Page 4 December 1, 2016 Looking Up Pluto’s Icy, Slushy Heart Press Release from MIT, Provided By Bob Eklund Beneath Pluto’s “heart” lies a cold, slushy ocean of water ice, according to data from NASA’s New Horizons mission. In a paper published in the journal Nature (http://www. nature.com), the New Horizons team reports that the dwarf planet’s most prominent surface feature—a heart-shaped region named Tombaugh Regio—may harbor a bulging, viscous, liquid ocean just below its surface. The existence of a subsurface ocean may solve a longstanding puzzle: For decades, astronomers have observed that Tombaugh Regio, which is Pluto’s brightest region, aligns almost exactly opposite from the dwarf planet’s moon, Charon, in a locked orientation that has lacked a convincing explanation. A thick, heavy ocean, the new data suggest, may have served as a “gravitational anomaly,” or weight, which would factor heavily in Pluto and Charon’s gravitational tug-of-war. Over millions of years, the planet would have gradually turned itself, aligning its subsurface ocean and the heart-shaped region above it, almost exactly opposite along the line connecting Pluto and Charon. “Pluto is hard to fathom on so many different levels,” says New Horizons coinvestigator Richard Binzel, professor of Earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences at MIT. “People had considered whether you could get a subsurface layer of water somewhere on Pluto. What’s surprising is that we would have any information from a flyby that would give a compelling argument as to why there might be a subsurface ocean there. Pluto just continues to surprise us.” During its flyby of Pluto, New Horizons collected measurements of surface features, including the dimensions of Pluto’s bright, heart-shaped region. The researchers determined that the heartshaped region is aligned directly opposite from the direction of Charon. The massive basin also appears extremely bright relative to the rest of the planet, and the reason, the New Horizons data suggest, is that it is filled with frozen nitrogen ice. Previously, Binzel and the New Horizons team had found evidence that this liquid nitrogen may be constantly refreshing, or convecting, as a result of a weak spot at the bottom of the basin. This weak spot may let heat rise through Pluto’s interior to continuously convect the ice, bubbling it over “like boiling oatmeal,” Binzel says. To the New Horizons team, a weak spot in Sputnik Planitia’s basin suggests that the planet’s crust, particularly in this region, must be quite thin. If a massive impactor indeed created the basin, it may have also triggered any material beneath the surface to push the thin crust outward, causing a “positive gravitational anomaly,” or a thick, heavy mass, that would have helped to align the region relative to Charon. But what sort of material would create enough of a gravitational weight to reorient the planet relative to its moon? To answer this, the team turned to a geophysical model of Pluto’s interior, working in measurements from the New Horizons spacecraft. “Pluto is small enough that it’s just about almost cooled off but still has a little heat, and it’s about 2 percent the heat budget of the Earth, in terms of how much energy is coming out,” Binzel says. “So we calculated Pluto’s size with its interior heat flow, and found that underneath Sputnik Planitia, at those temperatures and pressures, you could have a zone of water-ice that could be at least viscous. It’s not a liquid, flowing ocean, but maybe slushy. And we found this explanation was the only way to put the puzzle together that seems to make any sense.” Images: http://news.mit.edu/ • DMV Computer Upgrades Were Never Completed By Rob McCarthy The Department of Motor Vehicles computer system that crashed in October and interrupted license and registration services for over a week wasn’t hacked. It just showed its age. The recordkeeping system that stores vehicle and personal information on millions of Californians underwent a multi-million dollar upgrade three years ago to existing hardware. The state’s technology agency shutdown the project early, and fired the contractor in early 2013. The California Technology Agency said at the time that the modernization project, which ran for seven years, would be re-evaluated. The first phase of the project on the DMV licensing system was nearly completed when the agency pulled the plug on the $200 million IT project. The early termination left older hardware running the DMV vehicle-registration system. It’s unclear how the unfinished project affected the massive outage that began on Oct. 24 and affected 122 DMV locations, including Hawthorne and Inglewood. The Technology Agency did not return a phone call asking about the status of the suspended DMV modernization The DMV said that a “catastrophic failure” of equipment on Oct. 24 caused the outage. Hard disks failed in both the front-end and backup systems. A department spokesman ruled out a cyber attack as the cause, insisting it was equipment-related and not an act of sabotage. “Absolutely not,” spokesman Artemio Armenta told The Herald when asked if the DMV’s recordkeeping system with millions of California drivers’ personal information was hacked. “There’s no evidence of that.” It wasn’t a matter of replacing broken equipment to restore computer service to the affected offices, Armenta told The Herald. The replacement disks linked each of the 122 offices hardware to the DMV main system, and all of them that failed needed to be rebuilt. It took DMV employees working around-theclock nearly a full week to restore the disks, according to its spokesman. Three offices, including Inglewood, were still disconnected as of last week. The South Bay offices in Hawthorne, Torrance, Inglewood, Culver City and San Pedro remained open during the outage with limited services. DMV examiners gave drivers license tests and clerks assisted walk-in customers with paperwork and questions. Online license renewals and vehicle registration were not affected by the equipment failure, according to the department. Inglewood was the last of the 122 locations to have service restored. The DMV posted a notice at 2 p.m. Nov. 2 saying that nearly all of its offices were at full service again except for Inglewood. By the next morning, an update said that each DMV location was back in service. The outage extended beyond the DMV field offices. The Automobile Club of Southern California, which serves as an agent of the motor-vehicle department, said a number of offices were unable to process vehicle registrations from Oct. 24 into November. The Manhattan Beach office was among the first locations to have DMV service restored, according to a AAA spokesman. Nearly two weeks after the computer-system crashed, the Rancho Palos Verdes AAA office had limited DMV service to customers. The office as of Nov. 3 wasn’t able to process commercial license plates, handicapped stickers and off-road vehicle stickers. “Their outage is pretty massive,” AAA spokesman Jeffrey Spring said last week. The Automobile Club’s IT staff worked directly with the DMV to get branches back online. Thirty AAA offices in Southern California were waiting for service to be restored on Nov. 3. Spring didn’t have a date when all of the club’s locations would be back online with the DMV. The DMV conducted a planned security update on the Friday before Halloween, which prolonged the service problems at some offices. The IT staff worked with its contractor over the first weekend to get the busier DMV offices back to normal. When staff returned to work on Monday, Nov. 1, computer service was still not available at the high-volume offices. The DMV described the events of Oct. 24 as a “perfect storm” of simultaneous harddrive failures that overwhelmed the system. It simply was not designed to handle massive failures in such a short period of time, the media were told. The department had never experienced a technological chain of events like it, spokesman Jaime Garza told reporters in Sacramento. The California DMV wasn’t using industry best practices to avoid losing both the front-end and backup systems simultaneously, according to published reports. The primary and the recovery systems should be kept apart and on separate power supplies, technology experts say. The department reportedly kept both the main and backup systems in the same hardware cabinet. Again, it’s uncertain whether the halted modernization project would have addressed the issue or made a difference. The DMV pledged to conduct a full The DMV IT modernization program began in 2006 after an earlier project called Info/ California was called a “hopeless failure” after $44 million were spent. What was supposed to be a five-year, $28 million effort lasted for seven years. The size of the project grew until the projected costs were $170 million over the original budget. State officials criticized the DMV brass for poor management of the project and for lacking computer- technology experience. The embarrassing episode led to a full investigation by lawmakers. • Burkley & Brandlin LLP A T T O R N E Y S A T L A W project. Living Trusts/Wills, Probate, Employment Law, Personal Injury Trust and Estates Litigation, Business Litigation, Civil Litiga tion 310-540-6000 Lifetime El Segundo Residents *AV Rated (Highest) Martindale - Hubbell / **Certified Specialist Estate Planning, Trust & Probate Law, State Bar of California, Board of Legal Specialization Brian R. Brandlin • Bruce R. Brandlin • Christopher P. Brandlin
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