UK charity keeps India’s young on track

Children given way out of red-light area

Children eat their evening snacks at the Kamathipura night care centre run by the charity Prerana

Evening has descended on Kamathipura, Mumbai’s red-light district. Soni, the pretty 12-year-old daughter of a long-time sex worker, has arrived at the care centre where she has spent nearly every night since she was a toddler, while her 38-year-old mother has entertained clients

Soni and other daughters of sex workers would once have been condemned to follow in their mothers’ footsteps as pimps and a lack of education gave them few other options. But the neatly groomed Soni has different ideas about her future. “I want to be a dancer but if I can’t do that, I’d like to take up a job in computers,” she says with a bright smile.

Such dreams, and the skills to realise them, are what Prerana, the charity that runs the Kamathipura night care centre has tried to nurture in the thousands of sex workers’ children who have passed through its doors since 1986.

Prerana is one of the hundreds of grassroots organisations around the world that gets support from the Global Fund for Children, which is the beneficiary of this year’s FT Seasonal Appeal.

GFC identifies groups such as Prerana that are working to improve the lives of children and gives them financial grants and the advice and mentoring needed to become viable and self-sufficient.

Prerana’s goal is very simple: to give children options they might not otherwise have.

“When we started, it was as if every girl child in the red light area was born into the sex trade, and every boy was born to be allied to the sex trade – pimping, drug peddling, and trafficking,” says Priti Patkar, who founded Prerana after graduating from Mumbai’s Tata Institute of Social Sciences. “But if you are talking about a child’s rights, it should cut across all social groups,” she says. “These kids should have a right to choose a life away from the sex trade.”

To learn more about the Global Fund for Children and to make a donation, click here

Prerana opened its first night care centre in Kamathipura in 1988 after two years of intensive talks with sex workers. Most women in the brothels were unwilling to relinquish their children, usually the only bright spot in their lives, but they were keen to protect them from prostitution and its ills.

“When we asked mothers what they wanted for their children, they all said, ‘I want them to have a life other than the hell I have gone through’,” Ms Patkar says.

In each of Prerana’s three night care centres, sex workers’ children are given dinner, a safe place to sleep while mothers work and breakfast the next morning. About 220 children regularly sleep in the centres, which are open to both girls and boys as young as two.

As girls reach adolescence, and risks of exploitation increase, Prerana social workers usually try to persuade mothers to send their daughters to full-time shelters, mostly run by other groups, outside the red-light area. The charity also works with women dying of Aids to ensure that their soon to be orphaned children are put in safe shelters, rather than kept by brothel owners or pimps.

But Prerana goes far beyond just meeting children’s immediate needs for physical sustenance and protection. Children sleeping in its night centres are offered counselling to help them cope with their experiences in the red-light district and programmes to inspire them to believe that they can escape.

Prerana ensures the children are enrolled in government schools and provides coaching each evening to help them with their homework. There are regular talks on “life skills” and guest speakers visit monthly to talk to children about different career options.

The staff of the Financial Times have chosen The Global Fund for Children, a pioneering charity helping some of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable children, for our 2012 seasonal appeal.

Thanks to the generosity of our readers, the FT’s seasonal appeals have raised more than £9m for good causes since 2005. We aim to do even better this year.

The most effective motivational speakers are Prerana’s own graduates. Of about 3,500 children who have passed through the charity’s centres over the past two decades, Ms Patkar says nearly all have normal lives, working as nurses, housekeepers in five-star hotels, or in other service industry jobs. Some have obtained college degrees, and many are married with families of their own.

Mumtaz, an 18-year-old whose mother died of Aids seven years ago, is studying at Mumbai university, hoping for a job in a bank. Her childhood memories still haunt her but she feels she is moving forward in her life.

“I never felt safe,” she recalls of her childhood. “I would feel men ogling me. But I vowed I would never talk about my past to anyone. Life is more peaceful that way.”

Much has changed in Kamathipura since Prerana began its work.

Skyrocketing property prices have prompted the razing of many decrepit brothels to make way for new apartment blocks, and the Aids epidemic has claimed the lives of many women, leaving orphans behind. But the risks to sex workers’ children remain.

“I get very scared when I have to walk down the street,” says Soni. “There are young boys, and the way they look at me, and the way their hands casually touch you, I don’t like it at all. I am just waiting to grow up, get out of here, and go to see the Statue of Liberty.”

Future technology - Sky is no limit for rapid travel

By Rohit Jaggi Financial Times November 16, 2009 4:33 am

Supersonic aircraft projects have generated more words than speed in recent years.

There is a precedent – the British and French signed an agreement in 1962 to develop a supersonic airliner but the Mach 2 Concorde did not enter commercial service until 1976.

However, a ban on supersonic flight over US territory, which industry insiders insist was prompted by protectionism and was a main reason why only the two flag-carriers operated Concorde, is still shaping the technology of rapid air travel today.

Which is one reason why the route to bringing down intercontinental journey times may lie on the edge of the skies.

It was two years ago, at the last Dubai airshow, that Aerion opened the order book for its supersonic business jet. Since then it has accumulated “almost 50 orders, valued at over $4bn”, says Brian Barents, vice-chairman of Aerion. “A third come from the Middle East and Asia,” he adds.

Aerion, based in Reno, Nevada, is far advanced on a design for an $80m, 8–12 passenger jet capable of Mach 1.6, or twice the speed of most current business jets, and a range of 4,000 nautical miles.

The original business plan envisaged building 300 aircraft over 10 years from 2015. But market research being done for the company is expected to say, according to Mr Barents, “that there will be a bigger market than we expected”.

The aircraft is designed to be efficient both above and below the speed of sound – 661.5 kts, or 761.2 mph, or 1.225.1 km/h at sea level on a standard day – in order to navigate around existing speed rules. They include the supersonic ban above the US and a Mach 1.15 limit over most other land masses.

However, despite orders that have held up during the downturn, and despite planning to use “proven, robust and available” technology,Aerion has still not found an aircraft maker to build it.

Other projects, such as the Quiet Supersonic Transport designed by the Lockheed-Martin Skunk Works, concentrated on minimising the sound of the sonic boom.

In Europe an EC-mandated €27m ($40m) project led by Dassault Aviation of France has, since 2005, been looking into the feasibility of an 8–16-passenger high-speed aircraft (Hisac) with a transatlantic-plus range, a Mach 1.8 capability and a reduced sonic boom. The aim is for the aircraft to cut journey times by 20 to 50 per cent over current aircraft, operate from small airports, and equal or better current standards on noise and emissions. The research programme is due to be completed by the end of this year.

But by the time supersonic jets of this type finally get to the runway they may well have missed their take-off slot. An alternative may come from work done on travel to the edge of space.

According to Will Whitehorn, president of Virgin Galactic which has signed up 300 people for its planned $200,000-a-ticket suborbital space flights, technology being developed to take tourists and payloads into space “could eventually be a transportation system to take people around the planet”.

Earlier this year Reaction Engines, based in Oxfordshire in the UK, announced a £6m ($10m) research programme into its Sabre engine technology intended to power a reusable spaceship that would take off and land on ordinary runways. The project, which has won a €1m grant from the European Space Agency, will develop an engine that works both within and outside earth’s atmosphere, combining characteristics of jet and rocket engines.

The engines hold the key to hypersonic flight, says Mr Whitehorn. “The theory is well understood. Engines could be coming off the stocks in 2014 to 2016.”

Reaction Engines has laid down plans, as part of the EU “Lapcat” programme, for a 300-seat aircraft using a derivative of the Sabre engine that would cruise at Mach 5 at an altitude of 82,000 ft, or 25 km – either a half or a quarter of the way to space, depending on which definition you believe.

An Aerion’s comparatively modest Mach 1.6 would cut the New York–London journey time from seven and a half hours by conventional jet to just four and a quarter. Hypersonic speeds of Mach 5 would zoom passengers to Sydney from Brussels in four and a half hours.

“The output of the exhaust is just water,” says Mark Hempsell, future programmes director at Reaction Engines. “It’s much, much better on emissions than current airliners.”

Proving the Sabre engine technology could also would also, if it is engineered to last the thousands of cycles that airliner use demands, open up the prospect of using suborbital trajectories for intercontinental passenger travel.

“It is feasible to do suborbital,” says Mr Hempsell. “And it would be a whole lot more environmentally friendly.”

Which could mean space moves from being the final frontier, to being a gateway to the other side of our own world.

Peugeot's Hybrid Air - the car of the future that runs on air

It will be cheaper than a Toyota Prius, do more than 80 miles to the gallon and could completely shake up the car industry. The Peugeot engineers behind the Hybrid Air reveal that they couldn't even tell their families about the top-secret project

• 
  Tim Lewis The Observer, Sunday 24 March 2013
  
• 
  The Peugeot Hybrid Air, with the blue ‘scuba tank’ clearly visible.
  

There was a sense, when I arrived in Paris a couple of weeks ago, that France was if not quite in meltdown then certainly enduring a profound existential crisis. Unemployment had metastasised to 10.6%, and the country's credit rating was in the dumps. President François Hollande's maligned plans for a 75% "supertax" had sent some of the most famous French citizens scuttling to Belgium. In November, a cover of the Economist showed seven baguettes tied with a tricolour, a lit fuse poking out of the middle. The article warned: "Mr Hollande does not have long to defuse the time-bomb at the heart of Europe."

French manufacturing, in particular, was on its knees. Worldwide sales at carmaker PSA Peugeot Citroën were down 8.8% in 2012, the sixth successive year they had decreased. Three of its biggest markets – Spain, Italy, Portugal – were even less interested in new cars than France. The company had announced plans to shrink its French workforce by 8,000, almost one-fifth, over the next two years. Workers responded with violent protests, burning tyres and cutting power cables.

In these desperate times, however, there was one solitary flower growing up through the concrete. In January, Peugeot announced that it had developed a car that ran on air. It officially launched the Hybrid Air vehicle to the world at the Geneva motor show this month, and revealed that it would be in production by 2016. The car did not solely run on air, of course; the new technology was twinned with a petrol engine. But Peugeot believed that it had significant advantages over battery-powered electric hybrids, such as a Toyota Prius. Their cars would be cheaper to buy, for a start, and extra savings would come from a fuel economy of around 81 miles per gallon.

If Peugeot could back this up, Hybrid Air would shake up the whole car industry. The ailing French giant could certainly do with it being a success – its long-term survival might just depend on it.

At a Peugeot technical centre in Carrières-sous-Poissy, a few miles west of Paris, two engineers – project leaders Karim Mokaddem and Andrés Yarce – show me a Hybrid Air vehicle. From one side, the car looks no different from the compact hatchbacks that Peugeot and Citroën are famous for, but it has been sawn in half to better illustrate the new technology. Most visibly, running down the middle of the undercarriage, there is a blue, four-foot-long accumulator – what Mokaddem calls, with a wry smile, "the scuba tank".

The pressurised steel tank is filled with around 20 litres of nitrogen, plus some hydraulic fluid. Much like a Prius, Hybrid Air vehicles recover energy every time the driver brakes or decelerates. But instead of using this kinetic energy to charge a battery – as electric hybrids do – the Hybrid Air system has a reversible hydraulic pump that compresses the nitrogen in the tank and then unleashes it the next time the driver pumps the accelerator.

"It's mainly a …" Yarce searches for the word, "a syringe. The nitrogen compresses or decompresses and actually pushes the oil and the hydraulic components to transform this energy into a force that makes the vehicle move forwards. It's as simple as that."

The system does not produce vast amounts of energy – in fact you would struggle to drive even a mile before the petrol engine was forced to kick in – but if you are stop-starting around the city all day then the savings in fuel could be significant. "We named the prototype cars Kiwi One, Kiwi Two, etc, because the amount of energy stored within the scuba tank is exactly the same amount you'd find in a kiwi fruit," explains Mokaddem.

Another advantage over hybrids already on the market is that Peugeot's new cars do not require an expensive lithium-ion battery or electric motor, meaning that they will start from around £17,000. That's almost £5,000 less than a Prius. The parts are simple and easily serviced, a fact that would be attractive in the emerging markets of China, India and Russia.

For all the interest that Hybrid Air has inspired – both positive and sceptical – the Peugeot engineers are keen to downplay the idea that it is a radical solution. They acknowledge that the idea of hybrid hydraulics has been around for years. UPS has run a fleet of delivery vans since 2009 that use pressurised hydraulic fluid – rather than nitrogen – that converts braking energy into forward momentum. It has clear benefits for any vehicle that needs to make regular stops, such as street cleaners or a school bus.

"I'm not going to say this is a real innovation, for sure not," says Mokaddem, as we stand underneath another Hybrid Air vehicle, its conspicuous blue tank reminiscent of the air ducts of the Pompidou Centre. "We have made a new gearbox, sure, but the components are known components, and the innovation is how we have put them together to make the most efficient car."

"It's putting them together in the right way," agrees Yarce. "It's mainly like Lego."

Of course, if the idea of running a car on nitrogen was so obvious, then someone would have developed it fully before. But perhaps the most surprising aspect of the new technology is that it has been unveiled by Peugeot, a company that celebrated its 200th anniversary in 2010, and has not been known, in recent times certainly, for pioneering R&D.

"It's true that today the market is dominated – on the hybrid side, for sure – by Asian technology, that's reality," accepts Mokaddem. "So it was a little bit unexpected for a European car maker to develop such a new approach. Why? I don't know."

The development of Hybrid Air required Peugeot to overhaul entirely its approach to product development. The project, which was started in 2010, was worked on by a team of around 100 entirely in secrecy. They took this last part very seriously: Mokaddem could not reveal any details, even to his wife and children. "They thought I had become a spy," he jokes. With a small number of employees working on the project, and little hierarchy, the intention was to create – within the second-biggest carmaker in Europe – a unit with the energy and enterprise of a startup.

From the start, the team was encouraged to think of a "disruptive innovation". The term comes from Harvard professor Clayton Christensen's book, The Innovator's Dilemma, and describes a technology that does not just alter the market but creates an entirely new one. An incremental innovation, for example, would evolve a two-blade razor into a three-bladed one; a disruptive innovation would jump from compact discs to the iPod, or from volumes of encyclopaedias to Wikipedia.

When they had decided to focus on fuel economy, Mokaddem encouraged his fellow engineers to re-consider a car from first principles. They were pushed to think outrageously. The original prototype for Hybrid Air borrowed the hydraulic parts from an Airbus jet. The noise it made was excruciating, but when the car edged forward a few metres, the team knew they were on to something interesting. Ultimately, they adapted parts more commonly found in elevators and tractors.

Since its launch, the Hybrid Air project has provoked extreme and sometimes hysterical reactions. A comment on one online forum worried that the presence of the accumulator was like driving around under "a compressed air bomb". Both Mokaddem and Yarce explode into laughter when I put this to them. "We took into account gunshots, fire, lots of strange situations – the system will not explode and we have tested that," says Yarce. "We are completely confident today that there are no safety risks."

Another concern was a misunderstanding that the car could "run out of air".

"The air is isolated inside, it's a closed circuit, so we always have air inside," explains Yarce. "It's just a question of whether it's compressed or not. Clearly the system is based on a petrol combustion engine, so you need petrol to compress the air the first time. And, well, if you don't have any fuel, you clearly won't be able to move – that's the same as a standard car."

It will be a couple of years before we find out if Peugeot can fully realise the promise of Hybrid Air. The engineers need to do more work on the brakes and the hydraulics and they ultimately believe they can achieve 117mpg by 2020. Whether it can take down an established hybrid supplier such as Toyota remains to be seen.

But, for now, the project has at least provided some much needed hope for a beleaguered company and its precarious workforce. "PSA Peugeot Citroën needs to stand up and show we are still alive," says Mokaddem. "That we have ideas and we can differentiate ourselves. We are part of a new generation that is saying, 'We are a company with 200 years of history, but we are still young.' We are not going to die."

• This article was amended on 24 March 2013 to correct two mentions of hydrogen to nitrogen

Vann Nath Vann Nath, a Cambodian who painted to stay alive, died on September 5th, aged 65

Sep 17th 2011 | from the print edition The Economist

WHEN he was 52, with a hand that still trembled, Vann Nath produced a painting of a young man lying under a blossoming tree. He was playing a pipe while, in the background, cattle grazed by green palms in some bucolic corner of Cambodia. It was meant to be a self-portrait, he said, a beautiful memory from his childhood. He wanted only to paint idyllic landscapes now, in the style of temple murals or the French Impressionists who had first inspired him to take up art.

That was because, in 1978-79, he had been made to paint quite different pictures. In those months he was interned in S-21 prison, a former French lycée in Phnom Penh which had been converted into a torture-compound for alleged enemies of the Khmer Rouge regime. Perhaps 14,000 people were sent to S-21 for a daily routine of electrocution, water-boarding and flagellation before being carted off for execution—a shovel or spade to the head—at the nearby “killing fields”. Mr Vann Nath was one of only six or seven prisoners to make it out alive.

He never expected to. Like almost all the others, he had no idea why he had been sent there. He was not an intellectual; his family was poor and provincial, and he just a painter in a small business making signs and billboards. In 1975, obedient to the Khmers Rouges, he had joined a peasant commune and worked hard there. When he first saw the wasted prisoners in S-21, he thought it was all over for him. But after withering away for a month, fed so sparely on rice gruel that he felt an urge to consume the flesh of the dead, he was asked to paint portraits of the regime’s leader, Pol Pot.

At first he thought he could not do it. The shocks and beatings meant that he could barely stand. Besides, he had no idea what Pol Pot looked like, and only a black-and-white photograph to copy. All the time he painted, day and night, the screams of the tortured echoed from other rooms. He hoped, with every brush-stroke, that his jailers would like his work and let him live. He focused by thinking how much he would like to kill the man he drew.

Nonetheless, he carried out the task to the satisfaction of Duch, the prison commandant, the one—and still only—former cadre now being held to account for his role in the revolution. For his flattering portraits, giving Pol Pot a fresh-faced girl’s rosy cheeks, Mr Vann Nath’s name in the prison ledger was tagged “Keep for use”. But for that “keeping”, he often said, he would be dead.

When a Vietnamese invasion swept the Khmers Rouges from power, in January 1979, his portrait-painting ended. But in 1980-81 an even more harrowing spell of art began. The fleeing warders of S-21 left behind troves of documents outlining the prison’s work, but it was Mr Vann Nath, painting his memories in sombre oils, who showed most vividly what had happened there. Blindfolded men, women and children trucked into the compound in the middle of the night. Men carried, trussed like pigs, on bamboo poles. Babies torn from their mothers’ arms—to be smashed against walls, he learned later. Prisoners prodded, whipped and steered by stone-faced cadres into holding cells to be crammed side by side, like decaying logs. For many years after the Khmers Rouges fell from power, the upper echelons of the regime denied S-21’s existence. Mr Vann Nath caught its reality in furtive glances, as he moved from cell to workshop.

He painted by stilling his mind, in a process both painful and therapeutic. But painting still made no sense of what he had seen. It seemed to him that Cambodia could not cleanse itself of such an evil, and that his works were not good enough to do such horror justice. He only hoped the souls of those who had died would get some ease from them.

When S-21 was turned into a museum of the national self-genocide he had witnessed, some of his pictures hung on the walls. One day, for the first time since 1979, he saw one of his former jailers there, a “tiger” he had dreaded. Having puffed a few cigarettes to steel himself—for he was always a man of poise, despite his tormented past—he approached him affably and guided him by the shoulder to his paintings hanging there. “Is this accurate?” he asked. It was, the jailer conceded.

The international media, whose questions about S-21 he patiently answered time after time, called him Cambodia’s Goya. He brushed it off. His principal fear was that young Cambodians would not learn about—or, worse still, would not believe—what he had witnessed. He painted, he said, so that Cambodia would never turn on itself so monstrously again.

Silent witness

Two years ago Mr Vann Nath took the stand as a witness against Duch, his former master, who is now appealing a 35-year jail sentence handed down by a UN-backed war-crimes court in Cambodia. A second trial, of four senior leaders of the regime, is not expected to start until next year. The defendants say they are too ill to stand trial. They are attended, however, by a world-class team of doctors; Mr Vann Nath, who suffered years of kidney disease, struggled to afford even basic care. His testimony will be missing from subsequent proceedings. His paintings, however, speak for him.

• 
  BBC to put one million hours of its past online
  

Corporation wants its entire archive to be available for free

• 
  James Robinson, media correspondent
  
• 
  The Observer, Sunday 15 April 2007
  

Thousands of hours of broadcasting history are to be made available to the public online as part of a plan to open up the BBC's entire archive to licence-fee payers free of charge.

The radio and TV material, some of which has never been repeated, includes an interview with Martin Luther King filmed shortly before he was assassinated, and another with John Lennon and Yoko Ono in which the former Beatle talks candidly about the impact their relationship had on the band.

Other programmes include a 1956 episode of the nature series Zoo Quest in which a young David Attenborough captures the komodo dragon on film for the first time. The episode has never been repeated but could soon be available online as part of the ambitious project, headed by the BBC's director of future media and technology, Ashley Highfield.

The BBC wants to put nearly one million hours of material on the internet for viewers to watch, listen to and download and has already begun the long process of retrieving and transferring programmes. A trial involving 20,000 users will begin next month, and the service could be available nationally in a year's time. Highfield will announce details of the scheme in a speech this week.

Other shows the BBC hopes to make available include a 1981 performance of Othello, starring Anthony Hopkins in the title role and Bob Hoskins as Iago.

A 1968 Woman's Hour radio programme marking the 50th anniversary of women gaining the vote features interviews with suffragettes who campaigned alongside the Pankhursts.

Other material includes a dramatic government appeal, transmitted in May 1940, asking for volunteers to sail to Dunkirk to help rescue the 330,000 French and British troops stranded there.

Most of the programmes have never been repeated because the BBC does not own the rights to part of the material used in each broadcast.

The corporation is currently trying to clear the material so it can place it online, although the negotiations are proving more complicated than expected.

Although it owns the copyright to most shows, it does not have the right to repeat many of them. Actors, agents, composers and presenters have to be contacted and the process is proving time-consuming.

Ultimately, however, it wants to make every programme available, no matter how trivial or obscure. 'Lots of it might not be of wider interest, but if your mum was on a daytime quiz show, it will still be of interest to you,' Highfield says.

The BBC also plans to make a huge amount of supporting material available, including scripts, programme notes and letters relating to shows. If it can secure permission to use them, they will make up a huge database of documents that viewers can search easily and quickly.

Paperwork the BBC hopes to place online includes a signed expenses form Attenborough sent when he was filming in Indonesia: dated 10 August 1954, it requests tropical clothing.

The BBC also has letters from Attenborough, sent care of the British embassy in Jakarta, telling BBC bosses about his first impressions of the country.

The corporation has been planning to exploit its valuable archive for some time. New technology means it is far cheaper to store and distribute video and audio streams, and the growth of broadband has boosted demand for high-quality content.

The BBC is also searching for more ways to make money after receiving a below-inflation licence fee settlement last year. If the pilot scheme is a success, it could charge overseas users to access the programmes.

Although the archive would be free in the UK, it may carry advertising, which would prove controversial.

The plan will have to be approved by the BBC Trust, which replaced the Board of Governors at the start of the year.

Caught on tape

· Doubts and Certainties: Martin Luther King

In a poignant interview, broadcast on the day he was assassinated in April 1968, the civil rights leader says: 'The important thing isn't how long you live, but how well you live.'

· The Lennon Tapes

John Lennon and Yoko Ono talked to Andy Peebles in an interview transmitted in January 1981, two days before the ex-Beatle was killed, and never repeated. They talk candidly about the motivation for their famous 'bed-in' protests.

· Zoo Quest: Dragons of Komodo

David Attenborough travels to Indonesia to capture images of the komodo dragon for the first time, in an early film that delighted BBC viewers, according to 'audience reaction' notes also unearthed by the BBC.

· Woman's Hour: Militant Suffragettes

Antonia Raeburn talks to Grace Roe and Eleanor Higginson, two suffragettes from the Pankhurst era, about their campaign to win the vote. Roe explains how she dealt with police raids, and avoided arrest for a year.

Voyage to the most isolated base on Earth

 

27 January 2012

Alexander Kumar, the next ESA-sponsored crewmember to stay in Concordia, has arrived safely at the research base in Antarctica. The voyage to one of the remotest places on Earth takes even longer than the voyage to the International Space Station.

 
The international outpost’s programme of research includes glaciology, human biology and the atmosphere. ESA uses the base to prepare for future long-duration missions beyond Earth.

Concordia is an ideal place to study the effects on small, multicultural teams isolated for long periods in an extreme, hostile environment.  

 
Astrolabe

 
Alexander left the port of Hobart in Tasmania on 7 January aboard the vessel Astrolabe. The ship is used by the French Polar Institute to supply Concordia and the French coastal Antarctic station Dumont D’Urville.

Alexander’s work started before reaching the base: he had to tend to routine medical problems as the only qualified physician on the ship.

After a week-long journey across the Southern Ocean, the Astrolabe arrived at Dumont d’Urville.

 
 

The 1200 km second leg of the voyage called for a twin-propeller plane. The aircraft has to be maintained meticulously because it flies at altitudes where the air pressure is a third less than at sea level, in extreme cold weather.

After a five-hour flight, Alexander arrived at Concordia, a staggering 3200 m above sea level, and one of the coldest places on Earth. Alexander is replacing Eoin Macdonald-Nethercott, who has been at Concordia for over a year.

Once the Antarctic winter sets in next month, it will be impossible to access the outpost because temperatures can drop to –84°C.

Concordia’s 14 inhabitants have to learn to live and work together without help from the outside world. Only after the Antarctic summer warms the frigid surroundings will fresh supplies and personnel be able to reach the site.

 
 

Alexander will perform a comprehensive programme of research during his year-long stay. A variety of tests will investigate how the Concordia team adapt to the station. Areas of special interest are sleep patterns, individual and team performance, and exercise.

Alex will also test software tools that could help crews on future missions.

Directory: files -> quia -> users -> johnmellor
users -> Vocabulary review
users -> Three Approaches to Defining Jazz Mark Gridley, Robert Maxham and Robert Hoff Copyright 1989 by Oxford University Press
users -> Inventions and Inventors Web Quest Introduction
users -> How do we handle these contacts?
users -> A brief History of the Personal Computer
users -> Lecture #13 the civil war from The Election of Lincoln to the Surrender at Appomattox Election of 1860
users -> Hours: 05 Term: Winter/Spring 2005 Days
users -> Ch. 1 Thinking Geographically
users -> Using a variety of sources supports the process of geographic inquiry
johnmellor -> Il y aura un quiz sur le vocabulaire

Download 1.72 Mb.

Share with your friends: