Российская наука и мир (дайджест)

Институт космических исследований РАН разрабатывает проект "Венера-Д", цель которого - комплексное длительное изучение Венеры. Проект предполагает международное сотрудничество, в частности, участие Европейского космического агентства.
Исследовательская станция включает в себя блок для работы на орбите Венеры, и спускаемый аппарат, который сможет продержаться на поверхности планеты несколько дней (до сих пор спускаемые аппараты работали в жестких венерианских условиях не больше часа). Кроме того, планируется, что станция выпустит в атмосферу планеты несколько аэростатных зондов.

Densely clouded in acid-laden mist, Venus used to be the Soviet Union's favourite target for planetary exploration.
Now, after a lull of almost three decades, Russia is making plans for a new mission to the "morning star" and has invited Western scientists to participate.
Last week, Moscow-based space research institute IKI hosted an international conference aimed at luring scientists from Europe and possibly other countries such as the US into the ambitious project, officially scheduled for launch in 2016.
"The goal of this conference was to consolidate our and European scientists' ideas and determine what approaches toward this project we could use," says Oleg Korablev, who leads the work on returning to Venus at IKI.
The Soviet Union last went to Venus - jointly with a number of European nations - with the twin Vega probes of 1985. This followed 16 Soviet-only Venera missions between 1961 and 1983.
Known as Venera-D, the new mission is expected to involve a multi-front scientific assault on the mysteries of Venus with an orbiting spacecraft, multiple air balloons, a surface lander and - possibly - an innovative "wind-flyer".
"We want this mission to be as cutting edge as possible," says Ludmila Zasova, a leading planetary scientist at IKI who helped to organise the Moscow event.
"At this day and age, this is not easy even for a very rich country, therefore we understand that this mission has to be co-operative."
Giving the preliminary stage of the project and its enormous technical and financial challenges, the initial reaction of the European scientists seemed very positive.
"What surprised me was the level of dedication that Russians (put) into this mission," says Hakan Svedhem, a scientist with the European Space Agency (Esa).
"Questions remain of when exactly it is going to fly and what it is going to contain."
Dr Svedhem works with the Venus Express mission that currently orbits the planet, following its successful launch on board a Russian rocket in 2005.
He believes Venera-D has a good prospect of getting funded by the Russian space agency, and now discussion is focusing on what elements the mission would include.
"The Russian space science research budget has been expanding quite dramatically for a number of years, and I'm confident there will be room for this mission," he said.
"We are in the very early stage, but I am sure many Europeans will be involved in the end in this mission."
Venus scientists, unite!
Venera-D would be the second attempt in the last few years to combine efforts to explore Venus by European and Russian scientists.
A previous plan to merge Venera-D with the European Venus Explorer, EVE, had to be abandoned when the European mission was rejected in the favour of other planetary projects.
EVE scientists still intend to resubmit the project for Esa's next selection round at the end of next year; and according to Dr Svedhem, the mission has a good chance of getting funding.
However, even with a successful bid in 2010, EVE's launch date would inevitably be pushed beyond 2020.
"This new launch date does not correlate well with the timeframe of the Venera-D mission," says Dr Korablev.
As a result, he says, a different approach is needed.
Surviving "hell"
The IKI conference in Moscow was timed to co-incide with the end of the "paper" phase of Venera-D and the start of actual spacecraft development, scheduled for early next year.
During the last few years, the project has been through several incarnations, as scientists tackled the enormous engineering challenge that going to Venus entails.
From the outset they understood that in order to unlock the planet's secrets, their equipment would have to survive on the oven-hot surface beyond the hour-long lifespan of previous Soviet landers.
A longer stay would enable sensors on the surface to listen for tremors, which would give clues about the internal structure of the planet.
However, after sifting through various options for cooling schemes and exotic heat-resisting electronics, an initial 30-day survival goal had to be cut to one day.
"We now understand that it may not necessarily be justified, and may be too expensive, to last 30 days," IKI's director Lev Zeleny told the BBC.
"We did invent some cooling systems; however, we have very limited mass (on the lander), and would have to sacrifice a very interesting experiment studying dynamics of the atmosphere (in order to install it).
"Now we want somewhere around 24-hour survivability... but even in one day we can do a lot."
Navigating the Venusian skies
To compensate for the lander's quick frying death, Russian scientists proposed a number of innovative solutions in the exploration of Venus.
A series of balloons designed to float in the misty atmosphere of the planet would be deployed either from the main lander during its descent to the surface, or from protective capsules capable of penetrating the Venusian atmosphere.
Although balloons did once float over Venus as part of the Soviet Vega missions, a new lightweight generation of sensors promises to revolutionise their scientific harvest.
The "juice" of the future research on Venus would be studying isotopes of noble gases such as xenon and krypton in the planet's atmosphere.
Since they react only reluctantly with other substances, they could help to draw a blueprint of the ancient Venusian atmosphere.
In turn, such information could help to understand processes involved in the formation of closely located planets such as Earth and Venus.
"These are extremely sensitive measurements which have never been done (on Venus)," Dr Korablev told the BBC.
They would provide a colossal breakthrough in the quality of science compared with the Soviet missions completed in the 1980s.
"Even if we take existing instruments from Huygens (the European craft that landed on Titan in 2004) and send them to Venus, it would be a huge progress," he said.
Along with their primary instruments, Venus balloons could carry "microprobes" - essentially pieces of ballast filled with additional sensors.
As balloons drift in the Venusian sky, microprobes would be dropped one by one, to provide scientific measurements in various locations.
Flying in the wind
In addition to balloons and a lander, NPO Lavochkin, Russia's premier developer of deep-space spacecraft, has proposed a "vetrolet" (a Russian term for "wind-flyer") for the Venera-D mission.
A kite-like device could reportedly use the alien winds of Venus to stay aloft almost indefinitely at altitudes of 45-50km, with lightweight instruments and transmitters onboard.
Lavochkin has apparently conducted some experiments to prove that this exotic idea is workable.
Even if the Venera-D mission will be able to afford the additional mass needed to accommodate the device, the "wind-flyer" would probably be included only as an additional demonstrator rather than the main platform for scientific instruments.
Still, if successful, it could open a new page in the history of planetary exploration.
French connection
As a first sign that Russian efforts to internationalise Venera-D are bearing fruit, the French space agency CNES has expressed preliminary interest in taking full responsibility for developing the balloon part of the project.
However, French representatives told their Russian colleagues that a 2016 launch date for the mission would not be realistic for their contribution, and delay to 2018 would probably be needed.
A CNES delegation is expected in Moscow again in the middle of this month for further discussions.
Given Russia's own situation, IKI scientists might be willing to be flexible with the launch date for the sake of international participation.
A recently announced delay of Russia's flagship Phobos-Grunt mission from 2009 to 2011 is expected to cause a domino effect on all further plans.
Still, following Phobos-Grunt and one or two missions to the Moon, Venera-D is lined up to become the next planetary project. IKI scientists told their European colleagues that they intended to hold conferences on the Venera-D project annually, in the hope of expanding co-operation as the mission moves toward fruition.

BBC © MMIX.

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The Moscow Times / 21 September 2009

The Savior of Russia

By Richard Lourie

Научный прогресс в России имеет свои особенности, которые просматриваются и в развитии нанотехнологий.

Russia, lover of all things gigantic, is staking its bet on nanotechnology, the study of the infinitely small. Providing the ability to construct anything from the atoms up, the near magical world of nanotechnology promises breakthroughs in medicine ("swallowing the surgeon"), economics (tiny machines constructing tinier machines ad infinitum), energy and, of course, warfare.
Recently, Anatoly Chubais, the chief of Rusnano, the company spearheading the state-backed drive to master nanotechnology, said the country's nanotechnology industry would need 150,000 specialists by 2015! Last year, 100 people graduated with degrees in nanotechnology in Russia. Where are the other 149,900 supposed to come from?
Russia's educational system has suffered a severe decline. In 1991, UNESCO rated it third-best in the world, but by 2007, it had slipped to 37th place. Mikhail Kovalchuk, who heads the Kurchatov Institute's nanotechnology research, sees an advantage here, however. The old educational infrastructure could not have accommodated the "new revolution" in nanotechnology, so it is better that it withers away. And, he adds, "Nanotechnology will be the driving force of the Russian economy."
Great leaps forward have always appealed more to the Russian imagination than slow, patient daily labor. After World War II, Japanese and German industries were in ruins. Part of the economic miracle of both countries came from their modernized industrial bases rebuilt after the war. Russia, with its economy in shambles after its defeat in the Cold War, also wants to leapfrog from one level of technology to the next.
The Soviets achieved nuclear parity with the United States in astonishing time. The drive was headed by Igor Kurchatov and the science done by Andrei Sakharov. When the first Soviet H-bomb was exploded in 1953, Kurchatov embraced Sakharov and called him the "savior of Russia." Later, Sakharov worked on the Tokamak, a device designed to produce fission energy, the same mighty energy that powers the sun and H-bombs, but that work has yet to fulfill its great promise.
Abdul Kalam, the president of India from 2002 to 2007 and himself an eminent scientist specializing in ballistic missiles, has said nanotechnology "would revolutionize the total concepts of future warfare." Putin agrees, calling nanotech the "key to creating the newest, modern and supereffective weapons systems. Nanotechnology is an activity for which the government will not spare money." The Kremlin has allocated $7.7 billion for nanotech for the period from 2007 to 2015.
The military application of nanotechnology has obvious appeal to Russia in its drive to regain superpower status. Between 2001 and 2005, Russia was the world's leading exporter of military equipment. Now it is in third place, behind Italy and the United States, which has 10 times the market share. New Russian weapons systems have been problematic, to say the least. The much-vaunted Bulava naval intercontinental missile has failed seven of its 11 tests since 2004. Russian army equipment proved outmoded in the 2008 war with Georgia.
Nanotechnology will also revolutionize economics, especially the production of energy, delivering Russia from its dependence on exporting oil and gas. Kovalchuk believes that the nanoengineering of the Tokamak could be the key to producing nuclear fusion energy. It would be irony on an epic scale if Sakharov, the saintly genius of nuclear physics, once more proved the "savior of Russia." But Russia is exactly the sort of place where those kinds of things can, and do, happen.

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Intelink - La Ciotat, France / 21/09/2009

EADS: acquisition des cerveaux russes plutôt que des brevets

Evelyne Casalegno

Пока президент Дмитрий Медведев создает условия для лучших ученых в России, Европейский аэрокосмический и оборонный концерн (EADS) составляет списки нужных ему русских специалистов.

Pendant que le président Dmitri Medvedev crée des conditions pour les meilleurs scientifiques en Russie, EADS dresse les listes de spécialistes russes nécessaires au groupe. Le consortium européen a vite compris qu'au lieu des brevets, il est plus facile d'acheter des cerveaux, lit-on lundi dans le quotidien RBC daily.
Les Européens sont intéressés par deux orientations élaborées déjà à l'époque soviétique : le mélange kérosène-hydrogène et l'utilisation de l'hydrogène comme carburant pour les éléments combustibles.
"Nous sommes en pourparlers avec des scientifiques russes sur le problème de l'utilisation du carburant à hydrogène dans l'aviation civile, a déclaré le directeur de la technologie et membre du comité exécutif d'EADS Jean Botti. Les négociations avec l'Institut de chimie appliquée et l'Institut unifié de hautes températures de l'Académie des sciences de Russie sont au stade initial".
Selon Jean Botti, des contrats peuvent être signés avec des chercheurs ou des organisations scientifiques qui travailleront alors pour le compte d'EADS. "Vous avez beaucoup de jeunes scientifiques talentueux et extrêmement compétents dans les domaines de l'ingénierie, de la physique et d'IT-technologies", a indiqué le représentant du consortium européen sans cacher sa joie.
En URSS, dans les années 1970, on a commencé à penser déjà à l'utilisation de l'hydrogène comme carburant. A l'époque, la crise de l'énergie n'avait pas affecté le pays, mais en regardant ce qui se passait à l'Occident, il a été décidé de faire des recherches au niveau des types alternatifs de combustible pour le transport. De nos jours, la Russie n'a toujours pas employé cette nouvelle technologie datant du passé.
"Il faut effectuer des investissements initiaux importants et reconstruire non seulement les appareils volants, mais aussi l'infrastructure au sol (entrepôts et méthaniers)", estime le directeur général d'Inter-aviagaz Viatcheslav Zaïtsev. Sa compagnie essaie depuis 10 ans d'incorporer l'exploitation des hélicoptères et des avions de la petite aviation ravitaillés au gaz. Selon lui, il y aussi un problème typiquement russe : les administrations responsables de l'énergie alternative n'arrivent pas à s'entendre entre elles depuis des années sur la façon de développer les savoir-faire.
La Russie a acquis une riche expérience d'utilisation, en qualité de combustible, aussi bien de l'hydrogène que du combustible à gaz liquéfié, mais tous ces travaux sont suspendus. "Il s'avère que la plus grande difficulté réside non pas dans la création d'aéronefs, mais dans la production d'hydrogène et la création de l'infrastructure pour la production, le transport, le stockage et le ravitaillement", constate le chef de l'agence sectorielle Aviaport Oleg Panteleïev.

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Environment News Service / September 25, 2009

Thousands of Russians Petition to Stop Nuclear Power Plant

Экологические организации и местные жители выступили с протестом против постройки атомной электростанции в Навашинском районе Нижегородской области. По мнению экологов, проект недоработан и не учитывает многие обстоятельства.

MOSCOW, Russia, September 25, 2009 (ENS) - More than 36,000 Russian citizens have signed a petition protesting the planned construction of a nuclear power plant in the Nizhny Novgorod region east of Moscow. Environmentalists handed the signed petition to the office of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on Tuesday.
The government views the facility as a source jobs and electricity; residents worry about nuclear waste and radioactive emissions.
The signatures were collected among the inhabitants of the 30 kilometer (20 mile) zone around the proposed construction site, in the Navashino district, about 400 kilometers (250 miles) to the east of Russia's capital. More signatures were collected in the nearby town of Murom on the Oka River.
Before handing the signatures to the administration, the environmentalists presented them to the media at the Independent Press-Center in Moscow.
At the press conference, Murom City Council Member Vasily Vakhlyaev said the results of a public opinion poll indicate that 95 percent of the Murom residents strictly oppose the construction of the nuclear power plant so close to their town.
The Murom City Council adopted a decision to hold the public hearings on the nuclear power plant. The hearings are scheduled for September 28, and their results will be delivered to the federal authorities, the media, and Rosatom, the Russian state nuclear energy corporation, whose officials are invited to take part in the hearings.
The plant will have two 1,170 megawatt reactors and is designed to generate over 17 billion kilowatt hours a year and employ as many as 1,000 people in the long term. The first reactor is planned for launch in 2017.
Rosatom says the analysis of the power and capacity balance in Nizhniy Novgorod region shows that in 2007 the region was short of 1,800 megawatts while in 2020 it will need as much as 4,000 megawatts of power in addition to present generation.
Vladimir Slivyak of the nonprofit anti-nuclear organization Ecodefense said at the press conference that there are many problems with the proposed nuclear plant.
First, he said, plans for treatment of nuclear waste from the power plant are unclear. "According to the project documentation, spent nuclear fuel will be transported to a 'regeneragion plant' which does not exist and is not planned to be built."
"Thus, said Slivyak, "high-level radioactive waste which will present danger for at least 240,000 years and for which there is no safe disposal technology, may remain in Nizhny Novgorod region forever. So, what is actually under discussion - a nuclear reactor or nuclear waste dumping site? It looks like both."
The proposed construction site is located in a region of karst rocks, shaped by the dissolution of layers of soluble bedrock pitted with holes. Slivyak warns that siting a nuclear power plant there "may lead to karst rocks failures and collapses."
The project materials are missing such data as an analysis of nuclear fuel transportation that will affect the region, reactor decommissioning at the end of its lifecycle, and an analysis of the regional development option without a nuclear power plant, the critics point out.
Neither is there a calculation of the emission of such radioactive isotopes as tritium and carbon-14 during regular operation of the plant, they warn.
All this information is an essential part of the Environmental Impact Assessment, but Rosatom found it possible to ignore legal requirements for the EIA, the critics object.
"It's necessary to push federal officials to follow the legislation on public participation," said Slivyak. "In this case, that would mean stopping construction of a dangerous and expensive nuclear plant which will produce nuclear waste and release radioactive substances even at normal operation. Implementation of up-to-date energy efficiency and saving technologies in Russia would save twice more energy that all of country's nuclear reactors produces today."
"Nuclear energy has a direct effect on sickness and death rates," said Professor Alexey Yablokov of the Russian Academy of Science at the press conference. "This is proven by various research data in Germany and other countries."
Yablokov said that a simple nationwide switch to energy-efficient light bulbs would save so much energy that new nuclear reactors will not be needed.
Yablokov called for cancellation of the entire nuclear energy development program in Russia as "dangerous, expensive, and ineffective."
The Russian government held public hearings on the preliminary environmental impact assessment of the Nizhniy Novgorod nuclear power plant project in Navashino on September 4.
More than 850 people attended the hearings, officials said. Participants asked over 200 questions and received detailed answers from specialists of Rosatom, Energoatom Concern OJSC and Nizhniy Novgorod Atomenergoproekt OJSC.
"Public hearings went off well," said Alexander Tsapin, who serves as minister of internal policy in the Nizhniy Novgorod regional government. "All those who had remarks and recommendations on the project were given the floor."
The population of Navashino has supported the construction of Nizhniy Novgorod nuclear power plant, Tsapin said. "They understand that the project will stimulate the development of the local economy, will give more budgetary revenues and will stop the outflow of young people from the region."
Rosatom communications official Igor Konyshev said the September 4 discussion was just a small part of the public hearings that have been held in the region for two months.
"A month before the hearings the preliminary environmental impact assessment of Nizhniy Novgorod nuclear power plant project was made public," Konyshev said. "For a whole month after the hearings all concerned people will be able to ask questions and to express their opinion on the project."
On September 1, more than 3,000 residents of Murom expressed their opinions by taking part in an anti-nuclear rally where local authorities and Ecodefense activists criticized the proposed nuclear plant and urged local citizens not to be afraid to raise their voices.
The results of a national public opinion survey conducted in 2007 by one of Russia's largest research companies, ROMIR, a branch of the Gallup international, show that 78 percent of the country's residents are negative about plans to construct new nuclear plants. The poll was sponsored by the Heinrich Boell Foundation and Ecodefense.

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HPCwire / September 23, 2009

New Russian Top50 Supercomputers List Released

Научно-исследовательский вычислительный центр МГУ имени М.В.Ломоносова и Межведомственный суперкомпьютерный центр Российской академии наук представили очередную редакцию Топ-50 суперкомпьютеров стран СНГ. Список возглавил суперкомпьютер МВС-100К, установленный в Межведомственном Центре РАН.

MOSCOW, Sept. 23 - For the 5th time in a row T-Platforms, the major Russian supercomputer company, leads the rating in regard to the number of systems on the list.
The Research Computing Center of Lomonosov Moscow State University and the RAS Joint Supercomputer Center have released the 11th edition of the Top50 list of the most powerful computers of Russia and the CIS. The new edition was announced on September 22 at the all-Russia scientific conference "Scientific service on the Internet: scalability, parallelism, efficiency". For the 5th time in a row T-Platforms leads the rating in regard to the number of systems on the list (16 out of 50).
The top twenty of the list has remained unchanged. Like in the previous edition, the list is topped by MVS-100K supercomputer installed at the RAS Joint Supercomputer Center with Linpack-measured performance of 71,28 Tflops. The second position is occupied by SKIF MSU Chebyshev supercomputer based on blade systems developed by T-Platforms company. The supercomputer is installed at the Research Computing Center of Lomonosov Moscow State University and has Linpack-measured performance of 47,3 Tflops (computing efficiency - 78,9 percent). Since deployment in 2008 the supercomputer capacities have been fully loaded with computational jobs.
The 11th edition of the list has shown the minimal performance growth rate since the rating foundation. The total actual performance of the systems has grown from 382.6 Tflops to 387.1 Tflops within half year. The rating has updated by 10 percent - 5 systems out of 50 are new or upgraded.
Amongst the upgraded systems is a supercomputer with real performance of 1,505 Tflops installed at T-Platforms Cluster Solutions Center (CSC). It has gone 7 positions up compared to the previous rating and occupied the 39th position of the new list. This supercomputer is the only system in Russia that consists completely of nodes based on 9-core PowerXCell 8i processors; the compute nodes of the supercomputer were designed by T-Platforms.
The number of supercomputers with actual performance exceeding 1Tflop has grown from 47 to 49 in the new edition. The minimum threshold for entry into the Top50 list now amounts to 978Gflops of Linpack-measured performance (924,4Gflops in the previous edition).
The number of systems used in science and education has grown from 30 to 31 systems, and the number of supercomputers used for research has decreased from 10 to 9.
The shares of processor vendors have remained unchanged in the 11th edition of the rating: Intel - 37 systems, AMD - 7, IBM - 5 and Hewlett Packard - 1 system.
Supercomputers.ru is a joint project of Lomonosov MSU Research Computing Center and the RAS Joint Supercomputer Center. The Top 50 most powerful supercomputers rating has been published on this portal since May, 2004. The rating includes 50 most powerful (as tested by Linpack) supercomputers installed in the CIS. It doesn't include experimental and temporary systems and is updated twice a year. To avoid intentional system data overvaluation, Supercomputers.ru employees check the real supercomputers parameters on a sample basis.

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