hynde, Shakira, Walter Afanasieff, Steve Winwood and Grammy Award-winning producer, Andrew Watt.
Calling 2020/2021 a “remarkable year”, Hipgnosis founder and CEO, Merck Mercuriadis said today: “[Whilst] we never would have wished for a pandemic, it has accelerated the consumption of classic songs through streaming and demonstrated exactly what an excellent uncorrelated asset class proven songs are. The pandemic looks set to now lead us into inflation and again we are extremely well placed with Songs as an asset class for our shareholders to be beneficiaries.”
“THE PANDEMIC LOOKS SET TO NOW LEAD US INTO INFLATION AND AGAIN WE ARE EXTREMELY WELL PLACED WITH SONGS AS AN ASSET CLASS FOR OUR SHAREHOLDERS TO BE BENEFICIARIES.”
MERCK MERCURIADIS, HIPGNOSIS SONGS FUND
He added: “Our goals when we listed three years ago were to: (1) Establish Songs as an asset class; (2) Use the leverage of our fund and the great songs in our catalog to be a catalyst to change where the songwriter sits in the economic equation for the benefit of the songwriting community and our shareholders; (3) To replace the broken traditional publishing model with Song Management and add value.
“Having given our shareholders a 41% total return since inception, grown our NAV by more than 11% across this fiscal year, having advocated for songwriters at the highest level including the DCMS hearings taking place in Parliament and having increased our sync income from 9% to 15%, I’m delighted to say we are well on our way to Hipgnosis achieving all.”
Having rooted through Hipgnosis’ new preliminary update, below MBW presents three key takeaways from the music company’s latest numbers…
1) HIPGNOSIS HAS TRANSFORMED INTO A DEEPER CATALOG COMPANY IN THE PAST YEAR
One of the most interesting parts of Hipgnosis’ new results covers the make-up of the company’s portfolio of 64,555 songs (or, more accurately, its portfolio of songs and/or portions of songs).
The 84 catalogs acquired by Hipgnosis in the year to end of March 2021 – which also included deals for catalogs/income streams related to Blondie, Barry Manilow, Rick James, and Jimmy Iovine – changed the mix of its portfolio significantly.
As you can see below, some 60.2% of Hipgnosis’ song portfolio, in terms of fair value, is now at least a decade old.
At the end of March 2020, this figure came in at just 32.5%, and at the end of March 2019, 10-years-plus aged catalog represented just 10.2% of the firm’s total fair value.
Obviously as time ticks on, acquired catalogs are getting older, but there’s been a clear acquisitive swing at Hipgnosis to more evergreen/classic catalogs in the past 15 months.
That said, major contemporary music deals are still getting done by Hipgnosis, with the likes of Andrew Watt and Joel Little (Taylor Swift, Lorde). Hipgnosis acquired 178 songs from Little earlier this month.
2) HIPGNOSIS SAW ITS NET REVENUE GROW 66% IN FY 2020/2021 – BUT PANDEMIC-HIT PERFORMANCE RIGHTS WERE A PAIN POINT
Hipgnosis Songs Fund‘s net revenue increased by 66% in the year ended March 31, 2021, to $138.4 million.
That number was up on the prior year’s net revenue figure of $83.3 million. It included both new revenue from acquisitions, and $22.7 million of “Right To Income” which Hipgnosis says “in effect reduces the net purchase price [of acquisitions], to the benefit of the company”.
Hipgnosis also posted a healthy EBITDA in FY 2021 of $106.7 million.
That was up 49.8% on the $71.2 million EBITDA the company posted in the prior year period.
The $106.7 million EBITDA in FY 2021 represented a 77.1% margin on Hipgnosis’ net revenue in the period ($138.4m).
Hipgnosis has started recognizing two separate calculations for its portfolio: one for its entire catalog, and one for “steady state catalogs”, from which it says “we would not expect decay from peak earnings”.
Streaming income increased 18.4% across the whole Hipgnosis portfolio in the six months to end of March 2021 versus the prior six months, said the company. And its “steady state” catalog grew by 24.3% on the same six month vs six month basis in the second half of the FY.
However, Hipgnosis added: “[Performance] income – which is predominantly received from shops, bars and restaurants as well as live music – has fallen across the music industry in 2020 as a result of COVID-19 lockdowns globally, with PRS recently stating [UK] performance revenues fell by 19.7% in 2020.
“As a result of these industry wide trends, performance income in our catalogs’ royalty earnings income decreased by 25.8% in the second half of the year from the previous six month period across all catalogs, and 21.3% on our ‘steady state’ catalogs where we would not expect decay from peak earnings.”
Hipgnosis said it expected a “further modest fall” in performance revenues in the first half of the current financial year (to end of September 2021), but that it expects “performance income will quickly return to and exceed pre-COVID-19 levels as lockdowns are being lifted in our largest revenue generating markets”.
On 26 March 2021, Hipgnosis drew down USD $90 million under its Revolving Credit Facility, resulting in total gross indebtedness of $577 million and net indebtedness of $438 million.
3) HIPGNOSIS SAYS ITS COPYRIGHT MANAGEMENT PLATFORM IS INCREASING SOME CATALOGS’ REVENUES BY AS MUCH AS 40%
Hipgnosis’ preliminary results filing reads: “We have launched a platform that matches all data points to identify issues that can stop or delay payments. It provides a 3D picture of the data across 200 outside partners who collect revenue on the Company’s behalf. The platform is expected to shorten payment times and increase accuracy as we identify data breaks in real time.
“Our initial trial catalogs have identified 62% of Songs had data issues and we estimate a significant revenue uplift, projected to be as much as 40%, which will be realised by correcting the mistakes in registrations inherited from previous owners. These issues existed before our ownership, therefore every issue fixed is pure revenue upside for the Company.”
“SYNC REVENUES HAVE EXCEEDED ALL EXPECTATIONS AND, DESPITE FILM AND TV PRODUCTION BEING SHUT DOWN FOR MUCH OF THE LAST 16 MONTHS, REVENUES HAVE INCREASED.”
MERCK MERCURIADIS, HIPGNOSIS
In addition, Hipgnosis is buoyant about its ‘Song Management’ team, led by Ted Cockle and Amy Thomson.
Said Merck Mercuriadis: “Our new Song Management team, led by Ted Cockle and Amy Thomson, has made a strong impact, growing revenue and enhancing the legacies of our great Songs, which will make a positive economic impact to the Company in periods to come. Sync revenues have exceeded all expectations and, despite film and TV production being shut down for much of the last 16 months, revenues have increased. This has highlighted not only that we have bought well but also how undervalued our iconic songs have been by traditional publishers and the massive opportunity this affords Hipgnosis.”
Speaking of sync, Hipgnosis’ results revealed that it has now hired former BMG Global Head Of Sync, Patrick Joest, in Europe.Music
TOOK 'EM A LONG TIME TO DO WHAT'S BASIC
In an aviation first, Boeing drone refuels another aircraft in mid-air
The MQ-25 T1 and the F/A-18 Super Hornet, connected via the drone's fuel hose
Kevin Flynn For the first time ever, an un-crewed aircraft has successfully refuelled another aircraft while both planes were in flight. In the test, Boeing's MQ-25 T1 aerial tanker drone transferred jet fuel to a US Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet.
Codenamed the Stingray by the Navy, the MQ-25 T1 was developed and built at Boeing's facilities in St. Louis, Missouri, after the aerospace company won a US$805 million US Navy contract. The prototype drone made its first autonomous flight at the MidAmerica St. Louis Airport in 2019, although no refuelling was performed at that time.
Such was not the case on June 4th of this year, however, when the autonomously flying MQ-25 refuelled a piloted F/A-18 Super Hornet in mid-air. The fighter pilot started by flying in close formation below and behind the drone, at which point the MQ-25 released and extended its fuel-delivery drogue – this is essentially a funnel-like receptacle on the end of a long hose.
The pilot then moved in so that the drogue was able to couple with the F/A-18's nose-mounted fuel probe, at which point jet fuel was transferred from the MQ-25 to the Super Hornet. According to Boeing, both aircraft were flying at "operationally relevant speeds and altitudes."
The refuelling exercise came after 25 prior test flights of the MQ-25 T1 Kevin Flynn
Ultimately, plans call for Stingray tanker drones to operate off of aircraft carriers, taking to the air to refuel passing F/A-18 Super Hornets, EA-18G Growlers and F-35C Lightning II aircraft. That task is currently performed by piloted F/A-18s, which have to be removed from combat duty in order to do so.
"This history-making event is a credit to our joint Boeing and Navy team that is all-in on delivering MQ-25's critical aerial refuelling capability to the fleet as soon as possible," says Leanne Caret, president and CEO of Boeing Defense, Space & Security.
The MQ-25 T1 is now due to be shipped to Norfolk, Virginia, where it will the subject of aircraft carrier deck trials later this year.
You can watch the refuelling exercise for yourself, in the video below.
Boeing MQ-25 Becomes First Unmanned Aircraft to Refuel Another Aircraft
OUCH
U.S. seizes most of Colonial Pipeline's $4.4M ransom payment The successful operation underscores the need for companies to cooperate with investigators after a hack, federal officials said.
“The sophisticated use of technology to hold businesses and even whole cities hostage for profit is decidedly a 21st-century challenge, but the old adage ‘follow the money’ still applies,” Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said during a news conference. | Jonathan Ernst-Pool/Getty Images
Federal investigators were able to recover more than half of the $4.4 million ransom payment that Colonial Pipeline made to the hackers who froze its computers and forced the shutdown of its massive fuel distribution system, the Biden administration announced on Monday.
By tracing the payment across the ostensibly anonymous cryptocurrency ecosystem, the government was able to locate and seize $2.27 million from a virtual currency account used by the hackers.
“The sophisticated use of technology to hold businesses and even whole cities hostage for profit is decidedly a 21st-century challenge, but the old adage ‘follow the money’ still applies,” Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said during a news conference.
The announcement represents a rare bit of good news for the Biden administration as it rushes to fix digital weaknesses in the United States’ critical infrastructure, most of which is run by companies that have scant cyber expertise and are subject to little, if any, regulation.
It also bolsters federal officials’ argument that companies can help fight back against a rising tide of ransomware attacks if they cooperate with government investigations.
May's five-day shutdown of Colonial’s pipeline — one of the East Coast’s biggest fuel suppliers — led to gasoline hoarding that produced widespread, albeit short-term, shortages and helped drive up the price at the pump. The incident refocused attention on the threat of ransomware, prompting new cyber rules for pipeline operators, a bipartisan congressional push for a hack notification law and a parade of hearings, including two this week.
The DarkSide ransomware used to hack Colonial is one of more than 100 variants that the FBI is tracking, Deputy Director Paul Abbate said Monday. DarkSide, which is developed by a Russian criminal group that licenses it out to less sophisticated hackers, has struck more than 90 U.S. critical infrastructure companies in sectors ranging from manufacturing and health care to energy and insurance, Abbate said.
DOJ has created a task force on ransomware attacks, and the department recently announced that it was elevating the issue to the same severity level as terrorism, creating greater coordination between U.S. attorneys’ offices and prosecutors in Washington about which cases to charge. FBI Director Christopher Wray described the ransomware epidemic as a modern version of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Wray’s analogy, which was about the importance of public-private cooperation, underscored why ransomware has continued to plague society. For years, U.S. officials have urged companies to be more forthcoming when they are hacked, both so the government can help them recover and so federal experts can analyze the attacks and warn other potential victims. But many companies still refuse to disclose their breaches, fearing the legal, financial and reputational consequences of doing so.
Monaco used Monday’s announcement as an opportunity to hammer home the government’s message about preparing for and reporting breaches. “We are all in this together,” she said.
President Joe Biden recently signed an executive order that requires federal contractors to report cyber incidents to the government, and bipartisan draft legislation would extend that obligation to critical infrastructure operators and major IT service providers.
Colonial faced criticism for its initial reluctance to share information with the federal government. It alerted the FBI to the breach, but it did not notify DHS’ Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the government’s primary cyber defender. It took several days for Colonial to share breach data with CISA so the agency could prepare guidance for other potential targets, and even then, CISA’s acting director said he was in the dark about Colonial’s ransom payment.
That Colonial even paid the ransom was another source of controversy, as U.S. officials routinely warn against doing so, saying it fuels more attacks. “You are encouraging the bad actors,” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday.
Asked on Monday whether companies could feel better about paying ransoms given the possibility of their recovery, Monaco said doing so always entailed a risk.
“We may not be able to do this in every instance,” she said.
Thanks to the transparent, decentralized nature of the technology underpinning Bitcoin, it was fairly easy for the FBI to use public tools to trace Colonial’s payment as it left the digital address that the hackers provided to the company and moved from one virtual wallet to another.
But the FBI was able to recover the money only because it had separately obtained the private key for the wallet where the money ended up. Without that key, the money would have remained locked away, as is true in many other ransomware cases. Officials did not say how they obtained the key in this case.
SEIZURE — US seizes $2.3 million Colonial Pipeline paid to ransomware attackers
Funds seized after Justice Department IDs Bitcoin wallet and obtains its private key.
DAN GOODIN - 6/7/2021 The FBI said it has seized $2.3 million paid to the ransomware attackers who paralyzed the network of Colonial Pipeline and touched off gasoline and jet fuel supply disruptions up and down the East Coast last month.
In dollar amounts, the sum represents about half of the $4.4 million that Colonial Pipeline paid to members of the DarkSide ransomware group following the May 7 attack, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing the company's CEO. The DarkSide decryptor tool was widely known to be slow and ineffective, but Colonial paid the ransom anyway. In the interview with the WSJ, CEO Joseph Blount confirmed that the shortcomings prevented the company from using it and instead had to rebuild its network through other means.
Cutting off the oxygen supply
On Monday, the US Justice Department said it had traced 63.7 of the roughly 75 bitcoins Colonial Pipeline paid to DarkSide, which the Biden administration says is likely located in Russia. The seizure is remarkable because it marks one of the rare times a ransomware victim has recovered funds it paid to its attacker. Justice Department officials are counting on their success to remove a key incentive for ransomware attacks—the millions of dollars attackers stand to make.
"Today, we deprived a cyber criminal enterprise of the object of their activity, their financial proceeds and funding," FBI Deputy Director Paul M. Abbate said at a press conference. "For financially motivated cyber criminals, especially those presumably located overseas, cutting off access to revenue is one of the most impactful consequences we can impose."Advertisement
The Justice Department officials didn't say how they obtained the digital currency other than to say they seized it from a bitcoin wallet through court documents filed in the Northern District of California. The seizure is a badly needed victory by law enforcement in its uphill effort to curb the ransomware epidemic, which is hitting governments, hospitals, and companies—many providing critical infrastructure or services—with increasing regularity.
The seizure is consistent with statements from almost four weeks ago attributed to a DarkSide team leader. Without providing evidence, the post claimed that the group’s website and content-distribution infrastructure had been seized by law enforcement, along with all the cryptocurrency it had received from victims.
If true, the seizure would represent a small fortune. According to recently released figures from cryptocurrency tracking firm Chainalysis, DarkSide netted at least $60 million in its first seven months starting last August, with $46 million of it coming in the first three months of this year. While corroborating that law enforcement has, in fact obtained that much is not possible, Monday’s disclosure shows it did receive at least some digital assets from DarkSide.
During Monday's conference, Justice Department officials said they had tracked 90 victims who have been hit by DarkSide.
Over the past year, ransomware has evolved from representing a financial risk to one that has the potential to disrupt critical services and cause loss of life. On several occasions, infections hitting hospitals caused outages that required the hospitals to cancel elective surgeries or reroute emergency patients to nearby facilities. Last week, JBS, the world's biggest producer of meat, temporarily shut facilities throughout the US and elsewhere after it lost control of its network to a ransomware group known as REvil.
The law enforcement success intensifies speculation that Colonial Pipeline paid the ransom not to gain access to a decryptor it knew was buggy but rather to help the FBI track DarkSide and its mechanism for obtaining and laundering ransoms.Advertisement
The speculation is reinforced by the fact that Colonial Pipeline paid in bitcoin, despite that option requiring an additional 10 percent added to the ransom. Bitcoin is pseudo-anonymous, meaning that while names aren't attached to digital wallets, the wallets and the coins they store can still be tracked.
It's possible that Colonial Pipeline chose to pay the higher ransom at the behest of law enforcement because bitcoin could be tracked and monero—the other currency accepted by DarkSide—is completely untraceable. Even if that is the case, it's not clear how law enforcement gained possession of the cryptographic key needed to empty the wallet.
"As alleged in the supporting affidavit, by reviewing the Bitcoin public ledger, law enforcement was able to track multiple transfers of bitcoin and identify that approximately 63.7 bitcoins, representing the proceeds of the victim's ransom payment, had been transferred to a specific address, for which the FBI has the 'private key,’ or the rough equivalent of a password needed to access assets accessible from the specific Bitcoin address," Monday's release stated. “This bitcoin represents proceeds traceable to a computer intrusion and property involved in money laundering and may be seized pursuant to criminal and civil forfeiture statutes."
With most of the ransomware groups headquartered in Russia or other Eastern European countries without extradition treaties with Western nations, US officials have largely been hamstrung in their efforts to bring the attackers to justice. It’s too early to know if the techniques that allowed the officials to track the funds Colonial Pipeline paid to DarkSide can be used in investigations of other ransomware attacks. If they do, law enforcement may have gained a powerful tool when it was needed most.
ANOTHER FROZEN LIFE FROM THE PERMAFROST Weird "wheel animals" wriggle back to life after 24,000 years frozen
June 07, 2021
Bdelloid rotifers can survive being frozen for long periods by entering a state called cryptobiosis Michael Plewka
Scientists have managed to revive microscopic animals that had been frozen in the Siberian permafrost for 24,000 years. The Bdelloid rotifers, or “wheel animals” as they’re sometimes called, shook off their long sleep and went right back to moving, eating and reproducing like the Ice Age was only yesterday.
Bdelloid rotifers are tiny tubular creatures that are surprisingly tough. In that way, rotifers are a lot like tardigrades, except that the latter eats the former. When conditions get too cold or dry for them, rotifers will curl up into a ball and dry out, hibernating for months or years until conditions become more favorable again.
A close up of a bdelloid rotifer Michael Plewka
But now the little critters have absolutely smashed their previous record of about 10 years. In this case, the researchers used radiocarbon dating to determine that the permafrost from which they were recovered was between 23,960 and 24,485 years old. As if that wasn’t impressive enough, the rotifers were still able to reproduce through their usual asexual process, called parthenogenesis.
The researchers examined these second generation rotifers more closely, and found that while they were very closely related to modern ones, they’re different enough to constitute a new species. Next, to examine just how the animals might survive such extreme conditions, the researchers froze some of these rotifers at -15 °C (5° F) for one week, then thawed them out and watched them reawaken.
While most multicellular forms of life are damaged by the formation of ice crystals, rotifers seem to be able to protect their cells and organs from this damage. Exactly how remains unknown at this point, the team says. The experimental setup designed to test how the rotifers could withstand being frozen and thawed Stas Malavin
As impressive as a 24,000 year slumber is, these rotifers don’t actually hold the record. Worms called nematodes have wriggled back to life after about 40,000 years, while a batch of bacteria has them both beat at an astonishing 100 million years. Still, rotifers may be the most complex creatures in the club so far.
"The takeaway is that a multicellular organism can be frozen and stored as such for thousands of years and then return back to life – a dream of many fiction writers," says Stas Malavin, an author of the study. "Of course, the more complex the organism, the trickier it is to preserve it alive frozen and, for mammals, it's not currently possible. Yet, moving from a single-celled organism to an organism with a gut and brain, though microscopic, is a big step forward.”
THE RUSSIANS HAVE BEEN DOING CRYOSCIENCE SINCE THE SIXTIES, TRYING TO REVIVE FROZEN LIFE FOUND IN THE PERMAFROST
SPACE RACE 2.5 BILLIONAIRES IN SPACE Jeff Bezos and his brother to be on first Blue Origin passenger flight By David Szondy June 07, 2021 Jeff Bezos and his brother Mark will be passengers on the first Blue Origin human flight Blue Origin
Jeff Bezos has announced that he and his brother Mark will be aboard the first passenger-carrying Blue Origin flight on July 20, joining the winner of the continuing auction for the first paid seat, which now stands at US$2.8 million. If all runs to plan, this means Bezos will beat his fellow billionaires with space ambitions, Elon Musk and Sir Richard Branson, into space courtesy of technology developed by his own company.
Today's announcement signals confidence on the part of the Blue Origin founder regarding the odds of success for the first passenger flight of the Reusable Space Ship First Step crew capsule atop the New Shepard booster, which will lift off next month for a 10-minute suborbital flight into space from the company's Launch Site One in West Texas.
During the mission, the capsule will separate from the booster and coast to an altitude of over 62 miles (100 km), letting the passengers experience weightlessness and see the curvature of the Earth, before returning to the ground by parachute.
The run up to the flight is marked by the auction for the first paying passenger seat, which has attracted almost 6,000 people from 143 countries. Opening bidding will run until June 10 and will continue as a live online auction on June 12 at 1 pm EDT for registered and verified bidders.
If you have a few million dollars going spare, auction details can be found on the Blue Origin site. Proceeds from the auction will go to Blue Origin's Club for the Future, which encourages young people to enter the STEM field.
Jeff Bezos discusses the flight in the video below.
MISSION MORNINGSTAR
NASA selects 2 Venus missions to explore Earth’s ‘hellish’ neighbor
By Eliza Fawcett, Hartford Courant Published: June 7, 2021
For decades, scientists who study Earth’s neighbor Venus have watched with dismay as NASA sends mission after mission to Mars.
The last time the United States visited Venus was in 1989, when it sent the spacecraft Magellan to map the topography of the “hellish” planet. Although Venus is roughly the size of Earth, the planet is fundamentally different, encased in a dense, toxic atmosphere of carbon dioxide. The air pressure on Venus’ surface is equivalent to the pressure experienced a mile beneath Earth’s oceans.
Now, a Wesleyan professor is playing a key role in two newly-announced NASA missions to Venus.
“The question has always been, if you have two Earth-sized planets right next to each other, and one of them is habitable and teeming with life, and the other is not, what happened?” said Dr. Martha S. Gilmore, a professor of earth and environmental sciences at Wesleyan University in Middletown.
At long last, the moment to answer that question has come. Last week, NASA selected two Venus missions, both of which Gilmore helped develop, for its Discovery Program. Each project will receive about $500 million from NASA for development. The missions are expected to launch by 2028 to 2030.
One mission, VERITAS, will send an orbiter to Venus to create high-resolution imaging of the planet’s surface and gather data on the composition of its rocky topography. The other mission, DAVINCI+, will drop an atmospheric probe through Venus’ harsh atmosphere to measure its chemical composition.
“These two sister missions both aim to understand how Venus became an inferno-like world capable of melting lead at the surface,” NASA administrator Bill Nelson said in a speech last week. “They will offer the entire science community the chance to investigate a planet we haven’t been to in more than 30 years.”
NASA’s selection was a thrilling victory for Gilmore and other scientists in the small, insular research community that studies Venus. For years, researchers have submitted proposals to return to the planet, only to see them passed over in favor of other projects. In 2017, both Venus missions were in contention for NASA funding but lost out to two asteroid missions.
It’s different this time around.
“The relief we feel, it’s like, ‘Oh my god, finally!’” Gilmore said.
‘Other Earths’
Gilmore has been enamored of Venus since she was a doctoral student at Brown University, back when the Magellan mission was deployed. Although she has also studied Mars extensively over the course of her career, she has always been drawn to Venus, partly because the planet may hold the key to understanding what she calls “the basic building blocks of planets.”
“As we look out there, we want to find other Earths. We want to look at Earth-sized planets,” Gilmore said. “And so what better way to do that than to study an Earth-sized planet that we have access to, which is Venus?”
ANOTHER SOVIET FIRST
The Soviet space program began exploring Venus in the early 1960s and eventually landed spacecraft on the planet’s surface that took images of its rugged, rocky terrain — before getting crushed under the intense heat and pressure. Magellan spent four years in Venus’ orbit and mapped the planet’s surface, returning images that, at the resolution of a football field, showed that it was covered in ancient lava flows, indicating a history of volcanic activity.
Over the last decade, Gilmore said, scientific research has shown evidence for active volcanism on Venus, and new models have indicated that the planet’s climate may have been habitable for billions of years. The two new missions will provide the most extensive opportunity in years to explore the many unanswered questions about Venus — and our solar system.
For instance: Why do some planets become habitable while others don’t? Where does water come from? Do planets have an initial supply of water, or does it arrive from comets or meteorites?
“The imaging that DAVINCI+ will do and then mapping that VERITAS will do will let us look at landforms. That’s how we identified water on Mars: We can see sedimentary rocks; we can look for river channels and morphology,” Gilmore said.
In addition to obtaining high-resolution images of Venus’ surface, VERITAS (Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography, and Spectroscopy), the orbiter, will conduct a spectroscopy to determine the composition of the planet’s rocks, enabling scientists to study how the rocks were formed. Gilmore specializes in studying the oldest rocks on Venus, and her research suggests that those rocks are “compositionally different than the younger lava flows and different in a way that suggests they were formed in the presence of water.”
As it falls toward Venus’s surface, DAVINCI+ (Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging Plus) will have just 62 minutes to collect data and measure the atmosphere’s chemical composition. The probe is not designed to withstand the impact of landing.
On the DAVINCI+ mission, Gilmore has worked to fit the probe with a camera that will return high-resolution images of “tesserae,” unique geological features on Venus which may be similar to the Earth’s continents.
“As we go down over these old terrains, we can get images of them at the centimeter scale, to understand what those rocks are,” she said. “Are they sediments? Are there channels down there? We don’t know.” Preparing for the launch
The two Venus missions are still seven to nine years away from being launched. In the coming years, Gilmore and other scientists will work with engineers to refine the mission designs. Gilmore is also conducting experiments on rocks that will eventually help her interpret the data the missions generate.
The real work begins once the missions are complete and a fresh trove of data is available for analysis — a task that Gilmore’s undergraduate and graduate students will be able to assist on.
“That’ll probably take me through the rest of my career,” she said.
For now, Gilmore said she’s proud of the work the Venus community has done to get to this point. And she’s eagerly anticipating the work to come.
“I’m still shocked,” she said. “But I’m thrilled.”
NASA eyes return to inhospitable Venus
By MARCIA DUNN, Associated Press Published: June 3, 2021
This image shows the planet Venus made with data from the Magellan spacecraft and Pioneer Venus Orbiter. On Wednesday, NASA administrator Bill Nelson announced two robotic missions to the solar system's hottest planet. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — NASA is returning to sizzling Venus, our closest yet perhaps most overlooked neighbor, after decades of exploring other worlds.
The space agency’s new administrator, Bill Nelson, announced two new robotic missions to the solar system’s hottest planet, during his first major address to employees Wednesday.
“These two sister missions both aim to understand how Venus became an inferno-like world capable of melting lead at the surface,” Nelson said.
One mission named DaVinci Plus will analyze the thick, cloudy Venusian atmosphere in an attempt to determine whether the inferno planet ever had an ocean and was possibly habitable. A small craft will plunge through the atmosphere to measure the gases. It will be the first U.S.-led mission to the Venusian atmosphere since 1978.
The other mission, called Veritas, will seek a geologic history by mapping the rocky planet’s surface.
“It is astounding how little we know about Venus,” but the new missions will give fresh views of the planet’s atmosphere, made up mostly of carbon dioxide, down to the core, NASA scientist Tom Wagner said in a statement.
NASA’s top science official, Thomas Zurbuchen, calls it “a new decade of Venus.” Each mission, launching around 2029, will receive $500 million for development under NASA’s Discovery program.
The missions beat out two other proposed projects, to Jupiter’s moon Io and Neptune’s icy moon Triton.
DISASTER CAPITALI$M
Puerto Rico is prone to more flooding than the island is prepared to handle
CREDIT: PHOTO BY SGT. JOSE AHIRAM DIAZ-RAMOS/PRNG-PAO
AUSTIN, Texas -- Puerto Rico is not ready for another hurricane season, let alone the effects of climate change, according to a new study that shows the island's outstanding capacity to produce record-breaking floods and trigger a large number of landslides.
The latest research, appearing in the journal Hydrology, builds on three prior studies led by hydrologist Carlos Ramos-Scharrón at The University of Texas at Austin, whose team began investigating the devastating impact of tropical cyclones on the island after Hurricane Maria in 2017.
The first compared the 2017 hurricane as a rainstorm event to more than a century of cyclones that came before it, finding that Maria produced the highest island-wide daily rainfall amount ever recorded (similar to Hurricane Harvey's impact on Houston). The second found that Maria's rainfall triggered one of the highest number of rainfall-induced landslides ever reported worldwide in similarly sized areas. And the third identified landslides as the main source of the sediment infilling the already limited water storage capacity of the island's main reservoirs.
"We need to stop talking about climate change in future tense. It's already here," said Ramos-Scharrón, associate professor in the Department of Geography and the Environment and the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies. "Climate change projections for the Caribbean suggest longer dry periods interrupted by more intense storms. These storms release large quantities of sediment by landslides, and many of those end up reducing the island's capacity to store water. The combined effect of these climate change projections is for a higher propensity for water scarcity."
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Civil Air Patrol in cooperation with the Air National Guard does an ariel survey over northern Puerto Rico Sept. 26, 2017 after hurricane Maria impacted the island on Sept. 20, 2017. The Civil Air Patrol is part of the Air Force's total force concept.
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US Air Force photo by Airman 1st Class Nicholas Dutton
The latest paper, which focused on streamflow levels, draws attention to another glaring issue -- Puerto Rico is not prepared to handle the severe flooding sure to come its way. Flood management and the design of vital infrastructure, such as bridges, largely rely on a calculation of the likelihood that an event of a given magnitude is going to occur. For a particular region, that calculation depends on the history of flooding.
In Puerto Rico, the most current method to make such calculations relies on data collected only up to 1994. Since then, Hurricanes Hortense (1996), Georges (1998) and Maria surpassed bot100-year and 500-year flood marks across the island, with Maria surpassing 500-year levels in five locations.
h Five other tropical storms matched or surpassed 100- and 500-year levels in some specific locations, particularly near the central-eastern end of Puerto Rico, which is most vulnerable due to the westward trajectory of most tropical cyclones and the island's hilly topography.
"Events with these 100- and 500-year metrics just cannot be that common," Ramos-Scharrón said. "If this is not what climate change is supposed to be, then I do not know what it is. It can creep up on you. Puerto Rico needs to adapt its planning tools to the reality of what the island has experienced and scientists are documenting."
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The Adjuntant General of Puerto Rico, Brig. Gen. Isabelo Rivera, and State Command Sgt. Maj. Juvencio Méndez, along with the Governor of Puerto Rico, Hon. Ricardo Rosselló Nevares, and the Resident Commissioner of Puerto Rico in Washington, Hon. Jennifer González, the director of FEMA in Puerto Rico, Alejandro de la Campa, and the Director of the Authority of Electrical Energy of Puerto Rico, Eng. Ricardo Ramos, realized a reconnaissance flight of the island, Sept. 23, with aid from Puerto Rico National Guard Army Aviation, San Juan, P.R.
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Sgt. Jose Ahiram Diaz-Ramos/PRNG-PAO
Papers explore massive plankton blooms with very different ecosystem impacts
IMAGE: THE VIDEO PLANKTON RECORDER BEING RECOVERED AFTER A SUCCESSFUL SURVEY. view more
CREDIT: DAN BRINKHUIS, SCIENCEMEDIA.NL
"The big mystery about plankton is what controls its distribution and abundance, and what conditions lead to big plankton blooms," said Dennis McGillicuddy, Senior Scientist and Department Chair in Applied Ocean Physics and Engineering at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI).
Two new papers explore this question and provide examples of conditions that lead to massive plankton blooms with vastly different potential impacts on the ecosystem, according to McGillicuddy, co-author of both papers. Both papers also point to the importance of using advanced technology--including Video Plankton Recorders, autonomous underwater vehicles, and the Ocean Observatories Initiative's Coastal Pioneer Array--to find and monitor these blooms.
In one paper, Diatom Hotspots Driven by Western Boundary Current Instability, published in Geophysical Research Letters (GRL), scientists found unexpectedly productive subsurface hotspot blooms of diatom phytoplankton.
In the GRL paper, researchers investigated the dynamics controlling primary productivity in a region of the Mid-Atlantic Bight (MAB), one of the world's most productive marine ecosystems. In 2019, they observed unexpected diatom hotspots in the slope region of the bight's euphotic zone, the ocean layer that receives enough light for photosynthesis to occur. Phytoplankton are photosynthetic microorganisms that are the foundation of the aquatic food web.
It was surprising to the researchers that the hotspots occurred in high-salinity water intruding from the Gulf Stream. "While these intrusions of low?nutrient Gulf Stream water have been thought to potentially diminish biological productivity, we present evidence of an unexpectedly productive subsurface diatom bloom resulting from the direct intrusion of a Gulf Stream meander towards the continental shelf," the authors note. They hypothesize that the hotspots were not fueled by Gulf Stream surface water, which is typically low in nutrients and chlorophyll, but rather that the hotspots were fueled by nutrients upwelled into the sunlight zone from deeper Gulf Stream water.
With changing stability of the Gulf Stream, intrusions from the Gulf Stream had become more frequent in recent decades, according to the researchers. "These results suggest that changing large?scale circulation has consequences for regional productivity that are not detectable by satellites by virtue of their occurrence well below the surface," the authors note.
"In this particular case, changing climate has led to an increase in productivity in this particular region, by virtue of a subtle and somewhat unexpected interaction between the physics and biology of the ocean. That same dynamic may not necessarily hold elsewhere in the ocean, and it's quite likely that other areas of the ocean will become less productive over time. That's of great concern," said McGillicuddy. "There are going to be regional differences in the way the ocean responds to climate change. And society needs to be able to intelligently manage from a regional perspective, not just on a global perspective."
The research finding demonstrated "a cool, counterintuitive biological impact of this changing large scale circulation," said the GRL paper's lead author, Hilde Oliver, a postdoctoral scholar in Applied Ocean Physics and Engineering at WHOI. She recalled watching the instrument data come in. With typical summertime values of about 1-1.5 micrograms of chlorophyll per liter of seawater, researchers recorded "unheard of concentrations for chlorophyll in this region in summer," as high as 12 or 13 micrograms per liter, Oliver said.
Oliver, whose Ph.D. focused on modeling, said the cruise helped her to look at phytoplankton blooms from more than a theoretical sense. "To go out into the ocean and see how the physics of the ocean can manifest these blooms in the real world was eye opening to me," she said.
Another paper, A Regional, Early Spring Bloom of Phaeocystis pouchetii on the New England Continental Shelf, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans (JGR: Oceans), also was eye opening. Researchers investigating the biological dynamics of the New England continental shelf in 2018 discovered a huge bloom of the haptophyte phytoplankton Phaeocystis pouchetii.
However, unlike the diatom hotspots described in the GRL paper, Phaeocystis is "unpalatable to a lot of different organisms and disrupts the entire food web," said Walker Smith, retired professor at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science William and Mary, who is the lead author on the JGR: Oceans paper. The phytoplankton form gelatinous colonies that are millimeters in diameter.
When Phaeocystis blooms, it utilizes nutrients just like any other form of phytoplankton would. However, unlike the diatoms noted in the GRL paper, Phaeocystis converts biomass into something that doesn't tend to get passed up the rest of the food chain, said McGillicuddy.
"Understanding the physical-biological interactions in the coastal system provides a basis for predicting these blooms of potentially harmful algae and may lead to a better prediction of their impacts on coastal systems," the authors stated.
Massive blooms of the colonial stage of this and similar species have been reported in many systems in different parts of the world, which Smith has studied. These types of blooms probably occur about every three years in the New England continental shelf and probably have a fairly strong impact on New England waters, food webs, and fisheries, said Smith. Coastal managers need to know about these blooms because they can have economic impacts on aquaculture in coastal areas, he said.
"Despite the fact that the Mid-Atlantic Bight has been well-studied and extensively sampled, there are things that are going on that we still don't really appreciate," said Smith. "One example are these Phaeocystis blooms that are deep in the water and that you are never going to see unless you are there because satellites can't show them. So, the more we look, the more we find out."
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Both of these studies were carried out as part of the National Science Foundation-funded Shelfbreak Productivity Interdisciplinary Research Operation at the Pioneer Array involving partners at WHOI, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, Virginia Institute of Marine Science, Wellesley College, and Old Dominion University. Additional support has been provided by the Dalio Explorer Fund.
For more information, see the video "Life at the Edge: Plankton Growth at the Shelf Break Front," produced by ScienceMedia.nl for WHOI.
About Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) is a private, non-profit organization on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, dedicated to marine research, engineering, and higher education. Established in 1930, its primary mission is to understand the ocean and its interaction with the Earth as a whole, and to communicate an understanding of the ocean's role in the changing global environment. WHOI's pioneering discoveries stem from an ideal combination of science and engineering--one that has made it one of the most trusted and technically advanced leaders in basic and applied ocean research and exploration anywhere. WHOI is known for its multidisciplinary approach, superior ship operations, and unparalleled deep-sea robotics capabilities. We play a leading role in ocean observation and operate the most extensive suite of data-gathering platforms in the world. Top scientists, engineers, and students collaborate on more than 800 concurrent projects worldwide--both above and below the waves--pushing the boundaries of knowledge and possibility. For more information, please visit http://www.whoi.edu
A Regional, Early Spring Bloom of Phaeocystis pouchetii on the New England Continental Shelf
Authors: Walker O. Smith Jr.1,2*, Weifeng G. Zhang3, Andrew Hirzel3, Rachel M. Stanley4, Meredith G. Meyer1, Heidi Sosik3, Philip Alatalo3, Hilde Oliver3, Zoe Sandwith3, E. Taylor Crockford3 , Emily E. Peacock3, Arshia Mehta4 , and Dennis J. McGillicuddy Jr.3
Affiliations:
1 Virginia Institute of Marine Science, William & Mary, Gloucester Pt., VA, USA
2 School of Oceanography, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China
3 Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Woods Hole, MA, USA
4 Department of Chemistry, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA, USA
*Corresponding author
Diatom Hotspots Driven by Western Boundary Current Instability
Authors: Hilde Oliver1*, Weifeng G. Zhang1, Walker O. Smith, Jr.,2,3, Philip Alatalo1, P. Dreux Chappell4, Andrew Hirzel1, Corday R. Selden4, Heidi M. Sosik1, Rachel H. R. Stanley5, Yifan Zhu4, and Dennis J. McGillicuddy, Jr.1
Affiliations:
1Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Woods Hole, MA, USA
2Virginia Institute of Marine Science, College of William & Mary, Gloucester Point, VA, USA
3School of Oceanography, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, People's Republic of China
4Department of Ocean and Earth Sciences, Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA USA 5Department of Chemistry, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA, USA *Corresponding autho
